Hollywood Station (2006)

by Wambaugh, Joseph - Hollywood Station 01

  Then Mag saw it clearly and yelled, "GRENADE! CLEAR!" And nobody knew what was going on or what the hell to do except instinctively to draw their guns and crouch.

  Fausto did not clear out. Nor did the others. He shouldered past Benny, plunged into the back room, and saw Mag standing ten feet from the taped and hysterical Sammy Tanampai. And Fausto saw the grenade.

  Sammy's face was bloody where he'd snagged the tape free on a nail head, and he tried to say something with a crumpled wad of tape stuck to the corner of his mouth. He gagged and said, "I can't . . . I can't . . ."

  Fausto said to Mag, "GET OUT!"

  But the littlest cop ignored him and tiptoed across the room as though motion would set it off. And she reached carefully for it.

  Fausto leaped forward after Sammy unleashed the most despairing terrifying wail that Mag had ever heard in her life when his thigh muscles just surrendered. Mag's fingers were inches from the grenade when it dropped to the floor beneath her and the spoon flew across the room.

  "CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR!" Fausto yelled to all the cops in the store, but Mag picked up the grenade first and lobbed it into the far corner behind a file cabinet.

  Instantly, Fausto grabbed Mag Takara by the back of her Sam Browne and Sammy Tanampai by his shirt collar and lifted them both off the floor, lunging backward until they were out of the little room and into the main store, where all six cops and one shopkeeper pressed to the floor and waited in terror for the explosion.

  Which didn't come. The hand grenade was a dummy.

  No fewer than thirty-five LAPD employees were to converge on that store and the streets around it that night: detectives, criminalists, explosives experts, patrol supervisors, even the patrol captain. Witnesses were interviewed, lights were set up, and the area for two blocks in all directions was searched by cops with flashlights.

  They found nothing of evidentiary value, and a detective from the robbery team who had been called in from home interviewed Sammy Tanampai in the ER at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. The victim told the detective that the male robber had briefly smoked a cigarette but none had been found by detectives at the scene.

  Sammy grew lethargic because the injection they had given him was making him sleepy, but he said to the detective, "I don't know how they knew about the diamonds. The diamonds arrived at ten o'clock this morning and we were going to show them tomorrow to a client from San Francisco who requested certain kinds of pieces."

  "What kind of client is he?" the detective asked.

  "My uncle has dealt with him for years. He is very wealthy. He is not a thief."

  "About the blond woman who you think was Russian, tell me more."

  "I think they were both Russians," Sammy said. "There are lots of Russians around Hollywood."

  "Yes, but the woman. Was she attractive?"

  "Perhaps so. I don't know."

  "Anything out of the ordinary?"

  "Big breasts," Sammy said, opening and closing his aching jaw and touching the wounded flesh around his mouth, his eyelids drooping.

  "Have you ever gone to any of the nightclubs around here?" the detective asked. "Several of them are Russian owned and operated."

  "No. I am married. I have two children."

  "Anything else that you remember about either of them?"

  "She made a joke about keeping my knees together. She said that she never did. I was thinking of my children then and how I would never see them again. And she made that joke. I hope you get to shoot them both," Sammy said, tears welling.

  After all the cops who'd been in the jewelry store were interviewed back at the station, Hollywood Nate said to his young partner, "Some gag, huh, Wesley? Next time I work on a show, I'm gonna tell the prop man about this. A dummy grenade. Only in Hollywood."

  Wesley Drubb had been very quiet for hours since their trauma in the jewelry store. He had answered questions from detectives as well as he could, but there really wasn't anything important to say. He answered Nate with, "Yeah, the joke was on us."

  What young Wesley Drubb wanted to say was, I could have died tonight. I could have . . . been . . . killed tonight! If the grenade had been real.

  It was very strange, very eerie, to contemplate his own violent death. Wesley Drubb had never done that before. He wanted to talk to somebody about it but there was no one. He couldn't talk about it to his older partner, Nate Weiss. Couldn't explain to a veteran officer like Nate that he'd left USC for this, where he'd been on the sailing team and was dating one of the hottest of the famed USC song girls. He'd left it because of those inexplicable emotions he felt after he'd reached his twenty-first birthday.

