Bad Intent

Chapter 19

Usually, it’s far easier to make an hour-long or two-hour-long film than it is to make one that lasts only a minute. It is not especially difficult to condense the facts. I had put together enough evidence-including the shot of attorney Jennifer Miller at Jerry Kelsey’s place, with Kelsey’s face perfectly framed in the window behind her-to show the broad audience gross manipulation of the facts relating to Charles Conklin. The real difficulty lay in eliciting an emotional reaction in such a short time without resorting to the usual knee-jerk images: a waving flag, bodies on the street, starving orphans. I could explain, I could make people believe. But, in a sixty-second package, could I make anyone care?

By ten-thirty Thursday morning I was mentally numb and half-blind. With the help of a very patient and capable editor, I had what I thought was a good piece. I borrowed a portable tape player from him and drove over the pass to the hospital to show Guido.

“You look like hell,” Guido greeted me.

“You look like you’ve had a holiday,” I said. “Get the nurses off your bed and let me climb in. I’m exhausted.”

The two perky nurses who were ministering to him-one feeding him broth, one adjusting an IV-scowled at me as if I had invaded their zone. I further upset order by pushing things aside on his bedside table to make room for the video player. I plugged it into the same socket as the heart monitor, put in the tape, walked around to the side of the bed without all the IV apparatus, climbed up next to Guido, and stretched out.

“Excuse me,” the little brunette nurse whispered, scandalized. “Patient beds are sterile.”

“I’m sorry, Guido,” I said, sliding one of his pillows under my head and crossing my legs atop his white blanket. “You would have made a wonderful father.”

Guido told his nurses, “It’s useless to argue with her. Come over and see what she brought to entertain us.”

I started the tape. I watched them watch. And was gratified by their reactions. When it was over, I rewound it and played it again. The nurses stayed through the second run.

“That is so scummy, what they did,” the brunette spat. “Really, really scummy. How did they think they could get away with it?”

“Exactly the point I hoped to make,” I said.

Guido wrapped his arm around me, pulled me close to him, and kissed my forehead.

“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Hard facts, vivid images, steady build to the tagline. You did it without being self-indulgent or melodramatic. I think you’re getting dangerous, but it’s damn good. What are you going to do with it?”

“Lana Howard is taking it to her editorial board at noon. If she talks it into the rundown, look for it on the news at four, five, and six. Anything you would change?”

“Not a nanosecond.”

The brunette nurse’s face lit up. “You’ll be on the news?”

“Probably,” I said.

“If you’ll excuse us,” Guido said to her, “Miss TV Star and I have some things to discuss.”

The nurses left us alone but left the door open.

I asked him, “When are they going to spring you?”

“Now. Soon as the doc signs me out.”

“Want me to wait and drive you home?”

“Yes. If I call my mom, she’ll stay at my house for days shoveling pasta down me and cleaning cupboards. I don’t have the energy for her ministrations.”

“I think I owe you at least some taxi service,” I said. He waved off the suggestion of debt.

“What’s new?”

“Plenty.” I opened my bag and took out the police file on Wyatt Johnson’s shooting and turned to the follow-up report that Mike had written a year after the shooting.

“This is so interesting,” I said. “Reads like an old Dragnet script. Wish I could figure a way to use it.”

I took a sip of Guido’s water and started reading aloud to him the straight, flat, prose description of the scene in the service station men’s room that November night in 1979.

” ‘On 11-6-79, at 0045 hours, the victim, Los Angeles Police Department Officer Wyatt Johnson, a male black, twenty-four years of age, was found mortally wounded in the men’s rest-room of a service station on the corner of Century Boulevard and Clovis Avenue, in the City of Los Angeles. The victim had been shot six times through the chest and abdominal area. Four bullets exited the victim’s back and two deflected off his fourth and sixth thoracic vertebrae and exited through his right side. The motive for the shooting is unknown. The weapon was not recovered. No slugs were located at the scene or recovered from the corpse during autopsy.

” ‘At 0120 hours, detectives responded to the crime scene. The crime scene was being protected by the first officers on the scene.’ ” Their names and serial numbers were listed. I didn’t recognize any of them, and I didn’t read the names to Guido. ” ‘The weather was dry and clear, with the temperature in the low forty-degree range. The crime scene was illuminated by three single globe mercury vapor lights at the intersection and a double-tube fluorescent light attached to the eaves on the east side of the building. The area is commercial with multiple-family residences to the south.

” ‘Detectives observed the victim, supine, face downward, on the floor of the men’s restroom with his head wedged between the toilet bowl and the wash basin and his feet extending out the open doorway.’ “

I held up the hand-drawn diagram of the scene showing the orientation of the body, and then several black and white photographs of the blood-spattered room and the dark river that poured out from under the victim. According to the diagram, the room was three feet by four feet, barely wide enough to open the door without banging into the wash basin. To myself, I read through the description again before I turned to Guido.

