by Bill Bernico
The 9-1-1 call came in just a few minutes later from the same woman who’d called in the initial complaint. She described the couple and the car they’d left in, providing the license number as well. An APB was gotten out on the couple and the car and within thirty minutes two officers in car one-Lincoln-five were in pursuit. The patrol car kept on the Monte Carlo’s tail no matter what Jerry did to try to lose them. At one point in the chase, the black and white cruiser got close enough to see the occupants in the fleeing car and radioed in their description.
“One-Lincoln-five,” dispatch said. “Use caution when approaching the suspects. They are armed and dangerous. The two officers handling the domestic dispute complaint are both dead.”
“This is one-Lincoln-five,” the officer said, “copy that.”
Shirley rolled her window down, leaned out and fired at the patrol car. One of the shots took off the passenger side view mirror. Patterson stuck his service revolver out the window and returned fire. His shot hit the Monte Carlo’s gas tank. The car left a trail of gas as it fled. Shirley’s second shot pierced the windshield and struck Officer Kenny Patterson in the left shoulder. He grabbed the wound with his right hand and slumped against the door.
“You all right?” his partner Jack Andrews said.
“I’ll be all right,” Patterson said. “Just don’t let them get away.”
In the Monte Carlo, Shirley just realized that in the confusion of the moment that she’s neglected to bring any extra bullets. She’d fired four in the house and two out her car window and the revolver was empty.
“Damn,” Shirley said, tossing the gun on the back seat.
Andrews noticed what Shirley had just done and seized the opportunity to get up alongside the Monte Carlo and yank his wheel hard to the right, sending the Monte Carlo off the street and into a large palm tree on Melrose Avenue. The Monte Carlo’s front end had wrapped itself neatly around the trunk of the palm tree, buckling both doors and trapping the two occupants inside. Jerry’s head flew forward with the impact and hit the steering wheel. It gave him a deep gash in his forehead, but he was still conscious. Shirley’s feet were both pinned to the floor by the buckled metal of the floorboards.
Andrews called in their location and requested an ambulance for his partner. He got out of the patrol car and started to walk toward the Monte Carlo when he saw the gasoline gushing from the ruptured gas tank. It pooled in a puddle under the car and splashed against the front tires. Andrews backed off and returned to the squad car. He had just grabbed his microphone and was about to put a call in to the fire department when a spark from the still hot engine ignited the pool of gas under the Monte Carlo.
In a matter of seconds the entire car was engulfed in flames and Andrews could only stand by helplessly as the two screaming occupants cooked alive in the front seat. On the one hand, he almost started to feel sorry for the two people burning alive when he remembered that they’d just killed two of his fellow officers. Any pity he might have had for them went up in smoke along with the two killers and he just stood there smirking at the instant justice that had been doled out in this case.
I’d been reading the paper in my office when Dean called.
“Clay,” Dean said. “Have you been following the stories on the police shootings yesterday?”
“I’m reading it now,” I said. “Sounds to me like there may be a couple of guys out there with an ax to grind with the police department.”
“That’s a safe bet,” Dean said. “We’ve got six officers dead, two civilians cooked alive in their car and the city’s about to explode if we don’t put a lid on all this violence.”
“Makes me glad I didn’t go into police work,” I said. “The kinds of people I usually deal with aren’t this out of control. I don’t envy your position, Dean.”
“Yeah, well that’s kinda why I called,” Dean said.
“How’s that?” I said.
“I could use another pair of eyes and ears downtown,” Dean said. “We’ve got several teams out in the field, trying to find out what they can about our shooters, but their faces are all known to most of the people they’d meet. It’s hard to get their confidence.”
“And you figured I could blend in with the local lowlifes, is that what you had in mind?” I said.
“Well,” Dean said. “I wasn’t going to put it quite that bluntly, but yeah, that’s what I had in mind. You working on anything now that can’t keep?”
I made an exaggerated motion of flipping through my appointment book and letting Dean hear me doing it. “I guess I could squeeze you in sometime around…”
“Now?” Dean said. “Is that what you were going to say?”
“You read my mind,” I said. “That’s me you hear knocking on your office door.”
“Don’t bother,” Dean said. “I’m not in my office. I figured you could meet me.”
“Where?” I said.
“Well,” Dean said. “When you come out the front door of your building you turn left and walk to the corner. You’ll see a phone booth there. You know the one I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The phone booth on the corner. What about it?”
“Just so I’ll know you know the one I’m talking about,” Dean said, “stick your head out your window and take a look at it. Go ahead, I can wait.”
I grabbed the phone and walked it over to my window, threw up the sash and laid the phone on the sill. I still had the handset up to my ear when I leaned out and looked down and to my left at the phone booth. Dean waved back up at me.
“Yeah,” Dean said, pointing at the booth he was in and talking into the handset. “This phone booth.”
“Funny,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”
I took my time getting downstairs and over to the phone booth. Dean made an exaggerated gesture of looking at his wristwatch, tapping on the crystal, holding it to his ear and tapping on it again. He’d finished his little charade by the time I caught up with him.
“This is the town for it,” I said.
“For what?” Dean said.
