Hollywood Moon Page 6

  This was another case that caused Jakob Kessler vexation after his suggestion to install a skimmer in the POS machine was summarily dismissed by his wife as “stupid and risky.” He knew that none of the Eastern European teams would have hesitated to bribe Harold Swanson to install a skimmer there at the point of sale, to be removed at a propitious moment, thereby eliminating all these daily trips over the hill into the San Fernando Valley.

  When Harold Swanson saw Jakob Kessler in line at his counter, he worked a little faster to finish with another customer and said to Kessler, “Evening, sir, is that all you’re purchasing this evening?”

  “Just the duct tape,” Jakob Kessler said in his German accent.

  “Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “Sometimes we have sales on duct tape where you can buy six rolls at half price. Six.”

  Jakob Kessler said, “Six. I shall remember that.” Then he put down a $10 bill for the tape along with six $50 bills from his wallet.

  Harold Swanson put the duct tape and the skimmer in a plastic bag, pocketed the six President Grants, and handed the bag to Jakob Kessler, saying, “Have a nice evening, sir.”

  Tristan Hawkins and Jerzy Szarpowicz were waiting at the duplex/office with two of the three Latino runners that Kessler had hired for their skill in passing bogus checks at the many stores catering to illegal immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. Tristan and Jerzy were speaking to each other by then, as much as they ever did, Jerzy sitting in one of the secondhand overstuffed chairs, when all at once he slapped at a flea and leaped to his feet.

  “Goddamn it!” he yelled and did a dance, his wattles bouncing as he slapped at his belly and reached around to his back, brushing away more imaginary fleas.

  “Why do you think I never sit on nothin’ here unless it’s made of wood or plastic?” Tristan said. “How ’bout you, Diego?”

  One of the two young Mexicans sitting at the table in the kitchenette looked up and grinned, a gold tooth gleaming, and said, “Las pulgas. They don’ be hurting you, man. If they ain’t scorpions, I don’ say nothing.”

  He was doing freelance work, “washing” a stolen check with acetone. The larger Mexican next to him, a placid mestizo teenager, was doing the same to another check, but he was washing it with nail polish remover. Both men worked with great patience and care.

  Tristan said to them, “Don’t let Mr. Kessler see you doin’ that. Nobody with any class bleaches checks these days. It’s too easy to make your own.”

  The smaller Mexican shrugged and said, “This how we do it back in Cuernavaca. I still make some money like this.”

  Jerzy walked to the kitchen, opened the little refrigerator, found nothing but two strawberry sodas inside, and took one without asking and popped it open. He eased his bulk onto the floor, leaned against the plasterboard wall, and drank.

  Tristan said to the Mexican, “Can I have one too, Diego?”

  “Okay,” said the Mexican, not looking up from his work.

  Tristan put two dollars on the kitchen table and took the last soda. When he sat down beside his partner, he said, “So how do you like the job, wood?”

  “It’s okay,” Jerzy said. “Till somethin’ better comes along.” He gulped down the drink, crushed the can in his big beefy mitts, and said, “How long you been workin’ here, anyways?”

  “Almost two months,” Tristan said. “Old Jerzy was somebody I used to see at Pablo’s Tacos when I’d go there to score a couple rocks. He told me about Jakob Kessler. Now Old Jerzy’s gone.”

  “This job don’t look like a place where you form long-term relationships,” Jerzy said.

  “How’d you meet the man?” Tristan asked.

  “This basehead named Stella told me about him. She used to live in the room next to me at Cochran’s Hotel. Said I could make some serious coin, but I ain’t seen nothin’ serious yet.”

  “I don’t know a Stella workin’ for him,” Tristan said.

  “She’s brain-fried, man. Here one day, spun out and gone the next.”

  “Jakob Kessler is one weird dude,” Tristan said, realizing that this was the first time in four days working together that he and Jerzy had spoken more than a dozen words at a time.

  Jerzy just grunted and scratched his balls, looking as though he’d like to throw one of the Mexicans out of a kitchen chair so he could get off the floor.

  “Way he got me,” Tristan said, “he saw me lookin’ at some shiny spinners on a pimpmobile at Pablo’s. He says to me in that Hitler accent of his, ‘You don’t have to steal spinners. If you want them, you can walk in a store and buy them with a credit card.’ Then he bought me a taco plate and we talked.”

