Jack Mason has been the tip of the spear charging through cultural minefields for many years as the host of the Perfume Nationalist, a psychadellic avant-garde podcast that brilliantly weaves transgressive art, Jack’s encyclopedic knowledge and love of soap operas, perfume, and right-wing politics. His new book, which reads like a great novel, traces his hero’s journey, along with all the peaks and valleys he’s traversed along the way. I read the whole thing in a day and a half. Jack’s the best active movie critic (this is not hyperbole). His honesty is always compelling, he’s hilarious (I luaghed out loud at multiple passages), and his contributions to our culture, catalogued here, have brought an immense light to our often-dark world. Before I’d heard of Jack, I’d never bought myself any scents in my life. Today, I’ve got over twenty bottles. This is an excellent book.

First published ’98, Antonio Moresco’s The Beginnings is a maximalist pean to life’s failures, told in three sections: First, an unnamed narrator — clearly a stand-in for the author — takes a vow of silence at a rural monastery. Next, he transitions into a leftist revolutionary and finally, a novelist. In all three pursuits, he fails, and must re-set his life to a new way of thinking. Adventurous readers are rewarded with countless gems. Moresco’s oddball style itself evokes a sense of failure. It’s the prose equivalent of a house of falling cards. The Beginnings itself might just be a failure, which, paradoxically, makes it a one-of-a-kind success. Read it, and you’ll understand. English translation by Max Lawton.

1. Point Doom by Dan Fante

Dan Fante, son of the legendary Jon Fante, crafts an L.A.-set P.I. thriller centered around J.D. Fiorella, a Dan Fante-like anti-hero struggling with addiction and anger issues. J.D.’s sober these days, living with his elderly mother in Malibu, and he’s just got a new job selling used cars. A chance road rage incident on the Pacific Coast Highway puts him straight in the crosshairs of a deranged movie producer and his psychotic daughter. Mixing dark humor with flashes of horrific violence, Fante delivers a page-turning thriller that manages to thread in many great personal moments worthy of his earlier, more overtly autobiographical Bruno Dante series. What we get is Fante’s best novel. The touching dedication is to his mother Joyce, once played by Judy Holiday in Full of Life (1956), who loved mysteries and crime fiction so much she claimed to have read her way through every series printed in English.

2. My Dark Places by James Ellroy

In the mid-90s, at the height of his legendary career, James Ellroy reopens the still-unsolved 1958 murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker in El Monte, California. A retired L.A. Sherriff’s detective named Bill Stoner joins him on the cold case, and we get not just a fascinating true-life detective story, but a brutally honest memoir of Ellroy himself, the story of his family, as well as the ruminations of a man finally dealing with the lack of closure over a tragedy which occurred to him when he was only ten years old. Don’t be expecting a pat conclusion. “Closure is bullshit,” Ellroy often says.

3. Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn

A dark, personal memoir worthy of comparison to My Dark Places. Author, literary critic, and Montana resident Walter Kirn volunteers to deliver a disabled Gordon setter named Shelby, recently adopted over the internet by Rockefeller descendant in the east. Once in New York City, Walter meets Clark Rockefeller, and forms a strange friendship with the eccentric heir that lasts for fifteen years. Later, Kirn learns that “Clark Rockefeller” never existed at all and the man he knew was a Tom Ripley-esque conman who was about to be put on trial for murder. Kirn’s long first section where he’s on a road trip, delivering Shelby to an uncertain future, will haunt you.

4. Prophet’s Prey by Sam Brower

Here, an actual P.I. and mainstream Mormon chronicles one of his own investigations. Sam Brower (picture a Utah-vibing, real-life version of Kevin Costner in Yellowstone) opens a years-long case against the FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints) and its leaders, the Jeffs family, an insidious polygamist cult, rife with organized pedophilia. Many religious groups often speak about the need to push extremists out of their various faiths — Sam spent years actually doing this at great personal risk and has written a spellbinding account of his experiences. A badass high-light worthy of a Clint Eastwood flick — when some FLDS thugs show up on Sam’s property looking to intimidate him, he chases them down, boxes them in, and leans his head in through their window. “You come near my house again and trespass on my property, I’m going to splatter you all over my driveway,” he says. If you think the fringe, outlaw Mormons in Namaste Mart Confidential seems too outlandish to have any basis in reality, read this book.

5. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

This one’s not crime or true crime, but it’s a landmark in blending the truth with fiction. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s memories of Paris in the 1920s, when his writing career was just beginning and he was still with his first wife, Hadley. It’s before all the head injuries, the plane crashes, and before his suicide in 1961. Significant parts of this book have been verified as lies. Hadley shows up, but her trust fund they lived on during those “starving artist” years does not. We know from countless sources that Hemingway was a pompous and repellent jerk, especially to his older, more successful and more sensitive friend Scott Fitzgerald, who did nothing but champion the younger writer. In this text, he always comes off as the hero. A Moveable Feast is laughably petty. It’s cartoonishly dedicated on settling old scores through lies. Regardless, it remains a heartbreaking and beautiful masterpiece. It’s great fiction. Papa’s looking back on the good and the bad and crafting an elegiac and romantic vision of how things should have been. One of his most enduring fictional creations is this younger, heroic portrait of himself. With Namaste Mart Confidential, I asked myself, “Could I try something like this, a love-letter to an earlier time, as a P.I. novel?

You can buy Namaste Mart Confidential here.

Featuring buckets of blood, severed limbs, cannibals, a demonic talking cockatoo, and a Beethoven soundtrack, Pulp Modern: Die Laughing is a series of horror-comedy shorts adapted from a special issue of Pulp Modern, the long-running independent pulp fiction anthology magazine. While certainly a throwback, this fast-moving grindhouse feature comes off as uniquely fresh in 2024. It is both unapologetically R-rated and, in an especially unusual turn for our gray, present day, Pulp Modern: Die Laughing seeks to genuinely make people laugh with gags that are free from any modern puritanical or ideological guidelines.

These five shorts, each with different directors and crews, are woven together by a cool late night D.J. dude named Mr. C, played by the author and real-life DJ Alec Cizak, also the original founder of the Pulp Modern publication. As Mr. C spins various classical tracks that bring a haunting timelessness and gravitas to a film which is proudly ridiculous, we see he’s getting stalked. Someone’s sending him mysterious packages in the mail which he opens while hosting his radio show, and each package serves as the instigation for a new story.

The first two sections are Overkill and Mirrored. Overkill is a teens-camping-and-getting-picked-off-in-the-woods horror story where the Jason-like killer just won’t die, no matter how hard the lone surviving heroine tries to finish him off. Before the murders get underway, we see these teens satirically converse with each other over the campfire like modern day insufferable woke snowflakes. While it seems unlikely that teens in 2024 could survive that long without iPhone reception, it’s certainly hilarious and absurd. Mirrored is about a cursed mirror that projects back some unpleasant images.

The third section, Rest Stop, is the most traditionally accomplished. Based on a short story by Stephen King, it follows a New England professor with a successful writing career that seems to be having too powerful an effect on the rest of his life. Rest Stop is longer than the other stories and has the slickest production value. It’s confident and impressive material.

Cocky is about a young man living with his mother who teaches dirty words to a cockatoo that proves to be demonically possessed. Cocky is the funniest part of a very funny film and Simon Laherty, the actor playing the young man, was a standout in the cast. Laherty’s comic timing is excellent and Cocky is the best section of the film.

Sloppy Seconds is the final installment and then the Mr. C. storyline is all tied together.

Speaking as an author who was once published in Pulp Modern, I can tell you why I’m so happy this magazine endures. These days, most short story anthologies exist to lift various writers’ careers — their subject prompts are reliably connected to whatever “The Current Thing” happens to be and therefore, when published, lack staying power because of the fleeting, social-media-centered derivation of their themes. Of course, most of this stuff lacks any real entertainment value, something anyone still capable of having any fun can see. (“Did you catch that pulp crime story about gentrification in the latest issue of Circle Jerk? I think it was important. It think it will truly change things.”)

Pulp Modern never trafficked in a pompous, superficial agenda of this sort. PM is fun for any reader, not just the “independent fiction community.” By bringing to cinematic life one of their showcase issues in such a fun and often absurd way, Pulp Modern has shown their commitment to that agenda — Pulp Modern: Die Laughing truly is a blast. Be sure to check it out.

It was early winter, 2021. I sat at my writing desk at my home in Los Angeles. By then my resume of published short stories, all in the hardboiled crime genre, had grown to a decent size. It was time for a novel, one which would become Namaste Mart Confidential, my debut published on May 1st of this year from Run Amok Crime.

My anger at what COVID did to the world was heavy then. I felt immersing myself in a longer project could provide me with the illusion that I had a degree of agency in a deteriorating world. The Joan Didion line applied: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Pre-COVID life was gone and it was never coming back. The author Alec Cizak has pointed out that the past ten years had brought about more changes in the world any decade in which he’d been alive. Almost all of those changes, I’ll add, have been for the worse.

*

Fall, 2013 — eight years earlier. Smart phones were only six years old. You saw them around, but the general public’s brains weren’t fully phone-fried yet.

I sat in the audience at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, juiced on Old Fashioneds. My friend and co-worker, the stand-up comic Richie Walsh (I’m using his fictional character’s name here), was on stage, doing ten minutes under the spotlight. Tonight Richie had been stuck with a shitty slot. He went out and killed regardless. The first red light flashed.

Richie began a new closer: The nuns at his Catholic school growing up told him that if he jerked off, he’d grow unseemly hair all over the back of his hands. “After I heard that, I decided for all of my formative years to just wear mittens. Better than walking around with hands that look like an Armenian’s asshole!”

There were laughs and shocked gasps. But they were few.

It’s okay not to laugh at something you don’t find funny. Senses of humor vary, but this was 2013. People were still allowed to tell jokes. Obvious jokes were still commonly interpreted as jokes, and judged on how much they made people laugh.

*

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire committed a genocide against the Armenian people. Over a million were killed. Equivocations or denials about this still occur today. The Armenian Genocide was absent from my Midwest public school education. Today, when I see my Armenian-American neighbors looking celebratory when there’s an earthquake in Turkey, I understand their motives.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, L.A. County was flooded with Armenian immigrants eager to take a shot at the American dream. They settled mainly in Glendale and East Hollywood. A subset of these Armenians organized a mob. They called themselves Armenian Power.

