Hollywood Station

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.”

Andi looked again at the blank stares as she prepared for her parting shot and said, “Finally, all of the layers of oversight, based on the crimes of a few cops-costing millions annually, encouraged by cynical politicians and biased reporting and fueled by political correctness gone mad-have at last answered the ancient question posed by the Roman poet Juvenal in the first century A.D. He too was worried about law enforcement abuse, for he asked, ‘But who would guard the guards themselves?’ At the Los Angeles Police Department, more than nine thousand officers have learned the answer: Everybody.”

With that, Andi turned to glance at Anglund, who was looking at papers in his lap as though he hadn’t heard a word. She said to the class, “Any questions?”

Nobody answered for a long moment, and then one of the East Asians, a petite young woman about the age of Andi’s son, said, “Are you a cop or something?”

“I am a cop, yes,” Andi said. “With the LAPD, and have been since I was your age. Any other questions?”

Students were looking from the wall clock to the professor and back to Andi. Finally, Anglund said, “Thank you, Ms. McCrea. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your diligence and attention. And now that the spring quarter is so close to officially concluding, why don’t you all just get the hell out of here.”

That brought smiles and chuckles and some applause for the professor. Andi was about to leave, when Anglund said, “A moment, Ms. McCrea?”

He waited until the other students were gone, then stood, hands in the pockets of his cords, cotton shirt so wrinkled that Andi thought he should either send it out or get his wife an ironing board. His gray hair was wispy, and his pink scalp showed through, flaked with dandruff. He was a man of seventy if he was a day.

Anglund said, “Why did you keep your other life from us until the end?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I only like to don the bat suit when night falls on Gotham City.”

“How long have you been attending classes here?”

“Off and on, eight years,” she said.

“Have you kept your occupation a secret from everybody in all that time?”

“Yep,” she said. “I’m just a little secret keeper.”

“First of all, Ms. McCrea… is it Officer McCrea?”

“Detective,” she said.

“First of all, your paper contained opinions and assertions that you may or may not be able to back up and not a few biases of your own, but I don’t think you’re a racist cop.”

“Well, thank you for that. That’s mighty white of you, if that’s an acceptable phrase.” Thinking, There goes the Dean’s List. She’d be lucky to get a C-plus out of him now.

Anglund smiled and said, “Sorry. That was very condescending of me.”

“I bored them to death,” Andi said.

“The fact is, they don’t really give a damn about civil liberties or police malfeasance or law enforcement in general,” Anglund said. “More than half of today’s university students cannot even understand the positions put forth in newspaper editorials. They care about iPods and cell phones and celluloid fantasy. The majority of this generation of students don’t read anything outside of class but magazines and an occasional graphic novel, and barely contemplate anything more serious than video downloading. So, yes, I think you failed to provoke them as you’d obviously intended to do.”

“I guess my son isn’t so different after all, then,” she said, seeing her first C-plus morphing into a C-minus.

“Is he a college student?”

“A soldier,” she said. “Insisted on joining because two of his friends did.”

Anglund studied her for a few seconds and said, “Iraq?”

“Afghanistan.”

Anglund said, “Despite the flaws in your thesis, I was impressed by the passion in it. You’re part of something larger than yourself, and you feel real pain that uninformed outsiders are harming the thing you love. I don’t see much of that passion in classrooms anymore. I wish you’d revealed your other life to us earlier.”

Now she was confused, fatigued and confused, and her nausea was increasing. “I wouldn’t have done it today, Professor,” Andi said, “except my forty-fifth birthday is coming up in two weeks and I’m into a midlife crisis so real it’s like living with a big sister who just wants to dress up in thigh-highs and a miniskirt and dance the funky chicken. No telling what kind of zany thing I’ll do these days. And last night I got called out on a murder-suicide that looked like O.J. Simpson was back in town, and I’m exhausted. But I’m not half as tired or stressed as two young cops who had to wallow in a bloodbath doing a job that nobody should ever have to do. And when it was all over, one of them asked me back at Hollywood Station if I had some moisturizing cream. Because he surfed so much he thought his neck and eyelids looked like they belonged on a Galapagos turtle. I felt like just hugging him.”

Then the catch in her voice made her pause again, and she said, “I’m sorry. I’m babbling. I’ve gotta get some sleep. Good-bye, Professor.”

As she gathered her purse and books, he held up his class folder, opened it, and pointed to her name, along with the grade he’d given her presentation when he’d sat there behind her, when she’d thought he wasn’t listening. It was an A-plus.

“Good-bye, Detective McCrea,” he said. “Take care in Gotham City.”

Andi McCrea was driving back to Hollywood Division (she’d never get used to calling it Hollywood Area, as it was supposed to be called these days but which most of the street cops ignored) to assure herself that all the reports from last night’s murder-suicide were complete. She was a D2 in one of the three homicide teams, but they were so shorthanded at Hollywood Station that she had nobody else around today who could help with the reports from her current cases, not even the one that had solved itself like the murder-suicide of the night before.

She decided to send an FTD bouquet to Professor Anglund for the A-plus that guaranteed her the Dean’s List. That old socialist was okay after all, she thought, scribbling a note saying “flowers” after she wheeled into the Hollywood Station south parking lot in her Volvo sedan.

The station parking lots were more or less adequate for the time being, considering how many patrol units, plain-wrap detectives units, and private cars had to park there. If they were ever brought up to strength, they’d have to build a parking structure, but she knew that it wasn’t likely that the LAPD would ever be brought up to strength. And when would the city pop for money to build a parking structure when street cops citywide were complaining about the shortage of equipment like digital cameras and batteries for rifle lights, shotgun lights, and even flashlights. They never seemed to have pry bars or hooks or rams when it was time to take down a door. They never seemed to have anything when it was needed.

