Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (6 page)

Chief Robinson never apologized when he learned the truth. He just shrugged. “It made you a stronger person,” he said.

I never forgot it. Even when every instinct tells me a suspect is guilty, I reserve judgment until all doubt is removed, because I know how it feels to have everyone in the room be convinced you committed a crime when you’re innocent. And though I’ve submitted plenty
of defendants to polygraph tests because I know that a skilled operator can coax a confession out of a guilty man by convincing him that the machine has already revealed the truth, I never rely solely on the results of a lie detector test.

It didn’t take me long to discover that for a cop, the unexpected was inevitable. It was always waiting just around the corner, behind the door, or at the end of the blind alley. And it always seemed to happen in the dead of night.

At around three
A.M.
on one particular night, I was patrolling a notoriously rough part of Downey known as the Boot. The neighborhood, which lay just inside the city limits, was infamous for drugs, prostitutes, and worse. And the hub of the action was a sprawling complex with a hotel, nightclub, and restaurant known collectively as Tahitian Village. Word at the time was that organized crime ran the operation.

I get hunches about trouble, and that night mine led me into the narrow alley that emptied out in back of the nightclub. I drove through it, past the trash bins and into a nearly empty parking lot hidden behind the bar. Sure enough, I spied a car parked at a peculiar angle, straddling two spaces. Something about it didn’t look right. I got out and edged closer.

A man sat slumped over the steering wheel, eyes closed, mouth agape. Asleep? Maybe. Dead? Possibly. Drunk or on drugs? Probably.

I knocked on the window.

At once, he jerked upright, looked around wildly, and spied me. His eyes narrowed and his face lit up with a sort of murderous intensity. I had only a second to register his bizarre expression before he flung open the door and launched himself at me. He was enormous,
a head taller than me, and out of his mind with rage. Like a kick-boxer in overdrive, he flew at me, punching, kicking, biting, throttling, and grabbing for my gun in the holster.

Before I knew it, I was in a fight for my life, swinging and ducking as fast as I could to keep this lunatic from knocking me senseless and then killing me with my own bullets.

As yet another sharp right flew out of nowhere and caught me below the eye, I thought ruefully of my baton, lying uselessly on the front seat of my patrol car. I ducked a blow and landed one on his jaw. But this guy wasn’t going down. He just kept coming back for more, as if the only thing that would satisfy him was to murder me.

We didn’t carry radios in those days, so all I could do was keep fighting and try to steer the brawl back toward my car in the hope that I could get close enough to grab the radio and call for backup.

The stranger caught me around the neck and started to drag me across the parking lot, choking me until stars popped in front of my eyes. I twisted loose and dove for the car. Luckily, I had left the door open.

My hands slipping frantically over the radio, I pressed the button and shouted, “Car seven. Nine ninety-nine. Repeat, nine ninety-nine!”

When an officer called a nine ninety-nine, all hell broke loose. It was the police version of SOS or 911. Mayday. No matter what else you were doing on duty, you abandoned it and raced to the officer’s aid. (The verbal shorthand for “Emergency! Officer needs assistance!” varies by city and state. Some departments have scrapped codes altogether in favor of plain English to simplify things. However, the most common police call for help is “code zero,” which we used in Oregon.)

I barely got the words out before a pair of massive bleeding knuckles reached in and yanked me upward, hoisting me out of the car. The stranger flung himself on me, trying to force me down to the
pavement, his hands still scrabbling at my holster. I hit him as hard as I could, sending him reeling backward, then grabbed my gun.

I had done everything I could think of not to kill this guy, but I was in trouble. I was exhausted, and he was not only bigger than me, but full of the hyperenergetic, superwired kinetic strength people get when their systems are loaded with drugs. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he bent on killing a complete stranger and a cop, no less? All I did was tap on the window to see if he was okay. I wasn’t going to shoot him, but I had to end it. Soon. So I pulled out the .38 Smith & Wesson with the six-inch barrel that I had bought myself when I became a cop and cracked him hard across the head with its hefty barrel several times. (Cops had to buy their own guns in Downey in those days.) He let go of me instantly and crumpled to the pavement with a thump. I jumped on him and got him handcuffed.

