Unwilling Accomplice - Barbara Seranella

by Barbara Seranella

  Munch considered the intel that the victims were away when their homes were hit. Her past experiences on both sides of the law had turned her into something of an expert in criminal matters. "Sounds like someone had inside information. How many uh, incidents?"

  "Seven, but so far the only thing I’ve found to connect them all is that the people all lived within a five-mile radius of each other. "

  "Walking distance," Munch said.

  "That has occurred to us," he said. "l’d like to have one of the photographs of your niece. How about I stop by your work tomorrow morning?"

  "I’ll be there." She hung up the phone gingerly as if any sudden movements could upset the balance of the universe. Munch’s was due to rock.

  Overdue.

  Chapter 5

  The following morning Munch and Asia arrived at the gas station in Brentwood together, as usual. Before and after school, Munch’s boss, Lou, allowed Asia to share his office. Sometimes they warred over the small television. Lou kept it tuned to the local financial channel. Asia preferred cartoons. Lou gave in more often than not.

  As soon as Asia’s school bus departed, Munch told Lou about Charlotte and her emergency She had come to work in her uniform in case he couldn’t spare her.

  "Go ahead and take off," he said. "I’ve got the work covered here."

  "Thanks, I’m waiting for Rico. I’ll split as soon as he gets here."

  "He’s back in the picture? Since when?"

  "He’s not exactly back." She showed Lou the posters she’d had made of Charlotte. "He wanted one of these."

  Lou raised an eyebrow. "What’s his wife think of him seeing you?"

  "He doesn’t have a wife."

  "But I thought—"

  "Yeah, me, too. Just goes to show you where thinking gets you."

  "Be careful," Lou said, pulling on his lower lip the way he did when one of his stocks took a dive.

  "I’m not looking to get hurt, you know," Munch said. She saw Rico pull in. "Speak of the devil."

  Lou grunted a response.

  Rico was driving a black-and-white, which caused her heart to flutter with emotions that were too mixed to decipher. He was wearing a dark shirt and tie and looked improbably, unfairly, and exasperatingly good, although his forehead was creased with worry lines that Munch didn’t remember being there before. Was homicide getting him down or was his near brush with matrimony the cause? She tucked in her gray uniform shirt, flicked her braid behind her, and went out to greet him.

  His smile was full of relief, and she wondered what he had been expecting.

  "Can we get that coffee?" he asked.

  "I don’t have time right now. I want to hit the streets and see what I can find out."

  His expression was blank, betraying nothing of what might be going on inside his man-brain. She hoped her face was as expressionless. She handed him the photograph of Charlotte, explaining to him about the hair. Caught in still life, the girl looked very young. Sometimes Munch forgot how young fifteen could be. She had been so old herself by then.

  "There’s some outreach programs in Hollywood," Rico said. "Covenant House, Passage to Hope, Paths. They might be a good place to start."

  "What about Venice?" she asked.

  "You should try there, too, but Hollywood is the mecca of runaway teenagers. The woman who runs Passage to Hope is very savvy. She's helped the police before. In fact, she identified a rash of prostitute killings as serial."

  "Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind." It was odd not to touch him. She’d gotten more truly naked with him than with any man ever—had let him know her inside and out. Eight months of separation hadn’t washed away all those memories. At times she worried that she’d never get over him.

  Would his flesh still thrill her or was all that gone? The Rico of her imagination still took her breath away robbed her of her free will. She visited him in her dreams, woke with the feel of his hand cupping her. The disappointment didn’t set in until she was fully conscious. She reminded herself that she had phoned him. Time to snap out of it.

  "Are you seeing anyone?" he asked.

  She was tempted to tell him that she’d recently met a great guy named Jasper, but she wasn’t going to lie.

  "No. I've been busy. " What was that? she wondered. Excuse or opening?

  "It’s not that easy to make time for a love life when you’re raising a kid," he said.

  "And it’s not that easy to find a guy worth the hassle."

  He took a step closer, too close. "Please don’t count me out until you hear me out."

