Hollywood Crows (15 page)

Jetsam looked sheepishly at the other cops, and Stan Hooper said, “The woman customer has a name that sounds like maybe an Arab name, but she’s American. Her SUV was full of old magazines and newspapers written in a Middle East language. They were laying around the shop last time I looked. I wish she’d come and pay me and pick up her car, but she hopes I can sell it for her.”

Stan Hooper handed the repair estimates to Ronnie, who glanced at them perfunctorily just to help Jetsam gracefully exit, and she saw the name Margot Aziz.

“Aziz,” she said. “Would this customer be related to Ali Aziz who owns a nightclub on Sunset?”

“You got me,” Stan Hooper said, shrugging.

Hollywood Nate suddenly got very interested. He looked over Ronnie’s shoulder and saw the familiar address on the work order, and he memorized the phone number.

“How much does the lady want for the SUV?” Nate asked casually.

“It’s three years old but has very low mileage. It had some body damage but nothing major. Somebody smacked into her in the parking lot at Farmers Market, she said. She’ll take twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-eight thousand,” Nate said. “That’s a little high, isn’t it?”

“Maybe she’ll come down,” Stan Hooper said.

“Keep the alley clear, please,” Ronnie said, turning toward the door.

When the four cops were back outside, Ronnie said, “A Mercedes SUV? And you recently bought a Mustang, I believe. Are you on the take, Nate?”

“Nice ride. I always admired these Mercedes SUVs.”

“See you guys,” Ronnie said. “I’ll leave you to run license and VIN numbers if you wanna stay on this case.”

When the surfer cops got back in Flotsam’s pickup to drive to Hollywood Station, Flotsam said, “Dude, I know Ronnie rocks your libido, but this kinda move ain’t gonna help you become a Crow.”

Jetsam said, “At least I got it right about the Arabic newspaper.”

When they arrived back at Hollywood South, Ronnie found Bix sitting at a desk with his BlackBerry in front of him, still making tedious phone calls. And Nate seemed in a hurry to make a few calls of his own, but not in the office, where the others were working. Nate walked outside and dialed the number on his cell, surprised at how cotton mouthed he was when she answered.

“Hello… Margot?” Nate said.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“It’s Nate Weiss. The police officer you met?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “How’d you get my number?”

“You won’t believe what a coincidence this is,” Nate said. “But today I had occasion to be at Stan’s Body Shop and I saw your SUV there and learned it’s for sale.”

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“I’d like to talk to you about it,” Nate said. “I might be interested.”

“I’m asking twenty-eight thousand.”

“Would you be willing to negotiate?”

After a few seconds she said, “I might.”

“Could I come by and talk to you about it?”

“When?”

“Oh, after I get off work this evening?”

“What time would that be?”

“I could get to your house as early as eight o’clock.”

“My au pair is not available tonight,” Margot said. “I’m afraid I’ll be occupied with my five-year-old son. It’d be better if you come tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night at eight?”

“That’ll be fine,” Margot Aziz said. “One question, Officer Weiss.”

“Call me Nate. What’s the question?”

“That’s my dinner hour and I’m not a bad cook. How about sharing some homemade pasta and mango chicken salad with me?”

When Hollywood Nate Weiss closed his cell phone, he actually felt giddy.

After Margot Aziz hung up her house phone, she used her pay-as-you-go cell phone and rang another go cell that she’d bought for a beautiful Amerasian topless dancer.

“It’s me,” Margot said when Jasmine answered. “I can’t wait any longer for the number one draft pick. Remember the other one I mentioned to you? He’s coming here tomorrow night. I’ll see how it goes. He might work out.”

“I’m getting sick and tired of this,” the dancer said. “If something don’t happen soon, I’m pulling outta the whole thing. It’s too nerve-racking.”

“Be patient, honey,” Margot said. “We’ve worked hard getting into the man’s head. We’ve got him primed. It’ll just be a little while longer.”

Since there wasn’t a full moon, the watch commander hoped for a quiet night. A full moon over Hollywood meant that anything could happen and usually did. Most of the things were not the sort that the police discussed with the business community at meetings of the Community Police Advisory Board.

