by Hal Bodner
“No ma’am,” he squeaked.
“Carlos, I don’t believe you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Does that mean yes, you’re not being honest with me, or yes, I’m the wicked witch of the west?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Burman sighed. “I’m truly sorry about the coffee. I’m under a lot of pressure right now. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Burman sighed again. “No, you don’t.” She picked up the pen once again and swiveled her chair to look out of the office window. She began tapping the pen against her front teeth, thinking. She finally turned back to Carlos.
“Look, I’ll tell you what. Accept my apology and I’ll take you to lunch. We haven’t gone to lunch together for a few weeks. Would you like that?”
Carlos looked doubtful but eager.
Burman pressed her advantage. “I promise I will try, just try, mind you, not to yell. We’ll go to Montage. The maître d’ over there is very cute. We’ll sit so you can cruise him all through lunch, OK?”
Carlos began to relax slightly. He adored publicly basking in the company of his heroine. He smiled timidly.
Burman smiled back. “Now, dear,” she said pleasantly, “what’s with the goddamn package?”
Encouraged by her reasonably jovial tone, he replied, “Someone left it in front of the building last night. It has your name on it. See?” He pointed and continued like an eager puppy. “We would have found it earlier, but it was behind the little newsstands out front and they delivered a stack of Gazettes this morning. One of the guys from Parks and Services found it while he was sweeping.”
“Well, how about if you and I see what’s in it?” she whispered conspiratorially.
Carlos was almost giddily ecstatic at the attention he was getting. These shared playful moments between them were all too rare.
Burman opened her desk drawer and took out a pair of cuticle scissors. She began clipping the string tying the parcel together.
Tossing the wrapping into the recycling bin by her desk, she began to cut through the tape holding the box shut.
“What do you think it is?” Carlos asked.
“God knows,” said Burman. “Probably something for the homeless shelter.” She frequently received anonymous parcels of old clothing and kitchen items for her pet charity. The anonymity wasn’t due to any modesty on the donors’ parts. They simply didn’t want Burman to know who they were for fear she’d drop in on them in person to thank them for their generosity. True, they’d have her gratitude but they also risked her handing them half a dozen Building Code violation tickets on her way out of their homes.
Finally, the box was free of tape. Opening the flaps, she commented, “Let’s see what goodies we got.”
She looked in.
She turned white.
She uttered a strangled scream.
She passed out.
Carlos jumped to his feet. Lunging across her desk, trying to grab her before she slipped from her chair, his elbow struck the box, sending it flying into a corner of the office and spilling the contents onto the floor. Without thinking, he turned to look.
There, just rolling to a stop in the center of the floor, was a human head.
Carlos’s scream was anything but strangled.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
An hour later, City Hall was in chaos. The City’s entire complement of seven on-duty sheriff’s cars sat in the parking lot, their drivers bravely attempting to fend off the growing crowd of irate but buff, young men who were accustomed to parking at City Hall and walking across the street to 24-Hour Fitness and the Boys’ Town Gym to work out.
One of the spandex clad youths had, upon being told that parking privileges were being temporarily denied, called the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Activists League hotline, charging discrimination by the Sheriff’s Department. Shortly thereafter, the activists began to show up bearing signs and banners accusing the department, the city counsel, the owner of the parking franchise and the Supreme Court of homophobia.
At first there was dissension within the ranks as the activists immediately began to shout disparaging remarks at the gym bunnies, accusing them of political inactivity. Slowly, however, the two groups merged into one as the activists, most wearing ripped blue jeans, leather jackets, and vests bearing a variety of political buttons, began to garner support from the boys in the tight tank tops and even tighter bicycle shorts. At one end of the parking lot an aerobics instructor had formed his class into a series of human pyramids, each topped by a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender activist, hoisting high his or her protest sign.
