Kind of Blue (34 page)

“I’m all right.”

“I’ve been working the phones, trying to coordinate as much as I can from down here.”

“What’s Press Relations put out on this thing?” I asked.

“Just the stock release. We haven’t notified Wegland’s next of kin yet, so we just identified the man pancaked on the sidewalk as an LAPD officer. And we didn’t release how the officer fell, just that the incident is under investigation.”

“My surfboard shattered when it hit the sidewalk, so I don’t think anyone could identify exactly what it was,” I said. “Can Press Relations hold off on releasing that tidbit?”

“It’ll come out eventually,” Duffy said. “Hard to keep something like that out of the news.”

“That’s okay. Let’s just keep the details under wraps for a little while.”

“Until when?” Duffy asked.

“Just hold off tonight.”

“That’ll work. The chief and Grazzo are holding a press conference tomorrow morning. I told Grazzo I want to drive up for it and to check on you. But I think he’s afraid I’ll get too much face time on camera and steal some of his glory. He told me to stay in San Diego.”

“Sounds like Grazzo.”

“He’ll probably ID Wegland at the press conference. And once he does, there’ll be a shitstorm of media interest. Who knows what’ll come out. I hear the chief’s really bent out of shape. He’s still trying to figure out how to spin this. A cop as dirty as Wegland makes us all look bad.”

I listened to Duffy’s labored breathing.

“Why the need to keep this quiet tonight?”

“I just want to tie up some loose ends. Easier to do that if the news doesn’t break.”

“Got you.”

“Who’s giving Wegland’s wife the death notification?” I asked.

“Grazzo. He’s just about ready to drive out there. Fortunately, he had no kids.”

“What’s he going to tell her?”

“He’ll probably give her the usual line: It was an off-duty incident; the department has no details yet; and he’ll provide her with more information as the investigation continues.”

Duffy cleared his throat. “Well, I guess you were right. There was a little more to this case than it initially appeared. Which reminds me, I’d better get the paperwork going so I can kick that lowlife Fuqua—as much as I hate to. If you want to say, ‘I told you so,’ go ahead.”

“I’m too fried to say anything.”

“When I heard about what happened, I was worried as hell about you,” Duffy said. “I’m damn relieved you’re okay. You’ve had enough action for one night. You should head home right now, pour yourself a stiff one, and hit the rack.”

“Can’t.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Got to deal with those Homicide Special detectives.”

I followed the two Homicide Special detectives into an interview room. One was a short, bald detective in his late forties; his partner was a tall woman with a heavily lined face and a smoker’s cough.

The bald detective nodded to his partner, indicating that she should ask the questions.

“Hey, can we finish up tomorrow?” I asked. “I’ve got a few things to take care of.”

She shook her head. “No can do. You know that.”

“Let’s get this out of the way.”

“So,” she said with a wry smile, “how does a Felony Special detective end up attacking an LAPD commander with a surfboard and shoving him out the window?”

I gave her a brief recap of the incident. As I answered her questions, I was distracted and kept thinking about the San Pedro crackhead and the young Hispanic woman who had spotted two suspects the night Relovich was murdered. I wanted to track down Wegland’s partner—if he had a partner—tonight, because once his death hit the news, people would scatter like cockroaches under a klieg light.

When the detectives finished their interview, I walked over to Duffy’s office, hoping he’d gone on one of his binges right before he left town and had been careless. But when I turned the knob, I discovered that, unfortunately, he’d remembered to lock his office door. I couldn’t find the Guatamalan cleaning crew, so I started on the ground floor and worked my way up. After traversing the third floor, I found them in the bathroom. I asked one of them to follow me.

Outside Duffy’s office, I rattled the knob and motioned with a phantom key.

“
Eso no es permitido,
” he said.

I opened my wallet and handed him three twenties. He pocketed the money and let me in.

