Dewey saw their disappointment at the condition of the foreclosed house, and he said, “The last tenants were pretty awful. We haven’t had time to clean the place. Also, we’re going to paint the living room and the bathroom. Did my secretary tell you there’s a little powder room just off the kitchen? We’re going to wallpaper that as well as the kitchen. Everything will be done before you move in, if you decide to take the place.”
They listened politely and then walked through the small rooms, until the wife said, “This could work for us, but we have one more house to look at.”
Dewey said quickly, “How much did my secretary tell you the rent would be?”
“Twenty-four hundred a month,” the young woman said.
“It’ll go before the evening’s over,” Dewey said. “In fact, I have an appointment with a prospective tenant in”-he glanced at his watch-“thirty-five minutes.” He looked at them thoughtfully and said, “You know what? I’d like you two to have this place. It’d be a nice street for your baby to grow up on. Gosh darn it, you remind me of how it was when my wife and me were starting out. I’m gonna take it upon myself to trim three-no, make it four hundred dollars off the rent. I know the owner won’t give me any trouble when I tell him the place is not in good condition. He lives in Oregon and never comes to L.A., so I pretty much have total control over his property management. And I’ll waive the security deposit. You write me a check for the first and last month and it’s yours. You can move in on the first of the month, when the place will look fresh as a daisy, I guarantee you. Paint, wallpaper, plumbing repaired, the works.”
Dewey smiled large and studied them while they talked quietly but enthusiastically in Spanish, and then the wife took a checkbook from her purse and said, “We accept and we thank you! Shall I make out the check to Brad Simpson Real Estate?”
“That’ll be fine,” Dewey said, thinking that four Clevelands would be a nice deposit to the account he’d just opened at the bank as Brad Simpson.
He filled out the rental agreement as fast as he could, figuring that the next “client” would probably also be arriving early for their appointment. After he said good-bye to the couple, he only had to wait ten minutes until the next appointment arrived.
This was a black couple, a bit unusual in that there were not many black people living in Hollywood. Every other ethnic group was more than proportionately represented, especially the growing Latino and Asian populations. These two were only slightly older than the last couple.
Dewey’s professional smile broadened, and he extended a business card, saying, “Folks, you’re just in time. The last appointment said they’re coming to my office in the morning and will probably take the place, but until I get their first and last month’s check, it’s still open. My name is Brad Simpson and I’m very pleased to meet you!”
When the couple was looking at the kitchen, Dewey had a flashback to the last time he did the rental gag. On the first of February, six moving vans had arrived at the cottage he’d rented in mid-Hollywood. The street was blocked by the trucks, disputes raged, and the police were called. He happened to be driving by on his way to another “rental” and had to take a detour because of the traffic jam.
Malcolm Rojas could hardly wait until dark. He’d been watching the cottage for an hour. Dusky light blasted through the Hollywood smog, and the cottage where the woman had entered gave off a burnished glow. That light excited Malcolm. He was excited by everything around him, and even though the anger had not abated, he couldn’t say for sure which emotion was stronger, anger or excitement.
No one else had entered the bungalow, no children, no husband, nobody. It was such a small house that he figured she lived there alone. Somehow that made him angrier. That bitch got a little house of her own, and he had to share an apartment with his mother, like a helpless child.
She had unlocked the front door and had carried her shopping bags inside but had not returned to the door. Maybe it wasn’t locked now. Regardless, he was going in. If he had to, he’d ask her if his friend lived there. Who? Thomas, that was it. He’d ask if Thomas lived there. But if the door was unlocked, he was not going to ask anything. He was that angry and that excited. He reached into his pocket and stroked the box cutter.
She never heard him enter. She was in the kitchen, thawing a small steak in the micro when she heard him bump into a kitchen chair. When he rushed her from behind, he clamped his hand over her mouth, showed her the box cutter, and said, “If you scream even once, I’ll cut your throat.”
When he had her down on the kitchen floor, she began sobbing, her eyes on the box cutter that he held to her face.
She kept repeating, “Please don’t! Don’t hurt me! I’ll give you money! Take the money from my purse! Take my car! Please don’t hurt me!”
