Kind of Blue (21 page)

I hoped he was bullshitting me, because he was the best suspect I had. “You better be right. Because if you’re not, I’m coming over to your place and hooking you up.”

“Am I free to leave?”

“Yeah. Get out of here. But I’m putting you on notice that there’s now a record of you busting in here. If anything should happen to her, you’ll be my number one suspect. So stay away from this place.”

When he left, I motioned for Granger, who was staring at me through the sliding glass door, to come in. She quickly crossed the room and threw her arms around me. “Thanks for coming right over. I’m very afraid of that man.”

As she ran a fingernail down my back, I felt a stir of interest. My hands lingered around her waist for a moment, then I pushed her away.
Am I out of my mind? What the fuck am I doing?

“When you called me, you claimed he was slapping you around.”

“He was.”

I tapped her cheeks with my index fingers. “There’s not a single mark on your face.”

She gave me a half-smile. “I heal fast.”

“I can see that,” I said skeptically.

“Let me think of a way to thank you for coming all the way over here. While I’m thinking, how about a drink?”

I shook my head.

She took a step toward me.

Holding up my palms, I took a quick step back, hurried out the door and to my car.

When I returned to my loft, I called Dickie Jenkins at the Kismet Casino and asked him if he would view the video of the high-limit table again. But this time instead of searching for my guy with a bald head, I asked him to find the same guy—but with a hairpiece.

Jenkins didn’t sound too happy about it, but he agreed to do a quick search.

An hour later he called back.

“I found this character with the beaver pelt. Actually it’s a damn good piece. I never would have known it was a piece if you hadn’t tipped me off. He arrived shortly before eight and I fast-forwarded and he didn’t split until about two in the morning.”

“I wish you’d have told me that before. Would’ve saved me a lot of time.”

At my desk on Saturday morning, I realized that I was stumped. When I’m at a dead end, I often like to review a case away from the squad room, a conventional place that fosters conventional thinking. Sometimes I like to ponder the whys and wherefores of a homicide in a setting where I can let my mind wander.

I walked out of the PAB, down First Street and entered the Kyoto Grand Hotel, a drab white tower in the heart of Little Tokyo. Crossing
the lobby filled with Japanese businessmen and tourists, I took the elevator to the third floor. Above the bustle of downtown, with Bunker Hill’s skyscrapers looming in the distance, the hotel featured a traditional half-acre Japanese strolling garden. In the center was a six-foot waterfall flowing into a reflecting pool filled with darting koi, surrounded by blooming red and white azaleas, pink hydrangeas, and trellises laced with bugle vines. The hotel called the spot “the garden in the sky” and claimed it was designed to incorporate seven principals of Zen: spirituality, asymmetry, austerity, subtlety, simplicity, naturalness, and calmness. When I first began visiting the spot to get a respite from the squad room, I’d decided that the best way to solve a homicide was to clear my mind and incorporate those seven principals.

After wandering through the deserted garden for a few minutes, I grabbed a chair and set it down at the edge of the pond, beside a patch of grass that was as satiny as a putting green. Listening to the splash of the waterfall and the wind rustling the leaves of a sycamore, I felt a world away from downtown.

I spread the murder book on my lap and studied the crime scene photographs and diagram, the statements from neighbors, my autopsy notes, and the preliminary investigation report written by the Harbor Division officers. But after an hour of sifting through the murder book, I realized I was no closer to finding Pete Relovich’s killer than when I had picked up the case the week before.

On Sunday, I returned to San Pedro, walked through Relovich’s house again, traversed the backyard, and wandered down the hill and back up again. By Sunday night, I was afraid that I had picked up the case too late. I wished Duffy had contacted me the night of the murder, not twenty-four hours later.

When I walked to work on Monday, it was warm and clear, a late May morning with a warm breeze from the east and a hint of summer in the air. I could smell the oil stains on the street baking in the sun.

As I entered the squad room door, Ortiz, who liked to parrot the stock Hollywood detective clichés, called out, “Who’s the perp? Is an arrest imminent?”

I ignored him, and as I sat down at my desk, my phone rang.

“Detective Levine, it’s Walt Jenkins from SID serology.”

“What do you have for me?”

“We got a hit,” Jenkins said.

“Don’t leave me hanging.”

“The DNA results just came back. You got the hit on the Kleenex.”

“From the bathroom wastebasket?”

