Free Hollywood Moon by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

and a young neurosurgeon were standing by the young woman’s bed, all overjoyed.
    The Messingers had been apprised of the many visits by the police officer who’d shot the man that injured their child, and
     when they saw Dana Vaughn, Sarah’s mother embraced her. Sarah was lying propped up on pillows, and she looked at Dana curiously.
    Dana said, “Hello, Sarah. I’m so
very
happy tonight! You’re looking just fine!”
    “Thank you,” Sarah said faintly.
    “Do you know who this is, Sarah?” her mother asked.
    “No,” Sarah said, studying Dana for a moment. “But somehow I know her voice.”

FOUR
    O NE OF THE NEWER COPPERS on the midwatch was forty-two-year-old R.T. Dibney. He’d worked patrol at Southeast, Hollenbeck, Newton Street, Mission,
     and North Hollywood Divisions during his nineteen-year career prior to his transfer to Hollywood Station. Three of those moves
     were “administrative transfers,” which could mean almost anything but generally signaled that the officer hadn’t done (or
     hadn’t been caught doing) anything so serious that it could bring about heavyweight disciplinary action. But it was nevertheless
     an indication that the officer was persona non grata at the former station. It was the police version of “no convictions,”
     and nobody liked finding administrative transfers in a personnel package.
    R.T. Dibney was broad-shouldered and wore his chestnut hair in a kind of retro seventies cut, blow-dried, heavily sprayed,
     and just touching the ears, with sideburns long but not so long that he caught crap from the supervisors about shaving them
     shorter. He had a thin mustache that also was retro, unlike the macho growths that most cops sported, and, like his sideburns,
     it required a bit of L’Oréal to hide the gray. The thing about his mustache was that whenever he was in a tense situation,
     his upper lip twitched and the slender stash started jumping, a dead giveaway that something was amiss. As to his looks, according
     to Dana Vaughn he was “okay-looking in an infomercial-guy-selling-steak-knives sort of way.”
    His most recent transfer, the one from North Hollywood Division, resulted from his possibly having had a relationship with
     the wife of a Pacific Division watch commander, an allegation that could not be proved. The aggrieved watch commander, Lieutenant
     Edgar Lamb, had tried to set elaborate traps to catch his wife and her lover, certain that she was cheating on him with a
     police officer. One of the neighbors on his North Hollywood residential street told him confidentially that a black-and-white
     police car had been parked in front of his house several times during the deployment period when the lieutenant was on Watch
     3 at Pacific Division, working all night and not getting home until late morning.
    Then, a month later, when Lieutenant Lamb was at home on a day off and had occasion to report a raucous juvenile drinking
     party on his street, the call happened to be assigned to R.T. Dibney and his partner. When the two cops entered Lieutenant
     Lamb’s house, the lieutenant identified himself as a watch commander at Pacific Division and introduced the two cops to his
     wife. The family cat, a wary and suspicious Persian, hissed at the partner who was first in the house, arched her back as
     she always did with strangers, and ran behind the sofa to hide.
    But upon hearing R.T. Dibney’s voice saying to Lieutenant Lamb’s voluptuous wife, “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Lamb,” the cat
     ran from her safe haven directly to R.T. Dibney and purred, rubbed, and curled her body against and around his blue uniform
     trousers until it looked like he was wearing angora leg warmers.
    As the lieutenant gawked, R.T. Dibney said, “What a friendly cat!”
    Lieutenant Lamb said, “No, she’s a very unfriendly cat. She hates strangers.”
    “I had a tuna sandwich before coming to work and musta spilled a little fish juice on my pants,” R.T. Dibney said as his