Hollywood Crows

THIRTEEN

TWO OF THE CROWS at Hollywood South had worrisome thoughts the next day about Bix Ramstead, but neither was aware of the other’s concern. Ronnie wanted to know if Bix had fallen off the wagon and been drinking on duty the night before, and Nate wanted to know what the hell Bix Ramstead was doing up on Mt. Olympus at the home of Margot Aziz. But neither had the nerve to ask him.

That morning, Ronnie and Bix were tasked to do follow-ups to neighbors of various tanning salons, an aromatherapy salon, an acupuncturist, and a chiropractor. All complaints had come from neighborhood residents and businesspeople, and most concerned illegal parking and nighttime noise. There was an accusation of prostitution directed at tanning salons because of an excessive number of men entering and leaving all day and late in the evenings. One of the tanning salons and the aromatherapy salon had been busted in the past by vice cops posing as customers, but both businesses were said to be under new management.

As Ronnie and Bix were getting ready to hit the streets, their sergeant was involved in a peculiar debate with Officer Rita Kravitz about running an errand to the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre to pick up a generous donation check it had offered for the Special Olympics fund-raiser. Rita gave the sergeant a couple of lame excuses as to why she was too busy to handle the job and suggested he send one of the guys.

“But you might run into John Travolta or Tom Cruise up there,” the sergeant said. “Wouldn’t that make your day?”

Officer Rita Kravitz pushed her newest and trendiest-ever eyeglasses up onto her nose and with a curl to her lip said, “I might also get taken prisoner by those robots and brainwashed till I turn into a smiley-faced, twinkly-eyed cult cookie. And if you think that can’t happen, ask Katie Holmes.”

The other Crow with Bix on his mind was having a late-morning Danish and cappuccino at his favorite open-air table in Farmers Market, listening to a former director and three former screenwriters at the usual table railing about the ageism that had killed their careers and promoted mediocrity in Hollywood.

“The last meeting I took was with a head of development who was twenty-eight years old,” a former screenwriter said.

“All they wanna do is preserve their jobs,” another one said.

“They’d rather have a flop they can blame on somebody else than take a risk on their own that might produce a hit,” a third one said.

The first one said, “Every time my stuff gets rejected, they say it’s not enough ‘outside the box,’ whatever that means. Or not enough ‘inside their wheelhouse,’ whatever that means.”

The former director said, “Bottom line, they’re terrified of people our age because they think we might know something about making movies that they don’t know. And they’re right!”

There was a chorus of amens to that one.

Nate wasn’t enjoying the show business grousing. All he could think of was how Margot Aziz had looked when he’d first seen her here, and how she had not called him, as promised. He figured that Bix Ramstead might have had a lot to do with that. Nate tried rehearsing half a dozen approaches he could try with Bix to find out the truth. First, though, he’d have to get Bix alone, away from Ronnie Sinclair.

Nate finished his cappuccino and started on his rounds. He had three calls to make on apartment dwellers about chronic-noise complaints. He was already starting to think that this quality-of-life shit was way more tedious and boring than he ever thought it could be. But at least he had last night’s adventure of Sergeant Treakle and the rooster to sustain him. He would’ve loved to share the story with somebody, but so far today, he couldn’t find anyone at Hollywood Station who didn’t know all about it.

Nine hours into their ten-and-a-half-hour shift, Ronnie and Bix were tired. All they’d accomplished so far was to issue warnings to salon proprietors about the need to screen their workers to make sure that temporary employees were not turning tricks when the boss wasn’t around. Of course, they knew that most of the temps were hired precisely because they were more than eager to offer special services to safe and willing customers.

Their last tanning salon was on Sunset Boulevard near Western Avenue and was called Miraculous Tan. This one was larger than the others and seemed to be catering to an all-male clientele. The employees were saline Suzies in short shorts, Miraculous Tan T-shirts, and tennis shoes. When the bluesuits walked into the reception area, two male customers waiting on the sofa dropped their magazines and quickly departed.

The receptionist said, “Please wait, Officers. I’ll get the manager.”

