"Jetsam," his partner said with a sigh of resignation.
"Dude, this could be the beginning of a choiceamundo friendship."
"Jetsam? Bro, that is wack, way wack."
"What's in a name?"
"Whatever. So what happened to the Stetson after you played lawn dart in Grauman's courtyard?"
"No lawn in that courtyard. All concrete. I figure a tweaker picked it up. Probably sold it for a few teeners of crystal. I keep hoping to someday find that crankster. Just to see how fast I can make his body heat drop from ninety-eight point six to room temperature."
As they were talking, 6-X-32 got a beep on the MDT computer. Jetsam opened and acknowledged the message, then hit the en route key and they were on their way to an address on Cherokee Avenue that appeared on the dashboard screen along with "See the woman, 415 music."
"Four-fifteen music," Flotsam muttered. "Why the hell can't the woman just go to her neighbor and tell them to turn down the goddamn CD? Probably some juice-head fell asleep to Destiny's Child."
"Maybe Black Eyed Peas," Jetsam said. "Or maybe Fifty Cent. Crank up the decibels on that dude and you provoke homicidal urges. Heard his album called The Massacre?"
It wasn't easy to find a parking place near the half block of apartment buildings, causing 6-X-32 to make several moves before the patrol car was able to squeeze in parallel between a late-model Lexus and a twelve-year-old Nova that was parked far enough from the curb to be ticketed.
Jetsam hit the at-scene button on the keyboard, and they grabbed their flashlights and got out, with Flotsam grumbling, "In all of Hollywood tonight there's probably about thirteen and a half fucking parking places."
"Thirteen now," Jetsam said. "We got the half." He paused on the sidewalk in front and said, "Jesus, I can hear it from here and it ain't hip-hop."
It was the Schreckensfanfare, the "Fanfare of Terror," from Beethoven's Ninth.
A dissonant shriek of strings and a discordant blast from brass and woodwinds directed them up the outside staircase of a modest but respectable two-story apartment building. Many of the tenants seemed to be out this Friday evening. Porch lights and security lights were on inside some of the units, but it was altogether very quiet except for that music attacking their ears, assaulting their hearing. Those harrowing passages that Beethoven intended as an introduction to induce foreboding did the job on 6-X-32.
They didn't bother to seek out the complainant. They knocked at the apartment from which that music emanated like a scream, like a warning.
"Somebody might be drunk in there," Jetsam said.
"Or dead," Flotsam said, half joking.
No answer. They tried again, banging louder. No answer.
Flotsam turned the knob, and the door popped open as the hammering timpani served the master composer by intensifying those fearful sounds. It was dark except for light coming from a room off the hallway.
"Anybody home?" Flotsam called.
No answer. Just the timpani and that sound of brass shrieking at them.
Jetsam stepped inside first. "Anybody home?"
No answer. Flotsam reflexively drew his nine, held it down beside his right leg and flashed his light around the room.
"The music's coming from back there." Jetsam pointed down the dark hallway.
"Maybe somebody had a heart attack. Or a stroke," Flotsam said.
They started walking slowly down the long, narrow hallway toward the light, toward the sound, the timpani beating a tattoo. "Hey!" Flotsam yelled. "Anybody here?"
"This is bad juju," Jetsam said.
"Anybody home?" Flotsam listened for a response, but there was only that crazy fucking music!
The first room off the hall was the bedroom. Jetsam switched on the light. The bed was made. A woman's pink bathrobe and pajamas were lying across the bed. Pink slippers sat on the floor below. The sound system was not elaborate, but it wasn't cheap either. Several classical CDs were scattered on a bookcase shelf beside the speakers. This person lived in her bedroom, it seemed.
Jetsam touched the power button and shut off that raging sound. Both he and his partner drew a breath of relief as though bobbing to the surface from deep water. There was another room at the far end of the hallway, but it was dark. The only other light came from a bathroom that served this two-bedroom unit.
Flotsam stepped to the bathroom doorway first and found her. She was naked, half in, half out of the bathtub, long pale legs hanging over the side of the tub. She had no doubt been a pretty girl in life, but now she was staring, eyes open in slits, lips drawn back in that familiar snarl of violent death he'd seen on others: Don't take me away! I'll fight to stay here! Alive! I want to stay alive!
