Hollywood Station (18 page)

After Jetsam paddled out to his partner, he looked at Flotsam and said, "So what happened between you and Mag? Too painful to talk about?"

"She's got it all, dude. The most perfect chick I ever met," Flotsam said. "Do you know what the Oracle told me? When he walked a beat in Little Tokyo a hundred years ago, he got to know the Takara family. They own a couple of small hotels, three restaurants, and I don't know how much rental property. That little honey might have some serious assets of her own someday."

"No wonder you're in love."

"And she is such a robo-babe. You ever see more beautiful lips? And the way she walks like a little panther? And her skin like ivory and the way her silky hair falls against her gracefully curving neck?"

Sitting astride his surfboard, Jetsam said, "`Gracefully curving' . . . bro, you are way goony! Stay real! This could just be false enchantment because she grabbed that dummy hand grenade and tossed it that time."

Flotsam said, "Then I got way pumped the last night we worked together. I knew after my days off, you and me would be teamed for the rest of the deployment period, so I took the bit in my teeth and I went for it. I said something like, `Mag, I hope I can persuade you to grab a bikini and surf with me on the twilight ocean with the molten sun setting into the darkling sea.'"

"No, bro!" Jetsam said. "No darkling sea! That is sooo nonbitchin'!" He paused. "What'd she say to that?"

"Nothing at first. She's a very reserved girl, you know. Finally, she said, `I think I would rather stuff pork chops in my bikini and swim in a tank full of piranhas than go surfing with you at sunset, sunrise, or anytime in between.'"

"That is like, way discouraging, bro," Jetsam said somberly. "Can't you see that?"

Flotsam and Jetsam weren't the only ones complaining about the LAPD watchers that day. One of the watchers, D2 Brant Hinkle, had been biding his time at Internal Affairs Group. He was on the lieutenant's list but was afraid that the list was going to run out of time before an opening came for him. He was optimistic now that all of the black males and females of any race who'd finished lower on the written and oral exam than he had but got preference had already been selected. Even though he wasn't a D3 supervisor, he'd had enough prior supervisory experience in his package to qualify for the lieutenant's exam, and he'd done pretty well on it. He didn't think anyone else could leapfrog over him before the list expired.

It had been an interesting two-year assignment at IAG, good for his personnel package but not so good for the stomach. He was experiencing acid reflux lately and was staring down the barrel at his fifty-third birthday. With twenty-nine years on the Job this was his last realistic chance to make lieutenant before pulling the pin and retiring to . . . well, he wasn't sure where. Somewhere out of L. A. before the city imploded.

Brantley Hinkle was long divorced, with two married daughters but no grandchildren yet, and he tried for a date maybe twice a month after he heard a colleague his age say, "Shit, Charles Manson gets a dozen marriage proposals a year, and I can't get a date."

It made him realize how seldom he had a real date, let alone a sleepover, so he'd been making more of an effort lately. There was a forty-year-old divorced PSR whose honeyed tones over the police radio could trigger an incipient erection. There was an assistant district attorney he'd met at a retirement party for one of the detectives at Robbery-Homicide Division. There was even a court reporter, a Pilates instructor in her spare time, who was forty-six years old but looked ten years younger and had never been married. She'd whipped him into better shape with a diet and as much Pilates as he could stand. His waistband got so loose he couldn't feel his cell phone vibrating.

So he was in decent condition and still had most of his hair, though it was as gray as pewter now, and he didn't need glasses, except for reading. He could usually connect with one of the three women when he was lonely and the need arose, but he hadn't been trying lately. He was more focused on leaving Professional Standards Bureau and getting back to a detective job somewhere to await the promotion to lieutenant. If it came.

At IAG Brant Hinkle had seen complaints obsessively investigated for allegations that would have been subjects of fun and needling at retirement parties back in the days before the Rodney King beating and the Rampart scandal. Back before the federal consent decree.

