It reminded Dewey that when he was applying it earlier that evening, Eunice had slouched into the bathroom in her tatty pink robe, the one with cigarette burns on the front. Her frizz of coppery blonde hair was so grown out at the roots that she looked like a clown in a fright wig, and he’d noticed that she was starting to get two chins.
With the perennial cigarette dangling, Eunice looked at him working on his makeup and said, “That’s quite a mole. It reminds me of that movie on TV the other night, Dangerous Liaisons.”
“John Malkovich didn’t have a mole in that movie,” said Dewey, who was a lifelong movie buff.
Eunice said, “I was thinking of the whores in the French court. That’s what you remind me of with that spot of shit on your face.”
Get in the fucking moment! he told himself. Christ, what’s that kid’s name? He was just so damn tired.
“Evening, Mr. Willis,” the young man said and took a stool next to him at the bar.
He was a lanky kid, an inch or so over six feet, as most of them were. Dewey wondered how it happened that this generation was a couple of inches taller than his. About half of his college runners were emos, with heavy hair flopping onto their foreheads so it bounced in time to the tunes of Morrissey, which they seemed to favor. This kid looked more metrosexual in a white linen dress shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, a lavender T-shirt showing, and designer jeans he couldn’t have afforded without working for Dewey.
“What’ll you have?” Dewey said, and then it came to him and he added, “Stuart.”
Stuart, who had plenty of bogus ID attesting to his being of age, said, “The same thing you’re having.”
Without being asked, Stuart put a bogus driver’s license on the bar, which the bartender examined before making another Manhattan.
When the drink was in front of them, Dewey said, “Let’s go to a table and chat.”
After they got settled, Dewey said, “Would you like something to eat? How about a nice steak? They serve good food here at any hour of the night or day.”
“I had a big supper,” Stuart said, sipping his Manhattan. From his frowning response, Dewey was sure the Manhattan was a first for him.
“This place looks like a train car from the outside,” Stuart said. “Like you’re getting on a train.”
“It’s been too long since you’ve reported,” Dewey said. “I think you have something for me, do you not?”
“That’s the problem, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said.
“What… problem?” Dewey said, the bonhomie gone. Screw the steak. He began eye-fucking the kid behind those steel frames.
“Don’t get excited, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said. “I have money for you.”
“Then we don’t have a problem, do we?” Dewey said.
“I just don’t have it all. I had to gamble more than I intended to. Have you spent much time in those casinos, Mr. Willis?”
Unblinking, “Yes, I’ve been in all of them.”
“Well, there was this big Indian guy in the second casino, the one just outside Palm Springs? I think he was a security officer. He started following me after I withdrew the first bunch of money with my debit card. I was pretty sure he was watching, so I put way more in the slots than I wanted to. See what I mean?”
“Oh, yes, I see what you mean,” Dewey said. “It’s perfectly clear to me.”
“Okay, to start with, I followed your instructions, Mr. Willis. When I arrived, I got the five-hundred-dollar limit from the account, and then at one minute after midnight, I got another five hundred. And then I went back to the motel and went to bed. The next day, I went to the second casino and used the second card. You were right about the casinos. I don’t think there was a camera at the ATM machines like in the machines around here.”
“Only the general cameras surveying the wide areas,” Dewey said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
“Then I went to the third casino and used the third card,” the kid said. “I just felt a lot better doing it like that instead of using all three debit cards in one casino. You were right about that too.”
“Smart boy,” Dewey said. “Get to the point.”
Stuart took another sip from his cocktail and said, “I only played the slot machines to make it look good. I was actually thinking about playing something else in order to make it look even better.”
“I told you, only slots,” Dewey said. “And very few of those.”
“Right, so I maybe spent an extra two, two-fifty, in the slots that I didn’t wanna spend.”
Dewey was silent for a moment, knowing this was a lie, and said, “You spent over two hundred dollars of my money in slot machines? I don’t suppose you won anything in any of the three casinos, did you, Stuart?”
“No,” Stuart said. “Are you sure those machines aren’t rigged?”
“No, they’re not,” Dewey said, controlling his anger. “Where’s my money?”
“In the trunk of my car in an envelope.”
“Let’s go get it,” Dewey said.
When they got to the parking lot, Stuart opened the trunk of his Mazda and removed a large envelope, saying, “Everything is accounted for, just like you said, Mr. Willis. In the three casinos for the three days, I took out forty-five hundred dollars altogether. I spent two hundred for gas. I know it sounds like a lot, but my car needs a tune-up. I spent three hundred dollars for the three nights in a motel and only two hundred dollars for meals I was too tense to eat. I gambled two-fifty in the slots in the casinos. That left me with three thousand five hundred fifty. I deducted my thirty percent from the balance and had a few incidentals, including a new tire, and that came to four hundred fifty-five dollars. There’s twenty-five hundred for you, Mr. Willis. It came out a nice round number, and the cards are in the envelope with the money.”
“Nice round number,” Dewey said. “It always comes out a nice round number. And I wonder why so many of you young men claim that you had to gamble so much more than you were told to gamble? Is that because you are afflicted by compulsive gambling disorder or by inherent greed?”
