The Burning Room Page 5

  He held up the brown paper bag containing a white blouse with dried blood on it.

  “This is Merced’s shirt,” he said. “He was wearing it when he got shot.”

  He handed the bag to her and she held it with both hands as she looked into it.

  “Okay,” Soto said. “And?”

  “Well, I don’t know a lot about the case yet because we haven’t looked at the books, but I do remember that when Zeyas was running for mayor back then, he kept rolling Merced out in a wheelchair at all his rallies. And sometimes he was supposedly wearing the bloody shirt he’d had on that day at the plaza.”

  Soto’s face revealed shock that Zeyas, her hero, would stoop so low as to stage a fraud before the public to gather sympathy and votes.

  “That’s so sad that he would do this.”

  Bosch had long been cynical about all politicians. But he felt bad delivering the lesson to Soto.

  “Hell, he probably didn’t even know,” he said. “You know that guy Spivak who works for him and was there at the press conference? He’s been around city politics for as long as I can remember. He’s the kind of guy who could cook this up and not bother his candidate with the details. He’s a pure mercenary.”

  Soto handed the bagged shirt back to Bosch without a word. He put it on his desk with the other articles of clothing and looked back into the box. There was a stack of 8 x 10 crime scene photos on the bottom and that was it. He was disappointed that the case had resulted in so little in the way of physical evidence.

  “That’s it,” he said. “This is all they came up with.”

  “I’m sorry,” Soto said.

  “What are you sorry about? It’s not your fault.”

  He picked up one of the DVD stacks and snapped off the rubber band. There were six different plastic cases and they were marked with names, dates, and events—all but one having occurred before the day of the shooting at Mariachi Plaza. Four were weddings and two were birthday celebrations.

  “These must be videos of Merced’s band performing at weddings and stuff,” he said.

  He took the band off the next stack and found different markings on each of the three cases.

  1st STREET BRIDGE

  MARIACHI SUPPLIES & MUSIC

  POQUITO PEDRO’S

  “‘Poquito Pedro’s,’ ” Bosch read out loud.

  “Little Peter’s,” Soto said.

  Bosch looked at her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I guess you knew that.”

  “Stop saying you’re sorry every five minutes. I think these are camera views of the plaza. Poquito Pedro’s is a restaurant a half block down the street from the plaza—I saw it today when we went by—and they put cameras on the First Street bridge back then to try to stop the suicides.”

  “What suicides?”

  “About ten or twelve years ago a girl jumped off the bridge into the concrete riverbed. And then there were a bunch of copycats. Other kids. Weird, like suicide was contagious or something. So CalTrans put up cameras so they could monitor the bridge at the com center, where they have cameras on popular suicide sites. You know, so if it looks like somebody’s getting their courage up to jump, they can send somebody out to try to stop them.”

  Soto nodded.

  “We’ll have to look at these,” Bosch said.

  “Now?” Soto asked.

  “When we get to them. We have to read through the books. That’s always the starting point.”

  “How do you want to split them up?”

  “I don’t. We both need to familiarize ourselves with all aspects of the case. We both read through everything—even the tip binder. But if we send them out to get a second copy, we’ll lose a week waiting. So why don’t you go first and I’ll go back to the lab and pick up the slug and Chung’s report. By the time I get back you’ll probably be on the second book and I’ll take the first.”

  “No, maybe you should start. I have my meeting at one today. I could go back to the lab now, then go grab lunch before hitting Chinatown. By the time I get back, you’ll be on the second book.”

  Bosch nodded. He liked the idea of being able to dive into the murder books right away. By “my meeting,” Soto meant her weekly visit to a Department shrink at the Behavioral Sciences Center in Chinatown. Because she had been involved in a shooting involving fatalities—in this case her partner and two gunmen—it was required that she have continuing psychological evaluation and post-traumatic stress therapy for a year after the incident.

  “Sounds good.”

