Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  “If he thinks that, it’s not good,” Dinko said.

  Bino said, “But Kim might feel confident that an undocumented Mexican girl would be too scared to call the police. He might be lying low for a while to see what shakes out. What you have to understand about these organized crime foreign nationals from former Eastern bloc countries, and I’ll lump the Koreans in there with them, is that they don’t do business like our OC types. They’re basically cold war hoodlums. No matter what kind of show they put on with big cars, and tailor-made suits, and houses on Mount Olympus, they’re still thugs. Which makes them unpredictable. And that means that Kim could be very dangerous if he’s still around L.A. And if he’s guilty of the murder.”

  “Can Lita get police protection?” Dinko asked.

  Bino shook his head. “We can’t begin to prove yet that Kim’s the one who killed Daisy. He’s just another person of interest as of now. But if we can link him to her murder, this case will likely be taken away from me. It’ll involve federal crimes and human trafficking that caused the deaths of thirteen people in the container yard.”

  Dinko said, “Is there anything you can do for us right now?”

  Bino said, “I’ll personally contact the watch commander at Harbor Station and request that cars make frequent drive-bys at this address around the clock, even though from what you’ve told me, there’s no way Kim could know that Ms. Medina is staying here at your house. Still, be alert until we make contact with him or until we’re sure he’s fled the country.” He added, “And if our investigation clears him, I’ll let you know right away.”

  “I don’t think you believe in that possibility,” Dinko said, but Bino only smiled and replied, “If it walks like a duck . . .”

  Dinko said, “If he is the killer, will you find other evidence that’ll tie him to Daisy’s murder so that Lita’s testimony is not so important?”

  “We’re hoping,” Bino said. “When they’re finished posting the body today, we might get some idea if there’s a chance for DNA evidence. If there is, it’ll take a while to get results, given the backlog and the process itself. On CSI they get DNA hits in about thirty minutes, but it doesn’t work that way in real life.”

  “I really appreciate the way you’ve handled this with Lita,” Dinko said, shaking hands vigorously with Bino Villaseñor. “You were gentle.”

  By way of a good-bye, the detective simply looked at Dinko and said, “She’s a very fine girl, son.” And then he was in his car and heading north from Fish Town.

  It was a day that Hector Cozzo would never forget. He wasn’t sure if his life had begun to unravel at the off-the-hook Saturday night fiasco at his home, or if this was the day it happened. Hector had slept late after doing too much cocaine and vodka the night before, and he hadn’t read the morning newspaper, nor heard any news on TV. It was late afternoon when he decided to drive to the Mercedes dealer to show the service manager what some Armenian asshole had done to his car and to set up an appointment for bodywork. But when he got there he was told to first make a police report, which was required by the dealership’s insurance company.

  He grumbled to no avail, but after stopping at a bar for a quick drink he drove to Hollywood Station on Wilcox to make the written report, precisely as he’d been advised to do outside Club Samara by the snarky Jewish cop and his little female sidekick. Hector parked on the street in front and walked across the marble-and-brass stars bearing the names of Hollywood Station cops killed in the line of duty. He entered, seeing two cops manning the desk in the lobby.

  One of them was Asian and one was Latino, and Hector thought, Jesus! Isn’t there one fucking white Christian left in all of Hollywood?

  The Latino cop said, “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah,” Hector said. “Some Armo shithead keyed the hood of my Benz with some Armenian Power bullshit, and the dealer where I leased it says I gotta get a police report with a certain number on it before they’ll do anything.”

  “Did the car dealer ask for a DR number?”

  “Yeah, that’s it, I think.”

  “It’s just an LAPD crime report number,” the desk officer said. “I’ll be glad to take care of you.”

  Hector made his report, signed it, and left the lobby, thinking his luck just had to change somehow. And it did, instantly. For the worse.

