He held out his hand, and the cops saw a baseball-size rock similar to the decorative stones in the Tellers’ front flower garden.
“How long ago did it happen?”
“Less than five minutes ago,” Mrs. Teller said. “You got here fast.”
“Who lives here with you?” Dana asked.
“We have two daughters,” Mrs. Teller said.
Nate said, “Do they have any idea who it might’ve been?”
“Our ten-year-old daughter, Shelly, is on a sleepover with my parents,” Mrs. Teller said. “That’s her bedroom window. Naomi’s fourteen, and she said she hasn’t any idea who could’ve done such a thing.”
With that, Dana turned toward Mindy and R.T. Dibney, who were out of their car, and held up four fingers, indicating code 4, no further assistance needed.
Mindy nodded and said, “We’ll cruise the neighborhood, Dana.”
“I’d like to talk to Naomi privately, if you don’t mind,” Dana said to the Tellers, and the cops followed the couple into the house.
“She’s very upset,” Mrs. Teller said.
“I understand,” Dana said. “I have a daughter who’s eighteen. Believe me, I’m sensitive to teenage issues.”
Ogden Drive was a pleasant residential street with lots of trees on both sides. Shop 6-X-46 wasn’t cruising for more than three minutes when R.T. Dibney craned his neck sharply to the right, and Mindy uttered the line so often said by one partner to another when on patrol: “What’d you see?”
“Nothing,” R.T. Dibney said, turning forward again, but when Mindy looked over her shoulder, she observed a shapely woman in a T-shirt and shorts walking from her car to a lighted portico.
“For God’s sake!” Mindy said. “Can’t you at least get your inner creep under control when we’re actually looking for a suspect?”
“The kid’s long gone,” he said. “Just some brat pissed off at his girlfriend. Dana’ll get the girl to give up his name, and they’ll call his parents. It might make them reduce the little bastard’s weekly allowance from fifty bucks to forty.”
“What’s this?” Mindy said, seeing the silhouette of a car coming south in their direction with lights out. Then the headlights flashed on and she saw it was another police unit, searching slowly. Both cars stopped, facing opposite directions, and Mindy was looking at Sheila Montez.
“A rock thrower,” Mindy explained. “Busted out an upstairs window and GOA.” By which she meant gone on arrival.
“We didn’t see any peds roaming around,” Sheila said. “Maybe it was a neighbor kid.”
“I think I’ll just cruise for another few minutes,” Mindy said, to which R.T. Dibney grumbled something unintelligible.
“We may as well check around for a while too,” Sheila said to Aaron. “Even the alleys around here are nice. No mattresses or fish heads.”
“And people wave at you with all five fingers,” Aaron said.
There were several cars parked in front of residences on Ogden Drive during the early evening hours, and 6-X-66 drove past one of them. An old red Mustang was parked all the way north, almost at the corner of Sunset Boulevard. Sheila Montez and Aaron Sloane were heading south and were parallel with a house two doors from the Teller home, when Sheila saw a silhouette move across a lawn, heading away from the Tellers’.
“I saw something!” she said, hitting the brakes.
“What is it?” Aaron said, head on a swivel.
Sheila pulled into a driveway, backed out, and turned north, saying, “On your side. Turn the spot on the yards. I think I saw somebody moving through the trees.”
Aaron turned on the spotlight as she slowed, and he said, “I see him! A rabbit!”
Sheila saw him too, a slender male figure darting into the darkness beside a property on the east side of the street.
“I’m bailing!” he said, and when Sheila stopped for an instant, he was out of the car, flashlight in one hand, baton in the other, running east through a residential property into the darkness.
Meanwhile, R.T. Dibney, in 6-X-46, was complaining to Mindy Ling, saying, “What’s the use of trying to look for prowlers anyways with these politically correct little mini-lights?”
Mindy didn’t answer. She was too busy counting the days left in this deployment period, after which she was definitely going to ask for a partner reassignment. She thought she might even take a few special days off in order to shorten what had come to seem like a jail sentence.
