Joseph Wambaugh: Hollywood Moon

Six-Adam-Seventy-nine, driven by Leon Calloway with his female rookie as passenger, was the first to spot the Mazda, moments after the call came out. It was his P1 partner’s first pursuit, and it was memorable for the way things ended for all concerned.

With light bar flashing and siren howling, Calloway drove a nine-minute pursuit that made the rookie regret not having taken her partner’s advice about going to the bathroom before leaving the station. The pursuit ended in Rampart Division west of Alvarado, where, after a turn onto a one-way street, Rupert Moore crashed the Mazda into a row of trash cans sitting curbside in front of an apartment house. Two tires blew, and the parolee leaped from the damaged car and ran in panic into the darkness.

Within minutes, sixteen cops from Hollywood and Rampart Divisions were swarming the neighborhood with flashlights, searching yards and stairwells of apartment buildings, scanning fire escapes, and climbing walls and fences to check neighboring yards. But their murder suspect was nowhere to be found.

A voice on the tactical frequency said, “Airship up!” And soon they heard the police helicopter overhead and knew the spotter was trying to use night vision lenses to find their suspect.

Bored with it all, Leon Calloway decided to amuse himself at the expense of young Sarah Messinger. The rookie was just about to go into a dark alley, remove her Sam Browne in the darkness, and probably drop her radio and half her other gear in order to have an urgently needed pee.

The two of them had been searching as a team and were now half a block from the nearest assistance. They had entered a seedy apartment complex from the street side, climbing over a security gate. After searching alcoves and stairwells, they’d emerged in a poorly tended public area that fed onto the alley and was protected by a ten-foot-high wrought-iron fence with razor wire across the top. The gate could be opened from the yard side but was keyed on the alley side, a good thing given the number of Latino gang members who lived in houses and apartments bordering that alley.

When the partners got to the imposing security fence and Sarah was ready to scurry into the alley for the nature call, the big veteran cop backed against the wall of an adjoining garage, paused, and held a vertical finger to his lips, as though he’d heard something. Of course, his young partner froze and listened also, but all she could hear were the hum of traffic, meringue music coming from one of the second-floor apartments, and the faint sound of other cops calling to one another somewhere east in the alley.

Suddenly Leon Calloway began to bark. The sound came from his chest and passed up to his throat, where it took on a gravelly resonance that made Sarah Messinger actually spin around, expecting to face a gangbanger’s pit bull. Leon Calloway’s face looked flushed in the moonlight as he continued to strain and bark.

Then he yelled, “Come out, asshole, or we’ll turn the dog loose. This is your last chance.”

His astonished young partner gaped at this amazing performance until Leon Calloway whispered to her, “For chrissake, boot, tap on the side of the garage!” Then he began barking again.

Sarah Messinger obeyed in confusion by knocking twice on the clapboard with her knuckles.

Leon Calloway stopped barking and whispered urgently, “What the hell’s the matter with you? I said ‘tap.’ Use your baton, and don’t stop till I tell you.” Then he watched her draw her baton and knock on the wood siding: tap-tap-tap-tap .

It seemed to satisfy him and he shouted, “Last chance, dipshit! I’m taking the leash off Rambo right this second, hear me?” After that, he resumed barking.

Sarah Messinger was miserable. She had to pee desperately, and there was a killer on the loose, and she was tapping on the side of a ramshackle garage, and her goofy-ass partner was barking like a crazed Doberman, and finally, she’d had enough.

“Sir,” said Sarah Messinger, “why am I tapping on the side of this garage?”

“Why do you think, dummy?” said Leon Calloway. “It’s our dog wagging its tail!”

The rookie cop never got a chance to respond to this new information, or to Leon Calloway’s canine performance in general, because the instant she stopped tapping and he stopped barking, she heard a scraping above her. And when she looked up, Rupert Moore, who had been lying flat on the garage roof, legs and arms spread as he tried to hang on to the broken composite shingles, lost his grip completely and slid down, tumbling off the roof and landing with all 280 pounds on Sarah Messinger, slamming her skull onto the concrete and partially paralyzing her.

Officer Messinger finally got to release the few hundred cubic centimeters of urine from her bladder while she flopped on the walkway like a fish, and Officer Leon Calloway found himself fighting for his life with a man even bigger and stronger than he was. Rupert Moore had dropped the murder weapon on the walkway next to the flailing young woman who was trying in vain to get her limbs to obey and whose body happened to cover the knife, preventing the killer from grabbing it before he scrambled to his feet.

Then Leon Calloway began shouting for help and trying to draw his Beretta, but Rupert Moore, surging with adrenaline, had the cop’s hand in both of his, and there began what looked to the semiconscious young partner like a macabre death dance. Two big men, one of them shouting for help, the other screaming curses, both clawing at the pistol, lunging forward and jerking backward in a lunatic fox-trot, banging into the wrought-iron gate, falling to their knees, and then crashing down onto the walkway. The killer was on his back and the cop on top of him, the pistol at chest level of both men, whose grunts and raspy breathing sounded to the still-helpless rookie like noises in the hog pen on her grandparents’ farm in Stockton.

Instantly, there were flashlight beams and more shouts. Men were yelling, as was a woman, who had all run down the alley in the direction of Leon Calloway’s cries for help. But they couldn’t help him. They were locked out of the yard by the tall iron barrier and the razor wire.

One male voice hollered, “Run around to the front, Sam! Hurry up!”

Another yelled, “I’ll climb the fence next door! Get some light up there!”

Another screamed to the still-floundering rookie, “Shoot him! Shoot the bastard!”

Then there were more voices screaming at both Leon Calloway and Sarah Messinger: “Shoot! Shoot! Kill the fucker! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”

But Sarah Messinger couldn’t shoot anybody. Her entire focus was on getting her knees under her, and she couldn’t even manage that.

By this time, the three cops still standing outside the fence had guns pointed and were lighting Rupert Moore and Leon Calloway with crisscrossing flashlight beams, but nobody dared take a shot, not with heads bobbing and the big cop on top. Leon Calloway hadn’t enough strength left to do anything but hang on to the gun, with the tip of his index finger jammed between the trigger and the grip to keep it from firing. From one second to the next, Leon Calloway didn’t know if the muzzle was pointed toward Rupert Moore’s face or at his own, but he sensed it was at himself.

Now the helicopter was hovering right above them, lighting the life-or-death struggle with an aerial spotlight, and Sarah Messinger resumed her battle with cerebral contusion and the law of gravity, managing to get to her knees. And when she looked up, there in a literal spotlight, she was uncertain if this was reality or just another Hollywood production. Then she began vomiting all over her uniform shirt while voices were still screaming at her, “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”