Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  There were two reasons to be sad at roll call that day. Of course, the first was that Chester Toles had unceremoniously retired. Regardless of how often they’d bitched about him kissing off calls, along with anything that might require tedious paperwork, now that he was gone forever, it almost felt like a death in the ranks.

  The thumping of the baby killer was the talk of the station, and it triggered much speculation as to which version was closest to the truth, the arrestee’s or Chester’s. Most of the experienced coppers on Watch 5 figured that there was some truth in both versions. What everyone really liked, and what made them proud of the old Unicorn, was the way he’d told the FID investigator to stuff it and had walked out of the interview room and into the civilian world to enjoy the pension he’d earned.

  Sergeant Murillo suggested at roll call that Watch 5 should wait a couple of months until the FID investigation had chilled, and then organize a retirement party for Chester Toles. Like most street cops, something in their natures made them admire Chester for doing what they’d all fantasized about doing at various times in their careers, for lesser reasons than Chester had that day. The Unicorn’s partner and frequent critic, Fran Famosa, said she’d take the responsibility of organizing the party as soon as Sergeant Murillo thought the time was right.

  And then came the second part of the sad roll call. Velma Longstreet, a former Watch 5 copper who’d transferred downtown to Burglary Special Section after being appointed as a detective, had shot herself at a Venice Beach condo she shared with her fiancé, a detective from Major Crimes Division. There was nothing like a cop suicide to silence a raucous roll call or make an already somber roll call more grave. And, of course, there was the inevitable message from West Bureau about suicide signs that should be watched for, and encouragement for all to schedule a confidential appointment with a Department psychologist at Behavioral Science Services at the first sign of unusual depression, either in themselves or in a partner.

  It wasn’t just that a cop suicide brought forth sadness; it also instilled fear, because every man and woman in the room knew that the national police officer suicide rate was sometimes five times the rate of police officers being killed on duty. That many more murdered themselves than were murdered by others. Cops referred to the impulse toward self-destruction as “the Coppers’ Disease.” And for a moment at least, members of the midwatch looked at each other and wondered, Could anything ever make me do that? Could it ever happen to me?

  Sergeant Murillo didn’t have any jokes or stories for them to take to the streets, not on that evening. The only thing he said was that if anyone got a call or saw any unusual activity in east Hollywood at Shanghai Massage or Club Samara, they should report it to Detective Villaseñor. And then descriptions of Hector Cozzo and his red Mercedes SL were given to the watch, along with the caveat that he was not a suspect in the murder of the strip club dancer Soo Jeong but was a person of interest. Especially if he was accompanied by a big, middle-aged Korean whose name might be William Kim.

  “That last name narrows it down to half the Koreatown phone book,” Flotsam said. “In fact, the description fits one of the FID people that came out here to jack up Chester Toles. Maybe it’s him.”

  Mel Yarashi said to Flotsam, “The FID guy’s not Korean. He’s a Buddhahead like me, from Little Tokyo. His family’s owned a restaurant in J-Town for fifty years.”

  Flotsam said wearily, “Koreatown, Thai Town, J-Town, and Chinatown, which happens to be full of Vietnamese these days. What’s the difference, dude?”

  “Sergeant, I demand that you cut a face sheet on this round-eyed surfer scum for racial insensitivity!” Mel Yarashi cried out to Sergeant Murillo. “And I’ll go on a hunger strike if you refuse! Except for Bessie’s burritos. I gotta have them.”

  “Let’s go to work,” Sergeant Murillo said, at least able to send them to the streets with a semblance of a smile. They all touched the Oracle’s picture before leaving the room.

  That day of housecleaning turned into a very late spring cleaning, with every window in the house being washed inside and out, floors waxed, bathrooms scrubbed top to bottom, and even the organizing of pantry and refrigerator items.

  Dinko was exhausted by late afternoon, and so was his mother. Lita Medina, being only nineteen years and four months old, fared better, but she, too, was tired.

  Brigita said, “I’m too pooped to cook.”

  Dinko said, “I’m too tired to eat at the moment. Maybe after a shower I’ll revive.”

