Hollywood Crows (28 page)

“Since we’re not packing, I hope nobody tries to steal our boards,” Jetsam said, their guns being under the seat of the locked truck. “Anyways, the wusses that run the consent decree would go all PMS-ey if we capped a surfboard thief.”

“Only if they’re oppressed minorities,” Flotsam said. “If they’re white, you can shoot them down like rabid pit bulls and back over them in your truck five or six times.”

“Check the city demographics, bro,” Jetsam said. “We’re the oppressed minority.”

When they reentered Hamburger Hamlet, they got disapproving looks from the hostess, this pair of surfers in baggy T-shirts and board shorts, with salt still clinging to their sunburned faces, and sand falling from their hair. They couldn’t have looked more like surfers if they’d been wearing half-peeled wet suits, but at least she could now count four sneakers on their sockless feet, so they got seated in a booth to await the arrival of Hollywood Nate Weiss.

They only had to wait ten minutes, and both were hydrating with their second iced tea when Nate entered and sat down.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of doing lunch with you two sand crabs?” Nate said.

“Wanna cold drink?” Jetsam said when the waitress came over to their table. She was an Asian with very nice legs.

“I’ll have what they’re drinking,” Nate said.

“Iced tea coming up,” she said. “Lemme know when you want something else.”

Nate checked her out as she was walking away and said, “I might just do that.” Then he said to Jetsam, “So you wanted face time. What’s up?”

Flotsam assumed his “I got nothing to do with this” pose, and Jetsam said, “Last Friday night we wrote a parking ticket to a guy named Leonard Stilwell. The name mean anything to you?”

Nate looked puzzled and said, “Nope.”

“Wormy-looking white dude. Maybe a tweaker, maybe a crackhead. Fortyish. Medium height. Red hair, freckles, black Honda with primer spots?”

Nate shook his head and said, “
Nada
. Am I supposed to know him?”

Jetsam said, “I dunno, but he had an address in his car, and just for the hell of it we checked it out, because this dude shouldn’t be having an address up on Mount Olympus. Not unless he’s going there to clean out their garage or something. He’s got a couple priors for burglary.”

“Still not tracking,” Nate said.

“So we don’t find the address,” Jetsam said. “The number’s off a little bit. But right near there where the address should be, we see a car.”

“
His
car?” Nate said.

“Not
his
car,” Jetsam said.

That brought things to a sudden stop. Nate frowned slightly and said, “You saw my car?”

“SAG4NW,” Jetsam said. “So we thought you should know about this burglar Stilwell, is all.”

Flotsam corrected his partner, saying, “
He
thought you should know. Me, I’m neutral in this matter.”

Hollywood Nate didn’t speak for a moment and then said, “It was the wrong address, you said.”

“Yeah, but there was no street address to exactly match the one on the piece of paper. If I remember right, the address you were visiting ended in four eight? His address ended in two six. But then the street turns and the numbers are totally different. The house you were in is closest to the number he wrote down.”

Flotsam was sick of this. He said to Nate, “Dude, my pard thinks whoever lives in that house might be a future crime victim or maybe a present criminal if they’re connected to this dirtbag Leonard Stilwell. That’s, like, the shorthand version of this here drama.”

“What’s, like, the longhand version?” Nate said.

“The longhand version is that my pard is all goony over Sinclair Squared, and he would love to become a Crow and work with her, even though she don’t know a surfboard from an ironing board. But come to think of it, whenever somebody asks her to iron something, she divorces him. And since she don’t marry nobody unless his name is Sinclair, I wish he’d either change his name to Sinclair or stop all this Sherlock shit, because it’s wearing me down!”

Jetsam just looked at his partner, astonished. He’d never seen Flotsam so exercised.

“What’s his crush on Ronnie got to do with the burglar?” Nate asked Flotsam, as though Jetsam weren’t there.

“He heard that Ronnie and Bix Ramstead were working that part of the Hollywood Hills, kissing ass with all those rich whiners up there, and he’s, like, trying to bring the spotlight on this and score points with Ronnie and maybe the Crow sergeant.”

Jetsam still stared at his partner in astonishment and finally said, “Bro, why didn’t you switch to my frequency? I didn’t know you were all vaporized about this!”

“I been trying to for days,” Flotsam said. “You ain’t been the same ever since you fired off flares over the SUVs in the body shop. You’re, like, totally spring-loaded. You just don’t listen to body language no more!”

