Hollywood Moon (6 page)

“No,” she said, quite surprised. “Where was that?”

“I was one they took right from the academy and put into the buy program,” he said, “back when they still liked to do that.
I was twenty-one but looked sixteen. They put me in high school in the Valley, where teenage gangsters were selling pot and
meth on campus. It was when a couple kids got killed in a four-car TC after they’d smoked crystal in the gym. It was mostly
an intelligence-gathering job rather than making buys of dime bags. I was in school for two months as a senior transfer. My
UC name was Scott Taylor, and I actually tried out for the baseball team. One time a very aggressive LAPD officer stopped
a few of us in the school parking lot after a game, and he yelled to me, ‘Get your hands up!’ I put them up really high, thinking,
if he shoots me, the trajectory test would get my mom and dad some big bucks in the lawsuit.”

With a sly smile Sheila said, “Did you score with any of the cheerleaders?”

“I was warned about fraternizing with the other kids, especially of the female persuasion,” Aaron replied. “And just as I
was getting close to the adult gangster that was supplying the high school kids, I screwed up and ended my UC career.”

“How’d you do that?”

“By getting in a fight in shop class. Some little dude in one of the Hispanic gangs kept picking on me, always calling me
puto
and
maricón,
shit like that. I got sick of it, and one afternoon he dumped a soda on me and I kicked his ass. Beat him bad right there
in class. Our instructor called Security and had us both taken to the vice principal’s office. He happened to be the only
one that knew I was cop.”

“Damn, Aaron!” Sheila said. “There’s another side to you. Where do you park your Batmobile?”

“We were both given a suspension,” Aaron continued with a self-conscious smile. “Which was fine with me, except when I drove
home from school that afternoon, I got tailed by two tricked-out low riders packed with crew. I figured they were tooled-up,
so I tried to call for help, but my cell was dead. And that happened to be the day I was so late for school I ran out the
door, leaving my Beretta on the kitchen table instead of taping it under the seat of my UC car like I was supposed to. With
that posse driving up my ass, and me all helpless, I can tell you I was
scared
.”

“So what happened?”

“Of course, there’s never a cop around when you need one, so I drove that shitty UC car straight to the nearest mall with
the lead lowrider locking bumpers with me, and me thinking the crowds of people might scare them off. When I got there, I
looked in the mirror and saw one dude leaning out the window, aiming what looked like a TEC-nine at me. And I kinda panicked
and burned a fast left but lost it and went skidding through the window of a Big Five store, where luckily nobody got hurt
but me. Two cracked ribs and a busted collarbone.”

“What happened to the gangsters?”

“They split and got away. I wasn’t really able to ID any of them later when gang cops showed me six-packs. I got removed from
school real fast and from the buy program too. And after I recovered, I got sent to Wilshire patrol, where I finished my probation.
All that drama because I looked way young. I’ve never found any advantage to it.”

“That’s quite a story, Aaron,” Sheila said.

Aaron was pleased to see that for the first time, Sheila Montez seemed to be watching him with a bit of interest. Known for
being supercool and unflappable, she’d told him she’d worked down south at both the busy Seventy-seventh Street Division as
well as at Newton Street for three years. And she’d also done a couple of dangerous UC assignments where they’d needed Hispanic
women. Aaron had felt that his police career had been tame next to Sheila’s.

Aaron had also heard that she’d been married to a sergeant at Mission Division for about a year but had divorced him shortly
after her baby was stillborn. It was not something she’d ever talked about to him, but nowhere on the planet was gossip as
rife as in the police world, and secrets were nearly impossible to keep. Well, now he’d shown her that he too was someone
with a history. It wasn’t everyone that was chased through the window of a Big 5 store.

“My picture and UC name are in the high school yearbook,” Aaron said. “I have one at home. I’ll bring it in if you’d like
to see it. I look really dorky.”

“Sure, let’s have a peek,” Sheila said.

Their second call just after dark gave Aaron Sloane a chance to see another side of supercool Sheila Montez. After reading
the southeast Hollywood address on the computer screen, she rogered the message and hit the en route key. When they arrived
at the call, they saw a rescue ambulance already parked on the street, and a Latina in a lavender dress was waiting under
a streetlight in front of a stucco duplex that had been tagged from roof to concrete slab with gang graffiti.

