Hollywood Crows

FOUR

WATCH 5 HIT THE STREETS with a bang that evening. The bang came from a twelve-year cop with a sporty blonde haircut, rosy dumpling cheeks, and just a hint of makeup, whose Sam Browne belt was rumored to be a size 44. Gert Von Braun had recently transferred to Hollywood from Central Division, where she’d been in an officer-involved shooting that cops refer to as a “good” shooting. Gert had encountered an armed bandit running out of a skid row liquor store, loot and gun in hand, at the same moment that Gert, working alone in a report car, was pulling up in front. Steering with her left hand, Gert had fired one-handed through the open passenger window and hit the parolee-at-large with four out of five rounds, killing him instantly, thus making herself a celebrity gunslinger at Central Station.

But Gert was sick of all the skid row derelicts and the smells associated with them: urine and feces, vomit and blood. And, worst of all, the unbearably sweet, sickly smell of decaying flesh from corpses that had lain dead under bridges and in cardboard shelters. Some had been there for so long that even the flies covering them were dead. At least those corpses didn’t smell. And the living weren’t much better off, derelicts with their legs and feet covered with clumps of maggots that were eating them alive while the wretches ate whatever they could beg at the back doors of downtown eateries.

The watch commanders were always calling for acid washes at Central Station. They had an air-deodorizing machine going most of the time and burned incense sticks in the report room. Cops would come on duty, sniff the air, and say, “Is it a three- or four-stick day?”

Finally, Gert Von Braun had decided that Central Division smelled like one huge tennis shoe and she couldn’t get the odor out of her uniforms or her nostrils. Hollywood Station was closer to her home in the Valley and smelled much better, even though she knew it was a lot weirder than Central. She’d asked for a transfer and had gotten it.

Coppers at Hollywood Station noticed that Gert carried everything but a rocket launcher in her war bag, which was not actually a bag but a huge black suitcase on wheels. And the cops at Hollywood Station discovered quickly that Gert had “ETS,” which was what they called explosive temper syndrome, especially when she’d come puffing out of the station into the parking lot, red faced in the summer heat, dragging her load while her partner lagged behind with a beanbag shotgun as well as the Remington 870 one-shot-and-you-rot model.

It wasn’t a good time to start hacking on her, but nobody ever said the surfer cops were founts of wisdom. They always referred to big war bags on wheels as “wimpy bags for airline employees.” Jetsam nodded toward her nylon suitcase, winked at Flotsam, and said to Gert, “Excuse me, miss, but is our flight on time?”

Taking the cue, Flotsam said, “Can we have a beverage before takeoff? And extra peanuts?”

Gert Von Braun, who was only five foot six but outweighed Jetsam, if not the much larger Flotsam, said, “Shove your peanuts up your ass, you surfboard squids.”

“Oh, that’s scandalous,” Flotsam whispered to Jetsam.

“I’m so appalled,” Jetsam whispered back to Flotsam.

Still giving the surfer cops the stink eye, Gert hefted her equipment into the trunk of her shop, closed the lid, and began testing her Portable Officer Data Device System, which she’d checked out at the kit room.

The PODD, pronounced “pod” by the cops, was one of the instruments of torture encouraged by the monitors of the federal consent decree. It was a handheld instrument resembling a large BlackBerry. In it were the FDRs, or field data reports, which LAPD officers had to fill out for every contact with a suspect that was not the result of a radio call, that is, any stop of a suspect initiated by an officer. On it they had to list the gender, descent, and age of a suspect, and the reason for the stop, also indicating whether there was a pat-down or a more complete search of the suspect’s person or car.

The purpose of the FDR was to monitor whether or not cops were engaging in racial profiling, but like everything else connected with the federal consent decree, it discouraged proactive police work. With the mountains of paperwork they already had to endure in order to please their monitoring masters, this one was cumbersome and insulting, and it encouraged otherwise honest cops to dishonestly “balance out” their legitimate suspect stops of blacks and Latinos by creating nonexistent Asians or white Anglos. And it just generally pissed off everybody connected with it and resulted in yet more cops being taken off the streets to deal with the PODD information.

