Earth Angels (2 page)

He sprayed another shot of paint into the rag and sucked more paint fumes into his lungs. It was like sliding into soothing, tepid water as the high changed to the lighter than air, everything is OK sensation he'd first experienced as a nine year old when he'd inhaled model airplane glue. Clearly, as if the radios of a fleet of lowrider Chevys were playing simultaneously he could hear his favorite tune:

Earth Angel, earth angel, will you be mine? My darling dear, love you all the time. I'm just a fool. A fool in love with you.

As the music played inside his head, Payaso dropped his whiff gear back into the car and came to his feet. "All right," he said out loud as he grew well over eight feet tall and the deep pockmarks on his Bozo face smoothed out, his slack jaw tightened, and his crooked teeth straightened to perfection. "All right," he growled as oversized, droopy ears slid back handsomely against the sides of his head, his cock elongated to ten powerful, erect inches, and his stooped shoulders puffed out to Rambo size. "
Hijo la
, man. Mira," Payaso said to every
chingon
in East Los Angeles and for that matter across the L.A. River to the mayor in City Hall downtown and every sombrero salesman on the touristy Olvera Street. He was fucking Rambo. Mira.
Ese
! Look at my goddamn dick!

Right then, right at the pinnacle of his spray paint buzz, a red pickup truck pulled up in front of the church.

The driver and passenger in the cab were wearing white undershirts, as was the green eyed, glaring
vato
sitting on his haunches in the bed of the truck with his back against the cab. Payaso recognized him immediately as an Eighteenth Street gang shooter known as Greenie. He was wearing a knit watch cap with a small roll at the bottom pulled down tightly over his ears and a pair of stiff starched blue jeans with small rolls at the cuff and slit up the side what all the East L.A. gangs called "counties." Greenie was holding something covered with a towel.

Payaso backed toward the door of the church.

"Where are you from?" Greenie yelled, raising a sawed off shotgun from under the towel and aiming it directly at Payaso.

"White Fence!" Payaso yelled, scrambling to open the church door.

With the blast of the shotgun, Payaso felt himself being lifted from the planet earth by sharp, burning hooks and catapulted into the red-carpeted aisle of the crowded sanctuary. A frightened roar came from the wedding crowd. Payaso's head smacked the musty church carpet.

"Eighteenth Street!" a man shouted. There was the sound of running. More shotgun blasts. People screamed, shrieked. The cathedral erupted into hysteria.

Lying on the church carpet, Payaso tried to sit up, but couldn't. In fact, he couldn't catch his breath, not even one. His mouth, which suddenly felt like wet clay, opened wide for air. In front of him he could see tilted pews and an altar. His body was leaking warmth and he was taken by a wave of nausea.

Tires squealed as the pickup truck sped away. Voices and more footsteps on the carpet. Hands touching him. Shouts for an ambulance, blurry faces blocking his view of the altar. He felt himself being lifted. People were saying things in Spanish and English to comfort him. But he still couldn't breathe.

As the world turned into pastel grays, then bright, inside the eyelid pink, Payaso thought he smelled Four Star paint ... or,
Hijo La
man ... was it the rank odor of Mrs. Valladolid's rug?

Suddenly he was immersed in a sea of warm black ink.

****

TWO

Minutes after the shooting, the dimly lit church became a maelstrom of police activity as uniformed officers and detectives herded wedding guests into the street and roped off areas with yellow evidence tape, shouting conflicting commands at the crowd in an attempt to establish order. As all this was occurring, a deep and desperate sobbing echoed throughout the sanctuary.

Detective Jose Stepanovich, a clean cut young man wearing a tailored blue sports coat and gray slacks, looked down at the wounded man lying just inside the front door. He recognized the victim immediately. If he remembered correctly, the moniker was Payaso.

