Sex, Thugs and Rock & Roll

Violated by Mike Sheeter

Bill Gurevich’s first parolee of the day was a tier-one mope named Sheldon. Sheldon was fifty-seven, a weepy ex-middle school band teacher and statutory rapist.

Gurevich was forty-nine, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy. He ran the sex offender detail at the California Board of Pardon and Parole’s Van Nuys office, where he presided over eighty or ninety of these court-mandated interviews every week.

The ex-felons he supervised had been locked down for offenses ranging in severity from weenie wagging in the park to tossing a ten-month-old infant out of the window of a municipal bus.

Gurevich checked Sheldon’s pay stubs to make sure he was showing up regularly for his new job at the car wash.

Sheldon was afraid of the other parolees, so Gurevich walked him out through a waiting room full of fidgeting excons, and down the hall to the elevators.

On the way back, he stopped at the check-in counter and rapped his knuckles on the bulletproof partition. Tasha the receptionist looked up from her magazine.

“I’ve got a citizen coming to see me today, a Mrs. Sheila Halpert,” Gurevich said. “Be extra nice to her and call me the second she gets here, okay?”

Tasha shrugged, disengaging the electronic security door. Gurevich returned to his cubicle, got his electric razor out of his desk, and gave himself a quick once-over. He wasn’t looking forward to sitting across a desk from Sheila Halpert. One of his new parolees had abducted and raped her daughter.

Gurevich accessed the Department of Corrections database, calling up Richard Lencheski’s prison records and psychiatric reports.

Lencheski was a tier-two offender, released after doing a dime, first at Camarillo, then at San Luis Obispo.

He was six weeks out of the halfway house, still under full electronic surveillance. A vocational training course behind the walls had earned Lencheski his current, real world job as a baker’s helper. The parolee had been fully compliant since his release date, at least on paper.

Ten years ago, Lencheski had accosted the Halpert girl at a Panorama City playground, feeding her a crushed ice drink laced with codeine cough syrup before he abducted her in his camper truck. Several hours later, when he dropped her off at a bus stop, his nine-year-old victim was catatonic, with deep fingernail scratches and bite marks.

Gurevich looked at Lencheski’s prison ID photo. The guy was one of the rare sex offenders who looked the part, with fish-belly white jailhouse skin and scraggly, untrimmed eyebrows that reminded Gurevich of ticking oozing out of a flophouse mattress.

Gurevich glanced up from his computer monitor, startled, as the security lock buzzed someone through.

Thanks a bunch for the heads-up, Tasha, he thought.

He slipped on his jacket and stepped out into the corridor. Sheila Halpert strode towards him, hand extended.

Her pleasant expression caught him off guard.

Mrs. Halpert had been a fixture on the evening news since Lencheski’s release. When she agitated to abolish the parole system on the state house steps, or picketed Lencheski’s home with her supporters, all four local news stations ran with it.

On the tube she wore a boonie hat covered with campaign buttons and a trademark T-shirt-a yellow one-with an iron-on picture of her daughter on the front. Today, though, she was going low-key and professional in a designer suit.

Lauren Halpert would be a young adult by now. As Gurevich shook hands with her mother, he wondered how Lauren was getting along these days. He decided not to ask.

He ushered Mrs. Halpert into his cubicle. She sidestepped the stacks of file folders surrounding his desk and took a seat, checking out the wanted fliers for parole absconders covering his walls.

Gurevich offered coffee and she shook her head.

He said, “You look different in person.”

“That’s because I’m wearing my work clothes,” she said. “If you want any media coverage in this town you have to turn yourself into a cartoon character. When the camera crews show up, I pop into a phone booth and change into in my Vigilante Mom outfit.”

Gurevich was still trying to think of a tactful way to say what he needed to when she beat him to the punch.

“I know why you asked me to come in,” she said.

“You do?”

“Sure,” she said, “you want me to lay off Lencheski. That’s not going to happen.”

Well, there it was.

Gurevich made his voice flat and official.

“Mrs. Halpert, let me caution you. If you and your supporters get somebody worked up enough to take Lencheski off the count, you’ll be subject to prosecution.”

“Call me Sheila,” she said. “I’m a paralegal, Mr. Gurevich. If I need any legal advice I’ll ask one of the lawyers I work with.”

“How about meeting me halfway?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“You want to raise public awareness or campaign for new legislation? Great, I’ll sign your petition. But stop surrounding the man’s house. And call off those shock-jock buddies of yours.”

“Shortstack and Poppa Pete?” Sheila said, looking amused. “I don’t control those wild men.”