“Maybe we better take a closer look at this one,” Ronnie said. “Seeing us made those dudes run faster than my Sav-on panty hose.”

Bix nodded. He had spoken very little all day and his eyes weren’t as bright and clear as they usually were. Ronnie had tentatively tried directing conversation toward the previous night, when Bix had asked her to log him out, but each time she did, he’d change the subject.

The manager was as tall as Bix. Her hair was ash blonde and hung over her breasts in two pigtails. She was bulging with saline implants and had heavily rouged apple cheeks, resembling the stereotypical milkmaids from porn flicks they showed at the adult stores on Hollywood Boulevard. She was dressed in a white vinyl skirt, pink long-sleeved cotton blouse, and white wedges.

“I’m Madeline. How can I help you?” she said with a toothy smile that was impossibly white next to her crimson lip gloss.

Ronnie was too tired and it was too hot a day for subtlety. She said, “We’re getting numerous complaints from your neighbors that they’re suspecting illegal activity is going on here during day and evening hours. Also, we’re hearing that your customers are causing noise disturbances at night, and parking illegally.”

“Oh, that,” Madeline said. “We’ve changed management. That was before I came here two months ago. One of the girls was doing her own thing and nobody here knew about it. The vice officers arrested her. Your Detective Support Division knows all about it.”

“We’ve gotten complaints more recently than two months ago,” Bix said.

“I’ll bet they’re from the older Asian people who have the tailor shop two doors down, right?”

“We can’t discuss who the complainants are,” Ronnie said.

“No, of course not,” Madeline said, “but they’re always complaining about something. You can ask any of the businesspeople around here.”

“When we walked in here, two of your customers almost ran over us to get out the door,” Ronnie said.

“Maybe they had some problems of their own with the law,” Madeline said.

“Mind if we have a look around at your business?” Ronnie said. “I may want to try your services sometime. Especially one of those spritzer tans.”

Madeline didn’t look happy about it but said, “Of course. Follow me.”

The cops followed Madeline into a long hallway with five doors on each side, all of them closed. She led them to an intersecting hallway and turned right, toward a large, tiled room that looked like it was meant for showers.

“This is for sunless tanning,” Madeline said. “As a matter of fact, one of our employees is getting ready to go in now. She has a heavy date tonight and wants to look her best.” She turned to Bix and said, “If you would turn your back, Officer, I’m sure Zelda wouldn’t mind demonstrating how it works.”

Bix walked a few paces farther down the hall and faced the wall.

“Zelda, honey, you can come out,” Madeline said, knocking on one of the closed doors.

The shapely, young platinum blonde was wrapped in a towel. A plastic shower cap completely covered her hair, and booties covered only the tips of her toes and the bottoms of her feet. Her eyes opened wide when she saw Ronnie standing there with the boss. She hurried to the sunless tanning room, whipped off the towel, revealing her own implants, and hung it on a hook by the doorway.

“Zelda has cream on her palms, fingernails, and toenails,” Madeline explained to Ronnie. “We don’t want the tanning liquid to get in the nail beds or on her palms or the bottom of her feet. That would look totally unnatural.”

Zelda faced a bank of spigots on the middle of the wall and pushed a button. The tanning liquid sprayed out, covering her in a mist. She pressed the button again, turned around, and tanned the other side. When she was finished, she was dripping with goop the color of buckskin, and she began patting herself dry.

“We could offer you a police discount, Officer,” Madeline said to Ronnie, “if you’d like to make an appointment sometime.”

Bix joined them when Zelda was back in her changing room, and they continued their tour of the establishment, looking into one of the little rooms with tanning beds inside.

“Looks claustrophobic,” Bix said. “Like getting in a coffin and pulling down the lid.”

“Not at all,” Madeline said. “We give you tiny dark goggles to cover your eyes, and you’re only in there for about eight minutes at any level of tanning power you choose. It’s a lot more pleasant than baking in the hot summer sun.”

Ronnie said, “Maybe I’d like this kind of power tan better than the spritzer variety. More bang for the buck.”

