23. B-B-B-Bad-Ass to the Bone

If you've ever been pulled over for a minor traffic infraction, you may notice there are only two types of police officers: those who chew gum, and those who do not. Fresh from the academy, where I'm pretty sure the technique is informally taught, a gum-chewer tends to be young and green, with an overbuilt torso and a vaguely threatening swagger. Working a knowing wad between his front teeth, he isn't all that interested in your response to a question such as, "Do you know how fast you were going?" -- and is really only asking to watch you squirm.

"So did you sleep with the captain or didn't you?" Officer Mark"Bad-Ass" Muñoz inquired of me, casually popping a stick of Big Red.

"Do you want the truth or the lie?" The truth was that I hadn't. The lie was that I hadn't wanted to -- that I hadn't imagined it a hundred different times, a thousand different ways -- that I couldn't practically smell his skin against mine right then and there on the table.

All of this would be pretty inappropriate, since Mark and I were sitting side by side in the back booth of Mel's Diner having a "Tin Lunch" -- provided to uniformed cops free of charge, courtesy of the establishment.

"I can't blame you for asking," I said, "what with all the gossip. But it's not really your business." I reached in my purse for my ringing cellphone -- and Mark grabbed my hand, searching my eyes for the truth. "Hey. Answer the question."


I glanced at the call -- from my paparazzo friend Atti, hard at work conducting his own private investigation into my dead stripper friend's ever more convoluted back story.  Letting it go to voice mail, I set the phone on the table and let out a long sigh. "The captain is our boss, that's it. I don't care what people are saying and neither should you. Now let go of me or I'll call a cop." He smiled, kissing my forehead. "That's all I wanted to hear."

Like a harmless little bulldog, my big, bad, very public boyfriend knew better than anyone that what we had wasn't serious. I'm not even sure why we were dating, other than we seemed to have been cast in some weird play with a national television audience. We would kiss good night after another evening performance, then go back stage to lead our separate lives. If I'd only known I was such a good actress in the first place, I would never have ended up the mystery blonde at the center of the latest scandal unfolding inside the L.A.P.D.

Atti had wanted a story and I gave him one -- about the captain and me and our brief and completely professional getaway in Mexico after Rita's body was identified. Correcting all the lies was my only recourse after someone on the Hollywood Division cleaning crew sold a story to the National Enquirer. Supposedly I tore up the captain's office (true) during a heated argument (also true) about my being pregnant with his love child (false, false, false). Nobody wants to read about another girl in love with another career-driven power player who dumps her before it evens starts. 

Other than his wife, that is -- especially in light of how certain new credibility issues might affect the testimony of her husband's accused lover in a gruesome homicide case she was investigating in hopes of nailing a serial killer.  "I have to get downtown," I told Mark. "I seriously don't know what to tell Agent Knowles about all of this."

"I'd go with the truth," he said. "Cops like that."

Then again, Mark wouldn't know the truth if it bit him in the nose -- which of course it was about to. Things would have gone so differently from that point forward if only I hadn't left my phone on the table -- and Mark hadn't noticed the waiting message from Atti.

What happened next would also require Mark to be the type of guy who secretly takes note of his girlfriends' passwords just so he can check up on them. He picked up my phone, hammering in "CHERRYBOMB" -- all upper case, just exactly as I had it discretely tattooed on my backside.

"Hey blondie, I need you call me back before you meet with the FBI," Atti said in his urgent message, speaking in very hushed tones. "Turns out your boyfriend had a relationship with Rita nobody's talking about. Call me!"

As to which "boyfriend" Atti had been researching -- Bad-ass or the captain -- I guess that could have seemed murky to Mark, given my slipperiness under his questioning. Rita would have been so proud. She always thought I shared too much with guys. "Keep the sumbidges guessing," she'd slur, wandering around up all night half crocked. "Frackin bastids."