“C’mon, Sheila. They’re practically offering a bounty on Lencheski’s scalp. Somebody’s liable to take them seriously and kill him.”

“What a tragic loss to humanity that would be, huh?”

Gurevich shook his head. “I’m a parent too. I don’t condone or excuse anything Lencheski has done,” he said. “But the man’s under the protection and supervision of this office. So I’m asking you…I’m begging you, disband the lynch mob before everything spins out of control.”

“The system’s out of control, not me,” she said.

She picked up the framed photograph of Gurevich’s wife and daughter on his desk and examined it.

He had taken the photograph last spring, in the front yard of his heavily mortgaged ranch house in Mar Vista.

It showed Kay and Annie, his two redheads, side by side in golden late afternoon light, planting a rosebush. They wore matching straw sun hats. Annie, his little girl, looked like a solemn porcelain miniature of her mom.

“Precious,” Sheila said. “How old is she?”

“She just turned nine.”

“And you keep her picture right out here on your desk, where your parolees can see it?”

“It hasn’t been a problem,” Gurevich said.

He was lying. During Lencheski’s first visit to the office Gurevich had noticed the parolee’s gaze keep returning to his wife and daughter’s image. It had taken every scrap of his professionalism not to bat Lencheski out of the chair with a telephone book.

“Tell me something. God forbid, but what would you do if it was your little girl that animal assaulted?”

“I’m not going to answer that,” Gurevich said.

Richard Lencheski lived in the Hollywood wastelands near Yucca and Wilcox, in one of the last bungalow courts from the ’30s. The bungalows were crisscrossed with earthquake cracks and patched with battleship-gray driveway sealant. The eight-unit court stood on a cul-de-sac lined with smog-blackened royal palms and twenty-year-old cars.

Lencheski began his day kneeling in the box of gravel at the side of his bed, petitioning the Holy Ghost to turn away the wrath of his enemies.

Sheila Halpert was outside with her electric bullhorn, exhorting her followers against him.

His windows rattled in time with the vibrations of her voice. Their hateful call-and-response chants were the first sounds Richard heard every morning. They had been for three weeks now. He wondered if she had any TV trucks out there with her today. Or maybe a gun.

Before he stepped into the shower, he wound plastic cling wrap around his electronic ankle bracelet. He stood under the pinpoint spray, scrubbing his genitals with a loofah until they were raw. After five minutes under the icy water his teeth started chattering. He toweled off and went into his bedroom to dress for work.

He swallowed a couple of Excedrin with his coffee, lingering over it until he couldn’t ignore the blinking clock on his microwave any longer.

Crowd or no crowd, he needed to be at work soon. Janet, his boss, had a thing about punctuality. Janet was an ex-con too, had hung some bad paper back in the day. She knew about his registered sex offender status, but she never mentioned it.

All he did at work was clean up, watch the timers, and measure out ingredients from recipe cards. The bakery was his refuge. But first he had to get there in one piece. He went into his living room, leaned the detached front wheel of his ten-speed bike against the sofa, and peered through the venetian blinds at the demonstrators waiting for him to come outside.

One of them saw him looking and shied an egg at him. Lencheski jumped back as it smashed against the pane. The protesters jeered and whistled.

There must have been thirty people milling around on the narrow strip of grass between his place and the street. Most of them carried homemade picket signs. There were even some children out there.

He thought, Jesus, why aren’t those kids in school? What are they supposed to be anyway, bait?

He dug out his parole officer’s card and dialed.

“Sexual offender detail, Bill Gurevich.”

Lencheski said, “Mr. Gurevich, they’re demonstrating in front of my house again. I need help getting to work.”

“I can’t be holding your hand every day,” Gurevich said. “You wanted out, you got out. Now deal with it.”

“But they’re all charged up. Sheila Halpert was on the news again last night, accusing me of all kinds of vile crap I never did.”

“I called her in here and warned her,” Gurevich said. “If she’s slandering you, call your lawyer.”

Lencheski said, “I can’t lose my job, Mr. Gurevich. It’s all I’ve got going for me.”

“If I drop by there unannounced, am I going to find any contraband?”

“No, sir, you won’t.”

Gurevich sighed heavily and said, “You been to the clinic this week?”

“I got my Depo-Provera shot yesterday.”

“Okay, but this is the last time, Richard, you hear me? From now on, if you’re being threatened, call the cops. I’ll honk when I’m out front.”

Call the cops? Lencheski thought as he hung up.

Me? Yeah, right.

Lencheski stuffed magazines inside his waistband to protect his belly, liver, and kidneys and put on his bicycle helmet, pulling the chinstrap snug.

