Hollywood Station (10 page)

Untouchable Al, who was drunk and feeling very grumpy indeed, said, "Fuck you, you young twerp."

Wesley Drubb was stunned and turned to look at Nate, who was out of the car, leaning on the roof with his elbows, shaking his head, knowing what was coming.

"He's having a bad hair day," Nate said. "A dozen or so are hanging out his nose."

"We don't have to take that," Wesley said to Nate. Then he turned to Al and said, "We don't have to take that from you."

Yes, they did. And Al was about to demonstrate why. As soon as Wesley Drubb pulled on his latex gloves and stepped forward, putting his hand on Al's bony shoulder, the geezer shut his eyes tight and grimaced and groaned and squatted a bit and let it go.

The explosion was so loud and wet that the young cop leaped back three feet. The sulfurous stench struck him at once.

"He's shitting!" Wesley cried in disbelief. "He's shitting his pants!"

"I don't know how he craps on cue like that," Nate said. "It's a rare talent, actually. Kind of the ultimate defense against the forces of truth and justice."

"Gross!" the young cop cried. "He's shitting! Gross!"

"Come on, Wesley," Hollywood Nate said. "Let's go about our business and let Al finish his."

"Fucking young twerp," Untouchable Al said as the black-and-white drove swiftly away.

While Untouchable Al was finishing his business, an extraordinary robbery was taking place at a jewelry store on Normandie Avenue owned by a Thai entrepreneur who also owned two restaurants. The little jewelry store that sold mostly watches was this week going to offer a very special display of diamonds that the proprietor's twenty-nine-year-old nephew, Somchai "Sammy" Tanampai, planned to take home when he closed that evening.

The robbers, an Armenian named Cosmo Betrossian and his girlfriend, a Russian masseuse and occasional prostitute named Ilya Roskova, had entered the store just before closing, wearing stocking masks. Now Sammy Tanampai sat on the floor in the back room, his wrists duct-taped behind his back, weeping because he believed they would kill him whether or not they got what they wanted.

Sammy forced his eyes from roaming to his son's cartoon-plastered lunch box on a table by the back door. He'd placed the diamonds in little display trays and velvet bags and stacked them inside the lunch box next to a partially consumed container of rice, eggs, and crab meat.

Sammy Tanampai thought they might be after the watches, but they didn't touch any of them. The male robber, who had very thick black eyebrows grown together, raised up the stocking mask to light a cigarette. Sammy could see small broken teeth, a gold incisor, and pale gums.

He walked to where Sammy was sitting on the floor, pulled Sammy's face up by jerking back a handful of hair, and said in heavily accented English, "Where do you hide diamonds?"

Sammy was so stunned he didn't respond until the large blond woman with the sulky mouth, garishly red under the stocking mask, walked over, bent down, and said in less accented English, "Tell us and we will not kill you."

He started to weep then and felt urine soak his crotch, and the man pointed the muzzle of a .25 caliber Raven pistol at his face. Sammy thought, What a cheap-looking gun they are about to shoot me with.

Then his gaze involuntarily moved toward his child's lunch box and the man followed Sammy's gaze and said, "The box!"

Sammy wept openly when the big blond woman opened the lunch box containing more than a hundred and eighty thousand wholesale dollars' worth of loose diamonds, rings, and ear studs and said, "Got it!"

The man then ripped off a strip of duct tape and wrapped it around Sammy's mouth.

How did they know? Sammy thought, preparing to die. Who knew about the diamonds?

The woman waited by the front door and the man removed a heavy object from the pocket of his coat. When Sammy saw it he cried more, but the duct tape kept him quiet. It was a hand grenade.

The woman came back in, and for the first time Sammy noticed their latex gloves. Sammy wondered why he hadn't noticed before, and then he was confused and terrified because the man, holding the spoon handle of the grenade, placed it between Sammy's knees while the woman wrapped tape around his ankles. The grenade spoon dug into the flesh of his thighs above the knees and he stared at it.

