Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  They were quiet again until she said softly, “I am no child, Dinko.”

  FIVE

  Saturday night in Hollywood was always an adventure, but on a night of a full moon, which the coppers of Hollywood Station called a “Hollywood moon,” anything could happen. After calling roll for six car assignments, Sergeant Lee Murillo told the midwatch, “You’ll be pleased to know that there is not anything even resembling a Hollywood moon tonight. Now I’ll allow time for applause.”

  Fran Famosa clapped lethargically. She was not eager for busy nights of police work with her slacker partner, Chester Toles, watching her back. Sophie Branson, the oldest of the women officers, offered a few claps, but her partner, Marius Tatarescu, looked disappointed. With only half as many years on the Job, he was not as burned out as his senior partner, and he still craved the action.

  The midwatch sergeant then said, “You’re not going to like this, but I have some minor roll call training to discuss with you. It has to do with constitutional policing and cameras in cars, which will soon be installed citywide.”

  That brought groans from almost everyone. Sergeant Murillo waited for it to subside before saying, “What has been learned in pilot studies where they’ve been used is that you must not turn off the sound on the cameras, not for any reason. If the cameras don’t work, then get another car. Think of the camera’s visual and audio capabilities as a tool for your protection.”

  Ever the movie buff, Hollywood Nate said, “Come on, Sarge! When South Bureau put them in cars with that little pinhole camera facing the backseat, you know what kind of movies got produced? The kind of cheesy bombs that go straight to video. D. W. Griffith silent flicks. Nobody says a word all the way to the station with prisoners for fear of being criticized for something. All the banter between copper and suspect that used to elicit admissions is gone, baby, gone.”

  Sophie Branson said, “The inspector general is just looking for someone to hang for biased policing. It’s still killing them in the IG’s office that they had two hundred and forty-three racial-profiling complaints in a year and couldn’t sustain a single one, no matter how hard they tried to screw with the coppers named on them.”

  “This is not a biased police department,” Fran Famosa said. “Can’t they get that through their heads? How come when some fool off the street comes in with a racial-profiling complaint, you gotta cut paper no matter how psycho the guy is? We get dumb questions like ‘How many people of that race do you stop?’ When the obvious answer is, As many as is necessary to do my job!”

  Sergeant Murillo let them ventilate and then said, “Just remember that you truly do profile, but you do it based on the characteristics and behaviors of bad guys, not based on race or ethnicity. But, of course, if you’re on Hispanic gang turf in east Hollywood trying to curtail gang activity, you probably aren’t looking to stop and interrogate a Japanese sushi chef.”

  Hollywood Nate piped up: “Even if they do drive like students at the Braille Institute.”

  “That’s an ethnic stereotype, you ham actor!” said Officer Mel Yarashi, of 6-X-76, a third-generation Japanese-American. “You just offended me and made me not so sorry for Pearl Harbor and fifty-dollar sashimi appetizers.”

  Sergeant Murillo waited until several cops hooted at Mel Yarashi, who subtly flipped them off; then the sergeant said, “Remember to use proper expressions, like ‘reasonable suspicion’ and ‘probable cause.’ These things give you a perfectly legal right to stop people. And there’s case law on making the driver and passenger alight for officer safety. There’re lots of subtle reasons you can use. For instance, a car can have an obstructed forward view, can’t it? Maybe one of the Eighteenth Street crew might hang baby shoes or those retro fuzzy dice, that sort of thing. It can be a reason to stop a gang car.”

  “Seriously, Sarge,” Mel Yarashi said, “look at the crap that was said when the Rampart copper killed the Guatemalan drunk that was threatening people with a knife. They said the Hispanic copper shoulda told him to drop the knife in the guy’s specific Guatemalan dialect. Now Spanish is like Chinese? There’s a bunch of dialects we gotta learn?”

  Sophie Branson said, “After that shooting, the reports were stacked so high you could stand on them and paint your ceiling.”

  “If it ain’t the PC media, it’s the hug-a-thug race racketeers!” Anthony Doakes said.

