Harbor Nocturne (19 page)

He fled from the residence in all the confusion just as everyone else had done, even though Hector yelled weakly, “Hey, man, you stay here, goddamnit! We gotta talk! Who the fuck
are
you?”

“I told you who he is!” Dr. Maurice screamed in Hector’s face, his breath smelling like a dead rat. “He’s a paid informer sent by the California Medical Board to torment me! They won’t be satisfied until I hang myself,
just like my former colleague Dr. Cepeda!” And then, without realizing it, he actually got part of it right when he said, “You fool! Can’t you see? This is a sting! It’s been set up by the medical board to entrap me into revealing damaging information so they can send me to federal prison! You fool! You fool!”

The limo carrying Basil and Ivana was driving away into the night, and Dr. Maurice’s putative patient had run across the street and disappeared into the darkness. Hector Cozzo was left alone on the porch with a psychotic crack addict who was quaking in terror from the noisy police drama taking place on the street in front of them. Hector stood helplessly, trying to figure out what had just happened to him, and how the fuck he could ever explain this Bedlam meets Encino to Markov?

When the handcuffed man was being led away by the police, Hector heard him yell, “If I hadn’t dropped my roscoe, you never woulda taken me alive, copper!”

“I want to go home!” Dr. Maurice wailed again.

Hector found it all incomprehensible. He kept wondering how he had come to this, finally deciding it was Hollywood. The insanity of Hollywood will eventually overwhelm you, he thought, and you’ll submit to nutty schemes like the one with Basil and this quack.

Hector gave the former doctor a shove in the direction of the street and said, “Get the fuck outta my sight, termite teeth.”

* * *

Sergeant Hawthorne drove silently back to Hollywood Station, contemplating how he would cover this aborted mission in his report to the captain, but it was hard to think with his passengers babbling excitedly about the evening adventure.

“Dude!” Flotsam said, “When we saw that zombie heading for the front door, we knew he had to be either an extra from
Walking Dead
or Dr. Maurice. And the sarge here, he comes up with an idea to turn it all into a fire drill to get you outta there with no hassle.”

“The guy had a nose hair seven inches long and a mouth full of licorice bites!” Jetsam said. “I was fascinated.”

The vice sergeant felt exhausted, demoralized, wiped out. He said listlessly to Jetsam, “Actually, I already had that escape option cleared with the West Valley watch commander, if needed. I didn’t want Hector Cozzo to find out you’re a cop, in case there might be future possibilities with this operation.” He added, “But there won’t be. My big idea has turned into—”

“I don’t know, Sarge,” Jetsam offered by way of consolation. “I think I convinced Cozzo and Ivana that the doc’s brain has liquefied. And I made that offer to work with Hector for free as an assistant, didn’t I? Maybe he’ll call me.”

Sergeant Hawthorne said dejectedly, “Pimps don’t have interns. Hector Cozzo will hire you as an assistant when Ivana joins the Little Sisters of the Poor.”

“I stuck to the script,” Jetsam pointed out, fishing for compliments. “Considering I found myself in a degenerate version of Circus Maximus, with a real heavy freak-and-mutant act on the program.”

“You were slammin’, dude!” Flotsam said. “Hollywood Nate, with his SAG card and all, couldn’t have done no better. We got in the van, and listened. I loved the way you go, ‘He’s confused, look at him’ when Frankenstein’s stepdad is all acting out and screaming like Saturday night in the drunk tank.”

“Did you hear the way I delivered my lines?” Jetsam said. “I tried to stay way George Clooney cool.”

“You were totally cool, dude,” Flotsam assured him. “Red carpet all the way!”

Jetsam was all smiles from Flotsam’s accolades and from the 80 proof vodka he’d sampled, and he said to his partner, “You ain’t no slouch neither, bro. I could hear you from inside the house when you yelled out stuff to the West Valley coppers. Where’d you come up with that retro dialogue about your mouthpiece and your roscoe? Was that, like, method acting or something?”

Flotsam said, “Hollywood Nate got me watching Turner Classic Movies. Those lines came from Edward G. Robinson. Or was it James Cagney? You know, bro, the next time we do this, we should demand an A-list Winnebago for our dressing room.”

Sergeant Hawthorne felt a fierce headache coming on, coupled with an incipient death wish for his two jabbering companions. In a feeble effort to momentarily escape, he tried blocking out the inane chatter by tripping down memory lane, back to his life’s best days at UCLA. Back when his biggest worry was getting tickets to football and basketball games, and trying to date a busty classmate. Back in those halcyon days when he used to argue with his acerbic and cynical older sister about his impractical academic choices, using retorts like “There’re
plenty
of things I can do to improve my life from the study of Philosophical Analysis of Contemporary Moral Issues!”

