Pitchess is a sprawling jail complex set in the parched Castaic foothills about twenty miles north of downtown. I passed through the gates, deposited my Beretta in the metal locker, and waited in an interview room. A few minutes later, deputies brought out the junkie. The last time I had talked to him, he was extremely jittery, nervously tapping his feet, and picking at his nails. Now, wearing loose fitting jail blues, he walked across the room so slowly and sat down so deliberately he looked
as if he were moving underwater. After deputies uncuffed him, I slid the six-pack across the table and asked if he could pick out one of the suspects. He carefully studied each picture.
“Now if I pick out someone, will you give me a Get Out Of Jail Free Card?” he asked, smiling slyly.
“Doesn’t work that way. I can talk to the DA, but I need you to be
sure.
If you can’t identify anyone, don’t worry about it. I won’t forget you. They’ll be other six-packs to check out. This isn’t your last chance.”
The man, again, studied each picture. He slid the six-pack back across the table. “Dang! I wish I could, but I can’t. Don’t know
any
of them dudes. I don’t even know if the guy I saw was a brutha. It was too damn dark.”
I returned to the office and spent the rest of the day studying Fuqua’s file. First I tried to determine if Fuqua had ever been arrested with a Hispanic so I could show the junkie witness the suspect’s picture. But I had no luck. Then I searched through the computer for all the information gleaned from field interview cards, which listed everyone at a crime scene, from witnesses to neighbors to suspects. Still no Hispanics were identified at Fuqua’s arrest.
After I made fifty laser copies of Fuqua’s photo, I drove over to the Southeast station and passed them out during the p.m. shift roll call. “Anybody who finds Fuqua,” I announced, “gets a case of beer of their choice.”
When I was done, an old-timer in the gang unit, a black sergeant named Chester Pinson, said he wanted to talk. I followed him to his desk and he pulled up a chair for me.
“I’ve been keeping tabs on Fuqua since he was a fourteen-year-old pooh butt. As you know, he did a nickel at Folsom a while ago. Since then, a whole new generation of gangsters have hit the streets. But I remember him pretty well when he was coming up.”
“What do you remember about him?” I asked.
“He’s one cold motherfucker. When C-Dawg’s moving down the street, everyone takes a step back.”
“What’s the C for?”
“Capone. The number one gangster.”
“Was he?”
“Well, he dropped eight people before he was eighteen. Who knows what the tally is now.”
“Who was he killing?”
“Mostly rival gangsters.”
“Ever get close to popping him for murder?”
“Naw,” he said, disgusted. “Those gang-on-gang hits are tough to put together.” Pinson grabbed a pencil off his desk and slapped it on his palm. “All those stupid fucking movies with the serial killers knocking off one vic after another in crazy-ass ways, taunting detectives, sending them cute little notes. You and I both know that’s bullshit. You get one of them dudes every decade—maybe. Now C-Dawg is your
real-life
version of a serial killer.”
“I got some information that Fuqua might have been working with a Hispanic guy. That sound right to you?”
“I don’t know. He just did a stretch at Folsom. The blacks and Mexicans are at
war
there. They fucking hate each other. If I know Fuqua, he cliqued up there right away. At Folsom, if a black hangs with a Mexican, he’ll get a shiv in the liver. From his own peeps. So he might be kind of hesitant, as soon as he’s kicked loose, to partner up with a cholo. You might see a black and a Mexican gangbanger capering in a place like Oakwood, where everyone’s on top of each other. But it’s a little unusual for South Central.”
“You said it’s unusual. I take that to mean it’s possible that Fuqua was working with a Mexican dude.”
“It’s possible.”
“You know that Relovich was the only detective who ever put together a good enough case to send Fuqua to the joint?”
Pinson nodded.
“You think that could be enough of a motive for Fuqua to gun Pete down?”
