Hollywood Moon

SEVENTEEN

MALCOLM WAS GOING to treat himself to his second burger of the day, this time at Hamburger Hamlet, and he was also thinking about going to a movie. When his cell phone chimed, he felt sure it was Naomi Teller and didn’t bother to look, so he eagerly said, “Hi!”

“Clark, it’s Bernie Graham,” Dewey said.

“Oh, yeah, how you feeling, Mr. Graham?”

“I’m a lot better than yesterday,” Dewey said. “In fact, my secretary, Ethel, asked me to call. We’d like to take you to dinner as a sort of reward for what you did.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Graham,” Malcolm said. “You don’t have to do that. I only hope we can start working together soon.”

“We will,” Dewey said. “I need to mend a bit longer, but in the meantime, we’d like to take you someplace for a bite to eat after you get off work tomorrow. Do you know Musso’s on Hollywood Boulevard east of Highland?”

“No,” Malcolm said, “but I’ll find it.”

“It’s a very old place with good, wholesome food like your mother used to make.”

“My mother. Yeah,” Malcolm said.

“What about meeting us at Musso and Frank at five thirty? Pull around to the back and park in their lot. Come in and look for Ethel and me at one of the tables near the bar.”

Malcolm thought it over and said, “Okay, Mr. Graham, but I sure hope we can get started on my job real soon. I need the money.”

“We will, Clark, we will,” Dewey said and clicked off.

After Eunice returned from her banking excursion, one of many that seemed to last an unusual amount of time, Dewey said matter-of-factly, “Eunice, I made an early dinner reservation for tomorrow at Musso’s. I thought we could use a little R & R.”

As expected, she was dismissive. “Knock yourself out, Dewey. I’ll stay here and earn a living for both of us. Bring me two Whoppers after you’re through.”

Then he said, “I was hoping you’d come this time. I invited the kid, like we discussed.”

“Kid?”

“Yeah, the new boy, Clark. It’s the least I can do for the way he rescued me after I got beat up by that meth-crazed runner. I think he’ll turn out to be a good little moneymaker.”

“Did the kid say he’d come?” Eunice said, her voice rising in anticipation.

“Yeah, he’s coming,” Dewey said. “It’ll be fun to see the lad in a nice restaurant. A real treat for him. I wish you’d come along too. We haven’t had a night out together in a long time.”

She paused for only a few seconds before saying, “Well, it has been a while. I guess I can use an evening off. But why do you have to eat at the old places? Christ, drive down Melrose and pick one of the hot ones: Lucques or Bastide or All’ Angelo. You think you can recapture your youth by dining at Musso and Frank or the Formosa Café? Get real, Dewey. Old Hollywood is gone with the wind.”

He stared at her. There was nobody else on the planet who could come close to turning an invitation into an insult the way Eunice could. There was so much he would’ve liked to say, but all he said was, “The kid’ll feel more relaxed in one of the old places that serve comfort food. Let’s think of him.”

“Okay, have it your way,” Eunice said and lit another cigarette.

“Good,” Dewey said. “I made an early reservation because the boy works at his job all day and he’ll be starved.”

“I guess we really should do this,” she said. “He did you a big favor, all right.”

Dewey went to his bedroom and left the door slightly ajar and turned on the shower in the bathroom. Then he crept to the open door and listened.

He heard Eunice dial a number, and when it was answered, she said, “Hello, Henri, this is Eunice Gleason. You gotta take me tomorrow for a cut and dye. And I’ll need one of the girls for a manicure and pedicure as well.”

Dewey listened while she got her response, and then she said, “No, Henri. It has to be tomorrow. It’s important to me. I’ll give you a tip that’ll make you very happy.”

There was another silence and she said, “Eleven o’clock, and noon for the nail work. Terrific! Thanks, sweetie!”

When she hung up, Dewey heard her actually start humming a tune. He had to close the door when she came toward the hallway, so he couldn’t make out the song. With a grim smile he wondered if it was one from her childhood, like “Puppy Love.”

Malcolm finished his hamburger and paid the bill, and when he was in the parking lot, he started thinking of Naomi. He was surprised how disappointed he’d been when it had been Bernie Graham on the phone instead of his girl. He’d been thinking about what it would be like to kiss Naomi and have her kiss him back. He intended to find out next time.

The only girls he’d ever kissed were those sluts he went to school with in Boyle Heights. Those cholas with their eyebrows plucked bare, wearing eye shadow and mascara that made them look like those old punk rockers with painted faces. The making-out part and the gropes he got from them had never excited him much, not even on the few occasions when one of them would strip naked in his bedroom when his mother was at work. They’d certainly never excited him enough that he could keep an erection long enough to get the thing done, and after one of them taunted him and asked if he was a homo, he never even tried again. That was just before Malcolm and his mother moved to Hollywood, and it was one of the reasons the move had secretly been such a relief to him. Those little bitches were spreading lies about his failed performances, he was sure of it.

