by David Putnam
“Jonathon Delbert Norbert.” It was the name on the registration when I bought it and it sounded made up. “DOB is 10-15-60, and I’m sorry I don’t remember my driver’s license number.”
He left, went back to his car to run the information. By the time he came back, sweat beaded on my forehead in the cold night air.
“Couldn’t find you in the computer.”
“Yeah, that’s happened before. Sometimes it hits on my mom’s maiden name.”
“That right? What’s your mama’s name?”
“Aretha Jackson.”
“Jackson? That’s the same as Smith. There’ll be a thousand hits on it.”
I shrugged, too scared to smile.
“You got anything illegal in the car?”
“No, not at all. I was just going out to get some milk for my babies.”
“Then you don’t mind if we search?”
“No, not at all. Go ahead.”
The one cop nodded to his partner, who immediately went over to the car and opened the door. The inside of the car was, “clean as a Safeway chicken,” as Robby would’ve said. The searching cop worked over the inside for about ten minutes then came out with the ignition keys in his hand, headed for the trunk. The trunk contained the black bag with Q-Ball’s money, 45K, and the gun. It wasn’t against the law, under normal circumstances, to have that kind of money, but a black man at night in the ghetto was a sure call for the narcs to respond. If they put a narc dog on it, he’d sure as hell key on that dope money. After that, they’d eventually find out my real name. Game over.
The cop tinkered with the keys trying to find the right one. “Come on, show me which key opens the trunk.”
The car was an early model Plymouth, root beer-brown with a black stripe. As a precaution, I’d taken the trunk key off and put it in my shoe. “Oh, I lost that key a long time ago. But you can pull the backseat off, and if you’re real small, you can crawl into the trunk.”
The one cop looked at his partner, as if asking what they should do next. Time hung in the misty night air.
“Screw it. Let’s go.” He turned to me, “I’m going to let you off with a warning this time. Get a driver’s license. I stop you again, I’m going to run you in.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The night was suddenly lit up with a bright spotlight from a slow-moving sheriff’s patrol car eastbound on Imperial Highway. I brought my arm up to shield my eyes, my face from recognition.
“Hey, look what we have here.” Said a voice from the slow moving car. The car squeaked against the curb. “It’s Bad Boy Bruno Johnson.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The two blue bellies jumped me, took me to the ground hard. One gave me a cheap shot, a fist to the back of the head. The other hit me with a flashlight across the back of my legs. I roared and came up with them on my back, in a push-up position. There was nothing else to lose. They had me. The blue bellies quickly figured they’d grabbed a tiger by the tail.
I would have taken them and gotten away if the two sheriff’s deputies hadn’t joined in.
Dog pile on the black man.
The deputy who’d identified me, Good Johnson, no relation, laughed his coffee-sour breath right in my face as they got the handcuffs on. He’d been at Lynwood Station for at least fifteen years. The kind of deputy too cynical and callous, a violent-tempered ghetto deputy no other station or division would have. He was stuck, destined to do his entire career at the same place, festering, getting meaner and meaner until he’d eventually implode; take a lead pellet in the mouth to end his, sad, pitiful life.
The tag “Good” wasn’t earned out of job performance. It came up out of necessity when I first arrived at the station, a boot deputy. Two Johnsons became a problem. A white Johnson and a black Johnson like in the westerns with the cowboy hats. They called him the Good Johnson and me the Bad. Good added the “Boy” to mine, a derogatory reference to race and it stuck. Bruno The Bad Boy Johnson.
One blue belly stayed with his knees on my back, making it difficult to breathe, pinning me to the dirt. The others stood and brushed off their uniforms.
Good said to his trainee, “Get on the radio, advise 60L8 we have his package.” He turned to the blue bellies. “Nice stop. This guy’s wanted. There’s a BOLO out for him from our homicide division.” He kicked my hip. “He’s a real piece of shit. Used to be one of us, believe it or not. You guys can clear. We’ll handle it from here.”
I was on the ground again, handcuffed with white cops standing over me, deciding my fate. I didn’t like it, not one damn bit.
