Lost Dog (A Gideon and Sirius Novel Book 3) Page 2

  All those fabled streets, and all those failed dreams. There are truisms even in silly songs. At the end of my finale, Sirius gave me a nuzzle with his muzzle. My partner is a generous critic.

  I had never spent any time in Jim Gilliam Park, but I did know where it got its name. My father had been a Dodgers fan, and Jim “Junior” Gilliam was a key part of those classic fifties and sixties teams. Gilliam’s professional career started with the Brooklyn Dodgers, where he had the unenviable job of taking over for Jackie Robinson at second base. He was the Dodgers’ coach when he died unexpectedly from a brain hemorrhage at much too young an age.

  Quoting from iconic Dodger announcer Vin Scully, I said, “It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timer’s game.”

  Scully’s musing reminded me of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” I recalled their chorus of how Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio had left and gone away. I thought about expanding Sirius’s musical repertoire and singing a few lines from “Mrs. Robinson,” but I was afraid that someone might overhear and bring me up on charges of animal cruelty. When it came to my singing, less was more.

  Unlike a lot of L.A. parks, Jim Gilliam Park didn’t appear to have been overtaken by gangs, the homeless, or drug dealers. It helped that the park was designated by LAPD as a “stop-in center.” That meant cops regularly stopped there to write up their reports, take breaks, visit the water fountain, and nose around. A police presence tended to discourage illegal activities.

  Sirius and I got out of the car and went for a walk around the park. There were trails with lots of trees and greenery, and Sirius did lots of sniffing. We stopped to watch hoops being played on several basketball courts. All the players were under twenty-five and black. Not for the first time I wondered if there had ever been a time when I moved that quickly and jumped that high. I thought of Vin Scully’s “mere moment” line for the second time that morning. He wasn’t just a baseball announcer, he was a philosopher.

  No one seemed to mind my watching the games even though everyone knew I was a cop. If the players were wary of anything, it was Sirius. His ears were up and he was tugging against his leash, hoping I’d let him join in the game. What Sirius still had to learn was that sharp teeth and balls were not usually a good combination. Tomorrow I’d make a point of throwing a ball to him, or maybe even more to his liking, a Frisbee.

  I was in no rush to head into the community center, even though I knew the meeting was scheduled to start and I was there as its speaker. The truth was that I wished I had begged off. I was way outside my comfort zone. It was the second Monday of the month, it was 5:30 p.m., and this was the 187 Club.

  Someone once told me the 187 Club had started out with a more official name, something to do with grief and gathering, but its members had quickly adopted the name the 187 Club. California Penal Code 187 is the designation for a homicide, and it was that terrible bond that the club members had in common. This was a club no one wanted to join. Membership demanded the awful price of losing a loved one to violent crime.

  Langston Walker—retired Detective Langston Walker—had started the club after putting in thirty years at LAPD, his last eight with Robbery-Homicide. But Walker didn’t found the 187 Club because of his professional status. Like the other members, he too had lost a loved one. His youngest son had been caught in the crossfire when two gangs decided to shoot it out.

  Walker started up the 187 Club two years after his son was murdered and right before his retirement from the force. He’d made lemonade instead of hemlock. He didn’t have a degree in counseling and knew nothing about grief therapy, but that didn’t stop him from organizing monthly meetings. The 187 Club had no elected officers, and Walker didn’t have an official title, but club members referred to him as “The Speaker for the Dead.” Homicide detectives often say that’s their job—speaking for the dead. Running the club probably wasn’t the retirement Walker once envisioned, but doing so had kept him busy in the almost four years since.

  During the fifteen minutes Sirius and I had been out walking, the parking lot had filled up. From a distance I could see people making their way to the community center. It seemed to me they walked with heavy steps. Individuals who’ve had to endure the murder of a loved one were invariably marked. There was a weight they carried, a yoke that couldn’t be shrugged off.

  Several cars in the parking lot displayed the same bumper sticker: “Someone I Love Was Murdered.” I also saw the bumper sticker “Guns Don’t Die, People Do,” and another that read: “It’s Easier to Childproof Your Gun Than Bulletproof Your Child.”

  Gallows humor, with hard kernels of truth, has always been my way of coping as well.

  Sirius and I made our way to the entrance of the meeting room and then stood there waiting for Walker to notice our arrival. I wasn’t in any rush to go inside. The room was packed, and that was enough to make me feel hot and claustrophobic. My phobia is a by-product of having been badly burned in a canyon fire set by a psychopathic serial killer who thought no one would be stupid enough to go into an inferno to try and capture him. I had been that stupid. Sirius and I got our man, but we also got shot and badly burned. Even now I bear the scars, including a prominent one on my face. Then again, I was never leading-man material.

  I could see Walker circulating through the crowded room. It seemed like he had a word and a hug for everyone. I didn’t know him very well; we’d met at a few functions and at one or two crime scenes. Walker was around sixty and powerfully built, with a big chest and thick thighs. He was about my height, but probably had fifty pounds on me. Like half the people in the room, he was African American. Bullets are color-blind, but even though black people make up fewer than ten percent of Los Angeles’s population, they comprise almost a third of the city’s homicides. That’s not to say that every race, creed, and color wasn’t represented. In the room were Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, Persians, Indians, Arabs, and Caucasians. L.A. is polyglot central. Whites are no longer in the majority; almost half of L.A. is now of Latino ancestry.