“For getting an Oscar,” I said. “Isn’t that what your little pantomime was supposed to accomplish?”
“Okay,” Dean said, “so we both know how to be sarcastic. Shall we call it a draw and get on to the business at hand?”
“Fine,” I said. “What’d you want to see me about?”
“Not here,” Dean said. “How about at the coffee shop?”
I gestured with my upturned palm, bowing slightly at the waist. “Lead the way,” I said.
Dean and I walked into the Grove Coffee Shop half a block away from the phone booth and took a booth at the end of the aisle. Dean sat facing the door and I sat with my back to it. We both ordered coffee and waited as the waitress returned with the pot and poured us each a cup. Before we got a chance to discuss anything I saw Dean looking toward the front door and turned in my seat. Two uniformed police officers came into the shop and sat on stools at the counter. The one closest to us turned in his chair and waved when he saw us. He elbowed his partner, who also turned and waved. They both turned back around and grabbed menus.
“So,” I said, just to start off the conversation, “What did you have in mind for me?”
Dean ripped open a pack of sugar, poured the contents into his coffee cup and stirred thoughtfully. “I thought maybe you could hit a few of the bars downtown and just hang out. See if you can pick up some chatter about the shootings. Someone may feel like bragging.”
“Sounds kinda hit-or-miss to me,” I said. “Suppose I start talking up the shootings, like I was impressed? That may draw someone out.”
“Too dangerous,” Dean said. “It might come off as a bit obvious and we don’t want you becoming a target.”
“We?” I said. “You got a mouse in your pocket?”
“That’s a figurative ‘we’,” Dean said.
I looked up from my coffee to see Dean’s eyes get wide. He was looking over my shoulder at the two offi
cers seated at the counter. I turned around in time to see a tall man, maybe six feet four, walking in holding a large revolver in his right hand. He walked up behind the first officer and leveled the gun at the back of his head and fired. The front of the officer’s head exploded onto the hamburgers cooking on the grill in front of him. The other officer tried to stand and draw his service revolver and took a bullet to the shoulder. He fell to the floor and the large man stood over him, aiming the gun at the officer’s head.
At that moment Dean slid out of the booth and stood, drawing his .38 and firing at the large man. Dean hit him in the side, the bullet going clean through the man. The man turned and fired two rounds in our direction before he fled out the front door.
We both ran up to the fallen officer and I knelt at his side. “Call it in,” Dean said, following the large man out of the coffee shop.
The waitress and the short order cook both ran for the back room when the shooting started. Several other customers in the coffee shop hit the floor and remained motionless, their hands covering their heads.
I grabbed the microphone from the wounded officer’s shoulder and got headquarters. “Officer down, officer down,” I yelled into the microphone. “Grove Coffee Shop, Hollywood and Cahuenga. Send an ambulance.”
“This is dispatch. Identify yourself,” dispatch said.
“My name is Clay Cooper,” I said. “Sergeant Dean Hollister is in foot pursuit of the suspect. Send backup immediately. Suspect is a black male, approximately six feet four, two hundred fifty pounds, short cropped hair and carrying a large caliber handgun, probably a .44 magnum.”
“Copy that, Mr. Cooper,” dispatch said. “Stay there. I have backup on the way.” The microphone went dead.
I placed my hand over the officer’s wound and applied pressure to stop the bleeding. I looked down at the cop. He was just a kid, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. His eyes showed pain and something else—fear. I couldn’t blame him. He probably had less than three months on the street and he has to see his mentor and partner killed in front of his eyes. Even some veterans would find that hard to wrap their minds around.
Six minutes later two black and white squad cars pulled up to the curb, their lights flashing. Two pairs of policemen emerged from the cars and rushed into the coffee shop, their guns all aimed at me. I kept my hand on the fallen cop’s wound and looked up at the cops with the guns.
“My name’s Cooper,” I said. “I called this in. Dean Hollister’s out chasing down the suspect.”
They raised their guns toward the ceiling and I breathed a little easier. A minute later an ambulance screamed up to the curb and two attendants got out and rushed into the coffee shop. One of them knelt next to me and took over applying pressure to the officer’s wound.
He looked at me. “Good job,” he said. “You probably saved this officer’s life.”
I stood up and grabbed a towel off the counter and wiped the blood off my hands. Just then Dean came back into the coffee shop alone, shaking his head.
“I lost him,” he said. “He can’t get far with that stomach wound. We’ve got an APB out on him and teams are scouring the neighborhood. We’ll get him.”
The second attendant did a cursory examination of the first officer but as he suspected at first sight, the officer had been killed instantly. He pulled the officer’s collar back and looked at the cops who’d just arrived. “A lot of good the bulletproof vest did him,” he said.
Dean called into the precinct for a shooting team and a supervisor to meet him on the scene. Everyone did the job they were trained for and when all was said and done, it was no surprise when the supervisor ruled Dean’s actions justifiable. The shooting team agreed.
The ambulance rushed the wounded officer to the hospital. Officers on the scene questioned the waitress, the cook and the customers who’d been lying on the floor. A little better than an hour later, everyone was permitted to leave. Crime scene tape was stretched across the front door before the rest of the policemen left. Dean and I went back to my office, less than a block away.
