White sister

Chapter 27

Jungle Jack's Pawn Shop was in an old wood-sided house, tucked between two large vegetable stands in the produce market near Seventh. The fly-specked front windows displayed canteens, army knives, and other people's dusty clothes hanging on chipped mannequins. When I walked inside, a bell over the door rang, and after a moment, a rail-thin elderly man wearing his glasses up on his forehead came out from the back. He had Einstein hair and skin so white that it appeared almost purple in the overhead fluorescents.

"Don't break the circle, brother," he said listlessly, as he shuffled around behind the counter. On the street, the circle was your group of tights your buddies. The circle was supposed to protect you. But it was a worthless concept because on the Row, you couldn't count on support from anybody who wasn't pushing free meals, Bibles, or a campaign agenda. The old man stood looking me carefully up and down.

"Cop," he finally announced.

I pulled out my badge and showed him. He leaned down behind the counter and pulled out several sheets of paper.

"I'm running a business here, least I'm trying to, but you guys in property crime never get tired a putting me through these inventory checks do ya. I gotta bring in part-time labor to compile all this stuff. Here's the list you bozos had me do yesterday. Ain't my fault an occasional serial number gets filed. If you take my paid-for inventory and store it over at the PAB, how'm I supposed to stay in business?" The PAB was the Police Administration Building Parker Center.

"I'm not with property crimes." I fished John's pawn ticket out of my pocket and handed it to him.

He pulled his glasses down off his forehead and looked at it. "Says here, Samik Mampuna." Then he looked up at me. "You don't look like no Samik Mampuna."

"Sure I do. Use your imagination." I reached into my pocket and handed him a fifty. "Why don't we stop screwing around and you go get that computer out of the back?"

"Gotta stay here twenty days. State law. Only guy who can pick it up 'fore then is the guy who pawned it. After twenty days it goes up for general sale. That's the rule. This ticket was bought yesterday, so you got yourself a few weeks to wait."

He smiled, happy to finally be getting some payback on the LAPD.

"But you're gonna make an exception in this case, Jack, or I'm gonna get a desk and set it up on the sidewalk right in front of your place and check the serial numbers on every toaster and TV that walks in here."

He frowned at me. "Cops. All you people wanna do is mow my grass. Ain't nothing else you care about."

"Right. That's us, the Jungle Jack detail. Now, let's go. I want the computer."

He took a minute before moving toward the back of the shop. The laptop was my stolen property, but I knew this was going to be much quicker. To retrieve it on a fencing beef, I would need the numbers on the warranties, which were back in my desk in Venice Beach, not to mention a pound of LAPD paperwork and grief I didn't have time for.

After another minute Jungle Jack returned carrying Alexa's laptop and charger. He set it on the counter and I turned it on. It was working, but the LOW BATT was flashing so I shut it down, closed it, and turned to leave.

He stopped me and said, "That's three hundred fifty."

He was a crafty bastard who sensed that I had reasons for not wanting to go through the department. I didn't have time to argue, and I didn't want him to file a complaint against me downtown, so I pulled some more fifties off the wad of cash I had taken from home and dropped them on the counter.

"Don't break the circle, brother," he said as he picked up the cash.

"Then don't break my balls," I replied and walked out the door onto the street with the computer.

I needed a quiet place where I could work and didn't want to sit in my car parked at the curb. I drove a few blocks down Seventh to the old Ford Hotel. I parked in a side lot under a dusty palm tree, went inside, and paid the indifferent desk clerk twenty bucks. He handed me a key to a first-floor room that was at the end of a narrow, paint-deprived corridor. I let myself into a dingy rectangle with a window that faced a brick wall. I closed the door, set the laptop on the bed, and plugged it into the wall socket. Then I sat on the stained red bedspread and waited for it to boot.

Most of what was on the computer was case-related, and contained a lot of correspondence from Alexa to her division commanders at the four bureaus. For the past month, she had been working on crime stats for all the detective divisions, attempting to evaluate the crime complaint to clearance rate percentages for each section she supervised. It was a tough problem, because some bureaus, like Central and South, had a lot of gang activity, which included stranger shootings, car jackings, and payback homicides. These cases were notoriously hard to put down and the detectives in those divisions usually had a higher open unsolved percentage. The Valley Bureau, on the other hand, encompassed a lot of bedroom communities like Foothill and Devonshire, where detectives generally had a much easier go of it. When some jealous husband catches his wife with the golf pro and bludgeons her to death with his nine iron, it's pretty much bing-bang-boom! Gotcha.

Alexa was attempting to balance all this for performance evaluations. She had the stats for each detective division that she supervised, divided into different criminal categories: Rape, Robbery, ag-assaults, Child or Spousal Abuse, Property Crime, and Homicides. The clearance rates for each division were broken down by both arrests and by how many of the cases the D. A. had agreed to file. On another page, there was a running total of cases tried and their eventual outcomes, how many busts resulted in convictions. She was tabulating not only the arrests, but also the the quality of the arrests. It was extremely comprehensive and I marveled at her thoroughness.

As I scanned file after file, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I found a Special Ops file and used her password to open it. dark angel wasn't listed. I kept opening and closing windows like mad, my fingers flying over the keyboard. By mistake, I opened an unsecured folder marked 2005 overtime deployment projections. It was hardly the place to store sensitive documents, but since it was already open in front of me, I scanned it. The first few files were statistics, spreadsheets, archived correspondence, and e-mails. All of it, as expected, dealt with manpower deployment and overtime projections. I was scrolling and scanning, not paying too much attention, when all of a sudden there it was, hiding in plain sight: the dark angel, file. It contained twenty or more e-mails from Alexa to David Slade and from Slade to her. All were sent within the last two months. As I began to read, my heart went cold.

Dark Angel…

My thoughts are always on you. We must meet tomorrow night. I can't go another day without holding you. You need to give me another floor score. I ache to see you. How 'bout Cryto 457?

Love Hambone

Hambone Alexa's Academy nickname. I scrolled down further and read one from Slade to her.

Dear Hambone, Time away from you is agony. This time Watts is the key. I cant be away from my Queen. It's all about lost performance and royalty. Don't make me wait, darling. I've got WYD and plenty of ammo. I'm in the cut, waiting.

Love Dark Angel

They were all like that. Twenty of them. Hers more straightforward. His full of hip-hop sex references, always signed Dark Angel.

Toward the end, I read one posted where the tone was different. It sounded ominous. Actually, it read like a blackmail threat.

Hambone, You better come with everything I asked for NOW. I'm losing patience. You know I'm not kidding. This isn't much fun. You don't come through I'll go to the Old Man. Those are my conditions. You have 24 hours to deliver.

Dark Angel

I couldn't read any further.

As I looked at the e-mails and my vision blurred. All I kept thinking was, Why? How could she betray me like this?

I didn't know what to do. If this file ever fell into the wrong hands, it would become the motive for Slade's murder.