Hollywood Moon (12 page)

The waiter wore a trendy “emo chic” cut, with his highlighted hair falling over one eye, a style that was said to express
deep emotions.

With his best Bogie accent, Hollywood Nate said to Kenny. “If she can take it, so can I. You’re doing it for her, do it for
me. Serve it again, Ken.”

“Two skinny salads,” Kenny said. Then to Dana, “I wish he’d find an agent that could get him a job. Nate’s a lot easier to
take when he’s got a gig to worry about. Has he done Cary Grant for you yet? And his Jack Nicholson is just awful.”

“I might be reading for a cable movie next month,” Nate said to Kenny. “Remember the producer you introduced me to when we
were extras on that biker show?”

“He’s a porn producer, Nate,” Kenny said. “Is it straight porn or gay for pay?” Then he looked at Dana and said, “I figured
Nate would cross over someday.”

“How many times I gotta tell you, Kenny, I
am
gay except for the sex part,” Nate said, adding, “Not the porn producer. I’m talking about the fat guy who told us he had
a TV pilot he was prepping. The one who’s into aromatherapy? That guy.”

Unimpressed, Kenny said, “He comes in here once or twice a month. A notoriously bad tipper. Lots of luck with him, bucko.”

“Are you an aspiring actor too?” Dana asked.

“Isn’t everybody?” Kenny said. “Be right back with your drinks.”

When the waiter was gone, Dana said to Nate, “How long have you been knocking at the door of stardom?”

“I’ve had my SAG card more than a year. I’ve done TV movies.”

“Speaking parts?”

“Yeah, sort of. In a couple of them I had a line or two. But I’ve done lots of extra work.”

“You enjoy it?”

Clearly uncomfortable discussing his show-business struggles with a woman he was not trying to seduce, Nate said, “Sure. It’s,
you know, better than most… hobbies.”

“Is that what it is?” she asked in that penetrating way of hers that made him feel like a kid.

“Yeah, and maybe if it turns into something… well, you never know.”

Dana nodded and said, “Hollywood is more than several square miles in the middle of L.A. Hollywood is a state of mind, isn’t
it?”

When Kenny returned with the drinks, he said, “I didn’t mean to sound pessimistic about that fat producer, Nate. I just don’t
trust guys that stiff restaurant people.”

By now, Hollywood Nate was getting depressed talking about it and said, “Maybe I’m kidding myself. Hell, I’m thirty-seven
years old, with sixteen years on the Job. I might end up like the Oracle and die on the Walk with my boots on.”

“Who’s the Oracle?” Kenny asked.

“The late legendary sergeant of the midwatch,” Dana Vaughn said. “I never worked for him, but his picture’s hanging in the
roll call room. Forty-six years on the LAPD and died of a massive heart attack on the police Walk of Fame, right in front
of Hollywood Station.”

“Yeah, you guys have your own stars in the marble, don’t you?’ Kenny said. “Just like on Hollywood Boulevard. Once I went
to Hollywood Station when somebody stole my bike, and I saw those stars. For the officers from the station that were killed
on duty, right?”

“A heart attack after forty-six years of this?” Nate said. “That’s being killed on duty in my book.”

Kenny studied Hollywood Nate for a moment, and seeing how dejected he seemed now, the waiter said, “Don’t give up your hopes
and dreams, Nate. Gloria Stuart was an eighty-seven-year-old actress when
Titanic
was released, and she got a lotta good gigs out of it. You gotta be patient.”

“What a silly goose I’ve been,” said Hollywood Nate. “Here I am, studying the trades and paying parking tickets for casting
agents who think I can fix them, when all I gotta do for success is wait fifty years. Cue the
Rocky
theme!” Then he pushed his plate away and added ruefully, “My appetite’s gone.”

“I’ll eat your salad, honey,” Dana said cheerily. “I need plenty of roughage if I’m gonna keep my ballerina body for your
first red carpet appearance.”

A
WARNING POSTED
on the board said, “Don’t go to Taco Bell!” That was because a cook who worked there had gotten booked by vice cops the previous
night for snogging a hooker in his car. The cook had been an extremely resentful arrestee, since many of the cops ate at Taco
Bell regularly and he’d figured that gave him a get-out-of-jail-free card. The midwatch feared he’d take his revenge in their
tacos.