Today, East Hollywood is known as Little Armenia and the only place in the world with more Armenians than L.A. is Armenia itself.

AP was acquired by the Mexican Mafia. This meant that in the crime landscape of L.A., they were here to stay. There is, of course, nothing particularly special about this story arc in America. Forming a mob is a common step toward successful assimilation.

Some of the old school Armenian mob bosses didn’t even speak English. The younger ones, the gangsters born stateside, copied the L.A. cholo persona. On the streets, these Armenian-American cholos were everywhere in 2013.

*

The red light flashed again. Richie waved goodbye. “I’m Richie Walsh and I always close on Armenian assholes!” There was more applause and laughter.

Earlier that year, Richie got in a street fight in Little Armenia.

This was outside a bar, just after last call. For a while it was three on one — Richie was handling them all fine. Then a fourth guy pulled a blade and stabbed Richie in his side. A crowd of hipsters stood and watched. The four guys escaped, driving off down a Hollywood side street. A hipster wrote down their plates.

Richie initially refused medical attention. He just kept partying. He even showed up to work again before the wound was healed. Minor surgery later fixed him up. Today, you’d never know he got stabbed at all.

A Major Crimes detective ran the plates of the getaway car. The guy who stabbed Richie was in the Armenian mob.

“I always close on Armenian assholes!”

I remember thinking I’ve got to write about all this someday.

Richie was already using it for his comedy in 2013. He thinks faster than I do.

*

“Paris was a moveable feast.”

Find me a good book or film even remotely connected to Paris in the ’20s that doesn’t somehow acknowledge Ernest Hemingway’s book. A Moveable Feast is his memories of that time, when his writing career was just beginning and he was still with his first wife, Hadley. This was before all the head injuries, the plane crashes, before the booze got so far out of control, and before his suicide in 1961.

Significant parts of this book are, from a factual perspective, bullshit. Hadley shows up, but her trust fund money they lived on during those “starving artist” years does not. We know that Hemingway was a pompous and repellent jerk, especially to his older, more successful and more sensitive friend Scott Fitzgerald, who did nothing but champion the younger writer. In this text, Hemingway always comes off as the hero. A Moveable Feast is laughably petty. It’s cartoonishly dedicated on settling old scores through lies.

The book is a heartbreaking and beautiful masterpiece regardless. Papa’s looking back on the good and the bad and crafting an elegiac and romantic vision of how things should have been. One of his most enduring fictional creations is this younger, heroic portrait of himself.

What if I tried something like that as a P.I. novel? I thought. What if I didn’t wait until I’m an old man before I start?

*

People have always told me, “You and Richie don’t seem like friends.”

I have many friends like Richie. Outlaws. Fighters. Today I see why this is. My religious upbringing in the Midwest taught me lessons. Many of these lessons I wasn’t supposed to learn. Christopher Hitchens said, “Faith is the most overrated of all virtues.” Most non-believers spend long stretches of their lives in silence. People are free to believe whatever they want. I’ve passed my loudmouthed and annoying phase of speaking out against religion. But I still distrust it. What, or who, do I trust then? Well, guys like Richie have always been more honest, loyal and dependable than any traditional believer I’ve known.

I still know that the evil use religion as a cover. They always have and I’ve never had trouble seeing this. The villains of my novel couldn’t just be the Armenian Mob. I would have to include another, perhaps even more sinister presence: the truly faithful, the type who can quote every verse of their holy books from memory.

*

Joseph Smith was a teenage ex-con and grave robber from upstate New York in the early nineteenth century. A year after pleading guilty to fraud in court, Joseph walked out of the woods and told all of his neighbors that he’d been visited by an angel named Moroni who’d given him some golden plates, which, when translated, became something called the Book of Mormon.

After the first few years of laughter from the general public died down, Mormonism took off. Smith got into trouble with the law and with other religions. Eventually, the Mormons moved to Illinois, where Smith started his own city called Nauvoo. He ran for President and lost. He started telling every woman he met that God told him it was their personal duty to sleep with him. He said God condoned plural marriage. This lie almost certainly began when Joseph was caught cheating on his first wife, Emma. “God said I could have another! I’m not saying this baby, it’s God! I’m just the messenger.”

At 38, Joesph was murdered by an angry mob at the jail in Carthage, Illinois. After his death, the Mormons went west and settled in Utah and polygamy gained popularity. Then, in the late 1800s, the church changed course and outlawed the practice. Some factions didn’t accept this change and moved onto polygamist compounds. Some went into hiding.

Others turned to crime.

*

I had all the elements. I was ready to stir them together.

A 2013 setting in an America that didn’t understand it was on the cusp of a major decline. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Richie and I would be recast as P.I. anti-heroes. His long-ago stabbing would be woven into a missing person’s plot centered around a vanished lingerie saleswoman with mysterious origins. There would be Armenian mobsters and outlaw Mormons. Fiction and fact. I’ve always liked James Ellroy’s concept of “reckless verisimilitude.” So beyond what I’ve written here, I won’t clarify what’s true and what isn’t. Namaste Mart Confidential is an emotionally true depiction of my life, and Richie’s, as it was then. It’s a workplace comedy, a send-up of fashionable spiritualism. It’s a very funny book.

Cultural decline is a choice. Show your opposition to it by hovering your mouse over that PLACE YOUR ORDER button and then click away.

Namaste.

My name is Lalo Diaz. Long ago, before I became a killer for hire, I was given the nickname Cuban Pete, after the Desi Arnaz song. Desi had brought the Conga craze to America, become a stage and screen star, and a popular bandleader. My nickname proved ironic after Desi himself decided to hire me as his personal bodyguard during the third season of I Love Lucy. I was his trusted problem solver at a time when he and Lucy were living very different lives from the couple they played every Monday night at nine.

Our paths could have crossed earlier. I was born in Santiago de Cuba, like him. We were both from well-off families (his more so than mine) and we both suffered great losses during the “political reorganization” of Cuba in 1933. Since immigrating to America, I followed Desi’s career with enthusiasm, proud that a brother from the Homeland was achieving success. My experience was not as glamorous as his. After years of struggling, I failed to make anything of myself.

The war came and I enlisted. In the Pacific, I found myself in a situation not unlike what Desi later portrayed in Bataan, my favorite of his films. I didn’t think I would make it home. But I did.

I moved to Los Angeles. In the library downtown I studied biographies of great Americans. I asked myself, if these men had found themselves in my shoes, what would they do to get ahead? How far would they go? So I became a criminal.

A headfirst dive into the most violent annals of American capitalism gave each day a golden sheen. Everywhere I went, I was shown respect and saw firsthand that no person or system in America really cared what color your skin was as long as you made something of yourself. I became rich working as a freelance killer and enforcer across Los Angeles County, taking jobs for everyone — the colored dope pushers on the Southside, the heads of all the movie studios, and even the top man himself, Mickey Cohen. I still kick up monthly payments, even while he’s in the slammer for not paying his taxes.

*

Bev Brownstein’s cathouse was on Franklin, across from Dr. Hodel’s old mansion. It was a rainy night in February and I’d just spent an hour with a Swedish blonde named Eve. Before leaving, Bev called me to the bar.

“Another client needs a favor,” Bev said and handed me a Mojito.

“What client?”

“Desi Arnaz.”

I’d heard from some of the girls that Desi came here, but this idea seemed too fantastic. It was unsettling to have a man I perceived in such mythical terms so bluntly humanized.

Bev sipped champagne from a crystal flute. “Someone’s making trouble for him.”

Bev was protected by Mickey Cohen’s mob. Despite what you may have heard, Mickey C still had a lot of power in L.A., even from prison. If Bev needed muscle, all she had to do was pick up the phone. “Why is this a job for me?”

“Desi wants a fellow Cuban. He made that clear.”

So Desi Arnaz might need someone killed. “What’s his problem?”

We never discussed it, but Bev knew how I made a living.

“He didn’t say. I just think you two will hit it off.”

“I’ll see him.” I slid her a fifty.

*

I wore a white Gabardine jacket I’d bought that morning on Rodeo Drive. The skies were clear. I drove across town in my cherry red ’54 DeSoto. When I arrived at the Pacific Dining Car, Desi was already in a booth and drinking.

“Mr. Arnaz?”

He wore a Roman style Brioni suit with broad shoulders and a Don Loper tie. “Pete?” he said.

“That’s me.”

We shook hands.

“I am a fan,” I said.

“Kind of you to say.”

His face was a little fatter, but he still looked like the man on all those album covers I owned. I sat.

“I heard you are called Cuban Pete, like my song,” he said in Spanish. I could already tell that whenever we were alone we would be speaking to each other in our native language.

“My real name is Lalo. The man who first called me Pete was also a fan of yours. You are the biggest Cuban in this country.”

Desi laughed, as if he still couldn’t believe his own biography. I always heard that despite his confidence, he was a humble man. Our server arrived. Desi ordered another Bacardi and I had a Mojito. We both got baseball steaks.

I said, “Did Bev tell you that I also come from Santiago de Cuba? I remember when your father was the mayor.”

Desi smiled proudly. “He was the youngest in the town’s history.”

“Do you remember the Caribbean Castle hotel?”

“Of course.”

“My father started the chain.”

Desi whistled. “I brought many girls there.”

“It’s a tragedy that he couldn’t keep it open. He was always an outspoken capitalist. That made him a target.”

Our drinks arrived.

“Bev said that you could help me.”

“I’d like to.”

“This periwinkle blue Pontiac has been following me.” He looked around, like someone might be watching.

“Following you?”

He took another sip. “I’ve seen it all over town. It keeps on popping up, again and again.”

“Did you get a look at the driver?”

“It was hard at first. I couldn’t get close enough. I thought maybe it was some reporter, possibly from Confidential Magazine, or some crazy fan. The driver finally showed his face at Desilu Friday night.”

“What did he want?”

