Vigilante

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “I was supposed to take Lita to breakfast after I landed this morning. Laura and my camera crew picked me up at the airport, brought me here. After breakfast we were going to set up for an interview. Lita had agreed to be a show resource for us. She knew a lot of things about L.A. and the cops here. When we got to her house at a little before nine, patrol officers were already stringing yellow tape. Maybe my showing up was divine intervention, because I’m beginning to think maybe I’m the only one here who really gives a darn who killed her.”

  “You need to stop taking yourself so seriously,” I said. I had nothing more, so I turned to leave. He called after me.

  “Hey, Shane? Do you feel it?”

  “Feel what?” I replied, turning back. He had ditched the sad, funereal expression and was now wearing an excited, hopeful look, like a teenaged boy watching his first stripper.

  “I think deep down, on some level, we all know what’s coming in the future,” he began. “Like those stories you read about people who clean out their closets or straighten up the garage and a day later get hit by a bus. The family comes in and everything’s all packed up neat and ready to go. I have a theory the reason stuff like that happens is because intuitively we can all sense the future. It’s why sometimes we’re depressed for no good reason we can think of, or are unreasonably happy. What’s actually causing it is a subtle knowledge of what’s coming. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes bad.”

  “And sometimes it’s just too much sugar and too little sleep.”

  He shook his head, but he seemed happy, like he was delighted to be here, excited just to be Nix Nash.

  “Maybe you’re right, but I don’t think it’s dietary, or sleep related,” he kidded. “Like right now. Tell me you don’t actually feel some large sense of impending doom?”

  “I don’t feel anything,” I told him.

  “Just wait,” he said, grinning. “It’s coming.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  When I got back to the Police Administration Building, I Googled the Boca Raton Rape Clinic and sure enough, there were half a dozen pictures of Nix Nash hosting last night’s fund-raiser in South Florida.

  Not to be overly thorough, but I wanted to make absolutely sure he wasn’t a suspect, so I checked the airlines and found that Nash had been on a flight that left Fort Lauderdale Airport at 5:00 A.M., landing at LAX at 7:43 this morning. I talked to a terminal manager who remembered Nash coming off the flight and being stopped for autographs. That meant either he’d been at Lita’s house to take her to breakfast as he’d said or he’d been tipped to her death by someone inside our department. I suspected it was probably the latter and was determined to root out the spy and close that leak.

  The rest of the day was spent researching Lita Mendez. Of course, I’d heard a lot about her and knew something of the trouble she’d caused for the department, but for the last few years, because I’d been investigating high-profile homicides, her crusade against the Hollenbeck Station and the Internal Affairs Group had mostly escaped my scrutiny.

  As I surfed old stories about her on the Net, I was surprised by how much there was. When she died Lita was just thirty-three years old. One story revealed that she had become enamored of the court system at the age of six when she watched her mother get a restraining order against Lita’s father, who had been violently assaulting them both. Her dad, an Evergreen gangster, ended his short earthly journey a year later, going tits up in an alley off First Street. Lita had been keeping herself busy since adulthood by making life impossible for the cops in and around Hollenbeck.

  Among her numerous activities, she’d crashed various LAPD undercover operations, taking photos of the undercovers, posting their pictures on the Internet, putting their lives in danger, and burning these cops for this kind of work forever. Most of her civilian complaints were not for police brutality but for lesser charges like rude behavior or harassment.

  She had also made her share of enemies on the street. A committed Evergreen associate, she had little use for the more than forty-five competing Hispanic sets and often turned her legal skills against enemy shot callers.

  An article about her titled “Talking Truth with Lita Power,” by an L.A. Times writer named Trent Phillips, told how she was attempting to intimidate and drive rude, harassing police officers out of her neighborhood with complaints and lawsuits. Most cops thought her real motive was to compromise police activity and wrest control of Evergreen turf away from Patrol, turning the blocks back to the gangs.

