Kind of Blue Page 6

  “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.

  CHAPTER 4

  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.”

  Gupta dissected Relovich’s neck, snipped out the larynx, and then with a few deft slashes just above the throat, removed the U-shaped hyoid bone, which was encased in pink tissue. He pointed to a jagged edge of bone and said, “The hyoid’s cracked. Your guy was probably strangled.”

  I pointed to Relovich’s hands. “No defensive wounds at all. An ex-cop like him would have been fighting to his last breath. Doesn�
��t make sense.”

  “I agree.”

  “So what’s the cause of death. Gunshot or strangulation?”

  With tweezers, Gupta lifted Relovich’s lips and studied the gums. He then examined the tissue inside the eyelids, bent over, and peered into his eyes. “No sign of petechiae at all. Which is also very curious. If someone’s been strangled, you’ll see those distinctive red specks inside the mouth or eyes.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “You, Ash Levine, are the homicide detective, not me.”

  “Hard to figure,” I said, adjusting my mask. “Maybe our killer fires the shot, ransacks the house, and right before he’s about to split—even though Relovich was dead—our shooter wants to make sure, to give him a coup de grace. But he doesn’t want to risk another shot and tip off the neighbors. So he strangles him.”

  “You should have been a doctor.”

  I laughed. “You sound like my mother.”

  Gupta dropped his scalpel on the counter. “Indian mothers are the same as your Jewish mothers. My mother was so proud when I became a doctor. But when I chose to become a pathologist, she wanted to cry. She wants me to have a nice office in Artesia, so all her friends can make appointments with me and see how important I am. Now she’s embarrassed to tell them where I work. She thinks I’m crazy.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Any other ideas why your perpetrator wished to strangle this gentleman after he was already dead?”

  I shrugged. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  I changed my clothes at home, hopped into my Saturn, drove across town, and pulled up in front of my mother’s duplex. Before I could ring the bell, my nephew, Ariel, a skinny, wide-eyed seven-year-old wearing a Sponge Bob T-shirt, opened the door and jumped into my arms.

  “Where we going today, Uncle Ash?”

  “It’s a surprise. Get your jacket and we’re off.”

  As Ariel ran back into the duplex, my mom emerged from the kitchen. “Had breakfast?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “You want an early lunch?”

  “Not hungry. Just came from an autopsy.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s part of the job.”

  “Don’t get me started on that. Anyway, Ariel hasn’t eaten anything all morning. He was too excited about seeing you.”

  She shook her head, looking somber. “He can’t go the entire day without food.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You don’t think I’ll be able to find a restaurant in the entire city of Los Angeles that’s open on Sunday?”

  She limply held out her palms. “I just don’t want him—or you—eating chozzerai all day.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mom.” I then whispered, “When’s Marty getting out of rehab?”

  “A few more weeks.”

  “Any chance that marriage can be saved?”

  She shook her head glumly. “I hope so. It’s been very hard for Ariel. So these Sundays with you are very important to him.” She handed me a booster seat and patted his cheek. “You’re a good boy.”

  Ariel slammed the front door of the duplex and ran down the pathway to the car. I opened the back door, dropped the booster seat inside, and strapped him in.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” my mother said, leaning through the back window.

  He kissed her.

  “Okay, einekl,” she said. “Don’t give your Uncle Asher any trouble.”

  As I drove down the Harbor Freeway, Ariel said. “Now can you tell me where we’re going?”

  “San Pedro. We’re taking a boat ride in the harbor. I’ve just been down there for work and thought about you. Thought you’d like seeing all those big ships.”

  “Grandma told me you’re a policeman again.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why are you a policeman?”

  “Because I want to help people.”

  “Mama said it’s because you didn’t try in school, and that’s what happens to boys who don’t try in school, because they can’t get a good job, and that’s why I should try in school, or I’ll end up like you, but I told her I want to end up like you, and I want to be a policeman when I grow up, just like you, so I can carry a gun and shoot bad people, and she got mad, and she told me I should be a lawyer like my father or a psychologist like her, and I told her I wanted to be a policeman, and she told me to be quiet and go watch Rugrats.”

  “You should listen to your mother.”

  “Why’s my father in the hospital?”

  “Well, um,” I sputtered. “I know he’s sick, but I don’t know much about it. You better ask your mother to explain.”

  When I pulled off the freeway I headed away from the harbor, up a steep hill, and stopped in front of Relovich’s house. I climbed out of the car and unbuckled the booster seat.