  The midwatch roll call had just ended and the six cars were pulling out of the parking lot, with the partners in 6-X-32 deciding to head north on Wilcox and maybe grab something at Starbucks to get their engines revved with an instant buzz from an americano. Hollywood Nate had always told them that a few shots of bitter espresso could wake up Sleeping Beauty and Rip van Winkle, but maybe not the Unicorn.

  Flotsam was driving and Jetsam was keeping the books and filling out the spaces on the log when they drove past Hector Cozzo as he was getting into his car. They didn’t notice him, not with the setting sun glaring into the driver’s side window and careening off their windshield. But he noticed them.

  Hector Cozzo clearly saw Kelly, the degenerate peg-leg guy, now wearing a police uniform. There was no doubt about it! And the other cop driving looked like the suntanned, trash-talking hoodlum that’d been chased down and put in handcuffs!

  Hector Cozzo’s legs went weak. He had to sit down in his car and try to process what he’d just seen, and wonder in amazement how the cops could’ve known about Basil’s perverse fascination with amputees. And how in the hell could they even have a peg-leg cop working at Hollywood Station to sell the sting? And what were they after if not Markov’s entire cash business of selling upscale pussy, and that included the participation of Hector Cozzo? And now he was grateful that the crazy quack had shown up at his house on Saturday night and prevented any illegal activity from taking place in front of the fucking peg-leg cop!

  It just became too much to fathom, and Hector cried out, “THIS AIN’T FAIR!” which scared away a hungry crow that was hopping around Hollywood Station’s Walk of Fame while pecking at a half-eaten taco lying on a brass-and-marble tribute to a long-dead cop.

  Hector started up his Mercedes, but he was so shaken that he almost rammed another radio car exiting the Hollywood Station parking lot, and he had to slam on the brakes.

  The passenger in that radio car, known to all at Hollywood Station as the Unicorn, looked out the open window of his shop and growled, “Pay attention, buddy.”

  Hector muttered, “Yeah, okay.” Then, under his breath: “I hope you buy it tonight, you fat asshole!”

  The defenders and colleagues of Officer Chester Toles—who knew nothing of Hector Cozzo’s curse—would later maintain that it was the case on trial in Los Angeles Superior Court on that very Monday that effectively ended Chester’s police career. They said that if he’d not been needlessly subpoenaed, and if he’d not sat through hours of terrible testimony that day, what occurred later that night on Watch 5 might never have happened the way that it did.

  The preliminary hearing in superior court earlier that day had concerned the kidnapping and rape of an eight-year-old girl who’d been ambushed two months earlier while walking home from school with an older neighbor girl. Both girls were the children of Thai immigrants who were restaurant workers, and both lived in rented houses they shared with other Thai families in similar straits. The kidnapper had jumped out of his borrowed car and grabbed the girl, pulling her right out of her shoes.

  Just prior to the kidnapping, the defendant, a parolee named Earl Jesse Newhouse, had been involved in a violent daytime encounter with a streetwalking drag queen on Santa Monica Boulevard, called “Sodom Monica” by the cops at Hollywood Station. The dragon, whose true name was Morton Allan Griffin, had demanded seventy-five dollars for the kind of service Earl Jesse Newhouse had requested, and an argument over price had led to Morton Allan Griffin being punched so hard that three teeth were dislodged and later found on the curb by officers responding to a call from a passing motorist.

  It was after that act of violence that Earl J
esse Newhouse had smoked a bud and drank a forty, then gone cruising for the kind of action he’d enjoyed while serving seven years in Corcoran for strong-arm robbery. And that’s when he’d grabbed the little Thai girl, whom he’d raped and sodomized and, three hours later, pushed out of his car in Griffith Park, where she’d been found by a horrified family on a picnic. Chester Toles and his partner had received the radio call and, after seeing the condition the child was in, had called the ambulance that transported her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

  Chester Toles heard much testimony that Monday concerning those three terrible hours the child had endured. The testimony came from the report of the physician who’d treated the little girl at Cedars for her brutal injuries, and from an evidence tech who’d received the DNA swabs. But the testimony of one of the detectives who did the follow-up investigation that eventually led to the arrest was what disturbed him most.

