Hollywood Station (2006)

by Wambaugh, Joseph - Hollywood Station 01

  "You've got the biggest vice unit in the city," the Oracle said. "You've got half a dozen women. Why don't you use them?"

  "Only two work as undercover operators and they're both off sick," the vice sergeant said. "This isn't going to be a real task force. No motor cops as chase units. No big deal. We only wanna run a couple operators and cover units for a few hours."

  "Why can't you put your uniformed women on it?"

  "We have three. One's on vacation, one's on light duty, one's pregnant."

  "Why not use her?" the Oracle said. "It's a known fact that there's a whole lotta tricks out there who prefer pregnant hookers. Something about a mommy fixation. I guess they want to be spanked."

  "She's not pregnant enough to notice, but she's throwing up like our office is a trawler in a perfect storm. I ask her to walk the boulevard, she'll start blowing chunks on my shoes."

  "Aw shit," the Oracle said. "How're we supposed to police a city when we spend half the time policing ourselves and proving in writing that we did it?"

  "I don't answer trick questions," the vice sergeant said. "How about it? Just for one night."

  When the Oracle asked Budgie Polk and Mag Takara if they'd like to be boulevard street whores on Saturday night, they said okay. He only got an argument from Budgie's partner, Fausto Gamboa.

  Fausto walked into the office, where three supervisors were doing paperwork, and being one of the few patrol officers at Hollywood Station old enough to call the sixty-eight-year-old sergeant by his given name, he said to the Oracle, "I don't like it, Merv."

  "What don't you like, Fausto?" the Oracle asked, knowing the answer.

  "Budgie's got a baby at home."

  "So what's that got to do with it?"

  "Sometimes she lactates. And it's painful."

  "She'll deal with it, Fausto. She's a cop," the Oracle said, while the other sergeants pretended to not be listening.

  "What if she gets herself hurt? Who's gonna feed her baby?"

  "The cover teams won't let her get hurt. And babies don't have to have mother's milk."

  "Aw shit," Fausto said, echoing the Oracle's sentiments about the whole deal.

  After he'd gone the Oracle said to the other two sergeants, "Sometimes my ideas work too well. Fausto's not only gotten out of his funk, I think he's about to adopt Budgie Polk. Her kid'll probably be calling him Grandpa Fausto in a couple years."

  Cosmo Betrossian was a whole lot unhappier than Fausto Gamboa. He had diamonds to deliver to Dmitri at the Gulag soon and he had to kill that miserable addict Farley Ramsdale and his stupid girlfriend, Olive, sometime before then. Farley's claim that he had someone watching Cosmo and Ilya's apartment was so ridiculous Cosmo hadn't given it a thought. And as to Farley's other claim, that he had a letter that would be delivered to the police if something happened to him, well, the addict had seen too many movies. Even if there was a letter, let the police try to prove the truth of it without the writer and his girlfriend alive to attest to its veracity.

  Cosmo was going to make them disappear, and he would have liked to talk to Dmitri about that. Dmitri would have some good ideas about how to make someone vanish, but if Dmitri learned about the tweakers, he might see them as potential trouble and back out of the arrangement. No, Cosmo would have to deal with them with only Ilya to help. And it would not be easy. Other than a gang rival back in Armenia whom he had shot to death when he was a kid of eighteen, Cosmo had never killed anyone. Here in America he had never even committed violent crime until the jewelry store robbery. His criminal life had been relegated to the smuggling of drugs, which he did not use himself, fencing stolen property, and in recent years, identity theft, which he'd learned from a Gypsy.

  He'd met the Gypsy in a nightclub on the Sunset Strip. Cosmo had been frequenting the Strip then, doing low-level cocaine sales. But the Gypsy introduced him to a new world. He showed Cosmo how easy it was to walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles, armed with a bit of personal data stolen by common mail thieves like Farley Ramsdale, and tell a DMV employee that he needed a new driver's license because he'd changed his address and misplaced his license. At first the DMV employees would ask for a Social Security number but seldom if ever bothered to pull up the photo of the legitimate license holder to compare it with the face before them. They'd just take a new photo and change the address to the location where the license would be sent, and business would be concluded.

