Steven Bochco (6 page)

CHAPTER 11

The next morning, somewhere around ten o'clock, an actress friend of Ramon's comes by his house, probably thinking she's going to get laid, and instead finds more of Ramon stiff than she'd bargained for and calls the cops.

Detective Dennis Farentino catches the case. A homicide veteran, Dennis is very cool—someone you can't help being drawn to, unless you're a shitbird, in which case he's your worst nightmare. Dennis will tell you he never started a fight in his life, but by the same token he never backed down from one, either. What he won't tell you, unless you ask, is that he never lost a fight, which is pretty amazing when you figure that, by his own estimate, he's had maybe a couple of hundred.

Dennis was a superior high school athlete but a lousy student, so after graduation he went into the military, did six years, then came out and joined up again, this time with the LAPD. He was a natural cop: smart, coolheaded, brave, with an uncomplicated respect for authority. Within four years, he made detective, first with Narcotics, then Robbery Homicide.

Women, on the other hand, were a different story. Dennis never had a clue. Not that it stopped him, or them, from getting together. It was the
staying
together that caused him problems. I'm no shrink, so I won't bother to give you my twenty-five-cent analysis of why Dennis fucked up two marriages. I suspect it has to do with the fact that Dennis is threatened by the smart women and has no patience with the stupid ones, which narrows the field considerably.

I guess smart women give Dennis problems because he can't compete with them verbally in an argument. He holds his own when the argument is in his head (usually after the fact), but when it's actually happening, his anger tongue-ties him, and in the heat of battle, rather than get abusive (he never hit a woman in his life), he just shuts down emotionally. Relationship-wise, that's what they call non-productive.

Notwithstanding, because he's a handsome guy, in a quiet, understated way, and because a lot of women are attracted to the withholding type of guy, Dennis makes out like a bandit. Women always think they can get him to open up, which he certainly takes advantage of, but then when it comes to the heavy lifting real relationships require, they discover, to their dismay, that Dennis fatigues easily.

To his credit, I guess, in spite of the two busted marriages and a whole bunch of romances that went nowhere, you won't find a woman Dennis has ever spent time with (including the ex-wives) who doesn't have nice things to say about him.

Dennis has been divorced three or four years, there's no woman currently in his life in a serious way, and he probably drinks more than is good for him. He works his ass off staying fit, on the theory that if you're going to abuse yourself, you gotta be in shape for it. And he is. Dennis doesn't look like the kind of guy who's afraid to get physical.

So the way it is with Dennis these days is, he's got a small number of women friends he'll occasionally sleep with when they're between relationships, plus whatever comes his way in the natural course of things, as long as he doesn't have to work too hard for it.

Fourteen years on the job, Dennis has always kept his nose clean, at least professionally speaking. He's the kind of guy people always underestimate, which, according to him, is a good thing. He calls it his Columbo act. He wants everyone to think they're smarter than he is, because arrogance will fuck you up, every single time. (I happen to think that's true of our business, too.)

If asked, Dennis will describe himself as someone who's okay knowing he'll never be more than what he is—a cop who's seen too many stiffs and fucked too many women (I didn't know you
could
fuck too many women, but I'm not as cool as Dennis is, plus I'm married, which I take pretty seriously, most of the time at least).

Anyway, it isn't long before Ramon's house is a cordoned-off crime scene, swarming with uniformed cops, detectives, crime-scene investigators, and—as always—hovering around and above the perimeter, the media, already sensing this could be a good one. A fairly well known Latino actor found naked and bludgeoned to death in his bedroom isn't exactly your garden-variety homicide.

To the untrained eye, a crime scene is a pretty chaotic environment. But everybody present has a specific job—photographing the scene, dusting for prints, collecting evidence. You're looking for cigarette butts, chewed gum, used tissues, hair, any kind of DNA material you can compare against a suspect's, when and if you make an arrest.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Alma award is the likely murder weapon, so it's bagged and tagged, along with the used condom fished out of the toilet that didn't go all the way down when it was flushed. You don't see the good-looking babe on
CSI
doing
that,
I'll bet.

Dennis also tells his partner, a beefy older guy named Lonnie Rosen, to dump the phone for the numbers of whoever Ramon called or called him. Download his cell phone, too.

Then, out by the pool, Dennis questions the girl who found Ramon's body. She's young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, she's already got her starter set of implants, plus the requisite nose job, and she tells Dennis she's a student of Ramon's and that her name is Lisa Ratner.

Dennis wants to tell her that as long as she's changed every other damn part of herself, she may as well get rid of the
Rat
in her last name, but instead he asks, “What kind of student?”

