He pulled up in front of Norberto’s apartment building and got out of the car. He’d have to figure out something to say to Norberto. Maybe tell him that he should be the leader of the crew. The family wouldn’t accept a gringo, but they’d take him with open arms. Martin knew Norberto was gullible enough to fall for that.
He rang the doorbell. He knocked. A couple of punkedout Latino kids on skateboards cruised by. He knocked harder.
Norberto was probably out getting laid.
Martin walked around to the back; he knew where Norberto kept a key hidden. He found it, under the planter of a spiky barrel cactus, and let himself in.
“Norberto?”
Martin closed the door behind him. He was hit by the strong smell of cleaning fluids. Maybe the housekeeper, a sexy woman from Guatemala, had been there earlier. He walked through the living room to Norberto’s bedroom.
Martin peeked in the bathroom and saw the glaringly white bathtub. Yeah. The housekeeper had been there.
Martin opened the door to the bedroom closet and pulled out a suitcase. He plopped the suitcase on the bed and took a quick inventory. Several handguns, all of them Glocks, boxes of ammunition, a couple ounces of weed, three vials of various pills, a half kilo of coke, and a couple of small cellophane packets held together by a rubber band.
Martin picked up a Glock, checked to make sure it was loaded. He then took the cellophane packets. He’d put these in Bob’s pockets. Make it look like he was a heroin dealer. Another red herring for the police.
Martin left a quick note for Norberto. He simply wrote “Viva la Revolución.” He was careful to lock the door behind him. Now came the hard part.
Amado sat at the little coffee shop and looked through the LA Weekly magazine. Carajo, there were a lot of screenwriting classes and workshops to choose from, and each one seemed like some kind of scam. Write a script in thirty days? Sell your script in a week? Learn the secret to getting your script through the Hollywood maze? The secret of the pitch? How to meet an agent? They were like diet ads. Fast formulas for surefire hits. Lose weight now! Ask me how!
All of the classes were taught by people who put their names on them like they were somehow important or famous. Amado had never heard of any of them.
He was looking for one in español, because the telenovelas were in español. But there didn’t seem to be one. Still, all he wanted was to learn how to write; he could translate on his own.
Eventually he found one. It was the most expensive one, and, in Amado’s experience, you got what you paid for. It had the added attraction of being only two days long. Surely he could learn how to write a script in two days.
Amado tore the ad out of the magazine.
Don got there as quick as he could. Flores had taken the message and hadn’t mentioned anything to Don for about an hour. Then he took his feet off his desk, looked over from behind the sports page, and blandly told him that some mailman, actually a very butch lesbian mailman, had found an arm in a postbox. An arm that matched the description of the arm found on Carlos Vila’s garage floor.
So Don jumped in his car and raced over to the West Hollywood PD.
The arm looked exactly like Larga’s arm. Except this arm was wrapped in plastic and had several french fries clutched in its hand. It was so similar that Don double-checked with the evidence room at Parker Center. He called and found that the other arm, Larga’s arm, was resting comfortably in its cooler.
Don told the West Hollywood detective, a nice-enough man named Lowenstein, that the arm was evidence in an organized crime case he was working, and he needed it. Lowenstein blandly informed Don that it was a West Hollywood case now. They’d send him information as it became available.
Don knew better than to argue. He’d talk to his boss about it later. Right now, things were getting complicated.
The computer was boring. It took what seemed like an hour for the stupid Web pages to load. And then half the time they would jam or the URL would be missing or changed or something. Besides, what was Bob looking for? Even he didn’t know. He was just killing time.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing, he thought. I’ve been living my life, killing time, waiting for my Web page to load.
Bob heard the door open.
“I hope you got plain. I don’t like vanilla in the morning.”
“Hello, Bob.”
Bob looked up. Martin stood there.
“Hey, man, what’s going on?”
“I need your help. Can you spare some time?”
Bob nodded. Thank God, he was so bored.
“Yeah. No problem.”
Bob quickly scribbled a note. Martin looked around suspiciously, then leaned in close.
“I’ll tell you about it in the car.”
Amado was lucky. He’d called the screenwriting workshop and they had room for him. Not only did they have room, but the class was starting that afternoon. Amado went out and bought a college-ruled notebook and several mechanical pencils. He was ready.
He now found himself sitting in a small lecture hall at Occidental College in Eagle Rock with two dozen aspiring screenwriters. Amado looked around the classroom. Most of the other students were younger than him. Several had laptop computers glowing in front of them. There was the cute Korean girl with pink pigtails and a strapless sundress that revealed some artistic tattoos. There were several young men with thick eyeglasses and scruffy haircuts. These men, boys really, lounged around in a kind of superior slouch. Like they’d already written successful screenplays and were just at the class as a kind of goof. There were a couple of middle-aged women, dressed in black and looking intelligent with stylish eyeglasses and asymmetrical haircuts.
Amado was the lone one-armed Latino in the class.
A cell phone went off.
The teacher, a handsome, slender man who had written several megasuccessful teen comedies in the late ’80s, entered the room. He was simpático and confident. He assured them that with hard work and his formula they would all be pulling down big bucks in Hollywood sooner than they thought.
Words of encouragement. What every writer loves to hear.
Amado paid close attention, taking detailed notes, as the teacher began to describe the elements of a three-act structure. Every now and then the muted clicking of laptop keys would annoy Amado. But he realized that he would have to get one. He was serious about this and needed to have all the stuff that serious writers used. Like a cool laptop. He would call his friend Alberto after class and see if any laptops had fallen off a truck out by LAX.
Amado listened as the teacher told the class how someone named Shakespeare had used the three-act structure. He wanted to interrupt the teacher and ask him where the commercials went in a telenovela script, but decided that this was probably something that the writers figured out after they had the story.
The teacher talked. The class laughed. Amado wrote it down.
Act one: get man up a tree. Act two: shake a stick at him. Act three: get him down.
How hard could that be?
Esteban picked at a salad. He really wanted some kind of chorizo-and-egg burrito, but Lupe was concerned that he was eating too much fatty food. So Esteban picked at a salad. Not that it wasn’t delicioso. It had slices of grapefruit and avocado, red chili flakes, fresh lechuga.
But something was distracting Esteban. Martin had failed to show up for lunch. Which meant that he was up to something. Jodido hinchapelotas gringo gorrón. Nobody liked a rat.