Hollywood Moon hs-3

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Tristan parked the car in the Gym-and-Swim lot, where Jerzy pulled his baseball hat over his eyes to snooze. Tristan opened the trunk, took out his gym bag, and entered, showing his card to the kid at the desk, who barely glanced at it before giving him a locker key and a towel.

  There were no members in the locker room, so Tristan walked along the double rows of laminated wood lockers and tried them all before putting down his bag. You never knew when somebody might forget to lock his, but not today. He put the bag on one of the benches and took out his tiny eyeglass screwdriver and a pick. He could open a locker in less than a minute, and he opened two that turned out to be empty before he found one that was in use. The clothes hanging there looked promising, and the Rolex inside one of the Ferragamo loafers looked very promising, possibly indicating a large line of credit for this dude. It took all of Tristan’s self-control not to steal the Rolex and the wallet, but Jakob Kessler had drilled it into his head that discipline would make money for them and keep them out of jail. And that greed would get them jailed, “or worse.”

  Jakob Kessler, which Tristan figured was a bogus name, looked to Tristan like an accountant. He was an unimposing guy, maybe in his late fifties, with a full head of slicked-back silver hair, and maybe six feet tall but with posture somewhat stooped. There was something about those eyes, so pale that the irises looked more white than blue. Tristan thought from the beginning that he shouldn’t fuck with the guy, at least not until he saw how much money he was going to make through their association. He took the “or worse” to mean something very bad might happen to him if he disobeyed orders.

  Kessler had explained the game to Tristan in that accent of his, saying, “If you steal money, the man can figure out how it happened. If you replace the card and steal nothing, he will be confused and try to think, when was it he had his last restaurant meal and mistakenly got given back the wrong card?”

  “What if he goes to a gas station right after his workout and finds out he’s got a wrong card?” Tristan had asked Kessler.

  His employer had said, “Even if he discovers the replacement card today, he is going to take time to ponder and to maybe call the last restaurant he visited. He will not think that the card could have been stolen from his wallet, because nothing else is missing-not his money, nothing. His belief will be that the restaurant made a mistake. And we may have the use of the card for perhaps one day. Perhaps two. Perhaps longer, you never know. So you see, Creole, why we do not steal money, rings, or wristwatches? It would end that specific game for us.”

  When he spoke to Kessler, Tristan was conscious of his own grammar and diction, never talking street to the man. He said, “You mean at that specific location?”

  “Exactly,” Kessler said. “We can visit the Gym-and-Swim at least once a week for a very long time if we are patient and not greedy. You must never surrender to greed.” Then his employer said, “There must be discipline.”

  Tristan did not like the way Kessler’s eyes bore into his when he uttered that last word, and he didn’t think it wise to push it. Instead he said, “What’s the longest you ever had a card before it got canceled?”

  “For almost a month,” Kessler said.

  “And how much did your people charge on it?” Tristan asked.

  Kessler chuckled and said, “You have a curious mind, Creole. I don’t mind that. I like curiosity in a man as long as he is loyal and obedient. To answer your question, many thousands were charged in small amounts for three weeks before the switched card was discovered and reported.”

  “That ain’t-that’s not bad,” Tristan said. “Not bad at all.”

  “Think of what one location like Gym-and-Swim could do for us in a few months, Creole,” Kessler said to him, “if we never surrender to greed.”

  There it was again: greed. When Kessler said it that time, his eyes seemed to grow deader than Old Jerzy Krakowski. That’s where Tristan figured Old Jerzy was-dead. He figured that’s what Kessler really meant when he’d said that Old Jerzy’s employment had been terminated. He wondered if Old Jerzy had surrendered to greed.

  Tempted though he was, memories of all of those conversations with Jakob Kessler made Tristan leave the Rolex inside the loafer. Tristan opened the wallet and found three credit cards. He removed the American Express card and, choosing from among the several cards that Kessler had given to him, replaced it with a stolen and expired American Express card.