Sergeant Lee Murillo was conducting the midwatch roll call without any other supervisors present, so the troops were really
airing it out. The bitching started this time because an officer on Watch 2 was being disciplined for choking out a combative
suspect. The carotid restraint, or “choke hold,” had been the salvation of cops since the forming of the LAPD, but in the
era of the federal consent decree, it was considered a use of lethal force. It would trigger the same sort of exhaustive investigation
as an officer-involved shooting. This resulted in cops believing that if things came down to one or the other, they’d be better
off using guns. Or, as the troops put it, “If you can choke ’em, you can smoke ’em.”

After the kvetching had drained off most of the bile, Sergeant Lee Murillo read the crimes and talked about the sexual assault
on Sharon Gillespie in the parking garage the prior evening. He read the description of the assailant and said, “The victim
believes the suspect was of Middle Eastern descent, so you might keep that in mind.”

“That only takes in half the employees of every liquor store, gas station, and taxi company in Hollywood, Sarge,” Flotsam
said.

Jetsam said, “Not to mention the wealthier nightclub patrons from countries where donkeys and camels are beasts of burden
and occasional lovers. They park their Beemers and Benzes in every freaking no-parking zone within two blocks of the boulevards.”

“No ethnic wisecracks,” Sergeant Murillo said. “All I need is another complaint to investigate.”

Rather than sounding off like the surfer cops, Dana Vaughn raised her hand, and when Sergeant Murillo nodded at her, she said,
“I’m not sure about the Middle Eastern part of it. The young guy had dark, curly hair, a dark complexion, and dark eyes, but
he had no accent of any kind.”

R.T. Dibney chimed in and said, “That description fits Sanchez, Sarge.” Then he pointed to the former rookie partner of P3
Johnny Lanier and said to the black cop, “Sorry to racially profile your boy, but where was he last night at —”

“Okay, Dibney,” Sergeant Murillo said, while several of the troops sniggered, “save your humorous asides for the next retirement
party.”

While Dana Vaughn dead-stared R.T. Dibney for interrupting her, Sergeant Murillo said, “What was the point you wanted to make,
Vaughn?”

“Actually, Dibney just made it,” she said. “The description does fit lots of Hispanics as well. My opinion is that the box
cutter influenced her. She mentioned the nine-eleven hijackers more than once. So the suspect could be a young guy of Middle
Eastern descent or maybe of Hispanic descent, or maybe something else.”

Sergeant Murillo said, “Okay, one thing is certain. Guys like that don’t stop on their own, so give a little extra patrol
in the early evening to streets with likely apartment buildings, especially around that area. The citizens in those reporting
districts get a little jumpy about people roaming around with cutting instruments.”

When he saw some quizzical looks, he added, “For you people who weren’t around here a few years ago, the location is close
to where we had a pair of real bogeyman murders. A former dancer and personal trainer entered the house of a ninety-one-year-old
retired screenwriter, someone he’d never seen before, and cut the guy’s head off with a meat cleaver he found in the kitchen.”

Hollywood Nate, ever the cinematic authority, added, “That old man was one of the first screenwriters to be blacklisted during
the McCarthy era—not that you dummies know anything about movie history.” He stirred some interest when he added, “He also
cowrote
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
.”

“Yeah?” R.T. Dibney said. “I saw that on TV a hundred times when I was kid. What a great movie. The Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein,
they were all in it.”

Sergeant Murillo continued, “Then he carried the old screenwriter’s head and some of his organs over a back fence onto the
next street, entered another house, and slashed a sixty-nine-year-old doctor to death. The doctor was making airline reservations
at the time, and after he was killed, the nut job picked up the phone and said to the airline employee, ‘Everything’s fine
now.’ Then he went to Paramount Studios and tried to get in.”

“He musta been, like, writing a way weird movie in his head and figured Paramount would give him a job,” Flotsam observed.

“Back when the poor old guy wrote about movie monsters, I bet he never thought he’d meet a real one,” Sergeant Murillo said.
“It’s something to always keep in mind. There’re
real
monsters out there.” Then he noticed R.T. Dibney turned sideways in his chair, whispering on his cell phone, no doubt to
this week’s bimbo of choice, and he said, “Dibney, the city is paying for
both
of your ears. Now, let’s go to work.”