There would be no such problems with Naomi Teller. He got hard just imagining how she’d look naked. Thinking of those developing little breasts and her narrow hips was thrilling. At her age, she was built more like a boy. And her nipples would be pink, not brown like the ones on those little east-side bitches who’d mocked him. But he would not rush things sexually. He only wanted to kiss Naomi romantically, and tell her she was his girl, and hear her say that he was her guy and that she would never forget him.

Malcolm sat in his car and impulsively phoned her. It rang four times, and just before he clicked off, she said, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” he said, smiling.

“I know,” she said.

“I was wondering if you were thinking of me,” Malcolm said. “I was thinking of you.”

“In a way I was, Clark,” she said, and her tone was not happy.

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that I’m too young to be seeing you. My parents would be very upset, so I think you shouldn’t call me anymore.”

The silence on the line lasted ten seconds before she heard him say, “Tell me the truth. Did your parents put you up to this?”

“They don’t even know about you, Clark. It’s the way I feel. I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I know you’ll find a girl your age and -”

“You little bitch!” he cried, his face reddening and his voice quaking. “I thought you were different!”

Stunned, Naomi Teller said, “Clark! I’m hanging up now! Please don’t ever call me again!”

“You’re just like -” But she clicked off before he could finish. He was in a rage. He tossed the cell phone onto the seat beside him and opened the glove box, taking out the box cutter. He snapped out the cutting blade. This was the same fury he’d last felt when he’d beaten that bitch with his fists. He withdrew the blade into the grip, put the box cutter in the pocket of his jeans, and sped from the parking lot of Hamburger Hamlet, heading west.

The code 2 call on Ogden Drive was given to 6-X-76, Dana Vaughn and Hollywood Nate. It came out as “See the woman, prowler there now.” Backing up 6-X-76 were Mindy Ling and R.T. Dibney, who’d just cleared from code 7.

The responding car pulled up to the curb with lights out in case the prowler was still at the scene, but Dana and Nate saw the exterior house lights were on. A man and woman Dana’s age were standing on the front porch. As the backup unit parked behind their car, Dana and Nate got out and Nate said, “What happened?”

Martha Teller was small-boned and fair, like her daughter. Her husband was taller, prematurely bald, with rounded shoulders and the beginning of a paunch. He said, “I heard what sounded like footsteps on the front walkway. Then I heard someone yell, ‘You bitch!’ I looked out but I didn’t see anybody. Then a minute later, this came flying through an upstairs window.”

He held out his hand, and the cops saw a baseball-size rock similar to the decorative stones in the Tellers’ front flower garden.

“How long ago did it happen?”

“Less than five minutes ago,” Mrs. Teller said. “You got here fast.”

“Who lives here with you?” Dana asked.

“We have two daughters,” Mrs. Teller said.

Nate said, “Do they have any idea who it might’ve been?”

“Our ten-year-old daughter, Shelly, is on a sleepover with my parents,” Mrs. Teller said. “That’s her bedroom window. Naomi’s fourteen, and she said she hasn’t any idea who could’ve done such a thing.”

With that, Dana turned toward Mindy and R.T. Dibney, who were out of their car, and held up four fingers, indicating code 4, no further assistance needed.

Mindy nodded and said, “We’ll cruise the neighborhood, Dana.”

“I’d like to talk to Naomi privately, if you don’t mind,” Dana said to the Tellers, and the cops followed the couple into the house.

“She’s very upset,” Mrs. Teller said.

“I understand,” Dana said. “I have a daughter who’s eighteen. Believe me, I’m sensitive to teenage issues.”

Ogden Drive was a pleasant residential street with lots of trees on both sides. Shop 6-X-46 wasn’t cruising for more than three minutes when R.T. Dibney craned his neck sharply to the right, and Mindy uttered the line so often said by one partner to another when on patrol: “What’d you see?”

“Nothing,” R.T. Dibney said, turning forward again, but when Mindy looked over her shoulder, she observed a shapely woman in a T-shirt and shorts walking from her car to a lighted portico.

“For God’s sake!” Mindy said. “Can’t you at least get your inner creep under control when we’re actually looking for a suspect?”

“The kid’s long gone,” he said. “Just some brat pissed off at his girlfriend. Dana’ll get the girl to give up his name, and they’ll call his parents. It might make them reduce the little bastard’s weekly allowance from fifty bucks to forty.”

