Hollywood Moon
ALSO BY JOSEPH WAMBAUGH
F
ICTION
Hollywood Crows
Hollywood Station
Floaters
Finnegan’s Week
Fugitive Nights
The Golden Orange
The Secrets of Harry Bright
The Delta Star
The Glitter Dome
The Black Marble
The Choirboys
The Blue Knight
The New Centurions
N
ONFICTION
Fire Lover
The Blooding
Echoes in the Darkness
Lines and Shadows
The Onion Field
Copyright © 2009 by Joseph Wambaugh
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: November 2009
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and
not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07123-9
Contents
As ever, special thanks for the terrific anecdotes and great cop talk goes to officers of the Los Angeles Police Department:
Randy Barr, Gabriel Blanco, Sue Brandstetter, Alma Burke, Vicki Bynum, Holly Daniel, Bob Deamer, Mike Diaz, Bill Duke, Bob
Duretto (ret.), Klaus Edgell, Irma Foster, Dan Gomez, Brett Goodkin, Craig Herron, Diana Herron, Lin Hom, John Incontro, LaMont
Jerrett, Corina Lee, J. J. Leonard (ret.), Sig Lo, Al Lopez, Kathy McAnany, Steve McClain, Paul McKechnie, Joan McNamara,
Greg Nichols, Maligi Nua Jr., Bill Pack, Kim Porter, Armando Romero, Ken Smith (ret.), Nick Titiriga, Terri Utley, Ray Valois,
Jody Wakefield, Ed Whyte, Tracy Wolfe, Eddie Yoon
And to officers of the San Diego Police Department:
J. B. Boyd, Silvia Brown, Laurie Cairncross, Paul Conley, Carlton Hershman, Mike Holden, Lou Johns, Howard Labroe, Duane Malinowski,
Vic Morel, Paul Phillips, Tony Puente (ret.), Cori Queen, Dani Resch, Dave Speck, John Teft
And to Officer Arvar Elkins of the Huntington Beach Police Department
And to investigators of the San Diego District Attorney’s Office: Joe Cargel, Paul Libassi
And to San Diego deputy district attorney Joan K. Stein
And to special agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Mike Matassa (ret.)
And to special agent of the Secret Service Elizabeth McCaffree
H
OLLYWOOD NATE RENTS
midgets,” the long-legged, sunbaked surfer cop whom the others called Flotsam said to his partner while 6-X-32 was passing
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, cruising east on Hollywood Boulevard at twilight.
The dying spangled sunlight ricocheted off the windows of the taller buildings, and his shorter surfer partner, also weathered
and singed, whom of course they called Jetsam, glanced at the driver through the smoked lenses of his wraparound shades and
said, “What?”
Flotsam wore his two-inch hair gelled up in front like a baby cockatoo, and Jetsam’s was semispiked, both coifs streaked with
highlights not provided by sun, sea, or nature. And with just enough gel to get it done and still not annoy the watch commander,
a lieutenant in his early fifties, twenty years their senior, and very old-school.
“In fact,” Flotsam continued, “last Wednesday, Nate hired one to bowl with him for twenty bucks an hour. That’s when five
coppers from the midwatch and Watch 2 got together at the bowling alley in the Kodak Centre with a bunch from north Hollywood
and Wilshire. I heard that Nate, like, stole the spotlight with his midget.”
“Where did you hear about Hollywood Nate and midget love?” Jetsam wanted to know.
“I got it from Sheila,” Flotsam said, referring to Officer Sheila Montez, a midwatch P2 whom both surfer cops lusted for.
“And I ain’t saying he loves little people, but, dude, he’s so cinematically dialed-in, he devised this way to capture the
attention of all the bowling alley Sallys. His little fella gets all flirty and cute with the Sallys, and it sets things up
for Nate to move in and close the deal.”
Officer Nathan Weiss, a hawkishly handsome thirty-seven-year-old, physically fit gym rat, was called Hollywood Nate because
he possessed a SAG card and had actually appeared briefly in a few TV movies. And he always volunteered to work every red
carpet event at the Kodak Theatre in his thus-far futile quest for cinematic discovery and eventual stardom.
Jetsam envisioned those feverishly hot Sallys as he shot a casual glance toward the Walk of Fame, where lots of curb creatures
were already out. He saw a tweaker sidling closer toward the purse of an obese tourist who was busy yelling at her much smaller
husband. The tweaker backed off and slithered into the crowd when Jetsam gave him the stink eye as the black-and-white passed.
The Street Characters—Batman, Superman (two Supermans, actually), Darth Vader, Spider-Man, Bart Simpson, SpongeBob, and Catwoman—were
all mingling with tourists in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, posing for camera shots in an endless quest for
tourist bucks.
“Maybe we oughtta hire a midget too,” Jetsam said. “I used to bowl a lot when I was married to my second ex-wife, who I miss
like a prostate infection. It was a low-rent bowling alley in Long Beach, and I was, like, the only bowler in the whole place
who wasn’t sleazed-out. Even my second ex—who loved bowling, Leonardo DiCaprio, and pharmaceuticals—was inked-up, a butterfly
on her belly and my name on her ass. Her girlfriend told me how that prescription zombie screamed like a cat when they lasered
my name off. I’da coughed up two weeks’ pay for a video of it. Her exotic girlfriend, by the way, might be worth your attention,
bro. She’s an Indian.”
“Feather or dot?”
“Dot.”
“No way, dude,” Flotsam said. “Every time my laptop goes sideways, I get one of them on the line and always end up tossing
my cell phone against the wall in frustration. I buy more cells than every cartel in Colombia. But I agree, we should definitely
not overlook the target-rich environment at the Kodak Centre.”
Jetsam said, “Being where it’s located makes it, like, the most lavish bowling alley this side of the palace of Dubai. Maybe
we can’t afford it?”
“ ‘Can’t’ is a frame of mind that don’t hold our photo,” Flotsam said. “Hollywood Nate claims that on certain nights, it’s
full of bowling alley Sallys hoping Matt Damon will come in to roll a line or two, or maybe Brad Pitt when Angelina’s in Africa
looking for sainthood with people even skinnier than she is.”
Jetsam said, “I hear what you’re saying, bro. I mean, there’s gotta be opportunities on those lanes for coppers as coolaphonic
and hormonally imaginative as the almost four hundred pounds of male heat riding in this car.”
Flotsam thought about it some more and then said, “There’s a midget that works at the newsstand on Cahuenga. And there’s that
roller-skating midget at Hollywood and Highland. The one that throws water balloons at tourists? He’d crawl in a clothes dryer
for twenty bucks an hour.”
“A
plethora
of midgets ain’t gonna get us our way,” Jetsam said, showing off the new vocabulary he was acquiring from his community college
class. “We gotta think original. Maybe we could, like, hire a clown to bowl with us. That would amaze those ten-pin tootsies.”
“I’m scared of clowns,” Flotsam blurted, and it was out of his mouth before he could take it back.
“You’re what?” Jetsam said, and this time he turned fully toward his partner as the late-summer sun dropped into the Pacific
and lights came on in Hollywood, the fluorescent glow making the boulevard scene look even weirder to the swarming tourists.
Flotsam and Jetsam had been midwatch partners and fellow surfers for more than two years, but this was the first time Jetsam
had learned this incredible secret: His tall, rugged partner was afraid of clowns!
“Maybe I said it wrong, dude,” Flotsam quickly added. “It’s just that they, like, shiver me. The way a snake creeps you out,
know what I mean?”
“Snakes don’t creep me out, bro,” Jetsam said.
“Rats, then. I seen you that time we got the dead-body call where rats were all eating the guy’s eyeballs. You were ready
to blow chunks, dude.”
“It wasn’t the rats themselves, bro,” Jetsam said. “I just wasn’t ready for an all-out rodent luau.”
“Anyways, I’m just saying, clowns, like, make me, like, all… goose-bumpy. I mean, maybe I saw too many movies about slasher
clowns or something, I don’t know.”
“This goes on my desktop,” Jetsam said with a grin. “I’m holding on to this.”
“What happens in our shop stays in our shop, dude,” Flotsam said grimly, referring to their car with its “shop number” on
the roof and doors. “So hit your delete key.”
“I feel ya, bro,” Jetsam said. “No need to go all aggro. Next time a boulevard clown squirts a tourist with a water gun, just
stay in the car and roll your window up and lock the doors. I’ll man-up for both of us. And I’ll taze the first asshole that
calls my partner a sissified, whimpering bitch.”
While 6-X-32 was cruising the boulevard, two homeless middle-aged panhandlers in east Hollywood named Axel Minton and Bootsie
Brown were pushing a man in a wheelchair along the sidewalk to a graffiti-tagged neighborhood market frequented by local pensioners.
It was a store where Axel and Bootsie often begged for change from the residents of the neighborhood, mostly Latino and Asian,
who bought groceries there.
Axel was a spindly white man with sprigs of gray hair who would drink anything from a bottle if the label indicated any alcohol
content. Bootsie was a black man blind in one eye who slept in a storage shed behind the apartment building where eighty-eight-year-old
pensioner Coleman O’Toole lived. They both wore layers, sooty and drab, molded to their forms like fungus until it wasn’t
clear where the fabrics left off and they began. And neither was many gallons away from wandering Hollywood Boulevard—like
all those other self-lobotomized colorless specters in pull-tab necklaces and football helmets, or maybe wearing bikini bottoms
on their heads—pushing a trash-laden shopping cart, chanting gibberish, or yodeling at terrified tourists. The Hollywood cops
called it “gone to Dizzyland.”
Each transient had wheeled Coleman O’Toole to the store many times for a modest fee. This time they were both pushing the
wheelchair, and they were bickering when they stopped in front and entered, leaving Coleman O’Toole parked in the shadows.
While Axel and Bootsie were inside loading up on shelf items, which included three quarts of 100-proof vodka and three quarts
of gin, another octogenarian transient, known as Trombone Teddy, shuffled by. He’d been a good bebop sideman back in the day,
or, as he put it, “when I was a real person.” Teddy, who was well known to officers at Hollywood Station, looked curiously
at the figure in the wheelchair. Then he used his last few coins to phone the police, and the call was given to 6-X-32 of
the midwatch.
Axel and Bootsie’s bottles of liquor and several bags of snacks were piled on the counter. The part-time clerk, who called
herself Lucy, was a white transsexual in a blinged-out T-shirt, low-rise jeans, nosebleed stilettos, and magenta hair extensions
piled so high she wouldn’t have felt being conked by a bottle of Corona, which could easily happen in that store. She adjusted
her silk scarf to better conceal the healing from recent surgery to remove her manly apple and looked at the transients curiously.
Being acquainted with both of them as well as with Coleman O’Toole, she said, “Is Coley throwing a party or what?”
“It’s his birthday,” Bootsie said.
“No, it isn’t,” the tranny said. “His birthday was last month, same as mine. He brought me a card.”