  He put the two DVD stacks to the side of his desk and put the packaged clothing back into the evidence box. He then moved the box to the floor behind his chair and focused on the instrument case. Before opening it he studied all the stickers covering its front panel. It showed Merced had been a traveling musician with stops all across the Central Valley up to Sacramento and south through all parts of Mexico. There were stickers from U.S. border towns in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas as well.

  Bosch opened the case and studied the vihuela. The compartment it was set in was lined with purple velvet. He gingerly lifted the instrument out and held it up by its neck. He turned it so he could see the exit hole made by the bullet in the back. It was larger than the entry hole on the front because the bullet had mushroomed during the first impact.

  He now held it to his body like a musician, checking where the bullet hole would line up with his own torso.

  “‘Stairway to Heaven,’ Harry.”

  Bosch looked into the next module. The request had been called out by Tim Marcia, the squad jokester.

  “Not my style,” Bosch said.

  According to the Times account he had read that morning, Merced had been sitting on a picnic table when struck by the bullet. Bosch sat down on his desk chair and propped the instrument on his thigh. He strummed its five strings once and checked the alignment of the bullet hole again.

  “After you pick up the stuff from Chung, go over to ballistics and see if you can get someone to meet us at Mariachi Plaza tomorrow with a trajectory kit.”

  Soto nodded.

  “I will. What’s a trajectory kit?”

  “Tubes and lasers.”

  Bosch strummed the vihuela again.

  “We’ve got two holes in this and then we have where the bullet ended up in Merced. If we can make an approximation of his location and position, we may be able to get a line on where the bullet came from. Now that we know it was a rifle, I think we are looking for a perch.”

  “You don’t think Rojas and Rodriguez already did this?”

  “Not if they thought it was a handgun or a drive-by. Like I told the captain, the rifle changes everything. It means this probably wasn’t random. It probably wasn’t a drive-by and it might not even be gang related. We’re starting from scratch and the first thing we have to do is figure out where the bullet came from.”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. See you after Chinatown.”

  6

  Bosch could always tell a lot about detectives and how they worked their cases by the case files they kept. Full and complete summaries, legible notes, and a logical flow of reports were all hallmarks of a well-run investigation. Bosch also knew that most detective pairings had a division of labor. Often one investigator was charged with the paperwork because of his or her flair with the written word or because it simply suited his or her personality. It was as simple as dividing brains and brawn. In his own partnerships Bosch always preferred to avoid the paperwork. But it didn’t always work out that way and he always paid attention to detail when he was the writer of record.

  It appeared to Bosch that Rodriguez was the keeper of the record when it came to the partnership of Rojas and Rodriguez. His signature was on almost all of the documents and this gave insight into his resentment at having the case taken away. His summaries were concise and complete. No cop-speak or Joe Friday just-the-facts-ma’am shorthand. His witness summaries managed to capture the personalities of the individu
als as well as their statements, and this was very helpful to Bosch. It also made him realize that he had sized up Rodriguez and Rojas wrong during the confrontation at Hollenbeck. Rodriguez was upset because he cared about the case, whereas his partner, Rojas, didn’t share the same visceral connection to it. It meant Bosch needed to find a way to connect to Rodriguez and overcome his anger. He was the go-to guy.

  The basics of the case were laid out in the first pages of a blue binder that only now would be called the murder book. The incident report from April 10, 2004, contained the who, what, when, and where and was the baseline document of the case.

  Orlando Merced and his three bandmates had finished a gig early in the day, a girl’s fifteenth-birthday party that was held by her parents on the island in the middle of the lake in Echo Park. It was a Saturday—the busiest day for work—so the band drove in their van back to Mariachi Plaza in hopes of picking up a second job for the evening. The plaza was crowded with other mariachis waiting and hoping for work. The four men who made up Los Reyes Jalisco found a place to sit at a picnic table on the east side of the plaza. The four men played their instruments and followed the tradition of dueling musically with other bands in the plaza. The clash of music was so loud that very few people in the plaza heard a shot. Those who did hear it reported that it came from the west side of the triangular plaza, where it is bordered by Boyle Avenue. According to a report written by Rodriguez after sifting through witness statements, Merced was sitting on top of the precast concrete table with his feet on the bench. His bandmates did not hear the shot and did not notice he was hit until he toppled from the picnic table to the ground. One of the musicians called 911 at 4:11 p.m.

