Hollywood Hills

SEVEN

The new watch commander, Lieutenant O’Reilly, conducted roll call that afternoon for Watch 5, the midwatch. He was a thirty-year-old lieutenant who so far the troops didn’t much like. He’d tested well on promotion exams and was recently appointed to his rank with only nine years on the Department and sent to Hollywood Division for his probation. He gave them a condescending lecture that was so boring it couldn’t have been enlivened with hand puppets. It was all about treating the citizens of Hollywood with the utmost respect, even those who were as crazy as rabid squirrels. And in Hollywood that included a lot of folks.

On the wall behind the long tables where his captive audience sat were framed movie posters, including ones for Sunset Boulevard and L.A. Confidential, an indication that the officers of Hollywood Station were very aware of their unique geography. Finally, the lieutenant ran out of things to lecture them about and said, “Let’s go to work.” The cops gathered their gear, but before leaving the room, each of them touched for luck the framed photo of their late sergeant whom they’d called the Oracle. They had loved their old supervisor, and he had thought of them as his children.

The framed photo, which was affixed to the wall beside the doorway, bore a brass plate that said:

THE ORACLE

APPOINTED: FEB 1960

END-OF-WATCH: AUG 2006

SEMPER COP

The assistant watch commander, Sergeant Lee Murillo, a calm and bookish Mexican American with hair the color of stainless steel and the knotty rawboned body of a long-distance runner, had fifteen years of LAPD experience and was a supervisor they did happen to like. He was downstairs in the detective squad room talking to the MAC team about Cindy Kroll and Louis Dryden, and he gave the Little Armenia drive-by job to 6-X-76 when Lieutenant O’Reilly was finished with them.

All five patrol units, including 6-X-32, manned by Flotsam and Jetsam, and 6-X-66, with Hollywood Nate driving and Snuffy Salcedo riding shotgun, left the kit room with their gear and headed for the parking lot at 6 P.M. They toted black nylon war bags full of gear, as well as Remington shotguns, Ithaca beanbag shotguns, helmets, Tasers, pepper spray, and rovers. During the prior several years that the LAPD had suffered under the federal consent decree, they had also been required to draw from the kit room devices to record superfluous data about people they stopped or arrested. None of that data collecting had ever provided police critics with information that they’d hoped would prove claims of racial profiling. As hard as they tried, the disgruntled critics of the LAPD were not able to wave the race flag when it came to traffic and pedestrian stops.

P2 Vivien Daley, one of three female officers working the midwatch that evening, was the driver of the shop belonging to 6-X-76, so called because of the shop numbers on the roof and doors of their Crown Vics. Those numbers allowed a unit to be easily identified by citizens and by the LAPD helicopters, called airships by the troops.

The late summer sun was still high enough that Viv Daley put on her sunglasses when she got behind the wheel. The thirty-year-old cop was born and raised in Long Beach and had played varsity basketball at Long Beach State, but she had disappointed her parents, who wanted her to become a teacher. She always said she’d applied at the LAPD “on a whim” but had never regretted it in the eight years that she’d served. Viv loved to quote the Oracle to her parents, especially his often-repeated mantra: “Doing good police work is the most fun you’ll ever have in your entire lives.” She found that to be true.

Viv Daley had scrubbed good looks, and the only makeup she carried was a pencil to darken her sandy eyebrows and a subtle pale lipstick, a shade approved by the Department. She kept her auburn hair pinned up above the collar of her uniform shirt, as was required of all female patrol officers. At end-of-watch, when she’d changed into her jersey and jeans and three-inch wedges, she stood taller than almost every male officer on the watch, but Flotsam could still look down at her, wedges or not.

Her passenger partner “keeping books,” or “taking paper,” which simply meant being the report writer, was twenty-nine-year-old Georgie Adams, who had seven years on the Job. He wore his raven hair slicked back, and with his black irises and chiseled features, he was as dark and exotic-looking as Viv Daley was fair and freckled. The dissimilarity extended to their stature as well. At a wiry five foot eight, he was the shortest male officer on the midwatch, a full five inches shorter than his gym-fit partner, and though he was well muscled, he didn’t outweigh her by much due to her large-boned frame. He referred to Viv as “tall sister” and often called her “sis.”

