“Your point?”
“Wyatt Johnson would have literally fallen into the shooter’s arms. Look at all the blood in these pictures. In the interviews with the girls, they never said anything about seeing blood on Charles Conklin.”
Guido gave the pictures a closer look. “It was dark. The lights were sodium vapor and fluorescent. Both of them distort color, make red look black or brown. If the shooter wore something dark or some kind of print, I can see blood getting past notice. Unless it was shiny.”
“There are bloody footprints and handprints everywhere,” I said, pointing them out in the pictures. “A lot of people passed through that small space-James Shabazz, police, paramedics, the same assortment we saw dancing in attendance on Hanna the other night.”
“Dancing’s a good description. Looks like Arthur Murray charts on the floor.”
“I wonder what they did with the prints,” I said.
“That is not allowed!” The rebuke came from a tall, dark imperious man wearing a starched white lab coat. The pocket badge labeled him as Dr. V. K. Sadgopal and he stood at the end of the bed glaring at me and Guido snuggled together over the report.
Guido tightened his hold on me. “If you don’t like it, then expel me from this place.”
Dr. Sadgopal slapped his clipboard down on the end of the bed and reached for the privacy curtain. “If your vital signs are normal, Mr. Patrini, you may leave.” To me he said, “Excuse us.”
I got off the bed and went over to a chair in the corner. Very pointedly, the doctor pulled the curtain around Guido’s bed, excluding me, but also giving me a private corner of my own.
I slouched down into the plastic-upholstered chair, crossed my legs, and searched through the report until I found the original witness statements. The interviews were handwritten by the detectives on a printed form: name, residence, phone, business, physical description, where, when, and by whom interviewed, and signed at the end of the account by the witnesses.
I started with Hanna Rhodes. She had told the first detectives who questioned her, “I was at the filling station with my friend, LaShonda. I heard someone let off five or six. I saw the man run out of the toilet. I don’t know who he was. Tell him I said I never saw him before.”
LaShonda said more or less the same. When she was asked why she ran all the way to James Shabazz’s house instead of calling the police, she said, “I don’t know. I was scared.”
Tucked among the interviews I found the chronological record, the log of every action taken during the investigation. There were fifteen or so handwritten pages of telephone calls, follow-up interviews, leads, trips to canvass and recanvass the crime-scene neighborhood, autopsy findings, the booking of physical evidence. The record was meticulous, showed consistent effort, but for an entire year there was no result, no suspect identified.
The first entry for November 1980, 0830 hours, was, “Case assigned to Dets. Flint and Kelsey,” written in Mike’s neat, all-caps hand.
From the log, I knew everything Mike and Jerry did on that first day. Fifteen minutes after they were assigned to the case, they were at the crime scene, canvassing. The rest of the day they re-interviewed all of the witnesses on record they could find, and listed new contacts derived from those conversations. Every day for a week, they talked to the same people.
I went back to the stack of interviews, leafed through them until I found what the witnesses had told Mike. Every day for a week, everyone involved said just about the same thing: everyone heard the shots, no one recognized the gunman.
Mike was persistent with LaShonda DeBevis and Hanna Rhodes. Every day he contacted them, visited them at school, saw them at home. By the end of that week, I thought, to those kids Mike would either be like a member of the family or a nightmare that wouldn’t go away. Whichever way it fell, there was no change in their story.
There was progress, though. By the second day, Mike and Jerry were responding to telephone tips that came into the station. Someone remembered seeing a green Bonneville with gray primer paint on the right front door in the area on the night of the murder. Mike requested that patrol officers stop any cars of that description and identify the driver.
On Monday of the second week, Mike returned a call placed from the jail ward at County-USC Medical Center. I recognized the caller’s name-the jail-house snitch in the case. The next entry was the first appearance of Charles Conklin’s name. Mike ordered a computer run on Conklin’s records with the city, the county sheriff, and with Compton police. He also ordered booking photographs from the sheriff and from Compton. That afternoon, Mike and Jerry visited Conklin at his parents’ home.
All that week, twice a day, and sometimes three times, Mike interviewed Conklin or went by his house looking for him. He interviewed Conklin’s family, his employer and former employer, his neighbors, girlfriends and home boys, his parole officer, the clerk at his corner liquor store, and the snitch. Every day, the very last thing Mike did was make contact with Conklin.
I had no idea what Jerry was doing during all of this. There was a blank on the interview form to list all persons present. Mike’s name was on every interview sheet after he was assigned the case, Jerry’s on very few. So, I thought, maybe Jerry’s skill was in an area outside the interview room. Or, maybe he was out serving subpoenas-cop-speak for hitting the bars during the day.
On Friday morning of the second week, Mike picked up the booking photographs of Conklin he had ordered. He made a “photo display card” with six different men’s faces, and recorded that Conklin’s face was in position number five on the card. The rest of the day, Mike and Jerry made the rounds of their witnesses, showing every one of them the display card. Several recognized Charles “Pinkie” Conklin as a man who lived in the neighborhood and was “one badass dude,” by consensus. But no one, not LaShonda DeBevis nor Hanna Rhodes, connected him to the murder scene.
Mike went to Conklin’s house first thing Monday morning. The house was vacant and the landlord, who lived next door, had no idea where the Conklin family had gone. No phone, no forwarding, with two weeks paid-up rent. Just gone.
At 0830 hours, eleven-year-old LaShonda DeBevis told Mike that picture number five was “Pinkie,” the man she saw running from the restroom immediately after she heard shots fired. She gave a new interview: “I was afraid he would kill me or do me like I hear he did some girls I know. He is nasty. I saw that man lying in the toilet and I saw all his blood just pouring out and I saw Pinkie run by me with a real mean look on his face. I didn’t want to make Pinkie mad at me so he’d do me like that with his gun. That’s why I didn’t tell the police nothing. If he ever comes back, I hope he don’t kill me.”
Hanna Rhodes spilled it at noon: “Me and LaShonda was back there and we heard the gun, like I say before. We go start to run over where her mama work because we was scared. But we run smack into Pinkie. He was running out of that toilet where he shot the man. Me and LaShonda look at that dead man and we start screaming and then she run right off. I didn’t know what to do next. I think Pinkie has another gun and he shoot me, too. But he go get in that old green car of his and he drive off. I go jump into this old Cadillac is parked there and I climb down in the back and cover up in some old rags and things and I stay there until LaShonda and James call my name and say, ‘Get over here.’ “
Mike and Jerry had a meeting with the district attorney late that afternoon. The district attorney issued a 187 warrant for Conklin’s arrest. At that point Conklin was officially a wanted suspect, and all shift rotations at the Southeast Division were looking for him. Three days later, around dinnertime, he was pulled over on a routine traffic stop-driving erratically in a green Bonneville with gray primer paint on the right front door. He was arrested by the patrol officers when they ran his name through the computer.