Lost Light

phone up so he could speak to me.
    “Harry, do you ever think about Angella Benton?”
    “All the time,” I told him.
    “Me, too, Harry. My memory’s come back, and I think about that one a lot.”
    And that’s all it took. When I walked out of the Hollywood Division for the last time, I thought I’d had enough, that I’d walked around my last body, conducted my last interview with somebody I knew was a liar. But I’d hedged my bet just the same. I walked out carrying a box full of files-copies of my open cases from twelve years in Hollywood homicide.
    Angella Benton’s file had been in that box. I didn’t have to open it to remember the details, to remember the way her body looked on the tile floor, so exposed and violated. It still drove the hook into me. It cut me that she had been lost in the fireworks that came after, that her life had not become important until after two million dollars was stolen.
    I had never closed the case. It had been taken away from me by the big shots before I could. That was life in the LAPD. But that was then and this was now. The call from Lawton Cross changed all of that in me. It ended my extended vacation. It gave me a job.

3
    I no longer carried a badge but I still carried a thousand different habits and instincts that came with the badge. Like a reformed smoker whose hand digs inside his shirt pocket for the fix that is no longer there, I constantly found myself reaching in some way for the comfort of my badge. For almost thirty years of my life I had been part of an organization that promoted isolation from the outside world, that cultivated the “us versus them” ethic. I had been part of the cult of the blue religion and now I was out, excommunicated, part of the outside world. I had no badge. I was no longer part of us. I was one of them.
    As the months passed, there was not a day that I did not alternately regret and revel in my decision to leave the department behind. It was a period in which my main work was to separate the badge and what it stood for from my own personal mission. For the longest time I believed the two were inextricably entwined. I could not have one without the other. But over the weeks and months came the realization that one identity was greater, that it superseded the other. My mission remained intact. My job in this world, badge or no badge, was to stand for the dead.
    When I hung up the phone after talking to Lawton Cross I knew I was ready and that it was time to stand again. I went to the closet in the hallway and pulled out the box that contained the dusty files and all the voices of the dead. They spoke to me in memories. In crime scene visions. Of all of them I remembered Angella Benton the most. I remembered her body crumpled on the Spanish tile, her hands held out in such a way, as if reaching to me.
    And I had my mission.

4
    The morning after I spoke to Alexander Taylor I sat at the dining room table in my house on Woodrow Wilson Drive. I had a pot of hot coffee in the kitchen. I had filled my five-disc changer with CDs chronicling some of Art Pepper’s late work as a sideman. And I had the documents and photographs from the Angella Benton file spread in front of me.
    The file was incomplete because the case was taken by RHD just as my investigation was beginning to come into focus and before many of the reports were written. It was merely a starting point. But after almost four years removed from a crime scene it was all I had. That and the list of names Alexander Taylor had given me the day before.
    As I readied myself for a day of chasing down names and setting up interviews, my eyes were drawn to the small stack of newspaper clippings that had yellowed at the edges while closed in the file. I took these up and began looking through them.
    Initially Angella Benton’s murder rated only a short report in the Los Angeles Times. I remembered how this had frustrated me. We needed witnesses. Not only to the crime itself but possibly to the killer’s car or getaway route. We needed to know the victim’s movements before she was attacked. It had been her birthday. Where and with whom had she spent the evening before coming home? One of the best ways to stimulate citizen reports is through news stories. Because the Times decided to run only a short that was buried in the back of the B section, we got almost no help from the public. When I called the reporter to express my frustration, I was told that polling showed that