What would she say if she could see him right now? Feeling like an utter burnout at age twenty-eight, after his half-baked scheme involving apotemnophilia had blown up like a Taliban IED. A scheme that the Watch 5 sergeant had told him to his face was bizarre and harebrained and would never work. At last, here he was, exhausted, with two surfer goons he hoped he’d never see again.

He could almost hear his sister say to him, “So, our brainstorm du jour blew up in our face, did it? Thad, honey, you’ve always had the intensity and drive of a Vincent van Gogh. But I’m afraid your life’s self-portrait will look like it was painted by Cheeta the chimp.”

TWELVE

D
inko awoke early
the next morning. He showered and shaved and dressed up better than he ever had when he was accompanying his mother to Mass. Lita wore her best dress, a creamy white one with long sleeves and an empire waist, and flats, her only shoes, besides sneakers, that weren’t for use on a stage while straddling a pole. Even Brigita Babich went a little dressier than usual in a summer pastel, cut just below the knee but allowing room for an expanding middle.

“My, don’t you look beautiful, Lita!” Brigita said. “And look at my handsome son, all spruced up for a change.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Dinko said. “You look very beautiful, too.”

“Now you’ve gone too far,” Brigita said. “Let’s go to Mass.”

She had found Dinko and Lita watching television when she’d returned from bingo the night before, but there’d been something different about them, a certain look when their eyes met. She correctly suspected that this new friendship had turned into something more for them while she’d been trying to catch bingo numbers on all four corners of her card.

They attended the 9:00 Mass in English at Mary Star of the Sea, a church with a diverse parish that also offered Sunday Masses in Croatian, Italian, and Spanish. Brigita was interested to see if Lita and Dinko would go to Holy Communion. She wondered if they felt they were in a state of grace or not. She assumed that Dinko would go to Communion regardless, because despite her most strenuous efforts, he’d never been a devout Catholic like she and his father had been. She figured that Dinko would take Communion just for show even if he’d committed every mortal sin up to murder, without even bothering about confession and absolution.

When it was time for Communion, Brigita got up and walked down the aisle toward the altar, but both Dinko and Lita remained in the pew. Brigita thought that was evidence that they’d been intimate, and that Lita needed to confess to a priest before accepting Holy Communion. Brigita liked that. It meant that the girl respected the rules of the Church even if she’d broken a law of God.

That made Brigita wonder how many times this child had broken other laws of God, coming from who knew what kind of life in Mexico, and then as a dancer in a Hollywood nightclub. Still, Lita hadn’t been disrespectful and taken Holy Communion while not in a state of grace, and that had to be counted in her favor. Brigita was already fond of this girl and liked the positive effect she was having on Dinko, but where would it lead? He’d known her for only a few
days
. It was very worrisome.

Upon returning home, Brigita said, “You two can change and feed Ollie while I squeeze some orange juice and get brunch started.”

Lita said, “Please can I help? My mother, she like to cook also. She can make very good chipotle roasting beef, when she got the money for the beef. And she like to make
arroz con leche
for finish. You know the one?”

“I do,” Brigita said. “Rice and condensed milk, either warm or cold, with cinnamon on top. We used to order that when we’d go for Mexican food at Ports O’ Call. Remember, Dinko?”

“I remember,” he said, but really he didn’t. He found himself not wanting to remember anything that had happened before the last few days. Before Lita, that was another life, all of it. He was beginning anew.

“I’ll buy some chipotle chilies next time I go to the market,” Brigita said. Then: “When was the last time you saw your mother, Lita?”

“When I have to come here,” she said. “It is three months when I leave Guanajuato, and I ride the bus to Tijuana for one week and meet the coyote, and then I cross with ten other people.”

“With that big suitcase?” Dinko asked.

“Yes,” she said. “A man help me. I pay him, and after we cross, we see cars that wait and they drive me to the bus station in San Diego. And I take the bus to Los Angeles.”

“Have you phoned your mother in the past four months?” Brigita asked.

“She do not have the telephone,” Lita said. “But I make the calls to the lady who is living in the rooms above my mother and brothers. She always runs to get my mother for us to talk. I do not wish to trouble the lady, so I only call maybe one time each week. My mother says she is okay and my brothers go to school and they are okay. But my mother has the diabetes and the weak heart, so I must send money when I can. That is why I come here. To make more money than I make in Guanajuato.”