Desi rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Money. To keep quiet about what he’s seen. He wanted me to understand what he was capable of, so he told Lucy that I visit Bev’s. He even showed her a photograph.” Desi finished his Bacardi. “He threatened to tell the media all my secrets if I don’t pay him, not just Lucy. The whole show almost fell apart when Winchell just hinted in his column that Lucy was a Red. A scandal of this magnitude can’t happen now. We wouldn’t survive it.”

“How much did he ask for?”

“A million dollars! Can you believe that?” Desi ranted about how unbelievable it all was in the same way Ricky Ricardo did when he was exasperated by Lucy’s shenanigans. It was surreal feeling like the plot of my life had somehow become an episode of the show.

“What did Lucy do when this guy told her about Bev?”

“She went fucking crazy. She started throwing things and screaming at me backstage, right in front of Bill and Vivian.” He meant William Frawley and Vivian Vance, who played Fred and Ethel. “She was already mad at me for forgetting the date of our anniversary this year and then this two-bit punk tells her that I’ve been to Bev’s! Lucy’s kicked me out!”

I listened in awe.

“These American women are so difficult! I’m at the Biltmore until we reconcile.”

“The punk in the Pontiac, any idea who he was?”

“He was Cuban, I know that. His accent made it obvious. My security got his license plate. His name is Jorge Felix Delsol.”

“That name mean anything to you?”

“Never heard of him.” Desi blinked nervously.

“Desi, do you want me to kill him?”

He froze. To ease his concern, I thought about sharing my professional code with him. I never killed children and I avoided women. But it was too soon to get that specific. “I just need to know what we’re talking about,” I said.

“I suppose if Delsol were to go to jail and talk, the scandal could be bad for our ratings.” He waited. “So you really could do something like that?”

“I have, many times.”

Desi thought it over. “I want Delsol out of my life. I don’t want him expecting a million dollars from me. However you see fit to get rid of him, I’ll pay you.”

“How much?”

“Ten thousand.”

“It’s a deal.”

Desi and I shook hands. Our baseball steaks arrived.

*

I called an LAPD pal who could find the Pontiac and offered him a hundred dollars. He said to call back in an hour. Desi and I drove around.

“I don’t like people following me,” Desi said and lit a panatela. “A man deserves privacy. My father had a second family. I have many half siblings. No one ever gave Papa a hard time.”

When I called back from a booth, my pal reported that a K-Car spotted the Pontiac outside the Coach and Horses in West Hollywood. I told Desi. He insisted he was coming along.

At the bar, the Pontiac was parked outside. We walked in. The crowd was thin. Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart were at a booth with two Paramount suits.

“There!” Desi pointed. Near the bathrooms, there was a small Latin man in a blue zoot suit. “You’re going to see what you get messing with me now!” Desi yelled at Delsol in Spanish.

Delsol did a double take — Mother of God, it’s Cuban Pete.

I grabbed Delsol by the wrist and twisted. He slipped out of my grip and swung at me with his free hand. He caught my jaw and I stepped back, dazed. He drew a switchblade. I picked up a glass from the bar and tossed it at his face. He fell backward. Blood flowed. I kicked him three times and he went unconscious.

Across the room, Alfred Hitchcock watched, excited. If he didn’t know, I was sure the two Paramount suits would tell him to keep quiet about this. I was valuable to all the studios.

Desi got Delsol’s legs and I took his arms. Together we carried him out to the alley. It would have been smarter to put him in my car, but I didn’t want to get blood on my upholstered seats. I smacked Delsol three times. He woke and got to his feet. I drew my .38. Desi kept a lookout behind me.

Jorge Felix touched his bleeding face.

“Why are you trying to blackmail Mr. Arnaz?” I asked in Spanish.

“I work for Romero.”

I turned. Desi recognized the name Romero. It was obvious. I suspected he knew much more than he’d let on.

“And?” I said to Delsol.

“Desi owes Romero money. Romero wants the debt settled. ”

I looked from Delsol to Desi. Desi gave me a look that said he would explain later. I looked back at Delsol. “Where can I find this Romero?”

He gave us an address in Angelino Heights. I wrote it down.

“Where are the rest of the photographs?” I asked.

“The one I gave to Lucy is the only I had. Romero has the rest.”

I punched Delsol hard in the gut. He fell forward. “You better not fuck with Mr. Arnaz ever again. If you do, I won’t be so nice next time.”

Delsol gasped for breath. “I won’t.”

I placed the barrel of the .38 between Delsol’s eyes. “If any pictures of Mr. Arnaz show up, I’m going to hold you personally responsible.”

“I won’t release any photos,” he said.

“Get out of here.”
Delsol ran off.

When we were back on the road I asked Desi who Romero was.

He lit another cigar. “This Cuban gangster I knew back in Miami — an independent, lone wolf type. He did muscle jobs, loan sharking, ran bolita out of a bodega. I used to place bets there if I ever had a few extra cents, which was rare. Back in Cuba, Romero was one of Batista’s snipers. The rumor is that he got kicked out of the military for being a homo.” Desi waited. “Back then, I was struggling.”

“My first years in Miami were hard as well,” I said. “My father died of a heart attack six months after we first arrived to Florida. I believe it was heartbreak over everything he lost.”

“It was so bad for me I cleaned the shit out of bird cages.”

“You what?”

Desi nodded. “It was at a pet shop Little Havana. I did it all day.”

Again, I was speechless. It seemed impossible that Desi had ever done more degrading work than me.

“I took out a loan from Romero to get myself ahead. I could tell that he might have had the hots for me. He made a pass one day. I don’t know why he thought that was okay, but I kept quiet so I could get the loan and used that money to get my first band together. Then I got my first job with Xavier Cugat.”

“How big of a loan was it?”

“Five thousand dollars. I was late on a few payments, but I made them all, including the interest. My debt is paid.”

“And he’s got his lackey after you because you’re so famous now?”

“That must be it. I hear from yahoos all the time. Everyone wants a piece of what I’ve built. There’s a lot of stake with this show.”

I held up the address. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.”

*

Next stop, Angelino Heights. On the way, Desi asked me if I was married.

“Once, when I was young,” I told him. “She died in 1933.”

Desi turned. ’33 was the year of Revolution.

“Her name was Carmen.” I hadn’t spoken about Carmen in years. “I was seventeen, she was sixteen. We were separated the day everything turned bad. I tried to find her, to protect her, but it was no use. They had targeted me. I was the rich son of the hotel magnate. They targeted Carmen too because she was my wife. My father worked hard to build something for himself. How did the people of Cuba treat him? By raping and killing his daughter-in-law. I’m still proud of the Homeland, but that day I knew I needed to live in a country with a future.”

Desi patted my shoulder. “I saw the heads of rich men displayed on spikes along the side of the road. ’33 was a bad year. ”

We arrived at the house in Angelino Heights. I parked.

A young blonde walked a poodle toward the lake. Desi watched her. “Ai-yai-yai-yai-yai, what an ass on that one.” He sighed. “My whole life, women have gotten me into trouble. Ever since I was twelve and tried to fuck the maid’s daughter.”

After a while, I decided that it was safe to poke around in the back of the house. It didn’t look like anyone was home in the unit that Romero lived in, and there was a back fence with a private stairway that led right up to his unit. I told Desi that I wanted to go up there and look around. He once again said that he was coming along. I agreed.

We got out of my car and walked to the white picket fence. I drew a knife, slid it between the slats, caught the black metal lock and flicked it open. I walked into Romero’s backyard, the unkempt weed-filled dirt patch below a second floor balcony. We walked up the stairway.

On the back balcony, there was an air mattress and a dying succulent in a blue tin. The balcony looked toward downtown. We walked in.

There was a kitchen and a spare living room. A picture frame was turned face down on the table. I stood it upright. It showed a Cuban man, his wife, and their four kids.

“That’s Romero,” Desi said.

In the bedroom, there was a poster above the bed. It was a blown-up frame of Desi playing the bongos in the closing sequence of Too Many Girls. On the sheets beneath it were semen stains.

Desi and I looked at each other.

We searched for the stash of photos. We couldn’t find any.

Someone knocked. I put a finger to my mouth, signaling for Desi to be quiet. I looked through the keyhole. It was a little old lady.

“Yes?” I said.

“Mr. Romero? It’s me, Mrs. MacBean.”

I opened the door. Desi stepped behind me, away from her view. He knew she would go crazy if she saw Ricky Ricardo in person.

“You’re not Mr. Romero,” she said.

“No, I’m not. Who are you?”

“Mrs. MacBean, the landlady. I saw someone coming up the back stairs. I assumed it was Mr. Romero.”

“I’m a friend of Mr. Romero’s. I’m supposed to meet him here, but he hasn’t shown and I’m a little worried. When does he normally get back?”

“Why, Mr. Romero hasn’t been here all week. He’s paid up through February, but I was inquiring if he’d be staying for March as well.”

I thanked Mrs. MacBean and told her that I would ask Romero when I saw him. She went away.

*

Nelly Adler’s girls waited around in lingerie for the next lineup. I looked out the window. Nelly ran a new cathouse in West Hollywood. So far, only the top levels of the LAPD and the richest stars knew about it. Desi was upstairs with a girl.

“Get that worried look off your face, Pete,” Nelly said. “I’ve got security.”

I nodded, but reminded myself that Romero had been one of Batista’s snipers. Average L.A. muscle wasn’t trained to deal with him.

Desi was exhausted from the show, and Lucy still would not speak to him outside of work. Romero knew about Bev’s so he decided on Nelly’s tonight.

A half-hour in, there was a crashing sound and a woman’s scream. They came from upstairs. I looked at Nelly. Her face was white. I ran up. From the hallway I heard Desi shouting in Spanish.

I banged on the door. “It’s me, Cuban Pete!”

The door opened. Desi was naked but covered himself with a pink satin pillow. He pointed at the window. There was a bullet-sized hole in the glass. A naked woman was on the floor. She moaned and clenched her right arm. Blood seeped through her fingertips.

“It was a sniper,” Desi shouted. “He missed!”

I looked at the small clean hole through the glass. Behind me, Nelly’s bodyguards showed. They looked bewildered.

“Go get the son of a bitch!” Desi shouted at me.

