by Baxter Clare
Taquerias crowded next to fried chicken stands, and Easter egg-colored stores advertised fish cleaned and fresh chitterlings. Old brick buildings, peeling paint and heavily graffitied, sported architectural flourishes that were too high off the ground to be ravaged by vandalism and testified to the more optimistic roots of South Central Los Angeles.
Frank had been assigned to Figueroa right out of the academy, probably with the assumption that she'd quit. But instead of leaving, Frank had embraced the 'hood, sharply aware no other division could challenge or test her as much. At thirty-nine, her mastery of the mean streets was no longer a question, either for herself, her colleagues, or the veteranos and OGs within the division. Except for the unending mysteries of who killed who and why, Figueroa offered few surprises.
After a grueling sixteen-hour day, Frank pulled gratefully into her driveway. Though she lived in an old suburb of South Pasadena, her house was not the typically modest Los Angeles bungalow. Its last owner had been an architect with more imagination than money and a penchant for split-level ranch houses. Consequently, the center of the house was dominated by a huge sunken living room with a beamed ceiling. It was surrounded by two tiers of polished wood leading up to a tiled corridor. On the north and south sides doors opened off the corridor into various rooms, but to the east behind the living room the floor widened to accommodate an open corner kitchen and a large dining table, which Frank used as her desk.
Loafers clicking noisily on the tiles, she walked to the bedroom, turning lights on along the way. She paused in front of an old mahogany dresser to dump her service revolver, badge, ID card, and beeper, then emptied her pockets of coins, latex gloves, her wallet, notepads, pens, scraps of paper, and an unused roll of film. Feeling ten pounds lighter, she changed out of her work clothes into ripped shorts and a holey T-shirt that Mrs. Fontina had laundered and folded as carefully as if they were part of Frank's trousseau.
In the den at the other end of the house an expensive stereo system nestled between walls of books. Frank checked the CDs in the turntable, then hit the play button. Van Halen pounded through the house. Frank padded into the adjacent room, a garage that years ago she'd converted into a gym. A Soloflex was bolted in the center of the room, a bench and racks of weights lined one wall, and a punching bag hung on the opposite side next to a treadmill. Frank set it for the highest angle, then started burning off the day while David Lee Roth begged a pretty woman to stop a while. But Frank didn't hear him; she was busy thinking about the Agoura case.
She and Noah had spent the evening first with the girl's parents, later with her boyfriend. They had quickly ruled out Fubar's idea about a drug buy gone bad; Agoura had no reason to be in the area, and no one could think of who she might know in the 'hood or at Crenshaw High. Although the Agouras lived only a dozen miles from the high school and had been in Culver City for eight years, they never had occasion to venture into even the fringe of South Central.
From all her family said, Melissa Agoura seemed like a pretty typical teenager. She was a sophomore at Culver City High, a B-C student, with no extracurricular involvements. She babysat for a couple of neighborhood kids, made enough money that way and from her allowance to go to the mall with her girlfriends and the movies with her boyfriend. He'd admitted they liked to drink and smoke dope, but adamantly insisted they never used anything harder.
He and Melissa had been going together for almost a year. On weekends, if the weather was good, they liked going to the beach, but a lot of times they just went over to the rec area and hung out in the sun or splashed around near the fish ponds. He acknowledged that he fooled around in the scrub with her and tried to get her to go on the pill, but she wouldn't do it. His grades were a little lower than Melissa's. He didn't like school, worked part-time at a mechanic's on Cienega, and said he wanted to drop out of school and work full-time.
Noah was going to run him through the files tomorrow, but it didn't seem likely at this point that he was involved with Agoura's death. There were the girlfriends to interview, too. Two of them had called her house when she failed to meet them at the park. They'd planned on watching some boys from their school play baseball, a common activity for them on weekends. Weekdays, the same two friends came over to do homework and watch Oprah. Agoura and her brother were always fighting over the TV. He was only thirteen. Her little sister was twelve and adored Melissa. Posters of Leo DiCaprio and Hanson hung in their shared bedroom between posters of Titanic and the Spice Girls.