Jetsam drew his rover, keyed it, and prepared to make the call. His partner stayed and stared at the corpse of the young woman. For a few seconds Flotsam had the panicky idea that she might still be alive, that maybe a rescue ambulance would have a chance. Then he moved one step closer to the tub and peeked behind the shower curtain.
There were arterial spurts all over the blue tile of the wall even to the ceiling. The floor of the tub was a blackening vat of viscosity and from here he could see at least three chest wounds and a gaping gash across her throat. At that second but not before, the acrid smell of blood and urine almost overwhelmed him, and he stepped out into the hallway to await the detectives from Hollywood Station and from Scientific Investigation Division.
The second bedroom, apparently belonging to a male roommate, was tidy and unoccupied at the moment, or so they thought. Jetsam had shined his light in there in a cursory check while talking on the rover, and Flotsam had glanced in, but neither had bothered to enter the bedroom and look inside the small closet, its door ajar.
While the two cops were back in the living room making a few notes, careful not to disturb anything, even turning on the wall switch with a pencil, a young man entered from the darkened hallway behind them.
His voice was a piercing rasp. He said, "I love her."
Flotsam dropped his notebook, Jetsam the rover. Both cops wheeled and drew their nines.
"Freeze, motherfucker!" Flotsam screamed.
"Freeze!" Jetsam added redundantly.
He was frozen already. As pale and naked as the young woman he'd murdered, the young man stood motionless, palms up, freshly slashed wrists extended like an offering. Of what? Contrition? The gaping wrists were spurting, splashing fountains onto the carpet and onto his bare feet.
"Jesus Christ!" Flotsam screamed.
"Jesus!" Jetsam screamed redundantly.
Then both cops holstered their pistols, but when they lunged toward him the young man turned and ran to the bathroom, leaping into the tub with the woman he loved. And the cops gaped in horror as he curled himself fetally and moaned into her unhearing ear.
Flotsam got one latex glove onto his hand but dropped the other glove. Jetsam yelled into the rover for paramedics and dropped both latex gloves. Then they jumped onto him and tried to drag him up, but all the blood made his thin arms slip through their hands, and both cops cursed and swore while the young man moaned. Twice, three times he pulled free and plopped onto the bloody corpse with a splat.
Jetsam got his handcuff around one wrist, but when he cinched it tight the bracelet sunk into the gaping flesh and he saw a tendon flail around the ratchet and he yelled, "Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!" And he felt ice from his tailbone to his brain stem and for a second he felt like bolting.
Flotsam was bigger and stronger than Jetsam, and he muscled the rigid left arm out from under the chest of the moaning young man and forced it up behind his back and got the dangling bracelet around the wrist. And then he got to see it sink into the red maw of tendon and tissue and he almost puked.
They each got him by a handcuffed arm and they lifted him but now all three were dripping and slimy from his spurting blood and her thickening blood and they dropped him, his head hitting the side of the tub. But he was past pain and only moaned more softly. They lif
ted again and got him out of the tub and dragged him out into the hallway, where Flotsam slipped and fell down, the bleeding man on top of him still moaning.
A neighbor on her balcony screamed when the two panting cops dragged the young man down the outside stairway, his naked blood-slimed body bumping against the plastered steps in a muted plop that made the woman scream louder. The three young men fell in a pile onto the sidewalk under a street lamp, and Flotsam got up and began ransacking the car trunk for the first-aid kit, not knowing for sure what the hell was in it but pretty sure there was no tourniquet. Jetsam knelt by the bleeding man, jerked his Sam Browne free, and was trying to tie off one arm with an improvised tourniquet made from his trouser belt when the rescue ambulance came squealing around the corner onto Cherokee, lights flashing and siren yelping.
