Harbor Nocturne (22 page)

Just prior to the kidnapping, the defendant, a parolee named Earl Jesse Newhouse, had been involved in a violent daytime encounter with a streetwalking drag queen on Santa Monica Boulevard, called “Sodom Monica” by the cops at Hollywood Station. The dragon, whose true name was Morton Allan Griffin, had demanded seventy-five dollars for the kind of service Earl Jesse Newhouse had requested, and an argument over price had led to Morton Allan Griffin being punched so hard that three teeth were dislodged and later found on the curb by officers responding to a call from a passing motorist.

It was after that act of violence that Earl Jesse Newhouse had smoked a bud and drank a forty, then gone cruising for the kind of action he’d enjoyed while serving seven years in Corcoran for strong-arm robbery. And that’s when he’d grabbed the little Thai girl, whom he’d raped and sodomized and, three hours later, pushed out of his car in Griffith Park, where she’d been found by a horrified family on a picnic. Chester Toles and his partner had received the radio call and, after seeing the condition the child was in, had called the ambulance that transported her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Chester Toles heard much testimony that Monday concerning those three terrible hours the child had endured. The testimony came from the report of the physician who’d treated the little girl at Cedars for her brutal injuries, and from an evidence tech who’d received the DNA swabs. But the testimony of one of the detectives who did the follow-up investigation that eventually led to the arrest was what disturbed him most.

The D2 was a woman who testified to having served twenty-nine years with the LAPD, eighteen of them as a detective. She described how the child had remembered the name of the street where the assault had taken place in an underground parking lot. The girl remembered an elevator there, and that when the door opened and people got out, the kidnapper had pushed her to the floor of his car, but not before she got a glimpse of the elevator carpet, which was gray. Despite the horrific trauma she had suffered, the child still remembered the last three digits of his license number as he drove away after dumping her in Griffith Park.

At the conclusion of the detective’s testimony, when she was asked by the deputy DA if the victim had been of help to the investigation, the detective’s voice cracked just for an instant and she said, “The child was just
great
.” And those five words, more than anything else, were the most unbearable for Chester Toles.

The evidence was overwhelming, and the lackluster questions asked by defense counsel hired by an uncle of the defendant made Chester think that all this was nothing more than a way for the lawyers to wring more money out of the old man and to set up a plea bargain, rather than going to trial with this loser of a case.

After being in court from early morning to late afternoon, Chester had finally approached the prosecutor and said, “What the hell am I doing here? You don’t need me.”

He was excused then, and he drove straight to Hollywood Station in time for the 5:00
p.m
. roll call, furious and resentful that he’d been forced to sit all day and revisit that awful case again. Even after nearly thirty-five years on the Job—or maybe
because
he had nearly thirty-five years on the Job—his skin had grown thinner and sometimes bled easier, and this kind of crime involving a child he’d met could torment him.

Chester Toles, the lazy, normally phlegmatic Unicorn, was in a foul mood as Fran Famosa drove them from the Hollywood Station parking lot just after 5:30 on that Monday evening, which was when Chester saw some little maggot in a red Mercedes SL with his head up his ass almost take them out broadside.

And Chester Toles growled at him, “Pay attention, buddy.”

It was very hard for Hector to get his mind around the sighting of the two men, now in police uniforms, that he’d seen at his house on Saturday night. He didn’t know what to do or who to tell. Or should he tell anybody? That whole freak-o-rama with the amputation shit had been a police sting! And the foot chase and “capture” of the tall cop had been just a way to get the peg-leg guy out of the house with no question-and-answer session, so they could come back at him another day.

Well, there wasn’t going to be another day! The cops were after
him
. And they no doubt had designs on rolling up Markov and Kim. And thinking of the Korean made Hector remember that he hadn’t bothered trying to find the Mexican dancer, because he hadn’t the faintest idea where to start looking. Who the fuck did the buckethead think he was—Hector Cozzo, private eye? All of that made him check his e-mail messages for the first time that day, and he saw the new cell number Markov was using that month. It made him think that he should dump his own go-phone and buy another one. But right then he didn’t have time. He figured his pay-as-you-go phone would be okay for a little while longer.

He might ignore Kim’s phone calls, but he couldn’t do that to Markov, not if he wanted to keep his job. Then Hector thought that maybe he
didn’t
want to keep his job, now that the cops were after him. It was all so confusing. Was it only for running some hookers in a few skin joints? Or could it have to do with the dead gooks in the cargo container down at the harbor? But that was Kim’s deal, not his, Hector reasoned. That had nothing to do with
him
. That thought made him stop at a liquor store and buy a
Los Angeles Times
.

