Hollywood Moon (15 page)

Young Harris Triplett found himself riding the rest of the watch with Flotsam, and they happened to be cruising past Pablo’s
Tacos when Malcolm Rojas was walking away from the strip mall. Malcolm didn’t interest Flotsam at all. What interested Flotsam
was a portly black man driving an old Toyota who’d managed to find a parking place in the mall and who emerged from his car
with a small paper-wrapped parcel in his hand, which he tucked under his jacket before approaching the entry door.

“First thing, dude,” Flotsam said. “That year Toyota you can start with a screwdriver or a pair of scissors. Anything will
turn the ignition on. So we’re suspicious right away that the car could be hot, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said the unsuspicious boot.

“And we know from long experience that Pablo’s is a place where tweakers, baseheads, and every other kind of doper hangs out
and does deals, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said the rookie, who had no long experience about anything but who agreed with everything a P2 or P3 said.

“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ It makes me feel like a shoobie.”

“A what?”

“A lame-oh that wears socks and sandals on the beach.”

“Oh,” Harris said.

“Sometimes they bring their baloney sandwiches in a shoe box. Shoobie, get it? Way wack.”

“I see,” Harris said.

“So okay, for a dude in a place like this to be sticking a small package under his coat, that, like, sets off all kinds of
alarms on our blue radar, don’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” Harris said, with conviction this time.

“Goddamnit!”

“Sorry, sorry!”

Flotsam said, “Something about the way that dude dresses says to me he’s an immigrant. It’s like all these Armenian gangsters?
Unibrows in Armani Exchange and Members Only jackets, right? You know they ain’t from around here.”

“Got it.”

“Look at that dude’s shoes. Are they plastic or what? And those pants pulled up to his chest bone? And a white dress shirt
and horse-blanket coat? He’s from somewheres else too.”

“Got it,” Harris said.

“What if this black guy turns out to be Puerto Rican or Dominican?” Flotsam said. “I heard you can speak Spanish, right?”

“Yes,” the rookie said. Then he hesitated and added, “Well, I get a two-point-seventy-five-percent pay bump for speaking Spanish.
I minored in Spanish at Cal State L.A., but I’m not so good at the reading and writing.”

“We won’t have to write to the guy,” Flotsam said.

“To be honest, I sort of speak Spanglish.”

“Close enough,” Flotsam said. “Let’s go hear his story, whatever language it’s in.”

Flotsam parked the car in the red zone in front of the strip mall, and both cops collected their batons and entered the parking
lot.

The Nigerian and Dewey Gleason made eye contact the moment the man entered the taco shop. Dewey was about to speak, when he
spotted two uniformed cops—one a tall blond with gelled hair, and a younger athletic-looking partner—walking fast across the
parking lot. His instincts told him to avert his gaze from the Nigerian’s and to get the hell out of there ASAP.

Sure enough, the cops entered and the tall cop said to the Nigerian, “Sir, we’d like you to step outside for a minute.”

“What for?” the Nigerian said in accented English, eyes widening.

Flotsam said, “We need to have a few words, sir.” Then more firmly, “Step outside, please.”

Reluctantly, the Nigerian walked outside with the cops, and after the glass door swung shut, Dewey Gleason rose and dumped
his uneaten taco plate into a trash receptacle. He exited in time to see the cops walking the man toward an old Toyota at
the far side of the parking lot. Dewey saw a parcel drop from under the man’s checked sport coat and fall onto the asphalt.
The younger cop picked it up and the Nigerian acted as though he’d never seen it before.

Dewey slowed when passing the trio, and he could see that the package had torn open and several sheets of checks had spilled
onto the ground. The dumb shit had only needed to bring one sheet of checks for Eunice to duplicate! Dewey quickened his pace,
not bothering with the Bernie Graham limp and not looking back. He wasn’t sure, but when he reached the street, he thought
he could hear the sound of handcuff ratchets chattering closed. It was a sound that chilled his blood.

M
ALCOLM ROJAS COULD HEAR
his mother in the living room watching TV when he finally got home. That’s all she did when she wasn’t at work. He could
hear the ice cubes tinkling in her glass of Jim Beam. She was laughing at some dumb show she was watching and might be half
drunk by now. He thought he’d call in sick tomorrow. He hated working on weekends. The card belonging to that guy Bernie Graham
was on his mind. He decided to make an appointment with the man and hear more about the debit cards and the real money he
could make. It scared him to think about it, but it also excited him.

