Kind of Blue (7 page)

I hopped back in the car and continued my descent. When I reached Lancaster, I exited the freeway and swung down a road rippling with heat waves, past lizards darting across the asphalt, past a few isolated ranches studded with metal grain silos. I had never visited this edge of the county and was amazed at the beauty of the high desert in springtime. Entire hillsides were thick with orange poppies, ablaze in the late afternoon light. When I spotted a rural mailbox flanked by bales of hay, I juddered down a pitted dirt road and stopped in front of a weathered white clapboard farmhouse with a broad wooden porch. I climbed out of the car and stretched. The air was still; then a hot puff of wind from the Mojave riffled the leaves of the cottonwoods that shaded the house.

“Quiet out here, isn’t it?”

Startled, I whirled around and saw Relovich’s ex-wife, Sandy, walking around the side of the house, clutching a can of Bud. She was a big woman, not fat, but definitely packing too many pounds to be wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless blouse. From a distance, she looked like she was in her twenties, but when she approached me, I saw the fine lines around her eyes and mouth and the crinkling at her neck from too much desert sun and realized she was about forty.

“Come on,” she said. I followed her to a wooden deck behind the house. I set my briefcase down and we sat side by side on canvas lawn chairs, looking out onto a vast furrowed field. She finished her beer in a swallow, flipped open an ice chest, grabbed two more, and handed one to me. I shook my head.

“Smart cop,” she said. “When we were still together, Pete got caught drinking on the job one afternoon and got suspended.”

“Today they’re so hard-assed they’d probably fire him,” I said.

She popped open her beer, twisted off the tab, and tossed it into the dirt. “I’m not really a drinker, despite this,” she said, raising the can. “At least not a drinker like Pete. It’s just—the past few days. Well, you know.”

She slurred her words and her eyes were glassy and bright. I figured she was mixing antidepressants with her beer. There was something brittle about her manner, and I sensed that if I started peppering her with questions she might shatter.

“What do you grow here?” I asked, motioning toward the fields.

“Onions.”

“Doesn’t smell like onions.”

“We just planted last month. Don’t start harvesting until late summer. When I married Pete and I moved to Pedro, there were still some tuna canneries out on Terminal Island. I’d smell that tuna and think of the onion fields back home.”

“You grew up here?”

She lit a Winston and waved away the smoke. “Yeah. This is my folks’ place. After I left Pete, I moved back home with our daughter.”

“You really came from different worlds.”

She took a few nervous drags and said, “I was going to college in the Valley. Pete was working patrol. He came to my apartment building to break up a party. We started dating. I moved down to Pedro with him.” She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. “I hated the place. Too foggy down there, too cold. I’m a desert girl. I missed the sun.”

She told me what a happy marriage they had, what a good father Pete had been, until his drinking worsened. “Things got so bad I had to leave him.”

“So
you
left
him
.”

“That’s right. I didn’t want my little girl growing up like that.” Recalling what the uncle had told me, I knew either she or Relovich’s uncle was a liar. My guess it was her. But I wanted to keep her talking, so I didn’t press her.

When I asked her about Relovich’s days on the force, the cases he handled, and collars who might have wanted revenge, she stared at me, eyes unfocused, and launched into a disjointed monologue, jumping from subject to unrelated subject. Finally, after finishing her beer she said, “I’m sorry Detective Levine. I’m having a hard time concentrating.” Her lips trembled and she said softly, “This has been very, very hard for me. I’m going through a lot right now.”

She dropped her head and began crying, the tears falling onto the ground, stirring up tiny puffs of dust.

Watching her cry, I thought of Bud Carducci, the salty old cop who taught me the rudiments of homicide investigation when I was a young detective trainee. Bud used to always say, “Before searching for the outlaws, take a good look at the in-laws.”

I leaned back in my chair, crossed my arms, and studied Sandy, trying to discern if her emotion was real or feigned. Was she crying because she was truly disconsolate about Pete’s death, or because she was frightened and concerned she’d reveal something to me that would spark my suspicion?

She lifted her head, coughed a few times, and dried her eyes with her palms. “Our daughter’s freaked out. I’m just trying to keep it all together.”

