I let him wait without an answer while I sliced through the sealing tape on one of the cartons the movers had left in the middle of my office floor. Then I let him wait some more while I transferred the junk in the carton into the drawers of my rented desk.
The desk was a good, big, well-scarred wooden thing. I liked it very much, and wouldn’t have minded claiming it as my own.
But, under the circumstances, renting seemed like a good idea. I wasn’t at all sure Los Angeles and I were going to take to each other. The rented status of the desk bothered Mike. He had said, “Make the leap, Maggie. If nothing else, you can commit enough to buy a desk.”
If the desk was going to be an issue, I was glad it had some character, a history even. No one at the furniture rental agency had bothered to clean it out before sending it over, so it came with a full supply of someone else’s dead pens and a two-year-old appointment calendar.
Under the calendar I had found a folder of snapshots, pictures of a bunch of old guys at a Sigma Pi fraternity reunion picnic. They looked to be working hard at having fun, their expensive my-wife-bought-me-this sports togs stretched over fully ripened, middle-aged beer guts. Pretty cute, actually. I was especially fond of the moon picture, half-a-dozen round, naked white asses on display for the cameraman. One of the old boys held a card above his peachlike butt with “Moon Pi’s” written on it in bold letters. I thought I might use the picture for my Christmas cards.
“So, Maggie.” Ralph’s grin was stretched thin. “We have a deal?”
“Why do you want Etta?” I asked.
“I’m covering the Police Commission hearings and what I have is too flat. I think Miz Etta would give my coverage some power.”
“Etta wasn’t at the Commission hearings.”
“What she says pertains. You know, cops and the ghetto.”
“Uh huh,” I said, watching him closely. “It’s a big stretch, though. Muddies the line between straight news and manufactured stories. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Not at all.”
“How did you know I had the tape?”
“One of my stringers was covering the demonstration downtown this morning. He saw you outside the courthouse, heard some of the interview. He told me it was good. He was right. So, you selling?”
“Sure.” I dropped the empty carton onto the pile of empty cartons behind me. “Except, Casey’s orthodontia bill is past due. Etta will cost you fifteen hundred.”
He nodded. “Sold.”
The tooth-sucking smugness that crossed Ralph’s face just then told me that he had been prepared to pay something more for Miz Etta Harkness on the courthouse steps, told me that maybe he had neglected to tell me something significant. I was bothered a hell of a lot more about missing the point than I was in missing out on a few more dollars.
As I said, Ralph was a shark. I should have been sharper. But I had things other than Etta on my mind.
I turned on the computer and loaded the standard release form off my hard drive, made a few changes to give Ralph nonexclusive, one-shot broadcast rights, typed in the dollar figure, set the printer for two copies, and ran it.
“Just one restriction,” I said, groping in the desk drawer for a pen that worked. “I’m not finished with Etta yet. I’ll be real cranky if you edit my tape to make her look less than dignified. I don’t want her to quit talking to me.”
“Trust me.” Ralph glanced at the release I handed him and signed it. “What’s your project?”
“A documentary on growing up in the federal housing projects. Bullshit variation on my usual,” I said. “Any time the subject is mothers and kids, I seem to get the job. I’m doing this one for commercial TV—the next anniversary of the L.A. riots comes during sweeps week—so the money is good for a change. But honest to God, Ralph, I’d give it up in a heartbeat for a filthy hard news story.”
“That’s the MacGowen I know.” He laughed malevolently. “The rest of us are real glad you’ve gone independent, Maggie. You made it tough on the competition.”
“Liar.”
“I miss you in the trenches.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t in the trenches, Ralph. Just different trenches from you network types.”
He passed me the signed release. “Give me some background on Etta.”
“I only met her last night. This is all I know: She took over raising her grandson when her daughter O.D.‘ed. The kid was ten when she got him. By then, he was already in a gang and running on the streets. Now he’s fifteen. This morning he was arraigned for murder. It’s a family tradition. His daddy had a hearing this morning, too—a parole hearing on a murder conviction. Poor Etta couldn’t be in both places.”
“Poor Etta, indeed. San Luis Obispo is a good four-hour drive from L.A.”
I was ready to sign the release until he said that. I put down the pen. “How’d you know his dad was in San Luis?”
“You told me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
He shrugged, smiled his shark smile. “My stringer must have mentioned it.”
I would have argued, but among the dead pens in the top drawer, right there beside the orthodontist’s bill, was the second notice for payment of Casey’s tuition. So, okay, maybe it was partly a money thing. I signed the release, crammed my copy into the drawer, and pushed Ralph’s copy toward him.
He broke the silence that had settled over the room with a smooth conversational gambit: “Your project sounds like an interesting one.”
I took a couple of deep breaths. “Anything else I can do for you, Ralph?”
“Not professionally.”
When I stood, my standard dismissal gambit, he rose too, unfolding six and a half feet of worn-out skeleton. He was a skinny, aging preppie, his expensive clothes rumpled as if he were forever stuck in rebellion against a too-strict mother. Going about life looking like an unmade bed was perhaps the most endearing quality about Ralph.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, ejecting his thirty seconds of Etta from the machine and slipping it under his arm. “Want to swap some lies about the old days in prime-time news?”
