More officers soon entered the room, followed by Lieutenant Munroe. He took a position behind the podium at the head of the room and convened roll call. It was uneventful and dry, with the usual reporting of area crimes, including the credit-card theft Ballard had handled the night before. Munroe had no news on the Dancers case, not even an artist’s drawing of a suspect. His report lasted less than ten minutes. He concluded by throwing it to Ballard.
“Renée, anything you want to talk about?”
“Not much. We had the assault last night. The victim is still hanging in. Happened on the he-she stroll and anything anybody picks up on that would be welcome. Note that the suspect used brass knuckles. Ask around about that. Other than that and five people murdered in the Dancers, quiet times.”
People laughed.
“Okay,” Munroe said.
The lieutenant moved on to housekeeping announcements about scheduling and body-camera training. Ballard wanted to leave but knew it would be rude, so she pulled her phone to surreptitiously check messages down by her thigh. She saw that she had received a text from Jenkins a few minutes before. He was just checking in with her, as was their custom on the shifts they worked alone.
Jenkins: Howzit going?
Ballard: I think I found the upside-down house.
Jenkins: How?
Ballard: Prior with brass knuckles.
Jenkins: Cool. Are you making a move tonight?
Ballard: No, still gathering string. I’ll let you know.
Jenkins: Good.
Roll call ended as she was finishing the text exchange. Ballard put her phone away and headed toward the stairs. Munroe called to her from behind as she was making the turn on the first landing.
“Ballard, you’re not going over to the Dancers, are you?” he asked.
Ballard stopped and waited for him to catch up.
“No, why?” she said.
“Just wanted to know what my people are doing,” Munroe said.
Technically, Ballard was not one of Munroe’s people but she let the remark slide. He ran patrol in the division during the late show, but Ballard was a detective and reported to Lieutenant McAdams, the dayside D bureau commander.
“Like I said in roll call, I’m working the assault from last night,” she said. “McAdams gave it to me.”
“Yeah, I didn’t get the memo on that,” Munroe said.
“Did you get a memo telling you to keep me away from the Dancers?”
“No, I told you, just want to know where everybody on the shift is.”
“Yeah, well, now you know what I’m working on. I have to go by the hospital for a minute but I’m around if you need me.”
She turned and went down the last flight of steps and moved directly into the detective bureau. She wondered if Munroe was hiding something. She usually worked autonomously, without the patrol lieutenant keeping tabs on her. Had Olivas or someone else from downtown told him to keep her clear of the club and the investigation?
The exchange with Munroe unnerved her but she put the thoughts aside so she could focus on the case she had at hand. She got keys for the late show city-ride out of the drawer of the receptionist’s desk, then grabbed a fresh battery for her rover out of the charging station. She went back to her desk for her handbag and the radio and then headed out. Once she was in the car, she could immediately tell someone had used it during the day—someone who had ignored the rule prohibiting smoking in all city vehicles. She opened up all the windows as she pulled through the lot gate and turned north on Wilcox toward Sunset.
At Hollywood Presbyterian, she badged her way past a security guard and two nursing stations in order to get to the room where Ramona Ramone was lying comatose in a bed. Ballard had asked a nurse named Natasha to accompany her in case there came a time when she needed backup testimony at a trial.
The victim actually looked worse a night later. Her head had been partially shaved and the surgery to repair the skull fracture and limit the impact of brain swelling had left her face puffy and unrecognizable. She lay at the center of a nest of tubes, drips, and monitors.
“I need you to open her smock so I can photograph the bruises on her torso,” Ballard said.
“Wasn’t it done last night?” Natasha asked.
“It was. But the bruises will look different today.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to, Natasha. Just open the smock.”
Ballard knew that bruising occurred when blood vessels beneath the skin were damaged by impact and red blood cells leaked into the surrounding tissues. The bruise sometimes grew larger and darker in the twenty-four hours after an injury because blood continued to seep from the damaged vessels. Ballard was hoping that Ramona Ramone’s bruises would now be more defined and possibly even legible.
The nurse moved some tubing out of the way, then pulled down a thermal blanket that covered the patient. She unbuttoned the pale blue smock to expose the victim’s naked body. There was a catheter attached to the penis and the urine in the clear tube had a reddish hue from internal bleeding. The nurse pulled the blanket back up slightly and Ballard didn’t know if that was a show of modesty or revulsion.
Ballard noted that the right and left sides of the upper torso were fully covered in deep purple bruising. The delineated edges of the red impact marks she had seen the night before were now blurred as the blood continued to spread beneath the skin. If the damage were being seen for the first time now, it would be impossible to deduce that it had been inflicted with brass knuckles. Ballard leaned down over the bed from the left side to study the purple blossoms closely. Before long she identified two side-by-side rings of deep purple against a lighter shade of bruising. She believed it was the double O in the word GOOD.
“Natasha, will you look at this?”
Ballard straightened up and stepped to her left so the nurse could move in. She pointed to the pattern.
“What is that?” Ballard asked.
“You mean the bruising?” Natasha said.
“There’s a pattern there. Do you see it?”
“I see … well, maybe. You mean the circles?”
“Exactly. Let me photograph it.”
