When he closed his cell, Dewey looked at him and said, “Is she dead?”
“No, she escaped!” Tristan said. “And if I can get my hands on his gun, I’m killin’ that motherfuckin’ Polack as soon as all this is over.”
“How could she escape?” Dewey said.
“Never mind how. We gotta get outta here. You and me’re goin’ back to the storage room and loadin’ up every fuckin’ thing in there. Does your old lady know about the office?”
“She knows about it but not exactly where it is,” Dewey said.
“Okay, Bernie, we’re gonna store the merchandise in the office for a few days, and you’re gonna sell all of it to your fence, and we’re gonna split the money three ways. Because that’s all any of us is gonna get from this fuckin’ gag.”
“She can’t call the cops,” Dewey said in despair.
“I ain’t takin’ no chances,” Tristan said. “She figured out this gag from the git, and at this point she might be ready to go to jail herself jist to see you go down. If you wanna pack a bag, hurry the fuck up. And I wouldn’t advise you to argue about any of this, because the Polack is about ready to kill the first person that crosses him. But before you pack up, let’s check somethin’ out.”
Dewey followed Tristan into his bedroom and watched, perplexed, as Tristan went to the window and carefully examined the drapes, running his hand over every inch. When he was finished, Tristan said, “Like I thought. No key. And I don’t have to look. There ain’t no such business called North Hollywood Storage.”
“What?” Dewey Gleason said in confusion.
Five cars containing motorists on their way to work drove past Eunice Gleason when she ran into the street, waving frantically. The sixth one, an old Pontiac driven by a middle-aged Mexican woman heading to her job at a restaurant in Silverlake, stopped for her.
Eunice wasn’t sure how much English the woman understood, but Eunice told a tale of having been picked up by a man in a bar and literally held captive by him after she’d refused him sex.
The woman kept repeating, “Policía?” when there were breaks in Eunice’s tale, but Eunice looked out at the street, shook her head, and said, “No, no police. Just drop me there at Denny’s, por favor.”
When she got out of the car, she tried to give the woman a $20 bill, but the woman refused to take it, once again saying, “Policía?”
Eunice smoked a cigarette in front of Denny’s restaurant and looked in her compact mirror. She had what looked like a swath of sunburn across her mouth and chin where the tape had been ripped off. Her new hairdo was tousled and tangled, and there was no makeup left except around her eyes, but she felt surprisingly relaxed when she approached the door. Nobody in Denny’s seemed to notice that the disheveled woman who entered and went to a booth was barefoot.
Without looking at a menu, she said to the waitress who brought a pot of coffee to her table, “Hotcakes, crisp bacon, two eggs over easy, and tomato juice. When you get a chance.”
The salty-looking waitress said, “Rough night, huh?”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Eunice said, realizing that she was feeling something close to elation.
The whole kidnap might have been a Dewey Gleason gag, but the presence of Jerzy Szarpowicz was real. She had escaped torture and, finally, death. She had done it with brains and guts, and now she was free of that miserable little son of a whore who at this moment was probably trying to figure out how he could scrape together enough money to run for his life. Now that the weasel had realized what a formidable woman he’d married, he was no doubt panic-stricken. Well, her retirement had just arrived ahead of schedule. But it would be retirement for one person, not two, so she’d get by. She had to get back to the apartment and take the hard drives from the computers, along with all the incriminating files.
After that, she’d pack up and be on the first flight to San Francisco, where she’d establish a bank account and have the $945,000 moved from the four Hollywood banks in which she’d made deposits over the years. She thought she’d wait until the real-estate market improved before selling the family home on Russian Hill. She wanted to finally own a condo, maybe near North Beach, with its nightlife and people having fun. It was about time she started enjoying herself after so many years of hard work.
Eunice knew now that Dewey had actually bought into the many hints she’d dropped whenever he got frustrated, intimations that she’d hidden piles of money in a secret cache, like some Latin American drug lord. That was so like him. Limited talent, limited intellect, and limited imagination. Hugo could’ve eaten him alive. Eunice was actually smiling when she took the cell phone from her purse and dialed a number she’d been given last night.
Malcolm had his box cutter in his hand and was slashing open a crate containing video games when his cell chimed. He’d been working extra hard all morning, trying to quell the anger that was still simmering.
“Hello,” he said.
“Clark,” Eunice said. “It’s me, Ethel. Would you like a job today?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I’m at work right now.”
“That’s okay,” Eunice said. “I’ll need the rest of the day to get ready. I’d like you to come to the apartment and help me do some work.”
“I can’t get there till after six,” he said.
“Can you make it earlier?”
“I’ll try,” he said. “Will Mr. Graham be there?”
“No, I’ll explain it to you when you arrive. You’re gonna be well paid for your labor.”
“Okay, I’ll be there,” he said.
After he clicked off, he noticed that his battery was getting low, so he turned off the cell until he could get to his car and charge it. When he was back slashing open boxes and crates, he didn’t really feel much better for at last getting a job from Bernie Graham. The tormenting memory of his mother’s touch had made this an uncommonly terrible day for Malcolm Rojas.
There was some telephone debate that Saturday between the sex crimes team at West Bureau and their lieutenant after Dana Vaughn’s former colleague D2 Flo Johnson phoned the lieutenant at home to explain the entire case. The lieutenant had recently come from a staff meeting with West Bureau brass where once again complaints from self-styled “community leaders” concerning minority-group harassment had been discussed. As usual, things ended with dispiriting lectures about the federal consent decree and fears of allegations from black and Latino citizens.
The lieutenant said, “Okay, the rock-throwing prowler generally fits the description of the guy that attacked the women, but there’re a lot of young Hispanics with curly hair that would also fit.”
“How about the light blue T-shirt and jeans?” Flo Johnson said.
The lieutenant replied, “Common clothing for young guys. And that girl Naomi isn’t even positive which day she met her guy.”
“How about the damaged fists following the day when our guy attacked the second victim and put her in the hospital?”
“That’s more… convincing,” the lieutenant said. “But we still have to be careful not to stir up any more complaints about minority-group harassment.”
Flo Johnson sighed and said, “My maiden name was Trevino, Lieutenant. I’m second generation from Sonora, and this isn’t about annoying the Hispanic community. This is about a vicious rapist who’s gonna kill somebody sooner or later.”
And so it went until someone with more rank and more spine listened to the detective and gave her the okay to proceed. D2 Flo Johnson went to the website that links cell numbers to their providers. Then she wrote a search warrant and faxed it to the district attorney’s weekend command post, which faxed it to an on-call judge at home, who signed it and faxed it back.