  “He never bought me nothin’,” Jerzy said.

  “The man can talk,” Tristan said. “Do those weird eyes of his ever get on your nerves?”

  “I don’t pay no attention to nobody’s eyes,” Jerzy said. “Unless I think the guy’s an undercover cop and he’s lookin’ at me too close.”

  Tristan then said to the smaller Mexican, “How long you been at work here for the boss?”

  The Mexican shrugged and said, “Three, four week. I think.”

  “And your amigo?” Tristan said.

  “The same.”

  “See?” Tristan said to Jerzy. “Nobody works long for Kessler. Then they’re gone, like Old Jerzy. I’ll bet this fuckin’ apartment is rented week to week.”

  “What, you were hopin’ for a pension and health plan?” Jerzy said.

  “I just don’t wanna suddenly not be here someday,” Tristan said. “Like Old Jerzy.”

  The Mexicans completed their check washing and hid their work in a laundry bag just before Jakob Kessler arrived. He still looked neat and eminently presentable in his suit and white shirt and tie, a businessman finishing up a long day but still ready in case a sale had to be made.

  Tristan got to his feet, but Jerzy didn’t bother. Tristan pointed to a paper bag on a little table by the flea-infested chair in the living room. “We didn’t go through the real mail, Mr. Kessler. It’s all there ’cept for the junk stuff. And the two credit cards I got from —”

  “Never mind where you got them from,” Jakob Kessler interrupted, glancing quickly at the two Mexicans.

  “Oh, yeah,” Tristan said, remembering that Kessler kept his teams of runners segregated for security. “Anyways, it’s all there, Mr. Kessler.”

  “I was hoping you’d get more than two cards,” Jakob Kessler said.

  “The locker room—I mean the place was pretty busy. I’ll do better next time,” Tristan said.

  Jakob Kessler picked up the bag, looked inside, and said, “How many mailboxes did you visit?”

  “About fifteen or twenty,” Jerzy said, finally standing up.

  “Twenty-two,” Tristan said. “There’s bound to be some good stuff in there.”

  “We’ll see,” Kessler said. Then he reached into his inside jacket pocket, withdrew a leather wallet, and removed eight $100 bills, giving two to each man in the room. Then he removed one more $100 bill and gave it to Tristan, saying, “Your extra work was more risky.”

  “I could cash checks for you, Mr. Kessler,” Tristan said. “If you’d get me a driver’s license and a credit card. I always make a good impression, and people don’t question me. Or I could be a great shopper if you’d give me a chance.”

  “I shall keep that in mind, Creole,” Kessler said. “Perhaps in a few days.”

  “That’s it?” Jerzy said. “I was with him. I only get two Ben Franklins for all our labor?”

  Kessler said, “If your bags of material and the credit cards work out, you are going to get ten percent of what we net from them, as promised.”

  “How will I know how much you net?” Jerzy demanded.

  “I shall tell you how much,” Kessler said, annoyance in his voice, turning those pale lasers on his fat mail thief.

  “That don’t seem right, Mr. Kessler,” Jerzy murmured, but when he glanced at the man’s strange eyes, he looke
d away and was silent.

  “You know where to take the merchandise after you shop tomorrow, don’t you, Diego?” Jakob Kessler said to the smaller Mexican, who looked at Tristan and Jerzy and said, “I know, boss. The new place.”

  “Good lad,” said Kessler.

  “When we suppose to meet tomorrow, boss?” the Mexican asked.

  “I can’t do it tomorrow. Just wait for my call.”

  “Okay, boss,” said the Mexican.

  And then Kessler was out the door and gone.

  “That man talks to people like we’re all niggers,” Jerzy said to the Mexicans.

  “Fuck you, peckerwood,” said Tristan.

  For the first time all day, Jerzy smiled and replied, “As a famous member of your tribe once said, ‘Can’t we all jist get along?’ ”

  There was a remarkable part of the story of the Rupert Moore shooting that Dana Vaughn did not share with Hollywood Nate. He’d learned it from Sergeant Lee Murillo at end-of-watch after Dana had gone home. The story made it that much more difficult for Nate to get annoyed with her for all her witty remarks at his expense. Only a few officers at Hollywood Station knew about it, yet it was considered a small miracle by the parents of Officer Sarah Messinger.

