Hollywood Hills hs-4 Page 14

  “Sure,” Britney said. “I’m good to go.”

  Della let the black-and-white roll into the parking area as close as she could without alerting them. She parked and they got out quietly, leaving their car doors open, and approached in the darkness, Della on the driver’s side and Britney on the passenger side. They looked over the roof at each other, turned on their streamlights and jerked open the doors.

  Britney said, “Get outta the car!” And she shone her light onto the couple in the backseat.

  Della saw the situation first and said, “She can’t.”

  The amorous couple was not in Daddy’s car. A sweating middle-aged man was on top, his pants pushed down around his ankles. The woman on her back underneath him didn’t look as frightened as he did. In fact, Britney later remembered seeing what she thought was sadness in the woman’s face. When the man sat straight up, the rookie saw that the woman had no legs, only scarred stumps ending six inches higher than where her knees should have been.

  Della looked over the roof of the Honda at her startled partner to see how she was going to handle this one.

  Britney decided fast and simply mumbled, “Sorry.” And closed the car door, retreating quickly to the black-and-white with Della following.

  When they drove away, Britney said, “I don’t think I wanna know her story.”

  Della said, “I’m gonna enjoy being your FTO, kiddo. You’ve got what they can’t teach at the academy-good old common sense.”

  “There was nothing else to say, was there?” Britney asked.

  Della said, “No, but a lotta male coppers woulda tried. The more macho they are, the more they can fuck things up.”

  At that very moment a pair of seriously macho cops were hoping to assist in an attempt to serve a warrant for murder on a Mexican national from the Arellano-Félix cartel, who was supposedly living in southeast Hollywood on one of the residential streets near Beverly Boulevard. A snitch had supplied information that the fugitive, whose name was Jaime Soto Aguilar, was hiding out with a woman who owned a house in that vicinity, but as to which house, or even which street, the informant could not say. A detective had gone to roll call and requested that all units make a note of the license number and location of any very old cars in restored condition that might be parked in that neighborhood, because Aguilar was a car nut who couldn’t resist restoring classic cars. The detective said they’d follow up on any car leads as time permitted. The fugitive’s description was given along with information that he had a tattoo of a rattlesnake with dripping fangs coiled around his neck.

  Flotsam and Jetsam had listened with interest during roll call, especially about the car, because they had recently noticed a restored Chevrolet Malibu cruising around that area, and a guy who looked Latino was driving it. After noticing the apple-green eye-catcher, they’d discussed how cool it would be to drive a car named after their surfing beach.

  When they were not answering calls on that very warm and windless late summer evening, the surfer cops covered every residential street in that vicinity on both sides of Beverly Boulevard. And when the full moon was rising high over Hollywood, they spotted the apple-green Malibu parked on a street that was jammed with other parked cars. Flotsam and Jetsam put their sun-streaked heads together and cooked up a scheme that would require some assistance. Jetsam requested that 6-X-66 meet 6-X-32 in a certain alley off Beverly Boulevard.

  When Hollywood Nate and Snuffy Salcedo showed up and the two black-and-whites were parked side by side, Flotsam said, “Post up and keep an eye on that bitchin’ Malibu. The owner of that cherry ride’s gotta be in a house real close to it. And the owner might just be Aguilar. The license plate don’t mean shit. It’s registered to some chick named Johnson in Pomona.”

  “Where’re you beach rats going in the meantime?” Nate wanted to know.

  Jetsam said, “To collect some noisy junk.” Then Flotsam dropped it into gear and off they went.

  Snuffy Salcedo said to Hollywood Nate, “This is stupid. If they’re so sure the car belongs to Aguilar, why don’t they request a stakeout?”

  “Because the chances are so remote that it’s Aguilar’s, nobody would do it,” Nate said.

  “Then why’re we doing it?” Snuffy said. “We were told just to write down license numbers and locations if we saw a restored car.”

  “Based on my experience, it pays to indulge them,” Nate said. “Somehow, Neptune or whoever the surfer god is bestows crazy blessings on those two. Besides, my curiosity is killing me, isn’t yours? Noisy junk?”