  “I can cook!” Lita volunteered. “Please?”

  “It’s okay with me, dear,” Brigita said.

  Dinko said, “What a day. I actually worked at cleaning the house, and my mother says she doesn’t wanna cook a meal. Something strange is happening around here. I think we’re bewitched.” And he looked at Lita Medina in such a way that his mother thought he might be right.

  “I’m gonna take a very long bath,” Brigita said.

  While she was soaking in the tub, Brigita Babich thought of a local Croatian girl who’d joined the LAPD several years earlier. When other Croatians would see her on the streets, they’d run right up to her and pinch her cheeks or touch her uniform and sing her praises. They were all that proud of her. Brigita used to have a fantasy that Dinko might someday marry a girl like that.

  Hector Cozzo always felt a slight tug of nostalgia that embarrassed him when he drove south on the Harbor Freeway, heading “back to town.” The remote, incestuous nature of Pedro was something all the old residents forever talked about, especially the Croats and Italians. It was still a small town where the white people knew one another. They all liked to say, “Pedro is full of inbreeding, which is why we’re so weird.”

  Hector understood that their working-class seaside “town” was not like any other on the California coast. The inhabitants were blue-collar right down to the soles of their sensible shoes. And though they bemoaned the changes that had brought a hundred halfway houses and sober living homes—more than anywhere else in Los Angeles—Pedro was still special to them. Even though now he knew he might see more Latinos than Anglos, still there was something that made members of the younger generation, like thirty-two-year-old Hector Cozzo, experience an occasional yearning to come home.

  As he reached the freeway’s end that afternoon, under a summer sky that was clear and dry over the harbor, he saw the countless containers stacked high on Front Street, near the train tracks that boxed everyone in during peak traffic hours. There was no beauty to any of that, but it spoke to him of hardworking people who’d stayed when the fishing business had faded and the big canneries had closed.

  He felt again the bittersweet pang of nostalgia, and an impulse to drive straight to his parents’ house and grovel sufficiently. He could ask them to let him move home for a few months, and let the cops deal with Markov and Kim. But by his very nature, he knew he was unable to reject the offer of so much money. When it came to big bank, he was in. All in. After he had the money, he could consider going home to lie low and endure the ear pounding he would get from his family about what a failure he was. They might sing a different tune if his pockets were full of dead presidents.

  When he got to the heart of San Pedro, he stopped by a popular waterfront restaurant to use the outdoor restroom beneath the eatery. Recreational fishermen parked their cars in the lot next door, and a sign inside the restroom said, in both English and Spanish, “Please don’t clean fish in the bathroom sink.” Someone had penciled next to it, “Where should we clean them, the toilet?”

  Uh-huh, Hector thought, I’m back home in Pedro. And for no other reason than a wish to assuage the nostalgia, he toured the area in his Mercedes SL, hoping to see someone from the old neighborhood, and to be remembered and admired.

  There was nobody out in front of the Italian American Club. No old men gassing about the good old days. Ditto for the Croatian Hall, but at least there was still the “God Bless Croatia” sign, which nobody had tagged as yet. There’
d been weddings there, he recalled, where six hundred guests had attended. He remembered the time when some incompetent Serbs had tried to set off a puny bomb there, but it had detonated while still in their car.

  Hector had always liked hearing stories from his father about how, in the old days, the longshoremen’s unwritten law said that if a container broke open, the dockworkers could help themselves to the contents. The containers full of toys somehow always managed to break open during the Christmas holidays. There was a reason why most longshoremen drove pickups back in the day.

  Pedro had been like a European town then, but just before he was born, it stopped being a white workingman’s paradise. By the time he was in his junior year of high school, masses of Latinos and blacks walked east after school, and white kids like Hector Cozzo walked west to the hills. Pacific Avenue was the dividing line.

  Hector cruised his Mercedes past the old YMCA by Harbor View Park. Now it housed four floors of resident patients, many of who wore a key hanging from a shoestring around their neck. He recalled one of the loons that everyone called “General MacArthur,” who would march about the nearby streets wearing an army surplus uniform, chewing on an unlit corncob pipe, debating an imaginary President Truman, and periodically shouting, “Old soldiers never die!”

