Hollywood Moon Page 2

  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 the 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.

  Nate remembered seeing her dead-stare the kid just before she got behind the wheel that first night, and he heard her say to Harris, “Boy, I need to know right out front. Do you intend to fanny burp in my presence or in our shop?”

  “Of course not, ma’am!” Harris Triplett said, stunned.

  Then Dana said, deadpan, “Do you intend to crank up loogies? You got loogie problems, I suggest you swallow them. To spit them out the window and have them blow back on our shop would be highly unprofessional and might jeopardize your probation.”

  “I don’t do things like that!” Harris said.

  “I want you to remember a few basics about curb creatures,” she said. “Rock cocaine is either in their mouths or in their butts. Watch the breathing of the chest for a tip-off. It’s a built-in lie detector. And throw their keys on the roof of their car if you’re gonna return to our shop to run their records.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Okay,” Harris said.

  “And if they got booty rock, it’s your job to deal with it. There are dark and scary places where I won’t go.”

  “Right,” Harris said earnestly.

  Dana wasn’t through. “One more thing: Most males have no shame, but you need to remember there’re EEO laws on the books regarding age and gender. Do you resent working with me because my badge and handcuffs’re older than you? And do you think you can get away with making sexual innuendos and maybe touching me in an inappropriate way because I’m an old woman?”

  His face flushed, Harris Triplett looked around for help at that moment, and the passing surfer cops stepped in to save him.

  “She’s just honking on you, dude,” Flotsam said to the boot.

  Still deadpan, Dana continued, “On second thought, I’m pretty much EEO-proof. You can fanny burp if you want to, but no loogies. And about the sexual harassment, if I happen to touch you in a lewd or offensive way, you have every right to complain to the watch commander.” A long pause. “But tell me you won’t, honey. Please tell me you won’t!”

  “Get in the car, bro. She won’t hurt you… very much,” Jetsam said to the utterly bewildered rookie, and for the first time, Hollywood Nate got to see Dana Vaughn flash that annoying half-smile of hers when she slid in behind the wheel.

  Remembering that episode, Hollywood Nate had to admit that Dana was sometimes entertaining, even though she could be a major pain in the ass. A good thing about her was that, like Nate, she preferred Starbucks latte with biscotti to the usual Winchell’s cuppa joe with two sugars, two creams, and a raspberry jelly donut. Moreover, Nate knew that she’d been in a fatal shooting the month prior, when she’d worked Watch 3.

  That late-night watch was a graveyard shift for three days a week, lasting twelve hours. It overlapped the hours of the four-day-a-week, ten-hour midwatch. Two weeks after the shooting, Dana had asked to be assigned to the midwatch, and her request was granted. As an authentic gunfighter and a senior officer on the sergeants list, she was entitled to great respect.

  For twelve years prior to her assignment to night-watch patrol at Hollywood Station, Dana Vaughn had been away from patrolling the streets. She’d worked at the police academy for eight years as an instructor, teaching computer classes and report writing and reviewing the academic curriculum. Then, after leaving the academy, she’d spent four more years across the street from Hollywood Station in the Hollywood narcotics unit, housed in a small building at the corner of De Longpre and Wilcox. There she did mostly administrative chores and helped the UC coordinators who handled the undercover officers.

  Being a single mom, Dana Vaughn had tried for most of her career to keep from working the streets, seeking jobs that would allow her to have evenings at home and weekends off in order to properly raise her daughter. Late in her career, Dana had decided to take the sergeants exams, passed them easily, and was on the sergeants list. Now that her eighteen-year-old daughter, Pamela, was going off to Cal in September, Dana had decided that it was time to get more street experience in a black-and-white. After her promotion, she’d be sent to a patrol division as a supervisor, and she wanted to be ready for the new job.

  Dana’s ex-husband, a lawyer at a firm in the city’s tallest downtown office building, at Fifth and Grand, had bought their daughter a new Acura for high school graduation and assured them both that all through her university studies, he’d send $1,500 a month for Pamela, and he’d promised to continue the payments through graduate school if she sought an advanced degree. All of this made Dana despise the philandering bastard a little less than she had during their brief marriage.

  An incident that Hollywood Nate found very strange happened the very first night that he worked with Dana Vaughn. They’d received a “prowler there now” call
in the Hollywood Hills on a street below the famous Hollywood sign. They were the first and, Nate assumed, the only car to arrive. After checking the property on foot with flashlights, and after interviewing a nervous neighbor who thought she’d heard somebody knock over a trash can, they decided that it was probably a coyote or a raccoon or even a deer, since the hills were full of critters.