Dan Applewhite was using up some of his accumulated overtime days, so young Gil Ponce had been assigned to ride with Gert Von Braun. They hadn’t been out on the streets more than thirty minutes after sunset when 6-X-66 got a call in Southeast Hollywood regarding a silent burglar alarm at a furniture store. When they arrived and did a routine check of windows at the store, Gert’s new eight-inch flashlight began blinking. She tapped it a few times and the light went out.

“Goddamn this piece of shit!” she said. And she tapped it again and switched it off and on a few times.

And then Gil Ponce got a firsthand look at Gert’s EST, the explosive temper syndrome that other cops talked about privately.

“Motherfucking political hacks!” she snarled. And hurled the flashlight against the block wall at the rear of the furniture store, debris flying.

Gil just watched but said nothing, and she turned to him, saying, “We’re gonna stop at a drugstore and buy a goddamn flashlight that works!”

It sounded to Gil Ponce like a challenge, so he swallowed and said, “Yes, ma’am. Okay.”

“Don’t call me ma’am, goddamnit!” she said, getting into their shop, squeezing her bulk between the steering wheel and backrest.

“No,… Gert,” Gil said, slipping into the passenger seat as quickly and quietly as possible, keeping his eyes on the streets.

An hour later, Compassionate Charlie Gilford was once again called away from one of his favorite reality shows to meet 6-X-66 at the scene of a possible homicide, where the body was missing and a baby was dead. It was the kind of location that the committees that were dedicated to the beautification and renewal of Hollywood liked to think was so far off the boulevards that one needn’t consider it a Hollywood neighborhood at all. But it was.

It happened at a Brentwood slumlord’s three-story Hollywood apartment building. There was an outside stairwell under the roof at the rear of the property, which was used by various homeless transients as temporary housing. They slept, drank, urinated, and even defecated there, belying the adage about not shitting where one sleeps. All outdoor metal piping had been stripped and stolen long ago, and before brass hinges were replaced with steel, at least one transient was stabbed while kicking down the door of an empty apartment just to get the shiny treasure. Hispanic children did not dare walk barefoot for fear of discarded syringes.

One of the Honduran residents of the building, who had passed the stairwell from the parking lot on his way to the transient-free staircase at the front, spotted what appeared to be bloodstains on the concrete walkway where the trash bins were located. He poked his head inside the stairwell area, holding his breath against the stench, and saw more blood. He followed the trail to the corner under the stairwell and there saw thick viscous chunks of blood, and something that looked like raw oysters, but he just didn’t want to know. There was dried spatter on one wall and a Rorschach pattern on the concrete floor beside a blanket stiff from blood drenching, as well as articles of discarded clothing. The Honduran thought the scene was so horrible that rats would flee from it. But he was wrong. There were rats.

And under a cardboard box in the other corner he found a dead baby. Not a fetus, but a full-term baby with the cord still attached. It was a boy but he could not tell any more about it. He knew that he should not disturb this scene and ran to his apartment to call the police. When he told his wife about what he had found, she returned with him to the stairwell to await the police officers’ arrival.

Despite her husband’s protests, she went back to their apartment and fetched a bath towel, refusing to let the body lie on the dirty concrete floor. She picked up the dead baby, who was not stiff, rigor mortis having come and gone, and placed the body on the third step, folding the towel over the tiny body.

“Pobrecito,”
she said, and offered a prayer for the baby and for the mother if she was still alive, but the Honduran woman did not think that the mother could have lived. All that blood!

When 6-X-66 arrived at the scene, Gert Von Braun said to Gil Ponce, “You better do the talking here. They probably don’t speak English any better than George W. Bush.”

Here we go again, Gil Ponce thought, and he said, “I’m sorry, Gert. I don’t speak Spanish.”

She gave him a doubtful look and muttered the familiar refrain: “Fucking Hollywood. Nothing’s ever the way you expect.”

The Honduran man directed his remarks to young Gil Ponce. “Very bad thing happen,” he said in passable English. “Blood ees all over. We see thees dead baby.”

He led them to the stairwell and pulled back the towel. Gert shined the beam from her new flashlight onto the body and said, “Looks like it’s been here awhile. Wonder where Momma went.”

The Honduran said to Gil, “Much blood over there.” And he pointed to the blood-caked blanket.

When Gert shined her light on the wall, she said, “That looks like spatter. This might be more than a homeless woman giving birth. We better treat this as a homicide scene. Call the night-watch detective. Tell him we got something that looks like pizza topping without the crust.”

