77th Street Requiem Page 4

  “The president of the United States was waiting for Congress to hand down his orders of impeachment. We were in a recession that wouldn’t end, prices rose a percent every month. Police had become ‘pigs,’ and youth was running wild in the streets, talking about revolution.

  “In the Seventy-seventh Street Division neighborhood where Officer Roy Frady patrolled, where after work he was in the habit of stopping for a six-pack, the Symbionese Liberation Army had moved into a new safe house. Now and then some of these middle-class, white-bread radicals went to the market, or, if you believe rumor, walked the streets to earn a little easy money on their backs for the revolution.

  “Roy Frady noticed women, would certainly have looked closely at any white girls he saw in South Central. He and everybody else in the country were looking for the SLA and their star boarder, kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. Did Frady make a fatal connection between the faces on the street and the FBI wanted posters hanging in his squad room? Or did he just give in to an offer for a backseat blowfest with a pretty young woman?

  “Less than a week after Frady died, the SLA went down in flames. Anyone over thirty, Gaylord, will remember the SLA shoot-out. Bubba sure as hell does. You want action? You got it. More gunfire than most Vietnam vets heard in-country. A six-pack of bodies turned to ash by the SWAT team. When that safe house started burning you could see it all over this country, because the news was there.

  “One news hen, with SWAT teams all around her, gunfire coming from inside the house, walked right up and knocked on the front door: ‘Are you really the SLA? Can I talk to Patty Hearst?’ Why do you want cheap reenactment when I have the real thing on film?”

  I watched Steven type “SLA” on his electric notebook.

  “The newswoman’s name is Christine Lund,” Lana said. “Don’t forget that. Still anchors the news on a rival network.”

  Steven smiled as he typed.

  “Also in the general area, at that general time,” I said, “there was a brilliant guy, an honor student who lucked into the E ticket ride out of the projects—a full scholarship to a private college up north. But he didn’t fit in up there, he couldn’t cut it socially, got bounced for roughing up a female student. So he came home, bitter and full of rage. He acted out his rage by blowing away college students and luring police officers to their death. By May tenth, 1974, he had killed or wounded at least five police officers and four students. He knew Roy Frady.”

  Steven typed that, too.

  “Then there were the gang bangers. Frady had just finished working a gang detail, and the homeboys had put a price on his head.” I waited for Steven to finish his memo.

  “I told you Frady was easy with women, and he didn’t care if they were married or otherwise attached. It is possible that he was in the wrong bed when daddy came home. The killer could easily have been someone he knew: another cop, an old lover, someone with a score to settle.

  “Frady had a wife and two kids who were barely making it on their share of his salary. Every month, Mrs. Frady paid the premium on hubby’s life insurance.”

  I put down my notes and looked at Gaylord. “Roy Frady’s story is so rich, I will not phony it up with a lot of crummy production value.”

  “Miniseries,” Gaylord said, with a glaze over his eyes.

  CHAPTER

  4

  When Roy Frady died, he was living with another officer’s ex-girlfriend. The cuckolded officer was Barry Ridgeway. I thought he might offer me a different police perspective on Frady than the one I was getting from Mike and his friends. After what Doug had said about rumors that Ridgeway was into big-time mischief, I was even more interested in talking with him.

  Guido promised me that things at the shooting site were still under control, so I stopped on my way there for a little conversation with former officer Barry Ridgeway.

  Finding Ridgeway had been a coup for Hector. Shortly after Frady’s murder, Ridgeway was forced out of the LAPD for bad debts, for writing rubber checks. He resigned before the department could fire him. At that point he was already a blackout drinker. Two months later he went down on a vehicular manslaughter charge—driving under the influence—and spent eight years in state prison for it. After he got out, alcohol got him into more trouble. Finally, he got sober, and then he dropped out of sight.

  Hector made dozens of calls among the alumni of the Seventy-seventh Street station, class of 1974, before he got a line on Ridgeway. A week ago, Ridgeway’s old sergeant spotted him going into Victory Outreach, a rehab center on Broadway south of downtown, and called Hector.