The West Hollywood Cheerleaders had also arrived—an even dozen bearded and mustachioed men in red mini-skirts and fluffy white cotton sweaters, trimmed to match. Each sweater bore a prominently displayed scarlet W, the bottom points of the letter calculated to terminate at the nipple of each false tit. These worthies, after having performed a variety of complicated gymnastic maneuvers, were organizing passersby into a cheering section. Bravely they stood, twelve dubious drag queens all taller than six foot one, in their bright tangerine, chartreuse, and turquoise beehive wigs, wildly shaking their pom-poms and urging their brothers and sisters on to new heights of righteous outrage.
West Hollywood’s business community was also represented—at least in a manner of speaking. Two lesbians who owned a local graphic arts company had, upon seeing the massing crowd, stopped their Cherokee Jeep in the far right lane of Santa Monica Boulevard. Seizing the opportunity, one whipped out an expensive set of professional magic markers and several large sheets of cardboard and began artfully creating new signs for the swelling crowd while the other moved amongst the masses passing out her business cards.
As the traffic on Santa Monica came to a halt, blocked by the lesbians’ Jeep, the traffic enforcement people were called out to assist. They vainly tried to tow the errant Cherokee. However, since the line of cars stretched, bumper-to-bumper, from City Hall down to Santa Monica and Holloway, almost six blocks away, the tow truck was unable to get through. In fact, at the intersection of Santa Monica and La Cienega, the tow truck driver was brawling with an irate securities analyst from Beverly Hills who had failed to stop in enough time to avoid kissing the rear of the tow truck with the front bumper of his BMW. Other motorists had simply parked their cars in the gridlock, emerging from their vehicles to avidly urge the two pugilists further towards bloodshed. Traffic on La Cienega was halted, and the side streets began to back up.
Back at City Hall, the local press had gotten wind of what now could be called a riot. Several reporters from each of the local magazines and newspapers had managed to bully, con, or plead their way past the police barricade and were besieging the City Hall reception area. Eve, the receptionist on duty, returned from her quiet lunch in the conference room to be greeted from a scene right out of the horror novel she’d been reading while munching on her tuna fish sandwich. Aghast and frightened at the commotion, she hid in the ladies’ room. The lead reporter from the Gay Gazette, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall lesbian with pink spiked hair and pierced nostrils, witnessed Eve’s flight and, trying to get her attention, jumped the gate in the reception area. This provided the signal for the other reporters and they quickly seized the opportunity to follow the Gazette reporter over the gate, flooding down the hall to pound at the mayor’s locked office door, demanding an interview.
In Burman’s office, the cries and shouts from the mob below was starting to cause the windows to rattle. Two deputies were in the midst of trying to take a clear fingerprint from the brown paper wrapping. Clouds of fingerprint powder were billowing across the room as Burman had insisted the air conditioning be turned up full blast to try and dissipate the vile odors she was convinced would soon be emanating from the severed head.
The package’s gruesome contents had been covered with someone’s sweater to await Becky’s arrival. Carlos had been escorted into an adjacent office,
where, despite frequent bursts of hysterics, he was attempting to give a statement to one of Clive’s sergeants. Clive himself was making a largely ineffective attempt to calm Burman down.
“Please, Pamela,” he begged, “just relax. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“Relax?” Burman shouted. “Listen to this idiot! Someone drops a head, a fucking head, on my desk and he wants me to relax!”
Trying to replace a wet cloth on Burman’s forehead, Clive spoke soothingly, “Becky’s on her way. Here.” He held out the glass of water and two aspirin he’d been unsuccessfully trying to get the city manager to take for the past half hour.
Burman grabbed the cloth from his hand and flung it at him, where it landed draped across his shoulder. She whirled and shouted at the two deputies. “Can’t you morons stop with the frigging dust? You’re giving me lung cancer!”
“Pam, if you would let us turn off the air conditioning...” Clive began, removing the wet cloth as he twisted his head to examine the resulting wet spot and wondered if it would leave a stain.
“I already had to see that thing. Now you want me to smell it?” She whirled about, knocking the proffered glass from Clive’s hands and spattering his crotch with water. “Someone open a goddamned window!”