Stepanovich had grown up in East L.A. and had spent his entire nine years in the Department assigned to the area. There were few members of the more than thirty street gangs in the division he didn't know by sight. Stepanovich knew that Eastside gang members lived and died in their respective gang territory like peasants in a feudal state. He'd figured out long ago that knowing their cars, nicknames, girlfriends and hangouts was critical in solving a gang murder. Locked into their respective turf, the White Fence, Frogtown, Maravilla, Happy Valley, Clover, Third Street and Alpine Street gangs were easy to find. Even if they fled to Mexico to hide out with relatives after committing a murder, in a few months they usually returned to their home turf.

This special talent for being able to interpret and predict the activities of the street gangs had earned him a call from Captain Villalobos of Hollenbeck Division to brief the East Los Angeles Rotary Club on the problem. When questioned about the prognosis of the gang situation in general, he was smart enough to evade any direct answer rather than betray his true feelings, that the only way to solve the problem was to lock up each and every gangbanger and throw away the key.

A balding, taciturn paramedic whom Stepanovich had seen at the scene of the six other East L.A. gang shootings during the last month extended a clear plastic tube from a plasma bottle and attached it to a hypodermic needle. He lifted Payaso's right arm and stabbed the needle into a bulging blue vein that snaked between tattoos of a three dimensional Latin crucifix and the word "VIDA LOCA" just above it.

Payaso's eyes rolled back in his head, and his jaw hung slack as white spittle leaked from the corner of his mouth. He didn't appear to feel a thing.

Stepanovich stepped back and, moving his hand into a pillar of blue light streaming from a stained glass window, checked his watch. He took out a pen, noted the time on a leather-covered notepad given him as a police academy graduation gift by Nancy. She'd filed for divorce when a marriage counselor suggested that marrying a cop might have been a mistake for a dependent personality who needed a spouse around nights and weekends. Stepanovich ambled to a cluster of policemen and tan uniformed coroner's deputies kneeling in the aisle.

Raul Arredondo, a husky, hawk faced young detective who often worked with Stepanovich, came to his feet and stepped back to allow Stepanovich a view of the tiny corpse on the floor: a girl whose age Stepanovich guessed at about nine years old, dressed in pink taffeta, white panty hose, and shiny patent leather shoes. There was a small, bloodless opening below her chin and an enormous, gaping exit wound on top of her head, exposing wet brain tissue. Her wide brown eyes and small mouth were open in death. A few feet away, a woman Stepanovich guessed to be the child's mother was being restrained by two other women as she rocked back and forth, sobbing hysterically.

A feeling beyond anger overwhelmed Stepanovich. Like many cops, he'd become inured to violent death: gory gang murders, suicides, blood splashed traffic accidents, and drowning victims staring up at him from the bottom of swimming pools. The sight of a dead child, though, still pierced him to the core. "Damn," he heard himself saying.

"She caught a stray round," Arredondo said, trying to hide the emotion in his voice.

Detective Captain Bob Harger passed Stepanovich and stepped up onto a nearby pew. Only a few years older than Stepanovich, he was attired in a short-sleeved white shirt and pleated trousers secured by a black weave pattern leather belt. On the belt were two four-inch barrel revolvers in zebra skin holsters.

"Officers, take your commands from me!" Harger shouted in a foghorn voice that reminded Stepanovich of the officer survival lecture Harger regularly gave to police academy recruits. He pointed his right hand as if it was a gun: "I want a rope line from here to the door." Then his left pointed the opposite way: "Give me all witnesses over here in this corner. Stepanovich, keep this area clear."

Stepanovich gave a "Yes sir" to the order and moved to obey. As he ordered wedding guests toward the rear of the church a TV news crew stepped inside the door. The camera focused on Harger.

"Seal the front door!" Harger shouted to a uniformed sergeant. "No prints and photos until the detectives finish." With a few more commands, Captain Harger turned an utterly chaotic crime scene into a "manageable police problem," to use the lexicon of the in service training classes.

