Kind of Blue (15 page)

“Remember you told me if I thought of something to call you? When you asked me that, I was in kind of a fog. But after Lindsey told
you about the guy who came to Pete’s door with a gun and threatened him, well that gave me a jolt. I’d never heard that before. To think that Lindsey was there when that happened—that scares the hell out of me. Anyway, this morning I remembered something. It might be something you can use. It might not. But I thought I’d pass it along anyway. A few weeks ago, I was talking on the phone with Pete. We were making weekend plans for the upcoming month about how our daughter would get from Lancaster to Pete’s place in Pedro. He mentioned in a kind of casual way that he wouldn’t be able to pick her up on one of those Fridays because he’d made an appointment with Internal Affairs. Said he couldn’t come and get her until Saturday. I don’t know if it means anything, but I thought I’d tell you.”

“Which Friday was it that he had the appointment?” I asked.

“Can’t remember. I should have written it down. But it was within a few weeks of the call.”

I thanked her and hung up. I was reluctant to stop by Internal Affairs because of my brush with the investigators after the Latisha Patton murder. Still, I knew I had to suck it up and check out Relovich’s appointment.

Because Parker Center was such an outdated, overcrowded structure, a number of LAPD units were scattered in office buildings throughout downtown L.A. After PAB opened, a few of them remained in their buildings, including Internal Affairs.

The unit is now officially known as The Professional Standards Bureau, but most cops still call it by the old name. When I first got my shield, Internal Affairs moved to the Bradbury Building—a landmark structure built in the 1890s—an anomalous place for an LAPD squad room.

I walked down Broadway, spotted the unremarkable, boxy, brown brick building in the distance, and entered through the archway squeezed between a Subway shop and a telephone company. But once inside I was dazzled, as I am every time I linger in the elegant interior courtyard, a breathtaking five-story vault of open space flooded with sunlight from the massive glass roof. I admired the glazed brick walls, the marble stairs, the filigreed wrought-iron railings that look like hanging vines, the ornate birdcage elevators. I’d seen a magazine article recently
and learned that a young draftsman had designed the building after he read a science fiction story describing the typical office building in a city of the future as a “vast hall of light received not alone by the windows, but from a dome overhead.” A perfect building for this city of dreams, I thought, a city in the thrall of the movie business, where fantasy often dictates reality.

After wandering around the courtyard for a few minutes, I walked up to the third floor and, trying to appear casual and unconcerned, walked through the Internal Affairs squad room. It seemed like all the investigators in the room froze and cast suspicious looks my way; it was probably my imagination, but I definitely felt a hostile vibe. Maybe they heard about my return to Major Crimes and weren’t happy about it. I recognized several detectives who had questioned me about the Patton case. I avoided them and approached a young Asian detective who had probably been hired by I.A. after I’d quit. When I asked him if he knew anything about Relovich’s appointment, he jerked his thumb toward a desk in the corner and said, “Saucedo took the guy’s call.”

I stopped by Detective Virginia Saucedo’s desk, and she stood up and shook my hand. I had met her years ago on a case when she was working the robbery table at Hollywood Division. Saucedo was slender with a long, graceful neck and shimmering black hair that she wore in a French braid pinned under the nape of her neck. Her top was cut a little lower than LAPD regulations allowed. Drawing attention to the cleavage was a moonstone cross on a silver chain. She rolled a chair over for me from another desk. Unlike the others in the office, Saucedo was amiable and cooperative.

I sat down, briefly told her about the case, and asked about Relovich’s appointment.

“Not much to tell, really,” she said. “He just called, wanted to set up an appointment, and they put me on the phone.”

“Did he say what it was about?”

She shook her head. “I asked him, but he said he’d prefer to talk about it in person.”

“Did he sound upset? Stressed? Depressed?”

“Couldn’t really tell. We just had a very brief conversation.”

“When was his appointment?”

She sifted through her desk calendar and pointed to the entry:
Det.
Pete Relovich. Retired. Wants to talk. About—???
The date was for this Friday—a week after his death.

