before his first novel THE BLACK ECHO was just a gleam in his
eye, Michael Connelly was a crime journalist in South FLA. a
magazine article written in 1986 with 2 other reporters about
plane crash survivors was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize
for feature writing. this lead to a gig as a crime reporter
with the Los Angeles Times
he has a non-fiction collection of crime stories from those
days called CRIME BEAT. the intro he wrote for that
compilation provides a revealing window
John Lau
'Crime Beat'
by Michael Connelly
April 29, 2006 ยท Introduction: Watching the Detectives
Moments. It all comes down to moments. I have been watching
the detectives for more than thirty years. It all started
because of a single moment. The best things that I have seen
and taken into my imagination and then seeded into my fiction
came to me in moments. Sometimes I am haunted by the what
ifs. What if I hadn't looked out my car window that night
when I was sixteen? What if I hadn't seen the detective take
off his glasses? What if I had gone to L.A. for the first
time a day later, or I hadn't answered the phone the time my
editor called me to send me up the hill to check out a
murder?
Let me try to explain. Let me try and tell you about a
few of these moments.
When I was sixteen years old I worked as a night
dishwasher in a hotel restaurant on the beach in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida. The place stayed open late and the pots
and pans that were used to cook in all day had to be soaked,
scrubbed and cleaned. I often didn't get out of that place
until late.
One night I was driving my Volkswagen Beetle home from
work. The streets were almost deserted. I came to a red light
and stopped the car. I was tired and just wanted to get home.
There were no other cars at the intersection and no cars
coming. Thinking about running the light, I checked both ways
for cops and when I looked to my left I saw something.
A man was running. He was on the sidewalk, running full
speed toward the beach, in the direction I had just come
from. He was big and bearded with bushy hair down to his
shoulders. He wasn't a jogger. He was running either to or
from something. He wore blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt. He
was wearing boots, not running shoes. Forgetting about the
traffic light, I watched the man and saw him start to peel
off his shirt as he ran, revealing a printed T-shirt
underneath. He pulled the outer shirt off and then bundled it
around something he had been clutching in his hand. Barely
breaking his stride, he shoved the shirt into the interior
branches of a hedge next to the sidewalk and then kept
going.
I made a U-turn when the light changed. The running man
was a few blocks ahead of me. I drove slowly, following and
watching him. I saw him duck into the doorway of a bar called
The Parrot. It was a bar I was familiar with. Not because I
had ever been inside - I was too young. It was familiar
because on numerous occasions I had noticed the line of
motorcycles parked in front of it. I had seen the big men
going in to do their drinking there. It was a place I was
wary of.
I drove by The Parrot and made another U-turn. I went
back to the hedge and parked my bug. I looked around, then
quickly got out. At the hedge I stuck my hand into the
branches and retrieved the bundled shirt. It felt heavy in my
hands. I unwrapped it. There in the shirt was a gun.
A charge of fear and adrenaline went through me. I
quickly rewrapped the gun and put it back in its place. I ran
to my car and I drove away.
But then I stopped at a phone booth. When I reached my
father and told him what I had just seen and done and
discovered, he told me to come pick him up. He said we were
going to call the police and go back to the hedge.
Fifteen minutes later my father and I were at the hedge
when police cars, with blue lights flashing from their roofs,
pulled up. I told the officers what I had seen and what I had
done. I led them to the gun. They told me there had been a
robbery nearby. The victim had been shot in the head. They
said the running man sounded like the guy they were looking
for.
I spent the next four hours in the detective bureau. I
was interviewed and reinterviewed by detectives, one in
particular who was gruff and had a no-nonsense air about him.
He told me that the victim might not make it, that I might
end up being the only witness. Because of my description of
the running man, several men with long hair, beards and
printed T-shirts were pulled out of The Parrot and taken to
the police department to stand in suspect lineups. I was the
one looking through the one-way glass at them. I was the only
witness. I had to pick the shooter.
There was only one problem. They didn't have the guy.
It had been dark out but the street was lighted. I clearly
saw the man who stashed the gun and knew they didn't have
him. Sometime between when I saw him duck into The Parrot and
when the police came to round up patrons fitting my
description, the shooter had slipped away.
This did not sit well with the detectives. They
believed they had the guy. They believed that I was simply
too scared or intimidated to make the ID. I could not
convince them and after going back and forth with the gruff
detective for what seemed like hours it ended badly. My
father demanded my release and I left the department with
that detective thinking I had been too afraid to step up. I
knew he was wrong but it didn't make me feel any better.
Although I had been honest, I knew I had let him down.
I started reading the newspaper after that night.
Religiously. At first it was to look for stories about the
shooting. The victim survived, but I never heard from the
detectives again and I wondered what had happened to the
case. Was the shooter ever identified? Was he ever caught? I
also became fascinated with the crime stories and the
detectives working the cases. South Florida was a strange
place. A torrent of drug money was flooding the coast. Fast
boats and cars. Smugglers were moving into the best
neighborhoods. Crimes of violence happened everywhere at any
time. There seemed to always be a lot of crime stories to
read.
I got hooked. Soon I was reading true-crime books and
then crime novels. In the years that followed I discovered
the works of Joseph Wambaugh and Raymond Chandler. And
eventually I decided I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to
work for a newspaper on the crime beat. I wanted to watch and
learn from the detectives and then one day write about them
in novels. All because of a moment, all because I had looked
out my window.
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