Hollywood Moon (2 page)

“It ain’t his birthday, dummy,” Axel said to Bootsie. “It’s the anniversary of his retirement from the railroad. He has a
party every year to celebrate his current life of comfort and ease.”

Lucy looked at Coleman O’Toole’s pension check and at the endorsement. The signature looked like the old man’s scrawl. “Why
don’t you wheel Coley inside?” the tranny said, squinting out the window at the wheelchair figure alone in the darkness.

“You wanna check his ID, see if he’s old enough to buy booze?” Bootsie said with a wet, nearly toothless grin.

“Yeah, you wanna card old Coleman?” Axel said, snuffling and grinning wider than Bootsie. “Actually, the old bugger’s sick.
Puked halfway down the street. You don’t want him in here unless you got a bucket and mop.”

“And all this booze is gonna cure him?” Lucy said, then shrugged and started ringing up the items just as 6-X-32 parked in
front of the store and was met by Trombone Teddy.

The cops hardly noticed the old guy in the wheelchair, and Flotsam said, “Did you make the call, Teddy?”

“Yes, sir,” Teddy said. “Is there a reward for capturing a couple of crooks for check fraud?”

“Whadda you mean?” Jetsam said.

“If you would put in a word to the store owner, would he give me a few bucks for blowing the whistle on a pair of thugs?”

“High-level business negotiations are above my pay grade, Teddy,” said Flotsam. “But I gotta think somebody’d buy you a forty
or two.”

“Okay,” Teddy said. “I’ll take a chance that generosity still exists in this ungrateful, goddamn world. Go inside and you’ll
find two thieves cashing a stolen check.”

“This better be righteous, Teddy,” Flotsam said, walking inside with Jetsam at his back.

The tranny, who was as tall as Flotsam in those heels, was surprised when the cop appeared and said, “Can I see that check?”

Pushing the check across the counter, Lucy said, “Something wrong, Officer?”

“That’s what we wanna know,” Jetsam said.

Flotsam examined the check and said, “Are either of you Coleman O’Toole?”

It was Lucy who said, “No, they’re not, Officer. Coley’s the one out there in the wheelchair. These two sometimes wheel him
down here to buy groceries.”

“Coley’s the salt of the earth,” Axel said, looking uneasy. “I’d fight a whole pack of pit bulls for old Coley. He’s a fellow
wine connoisseur.”

“Connoisseurs don’t drink wine in a paper bag,” Jetsam noted.

“Coley’s my man,” Bootsie said. “When some no-account neighbor put lye in his gin bottle one time and he ended up wif a tube
in his stomach, it was me that poured some good whiskey into the tube so he could get drunk.”

“That’s a touching testament to friendship,” Flotsam said, putting the check on the counter.

He walked to the door, nodding to Jetsam, who stayed inside while the grocery transaction was being completed. Lucy was counting
out the change when Flotsam came back inside.

Axel Minton looked at the cop’s expression and said, “Uh-oh.”

The tranny’s eyes were theatrically made-up so as to be seen from balcony seats, and those amazing orbs moved from Flotsam
to the transients and back again before she said, “Don’t tell me that’s not Coleman O’Toole out there in the wheelchair!”

“Oh, yeah,” said Flotsam. “I’m sure it’s him. He’s strapped in and rigged up nice as you please.”

“What’s the problem, then?” Lucy asked.

“It’s that he won’t be needing all this booze,” Flotsam said. “Him being deceased and all.”

“Uh-oh,” said Bootsie, who pointed at Axel. “It was his idea after we found Coley layin’ on the floor, colder than Aunt Ruby’s
poon.” Then he looked at the tranny and said, “Sorry for my rude mouf, Miss Lucy.”

“You lying rat!” Axel said to Bootsie. Then to the cops, “He was the one noticed Coley had already signed his check!”

“Tha’s right, Officer,” Bootsie said, “but it was this here pissant that pointed to Coley layin’ there quiet as a bedbug on
your pilla and said ol’ Coley woulda wanted us to cash it and have a Irish wake!”

“Okay, you two turn around and put your hands behind your backs,” Flotsam said. And sotto to Jetsam, “Better notify the night-watch
detective about the corpse in the wheelchair and our two grave robbers. While we’re waiting for the body snatchers, I’ll take
care of Teddy.”

