Rather than sounding off like the surfer cops, Dana Vaughn raised her hand, and when Sergeant Murillo nodded at her, she said, “I’m not sure about the Middle Eastern part of it. The young guy had dark, curly hair, a dark complexion, and dark eyes, but he had no accent of any kind.”
R.T. Dibney chimed in and said, “That description fits Sanchez, Sarge.” Then he pointed to the former rookie partner of P3 Johnny Lanier and said to the black cop, “Sorry to racially profile your boy, but where was he last night at -”
“Okay, Dibney,” Sergeant Murillo said, while several of the troops sniggered, “save your humorous asides for the next retirement party.”
While Dana Vaughn dead-stared R.T. Dibney for interrupting her, Sergeant Murillo said, “What was the point you wanted to make, Vaughn?”
“Actually, Dibney just made it,” she said. “The description does fit lots of Hispanics as well. My opinion is that the box cutter influenced her. She mentioned the nine-eleven hijackers more than once. So the suspect could be a young guy of Middle Eastern descent or maybe of Hispanic descent, or maybe something else.”
Sergeant Murillo said, “Okay, one thing is certain. Guys like that don’t stop on their own, so give a little extra patrol in the early evening to streets with likely apartment buildings, especially around that area. The citizens in those reporting districts get a little jumpy about people roaming around with cutting instruments.”
When he saw some quizzical looks, he added, “For you people who weren’t around here a few years ago, the location is close to where we had a pair of real bogeyman murders. A former dancer and personal trainer entered the house of a ninety-one-year-old retired screenwriter, someone he’d never seen before, and cut the guy’s head off with a meat cleaver he found in the kitchen.”
Hollywood Nate, ever the cinematic authority, added, “That old man was one of the first screenwriters to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era-not that you dummies know anything about movie history.” He stirred some interest when he added, “He also cowrote Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”
“Yeah?” R.T. Dibney said. “I saw that on TV a hundred times when I was kid. What a great movie. The Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein, they were all in it.”
Sergeant Murillo continued, “Then he carried the old screenwriter’s head and some of his organs over a back fence onto the next street, entered another house, and slashed a sixty-nine-year-old doctor to death. The doctor was making airline reservations at the time, and after he was killed, the nut job picked up the phone and said to the airline employee, ‘Everything’s fine now.’ Then he went to Paramount Studios and tried to get in.”
“He musta been, like, writing a way weird movie in his head and figured Paramount would give him a job,” Flotsam observed.
“Back when the poor old guy wrote about movie monsters, I bet he never thought he’d meet a real one,” Sergeant Murillo said. “It’s something to always keep in mind. There’re real monsters out there.” Then he noticed R.T. Dibney turned sideways in his chair, whispering on his cell phone, no doubt to this week’s bimbo of choice, and he said, “Dibney, the city is paying for both of your ears. Now, let’s go to work.”
The dozen cops that made up the shorthanded midwatch gathered their war bags and headed for the door. And every one of them, even those who’d never known the man, stopped to touch for luck the framed photograph of the late sergeant they called the Oracle, whose frame bore a brass plate that said
THE ORACLE
APPOINTED: FEB 1960
END-OF-WATCH: AUG 2006
SEMPER COP
Many things had changed at LAPD since back in the day when the Oracle was doing street police work. The shooting of a black teenager in a stolen car that nearly ran over an officer introduced a policy of not shooting at moving vehicles. The striking of a combative black suspect with a five-cell flashlight by a Latino officer resulted in the firing of the cop and a massive purchase of little ten-ounce flashlights for the entire Department.
All of this was designed to alter what the L.A. Times had long called the “warrior cop ethos” of the LAPD. Much hand-wringing at City Hall resulted in wholesale policy changes by the police commission, whose African-American president had spent a good deal of his prior life as head of the Urban League, denouncing the LAPD’s proactive policies. This was one reason that the LAPD cops referred to him, and the rest of the Mexican-American mayor’s police commission appointees, as the “anti-police commission.”
Despite all this, some of the cops, especially those of a “frisky disposition,” which is how R.T. Dibney described himself, kept their old five-cell flashlights in their nylon war bags and still used them when there wasn’t a supervisor around. The zipper compartment of the war bag also contained a ticket book, notebook, and a street guide. In the other compartment was a helmet and chemical face mask. The surfer cops had observed R.T. Dibney on several occasions searching alleys and yards, walking behind the beam of the old five-cell flashlight.
The midwatch units, including Mindy Ling and R.T. Dibney, were busy loading up their cars with rover radios as well as PODDs, the handheld devices in which they could enter all sorts of useless data, some of it fictitious, for the auditors and overseers. The kit room also provided them with Tasers, Remington 870 shotguns, and beanbag shotguns. Mindy’s war bag was actually a huge carrier on wheels, like a flight attendant’s.
While all of this was going on, Jetsam was outside the parking lot, scurrying around a growth of curbside planting where he’d observed something interesting.
When he came back inside the lot to his waiting partner, he said, “Got it! Sweeeeet!”
“You are easily amused, dude,” Flotsam said.
“Wanna see it? Or are you scared of these too?”
“Fucking donk,” Flotsam said.
“You are seriously aggro, bro. Chill and enjoy. It’s showtime.”
Jetsam ran over to the black-and-white belonging to 6-X-46 and said, “My partner thinks he might have an idea who the rapist with the box cutter is. He’d like to talk to you.”
Mindy Ling said, “Yeah?” and immediately walked toward Flotsam, who was standing outside his car.
“He said he’d like to share it with both of you,” Jetsam said, so R.T. Dibney shrugged, and followed his partner to the surfers’ black-and-white.
When they were gone, Jetsam quickly opened the door on the passenger side and, reaching under the seat, found R.T. Dibney’s five-cell flashlight tucked away there. He removed the D-cell batteries from the big flashlight, replaced them with what he’d recovered from the planted area, dropped the batteries into the still-open trunk, and then strolled back over to Flotsam, who was just finishing up with his “clue.”
“So anyways,” Flotsam was saying, “I saw this dude hanging beside the parking gate of that other building half a block north of where the deal went down last night. He could be the same guy.”
Mindy Ling said, “You say that was last Tuesday when you saw him?”
“Yeah,” Flotsam said. “Right, partner?”
Jetsam, who had just arrived on cue, said, “Tuesday, yeah.”
“Did you talk to the sex crime detectives at West Bureau?”
“Not yet,” Flotsam said. “Coulda just been a guy trimming the bushes. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s nothing, but he was right on. Light blue T-shirt and all.”
“Okay,” Mindy Ling said, “we’ll be cruising that RD for the next few nights.”
When they were walking back to their shop, R.T. Dibney said, “Some clue. The description fits half the gardeners from here to Malibu. Which is where those two belong, hanging ten and chasing surf bunnies instead of trying to do real police work.”