Police and Thieves: A Novel (9 page)

My stepfather put the cigarette in his mouth, and frowned. He swerved the Hillman off the two-lane paved road onto a dirt path. “Hold on!” he cried. “This is going to be bumpy!” Then he pressed down on the gas pedal, bouncing my mother in her seat. We traveled along the path for what seemed like weeks, finally stopping and parking under a tree at the edge of an enormous faintly glowing green field. “That’s the cauliflower,” he said.

Doojie Sr. told us, making sure I understood, that deer came out at night to feed in the cauliflower field. “They’re sneaky little fuckers. They wait until the farmers get their crops going good, and then they raid it. But I’ve got a surprise for them.”

As far as I could see, the cauliflower field went on for eternity. It was as big as the earth itself. Doojie Sr. started up the Hillman again, this time turning on the headlights. “When the deer see the lights, they freeze. I see the reflection of the headlights in their eyes, and bam, I got me a target,” he chortled.

We waited for a few minutes and like magic, a pair of eyes lighted up in the field, just as Doojie Sr. had predicted. He whispered, “Give me the shotgun.” The weapon was resting on the floor under the front seat. My mother picked it up by the stock and shoved it at him. He took the gun and opened the door, not daring to make a sound.

He crept around the front end of the Hillman until he was alongside the headlights. He hefted the shotgun to his shoulder,
put his finger on the trigger, ready to shoot—the eyes in the cauliflower patch moved to one side, throwing off his concentration. Someone was playing tricks on him. “What the hell,” he complained.

Before he could move a muscle, three pairs of squad-car headlights pinned Doojie Sr. in mid-motion. A dozen policemen surfaced from the darkness, running toward him. “Put down that shotgun! We’ve been waiting for you!”

A moment later the Hillman was surrounded by police officers shining their flashlights at my mother and me. Doojie Sr. spun around in his tracks and shouted at us, “Don’t tell them anything, you hear me!” At the cops, he yelled, “So what? You caught me hunting without a license! Big fucking deal!”

A beefy policeman stuck his head in the Hillman’s window and smiled at me. I was rocking back and forth in my baby chair. “Cute kid,” he chuckled. He reached out to tickle my chin and I spit up my Gerber’s dinner on his hand.

Loretta found me thrashing by the door, sleepwalking. “Doojie, wake up. You’ve been dreaming.” It was still dark in the garage, not even morning. A cricket was chirping in the parking lot. Eichmann was snoring evenly, which assured me all was well and nothing had changed. I didn’t want to tell Loretta where I’d been. I couldn’t share it with her, like gossip or a movie we’d seen together. I had visited my own galaxy.

To complicate matters, now that Roy was out of the picture, we were having difficulty finding someone who would sell us another pound of weed. Thanks to Dee Dee and Maurice, our reputation was being sullied in the drug community. Ultimately the problem stemmed from our tendency to burn bridges behind us. We were geniuses at it. Our bottom line? It was progressive: We were planning another appropriation. What else could we do? If you conducted your transactions like there was an etiquette to follow, your profit margin remained zip. Eichmann warbled at me from the other end of the garage, “Doojie!”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s the dope?”

“I don’t know. What do you want it for?”

“I want you to roll me a fattie.”

“Why can’t you do it?”

“Because I want you to do it for me.”

Since I wasn’t busy, I did his bidding. Eichmann was instinctively dominant and was always jousting to be number one in everything. I let him have his way, letting him think he was on top. I found the weed in a bowl on the coffee table and began to construct a five-paper doobie, laboring over the monstrosity. While I crushed the fluffy buds between my fingers, Loretta went outside to take a leak in the parking lot. The lack of indoor plumbing was bothersome, especially in the winter months, but we’d done without heating and a refrigerator for so long, not having a toilet or a sink was no more than a minor irritation. By the time I loaded up
the papers with indica, Loretta came back inside sporting goose bumps on her arms, saying in a caustic drawl, “Damn, it’s chilly out there.”

“Is it foggy?”

“It is and I don’t like it. I heard California was sunny.”

“Not here. You got off at the wrong exit.”

When Loretta first came by the garage to see Eichmann, I didn’t even say hello to her. One, because her relationship with him wasn’t going to last, and secondly, she was too country for me, a rural shiksa. She was a friend of Eichmann’s aunt, the one who’d raised him. Loretta came from Tulsa, as did the old lady. The way Loretta talked about it, you’d have thought Oklahoma was in another solar system.

