Crime Wave Part 27

I'm 67 now. I'm healthy. I live in Las Vegas and work lounge gigs. I chase women. Women chase me. I chase the twisting twirl back to THEN.

My fear flared and flowed THEN to NOW My Patented PostPa.s.sive Rages popped once in a billion blue moons. I mainlined my way into madness and meandered out with more mini-myths.

I've mentioned this aforetold myth to a million myth-hungry people. They don't accept my secret history. They tell me the players are dead and unable to confirm or refute. They point to my genetic link to Alzheimer's disease.

They tell me I'm lying. They say I'm wrong. They say it's a fever dream. They get frenetically frustrated and say no no no.

I get righteously righteous and smilingly smug. I point to L.A. and claim credit for the nightmare.

November, December 1997s.e.x, GLITZ, AND GREED.

THE SEDUCTION OF O. J. SIMPSON.

[This piece was written before the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial.]

The Simpson-Goldman snuffs are recognizably prosaic. Subtract the accused killer's celebrity and s...o...b..z milieu and you've got a spur-of-the-moment whack-out equally indigenous to Watts, Pacoima and Dogd.i.c.k, Delaware. The intersection' of fame, extreme good looks, and pervasive media coverage has blasted a common double slash-job to the top of the pantheonic police blotter of our minds. The Leopold-Loeb, Wylie-Hoffert, and Manson Family cases--replete with complex investigations and psychological underpinnings emblematic of their time--cannot compete with the Simpson Trinity. A botched hack-and-run caper has become the Crime of the Century.

On Sunday, June 12, 1994, Oj. Simpson did or did not drive to his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson's pad and slaughter her and a young man named Ronald Goldman. He did or did not wear gloves and a ski mask; he did or did not butcher his victims with a bone-handled knife, a bayonet, or an entrenching tool. He did or did not split the scene and drive to his own home, a few minutes away.

Nicole Brown Simpson was or was not a devoted mother, a cocaine addict, and an airheaded party girl. She was or was not an anorexic, a bulimic, or a nymphomaniac given to picking up men at a Brentwood espresso pit. The minutiae of her life can be compiled and collated to conform to almost any sleazy thesis. She is most unambiguously defined by this heavily doc.u.mented fact: Oj. Simpson beat the s.h.i.+t out of her over the last five years of her life.

Ron Goldman was either a waiter who wanted to be an actor or an actor working as a waiter--a very common L.A. job euphemism. He was or was not Nicole Simpson's lover. He did or did not borrow Nicole's Ferrari on occasion--which did or did not p.i.s.s off Oj. no end. Forensic evidence indicates that Goldman fought very hard for his life.

Forensic evidence is utilized to supersede interpretation and conjecture through the application of impartial, empirically valid scientific methods. Forensic evidence is used to place suspected felons at crime scenes. Forensic evidence is a counterweight to gooey pleas for mitigation.

The gathering of forensic evidence is a conscious search for the truth. So are legitimate attempts to debunk scientific fallacies and sloppy applications of long-established forensic procedures. The a.n.a.lysis of forensic evidence may prove to be the adjudicating bottom line in the Oj. Simpson case. The flip side might be logical chaos--a verdict or the absence of a verdict sp.a.w.ned by the numbingly protracted cross-media extravaganza that has deluged all would-be jurors and indeed the entire American public with an accretion of contradictory details both densely pertinent and superfluous--a huge s.h.i.+tstorm of information, misinformation, innuendo, and disingenuously reported rebop that backs you into a corner like a date rapist you can never escape until you shut down your electronic and printed-page access to the world, move to the South Pole, and start flicking penguins.

Oj. did or did not shed his own blood outside Nicole's pad. He returned from an overnight trip to Chicago sporting a fresh cut-- which might have been caused by his slamming down a gla.s.s upon hearing the news of his ex-wife's death or might have been caused by his slas.h.i.+ng at the woman a bit too close to his free hand. Blood trajectories are primarily matters of forensic and hard legal concern. They lack the ma.s.s-market appeal inherent to hearsay accounts of an attractive woman's s.e.x life and attempts to portray a career misogynist as a lost brother to the Scottsboro Boys, and until the blood-oozing interactive Oj. CD-ROM hits stores, we just might have to view where that blood was spilled as a literal indication of Mr. Simpson's guilt or innocence--a niggling restriction to keep us tenuously open-minded as data rains down and inundates us.

