Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Moon

“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.

THERE 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.