The Late Show

11

Ballard sat in the van at the Mulholland Overlook about two blocks from Wrightwood Drive. It was a clear night and the lights of the Valley spread out to infinity toward the north. She had her rover on and tuned to the North Hollywood Division dispatch frequency. She didn’t have to wait long. A radio call went out to all patrol units, reporting a possible prowler and home break-in on Wrightwood. A patrol unit accepted the call and asked where they would meet the person who reported the incident. The dispatcher said the call came from a passing motorist who declined to identify herself.

After another thirty seconds went by, Ballard keyed her rover. She identified herself to dispatch as a Hollywood Division detective who was in the area and would respond to the call as well. Dispatch repeated the information to the responding patrol unit so the officers would know that there was a friendly in the neighborhood. The dispatcher then called for an air unit to fly over the hillside neighborhood with its powerful spotlight.

Ballard pulled away from the overlook and headed to Wrightwood. As she dropped down the steep street and took the first curve, she saw a patrol car — its blue lights engaged — parked a block away. She flashed her beams as she approached and stopped the van alongside the cruiser. Two officers were getting out. Since she was in her personal car, she held her badge out the window so they could confirm she was a cop. They were from North Hollywood Division, so they were strangers to Ballard.

“Hey, guys,” she said. “I was passing through and heard the call. Want some help or you’ve got it handled?”

“Not sure what there is to handle,” said one of the officers. “Whoever called it in is GOA and we don’t know exactly where this prowler was. Seems like a bullshit call.”

“Maybe,” Ballard said. “But I’ve got a few minutes. I’m going to pull over.”

She parked behind the patrol car and got out with a flashlight in one hand and the rover in the other. After introductions were made, Ballard volunteered to head up the street, knocking on doors and checking houses. The two patrol officers would work their way down the street. They had just split up when a helicopter came over the crest of the mountain and put its light down on the street. Ballard waved her own light up at it and proceeded up the street.

Thomas Trent’s house was the third house she came to. There were no lights on inside that she could see. She used the butt of the metal flashlight to bang loudly on the door. She waited but no one came. She knocked again and when she was satisfied there was no one home, she stepped back to the street and started sweeping the front of the house with her light as if checking for signs of a break-in.

Ballard turned and looked down the street. She could see the flashlights of the two patrol officers on opposite sides of Wrightwood. They were checking houses and moving further away from her. The chopper had banked out and was following the curve of the hillside, training its light on the back of the homes. Ballard saw an alcove where trash cans were kept and beyond it a gate. She knew it blocked access to a set of steps that led down the side of Trent’s house. It was a code requirement that hillside houses have a secondary means of access in case of fire or other emergency. She quickly moved around the trash cans to see if Trent had put a lock on the gate and she found that he had not. She opened it and started moving down the stairs.

Almost immediately her movements engaged a motion-activated light that illuminated the stairway. She brought her hand up and held it out to block the light, pretending to be blinded. She looked up through her spread fingers and checked the exterior of the house for any cameras. She saw nothing and dropped her hand. Satisfied that her image was not being recorded, she proceeded down the stairs.

The stairway had landings at two lower levels of the house, giving access to decks that ran across the rear of the structure. Ballard stepped onto the first level down and saw it was furnished with outdoor furniture and a barbecue grill. There were four sliding doors and she checked these but found them locked. She put her beam on the glass but curtains had been drawn behind the doors and she could not see inside the house.

Ballard quickly returned to the stairs and went down to the lowest level, where the deck was much smaller and there were only two sliding doors. As she approached the glass, she saw the curtain inside was only halfway extended across the door. She pointed her light at the gap and saw that the room beyond was almost empty. There was a straight-backed wooden chair at the center with a small table next to it. There appeared to be nothing else in the room.

As she swept the beam across the room, she was momentarily startled by a flash but then realized the entire wall to the right was a mirror. It was her own light that she had seen.

Ballard tried the door and found it unlocked, but after she started to slide it open, it abruptly stopped moving. She shone her light down into the door track and saw that there was a sawed-off broomstick placed in the inside track to prevent the door from being opened from the outside.

“Shit,” Ballard whispered.

She knew she didn’t have a lot of time before the patrol officers doubled back to check on her. She swept the flashlight across the room one more time and then moved down the deck to get a better angle on a partially opened door inside the house at the far side of the room. Through the opening she could see a hallway and part of a staircase going up to the next level of the house. She noticed a rectangular shape on the floor in the small alcove next to the stairs. She thought it might be a trapdoor leading to the foundation of the structure.

She walked out to the edge of the deck and pointed the light down over the railing. The beam shone on a lower platform on which the house’s air conditioner unit sat. Ballard realized that there must be access to the equipment from beneath the house.

“Find anything?”

