Words spoken before but not as my own eulogy. I nodded to myself and knew just how I was going to go out. I had written at least a thousand murder stories in my time. I was going to write one more. A story that would stand as the tombstone on my career. A story that would make them remember me after I was gone.
The weekend was a blur of alcohol, anger and humiliation as I grappled with a new future that was no future. After briefly sobering up on Saturday morning I opened the file that held my novel in progress and began reading. I soon saw what my ex-wife had seen long ago. What I should have seen long ago. It wasn’t there and I was kidding myself if I thought it was.
The conclusion was that I would have to start from scratch if I was going to go this way, and the thought of that was debilitating. When I took a cab back to the Short Stop to get my car, I ended up staying and closing the place out early Sunday morning, watching the Dodgers lose again and drunkenly telling complete strangers about how fucked up the Times and the whole newspaper business was.
It took me all the way into Monday morning to get cleaned up. I rolled in forty-five minutes late to work after finally getting my car at the Short Stop and I could still smell the alcohol coming out of my pores.
Angela Cook was already sitting at my desk in a chair she had borrowed from one of the empty cubicles. There had been a lot of them since they’d started the buyouts and the layoffs.
“Sorry I’m late, Angela,” I said. “It was kind of a lost weekend. Starting with the party on Friday. You should have come.”
She smiled demurely, like she knew there had been no party, just a one-man wake.
“I got you some coffee but it’s probably cold by now,” she said.
“Thanks.”
I picked up the cup she had gestured to and it had indeed cooled. But the good thing about the Times cafeteria was free refills—at least they hadn’t changed that yet.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Let me go check in with the desk and if nothing’s happening we can go get refills and talk about how you’re going to take over.”
I left her there and walked out of podland and over toward the Metro desk. On the way I stopped at the switchboard. It sat like a lifeguard stand in the middle of the newsroom, built high so that the operators could look out across the vast newsroom and see who was in and able to receive calls. I stepped to the side of the station so one of the operators could look down and see me.
It was Lorene, who had been on duty the Friday before. She raised a finger to tell me to hold. She handled two quick transfers and then pulled one side of her headset off her left ear.
“I don’t have anything for you, Jack,” she said.
“I know. I want to ask about Friday. You transferred a call to me late in the afternoon from a lady named Wanda Sessums. Would there be any record of her phone number? I forgot to ask for it.”
Lorene shoved her headset back in place and handled another call. Then without pulling her ear free she told me she didn’t have the number. She had not written it down at the time and the system only kept an electronic list of the last five hundred calls to come in. It had been more than two days since Wanda Sessums had called for me and the switchboard got close to a thousand calls a day.
Lorene asked if I had called 411 to try to get the number. Sometimes the basic starting point was forgotten. I thanked her and headed on to the desk. I had called information at home and already knew there was no listing for Wanda Sessums.
The city editor at the moment was a woman named Dorothy Fowler. It was one of the most transient jobs at the paper, a position both political and practical and one that seemed to have a revolving door attached to it. Fowler had been a damn good government reporter and was only eight months into trying her hand at commanding the crew of city-side reporters. I wished her well but kind of knew it was impossible for her to succeed, given all the cutbacks on resources and the empty cubicles in the newsroom.
Fowler had a little office in the line of glass but she preferred to be an editor of the people. She was usually at a desk at the head of the formation of desks where all the aces—assistant city editors—sat. This was known as the raft because all the desks were pushed together as if in some sort of flotilla where there was strength in numbers against the sharks.
All city-side reporters were assigned to an ace as the first level of direction and management. My ace was Alan Prendergast, who handled all the cop and court reporters. As such, he had a later shift, usually coming in around noon, because news that came off the law enforcement and justice beats most of the time developed late in the day.
This meant my first check-in of the day was usually with Dorothy Fowler or the deputy city editor, Michael Warren. I always tried to make it Fowler because she ranked higher and Warren and I never got along. This might have had something to do with the fact that long before I had come to the Times, I had worked for the Rocky Mountain News out of Denver and had encountered Warren and competed with him on a major story. He had acted unethically and for that I could never trust him as an editor.
Dorothy had her eyes glued to a screen and I had to say her name to get her attention. We hadn’t talked since I’d been pink-slipped so she immediately looked up at me with a sympathetic frown you might reserve for someone you just heard had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“Come inside, Jack,” she said.
She stood up and left the raft and headed to her seldom-used office. She sat behind her desk but I stayed standing because I knew this would be quick.
“I just want to say we are really going to miss you around here, Jack.”
I nodded my thanks.
“I am sure Angela will pick up without a blip.”
“She’s very good and she’s hungry, but she doesn’t have the chops. Not yet, at least, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? The newspaper is supposed to be the community’s watchdog and we’re turning it over to the puppies. Think of all the great journalism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The corruption exposed, the public benefit. Where’s that going to come from now with every paper in the country getting shredded? Our government? No way. TV, the blogs? Forget it. My friend who took the buyout in Florida says corruption will be the new growth industry without the papers watching.”