Last winter I was selling nickel bags in the Haight-Ashbury. I had a customer named Roland Murtaugh. Even though he was twenty-seven, he lived with his parents. He used to justify his inertia by saying, “Why should I leave home? I’ve got everything I want. I got my car and my room. My mom lets me get high and gives me an allowance.”

One day I walked up the hill to Roland’s place on Masonic. Every time I went to his house, he’d pontificate, “Doojie, I’m doing you a favor, buying your weed. I could do business with a lot of other people, you know?” I reminded myself to keep the visit short and impersonal. I wouldn’t get sucked into any of his games, the psychological ploys he’d set up to ambush me. I’d sell him a bag, then leave.

My resolve was tested when Roland answered the door stark naked with a blob of gray jism drying on his cock. He leaned against the doorjamb and crowed, “I just did it with my girlfriend. You want to meet her?” I said no, not today. Too bad, he sassed me. He turned around and gave me a shot of his fat cottage-cheese-white
cheeks. We went inside, and a slender girl with frosted hair and blue eyes came out of his parents’ bedroom winding a flannel sheet around her waist like it was a sarong. She looked at us and I could’ve sworn her eyes twinkled. Roland said to her, “Flo, this is Doojie. He’s a virgin. Can you believe it?”

Flo was about eighteen, comely, and more than I could handle. For a start, she was better-looking than me. Also, I didn’t exactly have the ways and means to charm a woman. I was working on it, but I wasn’t quite ready. She smiled at me and said, “Oh, yeah?”

Roland led us into a sunken living room. I knew the space, so I went over to where I felt comfortable. It was like that at every house when I was selling weed—I had to find the spot where I could make the deal with the least amount of stress. Maybe I was agoraphobic, but being in Roland’s home unnerved me. I sat down on a divan and laid out several eighths for him to choose from. Roland was finicky, and took his time in making a decision. Flo was meek, quiet, vibrating. Finally, he selected a bag that Bobo had deliberately underweighed, saying, “I’ll take this one. It looks good.”

“All right.”

He gave me his money, then we proceeded to close the transaction by smoking a ceremonial reefer. Every exchange was concluded that way. The three of us leaned back on the couch where we sat, and Flo let the sheet drop to her waist, exposing the wonder of her breasts. Roland didn’t give a hoot—he got a kick out of showing off the girl to me.

“Ain’t she luscious, Doojie?”

“I don’t know.”

Flo asked with a tinkle in her voice, “What do you do, Doojie? Are you a musician?”

“No.”

“Oh, I thought you were into music. You seem like you’d be
into Van Halen or something.”

We were toasted from the ganja I’d brought, a tad undone. When Flo proclaimed she was going to the kitchen to get a glass of wine, I excused myself and stumbled off to the bathroom, a room larger than the holding cell in the city’s prison. When I got there, I shut the door behind me, thankful to get away from them. I unbuckled my belt and faced the toilet, thinking Flo and Roland were a royal agony. He was always trying to make me squirm. As soon as I was done having a pee, I’d say good-bye. I was buttoning my pants when the door opened a smidgen—it was Flo.

“Doojie?

“Huh?”

“What are you doing?”

“Uh, nothing.”

She entered the room and shut the door behind her. She came up to me and placed her hands on my ribs, tracing her black-painted fingernails over my skin. My heart stopped on a dime because she was moving so fast. I knew then and there I was outclassed. The best I could do was play it cool, and play it knowledgeable.

“You’re skinny.”

“Yeah, well, I live in a garage. I’m a squatter.”

“A garage? That sounds fun.”

“You ought to try it.”

I hadn’t taken a shower or changed my clothes in a week. Flo’s nostrils flared; she put her hand on my crotch as if it were her own, divining what was in my pants with nimble, acquisitive, territorial fingers. I was taken aback by her resolute forwardness, and my sphincter froze tightly with remarkable speed.

“Do you want me to do you?”

Flo riveted her eyes on me, waiting for an answer. It was the moment I’d been yearning for all my life, and it was too mixed up
for me. First, there was Roland. He was in the living room, putting a CD on his parents’ system. Then, I didn’t know if this was how I wanted it to happen, here with Flo. The icing on the cake was that she was cute, but not my type. I said, “That’d be okay.”

