Hollywood Moon Page 5

  “My picture and UC name are in the high school yearbook,” Aaron said. “I have one at home. I’ll bring it in if you’d like to see it. I look really dorky.”

  “Sure, let’s have a peek,” Sheila said.

  Their second call just after dark gave Aaron Sloane a chance to see another side of supercool Sheila Montez. After reading the southeast Hollywood address on the computer screen, she rogered the message and hit the en route key. When they arrived at the call, they saw a rescue ambulance already parked on the street, and a Latina in a lavender dress was waiting under a streetlight in front of a stucco duplex that had been tagged from roof to concrete slab with gang graffiti.

  When she saw Sheila Montez, the woman started to speak Spanish, then saw that the male cop was a gringo and said in English, “My neighbor. Her baby…” Then the woman shook her head and walked back to her apartment.

  The two cops entered just as the paramedics were leaving. Before exiting, the older paramedic said, “The baby’s probably been dead for a few hours. Letting a sick infant with a respiratory infection sleep next to a broken-out window night after night wasn’t helpful, that’s for sure. And today Little Momma gave the baby a child’s dose of medication, not an infant’s dose. Then she put the baby facedown on a bulky quilt and decided to take a long nap after downing a glass or two of cheap chardonnay. It looks like the baby’s illness, the overdose of meds, and the quilt around the baby’s face resulted in accidental asphyxiation. But it’s yours now. Catch you later.”

  The young mother was not Latina. She was rosy-cheeked and freckled, the teenage wife of a Marine deployed in Iraq. She was sitting on a kitchen chair, crying, a wineglass beside her on the table. The crib was in the only bedroom. Sheila Montez hesitated for a moment but walked to the crib to look at the infant.

  The baby might have had her mother’s rosy cheeks in life, but in death she was already turning gray, now lying faceup, nesting in the heavy quilt. Sheila Montez stared down at the baby for a long time, and Aaron Sloane was more than happy to let her take charge, figuring this was a job for a woman.

  “She was like that when I woke up,” the young mother said between sobs, looking at Aaron. “She was ice-cold, and I knew right away she was gone!”

  Sheila Montez picked up the medicine bottle from a table beside the crib, looked at it, and put it back. For no apparent reason, she reached down and lifted the baby from the quilt that had smothered her and put her back down on the sheet. She adjusted the pink pajama across the infant’s chest and, using a towel that was draped over the crib, wiped some dried mucus from the baby’s face and smoothed back her corn-silk hair.

  Aaron Sloane didn’t learn until later that night that this was the first dead baby Sheila Montez had seen since the night that her own lay lifeless in her arms, when a nurse had let Sheila hold her dead baby for a few minutes before taking it away forever. He was just getting ready to put in an obligatory call to the night-watch detective so he could verify on-scene that it was an accidental death before the body snatchers took her away.

  All of a sudden his partner advanced toward the young mother. Sheila’s wide-set dark brown eyes looked black now, and her face had gone very pale around the mouth. Trembling with rage, Sheila Montez said, “You… ignorant… pathetic… little —”

  She didn’t get a chance to say more because Aaron Sloane leaped forward, grabbed his partner by the arm, and dragged her outside, from where he could hear the young mother sobbing loudly. And there on the sidewalk in the darkness, Sheila tried to say something to him. She tried, but her fury utterly overwhelmed her and she started to weep. Aaron put his arms around her for a moment and she didn’t resist, her body shuddering against him.

  He saw the headlights as another patrol unit drove up, and he said, “Come on, partner, let’s get you back to our shop.”

  While she was sitting in their car, trying to control the tears, Aaron waved off the second patrol car, indicating that no assistance was needed, returned to the duplex, made the calls, and did the paperwork until the coroner’s van arrived.

  Later, Sheila apologized to Aaron Sloane for what she wryly called “the Montez meltdown.” She also told him about her own dead baby, and a little bit about her bad marriage to the sergeant from Mission Division, something she’d never spoken about with any other officer, male or female, at Hollywood Station. She did it because she had to, and she could only hope that Aaron Sloane was that most rare of creatures, a partner who could actually keep a secret in the gossip-riddled world of street cops.