Down Imperial Highway came a screaming police car running the red signals, braking hard and accelerating, his engine winding out in a roar in between each stop. The blue bellies stepped back in the shadows, sensing something was about to happen. Good put his foot on my head in a pose, the great white hunter.
The car slid to the curb.
Robby Wicks jumped out, came up, and shoved Good. “Get the fuck off him. What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Robby stood me up and brushed me off. The coincidence that this was the second time it happened was not lost on me.
I looked him in the eye. “This is getting to be a habit with you.”
“You were late for our meet. I thought you might be jacking me off. I put out the call. Just to make sure you knew how serious I am about you helping on this thing.”
“So you’re not arresting me?”
“No. Have you done something I don’t know about?” He’d said it purely for the benefit of his audience. A question he’d never ask, not wanting to know the answer.
“Come on, take the cuffs off.”
“I don’t think so, not after what happened the last time.” He escorted me over to his car, hands still cuffed behind my back.
Johnson yelled, “You’re welcome. Those are my cuffs. I want ’em back.”
Robby turned, smiled, “Okay. For your own safety, get in your car and lock the door. I’ll bring them to you.”
He started to take the cuffs off. “You be cool, we have too much to do tonight for any more bullshit. You already put me behind the eight ball being late like this.” I nodded. I rubbed my wrists. He walked over and tossed the cuffs in onto Johnson’s lap. Johnson peeled out, tires spinning. The blue bellies quietly walked over to their car, got in, and left.
Robby waited until they were out of sight, saw me looking at my car. “You can’t drive. You don’t have a driver’s license. It’s a parole violation.”
“How am I supposed to get around?”
“Last I heard, you were laying your head in that burnt-out derelict apartment house over on 117th and walking or taking the bus to the liquor store.”
How’d he know about the pad on Alabama? “I don’t work there anymore.”
“Don’t dodge the question.”
“All of a sudden you know a great deal about me.”
“I told you, I want you to help me out with this thing. When you FTA-ed I gotta come look for you. Why all of a sudden are you driving a car? And whose car is it?”
“Okay, truce. I can’t leave my car here. I’ll follow you. Where’re we going?”
He hesitated, thinking it through. He knew I wouldn’t run, not with him following. “We got the witness stashed over at the Shamrock on Atlantic.” He looked at my car and thought some more. I didn’t give him a chance and headed back, got in, started up.
He wandered to his car, checked over his shoulder one last time before he got in, and fell in behind as I pulled out.
How did he know about my place on 117th and Alabama? That was supposed to be a cold pad. My residence of record was Chantal’s on Crenshaw. What else did he know? How long had the FBI been on me? Two weeks prior was when I’d first sensed I was being watched and didn’t trust my instincts. The money Jumbo paid me, the cash I buried out back of 117th, did they know about that too? Was the whole deal blown?
I was going to have to play along until I fo
und out.
We stayed on Imperial Highway all the way east until Atlantic and turned south. He pulled into Taco Quicky, a joint owned and operated by a reserve deputy. Like Lucy’s, the cops from all around came to eat for free. The parking lot was an absolute safe zone that crooks walked a wide path around. He rolled down his window. “Leave that heap and get in.”
I locked up and did as he asked. We pulled a U-turn in the parking lot and came right back into the drive-thru. Robby said, “I gotta get something in my stomach. I got a bleeding ulcer from all this stress. You want something?”
“No.”
He ordered two tacos and a cup of joe.
“That’s not exactly the best food to put down on top of an ulcer.”
His head jerked around about to spit fire and realized he was better off with the you catch-more-with-honey approach. He opened his mouth then shut it.
We pulled up further in line, two more cars before our turn. “I heard you came over and talked with Chantal.”
“Nice gal, great equipment. You tapping that? I know I would.”
He spoke too fast, covering for being found out.
I almost told him about Marie but didn’t want to give him anything he didn’t already have, especially if the FBI was onto our rescue operation. “How’s Barbara?”
