Hollywood Moon

TWENTY-TWO

BECAUSE HER MOTHER had not been religious, the daughter of Officer Dana Vaughn chose the Hollywood United Methodist Church for the funeral service after the coroner released her body. The Gothic church could be seen from the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, arguably the heart of Hollywood, and had been used in movies, so Pamela thought that her mother would’ve chuckled and approved of her choice.

She told this to Hollywood Nate Weiss during a phone conversation when she asked him to be one of the pallbearers, four of whom would be old friends of hers, male and female officers. Another choice that Pamela made was Leon Calloway, the officer from Watch 3 whose life was seconds from ending one dark night when Dana Vaughn had taken a risky head shot to save him. He fervently thanked Pamela for according him such an honor.

When she called Nate, Pamela had said that although Nate and Dana had been partners for only a short time, her mother talked of him often, always with affection and a mischievous gleam in her eye. Nate told her he’d be proud to serve, and he was very thankful that it was a phone conversation. He knew he might’ve cracked if he’d been face-to-face with this brave girl who so sounded like her mother.

Nate had spent an agonizing week after that extravagant police funeral complete with a graveside honor guard firing volleys, a bugler for taps, a lone bagpiper on the hillside, a helicopter flyover, and hundreds of cops in class-A uniforms. There was a moment at graveside when a rookie officer in uniform suddenly appeared beside the LAPD chaplain to read a prepared message. Nate didn’t know who she was, but pallbearer Leon Calloway knew. It was Officer Sarah Messinger, limping slightly but almost ready for her return to regular duty. She stood at attention before the microphone, simulating a modulated RTO voice they might hear on their police radios.

“Attention all units,” she began. “This is an end-of-watch broadcast for Police Officer Two Dana Elizabeth Vaughn, last assigned to Hollywood Division patrol.”

And then Sarah Messinger read a short summary of Dana’s career, including her saving the life of Officer Leon Calloway. When Nate saw the big cop’s shoulders tremble and heard a sob come from him, he almost lost it and had to say to himself, Hang on, hang on, hang on!

The “broadcast” concluded with “Officer Vaughn is survived by her daughter, Pamela, and every member of the Los Angeles Police Department grieves with her this day.”

Then Sarah Messinger saluted very slowly and said, “Officer Dana Vaughn, you are end-of-watch.”

Nate spent days asking himself what he could’ve done better that night. This, even though the investigators from Force Investigation Division and the District Attorney’s Office, as well as every officer at the scene, said there was nothing anyone could have done better. Yet he kept tormenting himself by reliving every second of the event, and after he was cleared to return to duty, he used up several of his overtime days to sit at home alone and brood.

He hadn’t been back to duty yet, when a second visit was scheduled for him with Behavioral Science Services in their offices in Chinatown. Like most cops, he distrusted shrinks and psychiatric testimony in general, often bought and paid for in courtroom trials. And like all cops, he ridiculed the MMPI test: “Do you want to be a forest ranger? Do you want to walk in grass naked? Have you ever thought of wearing women’s underwear? Is your stool black and tarry?” He would never have gone to the BSS shrink if not ordered to do so.

The first visit had been pointless. The psychologist was a man in his forties with a rosy, well-fed look who’d had a spot of mustard on his upper lip that Nate would’ve found distracting if he’d been even slightly interested in the questions. Nate was asked about sleeplessness and anxiety and anger, questions always asked of cops who’ve killed someone, and he’d denied experiencing any of it. He’d said his only regret was that he couldn’t have killed that bastard twice.

When the shrink got to the other routine questions about his relationships with parents and siblings, he’d said to the man, “What do my parents have to do with my partner getting hit by a fucking bullet from a Saturday-night special that couldn’t have found that particular mark again if the asshole had stood three feet away in broad daylight with a truck full of ammunition?”

The BSS shrink made notes about unconscious anger that had not been worked through and integrated and recommended this second annoying visit, which was on the day he returned to duty. It turned out that he was scheduled with a woman psychologist. This PhD was younger than Nate, barely thirty he guessed, tall and bony, with hair as straight and dull as straw and glasses with black rectangular frames. Her eggshell-white dress could only be called institutionally nondescript. In an earlier time, she would’ve been wearing Birkenstocks and rimless spectacles with her hair in a snood. She made him think of buttermilk.

The psychologist introduced herself as Marjorie, and she said to Nate, “I understand you’re an actor. What if you were to compose a scene that you wanted to tape and play back to see if it worked as intended? If I asked you to compose and play a scene describing Dana Vaughn, could you do it? Pretend that you’re all alone with your own tape machine and give it a try.”