  Cosmo and the Gypsy normally used an address of a house or apartment in their neighborhood where the occupant worked during the day. And either Cosmo or the Gypsy would check their neighbor's mailbox every day until the driver's license arrived. Later, when the DMV started asking for a birth certificate, Cosmo learned that with the information from the stolen mail, it was a simple matter for the Gypsy to make a credible birth certificate that would satisfy most DMV employees.

  Cosmo and the Gypsy got so lazy that instead of going to the DMV, they started using a CD template that was making the rounds among all the identity thieves. It showed how to make driver's licenses, Social Security cards, auto insurance certificates, and other documents.

  Stealing credit-card numbers became a bonanza. They could buy just about anything. They could even buy automobiles, and since car dealers were all covered by insurance, they were the easiest. By the time the legitimate card owners got their statements, Cosmo and the Gypsy would be off that card and on to another. Sometimes the credit-card statements went to bogus addresses supplied by Cosmo and the Gypsy, so legitimate card owners wouldn't discover the account was delinquent until they tried to buy something of value.

  The Gypsy had an interior decorator working with them at that time. She said it was amazing how many people on the affluent west side of town kept their old cards, even ATM cards, thrown into a drawer somewhere. Nobody seemed to care much. The credit-card company only took a hit if the card was presented in person by the thief. If the business was done on the Internet or by phone, the credit-card company was not liable. Banks and credit-card companies had long delays in catching up, and identity thefts were so paper intensive the police were overwhelmed.

  For a while Cosmo and the Gypsy had gotten so successful they were hoping to deal with the Russians whose eastern European contacts hacked into U. S. banks and lending institutions for card numbers, then ordered high-quality embossing and encoding strips from China. As it was, they just did their business online in the cybercaf,s or by phone and ordered merchandise to be sent to addresses they'd cased. FedEx would drop the parcels on the porch while the resident was at work, and they would be picked up by Cosmo while the Gypsy waited in their car. The resident would be shocked when, after a few months of this, the police showed up at the home with a search warrant for all that stolen property.

  Then one day without warning the Gypsy and the interior decorator moved to New York without notifying Cosmo until they were there. And that was that. Cosmo continued limping through the world that the Gypsy had sailed through, and now Cosmo was dealing with tweaker mail thieves and doing cybercaf, networking as best he could. He had almost been arrested twice and was losing confidence now that everybody was doing identity theft.

  The big break had come in the batch of mail stolen by Farley Ramsdale, when he had found the letter about the diamonds, and Cosmo had committed his first violent crime in America. He was stunned to learn that he liked it. It had thrilled him, that feeling of power over the jewelry store proprietor. Seeing the fear in his eyes. Hearing him weep. Cosmo had had complete control over everything, including that man's life. The feeling was something he could never put into words, but he believed that Ilya felt some of it too. If another chance at a safe and profitable armed robbery came up, he knew he would take it.

  But of immediate concern to him was Farley Ramsdale and Olive. And Cosmo was very worried about Ilya as a partner in homicide. Could she do what it took, he wondered. He hadn't spoken with her about the two addicts, not since they had come to the apartment with their blackmail thre
at. Cosmo sensed that Ilya knew what had to be done but wanted him to deal with it alone. Well, it was not going to work that way. He couldn't do it alone. They wouldn't trust him. Ilya was a very smart Russian, and he needed a plan with her involved.

  Hollywood Nate Weiss and Wesley Drubb were having another one of those Hollywood nights, that is, a night of very strange calls. It always happened when there was a full moon over the boulevard and environs.

  Actually, the Oracle, who'd read a book or two in his long life, forewarned them all at roll call, saying, "Full moon. A Hollywood moon. This is a night when our citizens act out their lives of quiet desperation. Share your stories tomorrow night at roll call and we'll give the Quiet Desperation Award to the team with the most memorable story." Then he added, "Beware, beware! Their flashing eyes, their floating hair!"