The Oj. Simpson case is a gigantic Russian novel set in L.A. The extravaganza occurred in L.A. because the major characters wanted to suck the giant poison c.o.c.k off the Entertainment Industry. It's a novel of metamorphoses--because L.A. is where you go when you want to be somebody else. It happened in L.A. because it's the best place on earth to get breast and p.e.n.i.s enlargements. It happened in the Brentwood part of L.A. because homelessness, crack addiction, and other outward signs of despair appear at a minimum there.

O.J. Simpson wanted to be White. Ron Goldman wanted to be an actor--an equally ridiculous ambition. Nicole wanted a groovy fast lane and the secondhand celebrity that comes with flicking famous men.

Her second-tier status extended to her death. She became the blank page that pundits used to explicate her husband's long journey of suppression.

Nicole bought a ticket to ride. The price was nakedly apparent long before she died. Her face was pinched and crimped at the edges--too-pert features held too taut and compressed by too many bouts with cocaine, too many compulsive gym workouts, and too much time given over to maintaining a cosmetic front. Her beauty was not the beach-bunny perfection revered by stupid young men and the man who may or may not have murdered her. The physical force of Nicole Brown Simpson is the glaze of desiccation writ large on her face. The lines starting to form might have been caused by inchoate inner struggles, or the simple process of aging, or a growingly articulate sense that she had boxed herself into an inescapable corner of obsessive male desire, random male desire, and a life of indebtedness to things meretricious and shallow.

Nicole's relations.h.i.+p with Oj. was deceptive and collusive from the start. He bought the hot blonde that fifty years of pop culture told him he should groove on, and an unformed psyche that adapted to his policy of one-way monogamy. She bought a rich, handsome, famous man possessed of infantile characteristics, which led her to believe that she could control him.

He bought a trip through his unconscious and a preordained mandate for horror. She abdicated to an inner drama that would ultimately destroy her.

They both bought a trip to Hollywood. O.J.'s athletic career was phasing out at the time they met; he sensed that he could continue his nice-guy impersonation and ease himself into plum acting roles with his long-perfected chameleon aplomb. He had made a second career out of disarming people with smiles and self-effacing gestures, and if he failed to hit the level of transposition that quality acting required, he could always play his familiar old ingratiating self, lower his cloning-sights from Laurence Olivier to Sly Stallone, get a mojo going as an action-flick hero, make big bucks, and score beaucoup poontang in the process. He knew a s.h.i.+tload of wimps and tough-guy wanna-bes in the Biz--geeks who subscribed to the ruthlessness-as-strength-ofcharacter ethic that pervades Hollywood but had never been in a fistfight and loved to tell jokes about their wives leaving them for well-endowed shvartzes. He knew these guys; they knew him; he got a symbiotic groove going with guys like that. Guys like that could make him a biiiiiig movie star.

Oj. miscalculated. His powers of sociopathic seduction were best exposited in five-second sound bites and best received by callow young women. It should be noted that Oj. Simpson is not the smartest motherf.u.c.ker ever to walk the earth. He is a man of great physical gifts, superficial charm, and limited cunning, who segued from football to Hollywood with an impressionable girl in tow. He nested in a place where marriage is a shuck and a smoke screen for hidden s.e.xual agendas; he brought a woman into the Inside World that the Outside World has been brainwashed into believing is the World Most to Be Coveted. He got her hooked on celebrity the way pimps get wh.o.r.es hooked on dope.

Oj. brought Nicole into a world where he was a second-cla.s.s citizen. He got small roles in doofus comedies--but the toughguy wanna-bes had no serious use for him. He would never be a movie star because he possessed the expressive range of a turtle. He'd transformed himself into a confirmed a.s.s-kisser who could never appear truly heroic or dangerous onscreen.

Nicole witnessed O.J.'s long downward slide. She saw the essential bifurcation of his fame: He was a big cheese to the outside world and small potatoes to the world he sucked up to. She came of age in lavish surroundings and reveled in insider perks. She had a front-row view of her husband cracking under the weight of his emptiness.

