Hollywood Moon (9 page)

On his midwatch deployment at Hollywood Station, R.T. Dibney was assigned to 6-X-46 with P2 Mindy Ling, a twenty-eight-year-old
Chinese-American cop with six years on the LAPD, the last three being at Hollywood Station. Mindy Ling was as tall as R.T.
Dibney and studious, ambitious, and serious, everything that R.T. Dibney was not. She wore her black hair pulled back severely
and rolled into a bun, and she was one of the few cops of either gender at Hollywood Station to wear an easy-access shoulder
mike, while others simply carried the radio on their Sam Browne belt. Mindy Ling used that kind of caution in everything she
did in life. She hated to make mistakes.

One of the reasons that Sergeant Lee Murillo assigned them together for the current deployment period was that he didn’t want
someone riding with R.T. Dibney who could be influenced by his lothario ways. Sergeant Murillo didn’t want to end up creating
another pair like the surfer cops, whom the sergeant called his Tylenol Team. That particular pair of supervisory headaches
made quality arrests but were always just a big toe away from stepping over the line while getting it done. As long as no-nonsense
P2 Mindy Ling was riding with R.T. Dibney, Sergeant Murillo figured he’d be under control, and the slightest romantic overture
toward her or anyone else would be dealt with instantly. Sergeant Murillo felt certain of that.

This was brought home on their first night working together in 6-X-46. Mindy Ling, who usually stayed home on her nights off
to study for a master’s degree in public administration, occasionally watched Turner Classic Movies with her parents. While
R.T. Dibney was loading up their black-and-white with their gear, Mindy began conversing with the cinematic scholar, Hollywood
Nate Weiss, about her partner’s style choices. R.T. Dibney saw them looking his way from across the parking lot but didn’t
know they were discussing his lounge-lizard mustache and tinted puffy coif reminiscent of yesteryear’s movie stars.

Because the gossipy world of street cops brooks no secrets, Hollywood Nate was also informing her that R.T. Dibney lost his
most recent wife by going to Las Vegas with his buddies after telling her he was on a fishing trip. He blew $2,000 on a weekend
of fun and frolic at the tables and in hotel bedrooms, and it just about cleaned out their bank balance. Nearly broke and
remorseful, he’d returned to L.A. and gone straight downtown to the diamond district, where two Iranian jewelers called Eddie
and Freddie sold him a beautiful cubic zirconium ring for his last $200. R.T. Dibney told his wife that the ring had cost
$2,500, and though it broke their piggy bank temporarily, he’d felt compelled to purchase it in order to renew their wedding
vows, so deep was his love for her.

That particular wife had a cousin in the jewelry business, and when she showed the cousin her ring, he pointed out to her
that her diamond was bogus and her husband was a conniving turd that she should flush away before spawning something that
carried his genetic profile. R.T. Dibney’s divorce lawyer told the cop that he alone was putting the lawyer’s kid through
college and in essence thanked him for being such a conniving turd.

Mindy Ling thanked Hollywood Nate for the information on R.T. Dibney, and by way of introduction that ultimately left her
new partner gob-smacked, she got behind the wheel of their car, turned to R.T. Dibney, and said, “I’ve heard a lot about you
and your devil-may-care swashbuckling exploits. Tell me, how many times have you been married?”

“I’ve been married three-point-five times,” R.T. Dibney said with a semi-leer. “It must be that I give off a certain musk
that makes me a marriage target, but I’m technically still on the market… in case anyone’s interested.”

R.T. Dibney was enjoying this unexpected attention from Mindy Ling until she added, “Partner, I’m as much into nostalgia as
the next girl, so I gotta respect someone in this day and age with the chutzpah to sport a toothbrush stash and a Lady Clairol
blow-dried do. But while you’re with me, I’d like you to keep in mind that no matter how hard you try channeling Errol Flynn,
he’s dead and gone, and nobody gives a damn how many women he balled. Now, let’s try to concentrate on good police work the
whole time we’re together, shall we?”