  “What happens in our shop stays in our shop,” Aaron Sloane at last said to Sheila Montez, trying to reassure her when he saw the anguish in her eyes.

  As for Aaron Sloane, he realized that he had been her confessor that night only because he was there, such being the strange and unique intimacy that can develop quite by chance within a police partnership. But in this case, it was an intimacy that set his heart racing. And being true to his word, nobody but Aaron Sloane ever learned what had happened to imperturbable Sheila Montez the night she stood in silence beside a dead baby’s crib.

  THREE

  THERE WAS MORE THAN THE USUAL amount of complaining going on at the midwatch roll call the next afternoon, especially concerning Officer Hall from Watch 3, who had been bitten on the thumb by a gay hooker on Friday night. His taller brother, who worked Watch 5, had started the gripe session on behalf of his little brother. The cops called them Short Hall and Long Hall. The prisoner wouldn’t consent to a blood test, so a search warrant would have to be obtained in order to take the prisoner’s blood. The cop’s vacation had to be postponed, and Long Hall was so livid that Sergeant Murillo assigned him to the desk, feeling that he might go all junkyard dog if turned loose on the streets.

  Long Hall said to Sergeant Murillo, “Twenty years of fighting ’roided-up street savages and my brother gets taken down by Tiny Tim with a germ in his ass. They shoulda just cut his thumb off so the AIDS bug couldn’t crawl up his arm.”

  Everyone in general was grouchy too because they were only able to field six cars, what with the perennial personnel shortages at LAPD. The midwatch should’ve had a dozen. It was to be expected, given that the bulk of the probationary rookies were on Watch 2 and Watch 3, leaving the Watch 5 midwatch to the saltier cops. And then someone mentioned the name of the despised US district judge who for more than six years had been ramrodding the federal consent decree, under which the LAPD was compelled to function as a result of the Rodney King riots and the so-called Rampart scandal a decade earlier.

  The federal jurist had publicly commented that a recent criminal case involving a series of home invasions where drug dealers were ripped off by a trio of cops, two from LAPD, indicated that the draconian consent decree policies should not be lifted. The judge felt that this case proved that the consent decree was an essential tool in policing the police, bringing with it an endless paper blizzard devoted to audits and oversight and micromanaging minutiae. The private “monitoring” firm, which received a cool $2.4 million a year from a teetering city budget to oversee compliance, could not have been unhappy with the judge’s comments, which implicitly encouraged more milking of the municipal cash cow with no end in sight.

  “Does anybody ever point out that there were only two crooked cops in that whole freaking Rampart deal?” Flotsam rhetorically asked the acting watch commander, not expecting an answer and not getting one.

  “And how about this latest case?” Hollywood Nate said. “Two cops again. We’re a police department of ninety-three hundred, for chrissake! A total of four thieving cops in ten years, and the judge thinks LAPD corruption is pervasive? I wonder how many corrupt lawyers are out there in our fair city?”

  Jetsam said, “And who caught the bad Rampart cops? It was us. LAPD caught them!”

  “It’s a catch-twenty-two,” Dana Vaughn said. “There’s no financial incentive for the auditing firm to ever say that LAPD’s taken all the steps required under the consent decree.
We might be still using hundreds of coppers doing useless and redundant paperwork for another ten years. No wonder the midwatch can only field six cars on a weekend night!”

  Sheila Montez said, “When LAPD was forced to break up the Rampart Crash unit, Mara Salvatrucha gangsters from L.A. to El Salvador were dancing in the streets.”

  Hollywood Nate said, “Why can’t all those cop haters be satisfied? They broke our sword, why do they have to bury it up our ass?”

  The acting watch commander was Sergeant Lee Murillo, a wiry, sharp-eyed, third-generation Mexican-American with prematurely gray wavy hair who had almost made an L.A. Dodgers farm team fifteen years prior, before his arm lost its elasticity and his fastball went from ninety-plus to a hanging balloon that his grandmother could’ve hit.