Ballard pulled out her phone and moved in close again when Natasha stepped back. As she took photos, she thought about the billboards she had seen all over the city that showed stunning, professional-grade shots taken on the new iPhone camera. Ballard guessed that these kinds of photos would never be put on billboards.
“Is that from the weapon?” Natasha asked. “Like maybe he had two big rings on his fingers when he punched this man.”
Ballard continued to shoot, with and then without the flash.
“Something like that,” she said.
She moved around to the other side of the bed and studied the bruising on the left side of Ramona Ramone’s torso. Here the purple blossoms were an even deeper color and Ballard could find no pattern indicative of the word EVIL. She did know that the deeper color meant deeper injury, and the imbalance between the two sides of the torso indicated that the attacker’s power hand was his right. She tried to recall if Thomas Trent had done anything during their interaction and test-drive earlier to reveal whether he was right-handed. It had been evident that the knuckles on his right hand were painfully bruised. She then remembered him writing down her phone number with his right hand.
Ballard took photos of the left side just so she could document the extent of the injuries.
“You can cover her up, Natasha,” she said. “I’m finished for now.”
Natasha started rebuttoning the smock.
“You saw that he’s a man, right?” the nurse asked.
“Biologically, yes,” Ballard said. “But she chose to live as a woman. That’s what I go with.”
“Oh,” Natasha said.
“Do you know if she has had any visitors? Any family?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Are they going to transfer her?”
>
“I don’t know. Probably.”
Hollywood Presbyterian was a private hospital. If family or insurance was not found for Ramone, she would be transferred to a county hospital, where she wouldn’t get the same level of care she was getting here.
Ballard thanked Natasha for her help and left the room.
After clearing the hospital, Ballard drove to a neighborhood in the shadow of an elevated section of the 101 freeway. Ramona Ramone had no driver’s license under her current or birth name and the only address Ballard had found for her was on Heliotrope Drive. It was the address on two shake cards in her vice file and the one given when she was last arrested.
Ballard had thought it was most likely a phony, not because there wasn’t a street in Hollywood called Heliotrope but because she knew something about plants and flowers from growing up in Hawaii. She had often worked with her family on tomato farms and plant nurseries on the dense mountainsides of Maui. A heliotrope was a plant that blossomed with fragrant purple and blue flowers and was known for turning its petals toward the sun. It seemed to Ballard like a metaphor of some kind, that maybe Ramona Ramone had chosen the name of the street because it fit with her desire to change and turn her petals to the sun.
Now, as she followed the road to the freeway, she saw that the address corresponded to a row of old RVs and house trailers parked stem to stern under the overpass. It was one of L.A.’s many homeless encampments, and beyond the row of beat-up vehicles on the street, she could see pitched tents and shelters made of blue tarp and other materials in the hardscrabble yard beneath the overpass.
Ballard parked her car and got out.
13
Ballard knew something about the social structure of the city’s teeming homeless encampments. Both the city and the department had been attacked and sued by civil rights groups for ill-advised handling of encounters with homeless people and their communities. It had resulted in problem-specific sensitivity training and what amounted to a hands-off policy. She had learned from those sessions that a homeless encampment evolves much like a city, with a need for a social and government hierarchy that provided services like security, decision-making, and waste management. Many had individuals who served as mayors, sheriffs, and judges. As Ballard moved into the Heliotrope encampment, she was looking for the sheriff.
Other than the constant sound of traffic on the freeway overhead, it was all quiet in the camp. It was after midnight, the temperature was dropping into the fifties, and the inhabitants were mostly hunkered down and bracing for another night facing the elements, with walls made of plastic tarp or, if they were lucky, the aluminum shell of a camper.
Ballard noticed one man moving through what looked like a debris field where the people who lived off the trash of others threw their own trash. He was buckling his belt and his zipper was down. When he looked up from the operation and saw Ballard, he startled.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“LAPD. Who the fuck are you?”
“Well, I live here.”
“Are you the sheriff? I’m looking for somebody in charge.”
“I’m not the sheriff but I got the night shift.”
“Really? You’re security?”
“That’s me.”
Ballard pulled her badge off her belt and held it up.
“Ballard, LAPD.”
“Uh, Denver. People call me Denver.”
“Okay, Denver. I don’t want to hassle anybody. I just need your help.”
“Okay.”
Denver stepped forward and put out his hand. Ballard held back from openly cringing. Luckily she was holding her rover in her right hand and avoided the outstretched hand.
“Elbow bump, Denver,” she said.
She offered her elbow but Denver didn’t know what to do with it.
“Okay, never mind that,” she said. “Let’s just talk. The reason I’m here is I think one of your citizens is in the hospital, hurt really bad. I want to find her place here. Can you help me?”
“Who is it? We have people come and go. Sometimes they just leave their stuff.”
“Her name’s Ramona Ramone. Kinda short Spanish girl? She said she lived here.”
“Yeah, I know Ramona. But one thing you should know—she’s a man.”
“Yes, I know that. She was born a man but identifies as a woman.”
That seemed to confuse Denver so Ballard moved on.
“So she lives here?”
