Because the gossipy world of street cops brooks no secrets, Hollywood Nate was also informing her that R.T. Dibney lost his most recent wife by going to Las Vegas with his buddies after telling her he was on a fishing trip. He blew $2,000 on a weekend of fun and frolic at the tables and in hotel bedrooms, and it just about cleaned out their bank balance. Nearly broke and remorseful, he’d returned to L.A. and gone straight downtown to the diamond district, where two Iranian jewelers called Eddie and Freddie sold him a beautiful cubic zirconium ring for his last $200. R.T. Dibney told his wife that the ring had cost $2,500, and though it broke their piggy bank temporarily, he’d felt compelled to purchase it in order to renew their wedding vows, so deep was his love for her.
That particular wife had a cousin in the jewelry business, and when she showed the cousin her ring, he pointed out to her that her diamond was bogus and her husband was a conniving turd that she should flush away before spawning something that carried his genetic profile. R.T. Dibney’s divorce lawyer told the cop that he alone was putting the lawyer’s kid through college and in essence thanked him for being such a conniving turd.
Mindy Ling thanked Hollywood Nate for the information on R.T. Dibney, and by way of introduction that ultimately left her new partner gob-smacked, she got behind the wheel of their car, turned to R.T. Dibney, and said, “I’ve heard a lot about you and your devil-may-care swashbuckling exploits. Tell me, how many times have you been married?”
“I’ve been married three-point-five times,” R.T. Dibney said with a semi-leer. “It must be that I give off a certain musk that makes me a marriage target, but I’m technically still on the market… in case anyone’s interested.”
R.T. Dibney was enjoying this unexpected attention from Mindy Ling until she added, “Partner, I’m as much into nostalgia as the next girl, so I gotta respect someone in this day and age with the chutzpah to sport a toothbrush stash and a Lady Clairol blow-dried do. But while you’re with me, I’d like you to keep in mind that no matter how hard you try channeling Errol Flynn, he’s dead and gone, and nobody gives a damn how many women he balled. Now, let’s try to concentrate on good police work the whole time we’re together, shall we?”
Late that afternoon, while 6-X-46 was still in the parking lot with the rest of the midwatch, fourteen-year-old Naomi Teller was near Fairfax High School, walking home to Ogden Drive, when a slender, smiling boy in a light blue T-shirt and jeans, who she thought was at least eighteen years old, walked up behind her on the sidewalk and said, “Yo, Goldilocks, you can’t be just getting out of summer school this late.”
Naomi hesitated but was reassured by his brilliant smile, which produced deep dimples in his cheeks. She liked the way his black hair curled over his ears and on his neck, and she liked his flaming dark eyes and tawny cheeks, which sported a young man’s light growth of soft dark whiskers. She felt that he might be Hispanic, but he had no accent, so she wasn’t sure. It was flattering to have such a very cute older boy paying attention to her.
Naomi had small bones, narrow shoulders, and still-developing breasts. Eyes too large and mouth too small, she hadn’t received much attention from the boys in middle school, but this older boy was looking at her and talking to her in a way that no one had before, and it was superexciting.
“I won’t be going to Fairfax until September,” Naomi Teller said truthfully, even though she was tempted to lie about her age.
“You and me should maybe go someplace and hang out,” he said. “I’d like to get to know you and make some friends around here. Most girls with hair like yours have to dye it to get it so gold, but I can see that yours was a gift from God. My name’s Clark, what’s yours?”
“Naomi,” she said, and she couldn’t help smiling back at him, his dimpled smile was so infectious. “That’s the name of the guy in Superman, Clark Kent.”
“That’s why my adopted parents named me that when they found me near a crashed spaceship.”
Naomi giggled, and he smiled more broadly and said, “Your hair is exactly the color of the honey I spread on my peanut butter sandwiches.”
That made her laugh. “I guess that’s a compliment.”
“Yours is a natural color,” he said. “Anybody can see that. I hate all those old women who try to make their hair look like yours. They can’t do it and shouldn’t try.”
