Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

“Do you have anything else that proves you’re Jasmine McVicker?” Gil asked.

She said, “I only have the one credit card. Look, Officer, you can walk across the street to the Leopard Lounge and anybody’ll tell you I work there.”

Gil looked at Cat over the roof of the ’vette, and Cat gave a shrug that said, Your call.

The fact was, young Gil Ponce wanted to go inside the Leopard Lounge and see what an upscale titty bar looked like. He said, “Let’s find a place to park your car and see if you’re who you say you are. If you are, I’ll give you a warning for driving without a license but no ticket. Fair enough?”

Just then, Jasmine’s cell phone rang and she grabbed it from her purse. Margot’s voice came on in a whisper, saying, “Showtime.”

Quickly Jasmine said, “I’ll be delayed. A very nice police officer has detained me for not having my driver’s license.”

“Goddamnit!” Margot whispered. “Get rid of him!”

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” Jasmine said, clicking off.

To Gil she said, “Where do I park?”

“Right up at the corner, in the red zone,” Gil said. “My partner can watch your car so you don’t get a ticket while you and me run inside for a minute.”

“But then I’ll have to come back out and move my car to some legal place before I can go back in again! I have to see one of the other dancers about something important and I’m late!”

“Better than getting a traffic citation, isn’t it?” Gil said. Then he added, “Are you really a dancer?”

Jasmine was desperate. If there hadn’t been a woman cop with him, she’d have given him her address and offered him a late date. Anything to give her fifteen minutes of goddamn parking so she could do what she had to do!

“Okay, okay!” she said. “But let’s just leave my car here for two minutes and run across the street. Please, Officer, it’ll save time!”

Gil shrugged at Cat, who gave a nod, having figured this one out. Cat had pumped up her young boot’s sagging morale to the point where he wanted to stroll into the topless bar with this hottie and check out the other flesh onstage. And who knows? Maybe get Jasmine’s phone number. They lose their innocence fast, these male rookies, Cat Song thought.

While Jasmine was locking her car, purse in hand, and Gil Ponce was making a mental list of cliché questions-such as how did such a beautiful girl end up dancing at the Leopard Lounge-Cat Song walked to their shop, opened the door, and listened for radio calls.

After they got inside the nightclub, it didn’t take thirty seconds for Jasmine to wave one of the harried, perspiring bartenders to the end of the bar to identify her for Gil Ponce, who couldn’t have cared less. He could barely hear the bartender over the erotic, pounding beat from Ali’s $75,000 sound system, and he just nodded at everything the man shouted over the nightclub din. Actually, Gil Ponce was preoccupied, gaping at two dancers onstage, pole writhing under strobes, one of whom was Ali’s stunning new star, Loxie Fox, her G-string studded with tightly folded $5 and $10 bills.

Cat Song snapped him out of it when she suddenly appeared behind him, saying in his ear, “Excuse me, Officer Casanova. I’m so glad you got your mojo back, but I thought you might like to know, there’s a hell of a pursuit coming our way from Rampart Division. Would you care to jump on it, or would you rather just sit this one out for a rainbow drink with an umbrella in it?”

Officer Gil Ponce raced out of the Leopard Lounge without asking for Jasmine McVicker’s phone number. Without even saying good-bye to her.

Jasmine hurried to the dancers’ bathroom and locked the door behind her. She opened her purse and grabbed the eyedrops she’d bought in a shop on La Brea. It supplied cosmetics to makeup artists working in film and television, drops that helped actors to cry their eyes out on cue. She poured them into both eyes, heeding Margot’s admonition to “make that mascara run.” When she was finished, her vision was so blurred she could hardly see her face in the mirror, but she knew she looked like hell. She was ready. Showtime.

Ali’s office door was locked, and Jasmine figured he was counting the cash. On big nights like this one, he made numerous trips to the bar to retrieve large currency notes, replacing $100 bills with $50s, $20s, $10s, and lots of $5s, which was the smallest tip that customers offered in this upscale nightclub.

Jasmine knew that Ali arranged for private security pickups at the end of the night when the money pile in his safe grew too large. She’d seen that often enough. She also knew that the money he took in at the Leopard Lounge was greater than the IRS, or Margot, or god almighty, would ever know about. And that if Margot thought she was getting half of Ali’s assets, she was kidding herself. Jasmine had informed Margot that she believed there was a safety deposit box, but she didn’t know where. Margot told her to work on it.

Jasmine banged on the door frantically and yelled, “Ali!”

“Who is there?” he called out.

“Jasmine! Open up!”

She knew he was looking through the peephole at her and then he opened the door, startled by her appearance.

“What has been happening to you?” Ali said, closing the door and locking it. “I thought you were having an ankle sprain?” He was looking weekend sharp, in one of his monogrammed white dress shirts and a charcoal gray Valentino suit, with black loafers.

Through a fluffy blur she could see that on the desktop there were stacks of currency. She ran to the client’s chair and sat while Ali stood between her and the desk, instinctively guarding his money.

“I just left Margot!” she said, wiping the mascara from her face, looking up at him with eyes overflowing.

“What is happening?” he said.

“You told me to spy on her!” Jasmine said, trying to sob.

“Yes, yes!” he said. “What is happening?”

“She’s Hoovering cocaine, Ali! She had lines laid out on her dressing table. There musta been three, four thousand bucks’ worth of blow! I did one line, sort of, just so I could find out what’s happening in that house.”

“What? Tell me!” he said.

“They wanted me to do a three-way,” Jasmine said. “Her and him, but I told them no way. I told him I don’t do kink. He was even more trashed than she was. I was scared of that guy!”

“Nicky!” he said frantically. “Where is Nicky?”

“He was there,” she said.

“WHAT?”

It was so loud, she jerked back in the client chair, her head thumping against the tufted leather back.

“I tried to take her aside and talk sense to her. Him, he was just roaming in and out of the house in his Speedo. He’d jump in the pool and then he’d come inside and do a line. Then he’d jump in the pool and swim some more. He kept wanting her to swim, but I kept telling her it was too risky in her condition. I kept telling her to stay in her bedroom and go to sleep.”

Ali seemed to forget the money then. He walked around the desk and sat in his swivel chair. He pushed the stacks of currency aside and put his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands. In less than a minute his face was more tearstained than hers.

She worried then that he might be too devastated to act. She was trying to provoke unbridled rage, not debilitating grief. She said, “Nicky wasn’t right there when they were doing the lines. He was in his own bedroom.”

Ali wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands and said, “Nicky has plenty energy. Nobody is going to keep Nicky in his bedroom.”

Deciding to use Nicky as the final card she’d play, Jasmine said, “The guy’s name is Lucas. He’s a big, young guy, Margot’s age. She met him at a nightclub on the Strip. I think the guy wants to take over Margot and her house, and he supplies her with coke.”