Street Rules (7 page)

Still Hunt was probably right; nobody would have seen anything.

Frank returned to Bobby, who was searching the wallet Handley gave him.

“She strapped?”

“Nope, nothing.”

“What do you think about that?”

Bobby nodded, “Kind of weird for that G to be running around without a gat. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“Yeah. Especially Placa. She favored those little deuce-fives. I could wallpaper my bathroom with her concealeds alone. Find out what time this was called in, and when the first unit showed up.”

Nook sauntered up, and asked, “Why’s the LAPD better than the AMA?”

Both Frank and Bobby stared at him, and he grinned, “We still make house calls.”

Neither of his colleagues responded, and he said, “What?”

“Do a weapons sweep. Look for a .25.”

Bobby asked, “You want to knock with us on this one?”

Frank nodded, watching Handley shove Placa’s shirt up. She knelt next to him, noting the entry wounds.

“How many you see?”

“Well… looks like five. So far,” he said, pointing. Placa had taken a round dead center in her back and another through her left shoulder blade. A third grazed the left side of her neck, and Handley exposed another a few inches above her beltline. The fifth made a tiny hole at the base of her head. Whoever smoked her had made sure she wouldn’t get up again.

“Trajectory?”

Handley gingerly examined the most lethal wounds. He boasted, “Hard to say for sure until we get her on the table, but entry appears to relatively level, maybe angling slightly left.”

Nook had recovered a fresh case from a .25, roughly 150 feet south of the body. It had been on the road and was flattened.

“Show me where the jacket was,” she said to Bobby.

He walked Frank in front of a battered pick-up parked at the crook of the curve. Frank stepped on the spot. Raising her arm, she sighted along the sidewalk at Placa’s height. The trajectory of Placa’s wounds would have been consistent with a shooter in a tall vehicle or standing where Frank was. She wondered if it was coincidence that she’d been shot with a .25. Maybe it was her gun. She tried to imagine Placa fleeing, Placa who’d rather suffer a beating death than run. Placa with her outrageous and dangerous pride.

Was she outnumbered and outgunned on foreign turf? Frank thought this was Rollin’ 60’s turf. Frank didn’t think the Kings had a quarrel with them. Maybe she’d rounded a corner and a rival happened to be coming around the other way. But she was running north. So the danger would have to have been from the south. From where the casing was, the shooter had been just at the bend, not enough time for a shooter to accidentally round the corner, recognize her, and open fire. Unless they knew she was there, as if they’d been following or chasing her.

Frank was doing her best to be objective, but events were becoming too coincidental; within one week Julio Estrella’s family was massacred. A few days later his brother winds up OD’d in the bottom of a canyon. After that, Placa mysteriously calls to tell Frank to meet with her, then ends up fatal. Another convenient drive-by statistic.

Frank needed a good witness. There had to be one. It was pretty hard to ignore a girl running down the street and shots being fired; even as jaded as south-central residents were, they would have instinctively glanced up to see which way the bullets were coming from. Was there shouting, screaming, anybody claiming? When the first shots sounded, they’d have all ducked for cover. Before that though, someone must have seen or heard something. But this was south-central; ratting in the ‘hood was often deadly and rarely done.

Adjusting the bite of the harness under her left arm, Frank drew a long breath and joined her men in their search for a witness.

A couple hours later, the best the detectives had were two people who thought maybe the car that had driven up on Placa was some sort of sedan. They couldn’t even give them a color or guess at a make. Too dark. No street lights. The usual frustrating responses. But the first witness was pretty sure she’d seen a sedan pulling away from the curb around the pickup, as if the sedan were leaving a parking space. When they asked the second witness where the car was in relation to the street, he’d said, come to think of it, the car looked to be parked.

“Right in front of that pickup,” he’d said pointing. And the car had a rounded back, not a square one. “Like a T-bird,” he’d added.

Frank stood on the dark street listening to a helicopter whock-whock overhead, it’s Night Sun cutting a path through the sky. Frank watched it fly out of her jurisdiction. Bobby stretched, cracking his back, and Nookey complained, “I didn’t even get a chance to have dinner.”

