The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(35)

Natasha started rebuttoning the smock.

“You saw that he’s a man, right?” the nurse asked.

“Biologically, yes,” Ballard said. “But she chose to live as a woman. That’s what I go with.”

“Oh,” Natasha said.

“Do you know if she has had any visitors? Any family?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Are they going to transfer her?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

Hollywood Presbyterian was a private hospital. If family or insurance was not found for Ramone, she would be transferred to a county hospital, where she wouldn’t get the same level of care she was getting here.

Ballard thanked Natasha for her help and left the room.

After clearing the hospital, Ballard drove to a neighborhood in the shadow of an elevated section of the 101 freeway. Ramona Ramone had no driver’s license under her current or birth name and the only address Ballard had found for her was on Heliotrope Drive. It was the address on two shake cards in her vice file and the one given when she was last arrested.

Ballard had thought it was most likely a phony, not because there wasn’t a street in Hollywood called Heliotrope but because she knew something about plants and flowers from growing up in Hawaii. She had often worked with her family on tomato farms and plant nurseries on the dense mountainsides of Maui. A heliotrope was a plant that blossomed with fragrant purple and blue flowers and was known for turning its petals toward the sun. It seemed to Ballard like a metaphor of some kind, that maybe Ramona Ramone had chosen the name of the street because it fit with her desire to change and turn her petals to the sun.

Now, as she followed the road to the freeway, she saw that the address corresponded to a row of old RVs and house trailers parked stem to stern under the overpass. It was one of L.A.’s many homeless encampments, and beyond the row of beat-up vehicles on the street, she could see pitched tents and shelters made of blue tarp and other materials in the hardscrabble yard beneath the overpass.

Ballard parked her car and got out.





13

Ballard knew something about the social structure of the city’s teeming homeless encampments. Both the city and the department had been attacked and sued by civil rights groups for ill-advised handling of encounters with homeless people and their communities. It had resulted in problem-specific sensitivity training and what amounted to a hands-off policy. She had learned from those sessions that a homeless encampment evolves much like a city, with a need for a social and government hierarchy that provided services like security, decision-making, and waste management. Many had individuals who served as mayors, sheriffs, and judges. As Ballard moved into the Heliotrope encampment, she was looking for the sheriff.

Other than the constant sound of traffic on the freeway overhead, it was all quiet in the camp. It was after midnight, the temperature was dropping into the fifties, and the inhabitants were mostly hunkered down and bracing for another night facing the elements, with walls made of plastic tarp or, if they were lucky, the aluminum shell of a camper.

Ballard noticed one man moving through what looked like a debris field where the people who lived off the trash of others threw their own trash. He was buckling his belt and his zipper was down. When he looked up from the operation and saw Ballard, he startled.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“LAPD. Who the fuck are you?”

“Well, I live here.”

“Are you the sheriff? I’m looking for somebody in charge.”

“I’m not the sheriff but I got the night shift.”

“Really? You’re security?”

“That’s me.”

Ballard pulled her badge off her belt and held it up.

“Ballard, LAPD.”

“Uh, Denver. People call me Denver.”

“Okay, Denver. I don’t want to hassle anybody. I just need your help.”

“Okay.”

Denver stepped forward and put out his hand. Ballard held back from openly cringing. Luckily she was holding her rover in her right hand and avoided the outstretched hand.

“Elbow bump, Denver,” she said.

She offered her elbow but Denver didn’t know what to do with it.

“Okay, never mind that,” she said. “Let’s just talk. The reason I’m here is I think one of your citizens is in the hospital, hurt really bad. I want to find her place here. Can you help me?”

“Who is it? We have people come and go. Sometimes they just leave their stuff.”

“Her name’s Ramona Ramone. Kinda short Spanish girl? She said she lived here.”

“Yeah, I know Ramona. But one thing you should know— she’s a man.”

“Yes, I know that. She was born a man but identifies as a woman.”

That seemed to confuse Denver so Ballard moved on.

“So she lives here?”

“Well, she did. She was gone like a week and we didn’t think she was coming back. Like I said, people come and go, just leave their shit behind. So somebody took her spot, you know what I mean? That’s how it works around here. You snooze, you lose.”

“Which spot was it?”

“She was in the ’seventy-four Midas at the front of the wagon train.”

He pointed toward the ragtag line of RVs parked along the curb in front of the open encampment area. The first RV was a dirty white camper with a Dodge van cab. There was a faded-orange accent stripe down the side and a plastic American flag draped over the back edge of the roof as a leak stopper. From the outside, the vehicle showed every bit of its forty years.