  The D2 was a woman who testified to having served twenty-nine years with the LAPD, eighteen of them as a detective. She described how the child had remembered the name of the street where the assault had taken place in an underground parking lot. The girl remembered an elevator there, and that when the door opened and people got out, the kidnapper had pushed her to the floor of his car, but not before she got a glimpse of the elevator carpet, which was gray. Despite the horrific trauma she had suffered, the child still remembered the last three digits of his license number as he drove away after dumping her in Griffith Park.

  At the conclusion of the detective’s testimony, when she was asked by the deputy DA if the victim had been of help to the investigation, the detective’s voice cracked just for an instant and she said, “The child was just great.” And those five words, more than anything else, were the most unbearable for Chester Toles.

  The evidence was overwhelming, and the lackluster questions asked by defense counsel hired by an uncle of the defendant made Chester think that all this was nothing more than a way for the lawyers to wring more money out of the old man and to set up a plea bargain, rather than going to trial with this loser of a case.

  After being in court from early morning to late afternoon, Chester had finally approached the prosecutor and said, “What the hell am I doing here? You don’t need me.”

  He was excused then, and he drove straight to Hollywood Station in time for the 5:00 p.m. roll call, furious and resentful that he’d been forced to sit all day and revisit that awful case again. Even after nearly thirty-five years on the Job—or maybe because he had nearly thirty-five years on the Job—his skin had grown thinner and sometimes bled easier, and this kind of crime involving a child he’d met could torment him.

  Chester Toles, the lazy, normally phlegmatic Unicorn, was in a foul mood as Fran Famosa drove them from the Hollywood Station parking lot just after 5:30 on that Monday evening, which was when Chester saw some little maggot in a red Mercedes SL with his head up his ass almost take them out broadside.

  And Chester Toles growled at him, “Pay attention, buddy.”

  It was very hard for Hector to get his mind around the sighting of the two men, now in police uniforms, that he’d seen at his house on Saturday night. He didn’t know what to do or who to tell. Or should he tell anybody? That whole freak-o-rama with the amputation shit had been a police sting! And the foot chase and “capture” of the tall cop had been just a way to get the peg-leg guy out of the house with no question-and-answer session, so they could come back at him another day.

  Well, there wasn’t going to be another day! The cops were after him. And they no doubt had designs on rolling up Markov and Kim. And thinking of the Korean made Hector remember that he hadn’t bothered trying to find the Mexican dancer, because he hadn’t the faintest idea where to start looking. Who the fuck did the buckethead think he was—Hector Cozzo, private eye? All of that made him check his e-mail messages for the first time that day, and he saw the new cell number Markov was using that month. It made him think that he should dump his own go-phone and buy another one. But right then he didn’t have time. He figured his pay-as-you-go phone would be okay for a little while longer.

  He might ignore Kim’s phone calls, but he couldn’t do that to Markov, not if he wanted to keep his job. Then Hector thought that maybe he didn’t want to keep his job, now that the cops were after him. It was all so confusing. Was it only for running some hookers in a few skin joints? Or could it have to do with the dead gooks in the cargo container down at the harbor? But that was Kim’s deal, not his, Hector reasoned. That had nothing to do with him. That thought made him stop at a liquor store and buy a Los Angeles Times.

  He sat in his car outside the liquor store and looked for it and there it was, the thing he’d feared. Daisy’s body had been found in a dumpster next to some sleeping bum. Hector Cozzo now realized that he was up to his armpits in murder. He was terrified. He felt a powerful urge to drive home and do some blow and drink a little vodka and try to figure it out later. His cell phone rang, and he saw that it was Markov again. He was afraid to answer and afraid not to answer. He answered it.

  Markov’s voice was quivering with rage when he said, “Come to my house in one hour.” And for the first time he gave Hector his address on Mount Olympus, then hung up before Hector could reply.