As Jetsam led the handcuffed miscreants out to their car to await the arrival of the coroner’s van, Flotsam bought a pint
of Jack for Trombone Teddy to show that generosity still exists in this ungrateful, goddamn world.

The woman officer with the smartest mouth at Hollywood Station was Dana Vaughn, and Hollywood Nate was stuck with her for
at least one deployment period, an unhappy way to spend his first month back on the midwatch. He’d spent a year at the Community
Relations Office (acronym CRO, pronounced “crow”), tending to touchy-feely quality-of-life issues and getting a little bump
in pay for the easy work. But when fellow crow Bix Ramstead shot himself after being involved in a scandal, a lot of the fun
was gone from the job and Nate felt like returning to real police work. Besides, he needed to work nights in order to keep
his days free to pursue and torment casting agents. At age thirty-seven, it was now or never.

With sixteen years on the LAPD, Nate Weiss figured he’d have to stick around for at least four more years to ensure a vested
pension, but one he couldn’t draw until the age of fifty, which kept most cops on the job long past twenty years. He wondered
what he’d do if his acting career finally caught fire in the next four years? Would it be worth it to resign from the LAPD
and lose that pension for an uncertain career as an actor? He might damn well need the pension after he turned fifty and his
pecs were falling and he couldn’t suck in his gut any longer. Hollywood Nate felt that he was way too handsome to make it
as an older character actor, and the mere thought of it made Nate unconsciously pass his hand over his abdominals, well covered
by a T-shirt, a Kevlar vest, and his uniform shirt.

Dana Vaughn, also a P2, who was driving 6-X-76’s Ford Crown Vic late that afternoon, hadn’t missed it. She never missed a
thing, which was one of the reasons Hollywood Nate didn’t quite feel relaxed around her.

After noticing that subtle move to his belly, Dana said, “Yeah, you’re ripped, Nate. Abs to die for. Must be tough being as
smokin’ hot as you. Who cleans all the mirrors in your house?”

“I just have a slight stomachache is all,” said Hollywood Nate lamely.

“Sure, honey,” Dana said with that throaty, tinkling chuckle of hers, which irritated him all the more because he actually
liked the sound of it.

When he muttered, “I’d sure hate to work for you when you make sergeant,” she laughed, and that pissed him off more than when
she snarked him about his vanity.

Another thing he disliked about Dana Vaughn was that she called him honey in the way that his aunt Ruthie called him honey.
Like the old woman at the donut stand in Farmers Market, his usual destination for a croissant and coffee in the morning.

Dana was six years older than Nate, with twenty-one years on the job, but she acted like she was from the WW II generation
or something. Almost every damn thing she said to him somehow sounded patronizing and made Nate feel like a kid. And to make
matters worse, she still looked good. She was fit, with great shoulders and only faint lines starting around her alert golden-brown
eyes and at the sides of her mouth when she smirked at him.

Dana used the workout room nearly as much as Nate, always in a tight tank and spandex shorts. She didn’t even bother to dye
her salt-and-pepper ear-length bob, and it looked just right on her, emphasizing the woman she was, not the girl she had once
been. If she’d been what the surfer cops called a yuckbabe or one of those always griping about “JFH,” meaning just-fucked
hairdo, instead of an older woman who still looked hot and knew it, Nate figured she’d have been easier to take.

The first time Nate had ever seen Dana was in the station parking lot when he happened to be loading his war bag and shotgun
into his shop after he’d just come back to patrol from his stint at the Community Relations Office. Dana was also new to Watch
5, the midwatch, and had been working for the first time that night with young Harris Triplett, a phase-three probationer
whose field training officer was on a day off. Since the P1 was in the last phase of his eighteen months of probation, he
could be put with a P2 like Dana instead of with a P3 FTO. In fact, Harris was scheduled to complete his probation in a matter
of days, and Nate had intended to buy him a burger to celebrate.

Nate remembered seeing her dead-stare the kid just before she got behind the wheel that first night, and he heard her say
to Harris, “Boy, I need to know right out front. Do you intend to fanny burp in my presence or in our shop?”

“Of course not, ma’am!” Harris Triplett said, stunned.

Then Dana said, deadpan, “Do you intend to crank up loogies? You got loogie problems, I suggest you swallow them. To spit
them out the window and have them blow back on our shop would be highly unprofessional and might jeopardize your probation.”

