Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

“Damn, the dude has an extra gear. He can really move!” Fran said, broadcasting their location for all units.

  Chester meant business now, and with his headlights on high beam and his light bar flashing and his siren yelping, he mashed down on the accelerator. When the purse snatcher was all the way to Sunset Boulevard and turning the corner eastbound in front of Hollywood High School, he tripped on the uneven pavement. He did a tumble and roll across the sidewalk, and the purse went flying. By the time he got up, 6-X-46 was stopped at the curb on the wrong side of Sunset, facing oncoming traffic, which had slammed to a stop at the sight of the black-and-white bearing down with its red and blue lights winking and its siren howling.

  There was an instant traffic snarl on Sunset Boulevard when Fran Famosa and Chester Toles, who was moving faster than Fran thought possible, got out and took off after the limping thief, who wasn’t going to go peacefully. He turned and threw a roundhouse punch at Fran, who ducked and grabbed him around the middle as Chester got him in an LAPD-nonapproved, but usually effective, choke hold. It took the thief to the pavement with both cops on top of him. His hoodie slipped back and his long black hair fell across a scowling face, brown as saddle leather. Fran saw that he was wearing aviator glasses like Chester’s, and they went soaring when he broke free of Chester’s choke hold.

  He was older than they’d originally thought, maybe mid-thirties, and he was strong, far stronger than Chester. He got to his knees, taking Fran up with him, and he stomped hard on Chester’s hand and kicked the baton away just as Chester was getting ready to unload with an LAPD-nonapproved head strike. Then the thief whirled and flung Fran Famosa off him, and he started to run again as they heard a welcome siren headed their way.

  Fran had a Taser in her hand, but Chester was between her and the thief with handcuffs in his left hand, and she saw the guy grab for Chester’s Beretta. Both men lurched into her, and she lost the Taser. Chester didn’t even realize it when his pistol clattered to the sidewalk along with his handcuffs. That’s when Fran delivered a nonapproved kick to the face of the thief and followed it with a blast of pepper spray, which caught him in the back of the head instead of the face, and then he was up again and trying to run, with Chester Toles hanging on to his left ankle.

  Fran Famosa picked up Chester’s lost baton and struck the thief once, twice, across the right knee, to no avail. Saying, “Fuck this!” she tried a nonapproved head strike, but he threw his arm up and took the blow across the wrist.

  It sounded like the muffled pop of a firecracker, and he yelled in pain, then said, “I’ll kill you, you cunt!” That’s when she saw the knife.

  And that’s when Chester yelled in desperation, “Shoot him, Fran!”

  Fran Famosa was trying to do just that, drawing her Glock .40, retreating a few paces, then taking a combat stance.

  But she heard a familiar voice yell, “Drop that knife!”

  Hollywood Nate, followed by Britney Small, both with their pistols drawn, were running at the thief, who threw down the knife and raised both hands to the top of his head. She’d been so into the adrenaline-charged moment—sound had ceased and all motion had slowed way down—and so close to killing the thief, that she had never heard 6-X-66 squeal to the curb in a brake-locking slide, its high beams lighting up the life-and-death struggle. And she never really registered Hollywood Nate and Britney Small’s arrival until Nate was handcuffing the purse snatcher’s hands behind his back.

  Britney said quietly, “Holster your weapon, Fran. We’ve got him controlled.”

  “Ooooh, my frigging back!” Chester Toles said, struggling to his feet with one hand pressed against the small of his back, looking for his glasses, his baton, his OC spray, and his dignity. Everything was strewn around the sidewalk, including the victim’s purse and its contents: wallet, keys, lipstick, compact, tissues, and coupons for Pizza Hut.

  Then Chester said, “I’m too old for this shit!”

  Just then, 6-X-76 rolled up and Mel Yarashi jumped out with Always Talking Tony Doakes, and A.T. started jawing.

  “This is some cluster fuck,” he told Nate when Fran and Britney were out of earshot, walking the thief to Fran’s shop. “This is what happens when you put a chick with a fat old slacker like Chester. They’re lucky they didn’t get scalped.”

