The Black Marble

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “I can’t deny it,” Sergeant Hawthorne said, taking the first bite of his cheeseburger and sadly watching a dollop of ketchup squirt out onto the yellow L of the sky-blue UCLA sweatshirt he wore when working vice to make himself look less like a cop. The troops around Hollywood Station said he was so lacking in copper machismo that he could dress in an LAPD raid jacket and still nobody would ever make him for Five-Oh.

  “Whose idea was this, anyways?” the shorter cop asked.

  “Sort of my idea, I guess,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “I talked to your watch commander as well as your midwatch sergeant about it before I decided to invite you here for a bite to eat.”

  The shorter cop said, “Lemme lock in on this. Are you telling me that Sergeant Murillo actually thought I should do this demented shit?”

  It was Sergeant Lee Murillo who’d pointed out that the young vice sergeant resembled the nineteenth-century writer Edgar Allan Poe, and had begun referring to him as “Sergeant Edgar.”

  “Well, no,” Sergeant Hawthorne admitted. “Your sergeant said it was completely up to you and that nobody should try to influence you one way or the other.”

  “Does the croaker who does the kind of freaky swashbuckling surgeries you talked about still practice around here?” the tall cop asked, starting on the second burger he’d ordered because, what the hell, little Sergeant Edgar with the big vocabulary was sponsoring the meal, wasn’t he? In fact, the tall cop had ordered the burgers with fries, plus a side of onion rings, and was even considering a piece of cherry pie with a double scoop of ice cream.

  The vice sergeant said, “Not anymore. He’s a burned-out crack addict now. He was fairly notorious for doing various kinds of edgy operations in a certain Tijuana clinic. It’s an abattoir.”

  “A what?” the tall one said.

  “A slaughterhouse.” Sergeant Hawthorne instantly regretted using a word they might not understand. He was aware that everyone at Hollywood Station knew this pair by their surfing monikers of “Flotsam and Jetsam,” and he noted that Flotsam always referred to Jetsam’s prosthesis as our foot, so it appeared that these two were Velcroed. He began to think of possibly including the tall partner in the deal as a way to persuade Jetsam to accept the assignment.

  Jetsam said, “He probably got one of those craigslist doctor degrees where they treat all ailments with leeches.”

  “No, Dr. Maurice Montaigne’s medical degree is legitimate,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “But his license to practice was pulled long ago.”

  “What was that word you used to describe this creepy crap?” Jetsam asked.

  “Apotemnophilia,” the sergeant said, this time leaning over the plate before taking a second bite of his burger. “I’ve been reading up on it.”

  Flotsam said, “That’s the biggest word I’ve heard since ‘pica and pagophagia.’ We got a call about a dude from his momma. He used to get all weirded out when he got drunk, and he’d eat red clay and ice cubes. She got scared he was gonna clog his colon. He told his momma it was for an iron deficiency. I told her it was just fucking Hollywood.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne stared at Flotsam for a moment before saying, “That’s very interesting.”

  Jetsam asked the sergeant, “Why would anybody go all off the hook with fantasies of doing something like that to himself?”

  “I told you, it’s truly incomprehensible,” the sergeant said, after chewing and swallowing a modest bite. “There aren’t many people in the entire world who have this condition.”

  “And they all live around here, probably,” Flotsam said with a head shake. “Fucking Hollywood.”

  The sergeant had been assigned to the station long enough to know that in these parts, cops always uttered the mantra “This is fucking Hollywood” to explain anything inexplicable, so he merely nodded and said, “It’s illegal to amputate a healthy limb in Mexico as well as the U.S., but of course it’s a lot easier to get it done across the border. So that’s why I’ve prepared a cover story for you about a place in T.J. called Clínica Maravilla.”

  Jetsam said, “How could I fool anybody? Wouldn’t the quack see my amputation was, like, done by skilled surgeons?”

  “No doctor will be seeing you at all. We’ve been told that Dr. Maurice is effectively retired, holed up somewhere smoking crack twelve hours a day. He’s harder to find than John the Baptist’s head.”

  “Who the fuck’s looking for that?” Flotsam wanted to know, and Sergeant Hawthorne cursed himself again for using an obscure metaphor.

  “Who’s the freak you’re dying to pop?” Jetsam asked.

  “We’re not really dying to pop the Russian with paraphilia. He’s just a very important client being serviced by the collector and the big boss. The collector is the guy who takes the money and pays all the bills, and sets up the special dates, and arranges for the girls to get medical care when needed, and—”

  “With the weird croaker we’re talking about?” Jetsam asked.

  “At one time.” Sergeant Hawthorne nodded. “But now that the dangerous doctor’s a hopeless crackhead, they no doubt use somebody else these days. What we’re hoping you can do is to get enough info that we can jack the collector for a few felonies and use that to persuade him to trade up for his boss. The collector’s name is Hector Cozzo. The girls call him Hector the collector, and he’s got a minor rap sheet for identity theft, forgery, and possession. The most time he’s ever done is sixty days in county jail. He’s a small-timer who somehow got this pretty good gig of collecting from massage parlor girls and from dancers working at a nightclub in east Hollywood that I’m sure you know about, Club Samara.”

