Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  “I’m grateful to ride shotgun tonight, partner,” she said to the big Romanian. “I had to get up early and go to Lance’s day care center to watch a production of The Wizard of Oz. It was adorable, but I didn’t get enough sleep.”

  “Is very good you got a mother to help take care of your boy,” Marius said. “Too bad his father is such a slice of turd.”

  “Piece of shit,” Sophie said. “The expression is ‘piece of shit,’ and that fits him perfectly. Never marry a cop, Marius.”

  “I am thinking that I am too old for getting married anyways, Sophie,” Marius said.

  “Anybody’s too old to marry a male cop, I can tell you that,” Sophie said. “They’re all little boys looking for a mommy. Every goddamn one of them.”

  “We got business, Sophie.” Marius pointed to the MDC as the computer beeped.

  Sophie opened the message and saw that it was a family dispute in a primarily Latino neighborhood in east Hollywood, and that sometimes meant that domestic violence would be involved. Then again, there could be immigrants from anywhere in the world in east Hollywood these days, Los Angeles County being a place where more than two hundred languages were spoken, not including dialects. She acknowledged the message and hit the en route button.

  Marius had to find a break in the traffic to make a U-turn and head back east, while Sophie lamented, “Where the hell’s Six-A-Forty-nine? And how about A-Seventy-nine? Watch Two doesn’t go end-of-watch for another thirty minutes, and here they are, kissing off their calls to Watch Five. The lazy bastards. It’s like a whole squad of Unicorns. Like cloning Chester Toles times twelve.”

  Marius didn’t say anything. Sophie Branson was always complaining about something, but she was smart and gutsy and had much more police experience than he did, so he figured he could learn a thing or two from her.

  When they arrived in the residential neighborhood of old cottages and cheaply constructed newer apartment buildings operated by slumlords, Marius parked and Sophie hit the at-scene button and grabbed her baton. Marius followed her to the cottage door as salsa music blared from the apartment building directly to the south. Windows were open and somebody was cooking enchiladas and it smelled good, causing Marius to sniff the air like a bird dog.

  The Salvadoran woman who opened the door had a swollen bruise under her left eye. She was in her mid-forties, her hair hanging sweaty and lank to her shoulders. She was nearly obese, and wore a black cotton dress that was torn and bloodstained. She reeked of stale beer.

  “Uh-oh,” Sophie said sotto to Marius. “Looks like Papa’s going to jail.”

  But when they got inside the messy little cottage, they saw her Salvadoran husband sitting on a kitchen chair held together by duct tape, holding a wet dish towel to his nose. The front of his T-shirt was bloodstained, and there were two empty beer cans lying on the cluttered kitchen table.

  “Who you were saying is going to jail?” Marius whispered to Sophie, who shrugged, muttering, “It’s a toss-up.”

  “Who called you, her?” the man demanded, pointing to his wife.

  He was inked full-sleeved on both arms with tats from his youthful affiliation with MS-13, the largest street gang in the world. He also had a newer L.A. Dodgers tattoo on his neck, the kind so many gang members were sporting these days for their home-game trips to Dodger Stadium to kick the shit out of visiting fans. His head was shaved and he looked to be at least fifty years old, although guesses were tricky with aging veteranos. Drugs and booze and prison had taken their toll. Cops could overestimate homeboys’ ages by as much as ten years.

  “I din’t call them,” the woman said belligerently, more to the cops than to her husband. “I can take care of business my own self.” Both she and her husband were American-born and spoke English unaccented, except for the old homie speech mannerisms he affected.

  “What’s the problem here?” Sophie said.

  “Him,” the woman said. “He thinks he can push me around.”

  The husband took the towel away and looked up, revealing a cut lip in addition to the nosebleed, and said, “I did all the pushing, huh?”

  “Okay, ma’am, you step into the other room with me,” Sophie said, taking the woman by the elbow and guiding her toward the bedroom, where she closed the door for privacy.

  When Marius and the husband were alone in the kitchen, the man stood unsteadily and said, “I work fifty hours a week at a fucking car wash and gotta come home to her bullshit.”