He sat in his car outside the liquor store and looked for it and there it was, the thing he’d feared. Daisy’s body had been found in a dumpster next to some sleeping bum. Hector Cozzo now realized that he was up to his armpits in murder. He was terrified. He felt a powerful urge to drive home and do some blow and drink a little vodka and try to figure it out later. His cell phone rang, and he saw that it was Markov again. He was afraid to answer and afraid not to answer. He answered it.

Markov’s voice was quivering with rage when he said, “Come to my house in one hour.” And for the first time he gave Hector his address on Mount Olympus, then hung up before Hector could reply.

Hector sat in his red Mercedes SL and considered his options. First, he could just blow off Markov, move his things out of the house he subleased from his boss, and take the leased car back to the dealer. Then he could go home to his parents’ house in Pedro and lie low until all of this, whatever it was, cooled down.

Thinking of that almost made him nauseous. He could hear his mother’s yammering about his failure to settle down with a real job. Or maybe she might try to hook him up with one of their Italian relatives who worked at a small cannery on Terminal Island, by the U.S. Coast Guard station, where they turned bonita into cat food. That job might be just
slightly
better than a jail cell to Hector Cozzo.

His second option would be to drive straight back to Hollywood Station and ask to see a detective, then make a deal to testify against Markov and Kim, and even give them what little he knew about their smuggling of the thirteen dead gooks, as well as what Violet had reported about the Mexican dancer witnessing the slopehead driving off with Daisy. He might have to get booked for pimping or pandering or something, and maybe take another hit for federal income tax evasion, but if he gave up the murderers, surely he wouldn’t do any significant time. And then he thought of himself in jail, even as a protected witness, and he imagined climbing into his bunk with the fear that one of Kim’s paid assassins might wake him with a blade slicing through his throat.

His third option would be to go to Markov and tell him about the undercover cop that came to the freak show on Saturday night, and make the old bastard see that he had to dime Kim for his own sake and for Hector’s, and to save the whole business enterprise. Kim had to go down, and he had to take that ride alone.

The third option made him decide to drive to Mount Olympus and present the situation to Markov with all of the logic he could muster.

FIFTEEN

O
fficer Chester Toles’s
long police career essentially ended within an hour after encountering Hector Cozzo in front of Hollywood Station. The cops in 6-X-46 received a radio call that took them to Thai Town, and just going to that location made Chester think of the little Thai girl and the horrible day he’d spent in court.

In fact, on their way to the call, Fran Famosa asked him, “What’s wrong, Chester? You look like you’re ready to go a few more rounds with the Indian that broke your glasses.”

“Had a bad day in court,” he mumbled.

“Yeah? What kinda case?”

“The kind you don’t talk to your civilian friends about,” he said.

“I’m not a civilian,” Fran said, and for once, she was truly worried about the old slacker. He looked
angry.

“Not worth talking about,” he said.

The rented house was in Thai Town, but the residents were not Thai. They were a white family of six people plus a boyfriend, and a rescue ambulance had arrived there ahead of the cops.

The rusty screen door was torn open, and the small living room was thick with cigarette smoke. The officers of 6-X-46 found Mom and Grandma sitting in front of a blaring television, and three children under the age of seven were perched on a greasy sofa, looking scared.

A pair of male paramedics, one white, one African-American, looked as though they were eager to get out of there the moment the cops entered. The white paramedic pointed to a tiny bedroom off the kitchen, and the cops went inside. They saw a two-year-old boy lying on the bed. He wore a vomit-soaked jersey and shorts, and his strawberry-blond hair was damp and plastered down.

The black paramedic closed the bedroom door behind himself for privacy and said, “That baby’s been dead for a while. Rigor is already setting in the jaw and legs. When I asked the momma why they didn’t call sooner, she said the child always takes long naps.” He pointed to the wall beside the bed and said, “That’s vomit. This child did a whole lot of vomiting. There’s serious bruising at the base of his skull and on his body under the jersey. I’ve seen this kind of battering before, where the skull’s fractured and ribs’re broken. And I’ll bet his liver is lacerated.” With that, he headed for the door, saying, “It’s all yours now.”

Fran went out to the car to request detectives and crime scene criminalists as well as a team from Children and Family Services, while Chester stayed inside and turned off the TV.

“Would you like to tell me what happened here?” he asked the mother in a very quiet voice.

She looked to be about thirty years old and had strawberry-blond hair like her dead son. She wore a tank and cutoff denim shorts, and was a younger version of her fifty-something mother, who sat smoking and sipping from a can of beer without saying a word.

Trying to sound sober, the mother said, “He got into some cleaning product and started vomiting.”

Chester looked around the filthy house and said, “I don’t see any evidence of cleaning around here.”

The mother said, “Well, that’s what happened, and then he fell down.”

“Where?” Chester said.

“Off the porch,” she said. “I think he hurt his head.”

Then the grandmother spoke for the first time. She said, “Can I walk down to the 7-Eleven and get some cigs?”