  Doakes, Mel Yarashi’s wiry twenty-eight-year-old partner, was a U.S. Army veteran of two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, with five years on the LAPD. He was the only African-American on the midwatch, in a police division with a small number of black residents. But on weekends like this, Hollywood would see a large number of young black males on the boulevards, many of them gang members from south Los Angeles who’d arrived by subway. Because he was a garrulous talker, Anthony Doakes’s sobriquet was “A.T.,” for “Always Talking Tony.”

  A.T. took a breath and continued: “Look how the Department caved when it comes to unlicensed illegal aliens on the sobriety checkpoints that impound cars of unlicensed drivers. Whoops! I shoulda said ‘undocumented immigrants.’ So we can’t impound their cars now because, being undocumented, they have a harder time getting a legal driver’s license and they need their uninsured cars to drive to work. At a vehicle kill rate five times higher than licensed drivers. Do I got it right?”

  Hollywood Nate was surprised when his young partner, Britney Small, politely raised her hand. When Sergeant Murillo nodded to her, she said, “The LAPD had one point eight million contacts with citizens last year. Exactly two hundred and forty-eight complaints of biased policing were filed. That comes to point oh oh oh one thirty-eight. Statistically speaking, that’s virtually a zero.”

  Sergeant Murillo said, “Very interesting, Britney. I’m impressed.”

  Even Hollywood Nate was impressed. “How do you know that, partner?” he asked.

  “I’m taking a couple of day classes at UCLA, and I wrote a paper on the subject,” she said, smiling self-consciously.

  “One other thing,” Sergeant Murillo added. “We’re all supposed to be using the Pelican flashlight our former chief authorized and insisted on. I know some of you are using Streamlights, but make sure they’re the correct weight and size.”

  “Right,” Nate said facetiously. “So small you couldn’t concuss a cricket if you gave it a dozen head strikes with one of them. When’re we gonna be required to trade our Glock forties for twenty-two target guns in order to give the dirtbags a real edge?”

  After they stopped snickering and grousing, Sergeant Murillo said, “One last thing: our esteemed surfing duo happens to be working a special detail tonight. So if you see them out on the boulevards dressed in soft clothes, pretend like you don’t know them.”

  “What’re they doing?” Sophie Branson asked.

  “Something with the vice unit,” Sergeant Murillo said, and that got a few hoots and catcalls out of some of the younger male cops. Those two? As vice cops?

  Chester Toles said, “I don’t think any of the curb creatures’ll take Jetsam for a copper, not if he shows them his plastic foot.”

  “I think that’s the general idea,” Sergeant Murillo said, “but I don’t know the particulars of their mission. Anyway, if you see either him or his partner, don’t acknowledge, unless they’re yelling for help.”

  He thumbed through his papers, remembering that there was something about drag queens and transsexuals being victimized by vandals, and when he found it he looked at Hollywood Nate and Britney Small, who patrolled the area in question. “A note for Six-X-Sixty-six. Somebody was shooting trannies and drag queens with paintballs last night while the victims were cruising for tricks on Santa Monica Boulevard.”

  Hollywood Nate said, “Boss, I can account for my whereabouts at all times. Britney is my witness. Besides that, I’m an actor, and that’s a very gay profession.”

  The coppers chuckled and Britney smiled, and then everyone collected their gear, careful to touch the Oracle’s pictu
re for luck before leaving the roll call room.

  Jetsam was particularly eager to get started, but Sergeant Hawthorne kept him and Flotsam in the office of the Hollywood vice unit until nightfall, going over the plan ad infinitum. Finally, Jetsam said, “Sarge, can we just land this plane? I mean, what can go wrong?”

  The vice sergeant said in earnest, “I haven’t had one of my officers get hurt since I’ve been here, so that’s part of it. But it’s not only that. It’s that we might get just this one chance at the collector, Hector Cozzo, and I don’t want us to lose it. He’ll be the one who can lead us up the food chain.”

  Four vice cops, their cover and security teams, breezed in and out of the office while the three men talked. All were dressed for the streets: jeans, T-shirts or other cotton shirts hanging out over their pistols and handcuffs, along with the inevitable tennis shoes for sneaking and peeking. There were mustaches, beards, shaved heads, earrings worn without piercing, openly displayed tats they’d acquired in military service before becoming cops—anything that would make it easier for them to pass easily among the denizens of Hollywood.