  According to Hector, Ridgeway didn’t want to talk to me. Out of jail, off parole, he had started over and he wanted shadows from the past to leave him alone.

  So, I wondered, if Ridgeway wanted to start over, what was he doing in the neighborhood where he got into trouble in the first place? Victory Outreach was inside the boundaries of the Seventy-seventh Street police division, and only a few blocks from the house where Roy Frady died.

  I drove off the freeway at Manchester, went east one block to the corner of Broadway. Before the Watts riots, the area around Broadway and Manchester had been a busy shopping area for a large blue-collar neighborhood; Lockheed, Hughes, and Mattel were nearby.

  After Watts, the population moved south from downtown in layers, Hispanics displacing blacks, blacks displacing whites. The hope of them all was to find something better. The reality was always someone else’s leftovers.

  Broadway and Manchester was in the path of that moving rainbow. As chain stores fled to the malls, ma ‘n’ pa operations moved in. Ten times as many failed as made it, leaving behind a patchwork of sad-looking, barricaded storefronts and a lot of vacant space.

  I parked in front of Jimmy’s Smokey Pit—Jesus Is Real and We Deliver painted on the side—and crossed Manchester to Victory Outreach.

  I had every expectation that Ridgeway would tell me to go to hell. My only opening wedge was that damned short skirt. I found him in a small back room at the center, counting freshly laundered white sheets and towels. I watched him through the open door for a moment before I approached.

  Ridgeway was around Mike’s age, late forties, though he looked a hundred; face like a beat-up road map of hard drinking, hard living, tough luck. While he looked a wreck, I got the impression that the damage was old. There was firm flesh on his bones, and his raisin-colored eyes were clear. In contrast to the other men in the center, most of whom wore thrift shop togs, Ridgeway sported a crisply ironed Hawaiian shirt over dark blue slacks with a crease, and his black loafers had a spit shine. His graying hair was short enough to pass police muster.

  When he heard my heels on the linoleum, he looked up, ogled me, smiled.

  “You from the county?” he asked, coming toward me to be helpful. “Women’s home is upstairs. I’ll show you.”

  “Barry Ridgeway?”

  He flinched the way a man with a guilty conscience flinches when he hears a stranger say his name.

  “We have some mutual friends,” I said, offering my hand.

  With an elaborate survey of my assets, he raised his brows like a gourmet before the buffet. “Any friend of yours has gotta be a friend of mine.”

  That was enough exploitation of the slut factor for me; Ridgeway was not a balky mule. I handed him my card with the network logo. “I’m Maggie MacGowen.”

  I half expected to get bounced. But after he gave me a new appraisal, Ridgeway pleated his beat-up face into a dazzling smile.

  “So, you ain’t Christine Lund,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Hell, don’t apologize. Never could stand that broad. Remember the SLA shoot-out? Half of L.A.’s finest getting ready to shoot it out with six asshole kids—urban guerrillas, my butt—had more ammo in that house than Gadhafi. This Lund babe walks right up to the door and knocks. Molotov cocktails flying out the window.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  Ridgeway slipped my card into his breast
pocket. “Hector Melendez came by the other day, told me some newsperson wanted to talk to me about Frady. We still had the black bands on our badges for Frady when the SLA went down. That’s what made me think of Lund.”

  He wasn’t the first to put Frady and the SLA into the same memory cell. He said, “I told Hector I didn’t want to talk to you, so why are you here? Where’s your film crew? Every TV newsie I ever met came with a film crew. Even Christine Lund don’t misbehave without a film crew.”

  “I’m not not a newsie, exactly, but my film crew’s up on Eighty-ninth Street. I’m sure Hector told you I’m working on a film about Frady. Will you talk to me about your history with Frady?”

  “I got questioned after he was found.” Ridgeway became busy with his towels again. “Maybe I should call my attorney. Maybe you should go away.”

  “Whatever makes you happy.” I looked at the bundles he was assembling: a sheet, a towel, a tiny bar of soap, a New Testament in each one. “Do you live here?”

