Hollywood Station (7 page)

"Yes, the man who insulted the Muslim ladies," he said. "They complained and wanted me to throw him out of the store."

Olive was so shaken, she didn't notice that she'd dropped the three twenties on the counter until the manager picked them up and held them up to the light and ran them through his fingers. And Olive panicked. She bolted and ran past shoppers with loaded carts, through the doors to the parking lot, and didn't stop until she was on the sidewalk in front.

When Farley found her walking on the sidewalk and picked her up, she didn't tell him about the guy and the complaint from the Muslim women. She knew it would just make him madder and get him in a terrible mood, so she said that the checkout clerk felt the money and said, "This paper is wrong." And that's why Farley went back to Sam, who told him to try to get good paper by bleaching real money with Easy-Off.

So today they were trying it again but with real money. She wore her cleanest cotton sweater and some low-rise jeans that were too big, even though Farley had shoplifted them from the juniors section at Nordstrom. And she wore tennis shoes for running, in case things went bad again.

"This time it won't go bad," Farley promised Olive while he parked in front of RadioShack, seemingly determined to buy a CD player.

When they were out and standing beside the car, he said, "This time you got real paper from real money, so don't sweat it. And it wasn't easy to get hold of all those five-dollar bills, so don't blow this."

"I don't know if they look quite right," Olive said doubtfully.

"Stop worrying," Farley said. "You remember what Sam told you about the strip and the watermark?"

"Sort of," Olive said.

"The strip on the left side of a five says five, right? But it's small, very hard to see. The president's image on the right-side watermark is bigger but also hard to see. So if they hold the bill up to the light and their eyes start looking left to right or right to left, whadda you do?"

"I run to you."

"No, you don't run to me, goddamnit!" He yelled it, then looked around, but none of the passing shoppers were paying any attention to them. He continued with as much patience as he could muster. "These dumb shits won't even notice that the strip ain't for a twenty-dollar bill and that the watermark has a picture of Lincoln instead of Jackson. They just go through the motions and look, but they don't see. So don't panic."

"Until I'm sure he's onto me. Then I run out to you."

Farley looked at the low, smog-laden sky and thought, Maintain. Just fucking maintain. This woman is dumb as a clump of dog hair. Slowly he said, "You do not run to me. You never run to me. You do not know me. I am a fucking stranger. You just walk fast out of the store and head for the street. I'll pick you up there after I make sure nobody's coming after you."

"Can we do it now, Farley?" Olive said. "Pretty soon I'll have to go to the bathroom."

The store was bustling when they entered. As usual, there were a few street people lurking around the parking lot begging for change.

One of the street people recognized Farley and Olive. In fact, he had their license number written down on a card, saving it for a rainy day, so to speak. Farley and Olive never noticed the old homeless guy who was eyeballing them as they entered. Nor did they see him enter the store and approach a man with a "Manager" tag on his shirt.

The homeless guy whispered something to the manager, who kept his eye on Farley and Olive for the whole ten minutes that they browsed. When Farley walked out of the store, the manager still watched him, until he was sure that Farley wasn't coming back in. Then the manager reentered the store and watched Olive at the checkout counter.

Slick, Olive thought. It's working real slick. The kid at the checkout took the four bogus twenties from Olive's hand and began ringing up the purchase. But then it happened.

"Let me see those bills."

The manager was talking to the kid, not to Olive. She hadn't seen him standing behind her, and she was too startled by his arrival to do anything but freeze.

He held the bills up to the late-afternoon light pouring through the plate glass, and she saw his eyes moving left to right and right to left, and she didn't care if Farley said they're too dumb to match up strips and watermarks and all that Farley Ramsdale goddamn bullshit! Olive knew exactly what to do and did it right at that instant.

Three minutes later Farley picked her up sprinting across the street against a red light, and he was amazed that Olive Oyl could move that fast, given her emaciated condition. A few minutes after that, Trombone Teddy walked into RadioShack and the manager told him that yes, they were crooks and had tried to pass bogus twenties. He handed Teddy several dollars from his pocket and thanked him for the tip. All in all, Teddy thought that his day was beginning quite fortuitously. He wished he could run into those two tweakers more often.

Chapter
FOUR

WONDERING WHY IN the hell she'd volunteered to read her paper when none of them knew what she did for a living, Andi McCrea decided to sit on the corner of the professor's desk just as though she wasn't nervous about criticism and wasn't scared of Professor Anglund, who'd squawked all during the college term about the putative abuse of civil liberties by law enforcement.

With her forty-fifth birthday right around the corner and her oral exam for lieutenant coming up, it had seemed important to be able to tell a promotion board that she had completed her bachelor's degree at last, even making the Dean's List unless Anglund torpedoed her. She hoped to convince the board that this academic achievement at her time of life-combined with twenty-four years of patrol and detective experience-proved that she was an outstanding candidate for lieutenant's bars. Or something like that.

So why hadn't she just gracefully declined when Anglund asked her to read her paper? And why now, nearly at the end of the term, at the end of her college life, had she decided to write a paper that she knew would provoke this professor and reveal to the others that she, a middle-aged classmate old enough to be their momma, was a cop with the LAPD? Unavoidable and honest answer: Andi was sick and tired of kissing ass in this institution of higher learning.

She hadn't agreed with much of what this professor and others like him had said during all the years she'd struggled here, working for the degree she should have gotten two decades ago, balancing police work with the life of a single mom. Now that it was almost over, she was ashamed that she'd sat silently, relishing those A's and A-pluses, pretending to agree with all the crap in this citadel of political correctness that often made her want to gag. She was looking for self-respect at the end of the academic trail.

