Free Hot Art by Joshua Knelman Page A

in the south of the city. By the time he became a detective, it was the early 1980s—an era when the city had over a thousand murders a year: drug murders, gang murders, senseless murders, horribly violent murders—and he was in South Central Los Angeles. “Murders seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day,” he said. “I was part of an on-call team. My memory of those days is chaotic. You had to be on your toes all the time, and you couldn’t work those kinds of jobs alone.”
    Once I asked Hrycyk what he’d been doing in 1985. He emailed me a picture. It was of a younger detective, in brown suit slacks and a white shirt strapped with a gun holster; he was standing over a bloody body laid out in a morgue. We talked about some of the cases he remembered. One involved an ice-cream pushcart vendor. One day, a gang of kids decided to rob the ice-cream man. They organized themselves, got a gun, and decided that if he put up any resistance, they would shoot him in the arm. When the kids approached, the man resisted—so one of the kids shot him in the arm. Unfortunately, the bullet also tore straight through his arm and entered his chest. He died beside his ice-cream cart, and the kids took off.
    When Detective Hrycyk showed up, he saw an empty pair of running shoes near the ice-cream cart, in front of an alley. “One of the kids had run so fast he’d run straight out of his shoes, into the alley.” A few days later, driving around the neighbourhood, Hrycyk spotted a kid wearing a brand-new pair of shoes almost exactly the same as the ones that were in front of the alley. It was the ice-cream killer, of course.
    â€œWe had another case that started when the storm drains overflowed after a heavy rain. The city sent out street maintenance crews, who lifted a manhole cover and couldn’t see to the bottom. They went to a neighbouring manhole cover, and tried to unclog the pipe. They pulled something through this one-foot pipe—it was a body. So somebody killed somebody else and hid the body in a manhole.”
    He had other stories: crack houses being targeted by rival drug gangs, who sent hit teams in to spray the place with bullets, leaving bodies behind; a man waiting at a bus stop, shot dead, apparently just for wearing the wrong colour of shoelaces.
    Hrycyk was often working three separate murder cases at once. “We were constantly running out of time. No computers, no databases, everything was handwritten,” he said. “The advantage of that work, as opposed to art investigations, was that there was a strong tradition—a body of knowledge and history to fall back on. There are schools for homicide investigation, and plenty of other detectives available to get advice from. I developed sources of information, talked to witnesses. There were a lot of people skills involved—cajoling people to get information out of them, people who are scared to talk.”
    By 1986 Hrycyk was feeling worn out. “I got tired of dealing with dead bodies,” he said. An opening came up in Burglary Special–Auto Theft, and he applied. He got the job, but instead of heading to Auto Theft, he was transferred to a new Burglary Special unit under the command of Detective Bill Martin. That unit’s mission, it turned out, was to explore a new area of crime: stolen art.
    Inside Burglary Special, in the downtown headquarters of the LAPD , rows of pigeonhole boxes lined a wall, and those boxes were stuffed with accumulating crime reports generated from across the city. One of the boxes was dedicated to cases involving stolen art, an area no detective in the department knew much about, or wanted to. The box was so full that paperwork was falling out of it.
    Detective Martin was curious. Once in a while he’d take a few minutes to peek at some of the cases. What he found was that, unlike the other property-crime boxes, these cases sometimes involved enormous sums of