In a hurry, Mark asked the waitress for the check. "Compliments of the house, Officer," she said, shooing him out as he popped yet another stick of Big Red. "As if you boys have to ask." Like I say, the gum-chewers don't tend to wait around long for answers they already have.

24. Cherry Bombed

I wonder if there's a greeting card to say I'm sorry for wanting to sleep with your husband but nothing happened so no harm done. Or maybe, to be more specific, I still want to sleep with your husband and always will, since I am madly in love with him. I can assure you that is highly unlikely, however, because he turned me down flat after traveling for many hours with his hand on my knee during a secret road trip to your lovely home in Mexico. I am disgusted with myself for leaking any of this to the press, but it was only under extreme duress, and I hope we can still be friends.

I sat in an outer office waiting to face the music with Special Agent Knowles. Her assistant was a scrappy little thing with a close-cropped brush cut who wished she was a boy, judging from her over-sized K.D. Lange suit and skinny tie. I caught her checking me out with a shy, stolen look over her computer monitor. I actually thought this was cute, since she wouldn't have had a chance with me even if she were a boy. I don't have the good taste to like girls that way, although like most of us, sometimes I wish I did. "She's a little busy today, what with everything," she said apologetically. I'm not sure what "everything" meant but was convinced it had to do with me. "I'm Jane, by the way," she added.

I smiled, absently rehearsing my testimony for tomorrow, when I would finally have a chance to look the accused in the eye. If his account was to be believed, I had unknowingly encountered him many times before, as he had regularly visited Rita's house to peep in our windows before stumbling upon her already dead body one night after I left for work. I didn't know if any of that was true, but I did know he was innocent -- at least by the letter of the law.

There was a lot of rushing around among plain looking people in important suits with tough-to-read faces. "Is there a bomb threat?" I asked Jane. "You really don't know?" she stage whispered, looking around. She was about to let me in on some big news when Agent Knowles opened her door to shoo me in. "Sorry to keep you waiting, Cherry." She'd hardly shut the door when I started spilling my guts. "The whole thing with the love child is a bald-faced lie. I don't even like children."

"Cherry, relax. Whatever went on between you and my husband, really, that's your business. You've probably realized we tend to live separate lives." She took my hands and looked in my eyes, as if presenting him to me like a gift. "Let's just try to be a little quieter about it in the future."

I wasn't sure of the appropriate response when a woman gives you her husband. Should somebody sign something? "None of it really matters now that you won't have to testify," she added -- realizing I still hadn't heard. "Dr. Hollister hung himself this morning in his cell."

I had to let that sink in a minute. "He's dead? I don't understand. What does that mean?"

"It means it's over." I finally noticed all the colorful flower arrangements scattered about, the bottles of champagne and gourmet cheese baskets wrapped in cellophane. "Personally I don't think this kind of thing is ever cause for a celebration. You never want it to end this way, but sometimes it just does. Try one of those chocolate strawberries," she urged me. "Have you ever seen one that big?" Taking a bite of the swollen red fruit as if answering an order, I couldn't help thinking about poor, dead Strawberry Margarita -- when I was seized by a horrible thought. What if this freak who'd gone to his grave insisting he didn't kill her was telling the truth?

"Rita had all this Femme Nikita kind of spy stuff!" I blurted out. "I don't know who she was keeping tabs on or why, but it wasn't Dr. Hollister. I should have given it to you but I was scared."

"I see," she said, pausing to consider this. "Well? Where is it?"

"I gave it to this photographer I know. Goes by the name Attilla. Like the Hun."

"Attila the Hun. I'm sorry, Cherry, are you sure that's even a real person?"

"Do I look like a total idiot? Please don't answer that." Determined to get Atti on the line, I felt around inside my purse. What I didn't know was that Atti was busy getting the life beaten out of him by unknown assailants -- after leaving me an incriminating phone message. "I left my cell somewhere," I said, thinking about the last time I saw it. "Lunch. Matt must have picked it up."

"Yes, I heard you and Officer Muñoz were seeing each other."

