Abazeda lived in West L.A., a few blocks south of Pico and west of Robertson. While many houses on the street were classic one-story Spanish-style cottages, Abazeda’s place was a monstrosity, a three-story stucco palace with a flat roof, three balconies festooned with gold ironwork, and four giant concrete columns flanking the front door. The lot was modest-sized, but the house was so enormous there was no room for landscaping. Instead of a front lawn, there was just a cement parking slab. There were no cars in front, and the house was dark. I parked across the street and decided to wait.
It was a warm evening, and as I rolled down my window, the breeze kicked up dust along the gutter. The gritty smell of the dust cut with the faint scent of orange blossoms suggested something that I couldn’t quite recall, an event hovering at the fringe of my memory. I closed my eyes for a moment.
Summer. A West Bank checkpoint at the edge of an orange grove. I was about to relieve a young South African immigrant named Danny, when I saw a Palestinian teenager approach the checkpoint. He walked robotically, stopped, and looked through Danny and the other soldiers. The Palestinian was curly haired, his skin was dark-the color of mahogany-but his eyes were an arresting pale green. Crusader eyes, the Palestinians called them. There was something about those sea green eyes that alarmed me: a curious unfocused lifeless look.
“Jible hawiye,” Danny ordered-the two Arabic words every Israeli soldier learns: Give me your identity card.
The Palestinian stepped forward, reached into his back pocket-a movement so casual he might have been reaching for a handkerchief-and removed a shiny aluminum RGN Russian hand grenade. He pulled the pin, blowing himself up, along with Danny, blasting the branches of the olive tree high behind them with bloody strips of clothing that flapped in the breeze like flags.
As I instinctively flexed my calf, where slivers of shrapnel were still embedded, I saw a man park a Lexus SUV in front of the house. I flipped open my murder book and checked Abazeda’s DMV picture. It was him.
I walked over and said, “Mr. Abazeda, I’m an LAPD homicide detective. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Detective Levine. Ann Licata told me that she has spoken with you.”
Abazeda was a solidly built man with sharp features. Bald, with just a horseshoe-shaped fringe of black hair, he stared at me with a slightly popeyed expression. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or he had some kind of optical condition. He wore a pale blue silk shirt, black linen slacks, and tan loafers with no socks.
“Why don’t we go inside,” I said. “It’ll be easier to talk.”
“No problem,” he said, opening the door with a key and punching a code into the alarm panel.
I followed him into an entryway with pale blue marble floors and a massive skylight veined with gold. He opened the door to an office off the entryway with white shag carpeting and a desk that was half the size of the room. Four video screens in the corner of the office offered exterior views of the house from rotating surveillance cameras. Abazeda sat in an overstuffed leather chair behind the desk. I pulled up a chair opposite him.
“Ann Licata told me you and she have an arrangement,” he said in a slight accent that sounded vaguely Middle Eastern.
“Where are you from, originally?” I asked.
“Is that really important?”
“Not really.”
“As I was saying, Ann told me that she cooperated with you and you agreed to leave her business alone.”
“From what I understand, it’s your business.”
“Your understanding is incorrect. She’s inexperienced in the ways of finance. I’m an advisor. That’s all.”
“At this point, as I told Ms. Licata, I’m not interested in the business-whoever owns it. I’m only interested in the murder of Pete Relovich.”
“I extend my condolences. I understand he was a former member of the LAPD-one of your brothers in arms.”
“You ever meet him?”
“I can’t say as I’ve ever had the pleasure.”
“Did you know he was working for your business, or should I say, the business that you’re an advisor for?”
“I didn’t know that until Ann told me when I talked to her yesterday.”
“You sure you never met Pete Relovich.”
“I’m sure.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
“You probably heard something from Jane Granger. Am I right?”
I stared at him without acknowledging his question.
“We used to go out, but when I ended the relationship she became very angry, very vindictive. I heard she started to date Mr. Relovich. It would be just like her to try to claim I was a jealous ex-suitor.”
“Do you own a gun?”
He smiled. “Of course not. Why would I need a gun?”
I stared at him thinking that this interview was a complete waste of time. Everything he’d said after “hello” was a lie, and if someone could lie saying “hello,” it would be him.
“Can you recall what you were doing on Thursday night?” I asked.
“I can. I was playing poker at the Kismet Casino in the city of Commerce.”
“How many hours did you play?”
“I got there about eight and played until well after midnight.”
“What game?”
“I used to play a lot of stud and draw. But I’ve recently become intrigued by the game of Texas Hold’em.”
“Do you remember what table?”
“The high-limit table.”
“What are the stakes?”
“One hundred-two hundred. Four bet cap.”
If he lied about what he was doing on Thursday night when Relovich was killed, I might have enough to arrest him, or at the very least, to get a warrant to search his house and look for the murder weapon.
I stood up and said, “I’m sure we’ll talk again.”
He smiled broadly. “I hope not.”
I navigated several freeways until I hit the 710 South, exited in Commerce, and parked in front of the Kismet Casino. I showed the doorman my badge and asked him to take me to the head of security. We walked through the club, a cavernous vault of stale air dotted with dozens of round tables. The only sounds were the click of chips and the raises and calls of tired men with poker pallors who murmured over their cards.
The doorman led me to a large room in the back of the club filled with video screens tracking the action at every table. He knocked and a wiry man in his fifties with a military-style buzz cut shook my hand and said, “Dickie Jenkins, head of security. Retired Torrance P.D.”
He led me into the room and we chatted for a few minutes about the cops he knew at the LAPD and a few Torrance homicide detectives I worked with on a case years ago.
When I told him I was investigating the murder of an ex-cop, he narrowed his eyes and said, “Whatever you need, you’ll get from me.”
