Unpaid Dues (10 page)

St. John wanted a cigarette. Badly He knew Munch was
being evasive if not outright deceptive, and he hated that he knew
that. Too many years on the job had given him a suspicious nature. He
wished he could turn it off sometimes. He couldn't. His innocence was
just another thing in a long line of casualties his profession
caused.

He returned to the police station with a heavy heart
and pulled old Field Identification cards. Munch had described Thor's
skin art in good detail. It was the usual sidewalk commando, bad-ass
biker, wannabe shit—a dagger dripping with drops of red blood,
crossed pistons, a flaming skull with Viking horns. He took a box of
Polaroids and settled downstairs in one of the old holding cells that
had been converted to a storage room. In addition to the station's
collection of memorable skin art, he had amassed his own private
album over the years. His favorite was one some gang-banger brain
surgeon had done on his belly It was a life-size replica of a pistol.
When the guy was wearing pants and an open shirt, it looked like he
had a weapon stuck in his waistband. Real brilliant. St. John also
had a picture of "Flower George" Mancini's foot, taken at
the time of his death. There was a dotted line leading to the man's
big toe and the instruction: HANG IT HERE, MOTHERFUCKER. Very nice.

St. John spent an hour sorting through stacks of
long-haired, sneering assholes that all started to look alike. He
found numerous misspellings—Devil's Disiples, Don't Tred ON Me—but
no Viking horns. Fuck this, he thought, rubbing his burning eyes. He
went back upstairs, grabbed his book of assorted business cards, his
telephone, and started dialing.

Whenever he met cops from another city; he collected
their business cards. He sorted them according to geography and kept
them in leather-bound organizers with plastic insert pages. The most
worn book in his collection covered the Westside. Santa Monica,
Beverly Hills, and Culver City were all incorporated cities that had
their own police stations. Venice Beach and the worst parts of Culver
City were in the Pacific station's jurisdiction. St. John had worked
the Pacific station beat for more years than he cared to count.

Rico Chacón was a detective there now, but St. John
didn't want to call him.

He had heard some disturbing rumors about Chacón and
his loyalties, rumors he thought he'd rather ignore. St. John treaded
carefully not sure if he wanted to find shit on the guy or not. Every
cop he knew, including himself, was a little dirty, had nightmares
about being in jail, caught for some minor indiscretion—a cut
corner—and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Chacón was in the fight game, a business notorious
for its criminal underpinnings. A little of that shit was bound to
rub off from time to time. Best to leave it alone unless the rumors
got heavier.

And then there was Chacón's thing with Munch. St.
John had introduced them and his wife, Caroline, kept him updated on
the status of their interrupted courtship. St. John didn't like it at
all. His wife reminded him that he wasn't the guy's conscience or his
rival. Besides, Chacón had only been in L.A. for a few months, so he
wouldn't have some asshole from the seventies filed in his memory
bank.

He called Sergeant Flutie over at Pacific and asked
to speak to someone from a street team, or one of the C.R.A.S.H
anti-gang units, someone on the job for at least ten years.

"
You should talk to Nunn," Flutie said.

"I thought he was retiring."

"
This coming Friday but he's working like he
still means it. You coming now?"

"I'll be there in fifteen."

Detective Bob Nunn was a good choice, thirty long,
hard years on the force, twenty-one of those years in Venice Beach.
His memory for names and dates was legendary. The job was going to
lose one dedicated detective.

St. John parked his Buick in the lot on Culver
Boulevard. He signed in at the front desk and was buzzed through to
the detectives' bullpen.

"
You coming to the party on Saturday?" Nunn
asked.

"I'm bringing the toe tags."

Nunn smiled good-naturedly "What you need?"

"I'm looking for a guy" St. John gave Nunn
everything he had on Thor. "First cop that can bring me a last
name and hopefully an address, I'1l buy a steak dinner."

"Sizzler?"

"
Pacific Dining Car."

"
You must want this guy bad. Let me think a
minute." Nunn lit a cigarette and sucked it like he was
drowning. St. John stood where he could get the full benefit of the
secondhand smoke. It smelled wonderful.

A poster of the Rocky Mountains on the wall showed a
beautiful twelve-point buck in silhouette before snow-capped peaks.
He'd heard Nunn was moving to Colorado when his thirty was up. After
a lifetime of busting murderers and other bad guys, he was going to
spend his declining days shooting Bambis. Go figure.

"
I had an aggravated assault case that sounds
like your guy The victim was a woman named Christine Hill." Nunn
tapped out his cigarette and lit a fresh one.

"I've never seen a face rearranged like that on
a living victim. Her assailant was a creep named Cyrill McCarthy aka
Thor."

St. John's pulse quickened. Was it really going to be
this easy?

Ntmn stood and opened the top drawer of a ponderous
gun-metal-gray filing cabinet. The sides bore dents at kicking level.
He pulled out a file folder. "The date of the offense was March
3, 1981." Four years ago. "I've got a case number for you
too."

St. John wrote as Nunn dictated.

"The case fell apart at trial. Christine Hill
bugged out. Wouldn't testify. It's all in the DA's packet. Let me
know if you get anything else on this guy McCarthy all but skated and
it still fucks with me, you know?"

St. John nodded. Nunn didn't need to be reminded that
he had an appointment with a deer and a thirty-ought-six.

"
Go see the DA. He's got the file."

"You know where McCarthy is now?"

"
He was in Chino for the holidays, but you'll
have to check with them."

"
Bobby I owe you."

"
Yeah, I won't forget. Pacific Dining Car."