  Wesley had grown sick of college life, sick of being the son of Franklin Drubb, sick of living on Fraternity Row, sick of living in his parents' big house in Pacific Palisades during school holidays. He'd felt like a man in prison and he'd wanted to break out. LAPD was a breakout without question. And he'd completed his eighteen months of probation and was here, a brand-new Hollywood Division officer.

  Wesley's parents had been shocked, his fraternity brothers, sailing teammates, and especially his girlfriend, who was now dating a varsity wide receiver-everyone who knew him was shocked. But he hadn't been sorry so far. He'd thought he'd probably do it for a couple of years, not for a career, for the kind of experience that would set him apart from his father and his older brother and every other goddamn broker in the real-estate firm owned by Lawford and Drubb.

  He thought it would be like going into the military for a couple of years, but he wouldn't have to leave L. A. Like a form of combat that he could talk about to his family and friends years later, when he inevitably became a broker at Lawford and Drubb. He'd be a sort of combat veteran in their eyes, that was it.

  Yes, and it had all been going so well. Until tonight. Until that grenade hit the floor and he stared at it and that little officer Mag Takara picked it up with Fausto Gamboa roaring in his ears. That wasn't police work, was it? They never talked about things like that in the academy. A man with a hand grenade between his knees?

  He remembered a Bomb Squad expert lecturing them at the police academy about the horrific event of 1986 in North Hollywood when two LAPD officers were called in to defuse an explosive device in a residential garage, rigged by a murder suspect involved in a movie studio/ labor union dispute. They defused it but were unaware of a secondary device lying there by a copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook. The device went off.

  What Wesley remembered most vividly was not the description of the gruesome and terrible carnage and the overwhelming smell of blood, but that one of the surviving officers who had just gotten inside the house before the explosion was having recurring nightmares two decades later. He would waken with his pillow soaked with tears and his wife shaking him and saying, "This has got to stop!"

  For a while this evening, after he'd completed his brief statement, after he was sitting in the station quietly drinking coffee, Wesley Drubb could only think about how he'd felt trying to dig with his fingernails into the old wooden floor of that jewelry store. It had been an instinctive reaction. He had been reduced to his elemental animal core.

  And Wesley Drubb asked himself the most maddeningly complex, dizzying, profound, and unanswerable question he'd ever asked himself in his young life: How the fuck did I get here?

  When Fausto Gamboa got changed into civvies, he met Budgie on the way to the parking lot. They walked quietly to their cars, where they saw Mag Takara already getting into her personal car and driving away.

  Fausto said, "It used to make me crazy seeing that kid doing her nails during roll call. Like she was getting ready to go on a date."

  "I'll bet it won't annoy you anymore, will it?" Budgie said.

  "Not as much," Fausto Gamboa conceded.

  Chapter SIX

  THIS WAS SUPPOSED to be a routine interview of a missing juvenile, nothing more. Andi McCrea had been sitting in her little cubicle in the detective squad room staring at a computer screen, putting togeth
er reports to take to the DA's office in a case where a wife smacked her husband on the head with the side of a roofing hammer when, after drinking a six-pack of Scotch ale, he curled his lip and told her that the meat loaf she'd labored over "smelled like Gretchen's snatch."

  There were two things wrong with that: First, Gretchen was her twice-divorced, flirtatious younger sister, and second, he had a panic-stricken look on his face that denuded the feeble explanation when he quickly said, "Of course, I wouldn't know what Gretchen's . . ." Then he began again and said, "I was just trying for a Chris Rock kind of line but didn't make it, huh? The meat loaf is fine. It's fine, honey."

  She didn't say a word but walked to the back porch, where the roofer kept his tool belt, and returned with the hammer just as he was taking the first bite of meat loaf that smelled like Gretchen's snatch.

  Even though the wife had been booked for attempted murder, the guy only ended up with twenty-three stitches and a concussion. Andi figured that whichever deputy DA the case was taken to would reject it as a felony and refer it to the city attorney's office for a misdemeanor filing, which was fine with her. The hammer victim reminded her of her ex-husband, Jason, now retired from LAPD and living in Idaho near lots of other coppers who had fled to the wilderness locales. Places where local cops only write on their arrest reports under race of suspects either "white" or "landscaper."

