Joseph Wambaugh: Hollywood Moon

Being a single mom, Dana Vaughn had tried for most of her career to keep from working the streets, seeking jobs that would allow her to have evenings at home and weekends off in order to properly raise her daughter. Late in her career, Dana had decided to take the sergeants exams, passed them easily, and was on the sergeants list. Now that her eighteen-year-old daughter, Pamela, was going off to Cal in September, Dana had decided that it was time to get more street experience in a black-and-white. After her promotion, she’d be sent to a patrol division as a supervisor, and she wanted to be ready for the new job.

Dana’s ex-husband, a lawyer at a firm in the city’s tallest downtown office building, at Fifth and Grand, had bought their daughter a new Acura for high school graduation and assured them both that all through her university studies, he’d send $1,500 a month for Pamela, and he’d promised to continue the payments through graduate school if she sought an advanced degree. All of this made Dana despise the philandering bastard a little less than she had during their brief marriage.

An incident that Hollywood Nate found very strange happened the very first night that he worked with Dana Vaughn. They’d received a “prowler there now” call in the Hollywood Hills on a street below the famous Hollywood sign. They were the first and, Nate assumed, the only car to arrive. After checking the property on foot with flashlights, and after interviewing a nervous neighbor who thought she’d heard somebody knock over a trash can, they decided that it was probably a coyote or a raccoon or even a deer, since the hills were full of critters.

When Nate and Dana were returning to their shop, Nate noticed another Crown Vic, parked half a block farther down the unlit street. Silhouetted across the roof was a light bar.

“That doesn’t look like a midwatch unit,” he’d said to Dana Vaughn, trying to peer through the darkness. “Must be somebody from Watch Three.”

“It is,” she said.

“You got infrared eyeballs or what?” Nate said. “How do you know?”

“I know,” she said.

“Why’re they sitting there in the dark like that?”

“That’s how a guardian angel does it,” Dana said, starting the engine and driving back down to the flats, passing the parked black-and-white without a word and without looking its way.

“It’s great working with you,” Nate said. “I just love a mystery.”

Dana Vaughn heaved a sigh and said, “I’m sure you remember the OIS I got involved in when I was working Watch Three.”

“Yeah, everyone knows you smoked a guy that was doing a death grapple with… what’s his name.”

“Leon Calloway is his name,” Dana said. “That’s him in the parked unit, with his partner.”

“You gonna enlighten me or what?” Nate asked.

And then Dana Vaughn said, “Yeah, I guess I’ve gotta.” And she slowly began to tell Hollywood Nate the story of her officer-involved shooting, which had endeared her to even the most hard-core anti-female coppers on Watch 3, one of whom had been Leon Calloway.

Calloway was a hulking, flat-nosed, twenty-five-year P2 with a jutting jaw that pushed into a room ahead of him, and a meticulously shaved head the size of a beach ball. He’d spent his last ten years working the night watch at Hollywood Station. When Dana Vaughn transferred to Hollywood patrol, some of the women officers told her which guys were good to work with and which were not. Calloway was in the latter group. When he occasionally worked with women officers who were in phase three of their probation, he was a mouth-breathing nightmare who scared the hell out of them.

Calloway would usually start the evening by saying to a female rookie, “I hope you can hold your pee or do it in an alley like a man. I don’t like looking for a ladies’ room when I’m doing police work.”

That might be followed by “Velcro crotches would solve the problem. I think I’ll invent police pants with a Velcro crotch for all you… ladies .”

It wouldn’t take long either before he’d look at the young boot, and no matter how feminine she appeared, he’d say, “Are you a lesbian?”

The first time they encountered Latino gang members in Southeast Hollywood, he’d always tell the probationer, “I don’t chase. If they run, you chase. I’ll drive after them. Try to keep up.”

Or he’d say, “Do you carry D batteries in your war bag?”

And when the perplexed female rookie said, “No, sir, why?” Calloway would say, “To throw at any little asshole that disses us by running. I hope you got a good arm, sis.”

And all young boots were warned by the older female officers that if they got an upset stomach from eating greasy tacos fried in lard from a stand on Normandie Avenue-which Calloway liked because it was a “full pop,” meaning it was free to cops-or if they were under the weather for any other reason, he was sure to say, “Oh, you’re not feeling well? Is it that time?”

The young women learned very quickly that they’d chosen a career in what was still a man’s world, and Leon Calloway never let them forget it.

He didn’t try any of this with women cops as senior as Dana Vaughn, but he was a hellish partner for rookie Sarah Messinger, who happened to be riding shotgun with Calloway on the night that Dana Vaughn got into the only officer-involved shooting of her career.

A business dispute had taken place between a streetwalking prostitute on the east Sunset Boulevard track and a customer who happened to be a parolee-at-large. The parolee was a large black man, even bigger than Leon Calloway and, as it turned out, considerably stronger. Although Hollywood had a very small African-American population, it was a nighttime destination for many black men from south L.A. because it was, well, Hollywood. The parolee, whose name was Rupert Moore, was one of those, and he was specifically looking for transsexuals or drag queens, having gotten a taste for them during his twelve-year jolt in Folsom Prison.

The detectives later learned that earlier in the evening, Rupert Moore had been turned away by at least one tranny and two dragons on the Santa Monica Boulevard track. After drinking in a bar on Western Avenue for three hours, Rupert Moore had decided to try east Sunset Boulevard, where he’d met a Latino tranny named Javier Molina, aka Josefina Lamour. A drag queen who was working a short distance farther east saw and heard the encounter and later gave details to homicide detectives.

Apparently Josefina didn’t like the look of Rupert Moore any more than the other trannies and dragons had. Josefina waved him off when he pulled his green Mazda to the curb, slurring his words and saying, “Say, baby, how ’bout you and me go for some sweet time in any motel you want.”

Josefina had never been known to take black tricks and wasn’t about to start with this supersize drunk. “Uh-uh, sorry,” Josefina said.

Rupert Moore had heard too many “uh-uhs” that evening, and he turned off the engine and got out.

Josefina tried walking away fast in sky-high wedges, but Rupert Moore, with his much longer stride, caught up and said, “Sweet stuff, I got forty-five dollars and it’s all for you.”

Josefina kept walking until Rupert Moore grabbed the tranny by the arm and said, “You think you’re too good for this nigger? Is that it, bitch?”

“I’m sorry,” Josefina said, very frightened, looking around for a black-and-white, a vice car, anything! But the headlights kept passing swiftly by on Sunset Boulevard, and nobody seemed to notice or care that a large man was holding a small woman by the arm as she struggled to break free.

The Pakistani owner of a nearby liquor store later said that he heard a scream, and when he ran outside, he saw Josefina Lamour trying to hold her spilling intestines inside her belly as Rupert Moore ran to his car, brandishing a bloody knife. Josefina Lamour was dead when the ambulance arrived eight minutes later.