“I feel ya, bro,” Jetsam said. “No need to go all aggro. Next time a boulevard clown squirts a tourist with a water gun, just stay in the car and roll your window up and lock the doors. I’ll man-up for both of us. And I’ll taze the first asshole that calls my partner a sissified, whimpering bitch.”
While 6-X-32 was cruising the boulevard, two homeless middle-aged panhandlers in east Hollywood named Axel Minton and Bootsie Brown were pushing a man in a wheelchair along the sidewalk to a graffiti-tagged neighborhood market frequented by local pensioners. It was a store where Axel and Bootsie often begged for change from the residents of the neighborhood, mostly Latino and Asian, who bought groceries there.
Axel was a spindly white man with sprigs of gray hair who would drink anything from a bottle if the label indicated any alcohol content. Bootsie was a black man blind in one eye who slept in a storage shed behind the apartment building where eighty-eight-year-old pensioner Coleman O’Toole lived. They both wore layers, sooty and drab, molded to their forms like fungus until it wasn’t clear where the fabrics left off and they began. And neither was many gallons away from wandering Hollywood Boulevard-like all those other self-lobotomized colorless specters in pull-tab necklaces and football helmets, or maybe wearing bikini bottoms on their heads-pushing a trash-laden shopping cart, chanting gibberish, or yodeling at terrified tourists. The Hollywood cops called it “gone to Dizzyland.”
Each transient had wheeled Coleman O’Toole to the store many times for a modest fee. This time they were both pushing the wheelchair, and they were bickering when they stopped in front and entered, leaving Coleman O’Toole parked in the shadows.
While Axel and Bootsie were inside loading up on shelf items, which included three quarts of 100-proof vodka and three quarts of gin, another octogenarian transient, known as Trombone Teddy, shuffled by. He’d been a good bebop sideman back in the day, or, as he put it, “when I was a real person.” Teddy, who was well known to officers at Hollywood Station, looked curiously at the figure in the wheelchair. Then he used his last few coins to phone the police, and the call was given to 6-X-32 of the midwatch.
Axel and Bootsie’s bottles of liquor and several bags of snacks were piled on the counter. The part-time clerk, who called herself Lucy, was a white transsexual in a blinged-out T-shirt, low-rise jeans, nosebleed stilettos, and magenta hair extensions piled so high she wouldn’t have felt being conked by a bottle of Corona, which could easily happen in that store. She adjusted her silk scarf to better conceal the healing from recent surgery to remove her manly apple and looked at the transients curiously.
Being acquainted with both of them as well as with Coleman O’Toole, she said, “Is Coley throwing a party or what?”
“It’s his birthday,” Bootsie said.
“No, it isn’t,” the tranny said. “His birthday was last month, same as mine. He brought me a card.”
“It ain’t his birthday, dummy,” Axel said to Bootsie. “It’s the anniversary of his retirement from the railroad. He has a party every year to celebrate his current life of comfort and ease.”
Lucy looked at Coleman O’Toole’s pension check and at the endorsement. The signature looked like the old man’s scrawl. “Why don’t you wheel Coley inside?” the tranny said, squinting out the window at the wheelchair figure alone in the darkness.
“You wanna check his ID, see if he’s old enough to buy booze?” Bootsie said with a wet, nearly toothless grin.
“Yeah, you wanna card old Coleman?” Axel said, snuffling and grinning wider than Bootsie. “Actually, the old bugger’s sick. Puked halfway down the street. You don’t want him in here unless you got a bucket and mop.”
“And all this booze is gonna cure him?” Lucy said, then shrugged and started ringing up the items just as 6-X-32 parked in front of the store and was met by Trombone Teddy.
The cops hardly noticed the old guy in the wheelchair, and Flotsam said, “Did you make the call, Teddy?”
“Yes, sir,” Teddy said. “Is there a reward for capturing a couple of crooks for check fraud?”
