Tito talked, and Donnie Brusco was arrested and sentenced to death by lethal injection. He was now sitting in San Quentin’s death row, waiting on his execution date. Tito got ten years for armed robbery and accessory to murder. Hunter and Garcia kept their side of the bargain and pleaded with the DA, who recommended early parole. After serving six years of his ten-year sentence, Tito had been released under the supervision of the California Probation Department and a parole officer eleven months ago. He served his time in the California State Prison in Lancaster – Inmate Facility A. The same facility where Ken Sands had served his sentence.
Fifty-Seven
The fact that he was under the supervision of the California Probation Department meant that Tito wasn’t hard to find. His registered address was a small apartment in a public housing project in Bell Gardens, East LA. His probation officer told Hunter over the phone that Tito was as good as they got when it came to paroled inmates. He was always on time for their scheduled meetings, held a steady job at a warehouse, and he hadn’t missed a single weekly group session with the assigned psychologist.
Hunter and Garcia’s first stop was at Tito’s workplace, a privately owned warehouse in Cudahy, southeast Los Angeles. The owner, a short and very round Jewish man who never stopped smiling, told Hunter that Fridays were Tito’s day off, but he would be in tomorrow, if they cared to come back. Saturdays he worked the nightshift, from nine in the evening to five in the morning.
Tito’s housing project was a redbrick, square-box monstrosity just west of Bell Gardens Park. The building’s metal entrance doors clanged like prison gates behind Hunter and Garcia as they stepped into the dingy ground-floor hall. The small space smelled heavily of urine and stale sweat, and there wasn’t an inch of wall that wasn’t graffitied. There were no elevators, just a set of dirty, narrow stairs going up five floors. Tito’s apartment was number 311.
Graffiti followed Hunter and Garcia all the way up, as if the stairwell was a colorful psychedelic tunnel. As they reached the third floor, they were greeted by an even more sickening smell than the one at the entrance hall – something like sour milk, or old, dried-up vomit.
‘Damn,’ Garcia said, bringing a hand up to cover his nose. ‘This whole place stinks like a sewer.’
In front of them, a long and narrow corridor in semi-darkness. Halfway down it one of the few working tube florescent lights that ran along the ceiling was malfunctioning, disco dancing on and off.
‘All we need is some music,’ Garcia joked. ‘And a whole cleaning squad with disinfectants and air fresheners.’
The door to apartment 311 was directly under the flickering light. They could hear Spanish dance music coming from inside. Hunter knocked three times. Instinctively, both detectives positioned themselves to the left and right of the door. There was no reply. Hunter waited about fifteen seconds and knocked again, placing his right ear closer to the door. He could hear movement inside.
A couple of seconds later the door was opened by a five-foot-three Latin woman with dark hair and in her early-twenties. She was beyond skinny. Her olive-tanned skin clung to her bones as if they were the only things left to cling to. Her pupils were dilated to the size of coffee beans, and her stare was distant and dopey. She was naked except for an ill-fitting Chinese-style robe draped over her scrawny shoulders. She didn’t bother closing it.
‘Oh, sexy visitors,’ she said with a Spanish accent, before Hunter and Garcia could introduce themselves. ‘We like visitors. The more the merrier.’ She gave them a cigarette-stained smile and pulled the door fully open. ‘Come in and let’s partyyy.’ She blew Hunter a kiss and started swinging to the sound of the music.
‘What the fuck are you doing, bitch?’ Tito stepped out from the bedroom, wearing nothing but a pair of lacy purple panties. ‘Get back in here and . . .’ He choked mid-sentence when his eyes rested on the two new arrivals. ‘What the fuck?’ He tried covering himself up. Hunter and Garcia were already inside the apartment, both staring at Tito – a six-foot-one, two-hundred-and-ten-pound man with a pear-shaped body, wearing a pair of women’s panties.
‘That’s not right,’ Hunter whispered.
Garcia’s headshake was barely noticeable. ‘So, so wrong.’
‘We’ve got some more people for our party, Papi,’ the woman said, closing the door. ‘Let’s get naked and daaance.’ She let her robe drop to the floor and reached for the buttons on Hunter’s shirt. He gently moved her hands away.
‘No, unfortunately we’re not here for the party.’ He collected her robe from the floor and helped her back into it.
‘
‘Thank you for covering yourself, Tito,’ Garcia said. ‘I was starting to feel queasy.’