by Peter Plate
Durrutti put his cards on the table. “I need your help, Jimmy.”
The Mexican got crafty. He pictured Durrutti’s wallet in his pocket. Unfortunately, there was no money in the billfold. “You do, huh? That ain’t hard to guess. What do I get out of it?”
He was honest. “Not a whole lot.”
“Orale. That’s what I thought. You ain’t got shit. Fair enough. Okay. Let’s do some thinking here. Do the cops know Paul Stevens is dust? Do they know the motherfucker is dead? Did you tell them that? Is anyone saying anything?”
Durrutti guided himself to the answer. “No.”
Jimmy was elated. He opened his mouth in a gory smile. He flung his hands in the air and did a tango. “Presto! There’s your answer. You’re clean. Pin the killing on the dead guy. That way, nobody gets hurt. Who’s gonna know? The only thing you have to do from now on in is keep your damn mouth shut.”
“Wrong,” Durrutti bitched. “If the cops can’t find the perpetrator and talk to him, they’ll drop the ball on me. They’re dogging me.”
“Yeah, so?” Jimmy hedged. “I can’t do anything about that.”
“You can tell them I’m not in on any of this.” Durrutti was on the brink of a tantrum.
Listening to him, Jimmy Ramirez let out a gale of laughter. He showed his mouth with the many fillings in his teeth. “Chale! You want me to rescue you? No fucking way, dude. I ain’t that stupid. Is that why you’ve been looking for me? To clean up after your poo-poo? You want a maid? Fucking Christ, you’ve been wasting your time, boy.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Keep your shit to yourself. You cover your own ass. I ain’t going to do it for you. I ain’t talking to the cops.”
“C’mon, man,” Durrutti wheedled. “I’m not gonna make it without you.”
“Fuck you ... coming across all co-dependent. Don’t you be whining at me with that crybaby shit.”
“I just need for you to talk.”
“I ain’t gonna talk. You think I want to be dead? In a pine box? You think I like the police? I ain’t into that, no how. I got things to do.” Jimmy pitched his Ray-Bans back on his nose and lowered his head, looked up and down, then snuffled, “I’m gonna say something I shouldn’t be saying, because it ain’t like I ain’t got my own troubles, see? But since you is seriously fucked up, here’s something that might help.”
Durrutti sensed a revelation in the making. “What’s that?”
Jimmy did a psychological three-sixty on him, going full circle, shifting from hostility to uncertainty to accommodation in an instant. His neck broke out in hives. “Well, this is fucked up. It really is, because I’ll tell you who did that killing.” His tired face was incandescent with righteousness. He cracked the knuckles on both hands and said, “That punk ass bitch Lonely Boy, that’s who. The vato is a time bomb and he did it.” He went pale and crossed himself and said a prayer in Spanish. Jimmy Ramirez looked like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. “Madre de Dios. But don’t you ever tell him I said that.”
“Lonely Boy?”
“That’s right, ese. The hijo de la grau puta is not to be trusted, let me assure you of this. He’ll stab you in the back the first chance he gets. He’s always saying how I should come party with him and his carnales? The motherfucker would turn me into barbecue if I got within a hundred yards of him.”
“I’ve never had any problems with him.”
Jimmy smiled meanly. “That’s because you’re white. You don’t know what’s going on. You’re on the moon.”
Durrutti was defensive. He hoped it didn’t show. “What’s that got to do with Lonely Boy?”
“Everything. The problem with you, you always be getting into things,” Jimmy sermonized. “You keep doing that, it will boomerang on your shit. Mind your own business and stay away from those Mara Salvatrucha pendejos. ”
“But I need your help.”
“I just did help you ... I dropped some wisdom on you and it was free. It was better than having the winning lottery ticket. I gave you everything I had. What more do you want? Go ahead and tell me.”
Durrutti was unraveling. The bump on his head throbbed. Fear bubbled out of his throat. “I want you to go to the cops and tell them I don’t know anything.”
Jimmy gauged the Jew’s sanity and chided, “Be cool. Don’t be a culo. What you need to do is lay low and ride this thing out. Stay at home and don’t answer the telephone. People ask you about it, don’t tell them anything.” He took a swipe at the lint on his Dickies shirt. “I need to work on my car.”
Durrutti would never forgive himself if he let Jimmy Ramirez out of his sight. Water sprang from his eyes. “Where are you going?”
