Tropical Depression (12 page)

So Hollywood it was. I flagged down one of the vans that take you to the rental car offices.

By the time I got fitted out with a brand new matchbox—no, thank you, I did not want a special this-week-only deal on a Cadillac convertible; that’s right, cash, I didn’t like credit cards; no, thank you, I did not want an upgrade of any kind for only a few dollars more; no, thank you, I didn’t want the extra insurance—it was dark and I was tired. I drove north on the San Diego Freeway slowly, slowly enough to have at least one maniac per mile yell obscenities at me. Imagine the nerve of me, going only sixty in a fifty-five zone.

The traffic was light. Pretty soon I made my turn east on the Santa Monica. I was getting used to being in L.A. again, getting back into the rhythm of the freeways. I felt a twinge of dread as I passed the exit for Sepulveda Boulevard, but I left it behind with the lights of Westwood.

The city always looks like quiet countryside from the Santa Monica Freeway. Once you are beyond Santa Monica and Westwood, you hit a stretch that is isolated from the areas it passes through. You could be driving through inner-city neighborhoods or country-club suburbs, but you’ll never know from the freeway.

That all changes as you approach downtown. Suddenly there is a skyline of tall buildings, and if you time it just right, there are two moons in the sky. The second one is only a round and brightly lit corporate logo on a skyscraper, but if it’s your first time through you can pass some anxious moments before you figure that out. After all, if any city in the world had two moons, wouldn’t it be L.A.?

And suddenly you are in one of the greatest driving nightmares of all recorded history. As you arc down a slow curve through the buildings and join the Harbor Freeway you are flung into the legendary Four-Level. The name is misleading, a slight understatement. It really seems like a lot more than four levels.

The closest thing to driving the Four-Level is flying a balloon through a vicious dogfight with the Red Baron’s Flying Circus. The bad guys—and they are all bad guys in the Four-Level—the bad guys come at you from all possible angles, always at speeds just slightly faster than the traffic is moving, and if you do not have every move planned out hours in advance you’ll be stuck in the wrong lane looking for a sign you’ve already missed and before you know it you will find yourself in Altadena, wondering what happened.

I got over into the right lane in plenty of time and made the swoop under several hundred tons of concrete overpass, and I was on the Hollywood Freeway. Traffic started to pick up after two or three exits, and in ten minutes I was coming off the Gower Street ramp and onto Franklin.

There’s a large hotel right there on Franklin at Gower. I’ve never figured out how they break even. They’re always at least two-thirds empty. They don’t even ask if you have a reservation. They are so stunned that you’ve found their hotel they are even polite for the first few days. There’s also a really lousy coffee shop right on the premises, which is convenient if you keep a cop’s schedule. I guessed I was probably going to do that this trip.

A young Chinese guy named Allan showed me up to my room. It was on the fifth floor and looked down into the city, onto Hollywood Boulevard just two blocks away. I left the curtain open. The room was a little bit bigger than a gas station rest room, but the decor wasn’t quite as nice.

It was way past my bedtime back home, but I couldn’t sleep. I left my bag untouched on top of the bed and went out.

The neighborhood at Franklin and Gower is schizophrenic. Two blocks up the hill, towards the famous Hollywood sign, the real estate gets pretty close to seven figures. Two blocks down the hill and it’s overpriced at three.

I walked straight down Gower, past a big brick church, and turned west. I waved hello to Manny, Moe, and Jack on the corner: it had been a while. There was still a crowd moving along the street. Most of them were dressed like they were auditioning for the role of something your mother warned you against.

Some people have this picture of Hollywood Boulevard. They think it’s glamorous. They think if they can just get off the pig farm and leave Iowa for the big city, all they have to do is get to Hollywood Boulevard and magic will happen. They’ll be discovered.

The funny thing is, they’re right. The guys that do the discovering are almost always waiting in the Greyhound station. If you’re young and alone, they’ll discover you. The magic they make happen might not be what you had in mind, but you won’t care about that for more than a week. After that you’ll be so eager to please you’ll gladly do things you’d never even had a name for until you got discovered. And a few years later when you die of disease or overdose or failure to please the magic-makers, your own mother won’t recognize you. And that’s the real magic of Hollywood. They take innocence and turn it into money and broken lives.