  Hector sat in his red Mercedes SL and considered his options. First, he could just blow off Markov, move his things out of the house he subleased from his boss, and take the leased car back to the dealer. Then he could go home to his parents’ house in Pedro and lie low until all of this, whatever it was, cooled down.

  Thinking of that almost made him nauseous. He could hear his mother’s yammering about his failure to settle down with a real job. Or maybe she might try to hook him up with one of their Italian relatives who worked at a small cannery on Terminal Island, by the U.S. Coast Guard station, where they turned bonita into cat food. That job might be just slightly better than a jail cell to Hector Cozzo.

  His second option would be to drive straight back to Hollywood Station and ask to see a detective, then make a deal to testify against Markov and Kim, and even give them what little he knew about their smuggling of the thirteen dead gooks, as well as what Violet had reported about the Mexican dancer witnessing the slopehead driving off with Daisy. He might have to get booked for pimping or pandering or something, and maybe take another hit for federal income tax evasion, but if he gave up the murderers, surely he wouldn’t do any significant time. And then he thought of himself in jail, even as a protected witness, and he imagined climbing into his bunk with the fear that one of Kim’s paid assassins might wake him with a blade slicing through his throat.

  His third option would be to go to Markov and tell him about the undercover cop that came to the freak show on Saturday night, and make the old bastard see that he had to dime Kim for his own sake and for Hector’s, and to save the whole business enterprise. Kim had to go down, and he had to take that ride alone.

  The third option made him decide to drive to Mount Olympus and present the situation to Markov with all of the logic he could muster.

  FIFTEEN

  Officer Chester Toles’s long police career essentially ended within an hour after encountering Hector Cozzo in front of Hollywood Station. The cops in 6-X-46 received a radio call that took them to Thai Town, and just going to that location made Chester think of the little Thai girl and the horrible day he’d spent in court.

  In fact, on their way to the call, Fran Famosa asked him, “What’s wrong, Chester? You look like you’re ready to go a few more rounds with the Indian that broke your glasses.”

  “Had a bad day in court,” he mumbled.

  “Yeah? What kinda case?”

  “The kind you don’t talk to your civilian friends about,” he said.

  “I’m not a civilian,” Fran said, and for once, she was truly worried about the old slacker. He looked angry.

  “Not worth talking about,” he said.

  The rented house was in Thai Town, but the residents wer
e not Thai. They were a white family of six people plus a boyfriend, and a rescue ambulance had arrived there ahead of the cops.

  The rusty screen door was torn open, and the small living room was thick with cigarette smoke. The officers of 6-X-46 found Mom and Grandma sitting in front of a blaring television, and three children under the age of seven were perched on a greasy sofa, looking scared.

  A pair of male paramedics, one white, one African-American, looked as though they were eager to get out of there the moment the cops entered. The white paramedic pointed to a tiny bedroom off the kitchen, and the cops went inside. They saw a two-year-old boy lying on the bed. He wore a vomit-soaked jersey and shorts, and his strawberry-blond hair was damp and plastered down.

  The black paramedic closed the bedroom door behind himself for privacy and said, “That baby’s been dead for a while. Rigor is already setting in the jaw and legs. When I asked the momma why they didn’t call sooner, she said the child always takes long naps.” He pointed to the wall beside the bed and said, “That’s vomit. This child did a whole lot of vomiting. There’s serious bruising at the base of his skull and on his body under the jersey. I’ve seen this kind of battering before, where the skull’s fractured and ribs’re broken. And I’ll bet his liver is lacerated.” With that, he headed for the door, saying, “It’s all yours now.”

  Fran went out to the car to request detectives and crime scene criminalists as well as a team from Children and Family Services, while Chester stayed inside and turned off the TV.

  “Would you like to tell me what happened here?” he asked the mother in a very quiet voice.

  She looked to be about thirty years old and had strawberry-blond hair like her dead son. She wore a tank and cutoff denim shorts, and was a younger version of her fifty-something mother, who sat smoking and sipping from a can of beer without saying a word.