“I don’t have a tape machine,” Nate said drily. “And cops’re too suspicious to talk to recording devices.”

Marjorie smiled and said, “But you’re an actor, Nate. I’ll lend you my pretend machine. And when you’re finished, you can take the pretend tape home with you.”

The shrink had such an unassuming manner and seemed so easy to ignore that Nate had to restrain himself from telling her that he truly did feel alone in the room. But after a moment of silence while he considered her goofy idea, he was surprised to discover that he wanted to talk about Dana Vaughn to an imaginary tape machine in an empty room. And when he started, the words tumbled out of him.

Nate gazed into space and said, “She had sparkling, golden-brown eyes and a special throaty chuckle that somehow ended with a tinkling sound like a wind chime, and she wasn’t afraid of raising a kid by herself, or of gray hair and laugh lines, or of guys with guns, or of anything else in this shitty world. And she was smarter than me and a better cop, and she called me honey, and it irked me at first, but now I miss it a lot.”

He fell silent then until Marjorie said, “And tell the machine what you regret now that she’s gone.”

That’s when Nate’s eyes welled and he finally said, “That the only time our lips ever touched was when I was trying to breathe life into her, and that I never said ‘honey’ right back at her, because she would’ve chuckled in that special way of hers, and that… that… she died all… all alone out there. Under that… fucking… Hollywood… moon.”

Then he wiped his eyes, stood abruptly, and said, “Thank you, Marjorie. The reading is over, and I don’t think I’d ever give me the role in whatever play you’re directing. I think I’d like to go to the station now. And may I say thank you for the loan of your pretend machine. I was able to talk to it more easily than to any of the humanoids around here.”

The body of Malcolm Rojas was released to his grieving mother after the postmortem, and though his mother would never believe in his guilt, both of the women he’d attacked identified their assailant from photos taken in life and in death.

The body of Jerzy Szarpowicz was cremated at the request of a brother in Arkansas, and the ashes were returned home by FedEx.

Of course, Hollywood Nate and everyone else at the station knew rather soon that Dewey Gleason and Tristan Hawkins would be charged with numerous counts of grand theft, forgery, and other property crimes. But despite three deaths having occurred at the crime scene, including the first-degree murder of a police officer, the District Attorney’s Office had not yet decided how to finally charge the two defendants. Although they were principals in immediate flight after the commission of felonies, their particular felonies did not meet the test for charging murder in the first degree of a peace officer. In fact, since neither defendant had personally used a firearm or other deadly weapon, even a charge of second-degree murder seemed a waste of taxpayer money. It was especially problematic for prosecutors that Ruben Malcolm Rojas was a wanted sexual psychopath and killer who had burst onto the scene and triggered the tragic events. Both defendants claimed that they were only trying to get away from him, not from the police, and fled in panic after Jerzy Szarpowicz, who they had not known was armed, began firing.

On the day following their arrest, just after TV footage of the suspects had been shown on local channels, a landlord in Frogtown called detectives at Hollywood Station to report that he’d rented an apartment to the one identified on the news as Dewey Gleason. That led to the discovery of the bed, chains, padlock, duct tape, and the rest. In hopes of striking a good plea bargain, the prisoners competed vigorously to reveal more information on each other as low-level confidence men. Up until then, neither arrestee had mentioned the kidnapping, but now each decided to amend his confession upon being confronted with the new Frogtown evidence. This occurred the day after the detectives had succeeded in marrying them to their former, less complex admissions.

Then both Dewey Gleason and Tristan Hawkins had to tell their versions of the kidnapping of Eunice Gleason, insisting that no one had any intention of harming Eunice, who Dewey maintained was the ringleader of their posse but not known by her low-level employees and bogus kidnappers. According to them, it was all an elaborate scam for Dewey Gleason to get some of the money from his ruthless wife, money that was rightfully his.

“It was just us little scammers trying to scam the big boss” was how Dewey put it to the detectives. “And it all went sideways.”

The Public Defenders Office and a court-appointed criminal lawyer argued that both clients were hardly more than identity-stealing scalawags whose confidence scheme directed at their boss, Eunice Gleason, had gone awry and resulted in a terrible but unforeseen tragedy not of their making. After conversations with jailhouse lawyers concerning prison overcrowding, coupled with their relatively innocuous arrest records and eager cooperation, Dewey Gleason became more sanguine, convinced that he would not serve more than eight years, and Tristan Hawkins less, considering their time served before sentencing and good behavior in prison.

It was pointed out to Dewey during an attorney visit that Symbionese Liberation Army urban terrorist Kathleen Soliah, aka Sara Jane Olson, who’d been a fugitive for twenty-four years until her capture in 1999, hadn’t served much longer than that, even though her gang had murdered a woman in a bank robbery and planted explosives under two LAPD police cars with intent to murder the officers. Dewey felt much more confident after that particular jailhouse chat.

