Police and Thieves: A Novel (3 page)

The rents in the Mission were already too high, so Dee Dee decided to dwell in the Buick. He stayed in the former luxury-class cruiser over the next winter and spring, long after the building I was interested in burned down to the ground.

Bobo never cottoned to Dee Dee, and neither did Eichmann. But money was money. Dee Dee poked his nose into every bag of weed we had, then said, “I want this one, okay? But I don’t know where you get off telling me this is the best indica on the market. Look at this crud.” Dee Dee held up the eighth. “It’s that tired hydroponic stuff. Why can’t you get some of the crippler dope that’s from Canada?”

“Do you want the eighth or not?”

“Of course I want it. I’ve got to have me some weed.”

“They’re ninety apiece.”

For a moment Dee Dee was silent. He noticed Bobo’s lunch, and licked his lips at the sight of a half-eaten burrito, two pieces of corn on the cob, and a short stack of homemade flour tortillas. The coffee table was cluttered with food and drugs.

“That’s outrageous,” Dee Dee said. “I can’t pay that much.
You guys are going off the deep end with prices like that.”

“Just give me the money,” Bobo said. “I know you’ve got it.”

“Your dope is too expensive. It ain’t fair.”

“If you don’t want it, you don’t have to buy it.”

“You can’t be charging so high. It’s robbery. People ain’t going to respect you for it.”

“You done complaining?”

“No, I ain’t. This is funky. You guys are getting greedy.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“Fuck you. You want the weed or not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then leave.”

“All right, all right,” Dee Dee protested angrily, pulling out his wallet. He jiggled his tiny feet, irked. The floor lamp flickered in the background, profiling his potato nose. He shoved aside the Modelo beer bottles on the table and put his hand, palm down, on the bag of weed he wanted.

“You know what?” Dee Dee said. “I know why you’re being this way.”

Bobo’s shaggy head yo-yoed up and down a full twelve inches, his eyelids fluttering. “You do, huh?”

“Damn right I do, sport. Everyone knows about that shooting and Doojie. The cops are looking for people to interview. The smarter homeboys are getting bus tickets out of town until it blows over.”

Quick as a slingshot, Eichmann got up from the couch with the army knife flashing in his hand. He motioned for me to turn out the lights—I reached under the table and shut off the power strip that everything was plugged into.

Dee Dee peeped, “Hey, what is this? A joke?”

Nobody did anything until Eichmann said, “Hit the lights.” I flipped the power strip switch back on. Eichmann was standing behind Dee Dee, holding the knife to our adversary’s Adam’s apple. He crooned into Dee Dee’s hairy ear, “You want to buy some dope? Doojie, get his wallet.”

Dee Dee’s tired puppy-dog face bulged at the jaw in terror, and a second later a wet spot quietly appeared on his pants.

I snagged the billfold from his blue derby jacket and thumbed through it, pulling out a sheaf of brand-new twenties. It was a couple of thousand dollars. I crushed the bills in my fist, seeing if they were real.

Where I came from, I didn’t see a twenty-dollar bill until I was eighteen. Big fish eat little fish: It was ours now. Bobo began to chuckle, and Eichmann cracked an ironic smile.

Dee Dee screamed, “You can’t have that! It’s not my money!”

Eichmann thrust the Swiss Army blade at Dee Dee’s unshaven throat; a drop of blood dripped onto the collar of his rayon disco shirt.

“It’s not yours?” Eichmann asked. “Who does it belong to?”

“That ain’t your business!”

“Somebody is going to be very angry with you for losing it.”

“You’ve got to give it back to me!”

“Why should I?”

“It ain’t mine!”

“That’s your problem, not ours.”

This was just what we needed, an unexpected infusion of liquid capital. I re-added the bills to get an exact count of our take, and discovered my previous sum was wrong. There was more money than I’d thought—I had nearly four thousand dollars in my hands.

Dee Dee merited what he was getting. Baiting us about the
shooting was the wrong tactic. We were doing something spiritually courageous in relieving him of his monetary resources.

The oblong contours of Eichmann’s face sparkled ivory and silver, bright with a fever I recognized as homicide.

“Don’t kill him. The fink isn’t worth it.”

“Who asked you, Doojie? If I want an opinion on the subject, I’ll find an expert.”

Eichmann jabbed the knife’s tip into Dee Dee’s scabby neck and said, “Hey.”