Her hairline was so high he suspected that the dirty blond hair was a wig. She had protuberant eyes, and those eyes stared at him unhappily. Chester didn’t answer her, but instead advised both women of their Miranda rights, receiving dull responses of understanding.

The oldest of the children started sobbing then. At first they were quiet sobs, and then he was wailing.

His mother said, “Hush, Terry!”

But Chester walked over to the sofa, lifted the six-year-old up until he was standing on the sofa cushions, and said, “What is it, son?”

Terry sniffled and said, “I killed my brother.”

“Oh, for chrissake!” the mother said. “Terry, go wash your face!”

Chester gave the woman a look that silenced her, then asked the boy, “Why do you say that?”

Terry said, “I took too long to find a phone!”

“Where did you look for a phone?” Chester asked.

“The houses on the street,” Terry said. “I went to three houses but nobody was home or they didn’t speak English, and then the lady in the fourth house let me in and phoned for me. If I hadn’t took so long, my baby brother would be alive!”

“Come outside, son,” Chester said, taking the boy out to the front porch. He told Fran, who had finished the notifications, “Go inside with Mom and Grandma while I have a chat with Terry.”

Fran nodded, but she didn’t like the look in Chester’s eyes. His pupils behind the aviator glasses almost looked dilated, and he spoke in such a quiet voice it was unnerving.

Then he said sotto to the boy, “Terry, you didn’t have anything to do with your baby brother’s death. He was already dead when you went for help. Did somebody hit your baby brother?”

The boy began sobbing again and nodded his head.

“Did your mother hit him?” Chester asked.

The boy nodded again.

“Anybody else?”

“Buster,” the boy said.

“Who’s Buster?”

“Mommy’s friend.”

“Does Buster live here?”

The boy nodded.

“Where is Buster now?”

“He left when I went looking for a telephone,” the boy said.

“In a car?”

The boy shook his head and said, “The car’s broke. That’s it.” He pointed to a wreck of an old Pinto up on blocks in the side yard.

“Then he left on foot?” Chester said.

The boy nodded again.

“What was he wearing?”

The boy said, “A Dodgers shirt.”

“Which way did he walk?”

Terry pointed north and Chester nodded slightly, because there was a neighborhood tavern at the end of the block.

Unit 6-X-72 cruised slowly down the street and stopped. Sophie Branson held four fingers up to ask if everything was code 4, or if further assistance was needed.

Chester Toles called out, “Can you come in for a few minutes.”

The boy and Chester walked back inside the house, and Chester said to his partner, “Fran, let me have the shop keys for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Fran took the keys from the belt of her Sam Browne and handed them to Chester, asking, “What? Something in the trunk we need?”

“Be right back,” Chester said a bit too casually, and he shuffled out the door and down the narrow, oil-stained driveway to the radio car.

Minutes later, he’d parked the black-and-white in an alley behind the bar at the end of the street. It was frequented by a number of Asian patrons, but there was also a sprinkling of old men from nearby Little Armenia, and there were some Latino customers as well. It was the end of the Monday workday and the bar was crowded, with only a few women sitting at the tables.

Several customers looked surprised to see the bald, overweight fifty-eight-year-old uniformed cop standing inside the doorway, scanning the crowd.

Then he walked up to a husky, thirty-something white guy in an L.A. Dodgers T-shirt. His neck was acne-pocked, and there were serious sweat rings on the shirt.

Chester said, “Step outside with me, Buster. We need to talk.”

Twenty minutes later, two detectives had arrived at the crime scene, and 6-X-72 was still at the house, assisting. Fran Famosa looked at her watch and went outside to peer up and down the street for her partner. She figured he’d had to take an urgent dump and had probably driven to the nearest gas station to get it done. That’s when she saw their shop driving back toward the house.

She stood, hand on hips, ready to needle him with an admonition that his urgent bowel movement was a good reason to eat Cuban black beans, like her mother used to make, instead of the lard-laden refried frijoles at his favorite Mexican taco shop. But when he got out of the car, Fran didn’t say anything. She put her hands to her face and uttered a little cry of alarm. Blood ran from a laceration over Chester’s right eye, and his hands looked like he’d experienced stigmata.

Fran ran to him, saying, “Chester! What the hell happened to you?”

He pointed toward the backseat of the radio car, where she saw a handcuffed man whose face was a mask of blood. He was trying with great effort to breathe through a mouth full of broken teeth, and both eyes were swelling shut. He was whimpering, attempting to say something to Fran Famosa, but he seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness and couldn’t manage it.

Chester said, “We better notify the watch commander and get Buster to Hollywood Pres. He resisted arrest in the alley behind the bar. I had to fight.”

