“He told you that?”
Dan Applewhite nodded. “I told him I’m a Unitarian. I could tell he didn’t know what that was.”
“Neither do I,” Gert said, then added, “we had a sergeant like him at Central Station. Things started happening to that guy.”
“What kind of things?”
“Mostly to his car. If he forgot to lock it, he’d find a string tied from his light-bar switch to the door. Or he’d find the plastic cord-cuffs hanging from his axle making noise while he was driving. Or he’d find talcum powder in his air vent. It’d make his uniform look like he was caught in a blizzard.”
“That’s kid stuff,” Dan Applewhite said.
“Once when a truck got jacked that was hauling huge bags of popcorn and candy to a chamber of commerce holiday party, we recovered it and somebody filled the sergeant’s private car with popcorn. I mean from the floor to the roofline. You looked inside his windshield and all you could see was popcorn.”
“That’s kid stuff,” Dan Applewhite repeated.
Gert said, “Then one night somebody paid a skid row derelict ten bucks to do some asphalt skiing. The cop who did it borrowed an old piece of plywood roofing from one of the makeshift lean-tos where the transients sleep. And tied a piece of rope to it and attached the rope to the sergeant’s car while he was inside a diner. And the derelict was promised another ten if he’d hang on for a whole block. He did, but it was pretty gnarly. Sparks were flying and the derelict started yelling and it pretty much all went sideways. People on the street were shocked, and the captain’s phone rang off the hook the next day. IA investigated the night watch for a month but never caught the culprit. All the derelict would say was, the guy who hired him was a cop and all cops look alike when they’re in uniform. The sergeant got ten days off for not looking after his car.”
“Well, that’s not childish,” Dan Applewhite said. “It’s much more mature when you can get an asshole like that a ten-day suspension.”
It was less than a half hour later that Sergeant Treakle himself rolled on a call assigned to 6-X-66. Dan Applewhite groaned when he turned and saw the young supervisor pull up in front of an apartment building in Thai Town that was occupied mostly by Asian immigrants.
“Chickenlips is here to check on us,” he warned Gert, who was knocking at the door.
The caller was a Thai woman who looked too old to have a twelve-year-old daughter but did. The girl was crying when the cops arrived, and the mother was furious. The girl’s auntie, who was a decade younger than the mother, had been trying to calm things. The auntie spoke passable English and translated for the mother.
The trouble had started earlier in the day when the local clinic informed the mother that her twelve-year-old daughter’s bouts of vomiting were the result of an early pregnancy. The mother wanted the culprit found and arrested.
Of course, the cops separated the kid from her mom, Gert walking the child into a tidy bedroom, talking to her gently, saying, “Wipe your eyes, honey. And don’t be afraid.”
The child, who was all cheekbones and kewpie lips, had lived in L.A. since she was eight, and her English was good. She stopped sobbing long enough to say to Gert, “Will I be taken to juvenile hall?”
“You won’t be taken anywhere, sweetie,” Gert said. “All of this can be handled. But we must find out who put the baby in you.”
The child dropped her eyes and asked, “Am I in trouble?” Then she began sobbing again.
“Now, now,” Gert said. “There’s no need to do that. You’re not in trouble with us. We’re your friends.” Then sensing someone behind her, she turned and saw Sergeant Treakle standing there watching.
Gert tried but failed to suppress the sigh that popped out of her, then said to the sergeant, “I wonder if you’d mind letting us females talk about this in private.”
Sergeant Treakle arched an eyebrow, grunted, and returned to the kitchen, where Dan Applewhite was getting a list of potential suspects for the follow-up by detectives. The child had no siblings, but there were uncles, cousins, and neighbors who were possibles.
Sergeant Treakle looked at his watch a couple of times, and when Gert left the girl in the bedroom and came back to the kitchen, he said, “Who’s the daddy?”
“I don’t know,” Gert said. “The sex crimes team will have to talk to her.”
“All that time and you don’t know?” Sergeant Treakle said.
Her voice flat as a razor, Gert said, “The child says she doesn’t know how it happened.”
Sergeant Treakle guffawed loudly and said, “She doesn’t know?”
Knowing his religious views, Gert Von Braun said, “Tell me, Sergeant Treakle, what if the young girl’s name was Mary? And the baby inside her was gonna be named Jesus, would you still scoff? After all, Mary didn’t know how the hell it happened either. Did she now?”
The sergeant’s jaws opened and shut twice, but nothing came out. He started to say something to Dan Applewhite, but nothing happened there either. He left the apartment and hurried to his car to make a negative entry in his log.
When they got back to their shop and started driving, Dan Applewhite took a good look at Gert Von Braun. He was a lot older and knew he wasn’t much to look at. And he couldn’t seem to keep a wife for very long, no matter how much money he spent on her. But he was starting to develop feelings he hadn’t had for a while. Despite her bulk and scary reputation, Gert Von Braun was starting to grow very attractive.
“What say we stop at Starbucks, Gert?” he said impulsively, then added something that usually interested other female partners. “I’d love to buy us a latte and biscotti.”
Gert shrugged and said, “I’m not much for sissy coffee, but I wouldn’t mind an In-N-Out burger.”
And zing went the strings of his heart! He grinned big and said, “Okay! One In-N-Out burger coming up!”
“With grilled onions and double the fries,” Gert added.
He was back at an ATM that night, a different one this time, on Hollywood Boulevard. Leonard Stilwell had worked diligently to set the film trap with the glue strips in place. He couldn’t sit around his room waiting for the job with Ali. The advance that Ali had given him was gone, smoked up in his pipe and lost on those goddamn Dodgers after he was stupid enough to make a bet with a sports book who’d beaten him 90 percent of the time.
Despite his prior misgivings and fear of all the cops he’d seen around the Kodak Center, the area offered an irresistible attraction in the persons of all those doofus tourists. So after casing carefully, he’d decided that a certain one of the ATMs wasn’t quite as dangerous as the others because it was in a dark corner and provided an easier escape route to the residential street several blocks away where he’d parked his old Honda. Now he was watching that ATM. Several Asians with cameras dangling from their necks almost bit. They’d be no good to him unless they spoke enough English to accept his “help.”
The ATM customer who finally stopped was the one he wanted. The guy was at least seventy years old and so was his wife. He was carrying a bag from one of the boulevard souvenir shops and she was carrying another one. They wore walking shorts and tennis shoes and their baseball caps had pins all over them from Universal Studios’ tour, Disneyland, and Knott’s Berry Farm. Her brand new T-shirt said “Movies For Me” across the back. Just looking at them made him imagine the heavenly smoke filling his lungs.
The guy put his card into the slot but nothing happened. He punched in his PIN and looked at his wife. Then he looked around, presumably for help, just as a younger man with hair the color of an overripe pumpkin, a wash of freckles, and a howdy-folks smile walked to the machine, holding his own ATM card in his hand.