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This time Gina Villegas glanced at her partner. A woman next door? Sure.

  “Of course we want to hear,” Carl Cheng said. “What did he say exactly?”

  Cindy Kroll now addressed all answers to the male detective and said, “He told me his entire life and career were on the line. He said his fiancée was not like me. When I asked him what he meant, he goes, ‘She’s a lady, not a whore like you.’ And then he threatened me.”

  “Use his exact words if you can remember,” Carl Cheng said.

  “Okay, he said to me, ‘Whatever happens is on your head, not mine. You’re forcing me to do whatever I gotta do to stop your blackmail from wrecking my whole life.’ That’s exactly what he said.”

  Carl Cheng said, “Did you ask him what he meant by that?”

  “I knew what he meant,” Cindy Kroll said. “I’m not stupid!”

  Gina Villegas said, “What you know or think you know about the implication of his words will not satisfy the District Attorney’s Office. Did he say more than that? Anything specific by way of a violent threat?”

  Cindy Kroll directed her answer to Carl Cheng and said, “Then he goes, ‘I’ll make it ten thousand dollars but no more. Take the extortion money and get outta my life.’ That’s exactly what he said.”

  “What did you say?” Gina Villegas asked.

  Cindy Kroll looked at her this time and said, “The same thing. That he should talk to my lawyer.”

  “It doesn’t constitute a threat of violence,” Carl Cheng said.

  “Look, Detective,” she said to him, “I had sex with that man lotsa times. All I want is a reasonable amount of child support to raise his baby boy.” Then she paused and said, “Our baby boy.”

  “There’re limits to what we can do,” Gina Villegas said.

  “You gotta do something now!” Cindy Kroll said. “The man’s been smoking a lotta crystal meth. Way more since our troubles started, and it makes him totally paranoid. He had an insane look in his eyes today when he threatened me. Do you know what it’s like to get all paranoid from smoking crystal?”

  Carl Cheng’s look said, No, but I’ll bet you do.

  “Do you know if he has a police record?” Gina Villegas asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Have you done crystal meth with him?” Gina Villegas asked.

  “Oh, fuck!” Cindy Kroll said, and stifled a sob. “You don’t care if he kills me! I need protection. Tonight is when he likes to go out and score enough crystal for the weekend. I’m in danger tonight.”

  Gina Villegas sat down at the kitchen table, pushed some baby debris aside, and opened her notebook and said, “Okay, give us his address and phone number. We’ll try to have a talk with him.”

  “What if he’s not home?” Cindy Kroll said. “I need protection at least for tonight.”

  “There are domestic violence shelters,” Gina Villegas said. “And restraining orders. Have you talked to your lawyer about all that?”

  “I don’t wanna go to a fucking shelter!” Cindy Kroll said. “I want police protection here in my home.”

  Carl Cheng said, “We can’t camp out here based on what you’ve told us. But we’ll ask the radio car in this area to drive by tonight and keep an eye on the place. I gotta tell you, though, this building’s like a fortress. I noticed that the rear fire door is steel-reinforced with no handle on the outside. And you have a watchman in the lobby, right? Does Louis Dryden have a key, either to the main door or to your apartment?”

  “No,” she admitted. “He only came in here a few times after he drove me home.”

  “Well, there you go,” Carl Cheng said. “You’re safe here. But just to put your mind at rest, a black-and-white will do drive-bys tonight. Okay?”

  After returning to the station, the MAC team tried to reach Louis Dryden by phone but got no answer, and no answering machine picked up. They ran a record check using the description supplied to them by Cindy Kroll but came back with nothing that fit Louis Dryden on Franklin Avenue. They were already into overtime by then and so were five other detectives, busy in their tiny cubicles, making phone calls and working computers.

  The MAC team told D3 Thelma Barker about the vague implied threat that Louis Dryden had allegedly made. They said that Cindy Kroll’s boyfriend was a tweaker and they were sure she was, too.

  “The mother of the year, she ain’t,” Carl Cheng finally told his D3. “Our read is that she gave birth to a baby she doesn’t want just to trap the guy into marriage or blackmail him into a nice cash settlement, or maybe both.”

