It made him realize how seldom he had a real date, let alone a sleepover, so he’d been making more of an effort lately. There was a forty-year-old divorced PSR whose honeyed tones over the police radio could trigger an incipient erection. There was an assistant district attorney he’d met at a retirement party for one of the detectives at Robbery-Homicide Division. There was even a court reporter, a Pilates instructor in her spare time, who was forty-six years old but looked ten years younger and had never been married. She’d whipped him into better shape with a diet and as much Pilates as he could stand. His waistband got so loose he couldn’t feel his cell phone vibrating.
So he was in decent condition and still had most of his hair, though it was as gray as pewter now, and he didn’t need glasses, except for reading. He could usually connect with one of the three women when he was lonely and the need arose, but he hadn’t been trying lately. He was more focused on leaving Professional Standards Bureau and getting back to a detective job somewhere to await the promotion to lieutenant. If it came.
At IAG Brant Hinkle had seen complaints obsessively investigated for allegations that would have been subjects of fun and needling at retirement parties back in the days before the Rodney King beating and the Rampart scandal. Back before the federal consent decree.
And they weren’t just coming from citizens; they were coming from other cops. He’d had to oversee one where a patrol sergeant his age looked at a woman officer in a halter bra and low-ride shorts who had just come from working out. Staring at her sweaty belly, the sergeant had sighed. That was it, he’d sighed. The woman officer beefed the sergeant, and that very expensive sigh got him a five-day suspension for workplace harassment.
Then there was the wrestling match at arrest-and-control school, where a male officer was assigned to wrestle with a woman officer in order to learn certain holds. The male cop said aloud to his classmates, “I can’t believe I get paid for this.”
She’d beefed him, and he’d gotten five days also.
Yet another involved a brand-new sergeant who, on his way to his first duty assignment as a sergeant, happened to spot one of the patrol units blow a stop sign on their way to a hot call that the unit had not been assigned. The sergeant arrived at his new post, and immediately he wrote a 1.28 personnel complaint.
Within his first month, that sergeant, a man who wore his new stripes with gusto, called one of the officers on his watch a “dumbbell.” The officer made an official complaint against him. The sergeant got a five-day suspension. The troops cheered.
Under the federal consent decree with the legions of LAPD overseers, the cops were turning on each other and eating their own. It was a different life from the one he’d lived when he’d joined the world-famous LAPD, uncontested leader in big-city law enforcement. In Brant Hinkle’s present world, even IAG investigators were subjected to random urine tests conducted by Scientific Investigation Division.
The IAG investigators who had preceded him said that during Lord Voldemort’s Reign of Terror, they sometimes had six Boards of Rights-the LAPD equivalent of a military court martial-going on at one time, even though there were only five boardrooms. People had to wait in the corridors for a room to clear. It was an assembly line of fear, and it brought about the phenomenon of cops lawyering up with attorneys hired for them by their union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
The more senior investigators told him that at that time, everyone had joked grimly that they expected a cop to walk out of his Board of Rights after losing his career and pension and leap over the wrought-iron railing of the Bradbury Building into the courtyard five stories down.
The Bradbury Building, at 304 South Broadway, was an incongruous place in which to house the dreaded Professional Standards Bureau, with its three hundred sergeants and detectives, including the Internal Affairs Group, all of whom had to handle seven thousand complaints a year, both internally and externally generated against a police force of nine thousand officers. The restored 1893 masterpiece, with its open-cage elevators, marble staircases, and five-story glass roof, was probably the most photographed interior in all of Los Angeles.
Many a film noir classic had been shot inside that Mexican-tile courtyard flooded with natural light. He could easily imagine the ghosts of Robert Mitchum and Bogart exiting any one of the balcony offices in trench coats and fedoras as ferns in planter pots cast ominous shadows across their faces when they lit their inevitable smokes. Brant knew that nobody dared light a cigarette in the Bradbury Building today, this being twenty-first-century Los Angeles, where smoking cigarettes is a PC misdemeanor, if not an actual one.
Brant Hinkle was currently investigating a complaint against a female training officer in a patrol division whose job it had been to bring a checklist every day for a sergeant to sign off. After a year of this bureaucratic widget counting, where half the time she couldn’t find a sergeant, she’d just decided to create one with a fictitious name and fictitious serial number.
But then the “fraud” was discovered, and no check forger had ever been so actively pursued. IAG sent handwriting exemplars downtown to cement the case against the hapless woman whom the brass was determined to fire. But as it turned out, there was a one-year statute on such offenses, and they couldn’t fire her. In fact, they couldn’t do anything except transfer her to a division that might cause her a long drive and make her miserable, this veteran cop who had had an unblemished record but had finally succumbed to the deluge of audits and paperwork.
Brant Hinkle and his team were secretly happy that she’d kept her job. Like Brant, just about all of them were using IA experience as a stepping-stone to promotion and weren’t the rats that street cops imagined them to be.
As Brant Hinkle put it, “We’re just scared little mice stuck in a glue trap.”
Once when they were all bemoaning the avalanche of worthless and demoralizing complaints that the oppressive oversight armies had invited, Brant said to his colleagues, “When I was a kid and Dragnet was one of the biggest hits on TV, Jack Webb’s opening voice-over used to say, ‘This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here… I’m a cop.’ Today all we can say is, ‘This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here… I’m an auditor.’”
Probably the most talked-about investigation handled by Brant Hinkle during these we-investigate-every-complaint years was the one involving a woman who had become obsessed with a certain cop and made an official complaint against him, signed and dated, maintaining, “He stole my ovaries.”
It had to be investigated in full, including with lengthy interviews. There had to be an on-the-record denial by the police officer in question, who said to Brant, “Well, I’m glad IA is taking her complaint seriously. There could be something to this ovary theft. After all, you guys are trying real hard to steal my balls, and you’ve just about done it.”
It was probably at that moment that Brant Hinkle spoke to his boss about a transfer back to a divisional detective squad.
NINE
WATCH 5, THE ten-hour midwatch, from 5:15 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. with an unpaid lunch break (code 7), had about fifty officers assigned to it. Five of them were women, but three of those women were on light duty for various reasons, and there were only two in the field, Budgie and Mag. And what with days off, sick days, and light duty, on a typical weekend night it was difficult for the Oracle to find enough bodies to field more than six or eight cars. So when one of the vice unit’s sergeants asked to borrow both of the midwatch women for a Saturday-night mini-version of the Trick Task Force, he got an argument.
“You’ve got the biggest vice unit in the city,” the Oracle said. “You’ve got half a dozen women. Why don’t you use them?”