“Female corpses,” Aaron said.
“Well, shit!” Compassionate Charlie Gilford scoffed. “You call that weird?” Then he repeated the mantra heard every day around the police station in that unique part of the world: “This is fucking Hollywood!”
NINE
GET UP!” Eunice yelled, and Dewey smelled smoke and and bolted upright, thinking the place was on fire. But the smoke he smelled was from the cigarette dangling from Eunice’s mouth.
When he looked up at her, he said, “Oh, shit.”
“Don’t gimme that oh-shit look,” Eunice said. “It’s eight o’clock. This is the second time I’ve had to come in here.”
Dewey said, “You’re killing me, Eunice! Killing me! I can’t work fifteen hours a day. Nobody can.”
She stared at him and said, “You don’t have to work at all, Dewey. This is Hollywood, U.S.A. You’re free to sit on your ass all day long and watch Girls Gone Wild videos if that’s what you want. But not in my apartment. Not in my life. Make up your mind.”
“Goddamnit, Eunice, I don’t have any morning appointments,” he said, cursing himself for the whine that drizzled out every time she looked as serious as a stroke, as serious as poverty.
“What’re you talking about, no morning appointments? You got houses to rent. I told you there was a ten-o’clock showing on the fourth house. And then you got two more appointments on that same house this afternoon and two more appointments tonight on the fifth and sixth houses. You claimed your burglar partners were gonna come through.”
He swung his feet onto the floor and kept his head ducked, ready for the explosion. “There won’t be a third, fourth, fifth, or sixth house.”
“Do you mean what I think you mean?”
“The last thing I did last night before I came home was check on them. You were right. The guys I hired only changed the lock on one and lied about doing the others. They gave me dummy keys for the rest.”
“Well, no shit, Dewey!” Eunice said, lip twisted in her supersneer. “Just like I predicted, whenever you hire tweakers.”
“You think I can hire unemployed mechanical engineers, Eunice? It’s the fucking world we live in. You can’t trust anybody.”
“Outsmarted by tweakers,” Eunice said. “Well, no shit!”
“They didn’t outsmart me! I told you, they threatened me. They coulda killed me, not that you’d care. I had no choice, Eunice. Sometimes that’s what happens out there.”
She stood smoking and looking down at him with contempt and said, “Well, get out on the street and pick up the noon delivery in Los Feliz. Do something to earn your keep, Dewey. That’s all I can say to you. Earn your keep like I do. Consider it a warning.”
“Here I lie, numb and helpless!” he said, using lines he’d delivered in dinner theater. “While a croaking albatross smothers me in its wings, plucking out my eyes, devouring my guts!”
“You sound like such a sissy when you go all theatrical,” Eunice jeered. “If Hugo was here, he’d say you oughtta consider testosterone shots.”
His head was throbbing when she stalked out of the room. He sat on the side of the bed for several minutes, listening to her computer keys begin clickety-clacking. He thought about his desperate life and how there didn’t seem to be a way to change it. If only he still got calls from his agent. He’d take any job he could get, anything that paid a stipend. He would read for parts, even audition for those snotty kids making Internet films. He’d do dinner theater gigs in the suburbs. If only he still had an agent. He opened the nightstand drawer and took out the cell phone he used for Tristan and Jerzy.
When he was shaved, dressed, and heading out the door, Eunice barely glanced at him, except to snort at his Jakob Kessler getup. He turned the dead bolts and had a flashback of Eunice’s face when his eyes had popped open that morning, of that dangling cigarette and that horrible scowl. Today she’d had the deepest furrows in her brow he’d seen in months. He felt so desperate and miserable and angry that he was emboldened to strike back somehow.
Before slamming the door behind him, he said, “You know, Eunice, your everyday scowl lines are especially mean and evil today. Why don’t you call your dermatologist?”
“Dude, who won?” the forklift driver said to Malcolm Rojas when they were uncrating a washing machine in the warehouse.
Malcolm reflexively touched his face. The flesh was tender under his left eye where the woman had nicked him with her fist after she’d struggled to her feet. She was strong, that fat bitch, and she’d fooled him with her begging and crying, but then she’d made a quick move and was on her feet and almost got away.
“Some dude at the mall,” Malcolm said. “He told me he wanted change for cigarettes and when I said, ‘Get a job,’ he suckered me. Man, I really kicked his ass.” Malcolm showed the knuckle abrasions to the forklift driver.
The forklift driver, a young Latino, said, “What was he, a mallate?”
“Yeah,” Malcolm said.
“Those South L.A. niggers,” the forklift driver said. “They take the subway to Hollywood for dope and pussy. You’re lucky he didn’t pull a blade or something.”
“He won’t even be pulling his cock,” Malcolm said. “I beat him real bad.”
The forklift driver grinned and gave Malcolm a thumbs-up before driving away.
Malcolm’s knuckles were hurting more than the small contusion under his eye. It was hard to remember exactly what had happened after he’d crawled forward onto her chest. He’d felt those big tits beneath him, and he was taking out his cock when she’d gotten her hands under his thighs and actually lifted him high enough for her to crawl out from between his legs. Then she was behind him, scrambling to her feet.
He’d spun and tackled her, and she went down and started screaming. She kept screaming even after he punched her, how many times, he couldn’t remember. He did recall picking up the box cutter after she’d knocked it out of his hand. He remembered exactly how he’d been going to swipe it across her throat just as he’d swiped it across a thousand boxes he’d unpacked. But as he was ready to do it, he’d heard a car door slam and he panicked. He’d leaped up, run to the door, and was sprinting down the street to his car before he realized that the slamming car door came from the driveway next to hers, and that whoever had done it was already inside their house.
Malcolm had found himself thinking about that encounter a dozen times since it happened. Sometimes he tried to remember every detail, sometimes the broad strokes. It made his palms sweat when he thought about it. He knew that this new rage within him was very dangerous, and he knew that he should try to get it under control. If he had money, real money, he could afford things to help him, like a hooker. Maybe a hooker would give him what he needed and he wouldn’t feel so angry all the time. Malcolm took out his cell phone and dialed the number of the man he’d met at Pablo’s Tacos.
Dewey Gleason as Jakob Kessler was on Hollywood Boulevard across from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, sitting at a table, sipping a mediocre cappuccino, and waiting for Tristan and Jerzy. It was amazing how many Street Characters bothered to come out in the morning hours, but there they were, even duplicates. There were two Chewbaccas, and Dewey wondered if either was the one who’d gotten his ass thrown in jail last year. The newspapers had fun with it, saying that Chewie had crossed over to the dark side.
He saw a Spider-Man and a Batman, this one looking even fatter than the one who’d recently gotten the crap beaten out of him by a panhandler half his size. That dustup made the news as well. He didn’t see any of the Marilyn Monroes this early in the day, and there weren’t a lot of tourists with cameras, certainly not the coachloads of Asians who really spent the bucks posing with, and tipping, the Street Characters. Dewey suddenly had a dreadful passing thought that without Eunice he could possibly find himself someday inside one of those horrid costumes, surviving on tips. The last stop of a failed actor. Dewey Gleason as a diminutive Darth Vader? Even on this hot summer day it made him shiver, and he shoved the image from his mind.