  He shook his head. “I have my own place. Way back when I got out of the joint, condition of my parole was putting in a year of community service here. Couldn’t wait to get finished with it and get the hell out of town. But when I came back, this place looked more like home to me than anywhere else did. Can you feature that?” He frowned. “It’s something to do, I guess. I come in every morning for the church service, then I stay and help out. I do grunt work, security now and then—can get pretty rough sometimes, guys in rehab kicking, come in seeing snakes and spiders, takes a pro to bring ’em down. Then around noon I walk a group from the women’s home over to the AA meeting at Mother of Sorrows on Main, make sure they get past the liquor store on the corner and get home again.” He gave me his dazzling smile; his teeth were false. “It’s a rich life.”

  “You weren’t easy to find. How long have you been back in town?”

  “Three, four months. Don’t know how long I’ll stick this time. Can’t seem to get into the old groove. Everything’s different.”

  He seemed to have forgotten he didn’t want to talk to me. I asked, “Feel like going for a walk around the old neighborhood?”

  “Depends on what you have in mind,” he said, dusting off some buried charm, openly flirting with me now.

  “I need to check on the mischief my crew is into. Eighty-ninth Street is only a few blocks from here. I thought maybe you’d walk me up, talk about the old days on the way.”

  I saw him pale, saw his eyes grow hard. “I had nothing to do with the Frady shooting.”

  “Fine. But who knows the area better than you do? How long were you on patrol duty out of Seventy-seventh Street?”

  “Six years.” Ridgeway didn’t seem unwilling, just cautious. He spent some time fussing with his stacks of sheets and towels, marking a tally in a notebook before he got around to saying anything more.

  “This wasn’t a good neighborhood when Frady got it,” he said finally. “In twenty years, things haven’t gotten any better. Sweet thing like you shouldn’t hang around down here.”

  “Can’t you get time off?”

  “I make my own hours.” He studied me with a wry grin on his face. Then, with his head cocked to the side, he asked, “If they was shooting all around you, would you go up to the door and knock, like her?”

  “If I thought someone would talk to me, sure I would.”

  He smoothed the front of his shirt. “Guess I’m in for a ride, huh? Let’s go out the back way.”

  We headed south on Broadway on foot. Sun had finally broken through the morning fog, leaving behind a gray haze that gave everything a silvery patina. By afternoon, when the air temp would climb into the low eighties, that cool haze would mix with the day’s emissions to become a pall of choking smog. October is the worst month in L.A. for creatures who breathe.

  Cops talk. That’s just the way they are. Must be a test for it when they apply for the academy—the BQ, Bullshit Quotient—and Ridgeway must have scored high. I listened to him rattle on about the way things were and the way things ought to be. It was a performance. I realized early on that he was intensely lonely and if talking about something as touchy as the death of Frady was the price he had to pay to have my company, anyone’s company, then he was willing to pay it. Loneliness can be a dangerous affliction, and I felt bad for him.

  Ridgeway walked on the curb side of me. “Who else you been talking to?”

  “Friends and family. Mike Flint, Doug Senecal, Hector.”

  “God, I can’t believe the way Hector went down.”

  I could only nod because all my words suddenly jammed up in my throat.

  Ridgeway said, “All I heard, he was being a hero, saving some kid or something.”

  “The kid was almost thirty, lived upstairs from Hector,” I said. “He had a long history of mental problems and suicide attempts. When he threatened to jump, his mother went looking for Hector because she knew he was a cop. But she forgot to tell Hec one little detail: the son was armed. He shot Hector coming through the bedroom door, then he shot himself.”

  Ridgeway shook his head. “Hector made a mistake.”

  “That’s what Mike Flint says, too.”

  “Flint. Haven’t seen him in twenty years. Haven’t missed him, either.” He set his jaw. “Frady, Flint, Senecal, and Melen-dez: the Four Whoresmen. Those guys were tight. Wouldn’t let anybody get inside.”

