My Dark Places

12

His ghosts were all women. They ran through his dreams interchangeably.

The decomp off Route 126. The waitress in the Marina. The teenager stunned mute by rape and blunt-force trauma.

Dream logic distorted the details. Victims moved between crime scenes and displayed conflicting signs of death. They came to life sometimes. They looked older or younger or just like they did when they fell.

Daisie Mae was sodomized like Bunny. Karen took the sap shots that knocked Tracy to her knees. The sap was homemade. The killers stuffed ball bearings into a length of garden hose and taped the ends shut.

The instant resurrections were unnerving. The women were supposed to stay dead. Murder brought them to him. His love began the moment they died.

He was dreaming a lot. He was giving up the chase and going through some kind of early withdrawal. It was time to get out. He gave it all he had. He wanted out unequivocally.

He was leaving debts unpaid. Karen would be sending him reminders. He failed her because the connections weren’t there and other murders scattered his obligations. He was a victim of confusion and chance—just as she was.

He’d try to pay her off with the love he still carried.

His name was Bill Stoner. He was 53 years old and a homicide detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He was married and had twenty-eight-year-old twin sons.

It was late March ’94. He was leaving the job in mid-April. He’d served 32 years and worked Homicide for the past 14. He was retiring as a sergeant with 25 years in grade. His pension would sustain him nicely.

He was leaving the job intact. He wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t obese from liquor and junk food. He stayed with the same woman for 30-plus years and rode out the rough times with her. He didn’t go the bifurcated route so many cops did. He wasn’t juggling a family and a series of girlfriends in the new gender-integrated law-enforcement community.

He didn’t hide behind the job or revel in a dark world-view. He knew that isolation spawned resentment and self-pity. Police work was inherently ambiguous. Cops developed simple codes to insure their moral grounding. The codes reduced complex issues to kick-ass epigrams. Every epigram boiled down to this: Cops know things that other people don’t. Every epigram obfuscated as much as it enlightened.

Homicide taught him that. He learned it gradually. He saw slam-dunk cases through to successful adjudication and did not understand why the murders occurred. He came to distrust simple answers and solutions and exulted in the few viable ones that he found. He learned to reserve judgment, shut his ego down and make people come to him. It was an inquisitor’s stance. It gave him some distance on himself. It helped him tone down his general temperament and rein in some shitty off-the-job behavior.

The first 17 years of his marriage were a brush war. He fought Ann. She fought him. It stayed verbal out of luck and a collective sense of boundary. They were equally voluble and profane and thus evenly matched. Their demands were equally selfish. They brought equal reserves of love to the war.

He grew up as a homicide detective. Ann grew up as a registered nurse. She entered her career late. Their marriage survived because they both grew up in the death business.

Ann retired early. She had high blood pressure and bad allergies. Their bad years put some bad mileage on her.

And him.

He was exhausted. Hundreds of murders and the rough stretch with Ann made for one big load. He wanted to drop the whole thing.

He knew how to let things go. The death business taught him that. He wanted to be a full-time husband and father. He wanted to see Ann and the boys up-close and permanent.

Bob was running an Ikea store. He was married to a solid woman and had a baby daughter. Bob toed the line. Bill Junior was more problematic. He was lifting weights, going to college and working as a bouncer. He had a son with his Japanese ex-girlfriend. Bill Junior was a brilliant kid and an inveterate fuck-head.

He loved his grandchildren to death. Life was a kick in the head.

He had a nice house in Orange County. He had his health and money socked away. He had a good marriage and a separate dialogue with dead women. It was his own take on the Laura Syndrome.

Homicide detectives loved the movie Laura. A cop gets obsessed with a murder victim and finds out she’s still alive. She’s beautiful and mysterious. She falls in love with the cop.

Most homicide cops were romantics. They blasted through lives devastated by murder and dispensed comfort and counsel. They nursed entire families. They met the sisters and female friends of their victims and succumbed to sexual tension hotwired to bereavement. They blew their marriages off behind situational drama.

He wasn’t that crazy or hooked on theatrics. The flip side of Laura was Double Indemnity: A man meets a woman and flushes his life down the toilet. Both scenarios were equally fatuous.

