“A good job,” he said. “Slicing boxes open on a Sunday? Unpacking merchandise I can’t afford to buy? A good job.”
He sat at the table and took a sip of the orange juice.
“If you’d only gone on to City College like I -”
“Like you what?”
He couldn’t stand it when her voice got shrill and whiny. He couldn’t stand the sight of her in that shapeless nightgown with her tits hanging down and her fat ass sticking out, and that bleached frizzy hair in pins and two pink curlers, like somebody in a movie fifty years old.
“I was gonna say, if you’d gone on to a community college last year, it woulda been better than any entry-level job you could get at that mall. Your mother told you that.”
The thing he hated most was when she referred to herself as “your mother,” often accompanied by the stroking of his hair, which, thankfully, she hadn’t done in months.
“First you say I shoulda went to college -”
“Gone, sweetie,” she interrupted. “Shoulda gone to college.”
“Okay!” he said. “Gone, gone, gone! How could I pay your damn room and board if I’da gone to college?”
“You wouldn’t have had to,” his mother said, putting the plate in front of him. “I woulda supported you for as long as you stayed in school.”
He felt it coming again. The anger. He started to cut the fried eggs and take a bite, but his hands began shaking.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Why is it your money? When Dad got killed, why did the lawsuit money go to you? Why not to both of us?”
“You were a boy, Malcolm,” she said.
“I’m not now,” he said. “I’m almost twenty. Why do you get the money and all I get is -”
“Room and board,” she said, still with that country accent from her Oklahoma roots. “Which you should be glad to pay for, unless you wanna go to college or even a trade school.”
Then her face softened and she stood behind him and, to his chagrin, reached over to actually stroke his hair, as though she’d read his thoughts and was taunting him. His breath caught. He could hardly believe it, and he said, “What’re you doing?”
“You’re still a boy,” she said, stroking.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do that!”
“Why not, sweetie?” she said. “You have your father’s lovely curls, and you’re still your mother’s darling little -”
Malcolm Rojas swept his breakfast off the table, sending the plate crashing to the floor. When he leaped to his feet, as though to hit her, she gasped and backed up to the sink.
“Malcolm!” she cried. “Have you gone crazy?”
He stood trembling, then turned and ran to his bedroom and slammed the door. Malcolm pulled on his jeans and a clean white T-shirt and didn’t bother to call his boss before running out the door and down the stairs of the apartment building.
The last thing he heard from his mother was sobbing and her shrill voice calling after him, “Sweetie, what’s wrong? Please! Let’s talk about it!”
When he got to the carports, he jumped in his Mustang, backed out, and started driving aimlessly. Ten minutes later he was heading west on Sunset Boulevard, roaring past the morning traffic clogged in the eastbound lanes, heading toward the ocean without knowing why. He pulled over long enough to calm himself and to phone the boss’s number, and he was glad to get voice mail and not the man. Malcolm wanted to explain how sorry he was that he had a fever and a sore throat, but he lost his nerve.
He put the cell phone away, reached into the glove compartment to remove the box cutter, and put it in the pocket of his jeans, deciding to go to his job.
That Sunday afternoon at roll call, the midwatch was down to four cars, with several cops off-duty. Sergeant Lee Murillo read the crimes and gave the usual admonitions and warnings about failure to complete the crushing load of forms that the consent decree entailed. Then he had to listen to the usual responses. These included some rational comments about the civilian firm that was getting richer from the audits, as well as some about the federal judge who would decide when the LAPD was in compliance. Then the heat started to rise, and of course the sergeant pretended not to hear the irrational suggestions delivered in stage whispers from one cop to another as to what the overseers should do with their audits, and what the federal judge should do with the consent decree, and what the judge’s mother should have done with him, and which parts of him should be fed to the family cat. He knew that cop defensive humor was the equivalent of smacking someone in the face with a cream pie full of maggots, so he let it go.
Recalling some of the morale-lifting techniques of their late beloved senior sergeant, he ended roll call by saying, “There’s nearly a Hollywood moon tonight.” He gestured toward the framed photo hanging beside the door and said, “For you new people, a Hollywood moon is what the Oracle called a full moon, and tonight we’re getting close. The team with the weirdest call gets an extra-large pizza with the works, compliments of Sergeant Hermann and my good self. Of course, we’ll share the pizza with the winners. Too much of that stuff is not healthy for you.”
“We had a weird one last night, Sarge,” Johnny Lanier said. “A woman called us because her elderly father swallowed eight triple-A batteries.”
“That’s not so weird,” said R.T. Dibney. “Poor old geezer probably just wanted to keep on going and going and going.”
“Does it count for weird if we catch another stalker breaking into some house in the Hollywood Hills just to take a dump in a celebrity’s toilet?” another wanted to know.
“Sorry, that’s almost a cliché,” Sergeant Murillo said.
Just before leaving, R.T. Dibney lifted the spirits of several of the male officers when he announced to the assembly that a rape report he’d taken the prior evening from a hooker on Sunset Boulevard contained a statement that the rapist had a “huge penis.”
“The dude musta been real proud of his cruel tool,” R.T. Dibney explained to all. “He took several photos of it to show off to the girls on the boulevard. And after he refused to pay and the hooker got lumped up, she grabbed the photos and ran. I got one of them here. Wanna see the big schvantz?”
That generated some interest, and several cops, females included, gathered around R.T. Dibney to have a look. It resulted in high fives and cries of “Yes!” from very relieved male cops who measured up. However, any urologist could’ve told them that the big schvantz was actually in the normal-to-small range. Like theirs.
At 5 P.M. that afternoon, Dewey Gleason, who was once again Ambrose Willis, was too occupied to remember the kid he’d met at Pablo’s Tacos. He was busy being a Realtor. Half the morning and all afternoon, he’d been checking on a dozen foreclosure addresses that Eunice had downloaded. These and thousands like them had been damaging the local economy for months.
The runners he’d chosen for this job were unsavory. He’d needed a professional lock-picking burglar but settled for a pair of lowlife housebreaking tweakers whom he intended to dump as soon as possible. They were waiting in a battered old Plymouth parked at the curb in front of a modest house on Oakwood, in southeast Hollywood. Dewey couldn’t remember their names, but it didn’t matter. When he parked his car and got out, both thirty-something tweakers-one an inked-up Latino with a lip stud, and the other a sleazed-out, nearly toothless, shaky white guy with the sweats-got out of their car to meet him. The white guy gave Dewey a dozen keys.
“Afternoon, Mr. Willis,” he said.
“Afternoon,” Dewey said. “How many houses did you get done?”
“All six,” the tweaker said, scratching his ribs, his neck, trying to reach his back.
Dewey gave him a look, and the tweaker smiled apologetically, showing the gaps in his grille, and said, “I’m jonesing. No sense lying to you. I need some ice pretty bad. Real bad, in fact.”