The bitch! She looked even older up close. He thought she was at least forty-five years old, maybe older. He looked at the roots of her strawberry blonde hair and could see gray. So she was maybe fifty years old. Look at her fat thighs! He pulled at her underwear, ripping it away from her while she said, “Please don’t hurt me!”
“Shut up!” he said. “First you’re going to suck me off, you fat old bitch!”
There was no doubt which team would win the Almost-a-Hollywood-Moon contest and get an extra-large pizza with the works from Sergeant Murillo for handling the weirdest incident, not after 6-X-66 got a call to the memorial park that night. One of the employees had returned to pick up a set of keys she’d inadvertently left on her desk, and she’d seen a door to the mortuary slightly ajar. She’d put in a 9-1-1 call on her cell and then informed the guard at the exit gate.
The cemetery was huge and far from 6-X-66’s beat. And since the message from communications came in on their computer as “See the woman, open door,” it didn’t excite anybody, and no other cars responded to back them up.
“Watch three’s got way more cars than we do,” Aaron Sloane, the driver, said to Sheila Montez. “Where are they? Why do we have to roll all the way up here?”
“The lazy bastards gotta run to Seven-Eleven for a caffeine pick-me-up three times a night before they can even start thinking like cops,” Sheila said irritably.
Aaron figured it was her monthly cycle making her cranky, but he’d been a cop long enough to know that absolutely the worst thing you could ever say to a woman officer who seemed to be in a bad mood was “Is it your time?”
Diplomatically, he said, “Maybe we could stop for a cup after we handle this call. You look a little… down tonight.”
She glanced at him, looked back at the streets, and said, “I’m fine.” Then, because he was not just any partner but the one who’d witnessed the Montez meltdown at the side of a dead baby’s crib, she opened up a bit. She said, “It’s just that you can’t depend on anybody anymore.”
Aaron hesitated and said, “Boyfriend trouble?”
That made her turn toward him and say, “If there is anything that nearly seven years of police work have taught me, it’s that everybody lies, and you should never under any circumstances get involved with another cop.”
He was crestfallen. “I thought you said you’d learned your lesson after your bad marriage to the sergeant from Mission Division. Have you been… dating another cop?”
“Who said anything about dating?” Sheila replied, and his heartbeat advanced ten beats per minute. “The Pope will samba at Saint Peter’s before I ever date one again. But I was dumb enough to be one of three investors in a twenty-eight-foot powerboat. Don’t ask me how or why. It happened right after I lost… lost the baby, and my divorce was final and… I don’t know, I think I went crazy. Now my fellow investors-cops, of course-are bickering. And we’re selling the boat, and I stand to lose almost eight thousand.”
“Whoa!” Aaron said. “I’m sorry, Sheila. Is there anything I can do?”
“Are you independently wealthy, Aaron?” she said with that little sloe-eyed glance of hers that made his heart rate advance five more beat
s per minute.
He had gone from thinking that Sheila Montez was a very hot-looking woman to thinking she was drop-dead gorgeous. It was getting very hard for him to hide his feelings. “No,” he said, “but I’d lend you whatever money I could.”
She snapped out of it, smiled, and said, “I know you would, partner. You’re probably the only cop I’d ever get involved with.”
Then Aaron’s heart rate increased another five beats, until she added, “In a business deal.”
Aaron turned his face toward her and said, “I guess if I ever get married, it shouldn’t be to another cop, should it?”
“Why do you ever have to get married?” she said. “Look around you. Just about all the married people at Hollywood Station are two-and three-time losers.”
“I don’t know,” he said, trying to keep it casual, when it was anything but. “It gets lonely living alone, and it gets tiresome dating people that I don’t even wanna be with. Don’t you feel like that sometimes?”
She didn’t answer him and didn’t seem to notice his moonstruck look as they drove east on the cemetery road, his normal sixty-two-beats-a-minute heart rate approaching three digits. They met a security guard at the entrance who directed them to the mortuary. The guard was a sixty-ish wisp of a guy who looked as though he didn’t want to be entering open doors in mortuaries after dark or, for that matter, at any other time.