Because of his Anglo-Saxon surname but swarthy appearance, questions about his ethnicity came up immediately with new partners, and when it did, Georgie Adams was quick to display his sinister smile and say, “I’m a Gypsy boy. A distant cousin to the late George Adams, California’s ‘King of the Gypsies.’ ”

Nobody ever knew if Georgie’s claim was true, and nobody had been able to pry much more of his history from him. He’d served in Iraq with the Marines and had been wounded by a roadside bomb, that much was known for sure. He was born and raised in San Bernardino, California, and sometimes he told what everyone figured was a preposterous story of having been bought from a Gypsy clan passing through town by a Syrian carpet importer and his wife, who raised him and let him keep his noble Gypsy surname. Yet whenever he was called to the home of an Arabic-speaking crime victim in Hollywood, it was clear that he could not speak the language of the Syrians. The next guess was that he was of Latino descent, but he could not speak Spanish either. All bets were off at Hollywood Station as to Georgie Adams’s true ethnicity.

His personnel package downtown didn’t reveal much, as one of the curious Hollywood Division supervisors who had taken a look at it learned. The supervisor even contacted the civilian employee who had conducted Georgie’s background check. He was told that the applicant’s parents, Jean and Theodore Adams, were third-generation San Bernardino residents whose forebears were Okies from the great migration of the 1930s. And further, the background investigator said, Georgie had come to them through a county adoption with almost nothing known about his birth mother, a teenage drifter, and nothing at all about his biological father.

The only certainties were that, immediately after graduating from high school in San Bernardino, Georgie Adams had joined the Marines and after his discharge had enrolled at a community college, which he left to join the LAPD. And that was it. The other cops referred to him as “the Gypsy,” and he seemed to like the handle.

Georgie’s partner, Viv Daley, never questioned him about his ethnicity or asked anything about his shadowy past. She simply said, “It’s none of my business. And anyway, I love a mystery.”

The surfer cops were attracted to Viv Daley and had tried many times to take her surfing, saying they’d turn her into a “quantum quebee,” which she learned from Jetsam was a compliment, meaning a hot surfer chick. But so far Viv had resisted their many invitations to attend the nighttime ragers on the sand, including one that was scheduled for Sunday night at Bolsa Chica Beach, where many firefighters and cops liked to surf.

When she told her partner about the invitation, and her concern that a bunch of boozy surfers might get a bit too aggressive and handsy with any women present, Georgie offered to go with her as chaperone.

He said, “Sis, if any drunken surfer trash put their paws on my bosom buddy, I’ll cut out their fucking hearts and feed them to the seagulls.”

“ ‘Bosom buddy,’ ” Viv said. “That’s charming, but I don’t think I’ll be needing a Gypsy assassin as a chaperone.”

When Jetsam heard from Viv about Georgie’s offer, he informed Flotsam, who said, “Dude, maybe we oughtta like, rethink our rager invite to Viv. The Gypsy might spoil the party if he goes all aggro and starts carving up kahunas.”

There’d been persistent rumors ever since he arrived at Hollywood Station that Georgie Adams carried a buck knife on duty in an ankle rig. There had been two known cases in LAPD history of unarmed undercover officers killing assailants with a knife when they were trapped in a deadly situation. The Gypsy was known for his mordant sense of humor, but when he showed his baleful smile and let it be known that he was looking for a chance to be the first uniformed LAPD copper to do it, the others tended to believe he might be serious.

The first time the rumor about the buck knife reached young Lieutenant O’Reilly, he ordered Sergeant Murillo to check it out, and if it was true, to put a stop to it immediately.

“Tell Adams he isn’t playing a role in a spaghetti western here,” Lieutenant O’Reilly said to his sergeant.

But the desk officer overheard the watch commander’s order, and LAPD’s jungle wireless went to work immediately. By the time Sergeant Murillo got around to asking Georgie Adams to accompany him to the locker room, the young cop didn’t look at all surprised, nor did he question his supervisor about his reason.

“I’m sorry, Adams,” Sergeant Murillo said when they were alone in the locker room, “but I’ve been tasked to find out if you carry a buck knife in an ankle rig, and if you do, to order you to stop doing it.”

Silently, Georgie reached down and pulled up both pant legs all the way to his knees. Sergeant Murillo saw no buck knife. What he did see was mottled scar tissue from third-degree burns, and grafts that looked like scorched lumpy egg white, wrapped around Georgie’s shins and calves from the top of his six-inch zip-up boots to just below his knees.

“Okay, thanks,” Sergeant Murillo said, and left him in the locker room.

When he returned to the watch commander’s office, Sergeant Murillo said, “I’ve spoken with Adams and checked for a buck knife.”

“What did you find out?” asked Lieutenant O’Reilley.

“That he earned his Purple Heart,” said Sergeant Murillo. “And I’m gonna invite him and his partner to meet me at Hamburger Hamlet for code seven tonight. Where I’ll buy them any goddamn thing they want.”

