Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Moon

Nate studied Dana Vaughn as she drove, observing that the wisecracking veteran had morphed. Now her mouth was pulled down at the corners, and her voice had lost some of its timbre, and in a peculiar way she looked younger. He liked being with this Dana more but thought it was time to bring his partner back from that other place.

Hollywood Nate cocked an eyebrow and said to Dana, “My gun neve r dribbles, partner. It’s always locked and loaded and ready for action.”

That did it. The tension faded, and she grinned mischievously, saying, “Ah, so all the Hollywood Nate gossip I hear from the girls in the locker room is true? Well, when you’re ready for show ’n’ tell, be sure to drop a dime, honey!”

ARED FLAG UP on a mailbox is like a party invitation,” Tristan Hawkins said to the man he called his apprentice, Jerzy Szarpowicz. “Outgoing mail. Come and get it.”

His passenger flipped down the car’s visor when the afternoon sun hit him in the eyes, surprisingly harsh rays given the layer of summertime smog they had to penetrate, smog lying low over the Hollywood Hills.

Jerzy Szarpowicz was the second Jerzy who’d worked for the boss, Jakob Kessler. The boss told Tristan that he liked to hire people of Eastern European ethnicity and also said that he was born and raised in the former East Germany and believed that Poles, Serbs, Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, and those from other former Soviet-bloc countries were more reliable than Americans. He said, however, that he never hired Russians or Armenians, who were too ambitious and dangerous, too given to extortion and violence.

But the only thing Polish about Jerzy Szarpowicz was his name, thanks to a Polish great-grandfather who’d immigrated to America from just outside of Radom, Poland. On one of his meetings with Tristan, Jakob Kessler admitted that he was sorry to learn that he hadn’t hired a real Pole, but he’d decided to give Jerzy a chance anyway.

Until the older Jerzy, whose surname was Krakowski, failed to show up on a scheduled job and was not seen again, having two Jerzys in the group confused some of the other runners. So Krakowski was called Old Jerzy, and Szarpowicz New Jerzy. When Tristan inquired after the fate of Old Jerzy, Jakob Kessler simply said that his employment had been terminated.

New Jerzy seldom spoke to Tristan, communicating with grunts and mumbles in response to the running commentary from the loquacious driver of the battered sixteen-year-old Chevy Caprice. Jerzy knew his partner only as Creole. When the car slowed and stopped at the next street mailbox with the flag up, Jerzy opened the box and scooped all of the outgoing mail through the open car window into his own lap.

Tristan said, “Man, I knew a crew of tweakers that used to steal the blue mailboxes right off the street corners. Took some tools, a pickup truck, and lots of sweat, but they’d do it. Or they’d break into a mail truck and steal keys and mail. I knew one street whore that was blowin’ a mail carrier, and she made her own key from his and sold that to the tweakers.”

“So what happened to the tweakers?” Jerzy muttered.

“What always happens to tweakers? Their teeth fall out and they end up in the joint. They’re doin’ federal time. How about you? Smokin’ much crystal these days?”

The fucking nerve of this dude, interrogating him, Jerzy thought, but he said, “I do pot and booze. And maybe I do a little crack or crystal once in a while.”

“Mr. Kessler will let you go if he thinks you’re a tweaker,” Tristan said. “He don’t like tweakers.”

Jerzy gave a noncommittal grunt while eyeing the multimillion-dollar homes on both sides as the car snaked its way along the residential streets overlooking Hollywood. As he saw it, the problem with stealing mail was that down in the flats, there weren’t street mailboxes. Most down there were attached to the walls of homes or businesses, and mail thieves would have to get out of the car and run to the box, taking a chance of being gang-tackled by some fucking neighborhood heroes or of giving some nosy neighbor enough time to take down their license number. That’s why they were cruising these fancy streets in the Hollywood Hills, but it was risky because the only people who drove crap cars like this one were Mexican gardeners or housekeepers. And since neither of them was a greaser, Jerzy didn’t like it a bit. Any cop who took a close look would jack them up for sure.

Jerzy Szarpowicz had been in Los Angeles for twenty years, having drifted in at the age of nineteen after receiving a bad-conduct discharge from the US Navy for grand theft. He’d thought about returning home to Arkansas but decided that with his dicey discharge and the several runins he’d had with LAPD narcs that got him three trips to L.A. County Jail for selling meth and crack, he wouldn’t even be able to get a shitty construction job like his father and both his brothers. Besides, he liked the climate in L.A.

What he didn’t like were all the goddamn nonwhite foreigners who lived in the city, and what he especially didn’t like was this dude next to him, who said Creole was his “nom de guerre” instead of just his street name. Creole seemed to think he was some kind of master criminal and Jerzy was his lackey. What Jerzy said behind Creole’s back to the few other runners he’d met was that Creole seemed to forget which one of them was the nigger.

Creole, who was nine years younger than Jerzy, wore his hair in dreads to his shoulders, and Jerzy thought his skin was the color of a buckskin mare his uncle used to own. Creole had delicate, almost feminine features and could nearly pass if he shaved his head. Jerzy decided that Creole’s momma was fucking white men and that’s how she ended up with a buckskin boy.

Creole claimed he’d lived for a time in New Orleans, long before Hurricane Katrina, and seemed to think he was some kind of artiste, always going on about some dance or other he’d choreographed back when he worked in a dance studio part-time. That’s when he wasn’t yapping about something he’d learned “back in college.” Jerzy figured him for a closet faggot that never got out of high school. His dance studio was probably a three-room rat hole he shared with streetwalking dragons, and the only dancing he did was when he got a ten-inch cucumber up his ass.

Tristan Hawkins didn’t like Jerzy Szarpowicz any more than Jerzy liked him, but he was under orders to train the surly redneck, and that’s what he was doing. Tristan looked at the pile of mail accumulating at his partner’s feet and said, “Okay, let’s call it a day up here. We gotta get our other job done and head back to the office.”

That’s another thing that made Jerzy sneer. The “office” was what he called the duplex apartment in east Hollywood where meetings were held with the boss in order to trade loot for pay.

“About time,” Jerzy said. “This is way stupid to be cruisin’ up here.” And he waved his hand to indicate the hills of Hollywood with all the multimillion-dollar homes. “Maybe you figure to outrun any cops that might come after this piece-of-shit car of yours?”

Tristan couldn’t contain his own sneer. This biker-ugly cracker calling him stupid? Tristan looked at Jerzy’s belly, hanging in two blubber rolls under his sweaty black T-shirt. Jerzy was tatted-out on both arms, Navy shit and women’s tits. And of course the dumb Polack wore a baseball cap backward on his football-shaped skull, with tufts of rhubarb-red hair sticking out over his wing-nut ears, and with eyebrows like balls of rust clinging to his lumpy forehead under the cap band. And those faded blue eyes of his, Tristan thought they looked too shallow to drown an ant, but the grungy little teeth were the worst, like you’d see on the pancaked carcass of roadkill that spent its life eating grubs, insects, and worms. When they went on certain jobs, Jerzy wore a long-sleeve shirt to cover the ink and turned the bill to the front, but it didn’t help at all, and Tristan hated to be seen with him and always walked several paces ahead.