Robert Crais - Free Fall

I went through a pair of leather upholstered swinging doors, then along a short hall that opened into the city room. Twenty desks were jammed together in the center of the room, and maybe a dozen people were hanging around the desks, most of them typing as fast as they could and the rest of them talking on the phone. Eddie Ditko had the desk on the far left corner, about as close to the editors’ offices as you could get without being one of the editors. A woman in her late twenties was working at a terminal next to him. She was wearing huge round glasses and a loud purple dress with very wide shoulders and a little purple pillbox hat. It was the kind of clothes you wore when you were establishing your identity as a retro-hip urban intellectual. Or maybe she was just odd. She glanced up once as I approached, then went on typing. Eddie was chewing on an unlit Grenadiers cigar and scowling at his VDT when I got there. He had to be forty years older than her. He didn’t bother glancing up. “Hey, Eddie, when are they going to make you an editor around here and get you off the floor?”

Eddie jerked the cigar out of his mouth and spit a load of brown juice at his wastebasket. He never lit them. He chewed them. “Soon’s I stop saying what I think and start kissing the right ass, like everybody else around here.” He said it loud enough for most of the room to hear. The purple woman glanced over, then went on with her typing. Tolerant. Eddie grimaced and rubbed at his chest. “Jeez, I got chest pains. I’m a goddamned walking thrombo.”

“Lay off the fats and exercise a little.”

“What’re you, my fuckin’ mother?” Eddie leaned to the side and broke wind. Classy.

I pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, hooking my arms over its back. “What’d you find on the REACT guys?”

Eddie clamped the wet cigar in his teeth, leaned toward the VDT, and slapped buttons. The little VDT screen filled with printing. “I put together some stuff from our morgue files, but that’s about it. REACT is an elite surveillance unit, and that means the cops block their files. They can’t do their jobs if everybody knows who they’re surveilling.”

“How many guys we talking about?”

“Five. You want the names?”

“Yeah.”

He hit a couple of buttons and a little printer beside his VDT chattered and spit out a page. He handed it to me. Five names were listed in a neat column in the center of the page.

LT. ERIC DEES

SGT. PETER GARCIA

OFF. FLOYD RIGGENS

OFF. WARREN PINKWORTH

OFF. MARK THURMAN

I looked over the names. They meant nothing. “They any good?”

Eddie grinned like a shark with his eye on a fat boy in baggy shorts. “They wouldn’t be a REACT team if they weren’t any good. They target felons and they’ve got a ninety-nine-point-seven percent conviction rate. Dees has been down there almost six years, along with Garcia and Riggens. Pinkworth joined a couple of years back and they picked up Thurman a year ago. He’s the baby.”

“How’d Thurman make the squad?”

Eddie hit more buttons and the printing on the screen changed. “Same as everybody else. Top ten of his academy class, a string of outstandings in his quarterly evaluations, Officer of the Month four times. You remember that nut pulled a gun on the RTD bus and threatened to start killing people unless Madonna gave him a blow job?”

“Sort of.”

The purple woman looked over. Interested.

“Hell, I wrote about that one. Guy stops the bus in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, and Thurman and a guy named Palmetta were the first cops on the scene. Thurman was, what, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old?”

The purple woman shrugged.

“Yeah, he was just a kid. That was part of the story. Anyway, the nut shoots this fat guy in the leg to make his point, then grabs this nine-year-old girl and starts screaming he’s going to do her next. He wants Madonna, right? Palmetta puts the call in for a hostage negotiator and the SWAT team but Thurman figures there ain’t time. He takes off his gun and goes into the bus to talk to the guy. The nut tries to shoot him twice but he’s shaking so bad both shots miss, so he puts the gun to the girl’s head. You know what happened then?”

The purple lady was leaning forward, frowning because she wanted to know.

Eddie said, “Thurman tells the guy he’s had Madonna and Madonna’s a lousy lay, but he knows Rosanna Arquette and Rosanna Arquette is the best blow job in town. Thurman tells the guy if he puts down the gun, as soon as he’s out on bail, he’ll set it up with Rosanna Arquette ’cause she owes him a couple of favors.”

The purple woman said, “And he went for that?”

Eddie spread his hands “Here’s a nut believes he’s gonna get Madonna, why not? The guy says only if she blows him twice. Thurman says, okay, she’ll do it twice, but not on the same day, she’s got a thing about that. The nut says that’s okay with him ’cause he’s only good for once a week anyway, and puts down the gun.”

The purple lady laughed, and she didn’t look so odd anymore.

Eddie was smiling, too. “That was, what, a couple years ago? Thurman gets the Medal of Valor and six months later he wins the early promotion to plainclothes and the REACT team. They’re top cops, pal. Every one of those guys has a story like that in his file else he wouldn’t be on the team.”

“Eddie, what if I didn’t want the good stuff? What if I was a reporter and I was looking for something that maybe had a smell to it?”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe I’m looking to see if they’ve crossed over.”

Eddie shook his head and patted the VDT. “If it’s in here, it’s already public record. Someone would’ve had to lodge the complaint, and it would’ve had to come out through LAPD PR or one of the news agencies or the courts. It wouldn’t be a secret and no one would be trying to hide it.”

“Okay. Could you check for allegations?”

“Substantiated or otherwise?”

I looked at him.

“Reporter humor. It’s probably over your head.” Eddie hit more keys and watched the screen, and then did it again. When he had filled and wiped the screen three times, he nodded and leaned back. “I had it search through the files keying on the officers’ names for every news release during the past year, then I threw out the junk about them saving babies and arresting the Incredible Hulk and just kept the bad stuff. This is pretty neat.”

I leaned forward and looked at the screen. “What’s it found?”

“Excessive-force complaints. ‘Suspect injured while resisting arrest.’ ‘Suspect filed brutality charges.’ Like that. ’Course, these guys are busting felons and felons tend to get nasty, but check it out, you’ve got twenty-six complaints in the past ten months, and eleven of them are against this guy Riggens.”

“Any charges brought?”

“ Nada. IAD issued letters of reprimand twice, and dealt a two-week suspension, but that’s it.”

I read the list. Twenty-six names ran down the left side of the page, and next to each name there was a booking number and the arresting charge and the claims levied by the defendants and the accused officer or officers. Riggens had all or part of eleven of the charges, and the remainder were divided pretty evenly between Pinkworth and Dees and Garcia and Thurman. Thurman had part of three.

Eddie said, “You’ve got to understand, cops on these special tac squads get charges filed all the time, so most of these really are garbage, but if I’m looking for tuna I’m looking for losers, and that’s Riggens.”

“Thanks, Eddie.”

Eddie stuck the cigar in his mouth and rolled it around and looked at me. “What you got going here, kid? It any good?”