  “Tell you what,” their D3 said. “I know it’s getting late and you’d like to get started on your weekend, but just to be on the safe side, let’s ask a patrol unit to drop one of your business cards with a phone-me message on Louis Dryden’s doorstep. That’ll put the fear of God in him if he’s thinking of doing something stupid.” She looked at her watch and said, “The midwatch is about finished with roll call. Why don’t you tell the sergeant what this is all about and also ask that a radio car drive by the place a few times tonight for a quick look-see. You never know with tweakers when they’re amped up.”

  “If she’s a tweaker, too, maybe she’s the one that’s paranoid,” Carl Cheng said. “That’s what tweakers do, get all paranoid.”

  “It’ll make me feel better if you do it my way,” his D3 said with a look that ended the discussion.

  “Okay, boss,” Carl Cheng said with a sigh of fatigue. “Anything you say.”

  SEVEN

  The new watch commander, Lieutenant O’Reilly, conducted roll call that afternoon for Watch 5, the midwatch. He was a thirty-year-old lieutenant who so far the troops didn’t much like. He’d tested well on promotion exams and was recently appointed to his rank with only nine years on the Department and sent to Hollywood Division for his probation. He gave them a condescending lecture that was so boring it couldn’t have been enlivened with hand puppets. It was all about treating the citizens of Hollywood with the utmost respect, even those who were as crazy as rabid squirrels. And in Hollywood that included a lot of folks.

  On the wall behind the long tables where his captive audience sat were framed movie posters, including ones for Sunset Boulevard and L.A. Confidential, an indication that the officers of Hollywood Station were very aware of their unique geography. Finally, the lieutenant ran out of things to lecture them about and said, “Let’s go to work.” The cops gathered their gear, but before leaving the room, each of them touched for luck the framed photo of their late sergeant whom they’d called the Oracle. They had loved their old supervisor, and he had thought of them as his children.

  The framed photo, which was affixed to the wall beside the doorway, bore a brass plate that said:

  THE ORACLE

  APPOINTED: FEB 1960

  END-OF-WATCH: AUG 2006

  SEMPER COP

  The assistant watch commander, Sergeant Lee Murillo, a calm and bookish Mexican American with hair the color of stainless steel and the knotty rawboned body of a long-distance runner, had fifteen years of LAPD experience and was a supervisor they did happen to like. He was downstairs in the detective squad room talking to the MAC team about Cindy Kroll and Louis Dryden, and he gave the Little Armenia drive-by job to 6-X-76 when Lieutenant O’Reilly was finished with them.

  All five patrol units, including 6-X-32, manned by Flotsam and Jetsam, and 6-X-66, with Hollywood Nate driving and Snuffy Salcedo riding shotgun, left the kit room with their gear and headed for the parking lot at 6 P.M. They toted black nylon war bags full of gear, as well as Remington shotguns, Ithaca beanbag shotguns, helmets, Tasers, pepper spray, and rovers. During the prior several years that the LAPD had suffered under the federal consent decree, they had also been required to draw from the kit room devices to record superfluous data about people they stopped or arrested. None of that data collecting had ever provided police critics with information that they’d hoped would prove claims of racial profiling. As hard as they tried, the disgruntled critics o
f the LAPD were not able to wave the race flag when it came to traffic and pedestrian stops.

  P2 Vivien Daley, one of three female officers working the midwatch that evening, was the driver of the shop belonging to 6-X-76, so called because of the shop numbers on the roof and doors of their Crown Vics. Those numbers allowed a unit to be easily identified by citizens and by the LAPD helicopters, called airships by the troops.

  The late summer sun was still high enough that Viv Daley put on her sunglasses when she got behind the wheel. The thirty-year-old cop was born and raised in Long Beach and had played varsity basketball at Long Beach State, but she had disappointed her parents, who wanted her to become a teacher. She always said she’d applied at the LAPD “on a whim” but had never regretted it in the eight years that she’d served. Viv loved to quote the Oracle to her parents, especially his often-repeated mantra: “Doing good police work is the most fun you’ll ever have in your entire lives.” She found that to be true.