I raced down the stairs, past Nelly and out to my DeSoto. On Doheny I saw a green Ford pickup ahead of me, speeding. I gunned it and got close. A trim Latin man was behind the wheel. It was Romero. I rolled my window down, aimed at the front passenger side tire and fired. The truck careened out of control and smashed into a light pole on Santa Monica. I parked and got out. Pedestrians ran. I opened Romero’s passenger side door. He was unconscious and his bleeding nose looked broken. A Manlicher rifle was in the backseat. I touched the barrel. It was still hot.

I pulled Romero’s keys from the ignition and opened the trunk. There I found a leather briefcase with a manila folder inside. It was full of photographs of Desi with prostitutes. Also in the case were three rolls of undeveloped film. I put the case in my trunk. Then I went back to the Ford and pulled Romero into my backseat.

On the streets I heard sirens but none followed me. After a while, when it felt safe, I parked at the mouth of the large tunnel that went underneath the Hollywood Bowl and pulled Romero out.

“Why are you squeezing Mr. Arnaz?” I asked.

“You mean the bongo player? The wannabe Yankee?” His voice echoed in the tunnel.

I punched him in the gut. “Do you think you deserve his money?”

“Yes!” He swung at me and missed. I pistol-whipped him in the face. He struggled to balance. “Desi was just some peasant who came to me for a loan. I had to do something about what he’s become! I was so disgusted, always hearing the stories about how women can’t resist that bourgeois asshole.”

“I saw the poster of him you keep above your bed. Apparently men can’t resist him either.”

He grabbed for my throat. I shot him twice, once in the chest and a second time between the eyes. Then I dragged his body into my trunk that was already lined with black tarp.

*

Back at Nelly’s, I saw floodlights. There was some sort of commotion. Nelly and Desi were out front. There were no sirens. I parked and walked closer.

Howard Rushmore, Bob Harrison’s head writer at Confidential, was on the lawn with a camera. A sidekick held the lights, which were aimed at Desi. Flashbulbs popped. Nelly and her two bodyguards blocked Desi from the camera.

Howard shouted, “What is Mr. Arnaz doing at this brothel? Our readers deserve the truth!”

Desi ran back inside. I got close and knocked Rushmore on his ass.

He looked up. “What business of this is yours, Pete?”

Rushmore and I knew each other well.

“I’m looking after Mr. Arnaz now.”
“That so?”

“Forget everything you saw tonight.”

“I heard one of Nelly’s girls got shot.”

“I’m not going to repeat myself.”

He stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. “I didn’t even get any usable shots. But his magazine’s working on a much bigger story that I can’t stop. It will run eventually, even if you take me out. Let the Latin lover boy know. America’s going to know the truth about him soon.”

“Get out of here while I’ll still let you.”

He and his sidekick took off.

Back inside, Nelly told me an ambulance had driven the wounded girl to a hospital. The paramedics would keep quiet about the call — Nelly paid them off too. When the coast was clear, Desi and I left. I told him that Romero was in the trunk.

We drove to Griffith Park and I went down a deserted path. I’d used it in the past. Desi watched me dig a hole and dump Romero into it. He didn’t seem fazed. I covered the body with kerosene and lit a match.

“He was in love with you,” I said. I tossed the photos and film into the fire.

“Can you blame him?” Desi said, grinning. The bright glow from the flames illuminated Desi’s face. He swept a bit of floating ash from his shoulder.

“Romero wasn’t the only enemy keeping tabs on you,” I said. “Rushmore is going to keep quiet about what he stumbled on tonight. But you’re going to have more problems from Confidential down the road.”

“That means I’ll need you to stick around.” He got back in my DeSoto and waited while I covered Romero’s remains. Then I got back in too.

“I’ve got people who depend on me to be available for them,” I said. “One of them is Mickey Cohen.”

Desi looked in the backseat at the bloodstains from Romero’s nose. I’d just have to get my seats reupholstered.

“Keep your other career,” Desi said. “But I’m your main client. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

*

Desi and I played gin rummy. It was eleven thirty in the morning. Desi always got up late. He wore a silk smoking jacket and smoked another panatela. Someone knocked at his door. I answered it.

It was Lucille Ball.

“Hey fella.” She saw my holstered .38. “Who are you?”

“My name is Lalo Diaz, but they call me Cuban Pete.”

“That’s cute. Where’s my husband?”

I invited her in and stood in the corner. She wore a simple black dress and a mink stole. In person, Lucille was stunning. There was little of the goof she played on TV.

Desi approached her. “So happy to see you, honey.”

Lucy waited. “I must be pretty dumb.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I actually miss you.” She waited again. “Do you miss me?”

Desi looked worried that this might be a trick question.

“Spit it out, you Cuban mushmouth.”

“Of course I miss you. When we fight this way, it tears me up inside.”

“Our fights are no reason to punish the babies.” As she stared at him, the bitterness in her eyes dissolved. He was still her Valentino, even after all these years. “I was figuring you could come home.”

“When?”

“Well, we’ve got to film the show tonight,” she said. “After that.”

They kissed. Lucille looked my way. “Where’d you pick this one up?”

“He helped me with that wacko who came to the studio.”

“Helped you? Helped you how?”

“Never mind about that. I’ll see you tonight, sweetheart.”

After Lucille left, Desi and I stopped by a flower shop on Beverly. He bought a bouquet of white roses. From there, I drove him to Cedars of Lebanon. A hospital orderly, who I had called in advance, helped me sneak Desi in.

“Mr. Arnaz wants to visit a wounded fan.” I slid him a fifty. “He doesn’t want his charity advertised.”

In her room, Nelly’s girl was sleeping. Her arm was in a cast. She woke. Desi whispered to her. He gave her the roses and an envelope.

We drove on to Desilu. I took a seat in the audience. The in-studio orchestra played the familiar theme song that ran at the start of each episode over the iconic image of the satin heart. Desi came out, illuminated by a spotlight and holding a microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Desi Arnaz. I’m the President of Desilu and the man who plays Ricky Ricardo.” The crowd applauded. Next, Desi introduced William Frawley and Vivian Vance. “And finally,” Desi said, “Allow me to introduce the star of the show, the Vice President of Desilu, and my favorite redhead, Lucille Ball!” The entire audience was on its feet, clapping and cheering.

We settled in as filming began. Tonight’s episode, which was for the back half of season three, had a scene that took place in Ricky Ricardo’s nightclub, the Tropicana. We all watched as Desi sang and played the bongos.

*

This short story originally appeared in issue #12 of Switchblade Magazine.

“I reject your hypothesis.”

-Quentin Tarantino

*

Sexuality and Gender Studies Professor Gardner Graham hadn’t left home in weeks because of the public controversy over her recent stances. She turned down most visitors and all requests for interviews. Her days were full of reading, buttery Chardonnay, and occasionally a Klonopin.

One person she saw was Tad Embrey, her well-scrubbed Republican neighbor from down the hill. Tad knew all about Gardner’s predicament. He slid a note under her front gate, offering his help. Gardner was touched by his kindness. She began letting him buy her groceries at the Namaste Mart on Hyperion.

Another person Gardner allowed in was Channing Hughes, her secret African-American boyfriend. Channing was twenty-one. Gardner was fifty-seven. Channing had been her student, before USC fired her.

“Absolve me of my whiteness!” Gardner screamed in bed. “Absolve me of my whiteness with that anthracite snake!”

Garner’s nightstand shook. Her copy of Linda Sarsour’s We Are Not Here To Be Bystanders fell on the floor.

“Your snake is religious!”

Out in the night, the Man wore white gloves and covered his face with pantyhose. His Thirteen Incher was sheathed in leather.

Binocular surveillance told him that Gardner’s balcony door was half open. He climbed a back gate, entered, and walked along her soft carpet toward the sounds of sex. He saw a muscular black ass thrusting. The Man drew his Thirteen Incher, snuck up behind Channing and slit his throat. Gardner shrieked. The Man pushed Channing from the bed. Blood sprayed. He grabbed Gardner by the hair, held his Thirteen Incher to her throat and forced her to watch Channing die in the corner.

The Man then let go of her hair and stabbed deep into her vagina, driving his blade down to the handle. It went through her and into the mattress, pinning her in place. Her arms flailed. He pulled it out and sliced open her stomach. Gardner’s insides spilled out in a wormy mush. The Man sheathed his weapon and used her blood to write TERFS — WE SEE YOU on the wall.

*

Shelby drove up the hill. The bubble siren blared on her roof. Both detectives could see the lights of the patrol cars above them.

Curious neighbors were out on their porches. Shelby and Dobbs got out. A patrolman recorded names. They flashed their shields, signed the log, and went under the tape. Spear, the shift’s senior lead officer, approached them.

“There’s two dead inside,” Spear said. “A fifty-seven-year-old USC Gender Professor named Gardner Graham and a USC student named Channing Hughes.”

Spear led them in. Shelby stepped in the bedroom first. It was a humid night. Gardner’s entrails smelled foul. Dobbs covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. The coagulation of the blood told Shelby they’d been dead about two hours. Moonlight from the window gave everything an alien luster.

“What can you tell us?” Dobbs asked Spear.

“The Professor’s neighbor, Mr. Embrey, called it in. He told us a lot. She recently got into a public controversy because of her views on transgenderism. It made her afraid to leave her house. Embrey saw a suspicious Mazda cruising around tonight. He took pictures from his window and got a plate.”

Shelby and Dobbs looked at the wall: TERFS — WE SEE YOU. Shelby’s wife Crockett was passionate about transgender rights. Shelby, who always focused on work, didn’t pay enough attention.

Dobbs asked, “What’s a TERF?”

“I don’t know,” Shelby said.

Captain Monica Thornton entered. Shelby and Dobbs stood at attention. The captain hadn’t called ahead.

She said, “Two other gender academics, Blanche Cottard and Anita Sciorra, both associated with Professor Gardner here, were the other double homicide in Silver Lake tonight. They were shot at close range with an AR-15 while having drinks at an outdoor table of the Black Cat.”

Shelby and Dobbs knew about the earlier call to the bar on Sunset. They hadn’t expected a connection to this case. “Wasn’t another woman like this killed downtown last week?” Shelby asked.