  She printed police corruption T-shirts with the pictures of officers she’d accused of crimes and then passed them out in community centers. It didn’t matter that most of her complaints found those cops innocent. She hung sheet banners from freeway overpasses decrying Hollenbeck police officers, identifying her favorite targets by name.

  On our part, the department had charged her with two dozen misdemeanors and a few low-weight felonies, everything from driving without a license to the more serious offense of assaulting a neighbor with a gardening tool. There were eight to ten counts of verbal assaults against various cops. None of this legal vitriol had gone anywhere in court.

  Last year Stephanie Madrid, a captain in charge of the Advocates Section at Internal Affairs, had used police union funds to finance a restraining order against Lita, which would require her to stay more than fifty yards away from the Hollenbeck Station. That suit had prevailed.

  There was a raging legal debate being fostered within the L.A. Times blog community over whether Lita Mendez was a community activist exercising her First Amendment rights or a criminal menace, who was hurting her community and the quality of civilian life in Boyle Heights. By-and-large, the bloggers were throwing in with Lita, accusing the police of just about everything but double-parking.

  However, even Lita’s detractors admitted that she had a sophisticated understanding of how to use the court system and the complicated Federal Consent Decrees that, until recently, had governed the LAPD. She had often stated in the L.A. Times articles that her dream was to one day complete her GED and go to law school.

  She might have made an excellent attorney, because with no formal legal training and a closet of conservative business suits for court, Lita Mendez had managed to keep Internal Affairs and our city prosecutors embroiled in an endless legal debate. Just last week Captain Stephanie Madrid had filed a criminal lawsuit against Lita, charging her with intentionally making a false police report.

  In the gang-corrupted streets, she was heralded by Evergreens as a hero. They claimed she had the courage to stand up to City Hall. Her attorney, who mostly worked her cases pro bono, claimed Lita had never been convicted of a felony, even though she did have a sealed stolen-car beef dating back to when she was a juvenile.

  When I was finished, I had compiled a long list of people who hated her guts. A lot of them were cops.

  Capt. Stephanie Madrid was well known to everyone in the department. She was a hard-ass who ran the Advocates Section at IA. Advocates were police officers who had the job of prosecuting accused officers. In essence, they were advocates for the department. Defense reps were the officers picked by the accused to defend them. A defense rep could be any officer on the LAPD as long as they were below the rank of captain. The chief advocate had supervisory responsibilities over both the advocates and defense reps. It was a big, important job and Captain Madrid ran a large machine that brought police officers charged with malfeasance before administrative Board of Rights hearings. Hundreds of cops had found themselves facing boards because of Lita’s mostly frivolous complaints.

  When I finished, I rubbed my eyes, which were fatigued from hours on the Internet. It was a depressing compilation of facts and angry people. I had a long list of G-sters and cops to look into, including a prickly IA captain. Stephanie Madrid was often referred to as the “Queen of the Dark,” so I certainly wasn’t looking forward to conducting a suspect interview with her.

  One thought was buzzing around me li
ke the angry green blowflies in Lita’s kitchen: this certainly was the perfect case for V-TV.

  At five o’clock Hitch called to say he was just leaving the ME’s office. I suggested we meet for a beer in a bar called the Copper Buckle across the street from the Police Administration Building. A lot of cops came in there for drinks after work, and it was usually packed.

  We found a booth in the back and sat across from each other over foaming mugs. I gave Hitch a copy of my background information on Lita and he slid my copy of the ME’s report over. Instead of reading the paperwork, we filled each other in verbally and would go through the paperwork later. After I gave him Lita’s background info, he started recapping the coroner’s report.

  “The two bullet wounds to the head were made by nine-millimeter copper-jacketed Federals. They were one-hundred-twenty-nine-grain Hydra-Shok hollow points and were fired postmortem,” he began.

  “If she was already dead, it sounds like the doer had some personal issues with the vic,” I said, thinking of my long list of angry cops.

