Hollywood Moon (25 page)

The woman was fortyish, well dressed, the only one in line wearing pearls, along with a tailored blazer, matching skirt, and
sensible heels.

“Watch her purse,” Dewey said.

“I’m not into snatching purses,” Malcolm said.

“Nobody wants you to. Watch and learn,” Dewey said.

While her purchases were being rung up, the woman opened her purse and removed her checkbook, placing it on the counter. She
opened it as though to write a check, then, changing her mind, removed her wallet, took a credit card out, and ran it through
the card reader. Then she put the card down beside the wallet and checkbook, not looking at them while she chatted with the
bag boy and the cashier.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to learn here,” Malcolm said, his frustration growing, wondering if he’d made a mistake trying
to hook up with this man.

“See the guy standing behind her?” Dewey said. “Imagine if you were standing there shoulder surfing.”

“What?”

“That’s what it’s called. The Colombians are really good at it. They can look at a checkbook and memorize an account number
in a few seconds.”

“I could never do anything like that, Mr. Graham,” Malcolm said. “I don’t have that kind of brain. I have to be honest with
you.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” Dewey said. “There’s a better way. You could just stand there with your camera phone and pretend you’re
text messaging. But you’d really be taking pictures of the credit-card number, the checkbook, even the driver’s license sometimes.
A good shoulder surfer could’ve gotten all three photos from that woman, later pushed the send button, and downloaded the
JPEG photos on his computer. Everything you could want is lying there in plain view. You don’t have to snatch anything from
anyone in this business, Clark. People will give their money to you. Why? Because you’re smarter than they are.”

“Is that what you want me to do, Mr. Graham? Shoulder surfing?”

“I’m just showing you one of the many possibilities that’re open to you,” Dewey said. “You’ll start out doing more simple
jobs.”

Dewey and Malcolm returned to the car and headed for Mel’s Drive-In on the Sunset Strip, where Malcolm Rojas was treated to
a meal and thirty minutes of schooling that Dewey conducted like a game.

When Malcolm was halfway finished, Dewey tested him by suddenly saying, “What’re the first numbers of an American Express
card, Clark?”

With his mouth full, Malcolm said, “Three-seven.”

“Visa?”

“Four.”

MasterCard?”

Malcolm swallowed his food and said, “Five.”

“Diners?”

“ Six-oh-one.”

“That’s my boy!” Dewey said, toasting Malcolm with his soda. “You are a
very
fast learner. You should see some of the employees I’ve had to teach. My secretary, Ethel, would be impressed by you.”

Sometime later, Dewey Gleason was to remember that impromptu comment to Malcolm Rojas, and it would then seem incredibly prescient.

S
ITTING OUTSIDE
in the Chevy Caprice and watching the parking lot of Mel’s Drive-In were Tristan Hawkins and Jerzy Szarpowicz, who was extremely
pissed off at his partner.

“I’m outta here, Creole,” Jerzy said. “You can follow Kessler and his little pal home and peep at them while they put on leather
underwear with the easy-access zipper in front. But me, I’m outta here.”

“This ain’t what’s goin’ on here, wood,” Tristan said. “This ain’t no sissy pickup. Kessler’s workin’ this kid like he worked
me.”

“Okay, so what’s that got to do with us gettin’ rich behind it?”

“It’s gonna take a little time to explain.”

“Gimme the
Reader’s Digest
version. I ain’t got all night.”

“Okay, so let’s look at this Kessler, or whatever his name is. A big crime boss? Shit, he never made me, not one time, and
I been followin’ him all over town. He’s nothin’ but another little cyber café identity thief with a gimmick. Except he’s
in business with somebody smarter than him, somebody who’s makin’ those bogus driver’s licenses and credit cards and writin’
phony paper for the purchases we hauled to the storage yard. Where there was lotsa other goods squirreled away, you might
remember. Kessler’s jist a recruiter of runners like us, and a money collector. We gotta find out who his boss is and then
we make our move.”

“What move?”

“We’re gonna become the junior partners.”

“Take me home, man. Now.”