The captain nodded. “Kathryn Tran. She was a UCLA gender Professor who was stabbed to death after leaving a restaurant downtown. RHD took it. They’ve been operating under the assumption that the Tran murder was done by a long-term kidnapper they’ve been after. Tran was the daughter of a big investment banker friend of the mayor. So far they’ve got nothing.”

“Are these two here going to RHD as well?” Dobbs asked the Captain.

If a case had any major media, celebrity, or political connection, it was transferred away from divisional detectives like them to the elite Robbery Homicide Division.

“No,” the Captain said. “It’s the same killer for all four and likely for all five. You two are catching all the cases.”

Shelby provided the best optics here. Captain Thornton liked to mentor other black female officers. She told Shelby that she could make Captain one day if she made the right moves. “Understood.” Shelby looked at the wall again.

“Each woman was given that label,” Captain Thornton said. “TERFs.”

“What does TERF mean exactly?” Dobbs asked Shelby again.

The Captain stared at Shelby, waiting.

“I don’t know,” Shelby said again.

“Who would?” Captain Thornton asked.

*

Christina Banuelos worked Vice. She was a twelve-year veteran of the department as well as the first and only trans detective on LAPD. Shelby and Dobbs arrived at her desk in the Vice Bureau of New Parker Center.

“This way,” Christina said. Carrying her laptop, she led them to a private conference room. They all took seats.

“Our victim’s neighbor got us a license plate,” Shelby said. “The neighbor was following the professor’s situation in the media. He gave us a run down on what he thinks is going on. My wife follows trans issues but I’m lost. Can you tell us what a TERF is?”

“I’m guessing neither of you have Twitter accounts.”

“I’ve got a Facebook page,” Dobbs said. “That’s it between us.”

“TERF means Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” Christina said. “It’s a label for feminists who maintain that biological sex exists. TERFs reject the idea that trans women are biological women and often oppose trans rights legislation and assert that trans women should be denied access to public spaces designated for biological women.”

Dobbs was confused. “That’s controversial?”

“Yes. A great deal of trans activists claim that all gender is a social construct and think that claim should be enforced legally in all situations. They believe people who disagree with that are expressing bigotry.”

Shelby felt relieved to be hearing this. Christina was a valuable resource for the LAPD. They’d known each other for years. One memory stuck out.

It was the Transgender Day of Awareness, two years back. Shelby went with Crockett. The march went down Hollywood Boulevard. Crockett held a poster board that read BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER. Shelby’s said TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. Back then Christina was in Traffic Investigation. She worked security for the march.

Later, there was an event at the LGBT Center on Schrader. There was a bar and Shelby ordered Margaritas. Crockett came back from the bathroom. Something was on her mind.

“What’s up?” Shelby asked.

“The CEO of the center just told Christina to leave,” Crockett said.

“What for?”

“An LAPD uniform violates the center’s policy of inclusion.”

“Where’s Christina now?”

Crockett pointed across the room. Christina was heading for the exit. Shelby got in front of her.

“Were you just told to leave?” Shelby asked.

Christina made a sad smile.

Shelby marched over to the CEO and flashed her shield. “I’d be in uniform too if it wasn’t my off day.” Shelby was angry. “Do I have to leave too?”

“The LAPD are some of the biggest enablers of the epidemic of violence against trans individuals,” the CEO said. “The uniform is frightening.”

“Get out of here with that shit.” Shelby knew these people never bothered to look up actual crime statistics. “Tell her you made a mistake. Invite her back.”

Later, Christina returned in plain clothes. The next day the CEO issued a formal apology both to Christina and the chief, calling all LAPD officers “valued members of our shared community.” Christina never discussed the incident with Shelby. Six months later, Christina was promoted to detective.

Shelby asked, “So Gardner Graham was a TERF?”

Christina turned her laptop around. It was Professor Graham’s Twitter account. A tweeted picture showed fifteen women. Graham was in the center. Christina pointed at three faces and said each name as she pointed: Anita Sciorra, Blanche Cottard and Kathryn Tran. Christina pointed at the caption:

All Proud TERFs.

“Professor Graham was concerned about the direction of the trans rights movement. While maintaining that trans people deserve equality, the professor believed that biological sex was real and that it shouldn’t be subordinated to subjective interpretations of gender. She didn’t think kids should be taught that trans women who are still biologically male can have their periods or that it’s scientifically legitimate for someone to change genders during the course of a conversation. Others disagreed vehemently. The issue’s become a cultural land mine. In an effort to decrease the toxicity of discourse, Graham decided to form a coalition of liberal intellectual feminists who all openly accepted the TERF label. She wanted to destigmatize the slur so others would feel more comfortable sharing their opinions that might deviate from trans orthodoxy. A month ago, Professor Graham shared a YouTube video explaining all of this. The controversy was major.”

“Why?” Dobbs asked.

“Professor Graham had been an anointed feminist activist for decades. Her influence as a gender studies professor was huge. This change was seen as betrayal. Some saw it as a threat.” Christina cracked her knuckles.

“Then our perp probably is an anti-TERF trans activist? Just like Graham’s conservative neighbor suspects?” Dobbs asked.

“I couldn’t say.”

Shelby pointed at Kathryn Tran in the picture. “Tran was killed a week back. The ME says it was likely with the same knife as Gardner and her boyfriend. Did RHD come to you about any of this?”

“No.”

Shelby thought about how good she would look clearing a case that RHD could get nowhere with. She reached over to the screen and scrolled down to the previous post. It was a picture of the professor and the famous author J.K. Rowling. The caption said THIS QUEEN.

“Christina, where do you personally stand on these issues?” Shelby asked. “What do you think about women who get called TERFs?”

Christina waited. “I knew I was trans at twelve. That’s long before any of these labels existed. I was the first trans woman on LAPD.”

“That couldn’t have been easy,” Shelby said.

Another memory came back:

Shelby and Christina were at a cop birthday party at El Compadre in Echo Park. It was just after Christina’s transition. They drank flaming Margaritas. Christina said she was “honored to travel between the sexes.” Christina described her childhood fantasies as “Napoleonic in nature.”

“On the job you see how evil people are.” Christina said. “I try to think fairly. Biological women deserve more than being told ‘men wouldn’t do that.’”

*

Shelby and Dobbs were taking witness statements when Detective Weber from the Intelligence Bureau called Shelby. Weber and his partner Marino were known to be full of useful information.

“A CI of ours knows the car seen leaving the Graham murder,” Weber said.

The DMV said the red Mazda from the neighbor’s picture was registered to a dead Salvadoran woman from Boyle Heights. No one knew who drove her Mazda now. It disappeared after her suicide a year ago. It was never reported stolen.

“Let us talk to your CI,” Shelby said.

“Tacos Gavilan in South Central. One hour.” Weber hung up.

Shelby told Dobbs. Dobbs didn’t want to owe Marino and Weber a favor but he knew their information would probably pan out.

At the restaurant, there were outdoor tables. Marino and Weber sat with a nebbish middle-aged white woman. She wore glasses and had black corkscrew curls.

Marino sipped horchata. “This is Mrs. DiAngelo. She’s a professor.”

Shelby wondered what Marino and Weber had on Mrs. DiAngelo.

“She’s got a name to go with the red Mazda,” Marino said.

“We’re listening,” Shelby said.

“Fredrix Smith.”

Dobbs wrote the name down.

“Who is Fredrix Smith?” Shelby asked.

“A student of mine.”

“Is he trans?” Shelby asked.

“No. He took the name to show solidarity with gender non-conformists. Fredrix is a cis, heterosexual white male.”

“What do you teach?”

“Whiteness Studies. I teach a lot of radical Antifa types.”

“What’s Whiteness Studies?” Dobbs asked.

“The study of the structures that produce white privilege and an examination of whiteness as a source of systemic racism and other group behaviors of white people, such as manifestations of white fragility.”

“How do you know Fredrix drives that Mazda?” Dobbs asked.

“I’ve seen him driving it.”

Marino unfolded a piece of paper. It was a screenshot of traffic cam footage from in front of the Black Cat. A red Mazda went north on Sunset. Mrs. DiAngelo pointed at the bumper stickers. They were pixelated but legible.

“COEXIST, Bernie Or Bust, No TERFs On Our Turf,” the Professor said.

“Fredrix is in Antifa?” Shelby had learned a lot about far left extremism in the past few hours.

“He’s sympathetic to Antifa. He’s not a member.”

“Why is Fredrix driving a car stolen from a dead woman?” Dobbs asked.

“Until now I just presumed the car was his. He must have added the bumper stickers after he stole it.”

“Where can we find him?” Shelby asked.

Mrs. DiAngelo gave them an address. “I gave him a ride home after a BLM march once.”

Shelby looked at Marino and Weber. “We owe you.”

Shelby and Dobbs drove to the address in Silver Lake. A SWAT team would meet them there — Fredrix had an AR-15 and had used it. While Dobbs drove, Shelby found Smith’s Instagram page. She scrolled through pictures: Fredrix was at a rally for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He released an album of self-produced electronic music. He brought a prop guillotine to a protest at Mayor Garcetti’s home in Hancock Park. There was a screenshot of an article. It was a Medium.com post. The title was, “Why I Killed the TERFs, by Fredrix Smith.” There was an image of Fredrix holding a sign that said TRANS IS TRUTH. Shelby clicked on the link in his bio.

Shelby showed this post to Dobbs.

Fredrix lived in a building on Lucile. SWAT was already there. Shelby and Dobbs put on their vests and drew their service weapons. SWAT prepared quickly. Both detectives felt a surge of anxiety about what they faced: this was some new form of evil. The building manager revealed that Fredrix, who lived in a unit in the back of the first floor, was home. SWAT entered and approached his door.

SWAT blew the hinges. In the living room, Fredrix stood with his hands behind his head. He wore a black T-shirt with a picture of Bernie Sanders on it. It said RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

“Get on your knees!”

Shelby had seen his face on many violent young white men over the years. He was doing that same bad imitation of Heath Ledger as the Joker.

“I regret nothing,” Fredrix said, kneeling. A SWAT team member put flex ties on him. “Illuminate my actions to the world, for it is you and the systemic repression you represent that should be exiled into the dark.”

*

He never asked for a lawyer. They’d been in the box for three hours. All he asked for was a Coke Zero.