  In the nineties, the LAPD acknowledged the changing demographics of the city, and over the years has come to field a force that better reflects the faces of its community. We’re not a Coca-Cola commercial, and the force doesn’t sing in perfect harmony, but on the whole we’re the same color: blue.

  A Hispanic woman who looked to be about thirty whispered something in Walker’s ear, which prompted him to turn around and take notice of Sirius and me. He waved and then reversed course. On the way over to us, he stopped to shake more hands and give more hugs. A politician might have learned a few things from him.

  He finally reached us and we shook hands. “Thanks for coming, Mike,” he said. “Or do you prefer Michael?”

  “Either is fine. But most people just call me Gideon.”

  “Then Gideon it is.”

  “What about you?”

  “These days I’m just plain old Langston. That’s the way I like it, even though there are a lot in here who call me Detective Walker.”

  He had a deep, mellifluous voice, the kind televangelists try to emulate. The difference was that his was the real thing.

  “I didn’t know you were going to bring backup,” Walker said, taking notice of my German shepherd partner.

  “Sirius,” I said, “meet Langston.”

  Sirius extended a paw, and Walker shook.

  “I know you by reputation, Sirius, and I’m glad we’re on the same team.”

  Sirius must have liked the sound of that; he wagged his tail.

  “There’s a patio section at the restaurant we’ll be dining at later,” said Walker. “I’ll let them know we’re a party of three.”

  “My partner thanks you.”

  Walker had told me that he’d be taking me to dinner after the meeting. He’d said it was his way of thanking those who came to speak.

  “We have a great crowd tonight,” he said. “It will be standing room only.”

 
I nodded and faked a smile, pretending to be enthusiastic about that.

  “I’ll make a few short remarks,” said Walker, “and then I’ll introduce you.”

  “I hope you’re still keeping to your plan about this being mostly Q&A,” I said. I didn’t have much in the way of prepared remarks.

  Walker must have heard the panic in my voice. “Don’t worry. I’ll prime the pump with questions whenever it looks like you’ve run out of things to say.”

  “That should occur right after the time I say hello.”

  “You won’t run out of things to say. I guarantee it. And our audience always comes with lots of questions. You’ll see.”

  Walker patted my arm and set out for the front of the room. Sirius and I weren’t alone for long. A middle-aged white man with thinning hair and a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke beard came up to us and said, “Detective Gideon?”

  “Guilty as charged,” I said, extending my hand.

  “I’m Arthur Epstein,” he said. “I think I’m the reason you’re here tonight. My wife was Suzanne Epstein.”

  The name was familiar to me, but I wasn’t able to make an immediate connection.

  “Suzie was the Santa Ana Strangler’s victim number five,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded. “I’m glad to finally have a chance to thank you in person for bringing Ellis Haines in. It wasn’t until he was behind bars that I began to heal. It’s possible you and Sirius saved my life by capturing him.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  “I’m told you see Haines every month,” said Epstein.

  I nodded. “I’m working with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. Haines is part of their serial killer profiling effort.”

  “I wonder if you can pass on a message from me,” he said.

  “What would you like me to say to him?”

  “Tell him Art Epstein and his son Joel look forward to the day the state of California takes his miserable life. Tell him we’ll be the ones smiling at him and waving bye-bye when the bastard gets what’s due to him.”

  I remembered now that Suzanne Epstein had been the mother of a ten-year-old boy.

  “I’ll be glad to pass on that message,” I said.

  Art Epstein teared up and managed to utter a husky “Good.” Then he took my right hand and squeezed it between his hands before walking off.

  Epstein had said that Haines’s imprisonment had allowed him to start the healing process. It was clear he still had a ways to go.

  From the front of the room, Walker began to speak. No one had to crane to hear him. “If everyone can take a chair or get as comfortable as possible, we’ll begin.”

  He looked around. “We will start as we always do, with a few moments of silence remembering those who were taken from us.”

  Heads around the room bent, and eyes closed. After half a dozen seconds, Walker spoke again.

  “As you know, we all come to this monthly meeting for different reasons. Many of us are still seeking justice for our loved ones. Getting that justice isn’t easy. Sometimes it’s impossible. As Justice Oliver Holmes once said to a lawyer speaking in his courtroom, ‘This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.’”

  A few people laughed; almost all nodded.

  Walker continued. “Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss psychiatrist who came up with the notion that there are five stages of grief. Those stages, she said, are denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance.

  “Kübler-Ross and David Kessler wrote about these stages in their book, On Grief and Grieving. In it they said, and I quote, ‘Those stages are part of a framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost.’

  “These five stages, they wrote, ‘are tools to help us identify and frame what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.’

