Dan Applewhite was called Doomsday Dan by the other cops because he lived in constant anticipation of calamity, with permanent frown lines and an inverted smile on his lips. He could be assertive and fearless, but after the fact he’d lapse into a funk and imagine the horrors that might befall him for his actions. He’d reach ungloved into a resisting doper’s mouth to pull out a five-gram stash of rock cocaine but later conclude that if he was lucky, he’d only contract staph from the encounter, instead of the AIDS virus. He was forty-nine years old and had one year to go before retirement, but he was morbidly convinced he’d never make it. Or if he did, the stock market would crash and bankrupt him, and there he’d be, a retired cop, begging for quarters on Hollywood Boulevard.
“I heard that Donald Trump carries a sterilizer for when he has to shake hands with lots of people,” Flotsam had said to Gil Ponce. “If I had to work with Doomsday Dan all the time, I’d buy him one. It gets embarrassing when he’s on a real downer and you go for a Fat Burger and he gloves up to spritz the table and scrub it down with paper napkins.”
Gil Ponce had hoped that a supervisor would move him to another training officer, but being a P1 with so little time left on his probation, Gil had resigned himself and felt lucky when deployment considerations put him with other partners. Despite Doomsday Dan’s pathological pessimism, the older cop had taught Gil a lot, and the twenty-two-year-old boot never doubted that Doomsday Dan was dependable and instructive.
More than once the older cop had lectured Gil on ways to take advantage of his Hispanic status in the diversity-conscious LAPD, especially now that the city of L.A. had a Mexican American mayor with political topspin.
“You’re Hispanic,” Dan had reminded him. “So use it when the time comes.”
“But I’m really not,” Gil Ponce finally said to his partner one evening when they were cruising the side streets in East Hollywood, looking for car prowlers. “Let me explain.”
Gil Ponce had been named after his paternal grandfather, who had immigrated with his parents to Santa Barbara, California, from Peru. All of their children, including Gil’s grandfather, had married Americans.
Gilberto Ponce III told Dan that he wished his mother, whose ancestry was a mix of Irish and Scottish, had named him Sean or Ian, but she said it would have dishonored his grandfather, whom young Gil loved as much as he loved his parents. Yet Gil had always felt like a fraud, especially now, when this FTO kept harping about the diversity promotions that a name like his could facilitate in Los Angeles, California, circa 2007.
“Having a Hispanic name is bogus,” Gil finally said that night to the senior officer.
“Read the nameplate on your uniform,” Dan Applewhite retorted. “You’re Hispanic. That means something today. Look around Hollywood Station. Except for the midwatch, white Anglos are in the minority. Half of the current academy class is Hispanic. L.A. is on the verge of being reclaimed by Mexico.”
“Okay, look at it this way,” the probie said. “What if my Peruvian grandpa had come from neighboring Brazil, where they have Portuguese names and don’t speak Spanish? Would I still rate diversity points?”
“Don’t make this too complicated just because you been to college,” Dan said. “It’s all about color and language.”
Gil said, “I know about as much Spanish as you do, and my skin is lighter than yours and my eyes are bluer. If you wanna work out the math, I’m exactly one-fourth Peruvian, and I don’t think any of that is mestizo in the first place.”
“You overanalyze,” Dan Applewhite said, wishing this college boy wouldn’t debate every goddamn thing, thinking it really was time for him to retire.
Gil said, “And if I had the same Peruvian DNA on my mother’s side with no Hispanic surname attached to me, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And should Geraldo Rivera’s kids rate diversity points? How about Cameron Diaz when she has kids? Or Andy Garcia? Or Charlie Sheen, for chrissake. He’s as much Hispanic as I am!”
The conversation was forever ended when Doomsday Dan pulled their shop to the curb, put it in park, and, turning to face his young partner, said, “This ain’t the city of angels, it’s the city of angles, where everybody’s looking for an edge. There’re hundreds of languages spoken right here in Babelwood, right? It’s all about diversity and preferences and PC. So if the lottery of life gave you an edge, you’re gonna accept it and be grateful. Because even though you’re a nice kid with potential, I’m telling you right here and now that if you don’t shut the fuck up and act like you been somewhere, as your FTO I’m gonna decide that you’re too goddamn stupid to be a cop and maybe shouldn’t even make your probation! Are you tracking?”
Then Dan Applewhite started to sneeze and had to grab his box of tissues and his nasal spray. “See what you did,” he said, sniffling. “You stressed me out and activated my allergies.”
When the older cop got his sneezing under control, his young partner thought things over, looked at his training officer, and said in English-accented high-school Spanish, “Me llamo Gilberto Ponce. Hola, compañero.”
Wiping his dripping nose, Doomsday Dan said, “That’s better. But you don’t have to overdo it. You Hispanics always tend to gild the lily.”
Leonard Stilwell was a thirty-nine-year-old crackhead with a mass of wiry red hair, a face full of freckles, and large, unfocused blue eyes that would have looked believable on a barnyard bovine. He had served two relatively short terms for burglary in the Los Angeles county jail system but had never been sentenced to state prison. The last conviction resulted from Leonard’s having tossed his latex gloves into a Dumpster after successfully completing his work. The cops later found the gloves, and, after cutting off the fingertips, the crime lab had successfully treated the inside of the fingertips and got good latent prints. After that conviction, Leonard Stilwell began watching CSI.
The county jail was so overcrowded that nonviolent prisoners like Leonard Stilwell could usually get an early release to make room for rapists, gangbangers, and spouse killers. So Leonard had benefited from all the crime that everyone else was committing and got squeezed out of the county jail onto the streets like toothpaste from a tube. Whenever he was free, he would hurry to old companions to try talking them into an advance against his cut from the next job, then he’d go on a rock cocaine binge for a few days to smoke the miseries of county jail from his memory bank before going back to work. But that had been when he was teamed with master burglar Whitey Dawson, who’d died from a heroin overdose six months earlier, his last words being “It don’t get any better!”
Leonard Stilwell had proved reasonably adept at breaking into liquor storage rooms, which had been Whitey Dawson’s specialty, and also showed some competence in refilling empty bottles of premium brands with the cheap stolen booze, then affixing a believable stamp to seal the cap. Twice he’d sold several of the doctored bottles, mixed with legitimate ones, to Ali Aziz of the Leopard Lounge, who had never caught on.
Now with Whitey Dawson gone, Leonard Stilwell was reduced to taking a job. It was the first time in fifteen years that he’d actually drawn a paycheck and he hated every minute of it. He was the only gringo at a second-rate car wash, and when the owner wasn’t yelling at him, the other workers were. One of the Mexicans was an old homeboy named Chuey, who sometimes had some decent rock to sell. Chuey never carried the rock on his person and he lived in a cottage in East Hollywood, where Leonard had to drive to if he wanted the dope.