“Lita,” Brigita said, “how did you earn money in Mexico?”

The young woman lowered her eyes and said, “I dance in the club. Same like the one in Wilmington.”

Dinko thought the interrogation had gone far enough, and so did Brigita. When Dinko asked, “Are we ever gonna get brunch?” Brigita said, “We certainly are. Lita, how about squeezing those oranges?”

“Yes!” Lita said with enthusiasm. “I am very good making the orange juice.”

Early that Sunday evening, at about the same time that Lita Medina and Dinko Babich were being stuffed with the third meal of the day, a homeless octogenarian derelict known as Trombone Teddy was sound asleep in a dumpster just off Hollywood Boulevard near Vine Street. He’d had a successful Sunday morning panhandling on the boulevard and had managed to get himself so lubricated in the early afternoon that he needed a nap in his favorite summer snoozing spot. Trombone Teddy was having one of those heavenly dreams of the days when he was a good sideman playing in several West Coast jazz spots, including at legendary drummer Shelly Manne’s famous nightclub, Shelly’s Manne-Hole, on Cahuenga Boulevard. As far as Trombone Teddy was concerned, those were the days when real music ruled, and he knew they would never return.

Teddy, who was known to many of the cops at Hollywood Station, was an extremely sound sleeper, especially after so much afternoon imbibing, and while he slept, a Honduran janitor working an overtime job at a nearby commercial building carried a trash can loaded with office detritus to the building’s seldom-used dumpster. He heard the buzz of circling flies, and when he opened the lid immediately leaped backward, dropping the trash can, but not before getting a good scare from the grizzled countenance of Trombone Teddy, who looked and smelled very dead indeed. As the lid slammed down, the janitor ran back to the job site to phone the police.

The midwatch had just cleared from roll call, and at 5:45
p.m
., 6-X-76 got the call. The janitor, who spoke English well enough to explain what he’d found, led Mel Yarashi and Always Talking Tony to the last resting place of Trombone Teddy, who was not known by either cop.

When they were still fifty feet away from the dumpster, Mel Yarashi turned to his younger partner and said, “Whoa! We got a stinker, all right. The dude’s deader than a lawyer’s conscience.”

Except that when they raised the lid, Teddy snorted and tried to roll over on the trash pile for a more comfortable repose.

Mel Yarashi told the janitor, “This is either Lazarus or the old bum ain’t dead.”

“Dead drunk, maybe,” A.T. said.

Then the older cop said, “Jesus, the smell!”

That’s when Teddy’s sleeping partner revealed herself. Teddy’s rolling movement had put his face on top of her extended hand, her flesh the palest of gray, and supple, rigor having come and gone.

“Goddamn!” Mel Yarashi cried, and he shoveled away some crumpled newspapers and cardboard boxes, seeing that the hand was attached to the clothed body of a woman. “Call for a homicide team!” he told A.T. “And notify the watch commander!” Then he shook Teddy, yelling, “Get the fuck up!”

Teddy threw up his hand to shield his eyes from the low-angled solar rays, and blinked uncomprehendingly at the Asian cop staring slack-jawed at him while a black cop talked excitedly into a hand-held radio.

“Good day, Officer,” Teddy said. “Am I preventing access to the dumpster this afternoon? If so, I’ll be glad to move to—”

“Get outta there!” Mel Yarashi sputtered, and he grabbed Teddy by the front of his greasy coat, lifting the scrawny derelict out onto the asphalt.

Still stunned, the cop blurted, “What’d you do to her?” Then he calmed himself, drew his handcuffs, and said, “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. You—”

Teddy interrupted the Miranda warning by saying, “But this dumpster is almost never used, Officer! They pick it up once a week, and it’s never more than half full. I woulda picked another one if I knew the people in the office building cared this much. They often wave to me and give me doughnuts sometimes. I’m sorry, Officer. If I’m trespassing, I won’t sleep in this one no more.”

Mel Yarashi ceased Mirandizing. He looked at Teddy’s watery blue eyes and childlike expression, and then at the extended arm of the dead woman in the dumpster, whose smell made him want to retch. He put his handcuffs back on his Sam Browne and said, “Tell me something. Did you know you went to bed with a corpse?”

Trombone Teddy blinked again, scratched his belly, and asked, perplexed, “Are you talking about that time last year when the guy next to me at the homeless shelter croaked during the night?”

