Cold Blooded Murder
A Policeman's Tale, Part 22
“A weed is a plant out of place.”
~Jim Thompson
Crime Scene Photos
For a month straight you start every shift with a dead body. Every. Single. Day. You drive to work in the dark. You park six blocks away under a dripping jacaranda and in front of a tweaker’s dungeon. You hope your car will still be there when you get back. You hike to the locker room and throw on your crusting uniform. You sit through a briefing full of yawner stories of yesterday with humorless beat cops in various stages of divorce or bemusement and endure the ritual distribution of subpoenas, of a legal update from a demoralized deputy DA on the twenty six ways to fuck up a Miranda Warning.
You think: this can’t possibly be happening, can it? Is this even real? Every day I catch a stiff right out of the gate? But the answer is yes, yes, and yes. A city coughs up its dead without relent and without remorse, even fancy cities haunted by celebrity ghosts and film festivals, with professional beach volleyball tournaments, with red tile Spanish roofs and visiting cruise ships and perfect weather. The sun comes up and the bodies get found by citizens who weren’t expecting to find a body before breakfast.
Burglaries and bodies are mostly a daytime phenomena.
The citizens take it a lot harder than you do because for them it is always a surprise, and also because a significant part of your central nervous system is going numb. You don’t realize it, at first, and if you aren’t very careful the numbness can metastasize in bad ways. You can end up selling jewelry on the beach, commandeering cars, playing the banjo at a desert church, or like the guy you had yesterday—retired from LAPD Robbery-Homicide and now a chauffeur for a low rent and mobbed-up outfit from Little Armenia—who came into town on real business but finally snapped—or just let go of something that was holding him together—and assigned himself to traffic control at State and Mission for a car crash that didn’t even exist.
Caution, is the word of the day.
The calls come in from dispatch, get typed into CAD, and even the dispatcher is amazed by the streak of dearly departeds that has landed on you. She dispatches the call with a kind of lilt. Not really a question, but it’s in there. Call it surprise, or even a measure of sympathy. On your way to the call she will type a single word and send it to you through the MDC. It pops up on your screen: Jesus.
13 with 13 King to cover, 1144 at such and such, on the corner of so and so. RP’s neighbor is down in the garden and unresponsive.
13 copy.
13 King copy, en route.
And off you go, 13 King, with your camera and your tackle box full of fingerprint powder and numbered markers, with your swab kits and your measuring tapes, with your mountain of paper bags of every size, with your little tubes of putty for lifting prints from weird surfaces. Most of the things you use you bought yourself because the CSI locker has been ratfucked to death and you don’t even like going in there. And anyway, so much for a quick cup of coffee with your pal 13 on the sidewalk outside the Santa Barbara Roasting Company. Nope. Grandpa went out this morning with a set of pruning sheers and is now dead right there in the dew. So much for a civilized morning debrief over a hot Americano with your buddy, where you could tell a few bums to get lost and discuss ad infinitum why the lieutenant thought it was a great idea to suddenly grow a mustache. He’s not a guy who should be growing mustaches and you were looking forward to breaking down this grooming felony before the calls for service ripped open the day.
But it’s not gonna happen. You are suddenly the Joe DiMaggio of found bodies, and there will be no latté and no salty morning banter for you.
People are always dying and sometimes it comes in waves for reasons no one can explain. Things just happen, even if 13 has a theory he calls Bum Tectonics—an idea that by tracking the movement of bums through the city you could probably predict earthquakes. Somehow you caught one of these rogue waves of non-criminal death, which can only be bad luck but is nevertheless excellent experience, because all you want is to land a seat in the detective bureau. You want narcotics because you saw those grimy rangers in the back parking lot, but a seat is a seat is a seat. And anyway, Grandpa may be dead in the backyard with the flowering begonias, but that’s still leveling up, as the kids say, and one step closer to the mysterious bureau where they wear big boy pants and make big boy cases.
They die in their bedrooms. They die in their kitchens, face down on the table. They take a gigantic shit on a slab of cardboard in the hallway and die naked on the floor surrounded by Japanese eroticism. They die in hotel rooms on vacation with their families from Kansas. They die in bum camps on the railroad tracks and in million dollar mansions up on The Riviera. They die in so many places and in so many ways you will eventually forget a lot of them, until one day, twenty years later, you are sitting in a restaurant and the image of a severed human head magically perched on the front of a train engine—like a ghoulish lantern—suddenly leaps into your mind, filtering over a plate of bacon and eggs with dangling eyeballs on crushed cheekbones—and with her earbuds still in her ears.