Oj. got his racial-ident.i.ty wires crossed up a long time ago. He must have figured his choices narrowed down to White man's s.h.i.+ll or glowering rape-o. He never figured out that the vast majority of Black men do not fall into either camp. His appeal transcended race because he was an equal-opportunity con artist capable of snow-jobbing Blacks and Whites alike. He fit into Hollywood because he had looks and name value, fawned and joked to the correct degree, and zinged some pseudo-egalitarian heartstrings. If his trial becomes a referendum on African-American rage and its inevitable consequences, a minute cause-and-effect examination of his life will reveal no overt instances of personalityforming trauma directly attributable to specific acts of White racism. To offer the historic oppression of Blacks as a salient factor of mitigation in an adrenaline-fueled double l.u.s.t homicide is preposterous. Oj. Simpson will have truly transcended race at that moment when Blacks and Whites get together and recognize him as a cowardly piece of s.h.i.+t who may or may not have murdered two innocent people and left two Black and White children devastated for the rest of their lives.

Of course, it won't go down that simply. This is one gigantic L.A.set Russian novel that exceeds the most extreme visions of Los Angeles as a bottomless black hole of depravity. This is a bottomless meditation on celebrity that will not eclipse until someone more famous than Oj. Simpson is accused of murdering two people s.e.xier than Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in a considerably more outre manner. This is a story told in a thousand voices--one of those microcosmic, kaleidoscopic, multiviewpoint jobs that sum up a time and place with interlocking subplots that go on forever.

This novel teems with grotesque characters and roils with unhinged incidents. The multimedia creators of this novel are grateful for the opportunity to regroup in the wake of a major disappointment: The Michael Jackson scandal diminuendoed before they got the chance to exploit its full sleaze potential and work up a hypocritical load of bile over the plight of b.u.t.t-flicked children. They've got their teeth in the Oj. case now--they're pit bulls with a standing order for more, more, more--and verisimilitude and dramatic viability outgun outright veracity as the criteria for determining the thrust of their reportage. Thus a longtime informant who says he heard two White men do the snuffs gets screaming national coverage before being dismissed with footnotelike shrugs; thus A.C. Cowlings cavorting at a p.o.r.no-industry wingding militates against Oj. with an inference of "check this lowlife jungle bunny out"; thus Valley-girl model Tiffany Starr pitching a boo-hoo number about her two-date relations.h.i.+p with Ron Goldman implies that any man who'd pour the pork to this bimbo deserved to get whacked.

Thus freedom of speech has given us a hybrid extravaganza that rests somewhere between haphazardly proffered obfuscation and willfully evolved fiction. The exploitability of the case intersected with the ascendance of tabloid television and created a phenomenon of great magnitude, and to censor it or attempt to curtail it in any manner would be unconscionable. The Oj. Simpson case is a collective work of performance art that has to play itself out before it can be a.s.sessed, structured, deconstructed, and dissected for moral meaning.

It may boil down to issues of public disclosure and legal ethics. It may boil down to an outcry for journalistic circ.u.mspection and objectivity at all costs.

The art of fiction hinges on subjective thinking. Novelists must a.s.sume the perspectives of many different characters. Some months ago, the Simpson defense team a.s.sumed Oj.'s perspective and realized that their client was flubbing his performance as an innocent man unjustly accused. Oj. never screamed, "Let's nail the s.h.i.+tbird who killed my wife!"

The defense team worked up some belated damage control. They took their strand of this gigantic Russian novel interactive via a toll-free tip hot line. Oj. offered a fat reward for information leading to the apprehension of the real snuff artists--cash he might or might not have after his lawyers bleed him dry. The Los Angeles Police Department canva.s.sed the area surrounding Nicole Simpson's town house in a search for witnesses to confirm or refute Oj.'s guilt, and got nowhere. The defense team, eager to cast the LAPD as both incompetent and racist, put out their public appeal--in case potential witnesses missed the canva.s.sing cops and the media coverage attending the most publicized crime of all time. This was a move of epic disingenuousness--specious in its logical structuring and wholly cynical in its application.

