“HANDS AGAINST THE FUCKING walls!”
Police flooded in, weapons drawn, and within seconds the room was torn apart. Desks were flipped, chairs were kicked over, and papers were sent fluttering to the ground. In a daze I stood, raised my hands, and was shoved roughly against the wall.
It was nothing like the police shows on TV. The raid was violent and aggressive. The outraged demeanor of the police suggested they’d walked in on a child pornography ring, not a bunch of people taking sports bets.
Next to me, a terrified-looking Mathew was patted down. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his belly wobble as rough hands frisked him. Next to him, Danny was getting the same treatment. Behind us a cop yelled, “Look what we got here!”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw one of the officers triumphantly brandishing an insulin syringe.
“That’s mine!” Kyle protested. “I’m a diabetic, for crissakes!”
I turned my head toward Tony, on my immediate left. We locked eyes. Gone was the impatient, dismissive stare that I was so familiar with. Instead, he radiated concern. Our hands were inches from each other, palms flat against the wall as we waited to be frisked. It felt strange to be standing there so quietly, with all the madness going on around us.
Slowly, I extended my pinkie finger toward his. I desperately wanted to touch him. I needed to touch him. My finger inched across the wall, closer, closer to his. When our fingers finally made contact it was as if all the noise of the raid suddenly receded. The shouting seemed far away, as if echoing from some distant place. All I could focus on was the sensation of Tony’s finger against mine. He wasn’t pulling away. We locked eyes again. This fleeting connection felt incredibly intense, after so many months of silent longing; for a brief, precious moment, everything seemed all right with the world.
Someone began patting Tony down. An officer grabbed a handful of his hair and wrenched his head back. With a sickening crunch, he smashed Tony’s face into the wall. Tony’s knees buckled, but he stayed on his feet. His eyes rolled back as his nose started to bleed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the policeman slip his hand into Tony’s pocket and remove a thick wad of money. Throughout it all, Tony never moved his hand away from mine.
I was terrified of what might happen if I moved. There was something lawless, even dangerous about these men. We were just taking bets—nobody was armed. Nobody would have resisted.
Moments later I felt a pair of hands on my body, patting my legs, moving slowly up to my waist, then farther, farther up my body, until they reached my breasts. I felt my cheeks burn as the hands cupped them. The cop stopped, taking a step backward.
“Turn around.”
Reluctantly, I removed my hand from Tony’s. I turned to face the man who’d frisked me.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “We got a female!”
I was marched into the room next door and directed to a chair next to Tony’s workout bench. Seated across from me was an older man with a hard, weather-beaten face and small, beady eyes that radiated cold disdain. He was wearing a dandruff-flecked navy-blue slicker jacket with “LAPD” embossed in yellow above a shield logo. His badge read “Officer Gibson.”
“Well, well,” he said, his eyes traveling down my body. “What’re you? The office bitch?”
I stared at him, dumbfounded.
“You fuck them all, correct?”
I was shocked. I had no idea how to respond.
“I’m just trying to figure out how it works around here,” he continued. “Do they pay you to crawl under the desk and give ’em head?” I noticed the light reflecting off Gibson’s gold wedding band and absently wondered if his wife knew what kind of a man she had married.
My mind drifted back to a decade earlier, when the police had responded to a burglary at our house in Westchester. The police officers had patiently followed my mother from room to room, listening with looks of concern as she tearfully recounted what had been stolen. They had taken notes and gently reassured her that they would do all they could to recover the missing goods. Back then I had felt so grateful for the protection of the police.
But now I was seeing another side to them. The harsh reality of being on the wrong side of the law was becoming very clear to me.
“Whattaya think, Mike?” Gibson asked one of his colleagues. “You think she fucks ’em one at a time, or all at once?”
As they debated this, some of Gibson’s men tramped up and down the ramp that separated the office area from the warehouse, unaware that some of the evidence they were searching for was right under their feet. It was under this ramp that Jim had concealed the diverters, which were supposed to render the phones untraceable. How had the police found us?
So far they’d recovered only a stack of betting slips. Gibson was clearly frustrated at the haul.
“Check her for tracks,” one of the officers suggested hopefully. Gibson forced my sleeve up. When he saw my healthy veins, he looked deflated and pushed my arms away. Another officer appeared behind Gibson, holding a small plastic baggie.
“We, uh, found this in the bathroom, sir.”
