WHILE GETTING READY for work the next morning, yet another overtime shift, Malcolm Rojas was nervous and anxious. His mother had been complaining again about not receiving her share of his recent paycheck.
After he’d eaten the cooked breakfast she’d prepared for him at 6 A.M., he said, “If you don’t stop nagging me about money, I’m gonna move in with my friend Phil.”
That stopped her, and she looked worried when she said, “Who’s Phil?”
“A guy I work with in the warehouse,” Malcolm said, trying quickly to come up with details about a fictional friend to make his threat more plausible. “Phil and me been talking about sharing the rent. His mom’s always nagging him too.”
“I’m not always nagging, sweetheart!” his mother said, pouring him more orange juice. “But money’s not easy to come by, and it’s not cheap living here in Hollywood. You know that.”
“Maybe it’d be better for both of us if I move out,” Malcolm said. “And pretty soon I’ll have enough money to do it. I’ll be getting a new job.”
“You’re not thinking of quitting your present job?”
“Pretty soon I am,” he said.
“For what? Where you gonna work?”
“I have… prospects,” he said.
“Where? Who with?”
“I’ll tell you when it happens,” he said. “Now I gotta go or I’m gonna be late.”
After he brushed his teeth, his mother was waiting at the door with his lunch in a paper bag. “Please don’t do anything yet, sweetie,” she said. “Let’s talk it over about you quitting your job. And don’t worry about giving me any money this time. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, pleased at how he could still manipulate her.
When she reached up and put her hands in his hair, about to kiss him on the cheek, she said, “My sweet boy.”
He grimaced and said, “Don’t do that! How many times do I gotta tell you?”
She jumped back so fast she bumped her head on the door frame. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Sometimes I forget how grown-up you are.”
When he was driving out of his parking space, he felt miserable, and it was all because of her. He vowed that when he started working for Bernie Graham, he really was going to move away from her forever. Her touch gave him an icy-cold feeling that would usually be followed by heat. He could feel it coming already. He knew the heat would grow as the day progressed. It might turn into the thing he couldn’t control, the burning sensation in his belly that worked its way up to his skull when he thought of all those bitches.
Tristan Hawkins fell onto Eunice Gleason’s bed, fully clothed. Dewey tried to get some sleep in his own bed but could not, suffering from severe acid reflux, which seldom troubled him like this. At 6 A.M., Dewey was dressed and in the kitchen making coffee when Tristan shuffled in, yawning and scratching.
“Jerzy shoulda called us by now,” Dewey said. “I don’t like this. I got a bad feeling about this.”
“Shut the fuck up and pour me some coffee,” Tristan said. “I got enough to worry about. Anyways, this was mostly your plan.”
“I thought she’d fold ’em the second she saw you two,” Dewey said. “I was wrong.”
“How long you been married to that woman, Bernie?”
“Nine years.”
“Nine years and you ain’t figured out yet that she’s twice as smart as you and ten times the man?”
Dewey poured two cups of coffee and said, “The milk’s in the fridge. The sugar’s in the cupboard there.”
After sipping his coffee, Tristan said, “Lemme ask you somethin’ about that woman. Would she stick big money in a bank account somewheres, knowin’ full well that if your business enterprise ever got brought down, the cops could find that money without a whole lotta trouble? Especially if they got all the records around here, and what must be stored in those computers out there in the other room? Would she do that?”
“I know what you’re getting at,” Dewey said. “Don’t you think I’ve looked for evidence of a safe deposit box?”
“Bernie,” Tristan said, dead-staring him. “Did you ever think she might do what you do? Like maybe take the cash to some nice fireproof, earthquake-proof, safe and secure storage locker? A place where she could go in and clean it out in a minute and boogie on outta town?”
Dewey’s eyes flickered just for an instant, but it was enough for someone as streetwise and sly as Tristan Hawkins. Dewey looked away and had a sickening thought that in this unholy foursome, he might actually be the dumbest!
“Speak to me, Bernie,” Tristan said. “This ain’t the time to be gamin’ me. Your old lady might be past talkin’ at this point. We may be on the verge of grabbin’ what we can and gettin’ the fuck outta Dodge.”
At that moment, the resolve of Dewey Gleason melted. He was so far out of his depth, he was ready to join forces with this wily young man sitting across from him. He said, “I did find a key in her wallet one time, and yeah, it looked like a padlock key.”
