1 Truesdale, Justice, and the American Way When we Justice kids were little and we'd finish watching a movie with my parents, my mother would always ask, "And what was the moral? What have we learned?" And while we would squirm and make faces over how that question intruded on our fantasies, I think I've finally figured out what Joymarie meant. It's like death. I've probably worked hundreds of homicide cases over the years and they've all meant something different to me, just like my favorite movies. Some homicides pull at your heartstrings--the murder of an innocent child or a battered woman--and haunt you long after the case is closed. Others--gangbangers, a homeless person--make you wonder how our society could stoop so low. Point is, you never know how death will slap you upside the head, or what a homicide investigation will uncover about the victim, the suspects, or yourself. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving found me downtown at my desk at the PAB, aka Parker Administrative Building, reading the newspaper and trying to get motivated to eat the tuna sandwich I'd bought off the local roach coach. It was unusually quiet in the third-floor bull pen that housed the ten men and two women in the Homicide Special unit of the department's Robbery-Homicide Division.
Almost everyone was out in the field; the rest had cut out early to get a head start on an extended holiday weekend. Among the absentees was my partner, Gena Cortez, who had decided at the last minute to take a few days off. We should all be so lucky, I grumbled to myself as I began unwrapping the stale sandwich before me. I was saved from my mean cuisine by Ma Bell in the form of a call from Billie Truesdale. Billie and I had worked a couple of homicides during the Rodney King riots and had ridden out the ensuing publicity storm together. Our trial by fire had forged a sisterly bond between us, despite the difference in our sexual orientation. That and the fact Billie worked South Bureau Homicide, location of some of the city's most brutal murders, while I was firmly, but increasingly unhappily, entrenched as the only black woman in the celebrated and celebrity-driven RHD. "Hail to the conquering heroine," I teased Billie by way of a greeting.
"I was just reading about the verdict in the Little Angel of Mercy case in the Times." A year ago, Billie and her partner had hooked up a registered nurse for the murders of several terminally ill hospital and nursing home patients. An employee of HealthMates, a South Bay home health agency, Angelo Clemenza had just been convicted of moving through a dozen health-care facilities and private homes, leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake. His "mission" had gotten the diminutive, soft-spoken man tagged by the right-to-die fanatics and the media as the Little Angel of Mercy, a loose translation of his name in Italian. The fact that over half of Clemenza's victims were elderly black men had raised the specter of the Atlanta child murders back in the eighties as well as the more recent Jeffrey Dahmer case, and had stirred up the CTs, or conspiracy theorists, from here to Chicago. Billie Truesdale and her partner had done a heroic job during the investigation, even appearing with the LAPD Public Relations commander at town hall meetings and on black radio programs while following Clemenza's devious trail through the South Bureau's jurisdiction as well as several neighboring suburbs. Clearing the Clemenza case was what my acronym-spouting father would call a CEA--career-enhancing achievement--and I was as happy for Billie as I would have been for myself, conspiracy theorists be damned. "At least now you can get the CT contingent off your back," I joked.
Taking note that Billie didn't laugh along with me, I was even more curious when she asked, her voice uneasy and low, "Are you tied up on something, Ch.