As I was heading north on the 5, I called downtown for an address. I checked my GPS and made my way to the Santa Monica Freeway. Cutting north on the Hollywood Freeway, I exited near Griffith Park and drove up a winding foothill road in Los Feliz. I parked on a quiet side street, walked about fifty yards, and stopped in front of a redwood bungalow carved onto a hillside.
I could use some backup, but, at this point, I didn’t trust anyone in the LAPD. Wegland and Patowski were dirty. Duffy was a liar. I had no idea who else in the department was compromised. I felt safest handling this alone.
I flicked on my Maglite, edged my way down the driveway, circled the house, and stopped at the back door. Pulling a set of lock picks out of my back pocket, I inserted the tension wrench into the keyhole and turned it slightly. As I continued to apply pressure with the tension wrench, I slipped the pick into the keyhole. I lifted the pins, one by one, unit I heard a click — the upper pin falling into place. Rotating the plug and opening the door, I slipped through the darkened house. Every few steps I stopped and listened. All I could hear was the ticking of a clock and the humming of the refrigerator. When I reached a large bedroom, I peered inside. There she was, curled up on her side, one arm clutching a pillow. I needed a confession. If I didn’t get one, I would have to haul her back to the station. And I knew she’d keep her mouth shut until her lawyer arrived. But if I took her by surprise, knocked her off her mooring, I just might be able to extract something useful from her.
When I stopped by Internal Affairs a few weeks ago, all those old-timers were flashing me hostile looks. Virginia Saucedo seemed like the only supportive detective in the room. She was a damn good actress.
Reaching for the Beretta, I slowly removed it from my holster, the leather creaking. I walked across the room and stood over the bed. “Detective Saucedo. You’re under arrest.”
She twitched, opened her eyes, and reached for the drawer in her end table, where I assumed she kept a pistol. I grabbed her wrist and said, “Let’s go.”
She was wearing a sheer blue V-necked nightgown, and the moonstone cross around her neck glowed in the faint light. She looked younger than the last time I had seen her. Shivering on the edge of the bed, blinking hard, hugging herself, she looked like a scared little girl.
“Where we going?”
“To the living room.”
Grabbing a robe from the foot of the bed, she slipped it on, and as she stood up I noticed she was almost my height. She stumbled off to the living room as I followed her. I motioned toward the couch with the barrel of the Beretta. She sat down, and I pulled a chair across from her.
I glanced around the room. This house was beautiful, too nice for a single cop on a detective’s salary. An enormous hand-carved chest in front of the sofa served as a coffee table, Mexican folk art lined the walls, and a large picture window revealed a spectacular view of the city, a carpet of lights from downtown to the ocean.
I figured the best way to go would be to bluff her.
“Conrad Patowski layed you out.”
She glared at me.
“Patowski is singing to save his ass. He’s angling for a deal. He served you up on a silver platter.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Conrad tried to get the best deal for himself. So he started talking. Said you went along with Wally to Relovich’s. You know the felony murder rule. You’re going down.”
She clasped her hands on her lap. “That’s all bullshit.”
“Tell me what happened. I’ll go to the DA with your statement and see if he can give you a break. Since Patowski’s talking, you better not bullshit me. I’ll compare statements and see who’s lying.”
“I think you’re lying.”
I leaned forward and said softly, “Save yourself.”
“Save myself from what?”
“You know they execute women in California.”
“If you want to arrest me, arrest me.”
Ignoring her, I pulled a digital voice recorder from my vest pocket, set it on the wooden chest, flicked it on, and read Saucedo her rights. “How’d it begin with Wegland?”
She fixed me with a cold stare and said, “Go fuck yourself.”
Before I could react, I was staring into the long blue steel barrel of a. 38 revolver that a slender, jittery Hispanic man with a thin mustache was waving at me. “Set it down on the floor,” he said in a quavering voice.
I dropped the gun.
“Am I glad to see you, baby,” Saucedo said. “Even if you are late.”
“I saw through the window this pendejo pointing a piece at you, so I snuck in the back door. Who the hell is he?”
She leaned over and shut off the tape recorder. “Just a stupid fucking cop who doesn’t know when to back away from a cleared case.”
When I reached toward my pocket, she shouted, “Hands to your side!”
The guy gripping the. 38 looked like he was nervous enough to pull the trigger. But I hoped he might be reluctant to shoot me if I was talking to Saucedo. “I’ve figured out a few things about you and Wally,” I said. “Before he made commander, he was a captain in Hollywood. You were working patrol there. He probably looked out for you. Helped you make detective. Got you on with I.A. And all this time the two of you were running your games and raking in the cash. Conrad was staying behind as the errand boy while Wally and you were out there ripping off houses. And all this led to the hit on Relovich.” I glanced at the guy with the gun and back at Saucedo. “What the hell happened to you?”
“How do you think I could afford this house?” she said, an angry, defiant expression clouding her features. “Around here, just the lots are selling for a million.”
“I think a jury would call it justifiable homicide because the L.A. real estate market made you do it. But why did Wally do it?”
The man with the. 38 called out, “Because he was pussy whipped.” He pointed the pistol at me and said, “This fucking guy’s a tongue jockey. He’ll talk all night if we let him. Let me shut this fool up.”
Crossing the room and opening a closet door, she removed a sweatshirt and a gun from a holster hanging on a hook. She wrapped the sweatshirt around the barrel of the gun, walked over, and knelt beside me. Then she whirled around and shot the man in the chest, the gunshot muffled by the sweatshirt.
He crumpled to the ground, his mouth open, his eyes bulging with astonishment, as the. 38 clattered on the hardwood floor.
She walked over to the man and kicked the pistol to the side of the room.
I knew Saucedo was going to shoot me with his gun, making sure to leave no prints. Then she was going to put her gun, which was probably a throw-down, in my hands.
“Why’d you go after Relovich?” I asked.
“You’re the Felony Special hotshot. You figure it out.”
I knew she let me talk because she was pumping me for information. She wanted to figure out how to play it with the LAPD after she disposed of me.
“When Relovich called I.A. a few weeks ago, you managed to take his call,” I said. “That call made you paranoid. You were afraid Relovich would rat you out because you were in on Wally’s scams from the get go. You went with him and his snitch Freitas to rip off Silver. And when Freitas started arguing about the split in the middle of the job, you blasted him.”
“If you know so much, why didn’t you come after me sooner?”
“I was still putting my case together. It was apparent early on that Wally took care of Avery Mitchell in Idaho, because he was afraid he’d talk. You might have done it yourself, but you’d be a bit conspicuous out there. Wally was just another middle-aged white guy in Idaho. After that, when he went after me, he had a little experience.”
“Obviously, he didn’t have enough,” she said with contempt. “He couldn’t even do that right.”
“It’s pretty clear that you killed Relovich, not Wegland.”
“I see Wally was pretty fucking talkative before he took that swan dive. That was Wally. All he wanted to do was talk, talk, talk. He thought he could persuade Relovich to keep his mouth shut about the shooting at Silver’s and the payoff.”
“But you knew there was only one way to make sure that-”
“No more stupid fucking questions.” She jabbed the gun at me and said, “On your stomach. Now!”
I dropped to my knees.
“ Stomach, I said! Wally should have cancelled you out when he had the chance.”
We both froze when we heard a metallic click-clack sound. I turned around and saw the silhouette of a man in the dim kitchen racking a Remington 870 police-issue 12-gauge shotgun.
“Drop the gun, Saucedo!” the man shouted.
Saucedo took a step toward me and raised her pistol.
I heard a deafening blast and saw Saucedo fly across the room, bounce off a wall, and topple to the floor.