Hollywood Station (20 page)

Now detectives in Las Vegas were also interested in Simpson, since it was discovered through his credit-card receipts that he'd also been in their city for a week. With no means of employment he'd had enough money to gamble in both places, and it turned out that a high-tech engineer from Chicago who was attending a convention had been robbed and murdered at a rest stop outside Las Vegas on the day that Simpson had checked out of his hotel.

The ballistics report hadn't been completed yet, but Andi had high hopes. Wouldn't this be something to talk about to the oral board at the next lieutenant's exam. It might even rate a story in the L. A. Times, except that nobody read the Times anymore or any newspaper, so there was no point getting excited about that part of it.

The other detective working late that night was Viktor Chernenko, a forty-three-year-old immigrant from Ukraine, one of two naturalized citizens currently working at Hollywood Station, the other being from Guadalajara, Mexico. Viktor had a mass of wiry, dark hair that he called "disobedient," a broad Slavic face, a barrel of a body, and a neck so thick he was always popping buttons.

Once when his robbery team was called to a clinic in east Hollywood to interview the victim of a violent purse snatching, the receptionist saw Viktor enter and said to a woman waiting in the lobby, "Your cab is here."

And he was just about the most dedicated, hardworking, and eager-to-please cop that Andi McCrea had ever encountered.

Viktor had immigrated to America in September 1991, a month after the coup that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, at a time when he was a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Red Army. His exit from the USSR was unclear and mysterious, leading to gossip that he'd defected with valuable intelligence and was brought to Los Angeles by the CIA. Or maybe not. No one knew for sure, and Viktor seemed to like it that way.

He was the one that LAPD came to when they needed a Russian translator or a Russian-speaking interrogator, and consequently he had become well known to most of the local gangsters from former Iron Curtain countries. And that was why he was working late. He had been assigned to assist the robbery team handling the "hand grenade heist," as the jewelry store robbery came to be called. Viktor had been contacting every ,migr, that he knew personally who was even remotely involved with the so-called Russian Mafia. And that meant any Los Angeles criminal from the Eastern bloc, including the YACS: Yugoslavians, Albanians, Croatians, and Serbs.

Viktor was educated well in Ukraine and later in Russia. His study of English had helped get him promoted to captain in the army before most of his same age colleagues, but the English he'd studied in the USSR had not included idioms, which would probably confound him forever. That evening, when Andi twice offered to get him some coffee, he had politely declined until she asked if she could bring him a cup of tea instead.

Using her proper name as always, he said, "Thank you, Andrea. That would strike the spot."

During his years in Los Angeles, Viktor Chernenko had learned that one similarity between life in the old USSR and life in Los Angeles-life under a command economy and a market economy-was that a tremendous amount of business was transacted by people in subcultures, people whom no one ever sees except the police. Viktor was fascinated by the tidal wave of identity theft sweeping over Los Angeles and the nation, and even though Hollywood detectives did not deal directly with these cases-referring them downtown to specialized divisions like Bunco Forgery-almost everybody Viktor contacted in the Hollywood criminal community had something or other to do with forged or stolen identity.

After several conversations with the jewelry store victim, Sammy Tanampai, as well as with Sammy's father, Viktor was convinced that neither of them had had any dealings, legitimate or not, with Russian gangsters or Russian prostitutes. Sammy Tanampai was positive that he had heard a Russian accent from the woman, or something similar to the accents he'd heard from Russian ,migr,s who'd temporarily settled in cheap lodgings that his father often rented to them in Thai Town.

It was during a follow-up interview that Sammy said to Viktor Chernenko, "The man didn't say many words, so I can't be exactly sure, but the woman's accent sounded like yours."

The more that Viktor thought about how these Russians, if they were Russians, had gotten the information about the diamonds, the more he concluded that it could have come from an ordinary mail theft. Sipping the tea that Andi had brought him, he decided to make another phone call to Sammy Tanampai.

"Did you mail letters to anyone about the diamonds?" he asked Sammy after the jeweler's wife called him to the phone.

"I did not. No."

"Do you know if your father did so?"

"Why would he do that?"

"Maybe to a client who wanted the kind of diamonds in your shipment? Something like that?"

And that stopped the conversation for a long moment. When Sammy spoke again he said, "Yes. My father wrote to a client in San Francisco about the diamonds. He mentioned that to me."

"Do you know where he mailed the letter?" Viktor asked.

"I mailed it," Sammy said. "In a mailbox on Gower, several blocks south of Hollywood Boulevard. I was on my way to pick up my kids at the day-care center. Is that important?"

"People steal letters from mailboxes," Viktor explained.

After he hung up, Andi said, curious, "Are you getting somewhere on the jewelry store case?"

With a smile, Viktor said, "Tomorrow I shall be looking through the transient book to see if many homeless people are hanging around Hollywood and Gower."

"Why?" Andi asked. "Surely you don't think a homeless person pulled a robbery that sophisticated?"

With a bigger smile, he said, "No, Andrea, but homeless people can steal from mailboxes. And homeless people see all that happens but nobody sees homeless people, who live even below subculture. My Russian robbers think they are very clever, but I think they may soon find that they have not pulled the fuzz over our eyes."

One of the reasons given for putting Budgie Polk and Mag Takara out on the boulevard on Saturday night was that Compstat had indicated there were too many tricks getting mugged by opportunist robbers and by the whores themselves. And everyone knew that many of the robberies went unreported because tricks were married men who didn't want mom to know where they went after work.

Compstat was the program of the current chief of police that he'd used when he was police commissioner of the NYPD and that he claimed brought down crime in that city, even though it was during a time when crime was dropping all over America for reasons demographic that had nothing to do with his program. Still, nobody ever expressed doubts aloud and everybody jumped onboard, at least feigning exuberance for the big chief's imported baby, pinching its cheeks and patting its behind when anyone was watching.

