In recent months he’d often awakened in the middle of the night and imagined ways in which he could kill Eunice, even though he’d never had the stomach for violence. In his most recent fantasy, one that gave him enormous pleasure, he envisioned holding her captive in an escape-proof basement, maybe in a cabin up near Angeles National Forest. Each morning he’d supply her all the water she needed, along with the choice of four Burger King Whoppers or four packs of cigarettes, which is what she ate and smoked on an average day. Whoppers or cancer tubes-either or, her choice. Dewey was confident that the miserable cunt would die of starvation within a month.
While Dewey Gleason was at the Pacific Dining Car, Dana Vaughn and Hollywood Nate got a call to meet 6-L-20 in the alley behind the Pantages Theater. Traffic on Hollywood Boulevard was heavy, and it took an extra few minutes to get there. The sergeant was Miriam Hermann, an LAPD old-timer with thirty-six years on the Job. They saw her car parked on Vine Street, and she was outside, leaning against it. Sergeant Hermann was a chunky woman of sixty-one years with black caterpillar eyebrows and iron-gray hair trimmed shorter than Dana’s. Sergeant Murillo, the best-read supervisor at Hollywood Station, thought she looked like Gertrude Stein. But Miriam Hermann had no Alice B. Toklas, only rescued animals: two dogs and three cats. It was said that she’d had an unhappy childless marriage to a veterinarian before she was a cop, but she wasn’t chatty about her past and no one knew for sure.
When Dana and Nate got out of their car, Sergeant Hermann said to them, “There’s something going on back by the trash Dumpster. I saw some guys walk outta the nightclub and into the alley.”
“A drug deal?” Nate said.
“Maybe,” the sergeant said. “Let’s have a look.”
While they were walking, Dana said, “They’re like lions waiting for prey in these nightclubs. A girl turns her back and they hit her drink with an eyedropper full of GHB. She awakes in a hotel room, raped and sodomized.”
“Never take your hands off your drinks in Hollywood,” Nate agreed. “If necessary, use a sippy cup.”
They entered the alley, staying in the shadows of the buildings with their flashlights off. There was plenty of street noise to muffle their footsteps, but they needn’t have worried. Somebody in a car on Vine Street was screaming at somebody else who was stalled in traffic. Soon horns were blowing and engines were racing. When the cops got close to the Dumpster, they saw that a man had a woman pinned up against it and was humping her from behind while two other men watched, probably waiting their turns.
The men were all well dressed and so drunk that none of them even noticed three cops approaching. Sergeant Hermann signaled to Dana and Nate, who circled the Dumpster to cut off retreat, and the sergeant turned her flashlight on the woman, who might as well have worn a sandwich board announcing her occupation. The two bystanders looked up but didn’t attempt to escape. The guy in the saddle made no effort to stop, even after staring into the flashlight beams. His eyes were watery and unfocused with lids drooping. He just kept going at it.
Several seconds passed until Sergeant Hermann finally said, “Am I not standing here, or what? Back off!”
Reluctantly, the jockey did so. He was a forty-ish white man dressed in nightclub-black and so fried he didn’t seem to know that his penis was hanging limp and ineffective as he struggled to put it away. The hooker was also white, way past her prime and obviously amped, probably on cocaine, the nightclub drug of choice. She was dressed confrontationally in a strapless black tube dress that stopped midthigh. Her makeup might be called theatrical if the theater was Kabuki. She wore stockings with seams, held in place by a partially exposed black garter belt, and she would’ve looked appropriate only at a Marilyn Manson concert.
“He wasn’t hurting me,” the hooker said. “In fact, I didn’t feel nothing.”
“That’s your fault. I want my money back,” the customer whispered, louder than he intended.
For the first time, the woman paid close attention to the cops and said, “I don’t know what this man is talking about, Officers. There’s no money involved here. This was just a spontaneous expression of love.” Then she looked woozily at the man in black and said, “Ain’t that right, honey?”
He caught on, staggered forward, and said, “That’s right, Officers. This was not an act of prostitution. It was just-I don’t know, a burst of mad passion. We shoulda gone to a motel.”
“You should go to a clinic,” Sergeant Hermann said. Then turning to the other two, she said, “How about you? Waiting to express your mad passion too, were you?”
One drunk, who was submitting to a pat-down search by Dana, said nothing. The other, who had already been searched by Hollywood Nate, said, “I just thought somebody was doing a Heimlich maneuver and I wanted to help. Can we go back to the nightclub now?”
Sergeant Hermann had the look of someone who wanted to be anywhere else, and after thirty-six years of police work, she definitely looked her age. She arched her spine with her hands on her hips, as though her back was killing her, looked at her watch, and said, “I’m hungry. Time for code seven.”
“Go ahead and take seven, Sarge,” Hollywood Nate said. Then to the hooker and her trick, he said, “You two are going to jail for lewd conduct.” He looked at the drunken observers and said, “Anybody got outstanding warrants? You paid all your traffic tickets?”
The two observers mumbled an assent, and Sergeant Hermann waved at her cops and walked back through the alley to Vine Street, while Dana handcuffed the two prisoners, and Hollywood Nate filled out FI cards on the other two. They looked too prosperous to be wanted on traffic warrants or anything else, and their IDs were proper, so they were released.
Before they left, Hollywood Nate said, “If you go anywhere near your cars, you better have a designated driver. Understand?”
Sergeant Hermann had completed a long cell call while standing beside her shop by the time Nate and Dana were walking out of the alley with their two arrestees. Before the sergeant got back in her car, Nate and Dana saw her approach a shiny new Beemer that was illegally parked on Vine Street with the engine running.
They heard her say to the young black man in the driver’s seat, “Move your car, please. That’s a no-parking zone.”
He looked lazily at her and said, “I’ll only be a minute. My friend went in the club to find somebody.”
“Move the car, sir,” Sergeant Hermann said.
“This is some shit,” the indignant driver said. “You’re only messin’ with me ’cause I’m young and I’m black and I’m good-lookin’ and I got a cool ride. Am I right?”
Sergeant Hermann, who had heard this, or variations of it, hundreds of times in her long career, was feeling very tired and very old at the moment. She said to the driver, “I’m a senior citizen and I’m a Jew and I look like a manatee and my Ford Escort’s nine years old. Where’re we going with this bullshit?”
The driver wanted to fire back but was out of verbal ammo, so he dropped it into gear and drove away.
EIGHT
THE NEXT MORNING, Malcolm Rojas got out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen, holding his throat and swallowing hard, feigning illness so he could avoid going to his job at the home improvement center.
His mother was frying eggs for him, and his orange juice was on the kitchen table. She looked at him and said, “Sore throat?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I can’t go to work. I’ll have to call in sick.”
“Oh, sweetie,” his mother said. “Are you sure you’re too sick? You have a good job, and I’d hate to see you lose it. And today you’ll get overtime pay.”