  Jason had been one of those whom several other women officers had sampled, the kind they called "Twinkies," guys who aren't good for you but you have to have one. Andi had been young then, and she paid the price during a five-year marriage that brought her nothing good except Max.

  Her only child, Sergeant Max Edward McCrea, was serving with the U. S. Army in Afghanistan, his second deployment, the first having been in Iraq at a time when Andi was hardly ever able to sleep more than a few hours before waking with night sweats. It was better now that he was in Afghanistan. A little better. Eighteen years old, just out of high school, he had gotten the itch, and there was nothing she could do to keep him from signing that enlistment contract. Nothing that her ex-husband could do either, when for once Jason had stepped up and acted like a father. Max had said he was going into the army with two other teammates from his varsity football team, and that was it. Iraq for him, tension headaches for her, lying awake in her two-story house in Van Nuys.

  After getting her case file in order, Andi was about to get a cup of coffee, when one of the Watch 2 patrol officers approached her cubicle and said, "Detective, could you talk to a fourteen-year-old runaway for us? We got a call to the Lucky Strike Lanes, where he was bowling with a forty-year-old guy who started slapping him around. He tells us he was molested by the guy, but the guy won't talk at all. We got him in a holding tank."

  "You need the sex crimes detail," Andi said.

  "I know, but they're not here and I think the kid wants to talk but only to a woman. Says the things he's got to say are too embarrassing to tell a man. I think he needs a mommy."

  "Who doesn't?" Andi sighed. "Okay, put him in the interview room and I'll be right there."

  Five minutes later, after drinking her coffee, and after getting the boy a soft drink and advising him for the second time of his rights, she nodded to the uniformed officer that he could leave.

  Aaron Billings was delicate, almost pretty, with dark ringlets, wide-set expressive eyes, and a mature, lingering gaze that she wouldn't have expected. He looked of mixed race, maybe a quarter African American, but she couldn't be sure. He had a brilliant smile.

  "Do you understand why the officers arrested you and your companion?" she asked.

  "Oh, sure," he said. "Mel was hitting me. Everyone saw him. We were right there in the bowling alley. I'm sick of it, so when they asked for our ID I told them I was a runaway. I'm sure my mom's made a report. Well, I think she would."

  "Where're you from?"

  "Reno, Nevada."

  "How long have you been gone?"

  "Three weeks."

  "Did you run away with Mel?" Andi asked.

  "No, but I met him the next day when I was hitchhiking. I was sick of my mother. She was always bringing men home, and my sister and me would see them having sex. My sister is ten."

  "You told the officer that Mel molested you, is that right?"

  "Yes, lots of times."

  "Tell me what happened from when you first met."

  "Okay," the kid said, and he took a long drink from the soda can. "First, he took me to a motel and we had sex. I didn't want to but he made me. Then he gave me ten dollars. Then we went to the movies. Then we had Chinese food at a restaurant. Then we decided to drive to Hollywood and maybe see movie stars. Then Mel bought vodka and orange juice and we got drunk. Then we drove to Fresno and parked at a rest stop and slept. Then we woke up early. Then we killed two people and took their money. Then we went to the movies again. Then we drove to Bakersfield. Then -"

  "Wait a minute!" Andi said. "Let's go back to the rest stop!"

  Twenty minutes later Andi was on the phone to the police in Fresno, and after a conversation with a detective, she learned that yes, a middle-aged couple had been shot and killed where they'd obviously been catching a few hours' sleep en route from Kansas to a California vacation. And yes, the case was open with no suspects and no evidence other than the .32 caliber slugs taken from the skulls of both victims at the postmortem.

  The detective said, "We just don't have any leads."

  Andi said, "You do now."

  When Andi's supervisor, D3 Rhonda Jenkins, came in late that afternoon after a long day in court testifying in a three-year-old murder case, she said, "My day sucked. How was yours?"

  "Tried to keep busy on a typical May afternoon in Hollywood, USA."

