A Killing in China Basin

NINETEEN


Late Tuesday night, a radio unit responding to a report of a robbery and shooting followed a dark blue ’78 Chevrolet Impala with two male occupants down Broderick Street into the Western Addition. When they hit their lights and the Impala didn’t pull over, they went to siren and the car stopped in the middle of the street. That’s where the officer and witness accounts began to differ.

Inside the Impala the man in the passenger seat shielded his eyes from the police spotlight and raised his right hand with an object in it. He didn’t know it but twenty minutes earlier a German tourist was beaten and robbed by a young black male jumping out of the passenger side of an older American car.

Raveneau read the officer’s account of the shooting on Wednesday morning. The men in the Impala were father and son. The father was stable after taking a bullet in the shoulder. His son died on the scene of injuries sustained by two gunshot wounds. Neither was armed and an angry crowd soon gathered. According to the father, his son used a paint brush to block the glare of the spotlight.

After interviewing the young man who claimed he’d met their China Basin victim at a bar, Raveneau and la Rosa drove to the Western Addition and looked at where the shooting had occurred. Most of the city homicides happened in the Mission, Bayview, Tenderloin, or here. Many of the killings stemmed from drug and gang related violence and those living in the affected areas of San Francisco were increasingly disturbed by the inability of the police to stop them. Worse, many believed the police didn’t care much about the residents in these areas and though one of the officers involved last night was black, race would loom large in the debate over what had happened.

Raveneau talked and continued driving after they left the Western Addition. His hands moved as he described parts of the city, the southwest corner, the Richmond where the Asian populations were higher and homicide investigations tended to be complicated by language and often revolved around gambling, loan sharking, and the influence of gangs, some as far away as Shanghai.

‘In some of these Asian hits,’ Raveneau said as they were driving again, ‘they’ll just sit on a car. They don’t try to hunt the victim down. They’ll watch his Honda or Mercedes because they know sooner or later he’ll come for it. And there’s a lot more weaponry than when I started. That’s everywhere. You can buy an AK47 or a 223 assault rifle made in China or Mexico cheap and get it from a van in a liquor store parking lot. But you know this, you saw all this at Vice.’

‘No, keep talking, I want to hear it.’

‘OK, since we’re close I’m going to take you by Lincoln Park.’

‘Do you really want to go back there today?’

‘We’ll go in quietly. Bryce is gone by noon anyway.’

They went up the steps and into the white-painted clubhouse and stood at the clubhouse bar and ordered coffees. Then they went out the French doors and around the eighteenth green.

‘Her name was Angela Ruiz. She was out walking her dog. She had a roommate who worked at a pub near here and she’d sometimes go down there at night with the dog, and other times she’d walk the dog up here.’

They came down the cart path under the tall pines and cedars that bordered the fairway. To their right California Street dead-ended into steps as wide as the street that climbed up to Lincoln Park. Raveneau pointed down California at a building.

‘Those windows up on the upper floor there, the second ones in, that’s where she lived. With her dog she’d routinely come up these steps and into the park at night. Her roommate told me that Ruiz had said that if her dog did its business in the trees along the golf course fairways, then there was no need for a doggy bag. So she’d bring the dog up here regularly right around sunset.

‘My prime suspect is a groundskeeper who hates dogs. He told me that if he catches a dog on the golf course he’ll take its collar off and drive it to a pound in another city. That way it’s just another stray with the clock ticking down as soon as it gets to the pound. The dog’s owner puts up posters on the telephone poles with the dog’s picture, but Bryce has turned the missing dog in at a pound fifty miles away.’

‘Don’t they have chips they put in pets now?’

‘Sure, but not all dogs.’ Raveneau pointed. ‘She was in those trees. Bryce told us he found her by chasing her dog. Later he changed that to stopping his mower there because he needed to go up into the trees and urinate.’

He showed her the spot under the tree where Ruiz had been. There were weeds but still the bare spot.

‘That spot had pebbles arranged as numbers. Her dog had pawed part of it, so we could only read a few of the numbers. Maybe if we could have read the rest we’d know more, but that’s where the “Numbers Man” case name comes from.’

They left Lincoln Park then drove the Embarcadero, following the waterfront as Raveneau talked about Hunter’s Point and the expanse of navy property the city didn’t patrol, which gangs out of the projects used routinely. Ironically, the crime lab was located there in a rehabbed area near the water. New development was slated for Hunter’s Point. But beyond the enclave with the crime lab were big abandoned structures, rotting wharfs, and dry docks. As they drove through, Raveneau pointed out the crane that had once loaded the Hiroshima bomb.

‘When there’s a killing in the projects we try to get there fast and get to the children who were witnesses. The kids have no problem saying it was a man in a bright green coat on a little bicycle who stopped and shot the other man, then rode off. Then we’re looking for a guy with a lime-green parka and a little bike in an area with the worst poverty in the city, with empty rooms, no phone or electric service, rock bottom nothing. We can usually find him, but bringing a case against him, that’s a different deal. That’s why we take anonymous tips.’

‘Bringing the case is what we’ve got to do more of.’

She said that with such fervor he glanced over at her.

‘It is. But out here they’re not going to testify if they’re going to get killed for it later. Who would?’ He turned to her. ‘Ready to head back?’

Later that afternoon they watched the copy of the Heilbron tape again. Images were date and time marked. In one thirty-five minute period Heilbron covered several square miles of the city, filming lone women, most of them walking along city sidewalks. His set-up had a zoom feature so after the camera was on them he often zoomed in. Some of the women must have become aware of the van from the way they reacted. Others seemed oblivious. He filmed eight different women before driving into China Basin and to the building where their victim was killed. Resolution was poor. The lighting was poor. But it was definitely the building, and the next shots were of Boyle’s Auto Body.

What followed was a sort of manic period of moving around with the camera running. He sat outside two clubs south of Market. He backtracked several times between Seventeenth and Twenty-first on Valencia Street. At one point a woman approached the passenger side of the van, but disappeared from camera range.

Then he returned to China Basin and Raveneau saw it as he watched this time. Heilbron came back to the building. He was fixated on it and Raveneau got the feeling that Heilbron wanted the street clear. The lens followed the few pedestrians in the area until they were gone. He wanted them gone. Was he waiting for a chance to bring their victim inside?

‘Let’s back it up,’ la Rosa said.

The camera pointed once more at the chain link fence where two individuals or what looked like people showed inside the fence. The time was 11:17 p.m., the night of the murder. Raveneau froze the frame. Neither individual fit the profile of Deschutes. The gate was shut. They were away from the front door and heading around to the back. Heilbron’s camcorder had high quality light enhancement features, but even so Raveneau couldn’t tell. Neither could la Rosa. If he had to guess, one was female, possibly the other as well.

‘We’d better turn this over to the lab rats in the morning,’ he said. Computer enhancement might get them there. ‘I’m going to play it once more,’ he said. He hit ‘Play’ and the figures moved away from the reflective face of the building and down the dark south side. In seconds they were gone.

‘What do you get from that?’ la Rosa asked.

‘That they both might be women.’

‘No way.’

Raveneau replayed it again and after a moment of quiet la Rosa allowed, ‘It’s possible. Yeah, you might be right.’