Pinson pushed his chair away from his desk and crossed his legs. “Could be, but I wanted to tell you something else. When I heard you found Fuqua’s DNA at the scene, I wanted to fill you in. Pete’s ex-partner is an old-timer name of Sam Doukas. When Sam was promoted to D-III, he got transferred over here to Southeast, so him and Pete had to split up. I got to know Sam, and he talked about Pete some. And he told me a story that I wanted to pass on to you. After Pete nailed down
that robbery case against Fuqua that landed him in Folsom, him and Sam went over to Fuqua’s place to hook him up. Fuqua was with some of his homeboys and he was putting a good show on for them, mother-fucking Pete and Sam this way and that. He told them that if they didn’t have their badges and guns, he’d kick both their asses.”
Pinson chuckled. “So Pete handed his badge and gun to Sam and told him and the homeboys to wait outside. While they were outside they heard some whacks and some thwacks and some furniture breaking. Three minutes later, Pete had Fuqua—who was out cold—over his shoulder and tossed him into the backseat of the squad car. He knocked the black right outta that boy.”
“That’s hard-core,” I said.
“Pete fought Golden Gloves when he was a kid. At the California Police Olympics, he was the light heavyweight champ.”
“How come you didn’t tell me about this when I picked up the case?”
Pinson held out his hands. “I’ve been on vacation. Just got back this morning and heard about Pete.”
“I’d like to talk to Doukas.”
“You can’t—he died of a stroke last year. Two months after he retired.”
“So what do you think?”
“Fuqua claimed that Pete cold-cocked him when he wasn’t looking. But nobody believed that—not even Fuqua’s homies. As you know, on the streets, rep is everything. And Fuqua’s rep took a hard fall. So he lost a lot because of Pete. He lost his rep and he lost five years. Maybe during that stretch in Folsom Fuqua stewed and stewed, and decided that when he got out, he’d put getting even with Pete at the top of his to-do list.”
On Wednesday evening, I pulled off Washington Boulevard, drove through a confusing labyrinth of streets, parked, and walked to Nicole Haddad’s house, which fronted one of the Venice canals. I was surprised how the area had changed.
When I was working patrol in the Pacific Division, the canals were filthy, with a sheen of scum on the surface and garbage littering the banks. Now they had been immaculately restored, and some of the small, ramshackle homes and vacant weed-choked lots had been replaced with two- and three-story villas. I had heard about the changes and now was relieved to see that they had not entirely destroyed the area’s idiosyncratic charm. Invisible from the major thoroughfares and accessible to only a handful of cars because of its narrow streets, the canals remained an anomalous L.A. island, cut off from the homogenous sprawl.
Unfortunately, the Italian-style resort, built in the early 1900s on marshland, was doomed—like so many city landmarks—because of Southern California’s slavish obeisance to the automobile. In the 1920s, when people began driving to the beach instead of commuting by trolley, city officials decided that Venice needed more roads and parking spaces. They ordered the inland lagoon filled in, converted it into a traffic circle, and paved over most of the canals. Soon, the remaining canals fell into disrepair. Later in the century, when land values in Venice and nearby Santa Monica skyrocketed, the scruffy neighborhood was rediscovered and gentrified.
I lingered for a moment by Nicole’s front gate. She lived in one of the original homes, a white clapboard beach bungalow with faded green trim and a weathered front porch made of rough-hewn redwood. Out front was a small dock with a rowboat tied to a post. Feathery cattails banked the fence that encircled the property. The tufts of star jasmine on the patio filled the air with an intensely sweet fragrance.
When Nicole peered through the blinds and saw me on the patio, she opened the front door. I could barely see her face because the living room was so dark; only the ruby studs in her ears were clearly visible, and they flickered like flames against her olive skin.
“How about a cruise?” I asked, jerking my chin toward the boat. “When I used to patrol this area, I always wanted to ride in the canals.”
“Sure,” Nicole said, walking to the edge of the dock. She wore black leather pants and a red 1940s jacket, cinched at the waist, with large black buttons.
We climbed in and I rowed down a canal, under an arched Venetian-style wooden bridge. I winced slightly because my shoulders were still sore from surfing.
“Sorry I don’t have a motorboat for you,” she said, a mocking gleam in her eyes.
“I think I can handle it. I went surfing a few days ago. First time in a long time. I’m out of shape.”
“A surfing cop?” she said. “Two diametrically opposed cultures.”