Excitement. That made him think once again of the woman in the apartment garage. Of how she’d been down on his lap. Of how
he’d
owned
her. She’d promised she’d do whatever he wanted if he didn’t hurt her with the box cutter. For a second he remembered that
he hadn’t done what he’d wanted to do with her, something he’d never done in his life. He’d wanted to come in her mouth, that
fat old bitch. And he didn’t, couldn’t. He pushed it from his mind. He listened to his mother laughing again, but he didn’t
want to let her make him angry. He began to listen to heavy metal on his iPod.

Music made him start thinking about that girl Naomi. He almost called her but changed his mind. He wanted to see her again
and promised himself that he would. He even liked the retainer on her teeth. It made her look… what was the word?
Vulnerable,
that was it. She looked so vulnerable. Naomi didn’t seem to go with heavy metal, so he turned off the iPod. He wondered what
she’d do if he kissed her and tried to touch her small breasts. He began getting an erection.

Then he heard his mother laughing again. He started to become angry, despite himself. He tried to think of Naomi again, but
he could not. He pictured that fat bitch in the parking garage and thought of what he’d wanted to do to her, and that made
him remember his failure. His fury grew powerful and he put his pillow over his head and tried to will himself to sleep.

It took him an hour, and when he awoke he was sweat-drenched. He could recall bits and pieces of a recurring dream. He was
younger in the dream, and he was in bed with… he couldn’t say who. He smelled the booze on her, and she kept stroking his
body, starting with his hair, until her hands slid down his hips. She was murmuring “Ruben… my sweet Ruben.” The dream was
always like that. He awoke with an erection, and even after he masturbated, he could not go back to sleep for hours. The rage
wouldn’t let him.

Because the Pacific Dining Car on Sixth Street near downtown was open 24/7, Dewey Gleason chose it instead of Musso & Frank
on Hollywood Boulevard, which was much closer to home. He preferred the city’s oldest eateries, where little had changed since
the likes of Gable and Tracy and Raymond Chandler had dined there. It was 1
A.M
., and he was fatigued, waiting in the clubby little bar for the college kid, after having delivered two Whoppers to Eunice
and changed his disguise. He loved old drinking spots like this, all mahogany, brass, and faux leather, offering timeless
reassurance. He sat sipping a Manhattan, his first drink at the end of a very long day. There were three other men having
cocktails, along with a bickering couple at the other end of the bar, no doubt having just come from somewhere that had gotten
them juiced enough to fight it out in public.

What was the kid’s name? Christ, he’d dealt with four of them since he’d hit the streets this morning and they’d begun to
look and sound alike. When contact was just getting started with these kids, they were all positively thrumming with nervous
energy, and not a little fear. Eventually they became laconic and lazy and even insolent when the greed set in. That’s when
Dewey had to dump them and look for a new set of faces, new college boys eager to sell their debit cards.

He asked himself again, What was the kid’s fucking name? One time last month when Dewey was this exhausted and it was this
late, he’d almost forgotten his
own
name, or rather the name of the character he was playing. Now, at 1
A.M
. in the Pacific Dining Car, he had to think for a moment and touch the eyeglasses he was wearing. They belonged to Ambrose
Willis, who in his past fictional life had been a lecturer in business management at an Ivy League university. Dewey was always
vague about which university until he was sure it was not one with which the kid had familiarity. Ambrose Willis wore an auburn
toupee and had a large mole on his left cheek near his mouth.

It reminded Dewey that when he was applying it earlier that evening, Eunice had slouched into the bathroom in her tatty pink
robe, the one with cigarette burns on the front. Her frizz of coppery blonde hair was so grown out at the roots that she looked
like a clown in a fright wig, and he’d noticed that she was starting to get two chins.

With the perennial cigarette dangling, Eunice looked at him working on his makeup and said, “That’s quite a mole. It reminds
me of that movie on TV the other night,
Dangerous Liaisons
.”

“John Malkovich didn’t have a mole in that movie,” said Dewey, who was a lifelong movie buff.

Eunice said, “I was thinking of the whores in the French court. That’s what you remind me of with that spot of shit on your
face.”

