Police and Thieves: A Novel (13 page)

Loretta was the only person stirring in the room, and all eyes were on her, as if she were an actress moving across a movie screen and we were the audience. The way Dee Dee was staring at her breasts, he was having trouble concentrating on his business. His red-flecked eyes were glazed over with masturbatory zeal, the kind your parents warned you about when you were a kid. Maurice had his hands in his pockets, resting them on the butts of his guns. You could have split the tension in the garage with an ax. Dee Dee shifted his weight from one scrawny leg to the other, looking first at Loretta and then at Eichmann. “I want my money. You pricks took my cash, every cent I had. It wasn’t even mine. I’m in debt. I came over here to buy your weed and you ripped me off.”

His request was inane. Dee Dee wanted compensation? What he really needed was a welt on his head. I couldn’t even begin to count the times he’d swindled me on deals. A hot, dry feeling started to smoke behind my eyes; I was going to cry, I was so mad.

“You want your money?” Eichmann asked.

Dee Dee drew himself up to his full height, all five and a half feet of him. He stuck his nose in the air. “Absolutely. I’ve got to have it. You can’t fuck up on me like that. I know my rights.”

“You don’t have any rights.”

Dee Dee was flabbergasted. “What are you saying, I got no rights?”

“No one does. That’s why you’re here. Now it’s your turn to push us around.”

“That’s only fair, ain’t it?”

“No, it’s coercion.”

“What’s that?”

“When you take something without being invited.”

“Like you did!”

“It still doesn’t make it fair.”

“Don’t talk that guff to me! I want my money!”

Maurice must’ve been practicing sound effects in his spare time. He imitated Dee Dee’s nasally voice, going, “Yeah. We want it now. I ain’t got all day to hang around your faggoty-ass garage.”

Eichmann was quivering with bitterness; the cords on his neck were standing out when he replied, “Faggoty-ass yourself. Watch the language, buster, okay? There’s a lady in the house.”

“I don’t see no lady.”

“I’m telling you to put a lid on it.”

Loretta poured the coffee into a couple of chipped enamel cups and took one of them over to Eichmann, squatting down by his side. Her bathrobe parted, showing her beefy, delicately veined thighs. Her underpants were baby pink, riding high on the hips and cutting back at the crotch, revealing a thicket of bleached pubic hair. Eichmann accepted the cup, murmuring his thanks. He settled back on the battered cushions and said, “Let’s cut the shit, Dee Dee. I’ve got your money right here. I know I was being mischievous taking your cash. I should apologize to you.”

“You going to say you’re sorry?”

“Maybe.”

“You should. It’d be good karma for you.”

“Okay … why not?”

“I accept it.”

“I ain’t done it yet, dimwit.”

“Where do you get off calling me names?”

“Let it slide … now, c’mere and I’ll give it to you.”

“You’ll gimme my dinero?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“Under my pillow where I keep all my things.” Eichmann pulled out the shoe box and removed the lid. There was our money; stacks of used five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills filled the cardboard box, everything we’d sweated and sacrificed for. Dee Dee did a jig, gabbling to Maurice, “See! I told you the homeboys would capitulate!”

Eichmann was offering the money to him like it was a donation to charity. The junkie was so confident he had the cash, he never saw what Eichmann had in his other hand. Just as Dee Dee reached out to put his grubby mitts on the box, Eichmann snatched it away from him, then he threw the cup of scalding hot coffee into the dope fiend’s eyes. Dee Dee jumped back, clutching his head and lurching away from the couch, blubbering, “Call a doctor! Get an ambulance!”

Maurice tried to yank a pistol out of his jacket, but the hammer got stuck on the pocket’s lining, allowing Bobo to step out from behind the couch and thump him in the ribs with the crowbar. The Mexican’s face was chiseled out of pockmarked marble, eyes dead-hard, and his timing was immaculate. Maurice was caught off-guard and he whinnied, “What are you, a spook?”

“No, I’m your daddy … who cares what I am? Put your hands up!”

The attempted shakedown had failed with a flourish. Our foes were standing next to the coffee table, beaten again. They were on a losing streak, which intensified every time they came into contact with us. Their compulsion to do battle was dimmed by the separate parts of their strategy: They didn’t have the guile or the tactics
to hurt us. Maurice conceded to Bobo, “You win. I told Dee Dee we had to get organized, but he likes to do things impromptu.”

