Hollywood Moon (18 page)

Malcolm had seen dozens of women leave the shopping center and go to their cars, but this was the one he wanted. She drove
an old gray Volvo sedan, and she was alone. He followed her, careful to keep a car between them like in the movies, and that
part was thrilling. He knew that nothing was going to happen. He was only playing a game, a stalking game. She wasn’t going
to pull into an underground parking garage like the last one. It couldn’t happen like that again. He was just fooling around,
just passing the time until his anger subsided and he could go home.

Malcolm followed her onto a residential street six blocks east of the Wilshire Country Club. She lived in a bungalow, the
type he’d seen in movies about old Hollywood. It was white stucco with a Spanish-tile roof. There was a tiny yard in front
and there were lots of other small houses nearby. He parked half a block down the street, leaned back, fingers interlaced
behind his head, and closed his eyes. He was just waiting to grow calm again. He needed a good night’s sleep, he thought.
Soon he was dozing fitfully.

The first “clients” arrived a few minutes before 6:30
P.M
., and Dewey, with his best Realtor’s smile, met them on the front porch, holding the door wide open. They were a young Latino
couple, he with a pronounced accent, she with a slight accent and a baby in her stomach. Dewey figured they were no older
than twenty, and they were shy.

The husband had the look of a gardener. He wore a khaki shirt and frayed jeans, and there was dirt under his nails. His naturally
dark skin showed a decided tan line across his forehead, where his hat was usually worn.

Dewey held out his hand and said, “Welcome, folks! I’m Brad Simpson. Here’s my card.”

The young man shook his hand, and his wife spoke for them, saying, “We’re the Valencias. We spoke to a lady in your office.”

“Yes,” Dewey said. “That was my secretary, Ethel. We’ve had so many inquiries in the last hour. She’s called me on my cell
four times. This one is going to be rented quickly. Come on inside.”

Dewey saw their disappointment at the condition of the foreclosed house, and he said, “The last tenants were pretty awful.
We haven’t had time to clean the place. Also, we’re going to paint the living room and the bathroom. Did my secretary tell
you there’s a little powder room just off the kitchen? We’re going to wallpaper that as well as the kitchen. Everything will
be done before you move in, if you decide to take the place.”

They listened politely and then walked through the small rooms, until the wife said, “This could work for us, but we have
one more house to look at.”

Dewey said quickly, “How much did my secretary tell you the rent would be?”

“Twenty-four hundred a month,” the young woman said.

“It’ll go before the evening’s over,” Dewey said. “In fact, I have an appointment with a prospective tenant in”—he glanced
at his watch—“thirty-five minutes.” He looked at them thoughtfully and said, “You know what? I’d like you two to have this
place. It’d be a nice street for your baby to grow up on. Gosh darn it, you remind me of how it was when my wife and me were
starting out. I’m gonna take it upon myself to trim three—no, make it four hundred dollars off the rent. I know the owner
won’t give me any trouble when I tell him the place is not in good condition. He lives in Oregon and never comes to L.A.,
so I pretty much have total control over his property management. And I’ll waive the security deposit. You write me a check
for the first and last month and it’s yours. You can move in on the first of the month, when the place will look fresh as
a daisy, I guarantee you. Paint, wallpaper, plumbing repaired, the works.”

Dewey smiled large and studied them while they talked quietly but enthusiastically in Spanish, and then the wife took a checkbook
from her purse and said, “We accept and we thank you! Shall I make out the check to Brad Simpson Real Estate?”

“That’ll be fine,” Dewey said, thinking that four Clevelands would be a nice deposit to the account he’d just opened at the
bank as Brad Simpson.

He filled out the rental agreement as fast as he could, figuring that the next “client” would probably also be arriving early
for their appointment. After he said good-bye to the couple, he only had to wait ten minutes until the next appointment arrived.

This was a black couple, a bit unusual in that there were not many black people living in Hollywood. Every other ethnic group
was more than proportionately represented, especially the growing Latino and Asian populations. These two were only slightly
older than the last couple.

Dewey’s professional smile broadened, and he extended a business card, saying, “Folks, you’re just in time. The last appointment
said they’re coming to my office in the morning and will probably take the place, but until I get their first and last month’s
check, it’s still open. My name is Brad Simpson and I’m very pleased to meet you!”

When the couple was looking at the kitchen, Dewey had a flashback to the last time he did the rental gag. On the first of
February, six moving vans had arrived at the cottage he’d rented in mid-Hollywood. The street was blocked by the trucks, disputes
raged, and the police were called. He happened to be driving by on his way to another “rental” and had to take a detour because
of the traffic jam.

Malcolm Rojas could hardly wait until dark. He’d been watching the cottage for an hour. Dusky light blasted through the Hollywood
smog, and the cottage where the woman had entered gave off a burnished glow. That light excited Malcolm. He was excited by
everything around him, and even though the anger had not abated, he couldn’t say for sure which emotion was stronger, anger
or excitement.

No one else had entered the bungalow, no children, no husband, nobody. It was such a small house that he figured she lived
there alone. Somehow that made him angrier. That bitch got a little house of her own, and he had to share an apartment with
his mother, like a helpless child.

She had unlocked the front door and had carried her shopping bags inside but had not returned to the door. Maybe it wasn’t
locked now. Regardless, he was going in. If he had to, he’d ask her if his friend lived there. Who? Thomas, that was it. He’d
ask if Thomas lived there. But if the door was unlocked, he was not going to ask anything. He was that angry and that excited.
He reached into his pocket and stroked the box cutter.

She never heard him enter. She was in the kitchen, thawing a small steak in the micro when she heard him bump into a kitchen
chair. When he rushed her from behind, he clamped his hand over her mouth, showed her the box cutter, and said, “If you scream
even once, I’ll cut your throat.”

When he had her down on the kitchen floor, she began sobbing, her eyes on the box cutter that he held to her face.

She kept repeating, “Please don’t! Don’t hurt me! I’ll give you money! Take the money from my purse! Take my car! Please don’t
hurt me!”

The bitch! She looked even older up close. He thought she was at least forty-five years old, maybe older. He looked at the
roots of her strawberry blonde hair and could see gray. So she was maybe fifty years old. Look at her fat thighs! He pulled
at her underwear, ripping it away from her while she said, “Please don’t hurt me!”

“Shut up!” he said. “First you’re going to suck me off, you fat old bitch!”

There was no doubt which team would win the Almost-a-Hollywood-Moon contest and get an extra-large pizza with the works from
Sergeant Murillo for handling the weirdest incident, not after 6-X-66 got a call to the memorial park that night. One of the
employees had returned to pick up a set of keys she’d inadvertently left on her desk, and she’d seen a door to the mortuary
slightly ajar. She’d put in a 9-1-1 call on her cell and then informed the guard at the exit gate.

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.