Hollywood Station (9 page)

When they got him out of the video room, Mag said, "What? Six-forty-seven-A?" referring to the penal code section for lewd conduct in public.

Benny looked at the guy, at the black elastic straps wound around his wrists, and said, "What were you doing in there, man? Besides displayin' your willie. What're them straps on your wrists all about?"

He was a fiftyish plump, bespectacled white guy with a pouty mouth and a fringe of brown hair. He said, "I'd prefer not to explain at this time."

But when they took him to a glass-windowed holding tank at Hollywood Station, they found out. He gave a short demonstration that caused Benny to exit the scene shortly after the prisoner dropped his pants and unhooked the intricately connected elastic straps that encircled his waist, wound under his crotch from each wrist, and finally threaded through holes in the end of a potato. Which he reached behind and removed from his anal cavity with a magician's flourish and not a little pride of invention.

Performing before five gaping cops who happened by the glass window, the prisoner then demonstrated that if he sat on one buttock and manipulated the straps attached to his wrists, he could adeptly pull the potato halfway out simply by raising his arms, then force it back into its "magic cave" by sitting on it. He looked like he was conducting an orchestra. Arms raised, potato out, then sit. Arms raised, potato out, then sit. And so forth.

"Probably keeping time with the background music on the video," Mag suggested. The guy was ingenious, she had to give him that.

"I ain't handling the evidence," Benny said to Mag. "No way. In fact, I wanna transfer outta this lunatic asylum. I'll work anywhere but Holly-weird!"

It disappointed her. Holly-weird. Why did they all have to say it?

By end-of-watch, Benny would find a gift box tied with a ribbon in front of his locker and a card bearing the name "Officer Brewster." Inside the box was a nice fresh Idaho potato to which someone had attached plastic eyes and lips, along with a handwritten note that said, "Fry me, bake me, mash me. Or bite me, Benny. Love ya.-Mr. Potato Head."

Chapter
FIVE

THERE WAS ALWAYS a male cop at LAPD with "Hollywood" attached to his name, whether or not he worked Hollywood Division. It was usually earned by the cop's outside interest in things cinematic. If he did an occasional job with a TV or movie company as a technical advisor, you could be sure everyone would start calling him "Hollywood Lou" or "Hollywood Bill." Or in the case of aspiring thespian Nate Weiss-who so far had only done some work as an extra on a few TV shows-"Hollywood Nate." After he got bitten by the show business bug, he enrolled at a gym and worked out obsessively. With those brown bedroom eyes and dark, wavy hair just starting to gray at the temples, along with his newly buffed physique, Nate figured he had leading-man potential.

Nathan Weiss was thirty-five years old, a late bloomer as far as show business was concerned. He, along with lots of other patrol officers in the division, had done traffic control and provided security when film companies were shooting around town. The pay was excellent for off-duty cops and the work was easy enough but not as exciting as any of them had hoped. Not when all those hot actresses only popped their heads out of their trailers for a few minutes to block out a scene if the director wasn't satisfied with a stand-in doing it. Then they'd disappear again until it was time to shoot it.

Most of the time, the cops weren't up close for the shooting itself, and even when they were, it quickly became boring. After the master shot, they'd do two-shots of the principals, with close-ups and reverse angles, and the actors had to do it over and over. So most of the cops would quickly get bored and hang around the craft services people, who supplied all the great food for the cast and crew.

Hollywood Nate never got bored with any of it. Besides, there were a lot of hot chicks doing below-the-line work and ordinary grunt work on every shoot. Some of them were interns who dreamed of someday being above-the-line talent: directors, actors, writers, and producers. When Nate had a lot of overtime opportunities, he actually made more money than just about all of those cinematic grunts. And unlike them, Nate did not have to suffer the biggest fear in show business: My Next Job.

Nate loved to display his knowledge of the Business when talking to some little hottie, maybe a gofer running errands for the first assistant director. Nate would say things like "My usual beat is around Beachwood Canyon. That's old Hollywood. A lot of below-the-line people live there."

