Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  Dr. Frank, I presume, a tall, busty woman who’d look much younger if she colored the stray wisps of gray that run through her auburn hair. She’s leaning against the doorjamb of her office, her arms loosely crossed at her stomach and her mouth fixed in a small grin.

  I tread around the snarling Miss Gloria, eyeing her like she’s a Doberman tethered to a chain of unknown length.

  Inside, Dr. Frank closes the door behind me and guides me into one of two chairs that front her desk, sits in the one I don’t, and reaches for a file on the corner of her desk.

  I say, “Thanks for throwing me the rescue line.”

  Her eyes are bright and very green when she smiles. The smile fades away as she says, “Sonita Khemra, strangled in MacArthur Park—horrible, truly horrible.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you at the scene?”

  “I was.”

  She briefly casts her eyes downward as if embarrassed to say whatever it is she’s contemplating. While I wait for her to talk, I inspect her white silk blouse and gray skirt, of barely respectable length. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, and along with the clothes, you can’t help but think she’s taking a stab at the frumpy high-school-principal look. The problem is her body won’t cooperate; it’s curvy in the way of ’50s movie stars and would make a Victorian granny dress look sexy.

  When she crosses her legs, I’m glad she’s not wearing a Victorian granny dress.

  “Not to come off as macabre,” she says, “but in what condition did you find her body?”

  Interesting question, the kind a cop would ask, so I say, “That’s the kind of question a cop would ask.”

  “I come by it honestly. My ex-husband is a patrolman with the Beverly Hills Police Department.”

  “Ex-husband?”

  She likes the way I asked this. “Yes, almost. Our divorce is in the works. He left me a few months ago for an emergency-room nurse he met while working a case.”

  “A pity.”

  “Do you really think it’s a pity?”

  I smile. “Just being polite, Dr. Frank.”

  “Call me Eleanor,” she says. “Tell me, Detective Crucci, do—”

  “Leo,” I say.

  She turns to the open email on her computer. “As in Leonardo, the name on your ID?”

  “Miss Gloria sent you an email about my ID?”

  “Now you’re getting an idea how she operates,” she says, and turns to me, fingering the tip of her chin while examining my face. “Hmm, somehow I think Leonardo suits you better than Leo.”

  “Maybe, but why don’t you call me Crooch instead, my street name.”

  She makes a girlish face at that, scrunching her mouth to one side and arching an eyebrow. The slight wrinkles that appear around her eyes and corners of her mouth show her age, which I’ve decided is late thirties or so. “Crooch,” she says, “Crooch,” as if seeing how the name plays in her mouth, “I like that….So, Crooch”—a smile—“tell me about the condition of the body at the crime scene.”

  I hold up my iPhone to her. “Would you like to see the photos?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I find the file in the phone’s photo app and hand the phone over.

  There’s just a hint of shock in her eyes when she sees the first pic, but she scrolls through the rest without hesitation and looks up to me, directly into my eyes, and I deduce she doesn’t wear tinted contacts. Her eyes are just a naturally bright green. She shifts in her seat, recrosses her legs. “Any suspects?” she says.

  I clear my throat. “Yeah, a witness saw a man running from the scene with Sonita’s purse in his hand. Taquan Oliver is his name. He’s currently in custody.”

  “Do you think he did it?”

  I shrug. “Probably, but maybe not. He admitted to taking her purse and the money inside it, but that’s it. He told me a believable story that would establish his innocence, but we get good stories from a lot of suspects. For now we’re proceeding as if he’s innocent. Look, I know almost nothing about Sonita. Tell me about her.”

  She leans back in her chair. “I guess I should have already made it clear that everything I tell you about Sonita is not for public consumption unless I’m subpoenaed—agreed?”

  “Of course.”

  She nods and crosses her hands in her lap. “I was Sonita’s counselor before I was promoted to vice principal last month. I’m just the acting principal pending a full-time replacement. Our principal became terminally ill and effectively retired.”

  “Miss Gloria told me that on the phone.”