But then she heard the RTO’s radio voice say, “All units in the vicinity of Ogden Drive between De Longpre and Sunset, officer in foot pursuit of prowler, eastbound through residential property, toward Genesee. Six-X-Forty-six, handle, code three.”
Hollywood Nate, unaware of the prowler sighting, was writing a crime report and having a cup of coffee in the living room of the Teller home with Naomi’s father, who he learned was a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Naomi’s mother was up in the bedroom, cleaning up broken glass and patching the window with cardboard. Dana and Naomi were alone in Dr. Teller’s study, where Dana had closed the door for privacy.
Naomi had continued to adamantly deny knowing who had yelled and thrown a rock through the upstairs window. Nor had Naomi told Dana Vaughn how guilty she felt because her bedroom was in the rear of the residence, and the bedroom that was attacked belonged to her younger sister. Something had made her lie defensively when Clark had asked if that was her bedroom facing the street, and now she felt cowardly and remorseful for having done it.
Naomi thought that the police officer was a very attractive woman with eyes that were alert, yet calm and patient. Even though she was fairly certain this officer would understand, Naomi just couldn’t bring herself to look at her while they chatted.
Finally, Dana said, “Naomi, I think you might have some idea who threw the rock. Someone could’ve been hurt. Certainly your family is frightened. Why don’t you tell me who you think it might’ve been. We won’t go charging over to the person’s house, but we’ll take some steps to see that it doesn’t happen again.”
Naomi looked straight into Dana Vaughn’s eyes and started to speak. But she stopped, looked away again, and said, “I just don’t know who he was. Maybe some crazy boy from middle school that just doesn’t like me. I really don’t know.”
Dana said, “Naomi, I’m sure you have a cell phone, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to give you my card with my personal cell number on it. I’d like you to give me your cell number. If you think very hard about it and decide you might have an idea who the rock thrower is, please give me a call. You don’t have to tell your parents about it if you don’t want to. We’ll keep this between the two of us until we’re sure we can quietly determine who actually did it. Is that a deal?”
“Okay,” Naomi said in a voice barely audible.
“We’ll help you, honey,” Dana said to Naomi Teller.
R.T. Dibney had been dropped off on Sunset Boulevard. He was out with his mini-flashlight, searching in an alley east of Ogden Drive, not just for the prowler, but for Aaron Sloane, who hadn’t been heard from since he’d leaped from the car and started running. There was plenty of chatter on the tac frequency that he was picking up on his rover but nothing from Aaron. He’d heard Sheila Montez talking to Mindy Ling twice, and Sheila’s voice was growing desperate.
Then he heard Aaron’s voice in bits and pieces, and Sheila’s voice said, “You’re breaking up!” and Aaron’s voice said, “Can you… lost… can’t… radio!” And everyone but Sheila Montez thought that at least he was probably okay even if his rover wasn’t, but where in the hell was the prowler? And within moments, two more black-and-whites from Watch 3 were cruising slowly along streets and alleys, searching with spotlights.
R.T. Dibney saw an open gate in a rear yard. He entered and heard a dog bark but realized it was coming from the house next door. By now, several homes in the area had their exterior lights on, and residents were o
utside, trying to see what was going on. Then another dog barked, and it sounded like a big one. R.T. Dibney was ready to draw his nine, when he thought he heard a sound behind him. Before he could turn, somebody slammed a shoulder into him and he was propelled forward right into the unlighted swimming pool, where he sank to the bottom and lost both his rover and his flashlight. By the time he came up, sputtering, choking, and gasping for air, he neither saw nor heard anything but the dog next door barking wildly.
When Aaron Sloane finally showed up on Ogden Drive, his uniform dusty from climbing into three yards after a shadow, he was limping and frustrated, and he slashed at a hedge with his baton. He’d been close enough to the prowler to see that the guy had dark hair and wasn’t very big, but that was all he’d seen.
When Sheila Montez spotted him standing alone in the moonlight beside a purple flowering jacaranda tree, she jammed on the brakes, leaped from the car, and ran straight at him, not knowing or caring that Mindy Ling was out on foot less than thirty yards away, shining her light into cars parked on the street.
Aaron was massaging his leg when he saw Sheila, and he said, “I pulled my hamster.”