In no rush to recover any so-called new evidence from the dumbest blonde in the bottle, she poured me a glass of champagne. "I'm sure he'll be just as relieved as you to hear this ordeal is pretty much over and done with. Chin-chin."

25. Now, Voyeurager

If you don't have a friend in law enforcement, I definitely recommend you get one -- especially in the event that you may or may not have witnessed a murder by someone who may or may not be on the loose. The captain and I were over, and though his wife had her own badge, for obvious reasons I couldn't exactly see her as a gal pal. As for my big, bad cop boyfriend, things had kind of cooled off after we stopped being media darlings. When my mysterious photographer friend went missing, along with any real evidence that he ever existed, I was left with only one candidate.

"Are you into bondage at all?" Special Agent Jane Hyatt whispered over the phone from work.

"No, thanks," I said. "I have enough problems."

She convinced me to grab a drink at Voyeur, the big deal celebrity S&M club in WeHo. I wasn't so sure about the naked chick in a gas mask crouched on the bar with her ass in my face. "Why do you like it here?" I asked, doing my best to ignore the gyrating anus between us.

There wasn't much of a crowd, other than a handful of balding conventioneers, wearing loosened ties and nervous grins. "Republican National Committee," Jane said, miming a pair of zipped lips. "Poor bastards can't get enough of this place." They huddled by a glass case to watch two dancers wearing nothing but frizzy rainbow wigs and over-sized clown shoes simulating oral sex on each other. "You really think that's hot?"  I asked.

"You're missing the point," she explained, teacher to student. "What's fun about voyeurism is you're not in it." A flat-chested girl -- clothed only in three stick-on stars -- lassoed some guy in vinyl cheeky shorts with the umbilical cord of a double-headed plastic baby. Was this just a Hollywood thing, or were Federal Agents all over the country relaxing this way after work? "Have another, I'm buying," Jane said brightly, beckoning a girl overhead. Our topless cocktail waitress wrested herself from the others writhing in ceiling nets like spiders in some hellish yoga class.

"This isn't a date," I said. "Really, I just wanted to talk."

She giggled like a little boy, wrinkling her freckled nose. "Can you keep a secret? I'm in love with A.K."

"Special Agent Knowles? Your boss? My boss's wife?"

"That's the one."

I took a minute to let that sink in. "I'm in love with her husband," I said.

"I heard."

"So she really knows?"

"A.K. knows everything. Every. Thing. Except how good we could be together." She sighed. You don't hear a lot of sighing in an S&M bar -- but I realized we had an awful lot in common. I let the butthole on the bar crawl out of earshot before blurting out the rest. "I told Agent Knowles I think there's more to the story behind Rita's murder --  and she just ignored me. Now my freelance journalist friend disappeared with the proof -- and I don't know why."

"She's on it," Jane assured me. "She just really wanted it to be the serial killer because that was the theory. The last thing you want to hear is you had the whole thing wrong, while some little blonde in the local P.D. -- who's also after your husband -- was onto the truth all along."

Wow. How did everything get so twisted? Here we were just a couple of girls in the big city pursuing our dreams and, boom, we're all messed up in marital issues and serial murder. A parade of naked villagers masked in burlap hoods carried bright green bottles of flaming Absinthe like raised torches. "Courtesy of the fat guys," one of them told me, gesturing to the Republicans.

"Is this even legal?" I asked the Fed by my side.

"I promise not to arrest you," she said. She lit a shot afire with a blazing sugar cube, dousing it with water before knocking back the milky elixir. She thought she was tough, what with all the weapons training, but she weighed like ninety-five pounds -- and a corn-fed farm girl from Petaluma like me could drink her under the table. "You and I should sit here and make out," she slurred, "show them both what they're missing."

"Why not?" I replied, slugging a wicked bitter mouthful directly from the green genie bottle. I leaned in for that forbidden kiss -- which turned out to feel like any other, warm and lovely. I'd never kissed a girl before, nor a fat Republican or a burlap masked villager -- but it was hard to tell one mouth from the other as the evening wore on.