  Nate's facial bruises from the fight with the veteran who wanted a ride were healing up well, and though he would never admit it to anyone, he was secretly wishing they'd given the psycho the goddamn ride he'd wanted. His black eye had actually cost him a job as an extra on a low-budget movie being shot in Westwood.

  Wesley was driving again, and with the Oracle going to bat for him, he hoped that there wouldn't be disciplinary action for letting their shop get stolen and trashed by the little homie who hadn't been arrested yet but whom detectives had identified. The Oracle had written in his report that Wesley's failure to shut off the engine and take the keys when he'd jumped out of the car was understandable given the extreme urgency of helping his partner subdue the very violent suspect.

  Hollywood Nate said that since Wesley had just finished his probation it wouldn't cost him his job, but Nate figured he'd be getting a few unpaid days off. "Forgiveness is given in church, in temple, and by the Oracle, but it ain't written into the federal consent decree or the philosophy of Internal Affairs," Nate warned young Wesley Drubb.

  Their first very strange call occurred early in the evening on Sycamore several blocks from the traffic on Melrose. It came from a ninety-five-year-old woman in a faded cotton dress, sitting in a rocker on her front porch, stroking a calico cat. She pointed out that the man who lived across the street in a white stucco cottage "hadn't been around for a few weeks."

  She was so old and shriveled that her parchment skin was nearly transparent and her colorless hair was thinned to wisps. Her frail legs were wrapped in elastic bandages, and though she was obviously a bit addled she could still stand erect, and she walked out onto the sidewalk unaided.

  She said, "He used to have a cup of tea and cookies with me. And now he doesn't come, but his cat does and I feed her every day."

  Hollywood Nate winked at Wesley and patted the old woman on the shoulder and said, "Well, don't you worry. We'll check it out and make sure he's okay and tell him to drop by and have some tea with you and give you his thanks for feeding his cat the past few weeks."

  "Thank you, Officer," she said and returned to her rocker.

  Hollywood Nate and Wesley strolled across the street and up onto the porch. The few feet of dirt between the house and sidewalk hadn't been tended in a long time but was too patchy and water-starved to have done more than spread a web of crabgrass across its length. There seemed to be several seedy and untended small houses along this block, so there was nothing unusual about this one.

  Hollywood Nate tapped on the door and when they received no answer said, "The guy might have gone out of town for the weekend. The old lady doesn't know a few weeks from a few days."

  Or a few years, as it turned out.

  When Wesley Drubb opened the letter slot to take a look, he said, "Better have a look at this, partner."

  Nate looked inside and saw mail piled up nearly to the mail slot itself. It looked to be mostly junk mail, and it completely covered the small hallway inside.

  "Let's try the back door," Nate said.

  It was unlocked. Nate figured to find the guy dead, but there was no telltale stench, none at all. They walked through a tiny kitchen and into the living room, and there he was, sitting in his recliner in an Aloha shirt and khaki pants.

  He was twice as shriveled as his former friend across the street. His eyes, or what was left of them, were open. He'd obviously been a bearded man, but the beard had fallen out onto his chest along with most of the hair on his head, and the rest clung in dried patches. Beside his chair was a folding TV tray, and on it was his remote control, a TV Guide, and two vials of heart medication.

  Wesley checked the jets on the kitchen range and tried light switches and the kitchen faucet, but all utilities had been turned off. On the kitchen table was an unused ticket to Hawaii, explaining the Aloha shirt. He'd been practicing.

  Nate bent over the TV Guide and checked the date. It was two years and three months old.

  Wesley asked Hollywood Nate if this could possibly be a crime scene because the dead man's left leg wasn't there.

  Nate looked in the corner behind the small sofa and there it was, lying right near the pet door where his cat could come and go at will. There was almost no dried flesh left on the foot, just tatters from his red sock hanging on bone. The leg had apparently fallen off.

  "Good thing he didn't have a dog," Nate said. "If grandma across the street had found this on her front porch, she might've had a heart attack of her own."

  "Should we call paramedics?" Wesley said.

  "No, just the coroner's crew. I'm pretty sure this man's dead," said Hollywood Nate.

