by James Ellroy
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475
“Lloyd, it’s true. I’ve also heard that Fred Gaffaney has got a file on you. Nasty stuff, some sex shit you pulled when you worked Venice Vice.”
“That was fifteen fucking years ago, and I wasn’t the only one!”
Dutch said, “Sssh, sssh. I’m just telling you. I don’t know if Gaffaney is in with Braverton and McManus on this, but I know it’s all coming down bad for you. Retire, Lloyd. With your master’s, you can teach anywhere. You can do consulting work. You can—”
Lloyd screamed. “No!” and picked up the phone, then saw the framed photograph of his family on the nightstand and put it back down. “No. No. No. If they want me out, they’ll have to fight me for it.”
“Think of Janice and the girls, Lloyd. Think of the time you’d have to spend with them.”
“You’re talking shit, Dutch. Without the Job, there’s nothing. Even Janice knows that. So fuck ’em all except six, and save them for the pallbearers. See you in L.A., Captain Peltz.”
Dutch’s voice was soft and hoarse. “Until then, Sergeant Hopkins.”
Lloyd hung up and walked into the bathroom, cursing when he saw the daintily wrapped soap bars and his disposable razor crusted with shaving cream. Muttering “Fuck it,” he soaked a washcloth in cold sink water and wiped his face, then straightened his necktie, wondering why he always wore one, even when he didn’t have to. When he looked in the mirror, the answer came to him, and he prepared to do battle with the institution that had given him all of his nightmares and most of his dreams. At a stand of pay phones in the lobby, Lloyd found a copy of the San Francisco yellow pages and leafed through the A’s until he hit “Attorneys.”
Dismissing the shysters who had full-page ads mentioning their low rates and drunk-driving experience, he got out a pencil and notepad and started jotting down names and addresses at random, filling up half a page before he noticed Brewer, Cafferty and Brown at an address on Montgomery that was probably only a half dozen blocks from where he was standing. Again muttering “Fuck it,” he smoothed his necktie and walked there, jamming his hands into his pockets to keep from running.
The waiting room of Brewer, Cafferty and Brown was furnished in the old-line California style of leather armchairs and brass floor lamps; the photographs on the walls blew the sense of tradition apart. Lloyd walked in and knew immediately that chance had directed him to either the best or the worst law firm ever to be considered by a defendant in an interdepartmental police trial. 476
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Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver glared down at him, giving the clenched-fist salute; a group photo of the United Bay Area Gay Collective beamed down. Hanging over the reception desk was a purple wall tapestry with “Power to the People!” embroidered in the center, and beside it there was a photographic blowup of dozens of Oriental men in karate stances. Lloyd examined the picture, figuring it for an outtake from a martial arts movie. He was wrong; it was the Boat People’s Political Action Army. Sitting down to wait for someone to welcome him, he felt like he had been given the D.T.s without benefit of booze. After a few minutes, a tall black woman in a tweed suit walked in and said, “Yes, may I help you?”
Lloyd stood up, noticing the woman catch sight of the .38 strapped to his belt. “I came to see an attorney,” he said. “Your office was close to my hotel, so I came here.”
“Then you don’t have an appointment?”
The woman was staring openly at his gun. Lloyd took out his I.D. holder and badge and showed it to her. “I’m a Los Angeles police officer,” he said.
“I’m looking for an attorney to represent me at a police trial board. An outof-town lawyer is probably a good idea. I’ve got forty thousand dollars in the bank, and I’ll spend every dime to keep my job.”
The woman smiled and walked back out of the room. Lloyd held eye contact with Huey Newton until she returned and said, “This way, please, Mr. Hopkins,” and led him to an inner office. A pale man was sitting behind a desk reading a newspaper. “Mr. Brewer, Mr. Hopkins,” the woman said, then exited and closed the door behind her.
Brewer looked up from his paper. “L.A.P.D., huh? Well, we know they didn’t bring you up on charges of excessive force, because they don’t recognize that concept.” He stood up and extended his hand. Lloyd shook it, measuring the man’s words, deciding his abrasiveness was a test. “I like your office,” he said as he took a chair next to the desk. “Out of the low-rent district. You do a lot of oil-leasing contracts on the side, take down the pictures of the niggers when the fat cats come to call?”