“How old is your girl?”

“Ten.”

“Is she at home?

“She’s in her room. But please don’t interview her. She’s not ready for that.”

“It’s really important, at this point, to talk to everyone. It would be very helpful for me to talk to your daughter.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t allow that.”

“Okay,” I said, already planning to return for a follow-up interview. I was determined to talk to the daughter. I wanted to know if she recalled her mother being home on Thursday night—about the time Relovich was killed.

“Do you have any idea why Pete retired after thirteen years?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“Did he have any enemies? Anybody you can think of who might have had a reason to kill him?”

She shook her head.

“Any old cases he was worried about?”

“He never really talked to me about his work.” She dug a balled up Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose. “I still miss Pete. I miss him so much.” She began sniffling and crying again.

I knew I wasn’t going to get much more out of her today. “Before I go, I’d like to know if you have any family pictures that were taken at Pete’s house?”

She lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply, and stood up. “About eight months ago, Pete gave our daughter, Lindsay, one of those disposable cameras for her birthday. She spent the weekend with him and took a lot of pictures at his house. I’ll get those for you,” she said over her shoulder as she walked toward the house.

A few minutes later a screen door screeched open, slapped shut, and she returned, carefully making her way down the back steps, gripping a banister for balance. I rose and she handed me an envelope stuffed with photos. “Why’d you want these?”

“I can study the pictures and compare them to what I see now in the house. Sometimes I can spot things that are missing, things that were stolen. I’ve had a few cases where I’ve done pawnshop runs and tracked down the people I was looking for.”

I slipped her my card and said, “If you think of something that might be helpful, please give me a call.”

She studied the card and said, “Your name sounds familiar.”

My stomach clenched.

“Didn’t you catch some serial killer?”

I nodded, relieved.

“I think I read about you in the paper.” She glanced at the card again. “Levine,” she muttered to herself. “That ends in a vowel. You
I
-talian?”

I shook my head.

She turned her head and studied me out of one eye. “You look
I
-talian.”

“When I was a young patrolman, Italian suspects would call me
paisano
. Once I was investigating a Greek loan shark, who dropped some of his mother’s baklava off at the station for me. He thought I was a landsman, so I’d cut him some slack.”

“Yeah, you could get lost anywhere in that part of the world.” She took a deep drag off her cigarette, exhaled, and fanned away the smoke. “Pete looked a little like you—when he was younger and thinner.” She dropped her cigarette, ground it into the dirt with her big heel and stared off at the onion fields, tears sluicing down her face. When I put my hand on her back, she began to sob, her chest heaving. She looked up at me and said, “Pete was a good guy. He just had his problems, like everyone else.” She kicked at the dirt with the toe of her boot. “Shit. I want you to find that son of a bitch.”

I nodded and said, “I will.”

I drove back to the freeway at dusk as the sun curled over the Tehachapis, the ridges lit a burnished gold in the dying light. The last
light lingered on the western horizon, streaking the sky charcoal and crimson. Overhead, the first stars glinted and the moon shone like a chunk of ice in the crystalline desert sky.

Speeding back down the San Gabriels, I pulled a small, digital, voice-activated recorder out of my briefcase, which was rigged with a microphone in the corner. All the way home I listened to the interviews of Relovich’s ex-wife and uncle.

I drove through the desolate downtown streets early the next morning, past crackheads dozing under bus benches and winos sleeping in cardboard boxes, and parked in Chinatown, which was bustling with families arriving for dim sum breakfasts. After picking up a cup of jasmine tea and a bag of
bao
—fluffy steamed buns brushed with syrup and stuffed with mushrooms and ginger—from a Chinese bakery, I headed back to César Chávez Avenue and crossed the bridge over the Los Angeles River, a thin stream of brackish water purling down the graffiti-scarred cement banks. I headed to the coroner’s office, a bland, two-story tan building off a dreary East Los Angeles street lined with fast-foot restaurants.

