McMichael made the IAD hearing on three hours' sleep and half a pot of coffee. Being tired strained his patience for men and women he didn't care for anyway. Cops who thought they were better than cops is how McMichael thought of them. And IAD was the incubator of the ambitious, the self-righteous and the power driven, because that was where you could protect the career of a friend or destroy the career of an enemy.
McMichael sat at one end of a long table in a headquarters conference room. No windows. There was a plastic pitcher of water and one glass at his place. At the almost comically faraway other end of the table were Assistant Chief Jerry Bland, IAD director Lieutenant Mitch Huzara, and IAD special investigator Sergeant Andrea Robb. McMichael saw his Human Resources file, positioned squarely in front of Robb. On top of that, a yellow legal pad.
He crossed his hands on the table and stared at his knuckles and thought about Sally Rainwater. He'd seen her face in a dream. What if she were telling it straight, that she'd come home and tried to resuscitate the old man? He wasn't optimistic about this, human nature being full of mostly disappointing surprises.
Bland and Huzara greeted him when he sat down. Robb positioned a microphone, glancing at him to get the angle right, but not bothering to acknowledge him. Then she fiddled with the recorder controls.
On her way up the ladder, he thought: files handy, blinders in place, ready to cream the opposition. What happened to the idea that cops liked busting dirtbags instead of each other?
"Voice check, McMichael," she said. "Say something."
"It's great to be here this morning."
"Again?"
"It's great to be here this morning."
She played it back. "Fine. It even picks up your sarcasm."
She was tall and red-haired and attractive, too, though it rankled him to admit it.
"We may as well get started," said Huzara. He was slight, bigheaded and balding, with a neat gray mustache. "Sergeant McMichael, just to let you know how it works around here, Jerry's representing the chief's office but he's not a part of the IAD. Andrea's going to lead the questions, but Jerry and I will have some, too. You're not being deposed or you'd have counsel here. That may be the next step. Or a polygraph. That's what we're here to determine. This meeting is called an Informal Hearing of Fact and that's exactly what it is. Give us facts, tell us the truth and we can all get to more important things in our lives. Got it?"
"Got it."
Andrea Robb clicked on the recorder and established date, time, participants and purpose of the hearing.
"Sergeant McMichael," she continued, "you worked in our Metro/Vice detail between nineteen ninety-eight and two thousand one, correct?"
"That's right."
"And James Thigpen was on that detail for how many of those years?"
"All of them."
"Did you work directly with him?"
"Yes, it's a small detail."
"What did you think of him?" she asked.
"Smart. High energy. Trustworthy."
"What else?"
"I worried about him because he was young and undercover. We all did."
"You and Officer Thigpen teamed up for a call-girl sting one summer, didn't you- they were working the convention center and the downtown hotels?"
"Yes. We made ten good arrests. Word got out and the rest of them beat it for a while."
"You and Thigpen made ten?" asked Robb.
"Working together. He was mostly trolling. When he got the right approach I'd come out from next door with the cuffs."
"Fun police work?" she asked.
"Humiliating for everybody is more like it."
"You didn't care for Metro/Vice?" she asked.
"Not really."
"Did Thigpen?"
McMichael poured some water and drank. He'd thought about this question almost every day for four weeks, since Jimmy Thigpen had been arrested. Chief Kerr, furious at the arrest, had issued a strict gag on all personnel, so not much was said about Jimmy Thigpen at the Fourteenth Street Headquarters. But that's all you heard in the cop bars- where'd he score the money, who else might have been in on it. Jimmy's lawyers and the district attorney's office had been negotiating for the better part of two weeks. Rumor had it that heads- cops' heads- would roll. Thigpen had been denied bail as a flight risk.
So it was all eyes on Metro/Vice Unit- past and present- and McMichael felt cornered. He couldn't say anything good about Jimmy because Jimmy looked rotten. He couldn't call too loud for Jimmy's head because it might look like he was eager to save his own.
So he went with the truth.
"Jimmy loved Metro/Vice."
"On what do you base that opinion?" asked Andrea Robb, pen poised above her notepad.
"Long hours. Good attitude. Little things, you know. Like he'd use his own car, so the girls wouldn't smell out one of our plainwraps. Or he'd put the wires on everybody if we were taping. Then he'd double- and triple-check them. He was our electronics guy when he was staying back. He took a lot of pride in hiding the wires, on getting good reception. You can tell when somebody likes what they're doing."
Robb looked at him doubtfully. "What about when he was undercover? Same good attitude?"
"Yeah. He played our young-and-innocent john and our desperate junkie or our yuppie businessman if he was out front."
"Played them well?" she asked.
"Jimmy only got blown once. That was his first year."
"Did you notice a change in him the last few months?"
Another question that McMichael had known was coming. This was where they moved their crosshairs from Thigpen to himself.
"No."
"Right up to the night the sheriff's undercover team took him down in that suite at the Hyatt?" asked Robb, with more than a trace of disbelief in her voice.
"Right up until then."
McMichael watched the silent flourish of eyebrows, glances, shaken heads.