  When the surfer cops returned to the alley in twenty minutes, they had the backseat of their shop, as well as the trunk, loaded with empty cans of all sizes, along with two battered old metal trash cans.

  “What the fuck?” Snuffy Salcedo said when he got a look at their cargo.

  “We are stupendously grateful for Chinese restaurants,” Flotsam said. “You hardly ever find metal trash cans these days.”

  “And food cans galore,” Jetsam said cheerfully.

  Flotsam said to Snuffy Salcedo, “Dude, can you drive like Jimmie Johnson?”

  Snuffy looked to Nate in utter puzzlement before he turned and said to Flotsam, “What?”

  “They work in mysterious ways, partner,” Nate explained to Snuffy. “Let’s do what they want and see where it goes.”

  Flotsam said to Snuffy, “Anyways, dude, try to drive like Jimmie Johnson tonight, okay? We want you to go to the top of the street and come screaming down till you’re almost opposite that pristine machine, and then lock ’em up. All four wheels. We wanna hear that rubber scream like a whore for a hundred-dollar tip.”

  “And what will you two be doing in the meantime, pray tell?” Hollywood Nate asked.

  Flotsam said, “Me and my pard, we’re gonna be dumping the trash cans full of junk onto the street and, like, making more noise than Chinese fucking New Year.”

  “If the guy that owns that Malibu ain’t boning his old lady, he’s gonna run to his ride, to see if it’s in pieces all over the street,” Jetsam explained.

  “Even if he is boning his old lady, he’s gonna pull right outta her and run to his ride,” Flotsam said. “He can find a bitch anywheres, but where’s he gonna find a mint Malibu like that one?”

  Snuffy looked at Nate again and said, “Know what? On a night this hot, everybody in a no-A/C neighborhood’s got their windows open. Maybe it’s me being back in Hollywood where anything can happen, but this is so loopy I think it might work.”

  Ten minutes later, Snuffy Salcedo was parked at the north end of the block, revving the engine of the Crown Vic. When he received a flashlight signal from the other end of the block, he floored it, and the black-and-white roared south until he was twenty yards from where the Malibu was parked and then he stood on the brakes.

  The wheels locked up and the car’s rear end started sliding until Snuffy got off the brakes and sped past the Malibu and the waiting surfer cops, each of whom was holding overhead a metal trash can full of junk. Snuffy could hear the explosive crash of cans and other metal before he drove into the alley to conceal the radio car.

  Flotsam, Jetsam, and Nate hid between houses and behind cars, and within a minute, people were running out of their houses to see which car had been smashed in the collision. Several car owners scurried to see if they still had fenders intact, but only one man, shirtless and barefoot, ran straight to the Malibu.

  He was checking the driver’s side of the car when he was lit by flashlight beams and a tall blond cop said to him, “Dude, I don’t know if you speak English, but if you even fart too loud, I’m gonna blow the eye right outta that rattlesnake.”

  A shorter blond cop said to him, “No, go ahead and rabbit. I love the smell of gunsmoke in the evening.”

  Snuffy Salcedo came running back from the alley with tobacco juice dripping down his chin as the fugitive was being handcuffed.

  Jetsam said, “Read him his rights in Spanish, bro.”

  Snuffy Salced
o told Jaime Soto Aguilar in Spanish of his Miranda rights, and when he was finished, the fugitive made one brief comment to Snuffy in Spanish.

  “What’d he say?” Flotsam asked.

  Snuffy replied, “He said he thinks he’s gonna have a heart attack.”

  “Bitchin’!” Flotsam said. “Tell him we never made a cardiac arrest.”

  “Do they rehearse this shit?” Snuffy Salcedo asked Hollywood Nate.

  “They don’t have to,” said Nate. “They’re in lockstep. I think they were Siamese twins separated at birth and raised apart. Probably by jackals.”

  During the ride to Hollywood Station with the fugitive handcuffed in the backseat of their shop, Jetsam said to his partner, “Bro, do you think this is, like, unusual enough to qualify for a pizza from Sergeant Murillo? Or does it have to be more like Hollywood weird? Like, more in the freak-show mold?”