I don't remember many details after that, not Jane and me stumbling out to the valet, nor one of us driving down Sunset while the other puked out the window.

I saw a flash of colored lights in the rear view mirror, and hoped that I knew the cop, but not too well. I thought I heard the captain's voice, telling me I was seriously out of control, young lady. I felt equal parts total terror and sweet relief, like when you're in trouble with your dad, but it's way better than the other trouble you were in. I might remember him later, standing there in my bedroom taking off his holster, and wondering whether that was actually happening or if it was all just another delicious dream. Maybe I did have a friend in law enforcement. Maybe it was him all along.

26. Three (Satin) Sheets to the Wind

At first I thought the captain wanted to make love to me like we were an old married couple and it was just another part of our morning ritual. A sliver of sunlight peeped through the curtains, igniting a glint in his eye. He rolled over, brushing a finger up my leg, murmuring something about making it fast. He was late for a meeting and traffic was bound to be bad. "I can't," I said. "Not like this." My head was throbbing and I might have still felt a little bit high from the night before -- with my mind and body not quite working together in synch.


"Just hike up your nightgown," he persisted. I pushed him away and said no, that I wanted it to be special with us after all these months. Feeling shy about him even being there, I covered myself with the slippery satin sheet. He reached up and ripped the curtains wide open, letting in a rush of light so bright I almost felt I could hide inside it. "You're not a child," he said, rolling himself on top of me and spreading my legs apart. "This isn't prom night." Crushing me with his weight as I tried to get away, he forced himself inside me, kissing me hard on the mouth. "No! I said no!" I gasped for air. "Please. I can't breathe." Tears welling in my eyes, I felt a warm trickle of blood escape from my lower lip. "You're raping me," I said.

Then Rita was lying there next to us, her shiny red hair spread out on the pillow like a ball of flame. "Just act like you like it," she said. "Don't be stupid." He leaned over and kissed her as he continued to thrust violently inside me. I tried to take her advice, to relax into him and tilt my hips up to meet his. I reached out to grab her hand and she placed it gently between her legs. When I resisted, she opened her stained red mouth and laughed.

I must have started screaming, because his hand was over my mouth and I was struggling to breathe again. "Promise you'll be quiet," he said. When I nodded my head yes, he let go -- but I spit in his face and he slapped mine, hard. I hit him in the chest with both fists, struggling to push him off me, but he pinned my arms over my head -- all the while pounding himself into me, rock hard and unforgiving.

Rita rolled over and looked into my eyes, tracing a hand over my belly -- as he came inside me, shuttering, his face turned upward into the blinding white light. "That's how I died," she whispered. "When are you going to put it together?"

"I'm sorry," I said.

I don't know what I had to be sorry about. She knew very well I wasn't a cop, how was any of it my problem if they couldn't seem to catch the right guy? I had to tell her something, though, the poor dead thing. "I promise you I'll fix it just as soon as I wake up."

I suddenly bolted upright and found myself sitting there all alone in a cold sweat -- twisted up in a bundle of pink satin sheets that had once been hers. If not for the one someone had used to carry away her dead body, the set would have been complete.

With the growing realization that it was only a dream, I couldn't have been more pissed off at both of them for taking up residence in my head like they owned the place. A girl should be able to take illegal pharmaceuticals and hallucinate without some dead chick and her big cop buddy getting all involved like we're in some freaky David Lynch movie.

I got myself showered and dressed, then noticed a neatly folded blanket and extra pillow on the futon in the living room. Had he slept outside my bedroom, guarding me like some prize he'd brought home in a cage? Or had I made the whole thing up? I honestly couldn't decide which was worse.

I jumped in my car and raced down Fountain toward the station. Punching in my code to buzz myself into the locker room, I plowed into Georgia May, standing in my path like a human wall. "You're late, Fancy Pants. Captain wants to see you in his office."

