Southside (9781608090563)

by Krikorian, Michael

  “I loved that guy,” said the detective. “I was a Chargers fan, but I loved Walter Payton.”

  “Everybody loved Sweetness,” said Sims getting emotional. “I named my boy after him.”

  • • •

  Later, at South Bureau, Waxman saw LaBarbera. “I went and saw that Edward Sims, the father of Payton Sims, one of Evil’s victims.”

  “Ralph, I know who he is. And?”

  “He’s a beaten-down drunk. No way in hell he coulda got the drop on Terminal. No way. You were right about the Walter Payton thing, though. Even had a poster of Sweetness in the kid’s room.”

  LaBarbera nodded and walked away.

  “Say, Sal, let me know if you ever need a good mechanic around here.”

  Back on 89th Street, Sims packed a large suitcase, a case he had bought with exhilaration years ago in anticipation of where it would take him. He remembered so vividly walking into the house with the suitcase, putting Sammy Davis Jr. on the turntable and moving the needle to the fourth track—“Faraway Places”—taking hold of his wife and dancing around the room as Sammy sang of going to Bombay and Rio, Beirut, Barcelona. The years chewed away at that joy until the day Payton died and it was vanquished. He’d never used that suitcase until that bitter day. He threw it angrily into the trunk of the Cutlass, took a last look at his home, and backed out of the driveway. He was to the curb when he looked at his roses, his glorious rosebushes. He pulled back up and ran over Double Delight.

  At the Bank of America on Central and 104th Street in Watts, he withdrew all his savings, just over $1,400. He rented a room at the Dare-U-Inn, a 32-unit, U-shaped motel on Main Street in an industrial area between Gardena and Compton. The Dare-U-Inn offered a nice degree of privacy as it catered to the illicit affair crowd or couples who stayed with other family members and couldn’t really let it all hang out. He paid the Korean owner for a week in advance, $280 in cash. The clean, large room had a TV with cable. He wanted to watch the news tomorrow morning.

  CHAPTER 24

  That night a hard rain fell.

  Leslie Harrington cherished the rain. Loved the sound of it beating on the window, the sight of it splashing on the panes. The coolness it brought. The excuse to light a fire in her Rustic Canyon home in Santa Monica. When it came down hard, she loved to curl up on her couch, wrapped all cozy in her favorite red comforter, Central Coast Chardonnay within easy reach, and watch Casablanca or Waterloo Bridge or Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

  She was content, even if she was alone, which she usually was lately. She loved to walk down to the deserted beach at night, no umbrella, just her hooded parka, and watch the silent rain meet the roaring surf of the sea. If there was thunder and lightning, all the better. But she would gladly settle for just the rain. She knew how to settle.

  She settled a lot in court. She knew if you could settle for something just a little less than what you wanted, more often than not, you’d win the case. She was a Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney. A rising star. Her star had begun to shine years ago when she sent one Cleamon Desmond away for the rest of his life for ordering the murder of two men on Central Avenue just north of Watts in Green Meadows.

  It was in that trial that she’d really learned to settle. Of course, she wanted the death penalty for this murderous thug known as Big Evil, said to be responsible for more killings than anyone else in the history of Los Angeles’s world-famous gang warfare. He’d beat many cases before. She knew this case was weak, hinging mainly on the testimony of another gang member, Freddie Gelson, who agreed to testify if he was granted a new life far away from 89th and Central. She laughed when one of the detectives, John Hart, told her “No problem. We can put Gelson up at the Rio Palace. Not the one in Brazil, though. The one on 105th and Broadway.”

  She also knew that in the wake of a then-recent Illinois decision to ban the death penalty, unless you had a without-a-doubt case, it was much harder to get a conviction on a capital case than a LWOP, life without the possibility of parole. Also in this crime, Desmond had not been the triggerman. That meant, as dim-witted as it was, even though he had ordered the hits, some jurors would rationalize “well, he didn’t actually pull the trigger that killed these people.” That was the breed of jurors she encountered.

  So she went for LWOP and won the trial. She gained the admiration of her peers. She had put away the most feared gang member in the city. Big Evil didn’t even seem to mind. She had, however, gained the intense hatred, the pure loathing of the father of one of Big Evil’s victims.