  “Lita was beaten to death first,” Hitch went on. “Head trauma, body trauma, and massive brain hemorrhage on the right side of the cerebellum, which Ray says was the immediate cause of death.”

  “How about DNA?” I asked.

  “Nothing on her body. Her nails had soap under them. Maybe she brushed her nails. Maybe the killer did. No soap where we found her, so it didn’t happen while she was lying on her kitchen floor. The body was clean. No foreign hair or skin traces, no vaginal DNA. It was so clean, in fact, the coroner thinks the corpse could have been hand vacuumed, which means the unsub knew what he was doing.”

  Again, I thought, cop.

  We drank our beers while I turned pages on the ME report. When I finished scanning the analysis, I looked up at him.

  “We got nothing here to hold Carla or Julio Sanchez.”

  “I still think there’s an outside chance they could be good for it,” Hitch replied.

  “Except we don’t have enough to charge them. Even if CSI matches their prints to prints inside the house it may not matter, because Carla used to live there. How about time of death?” I asked.

  “Still working on it. Her stomach content analysis came back just before I left, so it’s not on that top sheet. I clipped it to the back page. Lita had a mostly digested meal of beef enchiladas and Mexican beans. Ray thinks when she died it was maybe four hours old. If she ate at eight, which is just a guess, then she might have been killed around midnight. That fits with the lights still being on and the absence of rigor mortis.”

  “Enchiladas? So much for the Bolognese sauce.”

  “Once every ten years or so, I’m wrong,” he said, smiling ruefully. “That TOD estimate is also supported by lividity and maggot gestation. Ray will try and dial it in a little closer tomorrow by figuring in the ambient room temperature and adjusting for the temperature’s effect on larva development.”

  “Carla said she was there at eleven and Julio confirms it. If you believe them, it puts Carla outside the window on this preliminary time of death,” I said.

  We ordered two more beers. After they arrived I said, “Just for the hell of it, I checked on Nix Nash’s whereabouts, not that I think he did it, but I would have loved to get a way to stir him up a little.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He was in South Florida for some fund-raiser when she died.”

  “I still don’t think we should cut the Sanchezes loose,” Hitch said.

  “They’re on a seventy-two-hour hold. We could hang on to them for another day.”

  “I think that’s what we should do. Their bags are already packed and if we guess wrong and they really are the doers, it’s hasta la vista on those two. On a murder one, we’ll never extradite them from Mexico.”

  I nodded my agreement. It had been a long, depressing day. Neither of us wanted this damn case.

  So we packed up the paperwork, finished our beers, and went home.

  CHAPTER

  11

  “So tell me about Nash,” Alexa said. We were sitting in the backyard of our Venice canal house. The sun was just setting and the cloud-filled sky had turned to a mosaic of fiery colors. I can usually maximize the benefits of a beautiful sunset better than anybody can, but this evening I was barely aware of the bright oranges and purples that were part of the trailing edge of the February storm that had threatened a much-needed rain but had passed on without dropping any.

  After I filled her in on V-TV’s ubiquitous host, Alexa pumped me for case facts on Lita’s death.

  “Start with your suspects,” Alexa said, obviously concerned about the possibility of a police doer.

  “It’s a very polarized list. Half my names are gang assholes from competing sets who Lita had dustups with or enemies of her brother, Homer. The other half are cops she filed complaints against. Even Captain Madrid made the list.”

  “Stephanie may be a bit of a hard-ass, but that lawsuit and the false-reporting case she got the DA to file were only to back Lita off from all those nuisance complaints,” Alexa defended. “Captain Madrid was just doing her job.”

  “Easy for you to say, because she’s your pit bull. I wonder what Nash’s take is going to be.”

  We were drinking Coronas as the evening cooled. A family of ducks beat ass across the wind-rippled canal toward a thicket of reeds near the shoreline. Our cat, Franco, was hunkered in the bushes licking his chops, but the ducks were out of range.

