Suddenly he was angry, very angry, for no reason at all. The bouts of anger had begun when he was about thirteen years old and had grown gradually over the past six years. He’d never talked to anyone about it, especially not to his mother. Once he thought about talking to a counselor at school but changed his mind. It was far better to work things out on your own, he decided. Why not? He’d been a loner all his life. Sometimes he could quell the anger by masturbating, but he didn’t feel like doing that now.
He started the Mustang again and began driving. The sun had set and the mauve and persimmon sky over Hollywood was turning dark. He took one hand from the steering wheel and held it in front of him. The hand was shaking for no reason at all. He didn’t even know what street he was on now, but there were apartment buildings on both sides. Three of them had parking garages down below and electric security gates that could be opened by the residents as they drove inside. He remembered a TV movie where a contract killer waited outside such a building, hiding behind some bushes, and then followed a car inside to shoot the driver before escaping in the victim’s car.
He felt the anger growing, and his hands trembled more. His armpits were damp and he felt a bit light-headed, like when he’d sniffed glue back in middle school. He saw an apartment building that looked just like the one in the movie. There were even big clumps of bougainvillea growing beside the security gate that led to the underground parking. A contract killer could hide there, Malcolm thought. Just like in the movie.
FIVE
Night had fallen, and it was going to be a dark one, with low, hanging smog concealing the moon and stars. The residential street was adequately lighted, but the apartment building was situated in the middle of the line of streetlights and settled in deep shadow. The security lights on the front of the building were timed not to go on for another thirty minutes in order to save electricity. It was a quiet street, the only noise coming from the incessant traffic hum on Sunset Boulevard.
A white Pathfinder SUV drove south from Sunset toward the apartment building. There were plenty of cars parked on both sides of the residential street, but the Pathfinder was the only moving vehicle at the moment. The SUV slowed at the apartment building, and the driver touched the remote button and the heavy security gate began to rise and roll back. Beside the entrance to the parking garage was the large growth of bougainvillea as well as some azaleas. Crouching behind the flowering plants was Malcolm Rojas.
He had been hiding there for half an hour. It wasn’t a particularly hot summer evening, yet he was burning up. He felt feverish, and as angry as he’d ever been in his life. He’d watched four other cars drive in during the past thirty minutes. One of them was driven by a man, one by a young woman, one by a middle-aged woman who looked Hispanic. None of those had propelled Malcolm Rojas into action. A stab of pain, sizzling and fizzing, began somewhere behind his eyes. He was in a rage.
A forty-seven-year-old Realtor named Sharon Gillespie drove the Pathfinder. She lived with a man who was also in real-estate sales, and she was just coming home from her office. She parked in her usual space, number 33, at the south wall of the parking garage. When she got out and was preparing to lock the SUV, a hand was clamped across her mouth, and another hand, this one holding a box cutter, flashed before her eyes. She dropped her briefcase onto the garage floor but had no chance to scream.
The call to the apartment garage was given twenty-three minutes later to 6-X-76, the shop driven by Dana Vaughn, with Hollywood Nate writing the reports, or, as the cops referred to it, “keeping books.” And 6-X-66, with Sheila Montez driving and Aaron Sloane riding shotgun, arrived right behind them, all of them wanting to get more of a description. The radio call had only given the sketchy description of a male in his twenties, possibly of Middle Eastern descent, and wearing a light blue T-shirt, who’d fled on foot through a fire exit door that accessed the street, a door that was locked on the street side.
The apartment manager, a frightened woman in her sixties, was pacing in front of the building when the two patrol units parked in front. It went without saying that the female officer would question the victim and take the crime report in this kind of case, even though ordinarily that would be the passenger officer’s job. Dana grabbed the reports binder, and Hollywood Nate tagged behind when his partner approached the security gate.
As Dana Vaughn put it, “If there’s a vagina involved, we women get the case.”
“How long ago did the suspect leave here?” Dana asked the apartment manager.
“About fifteen minutes, I think,” the woman said. “She’s up in apartment thirty-three, waiting for you. Sharon Gillespie is her name. The poor woman!”