Clive sadly watched as the water spread across the lap of his gray woolen trousers. Taking out the ubiquitous handkerchief, he dabbed at the stain half-heartedly. Giving up on the odds of his suit surviving the rest of the day, he neatly folded the hanky and replaced it in his breast pocket. His attention still focused on his ruined trousers, he replied, “Those windows don’t open, Pam.”
He jumped and looked up sharply as a huge crash echoed through the office. Burman was standing in front of the shattered window, a metal wastepaper basket in her hands, smiling.
“They do now,” she said, a wild look in her eye.
The door opened and a police photographer entered.
“Sorry, chief, the traffic,” he apologized.
Clive wearily waved his hand toward the mound under the sweater. “It’s under there.”
Burman stalked across the room and grabbed the photographer by the knot of his tie. In a low, evil voice she said, “One photo, one fucking photo, of me and that...that thing makes the press, and you are dog meat. You got that?”
Releasing the hapless photographer, she returned to stand by the window. She looked out and her eyes grew very wide. She tried to speak, first making only gasping noises, following them with several unintelligible grunts. She turned to Clive, helplessly pointing through the shattered glass to the streets below.
Moving next to her, Clive looked out and turned to her, puzzled.
“What?”
Burman burbled something.
Clive sighed. “It’s been going on for almost an hour, Pam. You were too busy yelling to notice.”
Pamela Burman looked out over the masses of people and cars congealing in the middle of her city and, for the second time that day, fainted dead away.
Becky O’Brien finally managed to shoulder her way through the teeming mob and up the central stairs of City Hall. She’d left immediately upon receiving Clive’s call, but the line of cars going north of San Vicente Boulevard had been so heavy she’d despaired of being able to pull out of the morgue driveway. Seizing a brief opening, she recklessly forced the van out onto the street and managed to make the left onto Santa Monica at the corner. She was unable to go farther. With no possibility of being able to make the U-turn to City Hall, she’d abandoned the coroner’s van in the right hand lane by the Boys’ Town Gym and darted across the street to City Hall. Black bag clutched firmly in hand, she pushed open the front door and entered the reception area, tired, out of breath, and sweating.
She stopped for a moment, confused. Although she could hear shouting from somewhere deep inside the building and the echoes from the crowd penetrated the glass doors behind her, the reception area was strangely silent. It was also strangely, well, disheveled. The chairs had been overturned and the framed pictures were hanging at odd angles on the walls; the glass of one of them had been smashed. The floor was littered with pamphlets and announcement flyers. Becky knelt and picked several up, standing mutely, Animal Rights Task Force, Anti-Gay Bashing, and Senior Services advertisements clutched in her hand.
“Eve?” she asked the empty air, tentatively.
A small squeak came from behind the receptionist’s desk.
“Eve?” she repeated as she bent over the desk to see a terrified Eve, glasses askew, huddled underneath the desk.
Becky quickly passed through the gate and squatted on the floor in front of the almost catatonic receptionist.
“Are you all right, honey?” Becky tentatively took Eve’s hand and began to measure her pulse.
“There were thousands of them,” said Eve dully. “Millions.”
Becky dropped Eve’s hand and straightened her tilted glasses, seating them firmly on the receptionist’s face.
“They wanted to see the mayor. I got back from lunch and there they were, all wanting to see the mayor.”
Digging through her bag, Becky removed a hypodermic and a mild tranquilizer. Eve clutched her arm.
“I hid. In the bathroom. Until they left. Then I came back here.”
“I’m going to give you something to make you feel better, honey.” Becky readied the needle.
Eve slowly stood up, awkwardly dragging Becky with her. She turned to the desk and picked up a shattered piece of plastic covered with red and clear colored plastic buttons.
“They stepped on my switchboard!” she wailed. “How can I answer the phone if they stepped on my switchboard?”
She sobbed as Becky deftly slipped the hypodermic into her arm. Eve didn’t seem to notice.
