The Fallen

13

I was called in by Professional Standards as we drove back downtown from Logan Heights.

“Those guys give me the crawls,” said McKenzie. “Kind of like Ed back there.”

“I’ll tell them that.”

“Keep it between us,” she said. “Like the nasty DVD you burned. Fellowes with his damned socks on. Christ.”

“You’ll be next for Professional Standards,” I said.

“Yeah. They’ll separate us like criminals so we can’t match our stories. I hate being treated like that by the people I work with.”

Professional Standards is part of the Internal Affairs Division. These would be Garrett’s people, the ones who get paid to watch the watchers. A lot of the Professional Standards officers don’t work out of Broadway headquarters, so we everyday cops don’t even know what they look like. One of their captains is Roger Sutherland, who is rarely seen around headquarters but who now sat at a conference room table with my boss, Captain Villas, and Assistant Chief Bryan Bogle.

Bogle shut the door behind me as we sat. The table was rectangular and not large. I was seated along one side. Sutherland sat directly across from me, Bogle to my left, and Villas to my right. Two small tape recorders sat in front of Sutherland.

“Thanks for coming,” said Sutherland. Which was faintly comic because any SDPD officer who refuses to answer the questions of Professional Standards can be fired. There is no such thing as Fifth Amendment rights. A convicted criminal has more rights than an officer before Professional Standards. It is widely known in the department that Sutherland attended law school at night but could never pass the California bar. Maybe in compensation, he often seems vigorously bound to the letter of the law. He switched on both recorders.

I nodded and waited.

“Fill us in on the Asplundh investigation, will you?” he asked.

I did. Sutherland flipped open a notepad and pulled a pen from his coat pocket. He’s a big man, and the pen looked small in his hand. I wished that Villas had warned me about this interview, but I was obviously not supposed to be warned. Assistant Chief Bryan Bogle leaned back with his hands behind his head, staring past me out the window.

There was a lot to tell. McKenzie and I had come up with hundreds of pages of information gathered by the victim, six hours of incriminating video, and an interesting though incomplete timeline of Garrett Asplundh’s last hours. He had enemies to spare. The CSIs and crime lab had worked their usual magic. We had decent latents, a woman’s earring, a broken marble, and a gun possibly stolen by someone in law enforcement and brought here all the way from New Orleans to murder Garrett Asplundh. We had a Spook Valley genius, a clever madam, Chupacabra Junior, and a Wall Street investment analyst.

I told them we liked the Squeaky Clean earring. And that the lab couldn’t match the Explorer latents with Jordan Sheehan’s file prints, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Whether she pulled the trigger or not, what was her jewelry doing in Garrett’s car?

We’d see her later today.

“Detective Brownlaw,” said Sutherland, “I understand you recognized some of the men in Mr. Asplundh’s sex video.”

I looked at each of them in turn. “Yes, sir. One john was Captain Fellowes. Another was a Motor Patrol officer named Mincher. Also, Councilman Rood and his aide, Stiles. I recognized a fireman but don’t know his name. And a couple of paving contractors who get a lot of city jobs. I recognized them from a fraud case I worked years ago.”

Sutherland looked down at the table and shook his head.

Bogle still stared through the window.

Villas exhaled loudly.

“Detective Brownlaw,” asked Sutherland, “who knows the content of these sex videos, besides you and McKenzie Cortez and Captain Villas?”

“John Van Flyke — Garrett’s boss at Ethics Enforcement. And Carrie Ann Martier, the woman who compiled them. And two of her work friends. It’s possible that Stiles has seen a portion or was told about it by Garrett. Martier got an apology and some money not long after she told Garrett about getting beaten by Stiles. I think Garrett was behind that. He must have used something... convincing.”

“Have you or your partner spoken to Stiles?”

“Not yet.”

“To anyone on the sex video?”

“Just Carrie.”

Sutherland and Bogle traded some quick eye work. I looked out the window and thought about my wife again.

“Say nothing about these videos,” said Sutherland.

“No, sir.”

“Not one word.”

“It would be bad.”

“Bad? It would be unfair to this department and terrible for this city,” said Bogle. “We need to find internal solutions.”

“I know.”

I knew it, but it still didn’t mean much to me. The truth is I’ve never been interested in the political side of law enforcement, or in other men’s ambitions or in palace intrigues. Even less so since the fall from the Las Palmas. All I really wanted since I was six years old was to be a cop. That’s because a cop found me after I’d been chased and bitten by a dog on the way home from first grade and become lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood of Normal Heights. I was stuck down in a thorny juniper hedge where I thought I could get away from the dog. I was terrified and blubbering and bleeding and the dog was growling at me but the cop scared it away and helped me out and gave me a ride home. He called Animal Control right there from his patrol car, and they captured the dog, tested it for rabies and saved me from a series of painful abdominal injections. It may be a corny story but it’s true. Later, when I was thirteen, I read The New Centurions by Joe Wambaugh, and it only made me want to be a cop more. When Roy Fehler got shot in the gut the second time, I cried for his bad luck. I met Mr. Wambaugh at a party once and he’s a good guy. I’m just a cop and that’s all I’ll ever be, because it’s all I want to be.