While she and Madeline were talking about tans, Bix continued down the hall, subtly trying doorknobs, but they were locked. Behind the third door he heard a woman moaning. It was loud and unmistakable.

Madeline noticed him listening and quickly came forward, saying, “We can’t disturb our clients, Officer. Please follow me and I’ll show you-”

“There’s somebody moaning in there,” Bix said. “A woman.”

“Maybe she fell asleep and is dreaming,” Madeline said. “Really, I must-”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Ronnie said, exchanging glances with Bix. “Somebody falling asleep under those tanning lamps?”

“They shut off automatically,” Madeline said, and now she had Ronnie’s arm, trying to guide her back down the hallway.

Then they heard a man in that room cry out, “Do it to me, baby!”

“Got a key?” Bix said.

“I’ll…I’ll look for one,” Madeline said, hurrying back toward the reception area.

Ronnie winked at Bix and knocked lightly on the door, saying, “Hey! The vice cops’re here! Split up and get in separate rooms. Hurry!”

Within seconds the door opened and a plump naked man ran out, holding all of his clothes in his arms. He saw the uniformed cops, said, “Oh, Jesus!” and dropped the clothes, his erect penis pointing directly at Ronnie.

Inside the room, an eighteen-year-old honey-haired employee with eyebrow, nose, and lip rings, wearing a Miraculous Tan T-shirt and nothing else, was trying to get her shorts pulled up over her hips.

She said, “I was just trying to tell him his tanning time was up. Honest!”

While Bix got on his radio and asked for a unit to assist, Ronnie pointed to the man’s penis and said, “I hope you had plenty of tanning lotion on that thing, sir.”

Seeing that the cops weren’t about to buy her story, the girl said, “When I went in to wake him up, he was laying there pounding the clown! I didn’t have nothing to do with it! Honest!”

“Why, you lying little bitch,” the man said, his tumescence deflating.

It was turning out to be a different sort of day for the Crow team, who didn’t often get to make a felony arrest. After questioning the customer and the young employee, both of whom clearly implicated the salon manager in soliciting acts of prostitution and signed a report to that effect, Ronnie and Bix arranged for Madeline to be transported to Hollywood Station, interviewed by the vice sergeant, and booked for pandering.

A transporting unit arrived, and it happened to be the surfer cops who’d just cleared from roll call. Jetsam jumped on this one when he realized from the broadcast which Crow needed an assisting unit.

While Jetsam was chatting up Ronnie, Flotsam looked at Madeline’s driver’s license and said, “Holy crap. Madeline’s a man! Name of Martin Lester Dilford.”

The manager was standing silent, having admitted nothing, and Jetsam took out his handcuffs, saying, “Well, I guess I’ll do the pat-down here, since she’s a guy.”

“No, you won’t,” Madeline said. “I’m not a man anymore. And I won’t be put into a cell with men. And you won’t put your hands on me.”

“You’re a tranny?” Flotsam said.

“Transsexual, if you please,” Madeline said. “I haven’t had time to change my name legally yet.”

“Pre-op or post-op?” Ronnie asked.

“Post-op,” Madeline said. “As of three months ago, and I’ll strip and prove it if you like.”

“Then I guess I’ll be doing the pat-down here,” Ronnie said. “Just relax, Madeline.”

The desperate situation of Leonard Stilwell had gotten considerably worse. He was failing at every attempt to make a buck, and Ali Aziz had not phoned him yet about doing the job on Mt. Olympus. He had even driven up Laurel Canyon one afternoon and taken the right turn into the Mt. Olympus development, not doubting that there were more Italian cypress planted there per acre than anywhere else in the world. Leonard drove the streets and thought it looked pretty formidable. There were security company signs everywhere, and he saw a few homes where uniformed security people were standing in the driveway. He was not encouraged.

Leonard had been reduced to shoplifting from discount stores, but even boosting small merchandise wasn’t so easy anymore. It was at the cyber café where Leonard got drawn into a humiliating plot to commit the most pathetic crime he could imagine.