Fran Famosa didn’t say much to her partner on the code 3 run to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, where the injuries to the prisoner were deemed severe enough that he had to be transported by ambulance to the thirteenth floor of L.A. County–USC Medical Center, where the jail ward was located.

Later, in a Hollywood Station interview room, a member of Force Investigation Division gave Chester Toles the same Miranda warning Chester had given the mother and grandmother of the dead child.

After affirming his understanding, Chester pointed to the six white service stripes on the left sleeve of his blue uniform shirt and said to his interrogator, “Count ’em. Five years for each hash mark, for a total of thirty-four years and six months. So don’t talk to me like I’m a boot right outta the academy. I could demand to have a rep from the Protective League here right now, but I’m gonna cooperate as long as you show respect.”

The FID investigator, an up-and-comer on the lieutenant’s list with only nine years on the Job, who looked to Chester like the guy on
American Idol,
said, “Okay, no bullshit then. Let’s cut to the quick. Why would you go to that bar all alone if not to give some payback to a baby killer? Maybe you were very upset by what you’d seen and weren’t behaving like you normally would?”

Chester replied, “I thought you said no bullshit.”

The FID man smiled mirthlessly. “All right then, you tell me what was on your mind.”

Chester said, “After talking to the little boy Terry about the direction Buster took, I wanted to see if I could spot him anywheres. I saw the bar on the corner and decided to have a look inside. If I saw a guy in a Dodger shirt, I was gonna go outside and call for backup.”

“Then why didn’t you do that?”

“He spotted me in the bar and looked like he was gonna rabbit, so I asked him to step outside with me. I think the bartender mighta seen that and can verify what I’m saying.”

“Then what happened?”

“We went outside and I asked him to step to my car in the alley and produce some ID. That’s when I was getting ready to call for backup.”

“Did he ask you what it was about?”

“No.”

“Did he give you his ID?”

“No,” Chester said, pointing to the taped bandage across his forehead. “He gave me this. The minute we were alone in the alley, he head-butted me. I got six stitches here.”

“Then what happened?”

“Whadda you think happened? The fight was on. Nonstop and desperate.”

“Why didn’t you call for help?”

“I couldn’t. He was all over me.”

“Give me a blow-by-blow.”

“He’s a strong young guy and I’m a flabby old man, fifty-eight years old. I used the force needed to overcome his attack and to effect the arrest. And I’m lucky I was able to do it.”

“The no-bullshit pledge cuts both ways,” the FID man said. “The arrestee suffered a concussion, a broken nose, a jaw fracture, four broken ribs, and he lost a few teeth. At least two dozen stitches were needed to close lacerations over and under both eyes. Were you a professional fighter before you came on the Job?”

“I was a U.S. Army Ranger before I came on the Job,” Chester said. “Long before you ever took your first swig of mother’s milk.”

With an unchanging expression, the FID man said, “Your uniform is barely disheveled and your glasses weren’t even broken. And except for that cut on your forehead and your chewed-up fists, you came out of the fight unscathed.”

“I fought sober, he fought drunk,” Chester said. “I had the edge. And yeah, I tried to break his nose. The blood goes down their throat and they feel like they can’t breathe. Ever tried clocking a guy like that?”

Chester paused, but the FID man said, “I’m still listening.”

Chester said, “As for my glasses, I took them off the second we got to the alley, just as a precaution. I got my last pair smashed by an Indian purse snatcher in a fight last week. And by the way, the Indian brave was a stand-up guy. He never made any whiny complaints about excessive force. But you probably know all that already. So how does the baby killer say it went down?”

The FID man thought it over for a moment and said, “He claims he cooperated, but the minute you handcuffed his hands behind his back, you started pummeling him with punches and kicks.”

“I suppose you wanna test my boots for blood evidence?” Chester said. “Want me to take ’em off?”

The interrogator said, “I’d rather just hear the truth of what happened out there.”

“Got any witnesses that claim it was a total beatdown?”

“I can’t say at this time.”

“You’d say if you had any.”

“The truth would help everyone.”

“How about the head-butt?” Chester said. “What’s he have to say about that?”

“He thinks it may have happened by accident while he was struggling to escape the beating.”

“He’s a liar,” Chester said calmly. “Isn’t this a lotta fuss for a baby killer? Especially one who’s a
white
guy?”

The interrogator said, “Everyone has a breaking point. Maybe you reached yours today. Maybe seeing that dead baby triggered rage you couldn’t control.”

Chester scoffed, “You mean, you think just because I was arresting a guy that raped a child and beat a baby to death, I somehow went off my rocker? Is that what you’re saying here?”

The FID man cocked his head quizzically. “Who said anything about him raping a child?”

Chester Toles did not reply to that question. His blue eyes behind the smudged eyeglasses opened a bit wider, and he stared at the interrogator as though he didn’t quite understand the question, or even his own answer.