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The Wall at the Nickel
by
She died on the other Wall Street, the one that crosses the street they call the Nickel, you know, 5th Street, in Los Angeles, near the police station that looks like a fortress. Wall is the street with the liquor stores that sell 40-ouncers, with bars whose customers gulp Night Train like you drink bottled water, with gutters littered with what’s left of rotted lives. It’s the street where crazy is the norm, where homes are cardboard boxes, central heating is a trash can fire, and a hotel accommodation is jail. That’s the Wall Street where she died. She was filthy, the kind of filthy that gives license to lice, scabies and flies, the kind of filth that's caked into flesh by bathing in public restrooms, that's nurtured by eating food that has piss on it and by smoking discarded remains of cigarettes you find on sidewalks and in the street. The kind of filth that generates a stench so grotesque that it blisters your nostrils, and makes you heave with vomit. That kind of filthy. Every once in a while, even on Wall Street, even when the victim is entombed in unimaginable filth, you end up caring about a case. Sometimes it’s because the murder is so macabre. Sometimes it’s because you hate the suspect. Sometimes it’s because of the cash overtime you’ll get from working the case. And sometimes it’s because you end up falling in love with the victim. Somewhere in the bile of Wall Street, layered within the smoggy heat of August, buried underneath a blotched redness, soiled exterior, and unwashed essence, was a woman with no life. When Harry Draper, whom everyone called H, and I got out of our air-conditioned Crown Victoria on the Wall at the Nickel, all we saw was one more. After H and I checked in with the officer with the log – the very young and muscular Officer Greg Lucerne who was so muscular that his short-sleeved shirts looked pained – we looked around. All we saw was a dead woman, face down, on the sidewalk. We didn’t see a crime, much less a murder; there was no blood, no spent cartridges, no knives, and no slugs, except maybe the uniformed sergeant at the scene. Sergeant Ted Tolliver was a twenty-four-year veteran of the Department whose biggest concern was what the cost of living increase was going to be when he retired. He was always the last supervisor to respond to a hot shot radio call, and the first one to leave. He would frequently say that whenever he was on the streets in a black and white, police work was just about the last item on his list of things to do. I asked Sergeant Tolliver, as he was leaning against his patrol car, “How do we know she isn’t just passed out?” Sergeant Tolliver answered like a kid in school who is giving an answer that sounds more like a question, “Because she’s not breathing?” I got concerned. “Are you positive that she’s dead?” The sergeant, without evidencing any concern that someone’s daughter, mother, sister, or friend, was probably dead, replied, “I think so.” I pried further, “And why do you think so?” The sergeant, still leaning on the black and white, replied, “Because the paramedics said she was dead.” I asked, not because I needed to, but because I was supposed to, “Did you examine the body?” He shot back, still leaning, “That’s the coroner’s job, or yours.” So, no thanks to the dedicated public servant, Sergeant Tolliver, H and I knew that we had another dead one on the Wall at the Nickel. Against all logic, I asked Sergeant Tolliver if we had any witnesses. He answered like I knew he would, “Isn’t that your job to find out?” The sergeant stared at me. I stared back. I couldn’t help but enjoy the absurdity of a $65,000-a-year sergeant and a $75,000 homicide detective having a stare-out over a dead body on the Wall. But there we were. Eventually, Sergeant Tolliver directed Officer Lucerne and his partner, the one with the two stripes on his sleeves, to write field interview cards on all the drunks, transients, crazies, and anything else that had even the remotest chance of resembling human life. A few minutes later the two officers invaded the colony. It’s harder than you think to penetrate into the lives of those who occupy the Wall. You look into their glazed, lifeless eyes, you smell the waste broiled into the disheveled layers of rags tormenting their scabbed and scabbing skin, you see them mindlessly talking to or yelling at no one, and you are the one who has to interview them. While the officers were interviewing a block full of no ones, H and I scoured the area immediately surrounding the carcass. We didn’t find anything except a few ants, flies and spilled whatever. We turned over the nameless nobody and saw something odd. Torqued around this who-is-she was an expensive-looking gold necklace with a diamond studded Star of David. Down here at the Wall, the dead don’t usually have on gold and diamonds, and they never wear a Star of David. Of course, none of this would be relevant if our Jane Doe had died the usual Skid Row who cares, I need another drink, where’s my check, can you spare a few cents, don’t take my shopping cart, where am I going to sleep tonight kind of death. As if to surprise H and me, Officer Lucerne emerged from that hazy, brown malaise that always stifles Wall Street with a completed F.I. card and the need to talk right now. Young officers like him always get giddy after they have accomplished something they think is useful; it takes a few years before you understand that cops solve murders, we don’t prevent them. Never have, never will. If nothing changes, then nothing changes. And nothing ever changes on the Wall. I let Officer Lucerne talk before he detonated. “Sir, we just talked to one of those he-shes who sometimes wander off of 7th Street. She, or he, whatever it is, said that she saw the lady get out of a black BMW a couple of nights ago. She or he thinks it’s the lady we got here, but he’s not really sure.”
