by Justice
“You forgot ZZ Top booming out at earsplitting volume.”
“On the nailhead,” Martinez said. “Anyway, I got called down. We IDed the victim. His name was Henry Trupp.”
“Trupp was a biker?”
“One of them old, skinny, used-to-be types turned pathetic lush.”
“Did Trupp have a record?”
Martinez nodded. “Cat burglary.”
“Well, that’s confidence inspiring,” Decker said. “Trupp worked for a major motel chain. He had passkeys to all the rooms.”
“Motel help…we’re talking four-figure incomes. Some of the dives take whatever they can get, no questions asked.”
“He wasn’t working for a dive.”
“Then I guess he could fake it well enough to work.”
“When was Trupp’s last arrest?”
“About two years ago.”
“He was working for the Grenada for about a year and a half. Wonder if he did some pilfering there?”
“Could be. But dig this. His last arrest wasn’t for burglary.”
“Morals charge?”
“Very good. They caught him with some thirteen-year-old runaway who was rooting his pipes.”
“Cheryl Diggs supposedly got free rooms for herself and friends in exchange for head.”
“How old was she?”
“Seventeen…maybe even eighteen.”
“Mr. Trupp must have matured in his tastes.”
Decker smiled.
Martinez said, “Anyway, you get called down to a ex-con bar for a murder…how do you figure the guy’s been done in? Maybe shooting, most likely a stabbing—a broken beer bottle across the jugular. Maybe even a fatal beating, right?”
“Trupp was strangled,” Decker said.
Martinez stopped himself mid-chew. “Exactly.”
“Not garroted. It was done manually. You found imprints around his neck.”
Martinez didn’t answer.
Decker said, “Had Trupp been tied up?”
Martinez shook his head no. “Parallels to your girl?”
“To Cheryl Diggs, you mean? A few. Go on.”
Martinez sipped his coffee. “Now, Trupp had enough booze in his blood to preserve him in a specimen jar. So it wasn’t hard picturing someone going up to him and snapping his neck. The question was, why would someone do it that way?”
“And?”
“Well, Decker, that’s about as far as I got. Because I suddenly got word from my superiors that this guy was the night clerk at the Grenada, where the prom queen was murdered. I also got word that Devonshire was on the verge of arresting a suspect. Because of the publicity on the Prom Queen Murder, I was told to keep my investigation quiet so as not to complicate your shit before your suspect was arraigned. A week later, I got a promotion and a raise. But I also got bumped to CAPS. Someone shut me down.”
“Wasn’t me,” Decker said. “I would love to have known about this.”
“So why didn’t you follow up on Trupp?”
“Why do you think, Bert? I had the prime suspect in custody and a legit confession. Whitman said he did it, I’m going to tell him he was mistaken?”
“Well, all I knew was that some mafioso kid was plea-bargained down to a Man One. You’ve got to take a look at it through my binoculars, Pete.”
“You’re figuring the kid whacked the girl, then whacked Trupp because he saw something?”
“Exactly. But then I blink and the kid’s lost to me. I’m moved out of Homicide—”
“With a raise and a promotion.”
“Hush money. I was taken off Trupp and told to move on to something else. So I’m wondering if the loose ends you’re talking about is the Mafia trying to clean up its paperwork. Or somebody upstairs covering his tracks. Because from my point of view, I see a Man One conviction that maybe shoulda been two counts Murder One. For all I know, you’ve been hired to give me motivation for forgetting about Trupp.”
“I’m not working for anyone, especially the mob.”
“Look, at the time of the murders, I asked around about you. You’ve got a rep as an honest guy. But I’m clearing the air just so we understand each other.”
“Not a problem.” Decker shook his head. “So they booted you out of Homicide. No wonder you’re testy.”
“With the raise I’m not bitching. The shift just seemed like a coincidence to me. Then I get your call…that you’re reopening your own case. Sort of gets my dander up. Why are you doing that?”
“A half-dozen black pubic hairs.”
“What?”
“They did a pubic comb on the murder victim,” Decker stated. “They found pubics that matched the convicted perp—”
“The mafioso. Donatti’s kid, right?”
“Yeah. Christopher Whitman. The ME also found African-American pubic hairs. I want to know where they came from.”
“Didn’t the girl get around?”
“Yes. But none of the witnesses or friends recall Cheryl being with a black the evening of the prom. According to what I knew of the girl, she wasn’t actively involved with any blacks, period.”
“Maybe it’s not the type of thing a nice white girl would advertise.”
“Cheryl wasn’t a good girl. She was rebellious and sexually promiscuous. I think it would be the first thing she’d advertise.”
Mimi brought Decker over a white mountain of curds covered with boulders of green, orange, and pink melon balls. She cocked a bony hip and squinted at Decker, further creasing her wrinkled face. “Sure I can’t get you a cheeseburger?”
“Positive.”
She refilled their coffee cups. “Holler if you need me.” She let out a cackle. “For anything.”
Martinez smiled. “Yeah, you’re all talk, Mimsy.”
Mimi threw her head back and laughed, disappearing behind the doors to the kitchen.
