Stephen Cannell - Vigilante

“Pay you for a police statement? How long you been doing street crime, homes?” He frowned as I transferred the plate number down in my crime book. Then I shut off the tape and led him back to where the TV crew was waiting.

Nash handed me his card. “Put that in a safe spot, Detective,” he advised. “There’ll come a time soon when you’re going to need it.”

I certainly hoped not.

I walked back to my Acura, still parked in front of Lita’s house, picked up my radio mike, and started by running Edwin Chavaria. He’d done five years as an accomplice to a second-degree murder in 2004, got out a year early, and was currently almost at the end of his parole. As Nash had said, there was no paper pending. Then I ran the license number Chava had just given me.

The truck was a late-model Chevy Sidewinder registered to Carla and Julio Sanchez at 1414 Lorena Street, a few miles away, also in Boyle Heights. I ran both Sanchezes and found out Carla and her husband were part of White Fence, a rival gang to Evergreen. Carla had a pile of priors-everything from drug dealing and running a prostitution ring in ’03 to assault with intent to commit and illegal possession of a firearm. She’d done two short nickels in the California women’s prison in Tehachapi, where she was far from a model prisoner, with a long list of write-ups for assault and other yard crimes. Her husband, Julio, had a decent yellow sheet full of assaults and drug beefs. So far he’d only done county time. Neither was currently wanted.

I walked from my car back into Lita’s house, filled Hitch in on what had transpired, and then played back Chava’s statement on the digital recorder. Despite the fact that this was a very good lead, like me, Hitch wasn’t too impressed, because it had come from Nash. We entered the kitchen, where the ME was now working over the body with two evidence techs.

I looked up for the ceiling fan, but there was only a jagged hole overhead with stripped red and green electrical wires hanging down. It looked as if whatever fixture had once been up there had been hastily ripped out. The fan, if there ever was one, was missing.

Put with Chava’s story, this offered an interesting thematic option.

It was certainly conceivable that Carla Sanchez had snuck back here later to make good on her threat to “get the bitch.” Carla could have found her way inside, killed Lita Mendez, then ripped off the fan and split.

If Nix Nash hadn’t supplied this lead, Hitch and I would have been high-fiving each other about now. Put another blue dot up on the homicide board. Case solved.

Carla Sanchez had motive, method, and opportunity. She had a violent prison record and a string of violent priors, along with an eyewitness to the inciting event.

A perfect slam-dunk murder case. Yet neither of us could quite get behind it.

It all just felt like a setup.

The owner of the house across the street charged us four hundred dollars to rent his place for a week to use as a command post. Detective Becker was working on getting two landlines in so we could stay off our cell phones, which are too easy for the press to scavenge.

Becker also made a run for coffee and doughnuts and set them up in the new CP kitchen. The Winchells and Krispy Kremes were drawing cops and CSIs on breaks off the crime scene, keeping it less congested.

CSI was doing a grid search, marking everything with numbered tape cards. After that, they would vacuum the house, bag and tag all trace evidence, and photograph footprints in suspicious locations like outside of windows and by the side of the house.

Five minutes after I got back from my meeting with Nash, the ME rolled the body and, as I’d suspected, there were two bullet holes in the floor under her head.

The crime techs decided not to attempt fishing for the lead with forceps and possibly adding scratches to the soft lead bullets, which could confuse Ballistics. Instead, they decided to cut out the flooring with a saw and take it back to the crime lab to do the recovery there.

We had a brief discussion about both operational as well as procedural moves. We had to go interview the Sanchezes. Good investigating technique dictated we follow that lead immediately, before the suspects might decide to take off. However, the crime scene, always the temple of any homicide investigation, needed accurate supervision.

We discussed splitting up, with one of us staying here. But Carla and Julio were White Fence gangsters with records, a fact that demanded, in the interest of safety, we go after them as a team.

“How good a cop is Laguna?” I asked Hitch. “So far he set this crime scene up perfectly. Can we trust him to fill in for us?”

“When he’s sober, he rocks,” Hitch said. “He looks dry to me.”

So my partner and I asked Rick Laguna and Pam Becker if they would supervise the evidence gathering and the canvass of the neighborhood so we could follow our one lead. They agreed.

At about ten thirty, we got in the Acura and pulled out.

“So what’s he like?” Hitch asked, finally getting around to pumping me for info on Nix Nash.

“He says ‘gee’ and ‘for the love of Mike.’ He smiles a lot and talks about himself in the third person. The words ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear frequently.”

“I don’t trust this,” Hitch said after a moment of silence. “We’re not at the crime scene ten minutes and up pops Nash with this Chava character and the supposed beef over that ceiling fan. This is exactly the same kinda shit that happened to those cops in Atlanta last year. We’re being played.”

“Are you saying we should just drop this lead? You can’t be serious.”

“Have you been watching that TV show? Did you see what he did in Atlanta? It was a train wreck. Those poor doofuses were chasing leads mostly supplied by Nash, coming up with zilch while V-TV ’s out solving the case. Nash and his team of retired Atlanta cops turn up that schizoid bum sleeping in Piedmont Park and hand him over to those poor, confused homicide dicks on live TV. I fuckin’ gagged when I saw that. The killer’s actually wearing an old coat that has four of the six dead girls’ DNA stains on it. The Atlanta cops looked like vacuum bag dirt.”

We were a few blocks from Carla Sanchez’s address when I pulled the car over to the curb and parked next to a strip mall.

“What’re you doing?” Hitch said.

“You’re right. I agree we’re probably being screwed with. Chava’s statement is probably bogus, and if we go with it and it’s wrong, we look like fools. Plus, we waste important time and momentum at the front end of the investigation.”

“Exactly.”

“Problem is, we can’t ignore this. We’re in a box. If we don’t go talk to Carla Sanchez, we look incompetent. Then that will be the next lead on his damn show.”

“So, whatta you suggest? Should we just give up and put on some clown makeup?”

“We gotta cover each other. That’s number one,” I said. “When it got nasty on the Piedmont Murders the Atlanta cops started pointing fingers.”

He nodded.

“Two. We need to stay proactive. We gotta figure this guy is gaming us. Nix Nash has issues. Ex-cop, ex-lawyer. Our department went after him, got him convicted of a felony, and stripped him of his law license. Now he’s in a position to put some hurt on us. That’s probably his motive here. Except-”

“Except what?”

“Does it bother you that Nix Nash and Lita Mendez were both sort of in the same business?”

Hitch nodded. “I’ve been wondering about that myself.”

“What if they knew each other?” I said. “They almost had to, right? Both hung out in L.A. courtrooms around the same time in ’05, both filing complaints against cops. I can’t believe with that shared interest they didn’t hook up.”