Police and Thieves: A Novel
Page 13
When I woke up, it was near twilight and Eichmann was rudely shaking my shoulder, and complaining, “Get going, damn it. You’re late. Why can’t you ever do anything on time.” He threw my shoes on the sleeping bag and walked away, carping, “Everybody’s so disorganized around here.”
Latkes? I was losing my mind having dreams like that. I didn’t even know my father. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, put on my shoes, and tied my laces in double knots. Bobo opened the garage door; the springs hadn’t been oiled in years, and the noise they made was psychotic, earsplitting. Then it hit me: Eichmann hadn’t made any provisions in his plan for the police. This was unlike him, and it fed into my notion that he was getting ill in the brain. I said to him, “What about the cops?”
He folded his arms over his chest and scoffed at me with a mean little smile on his veal-colored lips. “You’re back on that crusade? Why can’t you do what you’re told and leave the rest to me. I’ll take care of it.”
“Yeah? How? You didn’t say anything about what to do when the cops show up. Dee Dee isn’t going to come alone.”
“No, he won’t. But he doesn’t trust them any more than he trusts us. He won’t do anything that’s a risk. He ain’t that audacious. We’ve got a chance to clean him out for good.”
“How can you be so naive?”
“Naive?” Eichmann’s oversized ears twitched. “What’s that? Are you capping on me?”
The clod didn’t know what the word meant, and he was leading us into a massacre. Furthermore, the irony of my destination was not lost on me. Dolores Park used to be a Jewish cemetery before the turn of the century. When the neighborhood changed hands, going Irish, the bodies were disinterred and laid elsewhere. Now it was my turn to get buried there. “Dee Dee is going to fuck us and leave us for the cops.”
“No, he ain’t, Doojie.”
“Oh, the swami predicts? Don’t fool yourself.”
“You know what? You’re getting chicken on me.”
“Yeah, so what if I am? What if I can’t take your shit anymore, then what?”
“Don’t give me that jive-ass shit! You’ve got to pull your weight on this job!”
“What for?”
“You’re asking me what for? I can’t believe you’re that dumb. I’ll tell you what for!”
“Sell him an eighth and steal his money, is that what this is about?”
“You’re getting out of line!”
“Why is this so important?”
Eichmann was ecstatic with rage; the red-bite scar on the side of his nose flared up like a bougainvillea in bloom. “Because selling weed is what we do … and we ain’t stopping for Dee Dee or Flaherty or anybody else!”
I was bowled over by his logic. Eichmann arched his eyebrows, smirking at me. I took the eighth from his outstretched hand, then I stepped through the garage’s door into the parking lot. Except for a couple of kids playing stickball on the pavement, the street was deserted. I took a breath to clear my head. A seashell-pink-and-robin’s-egg-blue sunset was settling over Mission’s brown sagging ghetto skyline, cooling off the neighborhood. Eichmann said, “Go up to the park and check it out, okay? That’s no biggie, is it? If everything’s proper, we take Dee Dee. If it ain’t, we don’t.”
“You all right, Doojie?” Bobo asked.
Eichmann’s dislike for me was scribbled all over his ruddy, scarred face. We looked at each other without the slightest hint of warmth. He was saying, “You ain’t going to let me down, are you?”
“Have I ever done that? What are you getting at?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t. If I say I don’t, I don’t.”
“I think you want to bail out on me.”
“This isn’t about you. It’s Dee Dee I’m worried about and the cops. Why can’t you understand that?”
“He ain’t shit. Now, are you going to do this or what?”
I gave up and let it go. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”
“We’ll watch your back.”
“Swear?”
“I swear it. We’ll be close by.”
Since I had nothing further to say to Eichmann, I put the eighth in a Marlboro hard-pack, turned around, and walked off toward Eighteenth Street, dragging my feet. Dolores Park was four blocks away, but the way I was feeling, it would take me ten years to get there. Eichmann yelled at me when I got to the sidewalk, “Hey, don’t fuck up, all right?”
All my life I’d been counted on to fail, to come up short. If there was a mistake, if there was a crime, you could pin it on Doojie. If you needed a scapegoat, some patsy who’d take the heat, you could always find me on San Carlos Street. Not this time. I periscoped my head into my jacket collar and said under my breath, repeating it like a mantra, “This is the last deal I do.”
