“Okay, I shoulda paid attention to the photos he gave me. Gimme a break, Eunice!”
“That kid got busted behind it, Dewey,” she said. “He went to jail.”
“It didn’t come back on us, did it?”
“It’s stupid to get your people arrested,” she said. “It’s bad business and it’s risky, Hugo always said.”
“Hugo!” Dewey Gleason said. “I’m a writer and an actor, not a lifelong grifter like Hugo. And look how that big-shot ex of
yours ended up. In San Quentin and nearly dead from emphysema, with a criminal record from here to Baltimore. Anyway, that
kid didn’t know who I am or where I live, nothing. So stop worrying.”
“So who were you on that one, Jakob Kessler?”
“No, I think I was the Jew, Felix Cohen, then. I hadn’t created Jakob Kessler yet.”
“You should uncreate him,” she said. “That German accent sounds phony.”
“It sounds just like Arnold!” Dewey said. “It’s an Austrian’s German accent.”
“It sounds phony on Arnold too,” she said. “And that cotton you stuff in your cheeks doesn’t make you look like the Godfather.
It makes you look like a man with a mouthful of disgusting food he can’t swallow. Kill the Kraut like you killed the Hebe.
Stick with American characters. You’re not actor enough to pull off the accents.”
His jaws clenched and he said, “I can’t do it till I use up the new guys, Creole and Jerzy. They only know me as Kessler.”
“By the way, what happened to the old Polish guy that got pinched in Santa Monica?”
“That’s Old Jerzy,” Dewey said. “He was a parolee. Probably sent back to Pelican Bay or wherever. I use his memory to keep
the new team in line.” With a bit of pride in his voice, he said, “They think scary Jakob Kessler had Old Jerzy eliminated
because he got greedy. I used some imagination on that one.”
With her iguana smile: “Imagination? That’s so goddamn lame, Dewey. It’s the reason you failed as a screenwriter and as an
actor. Kessler’s a walking cliché. Why don’t you face your limitations and concentrate on something you can do?”
Eyes moistening, Dewey said, “You can pull the guts right out of a man sometimes! I put in a ten-hour day already!”
“I put in
twelve
hours already,” she said. “And you got problems with relationships, take it up with Dear Abby.”
Malcolm Rojas wondered why he’d told young Naomi Teller that his name was Clark. He didn’t have a conscious reason to lie
to her, and yet he had. Something deep inside him made him do that, and he didn’t quite understand it. There were lots of
things about himself that he did not understand lately, lots of things that he had to do and did not know why. For instance,
he did not consciously understand why he’d taken the box cutter home today from his job opening cardboard boxes at the massive
home improvement center on Victory Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. It wasn’t for protection. Since he and his mother
had moved to the apartment building a few blocks west of Highland Avenue, he’d felt very safe. He’d never felt safe when they
lived in Boyle Heights, not in the middle of Latino gang turf, where he’d been raised until a year earlier, when he’d finished
high school and got the job at the shopping center, far from Boyle Heights.
Malcolm Rojas didn’t know why he’d pulled over and parked his red fifteen-year-old Mustang when he’d seen Naomi Teller on
the street. Couldn’t fathom why he’d gotten out and followed her and stopped her to talk. She didn’t really appeal to him.
She was too young, too skinny. She wasn’t his type at all. Why did he say he’d call her? There were many conflicting emotions
roiling inside him as he drove north on Highland Avenue toward Hollywood High School.
He parked and looked at the place. Why couldn’t he have gone to high school there? Why did his father keep him and his mother
all those years in a shitty house in Boyle Heights so his father could be close to his shitty job at the scrap yard? That
wasn’t reason enough. Malcolm had always been frightened there, of tattooed gang members, of barrio life in general, especially
with a mother who was a very white American and who didn’t understand more than a few words of Spanish. He’d felt like an
outsider and had stayed home a lot with her, paying the price for it when he had to endure the names the other kids called
him at school, especially after they found out that Malcolm’s father was Honduran, not Mexican like theirs. One of the names
they’d called him was Li’l Hondoo, and he hated it. He hated all those
cholo
bastards.
