~ TWO ~

By the time Tomic drove Josie the few blocks back to the narcotics office parking lot it was nearly midnight and the building was dark and locked. She was tempted to walk across Wilcox to the Hollywood police station and sleep in the officers’ cot room, but she had promised her son she’d be home for breakfast. It was the first day of school and she wanted to be with him when the bus got there. He’d been complaining they didn’t spend enough time together anymore.

David was only seven but old enough to realize his mother was different from other moms. None of those women made lunch with a 9mm semiauto Beretta strapped on her hip. Her husband was good about filling in and his mother lived close enough to help, but the boy wanted her, and she knew not being there enough was making him unhappy.

She could smell the stench from the roof that had saturated her clothes and hair, but the narco building didn’t have a shower. They were lucky to have a sink and toilet. It was a rundown city facility behind the Hollywood division gas pumps and housed two of the four West Bureau narcotics squads—Hollywood and Venice—with more than a dozen scruffy men and two females, her and the secretary. They had to pick up after themselves because the city’s maintenance crew frequently refused to clean the mouse-infested “pigpen.”

After Tomic dropped her off and drove away, she stood by the door for a few minutes but decided not to go inside. There was paperwork to do but it could wait until morning. She unlocked an old Dodge sedan and rolled down all the windows before heading toward Pasadena. The plan was to air herself out before she got home.

It was late but she knew Jake would be up. Her husband was a supervising attorney in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office downtown and worked as hard as she did. The difference was he could bring his work home. He’d always been indulgent about her long hours, but Josie saw a change in him after she got promoted again to Narcotics Detective II supervisor a few months ago. He liked the extra money but still told her it was too dangerous and not appropriate work for any woman with a small child. She disagreed.

Before David was born they had rarely argued. Jake supported her when she was one of the first women to work in an LAPD black-and-white patrol car. As a couple, they worked hard, played hard, and laughed a lot, but about a year ago all that seemed to change. Their lovemaking was still frequent and pleasurable, but increasingly he acted as if he resented her desire to be a street cop. He said he was afraid of losing her, but she didn’t believe that was the real reason. Her work was exciting and challenging and she was good at it. She hated that he made her feel guilty.

She suspected Jake’s mother, or Nonna, as David called her—grandma in Italian—was the primary source of his discontent. The older woman was first-generation Italian but embraced the old country’s ways. She was good at babysitting David but had never warmed to Josie as her son’s wife. On more than one occasion, she preached how a woman should stay home to take care of her family. Josie ignored her. Jake pretended not to hear.

“Hi, hon,” she said, finding him at the kitchen table with stacks of case files. “It’s cold in here. Did the furnace break down again?” she asked, leaning over to kiss him.

They’d bought this three-story home in Pasadena, just north of downtown Los Angeles, shortly after David was born. It was old and still needed work, but she’d fallen in love with the big rooms, all the crown molding, original fireplaces, big backyard, and large front porch, but was growing impatient with the antiquated plumbing and furnace.

“No,” he said, not looking up until he closed the file. “Mom doesn’t like the heat on when she sleeps.”

“She’s staying over again?” Josie asked, not trying to hide her disappointment.

“It got late. I didn’t want her to drive. Where’d you park that oil-leaking piece of crap they make you drive? Not in our driveway I hope.”

“I put it as close to your Porsche as I could,” she said and waited for his loud sigh before adding, “Just kidding, it’s in the street in front of the neighbor’s house. He’ll probably have it towed as soon as he gets up.”

“Perfect.”

“Snob.”

She took a bottle of brandy off the credenza in the dining room and poured herself a full snifter. “Want one?” she asked. He nodded. She put it in front of him and sat across the table.

“Love you,” he said, raising the glass before taking a sip. “You look tired.”

“Long day,” she said, took a big swallow, and waited for that wonderful warming sensation.

“How come you never talk about what you and Tomic do?” he asked with a forced smile after a few seconds of silence. She usually loved his smile . . . and everything else about him, but she knew where this conversation was going and was too tired to have it. Jake was older than she was, with gray hair, and like his mother had some old-fashioned ideas, but he was intelligent and handsome with a great sense of humor too. She’d loved him almost from the first time they’d met but his obsession with getting her into a less dangerous, more “appropriate” assignment was becoming tiresome.

“Because most of the time what we do is boring,” she said, lying. “I probably have as much paperwork as you . . . maybe more. Tonight we sat on the filthy roof of the anything-but Paradise Apartments with a family of raccoon-sized rats and waited for Tomic’s snitch.”