Dee Dee was on his hands and knees, debilitated, disoriented, and dry heaving. “My nose, man! It’s bad!” Maurice got an arm around his comrade and pulled him to his feet. Dee Dee’s seared face was covered with a myriad of tiny blood blisters, a lesson to our enemies to stay away from the garage. “You’ll pay for this!” he pledged, shrilling, “I’ll come back for you guys if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

We shoved the hapless duo out into the parking lot. I closed the door behind them. Eichmann replaced the lid on the shoe box and said to Loretta, “Shit, that was work. What’s to eat around here?”

If there was any poetry in the garage, something with a meter or a rhyme, or if nothing else, a verse that told us where we were going, I was somehow missing it. I stared up at the holes in the roof. Cobwebs dangled from the rafters. It all looked brutally naked under the sun’s circumspect gaze, and I said a little prayer for myself.

In the days following Dee Dee’s aborted putsch, Eichmann made repeated fraternal overtures toward me, sharing his clean clothing, his packet of instant bouillon cubes, and his imported Indonesian clove cigarettes. I didn’t know what to make of his uncharacteristic friendliness. I thought about it at night when I was suffering from insomnia, and every time I went out to meet a customer. I took it as a sign I could be honest with him because things were going wrong for me, extremely wrong.

One afternoon in the garage when nobody else was around, we were sitting by the coffee table shelling and eating sunflower seeds. I asked him, “Can I tell you something?”

“What is it?”

“I’m not getting along with you anymore.”

He winced with exasperation, trying to control his temper. “Doojie, you’re a schmuck. But this doesn’t come as a surprise.”

“How’s that?”

“You wear your dislike for me like a shirt you don’t take off—it stinks, you know?”

“Then why don’t you do something about it and make things better between us?”

Eichmann looked remarkably similar to a homeless man I used to know, a guy who’d been on the streets for years until we found him stuffed dead into a garbage Dumpster on Albion. My business partner’s hair was matted and shot through with bits of tawny-colored lint. His hands were shaking lightly.

Eichmann took me in with his feline eyes and said with a
smarmy grin, “I’m a dope dealer, a connoisseur of fine marijuana. I’m not a rabbi. You want me to be nicer to you? Get Flaherty off our backs.”

A tidal wave of cynicism washed over me. I bit my lip. If this piece of advice was Eichmann’s idea of friendship, then I had to work magic to keep it going. Somehow, I had to banish Flaherty from our lives.

The investigation into the Folsom Street shooting was moving slowly. The newspapers reported Flaherty had testified in an open hearing. The results were less than satisfactory. He was asked whether he’d tried to reason with the deceased before using his OC spray on him. Flaherty said yes with such vehemence everyone knew he was lying, but no one could prove it. When I read what he said in the paper, the patent falsehood of his testimony left a stinging aftertaste in my mouth. The newspaper also said the investigation was going upstairs to the Police Commission.

The Police Commission was composed of a bunch of cream-puffs. What were five civilians going to do faced with Flaherty and his lawyer? They wouldn’t do anything—Flaherty was free to roam the streets, persecuting me in the circle of hell I shared with Eichmann. Also, the landlord had paid us an unexpected visit at noon, letting us know our days in the garage were numbered.

The landlord was wearing silk slippers with two-inch lifts built into the heels, bringing him up to five feet. “You must give me money,” he said. I looked around the carport and saw my life written into its tatty walls. Pay the rent? The man was a comedian, the kind that made you laugh hysterically on the inside where no one could see you.

After our imbroglio with Dee Dee and Maurice, I kept a low profile and hung around the garage. Proof the conflict with Flaherty was getting personal came about a week later. One day I was sitting on a stoop across the street keeping an eye on things, scoping out the Cambodian kids playing soccer on the sidewalk. Bobo and Eichmann were at the liquor store around the corner, and I don’t know where Loretta was.

The vaselined sun was beating down on my head; I had to blink twice at what I saw—Flaherty was sneaking into the garage’s parking lot. He was alone, the Smith and Wesson dancing on his hip. Dust devils rose from the lot’s dirt floor with every kick of his Adidas. He approached the garage door warily, then rapped on the battered paneling.

This was not so great. I got to my feet, and shrank against the nearest wall. When the narc realized nobody was in the carport, and seeing the door was padlocked, he extracted a thin brown vinyl case from his scummy goose-down vest. Untying the thongs that held the satchel together, he selected a rod with a hook at the end of it. Then he inserted the device into the keyhole of the Schlage lock that Eichmann said was thief-proof.