And at that moment nobody was more pissed off than Officer Gert Von Braun, who checked her PODD and placed it on the deck lid of her shop, trying to ignore the surfer team who were watching her and chortling. Because she was mad at the surfers, and at the PODD, and at herself for transferring to Hollywood Station, her mind had been elsewhere when she loaded the magazine tube of her shotgun. The loading protocol was designed to make the gun “patrol ready,” that is, four in the magazine and none in the chamber, with the safety on until the gun is ready to be taken from the car and used. Then a final round was to be taken from the butt cuff to top off the magazine.

Probably because she was so hot and distracted by the smirking surfers, and had such a famously short fuse in the first place, she forgot that she’d just loaded the magazine. And she decided to test the action as she usually did before loading any rounds into the gun. Of course, that racked a live round into the chamber, with the safety off.

Gert realized at once what she’d done, and cursing the surfers under her breath for dissing her, she was about to unchamber the round after placing her cell phone beside the PODD on the deck lid of the car.

“Dude, I think we better get our wheels up,” Flotsam said to his partner. “Gert has locked in on us with lips drawn, fangs bared, and a shotgun in her paws.”

“Bro, that swamp donkey can shoot with either hand,” Jetsam agreed, eyeing Gert’s Distinguished Expert shooting medal on her left pocket flap over her extra-large bosom. “And her heart pumps Freon to her veins.”

Still glaring at the surfer cops, and trying to think up some crack she could make about their dumb-looking, bleached-out spiky hair, Gert saw that the PODD had bumped the cell phone and it was sliding clear off the deck lid of the car.

She said, “Shit!” and tried to catch it with her left hand before it hit the asphalt, but she touched the PODD and it started sliding. Now she was trying to catch both instruments with her left hand. And she accidentally touched the trigger with her right.

The evening began with a bang, all right. A big one. Doomsday Dan Applewhite yelled like he’d been shot. He’d been bent over the open trunk of his shop and leaped back from the explosion, twisting clumsily and falling down on his hip. His P1 partner, young Gil Ponce, who was one month from completing his eighteen-month probation, instinctively crouched and drew his Beretta.

Officer Von Braun’s shotgun had been pointed skyward, so the explosion did no damage, except to the psyche of Officer Applewhite. Within a minute, there were three supervisors running into the parking lot, including the lieutenant and Sergeant Treakle. Gert Von Braun was scared, mortified, and greatly relieved when she saw that she’d not blown away a cop, though she knew she’d be facing disciplinary action for the accidental discharge.

“You okay?” the lieutenant asked the senior field training officer, whose face had gone white.

“I think so,” Dan Applewhite said. Then he added, “I’m not sure. I better run over to Cedars and get MT’d. I went down hard.”

To the supervisors of Dan Applewhite, it went without saying that he’d go for medical treatment, since his retirement date was nearing. A paper cut could send him to Cedars-Sinai or Hollywood Presbyterian, demanding a tetanus shot. He was determined to have recorded on paper any injury he’d suffered while on duty as an active cop in case some disability popped up during his retirement years, as he was sure it would.

Gert Von Braun followed the supervisors into the station to give her statement for the 1.28 personnel complaint while the surfer cops jumped into their shop and cleared for calls, hoping they wouldn’t somehow get blamed for harassing, enraging, and distracting a recognized gunfighter who wore a size 44 Sam Browne. They needn’t have worried, though. Gert was told she’d probably end up with an official reprimand, and she took it like a man.

After the supervisors and Gert Von Braun were gone, Dan Applewhite’s twenty-two-year-old boot turned to his shaken partner and said, “Want me to drive tonight?”

Wordlessly, the older cop handed Gil the keys to their shop. Phantom pains were already burning Dan’s left hip and running down into his femur. He wondered if this would lead to eventual hip replacement. He’d heard horror stories of staph infection that crippled patients after hip surgery, and he got a terrifying mental picture of himself trying to negotiate the steps to his apartment with a walker.

Unhappily for the older cop, but happily for his young P1, the ER was jammed with patients who had real injuries that needed treatment. LAPD officer or not, Dan Applewhite was told that he’d have to wait an hour, maybe more, before a doctor could see him.

“How’re you feeling now?” Gil asked his partner, whose lean body was twisted gingerly onto his good hip as he sat contorted.

A six-year-old Latino boy whose mother was experiencing contractions was watching Dan Applewhite. Finally he said to the wiry cop, “Why do you sit down so funny? You look like a blue grasshopper.”

