Hollywood Crows by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

rouged. Then she massaged the dancer’s neck and shoulders, kissing the right shoulder lightly.
    “About seven, seven-thirty,” Jasmine said, placing her delicate fingers over Margot’s. “Not so hard,” she said. “I strained my shoulder on that goddamn pole last night.” Then she asked, “Have any luck with your friend? Will he be visiting again soon?”
    “Not as soon as I’d like,” Margot said, stopping the shoulder rub and sitting on a chair next to the makeup table. “He gets attacks of remorse. I think I can pull him out of it, but how soon, I can’t say.”
    “Shit!” Jasmine said.
    “Don’t be discouraged,” Margot said. “I had a lucky break today.”
    “Yeah, what kinda break?” Jasmine said listlessly.
    “A cop stopped me for a ticket,” Margot said. “Of course he didn’t write it. A handsome, horny cop with no wedding ring on his finger.”
    “So what? It’s not too hard for someone like you to talk a cop out of a ticket. I’ve done it myself.”
    “There was something about this one,” Margot said. “I think it could work with him.”
    “A substitute?”
    “If a second-stringer is needed,” Margot said. “But let’s not give up on our number-one draft pick. He’s perfect.”
    “Did today’s cop try to make a date?”
    “I have his cell number,” Margot said. “If we need it.”
    “Tell me something about your husband that I gotta know,” Jasmine said.
    “What’s that?”
    “Does that fucking Arab asshole
ever
get enough blow jobs?”
     
FOUR
     
    W ATCH 5 HIT THE STREETS with a bang that evening. The bang came from a twelve-year cop with a sporty blonde haircut, rosy dumpling cheeks, and just a hint of makeup, whose Sam Browne belt was rumored to be a size 44. Gert Von Braun had recently transferred to Hollywood from Central Division, where she’d been in an officer-involved shooting that cops refer to as a “good” shooting. Gert had encountered an armed bandit running out of a skid row liquor store, loot and gun in hand, at the same moment that Gert, working alone in a report car, was pulling up in front. Steering with her left hand, Gert had fired one-handed through the open passenger window and hit the parolee-at-large with four out of five rounds, killing him instantly, thus making herself a celebrity gunslinger at Central Station.
    But Gert was sick of all the skid row derelicts and the smells associated with them: urine and feces, vomit and blood. And, worst of all, the unbearably sweet, sickly smell of decaying flesh from corpses that had lain dead under bridges and in cardboard shelters. Some had been there for so long that even the flies covering them were dead. At least those corpses didn’t smell. And the living weren’t much better off, derelicts with their legs and feet covered with clumps of maggots that were eating them alive while the wretches ate whatever they could beg at the back doors of downtown eateries.
    The watch commanders were always calling for acid washes at Central Station. They had an air-deodorizing machine going most of the time and burned incense sticks in the report room. Cops would come on duty, sniff the air, and say, “Is it a three- or four-stick day?”
    Finally, Gert Von Braun had decided that Central Division smelled like one huge tennis shoe and she couldn’t get the odor out of her uniforms or her nostrils. Hollywood Station was closer to her home in the Valley and smelled much better, even though she knew it was a lot weirder than Central. She’d asked for a transfer and had gotten it.
    Coppers at Hollywood Station noticed that Gert carried everything but a rocket launcher in her war bag, which was not actually a bag but a huge black suitcase on wheels. And the cops at Hollywood Station discovered quickly that Gert had “ETS,” which was what they called explosive temper syndrome, especially when she’d come puffing out of the station into the parking lot, red faced in the summer heat, dragging her load