Kind of Blue (27 page)

“If I’d just stuck with regulations, maybe she’d be alive today. Maybe no one would have known that she’d seen the shooter. Maybe no one would have known she was cooperating with us. Instead, the shooter, somehow, found out.”

“How’d he find out?”

“Maybe he followed her when she drove out to the West Valley. Maybe someone saw us together at the apartment and word got out. Maybe when she made some calls, someone star eighty-nined her, found her phone number, and tracked her address.”

“Ash, that’s a lot of maybes. Too many for you to assume responsibility for her death.”

“I just know that what I did blew up in my face and my wit ended up dead. If I’d done things differently, the way I was supposed to, she might be alive today.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself. You did your best to protect her.”

I shrugged.

“It sounds to me that you did all that you could. I’d suggest you make a real effort to be as rational and realistic as you can about the situation. Because right now you’re over-assigning blame to yourself.”

“I had to do the death notification. When I told Latisha’s daughter her mother had been killed, well—” I swallowed hard and shook my head. “She blamed me. She was out of control. She screamed that I should have left her mother alone. I probably should have.”

“You need to focus on the reality of the situation. The reality is, this woman didn’t think she was safe where she was. Ultimately, you didn’t either. So you tried to protect her. The fact that you couldn’t keep her safe was not your fault. She might have been in danger no matter where she lived.”

“But I put her in danger.”

“You didn’t put her in danger. She was in danger before she even talked to you. She was in danger the moment she saw the man in the Shrek mask get out of his car. You can’t blame yourself, because when you moved her, you know what you were doing?”

“What?”

“Your job.”

“You know, whenever I’m in the middle of breaking down a case, I think of two phrases that always come up in Talmudic study:
tsorikh iyyun
—needing further study and
b’makhloket
—still in controversy.”

“Homicide detective as Talmudic scholar?” Blau asked, smiling wryly.

“I’m not giving myself that much credit. I’m just a cop who can’t leave a case alone.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes until I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Somewhere else in the Talmud it says something like, if you save a life, it’s like you saved the whole world. Sometimes I feel like that with my job.”

“You solve a murder, it’s like you’ve solved all the world’s murders?”

“That sounds like I’ve got delusions of grandeur.”

“Leave the psychological diagnosis to me,” Blau said, smiling. “But no one can dispute you have an important job.” Blau tapped his chin with his middle finger. “I get the feeling you’ve got something more to say about this woman, Latisha.”

I nodded.

“This is a good time to tell me about it.”

“I’ve got to be indirect about this.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to lose my job. So let’s say there’s this hypothetical detective with a witness who—”

“We’re not here to talk about the hypothetical. We’re here to talk about you.”

“What are your rules about confidentiality.”

“Typically, confidentially is absolute between a psychologist and patient.”

“
Typically
?” I asked.

“Well, I’m an LAPD employee, so the situation is a little more complicated because—”

I walked across the room, filled a cup with water, and downed it in a gulp.

“It just got too complicated for me, too.”

I crumpled the water cup, tossed it in the trash can, and walked out the door.

• • •

I sat in my car, staring out the windshield, my heart pounding, my throat dry, my hands shaking so much I couldn’t start the engine. I thought about that first night I moved Latisha to the apartment in the Valley. She told me she’d never felt so lonely in her life. She couldn’t go to work; she couldn’t see her daughter, her mother, or her friends. I went out and picked up a pizza, and we ate together on the sofa. She made me promise I’d return the next night. I picked up some pasta and a bottle of wine. She told me how grateful she was for the company. Robin and I had just separated, and I didn’t feel like being alone either.