“I swear to God, Mr. Willis — ,” the kid said, but Dewey put up a hand to silence him.
“My… organization went to a lot of expense to set this whole thing up,” Dewey said. “It hardly seems worthwhile now, Stuart.”
“I worked three days for that money, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said, “when you consider the driving time.”
“How long do you think my organization spent setting it up?”
“Maybe I could do another part of the work next time,” Stuart said. “Maybe I could make the deposits for you. Somebody has to put checks into the debit accounts. Why not me?”
“Ambitious,” Dewey said. “You’re an ambitious lad, Stuart. Well, it’s getting late and I have to report to the boss of our organization. I hope he’s not unhappy with your work. If he is, you’ll be hearing from… somebody.”
“Mr. Willis,” the kid said, “I worked hard and did the best I could. I wouldn’t cheat you!”
“Of course not,” Dewey said. “Go home and get some sleep. We’ll be in touch.”
After Stuart was clear of the parking lot, Dewey went to his car, started it up, and began the drive home to Hollywood. The $2,500 wasn’t bad, considering he had two more kids like Stuart to collect from before the month ended. The “organization boss”-that smoke-reeking, foul-tempered bitch-was someone he could almost live with, as long as the calendar month netted them at least $10,000 after expenses. Any less than that and she was so horrible, it was all he could do to keep from packing up and running away for good. Maybe then he’d have a chance of living a normal life span instead of dying of emphysema or lung cancer. And he would do it too, except that Eunice had sole access to the so-called retirement account.
For the first five years of their marriage, he’d secretly searched for an account number, a routing number, or an online password-anything that might open the door to her treasure vault. But he was never even
able to discover in which bank she hoarded their money. He reckoned that by now she’d accumulated about $500,000, give or take. Currently he was running six bank accounts under several names, where money from their various gags could be deposited, transferred to another bank, and withdrawn before their victims’ own banks ever discovered a problem. And Eunice did in-person as well as online banking. On one of his snooping forays, he’d found four checkbooks from local Hollywood banks.
Something had always bothered him about the “retirement account” story she’d fed him. It was that she was the momma bird protecting the nest egg that was going to see them through to a comfortable retirement in San Francisco. It was there that she owned an inherited family home on Russian Hill, currently leased out, but which would be theirs during their golden years. The thought of all that made him shiver with revulsion.
And then one day in March, after they’d gone out for a dress-up dinner at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she didn’t see a single celebrity and got drunk instead, he’d found a brass key. He’d spotted it while snooping in her wallet after she’d passed out in her bedroom, and it looked to him like a padlock key. He’d hardly slept that night, thinking about the lock that the key would fit. There had been too many occasions over the years when she’d nagged and harangued Dewey about making banking errors that could lead back to him, or rather to one of the characters he played when he did in-person banking.
The fact was, she was distrustful of banks and always overestimated the employees, always fearing “red flags,” as she put it. As far as Dewey could see, a few zeros added to a number meant nothing at all to the young tellers, most of whom looked like they’d rather be bartenders or cocktail waitresses or anything else where they could make a few bucks and meet some interesting people. He had persistent thoughts that someone like Eunice would keep her retirement fund in a safe deposit box rather than in an account where she’d surrender control to people she obsessively feared.
But the key he’d found in her wallet was not to a safe deposit box. It looked like an ordinary brass padlock key, the kind he used at storage facilities where he kept the merchandise that his runners bought with bogus checks and credit cards. He began thinking a lot about that key. There could be a huge amount of cash in storage somewhere in Los Angeles. That key provoked endless fantasies for Dewey Gleason.
In recent months he’d often awakened in the middle of the night and imagined ways in which he could kill Eunice, even though he’d never had the stomach for violence. In his most recent fantasy, one that gave him enormous pleasure, he envisioned holding her captive in an escape-proof basement, maybe in a cabin up near Angeles National Forest. Each morning he’d supply her all the water she needed, along with the choice of four Burger King Whoppers or four packs of cigarettes, which is what she ate and smoked on an average day. Whoppers or cancer tubes-either or, her choice. Dewey was confident that the miserable cunt would die of starvation within a month.
While Dewey Gleason was at the Pacific Dining Car, Dana Vaughn and Hollywood Nate got a call to meet 6-L-20 in the alley behind the Pantages Theater. Traffic on Hollywood Boulevard was heavy, and it took an extra few minutes to get there. The sergeant was Miriam Hermann, an LAPD old-timer with thirty-six years on the Job. They saw her car parked on Vine Street, and she was outside, leaning against it. Sergeant Hermann was a chunky woman of sixty-one years with black caterpillar eyebrows and iron-gray hair trimmed shorter than Dana’s. Sergeant Murillo, the best-read supervisor at Hollywood Station, thought she looked like Gertrude Stein. But Miriam Hermann had no Alice B. Toklas, only rescued animals: two dogs and three cats. It was said that she’d had an unhappy childless marriage to a veterinarian before she was a cop, but she wasn’t chatty about her past and no one knew for sure.
When Dana and Nate got out of their car, Sergeant Hermann said to them, “There’s something going on back by the trash Dumpster. I saw some guys walk outta the nightclub and into the alley.”