“No, wait, dawg! We know where Kessler keeps the TVs and other shit he steals. We saw how he does that part of his game, and
we know the address of the guy who’s gonna get the bill for all that stuff we delivered. We know Kessler dresses up in disguises.
We lean on him and let him know what we know, he’ll faint tits-up like the bitch he is and either let us in or else buy us
out. Think about it.”

“We can’t blackmail him. We been on jobs with him!”

“I’m jist sayin’, we could tell him we’ll rat him out to the cops about that house in Los Feliz, and where we took the stuff
to his storage locker and all the other shit. He can’t take a chance that we’re runnin’ a game on him, because he don’t know
nothin’ about us, and we know lots about him. Especially we know where he lives.”

“Maybe his boss ain’t a bitch like him,” Jerzy said. “What if he’s partnered up with some bad motherfucker that don’t want
no junior partners?”

“That’s why we need a little bit of patience. Maybe we do another job or two with him and we find out more, like who does
he work for and where is that partner. Shit, it might be that whoever runs him works the business right outta his crib on
Franklin. Then we got him. He won’t be able to bounce on out in the middle of the night. We gotta know a little more about
how it all works.”

Tristan stopped talking then and looked at Jerzy. He figured the Polack must be burning up every little brain cell he had.
The silence went on for nearly a minute and then Jerzy said, “Okay, let’s get him to give us a job tomorrow. I ain’t gonna
play along forever, man. And one other thing you gotta know about me right now.”

“What’s that?”

“I ain’t into violence unless…” He gave an ambiguous shrug.

“Unless what?”

“There’s
real
money to be had.”

Tristan held out his palm, and Jerzy slapped it without enthusiasm, saying, “Man, this could be a big fuckin’ mistake.”

Late in the evening, Officer Harris Triplett, the young patrol officer who’d recently completed his probation, was on temporary
loan to the vice unit as a UC operator. He was posing as a trick and not having a good time so far. Harris wore his sandy
hair so short and looked so youthful that the vice sergeant thought the young cop could easily pass for a sailor or Marine
on liberty. The plan was to borrow a few cops to use as operators to get as many hookers as possible off the streets ASAP,
because one of the local TV stations had been regularly featuring a spokesperson for the Restore Hollywood project who claimed
that the LAPD was ignoring vice problems on the boulevards.

It was an informal three-day operation to quiet the critics, so Harris Triplett was not wearing a wire under his Aloha shirt,
as a female UC operator would if she were posing as a hooker on the boulevard. Under the front seat of the Mercury Sable that
he was driving were a rover and his service weapon.

The first drag queen he encountered on the Santa Monica track, aka the “fruit loop,” was a mixed-race addict. The dragon,
wearing a short gold dress and platforms, looked at him through the window and said, “So whatchoo lookin’ for, dope or pussy?”

“What’ve you got?” Harris Triplett said, figuring if a good drug bust came his way, he shouldn’t say no. He started sniffling
and acting twitchy, his version of an addict, but he was far too hale and hearty to pull it off.

“You look like you could use some black,” the dragon said with a knowing smile.

“Yeah,” he said, figuring that “black” was tar heroin.

“Well, I ain’t got no black,” the dragon said. “Maybe I can get some liquid, though. I know somebody with a vial. That’s sixty
doses. You got that kind of sugar?”

“Yeah, I’ll take it,” Harris Triplett said, figuring that “liquid” was LSD or PCP.

The dragon let out a raspy chuckle and said, “You switched up on me to the other dope way too fast, baby. That means you’re
a cop. But you’re a cute little puppy. Come back when you’re a big dog.”

The dragon laughed again and walked away.

The next streetwalker he encountered was a tall white transsexual, well known to the vice unit who’d arrested her in the past.
And now that she was post-op, she could not be booked into a male facility. The tranny stopped on the sidewalk, holding back
her shoulder-length natural-red hair and bent forward to look inside the car.

“This is a pool car,” she said, “and you’re a cop.”

“What?” Harris Triplett said. “Me, a cop? I’m a Marine from Twenty-nine Palms.”

“Kiss me if you’re not a cop,” the tranny said.

Harris Triplett hesitated and said, “I don’t even kiss my wife.”

“You only got one key in the ignition, sweetie,” the tranny said before turning to walk away. “You should always use a key
ring with at least a house key on it. I wish you weren’t a cop. You’re cute as a button.”