Aaron cut the headlights when they were well down the road from the mortuary, and the black-and-white glided in and stopped a short distance away. Aaron and Sheila got out, leaving the doors ajar, and walked quietly to the side entrance of the mortuary, not expecting to find anything but a door left open by a careless employee. What’s to steal in a mortuary?
After they were inside, Sheila was the first to hear them: male voices. She held up a hand, and both cops froze, drew their pistols, and listened.
“Yours is an ugly pig!” one voice said.
“Fuck you,” the other said, giggling. “Yours is a hundred years old!”
“No!” Sheila whispered, looking wide-eyed at Aaron, her shocked expression saying, It can’t be!
He nodded with a grimace, his expression saying, Yes, it can.
Aaron led the way into the mortuary, quietly creeping down a carpeted hallway to a room lit by lamps, where loved ones had been embalmed that day and cosmetic work had begun. There were two female corpses and one male corpse in the room, each on its own table. On top of the elderly female corpses were two Hollywood tweakers, both naked, both tatted out, both sharing a jar of Vaseline and a glass pipe full of crystal meth. They were side by side, having pushed the tables together for buddy bonding, and had gotten into the mortician’s makeup box. One corpse had grotesque kewpie lips, while the other had eye shadow so thick she looked masked.
The scrawnier of the two white men said, “You got too much eye paint on her. She looks like a fucking raccoon!”
“Don’t get me started on your shitty work!” the other said. “The fucking Joker looks more natural than yours.” Then he turned his face to the corpse he’d mounted and said, “Goddamn it, bitch, can’t you move a little bit? I feel like I’m fucking my ex-wife!”
Both meth-crazed tweakers were laughing hysterically when Sheila Montez switched on the overhead light and said quietly, “Please give me an excuse to kill both of you.”
By the time they got the tweakers dressed and handcuffed and the night-watch detective and the watch commander were notified, two night-watch units had arrived and impounded the tweakers’ car, which they found parked on the north side of the memorial park. When 6-X-66 finally got to Hollywood Station, they put one prisoner in a holding tank, a little room with a bench and a big shatterproof window. They walked their other prisoner into the detective squad room, where Compassionate Charlie Gilford was watching Showbiz Tonight on his own little TV, which he kept in a desk drawer.
The detective switched off his TV, stretched, yawned, and stood up. His rumpled Men’s Wearhouse suit coat hung on the chair behind him, and for a few seconds, Sheila Montez had to gawk at the detective’s incredible necktie, decorated with what were apparently meant to be some sort of cubist embellishments. Compassionate Charlie, who liked to go bargain shopping for Tijuana imports on Alvarado Street, had bought it from a Mexican street vendor who kept pointing to the design, saying, “Diego Rivera!” Except that it looked like something Diego Rivera might have sketched on a tablecloth during a bout of d.t.’s.
“Okay, so what’s the big deal about this?” Charlie said to Aaron, while Sheila took the tweaker into an interview room.
“Didn’t the watch commander talk to you about it?” Aaron said.
“Is this the cemetery deal?” Charlie said, cranky from being pulled away for more paperwork.
“It sure is,” Aaron said.
The detective walked into the interview room, looked at the tweaker who sat in the chair nodding off, sniffed the air, and walked back out.
“That dude reeks,” Charlie said. “What am I smelling?”
“Formaldehyde,” Sheila Montez said, lip curling.
Sergeant Lee Murillo entered the detective squad room then and said to Aaron and Sheila, “Well, there’s no doubt about it. You two get the Almost-a-Hollywood-Moon award. One extra-large pizza with the works.”
Charlie Gilford glanced quizzically at the sergeant and said, “For what?”
Sergeant Murillo said, “For handling the weirdest call of the night.” Then the detective looked at Aaron Sloane and said, “Were those two hemorrhoids boning male corpses or female corpses?”
“Female corpses,” Aaron said.