  "I’ll be fair," she said, finding it difficult to speak or even breathe.

  "I’m sure of that."

  Kiss me, she thought. Make your move.

  "You’re right, though," he said. "This isn’t the time."

  ***

  Munch went back to her house to change out of her uniform and check on Jasper. He greeted her with as much enthusiasm after she’d been gone for only a few hours as he had when they’d left him alone for the day. He'd also managed to open her closet door and bring out three and a half pairs of her shoes to the front room.

  "You wanna go for a ride?" she asked as she pulled on jeans, a thick white T-shirt, and clean tennis shoes.

  His head tilted to one side, he sat taller and thrust out his chest to her in a gesture that seemed to say, "Me? You want me? With you? Now?"

  She had to laugh. "Yeah, come on, baby boy."

  As he bounded joyfully after her, Munch felt the familiar tugging ache of missing Asia. At work, when she was busy, she was able to focus on what was in front of her, but as soon as things slowed down, memories of cute stuff Asia said and did filled her thoughts. lt was scary, feeling so much love for another living being. It made her feel vulnerable to unbearable pain, yet she couldn’t imagine her life being full without the little rug rat. Perhaps her love for Asia was so absolute that it left no room for anyone else. And now there was this dog. She loved him, too. If anything, her heart had expanded. She guessed that was what happened when people had multiple kids. Lisa must be going out of her mind, the half she had left, anyway.

  Part of Munch wanted to stop by the school and take Asia out for the day though she knew that was foolish. Asia was smart enough to catch up after missing a day--that wasn’t it. But where Munch was going now wasn’t an appropriate place to take a little kid.

  Appropriate, Munch thought, hearing her own thoughts. When had that word snuck into her vocabulary? She felt the same when she heard herself refer to a woman as a gal instead of a chick. She was changing. No doubt about it. Hooray for me, she thought as she headed east on Sunset Boulevard toward Hollyweird.

  The air was scented by bus exhaust, carbon rich and sooty. Munch knew most people were repelled by those fumes, but to her it always smelled like money. When she’d started working on cars in the seventies, they all smelled like that. Catalytic converters had made a big difference. What came out of the newer cars’ tailpipes now was cleaner, clearer, and slightly sulfuric. A lot of mechanics hadn’t trusted or approved of the early smog equipment and were known to remove and/or modify it on occasion. The devices robbed engines of power and made them idle rough.

  But, since Munch had been running smog checks with the infrared analyzer that measured carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, she’d been sold on all the changes in the eighties’ engines. So maybe the sunsets over the Pacific Ocean had fewer colors in them now, and cars lacked the muscle of previous decades, but Asia didn’t miss days of play due to stage-three smog alerts.

  Progress. Munch was learning not to fight it.

  She stopped at the light on Highland and took in the sights. She’d gotten to know the streets of Hollywood pretty well in the last couple years. Most of the kids who rented her limousine for their proms wanted to cruise the Strip. Munch knew where all the clubs were, the big ones from the sixties like the Whiskey A Go-Go, Art Leboe’s, The Roxy, Kaleidoscope, and the newer, hipper ones like The Stock Exchange downtown and C
lub One. The high school kids couldn’t get into those places, but they insisted on at least driving by the outside. They ogled flamboyant transvestites, stared hard at the lingerie in the window of Frederick’s, and sucked in, wide-eyed, all those siren promises of tawdry glamour and debauchery.

  It was not the same in daylight. The cracks in the veneer showed. The red boas and black silk in the purple-framed windows of Frederick’s appeared lurid, almost cartoonish; the nightclubs and porno parlors looked seedier without the neon.

  Munch had looked up Passage to Hope in the phone book before leaving her house. The address was a storefront a few blocks off the main boulevard, in an area the cops and locals called Gower Gulch. The gulch was a mile east of the tourist draws of Mann’s Chinese Theater and the newly restored Roosevelt Hotel.

  The landmarks here included a Pep Boys franchise, the defunct and decrepit Henry Fonda Theater, a Korean-owned liquor store that accepted food stamps and sold lottery tickets, and First Continental Security Service, whose signs promised protection in four languages.