“An
acting
student,” Lisa says, in a tone implying Dennis must be some kind of an idiot.

“I guess I should've figured, someone as pretty as you,” Dennis says. “Where does he teach?”

“At the West Side Theater Arts School, on Pico Boulevard.”

“How long have you and Ramon been romantically involved?” Dennis asks.

“We're not,” she says, offended.

It always amazes Dennis that people lie to him about stuff like that. “So then you came over to his house because . . .”

“I came over because he invited me to, so we could talk about a scene I did in class the other night.”

“Oh yeah? What was the scene?”

“It was from
After the Fall.
”

“Arthur Miller,” Dennis says. “I always liked that play. I'd've liked to see what you did with it.”

“Thank you,” Lisa says.

“Okay, so you came over and what—rang the doorbell?”

“Yes.” And now her eyes start to puddle up.

“And when there was no answer,” Dennis prompts, “you went around the side of the house and let yourself into the bedroom through the sliding glass door?”

“It was open,” Lisa says, and bursts into tears. “I'm, like, I can't believe it. It was horrible. I've never seen a dead person before.”

Dennis puts a comforting arm around her and tells her he knows how awful it must've been and that it's okay if she doesn't want to stick around. He can always find her later if he needs to ask anything else.

By now, Lonnie's discovered the fuck tapes in the armoire and sends a uniformed officer to fetch Dennis.

Inside the bedroom, Lonnie says, “Take a look at this,” and hits the
PLAY
button on the VCR. Suddenly, there's Ramon, lying on the bed, hands behind his head, cool as you like, watching his dick get sucked by a woman with big, hard breasts, her ass smiling at the camera while her head bobs up and down. “This douche bag must have over two hundred tapes of this stuff,” Lonnie says.

“Was that in the machine or did you just put it in?”

Lonnie says the machine was empty, but between Ramon being bare-ass naked and the half-flushed condom they recovered in the toilet, you've got to assume that whoever he was banging killed him and took the tape.

“Well,” says Dennis, thumbing through the drawers full of tapes, “there's a couple hundred suspects right here, plus you gotta assume a jealous husband or boyfriend's in the picture somewhere.”

Lonnie says, “It's a dirty job, partner, but we're gonna have to look at all of 'em.”

Dennis hasn't seen Lonnie this animated in a long time. Big, overweight, in his late forties, and twenty-three years into an excessive affection for gin martinis, Lonnie's the kind of guy who makes lunch dates at eleven-thirty in the morning just so he can get that first martini in him on an empty stomach. After eighteen years in Robbery Homicide, he's witnessed enough crime scenes that he sleeps every night of his life with his gun under his pillow, which thrills Mrs. Rosen no end. (“That's the only goddamn gun in this bedroom that works,” she says to Lonnie about once a month.)

Around noon, Ramon's maid, Esperanza, shows up and immediately goes hysterical when she finds out Mr. Ramon
es muerte.
Dennis calls over a uniformed cop named Suarez to act as a translator. “Ask Esperanza was she here yesterday,” and when Suarez translates the question, she bursts into fresh tears, and Dennis can't understand a word of what she's saying. Finally, Suarez tells him that Esperanza is afraid Dennis thinks she killed Ramon, and Dennis says to the cop, “Ask her was she here last night?”

More excited Spanish, then Suarez tells Dennis she was home with her family last night.

“Okay, tell her she's not a suspect. I just want to know if she has any idea who might've come over last night. Did he have a steady girlfriend? Can she give us any names of women he'd been seeing recently?”

More tears, lots of talk, lots of head shaking, and Dennis gets the drift that Esperanza is a dead-end street, information-wise, though she does confirm a portrait of Ramon pretty much in sync with the murder scene itself, telling Dennis, through Suarez, that Ramon had different women to the house all the time. She knows this because she had to change the sheets every day, for obvious reasons, and she was always cleaning up Ramon's disgusting litter, which she's too embarrassed to get specific about but which Dennis takes to mean everything from stray items of women's underwear to used condoms. Esperanza tells Suarez she never saw any of these women, since her hours are noon to five every day, and in fact hardly ever saw Ramon, either, since he was usually at work.

Off the canvass of the neighbors, Ramon is variously described as sexy, friendly, charming, and in one case an asshole—this from a guy who lives across the street, who accuses Ramon of having made a pass at his wife, telling Dennis he's not surprised someone popped him.

“Should I be looking at
you
for murder?” Dennis asks this guy, with a straight face, and the guy is immediately defensive, telling Dennis he was at the Dodger game last night—he's got the stubs to prove it.