There were more than a hundred computers for rent in the cyber café, and lots of jackals and bottom feeders whom Leonard knew, tweakers mostly, used the computers to sell stolen items and make deals for crystal meth and other drugs. Leonard had a cheap little CD player with headphones that he’d boosted and nearly got caught with when he’d bypassed the checkout counter. None of the other scavengers in the parking lot of the cyber café would trade him so much as a single rock for the CD player. One of the base heads actually sneered at him. He was about to give up when a tweaker he’d seen before but didn’t know by name gave him a nod.

The tweaker was a white guy several years younger than Leonard but in far worse condition. He was jug-eared, with small, close-set eyes and pus-filled speed bumps all over his sunken cheeks. He had only a few teeth left in his grille and he grinned at Leonard. They recognized each other’s desperation and that was enough. Names were not needed.

“I need a driver,” the tweaker said to Leonard. “I seen you getting out of that Honda. You open for a job?”

“Let’s break it down, dude,” Leonard said.

The tweaker followed Leonard to his car, which was parked in front of a donut shop in the same little strip mall. After they got in Leonard’s car, the tweaker lifted his T-shirt and showed a small-caliber revolver stuck in his waistband.

“Freeze-frame!” Leonard said. “I ain’t into guns.”

“This ain’t real,” the tweaker said. And he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It clicked. He grinned and said, “It’s a starter pistol. Unloaded.”

“I think you better get outta my car,” Leonard said.

“Don’t flare on me, dawg!” the tweaker said. “You don’t gotta do nothing but drop me off on a street. That’s it. Drive me around till I see what I’m looking for and drop me off. You don’t even gotta pick me back up at the scene of the crime.”

“At the scene of the…” Leonard rolled his eyes and said, “Why don’t you just call a taxi?”

“We might have to drive around awhile till we spot him. And if something ain’t right, we may have to follow him for a little ways. I can’t have a cab driver witness.”

“A witness to what? You’re gonna chalk a guy with a fucking starter pistol?”

“I ain’t gonna dump the chump. I’m gonna jack his truck. And afterwards, I’m gonna meet you in the truck and give you two Ben Franklins. You won’t even be there when I jack it.”

“Lemme track. You saying I’m gonna get fucking chump change for a hijacking?”

“Man, I ain’t jacking a Brinks truck.”

“What’re you jacking?”

“An ice-cream truck.”

“There ain’t a fucking sane human being left in all of Hollywood,” Leonard said to the steering wheel as he gripped it tight.

The tweaker said, “See, this greaser that drives the truck, he brings his cash payment every other week to some other greaser that lent him the money to buy the truck.”

“How much cash is he carrying?”

“That’s my business.”

“Get outta my car.”

“I’ll give you three Franklins.”

“Out.”

“Three-fifty, and that’s it.”

“Three-fifty,” Leonard said. “I risk, what? Maybe five years in the joint for chump change?”

“Later, man,” the tweaker said, opening the door.

“I’m good with it,” Leonard said quickly. “These are hard times.”

“Okay,” the tweaker said with a gap-toothed grin. “There ain’t no risk to you at all. I cased this good. You just drop me near where the guy’s selling ice cream. The cash is in the metal box he keeps behind the seat of the truck. I scare the fuck outta him and jump in his truck and drive it maybe six blocks away to some safe place where you’re waiting for me. I jump in your car, and you drive me back here to the cyber café.”

“Dude, I want my three-fifty no matter what you end up getting from him.”

“I’m cool with that,” the tweaker said.

“So when do we do it?”

“In one hour,” the tweaker said. “In the meantime, could you buy me a Baby Ruth bar? I got the craves so bad I could eat a fishbone sandwich if they’d dip it in chocolate.”

Leonard stared for a moment at the “Help Wanted” sign in the window of the coffee shop. He wanted to tell this lowlife slacker to get a fucking job. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Three-fifty would buy enough rock to tide him over until the fucking Ay-rab called him for the housebreaking job.