Malcolm well remembered the conflicting emotions he’d felt when his father had been fatally injured at work after a drunken
crane operator dropped a mangled Ford station wagon on top of him and another worker. A local attorney had contacted his mother,
and because of the gross negligence of the company, she ended up with a $400,000 settlement, which allowed them to move away
from the barrio and into a modest apartment in Hollywood. The move made him feel that at last he was home.
As a baby he’d been christened Ruben after his father. His middle name was Malcolm, the name of his maternal grandfather,
who’d died before the boy was born. Early in life, young Ruben had decided that he wasn’t Honduran like his father, even though
he knew how very much he looked like the man. After his father’s death, young Ruben Rojas came to hate his Hispanic name and
insisted that his mother call him Malcolm in honor of her late father. She always indulged her only child’s whims, but it
was hard for her even now to remember that he was Malcolm and not Ruben.
When she’d get drunk, his mother would endlessly repeat the story of how she’d first arrived in L.A. from Tulsa and moved
into a hotel apartment near downtown. The man who would become Malcolm’s father was her neighbor. She’d laugh when telling
Malcolm how she didn’t even know where Honduras was but believed it to be somewhere near Spain. Her handsome Honduran neighbor
had an old car, and he would drive her to various cafeterias that were hiring waitresses and was always kind to her, and eventually
they fell in love.
Malcolm hated those stories and tried to ignore them, and he hated being anything like his father. Malcolm was from his mother’s
womb, so he was his mother’s son, and she was white and blue-eyed and blonde and…
Suddenly he was angry, very angry, for no reason at all. The bouts of anger had begun when he was about thirteen years old
and had grown gradually over the past six years. He’d never talked to anyone about it, especially not to his mother. Once
he thought about talking to a counselor at school but changed his mind. It was far better to work things out on your own,
he decided. Why not? He’d been a loner all his life. Sometimes he could quell the anger by masturbating, but he didn’t feel
like doing that now.
He started the Mustang again and began driving. The sun had set and the mauve and persimmon sky over Hollywood was turning
dark. He took one hand from the steering wheel and held it in front of him. The hand was shaking for no reason at all. He
didn’t even know what street he was on now, but there were apartment buildings on both sides. Three of them had parking garages
down below and electric security gates that could be opened by the residents as they drove inside. He remembered a TV movie
where a contract killer waited outside such a building, hiding behind some bushes, and then followed a car inside to shoot
the driver before escaping in the victim’s car.
He felt the anger growing, and his hands trembled more. His armpits were damp and he felt a bit light-headed, like when he’d
sniffed glue back in middle school. He saw an apartment building that looked just like the one in the movie. There were even
big clumps of bougainvillea growing beside the security gate that led to the underground parking. A contract killer could
hide there, Malcolm thought. Just like in the movie.
N
IGHT HAD FALLEN
, and it was going to be a dark one, with low, hanging smog concealing the moon and stars. The residential street was adequately
lighted, but the apartment building was situated in the middle of the line of streetlights and settled in deep shadow. The
security lights on the front of the building were timed not to go on for another thirty minutes in order to save electricity.
It was a quiet street, the only noise coming from the incessant traffic hum on Sunset Boulevard.
A white Pathfinder SUV drove south from Sunset toward the apartment building. There were plenty of cars parked on both sides
of the residential street, but the Pathfinder was the only moving vehicle at the moment. The SUV slowed at the apartment building,
and the driver touched the remote button and the heavy security gate began to rise and roll back. Beside the entrance to the
parking garage was the large growth of bougainvillea as well as some azaleas. Crouching behind the flowering plants was Malcolm
Rojas.
He had been hiding there for half an hour. It wasn’t a particularly hot summer evening, yet he was burning up. He felt feverish,
and as angry as he’d ever been in his life. He’d watched four other cars drive in during the past thirty minutes. One of them
was driven by a man, one by a young woman, one by a middle-aged woman who looked Hispanic. None of those had propelled Malcolm
Rojas into action. A stab of pain, sizzling and fizzing, began somewhere behind his eyes. He was in a rage.