  “In other words, he’s a pimp,” Flotsam said.

  “More or less,” Sergeant Hawthorne said.

  “So who’s the boss?” Jetsam asked.

  “That’s what we want to learn from Hector Cozzo. Our source said that massage parlor where Cozzo collects, is partly staffed by Asian girls who we now think were brought into the States as part of a human-trafficking ring, possibly with the help of Asian and Armenian or Russian gangsters. This could turn into a RICO indictment. You probably heard about the federal prosecutors indicting seventy members of Armenian Power last February?”

  Both uniformed cops looked at each other with blank expressions, so Sergeant Hawthorne said, “No? Well, Armenian Power was working with Eurasian gangs here in Hollywood, Glendale, and other places, doing everything from identity-theft scams to kidnapping for ransom. The particular massage parlor and nightclub girls we’re interested in have to pay their masters for travel expenses from their home countries, plus room and board and living expenses. Not to mention the stiff prices they have to cough up for drugs, so they can tolerate their pathetic lives. They’re never able to pay back what they owe, and eventually, they either run away or just get cut loose with the clothes on their backs and a few bucks in their purses.”

  “You mean, after they’re all thrashed and shot out?” Jetsam said.

  “Exactly,” the sergeant said. “Some of them are underage, too, but they get supplied with good ID and Social Security numbers and the rest of it. It’s hard for ICE to prove they’re in the country illegally, and besides, the feds are more concerned with Department of Homeland Security task force jobs these days, especially anything that remotely smells like terrorism. They’re not much worried about illegal immigrants who get pimped out in Hollywood. We’re working this mission on our own.”

  Flotsam said, “This here collector, how do you know about his client with the …”

  “Apotemnophilia. One of the older Korean girls who ran away and now lives in Las Vegas got busted, and she’s trying to cut a deal on a possession-for-sale she’s facing there. She did a lot of talking to the Vegas police, and they phoned us because the crimes she talked about are going down here in Hollywood Area. I had a long conversation with her on the phone. It was very enlightening.”

  Flotsam was not surprised that a young top spinner like Sergeant Edgar would refer to
their bailiwick using the now politically correct LAPD designation of “Hollywood Area” instead of the more militaristic-sounding “Hollywood Division,” by which all of the older coppers still called the unique real estate policed by the officers of Hollywood Station.

  The tall cop said, “So is the hooker that dimed the collector willing to testify if you bust him for pimping or whatever?”

  “I had to promise her that we would never subpoena her into a Los Angeles courtroom before she’d talk to me at all. Besides that, she doesn’t know anything really specific. What she does know she learned one night last year when she got an outcall job to a house in Encino that’s occupied by Hector Cozzo, though his name is not on the deed. There she was ordered to service a big middle-aged guy with a streak of white running through his dark hair.”

  “Like a fucking skunk,” Jetsam said sullenly.

  Sergeant Hawthorne said, “She guessed he was Russian, from his accent. She was told that he was the collector’s wealthiest and most important client. She did her job that night and got well tipped out, and was allowed to sit around for a few hours afterward, doing some blow that Cozzo gave her while he and the Russian talked in an adjoining room. She got a peek at some photos from an album the Russian brought with him and saw that they were looking at shots of amputees and amputated limbs. Arms, legs, hands, feet.”

  Flotsam said, “Goddamn! She’s lucky the freaks didn’t do a little amputation on her that night. Just for the fun of it.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne said, “Anyway, at one point, she overheard Cozzo mention to the client, that yes, he’d heard of a surgeon the big Russian knew a lot about. A surgeon that charged twenty thousand for taking an arm and fifteen thousand for a leg, on otherwise healthy people in a Tijuana clinic.”

  Jetsam said, “Did your snitch say if those two mutant deviates had all their own body parts intact?”

  “Yes, they did. And by now I’ve read enough about that kind of paraphilia to know that most of these people are obsessed with the idea of amputation but don’t necessarily try it out on themselves. They probably like to hear horror stories about some of the more gutsy people who allegedly went the distance. But Hector Cozzo is not one of them. He was only trying to please the Russian.”

  “Why don’t you, like, operate the goddamn massage parlor with an undercover copper and get a violation for prostitution and be done with it?” Jetsam said. “Why fuck with this sick Russian at all?”

  “We’ve tried UC operators without success,” the vice sergeant said. “These people are super careful and highly suspicious, and besides, we’re looking beyond a masseuse turning tricks. I know you’ve heard a lot lately about the LAPD cracking down on so-called erotic massage parlors, but we’re aiming higher. We want the money guys behind this one. So after we got the intel from Vegas and I learned about the collector’s rich Russian client with paraphilia, well …”

  “Dude,” Flotsam said to his glum partner. “Don’t push the off button. Let’s air this out. I wish they’d send me in as bait to chum up the water. I could handle whatever some Bangkok Bessie might wanna spring on me besides a back rub.” Then he leered at a buxom waitress and said, “And I could totally bring game to this here breast-aurant.”