“Another time. I’m trying to get out of here early. You see the unpacked piles around this office? You should see what Casey and I have to deal with at home.”
“You girls are going to like L.A., Maggie.”
“Maybe it has to grow on you,” I said. I looked out the window, across the dense-packed freeway and toward the hills beyond.
We were in day four of the September Santa Anas, hot, wild winds that blast down through the canyons north of the city. According to the bank across the street, the air temp outside was one hundred and two, again, and the humidity a crackling zero percent. The winds had died down somewhat, enough to let in a puke-yellow layer of smog. I was not enchanted by any of what I saw.
I got up and walked Ralph to the door. I made my cheek available for the obligatory air kiss. This was L.A., after all, and I was trying to fit in. But he grabbed my shoulder in a quick, just-us-jocks squeeze instead.
“Maggie,” he said, grinning again. “A little advice. For anything to grow on you, you have to stand still and let it take root.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Ralph’s a big shit, but he’s far from stupid. I opened the door and listened to him walk away down the linoleum-covered passageway. I was tired of Ralph, but his leaving left me feeling oddly alone.
I made some calls. My second-string shooter, a free-lance cameraman named Thieu, had some scheduling conflicts so I had to set new appointments with a Catholic Social Services counselor for Thursday and a county case worker for Friday to accommodate him. I called Central Juvenile Hall to make sure that everything had been approved for me to come in on Wednesday to talk with Tyrone Harkness.
Finding LaShonda DeBevis was my next priority. I wanted to interview LaShonda DeBevis on tape because she would give symmetry to my documentary. Like Tyrone, she had been raised in the Jordan Downs projects. What made her d
ifferent was that she had finished school and gotten out. A rare success story.
Mike had told me LaShonda was a librarian in Lennox, a neighborhood down by the L.A. airport. I got the library’s number from information and placed the call.
“LaShonda transferred out,” I was told. “She’s gone up to the Hacienda Heights branch.”
I asked for the number there, and called Hacienda Heights. After some telephone tag, I got to the head librarian, Chuck Kaufmann.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Kaufmann said, talking fast. “We’re in the middle of a remodel. It’s pretty chaotic. Anyway, Miss DeBevis isn’t here.”
“When will she be in?”
“Can’t answer that. When her paperwork came down Friday, it was a surprise to me. With these budget cuts, I was told I had to lay off some staff. Out of nowhere, here was a transfer with less seniority than any of my people. I called downtown and raised some Cain. They backed off and somehow in the fuss they decided to release the funds for the carpet I requested three years ago. That’s what all the noise is you hear. I want to get the new rug nailed down before someone in the head shed changes his mind.”
“So, where is Miss DeBevis?” I asked.
“All I know is my carpet is blue,” he said. “But try Valencia.”
I gave him my number in case he heard from LaShonda, then I tried Valencia. No LaShonda DeBevis. I didn’t have time to call county personnel and go through their procedures. I looked at my schedule and decided I could squeeze in a trip down to Lennox to talk to her former co-workers within the next few days.
There are a lot of Hanna Rhodes stories in the ghetto—drugs, teen pregnancy, prison time—but Mike knew her and insisted she was worth some effort to find. The number he had given me for her grandmother was no longer in service and there was no new listing in the city. I put her name aside. If I had time at the end of the week, I would get back to the search.
There were a lot of other details I could have tended to, but I needed to get out, move around a little.
I gathered up some unedited tapes and a ream of notes, stuck a reminder on the door for the custodian not to clean my office—I would clean, if I wanted clean, myself—and locked my new deadbolt.
There is nothing quite like stepping from an air-conditioned building out into the full force of a true Santa Ana condition. At first there is an instant of chill as every bit of moisture on your body suddenly evaporates. Then comes a wave of heat like a solid white light that envelops you, blinds you, pours into your lungs, and steals your breath. By the time I had crossed fifty feet of shimmering asphalt and made it to my car, I felt thoroughly desiccated. Like bleached bones in the desert.
The free-lancers from the offices across the hall from mine were off in a corner of the lot filming face shots for a political spot; the elections were six weeks away. I recognized the incumbent district attorney, Baron Marovich, scowling his Godam-I-earnest scowl for the camera. He had made it from the brouhaha downtown unscathed, his perfect graying hair unmolested. He didn’t seem to perspire.
I knew the city was in for a nasty campaign siege when I saw who his campaign manager was, a rotund little gnome watching the filming from the driveway. In the world of political whores, Roddy O’Leary was a high-dollar, big-breasted, allnight-whips-and-chains fuck. He had a genius for creating Willie Horton-like nightmares for the opposition, fingering with amazing accuracy exactly what scared the shit out of the largest number of registered voters, and playing on it.
It seemed to me impossible that Roddy O’Leary could have been spawned by woman. More likely, he was the residue left when the air of some smoke-filled room cleared.