  “Hey, I thought we were going for a boat ride,” Ariel said.

  “In a few minutes. I wanted to check on something.”

  “Why does that house have yellow tape around it?” Ariel asked. “It looks like the ribbon around a present.”

  I put an index finger to my lips and whispered, “Shh. Follow me and be real quiet.” We walked around to the back of the house and waded through a hedge to a window that had a jagged hole in the center.

  “Who broke the window?”

  “A man lived here and he forgot his key so he had to smash the window to get into his house. But I’ve been thinking about this window the past two days and something bothers me.”

  Ariel nodded, wide-eyed and serious, flattered that I was talking to him like a grown-up.

  I pointed to the shards on the sill and then the tiny specks of glass that speckled the dirt at the base of the hedge.

  “You know that book I bought for you, where you look at a drawing and there are ten things wrong with the picture and you have to pick all of them out?”

  Ariel nodded.

  “Well there’s something wrong with this picture.” I pointed to the window. “Say the man smashed the glass, opened the window, and then crawled inside. Where would all the glass be?”

  Ariel squinted, concentrating hard, and said, “Inside the house.”

  “Right.” I crouched and pointed to the dirt. “If he crawled inside the house right after he smashed the window, why are there tiny pieces of glass here and not any inside the house?”

  Ariel tugged on my pants. “I’m bored. Can we go now and see the ships.”

  Ariel hugged the railing during the harbor cruise and marveled at the big fishing vessels at dock, their spotting towers silhouetted against a scoured blue sky; the huge white cruise ships pulling into port for the afternoon; the cargo vessels lined up under the soaring cranes that cast enormous shadows on the splintery docks. The boat steamed around Terminal Island, through oil slicks, reflecting rainbow prisms in the sunshine, past the federal prison encircled with double chain-link fences and topped with razor wire. A few of the prisoners, lined up for yard time, waved at the boat passengers.

  “Did you arrest any of them?” Ariel asked, excited about seeing his first criminals.

  “Naw,” I said. “This is a federal prison. I only send people to state prisons.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Ignoring him, I pulled a sweatshirt over his head as the wind picked up. Watching him grip the railing, smiling, enjoying the boat ride, I felt a sudden, piercing tenderness toward him. I picked Ariel up and hugged him.

  I thought of my father, living with his parents and younger brother—who was about Ariel’s age—in a small German town on the North Sea. In 1941 they were sent by cattle car to the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, then on to Treblinka. They waited patiently at the station, under the impression that they had arrived at a labor camp. The Nazis sent most of the Jews—including the children and the elderly—to one line. A few dozen of the young men, who looked like they’d be good workers, waited in the other line. My father was sent with the
young men. He watched his father, mother, and brother marched to a corner of the camp. His father panicked at leaving his oldest son and ran toward him. He was shot in the back. My father never saw his mother and brother again.

  I leaned over, kissed Ariel’s cheek, and thought of my father’s little brother. Asher. My namesake.

  “Why aren’t you married anymore?” Ariel said.

  “That’s a long story.”

  “You miss Aunt Robin?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I miss my dad.”

  “He’ll be home soon.”

  “Maybe Aunt Robin will too?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  After Robin left me, investigating murders became a much more dismal, onerous task. The interviews with grieving relatives, the autopsies, the crime scenes with walls splashed with blood and imbedded with bone and tissue, all weighed more heavily on me. Whenever I picked up a new case, I could feel a tightness in the pit of my stomach, as if the spirit of the newly departed had remained to pressure me, to insure I did not forget my duty. Robin had always been a countervailing force; spending time with her had helped alleviate the strain of the job, ease that pressure in my gut.

  After the cruise, Ariel was hungry so we ate fish ’n’ chips at the harbor, and then bought ice cream cones and walked along the docks. I helped Ariel with his spelling by having him read the names on the fishing boats—many of them the first daughters of the skippers. At dusk, as Ariel snoozed in the backseat, I drove back to the city, thinking about Relovich’s broken hyoid bone and the smashed bedroom window.

  When I returned home, I removed from my briefcase the envelopes containing Relovich’s cancelled checks and phone records, and spread them out on my dining room table. Most of the cancelled checks covered routine expenses and none of them piqued my interest. I examined his phone bills from the last few months. His cell bills didn’t list any numbers called, just the amount owed; but his home phone bills recorded all the toll calls, which I highlighted with a yellow marker. Relovich had not made many repeat toll calls, but one phone number with a 213 area code stood out because during the past two months he’d called the number more than a dozen times.