“Well, shit!” Compassionate Charlie Gilford scoffed. “You call that weird?” Then he repeated the mantra heard every day around the police station in that unique part of the world: “This is fucking Hollywood!”
NINE
"Get up!” Eunice yelled, and Dewey smelled smoke and and bolted upright, thinking the place was on fire. But the smoke he smelled was from the cigarette dangling from Eunice’s mouth.
When he looked up at her, he said, “Oh, shit.”
“Don’t gimme that oh-shit look,” Eunice said. “It’s eight o’clock. This is the second time I’ve had to come in here.”
Dewey said, “You’re killing me, Eunice! Killing me! I can’t work fifteen hours a day. Nobody can.”
She stared at him and said, “You don’t have to work at all, Dewey. This is Hollywood, U.S.A. You’re free to sit on your ass all day long and watch Girls Gone Wild videos if that’s what you want. But not in my apartment. Not in my life. Make up your mind.”
“Goddamnit, Eunice, I don’t have any morning appointments,” he said, cursing himself for the whine that drizzled out every time she looked as serious as a stroke, as serious as poverty.
“What’re you talking about, no morning appointments? You got houses to rent. I told you there was a ten-o’clock showing on the fourth house. And then you got two more appointments on that same house this afternoon and two more appointments tonight on the fifth and sixth houses. You claimed your burglar partners were gonna come through.”
He swung his feet onto the floor and kept his head ducked, ready for the explosion. “There won’t be a third, fourth, fifth, or sixth house.”
“Do you mean what I think you mean?”
“The last thing I did last night before I came home was check on them. You were right. The guys I hired only changed the lock on one and lied about doing the others. They gave me dummy keys for the rest.”
“Well, no shit, Dewey!” Eunice said, lip twisted in her supersneer. “Just like I predicted, whenever you hire tweakers.”
“You think I can hire unemployed mechanical engineers, Eunice? It’s the fucking world we live in. You can’t trust anybody.”
“Outsmarted by tweakers,” Eunice said. “Well, no shit!”
“They didn’t outsmart me! I told you, they threatened me. They coulda killed me, not that you’d care. I had no choice, Eunice. Som
etimes that’s what happens out there.”
She stood smoking and looking down at him with contempt and said, “Well, get out on the street and pick up the noon delivery in Los Feliz. Do something to earn your keep, Dewey. That’s all I can say to you. Earn your keep like I do. Consider it a warning.”
“Here I lie, numb and helpless!” he said, using lines he’d delivered in dinner theater. “While a croaking albatross smothers me in its wings, plucking out my eyes, devouring my guts!”
“You sound like such a sissy when you go all theatrical,” Eunice jeered. “If Hugo was here, he’d say you oughtta consider testosterone shots.”
His head was throbbing when she stalked out of the room. He sat on the side of the bed for several minutes, listening to her computer keys begin clickety-clacking. He thought about his desperate life and how there didn’t seem to be a way to change it. If only he still got calls from his agent. He’d take any job he could get, anything that paid a stipend. He would read for parts, even audition for those snotty kids making Internet films. He’d do dinner theater gigs in the suburbs. If only he still had an agent. He opened the nightstand drawer and took out the cell phone he used for Tristan and Jerzy.
When he was shaved, dressed, and heading out the door, Eunice barely glanced at him, except to snort at his Jakob Kessler getup. He turned the dead bolts and had a flashback of Eunice’s face when his eyes had popped open that morning, of that dangling cigarette and that horrible scowl. Today she’d had the deepest furrows in her brow he’d seen in months. He felt so desperate and miserable and angry that he was emboldened to strike back somehow.
Before slamming the door behind him, he said, “You know, Eunice, your everyday scowl lines are especially mean and evil today. Why don’t you call your dermatologist?”
“Dude, who won?” the forklift driver said to Malcolm Rojas when they were uncrating a washing machine in the warehouse.
Malcolm reflexively touched his face. The flesh was tender under his left eye where the woman had nicked him with her fist after she’d struggled to her feet. She was strong, that fat bitch, and she’d fooled him with her begging and crying, but then she’d made a quick move and was on her feet and almost got away.
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