In fact, during the last interview he had with D2 Viktor Chernenko, a Ukrainian immigrant famous at Hollywood Station for mangling American idioms, Dewey said to the hulking, moon-faced detective, “Someday the fortune that my wife stashed somewhere is gonna be found. And when it is, I’m putting in a claim for it.”

“That is the fruit of your criminal enterprise,” Viktor Chernenko replied. “I do not think you will be successful.”

“We both worked as honest people for years,” Dewey lied. “Nobody can prove which of the money is dirty and which is clean. So okay, maybe I’ll give up some of it to Uncle Sam and retire on the rest.”

Viktor Chernenko arched his bushy brows and said, “If I were you, my friend, I would not count my ducklings before they quack.”

Hollywood Nate was welcomed back warmly at his first roll call with hugs and quiet words of sympathy and encouragement. Perhaps because of Nate’s return and the memories it evoked, roll call was subdued despite the efforts of Sergeant Lee Murillo to inject a bit of levity from time to time.

Nate was to have worked with R.T. Dibney that night, but R.T. had unexpectedly requested a special day off for reasons that some cops guessed had to do with a certain waitress that he’d been sniffing around. It was R.T. Dibney who’d introduced Aaron Sloane to the Iranian jewelers Eddie and Freddie, who’d sold Aaron a real diamond ring, not a $200 zircon like the one that R.T. Dibney bought from them to trick his wife. Aaron’s ring cost nearly $4,000, but the Iranians swore that Aaron was getting it at a fifty percent police discount.

Sheila Montez had not worn the ring to Hollywood Station yet because she and Aaron were afraid that one of them would get transferred per Department policy as soon as word got out that they were to be wed in December. They wanted to work together for as long as they could. But Sheila would wear it when they visited his parents or hers, and they’d admire it every night before going to sleep, when they would talk excitedly about buying a house in Encino now that the real-estate market had almost bottomed out.

With R.T. Dibney gone for the night, Sergeant Murillo asked Hollywood Nate if he’d mind helping out at the front desk with the regular desk officer from Watch 3, and Nate said he wouldn’t mind at all. Sergeant Murillo noticed that Nate’s eyes had lost their old luster, and it worried him. He met with Sergeant Hermann in the sergeants’ room and asked her what she thought the Oracle would’ve done to help restore their troubled cop.

Sergeant Hermann said she’d think about it, and an hour later she said to Nate, “How about a cuppa joe at Seven-Eleven?”

Hollywood Nate was a Starbucks man but he said okay, and they rode in the sergeant’s car to the mini-mall, where Sergeant Hermann bought the coffee and looked longingly at the sweets but patted her size 38 Sam Browne and shook her head sadly.

“Want a goody to dunk?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” Nate said listlessly.

“Look at you,” she said. “You don’t have to count calories and fat grams. You still working out?”

“Not since… not for a couple of weeks,” he said.

They took their coffee outside, and Sergeant Hermann said, “I’d like to ask you something personal. Did you go to temple after Dana Vaughn was killed?”

“What?” Nate said sharply. “Has the federal judge put a box on our ratings reports for religious attendance?”

“I’m just saying.” Sergeant Hermann held up her palm in a peace gesture.

Hollywood Nate took a sip of coffee and said, “Okay, since I went to temple for the first time since my bar mitzvah and said my half-assed version of Kaddish when the Oracle died, maybe I oughtta do more mumbo-jumbo to mourn another Gentile cop. I guess it’s no dopier than touching the Oracle’s picture every day, and we all do that. So what’s your point, Sergeant?”

“That sometimes gestures like that help us to keep old connections with ourselves, that’s all,” Sergeant Hermann said. “So we don’t go adrift and get lost.”

Nate was silent, but Sergeant Hermann had more. She said, “I’m gonna tell you what nobody but a woman who wears this badge truly understands. Thirty-seven years ago, when I served at the old stations, there weren’t even proper locker rooms for women. I remember at one station I dressed in the janitor’s broom closet. There was an air vent in there, and I could hear the guys in their locker room talking about us women, and what they said wasn’t nice. We woman got buried in shit every day and pretended it was sunshine. We had to be better than the men but keep our mouths shut so they wouldn’t notice when we passed them by. To think I’ve lived long enough to see cup holders in police cars.”

“Is this about Dana?” Nate said impatiently.