“Yeah. The snot gave us the sample. We got a match in the database. His name is Terrell Fuqua.”

I hung up the phone, clenched my fist, and said to myself, “
Yes
!”

Duffy walked by and I called out, “We got a cold hit!”

“On Relovich?”

“Yeah.”

Duffy clapped his hands once. Then he walked over to my desk and said, “You’re a marvel, Ash my lad. I never had a doubt you’d put this one together. I just didn’t think you’d do it so quickly.” He pulled up a chair in front me. “What’d you get the hit on?”

“The Kleenex.”

“Amazing.”

“Not really. Next to blood, mucus has about the highest concentration of DNA.”

Ortiz, who overheard the exchange, called out, “The Case of the Golden Booger.”

“Who’s your guy?” Duffy asked.

“Terrell Fuqua.”

“Sounds like an interior decorator from West Hollywood,” Ortiz said.

Duffy waved him off. “What do we know about Fuqua?”

“At this point, nothing,” I said.

“Let’s jack his ass up by the end of the day and we can make the five o’clock news.”

“I’ve got to track him down first.”

I slid my chair over to a computer and called up the system we called Cheers because of its acronym—CCHRS (Consolidated Criminal History Reporting System). I printed out Fuqua’s rap sheet—listing all his arrests in Los Angeles County—which was an impressive nine pages. Next, I clicked onto the CII—the Criminal Index Information—which detailed Fuqua’s convictions and prison sentences. Then I checked
CAL/GANG, a state-wide computerized gang file for law enforcement agencies to determine Fuqua’s street name—C-Dawg—and the set he ran with—the Back Hood Bloods.

After about twenty minutes, I had compiled a fairly comprehensive criminal biography for my suspect. Terrell Fuqua was a thirty-four-year-old ex-con who was one of the founding members of his South Central gang. He had been arrested numerous times by Southeast Division cops for narcotic sales, car theft, burglary, rape, selling stolen property, but he beat most of the charges because it appeared that witnesses had been intimidated into backing down, or his gang associates were willing to take the rap for him. He had been convicted of only two felonies: once for attempted burglary and once for robbery when he stuck up a liquor store and made off with $900.

During the attempted burglary, patrol officers had caught him trying to climb inside a window after a neighbor called 911. He spent a year in county jail.

And there was no way for him to wriggle out of the robbery because a detective recovered from Fuqua’s house a bottle of Tequila and a carton of cigarettes stolen from the liquor store, as well as a ski mask used during the heist. He spent five years at Folsom.

I called R & I—the Records and Identification Unit—and asked for all of Fuqua’s arrest reports. After I took the elevator down to the first floor and picked up the files, I started reading the copies while walking back to the elevator, bumping into a commander, who flashed me a withering look. For the next hour I perused the files and gleaned several facts that quickened my pulse: Fuqua had once been arrested on a South Central street corner carrying a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol—the same type of gun that killed Relovich. And Fuqua’s robbery arrest five years ago was even more interesting. The liquor store was in San Pedro, which established his familiarity with Relovich’s neighborhood. And the detective on the Harbor Division robbery table who put together the case against Fuqua was—Pete Relovich.

This confirmed what I had believed all along: Relovich knew his killer. Although it seemed unlikely that Relovich would let a dirtbag like Fuqua into his house, maybe there was an explanation. I just couldn’t fathom what it was.

Fuqua had an obvious motive—revenge—because although he had
an extensive criminal history, Relovich had been the only detective to put together a good enough case to send him to state prison. But I knew that sometimes an obvious motive was a red herring.

I called a state parole office in Sacramento and picked up the name and phone number of Fuqua’s parole officer. He provided me with his charge’s South Central address. I then contacted the Southeast Division captain and arranged for two uniforms to back me up when I jammed Fuqua. I headed down the Harbor Freeway, with Duffy in the front seat and Ortiz—whose partner just left for vacation—in back. We pulled off at Florence and met the two patrol officers in the station’s roll call room. I showed them a booking photo of Fuqua. Duffy worked out the logistics, telling the uniforms to storm the front door, while Ortiz and I guarded the back. Duffy said he would monitor the bust from the sidewalk.

