Hollywood Station (8 page)

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. Cot,, 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!"