The moment the crime scene criminalists had finished their preliminary work, and the coroner’s body snatchers had lifted the dead woman from the dumpster and placed her on their corpse cart, she was identified by her nickname and place of employment. The strip club dancer was wearing a Club Samara silver anklet, engraved with her professional name, “Daisy”—a gift that each of the dancers had been given with their holiday bonus in December. The second team of detectives at the scene drove to the nightclub, closed on Sunday, and got the head bartender’s phone number from one of the Latino busboys doing a cleanup prior to the Monday lunch opening.

Leonid Alekseev, the Russian bartender, was called. He drove to the club, where he met the team of detectives and quickly identified their death photo of the Korean dancer known as Daisy. He provided her employment name, Soo Jeong, and her Social Security number and driver’s license information, along with the address of her apartment in east Hollywood. Violet, aka Li Pham, Daisy’s roommate, was interviewed, but she could provide no information other than that Daisy had gone missing for unexplained reasons earlier in the week, and Violet claimed to be unsure of the exact day. She implied in broken English that such was the topsy-turvy world of exotic dancers, who did not always sleep at home.

By early evening, a sixty-two-year-old Georgian immigrant and retired pawnbroker, Bakhva Ramishvili, whose name appeared on the liquor license and the building lease, was sitting inside an interview room at Hollywood Station, perspiring noticeably. He assured a woman homicide detective that he was a minor investor in Club Samara but that the nightclub’s management was the responsibility of the Russian bartender, Leonid Alekseev. When pressed as to who else was an investor in the club, the Georgian gave the name Pavel Markov and an address on Mount Olympus.

After dark, a very weary Hollywood Division D2, Albino Villaseñor, drove alone up Mount Olympus, where local realtors claimed there were more Italian cypress trees per acre than anywhere else on earth. Bino Villaseñor was very familiar with Mount Olympus, a section of the Hollywood Hills preferred by well-to-do foreign nationals. There were plenty of residents from Israel, Iran, Russia, Armenia, and many Arab countries. The number of Bentleys and Rolls-Royces attested to that.

The detective had been hoping to spend Sunday evening watching a video of his granddaughter trying her hand at lacrosse. Instead, he’d been called from his home thirty minutes after Trombone Teddy had been found alive and well, but with a dumpster partner who was not. And Bino had been hard at work ever since.

He’d received another call that evening, from Sergeant Hawthorne of the Hollywood vice unit, who’d told him that the Club Samara dancers were being “serviced” by a dirtbag named Hector Cozzo, who was an unofficial facilitator for this nightclub and for a massage parlor that was an upscale brothel. The vice sergeant said there might also be a Korean named Mr. Kim who was connected to the nightclub as a provider of entertainment. Then Bino had been given a short version of the extraordinary undercover operation that had gone awry at Hector Cozzo’s Encino home.

After parking in front of the Mount Olympus address he’d been given by the license holder and part owner of Club Samara, the detective studied the house from the street. It wasn’t particularly impressive, not like some of the view homes near the top, and the detective was fairly certain that the house would turn out to be leased rather than owned by the resident. That, too, was common around these parts.

Bino Villaseñor examined his wardrobe after he got out of the car—an automatic response, he believed, to being in Hollywood Hills neighborhoods where his Mexican immigrant grandfather had actually worked as a gardener back when Bino was a child. His three-year-old brown gabardine suit was good at hiding coffee spills but was looking pretty sad of late, and he made a mental note to call tomorrow and see if they had any sales going on at Men’s Wearhouse. He adjusted the knot on his salsa-stained maroon necktie before ringing the bell.

The door was opened by a rather flamboyant-looking older man with a black Elvis hairdo, obviously dyed, wearing a pearly jumpsuit that had gone out of style in the 1980s or earlier. The resident looked with some disappointment at a bald, rumpled Latino with a bushy white mustache who was holding a large notepad in his hand. It seemed as though Markov might’ve been expecting someone more impressive and formidable.

Bino pulled his coat back to reveal the LAPD shield on his belt and said, “I’m Detective Villaseñor, the one who phoned you. If you’re Mr. Pavel Markov.”

Markov said, “That’s a name I use in business, Detective. My correct name is Pedrag Marcovic. It seems more profitable in Hollywood these days to be from Russia rather than my homeland of Serbia, so for business reasons I have adopted a name that implies I am an ethnic Russian, even though my poor grasp of the Russian language usually gives me away. Please come in.”

Bino entered the foyer and sized up the house in a glance, thinking, Leased for sure, with rented furniture. The guy was not wealthy, but was trying to be a player among those who were.