“Her friend Sadie did,” he said. “She went to the shelter with Ruthie. You can go there and ask them about it. I tried to stay outta their affairs. They’re businesswomen, if you get my meaning.”
“Are you telling us that all this blood came from Ruthie?” Charlie Gilford said.
“No, some of it came from Ruthie,” the man said, looking at Charlie like he was stupid or something.
“Did some of it come from Sadie?” Charlie asked.
“No,” the fat man said. “Some of it came from me.”
“From you?” Gert said. “Where from you?”
“From my schwanze,” he said. “See, I been having lots of trouble peeing, so I went to the clinic a few weeks ago and had some surgery. A doctor put a catheter clear up my willie with one of those balloons inside my bladder to hold everything in place. But the other night after I drank a couple forties and a quart of port, I got mad at it and ripped it out. Blood squirted everywhere.”
Both Charlie Gilford and Gil Ponce involuntarily uttered painful groans from stabs of sympathy pain. Gil doubled over a bit and Charlie grabbed his own crotch while Gert sneered at the two of them. Gil already knew she thought they were all just a bunch of pussies, so he stood up straight, took a deep breath, and told himself to maintain.
Gert said to the drunk, “You mean your thingie bled that much?”
“You can’t imagine,” the big man said. “I almost called nine-one-one. Wanna see it?”
Both Charlie Gilford and Gil Ponce said, “No!” But Gert Von Braun said, “Yeah, whip it out.”
He did. And while Charlie Gilford and Gil Ponce got busy looking in other directions, Gert shined her beam on the fat man’s penis and said, “Whoa, that’s gnarly! You gotta have a doctor stitch it up. That thing looks like the pork sausage my mom used to make.”
The detective said to Gert and Gil, “How about you two driving Mr. Kenmore here to the shelter and grabbing Ruthie and Sadie. In case they used different names, he can point them out. Treat this like a possible homicide. They coulda killed the baby.”
“Oh, no!” the fat man said. “She was going to adopt it out. She thought she could get maybe two thousand bucks for it if it was white. And sure enough it was. She cried when she saw it was dead. She wouldn’t hurt the baby. It was stillborn. I’m a witness. I put it in the corner and covered it with a box. We wouldn’t throw it in a Dumpster or anything like that. They were gonna come back and take care of the body like responsible citizens.”
“We gotta corroborate everything you told us and we’ll need you to help us do it,” Charlie Gilford said.
That was Gert’s cue, and she headed out to the front street to get their car and drive it around to the parking lot so they didn’t have to walk so far with the fat drunk.
“Just find the two women,” Charlie Gilford said to Gil Ponce. “Bring them to the station and we’ll let the Homicide team decide how they wanna handle all this.”
Gil said, “If the women don’t wanna come, do we place them under arrest?”
“Absolutely,” Charlie Gilford said. “We got a dead baby. This is a crime scene until somebody tells us different.”
“Nobody committed a crime,” the fat man said, reeling again and grabbing the corner of the concrete wall. “Ruthie woulda been a fine mother.”
Charlie Gilford said, “Yeah, well, that’s heartwarming, but I doubt that our Crows will wanna share this tearjerker the next time they meet the folks from the Restore Hollywood project.”
And while Charlie Gilford was dialing the Homicide D3 again to tell her about the new developments, and Gil Ponce was watching the detective, eager to ask more questions about his further duties, nobody was watching Livingston G. Kenmore. He just couldn’t stay upright any longer. He staggered a few steps over to the darkened stairwell and saw a pad of some kind on the third step and sat down on it.
“Holy shit!” Gil Ponce yelled. “Get up! Get up! Get the fuck up!”
It all happened just as the D3 on the other end of the line said to Charlie, “Is there any obvious trauma to the dead baby?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Compassionate Charlie Gilford after turning toward the commotion. “There is now.”
NINE
THE CROWS HAD a recurring problem and it had to do with the Nightclub Committee’s complaints about hot dog vendors. The prior evening, the vice unit, working in concert with the Crows and night-watch patrol, initiated Operation Hot Dog.
The night-watch and midwatch patrol officers had been too busy and too short staffed to deal with the vendors, and things had gotten out of hand. On Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards, where so many nightclubs were springing up-clubs whose purported ownership changed nearly as often as the tablecloths-Latino hot dog vendors were setting up carts to catch nightclub customers coming and going during the wee hours. On the night of Operation Hot Dog, there had been more than fifty vendors cited for illegal sidewalk sales, and their carts had been impounded. Now the station parking lot was jammed with carts and rotting hot dogs, and everyone was wondering if the “wienie sweep” had been a bit overzealous.
Ronnie got relieved of any responsibilities for Operation Hot Dog when she and Bix Ramstead were asked to meet 6-A-97 in Southeast Hollywood. The Crow who usually took care of calls in that neighborhood was on a short leave due to a death in his wife’s family. There were not many black residents living in Hollywood Division, and the absent Crow, a black officer, had established rapport with some of them.
Six-A-97 had responded to a complaint regarding shopping carts, five of them, that were lying around a wood-frame cottage rented to a Somalian couple. When Ronnie and Bix arrived, the older of the two waiting cops nodded to Bix Ramstead.
“We’re not trying to kiss this one off,” he said, “but you Crows deal with chronic-noise complaints and quality-of-life shit, right?”
“And ‘-quality-of-life’ covers a lot of territory,” Bix said wearily. “What’s the deal?”
The cop said, “The woman who called us says the people who live in that little house are from Somalia and the husband doesn’t like black people, so she can’t talk to them.”
“Somalians are black people,” Bix said.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t like American black people. So she wants us to talk to the guy and tell him that in this country, you can’t just walk off the market parking lot with shopping carts. In fact, she says the Somalian even jacked a cart from her teenage son when he tried to take it back to the market. She says the guy just doesn’t get it about shopping carts.”
“So did you try talking to the guy?” Ronnie asked.
“He won’t answer,” the cop said, “but the woman swears he’s in there. Can you take over? We got some real crime to crush.”
There it was, Ronnie thought. They were real cops, the Crows were something other.
“Okay,” Bix said. “What’s her name?”
“Mrs. Farnsworth.” The cop was obviously happy to dump this one on the Crows, since patrol officers believed that Crows never did a day’s work anyway.
Mrs. Farnsworth was a stout woman with straightened gray hair combed in a Condi Rice flip. Her bungalow, across the street from the Somalians’, had a geranium garden in front and was freshly painted. She invited the cops in and asked if they’d like a cold drink, but they declined.
“I’d like to handle this my own self,” she told them, “but that Somali man is mean. He has a big scar down the side of his face and he never smiles. His wife is very sweet. I talk to her when she passes on the way to the market. She’s about twenty years younger than him, maybe more. And she left him once. I didn’t see her for maybe three weeks and I don’t know where she went. Then a week ago she came back.”
“We’ll have the shopping carts picked up,” Bix said. “Any idea why he keeps taking different ones?”