I grabbed a PAB passkey from Duffy’s desk drawer, jogged up the stairs, and unlocked Wegland’s office. After sifting through the crime reports on his desk, the paperwork in his drawers, the files in his tall metal cabinet, and the crumpled papers in the trash, I realized I had no idea what I was looking for. After checking under the rug, I peered inside the dozen LAPD coffee mugs stamped with various unit insignias that were lined up on a shelf. Sinking into Wegland’s chair, I opened the top desk drawer and ran my hands underneath it. I did the same with the underside of the middle drawer. And then the bottom one. In the back, underneath the drawer, I felt something. I pulled the drawer out of the desk, emptied it, and flipped it upside down. Taped to the left corner, was a key with the number
52
and two faint, barely legible words imprinted along the top two lines:

POMONA
RAGE

What the hell did that mean? I examined the paperwork from Wegland’s desk, trash can, and file cabinet again, but saw no reference to Pomona. I decided to drive out to Wegland’s house and see if his wife was in any shape to talk. Maybe she could tell me the significance of pomona rage. If not, it wasn’t a wasted trip because I wanted to interview her anyway.

After calling downtown for Wegland’s home address, I drove out to Monrovia, and down a street, shaded by magnolias, of mostly tidy, single-story homes with clipped front lawns and sculpted shrubbery. Wegland’s was the largest on the block, a white Colonial with a pair of sturdy pillars bracing the portico, a steeply gabled roof, and windows inset with diamond panes. The house looked so absurd in Southern California; I could picture a black lawn jockey in front.

When I rang the bell, I heard the yapping of dogs in the backyard. A thin, severe-looking woman in her late forties with extremely short black hair opened the door.

“Mrs. Wegland?” I said.

“No. I’m her sister. Who are you?”

I handed her my card.

“An assistant chief was just here.”

“I know. But I’m assigned to the investigation and I wanted to ask Mrs. Wegland a few questions.”

“She’s in no condition to talk to anyone right now.”

“I promise it’ll be very brief.”

“Don’t you people have any shame?” she said indignantly. “My brother-in-law sacrificed
every
thing for his job. He gave his
life
for your department. Can’t you at least have the decency to let us grieve in peace?”

She slammed the door. I lingered on the porch for a moment, wondering how the woman would react when she discovered the truth. A moment later I heard a faint voice from inside the house: “That’s okay, Bonnie. I’ll come downstairs and talk to him for a minute.”

The sister opened the door, and I followed her into the living room. A gleaming black grand piano covered one corner of the room, wing-backed chairs flanked a marble fireplace, and hung on the opposite wall were several pictures of panting Pomeranians. No kids, but probably a backyard full of dogs.

“I’d ask you to sit, detective, but I can only manage a minute or two.”

Startled, I swiveled around. Grace Wegland was a younger-looking version of her sister. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and she clutched a hankie in her right hand. With her other hand, she dug a pill vial out of her pocket and shook it like a maraca. “I hope you’ll excuse me,” she said, swaying slightly, carefully enunciating each word. “I’m not entirely lucid right now.”

“I’m very sorry to trouble you at a time like this, but I was hoping you could tell me—”

“You worked with Wally before, didn’t you?”

“Yes. At Pacific. We met once.”

“Could you at least give me the courtesy of telling me what’s going on. Grazzo didn’t tell me a damn thing. Only that Wally was killed in some off-duty incident.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wegland, but that’s all I know.” I felt sorry for the woman. But not sorry enough to tell her the truth. And knowing that I might only have the opportunity to ask her a quick question or two, I blurted out, “I’m guessing your husband had a home office. Can I quickly check it out?”

She stared at me, eyes glassy, gripping the back of the sofa for balance.

A moment later, her sister charged into the room. “Out!” she shouted at me, jerking her thumb at the door.

Ignoring her, I asked Grace, “This might be important, Mrs. Wegland: Do you know any reason why Wally would have any business in Pomona?”

She continued to gaze at me with a slack-jawed, unfocused expression.

The sister marched to the door and swung it open.

As I drifted toward the door, I asked again, “Anything about Pomona—”

“Now!” the sister shouted.

She slammed the door as soon as I stepped on the porch. A moment later, I heard Grace Wegland utter a muffled sentence. “Storage.” was the only word I could make out.

Sitting in my car, I mulled over what she had said: storage. What did that have to do with Pomona or the key I discovered?

I rolled the window down. The scent of a spring evening in Los Angeles suffused the car with an intoxicating blend of mock orange and freshly cut grass.

