You Can Die Trying (7 page)

“I don’t even know Harriet Washington,” Gunner said evenly, trying to cool Kupchak off before he finally said something the black man could not take lying down.

“Then tell me who you’re working for.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Damn right you can’t.”

“Look. Believe what you want to believe. I’ve told you what I’ve been hired to do, and why I was hired to do it. You want to assume because I’m a soul brother, I must be lying to you, that’s your privilege. And your hang-up.”

He let Kupchak feel the weight of his gaze and refused to turn away.

“What makes you think I can help you?” Kupchak asked.

“You were McGovern’s watch sergeant. You probably knew him as well, if not better, than anyone else. Who better to talk to about what happened to him?”

Kupchak didn’t say anything. He was running Gunner’s logic through the churning machinery of his own, and it was a tedious process. Finally, having reached what was obviously a difficult decision for him, he took a seat at Gunner’s table, moving like a man taking the long walk down death row, and said, “Assuming this client of yours really exists. How do you know he’s not just jerking you around?”

“Jerking me around?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Jerking you around. How do you know he really saw what he says he saw?”

Gunner shrugged. “Intuition.”

Kupchak snickered. “Shit. Intuition. Tell me what the guy said. About how Maggie shot the kid.”

Gunner recounted the story of Lendell Washington’s shooting as Mitchell Flowers had described it, playing the same games of evasion regarding his client’s gender he had played with Matt Poole two days before. He outlined the methods of coercion someone had used on Flowers to keep him quiet, and then explained how Flowers’s capitulation to them made him feel responsible for McGovern’s dismissal from the LAPD, if not his ensuing suicide. The Uncle Tom angle never came up. Somehow, Gunner was sure Kupchak wouldn’t be particularly sympathetic to it.

“So your client’s on some guilt trip. That what you’re trying to tell me?”

“That’s what it amounts to, I guess. Yeah.” Kupchak was giving him an odd look. “You can’t buy that?”

“If it was anybody else but Maggie? Maybe. I don’t know. But Maggie …” He ended the sentence with a shrug of his own. “Let’s just say he was a hard man to feel sorry for. For some people in this community, anyway.”

“You mean black people.”

“I didn’t say that. You did.”

“Come on, Kupchak. Let’s not pretend we don’t both know what kind of nightstick-happy nigger-hater McGovern was, all right?”

“Look. Maggie was no racist,” Kupchak said flatly, his face turning crimson again. “He was just …
intolerant
of a lot of things. That’s all. Drug use. Welfare dependence. Child abandonment. You know.”

Gunner just looked at him.

“Next question,” Kupchak said.

Gunner wasn’t really ready to change the subject, but he knew it was the only prudent thing to do. If he pressed the issue of McGovern’s bigotry and lost his cool with Kupchak now, considering their surroundings, he could easily find himself having the spit-shined shoes of a dozen peace officers surgically removed from his tailbone tomorrow.

“You ever talk to McGovern about the Washington kid’s shooting? One on one?”

“You mean off the record?”

“On or off—whatever.”

“Of course I did. Many times.”

“And?”

“And his story was always the same, if that’s what you’re getting at. The kid fired on him first.”

“Humor me with the details, will you, Sergeant? ‘Once upon a time …’”

“He was on morning watch, as usual, breaking in a new partner. A female officer named Lugo, Deanna Lugo,” Kupchak said, annoyed at being cattle-prodded along. “Around two, two-thirty, they got a call over the radio that a couple of kids were holding up a liquor store over on Vernon and Third Avenue. Washington and some cousin of his. Something or another Ford; I don’t remember the kid’s first name. Anyway, Maggie and Lugo, they were just a few blocks away, so they were on the scene in minutes, but the kids took off on ’em soon as they saw the car, so they had to run ’em down. Maggie, he went after Washington, and Lugo, she went after Ford.”

“They split up?”

“You mean Maggie and Lugo? Yeah, they split up. I just told you—”

“No, no, no. I’m talking about the kids.”

“The kids? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they split up. Maggie said this kid Ford just left Washington standing there. Didn’t call out for him or nothin’, just took off without him. He was a real sweetheart, apparently. The guy behind the counter of the liquor store said it was him who’d run the whole show. He was the one holding the piece and giving all the orders. All Washington did that night was collect the money and wet his pants, the guy said; he was scared shitless from the time he and his cousin came in the store ’til the time they left.”