  When they got back to the station at end-of-watch and everyone was comparing full-moon stories, they had to agree that the Quiet Desperation Award went to Mag Takara and Benny Brewster, hands down.

  It began when a homeowner living just west of Los Feliz Boulevard picked up the phone, dialed 911, gave her address, and said, "The woman next door is yelling for help! Her door is locked! Hurry!"

  Mag and Benny acknowledged the code 3 call, turned on the light bar and siren, and were on their way. When they got to the spooky old two-story house, they could hear her from the street yelling, "Help me! Help me! Please help me!"

  They ran to the front door and found it locked. Mag stepped out of the way and Benny Brewster kicked the door in, splintering the frame and sending the door crashing against the wall.

  Once inside the house they heard the cries for help increase in intensity: "For god's sake, help me! Help me! Help me!"

  Mag and Benny ascended the stairs quickly, hearing car doors slam outside as Fausto and Budgie and two other teams arrived. The bedroom door was slightly ajar and Mag stood on one side of it, Benny on the other, and being cops, they instinctively put their hands on their pistol grips.

  Mag nudged the door open with her toe. There was silence for a long moment and they could hear the loud tick of a grandfather clock as the pendulum swept back and forth, back and forth.

  Then, in the far corner of the large bedroom suite, the voice: "Help me! Help me! Help me!"

  Mag and Benny automatically entered in a combat crouch and found her. She was a fifty-five-year-old invalid, terribly crippled by arthritis, left alone that night by her bachelor son. She was sitting in a wheelchair by a small round table near the window, where she no doubt spent long hours gazing at the street below.

  She was holding a .32 semiautomatic in one twisted claw and an empty magazine in the other. The .32 caliber rounds were scattered on the floor where she'd dropped them.

  Her surprisingly youthful cheeks were tear-stained, and she cried out to them, "Help me! Oh, please help me load this thing! And then get out!"

  There were two detectives working overtime at Hollywood Station that night. One was Andi McCrea, who had been given the job of finishing what she'd started innocently a few weeks ago as a stand-in for the absent sex crimes detail. But she didn't mind a bit because that was the first time in her career that she had solved a double homicide without knowing a damn thing about it.

  The kid from Reno was in Juvenile Hall awaiting his hearing. But more important, his forty-year-old fello
w killer, Melvin Simpson, a third-strike ex-con from the San Francisco Bay Area who had been in Reno on a gambling junket, was going to be charged with capital murder.

  Now detectives in Las Vegas were also interested in Simpson, since it was discovered through his credit-card receipts that he'd also been in their city for a week. With no means of employment he'd had enough money to gamble in both places, and it turned out that a high-tech engineer from Chicago who was attending a convention had been robbed and murdered at a rest stop outside Las Vegas on the day that Simpson had checked out of his hotel.

  The ballistics report hadn't been completed yet, but Andi had high hopes. Wouldn't this be something to talk about to the oral board at the next lieutenant's exam. It might even rate a story in the L. A. Times, except that nobody read the Times anymore or any newspaper, so there was no point getting excited about that part of it.

  The other detective working late that night was Viktor Chernenko, a forty-three-year-old immigrant from Ukraine, one of two naturalized citizens currently working at Hollywood Station, the other being from Guadalajara, Mexico. Viktor had a mass of wiry, dark hair that he called "disobedient," a broad Slavic face, a barrel of a body, and a neck so thick he was always popping buttons.

  Once when his robbery team was called to a clinic in east Hollywood to interview the victim of a violent purse snatching, the receptionist saw Viktor enter and said to a woman waiting in the lobby, "Your cab is here."

  And he was just about the most dedicated, hardworking, and eager-to-please cop that Andi McCrea had ever encountered.

  Viktor had immigrated to America in September 1991, a month after the coup that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, at a time when he was a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Red Army. His exit from the USSR was unclear and mysterious, leading to gossip that he'd defected with valuable intelligence and was brought to Los Angeles by the CIA. Or maybe not. No one knew for sure, and Viktor seemed to like it that way.