Jaime Agoura managed a tire store in West Hollywood, and Virginia Agoura was a bank teller at the Wells Fargo on Sepulveda. The Agouras were struggling to get by and somehow managing. Their kids weren't exceptional, but they were good kids. And now this. Frank had seen the shock and disbelief a thousand times, the certainty that the cops standing in their doorway had to be mistaken, that it couldn't be their child.
By the time she slowed the treadmill, Frank's T-shirt was heavy with sweat. The machine always made her feel wobbly, so she dismounted carefully, letting the effect fade as she toweled off. She eyed the Soloflex and thought about skipping it. Instead she straddled the seat and briefly worked her torso. She'd do arms and legs tomorrow. Right now she was ready for a beer.
The beer and a warm shower made Frank sleepy, but she sat on the kitchen counter in her pajamas and chugged another bottle, flipping through the paper. After years of nightmares and insomnia, Frank had hit on a formula that usually guaranteed sleep: brutally long hours on the job, hard work in the gym, and a specific blood alcohol level. Though she was tired, she wasn't about to start tampering with the combination.
When Noah poked his head in Frank's office the next morning, he could tell his boss had already been there for a while. She looked up, saw him grinning at her, and sat back.
"What's up?" she yawned.
"Looks like you've been."
Frank's hair was dry where it touched her collar in a sharp line, but it was still damp where her sunglasses held it away from her face. She was wearing a V-neck sweater over a button-down shirt and her sleeves were shoved over her elbows. That usually happened after at least her third cup of coffee.
"How long you been here?"
Frank ignored the question, holding up the LA. Times instead.
"See we made the third page of the Metro section?"
"Yeah. The eleven o'clock news, too. 'Racially motivated attack.’ Jesus. Like we don't have enough trouble already. RHD on this yet?"
Frank shook her head and swung her polished loafers onto a corner of the desk. RHD was the LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division. They handled the more sensitive cases, the ones they thought the average homicide dick was too stupid to work properly. Frank hated it when they snagged her cases, and she was damned if she was going to let them have this one. Though she knew she'd be powerless to stop them if they wanted it.
"I'll work Fubar to stave them off, but I don't think it's a big deal yet. You going to run the boyfriend?"
"Yeah, first thing. Him and her savings account, make sure her money's where it should be."
"Good. We need to go to the school, talk to people there. I want to talk to people across the street, too, and get back to Culver City, talk to the girlfriends."
"Okay. I got a wit coming in at nine to sign a statement."
Frank nodded and bent back over the stack of reports on her desk. Everyone was in the cramped squad room by 6:20. The morning meetings always started late because one of the detectives, Jill Symmonds, was chronically late. It was a condition the squad had gotten used to.
After the briefing, Frank stayed to talk with Jill and her partner, Bobby Taylor. Bobby looked a lot like Johnnie, only black.
Both men were tall, big-chested and broad-shouldered. In college, Bobby played fullback and Johnnie had been a linebacker, but where Bobby had stayed rock-hard, Johnnie was running to fat.
Frank appraised Jill and asked, "Hey, Fire Truck, you going to make it a couple more weeks?"
She was seven months
pregnant and her huge belly looked out of place on her slight frame. Jill nodded her bright auburn head. She was going out on maternity leave soon and Bobby would be partnerless. Frank talked about their caseload. She didn't want Jill to be the primary on any new cases. She'd pick up slack for Bobby unless Fubar drummed up another body. Not likely, though. The LAPD was notoriously short-handed, and the workload left by a vacancy was usually distributed among the remaining employees. At Figueroa the detectives were already handling more than twice, sometimes more than three times the average yearly caseload. The burnout rate among regular detectives was high enough; at Figueroa it was off the charts. Frank knew she had a pretty good squad and she was determined to hold it together, even if that meant shouldering much of the load herself.
