Hollywood Moon hs-3

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Dana looked at Nate and said, “We wrote a ticket to a pair like that. The driver’s name was… let’s see… Tristan something.”

  “That’s him!” Flotsam said. “We wrote shakes on both of them.”

  “What the hell,” Dana said, “shall we stroll down the street and see if they have a guest tonight?”

  “Why not?” said Hollywood Nate. “Birds of a feather?”

  “Be careful, honey,” Dana said.

  “What did I jist hear you say?” Jerzy Szarpowicz said to Malcolm Rojas.

  “I said I’m not leaving,” Malcolm said. “I got nowhere to go. I’m in trouble.”

  “You’re gonna be in a lot more trouble if you don’t get your ass outta here,” Jerzy said.

  “Look, kid, run along,” Tristan said. “We’re expectin’ an important call.”

  “I promise I’ll phone you tomorrow and give you a real job,” Dewey said. “Go home, Clark.”

  “I left a whole handprint on the wall,” Malcolm said, emotionless. “I can’t go home. The police might be there already.”

  Tristan looked at Dewey in puzzlement, and Dewey tapped his head and said, “He claims he murdered Ethel.”

  “I ain’t got time for fuckin’ bullshit!” Jerzy said. “We got business to do, and if I don’t get me a dime of rock pretty soon, I’ll be doing the killin’, and I’ll start with you!”

  With that, he grabbed Malcolm by the back of his neck and swung him toward the door, which he crashed into, and he dropped to his knees.

  “Get out, Clark!” Dewey said.

  Malcolm stayed on one knee, looking up at Jerzy Szarpowicz, and said, “I’m not afraid of you because you’re big. I can deal with big men now. I can deal with anybody.”

  “You little fuckhead!” Jerzy said, and he stepped forward, intending to kick Malcolm with his boot, but Malcolm was on his feet, leaping sideways and swiping through the air with his box cutter.

  It didn’t catch Jerzy in the throat, as Malcolm had intended, but sliced open a deep gash across his right cheek, and Jerzy screamed in pain and fury. When Malcolm lunged at him again with the box cutter, Jerzy had the two-inch.38 revolver out of his waistband, and he fired two rounds a few feet away into the young man’s chest. Malcolm Rojas looked down at his body, dropped the box knife, and fell into a sitting position, leaning against one of the crates. Then he gazed up with shuddering breaths, while the other three, their ears ringing from the explosions, screamed incoherent obscenities at one another.

  Tristan was the first to recover and shouted, “I’m outta here!”

  But when he jerked open the door, he saw a crew of uniformed police running toward the sound of gunfire. The street was hemorrhaging blue!

  “Cops!” he yelled, slamming the door. And then he shoved Dewey aside and ran for the back door, with Jerzy right behind him, gun in hand.

  The police heard the back door crash open, so Dana and Nate sprinted along the walk beside the duplex to the rear of the lot, followed by the surfer cops.

  R.T. Dibney and Aaron Sloane kicked in the front door of the duplex and found Dewey Gleason with his hands up and Malcolm Rojas dying on the floor.

  Tristan Hawkins tried to leap the chain-link fence dividing the properties but fell back hard, and Hollywood Nate shined a light on him and yelled, “Stay down or die!”

  Jerzy Szarpowicz powered through the doorway at that instant, firing his last four rounds at anything that had a human form, on his way to the rear alley. Hollywood Nate returned fire almost simultaneously, and the last thing Jerzy Szarpowicz saw were three orange fireballs that lit the darkness, two rounds hitting him in the right chest and one in his forehead, killing him instantly.

  The surfer cops were yelling, and Hollywood Nate was yelling, and Tristan Hawkins was facedown on the walkway, crying, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!”

  In a moment, he was handcuffed tight, palms outward, dragged to his feet, and hustled along the walkway to the front of the house, while Hollywood Nate, still leaking adrenaline from the gunfight, yelled into the house, “Is it okay in there?”

  “Okay!” Sheila Montez shouted, and she appeared backlit in the doorway, holstering her Glock.