  “Don’t you got anything at all you can bust this guy for right now?” Flotsam asked. “To put a twist on him?”

  “Nothing,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “Sure, we know he collects and arranges for immigrant girls to be housed and fed and paid, but so what? The massage parlors and nightclubs are businesses open to the public, and the girls can make any housing accommodation they choose, with anyone they want as a middleman. There’s no law against it. Of course, we’d love to prove that they’ve paid to get into this country illegally, and that they’re being virtually enslaved here by never being able to pay back what they owe, but we don’t have hard evidence on any of that. Not yet.”

  “Okay, so when do we get started?” Jetsam said. “All this mission talk is making me so unchill I’ll need a massage for real just to get my neck muscles relaxed.”

  The vice sergeant said, “The last reason that this operation is making me so cautious is because you’re not wired. I’ve only sent an operator into a risky massage parlor operation once since I’ve been here, and we had a wire in his clothes, so that when he stripped down and carefully laid his clothes over a chair, we could still hear almost everything.”

  Leering, Flotsam said, “Sweet! That means my partner can break bad and go all sexy and nobody’s gonna know.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne managed a tolerant half-smile. “Once again, this is an intelligence-gathering mission. We’re not after prostitution or lewd-conduct violations, so don’t go there. Just get your massage, convey the information we’ve agreed upon, pay the fee, and leave.”

  Jetsam turned to his partner and said, “Bro, you got lots of massages when you were in the navy. Do you think I should ask for lotion or powder?”

  Flotsam said, “Dude, I am definitely a lotion man, and I’ll explain. When a deep-muscle massage goes looking for new territory, you want, like, way slick and slippery little fingers doing the exploration. And I’ll tell you why . . .”

  Sergeant Hawthorne looked at his watch and at the two surfer cops, and wondered if his personal ambition was not leading him into career jeopardy.

  The sun was setting over the Pacific, throwing burgundy and indigo light over Hollywood Boulevard, perhaps one of the few places on earth where the ubiquitous smog actually made the sunset more beautiful. And then, in just a few short minutes, night had fallen on the boulevard and lights were turning on everywhere.

  Even though the cops of Hollywood Station were cracking down on the costumed Street Characters who hustled tourists in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the superheroes were out in force on this Saturday night. Some of the tired older ones, like Superman, Batman, and Darth Vader, were being replaced by newer superheroes, like Space Ghost, Mr. Fantastic, and Iron Man, who was the object of intense jealousy.

  What aroused the ire and envy of the other Street Characters posing for photos and accepting gratuities for their work was that Robert Downey Jr. had made the Iron Man so sexy on film that his hustling doppelgänger on the boulevard was getting all the play and all the tips. There was a queue of tourists waiting for a shot with him while other superheroes, like Spider-Man, just stood back and brooded. And then the web thrower decided he’d had enough of this shit.

  Spider-Man stepped in front of the next pair of tourists and said, “Come on, folks, get your picture with a real superhero, not some pile of rusty nuts and bolts.”

  “Hey, Sticky Foot,” Iron Man said, “no poaching.”

  Spider-Man replied, “Chill, Tin Man, or you might get your fenders dented.”

  Iron Man, who had seen his namesake’s movie fourteen times and was feeling invincible, said, “Crawl back in your web, you fucking insect, or you might get my iron upside the head!”

  And with that, he whacked Spider-Man across the skull with an iron gauntlet, except that the “iron” was really molded plastic. Spider-Man responded by kicking Iron Man in the groin, sending him crashing to the pavement on top of Judy Garland’s handprints, preserved forever in the forecourt cement.

  Spider-Man, standing over the fallen superhero, said, “Better borrow a monkey wrench to loosen those nuts, Iron Man!”

  The Wolf-Man asked Spider-Man, “How would you like it if someone did that to you?”

  Spider-Man flexed and replied, “What’s your problem, Fido? Either butt out or bring it on!”