For this effort, Andi wore the two-hundred-dollar blue blazer she'd bought at Banana instead of the sixty-dollar one she'd bought at the Gap. Under that blazer was a button-down Oxford in eye-matching blue, also from Banana, and no bling except for tiny diamond studs. Black flats completed the ensemble, and since she had had her collar-length bob highlighted on Thursday, she'd figured to look pretty good for this final performance. Until she got the call-out last night: the bloodbath on Cherokee that kept her from her bed and allowed her just enough time to run home, shower and change, and be here in time for what she now feared would be a debacle. She was bushed and a bit nauseated from a caffeine overload, and she'd had to ladle on the pancake under her eyes to even approach a look of perkiness that her classmates naturally exuded.

"The title of my paper is `What's Wrong with the Los Angeles Police Department,'" Andi began, looking out at twenty-three faces too young to know Gumby, fourteen of whom shared her gender, only four of whom shared her race. It was to be expected in a university that prided itself on diversity, with only ten percent of the student population being non-Latino white. She had often wanted to say, "Where's the goddamn diversity for me? I'm the one in the minority." But never had.

She was surprised that Professor Anglund had remained in his chair directly behind her instead of moving to a position where he could see her face. She'd figured he was getting too old to be interested in her ass. Or are they ever?

She began reading aloud: "In December of nineteen ninety-seven, Officer David Mack of the LAPD committed a $722,000 bank robbery just two months before eight pounds of cocaine went missing from an LAPD evidence room, stolen by Officer Rafael Perez of Rampart Division, a friend of David Mack's.

"The arrest of Rafael Perez triggered the Rampart Division police scandal, wherein Perez, after one trial, cut a deal with the district attorney's office to avoid another, and implicated several cops through accusations of false arrests, bad shootings, suspect beatings, and perjury, some of which he had apparently invented to improve his plea bargain status.

"The most egregious incident, which he certainly did not invent, involved Perez himself and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, both of whom in nineteen ninety-six mistakenly shot a young Latino man named Javier Ovando, putting him into a wheelchair for life, then falsely testified that he'd threatened them with a rifle that they themselves had planted beside his critically wounded body in order to cover their actions. Ovando served two years in prison before he was released after Perez confessed."

Andi looked up boldly, then said, "Mack, Perez, and Durden are black. But to understand what came of all this we must first examine the Rodney King incident five years earlier. That was a bizarre event wherein a white sergeant, having shot Mr. King with a Taser gun after a long auto pursuit, then directed the beating of this drunken, drug-addled African American ex-convict. That peculiar sergeant seemed determined to make King cry uncle, when the ring of a dozen cops should have swarmed and handcuffed the drunken thug and been done with it."

She gave another pointed look at her audience and then went on: "That led to the subsequent riot where, according to arrest interviews, most of the rioters had never even heard of Rodney King but thought this was a good chance to act out and do some looting. The riot brought to Los Angeles a commission headed by Warren Christopher, later to become U. S. secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, a commission that determined very quickly and with very little evidence that the LAPD had a significant number of overly aggressive, if not downright brutal, officers who needed reining in. The LAPD's white chief, who, like several others before him, had civil service protection, was soon to retire.

"So the LAPD was placed under the leadership of one, then later a second African American chief. The first, an outsider from the Philadelphia Police Department, became the first LAPD chief in decades to serve without civil service protection at the pleasure of the mayor and city council, a throwback to the days when crooked politicians ran the police force. His contract was soon bought back by city fathers dissatisfied with his performance and his widely publicized junkets to Las Vegas.

"The next black chief, an insider whose entire adult life had been spent with the LAPD, was in charge when the Rampart Division scandal exploded, making the race card difficult for anyone to play. This chief, a micromanager, seemingly obsessive about control and cavalier about officer morale, quickly became the enemy of the police union. He came to be known as Lord Voldemort by street cops who'd read Harry Potter.

"David Mack, Rafael Perez, and Nino Durden went to prison, where Mack claimed to belong to the Piru Bloods street gang. So, we might ask: Were these cops who became gangsters, or gangsters who became cops?"

Scanning their faces, she saw nothing. She dropped her eyes again and read, "By two thousand two, that second black chief, serving at the pleasure of City Hall, hadn't pleased the politicians, the cops, or the local media. He retired but later was elected to the city council. His replacement was another cross-country outsider, a white chief this time, who had been New York City's police commissioner. Along with all the changes in leadership, the police department ended up operating under a `civil rights consent decree,' an agreement between the City of Los Angeles and the United States Department of Justice wherein the LAPD was forced to accept major oversight by DOJ-approved monitors for a period of five years but which has just been extended for three years by a federal judge based on technicalities.

"And thus, the beleaguered rank and file of the formerly proud LAPD, lamenting the unjustified loss of reputation as the most competent and corruption-free, and certainly most famous, big-city police department in the country, finds itself faced with the humiliation of performing under outside overseers. Mandated auditors can simply walk into a police station and, figuratively speaking, ransack desks, turn pockets inside out, threaten careers, and generally make cops afraid to do proactive police work that had always been the coin of the realm with the LAPD during the glory days before Rodney King and the Rampart Division scandal.

"And of course, there is the new police commission, led by the former head of the L. A. Urban League, who uttered the following for the L. A. Times before he took office. Quote: `The LAPD has a long-standing institutionalized culture in which some police officers feel that they have the tacit approval of their leadership . . . to brutalize and even kill African American boys and men.' End quote. This baseless and crudely racist slander is apparently okay with our new Latino mayor, who appointed him claiming to want harmony in the racial cauldron where the police must do their job."