“Was he holding?”

“Who? Washington?”

“Yeah.”

Kupchak shrugged. “Not so the guy could tell. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. He was scared shitless, like I was saying. He’d had a piece on him, he probably would’ve been too spooked to show it.”

Gunner nodded to concede the point.

“Anyway, where was I?”

“Washington and Ford split up.”

“Oh, yeah. The way Maggie figured it, Ford must’ve seen him and Lugo coming and decided he’d carried Washington long enough, so he took off without him. He probably hoped Maggie and Lugo would prefer chasing one kid to two, and would go after Washington alone.”

“Only they didn’t.”

“No. They split up, too. Maggie went after Washington, and Lugo went after Ford. Maggie chased Washington for about six blocks, east, ’til he went into the alley where the shooting took place, between Forty-second Place and Forty-second Street, at Van Ness. Maggie said the kid just disappeared, the fucking alley was so dark, so he didn’t go in after him. He just stopped where he was and called for the kid to come out, and that’s when the little bastard opened up on him. Two rounds, Maggie said, one right after the other. He said he could hear the second slug go by, it came so close to his head.”

“And that’s when he returned fire.”

“Yeah. You don’t think he was entitled?”

“How many rounds did he fire?”

“Three. That’s what he told the IAD guys, and that’s what he told me.”

“What about Officer Lugo? She count it as three rounds, too?”

Kupchak started to speak, stopped, then said, “Officer Lugo said she couldn’t say how many rounds Maggie fired. She and Ford didn’t arrive at the scene until after the exchange of gunfire was over, she said.”

It seemed to pain him to have to relay this information. One side of his face had appeared to grow harder than the other as he spoke.

“But the kid was only hit once,” he went on. “That’s all. He took one round high on the right shoulder, up near the collarbone. The doctors said he should’ve made it, that he
would’ve
made it, he hadn’t been a bleeder. Maggie got a lousy break there.”

Gunner started to point out that the break Washington got was even worse, but instead just asked, “What about the gun?”

“The gun?”

“Yeah. The gun. The one the counter guy at the liquor store didn’t see, but that McGovern said he found on the body. He find it just like he said, or was it a plant?”

Kupchak tried to smile, but he was too insulted by the question to put much behind it. “You really expect me to answer a stupid question like that?”

“Look at it this way. I think you just did.”

Kupchak fell silent.

Gunner tried to wait for the cop’s recalcitrance to play itself out, but it soon became obvious that he was waiting in vain. Struggling to keep his growing impatience out of his voice, he said, “Look, Sergeant. This isn’t ‘Sixty Minutes,’ and I’m not Ed Bradley. I’m not asking you these questions because I’m out to bury anybody, I’m asking them because I need to know the answers to them. McGovern’s ass was going to be in a sling if he couldn’t find a weapon on Washington, and he knew it. You think I need you to tell me he might have placed a drop gun on the kid in a spot like that?”

Kupchak ignored the question.

Gunner gave him a few seconds more to speak, then said, “Okay. You win. You can’t help me, and I can’t help you. Sorry I wasted your lunch hour.”

Without another word, the black man started eating again, acting as if Kupchak had stood up to leave and was no longer sharing his table.

Kupchak watched him eat for a long, silent moment, too bewildered and humiliated by his sudden dismissal to say anything. Gunner wouldn’t even raise his eyes to look at him.

“So I don’t know if the fucking gun was a plant or not, all right? Maggie never told me, one way or the other. Way it looked, I guess it could’ve been a drop gun, sure. But so what if it was? What does that prove?”

Gunner wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and regarded him again. “Prove? I don’t think it ‘proves’ anything. But it certainly seems to
imply
a number of things. Doesn’t it?”

“Like maybe the kid wasn’t armed, after all.”

Gunner nodded.

“How the fuck did I know you were gonna say that?” Kupchak asked, grinning sardonically again. “You see what the poor bastard was up against? Who the hell was gonna believe there was a weapon, if he couldn’t
produce
one?”

“I’ve got a better question for you. Why would he have found it necessary to ‘produce’ a weapon if Washington was already holding one?”

“Because he couldn’t find the goddamn thing. What do you think?”

