“Turn around, kid stuff,” the older detective said. “Put your hands behind your back.”

After they handcuffed Farley, they led him out to the street, where a detective car drove up from wherever it had been hidden. Then they searched his Corolla, but of course it was clean. There wasn’t even a roach in the ashtray.

When they got to the station, Farley saw some movie posters on a wall. What the fuck kind of police station has movie posters on the wall? Farley thought. And how did he get in this horror flick? All he knew was, if he’d had Olive with him, he wouldn’t be here. That dumb bitch just got his ass busted!

It was after five o’clock and Farley hadn’t come home and hadn’t called. Olive was tired and she was very hungry. She remembered what Mabel had said about saving some food for her. She wondered if Mabel might let her help cook the meal. She’d like that, and getting to eat and chat with Mabel.

When she got to Mabel’s the old woman was delighted to see her.

“I’m sorry, Mabel,” she said. “I can’t find Tillie.”

“Don’t worry, dear,” Mabel said. “She’ll turn up. She always does. She’s still a bit of a wild thing. Tillie’s got a touch of Gypsy in her soul.”

“Would you like me to help you cook?”

“Oh, yes,” Mabel said. “If you’ll promise to stay and have supper with me.”

“Thank you, Mabel,” Olive said. “I’ll be real happy to join you for supper.”

“Then we’ll play gin. If you don’t know how, never mind, I’ll teach you. I know all about cards. Did I ever tell you I used to make good money telling fortunes with cards? That was sixty-five years ago.”

“Really?”

“Really. There are certain legal technicalities about foretelling the future that I didn’t follow. I was arrested twice and taken to Hollywood Station for ignoring those silly technicalities.”

“You, arrested?” Olive couldn’t imagine it.

“Oh, yes,” Mabel said. “I was a bit of a naughty girl in my time. The old police station was a lovely building constructed in nineteen thirteen, the year my parents got married. When I was born, they named me for the silent-screen star Mabel Normand. I never had any siblings. You know, I used to date a policeman from Hollywood Station. He was the one who arrested me the second time and persuaded me to stop telling fortunes for money. He was killed in the war. One week after D-day.”

Loving Mabel’s stories and gossip about the old days in Hollywood, Olive hated to interrupt her, but she thought about Farley and said, “Mabel, let me run home and leave a note for Farley so he’ll know where I’m at. Be right back!”

“Hurry, dear,” Mabel said. “I’ll tell you lots of tales about life in the golden age of Hollywood. And we’ll play cards. This is going to be such fun!”

SEVENTEEN

COSMO BETROSSIAN CURSED the traffic. He cursed Los Angeles for being the most car-dependent, traffic-choked city in the world. He cursed the Georgian bartender who gave him the stolen car that almost got him captured. But most of all he cursed Farley Ramsdale and his stupid woman. He sat in traffic on East Sunset Boulevard looking at all of the signs around him in the languages of the Far East, and he cursed them too.

Then he heard the siren and for a few seconds it terrified him until he saw an ambulance weaving through traffic on the wrong side of Sunset, obviously trying to get to the traffic accident that had him gridlocked. Glancing repeatedly at his Rolex knockoff, he cursed.

First, they left him in an interrogation room for what seemed like an hour, only letting him go to the bathroom once and then watching him piss, just like the goddamn probation officer who used to make him piss in a bottle twice a month. With no sympathy for the fact that it was hard to piss with someone watching to make sure you piss from your own dick and not from a bottle of clean piss stashed in your underwear.

Then one of the two detectives came in and gave him a bad-cop interrogation about a goddamn warehouse burglary of electronic equipment that he knew nothing about. Then the other detective played good cop and came in and gave him a cup of coffee. Then the bad cop took over and played the game all over again until Farley’s hands were shaking and his pulse was vibrating.

Farley knew they didn’t buy the wrong-address story, but he stuck with it. And he was pretty sure they were starting to think he hadn’t been involved in the warehouse burglary but was just some tweaker with exactly $3.65 in his pocket, hired only to pick up and deliver.

He would have given up Little Bart instantly if he thought it would help him, but something in good cop’s tone last time around told him he was going to be released. Except that bad cop came in and walked him to a holding tank with a wooden bench, where they locked him in. And every cop walking by could look through the big glass window and gawk at him like he was a fucking spider monkey at the Griffith Park zoo.

When Watch 5 left roll call at 6 P.M., several of them passed by the holding tank and did gawk at him.

“Hey, Benny,” B.M. Driscoll said to his partner. “Is that the tweaker we wrote the ticket to?”

“Yeah,” Benny Brewster said. Then he tapped on the glass and said to Farley, “What happened, man? They catch you selling ice?”

“Fuck you,” Farley mumbled, and when Benny laughed and walked away, Farley growled, “You’re the one oughtta be in a zoo with the rest of the silverbacks, you fucking ape.”

Budgie and Fausto saw Benny talking to someone in the holding tank, and Budgie looked in and said, “Fausto, that’s the guy we FI’d at the taco stand.”

Fausto looked at Farley and said, “Oh yeah, the tweaker with the skinny girlfriend. Bet they got him doing a deal at Pablo’s. They never learn, they never change.”

When Hollywood Nate and Wesley walked past the holding tank, Nate heard Fausto’s remark, took a look inside, and said, “Shit, everyone knows that dude. Hey, Wesley, check this out.”

Wesley looked in and said, “Oh yeah. That’s what’s-his-name-Rimsdale? No, Ramsdale.”

“Farley,” Nate said. “Like the old movie star Farley Granger.”

“Who?” Wesley said.

“Never mind,” Nate said. “Let’s go look for Trombone Teddy. We gotta find him or I’ll have stress dreams tonight about chasing an old geezer who keeps holding me off with the slide of his gold trombone.”

“Do you really have dreams like that?”

“No,” Nate said, “but it would make a good dream sequence in a screenplay, don’t you think?”

One of the sergeants on Watch 2 was a forty-year-old black woman, Wilma Collins. She had a good reputation with the troops but had a persistent weight problem that the coppers at Hollywood Station joked about. She wasn’t actually obese but they called her a “leather stretcher.” Her Sam Browne had a lot to hold in place.

Everyone knew that a few hours before end-of-watch, Sergeant Collins liked to sneak into IHOP and load up on buttermilk pancakes swimming in butter, with sausages and fried eggs and butter-drenched biscuits. They made lots of cholesterol and clogged-arteries jokes about Sergeant Collins.

When the surfer team were loading their war bags and getting ready to hit the streets, the entire parking lot and the watch commander’s office suddenly erupted. Some of those who heard it had to sit for a moment until they could gain control. It became a Hollywood Station moment.

It seems that Sergeant Collins had left her rover behind on the counter at IHOP, because a message was sent on the Hollywood frequency by a Mexican busboy who had keyed the mike and talked into the rover.

The busboy said, “Hello, hello! Chubby black police lady? Hello, hello! You leave radio here! Hello! Chubby black lady? You there, please? Hello, hello!”

Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb didn’t say much to each other when they left roll call. Nate was driving and Wesley had never seen him so intent on watching the street.