Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  “What the fuck?” Hector said. “Bingo? With all the boring old Croats?”

  Dinko said, “They like me. They tell my mother that I’m a perfect gentleman and she should be proud.”

  “I’ll be go to hell,” Hector said, “You ain’t the guy I used to know.”

  Dinko looked at him. “I told you, that guy died.”

  They were driving for several minutes before Hector tossed his cigarette out the window and said, “Hey! Starbucks is on Western. Where you going?”

  “I got something very important to show you,” Dinko said.

  Hector looked around. “We’re headed for Point Fermin Park!”

  “Just relax for a couple more minutes,” Dinko said. “I gotta take a leak.”

  “You’re going to Point Fermin to take a leak?”

  “Be patient,” Dinko said. “You’ll be surprised.”

  “What kinda surprised?”

  Dinko said, “Don’t you think Pedro is beautiful after dark? That’s when I can sorta see it the way I once saw it in the daytime through somebody else’s eyes. If I could write music, I’d write something about the nights here, and I’d call it ‘Harbor Nocturne.’ I can almost hear the music in my ears. It sounds melancholy.”

  “If you say so,” Hector muttered. “I jist wanna know where we’re headed.”

  Point Fermin Park was deserted at that time of night, and when Dinko pulled Hector’s Mustang to the curb near the highest point of the cliffs, Hector said, “Hey, Babich, what the fuck’s going on?”

  “I told you I gotta take a leak,” Dinko said, removing the ignition key ring and getting out of the car. “Come join me.”

  “What? You think I’m gonna shake it off for you, or something?”

  Dinko walked around the car and jerked open the passenger door, saying, “Get out.”

  “I ain’t getting out,” Hector said. “I don’t gotta piss.”

  But Dinko grabbed Hector by his mullet and pulled him out onto the curbside grass.

  “Hey!” Hector yelled. “What the fuck!”

  Then he was looking at a gun muzzle, and Dinko said, “Do as you’re told and keep your voice down or I swear to God I’ll kill you on the spot.”

  “Dinko! What’s wrong with you?” Hector cried.

  “We’re gonna take a stroll,” Dinko said, “and whether or not I shoot you depends on your answer to one question. Now get up!”

  He dragged Hector to his feet and put the car keys in Hector’s pocket, pushing him in a southerly direction toward the Point Fermin cliffs. As they walked, Dinko prodded him in the back with the muzzle of the old U.S. Army–issue .45-caliber pistol that had belonged to his grandfather.

  Hector said, “What question? What’d I ever do to you? You and me been friends all our lives!”

  “Walk faster,” Dinko said.

  “Where you taking me, Dinko?” Hector said, but in a few moments he figured it out. They reached the low concrete barrier marking the proximity of the eroding and dangerous cliffs.

  “Climb over,” Dinko said.

  “Are you crazy?” He was answered by a fist to his belly that put him back on the ground, gulping and gasping for air.

  Then Dinko shoved the pistol in his belt and grabbed Hector by the shirt collar and the back of his belt and lifted him over the barrier. He leaped across behind him and said, “Get up and walk.”

  Hector was sobbing now and trying to catch his breath after the body blow, but he managed to say, “No, I won’t.”

  Dinko said, “Hector, I only wanna ask you one question, that’s all. Just one. If you answer it truthfully, I won’t shoot you. Now get up.”

  Hector knelt and then struggled to his feet and said, “I swear on my mother and father, I had nothing to do with the death of that Mexican dancer!”

  “Her name was Lita Medina,” Dinko said. “Why can’t you remember that?”

  Hector said, “I didn’t send Kim down here to Pedro! How could I? I didn’t know she was with you! Jesus Christ, Dinko!”

  “And yet the Korean found her,” Dinko said, sounding most reasonable with the pistol now pointed at Hector’s belly.

  “Had to be the bitches!” Hector said. “She probably phoned one of the other dancers and said where she was staying and that one told Kim! None of them bitches can keep their mouths shut!”

  “Turn around and look at Catalina,” Dinko said.

  “Please, Dinko!” Hector said, and then wept openly.

  “If you answer my one question, I promise not to shoot you,” Dinko said. “But you have to answer it truthfully.”

  “I’m the one that told the cops where to find Kim’s old lady in Koreatown!” Hector pleaded. “I helped flush him out!”

  “Turn around,” Dinko said. “I won’t say it again.”

  Hector turned slowly, hands at his sides, and continued weeping.