  While the surfer cops were locking up first prize for the Hollywood moon award, 6-X-46 was down from the Hollywood Hills, and Della Ravelle was still lecturing her probationer in the ways of women in police work.

  As she drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard, Della said, “I can talk a lot about common sense, Britney. It’s a good copper’s most valuable trait. Things’re gonna be a whole lot better for you on this Job than they were for women like me back in the day. When I was a boot, the old guys never got tired of playing little tricks on us. Like when I worked Central, I can remember a time when a couple of OGs had me do a pat-down search on a base-head down on skid row who was wearing spandex. After I patted her down and told them she’s clean, my P3 said, ‘Good job. I’m gonna write a comment card on you.’ Then when I wasn’t looking one of the other OGs, a former SWAT guy who thought he was Mr. Tactical and smoked cigarettes in his teeth instead of his lips, puts his hideout gun on the ground and says, ‘You missed this, rookie. She had it tucked under her crotch.’ ”

  Britney said, “What’d you do then?”

  “For a few seconds I almost panicked, but then my common sense kicked in and I said, ‘No, sir. She was wearing spandex and there were no bulges on her except the ones nature gave her.’ The OGs had a laugh and I was a step closer to acceptance.”

  “I try to never forget that it’s still a man’s world out here,” Britney said.

  “Yes, but it’s lots better now,” Della said. “I won’t even try to tell you about the sexual harassment we used to put up with. And there were always the goddamn tricks. After a woman boot would search under the seats in her shop before she hit the streets, an OG would invariably drop a bag of rocks or some other kind of dope under the backseat and say, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you, baby girl? You missed this.’ It got so lame after a while that even they got tired of it. But we had to live with it till they did.”

  “How’d you finally win the OGs over?”

  “By trying to be a better cop than they were without them noticing. And by always staying a woman and making them respect that. I’ve seen women on this Job trying to become one of the boys, but that never works out. And women have to deal with the impostor syndrome. That’s where the woman copper starts to fear that the boss is gonna find out how unqualified she truly is. She starts to believe that she’s only faking competence, because every second she’s being scrutinized, way more than the men are, and it starts working on her self-esteem. It’s like the actor’s syndrome, but it’s all internal bullshit. You are competent and you don’t have to fear anything except the people out here who can hurt you. And that’s a healthy fear to have.”

  “You were right, Della,” Britney Small said. “I never learned this kind of stuff from Rupert Tong.”

  Della said, “I’m sure you’ve already learned on your own that when you meet men away from the Job and they find out you’re a cop, they all get a doofus grin and say, ‘Can you handcuff me?’ I hate that shit. I just tell them, ‘Get outta my face, asshole.’ ”

  “You’re right!” Britney said. “That already happened to me when I went out to a club with a couple of civilian girlfriends. Lame, isn’t it?”

  “You’re way lucky to be here in Hollywood for your probation,” Della said. “I remember the first time I found a gun after transferring here. Of course, guns recovered on radio calls don’t count, only observation guns. So one night on Hollywood Boulevard when the beat officers and a midwatch unit were jamming some Rolling Sixties gangsters who came up from Watts, I spotted this brother bopping along the Walk of Fame, pretending to be a tourist watching Tickle Me Elmo posing for pictures. But I saw that when he sauntered past one of the Rolling Sixties, he tried to take a little two-inch wheel gun from one of the bangers who hadn’t been patted down yet. I drew down on him and yelled for him to freeze and get down on his belly, and when everything settled and they were all proned out, I recovered my first obs gun here in Hollywood Division. And the sergeant we called the Oracle showed me off around the station and told everyone how I’d caught a gangster dumping a strap, and the watch commander wrote me an attagirl, and it was pretty cool. Of course it wasn’t a big burner, but size does not matter when it comes to guns.”

  Britney said, “I’ve got a couple of classmates who’re doing their probation in Central Division. After hearing you describe it, I’m real glad I caught Hollywood, believe me.”