  The Green Hornet, who was probably the sweetest and gentlest of the costumed panhandlers and was certainly the gayest, came to Iron Man’s aid and scolded Spider-Man, saying, “That was unkind, cruel, and totally unnecessary!”

  Spider-Man said, “Buzz off, Hornet, or you’ll get swatted next.”

  That sent the Green Hornet scurrying, and Marilyn Monroe—aka Regis the plumber in another life—let out a scream at the sight of Iron Man lying there writhing in pain. Captain America was the first to draw a mobile phone from his costume pocket and call 911.

  It was not the first time a PSR had some fun with this kind of broadcast. The businesslike LAPD radio voice said, “All units in the vicinity and Six-X-Forty-six, a four-fifteen fight in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, between Spider-Man and Iron Man. Person reporting is . . . Captain America. Six-X-Forty-six, handle code two.”

  “How exciting,” Fran Famosa said in disgust after rogering the call. “A Street Character bitch-slapping.”

  Chester Toles just raised his pale eyebrows a notch, adjusted his aviator eyeglasses, and scratched his rubbery bald scalp before turning north on Highland, but didn’t increase his speed by even one mile per hour. “Maybe if we give the young hotshots a chance to jump the call, we won’t have to handle it,” he said. “They might think a TV crew’s gonna roll on this one and they’ll end up on the news at ten.”

  Usually, Fran Famosa would utter an objection to Chester’s goldbricking, but when it came to a Street Character donnybrook she was in Chester’s corner. Superhero rumbles usually did bring out a TV news team, and when that happened the mob of tourists with cameras seemed to replicate itself, since everybody in Hollywood wanted to be on the big or small screen. The vehicular traffic on the boulevard would slow to a stop so motorists could rubberneck, and the cops would have a mess on their hands.

  “Yeah, take your time, Chester,” she said. “I’m not up for dealing with freak show panhandlers.”

  When, four minutes later, they arrived, Chester said to her, “No worries, mate. The situation is well in hand.”

  There were already two units from Watch 3 at the scene, both radio cars manned by eager young coppers who would love to handle a superhero squabble in front of an audience of hundreds, especially if a news team showed and the audience grew to potentially hundreds of thousands on the nightly news. Chester and Fran stopped in the red zone and made the obligatory gesture of officially handing off the call to the cops of Watch 3, who hadn’t handcuffed anyone and were still mulling over the culpability of Spider-Ma
n for the injurious groin kick, after witnesses had concurred that Iron Man had struck the first blow.

  In fact, Chester and Fran had just gotten back to their shop when a tourist in an L.A. Dodgers cap suddenly yelled, “Hey, that guy just grabbed my wife’s purse!”

  The thief was a slope-shouldered guy in a long-sleeved black hoodie that hid his face. He wore dirty jeans and running shoes and he was fast. He zigzagged across Hollywood Boulevard, causing several cars to brake and blow their horns at him. He was nearly out of sight before Chester had time to start the engine, with Fran Famosa ready to bail out and give chase on foot. That is, if her fat partner could get the fucking car moving!

  “Come on, Chester!” she said. “The dirtbag’s getting away!”

  “Okay, Fran, don’t get your knickers in a knot,” Chester said, pulling into traffic with his light bar on, tapping his horn to cut into the lanes of westbound traffic and across the oncoming eastbound traffic.

  Fran put out the broadcast that they were chasing a four eighty-four purse snatcher westbound on Hollywood Boulevard from Grauman’s, and in a moment the PSR relayed the information to all units in the vicinity. While this was going on, Chester had to blast the siren in order to squeeze through the eastbound number one lane of cars, whose confused and panicked drivers didn’t understand what the driver of the black-and-white wanted them to do.

  The purse snatcher turned south at the first corner, and by the time they got across Hollywood Boulevard, he’d vanished.

  “Maybe he ran into the parking structure,” Chester said. “He could hide behind a car and we’d never find him without a K-9.”

  “There he is!” Fran said.

  He’d been momentarily hidden from view by the darkness and a dozen young people walking north toward Hollywood Boulevard for an evening of fun and frolic. The runner turned, saw the black-and-white coming his way, and ran even faster.