“Oh, so that’s the reason. I wasn’t going to mention it, my dear, but you are a bit odoriferous this evening,” he said with a smirk that told her he was resigned to the fact she wouldn’t allow him to fully share that part of her life.

“Sorry about that . . . although, I do clean up nicely.”

“That’s true. I’m willing to conduct a personal inspection in bed in about . . . oh, say half an hour or so . . . okay?” he asked, looking at his watch and grinning.

She was beyond tired but didn’t turn him down because she always slept better after their lovemaking.

“Are you just getting home?” The question came from behind her, but Josie didn’t need to turn around to know her mother-in-law was standing in the dining room doorway, probably bundled in her chenille bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and wearing a hairnet to cover her heavily sprayed helmet of perfectly coifed white hair. “Are you drinking wine at this hour? You’ll never get up in the morning.”

“Hi, Mom, sorry if we woke you,” Josie said, not turning but smiling sweetly at Jake who grimaced.

“Go back to bed, Mom. We’ll talk in the morning,” he said.

“I’m thirsty,” she announced and shuffled to the sink, got a glass of water, and shot a disapproving glance at Josie before slowly leaving the kitchen. She was a stocky, relatively healthy old woman but Josie could hear her groaning as she climbed the stairs toward her bedroom on the second floor.

She and Jake stared silently at each other until the grunting stopped.

“Thus, the price we pay for a loving, trusted, grandma babysitter,” he said.

“Am I complaining?” she asked, getting up with her empty glass and picking up the bottle.

“No, that was me. Meet you in the bedroom.”

A SHOWER and twenty minutes of passionate lovemaking were the perfect formula for a good night’s sleep. Jake was already up by the time she woke the next morning. After another shower, she dressed quickly and was downstairs before Grandma Corsino had David dressed and at the kitchen table.

The young boy ran and jumped on Josie’s lap as soon as he saw her. He couldn’t stop chattering and she realized how long it had been since they’d sat at the breakfast table together. She pushed his hair back away from his handsome face. Unlike her or Jake, David had a pale complexion, thin light brown almost blond hair, but he had inherited her height and slender frame. When he was in kindergarten, his teacher discovered his talent for drawing and music and found him a piano teacher. He would have an advanced art class this year, also, but Jake said he worried his introverted little boy was being encouraged to do things that would further isolate him from other kids his age.

“Are you excited about first grade?” Josie asked, as Jake’s mother pushed a bowl of cereal in front of them.

“Feed the baby so he don’t miss the bus,” Grandma Corsino demanded.

“He’s a big boy, Nonna. He can feed himself,” Josie said, sliding him onto the chair next to hers.

David started eating, but stopped and with his mouth full shouted, “I’m so excited, Mom!” spitting corn flakes on the table and on his uniform shirt and laughing as the milk dripped down the sides of his mouth.

Josie laughed, but Jake and his mother looked at her as if she’d just started the boy on the road to becoming a sociopath. She wiped his face and cleaned the front of his shirt with a dish towel and said, “Lighten up guys; that was funny . . . in an Animal House sort of way.”

She walked her son to the school bus, hugged and kissed him before he climbed onboard. Josie waved until the bus was out of sight but felt pangs of guilt knowing it was probably one of the rare mornings when she’d be able to do this and how unhappy her son would be on all those other days.

HER MOTHER-IN-LAW wanted to make breakfast for her, too, but Josie made a feeble excuse why she couldn’t wait. Jake gave Josie a long kiss before he left for work and she knew if Nonna hadn’t been there, they would’ve been naked on the kitchen floor and late for work again. Instead she got into her car to go to work, stopping at the Winchell’s donut shop near the Pasadena Freeway and got their biggest cup of coffee and a bear claw to eat on the way to Hollywood.

Tomic had been subpoenaed to testify in court so she got to the narcotics office before him. The Venice squad was serving a search warrant that morning, so their side of the building was empty, but the chubby secretary, Dolores, was in the reception area. The radio base station was on her desk and she had the microphone in her hand talking to Lieutenant Randy Watts, West Bureau’s officer in charge. He was telling her he was on his way to downtown LA and wouldn’t be at the office until later that afternoon. Dolores jumped up and did a little Snoopy happy dance before signing off.

“Why’s the lieutenant downtown?” Josie asked, writing her name on the check-in sheet.

“Don’t know, don’t care . . . he drives me crazy . . . needs to stay there and bother the captain . . . leave me alone,” Dolores whined. “I’ve got such a headache.”