Brant Hinkle of Internal Affairs Group thought that Compstat might possibly have helped in New York, with its thirty thousand officers, maybe even in Boston, where the chief had served as a street cop. Perhaps it might be a worthwhile tool in many vertical cities where thousands live and work directly on top of others in structures that rise several stories. But that wasn't the way people lived in the transient, nomadic sprawl of the L. A. basin. Where nobody knew their neighbors' names. Where people worked and lived close to the ground with access to their cars. Where everyone owned a car, and freeways crisscrossed residential areas as well as business districts. Where only nine thousand cops had to police 467 square miles.

When crime occurred in L. A., the perpetrator could be blocks or miles away before the PSR could even assign a car to take a report. If she could find one. And as far as flooding an area with cops to deal with a crime trend, the LAPD didn't have half enough cops to flood anything. They could only leak.

There were a few occasions when Brant Hinkle got to see Compstat in action, during the first couple of years after the new chief arrived. That was when the chief, perhaps a bit insecure on the Left Coast, brought in a journalist crony from New York who had never been a police officer and made a special badge for him saying "Bureau Chief." And gave him a gun permit so he'd have a badge and gun like a real cop. That guy seemed to do no harm, and he was gone now and the chief of police was more acclimated and more secure, but Compstat remained.

Back then the chief had also brought several retired cops from New York, as though trying to re-create New York in L. A. They would put on a little slide show with two or three patrol captains sitting in the hot seat. On a slide would be a picture of an apartment building, and one of the retired NYPD cops with a loud voice and a Bronx accent would confront the LAPD captains and say, "Tell us about the crime problems there."

And of course, none of the captains had the faintest idea about the crime problems there or even where "there" was. A two-story apartment building? There were hundreds in each division, thousands in some.

And the second-loudest guy, maybe with a Brooklyn accent, would yell in their faces, "Is the burglary that occurred there on Friday afternoon a single burglary or part of a trend?"

And a captain would stammer and sweat and wonder if he should take a guess or pray for an earthquake.

However, Brant Hinkle learned that there were some LAPD officers who loved the Compstat sessions. They were the street cops who happened to hate their captains. They got a glow just hearing about their bosses melting in puddles while these abrasive New Yorkers sprayed saliva. At least that's how it was described to the cops who wished they could have been there to watch the brass get a taste of the shit they shoveled onto the troops. The street cops would've paid for tickets.

As far as the troops at Hollywood Station were concerned, the East Coast chief was not Lord Voldemort, and that alone was an answered prayer. And he did care about reducing crime and response time to calls. And he did more than talk about troop morale; he allowed detectives to take their city cars home when they were on call instead of using their private cars. And of great importance, he instituted the compressed work schedule that Lord Voldemort hated, which allowed LAPD cops to join other local police departments in working four ten-hour shifts a week or three twelve-hour shifts instead of the old eight-to-five. This allowed LAPD cops, most of whom could not afford to live in L. A. and had to drive long distances, the luxury of three or four days at home.

As far as Compstat was concerned, the street cops were philosophical and fatalistic, as they always were about the uncontrollable nature of a cop's life. One afternoon at roll call, the Oracle, who was old enough and had enough time on the Job to speak the truth when no one else dared, asked the lieutenant rhetorically, "Why doesn't the brass quit sweating Compstat? It's just a series of computer-generated pin maps is all it is. Give the chief a little more time to settle down in his new Hollywood digs and go to a few of those Beverly Hills cocktail parties catered by Wolfgang Puck. Wait'll he gets a good look at all those pumped-up weapons of mass seduction. He'll get over his East Coast bullshit and go Hollywood like all the clowns at city hall."

When his transfer came through, Brant Hinkle was overjoyed. He had hoped he would get Hollywood Detectives and had had an informal interview months earlier with their lieutenant in charge. He had also had an informal interview with the boss of Van Nuys Detectives, the division in which he lived, and did the same at West L. A. Detectives, pretty sure that he could get one of them.

When he reported, he was told he'd be working with the robbery teams, at least for now, and was introduced around the squad room. He found that he was acquainted with half a dozen of the detectives and wondered where the rest were. He counted twenty-two people working in their little cubicles on computers or phones, sitting at small metal desks divided only by three-foot barriers of wallboard.

Andi McCrea said to him, "A few of our people are on days off, but this is about it. We're supposed to have fifty bodies, we have half that many. At one time ten detectives worked auto theft, now there're two."

"It's the same everywhere," Brant said. "Nobody wants to be a cop these days."

"Especially LAPD," Andi said. "You should know why. You just left IA."

"Not so loud," he said, finger to lips. "I'd like to keep it from the troops that I did two years on the Burn Squad."

"Our secret," Andi said, thinking he had a pretty nice smile and very nice green eyes.

"So where's my team?" he asked Andi, wondering how old she was, noticing there was no wedding ring.

"Right behind you," she said. He turned and suffered an enthusiastic Ukrainian handshake from Viktor Chernenko.

"I am not usually a detective of the robbery teams," Viktor said, "but I am Ukrainian, so now I am a detective of robbery teams because of the hand grenade heist. Please sit and we shall talk about Russian robbers."

"You'll enjoy this case," Andi said, liking Brant's smile more and more. "Viktor has been very thorough in his investigation."

"Thank you, Andrea," Viktor said shyly. "I have tried with all my effort to leave no stone upright."

The Oracle decided maybe he himself should win honorable mention for the Quiet Desperation Award on that full-moon evening. He had just returned from code 7 and had severe heartburn from two greasy burgers and fries, when the desk officer entered the office and said, "Sarge, I think you need to take this one. A guy's on the phone and wants to speak to a sergeant."