“I didn’t know you were all bent, bro!”

“Work out your domestic partnership later,” Nate said. “I can tell you that the person who lives in that house is not some kind of crook. As to being a target of this guy Stilwell, I just don’t know.”

“Is she your squeeze?” Flotsam said with a leer.

“Hey, I don’t ask you about your Bettys,” Nate said.

“Dude, you are hormonally spirited!” Flotsam said admiringly.

Rebounding from Flotsam’s tirade, Jetsam said to Nate, “It wouldn’t hurt to ask your squeeze — I mean, the person who lives there — if she knows a Leonard Stilwell. If she don’t, it might be something to talk over with the burglary dicks. Trust me, bro, that pus bucket Stilwell is a waste of good air, and he’s up to no good.”

“I’ll give her a call,” Nate said, “and see what she knows.”

“Is she a hottie or just rich?” Flotsam said to Nate with that same annoying leer.

“She’s just somebody with a car for sale,” Nate said. “I was talking to her about her SUV.”

It had slipped from Nate’s mouth before he could stop it, and Jetsam jumped on it. “Hey, bro! That’s the SUV from the body shop, ain’t it? The one you talked to the guy about?”

Nate saw both surfers looking at him expectantly now. He decided to tell the truth. He said, “Yeah, that’s the one. And yeah, she’s a burner babe, but nothing happened.”

“This is destiny at work, bro!” Jetsam said with a flourish. “There’s only a few degrees of separation here. We’re all part of some inscrutable plan!”

Nate was speechless until Flotsam said, “He gets like this after we been surfing. He sits out there on the water and gets, like, these visions. They make him go all surfboard simple for the rest of the day. He’ll be okay later.”

“At least you should bounce for the iced tea,” Nate said, finishing his drink.

“Yeah, dude, it’s on us,” Flotsam said. “But if you want my opinion, you oughtta shine them Hills honeys. All that sculpted flesh and five-karat diamonds look good, but there’s, like, better ways to escape your humdrum existence. Grab yourself a log and come to Malibu. We’ll be your gurus.”

Jetsam agreed, saying, “Bro, it’s way wack to go all frothy over Mount Olympus bitches, who think their shit should be gilded and hung on gold chains.”

Flotsam concurred, saying, “Yeah, they think their turds should be bronzed and kept in trophy cases, dude.”

“Come to Malibu, bro,” Jetsam said. “Maybe you’ll have a vision too and find your true self.”

Nate stood up then, nodded, and said, “Am I ever glad I came here today. All this time I’ve been buying lottery tickets and stalking talent agents, and the answer was right before my eyes. I just couldn’t see it till you sea slugs dialed me in. It all comes down to a surfboard. The stuff that dreams are made of!”

There was no better time of day in Hollywood than twilight, as far as Ronnie Sinclair was concerned. The way the setting sun blasted through the low-hanging summer smog actually burnished the pollution into garish wine-colored clouds. After which, a scarlet glare was cast over the boulevards announcing to all: This place is unlike any other. Here even the toxic gases are beautiful!

After lunch, followed by a perfunctory visual check to see if there were signs of the homeless encampment springing up again, Ronnie drove them back toward Hollywood Boulevard. Bix Ramstead answered his cell phone and the look on his face startled her.

Bix reddened and whispered into the phone, “I’m working. I can’t talk. I’ll call you later.” He snapped the phone shut and said, “My brother Pete. He’s a pain. Always borrowing money, never paying it back.”

“Yeah, my sister used to be like that till her husband made it big,” Ronnie said, looking at Bix, who was smiling but not with those heavily lashed gray eyes she loved. And she knew he was lying again. That was not brother Pete on the cell call.

“Maybe I oughtta join you guys the next time you go up to Sunset Boulevard for a Mexican dinner,” Bix said abruptly. “With my family gone, I guess I should get out and mix a bit. Gets lonely talking to a dog, even one as smart as Annie.”

“I’ll bet she’s smarter than most of the people we call on every day,” Ronnie said. “I found out that our posse won’t be doing our Mexican thing tonight after all, but if you’re not busy, I’d be glad to meet you there.”

She had never detected a sexual vibe coming her way from Bix Ramstead and she didn’t detect it now when he said, “I might do that. When, right after we go end-of-watch?”

“Okay by me,” she said. “And I’ll pop for it, since I’m a semiprosperous single copper with nobody to spend my money on but me and two goldfish.”

