There was debris on and around the mattress. Overturned boxes, a dirty backpack pulled inside out, an empty mayonnaise jar that might have contained coins collected at street corners. Whatever else had been there was gone now. The fellow residents of Gower Grim had been sure to pick through the dead man’s belongings before alerting the police.
It was difficult with the homeless to determine death by overdose on-site. There were no empty or half-filled pill bottles left behind to help the investigator. The addicted in the homeless camps couldn’t afford the luxury of surplus supply, or if they did, it was long gone by the time police were on scene. But more often than not, the threadbare existence determined that the pill that killed them was the last pill they could afford. This man’s cause of death would certainly be determined by autopsy and toxicity testing, but she had to make the call now as to whether to crank up the machine. It wasn’t a decision taken lightly. The safe thing to do would be always to call out Homicide. But that would often mean crying wolf. That would start a rumble in the ranks that would result in distrust of Ballard. In more than four years on the late shift, she had called out Homicide several times, but she had never been wrong.
She stood up and moved back out to the street. She saw the white coroner’s van with the blue stripe down the side pulling in.
“Well?” Spellman asked.
“Purple Haze,” Ballard said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jimi Hendrix asphyxiated on his own vomit after taking too many pills. So did this guy. Did anybody get an ID?”
Spellman started laughing.
“That’s good, Ballard,” he said. “I gotta remember that.”
Ballard immediately regretted using the phrase. It was callous and now this callous patrol sergeant would use it again. It would get passed on and add another layer of callousness to the department.
“ID?” she prompted, to get things back on course.
“No, no ID found,” said La Castro. “We asked around — people here just knew him as Jimmy.”
“Holy shit!” Spellman said. “Purple Haze is right.”
He turned away to jerk his mask down so he could laugh unbound. Ballard saw several of the homeless people watching from the openings in their tents and lean-tos. Ballard felt all their hollow eyes on her as the originator of the joke that had made the sergeant laugh.
Ballard remained at the scene for the next half hour while the coroner’s investigator conducted the same overview as she had and came to the same conclusion. The death would not be ruled a homicide. While she waited, she used her rover to call for the unit that carried a mobile thumb reader. If the dead man had ever given a thumbprint while obtaining a California driver’s license or being booked into a jail or prison, his identity would come up. The readers were expensive and not distributed to every patrol car or detective.
When the reader arrived, Ballard took it into the dead man’s shack and placed his right thumb on the screen. It came back negative. No hits. The man was not in the system. This was unusual — almost unheard of — for a homeless drug user. Ballard took another read off his thumb and again the result was negative. This meant the coroner’s office would have to do a deeper dive to identify the man and notify next of kin. If that failed, his body would be kept in refrigeration for a year and then burned, his ashes buried under a number in Evergreen Cemetery in East L.A.
After the body was loaded into the blue-striped van, Ballard drove back to the station to get her paperwork done before end of watch. She first updated the chrono on the Midnight Men investigation, then wrote up the reports on the death of the unidentified man. She learned from the coroner’s investigator at the scene that he would be identified in records as John Doe 21-3 until his true identity was determined. Ballard realized that meant that only twenty-four hours or so into the new year, there were already three unidentified bodies in the Big Crypt at the coroner’s office. That so many were anonymous and uncounted in this city carried through even in death.
When finished, she printed out her reports and left copies in the mailbox for the detective lieutenant. He would not see them until Monday, when he was scheduled to come back into work. She also emailed the updated chrono to Lisa Moore. This was not necessary but she wanted the sex crimes investigator to see how far she had moved the investigation forward without her help.
The paperwork took Ballard to the end of her shift at six. But she needed to kill another hour because she wanted to swing by Native Bean when it opened at seven. She spent the time checking email and surfing the Web, first putting “Peter the Hermit” into the search engine. She discovered that he had been a legendary denizen of the Dell. He had lived on Ivar Avenue and had long white hair and a beard, which got him work in movies with biblical themes in the 1920s and ’30s. He was also credited with being one of the first to work the character impersonator trade on Hollywood Boulevard, posing in his biblical robes for tourists in exchange for tips. He was a mainstay in the Dell into the 1960s, when he passed.