“It’s about you,” Sergeant Hermann said. “You don’t get it that Dana Vaughn and all the other women with time on the Job understand our history because they still live it to some extent. She was senior to you. She was on the sergeants list and might’ve been your supervisor one day. It’s not your job to stay Velcro-close to a partner unless you’re a training officer with a probationer. If you’d been partnered with a man that night, you’d still be feeling deep sorrow but not what else you’re feeling.”

“You don’t know what I’m feeling,” Nate said.

“Nathan,” she said, “there was danger out there that night, and your job was to stop the son of a bitch who started shooting, and you did it. You wouldn’t be punishing yourself now if you’d been partnered with a senior officer like R.T. Dibney, or Johnny Lanier, or one of the surfers, because you can’t get past thinking of Dana Vaughn as a woman. And thinking that you shoulda been Super Glued to her before, during, and after the gunfight. Well, son, she wasn’t only a woman, she was a cop, and a good one. And she’d be ashamed of you for feeling you somehow failed her. And she’d hate it because that… diminishes her.”

After a long pause, he said, “Anything else, Sergeant Hermann?”

“Yeah,” she said, tossing her cup in a receptacle. “Why’re old farts like me such creatures of habit? Why the hell didn’t I take you to Starbucks? I won fifty bucks in a scratch-off yesterday. I could afford that freaking designer coffee.”

When they were back at Hollywood Station and Nate had returned to the front desk, Sergeant Hermann entered the sergeants’ room, where Sergeant Murillo was writing a report.

She said to him, “Lee, how about we let Nate work third man in a car for the rest of the night rather than vegetating at the desk? Maybe with Flotsam and Jetsam?”

Sergeant Murillo considered it and said, “Very good idea.”

After placing a call for 6-X-32 to come to the station, Sergeant Murillo called Hollywood Nate to the sergeants’ room and conjured a quick story, saying, “Nate, I just got another call from a citizen that the Street Characters are doing some real aggressive panhandling in front of Grauman’s. One of them grabbed a woman by the arm to complain about his tip, and another got in somebody’s face and intimidated them. How about you go up there with Flotsam and Jetsam and walk the boulevard for a few hours? Maybe a show of force will convince Batman, Darth Vader, and the rest to curtail their dark and evil ways.”

The only thing that Sergeant Lee Murillo said to Flotsam and Jetsam privately was “Take Nate with you for a few hours. Help him get his mojo back.”

“How do we do that, boss?” Flotsam asked.

“Be your usual zany selves,” said Sergeant Murillo.

Twenty minutes later, Nate was sitting in the backseat of 6-X-32 when it parked on Orange Drive. The panhandlers, hustlers, and purse picks didn’t like the sight of three cops getting out to stroll among the tourist throngs, so a few of the curb creatures decided to call it a night, pronto.

One of these was Two-Dollar Bill, so named because you know he exists but you seldom run into him. He was a bug-eyed scarecrow Nate’s age who looked older than Sergeant Hermann. His grille was gapped and yellow, his eyes were rheumy, and the rusty tumbleweed frizz growing from his head was sprinkled with psoriasis. Two-Dollar Bill was the kind of tweaker who was better off in jail, and a part of him knew that, because in recent months he was always unconsciously running to, instead of away from, the law. And nowadays he was always ready to allow searches and ready to make admissions from the git-go.

“Oh, shit!” Flotsam said when Two-Dollar Bill practically ran into them.

Since the physical condition of this tweaker made cops automatically glove-up, Flotsam reached into his pocket and drew on a latex glove in case touching was necessary. “Bill,” he said, “somehow I think you ain’t never gonna earn a blood bank T-shirt.”

“Just going home,” Two-Dollar Bill said. “Don’t wanna miss American Idol.”

“It ain’t on, Bill,” Flotsam said. Then to Nate, “Last year we popped Two-Dollar Bill when he had a pay-and-owe sheet stuffed in one sock and thirty-three grams of flake in the other. They kicked Bill outta jail too soon.”

Two-Dollar Bill said, “It wasn’t my flake or my owe sheet. I was holding it for some guy. I don’t know his real name but everybody calls him Planters.”

“Why do they call him Planters?” Flotsam asked.

“Because his body’s shaped like a peanut,” said Two-Dollar Bill.

“I don’t suppose your socks are dope-free tonight, are they, Bill?” Jetsam said, but Flotsam quickly clamped his gloved hand over the tweaker’s mouth to keep him from answering.

“Didn’t you learn anything in court last time, Bill?’ Flotsam said sotto. “Cop a ’tude or something. We got other business tonight.”

Flotsam shot Jetsam a look that said wasting their time by popping Bill again was not gonna help Hollywood Nate.