  “Let me repeat that: grief has no linear timeline. Maybe you’ve never gone beyond the grieving stage. Maybe that cloud of depression is still hanging over you. Maybe you thought you had come to terms with what happened to your loved one, but now you’re angry again. There’s no right or wrong way to deal with grief, but there are certainly healthier ways of coping. The loss we’ve all experienced is bad enough without compounding it through self-destruction.

  “If you’re wallowing in one of Dr. Kübler-Ross’s stages, then maybe you should consider doing yourself a favor and calling someone on our friend line. Like I’m always saying, we’re all in this together, even if it feels like we’re all alone.”

  Voices called out, “That’s right,” and “Amen,” and “Uh-huh.” The fellowship of the 187 Club was trying to stand up to denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. It seemed to me they were up against stiff competition.

  “Tonight our guest speaker, or perhaps I should say, guest speakers, is Detective Michael Gideon and his partner, Sirius. This cop–K-9 team was responsible for bringing in a killer who murdered the wife of one of our members. Please welcome Detective Gideon and Sirius.”

  At the sound of applause, Sirius began wagging his tail. He’s quite comfortable with people clapping for him. I’m not nearly as relaxed in public as he is. The one good thing about getting skin grafts over much of my body is that they don’t sweat. I’m the picture of calm, cool, and collected, even when I’m not.

  There was a small lectern at the front of the room. I was glad for it; I could hold on to it and hide behind it. My “speech”—such as it was—consisted of a cue card with a few notes jotted down. I put the card down on the lectern and studied it for a moment.

  Usually when Sirius and I do appearances, I start with a joke. I wasn’t sure whether humor had a place in the 187 Club, but I decided to take a chance.

  “You know,” I said, looking at my partner, “I don’t know why people think Sirius is so smart, but they do.”

  My partner’s ears perked up, and he looked at me. Everyone could see he was smiling, as if he was in on the joke.

  “Yeah, yesterday the two of us were playing chess, and there must have been ten people who came by and said, ‘That Sirius is so smart.’ And I had to tell them, ‘He’s not really that smart. I’m the one who’s won three out of five games.’”

  Almost everyone in the crowd began to laugh. I pretended to take offense at the laughter. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  Then I shook my head, gave Sirius a disdainful side glance, and said, “You were just lucky yesterday. Usually I do win.”

  The crowd laughed, and then laughed even more when Sirius chose to start licking himself. His targeted area seemed to be an editorial comment.

  I decided not to tell them my joke about what Timmy had said after hearing that Lassie had been eaten by a bear (“Well, doggone”). There was no need. Sirius had already won over the crowd.

  I took another look at the cue card. It hadn’t magically filled up since I’d last studied it.

  “I wish I had some great advice for everyone in this room,” I said. “It would be nice if I could expound upon Kübler-Ross, but the truth is before today I’d never heard her name. And I wish I was as learned as Langston and could tell you what else Justice Oliver Holmes said, but I’d probably mix his words with those of Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, I’m a product of our times, and most of the quotes I know come from popular music and movies.

  “But, like you, there have been times in my life when I’ve had to deal with those five stages of grief that Langston referred to. One time in particular it seemed as if my whole world was crumbling down around me. And that’s when I got a call from a friend who said, ‘Gideon, just remember this: illegitimi non carborundum.’ And so I said to my friend, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ And he told me illegitimi non carborundum translates to, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’”

  Most in the audience were smiling and nodding, which seemed a victory to me, as this was a group heavy with dark circles, haggard faces, and hunched shoulders.

  �
��My friend’s words made an impression on me. And so I wrote his phrase down in big bold letters and put that sheet of paper in a prominent place on my desk. And I referred to it when times were bad. This went on for a time, until I made the mistake of referencing my catchphrase to my oldest friend in the world, Father Patrick Garrity of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on Sunset Avenue. And how did Father Pat respond? He chastised me, and not for using the word “bastards,” but for my ignorance. Father Pat said that even I should have recognized pseudo-Latin for what it was. Did I mention that the Father is a classically trained Jesuit? Anyway, because of Father Pat, I can now properly curse in Latin. And now you can too. According to Father Pat, I should have said, ‘Noli nothis permittere deterere.’ And that translates to, ‘Do not allow the bastards to get you down.’

  “Now that’s not one of the Ten Commandments, I know, but when my world of terra firma became quicksand, I resolved that I wasn’t going to let those bastards grind me down.

  “We all have different bastards in our lives. Maybe you’re trying to deal with an indifferent justice system. That can be a real bastard. Or you have a boss who doesn’t understand what you’re going through and won’t cut you any slack. Or there’s that lawyer who’s making you jump through hoops. There could be bill collectors who keep calling with no regard for your situation. Yeah, there’s no shortage of bastards trying to grind you down. I’m sure we can all compile quite a list.

  “I can’t claim to have experienced loss in the same way that all of you have. But I do know that when there’s a hole in your heart, it’s hard to get out of bed. You want to grieve, but you don’t even feel like you have the energy to do that. You’re at the end of your rope, and it feels like you’re swinging from that rope. Maybe you’re trying to keep the bastard that killed your loved one in a cage, while he’s pulling every jailhouse-lawyer tactic at his disposal. I do know it’s a fact that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs.”