  Because the shot was heard by some and not by others, the scene at the plaza was described in the reports as chaotic. Those who heard the shot or saw Merced fall over panicked and ran for cover. Those who did not know what was going on were confused. Some followed those running and some turned in circles, wondering what was going on. The investigation produced no witness who saw a gunman firing from a passing car or on foot. No one was seen by witnesses or discerned on surveillance videos as a suspect fleeing the scene, but many earwitnesses agreed that the shot had come from the Boyle Avenue side of the plaza.

  North Boyle Avenue was the main drag in the Boyle Heights area and also traversed the heart of the turf controlled by a large and violent Latino street gang known as White Fence. The gang derived its name from the white picket fence that surrounded the La Purisima Church. The gang’s origins reached back to a men’s club at the church in the 1930s. The name White Fence evolved over the decades to become a symbol of the dividing line between the city’s white Anglo power elite and the Latin populace of East Los Angeles. The line between those with money and those who cleaned their houses and cut their lawns. Ethnic pride and solidarity aside, the gang became one of the most violent and feared in the city, often preying upon that same Latin populace. WF graffiti marked almost all the walls and surfaces of Mariachi Plaza. The LAPD’s Gang Intelligence Unit suspected that WF members regularly charged a “tax” on the musicians who waited for work there.

  White Fence became the initial focus of Detectives Rodriguez and Rojas. Branching off from Boyle Avenue and creating the rear border of the plaza was Pleasant Avenue, where several hardcore members of White Fence were known to live. Though Orlando Merced’s bandmates told the investigators they were not embroiled in a dispute with White Fence, nor had they been approached to pay a gang tax, Rojas and Rodriguez focused on the Pleasant Avenue gangsters in the initial stages of the case. Several of the gang members were detained and questioned through the days that followed the shooting. None provided anything that implicated the gang or led to another possible motive or source for the shooting.

  No shell casing was found on Boyle or Pleasant Avenue and the exact origin of the shooting was never determined. It seemed baffling to Bosch that a shooting across a plaza where more than fifty people were gathered did not produce a single credible witness. Such was the power and threat of White Fence.

  Rojas and Rodriguez also conducted a background investigation into the victim to attempt to determine if Orlando Merced had been a specific target in the shooting. There was nothing in their conclusions that suggested this was the case. It appeared to them and was subsequently announced to the public that he was a random and innocent victim.

  The detectives were soon reduced to chasing down call-in tips from the public. None of these panned out. No suspect list was ever formulated, but it was clear from the number of reports in the casebooks that the detectives focused much of their attention on a second-generation White Fence shot caller known as C. B. Gallardo. The initials stood for Cerco Blanca. He had been named by his father after the gang he had pledged his allegiance to.

  Rojas and Rodriguez followed a routine investigative strategy with Gallardo: bring him in on a smaller charge and sweat him on the bigger one. They were convinced Gallardo knew who had fired the shot into Mariachi Plaza even if he had not ordered it himself. They knew Gallardo ran an auto body shop that was a front for a chop shop where cars stolen by gang members were dissected and sold across the U.S. and in Mexico for parts and scrap metal. In this case, they worked with auto theft detectives to raid El Puente Auto on 1st Street ten days after the shooting. Gallardo was arrested for auto theft and possession of stolen property when ID numbers on a variety of parts in the shop were tracked to cars reported stolen from the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.

  But the man named for the gang he was affiliated with did not crack. Despite several hours of interrogation regarding the Merced shooting, Gallardo refused to admit any involvement and eventually refused to talk to the detectives at all. In the end, he pleaded guilty to a single count of auto theft and spent six months in the Wayside Honor Rancho.