  “Naturally,” she says, takes a deep breath, and leans forward, obviously uncomfortable with the information she’s about to reveal. “About Sonita…She was a wild young girl, Crooch. Her grades have always been horrible and she was a constant discipline problem, and getting worse. Sonita was into drugs—crack cocaine and pot that I know of. We disciplined her for possessing both on school grounds, but her misbehavior ran the entire gamut: alcohol, tardiness, absenteeism, even a fight or two.” A pause. “Her really bad behavior started about three months ago, when she left her mother to move in with her uncle. We were in the process of referring her to the district expulsion unit for a hearing, and probably would be finished with it by now if she had come to school in the last three weeks, but she hadn’t.”

  “Any indication she was trafficking?”

  She shakes her head. “If she was dealing to the students, I’ve heard nothing of it, and I probably would have.”

  “You mentioned her really bad behavior started when she moved in with her uncle; you think he had something to do with it?”

  “Oh, I’m practically certain of that. The timing of it, for one. Sonita was always a below-average student, and was always something of a discipline problem. But looking back at her record, her turn for the worse coincided with her move to her uncle’s place almost to the day.”

  “What’s her uncle’s name?”

  “Khang Nhou.” She notices that my pen remains frozen over my pad, looks into my questioning eyes and says, “Instead of spelling names, I’ll give you a copy of her file.”

  My pen hand falls to the pad in my lap. “Great, thanks.”

  She reads from the file. “Her parents are Samdech and Phath Khemra. Samdech is the father, but my understanding is he’s abandoned Sonita and her mother.”

  “Siblings?”

  “Grown and moved out.”

  A nod. “I met Mrs. Khemra last night, and it was a disaster.” After I describe the disaster to her, I ask, “So what is it about old Uncle Khang that you think sent Sonita down a bad road?”

  She leans back, folds her hands in her lap. “I counseled her face-to-face twice. According to her, he was too strict. Before she moved in with him, she ran wild, did whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.”

  Sounds familiar, I think, then say, “Rarely a good thing for a high school kid.”

  She tilts her head. “Hmm, something about the way you expressed that sentiment makes me think it comes from personal experience.”

  I smile. “Good catch, Eleanor. You were saying Uncle Khang was too strict with Sonita?”

  She gives her head a little shake as if to clear it. “Right, and he cut her off moneywise. He’s apparently wealthy, very wealthy. I saw him drop her off and pick her up a time or two in very exotic cars—a Lamborghini, for instance, and a couple others. Cars like that cause quite a stir when they show up in a middle-class school like ours.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Brentwood, in the kind of mansion you would expect to have a Lamborghini parked in its driveway. I googled a satellite image of it.”

  I stroke my chin. “He drove her all the way here?”

  “Just a few times. The few occasions Sonita decided to attend school after moving in with Khang, she drove a vintage Corvette.”

  “A Corvette, nice…” I look at my notes. “How does the guy make his dough?”

  “She told me he owns a company that sells
‘stuff’ from Cambodia, so I took that to mean he owns an import company. I googled that, too.” She looks at her notes. “He owns KN Imports, on Sixth and Alameda.”

  “Eleanor, you seem to have developed quite an interest in this guy.”

  “Yes, so much so I asked Gary—my loving husband—to check on him. Our, uh, troubles began shortly after that, and all I ever learned from him was that Khang was shady.”

  “Shady.”

  “Yes, that’s all Gary said, or something similar.”

  “Well, if Gary knows, that should be easy enough for me to check out. Tell me, if you know, how Sonita wound up living with Khang.”

  “Sonita’s mother is an immigrant and, as you found out, apparently never bothered to learn English. When Sonita’s behavior worsened, I called and talked to Mrs. Khemra through one of her grown children, who interpreted. Cutting through it all, Mrs. Khemra basically told me she had raised four other kids and her brother has none. She said she couldn’t control Sonita so she sent her to live with Khang so he could keep her in line.”