  Marius nodded from time to time, listening to the husband tell him in speech slurred and boozy that he’d merely asked for sex before supper.

  “Asked?” Marius said.

  “Absolutely,” the man said, sitting down again, since he was really blitzed. “And the bitch hit me with her fist or an ashtray or something, and broke my nose, I think.”

  Sophie was getting a very different story, of course. The woman acknowledged that a dispute had started over sex, which she was going to give him, until he got demanding and crude. She wasn’t quite as drunk as he was, but admitted that the fighting took place after each had guzzled two forties and polished off three six-packs of Corona.

  When the bedroom door opened, Sophie took her partner aside and told Marius the only detail that surprised him. The husband had managed to shove his wife into the closet during the struggle and had locked the door. It was her screams for help that no doubt had triggered the call from a frightened neighbor.

  “I’m too tired today to deal with this bullshit,” Sophie said sotto to Marius. “You handle it, okay? Whatever you wanna do is okay with me, but let’s try to leave here without any bodies coming with us.”

  Marius nodded and stood in front of the husband and wife like a referee in a prizefight and said, “Look at us. What do coppers do? We drink coffee and eat doughnuts and take people to jail. I got no solutions inside my head for your problem. You got to settle your problems your own selfs. Or maybe you like to start punching each other again so I can take someone to jail?”

  They were both quiet for a minute. The husband took the dish towel from his face and said to Marius, “Am I still bleeding?”

  The woman said, “Officer, he locked me in the fucking closet! What if the place caught on fire? I coulda died in there!”

  “Yes, madam, I am seeing your position,” Marius said. “Maybe is not a tie. Maybe your husband wins the guilt game by few points here.”

  “All I wanted is the sex I got coming as a husband!” the man cried, and a trickle of blood flowed from his right nostril.

  “In my country,” Marius said, “we can have sex with a goat, but then you got to set the goat free. You cannot lock her in a closet like you do to your wife here today.”

  “I coulda died in there,” the woman said. “This man is basically evil.”

  That caused Sophie to open the door and prepare to leave, but the man rocked sideways and would have fallen if Marius hadn’t caught him by the arm.

  “Do not drink no more tonight,” Marius said. “If we come back and are finding you lumped up again, we got to take actions.”

  “He’ll fight you if you come back,” the woman warned. “He’s fought cops before.”

  “He will not fight with us,” Marius said with a frown, his heavy, winged eyebrows nose-diving. “When anybody fights with us, we got to tenderize them.”

  “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” the husband said.

  Before closing the door behind him, Marius said, “I work for eight years at the meat counter in a big supermarket. You do not want for us to tenderize you. Trust in me, you will not like it.”

  When Marius and Sophie were back in their shop she typed a short disposition of the call on the keyboard, and they quickly headed west at twilight. The sun was preparing for its nightly plunge into the Pacific Ocean, but on this relatively smogless day it was giving off a blinding, slanted light that caused them both to flip down their visors.

  Ever the concerned animals advocate, Sophie said, “Marius
, you never had sex with a goat back in Romania, did you?”

  “I was only making a pointer to the drunk man,” Marius said.

  “Point,” Sophie said.

  “Pardon, Sophie?”

  “Point. A pointer is a dog.”

  “With you, is always animals, Sophie,” Marius said, puzzled by her correction.

  And as though on cue, as they passed a seedy auto repair business that was closed for the day, Sophie said, “Pull over!”

  Marius cut the wheel to the right. “What? What do you see?”

  “There!” she said, pointing to a Latino boy in a ragged blue T-shirt, tan shorts, and tennis shoes. He was about ten years old and was standing next to the eight-foot chain-link fence that protected the business from passing thieves.

  “The kid?” Marius asked. “What is he doing?”

  “The little fucker’s abusing a dog!” Sophie said, and she leaped out of the car while it was still rolling to a stop.

  When he saw the two cops coming at him briskly, the boy looked frightened, and he paused with a rock the size of a lemon in his right hand. Inside the fence a large dog, probably a rottweiler mix, growled at the cops.

