Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

She stopped slicing the mango. Repressing a grin, she glanced at him before saying deadpan, “I can’t imagine.”

Nate felt his face burning. He was like a kid around this woman! “Am I lame or what?” he finally said. “Sure, I love the Mercedes, but I just bought a new car last year. You should kick me right outta here.”

Margot brought the wine bottle to the bar counter, topped off his glass, and said with sudden seriousness, “I was glad you called, Nate.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been frightened about something and I was thinking about talking to the police.”

“Frightened of what?”

“Let’s have supper and then we’ll talk,” Margot said.

Gert Von Braun was teamed with Dan Applewhite for the first time after he returned from his days off. The other cops figured that putting Doomsday Dan with someone as explosive as Gert would produce a match made in hell. The surfer cops had bets on how long Gert could listen to Dan talking about the worldwide Muslim calamity on the horizon, or the imminent collapse of the world financial markets, before she threw a choke hold on him. What they didn’t know was how much Dan and Gert’s mutual loathing of Sergeant Treakle would produce a bond that nobody could have predicted.

It began when Sergeant Treakle informed Gert that the accidental discharge of the shotgun was going to result in an official reprimand for certain, the first in her eleven-year career. She was ready for it, of course, but not in the way the information was delivered.

Sergeant Treakle, who rarely bothered to learn any cop’s first name, called her into the sergeants’ room and said, “Von Braun, you will be getting an official reprimand for your carelessness with the shotgun.”

“I figured,” Gert said and prepared to leave.

“Furthermore,” he said, and she paused at the doorway, “it will result in a serious penalty if such a thing should ever happen again.”

Gert’s rosy complexion went white around her mouth and she said, “You think it’s ever gonna happen again, Sergeant?”

“I’m just giving you a word to the wise,” the young sergeant said, looking away nervously. Gert’s collar size was larger than his, and it was rumored that she had embarrassed a male cop at Central Division when he’d boozily arm wrestled her at the Christmas party.

She forced herself to stay calm and said, “Thanks for the words of wisdom.” And again she tried to leave.

But Sergeant Treakle said, “Part of the problem could be your physical condition.”

That stopped her cold. In fact, she took a step toward his desk and said, “What about my physical condition?”

“Your weight,” he said. “It must be hard to move around quickly enough when something unexpected happens. Like your cell phone falling and you trying to grab it, and accidentally hitting the shotgun trigger. Police officers must be ready to think and act quickly. Like athletes, as it were.”

Gert dead-stared Sergeant Treakle for a moment and then said very softly, “I’ve passed every physical since I came on the Job. And I was first in the agility test for women in the academy. And I’ve competed twice in the Police Olympics. Now I have a question for you. Have you ever heard of EEO laws?”

“Equal Employment Opportunity?”

“That’s right, Sergeant,” she said. “It’s all about discrimination in the workplace. And I’m giving you a gift right now by forgetting about this conversation. Because you’re offending me in a very personal way.”

Sergeant Treakle blanched and said, “We’ll talk later. I’ve got some calls to make.”

By the time Gert Von Braun joined Dan Applewhite in the parking lot, the grim set of her jaw told him that it wasn’t the time to tell her that staph infections had stricken several officers in neighboring divisions and an outbreak was imminent.

She drove in silence for five minutes, and when she spoke, she said, “Have you had any personal dealings with Treakle?”

“Once,” Dan Applewhite said. “He told me I had a sour expression when talking to citizens and that my attitude needed improving. He said he was sure I could improve my outlook on life by attending Bible study with him. He’s a born-again and got baptized in a pond somewhere, with people singing on the bank.”

“He told you that?”

Dan Applewhite nodded. “I told him I’m a Unitarian. I could tell he didn’t know what that was.”

“Neither do I,” Gert said, then added, “we had a sergeant like him at Central Station. Things started happening to that guy.”

“What kind of things?”

“Mostly to his car. If he forgot to lock it, he’d find a string tied from his light-bar switch to the door. Or he’d find the plastic cord-cuffs hanging from his axle making noise while he was driving. Or he’d find talcum powder in his air vent. It’d make his uniform look like he was caught in a blizzard.”

“That’s kid stuff,” Dan Applewhite said.

“Once when a truck got jacked that was hauling huge bags of popcorn and candy to a chamber of commerce holiday party, we recovered it and somebody filled the sergeant’s private car with popcorn. I mean from the floor to the roofline. You looked inside his windshield and all you could see was popcorn.”

“That’s kid stuff,” Dan Applewhite repeated.

Gert said, “Then one night somebody paid a skid row derelict ten bucks to do some asphalt skiing. The cop who did it borrowed an old piece of plywood roofing from one of the makeshift lean-tos where the transients sleep. And tied a piece of rope to it and attached the rope to the sergeant’s car while he was inside a diner. And the derelict was promised another ten if he’d hang on for a whole block. He did, but it was pretty gnarly. Sparks were flying and the derelict started yelling and it pretty much all went sideways. People on the street were shocked, and the captain’s phone rang off the hook the next day. IA investigated the night watch for a month but never caught the culprit. All the derelict would say was, the guy who hired him was a cop and all cops look alike when they’re in uniform. The sergeant got ten days off for not looking after his car.”

“Well, that’s not childish,” Dan Applewhite said. “It’s much more mature when you can get an asshole like that a ten-day suspension.”

It was less than a half hour later that Sergeant Treakle himself rolled on a call assigned to 6-X-66. Dan Applewhite groaned when he turned and saw the young supervisor pull up in front of an apartment building in Thai Town that was occupied mostly by Asian immigrants.

“Chickenlips is here to check on us,” he warned Gert, who was knocking at the door.

The caller was a Thai woman who looked too old to have a twelve-year-old daughter but did. The girl was crying when the cops arrived, and the mother was furious. The girl’s auntie, who was a decade younger than the mother, had been trying to calm things. The auntie spoke passable English and translated for the mother.

The trouble had started earlier in the day when the local clinic informed the mother that her twelve-year-old daughter’s bouts of vomiting were the result of an early pregnancy. The mother wanted the culprit found and arrested.

Of course, the cops separated the kid from her mom, Gert walking the child into a tidy bedroom, talking to her gently, saying, “Wipe your eyes, honey. And don’t be afraid.”

The child, who was all cheekbones and kewpie lips, had lived in L.A. since she was eight, and her English was good. She stopped sobbing long enough to say to Gert, “Will I be taken to juvenile hall?”

“You won’t be taken anywhere, sweetie,” Gert said. “All of this can be handled. But we must find out who put the baby in you.”