  He’d been a cop for thirteen years and a sergeant for three, all of his supervisory years having been spent at Hollywood Division, now officially called Hollywood Area to sound less military. Of course, the troops said that anyone, including the brass, who would replace division with area was a pussy, and Sergeant Murillo always referred to their piece of Los Angeles geography as Hollywood Division.

  The fact was, he agreed with everything they said, but being a supervisor, he wasn’t supposed to validate the bitching. He just sat in front of the room and gazed over the heads of the dozen seated troops at the one-sheet movie posters decorating the walls, posters that could be found in other parts of the building as well in case anyone didn’t know that this police station was in Hollywood, USA. In the roll call room were the posters for L.A. Confidential and Sunset Boulevard. Downstairs there was Hollywood Homicide.

  Lee Murillo wondered when they’d start in on their latest complaint. That would be the brouhaha over the judge’s wanting “confidential financial disclosure” by all LAPD officers who worked gang enforcement details and narcotics field enforcement. The rant came from Johnny Lanier, the only black cop on Watch 5. Johnny was a compact, outspoken P3 with fourteen years on the Job. He was a veteran of the first Gulf War who liked to say, “This job has all the good things about the Army: a uniform, weapons, camaraderie, ball-busting fun, and I don’t have to go back to Iraq.” He was next up to work the Gang Impact Team, but he didn’t know if he wanted to work GIT now that there was the financial disclosure issue.

  “Who’s the problem out there, gangbangers or us?” he said. “You think I want some gangster or his lawyer getting his hands on my bank account number? How does that keep me honest in the first place?”

  “No other law enforcement agency has to reveal their assets or bank accounts,” Hollywood Nate said. “Do you think those few crooked LAPD cops put their loot in their bank accounts? The only ones that get their privacy violated here are the honest cops!”

  Sergeant Lee Murillo looked at his watch then, and they took it as a cue. They ceased grumbling and settled down so he could call roll and read the crimes. But before he started, Sergeant Murillo earned a bit of applause when he said quietly, “I’d like to tell the federal judge that if I was a crooked cop, I would certainly never put the hot money in my bank account. I’d stuff it in my freezer, just like your average US congressman.”

  Six-X-Seventy-six decided to write their first ticket of the watch at 6:30 P.M., shortly after clearing from roll call, when they saw a ten-year-old GMC pickup blow a stoplight on Melrose Avenue near Paramount Studios. There was still plenty of daylight on this hot summer evening, and the setting sun was certainly not in the eyes of the driver who was heading east.

  Hollywood Nate was driving and said to Dana Vaughn, “You’re up.”

  Dana grabbed her citation book, and after Nate tooted at the guy to pull over, he parked behind the pickup. She got out and approached the car while Nate crossed behind her and stepped up on the sidewalk to look in through the passenger window.

  The driver was a wide-bodied working stiff in his late twenties dressed in a gray work uniform. His fingernails were grease-caked, and smudges showed on his ruddy cheeks, as though he’d been crawling under a car.

  “Your license and registration, please,” Dana Vaughn said, and the guy fumbled with his wallet.

  The smell of stale beer hit her, and when he handed over his driver’s license, she said, “How much have you had to drink today?”

  The guy looked up with bloodshot, unfocused eyes, brushed his light brown hair off his forehead, and said, “The boss let me off early because my wife had twins yesterday. A boy and a girl. Two of the mechanics I work with bought me some beers to celebrate.”

  “How many beers did you drink?”

  “Seven,” he said. “Or eight. I’m not used to drinking.”

  Dana looked over the bed of the truck at Hollywood Nate and said, “Whadda you know? A forthright man.” Then she opened the door of the pickup and said, “Step out, sir. Up onto the sidewalk.”

  When the new father stepped onto the sidewalk, he stumbled, and Nate reached out, grabbing his elbow. “Whoa, cowboy,” Nate said.

  “What’ve you been arrested for?” Dana asked.

  “Nothing,” the young man said. “Never. You can check. And I only had one ticket for speeding in my whole life.”

  “Your whole life is gonna be cut short if you keep drinking seven or eight beers and driving,” Dana said.