  “This would be unusual for a kid with access to so much wealth, but everyone who saw Sonita’s body last night, including me, thought she might be a prostitute. Not only her appearance, but she had a lot of money in her purse, which I now know could’ve come from Uncle Khang. But she also had a supply of condoms and a knife.”

  She briefly looks into the space over my shoulder, seemingly intrigued by my comment, before she responds. “For many reasons—mainly my naiveté, I suppose—that possibility never crossed my mind. But now that you mention it”—she shrugs—“prostitution could have been in Sonita’s picture, yes.”

  “And you say that because…”

  “Word around school is she was promiscuous. And her best friend, probably her only real friend, Monique Lefler, has something to do with it, too.”

  “So give me the scoop on Monique.”

  She barely considers this at all. “Monique is almost exactly like Sonita, at least in spirit, except Monique played the dominant role in the relationship. She’s a year older than Sonita, and like Sonita was held back a year for academic reasons. A very pretty girl—beautiful, actually—mixed race, African-American and Vietnamese. She’s very wild, and a lot smarter than her academic record indicates.”

  “That can be a combination for trouble.”

  Her expression turns grave. “In this case it probably is, and it gets worse. Monique comes from poor family circumstances, and I don’t mean that in financial terms. Her mother’s in prison—Corona, I think. Mom shot someone, I hear, in an incident that had something to do with prostitution.”

  “Is Monique in school today?”

  She shakes her head. “I doubt it,” she says, and swivels her chair to face her computer screen and taps the keys. “No, she’s not here, as usual.” She turns back to me. “Monique’s performing even worse academically than Sonita was, and has been truant at least as much. She’d probably be expelled now, too, but the expulsion hearing notices we’ve sent have been returned undelivered.”

  “What do you know about her father?”

  “Nothing but his address, which is apparently not good anymore.”

  “Do you have Sonita’s cellphone number?”

  “Yes, it’s contained in her file, an entire copy of which I’ll provide you.”

  “Can you give the number to me now? The one her mother gave us was disconnected weeks ago. I’m anxious to get my hands on the number of the phone Sonita’s been using most recently. To find out who she’s been talking to and what parts of town she was in yesterday.”

  She opens the file in front of her, scanning a page and saying, “You’re going to run a cell-tower search.”

  “Yeah, it tells us which towers her phone pinged, which gives us a general idea of her movements. The call records also give us specific information about who she’s communicated with.”

  “I’m afraid this number isn’t very recent,” she says, and reads it off.

  I’m deflated. “That’s the number her mother gave me. How about Monique’s number?”

  Taking a deep breath and turning to the computer, an irritated smile crossing her lips, she says, “Okay, but I probably shouldn’t.” She taps the keys and reads off the number to me, then reads off Monique’s last known address.

  I feed Monique’s number into my cell, say to Eleanor, “I’m going to call her now,” immediately dial it and just as immediately receive the usual recorded female voice informing me the number’s no longer in service. I shake my head. “That number’s dead, too. Have you—”

  She glances at her watch.

  “You running short?” I say.

  “Yes.” She sighs. “I’m afraid so. I have another appointment in five minutes, parents”—a soft roll of her eyes—“and I have to prepare and can’t keep them waiting. Do you have much more ground to cover?”

  Not really, but what I say, smiling, is, “Some, yeah, but it can wait until later.”

  She shoots a shy smile back and reaches for a manila file folder at the corner of her desk, hands it over. “There is some basic information in this file, and contact information for Khang. And there’s the discipline reports and copies of letters and memos.”

  “Thanks. Look, why don’t I digest the file this afternoon and talk to Monique and whoever else I need to talk to, then…well, maybe we can talk about it over dinner tonight?”

  She actually blushes.

  A silence passes between us.

  She finally says, “I’m sorry, Crooch, if I’ve led you on, but I’m afraid I’m not quite ready for a date yet. Maybe I’ll be ready in a month or so when my divorce is over and my head is straighter. Okay?”

  A month? “Oh, sure, I understand. I’ll call you then,” I say, but I probably won’t.

