“Any idea who could have killed him?”
Relovich coughed and spit into the water. “Probably some wetback from the projects.”
After the interview, I headed to my late afternoon meeting with Relovich’s ex-wife, Sandy, in the high desert. Lancaster, the northern tip of the county was more than a hundred miles from San Pedro, the southern tip. Fortunately, because it was a weekend, traffic was light. I sped through downtown, cut over a few freeways, and began to traverse the San Gabriel Mountains. I rolled down a window and inhaled the rich acorny scent of the chaparral. But after I reached the summit and started to slalom down the mountain, I was hit with a blast of desert heat and quickly rolled my window back up and flipped on the air conditioner. San Pedro had been cool and misty, in the low sixties; now it was at least thirty degrees hotter. Southern California, I thought, must have more microclimates than a Brazilian rain forest.
At a roadside lookout bordered by spiky Joshua trees, I stopped and stretched my legs. Everything seemed outsized here: the vast dun-colored expanse; the big sky, scorched white at the horizon and electric blue overhead; the limitless vistas. I looked back at the San Gabriels, the escarpment veined with snow that sparkled in the brilliant light.
I hopped back in the car and continued my descent. When I reached Lancaster, I exited the freeway and swung down a road rippling with heat waves, past lizards darting across the asphalt, past a few isolated ranches studded with metal grain silos. I had never visited this edge of the county and was amazed at the beauty of the high desert in springtime. Entire hillsides were thick with orange poppies, ablaze in the late afternoon light. When I spotted a rural mailbox flanked by bales of hay, I juddered down a pitted dirt road and stopped in front of a weathered white clapboard farmhouse with a broad wooden porch. I climbed out of the car and stretched. The air was still; then a hot puff of wind from the Mojave riffled the leaves of the cottonwoods that shaded the house.
“Quiet out here, isn’t it?”
Startled, I whirled around and saw Relovich’s ex-wife, Sandy, walking around the side of the house, clutching a can of Bud. She was a big woman, not fat, but definitely packing too many pounds to be wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless blouse. From a distance, she looked like she was in her twenties, but when she approached me, I saw the fine lines around her eyes and mouth and the crinkling at her neck from too much desert sun and realized she was about forty.
“Come on,” she said. I followed her to a wooden deck behind the house. I set my briefcase down and we sat side by side on canvas lawn chairs, looking out onto a vast furrowed field. She finished her beer in a swallow, flipped open an ice chest, grabbed two more, and handed one to me. I shook my head.
“Smart cop,” she said. “When we were still together, Pete got caught drinking on the job one afternoon and got suspended.”
“Today they’re so hard-assed they’d probably fire him,” I said.
She popped open her beer, twisted off the tab, and tossed it into the dirt. “I’m not really a drinker, despite this,” she said, raising the can. “At least not a drinker like Pete. It’s just-the past few days. Well, you know.”
She slurred her words and her eyes were glassy and bright. I figured she was mixing antidepressants with her beer. There was something brittle about her manner, and I sensed that if I started peppering her with questions she might shatter.
“What do you grow here?” I asked, motioning toward the fields.
“Onions.”
“Doesn’t smell like onions.”
“We just planted last month. Don’t start harvesting until late summer. When I married Pete and I moved to Pedro, there were still some tuna canneries out on Terminal Island. I’d smell that tuna and think of the onion fields back home.”
“You grew up here?”
She lit a Winston and waved away the smoke. “Yeah. This is my folks’ place. After I left Pete, I moved back home with our daughter.”
“You really came from different worlds.”
She took a few nervous drags and said, “I was going to college in the Valley. Pete was working patrol. He came to my apartment building to break up a party. We started dating. I moved down to Pedro with him.” She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. “I hated the place. Too foggy down there, too cold. I’m a desert girl. I missed the sun.”
She told me what a happy marriage they had, what a good father Pete had been, until his drinking worsened. “Things got so bad I had to leave him.”
“So you left him.”
“That’s right. I didn’t want my little girl growing up like that.” Recalling what the uncle had told me, I knew either she or Relovich’s uncle was a liar. My guess it was her. But I wanted to keep her talking, so I didn’t press her.
When I asked her about Relovich’s days on the force, the cases he handled, and collars who might have wanted revenge, she stared at me, eyes unfocused, and launched into a disjointed monologue, jumping from subject to unrelated subject. Finally, after finishing her beer she said, “I’m sorry Detective Levine. I’m having a hard time concentrating.” Her lips trembled and she said softly, “This has been very, very hard for me. I’m going through a lot right now.”
She dropped her head and began crying, the tears falling onto the ground, stirring up tiny puffs of dust.
Watching her cry, I thought of Bud Carducci, the salty old cop who taught me the rudiments of homicide investigation when I was a young detective trainee. Bud used to always say, “Before searching for the outlaws, take a good look at the in-laws.”
I leaned back in my chair, crossed my arms, and studied Sandy, trying to discern if her emotion was real or feigned. Was she crying because she was truly disconsolate about Pete’s death, or because she was frightened and concerned she’d reveal something to me that would spark my suspicion?
She lifted her head, coughed a few times, and dried her eyes with her palms. “Our daughter’s freaked out. I’m just trying to keep it all together.”
“How old is your girl?”
“Ten.”
“Is she at home?
“She’s in her room. But please don’t interview her. She’s not ready for that.”
“It’s really important, at this point, to talk to everyone. It would be very helpful for me to talk to your daughter.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t allow that.”
“Okay,” I said, already planning to return for a follow-up interview. I was determined to talk to the daughter. I wanted to know if she recalled her mother being home on Thursday night-about the time Relovich was killed.
“Do you have any idea why Pete retired after thirteen years?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“Did he have any enemies? Anybody you can think of who might have had a reason to kill him?”
She shook her head.
“Any old cases he was worried about?”
“He never really talked to me about his work.” She dug a balled up Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose. “I still miss Pete. I miss him so much.” She began sniffling and crying again.
I knew I wasn’t going to get much more out of her today. “Before I go, I’d like to know if you have any family pictures that were taken at Pete’s house?”
She lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply, and stood up. “About eight months ago, Pete gave our daughter, Lindsay, one of those disposable cameras for her birthday. She spent the weekend with him and took a lot of pictures at his house. I’ll get those for you,” she said over her shoulder as she walked toward the house.
A few minutes later a screen door screeched open, slapped shut, and she returned, carefully making her way down the back steps, gripping a banister for balance. I rose and she handed me an envelope stuffed with photos. “Why’d you want these?”
“I can study the pictures and compare them to what I see now in the house. Sometimes I can spot things that are missing, things that were stolen. I’ve had a few cases where I’ve done pawnshop runs and tracked down the people I was looking for.”