He looked at the tweaker and pulled a dollar bill from his pocket. “Go in there and buy yourself a chocolate donut. Tell them to dip it in powdered sugar. It’ll get you by for a couple hours.”

The hijacking was to occur on a residential street in East Hollywood, one of the few neighborhoods where a vendor could make a few dollars. Rogelio Montez was the driver of the little white truck, which played nursery tunes from a large outdoor speaker attached to the roof as he cruised the streets. He was an immigrant from the Yucatán, and this was the best job he’d ever had in his life.

Rita Kravitz, the Crow who oversaw quality-of-life complaints in that neighborhood, had contacted 6-X-66 at midwatch roll call to help her out with this ice-cream vendor. Rita Kravitz briefed the patrol officers about a chronic complainer who lived on the street, a woman who had nine school-age grandchildren and saw pedophiles everywhere.

“The alleged suspect drives one of those Good Humor sort of trucks,” Rita Kravitz had told them, “and he comes by pretty late on summer evenings. Maybe seven o’clock. Just write a shake on the guy and make sure he’s not driving the truck with Mister Wiggly exposed. The old lady’s already accused her mailman, the meter reader, and one of the presidential contenders of being a willie wagger. Although she’s probably right about the presidential contender.”

Gert Von Braun said, “Okay, but you should call Dateline for this kinda deal. They’re the ones with all the hidden cameras and lotsa time to set up on these guys.”

Gert Von Braun and Dan Applewhite had gotten teamed again because Doomsday Dan requested it, now that Gil Ponce was just about off probation. Gert told the senior sergeant that she didn’t mind at all working with Doomsday Dan, and the astonished sergeant later told his fellow supervisors that there truly is someone for everyone in this world.

When 6-X-66 cleared, they went straight to the neighborhood, found the vendor, and flagged him down, using the excuse that he had only one functioning brake light. Instead of writing him a ticket, they wrote an FI card from the information on his driver’s license.

He spoke very little English and seemed contrite about the brake light, and grateful not to be getting a citation. He looked so threadbare and poor that Dan Applewhite insisted on paying for the ice-cream bars that the guy wanted to give to them. Then the cops remained parked at the curb while he drove off, his truck playing merry tunes enticing Latino children from their homes with coins and dollar bills in their fists, all jabbering happily in Spanglish.

Gert and Dan sat, contentedly licking their ice cream and chatting. They were growing ever more comfortable with each other, and the real bonding of police partners had begun. And of course, they’d never heard of Leonard Stilwell and knew nothing of how his life was intersecting the lives of Crow officers. It was quite pleasant to eat ice cream on that hot and dry summer evening when twilight rays of the setting sun cast a magical aura over the land of make-believe, with not a smudge of dark cloud above Sunset Boulevard.

Leonard Stilwell knew he was making a very bad mistake as he drove the tweaker toward the residential streets in East Hollywood, where the ice-cream driver was supposed to be working. First of all, the tweaker kept playing with the starter pistol, twirling it, putting it under his T-shirt inside the waistband of his jeans, and then doing quick draws.

When they were passing L. Ron Hubbard Way, a short street off Sunset Boulevard that fed into the Dianetics Building, Leonard said, “I know you need to smoke some ice real bad, but could you, like, try to chill? You’re making me nervous.”

The tweaker put the gun inside his jeans again and said, “Get over yourself, dawg, and stay in the game. For my pickup, you look for me one block south of Santa Monica, two blocks east of the Hollywood cemetery. Whatever that fucking street is.”

“Kee-rist, dude,” Leonard said, “that’s the third time you told me. Your short-term memory’s gone!”

“Okay, okay, I’m just sayin’. Don’t I gotta, like, keep you dialed in and make sure you got your mind in the day?”

“My mind?” Leonard said. “You’re worrying about my mind?”

They were a block away from the ice-cream truck when the tweaker spotted it. “There it is, man!” he said. “Burn a right!”

“I see it,” Leonard said, driving slowly, keeping an eye on the tweaker, who looked like he’d jump out and start running, given half a chance.

