Hollywood Tough (2002) (3 page)

"Hey, they're my detectives. I go whenever I'm asked. Besides, I'm only the acting head of DSG, so I try harder. I'm just holding that post till the chief appoints a captain to the job."

"Honey, Filosiani isn't going to replace you. You're acting head only because you're still a lieutenant and, technically, they can't put a lou in that slot. But I can read that guy--you got the job." He grinned. "You is da man, woman."

"Well, de man-woman gotta take her sorry ass to work."

"I'll stick around here for another hour until they do the steak fry, then drive over the hill and pick you up. You got an address?"

She handed him a slip of paper, then kissed him on the lips. "Only one more thing before I leave . . ."

"Say good-bye to Nora?"

"No, that's done. I gotta run this bitch in the pedal-pushers off my guy."

"Come on . . . she's happily married."

"Maybe, but in Hollywood, marriage is an eight-letter condition with the half-life of a chocolate-chip cookie."

Alexa moved off, stopped next to Catherine Zeta-Jones and said something to her. The two stood there for another moment before the actress threw back her head and roared with laughter.

Alexa turned and smiled at Shane, then went out the front door to the entry hall to wait for the sheriff's car. That would have been all that was noteworthy, excep
t f
or one last thing that happened just before he left the party.

He said good-bye to Nora and was heading up from the beach, when he decided to cut through the pool house to save the longer walk around the side of the estate. He went in the beach entrance and was immediately greeted by a heavy cloud of cigar smoke and male laughter coming from the front room. Shane walked down the hallway toward the sound, listening to Farrell's voice. He was telling some kind of story when Shane reached the back of the main room.

The pool house was large--about the size of Shane's entire house in Venice. It had windows on the west that overlooked the ocean. The windows on the other side fronted Farrell's Olympic-size pool. Nora had decorated the pool house in a quasi-African theme: lots of bamboo, grass rugs, and native art. There were ten or twelve men in the room with Farrell, all smoking Cuban Cohibas. Nobody was paying any attention to Shane.

"So, Farrell, you get Kenny to draw you up a prenup like I advised?" one of the guests asked.

Farrell lit the man's cigar with a large gold lighter. "Listen, that kinda shit's good for you guys who can't take care of business, but I don't need no stinking prenup." He did that last part like the Mexican bandit in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

"Everybody needs a prenup. Ask Johnny Carson or Burt Reynolds. It's the law west of Sunset," the man persisted.

"Not me." Farrell seemed a little loaded. "Didn't need one with my last two wives. When I got tired of those ladies, they both got some bad shellfish and died of food poisoning." There was some nervous laughter, not much but some. Then Farrell swung his eyes around the room until his gaze ended up on Shane.

It's hard to explain to a civilian how a cop's hunches work, because they live in some intellectual and emotional no-man's-land somewhere between a guess and a feeling. In the end, they're not really hunches at all. They're based on keen instinct mixed with physical and emotional observations. In this case, the physical part was in Farrell Champion's dark eyes when they found Shane in the back of the room. They hardened momentarily. Even from twenty feet away Shane could see it: a tightening of the skin around the sockets, a shadow on the cornea that came and went so quickly it would have been easy to miss if you weren't trained to spot it. Suddenly the look was gone and the smiling Farrell was back.

"Hey, Shane, that was just a bad joke. Don't get the handcuffs out."

"No sweat." Shane smiled. "Why pay for a divorce if you can knock 'em off with bad shrimp?"

Farrell laughed. "Exactly."

Now Shane was feeling awkward, sort of on the spot, as everyone in the room had turned to stare at him. "Thanks for the great time. Thanks for having us."

"You bet. Good you could come."

As Shane left, he could feel Farrell's eyes on him, tracking his exit across the pool deck and into the house.

The valet delivered the dusty Acura. Shane pulled out of the Colony wondering what he should do about Farrell's bad joke.

Hey, Shane, don't go over the falls in a barrel here, he lectured himself. It was just a joke. But he had seen the look in Farrell's eyes, the shadow. He'd caught a partial glimpse into Farrell Champion's soul.

It could have been embarrassment at making a morbid joke, but something told Shane that there really were two women in Farrell's past who'd died of food poisoning.

It was a terrible dilemma because if he did anything to screw up this wedding, he had a hunch his beautiful wife would kill him.

Chapter
3.

The crime scene was on Oro Vista Boulevard. Shane's badge was still in Captain Haley's safe, but he knew one of the blues guarding the chain-link gate that fronted an avocado orchard. It displayed a sign identifying it as Rancho Fuente del Sol.

He drove up the lane to a spot where the police crime-scene vehicles were parked. The makeshift dirt parking lot was within sight of Tujunga Canyon Road, which ran just north of Oro Vista in Sunland. Shane got out and locked the Acura. He walked around the front of the crime tech's van and coroner's wagon, past the three slick-backsblack-and-white detective cars without roof lights. As he glanced across Tujunga, a carload of black teenagers wearing blue headbands drove by.. The car was a BMW four-door full of gangsters who stared across the street at the avocado grove, creeping along in the right lane for a block before speeding up. The car looked to Shane like a Crip mothership--a gang leader with his bodyguards. Shane waited. A few moments later, he saw another car, a primered Ford Fairlane work car with two bangers in the front seat, both heavily federated, wearing their colors blood red. They also slowed and looked the crime scene over before speeding up and passing on. Shane watched for five more minutes as two more motherships and half a dozen work cars drove by.

These were not curious African Americans from Sun-land High. They were Crips and Bloods from South Central who had heard about Stone's death, and were out there cruising the crime scene. Shane didn't like the feel of it. Any moment, these rival sets could open up on each other. It seemed strange they hadn't done it already.