  Only then did Nate notice that the purse snatcher appeared to be an American Indian. A.T. picked up the knife by the tip of the blade and said, “Uh-huh, a trophy taker. Wonder how many hanks of hair he’s got hanging from the lodge pole in his tepee? They should always put someone like me with someone like Chester. ‘I’ll catch ’em, you clean ’em,’ that’s my motto. I woulda run that red man’s dick into the dirt.”

  Mel Yarashi, who was accustomed to A.T.’s garrulous ways, said, “Hey, partner, let’s police up the sidewalk here. There’s property scattered everywhere.”

  A.T. nodded but, still wanting to chatter, strolled over to the black-and-white where the purse snatcher was strapped into the backseat with the door open and said, “Dude, you are one lucky Injun. The LAPD’s head-shot record with a handgun is sixty-three yards. If I’d been the closer here, I woulda just let you get sixty-four yards in front of me and broke that record.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” the exhausted Indian said.

  “Are you talking to me?” A.T. responded. “And when exactly did you have your lobotomy?”

  “I’m not an Injun. I’m a Native American.”

  “Really?” A.T. said. “Which casino?”

  “I want my glasses,” the prisoner said.

  A.T. said, “I was gonna look for them, but now I have reservations.”

  He looked around to see if anybody appreciated his Indian humor, but they were all busy talking on radios or cell phones, gathering scattered evidence, and waving off more arriving black-and-whites by holding up four fingers, meaning code 4, no further help needed. There were already too many coppers milling around the fight scene, but more kept coming.

  “I need my glasses, goddamnit!” the prisoner said.

  “What’s your name?” A.T. asked. “And lemme guess. You’re a parolee, right?”

  The prisoner did not deny his parole status but said, “My name’s Clayton Lone Bear. Now go get my glasses, you mud-shark nigger, or bring one of the white cops over here.”

  “Now you just played the stupid card and made a mortal enemy of this noble buffalo soldier!” Always Talking Tony said, thumping his own chest with a fist. “You want a white cop, try smoke signals.” Then he turned and said, “Hey, Mel, come over here and babysit Mr. Lame Bear for a minute. I gotta go talk to Chester and Fran. If he tries to go all Little Bighorn on you, gimme a holler.”

  Mel Yarashi trotted over to Fran and Chester’s shop to guard the prisoner, and A.T. walked toward the searchers, who were sweeping the sidewalk with their narrow flashlight beams.

  “Isn’t it great to be saddled with safe little baby flashlights,” Chester Toles said to Fran Famosa. “In the old days I coulda lit up the whole freaking scene all by myself with my five-cell monster.” Chester was squinting nearsightedly when he spotted a dark object and said, “Hey, the guy had a gun!” Then he moved closer and squatted down, saying, “Wait a minute! This looks like my gun!”

  With the adrenaline overload of the fearful street fight, Chester Toles had been unable to obey the street cop’s first commandment: Watch their hands! He hadn’t realized that the thief had jerked his Beretta from its holster before losing it.

  Chester picked it up, holstered it, and said to Fran with a shiver, “We came close to a bagpiper on the hill.” Meaning an LAPD funeral complete with a lone bagpiper playing a dirge, an LAPD custom since the 1963 funeral of Officer Ian Campbell, himself a piper, who was kidnapped from the streets of Hollywood and murdered in an onion field north of Los Angeles.

  A.T. strode up to them and said, “Hey, Chester, no big surprise, but I think this PLMF is a parolee-at-large. Way to go, cowboy.”

  Everyone knew that PLMF meant “
parolee-looking motherfucker,” but Chester Toles was too old and too sore right then to give a shit.

  While A.T. was walking back along the curb to his shop, something glinted in his flashlight beam, and he recognized the prisoner’s glasses lying in the gutter beside the curb. He glanced around and saw that everyone was occupied with his or her own tasks, so he turned off his flashlight and strolled over to the gutter in the darkness. And he surreptitiously stepped on them, crunching and grinding the glass and metal into the asphalt.

  Mel Yarashi was waving the traffic past the scene when Sergeant Murillo pulled up, parking behind Nate and Britney’s shop to take over supervision and make notification to Force Investigation Division about a “categorical use of force.”

  That was when A.T. saw Chester Toles approach the prisoner and hand a pair of glasses to Fran, saying, “Here, put these on his face. I don’t know where the hell my glasses are.”

