Hollywood Crows

TWO

IT WAS A FEW WEEKS after the jumper incident that Ronnie Sinclair decided she’d had enough of the midwatch and Sergeant Treakle, who had only received an official reprimand for barging into her crisis negotiation and, in Ronnie’s opinion, causing the demise of young Randolph Bronson. She’d discussed her situation with an old sergeant for whom she’d worked at Newton Street Division, now officially called Newton Street Area, since the current LAPD brass had decided that division sounded too militaristic. The working cops said the brass were full of shit, and they kept right on referring to police divisions even in the LAPD union’s monthly newspaper.

Ronnie’s former sergeant suggested that in these repressive times, supervisors like Treakle were harder to get rid of than Rasputin and jock itch. He thought she ought to have a talk with the boss of the Hollywood Division Community Relations Office, or CRO, pronounced “Crow” by the cops. “CRO is a good job, Ronnie,” he told her. “You’ve done enough hard-core police work for a while. Being a senior lead officer in CRO will give you a leg up when you take your sergeant’s oral.”

It had surprised Hollywood Nate to learn that Ronnie Sinclair was seeking the job that had opened up at the Community Relations Office, a job that Nate coveted. The CRO was composed of eighteen cops and two civilian workers led by a twenty-two-year sergeant. Eleven of the officers, both men and women, were senior lead officers, or SLOs, pronounced “Slows,” and were given a pay bump and wore two silver chevrons on their sleeves with a star beneath them. The SLOs acted as ombudsmen or community liaisons for the Hollywood Division captain. Five were Hispanics and could translate Spanish as needed, and three others were foreign born and could communicate in half a dozen other tongues, but that was only a fraction of the languages spoken in Hollywood. The coppers called their bailiwick Babelwood Division.

The Community Relations Office was housed in a one-story rambling old structure just a wedge shot across the police parking lot. It was dubbed Hollywood South by the troops in the main station, to which the Crows referred as Hollywood North, and which, like all LAPD police facilities, had the architectural charm of a parking garage in Watts.

Among other duties, Crows handled calls from chronic complainers and Hollywood loons, and they could pretty well set their own ten-hour duty tours in their four-day work week. The major efforts of these cops were directed at quality-of-life issues: chronic-noise complaints, graffiti, homeless encampments, abandoned shopping carts, unauthorized yard sales, and aggressive panhandlers. Crows also had the job of overseeing the Police Reserve Program and the Police Explorer Program for teenagers and directed the Nightclub Committee, the Homeless Committee, the Graffiti Committee, and even the Street Closure Committee.

In 2007, the city of Los Angeles’s love for committees was almost as overpowering as its lust for diversity and its multicultural mania, and it would be hard to imagine anywhere with more social experimentation involving the police than LAPD’s Hollywood Division. African Americans were the only ethnic group underrepresented in Hollywood demographics, but young black males arrived on the boulevards in large numbers every night, traveling on the subway or in cars from South L.A., many of whom were gang members.

The Crows also had to organize events such as the Tip-A-Cop fund-raiser, the Torch Run for the Special Olympics, and the Children’s Holiday Party, and were tasked to help police the antiwar demonstrations, the Academy Awards, and all of the red carpet events at the Kodak Center. In short, they were doing jobs that caused salty old-timers to shake their heads and refer to the CRO as the sissy beat. Crows were often called teddy bears in blue.

They were also called much worse, but there was some envy involved in all of the pejoratives aimed at the Crows, because these officers of Hollywood South had relative freedom and the choice of wearing uniforms or street clothes depending upon the assignment, and they almost always did safe, clean work. Crows generally chose to stay in the job for a long time.

Ronnie had beaten out Hollywood Nate for the first opening in the Community Relations Office and was sent to senior lead officer training at the recruit training center near LAX. An unexpected retirement occurred a month later, and Nate Weiss ended up following Ronnie to the CRO, thinking he had found the spot where he might remain happily until retirement or until he attained show business success, whichever came first. By early summer, he had worked on two more TV movies, with a line of dialogue in each, the plots being for people who watch daytime TV. He was sure that the last one might make it to Spike TV because at the last minute they’d included lots of gratuitous blood and gore for high-school dropouts.