And it was one of those gofers who had cost Nate Weiss his less than happy home two years back, when his then-wife, Rosie, got suspicious because every time the phone rang one time and stopped, Nate would disappear for a while. Rosie started making date and time notations whenever one ring occurred, and she compared it with his cell phone bills. Sure enough, Nate would call the same two numbers moments after the one-ring calls she noted. Probably the slut had two cell phones or two home numbers, and it would be just like Nate to think two separate numbers would fool Rosie if she got suspicious.

Rosie Weiss bided her time, and one cold winter morning Nate came home from work at dawn telling her he was just all tuckered out from an overtime hunt for a cat burglar in Laurel Canyon. Rosie thought, Sure, an alley cat, no doubt. And she did a little experiment in Nate's car while he slept, and then managed to just go about her business for the rest of the day and that evening.

The next day, when Nate went to work, he sat in the roll-call room listening to the lieutenant droning on about the U. S. Department of Justice consent decree that the LAPD was under and hinting that the cars that were working the Hispanic neighborhoods on the east side should be turning in Field Data Reports on non-Hispanics, even though there were none around.

Cops did what cops were doing from Highland Park to Watts, those who worked African American 'hoods and Latino barrios. LAPD officers were inventing white male suspects and entering them on FDRs that contained no names or birth dates and were untraceable. Therefore, an abundance of white male field interviews could convince outside monitors that the cops were not racial profiling. In one inner-city division, there was a 290 percent increase in non-Hispanic white male nighttime pedestrian stops, even though nobody had ever seen a white guy walking around the 'hood at night. Even with a flat tire, a white guy would keep riding on the rims rather than risk a stop. Cops said that even a black-and-white had to have a sign in the window saying "Driver carries no cash."

This was the federal consent decree's version of "don't ask, don't tell": We won't ask where you got all those white male names on the FDRs if you don't tell us.

Before the watch commander had arrived at roll call, a cop said aloud, "This FDR crap is so labor-intensive it makes embryonic cloning look like paint matching."

Another said, "We should all just become lawyers. They get paid a lot to lie, even if they have to dress up to do it."

So it seemed that the Department of Justice, instead of promoting police integrity, had done just the opposite, by making liars out of LAPD street cops who had to live under the consent decree for five years and then had to swallow the demoralizing three-year extension.

During that ponderous roll call, Hollywood Nate was dozing through the consent decree sermon and got surprised when the Oracle popped his head in the door, saying, "Sorry, Lieutenant, can I borrow Weiss for a minute?"

The Oracle didn't say anything until they were alone on the stairway landing, when he turned to Nate and said, "Your wife is downstairs demanding to speak to the lieutenant. She wants a one-twenty-eight made on you."

Nate was mystified. "A personnel complaint? Rosie?"

"Do you have any kids?"

"Not yet. We've decided to wait."

"Do you want to save your marriage?"

"Sure. It's my first, so I still give a shit. And her old man's got bucks. What's happened?"

"Then cop out and beg for mercy. Don't try weasel words, it won't work."

"What's going on, Sarge?"

Hollywood Nate got to see for himself what was going on when he, Rosie, and the Oracle stood in the south parking lot beside Nate's SUV on that damp and gloomy winter night. Still baffled, Nate handed his keys to the Oracle, who handed them to Rosie, who jumped into the SUV, started it up, and turned on the defroster. As the windows were fogging prior to clearing, she stepped out and pointed triumphantly at what her sleuthing had uncovered. There they were, in the mist on the windshield in front of the passenger seat: oily imprints made by bare toes.

"Wears about a size five," Rosie said. Then she turned to the Oracle and said, "Nate always did like little spinners. I'm way too zoftig for him."

When Nate started to speak, the Oracle said, "Shut up, Nate." Then he turned to Rosie and said, "Mrs. Weiss . . ."

"Rosie. You can call me Rosie, Sergeant."

