Hollywood Crows (18 page)

While driving to Mt. Olympus he thought of half a dozen opening remarks he could say to her, but rehearsing aloud made them sound dumber than they did in his mind. He almost parked on the street in front but decided that as a guest he was entitled to pull into the bricked motor court. The lot was quite expansive for a view site in the hills, where land was scarce, and the motor court was large enough for an easy U-turn. The house itself was deceivingly large, with a Spanish-tile roof, white plaster walls, exposed beams, and lots of arches, a style that realtors liked to call “early California.” A cinch to sell, especially to non-Californians who found it romantic.

Nate was very happy to see that there were no other cars in the motor court. He’d been worried that the babysitter might have decided to stay with the kid at Margot’s house. Or that maybe Margot had invited somebody else to her pasta supper. He attempted to stay calm, trying on the affable but poised mini-smile he’d used successfully in his last piece-of-shit movie, and rang the bell.

Margot showed him that dazzling smile when she opened the door. She too was wearing jeans, low-cut designer jeans, and a yellow tee that stopped six inches before the jeans began. His eyes went from her eyes directly to that tan, muscular belly. She’d pulled back her heavy butterscotch hair and pinned it with a tortoiseshell comb.

Extending her warm, dry hand, she took his and said, “Officer Weiss. You look so different in civilian clothes.”

“The uniform makes the man, huh?” He tried to keep the tremble out of his voice, needing one drink to mellow out.

Seeming to read his mind, she said, “What can I get you to drink? And to answer your question, you don’t need a uniform. In fact, you look much younger now.”

Nate tried on a broader smile and said, “Wine?”

“Name your flavor.”

“Whatever you’re having.”

“Pinot grigio it is,” she said. “I’m not a wine snob. Just give me an honest California pinot and I’m happy as a lark in the park. Come in and pour while I finish the pasta.”

Nate entered and was drawn at once to the living room, with its view of Hollywood and beyond. Blankets of lights, some twinkling, some still, and the summer smog hanging low and dark against the golden glow of sunset actually calmed him. The view wasn’t as good as some he’d seen from houses in the Hollywood Hills farther west, but this would do. He couldn’t imagine how many millions a home with a view would cost around there.

As far as the furnishings, it looked a trifle overdone, like many of the westside living rooms he’d seen in
Los Angeles
magazine and the
L.A
.
Times
. An unpleasant image of the Arab ex sitting on one of those plush sofas smoking a hookah flashed and faded. Nothing could spoil it for him. It all smelled like big bucks to Hollywood Nate Weiss.

“You know,” he said, “from here even the smog looks beautiful.”

Margot chuckled and he thought it sounded charming and warm. Everything about her was warm.

She said, “Come on, boy, let’s away with us to the kitchen, where you can pour us some grape. I need to let my hair down whenever my five-year-old stays over with our au pair.”

Nate followed her into a very large gourmet kitchen with two stainless-steel side-by-side refrigerator-freezer combinations and a commercial gas range and oven, also done in stainless steel. There were three steel sinks, and he wondered which she’d choose when she drained a pan of pasta. Too many choices!

He picked up the corkscrew and the bottle of pinot grigio and tried to peel off the neck seal and extract the cork like he’d seen sommeliers do it on those occasions when he could afford to take a date to an expensive restaurant. He had some trouble with the cork, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Have you been a police officer long, Nate?” she asked.

“Yeah, almost fifteen years,” he said.

“Really?” Margot said. “You don’t look old enough.”

“I’m thirty-six,” he said. Then he added, “You don’t look old enough to have a five-year-old child.”

“I could have one a lot older, but I’m
not
telling you my age,” she said.

“I already know,” Nate said. “Your driver’s license, remember?”

“Drat!” she said. “I forgot.”

Nate poured wine into the glasses and put one on the drain board by Margot.

“Does your son stay with your nanny often?” Nate asked.

“Only on very special occasions,” Margot said, and there was that coy smile again.

He took a big swallow then but told himself to slow it down, way down. He began thinking of acting tricks, such as pretending that this was a movie starring Nate Weiss. Trying to get himself into character but uncertain whom the character should resemble. Hollywood Nate Weiss simply had no frame of reference for a date like this one.