  “Yo, partner!” A.T. suddenly yelled to Mel Yarashi. “Code four. We’re not needed here. Let’s bounce.”

  SIX

  At last, nearly an hour after darkness had settled on the boulevards and the Saturday night revelry had begun, the vice sergeant decided it was time to head for the massage parlor in east Hollywood. As Sergeant Hawthorne was driving Flotsam and Jetsam there in a plain-wrapper vice car, which happened to be a ten-year-old white Volvo, he said, “One of the biggest massage parlors L.A. ever had was a Russian operation. Of course, the girls could never work off the trafficking debt because the expenses kept rising, but those beautiful girls kept trying. It took a long time to shut it down.”

  Flotsam was wearing an aloha shirt hanging out over his faded jeans, along with boat shoes, no socks. Jetsam was better dressed, in a Banana Republic long-sleeved paisley shirt, white chinos, and Adidas suede sneakers, but with socks to cover his prosthesis.

  Flotsam said, “I guess the recession don’t hurt those operations too much.”

  “The Russian operation never noticed the recession,” the vice sergeant said. “Not with an eighty-thousand-dollar-a-month advertising budget. They were really taking in the cash. You know, before we can work a massage parlor like we’re doing here, I have to get what they call ‘strip authority’ from West Bureau. It’s only good for a month. The bureau brass does not like officers taking their pants down.”

  “That must make it an adventure to drop a steamer,” Flotsam said.

  Sergeant Hawthorne was learning to ignore Flotsam’s ceaseless wisecracks. He said to Jetsam, “I figure we’ll only need the strip authority for a couple of weeks. I’ll send you in two or three times, and if there aren’t any nibbles we’ll shut down the mission and call it a swing and a miss.”

  “Nibbles,” Flotsam said with a wink to his partner.

  By then, Sergeant Hawthorne was sorry that he had brought the tall cop along, but his presence was the thing that had finally persuaded his partner to take this assignment. The vice sergeant said to Jetsam, “If we don’t get the information we need, at least you’ll get a couple of massages, compliments of the city of Los Angeles.”

  “Ain’t there no way I could get one?” Flotsam asked. “I mean for next time, if the deal goes sideways tonight and we end up with nothing?”

  “Sorry,” the vice sergeant said, repressing his growing exasperation. “I don’t think the bureau would approve of using taxpayer money on just-for-fun massages.”

  “I’m just sayin’,” Flotsam grumbled, “if you, like, wanted to settle for a prostitution bust.”

  “Okay, let’s get back to rehearsal,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “If you do get to talk about your occupation, where’re the game machines made?”

  Both Flotsam and Jetsam said, “Arizona.”

  “Just him,” the vice sergeant told Flotsam. “And how many machines’re needed to take in twenty grand a week?”

  “Five,” Jetsam said.

  “Always be conservative,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “Never overplay your hand.”

  “Ten,” Jetsam said. “But that’s in four days, Thursday through Sunday.”

  “Right,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “Who does your machine deliveries?”

  “A couple of Middle Eastern guys. One’s an Israeli.”

  “Good,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “Speak in generalities, but always throw in a specific, like ‘an Israeli.’ It adds to believability. Are they all electronic machines?”

  “No, some’re push machines. Depends on what the customer wants.”

  “Perfect,” the vice sergeant said. “Who does the payouts?”

  “Usually, bartenders. We been putting our machines mostly in the right kind of bars. And we think they could work really good in residential casinos.”

  “Do you have a residential casino that you could send Hector Cozzo to for a look-see, in case he should ask?”

  “Naw, we almost had one ready to go in Echo Park, but the operator got greedy and we told him to fuck off.”

  “You’re ready,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “Your partner will stay with me, and the cover team will be right outside but you won’t see them.”

  Flotsam said, “The stage is yours, dude.”

  “Bro,” Jetsam said. “All of a sudden I feel like I can’t carry a tune and all the judges are Simon Cowell ringers.”

  “Opening night jitters is all,” Flotsam said. “Get your Oscar on, dude. You’re Jack fucking Nicholson tonight. Break a leg!”

  Jetsam nodded, took a deep breath, and handed his badge and gun to his partner, saying, “Showtime!”