By July 2007, all of the Crows were future millionaires-in theory. One of them had been born in Iraq and had come to the U.S. as a child. He’d touted the wisdom of buying Iraqi dinars to his Crow partner now that the country was in chaos and its money nearly worthless. Through a currency broker, the partner bought one million dinars for $800 U.S. As the broker explained it to them, when Iraq eventually was able to get back to one dinar for one dollar and started being traded in all of the exchanges, “You’ll be millionaires!”

So two other Crows bought a million dinars. Three bought half a million each. Another bought one and a half million, figuring to buy a yacht when he retired. Ronnie Sinclair was very hesitant, but thinking of her aging parents, she bought half a million dinars.

The week after he’d been assigned to the CRO, Nate had one of his vigorous iron-pumping workouts in the high-tech weight room at Hollywood South. After the workout and a mirror examination of his impressive pecs, lats, and biceps, Nate entered the CRO office, sat down at a desk, and carefully studied an Iraqi dinar that one of the others had given to him. Looking at it under a glass and holding it against a lamp, he examined the horse in the watermark as though he knew what he was doing.

“Check it with a jeweler’s loupe, why don’t you?” said Tony Silva, one of the Hispanic officers. “It’s not counterfeit, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, but I read in the paper that counterfeiters are bleeding out the ink on these things,” Nate said, “and using them to make U.S. currency with laser printers.”

“Aren’t you gonna buy while you have the chance?” Samuel Dibble, the CRO’s only black cop, asked Nate. “What if Bush’s troop surge works and the dinar stabilizes? We’ll all be rich. How about you?”

Nate only smiled, trying not to look too condescending, but later said privately to his sergeant, “Cops are such suckers. Anyone can sell them a bill of goods. They’ll invest in anything.”

His sergeant said to him, “Yeah, I’m in for one million.”

Later, after the new commanding general in Iraq gave a major TV interview and said that the troop surge had a very good chance of success, Hollywood Nate Weiss secretly made a transfer from his savings account, called the currency broker, and bought two million dinars without telling any of the others.

Of course, Hollywood Nate’s former colleagues, the midwatch officers of Watch 5, were not dreaming of being millionaires. They were just trying to cope with young Sergeant Treakle, whose administrative spanking for bringing the Big Macs to the rooftop standoff had not dampened his zeal or ambition. They knew that Hollywood Division was as shorthanded as the rest of the beleaguered LAPD, so before a supervisor like Sergeant Treakle could get a suspension without pay, he would have to do something really terrible. Such as saying something politically incorrect to a member of what had historically been considered a minority group. At least that was the thinking of the midwatch, according to all of the bitching heard around the station.

On one of those summer nights under what the Oracle used to call a Hollywood moon, meaning a full moon that brought out the crazies, Flotsam mentioned the rooftop incident to Catherine Song and said, “Why couldn’t the jumper have been black or Hispanic? That would’ve pushed Treakle’s off button.”

“What about a Korean female?” Cat said back to him. “We’re not potential PC victims?”

“Negative,” Flotsam said. “You people have got too rich and successful for victimhood. You and me’re in the same boat. We could jump off a roof and who cares?”

Sergeant Treakle had teamed them up arbitrarily for one night, assigning Jetsam to ride with a Hispanic probationer whose field training officer was on a sick day. Jetsam didn’t like working with a boot, but Flotsam wasn’t complaining, and Cat knew why. She was very aware that he had eyes for her, but so did most of the other male officers on the midwatch.

That was when the PSR’s radio voice said, “Six-X-Thirty-two, a four-fifteen fight, Santa Monica and Western, code two.”

“Why can’t we get a call in our own backyard once in a while?” Flotsam grumbled as Cat rogered the call. “Doomsday Dan’s working sixty-six with a probie partner. They should be handling it.”

“Dan probably had to run over to the cyber café to rent a computer and watch his foreign stocks tumble,” Cat said. “Doesn’t matter how good the market’s doing. He’s a great anticipator of international disasters.”

