Hollywood Hills (2 page)

They drove off and headed for the closest In-N-Out Burger, where they each devoured two cheeseburgers and fries. They arrived at work in time for a shower, a shave, an allowable application of hair gel, and a quick change into uniforms, ready for the 5:15 P
. M
. midwatch roll call.

All of the other police officers at Hollywood Station referred to this team of surfer cops as Flotsam and Jetsam.

Chapter
Two.

FOR YEARS, HE had been dubbed "Hollywood Nate" because he carried a Screen Actors Guild card and was forever seeking stardom, as were thousands of Los Angeles bartenders, waiters, parking attendants, receptionists, window washers, dog walkers, and even people with vocations and professions, all nurturing similar hopes and dreams. Hollywood Nate's mother and older sister had always maintained that if only he had not been cast in a couple of TV movies early in his police career--back when Hollywood still made TV movies--the bug might not have bitten him so hard. Lots of cops from Hollywood and other police divisions worked the red carpet events or were hired as off-duty technical advisers on feature movies or TV shows, and that was the end of their emotional involvement with show business. But Nate was different.

Hollywood Nate's handsome hawkish profile and wavy dark hair, now going gray at the temples, along with his penetrating liquid brown eyes and iron-pumping build, had gotten him more than just sleepovers from below-the-line female employees on nearly every production he'd worked. Nate had also been given lots of paying jobs as an or-camera extra, and he'd even gotten those few speaking parts in TV productions, soon gathering enough credit
s t
o get a SAG card, which he proudly kept in his badge wallet beneath his police ID card. The "Hollywood" moniker would be his for the rest of his police days because the LAPD had always loved having a "Hollywood Lou" or a "Hollywood Bill" among its ranks, and since the seventeen-year LAPD veteran "Hollywood Nate" even had a SAG card, that made it better.

The thirty-eight-year-old cop had been somewhat indulged for a few months by his fellow coppers on the midwatch during a time of deep sadness for all of them. It came after Nate's partner, Dana Vaughn, had been shot dead by a thief whom Nate then killed with return fire. Nate had grieved intensely for Dana Vaughn and had needed to surmount overwhelming feelings of survivor guilt and deep regret for never having told her certain intimate things, like how she had touched his heart and what she had meant to him in the short time they had worked together as patrol partners. Now he had recurring dreams of telling her those things, and in the dreams, she never answered him but would smile and chuckle in that special way of hers that always made him think of wind chimes.

It was during that mournful and restless period that Hollywood Nate had been offered an audition that came from working the red carpet on a warm summer night at the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. There were thirty cops there that night, all happily drawing overtime pay. Rudy Ressler, a second-rate director and producer who once had coproduced an Oscar-nominated movie, attended that affair with an up-and-coming pair of young beauties known only to people who spent their lives watching nighttime TV designed for Gen X-ers. Ressler's personal escort that evening was a UCLA theater major skinnier than Victoria Beckham and younger than his own daughter. When the event ended and the Kodak was disgorging the multitudes, Nate had occasion to apply some muscle to the stampeding paparazzi that had crowded in on the foursome as they walked to the director's rented limo.

It wasn't that the aggressive paparazzi were interested in shooting photos of the director, but Brangelina, moving fast, had emerged from the crowd right behind the Ressler foursome. Things got very unruly very quickly, and the frightened UCLA coed began whimpering when an obese paparazzo with a camera hanging from a strap around his neck and a Styrofoam cup in his hand backed against her, mashing her into Ressler's hired limousine.

Nate had stepped in then with pap pressing on all sides and hooked a low elbow very hard into the belly of the fat guy, causing him to let out a w0000, double over, and spew Jamba Juice all over other paparazzi. Nobody in that crush of nighttime fans, including other pap, had seen the surreptitious elbow chop, and even the groaning paparazzo didn't know what had hit him. But Rudy Ressler saw it, as did one of the security aides of the LAPD chief of police. The aide waited by the chief's ominous-looking SUV with its dark-tinted windows.

When the Ressler party got into their limo, the director turned and said to Nate, "Thank you for helping us, Officer. If there's anything I can ever do for you ..." And he handed Nate a business card.

