The Late Show

13

Ballard knew something about the social structure of the city’s teeming homeless encampments. Both the city and the department had been attacked and sued by civil rights groups for ill-advised handling of encounters with homeless people and their communities. It had resulted in problem-specific sensitivity training and what amounted to a hands-off policy. She had learned from those sessions that a homeless encampment evolves much like a city, with a need for a social and government hierarchy that provided services like security, decision-making, and waste management. Many had individuals who served as mayors, sheriffs, and judges. As Ballard moved into the Heliotrope encampment, she was looking for the sheriff.

Other than the constant sound of traffic on the freeway overhead, it was all quiet in the camp. It was after midnight, the temperature was dropping into the fifties, and the inhabitants were mostly hunkered down and bracing for another night facing the elements, with walls made of plastic tarp or, if they were lucky, the aluminum shell of a camper.

Ballard noticed one man moving through what looked like a debris field where the people who lived off the trash of others threw their own trash. He was buckling his belt and his zipper was down. When he looked up from the operation and saw Ballard, he startled.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“LAPD. Who the fuck are you?”

“Well, I live here.”

“Are you the sheriff? I’m looking for somebody in charge.”

“I’m not the sheriff but I got the night shift.”

“Really? You’re security?”

“That’s me.”

Ballard pulled her badge off her belt and held it up.

“Ballard, LAPD.”

“Uh, Denver. People call me Denver.”

“Okay, Denver. I don’t want to hassle anybody. I just need your help.”

“Okay.”

Denver stepped forward and put out his hand. Ballard held back from openly cringing. Luckily she was holding her rover in her right hand and avoided the outstretched hand.

“Elbow bump, Denver,” she said.

She offered her elbow but Denver didn’t know what to do with it.

“Okay, never mind that,” she said. “Let’s just talk. The reason I’m here is I think one of your citizens is in the hospital, hurt really bad. I want to find her place here. Can you help me?”

“Who is it? We have people come and go. Sometimes they just leave their stuff.”

“Her name’s Ramona Ramone. Kinda short Spanish girl? She said she lived here.”

“Yeah, I know Ramona. But one thing you should know — she’s a man.”

“Yes, I know that. She was born a man but identifies as a woman.”

That seemed to confuse Denver so Ballard moved on.

“So she lives here?”

“Well, she did. She was gone like a week and we didn’t think she was coming back. Like I said, people come and go, just leave their shit behind. So somebody took her spot, you know what I mean? That’s how it works around here. You snooze, you lose.”

“Which spot was it?”

“She was in the ’seventy-four Midas at the front of the wagon train.”

He pointed toward the ragtag line of RVs parked along the curb in front of the open encampment area. The first RV was a dirty white camper with a Dodge van cab. There was a faded-orange accent stripe down the side and a plastic American flag draped over the back edge of the roof as a leak stopper. From the outside, the vehicle showed every bit of its forty years.

“I heard she bought it from the previous guy for four hundred bucks and then he moved into the jungle.”

Denver now pointed toward the encampment. It was clear that the RVs, no matter how decrepit and despairing, were the choice habitats in the community. A cottage industry had recently arisen in which old inoperable campers were pulled out of junkyards and backyards, towed to street parking locations under freeways or in industrial areas, and sold cheap or even rented to homeless people. They were passed from hand to hand and were often the subject of ownership fights and unlawful evictions. The department was in the process of putting together a task force to deal with this and the many other issues of the city’s growing homeless population — the largest west of New York City.

“How long was she there?” Ballard asked.

“A year or thereabouts,” Denver said.

“Is somebody in there now?”

“Yeah, a guy. Stormy Monday took it.”

“That’s the name he uses?”

“Yeah. People ’round here use a lot of different names, you know? They’ve left their other names behind.”

“Got it. Let’s go talk to Stormy. I’ve got to look inside.”

“He’s not a happy guy when you wake him up. They call him Stormy Monday but he’s kind of a dick every single day.”

“I know the type. We’ll deal with that, Denver.”

As she started toward the front of the train of RVs, she brought her rover up and called in a request for a backup. She was given an ETA of four minutes.

“You know, when police come around here, it makes people upset,” Denver said after she lowered the radio.

“I understand,” Ballard said. “We don’t want to cause any problems. But it will be up to Stormy Monday.”

Ballard had a small tactical light in her pocket that she had gotten out of the glove box of her car. The butt end was a heavy steel point. She used it to rap on the door of the Dodge Midas. She then stepped a comfortable four feet back and two to the left. She noticed that there was no handle on the door, just two holes through which were threaded the links of a steel chain. It was a way to lock the vehicle when you were inside it as well as out.