” ‘He was shot from the front and he fell forward.’ “

“There wasn’t room to fall any way but forward.”

“Right,” I said. “The shooter had to be straddling the toilet or else he was wedged into the corner between the toilet and the wash basin.”

“Your point?”

“Wyatt Johnson would have literally fallen into the shooter’s arms. Look at all the blood in these pictures. In the interviews with the girls, they never said anything about seeing blood on Charles Conklin.”

Guido gave the pictures a closer look. “It was dark. The lights were sodium vapor and fluorescent. Both of them distort color, make red look black or brown. If the shooter wore something dark or some kind of print, I can see blood getting past notice. Unless it was shiny.”

“There are bloody footprints and handprints everywhere,” I said, pointing them out in the pictures. “A lot of people passed through that small space-James Shabazz, police, paramedics, the same assortment we saw dancing in attendance on Hanna the other night.”

“Dancing’s a good description. Looks like Arthur Murray charts on the floor.”

“I wonder what they did with the prints,” I said.

“That is not allowed!” The rebuke came from a tall, dark imperious man wearing a starched white lab coat. The pocket badge labeled him as Dr. V. K. Sadgopal and he stood at the end of the bed glaring at me and Guido snuggled together over the report.

Guido tightened his hold on me. “If you don’t like it, then expel me from this place.”

Dr. Sadgopal slapped his clipboard down on the end of the bed and reached for the privacy curtain. “If your vital signs are normal, Mr. Patrini, you may leave.” To me he said, “Excuse us.”

I got off the bed and went over to a chair in the corner. Very pointedly, the doctor pulled the curtain around Guido’s bed, excluding me, but also giving me a private corner of my own.

I slouched down into the plastic-upholstered chair, crossed my legs, and searched through the report until I found the original witness statements. The interviews were handwritten by the detectives on a printed form: name, residence, phone, business, physical description, where, when, and by whom interviewed, and signed at the end of the account by the witnesses.

I started with Hanna Rhodes. She had told the first detectives who questioned her, “I was at the filling station with my friend, LaShonda. I heard someone let off five or six. I saw the man run out of the toilet. I don’t know who he was. Tell him I said I never saw him before.”

LaShonda said more or less the same. When she was asked why she ran all the way to James Shabazz’s house instead of calling the police, she said, “I don’t know. I was scared.”

Tucked among the interviews I found the chronological record, the log of every action taken during the investigation. There were fifteen or so handwritten pages of telephone calls, follow-up interviews, leads, trips to canvass and recanvass the crime-scene neighborhood, autopsy findings, the booking of physical evidence. The record was meticulous, showed consistent effort, but for an entire year there was no result, no suspect identified.

The first entry for November 1980, 0830 hours, was, “Case assigned to Dets. Flint and Kelsey,” written in Mike’s neat, all-caps hand.

From the log, I knew everything Mike and Jerry did on that first day. Fifteen minutes after they were assigned to the case, they were at the crime scene, canvassing. The rest of the day they re-interviewed all of the witnesses on record they could find, and listed new contacts derived from those conversations. Every day for a week, they talked to the same people.

I went back to the stack of interviews, leafed through them until I found what the witnesses had told Mike. Every day for a week, everyone involved said just about the same thing: everyone heard the shots, no one recognized the gunman.

Mike was persistent with LaShonda DeBevis and Hanna Rhodes. Every day he contacted them, visited them at school, saw them at home. By the end of that week, I thought, to those kids Mike would either be like a member of the family or a nightmare that wouldn’t go away. Whichever way it fell, there was no change in their story.

There was progress, though. By the second day, Mike and Jerry were responding to telephone tips that came into the station. Someone remembered seeing a green Bonneville with gray primer paint on the right front door in the area on the night of the murder. Mike requested that patrol officers stop any cars of that description and identify the driver.

On Monday of the second week, Mike returned a call placed from the jail ward at County-USC Medical Center. I recognized the caller’s name-the jail-house snitch in the case. The next entry was the first appearance of Charles Conklin’s name. Mike ordered a computer run on Conklin’s records with the city, the county sheriff, and with Compton police. He also ordered booking photographs from the sheriff and from Compton. That afternoon, Mike and Jerry visited Conklin at his parents’ home.

All that week, twice a day, and sometimes three times, Mike interviewed Conklin or went by his house looking for him. He interviewed Conklin’s family, his employer and former employer, his neighbors, girlfriends and home boys, his parole officer, the clerk at his corner liquor store, and the snitch. Every day, the very last thing Mike did was make contact with Conklin.

I had no idea what Jerry was doing during all of this. There was a blank on the interview form to list all persons present. Mike’s name was on every interview sheet after he was assigned the case, Jerry’s on very few. So, I thought, maybe Jerry’s skill was in an area outside the interview room. Or, maybe he was out serving subpoenas-cop-speak for hitting the bars during the day.

