Hollywood Station (13 page)

The assigned car, thanks to lights and siren, got there seconds before the others, but two of the midwatch units roared in before the officers of 6-A-65 were out of the car. One of the midwatch units was driven by Mag Takara. Her partner, Benny Brewster, jumped out with a shotgun, and then another car from Watch 3 arrived. Eight cops, four with shotguns, approached the house from which the call had emanated. The porch lights were out, and the street was quite dark. The decision whether to approach the porch did not have to be made. The front door to the house swung open, and the cops at the scene could scarcely believe what they were seeing.

A thirty-eight-year-old man, later identified as Roland Tarkington, owner of the house, stepped out onto the porch. It would be learned that his father had once owned large chunks of commercial property in Hollywood but had lost it all in bad investments, leaving his only child, Roland, the house and sufficient money to exist. Roland was waving a document in one hand and had the other hand behind his back.

In the glare of half a dozen flashlight beams plus a spotlight trained on him by the closest black-and-white, Roland spoke not a word but held up the paper as though it were a white flag of surrender. He struggled down the concrete steps from his porch and advanced toward the cops.

The thing that had the cops amazed was Roland Tarkington's size. He would be measured the next day during a postmortem at five feet six inches. His weight would be listed on the death report as just over 540 pounds. The shadow of Roland Tarkington thrown onto the walk behind him was vast.

After Benny Brewster shouted, "Let's see the other hand!" there was a cacophony of voices:

"Show us your other hand!"

"Both hands in the air, goddamnit!"

"Get down on the sidewalk!"

"Watch that fucking hand! Watch his hand!"

A probationary cop from Watch 3 left his training officer and crept along the driveway forty feet from the standoff as the obese man stopped, still silently waving the white paper. The probationer was in a position to see behind Roland Tarkington's back and yelled, "He's got a gun!"

As though on cue, another Hollywood performance ended when Roland Tarkington showed them what he was hiding, suddenly aiming what looked like a .9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol at the closest cop.

And he was hit by two shotgun blasts fired by separate officers from Watch 3 and five rounds from pistols fired by two other Watch 3 officers. Roland Tarkington, despite his great bulk, was lit up by bright orange muzzle blasts, lifted off his feet, and thrown down on his back, where he bled out, dying within seconds, his heart literally shredded. Another five police pistol rounds that missed had riddled the front of the house as Roland Tarkington fell.

Neighbors then poured out of their homes, and voices were yelling, and at least two women across the street were wailing and crying. The Oracle, who arrived just as the rounds exploded in the night, picked up the blood-spattered paper lying on the grass beside the dead man. Roland Tarkington's gun turned out to be a realistically designed water pistol.

The second cop to have fired his shotgun said, "What's it say, Sarge?"

The Oracle read aloud: "`I offer my humble apologies to the fine officers of the LAPD. This was the only way I could summon the courage to end my life of misery. I ask that my remains be cremated. I would not want anyone to have to carry my body to our family plot at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Thank you. Roland G. Tarkington.'"

None of the midwatch units had been in a position to fire, and Mag said to Benny, "Let's get outta here, partner. This is bad shit."

When they were back at their car putting the shotgun into the locked rack, Mag heard two cops talking to the Oracle.

One said, "Goddamnit! Goddamn this bastard! Why didn't he take poison? Goddamn him!"

The Oracle said to the cop, "Get in your car and get back to the station, son. FID will be arriving soon."

Another voice said to the Oracle, "I'm not a fucking executioner! Why did he do this to me? Why?"

The final comment was made by the night-watch detective Compassionate Charlie Gilford, who showed up as the black-and-whites were driving away. The RA was double-parked, a paramedic standing over the huge mound of bloody flesh that had been Roland Tarkington, glad that the crew from the coroner's would be handling this one.

Compassionate Charlie picked up the water pistol, squeezed the trigger, and when no water squirted out said, "Shit, it ain't even loaded." Then he shined his light on the blasted gaping chest of Roland Tarkington and said, "You would have to call this a heartrending conclusion to another Hollywood melodrama."