The smile left his eyes, “She’s still the same old Babs. You know what I’m sayin’?”
I’d tossed back many a beer and had more than a few barbeques with Robby and his wife Barbara. He met her when he was a detective in narcs. She was a police officer working patrol for the city of Montclair when she pulled him over one night on the freeway doing a hundred and ten. They both loved to tell the story. She walked up and asked for his license and reg. He flashed his star, told her he was en route to a two-kilo coke deal in East L.A., and had twenty minutes to get there. She said, “License and registration.”
“If I have to get out of this car,” Robby told her, “I’m going to handcuff you to your bumper.” He drove off and left her standing in the oscillating red light of her cop car, cite book in hand. It ate at him all night. He sent her red roses the next day. A month later they were married in Vegas and had been together ever since, close to two decades.
I needed to pump him for information without him knowing. He was playing me, and I didn’t have a clue why. “Who’s the witness at the Shamrock?”
He pulled up to the window and like a gentleman tried to pay for the food with a tattered twenty. The clerk recognized the car as on the job and waved off the money. He reached into his ashtray, dug out a handful of change and put it up on the counter as a tip before he drove off. He parked in the parking lot not far from my Plymouth, unwrapped a taco, and took a bite. I fought the urge to look at the Plymouth and wonder if the money in the trunk would be there when I got back. We needed that money, the kids, Marie.
“You going to tell me the name of the wit or is it some big secret?”
“It’s Chocolate.”
“Debbie Brown?” That at least made a little sense. She had been my snitch when I worked the street, a beautiful streetwalker, and after the first toke, a slave to the glass pipe. She would only talk to me. No matter what kind of information, dope, stolen cars, or murder, she’d only give it up to me.
He took a bite of taco and a sip of coffee. After he swallowed he winced, put his hand on his stomach and burped. He dropped the taco in the box and dumped the coffee out the window.
“Don’t you say a thing.” He put it reverse and we drove.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The stench was the first thing that hit me when the night clerk buzzed the glass entry door to the Shamrock. It smelled as if a hundred soaked St. Bernards had been let in to roll on the tattered carpet. Inside, the narrow hall led past the window where a disinterred skeleton of a night clerk sat. Robby held up the room key. The night man behind the bulletproof glass couldn’t care less. He glanced over then went right back to his Hustler magazine, a glossy page with lots of skin color.
The Shamrock was a rent by the week or month or hour kind of place. Some of the doors on the ground floor had hasps above the door knobs with large padlocks, extra security for the meth-fried speed freaks who thought everyone was out to get them. We took the stairs to the second floor, the stairwell too narrow for fire code.
The second floor wasn’t any different than the first with the exception of the odor. Here, it was warm and sour, like thrown-up milk. Robby stopped, listened, and looked. His paranoia made me reach down and touch the place on my hip where I used to carry my gun, back when we rolled as a team, rolling hot, chasing violent fugitives.
Robby put the key in the door, hesitated, knocked quietly, turned the key, eased the door open a crack, and said, “It’s me.” He waited a beat and went in. The room was dark with an orange cast from a t-shirt hanging over the end table lamp. The Mötley Crüe emblem on the tee threw an eerie shadow. I entered, button-hooked left out of habit, and kept my back to the wall while my eyes adjusted. Off in the center of the ten-foot-square pleasure palace, stood a shadow, a figured obscured by thick clothing that gave an image of a robed monk. “Bruno?” Her voice, disguised with a heavy rasp of a smoker. I didn’t recognize it.
Robby moved to the right over to the end table. “I told you, I don’t like the room dark.” He yanked off the Crüe shirt.
Chocolate flung up an arm to cover her face. In the brief glimpse it afforded, I didn’t recognize Chocolate. Robby tricked me. This was some old crone at least seventy years old, wrinkled, slump-shouldered, dressed in panhandler rags.
She slowly brought her arm down, her expression yearning for approval. A smile, concave from no teeth, added to the haggard image.