  Rodriguez’s casebook summation on C. B. Gallardo was that he remained a strong suspect in the Merced shooting. The report suggested that the motive behind the shooting was to instill fear in the musicians who sought work in Mariachi Plaza and make them more amenable to paying a protection tax to White Fence. According to this theory, Merced was a random victim, the unsuspecting receiver of a bullet fired without aim into the plaza. The last time the Hollenbeck detectives had spoken to Gallardo was two years before, when he was incarcerated at the penitentiary up in San Quentin for an attempted murder conviction. As before, Gallardo told them nothing.

  Bosch finished his review of the two casebooks before Soto got back from her appointment in Chinatown. He moved on to the DVDs from the evidence box, playing them on his laptop. He started with the performance videos. He watched several minutes of the band playing at a variety of indoor and outdoor events. He primarily focused on Orlando Merced, watching the man play and how he held his instrument. In all but one of the videos he was standing while playing, but there was a single video of the band on a stage at a wedding and all four of the musicians were sitting on chairs. Bosch noted that Merced did not rest his instrument on his thigh as he played. He held it up higher, leaning it against the shelf of his burgeoning stomach. This would be important to consider when they attempted to re-create the trajectory of the bullet that struck Merced. How he sat when he played and how he held the instrument would be two of the key things to understand.

  One of the performance videos was dated the same day as the shooting and it was a recording from the birthday party at Echo Park where Los Reyes Jalisco had played earlier in the day. While Bosch had fast-forwarded through most of the other videos, he watched this one in its entirety, hoping to pick up on something that would give a clue as to what happened later that day. He knew, of course, that Rojas and Rodriguez had certainly done the same thing, but he was undaunted. If nothing else, Bosch was confident in himself as an investigator and believed he observed things others did not. He knew this was egotistical, but a healthy ego was a requirement of the job. You had to believe you were smarter, tougher, braver, and more resilient than the unknown person you
were looking for. And working cold cases, you had to believe the same thing about the detectives who had worked the case before you. If you didn’t, you were lost. It was this sense of the mission that he hoped he could impart to Soto in the final year of his career.

  The Echo Park video showed a happy family celebrating their daughter’s quinceañera. Many friends and family members were on hand, and picnic tables were covered with traditional foods and gifts. The girl at the center of attention wore a white dress and a tiara with the number fifteen on it. She had a court of honor that included six other girls. There was dancing and the band played songs that Bosch assumed were traditional to the celebration. At one point the girl’s parents carried out two cultural traditions, the mother presenting her daughter with the “last doll,” symbolizing the end of childhood, and the father changing her shoes from flat sandals to high heels, symbolizing the beginning of womanhood.

  There was much love and poignancy captured on the video. It drew Bosch’s thoughts away from the case to his own daughter. He carried a constant burden of guilt when it came to her. Bosch was a single parent but mostly an absentee parent because of the hours consumed by his work. His daughter was seventeen now and she’d had no sweet sixteen party. He had never staged any kind of birthday celebration for her other than to celebrate it by themselves. Watching the party in Echo Park, he was reminded of his many failings as a father and it put a catch in his throat.

  Bosch turned the video off. He had seen nothing on it that had given him pause or any clue to the shooting that would happen just a few hours later. Merced and his bandmates were professional and did not mingle with the party guests. They were rarely the focus of the camera but were seen in backdrop during several moments of the video. Bosch ejected the disc and moved on to the second stack of DVDs.

  These DVDs contained film from surveillance cameras near the plaza. As such, they were not specifically focused on the plaza and only captured segments of what happened that day. To Bosch’s surprise the first video he viewed showed a grainy, long-distance image of Merced actually being shot. As far as he knew, this had never been made public. The video was taken from inside the mariachi supplies and music store located across 1st Street from the plaza. The camera was mounted in an upper corner of the store and its purpose was to document and discourage shoplifting. However, its reach was through the front plate-glass window of the store and across 1st to the plaza.