Hollywood Station (3 page)

The first patrol unit to arrive belonged to the sergeant known as the Oracle, who double-parked half a block away, leaving the immediate area to RA paramedics, Hollywood detectives, evidence collectors from Scientific Investigation Division, and the coroner's team. There was no mistaking the very old patrol sergeant, even in the darkness. As his burly figure approached, they could see those pale service stripes on his left sleeve, rising almost to his elbow. Forty-six years on the Job rated nine hash marks and made him one of the longest-serving cops on the entire police department.

"The Oracle has more hash marks than a football field," everybody said.

But the Oracle always said, "I'm only staying because the divorce settlement gives my ex half my pension. I'll be on the Job till that bitch dies or I do, whichever comes first."

The bleeding man was unmoving and going gray when he was blanketed and belted to the gurney and lifted into the rescue ambulance, both paramedics working to stem the now oozing blood but shaking their heads at the Oracle, indicating that the young man had probably bled out and was beyond saving.

Even though a Santa Ana wind had blown into Los Angeles from the desert on this May evening, both Flotsam and Jetsam were shivering and wearily gathering their equipment which was scattered on the sidewalk next to a concrete planter containing some hopeful pansies and forget-me-nots.

The Oracle looked at the blood-drenched cops and said, "Are you hurt? Any injuries at all?"

Flotsam shook his head and said, "Boss, I think we just had a tactical situation they never covered in any class I've taken at the academy. Or if they did, I fucking missed it."

"Get yourselves to Cedars for medical treatment whether you need it or not," the Oracle said. "Then clean up real good. Might as well burn those uniforms from the looks of them."

"If that guy has hepatitis, we're in trouble, Sarge," Jetsam said.

"If that guy has AIDS, we're dead," Flotsam said.

"This doesn't look like that kind of situation," the Oracle said, his retro gray crew cut seeming to sparkle under the streetlight. Then he noticed Jetsam's handcuffs lying on the sidewalk. He flashed his beam on the cuffs and said to the exhausted cop, "Drop those cuffs in some bleach, son. I can see chunks of meat jammed in the ratchets."

"I need to go surfing," Jetsam said.

"Me too," Flotsam said.

The Oracle had acquired his sobriquet by virtue of seniority and his penchant for dispensing words of wisdom, but not on this night. He just looked at his bloody, hollow-eyed, shivering young cops and said, "Now, you boys get right to Cedars ER and let a doc have a look at you."

It was then that D2 Charlie Gilford arrived on the scene, a gum-chewing, lazy night-watch detective with a penchant for bad neckties who was not a case-carrying investigator, his job being only to assist. But with more than twenty years at Hollywood Station, he didn't like to miss anything sensational that was going down and loved to offer pithy commentary on whatever had transpired. For his assessments they called him Compassionate Charlie.

During that evening's events on Cherokee Avenue, after he'd received a quick summary from the Oracle and called a homicide team from home, he took a look at the gruesome scene of murder and suicide, and at the bloody trail marking the grisly struggle that failed to save the killer's life.

Then Compassionate Charlie sucked his teeth for a second or two and said to the Oracle, "I can't understand young coppers anymore. Why would they put themselves through something like that for a self-solver? Shoulda just let the guy jump in the tub with her and bleed out the way he wanted to. They coulda sat there listening to music till it was over. All we got here is just another Hollywood love story that went a little bit sideways."

Chapter
TWO

IT HAD ALWAYS seemed to Farley Ramsdale that the blue mailboxes, even the ones on some of the seedier corners of Hollywood, were much more treasure-laden and easier to work than the resident boxes by most of the upmarket condos and apartments. And he especially liked the ones outside the post office because they got really full between closing time and 10 P. M., the hour he found most propitious. People felt so confident about a post office location that they dropped a bonanza in them, sometimes even cash.

The hour of 10 P. M. was midday for Farley, who'd been named by a mother who just loved actor Farley Granger, the old Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train being one of her favorites. In that movie Farley Granger is a professional tennis player, and even though Farley Ramsdale's mother had signed him up for private lessons when he was in middle school, tennis had bored him silly. It was a drag. School was a drag. Work was a drag. Crystal meth was definitely not a drag.

