Kind of Blue

KIND of BLUE

Also by Miles Corwin

The Killing Season
And Still We Rise
Homicide Special

A Novel

MILES CORWIN

Copyright © 2010 by Miles Corwin

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-60809-007-5

Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing,
Longboat Key, Florida
www.oceanviewpub.com

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Leni

KIND of BLUE

Lieutenant Frank Duffy trudged up the five flights of stairs from the Felony Special squad room to the tenth floor, where the LAPD command staff was based. By the time he had walked down the long hallway to Assistant Chief Vincent Grazzo’s office, he was already wheezing from exertion and beads of sweat speckled his brow. He knew he should have taken the elevator, but his doctor had ordered him to get some exercise and these days walking the stairs at the Police Administration Building—Los Angeles Police Department headquarters—was his only opportunity.

“I got something for you,” Grazzo told Duffy, who dabbed at his brow with his knuckles.

Grazzo sat upright in his chair, tightly gripping a pencil in one hand. Short and pudgy, his midnight blue LAPD uniform fit him like a wet suit, and rolls of flesh spilled out over his collar. Duffy always thought that overweight police officials in their fifties and sixties looked as absurd in their uniforms as tubby baseball managers waddling to the mound.

“Last night, an ex-cop by the name of Pete Relovich got clipped at his house,” Grazzo said. “Looks like a B and E.”

“The name is vaguely familiar,” Duffy said with a faint Irish inflection.

“When he was a young cop, he saved his partner’s life in Watts.”

“That was a long time ago, but I remember hearing something about it.”

“They were on a robbery stakeout in the projects. Just about to take down a gangster pistol-whipping an illegal with a pocketful of cash, when a few homies fired on them. The partner took one in the gut. Pete was hit in the nose by a fragment. It traveled through his fucking nasal cavity and ended up in his mouth. He spit the hot metal out, shielded
his partner with his body, then carried him to the squad car. And Pete still had the balls to return fire and drop one of the cocksuckers.” Grazzo shook his head with admiration. “He was one macho cop.”

“Wasn’t his father a captain in Newton years ago?”

“Yeah, that was his old man,” Grazzo said. “He retired a while back. Pete had thirteen in and pulled the pin last year.”

“Why not wait for the pension at twenty?”

“Who knows.”

“Anything interesting in his package?”

“He’s got a handful of excessive force complaints. But as far as I could tell he was just a hard-nosed street cop who was doing his job and ran into some whiners.

“Anyway, the chief’s got a hard on for this case. He and Relovich’s old man go way back. They were young boots together at the old Venice station. This one’s personal for the chief.”

“The father still alive?”

“Naw. Heart attack five years ago. But the chief wants this case cleared. He owes the old man that at least.”

“Where did Relovich live?”

“San Pedro.”

“Why isn’t Harbor Homicide handling the case?”

“Why did the chief bring back Felony Special after the unit was shitcanned in the nineties?”

Duffy wondered if a prerequisite for being named assistant chief was learning how to answer a question with a question—and then answering your own question.

“Power,” Grazzo said. “He now has the power to take any case from the divisional dicks—from a jaywalking to a homicide—and give it to the Felony Special guys. They’re
supposedly
,” Grazzo said, pausing for a moment, “the best detectives in the city. And the chief wants the best detectives handling this case.”

“Major Crimes,” Duffy said.

“What?” Grazzo asked.

“Back in the nineties, they called the unit Major Crimes.”

“Who gives a shit what they used to call it.”

“Okay,” Duffy said. “I’ll give it to the on-call team right now.”

“The chief doesn’t want it going to the on-call team.”

“You know that’s how we do it,” Duffy said.

“The chief doesn’t want this case going to the luck of the draw. He wants your best detective on the case. The best of the best, so to speak. So who do you wanna put on it?”

Duffy stroked his neck. “Let’s see. Saito is my best scene man. McKay’s my best interviewer. Griego used to work at Harbor Division and knows all the gangbangers and pipeheads down there, so he might be a good choice. Raymond’s a bulldog and he’ll—”

“Chief wants your best guy—overall.”

“My best guy overall quit eleven months ago.”

“Who was that?”

“Ash Levine.”

Grazzo tapped his index finger on his chin. “Asher Levine? The guy involved in that Latisha Patton fiasco?”

Duffy nodded. “That’s right. I hated to lose him.”

“You suspended him, didn’t you.”

“I did. But I never thought he’d quit over it.”

“Quitting the department just because he loses a wit and gets suspended? The guy sounds fucking unbalanced.”

“I don’t think so. He just was in very deep on that case.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“Sitting on his ass. Doing a little gofer work for his brother’s law firm.”

“Jew?” Grazzo asked.

Duffy nodded.

“What was a smart Jew doing working as a street cop?”

“Levine’s an odd duck. He’s a combat vet, too.”

Grazzo lifted his
Semper Fidelis
coffee mug in a mock toast and took a sip. “Don’t tell me he’s a fellow Marine.”

