When she called Nate, Pamela had said that although Nate and Dana had been partners for only a short time, her mother talked of him often, always with affection and a mischievous gleam in her eye. Nate told her he’d be proud to serve, and he was very thankful that it was a phone conversation. He knew he might’ve cracked if he’d been face-to-face with this brave girl who so sounded like her mother.
Nate had spent an agonizing week after that extravagant police funeral complete with a graveside honor guard firing volleys, a bugler for taps, a lone bagpiper on the hillside, a helicopter flyover, and hundreds of cops in class-A uniforms. There was a moment at graveside when a rookie officer in uniform suddenly appeared beside the LAPD chaplain to read a prepared message. Nate didn’t know who she was, but pallbearer Leon Calloway knew. It was Officer Sarah Messinger, limping slightly but almost ready for her return to regular duty. She stood at attention before the microphone, simulating a modulated RTO voice they might hear on their police radios.
“Attention all units,” she began. “This is an end-of-watch broadcast for Police Officer Two Dana Elizabeth Vaughn, last assigned to Hollywood Division patrol.”
And then Sarah Messinger read a short summary of Dana’s career, including her saving the life of Officer Leon Calloway. When Nate saw the big cop’s shoulders tremble and heard a sob come from him, he almost lost it and had to say to himself, Hang on, hang on, hang on!
The “broadcast” concluded with “Officer Vaughn is survived by her daughter, Pamela, and every member of the Los Angeles Police Department grieves with her this day.”
Then Sarah Messinger saluted very slowly and said, “Officer Dana Vaughn, you are end-of-watch.”
Nate spent days asking himself what he could’ve done better that night. This, even though the investigators from Force Investigation Division and the District Attorney’s Office, as well as every officer at the scene, said there was nothing anyone could have done better. Yet he kept tormenting himself by reliving every second of the event, and after he was cleared to return to duty, he used up several of his overtime days to sit at home alone and brood.
He hadn’t been back to duty yet, when a second visit was scheduled for him with Behavioral Science Services in their offices in Chinatown. Like most cops, he distrusted shrinks and psychiatric testimony in general, often bought and paid for in courtroom trials. And like all cops, he ridiculed the MMPI test: “Do you want to be a forest ranger? Do you want to walk in grass naked? Have you ever thought of wearing women’s underwear? Is your stool black and tarry?” He would never have gone to the BSS shrink if not ordered to do so.
The first visit had been pointless. The psychologist was a man in his forties with a rosy, well-fed look who’d had a spot of mustard on his upper lip that Nate would’ve found distracting if he’d been even slightly interested in the questions. Nate was asked about sleeplessness and anxiety and anger, questions always asked of cops who’ve killed someone, and he’d denied experiencing any of it. He’d said his only regret was that he couldn’t have killed that bastard twice.
When the shrink got to the other routine questions about his relationships with parents and siblings, he’d said to the man, “What do my parents have to do with my partner getting hit by a fucking bullet from a Saturday-night special that couldn’t have found that particular mark again if the asshole had stood three feet away in broad daylight with a truck full of ammunition?”
The BSS shrink made notes about unconscious anger that had not been worked through and integrated and recommended this second annoying visit, which was on the day he returned to duty. It turned out that he was scheduled with a woman psychologist. This PhD was younger than Nate, barely thirty he guessed, tall and bony, with hair as straight and dull as straw and glasses with black rectangular frames. Her eggshell-white dress could only be called institutionally nondescript. In an earlier time, she would’ve been wearing Birkenstocks and rimless spectacles with her hair in a snood. She made him think of buttermilk.
The psychologist introduced herself as Marjorie, and she said to Nate, “I understand you’re an actor. What if you were to compose a scene that you wanted to tape and play back to see if it worked as intended? If I asked you to compose and play a scene describing Dana Vaughn, could you do it? Pretend that you’re all alone with your own tape machine and give it a try.”
“I don’t have a tape machine,” Nate said drily. “And cops’re too suspicious to talk to recording devices.”
Marjorie smiled and said, “But you’re an actor, Nate. I’ll lend you my pretend machine. And when you’re finished, you can take the pretend tape home with you.”
The shrink had such an unassuming manner and seemed so easy to ignore that Nate had to restrain himself from telling her that he truly did feel alone in the room. But after a moment of silence while he considered her goofy idea, he was surprised to discover that he wanted to talk about Dana Vaughn to an imaginary tape machine in an empty room. And when he started, the words tumbled out of him.
Nate gazed into space and said, “She had sparkling, golden-brown eyes and a special throaty chuckle that somehow ended with a tinkling sound like a wind chime, and she wasn’t afraid of raising a kid by herself, or of gray hair and laugh lines, or of guys with guns, or of anything else in this shitty world. And she was smarter than me and a better cop, and she called me honey, and it irked me at first, but now I miss it a lot.”
He fell silent then until Marjorie said, “And tell the machine what you regret now that she’s gone.”
That’s when Nate’s eyes welled and he finally said, “That the only time our lips ever touched was when I was trying to breathe life into her, and that I never said ‘honey’ right back at her, because she would’ve chuckled in that special way of hers, and that… that… she died all… all alone out there. Under that… fucking… Hollywood… moon.”
Then he wiped his eyes, stood abruptly, and said, “Thank you, Marjorie. The reading is over, and I don’t think I’d ever give me the role in whatever play you’re directing. I think I’d like to go to the station now. And may I say thank you for the loan of your pretend machine. I was able to talk to it more easily than to any of the humanoids around here.”
The body of Malcolm Rojas was released to his grieving mother after the postmortem, and though his mother would never believe in his guilt, both of the women he’d attacked identified their assailant from photos taken in life and in death.
The body of Jerzy Szarpowicz was cremated at the request of a brother in Arkansas, and the ashes were returned home by FedEx.
Of course, Hollywood Nate and everyone else at the station knew rather soon that Dewey Gleason and Tristan Hawkins would be charged with numerous counts of grand theft, forgery, and other property crimes. But despite three deaths having occurred at the crime scene, including the first-degree murder of a police officer, the District Attorney’s Office had not yet decided how to finally charge the two defendants. Although they were principals in immediate flight after the commission of felonies, their particular felonies did not meet the test for charging murder in the first degree of a peace officer. In fact, since neither defendant had personally used a firearm or other deadly weapon, even a charge of second-degree murder seemed a waste of taxpayer money. It was especially problematic for prosecutors that Ruben Malcolm Rojas was a wanted sexual psychopath and killer who had burst onto the scene and triggered the tragic events. Both defendants claimed that they were only trying to get away from him, not from the police, and fled in panic after Jerzy Szarpowicz, who they had not known was armed, began firing.