We drove out of the station lot and parked a half block from Fuqua’s house. Ortiz and I slipped on our Kevlar vests and blue LAPD wind-breakers and followed the officers. The street was barren, without a single tree or bush, lined with slum apartments and ramshackle bungalows with splintered porches. Sandwiched between a front house, which was encircled by a dry patchy lawn, and an alley, Fuqua lived in small gray guest cottage with two stained mattresses stacked against the side.

While the uniformed officers pounded on the door, I kept my hand over my .45. In the distance, I could hear an out of sync rooster crowing. The officers continued to knock, but no one came to the door. I peeked in a back window. The apartment was vacant. Ortiz and I circled around to the sidewalk. I thanked the officers, who had missed lunch and were glad to leave, and motioned to Duffy. We walked to the house in front and rang the doorbell.

An elderly black man wearing faded denim overalls opened the door. He looked us up and down and glared with an expression of contempt. “Yeah?”

“We’re LAPD detectives and we’re looking for a former tenant of yours, Terrell Fuqua,” I said.

“Do you have a warrant for
this
house?”

“No.”

“Am
I
under arrest?”

I shook my head.

“Then I ain’t talking to no damn detective.” He slammed the door.

I rang the doorbell again.

The man angrily swung open the door. “What part of
no
don’t you understand, Mr.
LAPD
,” he said, spitting out the letters.

“I assume you rent that back house out,” I said.

The man stared at me without expression.

“My guess is that it’s not up to code. I’m sure if I notified city building and safety, an inspector could find a dozen violations and shut that rental down. It may be years before you could get a tenant in there again.”

The man slumped his shoulders and wearily opened the door. While Ortiz, Duffy, and I squeezed onto a sofa, the man carried a wooden chair from the kitchen and sat down across from us. “What you want to know?”

I showed him Fuqua’s booking photo. “Do you know this man?”

“Yeah. That Terrell. He lived out back.”

“When did he move in?”

“When he got outta the penitentiary. ‘Bout six months ago.”

“Weren’t you reluctant to rent to a guy who just got out of prison?” I asked.

“Naw. I tell him, ‘Don’t you bring that trouble around here.’ He didn’t. And he pay his rent on time.”

“When did he move?”

“Few weeks ago. I got a new tenant moving in on Monday.”

“Where’d he move to?”

“Don’t know. One day he say he got a new lady, and next day he out.”

“Where are they forwarding his mail?”

“He ain’t never got no mail.”

“Anybody around here might know where he moved?”

“He stay to himself. I don’t pay no mind to where he go and with who. As long as he pay his rent on time.”

I gave the man my card and asked him to call Felony Special if he heard anything about Fuqua. Driving back downtown, I told Duffy, “Interesting that he moved a month ago.”

“That’s right before Relovich was popped,” Duffy said. “Probably figured he’d do the job and then disappear.”

“Any guesses where he is?” Ortiz said.

“Fuqua,” I said, swirling my index finger, “is in the wind.”

I returned to R & I and picked up all of Fuqua’s 510s—LAPD forms that we fill out after the arrest report, and include personal information such as the addresses and phone numbers of relatives, girlfriends, and ex-spouses, and other random data. I discovered that Fuqua’s mother and four sisters lived in South Central. A brother lived in San Pedro, which would explain why Fuqua pulled the burglary there. I figured that if I door-knocked the family, they would warn Fuqua and he would be even harder to find.

Back at my desk, I called the state Department of Motor Vehicles office and asked for the date of birth for Fuqua’s mother and sisters. One of Fuqua’s sisters would be celebrating a birthday on Friday. Now I had the opportunity to try an approach that had worked a few times for me in the past. On Friday afternoon I would stake out the sister’s house. If she had a birthday party, and if Fuqua showed up, I would be there in the shadows, waiting.

In the meantime, I had plenty of work to keep me busy. And if I was lucky, maybe I could even pick up Fuqua before Friday.

I slipped Fuqua’s booking photo into a six-pack, grabbed my murder book, and drove up Interstate 5 to the Pitchess Detention Center. I decided to see if the skinny junkie who I had interviewed at the Pacific Division station after the drug sweep could identify Fuqua. The junkie had described the man climbing into passenger’s side of the car at the end of the bloodhound’s trail as a tall, skinny Mexican and the other as shorter and stocky. Fuqua was listed as five foot ten and two hundred twenty pounds, so he fit the description of the driver. I decided that there was no point in showing Fuqua’s picture to Theresa Martinez because she said she didn’t get a look at the driver.