Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Moon

A white Pathfinder SUV drove south from Sunset toward the apartment building. There were plenty of cars parked on both sides of the residential street, but the Pathfinder was the only moving vehicle at the moment. The SUV slowed at the apartment building, and the driver touched the remote button and the heavy security gate began to rise and roll back. Beside the entrance to the parking garage was the large growth of bougainvillea as well as some azaleas. Crouching behind the flowering plants was Malcolm Rojas.

He had been hiding there for half an hour. It wasn’t a particularly hot summer evening, yet he was burning up. He felt feverish, and as angry as he’d ever been in his life. He’d watched four other cars drive in during the past thirty minutes. One of them was driven by a man, one by a young woman, one by a middle-aged woman who looked Hispanic. None of those had propelled Malcolm Rojas into action. A stab of pain, sizzling and fizzing, began somewhere behind his eyes. He was in a rage.

A forty-seven-year-old Realtor named Sharon Gillespie drove the Pathfinder. She lived with a man who was also in real-estate sales, and she was just coming home from her office. She parked in her usual space, number 33, at the south wall of the parking garage. When she got out and was preparing to lock the SUV, a hand was clamped across her mouth, and another hand, this one holding a box cutter, flashed before her eyes. She dropped her briefcase onto the garage floor but had no chance to scream.

The call to the apartment garage was given twenty-three minutes later to 6-X-76, the shop driven by Dana Vaughn, with Hollywood Nate writing the reports, or, as the cops referred to it, “keeping books.” And 6-X-66, with Sheila Montez driving and Aaron Sloane riding shotgun, arrived right behind them, all of them wanting to get more of a description. The radio call had only given the sketchy description of a male in his twenties, possibly of Middle Eastern descent, and wearing a light blue T-shirt, who’d fled on foot through a fire exit door that accessed the street, a door that was locked on the street side.

The apartment manager, a frightened woman in her sixties, was pacing in front of the building when the two patrol units parked in front. It went without saying that the female officer would question the victim and take the crime report in this kind of case, even though ordinarily that would be the passenger officer’s job. Dana grabbed the reports binder, and Hollywood Nate tagged behind when his partner approached the security gate.

As Dana Vaughn put it, “If there’s a vagina involved, we women get the case.”

“How long ago did the suspect leave here?” Dana asked the apartment manager.

“About fifteen minutes, I think,” the woman said. “She’s up in apartment thirty-three, waiting for you. Sharon Gillespie is her name. The poor woman!”

“Nobody saw a car?” Sheila said, entering through the walk-in security gate and following Dana.

The apartment manager shook her head, saying, “It’s the element that’s taking over. Arabs, Iranians, they’re everywhere around here.”

A fifteen-minute head start in this most traffic-clogged city in North America might as well have been fifteen hours. As far as the cops were concerned, the suspect was probably in a car and long gone.

Dana Vaughn said to Sheila, “How about you and your partner help Nate secure the crime scene. I’ll get a description out as soon as I can.”

Sheila nodded and said to the manager, “Has anybody else touched anything in her vehicle or exited through the fire exit door since it happened?”

The apartment manager shook her head, and Hollywood Nate said, “Good. Take us there and open the car gate. Some crime lab people will be arriving soon. I hope.”

“Like CSI ?” the woman said.

Aaron fought the urge to heave a sigh but only said, “Don’t expect their kind of results, but we’ll do our best.”

Matthew Harwood, a fifty-year-old real-estate broker who was the roommate and lover of Sharon Gillespie, admitted Dana to apartment 33. He’d been crying with her and was wiping his eyes with his fingertips when Dana arrived. Sharon Gillespie was sitting in a kitchen chair, holding a cup of coffee in her trembling hands, her highlighted blonde hair damp, her face washed clean of makeup. A contusion on her left cheekbone was swollen and discolored.

Too late, Dana thought. She’d already bathed. Dana turned to Matthew Harwood and said, “I’ll talk to you later, sir, but do you mind if I talk to Ms. Gillespie alone? You might wait right outside with my partner. He’ll need some information.”

After Matthew Harwood was gone, Dana had a fleeting thought that this woman was not much older than she, and that made it more troubling. Dana said, “I know how… I have an idea how you’re feeling right now, but we’ll need to take you to the hospital to tend to your injuries and to get some evidence swabs. Is your underwear here or down where it happened?”

“He never made me remove my underwear,” Sharon Gillespie said. “It didn’t get that far. And this bruise on my face is my only injury. I’m not going to a hospital. I’m going to bed.”

“Okay, what do you mean, ‘It didn’t get that far’?”

“He held the weapon in front of my eyes. A box knife, like the nine-eleven hijackers used. He pushed me into the backseat of my SUV. He pushed my head down. He said he’d cut my eyes out if I didn’t…”

“Tell me the exact words that he said to you.”

“He said, ‘Suck my cock or I’ll cut your eyes out, you filthy slut.’ ”

“And then what happened?”

“What do you think happened? I did it.”

“I know this is very difficult,” Dana said. “But I have to know details. If we can collect any semen at all, we can get his DNA profile. His genetic fingerprint.”

“I know all that,” Sharon Gillespie said. “I’m not stupid. But he didn’t ejaculate. He didn’t even get hard. He got angry. Furious. He called me all kinds of things. ‘Whore, slut, pig, drunk, bitch.’ I don’t know what else.”

“Drunk?” Dana said, writing in her notebook. “Had you been drinking?”

“No, I’d just come from work.”

“Okay,” Dana said, “so there was no ejaculation?”

“No,” she said. “After a few minutes, he jerked me up by the hair and with that box knife in his fist punched me in the face and jumped out and ran toward the fire exit door.”

“Would you be able to recognize the man if you saw him again?”

“No. He was a Middle Eastern guy in his twenties. Close to six feet tall, wearing a light blue T-shirt and jeans. He had black, curly hair and he looked like the nine-eleven hijackers. With that same kind of box knife.”

“A box cutter,” Dana said. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Sharon Gillespie said, “I’ve seen the guys at Home Depot cutting open boxes with those things.”

“Did he have a Middle Eastern accent?” Dana asked.

“No, he had no accent that I could make out. He didn’t say much. Only those filthy obscenities.”

“About calling you a drunk,” Dana said, “could he be someone who’d seen you at a bar or restaurant when you were having a few drinks? Maybe a busboy or waiter?”

“I go to a lot of restaurants in my business, but I never get drunk,” Sharon Gillespie said. “Now, please go out there and catch that god-damn Arab!” Then she started to weep.

After Dana put out a further description of the suspect to the RTO at Communications Division, she walked down to the parking garage. There she found the lazy night-watch detective “Compassionate Charlie” Gilford, a lanky, middle-aged veteran D2 notorious for his horrible taste in neckties and acerbic comments at crime scenes.