Harris Triplett was starting to think that he was cute enough to clean up the streets of Hollywood single-handed if he just
knew his ass from lamb chops. He put the vice unit’s Mercury key on his own key ring and hoped he could manage to pop at least
one hooker before his three-night loan to the vice unit ended.

He got on the rover to ask for permission from his cover team to try the Sunset Boulevard track, and permission was granted.
And that did the trick. The first streetwalker he spotted on Sunset Boulevard was neither a dragon nor a tranny. She had real
double-X chromosomes, and she appeared to be very young. And as it turned out, she was only fifteen years old. She was full-figured,
bulging out of her little black dress, and wore her white-blonde hair in a bob, with blood-red gloss on her plump lips that
made her look like a child playing dress-up.

She was only slightly more experienced than Harris Triplett at this game, and she smiled brightly when she saw his dewy grin,
smooth, chiseled features, and short chestnut hair.

“Hi!” she said.

“Hi,” Harris Triplett said. “What’s up tonight?”

“Whatcha looking for?”

“Whatcha got?” he said.

“Do you have, like, a hundred bucks to spend?” she said.

“On what?” he said.

“I don’t wanna, like, make you mad or anything,” she said, “but I been told that I shouldn’t negotiate until we get where
we’re going.”

“So where we going?”

“My apartment. It’s just up the street. I’ll walk and you can follow me.”

“How do I know you aren’t taking me someplace where I’ll get mugged?”

“There’s a whole lot going on up in my apartment house, but it ain’t got nothing to do with mugging,” she said.

Harris Triplett didn’t have enough for his violation yet, since she hadn’t defined
negotiate
by offering sex for money, so he said, “Okay, start walking. I’ll be right behind you.”

When the girl had walked half a block north on the dark and quiet residential street, Harris picked up the rover and talked
to his cover team, making the vice cops in charge of his security wish he’d been wired.

After some intense conversation between two teams of vice cops, the senior officer came on the radio and said, “Okay, Harris,
we think we know where she’s taking you. Go ahead and walk to the door with her, but try to get the violation outside. And
take your gun. If she spots it and you lose the arrest, that’s fine, it’s only a misdemeanor. The second you get your violation,
scratch your head. We’ll be on the street, watching you through glasses.”

Whispering into the radio, Harris Triplett said, “What if she won’t talk unless I go inside?”

There was more uncertain conversation among the vice cops, and then the voice came back on and said, “Step inside if you have
to, but for no more than one minute. If you don’t get the offer that quick, open the door and walk away. If something goes
wrong in there, yell loud, or throw something through the window if you have to. Sixty seconds after you close that door,
you better come out, or we’re coming in like the cavalry. Understand?”

Harris Triplett parked the Mercury and watched the young hooker ascending the outside stairway of the two-story apartment
building already known to cops at Hollywood Station as “Middle Earth” because, as the vice cops put it, “we can’t always figure
out the species that inhabits the place.”

The cover team parked their UC car half a block south, just as 6-X-76 happened to be passing on patrol. When Hollywood Nate
Weiss and Dana Vaughn spotted two guys moving fast along the sidewalk, Dana hit them with the spotlight, and one of the guys
held up his LAPD badge and waved them to the curb.

“Vice,” Hollywood Nate said and pulled to the curb beside them.

The younger of the two vice cops, a Latino in a cut-off sweatshirt, khakis, and tennis shoes, said, “Stick around till we
see what we’ve got here, okay?”

Dana informed Communications that 6-X-76 was code 6, meaning out for investigation, and they followed the vice cops to the
apartment building where Harris Triplett had passed through an unsecured walkway.

Because his security team was so hesitant about his entering the apartment, Harris Triplett was more than a little nervous
as he climbed the stairs, his Glock tucked under his shirt inside his waistband. The young hooker had opened the door and
stood on the outside landing in the wash of light from inside, smiling encouragement to her young trick who was ascending
apprehensively.

“Everybody’s nervous about coming in,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s nobody here but you and me and one itsy-bitsy spider
that lives under the kitchen sink.”

When he got to the open door and peered inside a neat and tidy little one-bedroom apartment, he said, “What am I going to
get for my hundred dollars?”