I looked down and took a quick step back. My right foot had been on the chalk outline on the floor. It seemed like a desecration of some kind and a wave of panic and disgust went through me. Ed hadn’t seemed to notice. He was standing with his back to us, staring out the wide bay window. He pointed to a hole in the glass ringed by a spider web of cracks. It was low to the floor.
“You can see they were standing right outside. The shot came through here and, well, you can see where the body was. Pete said he collapsed right where he was standing.”
I surveyed the rest of the room. It was nearly empty. There was a desk on one side of the room and a bookshelf and leather chair on the other side. Other than that, the room was bare. It would have been a clear shot, and the shooter would have had a clear view of what was going on inside the room.
I asked, “So the cops were just standing outside the window and shot into the house?” I could hear a tone of incredulity in my voice. Ed heard it too and smiled.
“Yeah. Pretty fucking amazing, huh?” He turned back toward the window with the outrage starting to spill from him again. “I mean, what the fuck? They get called to investigate a noise disturbance. They show up at a house where there’s obviously a Halloween party going on. They go around the side of the house, look in through a window, and see two guys talking, one of them has a gun in his hand, so they just shoot him through the window? No warning? Nothing?”
Ed turned back and stared at the chalk outline on the floor. “It’s crazy.”
I walked over to the window. There was a walkway on the ground outside and a strip of grass between the walkway and the jasmine covered wall that marked the edge of the property. I asked, “Were there any people outside who might have seen something?”
“Not that I know of,” Ed said. “The only guy who saw anything was Pete.” He thought about that for a second, and then added, “And the cops. But I don’t expect them to be too helpful.”
Ed walked out into the hallway and turned toward the back of the house. We followed him through a back room with leather walls and a large pool table with bright pink felt. We went through a set of French doors out onto a wide deck overlooking the city. The hill dropped away below us and there was very little in the way of a yard behind the house. There were some steps that led down to a pool area where the walkway from the side of the house ended. We stood at the rail looking down at Los Angeles.
Finally, Ed Vargas asked, more to himself than to us, “So now what?”
Jendrek leaned sideways against the railing and spoke. “Well, I’d expect the police department will complete its internal investigation of the shooting very quickly. And, not to be too cynical, I’ll bet they conclude that the shooting was justified because they’ll be expecting us to file a lawsuit.”
Ed’s eyes swelled with rage. “Well they damned sure better expect a lawsuit. We’re going to sue the hell out of them. How could they even think something like this was justified?”
Jendrek held his hands out in front of him. “I’m not defending the police here. I agree with you. This is outrageous. Shooting a man at a costume party because he has a gun in his hand? I mean, you’ve got to be kidding. It never occurs to them that it could be a fake gun? I hear you. I understand where you’re coming from. But you’ve got to understand that suing a police department is not an easy thing to do.”
Ed leaned his back against the railing and stared at the house. He was grappling with a whole range of emotions that I could only guess at. The incongruity of his haggard, sleep deprived face and the cheerful luster of his bellhop uniform was almost comical. But he didn’t look like he was finding much humor in anything. Finally, he said, “I want you to do whatever it takes to make them pay for what they’ve done to me.”
Jendrek glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. The young man’s reference to himself instead of his father struck us both like a slap