And they weren't just coming from citizens; they were coming from other cops. He'd had to oversee one where a patrol sergeant his age looked at a woman officer in a halter bra and low-ride shorts who had just come from working out. Staring at her sweaty belly, the sergeant had sighed. That was it, he'd sighed. The woman officer beefed the sergeant, and that very expensive sigh got him a five-day suspension for workplace harassment.

Then there was the wrestling match at arrest-and-control school, where a male officer was assigned to wrestle with a woman officer in order to learn certain holds. The male cop said aloud to his classmates, "I can't believe I get paid for this."

She'd beefed him, and he'd gotten five days also.

Yet another involved a brand-new sergeant who, on his way to his first duty assignment as a sergeant, happened to spot one of the patrol units blow a stop sign on their way to a hot call that the unit had not been assigned. The sergeant arrived at his new post, and immediately he wrote a 1.28 personnel complaint.

Within his first month, that sergeant, a man who wore his new stripes with gusto, called one of the officers on his watch a "dumbbell." The officer made an official complaint against him. The sergeant got a five-day suspension. The troops cheered.

Under the federal consent decree with the legions of LAPD overseers, the cops were turning on each other and eating their own. It was a different life from the one he'd lived when he'd joined the world-famous LAPD, uncontested leader in big-city law enforcement. In Brant Hinkle's present world, even IAG investigators were subjected to random urine tests conducted by Scientific Investigation Division.

The IAG investigators who had preceded him said that during Lord Voldemort's Reign of Terror, they sometimes had six Boards of Rights-the LAPD equivalent of a military court martial-going on at one time, even though there were only five boardrooms. People had to wait in the corridors for a room to clear. It was an assembly line of fear, and it brought about the phenomenon of cops lawyering up with attorneys hired for them by their union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

The more senior investigators told him that at that time, everyone had joked grimly that they expected a cop to walk out of his Board of Rights after losing his career and pension and leap over the wrought-iron railing of the Bradbury Building into the courtyard five stories down.

The Bradbury Building, at 304 South Broadway, was an incongruous place in which to house the dreaded Professional Standards Bureau, with its three hundred sergeants and detectives, including the Internal Affairs Group, all of whom had to handle seven thousand complaints a year, both internally and externally generated against a police force of nine thousand officers. The restored 1893 masterpiece, with its open-cage elevators, marble staircases, and five-story glass roof, was probably the most photographed interior in all of Los Angeles.

Many a film noir classic had been shot inside that Mexican-tile courtyard flooded with natural light. He could easily imagine the ghosts of Robert Mitchum and Bogart exiting any one of the balcony offices in trench coats and fedoras as ferns in planter pots cast ominous shadows across their faces when they lit their inevitable smokes. Brant knew that nobody dared light a cigarette in the Bradbury Building today, this being twenty-first-century Los Angeles, where smoking cigarettes is a PC misdemeanor, if not an actual one.

Brant Hinkle was currently investigating a complaint against a female training officer in a patrol division whose job it had been to bring a checklist every day for a sergeant to sign off. After a year of this bureaucratic widget counting, where half the time she couldn't find a sergeant, she'd just decided to create one with a fictitious name and fictitious serial number.

But then the "fraud" was discovered, and no check forger had ever been so actively pursued. IAG sent handwriting exemplars downtown to cement the case against the hapless woman whom the brass was determined to fire. But as it turned out, there was a one-year statute on such offenses, and they couldn't fire her. In fact, they couldn't do anything except transfer her to a division that might cause her a long drive and make her miserable, this veteran cop who had had an unblemished record but had finally succumbed to the deluge of audits and paperwork.

Brant Hinkle and his team were secretly happy that she'd kept her job. Like Brant, just about all of them were using IA experience as a stepping-stone to promotion and weren't the rats that street cops imagined them to be.

As Brant Hinkle put it, "We're just scared little mice stuck in a glue trap."

Once when they were all bemoaning the avalanche of worthless and demoralizing complaints that the oppressive oversight armies had invited, Brant said to his colleagues, "When I was a kid and Dragnet was one of the biggest hits on TV, Jack Webb's opening voice-over used to say, `This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here. . . . I'm a cop.' Today all we can say is, `This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here. . . . I'm an auditor.'"