She paused as if to ponder the sad state of things.
“Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m just depressed. Angela is great. She’ll do good work and in three or four years she’ll own that beat the way you own it now. But the point is, between now and then, how many stories will she miss? And how many of them would have never gotten by you?”
I only shrugged. These were questions that mattered to her but no longer to me. In twelve days I was out.
“Well,” she said after a delayed silence. “I’m sorry. I’ve always enjoyed working with you.”
“Well, I still have some time. Maybe I’ll find something really good to go out on.”
She smiled brightly.
“That would be great!”
“Anything happening today that you know of?”
“Nothing big,” Dorothy said. “I saw on the overnote that the police chief is meeting with black leaders to talk about racially targeted crime again. But we’ve done that to death.”
“I’m going to take Angela around Parker Center and I’ll see if we can come up with something.”
“Good.”
A few minutes later Angela Cook and I refilled coffee cups and took a table in the cafeteria. It was on the first floor in the space where the old presses had turned for so many decades before they started printing the paper offsite. The conversation with Angela was stiff. I had met her briefly six months earlier when she was a new hire and Fowler had trotted her around the cubicles, making introductions. But since then I hadn’t worked on a story with her, had lunch or coffee with her, or seen her at one of the watering holes favored by the older denizens of the newsroom.
“Where’d you come from, Angela?”
“Tampa. I went to the Uni
versity of Florida.”
“Good school. Journalism?”
“I got my master’s there, yeah.”
“Have you done any cop shop reporting?”
“Before I went back for my master’s I worked two years in St. Pete. I spent a year on cops.”
I drank some coffee and I needed it. My stomach was empty because I hadn’t been able to keep anything down for twenty-four hours.
“St. Petersburg? What are you talking about there, a few dozen murders a year?”
“If we were lucky.”
She smiled at the irony of it. A crime reporter always wants a good murder to write about. The reporter’s good luck is somebody else’s bad luck.
“Well,” I said. “If we go below four hundred here we’re having a good year. Real good. Los Angeles is the place to be if you want to work crime. If you want to tell murder stories. If you’re just marking time until the next beat comes up, you’re probably not going to like it.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not worried about the next beat. This is what I want. I want to write murder stories. I want to write books about this stuff.”
She sounded sincere. She sounded like me—from a long time ago.
“Good,” I said. “I’m going to take you over to Parker Center to meet some people. Detectives mostly. They’ll help you but only if they trust you. If they don’t trust you, all you’ll get are the press releases.”
“How do I do that, Jack? Make them trust me.”
“You know. Write stories. Be fair, be accurate. You know what to do. Trust is built on performance. The thing to remember is that the cops in this town have an amazing network. The word about a reporter gets around quickly. If you’re fair, they’ll all know it. If you fuck one of them over, they’ll all know that too and they’ll shut your access down everywhere.”
She seemed embarrassed by my profanity. She would have to get used to it, dealing with cops.
“There’s one other thing,” I said. “They have a hidden nobility. The good ones, I mean. And if you can somehow get that into your stories, you will win them over every time. So look for the telling details, the little moments of nobility.”
“Okay, Jack, I will.”
“Then you’ll do all right.”
While we were making the rounds and the introductions in the police headquarters at Parker Center we picked up a nice little murder story in the Open-Unsolved Unit. A twenty-year-old rape and murder of an elderly woman had been cleared when DNA collected from the victim in 1989 was unearthed in case archives and run through the state Department of Justice’s sex crimes data bank. The match was called a cold hit. The DNA collected from the victim belonged to a man currently doing time at Pelican Bay for an attempted rape. The cold case investigators would put together a case and indict the guy before he ever got a chance at parole up there. It wasn’t that flashy, because the bad guy was already behind bars, but it was worth eight inches. People like to read stories that reinforce the idea that bad people don’t always get away. Especially in an economic downturn, when it’s so easy to be cynical.
When we got back to the newsroom I asked Angela to write it up—her first story on the beat—while I tried to run down Wanda Sessums, my angry caller from the Friday before.
Since there was no record of her call to the Times switchboard and a quick check with directory assistance had turned up no listing for Wanda Sessums in any of L.A.’s area codes, I next called Detective Gilbert Walker at the Santa Monica Police Department. He was the lead investigator on the case that resulted in Alonzo Winslow’s arrest in the murder of Denise Babbit. I guess you could say it was a cold call. I had no relationship with Walker, as Santa Monica didn’t come up very often on the news radar. It was a relatively safe beach town between Venice and Malibu that had a pressing homeless problem but not much of a murder problem. The police department investigated only a handful of homicides each year and most of these weren’t newsworthy. More often than not they were body dump cases like Denise Babbit’s. The murder occurs somewhere else—like the south end of L. A.—and the beach cops are left to clean up the mess.