After dinner, when I was leaving, my hand on the doorknob, she started to cry. I put my arm around her shoulder, trying to comfort her. She looked up at me, her eyes misty, and at that moment I realized, for the first time, how beautiful she was. She had high, sharp cheekbones and almond, amber-colored eyes. She was only a few inches over five feet, but had the willowy body of a dancer, and every move she made was fluid and graceful. While Robin was sarcastic and cynical and could be devious like me, Latisha was sweet and direct. “You’re my protector,” she whispered to me, her arms around my waist. She framed my face in her hands and kissed me; she led me to the bedroom. I felt like I was in a trance and I stayed in that trance, oblivious to the consequences. And there were many. My feelings for her were intense, the emotions complicated. During those last few days I thought about asking her to move in with me after the case was resolved.

Did Latisha’s involvement with me cost her life? Definitely. Did the fact that I was sleeping with her every night for weeks end up putting her at even more risk? Probably. I tried to be discreet, but who knows. Maybe someone tailed me from downtown. Maybe the killer attached a GPS to my engine block. Maybe Latisha told someone in the apartment complex about her dilemma. Maybe she slipped and talked to someone from the old neighborhood about our relationship or about where she was living. In the end it was on me. I convinced her to talk to me, to move, to testify against the killer if I ever caught him. I then decided to up the ante and make the relationship personal.

Robin was the only one who suspected what was going on. After I moved out, Robin, shaken by the finality of the move, had second thoughts about the separation. She called me at home, late at night, a
number of times. I was never there. After Latisha was killed, I stopped by our old house. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted from Robin; I just felt like I needed to be with her. She wouldn’t let me in. She just stood on the porch, staring at me, frowning. She could see how Patton’s murder had shaken me to the core.

“I know you, Ash, and this
woman
,” she said with distain, “wasn’t just another witness.” She walked back inside, slammed the door, and that’s the last time I saw her. I called Robin a few months ago, and she advised me to hire a divorce lawyer.

Telling Blau all this would be a big gamble. I couldn’t even tell Ortiz. All I could do was wrap up the Relovich investigation and finagle some time so I could finally get to the real case that lured me back to the LAPD.

I returned to the squad room, my head throbbing. I filled my coffee cup with water and downed three Tylenol. Moving my steno pad off the corner of my blotter, I stared at the picture of Latisha. When I started to choke up, I left the squad room and locked myself in a bathroom stall. Should I just dump the Relovich case now? No. I’ve got to do right by Pete Relovich. Latisha’s homicide is a very cold case, a year old. Waiting another couple of days won’t hurt. I’ll finish off the Relovich case. Then I’ll go after Latisha’s killer.

After splashing cold water on my face, I returned to the squad room. Still feeling shaky, I opened up the Relovich murder book and drummed a forefinger on my leather shoulder holster. Where to begin? It was always easier to launch a new investigation than to revisit a cleared case. The difficulty was reviewing the material with a fresh perspective, envisioning a new path to follow that deviated from previous avenues of investigation.

Bud Carducci always told me to view the disparate elements of an investigation like the links in a chain. A smart defense attorney, Carducci explained, will always hone in on the weakest link and split it open. The jury won’t care how strong the other links in the chain are. When it is time to deliberate, they’ll focus on the broken one.

I decided to first focus on the interview summaries, including the ones conducted by the Harbor Division detectives. But when I finished reading them, I hadn’t found an obvious weak link. The interview with Relovich’s ex-wife, Sandy, however, troubled me. She insisted she had no idea that Relovich had hidden almost $5,000 under his floor tile. But I recalled that she seemed hinky when I told her about the cash. My instincts during interviews had been wrong in the past, but not often. I decided to pay her another visit.

• • •

I drove north out of the city on a cool, gray morning. As I climbed the San Gabriel Mountains, the fog thinned, and by the time I reached the summit at 3,300 feet, I could discern two distinct climate patterns: ash gray and overcast in the vast Los Angeles basin; turquoise skies and shimmering heat waves in the scorching Mojave Desert. In L.A., summer weather was still a month away. But here, in the high desert, the sun was unforgiving, parching the hillsides and withering the spring flowers.

When Sandy answered the door, she was holding a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She stared at me for a moment, her eyes rheumy, her expression perplexed. When she recognized me, she set her beer on the floor and hugged me, the smoke from the cigarette swirling around and burning my eyes.