Dead women fired up his imagination. He honored them with tender thoughts. He didn’t let them run his life.

He was set to retire soon. Things were running through his head fast and bright.

He had to drive out to the Bureau. A man was meeting him at 9:00. His mother was murdered 30-some years back. The man wanted to see her file.

The January earthquake wrecked the Hall of Justice. Sheriff’s Homicide moved to the City of Commerce. It was an hour’s shot north of Orange County.

He took the 405 to the 710. Freeway runs were half of any given homicide job. Freeway runs exhausted him.

L.A. County was large, topographically diverse and traversable only by freeway. Freeways streamlined body-disposal problems. Killers could zip to remote canyons and dump their victims fast. Freeways and freeway embankments were four-star drop zones. He rated freeways by their body-dump past and body-dump potential. Every stretch of L.A. freeway marked a dump site or the route to a crime scene. Every on- and off-ramp led him to some murder.

Bodies tended to stack up in the worst parts of the county. He knew every mile of freeway to and from every skunk town with a Sheriff’s Homicide contract. The mileage accrued and weighed his weary ass down. He wanted to get off the Drop Zone Expressway forever.

Orange County to downtown L.A. was a hundred miles round-trip. He lived in Orange County because it wasn’t L.A. County and one big map of past and present murder. Most of Orange County was white and monolithically square. He fit in superficially. Cops were hellions masquerading as squares. He liked the Orange County vibe. People got outraged over shit he saw every day. Orange County made him feel slightly disingenuous. Cops flocked to places like Orange County to live the illusion of better times past and pretend they were somebody else. A lot of them carried reactionary baggage. He dumped his a long time ago.

He lived where he did to keep his two worlds separate. The freeway was just a symbol and a symptom. He’d always be running back and forth—one way or another.

Sheriff’s Homicide was working out of a courtyard industrial complex. They were squeezed in between toolmaking and computer-chip firms. The setup was temporary. They were supposed to move to permanent digs soon.

The Hall of Justice oozed style. This place didn’t look remotely coplike. The exterior was plain white stucco. The interior was plain white drywall. The main room featured a hundred desks pushed together. The place looked like a phone sales front.

The Unsolved Unit was walled off separately. A storeroom lined with shelves adjoined it. The shelves were stuffed with unsolved homicide files.

Each file was marked with the letter Z and a six-digit number. Stoner found Z-483-362 and carried it back to his desk.

He spent seven years at Unsolved. The unit had a simple mandate: Check Z-files for workable leads and assess new information coming in on unsolved murders. The job was public relations and anthropological study.

Unsolved cops rarely solved murders. They fielded phone tips, perused files and got hooked on old killings. They ran checks on old suspects and talked to old detectives. Unsolved entailed a lot of desk work. Older men rotated in before they retired.

Stoner was ordered in young. Captain Grimm had a special job for him. Grimm thought the Cotton Club murder was workable. He told Stoner to work it full-time.

The job took four years. It was a high-profile, career-defining glory case.

It kicked his ass. It put a lot of freeway miles on him.

Stoner looked through the Z-file he pulled. The autopsy photo was gruesome. The Arroyo High shots were almost as ugly. He’d prepare the man first.

Cops cruised by his desk and ragged him about his retirement. His partner, Bill McComas, just had a quadruple bypass. The guys wanted a progress report.

Mac was tenuously okay. He was set to retire next month— less than intact.

Stoner kicked his chair back and daydreamed. He was still seeing things fast and bright.

He was a California boy. His people split Fresno and bopped to L.A. County during the war. His parents fought like cougars. It pissed him off and scared his sisters.

He grew up in South Gate. It was flat, hot and postwar stucco. Transplanted Okies reigned. They liked hot rods and barn music. They worked industrial jobs and snagged boom-economy paychecks. The old South Gate spawned blue-collar squares. The new South Gate spawned dope fiends.

He grew up hooked on girls and sports and nursed a vague sense of adventure. His father was a foreman at the Proto-Tool plant. It was lots of work for marginal pay and zero adventure. He tried Proto-Tool himself. It was boring and hard on the body. He tried junior college and pondered a teaching career. The notion didn’t really send him.