“This whole town has gone crazy,” Dean finally said when we got back to my office. “Not even the cops are safe. You can imagine how the citizens are feeling right about now.”
“That was some pretty fast thinking,” I said. “And some pretty good shooting, too. You saved that second officer’s life, you know.”
“You did,” Dean said. “Too bad I wasn’t a better shot or that lowlife would be on a slab in Andy’s morgue.” He was referring to the medical examiner, Andy Reynolds.
“They’ll get him,” I said. “There are not too many places he can hide with his kind of heat on him. I mean, who’s gonna take him in?”
“You’d be surprised,” Dean said. “Friends, relatives, other lowlifes, they all hate the cops and any one of them would hide this guy from us.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
Two days later the suspect from the coffee shop shooting was seen loitering near an abandoned car, whose engine was running. The cop on patrol radioed in the license number of the car and found it was stolen. The patrolman got out of his cruiser and ordered the suspect to stop and raise his hands. The suspect refused to obey orders, and instead turned toward the patrolman and raised the gun he was holding. The patrolman promptly shot him dead on the spot.
The suspect was later identified as Maurice Clemson, 37, of North Hollywood. After shooting him dead, police found Clemson had a serious gunshot wound from the coffee shop shootout. The wound had been treated and bandaged.
I read the reports the following day in the newspaper. It told how four other people were arrested for allegedly helping the suspect elude authorities during a massive two-day manhunt. It also said that investigators began arresting more than a half dozen people they say helped Clemson run and hide. On Monday, officers detained Clemson’s sister, who they think treated the suspect’s gunshot wound. They believed that she drove up to North Hollywood, bandaged him and gave him a place to hide overnight.
Authorities said that Clemson had singled out the Hollywood officers and spared employees and other customers at a coffee shop. He then fled, but not before Dean Hollister, a plain-clothes detective, who’d been in the coffee shop at the time of the shooting shot Clemson in the torso. The slain officer was identified as Sgt. Mark Reingold, 39. His partner, Greg Roberts, 22, is expected to make a full recovery. The detective who shot Clemson was not injured, a source said.
Police said they aren’t sure what prompted Clemson to shoot the two officers, who were in uniform and working on paperwork at the coffee shop just two blocks outside of their jurisdiction. The only motive that they had was that Clemson had decided he was going to go kill police officers. They also said that they’d found out that Clemson talked the night before the shooting about killing a couple of cops and watching it later on the news.
Clemson had been released on bail just a week earlier even though a psychological report in October warned that he was dangerous, one report said. Clemson had told psychiatrists he had visualizations of people drinking blood and people eating babies.
Police believe Clemson chose the coffee shop because it was frequented by police officers from various precincts. They did not believe that these specific Hollywood officers were actually targeted other than that they were police officers in that location at the time where Clemson knew he could find police officers.
I laid the paper down in disgust. Who were these psychologist clowns who decided to release Clemson? They should be held responsible for the killings along with Clemson himself. This was just another case of blatant apathy on the part of the system.
I slipped into my coat and headed for the street. I decided to pay Dean a visit. He was in his office when I arrived. He was on the phone but gestured toward the spare chair. I sat and waited for the phone call to end. When it did, Dean hung up and looked at me.
“That was ballistics,” Dean said. “They just finished their reports on the stash of weapon
s we found in the house where officers Wilton and Jessup were killed answering that domestic dispute call.”
“What did they find out?” I said.
“There were eight hand guns, four high-powered rifles with scopes, two shotguns, half a box of hand grenades, fifteen hundred rounds of ammunition and assorted knives,” Dean said. “One of the rifles matched samples taken from the street shootings at Selma and Gower and the other was a perfect match to the officer slayings at Sycamore and DeLongpre. Those two animals who cooked alive in their Monte Carlo were the shooters. We matched prints found on the weapons with their rap sheets. And they both had long, violent histories.”
“If that was the case,” I said, “why were they still out walking the streets free?”
“They were both out on bail,” Dean said. “They were awaiting trial for a totally unrelated offense. Their previous arrest history couldn’t be used in the trial so the jury would never have gotten any of that information. It’s a shitty system, I know, but it’s all we have.”
“Were these two responsible for any of the other cop killings these past few months?” I said.
Dean nodded. “Once ballistics started their testing, samples began pouring in from all over the area and wouldn’t you know it? They all matched, all twenty of them. Those two killers had been busy. Hopefully we can all breathe easier now that they’re dead.”
“So I take it this means you won’t be using me to infiltrate the seedier element downtown,” I said.
“Maybe next time,” Dean said. “By the way, Clay, how’s Matt doing these days?”
“Dad’s slowing down quite a bit lately,” I said. “He’s seventy-six now and I’ve noticed subtle changes in him these last few months.”
“Like what?” Dean said.
“Like when we’re talking,” I said. “Shortly after we have a conversation he’ll ask me about something we’d just discussed. It’s like he can’t remember short term. Ask him about something he did in the forties and he’ll rattle off every last detail, but yesterday is a mystery to him.”