St. John left the Pacific station and drove over to
the West L.A. courthouse. An Assistant District Attorney named Josh
Greenberg took him to find the court documents relating to the case
number Nunn had given him. They were in a cardboard legal file box in
storage. The file on McCarthy was an inch thick and covered with
dust. Someone had made an annotation on the cover: a dot inside a
circle with a small "3" in the upper right. DA code for
Asshole to the Third Power. St. John sat on a bench in the hallway to
read the various court transcripts, affidavits, and investigators'
reports.

After Christine Hill bugged out, the only witness
willing to testify against Cyrill McCarthy was a woman named Stacy
Lansford. She was painted by the public defender as one of McCarthy's
disgruntled exes. This was a vast understatement according to the
investigator's note. Stacy Lansford was discredited by the public
defender when it was revealed that all her knowledge about the crime
in question was second- and third-hand, thereby ruled as hearsay.

Another blow to the prosecution's case came from the
judge, the honorable David Helmer. Judge Helmer noticed a mistake in
the prosecutor 's court filing—the date of one of McCarthy's prior
offenses showed the wrong year. Judge Helmer, for whatever reasons of
his own (cops and prosecutors had a theory about the dye in the
robes), refused to let the DA amend the date. The result was a deal
where McCarthy was allowed to plead guilty and the judge ignored his
earlier convictions. McCarthy was sentenced to only three years and
was out in less than two.

After the sentencing phase, Stacy Lansford had
written a letter to the court. It was in the DA's file and addressed
to the judge.

"
Your Honor, sin please do not take what I have
to say as a lack of respect, but you have made a terrible mistake. I
met Cyrill McCarthy when I was in high school; he was older than me
and seemed very experienced in the world. I was unhappy at home, so I
jumped at the chance to escape. We married when I was sixteen. I
didn't realize until he had taken me away from my family and friends
what a terrible mistake I had made."

She then went on to recount two years of terror
during which McCarthy had made her play Russian roulette, beaten her
so severely that she had to have her spleen removed, and had even
gone so far as to kidnap her once from her parents' home when she
tried to seek refuge.

St. John checked the dates. McCarthy's relationship
with Stacy Lansford had happened after Munch severed contact with the
guy. He kept reading.

"When I first met Mr. McCarthy he told me his
previous girlfriend had set the upholstery in his car on fire. Later
the story changed. He told me he burned the seats himself because the
fabric had soaked up too much blood. I thought he was just trying to
scare me at first, but after I got to know him better, I believed he
was capable of anything."

St. John flipped back to the beginning of the file.

The case that was ruled to be ignored was from eleven
years ago, initiated after a confidential informant reported that the
Satan's Pride was stockpiling grenades at a house in Inglewood.
Warrants were served. The police raided the premises at three-thirty
in the morning. There had been two occupants in the house, Cyrill
McCarthy and a severely battered woman. The woman was nude,
handcuffed to a portable potty chair, and, as tox reports would later
prove, under the influence of the barbiturate Seconal. The skin
across the cheekbone of the woman's left eye was broken open, and
blood matching her type was discovered on the toe of Cyrill
McCarthy's steeltoed boot.

The police searched the premises. They found several
knives circa World War II, Nazi paraphernalia, small amounts of
narcotics, including the amphetamines known on the street as
"bennies," a half-ounce of marijuana, and three red
capsules later identified as Seconal. No grenades were found.

The officers serving the warrant had taken both
McCarthy and the woman into custody. The woman refused to answer the
0fficers' questions and didn't want to press charges. When the
detectives discovered that she was only seventeen, they no longer
needed her help to arrest McCarthy for statutory rape. He was
convicted of corrupting the morals of a minor and sentenced to
eighteen months at the California Institution for Men in Chino,
California. He was out in ten. The juvenile in the case was
identified as Jane Ferrar.

Bingo.

St. John returned to the copy of Stacy Lansford's
handwritten letter.

"
After the baby was born, I feared for both our
lives. Thor was so disappointed that Katie was a girl and had even
accused me of cheating on him, as his sperm would only produce a male
child. Katie even had red hair, just like his."

St. John sat straight in his chair. The reference to
"Thor" was highlighted in yellow. The investigator had made
a notation in pencil in the margin. Moniker? "Thor told me he
had killed three colored guys who had some drugs he wanted (he called
them "niggers" of course). It was probably sometime in 1974
or 75. He said the one guy crawled the length of the hallway with his
throat cut. The noise this guy made sounded like a broken accordion
and Thor said it was so funny, he wouldn't mind hearing it again.

"There is no doubt in my mind that he was guilty
of this crime and many more. I just wish I had some way to prove it."

The last page in the file was the report of a
psychologist who interviewed Cyrill McCarthy: It seems to him that
his appointed task in We relative to members of the opposite sex is
to extract as much pleasure from them as he possibly can, while at
the same time inflicting as much pain and anguish as possible.

He shows no remorse or inclination to alter his
perverse and dangerous sexual behavior. It is quite likely to
continue.
 

Chapter 10

Late that afternoon, Munch went to use the bathroom,
but when she pulled on the door to get out it was stuck. "Shit!"
she screamed to the ceiling. Carlos's voice came in through the
transom. "Whas the matter?"

"The frigging door is stuck again."

"
You need some help?" This time it was
Lou's voice.

"We gotta fix this door," she said.

"Beat on the upper right corner," Carlos
said. She hit it with the palm of her hand.

"No. Higher," Lou said.

"I can't reach any higher."

"Maybe if you took off your shoe."

She slid off her tennis shoe and whacked at the door.

"Is that the hardest you can hit it?" Lou
said. His voice sounded strangled. She realized why. The door opened
inward. At their direction, she had jammed it farther shut.

"You guys."

They laughed. Energized by her embarrassment, she
yanked the door open. There were tears in Lou's eyes.