O’Leary was watching his candidate with exquisite concentration. I rolled up alongside him, letting my front fender all but kiss his ass. He turned around in shocked surprise and recognized me before he could let off his usual stream of expletives. He backed up and leaned in my window. Sweat poured down his red face, plastered his short-sleeved shirt to his round belly.
“Move it, O’Leary,” I said. “You’re blocking the driveway.” He laughed too hard, showing a lot of tobacco-stained teeth. “What brings you to town, MacGee?”
“The name’s MacGowen,” I said. “I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I thought I came down to work, but I’m beginning to think that somewhere along the way I must have sold my soul to the devil, because it feels like I’m in hell.”
“It’s hot,” he confirmed, wiping his face. “But like Truman said…”
“It was good advice,” I said. “Problem is, there’s no way to get out of this kitchen.”
He laughed some more. I said, “How come you’re stooping to a district attorney race? Last I heard, you were humping for a big-time governor somewhere in the East.”
His smile grew hard at the edges. “In my game, you’re only as good as your last campaign. You can’t always pick a winner.”
“Excuse me.” I cupped my hand behind my ear. “Did you say can’t always pimp a winner?”
He threw back his head and laughed until his cheeks glowed from tears as well as sweat. Trust me, I’m not that funny. When he was finished, he snuffled and snorted and caught his breath.
“God, I’ve missed ya, MacGee.”
“MacGowen,” I repeated. “And I’ve been around. You just have to know where to look. I saw your candidate making a jackass of himself in front of Parker Center this morning. What was that all about?”
“Case of police harassment, wrongful imprisonment. It’s a good issue.”
“May be a good issue, but do you have a good case?”
“Does it matter?” Roddy belched a little puff of whiskey-laden air. In politics, his kind was going the way of the dinosaur, pushed out by Bright Young Men, and now and then, by women. I wondered how desperate he might be for this win, how many campaigns he might have in his future if he lost another one.
“Better be careful, Roddy,” I said, nudging his elbow out of my open window. “Tug on Superman’s cape, you’ll find out if it matters.”
Chapter 4
November 6, 1979. Los Angeles (UPI).
Police Officer Wyatt Johnson, age 25, was shot and killed by a thug just after midnight this morning in a Southeast Los Angeles gas station.
Authorities said the off-duty officer, a four-year veteran with the department, was shot five or six times in the head and chest in the station’s restroom.
A witness told authorities that Johnson, who was not in uniform at the time, made a telephone call just before going into the restroom. Moments later, shots were heard and one or two gunmen quickly ran from the station, disappearing into the darkness. Johnson’s wallet was not missing and authorities say they have no motive for the killing.
That was very nearly all the papers had to say about the killing that was at the center of Mike’s new problems. For all the fuss it had stirred, I confess I was disappointed it had been such a low-wattage caper.
I scanned the microfilm and found one follow-up story printed two days later recapping the first story, adding more details about the six wounds Officer Johnson had received, some family background, funeral arrangements, and a reward offer of five thousand dollars from the L.A. County Professional Peace Officers Association for the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers. The police had no leads. The obituary appeared on the third day after the death, listing his wife, Beth, one child, Wyatt, Jr., his mother, and a sister as survivors. And that was all.
I went through the Times microfilm index again, searching through the end of 1979, all of 1980 and 1981. I found no arrest reported, no summation of the trial or announcement of the verdict. Not a single further listing for the dead cop. Nothing.
I had looked up Johnson only because I am nosy and because I was in the microfilm files anyway. My original goal had been finding background information on the father of Etta’s grandson, a convicted murderer named Charles Conklin. It would have been nice if point A, the killing that had set a particular course for
the child’s life, had been a recognizable case, something for the viewer to hang his time perspective to, as in, the day Kennedy was shot, where were you? I knew the date he was sentenced, February 1982, but there had been no news stories about Conklin, either. Because I didn’t have Kennedy, or anything even close, I would have to provide the narrative framework myself.
I was in the Encino branch of the county library, alone except for a few old men reading newspapers or dozing by the front windows. The quiet made me feel sleepy.
I went out to the circulation desk to buy a roll of quarters and went back to my microfilm reader and ran copies of the Johnson items. Then I blew the rest of the change on background stories for my project: the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, American hostages seized in Iran, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, double-digit inflation.
Globally, the late seventies had been one disaster after another. As always. Locally, there was a comforting consistency: Bradley was mayor, Gates was police chief, Baron Marovich was running for office.
Because I had seen Marovich twice already that very day, I turned back to the November 6, 1979, Metro section story about developments in the primary for city attorney. Marovich had been the third man in the race, the play maker. His opponents were charging him with improper fundraising and condemning him for turning a traditionally gentlemanly political exercise into a vile brawl.
Plus ca change my French grandfather would have said: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Marovich’s current campaign had been tagged by the morning paper as a record-breaker in character assassination. His opponent challenged his financial disclosure statements. Same old stuff. Marovich even looked about the same now as he had in the old news photo accompanying the 1979 story, except that his helmet of hair had grown gray and a few new lines marked the corners of his eyes.
I made some notes on the margins of the slick photocopies and filed them away in my bag. I returned the spools of microfilm, stopped for a drink of water, and went back out into the heat.
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