  For each of the ten days that the rookie was at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in a coma, Dana Vaughn had visited her, a woman she’d never met. Sarah Messinger was only a few years older than Dana Vaughn’s daughter, and there was something about what the rookie had undergone that made Dana bond with that helpless young woman who was sustained by feeding tubes and monitors.

  Dana introduced herself to the ward nurses on the first night, nurses who knew about the incident that put Officer Sarah Messinger in their care. And each day or evening, when she was sure that there would be no one else but nurses present, Officer Dana Vaughn, usually in uniform, would go to the bedside of the young woman and speak to her for ten minutes or more. Sometimes she told Sarah Messinger about the happenings on Watch 3. Sometimes she talked about teaming up with Sarah when she came back to work and was off probation. Sometimes she just did girl talk. But she never missed a day.

  On one of those visits, when Dana was in uniform, an elderly Irish priest entered while Dana was talking to the young woman. The shoulders of the priest’s black coat were flaked with dandruff, and Dana thought she could smell liquor on his breath. She stopped talking when he entered.

  “Don’t stop, Officer,” he said with a thick brogue. “Please don’t let me bother you. I only make the rounds to see if I’m needed by anyone.”

  Dana was embarrassed and said, “I know it’s silly of me. The nurses say she can’t hear me, but… well, I know it’s silly.”

  “It’s not silly,” the priest said, and when he walked closer to the bed, Dana could see right through his wispy white hair to his scaly pink scalp, and she smelled liquor on his breath for sure. “Doctors don’t know everything. I believe that people in comas are like dolphins that dive deep into the waters, fathoms deeper than we can imagine, but they are still capable of receiving signals from the surface. You keep talking to your young friend, and she will hear you in ways that we cannot understand.”

  “I’m not a Catholic, Father,” Dana said, “but I’d like to think you’re right.”

  “I’m not a good Catholic,” the old priest said, “but I know I’m right.”

  The remarkable event happened at 8 P.M. on the evening of the tenth day, when Sarah Messinger awakened from her coma. Dana Vaughn was on a night off and dressed in civilian clothes when she rushed from home after getting a call and hearing the wonderful news. As she entered the hospital room, the parents of Sarah Messinger and a young neurosurgeon were standing by the young woman’s bed, all overjoyed.

  The Messingers had been apprised of the many visits by the police officer who’d shot the man that injured their child, and when they saw Dana Vaughn, Sarah’s mother embraced her. Sarah was lying propped up on pillows, and she looked at Dana curiously.

  Dana said, “Hello, Sarah. I’m so very happy tonight! You’re looking just fine!”

  “Thank you,” Sarah said faintly.

  “Do you know who this is, Sarah?” her mother asked.

  “No,” Sarah said, studying Dana for a moment. “But somehow I know her voice.”

  FOUR

  ONE OF THE NEWER COPPERS on the midwatch was forty-two-year-old R.T. Dibney. He’d worked patrol at Southeast, Hollenbeck, Newton Street, Mission, and North Hollywood Divisions during his nineteen-year career prior to his transfer to Hollywood Station. Three of those moves were “administrative transfers,” which could mean almost anything but generally signaled that the officer hadn’t done (or hadn’t been caught doing) anything so serious that it could bring about heavyweight disciplinary action. But it was nevertheless an indication that the officer was persona non grata at the former station. It was the police version of “no convictions,” and nobody liked finding administrative transfers in a personnel package.

  R.T. Dibney was broad-shouldered and wore his chestnut hair in a kind of retro seventies cut, blow-dried, heavily sprayed, and just touching the ears, with sideburns long but not so long that he caught crap from the supervisors about shaving them shorter. He had a thin mustache that also was retro, unlike the macho growths that most cops sported, and, like his sideburns, it required a bit of L’Oréal to hide the gray. The thing about his mustache was that whenever he was in a tense situation, his upper lip twitched and the slender stash started jumping, a dead giveaway that something was amiss. As to his looks, according to Dana Vaughn he was “okay-looking in an infomercial-guy-selling-steak-knives sort of way.”