“And where’s that key?”
“I don’t know. It was gone the next time I looked.”
“That means,” Tristan said, “I was right when I told the Polack that you had no intention of transferrin’ funds and havin’ a way to beat the wait period, and all that bullshit you said. You hoped to get that key and whatever information you needed to get in her secret place and clean it out and leave poor Creole and the dumb Polack with nothin’ but your half-dead wife.”
“Don’t say ‘ half-dead,’ ” Dewey murmured, and Tristan thought he was about to start blubbering.
“Get used to it, Bernie,” Tristan said. “She might be fully dead by now, because I seen how the Polack gets when he smokes crystal, and it ain’t pretty.”
Then tears did well in the eyes of Dewey Gleason, and Tristan said, “So, all in all, it might jist be you and me against the fuckin’ world right now. And I’m ready to tear this place apart to scope out a key and try to find the lock it belongs to.”
Dewey said, sniffling, “She drove me to this! I’m not a violent person. I never hurt anybody in my -”
“Me neither,” Tristan interrupted, “but if you don’t main-tain and get hold of yourself, I jist might do some violence on you. Now wipe your fuckin’ nose and let’s get to work!”
They had begun ransacking Eunice’s closet, searching in the pockets and linings of every hanging piece of clothing, when Tristan heard the man sob.
Eunice was startled by Jerzy’s snores. He was lying on his sleeping bag still clothed in his black T-shirt and filthy jeans, but he’d removed his boots and she could smell his feet. With the blindfold removed now, she was able to see light through the cracks in the blinds. She’d never needed a cigarette more. She’d been lying there for four hours and had not yet been harmed. If he had not chased his pipe full of crystal with a cocktail of downers, she knew the night might have ended in horror.
At 2:30 A.M., he’d sat astride her with a buck knife in his hand, wired from the methamphetamine, and said, “Do you and me have this heart-to-heart, or do I cut your left nipple off to start with?”
With tears soaking the blindfold and her mouth taped shut, she’d nodded her head vigorously, and he’d said, “Okay, I’ll play along for one question and one answer. Here’s the question: Are you ready to pay us five hundred thou to get away from here?”
Her nodding was so robust it made him laugh, and he dug his nails under the tape and ripped it off her face, along with some dermis at the corners of her mouth. But she did not cry out in pain.
“You got some balls, woman,” he said. “That musta stung.”
With as much composure as she could muster, Eunice said, “Now the blindfold, please. And a cigarette. We’ll talk, and you won’t be sorry.”
Jerzy emitted a loon laugh and said, “Momma, you totally are a devil-woman! If you wasn’t so old, I’d prob’ly fuck you jist to absorb some of your test-tosterone! Maybe I’ll let you gimme a blow job before we say good-bye if you promise not to gnaw my cock off.”
She felt his fingernails again and the blindfold was pulled and twisted and finally torn away, along with some of her hair, but again she did not utter a sound. She looked up at the naked lightbulb in the ceiling fixture, blinked several times, and then looked at Jerzy’s face. It seemed like his dilated eyes were all pupil with no iris showing. She turned her head for a glance around the empty room.
“It could use a woman’s touch,” Jerzy said. “But I don’t think you’ll be here long enough, one way or the other.”
That was when he’d gone to his leather jacket crumpled on the floor and removed a plastic bindle from a zip pocket and shaken several capsules into his large, filthy hand. He’d swallowed them down with a pint of gin from the other pocket. When he raised the bottle, his T-shirt was hiked, and she could see a gun inside the waistband of his jeans.
“Please unchain one hand so I can smoke on my own,” she’d said.
That was the moment. He’d reached for her left wrist, but she’d jerked her right hand forward and said, “This one’s killing me.”
It made no difference to Jerzy which hand he freed, and he’d unlocked the padlock that joined the link around her right wrist, the one that was so tightly cinched that she knew she had no chance of slipping out of it. But when Creole had linked her left wrist, he’d put the padlock through the chain one link looser, and Eunice thought there was maybe a chance with that one.
Shaking his head in admiration, Jerzy tossed the padlock onto the floor and said, “If I ain’t careful, I’m gonna ask you to divorce Bernie and marry me!”
When her right wrist was free, she lowered her arm painfully and said, “Thank you, Jerzy. I don’t think I’ll be looking for another husband, but I will definitely be eliminating that son of a bitch who put you up to this. Can I have that cigarette, please?”