“My mom tries,” Naomi said.
“Maybe we should go to the movies sometime, Naomi,” he said. “Can I have your number?”
“Well…,” she said.
“What time do you go to bed?”
“In the summer? About eleven. My mom’s strict.”
“I’ll call you at ten forty-five to say good night,” he said.
Naomi thought those dimples and that smile were to die for. And his teeth? So straight and white, natural white, not that phony bleached white that so many older people like her father were doing these days.
She said, “Okay, you can call me.” And she gave him her cell number, which he wrote on the back of his hand with a ballpoint pen.
He looked at her quite seriously then, as though he wanted to say something more, but an older couple walked out of a nearby apartment building and looked their way. Then he smiled again and said, “Got to bounce. Call you later. I’ll think of you when I make my peanut butter and honey sandwich tonight.”
She giggled again and gave a little wave and continued home, except she hadn’t gone half a block when her cell rang. She took it out of her purse and didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?” she said, thinking it was a wrong number.
“It’s Clark,” he said.
She turned around, but there was nobody walking on the street, only lots of traffic roaring by. “I thought you were going to call me tonight,” Naomi said. “Where are you?”
“I’m watching you, Naomi,” he said. “You’re so beautiful, I can’t help it. And I called just to make sure you gave me the right number. If you hadn’t, my heart would be broken.”
She looked around uneasily then, peering through exhaust smoke from a large truck passing on the street, and said, “Where are you? I can’t see you.”
“Nowhere,” he said. “I’ll call later. Don’t forget me. Don’t ever forget me.”
The man that Tristan and Jerzy knew as Jakob Kessler was exhausted by the time he got back to his apartment on Franklin Avenue that night. His wife, Eunice Gleason, was waiting for him, poisoning the air with her chain-smoking. He entered, unlocking both dead-bolt locks, and removed his suit coat and the booster bag that contained the skimmer, the bag of mail, and the credit cards. His feet were killing him, so he took off the custom-made shoes with the three-inch lifts, and arching his back, he stretched. And he was no longer stooped.
“I’m home, Eunice,” he yelled with no trace of a German accent.
“No shit,” Eunice said, a cigarette protruding from her teeth as her hands flew over the computer keys. An ashtray beside her on the table was full of butts, and with shades drawn, under the harsh glare from the gooseneck lamp, she looked to him like she should have been onstage, maybe stirring a kettle in Macbeth.
Eunice was fifty-five years old, a coppery blonde with gray roots that she seldom bothered dyeing anymore until there was at least an inch showing. She was fifteen pounds heavier than when they’d married nine years earlier, and her tits and ass were starting to nose-dive, but when she fixed herself up, she could be passably attractive. The four packs a day she smoked sent her to a spa for regular Botox injections to smooth out the lines and wrinkles, but there was no reasoning with a nicotine addict, especially a hardhead like Eunice, so he’d given up long ago. Anyway, he figured that the world’s best plastic surgeon could never erase her natural scowl lines.
Their “workroom” was what for most people would have been the living room. There was a long table with three computers and mail trays taking up every inch of the tabletop. On the other side of the room was a cheap metal desk with another computer as well as
a stack of mail trays, all of them full of neatly catalogued envelopes with current work inside them. Eunice had reserved the table nearest to the window for the machine that she bought online to reencode information on magnetic strips.
She had a genius for recovering information from online public information sources. By no means did runners stealing mail or credit cards accomplish most of her information collecting. And Eunice had acting talent when it came to telephonically posing as a store employee where a purchase had been made, or as a bank employee requiring account information from a gullible bank customer.
He’d watch her with admiration when she’d do her “social engineering” calls, such as phoning the gas company in order to pay “her husband’s” gas bill. She’d ask which credit card he used last time, and the gas company employee would almost always tell her the last four digits on the card. It was childishly simple for her to obtain needed data.