When he was six houses away from the truck, Leonard pulled around the corner and stopped.

The tweaker said, “Remember, you gotta meet me at-”

Unable to bear another repeated direction, Leonard interrupted, saying, “Dude, keep this in your fucked-up memory bank. If the cops get onto you, you’re gonna have to outrun them in a vehicle that moves at about the speed of prostate cancer. But if you live through it and you bring me less than three-fifty, I’m gonna knock that last corn nut you call a tooth right outta your grille!”

“Chill, Phil!” the tweaker said. “You’re gonna get what’s coming to you. Now bang a U-ee and split.”

With that, Leonard drove off, making a U-turn and watching the tweaker in his side-view mirror. The tweaker immediately began slouching toward the ice-cream truck. The last Leonard saw was the scarecrow jogging, then sprinting, in full attack mode.

Gert and Doomsday Dan were just finishing their ice-cream bars and Dan said, “Okay, we observed the vendor’s normal activity and there’s nothing abnormal about it. Let’s log this and get on with the rest of our lives.”

“Yeah, he’s clean,” Gert said, “but when you think about it, this would be a good job for a pedophile. Selling Eskimo Pies, Push-Ups, and Big Sticks all day long. Like, Hello, little girl, would you like to lick a big stick? Know what I mean?”

“You got a point,” Dan said as Gert started the car.

“Man, there’s a guy that needs ice cream bad,” Gert said.

The tweaker was in an all-out sprint when they saw him in the next block. He ran straight at the vendor, who was giving two ice-cream bars to a girl about ten years old who held a younger girl by the hand. The truck’s engine was running and “It’s a Small World” was playing noisily.

The tweaker hit the driver hard with his shoulder, sending him sprawling. The children screamed, dropped their ice cream, and started to run. The tweaker pulled his starter pistol, pointed it at the face of the supine Mexican, and said, “Stay down or die!”

Then the tweaker leaped into the truck and drove away.

“Goddamn!” Gert Von Braun said, squealing out from the curb, turning on her light bar as Dan Applewhite got on the radio and said, “Six-X-Sixty-six is in pursuit of a two-eleven vehicle!”

The location and description of the pursued vehicle got garbled by the howling of the siren, and after clearing the frequency for the pursuit car, the radio PSR said, “Six-X-Sixty-six, repeat the location! And did you say an ice-cream truck?”

That was enough to alert a television news crew who monitored police calls. Within minutes, there was a crew speeding toward East Hollywood. Nobody wanted to miss this pursuit. An ice-cream truck?

Leonard Stilwell had been sitting with his engine turned off and was worried that it might not start. That would be just his luck. After a few minutes he started it. But then he got worried about overheating the old Honda and switched off the ignition again.

When the police unit was two blocks away but speeding toward him, he heard the siren. It was coming from the direction of the Hollywood cemetery. He figured it might be an ambulance. Yeah, he thought, probably an ambulance. But thirty seconds later, he said, “Fuck this!” started the car, and pulled away from the curb. No matter who that siren belonged to, Leonard Stilwell had just resigned from the hijacking business.

The tweaker was gunning the engine of the ice-cream truck for all it was worth, but it wasn’t worth much. The truck was sputtering and the transmission was slipping as the truck headed north on Van Ness Avenue. Driving south on Van Ness in his direction was the tweaker’s wheelman, fleeing in his Honda.

The tweaker almost swerved into him head-on and yelled out the window, “You bastard! You chickenshit asshole! Don’t leave me!”

The pursued and pursuers, with 6-X-66 still the primary, blew right past Leonard in the opposite direction, and he wheeled west on Melrose, heading anywhere but to the cyber café, where there would no doubt be cops looking for him as soon as the tweaker got busted and spilled his guts. But the tweaker didn’t know his name and certainly hadn’t written down his license number, and anyway, the loser was so brain fried he probably wouldn’t even remember what kind of car Leonard owned. As soon as Leonard got safely back to his apartment, he intended to call Ali Aziz. He needed that job. He needed money now.