  Tristan picked six more lockers and was disappointed that only one had clothes inside. He removed a Visa card from the wallet in that locker, and was in the process of replacing it with a stolen and expired Visa card, when a customer in a Speedo walked into the locker room, drying off with a towel. Tristan was ready to bolt if this was the guy’s locker and he started yelling.

  But the man, a flabby fifty-something with a bad transplant and a worse dye job, just smiled and said, “The pool’s too cold today in case you plan to try it.” He went to a locker on the other side of the benches and unlocked a lower one.

  Tristan said to the guy, “I just had a workout on the treadmill. I’m ready to go home.”

  Then a naked bodybuilder suddenly entered from the pool area, a white guy with shoulders like a buffalo who was all sleeved-out with tatts, from his wrists to his bulging biceps. On his belly he had an attention-getting tattoo of a semiautomatic pistol, muzzle down. With his shirt hanging open, it would look like he was packing, a handgun tucked inside his waistband. His head was shaved, and even his skull was inked-up. Just over his left ear, where a gold loop dangled, a tatt on his skull said, “What’re you looking at, bitch?”

  Tristan froze. The guy was between him and the exit. If he was into this ’roid monster’s locker, he was one dead identity thief. But the guy walked past him and opened a locker near the end of the row.

  Tristan hurriedly completed the switch, closed the locker, and left the locker room, making sure to slip past the desk when the kid was on the phone and not looking, because he hadn’t been in there long enough for a workout or a swim. His only regret was that the Rolex would’ve looked very fine on his wrist. He was definitely a Rolex type of dude.

  Officer Sheila Montez, the heavy-lashed, sloe-eyed P2 who was currently the heartthrob of both surfer cops as well as half the midwatch, had just finished doing her nails with clear polish, all the while shooting peevish glances at her slightly older partner. Aaron Sloane, at age twenty-nine and with eight years on the LAPD, certainly did not look older than Sheila Montez, nor anyone else at Hollywood Station, and that included twenty-two-year-old rookies. The boyish-looking cop was too heavy-footed on brake and throttle for Sheila’s taste, and he caused her to smear polish on her fingertip.

  Both partners had the windows rolled down on this warm summer twilight as Aaron drove through the streets in the Hollywood Hills, where a number of car burglaries had taken place during early evening hours. After Sheila finished with her nails, she held all ten fingers in front of her, blowing lightly on them. Like all women patrol officers at LAPD, she had her hair pinned up so that it did not hang below her collar. And like all women officers who favored lip gloss and nail polish, she wore a pale unobtrusive shade while on duty. Aaron Sloane liked watching her do her lips and nails and thought her dusky good looks could be enhanced by a more crimson shade, especially if those lustrous umber tresses were unpinned and draped across her shoulders.

  Sheila had almost seven years on the Job, and though she’d recently transferred to Hollywood from Pacific Division, she was comfortable enough with Aaron to be tending to nails and makeup while riding shotgun in unit 6-X-66. When she’d been a rookie at Northeast Division, her field training officer, an old P3 named Tim Brannigan, would’ve had apoplexy if she’d tried this in his shop. Tim Brannigan had been the kind of FTO who resented women working patrol in the first place, never talked to her when he could yell, and made her call him sir right to the end of her probationary period.

  Since he’d hated writing reports, Tim Brannigan ha
d let her drive only about once every four or five days. The rest of the time she was the passenger, doing the report writing. His favorite response to her requests to drive had been, “Rookie, you’re taking the paper.”

  Sheila figured the old bastard probably wasn’t breast-fed as a baby, so he never learned to appreciate or respect women. But at least he wasn’t one of the handsy partners who’d “accidentally” touch her when reaching for the MDC dashboard computer. There had been more than a few of those in her career.

  Sheila recalled a night two weeks earlier when Aaron Sloane was driving and a code 3 call had interrupted her nail polishing. She’d had to hang her wet nails out the window to dry while he drove with lights and siren to a check-cashing store where a clerk had accidentally tripped the silent robbery alarm. Aaron never complained about her dangling fingers and never told the others about what he called her girl stuff and she called her ablutions. And he never complained about the car mirror being turned so she could touch up her lips.