“Nobody saw a car?” Sheila said, entering through the walk-in security gate and following Dana.
The apartment manager shook her head, saying, “It’s the element that’s taking over. Arabs, Iranians, they’re everywhere around here.”
A fifteen-minute head start in this most traffic-clogged city in North America might as well have been fifteen hours. As far as the cops were concerned, the suspect was probably in a car and long gone.
Dana Vaughn said to Sheila, “How about you and your partner help Nate secure the crime scene. I’ll get a description out as soon as I can.”
Sheila nodded and said to the manager, “Has anybody else touched anything in her vehicle or exited through the fire exit door since it happened?”
The apartment manager shook her head, and Hollywood Nate said, “Good. Take us there and open the car gate. Some crime lab people will be arriving soon. I hope.”
“Like CSI?” the woman said.
Aaron fought the urge to heave a sigh but only said, “Don’t expect their kind of results, but we’ll do our best.”
Matthew Harwood, a fifty-year-old real-estate broker who was the roommate and lover of Sharon Gillespie, admitted Dana to apartment 33. He’d been crying with her and was wiping his eyes with his fingertips when Dana arrived. Sharon Gillespie was sitting in a kitchen chair, holding a cup of coffee in her trembling hands, her highlighted blonde hair damp, her face washed clean of makeup. A contusion on her left cheekbone was swollen and discolored.
Too late, Dana thought. She’d already bathed. Dana turned to Matthew Harwood and said, “I’ll talk to you later, sir, but do you mind if I talk to Ms. Gillespie alone? You might wait right outside with my partner. He’ll need some information.”
After Matthew Harwood was gone, Dana had a fleeting thought that this woman was not much older than she, and that made it more troubling. Dana said, “I know how… I have an idea how you’re feeling right now, but we’ll need to take you to the hospital to tend to your injuries and to get some evidence swabs. Is your underwear here or down where it happened?”
“He never made me remove my underwear,” Sharon Gillespie said. “It didn’t get that far. And this bruise on my face is my only injury. I’m not going to a hospital. I’m going to bed.”
“Okay, what do you mean, ‘It didn’t get that far’?”
“He held the weapon in front of my eyes. A box knife, like the nine-eleven hijackers used. He pushed me into the backseat of my SUV. He pushed my head down. He said he’d cut my eyes out if I didn’t…”
“Tell me the exact words that he said to you.”
“He said, ‘Suck my cock or I’ll cut your eyes out, you filthy slut.’ ”
“And then what happened?”
“What do you think happened? I did it.”
“I know this is very difficult,” Dana said. “But I have to know details. If we can collect any semen at all, we can get his DNA profile. His genetic fingerprint.”
“I know all that,” Sharon Gillespie said. “I’m not stupid. But he didn’t ejaculate. He didn’t even get hard. He got angry. Furious. He called me all kinds of things. ‘Whore, slut, pig, drunk, bitch.’ I don’t know what else.”
“Drunk?” Dana said, writing in her notebook. “Had you been drinking?”
“No, I’d just
come from work.”
“Okay,” Dana said, “so there was no ejaculation?”
“No,” she said. “After a few minutes, he jerked me up by the hair and with that box knife in his fist punched me in the face and jumped out and ran toward the fire exit door.”
“Would you be able to recognize the man if you saw him again?”
“No. He was a Middle Eastern guy in his twenties. Close to six feet tall, wearing a light blue T-shirt and jeans. He had black, curly hair and he looked like the nine-eleven hijackers. With that same kind of box knife.”
“A box cutter,” Dana said. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Sharon Gillespie said, “I’ve seen the guys at Home Depot cutting open boxes with those things.”
“Did he have a Middle Eastern accent?” Dana asked.
“No, he had no accent that I could make out. He didn’t say much. Only those filthy obscenities.”
“About calling you a drunk,” Dana said, “could he be someone who’d seen you at a bar or restaurant when you were having a few drinks? Maybe a busboy or waiter?”
“I go to a lot of restaurants in my business, but I never get drunk,” Sharon Gillespie said. “Now, please go out there and catch that god-damn Arab!” Then she started to weep.