“I just told you.” Jimmy adopted an attitude. “Are you stupid? I’ve got to fix my car.”
“But what about the cops?”
Jimmy snarled, getting testy, “If the cops want to have a chitchat with Jimmy Ramirez, let them try to find my ass. They’ll need a Rand McNally map. There ain’t nothing else I can do for you. Okay? Now I’ve got to go. Other people be looking for me too. Not just you. And you know what? I blew out the damn transmission on the Chevy. That’s where I’m going right now, to get a new one over on Potrero Street. All right.”
The light went green and Jimmy dived into the intersection without saying farewell. The shadows on Folsom Street were cerulean blue. Gunshots were going off a block away. The Mexican crossed the street, heading in that direction.
Durrutti watched the vato lope with short, angry, tight steps and realized he didn’t have to follow him. Silence would be his alibi. He walked back to the restaurant in a contemplative mood. While his problems hadn’t gone away, at least he’d found Jimmy. It was no mean accomplishment. He had been persistent. He’d achieved his goal. He could move on with his life.
The dinner crowd in Chava’s had dispersed; Maimonides was drinking his fourth cup of coffee when Durrutti flopped in the chair next to him. He waited for his friend to offer a field report, but when Durrutti didn’t speak, he asked, “So? I’m all ears. Was it Jimmy Ramirez? Did you guys have a summit conference?”
Durrutti related the edited version. “Yes, it was him.”
Maimonides was confounded. “And?”
“He told me who he thinks it was that killed the cop.”
Maimonides chewed on this for a full minute, raising his head and lowering it. Then he said, “I don’t think I want to know. I should ask. But I won’t. Let me ask you one question, though. Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Que sera, sera. Now what?”
“You tell me.” Durrutti was shattered. Now that Jimmy had come and gone, he was beat. Exhaustion wasn’t even the word for it. He was five miles underwater with tiredness.
Maimonides put his coffee cup on the table and burped. “The next step. We settle with Ephraim Rook.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Franklin Square on Bryant Street had housed the San Francisco Seals baseball stadium before it was torn down. The city’s biggest stars such as Lefty O’Doul, Frank Crosetti, Tony Lazzeri and Joe DiMaggio used to play there. Today all that was left of the park was a score of leafless trees, some bushes where the junkies shot up, a neglected tennis court and a handful of homeless shanties made from cardboard.
July’s heat was getting on everyone’s tits. The merchants on Bryant Street wanted the homeless out of Franklin Square. The mayor’s office put up a five thousand dollar reward for the capture of the cop killer. The switchboard at city hall was swamped with tips on how to handle both problems.
A junkie carrying a bedroll, three evangelicos in worsted linen suits, two Honduran flower vendors and a teenage hooker were under the eaves of the Sierra Hotel on Mission Street trying to stay cool. The afternoon heat had sucked the oxygen out of the atmosphere and burned it dry. The air seemed to incinerate with every breath you took. Bernal Hill was a soft blue blur in the distance. The fruit bins at Chavarria’s Market
were chock full of apples, oranges and mangoes that looked like a mirage.
A black and white, silent as a ghost, drifted to a halt at the stoplight in front of Pete’s Bar-B-Q joint. Zets was behind the wheel with a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth. He had a gander out the window and flipped when he saw Lonely Boy leaning against a wall outside Ritmo Latino.
The cop’s homely face was reborn pretty when he saw he had a chance to bust the loco. Zets made a U-turn in the road and laid a rubber burning brodie as he killed the engine on the sidewalk. He hopped out of the vehicle with his billy club, wielding the baton with two hands.
Lonely Boy wasn’t having a good day. Seeing Zets was the icing on the cake. He saw what his chances were of getting away and swiftly reasoned he had none—the black and white barred his escape. He made a split-second decision, one of his specialties. Instead of entering Ritmo Latino and trying to get away from the cop by some other route, he rushed forward to headbutt Zets in the stomach.
The lawman lost his footing and before he was able to recover his balance, Lonely Boy pried the billy club from his fingers. Turning the tables on the cop, the vato demonstrated technical virtuosity with the PR-24 as he showered blows on Zets’s neck and shoulders. He drummed the baton on the policeman’s riot helmet until his adversary was cross-eyed.
