Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  “What happened to change it?” Tina asked.

  Dinko said, “There was a big lawsuit to break up the nepotism, and the union lost and got forced to open things up to a very bad element. It was a shotgun wedding that never worked out. If there aren’t enough registered longshoremen to work a job, the casuals come in, but it takes the casuals eight hours to do the work we can do work in two hours. They’re the grunts of the waterfront, and they work like Frenchmen.”

  “I guess that’s when the other kinds of people came in?” Tina said.

  “For sure,” Dinko said. “We got some blacks, but Mexicans make up at least half of the entire union. We got thugs that won’t break away from their street gang culture, no matter how much they make. Nepotism was good. We replaced it with dirtbags.”

  “It’s a different world, Dinko,” Goran said, “and it ain’t a better one.”

  They declined to shoot cell-phone photos of Fire Station No. 112, an award-winning building designed to shelter a 1925 classic fireboat that could produce more than ten thousand gallons of water per minute. Ditto for no photo op when Dinko stopped in front of the Warner Grand Theatre, a 1931 Art Deco beauty, one of three remaining, designed by the architect B. Marcus Priteca, who was commissioned by Warner Bros.

  They did take some pictures when Dinko drove them past Croatian Hall, where the words above the door said, “God Bless Croatia.”

  Dinko said, “In my dad’s day everybody called it Slav Hall, but no more. Not since the big war over there with the Serbs. Now we’re Croatians, not Slavs. Back in the day, lots of Slavs, including Serbs, came to work in the fishing business and on the docks. Back when the canneries employed maybe thirty thousand women, mostly illegal Mexicans.”

  “Could we drive by your church again, Dinko?” Goran asked. “I oughta take a picture.”

  Dinko parked in front of Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, and Goran got out and snapped a few cell-phone shots of the words on the façade: “Maria Stella Maris Ora Pro Nobis.”

  “I remember your father’s letter saying you were baptized here,” he said to Dinko. “He was a proud man that day, I can tell you.”

  “I went to school there,” Dinko said. “My grandpa stood with me when I made my confirmation in that church.”

  “Back way before you were born, your grandpa, he used to always write about the tuna fishing to my father,” Tina said.

  Dinko said, “In my grandpa’s day, the Croatian fishermen would go out, twelve on a boat for maybe three months in Mexican waters. They’d come back with a hundred fifty tons of tuna in the hold and unload at Terminal Island. You used to almost be able to walk from one boat to another, there were so many. But then the superseiners came here. They could easily go to Costa Rica to fish. And just like that, it was over. There’s still shabby old gill net boats around, manned by Asian fishermen catching squid for local markets. We say the Asians eat everything in the water except submarines. Anyways, we still have Croatian and Italian Masses here at the church, along with Spanish, of course. You can’t get away from Mexicans, no matter what.”

  Both Goran and Tina were more than ready to call it a day by the time Dinko drove them to Point Fermin Park, the southernmost tip of the City of Angels. The Cleveland cousins actually got out of the Jeep and walked a short distance across the shady lawns and gardens, and saw people picnicking and jogging and playing with Frisbees.

  And then Dinko said, “Lotsa people jump off the Vincent Thomas Bridge, or they come here to Point Fermin and hop over the barrier there, and do a dive off the cliffs. Pedro is a popular place to come to if you’re of the jumper persuasion. Once I saw the Port Police hauling a floater with a rope around his torso. The dead guy’s arm kept waving at the tourists every time the body hit a little ripple.”

  The suicide talk was too much for Tina, who said, “Maybe we should start heading for the ship, Dinko.”

  When they passed Ports O’ Call Marketplace, Dinko pointed to the sign reading, “Home of the Proudest People on the Coast.” He said, “That used to be a great place for tourists to go and have a bite to eat right on the harbor and browse in the shops. Now it’s just a place where the Mexicans go on Sunday to get drunk and slap around their women. Look there. He’s spun.”

  He pointed to a raggedy, toothless man standing on the curb near the intersection where Harbor Boulevard turned into Front Street. While Tina was trying to admire the Pacific Electric car that served as a trolley, the raggedy man waved a cardboard sign in her face that said, “Will work 4 meth.”