“Whadda you mean?” Jetsam said.
“If you would put in a word to the store owner, would he give me a few bucks for blowing the whistle on a pair of thugs?”
“High-level business negotiations are above my pay grade, Teddy,” said Flotsam. “But I gotta think somebody’d buy you a forty or two.”
“Okay,” Teddy said. “I’ll take a chance that generosity still exists in this ungrateful, goddamn world. Go inside and you’ll find two thieves cashing a stolen check.”
“This better be righteous, Teddy,” Flotsam said, walking inside with Jetsam at his back.
The tranny, who was as tall as Flotsam in those heels, was surprised when the cop appeared and said, “Can I see that check?”
Pushing the check across the counter, Lucy said, “Something wrong, Officer?”
“That’s what we wanna know,” Jetsam said.
Flotsam examined the check and said, “Are either of you Coleman O’Toole?”
It was Lucy who said, “No, they’re not, Officer. Coley’s the one out there in the wheelchair. These two sometimes wheel him down here to buy groceries.”
“Coley’s the salt of the earth,” Axel said, looking uneasy. “I’d fight a whole pack of pit bulls for old Coley. He’s a fellow wine connoisseur.”
“Connoisseurs don’t drink wine in a paper bag,” Jetsam noted.
“Coley’s my man,” Bootsie said. “When some no-account neighbor put lye in his gin bottle one time and he ended up wif a tube in his stomach, it was me that poured some good whiskey into the tube so he could get drunk.”
“That’s a touching testament to friendship,” Flotsam said, putting the check on the counter.
He walked to the door, nodding to Jetsam, who stayed inside while the grocery transaction was being completed. Lucy was counting out the change when Flotsam came back inside.
Axel Minton looked at the cop’s expression and said, “Uh-oh.”
The tranny’s eyes were theatrically made-up so as to be seen from balcony seats, and those amazing orbs moved from Flotsam to the transients and back again before she said, “Don’t tell me that’s not Coleman O’Toole out there in the wheelchair!”
“Oh, yeah,” said Flotsam. “I’m sure it’s him. He’s strapped in and rigged up nice as you please.”
“What’s the problem, then?” Lucy asked.
“It’s that he won’t be needing all this booze,” Flotsam said. “Him being deceased and all.”
“Uh-oh,” said Bootsie, who pointed at Axel. “It was his idea after we found Coley layin’ on the floor, colder than Aunt Ruby’s poon.” Then he looked at the tranny and said, “Sorry for my rude mouf, Miss Lucy.”
“You lying rat!” Axel said to Bootsie. Then to the cops, “He was the one noticed Coley had already signed his check!”
“Tha’s right, Officer,” Bootsie said, “but it was this here pissant that pointed to Coley layin’ there quiet as a bedbug on your pilla and said ol’ Coley woulda wanted us to cash it and have a Irish wake!”
“Okay, you two turn around and put your hands behind your backs,” Flotsam said. And sotto to Jetsam, “Better notify the night-watch detective about the corpse in the wheelchair and our two grave robbers. While we’re waiting for the body snatchers, I’ll take care of Teddy.”
As Jetsam led the handcuffed miscreants out to their car to await the arrival of the coroner’s van, Flotsam bought a pint of Jack for Trombone Teddy to show that generosity still exists in this ungrateful, goddamn world.
The woman officer with the smartest mouth at Hollywood Station was Dana Vaughn, and Hollywood Nate was stuck with her for at least one deployment period, an unhappy way to spend his first month back on the midwatch. He’d spent a year at the Community Relations Office (acronym CRO, pronounced “crow”), tending to touchy-feely quality-of-life issues and getting a little bump in pay for the easy work. But when fellow crow Bix Ramstead shot himself after being involved in a scandal, a lot of the fun was gone from the job and Nate felt like returning to real police work. Besides, he needed to work nights in order to keep his days free to pursue and torment casting agents. At age thirty-seven, it was now or never.