The Late Show

34

Ballard was twenty minutes late getting to Men’s Central Jail, but Compton was there, waiting for her. They signed in and Ballard stowed her backup gun in a locker before they were placed in an interview room to wait while Christopher Nettles was located and brought to them.

“How are we going to do this?” Ballard asked.

“Let me do the talking,” Compton said. “He knows I’m the one with the power. I filed on him with the gun. That’s our currency.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

While they waited, Compton reached over and lifted Ballard’s hands and somberly studied the bandages on her wrists.

“I know, it looks like I tried to end it all,” she said. “I’ll only need the bandages for a week.”

“The bastard,” Compton said. “I’m just glad you put him down.”

Ballard told Compton the short version of what had happened with Trent and how an illegal leak to the Times had bent the story against her. Compton shook his head. Ballard decided not to tell him about how the rough sex they had had Saturday morning had hindered the ability of the RTC nurse to determine if she had been raped. That discussion could keep for another time.

The conversation as it was ended when the door opened and Nettles was escorted in by two jail deputies. He immediately objected to the presence of Ballard, claiming that she had mistreated him during his arrest.

“Sit down and shut up,” Compton said sternly. “You don’t get to decide things like that.”

The deputies put him in a chair and locked one of his wrists to a steel ring at the center of the table.

“So what do you want?” Nettles said.

Compton waited until the deputies stepped out.

“Do you have any idea about your situation, Christopher?” he asked. “You’re going up in front of a judge tomorrow. Has a lawyer been by to talk to you?”

“Not yet,” Nettles said.

He flicked his cuffed hand in a gesture that suggested he wasn’t worried.

“Well, the reason you haven’t seen a lawyer is that a lawyer isn’t going to be able to help you,” Compton said. “Your parole has been revoked and you’re going back up to Corcoran, and there isn’t a damn thing a lawyer can do about it.”

“I only had a bullet left,” Nettles said. “I can do that, no sweat off my balls.”

He looked at Ballard as he said it. Ballard knew that a bullet was a year in the pen.

“And what? You think the D.A.’s going to just let all those burglaries slide?” Compton asked.

“What I hear people saying in here is that all the D.A.’ll do is stack ’em right next to my current situation, and I won’t do an extra day on account of overcrowding,” Nettles said. “How ’bout that?”

“Then how about the felon with a gun charge I just added to your résumé? That’s five years stacked on top of the bullet. You can do that, no sweat off your balls?”

“The fuck you talking about, man?”

“I’m talking about a plus-five.”

“That’s bullshit!”

Nettles shook the handcuff violently. He pointed his free hand at Ballard.

“This is because of you, bitch!” he yelled.

“Don’t blame me for your crimes,” Ballard threw back at him. “Blame yourself.”

Ballard kept her hands on her lap and below the table. She was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, but she didn’t want to risk Nettles seeing the bandages around her wrists and asking questions.

“Look, Christopher, why do you think we’re here?” Compton said. “You think we get off on giving you the bad news?”

“Probably,” Nettles said. “She does.”

“Actually, you’re wrong,” Compton said. “We’re not here to bring bad news. We’re the light at the end of your tunnel. We came to help you help yourself.”

Nettles settled down. He knew there was a deal to be made now. He looked suspiciously at Compton.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want to know about the guns,” Compton said. “I want to know where you stole them from. I want addresses, details. You give me that, and we start subtracting from the total. You see?”

Ballard appreciated that Compton was not directly asking about the Glock. It was better not to reveal their specific intention to Nettles. The ex-con might then attempt to manipulate the interview.

“I don’t know, man,” Nettles whined. “How am I supposed to remember addresses?”

“Think,” Compton said. “You must have some idea what houses you hit. Start with the gun you were carrying. The Glock model seventeen. You must’ve liked it, because you didn’t pawn it. Where’d that come from?”

Nettles leaned forward and put the elbow of his free arm down on the table. He used his free hand to work his jaw like The Thinker as he considered the question.

“Well first of all, all three of those guns came from the same house,” he finally said. “I just don’t remember the fucking address. Don’t you people get burglary reports for these things?”

Compton ignored the question.

“What about the street?” he asked. “Do you remember the street name?”

“No, I don’t remember any street name,” Nettles said.

Ballard had connected six of the credit cards found in Nettles’s room at the Siesta Village with burglary reports where no firearms were reported as taken. This meant those victims had either lied about the guns or there was at least one burglary committed by Nettles that was not reported — most likely because a murder weapon had been stolen. The six known cases had all been located on streets a few blocks from the Siesta Village, creating a pattern extending north, east, and west from the motel.

There was no freeway or other impediment to accessing the neighborhood south of the motel, and yet none of the known burglaries had occurred there. This told Ballard that the house they were looking for might be south.

“Did you ever hit any houses south of the motel where you were staying?” Ballard asked.

“South?” Nettles responded. “Uh, yeah, I hit south.”

Compton threw her a look. She wasn’t supposed to ask the questions. But she continued the line of inquiry.

“Okay, how many times did you go south?”

“Once or twice. The houses that way weren’t as nice. People had junk.”

“When did you hit down there?”

“When I first started.”

“Okay, according to the motel, you had been there nine days before your arrest. So in the first couple days, you went south?”

“I guess so.”

“How long have you had the guns?”

“It was one of the first ones.”

“From south of the motel?”

“Yeah, I guess. I think it was the second. Yeah, the second. The guy thought he was real fucking clever hiding the guns behind the books on his shelves, but I always knock the books off the shelves. Right to the floor. People hide all kinds of good shit behind the books. That’s how I found the guns.”

Ballard took out her phone and went to the GPS app. She pulled up a map centered on Santa Monica Boulevard and Wilton Place, where the Siesta Village motel was located. She started reading off the names of streets to the south. Saint Andrews, Western, Ridgewood, Romaine — Nettles kept shaking his head until she came to Sierra Vista.

“Wait,” he said. “Sierra Vista. That sounds familiar. I think that’s it.”

“What did the house look like?” Ballard asked.

“I don’t know, it looked like a house.”

“Did it have a garage?”

“Yeah, a garage in the back. Separate.”

“One floor, two floors?”

“One. I don’t fuck around with two-story jobs.”

“Okay, was it brick, wood structure, what?”

“Not brick.”

“How’d you get in?”

“I went in the backyard, and popped a slider by the pool.”

“Okay, so there was a pool.”

“Yeah, next to the garage.”

“So there was a gate, then? Like a fence around the pool?”

“The whole backyard. It was locked and I climbed over.”

“Was it a wall or a fence?”

“Fence.”

“What color was the fence?”

“It was like gray. Stained gray.”

“How’d you know nobody was home?”

“I was parked on the street and I saw the guy leave.”

“In a car?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of car? What color?”

“It was a Camaro. Yellow. I remember the car. Cool car. I wanted that car.”

“How’d you know the place was empty? Just because the guy drove off didn’t mean the house wasn’t full with a wife and kids.”

“I know, I always knock on the front door. I have a work shirt with my name on the pocket. I act like I’m a gas inspector looking for a leak. If somebody answers, I just go through the motions and go to the next one.”

“So, what did the front door look like?” she asked.

“Uh, it was yellow,” Nettles said. “Yeah, yellow. I remember because it was like the car. The dude liked yellow.”

Ballard and Compton exchanged a look, though they said nothing. They had what they needed for now. A yellow door and yellow car on Sierra Vista. It wouldn’t be hard to find.