His sisters married cops. He had one brother-in-law on the South Gate PD and one on the Highway Patrol. They told him enticing stories. The yarns dovetailed with some other notions he’d been kicking around.

He wanted adventure. He wanted to help people. He took the entrance test for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department the day after his twenty-first birthday.

He passed it. He passed the physical and the background check. He was assigned to the Sheriff’s Academy class of December ’61.

The Department was shorthanded. He was pre-assigned to the Hall of Justice Jail. He met some celebrated killers straight off.

He met John Deptula. Crazy John burglarized a bowling alley and woke up a live-in handyman named Roger Alan Mosser. Deptula beat Mosser to death and carted his body out to the Angeles National Forest. He decapitated Mosser and stuck his head down a campground porta-toilet. Ward Hallinen cleared the case for Sheriff’s Homicide.

He met Sam LoCigno. LoCigno popped Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen. It was a contract hit. It occurred at Rondelli’s Restaurant in December ’59. The hit was botched six ways from Sunday.

His tier featured drag queens and badass armed robbers. He listened to them and learned things. He entered the Academy and devoured a four-month course in criminal justice. He met a good-looking blonde named Ann Schumacher. She was working at the Autonetics plant in Downey. They made plans to go out on his graduation night.

He graduated the Academy in April ’62. He took Ann to the Crescendo on the swinging Sunset Strip. Ann looked good. He looked good. He was packing a .38 snub-nose. He was twenty-one years old and unassailably cool.

He wanted to work a prowl-car beat. The Sheriff’s were running patrol units out of fourteen stations. He wanted full-time action.

He got jail duty.

They assigned him to the Wayside Honor Rancho. It was sixty-five miles from his pad. The job initiated his long and ugly relationship with freeways.

Wayside knocked some youth out of him. Wayside was a good course in pre-breakdown American justice.

Wayside housed inmates sentenced to county time and Hall of Justice Jail overflow headed to the joint. Whites, Negroes and Mexicans hated each other but refrained from racial warfare. Wayside was an efficient cog in a still-operational system. The system worked because criminal numbers were far short of stratospheric and most criminals did not employ violence. Heroin was the big bad drug of the era. Heroin was a well-contained dope epidemic. Heroin made you pull B&Es and pimp your girlfriend to support your habit. Heroin made you nod out. Heroin did not make you freak out and chop up your girlfriend—like crack would 20 years later. The system worked because felons and misdemeanants plead guilty most of the time and did not file nuisance appeals routinely. The system worked because pre-breakdown jail time was doable. Criminals were pre-psychologized. They accepted authority. They knew they were lowlife scum because they saw it on TV and read it in the papers. They were locked into a rigged game. Authority usually won. They took pleasure in picayune triumphs and reveled in the game’s machinations. The game was insiderism. Insiderism and fatalism were hip. If you stayed shy of the gas chamber, the worst you’d get was penitentiary time. Pre-breakdown joint time was doable. You could drink pruno and fuck sissies in the ass. The system worked because America was yet to buck race riots and assassinations and environmental bullshit and gender confusion and drug proliferation and gun mania and religious psychoses linked to a media implosion and an emerging cult of victimhood—a 25-year transit of divisive bad juju that resulted in a stultifying mass skepticism.

He became a cop at just the right time. He could cleave to simple notions with a clear conscience. He could kick ass with legal impunity. He could postpone aspects of his cop education and come of age as a homicide detective.

He bought the whole illusion back in 1962. He knew the system worked. Jail duty was doable. He got a twisted kick out of the inmates. They played their roles according to the script of the time. The jailers did, too.

He married Ann in December ’62. He transferred to Nor-walk Station a year later. He spent his first anniversary out in a patrol car. Ann was hurt and pissed.

They started fighting. Ann wanted all of his time. He wanted all of her time precisely synced to his schedule. The L.A. County Sheriff’s demanded most of his time. Something had to give.

They fought. His marriage turned into his parents’ marriage with the volume up and lots of “Fuck you”s. Ann had this abandonment complex. Her mother left her and shacked up with an armed robber. The guy took Mom with him on a cross-country heist spree. Ann had this overtly screwed-up childhood.