Late that afternoon, while 6-X-46 was still in the parking lot with the rest of the midwatch, fourteen-year-old Naomi Teller
was near Fairfax High School, walking home to Ogden Drive, when a slender, smiling boy in a light blue T-shirt and jeans,
who she thought was at least eighteen years old, walked up behind her on the sidewalk and said, “Yo, Goldilocks, you can’t
be just getting out of summer school this late.”

Naomi hesitated but was reassured by his brilliant smile, which produced deep dimples in his cheeks. She liked the way his
black hair curled over his ears and on his neck, and she liked his flaming dark eyes and tawny cheeks, which sported a young
man’s light growth of soft dark whiskers. She felt that he might be Hispanic, but he had no accent, so she wasn’t sure. It
was flattering to have such a very cute older boy paying attention to her.

Naomi had small bones, narrow shoulders, and still-developing breasts. Eyes too large and mouth too small, she hadn’t received
much attention from the boys in middle school, but this older boy was looking at her and talking to her in a way that no one
had before, and it was superexciting.

“I won’t be going to Fairfax until September,” Naomi Teller said truthfully, even though she was tempted to lie about her
age.

“You and me should maybe go someplace and hang out,” he said. “I’d like to get to know you and make some friends around here.
Most girls with hair like yours have to dye it to get it so gold, but I can see that yours was a gift from God. My name’s
Clark, what’s yours?”

“Naomi,” she said, and she couldn’t help smiling back at him, his dimpled smile was so infectious. “That’s the name of the
guy in Superman, Clark Kent.”

“That’s why my adopted parents named me that when they found me near a crashed spaceship.”

Naomi giggled, and he smiled more broadly and said, “Your hair is exactly the color of the honey I spread on my peanut butter
sandwiches.”

That made her laugh. “I guess that’s a compliment.”

“Yours is a natural color,” he said. “Anybody can see that. I hate all those old women who try to make their hair look like
yours. They can’t do it and shouldn’t try.”

“My mom tries,” Naomi said.

“Maybe we should go to the movies sometime, Naomi,” he said. “Can I have your number?”

“Well… ,” she said.

“What time do you go to bed?”

“In the summer? About eleven. My mom’s strict.”

“I’ll call you at ten forty-five to say good night,” he said.

Naomi thought those dimples and that smile were to die for. And his teeth? So straight and white, natural white, not that
phony bleached white that so many older people like her father were doing these days.

She said, “Okay, you can call me.” And she gave him her cell number, which he wrote on the back of his hand with a ballpoint
pen.

He looked at her quite seriously then, as though he wanted to say something more, but an older couple walked out of a nearby
apartment building and looked their way. Then he smiled again and said, “Got to bounce. Call you later. I’ll think of you
when I make my peanut butter and honey sandwich tonight.”

She giggled again and gave a little wave and continued home, except she hadn’t gone half a block when her cell rang. She took
it out of her purse and didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?” she said, thinking it was a wrong number.

“It’s Clark,” he said.

She turned around, but there was nobody walking on the street, only lots of traffic roaring by. “I thought you were going
to call me tonight,” Naomi said. “Where are you?”

“I’m watching you, Naomi,” he said. “You’re so beautiful, I can’t help it. And I called just to make sure you gave me the
right number. If you hadn’t, my heart would be broken.”

She looked around uneasily then, peering through exhaust smoke from a large truck passing on the street, and said, “Where
are you? I can’t see you.”

“Nowhere,” he said. “I’ll call later. Don’t forget me. Don’t ever forget me.”

The man that Tristan and Jerzy knew as Jakob Kessler was exhausted by the time he got back to his apartment on Franklin Avenue
that night. His wife, Eunice Gleason, was waiting for him, poisoning the air with her chain-smoking. He entered, unlocking
both dead-bolt locks, and removed his suit coat and the booster bag that contained the skimmer, the bag of mail, and the credit
cards. His feet were killing him, so he took off the custom-made shoes with the three-inch lifts, and arching his back, he
stretched. And he was no longer stooped.

“I’m home, Eunice,” he yelled with no trace of a German accent.

“No shit,” Eunice said, a cigarette protruding from her teeth as her hands flew over the computer keys. An ashtray beside
her on the table was full of butts, and with shades drawn, under the harsh glare from the gooseneck lamp, she looked to him
like she should have been onstage, maybe stirring a kettle in
Macbeth
.