The post--Rodney King LAPD would prefer not to ha.s.sle highprofile Blacks. Popping a low-profile White killer for the job would vibrate their vindaloos no end. The Simpson defense team understands the tortured history of the LAPD and Los Angeles Blacks--both its historical validity and the level of justified and irrational paranoia that it has produced. They put out a magnet to attract misinformation, fear, and outright madness--and some of the more presentable bits they receive may show up in court as fodder to further confuse an already informationally swamped jury.

And the LAPD will be exhorted to check out "leads" that they know will lead nowhere, or risk a barrage of courtroom recriminations that will further obscure the facts of the case, serve to excite racial tension, and contribute to the cause of general divisive bad juju.

The defense team's probably thinking they can sell the hot-line tapes for big bucks. The LAPD's probably wis.h.i.+ng they framed some random pervert for the job.

If Oj. is guilty, he should cop a plea behind exhaustion. His 2,033 yards in one season rate bupkis when compared to his postfootball sprint.

Second-rate acclaim and the pursuit of empty pleasures wear a guy out. Beating up women is a young man's game. Attrition narrows your choices down to changing your life or ending it.

Change takes time. It's not as instantaneous as a few lines of c.o.ke or some fresh p.u.s.s.y.

Suicide takes imagination. You've got to be able to conjure up an afterlife or visions of rest--or be in such unbreachable pain that anything is preferable to your suffering.

Oj. went out behind a chickens.h.i.+t end run. He didn't have the soul or the b.a.l.l.s to utilize his first two options.

December 1994THE TOOTH OF CRIME.

Captain Dan Burt looks and talks like an enlightened fast-track Republican. He's midsized, tan, and groomed. If he wasn't running the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau he'd be saving America from both Bill Clinton and right-wing yahoos within his own party. He knows how to talk, inspire loyalty, and wear a dark-blue suit.

Today he's riffing on the Simpson case and its lessons for homicide detectives. Six team heads and two administrative aides pack his office SRO.

Burt says: "We can cop an att.i.tude behind the Oj. thing or we can learn from it. I'm glad it wasn't our case, but I want to make d.a.m.n sure we all go to school on it."

He's got seven lieutenants and one sergeant by the short hairs. He lays out a dizzying spiel on crime-scene containment, evidence chains, and the need to recognize the media magnitude of celebrity murders at the outset, think them through from an adversarial attorney's perspective, and evaluate and define every investigatory aspect as they progress. The pitch is tight and inside, with a slow-breaking kicker: The LAPD took the grief on this one, and we reaped the benefit.

A handsomely crafted ceramic bulldog sits on a table beside the captain's desk, replete with a Sheriff's Homicide baseball cap and a rubber t.u.r.d behind its a.s.s. Burt pats the beast and wraps up the briefing.

"This unit has flourished because we've made an effort to stay open-minded and learn from our mistakes. We've never let our reputation turn us arrogant. If we continue to a.s.sess the Simpson case and incorporate what we learn into our procedures, we'll make something good out of one big G.o.dd.a.m.n mess."

Murder is a big, continuous twenty-four-hour-a-day mess. Murder sp.a.w.ns a numbingly protracted investigatory process that is rarely direct and linear--chiefly because it overlaps with more and more murder, taxing the resources of the investigative agencies involved and inundating detectives with interviews, courtroom appearances, reports to be written, and next-of-kin to be mollified and cajoled into intimate revelations. Murder seldom slows down and never stops; murder stays true to its Motivational Trinity: dope/s.e.x/money.

The L.A. Sheriff's Department investigates all murders, suicides, industrial-accident fatalities, and miscellaneous sudden deaths within the confines of Los Angeles County--the vast, unincorporated area in and around the L.A. city limits. The LAPD's jurisdiction snakes inside, outside, and through the LASD's turf-- city/county borders are sometimes hard to distinguish. The county consists mainly of lower-middle-cla.s.s suburbs and rat's a.s.s towns stretching out ninety-odd miles. This is the big bad sprawl visible from low-flying airplanes: cheap stucco, smog, and freeway grids going on forever.