28
If the passengers on the Church Street cable car felt like peering out the window, and if they saw anything in the dark of Dolores Park, they might have noticed the halo of corruption around Dee Dee’s head. The snitch was on top of the landing near the Nineteenth Street footbridge waiting for me. I doubted the cops were paying him to set us up. The narcs wouldn’t give him anything in return, no rewards. At best, Dee Dee would be promised limited immunity, like a warranty on a cheap car.
Dee Dee was so much like Eichmann: They both wanted revenge. Dee Dee wanted it on us; Eichmann wanted it on the world. Revenge was all the dope fiends on Mission Street ever talked about, the glory of getting even, as if it was their sacred duty.
Behind Dee Dee, on the other side of the bridge and down the stone steps toward the Muni stop at Eighteenth Street, I heard the faint crackle of a police radio riding the breeze. The cops were in the soccer field, hiding under the wall that sheltered the playing grass.
I wanted to make Dee Dee wait. Doojie Sr. used to say patience was a hunter’s greatest virtue. He proved this the time he took my mother and me duck hunting at the Crystal Springs Reservoir down the peninsula near San Mateo. We packed a picnic and took a route through the mountains at La Honda. When we arrived at the reservoir, the mosquitoes were thick in the air, and it was twilight. Doojie Sr. got his shotgun from the trunk and said to my mother, “You wait here and don’t make a sound. I’ll be right back.”
He shut the door and disappeared into the bush. My mother turned to me and smiled with her mouth, but not with her eyes. Then she lit a cigarette. A few minutes later, a single shot trumpeted in the pitch-black distance. I fell asleep in the baby seat, and my mother gave herself a pedicure by the glow of a flashlight.
Hours later, she jumped at the sound of some movement in the underbrush. She rolled down the window and called out, “Who’s there?”
Doojie Sr. reeled over to the Hillman, bleeding from his scalp. He opened the driver’s door and my mother wailed, “Oh, God! Where have you been?”
My stepfather’s head was slick with blood, as if he had dipped his skull into a gallon can of paint. He gasped, “I’ve been unconscious. I slipped on a branch and knocked myself out on a rock. That’s when the gun went off. I’m lucky I didn’t shoot myself in the foot.”
Dolores Park was vacant except for a solitary man walking his dog on the Twentieth Street path. Much as I hated to admit it, the night was gorgeous. A crescent moon was rising over a wedge of fog, throwing spears of light against the houses, the palm trees, and all the streets in the Mission. I couldn’t see the cops, but I was close to the footbridge, and I had a head start on them if things turned sour.
It was time to proceed to the next stage of Eichmann’s plan and make contact with Dee Dee. My heart was pounding against my rib cage like a prisoner trying to break out of a jail cell.
I twisted my ankle in a snarl of rosebush bramble, then jumped over the cable-car tracks and climbed up the grassy embankment to the bridge. By the time I got to the walk path, I was sweating buckets.
Dee Dee saw me and waved his arm, yipping, “Doojie, Doojie, how ya doing? Where’s everybody else?”
“I’m by
myself. What did you expect, a marching band? I got an eighth for you. Show me your money, Dee Dee.”
“How come you came alone? I was hoping Bobo would be here. Eichmann too.”
“They’re busy. What difference does it make? Do you want the weed or not? I ain’t got all night.”
“They’re too busy for me? Even for me?”
“Yeah, it’s amazing, ain’t it? You being the most important person in San Francisco and everything.”
“Too bad. God, wouldn’t it have been cool to have all of us together again? I wanted to see them.”
“I’m sure you did. How come?”
“I ain’t got a reason. Just trying to be sociable, you know, friendly. Is that okay?”
“I don’t have no feelings about it one way or another. Let’s just make the deal.”
“Ah, Doojie …”
“Yeah?”
“You and me go back a ways, don’t we?”
“Sure do. Longer than I care to remember.”