Sitting at the desk next to Bobby's, a red-haired detective who could have passed for Jill's father chimed in, "Hey, Freek, who's gonna pick up slack for Nookey when I leave?"
Peter Gough was fifty-six years old and should have been long retired. Ironically, it was Peter who had given Frank her nickname during her first week on the job. Gough had been a sergeant in the Newton Division when Frank and her partner had responded to a B&E he'd called in. He took one look at Franco and asked her partner, "Where's your sidekick?"
Her partner, as disgusted with female patrol cops as Gough was, spat bitterly, "She's it. Meet L.A. Franco."
"L.A.?" Gough had puzzled. "What the hell sorta name is that?"
"She says it's Dutch or something and that I wouldn't remember even if she did tell me."
With a cold appraisal Gough had concluded, "L.A. Freako's more like it, you ask me."
Her partner had laughed, and the name stuck. During the disco era there was a popular song that referred to "le Freak" and her name metamorphosed into that. Later, when she was commanding her own squad and it became clear to her detectives that she wasn't just another stat-gathering bureaucrat, her name evolved again. Frank's reputation for independence, plus presumption about her sexual preferences, created a play on words meaning she was on her own frequency, tuned in to a different radio band. Since then she was La Freek or Lt. Freek.
Gough had been flirting with burnout even then, and now he was completely fried. He'd had it with police work, wanting only to tend to his garden and start a specialty nursery. Dan Nukisona was the partner Gough had worked with for the last six years. Nookey was only a little younger than Gough, but he wouldn't hear of retiring. Every time Gough said the "R word," Nookey hissed vehemently.
"Boy-red, you are irreplaceable," Bobby said.
"I'm thinking Jill's going to like being a mom so much, she might never come back. I'm going to throw Nookey and Bobby together and see what happens," Frank answered, unhinging her long legs from the corner of Jill's desk.
Jill rolled her eyes skeptically. Nookey pretended to inspect the report he had rolled in the typewriter.
"Yeah," he said. "You've got your Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey, now we'll have Nappie and Jappie."
"No, no, no," Johnnie said in his gravely voice. "You'll be the Spook and the Gook, like in that book that cop wrote. Goddamn, that was the funniest thing I ever read."
"That's the only thing you've ever read," Gough grumbled.
Amidst the chatter, Noah's witness had nervously entered the squad room. He was dressed down in huge pants and T-shirt, cap turned back, thick gold chains called Turkish ropes around his neck and wrists.
"Where Detective Jantzen at?"
"Over here," Noah called, waving the wit into a chair. The young man was hesitant about giving a statement and balked at signing it. It took Noah and Johnnie most of the morning to get his signature against the banger who'd smoked his brother. He was afraid he'd be retaliated against, and Noah had to admit he had every reason in the world to be afraid.
Gough's right, Frank thought, we need rain. The day was mild and clear as she walked toward the Kenneth Hahn Recreation Area office, but the sky was smudged with smog.
The scrub surrounding the park was pale and dangerously dry from the summer's drought. Oil derricks pumped behind a fence, bobbing into dusty, raw dirt that contrasted starkly with the park's freshly cut and watered lawn.
Frank eyed the scenery, calculating its strategic cover. The section she was in now contained a shady fishing lake and a large lawn studded with saplings. On the western edge of the park, there was a smaller, more isolated lookout planted with trees from around the world, surrounded by vegetation and scrub. A chaparral-covered slope occupied the northern part of the park, with closed trails leading up into a tangle of dense brush and vegetation. She'd been here before and knew that a paved road in the chaparral led to a higher section containing another large, grassy area. Sections of Leiderman were open and grassy, affording little cover, but the huge chaparraled hill to the north and all the wild vegetation surrounding the park offered great hiding spots.
Frank introduced herself to a receptionist and was soon welcomed by an energetic woman in khaki and olive drab. Seated in her crowded office, Frank requested personnel records for all park employees as well as interviews with them. Gravity replaced the ranger's ebullience. She was very cooperative, inquiring if a park employee was their suspect.