When they got to the location of the call, which turned out to be a bit east of Western Avenue, Cat said, “Doomsday Dan sure would break out the gloves for this one.”

Four onlookers, two of them Salvadoran gang members, along with a pair of white parolees out looking for some tranny or dragon ass, were watching the disturbance. Transsexuals were preferred by the ex-cons in that all of their hormone treatments and surgery made them more like women, but in a pinch the parolees would settle for a drag queen. The onlookers were watching what had been a pretty good fight between a black drag queen and a white man in a business suit, which was now down to a screaming contest full of threats and gestures.

When the cops got out of the black-and-white, four observers walked quickly away, but a fifth stepped out of the shadows from a darkened doorway. Trombone Teddy was a transient, known to Flotsam from prior contacts. He was a street person nearly eighty years old who panhandled on the boulevards.

Teddy had stayed at the fight scene to watch the denouement, knowing he was drunk enough to get busted but too drunk to care. He wore a Lakers cap, layers of shirts that were now part of him, and nearly congealed trousers the color and texture of just-picked mushrooms. Looking at Teddy made you think fungus.

“I’m a witness,” Trombone Teddy said to Flotsam.

“Go home, Teddy,” the tall cop said, putting his mini-flashlight under his arm, cursing because the little light wouldn’t stay there.

“I am home,” Teddy replied. “I been living right here in this doorway for the last few days. The cops rousted us outta our camp in the hills. Up there we could hear the concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. I was a real sideman in my time, you know. I could blow better than any I ever heard at the Bowl. Back when I was a real person.”

That made Flotsam feel a little bit sad, Trombone Teddy reminiscing about having been a real person. Back in the day.

With the police there as protection, the black dragon, wearing a mauve shell and a black double-slitted skirt, hauled off for one last shot, swinging a silver purse at the white businessman, until Flotsam stepped in and said, “Back off! Both of you!”

Reluctantly, the dragon stepped back, blonde wig askew, one heel broken off the silver pumps, makeup smeared, panty hose shredded, and yelled, “He kidnapped me! I barely escaped with my life! Arrest him!”

Flotsam had already patted down the other combatant. He was portly and middle-aged with a dyed-black comb-over that shone like patent leather. A trickle of blood dripped from his nose and he wiped it with a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket.

He handed Flotsam his driver’s license and said, “My name is Milt Zimmerman, Officer. I’ve never been arrested for anything. This person stole my car keys and took off running to here, where I caught her. My car is two blocks west in an alley. I want her arrested for attempted car theft.”

“Ask this guddamn kidnapper how we got in the alley! Jist ask him!” the dragon cried.

“Step over here with me,” Cat said to the slender drag queen, who listed to starboard on the broken silver pump.

When the combatants were separated, Trombone Teddy staggered back and forth from one pair to the other so as not to miss any of the good parts, and he heard Cat say to the dragon, “Okay, now give me some ID and tell me what happened.”

The drag queen produced a driver’s license bearing the name of Latrelle Johnson, born in 1975, from the silver purse. Cat shined her light on the photo, taken when Latrelle was without eyebrows and lipstick and wig, and Cat decided that the dragon was far better-looking as a man than as a woman.

Cat said, “Okay, Latrelle, tell me what happened.”

“Please call me Rhonda,” the dragon said. “That’s my name now. Latrelle don’t exist no more. Latrelle is dead, and I’m glad.”

“Okay, Rhonda,” Cat said, thinking that sounded kind of sad. “So what’s the story here?”

“He picked me up from the corner two blocks down Santa Monica and offered to take me to a club for some drinks and a dance or two. Me, I’m stupid. I believed him.”

“Uh-huh,” Cat said. “You just happened to be on this corner waiting for someone to go dancing with?”

“I ain’t hookin’,” said Rhonda, then after a few seconds added, “Well…I admit I got busted a couple times for prostitution, but tonight I happened to be jist makin’ a call at the public phone here by the liquor store.” Rhonda pointed to the phone box behind them.

“Okay, then what?” Cat said, deciding that there would be no kidnapping report and maybe no reports at all, except for a couple of field interrogation cards.