“Did Donny bring PCP in the office again?” Josie asked. Last week, the detective had confiscated a bottle of the hallucinogenic drug and left it on his desk while he finished reports. It wasn’t sealed tightly, and the fumes made everyone in the building dizzy and confused.

“No, but his partner is living in our interview room. His wife threw him out again last night and he moved in . . . brought all his stuff. I can’t work, can’t get to the case files or anything,” she said, moaning and dramatically dropping onto her chair.

The Hollywood squad room was on the other side of the building at the end of a long hallway lined with steel lockers. Josie had to pass the interview/stock room on the way to her desk, so she banged on the door with her fist and shouted, “Curtis, get up.”

Curtis Flowers was one of the few black men in the division and one of the best narcotics detectives in the city, but his personal life was a bad soap opera. His illegal immigrant wife, Sofia, either threatened to kill him or threw him out of their house at least once a month and he lived in his car or the office until she forgave him. The door finally opened, and he stood in front of her with his closely cropped afro, dressed only in boxer shorts.

“Morning, Josie, want something?” he mumbled, looking around as if he couldn’t remember why he was there.

“No, Dolores needs to get to her files.”

He nodded, stepped back inside, and closed the door. She knew Curtis still hadn’t quite accepted her into his world. She thought he liked her but in a lot of subtle ways he made it clear he didn’t think any woman belonged in narcotics street enforcement. Tomic told her Curtis had argued vigorously to keep her out of their squad and once she got there, he constantly complained about her tactics. That didn’t surprise her since her “get the drugs at any cost” tactics mimicked Tomic’s and although her partner liked Curtis, they were very competitive.

The Hollywood squad room was already humming with activity. Josie checked the board for messages but there was nothing from Kent. She retrieved Kent’s informant package from the file cabinet in the lieutenant’s office and filled in their brief contact last night.

There were two long wooden tables in the squad room with enough space for four detectives at each table, two on each side. Squad leader Detective III Red Behan’s desk was in the corner by a window that faced Wilcox Avenue. She and Tomic; Curtis Flowers and Donny Roberts; Tony “Too Tall” Gilbert and Art Friedman were the three Hollywood teams. The lieutenant kept promising to find them two more detectives but despite a flood of cocaine and heroin hitting Hollywood’s streets during the last few months, it hadn’t happened.

“Josie, you gotta hear this,” Art said, sitting beside her with a tape recorder. He was a fastidious, serious man and she never understood why he was working street enforcement. He’d spent most of his career at a desk job in the conventional boring environment of Parker Center, the police administration building, as an adjutant but had transferred here about the same time she did. He kept his hair short and trim, was clean shaven, wore pressed slacks instead of Levi’s, and claimed he didn’t mind the crazy impulsiveness of this job while everything about him said he should. He was clearly out of his element and was the only detective in the Hollywood squad who hadn’t been promoted to the rank of Detective II supervisor.

He turned on the tape recorder and the original theme song from the Howdy Doody television show played. Everyone, including her, laughed. Lieutenant Watts was skinny, redheaded, and freckled, a dead-ringer for the popular kids’ puppet, and they all knew Art in his quiet unassuming way would find the most inappropriate time to play the recording.

“Fuck me!” Donny shouted and fell backward off his chair. He had been sitting with his feet on the table in front of her but was scrambling on the floor on hands and knees now to get to the other side of the room as quickly as he could.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Art asked, getting up to help while his partner, Too Tall, wearing his tinted glasses, never looked up from the sports page of the LA Times.

Donny pointed at the table as a foot-long, shiny, red-tinged snake slithered out from the hole where the telephone lines came through. It was Curtis’s pet Rosy Boa, Rosie. Josie remembered the tiny reptile from his owner’s last stay in the interview room and she figured it must’ve gotten out of its cardboard box during the night. She picked it up and tried to show Donny it was harmless, but he scooted on his butt into a corner to get away from her.

“Throw the damn thing outside and shoot it!” Donny shouted, scrambling to his feet.

Curtis, dressed now, came into the room and gently took the snake from Josie. He looked at his partner, shook his head, turned around, and went back toward the interview room whispering something to Rosie.

“I hate fuckin’ snakes,” Donny yelled, brushing off his pants.

“We figured,” Art said, picking up the chair. “Come on, Too Tall. Let’s get outta here before Behan gets back.”

Tony Gilbert folded the paper and took one last gulp of coffee. He was about six foot four, slender with shoulder-length black hair and a day-old beard, and rarely was seen without tinted glasses that supposedly helped with his migraines. At some point in his life he’d gotten tired of telling people how tall he was, so when anyone asked, he’d always say, “too tall,” and his nickname was born.

