Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [16]
“I’m giving you Esmeralda,” Yippie Calzone said abruptly.
“Pretty-ass Esmeralda? You nuts?” Cravitz asked, genuinely surprised.
Yippie Calzone opened his briefcase and pulled out Esmeralda—his custom-made service revolver, a snub-nosed Colt .45 Peacemaker—and carefully laid her on the table.
Cravitz stared down at the beauty. She gave off a brazen sparkle that seemed to bewitch the mind.
The piece was one of a matched pair that once belonged to Jack Johnson, the Negro heavyweight champion, in 1908. Her grips were fashioned from Alaskan whale bone and her barrel and frame were forged with silver from Civil War—era coins. There was a flaw in her muzzle that gave her bulletholes a distinctive teardrop shape.
“I’ve decided she’s a cold-hearted bitch. I don’t love her no more,” Yippie said. “She’ll listen to you; she’ll take care of you.”
Like most of his pals, inside the law and out, Cravitz had always had a hard-on for Esmeralda. The weapon had been a gift to Calzone from the City of Los Angeles for his years of courageous service—twenty years back.
In his lawless teenage years—when Cravitz was pursuing his ambition of becoming a criminal just like his big brother, Cash—he and Cash had once worked out an elaborate plan to steal the treasure. The scheme fell through when Cash was arrested for a shootout—at a goddamn crap game.
The arrest of his big brother turned out to be a boon. Good and thoughtful people—including his own folks—swept into the breech left by his thuggish brother. It would take a brutal stretch at Pelican Bay before ol’ Cash saw the profit in pulling at least one of his feet out of the mire of everyday crime. Since the ’92 riots, Cash had rehabilitated his reptilian image and remade the Château Rouge, the abandoned, rat-infested hotel he’d bought, into a hangout joint for politicos and big shots; all attracted like flies by the old G’s deep greasy pockets and his doe-eyed and perfumed, big-titted bar girls.
“This feels like the bad-news part,” Cravitz said.
“Well,” Yippie said, “you do know I’m a killer.”
“That was a good shooting,” Cravitz said.
No one in the city could forget the time that Calzone fatally shot two boys during a drug sting in Midtown. The weapons the boys had leveled on Calzone and his partners turned out to be toys. Because Calzone was Chicano and the boys were black, the incident quickly took on a nasty racial tone.
There were at least ten reprisal shootings. Black kids shot up brown folk picnicking in the park; Chicano kids shot up black folk at bus stops.
“Good shooting,” Yippie repeated with contempt. “Me, killing kids. Imagine.”
“They were perps, homeboy,” Cravitz said, pouring out two more glasses of pulke. “It was them or you.”
The men drank again in silence and Cravitz could hear the bustle of traffic just outside the window.
“I have nightmares, Quick,” Yippie said. “I can’t get their faces out of my head. And those mothers—” After a moment, the old cop took out a pack of Camels, “I’m taking time off. I already spoke to Vargas.”
“Nothin’ wrong with that,” Cravitz said. “Manny will bring you back into the fold.”
Yippie lit a cigarette and took a short drag, then, as quickly, mashed it out in the ashtray. “I’ve made a will,” he said. “I’ve been too lucky too long.”
Yippie Calzone’s face, covered over with pockmarks and scars, was not handsome. But there was something compelling about his sad, soulful eyes.
“I’ve always had death threats,” Yippie said. “They come with the job. But the dreams …” Yippie said. “I dreamed someone is going to kill me before this week is done.”
Cravitz got up from his chair and placed his big