From the Beechwood Canyon off ramp it should have been less than fifteen minutes up the canyon to Burke’s estate but a black and white swung onto my tail and popped its siren as I crossed Franklin. I was naïve enough to hope it was a routine traffic stop until the reflection of the LAPD officer in my rear-view mirror pointed a big gun at my head. It’s hard not to scream and curl into a ball when somebody points a gun at your head. Those who do are inevitably shot. His partner wiped across the windshield, the trajectory of his sights inscribing an arc into my skull, and planted his boots just up-fender from the side mirror. He knew where to position himself for maximum field-of-fire. If I tried to drop prone on to the seat I’d be dead before I touched canvas. The uniform in the mirror swung open the door and ordered me to kneel to the pavement. I kneeled and when ordered went down face first. I remembered how to take orders, how to disappear in the minutia of obedience. He pulled first one hand behind my back, then the other, cuffed them in place and left me face down on the street.
They stood over me to talk. I heard numbers recited and slang for the local police stations. They called me in and when they heard what they needed to know a pair of black boots nudged my shoulder. I rolled over on to my back, sat up, kicked my legs sideways to kneel and stand. My shirt had soaked through with sweat. The Jeep Cherokee rolled past as I waited for them to load me into the cage. Brenda didn’t swing her head to rubberneck the scene and I didn’t make a big deal of watching her go. Before turning on to Franklin she flashed her brake lights three times. I think she meant to wish me luck.
I’ve been few places lonelier than the back of a squad car. Not even a cell compares. In a cell, you’ve arrived at a place you expect to stay awhile. As cold and bare and hard as it is, it’s home. You can look forward to getting out some day. In the back cage of a squad car you’re baggage on the first leg of a long, bad trip. You have nothing to look forward to, not to staying cramped and cuffed inside nor to getting out, because oh the places you’ll go, county jail to courthouse to prison and all its attendant facilities; none of them will be any improvement on the awful place you’re in at the moment. When I saw one of the officers pull from under the front seat of the Caddy the .38 pistol I’d taken from Grimes I was sure I’d just bought a ticket for the full, bad ride.
39
Once in the system you have no choice but to go where the ticket books you. I was Mirandized and driven to the Hollywood station, pulled from the back seat like a suitcase and carried by the handle of my upper arm to the far end of a wooden bench. A metal rail ran parallel beneath the seat. I was chained to it and abandoned. On the opposite end of the bench a junkie nodded out, his chin buried in his chest and an imaginary cigarette smoking between his middle and forefingers. While I waited two officers brought in a woman with long black hair and a lip stud. Dense tattoo vines crawled up her arms from wrist to shoulder. She slipped me a conspirator’s grin as they pulled her past the bench and into a tempered-glass observation room. The observation room was reserved for minors; she looked seventeen going on thirty-seven.
The circulation in my hands had diminished to a stinging numbness by the time Douglas walked through the door. To some people pain might be a distraction but physical suffering stilled my emotions and sharpened my mind to clearer focus. He didn’t offer any formalities of greeting and neither did I. He clipped the cuffs and led me through the detectives’ bullpen, a clattering, paper-strewn space with about twenty rickety desks and a half-dozen movie posters on the wall. The Hollywood station takes its show-biz legacy seriously; seven Hollywood Walk of Fame-style stars lay embedded in the concrete walk leading to the front entrance, each star emblazoned with the name of a legendary policeman and the LAPD badge.
‘You’ve been advised of your right to counsel?’ Douglas closed the door to a room that smelled like fear and boredom. It was one of three interview rooms used for suspects. I’d been there before; after my husband’s body had been found Harker had interviewed me in that room or one just like it.
‘I’ll waive it until I hear the charges.’
He drew a pen and notebook from the side pocket of his beige windbreaker and glanced over the arresting officer’s report. ‘Possession of a firearm, that’s the charge we’re holding you on. That alone should be enough to revoke your parole.’
