Vigilante

The shot took us back to the conference room. Nash held up the iPhone. “Here’s the cell that Janice Santiago shot her video on,” he said. “And here’s what she shot.”

“Roll it,” Drew said, and the cell-phone footage played on a large screen in the conference room so that all of Nix’s “experts” could see it and participate.

The cell video was time-stamped 10:48 P.M. On the screen Carla Sanchez walked up to Lita’s front porch and rang the bell. Lita opened the door; Carla dug out her wallet, pulled out some money, and handed it over. Then Lita handed Carla the ceiling fan, which Carla carried back to the truck. She got in the Sidewinder and Julio drove them both away.

“Camera One, move in tight on Nix,” Drew said.

“So, there’s your corroborating witness, including a cell video proving Carla Sanchez’s story that she bought the ceiling fan just as she said she had. Yet, strangely, this innocent woman and her husband are still in jail. Why couldn’t the cops find Janice Santiago? She lives just down the street in Lita’s neighborhood. It only took me half an hour to locate her. What’s going on here, Marcia?”

“Somebody’s not doing their job,” Marcia Breen said in close-up. “Or worse still, maybe somebody wants the Sanchezes in jail so they can charge Carla and Julio with this crime. If the Sanchezes are found guilty of Lita’s murder, it could cover over what’s really going on, couldn’t it?”

“And what do you suppose that is?” Nix asked innocently. “Let’s see.… Hey, maybe it’s this.”

And we were again on the same shot of Lita Mendez inside her living room.

She was looking into the camera just as before. “My name is Lolita Mendez,” she said again. “I live in Boyle Heights, a suburb of L.A., and members of the Los Angeles Police Department are trying to kill me.”

The shot switched back to Nash in close-up. “We’ll be right back,” he said solemnly as they went to commercial.

CHAPTER 21

I sat in the control room fuming. I’d been outplayed and led in a big, ugly circle by this guy. I could see now how the cops in Atlanta had been made to seem like such fools. Nobody in the control room spoke to me, although a few stole looks.

After the two-minute break, Nash was on camera again.

“We’re going to find out what kind of corruption is going on in Boyle Heights. This is a major V- TV expose and you’re not going to want to miss a moment of it.”

“Camera Three, go wide and track,” Drew said as Nix turned and began walking through his fake squad room set where fake detectives were working at desks, not looking up as he passed.

“Law enforcement doesn’t have much time to solve a murder in metropolitan crime areas,” Nix said. “They pile up fast, so if detectives don’t put a case down in the first forty-eight hours, it quickly becomes something police call a cold case.

“Here on V-TV we like to dig into some of those old cases and see if we can supply a measure of justice and closure to the families of these tragic murder victims. In each city we visit, we select one cold case that seems to have maybe gotten more than the normal amount of short shrift and see what we can do. For our new viewers it’s a segment we call: ‘Cold, but Not Forgotten.’”

Nash walked into a fake captain’s office to join J. J. Blunt, Frank Palgrave, Marcia Breen, and two attractive plainclothes female detectives in suits with prop badges hanging out of their breast pockets.

“You already know Frank and Marcia and ex-FBI profiler J. J. Blunt. So now meet Karen Bowman and Katie McKiernan, both retired LAPD detectives.” The women smiled as Nash continued. “You guys have the case files?”

Karen Bowman handed over a stack of cold-case folders and Nash gave a brief summary of each. One or two of the cases went back as far as the seventies.

Then Nix told his audience, “I’ve asked every detective here to write down their vote for which case they think we should reinvestigate. So hand your slips on up.”

They all passed pieces of paper forward and Nix made a big show of counting the votes before announcing: “Three out of five of you agree we should look at Hannah Trumbull’s murder from four years ago.” He turned right into Camera Two as Drew punched the shot up.

“Here’s the dope on this murder,” Nix said. “Hannah Trumbull, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old nurse from Good Samaritan Hospital in L.A., was murdered in December of 2006.” He held up her picture. She was indeed beautiful. She had shoulder-length straight blond hair and piercing blue eyes. “Hannah was shot to death in the garage of her duplex in West Hollywood. LAPD Hollywood Division Detectives Keith Monroe and John Hall got the squeal. After investigating for just two days, they determined that the murder was committed by this man.”

A sketch of an African-American man in a watch cap appeared on the screen superimposed over Nix’s shoulder. The suspect in the drawing looked to be in his mid-thirties.

Nix continued, “Nobody can find this dude. They say they’ve been looking scrupulously for four years, but I was a cop once and believe me, no cop looks for anything for four years unless it’s a winning lottery ticket.

“This drawing was done by an LAPD sketch artist in 2006 working with Gina Wilson, a woman who lived across the street from Hannah Trumbull. Gina was robbed by this man one week before Hannah Trumbull’s murder, and Detectives Monroe and Hall think this thief was targeting that neighborhood and committed both crimes. Working with the artist, Gina produced this drawing of the SBG, which, by the way, is unofficial cop lingo for ‘Standard Black Guy.’

“So here’s what these two homicide cops would have you believe. They say this home invasion specialist, this SBG, broke into Gina Wilson’s house a week before Hannah’s murder, tied Gina up, robbed her, and then left. He didn’t beat Miss Wilson to death or shoot her in her garage. He just stole her money. So, if he didn’t shoot Gina Wilson, why did the SBG shoot and kill Hannah Trumbull?”

Nix picked up the actual suspect sketch and now turned to the camera, holding it up. “I ask you, is this really a picture of Hannah’s murderer or is it a picture of police disinterest and incompetence? On our next show, we’re going to try and find out if this guy, who the cops have been searching to find for four years, really did the Hannah Trumbull murder. I think he may just be a convenient way for our two homicide detectives, Monroe and Hall, to dump poor Hannah’s violent, hard-to-solve murder and move on.

“Next week, we’re also going to see if we can run down Hannah’s parents and get them in here to talk to us. We’ll hear what they know about their daughter’s life in the days just prior to her death. We’ll ask them what they think about the service they’ve gotten from the LAPD so far. If you have any thoughts which might help us you can text the number at the bottom of the screen. We’ll also continue to probe the troubling Lita Mendez homicide, plus a lot more. It’s a pile of work, but it’s God’s work, and here at V-TV we’re always invigorated. Stick around. There’s more. We’ll be right back.”

The final segment of the show dealt with the fact that Los Angeles superior court judges were being paid cash bonuses funded by the county government. Jurists were getting up to forty-five thousand dollars extra over their base pay. So far, according to Nash, $300 million in this fiscally crippled state had been paid out to judges in Los Angeles County. Judges who, Nash informed us, were already among the highest paid in the country.

Ex-judge Web Russell weighed in. “If the county is paying bonuses, will these judges in return feel a need to favor the County of L.A. when actions are brought against it? Is this a condition where the county is in effect actually bribing these judges to get favorable results at trial?”

Nix Nash did the show close from his dressing room. He’d kicked his shoes off. His stocking feet were up on the coffee table. He was sipping a soft drink and grinning at the camera.

He set the can down and said, “So that’s show one from L.A. We’re in the City of Angels, but we haven’t seen too many angels yet. Maybe just two.” He held up Hannah’s and Lita’s pictures, one in each hand. “Remember this quote by the noted American humorist Donald Robert Perry Marquis: ‘Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.’ If that’s so, then we’re probably the biggest procrastinators on earth. On V- TV, all we do is examine what happened yesterday. We’re in L.A. speaking truth to power. See you next week. God bless, and turn out the lights as you leave.”

Drew Burke said, “Kill the lights.”