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.”
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.”