Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

One of the trannies, the best-dressed person at the meeting, said, “If they’re on the street, it’s public property. Are you jealous?”

“Yeah,” said a woman wearing a lip ring, an eyebrow spike, and a tongue stud. The face jewelry seemed peculiar in that she was seventy-five years old if she was a day. “Just stay in your house, and that way you won’t know there’s people blowing each other in this world.”

“Fucking-A-Bertha!” Henry yelled.

That set off the one they called “Rodney the Racist,” a fiftyish Nazi wannabe, whose shaved skull was decorated with a backward swastika that he’d created with a mirror and Magic Marker.

Rodney raised his hand, and when Tony Silva acknowledged him, he stood and said, “It’s all these goddamn illegal aliens causing the problems.”

A burly senior citizen who resided in Little Armenia and was said to have made a few bucks before alcoholism rotted his brain stood and said, “Immigrants make America great!”

The play Nazi said, “What’re you, an illegal alien?”

“I come to this country legal, you son of bastard!” the Armenian yelled.

“Yeah, through a drainpipe at the Tia-juana border!” a homeless transient yelled back.

“Order, please!” Tony Silva said from the front of the room. “Please, folks! Let’s stay on point and take turns!”

“He is Nazi and he eat shit!” the Armenian yelled.

“Spoken like a goddamn illegal Mexican!” the play Nazi shot back. “Get a green card!”

“I am not Mexican!” the Armenian hollered, pointing to Officer Tony Silva. “He is Mexican! I dare you call Officer Silva filthy names, you pig-shit Nazi.”

Widening his smile to no avail, Tony Silva said, “Actually, my family is from Puerto Rico.”

A stick-thin woman looking slightly Goth with a hedge-clipper do turned and said to Ronnie, “My little love dumpling claims my hemorrhoids look like Puerto Rico. Or is it Cuba?”

Tony Silva tried levity then. Sweat beads popping, he stood and said, “To quote the ex-convict philosopher and celebrity thug Rodney King, can’t we all get along? Can’t we just get-”

He didn’t get a chance to finish. The Armenian geezer made as though to attack the play Nazi but was easily restrained by Bix Ramstead, who’d been sitting quietly in the back row. That officially ended the Wednesday night meeting, and the distracted cops never saw the homeless transients stealing all of the remaining donuts, stuffing them under their grimy layers of clothing.

After locking up, Ronnie and Officer Tony Silva were standing in the shadows of the parking lot when she said to him, “Tony, those people weren’t just sitting there spouting designer slogans and trendy complaints. That was truly a cuckoo’s nest. Some of those people are seriously crazy!”

“Crazier than Kelly’s cat,” Tony Silva responded with his calm professional smile frozen in place.

“Fucking-A-Bertha!” a voice yelled from the darkness.

Meanwhile, some unusual police action was about to take place on Hollywood Boulevard, and Leonard Stilwell was present to witness it. He had placed himself directly in front of the Chinese Theatre because there were more tourists than usual meandering around the theater forecourt on this warm evening, looking at the movie star handprints in cement. If desperation was forcing him to try his hand as a purse pick, this seemed like the place to do it.

Of course, Leonard was streetwise enough to have spotted a few hooks waiting by the entrance to the subway station, young black guys ready to hook up customers to partners holding crack or crystal. The hooks liked the subway for quick retreat back to South L.A., where they resided. When the foot-beat cops or the bike patrol appeared, the hooks would vanish.

Leonard was hoping to see that skinny kid who had lifted the wallet from the tourist’s purse while she was snapping pictures. The kid had moves, and if Leonard spotted him, he was going to offer him $20 just to give Leonard some tips. Leonard smoked half a dozen cigarettes while he watched and waited, feeling his palms dampen whenever he spotted a likely purse dangling from the arm or shoulder of a preoccupied tourist. He figured they were all wise to the jostling gag and would reach for their purses if someone bumped into them. That was the thing about the kid. He didn’t touch her. He just drifted in like a ghost and was gone, leaving the purse hanging open and the wallet missing.

What Leonard failed to see was the start of an incident that did not make the L.A . Times but did rate a column in one of the underground sheets beneath a provocative headline and a story yammering about “warrior cops.” The warrior cop in question was Officer Gert Von Braun, but it all got started by a sharp-eyed rookie.

Probationer Gil Ponce was teamed with Cat Song in 6-X-32 because Dan Applewhite was on days off. Gil was ecstatic to get away from his moody field training officer, and being teamed with someone as cool as Cat Song was definitely a bonus.

When Gil had occasion to work with a P3 or even a P2 whom he didn’t know personally, he’d always address them as “sir” or “ma’am.” He still had a few weeks to go on his probation and he wasn’t going to risk any negative comments from anyone.

When he got to their shop after roll call, she said, “I’m driving, you’re booking, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said to Cat.

“How old’re you?” she asked after they were in their car.

“Twenty-three,” he said. “Almost.”

“I’m thirty-three,” she said. “Almost. But if you call me ‘ma’am,’ I’ll get feeling so matronly I’ll have to kill you and blame it on hormonal hysteria. My name’s Cat.”

“Okay, Cat,” Gil said.

When she wrote his name in the log, she said, “If we need it, can you translate Spanish, Gil?”

“No, sorry. My name’s Hispanic but…”

“No need to apologize,” Cat said, raising a slender hand with manicured nails the same color as her lipstick. “Somebody’s always calling on me to translate Korean and all I can say is kimchi because I grew up eating the stuff.”

Later in the evening Gil Ponce was starting to mentally play How much would I give to trade Dan Applewhite for Cat Song? when they got the call to meet the foot-beat team at Hollywood and Highland.

It wasn’t much. The foot beat had a plain drunk in tow and they needed a team to transport him to jail. He was a transient who’d been begging for change in the Kodak Center and apparently had been very successful.

“He’s annihilated,” the older cop said to Gil, who wasn’t sure if he should glove up or not. He knew that some of the older cops scoffed when the young ones drew the latex gloves, but there had been roll call training about the prevalence of staph, along with some grisly photos of cops who’d picked up horrible lesions on their hands and arms and even their legs.

There was plenty of light from street lamps and headlights, and plenty of neon there on Hollywood Boulevard, but Gil shined his flashlight beam on the guy. He saw that the transient had a long string of snot dangling from one nostril and his cotton trousers were urine soaked. So Gil put on the gloves, glad to see that Cat did the same. Just before he took control of the reeling drunk, the guy started moaning, leaned forward, and vomited.

All four cops leaped back a few paces and Gil said, “He’s chunking all over his shoes! Oh, gross!”

It was this part of police work-the smell of the hanging body leaking feces or a drunk reeking from urine and vomit-that Gil Ponce feared he might never learn to accommodate. The blood and hideous trauma of every kind he could handle, but not the odors. And just as he was about to lead the drunk at arm’s length to their shop, he was saved. He looked at the mob of tourists half a block away on the Walk of Fame and spotted a young guy with shoulder-length dark hair, a red tee, baggy jeans, and flip-flops, walking fast, a brown leather purse tucked under his arm.