“What’s this?” Mindy said, seeing the silhouette of a car coming south in their direction with lights out. Then the headlights flashed on and she saw it was another police unit, searching slowly. Both cars stopped, facing opposite directions, and Mindy was looking at Sheila Montez.

“A rock thrower,” Mindy explained. “Busted out an upstairs window and GOA.” By which she meant gone on arrival.

“We didn’t see any peds roaming around,” Sheila said. “Maybe it was a neighbor kid.”

“I think I’ll just cruise for another few minutes,” Mindy said, to which R.T. Dibney grumbled something unintelligible.

“We may as well check around for a while too,” Sheila said to Aaron. “Even the alleys around here are nice. No mattresses or fish heads.”

“And people wave at you with all five fingers,” Aaron said.

There were several cars parked in front of residences on Ogden Drive during the early evening hours, and 6-X-66 drove past one of them. An old red Mustang was parked all the way north, almost at the corner of Sunset Boulevard. Sheila Montez and Aaron Sloane were heading south and were parallel with a house two doors from the Teller home, when Sheila saw a silhouette move across a lawn, heading away from the Tellers’.

“I saw something!” she said, hitting the brakes.

“What is it?” Aaron said, head on a swivel.

Sheila pulled into a driveway, backed out, and turned north, saying, “On your side. Turn the spot on the yards. I think I saw somebody moving through the trees.”

Aaron turned on the spotlight as she slowed, and he said, “I see him! A rabbit!”

Sheila saw him too, a slender male figure darting into the darkness beside a property on the east side of the street.

“I’m bailing!” he said, and when Sheila stopped for an instant, he was out of the car, flashlight in one hand, baton in the other, running east through a residential property into the darkness.

Meanwhile, R.T. Dibney, in 6-X-46, was complaining to Mindy Ling, saying, “What’s the use of trying to look for prowlers anyways with these politically correct little mini-lights?”

Mindy didn’t answer. She was too busy counting the days left in this deployment period, after which she was definitely going to ask for a partner reassignment. She thought she might even take a few special days off in order to shorten what had come to seem like a jail sentence.

But then she heard the RTO’s radio voice say, “All units in the vicinity of Ogden Drive between De Longpre and Sunset, officer in foot pursuit of prowler, eastbound through residential property, toward Genesee. Six-X-Forty-six, handle, code three.”

Hollywood Nate, unaware of the prowler sighting, was writing a crime report and having a cup of coffee in the living room of the Teller home with Naomi’s father, who he learned was a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Naomi’s mother was up in the bedroom, cleaning up broken glass and patching the window with cardboard. Dana and Naomi were alone in Dr. Teller’s study, where Dana had closed the door for privacy.

Naomi had continued to adamantly deny knowing who had yelled and thrown a rock through the upstairs window. Nor had Naomi told Dana Vaughn how guilty she felt because her bedroom was in the rear of the residence, and the bedroom that was attacked belonged to her younger sister. Something had made her lie defensively when Clark had asked if that was her bedroom facing the street, and now she felt cowardly and remorseful for having done it.

Naomi thought that the police officer was a very attractive woman with eyes that were alert, yet calm and patient. Even though she was fairly certain this officer would understand, Naomi just couldn’t bring herself to look at her while they chatted.

Finally, Dana said, “Naomi, I think you might have some idea who threw the rock. Someone could’ve been hurt. Certainly your family is frightened. Why don’t you tell me who you think it might’ve been. We won’t go charging over to the person’s house, but we’ll take some steps to see that it doesn’t happen again.”

Naomi looked straight into Dana Vaughn’s eyes and started to speak. But she stopped, looked away again, and said, “I just don’t know who he was. Maybe some crazy boy from middle school that just doesn’t like me. I really don’t know.”

Dana said, “Naomi, I’m sure you have a cell phone, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to give you my card with my personal cell number on it. I’d like you to give me your cell number. If you think very hard about it and decide you might have an idea who the rock thrower is, please give me a call. You don’t have to tell your parents about it if you don’t want to. We’ll keep this between the two of us until we’re sure we can quietly determine who actually did it. Is that a deal?”

“Okay,” Naomi said in a voice barely audible.

“We’ll help you, honey,” Dana said to Naomi Teller.

R.T. Dibney had been dropped off on Sunset Boulevard. He was out with his mini-flashlight, searching in an alley east of Ogden Drive, not just for the prowler, but for Aaron Sloane, who hadn’t been heard from since he’d leaped from the car and started running. There was plenty of chatter on the tac frequency that he was picking up on his rover but nothing from Aaron. He’d heard Sheila Montez talking to Mindy Ling twice, and Sheila’s voice was growing desperate.