“Tell me again, from the beginning,” Shelby said.

“Trans Exclusionary Radical Fascism denies the right of trans people to exist.” Fredrix had explained that the last letter of the acronym had been updated from feminist to fascist. “TERFs are the biggest threat to the most marginalized identity in American society.”

Dobbs sighed.

“Why do you care this much about trans people?” Shelby asked.

“TERFs, like all Nazis, deserve no right to a peaceful existence. They’ve repeatedly declared their intent to directly harm the trans community. They threaten the safety of others and therefore deserve no safety themselves until they choose to be human again.”

“Are you hoping that others go out and stab different TERFs in the vagina? Or shoot them?”

“I live in Silver Lake. My community is a bastion of progressive virtues. One of the most evil and public of all TERFs was in my midst. Gardner Graham was their leader. I always remember that where you see a TERF, behind them is someone in a MAGA hat cheering them on. In our current climate, deaths like these are a political necessity.”

Medium had since taken the post down but it was still circulating. “Explain why to us now,” Shelby said.

“Gardner Graham needed to experience the pain her words caused. Every time a TERF speaks, the emotional pain that marginalized trans people register is just as torturing in reality as the physical pain I was forced to put her through. All TERFs deserved a fair warning about what’s coming for them if they speak up. They need to know protectors of the weak are watching them.”

Dobbs asked, “Why did you stab some but shoot others?”

“I followed two of them to the Black Cat, a historic landmark in the world of LGBTQI+ rights. I didn’t plan to kill them there, but the symbolism was too perfect. I couldn’t get close enough for intimate knife work with all those people around, so I used my AR.” Fredrix yawned. “I’ve told you everything. Now I’m going to enjoy my soda. Call my lawyer, Detectives.”

Shelby and Dobbs went out to the hall.

Captain Thornton approached. “Despite Medium taking it down, Smith’s post has gone viral. Numerous outlets are acting like he did something worthwhile.”

The captain held out her tablet. The top headlines were: “Gender Theorist Claims Responsibility For Murder of Alt Right Professor,” “Fredrix Smith: Serial Killer Or Unlikely Freedom Fighter?” and from a popular LGBT magazine Shelby used to read, “The TERF Murders: Who’s Really To Blame Here?”

“I’ve scheduled a press conference in an hour,” Thornton said.

“His Medium post didn’t even make sense,” Dobbs said, still registering the headlines.

“The internet doesn’t feel that way. We can’t let Smith hide behind this bullshit. You two have to hold a press conference and tell the truth.”

Later, the room was packed with media. The gay and trans journalists were given front seats by the department’s media relation’s team. Shelby read a statement. She explained what murders Smith was being charged with and why. She listed evidence.

After the speech, she opened up for questions.

“Does the LAPD have anything to say about Smith’s cause?”

“His cause?”

“The fight for trans equality. The fact that Professor Graham refused to understand the obvious difference between sex and gender.”

“We’re focusing on hard, physical evidence. Like the fact that both murder weapons were found in his house and that his car was photographed leaving both crime scenes,” Shelby said.

“Wasn’t the car stolen? Does proof exist that Smith ever drove that car?”

“His fingerprints were found all over the steering wheel as well and the handles of the vehicle.”

“But you don’t deny that the LAPD has a history of systemically oppressing marginalized groups, do you? The LAPD are some of the biggest enablers of the epidemic of violence against trans individuals.”

“Do you have any words for the trans community tonight?”

“Does the hate ideology Professor Graham espoused bear any connection to the way she was treated?”

“Did Professor Graham play any part at all in her own demise?”

*

Shelby waited in the garage. Marino and Weber arrived.

“I need another favor.”

“What?” Weber asked.

“Smith wants his lawyer. He’s sticking with his freedom fighter story. He needs to fully confess before the lawyer shows.”

“He did confess,” Marino said. “He’s done for.”

“He has to say why for real. Help me make him.”

*

Marino and Weber entered the box. Marino carried a bag. Weber turned off the camera. Marino took a belt from the bag and strapped Fredrix to a chair with it.

Shelby watched on the other side of the mirror. Dobbs stood behind Shelby.

Marino took a phone book out of the bag. Fredrix looked confused. This proud social justice warrior and self-proclaimed expert on all abuses committed by the LAPD didn’t know what the phone book was for.

Marino showed him.

Fredrix screamed.

Marino kept hitting him.

“Help! Please stop! I’ll do anything!”

Marino looked into the mirror and smiled. All it took was four hits. Weber unstrapped Fredrix. Marino left the phone book on the table. They left.

Shelby and Dobbs walked in. Shelby turned the camera on. Dobbs handed Fredrix a Coke Zero.

“Give me the truth,” Shelby said.

“You’re an Uncle Tom and a race traitor,” Fredrix said. “That’s the truth.”

“I can call my friends back anytime.”

Fredrix took a sip.

“Your whole Medium post is phony, right?” Shelby said. “All you really care about is being cruel to women.”

Fredrix shrugged. “I also enjoy messing with people’s heads.”

“Why target TERFs?” Shelby asked.

“At first this was a nebulous idea. After I discovered what a TERF was, I guessed that if I openly murdered a few, most would support me as long as I signaled woke motivations. If you know how to play a male feminist, like I do, you can fuck a lot of terrific poon. There’s no way I could have scored like I have if I hadn’t specifically focused my energy on the women in the L.A. social justice movement and enthralled them with my passion for activities like protesting the state of Israel or businesses that aren’t vegan friendly.”

“I’ve seen how them hippie girls look. They fine,” Shelby said.

“But they don’t fulfill me. To properly get off, I need to be rough. That required creativity. When I learned that Gardner Graham lived in my neighborhood, I took it as a sign that I should finally undertake this new, bigger project. It would be a series of Jack the Ripper-style murders, all done in the name of trans rights. Instead of ending up as just another anti-woman serial killer, history would absolve me as a hero, all because the reasonable people out there would be too scared to state the obvious for fear of being called transphobic. One day, I saw Professor Graham shopping at Namaste Mart. I was just buying my oat milk and jicama wraps and there was my Mary Kelly.”

“Kathryn Tran was a week ago,” Dobbs said.

“I always do ample surveillance before I strike. I was following Tran that night, taking notes. As I watched her eat dinner through the window at Terroni, I got a throbbing hard-on. I’d been going through a dry spell. I have needs. I had my Thirteen Incher. I just got on with it. Later that night I plotted out how I would move on the other three.”

“How rough with women have you been in the past?” Dobbs asked.

“Ever heard of the East Side Rapist?”

A serial rapist had been attacking women across the eastern half of Los Angeles for the past five years. Since many of the victims were illegal Hispanics, LAPD had long suspected that many of the rapes had gone unreported and the real count was higher than recorded. The dead woman who owned the car Fredrix had used in the murder was one of the East Side Rapist’s first victims. After she was raped she killed herself. The East Side Rapist was still out there.

“What about him?” Shelby asked.

“That’s me. I’m the East Side Rapist.”

“How many women was that?” Shelby asked.

“I wasn’t organized at first. Thirty? Thirty-five?”

Dobbs wrote on his notepad.

“I didn’t want to kill the black kid. The targets were supposed to be only women.” Fredrix winked.

“Are you hoping other people kill more TERFs?” Shelby asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I want to begin a new movement.”

Dobbs looked at Shelby — Jesus Christ.

“And I consider this project a success. What I’m saying now will be regarded as a false, coerced confession by one of the most corrupt police forces in history. Men will still believe in my cause. What I wrote on the Internet will be remembered, not what I’m saying now.”

Shelby and Dobbs left the room.

Dobbs called Fredrix’s lawyer.

*

Shelby called Christina on FaceTime.

Christina wore sweats and sat on the balcony of her apartment, lit by the sunset. Back when Christina first transitioned, Shelby remembered her looking awkward, like a teenage boy’s weird impression of what a woman should be. Now she was a true beauty.

“Bad time?”

Christina said, “No. How can I help?”

“It’s a personal question.”

Christina looked embarrassed.

“Forget it,” Shelby said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“What’s your question?”

Shelby waited. “How could those people kick you out of that event? Why let them do it?”

“They didn’t know I was trans.”

“How is that possible?”

“All they saw was my uniform. The reason they asked me back in was because you used your badge to scare them. After the event was over, that was when they realized I was the famous trail-blazing trans cop. That’s when they apologized.”

“But why didn’t you tell them at the event? Why not say it to their face?”

“Because I’m LAPD first. Trans is just how I was born. I didn’t think I would lessen the division between my community and the police if I lost my temper. I want other trans people to not be scared of cops. I want there to be peace.”

Shelby went home.

Crockett was still up. All their dogs yipped. “You don’t even call me once over a case like this?” Crockett had been reading hateful things about her on the Internet. Shelby could tell.

“I was busy.”

“Bitch, I’m an ally to the trans community.”

“I consulted Christine. She’s a detective now. It’s her job.”

“Yeah, but she’s not on the right side anymore.”

“She’s not on the what?”

Crockett just stared.

“Smith’s just a routine misogynist. He admitted as much to me but it won’t come out. Don’t be fooled by his act. He’s just using the type of good causes you believe in as a cover.”

“Won’t come out?” Crockett connected dots. “So what they’re saying is true, you really did try and kill him like he was George Floyd?”

Shelby turned around and left.

She drove to the strip mall behind the Three of Clubs in Hollywood, where her trans CI Yolanda Olmos got her head kicked in four years ago. One of Yolanda’s johns had done it. When Shelby called her family to make the notification, Yolanda’s father simply said, “My son died a long time ago.”

At the Vons on Sunset, Shelby bought a box of refrigerated Margaritas in cans. Back at New Parker Center, she drank all of them in her car and fell asleep alone on a cot inside.

A Killer of TERFS was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

*

Jet streams whirred around the tub. I begin each morning with a bath. My second wife and I split up two months ago and I’ve been staying on the 31st floor of the downtown Westin. My name is Pete Zolochevskaya (Pete Zolo if you aren’t good with long Russian names) and I’m a Detective Lieutenant Grade Three in the LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division. I’ve got fifteen years on the job, nine in RHD.