  Hollywood Nate then shakily holstered his Beretta and trotted along the walkway to the front of the house, where Dewey Gleason had now become convinced that what the boy had told him must be true, and Dewey was yelling at anyone who’d listen, “I had nothing to do with her murder! Clark did it!”

  Tristan said to Jetsam, who clutched his arm, “Officer, get me to a detective quick! I wanna make a deal. I’ll tell you everything I know about these crazy fuckin’ people.”

  It was then that Hollywood Nate said, “Where’s Dana?”

  Mindy said, “Didn’t she cover the back door with you?”

  By now all of the detectives had arrived and were milling around the property and talking on cells, while the bluesuits were gathered in front of the duplex with their two handcuffed prisoners.

  And Hollywood Nate said again, “Where the hell’s Dana?” Then he switched on his flashlight and ran back along the walkway to the rear of the duplex, with the surfer cops right behind him.

  Flotsam spotted her first with his flashlight beam. She was lying in a flower bed behind a short hedge that partially concealed her body.

  “Here!” Flotsam yelled. “Call an RA!”

  Hollywood Nate leaped the hedge and was down on his knees in the dirt, turning her onto her back, and crying out, “Partner! Partner!”

  Flotsam shined his light onto her face and saw her eyes open in slits, and he said, “It’s bad, Nate! It’s bad!”

  “No!” Nate shouted in denial, unable to see a bullet wound. He started doing chest compressions through her Kevlar vest, when Jetsam came running toward them, and Flotsam showed a distraught face to his partner and shook his head.

  Then Nate stopped the chest compressions and, tilting her head back, raised her chin and placed his mouth over hers. He began breathing into her mouth, his left hand now wet with blood leaking from the bullet wound that severed her spinal cord at the cervix, just above her vest, killing her in seconds. By now other cops were there, lighting the scene with flashlight beams, and both Sheila Montez and Mindy Ling were crying.

  Nate began doing the chest compressions again, his left hand slippery with her blood, and he began sobbing and murmuring, “Please don’t, Dana! Please don’t!” And both surfer cops turned way, Flotsam looking up at the Hollywood moon while the yelp of the ambulance siren drew closer and Hollywood Nate begged Dana Vaughn not to die.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Because her mother had not been religious, the daughter of Officer Dana Vaughn chose the Hollywood United Methodist Church for the funeral service after the coroner released her body. The Gothic church could be seen from the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, arguably the heart of Hollywood, and had been used in movies, so Pamela thought that her mother would’ve chuckled and approved of her choice.

  She told this to Hollywood Nate Weiss during a phone conversation when she asked him to be one of the pallbearers, four of whom would be old friends of hers, male and female officers. Another choice that Pamela made was Leon Calloway, the officer from Watch 3 whose life was seconds from ending one dark night when Dana Vaughn had taken a risky head shot to save him. He fervently thanked Pamela for according him such an honor.

  When she called Nate, Pamela had said that although Nate and Dana had been partners for only a short time, her mother talked of him often, always with affection and a mischievous gleam in her eye. Nate told her he’d be proud to serve, and he was very thankful that it was a phone conversation. He knew he might’ve cracked if he’d been face-to-face with this brave girl who so sounded like her mother.

  Nate had spent an agonizing week after that extravagant police funeral complete with a graveside honor guard firing volleys, a bugler for taps, a lone bagpiper on the hillside, a helicopter flyover, and hundreds of cops in cl
ass-A uniforms. There was a moment at graveside when a rookie officer in uniform suddenly appeared beside the LAPD chaplain to read a prepared message. Nate didn’t know who she was, but pallbearer Leon Calloway knew. It was Officer Sarah Messinger, limping slightly but almost ready for her return to regular duty. She stood at attention before the microphone, simulating a modulated RTO voice they might hear on their police radios.

  “Attention all units,” she began. “This is an end-of-watch broadcast for Police Officer Two Dana Elizabeth Vaughn, last assigned to Hollywood Division patrol.”

  And then Sarah Messinger read a short summary of Dana’s career, including her saving the life of Officer Leon Calloway. When Nate saw the big cop’s shoulders tremble and heard a sob come from him, he almost lost it and had to say to himself, Hang on, hang on, hang on!

