THE COED MURDER CLUB. Ken Salter
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Bean, a private investigator hired by the Rohnert family to find the men who assaulted their daughter. I just finished reading the file on Mindy Rohnert. Detective Sawyer said you’d fill me in on the rest of the details.” I hoped Sawyer hadn’t bothered to apprise her of my talk with him and that my lie would hold up.
“Uh-huh. The girl who got raped by three guys we couldn’t find.” She was looking at the phone she’d hung up.
Her mind was somewhere else. Time for a different tack. “I couldn’t help overhearing you on the phone. Sounds like something exciting happened.”
“God, yes! Phil and I – the guy I patrol with – got a call from a Telegraph Avenue merchant that a couple of punks grabbed this coed off the street and forced her into a car. We were just around the corner. Wow, what a charge! We chased them toward Ashby and cornered them on Russell when their car didn’t clear the street barricade. One perp raised a gun and I yelled for him to drop it. I had my safety off and was just starting to squeeze off a round when he dropped it and hollered ‘Don’t shoot.’ I managed to jerk my gun up and just missed blowing a hole in his head. Jesus, Mary, it was so damned close. I’ve never fired at someone before. I nearly killed the bastard. We got the girl out before they could head into the hills to rape and possibly kill her. Whew! I’m still shaking inside.”
She was really pumped up. “Reminds me of some close calls I had in the Navy. Let me buy you a drink. We can trade war stories and then you can tell me why Mindy’s case got relegated to the back burner.”
“I really need to write up a report of the incident for internal affairs and clarify why I fired my gun. But, I’m still pretty wound up. My adrenaline is still at the scene.” She paused to give me a funny look. “You really serious about trying to find those three rapists?”
“Yeah, she just got the word that the guys who boffed her were HIV positive. I’m hired to find them and bring them to justice if I can. I need all the help I can get.”
“Hey, I’m sorry for her. I didn’t know.” She let out a sigh. “Sorry for the offhand reception. When I first saw you, I thought you were a guy from internal affairs who was snooping on my phone call to my mother. Are you serious about that drink? I think I could really use one.”
“You got it.”
“Give me a couple of minutes. I have to clean up my desk. Okay?”
“I’ll wait for you at Rudy’s. Take your time.”
She flashed me a smile that could melt a hard-hearted guy in a black hat. I made my way to Rudy’s Bar near the courthouse; it’s the local hangout for lawyers and cops. I picked up a draft Anchor Steam beer from the bar and slid into a booth in the far corner of the room with a view of the door. I didn’t want to get surprised by Sawyer for using his name in my little white lie.
While I waited and sipped my beer, I wondered about Mary Sandoval and why she’d decided to become a cop. It was an unusual occupation for a Latina woman. Most Latinos and blacks I knew wouldn’t dream of becoming a police officer; some detested the cops for sticking together like the mafia, planting drugs and guns on suspects they arrested, and lying in court under oath. Not all cops were “dirty.” I’d worked with some honest, hardworking police officers like Detective Walker, but the guys who lived and worked on the streets held mostly negative views of the police. Many had been stopped, frisked, hassled and even arrested just because of the color of their skin. Gel your hair and wear a zoot suit and you earned a rep as a defiant, bad dude. Wear dreadlocks and they pegged you as a ganja kingpin.
Even my Mexican secretary, Juanita, had few nice words for la policia. Mary and Juanita might share some cultural heritage and language, but they were as different as night and day. Juanita’s often broken English betrayed the failure of bilingual education attempts in the poorer barrios in Los Angeles. Mary looked like she could dance in the streets of Rio at Carnival time, yet she talked like a college preppie.
The place started filling up with lawyers and assistant D.A.’s who now dropped the facade that they role played for their clients that they were fighting for truth and justice in an adversary court system. With clients at home or in jail, they joshed each other and co-mingled openly. They were more boisterous than the cops who hunkered down over their boilermakers and kept their distance from the lawyers according to some unwritten ritual. Cops celebrating a shift change huddled together in small cliques separated by race. It was a sad testament to the so-called colorblind world they were supposed to prosecute and defend.
I spotted Mary as she came through the door and waved her over to my booth through the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke.
“Several lawyers paused in their tracks to watch Mary wiggle her ass as she walked her walk and crossed the room to join me. After the small stir of her passage in the male-dominated room, they ignored us. Mary ordered a white wine.
“You threw me for a loop back there. I just knew you had to be from internal affairs.” She’d applied some dark blue eye shadow and checked in her .38 Chief’s Special revolver. But for the uniform, she could pass for a coed on a date.
“They’ve been hassling you?” I asked.
“Yeah, how’d you guess?” She threw me a killer smile.
“Two hundred plus years worth of collective experience dealing with the Man. I’m still waiting for my forty acres and a mule,” I said lightheartedly.
She chuckled, “Yeah, and to think my mother’s people used to own this state.” She rolled her big, black eyes. “Bet you’re wondering what motivated me to put up with all this police bullshit, huh?”
“Not really,” I lied. “Lots of my folks work for the police, too. For some, it’s the steady paycheck and the power to pack and use a gun, but for most, it’s the sad recognition that predators like the ones you cornered today prey mostly on their own people. We’ve got the most to lose if we don’t keep the riffraff in our community in check.”
“That might explain the number of black officers on the force, but there’s only one black policewoman and she’s not having it any easier than me.”
“Let’s face it. Police departments are one of the last bastions of male supremacy for poor whites, blacks and Latinos. Just look at those guys over there.” I pointed to the groups of white and minority male police officers whispering over their drinks. “They might not drink or socialize with each other, but they’ll join forces in a jiffy to limit women in the force to handling domestic disputes and working as meter maids. They sure don’t want them riding shotgun in their patrol cars or responding to a shooting as a backup.”
Mary gave me a look of approval. I seemed to have passed whatever test she had in mind. “Do you really think it’s going to do any good to open up the Rohnert case at this late date?” she asked.
I shrugged. “That depends on how much help I get from you and whether I get some lucky breaks. I have a nasty feeling about the case. I think it was premeditated and cleverly orchestrated to entrap and disable Mindy’s ability to resist. The players were too smooth. I wondered whether you’d run across a similar M.O.?”
“Similar in what way?” Mary looked like she was tuning in on my wavelength.
“Guys playing at being Mr. Nice. Picking up girls and introducing them to their so-called friends, who act out nice guy roles until she let’s down her guard; then they jump her bones.”
“Jesus, that’s a pretty common scenario around a university town with all the frat houses, sororities and group living arrangements. The girls today are into binge drinking and partying. When they get shit-faced drunk, they’re easy pickings for a gang rape. I had a case recently where a woman student got loaded on beer at a frat house, then went upstairs with the jock who’d been filling her glass. She still doesn’t know how many frat brothers had her. She was too drunk to keep count and is pissed at me that I can’t nail the whole fraternity for rape.”
“Why can’t you stick it to them when they use liquor to break down a girl’s