  Della was silent for a moment, remembering how it had been back then, remembering the smell of skid row, the fluffy acrid miasma. And then she said, “I truly hated being a boot down there. The smell of shit and piss and rotting flesh and general decay was everywhere in those days. It got into the fabric of our uniforms. People had lots of scabies. You could grab someone and your hands would slip right off their wrists. I got scabies twice from searching skid row hookers. They were like itchy fleabites. They get on your arms, your thighs, and your stomach. Good thing I never got them on my gizmo.”

  “Gross!” Britney said.

  “And the guys enjoyed it when I had to search the obese ones who liked to hide crack under their humongous breasts. Their tits would be sticky. The guys would say, ‘Sticky boobs hide crack.’ Once I was searching this monstrous woman in a muumuu who was so fat they claimed she’d flipped a bus bench. And I thought I found a stash in the rolls of fat around her middle. But when I dug it out, it turned out to be an Oreo cookie and some Doritos she was keeping there to snack on. The guys really enjoyed watching me running like mad to a faucet to clean up.”

  “Disgusting!” Britney said.

  Still reminiscing, Della said, “That wasn’t even the real bad stuff. Once we found a dead baby in a backpack. It had blue eyes.”

  Della stopped talking then and they rode in silence. Della broke the silence when she said, “So whadda you think we should do about code seven tonight? My dad sent me three hundred bucks for my birthday, so I’ll treat. We can do sushi on Melrose or a spicy chicken salad in Thai Town or maybe some rice and lamb in Little Armenia. No noshing on manly burritos and burgers for the girls of Six-X-Forty-six. Sound good, partner?”

  “Can we wait awhile?” Britney said. “For some reason, I don’t seem to have an appetite right now.”

  A trap that had been set by the narks two weeks earlier prompted a radio call on that night of the Hollywood moon that made Britney Small the talk of the station for days to come. A tip from a citizen had led narcotics detectives to the backyard of a vacant house that had been in foreclosure for a number of months. A local Realtor happened to be checking out the property one afternoon and he recognized a large number of cannabis plants on one neat little patch of ground in that overgrown backyard. The Realtor phoned the office of the narcotics detectives, who were housed a block from the main police station, and had a chat with a detective there.

  The resourceful detectives not only confiscated the marijuana but they left a note pinned to an olive tree in that yard. The note said, “Sorry about your grow. Call if you’d care to negotiate.” They left a cell number used for situations like this and were happily surprised when a call came in the very next d
ay. The caller offered $500, no questions asked, for the return of the plants. A female undercover cop met the pot grower by the parking lot of the Hollywood Bowl, and after the grower made his offer in person, he was arrested by other narks watching the action through binoculars.

  The marijuana cultivator was a two-striker who wanted to deal and was eager to give up associates and fellow dealers. He offered the narks information about a male nurse of an anesthesiologist in Venice who had a shaky medical license. The nurse resided in an apartment building in the Las Palmas neighborhood, where he provided his client list-consisting of many drag queens and transsexuals-with forged prescriptions supposedly written from a medical office in Culver City.

  One of the things that the two-striker had said, resulting in a search warrant, was, “The quack’s nurse writes enough scrips in there to smoke out every dragon and trannie in Hollywood.” And hoping to curry favor he added, “But he’s bipolar and mega-goony most of the time, so watch out. I’ve been told he might have a gun in there.”

  Two teams of narks and their D3 had intended to serve the warrant on the night of the full moon. The nurse was supposed to be at home with his lover, a post-op transsexual called Molly Black, who had been Marvin Black in another life and whose last surgery had completed the gender transformation. At the last minute, one of the teams of narks was pulled away for the arrest of another prescription drug dealer whom they’d been trying to get for months. The three remaining detectives needed a backup team, so they put in the call for a patrol unit to meet them on Las Palmas Avenue. The call was given to 6-X-46 of the midwatch.

  Britney Small was excited about this one and wondered if the full moon was going to produce something weird enough for them to win the pizza prize. Also, she’d never been on a forced-entry raid of any kind, and she was stoked when the detectives asked her and Della to accompany them to the third-floor apartment. Their D3 decided to watch the outside window in case evidence came flying out. The entry team wanted women officers with them because of the post-op tranny in there. She was now officially a woman and would have to be searched by a woman.