Police and Thieves: A Novel (12 page)

“In the Mission? Me and my friends, we don’t go there anymore.”

“Where? Capp Street?”

“No, the Mission. Too many white people like yourself.”

I wanted to say, hey, wait a minute, but she said she had to go. Loretta and Bobo went to find something to drink. Left alone, I felt useless. Eichmann said to me over the hubbub, “Let’s do some exploring.”

Sensitive to my moods, he knew how to cheer me up because
one of my hobbies was other people’s private property. And this house had a lot of it. Clearly, a great deal of motivation had gone into the furnishings. Three velveteen wingback chairs in the living room, along with an assortment of carved wooden sculptures from Africa and Asia, caught my interest. As we forced our way into the kitchen, shoving past a kid puking on the floor, Eichmann spluttered, “Look who’s here.”

Dee Dee was putting the moves on a girl half his age. He had her in a corner and he was seducing her with bong hits. Since his back was to me, I saw the bald spot on his head. The girl wasn’t letting him get too close to her, even though she was smoking his weed.

Eichmann went, “Hey, Dee Dee! You robbing the cradle?”

Dee Dee flipped us the bird, and Eichmann went after him. A geek in a Pendleton jostled me and said, “You want some acid?”

“Could be. What do you have?”

“Windowpane … the best.”

He produced a plastic vial from his shirt pocket. Inside the cylinder were a hundred microsquares of transparent gelatine that appeared to resemble authentic windowpane. It was an excellent product, with a high resale value.

“How much?”

“Five bucks a hit.”

“That’s too much.”

“Okay. Four bucks each if you buy five of them.”

I thought about stealing the vial from him, then nixed the idea. Possession of acid in any amount was a felony charge, just what I didn’t want. The vision of Flaherty busting me with a hundred hits in my pocket was more hallucinatory than the drug itself. It was a sobering thought, and suddenly I didn’t feel like meeting anybody else, so I made for the staircase to the second floor. Eichmann had informed me the parents’ room was at the end of
the hall up there—I was curious to see what they had in their boudoir. He joined me and we climbed the stairs together.

“You having fun?” Eichmann asked.

“Fun?”

“Yeah, fun. You know, leisure.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? What’s the matter with you? Are you getting moody again?”

“Maybe.”

“Look, don’t be like that.”

“Don’t tell me how to be. I hate it when you do that.”

“What do you want? You’re depressing me.”

“I’m depressing you? God, you should talk. How many millions of times have I listened to your shit?”

“Oh, now you’re going to make me feel guilty for having talked to you about Loretta and me, huh? Gee, what a friend.”

“Well, fuck you.”

“Fuck you, too, Doojie. When you’re bored, you’re a bring-down, you know that?”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Wait until we snoop around, that’ll improve your spirits. I want to show you something.”

I followed Eichmann to the second floor, marveling at the size of the condo as we sneaked down the hall into the master bedroom. “This is where the mom and dad sleep when they’re getting along with each other,” he said. We stopped by the door—he pointed a nail-bitten finger out the window. “Neat, huh?”

The sun was sinking in the west behind the Golden Gate Bridge, backlighting the radar cone of a turquoise and bronze freighter gliding through the white-capped water by Alcatraz. Sausalito’s lights were shimmering, changing in the fog that jitter-bugged into the bay from the bald and sorry Marin Headlands.
Mount Tamalpais loomed purple and tall behind all of it; the top of the mountain was wreathed by a thick ivory band of fog. I could’ve spent the rest of the night gazing out the window, but Eichmann wouldn’t let me. “C’mon, Doojie, let’s open pandora’s box and see what we find.”

Eichmann wasn’t a good influence on me, but I didn’t have the will to resist his corrosive need to exploit every situation he found himself in. For me, it was easier to let him think I was following his orders, just enough to keep him from nagging me. We found a large number of coats and purses stacked up in the main closet; these items belonged to the party’s guests.

While Eichmann went through the coats, sorting out the wallets, each in accordance to its value—the money was in a pile by his feet, and the credit cards were on the pillow next to him—I opened a woman’s dresser and discovered a packet of sheer silk stockings. I ripped open the cellophane packaging, then pulled a stocking over my head to imitate a bank robber. Eichmann took one look at me and batted his eyes.