  “Drop that,” Sophie ordered, and when the boy did, the dog bared his teeth and snarled at them. “Are you throwing rocks at that dog?”

  “No,” the boy said, trembling. “I was throwing the rock way to the back of the yard by the cars. It’s his rock.”

  “Whadda you mean, his rock?” Sophie demanded.

  “It belongs to him. I throw it for him every day after supper. He waits for me with the rock in his mouth. He drops it and I reach under the fence and pick it up. I toss it for him till I get so tired I gotta stop. Then I scratch him through the fence for a while and then I go home.”

  “And what does he do when you throw the rock?” Marius asked.

  “He plays,” the boy said.

  “Are you saying he fetches?” Sophie asked. “He gets the rock and brings it back to you?”

  “Yes,” the boy said, his lower lip quivering. “Every night he waits for me to play with him. His name is Barney.”

  Still doubtful, Sophie said, “Let’s see him fetch. Throw the rock.”

  The boy picked up the rock and, backing away from the fence, threw it in the direction of the metal doors that were rolled down and locked for the night. Sure enough, Barney barked happily and ran for the rock, retrieved it, and brought it back to the fence, where he dropped it at the feet of the boy, who reached under the fence and picked it up.

  Marius suppressed a snicker at Sophie, who reddened and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  She ran to their car, opened the truck, rummaged in her war bag, and came back with a brand-new yellow ball constructed of hard rubber that was safe for dogs to chew. “Here,” she said to the boy. “This is a gift for you and Barney. I want you to continue coming here every night to play with him.”

  “I will,” the boy said. “I like to play with him. He’s a good dog.”

  “That’s fine,” Sophie said, “because he’s a working dog and he needs exercise, understand? Now let’s see how he likes a real toy.”

  The boy took the ball from her and dropped the rock on the ground. He backed up a few paces and threw the rubber ball over the fence, and they watched it bounce toward the garages. Barney watched it, too. He trotted after it, and when it came to a stop he sniffed it suspiciously. He picked it up for a few seconds, then dropped it on the ground near a pickup truck parked by the garages. He ran back to the boy, barking excitedly.

  The boy nodded to Barney, reached down and grabbed the rock, and threw it as hard as he could toward the garages. The dog, deliriously happy, ran and retrieved it, his docked tail wagging furiously.

  Marius maintained a noncommittal expression as they walked back to their shop, leaving the twelve-dollar dog-safe rubber ball in the yard, but after they were in the car he said sympathetically, “Barney very much loves his rock, Sophie. Sometimes you cannot teach old doggies the new games.”

  “Tricks,” she said with an exhausted sigh.

  It was a rather uneventful Thursday night for the officers of the midwatch, but just before end of watch, at 3:00 in the morning, 6-X-66 caught a “possible jumper” code 3 call from the hotel at Hollywood and Highland.

  The driver of 6-X-66 was twenty-four-year-old Britney Small, who had only two and a half years on the job and was by nature shy and reserved. She had light brown hair, pale soulful eyes, and was slender enough to be called “the ballerina” of Watch 5. As young as she was, Britney was entitled to unusual respect for having shot and killed an armed murderer whose pursued van had caused the crash in which Jetsam’s foot had been crushed. By facing the killer’s gun and putting him down, the then rookie cop had become an authentic gunfighter in the eyes of the crusty Old Guys at Hollywood Station who were often critical of female officers, and always critical of young female officers.

  Her partner in 6-X-66 for this deployment period, Hollywood Nate Weiss, might be considered an OG by now, but he was so different in temperament from most of the Old Guys that the women officers never thought of him that way. Moreover, he was hawkishly handsome, with dark hair going silver at the temples, and he was ripped from almost daily workouts in the weight room. It was hard for Britney to think of Hollywood Nate as an OG. Chester Toles, the Unicorn—now, there was an OG.