  Dinko said, “Walk forward a few steps and keep looking at Catalina. Lita loved it over there.”

  There was no mist to shroud the island, and there was no overcast. This was an uncommonly starry night, the sky looking like fireflies on black velvet, and a platinum quarter-moon hung low over the black island and painted the sea with a silver sheen. They were not alone on that cliff. A ground squirrel scampered from their path, and a lone white gull soared close, unfurling its feathers to hover in the wind over the human silhouettes, as though hoping the human beings would toss a food scrap into the air.

  Hector wobbled half a step forward and said, “Dinko! The cliff!”

  Dinko said, “Look up, Hector. A white bird watching us. Could it be the Holy Ghost?”

  “Please, Dinko!” Hector said, his tears gleaming in the starlight.

  Dinko said, “Are you ready for the question that’ll decide whether or not I shoot you? This is your road-to-Damascus moment, Hector. Are you prepared?”

  The ocean’s assault on the shoreline intensified, waves booming against the rocks below, and the wind hissed in their faces, blowing Hector’s mullet skyward like a black pennant fluttering. He managed to say between sobs, “Ask it.”

  Dinko Babich said, “Keep looking out at Lita’s island and tell me, did you really pay cash for that Mercedes SL like you told me on the first day I met her or did you lease the car?”

  Hector Cozzo stared in the direction of Santa Catalina Island, but he couldn’t see anything through his tears except a blur of the great dark ocean and the fearful heavens above it. At last he stopped sobbing long enough to say, “I leased it.”

  Dinko Babich said, “Hector, you finally told the truth about something. God will be so amazed.”

  Then Dinko stepped forward and, with the heel of his left hand, shoved his former friend over the crumbling edge of the Point Fermin cliffs.

  Hector Cozzo screamed all the way down to the rocks below, and Dinko Babich whirled and leaped over the barrier and ran back across the park, still hearing the scream. But as he ran he realized he was hearing the feral South Shores peacock echoing the scream it heard from Hector Cozzo as he was plunging to his death.

  Dinko continued to hear it as he ran north, toward his car, not sure if it was the wandering peacock’s scream or his memory of Hector’s scream, and not even stopping to catch his breath until he’d run as fast as he could run for nearly two miles.

  The area patrol unit from Harbor Station made an early-morning check on the unlocked Mustang parked by Point Fermin Park, and when the cops got back to the station they reported it to the watch commander. And because the cliffs of Point Fermin were one of the three favorite suicide locations in southern California, an airship was requested to do a flyover of the shoreline after daybreak. The observer in the police helicopter spotted the shattered body of Hector Cozzo at 9:30 that morning.

  There was some press coverage of the recovery, but not much. Nobody from the press connected the deceased to the violent events two months earlier. It was an ordinary suicide from a place where there had been others. But a detective at Harbor Stat
ion recognized the name Hector Cozzo as belonging to the man Hollywood detective Albino Villaseñor had interrogated on the day of the church murder. The Harbor detective phoned Hollywood Station to chat with Bino about the Point Fermin suicide.

  He said, “I suppose Cozzo coulda been despondent about his connection to all the bad shit that came down from that Hollywood nightclub, and finally just got juiced and spiraled out from a guilty conscience.”

  “Maybe so,” Bino responded.

  Then the Harbor detective said, “You don’t suppose this could be anything but a suicide, do you?”

  Bino Villaseñor hesitated for a few beats before saying, “All the bad guys connected to the case are dead. The murders are cleared. Hector Cozzo’s death has to be just an ordinary suicide. Thanks for the call.”

  The owner of the building in which Club Samara had operated decided to lease the nightclub to a sports bar franchise that expected to do good business at that location. Shanghai Massage closed down, and the building was sold to a real estate broker who only massaged the egos of Hollywood property owners forced to sell to the bottom-feeders sniffing out real estate steals during the lean years of the Great Recession.

  Hector Cozzo’s parents were extremely aloof and reticent after the death of their son. His funeral was restricted to family members, and his parents insisted to all that their son’s death was the result of a drunken fall, not a suicide. After finding the valise in his closet, the parents bought a new Cadillac Sport Wagon.

