Hollywood Moon (48 page)

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?”