When she saw Sheila Montez, the woman started to speak Spanish, then saw that the male cop was a gringo and said in English,
“My neighbor. Her baby…” Then the woman shook her head and walked back to her apartment.

The two cops entered just as the paramedics were leaving. Before exiting, the older paramedic said, “The baby’s probably been
dead for a few hours. Letting a sick infant with a respiratory infection sleep next to a broken-out window night after night
wasn’t helpful, that’s for sure. And today Little Momma gave the baby a child’s dose of medication, not an infant’s dose.
Then she put the baby facedown on a bulky quilt and decided to take a long nap after downing a glass or two of cheap chardonnay.
It looks like the baby’s illness, the overdose of meds, and the quilt around the baby’s face resulted in accidental asphyxiation.
But it’s yours now. Catch you later.”

The young mother was not Latina. She was rosy-cheeked and freckled, the teenage wife of a Marine deployed in Iraq. She was
sitting on a kitchen chair, crying, a wineglass beside her on the table. The crib was in the only bedroom. Sheila Montez hesitated
for a moment but walked to the crib to look at the infant.

The baby might have had her mother’s rosy cheeks in life, but in death she was already turning gray, now lying faceup, nesting
in the heavy quilt. Sheila Montez stared down at the baby for a long time, and Aaron Sloane was more than happy to let her
take charge, figuring this was a job for a woman.

“She was like that when I woke up,” the young mother said between sobs, looking at Aaron. “She was ice-cold, and I knew right
away she was gone!”

Sheila Montez picked up the medicine bottle from a table beside the crib, looked at it, and put it back. For no apparent reason,
she reached down and lifted the baby from the quilt that had smothered her and put her back down on the sheet. She adjusted
the pink pajama across the infant’s chest and, using a towel that was draped over the crib, wiped some dried mucus from the
baby’s face and smoothed back her corn-silk hair.

Aaron Sloane didn’t learn until later that night that this was the first dead baby Sheila Montez had seen since the night
that her own lay lifeless in her arms, when a nurse had let Sheila hold her dead baby for a few minutes before taking it away
forever. He was just getting ready to put in an obligatory call to the night-watch detective so he could verify on-scene that
it was an accidental death before the body snatchers took her away.

All of a sudden his partner advanced toward the young mother. Sheila’s wide-set dark brown eyes looked black now, and her
face had gone very pale around the mouth. Trembling with rage, Sheila Montez said, “You… ignorant… pathetic… little —”

She didn’t get a chance to say more because Aaron Sloane leaped forward, grabbed his partner by the arm, and dragged her outside,
from where he could hear the young mother sobbing loudly. And there on the sidewalk in the darkness, Sheila tried to say something
to him. She tried, but her fury utterly overwhelmed her and she started to weep. Aaron put his arms around her for a moment
and she didn’t resist, her body shuddering against him.

He saw the headlights as another patrol unit drove up, and he said, “Come on, partner, let’s get you back to our shop.”

While she was sitting in their car, trying to control the tears, Aaron waved off the second patrol car, indicating that no
assistance was needed, returned to the duplex, made the calls, and did the paperwork until the coroner’s van arrived.

Later, Sheila apologized to Aaron Sloane for what she wryly called “the Montez meltdown.” She also told him about her own
dead baby, and a little bit about her bad marriage to the sergeant from Mission Division, something she’d never spoken about
with any other officer, male or female, at Hollywood Station. She did it because she had to, and she could only hope that
Aaron Sloane was that most rare of creatures, a partner who could actually keep a secret in the gossip-riddled world of street
cops.

“What happens in our shop stays in our shop,” Aaron Sloane at last said to Sheila Montez, trying to reassure her when he saw
the anguish in her eyes.

As for Aaron Sloane, he realized that he had been her confessor that night only because he was there, such being the strange
and unique intimacy that can develop quite by chance within a police partnership. But in this case, it was an intimacy that
set his heart racing. And being true to his word, nobody but Aaron Sloane ever learned what had happened to imperturbable
Sheila Montez the night she stood in silence beside a dead baby’s crib.

