Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Moon

“I’m not a good Catholic,” the old priest said, “but I know I’m right.”

The remarkable event happened at 8 P.M. on the evening of the tenth day, when Sarah Messinger awakened from her coma. Dana Vaughn was on a night off and dressed in civilian clothes when she rushed from home after getting a call and hearing the wonderful news. As she entered the hospital room, the parents of Sarah Messinger and a young neurosurgeon were standing by the young woman’s bed, all overjoyed.

The Messingers had been apprised of the many visits by the police officer who’d shot the man that injured their child, and when they saw Dana Vaughn, Sarah’s mother embraced her. Sarah was lying propped up on pillows, and she looked at Dana curiously.

Dana said, “Hello, Sarah. I’m so very happy tonight! You’re looking just fine!”

“Thank you,” Sarah said faintly.

“Do you know who this is, Sarah?” her mother asked.

“No,” Sarah said, studying Dana for a moment. “But somehow I know her voice.”

ONE OF THE NEWER COPPERS on the midwatch was forty-two-year-old R.T. Dibney. He’d worked patrol at Southeast, Hollenbeck, Newton Street, Mission, and North Hollywood Divisions during his nineteen-year career prior to his transfer to Hollywood Station. Three of those moves were “administrative transfers,” which could mean almost anything but generally signaled that the officer hadn’t done (or hadn’t been caught doing) anything so serious that it could bring about heavyweight disciplinary action. But it was nevertheless an indication that the officer was persona non grata at the former station. It was the police version of “no convictions,” and nobody liked finding administrative transfers in a personnel package.

R.T. Dibney was broad-shouldered and wore his chestnut hair in a kind of retro seventies cut, blow-dried, heavily sprayed, and just touching the ears, with sideburns long but not so long that he caught crap from the supervisors about shaving them shorter. He had a thin mustache that also was retro, unlike the macho growths that most cops sported, and, like his sideburns, it required a bit of L’Oréal to hide the gray. The thing about his mustache was that whenever he was in a tense situation, his upper lip twitched and the slender stash started jumping, a dead giveaway that something was amiss. As to his looks, according to Dana Vaughn he was “okay-looking in an infomercial-guy-selling-steak-knives sort of way.”

His most recent transfer, the one from North Hollywood Division, resulted from his possibly having had a relationship with the wife of a Pacific Division watch commander, an allegation that could not be proved. The aggrieved watch commander, Lieutenant Edgar Lamb, had tried to set elaborate traps to catch his wife and her lover, certain that she was cheating on him with a police officer. One of the neighbors on his North Hollywood residential street told him confidentially that a black-and-white police car had been parked in front of his house several times during the deployment period when the lieutenant was on Watch 3 at Pacific Division, working all night and not getting home until late morning.

Then, a month later, when Lieutenant Lamb was at home on a day off and had occasion to report a raucous juvenile drinking party on his street, the call happened to be assigned to R.T. Dibney and his partner. When the two cops entered Lieutenant Lamb’s house, the lieutenant identified himself as a watch commander at Pacific Division and introduced the two cops to his wife. The family cat, a wary and suspicious Persian, hissed at the partner who was first in the house, arched her back as she always did with strangers, and ran behind the sofa to hide.

But upon hearing R.T. Dibney’s voice saying to Lieutenant Lamb’s voluptuous wife, “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Lamb,” the cat ran from her safe haven directly to R.T. Dibney and purred, rubbed, and curled her body against and around his blue uniform trousers until it looked like he was wearing angora leg warmers.

As the lieutenant gawked, R.T. Dibney said, “What a friendly cat!”

Lieutenant Lamb said, “No, she’s a very unfriendly cat. She hates strangers.”

“I had a tuna sandwich before coming to work and musta spilled a little fish juice on my pants,” R.T. Dibney said as his slender mustache jumped and twitched.

Thus began the suspicion that, though never conclusively proved, put R.T. Dibney on the short list for an administrative transfer, and he was assigned to the desk during part of his last deployment period at North Hollywood Division. At the urging of Lieutenant Edgar Lamb, Internal Affairs agreed to monitor a video camera in the station lobby to determine whether or not R.T. Dibney was making on-duty phone calls to Lieutenant Lamb’s wife.

To set the trap, R.T. Dibney was specifically told by a North Hollywood sergeant that the camera in the lobby was strictly for officer safety because of an incident wherein a deranged person had walked into Rampart Station with a can of gasoline and tried to set the place on fire. And would have, except that he couldn’t strike a match while wearing gloves.

After the sergeant’s rather suspiciously timed and unnecessary remarks about the camera, R.T. Dibney whispered to the other desk officer, “Know what? We’re on reality TV.”

And during that tour of duty at the desk, when nobody was in the North Hollywood lobby but R.T. Dibney and that desk partner-a black veteran P2 named Otis Maxwell-R.T. Dibney suddenly began humming and rocking slowly, his mustache twitching, and then did a weird and spooky dance while staring at the camera lens as Officer Maxwell watched, stupefied.

When R.T. Dibney puckered his lips sensually and pinched his own nipples, Officer Maxwell cried, “What’re you doin’, Dibney? Your fuckin’ stash is jumpin’ like a tap dancer’s nuts.”

“Who am I?” R.T. Dibney said.

“Who are you?” Maxwell sputtered. “You’re a fifty-one-fifty wack job is who you are.”

“This is a charade. You gotta guess the famous movie. Come on, it’s been on TV a hundred times.”

“This is about a movie?” said Maxwell.

“I’ll give you a hint,” R.T. Dibney said. “I kill women and strip off their skin.”

“Boy, we better get you down to the BSS shrink,” said Maxwell. “You’re weirded out. Gone bug shit.”

“Okay, another hint,” Dibney said. “My moniker in the movie is Buffalo Bill. The movie stars Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar.”

Officer Maxwell could only gawk wordlessly when R.T. Dibney once again began the lascivious writhing and lubricious posing, all the time panting at the camera, and he only stopped when Maxwell cried, “ Silence of the Fuckin’ Lambs ! Now step off! You’re freakin’ me!”

Internal Affairs later viewed the eerie video, and an IA investigator informed Lieutenant Edgar Lamb that this officer was not going to be caught so easily and that maybe the lieutenant should seek marriage counseling.

The end of R.T. Dibney’s tour at North Hollywood Division and his administrative transfer finally came when he was ordered to transport to jail a Beverly Hills attorney whom a motor officer had arrested for DUI. The attorney, who’d been berating the motor cop, then directed the tirade against R.T. Dibney the moment the lawyer was put into the backseat of his black-and-white. According to the lawyer’s formal complaint, halfway to the station after the attorney demanded an answer to a legitimate question, “The officer farted at me. Twice.” And since this happened while the LAPD was laboring under the draconian federal consent decree, by which every accusation had to be taken seriously, a personnel complaint was initiated and had to be fully investigated.