Zets feared he was losing the battle and unsnapped his nylon mesh holster and tugged out his service revolver as fast as he could. His momentum was fading; despite the heat, his balls were cold. He spun and mewled, “Drop the club and put your hands up, fuckwad!”
Lonely Boy wasn’t afraid of being shot. Bullets made him laugh. He wasn’t scared of Zets. Cops were clowns. He didn’t fear jail. Prison was a carnival. A festival of the damned. He wasn’t afraid of anything. Not even deportation. The only thing that frightened him was losing his honor in front of the Salvadorean men gathering around the policeman and him.
Zets aimed the pistol, propped his shooting hand with his other hand and repeated the order. “Put the stick down, fucker!”
A gun at your head calls for surrender. For Lonely Boy the closeness to his own destruction was an invitation to express the numerous grievances that had been building up in him ever since he’d joined the Mara Salvatrucha and started fighting with the police on Mission Street at the age of fourteen. Swinging the nightstick like a cossack he jitterbugged five steps and leaped on Zets.
The cop was unnerved by the vato’s rapid advance and barely had time to get a shot off. The bullet whizzed by Lonely Boy’s ear and nicked him, grooving a skid mark in his scalp, just as he let Zets have it on the chin with the billy club. Spitting blood and bits of his teeth, the cop lost his grip on the Smith and Wesson. The pistol dropped to the sidewalk with a sharp clatter and lay unattended and forlorn on the pavement.
To lose a gun on the job was a police officer’s worst nightmare. The only thing worse was death. The loss of your weapon brought shame that was unbearable and the dislike of your fellow peace officers. Your career in law enforcement was kaput. You were a pariah.
For a villain it was the height of bliss.
Lonely Boy went after the Smith and Wesson like he was picking daisies. The expression on his young-old face was divided between happiness—he had a cop’s gun—and an awareness of how alone he was at that instant. No one was more solitary than an outlaw with a gun in his hand. He held his arm up and discharged the revolver.
The shot punctured a parked Buick’s gas tank. The vehicle instantaneously went up in flames, engulfed by a riptide of black smoke that spiraled a hundred feet into the air and set the telephone lines on fire. The car was lifted off the road; the front end went up and then slammed down onto the asphalt as the trunk flew open and a spare tire leapfrogged out, rolling onto the sidewalk. Along Mission Street people stopped what they were doing to see what the gunfire was about. The doorways to Ritmo Latino, Hunt’s Donut’s and the Mission Villa Restaurant were filled with onlookers.
The cop saw the madness in Lonely Boy’s eyes when the loco drew a bead on him with the revolver. Never in his life had Zets so clearly seen the messenger of his own passing. The gun was enormous in the young man’s hand. Lonely Boy curled his finger around the pistol’s beveled trigger and the hammer clopped down on the firing pin, but nothing happened: there were no more bullets in the cylinder.
Lonely Boy peered at the useless weapon, feeling much older than his twenty-two years. Fatalism gave him a certain distance from himself. He hitched his shoulders in resignation, frazzled and tuckered out. He was too exhausted to run. Too pissed off to know what to do. Too heavyhearted to fight on.
He chucked the Smith and Wesson under a Ford sedan at the curb. With his foot he nudged the nightstick toward Zets. Whatever message Fortune had whispered into Lonely Boy’s ear, the vato loco showed nothing on his macerated features. He crammed his hands into the pockets of his khakis and assailed Zets with careless insolence.
“You gonna take care of business or what?”
The policeman didn’t pause to think. He didn’t think at all. He snagged the billy club and slid his riot gauntlets over the cudgel’s oiled pommel. Then he smashed the baton over Lonely Boy’s shaved head, partially splitting open his scalp.
Stars went round and round in Lonely Boy’s eyes. The blood in his ears felt like molasses. More blood streamed from his nose. With the last ounce of energy remaining in him—knowing he was lost in the jungle of his own dreams—he feinted once and coldcocked Zets in the mouth with his right fist. He followed the punch with a left hook and floored the cop with a haymaker on the nose.
Zets’s riot helmet was ripped from his head and went skipping into the gutter. Too stunned to react—his eyes were white with the concussion—he toppled over like a condemned building hit by a wrecking ball. He swan dived onto the pavement, landed on the cement chin first, and smacked himself in the face with the nightstick.