Brewer filled a pipe with tobacco and tamped it down. “So much for light conversation. I don’t have to agree with a client’s ideology in order to represent him. Why are you getting a trial board?”
Lloyd forced himself to talk slowly. “The overall charge will probably be dereliction of duty. I’m currently on a six-week suspension, with pay. The
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specific charge or charges will have to do with a recent perjury I committed at a murder trial arraignment. I—”
Brewer jabbed the air with his pipe stem. “Why did you commit perjury?
Is this a common practice of yours?”
“I lied to protect a woman innocently involved in the case,” Lloyd said softy, “and I’ve lied previously only to circumvent probable-cause statutes in regard to hard felonies.”
“I see. By any chance were you intimately involved with this woman?”
Lloyd grasped the arms of his chair. “That’s none of your business, Counselor. Next question.”
“Very well. Let’s backtrack. Tell me about your career with the L.A.P.D.”
Lloyd said, “Nineteen years on the Job, fourteen as a detective-sergeant, eleven in Robbery/Homicide Division. I’ve got a master’s in criminology from Stanford, I’m considered the best homicide detective in the Department, I’ve earned more commendations than I can count, I’ve successfully investigated a number of highly publicized murder cases. My arrest record is legendary.”
Brewer lit his pipe, then blew smoke at the ceiling. “Impressive, but what’s more impressive is that someone with such an outstanding record should have incurred such departmental disfavor. I should think that one perjury slipup wouldn’t have been sufficient to jeopardize your career. I know the L.A.P.D. looks after their own.”
“There’s other stuff. Minor fuckups over the years. The high brass sent me to a shrink. I shot my mouth off about things I shouldn’t have.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to get rid of it! Because I never thought they’d try to do this to me!”
“Please calm down, Sergeant. There are ways to get around one psychiatrist’s report, usually by mitigating it with the report of a different analyst, one with a superior reputation.”
Lloyd gripped the sides of the desk until he felt his hands go numb.
“Counselor, this isn’t a trial in a court of law, this is a kangaroo cop trial, and academic credentials don’t mean shit. Saving my job is a long shot from the gate, and making a department employee look bad would only make the odds worse.”
Brewer slid back in his chair and stared past Lloyd at the far wall.
“Well . . . there are other approaches. You have a family?”
“Wife and three daughters. I’m separated from them.”
“But you remain cordial?”
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“Yes.” Lloyd stared at the attorney, who kept his eyes fixed on a point just above his head and said, “Then we can exploit them as character witnesses, gain sympathy for you that way. You yourself present an interesting picture, one that can be used to advantage. Are you aware that your clothes don’t fit? They’re at least two sizes too large. We can portray you in court as a victim of your own conscientiousness, a man driven to radical weight loss by overzealous dedication to duty! If you were to lose even more weight, that sympath
y factor would be increased. With proper coaching your daughters would elicit the mo—”
“Look at me,” Lloyd hissed, holding down a picture of his hands around Brewer’s throat, squeezing until the lawyer’s averted eyes popped out of his skull. “Look at me, you cocksucker.”
Brewer closed his eyes. “Control your language, Sergeant. I want you to get used to wearing a penitent expression, one that wi—”
Lloyd stepped around the desk, grabbed Brewer by the arms and shoved him into a glass bookcase. The glass shattered; law texts spilled to the floor. Lloyd took hold of Brewer’s neck with his left hand, and balled his right hand into a fist and aimed it at the lawyer’s squeezed-shut eyes. Then he heard a scream, and his peripheral vision caught the receptionist with her hands clasped over her mouth. He pulled the punch at the last second, sending his fist through an unbroken pane of glass. Shoving Brewer aside, Lloyd held his bloody hand in front of him. “I . . . I’m sorry, goddamn you . . . I’m sorry.”
