The Black Box

Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. The program had an ingenious acronym and some said they spent more time coming up with that than they did on the actual program. CRASH attacked the lower levels of the pyramid. It disrupted the street business of the gangs but rarely reached toward the top. And no wonder. The street soldiers who sold drugs and carried out missions of retribution and intimidation rarely knew more than what the day’s job was and rarely gave even that up.
    These were young men fired in the anti-cop cauldron of South L.A. They were seasoned by racism, drugs, societal indifference, and the erosion of traditional family and education structures, then put out on the street, where they could make more in a day than their mothers made in a month. They were cheered on in this lifestyle from every boom box and car stereo by a rap message that said fuck the police and the rest of society. Putting a nineteen-year-old gangbanger in a room and getting him to give up the next guy in the line was about as easy as opening a can of peas with your fingers. He didn’t know who the next guy in line was and wouldn’t give him up if he did. Prison and jail were accepted extensions of gang life, part of the maturation process, part of earning gang stripes. There was no value in cooperating. There was only a downside to it—theenmity of your gang family, which always came with a death warrant.
    “So, what you’re saying,” Bosch said, “is that we don’t know who Trumont Story was working for back then or where he got the gun that he gave to Coleman to take out Regis.”
    “Most of that’s right. Except the gun part. My guess is that Tru always had that gun and he gave it out to people he wanted to use it. See, we know lots more now than we knew then. So taking today’s knowledge and applying it to back then, it would work like this. We start with a guy at the top or near the top of the pyramid called the Rolling Sixties street gang. This guy is like a captain. He wants a guy named Walter ‘Wide Right’ Regis dead because he’s been selling where he shouldn’t be selling. So the captain goes to his trusted sergeant at arms named Trumont Story and whispers in his ear that he wants Regis taken care of. At that point, it is Story’s job and he has to get it done to maintain his position in the organization. So he goes to one of the trusted guys on his crew, Rufus Coleman, gives him a gun, and says the target is Regis and this is the club where he likes to hang. While Coleman goes off to do the job, Story goes and gets himself an alibi because he’s the keeper of that gun. Just a little safeguard in case he and the gun are ever connected. That’s how they do it now, so I’m saying that’s probably how they did it back then—only we didn’t exactly know it.”
    Bosch nodded. He was getting the sense of the fruitlessness of his search. Trumont Story was dead and the connection to the gun was gone with him. He was really no closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen than he was on the nighttwenty years ago when he stared down at her body and apologized. He was nowhere.
    Gant identified his disappointment.
    “Sorry, Harry.”
    “Not your fault.”
    “It probably saves you a bunch of trouble anyway.”
    “Yeah, how so?”
    “Oh, you know, all those unsolved cases from back then. What if the only one we closed was the white girl’s? That probably wouldn’t go over too well in the community, know what I mean?”
    Bosch looked at Gant, who was black. He hadn’t really considered the racial issues in the case. He was just trying to solve a murder that had stuck with him for twenty years.
    “I guess so,” he said.
    They sat in silence for a long moment before Bosch asked a question.
    “So, what do you think, could it happen again?”
    “What, you mean the riots?”
    Bosch nodded. Gant had spent his whole career in South L.A. He would know the answer better than most.
    “Sure, anything can happen down here,” Gant answered. “Are things better between the people and the department? Sure, way better. We got some of the people actually trusting us now. The murder count’s way down. Hell, crime in general is way down and the bangers don’t run the streets with impunity. We got control, the people have control.”
    He stopped there and Bosch waited but that was it.
    “But . . .,” Bosch prompted.
    Gant shrugged.
    “Lotta people without jobs, lotta stores and businesses closed up. Not a