“I don’t do things like that!” Harris said.

“I want you to remember a few basics about curb creatures,” she said. “Rock cocaine is either in their mouths or in their
butts. Watch the breathing of the chest for a tip-off. It’s a built-in lie detector. And throw their keys on the roof of their
car if you’re gonna return to our shop to run their records.”

“Yes, ma’am. Okay,” Harris said.

“And if they got booty rock, it’s your job to deal with it. There are dark and scary places where I won’t go.”

“Right,” Harris said earnestly.

Dana wasn’t through. “One more thing: Most males have no shame, but you need to remember there’re EEO laws on the books regarding
age and gender. Do you resent working with me because my badge and handcuffs’re older than you? And do you think you can get
away with making sexual innuendos and maybe touching me in an inappropriate way because I’m an old woman?”

His face flushed, Harris Triplett looked around for help at that moment, and the passing surfer cops stepped in to save him.

“She’s just honking on you, dude,” Flotsam said to the boot.

Still deadpan, Dana continued, “On second thought, I’m pretty much EEO-proof. You can fanny burp if you want to, but no loogies.
And about the sexual harassment, if I happen to touch
you
in a lewd or offensive way, you have every right to complain to the watch commander.” A long pause. “But tell me you won’t,
honey.
Please
tell me you won’t!”

“Get in the car, bro. She won’t hurt you… very much,” Jetsam said to the utterly bewildered rookie, and for the first time,
Hollywood Nate got to see Dana Vaughn flash that annoying half-smile of hers when she slid in behind the wheel.

Remembering that episode, Hollywood Nate had to admit that Dana was sometimes entertaining, even though she could be a major
pain in the ass. A good thing about her was that, like Nate, she preferred Starbucks latte with biscotti to the usual Winchell’s
cuppa joe with two sugars, two creams, and a raspberry jelly donut. Moreover, Nate knew that she’d been in a fatal shooting
the month prior, when she’d worked Watch 3.

That late-night watch was a graveyard shift for three days a week, lasting twelve hours. It overlapped the hours of the four-day-a-week,
ten-hour midwatch. Two weeks after the shooting, Dana had asked to be assigned to the midwatch, and her request was granted.
As an authentic gunfighter and a senior officer on the sergeants list, she was entitled to great respect.

For twelve years prior to her assignment to night-watch patrol at Hollywood Station, Dana Vaughn had been away from patrolling
the streets. She’d worked at the police academy for eight years as an instructor, teaching computer classes and report writing
and reviewing the academic curriculum. Then, after leaving the academy, she’d spent four more years across the street from
Hollywood Station in the Hollywood narcotics unit, housed in a small building at the corner of De Longpre and Wilcox. There
she did mostly administrative chores and helped the UC coordinators who handled the undercover officers.

Being a single mom, Dana Vaughn had tried for most of her career to keep from working the streets, seeking jobs that would
allow her to have evenings at home and weekends off in order to properly raise her daughter. Late in her career, Dana had
decided to take the sergeants exams, passed them easily, and was on the sergeants list. Now that her eighteen-year-old daughter,
Pamela, was going off to Cal in September, Dana had decided that it was time to get more street experience in a black-and-white.
After her promotion, she’d be sent to a patrol division as a supervisor, and she wanted to be ready for the new job.

Dana’s ex-husband, a lawyer at a firm in the city’s tallest downtown office building, at Fifth and Grand, had bought their
daughter a new Acura for high school graduation and assured them both that all through her university studies, he’d send $1,500
a month for Pamela, and he’d promised to continue the payments through graduate school if she sought an advanced degree. All
of this made Dana despise the philandering bastard a little less than she had during their brief marriage.

An incident that Hollywood Nate found very strange happened the very first night that he worked with Dana Vaughn. They’d received
a “prowler there now” call in the Hollywood Hills on a street below the famous Hollywood sign. They were the first and, Nate
assumed, the only car to arrive. After checking the property on foot with flashlights, and after interviewing a nervous neighbor
who thought she’d heard somebody knock over a trash can, they decided that it was probably a coyote or a raccoon or even a
deer, since the hills were full of critters.

When Nate and Dana were returning to their shop, Nate noticed another Crown Vic, parked half a block farther down the unlit
street. Silhouetted across the roof was a light bar.