Lieutenant O’Reilley never asked Sergeant Murillo about the buck knife again.

Back when Viv Daley and Georgie Adams had first been partnered, Sergeant Murillo had taken her aside in the sergeants’ room and said, “I know that Adams is an acquired taste. I was wondering if you’re happy working with him?”

Viv Daley said, “Sarge, I wouldn’t trade him for anybody at Hollywood Station. When the Gypsy’s got your back, a girl couldn’t be more safe at a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.” Then she added, “Except for when Bill Clinton lived there.”

Viv and Georgie drove to Louis Dryden’s apartment building on Franklin Avenue and slid the detective’s business card in the jamb of Dryden’s front door where he couldn’t miss it, then began patrol and cleared for calls. While driving eastbound on Hollywood Boulevard on the way to their area, they saw that the Street Characters were out in force in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The recession had brought hard times to even some of the costumed performers, who posed for photos with tourists and received voluntary tips for it. They were not allowed by law to panhandle or make demands of the tourists.

Newscasters gleefully reported to their audiences whenever tensions arose around the Grauman’s forecourt, where the handprints and footprints of famous movie stars were set in the cement pavement. On a recent occasion, Elmo the Muppet had been arrested for aggressive panhandling, and so had the dark-hooded character from Scream. Street Character Freddy Krueger was also busted for taking his role too seriously and allegedly stabbing someone. Mr. Incredible had been jailed, as had Batman and Chewbacca from Star Wars. So far, the several Darth Vaders had behaved themselves, but Spider-Man, or rather one of several using that costume, got popped by Hollywood cops for slugging somebody.

As 6-X-76 passed Grauman’s, Georgie Adams said, “I’m gonna be real disappointed if SpongeBob Square-Pants ever gets busted for something. I always liked him on TV.”

“I never much liked Spider-Man,” Viv said. “Too creepy. Crawling around like an insect and all that.”

“Let’s make a pass by that apartment house we’re supposed to check,” Georgie said. “Then I can log it and get it over with. Sounds like it’s just a PR job the detectives are foisting off on us poor overworked bluesuits.”

In the last of the daylight, when the summer sun was settling down behind the Pacific Ocean, giving Hollywood its special rosy glow, the old apartment building in Little Armenia looked impregnable to the officers of 6-X-76.

“This is bullshit,” Georgie Adams said. “Real-estate guys like Dryden don’t kill their squeezes themselves. They hire it done. He’d just find an Eighteenth Streeter or some other local crusier and put a ticket on her.”

“The detectives said he’s supposed to be into crystal meth,” Viv reminded him. “A desperate guy on ice might do anything when he gets all spun out.”

“Anyways,” Georgie said, “even Spider-Man himself couldn’t get in there.”

“Spider-Man,” Viv said, mulling it over. She then drove around to the alley behind the building and parked by the attached carport.

“What’re you looking for, sis?” Georgie wanted to know.

“Any sign of a trail from his web-shooter,” Viv said with a sly smile. “I think old sticky foot could get into her apartment.”

“How?”

“There,” she said, pointing to the neighboring apartment building.

The building was in the process of being renovated and reroofed before the winter rains came. An eight-foot temporary chain-link fence was all that secured the construction site. Rolls of tar paper and shingles were visible inside the fence where workers had left them, along with two aluminum extension ladders.

“So?” Georgie said.

Viv said, “He could climb over the fence and borrow one of those extension ladders.”

“So?” Georgie said. “She’s on the third floor. Most ladders don’t go that high unless you’re a firefighter on a truck.”

Viv said, “He could use the ladder to get onto the carport roof and then pull it up and extend it high enough to do the job.”

“You got some imagination, sis,” Georgie said. “But there’s no accessible window over the carports.”

“But from that point he could get clear to the roof of the building.”

“Then what?” Georgie said. “He goes down her chimney? News flash, sis. There ain’t no chimneys.”

“I noticed the small window on the south side,” Viv said. “She keeps it wide open. I’ll bet there’s no AC in that little place and she needs ventilation. He could scoot to the edge of that flat roof on his belly, lower his legs down in front of the open window, and swing right into her apartment.”

“Like a spider?” Georgie said mischievously.

“Like a meth-crazed, desperate tweaker,” Viv said. “With all those paranoid tweaker thoughts spinning through his head.”

“That’s probably the kitchen window there on the south side,” Georgie said. “I’ll bet it’s over the sink. If he went in there, he’d land in her garbage disposal and she could just turn it on and flush that fucking spider right down the drain.”

