When the girl had walked half a block north on the dark and quiet residential street, Harris picked up the rover and talked to his cover team, making the vice cops in charge of his security wish he’d been wired.
After some intense conversation between two teams of vice cops, the senior officer came on the radio and said, “Okay, Harris, we think we know where she’s taking you. Go ahead and walk to the door with her, but try to get the violation outside. And take your gun. If she spots it and you lose the arrest, that’s fine, it’s only a misdemeanor. The second you get your violation, scratch your head. We’ll be on the street, watching you through glasses.”
Whispering into the radio, Harris Triplett said, “What if she won’t talk unless I go inside?”
There was more uncertain conversation among the vice cops, and then the voice came back on and said, “Step inside if you have to, but for no more than one minute. If you don’t get the offer that quick, open the door and walk away. If something goes wrong in there, yell loud, or throw something through the window if you have to. Sixty seconds after you close that door, you better come out, or we’re coming in like the cavalry. Understand?”
Harris Triplett parked the Mercury and watched the young hooker ascending the outside stairway of the two-story apartment building already known to cops at Hollywood Station as “Middle Earth” because, as the vice cops put it, “we can’t always figure out the species that inhabits the place.”
The cover team parked their UC car half a block south, just as 6-X-76 happened to be passing on patrol. When Hollywood Nate Weiss and Dana Vaughn spotted two guys moving fast along the sidewalk, Dana hit them with the spotlight, and one of the guys held up his LAPD badge and waved them to the curb.
“Vice,” Hollywood Nate said and pulled to the curb beside them.
The younger of the two vice cops, a Latino in a cut-off sweatshirt, khakis, and tennis shoes, said, “Stick around till we see what we’ve got here, okay?”
Dana informed Communications that 6-X-76 was code 6, meaning out for investigation, and they followed the vice cops to the apartment building where Harris Triplett had passed through an unsecured walkway.
Because his security team was so hesitant about his entering the apartment, Harris Triplett was more than a little nervous as he climbed the stairs, his Glock tucked under his shirt inside his waistband. The young hooker had opened the door and stood on the outside landing in the wash of light from inside, smiling encouragement to her young trick who was ascending apprehensively.
“Everybody’s nervous about coming in,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s nobody here but you and me and one itsy-bitsy spider that lives under the kitchen sink.”
When he got to the open door and peered inside a neat and tidy little one-bedroom apartment, he said, “What am I going to get for my hundred dollars?”
She smiled bigger and said, “Let’s go inside. I been taught not to talk till we’re relaxed and friendly.”
Harris stepped gingerly inside, ready to go for his gun at the slightest provocation, and he started counting in his head to sixty.
“You’re so nervous, it makes you more cute,” she said. “Anybody ever tell you that?”
“You have no idea,” he said, counting: fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…
“I just feel like kissing you, and I never kiss my dates,” she said.
“I’m not really into kissing,” he said. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine…
“What if I kissed your cock?” she said. “Would you be into that?”
“Well, that’s a different story,” he said. Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three…
She put her hand on his groin and said, “I think I’ll fuck you till you beg me to stop. But first let’s see the hundred dollars, darling.”
“Fifty-two, fifty-three…,” he said aloud now, alarming the girl, especially when he jerked open the door and started scratching his scalp with both hands like he had a head full of lice.
And suddenly they both heard a loud and terrible scream from the apartment next door, and the cover team, who also heard it, along with 6-X-76, came running fast, taking the stairs two at a time.
The hooker yelled, “What’s going on?” and Harris Triplett was half in and half out of the doorway, pointing frantically to the next apartment, where they heard a cry for help.
The older vice cop, a burly white guy with a shaved head and a clamp-on hoop earring, banged on that door and yelled, “Police! Open up!”
They could hear several frantic voices inside, but no one came to the door. The older vice cop drew his pistol, stepped back, and kicked it open.
The four cops rushed inside, and the older vice cop yelled to three terrified men, “Everybody freeze!”
The older vice cop and Hollywood Nate ran along a hallway to the sound of moaning. The master bedroom was well lit and occupied by one naked man with lank gray hair and a gray mustache over a blue upper lip. He lay prone on the king-size bed and moaned, gasping for breath. Alongside the man, half hidden in the sheets, was a bloody object that looked to Nate like a totem of some sort.
“Call an RA,” the vice cop said, and Nate drew the rover from his belt and requested a rescue ambulance.
Nate hurried back down the hallway to the large living room just in time to see Dana Vaughn come out of a bathroom with a bath towel while the Latino vice cop guarded three men, two of them already handcuffed together. The third man, a naked senior citizen with sad, baggy eyes, his body frail and fish-belly white, stood next to the fake fireplace with his hands in the air, sporting a tent-pole erection that would not subside given the number of potency pills he’d ingested with his martinis. His crimson countenance attested to the pills more than to his current embarrassment.
Dana said, “Cover that object, sir.”
When she threw the towel at him, it landed right on his erection, and Nate said, “Damn, partner, it must take a lot of practice to do that.”
Dana figured everybody at Hollywood Station would hear about the towel toss, given Nate’s big mouth.
After advising the guests of their Miranda rights, the Latino vice cop said, “Write some FI’s on these guys till we find out what’s what. I gotta go check on our little operator.”
He went next door, where Harris Triplett had placed the young hooker under arrest and handcuffed her while she cried her eyes out and tried in vain to convince him that she was not a juvenile and not a runaway.
Finally the girl said, “Okay, okay, you’ll find out anyways. My name’s Muriel Travers and I ran away from Canton, Ohio, two months ago.”
“And how old’re you?” the Latino vice cop asked.
“Sixteen,” she said, dabbing at her tears with a tissue. “In four weeks.”
While the vice cop went back next door to inform his partner that they had a juvie to deal with, Harris Triplett became filled with compassion for the weeping teenager, and he said gently, “I’m sorry, Muriel. I know how you must feel, but when you get home to your family, this Hollywood experience will seem like a bad dream. Do you want me to call your folks for you? Is there anything I can do to help you?”
“Yeah,” she said, “you could take out your gun and blow your fucking head off, you narc cocksucker.”
Meanwhile, in the next apartment, Hollywood Nate had himself a look at the decor. There were large framed photos of nude men wrestling and playing volleyball, and the resident was into Barbie dolls and Disney collections, which was not uncommon in Hollywood. On the fake fireplace hearth, a Mickey Mouse stuffed toy was riding a glass penis.
The two middle-aged men sitting quietly on the sofa in the large living room, handcuffed together, kept looking anxiously at the hallway leading to the master bedroom. One was a balding fat guy with Jack Sparrow facial hair, wearing an orange wife beater, board shorts, and flip-flops, and anxiously crushing a blond wig in his hands, apparently part of his beach boy getup for this 1960s party. The other guest was a bit younger than the others, with a fringe of mousy hair, and teeth coated in porcelain veneer as white as a toilet bowl. He was dressed like a cheerleader in a letterman sweater, chinos, and saddle shoes. Both men were blitzed but sobering up from fright.