Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

“Bro, I didn’t notice you were shoeless,” Jetsam said to his partner when they returned to Flotsam’s GMC pickup to get his sneakers. “You gotta show some class.”

“Why do you take me to fancy establishments where you gotta wear shoes?” Flotsam said. “I’m so used to running around the beach all day, I don’t know if I got flip-flops on or not. You think I spend a lotta time looking at my own feet?”

“Since we’re not packing, I hope nobody tries to steal our boards,” Jetsam said, their guns being under the seat of the locked truck. “Anyways, the wusses that run the consent decree would go all PMS-ey if we capped a surfboard thief.”

“Only if they’re oppressed minorities,” Flotsam said. “If they’re white, you can shoot them down like rabid pit bulls and back over them in your truck five or six times.”

“Check the city demographics, bro,” Jetsam said. “We’re the oppressed minority.”

When they reentered Hamburger Hamlet, they got disapproving looks from the hostess, this pair of surfers in baggy T-shirts and board shorts, with salt still clinging to their sunburned faces, and sand falling from their hair. They couldn’t have looked more like surfers if they’d been wearing half-peeled wet suits, but at least she could now count four sneakers on their sockless feet, so they got seated in a booth to await the arrival of Hollywood Nate Weiss.

They only had to wait ten minutes, and both were hydrating with their second iced tea when Nate entered and sat down.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of doing lunch with you two sand crabs?” Nate said.

“Wanna cold drink?” Jetsam said when the waitress came over to their table. She was an Asian with very nice legs.

“I’ll have what they’re drinking,” Nate said.

“Iced tea coming up,” she said. “Lemme know when you want something else.”

Nate checked her out as she was walking away and said, “I might just do that.” Then he said to Jetsam, “So you wanted face time. What’s up?”

Flotsam assumed his “I got nothing to do with this” pose, and Jetsam said, “Last Friday night we wrote a parking ticket to a guy named Leonard Stilwell. The name mean anything to you?”

Nate looked puzzled and said, “Nope.”

“Wormy-looking white dude. Maybe a tweaker, maybe a crackhead. Fortyish. Medium height. Red hair, freckles, black Honda with primer spots?”

Nate shook his head and said, “ Nada. Am I supposed to know him?”

Jetsam said, “I dunno, but he had an address in his car, and just for the hell of it we checked it out, because this dude shouldn’t be having an address up on Mount Olympus. Not unless he’s going there to clean out their garage or something. He’s got a couple priors for burglary.”

“Still not tracking,” Nate said.

“So we don’t find the address,” Jetsam said. “The number’s off a little bit. But right near there where the address should be, we see a car.”

“ His car?” Nate said.

“Not his car,” Jetsam said.

That brought things to a sudden stop. Nate frowned slightly and said, “You saw my car?”

“SAG4NW,” Jetsam said. “So we thought you should know about this burglar Stilwell, is all.”

Flotsam corrected his partner, saying, “ He thought you should know. Me, I’m neutral in this matter.”

Hollywood Nate didn’t speak for a moment and then said, “It was the wrong address, you said.”

“Yeah, but there was no street address to exactly match the one on the piece of paper. If I remember right, the address you were visiting ended in four eight? His address ended in two six. But then the street turns and the numbers are totally different. The house you were in is closest to the number he wrote down.”

Flotsam was sick of this. He said to Nate, “Dude, my pard thinks whoever lives in that house might be a future crime victim or maybe a present criminal if they’re connected to this dirtbag Leonard Stilwell. That’s, like, the shorthand version of this here drama.”

“What’s, like, the longhand version?” Nate said.

“The longhand version is that my pard is all goony over Sinclair Squared, and he would love to become a Crow and work with her, even though she don’t know a surfboard from an ironing board. But come to think of it, whenever somebody asks her to iron something, she divorces him. And since she don’t marry nobody unless his name is Sinclair, I wish he’d either change his name to Sinclair or stop all this Sherlock shit, because it’s wearing me down!”

Jetsam just looked at his partner, astonished. He’d never seen Flotsam so exercised.

“What’s his crush on Ronnie got to do with the burglar?” Nate asked Flotsam, as though Jetsam weren’t there.

“He heard that Ronnie and Bix Ramstead were working that part of the Hollywood Hills, kissing ass with all those rich whiners up there, and he’s, like, trying to bring the spotlight on this and score points with Ronnie and maybe the Crow sergeant.”

Jetsam still stared at his partner in astonishment and finally said, “Bro, why didn’t you switch to my frequency? I didn’t know you were all vaporized about this!”

“I been trying to for days,” Flotsam said. “You ain’t been the same ever since you fired off flares over the SUVs in the body shop. You’re, like, totally spring-loaded. You just don’t listen to body language no more!”

“I didn’t know you were all bent, bro!”

“Work out your domestic partnership later,” Nate said. “I can tell you that the person who lives in that house is not some kind of crook. As to being a target of this guy Stilwell, I just don’t know.”

“Is she your squeeze?” Flotsam said with a leer.

“Hey, I don’t ask you about your Bettys,” Nate said.

“Dude, you are hormonally spirited!” Flotsam said admiringly.

Rebounding from Flotsam’s tirade, Jetsam said to Nate, “It wouldn’t hurt to ask your squeeze-I mean, the person who lives there-if she knows a Leonard Stilwell. If she don’t, it might be something to talk over with the burglary dicks. Trust me, bro, that pus bucket Stilwell is a waste of good air, and he’s up to no good.”

“I’ll give her a call,” Nate said, “and see what she knows.”

“Is she a hottie or just rich?” Flotsam said to Nate with that same annoying leer.

“She’s just somebody with a car for sale,” Nate said. “I was talking to her about her SUV.”

It had slipped from Nate’s mouth before he could stop it, and Jetsam jumped on it. “Hey, bro! That’s the SUV from the body shop, ain’t it? The one you talked to the guy about?”

Nate saw both surfers looking at him expectantly now. He decided to tell the truth. He said, “Yeah, that’s the one. And yeah, she’s a burner babe, but nothing happened.”

“This is destiny at work, bro!” Jetsam said with a flourish. “There’s only a few degrees of separation here. We’re all part of some inscrutable plan!”

Nate was speechless until Flotsam said, “He gets like this after we been surfing. He sits out there on the water and gets, like, these visions. They make him go all surfboard simple for the rest of the day. He’ll be okay later.”

“At least you should bounce for the iced tea,” Nate said, finishing his drink.

“Yeah, dude, it’s on us,” Flotsam said. “But if you want my opinion, you oughtta shine them Hills honeys. All that sculpted flesh and five-karat diamonds look good, but there’s, like, better ways to escape your humdrum existence. Grab yourself a log and come to Malibu. We’ll be your gurus.”

Jetsam agreed, saying, “Bro, it’s way wack to go all frothy over Mount Olympus bitches, who think their shit should be gilded and hung on gold chains.”