The Tin Collector

Chapter 26

They walked down Third Street, through the glare of the movie lights, and settled on a small, dingy bar called the Appaloosa, two blocks south of the Bradbury. The proprietor had made a half-assed decorating attempt at a Mexican motif: table candles with corny glass sombreros, badly painted pictures of Appaloosas with stoic Mexican cowboys or dusty regal hombres from Santa Ana's army looking across prairies or valleys, their heads held high, reeking Hispanic nobility.

"That fucking Schwarzenegger movie is driving me nuts," she said as they slid into a cracked vinyl booth and waved at a Mexican waiter wearing a dirty white coat about the same color as the gray linoleum floor. Mariachi recordings hissed and popped through a bad speaker system. The place was a refried dive.

"Scotch and water," she said.

"Two," he added.

The waiter left and they sat there, each waiting for the other to start. She was pushed back on the ruptured red vinyl seat, as if she were trying to get as far away from him as possible.

"This is your party," she finally said.

"I want to know why you threw my board."

"Ancient history."

"I wanna know, just the same."

"I wanna know why Christie Brinkley can't keep a husband. It's a mystery. Leave it at that."

"You threw my board sixteen years ago, and now you volunteer for this one?"

"I didn't volunteer. I was ordered. I've been out of Internal Affairs for ten years, running a patrol shift down in Southwest. I wanted to stay in the field, but because of you, I ended up getting called back by Tom Mayweather to handle your board. Don't ask me why."

"Tom Mayweather?"

"Yeah. Heard of him?" Cutting sarcasm now, laying it on with a trowel. "He's head of Special Investigations Division. Read your department administration list."

"I heard you volunteered."

"Look, Scully, for whatever it's worth, you don't even remotely interest me anymore. I'm gonna try your BOR in seven days because the Glass House wants me to. Then I'm going back to Southwest Patrol, where I can actually do some honest-to-God police work."

"Why would Tom Mayweather pull you back to handle my board?"

"If I tell you what I think the reason is, it'll just piss you off."

"I'm already pissed off."

"Because I hold the record. I'm the best advocate they ever had down there. I only lost your case and a few others in the time I was in that division. Mayweather wanted the best, so he ordered me back. If that seems egotistical and self-serving tough. That's what I think."

"You know what I think?"

She didn't answer, but sat staring at him with those remarkable laser-blue eyes.

"He pulled you back because you tried me before. Sparks flew back then, and he knew it would piss me off. He's trying to pressure me to turn over that videotape he thinks I have. He thought putting you on the case would up the stakes." He paused while the waiter set down their drinks and left.

"That's your take, because you always put yourself at ground zero," she said. "To everyone else, you're marginal business, just another dumb mistake that needs to be handled in due course. This has been fun. We've had our one drink. Meeting's over, see ya." She took a long swallow, then set the glass down and started to leave.

"Hey, Lexie, I'm not through yet."

"I don't go by 'Lexie,' asshole. The name's Alexa."

"I don't go by 'asshole,' Alexa. The name's Shane."

They sat in silence for a moment.

"So, why did you throw my board?"

"You won't get off that, huh?"

"It's pretty unusual. You're the best advocate down there, the Black Witch of the Division, yet you intentionally let me slide? I want to know why."

"Because I knew Ray Molar was using you. In the years I'd been at IAD, I'd seen a handful of probationers take violence beefs for him… guys he'd handpicked out of the Academy and teamed up with. It became pretty obvious what was happening. He was busting heads and holding court in the street, then getting you dummies to take the heat for him if complaints came down. It was starting to piss me off. Then, when Ray gave the chief advocate that bullshit statement behind my back, saying that you had emotional problems and that he'd been worried about your mental stability, I sorta lost it. Furthermore, I was sure my key wit, that gas-station attendant, was dirty. Ray musta threatened him to get him to say he saw you beat that kid, because he flunked the poly I gave him. The case was an air ball, so I called DeMarco and told him where the holes were."

Shane sat there for a long moment and looked at her. She seemed different, somehow softer, more vulnerable. Maybe it was the low light, or the scotch, or maybe it was what she'd done for him sixteen years ago at some risk to her own career. But he was being compelled to view her in a different way, so he sat there, turning dials, trying to regain some focus on her.

"You just throw cases if they seem wrong to you?"

"Listen, Scully, I know you think Internal Affairs is a sewer full of ladder-climbing politicians who don't care how many cops' careers they wreck."

"And it's not?"

"No, it's not. Don't you think we're drowning in all the politically correct bullshit that goes through this division? The Gay and Lesbian Alliance gets pissed because some cop gets tough trying to bust a two-hundred-pound angel-dusted bull dyke who's brandishing a hammer. The arresting officer ends up putting the bracelets on but has his head opened up in the process. Instead of filing a resisting-arrest charge on the hammer-wielding debutante, the cop gets accused of gay bashing. It's a big news story. Lots of angry meetings in West Hollywood. The L. A. Times does a blue-death dance on the front page, and our fearless leaders dump the whole thing into our basket…

"Or some gangbanger caught standing over a dead body with a smoking MAC-Ten accuses the arresting officer of beating him in the station I-room. The EMTs are called, and the banger doesn't have a mark on him. But the special-interest groups take it to the press racial violence, forced confessions, cops on the rampage. It's a big deal, and everybody knows all the banger is doing is getting back at the cops who busted him. It's total bullshit. My own IOs are telling me the board won't float, but the perp's a minority. The Glass House and the mayor fold like deck chairs, and the whole mess is back in my office.