  On that rainy night in Rustic Canyon, that father, one Edward Sims, was parked on her street, watching her watch the rain and a movie. Watching her drink some white wine. He put down his binoculars and cracked a new 750 ml of Hennessy, courtesy of an unwitting LAPD detective. He took a sip and smiled as he wondered if that detective could be considered an accomplice for what was going to happen in Rustic Canyon tonight.

  Eddie Sims leaned over onto the passenger seat, out of sight, whenever he heard or saw a car coming down the street. There were not many cars, but Sims figured anyone who saw a black man here might get suspicious, just as anyone seeing a white man on his block would. The difference was that on his block the white man, unless he was police, might get his ass kicked and robbed. Over here in Rustic Canyon, they’d just call the police. Roll the damn SWAT team just because a brother parked on the street. And with binoculars? Prob’ly get five years. What the charges, man? BMPWB of the Rustic Canyon Criminal Code. Black man parked with binoculars.

  He had made up his mind even before he’d shot the reporter that he would never go to prison. He had two options—to get away with it or to die resisting. At this point, he was so far gone, he didn’t even care. At the same time, he felt very much at peace. He was hoping to get away with this, but knew in the long run, he would not. In a way, he felt Eddie Sims was already dead. It was very freeing to live when you are already dead.

  And that was sad to him. Eddie Sims, he thought, had been a good man for many years. A decent man. A man who always tried to do the right thing, even if he made some wrong decisions. Like when he asked Jennette to marry him only two minutes after she told him she was pregnant. He knew she wasn’t the woman he wanted to spend a lifetime with, knew she was more interested in diamonds than in sharing a life together in a modest home. Eddie knew that with just his high school education and limited mechanical skills he wasn’t going far. He just wanted to work, get a good job, pay for the baby’s education. That’s what he wanted most, to make his baby’s life better than his had been.

  Eddie’s life as a youth was rough. He had lived in the largest and, probably, worst housing project in the United States, the doomed Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side of Chicago. But, his family—mother and two brothers—got out when he was seven. His father had been locked up in Joliet for armed robbery and manslaughter. Received twenty years, but only did six months because he got shanked to death in the yard by the cousin of the man he killed during the botched liquor store robbery on 66th Place and Blackstone Avenue.

  The family moved to his mother’s mother’s two-bedroom home in South Central on the corner of 76th and Wadsworth, just a mile north from the home he’d rented for the last ten years. In South Central in 1971, his two older brothers had joined the original Crips gang, founded by the legendary Raymond Washington who lived just two doors down.

  Back in those days, there was just one gang called the “Crips”—not like now where there are a one hundred different Crip gangs—and they fought with their fists. But, soon the guns came with bloody, reckless vengeance. The older Sims brothers were both killed fighting against the Swans, part of the newly formed alliance of black gangs—Bounty Hunters, Piru, Brims, Denver Lanes, Bishops, Van Ness Gangsters—that went under the umbrella of the Bloods.

  Eddie never joined the Crips. Never took retaliation against the Bloods, either. His mother would curse him for this. “Your brothers, my two sons, get killed by Swans and pussy bitch Eddie
just wants to stay home and work on his shitty old Oldsmobile. I’m glad your father is dead. He’d be ’shamed of you. Little bitch.”

  But Eddie didn’t have it in him to kill. It didn’t seem to him it was courageous—or took—courage to kill. It wasn’t toughness. He guessed it was hatred and despair and a never-ending tormented feeling that it was better to kill and get killed than to just go on living. That was the way Sims felt now.

  Eddie kept working on that Oldsmobile, a ’67 442 with its 360-horsepower force air engine, that was his pride and joy. To his sadness, he sold it when times demanded. He would eventually get another Olds, an ’84 Cutlass, from his earnings as a mechanic at a ramshackle auto supply/repair joint. He made enough money to get by and salt away some for his son’s college fund. It wasn’t much money he stashed—sometimes only five bucks a week, but it was enough to be a source of pride for Eddie Sims. That’s what kept him going, his beautiful, sweet son, Payton.