I set the oars in their hooks, leaned back, and watched the boat glide under another bridge. A soft, salty breeze blew from the sea, and the only sounds I could hear were the occasional quack of a duck and the tinkle of wind chimes. The faded blue sky was soon daubed with gold and tangerine, the rippled water reflecting the sunset. I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the tension beginning to ease a bit from my knotted up neck and shoulders.
“You know why the sunsets are so great in L.A.?” she asked.
“The smog.”
“Right. It’s interesting when you examine Southern California landscape paintings from seventy-five years ago and compare them to more current works. The sunsets in the older paintings were more subdued than the sunsets in the current ones. That’s because as the smog worsened and the chemicals coalesced on the horizons, landscape artists began replicating those colorful, sulfuric sunsets.”
“Art imitating smog?”
Nicole laughed. “Something like that.”
I resumed rowing and said, “It’s amazing they haven’t paved this area over, like so much of L.A.”
“Where do you live?”
“In a loft downtown.”
“Oh, the forbidding Downtownistan. I’ve lived in L.A. fifteen years and I don’t think I’ve been downtown more than a couple of times. Let’s go to
your
‘hood for dinner. Give me the downtown tour. Maybe L.A. will finally make sense to me.”
When I opened the Saturn’s passenger door, she said, “A station wagon in a hybrid world. I haven’t been in one of these since I was in the fourth grade.”
I returned to the Santa Monica Freeway, drove back downtown, and parked at Union Station. We walked to Olvera Street, a faux Mexican
mercado
lined with nineteenth-century brick and adobe buildings and filled with stalls where merchants hawked sombreros, serapes, leather wallets, small guitars, and other cheesy souvenirs. She followed me to a stall filled with the statues of Aztec warriors. A few feet away, a small section of the street was laid out in a zigzag pattern of brick and stone.
I tapped my foot on the pattern and said, “This is why L.A.’s such a mess.” I led her to La Golondrina, housed in a two-story brick building built in the mid-1800s, the first Mexican restaurant in L.A. We sat in a street-side patio and watched the German and Japanese tourists shuffle by. The waitress brought us the beer, corn tortillas, and nopales salad I had ordered.
I gazed intently at her, dazzled by how the flecks of green in her dark eyes glittered under the lights.
She waved both palms in front of my face and laughed. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s not polite to stare.”
“She warned me about everything else—at least fifty times. I think that was the only admonition she ever forgot.”
I filled my tortilla with the nopales. When she gazed at it skeptically, I said, “Nopales is cactus. They marinate it and slice it up. It’s the chopped liver of Mexico.”
She laughed, covering her mouth with her napkin.
Since she said she couldn’t figure out the city, I decided to give her my why-L.A.-is-so-fucked-up-rap. I told her how the zigzag pattern I just showed her is where a section of the
zanja madre
—the mother ditch—brought water to the first settlers from the L.A. River about a half mile away; and the river is why the city was established here; but the river was eventually paved over to control the flooding and now is just
a cement channel with a thin trickle of water most of the year. I told her how you could have an office on the top floor of a downtown office building and not even see a patch of water no matter what direction you looked; how the architect who designed the new cathedral downtown said the grand cathedrals in Europe were all built beside rivers and the best equivalent he could come up with in L.A. was the traffic-choked 101 Freeway; how the city has no real reason for existing because downtown is landlocked, the harbor more than twenty miles to the south and the ocean fifteen miles to the west.
We finished the nopales, and as we walked back to my car, I said, “My dad worked downtown for thirty-five years. He used to take me with him sometimes in the summer and show me the different buildings. When I was a kid, I thought about being an architect.”
“But you ended up as a homicide detective. Isn’t that a depressing gig?”
“Whenever I get called out on a case, I think about a quote from Ecclesiastics that I still remember from Hebrew school:
It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.
”
She gave me a quizzical look.
“Everyone knows they’re not guaranteed tomorrow, but we all get so wrapped up in the daily drivel it’s easy to forget it,” I said. “But when you see a body out on the pavement, with the blood dripping into the gutter, well, that has a way of bringing it home to you. I feel sorry for people who are so insulated from death.”
“So when a body is—”
“I’d rather talk about L.A. history.”