Dee Dee pulled out a roll of cash from his pocket, luring me in closer to him. He’d been on a methedrine binge; I could smell him from three feet away. He gave me a queer grin, then wind-milled his right arm. That was the signal. I looked over my shoulder—Flaherty was scrambling up the stairs, causing a ruckus. His presence was so sudden, it didn’t scare me.
I plucked the money out of Dee Dee’s hand and took off, shooting between the narc and him, running across the grass to the tennis courts. In two blinks of an eye, I was on the sidewalk at Dolores Street. Flaherty was raging, “Get him! Get him!”
The man with the best arrest record in the police department had made a mistake. Using Dee Dee as his foil was a bad idea. Untested, the junkie folded under fire. I was joined at the phone booth on Eighteenth Street by Eichmann, and we went over to Guerrero, scooting past the bakery at the corner.
Flaherty was behind us, but we were pulling away from him; sprinting was no fun for a man of his girth. If speed had to decide the race, I was going to beat Flaherty hands down. But in the end endurance would decide the contest, determine who would run the longest without having a nervous breakdown.
When we were midway down Dearborn, Flaherty appeared at the end of the street. There was no getting away from the dybbuk. At Duggan’s Funeral Home on Seventeenth Street, a service was letting out. The front steps to the chapel were packed with mourners. The parking lot to the side of the mortuary was a crush of black hearses. Irish families lived in the Sunset District now that they had more money, but they still came home to the Mission when they died. I ran to the intersection of Sixteenth Street, losing myself among the junk dealers and prostitutes milling by Dalva and the Roxie Cinema, but that didn’t stop Flaherty. He was right behind me.
Doojie Sr. said I always had a knack for finding trouble. Once he got it in his head to take me to a kid’s birthday party. We climbed into the Hillman and drove out of town, turning off the freeway and climbing a road to an exclusive suburban enclave in the Los Altos Hills. The backseat of the Hillman had its usual cache of weapons: two Browning Defender shotguns and a Chinese SKS assault rifle wrapped in an oilcloth. Doojie Sr. was feeling magnanimous toward me because he’d just come back from Florida after a successful three-month gig poaching alligators in the Everglades.
There were thirty kids at the party along with their parents. I was five years old, and I didn’t have good manners. Doojie Sr. went straight to the punch bowl, got himself a cup of grog, and started flirting with our host’s wife, a woman in green capris with a matching cashmere sweater.
Her husband had organized all the kids around a pink papier-mâché donkey piñata hanging from the ceiling in the living room. A blindfold was placed over the birthday boy’s eyes, and he was given a stick to strike the donkey. Everyone screamed when he took a swing and missed the piñata, nearly falling over. He flailed wildly and by chance struck pay dirt—the donkey’s legs broke open and a shower of toys fell to the floor.
A black plastic squirt gun lay among the goodies, and I jumped on top of a girl’s shoulders to get my fingers around its fluted barrel. Another girl with bobbed hair tried to take the gun away from me, but I refused to give it up, and she started to bawl. The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by a posse of adults. The toy was wrenched from my hands by Doojie Sr. who shamed me in front of everyone. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know how to share weapons?”
He and the host’s wife escorted me from the living room downstairs to the basement, a bare-walled room occupied by a Maytag washer and dryer. In the doorway, Doojie Sr. put his hand on the hostess’s hip and pointed at a chair next to the dryer, saying to me, “You sit there and cool out. The next time you want a gun, just ask politely. That’s all you have to do. It works like a charm.”
Flaherty was getting closer. I ran down Valencia toward the police station with my whole life unreeling before my eyes. Louis flashed through my mind—after the beating he received from Flaherty, I’d gone to his house in Bernal Heights to deliver him a courtesy eighth, a token of my esteem for not ratting on me.
I’d never been to his home before. It was a two-storied cottage on the northwestern slope, the more affluent section of the hill. How he managed to afford that, I don’t know. Louis let me in the door and I squeezed by him into a spotless vestibule, then he went ahead of me into the kitchen, saying over his shoulder like he was very busy, “Follow me.”