  When they arrived at the World Cruise Center berths, Tina gasped. There were two cruise ships docked there, just south of the mile-long Vincent Thomas Bridge, looming in the background. The nearer ship was so enormous from this vantage that it was hard for Tina and Goran to take it all in.

  Tina said, “That ship. It looks like a big white building that got knocked over and is laying right there by the dock.”

  “Raise your gaze,” Dinko said. “Look behind it. You’re seeing two ships, not just one. Sometimes they load and unload up to thirteen thousand people in a single day.”

  And then the cousins realized there was an even larger ship docked behind the nearer one. It soared higher, and Goran said, “How do they get things that big to go so fast on the ocean? And how the hell do they park them?”

  “The port pilots who go out on boats and bring in the big ships are the highest-paid city employees,” Dinko said. “They deserve it.”

  “It makes you feel real small just looking up at them,” Tina said to her husband. “And to think, we’ll be on one.”

  Goran said, “Well, Dinko, I’m glad to hear you done so well in life, even with all the changes in your union.”

  “I hope you’re saving a lot for your golden years,” Tina said. “Are you planning for the future?”

  Dinko, who never planned past the current day, just grinned and said, “Time to go aboard for your second honeymoon. Have fun, but don’t do anything naughty. Everybody’s got cell cameras, and you might end up on YouTube!”

  THREE

  Sergeant Lee Murillo, seated at a table in the front of the roll call room, was easily the most popular supervisor at Hollywood Station. He was conducting roll call for Watch 5 and, as usual, wanted to get officers of the midwatch in an upbeat mood before turning them loose on the streets at sunset. Sergeant Murillo was the son of Mexican farmworkers and had spent much of his formative years in the public libraries of the Central Valley while his family worked the fields. He still got most of his entertainment from books, and was a whippet-lean long-distance runner who had competed twice in the police Olympics. Although he was not yet forty, his hair was pewter gray, and he could look quite professorial when wearing his round wireless bifocals.

  They were fielding seven cars, and all fourteen officers sat at long tables in fixed chairs with framed movie posters behind them, this being the only police station on the planet with one-sheets hanging on walls around the station. Many of them were from old cop movies or famous films that featured specific locations policed by the cops of Hollywood Station. On the wall by the door was a framed photo of a beloved senior sergeant they called the Oracle. He had died of a heart attack five years prior on the pavement in front of the station, where stars bearing the names of station officers killed on duty were set in marble and bronze, just like famous movie stars were remembered on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame. And being a superstitious lot, every officer would touch the Oracle’s picture for luck after roll call, before heading out to the streets.

  The brass plate affixed to the frame around the Oracle’s photo said:

  The Oracle

  Appointed: Feb 1960

  End of Watch: Aug 2006

  Semper Cop

  Sergeant Murillo was doing his Kung Fu impression on this particular Thursday’s roll call while he read the lineup of names and car assignments. “And you, Grasshopper,” he said to Officer Francisca Famosa with the appropriate accent and lilt,
“you will be working Six-X-Forty-six with the Unicorn tonight . . . if you can find him.”

  Fran Famosa was an attractive thirty-five-year-old Cuban-American with thirteen years on the Job. She had a dusting of tan freckles on her nose and cheekbones, freckles a bit darker than her hair, which she wore pinned up off her collar, per Department regulations. And like all female uniformed officers, she wore a pale and subtle shade of lip gloss. She was a divorced survivor of a bad marriage to a now unemployed television sportscaster, and the mother of a four-year-old daughter.

  Fran shook her head in dismay. Her partner for the remainder of the deployment period was Chester Toles, who was fifty-eight years old with nearly thirty-five years on the LAPD. The midwatch coppers tended to be divorced or never married, making it easier to work a shift beginning at 5:00 p.m. and lasting until 3:00 a.m., at the height of the street action. Chester was one of the few at Hollywood Station who’d been married to the same spouse for most of his life, and he had three children and four grandchildren. He was notoriously lazy and would try to kiss off any call he could, but since he “owned his pink slip,” due to having been a cop since back when Gerald Ford was in office, he was fearless in the face of official reprimands or even short suspensions. He considered himself, administratively speaking, bulletproof.