T
HERE WAS MORE THAN THE USUAL
amount of complaining going on at the midwatch roll call the next afternoon, especially concerning Officer Hall from Watch
3, who had been bitten on the thumb by a gay hooker on Friday night. His taller brother, who worked Watch 5, had started the
gripe session on behalf of his little brother. The cops called them Short Hall and Long Hall. The prisoner wouldn’t consent
to a blood test, so a search warrant would have to be obtained in order to take the prisoner’s blood. The cop’s vacation had
to be postponed, and Long Hall was so livid that Sergeant Murillo assigned him to the desk, feeling that he might go all junkyard
dog if turned loose on the streets.

Long Hall said to Sergeant Murillo, “Twenty years of fighting ’roided-up street savages and my brother gets taken down by
Tiny Tim with a germ in his ass. They shoulda just cut his thumb off so the AIDS bug couldn’t crawl up his arm.”

Everyone in general was grouchy too because they were only able to field six cars, what with the perennial personnel shortages
at LAPD. The midwatch should’ve had a dozen. It was to be expected, given that the bulk of the probationary rookies were on
Watch 2 and Watch 3, leaving the Watch 5 midwatch to the saltier cops. And then someone mentioned the name of the despised
US district judge who for more than six years had been ramrodding the federal consent decree, under which the LAPD was compelled
to function as a result of the Rodney King riots and the so-called Rampart scandal a decade earlier.

The federal jurist had publicly commented that a recent criminal case involving a series of home invasions where drug dealers
were ripped off by a trio of cops, two from LAPD, indicated that the draconian consent decree policies should not be lifted.
The judge felt that this case proved that the consent decree was an essential tool in policing the police, bringing with it
an endless paper blizzard devoted to audits and oversight and micromanaging minutiae. The private “monitoring” firm, which
received a cool $2.4 million a year from a teetering city budget to oversee compliance, could not have been unhappy with the
judge’s comments, which implicitly encouraged more milking of the municipal cash cow with no end in sight.

“Does anybody ever point out that there were only two crooked cops in that whole freaking Rampart deal?” Flotsam rhetorically
asked the acting watch commander, not expecting an answer and not getting one.

“And how about this latest case?” Hollywood Nate said. “Two cops again. We’re a police department of ninety-three hundred,
for chrissake! A total of four thieving cops in ten years, and the judge thinks LAPD corruption is pervasive? I wonder how
many corrupt lawyers are out there in our fair city?”

Jetsam said, “And who caught the bad Rampart cops? It was us. LAPD caught them!”

“It’s a catch-twenty-two,” Dana Vaughn said. “There’s no financial incentive for the auditing firm to ever say that LAPD’s
taken all the steps required under the consent decree. We might be still using hundreds of coppers doing useless and redundant
paperwork for another ten years. No wonder the midwatch can only field six cars on a weekend night!”

Sheila Montez said, “When LAPD was forced to break up the Rampart Crash unit,
Mara Salvatrucha
gangsters from L.A. to El Salvador were dancing in the streets.”

Hollywood Nate said, “Why can’t all those cop haters be satisfied? They broke our sword, why do they have to bury it up our
ass?”

The acting watch commander was Sergeant Lee Murillo, a wiry, sharp-eyed, third-generation Mexican-American with prematurely
gray wavy hair who had almost made an L.A. Dodgers farm team fifteen years prior, before his arm lost its elasticity and his
fastball went from ninety-plus to a hanging balloon that his grandmother could’ve hit.

He’d been a cop for thirteen years and a sergeant for three, all of his supervisory years having been spent at Hollywood Division,
now officially called Hollywood Area to sound less military. Of course, the troops said that anyone, including the brass,
who would replace
division
with
area
was a pussy, and Sergeant Murillo always referred to their piece of Los Angeles geography as Hollywood Division.

The fact was, he agreed with everything they said, but being a supervisor, he wasn’t supposed to validate the bitching. He
just sat in front of the room and gazed over the heads of the dozen seated troops at the one-sheet movie posters decorating
the walls, posters that could be found in other parts of the building as well in case anyone didn’t know that this police
station was in Hollywood, USA. In the roll call room were the posters for
L.A. Confidential
and
Sunset Boulevard
. Downstairs there was
Hollywood Homicide
.