The vehicle was the wrong one, but officers noticed that its driver, Detective Thomas, was "acting belligerently, apparently because he was inebriated," a police spokesman said.
Mr. Mercado's body was discovered at 10 35 a.m. by his driver, who, detectives said, had arrived to pick him up.
There was one more thing: the driver told detectives that "supervisors were aware of this problem and continued to allow him and other employees to use this forklift," records show.
Some of the drivers told detectives Mr. El-Atriss had supplied the fake documents, officials said.
The crime movies of Michael Mann, with their professional antagonists-cum-doppelgangers duking it out in a perpetual, neon-lit dark night of the LA soul, could all have been extrapolated entirely from the template of Hill's near-mythic battle between characters so archetypal they don't even have names: the Driver (Ryan O'Neal), the Detective (Bruce Dern) and the Girl (Isabelle Adjani).
Guided by a detective, the driver hooked up a brown Buick Skylark and hauled it to a police garage.
"May I get in the car?" he said to the driver, a retired N.Y.P.D. detective who was doing a favor for Hayes.
"All the bad guys have to do is know someone down South with a clean driver's license," said Detective Fowlkes.
According to detectives, the driver, believed to be about 40 years old, picked up a 26-year-old woman early Friday morning and in the vicinity of Rodney and South First Streets pulled a knife on her.
LONDON'S licensed taxi drivers paid private detectives to pose as passengers and gather evidence on freelance minicab drivers who use the controversial booking app Uber.