The little man squealed, “What?”

“You aren’t planning on talking, are you?”

“To who?”

“The cops.”

“About what?”

“That shooting.”

“Not me!”

“Oh, yes, you are.”

“No, man, I don’t do that shit! I’m a stand-up dude!”

“You don’t do what shit?”

“I’m not going to rat on you!”

“You’re not? Who said you were going to do that?”

“You did!”

“I did not. But let’s say you did snitch Doojie out … what would you tell them?”

“Are you trying to trick me?”

“No, it’s just for the sake of argument.”

“Ah, you know!”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’d tell the cops Doojie witnessed the shooting!”

“But you aren’t going to say anything about it?”

“No way!”

“Promise?”

“Promise!”

Eichmann pressed the blade hard enough to make the other man wail like a monkey in a zoo cage. He was cold as melted ice and there was no emotion in his voice when he whispered, “You got any more money?”

A crafty glint surfaced in Dee Dee’s nearsighted eyes. “No, you’ve got it all.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Sure, I’m sure. You ain’t calling me a liar, are you?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“I’m a lot of things, but a liar I ain’t. It don’t come natural to me.”

I had a hunch and I followed it. I got down on the floor, and before Dee Dee could do anything to stop me, I removed his moldy tennis shoes and peeled a pair of argyle socks from his blue-veined skanky feet.

A thin wad of one-hundred-dollar-bills fell to the floor. The sight of the money was nearly worth the price of smelling his toes. I added up the hundreds, a total of ten Ben Franklins.

Dee Dee bleated, “That’s it! You’ve wiped me out! You guys are going to be the death of me because I’m telling you, that money ain’t mine!”

Bobo grabbed Dee Dee by the scruff of his neck and dragged him over to the garage’s entry. He opened the door, saturating our cave with sunlight.

Bobo was set to toss Dee Dee and his shoes into the driveway when Eichmann hauled off and kicked our victim in the backside, snarling, “You ain’t welcome here, Dee Dee!”

It would have been amusing, but Dee Dee was a trickster, and treacherous. I had a premonition we’d be seeing him again.

In gossip-saturated San Francisco, every person’s private affairs
were hung out like wash on a clothesline. I had to get away from it. How, I didn’t know.

Selling and smoking marijuana was an ingrained familial custom. It started when my mother left Daly City for the Lower East Side of New York. She holed up in a brownstone tenement on Avenue B, near the Norfolk Street address her parents stayed at when they first came to America.

She supported herself by cleaning kilos of Mexican pot for the guy who lived upstairs. His name was Harold and he was skimming seventy-five thousand dollars a year selling weed. To top things off, Hank Mobley, the jazz musician, resided across the hall with his wife and kid.

Eight years later she came back to California, conscious she was leaving a city filled with Jews and returning to a community where there weren’t any. This made her defensive, confrontational. She extolled the virtues of cannabis and urged her mom to try it.

The experiment didn’t work out so well. My grandmother liked the music her daughter got high with—early Led Zeppelin, the first and second albums when the band was covering songs by Willie Dixon and Otis Rush. Nice beat, she smiled. But the weed made her cough and she didn’t try it again.

Bubbeh’s drug of choice was black tea with hot milk, three times a day.

Flaherty first made a reputation for himself back in 1979 after the Dan White trial verdict. A former policeman, White had shot and killed the mayor and a gay Board of Supervisors member at City Hall. He drew a sentence of eight years in prison for the shootings, and a riot broke out downtown. Twelve police cars were burned to cinders on McAllister Street. During the rioting, some cops got too zealous beating up the gay boys who were demonstrating in the Civic Center Plaza. Specific police officers were named. Flaherty was one of them.

Eichmann was an altogether different type of headache for me. Before I met him at the St. John Coltrane Church, I’d seen him on Valencia Street, hanging out in front of the Roxie Cinema, selling used paperback books, half hoping to attract the restaurant traffic with his wares. But no one was interested. He slicked his hair back and wore torn jeans and Ray-Ban sunglasses. Dee Dee said Eichmann had a reputation for being antisocial, high-strung. Working with him was tedious; he was impatient with me, and his neurotic energy was difficult to accommodate.