I stopped for a hot dog, hoping my sour mood would pass. It didn’t. I got mustard on my shirt. I watched a transvestite hooker working on a young Marine. The jarhead was drunk enough not to know better. He couldn’t believe his luck. I guess the hooker felt the same way.

The hot dog started to taste like old regrets. I threw the remaining half into the trash and walked the last two blocks to Cahuenga.

The World News is open twenty-four hours a day, and there’s always a handful of people browsing. In a town like this there’s a lot of people who can’t sleep. I don’t figure it’s their conscience bothering them.

I stood on the sidewalk in front of the place. There were racks of specialty magazines for people interested in unlikely things. There were several rows of out-of-town newspapers. Down at the far end of the newsstand was an alley. Maybe three steps this side of it there was a faint rusty brown stain spread across the sidewalk and over the curb into the gutter. I stepped over it and walked into the alley.

The alley was dark, but that was no surprise. The only surprise was that I started to feel the old cop adrenaline starting up again, just walking down a dark alley late at night. Suddenly I really wanted this guy. I wanted to find whoever had killed Roscoe and put him in a small cell with a couple of very friendly body-builders.

The night air started to feel charged. It felt good to be doing cop work again, and that made me a little mad, but I nosed around for a minute anyway. I wasn’t expecting to find anything, and I didn’t. By getting down on one knee and squinting I did find the spot where the rusty stains started. There was a large splat, and then a trickle leading back out of the alley to the stain on the sidewalk.

I followed the trickle back to the big stain and stood over it, looking down.

Blood is hard to wash out. But sooner or later the rain, the sun, and the passing feet wear away the stains. This stain was just about all that was left of Roscoe McAuley and when it was gone there would be nothing left of him at all except a piece of rock with his name on it and a couple of loose memories. What he was, what he did, what he thought and cared about—that was already gone. All that was hosed away a lot easier than blood stains—a lot quicker, too.

“I’m sorry, Roscoe,” I said to the stain. It didn’t answer. I walked back up the hill and climbed into a bed that was too soft and smelled of mothballs and cigarettes.

I woke up early the next morning and didn’t know where I was. In the pre-dawn darkness I had a moment of terrible panic that took me over, drenched me with sweat, left me gasping, sucking in air that tasted wrong. I was breathing air-conditioned disinfectant instead of the salty-citrus taste of Key West. In a moment of complete disorientation I reached across the bed for Jennifer’s hand. There was nobody there.

When I woke up enough to remember where I was and why, it wasn’t much better, but at least I could find my feet. I did, and swung them over the side of the bed and onto the floor. I sat on the bed for a minute collecting myself. With my weight on it, the mattress sagged a good three inches in the middle.

All the demons came back at me as I sat there in the dark. It was stupid to come back to L.A. I didn’t owe Roscoe a thing. This wasn’t my problem at all. But my problem could find me here. It had found me, as I lay there in my rented bed. It had found me and hammered at me and whispered low, horrible things. It was cold in the room but the sheets were soaking wet from the sweat the dreams had squeezed out of me.

I shivered, only partly from the cold of the room. I knew only one way to get rid of night demons. I pulled on a pair of shorts, and a T-shirt that said
CONCH REPUBLIC
. I got out a pair of Turntec Road Warriors and tied my room key between my shoelace and the tongue of the shoe, and went out.

I ran up Beechwood Canyon to the small and strange community of Hollywoodland, and then up the hillside to the west. As I pounded back down the hill, with the jam-packed Hollywood Freeway below me on the right, the sun was coming up.

Back in my room I showered, shaved, and dressed, feeling a little bit more like a threat to someone who had killed at least twice. I went down to the coffee shop for breakfast.

The trick to a strange coffee shop is to start simple and work your way up. Charlie Shea, my last partner, once went into a place for the first time and ordered a ham and cheese omelette. That was a big mistake; there are too many chances for something to go wrong.

Charlie hit the jackpot. A new cook, on his first shift, panicked when they ran out of ham and eggs at the same time. So he thickened the remaining eggs with pancake mix, and chopped up some bologna for ham. Charlie took one bite and got the strangest look on his face. All the flavors were familiar, but they were
wrong.
He’d ordered a ham and cheese omelet and ended up with a bologna pancake.