They fought. They reconciled. They fought. He resisted scads of cop-chaser women out to throw him some trim. The LASD hovered as his potential divorce co-respondent.

He loved patrol work. He loved the flow of unexpected events and the daily mix of new people in trouble. Norwalk was a “gentlemen’s station.” The population was white and the pace was slow. The county ding farm was on his beat. The dings wandered off and pulled amusing stunts stark naked. The Norwalk deputies ran a ding taxi service. They were always running some ding back to the farm.

He enjoyed his Norwalk tour of duty. The system worked and crime was containable. Some of the older guys saw hard times coming. The Miranda decision was fucking things up. The balance of power had shifted from cops to criminal suspects. You couldn’t log confessions with sweat-box tricks and phone-book shots to the kidneys.

He didn’t hold with those tactics. He didn’t pack black-leather sap gloves with 16-ounce palm weights. He wasn’t a violent guy. He tried to reason with unruly types and only fought when he had to.

He flipped his patrol car in mid-pursuit and almost died on the spot. He tangled with a teenage glue sniffer and took some heavyweight lumps. He responded to an accident call and swooped down a two-vehicle pile-up. A man was dead in his truck. His head smashed into the radio dials and kicked the volume way up. You could hear the song “Charade” for blocks around.

Norwalk gave him some wild moments. They were bush league compared to Watts in August ’65.

Ann was eight months pregnant. They were driving north on the Long Beach Freeway. Their view was high and expansive. They saw a dozen fires blazing.

He pulled off the freeway and called Norwalk Station. The watch commander told him to suit up and report to Harvey Aluminum. Harvey was deep in a labor-management conflict. The LASD had a command post set up there already.

He dropped Ann off and blasted over to Harvey. The parking lot was jammed with black & whites and deputies in full riot gear. The command post was dispatching four-man units. He grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and three temporary partners.

The deal was 12-hour shifts. The deal was go bust looters and firebugs. The deal was scour Watts and Willowbrook—the flashpoint of all this nigger voodoo.

He went into it in broad daylight. The heat was somewhere up in the 90s. The fires added some heat. His riot gear added some more. South L.A. was all heat and frenzy.

Looters were gutting liquor stores. Looters were guzzling brand-name stuff right there. Looters were pushing shopping carts down the street. The carts were chock-full of booze and TV sets.

Gunshots popped continuously. You couldn’t tell who was shooting who. The National Guard was out in force. They looked young and dumb and scared and plain trigger-happy.

You couldn’t patrol logically. Too much came at you too fast. You had to snag looters at random. You had to work by whim and the stimulus of the moment. You couldn’t gauge the direction of gunshots. You couldn’t trust the guardsmen not to spray rounds and kill you with ricochets.

It was uncontainable disorder. It grew in direct proportion to their attempts to control it. A deputy was pushing a crowd back. A looter grabbed his shotgun. It discharged and blew his partner’s brains out.

It went on and on. The action dispersed and reconstellated unexpectedly. He worked three whole days of it. He shagged dozens of looters and lost weight from heat exposure and adrenaline overload.

The action tapped out from some kind of mass exhaustion. Maybe the heat wore the rioters down. They made their statement. They brightened up their shitty lives. They gorged themselves with cheap booty and convinced themselves they’d gained more than they lost.

The cops lost their collective cherry.

Some denied it. They attributed the riot to a specific series of criminally spawned events. Their logic of cause-and-effect went no deeper.

A lot of cops went into default mode. Unruly niggers were unruly niggers. Their inbred criminal tendencies should now be suppressed even more rigorously.

He knew better. The riot taught him that suppression was futile. You don’t burn down your own world for no good reason. You couldn’t shut people down or keep people out. The more you tried, the more chaos would supersede order. The revelation thrilled him and scared him.

The twins were born a month after the riot. His marriage ran smooth for a while. He studied for the sergeant’s exam and worked Norwalk Patrol. He pondered the lessons of Watts.

He lived in two worlds. His family world was uncontrollable. The lessons of Watts failed him at home. He knew how to handle criminals. He couldn’t handle the volatile woman he loved.

