Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Moon

“I was talking to Nate,” Dana said. “I didn’t see.”

Hollywood Nate said, “I didn’t notice either.”

“I better go back up and touch it,” Jetsam said.

“Dude!” Flotsam said. “Ain’t that taking superstition a little too far?”

Jetsam paused and looked as though he was about to get into the car, until Dana with a wink at Nate said to Jetsam, “It’s a tradition and it’s about luck. And tonight there’s a Hollywood moon. I wouldn’t tempt fate, honey.”

That did it. He ran back inside Hollywood Station.

When the taxi delivered Eunice to her apartment on Franklin, she was so sure that Dewey and his friends had fled that she didn’t ask the driver to accompany her inside. However, after entering, she did take a cursory look in every room before closing the door. It was only the irrational doper, Jerzy Szarpowicz, who worried her at all.

The fact that they’d ransacked the place did not surprise Eunice. Her gag with the key was enough to make the morons conduct a frantic search. She removed the hard drive from each computer and then pulled three flattened cardboard boxes from under her bed, which she kept for this purpose. She put them together and began loading them with hard drives, files, credit cards, and forgery paraphernalia that littered her worktable. She planned to drop each box in one of several trash Dumpsters behind various commercial establishments on the way to the airport.

She then sat down and wrote a letter to the apartment manager, describing how the sudden death of her father in Florida had made it necessary to leave immediately to care for her aging mother. She invited the manager to keep the security and deposit fees and to dispose of all property left behind as she saw fit, including clothing and personal items belonging to her husband. She broke into a smile when she wrote that part of it. After finishing the letter, there wasn’t much to do but pack as much as she needed, leaving older articles of clothing behind. San Francisco definitely required a whole new wardrobe anyway.

After she showered and did her makeup, hiding the damage that Jerzy and his duct tape had done, she felt positively giddy. Wearing a new lace-trimmed bra and thong panties like those she’d bought for her dinner at Musso & Frank, Eunice went to the kitchen, lit a smoke, and poured herself a Bombay martini. She felt her excitement grow while waiting for Clark to arrive. She couldn’t decide what to wear for the trip. She felt free. She felt… young.

“I wish I had the Polack here instead of you,” Tristan said to Dewey Gleason as they staggered from the storage room to the van, carrying a thirty-six-inch TV console that required two rest pauses before they could move the box fifty feet.

“I might be able to pull my own weight if that son of a bitch hadn’t driven my ribs halfway to my backbone,” Dewey said, leaning on the box and panting.

It was almost impossible to contemplate that the goods he had stored in this room were the sum of all he possessed in life. He was certain that Eunice was already leaving the Franklin Avenue address, now that her elaborate security was blown. He didn’t know for sure if she’d get out of Los Angeles or find another Dewey Gleason and set up at another location, but he believed she might’ve bought herself a gun by now and would shoot him dead if she ever set eyes on him again. Dewey had a passing thought that if he had a gun of his own, he might save her the trouble. He was alone. He was lost.

“You ready, Bernie?” Tristan said. “We shoulda had this job done hours ago.”

“I got pain shooting through me,” Dewey said.

“You’re gonna have a bullet shootin’ through you if we don’t get back to the office before dark. The Polack ain’t a patient man.”

“That actually sounds comforting,” Dewey said, picking up his end of the load with a moan that sounded like the lowing of a cow.

Jerzy Szarpowicz was literally bouncing from wall to wall in the little duplex/office. He would stride across the room, turn his back to the wall, and push off toward the other wall. He was muttering aloud, mostly a string of incoherent obscenities, aimlessly directed at Bernie Graham’s woman, at Bernie Graham himself, at Creole, and at the Mexican at Pablo’s Tacos who wouldn’t front him a little crack or crystal after he’d done business with the greaseball for three years. The taxi rides had eaten up almost all his cash, and in fact, he was $1.45 light on the fare after he had the driver take him from Pablo’s parking lot to here. The taxi driver, one of those camel fuckers Jerzy despised so much, had started bitching about it until he got a good look at Jerzy’s snarling face and red-rimmed blazing eyes, and then he’d just dropped it in gear and sped away.

Jerzy had been pacing with the buck knife in his hand, indulging in violent fantasies until he tired of that. Then he pulled the snub-nosed revolver from his jeans and passed the time by aiming it at the imaginary heads of those he hated. Two of those he hated interrupted him by driving up to the curb in the rented van and in the Honda just as the Hollywood moon began to rise.

Tristan and Dewey each carried a box containing a laptop to the door, which was held open by Jerzy, who’d tucked his weapons inside the waistband of his jeans, under his T-shirt.

“Where the fuck you been?” Jerzy growled.

“Don’t start,” Tristan said. “I might as well’ve loaded the van by myself, all the help Bernie gave me. My ass is scrapin’ the ground.”

“I need money right now,” Jerzy said to Dewey. “Call your fence and start sellin’ this shit.”

“I have a call in to him,” Dewey said, “but I don’t think my receiver’s gonna run right over here this minute.”

“Come on, dawg,” Tristan said to Jerzy. “Help me carry all those boxes inside. Bernie, you keep callin’ the guy till you reach him. Tell him this is like a big garage sale if he’s got plenty of cash.”

Dewey sat down on a kitchen chair, cell phone in hand, and said, “I’ll keep trying.”

Jerzy looked like his central nervous system was short-circuited, and he seemed ready to start tearing the wallpaper off the walls. Dewey tried his best to avoid eye contact, but Jerzy said to him, “Bernie, if you don’t get me some money tonight, I’m gonna start rememberin’ how much I hated Jakob Kessler.”

Dewey tried speed-dialing Hatch one more time while Tristan and Jerzy walked to the van under an unusually clear summer sky in a bright glow of moonlight.

“Yeah, we got us a Hollywood moon up there, dude,” Flotsam said when he walked back to the shop with the license belonging to the driver of a Lexus hardtop convertible. “Did you see what that guy’s wearing?”

Jetsam, who had walked up on the passenger side, flashing the beam from his mini-light onto the dash to let the driver know he was there, said, “I think I saw a coat and tie, right?”

“You didn’t look low enough. He ain’t wearing pants. But he’s got nice wingtip shoes on and socks.”

“Where’s his pants, bro?” Jetsam said as Flotsam put the ticket book and flashlight on the hood of the black-and-white and started writing.

“On the seat beside him,” Flotsam said. “With his underwear. He was probably jerking off, and that’s why he was late on the red light.”

“What did you say to him, bro?”

“I asked to see his license.”

“What did he say?”

He said, ‘Yes, officer.’ ”

“Is that, like, okay with you, bro? I mean, maybe he was flashing somebody in the lane next to him.”

“That’s a seventy-thousand-dollar ride. If he wants to jizz all over it, that’s his business.”

As Flotsam finished writing the ticket, Hollywood Nate and Dana Vaughn turned the corner onto Gower, dimmed the headlights, and pulled next to the surfer cops.