My call found Walker at his desk. His voice seemed friendly enough until I identified myself as a reporter with the Times. Then it went cold. That happened often. I had spent seven years on the beat and had many cops in many departments that I counted as sources and even friends. In a jam, I could reach out. But sometimes you don’t get to pick who you have to reach out to. The bottom line is you can never get them all in your corner. The media and the police have never been on comfortable terms. The media views itself as the public watchdog. And nobody, the police included, likes having somebody looking over their shoulder. There was a chasm between the two institutions into which trust had fallen long before I was ever around. Consequently, it made things tough for the lowly beat reporter who just needs a few facts to fill out a story.
“What can I do for you?” Walker said in a clipped tone.
“I’m trying to reach Alonzo Winslow’s mother and I was wondering if you might be able to help.”
“And who is Alonzo Winslow?”
I was about to say, Come on, Detective, when I realized I wasn’t supposed to know the suspect’s name. There were laws about releasing the names of juveniles charged with crimes.
“Your suspect in the Babbit case.”
“How do you know that name? I’m not confirming that name.”
“I understand that, Detective. I’m not asking you to confirm the name. I know the name. His mother called me on Friday and gave me the name. Trouble is, she didn’t give me her phone number and I’m just trying to get back in—”
“Have a nice day,” Walker said, interrupting and then hanging up the phone.
I leaned back in my desk chair, noting to myself that I needed to tell Angela Cook that the nobility I mentioned earlier did not reside in all cops.
“Asshole,” I said out loud.
I drummed my fingers on the desk until I came up with a new plan—the one I should have employed in the first place.
I opened a line and called a detective who was a source in the South Bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department and who I knew had been involved in the Winslow arrest. The case had originated in the city of Santa Monica because the victim had been found in the trunk of her car in a parking lot near the pier. But the LAPD became involved when evidence from the murder scene led to Alonzo Winslow, a resident of South L.A.
Following established protocol, Santa Monica contacted Los Angeles, and a team of South Bureau detectives intimately familiar with the turf were used to locate Winslow, take him into custody and then turn him over to Santa Monica. Napoleon Braselton was one of those South Bureau guys. I called him now and was flat-out honest with him. Well, almost.
“Remember the bust two weeks ago for the girl in the trunk?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s Santa Monica,” he said. “We just helped out.”
“Yeah, I know. You guys took Winslow down for them. That’s what I’m calling about.”
“It’s still their case, man.”
“I know but I can’t get a hold of Walker over there and I don’t know anybody else in that department. But I know you. And I want to ask about the arrest, not the case.”
“What, is there a beef? We didn’t touch that kid.”
“No, Detective, no beef. Far as I know, it was a righteous bust. I’m just trying to find the kid’s house. I want to go see where he was living, maybe talk to his mother.”
“That’s fine but he was living with his grandmother.”
“You sure?”
“The information we got in the briefing was that he was with the grandmother. We were the big bad wolves hitting grandma’s house. There was no father in the picture and the mother was in and out, living on the street. Drugs.”
“Okay, then I’ll talk to the grandmother. Where’s the place?”
“You’re just cruising on down to say hello?”
&nbs
p; He said it in a disbelieving tone and I knew that was because I was white and would likely be unwelcome in Alonzo Winslow’s neighborhood.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take somebody with me. Strength in numbers.”
“Good luck. Don’t get your ass shot until after I go off watch at four.”
“I’ll do my best. What’s the address, do you remember?”
“It’s in Rodia Gardens. Hold on.”
He put the phone down while he looked up the exact address. Rodia Gardens was a huge public housing complex in Watts that was like a city unto itself. A dangerous city. It was named after Simon Rodia, the artist who had created one of the wonders of the city. The Watts Towers. But there wasn’t anything wonderful about Rodia Gardens. It was the kind of place where poverty, drugs and crime had cycled for decades. Multiple generations of families living there and unable to get out and break free. Many of them had grown up having never been to the beach or on an airplane or even to a movie in a theater.
Braselton came back on and gave me the full address but said he had no phone number. I then asked if he had a name for the grandmother and he gave me the name I already had, Wanda Sessums.
Bingo. My caller. She had either lied about being the young suspect’s mother or the police had their information wrong. Either way, I now had an address and would hopefully soon put a face with the voice that had berated me the Friday before.
After ending the call with Braselton I got up from my cubicle and wandered back into the photo department. I saw a photo editor named Bobby Azmitia at the assignment desk and asked if he had any floaters currently out and about. He looked down at his personnel log and named two photographers who were out in their cars looking for wild art—photographs unconnected to news events that could be used to splash color on a section front. I knew both of the floaters and one of them was black. I asked Azmitia if Sonny Lester could break free to take a ride with me down the 110 Freeway and he agreed to offer the photographer up. We made arrangements for me to be picked up outside the globe lobby in fifteen minutes.