  “Keep your mind in this game, bro!” Jetsam said. “They’re trying to shanghai me here!”

  “Funny you should say that,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “The name of our primary target is Shanghai Massage.”

  “See?” Jetsam said. “There’s all, like, bad juju going on here. I’m not down with this program.”

  “Don’t go aggro, dude,” Flotsam said to his partner. “He ain’t asking for a kidney.”

  “And we’re not looking for a misdemeanor prostitution arrest on an individual masseuse,” Sergeant Hawthorne said quickly, pleased to have Flotsam as an ally. “This is an intelligence-gathering mission, nothing more. We’re hoping that any masseuse who meets you will gossip about you to the collector, about an amputee client who tipped well and talked about having had his foot surgically removed in Tijuana by Dr. Maurice. We hope the collector might get curious enough about you to wonder if you could be a brother-in-fantasy to the big Russian. You being a somebody who had actually gone the distance with an amputation of a healthy foot. And if so, his very important Russian client might be burning with curiosity to meet you and hear all about how your Tijuana amputation went down. And if that works and you get inside, who knows what information and evidence you might be able to gather from these people?”

  “That’s a lotta ifs you got going here,” Jetsam said.

  “What’s Cozzo look like?” Flotsam asked.

  Sergeant Hawthorne produced a six-year-old mug shot, put it on the table, and said, “White male, thirty-two, five-six, a hundred forty soaking wet, black hair cut in a mullet, brown eyes, teeth like a ferret, and flamboyant in the clothes he wears.”

  The surfer cops barely glanced at the photo, and Jetsam said dismissively, “Everybody in fucking Hollywood’s flamboyant, so what’s that mean? Half the male population uses Johnny Depp guy-liner, for chrissake. And who the hell but the lamest of low-life skateboarders that wear their baseball caps sideways would have a mullet haircut in the twenty-first century?”

  “How do you know this ain’t just get-out-of-jail-free bullshit from your Vegas snitch?” Flotsam said, piling on.

  “We’ve been able to corroborate some of it,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. Then he added, “I’ll bet I could get your watch commander to let me borrow you both for the occasional nights we’d be needing you.”

  “What the hell would I do?” Flotsam said.

  “Maybe you could kind of act like security for your partner, sort of like his muscle. If he gets a foot in the door.”

  “It’s my stump that’s gonna get me in the door,” Jetsam reminded him.

  Sergeant Hawthorne managed a polite guffaw at the amputation humor and said, “Maybe a good cover story would be that you’re a seller of illegal video poker machines, the kind that’s springing up in residential casinos all over L.A. They’re brought from Arizona and can rake in between one and two thousand per machine per week, no problem. With your highlighted blond hair and permanent suntans, you resemble each other enough for you to claim you’re brothers, and I think Hector Cozzo would buy that. If he accepts the amputee, he’ll accept the brother with no worries that this might be a police sting.”

  “First of all, we don’t use tanning parlors,” Flotsam said, his eyes narrowing.

  “And we don’t highlight neither,” Jetsam said, equally resentful. He touched his lightly gelled hair and said, “These streaks’re what the sun does to hard-core kahunas that surf year-round.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest anything untoward,” the sergeant apologized.

  Flotsam grunted and turned to Jetsam, saying, “Untoward?” Then, to their host: “If we work for you, Sarge, we might need a translator.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne, who was thinking exactly the same thing about them, said, “You can ask any of the night-watch vice officers about me. I’m a forgiving supervisor, and I’m easy to get along with. Maybe I don’t look or sound the part, but I’m a pretty good street copper as well.”

  Doubting that, Flotsam told his partner, “Dude, it could be nectar-neat to catch an occasional break from these bluesuits and, like, go all Mission Impossible for a night or two.”

  “Easy for you to say, bro,” Jetsam said. “You ain’t the one that’d have to get your mind into a ghoulish game of show-and-tell where some psycho pervert wants to hump your stump.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne said, “It’s not like that. Cozzo is basically a grifter with a rich foreign client who has a very strange Achilles’ heel, that’s all.”

  “If he ever decides to go the distance himself, the geek won’t even have a heel,” Jetsam reminded them with a perceptible sneer.

  “We could try it once and see how it goes,” the vice sergeant said. Then: “Whoops!” as another dollop of ketchup oblitera
ted the A in UCLA.

  Jetsam shook his head. “Sarge, your sweatshirt now just says UC, as in ‘undercover,’ with two blobs of red beside it. So you just managed to out yourself. Any denizens of the dark out there can read that you’re UC, and you did it with your own ketchup.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne managed an embarrassed smile and began wiping ketchup off the sweatshirt and off his face, until scraps of shredded napkin clung to his chin.

  Jetsam looked at the vice sergeant and said, “What’s the thread count on these things anyways? You got pieces of it hanging off your face.”

  Flotsam said, “Sarge, if we let you dial us in, you gotta learn how to eat a fucking hamburger. You’re making us, like, way nervous here.”

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1978 by Joseph Wambaugh

  cover design by Jason Gabbert

  This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

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