The pursuit was coming to an end after the ice-cream truck rumbled north on the east side of Paramount Studios, then passed the Hollywood cemetery and turned west on Santa Monica Boulevard. There it caused a traffic collision when a Toyota SUV, trying to avoid broadsiding the ice-cream truck, swerved into the rear of an MTA bus. The tweaker nearly caused a second collision when he pulled a hard left onto Gower Street, nearly rolling the ice-cream truck, and slammed to a stop on the west side of the Hollywood cemetery, abandoning the truck.

Gert Von Braun had almost gotten in a TC of her own at Santa Monica and Gower, where she was stopped cold by a pair of elderly motorists who couldn’t tell where in the hell the siren was coming from in the fading twilight and just stopped, completely blocking the intersection. When Gert, red faced and fuming, got around them and squealed south onto Gower Street, the cops spotted the abandoned truck.

A man walking a dog waved at them and yelled, “The guy climbed the fence and ran into the cemetery!”

The mausoleums and tombs on the cemetery grounds contained the mortal remains of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. DeMille, and many other Hollywood immortals. A pair of security guards opened a gate for Gert Von Braun and Dan Applewhite, and now there were three other Hollywood night-watch and midwatch cars wheeling into the cemetery.

The tweaker had been running frantically through the park, and for no reason anyone could later determine, he ran to the obelisk rising into the blue-black sky with the Hollywood sign visible in the background, to the north on Mt. Lee. He waited while cops and security guards searched the cemetery grounds on foot with flashlights, and with spotlights from the police vehicles. It was there at the obelisk that the tweaker made his last mistake of the day, after being spotted by Gil Ponce, who was teamed with Cat Song.

The tweaker later told a paramedic on their way to the ER that he’d been hanging on to the starter pistol only because he wanted the police to have it if he wasn’t able to get away. This, in order to prove that he hadn’t used a real gun in the hijacking. The tweaker said that when he saw about two tons of blue running his way, and when a young cop spotted him and began shouting commands, he got worried about the starter pistol in his waistband, scared that the rookie would see it and panic. He said he tried to draw it out with only three fingers, like in the cowboy movies, and drop it on the ground.

But the LAPD hadn’t taught Gil Ponce with cowboy-movie training films, and it was too dark to see a three-fingered draw. When the tweaker pulled the gun from his waistband, he saw orange balls of flame and was jolted back against the obelisk, struck in the upper body by two of three rounds fired by Gil Ponce.

Cat was running fast, her nine in both extended hands, when Gil fired the rounds. After the tweaker was on the ground and other cops were running to the obelisk and Cat had gotten on her rover and requested a rescue ambulance, Gil Ponce said, “He pulled a gun, Cat! I had to shoot him!”

“I know you did,” she said, putting her arm around the young man. “I would’ve done the same thing. You did good.”

By the time the tweaker arrived at the ER, he was deemed to be in serious but not critical condition. However, after a seemingly successful surgery, he died three hours later of a pulmonary embolism. Surgeons reported that one of the rounds had dotted the i on the tattoo across his bony chest, which said “Mom tried.”

Despite the tweaker’s statement, which the paramedic repeated in a TV interview, it was widely believed that the trapped and surrounded robber had intended to die. In fact, the TV reporter who covered the incident from the start of the pursuit came on the eleven o’clock news and described the events in the Hollywood cemetery. After reciting a long list of film stars who were interred there, he told his audience that police had withheld the name of the deceased until next of kin could be located.

Then, in response to a question from the anchor desk, he said, “It is the opinion of this reporter that, despite what was said to the paramedic in the rescue ambulance, what we have here is another tragic case of suicide-by-cop. To believe that the cornered robbery suspect was trying to comply with police commands when he pulled what appeared to be a deadly weapon from his waistband flies in the face of credibility. If he’d wished to surrender, he would never have done something so stupid.”

Leonard Stilwell, who was lying in bed when he saw that newscast, knew from long experience that in Hollywood, things are seldom as they seem. And he muttered to the TV screen, “Dude, that idiot’s entire brain would fit in a coke spoon.”