On the Grind (2009) (3 page)

I finally flopped down on the bed and Franco stuck close, lying in the hollow beside me. I'd found him starving in Carol White's apartment after she'd been murdered and had rescued him. Now it seemed, instead of going out and prowling for lady cats, he had my back, or at least my side. Then he nuzzled me and licked my hand. Cat affection. You know you're down to last straws when your only emotional support comes from a cat.

The next morning, I dressed in a suit, then collected my city
-
issued gear, took my uniforms out of the closet, folded them and stuffed everything into a bag with my Maglite, cuffs, reg book, and shoulder rovers.

I packed a second personal bag with my shaving gear and a few clothes, grabbed some job-hunting duds, a blazer and a pair of slacks, and put them in the trunk of my car. Then I took one last walk around the canal house. I'd bought this place before I ever met Alexa, but now had to find a lonely hotel someplace.

Just as I was about to leave, I heard the front door open. I went into the entry and found Chooch standing there with his backpack over his shoulder. He seemed shocked to see me.

"You . . . whatta you ... I came to pick up some laundry Mom did for me."

"Son, I need to talk to you."

"Leave me alone," he said and pushed past me.

He headed toward his room, which was a space we'd remodeled for him, turning our two-car garage into a third bedroom after his girlfriend Delfina's family died and she'd moved in with us. Now Del was living in a freshman dorm at USC and Chooch was in his second year there. He was currently playing third-string quarterback for the Trojans, but was moving up the depth chart. Needless to say, he was a big guy. Six-four and a half, two thirty. But more than being big physically, he was big emotionally. He and Alexa were the reason I'd survived my dark, dangerous period. I had invested a lot of myself in Chooch, but more than that, he had invested in me. Now I could tell that, because of what had just happened, and because of what Alexa had obviously told him, everything had changed.

"Chooch, I need to talk to you about this," I persisted.

"I talked to Mom. I know what happened," he said. He was pulling folded laundry out of a basket, shoving it angrily into a canvas bag.

"You don't know my side of it," I said. Of course, when you got right down to it, I really didn't have a side.

"Okay." He turned to face me. "Is it wrong what they're saying? Did you take money and have . . . and do things with . . ." He stopped, his face contorted in pain.

"Son, there's more to it. You'll understand it all one day."

"Just tell me you didn't do any of that," he challenged.

"I can't, Son. I wish I could, but I can't."

"Then get out of here, Dad. Leave me alone. Everything you ever told me, all that advice on how to live my life and be a man, was bullshit. It was all a lie. I don't ever want to see you again." He slammed the bedroom door in my face.

I stood there for several moments, unsure what to do. I wanted to go in and tell him he was wrong, but I couldn't. There was nothing I could say. Finally, I just walked out and got into my Acura MDX. I took a long moment to collect my thoughts. Then I heaved a deep sigh to try to settle myself down. I put the car in gear and pulled out. I was so upset I could barely breathe as I drove on still-damp streets under a cloudless blue sky heading back downtown toward Parker Center.

The meeting in the chiefs office and the deal I'd made was supposed to be a closely guarded secret. The idea was that my resignation over a misdemeanor was a situation that wouldn't provide any recriminations or public scandal. But I wasn't three steps out of my car in the Glass House garage before an old friend of mine from Robbery-Homicide walked past me without even saying hello. His vibe was toxic. He knew.

More of the same followed as I entered the elevator and took the short ride up to five. Eyes were averted. My hellos went unanswered. This is not the way you treat a colleague who made a mistake and lost some evidence.

The secret we had all sworn to in the chiefs office was out. Everybody in the building knew I'd been accused of sleeping with Tiffany Roberts and had taken money to boot her solicitation-of
-
murder case. The entire ugly mess had leaked in less than ten hours. Who was it that said if three people are trying to keep a secret, two of them had better be dead?

When I walked through Homicide Special I was greeted by an awkward silence. Even people on phone calls hung up and looked angrily over at me. I found my way to the cubicle that Sally and I shared. She was sitting there looking like my crime had somehow also been hers. Eyes down, humiliated, frosted reddish blond hair catching and reflecting the fluorescent overhead lights. When she turned her freckled face up to me, her normally sunny expression was gone. She looked different. Hard to explain. Her demeanor was so altered I was seeing her as a different person.

"Hi," I said.

"Right," she responded. "I've been through your murder books Cal left for me. I think I got most everything I need."

I put the bag full of my city police possessions on my chair. "You want to go over any of the cold cases?" I asked.

"Not this morning. If I need anything, Fve got your cell number."

"Listen, Sally--"

"Don't, Shane, okay? I don't want to hear it." She was talking loudly enough that Jim Diamond and Don Stonehouse in the next cubicle were able to hear it all. She was talking loud on purpose. She needed everybody to know she wasn't part of my corruption. She had her own career to worry about.

"See ya," she said. "You can leave your stuff there. Til give it to the captain. He's at the chiefs weekly COMSTAT meeting." "Right."

I got up and walked out of the cubicle.

I wanted to keep moving forward, wanted to get my job apps started, so I left Parker Center and took the 110 Freeway to the Pasadena Police Department, which was twenty minutes east from the interchange downtown and was located behind a beautiful domed turn-of-the-century city hall.

The PD administration building was in an old-style structure with magnificent two-story glassed-in stone arches. I found the personnel office and sat across from a uniformed sergeant. When I told her I was recently off the LAPD for personal reasons and was looking for a job in Pasadena, she quickly entered a secure password, logged in to POLITE and found me on the site.

I don't know exactly what was written there, but her face hardened. Suddenly we were just going through the motions --fill this out, sign that. I left twenty minutes later with no hope of ever being employed there.