Her eyes suddenly stood out, brown and youthful yet over-tired. Right then it clicked in, an old memory. This was Chocolate. The street had been horribly unkind. It never was kind to anyone wedded to the glass pipe. It stole thirty years of her life, probably more because she would never recall the first thirty, her memory a blur, having lived fast and loose way out on the fringe. I tried to remember how old she should be. Twenty-eight. My God, twenty-eight.
I couldn’t keep the shock out of my expression. Her smile fell. She covered her face with her hands and ran to the bathroom. “Chocolate, wait.” I went after her, got to the door before she could close it. She didn’t fight and stepped back, her face turned down, hands up for cover.
I stepped in and closed the door. The room turned to pure blackness. We waited, her breathing the only sound. “I’m sorry. I … I—”
“You don’t have to explain. I know.”
I stepped over, hands out in the dark reaching for her. I touched her. She backed off a step. I moved in and took hold of her, hugged her frailness. She shook as she wept.
The first time I came across her was on Long Beach Boulevard during a call of an armed robbery.
The white-haired diminutive old man, the victim who’d called, stood out in front of the motel waiting for me. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. I pulled into the driveway, rolled the window down. The night was cold. “Are you the one who called?”
He nodded.
“What happened?”
“She took my car. I want my car back.”
“Who took your car?”
“A hooker.”
This was odd. Usually the johns made up some story as a cover for their extramarital vice gone wrong. This one held his head up, proud.
“Who took it and what kind of car was it?” I wanted to get out a broadcast right away. “She was an African goddess. The most beautiful woman you ever did see. You’d have to look a long time—”
“Sir, what kind of car was it and what kind of weapon did she use?”
“As soon as we got in the room, she said, ‘Give me the keys, ol’ man.’ I didn’t even have time to reach in my pocket. I’d have given her anything just to see her naked, just to see that beauty in its natural state. Deputy, she’s that beautiful. The
n she—” he laughed, then said, “she grabbed hold of me, picked me up, turned me upside down, and shook me until my keys fell out of my pocket. The way she touched me, wrapped her arms right around me, turned me upside down, my God, it was sensual. Worth every penny of the two hundred dollars in my wallet. I don’t care about the money, honestly, I don’t. I just want my car back. It’s a brand-new Lincoln Mark IV, green with soft, butter-cream leather interior.”
Chocolate never wanted to hurt anyone, at least not at first. Later on, the street put the finishing touches on her. With her corruption complete, she did a year and a half in the joint for stabbing John Ahern, aka Jumbo. In reality, it was self-defense.
I caught up with her a few days later, still driving the old man’s car, the Lincoln. The old man was right, she was an absolute beauty, the kind of young girl you wanted to just look at, her youth, her vibrancy, the wildness in her eyes. She was a gorgeous seventeen-year-old hooker, new to the street, tall, five eleven, a hundred and forty-five pounds. Her weight in all the right places, hips and breasts, muscular arms and long, well-defined legs.
She looked at me strangely when I didn’t handcuff her. I gave her what I called my Father Willy speech about the life she’d chosen and how she was on the wrong path. No one had ever done that for her, especially not a cop who should’ve been taking her to jail. I’d passed the test. Two weeks later, she called me at the station and gave up a mid-level rock coke dealer, Q-Ball. When I didn’t give her up in court, she grew to trust me. Her beauty opened every door on the street, the lowlife slime and the corrupt upper class let her pass, told her about their robberies, the molestation, where they kept their stash. Together we threw a lot of bad folks in jail. I’d lost touch with her, my life overcrowded with my obsession, working on the Violent Crimes Team.
Chocolate was content to stay just the way we were in the quiet, dark bathroom that smelled of urine and mold and soured plastic. We stayed for a long time. I couldn’t help thinking how everyone involved in this thing: Robby, Jumbo, Q-Ball, and now Chocolate were linked to and through me to everything going on. Sure, everything on the street was connected one way or another. With the regular Joe Citizens there’s six degrees of separation. With crooks, since they only make up five percent of the population, there was only two degrees. This wasn’t Robby’s street doctrine, it was mine.