Righting the overturned chair, Becky settled Eve into it gently.
“I’ve got to go see Pamela. You stay right here, OK? I promise I’ll be right back.”
“I have to answer the phone,” Eve repeated blankly.
Becky searched until she found the smashed telephone receiver where it had come to rest at the base of one of the large potted plants. Handing it to Eve, who seized it happily and clutched it to her ear, she said, “Here dear, it’s for you.”
The front door opened and a harried deputy came into the building.
“You,” Becky called. “Watch her.”
The deputy crossed the wreckage of the room and looked quizzically at Eve.
“Is she OK?”
“She’s in mild shock. I gave her a sedative, but I don’t want to leave her alone. Stay here. Don’t go back outside.”
“Thank you, ma’am!” the deputy said with relief.
Satisfied that Eve would be safe, Becky steeled herself for whatever she would have to face and marched down the hallway toward Burman’s office.
Passing the Mayor’s door, she hesitated for a moment. The last thing she wanted to do at the moment – or ever, for that matter – was to speak to the mayor. Yet, at the very least, she felt obligated to make sure he hadn’t been trampled by the crowd into a bloody pulp in the middle of his office floor. Cursing her sense of duty, she rapped sharply.
“Daniel,” she called. “It’s Becky O’Brien. You all right?”
The mayor’s door slowly opened. An impeccably manicured hand appeared followed by a face suitable for a movie star.
“Are they gone?” a rich baritone voice asked with more than a hint of timidity.
“Yes, Daniel, they’re gone.”
At this, West Hollywood’s mayor, Daniel Eversleigh, straightened up to his full height of six foot one and declared with false bravado, “Well! Storming the mayor’s office! I’ve never heard of such a thing! I’ll make certain Clive gets to the bottom of this! Tell him I want to see him. Right away!”
“Whatever you say, Daniel,” Becky sighed.
The door slammed as Daniel Eversleigh returned to the depths of his office and to the perpetual state of blissful ignorance with whi
ch he governed the city.
Despite his well-known penchant for having absolutely no idea of what was going on around him, Daniel Eversleigh had managed to remain West Hollywood’s mayor for the past three terms. This was in no small part due to the fact that, while he was incapable of making a decision on anything, he possessed a bright, affable manner and the ability to tell various supporters of opposing issues exactly what they most wanted to hear.
Daniel Eversleigh was an arresting man in his late fifties. He’d gained a few pounds since his days as a UCLA quarterback, but he still managed to keep a more or less svelte figure. The dashing bearing that he affected, with medium brown hair attractively gray at the temples, was faintly reminiscent of Errol Flynn, a resemblance Daniel was intelligent enough to exploit. For those voters who had no fondness for old Hollywood movies, Daniel reminded them of a favorite uncle, and Eversleigh was adept at cultivating an avuncular style. He was always the soul of gentility, pleasant yet with a slight air of distance that caused people to want his approval. In short, for the voters of West Hollywood, Daniel Eversleigh was a man they felt they could trust as mayor.
Eversleigh had developed the perfect formula for reelection. He always abstained from every council vote and he always appeared at every civic function to congratulate whatever group was sponsoring it. In great demand for the openings of everything from supermarkets to pet hospitals, he freely granted civic commendations and plaques to community group leaders and to quite a few surprised private residents who had absolutely nothing to do with city politics. His office was covered with photographs of him holding cute little furry animals and kissing babies. Politically, he was neither a registered Democrat nor a Republican nor a Libertarian; thus, when speaking in front of any partisan group, he was always able to declare his imminent intentions of running out and joining the relevant party.
His civic accomplishments were dubious but never offensive; he took no risks. In response to the city’s problem with insufficient parking in residential neighborhoods and the general dissatisfaction with permit parking signs that were complicated enough to require a Nobel prize winner in mathematics to accurately interpret, he erected signs, alternately stating This is a Permit Parking Neighborhood and This is Not a Permit Parking Neighborhood.