The LASD Homicide Bureau is housed in a courtyard industrial park in the city of Commerce--six miles from downtown L.A. Sheriff's Homicide is individually subcontracted by numerous police departments inside the county--if you get whacked in Norwalk or Rosemead, the LASD will work your case.

Sheriff's Homicide investigates about 500 snuffs a year. The L.A. District Attorney's office has publicly acknowledged its investigators as the best in southern California. Police departments nationwide send their prospective homicide d.i.c.ks to the LASD for two-week training programs. LASD detectives teach well because theirs is regarded as the pinnacle a.s.signment--one bestowed after a minimum of ten years in jail work, patrol, and other Detective Division jobs. The mid-forties median age says it all: These people have put the rowdier aspects of police work behind them and have matured behind the gravity of murder.

Former sheriff Peter Pitchess dubbed his homicide crew "the Bulldogs"--a nod to their tenacity and salutary solved-case rate. In truth, bulldogs are lazy creatures p.r.o.ne to breathing disorders and hip dysplasia. The vulture should replace the bulldog as Homicide's mascot.

Vultures wait for people to die. So do homicide cops. Vultures swoop down on the recently dead and guard the surrounding area with sharp claws and beaks. Homicide cops seal crime scenes and kick off their investigations with the evidence culled within.

Sheriff's Homicide is a centralized division. Its basic makeup is six teams of fourteen detectives apiece, bossed by lieutenants Derry Benedict, Don Bear, Joe Brown, Dave Dietrich, Ray Peavy, and Bill Sieber. Two adjunct units--Unsolved and Missing Persons--work out of the same facility. The teams handle incoming murders on a rotating, forty-eight-hour on-call basis.

On-call detectives carry beepers and sleep very poorly, if at all. Beeper chirps signify death and additions to their already strained caseloads. Late-night beeps are only marginally preferable to what the old-timers called "trash runs": call-outs for obvious suicides and pro forma viewings of the poor f.u.c.ker who got decapitated by an exploding boiler.

The bureau is furnished in the white-walled, metal-desked, policework moderne style. All incoming calls originate in the "Barrel," a desk counter rigged with telephones, memo baskets, and boards for charting murders and a.s.signed personnel. The Barrel adjoins the main squad room--ninety desks arranged in lengthwise rows. The team lieutenants' desks sit crosswise at the far end, next to a shelf jammed with Sergeant Don Garcia's bulldog trinkets.

You can purchase bulldog watches and T-s.h.i.+rts at Sergeant Garcia's cost. A bulldog wall clock will set you back $39.95. Dig the bulldog lapel pin--the giant tongue and spiked collar detailing are worthy of Walt Disney on angel dust. Don's been running the concession for years. He buys the stuff bulk from various manufacturers. He's just acquired a new item: a bulldog neon sign to light up your wet bar!

The Unsolved and Missing Persons units reside in separate rooms off the squad bay. The sign on Unsolved's door reads "UNLOVED." Unsolved is charged with periodically reviewing cold cases and investigating any new leads pertaining to them. The crew--Dale Christiansen, Rey Verdugo, Louie "the Hat" Danoff, John Yarbrough, and Freddy Castro--is the faculty of the College of Unresolved justice. Their curriculum is the file library that Louie the Hat has lovingly preserved. Louie says the files talk to him. He's on a spiritual trip and runs his "no body" cases by psychics once in a while.

A corridor links Unsolved to a room lined with computers. A dozen screens glow green all day every day--dig the dozen clerks running record checks on permanent overdrive. The clerks-- mostly women--hog the lunchroom from noon to 2 P.M. daily. They watch soap operas and pine for the candy-a.s.s male stars-- right down the hall from the ugly bulldog wall plaque.

Note to Sheriff Sherman Block: Vultures are more charismatic than bulldogs.

It's early December. Deputies Gil Carrillo and Frank Gonzales have tickets for the annual Sheriff's/LAPD fistfest. They're primed for an evening of charity boxing--until Lieutenant Brown tells them they're the first on-call team up.

It's a given: Some geek will get murdered tonight and f.u.c.k up their fun.

Carrillo and Gonzales decide to stay home and rest. Gil lays some comedy on the deskman, Sergeant Mike Lee: I want a good night's sleep and an indoor crime scene near my pad about io A.M. tomorrow. Joe Brown says he'll place the order, ha! ha! ha!

