Free Hollywood Crows by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

normal olive tone to purple and black. His torso, arms, neck, and even the side of his face, were decorated with colorful body art, much of it gang tatts. A stepladder was tipped over onto the alley floor a few feet from the dangling corpse.
    “Partner!” Gil yelled.
    When the older cop saw the dangling corpse, he said, “Somebody from that apartment building must’ve put in the call.”
    Never having seen a suicide victim before, Gil said, “Whadda we do now?”
    Dan Applewhite said, “Mostly we worry about this dude’s head coming off and rolling down the alley.”
    When the coroner’s crew arrived, a floodlight was set up. One of the body snatchers said he’d go up the ladder to remove the noose if his partner and a cop could lift the corpse to give the rope some slack. By then several residents of the apartment building had their windows open and were gawking down at the macabre spectacle.
    Gil gaped in horror at the feces-caked legs of the dead man, and Dan Applewhite said, “My young pard is big and way stronger than me. He’ll help you.”
    “I can smell him from here!” Gil cried.
    “We’ll wrap a sheet around him when we lift,” the body snatcher said. “We never untie the knots. The coroner wants his knots intact. Hold your breath. It’ll be all right.”
    “Gross!” Gil Ponce murmured, gloving up.
    By the time the stepladder was in place, and the lights and voices in the alley had caused several more illegal immigrants to pop their heads out of windows, D2 Charlie Gilford had arrived, pissed off for having to leave his TV just because some old cruiser did an air dance. One of the talent show contestants, a fat girl, had begun blubbering, and the killer panelists were pouring it on just as the phone rang.
    Dan Applewhite said to the detective, “Just an over-the-hill homie. Which means a middle-aged guy that never filed a tax return.”
    Charlie gazed at the dangling man’s full-torso and full-sleeve colorful gang tatts, then at young Gil Ponce walking disconsolately toward the stepladder as though to his own hanging. Finally, the detective sucked his teeth and smirked. Dan Applewhite noticed and said, “I know what you’re thinking, Charlie, but those people up there can hear you. It’s obvious, so don’t say it!”
    But the night-watch detective was nothing if not obvious. Squinting at pale and queasy Gil Ponce, Compassionate Charlie Gilford yelled, “Hey, kid, find me a fucking stick!
This
is what I call a piñata!”
     
FIVE
     
    F LOTSAM AND JETSAM caught an early-evening call that they felt should have been referred to the CRO the next day. A Guatemalan woman who lived in Little Armenia complained that she couldn’t drive out of her alley early in the mornings because of all the cars parked at an auto body repair business owned by a man who she thought was Armenian. She needed to get downtown to her sweatshop job in the garment district by 7:30 A.M ., but the south end of the alley was often blocked. The north end had apartment buildings on both sides filled with Latino gang members, and everyone was afraid to drive or even walk in that direction.
    “This is a quality-of-life issue,” Flotsam said to the mother of five, whose English was better than most.
    “I do not understand,” she said.
    “We got officers who deal with this kind of thing,” Flotsam said. “They work in the Crow office.”
    “Like the bird?”
    “Well, yeah, same name,” Jetsam said. “See, they warn people and then write citations if they do stuff like blocking alleys in the neighborhood.”
    “I can sympathize,” Flotsam said. “I mean, you can’t even use the alley because of thugs. Your kids have to bob and weave their way to school just to get through yellow tape.”
    She understood the allusion to yellow tape. She’d seen plenty of it strung across crime scenes since migrating to Los Angeles.
    “How do I call to this crow?” she asked.
    “I’ll tell one to call you tomorrow when you get