Hollywood Moon (16 page)

“Nice round number,” Dewey said. “It always comes out a nice round number. And I wonder why so many of you young men claim
that you had to gamble so much more than you were told to gamble? Is that because you are afflicted by compulsive gambling
disorder or by inherent greed?”

“I swear to God, Mr. Willis —,” the kid said, but Dewey put up a hand to silence him.

“My… organization went to a lot of expense to set this whole thing up,” Dewey said. “It hardly seems worthwhile now, Stuart.”

“I worked three days for that money, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said, “when you consider the driving time.”

“How long do you think my organization spent setting it up?”

“Maybe I could do another part of the work next time,” Stuart said. “Maybe I could make the deposits for you. Somebody has
to put checks into the debit accounts. Why not me?”

“Ambitious,” Dewey said. “You’re an ambitious lad, Stuart. Well, it’s getting late and I have to report to the boss of our
organization. I hope he’s not unhappy with your work. If he is, you’ll be hearing from… somebody.”

“Mr. Willis,” the kid said, “I worked hard and did the best I could. I wouldn’t cheat you!”

“Of course not,” Dewey said. “Go home and get some sleep. We’ll be in touch.”

After Stuart was clear of the parking lot, Dewey went to his car, started it up, and began the drive home to Hollywood. The
$2,500 wasn’t bad, considering he had two more kids like Stuart to collect from before the month ended. The “organization
boss”—that smoke-reeking, foul-tempered bitch—was someone he could almost live with, as long as the calendar month netted
them at least $10,000 after expenses. Any less than that and she was so horrible, it was all he could do to keep from packing
up and running away for good. Maybe then he’d have a chance of living a normal life span instead of dying of emphysema or
lung cancer. And he would do it too, except that Eunice had sole access to the so-called retirement account.

For the first five years of their marriage, he’d secretly searched for an account number, a routing number, or an online password—anything
that might open the door to her treasure vault. But he was never even able to discover in which bank she hoarded their money.
He reckoned that by now she’d accumulated about $500,000, give or take. Currently he was running six bank accounts under several
names, where money from their various gags could be deposited, transferred to another bank, and withdrawn before their victims’
own banks ever discovered a problem. And Eunice did in-person as well as online banking. On one of his snooping forays, he’d
found four checkbooks from local Hollywood banks.

Something had always bothered him about the “retirement account” story she’d fed him. It was that she was the momma bird protecting
the nest egg that was going to see them through to a comfortable retirement in San Francisco. It was there that she owned
an inherited family home on Russian Hill, currently leased out, but which would be theirs during their golden years. The thought
of all that made him shiver with revulsion.

And then one day in March, after they’d gone out for a dress-up dinner at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where
she didn’t see a single celebrity and got drunk instead, he’d found a brass key. He’d spotted it while snooping in her wallet
after she’d passed out in her bedroom, and it looked to him like a padlock key. He’d hardly slept that night, thinking about
the lock that the key would fit. There had been too many occasions over the years when she’d nagged and harangued Dewey about
making banking errors that could lead back to him, or rather to one of the characters he played when he did in-person banking.

The fact was, she was distrustful of banks and always overestimated the employees, always fearing “red flags,” as she put
it. As far as Dewey could see, a few zeros added to a number meant nothing at all to the young tellers, most of whom looked
like they’d rather be bartenders or cocktail waitresses or anything else where they could make a few bucks and meet some interesting
people. He had persistent thoughts that someone like Eunice would keep her retirement fund in a safe deposit box rather than
in an account where she’d surrender control to people she obsessively feared.

But the key he’d found in her wallet was not to a safe deposit box. It looked like an ordinary brass padlock key, the kind
he used at storage facilities where he kept the merchandise that his runners bought with bogus checks and credit cards. He
began thinking a lot about that key. There could be a huge amount of cash in storage somewhere in Los Angeles. That key provoked
endless fantasies for Dewey Gleason.

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.

T
HE 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.”

“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?”