On Friday morning of the second week, Mike picked up the booking photographs of Conklin he had ordered. He made a “photo display card” with six different men’s faces, and recorded that Conklin’s face was in position number five on the card. The rest of the day, Mike and Jerry made the rounds of their witnesses, showing every one of them the display card. Several recognized Charles “Pinkie” Conklin as a man who lived in the neighborhood and was “one badass dude,” by consensus. But no one, not LaShonda DeBevis nor Hanna Rhodes, connected him to the murder scene.

Mike went to Conklin’s house first thing Monday morning. The house was vacant and the landlord, who lived next door, had no idea where the Conklin family had gone. No phone, no forwarding, with two weeks paid-up rent. Just gone.

At 0830 hours, eleven-year-old LaShonda DeBevis told Mike that picture number five was “Pinkie,” the man she saw running from the restroom immediately after she heard shots fired. She gave a new interview: “I was afraid he would kill me or do me like I hear he did some girls I know. He is nasty. I saw that man lying in the toilet and I saw all his blood just pouring out and I saw Pinkie run by me with a real mean look on his face. I didn’t want to make Pinkie mad at me so he’d do me like that with his gun. That’s why I didn’t tell the police nothing. If he ever comes back, I hope he don’t kill me.”

Hanna Rhodes spilled it at noon: “Me and LaShonda was back there and we heard the gun, like I say before. We go start to run over where her mama work because we was scared. But we run smack into Pinkie. He was running out of that toilet where he shot the man. Me and LaShonda look at that dead man and we start screaming and then she run right off. I didn’t know what to do next. I think Pinkie has another gun and he shoot me, too. But he go get in that old green car of his and he drive off. I go jump into this old Cadillac is parked there and I climb down in the back and cover up in some old rags and things and I stay there until LaShonda and James call my name and say, ‘Get over here.’ “

Mike and Jerry had a meeting with the district attorney late that afternoon. The district attorney issued a 187 warrant for Conklin’s arrest. At that point Conklin was officially a wanted suspect, and all shift rotations at the Southeast Division were looking for him. Three days later, around dinnertime, he was pulled over on a routine traffic stop-driving erratically in a green Bonneville with gray primer paint on the right front door. He was arrested by the patrol officers when they ran his name through the computer.

After the arrest, the log continues for several pages as Mike and Jerry helped the district attorney put together an evidence package for Conklin’s arraignment. They ordered Wyatt’s autopsy photos and reports, asked for an aerial photo of the crime scene to be made, searched through DMV files for any records on the green Bonneville. They stayed in contact with their witnesses and tried to milk more from them, tried to find others who might suddenly remember something that happened that night.

Mike logged in receipt of a lie detector test administered to the snitch in an unrelated case. I found the photocopy of the test report. The results were inconclusive. In the opinion of the examiner, the snitch did not register appropriate physiological responses, suggesting he was an accomplished liar.

One year and two months after the murder, Charles Conklin was held to answer the charges at a preliminary hearing. A trial date was set. During the three-week interim, Mike and Jerry served subpoenas and held their evidence and witness package together. During the trial, they chauffeured witnesses, ran errands for the D.A., and testified.

The trial lasted five days. The jury convicted Charles Pinkerton Conklin to life in prison for the murder of Officer Wyatt Johnson. End of file.

As I read the detective reports and the witness interviews, my mind’s eye saw it all as if it were on a big, color screen. While I was trying to figure an angle that would let me use the file without getting Hector into trouble, I was vaguely aware of a lot of movement on the other side of the curtain. I never heard Dr. Sadgopal leave.

When the curtain was drawn open again, Guido was alone, dressed in the same soiled shirt and jeans he had been wearing when I brought him in the day before. He bowed to me and said, “Ta da.”

“You’re a mess,” I said. “Stay put for twenty minutes. I’ll go find you a clean shirt. Maybe the gift shop has something.”

“Don’t bother. Get me out of here.”

The heat, the bright noon sun, drug residue all conspired against Guido. He had been enervated when I told him about the office break-in. He smelled quick money from tabloid TV and talked about expanding my tape to fit their format. The money interested me, but not as much as reaching a big audience did. We were going to spend the afternoon working on something. But by the time I turned up his street, he was worn out, ready for a nap.

I went inside with Guido on the pretext of needing to use the bathroom. I wanted to make sure that no one had been there tampering with his tapes or equipment.

My techno friend, Guido, living alone in the woods without close neighbors, had installed a very sophisticated video-based security system. None of the cameras had been tripped or tampered with. I know, because I checked every one of them. Feeling something of an alarmist, a relieved alarmist, I double-checked that everything was reset before I left him.

I was at the studio during the editorial meeting, but I was upstairs, holed up again with a couple of production staffers, making some changes in the tape.