  Another of the crazies was called “the mayor of San Pedro.” One day he’d wear a gray suit and carry a briefcase. The next day it’d be a brown suit, but he’d be shoeless. The next day he’d wear a suit and necktie, but no shirt under the tie.

  The fruit loop Hector remembered most clearly was the one they called Julius Caesar, who wore a red cape with a Burger King crown. He’d parade up and down the promenade beside Ports O’ Call on his way to and from the Cruise Terminal, telling all to beware the ides of March. People using the Red Car line would give him pocket change, and kids riding by on the bike path would try to steal his crown.

  Hector’s best boyhood memories were of Sunken City, at the southern tip of San Pedro, a strange and eerie place where in 1929, for inexplicable reasons, the oceanfront residential properties and the land beneath them started to slip into the sea at the incredible rate of almost one foot per day. Soon the houses were gone and the land was a litter of uprooted trees and broken sidewalks, with streets that went nowhere—a mayhem of junk and debris.

  Over the course of Hector’s life, graffiti artists had taken over Sunken City and painted almost everything they found down there. Despite the “No Trespassing” signs and the dangerous footing, young daredevils like Hector Cozzo would squeeze through holes in the fence with their girlfriends. Sunken City turned out to be a perfect place to drink and smoke dope and to look around at a vanished neighborhood and realize that nothing is forever, and you can’t fuck with Mother Nature, who is one scary bitch that can sweep you away with the tides. It was there that a girl two years older than Hector, from one of the most established Italian families, had popped his cherry. He wondered whatever happened to her. How he wished she could see him now, cruising Pedro in his red SL.

  Hector looked at his watch and decided it was late enough to do what he’d come down there to do. He drove to the family home of Dinko Babich, the big, comfortable house he’d envied as a child, where only three people had lived. He recalled that he was never in the house for long before Mrs. Babich would give him something to eat and ask why she never saw him at Mass.

  He parked a block away, between two other houses on the hill where he didn’t think anyone would get nosy and question why he was parked there. After all, he wasn’t some “onionhead,” which was what he always called Latinos with shaved heads. And how many burglars drove cars like his?

  He rolled the windows down and lit a cigarette and waited for Dinko’s car to either leave the garage or return home. He remembered that Dinko was on suspension, and he felt certain that they would be at home in the late afternoon. He also thought that if they were at home, they might leave to go to the market or maybe to get some takeout food. Or maybe Dinko and the girl would head out to a motel so they could do what Hector knew they could not do in the traditional home of Mrs. Babich. And what else could Dinko want from a Mexican whore anyway?

  He tried not to consider that he could be wrong about where she was. Lita Medina could’ve taken a taxi or a bus to Union Station, in downtown L.A., and by now be on her way to anywhere in the country. Or maybe she could’ve met some bucks-up player in the few days she’d worked at Club Samara, some guy she was lap-dancing. She was certainly hot-looking enough to have affected some rich guy the way she’d affected Dinko Babich, so maybe she was ensconced in some six-million-dollar crib in the Hollywood Hills without a thought in her head about Daisy’s murder. He had to admit that he could be wrong, but he did not think he was. He believed that Lita Medina was in that house, and if he was patient and didn’t spook anybody, she’d be worth fifty thousand to him.

  He passed the time by thinking that he’d make Markov pay all of it upon receipt of the street address. Hector once again tried to assure himself that Kim would simply give her a few grand and that she’d be glad to get out of town with more money than she’d ever seen in her short but miserable life of poverty and whoring.

  The housecleaning and the long bath had made Brigita Babich very sleepy, and she decided to take a twenty-minute nap, which ended up lasting two hours. She had vague and mixed-up dreams of her youth, about hula hoops and lava lamps and sock hops. When she awoke, she could almost remember dancing slow and sexy to “Donna,” not with the man she’d eventually married but with an Italian boy named Tommy DeFranco, who’d been the dreamiest boy in their class. It occurred to her that she wore her hair in the same style at age sixty-three that she had at age fifteen, in short layers with curling-iron waves and teased up tall. The difference was that now it had to be dyed.