  When Nate and Dana were returning to their shop, Nate noticed another Crown Vic, parked half a block farther down the unlit street. Silhouetted across the roof was a light bar.

  “That doesn’t look like a midwatch unit,” he’d said to Dana Vaughn, trying to peer through the darkness. “Must be somebody from Watch Three.”

  “It is,” she said.

  “You got infrared eyeballs or what?” Nate said. “How do you know?”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Why’re they sitting there in the dark like that?”

  “That’s how a guardian angel does it,” Dana said, starting the engine and driving back down to the flats, passing the parked black-and-white without a word and without looking its way.

  “It’s great working with you,” Nate said. “I just love a mystery.”

  Dana Vaughn heaved a sigh and said, “I’m sure you remember the OIS I got involved in when I was working Watch Three.”

  “Yeah, everyone knows you smoked a guy that was doing a death grapple with… what’s his name.”

  “Leon Calloway is his name,” Dana said. “That’s him in the parked unit, with his partner.”

  “You gonna enlighten me or what?” Nate asked.

  And then Dana Vaughn said, “Yeah, I guess I’ve gotta.” And she slowly began to tell Hollywood Nate the story of her officer-involved shooting, which had endeared her to even the most hard-core anti-female coppers on Watch 3, one of whom had been Leon Calloway.

  Calloway was a hulking, flat-nosed, twenty-five-year P2 with a jutting jaw that pushed into a room ahead of him, and a meticulously shaved head the size of a beach ball. He’d spent his last ten years working the night watch at Hollywood Station. When Dana Vaughn transferred to Hollywood patrol, some of the women officers told her which guys were good to work with and which were not. Calloway was in the latter group. When he occasionally worked with women officers who were in phase three of their probation, he was a mouth-breathing nightmare who scared the hell out of them.

  Calloway would usually start the evening by saying to a female rookie, “I hope you can hold your pee or do it in an alley like a man. I don’t like looking for a ladies’ room when I’m doing police work.”

  That might be followed by “Velcro crotches would solve the problem. I think I’ll invent police pants with a Velcro crotch for all you… ladies.”

  It wouldn’t take long either before he’d look at the young boot, and no matter how feminine she appeared, he’d say, “Are you a lesbian?”

  The first time they encountered Latino gang members in Southeast Hollywood, he’d always tell the probationer, “I don’t chase. If they run, you chase. I’ll drive after them. Try to keep up.”

  Or he’d say, “Do you carry D batteries in your war bag?”

  And when the perplexed female rookie said, “No, sir, why?” Calloway would say, “To throw at any little asshole that disses us by running. I hope you got a good arm, sis.”

  And all young boots were warned by the older female officers that if they got an upset stomach from eating greasy tacos fried in lard from a stand on Normandie Avenue—which Calloway liked because it was a “full pop,” meaning it was free to cops—or if they were under the weather for any other reason, he was sure to say, “Oh, you’re not feeling well? Is it that time?”

  The young women learned very quickly that they’d chosen a career in what was still a man’s world, and Leon Calloway never let them forget it.

  He didn’t try any of this with women cops as senior as Dana Vaughn, but he was a hellish partner for rookie Sarah Messinger, who happened to be riding shotgun with Calloway on the night that Dana Vaughn got into the only officer-involved shooting of her career.

  A business dispute had taken place between a streetwalking prostitute on the east Sunset Boulevard track and a customer who happened to be a parolee-at-large. The parolee was a large black man, even bigger than Leon Calloway and, as it turned out, considerably stronger. Although Hollywood had a very small African-American population, it was a nighttime destination for many black men from south L.A. because it was, well, Hollywood. The parolee, whose name was Rupert Moore, was one of those, and he was specifically looking for transsexuals or drag queens, having gotten a taste for them during his twelve-year jolt in Folsom Prison.

  The detectives later learned that earlier in the evening, Rupert Moore had been turned away by at least one tranny and two dragons on the Santa Monica Boulevard track. After drinking in a bar on Western Avenue for three hours, Rupert Moore had decided to try east Sunset Boulevard, where he’d met a Latino tranny named Javier Molina, aka Josefina Lamour. A drag queen who was working a short distance farther east saw and heard the encounter and later gave details to homicide detectives.