Jerzy Szarpowicz didn’t know what the hell to say to this woman now! So she’d figured out that her old man was in on the gag! He could hardly wait to hear what she said next. He walked over to the kitchen counter to her purse, and she only had a few seconds when his back was to her, but she used her right hand to manipulate the chain encircling her left wrist. She thought she just might be able to pull free. It was possible!
He dropped the purse beside the bed, and when he gave her a cigarette and lit it, she took the biggest pull on a smoke that he’d ever seen, and she said, “Bless you, Jerzy.”
“Yeah, well, you better hold your prayers till we talk.”
Between desperate puffs, inflating her lungs with smoke, Eunice watched the downers already having an effect on Jerzy, despite the meth he’d smoked.
“How close are you to Creole?” she asked.
“We ain’t in love,” Jerzy said.
“I wanna make a deal with you and you alone,” Eunice said.
“Ain’t you takin’ advantage of my kindness with all your wants?”
Eunice said, “If you will kill my husband, I’ll give you three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s all I’ve got. If you wanna share it with Creole, that’s up to you. But I have a feeling you’re too smart for that.”
Jerzy took one of the cigarettes from Eunice’s pack, lit it, stood up and started pacing, and said, “Fuck me! You are one evil-eyed, cold-blooded, backstabbing devil-woman!”
“I know I’m in no position to make deals,” she said. “I’ll lead you to the money this morning, after you kill Bernie for me. I want him dead.”
“Any other requests?” he said. “You want me to run down to the market and get you some peppermint ice cream?”
“There’s a key,” she said. “It’s in my apartment. I’ll tell you where I hid it. Take a taxi there. Deal with Creole any way you want, but kill that son of a bitch I’m married to. Use your knife to keep it quiet. Bring the key back here, unchain me, and I’ll drive with you to the storage facility where the money is.”
Jerzy was wishing he hadn’t mixed the downers with the glass. His head was spinning and he was having trouble following the conversation. Then he said the one thing she hoped he would not say. “Why don’t you jist tell me where the key is, and I’ll phone Creole and he’ll bring it here along with Bernie. And after you tell Bernie how to get the money outta storage, I’ll take the money away from him at the storage place and kill him for you. I never liked the motherfucker anyways.”
“Won’t work,” she said quickly. “Nobody can get into the storage facility but me. There’s a real security guard in the office where you check in. He’s even armed. He’ll never let Bernie or anyone else in there without me. Is it safe to kill Bernie here in front of Creole? Will he permit it?”
“You think I’m gonna leave you here alone while I taxi to your crib?” he said.
“There’s nothing I could do,” she said. “You can chain up both my wrists to the bed and tape my mouth again. But I wish you wouldn’t. My lips hurt like hell.”
Eunice forced herself to breathe normally as she watched him thinking. She was counting on his greed and the fact that his brain was drug-addled. Nearly a minute passed before he spoke.
“Where’s the key?” he said.
“There’s a little pocket that I sewed in the drape over the window in his bedroom. The key is in it. You could get it without Creole even knowing about it.”
“You mean the key is right there beside his bed?”
“That’s right,” she said. “The last place he’d ever look.”
“A devil-woman,” he said admiringly. “And where’s the storage place?”
“It’s called North Hollywood Storage,” she said, unable to come up with the name of an existing storage facility other than the one from which she was kidnapped. This was a hazardous moment for her if Jerzy was smart enough to pick up his cell to look for a phone number under that name. “It’s not too far from our apartment. I put a lotta furniture in that storage room to make it look legit. The money’s in the dresser drawers.”
“I gotta figure out how to make all this work,” Jerzy croaked. “Right now I can’t think too good.”
It was then that he’d said he needed to take a nap to clear his head.
When he awoke three hours later, Eunice could clearly see dawn through the cracks in the blinds and in those three hours, she’d formulated her plan. He snuffled and snorted and dragged himself to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom to urinate.
When he came back, Eunice said, “Are Creole and my husband at our apartment?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Eunice saw the ox nodding, still half asleep, and she thought it was now or never. She said, “God, I gotta go to the bathroom bad. I’m about to poop my pants.”
“I hope you ain’t too modest,” Jerzy said, “because the door stays open. And make it quick.” Then he unlocked the padlock on her left wrist.