He gallantly volunteered to go back to the office and start the odious paper work. Frank knew his ulterior motives were to get a little nap and avoid doing the next of kin. She told him to go get some dinner, and then he and Bobby could round up the homies. Frank said she’d do the notification and Nook looked at her curiously.

“Why are you gonna do it?”

“My turn,” Frank said simply, not wanting to explain her long ties to Placa’s mother. She’d wanted to tell Claudia Estrella about her brother Luis’ death but Foubarelle and the Deputy Chief had claimed her time that afternoon.

Frank drove slowly north-east, finally parking in front of a house that wasn’t quite as tidy as the rest on the block. She couldn’t think how many times she’d rolled to a stop here in a black-and-white. A Spanish TV show blared through the open windows and a yellow mosquito bulb dangled from a socket over the front door. She knocked loudly, and when the door opened, the face in the crack betrayed recognition and a weary animosity.

“Hey, Claudia. I need to talk to you.”

Claudia Estrella stepped back into the disheveled living room and the lieutenant followed. Frank took in a dark-eyed girl on the plastic-covered couch, distracted between the stranger and the television. A toddler crawled on the floor with a sagging diaper, and Placa’s older sister stared at Frank from the kitchen. Drying her hands on a towel, she asked disgustedly, “What you want now?”

Frank didn’t answer, facing Claudia instead. She noted the gray roots under the black dye, the hard set of her face and deep lines.

“When was the last time you saw Carmen?” she asked, calling Placa by her proper name.

“Two, three o’clock.”

“Where’d you see her?”

“Here.”

“What was she doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was she eating, or watching TY hangin’ out? What was she doing?”

“I don’t know. I just saw her going out.”

“Where was she going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was Gloria here too?”

Claudia bit some skin around the edge of her thumb and stared at Frank with a sharp, wary expression.

“Yeah.”

“Gloria,” Frank called. “Come out here. I need to talk to you.”

They heard swearing in the kitchen and a drawer banging.

“I ain’t got nothin’ to say to you,” Claudia’s eldest daughter said from the doorway.

“When was the last time you saw your sister?”

She shrugged, just like her mother.

“Earlier, like she tol’ you.”

“Not since?”

The young woman shook her long hair. When she’d been a banger she’d worn it in a teased pile, now it just hung limply. Permanent bags under the big eyes replaced the black circles from makeup, and like her mother, her hips had spread with each child. Babies had ended their days of hanging with their girlfriends and fighting over boyfriends. They had handed their legacy down to Placa and this was were it ended, in a stuffy house smelling of old diapers and grease, with the TV on too loud and Del Taco bags covering a chipped coffee table.

“What was she doing?”

“Nothin’. She wasn’t even here most of the day. Probably being a lazy-ass and kickin’ it in the park, I don’t know.”

“Did you talk to her before she left?”

“No.”

“She didn’t say anything to you?”

Gloria shook her head.

“She talk to the kids, anybody else?”

“I don’ know,” she answered, her irritation growing. “What, you think I had some tape recorder goin’ on or somethin’?”

“Did she look like she was upset when she left? Happy? Anything?”

“Normal,”
she said in Spanish, flipping a shoulder.

Frank asked Claudia, “She get any phone calls before she left?”

Gloria aborted a glance at her mother, but not fast enough to escape Frank’s notice. Claudia’s son, Tonio, emerged sleepily from a bedroom. Skinny and gangly, only fourteen, he scratched his hairless chest and asked in Spanish what was going on.

“Estan preguntando de Carmen. No les diga nada.”

Frank wouldn’t say she was fluent in Spanish, but after years of listening to it everyday, she could understand a fair bit.

“Don’t say anything to me about what?” she asked Gloria, who stamped her foot and said, “Nothin’. Why you police comin’ aroun’ askin’ all these questions when we tell you we don’ know nothin’, eh?”

Ignoring her, Frank faced Claudia instead. She’d struck this pose so many times. It was never pleasant, but at least it was easier with a stranger. Nonetheless Frank did her job perfectly, speaking levelly and gauging Claudia’s reaction, as she said, “Somebody shot Placa.”

Claudia’s mask slipped for a second and Frank was aware of Gloria careening into the room, screaming, “That fucker! I’ll kill him! That fucking
pendejo
, I’ll kill him!”