The door to the holding cell was closed, but someone started pounding and kicking at it from the inside. The space was an oversized closet with a dim light and a bench. Most of the time, especially in the summer, the door was kept open to keep arrestees from suffocating.

Too Tall opened the door and Billie stepped out, followed by a wave of pungent body odor. She was almost Josie’s height but very overweight and wore pink tights, ballerina slippers, and a low-cut pink halter top. Her dyed blondish-orange hair was in two sloppy ponytails sticking straight up.

“Motherfucker,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “You fucking shitheads said a couple a fucking minutes. Detective Corsino, help me out here. These fuckers kidnapped me.”

“Morning, Billie . . . hustling kind of early,” Josie said.

“No, I swear. These pricks got me outside the Shack. I was gettin’ my damn breakfast.”

Josie didn’t have a chance to respond. Too Tall grabbed Billie’s arm and escorted her toward the hallway. This was one of those rare occasions when Josie believed Billie. Art and his partner were smart enough to be good cops, but they were lazy. Billie was a heroin addict who had a baby and she didn’t want to go to jail. Every cop in Hollywood knew she’d give up information on her drug contacts if you caught her using or selling heroin. But these guys never bothered to catch her dirty. It was easier for them to make up some phony charge and then force her to snitch or go to jail.

When Josie first got to Hollywood, Behan had told her the most important rule in working with snitches was to be fair. He said, “If they know you won’t bullshit or cheat them and you keep your word they’ll make you look good.” He was right. She’d made a lot of important cases with informants, including Billie. Art and Too Tall rarely got more than dime-bag dealers.

Behan came into the squad room with a mug of coffee as Billie was being pulled down the hallway, and she pleaded with him to free her from his two “asshole dicks.”

“Nice outfit,” Behan mumbled as Billie disappeared out the door. “Pink is definitely your color.”

The tall lanky Hollywood squad leader sat at his desk and stared into the coffee mug. He was another redhead but without freckles and, unlike Watts, was highly respected among his subordinates.

“You okay?” Josie asked.

“Where’s your partner and why aren’t you in the field catching bad guys?” he asked, holding his head with both hands.

It was a familiar scene. Behan would be miserable until late morning when he’d disappear for an hour, then come back refreshed, smelling of breath mints and ready to do his job. His drinking wasn’t a problem . . . not for her.

“He’s in court,” she said.

“Then go out with Art and Too Tall. Keep Billie from making them look stupid again.”

“No, thanks,” she said, and he turned to glare at her but didn’t make it an order. She knew he didn’t like the way that team worked either.

“Okay then, where’s Curtis?” he asked.

“In his bedroom,” she said, pointing at the interview room. Josie enjoyed working with Curtis, even though he watched and critiqued her every move. He and Tomic had taught her a lot. Curtis’s partner, Donny, was a nice guy, but he’d rather sit in the office, make phone calls, and do paperwork than work the streets. “I’m waiting for Tomic’s snitch to call for a meet this morning.”

“Did Sofia throw Curtis out or stab him again?” Behan asked.

Donny shrugged and said, “I got paperwork, but Josie can partner up with Curtis until Tomic gets back.”

“No, you and your partner get out of here. You can do paperwork later,” Behan ordered.

He finished the mug of coffee and glanced up as a locker slammed shut in the hallway.

“Curtis, if that’s you, I’m serving your eviction notice. Get your shit out of my interview room before the lieutenant gets back,” Behan shouted.

“No problem, boss,” Curtis said and went back into the room to retrieve a couple of boxes. He got Donny to help carry them out to his city car and load them into the trunk.

“Shut up,” Behan said when he noticed Josie staring at him. “As bad as my life gets, I never moved into a police station.”

She didn’t say anything but they both knew he’d been divorced several times and he should’ve been a little more sympathetic about Curtis’s situation. Josie guessed he didn’t want to deal with the lieutenant. Watts was politicking for a cushy lieutenant’s job downtown and was terrified any controversy in West Bureau would derail his chances. He wouldn’t allow anything that was risky or had the least chance to turn out badly, so she and most of the other detectives had stopped getting his permission. They were willing to take responsibility for the outcome of their cases and Watts was willing to let them.

There was another, louder bang in the hallway as if a hammer had been smashed into one of the lockers. Josie and Behan jumped up and ran out of the squad room to find Tomic leaning against the wall. His locker had a huge dent at the bottom where he’d apparently kicked it.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Behan asked, rubbing his aching temples and staring at the mangled locker door.

“Superman’s dead.”