Sheila threw her arms around Aaron’s neck, and he was astonished. He was even more astonished to see her eyes glistening and to hear her say, “When I couldn’t reach you on your rover, I thought… I thought…”
“I’m okay, Sheila!” he said. “I’m okay.” And now he wasn’t even thinking about the prowler, or his injured hammy, and he didn’t want her to stop holding on to him, and all of his anger at the prowler and his malfunctioning rover had morphed into unbridled joy.
Mindy Ling pretended to be searching very intently when the partners of unit 6-X-66 got back in their shop, and Mindy saw the silhouette of their profiles only inches apart and closing.
Driving east on Sunset Boulevard, Malcolm Rojas was more excited than he’d ever been in his life. He couldn’t contain himself and began laughing, overwhelmed by the unimaginable thrill of what he’d accomplished that night. He wished there were a way he could share it with someone, but of course he could not. He wished they all could’ve seen what he did to the cop. Especially all those cholo punks in Boyle Heights who’d bullied him and called him Li’l Hondoo. He wished Naomi could’ve seen it.
There was just a twinge of anger left in him when he thought about Naomi, but most of it was gone now. He’d go home and relive this evening in his mind and masturbate. And now he was actually looking forward to having a meal at a nice restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard tomorrow evening with Bernie Graham and his secretary, Ethel. That was exciting too because it would mark the beginning of his job. He felt now like he could accomplish anything he wanted to do. This was the start of a new life for Malcolm Rojas. He felt like a man. Then he thought he might legally change his name to Clark Jones.
Some of the cars belonging to residents and visitors previously parked on Ogden Drive had driven away by the time the searchers were ready to give up. A few of the drivers getting into those cars had been interrogated by police, but most had not, including the driver of an old red Mustang, who by then was nearly home.
It was 6-A-35 from Watch 3 that first spotted R.T. Dibney standing on Sunset Boulevard in his socks, holding his shoes in his hand as heavy traffic sped by and headlights lit him. His Sam Browne and holstered pistol were slung over his shoulder, and his uniform was still dripping. As soon as the extraordinary encounter between the prowler and R.T. Dibney was described on the tac frequency by 6-A-35, at least four cars sped to the pickup location. Half a dozen cops from Watch 5 and Watch 3 jumped from their shops to take cell phone shots of the soppy cop, now stripping off his T-shirt, with his Kevlar vest and uniform shirt spread across the roof of the first black-and-white to arrive.
There, under a bright summer moon and a relatively smogless sky over Hollywood, they chattered and chuckled and clicked photos like crazy while R.T. Dibney shook his fist and cursed them and the mothers who’d spawned them.
Dana Vaughn was one of the cops taking photos, and Hollywood Nate said to her, “I wish we had a video cam with a zoom lens. R.T.’s normally twitchy mustache is vibrating like an electric toothbrush.”
EIGHTEEN
THE NEXT DAY WAS to be the most momentous in his life. At such a moment, he could face and admit who Dewey Gleason really was: failed actor, failed screenwriter, mediocre forger and thief. At such a time, all denial was stripped away. He thought of his brother and sister in Seattle, a civil engineer and a schoolteacher. Both had spouses and children and were ostensibly happy, yet he’d always felt he was smarter and more accomplished than either of them. For years he’d blamed his failures on the show-business bug that bit him during his high school years. Then later, he’d decided it wasn’t a bug, it was a goddamn vampire bat that sucked Seattle right out of him and eventually steered him to Hollywood. And this was where it would all finally end, one way or the other.
Of course, Dewey had slept intermittently, and the sleep he did get was clouded by bizarre and unremembered nightmares. There were so many things that could go wrong, he’d finally stopped listing them. He’d faced the certain truth that if this didn’t work, he and Eunice were finished as a team, whether or not she guessed he’d engineered the gag. She’d probably pack up and head for San Francisco without him. That is, if she survived. And that made him think of Jerzy Szarpowicz, and of how much he hated even being in the cretin’s presence, let alone having his own freedom depend on him. As he faced his fiftieth birthday in extreme desperation, he felt old, as old as original sin. Dewey knew that his plan could lead to extreme violence. And that made him get out of bed before daybreak and make his fourth trip to the bathroom.