Chapter
SEVEN

THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY evening saw throngs on Hollywood Boulevard at another of the endless red carpet ceremonies, this one at the Kodak Theatre, where show business backslaps and hugs itself before returning to everyday backbiting and seething in never-ending bouts of jealousy over a colleague's getting a job that should have been given to Me! Show business's unmentioned prayer: Please, God, let me succeed and let them . . . fail.

The midwatch was in terrible shape as far as deployment was concerned. Fausto was on days off and so was Benny Brewster. Budgie Polk saw the Oracle working at his desk and found it reassuring to see all those hash marks on his left sleeve, all the way up to his elbow. He wore not his heart on his sleeve, but his life. Forty-six years. Nine service stripes. Who could push him around? The Oracle had said he was going to break the record of the detective from Robbery-Homicide Division who'd retired in February with fifty years of service. But sometimes, like now, he looked tired. And old.

The Oracle would be sixty-nine years old in August, and it was all there around his eyes and furrowed brow, all the years with the LAPD. He'd served seven chiefs. He'd seen chiefs and mayors come and go and die. But in those old glory days of LAPD, he couldn't have imagined he'd be serving under a federal consent decree that was choking the life out of the police department he loved. Proactive police work had given way to police paranoia, and he seemed to internalize it more than anyone else. Budgie watched him unscrew a bottle of antacid liquid and swallow a large dose.

Budgie had been hoping to team up with Mag Takara, but after Budgie walked into the watch commander's office and had a look at the lineup, she took the Oracle aside in the corridor, where she said privately, "Did the lieutenant decide on the assignments tonight, Sarge?"

"No, I did," he told her, but he stopped talking when Hollywood Nate interrupted by bounding in the back door with three rolls of paper, carrying them like they were treasure maps.

"Wait'll you see these, Sarge," he said to the Oracle.

He handed two to Budgie while he carefully unrolled the third, revealing a movie one-sheet for Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson.

"Don't we have enough movie posters around the station?" the Oracle said.

"But this one's in great shape! It's a copy, but it's a pretty old copy. And in beautiful condition. I'm getting the frames donated tomorrow."

"All right, put them up in the roll-call room with the others," the Oracle said, running his hand over his gray crew cut. "I guess anything's better than looking at all these inmate green walls. Whoever designed our stations must've got his training in Albania during the cold war."

"Way cool, Sarge," Nate said. "We'll decide where to put the others later. One's for Double Indemnity, and the other's for Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean's face right under the title. Lots of great shots of Hollywood in those movies."

"Okay, but pick places where citizens can't see them from the lobby," the Oracle said. "Don't turn this station into a casting office."

After Hollywood Nate had sprinted up the stairs, the Oracle said to Budgie, "I'm a sucker for young cops who respect old things. And speaking of old things, with Fausto off I thought you wouldn't mind working with Hank Driscoll for a few days."

Budgie rolled her eyes then. Hank aka "B. M." Driscoll was someone nobody liked working with, especially young officers. It wasn't that he was old like Fausto-he had nineteen years on the Job and was only a little over forty-but it was like working with your whiny aunt Martha. The B. M. sobriquet that the other cops hung on him was for Baron Mnchhausen, whose invented illnesses resulted in medical treatment and hospitalization, a disorder that came to be known in the psychiatric community as Munchausen syndrome.

B. M. Driscoll probably had more sick days than the rest of the midwatch combined. If they had to arrest a junkie with hepatitis, B. M. Driscoll would go to his doctor with symptoms within forty-eight hours and would listen doubtfully when assured that his claims were medically impossible.

The ten-hour shift of Watch 5 crawled by when you had to work with him. Older cops said that if you felt that life was flying by too quickly, you could bring time almost to a standstill just by working a whole twenty-eight-day deployment period with B. M. Driscoll.