“Well, she did. She was gone like a week and we didn’t think she was coming back. Like I said, people come and go, just leave their shit behind. So somebody took her spot, you know what I mean? That’s how it works around here. You snooze, you lose.”
“Which spot was it?”
“She was in the ’seventy-four Midas at the front of the wagon train.”
He pointed toward the ragtag line of RVs parked along the curb in front of the open encampment area. The first RV was a dirty white camper with a Dodge van cab. There was a faded-orange accent stripe down the side and a plastic American flag draped over the back edge of the roof as a leak stopper. From the outside, the vehicle showed every bit of its forty years.
“I heard she bought it from the previous guy for four hundred bucks and then he moved into the jungle.”
Denver now pointed toward the encampment. It was clear that the RVs, no matter how decrepit and despairing, were the choice habitats in the community. A cottage industry had recently arisen in which old inoperable campers were pulled out of junkyards and backyards, towed to street parking locations under freeways or in industrial areas, and sold cheap or even rented to homeless people. They were passed from hand to hand and were often the subject of ownership fights and unlawful evictions. The department was in the process of putting together a task force to deal with this and the many other issues of the city’s growing homeless population—the largest west of New York City.
“How long was she there?” Ballard asked.
“A year or thereabouts,” Denver said.
“Is somebody in there now?”
“Yeah, a guy. Stormy Monday took it.”
“That’s the name he uses?”
“Yeah. People ’round here use a lot of different names, you know? They’ve left their other names behind.”
“Got it. Let’s go talk to Stormy. I’ve got to look inside.”
“He’s not a happy guy when you wake him up. They call him Stormy Monday but he’s kind of a dick every single day.”
“I know the type. We’ll deal with that, Denver.”
As she started toward the front of the train of RVs, she brought her rover up and called in a request for a backup. She was given an ETA of four minutes.
“You know, when police come around here, it makes people upset,” Denver said after she lowered the radio.
“I understand,” Ballard said. “We don’t want to cause any problems. But it will be up to Stormy Monday.”
Ballard had a small tactical light in her pocket that she had gotten out of the glove box of her car. The butt end was a heavy steel point. She used it to rap on the door of the Dodge Midas. She then stepped a comfortable four feet back and two to the left. She noticed that there was no handle on the door, just two holes through which were threaded the links of a steel chain. It was a way to lock the vehicle when you were inside it as well as out.
There was no answer and no movement from the RV.
“It looks like somebody’s locked in,” Ballard said.
“Yeah, he’s in there,” Denver said.
Ballard rapped harder on the door this time. The sound echoed off the concrete overhead and could be heard well above the din of the freeway.
“Hey, Stormy!” Denver called out. “Come on out here a minute.”
A patrol car cruised slowly down Heliotrope, and Ballard flicked her light at it. The car pulled to a stop in the street beside the Midas. The two female blue suiters from roll call got out. Herrera was the lead and her partner was Dyson.
“Ballard, what’ve we got?” Herrera asked.
“Gotta roust a guy in here,” Ballard said. “Denver here says he’s not going to be happy.”
The RV’s springs were shot after so many decades of use. The vehicle started to creak and move as soon as there was movement inside. Then, from the other side of the door came a voice.
“Yeah, what do you want?”
Denver stepped in unbidden.
“Hey, Stormy, you got the police out here. They want to see inside the crib on account of Ramona used to live here.”
“Yeah, she ain’t livin’ here now,” Stormy replied. “I’m sleeping.”
“Open the door, sir,” Ballard said loudly.
“You have a warrant or something? I know my rights.”
“We don’t need a warrant. We need you to open the door, or what we’ll do is tow this vehicle with you in it to the police yard, where the door will be forcibly opened and you’ll be arrested for obstructing an investigation. You’ll be in county jail and this prime spot will go to somebody else. Is that what you want, sir?”
Ballard thought she had covered everything. She waited. Herrera stepped away to listen to a call on her shoulder mic. Dyson stayed with Ballard. Thirty seconds went by and then Ballard heard the rattle of the chain inside the door. Stormy Monday was opening up.
Based on the moniker and the prep that he was an angry guy, Ballard was expecting a big man to come out of the trailer, ready for confrontation. Instead, a small man with glasses and a gray beard stepped out with his hands up. Ballard told him to put his hands down and walked him over to Dyson and Herrera, who had returned to the group. Ballard questioned him about the ownership of the RV and its contents. The man, who identified himself as Cecil Beatty, said he had moved in only two days earlier, and that was after the RV had been picked through by others. He said that he didn’t think there were any belongings left that had been Ramona Ramone’s.
Ballard told the patrol officers to watch Beatty while she took a look inside the RV. She put on latex gloves and went up the two steps and in. She swept her light across a small two-room space that was littered with junk and smelled as sour as the Hollywood Station drunk tank on a Sunday morning. Ballard put her mouth and nose into the crook of her elbow as she moved through the debris that littered every surface and the floor. She saw nothing that stood out as possibly belonging to Ramona Ramone. She moved through the first room and into the back room, which essentially consisted of a queen-size bed piled with darkly stained sheets and blankets. She nearly lost it when the sheets suddenly moved and she realized there was someone in the bed.