Eunice stood up with a groan, bowed her back and rotated her hips, and walked slowly to the bathroom. On the way, she saw bread and a mayonnaise jar on the kitchen counter. Jerzy stood outside the door, glancing inside while Eunice, actually constipated from stress and fear, gave her own acting performance, grunts and all. Needing an eye-opener, Jerzy shuffled over to his leather jacket on the floor and took a swig from the gin bottle.
When she was finished, she washed her hands, leaving them wet, and returned to the bed. She put her left wrist back into position and kept her right hand down by her hip, the hand with the bar of soap in it, which she slid beneath her wrinkled dress. She held up her left wrist to be chained.
As soon as he clicked the padlock through the same link as Creole had used before, she said, “Call a taxi and get over there. Ring them on the gate phone, and when they let you inside, act like you’re panicked. Say you killed me accidentally and everyone better get outta town. Get Creole out of there somehow and then kill my husband and get that key. Taxi back here and we’ll go together to the storage facility to pick up my husband’s car for the rest of our business.”
“It might jist work,” Jerzy said, looking at his buck knife.
“It will,” she said. “But you better call Creole now and say something to keep them from driving over here. The element of surprise is what’s gonna make it all happen for you.”
“What should I say?” Jerzy asked, and Eunice believed she almost owned him now. She was thirsty and knew he must be parched, given all the booze and drugs he’d ingested.
“Tell Creole to stay there and wait for your call. Say that you might be on the verge of getting the info but that I’m a tough cookie.”
“You got that part right,” he said.
“Okay, Jerzy, you saw Bernie do his acting bits often enough. Let’s see you do it, but first, please get me some water.”
He went to the kitchen and came back with a plastic bottle of water, removed the cap, and handed it to her. When she drank, it seemed to remind him how thirsty he was, and he returned to the kitchen for another. When he did, she poured water on her left hand and wrist.
He returned and retrieved his cell from his jacket and speed-dialed, and then he did just what she was depending on. He turned away and walked to the kitchen to give his performance without an audience. Dewey would have stayed there, relishing an observer, but Jerzy was not an actor, and she knew instinctively he’d want privacy.
She heard him say to his partner, “I need more time. She’s bad, man. Her old man’s a pussy, but she ain’t. Gimme another hour.”
And while he talked, she soaped up her left hand and wrist, moving herself into more of a sitting than reclining position so that he would not see the soap slime running down her bare arm. There was one more movement she was depending on: a bowel movement, a real one this time. His. She needed him in that bathroom. But as she twisted and pulled, her hand was not slippery enough. It wasn’t working!
He came back from the kitchen and said, “Okay, I gotta call a cab, and I’m gonna have to chain you up real good and tape your mouth. Sorry about that.”
“Jerzy,” Eunice said. “I’m about to faint from hunger. Before you go, can I have something to eat? Anything.”
“All we got is some bread and a package of salami.”
“That sounds great,” Eunice said. “Please bring it here.”
Jerzy went to the kitchen and came back with the package of meat he hadn’t opened and the loaf of bread.
“You wouldn’t have anything to put on the bread, would you?” she asked.
“I got a jar of mayo in there,” he said.
“That’s perfect,” Eunice said.
When he came back with the jar of mayonnaise and a plastic butter knife, she’d already torn open the meat package and was making a sandwich. “Would you like one?” she asked.
“Naw, I only get the munchies when I smoke pot,” he said. “When I get the money, I think I’ll switch to blow. I’ll be able to afford first-class booger sugar after you make me rich.”
“Can you open the jar for me?” Eunice asked.
He opened the mayonnaise jar and handed it to her, watching her spread a small dab on the sandwich with the plastic knife.
“Don’t try stabbing me in the throat,” Jerzy said with a revolting leer.
Eunice wished she’d had a cigarette to calm herself, but with as much self-control as she could manage, she said prosaically, “Maybe you need to have a poop too before you leave here, Jerzy. You’re gonna kill a man with a knife. And it won’t be a plastic knife like this one.”
He stared at her fiercely, and she froze, shivers shooting through her. Had she gone too far and made the dolt suspicious? Or was he just contemplating the impending murder, something he’d never done before?