After Dana put out a further description of the suspect to the RTO at Communications Division, she walked down to the parking garage. There she found the lazy night-watch detective “Compassionate Charlie” Gilford, a lanky, middle-aged veteran D2 notorious for his horrible taste in neckties and acerbic comments at crime scenes.
The detective said, “SID’s gonna have to crawl that SUV with a black light.”
“No, they aren’t,” Dana said. “There’s no semen in there.”
Charlie Gilford, who had a thing for well-preserved fortyish woman like Dana, said to her, “What, no dribble in the withdraw mode? You got the panties?”
“Nope,” Dana said, and before she could explain, Charlie Gilford said, “Those drawers and what was in them is a crime scene. Where are they?”
“He didn’t ejaculate,” Dana said, unsure which was more distasteful, his manner or his necktie.
“How can she be sure?” the detective said.
“Because his penis was in her mouth and it was flaccid,” Dana said. “That means it wasn’t hard.”
“I know what it means,” Charlie Gilford said, but Dana doubted it. Then he added, “How come the only sex maniac that leaves all the evidence where you can’t miss it is Bill Clinton?”
Dana Vaughn and Hollywood Nate didn’t immediately hear the further description of the apartment garage rapist when the Communications RTO broadcast her follow-up info. Since violent assailants often seem older or larger to their victims, Dana said to Nate, “He might not be that old, and he might not be that tall. And in fact, he might not be Middle Eastern. Just because the guy had a box cutter doesn’t mean he works for Osama bin Laden.”
“Might even be a Jew,” Nate said. “His description sounds like my cousin Morris.”
None of the Hollywood cops expected to find the guy on foot in the area, and of course they were right. Dana and Hollywood Nate cleared from their call, but before heading for the station, they immediately received another one.
At Nate’s insistence, Dana had to speed to this one. It was the kind of call that brought out black-and-whites from all over the division, not to mention gang cops, motor cops, and any other male officers who happened to be on the radio frequency. It was a “311 woman,” the penal code designation defining indecent exposure. The call sent 6-X-76 to a Laundromat on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Dana said en route to Hollywood Nate, “I know this is the most important call that you pathetically desperate males will roll on this month, but would you be terribly upset if I slowed down? My motto is ‘Drive to Arrive.’ ”
Three female customers waited outside on the sidewalk for the police before venturing back inside to retrieve their clothes from the coin-operated dryers. Dana parked the Ford Crown Vic in front of the Laundromat and took her time emerging, not wanting to get in the way of horny male coppers like Hollywood Nate, who might trample her.
The Asian woman who’d made the call said, “She’s still inside. She scared us to death when she took off all her clothes.”
When Nate ran into the Laundromat, he found the 311 woman sitting on a folding chair. Rather, she was sitting on two folding chairs that had been pushed together. She was naked and milky white with long, stringy brown hair, and she weighed approximately 350 pounds. She was crying, her mascara running down her swollen cheeks and dripping off her pug nose onto her pendulous bosom.
Nate gaped, then turned to Dana and held up four fingers, meaning “code 4,” no further help needed at the scene. Dana jogged out to their car and put out the code 4 broadcast, knowing that it wouldn’t stop the other horny bastards from arriving. Not unless she said that the 311 woman was “GOA,” or “gone-on-arrival,” in which case they’d fan out and start looking for her.
The woman on the sidewalk who’d put in the call said to Dana, “Why is that woman naked, Officer?”
“We’re gonna find out,” Dana said. “Be patient.”
When she reentered the Laundromat, Nate said to her, “I got a feeling you should handle this one.”
Hollywood Nate walked out to the sidewalk, when, predictably, a car from Watch 3 squealed to the curb, despite the code 4 broadcast.
“You don’t wanna go in there,” he said to the cops inside. “She’s naked all right, but she weighs at least three bills. Her jelly rolls hang like a loincloth. You don’t wanna go in there.”