  Leo

  My cruiser is parked in the row of reserved slips at the head of the school parking lot. Energized from a professional level but personally deflated, I slide inside, boot my MDT and spread open the file she gave me in the passenger seat, eager to kick-start a COPLINK session. COPLINK is a slick integrated info system that’s combined LAPD’s six previously separate databases—dispatch, booking, criminal histories, field interviews, citations, corrections—and jacked them all into other info sources: auto registration from forty-six states, property records, business licensing, NCIC, Homeland Security, LexisNexis systems, and probably many others the department hasn’t told us about. Constantly updates itself. Builds institutional memory. Connects all the dots and presents it to you in snapshot form so the information that once took weeks to compile and analyze now takes seconds.

  Good old Uncle Khang’s name gets fed into COPLINK first, and my brain crackles when his record materializes on the screen. His official story begins with him becoming a founding gang member of the Oriental Lazy Boyz in the late ’90s when it formed in the Pueblo Del Rio housing project in South LA, his street name at the time being Flipper. Every cop in LA who hasn’t tangled with the OLB up-close and personal has at least heard of it. Strictly a Cambodian gang in the beginning, OLB’s founders and their parents had fled Pol Pot’s killing fields and imported the insane brutality they’d witnessed there to the streets of LA. They warred with Hispanic and Vietnamese gangs until they carved out a solid territory in South Central, eventually splintering into cliques that now control other downtown areas. They’re into everything illegal that turns a decent buck: drugs, robbery, extortion, prostitution, car theft, and most notoriously, assassination. Their most infamous hit is the one that went down against Haing Ngor, the Cambodian star of the movie The Killing Fields, but they’ve been credited with hundreds more—many of them message hits, the ones where their victims are disemboweled and/or dismembered, then left in a public place as a warning.

  Khang’s rap sheet is old, the last entry being sixteen years ago: two assault charges, both obvious shakedowns, a marijuana-trafficking charge, and three promoting-prostitution charges. The way Flipper smiled at th
e camera for his mug shots makes you think he knew without doubt he was going to beat the raps. He was right. He beat all five, all dismissed before trial. A BOLO was issued for Flipper in ’97 in connection with the beating death of a rival gang member, one Ngo Loc Thieu, and he reportedly fled to Cambodia. Khang returned to LA in ’01 and voluntarily presented to G & N (Gangs and Narcotics) for questioning. The Thieu case was cleared while Flipper was off the radar screen, so the investigating officer released him. In ’02, Khang obtained a business license for KN Imports, LLC, now located just off Alameda in the warehouse district. A business article published since then reported that he imports goods from Cambodia—rice, garments, bamboo, silk—and painted him as a quiet leader of the growing Cambodian community. What the story didn’t report was that horse and hash are major imports from Cambodia, too—as are prostitutes, most of them willing participants in the sex trade, but many others enslaved into it.

  The information on Khang indicates countless ways he could be involved in Sonita’s murder. I discover that the same thing goes for Sonita’s sidekick, Monique Lefler, when I run her name through the info mill: Monique’s been busted multiple times for curfew violations, once for a soliciting charge that was dismissed, and twice for marijuana possession. Monique’s delinquency could have a lot to do with her mother, Chau Thi Lefler, who has a string of prostitution arrests dating back to the early ’90s. She’s now pulling three-to-five in Corona’s dyke hotel for assault and promoting prostitution, the assault charge resulted from her emptying a small-caliber Saturday night special into a john who refused to pay up. Monique’s father, Terry Lee Lefler, is comparatively clean, with only one arrest that sparks any interest at all, the one for promoting prostitution a couple of years back; the charge was dismissed but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty, and it’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. He could’ve been Sonita’s pimp, maybe even his daughter’s pimp—it happens all the time in LA, along with granddaughters, nieces, wives—and/or their drug supplier on the street. No matter how you spin it, there are a lot of questions to ask Khang, Monique Lefler, and her father. One rule I’ve formed over the years: whenever you suspect a big shot might be involved in a crime, you work your way to him from the bottom up; if you do your job right and have a little luck, you’ll have a lot more to talk about when you get there.