  Viv Daley had scrubbed good looks, and the only makeup she carried was a pencil to darken her sandy eyebrows and a subtle pale lipstick, a shade approved by the Department. She kept her auburn hair pinned up above the collar of her uniform shirt, as was required of all female patrol officers. At end-of-watch, when she’d changed into her jersey and jeans and three-inch wedges, she stood taller than almost every male officer on the watch, but Flotsam could still look down at her, wedges or not.

  Her passenger partner “keeping books,” or “taking paper,” which simply meant being the report writer, was twenty-nine-year-old Georgie Adams, who had seven years on the Job. He wore his raven hair slicked back, and with his black irises and chiseled features, he was as dark and exotic-looking as Viv Daley was fair and freckled. The dissimilarity extended to their stature as well. At a wiry five foot eight, he was the shortest male officer on the midwatch, a full five inches shorter than his gym-fit partner, and though he was well muscled, he didn’t outweigh her by much due to her large-boned frame. He referred to Viv as “tall sister” and often called her “sis.”

  Because of his Anglo-Saxon surname but swarthy appearance, questions about his ethnicity came up immediately with new partners, and when it did, Georgie Adams was quick to display his sinister smile and say, “I’m a Gypsy boy. A distant cousin to the late George Adams, California’s ‘King of the Gypsies.’ ”

  Nobody ever knew if Georgie’s claim was true, and nobody had been able to pry much more of his history from him. He’d served in Iraq with the Marines and had been wounded by a roadside bomb, that much was known for sure. He was born and raised in San Bernardino, California, and sometimes he told what everyone figured was a preposterous story of having been bought from a Gypsy clan passing through town by a Syrian carpet importer and his wife, who raised him and let him keep his noble Gypsy surname. Yet whenever he was called to the home of an Arabic-speaking crime victim in Hollywood, it was clear that he could not speak the language of the Syrians. The next guess was that he was of Latino descent, but he could not speak Spanish either. All bets were off at Hollywood Station as to Georgie Adams’s true ethnicity.

  His personnel package downtown didn’t reveal much, as one of the curious Hollywood Division supervisors who had taken a look at it learned. The supervisor even contacted the civilian employee who had conducted Georgie’s background check. He was told that the applicant’s parents, Jean and Theodore Adams, were third-generation San Bernardino residents whose forebears were Okies from the great migration of the 1930s. And further, the background investigator said, Georgie had come to them through a county adoption with almost nothing known about his birth mother, a teenage drifter, and nothing at all about his biological father.

  The only certainties were that, immediately after graduating from high school in San Bernardino, Georgie Adams had joined the Marines and after his discharge had enrolled at a community college, which he left to join the LAPD. And that was it. The other cops referred to him as “the Gypsy,” and he seemed to like the handle.

  Georgie’s partner, Viv Daley, never questioned him about his ethnicity or asked anything about his shadowy past. She simply said, “It’s none of my business. And anyway, I love a mystery.”

  The surfer cops were attracted to Viv Daley and had tried many times to take her surfing, saying they’d turn her into a “quantum quebee,” which she learned from Jetsam was a compliment, meaning a hot surfer chick. But so far Viv had resisted their many invitations to attend the nighttime ragers on the sand, including one that was scheduled for Sunday night at Bolsa Chica Beach, where many firefighters and cops liked to surf.

  When she told her partner about the invitation, and her concern that a bunch of boozy surfers might get a bit too aggressive and handsy with any women present, Georgie offered to go with her as chaperone.

  He said, “Sis, if any drunken surfer trash put their paws on my bosom buddy, I’ll cut out their fucking hearts and feed them to the seagulls.”

  “ ‘Bosom buddy,’ ” Viv said. “That’s charming, but I don’t think I’ll be needing a Gypsy assassin as a chaperone.”

  When Jetsam heard from Viv about Georgie’s offer, he informed Flotsam, who said, “Dude, maybe we oughtta like, rethink our rager invite to Viv. The Gypsy might spoil the party if he goes all aggro and starts carving up kahunas.”

  There’d been persistent rumors ever since he arrived at Hollywood Station that Georgie Adams carried a buck knife on duty in an ankle rig. There had been two known cases in LAPD history of unarmed undercover officers killing assailants with a knife when they were trapped in a deadly situation. The Gypsy was known for his mordant sense of humor, but when he showed his baleful smile and let it be known that he was looking for a chance to be the first uniformed LAPD copper to do it, the others tended to believe he might be serious.