"After a while you start to sort out the really bad ones, maybe drop a few key pieces of manufactured evidence overboard, impeach one of your own lying wits if you have to, lay back a bit, try and even things out so good cops don't end up paying the price for somebody's political agenda.

"Then along comes a Rodney King, where the cops were dead wrong, and you gotta go to war, kick some ass. The police need policing. A department without self-investigation is bound to become corrupt."

She drained her drink, the ice cube clinking on her teeth. She set the glass down hard on the table, telling him the lecture had ended. "Is that all? Can I go now?"

"Tell me about Calvin Sheets."

"I told you. Calvin was terminated by a good friend of mine, a current advocate named Susan Kellerman. Susan and I were both sergeants in Southwest Patrol, and I recommended her for Internal Affairs. She's not there two weeks and she gets Calvin's board. He was threatening her life with anonymous phone calls all during the investigation, but she couldn't prove it was him. She called me and asked what she should do. I took a ride out to Calvin's house and gave him a heads-up talk. It wasn't pleasant."

"What happened?"

"I just said it wasn't pleasant. Okay?"

"Did Susan tell you everything about his case?"

"In detail. As a matter of fact, I got so mad at Sheets, I worked it for free. Did some IO work in my off-hours to help her."

"What was he charged with?"

"He was shift commander on the Coliseum detail and was keeping bogus time sheets. He had officers listed as 'on duty' who weren't even there. They were kicking back salary and overtime to him. It was a mess more than ten cops involved. His whole shift was signing their own arrest reports 'cause Sheets wasn't around. On top of all that, he was off working a second job at the movie studio, doing security work."

"For Logan Hunter."

"Yeah. The cops on his detail called him Dream Sheets because he was so tired when he finally got to the Coliseum, he would just sleep in his office. He was running the sloppiest PED team I ever saw. His Prostitution Enforcement Detail at the Coliseum was watching the games while the hookers were running wild. There were more blow jobs going on in the parking lot than at a swingers' convention. The Coliseum Commission was enraged. We had dozens of letters from those guys. Calvin's board took two days, and Susan got his tin. Eight of the ten cops he was supervising got terminated with him. Two rookies survived but were given six-month mandatory suspensions. It was a disaster for the city. Calvin called me up after he got terminated… told me he would pick a time when I wasn't looking and pay me back with interest. I can hardly wait for him to try. Total sleaze."

Shane sat across the table, absentmindedly twirling a red swizzle stick between his fingers.

"Stop playing with that, will you? It's making me nervous."

He put the stick in the ashtray. "Doesn't any of this seem strange to you? Add what I have to what you just told me, and it starts to reek. All these Internal Affairs cases, Ray's den and the H Street Bounty Hunters… a banger named Sol Preciado was doing assaults at the Coliseum; Calvin Sheets was failing to supervise his PED team down there, his fingerprints were on that videotape box, in an Arrowhead house where I think prostitutes were screwing guys that Sheets and Ray were blackmailing…"

"You've gotta connect the dots, Shane. You haven't done that. It's called police work."

"I know, but don't you think a lot of this is damn strange?"

She sat looking at him for a long moment. Finally she nodded her head slowly. "Drucker's case is going to a board tomorrow."

"No, it's not. Mayweather just got an extension pushing it back to the twenty-third. If you're so concerned about policing the police, why not work on this?"

"Because I'm on the other side of your case. I'm prosecuting you. How on earth can I help you?"

"I won't tell if you won't." He grinned.

"Tell you what, tomorrow I'll ask a few questions, just for the hell of it."

"I think we should talk to Sol Preciado. He's a witness in Drucker's case. Why don't we go out to juvie and sit him down."

"When were you planning for us to do that?"

"Now. Let's do it now. You've got an advocate card; the jail warden won't question it. Let's get him in an I-room at juvie hall and play 'I've Got a Secret.' Bluff him, see what he knows."

She sat looking at him, not answering or reacting to the suggestion.

"If we get nothing, I promise I'll leave you alone." Then he added, "You won't have to see me again till my board."

"We've gotta get one thing straight first," she said. "I want an unequivocal promise that you're not gonna use what I just told you about your old BOR against me."

"Alexa, I was never gonna use that. You may think I'm an asshole, but at least I'm an asshole with principles. You did me1/2 a favor. I won't forget it. Whatever you decide now, as far as I'm concerned, nothing happened back then."

"Okay, then let's go do some jailin'," she said.

They each took a car and followed each other all the way out to the juvenile jail in Downey.

Trouble was, once they got there and asked that Sol Preciado be brought to an interrogation room, they found out he was no longer a guest of the city. Earlier that afternoon a door had been mysteriously left open in the back of a court transport vehicle and the fifteen-year-old gangbanger had escaped again.

Shane and Alexa took the creaking elevator back down to the lobby and walked out of juvenile hall into the harsh Xenon lights of the parking lot.

"This kid has more jailbreaks than Dillinger," she said.

"They pushed Drucker's board back to get time to arrange for this. They let him go so he wouldn't be around to testify," Shane said. When she looked over at him, he added, "I'm telling you, it's been like this ever since I shot Ray. Somebody is pulling strings, making shit happen. It's been orchestrated better than the Philharmonic."

"You're being paranoid," she concluded.

"I'm being framed," he corrected.