  Payton was named for Eddie’s favorite football player, Walter Payton aka “Sweetness.” Jennette didn’t want the name, but let Eddie have his way after he bribed her by offering up his entire next paycheck if she named the boy after the great Chicago Bear running back. “What’s in a fuckin’ name?” Jennette had said. “For your paycheck, as pathetic as it is, you can name him Gale Sayers for all I care.”

  Eddie always remembered that because he was stunned his wife even knew who Gale Sayers was. Musta seen that TV movie of the week about Brian Piccolo getting cancer. Everybody in the whole country saw that tearjerkin’ motherfucker. Even Dick Butkus probably cried.

  CHAPTER 25

  Leslie Harrington was crying. She knew this was going to turn out bad. When Vivian Leigh says to Robert Taylor: “I loved you, I’ve never loved anyone else. I never shall, that’s the truth, Roy, I never shall.” That’s when Harrington always lost it. She had seen Waterloo Bridge four times and always hoped for a happy ending.

  Outside, Sims had picked up the binocs and watched Harrington bawling like a jilted fourteen-year-old girl. What the fuck was she watching? Maybe I should just knock on the door while she’s vulnerable and gut her with this KA-BAR.

  Sims knew a gunshot would shock and awe this block, and the police would swarm in a minute. So he was planning on sticking her with the Marine Corps knife his slain son had owned. Payton Sims had told his father when he was eighteen that he wanted to have a gun for protection in the gang neighborhood they lived. The elder Sims said no, though he felt good that his son had come to him to ask for permission. Eddie told his kid that a gun could only get him in trouble. “If you have to use a gun, only two things happen—you lose and get shot, you win and go to prison.” When Payton asked, “What about a knife?” the father reluctantly agreed. Payton researched knives, considered the British SAS commando knife, but went for the Marine KA-BAR. Eddie never forgave himself for not letting his kid get the gun. It tormented him.

  Eddie switched to a pleasanter thought. The split-second look of horror on Terminal’s face when he realized he was about to get shot. How he wished he could have videotaped that and shown it to Evil. He looked over through the window that Harrington left uncurtained because she so loved to see the rain splash. The room had changed its hue. The movie or whatever she was crying about, must’ve ended, and she’d turned off the tube.

  I guess I got away with both of them, Sims thought. Not a word about shooting the reporter. That was, what, weeks ago? Losing track of time. Terminal was a couple days ago, but if they had something I would have heard. That visit from Detective Waxman went well. That fool had no idea.

  Sims knew this would be different. He had no feelings about it. He was going to kill Harrington for her decision not to seek the death penalty. Sure, he knew the California death penalty was a joke. You get it and live another fifteen years minimum, but at least it was death. Not life. Evil was living the life of a star up in Pelican Bay.

  The problem was going to be that killing a deputy D.A., a white woman, in Santa Monica, would be a national story, would bring in twenty-five detectives, if they had that many. Sims knew a world-class manhunt would be launched to find Leslie Harrington’s killer. This wouldn’t be like the search for Terminal’s killer. No one cared about Terminal other than his family and the overworked detectives assigned to the case. But Leslie Harrington was going to become famous.

  As he sat there, Sims decided he was not going to kill Harrington that night. Just getting the lay of the land, getting a feel for the block so when he came back he would be comfortable in the kill zone, would be enough for that night. But, when the front door suddenly opened and Harrington came out in a hooded sweatshirt and walked to the sidewalk, her arms spread, relishing the raindrops falling all about her, Sims flung open his door.

  Harrington heard the door and looked quizzically at the black man moving oddly quick around his car. Not running, but speed walking. In a spark, her mind thought of those speed walkers in the Olympics. Then, in another flash, she thought, what is this man doing here? Why is he moving fast? She was wine-buzzed and still in movie mode, and this was like a movie. It took a second, maybe two, to realize this was not a movie. The guy coming her way was not Robert Taylor or Humphrey Bogart.