Dan Applewhite ignored the kid but said to Gil Ponce, “Let’s get the hell outta here. But if anything happens as a result of this, I want you as witness. I’m in pain from my hip…”

“To your lip,” Gil said, then with his FTO glaring at him added, “Sorry. Just trying to cheer you up. Let’s get you a cup of coffee.”

Like Hollywood Nate, Doomsday Dan was one of the Starbucks cops and would rather endure severe caffeine deprivation than ever set foot in a 7-Eleven for a cuppa joe. Gil Ponce couldn’t understand that, given the price of Starbucks coffee, but his field training officer was a partner who would often buy coffee for both of them, and sometimes even a meal at Hamburger Hamlet or IHOP. Generosity was one of Dan’s saving graces that everyone appreciated, and it made working with him tolerable when he was in a dark mood. Gil figured that maybe it was his FTO’s way of compensating.

Dan Applewhite was called Doomsday Dan by the other cops because he lived in constant anticipation of calamity, with permanent frown lines and an inverted smile on his lips. He could be assertive and fearless, but after the fact he’d lapse into a funk and imagine the horrors that might befall him for his actions. He’d reach ungloved into a resisting doper’s mouth to pull out a five-gram stash of rock cocaine but later conclude that if he was lucky, he’d only contract staph from the encounter, instead of the AIDS virus. He was forty-nine years old and had one year to go before retirement, but he was morbidly convinced he’d never make it. Or if he did, the stock market would crash and bankrupt him, and there he’d be, a retired cop, begging for quarters on Hollywood Boulevard.

“I heard that Donald Trump carries a sterilizer for when he has to shake hands with lots of people,” Flotsam had said to Gil Ponce. “If I had to work with Doomsday Dan all the time, I’d buy him one. It gets embarrassing when he’s on a real downer and you go for a Fat Burger and he gloves up to spritz the table and scrub it down with paper napkins.”

Gil Ponce had hoped that a supervisor would move him to another training officer, but being a P1 with so little time left on his probation, Gil had resigned himself and felt lucky when deployment considerations put him with other partners. Despite Doomsday Dan’s pathological pessimism, the older cop had taught Gil a lot, and the twenty-two-year-old boot never doubted that Doomsday Dan was dependable and instructive.

More than once the older cop had lectured Gil on ways to take advantage of his Hispanic status in the diversity-conscious LAPD, especially now that the city of L.A. had a Mexican American mayor with political topspin.

“You’re Hispanic,” Dan had reminded him. “So use it when the time comes.”

“But I’m really not,” Gil Ponce finally said to his partner one evening when they were cruising the side streets in East Hollywood, looking for car prowlers. “Let me explain.”

Gil Ponce had been named after his paternal grandfather, who had immigrated with his parents to Santa Barbara, California, from Peru. All of their children, including Gil’s grandfather, had married Americans.

Gilberto Ponce III told Dan that he wished his mother, whose ancestry was a mix of Irish and Scottish, had named him Sean or Ian, but she said it would have dishonored his grandfather, whom young Gil loved as much as he loved his parents. Yet Gil had always felt like a fraud, especially now, when this FTO kept harping about the diversity promotions that a name like his could facilitate in Los Angeles, California, circa 2007.

“Having a Hispanic name is bogus,” Gil finally said that night to the senior officer.

“Read the nameplate on your uniform,” Dan Applewhite retorted. “You’re Hispanic. That means something today. Look around Hollywood Station. Except for the midwatch, white Anglos are in the minority. Half of the current academy class is Hispanic. L.A. is on the verge of being reclaimed by Mexico.”

“Okay, look at it this way,” the probie said. “What if my Peruvian grandpa had come from neighboring Brazil, where they have Portuguese names and don’t speak Spanish? Would I still rate diversity points?”

“Don’t make this too complicated just because you been to college,” Dan said. “It’s all about color and language.”

Gil said, “I know about as much Spanish as you do, and my skin is lighter than yours and my eyes are bluer. If you wanna work out the math, I’m exactly one-fourth Peruvian, and I don’t think any of that is mestizo in the first place.”

“You overanalyze,” Dan Applewhite said, wishing this college boy wouldn’t debate every goddamn thing, thinking it really was time for him to retire.