“No. IDF—Israeli Defense Forces. Dropped out of college, moved to Israel, and joined up. I’ve known him since he was in patrol and I’ll tell you, he’s a hell of a detective. He doesn’t think like a normal person. He sees things other guys miss. I remember a time when we were both at Pacific Division and he was just a young patrolman at the time. We were working the crime scene when—”

“You’re a chatty fucking Irishman,” Grazzo said.

Duffy shrugged.

“You want to bring him back?” Grazzo asked.

Duffy grabbed a Kleenex off Grazzo’s desk and mopped his brow. “He’s a pain in the ass. But yeah, I’d love to have him back.”

“The chief wasn’t happy when the Latisha Patton hit stirred up all that bad press for us, but he didn’t want to lose Levine over it. He thought Levine’s work on the Spring Street Slasher case was outstanding.” Grazzo tugged at his collar. “What was it—four, five vics before he scooped up that psycho?”

“An even half dozen,” Duffy said.

“I say go get Levine.”

“How about the background checks, shrink visits, and all that other LAPD bullshit?”

“I’ll fast track the paperwork and put him on temporary. You get him an appointment with the shrink. He can finish the rest of it next week. Can you run him down now?”

“Today?”

“Yeah, today.”

“I don’t know if I can find him this afternoon.”

Grazzo checked his watch and frowned.

“But I know where he’ll be tonight.”

“Where’s that?”

“Where else would a divorced Jewish cop—with no life and no kids—be on a Friday night?”

Grazzo frowned. He didn’t like it when someone else—especially someone lower on the LAPD chain of command—answered a question with a question and then prepared to answer it.

Duffy chuckled and said, “At his mother’s.”

Duffy could not find a spot in front of Mrs. Levine’s duplex, the duplex where he knew Levine was raised, so he parked two blocks away and strolled down the sidewalk, crunching across dried palm fronds that carpeted the street after the breezy afternoon. He recalled cruising down this street when he was a young patrolman in the Wilshire Division. The other cops called the area—east of Fairfax and south of Pico—the Borscht Belt because of all the elderly Eastern European Jews who clustered there. The neighborhood was modest, filled with duplexes and small apartment buildings, but the places were tidy then and the landscaping
was well tended. Now, Duffy saw how it had deteriorated. Slabs of stucco had crumbled from a number of the apartment facades, tufts of crabgrass peeked through the cracks in the asphalt driveways, and the narrow lawns in front of most of the duplexes were dusty patches of weeds. Rusty air conditioners teetered from a few windows and metal shopping carts were abandoned in the gutters.

There were still some elderly Jews left—like Levine’s mother—but Duffy noticed a number of Hispanic kids in diapers playing in front of the apartments and several surly black teenagers wearing blue nylon do-rags leaning against cars. On a few garage doors, he saw the spray-painted tags of the Mansfield Family Crips. Duffy walked up the brick path to the duplex Mrs. Levine rented, which was squeezed between two small apartment buildings, beige boxes with water stains beneath the rooflines. The duplex, with its red-tiled roof, wrought iron light sconces, and small courtyard, once must have had a stately elegance. But Duffy noticed that many of the tiles on the roof were split, the sconces were bent and nicked, and the wooden steps leading to the upper unit sagged in the middle.

Duffy glanced at the side of the duplex and noticed that all the windows were shielded with thick black security bars. He wiped his feet on the mat and, before ringing the doorbell, paused for a moment, rehearsing a few possible approaches, trying to decide which would be the most effective.

I just finished mumbling my way through the
Bir Mat Hamazon
—grace after the meal—when I heard the doorbell ring and Lieutenant Duffy call out, “Open up, Ash, I know you’re in there.”

My mother padded across the room and peered through the peephole. Then she quickly glanced at me with a pained expression, her eyes filling with an amalgam of anger and dread, and opened the door.

“Shabat Shalom, Mrs. Levine,” Duffy said, smiling. He reached for her hand and then patted it gently.

She glared at him.

“I learned a little Hebrew in the seminary when I had a class in comparative religion.”

“Very little, I assume.”

While he prattled on, trying to charm my mother, I sat slumped in a dining room chair. My temples felt like they were being squeezed in a vise. In an instant, I was transported right back to that street corner at 54th and Figueroa, where I saw Latisha Patton splayed on the sidewalk, her head encircled by a pool of blood, brain tissue and skull shards blown into the gutter. Why? Because of my stupidity. Or incompetence. Or carelessness. Or all of it. I felt as if I had killed her myself. For the past year I had been trying to bury the agonizing memory of that afternoon. And now, seeing Duffy brought it all back again. When I set my hands on my lap, I saw that I had left sweaty handprints on the wooden arms of the chair.

My mother glanced over at me for a moment. She could always read me better than any suspect. Turning to Duffy, she said in a loud whisper, “I wish you’d just let him get on with his life.”

She looked particularly small and frail at that moment. Pale and freckled, her bright red hair was so lacquered and spherical it looked
like a football helmet. She had an energy that made her seem physically imposing, but when people stood next to her and realized she was only about five feet tall, they were always surprised. Of course, standing next to Duffy would make anyone look small and frail. He was six foot five and somewhere between burly and fat, like an offensive lineman a few years past his playing days.