  Part of the reason Aaron never protested about anything was that he was one of the smitten ones, as Sheila had suspected from their first night together. But she’d never encouraged him, even though now, glancing over at him, she had to admit that he had boy-next-door good looks and was buff from a lot of iron pumping. It was just that the sandy-haired, baby-faced reticent types like Aaron had never appealed to her.

  And as though he had read her mind at that moment, Aaron said, “I got carded Saturday night when I had a date with a girl I met in my poly sci class.”

  Like many of the young cops at Hollywood Station, Aaron was taking college classes, and he was only six units away from a bachelor’s degree.

  “Does that surprise you?” Sheila asked. “Getting carded? I wish I could get carded once in a while.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re worried about getting old,” Aaron said, gazing at her with that moony expression of his.

  “Less than two years from now I’ll be thirty,” she said. “It’s hard to believe.”

  “I’ll be thirty in four months,” Aaron said. “And I get carded just about every damn time I go to a bar. It’s embarrassing when I have a date.”

  “You’ll be glad someday to be looking like a perennial frat rat.” To tweak him she added, “Do you have to shave every day, Aaron, or just a couple times a week?”

  Aaron reddened and said, “You know, my youthful DNA almost got me killed before I got off probation. Did you know I worked UC for a while? I mean deep undercover.”

  “No,” she said, quite surprised. “Where was that?”

  “I was one they took right from the academy and put into the buy program,” he said, “back when they still liked to do that. I was twenty-one but looked sixteen. They put me in high school in the Valley, where teenage gangsters were selling pot and meth on campus. It was when a couple kids got killed in a four-car TC after they’d smoked crystal in the gym. It was mostly an intelligence-gathering job rather than making buys of dime bags. I was in school for two months as a senior transfer. My UC name was Scott Taylor, and I actually tried out for the baseball team. One time a very aggressive LAPD officer stopped a few of us in the school parking lot after a game, and he yelled to me, ‘Get your hands up!’ I put them up really high, thinking, if he shoots me, the trajectory test would get my mom and dad some big bucks in the lawsuit.”

  With a sly smile Sheila said, “Did you score with any of the cheerleaders?”

  “I was warned about fraternizing with the other kids, especially of the female persuasion,” Aaron replied. “And just as I was getting close to the adult gangster that was supplying the high school kids, I screwed up and ended my UC career.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “By getting in a fight in shop class. Some little dude in one of the Hispanic gangs kept picking on me, always calling me puto and maricón, shit like that. I got sick of it, and one afternoon he dumped a soda on me and I kicked his ass. Beat him bad right there in class. Our instructor called Security and had us both taken to the vice principal’s office. He happened to be the only one that knew I was cop.”

  “Damn, Aaron!” Sheila said. “There’s another side to you. Where do you park your Batmobile?”

  “We were both given a suspension,” Aaron continued with a self-conscious smile. “Which was fine with me, except when I drove home from school that afternoon, I got tailed by two tricked-out low riders packed with crew. I figured they were tooled-up, so I tried to call for help, but my cell was dead. And that happened to be the day I was so late for school I ran out the door, leaving my Beretta on the kitchen table instead of taping it under the seat of my UC car like I was supposed to. With that posse driving up my ass, and me all helpless, I can tell you I was scared.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Of course, there’s never a cop around when you need one, so I drove that shitty UC car straight to the nearest mall with the lead lowrider locking bumpers with me, and me thinking the crowds of people might scare them off. When I got there, I looked in the mirror and saw one dude leaning out the window, aiming what looked like a TEC-nine at me. And I kinda panicked and burned a fast left but lost it and went skidding through the window of a Big Five store, where luckily nobody got hurt but me. Two cracked ribs and a busted collarbone.”

  “What happened to the gangsters?”