  When Jetsam was standing at the intersection, waiting for the traffic light to change, Sergeant Hawthorne said to Flotsam, “You’d never know he has a prosthetic foot. He doesn’t limp at all.”

  “When he’s hurting he never lets you know,” Flotsam said. “He can still ride more barrels than anybody at Malibu. My little pard’s straight-up game. Dead game.”

  “Please don’t use words like dead tonight,” Sergeant Hawthorne said.

  There were three other men in the minimalist waiting room of Shanghai Massage. The plasterboard walls were painted a subtle peach, and the floor was covered in gleaming ebony tiles. Several chairs of vinyl and chrome were set along the walls, and a glass coffee table was covered with magazines. The other customers were forty-something, well-dressed white men, each with a magazine. They looked uneasily at Jetsam when he stepped to the counter, and then they averted their eyes and went back to the magazines.

  The woman behind the counter, with pink-framed reading glasses hanging from a chain, was not, as Jetsam had expected, Chinese. She was white—a dyed blonde, of course, in Hollywood’s Lady Gaga era. She wore a tight white tee with pink shorts, and her bobbed hair was cut in severe bangs that just cleared her upper eyelids. But she was attractive in spite of a face full of Botox and a bad boob job that had sent each large nipple pointing away from her breastbone.

  “Good evening,” she chirped. “May I help you?”

  Jetsam said, “I got a bad cramp in my leg and I want a deep-muscle massage.”

  “As you can see, we have gentlemen waiting,” she said. “I take it you didn’t call for a reservation?”

  “No, I was driving by and saw your sign.” Then he remembered his earlier briefing and added, “I also read your ad in . . . I think it was a free newspaper at the car wash.”

  “So you’ve never been here before?”

  “Nope,” Jetsam said with what he hoped was a disarming smile.

  She looked him over carefully. A very fit guy in his mid-thirties? She could easily picture him in LAPD blue. Her Botoxed expression was unreadable as she said, “Well, it might be better if you came back some other night, after you’ve made a reservation. We only got so many girls here.”

  Jetsam played his trump card then, by reaching down and raising the trouser leg of his chinos, revealing his prosthetic foot with supportive bracing. He said, “Living with this causes pain in my upper thigh sometimes. Tonight it’s, like, way bad. I don’t mind w
aiting till one of the girls gets free.”

  Her demeanor changed immediately—she would’ve wrinkled her Botoxed brow if she could. This was no cop! She was genuinely sympathetic when she said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Sure, if you’ll have a seat, I think we can take care of you in a half hour or less. My name’s Gretchen.”

  “Fine by me, Gretchen,” Jetsam said, and he took a seat, surprised that the reading material was not a bunch of fuck magazines.

  There was Esquire, GQ, Sports Illustrated, Car and Driver, and even an Architectural Digest. This was not what he’d expected at all. In fact, he was hoping that the hundred and fifty dollars the sergeant had given him would cover it. They’d figured that, without sex involved, a thirty-minute legit massage in this upmarket establishment could cost no more than $125, tip included. He only had some thirty dollars of his own money in his wallet.

  Two guys emerged from the doorway that led to the massage rooms, one a white guy, one an Asian, obviously regular customers. Both headed straight for the street door and barely acknowledged Gretchen, who said, “Thank you, gentlemen, see you next time!”

  The other waiting clients were ushered through the door to the massage rooms within twenty minutes, and yet another customer entered the massage parlor from the street. This one wore a Hugo Boss pin-striped suit and said, in an Eastern European accent, “Good even-ink, my darling” to Gretchen, who replied, “Right on time for your appointment. Go right in. Belinda is waiting for you.”

  Jetsam had been there exactly thirty-seven minutes when Gretchen said to him, “This way, sir. Your masseuse will be Ivana. She’s very well trained, and I’m sure she can help you.”

  Jetsam followed Gretchen along a narrow hallway with closed doors on each side, obviously the massage rooms. When they got to the last room on the left, Gretchen tapped on the door twice and an eye-catching brunette opened it. She was about Jetsam’s age and at least as tall, and she was wearing a powder-blue, gossamer-thin tee and very brief navy-blue shorts, with her hair tied back in a ponytail. Her breasts were larger than Gretchen’s, but they were real, and they bounced when she took a few steps toward him, hand extended.