In fact, he was so desperate he decided to go out that evening and try to game some chump at the ATM in the shopping mall. There was a market there that he’d burglarized on two occasions back when Whitey Dawson was alive and not so heroin crazed. Whitey could disarm most of the alarms they’d encounter, and he was a master with lock picks. Leonard was no good at any of it but had always been available to Whitey. Now Leonard had fallen on very hard times and been forced to become resourceful.
He’d tried an ATM trap four times and each attempt had failed, but he’d learned a few things through failure. This time Leonard made sure he had strips of black film that would be undetectable when pressed against the black slot reader at an ATM. He folded over the ends of the film and attached glue strips on the folded portions. What he’d failed to do last time, he corrected by cutting slits on the film so the card didn’t get kicked back out the slot by the mechanism.
It was getting close to the hour when most of the stores were closing in Hollywood, so he didn’t waste time. He dressed in a clean Aloha shirt, reasonably clean jeans, and sneakers, in case he had to beat feet in a hurry. He drove his old Honda to the mall parking lot, leaving the car near enough to the ATM for a fast exit but not so close that a witness would see him jumping into it. He strolled to the ATM and pretended to be inserting a card to make a transaction. Instead he inserted the trap into the slot and pressed hard on the glue strips on the upper and lower lip of the card reader. Then he retreated and waited.
An elderly woman approached the ATM holding a child by the hand, probably the woman’s grandson, by the looks of them. They appeared to be Latinos, and Leonard cursed his luck. If they were illegal aliens who didn’t speak enough English to give up the PIN, it wasn’t going to work. But on second thought, they were too well dressed to be illegals, and it gave him hope.
The woman inserted her card, but nothing happened. She punched in her PIN and waited. Still nothing happened. She looked at the boy, who Leonard guessed was about ten years old. Then Leonard strolled closer and heard them speaking a foreign language that wasn’t Spanish.
Leonard pulled out an old ATM card he carried for this game, made sure that they saw it, and said, “Excuse me, is there something wrong with the machine?”
The boy said, “The card is stuck inside. It won’t come out.”
“Lemme try it,” Leonard said. “I’ve had this happen to me.”
The woman looked at Leonard and he gave her his biggest freckle-faced, blue-eyed, reassuring smile. She said something to the boy in that strange language and the boy answered her.
Up close, while he was trying to sell Leonard Stilwell to them, she didn’t look so old, maybe the same age as his mother, who would be fifty-eight if she were alive. And up close this woman looked smart. And wary.
“Where’re you from?” Leonard asked the boy.
“My grandmother is Persian,” the boy said. “I am American.”
He should’ve known. They were all over Iran-geles. And he’d never met a poor one, so he was feeling pretty stoked when he said, “See, I know what to do to get your card back. You punch in your PIN number at the same time that I press ‘cancel’ and ‘enter.’ Then the card should just pop out.”
The boy spoke again to the woman, and she reluctantly moved aside for Leonard, who stepped up and put his fingers on the “cancel” and “enter” keys. She looked at him and he smiled again, trying not to swallow his spit. When he did that, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbed, a sure sign of nerves.
“We have to time this right,” he said to the boy. “Tell her she has to put in her PIN number now.”
Instead, it was the boy who moved next to Leonard. He said, “I can do it. I’m ready.”
“Go,” Leonard said, and he watched the boy punch the five digits as Leonard pressed the “cancel” and “enter” keys.
And then Leonard stepped back, scratched his head theatrically, making dandruff flakes appear on his bird’s nest of rusty red hair, and said, “I’m sorry, it’s always worked before. Can’t help you, I guess.”
Leonard shrugged at the woman and, lifting his hands palms up, turned and walked toward the parked cars, where he crouched behind the first row and watched them. The woman and boy conversed for a moment and then went inside the store while Leonard sprinted to the ATM machine, carefully lifted the folded tips of the film, gently pulled, and captured the ATM card. Then he punched in the PIN, took a chance on asking for $300, the maximum daily withdrawal allowed by the bank whose name was on the card, and jackpot!
Fifteen minutes later, Leonard Stilwell was parking in the pay lot closest to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, not even pissed off by the exorbitant parking fee because he had three bills in his kick. He was looking for Bugs Bunny, not the tall Bugs Bunny who often showed up on Friday night, but the short Bugs Bunny who always kept a stash of rocks inside his bunny head as he hopped around in his rabbit suit with a big foam-rubber carrot in his paw, saying, “What’s up, doc?” to every tourist with a camera who got within ten yards of him.
The Street Characters were always out in numbers on soft summer nights like this one. He saw Superman, Batman, Porky Pig, and SpiderMan, one of several, in his predatory pose with one knee raised, looking more like a bird than a spider. Summer nights like this, when the smog conditions created a low sky, cutting heaven down to size, made people feel that paradise could be found right here on Hollywood Boulevard. They made this a magical place for anyone with hopes and dreams.
Leonard Stilwell, who knew something about Hollywood magic, watched an intent tourist with a purse dangling from a strap over her shoulder snap a photo of her husband, who was posing with Catwoman. This, while a lean and nimble teenage boy expertly opened her purse and removed her wallet, disappearing into the crowd before she’d even asked Catwoman to pose for one more.
When it was time to pay the amazon for the photo, the woman said, “Oh, Mel! Melvin! My wallet’s gone!”
Leonard hoped he’d never have to resort to the risky trade of purse and pocket picking, and as he sidled through the throngs, he heard Catwoman say, “I hope you don’t think I dress up and pose for free, Melvin. Nobody got your wallet, did they?”
When Leonard saw the Hulk, he was hopeful. He knew that the Hulk was a pal of Bugs Bunny because he once saw them leave together in the same car. But the Hulk was very busy at the moment with no less than six Asian tourists lining up to take photos with him. Ditto for Mr. Incredible, Elmo, and even Count Dracula, whose blood-dripping leer was too scary for photos with little kids.
Then Leonard spotted him. Bugs Bunny was doing a double shoot with the Wolf Man, both of them sandwiching an obese, fifty-something woman wearing a sequined “I Love Hollywood” baseball cap, her chubby hands caressing the heads of both Street Characters.
When Bugs had collected his tip from the woman, Leonard approached him and whispered in a two-foot ear, “I need some rock.”