“I thought maybe he was takin’ me out to the Strip, but we only got a couple blocks and he whips into an alley and forces me to commit a sex act. I was scared for my life, Officer!”

Milt Zimmerman heard part of that and yelled, “She’s a liar! She wanted it! Then she grabbed my car keys and ran off with them!”

“Okay, pay attention to me, not to them,” Flotsam said, taking Milt Zimmerman by the arm and walking him several steps farther away, while Trombone Teddy drifted toward Cat and Rhonda because their conversation sounded juicier.

Milt Zimmerman said to Flotsam, “She’s lying! I told her I wanted a blow job and she gave it up willingly. Then when she’s done she wants an extra twenty. I said no way, and she grabs my keys from the ignition and starts running back here, where I first picked her up. My Cadillac’s still back there in the alley!”

“Thing is,” Flotsam said. “She’s a him. You might call her a ‘shim.’”

“I didn’t know!” Milt Zimmerman said. “She looks like a woman!”

“This is Hollywood,” Flotsam said, “where men are men and so are the women.”

Back by the liquor store Rhonda was starting to reveal more details, causing Trombone Teddy to shuffle closer, his hearing not what it used to be. When Cat came on the Job, she was trained by old male coppers who scorned latex gloves, which cops didn’t have back in the day. But looking at Trombone Teddy made Cat glad she was carrying a pair tonight.

She said to the old eavesdropper, “Get your butt away from here. Now!”

“But I always liked soap opera,” Trombone Teddy said.

Cat reached in her pocket and said, “Don’t make me glove up. If I do, you’re going to jail.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Teddy muttered and walked back toward Flotsam, where he knew it wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining.

“So what exactly went on in that alley?” Cat asked Rhonda. “The details.”

Rhonda said, “At first he seemed real nice. He stopped the car the second we was in the alley. He turned off the motor and started kissin’ me. Hard. I said somethin’ like, ‘Easy, baby, give a girl a minute to breathe.’ Next thing I know, the pants came off.”

“Yours?”

“His. Then he made me do something that I would never do. He said if I didn’t do it, he’d get violent. He had very strong hands and I was afraid. When he said it, he reached under my skirt and pulled my panty hose down and my thong clear off!”

“Was it anal sex? Did he bugger you?”

“No! He made me bugger him! It was humiliatin’. I was so scared, I done it. I don’t know how I managed, but I did. And I didn’t have no condom neither.”

“I see,” Cat said. “Then what?”

“Then, when I was through, he said he wanted more and I said no way and tried to get outta the car. And he started cussin’ and said he oughtta run over me with his Cadillac. So I jist grabbed his keys, got out, and ran while he was tryin’ to pull his pants back up.”

Rhonda took out a tissue and wiped at her mascara then, and Cat wasn’t sure if it was for her benefit or if Rhonda was really getting weepy.

Cat said, “Rhonda, don’t make us do a lot of paperwork for nothing here. Tell me the truth. Was there money involved in this incident?”

Rhonda put the tissue back in the purse and said, “He offered me thirty-five dollars.” Then Rhonda quickly added, “I didn’t ask him for it. He jist offered to give it to me. Not for sex, but like a gift, sorta.”

“If you went dancing with him?”

“Uh-huh,” Rhonda said, sniffling again.

“Stay right here.”

Seeing Cat walking toward him, Flotsam told Milt Zimmerman to stay put, and he met Cat halfway, where they could talk in whispers. Trombone Teddy tried to sidle closer, but when Cat gave him a look, he scuttled away to his doorway bed, muttering, “I been scared to death of them ever since Pearl Harbor.”

“She’s Korean, Teddy. You’re safe,” Flotsam informed him.

“North or South?” Teddy asked anxiously.

When Cat and Flotsam were huddled, Flotsam said, “He claims he picked up the dragon in front of the liquor store by the phone booth. The dragon offered sex for fifty bucks but said okay to thirty-five. They drove to the alley, where he got his steam released from a head job, then the dragon demanded twenty more. He refused and the dragon up and grabbed his keys and ran back to the liquor store.”