I probed a little,
“How come the transvestite knows it was a BMW?”
I came back with,
“What did our expert witness say the guy driving the Beamer looked like?” With some expectation I asked, “Did you get an F.I.?” As Officer Lucerne handed me the card, he boasted with pride, “Sure.” The witness’ name was Wanda Fournier; she was 27 years old, claimed to be a female, and she was black. When Wanda was a man he went by the name of Wayne. He’d been arrested as both. I wanted to exploit any clue we might have, even if it was only to prove that we didn’t have a murder. “Lucerne, tell Miss Wanda that she can whore out here all she wants and never get arrested if she can tell us who was driving that BMW.” “My partner already did. She said that she would try.” Trust me, investigating a dead transient is no bowl of cherries. You have to inventory and book everything the yahoo had when she died; the cans, newspapers, clothes, shoes, dead batteries, covers with no books, books with no covers, cardboard, door mats, mattresses, those orange traffic cones, everything. Which means you have to touch everything. Which means we go through a ton of plastic gloves. You have to make sure that you find every goddamned thing there is in every goddamned pocket on every goddamned shirt, sweater and jacket. The challenge is to not get pricked by a hype kit, cut by a coke pipe, sliced by a razor blade, or stabbed by a knife, homemade or store stolen. Inside the pocket of the dead woman’s third shirt was a word scribbled with faded and smeared lead on a tattered piece of lined paper. Just one word, jaggedly written. Mash. That was it. We didn’t find anything else in her other nine thousand pockets. Zippo. I had Photos respond to take pictures so that we could professionally analyze a scene that may or may not have involved a crime, that may or may not have been related to mash, that may or may not have been witnessed by someone who may or may not have been a woman. I figured it was useless to have Prints respond. What would they have printed? The smog? If we needed to, we could get the piece of paper examined at Parker Center. Hopefully we wouldn’t need to. When Photos finished taking pictures of the dead woman and the decayed acreage around her, we wrapped up the scene. I told Sergeant Tolliver that he didn’t have to lean on the black and white anymore, and H and I both thanked Officer Lucerne and his partner. H and I walked over to the liquor stores on the Wall, the ones that sell those 40 ouncers to those broken souls who will find their permanent escape soon enough. All of the clerks in all of the liquor stores hadn’t seen anything unusual. How unusual. When you’re a cop and you don’t have anything else to do, you go to the station. So, H and I went to the station, the one on the Wall, the one that looks like a fortress. We did F.I. runs for black BMWs that may have been stopped around 5th and Wall. Nothing. We ordered up computer runs on black BMWs that had been cited, impounded, or whose drivers had been arrested, or that had been reported in crimes. H and I made our plans for tomorrow. We were going to talk to our snitches. We’d talk to Narcotics and see if they knew our dead woman, or if they knew someone who did. And then H went home to his family, and I went wherever. Those guys in Narcotics are amazing. I mean it. They have arrested and booked just about everyone. They’re also fortunate. Even though they are detectives, they don’t have to do follow-up reports; they don’t even have to file their own cases. They just do police work. Not too long ago, Strout and McVie, two transplanted New Yorkers with attitudes booked two cocaine dealers and four customers, five ounces of rock, and six guns, including two shotguns, one a sawed-off. Scientific Investigation Division made the shotguns on that slaughter of four people on Arlington who were related to the famous football player. I’m sure you saw it on TV and read about in the newspapers. The people who were shot to death weren’t the intended targets. The suspects were supposed to kill the people on the next street over. Turns out that the two cocaine dealers were the murderers and now they are both on death row. Strout and McVie did all the work. All H and I did was take the credit. Like usual, Strout and McVie were more than helpful. The next day they told H and me that about a week ago they popped a guy for possession of coke around 5th and Main. The suspect was reasonably cooperative and had a ton of jewelry, probably stolen. The jewelry included some necklaces with the Star of David. Strout was Jewish so he asked the guy how much he was selling the Star of David necklaces. The suspect told Strout he’d give him a police discount. The suspect also said that some stupid old homeless woman bought one of the necklaces with the Star of David with a cell phone. I asked Strout if the suspect was still in custody. He replied, “You just might be in luck. You can’t bail out with a cell phone and he sure as hell isn’t eligible for an O.R. Let me check with the filing team.” Detective Strout went over to his desk, made a couple of calls, and returned with a slight smile, “He’s in custody over at Twin Towers. So is the cell phone.” H and I beat feet over to the Towers where we interviewed one Winston Herron, a quite affable dope fiend. He repeated to us what he told the Narco guys. I asked if we could keep the phone. He bellowed, “Shit yes. The motherfucking thing died right after I started using it.” The cell phone was one of those fancy kind. I have never bothered with cell phones; bad news comes fast enough without them. But H lives for his cell phone. I thought he was going to have an orgasm when he saw the phone old Winston had. H played around with the phone for awhile. He laughed when he realized that his charger would work on Winston’s phone. After the phone got charged, so did H. He told me that you can get the numbers that had been recently received and dialed. He then proceeded to write down each such phone number. We called every one of those numbers. We told whoever answered that we were the police and that we were trying to find the rightful owner of the phone Most people hung up immediately. But one man didn’t. Over the phone he sounded tired and nervous, and maybe a little scared. He told us who the phone might belong to. He asked us if he could meet us somewhere. I suggested the police station on Wall, the one that looks like a fortress. He said that he knew where it was, and that he would meet us in about an hour or so. Two and a half hours later he showed up. H frisked him, just to make sure. He said that he understood, as if I cared. He said that his name was Harry Stein, that he owned Harry Stein Clothiers out in the west end of the San Fernando Valley, and that his girlfriend was missing, again. He told us that he hadn’t seen her in about a week, maybe less. He told us that he last spoke to her about four days ago, maybe less. No, he hadn’t reported her missing, not this time. He explained, “What’s the point? You guys find her and then, when she gets into one of her moods, she wanders off.” Moods. I’ve had more than my share of them, especially the kind that makes you wish you could burrow straight into the furnace of hell since you're there already, the kind of mood that makes it impossible to be grateful for anything or anyone, the kind of mood that makes you cry at the prospect of having to get out of bed and live.