‘I have a story for the gun. First, it isn’t mine.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It was under the seat of your car. That’s possession.’
‘I didn’t know it was there.’
‘Technically, that also doesn’t matter.’
‘Technically we’d all be in jail if they caught us at the wrong moment.’
A wry smile chipped at his blank façade. Douglas wasn’t a bad guy as far as cops went. He dipped his chin once, as much a sign that he was willing to listen as I’d ever get.
‘The gun belongs to a private detective named Richard Grimes.’ His eyes drifted off course when he heard the name. I hadn’t been talking long enough to bore him; he knew Grimes. ‘We were driving in my car about four days ago when a pick-up truck ran a red light – this was about three, three-thirty in the morning. Grimes, he was in the back seat, and when we hit he went flying over the front and whacked into the dash. The pick-up truck, it was a straight hit-and-run, I never got his plates. Grimes was banged up pretty bad, first thing I noticed was a gash on his head. Then I saw the gun on the floor and I knew it was his but I didn’t know what to do with it. I picked it up, wanted to give it back to him but he wasn’t moving. I couldn’t just put it in one of his pockets and I sure as hell didn’t want to hold it either so I figured the best thing to do was throw it under the seat. Then in the rush of getting him to the hospital I just forgot about it.’
He didn’t bother to take notes. ‘Good story. Hit-and-run driver, explains your fingerprints on the weapon, Grimes has a head injury so if he doesn’t tell the same story you can say he just doesn’t remember.’
‘Check the admissions sheet at St John’s. He’ll be there.’
‘I’ll check more than the admissions sheet. I’ll check with Grimes and I’ll check your car. But the fact remains, the gun was in your possession. You’re going back to prison.’
The way he said that sounded less threat than fact. They had intended from the start to revoke my parole and with the gun I had given them the weapon to do it. ‘Why was I pulled over?’
‘For questioning.’
‘What do you mean, for questioning? About what?’
‘Where you were between four and ten p.m. yesterday?’
Given the time frame, it had to be Finny. He decided he feared me more than the law and filed a complaint. Douglas sat rigidly erect, pushing the arresting officer’s report with his forefinger and pulling it back with his ring finger. He wasn’t the one going to jail here. To him, I was just a job. He couldn’t care less what happened to me.
‘I’ll talk to that lawyer now.’
‘A murder investigation.’
That surprised me. I didn’t expect to be innocent. ‘Whose murder?’
‘Liliana Tutuila.’
The name meant nothing to me. ‘Never heard of the woman. Every time you get an unsolved, you going to call me in for questioning?’
He coughed once and eyed me over the ridge of his fist. ‘You might know her by an alias: Piña Noir.’
I rocked back in my chair as though the first and last name were blows. First Gabe, now Piña. Mine was the kiss of death. Had she never met me she might still be alive. I made the mistake of thinking out loud. ‘What am I supposed to do now? Can you tell me that? Feel guilty for the rest of my life?’
He started to take notes then. ‘You were angry at her because – why – she and your husband were lovers? Or because you two were lovers?’
I flung my head down, cracked it against the wood table hard enough to make the legs jump. I had no choice. The pain and anger flashed through me like a fireball and the only way to stop it was to put myself out before I burned to ci
nders. Douglas leapt across the table and cuffed my wrists to the chair. His fingers reached to my forehead and came down with blood. When the pain began to vibrate above my eye I knew the fireball had blown through me. The door popped open and he called out he needed a med-kit.
‘You plan to report police brutality? Is that what this is about? You should know the room is wired for sound and your little display is on tape.’
‘You disgust me,’ I said.
He stepped away as though I’d just bit him. He had no idea where I was coming from. ‘She went to meet you yesterday afternoon and wasn’t seen alive after that. You don’t have a clean alibi for the night of your husband’s murder and you were seen arguing with Dave Schuman a few days before he was killed. Care to explain?’