The raised scars on his torso reminded him of the day he got shanked. They made him wait for it in prison too.

It happened midway through his sixth week in general pop. At first he thought he had been sucker punched.

Then came a scalding sensation as blood welled out of his shirt, pints of it saturating the cloth, speckling his running shoes and the grass at his feet.

Some Chicano dude, an Aztec Warrior from C block, had rolled up on his blind side in the exercise yard, punching a cement-sharpened shard of Plexiglas into his belly. His attacker waggled the jailhouse dagger like a stick shift as the two of them went down in a tangle, the Cholo on top, running the gears inside him.

Richard felt like he was freezing to death in July. He blacked out from shock and blood loss. On the gurney, he regained consciousness just long enough to ask a CO why he’d waited for so long to pull the guy off him.

The screw said, “Because I have kids too, scumbag.”

Don’t ever let them get you on the ground, he told himself. They do, and you won’t be getting up again.

“This neighborhood’s a zero-tolerance zone for sex perverts!” Sheila’s electrified voice boomed.

Twenty-five minutes later, he heard Gurevich’s car horn. Lencheski took a series of rapid breaths, hoisted his bicycle wheel high, using it as a shield, and bolted out the front door.

Walking fast, eyes down, Lencheski shouldered his way through the mob and unchained his bike from the telephone pole out front. Gurevich stood at the curb by his state-issue sedan, the trunk open, watching him approach.

The crowd was surging closer now, starting to throw stuff, more eggs and a few soda cans.

Lencheski tossed his bike into Gurevich’s Chevy and scrambled into the shotgun seat.

As they pulled away from the curb, Sheila yelled through her bullhorn, “You believe what you’re seeing? Child molesters get limo service! Our tax dollars in action, right?”

Lencheski and Gurevich rode past the Cyrillic-and Hebrew-lettered storefronts of the Fairfax District without speaking to each other.

The Chevy turned west onto Pico Boulevard and pulled to the curb in front of Dharma Buns just as the neon sign over the doorway flickered on.

The pink and yellow bakery’s logo featured a blissed-out Buddha sitting on a cupcake in the lotus position.

Gurevich spotted Janet behind the counter and said, “Go punch in, Richard. I need to talk to your boss.”

Lencheski took his bike around back and chained it up. He let himself in the delivery door, went to his locker, and changed into his baker’s whites.

Out front, Gurevich walked up and down and peered into the display cases while Janet ignored him.

She was using an icing sleeve, edging a big sheet cake with a wavy pink border. Gurevich inspected the cake. There was a photo-realistic portrait imprinted on the frosting, a good likeness of a beaming black lady in her sixties. Probably for her retirement party, Gurevich decided.

“How’s our boy been getting along?”

“Real good.”

Janet put the cake into a pink Dharma Buns box and wiped her hands on her apron, giving him her Frontera Women’s Prison deadpan.

Gurevich said, “Richard has enemies, you know? Somebody might come in here looking to harm him.”

She said, “You want me to fire him?”

“No,” Gurevich said, “but for his safety and yours, keep an eye on any customers you haven’t seen before.”

“Richard stays in the back. He never deals with customers.”

“And he never has any contact with kids in here either, is that right?”

Janet shook her head. “No way,” she said. “He’s scared to death of kids, and just about everybody else.”

Gurevich said, “What about that computer? Does he ever use it to go online?”

Janet shook her head. “I doubt he even knows how to turn it on. It’s just for special orders, like picture cakes.”

“I was wondering how you did those,” Gurevich said. “The pictures on top are pretty realistic.”

“Nothing to it,” Janet said. “Watch.”

She brought the monitor to life and clicked on a desktop icon. The same black lady’s face Gurevich had noticed before appeared on the screen.

In seconds, the printer disgorged a semitransparent sheet imprinted with the woman’s picture. It resembled amber cellophane. Janet broke off a corner and offered it to Gurevich. It tasted gummy, like a fruit roll-up.

“A customer sends a digital image or brings me a photo and I scan it,” Janet said. “The transfer medium is made of spun sugar and shortening. The image prints out as an overlay and bonds to the frosting after a few minutes in the oven. It’s the same technique scam artists use to get the Virgin Mary onto a tortilla.”

“Thanks for showing me,” Gurevich said.

He took one of his cards out of his wallet and put it down on the counter in front of her.

She looked at it, but made no move to take it.

He said, “If anybody hassles you, call 911 and give the officers my card as soon as they get here, okay?”