“You look like your mother,” Eichmann said.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed surrounded by his booty, his face was flushed, child-like with the pleasure of thievery. Taking what didn’t belong to him was a mirror of his own reflection; he knew he was ugly, but when he stole, it somehow beautified him. “I got fifty bucks here,” Eichmann said with contentment. “I don’t want the credit cards. Do you?”

“No.”

“How about ten bucks. You want that?”

“No.”

The less you needed, the less trouble you got into. If you didn’t want anything, you didn’t have anything people could take from you—if you didn’t have an appetite, you’d never go hungry. Eichmann pursed his lips at me, replying, “Suit yourself.”

The bedroom door swung open and Bobo stumbled in with his shirt torn, his hair adorned with pieces of glass, and with his round fleshy face showcasing a black eye. “Hey, the cops are coming to shut the party down.”

“How do you know?”

“They’re outside.”

We rushed to the window. The descent from Grant Street down the hill to Washington was a river of police vehicles; a string of black and white squad cars, plus three vans were parked on the sidewalk next to the condo. A squadron of riot cops charged the front door, causing a mass exodus. Partygoers were fleeing through the rear gardens, trampling the stately flower beds that bordered the property. The police followed everybody through the house into the backyard, clubbing the less fortunate. One kid with three cops on top of him was screaming, “Mom! Help me, Mom!”

I locked the bedroom door and turned out the lights, getting down on my hands and knees. If I remained motionless, the police wouldn’t detect me; if I stayed out of sight, they’d never find me. Eichmann, enjoying my discomfort, the police sirens, and hiding out in the dark, said to Bobo, “You know, I was thinking we ought to get out of the neigborhood more often, go to more parties. I like being festive.”

Whatever Bobo said next was drowned by the sound of breaking glass coming from downstairs.

It was dawn when Eichmann walked in the garage door. After being out all night long in North Beach’s foggy streets, one of his cowboy boots was missing. He took off the other one he still had on and removed his pants. As he stood shivering in his boxer shorts, the light from the driveway filtered through the gaps in the garage’s walls, dappling his watermelon-shaped belly. He extracted a warm beer from a case next to the hot plate and popped it open. He threw his head back and guzzled the brew, letting the off-white suds run down both sides of his mouth onto his shirt.

Loretta was curled up like a cat on the couch, snoring throatily. Eichmann wiped his lips with a shirtsleeve and staggered over to her, calling her name under his breath. He perched himself gingerly on a sofa cushion next to her and sighed. The morning sun made him look a hundred years older than he was. She turned over and said something like, “Honey, what are you doing?” He dropped a hand on her breasts, letting it rest there, too tired to do anything else.

He looked at his hand, his skin darker than hers. Loretta opened an eye, then fluffed the pillow and slammed her head back into it. Eichmann peeled the blanket from her shoulders, tracing his index finger down her ribs and her stomach, stopping at the hair between her desperately white legs. Like the hair on her head, the thatch had been bleached platinum with peroxide. He brightened when Loretta said to him, nearly asleep, “Put your finger in me, will you?”

All of Eichmann’s relationships with women were problematic. I didn’t understand what he was putting himself through with Loretta, but even if I did know, what could I do? There were too many questions, and not enough answers. Knowing this, I tried to think about other things.

It wasn’t difficult: Flaherty was on my mind. Thinking about him reminded me of my stepfather, a man who loved guns as much as any policeman did, if not more. Doojie Sr. believed in the intrinsic and artistic value of weaponry.

My stepfather had two and a half fingers on his right hand. The other digits had been blown to smithereens by a stick of dynamite he’d set off in his parents’ living room. The backseat of the Hillman was always piled high with rifles, carbines, and animal traps. His favorite gun was a double-barreled silver-plated fowling piece from France with a burnished stock covered in carvings. But his arsenal was versatile: I was particularly awed by the Browning automatic rifle he kept, a gun as tall as me.

Every Sunday we went out to the country south of Half Moon Bay to do some recreational shooting. We’d cruise the hilly roads near San Gregorio, scanning the roadside trees for wild game. More than once, he parked the sedan on the road’s shoulder and aimed a 30.06 Remington bolt-action rifle through a side window, firing off rounds at whatever was in the treeline, permeating the car’s interior with a cloud of gunpowder so impenetrable you couldn’t see anything through the windshield. “Goddamn it!” he’d yell. “I’m gonna have me some venison tonight!”