Ballard turned quickly from the railing. One of the patrol officers had come down the steps — the older, senior officer with four hash marks on his sleeve. His name was Sasso. He raised his light and pointed it at her.

Ballard raised her hand to block the glare.

“Do you mind?” she said.

He lowered the flashlight.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No, nothing,” she said. “The gate up top was open, so I thought maybe somebody came down here. But it doesn’t look like anybody’s even living here.”

She flashed her beam on the glass doors, revealing the room that contained only the chair and table. Sasso directed his light through the door as well, then looked back at Ballard. His face was in shadow now.

“So you were just in the neighborhood?” he asked.

“I had a meeting down in the Valley and was heading over the hill,” Ballard said. “I work the late show and was going in early. You heard about the club shooting last night on Sunset? I wanted to see what they were putting out in roll call about it.”

“And you cross over on Wrightwood to get to Hollywood?”

There was a clear note of suspicion in his voice. Sasso had twenty years in, according to his sleeves. He had probably been party to more than a few radio calls staged by detectives to create reason to case a house. It was called ghosting.

“Things were moving slow on Laurel Canyon, so I hopped over to Vineland and it brought me up here,” she said. “I was going to shoot over to Outpost and take that down.”

Sasso nodded, but Ballard suspected he wasn’t buying it.

“We’re going to clear,” he said. “We’re stacking legit calls and need to get to them.”

It was his way of chastising her for wasting their time.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m out of here too.”

“I’ll call off the bird,” he said.

Sasso headed back up the stairs. Ballard took one more glimpse over the deck rail before following him. She pointed her light down and saw no exterior access to the platform holding the air conditioning unit below. She was sure that access came from both inside and underneath the house.

At the top she pulled the gate closed and put the trash cans back into place as she had first seen them. She then walked back down the street to her van. The patrol car behind her made a three-point turn and went down the hill. Ballard heard the sound of the helicopter tailing away into the night. She considered returning to Trent’s house to make an attempt to get down to the utility platform, but Sasso’s suspicions gave her pause. He and his partner might double back to see if she had lingered in the neighborhood.

She started the van and headed up to Mulholland. Just as she had told Sasso, she took it to Outpost, passing intermittent vistas of the lighted city below, and then dropped down into Hollywood. She was on Sunset a few blocks from Wilcox when her phone buzzed. It was the return call from Jorge Fernandez of the Valley Bureau vice unit. Ballard thanked him for calling back and briefly described the case she was working with an assault victim she was unable to speak to.

“So how can I help you?” Fernandez asked.

Ballard noticed as she passed the Dancers that an FSD van was parked out front, and through the open front doors she could see bright lights inside — the kind used at crime scenes. She wondered what could be going on there twenty hours after the crime.

“Hey, Ballard, you there?” Fernandez prompted.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” she said. “So I have this guy. I wouldn’t call him a suspect yet. Let’s say he’s more on the level of a person of interest.”

“Okay, and what’s it got to do with me?”

“You arrested him three years ago on a vice sting up on Sepulveda Boulevard.”

“I’ve arrested a lot of people up there. What’s his name?”

Ballard turned down Wilcox toward the station.

“Thomas Trent,” she said.

There was a pause before Fernandez responded.

“Nothing,” he said. “Rings no bells.”

Ballard gave him the date of the arrest, said it was at the Tallyho and that Trent was the guy who had brass knuckles in his pockets.

“Oh, yeah, that guy,” Fernandez said. “I remember the brass knuckles. They had words on them.”

“What words?” Ballard asked. “What do you mean?”

“Shit, I can’t remember. But each one had a word on it so that it would leave a mark or a bruise that said the word.”

“There wasn’t a description in the arrest report. It just said brass knuckles.”

“I’m thinking... ”

“Were you with a partner? You think he would know? It could be important.”

“It was a task force. The whole unit was out there. I can ask around, see who remembers.”

“Well, tell me about the arrest if you can. This guy brought brass knuckles to a motel room where he thought there would be an underage prostitute, and he ends up on probation. How does that happen?”

“Good lawyer, I guess.”

“Seriously? You can’t give me anything else?”

“Well, we were setting up in the room because we had one of these creeps coming at ten, but then there’s a knock on the door at nine and it’s your guy — Brass Knuckles. We were like, what the fuck is this? So we jammed him and found the brass knuckles in the pocket of his jacket. I remember he had an excuse — he said he was like a used-car salesman or something and went on test-drives with sketchy people and needed something to protect himself.”

“Brass knuckles?”

“I’m only telling you what he said.”

“Okay, okay — what happened next?”

“Well, it was a wobbler. We thought he was probably our ten-o’clock guy but we couldn’t connect him to the script we had running, so we—”

“What script?”