By this time, our brawl had made enough of a racket to alert the crowd inside the bar. A straggle of onlookers had drifted out the back door and everyone was standing in a semicircle staring down at me, panting and bleeding as the surging adrenaline that had sent my heart into a furious gallop finally subsided. I dragged a shaking hand across my forehead to wipe away the sweat. That’s when I heard the sound of sirens in the distance. Relief coursed through me. Help was on the way. It’s hard to describe what that sound means to a cop in trouble. It’s like the cavalry storming in.

I didn’t even realize I had dropped my .38 until a stranger in the crowd silently handed it back to me. It had been one hell of a fight. Blood was all over the parking lot, and I had been lucky—very lucky—to come out on top.

My opponent, the mysterious Mike Tyson of the back alley, ended up in the hospital with twenty-five stitches. But the way I saw it, I was lucky to be alive and so was he. Things could have ended a lot
worse. Nonetheless, I found myself in court over the incident. And of all the courtrooms I didn’t want to land in, this one topped the list. It belonged to Leon Emerson, a hard-nosed judge whose courtroom I had been in before and who seemed to dislike me intensely.

I walked in, and there sat the psycho from the parking lot, ready for his arraignment, clad in a business suit but sporting a massive, turbanlike bandage on his head. As bad luck would have it, he turned out to be a VIP with North American Aviation.

“I was completely out of it. Really drunk,” he testified. “I swear I thought I was back in Vietnam. I just went nuts.”

Emerson didn’t buy a word of it. It didn’t matter that the man was trying to apologize, pleading mea culpa. He was a high-ranking executive, a big shot with a big corporation, and he had suffered what looked like some serious police brutality from the judge’s viewpoint. Emerson didn’t seem to care that the man had been drunk out of his mind and had attacked a public servant. He made his opinion clear with a slew of snide remarks aimed at me from the bench.

I sat there, black and blue and boiling, biting my swollen lip, as he prattled on, Monday-morning quarterbacking in his robes. What did Emerson know about it? He wasn’t the one lying on his back in a parking lot in the middle of the night getting the crap kicked out of him and thinking he was about to die. I was out there trying to do my job. I didn’t have any other avenues. I could have been killed. The guy was insane. He was trying to get my gun.

I kept my anger in check, but when I got back to the station, I wrote a memo to the chief of police defending myself and complaining about Emerson’s comments. The result wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for: The chief wrote his own complaint to the judge, saying that he supported my actions. But he still ordered the whole department to go to baton-training school. Worse, thanks to me and my boxing match behind Tahitian Village, we had to carry our batons in rings
on our belts at all times from then on, which made walking, running, driving, and even sitting down at your desk awkward and cumbersome.

“Thanks a lot, man,” my colleagues grumbled. They were as ticked at me as I was at Judge Emerson.

Licking my wounds, I went back to work. I was getting good at what I did, discovering I had a sixth sense for the cars carrying drugs. Sometimes I could tell from subtle glitches in the driving. Sometimes furtive motions from the front seat gave the drivers or their passengers away. Sometimes a simple hunch would tip me off.

Soon I led the department in narcotics arrests. I was assigned to AI (accident investigation), but I was still catching so many drug users that I landed myself right back in the crosshairs of Judge Emerson. I had been gracing the L.A. County District Court judges’ courtrooms so often to testify that he convinced himself I must be in league with the drug trade. “You’ve got a whole police department down there,” he told my boss. “How come one guy is making all these narcotics arrests?” He couldn’t believe the busts were legitimate. He figured I was planting dope, faking probable cause for pulling people over, or getting inside tips from an informant. Finally, he demanded a ride-along.

I was still fuming about the man’s barbed comments, but I had no idea he was targeting me. I thought he just wanted to do a ride-along and I had been unlucky enough to get stuck with him.

At around seven
P.M.
we were sitting next to each other parked on Imperial Highway, working radar and trying to make polite conversation despite the ill will almost palpable in the car, when a black 1959 Ford Fairlane sped past us. I clocked the Ford at twenty miles
over the limit. At fifteen over, I would have let him go. But that speed on this road was dangerous. I turned on the overhead lights and tailed the car, spying the familiar hunched pose—the telltale hurried scramble of a user fumbling to stuff his stash under the seat.

