Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

When Gert shined her light on the wall, she said, “That looks like spatter. This might be more than a homeless woman giving birth. We better treat this as a homicide scene. Call the night-watch detective. Tell him we got something that looks like pizza topping without the crust.”

“We stay here?” the Honduran said to Gil Ponce.

Gert Von Braun said, “I’m ten years older than him. Talk to me, why don’t you?”

“Sorry?” the man said, not understanding.

Gert said, “Never mind. Talk to him.” She was used to it with people from male-dominated cultures.

“Go to your apartment,” Gil said. “But a detective will come and speak to you soon. Okay?”

“Okay,” the man said.

Compassionate Charlie got there well before the coroner’s crew. He spoke with Gert and Gil, looked at the spatter and the vast blood loss someone had suffered, and got the Homicide D3 at home, telling her what they’d found. The D3 said she’d phone the detectives who were on call and get back to him.

And that was when the fattest transient any of the cops had ever seen staggered onto the scene. He was a homeless alcoholic who’d been arrested many times on the boulevards where he panhandled tourists. He was a middle-aged white man, perhaps a few years older than Detective Charlie Gilford, but very much larger. He wore a battered fedora, a patched, dandruff-dusted sport coat, and a greasy necktie over a filthy flannel shirt, perhaps his attempt to retain a drop of dignity.

When he lurched unsteadily toward the stairwell, the neck of a wine bottle protruding from his coat pocket, he didn’t even see the cops until Gert Von Braun lit him with the beam from her new flashlight.

Charlie Gilford said, “Jesus! This double-wide juicer must weigh three bills easy.”

“Uh-oh,” the fat man said when he saw them. “Evening, Officers.”

Gil Ponce gloved up and patted him down, removing the wine bottle as the man looked at it wistfully, his breath like sewer gas, facial veins like a nest of pink worms. The fact that his face had color and had not turned lemonade yellow was a testament to his still-functioning liver.

“What’s your name?” Charlie Gilford asked him.

“Livingston G. Kenmore,” the man said, lurching sideways until Gil Ponce steadied him.

“Whadda you know about this?” Charlie Gilford asked.

“About what?”

“The blood. The dead baby.”

“Oh, that.”

The cops looked at one another and back at the drunk. Finally, Charlie Gilford said, “Yeah, that. What happened here?”

“About the blood or the baby?”

“Let’s start with the baby,” Gert said.

“It belongs to Ruthie. It’s dead.”

“We know it’s dead. Who’s Ruthie?”

“She was sleeping here,” he said. “She was big as a house, but she still was doing guys for ten bucks. Ruthie didn’t get too many takers at the end. Her belly was out to here.” He patted his own enormous belly then.

“Where’s Ruthie now?” Charlie asked.

“She went to the homeless shelter two days ago,” the fat man said. “You can find her there now. She wasn’t feeling too good after she had the baby. Poor thing. It was dead before it came out. She bled a lot.”

“Did you help her have the baby?” Gert asked.

“Her friend Sadie did,” he said. “She went to the shelter with Ruthie. You can go there and ask them about it. I tried to stay outta their affairs. They’re businesswomen, if you get my meaning.”

“Are you telling us that all this blood came from Ruthie?” Charlie Gilford said.

“No, some of it came from Ruthie,” the man said, looking at Charlie like he was stupid or something.

“Did some of it come from Sadie?” Charlie asked.

“No,” the fat man said. “Some of it came from me.”

“From you?” Gert said. “Where from you?”

“From my schwanze,” he said. “See, I been having lots of trouble peeing, so I went to the clinic a few weeks ago and had some surgery. A doctor put a catheter clear up my willie with one of those balloons inside my bladder to hold everything in place. But the other night after I drank a couple forties and a quart of port, I got mad at it and ripped it out. Blood squirted everywhere.”

Both Charlie Gilford and Gil Ponce involuntarily uttered painful groans from stabs of sympathy pain. Gil doubled over a bit and Charlie grabbed his own crotch while Gert sneered at the two of them. Gil already knew she thought they were all just a bunch of pussies, so he stood up straight, took a deep breath, and told himself to maintain.

Gert said to the drunk, “You mean your thingie bled that much?”

“You can’t imagine,” the big man said. “I almost called nine-one-one. Wanna see it?”

Both Charlie Gilford and Gil Ponce said, “No!” But Gert Von Braun said, “Yeah, whip it out.”

He did. And while Charlie Gilford and Gil Ponce got busy looking in other directions, Gert shined her beam on the fat man’s penis and said, “Whoa, that’s gnarly! You gotta have a doctor stitch it up. That thing looks like the pork sausage my mom used to make.”

The detective said to Gert and Gil, “How about you two driving Mr. Kenmore here to the shelter and grabbing Ruthie and Sadie. In case they used different names, he can point them out. Treat this like a possible homicide. They coulda killed the baby.”

“Oh, no!” the fat man said. “She was going to adopt it out. She thought she could get maybe two thousand bucks for it if it was white. And sure enough it was. She cried when she saw it was dead. She wouldn’t hurt the baby. It was stillborn. I’m a witness. I put it in the corner and covered it with a box. We wouldn’t throw it in a Dumpster or anything like that. They were gonna come back and take care of the body like responsible citizens.”

“We gotta corroborate everything you told us and we’ll need you to help us do it,” Charlie Gilford said.

That was Gert’s cue, and she headed out to the front street to get their car and drive it around to the parking lot so they didn’t have to walk so far with the fat drunk.

“Just find the two women,” Charlie Gilford said to Gil Ponce. “Bring them to the station and we’ll let the Homicide team decide how they wanna handle all this.”

Gil said, “If the women don’t wanna come, do we place them under arrest?”

“Absolutely,” Charlie Gilford said. “We got a dead baby. This is a crime scene until somebody tells us different.”

“Nobody committed a crime,” the fat man said, reeling again and grabbing the corner of the concrete wall. “Ruthie woulda been a fine mother.”

Charlie Gilford said, “Yeah, well, that’s heartwarming, but I doubt that our Crows will wanna share this tearjerker the next time they meet the folks from the Restore Hollywood project.”

And while Charlie Gilford was dialing the Homicide D3 again to tell her about the new developments, and Gil Ponce was watching the detective, eager to ask more questions about his further duties, nobody was watching Livingston G. Kenmore. He just couldn’t stay upright any longer. He staggered a few steps over to the darkened stairwell and saw a pad of some kind on the third step and sat down on it.

“Holy shit!” Gil Ponce yelled. “Get up! Get up! Get the fuck up!”

It all happened just as the D3 on the other end of the line said to Charlie, “Is there any obvious trauma to the dead baby?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Compassionate Charlie Gilford after turning toward the commotion. “There is now.”

THE CROWS HAD a recurring problem and it had to do with the Nightclub Committee’s complaints about hot dog vendors. The prior evening, the vice unit, working in concert with the Crows and night-watch patrol, initiated Operation Hot Dog.