Gil said, “And if I had the same Peruvian DNA on my mother’s side with no Hispanic surname attached to me, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. And should Geraldo Rivera’s kids rate diversity points? How about Cameron Diaz when she has kids? Or Andy Garcia? Or Charlie Sheen, for chrissake. He’s as much Hispanic as I am!”

The conversation was forever ended when Doomsday Dan pulled their shop to the curb, put it in park, and, turning to face his young partner, said, “This ain’t the city of angels, it’s the city of angles, where everybody’s looking for an edge. There’re hundreds of languages spoken right here in Babelwood, right? It’s all about diversity and preferences and PC. So if the lottery of life gave you an edge, you’re gonna accept it and be grateful. Because even though you’re a nice kid with potential, I’m telling you right here and now that if you don’t shut the fuck up and act like you been somewhere, as your FTO I’m gonna decide that you’re too goddamn stupid to be a cop and maybe shouldn’t even make your probation! Are you tracking?”

Then Dan Applewhite started to sneeze and had to grab his box of tissues and his nasal spray. “See what you did,” he said, sniffling. “You stressed me out and activated my allergies.”

When the older cop got his sneezing under control, his young partner thought things over, looked at his training officer, and said in English-accented high-school Spanish, “Me llamo Gilberto Ponce. Hola, compañero.”

Wiping his dripping nose, Doomsday Dan said, “That’s better. But you don’t have to overdo it. You Hispanics always tend to gild the lily.”

Leonard Stilwell was a thirty-nine-year-old crackhead with a mass of wiry red hair, a face full of freckles, and large, unfocused blue eyes that would have looked believable on a barnyard bovine. He had served two relatively short terms for burglary in the Los Angeles county jail system but had never been sentenced to state prison. The last conviction resulted from Leonard’s having tossed his latex gloves into a Dumpster after successfully completing his work. The cops later found the gloves, and, after cutting off the fingertips, the crime lab had successfully treated the inside of the fingertips and got good latent prints. After that conviction, Leonard Stilwell began watching CSI.

The county jail was so overcrowded that nonviolent prisoners like Leonard Stilwell could usually get an early release to make room for rapists, gangbangers, and spouse killers. So Leonard had benefited from all the crime that everyone else was committing and got squeezed out of the county jail onto the streets like toothpaste from a tube. Whenever he was free, he would hurry to old companions to try talking them into an advance against his cut from the next job, then he’d go on a rock cocaine binge for a few days to smoke the miseries of county jail from his memory bank before going back to work. But that had been when he was teamed with master burglar Whitey Dawson, who’d died from a heroin overdose six months earlier, his last words being “It don’t get any better!”

Leonard Stilwell had proved reasonably adept at breaking into liquor storage rooms, which had been Whitey Dawson’s specialty, and also showed some competence in refilling empty bottles of premium brands with the cheap stolen booze, then affixing a believable stamp to seal the cap. Twice he’d sold several of the doctored bottles, mixed with legitimate ones, to Ali Aziz of the Leopard Lounge, who had never caught on.

Now with Whitey Dawson gone, Leonard Stilwell was reduced to taking a job. It was the first time in fifteen years that he’d actually drawn a paycheck and he hated every minute of it. He was the only gringo at a second-rate car wash, and when the owner wasn’t yelling at him, the other workers were. One of the Mexicans was an old homeboy named Chuey, who sometimes had some decent rock to sell. Chuey never carried the rock on his person and he lived in a cottage in East Hollywood, where Leonard had to drive to if he wanted the dope.

Leonard drove there just after sunset and found Chuey’s door wide open. He yelled and finally entered but couldn’t find Chuey anywhere. Then he walked into the backyard and found him. Horrified, Leonard ran back inside, picked up Chuey’s phone, and called 9-1-1, reporting what he’d found in what he considered to be Spanish-accented English but which was almost indecipherable.

Before he left the cottage, he sublimated his horror long enough to ransack the bedroom until he found Chuey’s wallet. He stole $23 from the wallet and got the hell out of there.

Their “unknown trouble” call came a couple of hours after Dan Applewhite’s allergy attack had quieted. Unknown trouble usually meant that somebody had phoned while drunk or hysterical, or sometimes in a language that was unintelligible. But it could mean anything and made cops a bit nervous and more alert.