At the age of seventeen years and two months, Farley Ramsdale had gone from being a beads 'n' seeds pothead to a tweaker. The first time he smoked crystal he fell in love, everlasting love. But even though it was far cheaper than cocaine, it still cost enough to keep Farley hopping well into the night, visiting blue mailboxes on the streets of Hollywood.

The first thing Farley had to do that afternoon was pay a visit to a hardware store and buy some more mousetraps. Not that Farley worried about mice-they were scampering around his rooming house most of the time. Well, it wasn't a rooming house exactly, he'd be the first to admit. It was an old white-stucco bungalow just off Gower Street, the family home deeded to him by his mother before her death fifteen years ago, when Farley was an eighteen-year-old at Hollywood High School discovering the joys of meth.

He'd managed to forge and cash her pension checks for ten months after her death before a county social worker caught up with him, the meddling bitch. Because he was still a teenager and an orphan, he easily plea-bargained down to a probationary sentence with a promise to pay restitution, which he never paid, and he began calling the two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow a rooming house when he started renting space to other tweakers who came and went, usually within a few weeks.

No, he didn't give a shit about mice. Farley needed ice. Nice clear, icy-looking crystal from Hawaii, not the dirty white crap they sold around town. Ice, not mice, that's what he worried about during every waking hour.

While browsing through the hardware store, Farley saw a red-vested employee watching him when he passed the counter where the drill bits, knives, and smaller items were on display. As if he was going to shoplift the shitty merchandise in this place. When he passed a bathroom display and saw his reflection in the mirror, now in the merciless light of afternoon, it startled him. The speed bumps on his face were swollen and angry, a telltale sign of a speed freak, as his kind used to be known. Like all tweakers he craved candy and sweets. His teeth were getting dark and two molars were hurting. And his hair! He had forgotten to comb his fucking hair and it was a whirling tangle with that burnt-straw look, hinting at incipient malnutrition, marking him even more as a longtime crystal-smoking tweaker.

He turned toward the employee, an East Asian guy younger than Farley and fit-looking. Probably a fucking martial arts expert, he thought. The way Korea Town was growing, and with a Thai restaurant on every goddamn street and Filipinos emptying bedpans in the free clinics, pretty soon all those canine-eating, dog-breath motherfuckers would be running City Hall too.

But come to think of it, that might be an improvement over the chili-dipping Mexican asshole who was now the mayor, convincing Farley that L. A. would soon be ninety percent Mexican instead of nearly half. So why not give the slopes and greasers knives and guns and let them waste each other? That's what Farley thought should happen. And if the south end niggers ever started moving to Hollywood, he was selling the house and relocating to the high desert, where there were so many meth labs he didn't think the cops could possibly hassle him very much.

Since he couldn't shake that slit-eyed asshole watching him, Farley decided to stop browsing and headed for the shelf containing the mousetraps and rat poison, whereupon the Asian employee walked up to him and said, "Can I help you, sir?"

Farley said, "Do I look like I need help?"

The Asian looked him over, at his Eminem T-shirt and oily jeans, and said in slightly accented English, "If you have rats, the spring-loaded rattraps are what you want. Those glue traps are excellent for mice, but some larger rodents can pull free of the glue pads."

"Yeah, well, I don't have rats in my house," Farley said. "Do you? Or does somebody eat them along with any stray terriers that wander in the yard?"

The unsmiling Asian employee took a deliberate step toward Farley, who yelped, "Touch me and I'll sue you and this whole fucking hardware chain!" before turning and scuttling away to the shelf display of cleaning solutions, where he grabbed five cans of Easy-Off.

When he got to the checkout counter, he grumbled to a frightened teenage cashier that there weren't enough English-speaking Americans left in all of L. A. to gang-fuck Courtney Love so that she'd even notice it.