I was feeling fragile enough without any vicious surprises, so I had scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and bacon. I stayed away from the orange juice; it’s surprisingly easy to screw up. I stuck with coffee and a glass of water. I’ve had worse breakfasts.

By the time I was done it was just after seven-thirty. I climbed into my tiny rental car and drove down to the Hollywood substation on Wilcox.

Ed Beasley was already at his desk. Ed was forty-two, black, good-looking in a sinister way, with thick eyebrows and mustache. He had one of those male-pattern baldness hairlines that receded in two fjords on top, leaving a kind of widow’s peak running down onto the forehead. It usually made him look rakish.

This morning he didn’t look rakish at all. He looked like he’d just pulled a string of all-nighters. He had a Kool smoldering in his ashtray and an enormous Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. His eyes were closed and his forehead was wrinkled in deep vees. He was talking on the telephone, the receiver wedged between his shoulder and ear. He looked up at me as I walked over, raising his eyebrows in mild surprise.

“All right,” he said into the telephone. “I’ll see what I can do. Okay,” he said and hung up.

He looked me over. I just stood and let him look. “Well, Billy,” he said finally. “Fish not biting?”

There was an edge to his voice that I’d never heard before and I guessed I was right about the all-nighters. I didn’t answer, and after a minute Ed just nodded at a chair to the left of his desk. “Took you almost twenty-three hours, Billy. You slowing down.”

I sat. Ed slurped his coffee. He half-raised the cup. “Get you some?”

“No thanks. I ate already.” He nodded and slurped some more.

“Doctor say this shit’ll kill me.”

“But he won’t say when?” I asked him, completing the ancient joke.

“Something like that,” Ed said. A young white guy with rolled-up sleeves, a shoulder holster, and suspenders stopped and put a pair of files on Ed’s desk. He looked at me, looked at Ed, shrugged, and walked off. Ed watched him go and shook his head. “He wears suspenders,” Ed told me, disgusted. “Thinks they make him look like Kevin Costner.”

“Why would he want to?”

Ed snorted and slurped coffee. “These new guys, man, I don’t know. Half of ’em even think Madonna’s sexy.”

“That’s better than thinking she’s talented,” I said. “I need to know what you’ve got on Hector and Roscoe McAuley, Ed.”

He gave me the biggest, brightest, toothiest smile he had. It didn’t hide the fact that he was mad as hell, and tired almost to the point of no return. “What I got is shit,” he said. “And what’s more, that’s all I’m
gonna
get.”

He slurped more coffee. “Word came down from on high. Community relations is
paramount.
So we can’t poke at nothing that might disturb the current delicate balance of racial tensions.”

He slurped some more and took a long hard pull on his Kool. Through a cloud of smoke, he said, “Which means if a cop dies in the course of investigating a death unofficially, on his own time, and it can be made to look kinda like he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, we got to leave it alone, ’cause we can’t look like we’re putting more energy into a cop-killing than into securing a crack dealer’s civil rights. And it means that anybody dumb enough to get killed during the riots, meaning Hector, it’s like it never happened. ’Cause we don’t want nobody having no bad dreams about the riots, I guess.”

He rolled his eyes back for a moment and chanted, “Love to see them niggers sing and dance, but they get killed—don’t wet your pants. We gave the mother one good chance, he’s blown away by circumstance.”

I stared at Ed in astonishment. “Sorry,” he finally said. He pulled hard on his Kool. It was down to the filter now. “It’s a rap number. Kind of an underground hit in the hip-hop clubs since the riots.” He swiveled away from the desk and looked off to his left. “It’s supposed to be about Hector. And of course it has a lot to say about the current delicate balance of racial tensions. ’Specially on the Force.”

There was more of that edge in his voice, a whole lot more. Ed was one of those cops who believe God brought him through hell in his early life so he could be a better L.A. cop. To hear that much bitterness in his voice would have been unthinkable two years ago.

I was sorry for Ed. I knew what it meant to lose your faith in something pure and important. But I hadn’t come all this way to pat anybody on the head, not even myself. I pushed on.