Then another phone call came in, this one on Ronnie’s cell. She picked it up and said, “Officer Sinclair.”

“It’s Nate,” Hollywood Nate said to her. “Can I talk to Bix?”

“Sure,” she said, handing Bix her phone and saying, “It’s Nate.”

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” Bix said to him.

Then the smile was gone. His face darkened yet again. His lips turned down and he said, “Yeah, I know the resident at that address.” After a moment he said, “I, uh, I’ll see you back at Hollywood South and we can talk about it. In an hour, okay?”

When he hung up this time, he felt he definitely owed his partner an explanation, so he said to Ronnie, “Just some Hollywood Nate deal. A person on Mount Olympus that I dealt with on a prior call might be a burglary target. Some guy with four-five-nine priors had the resident’s address in his car, or a similar address to that one. It’s just bullshit, I’m sure. It’s nothing.”

The brooding look on his face said that it was not nothing to Bix Ramstead. And Ronnie Sinclair knew that he was lying to her yet again.

Ali Aziz couldn’t eat a bite all day. He mulled over his plan a dozen times and he couldn’t stop sweating. He even used the shower in the dancers’ bathroom and steamed himself clean, letting the hot water pelt his balding dome until it turned pink. He went to the closet in his office and changed into a clean silk shirt. He shaved his face, doused himself with cologne, and flopped onto the leather sofa in his office and tried to nap, but he could not.

He didn’t want food or whiskey or women. He only wanted this torment to be over. He wanted Margot to be gone forever. He wanted to have his son, Nicky, and to take him away from this terrible city, from this terrible, godless country someday. Here, there was no respect, no love, no truth. Everything here was a lie.

Jaime Salgando showed up half an hour early at the Leopard Lounge. When he entered Ali’s office, he said, “Traffic was light for once.”

Ali looked approvingly at Jaime’s double-breasted pinstriped suit, wondering if it was a Hugo Boss. And at his starched white shirt with shooting cuffs and gold links and at his sky blue necktie with a perfect knot, and he said, “This is how gentlemen dress. In my country, in your country, men have respect. In this country, no respect.”

Jaime said, “Thank you,” and sat in the client chair nervously, wanting to get the business finished.

“The girls shall arrive at eight o’clock, like you say,” Ali said.

“Yes, yes,” Jaime said, “that gives us a chance to do our business. I have an acquaintance at a compounding pharmacy who helps me with these unusual orders.”

“What is the meaning of ‘compounding’?”

“They mix a lot of drugs and medications for special prescription orders. This employee is from the village in Mexico where I used to spend my summers. He was able to help me, but it cost me six hundred dollars.”

Ali looked at him, trying to keep his smile in place. He knew that Jaime was lying to him, but he was powerless. Everyone lied to him. By forcing Jaime to come tonight instead of Saturday, he was going to pay a price. Ali took the roll of hundreds from his gold money clip and counted out six bills, placing them on the desk.

“Of course, my brother,” Ali said. “We got to pay for good service always. That is the American way.”

Jaime Salgando picked up the bills and put them in his pocket and withdrew a small pill envelope with his pharmacy’s name on it. He opened it and dropped two green capsules on the desktop, then put the envelope back in his pocket.

Ali nearly panicked. “Two?” he said. “I need
two
capsules to kill the dog?”

“No, you only need one of these to easily kill a fifty-kilo dog. The other is just in case the dog does not take the bait or if something goes wrong. Then you can try again some other time.”

Ali’s relief was palpable. “You are a smart man, brother,” he said. “Very smart. Yes, is good to have the, how you say, backdown?”

“Backup.”

“Yes, we got the backup now. Very good. Very good.”

“I’d like a drink while I wait for the girls.”

“Yes, yes,” Ali said. “Anything. You want champagne? I got good champagne for special customers.”

“I want a bottle of good champagne brought to the motel,” Jaime said, very businesslike and matter-of-fact. “Make it two bottles. And an ice bucket. And three glasses, of course. But for now I’d like a double shot of tequila. The Patrón Silver that you serve to your special clients.”

“You got it, brother,” Ali said, but now his forced smile had turned grim and produced white lines around his mouth. Ali was starting to loathe Jaime Salgando nearly as much as he loathed the other thieves with whom he was forced to do business. Almost as much as he loathed Leonard Stilwell.