Jetsam nodded subtly, and when Flotsam took his hand away, Two-Dollar Bill said, “You won’t find nothing in my socks but a few tits-up bedbugs. I can’t keep them outta my socks and underwear. When I got underwear.”

“Home is where the heart is, dude,” Flotsam said, giving Two-Dollar Bill a little shove, sending him scurrying off into the night.

While they continued along the boulevard, Flotsam and Jetsam were as garrulous as usual, talking about getting Nate out to Malibu for evening surfing, but Nate was generally unresponsive, still mulling over the import of what Sergeant Hermann had said to him.

As they approached the Kodak Centre, Flotsam said to him, “Dude, when was the last time you rented a midget to bowl with?”

“I only did it once,” Nate said.

“We been thinking,” Jetsam said. “If we gave you the rental fee, could you get your midget and bring him back to the bowling alley in the Kodak Centre on Wednesday night? We figure he’d attract enough bowling alley Sallys for all of us.”

Nate said, “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Well, do you have, like, anyone else you could invite?” Jetsam asked.

“Yeah, dude,” said Flotsam. “A man with your hormonal ingenuity oughtta be able to come up with another idea to get them Sallys mega-stoked.”

“Downright stokaboka is how we want them,” Jetsam said to Nate. “Invite anyone but a clown.”

“Dude!” Flotsam yelled it so loud at Jetsam that he startled Nate.

To change the subject, Jetsam quickly said, “Hey, this juicehead is faced.”

A balding tourist with a double chin and cheeks flushed to bubblegum pink was staggering along the Walk of Fame, definitely tanked. The front of his “Hollywoodland” souvenir T-shirt looked like it had been washed in mai tais, and his fly was unzipped, the tail of his tee protruding.

“Whoa there, pard,” Jetsam said, grabbing his elbow as the man tried to lurch past. “How many drinks you had tonight?”

“I’m perf… perf… fectly sober!” the tourist said, reeling.

“Don’t try to okeydoke us, dude,” Flotsam said. “Answer the question.”

“What was the question again?” said the tourist, wattles twitching.

“How many drinks you had tonight?” Jetsam repeated. “The truth bus or the bullshit bus. Which one you taking?”

The tourist hiccupped twice and said, “About fifteen or twenty drinks, maybe. Beers mostly. I been pissing barley and hops all night.”

Flotsam said, “Dude, that answer makes you just about the most honest man in all of L.A., so we’re gonna give you a chance to prove your sobriety. Now pay attention.”

A few minutes later they were in the privacy of the parking lot west of the tourist masses in Grauman’s forecourt, and Hollywood Nate was mystified when Flotsam pulled a balloon from his pocket and blew it up. On his second try, the tourist actually slapped the balloon as it dove past his nose, prompting Flotsam to say, “You got game, dude.”

Ten minutes after that, the tourist was boarding a bus to his hotel in Universal City, having put forth satisfactory effort in a two-out-of-three balloon test to satisfy the forces of law and order that he was a real trouper.

Nate was still chortling when Jetsam said to him, “Hey, bro, let’s see if any of them Main Street Crips or Rolling Sixties are up from south L.A. They’ll be hanging around the subway station dealing crack.”

“We might find a gun,” Flotsam said to Nate. “You down?”

“I got your back,” said Nate.

“The game’s afoot, dude!” Flotsam announced.

“Rock on, bro!” Jetsam concurred.

This was the camera’s favorite time, called “magic hour” in the movie business. The summer sun was plunging into the ocean off Malibu, and onshore winds chased tumbling clouds to the east, inflamed by streaks of color from dying solar fire. The sky over Hollywood Boulevard was transformed into a blazing palette where any fool could gaze up breathless and dream of painting a new self-portrait, and maybe this time get it right. After a moment, Nate found himself stepping out with just a touch of foot-beat swagger, slipping through the crowds, giving the stink eye to Batman and Darth Vader, striding over marble and brass stars along the Walk of Fame. The surfer cops strolling behind him gave each other a knuckle bump, and Flotsam whispered, “Dude, I think Nate just caught a blast of mucho mojo!”

Nate glanced into the Kodak Centre as they were passing, and he halted, turning his face to the darkening west, letting that sea breeze cooled by the Pacific sigh in his ears and blow through his hair, bringing with it a breath of great possibility, perhaps even redemption.

“About that Wednesday night bowling?” he said. “I’m good to go. And I’ll see about renting us a midget.”

Upon hearing this news the surfer cops beamed. “Midgets rule, dude!” said Flotsam.

“We’re gravy, bro!” said Jetsam.

Then Flotsam’s grin melted like a Slurpee on the sidewalk when Hollywood Nate said, “But will somebody please tell me, why no clowns?”