Gil and Frank retire to their cribs. Gil's about six foot three and ma.s.sively broad. The earth shakes whenever he walks. He cobossed the LASD's end of the Richard Ramirez "Night Stalker" serial killer task force back in the eighties, ran against Sherman Block in the last sheriff's election, and glommed 17 percent of the vote. Frank's picture should appear in every dictionary on earth, next to the words "Latin lover." He is one handsome motherf.u.c.ker. Carrillo and Gonzales bring vulture charisma to every case they work--but they're p.i.s.sed that they blew the fights off for nothing.

Because Gil's wish comes true. His beeper beeps at 10 A.M.--it's an indoor crime scene ten minutes from his pad.

The victim is Donna Lee Meyers, female Caucasian, age 37. She's dead at her house in Valinda, a downscale San Gabriel Valley town.

She's facedown on a green s.h.a.g rug in the bathroom. She's nude. She's been stabbed between twenty and forty times. Defensive wounds on her hands and arms indicate an extended struggle with her killer.

Patrol deputies responded to the 911 call. The informant was Donna Lee Meyers's father. He came to pick up his 3-year-old grandson and found the back door unlocked and the house filled with gas fumes.

The boy coughed and led him to the body. Every gas burner in the kitchen had been turned on and left unignited.

Carrillo and Gonzales arrive at the scene and get a rundown from the deputies. Their first collective hypothesis: The killer didn't have the stones to ice a little child up front, so he juiced up the gas before he split. Their first collective instinct: The murder was unpremeditated, with a sharp instrument used as a weapon of opportunity. Their first collective decision: Stay outside and let the criminalists do their work first--don't risk contaminating the crime scene.

The serologist takes blood samples off the rug and the surrounding area. The print man dusts and comes up with smudges and smears. A technician prowls with an Electrostatic Dust Lifter--a vacuum sealer--like device that transfers the outline of footprints to a cellophane dust-catching sheet. The coroner remains on hold--to remove the body when Carillo and Gonzales give the word.

Carillo and Gonzales canva.s.s the neighborhood. The word on the street: Donna Lee Meyers did cocaine--and used to deal small quant.i.ties of it. Carillo and Gonzales take notes, write down names for backup interviews and compile a list of Donna Lee Meyers's known a.s.sociates. A friend of the victim's shows up at the house--and appears to be genuinely shocked that Donna Lee is dead. Carillo and Gonzales take the man to a nearby sheriff's substation and question him.

He tells them that he dropped by to pay Donna Lee back some coin, and cops to being a casual c.o.ke user. The man vibes totally innocent. Carillo and Gonzales let him go and hotfoot it back to the crime scene.

They view the body. A deputy tells them that the killer left the TV on for the kid. Coroner's a.s.sistants take Donna Lee Meyers to the L.A. County Morgue.

The follow-up begins.

Carillo and Gonzales attend the autopsy and hear the cause of death confirmed. They locate the father of Donna Lee Meyers's son and dismiss him as a suspect. A psychologist a.s.sists them in their dealings with Donna Lee's little boy. The boy's memories of that day are h.e.l.lishly distorted. Gentle questioning elicits ambiguous responses.

Early December becomes mid-December. Carrillo and Gonzales interview Donna Lee Meyers's known a.s.sociates and come up short on hard suspects. It's becoming a long, hard one--the kind you solve or don't solve while other cases acc.u.mulate.

It's creeping up on Christmastime. The bureau lunchroom is draped with red and green banners and packed with an a.s.sortment of sugar-soaked treats.

Bulldog-vultures swoop by and chow down--pecan pies and toffee cl.u.s.ters hook you on the first bite.

Talk flows. Food disappears. Nineteen ninety-four is winding down in a swirl of rapid-fire conversation.

Bill Sieber's midway through his standard epic pitch: how a friend's daughter was murdered in Olympia, Was.h.i.+ngton, and boy did the cops screw up the case! Bill's a primo monologuist. He's got his audience hooked--even though every detective has heard the story six dozen times. Lieutenant Frank Merriman's interjecting punch lines, smiling his standard s.h.i.+t-eating grin. Frank grins 96 percent of the time. Somebody should transpose his brain waves to TV so the whole world could cut in on the laughs.