“A drug deal?” Nate said.
“Maybe,” the sergeant said. “Let’s have a look.”
While they were walking, Dana said, “They’re like lions waiting for prey in these nightclubs. A girl turns her back and they hit her drink with an eyedropper full of GHB. She awakes in a hotel room, raped and sodomized.”
“Never take your hands off your drinks in Hollywood,” Nate agreed. “If necessary, use a sippy cup.”
They entered the alley, staying in the shadows of the buildings with their flashlights off. There was plenty of street noise to muffle their footsteps, but they needn’t have worried. Somebody in a car on Vine Street was screaming at somebody else who was stalled in traffic. Soon horns were blowing and engines were racing. When the cops got close to the Dumpster, they saw that a man had a woman pinned up against it and was humping her from behind while two other men watched, probably waiting their turns.
The men were all well dressed and so drunk that none of them even noticed three cops approaching. Sergeant Hermann signaled to Dana and Nate, who circled the Dumpster to cut off retreat, and the sergeant turned her flashlight on the woman, who might as well have worn a sandwich board announcing her occupation. The two bystanders looked up but didn’t attempt to escape. The guy in the saddle made no effort to stop, even after staring into the flashlight beams. His eyes were watery and unfocused with lids drooping. He just kept going at it.
Several seconds passed until Sergeant Hermann finally said, “Am I not standing here, or what? Back off!”
Reluctantly, the jockey did so. He was a forty-ish white man dressed in nightclub-black and so fried he didn’t seem to know that his penis was hanging limp and ineffective as he struggled to put it away. The hooker was also white, way past her prime and obviously amped, probably on cocaine, the nightclub drug of choice. She was dressed confrontationally in a strapless black tube dress that stopped midthigh. Her makeup might be called theatrical if the theater was Kabuki. She wore stockings with seams, held in place by a partially exposed black garter belt, and she would’ve looked appropriate only at a Marilyn Manson concert.
“He wasn’t hurting me,” the hooker said. “In fact, I didn’t feel nothing.”
“That’s your fault. I want my money back,” the customer whispered, louder than he intended.
For the first time, the woman paid close attention to the cops and said, “I don’t know what this man is talking about, Officers. There’s no money involved here. This was just a spontaneous expression of love.” Then she looked woozily at the man in black and said, “Ain’t that right, honey?”
He caught on, staggered forward, and said, “That’s right, Officers. This was not an act of prostitution. It was just-I don’t know, a burst of mad passion. We shoulda gone to a motel.”
“You should go to a clinic,” Sergeant Hermann said. Then turning to the other two, she said, “How about you? Waiting to express your mad passion too, were you?”
One drunk, who was submitting to a pat-down search by Dana, said nothing. The other, who had already been searched by Hollywood Nate, said, “I just thought somebody was doing a Heimlich maneuver and I wanted to help. Can we go back to the nightclub now?”
Sergeant Hermann had the look of someone who wanted to be anywhere else, and after thirty-six years of police work, she definitely looked her age. She arched her spine with her hands on her hips, as though her back was killing her, looked at her watch, and said, “I’m hungry. Time for code seven.”
“Go ahead and take seven, Sarge,” Hollywood Nate said. Then to the hooker and her trick, he said, “You two are going to jail for lewd conduct.” He looked at the drunken observers and said, “Anybody got outstanding warrants? You paid all your traffic tickets?”
The two observers mumbled an assent, and Sergeant Hermann waved at her cops and walked back through the alley to Vine Street, while Dana handcuffed the two prisoners, and Hollywood Nate filled out FI cards on the other two. They looked too prosperous to be wanted on traffic warrants or anyth
ing else, and their IDs were proper, so they were released.
Before they left, Hollywood Nate said, “If you go anywhere near your cars, you better have a designated driver. Understand?”
Sergeant Hermann had completed a long cell call while standing beside her shop by the time Nate and Dana were walking out of the alley with their two arrestees. Before the sergeant got back in her car, Nate and Dana saw her approach a shiny new Beemer that was illegally parked on Vine Street with the engine running.
They heard her say to the young black man in the driver’s seat, “Move your car, please. That’s a no-parking zone.”
He looked lazily at her and said, “I’ll only be a minute. My friend went in the club to find somebody.”
“Move the car, sir,” Sergeant Hermann said.
“This is some shit,” the indignant driver said. “You’re only messin’ with me ’cause I’m young and I’m black and I’m good-lookin’ and I got a cool ride. Am I right?”
Sergeant Hermann, who had heard this, or variations of it, hundreds of times in her long career, was feeling very tired and very old at the moment. She said to the driver, “I’m a senior citizen and I’m a Jew and I look like a manatee and my Ford Escort’s nine years old. Where’re we going with this bullshit?”
The driver wanted to fire back but was out of verbal ammo, so he dropped it into gear and drove away.
EIGHT
The next morning, Malcolm Rojas got out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen, holding his throat and swallowing hard, feigning illness so he could avoid going to his job at the home improvement center.
His mother was frying eggs for him, and his orange juice was on the kitchen table. She looked at him and said, “Sore throat?”
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