Long Beach was the same deal. So was Santa Monica. Except in that quaint beach city the personnel officer was an old sergeant with six three-year stripes on his uniform sleeve. We were about the same vintage and I saw a flash of sympathy pass through his gray eyes. He told me Santa Monica PD wasn't looking for anybody with my qualifications right now, which of course was B
. S
. But then he took an ounce of pity on me.

"Why don't you try Haven Park?" he suggested. "They'll hire guys with bad POLITE write-ups."

"I was thinking about that," I answered. "But isn't their starting scale like really low? Less than fifty-five thousand a year?"

"You want to stay in law enforcement, that's your best bet." Then he leaned forward. "Listen, Scully, you got some serious shit on you." He pointed at the computer screen in front of him. "You're wasting your time here or on any other legitimate department. Haven Park's your only shot."

I thanked him and left.

No luck in the Valley or at the sheriff's department, but I put in my application everywhere just the same. I had twenty years of service on the LAPD and two Medal of Valor citations, but because of what was posted on POLITE, nobody was going to give me a second look. Regardless, I had to apply everywhere else first. Had to go through the steps.

Tomorrow, I would go to what had been called by the press "the most corrupt police department in California."

Tomorrow, I'd give the dreaded Haven Park PD a try.

Chapter
5

I spent the night at a downtown hotel. The Biltmore on Grand. I can't even remember what the room looked like, I was that upset.

The next morning, I dressed in my charcoal-gra
y
suit, a fresh shirt and tie. I got my Acura out of the parking garage beneath the hotel and loaded all my stuff from home in the trunk and began the short four-mile trip into downtown L
. A
. where the tiny, one
-
square-mile, incorporated city of Haven Park was located.

I took the freeway past the City of Commerce with its rail yards and warehouses. On the other side of the freeway were the small, incorporated cities of Maywood and Cudahy. I left them behind, finally getting off on Ortho Street. How fitting, I thought, to be traveling into a criminal cesspool on a street named after a fertilizer. I turned left and, after driving about a mile, took another left on Lincoln Avenue and I was in Haven Park. Only it looked more like a small town in Mexico, or at the very least, a Texas border town. Td read somewhere that the population of Haven Park Wa
s u l
argely made up of illegal aliens. Thirty thousand Hispanics living in a one-square-mile stucco town.

As I drove down the main drag, I saw nothing but urban sprawl, most of it run-down businesses that had been painted in bright south-of-the-border colors--yellows, greens and oranges. Most of the building signs were in Spanish. I passed the Mendoza Clinica Del Dentista, a yellow one-story building with heavily barred windows. Most people run from a dentist's office, but Dr. Mendoza was worried about people trying to break into his. A huge King Taco on one corner advertised TENEMOS TACOS DE POLLO, and under that was a sign for Mexican ribs.

I passed a string of run-down strip malls and then saw the alabaster-white, wood-sided city hall building coming up on my right. It dominated most of a city block. It had a wooden cupola on each corner and a big weather vane on the roof making it look like a Mafia wedding cake. The city hall and the Haven Park PD shared opposite ends of the large structure.

There was a small glass door right in the center that did not appear to be the main entrance for either the city hall or the police station. There was an open meter right in front, so I parked, got out, fed the slot a quarter, and walked down to the police station. Then I took a short detour around the Haven Park PD side of the building past the fenced and landscaped parking lot. I looked in at the police vehicles parked behind the chain link. It was better rolling stock than we had on the LAPD. There were two or three new Ford Crown Victoria squad ears that were not currently out on patrol. Two new SWAT vans, as well as some EMT trucks, black-and-white station wagons and surveillance vans were parked in random slots. A large black-and-white Vogue motor home that appeared to be a tricked-out mobile command center with two satellite dishes on the roof loomed above the rest. All of it looked less than a year old.

I headed back to the police department's front door, which had HAVEN PARK P
. D
. stenciled in gold letters above the city seal. Under that it said RICHARD ROSS -- CHIEF OF POLICE.

I knew all about Ricky Ross. In fact, I had a tortured history with him that went back ten years to my patrol days on the LAPD when I had partnered with Ross for six months while working in Van Nuys. I was the one who'd gotten him thrown off the LAPD. Back then I was just a few months sober, but Rick Ross was still the chief engineer on the Red-Nose Express. He liked to get liquored up, and on his way home in plainclothes would sometimes pull his sidearm and wave it at people who cut him off on the freeway. This practice earned him the nickname 'Treeway" Ricky Ross.

One night, when I was catching a ride with him, I actually witnessed this behavior and, in an over-the-top moment, saw him accidentally discharge his weapon, barely missing a banker from West Covina. I'd immediately turned Ricky in to Internal Affairs and testified against him at his Board of Rights hearing. He'd claimed he was just removing his backup gun from his covert carry holster and it had accidentally discharged. He caught a huge break and went on suspension for six months, but that only made him worse.

He was drunk all the time after that. His wife finally divorced him. He lost his house and a month later he'd lost his LAPD badge for good. Rick Ross blamed me for all of it. It would seem that this man could be a tough mountain for me to climb if I wanted a job in Haven Park. But I had a way around him.

As I pushed open the door to the police headquarters, I ran smack into a big police sergeant in uniform, another cop that I'd known back on the job in L
. A
. He was a large, muscle-bound guy with a steroid abusers body named Alonzo Bell. Alonzo was half white, half some other, dark race that he would never exactly identify--Arab or Persian, maybe even Hispanic. Bell is an Anglo name, so he'd probably changed or shortened it, or the complexion came from his mother's side.

Alonzo had been thrown off the LAPD years ago for losing it in an I-room and almost beating to death a gangbanger who'd shot and wounded his partner. The partner survived, but Alonzo s L
. A
. police career didn't. I remembered him as a giant attitude problem you didn't want to mess with.