  When it came to handling an end-of-watch call or an unpleasant job of any kind, nobody could ever find Chester, so Sergeant Murillo had dubbed him “the Unicorn.” He said that Chester Toles was like a mythical being that didn’t exist. Fran Famosa had gotten stuck with Chester as a partner when his assigned partner contracted a staph infection and was ordered off duty for at least three weeks.

  Earlier in the week, Fran had taken Sergeant Murillo aside to whisper that everyone was happier when the Unicorn was a “house mouse,” working the front desk in the station lobby, instead of being on the streets in a black-and-white. She asked why Murillo couldn’t keep him assigned there.

  Her sergeant had said, “The captain thinks Chester will be more likely to pull the pin and head for Idaho to drink beer and fish his life away with old cronies if he’s forced to work the streets for a while. And by the way, he could manage to vanish for long periods of time even when he was a house mouse, so that was no picnic for us, either.”

  “Why me?” Fran had persisted, but Sergeant Murillo had replied, “Because you’re just about the most mature and sensible officer on Watch Five, Fran. We know you can manage him.” And what could she say to that?

  “So, Chester, are you with us in body and spirit this afternoon?” Sergeant Murillo called out, looking directly at Toles, who sat at the back table beneath a movie poster depicting Gloria Swanson and William Holden in Sunset Boulevard.

  Next to that one was a poster showing Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, wearing the worst blond wig ever inflicted on an actress. Most of the more noirish one-sheet selections had been placed there by “Hollywood Nate” Weiss, LAPD’s only card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild.

  Chester Toles hadn’t responded, so Sergeant Murillo said, “Yo, Chester! Time to wake up.”

  Flotsam, who was sitting on Chester’s left, looked over and saw that behind the aviator eyeglasses that Chester believed made him look more macho, the pudgy cop’s eyes were closed.

  The surfer cop said, “Don’t disturb him, Sarge. Climbing the stairs took its toll, and he needs his narcoleptic nap. When Chester retires he’ll die of terminal bedsores.”

  When Chester heard his name that time, his little blue eyes suddenly popped open, but everyone knew he’d been snoozing. In addition to being Hollywood Station’s invisible man, Chester was also the king of non sequiturs. He scratched the blotchy pink skin on his shiny bald dome while suppressing a yawn and said, “I wasn’t sleeping, Sarge. I was just deep in thought about something from back in the day. I been trying real hard to remember the name of the sergeant we had here on the midwatch before you transferred to the station.” He looked around earnestly at the other troops and said, “Any of you old enough to remember? The supervisor that looked like Luca Brasi, but was a girl? The one we called B.P., for Big Panties? That one? An old boyfriend of hers told me that when she wore her thong underwear it produced a real camel-toe effect down there, if you catch my drift.”

  The entire assembly was speechless after that, especially the three women officers on Watch 5. Then Sergeant Murillo broke the silence by saying, “Too much information. Let’s go to work.”

  Fran Famosa’s heavily lashed brown eyes rolled back in her head as she sagged in her chair and mouthed to the ceiling, “Why me?”

  She was so disgusted that when she got up and left the roll call room she almost forgot to touch the Oracle’s picture for luck.

  The sun was not close to setting at 5:30 on this warm summer evening, as the midwatch cops loaded the trunks of their black-and-white Crown Vics, called “shops” because of the “shop numbers” on the doors and roofs. The numbers allowed any observers, as well as the police helicopters they called “airships,” to identify individual patrol units. Radio car 6-X-72 frequently was the final one to leave the parking lot because of last-minute trips back to the women’s locker room by Officer Sophie Branson.