There's a general consensus among the neighbors that women came and went at all hours, but as far as last night is concerned, no one can volunteer having seen anyone who may have been visiting Ramon between the hours of nine and eleven
P.M.
, roughly the time of death as determined by the M.E.

CHAPTER 12

Later that afternoon, Dennis goes over to the West Side Theater Arts School on Pico Boulevard, where Ramon taught, and meets the owner of the place, an old queen named Lars, who is stunned at the news of Ramon's murder. He keeps patting his heart and saying, “This can't be happening. I just do not believe this.”

But of course, his disbelief notwithstanding, Ramon
is
a murder victim, Lars
is
a drama queen, and Dennis
is
a ruggedly handsome and extremely sexy cop. So, pale blue eyes glistening with tears, Lars volunteers that Ramon was one of his
most
sought after teachers, and not just by the females. He was a favorite with men, too.

“Was Ramon bisexual?” Dennis asks.

“Oh, would that he was,” Lars says. “But that wasn't his movie. What I meant was, he had a macho thing about him that men responded to, and he knew how to communicate from his gut.”

Lars tells Dennis that Ramon's classes, Tuesday and Thursday nights from eight to ten, were always full, and there was always a list of actors wanting to get in.

“Was Ramon having an affair with any of his students in particular that you knew of?”

“Oh my dear,” Lars says, pressing his fingertips into his chest. “Ramon was not exactly what you'd call a monogamous creature. That wasn't his movie, either. Ramon played the field, and as you can tell from the size of his classes, he had a very large field to play in.”

“What about beefs? Any conflicts between his students over Ramon's affections?”

Lars tells Dennis it was no secret that Ramon was a player, but he was so open about it, so charming and seductive, that no one was under any illusion Ramon could be tamed. “And, of course, women talk, don't they, so it's no secret that, among other things, Ramon supposedly had a member
formidable.
”

Deadpan, Dennis tells Lars that he saw Ramon's dead body and even on the mush, it looked like Ramon probably went a good eight, nine inches.

“Oh my,” Lars says, patting his heart.

Dennis wonders, would Lars be kind enough to furnish a list of all Ramon's students?

“Of course,” Lars says. “Anything I can do to help. In fact, if you'd like, Detective, I can give you their head shots as well, if you promise to return them when you're done.”

Head shots are eight-by-ten-inch glossy photos actors give to producers and casting directors, with their résumés on the back, and having them will allow Dennis and Lonnie to look at Ramon's sex tapes and match names to faces (and asses, one presumes).

Dennis gratefully takes the list and photos, thanks Lars for his cooperation, and tells him if he thinks of anything at all that might be useful, don't hesitate to call. Lars accepts Dennis's card and says, with a flirtatious little smile, that he might call even if he can't think of anything useful.

In the detectives' squad room of the Hollywood Division, Dennis and Lonnie plow (you should pardon the expression) through boxes full of Ramon's Funniest Home Videos, using the list Lars provided to identify most of the women on the tapes. And it doesn't surprise Dennis in the least that one of the first tapes they look at stars—who else?—Lisa Ratner.

About thirty tapes later, Lonnie shakes his head admiringly. “Jesus, is this a great country or what? People always think cops get a lot of trim, but this guy, Christ, it's like a license to steal.”

But for Dennis, it's just depressing. The sex isn't sexy, the endless coupling seems joyless, and in the sheer volume of it, maybe Dennis is seeing something uncomfortably reminiscent of his own journeyman's sex life.

Dennis and Lonnie split up the names of all the actresses on the list Lars provided and commence interviewing them. The ones of particular interest to Dennis are the ones that
don't
match up with any of the sex tapes, on the theory that if Ramon was killed by the last woman he fucked, she probably would've taken the tape.

Lonnie likes to bust Dennis's balls by pointing out the flaw in the theory: if they were secret tapes, how would she know they existed at all?

“Fuck you,” says Dennis. “At least I
got
a theory. All you got is a jealous hard-on watching this prick get sucked and fucked by half the actresses in Hollywood.”

Anyway, off Dennis's theory, such as it is, he winds up calling Linda Paulson, wondering could they maybe get together to talk about Ramon.

Linda says she doubts she'll be of much help, but she'll be delighted to meet with him. “Would you like to interview me down at the jail,” she asks, “or would you prefer to come up to the house for a cup of coffee?”

Dennis says the house would be better, as the screams from all the suspects being beaten up by the cops “down at the jail” might be off-putting.

Linda laughs. “I like you already, Detective,” and they make an appointment for later in the day.