There was no answer and no movement from the RV.

“It looks like somebody’s locked in,” Ballard said.

“Yeah, he’s in there,” Denver said.

Ballard rapped harder on the door this time. The sound echoed off the concrete overhead and could be heard well above the din of the freeway.

“Hey, Stormy!” Denver called out. “Come on out here a minute.”

A patrol car cruised slowly down Heliotrope, and Ballard flicked her light at it. The car pulled to a stop in the street beside the Midas. The two female blue suiters from roll call got out. Herrera was the lead and her partner was Dyson.

“Ballard, what’ve we got?” Herrera asked.

“Gotta roust a guy in here,” Ballard said. “Denver here says he’s not going to be happy.”

The RV’s springs were shot after so many decades of use. The vehicle started to creak and move as soon as there was movement inside. Then, from the other side of the door came a voice.

“Yeah, what do you want?”

Denver stepped in unbidden.

“Hey, Stormy, you got the police out here. They want to see inside the crib on account of Ramona used to live here.”

“Yeah, she ain’t livin’ here now,” Stormy replied. “I’m sleeping.”

“Open the door, sir,” Ballard said loudly.

“You have a warrant or something? I know my rights.”

“We don’t need a warrant. We need you to open the door, or what we’ll do is tow this vehicle with you in it to the police yard, where the door will be forcibly opened and you’ll be arrested for obstructing an investigation. You’ll be in county jail and this prime spot will go to somebody else. Is that what you want, sir?”

Ballard thought she had covered everything. She waited. Herrera stepped away to listen to a call on her shoulder mic. Dyson stayed with Ballard. Thirty seconds went by and then Ballard heard the rattle of the chain inside the door. Stormy Monday was opening up.

Based on the moniker and the prep that he was an angry guy, Ballard was expecting a big man to come out of the trailer, ready for confrontation. Instead, a small man with glasses and a gray beard stepped out with his hands up. Ballard told him to put his hands down and walked him over to Dyson and Herrera, who had returned to the group. Ballard questioned him about the ownership of the RV and its contents. The man, who identified himself as Cecil Beatty, said he had moved in only two days earlier, and that was after the RV had been picked through by others. He said that he didn’t think there were any belongings left that had been Ramona Ramone’s.

Ballard told the patrol officers to watch Beatty while she took a look inside the RV. She put on latex gloves and went up the two steps and in. She swept her light across a small two-room space that was littered with junk and smelled as sour as the Hollywood Station drunk tank on a Sunday morning. Ballard put her mouth and nose into the crook of her elbow as she moved through the debris that littered every surface and the floor. She saw nothing that stood out as possibly belonging to Ramona Ramone. She moved through the first room and into the back room, which essentially consisted of a queen-size bed piled with darkly stained sheets and blankets. She nearly lost it when the sheets suddenly moved and she realized there was someone in the bed.

“Dyson, come here,” Ballard called. “Now!”

Behind her, Ballard heard the officer enter the RV. She kept her light on the face of the woman in the bed. She was bedraggled, her hair in unkempt dreadlocks. There were scabs on her face and neck. A person at the dead end of addiction.

“Take her out of here,” Ballard said.

Dyson moved in, yanked back the sheets, and pulled the woman, who was fully clothed in multiple layers of sweaters and jackets, off the bed. She walked her out and Ballard continued to search.

Seeing nothing that was of value to her investigation, she backed out of the bedroom area. There was a kitchenette section opposite what once was a tiny bathroom but had long since gone unused. The two-burner grill was probably now used mostly to cook spoons of heroin or crystal meth. Ballard started opening the overhead cabinets, half expecting to find rats skittering in the back shadows. Instead, she found a small empty box that had once held a disposable phone. The box looked fairly new, unlike the rest of the junk in the RV.

Ballard stepped out of the RV and over to where Beatty and the woman were standing, heads down, next to the two unies. She held the box up to Beatty.

“Is this yours?” she asked.

Beatty looked at it and then looked away.

“Nope, not mine,” he said. “That was there.”

“Was it Ramona’s?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I never saw it before.”

Ballard assumed that the box had belonged to Ramona. If there was anything on or in the box that revealed a serial or product number, then she had a shot at running down calls made on the phone even though the phone itself was missing and supposedly untraceable. If there were calls that linked Ramona to Trent, then that evidence would be usable at trial, and the whole roust, and her breathing in the putrid air of the RV, would not be for naught.

“Okay, thank you for your cooperation,” she said.