Eunice was fifty-five years old, a coppery blonde with gray roots that she seldom bothered dyeing anymore until there was
at least an inch showing. She was fifteen pounds heavier than when they’d married nine years earlier, and her tits and ass
were starting to nose-dive, but when she fixed herself up, she could be passably attractive. The four packs a day she smoked
sent her to a spa for regular Botox injections to smooth out the lines and wrinkles, but there was no reasoning with a nicotine
addict, especially a hardhead like Eunice, so he’d given up long ago. Anyway, he figured that the world’s best plastic surgeon
could never erase her natural scowl lines.

Their “workroom” was what for most people would have been the living room. There was a long table with three computers and
mail trays taking up every inch of the tabletop. On the other side of the room was a cheap metal desk with another computer
as well as a stack of mail trays, all of them full of neatly catalogued envelopes with current work inside them. Eunice had
reserved the table nearest to the window for the machine that she bought online to reencode information on magnetic strips.

She had a genius for recovering information from online public information sources. By no means did runners stealing mail
or credit cards accomplish most of her information collecting. And Eunice had acting talent when it came to telephonically
posing as a store employee where a purchase had been made, or as a bank employee requiring account information from a gullible
bank customer.

He’d watch her with admiration when she’d do her “social engineering” calls, such as phoning the gas company in order to pay
“her husband’s” gas bill. She’d ask which credit card he used last time, and the gas company employee would almost always
tell her the last four digits on the card. It was childishly simple for her to obtain needed data.

She’d frequently go on MySpace, where she could often learn a woman’s full name along with her year and place of birth. Then
she’d contact that city, claim to have lost her birth certificate, and obtain a new one. She’d go to the DMV with the birth
certificate and get a driver’s license. After that, she’d claim to have lost her Social Security card, and with all of the
identity documents she’d already gotten, a new one would be issued. She could start all of this by just going to websites,
doing nothing more than that.

The information that legal entities such as convention centers or cruise lines acquired from customers for access cards that
their machines could read often ended up in the hands of Eunice Gleason and others like her. There was much valuable information
to be gained from these and countless sources, and yet she was relentless in still requiring old-fashioned hands-on collecting
from skimmers that she’d bought and provided. If her husband wasn’t of use to her in this collecting phase of their enterprise,
he wondered if he’d still be her husband.

He walked into the second bedroom, where he slept alone, loosened his tie, and entered the bathroom. After urinating, he washed
his hands and face and, carefully pulling away the tape holding it in place, removed the silvery wig. Then he opened the medicine
cabinet, found the contact lens case, and groaned with relief when he got the pale lenses out of his eyes. He looked at his
normal light brown eyes for signs of irritation and squeezed some lubricating drops into both eyes. He took the jowl-enhancing
gauze pads out of his mouth and, after brushing back his own gray-brown hair, examined himself. Without the dark shadows and
tiny lines he’d drawn so carefully around his eyes, and after losing the wig, he figured he looked thirty-nine years old,
although he was actually forty-eight.

When he reentered the workroom, he went straight to a window and opened it to let out some of the smoke that the electronic
smoke eater hadn’t removed. Eunice was too paranoid to ever let the shades be raised.

“Hey, don’t let in the hot air,” Eunice said. “The electric bill’s killing us as it is, with all these computers going.”

“I can’t breathe in here,” he said. “Edward R. Murrow didn’t smoke this much. Nor did the Malibu Canyon fires, for that matter.”

“Instead of standing here whining about it, just go in your bedroom and start phoning the college kids. And you got some shoppers
to work before you go to bed tonight, so you better get into costume ASAP.” Then she said, “By the way, did you buy another
couple of prepaid cells?”

“Yes, I bought more GoPhones,” he said with disgust. “I don’t have dementia yet.”

“How many kids you got for tonight?”

“Two. They both park cars at restaurants and love to act. They’re perfect.”

“Do they look like the faces on the driver’s licenses?”

“Of course they do! You made the damn IDs, didn’t you? Gimme a little credit.”

“Yeah, I made them, but the last time you gave me photos to work with, the little bastard was five years younger in the pictures.
Remember?”