Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

The gardener had moved the truck behind which Leonard Stilwell had parked, and a woman in the next house watched him when he walked to his car.

Leonard smiled at her and said, “Do you know which house Madonna lives in? I seem to have the wrong address.”

The woman looked at him suspiciously and said, “No, I don’t. I don’t think there’s anyone by that name on this block.”

“Oh, well, I’ll try farther down,” Leonard said with a wave.

While driving down the hill, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. Ali hadn’t hired him to take something out of that house. He’d been hired so that Ali could get into that house. And it had nothing to do with the big folder that Ali had carried back inside. He’d been in there for thirteen minutes. What was he looking for? He couldn’t have been stealing something that she’d miss or he’d have wanted Leonard to make it look like a burglary. Yet that’s what Ali did not want.

Leonard pulled to the curb at the first sewer opening he saw, hopped out of his car, and tossed the latex gloves down the hole. Now let’s see them try to CSI my ass again, he thought.

When he got back in the car, he took the tension bar and lock pick from his pocket and put them in the glove box. He was two blocks from the cyber café, where he figured to score plenty of rock with some of the Franklins he had, when it hit him: the answer to the Ali Aziz puzzle. Suddenly, he was on it. There was only one thing it could be. That fucking devious Ay-rab had planted a listening device in his ex-wife’s house!

If Leonard were to drive up there later tonight, he was sure he’d find somebody parked on that street who shouldn’t be there, somebody hired by Ali to monitor what was happening in the little lady’s bedroom. Leonard figured that this was the kind of shit that crazed rich people did during their divorces. People who didn’t really appreciate what was worthwhile in life.

So it had all been a lie, Leonard thought. Ali Aziz had hired him under completely false pretenses and had lied to him about nearly everything. Well, he had known something was wrong from the get-go and should have guessed sooner that Ali was a complete phony and liar. That’s the way it was nowadays. There wasn’t an honest person left in the whole fucking town.

TERRIBLE EVENTS were to take place on Hollywood Boulevard early that evening, events that left tourists screaming and children in tears. And Leonard Stilwell, flush with greenbacks and desperate for rock, walked right into it.

Things hadn’t been peaceful along the Walk of Fame in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre for some time. There was always a Street Character getting busted for something or other by the Street Character Task Force. Arrests had involved the red Muppet Elmo and Chewbacca and Mr. Incredible, to name a few. And the Crows had meetings where they tried to gather the hundred freelancing Street Characters-many of whom duplicated the same cartoon icons, and many of whom were drug addicts-to warn them that laws against aggressive panhandling would be enforced to the letter.

And it wasn’t that the Street Characters were only fighting the law, they were fighting one another too. For example, when a tourist was snapping photos of a Superman, a SpongeBob SquarePants might hop into the shot and try to hustle half the tip. This caused clashes among the Characters, some of them physical, as well as the forming of cliques. On a given day, one or two of the Spider-Man Characters might align with a Willy Wonka, who might be feuding with a Catwoman or a Shrek. And that might torque off Donald Duck, or the Wolf Man, or one of the many Darth Vaders. It could get ugly when teams like a Lone Ranger and Tonto or a Batman and Robin got hacked off at each other, especially since their tips from tourists depended in no small measure on the partnership itself. What was a Robin without a Batman?

But that was what happened on that Thursday evening, a few hours after Ali Aziz had been so busy perpetrating the future murder of his ex-wife. And shortly after Leonard Stilwell, with a thousand bucks in his kick, could not score at the cyber café or at Pablo’s Tacos because of a mini-task force of narcs who were jacking up every tweaker or street dealer anywhere near those two establishments.

It could have been that everyone, including Street Characters, was particularly gloomy from the announcement that there would no longer be a Hollywood Christmas Parade, an event inaugurated by the Hollywood chamber of commerce in 1928. The popular parade had featured Grand Marshal superstars such as Bob Hope, Gene Autry, James Stewart, Natalie Wood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charlton Heston. But as Hollywood had lost much of its glamour in recent years, so did the parade. Recent Grand Marshals included Tom Arnold, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda. And it had finally gotten so bad that they even had to settle for a local politician, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. That was probably the parade’s death knell.

So, on Hollywood Boulevard, on a scorching summer evening when the bone-dry air hit you in the face like a blast from a hair dryer, and the temperature inside Street Characters’ costumes was unbearable, the stage was set for riot. And to make things worse, a labor dispute was going on, and a local union had a group of members with signs and pickets demonstrating in front of the Kodak Center because of nonunion workers being employed there. A woman officer in plainclothes from LAPD’s Labor Relations Section was monitoring, but that was the only police presence.

Just after sunset, when Hollywood takes on its rosy glow, and the hundreds of tourists in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre feel the buzz that says, anything can happen here, something did. Some said that Robin started it, others blamed it on Batman. Either Robin called Batman “a big fat chiseling faggot” or Batman called Robin “a whiny little sissy punk.” Nobody was ever sure where the truth lay, but there was no doubt that Robin threw the first punch at his partner. It was a hook to Batman’s ample gut and Batman’s plastic breastplate didn’t protect him much.

He went, “Oooooof!” And sat down on Steve McQueen’s footprints, preserved in the cement of the forecourt.

Then a Spider-Man, one of the larger ones who had been aligned with that particular Batman during a recent Street Character feud, put a hand on Robin’s face and shoved him down onto the concrete imprint of Groucho Marx’s cigar.

Then Superman and his pal Wonder Woman-who was actually a wiry transvestite with leg stubble-called Spider-Man a “pukey insect” and proceeded to beat the living shit out of him while tourists screamed and children quaked in fear.

Leonard Stilwell had parked his Honda in the parking lot closest to the Kodak Center. He didn’t give a damn about the excessive parking charges, not with all those Franklins in his pocket. He figured to catch up with Junior tomorrow and give the Fijian back his tools, along with a President Grant.

He was surprised to discover that no matter how much money he had, sometimes there were things that money couldn’t buy. And so far that afternoon and evening, he could not buy rock cocaine anywhere. He hoped that one of the hooks from South L.A. who hung around the subway station might have a few rocks on him. If not, he could risk trying one of the Street Characters in front of the Chinese Theatre, but only as a last resort. He still remembered clearly what had happened at the Kodak Center to big Pluto when he had the dope in his head.

The woman officer from Labor Relations Section had run to the melee, holding up her badge and yelling, “Police officer!” but Superman and Wonder Woman wouldn’t back off and Spider-Man was moaning in pain. And the trouble was far from over.