“And that was unusual for him to come there?”
“Sort of. Not really.”
This had stood out to Ballard in the murder book chrono—that it was unusual for Hilton to go to Brazil’s workplace. Now she was hearing something different.
“I read a report from the first investigation that had you saying he’d never done that before,” she prompted.
“First of all, I didn’t know this guy who was interviewing me,” Brazil said. “I called him Detective Vitalis—you remember that stuff in the green bottles? And for a while—until they confirmed my alibi—I thought they were going to try to blame me and make it a fag-on-fag crime. So I told him what I told him.”
“Which was a lie?”
“No, not a lie. But it wasn’t everything, you know? I worked for a company that did craft services. You know, brought all the food and snacks and stuff for whatever production we were on. Sometimes we were at the studio and sometimes we were out filming on location, like on the streets somewhere. And I always told John where we would be and he’d come by and I’d sneak him some food, you know? And that’s why he came to the studio that day. He was hungry. He must’ve had no money and wanted something to eat. But giving my name at the guard shack at Archway wouldn’t have worked. It was our first time on that lot and they didn’t know me from Adam.”
Ballard nodded. It was always good to get the fuller story, but sometimes the more you knew, the more you saw conflicts with other information.
“So, if he had no money for food and tried to come to you, how did he have money to go down to that alley to buy drugs?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Brazil said. “Maybe he had something to trade. Maybe he stole something. He did that sort of thing, you know?”
Ballard nodded. It was possible.
“All I know is that if he came to find me it was because he had no money,” Brazil said. “I need to go to the bar.”
While he was gone, Ballard decided to take the interview in other directions when he got back. This time she had to wait a while as Brazil delivered drinks to his one table, then took their food orders and went back to the kitchen.
“You know, I like you,” he said when he returned. “You are not like Detective Vitalis was at all.”
“I assume you mean Detective Talis?” Ballard said. “I had a hard time with him too.”
“No, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t because of his name. He had his hair hard-parted on the side and then very slick and in place. I could smell the Vitalis because that’s what my father always used.”
“Was his name Hunter?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Hunter. I remember because there was a bar on the boulevard back then called The Hunter. Their slogan was ‘Where the hunter meets the hunted.’ Anyway, he was a jerk.”
“He’s dead.”
“Well, he seemed old even back then.”
“Were you and John lovers or just roommates?”
“Oh, so we’re getting personal.”
“Part of the job. Sorry.”
“We were both, you could say. Nothing serious but sometimes things would happen.”
“Did he have anybody else?”
“Oh, yeah, he had his unattainable fantasy. We all do.”
“Who was his?”
“John went to prison, you know. His parents wouldn’t get him a good lawyer and he ended up with a three-year sentence. He fell in love with somebody there who protected him. But that was only there. There are guys who do what they need to do in prison and then on the outside it’s a different story. They go from gay love to gay hate. You see it all the time. It’s self-denial.”
“Did he ever tell you this guy’s name?”
“No. I mean, I don’t remember if he did. It didn’t matter because it was over. His lover got out and went back to straight life.”
“But John hung on to the fantasy?”
“Yeah, the dream. He sat around drawing pictures of the guy.”
“Pictures?”
“The guy posed for him or something in prison and Johnny was a pretty good artist. It was the one thing he could do well. He was drawing all the time. On napkins, loose papers, anything. He kept a notebook of drawings from when he was in prison.”
“Did you ever tell any of this to Detective Vitalis?”
“No, he never called me back after that first interview. When I wasn’t useful to him as a suspect, I wasn’t useful.”
“Is this what you were trying to reach him about? The man in prison?”
“No, I wanted him to call my boss back and say I wasn’t a suspect. I got fired because of what he told them—that I would sneak Johnny food every now and then. He told them and I got fired. They thought I was a suspect, and it wasn’t fair.”
All Ballard could do was nod. She didn’t doubt the story for a moment. Hunter and Talis had put together an incomplete murder book on an incomplete investigation. They had been steered away from the truth or turned away on their own. Either way, it was no surprise that they left other victims and casualties in their path.
“Don’t be like them,” Brazil said.
“I’m not,” she said.
22
Ballard got to the station early for her shift and walked into a detective bureau she had never seen so crowded so late in the day. Several dayside detectives were at their desks, working phones and computers. Something had happened. She saw her boss, Lieutenant McAdams, standing by one of the detectives and reading over his shoulder as he typed on a keyboard.
She walked over.
“L-T, what’s happening?”
McAdams turned around.
“Ballard, what are you doing in so early?”
“Was going to get an early start. I had some leftover paperwork and wanted to get it in before roll call. Never know what will happen after that.”
“Paper on what?”
“Oh, just some follow-up stuff on the crispy critter we had the other night. Arson wanted the photos I took on my phone. And then they never sent me their report. So, I’m asking for that, seeing if they got an ID. What’s going on here?”