That part of Hollywood was gang territory, but not the turf of the Salvadorans. This was where older cruisers lived, Mexican American veteranos of White Fence. Recent reports identified 463 street gangs in Los Angeles with 38,974 members. But how the LAPD had managed to count heads so precisely was anybody’s guess.

“Bring the shotgun,” Dan said to Gil Ponce, who removed the Remington from its barrel-up bed between the seats and racked one into the chamber, topping off the magazine with an extra round.

It was a wood-frame cottage, white paint faded and peeling, the tiny yard full of weeds. A smell of salsa and frying lard was coming through the open door.

“Police!” Dan Applewhite said at the doorway. “Did somebody call?”

No answer. He took the shotgun from Gil and used the muzzle to push the door farther open. The house was dark but there was light coming from the kitchen. Somebody had eaten at the table recently. The single bedroom was vacant and the bed was made carelessly, a worn bedspread pulled up over a single pillow. A man’s clothes were draped over a chair and hanging in the closet, the meager wardrobe consisting of two pairs of khaki trousers, several white tees, and a gray sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves.

The back door was open and Gil shined his light outside into a small rear yard, where he saw a child’s tricycle and a plastic wading pool, although the house interior bore no signs of a child living there. On a cheap dresser in the bedroom, he noted four pictures of a smiling Latino boy, and said, “He’s got a son living somewhere, if not here.”

The young cop walked to the back porch of the cottage and noticed that the rear gate was hanging open, facing onto an alley. Across the alley was a firetrap of an apartment building, defaced by gang graffiti, known to house Latino illegal immigrants. The proof of their occupancy was all of the bean and tomato plants in the common areas, where there was an erstwhile flower planter or a patch of earth. It wasn’t very late and only a few windows showed light in that three-story building, whose westside owner had been cited for fire code violations.

Gil Ponce walked through the yard and out to the alley, and there he found the object of their call. He was hanging by what appeared to be nylon rope from a climbing spike on a telephone pole between the cottage and the house next to it. He was wearing white cotton briefs and that was all. He was shoeless and there were drizzles of feces running down his legs and over his feet. His neck was stretched a third more than normal and his face had gone from its normal olive tone to purple and black. His torso, arms, neck, and even the side of his face, were decorated with colorful body art, much of it gang tatts. A stepladder was tipped over onto the alley floor a few feet from the dangling corpse.

“Partner!” Gil yelled.

When the older cop saw the dangling corpse, he said, “Somebody from that apartment building must’ve put in the call.”

Never having seen a suicide victim before, Gil said, “Whadda we do now?”

Dan Applewhite said, “Mostly we worry about this dude’s head coming off and rolling down the alley.”

When the coroner’s crew arrived, a floodlight was set up. One of the body snatchers said he’d go up the ladder to remove the noose if his partner and a cop could lift the corpse to give the rope some slack. By then several residents of the apartment building had their windows open and were gawking down at the macabre spectacle.

Gil gaped in horror at the feces-caked legs of the dead man, and Dan Applewhite said, “My young pard is big and way stronger than me. He’ll help you.”

“I can smell him from here!” Gil cried.

“We’ll wrap a sheet around him when we lift,” the body snatcher said. “We never untie the knots. The coroner wants his knots intact. Hold your breath. It’ll be all right.”

“Gross!” Gil Ponce murmured, gloving up.

By the time the stepladder was in place, and the lights and voices in the alley had caused several more illegal immigrants to pop their heads out of windows, D2 Charlie Gilford had arrived, pissed off for having to leave his TV just because some old cruiser did an air dance. One of the talent show contestants, a fat girl, had begun blubbering, and the killer panelists were pouring it on just as the phone rang.

Dan Applewhite said to the detective, “Just an over-the-hill homie. Which means a middle-aged guy that never filed a tax return.”

Charlie gazed at the dangling man’s full-torso and full-sleeve colorful gang tatts, then at young Gil Ponce walking disconsolately toward the stepladder as though to his own hanging. Finally, the detective sucked his teeth and smirked. Dan Applewhite noticed and said, “I know what you’re thinking, Charlie, but those people up there can hear you. It’s obvious, so don’t say it!”

But the night-watch detective was nothing if not obvious. Squinting at pale and queasy Gil Ponce, Compassionate Charlie Gilford yelled, “Hey, kid, find me a fucking stick! This is what I call a piñata!”