She gave Herrera and Dyson the nod to release the two inhabitants of the RV and they immediately scurried back inside. She then turned to Denver and signaled him over for a private discussion.

“Thank you for your help on this, Denver. I appreciate it.”

“No problem. That’s my job here.”

“When we first talked about Ramona, you said she had been gone a week.”

“Yeah, we have a rule. Nobody squats in another guy’s spot unless they haven’t been around for four days. ’Cause you know, people get arrested, and that can take you out for seventy-two hours. So we wait four days before a spot is up for grabs.”

“So you’re sure she was gone four days before Stormy moved in two days ago?”

“I’m sure. Yeah.”

Ballard nodded. It was an indication that Ramona might have been held captive by her attacker for as long as five days of pain and torture before being dumped in the parking lot the previous night and left for dead. It was a grim thought to consider.

Ballard thanked Denver again and this time she shook his hand. She wasn’t sure if he noticed that she still had the latex gloves on.

Back at the Hollywood Station by 1:30 a.m., Ballard wandered through the watch office before heading back to the D bureau. Munroe was at his desk and another officer was at the report-writing desk at the far end of the room.

“Anything happening?” she asked.

“Quiet,” Munroe said. “After last night, I’ll take it.”

“The crims are still at the Dancers?”

“I wouldn’t know. The forensic unit doesn’t answer to me.”

“Well, maybe since it’s so slow, I’ll go over and see if they need some help.”

“Not ours, Ballard. You need to stay here just in case.”

“Just in case of what?”

“In case we need you.”

Ballard had no intention of going by the Dancers. She had just wanted to see how Munroe would react, and his agitation and quick response confirmed that he had gotten word to keep Ballard and possibly all Hollywood Division personnel away from that crime scene.

Munroe tried to change the subject.

“How’s your victim?” he asked.

“Hanging in there,” Ballard said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Looks like she’s going to make it. I’m worried the suspect might get wind and try to finish the job.”

“What, he’s going to sneak into the hospital? Smother the vic with a pillow?”

“I don’t know, maybe. There hasn’t been any press on the case but—”

“You’ve watched The Godfather too many times. If this is about me putting somebody on this whore’s door, it’s not going to happen, Ballard. Not from my end. I’ve got no people for that. I’m not going to leave myself short on the street to have a guy twiddling his thumbs or making time at the nurses’ station. You can shoot a request down to Metro Division, but if you ask me, they’ll evaluate this and take a pass too.”

“Okay. Got it.”

When she returned to her borrowed desk in the detective bureau, Ballard put down the phone box she had collected from the RV and was prepared to spend the rest of her shift attempting to trace the phone it had once contained. But then she saw the pink message slip she had picked up earlier. She sat down and lifted the desk phone. Calling the number in the middle of the night did not give her pause. It was a toll-free number, which meant it most likely connected to a business. It would be either open or closed, so she would not be waking anybody up in the middle of the night.

While she waited for the call to go through, she once again tried to decipher the name written on the slip of paper. It was impossible. But as soon as her call was answered, she realized who had called and left the message.

“Cardholder services. How can I help you?”

She heard an English-Indian accent — like from the men from Mumbai that she had spoken to on Mrs. Lantana’s phone the night before.

“May I speak to Irfan?”

“Which one? We have three.”

Ballard looked at the pink slip. It looked like it said Cohen. She turned the C to a K and thought she had it.

“Khan. Irfan Khan.”

“Hold the line, please.”

Thirty seconds later, a new voice came on the line and Ballard thought she recognized it.

“This is Detective Ballard, Los Angeles Police Department. You left a message for me.”

“Yes, Detective. We spoke on the phone a little over twenty-four hours ago. I tracked you down.”

“Yes, you did. Why?”

“Because I have received permission to share with you the intended delivery address of the attempted fraudulent purchase on the credit card that was stolen.”

“You got court approval?”

“No, my department head gave me approval. I went to him and said we should do this because you were very insistent, you see.”

“To be honest, I am surprised. Thank you for following up.”

“Not a problem. Happy to help.”

“What is the address, then?”

Khan gave her an apartment number and address on Santa Monica Boulevard and Ballard could tell it was not far from El Centro Avenue and the home of Leslie Anne Lantana. It was probably walking distance.

Ballard checked the urge to tell Khan that the chances of her being able to make an arrest on the case were hampered by the twenty-four-hour delay in getting the address. Instead, she thanked him for pursuing the matter with the department head and ended the call.

She then grabbed her rover and the key to the plain wrap and headed for the door.