"Because you're a temp," she said, "and the city's too broke to care. You got a plain white sport tee in your whore-drobe?
"You mean like a golf shirt?
"Exactly."
"Are you out of your mind? Do I look like a female golfer?"
"Well, you can't parade around here like you're itching to jump out of a cake." She squired me to a dark corner desk, covering my shoulders with a crocheted throw draped over a chair. "Maybe your real issue is my body type," I told her. "They're called large, natural breasts and I wear them wherever I go."
"Wasn't I supposed to meet the captain? He might see things a little differently."
"Captain ain't coming to your rescue tonight, Missy. He's in the field, along with the rest of the cowboys." She piled a mountain of hand-issued pink citations in front of me to be entered by hand into the law enforcement computer system. "No monkeying around," she warned me. "The Justice Department records every click." There would be serious consequences, for example, if I got smart and called up Charlie Sheen's entire rap sheet. "You mean there's more?" I said. "You don't want to know," she assured me, conjuring up the scattered paparazzi who roam the halls by night to offer deep dish pizza and shallow praise in exchange for fresh dirt. "Now get to work. "I'll need the whole basket entered by morning."
"What do I do with the originals?""Shred them," she said, flipping on the loudly churning blades of an industrial-sized machine. "You might want to tie up all that pretty hair first."
Every gut-wrenching drama imaginable overtakes Hollywood Division after dark -- dispatchers answering cries for help, Watch Commanders choreographing high speed chases, legions of homeless folks storming the doors to report alien invasions. There I sat sequestered alone in the dimly lit Records Room, six degrees of desperation from the kind of excitement I'd only seen in the movies.
I briefly considered shredding the remaining mound of tickets for minor traffic infractions before I entered them rather than afterwards and calling it a random act of kindness towards pissed off motorists around the Southland. Maybe I wasn't worth the price of a crappy uniform, but in a time when information was king, in a club as closed as Hollywood, a lowly records clerk might actually become an awesome force for good.
I typed the name "Charlie Sheen" into the cross-agency records system, my finger hovering over the enter key, when I saw the flickering flame of a Zippo lighter flash between two towering file cabinets in a dark corner, where someone was sneaking a smoke. "Don't mind me," said a familiar man's voice from the shadows, echoing a phrase from the previous night. "Nobody has to know."