I shook my head in disbelief. I kept that bathroom spotless, and whatever it was that he was holding definitely had not come from there. Gibson took my hand and placed the baggie on my palm. It was full of a fine white powder. I had never used it, but this was obviously cocaine. I stared at Gibson, perplexed. He grinned and forced my hand closed.
“That’s not mine!”
“Yeah? Then why are your prints all over it?”
My mind flashed back to a speech Tony had given during my first week at the warehouse. “Whatever you do, don’t bring drugs to the office,” he’d ordered. “If we ever get busted, Sacco’ll take care of you. But if you’re caught with drugs, you’re on your own.”
Since I didn’t drink or do drugs, I hadn’t given much thought to his warning. But now, with Gibson forcing my hand closed over a baggie of planted cocaine, the memory made my blood run cold. From the next room I could hear Danny pleading with someone. Then I heard him yelp in pain.
The city of Los Angeles would later pay over $20 million to settle excessive-force cases. But back in 1987, the district attorney was still refusing to prosecute officers and sheriff’s deputies accused of assault and brutality. The D.A. was essentially condoning their behavior. I knew the LAPD was corrupt—after all, it was taking regular payoffs from us. But nothing could justify the behavior I saw on display that day.
The atmosphere eased somewhat when a female officer stepped into the room. She was short and stocky, a tough-as-nails woman with a pair of torpedo-sized breasts that strained the buttons of her white uniform blouse. She greeted her colleagues jovially, then adopted a frosty expression when she turned to face me. “On your feet,” she ordered.
She led me to the bathroom. Wordlessly she patted me down, running her fingers under my bra and through my hair. As she did this I noted with satisfaction that the towel was still on the rack, undisturbed.
When the search was over, Gibson handed the female officer a plastic sack. It contained my belongings—my wallet, keys, and Dr. Pepper–flavored lip-gloss. I noted with relief that the baggie of cocaine was not there. I was led out, pushed into the back of a waiting police car, and taken away, blue lights flashing.
True to Ron’s word, my bail arrived at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women before I did. As my paperwork was being processed, I went over and over what had just happened. Had I witnessed the police as they really were?
An hour later I was standing outside of the prison, waiting for a taxi. The Armenian driver who collected me demanded to see the cash up-front before he’d agree to take me the short distance from Monterey Park to East L.A. By the time we got to the warehouse district it was completely deserted. My car was the only one remaining on the street. I was relieved to see it hadn’t been broken into.
I pulled up at the nearest pay phone and dialed Jim’s number.
“Hello?”
“We got busted.”
Jim was struck dumb but managed to gather himself together. “Jesus … RB, are you all right? Where are you? What number are you on?” I gave Jim the number of the pay phone. He told me to stay put, and hung up.
A minute later the phone rang.
“You okay?” It was Ron Sacco.
“Yes.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” he assured me. “Listen, I want you to drive over to Mathew’s place. We’re going to meet there later. Do you have a pen?”
I jotted down the directions and hung up. I was grateful to have somewhere to go. The thought of spending the night alone in my apartment was unbearable. I needed to know that everybody was all right, especially Tony.
I pulled up in front of a pale-yellow 1950s-style house and double-checked the address Ron had given me. A pretty woman with a full face and curly auburn hair answered the door. I recognized her immediately as Mathew’s wife, Patsy, from the photos I’d seen of her. She led me inside, chatting happily, and pointed me toward the bathroom. “There’s some clean towels on the rack,” she said breezily. “You’ll probably want to clean up, after what you’ve been through.”
She was right. I wanted to wash any traces of Gibson off me.
I left the bathroom and followed the smell of garlic to the kitchen. I found Patsy stirring an enormous bowl of spaghetti sauce. “Thought I’d make a start on dinner,” she said. “The guys’ll be starving when they get out.” Patsy’s reaction to the arrests seemed surreal. She acted as if it were normal for her husband to be carted off to jail.
The doorbell rang. I flinched, still jumpy from the events of the day. “That’ll be Joanna!” Patsy cooed.
Joanna was Ron Sacco’s girlfriend. I’d heard a lot about her, but this was the first time we’d met. She was a striking woman in her mid-thirties, dressed in burgundy leather slacks, a matching leather jacket, and high-heel suede boots. Her hair was bleached platinum blond and styled in full, soft waves around her luminous face. She should have looked cheap, but somehow she was undeniably glamorous.
“You must be RB.” She smiled, revealing a row of perfect white teeth.