“So are you really interested in the Mercedes?” Margot said.

“Of course,” Nate said nervously. “Why else would I have called?”

She stopped slicing the mango. Repressing a grin, she glanced at him before saying deadpan, “I can’t imagine.”

Nate felt his face burning. He
was
like a kid around this woman! “Am I lame or what?” he finally said. “Sure, I love the Mercedes, but I just bought a new car last year. You should kick me right outta here.”

Margot brought the wine bottle to the bar counter, topped off his glass, and said with sudden seriousness, “I was glad you called, Nate.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been frightened about something and I was thinking about talking to the police.”

“Frightened of what?”

“Let’s have supper and then we’ll talk,” Margot said.

Gert Von Braun was teamed with Dan Applewhite for the first time after he returned from his days off. The other cops figured that putting Doomsday Dan with someone as explosive as Gert would produce a match made in hell. The surfer cops had bets on how long Gert could listen to Dan talking about the worldwide Muslim calamity on the horizon, or the imminent collapse of the world financial markets, before she threw a choke hold on him. What they didn’t know was how much Dan and Gert’s mutual loathing of Sergeant Treakle would produce a bond that nobody could have predicted.

It began when Sergeant Treakle informed Gert that the accidental discharge of the shotgun was going to result in an official reprimand for certain, the first in her eleven-year career. She was ready for it, of course, but not in the way the information was delivered.

Sergeant Treakle, who rarely bothered to learn any cop’s first name, called her into the sergeants’ room and said, “Von Braun, you will be getting an official reprimand for your carelessness with the shotgun.”

“I figured,” Gert said and prepared to leave.

“Furthermore,” he said, and she paused at the doorway, “it will result in a serious penalty if such a thing should ever happen again.”

Gert’s rosy complexion went white around her mouth and she said, “You think it’s ever gonna happen again, Sergeant?”

“I’m just giving you a word to the wise,” the young sergeant said, looking away nervously. Gert’s collar size was larger than his, and it was rumored that she had embarrassed a male cop at Central Division when he’d boozily arm wrestled her at the Christmas party.

She forced herself to stay calm and said, “Thanks for the words of wisdom.” And again she tried to leave.

But Sergeant Treakle said, “Part of the problem could be your physical condition.”

That stopped her cold. In fact, she took a step toward his desk and said, “What about my physical condition?”

“Your weight,” he said. “It must be hard to move around quickly enough when something unexpected happens. Like your cell phone falling and you trying to grab it, and accidentally hitting the shotgun trigger. Police officers must be ready to think and act quickly. Like athletes, as it were.”

Gert dead-stared Sergeant Treakle for a moment and then said very softly, “I’ve passed every physical since I came on the Job. And I was first in the agility test for women in the academy. And I’ve competed twice in the Police Olympics. Now I have a question for you. Have you ever heard of EEO laws?”

“Equal Employment Opportunity?”

“That’s right, Sergeant,” she said. “It’s all about discrimination in the workplace. And I’m giving you a gift right now by forgetting about this conversation. Because you’re
offending
me in a very personal way.”

Sergeant Treakle blanched and said, “We’ll talk later. I’ve got some calls to make.”

By the time Gert Von Braun joined Dan Applewhite in the parking lot, the grim set of her jaw told him that it wasn’t the time to tell her that staph infections had stricken several officers in neighboring divisions and an outbreak was imminent.

She drove in silence for five minutes, and when she spoke, she said, “Have you had any personal dealings with Treakle?”

“Once,” Dan Applewhite said. “He told me I had a sour expression when talking to citizens and that my attitude needed improving. He said he was sure I could improve my outlook on life by attending Bible study with him. He’s a born-again and got baptized in a pond somewhere, with people singing on the bank.”

“He told you that?”

Dan Applewhite nodded. “I told him I’m a Unitarian. I could tell he didn’t know what that was.”

“Neither do I,” Gert said, then added, “we had a sergeant like him at Central Station. Things started happening to that guy.”

“What kind of things?”

“Mostly to his car. If he forgot to lock it, he’d find a string tied from his light-bar switch to the door. Or he’d find the plastic cord-cuffs hanging from his axle making noise while he was driving. Or he’d find talcum powder in his air vent. It’d make his uniform look like he was caught in a blizzard.”