I parked and munched on the
bao
and sipped the tea. When I finished, I cut through the back entrance, pulled powder blue scrubs over my clothes and booties over my shoes, and then slipped on my breathing-filter mask. I walked down a hallway, which was the same color as the scrubs, past the fluorescent lights that zapped the insects drawn to the corpses, and entered the autopsy room. I grimaced as I was assaulted by the distinctive amalgam of formaldehyde, decaying flesh, and disinfectant. A dozen bodies were lined up on shiny steel gurneys, and pathologists and technicians were bent over the corpses, probing, peering, cutting, snipping, dissecting, and slicing. Metal troughs and chrome counters gleamed under the bright overhead lights. The brown tile floor was stained with blood and stippled with tissue.

“Busy weekend?” I asked Dr. Ramesh Gupta, who was examining Pete Relovich’s waxy, gray body.

“Quite hectic, Ash,” Gupta said, in a lilting, melodious East Indian accent. “Eleven homicides last night, plus three suicides. One was a jumper.” He frowned and shook his head. “From a freeway overpass. At rush hour. Very messy. Anyway, glad you’re back. God knows, the LAPD can’t afford to lose a man as perceptive as you.”

“Thanks Doc. I’m glad you’re on this one.”

Relovich was a big, beefy guy with broad shoulders and a thick neck. But on the metal gurney, naked, streaked with blood, he looked victimized and vulnerable. Relovich’s brown eyes glittered under the fluorescent lights, as lifeless as imbedded marbles.

The countless corpses I had seen rarely had looks of terror or horror on their faces, which had surprised me when I finished basic training and saw my first dead bodies. Often, they looked simply confused or disoriented. But Relovich had a curious expression: his mouth was open and his eyes were slightly narrowed as if he was about to raise an index finger and say, “I disagree.”

I bent over the body and spotted a thick scar on the side of his nose. That must have been where the bullet fragment entered his nasal cavity before landing in his mouth. I don’t think I would’ve had the balls to spit it out, carry my partner to safety, and then return fire.

When I pick up a case late—like this one—the victim is an abstraction for the first day or two. It is not until the autopsy, until I see the victim splayed on the gurney, cold and gray, the dangling toe tag, that the murder becomes palpable to me.

Now, looking down at Relovich’s corpse, I felt a great responsibility. To him. To securing justice. And I felt a great burden. I knew that if I didn’t solve this case, it would never be solved. It’s all on me. I looked around at the other bodies on the gurneys and thought of my murdered relatives. They never had a proper burial. Nobody investigated their deaths. Their killers were never brought to justice. Not one of them even has a tombstone.

Gupta snapped his fingers and said, “Wake up, Ash.” He pointed to the neat, round hole below Relovich’s lower lip. “A clean entry wound.” He then lifted Relovich up, and I spotted at the base of his head the jagged, star-shaped exit wound.

“I’ve got a complicated diagnosis for you,” Gupta said gravely. “Cause of death, mode of death, and manner of death can be summed up like this: B.B.T.S.”

“I don’t know that one,” I said, perplexed. “You better explain.”

“Brains blown to shit,” Gupta said with a high-pitched giggle. Still smiling, he grabbed a scalpel off the counter and made a large Y-shaped incision from Relovich’s shoulders to his navel. An autopsy technician,
wielding a huge pair of clippers, crunched through Relovich’s ribs and removed the sternum.

“No matter how many times I hear it, I hate that sound,” I said.

Gupta lifted the rib cage and peered inside, like a mechanic searching for a missing spark plug. Pointing to an expanse of brown, pitted tissue he said, “Very dirty lungs.”

“Well, he
did
work in Los Angeles.”

“No. He was a smoker.”

After deftly trimming out Relovich’s heart and other internal organs, weighing them, and logging the information on a clipboard, Gupta grabbed a metal ladle, dipped it into the open chest cavity, and poured a small quantity of blood into a glass vial. “See how easy that blood pours? Your victim expired quickly. No thickening or clotting at all.”

“Coroner investigator estimates time of death at about twenty-three hundred,” I said. “But I don’t trust their estimates. What’s your take?”

Gupta jabbed at the stomach contents with the scalpel. “I’d say the investigator was pretty close.” He pointed to a checkerboard of partially digested brown meat fibers and what appeared to be white potato chunks. “He probably ate dinner a few hours before he was killed. That food had just started working through his digestive system.”