Then he heard Aaron’s voice in bits and pieces, and Sheila’s voice said, “You’re breaking up!” and Aaron’s voice said, “Can you… lost… can’t… radio!” And everyone but Sheila Montez thought that at least he was probably okay even if his rover wasn’t, but where in the hell was the prowler? And within moments, two more black-and-whites from Watch 3 were cruising slowly along streets and alleys, searching with spotlights.

R.T. Dibney saw an open gate in a rear yard. He entered and heard a dog bark but realized it was coming from the house next door. By now, several homes in the area had their exterior lights on, and residents were outside, trying to see what was going on. Then another dog barked, and it sounded like a big one. R.T. Dibney was ready to draw his nine, when he thought he heard a sound behind him. Before he could turn, somebody slammed a shoulder into him and he was propelled forward right into the unlighted swimming pool, where he sank to the bottom and lost both his rover and his flashlight. By the time he came up, sputtering, choking, and gasping for air, he neither saw nor heard anything but the dog next door barking wildly.

When Aaron Sloane finally showed up on Ogden Drive, his uniform dusty from climbing into three yards after a shadow, he was limping and frustrated, and he slashed at a hedge with his baton. He’d been close enough to the prowler to see that the guy had dark hair and wasn’t very big, but that was all he’d seen.

When Sheila Montez spotted him standing alone in the moonlight beside a purple flowering jacaranda tree, she jammed on the brakes, leaped from the car, and ran straight at him, not knowing or caring that Mindy Ling was out on foot less than thirty yards away, shining her light into cars parked on the street.

Aaron was massaging his leg when he saw Sheila, and he said, “I pulled my hamster.”

Sheila threw her arms around Aaron’s neck, and he was astonished. He was even more astonished to see her eyes glistening and to hear her say, “When I couldn’t reach you on your rover, I thought… I thought…”

“I’m okay, Sheila!” he said. “I’m okay.” And now he wasn’t even thinking about the prowler, or his injured hammy, and he didn’t want her to stop holding on to him, and all of his anger at the prowler and his malfunctioning rover had morphed into unbridled joy.

Mindy Ling pretended to be searching very intently when the partners of unit 6-X-66 got back in their shop, and Mindy saw the silhouette of their profiles only inches apart and closing.

Driving east on Sunset Boulevard, Malcolm Rojas was more excited than he’d ever been in his life. He couldn’t contain himself and began laughing, overwhelmed by the unimaginable thrill of what he’d accomplished that night. He wished there were a way he could share it with someone, but of course he could not. He wished they all could’ve seen what he did to the cop. Especially all those cholo punks in Boyle Heights who’d bullied him and called him Li’l Hondoo. He wished Naomi could’ve seen it.

There was just a twinge of anger left in him when he thought about Naomi, but most of it was gone now. He’d go home and relive this evening in his mind and masturbate. And now he was actually looking forward to having a meal at a nice restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard tomorrow evening with Bernie Graham and his secretary, Ethel. That was exciting too because it would mark the beginning of his job. He felt now like he could accomplish anything he wanted to do. This was the start of a new life for Malcolm Rojas. He felt like a man. Then he thought he might legally change his name to Clark Jones.

Some of the cars belonging to residents and visitors previously parked on Ogden Drive had driven away by the time the searchers were ready to give up. A few of the drivers getting into those cars had been interrogated by police, but most had not, including the driver of an old red Mustang, who by then was nearly home.

It was 6-A-35 from Watch 3 that first spotted R.T. Dibney standing on Sunset Boulevard in his socks, holding his shoes in his hand as heavy traffic sped by and headlights lit him. His Sam Browne and holstered pistol were slung over his shoulder, and his uniform was still dripping. As soon as the extraordinary encounter between the prowler and R.T. Dibney was described on the tac frequency by 6-A-35, at least four cars sped to the pickup location. Half a dozen cops from Watch 5 and Watch 3 jumped from their shops to take cell phone shots of the soppy cop, now stripping off his T-shirt, with his Kevlar vest and uniform shirt spread across the roof of the first black-and-white to arrive.

There, under a bright summer moon and a relatively smogless sky over Hollywood, they chattered and chuckled and clicked photos like crazy while R.T. Dibney shook his fist and cursed them and the mothers who’d spawned them.

Dana Vaughn was one of the cops taking photos, and Hollywood Nate said to her, “I wish we had a video cam with a zoom lens. R.T.’s normally twitchy mustache is vibrating like an electric toothbrush.”