  His most recent transfer, the one from North Hollywood Division, resulted from his possibly having had a relationship with the wife of a Pacific Division watch commander, an allegation that could not be proved. The aggrieved watch commander, Lieutenant Edgar Lamb, had tried to set elaborate traps to catch his wife and her lover, certain that she was cheating on him with a police officer. One of the neighbors on his North Hollywood residential street told him confidentially that a black-and-white police car had been parked in front of his house several times during the deployment period when the lieutenant was on Watch 3 at Pacific Division, working all night and not getting home until late morning.

  Then, a month later, when Lieutenant Lamb was at home on a day off and had occasion to report a raucous juvenile drinking party on his street, the call happened to be assigned to R.T. Dibney and his partner. When the two cops entered Lieutenant Lamb’s house, the lieutenant identified himself as a watch commander at Pacific Division and introduced the two cops to his wife. The family cat, a wary and suspicious Persian, hissed at the partner who was first in the house, arched her back as she always did with strangers, and ran behind the sofa to hide.

  But upon hearing R.T. Dibney’s voice saying to Lieutenant Lamb’s voluptuous wife, “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Lamb,” the cat ran from her safe haven directly to R.T. Dibney and purred, rubbed, and curled her body against and around his blue uniform trousers until it looked like he was wearing angora leg warmers.

  As the lieutenant gawked, R.T. Dibney said, “What a friendly cat!”

  Lieutenant Lamb said, “No, she’s a very unfriendly cat. She hates strangers.”

  “I had a tuna sandwich before coming to work and musta spilled a little fish juice on my pants,” R.T. Dibney said as his slender mustache jumped and twitched.

  Thus began the suspicion that, though never conclusively proved, put R.T. Dibney on the short list for an administrative transfer, and he was assigned to the desk during part of his last deployment period at North Hollywood Division. At the urging of Lieutenant Edgar Lamb, Internal Affairs agreed to monitor a video camera in the station lobby to determine whether or not R.T. Dibney was making on-duty phone calls to Lieutenant Lamb’s wife.

  To set the trap, R.T. Dibney was specifically told by a North Hollywood sergeant that the camera in the lobby was strictly for officer safety becaus
e of an incident wherein a deranged person had walked into Rampart Station with a can of gasoline and tried to set the place on fire. And would have, except that he couldn’t strike a match while wearing gloves.

  After the sergeant’s rather suspiciously timed and unnecessary remarks about the camera, R.T. Dibney whispered to the other desk officer, “Know what? We’re on reality TV.”

  And during that tour of duty at the desk, when nobody was in the North Hollywood lobby but R.T. Dibney and that desk partner—a black veteran P2 named Otis Maxwell—R.T. Dibney suddenly began humming and rocking slowly, his mustache twitching, and then did a weird and spooky dance while staring at the camera lens as Officer Maxwell watched, stupefied.

  When R.T. Dibney puckered his lips sensually and pinched his own nipples, Officer Maxwell cried, “What’re you doin’, Dibney? Your fuckin’ stash is jumpin’ like a tap dancer’s nuts.”

  “Who am I?” R.T. Dibney said.

  “Who are you?” Maxwell sputtered. “You’re a fifty-one-fifty wack job is who you are.”

  “This is a charade. You gotta guess the famous movie. Come on, it’s been on TV a hundred times.”

  “This is about a movie?” said Maxwell.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” R.T. Dibney said. “I kill women and strip off their skin.”

  “Boy, we better get you down to the BSS shrink,” said Maxwell. “You’re weirded out. Gone bug shit.”

  “Okay, another hint,” Dibney said. “My moniker in the movie is Buffalo Bill. The movie stars Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar.”

  Officer Maxwell could only gawk wordlessly when R.T. Dibney once again began the lascivious writhing and lubricious posing, all the time panting at the camera, and he only stopped when Maxwell cried, “Silence of the Fuckin’ Lambs! Now step off! You’re freakin’ me!”

  Internal Affairs later viewed the eerie video, and an IA investigator informed Lieutenant Edgar Lamb that this officer was not going to be caught so easily and that maybe the lieutenant should seek marriage counseling.