Lately Eichmann had been querying me, accusing me of wimping out on him. His thesis was that I wanted to get out of the business. He thought I was getting scared. He was right on both counts, but I wasn’t going to admit that.

The sticky fog-burned air was a perfect conductor for the acute tension Flaherty was radiating. The lock wasn’t yielding to
his ministrations, so he took out another thin metal rod from his satchel, one with a smaller head. He put the thing into the keyhole, fooled with it for a minute, and then said out loud, “Got it!” He removed the Schlage and nudged open the creaky door, going inside.

I dashed across the pavement and ran into the lot after him. I snuck up to the door and peered in—Flaherty was dumping underwear, socks, and papers on the floor. He picked up our two-burner hot plate and hurled it against a wall, smashing it to pieces. Then he overturned a basin filled with dishes and rinse water, spilling the water and jettisoning the dishes onto the floor.

The coffee table was caked with leaves and crumbs from Chad’s Kentucky weed—the clues we were operating a cartel in the garage. Flaherty got down on his knees and pushed aside a hummock of months-old laundry to focus his attention on a sinsemilla bud. He scooped up the bud and pocketed it.

He left a half hour later after wrecking everything in sight. I hid behind a garbage can when he exited the garage, wondering what he was up to. Then Eichmann and Bobo showed up with Louis in tow. I told them what had happened and we proceeded to evaluate the damage.

Flaherty had executed a blitzkrieg on our nest. He’d taken a knife and sliced the couch cushions, broken the coffee table, and urinated on my sleeping bag. Louis was still looking vulnerable from the session with Flaherty at the police station. He said, “That narc, he’s a Mexican, ain’t he? Whatever he is, he’s way off course. Ain’t nothing good will come of him.”

“He isn’t a Mexican,” Eichmann mumbled.

Louis paused to touch a bandage on the side of his mouth. His scalp was covered with stitches running north and south; his cheeks were crisscrossed with welts. The man’s face was a landmark
of devastation. “What do you mean, he ain’t no Mexican?”

“Just what I said, Louis. Flaherty is about as much a Mexican as you are a white man.”

“Hell,” Louis jeered. “And he might be a policeman, but only on the outside.”

“What are you saying?”

“On the inside, he’s something sick I don’t want to look at. But I’m going to get his ass, you wait and see.”

I listened to Louis talk about going to war with Flaherty. If he wanted to challenge the policeman to combat, I didn’t know what to do.

Eichmann took me to one side and said quietly, “You take the money, Doojie. It’ll be safer with you, on account of you being the youngest one here with no convictions on your arrest record and shit.” He slipped me two huge wads of bills, his and Bobo’s. Eichmann cut his eyes over to the garage door while I stuffed the money down my pants.

Bobo was at the door gripping a crappy Brazilian-made Taurus .38 revolver in his hand, keeping watch on the parking lot and San Carlos Street. I pointed at the gun and said to Eichmann, “What’s that for?”

“The pistol? It’s for protection.”

“Since when?”

“Starting here and now.”

Louis ranted about what he was going to do to the narc. “I’ll find him,” he vowed, rubbing the gristle on his nose. “I ain’t going to put up with it, him treating me like that. He was demoralizing me.”

Hearing Louis, I wanted to go to sleep for a month. I was drawing Flaherty’s hostility like a magnet, and my friends were getting penalized for it. Nobody was going to get out of this unscathed.

“I was at the station,” Louis said. “On account of my car, you know. Some goddamn vato on York Street boosted my ride. So I go down to the cop shop. I’m jawing with the desk sergeant when Flaherty comes up to me and says, ‘You Louis?’ I say, ‘Who’s asking?’ He replied, ‘Never mind. Come with me.’ Then he got me in that room and after he brought in Doojie, he worked me over something sinful, saying he wanted someone who saw what he did. He told me what he did, like he’s so bad, it don’t matter who he tells. He said he did it, and that you saw him do it.”

“I didn’t,” Eichmann said. “Doojie did.”

“Whatever. He kept socking me in the belly, but I didn’t tell him nothing. He had me down on the floor, but I didn’t say who you were. But now he knows where you live. What are you going to do about that? Y’all are stupid for staying around here with that cop on the loose. You need to do something quick or you’re going to end up in serious shit.”