Ballard had thought it was most likely a phony, not because there wasn’t a street in Hollywood called Heliotrope but because she knew something about plants and flowers from growing up in Hawaii. She had often worked with her family on tomato farms and plant nurseries on the dense mountainsides of Maui. A heliotrope was a plant that blossomed with fragrant purple and blue flowers and was known for turning its petals toward the sun. It seemed to Ballard like a metaphor of some kind, that maybe Ramona Ramone had chosen the name of the street because it fit with her desire to change and turn her petals to the sun.
Now, as she followed the road to the freeway, she saw that the address corresponded to a row of old RVs and house trailers parked stem to stern under the overpass. It was one of L.A.’s many homeless encampments, and beyond the row of beat-up vehicles on the street, she could see pitched tents and shelters made of blue tarp and other materials in the hardscrabble yard beneath the overpass.
Ballard parked her car and got out.
13
Ballard knew something about the social structure of the city’s teeming homeless encampments. Both the city and the department had been attacked and sued by civil rights groups for ill-advised handling of encounters with homeless people and their communities. It had resulted in problem-specific sensitivity training and what amounted to a hands-off policy. She had learned from those sessions that a homeless encampment evolves much like a city, with a need for a social and government hierarchy that provided services like security, decision-making, and waste management. Many had individuals who served as mayors, sheriffs, and judges. As Ballard moved into the Heliotrope encampment, she was looking for the sheriff.
Other than the constant sound of traffic on the freeway overhead, it was all quiet in the camp. It was after midnight, the temperature was dropping into the fifties, and the inhabitants were mostly hunkered down and bracing for another night facing the elements, with walls made of plastic tarp or, if they were lucky, the aluminum shell of a camper.
Ballard noticed one man moving through what looked like a debris field where the people who lived off the trash of others threw their own trash. He was buckling his belt and his zipper was down. When he looked up from the operation and saw Ballard, he startled.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“LAPD. Who the fuck are you?”
“Well, I live here.”
“Are you the sheriff? I’m looking for somebody in charge.”
“I’m not the sheriff but I got the night shift.”
“Really? You’re security?”
“That’s me.”
Ballard pulled her badge off her belt and held it up.
“Ballard, LAPD.”
“Uh, Denver. People call me Denver.”
“Okay, Denver. I don’t want to hassle anybody. I just need your help.”
“Okay.”
Denver stepped forward and put out his hand. Ballard held back from openly cringing. Luckily she was holding her rover in her right hand and avoided the outstretched hand.
“Elbow bump, Denver,” she said.
She offered her elbow but Denver didn’t know what to do with it.
“Okay, never mind that,” she said. “Let’s just talk. The reason I’m here is I think one of your citizens is in the hospital, hurt really bad. I want to find her place here. Can you help me?”
“Who is it? We have people come and go. Sometimes they just leave their stuff.”
“Her name’s Ramona Ramone. Kinda short Spanish girl? She said she lived here.”
“Yeah, I know Ramona. But one thing you should know — she’s a man.”
“Yes, I know that. She was born a man but identifies as a woman.”
That seemed to confuse Denver so Ballard moved on.
“So she lives here?”
“Well, she did. She was gone like a week and we didn’t think she was coming back. Like I said, people come and go, just leave their shit behind. So somebody took her spot, you know what I mean? That’s how it works around here. You snooze, you lose.”
“Which spot was it?”
“She was in the ’seventy-four Midas at the front of the wagon train.”
He pointed toward the ragtag line of RVs parked along the curb in front of the open encampment area. The first RV was a dirty white camper with a Dodge van cab. There was a faded-orange accent stripe down the side and a plastic American flag draped over the back edge of the roof as a leak stopper. From the outside, the vehicle showed every bit of its forty years.
“I heard she bought it from the previous guy for four hundred bucks and then he moved into the jungle.”
Denver now pointed toward the encampment. It was clear that the RVs, no matter how decrepit and despairing, were the choice habitats in the community. A cottage industry had recently arisen in which old inoperable campers were pulled out of junkyards and backyards, towed to street parking locations under freeways or in industrial areas, and sold cheap or even rented to homeless people. They were passed from hand to hand and were often the subject of ownership fights and unlawful evictions. The department was in the process of putting together a task force to deal with this and the many other issues of the city’s growing homeless population — the largest west of New York City.
“How long was she there?” Ballard asked.
“A year or thereabouts,” Denver said.
“Is somebody in there now?”
“Yeah, a guy. Stormy Monday took it.”
“That’s the name he uses?”
“Yeah. People ’round here use a lot of different names, you know? They’ve left their other names behind.”
“Got it. Let’s go talk to Stormy. I’ve got to look inside.”
“He’s not a happy guy when you wake him up. They call him Stormy Monday but he’s kind of a dick every single day.”
“I know the type. We’ll deal with that, Denver.”
As she started toward the front of the train of RVs, she brought her rover up and called in a request for a backup. She was given an ETA of four minutes.
“You know, when police come around here, it makes people upset,” Denver said after she lowered the radio.
“I understand,” Ballard said. “We don’t want to cause any problems. But it will be up to Stormy Monday.”
Ballard had a small tactical light in her pocket that she had gotten out of the glove box of her car. The butt end was a heavy steel point. She used it to rap on the door of the Dodge Midas. She then stepped a comfortable four feet back and two to the left. She noticed that there was no handle on the door, just two holes through which were threaded the links of a steel chain. It was a way to lock the vehicle when you were inside it as well as out.
There was no answer and no movement from the RV.
“It looks like somebody’s locked in,” Ballard said.
“Yeah, he’s in there,” Denver said.
Ballard rapped harder on the door this time. The sound echoed off the concrete overhead and could be heard well above the din of the freeway.
“Hey, Stormy!” Denver called out. “Come on out here a minute.”
A patrol car cruised slowly down Heliotrope, and Ballard flicked her light at it. The car pulled to a stop in the street beside the Midas. The two female blue suiters from roll call got out. Herrera was the lead and her partner was Dyson.
“Ballard, what’ve we got?” Herrera asked.
“Gotta roust a guy in here,” Ballard said. “Denver here says he’s not going to be happy.”
The RV’s springs were shot after so many decades of use. The vehicle started to creak and move as soon as there was movement inside. Then, from the other side of the door came a voice.