Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

The child dropped her eyes and asked, “Am I in trouble?” Then she began sobbing again.

“Now, now,” Gert said. “There’s no need to do that. You’re not in trouble with us. We’re your friends.” Then sensing someone behind her, she turned and saw Sergeant Treakle standing there watching.

Gert tried but failed to suppress the sigh that popped out of her, then said to the sergeant, “I wonder if you’d mind letting us females talk about this in private.”

Sergeant Treakle arched an eyebrow, grunted, and returned to the kitchen, where Dan Applewhite was getting a list of potential suspects for the follow-up by detectives. The child had no siblings, but there were uncles, cousins, and neighbors who were possibles.

Sergeant Treakle looked at his watch a couple of times, and when Gert left the girl in the bedroom and came back to the kitchen, he said, “Who’s the daddy?”

“I don’t know,” Gert said. “The sex crimes team will have to talk to her.”

“All that time and you don’t know?” Sergeant Treakle said.

Her voice flat as a razor, Gert said, “The child says she doesn’t know how it happened.”

Sergeant Treakle guffawed loudly and said, “She doesn’t know? ”

Knowing his religious views, Gert Von Braun said, “Tell me, Sergeant Treakle, what if the young girl’s name was Mary? And the baby inside her was gonna be named Jesus, would you still scoff? After all, Mary didn’t know how the hell it happened either. Did she now?”

The sergeant’s jaws opened and shut twice, but nothing came out. He started to say something to Dan Applewhite, but nothing happened there either. He left the apartment and hurried to his car to make a negative entry in his log.

When they got back to their shop and started driving, Dan Applewhite took a good look at Gert Von Braun. He was a lot older and knew he wasn’t much to look at. And he couldn’t seem to keep a wife for very long, no matter how much money he spent on her. But he was starting to develop feelings he hadn’t had for a while. Despite her bulk and scary reputation, Gert Von Braun was starting to grow very attractive.

“What say we stop at Starbucks, Gert?” he said impulsively, then added something that usually interested other female partners. “I’d love to buy us a latte and biscotti.”

Gert shrugged and said, “I’m not much for sissy coffee, but I wouldn’t mind an In-N-Out burger.”

And zing went the strings of his heart! He grinned big and said, “Okay! One In-N-Out burger coming up!”

“With grilled onions and double the fries,” Gert added.

He was back at an ATM that night, a different one this time, on Hollywood Boulevard. Leonard Stilwell had worked diligently to set the film trap with the glue strips in place. He couldn’t sit around his room waiting for the job with Ali. The advance that Ali had given him was gone, smoked up in his pipe and lost on those goddamn Dodgers after he was stupid enough to make a bet with a sports book who’d beaten him 90 percent of the time.

Despite his prior misgivings and fear of all the cops he’d seen around the Kodak Center, the area offered an irresistible attraction in the persons of all those doofus tourists. So after casing carefully, he’d decided that a certain one of the ATMs wasn’t quite as dangerous as the others because it was in a dark corner and provided an easier escape route to the residential street several blocks away where he’d parked his old Honda. Now he was watching that ATM. Several Asians with cameras dangling from their necks almost bit. They’d be no good to him unless they spoke enough English to accept his “help.”

The ATM customer who finally stopped was the one he wanted. The guy was at least seventy years old and so was his wife. He was carrying a bag from one of the boulevard souvenir shops and she was carrying another one. They wore walking shorts and tennis shoes and their baseball caps had pins all over them from Universal Studios’ tour, Disneyland, and Knott’s Berry Farm. Her brand new T-shirt said “Movies For Me” across the back. Just looking at them made him imagine the heavenly smoke filling his lungs.

The guy put his card into the slot but nothing happened. He punched in his PIN and looked at his wife. Then he looked around, presumably for help, just as a younger man with hair the color of an overripe pumpkin, a wash of freckles, and a howdy-folks smile walked to the machine, holding his own ATM card in his hand.

“Are you finished with your transaction, sir?” Leonard said.

“There’s something wrong with the machine,” the tourist said. “My card won’t come out and the dang thing doesn’t work.”

“Golly,” Leonard said, as syrupy as he could manage. “I’ve run into this before. Do you mind if I try something?”

“Help yourself, young man,” the tourist said. “I sure don’t wanna be calling my bank and canceling my card. Not when we just got to Hollywood.”

“Don’t blame you,” Leonard said. “Let’s see.”

He stepped forward, put his fingers on the “enter” and “cancel” keys, and said, “Way it was explained to me is, you punch in your PIN number at the same time you hold down ‘cancel’ and ‘enter,’ and it should kick out the card. Wanna try it?”

“Sure,” the tourist said. “Let’s see, I hold down which two keys?”

“Here, lemme help,” Leonard said. “I’ll hold the two keys down and you just go ahead and punch in your PIN number.”

“I’ll hold down the keys,” a deep voice behind Leonard said.

He turned and saw a guy his age. A tall, buffed-out guy looking him right in the eye. Leonard’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

“This is my son,” the tourist said. “There’s something wrong with the machine, Wendell. This fellow’s helping us.”

“That’s nice of him,” Wendell said but never took his stare from Leonard’s watery blue eyes, not for an instant.

Leonard said, “Go ahead and punch in your PIN number.” But he didn’t dare look at the keyboard. In fact, he made it a point to look away.

“Nothing,” the tourist said. “Not a goldang thing happened.”

“Well, guess you’ll have to cancel it,” Leonard said. “It was worth a try. Sorry I couldn’t help you.”

As he was sidling away, he heard the woman say, “See, Wendell, there’s lots of real nice, polite people in Hollywood.”

Leonard felt like weeping by the time he’d walked several blocks to his car. He needed crack so bad he couldn’t think of anything else. He wasn’t even hungry, although he hadn’t eaten a real meal for two days. And to make matters worse, there was a police car parked behind his car with its headlights on, and two cops were giving him a goddamn ticket!

“Is this your car?” Flotsam asked when Leonard approached, keys in hand.

“Yeah, what’s wrong?” Leonard said.

“What’s wrong?” Jetsam said. “Take a look where you’re parked.”

Leonard walked around to the front of the car and saw that he was halfway across a narrow concrete driveway belonging to an old two-story stucco house that was crammed between two newer apartment buildings. He hadn’t noticed the driveway when he’d parked, not after he’d circled the streets for twenty minutes, looking for a parking place where he wouldn’t get a goddamn ticket like this.

“Gimme a break!” Leonard said. “I’m between jobs. And even if I wasn’t tapped, I couldn’t give my ride to those goofy wetbacks at the pay lot. They’ll back your car right up onto the fanny pack of the first tourist dumb enough to take a shortcut through the parking lot, and then what?”

“Too late,” Flotsam said. “It’s already written. Lucky you came back, though. The guy in that house wanted your car towed.”