Martinez said, “This is getting very interesting. Trupp’s clothing was combed for transfer evidence. Guess what we found?”
Decker’s heart quickened. “You found African-American hairs?”
Martinez nodded. “Which never made a lot of sense to me. Because the Chopperhouse is white boy only.”
“Maybe they belonged to a hooker.”
“They were male black hairs,” Martinez said. “And they weren’t pubis, they were head hairs.”
“Did you do a DNA on them?”
“No. Didn’t have a suspect. Why? Did you?”
“I was going to but then Whitman showed up. We can order the tests now. Quietly, of course. Find out if yours match mine.”
“Opening up a closed case just for curiosity?”
“Your case is open, Bert. And if they match, we have something more than just curiosity.”
“It’s gonna take time,” Martinez said. “But right now, the hairs are all we got. Because we didn’t find any blood at the scene. How about you?”
Decker thought a moment. No blood was found at the scene. But after reexamining the autopsy report, Decker recalled Craine’s stating that there had been trace amounts of blood inside Cheryl’s vagina. That blood had matched the semen from the unidentified source, the ME postulating that the blood might have come from a wound on the penis.
“There was some blood work. Of course, that’s not going to help if you don’t have anything for me to match it against.”
“We’ll just have to wait for the DNA.” Martinez studied Decker intensely. “You sit on this case for a couple of months. Now you decide to open it up. What gives?”
“Like I told you, I was never satisfied with how it was handled.”
“So why now?”
“Someone gave me a push. Not the mob. For now, that’s all you need to know.”
“Why’d your superior shut you down in the first place? Does he have a hard-on for the Mafia?”
“No, I think it was the riots,” Decker said. “It scared him a mite.”
Martinez’s eyes widened. “Ah…the thought of a black boy killing a whi
te girl…”
“Especially when the white girl had a rich, white, mob boyfriend with kinks. He’s also a pathological liar and a cold mother-effing SOB.”
“Capable of murder, then.”
“Absolutely.”
“So why start?”
“Because either the system works or it doesn’t. And if the system doesn’t work, I’m in the wrong profession.”
35
The house was dark and quiet. At one in the morning, Decker hadn’t been expecting a party. But he had hoped to see that welcoming crack of light peeking out from under his bedroom door. It was not to be. Quietly, he walked through his shadowed living room and dining room and into the kitchen. He turned on a small-wattage lamp resting on the kitchen table and started to boil some water. While the kettle heated, he sat down in one of the two chairs, his body slumped and tired.
A moment later, the kitchen door opened.
Rina’s face was flushed, her cerulean eyes darting with confusion. Her long black hair was loose and wild. She wore a long white gown and a matching peignoir. She looked like something the moors had blown in.
“I’m fine, Rina,” Decker said. “Go back to sleep.”
She sat down at the kitchen table. “What time is it?”
“A little past one. Did you attend the Rebbitzin’s lecture?”
“Huh?”
Decker laughed softly. “Go back to sleep.”
“What did you say?”
“I asked you if you attended the Rebbitzin’s lecture.”
“Oh…yes…yes, I did. It was good. Not as good as what we had planned, but I enjoyed it.”
Decker felt his stomach tense. “You’re mad?”
“No, I’m not mad.”
“Disappointed?”
“Not really.”
“Resigned?”
Rina rubbed her eyes. “Keep throwing out enough adjectives, you’ll find one that fits.” She sat down. “It’s okay, Peter. I’m not complaining.”
The kettle began to whistle. Rina stood, but Decker held her arm. “I’ll get it. You want some herbal tea?”
“Sure.”
Decker smiled. “With honey, honey?”
“With honey, honey.”
Decker got up and made two mugs of tea. He sat down and took her hand. “So the Rebbitzin’s lecture was good, huh?”
“Yes, it was fine.” She sipped tea. “She had a pretty good-sized turnout. Over thirty women. I was surprised.”
“Were they all from the yeshiva?”
“No. About half were from the community. Women interested in exploring their roots…what Orthodox Judaism is all about.”
“That’s great.”
“I thought so. We had quite a lively discussion…not all the women were pro-Orthodox but everyone was respectful. It made for interesting conversation.”
“I’m sure.”
“Afterward, the Rebbitzin and I went to her house for coffee. We talked. Apparently the Rebbitzin has developed quite a reputation. She’s going to be doing some kind of lecture circuit for the next month. She asked me if I would fill in for her while she was gone. I told her sure.”
“Wait a minute.” Decker sat up in his chair. “Wait a minute. What did you agree to?”
Rina squinted over her teacup. “I told the Rebbitzin I’d help her out. Is that a problem?”
“Uh, no…” Decker sipped his tea. “No, not at all. Just what does it entail?”
“Four lectures, Peter. I think I can handle that.”
Decker laughed, but he wasn’t happy. “Of course. I wasn’t implying you couldn’t. I’m just…”
“Irritated?”
“No, Rina, I’m not irritated,” Decker said. “I’m just surprised you didn’t discuss it with me first, that’s all.”
“It’s only four lectures, Peter—”
“I know, I know. It’s fine. I think it’s great.”
“Thank you. But I don’t need your permission.”