Joanna was obviously well acquainted with Patsy’s kitchen. Soon she was taking olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and assorted herbs and spices out of the cupboards to prepare a salad dressing. “I’ll be speaking with our lawyer tomorrow morning,” she said. “In the meantime, I’ll need to know exactly what happened. Every detail is important.”
I recounted the bust to the best of my recollection. She frowned when I told her that the police had smashed down the door in lieu of presenting us with a search warrant. She seemed relieved that the sheriffs were not involved in the raid, as their jurisdiction was statewide.
“Did it seem that they were looking for something … specific?”
I shrugged. “They turned the place upside down, but they didn’t find the diverters or the recorders. Not while I was there.”
“Something doesn’t add up,” she mused. “We’ve always been on good terms with the LAPD.”
After speaking with her for a while, I realized I’d been wrong in my assumption that Joanna was in her thirties. Based on her manner, intellect, and experience, I now decided that she was maybe a decade older. I liked that about Sacco. With his money he could have had any number of twenty-something bimbos on his arm. Instead he stuck with a woman who was not only close to his own age, but an asset to him professionally.
“What happens now?” I asked. I assumed that a bust of that magnitude would spell the end for the office.
“We’ll open tomorrow from a backup location. Business as usual,” Joanna said nonchalantly. “What about you?”
“Me?”
Joanne looked at me intently. “Ron likes you. The players like you. It would be … reassuring for them if you stayed on.”
I considered the possibility of backing out, but quickly dismissed it. I had no moral issue with what we were doing. After seeing the way the police behaved today, I had no illusions about who the real bad guys were. Besides, I knew that the only way I could be sure of seeing Tony again would be to continue working for him.
“I’ll be there.”
Joanna leaned across and gave me a hug. When she broke away I glanced at my watch. It was getting late.
“This could take a while,” she said. “It takes longer to process the guys.”
“They probably won’t be here until around one,” Patsy called from the kitchen.
“You should go home and get some sleep,” Joanna suggested.
But I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to see Tony.
I thanked Patsy for her hospitality and followed Joanna outside, where she reassured me again that I didn’t have anything to worry about. We said our goodbyes and I headed toward the car.
Stopping, I turned back to her. “By the way … do you have any idea where the guys have been taken to?”
Joanna smiled knowingly. “L.A. County Jail.” She scrutinized me for a moment. “And in case you’re wondering … it’s Santino.”
“Santino?” I repeated blankly.
“Tony’s last name. Santino. You’ll have to ask for him at the front desk.”
I started laughing as I ran toward the car.
“Thanks, Joanna!”
As I barreled down the highway, it struck me that I was plotting to seduce a man I’d hated not so long ago. The more I’d learned about Tony, however, the more attracted I became to him. There was something old-fashioned about him, I decided—almost chivalrous. Even though he insisted that I be treated exactly like one of the guys, he always made sure that someone walked me to my car after work. He also had us put 5065 on hold every time he called for a month, because he’d screwed me out of that half-point. Tony was fiercely loyal to his friends, and I was touched by how involved in his siblings’ lives he was. Despite his rough exterior, he was a smart, well-informed guy. He read the paper every day, and could wax lyrical about the ins and outs of the Iran-Contra affair currently in the headlines. When I started dreading my days off, I knew that my feelings for him were completely out of control. There was no stopping it now; my feelings were too strong. What I was about to do may have been madness, but I didn’t care.
Gibson’s assumption that I was having sex with the guys in the office couldn’t have been further from the truth. I had been in Los Angeles for seven long, celibate months. I was hoping that tonight was going to change all that. The moment I’d touched Tony’s hand and he hadn’t pulled away gave me all the incentive I needed.
I skidded to a halt in the parking lot outside the L.A. County Jail and brazenly marched toward the entrance. Before I got halfway to it, the doors swung open and Tony stepped out into the night. He didn’t see me. He headed straight for a row of pay phones. I stopped in my tracks, suddenly frozen with indecision.
As he rummaged for change, I forced myself to continue walking. This was fate, I decided. A minute later and I would have missed him.
“Hi,” I said.
He spun around. His expression softened when he saw me. We stood there staring at each other, saying nothing.
I reached out and ran my fingers softly over the blue lump where his forehead had connected with the wall.
“That’s a nasty bruise.”
“Yeah. Guess that’s what I get for resisting arrest.” He stared at me, as if he couldn’t believe I had come. “What are you doing here?”
I shrugged, smiling nervously. “I thought you might need a ride.”