Though my paparazzo friend Atti had survived the fall of the Soviets back wherever he was supposedly from -- a break-in at his down market east side duplex had sent him packing. He'd been roughed up pretty bad when he startled some creep in a ski mask, but the way I figured it, these things can happen anywhere. "I really need you to stay and help me figure out what happened to Rita," I whined, trailing him with an empty box for the cast-offs. "She won't stop haunting me in these super freak sex dreams I've been having. Can I take the Betty Boop juice glasses?"
"This is serious now, blondie. You want to stay alive, you best start believing the cops are in on all of it somehow," he said, gesturing for me to sit on an overstuffed carton of kitchen stuff marked "Fragile" so he could tape it shut. Moving, while never fun, seemed to be particularly challenging with a broken hand, two cracked ribs and a messed up face. "This was not the work of a junkie looking for drugs," he added -- handing me the key to a safe deposit box where he'd stashed Rita's mysterious surveillance gadgets. "Bank of America, Hollywood and Vine. They can't legally access the contents without an executed warrant and a second key from the banker. Understand?"
"If I don't turn over the disks, how am I ever going to find out what's on them?" I asked. "It's not like I have a spy decoder ring." Atti kept insisting Rita had gotten into some really big trouble involving the road trips she and I took down to Mexico looking for prescription Viagra and Phen-Fen to sell to the other dancers at Starbutts. He'd dug up some secret ledger Rita was keeping around a much bigger kind of operation with profits in the six million dollar range. "Are you a hundred percent sure pharmaceuticals were all you carried back over the border?" he asked."I'm very weight conscious," I said. "I think I'd notice a few extra pounds of black tar heroine on me -- especially in a string bikini."
"That girl was wearing a wire. I can't say why, when or for who, but you need to find somebody with skills to crack the voice recorder data," he said. "Isn't there anybody you trust over there?""I already told the FBI about all that. Nobody seemed interested."
"What a surprise," he said. "Jesus, I wish I still had the balls for this kind of stuff. Did I ever mention I'm fifty?"
Nobody turns fifty in Hollywood, so no. "I did make out with a really nice girl at an S&M bar the other night," I told him, changing the subject to something more palatable. "Junior agent, little crazy around the eyes." The ever more bizarre investigation into how a low rent Hollywood stripper came to be killed and dismembered -- in two separate acts of violence -- was now in the hands of the world's ditziest detective and a lovelorn lesbian with a badge. "I don't know how much help Jane is going to be," I said. "She won't want to talk at work, since she's in love with her boss, who's married to my boss, who I'm still in love with, the bastard. I'd try her cell if I hadn't lost my phone."
"You still really think all that is just a coincidence?" he said. "Whoever picked up your phone knows you're onto the link between Rita and Mo K," he said over a shoulder on his way out the door, toting a single backpack. "It all goes back to Starbutts -- and those cops of yours hanging around the place like they own it."
"Please don't leave," I said, batting my lashes as a very last resort. "I'm not smart like you."
"Don't even," he replied. "I like fat women. I mean really, really fat."
"Now it makes sense. I figured you were either gay or just European."
With that he was gone. A UPS guy stacked a dolly with the last few boxes to be shipped anywhere other than here. I stood alone amidst the moving refuse, listening to the sounds of Hollywood. Two women and a crying baby yakking in Spanish. Some men rolling a fruit cart down the street. A guy getting out of a fancy car yelling "Get! Me! His! Agent!" into some hidden earpiece like a babbling schizo into the void.
I saw a flash of sun spotlighting a discarded gum wrapper by Atti's front door. I picked it up between two fingers like the nerdy crime lab guy nobody ever listens to on one of those shows. "Big Red," I couldn't help reading aloud, just to be dramatic. If Officer Mark"Bad-Ass" Muñoz had been here, he left a calling card.