She unbuttoned my pants, exhibiting the avid interest of a cultural anthropologist on a foreign excavation site. You could tell she thought she was doing a scholastic procedure, something academic. “You’re really a virgin, Doojie?” she asked.

I stammered, “Sure am.”

When Flo took me in her palm, I realized no one had ever touched me before, not really. I stood against the edge of the sink, holding on to the water spigot as she accelerated her fingertips back and forth across my penis and testicles. It didn’t take Flo more than forty seconds to get me to ejaculate; my seed sprayed her tits as Roland barged in through the door.

“What are you guys doing in here?”

He took one look at me with my pants around my knees and sobbed, “Take your shitty weed and get out of my house!”

He turned deadly ill in the face when he saw Flo’s hair was speckled with my spunk. “Baby girl! What have you done? Oh, my God!”

I didn’t know if it was scarcity, but Loretta looked magnificent to me. Her nightgown had tomato paste smeared on it from last night’s pizza; my groin sang with horniness when I saw her breasts outlined against the gown’s chenille fabric. When I was done rolling the joint, I gave it to her. She lighted the bomber, admiring it for its robust size. She took a puff, then asked, “You want some?”

We were standing face-to-face, no more than a few inches away from one another, staring into each other’s eyes, breathing hotly. I was ready to kiss her when Eichmann boomed, “Hey, Doojie, where’s my spliff, man? What do I have to do, beg? C’mon,
bring it over here!”

Bobo woke up on the couch and shouted, “Aw, be quiet, will you? Damn, I was sleeping!”

Loretta underwent a psychological transformation at the sound of her boyfriend’s voice. The color in her eyes changed from intimate green to faraway gray. Her stance went from languid and tropical to wintery. This was the first time I’d seen her without lipstick; her mouth was pink and thin, puckered like a scar. Eichmann sat up in his sleeping bag, looking owlish. “You guys doing something behind my back?”

Loretta exhaled a jet of smoke and replied wearily, “You wish.”

The investigation into Flaherty and the Folsom Street shooting was turned over to the police department’s Internal Affairs Division. An investigator from the division’s Management Control Unit was assigned to review Flaherty’s case. This wasn’t the first time the narc had been charged with using excessive force. The police department’s public relations staff reported he’d been involved in two prior cases. The local newspapers said it was three incidents.

Questions were being asked. Since the victim had acted strange, why didn’t Flaherty call in a Code 3 and have a medical evaluation made of the man at General Hospital? Flaherty insisted on saying the suspect was dangerous; that’s why he used his OC spray to subdue him.

Flaherty was improvising with the fluidity of a jazz saxophonist taking a solo. Since he’d already perjured himself, he kept going. If you take one step over the line that divides right from wrong, you might as well take another hundred steps, and so Flaherty did that.

When I read his statement in the paper, I came up with a riddle: The truth was not the same as reality. When Flaherty’s lawyer, on loan from the Police Officers’ Association, told the press the victim had been smoking cocaine, I laughed. In reality, the Mexican had been scared, forlorn. In truth, Flaherty had hounded him.

Flaherty claimed he’d interviewed all the residents on Cesar Chavez Boulevard and Folsom Street, but nobody had anything to add to the investigation. I wondered how much of what he was saying
had been orchestrated by his lawyer. Flaherty was claiming there were no witnesses to the shooting.

The news magnified Eichmann’s hostility toward Bobo and Loretta and me. He said my problems with Flaherty were taking a toll on our network—our customers were dropping away like flies. No one wanted to be identified with us. Where it was going with Eichmann, I didn’t know. I was unable to reason with him and I gave up trying. I didn’t have the energy to keep up with his torrential wrath, nor did I want to.

A day later Eichmann started a fracas with Bobo. This had been coming, as Bobo was spending more and more time in the local cafés. Eichmann took his increasingly frequent absences as a dereliction of business and as an expression of personal disloyalty. He said to Bobo, “I haven’t seen you around much lately, have I?”

In the silence that followed Eichmann’s question, you could hear the flies buzzing around our heads. Even though Bobo was a half foot shorter than Eichmann, he was muscle-bound, a former car mechanic who used to lift heavy engines, nobody you’d want to confront. But the things that daunted the common man didn’t hinder Eichmann, never did. Bobo was noncommittal. “I’ve been busy.”