6
Duane Rice looked at Bobby “Boogaloo” Garcia and knew two things: that, ex-welterweight or not, he could take him out easy; and that the little taco bender was incorrigibly mean. After a jailhouse handshake, Rice looked around his living room, saw quality stuff and pegged him as a nondoper who gangsterized because he was too lazy to work and in love with the game. Thinking, so far so good, he threw out a line to test his smarts: “I think I saw you fight once. You knocked Little Red Lopez through the ropes at the Olympic about ten, twelve years ago.”
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Bobby grinned and pointed to the couch; Rice sat down, seeing smarts up the wazoo and a big determination to milk the game. “Likable Louie must have told you that,” Bobby said. “Told you I’d dig it. Louie’s gotta be the dumbest smart guy I know, because only about six people in the world know about that, and I’m the only one cares, just like you’re the only one gives a rat’s ass about how you ragged that judge. Fucking Louie. How’d he manage to stay alive so long?”
“He can do things we can’t do,” Rice said, reaching into the back of his waistband and pulling out a silencer-fitted .45 automatic. “Like this.” He worked the slide and ejected the clip, catching the chambered round as it popped into the air. “Dum dum. Likeable Louie has stayed alive for so long because guys who can get nice things are likable. Right, Bobby?”
Laughing, Bobby held out his hands. Rice tossed the .45 up to him, and he grabbed it and did a series of quick draws aimed at the Roberto Duran poster above the fireplace. “Pow, Roberto, pow! Pow! No más! No más! ”
Grinning from ear to ear, he handed the gun back butt first and slumped into a chair across from Rice. “Louie ain’t likable, Duane. He’s lovable. He’s so lovable that I’d suck his daddy’s dick just to see where he came from. How many of those you got?”
“Three,” Rice said. “One for you, one for me, one for your brother. Is he coming?”
“Any minute. Wanta trade pedigrees?”
“Sure. The vehicular manslaughter conviction you already heard about, three years at Soledad because I lost my temper and reverted to my white trash origins; a bust on one count of G.T.A., a bullet in the County, reduced to six months. Y.A. parole and County probation, both of which I’m hanging up, because car thief/mechanic is what my P.O. calls a ‘modus operandi—occupational stress combination.’ In other words, he expects me to sling burgers at McDonald’s for the minimum wage. No way.”
Bobby nodded along, then flashed a grin and said, “How many cars you boost before you got busted?”
“Around three hundred. You and your brother did B&Es, right?”
“Right. At least four, five hundred jobs, with one bust, and that was a fluke.”
“What did you do with the money? Louie pays a good percentage, and he said you guys aren’t into dope.”
Bobby cracked the knuckles of his right hand. “I own this house, man. Joe and I used to own a coin laundromat and a hot-dog stand, and I bankrolled 480
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a couple of fighters after I quit myself. What about you? Three hundred G.T.A.s and you drive up in an old nigger wagon looks like something the cat dragged in. What’d you do with your money?”
“I spent it,” Rice said, boring his eyes into Bobby’s, testing for real now, wondering if retreating was the smart thing to do. The two-way stare held until Bobby’s eyelids started to twitch and he smiled/winced and said, “Shit, man, I like women as much as the next man.”
Stalemate: Bobby had backed off, but returned with a good shot, right on target. Rice tasted blood in his mouth, and felt his teeth involuntarily biting his cheeks. The bloody spittle lubed his voice so his next shot sounded strong to his own ears. “You think you can be cool with that gun? You think you can hold on to it and not shoot it?”
Three seconds into a new eyeball duel, the front door opened and Joe Garcia walked in carrying a bag of groceries. Rice broke the stare and stood up and stuck out his hand. Joe shifted the bag and grabbed the hand limply, then said, “Sorry I’m late,” and reached into the bag and pulled out a can of beer. He tossed it at Bobby, who shook it up, then popped the top and let the foam shoot out and spray his face. Chugalugging half the can, he cocked a thumb and forefinger at the Roberto Duran poster and giggled, “Pow! Pow! No más!
No más!” Rice watched Joe Garcia watch his older brother. He seemed wary and disgusted, a smart reaction for a tagalong criminal. Bobby killed his beer and plugged Roberto Duran a half dozen more times. Rice knew the charade was a machismo stunt to hide his fear. To hide his own contempt and relief, he watched Joe walk into the kitchen, then joined Bobby in laughing. When Joe returned looking outright scared and Bobby gazed over at him and wiped his lips, Rice said, “Let’s talk business, gentlemen.”