When the robbers were finished, the woman said, "You better got strong legs. If you relax too much your legs, you shall lose the handle. And then you die."

And with that, the man, holding Sammy's knees in place, pulled the pin and dropped it on the floor beside him.

Now Sammy did wail, the muffled sound very audible even with his mouth taped shut.

"Shut up!" the man commanded. "Keep the knees tight or you be dead man. If the handle flies away, you be dead man."

The woman said, "We shall call police in ten minutes and they come to help you. Keep the knees together, honey. My mother always tell me that but I do not listen."

They left then but didn't call the police. A Mexican dishwasher named Pepe Ramirez did. He was on his way to his job in Thai Town, driving past the boss's jewelry store, and was surprised to see light coming from the main part of the store. It should have been closed. The boss always closed before now so he could get to both his restaurants while they were preparing for the dinner crowd. Why was the boss's store still open? he wondered.

The dishwasher parked his car and entered the jewelry store through the unlocked front door. He spoke very little English and no Thai at all, so all he could think to call out was "Meester? Meester?"

When he got no answer, he walked cautiously toward the back room and stopped when he heard what sounded like a dog's whimper. He listened and thought, No, it's a cat. He didn't like this, not at all. Then he heard banging, a loud muffled series of thumps. He ran from the store and called 911 on his brand-new cell phone, the first he'd ever owned.

Because of his almost unintelligible English and because he hung up while the operator was trying to transfer the call to a Spanish speaker, his message had been misunderstood. Other undocumented migrants had told him that the city police were not la migra and would not call Immigration unless he committed a major crime, but he was uncomfortable around anyone with a uniform and badge and thought he should not be there when they came.

It came out over the air as an "unknown trouble" call, the kind that makes cops nervous. There was enough known trouble in police work. Usually such a call would draw more than one patrol unit as backup. Mag Takara and Benny Brewster got the call, and Fausto Gamboa and Budgie Polk were the first backup to arrive, followed by Nate Weiss and Wesley Drubb.

When Mag entered the store, she drew her pistol and following her flashlight beam walked cautiously into the back room with Benny Brewster right behind her. What she saw made her let out a gasp.

Sammy Tanampai had hopelessly banged his head against the plasterboard wall, trying to get the attention of the dishwasher. His legs were going numb and the tears were streaming down his face as he tried to think about his children, tried to stay strong. Tried to keep his knees together!

When Mag took two steps toward the jeweler, Benny Brewster shined his light on the grenade and yelled, "WAIT!"

Mag froze and Fausto and Budgie, who had just entered by the front door, also froze.

Then Mag saw it clearly and yelled, "GRENADE! CLEAR!" And nobody knew what was going on or what the hell to do except instinctively to draw their guns and crouch.

Fausto did not clear out. Nor did the others. He shouldered past Benny, plunged into the back room, and saw Mag standing ten feet from the taped and hysterical Sammy Tanampai. And Fausto saw the grenade.

Sammy's face was bloody where he'd snagged the tape free on a nail head, and he tried to say something with a crumpled wad of tape stuck to the corner of his mouth. He gagged and said, "I can't . . . I can't . . ."

Fausto said to Mag, "GET OUT!"

But the littlest cop ignored him and tiptoed across the room as though motion would set it off. And she reached carefully for it.

Fausto leaped forward after Sammy unleashed the most despairing terrifying wail that Mag had ever heard in her life when his thigh muscles just surrendered. Mag's fingers were inches from the grenade when it dropped to the floor beneath her and the spoon flew across the room.

"CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR!" Fausto yelled to all the cops in the store, but Mag picked up the grenade first and lobbed it into the far corner behind a file cabinet.

Instantly, Fausto grabbed Mag Takara by the back of her Sam Browne and Sammy Tanampai by his shirt collar and lifted them both off the floor, lunging backward until they were out of the little room and into the main store, where all six cops and one shopkeeper pressed to the floor and waited in terror for the explosion.