“That’s kid stuff,” Dan Applewhite said.

“Once when a truck got jacked that was hauling huge bags of popcorn and candy to a chamber of commerce holiday party, we recovered it and somebody filled the sergeant’s private car with popcorn. I mean from the floor to the roofline. You looked inside his windshield and all you could see was popcorn.”

“That’s kid stuff,” Dan Applewhite repeated.

Gert said, “Then one night somebody paid a skid row derelict ten bucks to do some asphalt skiing. The cop who did it borrowed an old piece of plywood roofing from one of the makeshift lean-tos where the transients sleep. And tied a piece of rope to it and attached the rope to the sergeant’s car while he was inside a diner. And the derelict was promised another ten if he’d hang on for a whole block. He did, but it was pretty gnarly. Sparks were flying and the derelict started yelling and it pretty much all went sideways. People on the street were shocked, and the captain’s phone rang off the hook the next day. IA investigated the night watch for a month but never caught the culprit. All the derelict would say was, the guy who hired him was a cop and all cops look alike when they’re in uniform. The sergeant got ten days off for not looking after his car.”

“Well, that’s not childish,” Dan Applewhite said. “It’s much more mature when you can get an asshole like that a ten-day suspension.”

It was less than a half hour later that Sergeant Treakle himself rolled on a call assigned to 6-X-66. Dan Applewhite groaned when he turned and saw the young supervisor pull up in front of an apartment building in Thai Town that was occupied mostly by Asian immigrants.

“Chickenlips is here to check on us,” he warned Gert, who was knocking at the door.

The caller was a Thai woman who looked too old to have a twelve-year-old daughter but did. The girl was crying when the cops arrived, and the mother was furious. The girl’s auntie, who was a decade younger than the mother, had been trying to calm things. The auntie spoke passable English and translated for the mother.

The trouble had started earlier in the day when the local clinic informed the mother that her twelve-year-old daughter’s bouts of vomiting were the result of an early pregnancy. The mother wanted the culprit found and arrested.

Of course, the cops separated the kid from her mom, Gert walking the child into a tidy bedroom, talking to her gently, saying, “Wipe your eyes, honey. And don’t be afraid.”

The child, who was all cheekbones and kewpie lips, had lived in L.A. since she was eight, and her English was good. She stopped sobbing long enough to say to Gert, “Will I be taken to juvenile hall?”

“You won’t be taken anywhere, sweetie,” Gert said. “All of this can be handled. But we must find out who put the baby in you.”

The child dropped her eyes and asked, “Am I in trouble?” Then she began sobbing again.

“Now, now,” Gert said. “There’s no need to do that. You’re not in trouble with us. We’re your friends.” Then sensing someone behind her, she turned and saw Sergeant Treakle standing there watching.

Gert tried but failed to suppress the sigh that popped out of her, then said to the sergeant, “I wonder if you’d mind letting us females talk about this in private.”

Sergeant Treakle arched an eyebrow, grunted, and returned to the kitchen, where Dan Applewhite was getting a list of potential suspects for the follow-up by detectives. The child had no siblings, but there were uncles, cousins, and neighbors who were possibles.

Sergeant Treakle looked at his watch a couple of times, and when Gert left the girl in the bedroom and came back to the kitchen, he said, “Who’s the daddy?”

“I don’t know,” Gert said. “The sex crimes team will have to talk to her.”

“All that time and you don’t know?” Sergeant Treakle said.

Her voice flat as a razor, Gert said, “The child says she doesn’t know how it happened.”

Sergeant Treakle guffawed loudly and said, “She doesn’t
know
?”

Knowing his religious views, Gert Von Braun said, “Tell me, Sergeant Treakle, what if the young girl’s name was Mary? And the baby inside her was gonna be named Jesus, would you still scoff? After all, Mary didn’t know how the hell it happened either.
Did
she now?”

The sergeant’s jaws opened and shut twice, but nothing came out. He started to say something to Dan Applewhite, but nothing happened there either. He left the apartment and hurried to his car to make a negative entry in his log.