It took him half an hour to outline the plan exactly the way he’d heard it through the ventilator shaft, stressing that no one knew he’d heard it and that he’d cased the locations to a T, getting the facts validated straight down the line. He would be the “inside” man who actually hit the banks; they would be the “outside” men who held the two girlfriends captive at their pads and received the phone calls from the rogue bank manager. Gauging their reactions, Rice saw that Bobby wanted it for the money and the pure unadulterated thrill—every time he mentioned the kidnap angle the ex-welter popped his knuckles and licked his lips; he saw that Joe was afraid of the whole thing, but more afraid of putting the kibosh on his brother’s glee. For a two-time-only deal, they were solid partners. Finishing his pitch, Rice said, “A few other things: park your car on the
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nearest big street to the chicks’ pads. That’s Ventura for the Issler woman, Lankershim for Confrey. Wear gloves, but don’t put on your ski masks until right before you go in the door. Carry briefcases and dress well so you’ll blend in with the neighborhood. We meet at my place, Room 112 at the Bowl Motel on Highland up from the Boulevard, one hour after I call you at the girlfriends’ pads. Tie the chicks up and tape their mouths, but make sure they can breathe. Questions?”
Bobby Garcia said, “Yeah. You said you been casing both gigs for three days. What do you mean by that?”
“We’ve got two on-the-sly romances going down,” Rice said. “Hawley from the B. of A. and his bitch Issler; Eggers from Security-Pacific and his babe Confrey. Both men open their banks early, by themselves, and pilfer from the tellers boxes, probably small amounts. Okay, three days now, I’ve seen them tap the tills before opening. I’ve watched the guards and tellers arrive, parked across the street with binoculars. At both banks the money at the tellers stations is left there overnight!”
Joe Garcia raised his hand. “Why are these banks so lax about their security?”
“Good question,” Rice said. “I thought about that, then I did some more checking. First off, Hawley is a fuckup, too wimpy to run a tight ship. He’s got nothing but party-hearty types working there, you know, everybody smokes dope on thei
r lunch hour, young squares with no ambition, so they’ve got to get wasted to make it through the day. Also, the SecurityPacific is only half a block from an L.A.P.D. substation—maybe Eggers thinks he’s robbery-proof. Who knows? And who cares?”
Bobby held up his hands, then brought them together and began slowly cracking the knuckles on each finger. Finishing, he said, “Let’s cut the shit and get to the cut. It’s a righteous fucking plan, but how much are we gonna make?”
Rice said, “I’m guessing at least thirty K per bank minimum, sixty-forty split—sixty for me, forty for you guys to split.”
Bobby snorted. Joe said, “That sounds fair to me, you did all the wo—”
“Shut up, pendejo!” Bobby yelled. Lowering his voice, he said to Rice, “I like you, Duane, but you’re giving me the big one where it hurts the most. Fifty-fifty, or you go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.”
Rice faked a sheepish look; his split strategy had worked to perfection.
“Deal,” he said, sticking out his right hand for the brothers to grasp, wincing when Bobby slammed it with both callused palms, grinning when Joe’s 482
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tagalong hands followed. “Day after tomorrow for Hawley and Issler. I’ll meet you here tomorrow night at nine for a final briefing. If you need me for anything, call me at Louie’s bootleg number.”
The three men stood up and shook hands all around. Rice turned to walk out, and Bobby tapped him on the shoulder. “Ain’t you forgetting something, Duane?”
Rice smiled and did a two-gun pirouette, drawing one .45 from his back waistband and another from his shoulder holster, flipping them up by the silencered barrels and catching them by the grips. “Be cool,” he said as he handed the guns to Bobby.
Bobby “Boogaloo” Garcia grinned and emptied both .45s at his back living room wall, blowing Roberto Duran to shreds and the wall itself into a rubble heap of rotted wood, dust and plaster chips. Joe squinted through the gun smoke and saw that the shots had ripped apart the connecting door to his bedroom. Screaming, “You rape-o motherfucker, you wasted my albums!”