Blood was painted all around Lonely Boy’s saturnine mouth as he tiptoed over to the supine cop. He got down on his knees and calmly stripped Zets of his backup gun, a .25 derringer in an ankle holster, the nightstick and his gun belt. Zets moaned, as if he were asleep. Not one to gloat, Lonely Boy didn’t dawdle over the policeman. He’d save that for another time. Shouldering his loot, he pirouetted in a circle and melted away into the throng before anyone could stop him.
Chapter Twenty-six
A lemony wedge of fog was thinning in the morning’s pancake brown sky. A gaggle of general assistance recipients in orange workfare vests, evenly divided between two pregnant women and two middle-aged white guys, swept the sidewalks by Bruno’s night club, scaring off the sea gulls. A busted water main at the corner of Twentieth Street had the city employees who were doing the repairs knee-deep in sewage runoff.
Maimonides and Durrutti witnessed the overflow as they sat on the hood of the Seville and waited for Ephraim Rook. The street was peaceful because it was the first of the month and all the junkies had their welfare checks. Maimonides asked Durrutti, “You nervous about making the deal with Ephraim? You shouldn’t be. We have him by the short hairs.”
Durrutti’s stomach was flatulent. The prospect of seeing Rook again reminded him of Sugar, the thought of whom made his head swim. He did inventory, like they taught you in Alcoholics Anonymous. The police were on his back. He rented a room in a tenement hotel. Other men his age were in debt, working two jobs, married with kids. He concluded he could be worse off. He looked up at the sun and wished he’d brought his sunglasses. He replied, “No, I ain’t nervous. Not at all. I’m doing great. Never been better in my fucking life.”
Rook’s money was in a plastic laundry bag at Maimonides’s side. The cash was visible through the translucent plastic. Fifty thousand dollars in plain sight. The thief caressed it and purred, “That’s what I want to hear from you, Ricky. You should be glad. The money we’re getting from him makes me want to cry I’m so happy. Ephraim is seeing things our way. Good for him. Good for us. Good for the whole economy.”
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Maimonides’s soliloquy was drowned out by the rumble of Rook’s Saab. The charcoal-gray coupe swept into the parking space behind the Cadillac and stopped on a dime. The Saab’s motor died, but no one got out of the vehicle. A couple were in the car, a man and a woman behind the windshield. The expression on their faces was identical. Like chopped grief.
Sugar rolled down her window and looked at Durrutti. Courtesy of Ephraim Rook, she was decked out in a sleeveless, skin-tight Givenchy cocktail dress with a low decolletage. A single strand of cultured pearls decorated her freckled cleavage. Her hair was freshly cut and shampooed and had been revamped into a semi-pixie cut and redyed several blended shades of brown, ranging from chestnut to auburn. Her bare, salon-tanned arms were festooned with numerous turquoise bracelets. On her left hand was a diamond engagement ring the size of a golf ball. Her cheeks had been brushed with a fine-grained iridescent powder that made her skin glint like a disco globe in a nightclub.
Maimonides was scientific about Sugar’s presence. “Well, well, the show has begun. We have some guests. If Ephraim’s here to talk about the money, he made a drastic error in bringing a chick with him. Usually I don’t talk business in front of women. This time I will, but it will cost him dearly.”
What have I done to deserve this? Durrutti asked himself.
Rook extricated himself from the Saab and was overheard saying to Sugar, “You stay here, doll. I’ll handle this shit. It’ll only be a minute. Play the radio or something while you wait. I got some nice tapes. You like Art Pepper?” He was grim-faced and hoary, his eyes hidden behind a pair of Armani sunglasses. His mouth was a bulletin board of tension. His neck was terraced with wrinkles. Closely shaved, his skin was dehydrated. In the bright sunlight he seemed old and not very menacing.
“Friend,” Maimonides greeted him. A famished grizzly bear’s smile cut into his chapped lips. “We are overjoyed to see you. Yes, indeed.”
Ephraim had lost weight due to nervous agitation and being cuckolded. The Brooks Brothers suit he wore didn’t fit him. He stalked over to the Seville with a cheesy vinyl briefcase in one hand, ignoring the cars racing in the road. “Friend? Over my dead body. For fuck’s sake, Maimonides. You too, Ricky. The only reason I’m doing this is because I want to keep the peace. Unlike you assholes, I’m not a selfish guy. I put the people before myself. So where’s my fucking money, please?”