I wouldn’t say we were ever friends; we weren’t. We might have been close, held together by my yearning for an elder sibling, for someone I could trust and count on, but there was also a distance between us that was never going to go away. Yet the influence he had on me was marked. There was something honest about his cheerful malice, the democratic way it was directed at everyone with equal opportunity. Eichmann wasn’t a bigot.

He taught me quite a few things, primarily about himself.
Eichmann knew a bit of Yiddish; he’d studied the Talmud and as a kid he’d gone to synagogue to study the writings of the Jewish philosophers. He didn’t speak Spanish. The people we sold weed to east of Valencia didn’t understand English. The language barrier puzzled Eichmann, and whenever he wasn’t getting his thoughts across to someone, he had a tendency to lose it. I became critical of him over this. We were getting into trouble with other dealers like Dee Dee. Eichmann’s bad temper ruled his existence with an iron hand. Why? For the same reasons people have always had when they’ve been cheated out of the good life. They’re like animals mesmerized by a car’s headlights in the road; they freeze, they don’t know how else to react, and so they bite the first person who crosses their path.

A couple of days after our skirmish with Dee Dee, I went for a walk on Mission Street past the Krishna Hotel, Speedy Gonzalez Printing, Kong’s Bargain Center, Guadalupana Bakery, and Clarion Alley. I was thinking about my problem, and not getting anywhere with it. The junkies were assembled in front of Fida Market, the winos by the California Savings Bank. San Francisco was a provincial town as far as metropolitan cities went, but we had more than our share of urban conflict, West Coast style.

It had something to do with the topography of the area; the city was on a peninsula jutting into the Pacific Ocean, isolated from the rest of the continent, cut off from the rest of the country. In this place, you could do almost anything if you were willing to pay the price. When the Spaniards came here in 1776, they found the Ohlone Indians taking care of their own business. So they got rid of them. Whenever I was at Mission Dolores, watching the German and Japanese tourists swarm around the church, I tried to conjure up the ghosts of the Ohlone who died building the cathedral. Some of them were buried in the flower-choked
cemetery next door. But I was only a dope dealer and I couldn’t get my own customers to pay me, much less raise the dead.

I went to bed that night and slept without dreaming. The next morning, the sunlight was so blinding and harsh, it seared the retina. I saw the smoggy brown sun through the holes in the garage’s roof. Then I saw it through the black and yellow depths of an oncoming migraine headache.

Eichmann was lying on the couch with his lady of the moment, a girl named Loretta who was on the nether side of twenty-one. She was buxom or stocky, depending how you felt about her, and she had muscular arms, melon-shaped breasts, a face that was sharp, feral, and intelligent. She was saying to him, “You want some coffee?”

“Nah, not yet. Let me smoke a cigarette first, all right?”

“You know what?”

“What’s that?”

“I had a dream.”

“About what?”

“We had a pet.”

“A pet? Here in the garage?”

“I don’t know where it was … just a big room and in the middle of it there was a black kitty with a blue ribbon around its neck. It licked my face.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Wouldn’t you like to have a pet?”

“Animals shed hair. We’ll get sick.”

“But wouldn’t it be sweet … a kitty?”

“The landlord won’t go for it.”

“Who cares what the landlord says?”

“I care. I hate him enough to care.”

Loretta had been with Eichmann for the last couple of
weeks, spending nearly every night with us in the garage. When you’re young, everything is in front of you, including a mountain range of problems.

She removed her bra and looked at her breasts, inspecting the blue veins which traveled from her nipples to her neck, then pressed her tits into Eichmann’s back. She made an attempt to hug him, but Eichmann wasn’t up to the task of intimacy, especially if someone else wanted it.

Loretta wasn’t asking for much, just some basic affection. All he had to do was put his arms around her. However, it wasn’t that simple. Nothing was anymore, not since Dee Dee and Louis told us about the cops.

“Time to get up,” Eichmann spouted. “We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

Bobo placed a cup of coffee on the couch arm next to me and said, “Here you go, Doojie. This’ll help you to wake up.”

The Mexican was clean shaven, and his unruly coarse black hair was tied back in a ponytail. While I sipped the coffee, letting it burn the back of my mouth, he removed a doughnut from a paper bag and neatly took a bite, taking care not to get any crumbs on himself. Whenever Bobo was eating something, he fell into a trance, happy to be with himself. His colicky brown eyes were muddy with glee; the fjord-deep lines bordering his mouth softened.