Hollywood Nate said, "You may regret that rash remark, sir." And he took the badge wallet from his pocket to show Rudy Ressler his SAG card, and said, "At the station they call me Hollywood Nate because of this."

"I'll be damned," the director said. He laughed out loud, turning to his companions and saying, "This officer is a SAG member. Only in Hollywood!"

"Have a good evening, sir," Nate said with a hopeful smile. "Call me when you get a chance, Officer. I'm serious," the director replied, looking at Hollywood Nate appraisingly this time. Before the limousine pulled away, Nate heard Rudy Ressler sa
y t
o the driver, "We're dropping Ms. Franchon at her sorority hous
e a
nd then you can take the rest of us to Mrs. Brueger's home in the Hollywood Hills. Do you remember where it is from last time?" "Yes, sir, Mr. Ressler," the driver said.

The limousine drove off, leaving the other cars blowing horns and flashing their high beams at the inevitable traffic jam, and the paparazzi still snapping pictures. Hollywood Nate decided to take a better look at the chief's SUV and at the LAPD security aide standing beside it, who looked familiar. When he got closer, he recognized the wide-bodied, balding, mustachioed Latino cop in the dark three-piece business suit. It was Lorenzo "Snuffy" Salcedo, an old friend and classmate who had served with Nate in 77th Street Division when they were boots fresh out of the police academy, as well as later, when Snuffy had worked patrol at Hollywood Station for two years.

Snuffy had served nine years in the navy before becoming a cop and was ten years older than Nate. But he wasn't showing the effects of his forty-eight years. He had competed in power lifting in the Police Olympics and had a chest like a buffalo. Snuffy had acquired his nickname from his habit of tucking a pinch of Red Man chewing tobacco inside his lower lip and spitting tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup. Some cops mistakenly thought that he was dipping snuff. Nate remembered that their training officers at 77th had threatened to make Snuffy drink the contents of his cup if they caught him, but at Hollywood Station, once he was off probation, he'd kept his lip loaded most of the time. He was always the division champ when it came to chatter and gossip, in a profession where gossip was coin of the realm.

Back then, their late sergeant, whom they'd called the Oracle, was often tasked by the watch commander to deal with Snuffy's droopy 'stash. But the Oracle would simply say to him, "Zapata is dead, Snuffy. Trim the tips off that feather duster next time you're clipping your nails."

Snuffy seldom did and the Oracle didn't really care. Then Nate thought of how much he missed the Oracle, who'd died of a massive heart attack on the Walk of Fame in front of Hollywood Station. The stars in marble and brass on that part of Wilcox Avenue were not there to commemorate movie stars but as memorials to the Hollywood Division coppers who had been killed in the line of duty.

Nate's reminiscing stopped when Snuffy Salcedo left the LAPD chief's SUV at the curb and jogged toward the red carpet parking area, arms outstretched. Under the mustache his toothy grin was glinting arctic white from all the lights on Hollywood Boulevard.

Nate said, "Snuffy Salcedo, I presume?"

Snuffy said, "Hollywood Nate Weiss! Where the fuck you been and how are you? Abrazos,'mano!"

He gave Nate a rib-crushing embrace, and up close Nate saw that bulge under Snuffy's lower lip.

Snuffy said, "I saw you spear that chubby pap, you rascal. Glad to see you still got the chops you learned back in the day with me." Then he did an Elvis impression and sang, "Down in the ghet-to!"

Nate said, "I see you still got that revolting wad of manure inside your lip. Does the big boss let you drive with a cup of tobacco juice in the cup holder?"

"It disappears when Mister shows up," Snuffy said.

Many of the veteran LAPD cops had never accepted this chief of police, the second one to be imported from the East Coast since the Rodney King riots. This chief had come seven years ago, and when the coppers referred to him privately, it was not with "Chief" before his surname but with "Mister," the ultimate invective, meaning that he was just another imported civilian politician and could never be a real LAPD copper.

"So how do you like driving for this one?" Nate asked. "Have you ever had a colonoscopy?" Snuffy said.

"Why've you stayed in Metro all these years, Snuffy?" Nate asked. "Aren't you sick of it yet?"