  She had to park a short block away near St. Augustine’s Methodist Church. She clipped Jasper’s leash to his collar and walked to the shelter.

  Years spent as a barefoot hippie had given Munch the instinct to watch where she stepped. She often found money tools, and other useful objects that most people passed right by. She noted that there were no stars on the sidewalks in Gower Gulch, just a lot of brown spatters that could be blood or chocolate, and quarter-size blots of black asphalt.

  The Capitol Record building towered to the north. Its circular stories were each adorned with their own ring of green awning—it was built to resemble a stack of LPs on a turntable, complete with spindle. Munch thought it looked more like a huge mechanical, multilayered wedding cake. The builders must have been inspired by something they saw on that cartoon show The Jetsons. Or vice versa. She was met at the front desk of the storefront headquarters of Passage to Hope by a woman who introduced herself as Dr. Dianna Benét. The beginnings of tiny crow’s-feet at the edge of Benét’s eyes put her at thirty. At least. Munch was noticing a few of those things around her own hazel eyes. She figured she’d earned them.

  "Have you lost someone?" Benét asked.

  "My niece." Munch showed Dr. Benét the picture. "She’s diabetic and dependent on insulin. I thought maybe if she stopped in, you could give it to her and ask her to call me."

  "I can’t do that," Benét said. Behind her a phone rang, and a teenage boy answered it in a voice crackled by puberty "I’m not a medical doctor, I'm a sociologist. I founded this shelter."

  "Thank you," Munch said, meaning it.

  "We send kids to the free clinic if they need medicine, but your niece could also go to any pharmacy and get her insulin."

  "Without a prescription?"

  "Insulin doesn’t require a prescription." Dr. Benét paused to read a message that the boy who had answered the phone handed her. "Tell her we need tennis shoes, size four and up."

  Benét turned back to Munch. "Where were we?"

  "My niece’s insulin?"

  "Right. She could get it by telling the pharmacist how many units of what type of insulin she used and how often she took her shots. If she had the money she could buy it on the spot. Syringes, too."

  "I didn’t realize that," Munch said, referring to the insulin. She knew about syringes, though.

  "It’s true." Two different phone lines rang at once. The boy answered one of them, looking frazzled. "Anything else?"

  Munch pulled one of her flyers from her bag. "Can I give you her picture and my number?" She placed the photo on the counter. Benét glanced at it briefly, showed no signs of recognition, but pulled it toward her.

  "We rescue kids conned into prostitution and pornography. Do you have a reason to think your niece might be turning tricks?"

  "I don’t know her that well," Munch said, "but I have a feeling not. Her mom hasn’t provided a very stable home for her, and a friend of hers died a little while ago. She might have felt she needed a break."

  "Let’s hope she didn’t come here to Hollywood for it."

  A young black girl emerged from the back. Her hair was wet. "We’re out of conditioner, Dr. Di."

  Benét put a protective arm around the girl’s narrow shoulders and gave her a motherly squeeze before releasing her.

  "It’s on our list. Maybe tomorrow. "

  The street door opened and a man in a janitor’s uniform brought in a large cardboard box full of used clothes and set it on the floor. He smiled at Dr. Benét. "Got some more donations for you."

  "Thank you, Larry" she said. Munch liked her no-nonsense manner and that she seemed either unaware of her attractiveness or unwilling to use it to her advantage. Maybe she was trying to set an example.

  A few more kids joined the two already in the anteroom, and together they fell on the donation as if it were treasure. Benét smiled and turned back to Munch. "The runaways who flock to Hollywood are such easy targets. The pimps around here are expert predators and masters of manipulation. They prey on unhappy children who come from difficult homes."

