Hollywood Moon (47 page)

He dialed the Bernie Graham number.

Dewey Gleason felt a sliver of hope when the cell rang. He didn’t even look at the caller ID. It had to be Hatch, the man
with the money!

“Bernie Graham,” Dewey said anxiously.

“Mr. Graham, it’s Clark,” he heard the voice say.

“Oh, shit,” Dewey said. “I can’t talk to you now. Call tomorrow.”

“You
have
to talk to me, Mr. Graham,” Malcolm said. “I’m outside the office in my car.”

“Get outta here, Clark!” Dewey said. “I’m busy. Call tomorrow.”

“You’ll wanna talk to me,” Malcolm said. “It’s about Ethel. I was with her.”

Dewey was silent for a moment and then said, “Okay, come in.”

“Are you alone?” Malcolm asked.

“No, but we’ll talk privately. Come in.”

Malcolm closed his cell and put it in the glove compartment with the box cutter. He thought about it for an instant, then
put the box cutter in the pocket of his jeans. He felt calmer just having it there. The box knife made him feel… large. When
he stepped from the car, a dagger of moonlight stabbed at his eyes. He looked away from the glowing white ball in the black-velvety
sky over Hollywood.

“Who the fuck was that?” Jerzy Szarpowicz asked.

“A runner,” Dewey said. “He’s outside.”

“You told him to come in?” Tristan said. “I can’t believe it.”

“You’ll wanna hear what he has to say,” Dewey said. “It’s something about my wife.”

That silenced them. All three were waiting when Malcolm tapped on the door. Dewey opened it, and Malcolm stepped inside, out
of the bright moonlight. He looked at the boxes and crates stacked wall-to-wall.

“Hello, Mr. Graham,” he said with a shy smile. “I knew you were still in business.”

“Whadda you know about his wife?” Jerzy said to Malcolm.

Malcolm looked warily at the ferocious man and back at Dewey. “This is real confidential, Mr. Graham,” he said.

“Okay, let’s go in the other room,” Dewey said.

Dewey led Malcolm around the maze of stolen merchandise to the single bedroom at the rear of the apartment.

Dewey turned on the ceiling light, and before he closed the door he heard Jerzy say, “I ain’t happy about this.”

He heard Tristan reply, “I ain’t happy about nothin’ right now.”

After the door was closed, Dewey said to Malcolm, “What about Ethel?”

“She lied to me, Mr. Graham,” Malcolm said. “She told me your business was all through, and she wanted to pay me to drive
her and all her stuff to the airport. But I didn’t do it.”

Flabbergasted, Dewey said, “She called you?”

Nodding, Malcolm said, “She said she was the boss and you were… nothing. She was in a hurry to leave and go to New York. I
bet she stole some of your money.”

“All of this happened at our apartment?” Dewey said.

“Yeah,” Malcolm said. “I came straight here afterwards. I’m glad to see everything’s okay. I can help you sell the stuff in
there and then we can leave L.A. and start making real money like you said. You can find another secretary better than Ethel.”

This boy! Dewey could only gape at him, at his earnest and intense gaze, the dark, liquid eyes somehow different tonight,
with a kind of… glint in them. “Did she say anything else, Clark? Anything about… about how she spent the night after the
three of us had dinner?”

“No,” Malcolm said.

“How did she look? The same as at dinner?”

Malcolm thought and said, “She had a lot more makeup on.”

“Okay,” Dewey said. “So you left her and came here?”

“That’s right,” Malcolm said.

“That’s fine, Clark,” Dewey said. “But you can run along now. I’ll call you on Monday and we’ll get some jobs going. Okay?”

“I can’t wait, Mr. Graham,” Malcolm said. “I want you to leave L.A. with me and teach me the business. We’ll be a good team.”

“I couldn’t leave L.A. even if I wanted to,” Dewey said. “I’m short on cash right now.”

“You have to,” Malcolm said.

Dewey was losing patience. He said, “Why do I have to?”

“Because you’ll be in trouble when they find Ethel in your apartment.”

“Whadda you mean, ‘find her?’ ”

“Find her dead.”

Neither spoke until Dewey said, “What the hell’re you talking about, boy?”

“She made me kill her,” Malcolm said. “I had no choice.”

Dewey could only shake his head in exasperation. He could see from the beginning that the kid was a bit strange and creepy,
but he should’ve realized sooner that the boy was a real mental case. He opened the bedroom door and said, “Then she won’t
be needing the apartment anymore, will she? Maybe I’ll just move back in until the rent runs out.”