“You think there’s any connection between the appointment and what happened to him?”

“Not sure,” I said.

Staring at the calendar, she said softly, “I hope I’m not out of line, but I want to tell you that I really felt bad for you last year. I know that was a very painful thing to go through.”

I nodded, feeling uncomfortable, unsure of what to say.

She gazed into my eyes for a moment with a look of pity and concern, an almost maternal expression. “Coming back, I know, can’t be easy. If you ever want someone to talk to, call me.” She scrawled her home number on the back of her business card and deftly slipped it to me, so the other detectives wouldn’t see.

She was a pretty girl, with lustrous black eyes and a nice body. I took the card and slipped it into my pocket. But when I thought about the way she had looked at me, I didn’t know whether I would call her.

I walked back to PAB, climbed into my car, drove down to San Pedro, and parked in front of Relovich’s house. I lingered on the sidewalk for a moment, enjoying the sunshine and looking out at the sea, the white-caps iridescent in the bright light. For the next few hours I walked up and down the street interviewing neighbors, but it was a fruitless afternoon. No one had heard anything; no one had seen anything; no one provided any useful information about Relovich.

When I returned to the house, I noticed that the living room walls were streaked purple—the color of the jacaranda blossoms that I could see outside the front window. The fingerprint technicians had dabbed the walls with ninhydrin, which reacts to the amino acids in the fingers’ sweat patterns, leaving a purple residue.

Sitting in my car outside Relovich’s house, staring at the sea, I reached for my cell. I called a clerk at the Harbor Division jail and discovered that Theresa Martinez, the young Hispanic woman who dressed like a preppy, had made bail a few hours after she’d been busted and I had questioned her. The clerk gave me her address and I drove down the hill to where she lived, a generic 1960s-style, two-story complex with the small apartments encircling a kidney-shaped pool.

I walked up the stairs to her apartment and rang the bell. She looked through the keyhole and opened the door a few inches.

“Yes,” she said suspiciously.

“I’m detective—”

“I remember you.”

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“When we last talked, I thought you might have seen something that night that might help me.”

“I didn’t.”

“Look, I’m a homicide detective. I’m investigating the murder of a retired cop. I’m hoping you might be able to tell me something that could help my investigation, something that—”

“Well, I can’t,” she said, slamming the door.

“If you do think of something, call me.”

I pulled a card out of my wallet and slid it under the door.

I had a few hours to kill until I figured Abazeda would be home. So rather than risk the freeway during the crush of the evening commute, I stopped by Ante’s, a landmark Croatian restaurant two blocks from the harbor. A few years ago I had investigated the murder of a harbor commissioner who was carjacked and shot a block away. It took me six days to clear the case, and I had lunched at Ante’s each day.

“Welcome back, Detective Levine,” the hostess said when she saw me. “I’ve got a nice quiet booth in the corner for you.”

The dining room was homey, with high-backed red leather booths, a wood beam ceiling, Croatian handicrafts on one wall, and a colorful mural of the Adriatic coastline on another. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and I was ravenous. I started with a salad of iceberg lettuce, cabbage, cucumber, and octopus and a side dish of fried smelt, and then polished off a plate of
Sarma
—seasoned meat and rice rolled in cabbage leaves—served with mostaccioli.

I was about to ask for the check, when the hostess, carrying a tray, stopped by and said, “A little something for you—on the house.” She brought me a piece of sweet, flaky strudel and a glass of Croatian plum brandy, the same kind of brandy, I realized, Goran Relovich had been drinking on his fishing boat.

After I finished the strudel, I sipped the brandy and I recalled the photographs that Lindsey Relovich had taken during her birthday at her father’s house.

From a flap in the back of the murder book, I removed the photographs. I sifted through the packet, spread the pictures out on the table, and divided them into piles—each pile representing a different room of the house. Apparently, Lindsey had followed her father through the house that day and snapped pictures while he mugged for the camera. There were a few pictures of Relovich posing behind his daughter, towering over her. I knew Relovich’s life during the past few years had been troubled, but he looked truly happy in the pictures with his daughter.