"The overtime money driving for this one has been keeping me where I am," Snuffy said. "Mister is the first LAPD chief to need security aides everywhere but in his bathtub. You'd think a guy that's been married as many times as he has woulda picked a babe that cooks this time around, but there's no food in their house and they go out every night to eat. On his weekend days off, he even needs us with him. We're a full-service detail with this one. There's five of us security aides and we're all getting richer than Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band."

"I had a feeling his Irish twinkle might mask a gloomy Celtic interior," said Nate.

Snuffy Salcedo said, "In addition to an ego that makes him think the MetLife blimp should have his face on it instead of Snoopy's, I think Mister's got something like OCD. He has a thing about stoplights and he counts them. I might get yelled at if I take a route with too many of them. And he's obsessed with wiping his face with Kleenex. If there was even half the oil coming out of Mister's pores that he thinks there is, we wouldn't need any more imports from Saudi Arabia. Since I don't have a degree in abnormal psychology, I just concentrate on the overtime money when he's like that. By the way, did you get married again?"

"Not a chance," Nate said. "And no kids."

"You were so lucky her casabas never got to producing dairy products. Me, I'll be paying for our kids till Jesus returns."

"Even without kids I know what divorce costs," Nate said, nodding. "Twelve months of eating Hungry-Man nukeable food until I could afford an occasional lamb chop."

"I used to call mine RK," Snuffy said, "because during sex she was about as active as roadkill. Yet she talked me into paying for a boob job for both her and her sister, and she went wild after that. Four new mammaries and I had no access to any of them. I was the boob."

Nate said, "Me, I'm not gonna marry another Jewish woma
n n
o matter what my mother wants. My ex turned scary mean the minute her blood sugar rose with morning orange juice. It took a while after the divorce till she stopped breaking eggs on my car."

"Guys like you and me should mix 'n' match," Snuffy said. "And always marry outside our tribes."

"I'd sure like to see you transfer back to Watch Five at Hollywood Station," Nate said sincerely. "It'd be like old times. We could partner up. I'd even let you keep your spittoon in the cup holder and try not to puke all over myself when you used it."

"What!" Snuffy said incredulously. "You haven't heard?" "Heard?"

"I've finally had enough of this driving gig. I'm transferring back to Hollywood in time for the next deployment period. I thought there'd be notices on the bulletin boards by now, and pictures of me in the roll call room right next to the Oracle's."

"Fantastic!" Nate said. "Wait'll I spread the word. Snuffy Salcedo's turning in his chauffeur's cap and coming home to roost."

"Long overdue," Snuffy said. "I've driven for three chiefs. The only one I liked was the first one that City Hall imported from the East Coast. I wish the mayor hadn't gotten rid of him when he found out the dude wouldn't trade his Las Vegas jaunts for eternal youth. I grew fond of him. Basically he was just a harmless old porch Negro."

Nate was about to ask Snuffy if he'd heard from any of their classmates lately, when the burly Latino cop stopped chattering long enough to turn toward the herd of people emerging onto the red carpet, and said, "Holy shit! He's already out!"

Hollywood Nate turned and saw the chief of police, his wife, and another elegantly dressed couple standing on the curb in front of the Kodak Theatre, and the chief wasn't twinkling. All of the bonhomie that he'd shown to the paparazzi was gone.

Snuffy Salcedo scampered to the SUV, jumped in, and zoome
d t
o the pickup area, where he leaped out and ran around to open the rear door for Mrs. Chief. Nate saw the chief jawing at Snuffy and neither looked very happy.

On the next transfer list, P2 Snuffy Salcedo did return to Hollywood Station, where he could no longer get as rich as the E Street Band.

Chapter
Three.

LEONA BRUEGER HAD always referred to her home located high in the Hollywood Hills, almost to Woodrow Wilson Drive, as a mini-estate. Three residential lots had been bought and cleared of aging houses and tied together to make it the largest parcel in that part of the Hills, with a splendid view almost to the ocean. Her late husband, Sammy Brueger, had made most of his early money by buying into three wholesale meat distributors at a time when people said you couldn't make real money in that business.