“You are such an asshole, Gypsy,” Viv said, poking him in the shoulder when her partner showed her his wicked little grin.

Despite Georgie’s protests, Viv managed to find time to drive by the apartment building and check out the alley two more times.

On their last check of the evening, Georgie Adams shined the spotlight on the graffiti sprayed on the stucco wall of the building on the alley side. There were gang slogans and the letters AP for “Armenian Power” written large.

Georgie said, “At least the Armenian cruisers respect education. All their graffiti is spelled right.”

At 9:15 P.M. on that moonless night, when the smog and overcast blowing in from the ocean hung low over the Los Angeles basin, there was a ruckus on Hollywood Boulevard that brought four of the midwatch units responding. Catwoman, who had tried in vain to look like Halle Berry, head-butted Superman for muscling in on her tourist tips and knocked him right on his ass in Grauman’s forecourt. The boozy superhero ended up dazed on John Wayne’s boot prints and yelled to everyone that he was going to murder Catwoman.

This Superman was not one of the younger Street Characters and didn’t much resemble the movie version’s. He had a nose full of broken veins, and a double chin, and was starting to get a middle-aged paunch that his costume with all the built-in muscles couldn’t hide. When he got to his feet, he lurched at the plucky Catwoman, who held her ground with claws extended. But then Marilyn Monroe, who was actually a forty-year-old transvestite named Melvin Pickett, came to Catwoman’s aid.

Superman grabbed Catwoman, who fought back and tried to kick him in the groin. When Superman drew back a fist, Marilyn Monroe stepped in and belted Superman across the mouth with her leather purse, which was heavy with rolls of quarters she’d collected for the Sunset Strip Beautification Project. There was a major donnybrook going on by the time the first black-and-whites arrived.

Six-A-Fifteen from Watch 3 showed up before any of the midwatch units, and that turned out to be unfortunate for Superman. The cop driving 6-A-15 was Preston Lilly, who’d served thirty-five years with the LAPD, twenty-two of them at Hollywood Station. He was a large, square-shouldered man with a massive shaved skull the color of old ivory. His eyes were gray and spaced too far apart, making them seem out of sync when aimed in your direction. Some people said that looking into the face of Preston Lilly was like looking at an enormous pale eel. He had already decided to retire before the end of the year, and he was sick of working 6-A-15 because he was always getting bullshit calls to the rich whiners in the Hollywood Hills.

“You can never make them Hills dwellers happy,” Preston Lilly complained to his partner, a Cuban immigrant named Mario Delgado. “A bunch of guys with too much money and a bunch of trophy wives with too much time on their hands. They like to bitch just for the sake of bitching.”

The phlegmatic Cuban just shrugged and said, “Better than working down in Watts, ’mano.” He had recently transferred to Hollywood Division from Southeast Division. Then he added, “We got to take some shit from the jotos in the Hills. They might be friends of the chief. Or maybe the mayor. That’s the way life is.”

“I own my own pink slip,” Preston Lilly said. “My pension’s vested. I could commit murder and they’d still have to send my pension checks to me at San Quentin. And I already filed my retirement papers, so nobody better fuck with me, in the Hills or in the flats. I got nothing to lose, compadre.”

Superman found that out when Preston Lilly stepped in to break up the tussle. Because Marilyn Monroe was sober, she’d been able to get a good choke hold on the larger Street Character, and Superman was sitting on Grauman’s forecourt with his back to Marilyn, who had him in not only a choke hold but also a scissors grip, with her shaved legs around his waist. The Incredible Hulk, a gentle soul who hated violence of any kind, had picked up Marilyn Monroe’s purse and was guarding it and pleading in vain for the combatants to stop fighting.

Marilyn Monroe’s platinum blond wig got twisted askew at the start of the fight and the hair was hanging in her face like a sheepdog’s. Her white dress was ripped open all the way down the side and had been torn off one shoulder. A large falsie had popped up out of her bra and was resting on Superman’s shoulder like an inverted cereal bowl. The panty hose on both of Marilyn’s legs was shredded, and her open-toed three-inch spikes were now without heels. And while Superman sat helpless, Catwoman pounded his face with relatively ineffectual blows that nevertheless made him howl in drunken rage.

“You’re dead!” he screamed. “When I get up, I’m killing you, you nigger cunt!”

“You gotta get up first, peckerwood!” she yelled back, and socked him in the eye with her little fist.

The first thing that Officer Preston Lilly did was grab Catwoman by the arm and flick her away from the brawlers. Then he said, “Cease and desist, Ms. Monroe! And you, too, Man of Steel!”