He was tall and wiry, the grandson of Wisconsin farmers who came to California during the Great Depression, which he claimed kept his parents from eating properly, so they passed unhealthy genes down to him. He kept his sparse brown hair clipped almost as close as the Oracle's because he believed it was more hygienic. And he was twice divorced, the mystery being how he found anyone but a psychiatrist to marry him in the first place.

However, there was one event in his career that made him a bit of a police legend. Several years earlier, when he was working patrol in the barrio of Hollenbeck Division, he became involved in a standoff with a drug-crazed, facially tattooed homeboy who was threatening to cut his girlfriend's throat with a Buck knife.

Several cops were there in the middle of the street, pointing shotguns and handguns and cajoling and threatening to no avail. Officer Driscoll was holding a Taser gun, and at one point during the standoff when the homie lowered the blade long enough to wave it during his incoherent rant, B. M. Driscoll fired. The dart struck the homeboy in the left chest area, penetrating the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket as well as his butane lighter. Which was ignited by a lit cigarette. Which caused the guy to burst into flames. Which ended the standoff.

They got the shirt off the homeboy before he was seriously burned and threw him into a rescue ambulance, and B. M. Driscoll became something of a celebrity, especially among the Latino cruisers where he was known as "the dude with the flame thrower."

But whether he was a legend or not, Budgie Polk was very unhappy about her assignment. She said to the Oracle, "Just tell me one thing, Sarge. Tell me that you're not keeping me and Mag apart because I'm just back from maternity leave and she's a little munchkin. I can't explain to you how degrading it is when that happens to us women. When male supervisors say stuff like `We're splitting you up for your own safety.' After all the shit we women have gone through to get where we are on this Job."

The Oracle said, "Budgie, I promise you that's not why I put you with Driscoll instead of Mag. I don't think of you in those terms. You're a cop. Period."

"And that's not why you put me with Fausto? So the old war horse could look after me?"

"Haven't you caught on by now, Budgie?" the Oracle said. "Fausto Gamboa has been a bitter and depressed man since he lost his wife to colon cancer two years ago. And both their sons are losers, so they don't help him any. When Ron LeCroix had to get his hemorrhoids zapped, it looked like a perfect time to team up Fausto with somebody young and alive. Preferably a woman, to soften him up a little bit. So I didn't assign him to you for your benefit. I did it for him."

They didn't call him the Oracle for nothing, Budgie thought. She was painted into a corner now with nowhere to go. "Hoisted by my own ponytail" was all she could mutter.

The Oracle said, "Put some cotton in your ears for a few days. Driscoll's actually a decent copper and he's generous. He'll buy your cappuccino and biscotti every chance he gets. And not because you're a woman. That's the way he is."

"I hope I don't catch bird flu or mad cow just listening to him," Budgie said.

When they got to their patrol unit, Budgie driving, B. M. Driscoll threw his war bag into the trunk and said, "Try not to get in my breathing zone if you can help it, Budgie. I know you've got a baby, and I wouldn't want to infect you. I think I could be coming down with something. I'm not sure, but I've got muscle pain and sort of feel chills down my back. I had the flu in October and again in January. This has been a bad year for my health."

The rest was lost in radio chatter. Budgie tried to concentrate on the PSR's voice and tune his out. She was reminded of an event she'd first heard about when she transferred to Hollywood Division and met Detective Andi McCrea. Other women officers particularly enjoyed the story.

It seemed that several years ago an LAPD officer from a neighboring division was shot by a motorist he'd pulled over for a ticket. Andi McCrea was a uniformed cop in Hollywood Division at that time, and several night-watch units were assigned to patrol their eastern border, where the suspect was last seen abandoning his car after a short pursuit.

It was past end of watch, and cars were working overtime, in communication with one another and checking alleys, storage yards, and vacant buildings, with no sign of the shooter. Then Andi got the word who the officer was: an academy classmate of hers, and he was badly wounded. She'd been relentless that night, shining her spotlight beam onto rooftops, even into trees, and her older male partner, like B. M. Driscoll, was a complainer. Not about imaginary illnesses, but about his need for rest and sleep. He was an unreliable shiftless cop.