Farley left the store and had to walk back to the house, since his piece-of-shit white Corolla had a flat tire and he needed some quick cash to replace it. When he got to the house, he unlocked the dead bolt on the front door and entered, hoping that his one nonpaying tenant was not at home. She was a shockingly thin woman several years older than Farley, although it was hard to tell, with oily black hair plastered to her scalp and tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. She was a penniless, homeless tweaker whom Farley had christened Olive Oyl after the character in Popeye.

He dumped his purchases on the rusty chrome kitchen table, wanting to catch an hour of shut-eye, knowing that an hour was about all he could hope for before his eyes snapped open. Like all tweakers, he was sometimes awake for days, and he'd tinker with that banged-up Jap car or maybe play video games until he crashed right there in the living room, his hand still on the controls that allowed him to shoot down a dozen video cops who were trying to stop his video surrogate from stealing a video Mercedes.

No such luck. Just as he fell across the unmade bed, he heard Olive Oyl clumping into the house from the back door. Jesus, she walked heavy for a stick of a woman. Riverdance was quieter. He wondered if she had hep C by now. Or Christ! Maybe AIDS? He'd never shared a needle on the rare occasions when he'd skin-popped ice, but she'd probably done it. He vowed to quit boning her and only let her blow him when he was totally desperate.

Then he heard that tremulous little voice. "Farley, you home?"

"I'm home," he said. "And I need to catch some z's, Olive. Take a walk for a while, okay?"

"We working tonight, Farley?" She entered the bedroom.

"Yeah," he said.

"Want a knobber?" she asked. "Help you to sleep."

Jesus, her speed bumps were worse than his. They looked like she scratched them with a garden tool. And her grille showed three gaps in front. When the hell had she lost the third tooth? How come he hadn't noticed before? Now she was skinnier than Mick Jagger and sort of looked like him except older.

"No, I don't want a knobber," he said. "Just go play video games or something."

"I think I got a shot at some extra work, Farley," she said. "I met this guy at Pablo's Tacos. He does casting for extras. He said he was looking for someone my type. He gave me his card and said to call next Monday. Isn't that cool?"

"That's so chill, Olive," he said. "What is it, Night of the Living Dead, Part Two?"

Unfazed, Olive said, "Awesome, ain't it? Me, in a movie? Of course it might just be a TV show or something."

"Totally awesome," he said, closing his eyes, trying to unwire his circuits.

"Of course he might just be some Hollywood Casanova wanting in my pants," Olive said with a gap-toothed grin.

"You're perfectly safe with Hollywood Casanovas," Farley mumbled. "You got nothing to spank. Now get the fuck outta here."

When she was gone he actually succeeded in falling asleep, and he dreamed of basketball games in the gym at Hollywood High School and boning that cheerleader who had always dissed and avoided him.

Trombone Teddy had a decent day panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard that afternoon. Nothing like the old days, when he still had a horn, when he'd stand out there on the boulevard and play cool licks like Kai Winding and J. J. Johnson, jamming as good as any of the black jazzmen he'd played with in the nightclub down on Washington and La Brea forty years ago, when cool jazz was king.

In those days the black audiences were always the best and treated him like he was one of them. And in fact he had gotten his share of chocolate cooz in those days, before pot and bennies and alcohol beat him down, before he hocked his trombone a hundred times and finally had to sell it. The horn had gotten him enough money to keep in scotch for oh, maybe a week or so if he remembered right. And no trash booze for Teddy. He drank Jack then, all that liquid gold sliding down his throat and warming his belly.

He remembered those old days like it was this afternoon. It was yesterday he couldn't recall sometimes. Nowadays he drank anything he could get, but oh, how he remembered the Jack and the jazz, and those sweet mommas whispering in his ear and taking him home to feed him gumbo. That's when life was sweet. Forty years and a million drinks ago.

While Trombone Teddy yawned and scratched and knew it was time to leave the sleeping bag that was home in the portico of a derelict office building east of the old Hollywood Cemetery, time to hit the streets for some nighttime panhandling, Farley Ramsdale woke from his fitful hour of sleep after a nightmare he couldn't remember.