Free Hollywood Crows by Joseph Wambaugh

and my skin is lighter than yours and my eyes are bluer. If you wanna work out the math, I’m exactly one-fourth Peruvian, and I don’t think any of that is mestizo in the first place.”
    “You overanalyze,” Dan Applewhite said, wishing this college boy wouldn’t debate every goddamn thing, thinking it really was time for him to retire.
    Gil said, “And if I had the same Peruvian DNA on my mother’s side with no Hispanic surname attached to me, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And should Geraldo Rivera’s kids rate diversity points? How about Cameron Diaz when she has kids? Or Andy Garcia? Or Charlie Sheen, for chrissake. He’s as much Hispanic as I am!”
    The conversation was forever ended when Doomsday Dan pulled their shop to the curb, put it in park, and, turning to face his young partner, said, “This ain’t the city of angels, it’s the city of
angles
, where everybody’s looking for an edge. There’re hundreds of languages spoken right here in Babelwood, right? It’s all about diversity and preferences and PC. So if the lottery of life gave you an edge, you’re gonna accept it and be grateful. Because even though you’re a nice kid with potential, I’m telling you right here and now that if you don’t shut the fuck up and act like you
been
somewhere, as your FTO I’m gonna decide that you’re too goddamn stupid to be a cop and maybe shouldn’t even make your probation! Are you tracking?”
    Then Dan Applewhite started to sneeze and had to grab his box of tissues and his nasal spray. “See what you did,” he said, sniffling. “You stressed me out and activated my allergies.”
    When the older cop got his sneezing under control, his young partner thought things over, looked at his training officer, and said in English-accented high-school Spanish, “
Me llamo Gilberto Ponce. Hola, compañero
.”
    Wiping his dripping nose, Doomsday Dan said, “That’s better. But you don’t have to overdo it. You Hispanics always tend to gild the lily.”
     
     
    Leonard Stilwell was a thirty-nine-year-old crackhead with a mass of wiry red hair, a face full of freckles, and large, unfocused blue eyes that would have looked believable on a barnyard bovine. He had served two relatively short terms for burglary in the Los Angeles county jail system but had never been sentenced to state prison. The last conviction resulted from Leonard’s having tossed his latex gloves into a Dumpster after successfully completing his work. The cops later found the gloves, and, after cutting off the fingertips, the crime lab had successfully treated the inside of the fingertips and got good latent prints. After that conviction, Leonard Stilwell began watching
CSI
.
    The county jail was so overcrowded that nonviolent prisoners like Leonard Stilwell could usually get an early release to make room for rapists, gangbangers, and spouse killers. So Leonard had benefited from all the crime that everyone else was committing and got squeezed out of the county jail onto the streets like toothpaste from a tube. Whenever he was free, he would hurry to old companions to try talking them into an advance against his cut from the next job, then he’d go on a rock cocaine binge for a few days to smoke the miseries of county jail from his memory bank before going back to work. But that had been when he was teamed with master burglar Whitey Dawson, who’d died from a heroin overdose six months earlier, his last words being “It don’t get any better!”
    Leonard Stilwell had proved reasonably adept at breaking into liquor storage rooms, which had been Whitey Dawson’s specialty, and also showed some competence in refilling empty bottles of premium brands with the cheap stolen booze, then affixing a believable stamp to seal the cap. Twice he’d sold several of the doctored bottles, mixed with legitimate ones, to Ali Aziz of the Leopard Lounge, who had never caught on.
    Now with Whitey Dawson gone, Leonard Stilwell was reduced to