Without comment, the night-watch car drove off, and a second one arrived and received the same eyewitness commentary, resulting in the same rapid departure. But the third black-and-white to arrive belonged to the midwatch surfer cops, and they stayed briefly.
After Hollywood Nate explained what he’d encountered inside the Laundromat, Flotsam tried to give Hollywood Nate his cell phone camera, saying, “Dude, you gotta get me a couple shots of her! Frontal and reverse!”
“I’m over this,” Nate said.
“It might be worth a buck on YouTube!” Jetsam urged.
“Paddle off, you surfboard pervs!” Hollywood Nate said, and the surfer cops reluctantly drove away.
When Nate got back inside the Laundromat, Dana Vaughn was sitting in a folding chair next to the 311 woman, who made no effort to hide her nakedness from Hollywood Nate. Not that it would have been possible, since she only had a small hand towel, which she was using to dab at her lacerated and swollen lip and to wipe away her tears. She appeared to Nate to be in her late thirties.
She said to Dana between sobs, “He said he was leaving me and would never come back. And I’d always believed him when he said we were going to get married and have a family.”
“How long have you been together, Reba?” Dana asked.
“Over a year. I spent most of my trust fund on him.” Then she started crying openly again.
Dana looked up at Hollywood Nate and said, “This is Reba Costello. Her boyfriend Lester’s a piece of work. He drops her here to do their laundry, and then he goes out and hits a couple bars on Western Avenue. Then he comes back, and when the second load of laundry’s not started, he starts ragging on her, and when they’re alone, he ends up punching her in the mouth.”
“Where’s Lester now?” Nate asked.
“Probably back on Western Avenue,” Dana said, answering for the sobbing woman.
“She gonna sign a report?”
Reba looked up at Nate and said, “I don’t wanna have him arrested. I just want him to get a job and not get drunk all the time!”
“You don’t have to be his punching bag,” Dana said. “He should be in jail, Reba.”
“No, please!” the woman said. “As soon as the clothes’re dry, I’ll just go home. I can walk from here.”
“So why is she naked?” Hollywood Nate asked Dana, just as the dryer al
arm sounded and the drum stopped turning.
Dana walked him a few steps away from the woman and whispered, “When he knocked her down on the floor here, the drunken bastard whipped it out and pissed on her. All she had on was her cotton dress and underwear. They’re in the dryer with the second load.”
Nate raised his voice, saying, “After that, she’s not gonna sign a crime report?”
“No, no!” Reba said, overhearing him. “I think maybe I can persuade Lester to go to AA. Then everything will be fine. Honest.”
Dana said to Reba Costello, “The load’s done. Take your dress out and put it on. We’ll give you a lift to your apartment.”
“You’ve been real nice,” Reba said, getting painfully to her feet and opening the dryer. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I’ll help you fold your things,” Dana said. “And then we’ll get you home.”
Fifteen minutes later, 6-X-76 dropped Reba Costello and her laundry at her apartment, a few blocks from the Hollywood Cemetery. Dana helped the obese woman out of the car, along with her bags of laundry.
“He wouldn’t by chance be home by now, would he?” Dana said. “I’d like to have a little chat with him.”
“No, no, he’ll be out till the bars close when he’s like this,” Reba said. “I’ll be okay. Thank you, Officers, for being so kind.”
“Take care of yourself, honey,” Dana said. “Call us if he ever lays a hand on you again.”
When they had driven away, Hollywood Nate said, “Let’s request seven,” referring to code 7, the LAPD radio designation for a meal break.
“Okay,” Dana said, “and you can be sure I won’t be eating anything with a lot of fat grams or calories. Not tonight.”
Nate said, “How come our Hollywood romances never end happy like the ones in the movies?”
“Does anything?” Dana Vaughn said.
By the time Malcolm Rojas arrived home that night, his mother was sound asleep and snoring on the sofa while the TV blared. Malcolm was exhausted, and his fury had waned. He was ravenously hungry and hoped that his mother had prepared something and put it in the fridge for him, but she had not. He went to the cupboard and began eating cereal out of the box. Then he ate an apple, and after that, some cottage cheese that had already started to turn.
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