“I never got around to calling you, but I wanted to say that I’m grateful,” she said. “Thank you for everything you’ve done.”

I followed her into the kitchen, where she poured me a glass of iced tea.

“It’s finally over. You finally got him,” she said, grabbing another beer from the refrigerator and joining me at a round wooden table. “As you can see, I’m drinking again too early in the day. Maybe now that you’ve put the case to rest, I’ll get it together.”

I had worked with enough drunks to know Sandy was lying to herself. But I just nodded sympathetically.

“You’ve really helped me and my little girl, and I’m grateful to you for that,” she said. “She believed that the bad man who killed her father was going to come after me and kill me, too. She’s had a lot of trouble sleeping. But after you made the arrest, well, it helped a lot.”

Sandy took a deep drag of her cigarette and said while exhaling, “What brings you all the way out to our shit-kicking little burg?”

“I wanted to ask you a few follow-up questions.”

“Okay. Ask.”

“Remember I mentioned that stash of cash that I found under a tile in Pete’s kitchen?”

She angrily stubbed out her cigarette. “
Remember
I told you I didn’t know anything about it?”

“Yes I do. But it’s something I have to pursue.”

“Why? I thought the case was solved. You already arrested that gangster who killed Pete.”

“There might be more to the homicide than I originally thought.”

“Detective Levine, this is the fourth time you’ve been out here. I’m sick of this shit.”

Telling her about the questions I had about the case would be pointless. She’d probably just get angry. But if I mentioned the partner, it might provide enough of a scare so she’d open up to me. I leaned toward her and said, “I locked up one suspect, but witnesses have told me that he had a partner. I need to find that partner. That’s the only way I can be sure this case is solved. And it’s the only way I can be one hundred percent sure that you and your daughter are safe.”

She gripped the edge of the table. “Do you think this partner could come after us?” she asked, voice quavering.

“No. But it’ll be better for everyone if I find out who he is and get him into custody.”

She wiped her eyes with a fist.

I fought back the impulse to speak. Sometimes silence was more effective in gleaning information than the most penetrating question.

Slowly lifting her head, she lit another cigarette, smoking half of it in silence. Finally, she said, “Maybe what I’m going to tell you will help you find out whatever you’re trying to find out. Probably not. But I’d never forgive myself if I had some little piece of information that could help you find this partner and I didn’t tell you.” She stubbed out her cigarette and stared into the ashtray for a moment. “About eleven years ago, Pete was working patrol in Hollywood. He’d only been a cop for a few years. Something happened. I don’t know exactly what. Pete never talked about his work. He didn’t want to bring the streets home with him. But something big must have gone down. We weren’t married yet, just living together in a small apartment in Torrance, trying to save up for a down payment so we could get our own place. Pete was just a young patrolman. So it was slow going. Then one Saturday he sits me down and tells me he’s got $60,000 for a down payment. Those were the days when you could still buy a nice house in Pedro for $300,000. He made me promise not to ask him where he got the money. I agreed. So he bought the house a month or two later. We got married and moved in.”

She downed her beer in two gulps and lit another cigarette.

“Where’d he get the money?”

“I didn’t want to know then. I don’t want to know now.”

“Who was his partner at the time?”

“No idea. He had lots of partners over the years.”

“Do you remember what month he bought the house?”

“February. I remember it was around Valentine’s Day.”

“Did you know about the cash under the tile?”

“No. He said the $60,000 was the whole jackpot. I guess he kept a little extra for himself.”

“You think this is what he was going to tell Internal Affairs?”

“I sure as hell hope not. It was too late to do anything about the money. He’d spent it. He should have been smart enough to keep his mouth shut.”

“Any idea what his appointment with Internal Affairs was about?”

“No idea.”

“Last time I was here, I showed you those little Japanese figures. You said you didn’t know anything about them. Are you sure that—”

“I still don’t know anything about them.”