“Did he say why Rhonda wanted twenty more after it was over?” Cat asked.

“No, why?”

“If Rhonda’s telling most of the truth, it’s because the guy wanted something that the more fem dragons like Rhonda are seldom asked to do.”

“Dragons and trannies do anything you want,” Flotsam said, “which is why they got every kind of plague and pestilence. So what was it?”

“Anal sex,” Cat said.

“So? The dragon found that peculiar?”

“Milton was the catcher, not the pitcher.”

Flotsam said to Cat, “Lemme track this. You’re telling me that Milton ended up being Rhonda’s bitch?” He turned to gawk for a moment at the outraged businessman impeccably clothed by Armani, then said, “Sometimes it gets way too confusing out here.”

All that was left to do was to mollify both of the complainants. The two cops walked over to the businessman, and Flotsam said, “Mr. Zimmerman, do you really wanna make a crime report? Before you answer, lemme tell you that the person over there in the torn skirt says that you paid to be…”

“Buggered,” Cat finished it abruptly. “That doesn’t mean you can’t be a victim of an attempted car theft, but it might get embarrassing for you and your family if it went to court. Of course, we could disprove Rhonda’s allegations by taking you to Hollywood Presbyterian and having a doctor swab your anus for DNA evidence. Whadda you think?”

After a long hesitation, Milt Zimmerman said, “Well, I’m okay with just forgetting the whole thing and getting the hell away from that lunatic.”

Flotsam said, “Just stand by for a minute until we see if the other party is satisfied with this outcome.”

When they walked back to the liquor store, Rhonda was hanging up the receiver on a public phone attached to the wall. Cat said, “Rhonda, you might wanna think this over before you insist on reports for kidnapping or sexual assault. You see, there was money involved here, regardless of whether he decided to give it or you asked him for it. Sex and money usually means prostitution.”

“And after all, he’s the one that got boned,” Flotsam said to Rhonda. “So even if we arrested him for assaulting you, his defense lawyer would say he took it in the chute, not you. That this is just a case of tit for tat.”

“Okay,” Rhonda said with a sigh. “But I will always know that I was the victim, not that freak. And my tits had nothin’ to do with it!”

While Milt Zimmerman walked to the alley with the car keys that Cat had retrieved, Rhonda removed the broken silver pump and hobbled down Santa Monica Boulevard in the other direction, disappearing into the night.

“No such thing as rape in Hollywood,” Cat said to Flotsam. “Just a lot of business disputes.”

Flotsam had the last word, two words, actually. It was what was always said by officers in that unique police division, there in the very heart of Los Angeles. He shook his head in utter bewilderment and said, “Fucking Hollywood!”

Just then the public phone rang. Cat was heading for their car but Flotsam said, “They’re all afraid of cell phones from watching The Wire on TV.”

Flotsam picked it up and in a voice as close to Rhonda’s as he could manage said, “Heloooo.”

As expected, a male voice said, “Is this Rhonda?”

“It certainly is,” Flotsam said in falsetto.

“I’m the guy who had a little party with you at my apartment three weeks ago,” the caller said. “Lance. Remember?”

“Ohhhh, yes,” Flotsam said. “Remind me of your address, Lance.”

Before he hung up, Cat heard him say, “Get ready to shed those pants, Lance!”

“What’s going on in that water-logged brain?” Cat asked with a sloe-eyed glance.

At eleven-thirty, 6-X-32 pulled up in front of an apartment building on Franklin, an upmarket neighborhood where Flotsam and Cat wouldn’t have expected a dragon streetwalker to have an outcall date.

Flotsam said to Cat, “I thought we’d find the guy somewhere like that building near Fountain and Beachwood. That’s where a lotta trannies and dragons do business. My partner and me call it Jurassic Park.”

“Why?” Cat asked.

“Because of the occupants. We don’t know what the hell they are.”

Flotsam shined his spotlight along the second-floor balcony until he spotted Lance’s apartment number, then got on the PA and said, “Attention, Lance! Miss Rhonda regrets she is indisposed and unable to keep her date with you tonight. It’s her recurring prostate infection.”