A forty-seven-year-old Realtor named Sharon Gillespie drove the Pathfinder. She lived with a man who was also in real-estate
sales, and she was just coming home from her office. She parked in her usual space, number 33, at the south wall of the parking
garage. When she got out and was preparing to lock the SUV, a hand was clamped across her mouth, and another hand, this one
holding a box cutter, flashed before her eyes. She dropped her briefcase onto the garage floor but had no chance to scream.
The call to the apartment garage was given twenty-three minutes later to 6-X-76, the shop driven by Dana Vaughn, with Hollywood
Nate writing the reports, or, as the cops referred to it, “keeping books.” And 6-X-66, with Sheila Montez driving and Aaron
Sloane riding shotgun, arrived right behind them, all of them wanting to get more of a description. The radio call had only
given the sketchy description of a male in his twenties, possibly of Middle Eastern descent, and wearing a light blue T-shirt,
who’d fled on foot through a fire exit door that accessed the street, a door that was locked on the street side.
The apartment manager, a frightened woman in her sixties, was pacing in front of the building when the two patrol units parked
in front. It went without saying that the female officer would question the victim and take the crime report in this kind
of case, even though ordinarily that would be the passenger officer’s job. Dana grabbed the reports binder, and Hollywood
Nate tagged behind when his partner approached the security gate.
As Dana Vaughn put it, “If there’s a vagina involved, we women get the case.”
“How long ago did the suspect leave here?” Dana asked the apartment manager.
“About fifteen minutes, I think,” the woman said. “She’s up in apartment thirty-three, waiting for you. Sharon Gillespie is
her name. The poor woman!”
“Nobody saw a car?” Sheila said, entering through the walk-in security gate and following Dana.
The apartment manager shook her head, saying, “It’s the element that’s taking over. Arabs, Iranians, they’re everywhere around
here.”
A fifteen-minute head start in this most traffic-clogged city in North America might as well have been fifteen hours. As far
as the cops were concerned, the suspect was probably in a car and long gone.
Dana Vaughn said to Sheila, “How about you and your partner help Nate secure the crime scene. I’ll get a description out as
soon as I can.”
Sheila nodded and said to the manager, “Has anybody else touched anything in her vehicle or exited through the fire exit door
since it happened?”
The apartment manager shook her head, and Hollywood Nate said, “Good. Take us there and open the car gate. Some crime lab
people will be arriving soon. I hope.”
“Like
CSI
?” the woman said.
Aaron fought the urge to heave a sigh but only said, “Don’t expect their kind of results, but we’ll do our best.”
Matthew Harwood, a fifty-year-old real-estate broker who was the roommate and lover of Sharon Gillespie, admitted Dana to
apartment 33. He’d been crying with her and was wiping his eyes with his fingertips when Dana arrived. Sharon Gillespie was
sitting in a kitchen chair, holding a cup of coffee in her trembling hands, her highlighted blonde hair damp, her face washed
clean of makeup. A contusion on her left cheekbone was swollen and discolored.
Too late, Dana thought. She’d already bathed. Dana turned to Matthew Harwood and said, “I’ll talk to you later, sir, but do
you mind if I talk to Ms. Gillespie alone? You might wait right outside with my partner. He’ll need some information.”
After Matthew Harwood was gone, Dana had a fleeting thought that this woman was not much older than she, and that made it
more troubling. Dana said, “I know how… I have an
idea
how you’re feeling right now, but we’ll need to take you to the hospital to tend to your injuries and to get some evidence
swabs. Is your underwear here or down where it happened?”
“He never made me remove my underwear,” Sharon Gillespie said. “It didn’t get that far. And this bruise on my face is my only
injury. I’m not going to a hospital. I’m going to bed.”
“Okay, what do you mean, ‘It didn’t get that far’?”
“He held the weapon in front of my eyes. A box knife, like the nine-eleven hijackers used. He pushed me into the backseat
of my SUV. He pushed my head down. He said he’d cut my eyes out if I didn’t…”
“Tell me the exact words that he said to you.”
“He said, ‘Suck my cock or I’ll cut your eyes out, you filthy slut.’ ”
“And then what happened?”
“What do you think happened? I did it.”
“I know this is very difficult,” Dana said. “But I have to know details. If we can collect any semen at all, we can get his
DNA profile. His genetic fingerprint.”