Probably the most talked-about investigation handled by Brant Hinkle during these we-investigate-every-complaint years was the one involving a woman who had become obsessed with a certain cop and made an official complaint against him, signed and dated, maintaining, "He stole my ovaries."

It had to be investigated in full, including with lengthy interviews. There had to be an on-the-record denial by the police officer in question, who said to Brant, "Well, I'm glad IA is taking her complaint seriously. There could be something to this ovary theft. After all, you guys are trying real hard to steal my balls, and you've just about done it."

It was probably at that moment that Brant Hinkle spoke to his boss about a transfer back to a divisional detective squad.

Chapter
NINE

WATCH 5, THE ten-hour midwatch, from 5:15 P. M. to 4:00 A. M. with an unpaid lunch break (code 7), had about fifty officers assigned to it. Five of them were women, but three of those women were on light duty for various reasons, and there were only two in the field, Budgie and Mag. And what with days off, sick days, and light duty, on a typical weekend night it was difficult for the Oracle to find enough bodies to field more than six or eight cars. So when one of the vice unit's sergeants asked to borrow both of the midwatch women for a Saturday-night mini-version of the Trick Task Force, he got an argument.

"You've got the biggest vice unit in the city," the Oracle said. "You've got half a dozen women. Why don't you use them?"

"Only two work as undercover operators and they're both off sick," the vice sergeant said. "This isn't going to be a real task force. No motor cops as chase units. No big deal. We only wanna run a couple operators and cover units for a few hours."

"Why can't you put your uniformed women on it?"

"We have three. One's on vacation, one's on light duty, one's pregnant."

"Why not use her?" the Oracle said. "It's a known fact that there's a whole lotta tricks out there who prefer pregnant hookers. Something about a mommy fixation. I guess they want to be spanked."

"She's not pregnant enough to notice, but she's throwing up like our office is a trawler in a perfect storm. I ask her to walk the boulevard, she'll start blowing chunks on my shoes."

"Aw shit," the Oracle said. "How're we supposed to police a city when we spend half the time policing ourselves and proving in writing that we did it?"

"I don't answer trick questions," the vice sergeant said. "How about it? Just for one night."

When the Oracle asked Budgie Polk and Mag Takara if they'd like to be boulevard street whores on Saturday night, they said okay. He only got an argument from Budgie's partner, Fausto Gamboa.

Fausto walked into the office, where three supervisors were doing paperwork, and being one of the few patrol officers at Hollywood Station old enough to call the sixty-eight-year-old sergeant by his given name, he said to the Oracle, "I don't like it, Merv."

"What don't you like, Fausto?" the Oracle asked, knowing the answer.

"Budgie's got a baby at home."

"So what's that got to do with it?"

"Sometimes she lactates. And it's painful."

"She'll deal with it, Fausto. She's a cop," the Oracle said, while the other sergeants pretended to not be listening.

"What if she gets herself hurt? Who's gonna feed her baby?"

"The cover teams won't let her get hurt. And babies don't have to have mother's milk."

"Aw shit," Fausto said, echoing the Oracle's sentiments about the whole deal.

After he'd gone the Oracle said to the other two sergeants, "Sometimes my ideas work too well. Fausto's not only gotten out of his funk, I think he's about to adopt Budgie Polk. Her kid'll probably be calling him Grandpa Fausto in a couple years."

Cosmo Betrossian was a whole lot unhappier than Fausto Gamboa. He had diamonds to deliver to Dmitri at the Gulag soon and he had to kill that miserable addict Farley Ramsdale and his stupid girlfriend, Olive, sometime before then. Farley's claim that he had someone watching Cosmo and Ilya's apartment was so ridiculous Cosmo hadn't given it a thought. And as to Farley's other claim, that he had a letter that would be delivered to the police if something happened to him, well, the addict had seen too many movies. Even if there was a letter, let the police try to prove the truth of it without the writer and his girlfriend alive to attest to its veracity.