After a few seconds, Janet picked the card up, slipping it into the pocket of her apron.

Gurevich pointed to a tray of crullers in the display case and said, “These look good. What d’you call them?”

“Dharma Doughnuts,” she said. “You want one?”

“Sure, that’d be nice,” Gurevich said.

Janet picked up a donut with a pair of tongs, wrapped it in wax paper, and said, “Eighty-five cents.”

Annie was carrying the conversational load tonight, chattering away about fourth grade politics. Kay’s strained silence during dinner told Gurevich something was worrying her.

She sat with her eyes down, picking at her food. Gurevich couldn’t tell if she was fretting about finances or fuming about something he’d done. Marital telepathy warned him that whatever it was, Kay didn’t want him to mention it in front of Annie.

Annie finished eating and went into the living room to watch TV. Gurevich helped Kay clear the table.

When they were alone in the kitchen, Kay took a letter out of her purse and handed it to him. He went over to the island and read it under the overhead light. It was a parental alert on the letterhead of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s School Police.

A man with a telephoto-lens camera had been spotted taking pictures of kids on the playground at Annie’s school. School police officers had attempted to detain and question the guy, but he escaped on a ten-speed bike.

The unknown suspect was late middle-aged, Caucasian, medium height and weight with bushy eyebrows, wearing white pants and a dark blue sweatshirt.

Gurevich’s throat tightened up.

He pictured Lencheski gliding up to his daughter on his bike as she walked home, gaining her trust, offering her one of his doped-up fountain drinks.

Still darker images from his days as a sheriff’s deputy came back to him, memories of cadaver dogs and methane probes, of explorer scouts and police academy cadets grid-searching a brushy hillside, one of the dog handlers calling out as he spotted a backpack under some leaves-Jesus-and then the first heart-stopping glimpse of those little white legs…

Kay said, “I hoped you’d know who to call about this.”

Gurevich refolded the letter and stuffed it back into its envelope. He stepped over to the refrigerator and poured himself some milk.

He felt her eyes on his back and took a few seconds before he answered her.

He sipped some milk and said mildly, “Don’t worry about it, babe. I’ll take care of it tomorrow after work.”

Kay said, “Oh, Bill, that’ll be great.”

Lencheski stood at the foot of the cul-de-sac on his ten-speed, scanning the shadows for potential ambushers.

The demonstrators were gone.

He glided down the street as quietly as he could. He dismounted the bike and stood on the sidewalk in front of the bungalow court with the rubber-coated security chain in his hands, watching and listening.

There was no foot traffic, no one lurking in a parked car. He detached the front wheel and padlocked the ten-speed’s frame to a light pole.

He started to relax as he approached his bungalow, the bike’s front wheel on his shoulder.

His front door opened from the inside and the light over the stoop flicked on. Lencheski braced for an attack.

“Getting in a little late, aren’t you, Richard?” Gurevich said. “What have you been up to this evening?”

“Racking up some overtime,” Lencheski said, relieved. “We had a rush order on a wedding cake.”

Gurevich stepped aside. Lencheski entered the bungalow. The place had been tossed, furniture overturned, all his stuff strewn around.

“Did somebody break in here?” Lencheski said.

“Yeah, me,” Gurevich said. “These crappy locks of yours, all I needed was a credit card. Probably don’t see many of those in this neighborhood, though. Don’t you have anything worth stealing here, Richard?”

“Just my bike and my TV is all.”

“What about a camera? Maybe with a telephoto lens?”

“What’s this about, Mr. Gurevich? What are you looking for?”

“We’ll talk after I finish my inspection.”

Gurevich walked into the bedroom.

Lencheski followed him and watched him yank the dresser drawers out, dumping their contents on the floor.

Gurevich kicked apart the jumble of T-shirts, socks, and shorts with his shoe. He turned his attention to the closet, rattling wire hangers as he pulled pants and coat pockets inside out.

Lencheski said, “Like I said before, I don’t keep any contraband here, Mr. Gurevich.”

“Keep your mouth shut until I tell you different,” Gurevich said. The camera is probably in his locker at the bakery, he thought. If I find it, he’s going back inside on the next bus.

He looked at the bowl-shaped piece of frosted glass that shielded the overhead lightbulbs. There was a dark rectangular shadow behind it.

Gurevich dragged a chair over and stood on it, retrieving the hidden object. A moment later he stepped back down, staring at the bottle of terpin hydrate and codeine elixir in his hand.

“I never saw that before,” Lencheski said.

Gurevich slipped the codeine into his pocket. He grabbed Lencheski by the collar and punched him under the heart. Lencheski cawed in distress and jackknifed forward.