I started the
questioning, “So, Mr. Stein, tell us who we are talking about?” “Tell us about Sheila.” Mr. Stein told us about an extremely intelligent woman, a sensitive and generous woman who couldn’t boil water. He showed us a picture of Sheila. She wasn’t bad looking at all. She was just a little pudgy in a cute sort of way, and her hair was that wet, straggly, curlicue mass that is so popular these days. You could see in her image a quiet, majestic quality that inexorably, seductively bound you to her. And you could see a beautiful gold chain with a Star of David looped around her neck. And you knew. Mr. Stein told us about Sheila’s hospitalizations, doctors and medications. He stated to us that the last time he saw Sheila, she was talking about suicide, again. The last time he actually spoke to her was on her cell phone, and she wouldn’t say where she was. But H and I knew. I asked, in that way that the police are inclined to do, about that torn piece of paper with the word mash that we found in one of her eight billion pockets. Mr. Stein hesitated, as suspects are inclined to do, before he said, “When Sheila gets deep into one of her dark depressed moods, she goes around singing that theme song to the movie 'M.A.S.H.' The one about how suicide is painless? When she starts singing that song, I know it’s time to get her to the hospital.”
I kept at it, “So
why didn’t you take her to the hospital?” “Let her what?” “Let her do what she has to do.” H interjected, finally. He asked, “In that last conversation you had with Sheila, did she tell you for a fact that she was going to kill herself?” Mr. Stein answered in a hushed, defeated sort of tone, “Sheila said that she had been on a computer in the library and found a website that tells you all the different ways to kill yourself, and the chances for success with each method and each type of drug or poison. The site recommended a specific drug that is particularly difficult to detect, especially if you don’t know to look for it.” I started the questioning again, “Mr. Stein, during our investigation into Sheila’s death we were told that Sheila was seen getting out of a black, late model, BMW...” Mr. Stein interrupted, “That was me. Like I told you, I made Sheila a promise.” I quizzed him, “Meaning what?” “Meaning that I drove her to where she wanted to go, when she wanted to go there.” “You did what?” “Look, people like Sheila know only how to suffer. She had suffered enough. She deserved some peace.” Incredulous, I asked of Mr. Stein, “The woman we saw on the Wall was absolutely filthy.” Mr. Stein, sounding more defeated and more hushed, said, “When Sheila gets really suicidal, she stops taking care of herself. She doesn’t bathe or shower. She doesn’t brush her teeth. She doesn’t change her clothes. She hardly eats. She doesn’t do anything. She’s basically dead alive.” I couldn’t help myself. “Jesus fucking Christ. This is incredible. You knowingly drove her to her death.”’ Without rancor, without even any emotion, Mr. Stein answered, “No. Life drove Sheila to her death. I just gave her a ride.” H again intervened, “Mr. Stein, we can see in the photo that Sheila is wearing a necklace with a Star of David. In our conversation we talked to someone who said he traded a necklace for Sheila’s cell phone. Why would she buy a Star of David necklace if f she already owned one?” “It was her way of saying thanks.” Mr. Stein then retrieved the necklace out of his right front pants pocket. She mailed it to me without a return address. I got it yesterday. Here’s the note that went with it.” I took the note from Mr. Stein. The note said, “Thank you. Goodbye. I love you. Sheila.” We thought about booking Mr. Stein for murder, especially after we found out that he had a life insurance policy on Sheila for half a million dollars. His explanation was: “Look. Sheila was going to kill herself, one way or the other. Nothing was going to prevent that. I figured I might as well profit from her death wish.” Being a bastard isn’t a crime; so Mr. Stein walked, and then he cashed in on the insurance policy. Who the hell knows where Wanda is. H and I haven’t seen her, or him, for awhile now. In the meantime, I fell in love with Sheila. Sheila was right. Whatever she took, the coroner couldn’t find. As for the official cause of death, it’s unknown. But I know what killed Sheila on the Wall at the Nickel. |