  Then she felt paralyzing fear. She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t move. He sprinted to her now. She felt nothing but sadness, for Vivian Leigh and for herself. Sims was on her now. She said not a word. She was like a guilty, standing mannequin, ready for execution. He pulled her head back savagely and, with the glistening, razor-sharp KA-BAR Marine blade, cut her pretty throat. It severed the jugular vein and carotid artery. Her head shook involuntarily side to side as if saying “no.” The blood sprayed out like water from sprinklers on the Dodger Stadium infield before a hot summer day game. Then she collapsed.

  Her gushers of blood mingled with her beloved pools of raindrops. It reminded Sims of strawberry Kool-Aid. He never liked strawberry. He was a grape guy.

  Molly Brink had her routine. Every morning at six-thirty she’d be out the door with her Rottweiler mix named Scruffy McDoo, a slobbering, loveable 100-pound rescue mutt. Molly lived in the Santa Monica flatlands, but enjoyed the cool morning air and slight uphill grade of Rustic Canyon. It was McDoo who first detected something amiss as they turned off West Channel Road onto Rustic Canyon. The rain had stopped hours earlier, but the sidewalks and streets were still wet. The scent of death was in the damp air.

  Molly sensed McDoo’s bizarre behavior and she got an extra chill, the goose bumps roiling up her spine all the way to her neck and jawbone. Then she saw a form in the low ivy around an old oak tree. She slowed and almost tiptoed up to it. A body. A woman. She inched closer and then she saw the throat. Or what was left of it. Molly started retching.

  In fifteen minutes, the street was a beehive of police activity. A dozen Santa Monica PD cruisers lined the normally tranquil street. Detectives, crime-scene people, the coroner’s van. Officers were going door-to-door, waking neighbors with the horrible news. Trying to see if anyone had seen anything, anything at all even remotely unusual. They got next to nothing. One woman did notice an unfamiliar car on the block a house away from Harrington’s, but did not know the type of car other than to say “I just noticed it because it wasn’t new and all the cars around here are new.” They got her to say it was a dark car with two doors.

  When the crime scene was in full chaotic bloom on Rustic Canyon, the killer of Leslie Harrington was in a deep sleep at the Dare-U-Inn. Eddie Sims had driven fretfully from the killing zone, but once he got onto the Santa Monica Freeway, he mellowed and began to get a peaceful high. It was not like the adrenaline-fueled energy he had after Terminal’s demise. This was a calm, tranquil feeling, his reward for killing the woman he blamed for not sending Big Evil to San Quentin and death row.

  When Sims awoke at seven, although Leslie Harrington had not been identified publically by name, the story was breaking news.

  There was a time when Eddie Sims would have been disgusted
by such a heinous attack. An innocent young woman killed because she didn’t go for death. Killed because she went for life. Feeling sad? Feeling bad? Fuck no. That was the old Eddie. The weak and meek Eddie who had let his wife get away with cheating on him and bragging about fucking two men at once. The weak and meek Eddie who couldn’t protect his only son. Fuck that pussy Eddie. That Eddie was dead. The new Eddie was taking no prisoners. New Eddie was without heart. It was already time to focus on his next victim. After that, Eddie would get the blood-sucking reporter, kill him this time, then go for his grand finale. As for the reporter, he fantasized about just walking right up to him in daylight and shooting him in the head. Just like Denzel did in Harlem in American Gangster, then calmly walk away with everyone looking on. But, that was Hollywood. This was Los Angeles.

  • • •

  Sal, Johnny, and I met at the Desmond household. They had agreed to the meeting, but Mr. Desmond asked them to come early, by seven, so he would not have to be late for work.

  Sal rapped his trademark powerful one knock on the Desmonds’ security door.

  “When’d you start doing that knock?” I asked.

  “On patrol. In the Seventy-Seventh. Everyone was doing the five rap hard knock. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Gangsters heard that, knew it was police. So I went with my one-punch knockout knock. It confused them. I think they were expecting follow-up knocks, but just got the one. So they would come to the door to check it out. Like, what the fuck was that? A knock on the door or a single gunshot.”

  I wasn’t sure if LaBarbera was messing with me or not, but I went along. “So like before you got married, did you do that knock when you went to pick up a date?”