  “Did you feel excluded?”

  He shrugged. “We hung together. All the guys used to go end of watch to that liquor store on the next corner, Manchester and Main, get a six-pack, stand around, cool down before we went home to the old ball and chain. You know, like divers go through decompression. We had to get civilized again. Sometimes we’d go on down to Alphy’s for breakfast, or over to the topless places on Florence. Unless we picked up a girl first.”

  “In the parking lot?”

  “They’d be waiting for us.” The charm again. “Lot of women like uniforms.”

  “Did Frady pick up girls?”

  “Not on the street. Not like Flint and Hector. And me. Frady had regulars he serviced, nurses over at Morningside Hospital—that’s where we both met JoAnn, in the ER—and a black chick he met on a disturbance call, couple others. But he didn’t go in much for the groupies, if you want to call them that.”

  “You said, ‘Not like Flint and Hector.’”

  “Those two, Jesus. They couldn’t beat the chicks off.” He sniffed. “Not that they tried.”

  So Mike had been a slut. This wasn’t new information. He was young in 1974, unhappily married to an in-your-face shrew, moonlighting three part-time jobs, hearing “pig” every time he got out of his patrol car and “bum” every time he pulled into his driveway. I was sure there was some cause and effect working here, because Leslie wasn’t married to Mike anymore and she wasn’t a shrew anymore. I wouldn’t want to be a young cop’s wife. Truth is, I was fighting off the pressure to become an old cop’s wife. Or even, as Mike phrased it, to fucking come in for a landing.

  Maybe it was the smog, but my chest felt heavy, as if there were a black hole inside that sucked up all the good air. Wasn’t the first time the mention of Mike Flint and other women opened up that hole, consumed all the air around me. I trusted Mike, and I’m not by nature jealous. But I had been married for a long time to a womanizer, a good-looking world-class liar, and the experience had left me scarred and gun-shy.

  We were directly under the approach path to LAX. Even though I calculated that Casey was somewhere in the air over western Texas, I kept watching the sky for flaming aircraft.

  I took a big breath. “Tell me about JoAnn Chin.”

  “I shouldn’t have brought her up,” he hissed out the side of his mouth. “When Frady got it, JoAnn was the first question the department asked me. Tell you this, if I ever thought of killing anyone—and I didn’t—I would have done her, not him.”

  “You weren’t jealous when Frady moved in with her?”

  “Jealous over JoAnn?” H
is denial had enough melodrama in it that it sent up a flag: methinks thou dost protest … “She was a gorgeous girl. Flat, but otherwise real built. And a world-class fuck—ask any of the guys. But she wasn’t worth losing my family for. And she sure as hell wasn’t worth killing Frady for.”

  “She broke up your marriage, and she didn’t help Frady’s any,” I said.

  “Don’t give her too much credit. When my wife called her and asked what was going on, JoAnn snitched me off, and I hated her for that. But she didn’t break us up. It’s just, I got caught dirty one time too many, I got drunk one time too many, and I mailed the house payment to my bookie. I can’t blame JoAnn, and I sure as hell can’t blame Roy Frady. And another thing, her and me were ancient history before she took up with Roy.”

  Ridgeway was having trouble breathing, too. And his face was red.

  The neighborhood grew seedier the further south we walked from Manchester Boulevard. The original houses in the area were small, prewar frame bungalows. Fifty years ago, when the war came and defense plants opened nearby, little rental units sprang up like victory gardens in front yards, backyards, side yards—anywhere a bedroom, kitchenette, and bath could be planted. They were never what you would call nice, and fifty years of tenants and hard wear had turned them into stepchildren of the slums.

  We crossed Broadway at Eighty-ninth and walked straight into what looked like a neighborhood carnival. Film trucks, Winnebagos for the crew, and a vast array of equipment filled the narrow street and provided entertainment for everyone for blocks around. We usually have two security guards on a shoot of that size. I counted five, and they were very busy with crowd control.

  Ridgeway nudged my shoulder with his. “What the hell?”