Which didn't come. The hand grenade was a dummy.

No fewer than thirty-five LAPD employees were to converge on that store and the streets around it that night: detectives, criminalists, explosives experts, patrol supervisors, even the patrol captain. Witnesses were interviewed, lights were set up, and the area for two blocks in all directions was searched by cops with flashlights.

They found nothing of evidentiary value, and a detective from the robbery team who had been called in from home interviewed Sammy Tanampai in the ER at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. The victim told the detective that the male robber had briefly smoked a cigarette but none had been found by detectives at the scene.

Sammy grew lethargic because the injection they had given him was making him sleepy, but he said to the detective, "I don't know how they knew about the diamonds. The diamonds arrived at ten o'clock this morning and we were going to show them tomorrow to a client from San Francisco who requested certain kinds of pieces."

"What kind of client is he?" the detective asked.

"My uncle has dealt with him for years. He is very wealthy. He is not a thief."

"About the blond woman who you think was Russian, tell me more."

"I think they were both Russians," Sammy said. "There are lots of Russians around Hollywood."

"Yes, but the woman. Was she attractive?"

"Perhaps so. I don't know."

"Anything out of the ordinary?"

"Big breasts," Sammy said, opening and closing his aching jaw and touching the wounded flesh around his mouth, his eyelids drooping.

"Have you ever gone to any of the nightclubs around here?" the detective asked. "Several of them are Russian owned and operated."

"No. I am married. I have two children."

"Anything else that you remember about either of them?"

"She made a joke about keeping my knees together. She said that she never did. I was thinking of my children then and how I would never see them again. And she made that joke. I hope you get to shoot them both," Sammy said, tears welling.

After all the cops who'd been in the jewelry store were interviewed back at the station, Hollywood Nate said to his young partner, "Some gag, huh, Wesley? Next time I work on a show, I'm gonna tell the prop man about this. A dummy grenade. Only in Hollywood."

Wesley Drubb had been very quiet for hours since their trauma in the jewelry store. He had answered questions from detectives as well as he could, but there really wasn't anything important to say. He answered Nate with, "Yeah, the joke was on us."

What young Wesley Drubb wanted to say was, I could have died tonight. I could have . . . been . . . killed tonight! If the grenade had been real.

It was very strange, very eerie, to contemplate his own violent death. Wesley Drubb had never done that before. He wanted to talk to somebody about it but there was no one. He couldn't talk about it to his older partner, Nate Weiss. Couldn't explain to a veteran officer like Nate that he'd left USC for this, where he'd been on the sailing team and was dating one of the hottest of the famed USC song girls. He'd left it because of those inexplicable emotions he felt after he'd reached his twenty-first birthday.

Wesley had grown sick of college life, sick of being the son of Franklin Drubb, sick of living on Fraternity Row, sick of living in his parents' big house in Pacific Palisades during school holidays. He'd felt like a man in prison and he'd wanted to break out. LAPD was a breakout without question. And he'd completed his eighteen months of probation and was here, a brand-new Hollywood Division officer.

Wesley's parents had been shocked, his fraternity brothers, sailing teammates, and especially his girlfriend, who was now dating a varsity wide receiver-everyone who knew him was shocked. But he hadn't been sorry so far. He'd thought he'd probably do it for a couple of years, not for a career, for the kind of experience that would set him apart from his father and his older brother and every other goddamn broker in the real-estate firm owned by Lawford and Drubb.

He thought it would be like going into the military for a couple of years, but he wouldn't have to leave L. A. Like a form of combat that he could talk about to his family and friends years later, when he inevitably became a broker at Lawford and Drubb. He'd be a sort of combat veteran in their eyes, that was it.

Yes, and it had all been going so well. Until tonight. Until that grenade hit the floor and he stared at it and that little officer Mag Takara picked it up with Fausto Gamboa roaring in his ears. That wasn't police work, was it? They never talked about things like that in the academy. A man with a hand grenade between his knees?