  She looked at Nate, knowing that he hated booking drunk drivers, believing it was too much paperwork for a misdemeanor and that it probably meant court time. He was always looking for something that could get his name in the news. Something that could make a casting agent see it and remember him.

  The mechanic stood on the sidewalk, facing the two cops and reeling slightly, taking out his cell phone. “I can call and have my brother come get me,” he said boozily. “I’m a father now. I can’t afford to go to jail. Besides, Officer, I’m not really drunk.”

  “You’re not, huh,” Dana said. “Let’s see you count backward from seventy-five to fifty-five. If you can do it, we’ll let you lock up your truck and call your brother.”

  The mechanic said, “Yes, Officer.” And turning around unsteadily until his back was to the astonished cops, he said slowly over his shoulder, “Can you please tell me again what number I should start with?”

  Hollywood Nate stared dumbfounded, and when he’d recovered, he said to Dana, “Partner, there’s no way we can book this guy. I can dine out on this story.”

  Dana Vaughn said to the new father, “Okay, honey, turn back around and call your brother to come get you.”

  The trio standing on the sidewalk never noticed the nondescript gray Honda Civic motoring slowly past them on Melrose, where the mechanic had earned his freedom by unintentionally providing the officers of 6-X-76 with a locker-room tale. The man that Tristan and Jerzy knew as Jakob Kessler glanced their way but was not curious, checking his watch because he had to be at the restaurant before Suzie got off shift.

  Suzie was waiting for Kessler when he got there. She was a recent college graduate who’d majored in art history and, like thousands before her, had gotten employment where she could, usually in Hollywood eateries. The young woman looked nervous and was fiddling with her auburn ponytail when Kessler walked into the chain eatery on Sunset Boulevard. The stools were all taken, as were most of the tables, and Jakob Kessler, wearing his usual dark suit and plain necktie, waited until a customer vacated one of the stools.

  He sat, ordered a cup of coffee, and used a paper napkin when he lifted the cup to his lips, so as not to leave fingerprints when he was working a job. As for DNA on the cup, there was nothing he could do about it short of carrying a spray bottle and washing it. He dismissed his action as a silly example of his growing anxiety with the work overload being forced upon him, and he dropped the paper napkin.

  Suzie brushed past him, touching his back when she took an order to the kitchen, and when she returned, she paused behind his stool, removed the skimmer from under her apron, and handed it to him. Jakob Kessler took the skimmer, which was the size of a cigarette pack, and put i
t under his suit coat in a small bag hanging from his shoulder. As Suzie was walking away, she had her hands behind her and held up four fingers on one hand and five on the other, meaning that she’d skimmed nine credit cards.

  Jakob Kessler put money on the counter for his coffee and counted out two $50 bills for Suzie. He felt he was being overly generous, but she was new and he wanted to keep her in the game. They passed close to each other when he headed for the door and she freed her right hand from a tray of dessert and grabbed the money, slipping it into her apron pocket. He didn’t have a replacement skimmer with him and made a mental note to have his wife go on the Internet and buy several new ones. After all, they were only $50 each and worth their weight in diamonds.

  For his next stop he had to drive over the hill to a mall in Sherman Oaks. Once again he considered the way he was doing business, wearing out tires and shoe leather when there were competitors doing it the easy way. He knew several Hollywood Armenians who were putting their skimmers inside service station gasoline pumps. He’d been told that it was ridiculously easy to do, since one key opened all pumps. The Armenians would simply wait until the service station was closed, then install the skimmer. After a few days they’d return to the pump and remove it as easily as they’d installed it.

  The Romanians were more ingenious, and experts in Bluetooth technology. They’d simply aim their device, which would seek, find, and connect, relaying the information from the skimmer. They didn’t even have to take the risk of dealing with a device that might get discovered by a service station owner who’d then alert police. The city was full of cyber thieves trolling the airwaves.

  He drove to a Hollywood shopping center and entered a hardware store, one of the chains that employed at least a hundred employees in each store. He picked out a roll of duct tape that he did not need and headed for the checkout line manned by a longtime store employee named Harold Swanson, a man who spent far too much on the horses at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita.