Hollywood Station

FIVE

THERE WAS ALWAYS a male cop at LAPD with “Hollywood” attached to his name, whether or not he worked Hollywood Division. It was usually earned by the cop’s outside interest in things cinematic. If he did an occasional job with a TV or movie company as a technical advisor, you could be sure everyone would start calling him “Hollywood Lou” or “Hollywood Bill.” Or in the case of aspiring thespian Nate Weiss-who so far had only done some work as an extra on a few TV shows-“Hollywood Nate.” After he got bitten by the show business bug, he enrolled at a gym and worked out obsessively. With those brown bedroom eyes and dark, wavy hair just starting to gray at the temples, along with his newly buffed physique, Nate figured he had leading-man potential.

Nathan Weiss was thirty-five years old, a late bloomer as far as show business was concerned. He, along with lots of other patrol officers in the division, had done traffic control and provided security when film companies were shooting around town. The pay was excellent for off-duty cops and the work was easy enough but not as exciting as any of them had hoped. Not when all those hot actresses only popped their heads out of their trailers for a few minutes to block out a scene if the director wasn’t satisfied with a stand-in doing it. Then they’d disappear again until it was time to shoot it.

Most of the time, the cops weren’t up close for the shooting itself, and even when they were, it quickly became boring. After the master shot, they’d do two-shots of the principals, with close-ups and reverse angles, and the actors had to do it over and over. So most of the cops would quickly get bored and hang around the craft services people, who supplied all the great food for the cast and crew.

Hollywood Nate never got bored with any of it. Besides, there were a lot of hot chicks doing below-the-line work and ordinary grunt work on every shoot. Some of them were interns who dreamed of someday being above-the-line talent: directors, actors, writers, and producers. When Nate had a lot of overtime opportunities, he actually made more money than just about all of those cinematic grunts. And unlike them, Nate did not have to suffer the biggest fear in show business: My Next Job.

Nate loved to display his knowledge of the Business when talking to some little hottie, maybe a gofer running errands for the first assistant director. Nate would say things like “My usual beat is around Beachwood Canyon. That’s old Hollywood. A lot of below-the-line people live there.”

And it was one of those gofers who had cost Nate Weiss his less than happy home two years back, when his then-wife, Rosie, got suspicious because every time the phone rang one time and stopped, Nate would disappear for a while. Rosie started making date and time notations whenever one ring occurred, and she compared it with his cell phone bills. Sure enough, Nate would call the same two numbers moments after the one-ring calls she noted. Probably the slut had two cell phones or two home numbers, and it would be just like Nate to think two separate numbers would fool Rosie if she got suspicious.

Rosie Weiss bided her time, and one cold winter morning Nate came home from work at dawn telling her he was just all tuckered out from an overtime hunt for a cat burglar in Laurel Canyon. Rosie thought, Sure, an alley cat, no doubt. And she did a little experiment in Nate’s car while he slept, and then managed to just go about her business for the rest of the day and that evening.

The next day, when Nate went to work, he sat in the roll-call room listening to the lieutenant droning on about the U.S. Department of Justice consent decree that the LAPD was under and hinting that the cars that were working the Hispanic neighborhoods on the east side should be turning in Field Data Reports on non-Hispanics, even though there were none around.

Cops did what cops were doing from Highland Park to Watts, those who worked African American ’hoods and Latino barrios. LAPD officers were inventing white male suspects and entering them on FDRs that contained no names or birth dates and were untraceable. Therefore, an abundance of white male field interviews could convince outside monitors that the cops were not racial profiling. In one inner-city division, there was a 290 percent increase in non-Hispanic white male nighttime pedestrian stops, even though nobody had ever seen a white guy walking around the ’hood at night. Even with a flat tire, a white guy would keep riding on the rims rather than risk a stop. Cops said that even a black-and-white had to have a sign in the window saying “Driver carries no cash.”

This was the federal consent decree’s version of “don’t ask, don’t tell”: We won’t ask where you got all those white male names on the FDRs if you don’t tell us.

Before the watch commander had arrived at roll call, a cop said aloud, “This FDR crap is so labor-intensive it makes embryonic cloning look like paint matching.”

Another said, “We should all just become lawyers. They get paid a lot to lie, even if they have to dress up to do it.”

So it seemed that the Department of Justice, instead of promoting police integrity, had done just the opposite, by making liars out of LAPD street cops who had to live under the consent decree for five years and then had to swallow the demoralizing three-year extension.

During that ponderous roll call, Hollywood Nate was dozing through the consent decree sermon and got surprised when the Oracle popped his head in the door, saying, “Sorry, Lieutenant, can I borrow Weiss for a minute?”

The Oracle didn’t say anything until they were alone on the stairway landing, when he turned to Nate and said, “Your wife is downstairs demanding to speak to the lieutenant. She wants a one-twenty-eight made on you.”

Nate was mystified. “A personnel complaint? Rosie?”

“Do you have any kids?”

“Not yet. We’ve decided to wait.”

“Do you want to save your marriage?”

“Sure. It’s my first, so I still give a shit. And her old man’s got bucks. What’s happened?”

“Then cop out and beg for mercy. Don’t try weasel words, it won’t work.”

“What’s going on, Sarge?”

Hollywood Nate got to see for himself what was going on when he, Rosie, and the Oracle stood in the south parking lot beside Nate’s SUV on that damp and gloomy winter night. Still baffled, Nate handed his keys to the Oracle, who handed them to Rosie, who jumped into the SUV, started it up, and turned on the defroster. As the windows were fogging prior to clearing, she stepped out and pointed triumphantly at what her sleuthing had uncovered. There they were, in the mist on the windshield in front of the passenger seat: oily imprints made by bare toes.

“Wears about a size five,” Rosie said. Then she turned to the Oracle and said, “Nate always did like little spinners. I’m way too zoftig for him.”

When Nate started to speak, the Oracle said, “Shut up, Nate.” Then he turned to Rosie and said, “Mrs. Weiss…”

“Rosie. You can call me Rosie, Sergeant.”

“Rosie. There’s no need to drag the lieutenant into this. I’m sure that you and Nate -”

Interrupting, she said, “I called my dad’s lawyer today while this son of a bitch was sleeping it off. It’s over. Way over. I’m moving everything out of the apartment on Saturday.”

“Rosie,” the Oracle said. “I’m positive that Nate will be very fair when he talks with your lawyer. Your idea of making an official complaint for conduct unbecoming an officer would not be helpful to you. I imagine you want him working and earning money rather than suspended from duty, where he and you would lose money, don’t you?”

She looked at the Oracle and at her husband, who was pale and silent, and she smiled when she saw beads of sweat on Nate’s upper lip. The asshole was sweating on a damp winter night. Rosie Weiss liked that.

“Okay, Sergeant,” she said. “But I don’t want this asshole to set foot in the apartment until I’m all moved out.”

“He’ll sleep in the cot room here at the station,” the Oracle said. “And I’ll detail an officer to make an appointment with you to pick up whatever Nate needs to tide him over until you’re out of the apartment.”

When Rosie Weiss left them in the parking lot that evening, she had one more piece of information to impart to the Oracle. She said, “Anyway, since he got all those muscles in the gym, the only time he can ever get an erection is when he’s looking in the mirror.”

After she got in her car and drove away, Nate finally spoke. He said, “A cop should never marry a Jewish woman, Sarge. Take it from me, she’s a terrorist. It’s code red from the minute the alarm goes off in the morning.”

“She’s got good detective instincts,” the Oracle said. “We could use her on the Job.”

Now, his wife was married to a pediatrician, no longer entitled to alimony, and Nate Weiss was a contented member of the midwatch, taking TV extra work as much as he could, hoping to catch a break that could get him into the Screen Actors Guild. He was sick of saying, “Well, no, I don’t have a SAG card but…”

Hollywood Nate had hoped that 2006 would be his breakthrough year, but with summer almost here, he wasn’t so sure. His reverie ended when he got a painfully vigorous handshake from his new partner, twenty-two-year-old Wesley Drubb, youngest son of a partner in Lawford and Drubb real-estate developers, who had enormous holdings in West Hollywood and Century City. Nate got assigned with the former frat boy who’d dropped out of USC in his senior year “to find himself” and impulsively joined the LAPD, much to the despair of his parents. Wesley had just finished his eighteen months of probation and transferred to Hollywood from West Valley Division.

Nate thought he’d better make the best of this opportunity. It wasn’t often he got to partner with someone rich. Maybe he could cement a friendship and become the kid’s big brother on the Job, maybe persuade him to chat up his old man, Franklin Drubb, about investing in a little indie film that Nate had been trying to put together with another failed actor named Harley Wilkes.

The cops often called their patrol car their “shop” because of the shop number painted on the front doors and roof. This so that each car could be easily identified by an LAPD helicopter, always called an “airship.” When they were settled in their shop and out cruising the streets that Nate liked to cruise no matter which beat he was assigned, the eager kid riding shotgun swiveled his head to the right and said, “That looks like a fifty-one-fifty,” referring to the Welfare and Institutions Code section that defines a mental case.

The guy was a mental case, all right, one of the boulevard’s homeless, the kind that shuffle along Hollywood Boulevard and wander into the many souvenir shops and adult bookstores and tattoo parlors, bothering the vendors at the sidewalk newsstands, refusing to leave until somebody gives them some change or throws them out or calls the cops.

He was known to the police as “Untouchable Al” because he roamed freely and often got warned by cops but was never arrested. Al had a get-out-of-jail-free card that was better than Trombone Teddy’s any old day. This evening he was in a cranky mood, yelling and scaring tourists, causing them to step into the street rather than pass close to him there on the Walk of Fame.

Nate said, “That’s Al. He’s untouchable. Just tell him to get off the street. He will unless he’s feeling extra grumpy.”

Hollywood Nate pulled the black-and-white around the corner onto Las Palmas Avenue, and Wesley Drubb, wanting to show his older partner that he had moxie, jumped out, confronted Al, and said, “Get off the street. Go on, now, you’re disturbing the peace.”

Untouchable Al, who was drunk and feeling very grumpy indeed, said, “Fuck you, you young twerp.”

Wesley Drubb was stunned and turned to look at Nate, who was out of the car, leaning on the roof with his elbows, shaking his head, knowing what was coming.

“He’s having a bad hair day,” Nate said. “A dozen or so are hanging out his nose.”

“We don’t have to take that,” Wesley said to Nate. Then he turned to Al and said, “We don’t have to take that from you.”

Yes, they did. And Al was about to demonstrate why. As soon as Wesley Drubb pulled on his latex gloves and stepped forward, putting his hand on Al’s bony shoulder, the geezer shut his eyes tight and grimaced and groaned and squatted a bit and let it go.

The explosion was so loud and wet that the young cop leaped back three feet. The sulfurous stench struck him at once.

“He’s shitting!” Wesley cried in disbelief. “He’s shitting his pants!”

“I don’t know how he craps on cue like that,” Nate said. “It’s a rare talent, actually. Kind of the ultimate defense against the forces of truth and justice.”

“Gross!” the young cop cried. “He’s shitting! Gross!”

“Come on, Wesley,” Hollywood Nate said. “Let’s go about our business and let Al finish his.”

“Fucking young twerp,” Untouchable Al said as the black-and-white drove swiftly away.

While Untouchable Al was finishing his business, an extraordinary robbery was taking place at a jewelry store on Normandie Avenue owned by a Thai entrepreneur who also owned two restaurants. The little jewelry store that sold mostly watches was this week going to offer a very special display of diamonds that the proprietor’s twenty-nine-year-old nephew, Somchai “Sammy” Tanampai, planned to take home when he closed that evening.

The robbers, an Armenian named Cosmo Betrossian and his girlfriend, a Russian masseuse and occasional prostitute named Ilya Roskova, had entered the store just before closing, wearing stocking masks. Now Sammy Tanampai sat on the floor in the back room, his wrists duct-taped behind his back, weeping because he believed they would kill him whether or not they got what they wanted.

Sammy forced his eyes from roaming to his son’s cartoon-plastered lunch box on a table by the back door. He’d placed the diamonds in little display trays and velvet bags and stacked them inside the lunch box next to a partially consumed container of rice, eggs, and crab meat.

Sammy Tanampai thought they might be after the watches, but they didn’t touch any of them. The male robber, who had very thick black eyebrows grown together, raised up the stocking mask to light a cigarette. Sammy could see small broken teeth, a gold incisor, and pale gums.

He walked to where Sammy was sitting on the floor, pulled Sammy’s face up by jerking back a handful of hair, and said in heavily accented English, “Where do you hide diamonds?”

Sammy was so stunned he didn’t respond until the large blond woman with the sulky mouth, garishly red under the stocking mask, walked over, bent down, and said in less accented English, “Tell us and we will not kill you.”

He started to weep then and felt urine soak his crotch, and the man pointed the muzzle of a.25 caliber Raven pistol at his face. Sammy thought, What a cheap-looking gun they are about to shoot me with.

Then his gaze involuntarily moved toward his child’s lunch box and the man followed Sammy’s gaze and said, “The box!”

Sammy wept openly when the big blond woman opened the lunch box containing more than a hundred and eighty thousand wholesale dollars’ worth of loose diamonds, rings, and ear studs and said, “Got it!”

The man then ripped off a strip of duct tape and wrapped it around Sammy’s mouth.

How did they know? Sammy thought, preparing to die. Who knew about the diamonds?

The woman waited by the front door and the man removed a heavy object from the pocket of his coat. When Sammy saw it he cried more, but the duct tape kept him quiet. It was a hand grenade.

The woman came back in, and for the first time Sammy noticed their latex gloves. Sammy wondered why he hadn’t noticed before, and then he was confused and terrified because the man, holding the spoon handle of the grenade, placed it between Sammy’s knees while the woman wrapped tape around his ankles. The grenade spoon dug into the flesh of his thighs above the knees and he stared at it.

When the robbers were finished, the woman said, “You better got strong legs. If you relax too much your legs, you shall lose the handle. And then you die.”

And with that, the man, holding Sammy’s knees in place, pulled the pin and dropped it on the floor beside him.

Now Sammy did wail, the muffled sound very audible even with his mouth taped shut.

“Shut up!” the man commanded. “Keep the knees tight or you be dead man. If the handle flies away, you be dead man.”

The woman said, “We shall call police in ten minutes and they come to help you. Keep the knees together, honey. My mother always tell me that but I do not listen.”

They left then but didn’t call the police. A Mexican dishwasher named Pepe Ramirez did. He was on his way to his job in Thai Town, driving past the boss’s jewelry store, and was surprised to see light coming from the main part of the store. It should have been closed. The boss always closed before now so he could get to both his restaurants while they were preparing for the dinner crowd. Why was the boss’s store still open? he wondered.

The dishwasher parked his car and entered the jewelry store through the unlocked front door. He spoke very little English and no Thai at all, so all he could think to call out was “Meester? Meester?”

When he got no answer, he walked cautiously toward the back room and stopped when he heard what sounded like a dog’s whimper. He listened and thought, No, it’s a cat. He didn’t like this, not at all. Then he heard banging, a loud muffled series of thumps. He ran from the store and called 911 on his brand-new cell phone, the first he’d ever owned.

Because of his almost unintelligible English and because he hung up while the operator was trying to transfer the call to a Spanish speaker, his message had been misunderstood. Other undocumented migrants had told him that the city police were not la migra and would not call Immigration unless he committed a major crime, but he was uncomfortable around anyone with a uniform and badge and thought he should not be there when they came.

It came out over the air as an “unknown trouble” call, the kind that makes cops nervous. There was enough known trouble in police work. Usually such a call would draw more than one patrol unit as backup. Mag Takara and Benny Brewster got the call, and Fausto Gamboa and Budgie Polk were the first backup to arrive, followed by Nate Weiss and Wesley Drubb.

When Mag entered the store, she drew her pistol and following her flashlight beam walked cautiously into the back room with Benny Brewster right behind her. What she saw made her let out a gasp.

Sammy Tanampai had hopelessly banged his head against the plasterboard wall, trying to get the attention of the dishwasher. His legs were going numb and the tears were streaming down his face as he tried to think about his children, tried to stay strong. Tried to keep his knees together!

When Mag took two steps toward the jeweler, Benny Brewster shined his light on the grenade and yelled, “WAIT!”

Mag froze and Fausto and Budgie, who had just entered by the front door, also froze.

Then Mag saw it clearly and yelled, “GRENADE! CLEAR!” And nobody knew what was going on or what the hell to do except instinctively to draw their guns and crouch.

Fausto did not clear out. Nor did the others. He shouldered past Benny, plunged into the back room, and saw Mag standing ten feet from the taped and hysterical Sammy Tanampai. And Fausto saw the grenade.

Sammy’s face was bloody where he’d snagged the tape free on a nail head, and he tried to say something with a crumpled wad of tape stuck to the corner of his mouth. He gagged and said, “I can’t… I can’t…”

Fausto said to Mag, “GET OUT!”

But the littlest cop ignored him and tiptoed across the room as though motion would set it off. And she reached carefully for it.

Fausto leaped forward after Sammy unleashed the most despairing terrifying wail that Mag had ever heard in her life when his thigh muscles just surrendered. Mag’s fingers were inches from the grenade when it dropped to the floor beneath her and the spoon flew across the room.

“CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR!” Fausto yelled to all the cops in the store, but Mag picked up the grenade first and lobbed it into the far corner behind a file cabinet.

Instantly, Fausto grabbed Mag Takara by the back of her Sam Browne and Sammy Tanampai by his shirt collar and lifted them both off the floor, lunging backward until they were out of the little room and into the main store, where all six cops and one shopkeeper pressed to the floor and waited in terror for the explosion.

Which didn’t come. The hand grenade was a dummy.

No fewer than thirty-five LAPD employees were to converge on that store and the streets around it that night: detectives, criminalists, explosives experts, patrol supervisors, even the patrol captain. Witnesses were interviewed, lights were set up, and the area for two blocks in all directions was searched by cops with flashlights.

They found nothing of evidentiary value, and a detective from the robbery team who had been called in from home interviewed Sammy Tanampai in the ER at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. The victim told the detective that the male robber had briefly smoked a cigarette but none had been found by detectives at the scene.

Sammy grew lethargic because the injection they had given him was making him sleepy, but he said to the detective, “I don’t know how they knew about the diamonds. The diamonds arrived at ten o’clock this morning and we were going to show them tomorrow to a client from San Francisco who requested certain kinds of pieces.”

“What kind of client is he?” the detective asked.

“My uncle has dealt with him for years. He is very wealthy. He is not a thief.”

“About the blond woman who you think was Russian, tell me more.”

“I think they were both Russians,” Sammy said. “There are lots of Russians around Hollywood.”

“Yes, but the woman. Was she attractive?”

“Perhaps so. I don’t know.”

“Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Big breasts,” Sammy said, opening and closing his aching jaw and touching the wounded flesh around his mouth, his eyelids drooping.

“Have you ever gone to any of the nightclubs around here?” the detective asked. “Several of them are Russian owned and operated.”

“No. I am married. I have two children.”

“Anything else that you remember about either of them?”

“She made a joke about keeping my knees together. She said that she never did. I was thinking of my children then and how I would never see them again. And she made that joke. I hope you get to shoot them both,” Sammy said, tears welling.

After all the cops who’d been in the jewelry store were interviewed back at the station, Hollywood Nate said to his young partner, “Some gag, huh, Wesley? Next time I work on a show, I’m gonna tell the prop man about this. A dummy grenade. Only in Hollywood.”

Wesley Drubb had been very quiet for hours since their trauma in the jewelry store. He had answered questions from detectives as well as he could, but there really wasn’t anything important to say. He answered Nate with, “Yeah, the joke was on us.”

What young Wesley Drubb wanted to say was, I could have died tonight. I could have… been… killed tonight! If the grenade had been real.

It was very strange, very eerie, to contemplate his own violent death. Wesley Drubb had never done that before. He wanted to talk to somebody about it but there was no one. He couldn’t talk about it to his older partner, Nate Weiss. Couldn’t explain to a veteran officer like Nate that he’d left USC for this, where he’d been on the sailing team and was dating one of the hottest of the famed USC song girls. He’d left it because of those inexplicable emotions he felt after he’d reached his twenty-first birthday.

Wesley had grown sick of college life, sick of being the son of Franklin Drubb, sick of living on Fraternity Row, sick of living in his parents’ big house in Pacific Palisades during school holidays. He’d felt like a man in prison and he’d wanted to break out. LAPD was a breakout without question. And he’d completed his eighteen months of probation and was here, a brand-new Hollywood Division officer.

Wesley’s parents had been shocked, his fraternity brothers, sailing teammates, and especially his girlfriend, who was now dating a varsity wide receiver-everyone who knew him was shocked. But he hadn’t been sorry so far. He’d thought he’d probably do it for a couple of years, not for a career, for the kind of experience that would set him apart from his father and his older brother and every other goddamn broker in the real-estate firm owned by Lawford and Drubb.

He thought it would be like going into the military for a couple of years, but he wouldn’t have to leave L.A. Like a form of combat that he could talk about to his family and friends years later, when he inevitably became a broker at Lawford and Drubb. He’d be a sort of combat veteran in their eyes, that was it.

Yes, and it had all been going so well. Until tonight. Until that grenade hit the floor and he stared at it and that little officer Mag Takara picked it up with Fausto Gamboa roaring in his ears. That wasn’t police work, was it? They never talked about things like that in the academy. A man with a hand grenade between his knees?

He remembered a Bomb Squad expert lecturing them at the police academy about the horrific event of 1986 in North Hollywood when two LAPD officers were called in to defuse an explosive device in a residential garage, rigged by a murder suspect involved in a movie studio/ labor union dispute. They defused it but were unaware of a secondary device lying there by a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook. The device went off.

What Wesley remembered most vividly was not the description of the gruesome and terrible carnage and the overwhelming smell of blood, but that one of the surviving officers who had just gotten inside the house before the explosion was having recurring nightmares two decades later. He would waken with his pillow soaked with tears and his wife shaking him and saying, “This has got to stop!”

For a while this evening, after he’d completed his brief statement, after he was sitting in the station quietly drinking coffee, Wesley Drubb could only think about how he’d felt trying to dig with his fingernails into the old wooden floor of that jewelry store. It had been an instinctive reaction. He had been reduced to his elemental animal core.

And Wesley Drubb asked himself the most maddeningly complex, dizzying, profound, and unanswerable question he’d ever asked himself in his young life: How the fuck did I get here?

When Fausto Gamboa got changed into civvies, he met Budgie on the way to the parking lot. They walked quietly to their cars, where they saw Mag Takara already getting into her personal car and driving away.

Fausto said, “It used to make me crazy seeing that kid doing her nails during roll call. Like she was getting ready to go on a date.”

“I’ll bet it won’t annoy you anymore, will it?” Budgie said.

“Not as much,” Fausto Gamboa conceded.