She’d frequently go on MySpace, where she could often learn a woman’s full name along with her year and place of birth. Then she’d contact that city, claim to have lost her birth certificate, and obtain a new one. She’d go to the DMV with the birth certificate and get a driver’s license. After that, she’d claim to have lost her Social Security card, and with all of the identity documents she’d already gotten, a new one would be issued. She could start all of this by just going to websites, doing nothing more than that.
The information that legal entities such as convention centers or cruise lines acquired from customers for access cards that their machines could read often ended up in the hands of Eunice Gleason and others like her. There was much valuable information to be gained from these and countless sources, and yet she was relentless in still requiring old-fashioned hands-on collecting from skimmers that she’d bought and provided. If her husband wasn’t of use to her in this collecting phase of their enterprise, he wondered if he’d still be her husband.
He walked into the second bedroom, where he slept alone, loosened his tie, and entered the bathroom. After urinating, he washed his hands and face and, carefully pulling away the tape holding it in place, removed the silvery wig. Then he opened the medicine cabinet, found the contact lens case, and groaned with relief when he got the pale lenses out of his eyes. He looked at his normal light brown eyes for signs of irritation and squeezed some lubricating drops into both eyes. He took the jowl-enhancing gauze pads out of his mouth and, after brushing back his own gray-brown hair, examined himself. Without the dark shadows and tiny lines he’d drawn so carefully around his eyes, and after losing the wig, he figured he looked thirty-nine years old, although he was actually forty-eight.
When he reentered the workroom, he went straight to a window and opened it to let out some of the smoke that the electronic smoke eater hadn’t removed. Eunice was too paranoid to ever let the shades be raised.
“Hey, don’t let in the hot air,” Eunice said. “The electric bill’s killing us as it is, with all these computers going.”
“I can’t breathe in here,” he said. “Edward R. Murrow didn’t smoke this much. Nor did the Malibu Canyon fires, for that matter.”
“Instead of standing here whining about it, just go in your bedroom and start phoning the college kids. And you got some shoppers to work before you go to bed tonight, so you better get into costume ASAP.” Then she said, “By the way, did you buy another couple of prepaid cells?”
“Yes, I bought more GoPhones,” he said with disgust. “I don’t have dementia yet.”
“How many kids you got for tonight?”
“Two. They both park cars at restaurants and love to act. They’re perfect.”
“Do they look like the faces on the driver’s licenses?”
“Of course they do! You made the damn IDs, didn’t you? Gimme a little credit.”
“Yeah, I made them, but the last time you gave me photos to work with, the little bastard was five years younger in the pictures. Remember?”
“Okay, I shoulda paid attention to the photos he gave me. Gimme a break, Eunice!”
“That kid got busted behind it, Dewey,” she said. “He went to jail.”
“It didn’t come back on us, did it?”
“It’s stupid to get your people arrested,” she said. “It’s bad business and it’s risky, Hugo always said.”
“Hugo!” Dewey Gleason said. “I’m a writer and an actor, not a lifelong grifter like Hugo. And look how that big-shot ex of yours ended up. In San Quentin and nearly dead from emphysema, with a criminal record from here to Baltimore. Anyway, that kid didn’t know who I am or where I live, nothing. So stop worrying.”
“So who were you on that one, Jakob Kessler?”
“No, I think I was the Jew, Felix Cohen, then. I hadn’t created Jakob Kessler yet.”
“You should uncreate him,” she said. “That German accent sounds phony.”
“It sounds just like Arnold!” Dewey said. “It’s an Austrian’s German accent.”
“It sounds phony on Arnold too,” she said. “And that cotton you stuff in your cheeks doesn’t make you look like the Godfather. It makes you look like a man with a mouthful of disgusting food he can’t swallow. Kill the Kraut like you killed the Hebe. Stick with American characters. You’re not actor enough to pull off the accents.”
His jaws clenched and he said, “I can’t do it till I use up the new guys, Creole and Jerzy. They only know me as Kessler.”
“By the way, what happened to the old Polish guy that got pinched in Santa Monica?”