  “They split and got away. I wasn’t really able to ID any of them later when gang cops showed me six-packs. I got removed from school real fast and from the buy program too. And after I recovered, I got sent to Wilshire patrol, where I finished my probation. All that drama because I looked way young. I’ve never found any advantage to it.”

  “That’s quite a story, Aaron,” Sheila said.

  Aaron was pleased to see that for the first time, Sheila Montez seemed to be watching him with a bit of interest. Known for being supercool and unflappable, she’d told him she’d worked down south at both the busy Seventy-seventh Street Division as well as at Newton Street for three years. And she’d also done a couple of dangerous UC assignments where they’d needed Hispanic women. Aaron had felt that his police career had been tame next to Sheila’s.

  Aaron had also heard that she’d been married to a sergeant at Mission Division for about a year but had divorced him shortly after her baby was stillborn. It was not something she’d ever talked about to him, but nowhere on the planet was gossip as rife as in the police world, and secrets were nearly impossible to keep. Well, now he’d shown her that he too was someone with a history. It wasn’t everyone that was chased through the window of a Big 5 store.

  “My picture and UC name are in the high school yearbook,” Aaron said. “I have one at home. I’ll bring it in if you’d like to see it. I look really dorky.”

  “Sure, let’s have a peek,” Sheila said.

  Their second call just after dark gave Aaron Sloane a chance to see another side of supercool Sheila Montez. After reading the southeast Hollywood address on the computer screen, she rogered the message and hit the en route key. When they arrived at the call, they saw a rescue ambulance already parked on the street, and a Latina in a lavender dress was waiting under a streetlight in front of a stucco duplex that had been tagged from roof to concrete slab with gang graffiti.

  When she saw Sheila Montez, the woman started to speak Spanish, then saw that the male cop was a gringo and said in English, “My neighbor. Her baby…” Then the woman shook her head and walked back to her apartment.

  The two cops entered just as the paramedics were leaving. Before exiting, the older paramedic said, “The baby’s probably been dead for a few hours. Letting a sick infant with a respiratory infection sleep next to a broken-out window night after night wasn’t helpful, that’s for sure. And today Little Momma gave the baby a child’s dose of medication, not an infant’s dose. Then she put the baby facedown on a bulky quilt and decided to take a long nap after downing a glass or two of cheap chardonnay. It looks like the baby’s illness, the overdose of med
s, and the quilt around the baby’s face resulted in accidental asphyxiation. But it’s yours now. Catch you later.”

  The young mother was not Latina. She was rosy-cheeked and freckled, the teenage wife of a Marine deployed in Iraq. She was sitting on a kitchen chair, crying, a wineglass beside her on the table. The crib was in the only bedroom. Sheila Montez hesitated for a moment but walked to the crib to look at the infant.

  The baby might have had her mother’s rosy cheeks in life, but in death she was already turning gray, now lying faceup, nesting in the heavy quilt. Sheila Montez stared down at the baby for a long time, and Aaron Sloane was more than happy to let her take charge, figuring this was a job for a woman.

  “She was like that when I woke up,” the young mother said between sobs, looking at Aaron. “She was ice-cold, and I knew right away she was gone!”

  Sheila Montez picked up the medicine bottle from a table beside the crib, looked at it, and put it back. For no apparent reason, she reached down and lifted the baby from the quilt that had smothered her and put her back down on the sheet. She adjusted the pink pajama across the infant’s chest and, using a towel that was draped over the crib, wiped some dried mucus from the baby’s face and smoothed back her corn-silk hair.

  Aaron Sloane didn’t learn until later that night that this was the first dead baby Sheila Montez had seen since the night that her own lay lifeless in her arms, when a nurse had let Sheila hold her dead baby for a few minutes before taking it away forever. He was just getting ready to put in an obligatory call to the night-watch detective so he could verify on-scene that it was an accidental death before the body snatchers took her away.

  All of a sudden his partner advanced toward the young mother. Sheila’s wide-set dark brown eyes looked black now, and her face had gone very pale around the mouth. Trembling with rage, Sheila Montez said, “You… ignorant… pathetic… little — ”