Get in the fucking moment! he told himself. Christ, what’s that kid’s name? He was just so damn tired.

“Evening, Mr. Willis,” the young man said and took a stool next to him at the bar.

He was a lanky kid, an inch or so over six feet, as most of them were. Dewey wondered how it happened that this generation
was a couple of inches taller than his. About half of his college runners were emos, with heavy hair flopping onto their foreheads
so it bounced in time to the tunes of Morrissey, which they seemed to favor. This kid looked more metrosexual in a white linen
dress shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, a lavender T-shirt showing, and designer jeans he couldn’t have afforded
without working for Dewey.

“What’ll you have?” Dewey said, and then it came to him and he added, “Stuart.”

Stuart, who had plenty of bogus ID attesting to his being of age, said, “The same thing you’re having.”

Without being asked, Stuart put a bogus driver’s license on the bar, which the bartender examined before making another Manhattan.

When the drink was in front of them, Dewey said, “Let’s go to a table and chat.”

After they got settled, Dewey said, “Would you like something to eat? How about a nice steak? They serve good food here at
any hour of the night or day.”

“I had a big supper,” Stuart said, sipping his Manhattan. From his frowning response, Dewey was sure the Manhattan was a first
for him.

“This place looks like a train car from the outside,” Stuart said. “Like you’re getting on a train.”

“It’s been too long since you’ve reported,” Dewey said. “I think you have something for me, do you not?”

“That’s the problem, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said.

“What… problem?” Dewey said, the bonhomie gone. Screw the steak. He began eye-fucking the kid behind those steel frames.

“Don’t get excited, Mr. Willis,” Stuart said. “I have money for you.”

“Then we don’t have a problem, do we?” Dewey said.

“I just don’t have it all. I had to gamble more than I intended to. Have you spent much time in those casinos, Mr. Willis?”

Unblinking, “Yes, I’ve been in all of them.”

“Well, there was this big Indian guy in the second casino, the one just outside Palm Springs? I think he was a security officer.
He started following me after I withdrew the first bunch of money with my debit card. I was pretty sure he was watching, so
I put way more in the slots than I wanted to. See what I mean?”

“Oh, yes, I see what you mean,” Dewey said. “It’s perfectly clear to me.”

“Okay, to start with, I followed your instructions, Mr. Willis. When I arrived, I got the five-hundred-dollar limit from the
account, and then at one minute after midnight, I got another five hundred. And then I went back to the motel and went to
bed. The next day, I went to the second casino and used the second card. You were right about the casinos. I don’t think there
was a camera at the ATM machines like in the machines around here.”

“Only the general cameras surveying the wide areas,” Dewey said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Then I went to the third casino and used the third card,” the kid said. “I just felt a lot better doing it like that instead
of using all three debit cards in one casino. You were right about that too.”

“Smart boy,” Dewey said. “Get to the point.”

Stuart took another sip from his cocktail and said, “I only played the slot machines to make it look good. I was actually
thinking about playing something else in order to make it look even better.”

“I told you, only slots,” Dewey said. “And very few of those.”

“Right, so I maybe spent an extra two, two-fifty, in the slots that I didn’t wanna spend.”

Dewey was silent for a moment, knowing this was a lie, and said, “You spent over two hundred dollars of my money in slot machines?
I don’t suppose you won anything in any of the three casinos, did you, Stuart?”

“No,” Stuart said. “Are you sure those machines aren’t rigged?”

“No, they’re not,” Dewey said, controlling his anger. “Where’s my money?”

“In the trunk of my car in an envelope.”

“Let’s go get it,” Dewey said.

When they got to the parking lot, Stuart opened the trunk of his Mazda and removed a large envelope, saying, “Everything is
accounted for, just like you said, Mr. Willis. In the three casinos for the three days, I took out forty-five hundred dollars
altogether. I spent two hundred for gas. I know it sounds like a lot, but my car needs a tune-up. I spent three hundred dollars
for the three nights in a motel and only two hundred dollars for meals I was too tense to eat. I gambled two-fifty in the
slots in the casinos. That left me with three thousand five hundred fifty. I deducted my thirty percent from the balance and
had a few incidentals, including a new tire, and that came to four hundred fifty-five dollars. There’s twenty-five hundred
for you, Mr. Willis. It came out a nice round number, and the cards are in the envelope with the money.”