The novelty of kids wore off. They started fighting again. They fought in front of the boys and felt bad about it.

He made sergeant in December ’68 and transferred to Firestone Station. Firestone was high-density, high-crime, all black. The pace was frantic. He learned to work at triple his Norwalk rate.

He worked as a patrol supervisor. He ran from Code 3 call to Code 3 call every shift. Firestone was dope and armed robbery and brutal domestic calls. Firestone was a riot zone back in ’65. The folks there had their own post-riot revelations going. Firestone was sidewalk crap games and guns. Firestone was the child who climbed into the dryer and got burned and spun to death. Firestone was decelerated chaos. Firestone could blow fast.

He spent four years there. He finished his patrol tour and went on the station detective squad. He did some community relations work. Anything that bridged the cop-civilian gap was good for business. The LAPD had fucked cop-civilian relations to an all-time fare-thee-well. He didn’t want the Sheriff’s to follow their lead.

He transferred to the auto-theft detail. He developed sound detective skills and reveled in the specific nature of the work. Theft crimes were cut-and-dried. They boiled down to violated ownership. They were isolated problems that ended with the apprehension of specifically guilty parties. He didn’t have to pop harmless kids for marijuana. He didn’t have to referee domestic disputes and dispense marital advice like he knew what he was talking about.

Detective work was his calling. He had the social skills and the temperament for it. Patrol work was a breathless sprint with no fixed finish line. Detective work was sedately paced by comparison. He plugged into suspects one-on-one and co-opted their knowledge. He moved deeper into the cop-criminal matrix.

He came to Firestone as a policeman. He left as a detective. He went to Internal Affairs Division and hounded other cops.

Cops who stole money. Cops who leaned too hard on their nightsticks. Cops who used dope. Cops who jacked off at porno movies. Cops who gave blow jobs to inmates in county holding tanks. Cops who were ratted off for imagined offenses out of pure spite.

IA was brutal. The moral turf was hazily defined. He did not enjoy hassling fellow cops. He sought out the literal truth pertaining to their situations and stressed mitigating factors. He felt empathy for some very twisted men. He knew how the job undermined family contracts. A fair portion of the cops he knew were functioning alcoholics. They were no better or worse than cops accused of smoking dope.

He had a handle on his own shortcomings. He used them to illustrate the big bottom line. You don’t steal or use dope or engage in perverted activities. You don’t exploit your cop status for illegal gain. You have to impose those restrictions on the cops you investigate.

It was a morally valid line. It was an ego-driven simplification.

His marriage was dead stalled. He wanted out. Ann wanted out. They kept waiting for the other one to get up some guts and end it. They bought a house and sunk their hooks in each other deeper. He fought a persistent urge to chase women.

He left IA in ’73. He went to the Lakewood Station squad and worked auto theft and auto burg for two years. He went to Metro in ’75.

Metro worked county-wide. He ran a five-man surveillance team all over the county map. LA. County expanded for him. He saw crime booming in poverty pockets where people had just enough coin for drugs and cheap pads. The landscapes there were flat and polluted. The people lived in operational squalor. They moved between smoggy towns like rats in a maze. Freeways spun them around in circles. Drugs were a closed circuit of brief ecstasy and despair. Burglary and robbery were drug-adjunct crimes. Murder was a common by-product of drug use and illegal drug trafficking. Drug enforcement was a futile closed circuit. Drug use was an insane and entirely understandable reaction to life in bumfuck L.A. County. He learned these things driving elevated freeways.

He worked Major Frauds in ’78 and moved to VOIT in ’79. VOIT stood for Violent Offender Impact Team. It was a small unit mandated to apprehend serial armed robbers. The job crossed over to Homicide.

Ann got a calling. She obeyed it on instinct. She entered nursing school and excelled at the work. Her stab at independence resurrected their marriage.

He respected her profession. He respected her pursuit of a career at age forty. He liked the way her calling meshed with his new calling.

He wanted to work Sheriff’s Homicide. He wanted to investigate murders. He wanted it with a passionate sense of commitment.

He called in some favors and got it. It brought him to the body off the roadside and the body in the Marina. It brought him to the girl stunned mute by rape and blunt-force trauma.

His ghosts.