“We stay here?” the Honduran said to Gil Ponce.

Gert Von Braun said, “I’m ten years older than him. Talk to me, why don’t you?”

“Sorry?” the man said, not understanding.

Gert said, “Never mind. Talk to him.” She was used to it with people from male-dominated cultures.

“Go to your apartment,” Gil said. “But a detective will come and speak to you soon. Okay?”

“Okay,” the man said.

Compassionate Charlie got there well before the coroner’s crew. He spoke with Gert and Gil, looked at the spatter and the vast blood loss someone had suffered, and got the Homicide D3 at home, telling her what they’d found. The D3 said she’d phone the detectives who were on call and get back to him.

And that was when the fattest transient any of the cops had ever seen staggered onto the scene. He was a homeless alcoholic who’d been arrested many times on the boulevards where he panhandled tourists. He was a middle-aged white man, perhaps a few years older than Detective Charlie Gilford, but very much larger. He wore a battered fedora, a patched, dandruff-dusted sport coat, and a greasy necktie over a filthy flannel shirt, perhaps his attempt to retain a drop of dignity.

When he lurched unsteadily toward the stairwell, the neck of a wine bottle protruding from his coat pocket, he didn’t even see the cops until Gert Von Braun lit him with the beam from her new flashlight.

Charlie Gilford said, “Jesus! This double-wide juicer must weigh three bills easy.”

“Uh-oh,” the fat man said when he saw them. “Evening, Officers.”

Gil Ponce gloved up and patted him down, removing the wine bottle as the man looked at it wistfully, his breath like sewer gas, facial veins like a nest of pink worms. The fact that his face had color and had not turned lemonade yellow was a testament to his still-functioning liver.

“What’s your name?” Charlie Gilford asked him.

“Livingston G. Kenmore,” the man said, lurching sideways until Gil Ponce steadied him.

“Whadda you know about this?” Charlie Gilford asked.

“About what?”

“The blood. The dead baby.”

“Oh, that.”

The cops looked at one another and back at the drunk. Finally, Charlie Gilford said, “Yeah, that. What happened here?”

“About the blood or the baby?”

“Let’s start with the baby,” Gert said.

“It belongs to Ruthie. It’s dead.”

“We know it’s dead. Who’s Ruthie?”

“She was sleeping here,” he said. “She was big as a house, but she still was doing guys for ten bucks. Ruthie didn’t get too many takers at the end. Her belly was out to here.” He patted his own enormous belly then.

“Where’s Ruthie now?” Charlie asked.

“She went to the homeless shelter two days ago,” the fat man said. “You can find her there now. She wasn’t feeling too good after she had the baby. Poor thing. It was dead before it came out. She bled a lot.”

“Did you help her have the baby?” Gert asked.

“Her friend Sadie did,” he said. “She went to the shelter with Ruthie. You can go there and ask them about it. I tried to stay outta their affairs. They’re businesswomen, if you get my meaning.”

“Are you telling us that all this blood came from Ruthie?” Charlie Gilford said.

“No, some of it came from Ruthie,” the man said, looking at Charlie like he was stupid or something.

“Did some of it come from Sadie?” Charlie asked.

“No,” the fat man said. “Some of it came from me.”

“From you?” Gert said. “Where from you?”

“From my schwanze,” he said. “See, I been having lots of trouble peeing, so I went to the clinic a few weeks ago and had some surgery. A doctor put a catheter clear up my willie with one of those balloons inside my bladder to hold everything in place. But the other night after I drank a couple forties and a quart of port, I got mad at it and ripped it out. Blood squirted everywhere.”

Both Charlie Gilford and Gil Ponce involuntarily uttered painful groans from stabs of sympathy pain. Gil doubled over a bit and Charlie grabbed his own crotch while Gert sneered at the two of them. Gil already knew she thought they were all just a bunch of pussies, so he stood up straight, took a deep breath, and told himself to maintain.

Gert said to the drunk, “You mean your thingie bled that much?”

“You can’t imagine,” the big man said. “I almost called nine-one-one. Wanna see it?”

Both Charlie Gilford and Gil Ponce said, “No!” But Gert Von Braun said, “Yeah, whip it out.”