Meanwhile, there were hundreds of tourists watching, whistling, howling like coyotes, and it seemed like every single one of them was snapping photos.

Marilyn Monroe released her scissors hold as well as the choke hold and she stumbled to her feet with one shoe missing now. When Preston Lilly took Superman by the arm to drag him to his feet, the still boozy Street Character said, “Take your hands off me, you bald-headed pig fucker!”

“I don’t like your mouth,” Preston Lilly said. “You better lock it up.”

Superman answered that by spitting on Preston Lilly.

The big cop looked down and saw the spittle dripping from his LAPD badge onto the blue uniform shirt pocket and running down to the pewter pocket button.

Mario Delgado saw Preston Lilly instinctively ball his huge right fist, but the little Cuban stepped in fast and said, “Whoa, partner! You’re being watched by three hundred witnesses and about a hundred of them might be hostile.”

That made the Cuban cop take charge of things and grab one of Superman’s arms, and then both cops got Superman’s hands cuffed behind his back.

Marilyn Monroe held up a heel-less shoe and yelled to Superman in her natural baritone voice, “I paid three hundred bucks for my Louis Vuitton’s and that was a sale price, you sleazy turd! I’m suing your sorry ass!”

The arriving midwatch units got things under control, and after making the milling throngs move along, they began interviewing the other Street Characters who had witnessed the fracas. Preston Lilly walked Superman to their shop and strapped him in the backseat, then got behind the wheel to await his partner.

Mario Delgado was busy talking to Flotsam and Jetsam, who were trying to help Marilyn Monroe get what was left of her white dress pinned up enough to cover her pantie girdle. It was then that Superman, bitching that he was the real victim and that Preston Lilly was a fascist swine, hacked up a big loogie and spit it through the caged partition of the police car right onto the shaved skull of Officer Preston Lilly.

Mario Delgado was shocked when he turned and saw Preston Lilly suddenly start up the engine of the black-and-white and heard him yell, “Catch a ride back to the station, partner! I gotta get Superman outta here!”

The black-and-white squealed away from the curb and was gone. Just like that.

“What the hell?” the baffled Cuban cop said to Flotsam, who replied, “Dude, I think Preston don’t want any witnesses.”

Nearly forty minutes later, Mario Delgado paced anxiously in the parking lot of Hollywood Station, but still his partner and Superman had not appeared. He went inside and up to the lunchroom, where he bought a soda from the machine and then joined Hollywood Nate and Snuffy Salcedo in the report room.

The Cuban cop was not finished with his soda when they all heard yammering coming from the passageway leading from the parking lot door. Mario Delgado and Nate and Snuffy all ran out of the report room and found Preston Lilly walking the handcuffed superhero to the holding tank, where he put him inside, removed the handcuffs, and pushed him down onto the bench. He closed the door, but everyone could still see Superman through the shatterproof window, and he kept hollering. They could also see that there wasn’t a mark on his very flushed face other than the small abrasions he’d received in the fight.

Sergeant Murillo left the sergeants’ room to come and see what the yelling was all about, and when Superman saw the chevrons on his sleeves, he hollered, “Sergeant, I demand to make a citizen’s complaint! I’ve been tortured! It was worse than waterboarding!”

Preston Lilly looked at Sergeant Murillo and said, “That’s preposterous.”

Superman jumped up from the bench and ran to the glass window, yelling, “That skinhead Nazi took me to the Hollywood Freeway on-ramp and got out and grabbed my hair and pulled my head through the open window. And he rolled it up until I was trapped by the neck. There I was with my hands cuffed behind my back and my head hanging out, and he drove a hundred goddamn miles an hour for I don’t know how long and I was screaming the whole time for him to stop! It woulda been better if he’d just tied me to the hood like a fucking road-killed deer!”

Sergeant Murillo looked at Preston Lilly, who said, “Go ahead and cut paper, Sarge. I’m at the end of my career, where I can take the safety off and tell the captain what I think. Or the bureau commander. Or the fucking chief of police, for that matter. I’m bulletproof now. But as far as what Superman says? It’s preposterous.”

Superman said, “Sergeant, I swear to you. When I begged for mercy, all he did was drive faster. I could hardly breathe. And do you know what he said? He floored it all the way and he yells to me, ‘Nobody’s whupping on you, Superman. I’m just letting your own lips beat you to death.’ That’s what he said.”

Preston Lilly looked at Superman and at Sergeant Murillo and said, “That’s preposterous.”

Sergeant Murillo said to the big cop, “Preston, do what you can to move up your retirement date. And until you go, please leave the safety on.”