‘Coincidence.’
A dogsbody shouldered the door wide enough to toss a med-kit on to the table. Douglas broke it open and doused his hands with rubbing alcohol, directing the pinkish spill onto a wad of cotton. ‘Coincidence ranks up there with mistaken identity in the top ten of stupid defences. The court doesn’t like to hear the word – ever. I suggest you come up with something else.’ When he finished wiping the excess from his hands he returned the alcohol to the med-kit and snapped it shut again. No kindness there, just AIDS awareness. Blood trickled into the corner of my eye. I squeezed it out, took a breath, went on.
‘She gave me a call yesterday. I wanted to talk to her. She agreed to meet at Tower Records at four but never showed up.’
‘Why did you want to talk to her?’
‘She said she was going to tell a journalist what she knew about the night my husband was murdered. I wanted to stop her.’
‘How did you plan to stop her?’
‘Begging, pleading, whatever.’
‘Not say, with a knife?’ When he didn’t get an answer to that question he tried another. ‘What was your relationship, exactly?’
‘Friends.’
‘Did you pay to have sex with her?’
‘I paid to talk to her. For her time. Not for sex.’
‘The sex was a freebie?’
‘The sex is none of your business.’
‘That must mean it was good. Too good to share?’
‘You’ve seen the photographs from the disk – what are you hassling me for? Go talk to Damian Burke or Supervisor Danavitch.’
I didn’t appreciate the way his eyes flickered across my face, like he measured me for a strait-jacket.
‘You did look at the disk, didn’t you? Don’t tell me you haven’t even seen it.’
‘I looked at it.’
‘Then you know.’
‘The disk was blank.’
‘How?’
He didn’t bother to answer and his expression betrayed nothing except the suspicion that I was a murderous lunatic. Maybe he never saw the copy Frank had made. I’d delivered the disk not to him but to Harker, who could have glanced at the images and wiped it clean. Protecting a major politician would be a smart career move but maybe it went deeper than that. Harker could have known about the photographs all along and attempted to blackmail no that was a crazy idea but maybe he wanted to cover it up because the scandal would ruin Danavitch’s career and why not blackmail he knew how to make the deaths seem like a serial killing and all these ideas gyred around in my head until I could no longer separate fact from paranoia. ‘There were photographs on that disk, digital copies. That’s why the killer ransacks the apartments. He’s looking for the negatives.’
‘You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?’
‘No, not all.’
‘Don’t think much of the job we’re doing?’
‘I’m sure you’re doing –’
‘Think you can do the job better?’
‘I can help –’
‘Sure you can help. Know how?’
‘Yeah, I can –’
‘You can tell me now what else might be in your car.’
Gabe’s original disk was in the car. I hadn’t taken the precaution to properly hide it. Anybody feeling under the dash would find it taped to the inside rim. If the disk disappeared I didn’t have another copy. Without the photographs I couldn’t prove anything and I’d have several years in a hard, cold place to dwell on my incompetence. I said, ‘Nothing.’
Douglas saw a nervous catch in my eyes or maybe like any predator he sensed when another creature feared him. ‘Detective Harker is searching your car this afternoon. As an ex-con you don’t have to be told that evidence connecting you to any of the three murders will put you on the fast track to the gas chamber.’
‘Then go ahead and order the cyanide capsule.’
He took that as an admission of guilt, made a little note in his book. ‘What will he find in the car?’
‘The question is, what is he going to plant?’
‘What are you trying to insinuate?’
‘I’m not insinuating anything. I’m saying Harker will find in the car whatever evidence he needs to put me away –’
‘Stop right there –’
‘– and when I protest that it’s planted nobody will believe me because I’m an ex-con and my word isn’t good enough to spit on.’
‘You’re right there. It isn’t.’
‘Are you forgetting the night you pulled me over outside Hancock Park? You were ready to plant evidence then.’