Finally he said, “Yeah, I gotta admit I’m a little nervous about guttin’ your old man, but once I start…”
Jerzy stopped talking and lumbered into the little bathroom, leaving the door open. She heard him unbuckle his belt, and as soon as his bathroom noises began to tell the story, she reached into the mayonnaise jar and scooped out a handful, slathering it on her left hand and wrist. Then she rotated her wrist and pulled, all the time trying to hold the chain in her right hand to keep it from striking the steel bed frame. The mayonnaise oozed down her arm as she twisted her wrist and tugged. And suddenly, her left hand slipped past the linked manacle! She sat upright, and when she heard him grunting, swung her feet to the floor, grabbed her purse, and bolted for the door.
Jerzy saw her flash across the open bathroom door and yelled, “Hey!” Then he leaped to his feet with his jeans down around his boots, and fell forward onto his knees and then onto his face, yelling, “I’ll kill you! Now I’ll kill you! You’re a dead woman!”
But he was yelling into an empty room. Eunice was already halfway down the steps, not knowing what part of L.A. she was in, running barefoot along the sidewalk in Frogtown, absolutely certain that if she let him get close, he’d shoot her dead.
Tristan Hawkins and Dewey Gleason were exhausted from having ransacked the apartment for hours. They had not found a key, nor any evidence of a storage facility, a safe deposit box, or anything else to provide a clue as to where the money could be.
Tristan was slumped in Eunice’s chair in front of one of the computers, and he said, “Maybe we gotta admit the possibility that your old lady put all the money in a bank account. Or maybe more than one account. If she did that, we’re gonna have problems.”
Dewey, who looked to Tristan like a man facing a firing squad, said, “I don’t understand how she could be holding out so long. What could he be doing to her?”
“We’re way down the road past all that,” Tristan said. “We gotta depend on the Polack to make her talk, and that’s the end of it.”
“I wish I had it to do over,” Dewey said with a bleak stare into the abyss.
“Well, you don’t,” Tristan said, “and I’m sick of hearin’ you say that.”
And that was when Tristan’s cell rang, and Dewey said, “Thank God! Maybe she’s talked!”
“Yo,” Tristan said into the phone, and Dewey studied him, seeing the alarm grow on his face as he listened to a long monologue from Jerzy Szarpowicz.
Then Tristan said, “No, don’t come here! Catch a cab to… to the office. Yeah, wait there. We’ll clean out the storage room and take the stuff there in the van.”
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.
The cell provider had given the name of Madge Rojas, with an address on Maplewood Avenue in east Hollywood. It was early afternoon when four detectives went to the Maplewood address, but they found nobody at home. After that, Flo Johnson and her partner sat in their car on Maplewood Avenue and sweated in ninety-degree heat. Her D3 back at the office contacted a D3 at Major Crimes Division and explained the urgency of the case, and he agreed to go up to a satellite link and wait for whoever possessed that number to turn on his cell phone.
As this was going on, Madge Rojas enjoyed a matinee with popcorn and soda at a multiplex cinema while her son, Malcolm, worked his overtime shift on a busy Saturday at the home improvement center. Malcolm’s mother decided not to rush back to their apartment. He seldom came straight home from work anymore, especially on a weekend. She’d given up questioning him about where he went at night. He’d get so angry, he was starting to scare her. She made a mental note to contact one of the free clinics about psychological counseling for her son. Meanwhile, she thought there was no reason she couldn’t stay and see one of the other movies at the multiplex after this one. No reason at all.
At 3 P.M., when Dana Vaughn was about to get a shower and start preparing for work, her cell chimed.
“Dana? It’s Flo Johnson,” the detective said. “It’s been a real busy morning and afternoon. How come all the good stuff happens on weekends?”
“Did you get him?” Dana asked, trying not to sound disappointed for not having been in on it.
“Not yet,” the detective said. “The phone bill goes to a Madge Rojas at an address on Maplewood. Autotrac ran the name, and credit info indicates she lives with her nineteen-year-old son, Ruben Malcolm Rojas, who has no criminal record. We did get the license number of his Mustang, and I’ve already phoned the Hollywood watch commander to pass it on at roll call to Watch 3 and Watch 5. We’ll be waiting for the cell phone ping as soon as it’s turned on. I’ll personally ask your boss to let you help back us up if we ping it to a Hollywood location.”
“Too cool!” Dana said. “I’ll wear a fresh uniform. I work with Hollywood Nate Weiss, and he’ll figure a way to get us some press coverage if we’re in on this one.”
Flo Johnson chuckled and said, “A little extra color instead of our usual drab lipstick shows up better on TV.”