As Shane watched, a car full of Crip bangers parked across the street. One of the teenagers got out wearing a blue-hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. His muscles glistened in the overhead xenon street lighting. Even at this distance, Shane could read the angry scowl.

Shane made his way down a marked trail between a row of trees, and finally came to an opening where the lab techs were still working. It was a dirty, disorganized crime scene. Not so much because of Stone's blood, which had dried and looked black in the moonlight, but because the shooters hadn't bothered to "police" their brass, or scuff out their footprints. The forensics team was marking, bagging, and photographing the hundred or more shell casings, then logging them into evidence. The hope was that there would be a fingerprint on one of the casings. Of course, the chance of this happening was less than one percent, because the rule was that anybody who didn't pick up their brass had probably worn gloves when loading clips. The shooters were teenagers, but they were very savvy in the art of murder.

The lab would also study the casings for tool marks--the tiny scratches and indentations left by the breech as it fired and ejected the casings. Tool marks were specific to each weapon and could be used to identify the firearm if it was ever recovered. They were also pouring plaster of paris into the footprints, making molds and marking each one.

Alexa was near the body as the coroner's assistant started to roll him. Shane approached and stood silently behind her, looking down at the dead African-American gang leader as he was flopped over. His face and chest looked like meat salad, shredded and destroyed by the high-powered ordnance that had poured into him at close range.

Stone had been a big man, six-five and over three hundred pounds. He had made a large target and most of the hits were above the waist. The body's surface blood was dried and the limbs flopped lifelessly, indicating that rigor mortis had already come and gone--something that takes at least six hours. Second-generation maggots were nesting on and under the body. A maggot generation was usually around eight hours. Because of these two factors, Shane judged the murder to be between six and sixteen hours old. Despite his size, the vic had been blown right out of his expensive yellow crocs . . . crocodile shoes were a gang status symbol in the 'hood.

Near the body was a cardboard sign, the message written in large block letters. It was just being bagged by the CSIs.

"Snitches get stitches and end up in ditches," Shane read the sign softly, and Alexa, who had not heard him come up behind her, turned and saw him.

"Hi," she said.

"They weren't kidding around, were they?" he said, still looking at the mutilated body. "Put enough lead in him to open a strip mine."

"So far, over a hundred rounds counted--that's five banana clips, at least."

"If you try to shoot at the king, it's imperative you don't miss," Shane observed, then added, "You got a buncha 'hood-rats cruising by on Tujunga. I spotted a lotta work cars and a few motherships."

"Yeah, it's been like that since I got here. If this is Stone, it's a big one. It's gonna change everything in South Central."

Then one of the lab techs came up and stood beside Alexa. He was a Japanese guy named Daniel Katsumota. Shane had dealt with him a few times over the years--a good scientist.

"We're gonna pull him outta here, Lou, unless your people want to take any last pictures."

"Check with Ben and Al first, but I think we're finished.

Thanks," Alexa said, and they started to load the body onto the gurney.

"I can get out of here now," she said to Shane.

He waited while she went to talk to the two homicide dicks who had caught the squeal and were now the primaries on Stone's murder. Then Shane and Alexa walked back down the row of trees to the makeshift police parking area. Across the street was another mothership--a Lincoln Town Car with at least five guys inside.

"Doesn't look good," he said.

They got into the Acura and pulled out of the grove heading back to the 210. It would be a long ride, picking their way from freeway to freeway, all the way to Venice Beach.

"That guy sure looked like Stone. He's the right size," Shane said to break the tension in the car. Alexa seemed worried, and had fallen into a thoughtful silence.

"We can't make a final I
. D
. until we get his dental records," she said. "But his wallet was in his pocket and the CRASH unit had pictures of him from an old arrest . . . same death's-head ring, same neck jewelry, same tatts. It's Stone."

"Wonder who got him?"

"Bloods . . . had to be. But somebody close to him probably set him up. He was too careful to get ambushed. That's why he lasted so long."

"Right," Shane said, "so that means a full gang war between the Crips and the Bloods to control his drug turf."

"I've got the CRASH unit on a twenty-four, twenty-four," she said. That was twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off. It basically added a third more manpower to the street without increasing personnel, but it burned out the troops, so it was only stopgap at best. "I'm upping patrol units in the heavy Crip and Blood territories, the Sixties and One Twenty-nine South, where Stone's Front Street Crips hang. I've got the Hoover Street brands covered, but it's such a large area, it's almost hopeless."

"Yeah .. ."

More silence. Then like a beautiful setter coming out of a deep lake, Alexa pulled herself up from her funk, shook the water off, and fixed a smile on her face.

"So how was the rest of the party?"

"Good," Shane said, keeping his eyes on the road. "Were Nora and Farrell upset I left early?"

"Uh-oh, gee, I don't think so. . . ."

" 'Gee, you don't think so'?" She was looking at him now, scrutinizing, already smelling a rat.

"What I mean is, they were so busy with their Hollywood friends, it was hard to tell."

"Shane, what happened? Did you do something?"

"Did I do something? Not much, really, unless you count knocking Michael Douglas into the pool and grabbing Catherine Zeta-Jones, tying her to the pool chair with my belt, and taking my pleasure with her. Everybody seemed to think it was good fun," he joked.

"Don't dodge. What happened? Something happened."

How she could do that still mystified him. What on earth had he said that had tipped her? He hadn't even been looking at her. She'd done it off one sentence and some body language. No wonder she'd been such a great detective.

"Well, something sorta happened at the end, while I was getting out of there."

"What?" She had turned to face him now, staring at him in the driver's seat of the Acura, face lit only by passing freeway signs.