The first patrol unit to arrive belonged to the sergeant known as the Oracle, who double-parked half a block away, leaving the immediate area to RA paramedics, Hollywood detectives, evidence collectors from Scientific Investigation Division, and the coroner's team. There was no mistaking the very old patrol sergeant, even in the darkness. As his burly figure approached, they could see those pale service stripes on his left sleeve, rising almost to his elbow. Forty-six years on the Job rated nine hash marks and made him one of the longest-serving cops on the entire police department.
"The Oracle has more hash marks than a football field," everybody said.
But the Oracle always said, "I'm only staying because the divorce settlement gives my ex half my pension. I'll be on the Job till that bitch dies or I do, whichever comes first."
The bleeding man was unmoving and going gray when he was blanketed and belted to the gurney and lifted into the rescue ambulance, both paramedics working to stem the now oozing blood but shaking their heads at the Oracle, indicating that the young man had probably bled out and was beyond saving.
Even though a Santa Ana wind had blown into Los Angeles from the desert on this May evening, both Flotsam and Jetsam were shivering and wearily gathering their equipment which was scattered on the sidewalk next to a concrete planter containing some hopeful pansies and forget-me-nots.
The Oracle looked at the blood-drenched cops and said, "Are you hurt? Any injuries at all?"
Flotsam shook his head and said, "Boss, I think we just had a tactical situation they never covered in any class I've taken at the academy. Or if they did, I fucking missed it."
"Get yourselves to Cedars for medical treatment whether you need it or not," the Oracle said. "Then clean up real good. Might as well burn those uniforms from the looks of them."
"If that guy has hepatitis, we're in trouble, Sarge," Jetsam said.
"If that guy has AIDS, we're dead," Flotsam said.
"This doesn't look like that kind of situation," the Oracle said, his retro gray crew cut seeming to sparkle under the streetlight. Then he noticed Jetsam's handcuffs lying on the sidewalk. He flashed his beam on the cuffs and said to the exhausted cop, "Drop those cuffs in some bleach, son. I can see chunks of meat jammed in the ratchets."
"I need to go surfing," Jetsam said.
"Me too," Flotsam said.
The Oracle had acquired his sobriquet by virtue of seniority and his penchant for dispensing words of wisdom, but not on this night. He just looked at his bloody, hollow-eyed, shivering young cops and said, "Now, you boys get right to Cedars ER and let a doc have a look at you."
It was then that D2 Charlie Gilford arrived on the scene, a gum-chewing, lazy night-watch detective with a penchant for bad neckties who was not a case-carrying investigator, his job being only to assist. But with more than twenty years at Hollywood Station, he didn't like to miss anything sensational that was going down and loved to offer pithy commentary on whatever had transpired. For his assessments they called him Compassionate Charlie.
During that evening's events on Cherokee Avenue, after he'd received a quick summary from the Oracle and called a homicide team from home, he took a look at the gruesome scene of murder and suicide, and at the bloody trail marking the grisly struggle that failed to save the killer's life.
Then Compassionate Charlie sucked his teeth for a second or two and said to the Oracle, "I can't understand young coppers anymore. Why would they put themselves through something like that for a self-solver? Shoulda just let the guy jump in the tub with her and bleed out the way he wanted to. They coulda sat there listening to music till it was over. All we got here is just another Hollywood love story that went a little bit sideways."
Chapter TWO
IT HAD ALWAYS seemed to Farley Ramsdale that the blue mailboxes, even the ones on some of the seedier corners of Hollywood, were much more treasure-laden and easier to work than the resident boxes by most of the upmarket condos and apartments. And he especially liked the ones outside the post office because they got really full between closing time and 10 P. M., the hour he found most propitious. People felt so confident about a post office location that they dropped a bonanza in them, sometimes even cash.
The hour of 10 P. M. was midday for Farley, who'd been named by a mother who just loved actor Farley Granger, the old Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train being one of her favorites. In that movie Farley Granger is a professional tennis player, and even though Farley Ramsdale's mother had signed him up for private lessons when he was in middle school, tennis had bored him silly. It was a drag. School was a drag. Work was a drag. Crystal meth was definitely not a drag.
At the age of seventeen years and two months, Farley Ramsdale had gone from being a beads 'n' seeds pothead to a tweaker. The first time he smoked crystal he fell in love, everlasting love. But even though it was far cheaper than cocaine, it still cost enough to keep Farley hopping well into the night, visiting blue mailboxes on the streets of Hollywood.