"Rosie. There's no need to drag the lieutenant into this. I'm sure that you and Nate -"

Interrupting, she said, "I called my dad's lawyer today while this son of a bitch was sleeping it off. It's over. Way over. I'm moving everything out of the apartment on Saturday."

"Rosie," the Oracle said. "I'm positive that Nate will be very fair when he talks with your lawyer. Your idea of making an official complaint for conduct unbecoming an officer would not be helpful to you. I imagine you want him working and earning money rather than suspended from duty, where he and you would lose money, don't you?"

She looked at the Oracle and at her husband, who was pale and silent, and she smiled when she saw beads of sweat on Nate's upper lip. The asshole was sweating on a damp winter night. Rosie Weiss liked that.

"Okay, Sergeant," she said. "But I don't want this asshole to set foot in the apartment until I'm all moved out."

"He'll sleep in the cot room here at the station," the Oracle said. "And I'll detail an officer to make an appointment with you to pick up whatever Nate needs to tide him over until you're out of the apartment."

When Rosie Weiss left them in the parking lot that evening, she had one more piece of information to impart to the Oracle. She said, "Anyway, since he got all those muscles in the gym, the only time he can ever get an erection is when he's looking in the mirror."

After she got in her car and drove away, Nate finally spoke. He said, "A cop should never marry a Jewish woman, Sarge. Take it from me, she's a terrorist. It's code red from the minute the alarm goes off in the morning."

"She's got good detective instincts," the Oracle said. "We could use her on the Job."

Now, his wife was married to a pediatrician, no longer entitled to alimony, and Nate Weiss was a contented member of the midwatch, taking TV extra work as much as he could, hoping to catch a break that could get him into the Screen Actors Guild. He was sick of saying, "Well, no, I don't have a SAG card but . . ."

Hollywood Nate had hoped that 2006 would be his breakthrough year, but with summer almost here, he wasn't so sure. His reverie ended when he got a painfully vigorous handshake from his new partner, twenty-two-year-old Wesley Drubb, youngest son of a partner in Lawford and Drubb real-estate developers, who had enormous holdings in West Hollywood and Century City. Nate got assigned with the former frat boy who'd dropped out of USC in his senior year "to find himself" and impulsively joined the LAPD, much to the despair of his parents. Wesley had just finished his eighteen months of probation and transferred to Hollywood from West Valley Division.

Nate thought he'd better make the best of this opportunity. It wasn't often he got to partner with someone rich. Maybe he could cement a friendship and become the kid's big brother on the Job, maybe persuade him to chat up his old man, Franklin Drubb, about investing in a little indie film that Nate had been trying to put together with another failed actor named Harley Wilkes.

The cops often called their patrol car their "shop" because of the shop number painted on the front doors and roof. This so that each car could be easily identified by an LAPD helicopter, always called an "airship." When they were settled in their shop and out cruising the streets that Nate liked to cruise no matter which beat he was assigned, the eager kid riding shotgun swiveled his head to the right and said, "That looks like a fifty-one-fifty," referring to the Welfare and Institutions Code section that defines a mental case.

The guy was a mental case, all right, one of the boulevard's homeless, the kind that shuffle along Hollywood Boulevard and wander into the many souvenir shops and adult bookstores and tattoo parlors, bothering the vendors at the sidewalk newsstands, refusing to leave until somebody gives them some change or throws them out or calls the cops.

He was known to the police as "Untouchable Al" because he roamed freely and often got warned by cops but was never arrested. Al had a get-out-of-jail-free card that was better than Trombone Teddy's any old day. This evening he was in a cranky mood, yelling and scaring tourists, causing them to step into the street rather than pass close to him there on the Walk of Fame.

Nate said, "That's Al. He's untouchable. Just tell him to get off the street. He will unless he's feeling extra grumpy."

Hollywood Nate pulled the black-and-white around the corner onto Las Palmas Avenue, and Wesley Drubb, wanting to show his older partner that he had moxie, jumped out, confronted Al, and said, "Get off the street. Go on, now, you're disturbing the peace."