Hollywood Moon hs-3 Read online

  Hollywood Moon

  ( Hollywood station - 3 )

  Joseph Wambaugh

  Joseph Wambaugh

  Hollywood Moon

  ONE

  Hollywood Nate rents midgets,” the long-legged, sunbaked surfer cop whom the others called Flotsam said to his partner while 6-X-32 was passing Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, cruising east on Hollywood Boulevard at twilight.

  The dying spangled sunlight ricocheted off the windows of the taller buildings, and his shorter surfer partner, also weathered and singed, whom of course they called Jetsam, glanced at the driver through the smoked lenses of his wraparound shades and said, “What?”

  Flotsam wore his two-inch hair gelled up in front like a baby cockatoo, and Jetsam’s was semispiked, both coifs streaked with highlights not provided by sun, sea, or nature. And with just enough gel to get it done and still not annoy the watch commander, a lieutenant in his early fifties, twenty years their senior, and very old-school.

  “In fact,” Flotsam continued, “last Wednesday, Nate hired one to bowl with him for twenty bucks an hour. That’s when five coppers from the midwatch and Watch 2 got together at the bowling alley in the Kodak Centre with a bunch from north Hollywood and Wilshire. I heard that Nate, like, stole the spotlight with his midget.”

  “Where did you hear about Hollywood Nate and midget love?” Jetsam wanted to know.

  “I got it from Sheila,” Flotsam said, referring to Officer Sheila Montez, a midwatch P2 whom both surfer cops lusted for. “And I ain’t saying he loves little people, but, dude, he’s so cinematically dialed-in, he devised this way to capture the attention of all the bowling alley Sallys. His little fella gets all flirty and cute with the Sallys, and it sets things up for Nate to move in and close the deal.”

  Officer Nathan Weiss, a hawkishly handsome thirty-seven-year-old, physically fit gym rat, was called Hollywood Nate because he possessed a SAG card and had actually appeared briefly in a few TV movies. And he always volunteered to work every red carpet event at the Kodak Theatre in his thus-far futile quest for cinematic discovery and eventual stardom.

  Jetsam envisioned those feverishly hot Sallys as he shot a casual glance toward the Walk of Fame, where lots of curb creatures were already out. He saw a tweaker sidling closer toward the purse of an obese tourist who was busy yelling at her much smaller husband. The tweaker backed off and slithered into the crowd when Jetsam gave him the stink eye as the black-and-white passed. The Street Characters-Batman, Superman (two Supermans, actually), Darth Vader, Spider-Man, Bart Simpson, SpongeBob, and Catwoman-were all mingling with tourists in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, posing for camera shots in an endless quest for tourist bucks.

  “Maybe we oughtta hire a midget too,” Jetsam said. “I used to bowl a lot when I was married to my second ex-wife, who I miss like a prostate infection. It was a low-rent bowling alley in Long Beach, and I was, like, the only bowler in the whole place who wasn’t sleazed-out. Even my second ex-who loved bowling, Leonardo DiCaprio, and pharmaceuticals-was inked-up, a butterfly on her belly and my name on her ass. Her girlfriend told me how that prescription zombie screamed like a cat when they lasered my name off. I’da coughed up two weeks’ pay for a video of it. Her exotic girlfriend, by the way, might be worth your attention, bro. She’s an Indian.”

  “Feather or dot?”

  “Dot.”

  “No way, dude,” Flotsam said. “Every time my laptop goes sideways, I get one of them on the line and always end up tossing my cell phone against the wall in frustration. I buy more cells than every cartel in Colombia. But I agree, we should definitely not overlook the target-rich environment at the Kodak Centre.”

  Jetsam said, “Being where it’s located makes it, like, the most lavish bowling alley this side of the palace of Dubai. Maybe we can’t afford it?”

  “ ‘Can’t’ is a frame of mind that don’t hold our photo,” Flotsam said. “Hollywood Nate claims that on certain nights, it’s full of bowling alley Sallys hoping Matt Damon will come in to roll a line or two, or maybe Brad Pitt when Angelina’s in Africa looking for sainthood with people even skinnier than she is.”

  Jetsam said, “I hear what you’re saying, bro. I mean, there’s gotta be opportunities on those lanes for coppers as coolaphonic and hormonally imaginative as the almost four hundred pounds of male heat riding in this car.”

  Flotsam thought about it some more and then said, “There’s a midget that works at the newsstand on Cahuenga. And there’s that roller-skating midget at Hollywood and Highland. The one that throws water balloons at tourists? He’d crawl in a clothes dryer for twenty bucks an hour.”

  “A plethora of midgets ain’t gonna get us our way,” Jetsam said, showing off the new vocabulary he was acquiring from his community college class. “We gotta think original. Maybe we could, like, hire a clown to bowl with us. That would amaze those ten-pin tootsies.”

  “I’m scared of clowns,” Flotsam blurted, and it was out of his mouth before he could take it back.

  “You’re what?” Jetsam said, and this time he turned fully toward his partner as the late-summer sun dropped into the Pacific and lights came on in Hollywood, the fluorescent glow making the boulevard scene look even weirder to the swarming tourists.

  Flotsam and Jetsam had been midwatch partners and fellow surfers for more than two years, but this was the first time Jetsam had learned this incredible secret: His tall, rugged partner was afraid of clowns!

  “Maybe I said it wrong, dude,” Flotsam quickly added. “It’s just that they, like, shiver me. The way a snake creeps you out, know what I mean?”

  “Snakes don’t creep me out, bro,” Jetsam said.

  “Rats, then. I seen you that time we got the dead-body call where rats were all eating the guy’s eyeballs. You were ready to blow chunks, dude.”

  “It wasn’t the rats themselves, bro,” Jetsam said. “I just wasn’t ready for an all-out rodent luau.”

  “Anyways, I’m just saying, clowns, like, make me, like, all… goose-bumpy. I mean, maybe I saw too many movies about slasher clowns or something, I don’t know.”

  “This goes on my desktop,” Jetsam said with a grin. “I’m holding on to this.”

  “What happens in our shop stays in our shop, dude,” Flotsam said grimly, referring to their car with its “shop number” on the roof and doors. “So hit your delete key.”

  “I feel ya, bro,” Jetsam said. “No need to go all aggro. Next time a boulevard clown squirts a tourist with a water gun, just stay in the car and roll your window up and lock the doors. I’ll man-up for both of us. And I’ll taze the first asshole that calls my partner a sissified, whimpering bitch.”

  While 6-X-32 was cruising the boulevard, two homeless middle-aged panhandlers in east Hollywood named Axel Minton and Bootsie Brown were pushing a man in a wheelchair along the sidewalk to a graffiti-tagged neighborhood market frequented by local pensioners. It was a store where Axel and Bootsie often begged for change from the residents of the neighborhood, mostly Latino and Asian, who bought groceries there.

  Axel was a spindly white man with sprigs of gray hair who would drink anything from a bottle if the label indicated any alcohol content. Bootsie was a black man blind in one eye who slept in a storage shed behind the apartment building where eighty-eight-year-old pensioner Coleman O’Toole lived. They both wore layers, sooty and drab, molded to their forms like fungus until it wasn’t clear where the fabrics left off and they began. And neither was many gallons away from wandering Hollywood Boulevard-like all those other self-lobotomized colorless specters in pull-tab necklaces and football helmets, or maybe wearing bikini bottoms on their heads-pushing a trash-laden shopping cart, chanting gibberish, or yodeling at terrifie
d tourists. The Hollywood cops called it “gone to Dizzyland.”

  Each transient had wheeled Coleman O’Toole to the store many times for a modest fee. This time they were both pushing the wheelchair, and they were bickering when they stopped in front and entered, leaving Coleman O’Toole parked in the shadows.

  While Axel and Bootsie were inside loading up on shelf items, which included three quarts of 100-proof vodka and three quarts of gin, another octogenarian transient, known as Trombone Teddy, shuffled by. He’d been a good bebop sideman back in the day, or, as he put it, “when I was a real person.” Teddy, who was well known to officers at Hollywood Station, looked curiously at the figure in the wheelchair. Then he used his last few coins to phone the police, and the call was given to 6-X-32 of the midwatch.

  Axel and Bootsie’s bottles of liquor and several bags of snacks were piled on the counter. The part-time clerk, who called herself Lucy, was a white transsexual in a blinged-out T-shirt, low-rise jeans, nosebleed stilettos, and magenta hair extensions piled so high she wouldn’t have felt being conked by a bottle of Corona, which could easily happen in that store. She adjusted her silk scarf to better conceal the healing from recent surgery to remove her manly apple and looked at the transients curiously.

  Being acquainted with both of them as well as with Coleman O’Toole, she said, “Is Coley throwing a party or what?”

  “It’s his birthday,” Bootsie said.

  “No, it isn’t,” the tranny said. “His birthday was last month, same as mine. He brought me a card.”

  “It ain’t his birthday, dummy,” Axel said to Bootsie. “It’s the anniversary of his retirement from the railroad. He has a party every year to celebrate his current life of comfort and ease.”

  Lucy looked at Coleman O’Toole’s pension check and at the endorsement. The signature looked like the old man’s scrawl. “Why don’t you wheel Coley inside?” the tranny said, squinting out the window at the wheelchair figure alone in the darkness.

  “You wanna check his ID, see if he’s old enough to buy booze?” Bootsie said with a wet, nearly toothless grin.

  “Yeah, you wanna card old Coleman?” Axel said, snuffling and grinning wider than Bootsie. “Actually, the old bugger’s sick. Puked halfway down the street. You don’t want him in here unless you got a bucket and mop.”

  “And all this booze is gonna cure him?” Lucy said, then shrugged and started ringing up the items just as 6-X-32 parked in front of the store and was met by Trombone Teddy.

  The cops hardly noticed the old guy in the wheelchair, and Flotsam said, “Did you make the call, Teddy?”

  “Yes, sir,” Teddy said. “Is there a reward for capturing a couple of crooks for check fraud?”

  “Whadda you mean?” Jetsam said.

  “If you would put in a word to the store owner, would he give me a few bucks for blowing the whistle on a pair of thugs?”

  “High-level business negotiations are above my pay grade, Teddy,” said Flotsam. “But I gotta think somebody’d buy you a forty or two.”

  “Okay,” Teddy said. “I’ll take a chance that generosity still exists in this ungrateful, goddamn world. Go inside and you’ll find two thieves cashing a stolen check.”

  “This better be righteous, Teddy,” Flotsam said, walking inside with Jetsam at his back.

  The tranny, who was as tall as Flotsam in those heels, was surprised when the cop appeared and said, “Can I see that check?”

  Pushing the check across the counter, Lucy said, “Something wrong, Officer?”

  “That’s what we wanna know,” Jetsam said.

  Flotsam examined the check and said, “Are either of you Coleman O’Toole?”

  It was Lucy who said, “No, they’re not, Officer. Coley’s the one out there in the wheelchair. These two sometimes wheel him down here to buy groceries.”

  “Coley’s the salt of the earth,” Axel said, looking uneasy. “I’d fight a whole pack of pit bulls for old Coley. He’s a fellow wine connoisseur.”

  “Connoisseurs don’t drink wine in a paper bag,” Jetsam noted.

  “Coley’s my man,” Bootsie said. “When some no-account neighbor put lye in his gin bottle one time and he ended up wif a tube in his stomach, it was me that poured some good whiskey into the tube so he could get drunk.”

  “That’s a touching testament to friendship,” Flotsam said, putting the check on the counter.

  He walked to the door, nodding to Jetsam, who stayed inside while the grocery transaction was being completed. Lucy was counting out the change when Flotsam came back inside.

  Axel Minton looked at the cop’s expression and said, “Uh-oh.”

  The tranny’s eyes were theatrically made-up so as to be seen from balcony seats, and those amazing orbs moved from Flotsam to the transients and back again before she said, “Don’t tell me that’s not Coleman O’Toole out there in the wheelchair!”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Flotsam. “I’m sure it’s him. He’s strapped in and rigged up nice as you please.”

  “What’s the problem, then?” Lucy asked.

  “It’s that he won’t be needing all this booze,” Flotsam said. “Him being deceased and all.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Bootsie, who pointed at Axel. “It was his idea after we found Coley layin’ on the floor, colder than Aunt Ruby’s poon.” Then he looked at the tranny and said, “Sorry for my rude mouf, Miss Lucy.”

  “You lying rat!” Axel said to Bootsie. Then to the cops, “He was the one noticed Coley had already signed his check!”

  “Tha’s right, Officer,” Bootsie said, “but it was this here pissant that pointed to Coley layin’ there quiet as a bedbug on your pilla and said ol’ Coley woulda wanted us to cash it and have a Irish wake!”

  “Okay, you two turn around and put your hands behind your backs,” Flotsam said. And sotto to Jetsam, “Better notify the night-watch detective about the corpse in the wheelchair and our two grave robbers. While we’re waiting for the body snatchers, I’ll take care of Teddy.”

  As Jetsam led the handcuffed miscreants out to their car to await the arrival of the coroner’s van, Flotsam bought a pint of Jack for Trombone Teddy to show that generosity still exists in this ungrateful, goddamn world.

  The woman officer with the smartest mouth at Hollywood Station was Dana Vaughn, and Hollywood Nate was stuck with her for at least one deployment period, an unhappy way to spend his first month back on the midwatch. He’d spent a year at the Community Relations Office (acronym CRO, pronounced “crow”), tending to touchy-feely quality-of-life issues and getting a little bump in pay for the easy work. But when fellow crow Bix Ramstead shot himself after being involved in a scandal, a lot of the fun was gone from the job and Nate felt like returning to real police work. Besides, he needed to work nights in order to keep his days free to pursue and torment casting agents. At age thirty-seven, it was now or never.

  With sixteen years on the LAPD, Nate Weiss figured he’d have to stick around for at least four more years to ensure a vested pension, but one he couldn’t draw until the age of fifty, which kept most cops on the job long past twenty years. He wondered what he’d do if his acting career finally caught fire in the next four years? Would it be worth it to resign from the LAPD and lose that pension for an uncertain career as an actor? He might damn well need the pension after he turned fifty and his pecs were falling and he couldn’t suck in his gut any longer. Hollywood Nate felt that he was way too handsome to make it as an older character actor, and the mere thought of it made Nate unconsciously pass his hand over his abdominals, well covered by a T-shirt, a Kevlar vest, and his uniform shirt.

  Dana Vaughn, also a P2, who was driving 6-X-76’s Ford Crown Vic late that afternoon, hadn’t missed it. She never missed a thing, which was one of the reasons Hollywood Nate didn’t quite feel relaxed around her.

  After noticing that subtle move to his belly, Dana said, “Yeah, you’re ripped, Nate. Abs to die for. Must be tough being as smokin’ hot as you. Who cleans all t
he mirrors in your house?”

  “I just have a slight stomachache is all,” said Hollywood Nate lamely.

  “Sure, honey,” Dana said with that throaty, tinkling chuckle of hers, which irritated him all the more because he actually liked the sound of it.

  When he muttered, “I’d sure hate to work for you when you make sergeant,” she laughed, and that pissed him off more than when she snarked him about his vanity.

  Another thing he disliked about Dana Vaughn was that she called him honey in the way that his aunt Ruthie called him honey. Like the old woman at the donut stand in Farmers Market, his usual destination for a croissant and coffee in the morning.

  Dana was six years older than Nate, with twenty-one years on the job, but she acted like she was from the WW II generation or something. Almost every damn thing she said to him somehow sounded patronizing and made Nate feel like a kid. And to make matters worse, she still looked good. She was fit, with great shoulders and only faint lines starting around her alert golden-brown eyes and at the sides of her mouth when she smirked at him.

  Dana used the workout room nearly as much as Nate, always in a tight tank and spandex shorts. She didn’t even bother to dye her salt-and-pepper ear-length bob, and it looked just right on her, emphasizing the woman she was, not the girl she had once been. If she’d been what the surfer cops called a yuckbabe or one of those always griping about “JFH,” meaning just-fucked hairdo, instead of an older woman who still looked hot and knew it, Nate figured she’d have been easier to take.

  The first time Nate had ever seen Dana was in the station parking lot when he happened to be loading his war bag and shotgun into his shop after he’d just come back to patrol from his stint at the Community Relations Office. Dana was also new to Watch 5, the midwatch, and had been working for the first time that night with young Harris Triplett, a phase-three probationer whose field training officer was on a day off. Since the P1 was in the last phase of his eighteen months of probation, he could be put with a P2 like Dana instead of with a P3 FTO. In fact, Harris was scheduled to complete his probation in a matter of days, and Nate had intended to buy him a burger to celebrate.