“Of course,” I muttered to myself. “Storage.”

The faint writing on the key was pomona rage. But now I realized that the first three letters of the second word had worn off the old brass key.

It should have read
POMONA STORAGE
.

I pulled off the freeway about thirty miles east of downtown and rolled into the parking lot of Pomona Storage, one of the ubiquitous self-storage warehouses hard by the freeway that dot the Southern California landscape. I parked on the street and walked past the small office—closed for the night—and onto an asphalt lot with a dozen cinderblock warehouses. In the corner of the lot was the warehouse for spaces 1-60, but there was a security box outside the door, and I didn’t have the code.

After lingering by the back fence for fifteen minutes, I was relieved to see a pick-up truck screech to a halt in front of the warehouse. An unshaven man wearing jeans and cowboy boots hopped out, punched a code in the security box, and opened the door.

When I followed him inside, the man shouted, “What the—”

But he stopped in mid-sentence when I pulled my suit coat back, revealing the badge on my belt.

As I walked down the narrow, dim corridor lit by dusty lightbulbs, I recalled when I was a young patrolman and I was dispatched to a self-storage warehouse in Mar Vista to investigate a noxious odor emanating from a unit. My partner and I discovered a bloated, dripping, decaying body in a packing crate. Later, when I had worked the robbery table, I discovered that a few of the burglars I was tracking had stashed their loot in storage units all over town.

Pomona Storage, with its cracked cement floors, ceilings covered with tattered aluminum insulation panels, and stripped-down exterior, had been shoddily built decades ago. The warehouse where Wegland rented space, however, had one concession to modernity: climate control. Cool air blew from the ceiling vents and a digital thermostat on the wall read: 66. I figured the owners installed a heating and air-conditioning unit in one of the dozen warehouses on the property and
then charged the customers—who wanted to protect their belongings from mildew—double the rent.

At space 52—a few doors down from the man in the cowboy boots—I pulled out the key, opened the padlock, raised the metal roll-up door, and flipped on the light. Inside was a cubicle the size of a large office, with a cement floor and plasterboard walls lined with metal shelves. Strewn about were dozens of empty cardboard boxes, a few bare picture frames, and mounds of balled up packing paper.

Too late
, I thought.
I wonder who got here first?

When I heard a loud rattling, I whirled around and saw the metal storage door closing and caught a quick glimpse of the bottom half of a body—just jeans and sneakers—and fingers sliding the door down. Before I could move, glass shattered on the cement floor. The door rattled to the ground. I heard the metallic click of the padlock. The moment I smelled the gasoline, the packing paper ignited, shooting flames above my head, singeing the boxes on the shelves.

I darted to the door and began kicking it, but there was little give. I banged on the plasterboard walls and began shouting for help. Suffocating from the smoke and beating on my flaming pants cuffs, I ran around the room, hammering the walls, desperately searching for a soft spot, an opening.

The boxes on the shelves had ignited and were shooting flames up to the ceiling. I wrapped my suit coat around my right hand and began knocking boxes off the shelves and onto the floor. I climbed the shelves like a ladder, my head grazing the plasterboard ceiling. The smoke was now so thick I couldn’t see the door. I had investigated enough arson-murders to know I had only a minute or two left until the room was sucked of oxygen.

I grabbed my gun and blasted the corner of the ceiling, emptying my magazine, the hefty 230-grain, .45-caliber hollow-points punching a fist-sized hole in the thin plasterboard. I slammed another magazine into the Beretta and, with a few more shots, widened the hole. Gripping the opening with both hands, I realized it was a false top, a shoddily constructed ceiling plopped on top of the framing. Straining, my feet wedged against the wall for leverage, I slid the ceiling over a few feet, and climbed up and onto the metal framing. I scuttled along the framing for about twenty-five yards, struggling in the darkness, coughing
through the smoke, frantically searching for a wedge of light. I was trying to gauge which unit the man with the cowboy boots had opened.

Jamming both heels on the edge of one of the false ceilings, I rammed it open slightly and peered inside. I was exultant to discover the lights were on and the metal roll-up door was open; I knew I had hit the right space. When the man in the cowboy boots smelled the smoke, he must have dashed outside without closing the door.