  She was forty-two years old with twenty years on the Job and had been a blonde for so many years that only her academy classmates remembered her as a brunette. Her career with the LAPD had added a dozen pounds or so to her five-foot-nine frame and produced lines around her mouth and creases at the corners of her eyes, but otherwise she felt she’d looked acceptable when, recently, she’d attended her class reunion at the police academy. She had been married and divorced three times, twice to other cops, and was the mother of a six-year-old son.

  About her most recent husband, she’d told her partner, “As a cop, he’s solid. As a husband, he was a spawn of the devil.”

  She was partnered with Marius Tatarescu, a Romanian-born cop who was close to her age but did not have her experience. He’d joined the LAPD a decade later in life, after mastering English well enough to pass the civil service exams. At age forty-three, he only had eleven years on the Job. He was big and burly, a jolly jokester with a heavy accent, extremely dense black hair, and matching winged eyebrows. The first night they’d worked together, Sophie had told him it was a good thing the LAPD no longer required patrol officers to wear hats on duty, because he’d never find one big enough to accommodate his hair.

  He explained his bachelorhood to Sophie and the other much-married coppers of the midwatch by saying, “I am fourth-generation vampire from Transylvania. I suck too much blood from all girls I date, so nobody likes to marry me.”

  When citizens 6-X-72 encountered would inquire about his accent, Marius would say, “Texas is my home estate.” When people would grin and say, “Dallas?” Marius would answer, deadpan, “Austin. I was longtime neighbor pal of Georgie Boosh.”

  The reason it took 6-X-72 so much time to leave the parking lot was because Sophie Branson would often remember something that was missing from her war bag. Marius’s war bag was just the regular black nylon model that most of the seasoned male cops carried. Sophie’s war bag was the kind many women coppers preferred: a suitcase on wheels, such as airline flight attendants pulled to and from their boarding gates.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t have enough gear on her Sam Browne, including a Glock .40-caliber pistol, a Taser, OC spray, a rover radio, handcuffs, and extra ammo. There was other gear to be hauled: a Remington 870 shotgun, an Ithaca beanbag shotgun, a helmet, and, in her war bag ticket books and notebooks, pet treats and chew toys. It was the absence of enough pet food in the war bag that usually made her return to the locker for extra treats. Sophie Branson was a dedicated animal-rights advocate who firmly believed that the meanest pit bull they encountered on their beat was more worthy of kindness than any man she had ever married.

  Sophie was well known by everybody at the station for rescuing things: birds, cats, dogs, hamsters, the lot. Whenever anyone found ani
mal hair or bird feathers in one of the shops they’d say, “Sophie was here.” She was a dues-paying member of PETA, the Humane Society, the ASPCA, and other animal-welfare groups. She had been admonished several times for picking up a stray dog while on duty and leaving it in the cot room with a sign on the door saying, “In use” until she could take it home after end of watch.

  She had caught feral cats with humane traps set in the Hollywood Station parking lot and fostered them until she could find them homes. Her own house in Van Nuys was a veritable menagerie. And once, while patrolling in the Hollywood Hills, she’d spotted a mother possum that had been killed by a car. She’d pulled the three babies out of the mother’s pouch and had taken them home, where she’d bottle-fed them, releasing them back in the Hollywood Hills when they were old enough to fend for themselves. She’d taken photos of her carpeted cat house at home, with rescued kittens and possum babies peeking out the little windows, and she’d taped the photos inside her locker at the station.

  There’d been a noteworthy moment in the roll call room a few months earlier when one of the midwatch coppers had been about to mash a huge centipede crawling across the floor. Sophie Branson had let out a yell and scooped up the insect on a page from her notebook.

  She’d admonished the cop, saying, “They keep spiders away! It’s a sin to kill a centipede!”

  After she’d returned from releasing the insect outside the station, Sergeant Murillo had said to her, “Sophie, maybe that’s true of mockingbirds. But centipedes?”

  It was Marius’s turn to drive, and Sophie was happy to “take paper”—that is, to write reports and fill in entries on the Daily Field Activity Report, aka “the log,” and tend to the onboard MDC computer mounted between them. Marius was driving westbound on Melrose in what was still heavy traffic, because “rush hour” could last until darkness on these summer days in the most traffic-clogged city of North America.