Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

“Fucking Ay-rab!” he said when he saw that it was not an old knob setup. It was a bronze-handled, single-sided dead bolt, no doubt with a thumb-turn on the inside.

He told himself to stay calm. That shouldn’t matter at all. Old knob, new handle, what the fuck was the difference? He found the light switch and turned on the garage light. It was fluorescent and provided more than enough illumination. He knelt in front of the handle and inserted the tension bar, then the pick, and he repeated Junior’s words.

“Tension bar turns cylinder. Rake lifts pin.”

For a few seconds he thought it felt like the setup on Junior’s door. But then he lost it. He removed the tools, took out a penlight, and squinted at the key slot. It looked pretty much like the one at Junior’s crib. So why did it feel different?

He tried it again. This time he used all the terminology, mumbling it like a mantra: “Insert TR-four tension bar to turn the cylinder. Then insert double-diamond pick to lift the pin.” He moved his bony fingers delicately, gracefully, just as Junior had moved his brown sausage fingers. Nothing happened.

He choked back a sob of frustration. Ten Ben Franklins just to turn a fucking cylinder and lift a fucking pin! A Fijian gorilla with the brain of a cockatoo could do it with his eyes shut. And that gave him an idea.

Leonard shut his eyes and inserted the tension bar and the pick. Blind people develop a special touch, he told himself. He felt for the cylinder and the pin, but he only felt metal scraping metal.

He opened his eyes, and this time a wet balloon of a sob escaped his lips. “Jesus!” he said. “Why can’t I get just one fucking break?”

Then he had a head-slapping moment. The gloves! The fucking latex gloves had diminished the feel. The touch.

He peeled off the gloves. He wiggled his fingers. Even though it was a blister outside and ovenlike in the garage, he blew on his fingers and flexed them like safecrackers do in the movies. He held the tension bar and the pick as lightly as he could. Like two delicate bugs he didn’t want to harm.

He inserted the tension bar. He inserted the rake. He felt for the cylinder and he felt for the pin. He also felt the sweat pouring down his face. He was tasting it. It was flowing under the neck of his T-shirt. Flop sweat, a Hollywood malady.

He couldn’t feel shit! He threw the tension bar and pick onto the concrete floor. If they were bugs, the little fuckers would be dead.

Leonard Stilwell groaned when he stood up. It was over. He was going to blame it on the new door hardware. Maybe that fucking sand nigger would give him something for his attempt. Maybe a President Grant. If not, maybe an Andrew Jackson. But in his heart Leonard knew better. That towel head would want Leonard to return the two-bill advance that he’d already smoked up.

He bent over to pick up the tension bar and pick. His back had stiffened, and feeling unsteady, he grabbed at the door handle for support. And the handle dropped. And the door opened. The maid Lola had failed to set the thumb-turn on the inside handle!

“Holy shit!” he said, stumbling inside, fumbling for the notebook paper in his pocket as the alarm’s warning chirp sounded. He couldn’t find it! The security breach would show on the computer in the office of the security provider in a few more seconds if he didn’t…

He found it in his pants pocket! He looked at it and punched in the maid’s code and the warning tone stopped. Then he stepped back out to the garage and retrieved the tension bar and pick. He put on the latex gloves and, for good measure, used the tail of his T-shirt to wipe the door handle that he’d grabbed on to. Nobody was going to CSI his ass.

When he got inside, he walked to his right, entered the kitchen and then the dining room, where he could see the view of Hollywood. He’d never been in a home like this. As scared as he was, he had to admire it for a moment. It was hard to take it all in. The extravagance! Now he wished he’d demanded more for this job. Ali was always poor-mouthing about how his wife had made him almost broke. Look at this! What was an extra thousand to that fucking goat eater? To a man who had lived in a house like this?

Leonard Stilwell believed that was a weakness that had held him back all his life. He was too generous and too trusting in his fellow man, and what had it gotten him? He tore himself away from the sights and got down to business. He found the little office near the kitchen, where Margot Aziz paid her bills. He opened the drawer that Ali had described to him and found the large envelopes, labeled by year. He looked through them until he found the folder for 2004. He tucked it under his arm and returned to the door, setting the thumb-turn that the maid had forgotten to set.

He was into the garage and the spring-loaded hinge on the door was in the process of closing the door behind him when he remembered. Ali said more than once for him to leave the door unlocked. Leonard stopped the door just in time. He unlocked the thumb-turn so that the maid, Lola, would catch hell for not setting it, just as Ali had ordered him to do. Of course Ali would never find out from Leonard that Lola had failed to set it in the first place.

But when he was walking away from the house, Leonard regretted that he hadn’t set the thumb-turn. Fucking rich assholes never give working people a break. He didn’t want to be responsible for the dumb old Mexican woman getting her ass chewed out. But he figured the divorce was so bitter that Ali’s ex would never fire the maid, if only to spite Ali.

On the other hand, the Mexican maid probably had family who would take care of her, and Social Security, and maybe welfare checks, and everything else the U.S. government gives to the millions of wetbacks in this country. The same federal government that turned him down the last time he applied for SSI assistance based on his poor health and addiction to rock cocaine. Some county social worker would always point to some shitty job like dishwasher and expect him to take it. In 2007 Los Angeles, it didn’t pay to be a white man.

After being seated safely behind the wheel of his Honda, Leonard opened the big folder to see if he could spot what it was that made this worth so much to Ali Aziz. But all he found were receipts, check stubs, and banking lists of cleared checks. Just ordinary household crap that anyone might keep around for a few years.

As he was driving down the hill to meet Ali Aziz, a lot was going on inside the head of Leonard Stilwell. He kept looking at the file folder. How could it be so important? And then there had been Ali’s insistence on the door being left unlocked to get the ex-wife more pissed off at the Mexican maid. But if the house was in escrow and the ex-wife was moving, the maid would be history anyway. It didn’t hang together and never had from the first moment Ali had tried to spin it.

When he got down to the Mt. Olympus sign, he saw Ali’s Jaguar farther down the road, facing up the hill. He parked on the opposite side of the road, got out with the file folder, and crossed to Ali’s car.

He handed the folder through the open window, and Ali said, “Good, Leonard. You done a very good job. Give me the garage opener and the piece of paper with the alarm code, please.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Leonard said, handing both items to Ali. “She has new door hardware. If I wasn’t an expert, I never coulda picked the lock.”

Ali gave Leonard a roll of hundred-dollar bills, saying, “It is all there, Leonard. Thank you for helping me.”

“It was a different lock setup. Not like you said it was,” Leonard repeated.

“You leave it unlocked?” Ali said, suddenly concerned.

“Yeah, sure,” Leonard said.