  The “broadcast” concluded with “Officer Vaughn is survived by her daughter, Pamela, and every member of the Los Angeles Police Department grieves with her this day.”

  Then Sarah Messinger saluted very slowly and said, “Officer Dana Vaughn, you are end-of-watch.”

  Nate spent days asking himself what he could’ve done better that night. This, even though the investigators from Force Investigation Division and the District Attorney’s Office, as well as every officer at the scene, said there was nothing anyone could have done better. Yet he kept tormenting himself by reliving every second of the event, and after he was cleared to return to duty, he used up several of his overtime days to sit at home alone and brood.

  He hadn’t been back to duty yet, when a second visit was scheduled for him with Behavioral Science Services in their offices in Chinatown. Like most cops, he distrusted shrinks and psychiatric testimony in general, often bought and paid for in courtroom trials. And like all cops, he ridiculed the MMPI test: “Do you want to be a forest ranger? Do you want to walk in grass naked? Have you ever thought of wearing women’s underwear? Is your stool black and tarry?” He would never have gone to the BSS shrink if not ordered to do so.

  The first visit had been pointless. The psychologist was a man in his forties with a rosy, well-fed look who’d had a spot of mustard on his upper lip that Nate would’ve found distracting if he’d been even slightly interested in the questions. Nate was asked about sleeplessness and anxiety and anger, questions always asked of cops who’ve killed someone, and he’d denied experiencing any of it. He’d said his only regret was that he couldn’t have killed that bastard twice.

  When the shrink got to the other routine questions about his relationships with parents and siblings, he’d said to the man, “What do my parents have to do with my partner getting hit by a fucking bullet from a Saturday-night special that couldn’t have found that particular mark again if the asshole had stood three feet away in broad daylight with a truck full of ammunition?”

  The BSS shrink made notes about unconscious anger that had not been worked through and integrated and recommended this second annoying visit, which was on the day he returned to duty. It turned out that he was scheduled with a woman psychologist. This PhD was younger than Nate, barely thirty he guessed, tall and bony, with hair as straight and dull as straw and glasses with black rectangular frames. Her eggshell-white dress could only be called institutionally nondescript. In an earlier time, she would’ve been wearing Birkenstocks and rimless spectacles with her hair in a snood. She made him think of buttermilk.

  The psychologist introduced herself as Marjorie, and she said to Nate, “I understand you’re an actor. What if you were to compose a scene that you wanted to tape and play back to see if it worked as intended? If I asked you to compose and play a scene describing Dana Vaughn, could you do it? Pretend that you’re all alone with your own tape machine and give it a try.”

  “I don’t have a tape machine,” Nate said drily. “And cops’re too suspicious to talk to recording devices.”

  Marjorie smiled and said, “But you’re an actor, Nate. I’ll lend you my pretend machine. And when you’re finished, you can take the pretend tape home with you.”

  The shrink had such an unassuming manner and seemed so easy to ignore that Nate had to restrain himself from telling her that he truly did feel alone in the room. But after a moment of silence while he considered her goofy idea, he was surprised to discover that he wanted to talk about Dana Vaughn to an imaginary tape machine in an empty room. And when he started, the words tumbled out of him.

  Nate gazed into space and said, “She had sparkling, golden-brown eyes and a special throaty chuckle that somehow ended with a tinkling sound like a wind chime, and she wasn’t afraid of raising a kid by herself, or of gray hair and laugh lines, or of guys with guns, or of anything else in this shitty world. And she was smarter than me and a better cop, and she called me honey, and it irked me at first, but now I miss it a lot.”

  He fell silent then until Marjorie said, “And tell the machine what you regret now that she’s gone.”

  That’s when Nate’s eyes welled and he finally said, “That the only time our lips ever touched was when I was trying to breathe life into her, and that I never said ‘honey’ right back at her, because she would’ve chuckled in that special way of hers, and that… that… she died all… all alone out there. Under that… fucking… Hollywood… moon.”