Andi McCrea was bone-weary and not just because she had not slept since yesterday morning. Hollywood Division’s workload called for fifty detectives, but half that many were doing the job, or trying to do it, and these days she was always mentally tired. As she trudged toward the back door of Hollywood Station, she couldn’t find her ring of keys buried in the clutter of her purse, gave up, and walked to the front door, on Wilcox Avenue.

The building itself was a typical municipal shoe box with a brick facade the sole enhancement, obsolete by the time it was finished. Four hundred souls were crammed inside a rabbit warren of tiny spaces. Even one of the detectives’ interview rooms had to be used for storage.

By habit, she walked around the stars on the pavement in front of the station without stepping on them. There was nothing like them at other LAPD stations, and they were exactly like the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame except that the names embedded in the marble were not the names of movie stars. There were seven names, all belonging to officers from Hollywood Station who had been killed on duty. Among them were Robert J. Coté, shot and killed by a robber, Russell L. Kuster, gunned down in a Hungarian restaurant by a deranged customer, Charles D. Heim, shot to death during a drug arrest, and Ian J. Campbell, kidnapped by robbers and murdered in an onion field.

The wall plaque said “To Those Who Stood Their Ground When in Harm’s Way.”

Hollywood Station was also different from any other in the LAPD by virtue of the interior wall hangings. There were one-sheet movie posters hanging in various places in the station, some but not all from cop movies based in Los Angeles. A police station decorated with movie posters let people know exactly where they were.

Andi was passed in the corridor leading to the detective squad room by two young patrol officers on their way out. Although there were several older cops working patrol, Hollywood Division officers tended to be young, as though the brass downtown considered Hollywood a training area, and perhaps they did.

The short Japanese American female officer she knew as Mag something said hi to Andi.

The tall black male officer whose name she didn’t know said more formally, “Afternoon, Detective.”

Six-X-Sixty-six had been asked by the vice sergeant to pop into a few of the adult bookstores to make sure there weren’t lewd-conduct violations taking place in the makeshift video rooms. A pair of Hollywood Station blue suits making unscheduled visits went a long way toward convincing the termites to clean up their act, the vice sergeant had told them. Mag Takara, an athletic twenty-six-year-old, and the shortest officer at Hollywood Station, was partnered in 6-X-66 with Benny Brewster, age twenty-five, from southeast L.A., who was one of Hollywood’s tallest officers.

One morning last month, the Oracle had spotted a clutch of male cops in the parking lot after roll call convulsing in giggles at Mag Takara, who, after putting her overloaded war bag into the trunk, couldn’t close the lid because it was sprung and yawned open out of reach.

Mag’s war bag was on wheels, jammed with helmet and gear. She had also been carrying a Taser, an extra canister of pepper spray, a beanbag shotgun, a pod (handheld MDT computer), her jacket, a bag of reports, a flashlight, a side-handle baton as well as a retractable steel baton, and the real we-mean-business shotgun loaded with double-aught buck that would be locked in the rack inside the car. She was so short she had to go around to the rear window of the patrol car and close the trunk by walking her hands along the length of the deck lid until it clicked shut.

The Oracle watched her for a moment and heard the loudest of the cops tossing out lines to the others like, “It’s a little nippy, wouldn’t you say? A teeny little nippy.”

The Oracle said to the jokester, “Bonelli, her great-grandparents ran a hotel on First Street in little Tokyo when yours were still eating garlic in Palermo. So spare us the ethnic wisecracks, okay?”

Bonelli said, “Sorry, Sarge.”

While the cops were all walking to their patrol cars, the Oracle said, “I gotta balance that kid out.” And he’d assigned Benny Brewster to partner with Mag for the deployment period to see how they got along. And so far, so good, except that Benny Brewster had a cultural hangup about adult bookstores when it came to gay porn.

“Those sissies creep me out,” he said to Mag. “Some of the gangstas in Compton would cap their ass, they saw the stuff we see all over Hollywood” is how he explained it.

But Mag told him she didn’t give a shit if the fuck flicks were gay or straight, it was all revolting. One of her former cop boyfriends had tried to light her fire a couple of times by showing her porn videos in his apartment after dinner, but it seemed to her that act two of all those stories consisted of jizz shots in a girl’s face, and how that could excite anybody was way beyond her.

Despite his hangup about gay men, Benny seemed to her like a dedicated officer, never badge-heavy, never manhandling anybody who didn’t need it, whether gay or straight, so she had no complaints. And it was very comforting for Mag when Benny was standing behind her, eye-fucking some of those maggots who liked to challenge little cops, especially little female cops.

They met Mr. Potato Head in the first porn shop they checked out. It was on Western Avenue, a dingier place than most, with a few peep rooms where guys could look at video and jerk off with the door locked, but this one had a makeshift theater, a larger room with three rows of plastic chairs posing as theater seats, and a large screen along with a quality projector hanging from the ceiling.

The theater was curtained off by heavy black drapes and there was no lighting inside, except for what came from the screen. The occasional visit from uniformed cops was supposed to discourage the viewers from masturbating in public, whether alone or in tandem, while they watched two or three or five guys porking whatever got in front of them. To background hip-hop lyrics about rape and sodomy.

Benny walked down one aisle, looking like he wanted to get it over with, and Mag started down the other, when she heard him say, “Do your pants up and come with me!”

The viewer had been so involved in what he was doing that he hadn’t seen that very tall black cop in a dark blue uniform until he was standing three feet away. He lost the erection he’d been stroking, as did just about all of the other guys in the room, but Mag figured some of these dudes were so bent that the presence of the law, the danger of it all, probably enhanced the thrill.

She shined her light across the chair to see what was going on but he had already pulled up and belted his pants. He was being led by the elbow toward the black curtain and Benny kept saying, “Damn!”

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.”