  "Yeah? What'd you do?" Rhonda asked, just making conversation as she slipped off her low-heeled pumps and massaged her aching feet.

  Deadpan, Andi said, "First I made calls on two reports from last night. Then I reread the case file on the pizza man shooting. Then I interviewed a banger down at Parker Center. Then I had some coffee. Then I cleared a double homicide in Fresno. Then I wrote a letter to Max. Then -"

  "Whoa!" Rhonda said. "Go back to the double homicide in Fresno!"

  "That bitch! You couldn't find her heart with a darkfield microscope," Jetsam complained to his partner.

  Flotsam, who was attending community college during the day, said, "Dude, you are simply another victim of the incestuous and intertwined and atavistic relationships of the law-enforcement community."

  Jetsam gaped at Flotsam, who was driving up into the Hollywood Hills, and said, "Just shove those college-boy words, why don't you."

  "Okay, to be honest," said Flotsam, "from that photo you showed me, she was spherical, dude. The woman looked to me like a fucking Teletubby. You were blinded by the humongous mammary glands is all. There was no real melding of the hearts and minds."

  "Melding of the . . ." Jetsam looked at his partner in disbelief and said, "Bro, the bitch's lawyer wants everything, including my fucking fish tank! With the only two turtles I got left! And guess what else? The federal consent decree ain't gonna end on schedule because that asshole of a federal judge says we're not ready. It's all political bullshit."

  "Don't tell me that," Flotsam said. "I was all ready to yell out at roll call, `Free at last, free at last, Lord God Awmighty, free at last!'"

  "I'm outrageously pissed off at our new mayor," Jetsam said, "turning the police commission into an ACLU substation. And I'm pissed off at my ex-wife's lawyer, who only wants me to have what I can make recycling aluminum cans. And I'm pissed off living in an apartment with lunging fungus so aggressive it wants to tackle you like a linebacker. And I'm pissed off at my former back-stabbing girlfriend. And I'm pissed off at the Northeast detective who's boning her now. So all in all, I feel like shooting somebody."

  And, as it happened, he would.

  The PSR radio voice alerted all units on the frequency to a code 37, meaning a stolen vehicle, as we
ll as a police pursuit in progress of said vehicle.

  Ever the pessimist, Jetsam said, "Devonshire Division. He'll never come this far south."

  The more optimistic Flotsam said, "You never know. We can dream."

  Jetsam said, "Since our politician chief won't let us pursue unless the driver's considered reckless, do you suppose this fucking maniac has crossed the reckless-driving threshold yet? Or does he have to run a cop off the road first?"

  They listened to the pursuit on simulcast as it crossed freeways and surface streets in the San Fernando Valley, heading in the general direction of North Hollywood. And within a few minutes it was in North Hollywood and heading for the Hollywood Freeway.

  "Watch them turn north again," Jetsam said.

  But the pursuit did not. The stolen car, a new Toyota 4Runner, turned south on the Hollywood Freeway, and Jetsam said, "That one has a pretty hot six under the hood from what I hear. Bet he'll double-back now. Probably some homie. He'll double-back, get near his 'hood, dump the car, and run for it."

  But the pursuit left the Hollywood Freeway and turned east on the Ventura Freeway and then south on Lankershim Boulevard. And now the surfer team looked at each other and Jetsam said, "Holy shit. Let's go!"

  And they did. Flotsam stepped on it and headed north on the Hollywood Freeway past Universal City and turned off in the vicinity of the Lakeside Country Club, where by now a dozen LAPD and CHP units were involved, as well as a television news helicopter, but no LAPD airship.

  And it was here that the driver dumped the car on a residential street near the country club, and he was into a yard, over a fence into another yard, onto the golf course, running across fairways, and then back into a North Hollywood residential street where nearly twenty cops were out on foot, half of them armed with shotguns.

  Even though a North Hollywood Division sergeant was at the abandoned stolen car, trying to inform the communications operator that there was sufficient help at the scene, cars kept coming, as happens during a long pursuit like this. Soon there were L. A. Sheriff's Department units as well as more CHP and LAPD cars, with the TV helicopter hovering and lighting up the running cops below.