“I’m not giving you my permission. Christ, Rina, why are you acting so touchy?”
“Because I tell you I’m going to be filling in for the Rebbitzin, the normal response is for you to say, ‘Great. What are you going to talk about?’ Instead, you’re asking me what it entails.”
“I don’t think that’s an abnormal response. I just want to know how it’s going to affect our family.”
“You mean how it’s going to affect you.”
“Rina, it’s not going to affect me—”
“Of course it won’t. You’re never home.”
Decker put down his teacup, blew out air, and placed his forehead in his hand.
The room turned quiet and cold. Rina sipped her tea and waited. Decker waited.
Finally, she whispered, “I can understand the pressing nature of your current cases. What I can’t understand is why you had to cancel our date for an old case you closed months ago. A case where the guy confessed and is currently doing jail time.”
“I told you it could wait for tomorrow.”
“Then why didn’t you put it off until tomorrow? Why does something always come up?” Rina shook her head. “It’s late. We’re both tired. I’m going to bed.”
“Wait a minute,” Decker said. “Let’s thrash this out, all right?”
“Fine. What came up that was so important on a case you closed two months ago?”
Slowly, Decker recapped the Diggs case. When he was finished, he said, “I didn’t reopen the file because the girl asked me to. I did it because I was never happy about the way the whole thing was handled, you know that.”
“I know that.”
“The girl just more or less jogged my memory, reminded me that I was unhappy. So…I pulled out the file, figuring it shouldn’t take more than an hour at most. Next thing I knew, a major player in the story had been murdered and I was talking to some pissed-off dee in Van Nuys who’d also been shut down.”
“You became intrigued.”
“What can I say? It could have waited. But I got caught up in the situation. It was very inconsiderate of your feelings. But beyond that it doesn’t mean anything—”
“Not for you maybe.”
“I’m just saying it doesn’t mean I prefer my work to my family. You and the children are the most important—hell, you people are the only important things in my life.”
“How nice to be valued.”
“I’m going to ignore the sarcasm. Rina, I’m very sorry.”
She sighed. “It’s all right. Another time.”
Decker felt low. “I ruined your evening. I missed out, too. I know I need to prioritize. I’m human. I screw up.”
Rina sighed. “You can’t check up on the case during working hours?”
“If Davidson sees me working on a closed case—any closed case, but this one in specific—he’ll have a full-blown snit. I don’t want to deal with him right now.”
“So what exactly do these African-American hairs mean?”
“There was another man involved.”
“But Cheryl was wild.”
“Her friends never mentioned her being chummy with a black. Whitman never mentioned it, either.”
“I’m sure neither her friends nor Whitman knew everything about her.”
“Whitman knew quite a bit. He knew she was having an affair with a teacher. He knew she got free rooms at the Grenada in exchange for sexual favors. I think she might have told him if she was having relations with a black. If for no other reason than to try to get a rise out of him. He was real apathetic toward her.”
“Not that apathetic. He murdered her.” Rina paused. “Or don’t you believe that?”
“I don’t know. All I’m saying is, the hairs should have been looked into a long time ago. Now I’ve got Martinez telling me that the ME found Afro male head hairs on Trupp’s clothes. It got me curious. I had some choices when I finished up with Martinez. I could have gone home. But the evening was shot anyway.”
“I’ll say.”
<
br /> “Rub it in.”
“Go on, Peter.”
“I didn’t want to wait till tomorrow morning for an analytical officer. So I decided to do my own computer work. I fed the basic stats of the Diggs case into the Crime Analysis Detail program. The software compares major crimes in the department from the different sub-stations. That’s one of the ways we see if there’re any pattern crimes.”
“Serial killings?”
“Serial anything. Could be robbery or rape. Anyway, I wanted to see if there were any other LA cases in the last couple of years that matched any of the particulars of mine.”
“You must have gotten back a ton of read-outs. There are lots of rapes and murders in this city.”
“Not too many where the victims had been strangled and bound ritualistically like Cheryl Diggs. Only about a dozen including my own. Most of them didn’t fit. But there was this one case. I don’t know. Intuitively, I think I may have something. It was about two years ago in West Bureau, Wilshire specifically.”
“A black area.”
“Racially mixed—black, Hispanic, Asian, and white. A gradation area, not a salad bowl. Farther south you go geographically, the blacker it gets. You go north, it’s where the whites live.”
“So the perp could be black or white.”
“The victim lived in a black area. And the biggest victims of black crime are blacks themselves.”
“But Cheryl was white, Peter.”
“Rina, felons are opportunists.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, if he’s a black guy, the girls he sees the most are black. So he’s going to rape blacks. But suppose…”
Decker paused to formulate his thoughts.
“Just suppose he gets a job in a white hotel that services white people…white girls. Then one night, he sees a bunch of drunken, zonked-out teenagers checking into some rooms for an evening of debauchery. He waits, he bides his time. Then he sees them all leave. Except this one girl who stays behind in her hotel room. She’s all alone. Maybe she’s sleeping. Maybe she’s so stoned, it doesn’t matter if she’s awake or not. He goes in there…and ties her up…and bam…make any sense?”