“We had some hillbilly decide to rob the cash pickup at the In-N-Out on Sunset. Dipshit takes off and realizes he can’t get out of the parking lot because the drive-through line’s clogging the entrance. He ditches the car and runs up to Hawthorne, where he tries to jack a UPS truck, not knowing the driver’s in the back with the packages. The truck takes off, the guy in the back surprises him, they get into a fight for control, and the truck hits three parked cars.”
“Wow.”
“I’m not done yet. Then this guy jumps out of the truck and is still going, but now he’s got the UPS guy and somebody that was in one of the parked cars running after him. He goes north again, tries to cross Hollywood, and is run over by a TMZ tour bus. You know how much paperwork this has generated, Ballard? I’ve got four guys running OT and two are borrowed from Wilshire. So I hope you weren’t planning to hit me up for a greenie on your crispy critter, are you?”
A greenie was an overtime request card.
“No, L-T. No OT.”
“Good, because this is going to break the bank, this deployment, and we still have eight days to go.”
“Don’t worry. You need me to do anything on it?”
She felt she had to offer even though she wanted no part of the case.
“No, we’ve got it covered,” McAdams said. “You just take care of your crispy critter and whatever else comes up tonight. By the way, nothing on a new partner for you yet, but Captain Dean at Wilshire says they can continue to take care of Hollywood Division on the nights you’re off.”
“Great,” Ballard said. “But I don’t mind working alone, L-T. I’ve got patrol backing me up whenever I need it.”
She turned away and looked for a desk to use. The one she had been using lately was currently occupied by its dayside owner. She picked a spot farthest away from the other detectives’ activity and sat down to work.
Ballard realized that the story she had spun for McAdams about the crispy critter had an element of truth to it. She had not received a report from the Fire Department arson team on the man who had died in his tent on Cole Avenue. This prevented her from completing her own report.
She found Nuccio’s card in the bottom of her backpack and then opened up her LAPD e-mail account on the desktop computer. She composed and sent Nuccio a message asking for the victim’s ID and official cause of death and any other pertinent details, including whether the homeless man’s next-of-kin had been located and informed of the death. She was not expecting to hear back from Nuccio until at least the next working day. She knew the arson guys were nine to fivers unless they were called out or were running with a case.
But her cell phone rang a minute after she sent the e-mail.
“Ballard, it’s Nuccio.”
“I just sent you an e-mail. I need—”
“I read it. That’s why I’m calling. You can stand down. RHD is taking it.”
“Wait, what?”
“We’re calling it a suspicious death after all and that’s the protocol. Robbery-Homicide Division handles it.”
“What’s suspicious about the death?”
“A few things. First of all, the dead guy has some juice, believe it or not. From a rich family down in San Diego. So that’s going to sharpen the focus on this.”
“What’s his name? Who is he?”
“His name is Edison Banks Jr. and his father had a shipyard or something down there and got rich on Navy contracts. He died last year and this kid in the tent inherited a bundle but probably didn’t know it. Five years ago, his father got tired of his shit, gave him ten grand in cash and kicked him out of the house. He was twenty. The family never heard from him again. I guess he used up the money and has been up here on the streets ever since. There’s a younger brother and now he gets all the dough.”
“And you’re saying that makes this suspicious?”
“No, I’m saying that makes us want to check all of the boxes on this. And in doing that, it got suspicious.”
“How?”
“Two things. One is the autopsy. The blood-alcohol screen was off the chart. Came back with a three-six BAC. That’s like triple the drunk driving limit.”
“More like quadruple. But he wasn’t driving, Nuccio.”
“I know that, but this kid is five-eight, a hundred forty pounds, according to the autopsy. That much booze and he wouldn’t be driving or anything else. He’d be down for the count.”
Ballard didn’t bother schooling Nuccio on how blood-alcohol content was not skewed by body size or weight.
“Doesn’t matter how drunk he was, he still could’ve kicked the heater over in his sleep,” she said.
“Maybe,” Nuccio said. “Except we examined the heater, too. It’s got a float valve that cuts off fuel supply to the flame if the device is more than forty-five degrees off level. It’s a safety feature. So kicking it over actually puts the flame out. It doesn’t start a fire.”
“And you tested it?”
“Several times. And it doesn’t leak. Only way to spill the fuel is to unscrew the cap and turn it on its side. But the cap was screwed on. So, it’s suspicious. This guy’s in the tent passed out, somebody for whatever reason crawls into the tent, unscrews the cap, and dumps out the heating oil, screws it back on and gets the hell out. Then lights a match, throws it in, and whoosh. Poor guy never knew what hit him. That’s the only way it would work and that adds up to suspicious. RHD is taking it by protocol.”
Ballard was silent as she considered what Nuccio had described. She saw it like a movie in her mind.
“Who has it at RHD?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Nuccio said. “I talked to Captain Olivas about it and there’s a big powwow tomorrow at eight. I’ll find out who he assigned it to then.”