  Apparently Josefina didn’t like the look of Rupert Moore any more than the other trannies and dragons had. Josefina waved him off when he pulled his green Mazda to the curb, slurring his words and saying, “Say, baby, how ’bout you and me go for some sweet time in any motel you want.”

  Josefina had never been known to take black tricks and wasn’t about to start with this supersize drunk. “Uh-uh, sorry,” Josefina said.

  Rupert Moore had heard too many “uh-uhs” that evening, and he turned off the engine and got out.

  Josefina tried walking away fast in sky-high wedges, but Rupert Moore, with his much longer stride, caught up and said, “Sweet stuff, I got forty-five dollars and it’s all for you.”

  Josefina kept walking until Rupert Moore grabbed the tranny by the arm and said, “You think you’re too good for this nigger? Is that it, bitch?”

  “I’m sorry,” Josefina said, very frightened, looking around for a black-and-white, a vice car, anything! But the headlights kept passing swiftly by on Sunset Boulevard, and nobody seemed to notice or care that a large man was holding a small woman by the arm as she struggled to break free.

  The Pakistani owner of a nearby liquor store later said that he heard a scream, and when he ran outside, he saw Josefina Lamour trying to hold her spilling intestines inside her belly as Rupert Moore ran to his car, brandishing a bloody knife. Josefina Lamour was dead when the ambulance arrived eight minutes later.

  Six-Adam-Seventy-nine, driven by Leon Calloway with his female rookie as passenger, was the first to spot the Mazda, moments after the call came out. It was his P1 partner’s first pursuit, and it was memorable for the way things ended for all concerned.

  With light bar flashing and siren howling, Calloway drove a nine-minute pursuit that made the rookie regret not having taken her partner’s advice about going to the bathroom before leaving the station. The pursuit ended in Rampart Division west of Alvarado, where, after a turn onto a one-way street, Rupert Moore crashed the Mazda into a row of trash cans sitting curbside in front of an apartment house. Two tires blew, and the parolee leaped from the damaged car and ran in panic into the darkness.

  Within minutes, sixteen cops from Hollywood and Rampart Divisions were swarming the neighborhood with flashlights, searching yards and stairwells of apartment buildings, scanning fire escapes, and climbing walls and fences to check neighboring yards. But their murder suspect was nowhere to be found.

  A voice on the tactical frequency said, “Airship up!” And soon they heard the police helicopter overhead and knew the spotter was trying to use night vision lenses to find their suspect.

  Bored with it all, Leon Calloway decided to amuse himself at the expense of young Sarah Messinger. The rookie was just about to go into a dark alley, remove her Sam Browne in the darkness, and probably drop her radio and half her other gear in order to have an urgently needed pee
.

  The two of them had been searching as a team and were now half a block from the nearest assistance. They had entered a seedy apartment complex from the street side, climbing over a security gate. After searching alcoves and stairwells, they’d emerged in a poorly tended public area that fed onto the alley and was protected by a ten-foot-high wrought-iron fence with razor wire across the top. The gate could be opened from the yard side but was keyed on the alley side, a good thing given the number of Latino gang members who lived in houses and apartments bordering that alley.

  When the partners got to the imposing security fence and Sarah was ready to scurry into the alley for the nature call, the big veteran cop backed against the wall of an adjoining garage, paused, and held a vertical finger to his lips, as though he’d heard something. Of course, his young partner froze and listened also, but all she could hear were the hum of traffic, meringue music coming from one of the second-floor apartments, and the faint sound of other cops calling to one another somewhere east in the alley.

  Suddenly Leon Calloway began to bark. The sound came from his chest and passed up to his throat, where it took on a gravelly resonance that made Sarah Messinger actually spin around, expecting to face a gangbanger’s pit bull. Leon Calloway’s face looked flushed in the moonlight as he continued to strain and bark.

  Then he yelled, “Come out, asshole, or we’ll turn the dog loose. This is your last chance.”

  His astonished young partner gaped at this amazing performance until Leon Calloway whispered to her, “For chrissake, boot, tap on the side of the garage!” Then he began barking again.

  Sarah Messinger obeyed in confusion by knocking twice on the clapboard with her knuckles.

  Leon Calloway stopped barking and whispered urgently, “What the hell’s the matter with you? I said ‘tap.’ Use your baton, and don’t stop till I tell you.” Then he watched her draw her baton and knock on the wood siding: tap-tap-tap-tap.