  “Nix Nash says he wants me to give him a chance to prove he’s a good guy,” I continued. “In one breath he calls me Shane and tells me he just loves police. Then, in the next, he tells me he can feel the future and he sees me going into a pot of boiling oil with some chopped vegetables.”

  “He threatened you?” Alexa said, surprised.

  “You had to be there, but yeah. And he knew Lita from when he practiced law here. He told me he was going to use her on his L.A. show as a police expert. His story is he flew in from Boca Raton and landed at around eight this morning, then drove over to Lita’s house to take her to breakfast and do an interview. When he pulled in, he says Patrol was already stringing crime scene tape.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I know he was in Florida ’cause I checked. But I think he knew to go to Lita’s because he’s got a mole in our department. He’s already spying on us from the inside.”

  “Be careful, Shane. I hope you remember what happened in Atlanta.”

  “You hope I remember? Which one of us was it who threw a shoe at the TV set over that dumb-ass Piedmont Park bust?”

  “You. I threw that cute little Let’s Screw pillow you gave me for our anniversary.”

  Alexa reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.

  “What’s that?”

  “I had Danny do a full background on Nash, state and federal,” she said. “There’s some interesting stuff here that’s not common knowledge.”

  I groaned loudly, then closed my eyes. “Tell me. I can’t read another depressing personal history.”

  She glanced down at the sheet of paper before setting it on the table between us. “Nix is the third of four brothers. All of his sibs are Dade County cops. His father and uncle were also on the force down there, so it’s a law enforcement family. They’re all rock-hard southern conservatives. He was actually named after President Nixon. But for some reason Nix didn’t qualify for the Dade County PD. I’m looking into it. I think he had a medical issue. Anyway, instead of MDPD, he ended up on the Florida Marine Patrol, which basically patrols the rivers and swamps in Dade County, including the Florida Everglades. FMP was a big deal during the drug cowboy days in the late eighties.”

  “I thought his TV show main title said he was a Dade County cop,” I interrupted.

  “Me too, but Danny checked it on Hulu. The main title says he enjoyed an early career in South Florida law enforcement, which technically includes the Florida Marine Patrol.”

 
“Okay, go on.”

  “Well, he supposedly resigned, but Danny made a few calls and found out that it wasn’t quite that cut-and-dried.”

  I sat up straighter and looked over.

  “Apparently there was a killer operating in the Florida Everglades in the nineties,” Alexa continued. “This whack job was killing tourists and fishermen who ventured too far back into the swamp. The unsub turned out to be an illiterate French-speaking Cajun sociopath named Lee Bob Batiste. The way this supposedly goes, Nash and his partner arrested Batiste for operating an airboat while intoxicated. When they searched him they found six driver’s licenses in his wallet belonging to victims of the serial killer.

  “Nash was ambitious and wanted to get off the water and into FMP Detectives. He knew a little Cajun and started interrogating Batiste about why he had these six DLs in his wallet and Batiste immediately confessed to all the murders. Problem was, Nash was so eager to make his serial murder collar, he never Mirandized Batiste.

  “Lee Bob Batiste was released from custody and disappeared back into the Florida swamp, never to be seen again. Because Nix Nash had caused this miscarriage of justice, and because the victims’ families were enraged, there was a lot of pressure on him to resign. Six months later, after the fuss had died down a bit, that’s what he did.”

  “Not exactly the way it looks on his TV show,” I said.

  “Apparently, as a favor to all the cops in his family and because they waited the six months till it got off the front pages, the connection to his resignation was glossed over.”

  “Explains better why he hates cops.”

  “He’d say that the Marine Patrol mistake was a lesson learned and it’s why he is so down on sloppy investigations.”

  “Right.” I was getting irritated again. “What else?”

  “We know most of the rest. He decided to study law and became a lawyer in the late nineties. He moved to L.A., passed the bar and made a career suing cops here, got prosecuted for embezzling, lost his license, went to prison, wrote a book, got rich, yadda yadda yadda.”