Cheryl Lyons zips by. She's got electric turquoise eyes--or she's wearing electric turquoise contact lenses. The late jack Hoffenberg bootjacked Cheryl's persona for the female lead in his novel The Desperate Adversaries. Cheryl the 1973 narc became Cheryl of the Paperback Pantheon. Cheryl's pensive today--will the county notch in eight more murders and top its all-time yearly high of 537?

Ike Sabean thinks it's a lock. Ike works juvenile Missing Persons--and must be considered a certified genius.

You've seen his work on milk cartons--the photos of missing kids and the number to call if you spot them. Ike developed the idea in cahoots with a Chicago dairyman. He got a total of sixtyseven dairies and industrial firms to display the pix--and ran up a 70 percent local found rate until the public became inured to the photos. Ike's also a board-licensed mortician. He explains the allure of his moonlighting job thusly: "I like to work with people."

Jerome Beck lingers by the chocolate-chip-cookie plate. Beck was the technical adviser on the flick Dead Bang. He also wrote the story. Guess what? The director of that movie named the Don Johnson--portrayed lead character "Jerry Beck."

Big Gil Carrillo walks in. The floor shakes; a serving bowl full of Jell-O jiggles. Gil b.u.t.tonholes Louie the Hat and runs the Donna Lee Meyers crime-scene pix by him.

They discuss defensive wounds and blood-spatter trajectories. Louie's got a s.p.a.ced-out woman in tow--a psychic he consults every so often.

They call him "the Hat" because he always wears a Tyrolean porkpie with a feather in the band. If you f.u.c.k with Louie's hat, Louie will f.u.c.k with you. A few years ago, some LAPD clown s.n.a.t.c.hed Louie's hat and goofed on Louie's shaved head. Louie unhesitatingly popped him in the chops.

Big Gil walks off. Louie hobn.o.bs with his psychic. Don Garcia tacks a notice to the bulletin board: Bulldog wrist.w.a.tches make wonderful Christmas gifts!

The computer women look p.i.s.sed. All this holiday bonhomie is drowning out the volume on their soap opera.

The boss is teething on the Guevara case. His ceramic bulldog is teething at the fur ball on the tip of his Santa Claus cap--Dan Burt likes to dress the beast in seasonal headwear.

Ray Peavy's crew got the job--a double abduction/murder way the h.e.l.l out in Lancaster. Deputy Liova Anderson and Sergeant Joe Guzman caught the first squeal--one baffling whodunit.

Peavy's laying out a chronology for Dan Burt. It's an informal captain's office confab--and the open door encourages kibitzers.

Anderson got the initial call on Wednesday, November 3o: a body dump out in the desert. Liova drives up to Palmdale/Lancaster and views the stiff: a male Latin with his hands, face, and crotch scorched.

The victim was wrapped in a baby blanket, doused with a flammable agent, and burned. Liova picks up a strong vibe: The genital scalding indicates some sort of s.e.x murder.

Liova has to work solo for the first seventy-two hours--Joe Guzman, a nationally known expert on gang violence, is off giving a lecture in Texas. She knuckles down and hauls.

She attends the postmortem on Friday. The doctor pulls a bullet out of the dead man's head and tags the cause of death as a "gunshot wound." He cuts the dead man's fingers off, rehydrates them, and rolls a clean set of prints.

On Sunday, Liova hears a radio news broadcast. A Latin couple named Carlos and Delia Guevara have been reported missing in Lancaster. She gets another strong vibe: Her dead man is Carlos Guevara.

She calls the Antelope Valley Sheriff's Missing Persons unit. An officer tells her that Sergeant jim Sears and Deputy jerry Burks of Sheriff's Homicide have already been a.s.signed to the case-- because a bullet hole was found in Carlos and Delia Guevara's living-room wall.

Joe Guzman returns from Texas. Liova drives him up to Lancaster and explains the case en route. The team meets up with Burks and Sears at the Guevara house. Sears drops a belated bomb: Delia Guevara's body was discovered in Yermo over the weekend.