The cemetery was huge and far from 6-X-66’s beat. And since the message from communications came in on their computer as “See the woman, open door,” it didn’t excite anybody, and no other cars responded to back them up.
“Watch three’s got way more cars than we do,” Aaron Sloane, the driver, said to Sheila Montez. “Where are they? Why do we have to roll all the way up here?”
“The lazy bastards gotta run to Seven-Eleven for a caffeine pick-me-up three times a night before they can even start thinking like cops,” Sheila said irritably.
Aaron figured it was her monthly cycle making her cranky, but he’d been a cop long enough to know that absolutely the worst thing you could ever say to a woman officer who seemed to be in a bad mood was “Is it your time?”
Diplomatically, he said, “Maybe we could stop for a cup after we handle this call. You look a little… down tonight.”
She glanced at him, looked back at the streets, and said, “I’m fine.” Then, because he was not just any partner but the one who’d witnessed the Montez meltdown at the side of a dead baby’s crib, she opened up a bit. She said, “It’s just that you can’t depend on anybody anymore.”
Aaron hesitated and said, “Boyfriend trouble?”
That made her turn toward him and say, “If there is anything that nearly seven years of police work have taught me, it’s that everybody lies, and you should never under any circumstances get involved with another cop.”
He was crestfallen. “I thought you said you’d learned your lesson after your bad marriage to the sergeant from Mission Division. Have you been… dating another cop?”
“Who said anything about dating?” Sheila replied, and his heartbeat advanced ten beats per minute. “The Pope will samba at Saint Peter’s before I ever date one again. But I was dumb enough to be one of three investors in a twenty-eight-foot powerboat. Don’t ask me how or why. It happened right after I lost… lost the baby, and my divorce was final and… I don’t know, I think I went crazy. Now my fellow investors-cops, of course-are bickering. And we’re selling the boat, and I stand to lose almost eight thousand.”
“Whoa!” Aaron said. “I’m sorry, Sheila. Is there anything I can do?”
“Are you independently wealthy, Aaron?” she said with that little sloe-eyed glance of hers that made his heart rate advance five more beats per minute.
He had gone from thinking that Sheila Montez was a very hot-looking woman to thinking she was drop-dead gorgeous. It was getting very hard for him to hide his feelings. “No,” he said, “but I’d lend you whatever money I could.”
She snapped out of it, smiled, and said, “I know you would, partner. You’re probably the only cop I’d ever get involved with.”
Then Aaron’s heart rate increased another five beats, until she added, “In a business deal.”
Aaron turned his face toward her and said, “I guess if I ever get married, it shouldn’t be to another cop, should it?”
“Why do you ever have to get married?” she said. “Look around you. Just about all the married people at Hollywood Station are two-and three-time losers.”
“I don’t know,” he said, trying to keep it casual, when it was anything but. “It gets lonely living alone, and it gets tiresome dating people that I don’t even wanna be with. Don’t you feel like that sometimes?”
She didn’t answer him and didn’t seem to notice his moonstruck look as they drove east on the cemetery road, his normal sixty-two-beats-a-minute heart rate approaching three digits. They met a security guard at the entrance who directed them to the mortuary. The guard was a sixty-ish wisp of a guy who looked as though he didn’t want to be entering open doors in mortuaries after dark or, for that matter, at any other time.
Aaron cut the headlights when they were well down the road from the mortuary, and the black-and-white glided in and stopped a short distance away. Aaron and Sheila got out, leaving the doors ajar, and walked quietly to the side entrance of the mortuary, not expecting to find anything but a door left open by a careless employee. What’s to steal in a mortuary?
After they were inside, Sheila was the first to hear them: male voices. She held up a hand, and both cops froze, drew their pistols, and listened.
“Yours is an ugly pig!” one voice said.
“Fuck you,” the other said, giggling. “Yours is a hundred years old!”
“No!” Sheila whispered, looking wide-eyed at Aaron, her shocked expression saying, It can’t be!
He nodded with a grimace, his expression saying, Yes, it can.
Aaron led the way into the mortuary, quietly creeping down a carpeted hallway to a room lit by lamps, where loved ones had been embalmed that day and cosmetic work had begun. There were two female corpses and one male corpse in the room, each on its own table. On top of the elderly female corpses were two Hollywood tweakers, both naked, both tatted out, both sharing a jar of Vaseline and a glass pipe full of crystal meth. They were side by side, having pushed the tables together for buddy bonding, and had gotten into the mortician’s makeup box. One corpse had grotesque kewpie lips, while the other had eye shadow so thick she looked masked.
The scrawnier of the two white men said, “You got too much eye paint on her. She looks like a fucking raccoon!”
“Don’t get me started on your shitty work!” the other said. “The fucking Joker looks more natural than yours.” Then he turned his face to the corpse he’d mounted and said, “Goddamn it, bitch, can’t you move a little bit? I feel like I’m fucking my ex-wife!”
Both meth-crazed tweakers were laughing hysterically when Sheila Montez switched on the overhead light and said quietly, “Please give me an excuse to kill both of you.”
By the time they got the tweakers dressed and handcuffed and the night-watch detective and the watch commander were notified, two night-watch units had arrived and impounded the tweakers’ car, which they found parked on the north side of the memorial park. When 6-X-66 finally got to Hollywood Station, they put one prisoner in a holding tank, a little room with a bench and a big shatterproof window. They walked their other prisoner into the detective squad room, where Compassionate Charlie Gilford was watching Showbiz Tonight on his own little TV, which he kept in a desk drawer.
The detective switched off his TV, stretched, yawned, and stood up. His rumpled Men’s Wearhouse suit coat hung on the chair behind him, and for a few seconds, Sheila Montez had to gawk at the detective’s incredible necktie, decorated with what were apparently meant to be some sort of cubist embellishments. Compassionate Charlie, who liked to go bargain shopping for Tijuana imports on Alvarado Street, had bought it from a Mexican street vendor who kept pointing to the design, saying, “Diego Rivera!” Except that it looked like something Diego Rivera might have sketched on a tablecloth during a bout of d.t.’s.
“Okay, so what’s the big deal about this?” Charlie said to Aaron, while Sheila took the tweaker into an interview room.
“Didn’t the watch commander talk to you about it?” Aaron said.
“Is this the cemetery deal?” Charlie said, cranky from being pulled away for more paperwork.
“It sure is,” Aaron said.
The detective walked into the interview room, looked at the tweaker who sat in the chair nodding off, sniffed the air, and walked back out.
“That dude reeks,” Charlie said. “What am I smelling?”
“Formaldehyde,” Sheila Montez said, lip curling.
Sergeant Lee Murillo entered the detective squad room then and said to Aaron and Sheila, “Well, there’s no doubt about it. You two get the Almost-a-Hollywood-Moon award. One extra-large pizza with the works.”
Charlie Gilford glanced quizzically at the sergeant and said, “For what?”
Sergeant Murillo said, “For handling the weirdest call of the night.” Then the detective looked at Aaron Sloane and said, “Were those two hemorrhoids boning male corpses or female corpses?”