  Munch considered that for a moment. "I’ve never understood the whole pimp/prostitute thing. I mean, I know what the pimp gets out of it. But what about the girl?" When Munch had been strung out on drugs, she had worked the streets of Venice, making direct exchanges of sex for money with the mostly blue-collar johns who knew which streets to cruise. The world of the pimp was as alien as the world of high-class call girls who charged a thousand a night. She suspected the latter was just a fantasy anyway

  "l did my thesis on this relationship. Let me break it down for you." Dr. Benét gestured toward the world outside her front door. "A kid such as your niece hits the street with no resources. She can’t work or rent a room because she’s underage. She does okay maybe during the day, but then night comes. It’s dark and she’s scared. The offers start getting weirder."

  "She’s hungry and cold," Munch added. Charlotte was already too thin.

  "Right. And so she makes a compromise when some not-too-greasy old man invites her home."

  Munch shuddered, feeling again that walking-on-my-grave sensation. "He feeds her, lets her sleep there, and all she has to do is screw him or jerk him off."

  "You sound like maybe you’ve had some experience." Benét said gently

  "Yeah, it was some years ago. I used to be an intravenous drug user. " Munch looked at the good doctor sideways. "They didn’t give that heroin away."

  Benét laughed in the right place and Munch liked her even more.

  "How long are you sober?"

  "Eight and a half years." Munch heard herself and smiled.

  She sounded like one of Asia’s little friends, still counting her age with fractions.

  "That’s great," Benét said.

  "Yeah, I think so, too."

  Benét resumed her lecture. "After that first compromise, she’s ripe for the picking, and believe me, these pimps know how to spot their prey. He’ll say, ’Why don’t you buy those hundred—dollar shoes? Won’t your daddy buy them for you?’ The kid will say ’My daddy drinks all the time,’ or, ’I don’t have a daddy' The pimp will wine and dine her, giving her constant reinforcement and attention. ’You need a daddy’ he’ll say ’to give you all those fine things.'"

  "’You and me against the wor1d,"’ Munch said, watching a brown—haired girl who couldn’t be older than twelve admire a tie-dyed T-shirt that she pulled from one of the donation boxes.

  "Exactly. He tells her she’s beautiful, that all these men want her."

  Munch thought of the Cat Stevens lyrics It’s hard to get by just upon a smile, girl. She’d made her first break from home when that song came out. Those words had become a personal mantra.

  Benét continued. "He’ll point out society's wrongs: ’If the president is a crook . . .’ or ’You know all those businessmen take advantage of the working man . . .’ She’s just a kid, what

  does she k
now? And here’s this grown man defining the universe for her. He says, ’Hey the whole world is doing this, you better get hip.' "

  "And kids want to be hip," Munch said, thinking she’d been cured of that aspiration when it had been drummed into her at Narcotics Anonymous meetings that the desire to be hip, slick, and cool was often a terminal condition for an addict. Benét bent her head and dropped her voice. This woman had an intensity that demanded attention. Munch leaned closer so as not to miss a word.

  "Then comes the degradation stage, when a pimp actually has the kid. If she tries to break loose, he threatens to expose what she’s been doing. He tells her that no one would want her, not her family certainly not a boy her own age, when they learn what she’s been doing."

  Munch nodded. She still fought her own shame.

  Benét loaded condoms and cards with the shelter’s number into her shoulder bag as she spoke. "He controls who she has contact with. The only people she meets are other prostitutes. Approval and affirmation go to the girls who bring in the most money. The pimp becomes her man, her father figure, her god. She’1l do anything for him."

  "I never had a pimp," Munch said, not counting Flower George, who wasn’t much of a father figure either.

  "No," the good doctor said, "heroin was your pimp."

  Munch exhaled in a sound that was half-recognition and half-shock as another puzzle piece of her past shifted into place, a Rubik’s Cube moment. She wondered if she’d ever have her personal story all figured out. Would she live that long?

  Dr. Benét picked up Charlotte’s picture and studied it.

  "Runaway kids are divided into three subcultures. I just have to know two things about the kid. What does their hair look like and what kind of music do they listen to? Boys with short hair who are into disco, they’re gay. That means West Hollywood, Santa Monica Boulevard. Kids into rap go hang out with gangs and pimps."