  Then he wiped his eyes, stood abruptly, and said, “Thank you, Marjorie. The reading is over, and I don’t think I’d ever give me the role in whatever play you’re directing. I think I’d like to go to the station now. And may I say thank you for the loan of your pretend machine. I was able to talk to it more easily than to any of the humanoids around here.”

  The body of Malcolm Rojas was released to his grieving mother after the postmortem, and though his mother would never believe in his guilt, both of the women he’d attacked identified their assailant from photos taken in life and in death.

  The body of Jerzy Szarpowicz was cremated at the request of a brother in Arkansas, and the ashes were returned home by FedEx.

  Of course, Hollywood Nate and everyone else at the station knew rather soon that Dewey Gleason and Tristan Hawkins would be charged with numerous counts of grand theft, forgery, and other property crimes. But despite three deaths having occurred at the crime scene, including the first-degree murder of a police officer, the District Attorney’s Office had not yet decided how to finally charge the two defendants. Although they were principals in immediate flight after the commission of felonies, their particular felonies did not meet the test for charging murder in the first degree of a peace officer. In fact, since neither defendant had personally used a firearm or other deadly weapon, even a charge of second-degree murder seemed a waste of taxpayer money. It was especially problematic for prosecutors that Ruben Malcolm Rojas was a wanted sexual psychopath and killer who had burst onto the scene and triggered the tragic events. Both defendants claimed that they were only trying to get away from him, not from the police, and fled in panic after Jerzy Szarpowicz, who they had not known was armed, began firing.

  On the day following their arrest, just after TV footage of the suspects had been shown on local channels, a landlord in Frogtown called detectives at Hollywood Station to report that he’d rented an apartment to the one identified on the news as Dewey Gleason. That led to the discovery of the bed, chains, padlock, duct tape, and the rest. In hopes of striking a good plea bargain, the prisoners competed vigorously to reveal more information on each other as low-level confidence men. Up until then, neither arrestee had mentioned the kidnapping, but now each decided to amend his confession upon being confronted with the new Frogtown evidence. This occurred the day after the detectives had succeeded in marrying them to their former, less complex admissions.

  Then both Dewey Gleason and Tristan Hawkins had to tell their versions of the kidnapping of Eunice Gleason, insisting that no one had any intention of harming Eunice, who Dewey maintained was the ringleader of their posse but not known by her low-level employees and bogus kidnappers. According to them, it was all an elaborate sca
m for Dewey Gleason to get some of the money from his ruthless wife, money that was rightfully his.

  “It was just us little scammers trying to scam the big boss” was how Dewey put it to the detectives. “And it all went sideways.”

  The Public Defenders Office and a court-appointed criminal lawyer argued that both clients were hardly more than identity-stealing scalawags whose confidence scheme directed at their boss, Eunice Gleason, had gone awry and resulted in a terrible but unforeseen tragedy not of their making. After conversations with jailhouse lawyers concerning prison overcrowding, coupled with their relatively innocuous arrest records and eager cooperation, Dewey Gleason became more sanguine, convinced that he would not serve more than eight years, and Tristan Hawkins less, considering their time served before sentencing and good behavior in prison.

  It was pointed out to Dewey during an attorney visit that Symbionese Liberation Army urban terrorist Kathleen Soliah, aka Sara Jane Olson, who’d been a fugitive for twenty-four years until her capture in 1999, hadn’t served much longer than that, even though her gang had murdered a woman in a bank robbery and planted explosives under two LAPD police cars with intent to murder the officers. Dewey felt much more confident after that particular jailhouse chat.

  In fact, during the last interview he had with D2 Viktor Chernenko, a Ukrainian immigrant famous at Hollywood Station for mangling American idioms, Dewey said to the hulking, moon-faced detective, “Someday the fortune that my wife stashed somewhere is gonna be found. And when it is, I’m putting in a claim for it.”

  “That is the fruit of your criminal enterprise,” Viktor Chernenko replied. “I do not think you will be successful.”

  “We both worked as honest people for years,” Dewey lied. “Nobody can prove which of the money is dirty and which is clean. So okay, maybe I’ll give up some of it to Uncle Sam and retire on the rest.”