I handed him the DMV photo of Abazeda. I told him that Abazeda claimed that on Thursday night he was playing at the high-limit Texas Hold’em table. “Can you roll back the video and see if you can spot him there between seven and closing?”
“Sure I can. We’ve got a camera trained on that table all night.” He pointed to one of the video screens, and I could see a half dozen men crowded around a table gripping their cards. “But that’s a lot of hours of tape, and I’ve got to examine it frame by frame. Might take me a while.”
“How long?”
“Since this is a homicide case, I’ll hunker down and get it done as fast as I can. But it still might take me a few days to go through it all.”
“Any chance I can get the tape and go through it myself?”
“I wish I could. But the club won’t release it. That’s their policy, not mine. I could lose my job if I give it up to you. You’ll either have to get a warrant or wait for me. I’m truly sorry.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
“And I’ll get it done as soon as I can.”
• • •
I heard the ringing phone as I unlocked the door to my loft and picked it up on the fifth ring.
“Hey, brah. Meet me tomorrow morning at Point Dume.”
It was Razor Reed.
I was a young patrolman answering hotshot calls on the Pacific Division p.m. shift when I met Razor. On a warm summer night he had just left a Venice restaurant when two Sho’line Crips jumped out of the shadows and pistol-whipped him after he refused to turn over his watch. My partner and I just happened to be driving by the restaurant. I jumped out of the car, drew down on the Crips, hooked them up, and called an ambulance.
I stopped off at the hospital that night and questioned Razor, who had suffered a concussion and a fractured jaw. When I asked why he had refused to give up the watch, Razor lifted it off the end table and showed me the engraved back: First Place Huntington Beach Open.
“My first win in a surf contest,” Razor had told me. “Got the watch and fifteen thousand dollars. Sentimental value, brah.”
Razor had been a professional surfer, and when he retired from the circuit more than a decade ago, he had opened a surf shop in Santa Monica. A few weeks after the beating, he stopped by the station with a gift: a custom surfboard he had shaped for me. “You’re wound pretty tight,” Razor had told me. “This’ll mellow you out.”
The board was beautiful: a sleek expanse of foam and fiberglass with a Canadian poplar stringer flanked by two swirling turquoise panels. In the center, Razor had played off my first name and airbrushed a custom insignia: a fiery wave raining smoldering ashes on the pale green water.
Razor had designed a hybrid for me, a board that was long enough, wide enough, and stable enough so a beginner could easily paddle, catch waves, and build up some speed, but streamlined enough so he would be able to maneuver a bit once he knew what he was doing. The tri-fin was eight-feet long with a full nose for flotation, slightly kicked up for steep drops, a rounded pintail, hard rails at the bottom, and softer edges in the middle.
At the time, I was in my mid-twenties, living in a one-room studio a few blocks from Venice Beach. I was still reeling from my army service, still confused and aimless, still unsure I wanted to be a cop, still struggling to occupy my days until it was time to start my four o’clock shift. I figured I might as well try surfing; I had nothing better to do.
I started out in the early mornings near the Venice breakwater riding the bumpy white water straight into shore. The other surfers razzed me, shouting, “Straight off, Adolph.” But I always had pretty good balance, and I soon felt comfortable on the board. I started to paddle farther out and give real waves a try, but for a week I continually misjudged the breaks and pearled, catching the nose of the board during my descent and tumbling into the water. To avoid the other surfers, who cut me off and cursed at me, called me a kook and a barney, I surfed at dawn, beating the crowds. Occasionally, I would judge it just right, catch the wave as it was breaking and angle across the face. The exhilaration was exquisite.
I soon found that surfing in the early morning was the perfect antidote to the insanity at night. I spent my shift lurching from crisis to crisis, breaking up fights between coked-out men and doleful women with Southern Comfort on their breath, jamming street corner junkies, cuffing fractious drunks, speeding to drive-bys, barroom shootings, alley stabbings. Waking at dawn, driving up the coast, slipping on my wet suit, and paddling out into the glassy surf, helped me unwind, washed away the tension of the previous night. Since I returned from Israel, I had trouble sleeping and often awoke during nightmares, sweating and shouting. Knowing I would be surfing the next morning calmed me, helped me fall back asleep as I envisioned gentle swells peeling off a point.
A few months after Razor had dropped the board by the station, I called him at the shop, told him I had been using the board every day, and thanked him. Razor said there was a nice northwest swell and asked me if I wanted to go surfing. The next morning, Razor picked me up and drove up the coast to Silverstrand beach in Oxnard. I had trouble with the hard-breaking waves, which were overhead with paper-thin walls; I continually tumbled off the board and ended up in the surf with my leash tangled around my legs. Razor showed me how I was taking off a fraction too late. “Commit yourself fully to the wave,” Razor had said. “If you hesitate, you’re lost.” I knew he was right. During my next few rides, for the first time that day, I stayed with the waves all the way and finished off with flourishing kick outs. Since then, we surfed together a few times a year. I still had the board with the fiery wave in the center.
During the past year, Razor had called a number of times, but I always put him off. I wasn’t interested in surfing or seeing anyone connected to my days as a cop.
Now, Razor was trying to lure me out again. “A south swell just rolled in. The outer reef by Little Dume is cranking.”
I had surfed the outer reef with Razor in the past. But only in the summer and fall. South swells in the spring were rare. A hurricane from Baja must be blowing up the coast, I figured.
“I got a case, Razor. I don’t think I can break away.”
“Dude, I’ve been worried about you. You’ve got to get out of your own head.”
I thought about what Dr. Blau had said: You have to learn when to let go and leave the job behind-”
“Okay, Razor, you’ve worn me down. What time tomorrow morning?”
“Six. And get your stoke on.”