“That’s what we called the conversations we were working on the Internet. So we didn’t have intent. We called our filing D.A. and told him what we had and how we weren’t sure he was the one from the script. The D.A. said to arrest him for the knuckles and if we connected him later, we could add it on. So we booked him as instructed and that was it.”

“Was there ever any further work on connecting him to the script?”

“Look — it’s Ballard, right?”

“Yeah, Ballard.”

“You have any idea how time-consuming it is to do a computer-to-computer verification? And this guy worked in a car dealership where he had access to computers on every fricking desk. We had him on the knuckles and we booked it as a felony. That was it. We had other fish to fry.”

Ballard nodded to herself. She knew how the system worked. There were too many cases, too many variables, too many legal rules. They got Trent on a felony and that was one more dirtbag off the street. It was time to move on and get the next one.

“Okay, thanks for the call back,” she said. “This helps. Do me a favor — if anybody in the unit remembers what was on the knuckles or anybody happened to take pictures, let me know. It could help the case.”

“You got it, Ballard.”

Ballard pulled into the gated entrance to the station’s rear parking lot and held her ID out the window to the electronic reader. The steel wall rolled away and she entered and started cruising the lot, looking for a spot to park. The lot was often more crowded at night because there were fewer cars in the field.

She entered the station through the back door and saw two drunks cuffed to the lockup bench. Both had vomited on the floor between their feet. Ballard was carrying her suit. She went down the rear hallway and upstairs to the locker room to change.

The detective bureau was deserted as usual when she got there. Because she had no assigned desk, she had to check the receptionist’s desk to see if there were any messages for her. There was one pink slip: a call had come in at four p.m. from an 888 area code. The name scribbled on the caller line looked like Nerf Cohen, a name she didn’t recognize. Ballard took it back to her regular workstation and sat down.

Before checking out the message, she opened the photo archive on her cell phone and swiped back through her pictures until she came to the close-up shots she had taken of the bruising on Ramona Ramone’s torso. She used her thumb and finger to enlarge each photograph to look for any indications of a pattern in the bruising that she had deduced had come from brass knuckles. She wasn’t sure if it was the power of suggestion coming from Fernandez’s information, but she now thought she could see what she had not noticed before in the hospital. She thought she saw distinctive patterns in the bruises on the right and left sides of the torso. Not enough to make out words but she believed she could see the letter C or O on the left side and either an N or a V on the right side. She realized that the markings she was looking at, if they were words, would likely appear backward in bruising if they read the right way on the attacker’s fists.

Still, the bruising patterns were significant. What Ballard was looking at wasn’t scientific or remotely conclusive but it was a little piece of the puzzle that seemed to fit with Trent, and therefore it gave her a nice jolt of momentum. She decided it was time to start committing her investigative moves — the legal ones, at least — to a digital record. She checked the clock over the television screens on the far wall and saw that it was an hour till the late show roll call. She could get a lot done in that time. She went to work, starting an Investigator’s Chronology, even though it would not be the first document in the file. She knew from long experience that the chrono was the written centerpiece of a case.

She was a half hour into her work when her phone buzzed with a call from a blocked number. She answered.

“This is Ballard.”

“Good and evil.”

She recognized the voice of Jorge Fernandez. Her voice jumped up a notch with excitement.

“That was on the knuckles?”

“Yep. I asked the guys and somebody remembered. Good and evil, the constant battle within man. You get it?”

“I get it.”

“Does it help?”

“I think so. Can you give me the name of the officer who remembered? I might need it.”

“That would be Dapper Dave Allmand. We call him that ’cause he’s got a certain sartorial style. This is vice but he thinks it’s a fucking fashion show.”

“Got it. And thanks, Fernandez. I owe you one.”

“Happy hunting, Ballard.”

After disconnecting, Ballard pulled up the photos of Ramona Ramone’s bruises on her phone again. Now she could see it: the double O in GOOD and the V in EVIL. They read the same backward or forward.

Ballard knew that it was highly unlikely that Trent would have gotten back the brass knuckles he had been arrested with. After three years, they would have been destroyed by the property unit. But if the weapons were part of a paraphilia — in this case, a sadomasochistic fantasy — it was not a stretch to believe he would go back to wherever he got the original set and buy a duplicate pair.

The adrenaline jolt Ballard had felt earlier now turned into a locomotive charging through her veins. To her mind, Trent was no longer just a person of interest. The train had gone by that stop. She believed he was her man, and there was nothing quite like that moment of knowing. It was the Holy Grail of detective work. It had nothing to do with evidence or legal procedure or probable cause. It was just knowing it in your gut. Nothing in her life beat it. It had been a long time coming to her on the late show but now she felt it and she knew deep down it was the reason she would never quit, no matter where they put her or what they said about her.