Fuck you all, he thought, if you can't hack the truth.
"So, the new Porsche didn't make you wonder," said Huzara.
"I never saw it."
"And Thigpen's trips to Maui and Aspen and Key West – they didn't make you wonder?"
"I didn't know where he went. He never said."
"What about his moonlighting for Pete Braga?" asked Huzara.
McMichael hated being caught with his pants down. "I didn't know. Tell me."
"Yeah," said Huzara. "Jimmy trucked the new cars down to TJ for budget leather interiors, trucked them back up when they were finished. Saved Pete lots of money. Made some pretty good money himself."
McMichael thought about this, couldn't figure it into what had happened the night before.
"Though a part-time job might not account for over three hundred grand in cash," said Robb.
McMichael sat back and waited.
"Okay," said Huzara. "With all the things that Thigpen never said, didn't that make you wonder about him? Most guys, they'd talk about a new car, or a vacation or some easy money on the side."
"He was private. I never suspected a sixty-thousand-dollar car in his garage or those trips you found out about. Or working for Braga. He's a good actor. That's why you put him out there undercover at the age of twenty-one."
Jerry Bland sat back. He was thick, rounded without being fat, and had a face like a steer watching you from a pasture. McMichael knew him to be an accomplished bowler. "So it's our fault Thigpen went bad?"
"I've got no opinion on that, sir," said McMichael. "But I know he had peach fuzz. Literally. And I know he did his six months at the Sheriff's Academy, but almost nothing else before we put him on the street. What, two months at the jail? No patrol. Nothing. On his twenty-second birthday he was behind the Las Flores Hotel getting beaten by four Arellano Felix cartel heavies. That was the one time he got blown. They kicked his balls halfway up his stomach. We had to use a towel to unhook his lips off his front teeth."
"Sure, we know about all that," said Huzara, taking off his glasses to inspect a lens.
"You saw no change in him at all, then?" asked Bland.
"None."
"Tom," said Bland, "did Jimmy ever tell you about any of this? Personal business with the working girls, maybe- dope and cash?"
"No, sir. Not one word."
"Did you ever overhear him say anything about those things?" asked Robb.
"No, Andrea."
"Overhear anyone talking about those things?"
"Never."
"Ever hear anything about a little group of cops, maybe thought they were extra special, extra cool?"
"Just IAD." Everybody smiled except for Robb.
"You're a funny guy, McMichael."
Silence, then, while Robb checked her tape recorder, Bland leaned back and crossed his hands behind his head, Huzara stared at McMichael.
"I hope Thigpen doesn't start naming other cops," said Bland. "Then we'd have a shitstorm like L.A. 's."
"This isn't L.A.," said Huzara.
There was nothing McMichael could say to that.
"I'm finished for now," said Robb.
"Over and out for me," said Bland, yawning.
"Not for me," said Huzara. "Sergeant, I saw Thigpen last night. He asked me to say hello to you."
"Say hello back when you see him."
"You guys pretty good friends?"
"I already told you we aren't."
"And he never told you about all the money and dope he was stealing?" asked Huzara.
"How many ways can I say no?" asked McMichael.
Robb looked at him, then at the still-running recorder, then back to McMichael. "Anything else, Sergeant McMichael?"
"Nothing."
"Do you realize that your statements here are binding, if not evidentiary?" asked Huzara.
"They're just the truth."
Robb clicked the machine with finality and McMichael stood. There was a long moment when all four of the cops became cops again- McMichael could feel the change in the air.
"So you got Pete Braga?" asked Bland. He often appeared to be chewing on something, then not to be. Department gossips had never been able to figure out what.
McMichael nodded. "Eighty-four, sitting by his fireplace. Bad scene."
"Eighty-four and still pulling strings on the Port Commission. Still selling cars by the million," said Bland.
"Thirty-something years of politics and Fords," said McMichael. "That was news to me about Jimmy working for him."
"I hear things," said Bland. "So, you walked right back into old bad blood."
"That was a long time ago, sir."
"Does it ever really go away?" Bland offered a Wattsaver smile.
"Some of it does."
"I heard there was a nurse involved. Worked for him," said Huzara.
"She says she was out buying firewood when it happened. Ralph's on Rosecrans. I'll check her alibi tonight with the night shift."
McMichael started out.
"So how do you like Homicide compared to Metro/Vice?" asked Robb. She stood and faced him. Her voice was chipper and she had offered McMichael his first smile. It was really something. The whole package was.
"Dead people are honest. You can really turn off your tape recorder now, Andrea."
Andrea Robb colored a little and the smile melted. She reached down as McMichael walked by on his way to the door.
A moment later she caught up with him by the elevator and tugged him into an empty hallway. McMichael was looking forward to her apology.
"Detective," she said, "I've lived on Point Loma for twenty years and there is no Ralph's on Rosecrans. Might save you a lot of driving around."
"Thank you."
"I'm a cop first, no matter who thinks what."
"Good to know."
She nodded and turned the corner for the elevator. McMichael let her go while he dialed the law offices of Grothke, Steiner & Grothke- Pete Braga's counsel.