“Are you finished with your transaction, sir?” Leonard said.
“There’s something wrong with the machine,” the tourist said. “My card won’t come out and the dang thing doesn’t work.”
“Golly,” Leonard said, as syrupy as he could manage. “I’ve run into this before. Do you mind if I try something?”
“Help yourself, young man,” the tourist said. “I sure don’t wanna be calling my bank and canceling my card. Not when we just got to Hollywood.”
“Don’t blame you,” Leonard said. “Let’s see.”
He stepped forward, put his fingers on the “enter” and “cancel” keys, and said, “Way it was explained to me is, you punch in your PIN number at the same time you hold down ‘cancel’ and ‘enter,’ and it should kick out the card. Wanna try it?”
“Sure,” the tourist said. “Let’s see, I hold down which two keys?”
“Here, lemme help,” Leonard said. “I’ll hold the two keys down and you just go ahead and punch in your PIN number.”
“I’ll hold down the keys,” a deep voice behind Leonard said.
He turned and saw a guy his age. A tall, buffed-out guy looking him right in the eye. Leonard’s Adam’s apple bobbed.
“This is my son,” the tourist said. “There’s something wrong with the machine, Wendell. This fellow’s helping us.”
“That’s nice of him,” Wendell said but never took his stare from Leonard’s watery blue eyes, not for an instant.
Leonard said, “Go ahead and punch in your PIN number.” But he didn’t dare look at the keyboard. In fact, he made it a point to look away.
“Nothing,” the tourist said. “Not a goldang thing happened.”
“Well, guess you’ll have to cancel it,” Leonard said. “It was worth a try. Sorry I couldn’t help you.”
As he was sidling away, he heard the woman say, “See, Wendell, there’s lots of real nice, polite people in Hollywood.”
Leonard felt like weeping by the time he’d walked several blocks to his car. He needed crack so bad he couldn’t think of anything else. He wasn’t even hungry, although he hadn’t eaten a real meal for two days. And to make matters worse, there was a police car parked behind his car with its headlights on, and two cops were giving him a goddamn ticket!
“Is this your car?” Flotsam asked when Leonard approached, keys in hand.
“Yeah, what’s wrong?” Leonard said.
“What’s wrong?” Jetsam said. “Take a look where you’re parked.”
Leonard walked around to the front of the car and saw that he was halfway across a narrow concrete driveway belonging to an old two-story stucco house that was crammed between two newer apartment buildings. He hadn’t noticed the driveway when he’d parked, not after he’d circled the streets for twenty minutes, looking for a parking place where he wouldn’t get a goddamn ticket like this.
“Gimme a break!” Leonard said. “I’m between jobs. And even if I wasn’t tapped, I couldn’t give my ride to those goofy wetbacks at the pay lot. They’ll back your car right up onto the fanny pack of the first tourist dumb enough to take a shortcut through the parking lot, and then what?”
“Too late,” Flotsam said. “It’s already written. Lucky you came back, though. The guy in that house wanted your car towed.”
“No mercy,” Leonard said. “There ain’t a drop of mercy and compassion in this whole fucking town.”
Jetsam had his flashlight beam close enough to Leonard’s face to see the twitching and sweat. He raised the light to check Leonard’s pupils and said, “Got some ID?”
“What for?” Leonard said. “I haven’t done nothing.”
“You drive this car,” Jetsam said. “You have a driver’s license, right?”
Leonard reached in his pocket for his wallet. “Not a drop of mercy or compassion for a fellow human being,” Leonard said, taking the parking citation from Flotsam and handing Jetsam his driver’s license.
Jetsam took the license and walked back to their shop and sat down inside it.
“Aw, shit,” Leonard said. “What’s he doing, calling in on me?”
“Just routine,” Flotsam said, giving Leonard a quick pat-down.
“That’s what they always say,” Leonard whined. “Do you guys ever give a person a break? I mean ever?”
“Whadda you been arrested for?” Flotsam asked.
“You’re gonna find out in a few minutes,” Leonard said. “Couple of small-time thefts is all. I learned my lesson. I’m just a working stiff now. Between jobs.”
When Jetsam came back, he said to his partner, “Mr. Stilwell here has two priors for burglary and one for petty theft.”
“The burglaries were reduced to petty theft,” Leonard said. “I pled guilty and I only got county jail time. The petty theft was for shoplifting when I had to steal some groceries for an elderly neighbor who was sick. Jesus! Can’t a guy get a second chance?”
By then, both cops figured him for a crackhead or maybe a tweaker, and Flotsam said, “Mr. Stilwell, you wouldn’t object if we took a look in your car, would you? Just routine, of course.”
“Go ahead,” Leonard said. “If I said no, you’d find an excuse to do it anyways.”
“Are you saying no?” Jetsam said.
“I’m saying just do what the fuck you gotta do so I can go home. I give up. There ain’t a drop of mercy and compassion and charity left in this whole fucking city. Here.”
He pulled the keys from his pocket and tossed them to Jetsam, who opened the door and did a quick search for drugs in the glove box, under the seats and floor mats, and in other obvious places. All he saw was a note behind the visor with an address on it. He recognized the street as one on Mt. Olympus near the house where a multiple murder involving Russian gangsters had occurred. He jotted the address down in his notebook.
When he was finished, he nodded to Flotsam and said, “Okay, Mr. Stilwell, thanks for the cooperation.”
By then Leonard was shaking his head in disgust, and when he got into his car, he was mumbling aloud about the merciless, pitiless, fucking city he lived in.
“Let’s drive up to Mount Olympus for a minute,” Jetsam said when they were back in their shop.
“What for?”
“That guy had an address behind his visor. What would a loser like that be doing up on Mount Olympus? Except casing a house, maybe.”
“There you go again,” Flotsam said. “Dude, you are determined to go all detective and sleuthy on my time. Maybe the guy’s looking to become a gardener or something. Did you think of that?”
“He’s the wrong color. Come on, bro, it’ll just take a few minutes.”
Flotsam headed for the Hollywood Hills without another word and, finding the winding street, followed it up to the top.
Jetsam checked addresses and said, “This number don’t exist.”
“Okay,” Flotsam said. “You satisfied now?”
He turned around just as Jetsam spotted a familiar car in a driveway a few houses away from where the street address should have been.
“That’s Hollywood Nate’s ride!” he said.
“That Mustang?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude, there’s lots of Mustangs in this town.”
Jetsam grabbed the spotlight and shined it on the car. “How many with a license plate that says SAG4NW?”
“What?”
“Screen Actors Guild for Nate Weiss. How many?”
“So?”
“Maybe we should stop and see if the resident knows a Leonard Stilwell.”
“Look, dude,” Flotsam said. “We already dragged Hollywood Nate into one of your wild goose chases. We ain’t gonna interrupt whatever he’s doing in there with another of your clues. And knowing him, whatever he’s doing in there involves pussy, that much is totally for sure. So he is not gonna be happy to see us, no matter what.”