“He couldn’t find it?”

“No. He couldn’t find it. Maggie figured the kid must’ve tossed it before he got to him. You know, so he’d appear to be clean.”

“Tossed it where?”

“I don’t know. Over a fence, up on the roof of one of the garages … Who knows?”

“The gun was lying around somewhere, Kupchak, somebody would have come across it, don’t you think?”

“Look, Gunner, how many times do I have to tell you? The goddamn alley was dark! Maggie and Lugo could’ve missed an elephant in there that night!”

“Maggie and Lugo, maybe,” Gunner said. “But not the bloodhounds from Internal Affairs. The way I hear it, those guys search the area surrounding an officer-involved shooting like their lives depend upon it.”

“They search as hard as they wanna search,” Kupchak said, with evident contempt for the subject.

Gunner paused. “And the two slugs from Washington’s gun? Or the powder burns on his hand? Would they have missed those, too?”

“It wouldn’t have been the first time.”

He’d said this last with the same note of casual loathing in his voice, and this time Gunner decided to call him on it. “I get the feeling you don’t think they did a quality job on McGovern’s case,” he said.

Kupchak inventoried the faces around them before answering. “I think they did exactly what they set out to do,” he said.

“You want to spell that out?”

“No. I don’t. I think you know what I’m saying.”

“I know what it sounds like you’re saying. It sounds like you’re saying they fucked him over.”

“Does it?”

“But you’re not saying how.”

“You’re a detective. You figure it out. The goddamn gun never turned up, and neither did anything else that might have done Maggie’s case any good. That doesn’t sound like a rear-ender to you?”

“It might. If I thought the people you’re talking about had something against him.”

“Oh, they had something against him, all right. The same thing they have against a lot of good cops: he wasn’t their cup of tea. He was too much his own man, too independent a thinker.” He shook his head. “But that’s not what cost him his badge.”

Gunner gave him all the time he needed to elaborate.

“The assholes in IAD, they may be bloodsuckers, but they don’t generally make a celebrity out of a guy when they take him down unless somebody tells ’em to. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Somebody was pulling their strings on this one.”

Kupchak nodded his head.

“You know who that somebody might have been?”

Kupchak shrugged. “I’ve got a few ideas. But none I’d care to discuss here. Why don’t we just say it was somebody with an office downtown, and leave it at that?”

It wasn’t an idle suggestion; it was a directive.

Acquiescing, Gunner said, “Okay. You don’t want to talk about the who, let’s talk about the why.”

“The why’s a gimme, Gunner. They went after Maggie because of the Dexter Hardy thing.”

“Dexter Hardy?”

“That’s right. Dexter Hardy.”

“What did McGovern have to do with Dexter Hardy?”

“Nothing. That’s what’s so nuts about it. He was nowhere near the scene that night.”

“Then how—”

“How could he get blamed for what happened? I’ll tell you how. By training three of the four officers who
were
there that night. That’s how. Tripp, Benzinger, and Ammolino, they all rode with Maggie when they first came up.”

Gunner shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said.

“Maggie was their probationary officer, Gunner,” Kupchak said. “He was the one who taught ’em to be cops. Get it?”

Now Gunner understood. Dexter Hardy was a thirty-eight-year-old garage mechanic and part-time armed robber who had had fame beaten into him by a small army of LAPD officers during a routine traffic stop in Carson eighteen months earlier. Because a neighbor with a camcorder had taped the entire incident, Hardy was today a maimed celebrity rather than a corpse, the star of a horrific home video depicting four Caucasian policemen—among them, three officers named James Tripp, Alan Benzinger, and Joseph Ammolino—clubbing an unarmed black civilian in the street like children attacking a piñata, as six other officers stood around and watched. The riots that had decimated South-Central Los Angeles and titillated the nation six months later had started within minutes of the four principal officers involved in Hardy’s beating being acquitted of assault charges in a Simi Valley courtroom.

All in all, it made for the most humiliating and damaging public relations fiasco in the LAPD’s 210-year history.

“Maggie was fifteen miles away when the Hardy arrest was made, but he may as well have been right in the thick of it, for all the shit they laid on him,” Kupchak said. “Some people said Tripp, Ammolino, and Benzinger were just the tip of the iceberg, that Maggie had been building cops like them for years, and was still doing it.”