How can a city detective afford to stay in the Westin, you ask? Well, I’m what they call a “celebrity cop.” I get royalties from books, movies, and TV shows based on my past cases, as well as consistent technical advisor gigs from the Industry. That accounts for much of my added income.

As for the rest: Sometimes I’m willing to use the job as an ATM. If you’d seen what I’ve seen, this wouldn’t concern you as much as it probably does. Men in rare positions like mine must make troubling choices and I’ve sacrificed too much for this department to just hand all this extra income over to charity. I also know too much to ever have the full breadth of my finances examined closely. L.A. needs me doing my job with my mouth shut.

During my bath I read a history book called Winston and Joseph. It was about the alliance Churchill made with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Histories about moral compromises for the greater good have always fascinated me. It’s the good you do in the long run that counts. I never forget that in my heart.

I always expect breakfast to be waiting as soon as I step out of the bath. Room service knows it must require two things: A full plate of bacon and a half-sized bottle of Veuve Clicquot Brut or champagne of comparable quality. Churchill also started each morning with champagne. It’s where I got the idea. I am that rare Russian who doesn’t drink vodka.

This morning, as I ate and drank, I scanned through the Times. On the bottom corner of the front page there was an update about the Anna Safarian jewelry heist. What happened was this:

Anna Safarian, the reality TV and social media megastar, recently separated from her rapper husband Mahad Southern, was staying in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills hotel with her three-year old daughter Spirit.

At two in the morning, when Anna’s security was thin, three armed and masked men invaded her suite. While Spirit slept in the next room, they zip tied her and a bodyguard and made off with a gold and diamond Jacob necklace, two Cartier diamond bracelets, a gold Rolex that was Mahad’s, and Anna’s 20-carat diamond engagement ring, as well as many other expensive pieces of jewelry. Their full haul was ten million. It was a bold job.

To me the case screamed inside man. The crew knew Anna’s routines. It was very possibly someone from L.A., a player I could have crossed paths with at some point. I wanted in. But my lieutenant assigned Ron Palmer and Jim Devery. Neither of these guys are bad detectives. They’re just not aggressive or creative enough for a case this important. I was shut out. You see, Anna and I have a history. But I’ll elaborate on that later.

I was finishing the bottle when I got a call from the bureau: A jewelry storeowner had been shot dead in West Hollywood.

More jewelry.

Instead of showing up for morning roll call I got dressed and drove straight there, planning to meet my partner Sergeant Joe Ancell at the scene.

*

The dead jeweler was a heavyset Russian named Nikolai Karpov. He was face down on the floor of his office, in back of a small store in an upscale mall complex. He looked to be about seventy, with one of those rough, frowning, vodka-weathered faces that had likely survived Soviet Russia. Many of the old Russians in this part of town look this way.

The MEs were finishing up with the body. Karpov’s son Gary, the head manager of the store, discovered the body. The store cameras, we heard, had been turned off.

“We need to talk to the son again,” Joe said.

Joe Ancell and I have been partners for six months. He’s a solid investigator, but we haven’t hit our stride yet. I don’t trust him in the way a partner needs to and I don’t think he trusts me either. I know that in his private life, Joe is a Buddhist. He meditates, goes on retreat, does yoga, the whole nine. I heard that becoming a Buddhist is what got him off the sauce. With me, Joe has never gotten personal.

We pulled Gary to a quiet corner on the sales floor.

“Did you confirm about the cameras?” I asked.

“Someone turned them off last night. Yes.”

“Who?” Joe asked.

“My father, my wife and my brother are the only ones who can.”

“Do you think your father turned them off?”

Gary’s lip twitched. “Why would he?”

“You tell us. Did he have any meetings planned? Did he say what he might have been doing at the store here tonight?”

He thought for too long. “No.”

Gary was genuinely grieving, but he was withholding something.

A West Hollywood sheriff that had been the first responder approached Joe and I. “Two guys from your bureau want you outside,” he said.

Palmer and Devery.

Joe and I walked out to their van. Palmer and Devery were all over the news these days. They limited exposure if they stayed in the van.

Inside, Devery drank coffee. Palmer scratched his crotch. Both looked sleep-deprived.

“I had a feeling this was connected to your case,” I said with a thirsty smile.

“We’ve been looking at European crews for the job,” Devery said. “In the past few years there were major jewel heists in Venice, Paris, and London. We know that old man Karpov had connections to the European black market for jewelry and has connections to the ROC here in L.A.”

“I had a feeling something was dirty about him,” I said.

Devery nodded. “We were considering him, only we didn’t look to hard because we got the word Karpov went legit years ago.”

“Give us some details about what happened here,” Palmer said. “Let us see if anything clicks with what we know.”

“The old man turned off his cameras so he could meet with someone overnight,” Joe said. “Whoever he met probably killed him. If you think your guys could be trying to unload this stuff somewhere in town — ”

“What we’ve got is thin but that’s possible,” Palmer said.

“Then yes, we might be after the same guy,” Joe said.

“We need to share information,” Palmer said.

“I’ll do you one better,” I said. “Being in the special relationship I have with your victim . . .”

“Anna Safarian,” Devery said.

“Yes. I’ll give her a call and see if I can’t jog her memory.”

“We can call her,” Devery said. “We talked to her already.”

“Now that she’s single, you want to chase your old girlfriend when you’re supposed to be working a case?” Palmer asked.

Before the robbery, the tabloid chronicling of Anna’s recent separation with Mahad Southern had been the entertainment media’s biggest story. They were the Hollywood power couple of the moment. No one knew for sure what caused the split. But everyone knew she was playing the field again.

“What I want is to solve both of our cases, something I can do. Is that something you want me to do Palmer?”

Palmer huffed, annoyed but passive.

“Fuckin’ Zolo,” Devery said, shaking his head.

*

I met my long time snitch Halfa Dollar at his mansion in Long Beach. “I need to bump into Anna,” I said.

Halfa Dollar was a famous gangster rapper turned actor and TV producer. Over a long career, he had cultivated a dangerous, anti-police image. Most people did not know that in private he was an LAPD ass-kisser, someone born to please the blue. The last black celebrity as pro-cop as him was O.J. Simpson, pre “Trial Of The Century.”

“Ahhh, the bitch that makes us Eskimo brothers.”

Yes, Halfa Dollar had dated Anna too. “Find out where she’s going to be tonight for me,” I said. Halfa Dollar was also a long time friend and collaborator of Mahad Southern.

“Can you believe baby girl was posting about all the jewelry on Instagram before the heist?” he asked. “Wait, is the heist your case?”

“No. I just need you to find out where she’ll be so I can surprise her.” I went to his bar and popped a bottle of his Moet while he sent out texts and made calls. He looked determined to cooperate as usual.

Halfa and I had first met seven years ago when I arrested him for carrying a gun on parole. I offered to bury the charge if he became my snitch. Ever since he’s become a great source of intelligence, and a sort of friend as well, as long as the doors are closed and none of the brothers who know his rep can see us. If they’re around, I let him play like he’s Tony Montana and I’m some pushover he’s paid for. It’s kind of cute how much this boosts his self-esteem.

“Anna’s going to be at a record release party tonight,” he told me, fifteen minutes later. “The label people are friends. I got you on the list.”

“Thanks, pal,” I said and finished my glass.

*

Anna was alone at a table on the balcony, flanked by her security. All of SoHo House watched her drink. When I got close, her bodyguard put a hand on me.

“LAPD,” I said and flashed my shield.

He removed his hand and looked at Anna. She nodded. The bodyguard moved to the side, clearing my path to her. I sat down.

“You thought you would surprise me?” Anna said.

I shrugged. “Halfa Dollar can’t keep his mouth shut.”

“He’s in love with me, still.” She sipped her vodka soda. She looked good. Her world famous ass hung off both sides of her seat. “The last time I actually came to the phone when he called Halfa said he was going to commit suicide.”

Halfa said it was the other way around. Of course he was lying.

“I’ve been reading about the separation,” I said.

“I haven’t spoken to Mahad in weeks.”

I ordered a glass of Veuve from the server. “You’ve been too busy posting pictures of expensive jewelry.”

“You came to give me shit?”

“Your caption should have said ‘Rob me.’”

“I’m trying to revamp my brand to be more classy and respectable, like I’ve grown up. That was why I posted them.” She watched me. “You came when you could have just called.”

I smiled. “I wasn’t going to just call, not for this.”

*

Anna Safarian is seen across the world as ditzy and self-centered. That, of course, is accurate. But what most don’t see that she is great at using the emotional weakness of others as a weapon. The only person I can think of who is better at sniffing out this vulnerability in people is President Trump. It’s a peculiar quality in many reality TV stars and makes me consider how far Anna will go in life if she doesn’t self-destruct when she is still young.

She was on the phone, telling her nanny that she would be home for breakfast with Spirit. She got back into bed with me.

“So they put you on my case?”

“A jewelry store owner got killed. That’s my case. He could have been the kind of guy who would buy stolen jewels. The guys who robbed you may be my killers. I’m here for that, but mainly to make sure you’re okay.”

“You could have said that before the sex.”

Like I twisted her arm. “Going through what you did is no joke.” She looked at my ring finger, once again bare. “The heist guys, who were they?” I asked.

“I already told the detectives I don’t know.”

“You held out or you haven’t thought hard enough. Nothing was off?”

“Off?”

“You don’t have any suspicions about the people who knew you would be in that hotel with jewels? You won’t get in trouble if you remember now.”

She waited. “All right. Yes.” She waited again. “I know who it was.”

Just like I thought. “Who?”

“Thibault Lemoine. Mahad and I split because he caught me and Thibault together.”

“Who is Thibault Lemoine?”

“He’s a French bad boy, splits his time between Paris and L.A. He’s been to prison. Mahad walked in on us when I thought he would be gone.”

TMZ would have paid a lot to know what Anna just told me. If it hadn’t been her, I might have called them.

“Thibault’s been to prison for what?”

“Robbing people at gunpoint. He threatened me.”

She sounded scared. Anna never sounded scared.

“Walk me through everything that happened,” I said.

“He stormed into my room. His two friends were with him — ”

“You know who the friends were?”

“I think they were his brother Henri and a guy named Rene. They wore masks but I don’t know what the point was. On the way out, Thibault took his mask off and told me he was going to release all the sex tapes we made together.”