“That’s Old Jerzy,” Dewey said. “He was a parolee. Probably sent back to Pelican Bay or wherever. I use his memory to keep the new team in line.” With a bit of pride in his voice, he said, “They think scary Jakob Kessler had Old Jerzy eliminated because he got greedy. I used some imagination on that one.”
With her iguana smile: “Imagination? That’s so goddamn lame, Dewey. It’s the reason you failed as a screenwriter and as an actor. Kessler’s a walking cliché. Why don’t you face your limitations and concentrate on something you can do?”
Eyes moistening, Dewey said, “You can pull the guts right out of a man sometimes! I put in a ten-hour day already!”
“I put in twelve hours already,” she said. “And you got problems with relationships, take it up with Dear Abby.”
Malcolm Rojas wondered why he’d told young Naomi Teller that his name was Clark. He didn’t have a conscious reason to lie to her, and yet he had. Something deep inside him made him do that, and he didn’t quite understand it. There were lots of things about himself that he did not understand lately, lots of things that he had to do and did not know why. For instance, he did not consciously understand why he’d taken the box cutter home today from his job opening cardboard boxes at the massive home improvement center on Victory Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. It wasn’t for protection. Since he and his mother had moved to the apartment building a few blocks west of Highland Avenue, he’d felt very safe. He’d never felt safe when they lived in Boyle Heights, not in the middle of Latino gang turf, where he’d been raised until a year earlier, when he’d finished high school and got the job at the shopping center, far from Boyle Heights.
Malcolm Rojas didn’t know why he’d pulled over and parked his red fifteen-year-old Mustang when he’d seen Naomi Teller on the street. Couldn’t fathom why he’d gotten out and followed her and stopped her to talk. She didn’t really appeal to him. She was too young, too skinny. She wasn’t his type at all. Why did he say he’d call her? There were many conflicting emotions roiling inside him as he drove north on Highland Avenue toward Hollywood High School.
He parked and looked at the place. Why couldn’t he have gone to high school there? Why did his father keep him and his mother all those years in a shitty house in Boyle Heights so his father could be close to his shitty job at the scrap yard? That wasn’t reason enough. Malcolm had always been frightened there, of tattooed gang members, of barrio life in general, especially with a mother who was a very white A
merican and who didn’t understand more than a few words of Spanish. He’d felt like an outsider and had stayed home a lot with her, paying the price for it when he had to endure the names the other kids called him at school, especially after they found out that Malcolm’s father was Honduran, not Mexican like theirs. One of the names they’d called him was Li’l Hondoo, and he hated it. He hated all those cholo bastards.
Malcolm well remembered the conflicting emotions he’d felt when his father had been fatally injured at work after a drunken crane operator dropped a mangled Ford station wagon on top of him and another worker. A local attorney had contacted his mother, and because of the gross negligence of the company, she ended up with a $400,000 settlement, which allowed them to move away from the barrio and into a modest apartment in Hollywood. The move made him feel that at last he was home.
As a baby he’d been christened Ruben after his father. His middle name was Malcolm, the name of his maternal grandfather, who’d died before the boy was born. Early in life, young Ruben had decided that he wasn’t Honduran like his father, even though he knew how very much he looked like the man. After his father’s death, young Ruben Rojas came to hate his Hispanic name and insisted that his mother call him Malcolm in honor of her late father. She always indulged her only child’s whims, but it was hard for her even now to remember that he was Malcolm and not Ruben.
When she’d get drunk, his mother would endlessly repeat the story of how she’d first arrived in L.A. from Tulsa and moved into a hotel apartment near downtown. The man who would become Malcolm’s father was her neighbor. She’d laugh when telling Malcolm how she didn’t even know where Honduras was but believed it to be somewhere near Spain. Her handsome Honduran neighbor had an old car, and he would drive her to various cafeterias that were hiring waitresses and was always kind to her, and eventually they fell in love.
Malcolm hated those stories and tried to ignore them, and he hated being anything like his father. Malcolm was from his mother’s womb, so he was his mother’s son, and she was white and blue-eyed and blonde and…
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