The phlegmatic Cuban just shrugged and said, “Better than working down in Watts, ’mano.” He had recently transferred to Hollywood Division from Southeast Division. Then he added, “We got to take some shit from the jotos in the Hills. They might be friends of the chief. Or maybe the mayor. That’s the way life is.”
“I own my own pink slip,” Preston Lilly said. “My pension’s vested. I could commit murder and they’d still have to send my pension checks to me at San Quentin. And I already filed my retirement papers, so nobody better fuck with me, in the Hills or in the flats. I got nothing to lose, compadre.”
Superman found that out when Preston Lilly stepped in to break up the tussle. Because Marilyn Monroe was sober, she’d been able to get a good choke hold on the larger Street Character, and Superman was sitting on Grauman’s forecourt with his back to Marilyn, who had him in not only a choke hold but also a scissors grip, with her shaved legs around his waist. The Incredible Hulk, a gentle soul who hated violence of any kind, had picked up Marilyn Monroe’s purse and was guarding it and pleading in vain for the combatants to stop fighting.
Marilyn Monroe’s platinum blond wig got twisted askew at the start of the fight and the hair was hanging in her face like a sheepdog’s. Her white dress was ripped open all the way down the side and had been torn off one shoulder. A large falsie had popped up out of her bra and was resting on Superman’s shoulder like an inverted cereal bowl. The panty hose on both of Marilyn’s legs was shredded, and her open-toed three-inch spikes were now without heels. And while Superman sat helpless, Catwoman pounded his face with relatively ineffectual blows that nevertheless made him howl in drunken rage.
“You’re dead!” he screamed. “When I get up, I’m killing you, you nigger cunt!”
“You gotta get up first, peckerwood!” she yelled back, and socked him in the eye with her little fist.
The first thing that Officer Preston Lilly did was grab Catwoman by the arm and flick her away from the brawlers. Then he said, “Cease and desist, Ms. Monroe! And you, too, Man of Steel!”
Meanwhile, there were hundreds of tourists watching, whistling, howling like coyotes, and it seemed like every single one of them was snapping photos.
Marilyn Monroe released her scissors hold as well as the choke hold and she stumbled to her feet with one shoe missing now. When Preston Lilly took Superman by the arm to drag him to his feet, the still boozy Street Character said, “Take your hands off me, you bald-headed pig fucker!”
“I don’t like your mouth,” Preston Lilly said. “You better lock it up.”
Superman answered that by spitting on Preston Lilly.
The big cop looked down and saw the spittle dripping from his LAPD badge onto the blue uniform shirt pocket and running down to the pewter pocket button.
Mario Delgado saw Preston Lilly instinctively ball his huge right fist, but the little Cuban stepped in fast and said, “Whoa, partner! You’re being watched by three hundred witnesses and about a hundred of them might be hostile.”
That made the Cuban cop take charge of things and grab one of Superman’s arms, and then both cops got Superman’s hands cuffed behind his back.
Marilyn Monroe held up a heel-less shoe and yelled to Superman in her natural baritone voice, “I paid three hundred bucks for my Louis Vuitton’s and that was a sale price, you sleazy turd! I’m suing your sorry ass!”
The arriving midwatch units got things under control, and after making the milling throngs move along, they began interviewing the other Street Characters who had witnessed the fracas. Preston Lilly walked Superman to their shop and strapped him in the backseat, then got behind the wheel to await his partner.
Mario Delgado was busy talking to Flotsam and Jetsam, who were trying to help Marilyn Monroe get what was left of her white dress pinned up enough to cover her pantie girdle. It was then that Superman, bitching that he was the real victim and that Preston Lilly was a fascist swine, hacked up a big loogie and spit it through the caged partition of the police car right onto the shaved skull of Officer Preston Lilly.
Mario Delgado was shocked when he turned and saw Preston Lilly suddenly start up the engine of the black-and-white and heard him yell, “Catch a ride back to the station, partner! I gotta get Superman outta here!”
The black-and-white squealed away from the curb and was gone. Just like that.
“What the hell?” the baffled Cuban cop said to Flotsam, who replied, “Dude, I think Preston don’t want any witnesses.”
Nearly forty minutes later, Mario Delgado paced anxiously in the parking lot of Hollywood Station, but still his partner and Superman had not appeared. He went inside and up to the lunchroom, where he bought a soda from the machine and then joined Hollywood Nate and Snuffy Salcedo in the report room.
The Cuban cop was not finished with his soda when they all heard yammering coming from the passageway leading from the parking lot door. Mario Delgado and Nate and Snuffy all ran out of the report room and found Preston Lilly walking the handcuffed superhero to the holding tank, where he put him inside, removed the handcuffs, and pushed him down onto the bench. He closed the door, but everyone could still see Superman through the shatterproof window, and he kept hollering. They could also see that there wasn’t a mark on his very flushed face other than the small abrasions he’d received in the fight.
Sergeant Murillo left the sergeants’ room to come and see what the yelling was all about, and when Superman saw the chevrons on his sleeves, he hollered, “Sergeant, I demand to make a citizen’s complaint! I’ve been tortured! It was worse than waterboarding!”
Preston Lilly looked at Sergeant Murillo and said, “That’s preposterous.”
Superman jumped up from the bench and ran to the glass window, yelling, “That skinhead Nazi took me to the Hollywood Freeway on-ramp and got out and grabbed my hair and pulled my head through the open window. And he rolled it up until I was trapped by the neck. There I was with my hands cuffed behind my back and my head hanging out, and he drove a hundred goddamn miles an hour for I don’t know how long and I was screaming the whole time for him to stop! It woulda been better if he’d just tied me to the hood like a fucking road-killed deer!”
Sergeant Murillo looked at Preston Lilly, who said, “Go ahead and cut paper, Sarge. I’m at the end of my career, where I can take the safety off and tell the captain what I think. Or the bureau commander. Or the fucking chief of police, for that matter. I’m bulletproof now. But as far as what Superman says? It’s preposterous.”
Superman said, “Sergeant, I swear to you. When I begged for mercy, all he did was drive faster. I could hardly breathe. And do you know what he said? He floored it all the way and he yells to me, ‘Nobody’s whupping on you, Superman. I’m just letting your own lips beat you to death.’ That’s what he said.”
Preston Lilly looked at Superman and at Sergeant Murillo and said, “That’s preposterous.”
Sergeant Murillo said to the big cop, “Preston, do what you can to move up your retirement date. And until you go, please leave the safety on.”
EIGHT
Just after midnight Cindy Kroll heard a scraping sound on the roof. Her first thought was that some crows were up there pecking at the composite material that was designed to look like wood. She had fed her baby daughter some applesauce and bottle-fed her infant son before lying down on the bed in her T-shirt and underpants. It was so hot, she was just trying to catch some breeze from the open windows, and she had not intended to go to sleep yet, but she had dozed. The wine she’d had earlier while watching TV had done it.
She reminded herself that she had to cut down on the wine and she was dying to smoke some crystal, but she knew she had to kick it. Then she remembered that her daughter had fallen asleep in the playpen and that she had to get up and put her in her crib. Her son was lying beside her asleep, and she looked at him. She thought he resembled his father, Louis Dryden. She didn’t mind that. Louis was a good-looking man even if he-