After studying the photographs, I finished the brandy in a swallow. Then I tried to recall how each room looked when Duffy and I had inspected the house. I would visit the place again for a more thorough inspection, but I wanted to see if any of the photographs provided me with some insight.

One did.

The little girl had photographed her father in the spare bedroom, pulling her birthday present out of a closet. I remembered the desk and figured that Relovich used the room as an office. In the photo, a laptop computer sat on a corner of the desk.

I closed my eyes and recalled the desk with the coffee cup filled with pens and pencils. Riffling through the murder book, I located the property report compiled by the Harbor Division detectives. Now I was certain. Whoever killed Relovich had pinched his laptop. Because when I had searched the house, it wasn’t there.

If Abazeda had killed Relovich, that would make sense. He was worried that Relovich was stealing his girls and his clients. The laptop might contain that information.

Abazeda lived in West L.A., a few blocks south of Pico and west of Robertson. While many houses on the street were classic one-story Spanish-style cottages, Abazeda’s place was a monstrosity, a three-story stucco palace with a flat roof, three balconies festooned with gold ironwork, and four giant concrete columns flanking the front door. The lot was modest-sized, but the house was so enormous there was no room for landscaping. Instead of a front lawn, there was just a cement parking slab. There were no cars in front, and the house was dark. I parked across the street and decided to wait.

It was a warm evening, and as I rolled down my window, the breeze kicked up dust along the gutter. The gritty smell of the dust cut with the faint scent of orange blossoms suggested something that I couldn’t quite recall, an event hovering at the fringe of my memory. I closed my eyes for a moment.

Summer. A West Bank checkpoint at the edge of an orange grove. I was about to relieve a young South African immigrant named Danny, when I saw a Palestinian teenager approach the checkpoint. He walked robotically, stopped, and looked through Danny and the other soldiers. The Palestinian was curly haired, his skin was dark—the color of mahogany—but his eyes were an arresting pale green. Crusader eyes, the Palestinians called them. There was something about those sea green eyes that alarmed me: a curious unfocused lifeless look.

“Jible hawiye,”
Danny ordered—the two Arabic words every Israeli soldier learns: Give me your identity card.

The Palestinian stepped forward, reached into his back pocket—a movement so casual he might have been reaching for a handkerchief—and removed a shiny aluminum RGN Russian hand grenade. He pulled the pin, blowing
himself up, along with Danny, blasting the branches of the olive tree high behind them with bloody strips of clothing that flapped in the breeze like flags.

As I instinctively flexed my calf, where slivers of shrapnel were still embedded, I saw a man park a Lexus SUV in front of the house. I flipped open my murder book and checked Abazeda’s DMV picture. It was him.

I walked over and said, “Mr. Abazeda, I’m an LAPD homicide detective. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“It’s nice to finally meet you, Detective Levine. Ann Licata told me that she has spoken with you.”

Abazeda was a solidly built man with sharp features. Bald, with just a horseshoe-shaped fringe of black hair, he stared at me with a slightly popeyed expression. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or he had some kind of optical condition. He wore a pale blue silk shirt, black linen slacks, and tan loafers with no socks.

“Why don’t we go inside,” I said. “It’ll be easier to talk.”

“No problem,” he said, opening the door with a key and punching a code into the alarm panel.

I followed him into an entryway with pale blue marble floors and a massive skylight veined with gold. He opened the door to an office off the entryway with white shag carpeting and a desk that was half the size of the room. Four video screens in the corner of the office offered exterior views of the house from rotating surveillance cameras. Abazeda sat in an overstuffed leather chair behind the desk. I pulled up a chair opposite him.

“Ann Licata told me you and she have an arrangement,” he said in a slight accent that sounded vaguely Middle Eastern.

“Where are you from, originally?” I asked.

“Is that really important?”

“Not really.”

“As I was saying, Ann told me that she cooperated with you and you agreed to leave her business alone.”

“From what I understand, it’s
your
business.”