As far as Stepanovich was concerned, Harger was a born leader. He wasn't just a champion on the police handball court, but actually taught a class in the sport. Not only was he a decorated Vietnam War veteran, but a major in the Army Reserves. And it was well known he had shot it out with bad guys more than once during his career. But perhaps most of all, Stepanovich admired Harger's humility: he preferred to chug beers with the men rather than schmooze with the brass. He was an ass kicker, a policeman's policeman, in direct contrast to many of the up and coming young LAPD lieutenants. Stepanovich and other street detectives referred to these policemen as pogues: aggressive, ass kissing yuppies who excelled at nothing more than scoring high on the written portion of promotional examinations.

In fact, one of the most oft told LAPD war stories concerned Harger. As Stepanovich heard it, in a struggle with an armed robber for a weapon Harger had managed to turn the barrel of the gun toward his opponent. As the desperate man scrambled frantically, Harger had smiled broadly, then fired the weapon directly into the man's mouth. Perhaps because the legend fulfilled the subconscious wish of every cop who'd ever felt his bowels weaken during such a struggle, the story had become a Los Angeles police legend. In some versions of the tale the crook, whose teeth were blown down his throat, was a dope dealer. In others he was a child molester.

"Harger the Charger, a man with a whole bucket of balls," said Detective C.R. Black, a tall, rangy man looming behind Stepanovich.

Black looked much older than his thirty-five years. He had worked as a hod carrier in Bakersfield, California, before joining the department, and though he had a red and leathery neck as a result, his face held the toxic pallor common to cops who preferred working nights. His slicked back black hair was thinning, the roots smothered by years of wearing a black uniform hat. He was wearing cowboy boots and a brown, Western style polyester suit jacket that reeked of tobacco smoke. "Stones," Black said. "A basket of fucking stones."

"A real street cop," said the boyish, freckled Detective Tim Fordyce, standing to Stepanovich's right spinning a roll of evidence tape on his index finger. His detective badge was pinned to the lapel of a green corduroy sports coat, the only jacket Stepanovich had ever seen him wear. Fordyce was a meticulous, frugal young man who lived with his elderly parents, liked to talk computers, and professed to live for the weekends he spent in his Winnebago. Stepanovich liked Fordyce, but because he always seemed to avoid taking a definite position on anything, considered him to be less than stalwart.

Two hours later, the atmosphere in the church had changed. Frenzy was replaced by orderly and dull police procedure as men collected shotgun pellets, wadded them into small clear plastic bags, and measured and remeasured ballistic distances. Photos were retaken, and potential witnesses were interviewed.

Because he spoke Spanish, Stepanovich's job had been to interview these potential witnesses. As with virtually every gang murder, no one interviewed, even those who'd been within a few feet of the victims and perpetrators, admitted seeing anything.

Stepanovich found this response unsurprising. Unlike the black gang murders in South L.A. based on disputes over the sale of narcotics, retaliation murders committed by Hispanic gangs were based strictly on gang rivalry. It had been that way ever since the Mexican immigrants arriving after the turn of the century had settled in East L.A. and found themselves clinging to others from Zacatecas, Guadalajara, or Tecate. Gangs had formed and through the years loyalties had never weakened. Every building and every wall in East L.A. was tattooed with gang placas: coded challenges that glorified individual gangs and marked territorial boundaries: the graffiti of death.

One of the last potential witnesses left to interview was a thirtyish Mexican man with a Fu Manchu mustache who was slouching in a pew close to the door. As Stepanovich sat next to him, the man opened his eyes and sat up.

"May I have your name, sir?"

"Albert Garcia."

"Were you sitting here when the shooting occurred?"

Garcia nodded.

Stepanovich wrote his name on a fresh sheet of paper. "What did you see today, Mr. Garcia?"

"I didn't see nothing," Garcia said, rubbing his eyes as if he'd awakened from a long nap. "I didn't see shit. "

"Anything you tell me will be kept in confidence," Stepanovich said, noticing Garcia's grime caked fingernails.

"That don't mean dick in East L.A."

"Sitting here would give someone a wide open shot of anyone coming in the door. There's no way a person could miss seeing what went down."

"I saw the same thing everybody else did," Garcia said. "The door flies open and this dude comes in shooting."