When the car finally pulled over, I approached the driver and motioned for him to roll down the window. He cracked it a mere two inches. A pair of bloodshot eyes with pupils so dilated that I could barely make out a rim of iris around them blinked up at me. I glanced back at Emerson and waved him out of the car.

“Could you come over here for a minute, Judge?” I asked him. He walked up to me. “Can you smell that, Your Honor?” Pungent fumes of pot smoke were wafting out of the cracked window. Emerson nodded.

“You’re gonna have to step out of the car, sir,” I told the driver while Judge Emerson peered over my shoulder. Reluctantly, he swung open the door and stepped out. As he did, I caught sight of something black and shiny peeking out from under the passenger’s seat. I ordered the driver to face the car, handcuffed him, and read him his rights.

“Take a closer look in there, Your Honor,” I told Emerson, indicating the car’s interior. Emerson strolled over to the passenger’s side and opened it. Across the top of the Ford, I watched his eyes widen as he spied the half-hidden handgun on the floor.

“Anything else under the seat?” I asked, keeping my voice casual. Emerson bent down for a closer look. Sure enough, there was “jar” after “jar”—a thousand pills each—of colorful “reds” and “yellows” (barbiturates and Nembutal), all neatly divided into plastic bags for sale. We had just nabbed a dealer en route to a delivery, enjoying a joint along the way.

I arrested him for possession with intent to sell, then packed him in the back of the car and we headed to the station. In we walked, with
the judge carrying all this dope, a big grin across his face. I booked the dealer, filled out the evidence cards, and typed up my report. Emerson waited until I finished, then left.

“Nice work,” he said on his way out.

I had won over the judge at last . . . at least until he got subpoenaed in the case and was accused by the dope dealer’s defense attorney of breaching the separation of the judicial and executive branches of government. The case was dismissed because of it, which understandably infuriated Emerson. It frustrated me, too, to think of the dealer back out on the street, but there was nothing either of us could do about it.

A few days later, Jim Shade told me Emerson’s true motive for the ride-along: The judge had set me up, sure that I was crooked. Lieutenant Shade had defended me, just as he had in the $8.00 incident, when rapist Robert Thornton tried to get me fired. “Englert’s not dirty,” he assured Judge Emerson. “He’s just got a nose for narcotics and a sixth sense for suspicious cars.”

But here’s what neither Emerson nor Shade knew: I wasn’t a dope cop myself, but I was doing an exemplary job for them—turning loads of drugs over to them and filing flawless reports—because what I wanted more than anything was to join their ranks.

I was at my desk one day, filing yet another report on a drug bust I had made, when the phone rang.

“Englert?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Leon Emerson.”

What now? I thought.

“Listen,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”

That was all it took. In the years that followed, Judge Emerson became one of my closest friends. The better I got to know him, the
more I admired his dedication. He had taken time out of his own schedule to check up on me, not to be a jerk but because he cared about justice and honesty in the courtroom.

But if you had predicted back on Imperial Highway in 1964 that the stern-faced judge in the passenger seat would become one of my best buddies, bucking hay with me under the glaring sun on my Oregon farm during weekend visits in the years to come, I would have said you were as high as that driver in the 1959 Ford Fairlane.

I kept busting drug users with Emerson’s blessing and eventually made a good enough impression to get assigned to narcotics. In 1966, to my delight, I became an undercover agent in Downey.

In many ways, undercover work was the antithesis of what I had done as a patrolman. You don’t go into an office every morning. You don’t wear a uniform. You don’t worry about keeping your hair short or staying clean-shaven. Your job is to convince criminals that you’re one of them.

I still remember what I wore on my first day undercover: a grubby baseball cap, a goatee, a rumpled short-sleeved golf shirt, and—taking a page from old Robert Thornton’s book—glasses with big, black frames. The lenses were just clear glass, but they were so thick and heavy that they fooled the bad guys, who figured there was no way I could be a cop. Not with eyesight that pathetic. When a guy I had never met asked if I was on the level, my contacts would dismiss his doubts casually. “That dude?” they would ask incredulously. “The guy’s practically blind.” For many years I kept those glasses hanging in my lab to remind me of all the frightening places and white-knuckle predicaments they helped me scrape through.