Cindy Kroll said, “I asked the woman in the next apartment to look in on them every few minutes. Don’t you wanna hear what I got to say? This man threatened me!”
This time Gina Villegas glanced at her partner. A woman next door? Sure.
“Of course we want to hear,” Carl Cheng said. “What did he say exactly?”
Cindy Kroll now addressed all answers to the male detective and said, “He told me his entire life and career were on the line. He said his fiancée was not like me. When I asked him what he meant, he goes, ‘She’s a lady, not a whore like you.’ And then he threatened me.”
“Use his exact words if you can remember,” Carl Cheng said.
“Okay, he said to me, ‘Whatever happens is on your head, not mine. You’re forcing me to do whatever I gotta do to stop your blackmail from wrecking my whole life.’ That’s exactly what he said.”
Carl Cheng said, “Did you ask him what he meant by that?”
“I knew what he meant,” Cindy Kroll said. “I’m not stupid!”
Gina Villegas said, “What you know or think you know about the implication of his words will not satisfy the District Attorney’s Office. Did he say more than that? Anything specific by way of a violent threat?”
Cindy Kroll directed her answer to Carl Cheng and said, “Then he goes, ‘I’ll make it ten thousand dollars but no more. Take the extortion money and get outta my life.’ That’s exactly what he said.”
“What did you say?” Gina Villegas asked.
Cindy Kroll looked at her this time and said, “The same thing. That he should talk to my lawyer.”
“It doesn’t constitute a threat of violence,” Carl Cheng said.
“Look, Detective,” she said to him, “I had sex with that man lotsa times. All I want is a reasonable amount of child support to raise his baby boy.” Then she paused and said, “Our baby boy.”
“There’re limits to what we can do,” Gina Villegas said.
“You gotta do something now!” Cindy Kroll said. “The man’s been smoking a lotta crystal meth. Way more since our troubles started, and it makes him totally paranoid. He had an insane look in his eyes today when he threatened me. Do you know what it’s like to get all paranoid from smoking crystal?”
Carl Cheng’s look said, No, but I’ll bet you do.
“Do you know if he has a police record?” Gina Villegas asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Have you done crystal meth with him?” Gina Villegas asked.
“Oh, fuck!” Cindy Kroll said, and stifled a sob. “You don’t care if he kills me! I need protection. Tonight is when he likes to go out and score enough crystal for the weekend. I’m in danger tonight.”
Gina Villegas sat down at the kitchen table, pushed some baby debris aside, and opened her notebook and said, “Okay, give us his address and phone number. We’ll try to have a talk with him.”
“What if he’s not home?” Cindy Kroll said. “I need protection at least for tonight.”
“There are domestic violence shelters,” Gina Villegas said. “And restraining orders. Have you talked to your lawyer about all that?”
“I don’t wanna go to a fucking shelter!” Cindy Kroll said. “I want police protection here in my home.”
Carl Cheng said, “We can’t camp out here based on what you’ve told us. But we’ll ask the radio car in this area to drive by tonight and keep an eye on the place. I gotta tell you, though, this building’s like a fortress. I noticed that the rear fire door is steel-reinforced with no handle on the outside. And you have a watchman in the lobby, right? Does Louis Dryden have a key, either to the main door or to your apartment?”
“No,” she admitted. “He only came in here a few times after he drove me home.”
“Well, there you go,” Carl Cheng said. “You’re safe here. But just to put your mind at rest, a black-and-white will do drive-bys tonight. Okay?”
After returning to the station, the MAC team tried to reach Louis Dryden by phone but got no answer, and no answering machine picked up. They ran a record check using the description supplied to them by Cindy Kroll but came back with nothing that fit Louis Dryden on Franklin Avenue. They were already into overtime by then and so were five other detectives, busy in their tiny cubicles, making phone calls and working computers.
The MAC team told D3 Thelma Barker about the vague implied threat that Louis Dryden had allegedly made. They said that Cindy Kroll’s boyfriend was a tweaker and they were sure she was, too.
“The mother of the year, she ain’t,” Carl Cheng finally told his D3. “Our read is that she gave birth to a baby she doesn’t want just to trap the guy into marriage or blackmail him into a nice cash settlement, or maybe both.”
“Tell you what,” their D3 said. “I know it’s getting late and you’d like to get started on your weekend, but just to be on the safe side, let’s ask a patrol unit to drop one of your business cards with a phone-me message on Louis Dryden’s doorstep. That’ll put the fear of God in him if he’s thinking of doing something stupid.” She looked at her watch and said, “The midwatch is about finished with roll call. Why don’t you tell the sergeant what this is all about and also ask that a radio car drive by the place a few times tonight for a quick look-see. You never know with tweakers when they’re amped up.”
“If she’s a tweaker, too, maybe she’s the one that’s paranoid,” Carl Cheng said. “That’s what tweakers do, get all paranoid.”
“It’ll make me feel better if you do it my way,” his D3 said with a look that ended the discussion.
“Okay, boss,” Carl Cheng said with a sigh of fatigue. “Anything you say.”
SEVEN
The new watch commander, Lieutenant O’Reilly, conducted roll call that afternoon for Watch 5, the midwatch. He was a thirty-year-old lieutenant who so far the troops didn’t much like. He’d tested well on promotion exams and was recently appointed to his rank with only nine years on the Department and sent to Hollywood Division for his probation. He gave them a condescending lecture that was so boring it couldn’t have been enlivened with hand puppets. It was all about treating the citizens of Hollywood with the utmost respect, even those who were as crazy as rabid squirrels. And in Hollywood that included a lot of folks.
On the wall behind the long tables where his captive audience sat were framed movie posters, including ones for Sunset Boulevard and L.A. Confidential, an indication that the officers of Hollywood Station were very aware of their unique geography. Finally, the lieutenant ran out of things to lecture them about and said, “Let’s go to work.” The cops gathered their gear, but before leaving the room, each of them touched for luck the framed photo of their late sergeant whom they’d called the Oracle. They had loved their old supervisor, and he had thought of them as his children.
The framed photo, which was affixed to the wall beside the doorway, bore a brass plate that said:
THE ORACLE
APPOINTED: FEB 1960
END-OF-WATCH: AUG 2006
SEMPER COP
The assistant watch commander, Sergeant Lee Murillo, a calm and bookish Mexican American with hair the color of stainless steel and the knotty rawboned body of a long-distance runner, had fifteen years of LAPD experience and was a supervisor they did happen to like. He was downstairs in the detective squad room talking to the MAC team about Cindy Kroll and Louis Dryden, and he gave the Little Armenia drive-by job to 6-X-76 when Lieutenant O’Reilly was finished with them.
All five patrol units, including 6-X-32, manned by Flotsam and Jetsam, and 6-X-66, with Hollywood Nate driving and Snuffy Salcedo riding shotgun, left the kit room with their gear and headed for the parking lot at 6 P.M. They toted black nylon war bags full of gear, as well as Remington shotguns, Ithaca beanbag shotguns, helmets, Tasers, pepper spray, and rovers. During the prior several years that the LAPD had suffered under the federal consent decree, they had also been required to draw from the kit room devices to record superfluous data about people they stopped or arrested. None of that data collecting had ever provided police critics with information that they’d hoped would prove claims of racial profiling. As hard as they tried, the disgruntled critics of the LAPD were not able to wave the race flag when it came to traffic and pedestrian stops.