Every other Sunday was target-practice day. That’s when Doojie Sr. trained me to fire a number of weapons, from a single-shot .22 deer-hunting rifle to a U.S. military model 1911 Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol. “It’s good for you,” he instructed me. “You get the hang of loading a gun, you can handle anything in this world.”

Doojie Sr. also seeded my young brain with his knowledge of the penal industry. He’d been in a maximum-security penitentiary for several years and had had a lot of trouble with the police. He was an experienced hand when it came to running from the law. What would he do if he were in my position with a notorious narc on his case? I could hear him say, clear as the bells ringing for mass at Mission Dolores, “Doojie, I don’t know. They always caught me, didn’t they?”

The pounding on the door began shortly after Eichmann came home from North Beach. The racket was so atrocious and, given the hour, so insistent, it set my hair on end. I got out of my sleeping bag, hearing several voices in the parking lot. Eichmann sat up on the couch—Loretta’s arms were entwined around his waist. The noise was horrendous; he made a vile face, barking in a low-pitched growl, “Who’s there? What do you want?”

“Open up, Eichmann! We’ve got business with you!”

“Who is it?”

“You know who it is! Let me in!”

Loretta slung a bathrobe around herself, raking a hand through her newly re-peroxided hair. Eichmann sat up and bellowed in the loudest, ugliest voice imaginable, “State your business!”

“It’s me, Dee Dee! And I want my money!”

“You want what?”

“My money!”

The banging resumed like an artillery shelling. It was unbelievable—of all the turkeys we’d jacked up, Dee Dee was the first in line to seek retribution. Justice was going to prevail. I pulled on my pants and skipped over to the door, standing alongside Bobo. Eichmann said, just loud enough for the two of us to hear, “He’s got someone with him. Let them in and we’ll pretend like they’ve got us … and we’ll cream them.”

I swung the door upward; nourishing sunlight blitzed into the garage, illuminating the dust motes swimming in the updraft.
Then Dee Dee stalked in. His stringy, ratty hair was plastered to his misshapen skull. His thin, triangular face was covered with psoriasis; shreds of toilet paper were hanging from his cheeks where he’d been picking at the sores. The first person he saw was Loretta with her ghostly skin shining luminescent in the strong light. The folds of her sateen bathrobe hung loosely over her frame, showing the contours of her physique. She took a deep breath and her breasts heaved invitingly. Dee Dee’s undershot jaw dropped a good half foot.

Maurice was making a show of his entrance. He was garbed in a medium-brown mohair suit with cigarette burns on the lapels, a pair of heel-worn Rockports, and a bolo tie. If the way he was dressed meant anything, like a marker in the ledger book of his personal wealth, Maurice had taken a downswing in the world. I knew he was carrying a gun and so did Bobo—he slipped off into the shadows behind the couch with a crowbar, staying out of Maurice’s sight.

Dee Dee brushed past me without any visible recognition, padding in his Converse sneakers over to Eichmann. “I want my money. It’s time for payback. I ain’t going to say anything about the way you sliced me up. Just give me the cash and I’ll be out of here.”

Eichmann bestowed a malignant smile on the intruders, his face creased and oily with ill humor. He was coiled on the couch cushions, ready to spring. “Well, look who’s here … aloha, Dee Dee. You’re so kind to come over and pay us a visit and as a bonus, I see you brought Horatio Alger himself.”

The literary reference had Maurice slavering with homicidal angst, unable to control himself. His doughboy face was congested with blood; spit shot out of his mouth when he opened it. “You want to start something up, Eichmann?”

Dee Dee hushed him. “Can’t you see he’s baiting your ass? Relax, man! I’ll deal with these motherfuckers!”

Everyone fell silent; nothing was heard, not a sound. The two thieves stood together, giving Eichmann tremendous static. Psychologically, an atom bomb had gone off in the garage. Considering how it felt, we were weathering it pretty well. Loretta wandered over to the hot plate to heat up the water for some instant Folger’s coffee. She switched on the radio—the KFRC weatherman said the temperature would be in the high 90s with moderate air pollution, the hottest day of the year so far.