He led me into a sunny nook that faced the blue waters of the East Bay and the shipping yards in China Basin. A huge, red-tinged smokestack rose up from the shoreline, dwarfing the warehouses around it. Louis had two frying pans going on his stove. One of them was crackling with six eggs, the other pan was smoking with bacon. The toaster popped up two pieces of browned Wonder bread. By the sink there was a plate of yams and a stack of corn muffins on a napkin. Louis had an apron around his waist, and he was drinking buttermilk from a carton; there was a ring of it drying around his mouth. He squinted at me, asking, “So, Doojie, you want something to eat?”
A lone black woman panhandler in a watch cap was standing by Taqueria El Toro with a paper cup in her hand. Behind her, the sandstone bulwarks of the police station loomed at the intersection, huge and silent against the neon-lit foggy sky. Eichmann shouted at me, telling me to watch my back. I craned my head: Flaherty’s obsidian eyes burned into mine.
Not everyone was in hot water like me. Five blocks away on Mariposa Street, Loretta was probably taking a nap at Eichmann’s aunt’s place. The old woman’s studio was small and filled with her chotchkes, but she had an extra fold-out bed for Loretta.
Mrs. Popolovsky was Eichmann’s only living relative, the elder sister of his long-gone mother. Every time I went over there to see how Loretta was doing, Mrs. Popolovsky would wave me in the door with a scolding, saying, “Come in. Come in already.”
She was thrilled Loretta was having Eichmann’s baby. She was already praying for a boy and asking Loretta if they would bring up the child in the orthodox way. I don’t know how Mrs. Popolovsky ended up in Oklahoma. Eichmann never told me, but her drawl was as pronounced as Loretta’s. She wore a sack dress with light-brown orthopedic shoes, the kind you laced up the sides. Her English was poor, and to compensate for it, she used gobs of volume to make herself understood. Mrs. Popolovsky was feeding the pregnant girl schmaltz night and day. “To fatten up the baby and make it strong like its father,” she said.
The thing of it was Loretta wasn’t a Jew. Mrs. Popolovsky didn’t give two hoots. “A baby is a baby. It’s a saint. It isn’t born a ganef. It becomes one.”
At the stop light, Eichmann waved his arms and ran into the street, moving against the traffic toward the Elbo Room, a club on the corner of Sycamore. The place used to be known as Amelia’s, the only dyke bar in San Francisco.
Eichmann pushed his way in the door, past the people queuing up to pay the cover charge. He never paid for anything if he could help it. The doorman, a muscle-bound laid-back guy in a fedora and gold chains, d
idn’t have a chance to register what Eichmann was doing. Eichmann went by him so fast, all he left behind was his musky smell.
I leapfrogged over a parked car and bounded into the street, crossing the yellow dividing line, intent on following Eichmann into the Elbo Room. My approach was foxy. On the sidewalk I flopped onto my stomach and snaked in between the legs of a man in a Nike jacket, inching forward. The bouncer heard some noise, but I was well below eye level, and he didn’t see me until I was already in the door and past him.
Nobody bothered me when I got to my feet. A girl in a tight iridescent minidress brushed my chest with her bare arm. She made a wince that passed for a smile, looking down her aquiline nose at me.
Eichmann was sitting by himself on a barstool in the corner next to the men’s room. He had his back to the wall and he was nursing a beer. His frayed pant cuffs were high on his shins, exposing his alabaster pale ankles and the drooping black nylon socks he’d worn for weeks. He was moving his foot to the beat of the music, letting his eyes roam across the room.
Maybe I should have let him alone. He was trying to get away from me as much as he was trying to get away from Flaherty. But the seat next to him was empty and I climbed aboard it. The bartender looked at me, though I didn’t say anything. A breathless waitress came over and dumped a load of dirty glasses onto the dish rack. A big black dude stalked out of the rest room, slamming the door behind him, just inches from Eichmann’s ear. My partner took it all in with a world-weary gaze and said to me, “What do you want, Doojie?”
I wanted a lot of things. The landlord showed up the other evening with a rental cop, a private security-guard type, to evict us. We stopped what we were doing, shut the roll-down door, and barricaded ourselves inside the garage. Since we’d gone shopping that morning at Trader Joe’s, we had enough supplies to withstand a siege for at least a week. Eichmann peered through the slats in the wall facing the driveway and said, “These guys are idiots.”