“Don’t go out there yet,” Malcolm said. “You think I’m making this up, but I’m not. I cut her throat. She bled all over the
place. She’s dead, Mr. Graham. You and me, we gotta make plans.”

“This is ridiculous,” Dewey said, but he felt an ominous shiver in the sweltering room on this warm summer night. He shook
it off. “Ridiculous,” he repeated.

Dewey walked out to the room where Jerzy and Tristan waited. He said to Jerzy, “Clark’s leaving. He needs to go home and rest.
I think maybe he’s having some kind of… episode.”

Less than a block away, no fewer than three unmarked cars were double-parked, including one containing D2 Flo Johnson. Behind
the most recent arrival were 6-X-32, Flotsam and Jetsam, and 6-X-76, Dana Vaughn and Hollywood Nate. Two detectives were on
the front porch of a residence adjacent to the red Mustang with the pinging cell phone in the glove box. Three detectives
were covering the rear of the house, and the bluesuits were backing the detectives in front.

A very old immigrant from the Dominican Republic who did not speak English and was thoroughly confused opened the door. Flo
Johnson spoke to him in Spanish for a few minutes and then said to the others, “This isn’t where he is. Do you wanna set up
on the Mustang or start knocking on doors?”

The detectives were trying to decide on their next move when 6-X-66, Sheila Montez and Aaron Sloane, arrived, followed by
R.T. Dibney and Mindy Ling in 6-X-46.

Dana looked at the cops emerging from their shops and said, “The midwatch is well represented. Let’s find this bastard. He’s
gotta be in one of the houses on this block.”

The surfer cops approached Dana and Nate, and Flotsam said, “On Wednesday we got a call half a block south on this side of
the street to an apartment almost empty of furniture. There were two guys there with bad news written all over them. Might
be setting up a crack house or something.”

“A big fat white guy that looks like a biker,” Jetsam said, “and a light-skinned black guy with dreads.”

Dana looked at Nate and said, “We wrote a ticket to a pair like that. The driver’s name was… let’s see… Tristan something.”

“That’s him!” Flotsam said. “We wrote shakes on both of them.”

“What the hell,” Dana said, “shall we stroll down the street and see if they have a guest tonight?”

“Why not?” said Hollywood Nate. “Birds of a feather?”

“Be careful, honey,” Dana said.

“What did I jist hear you say?” Jerzy Szarpowicz said to Malcolm Rojas.

“I said I’m not leaving,” Malcolm said. “I got nowhere to go. I’m in trouble.”

“You’re gonna be in a lot more trouble if you don’t get your ass outta here,” Jerzy said.

“Look, kid, run along,” Tristan said. “We’re expectin’ an important call.”

“I promise I’ll phone you tomorrow and give you a real job,” Dewey said. “Go home, Clark.”

“I left a whole handprint on the wall,” Malcolm said, emotionless. “I can’t go home. The police might be there already.”

Tristan looked at Dewey in puzzlement, and Dewey tapped his head and said, “He claims he murdered Ethel.”

“I ain’t got time for fuckin’ bullshit!” Jerzy said. “We got business to do, and if I don’t get me a dime of rock pretty soon,
I’ll be doing the killin’, and I’ll start with
you!
”

With that, he grabbed Malcolm by the back of his neck and swung him toward the door, which he crashed into, and he dropped
to his knees.

“Get out, Clark!” Dewey said.

Malcolm stayed on one knee, looking up at Jerzy Szarpowicz, and said, “I’m not afraid of you because you’re big. I can deal
with big men now. I can deal with anybody.”

“You little fuckhead!” Jerzy said, and he stepped forward, intending to kick Malcolm with his boot, but Malcolm was on his
feet, leaping sideways and swiping through the air with his box cutter.

It didn’t catch Jerzy in the throat, as Malcolm had intended, but sliced open a deep gash across his right cheek, and Jerzy
screamed in pain and fury. When Malcolm lunged at him again with the box cutter, Jerzy had the two-inch .38 revolver out of
his waistband, and he fired two rounds a few feet away into the young man’s chest. Malcolm Rojas looked down at his body,
dropped the box knife, and fell into a sitting position, leaning against one of the crates. Then he gazed up with shuddering
breaths, while the other three, their ears ringing from the explosions, screamed incoherent obscenities at one another.

Tristan was the first to recover and shouted, “I’m outta here!”