  The first time the rumor about the buck knife reached young Lieutenant O’Reilly, he ordered Sergeant Murillo to check it out, and if it was true, to put a stop to it immediately.

  “Tell Adams he isn’t playing a role in a spaghetti western here,” Lieutenant O’Reilly said to his sergeant.

  But the desk officer overheard the watch commander’s order, and LAPD’s jungle wireless went to work immediately. By the time Sergeant Murillo got around to asking Georgie Adams to accompany him to the locker room, the young cop didn’t look at all surprised, nor did he question his supervisor about his reason.

  “I’m sorry, Adams,” Sergeant Murillo said when they were alone in the locker room, “but I’ve been tasked to find out if you carry a buck knife in an ankle rig, and if you do, to order you to stop doing it.”

  Silently, Georgie reached down and pulled up both pant legs all the way to his knees. Sergeant Murillo saw no buck knife. What he did see was mottled scar tissue from third-degree burns, and grafts that looked like scorched lumpy egg white, wrapped around Georgie’s shins and calves from the top of his six-inch zip-up boots to just below his knees.

  “Okay, thanks,” Sergeant Murillo said, and left him in the locker room.

  When he returned to the watch commander’s office, Sergeant Murillo said, “I’ve spoken with Adams and checked for a buck knife.”

  “What did you find out?” asked Lieutenant O’Reilley.

  “That he earned his Purple Heart,” said Sergeant Murillo. “And I’m gonna invite him and his partner to meet me at Hamburger Hamlet for code seven tonight. Where I’ll buy them any goddamn thing they want.”

  Lieutenant O’Reilley never asked Sergeant Murillo about the buck knife again.

  Back when Viv Daley and Georgie Adams had first been partnered, Sergeant Murillo had taken her aside in the sergeants’ room and said, “I know that Adams is an acquired taste. I was wondering if you’re happy working with him?”

  Viv Daley said, “Sarge, I wouldn’t trade him for anybody at Hollywood Station. When the Gypsy’s got your back, a girl couldn’t be more safe at a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.” Then she added, “Except for when Bill Clinton lived there.” />
  Viv and Georgie drove to Louis Dryden’s apartment building on Franklin Avenue and slid the detective’s business card in the jamb of Dryden’s front door where he couldn’t miss it, then began patrol and cleared for calls. While driving eastbound on Hollywood Boulevard on the way to their area, they saw that the Street Characters were out in force in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The recession had brought hard times to even some of the costumed performers, who posed for photos with tourists and received voluntary tips for it. They were not allowed by law to panhandle or make demands of the tourists.

  Newscasters gleefully reported to their audiences whenever tensions arose around the Grauman’s forecourt, where the handprints and footprints of famous movie stars were set in the cement pavement. On a recent occasion, Elmo the Muppet had been arrested for aggressive panhandling, and so had the dark-hooded character from Scream. Street Character Freddy Krueger was also busted for taking his role too seriously and allegedly stabbing someone. Mr. Incredible had been jailed, as had Batman and Chewbacca from Star Wars. So far, the several Darth Vaders had behaved themselves, but Spider-Man, or rather one of several using that costume, got popped by Hollywood cops for slugging somebody.

  As 6-X-76 passed Grauman’s, Georgie Adams said, “I’m gonna be real disappointed if SpongeBob Square-Pants ever gets busted for something. I always liked him on TV.”

  “I never much liked Spider-Man,” Viv said. “Too creepy. Crawling around like an insect and all that.”

  “Let’s make a pass by that apartment house we’re supposed to check,” Georgie said. “Then I can log it and get it over with. Sounds like it’s just a PR job the detectives are foisting off on us poor overworked bluesuits.”

  In the last of the daylight, when the summer sun was settling down behind the Pacific Ocean, giving Hollywood its special rosy glow, the old apartment building in Little Armenia looked impregnable to the officers of 6-X-76.

  “This is bullshit,” Georgie Adams said. “Real-estate guys like Dryden don’t kill their squeezes themselves. They hire it done. He’d just find an Eighteenth Streeter or some other local crusier and put a ticket on her.”