  It had taken several weeks for the gravestone to be finished and set in place at the cemetery. The lettering said:

  Lita Medina Flores

  Age nineteen years and four months

  She was loved

  The cemetery workers noticed that every weekend someone placed fresh sprigs of lilac by the stone.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  During roll call, the officers of Watch 5 at Hollywood Station could hardly keep their eyes open. They took it as just more political correctness being spoon-fed to them by the geeks at West Bureau. As usual, it involved the care and handling of minority citizens in the ethnic melting pot of Los Angeles, and the need to be ever vigilant about avoiding even the semblance of racial profiling.

  After Sergeant Murillo finished droning on with the material he was required to read, he brought an LAPD internal discipline matter to their attention, and this perked up the midwatch considerably. It involved a complaint by an African-American streetwalking hooker in Central Division who had alleged that she’d traded sexual groping for the freedom to ply her trade untroubled by cruising patrol units.

  She named four officers in her complaint: two were white, one was Hispanic, and one was Asian. The first three admitted only to watching the hooker expose her breasts for them, but they denied that any touching had taken place and accepted a penalty of a short suspension with the attendant loss of pay. The Asian cop proclaimed his complete innocence and demanded a Board of Rights hearing.

  What got the incident repeated at roll calls all over the city was that when the hooker was sworn and gave her testimony at the trial board, the Department advocate, in trying to prove that sexual groping had taken place, asked her if there was something unusual about the officer that could be proven if he submitted to an unclothed examination.

  The hooker said, “Oh yeah. I seen bigger pee-nile objects on a doodlebug.”

  When the midwatch stopped their hooting and chortling, Flotsam said, “Sarge, the moral of this story is that no Asian copper should ever demand a trial board if his pee-nile object is involved.”

  Mel Yarashi stood and yelled to the sergeant, “That is, without a doubt, the most scurrilous and despicable and absolutely false racial stereotyping I have ever heard! I demand that you cut paper on this snarky surf goon!”

  Hollywood Nate was without a partner that night while Britney Small was taking a day off. They were so shorthanded on Watch 5 that there was nobody to assign with Nate, so Sergeant Murillo asked if he’d help out at the front desk. Nothing much happened of interest other than when a shirtless young man entered the lobby with his hands cuffed behind him and asked Nate if he could help with “an alternative lifestyle problem.” It seemed that the young man and his love partner, who was pacing nervously outside the station, had lost their handcuff key. Nate unlocked the cuffs and sent him on his way with an admonition that a handcuff key should always be kept bedside, next to the handcuffs and condoms.

  Before making his exit the young man said, “Thank you, Officer. This has been just so embarrassing!”

  Nate said, “Think nothing of it. This is just so Hollywood.”

  Hollywood Nate got bored around midnight and asked Sergeant Murillo if he’d like to take a ride with him and grab a burger. They went to Hamburger Hamlet, and after they’d finished their meal, Sergeant Murillo asked Nate to drive along Hollywood Boulevard so he could see what was being done to curtail the panhandling on the Walk of Fame. And it was near Grauman’s Chinese Theatre that they spotted the surfer cops jacking up four drunken panhandlers, who were standing in a row facing the street.

  Sergeant Murillo said, “Pull over, Nate, and wait for me. I’d like to see my beach boys in action.”

  “They work in mysterious ways,” Nate warned.

  The midwatch supervisor got out of the car and made his way through a flock of tourists, approaching unseen by the surfer cops, both of whom had their backs to him and were shaking their heads in frustration. When he got close enough, he watched one of the transients contemplate a question from Jetsam, while Flotsam seemed to be trying to draw out an answer with wild hand waving. The transient suddenly displayed a toothless grin and gave an answer.

  Sergeant Murillo returned to the radio car at the curb without having been noticed by the cops or the panhandlers.

  When he got in, he said, “Okay, back to the barn.”

  “What were they doing?” Nate asked.

  “You got me,” the sergeant said. “It seemed like an audition or something.”

  “An audition?” Hollywood Nate said. “I’m the only guy at Hollywood Station who goes to auditions.”

  His sergeant said, “I didn’t hear the question from our guys, but only one of the derelicts answered it.”

  Nate said, “So what was the answer?”

  Sergeant Murillo said, “It was Sesame Street nonsense. Something about the good ship Lollipop. What’s up with that?”

  Nate pointed toward the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre forecourt, jammed with superheroes and stargazers, and tourists surrounding Marilyn Monroe, who displayed her porcelain veneers while cameras flashed.

  “Sarge,” said Hollywood Nate, “the Oracle always told us that doing good police work was the most fun we’d ever have in our entire lives. But he never said that doing police work in Hollywood, California, was a job for grown-ups, now did he?”