Anger ripened his skin to the colour of black cherries. ‘You give me a blank disk, slam your head on the table hard enough to draw blood and then accuse me and my partner of some conspiracy to tamper with evidence. Yes, I think you’re a liar and yes, you are a suspect. If I can’t connect you to Tutuila I’ll find something else because I think you’re too dangerous to walk the streets.’
I said, ‘I’ll take that lawyer now.’
40
A private security guard employed by one of the armed response services noticed the car first. He had been on routine patrol above Lake Hollywood and stopped because the parking lights had been left on. Kids and young lovers often parked on the street to slip through the fence and drink and screw around in the hills above. He didn’t think it anything more serious than that until he noticed the corner of a leather jacket sticking out of the trunk. He was well enough trained not to force the trunk himself. If he read the papers and suspected what was inside he wouldn’t want to look. He called the LAPD.
Like the scalp collector, Piña had been stabbed and dumped into the trunk of her own car. She had either been murdered on the street where the car was found or driven into the hills after being killed elsewhere. If the police had found conclusive forensic evidence to prove either scenario they weren’t talking about it. She had been stabbed in the back and chest and slashed above the ankle of one leg. The inside of the trunk bore scratch marks. Paint chips were imbedded in the soft flesh under her shredded fingernails. Death had not been instantaneous. She might have tried to inscribe something in the paint before she died. Nobody had yet been able to decipher what she had written, if she had written anything at all. She might have scratched the paint inadvertently as she flailed out at the end of her life.
A lawyer told me this after I had been processed through the Inmate Reception Center of the Twin Towers, a complex of four high-rise, high-security octagons set across the freeway from downtown Los Angeles. With its eight stories of hardened concrete, archer-slit-style windows, tempered glass cells and inmate monitoring system the Twin Towers complex was Los Angeles County’s 21st century version of the medieval prison tower. Accused felons awaiting trial were held there, along with prisoners convicted on misdemeanor charges. It opened while I was doing hard time at California Institute for Women. The facility might have been new but the receiving deputy was no different from the woman who had processed me at the old jail five years before. I stood barefoot on the cold floor with my legs spread and arms lifted. She ran gloved hands through my hair, looked into my ears, nose and mouth, felt around the wiring of my bra and patted down my legs. Her hands were qu
ick and sure. She removed my cuffs and when the electronic lock sprang back I walked unescorted into holding tank number two.
Four women in similar circumstances sullenly eyed my entrance. Three walls of the tank were concrete and the fourth, glass, looked out on to the corridor, or rather, looked in at us. An aluminium bench lined the two far walls. One woman tried to sleep but the bench was too narrow and every five minutes or so she slipped off. After the third fall she gave up and slept on the floor. Messages, names and telephone numbers had been scratched into the concrete with the only sharp object remaining to the prisoners: their fingernails. One message went, ‘Help, I’ve been abducted by aliens.’
An hour later my number was called and the same deputy or one who looked just like her led me into a room with a bathtub. I removed my black jeans, pullover, bra and panties. Once again she examined my hair, ears, nose and mouth, this time gripping a club-like flashlight. I spread my fingers, lifted my arms and feet, bent over and pulled apart my buttocks. She directed the beam of the flashlight down my throat and up my vagina and rectum. These manoeuvres she performed with quiet professionalism. She would process a dozen prisoners that day. I was no more a human being to her than meat is an animal to a butcher. While I bathed and then cleaned the tub, she turned the pockets of my jeans inside out, felt carefully at the seams and at the stitching of my pullover and placed each article into a blue plastic sack with a string tie. She unhooked the nozzle to a tank of parasiticide attached to the wall and directed me to lift my arms, turn from front to back and bend over while she sprayed the now public recesses of my body with Kwell. The acrid odour was as familiar as it was vile. Prison perfume. Every new inmate reeked of it. At the door she gave me a jail dress and pair of thongs. I was allowed to keep my underwear.
Killing Paparazzi Page 22