Anna had two sex tapes online already. I had seen them both before we ever met. She later told me that she had been the one who released them. “Something like that out there in the world would scandalize you.”

“I’ve got Spirit now, Pete.” I watched her face closely. She seemed sincere. “She was in the other room when it happened. I can’t have another tape come out after this. It would piss Mahad off and I still want to get back together with him. Plus, I’m trying to change my act. I don’t mean just another re-vamping of my brand, I want to behave more responsibly for all the girls everywhere who look up to me.”

I waited for the punch line but it never came. A reformed Anna Safarian. What do you know?

“I had a feeling you were holding out, but why? Why keep this from Palmer and Devery?”

“The whole thing was scary. I’d like the jewels back but loosing them is no tragedy. They were insured. It’s that the things I did with this guy, I shouldn’t have recorded. I really don’t want the tape out there,” she said. “He’ll do it. If they bust him, his buddies will put it out. They’re twisted.”

*

Joe met me by our desks at New Parker Center. He handed me a book called Insight Meditation by Joseph Goldstein. I read the back cover. It was about how to be a Buddhist meditator.

“I know you’re curious,” he said. “And you said you like to read.”

I looked at the cover. “I figured you didn’t talk about this stuff at work.”

“I try not to evangelize but I’ve got no problem talking about it.”

I flipped through the pages “So you sit crossed-legged and become enlightened? Does it make you a better detective?”

“Sometimes.”

I put the book down and waited.

“Where were you last night?” Joe asked.

“With Anna Safarian.”

Joe raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. We had a relationship,” I said. “But you already knew that. I know her well enough to suspect she was holding out on Palmer and Devery. I thought I could get it out of her.”

“Get it out of her how?”

I pointed at the Buddhism book. “You think outside the box with this stuff. I think outside the box too.”

“On the job I follow SOPs.” Joe watched me. He rubbed his bald head. “What did she tell you?”

I told him what Anna told me. Then I said, “Also, Lemoine’s got a record, including an old warrant for assault on an ex when he lived in L.A. five years ago. He’s got a crew of two other guys: his brother Henri and a guy named Rene Leroux. It really was a three-man team that did the heist. That part of her story was legit.”

Joe thought about it. “What did she say about Nikolai Karpov?”

“She doesn’t know anything about him.”

*

Joe and I put out BOLO’s on Thibault, Henri and Rene. We agreed to give it a few hours before giving Palmer and Devery an update. Joe and I were clearing theirs for them. Giving us a shot to clear ours first was only reasonable.

A patrol car spotted Thibault. He was at an outdoor restaurant on Melrose, a hundred yards from his parked Mustang, having a mimosa brunch with a woman. I thanked the unis who found him. Joe and I stayed and watched. Joe was in his Cavalier. I was in my Challenger.

The meal wrapped up. Thibault got in his Mustang and cut east, back to Hollywood. We followed. At La Brea he went up to Franklin and eventually pulled into the lot of a house just east of Cherokee. It was an old house with 20’s-style architecture. I remembered it from calls in my patrol days.

A light green Maserati was parked at a meter on Franklin. I pointed at it. “That’s Rene Leroux’s ride,” I said.

“I’ll bet Henri is in there too. We’ve got Thibault on the assault warrant. We can take him off the street now. We should call tactical.”

I shook my head. “We wait.”

“At least let’s call Palmer and Devery.”

“Palmer and Devery want their cases solved. I want to solve ours. Let’s wait and watch these mopes.”

Joe and I waited in our separate cars, watching the house.

Rene walked out to his Maserati. He looked jittery, like he was high.

“Follow Rene,” I told Joe over the radio.

“What about you?”

“I’ll stay on the house.”

I could sense Joe’s disapproval, but I was ranking officer. I watched him in my rearview start his car and follow Rene east down Franklin.

Next, I went to the trunk for my gear and put on my Kevlar. Then I walked around the building to the back, toward the fence where I remembered that the pool was. It was difficult to climb over the fence, but I made it, and removed my Sig. There was a doorway with glass panels. It was closed. I raised the butt of my Sig to a panel and smashed it in. Then I reached through, unlocked the back door from the inside, and entered.

The hallway before me was empty. A TV played somewhere. I walked forward. Henri Lemoine appeared in the hallway. He had a gun.

I aimed for his heart and fired twice.

Henri dropped. I stepped closer. This gave me a view of the room Henri just came from. Thibault was there. I made him raise his hands. He looked down at his brother’s body.

“The jewels and the tape,” I said.

Thibault was frozen. A Glock .380 was on the table in front of him. The same gun Nikolai Karpov was killed with. I reached forward, grabbed it and jammed it into my waistband.

“Listen up. I’m here for two things: The jewels you stole from Anna and the sex tape you threatened her with. Every copy.”

Thibault regained the power of speech: “How do you know about the tape?”

“Anna has friends. I’m here for her.”

“I want my attorney.”

“That’s what you say after you get arrested. I haven’t arrested you.” I stepped closer. “I’m LAPD and it’s nothing to me to make you as dead as your brother. Where are the jewels?”

Thibault gulped. He looked ready to shit himself. “Upstairs.”

“And the tape?”

“There too. In a lockbox.”

“Take me.”

He led me up to a bedroom. The lockbox was on the floor of the closet.

“Open it,” I said.

He took the keys and opened it. Inside there was a bag of jewelry and a camera disc. He handed them both to me. With my Sig on him, I looked into the bag.

Anna’s jewels were there, all ten million worth.

I held up the disc.

“Copies?”

“There’s one on my laptop, another on my external hard drive. They’re both in my car outside.”

“Other copies besides those?”

“That’s all.” He looked too scared to be lying.

“Who killed Nikolai Karpov?”

He closed his eyes.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked.

“He was supposed to buy the jewels. Said he needed the money. But he changed his mind. He was too scared. We couldn’t trust him to keep quiet.”

I pointed at the .380 at my side. “This the gun you used?”

He said nothing. It was.

“You know, Anna and I dated too,” I said.

“So she’s got you here, trying to scare me?”

“She wanted the tape back,” I said.

“She’s a dumb whore with too much money.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “She’s trying to be a good mother.”

I raised my Sig and fired twice into his forehead. He tipped over backwards. I kneeled over his corpse and put his own .380 in his hand and then used his dead finger to squeeze the trigger on one shot that I sent to the wall by the door. I went to Thibault’s car, got his laptop and external hard drive, and hid them in my car.

Then I called it in.

*

Night fell in West Hollywood. Masha Karpov, Nikolai’s widow, lived on Fuller near Plummer Park. The house she’d shared with her late husband was decorated with Catholic art and there was a picture of Ronald Regan on the wall by where we sat. He smiled down on us.

“How have you been holding up, ma’am?”

She looked at my card. “Zolochevskaya,” she said in her thick accent.

“I’m from Los Angeles, born and raised. I’ve never even been to Russia.”

She shook her head.

“I came with news. We found who killed your husband.”

Masha shook her head again. “He used to do business with these people. He stopped. Nikolai good man for years.”

Ballistics confirmed that the .380, in fact, turned out to be the murder weapon. Thibault hadn’t bothered to get rid of it. He’d also sent Nikolai numerous texts in the days and hours leading up to the murder. Nikolai’s son admitted that the old man had gone off the wagon with his gambling addiction and racked up debts to the ROC that he’d been struggling to pay off.

“I think that’s what got him killed,” I told Masha. “Telling them no.”

“These men, it was you who shot them?”

I nodded.

Masha made a slight grunt. “We will drink vodka,” she said, and went to the kitchen. I didn’t ask her if she had any champagne.

*

If you asked most guys in IA, I’m sure they’d tell you what a sleaze I am. Sure, I’ve made myself appear that way sometimes while trying to make cases, and I’ve already admitted to taking money, but personally I consider myself a romantic, like Winston Churchill. And as crazy it sounds, my time with Anna meant a lot to me. The day after I killed the Lemoine brothers, I called her up, hoping to reassure her that the tapes weren’t going to pop up. She changed her number. I called Halfa Dollar. Anna hadn’t given him the new one. I touched base with a few Hollywood contacts and none of them could help either.

Joe came by the Westin at breakfast time.

“I’m halfway through Insight Meditation,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” He looked at the opulent meal I began each day with.

“I suppose my champagne and bacon is my form of meditation. Every morning this is what I do. My head would be a mess if I didn’t.”

“If it makes you a better person, that counts.”

The deaths of Thibault and the others had been in the media, but Anna’s lawyer asked us to keep the connection to the heist quiet. Her jewelry was back. There was no reason to advertise what really happened. Rene Leroux, after Joe arrested him, ended up taking a deal and confessing to his part in the heist and that he witnessed Thibault kill Nikolai. Palmer and Devery were grateful to have their case so neatly tied up. Joe was clearly upset and suspicious about it all.

“We recovered the jewels and put two bad guys underground. A third is facing years,” I said point blank.

“I can’t prove anything, but I know. You made me a part of . . .”

“You’re feeling bad about me shooting an armed murdering thief? How long have you been in RHD, Joe?” I wanted him to really understand how corrupt the whole system was. The thought that he could be wired also crossed my mind.

“I’m working the same job as you and I see lying as existing on the same continuum as violence. Karma means that your behavior creates a bill that will one day have to be paid.”

“Says who, a fat man sitting on his ass from thousands of years ago?”

“That’s a westernized stereotype. The Buddha was actually quite skinny.”

“So you’re my karmic bill collector?”

“If I’m an instrument to stop you, that’s my path.”

Then he walked out the door.

I felt jealous of a detective that could be idealistic enough, at Joe’s age, to muster anger and indignation about the suspicious shooting of a guilty suspect. Joe Ancell the Buddhist and I were not finished with each other, but I had time to mediate on how I would handle him. I sat, opened the Times, and returned to my champagne and bacon.

That weekend, Anna posted an Instagram picture of herself wearing the recovered engagement ring Mahad Southern had first given her. The media went insane. When asked about its return, Anna stayed coy and evasive, hinting about some heroic knight who had come to her rescue.

She never mentioned my name.

*

This story was originally published in issue #8 of Switchblade Magazine.