I sucked in a breath and headed upstairs, thought for a second and turned back. "I quit," I said.

27. That's Cherry, Like the Tart

For a sweet young thing, the most sought after of all Hollywood commodities, selling yourself on the open market comes with a whisper short shelf life. At the age of twenty-six -- having survived eight long years in a town that prefers to eat us alive -- I was dangerously close to my expiration date. "It's been fun playing cops and robbers," I told Georgia May, "but I'm on a very tight schedule." Standing in line at Zankou Chicken, we looked out the window toward the Greyhound station, where a fresh busload of us ships in pretty much every hour.


"Let's eat here while the skin is still crispy," she said, pondering the overhead menu, for some unknown reason, since she already had it memorized. "Chicken Tarna, Chicken Shawerma, Chicken Kebab.  Spit-roasted, slow-roasted, flame grilled."

The Bubba Gump of the poultry world, the woman was obsessed with getting her bird on, even as my life fell to pieces on the floor. "Let's get a whole one and split it," she said. "Don't tell me you can't eat all that -- I've seen you put down a roll of cookie dough. Steamed rice or chopped salad?"

"Why aren't you listening to me? I keep saying I don't want to work for you any more and you keep bringing it back to side dishes."

"They're very cheap with the garlic sauce, you'd think it was made of crack," she said, lowering her voice. "I'll tell her she left one out of the bag so we can get some extra." Exasperated, I turned up the volume. "This was supposed to be a temp job! I want my life back!"

"Alrighty. What about your buddy?"


"She can haunt me all she wants. It's not my fault what happened to her."

"Not her, some photographer coming around looking for you," she said, stuffing a white paper bag with napkins. "Looked like somebody roughed him up pretty good over something or other. That's why captain was asking for you." She read the look of surprise on my face. "You think he wanted to ask for your hand in marriage?"

 "I thought he was mad at me because I'm just not up to this job."

She laughed, peeling the cellophane off a minted toothpick. "Ain't nothing to this job, Fancy Pants," she scoffed. "Just sit there and eat your chicken, try not to get too much grease on the booking sheets when somebody else brings in the bad guy. First of the month you pay your own rent instead of calling home to your daddy and crying about how his little ballerina should have been famous by now. Meanwhile, whatever you and Cap got going on, I'm here to tell you -- you ain't the first. Ain't gonna be the last, neither, so you best snap out of it and move on before your ass falls."

A couple of fresh-faced new arrivals walked past the pictures windows, toting their rolling suitcases, in the general direction of the beach. "Why do they always look so much like me and Rita getting off that bus?" I wondered aloud.

"You all look alike to me. Why don't you run out and tell them it's another thirty miles before they can dip as much as a pretty little toe in the sand. Even if they do make it, the beach belongs to some fancy movie director who's got it roped off all the way up to Santa Barbara."

"Or you want to let them work that out for their damn selves, and help me get some more garlic up in this bag?"

"Somebody killed my friend," I said, as though it just occurred to me. "You keep out of my way while I stay on long enough to figure out why -- and I'll score you a five-gallon vat of that crap right now."

She crossed her arms with a full-on eye roll, challenging me to make good on that deal. I turned to the put upon little manager at the register. "Excuse me, sir? My name is Cherry. Like the tart? I work at LAPD Hollywood Division. We girls get so hungry over there."

28. Dead Blonde Walking

It's easy to pack your things and get out of town when you live in Hollywood. We like to travel light, as if we're on an extended vacation in Vegas. If things go well at the tables, we'll be on to better things soon enough, so why bother with anything more permanent than a garage sale coffee maker and your mother's old vacuum cleaner with lost suction?

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."

Atti paused. "When did that  happen, exactly?"

"Same day you got robbed," I said. "How many times do I have to tell you I left it on the table at Mel's Diner after Matt got all nasty with me? I was on my way to see Agent Knowles."

"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.