The old adversaries stared at each other, even as the little girl on the couch and the toddler picked up their mother’s wailing, even as Gloria fell to the floor and her brother rushed to Frank demanding to know where Placa was and how she was. Both women had done this too many times. Stoically they shared the silence of bad news delivered and bad news received.

As if in confirmation, Claudia said, “She’s dead.”

Frank nodded. Seemingly without effort, Claudia rearranged her face into a quiescent tableau, a still brown desert that revealed nothing across its landscape but the inevitable play of time and gravity.

Taking a knee next to Gloria, Frank asked, “What
pendejo
are you talking about, Gloria? Who did this?”

Rocking and sobbing, she moaned her sister’s name. Frank repeated her question, with no effect. Finally she asked, “Is it the same
pendejo
that shot Julio and his family? Is that who you’re talking about?”

Gloria halted her hysteria, staring at Frank through her tears. Then she laughed, crying, “You don’t know nothin’! You fuckin’
jura
don’t know
nothin’
‘bout what’s goin’ on. Get out of here! Get out of my house! Leave my family alone!”

She resumed her moaning and Frank stood. Claudia opened the door, staring implacably at Frank. Frank hovered over her.

“She called me. She wanted to meet me tomorrow morning at Saint Michael’s. Said she had something to tell me. What was it, Claudia? What was she going to tell me?”

Claudia’s only response was to close her eyes.

Quietly, tenderly, Frank said, “Claudia. You and me, we go back a long way. And Placa, too. What do you know about all this?”

Claudia said nothing, just gnawed on her thumbnail. She looked old. Older than she should have.

“Look at me,” Frank said, so low only Claudia could hear. “Look at me.”

The woman’s dusty eyes flickered across Frank’s but she couldn’t maintain the gaze.

“What’s going on?” Frank whispered. “Tell me.”

Like a lover denied, Frank implored, “Give it up, Claudia. Talk to me.”

She waited, but she may as well have been talking to the table. Frank nodded, her hand on the doorknob.

“Okay,” she said gently. “I’m leaving now, but I’ll be back. You know something. And until I find out what that is, I’m gonna be here every day.
Claro?”

Placa’s mother stared tightly and Frank opened the door. On her way out, she paused.

“Take your time. I’m in no hurry on this. I got eight more years before I retire,
entonces,”
she shrugged, “if I have to be here everyday that’ll just be another part of the job.”

The night had cooled and felt good on Frank’s tired face. She lifted her head to search for a sign of stars or the moon, but the LA sky reflected only a dull red pall. It was as if heaven had turned its back on the City of Angels, leaving it in a fiery, Stygian gloom. It was reminiscent of the night Kennedy had dragged her to the beach and they’d lain on their backs, trying to catch sight of the elusive gems in the sky. For a moment she missed Kennedy.
No,
that’s not true she told herself,
you miss being in bed with her.
That was true. It would have been nice to find Kennedy and hold her tightly enough to forget everything for a while.

Frank pulled in a lungful of the tainted sky. She was beat. She should go home and grab some sleep, but she knew that history would overtake her the minute she stopped moving. She wasn’t ready to face all its ghosts. She would, she promised herself, just not yet.

Firing up the Honda, Frank caught the freeway, merging smoothly with the cars and trucks that flowed at all hours. She drove and listened to the talk on KFI, Tammy Bruce sparring with a homophobe. Frank tried to listen to the banter, but kept seeing Placa on the sidewalk, and Claudia’s calm, prescient acceptance of her youngest daughter’s fate. She drove faster, making the Honda shimmy, relieved to finally see the warm glow of the Alibi’s front window, iron grate and all.

Inside, Frank returned a nod from a couple Vice detectives out of Parker. It was almost closing time and she took a seat at the empty bar, surprised to see Nancy.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

The waitress slipped onto a stool next to Frank and purred, “Filling in for Dee. Now, what are you doing here?”

“Working.”

Nancy wagged her head, “It’s Saturday.”

“I’ll make sure to tell the bad guys that.”

“Have you had dinner?”

“Nope. Kitchen still open?”

“He’s closing down, but I can get you something. What do you want?”