Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Moon

Flotsam spotted her first with his flashlight beam. She was lying in a flower bed behind a short hedge that partially concealed her body.

“Here!” Flotsam yelled. “Call an RA!”

Hollywood Nate leaped the hedge and was down on his knees in the dirt, turning her onto her back, and crying out, “Partner! Partner!”

Flotsam shined his light onto her face and saw her eyes open in slits, and he said, “It’s bad, Nate! It’s bad!”

“No!” Nate shouted in denial, unable to see a bullet wound. He started doing chest compressions through her Kevlar vest, when Jetsam came running toward them, and Flotsam showed a distraught face to his partner and shook his head.

Then Nate stopped the chest compressions and, tilting her head back, raised her chin and placed his mouth over hers. He began breathing into her mouth, his left hand now wet with blood leaking from the bullet wound that severed her spinal cord at the cervix, just above her vest, killing her in seconds. By now other cops were there, lighting the scene with flashlight beams, and both Sheila Montez and Mindy Ling were crying.

Nate began doing the chest compressions again, his left hand slippery with her blood, and he began sobbing and murmuring, “Please don’t, Dana! Please don’t!” And both surfer cops turned way, Flotsam looking up at the Hollywood moon while the yelp of the ambulance siren drew closer and Hollywood Nate begged Dana Vaughn not to die.

BECAUSE HER MOTHER had not been religious, the daughter of Officer Dana Vaughn chose the Hollywood United Methodist Church for the funeral service after the coroner released her body. The Gothic church could be seen from the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, arguably the heart of Hollywood, and had been used in movies, so Pamela thought that her mother would’ve chuckled and approved of her choice.

She told this to Hollywood Nate Weiss during a phone conversation when she asked him to be one of the pallbearers, four of whom would be old friends of hers, male and female officers. Another choice that Pamela made was Leon Calloway, the officer from Watch 3 whose life was seconds from ending one dark night when Dana Vaughn had taken a risky head shot to save him. He fervently thanked Pamela for according him such an honor.

When she called Nate, Pamela had said that although Nate and Dana had been partners for only a short time, her mother talked of him often, always with affection and a mischievous gleam in her eye. Nate told her he’d be proud to serve, and he was very thankful that it was a phone conversation. He knew he might’ve cracked if he’d been face-to-face with this brave girl who so sounded like her mother.

Nate had spent an agonizing week after that extravagant police funeral complete with a graveside honor guard firing volleys, a bugler for taps, a lone bagpiper on the hillside, a helicopter flyover, and hundreds of cops in class-A uniforms. There was a moment at graveside when a rookie officer in uniform suddenly appeared beside the LAPD chaplain to read a prepared message. Nate didn’t know who she was, but pallbearer Leon Calloway knew. It was Officer Sarah Messinger, limping slightly but almost ready for her return to regular duty. She stood at attention before the microphone, simulating a modulated RTO voice they might hear on their police radios.

“Attention all units,” she began. “This is an end-of-watch broadcast for Police Officer Two Dana Elizabeth Vaughn, last assigned to Hollywood Division patrol.”

And then Sarah Messinger read a short summary of Dana’s career, including her saving the life of Officer Leon Calloway. When Nate saw the big cop’s shoulders tremble and heard a sob come from him, he almost lost it and had to say to himself, Hang on, hang on, hang on!

The “broadcast” concluded with “Officer Vaughn is survived by her daughter, Pamela, and every member of the Los Angeles Police Department grieves with her this day.”

Then Sarah Messinger saluted very slowly and said, “Officer Dana Vaughn, you are end-of-watch.”

Nate spent days asking himself what he could’ve done better that night. This, even though the investigators from Force Investigation Division and the District Attorney’s Office, as well as every officer at the scene, said there was nothing anyone could have done better. Yet he kept tormenting himself by reliving every second of the event, and after he was cleared to return to duty, he used up several of his overtime days to sit at home alone and brood.

He hadn’t been back to duty yet, when a second visit was scheduled for him with Behavioral Science Services in their offices in Chinatown. Like most cops, he distrusted shrinks and psychiatric testimony in general, often bought and paid for in courtroom trials. And like all cops, he ridiculed the MMPI test: “Do you want to be a forest ranger? Do you want to walk in grass naked? Have you ever thought of wearing women’s underwear? Is your stool black and tarry?” He would never have gone to the BSS shrink if not ordered to do so.

The first visit had been pointless. The psychologist was a man in his forties with a rosy, well-fed look who’d had a spot of mustard on his upper lip that Nate would’ve found distracting if he’d been even slightly interested in the questions. Nate was asked about sleeplessness and anxiety and anger, questions always asked of cops who’ve killed someone, and he’d denied experiencing any of it. He’d said his only regret was that he couldn’t have killed that bastard twice.

When the shrink got to the other routine questions about his relationships with parents and siblings, he’d said to the man, “What do my parents have to do with my partner getting hit by a fucking bullet from a Saturday-night special that couldn’t have found that particular mark again if the asshole had stood three feet away in broad daylight with a truck full of ammunition?”

The BSS shrink made notes about unconscious anger that had not been worked through and integrated and recommended this second annoying visit, which was on the day he returned to duty. It turned out that he was scheduled with a woman psychologist. This PhD was younger than Nate, barely thirty he guessed, tall and bony, with hair as straight and dull as straw and glasses with black rectangular frames. Her eggshell-white dress could only be called institutionally nondescript. In an earlier time, she would’ve been wearing Birkenstocks and rimless spectacles with her hair in a snood. She made him think of buttermilk.

The psychologist introduced herself as Marjorie, and she said to Nate, “I understand you’re an actor. What if you were to compose a scene that you wanted to tape and play back to see if it worked as intended? If I asked you to compose and play a scene describing Dana Vaughn, could you do it? Pretend that you’re all alone with your own tape machine and give it a try.”

“I don’t have a tape machine,” Nate said drily. “And cops’re too suspicious to talk to recording devices.”

Marjorie smiled and said, “But you’re an actor, Nate. I’ll lend you my pretend machine. And when you’re finished, you can take the pretend tape home with you.”

The shrink had such an unassuming manner and seemed so easy to ignore that Nate had to restrain himself from telling her that he truly did feel alone in the room. But after a moment of silence while he considered her goofy idea, he was surprised to discover that he wanted to talk about Dana Vaughn to an imaginary tape machine in an empty room. And when he started, the words tumbled out of him.

Nate gazed into space and said, “She had sparkling, golden-brown eyes and a special throaty chuckle that somehow ended with a tinkling sound like a wind chime, and she wasn’t afraid of raising a kid by herself, or of gray hair and laugh lines, or of guys with guns, or of anything else in this shitty world. And she was smarter than me and a better cop, and she called me honey, and it irked me at first, but now I miss it a lot.”