on our case.
His producer, Laura Burke, was watching over the shot, supervising her cameramen. When she spotted me, she leaned forward and whispered something to Nash. He stopped his rant and turned. Then he glanced at Laura and drew a finger across his throat, signaling her to stop filming. He handed his mike to an assistant and walked across the street, stopping at the chain link.
I walked the twenty yards or so to the edge of the lot to meet him. We stood two feet apart on opposite sides of the galvanized fence.
“I saw you arrested them,” he said.
I didn’t have anything to say to this guy, so I just stood there.
“Stuck for a response?” He grinned. “Here’s one that might work. How ’bout, ‘Thanks, Nix, I appreciate all the great help’?”
“You knew Lita, didn’t you?” I said, and watched him carefully for a reaction.
He favored me with a small sad smile. “Of course I knew her. She was doing important work, keeping you guys honest. Back when I still practiced law in this town, she often helped out on cases I was doing.” The smile died. “I’m going to miss her. But more than that, I’m going to catch her killer.”
“I’d advise you not to interfere. That
“So I’m supposed to leave the investigation of my friend up to the very people I think might be responsible for her death?”
“The police didn’t kill Ms. Mendez,” I said softly. “You’re the one who gave me the Carla Sanchez lead.”
“In a homicide investigation I’m sure you’ve discovered some things aren’t quite as obvious as they appear on the surface.”
I let that pass, then said, “I pull up at nine fifteen A.M., you’re already up the street interviewing Edwin Chavaria. That’s excellent response time, even for you. Wanta set my mind at ease about that?”
“If that’s some sort of accusation that I might have something to do with this, then yes, let me put your mind at rest. I was in Florida yesterday hosting a fund-raiser at the Boca Raton Rape Clinic. You can Google it and check me out. The pictures online are great. I took an early flight and landed at eight this morning. Are three thousand miles enough of an alibi for Nix Nash, Detective?”
He was back to the third person and being damn snotty about it.
“I was supposed to take Lita to breakfast after I landed this morning. Laura and my camera crew picked me up at the airport, brought me here. After breakfast we were going to set up for an interview. Lita had agreed to be a show resource for us. She knew a lot of things about L.A. and the cops here. When we got to her house at a little before nine, patrol officers were already stringing yellow tape. Maybe my showing up was divine intervention, because I’m beginning to think maybe I’m the only one here who really gives a darn who killed her.”
“You need to stop taking yourself so seriously,” I said. I had nothing more, so I turned to leave. He called after me.
“Hey, Shane? Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?” I replied, turning back. He had ditched the sad, funereal expression and was now wearing an excited, hopeful look, like a teenaged boy watching his first stripper.
“I think deep down, on some level, we all know what’s coming in the future,” he began. “Like those stories you read about people who clean out their closets or straighten up the garage and a day later get hit by a bus. The family comes in and everything’s all packed up neat and ready to go. I have a theory the reason stuff like that happens is because intuitively we can all sense the future. It’s why sometimes we’re depressed for no good reason we can think of, or are unreasonably happy. What’s actually causing it is a subtle knowledge of what’s coming. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes bad.”
“And sometimes it’s just too much sugar and too little sleep.”
He shook his head, but he seemed happy, like he was delighted to be here, excited just to be Nix Nash.
“Maybe you’re right, but I don’t think it’s dietary, or sleep related,” he kidded. “Like right now. Tell me you don’t actually feel some large sense of impending doom?”
“I don’t feel anything,” I told him.
“Just wait,” he said, grinning. “It’s coming.”
CHAPTER 10
When I got back to the Police Administration Building, I Googled the Boca Raton Rape Clinic and sure enough, there were half a dozen pictures of Nix Nash hosting last night’s fund-raiser in South Florida.
Not to be overly thorough, but I wanted to make absolutely sure he wasn’t a suspect, so I checked the airlines and found that Nash had been on a flight that left Fort Lauderdale Airport at 5:00 A.M., landing at LAX at 7:43 this morning. I talked to a terminal manager who remembered Nash coming off the flight and being stopped for autographs. That meant either he’d been at Lita’s house to take her to breakfast as he’d said or he’d been tipped to her death by someone inside our department. I suspected it was probably the latter and was determined to root out the spy and close that leak.
The rest of the day was spent researching Lita Mendez. Of course, I’d heard a lot about her and knew something of the trouble she’d caused for the department, but for the last few years, because I’d been investigating high-profile homicides, her crusade against the Hollenbeck Station and the Internal Affairs Group had mostly escaped my scrutiny.
As I surfed old stories about her on the Net, I was surprised by how much there was. When she died Lita was just thirty-three years old. One story revealed that she had become enamored of the court system at the age of six when she watched her mother get a restraining order against Lita’s father, who had been violently assaulting them both. Her dad, an Evergreen gangster, ended his short earthly journey a year later, going tits up in an alley off First Street. Lita had been keeping herself busy since adulthood by making life impossible for the cops in and around Hollenbeck.
Among her numerous activities, she’d crashed various LAPD undercover operations, taking photos of the undercovers, posting their pictures on the Internet, putting their lives in danger, and burning these cops for this kind of work forever. Most of her civilian complaints were not for police brutality but for lesser charges like rude behavior or harassment.
She had also made her share of enemies on the street. A committed Evergreen associate, she had little use for the more than forty-five competing Hispanic sets and often turned her legal skills against enemy shot callers.
An article about her titled “Talking Truth with Lita Power,” by an
She printed police corruption T-shirts with the pictures of officers she’d accused of crimes and then passed them out in community centers. It didn’t matter that most of her complaints found those cops innocent. She hung sheet banners from freeway overpasses decrying Hollenbeck police officers, identifying her favorite targets by name.
On our part, the department had charged her with two dozen misdemeanors and a few low-weight felonies, everything from driving without a license to the more serious offense of assaulting a neighbor with a gardening tool. There were eight to ten counts of verbal assaults against various cops. None of this legal vitriol had gone anywhere in court.
Last year Stephanie Madrid, a captain in charge of the Advocates Section at Internal Affairs, had used police union funds to finance a restraining order against Lita, which would require her to stay more than fifty yards away from the Hollenbeck Station. That suit had prevailed.
There was a raging legal debate being fostered within the