The first thing Farley had to do that afternoon was pay a visit to a hardware store and buy some more mousetraps. Not that Farley worried about mice-they were scampering around his rooming house most of the time. Well, it wasn't a rooming house exactly, he'd be the first to admit. It was an old white-stucco bungalow just off Gower Street, the family home deeded to him by his mother before her death fifteen years ago, when Farley was an eighteen-year-old at Hollywood High School discovering the joys of meth.
He'd managed to forge and cash her pension checks for ten months after her death before a county social worker caught up with him, the meddling bitch. Because he was still a teenager and an orphan, he easily plea-bargained down to a probationary sentence with a promise to pay restitution, which he never paid, and he began calling the two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow a rooming house when he started renting space to other tweakers who came and went, usually within a few weeks.
No, he didn't give a shit about mice. Farley needed ice. Nice clear, icy-looking crystal from Hawaii, not the dirty white crap they sold around town. Ice, not mice, that's what he worried about during every waking hour.
While browsing through the hardware store, Farley saw a red-vested employee watching him when he passed the counter where the drill bits, knives, and smaller items were on display. As if he was going to shoplift the shitty merchandise in this place. When he passed a bathroom display and saw his reflection in the mirror, now in the merciless light of afternoon, it startled him. The speed bumps on his face were swollen and angry, a telltale sign of a speed freak, as his kind used to be known. Like all tweakers he craved candy and sweets. His teeth were getting dark and two molars were hurting. And his hair! He had forgotten to comb his fucking hair and it was a whirling tangle with that burnt-straw look, hinting at incipient malnutrition, marking him even more as a longtime crystal-smoking tweaker.
He turned toward the employee, an East Asian guy younger than Farley and fit-looking. Probably a fucking martial arts expert, he thought. The way Korea Town was growing, and with a Thai restaurant on every goddamn street and Filipinos emptying bedpans in the free clinics, pretty soon all those canine-eating, dog-breath motherfuckers would be running City Hall too.
&
nbsp; But come to think of it, that might be an improvement over the chili-dipping Mexican asshole who was now the mayor, convincing Farley that L. A. would soon be ninety percent Mexican instead of nearly half. So why not give the slopes and greasers knives and guns and let them waste each other? That's what Farley thought should happen. And if the south end niggers ever started moving to Hollywood, he was selling the house and relocating to the high desert, where there were so many meth labs he didn't think the cops could possibly hassle him very much.
Since he couldn't shake that slit-eyed asshole watching him, Farley decided to stop browsing and headed for the shelf containing the mousetraps and rat poison, whereupon the Asian employee walked up to him and said, "Can I help you, sir?"
Farley said, "Do I look like I need help?"
The Asian looked him over, at his Eminem T-shirt and oily jeans, and said in slightly accented English, "If you have rats, the spring-loaded rattraps are what you want. Those glue traps are excellent for mice, but some larger rodents can pull free of the glue pads."
"Yeah, well, I don't have rats in my house," Farley said. "Do you? Or does somebody eat them along with any stray terriers that wander in the yard?"
The unsmiling Asian employee took a deliberate step toward Farley, who yelped, "Touch me and I'll sue you and this whole fucking hardware chain!" before turning and scuttling away to the shelf display of cleaning solutions, where he grabbed five cans of Easy-Off.
When he got to the checkout counter, he grumbled to a frightened teenage cashier that there weren't enough English-speaking Americans left in all of L. A. to gang-fuck Courtney Love so that she'd even notice it.
Farley left the store and had to walk back to the house, since his piece-of-shit white Corolla had a flat tire and he needed some quick cash to replace it. When he got to the house, he unlocked the dead bolt on the front door and entered, hoping that his one nonpaying tenant was not at home. She was a shockingly thin woman several years older than Farley, although it was hard to tell, with oily black hair plastered to her scalp and tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. She was a penniless, homeless tweaker whom Farley had christened Olive Oyl after the character in Popeye.
Hollywood Station (2006) Page 2