Gurevich took hold of Lencheski’s greasy hair, yanked him upright, and said, “What’d I tell you about talking?”

Lencheski struggled to reinflate his lungs, his eyes and nose streaming. Gurevich shoved him into the nearest corner and resumed his search.

He flipped Lencheski’s stained mattress off its metal frame.

There was a pink pastry box from Dharma Buns under the bed. Gurevich opened the box and looked inside.

It was a cake with white butter frosting, its top bearing a photo-realistic image of a little redheaded girl on a playground swing set. Her denim skirt was billowing high on her thighs, her legs akimbo.

Her feet and ankles had been partially eaten away. The tines of a fork had scored deep gouges into her abdomen.

It was a likeness of nine-year-old Annie Gurevich, a candid shot taken during recess at her school.

Gurevich came into the office a half hour late the next day and told Tasha to reschedule all his interviews.

He closed the door to his cubicle and booted up his computer. When the California Department of Justice site came up, he launched the appropriate application and typed in Richard Lencheski’s parole number and the code number of his electronic surveillance anklet.

Seconds later a map of Hollywood and West Los Angeles appeared on his monitor. The map showed a series of yellow dots superimposed on a grid of city streets, along with a time code. Annie’s school was at the terminus of the dots.

Gurevich was still staring at the electronic map overlay five minutes later when Tasha transferred a call from the West L.A. Sheriff’s homicide dicks.

Gurevich took the call, listened for a moment, and said, “Yeah, he’s one of mine, all right.”

He checked out a Chevy and drove to Lencheski’s bungalow. When he arrived at the cul-de-sac, Sheila Halpert and her supporters were nowhere to be seen.

Today’s crowd consisted of two sheriff’s radio cars, an SUV from the Scientific Investigations Unit, and a white panel van from the medical examiner’s office.

Gurevich showed his credentials to the scene control officer and signed the log. He ducked under the yellow police line tape, and went into Lencheski’s bungalow.

He followed the sound of voices into the bedroom. Two sheriff’s detectives were standing over Lencheski’s corpse.

The older of the two men was a friend.

Joe Coyne had been one of Gurevich’s training officers when he started with the sheriff’s. Joe was beefier now, but still looked like the UCLA wrestler he had once been. The other detective was Bert Engelman, a twenty-something ex-marine, Coyne’s latest detective trainee.

He shook hands with both men as Joe introduced Gurevich to his partner. “I knew Bill when he used to work for a living,” Coyne said.

Gurevich avoided looking at Lencheski’s body and said, “What can I tell you? I got too old to chase ’em. Now all I do is check their ear tags.”

“Somebody tagged this homeboy real good,” Engelman said. “Beat the crap out of him, then crammed cake and frosting down his gullet until he suffocated.”

“Sweets to the sweet, huh?” Gurevich said.

The medical examiner yanked a probe out of the dead man’s liver and made a note.

Lencheski’s face was smeared with cake and frosting, his eyes open, his dislocated jaw agape. What remained of the cake was still in its box at Lencheski’s side, smashed, the picture on its top obliterated.

“Anybody you like for this?” Joe Coyne said.

Gurevich said, “You know about the Halpert woman, right?”

“She was the first one I thought of too,” Coyne said, “but we can place her with her husband last night. He’s LAPD, a lieutenant at Newton Division. They were in Palm Springs when this went down, attending the D.A.R.E. To Keep Kids Off Drugs Golf Tournament.”

“Hell of an alibi,” Gurevich said.

“Partner, give us a minute, okay?” Coyne said.

Engelman stepped out of the room. Coyne took Gurevich’s arm and led him a few steps away, out of the ME’s hearing.

“I hear what you’re saying,” Coyne said. “Maybe it’s too good. Maybe the husband leveraged a snitch or another ex-con into whacking Lencheski for him. Or hell, maybe it was one of the wife’s supporters.”

Gurevich said, “Yeah, any of that’s plausible.”

“Between you and me, though, this diaper-sniper son of a bitch got what he deserved,” Coyne said. “He molested a cop’s kid. So screw him, I’m writing this one up as a bottom-of-the-pile residential burglary gone wrong.”

“I’ve got no problem with that,” Gurevich said.

“Glad you feel that way, Bill,” Coyne said. “LAPD or sheriff’s or corrections, none of that interagency turf war crap matters now. This one’s still in the family. And we take care of our own, right?”

Gurevich watched the ME’s men wrap Lencheski’s body in a sheet and lift it onto their gurney.

“If we don’t, who will?” he said.