  Then she smelled the aroma from the kitchen, and it didn’t smell like anything she was used to cooking. She threw on a sweatshirt, loose-fitting long pants, and bedroom slippers. After running a comb through her hair, she went out to the kitchen.

  Dinko, who was only a fair cook but could eat huge portions despite his lanky build, was watching Lita at the stovetop sautéing chicken cutlets.

  When Brigita appeared in the doorway, Dinko said to his mother, “Lita’s making something she says is a chipotle chicken sandwich from whatever she found in our fridge and the cupboard. I offered to go out and buy some tortillas or whatever she was used to cooking with, but she said she’d work with what we have.”

  “It smells divine,” Brigita said. “What’s in it?”

  Lita smiled. “Oh, is hard for me to say in English. I learn from a family in Guanajuato where I work, but they are Greek people who love Mexican cooking. I do not have the Greek bread, so I am making with the bread you have here. Is Italian bread, no?”

  “French,” Dinko said, “from a local bakery.” To his mother he said, “I can tell you, some of the ingredients are chipotle peppers, but I don’t know how you happened to have those, and yogurt and peanut butter. Yes, peanut butter! And oregano and garlic powder. Then she shredded lettuce and grated cheddar cheese, and sautéed onion and red peppers, and now she’s sautéing the chicken. It’s all gonna be stuffed into the French baguettes, and I’m salivating and dying to bite into one of her chipotle sandwiches.”

  Brigita took a bottle of California pinot grigio from her small wine fridge and poured three glasses for the table. Then she sat and said, “Okay, I’m game for anything.”

  And it turned out that she loved their supper almost as much as Dinko did. Lita dropped her gaze every time they praised her culinary talents, which they did often during the meal, and finally she said to Dinko, “Is nothing like what your mamá can do. I wish to learn much from your mamá.”

  Perhaps it was her growing admiration for this young girl from God knows where, or perhaps it was the bolstering that her courage got from a tasty meal and a second glass of wine; in any case, Brigita said to them, “All right, you two. I think you’r
e pretty serious about each other, aren’t you?”

  “As tumors and taxes,” Dinko said.

  “But so soon!” Brigita said.

  Lita said nothing and only stared at the glass of wine on the table in front of her.

  “What do you wanna do about it?” Brigita asked.

  “What you would expect two people who love each other to do,” her son said. “We wanna get married.”

  “Is that true, Lita?” Brigita asked. “Do you wish to marry my son?”

  Lita Medina looked up at Brigita Babich and then at Dinko and said, “I do love him very much. He is very kind.”

  “I’m gonna be a different longshoreman when I go back to the job,” Dinko promised his mother. “I’m gonna work all the hours I can and do what you’ve wanted me to do for years. I’m gonna grow up.” He looked at Lita. “This girl did it to me. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t.”

  “Lita,” Brigita said, “you came to America to earn money for your sick mother and brothers in Mexico. Has that plan changed?”

  Lita looked at Dinko, who answered for her: “I’m gonna turn into one of the hungrys of the Dispatch Hall. I can easily earn enough to send a few thousand a month to her mother. That’s a lotta money in Mexico, and it should help. I’m gonna work enough to earn a hundred grand a year.”

  Lita said apologetically to Brigita, “I tell Dinko my family is not his . . . what is the word, Dinko?”

  “Responsibility.”

  “Correct,” Lita said. “Is not his responsibility. Is for me to take care of my family. Is not for Dinko.”

  “I can help, though,” Dinko said. “I wanna do it, and I will.”

  “That’s fine, son,” Brigita said, “but wouldn’t you like to continue to learn more about each other first? My old family ways are not ironclad. I know I’ve gotta change with the times. If you and Lita wanna live here like . . . well, like husband and wife, that’s okay with me. We can get rid of the double bed in your room and buy a king-size, if it would be more comfortable for the two of you. Maybe in a few months you’ll both know better whether or not you’re ready to commit to each other for life.” She looked at Lita. “What do you say about all this, sweetheart?”