"That's a possibility we can't overlook," Frank responded vaguely. "I have detectives waiting to talk to your staff and I'd like someone available to us while we're here, to show us around, help with identification, that sort of thing "
"I'd be glad to help," she offered. Frank nodded, standing.
The ranger escorted Frank and the detectives around the rec area until a cool dusk descended. Johnnie suggested they compare notes at the Alibi, and while they waited for their round, Noah flipped through the pages of his notebook. He wanted to reinterview one of the landscape staff, a short Hispanic man who'd been awfully uneasy with Noah's questioning. Johnnie had two visitors and an employee that he wanted to talk to again.
While Frank described her uneventful interviews, Bobby and Jill walked in. Frank called for another round and Jill slowly sipped a beer. Her colleagues had busted her chops the first time she'd ordered a drink while carrying the baby. She condescendingly pointed out that her mother had produced five fat and healthy babies while puffing Salems, sipping martinis, and swilling coffee. She doubted that nursing one or two beers a week would turn her kid into a dribbling turnip.
As the talk shifted from work to bullshit, Fire Truck said goodnight. Before her marriage to an emergency room doctor, the redheaded detective had been fast in bedding partners, hence her nickname. Now as she lumbered wearily toward the door, Johnnie commented, "Goddamn, that don't look like fun."
Bobby nodded, adding, "She's tired a lot."
"Hey, Frank, when are you gonna have a baby?" Johnnie teased.
"Hell, I've got all of you. What do I need another one for?"
The badinage continued around the table, through another succession of beers and old stories. At one point, after Johnnie and Bobby headed for the can, Frank stretched her long legs under the table. She whipped the sunglasses off her head and Noah watched as she ran her fingers through her hair. It was dark blonde, streaked with rich colors that could never come from a bottle. She wore it slightly layered on the sides, longer in back, and between haircuts it was kept out of her face by the Ray Bans propped on her head. It was getting long and starting to curl up where it met her shoulders.
"Hey," Noah warned, leaning on one elbow and grinning tipsily, "you better get a haircut before kids start mistaking you for Butch Barbie."
Mellowed by the beers, Frank was caught off guard and chuckled out loud.
During a game three weeks into his third Pop Warner season, the boy stood on the thirty-yard line, waiting for the ball. They were a touchdown behind with only a few minutes left to play. The quarterback tossed the ball toward him. It floated down perfectly into his hands and he heard his father scream, "You got it, son! You got it!" Then he felt the ball slip through his fingers and bounce off his knee. A boy from the other
team landed on it. He heard groans on his side of the field, cheers on the other. The boy who'd recovered the ball ran happily to his coach.
He was afraid to look at the sidelines. He couldn't move. The coach trotted out and walked him off the field, saying, "Good try. You almost had it. You'll get it next time."
The coach left the boy, and he could feel his father's presence behind him, felt the hot stare burning into the back of his brain. His little heart was tripping all over itself; he had to go to the bathroom. He watched the last couple of plays but didn't see them. When the game ended, his father put a light hand on his son's shoulder and steered him toward the car.
That evening there were no hits in the belly or fists to the arms. There was something new. His father threw the ball at him four times and four times the boy caught it. He smiled slightly, hopefully. His father smiled back and threw the ball. Hard. The boy couldn't hang on to it. Sadly, the father shook his head and retrieved the ball. He put it in his son's hands then moved toward the closed door.
Standing in the center of his roomy bedroom, uncoiling from the blow he'd expected, the boy couldn't believe they were done.
His father said patiently, turning at the door, "You've got to learn how to hold on to the ball." Then he launched himself across the room and tackled the boy. One hundred ninety pounds met sixty-six against the wooden floor. The boy's vision grayed. When he could focus, he saw his father's face only inches away. His lips were parted, and he was staring at his son in a new way. The boy closed his eyes and lay quietly under his father. In a life already filled with more than its share of fear, the new look on his father's face was more terrifying than anything the boy had ever seen.