Gina Villegas thanked him, and when they got to the one-bedroom apartment on the third floor, a dangerously thin woman met them at the door. She was a twenty-five-year-old strawberry blonde with frightened, darting eyes, trembling hands, and suspiciously stained teeth.
Carl Cheng's glance toward his partner said, Tweaker.
Before either cop could say anything to her, the woman said, "I'm the one who called your office. My name's Cindy Kroll. My ex-boyfriend is threatening me. I think he wants to kill me."
"And why would you think that?" Gina Villegas asked while Carl Cheng glanced around the little apartment.
There were two chairs at the small Formica table in the kitchen. And in the living room, if you could call it that, was a sofa, a shabby overstuffed chair, an infant's crib, and a playpen, all crowded together around a big-screen Sony TV.
Carl Cheng smirked subtly in his partner's direction as if to say, No matter how crappy they live, they always have a better TV than I do.
Cindy Kroll said, "Sorry there's no place to sit down." She pointed to a thirteen-month-old in the playpen. Then she said, "My five-week-old baby boy's asleep in my bedroom. We don't have much room here."
Gina Villegas said, "A thirteen-month-old and a five-week-old? You're not wasting time starting a family, are you?"
"My baby boy was an accident, and that's what's causing the problem," Cindy Kroll said. "His father wants me dead for demanding child support."
"Are you married to him?" the detective asked.
"No," she said. "After my first baby was born, my husband, Ralphie, took off and left us. I had a tough time and could only make a few bucks cleaning houses. I had a job cleaning the apartment of Louis Dryden every week for four months. He lives up on Franklin Avenue and has a pretty good job at a real-estate company in Santa Monica, selling vacation rentals. He's maybe ten years older than me, and, well, we started getting intimate while I was working for him and pretty soon I got pregnant."
"Pregnant by him?" Gina Villegas said.
"Of course by him." Cindy Kroll's darting eyes flashed. "I'm no slut."
"No, I didn't mean that you were. But you also have a husband, right?"
"He's outta my life. I got pregnant by Louis and nobody else." "Go on," Gina Villegas said.
"He gave me some cash to get an abortion but I didn't do it. I decided to have the baby and hire a lawyer. For the past couple of months my lawyer's been calling him, but Louis says the baby isn't his. He says he's engaged to a terrific woman now and I'm ruining his life with my lies."
"How about a paternity test?" Gina Villegas said. "That should settle the matter."
"That's what my lawyer's working on now. We're gonna take him to court."
Carl Cheng spoke for the first time and said, "Why're we here, ma'am?"
"He stalked me today," Cindy Kroll said. "He caught me at the Seven-Eleven store I always go to and told me this is my last chance. He said he'd give me five thousand dollars to leave him alone and quit saying the baby's his."
"And what'd you say?" Carl Cheng asked.
"I told him to talk to my lawyer."
"And when you were at the store, where were your babies?" Gina Villegas asked.
After a long pause, Cindy Kroll said, "I was only gone for a few minutes."
"You can't leave babies alone like that. It's child endangering and it's against the law," Gina Villegas said.
Cindy Kroll said, "I asked the woman in the next apartment to look in on them every few minutes. Don't you wanna hear what I got to say? This man threatened me!"
This time Gina Villegas glanced at her partner. A woman next door? Sure.
"Of course we want to hear," Carl Cheng said. "What did he say exactly?"
Cindy Kroll now addressed all answers to the male detective and said, "He told me his entire life and career were on the line. He said his fiancee was not like me. When I asked him what he meant, he goes, 'She's a lady, not a whore like you.' And then he threatened me."
"Use his exact words if you can remember," Carl Cheng said.
"Okay, he said to me, 'Whatever happens is on your head, not mine. You're forcing me to do whatever I gotta do to stop your blackmail from wrecking my whole life.' That's exactly what he said."
Carl Cheng said, "Did you ask him what he meant by that?"
"I knew what he meant," Cindy Kroll said. "I'm not stupid!"
Gina Villegas said, "What you know or think you know about the implication of his words will not satisfy the District Attorney's Office. Did he say more than that? Anything specific by way of a violent threat?"