“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.

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.