When he was sitting on the toilet, he made a mental note to call Creole to tell him that when they got their kidnap victim into the apartment in Frogtown, they must not let Eunice have a cigarette, no matter how much she begged. Dewey hoped that nicotine deprivation might be the torture that would break her faster than anything they could inflict.
Tristan Hawkins and Jerzy Szarpowicz met at the house near Frogtown that Jerzy shared with his woman and her kids. After that, they spent an hour renting a van, using the same bogus ID that Tristan had used before, and then drove to a thrift shop, where they bought a roll-away bed with a pancake mattress of jail quality. The bed was old but the frame was made of heavy steel that would fit their needs. They didn’t bother buying a pillow and certainly didn’t purchase sheets. The thrift shop manager threw in a blanket with cigarette burns in several places, and having seen their victim, Tristan figured that cigarette burns would probably make her feel at home.
Next they bought some lengths of chain at a hardware store, along with two padlocks, a roll of duct tape, and some large cleaning rags to serve as blindfolds. They made a trip to a sporting goods store for two sleeping bags for themselves, and then to a supermarket for cans of soup, packages of lunch meat, three loaves of bread, mayonnaise (because Jerzy insisted), an ice chest, bags of ice, bottled water, toilet paper, one bar of soap, and several rolls of paper towels. They bought a box of lawn-and-leaf bags to haul away all debris from the apartment after they were finished with their gag. And that completed the shopping list.
Or so Tristan thought until Jerzy said, “We forgot something.”
“What?” Tristan said.
“We gotta go back to the thrift shop and get an old rug.”
“We ain’t settin’ up housekeepin’, dawg,” Tristan said. “Next thing, you’ll be wantin’ a few pots of geraniums.”
“The rug’s for jist in case,” Jerzy said.
“In case of what?”
“In case we gotta roll her up in it if things don’t work out right.”
Tristan started to say something but changed his mind. What good would it do? He’d told both Jerzy and Bernie enough times that he wasn’t going to stand for violence, but he knew in his heart that he wouldn’t be able to stop it if it got started. He’d grown up in the ’hood. He knew how no
body could stop violence once it really got started. He refused to go back inside the thrift shop, so Jerzy bought the threadbare rug for $65 and carried it to the rental van by himself.
Eunice was absolutely bubbly when she went off to Henri’s for all the beauty work. She even mentioned to Dewey that she might stop by Macy’s and pick up something to wear.
“We’re only going to Musso’s,” Dewey said. “I’ve seen guys in T-shirts and tennis shoes having dinner there. In fact, that’s the dress code for most of the half-ass movie and TV people around this fucking town.”
“You’re grouchy this morning,” Eunice said. “And you got bags under your eyes.”
“That’ll provide a marked contrast to our young dinner guest,” Dewey said.
“I forgot we even have one,” Eunice said, and Dewey controlled the urge to smirk. “I don’t suppose Clark’ll be dressed up, will he?”
“Not ghetto-fabulous or anything like that, I wouldn’t think,” Dewey said, and added with feigned enthusiasm, “Okay, then, see you later when you’re beautiful.”
Malcolm Rojas brought a clean shirt and jeans to work and put them in a locker. He thought he’d shower and shave there at the end of the day. Actually, he really only had to shave every other day, and he’d shaved yesterday for that little bitch Naomi, but tonight was a special occasion. His mother hadn’t been awake when he left in the morning, so at least he was spared her nagging, or an interrogation as to why he hadn’t called her when he’d failed to come home for supper last night.
It had been hard for Malcolm not to tell someone at work about what had happened to him. He’d bought an L.A. Times, hoping to find some mention of the cop getting dunked in a swimming pool, but there was nothing there. He hadn’t even thought to look in the paper to see if the other incidents had been mentioned. That’s because he wasn’t proud of how he’d failed on both of those occasions, but nobody could say he’d failed last night. He’d gotten away when it looked like half the cops from Hollywood Station were looking for him. It made Malcolm smile every time he thought about it.
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