The dozen cops that made up the shorthanded midwatch gathered their war bags and headed for the door. And every one of them,
even those who’d never known the man, stopped to touch for luck the framed photograph of the late sergeant they called the
Oracle, whose frame bore a brass plate that said

T
HE
O
RACLE

A
PPOINTED
: F
EB
1960

E
ND-OF
-W
ATCH
: A
UG
2006

S
EMPER
C
OP

*   *   *

Many things had changed at LAPD since back in the day when the Oracle was doing street police work. The shooting of a black
teenager in a stolen car that nearly ran over an officer introduced a policy of not shooting at moving vehicles. The striking
of a combative black suspect with a five-cell flashlight by a Latino officer resulted in the firing of the cop and a massive
purchase of little ten-ounce flashlights for the entire Department.

All of this was designed to alter what the
L.A. Times
had long called the “warrior cop ethos” of the LAPD. Much hand-wringing at City Hall resulted in wholesale policy changes
by the police commission, whose African-American president had spent a good deal of his prior life as head of the Urban League,
denouncing the LAPD’s proactive policies. This was one reason that the LAPD cops referred to him, and the rest of the Mexican-American
mayor’s police commission appointees, as the “anti-police commission.”

Despite all this, some of the cops, especially those of a “frisky disposition,” which is how R.T. Dibney described himself,
kept their old five-cell flashlights in their nylon war bags and still used them when there wasn’t a supervisor around. The
zipper compartment of the war bag also contained a ticket book, notebook, and a street guide. In the other compartment was
a helmet and chemical face mask. The surfer cops had observed R.T. Dibney on several occasions searching alleys and yards,
walking behind the beam of the old five-cell flashlight.

The midwatch units, including Mindy Ling and R.T. Dibney, were busy loading up their cars with rover radios as well as PODDs,
the handheld devices in which they could enter all sorts of useless data, some of it fictitious, for the auditors and overseers.
The kit room also provided them with Tasers, Remington 870 shotguns, and beanbag shotguns. Mindy’s war bag was actually a
huge carrier on wheels, like a flight attendant’s.

While all of this was going on, Jetsam was outside the parking lot, scurrying around a growth of curbside planting where he’d
observed something interesting.

When he came back inside the lot to his waiting partner, he said, “Got it! Sweeeeet!”

“You are easily amused, dude,” Flotsam said.

“Wanna see it? Or are you scared of these too?”

“Fucking donk,” Flotsam said.

“You are seriously aggro, bro. Chill and enjoy. It’s showtime.”

Jetsam ran over to the black-and-white belonging to 6-X-46 and said, “My partner thinks he might have an idea who the rapist
with the box cutter is. He’d like to talk to you.”

Mindy Ling said, “Yeah?” and immediately walked toward Flotsam, who was standing outside his car.

“He said he’d like to share it with both of you,” Jetsam said, so R.T. Dibney shrugged, and followed his partner to the surfers’
black-and-white.

When they were gone, Jetsam quickly opened the door on the passenger side and, reaching under the seat, found R.T. Dibney’s
five-cell flashlight tucked away there. He removed the D-cell batteries from the big flashlight, replaced them with what he’d
recovered from the planted area, dropped the batteries into the still-open trunk, and then strolled back over to Flotsam,
who was just finishing up with his “clue.”

“So anyways,” Flotsam was saying, “I saw this dude hanging beside the parking gate of that other building half a block north
of where the deal went down last night. He could be the same guy.”

Mindy Ling said, “You say that was last Tuesday when you saw him?”

“Yeah,” Flotsam said. “Right, partner?”

Jetsam, who had just arrived on cue, said, “Tuesday, yeah.”

“Did you talk to the sex crime detectives at West Bureau?”

“Not yet,” Flotsam said. “Coulda just been a guy trimming the bushes. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s nothing, but he was right on.
Light blue T-shirt and all.”

“Okay,” Mindy Ling said, “we’ll be cruising that RD for the next few nights.”

When they were walking back to their shop, R.T. Dibney said, “Some clue. The description fits half the gardeners from here
to Malibu. Which is where those two belong, hanging ten and chasing surf bunnies instead of trying to do real police work.”