Hollywood Moon Read online

  ALSO BY JOSEPH WAMBAUGH

  FICTION

  Hollywood Crows

  Hollywood Station

  Floaters

  Finnegan’s Week

  Fugitive Nights

  The Golden Orange

  The Secrets of Harry Bright

  The Delta Star

  The Glitter Dome

  The Black Marble

  The Choirboys

  The Blue Knight

  The New Centurions

  NONFICTION

  Fire Lover

  The Blooding

  Echoes in the Darkness

  Lines and Shadows

  The Onion Field

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2009 by Joseph Wambaugh

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07123-9

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As ever, special thanks for the terrific anecdotes and great cop talk goes to officers of the Los Angeles Police Department:

  Randy Barr, Gabriel Blanco, Sue Brandstetter, Alma Burke, Vicki Bynum, Holly Daniel, Bob Deamer, Mike Diaz, Bill Duke, Bob Duretto (ret.), Klaus Edgell, Irma Foster, Dan Gomez, Brett Goodkin, Craig Herron, Diana Herron, Lin Hom, John Incontro, LaMont Jerrett, Corina Lee, J. J. Leonard (ret.), Sig Lo, Al Lopez, Kathy McAnany, Steve McClain, Paul McKechnie, Joan McNamara, Greg Nichols, Maligi Nua Jr., Bill Pack, Kim Porter, Armando Romero, Ken Smith (ret.), Nick Titiriga, Terri Utley, Ray Valois, Jody Wakefield, Ed Whyte, Tracy Wolfe, Eddie Yoon

  And to officers of the San Diego Police Department:

  J. B. Boyd, Silvia Brown, Laurie Cairncross, Paul Conley, Carlton Hershman, Mike Holden, Lou Johns, Howard Labroe, Duane Malinowski, Vic Morel, Paul Phillips, Tony Puente (ret.), Cori Queen, Dani Resch, Dave Speck, John Teft

  And to Officer Arvar Elkins of the Huntington Beach Police Department

  And to investigators of the San Diego District Attorney’s Office: Joe Cargel, Paul Libassi

  And to San Diego deputy district attorney Joan K. Stein

  And to special agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Mike Matassa (ret.)

  And to special agent of the Secret Service Elizabeth McCaffree

  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 hormona
lly 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 terrified 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 chang
e 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.