  Hollywood Nate Weiss, divorced and childless, was thirty-nine years old with eighteen years on the LAPD, and he was absolutely dreading his next birthday, fearing that his hopes and dreams of making it as an actor were fading with each passing year. Forty was frightening. He’d be middle-aged! Nate spent much of his time fantasizing about catching an acting job that would lead to a new career and allow him to retire from police work in two years. However, since earning his SAG card he’d managed to get only half a dozen jobs as a day player on short-lived television cop shows, and only three of them had provided a few words of dialogue. He wouldn’t have gotten any of them if he hadn’t used his badge as an inducement. The best job came when he stopped a has-been features director for a DUI but drove the guy home instead of taking him to jail.

  Britney always preferred to work with seasoned women officers, but she did not mind working with Hollywood Nate because he treated his women partners the same as the men, except with a bit more deference. She chalked that up to his artistic nature as an actor. Britney was aware that before she came on the Job, Nate had lost a woman partner named Dana Vaughn in a gun battle and had killed the man who’d murdered her. There were whispers that Nate had carried feelings of guilt for a long time over that incident, and that perhaps his relationship with Dana Vaughn had been more than just radio car partners. But that was only locker room speculation.

  Though Britney was long past her eighteen months of probation now, she wanted to learn as much as she could, and she had encouraged Nate to let her know if she ever performed in a way that needed improvement. So far, he’d seldom offered tactical advice of any kind.

  But when, a block from the jumper call, she cut the siren’s wail, he did have a tip for her. He said, “You know, Britney, I’ll never forget what my field training officer said to me when I got my first jumper call. A very distraught guy was sitting on a tenth-floor window ledge, and there was nobody there but us to talk him in or try a rescue. My FTO said, ‘Before you do anything at all, I want you to take out your notebook and write down the names of everybody in the world you’re willing to die for. When we get up there and see our jumper face-to-face, you might feel a tug at your heart and get an urge to rush forward and save the person. But first, check your list. If the jumper’s name is not on your list, let the fucker go it alone and not take you along for the ride.’”

  When he was finished, Britney said, “So what did you do on that one?”

  “I never had to check my list. The guy jumped just as we were getting out of the elevator, and when we got back down to the sidewalk I could see that his name was not on my
list, and his face didn’t resemble anyone I knew, or even a human face. What used to be his head looked like somebody had mixed dozens of eggs and raspberry jam in a bucket and dumped it on the sidewalk.”

  “I’ll make my mental list now,” Britney said.

  As it turned out, Britney and Nate’s jumper turned out to be a mannequin that some drunken college students had hung out of a hotel window for laughs. The pranksters were gone by the time the police arrived.

  FOUR

  The dispatch hall of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was sacred ground for longshoremen, and the dispatcher was a minor deity. Dinko Babich remembered when district attorney investigators, trying to arrest a dispatcher on a warrant, had invaded the hall. A mini-riot ensued when thirty longshoremen surrounded the lawmen, who had to call for LAPD reinforcements. On Friday afternoon, as Dinko pulled up in front of the hall and parked, he began stewing about his thirty-day suspension for drug use on the docks, and regretted that it would be another twenty-two days until he could get back to work.

  He couldn’t stand sitting around the house with his mother, and it was even worse when one of his mother’s friends would come to visit for the day and spend half of it trying to persuade him that he needed to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings because of the suspension, which he thought was ridiculous. He was a recreational pot smoker, not some spun-out tweaker who couldn’t run his own life. If he hadn’t been persuaded to smoke a doob with another longshoreman during their lunch break, he never would’ve been suspended. He’d never said he was perfect.

  There was the usual token force of black men outside the hall, sitting at picnic tables, playing cards. These longshoremen did not have the A book, which usually implied connections and was as good as gold. With that book a longshoreman could sometimes work a six-hour shift and take a two-hour lunch break at the end of the shift, arriving home before the wife had even started cooking.

  Dinko figured there was no use asking the guys outside the hall if they had any grow. The blacks mostly smoked rock. They could buy a piece of rock for five or ten dollars, or even a tiny chip for as little as two bucks. They liked to fire up a cookie of rock and shatter it into pieces. The Mexican rock was more like a tortilla, and they’d cut it thin with a razor blade until it resembled a communion wafer, but that wafer offered a very short trip to heaven with lots of purgatory to follow. Dinko did not trust rock. He’d seen too many crackheads get hooked behind it.