But when he jerked open the door, he saw a crew of uniformed police running toward the sound of gunfire. The street was hemorrhaging
blue!

“Cops!” he yelled, slamming the door. And then he shoved Dewey aside and ran for the back door, with Jerzy right behind him,
gun in hand.

The police heard the back door crash open, so Dana and Nate sprinted along the walk beside the duplex to the rear of the lot,
followed by the surfer cops.

R.T. Dibney and Aaron Sloane kicked in the front door of the duplex and found Dewey Gleason with his hands up and Malcolm
Rojas dying on the floor.

Tristan Hawkins tried to leap the chain-link fence dividing the properties but fell back hard, and Hollywood Nate shined a
light on him and yelled, “Stay down or die!”

Jerzy Szarpowicz powered through the doorway at that instant, firing his last four rounds at anything that had a human form,
on his way to the rear alley. Hollywood Nate returned fire almost simultaneously, and the last thing Jerzy Szarpowicz saw
were three orange fireballs that lit the darkness, two rounds hitting him in the right chest and one in his forehead, killing
him instantly.

The surfer cops were yelling, and Hollywood Nate was yelling, and Tristan Hawkins was facedown on the walkway, crying, “Don’t
kill me! Don’t kill me!”

In a moment, he was handcuffed tight, palms outward, dragged to his feet, and hustled along the walkway to the front of the
house, while Hollywood Nate, still leaking adrenaline from the gunfight, yelled into the house, “Is it okay in there?”

“Okay!” Sheila Montez shouted, and she appeared backlit in the doorway, holstering her Glock.

Hollywood Nate then shakily holstered his Beretta and trotted along the walkway to the front of the house, where Dewey Gleason
had now become convinced that what the boy had told him must be true, and Dewey was yelling at anyone who’d listen, “I had
nothing to do with her murder! Clark did it!”

Tristan said to Jetsam, who clutched his arm, “Officer, get me to a detective quick! I wanna make a deal. I’ll tell you everything
I know about these crazy fuckin’ people.”

It was then that Hollywood Nate said, “Where’s Dana?”

Mindy said, “Didn’t she cover the back door with you?”

By now all of the detectives had arrived and were milling around the property and talking on cells, while the bluesuits were
gathered in front of the duplex with their two handcuffed prisoners.

And Hollywood Nate said again, “Where the hell’s Dana?” Then he switched on his flashlight and ran back along the walkway
to the rear of the duplex, with the surfer cops right behind him.

Flotsam spotted her first with his flashlight beam. She was lying in a flower bed behind a short hedge that partially concealed
her body.

“Here!” Flotsam yelled. “Call an RA!”

Hollywood Nate leaped the hedge and was down on his knees in the dirt, turning her onto her back, and crying out, “Partner!
Partner!”

Flotsam shined his light onto her face and saw her eyes open in slits, and he said, “It’s bad, Nate! It’s bad!”

“No!” Nate shouted in denial, unable to see a bullet wound. He started doing chest compressions through her Kevlar vest, when
Jetsam came running toward them, and Flotsam showed a distraught face to his partner and shook his head.

Then Nate stopped the chest compressions and, tilting her head back, raised her chin and placed his mouth over hers. He began
breathing into her mouth, his left hand now wet with blood leaking from the bullet wound that severed her spinal cord at the
cervix, just above her vest, killing her in seconds. By now other cops were there, lighting the scene with flashlight beams,
and both Sheila Montez and Mindy Ling were crying.

Nate began doing the chest compressions again, his left hand slippery with her blood, and he began sobbing and murmuring,
“Please don’t, Dana! Please don’t!” And both surfer cops turned way, Flotsam looking up at the Hollywood moon while the yelp
of the ambulance siren drew closer and Hollywood Nate begged Dana Vaughn not to die.

B
ECAUSE HER MOTHER
had not been religious, the daughter of Officer Dana Vaughn chose the Hollywood United Methodist Church for the funeral service
after the coroner released her body. The Gothic church could be seen from the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland
Avenue, arguably the heart of Hollywood, and had been used in movies, so Pamela thought that her mother would’ve chuckled
and approved of her choice.

She told this to Hollywood Nate Weiss during a phone conversation when she asked him to be one of the pallbearers, four of
whom would be old friends of hers, male and female officers. Another choice that Pamela made was Leon Calloway, the officer
from Watch 3 whose life was seconds from ending one dark night when Dana Vaughn had taken a risky head shot to save him. He
fervently thanked Pamela for according him such an honor.