Of course, it was Olivas. RHD teams took the big cases. Ballard had been on one of those teams once. Until defending herself against Olivas cost her the job.
“Okay, Nuccio, I’ll see you there tomorrow,” she said.
“What?” Nuccio said. “No. This was informational only. It’s not your case, Ballard. RHD has it, and besides, you don’t even know where the meeting is.”
“I know that you go to RHD. RHD never comes to you. I’ll see you there.”
She disconnected the call. She wasn’t sure she would go to the meeting—it was her goal in life to never be in the same room with Olivas again—but she needed Nuccio to think she was coming. That would rattle him and it would rattle Olivas when he was told. That’s what Ballard wanted.
23
Ballard spent the first hour after roll call trying to get a line on Edison Banks Jr. He had no criminal record and his driver’s license had expired three years earlier and not been renewed. Ballard pulled up the DMV photo and estimated it was taken seven years earlier, when the license was issued. It showed a blond-haired surfer type with thin lips and green eyes. Ballard printed it even though she knew that it would probably be useless in terms of showing it to people who might have known Banks in recent years.
Next, she started working the phone, calling shelters, soup kitchens, and homeless outreach centers in the Hollywood area. There weren’t many of them and not all of them operated twenty-four hours. She was looking for any sort of connection to Banks that she could have in her back pocket if she crashed the RHD meeting in the morning. She didn’t expect to be allowed to stay on the case—that was a given with Olivas the captain in charge—but if she could come up with information that kick-started the investigation or gave it a direction, then her actions on the night of the body’s discovery might not be judged so harshly. She knew that Olivas would take any opportunity to second-guess her decisions, and she was vulnerable to criticism on this one: she had passed off what might have been determined to be a homicide to the LAFD arson squad, and that shouldn’t have happened. She should have been the one to inform RHD, not the Fire Department.
At the end of an hour she had nothing. Banks had apparently steered clear of places where names and photos are taken in exchange for a bed, a hot meal, or a bar of soap. Or he was using an alias. Either way, he had successfully stayed off the grid. It clearly suggested that Banks had been hiding his trail and didn’t want his family to find him.
She grabbed the DMV photo off the printer and a rover from the charging station before heading down the hallway to the watch office. She told Lieutenant Washington that she was going out to conduct a second-level canvass of the area, now that the death had been ruled suspicious.
“Arson deaths go to RHD,” Washington said.
“I know,” Ballard replied. “There’s a meet tomorrow at eight. I just want to finish my report and pass it on. There’s a few people out there we missed the other night and now’s the time to get them. They scatter at sunup.”
Washington asked if she wanted backup and she declined. The presence of uniformed officers would not be conducive to getting information from the denizens of the Hollywood night.
She first cruised around the city park and slowly along Cole to check things out. She saw no activity, except for a few inhabitants of the encampment who were still awake and sitting on the curb or on folding chairs and smoking and drinking by themselves.
At the north end of the park, Ballard saw a group of men sitting under a streetlight. She parked her car across the street from them in front of a prop house and used the rover to call her location in to the watch office. It was a routine practice.
As she got out, she slipped off her suit jacket so the badge on her belt would be readily recognized when she approached the men. Crossing the street, she counted four men sitting together in a small clearing between two tents and a blue tarp lean-to attached to the park’s perimeter fence. One of the men spoke up in a raspy whiskey- and cigarette-cured voice before she got to them.
“Why, that’s the prettiest po-lice officer I think I ever seen.”
The other men laughed and Ballard could tell they weren’t feeling any pain at the moment.
“Evening, fellas,” she said. “Thanks for the compliment. What’s going on tonight?”
“Nothin’,” Raspy said.
“We’s just havin’ an Irish wake for Eddie,” said another, who was wearing a black beret.
A third man raised a short dog bottle of vodka to toast the fallen. “So, you guys knew Edison,” Ballard said. “Yup,” said the fourth man.
He appeared to Ballard to be barely twenty years old, his cheeks hardly holding a stubble.
“Were you guys here the other night?” she asked.
“Yeah, but we didn’t see nothing till it was all over,” said Beret.
“How about before?” Ballard asked. “Did you see Eddie earlier in the night? Was he around?”
“He was around,” Raspy said. “Had himself a fiver and he wouldn’t share none of it.”
“What’s a fiver?”
“A whole fifth of the good stuff.”
Ballard nodded. Judging by the one man’s short dog, she assumed scraping enough change on corners and from passersby to buy a fifth was a rare thing.
“How’d he get the fiver?” she asked.
“He, um, had a guardian angel,” said The Kid.
“Someone bought it for him? Did you see who?”
“Nah, just somebody. It’s what he said. Said somebody gave him the big boy for nothin’. Didn’t have to suck a cock or anything.”
The Night Fire Page 13