1. Never Trust a Stripper With Her Clothes On

Nobody comes to Hollywood to get all mixed up with the cops. That kind of thing happens just when you least expect it, such as when you are twenty-six years old, smoking hot and fast asleep on a sheepskin rug with your mouth wide open.

I was crashing with my crazy stripper friend Rita in a sweet little rent-controlled bungalow off Fountain and Highland. She'd started taking an adult education class in boudoir photography and liked me to nod off all made up like a two-dollar whore. Then she'd snap practice shots to PhotoShop while she sat at her desk all night tweaking.

It wasn't a bad gig, all in all, although lately she'd gotten a little antsy about me ponying up a few bucks for living expenses. The only regular income I had at the time was a small residuals check for a television commercial I'd done for Check-Into-Cash. I was the hot blonde in the red Porsche acting all pouty until my fat boyfriend hands me a fresh roll of bills. Story of my life, really.  Show me a broke jerk with a fancy car and I get stupider than I look.

Anyway, the phone rang and it was George, my fast-talking office pimp from the temp agency over on Miracle Mile. "You got any problem working around weapons?" he asked. "I can get you double time on a short-term typing job if you're comfortable with criminal activity in the workplace."

"Porn?" I said.  "You got the wrong girl." I glanced at my open-mouthed image on Rita's computer screen -- now enhanced with a crudely digitized dildo, Perez Hilton-style. My pops always said never trust a stripper with her clothes on. I hit the delete key. Delete, delete, delete. Delete!

Rita bolted upright from a dead sleep. "That's it!" she declared. "You're moving out." She got up and started stuffing my scattered clothes into a paper bag from Trader Joe's. Rail thin under a huge mane of red hair, she looked like she was on fire. I always wondered how she didn't scare the crap out of the poor bastards who dared asked her climb on board for a lap dance. Maybe that was the whole point, to take your punishment like a man before going home to the wife and pretending the thrill wasn't gone.

George yammered on over the phone about some records clerk opening with the Los Angeles Police Department. "Doesn't that sound glamorous," I said, dodging a rainbow of dirty underpants.

"You know how many girls would jump at this thing?" he insisted. "It's at Hollywood Division, night watch.  Maybe not the best part of town, but at least you'd be free for auditions during the day."

"I need exposure, George," I pleaded, locking myself in the bathroom. "What ever happened to getting me into one of the studios? I'll do anything. Any. Thing."

"Get in line," he said flatly. It occurred to me a guy in his position must get all kinds of nasty offers, from girls who might actually follow through on them.  "Look, kid, I like you, but I got a lot of calls to make.  You should know the city offers a very good benefits package -- medical and dental."

Medical? Dental? Why didn't he say so in the first place? I allowed myself to fantasize for a moment about medically necessary therapeutic massage, doctor-assisted weight loss -- maybe even a new set of veneers. All of this would require a bit of acting, naturally, but wasn't that my thing? "Of course, you will have to pass a background check," George informed me. "Is that going to be a problem?"

My heart sank. A long pause.

"Come on, Cherry.  It's not like you've been convicted of a minor vice crime.  I mean, have you?"

"Define minor," I said.

2. The Case of the Naked Maid

If there's one thing I've learned about Hollywood, it's that it doesn't matter how many people tell you no, since you only need one to say yes. Currently this was Georgia May, the large, Jamaican-born Police Records Chief sucking the last bit of charred flesh from a plate of denuded chicken wings. It was all starting to look like a recently unearthed crime scene in the Angeles National Forest. "You should know we go deep on the background check." she said. "Very deep indeed."

"I once worked as a naked maid for some no-name Saudi prince in Bel-Aire Canyon!" I blurted out.

Angry hipsters gathered with the precision of a flash mob to slap citations against the service window Georgia manned, bent on reclaiming illegally parked vintage Mustangs towed from some back alley burlesque club. She flipped over a break sign and clanged shut the blinds, narrowing her eyes. "Was it really this fellow's house you were cleaning, or maybe some other part of his...holdings?"

"There wasn't any kind of funny business," I insisted.  "I only even saw him once." Obviously I should have stopped there, but her face said she was going to need more. "I was on all fours scrubbing a bathtub shaped like the giant Sphinx. Suddenly there he was, with his hairy ass on my nice clean sequin john, reading The Wall Street Journal."

He offered me a few extra bills to reach up and hand him something to hurt himself with, he didn't care what --  a wooden back brush, a heavy duty toilet wand.  I tossed a flowering cactus into his lap. "I think they call it a penis plant," I muttered. "He pricked his own prick, though, I'd hardly call that a sex crime."

"I'll check the statute and get back to you," she said, dismissing me with a snort. "Next!" She opened the blinds to bark above the din. "Let me see some numbers, you morons!"

"Just you wait a minute, lady." I interrupted. "Maybe I'm not cut out for police work, but I am not going to let you stand here and judge me. I did a real job for a fair wage and I never went back, because I may have a dream, but I also have my pride, and that's got to be worth something in this stinking town. Now, if you'll just validate my parking, I'll be locking myself in my car under a nice bright streetlight and calling it a night." When I dug into my bag for the claim ticket, my granny's rosary fell out.

"That belong to you, Homeless?" she asked.

"Oh, what's it to you?" Granny had always wanted to come to Hollywood.  It's the only part of her that made it. I refused to cry over any of it in front of this snotty civil servant reeking of hot sauce and superiority -- not to mention the entire cast of Occupy L.A., standing slack-jawed at the window. Just then, something about Miss Georgia May seemed to soften, if only for a second or two. She might once have had a dream of her own -- maybe something to do with poultry. She looked me up and down like a stray cat at the back door you finally give in and feed, beckoning for me to follow her down a long, dark corridor. "I can type as fast as you talk, did the agency mention that? Oh, and you should also know I have a tattoo," I said, "although it's very tastefully placed."

Handing me a scratchy blanket,  she opened an empty holding cell, sparsely decorated with a small television and a pair of twin beds. "Employee break room," she said. "You'll get used to it."

"Does this mean I got the job?"

"I just do the pre-screenings," she said, "supposed to weed out folks like you, talking about some penis plant.  Take it up with the captain in the morning."

The captain? There was a captain? Please God, if You really exist, if we're in this together at all,  please let the captain be a man.

3. Oh Captain, My Captain

I need to put to rest all the rumors about me and the captain sleeping together all along. I slept next to him once, but that was only by accident. I didn't even know he was a captain, with a wife and kids and political aspirations, not necessarily in that order. Nor did I know he would either become the one true love of my life or the likeliest guy to want me dead, depending on where you get your cable news once I start spilling my guts.

I was crashing in a holding cell we use as a break room here at Hollywood Division. That's when all the shooting started. I was pretty sure the Navy SEALS had taken over the compound, going full-on Bin Laden on anything that moved. I bolted upright, meeting a pair of steely blue eyes over in the next bed. "Excuse me," I hissed through the dark, as though he'd barged in on me in the ladies' room. "There's a girl in here."

He chuckled, tossing a pair of handcuffs on the nightstand before pausing to light a Marlboro. "I promise I'll stay on my side." I caught a flash of his silhouette in the flame of a silver Zippo as he reclined on an adjacent bunk -- followed by another burst of automatic fire from just downstairs. Bam. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.  I pulled the covers over my face. "Please put that out," I whispered. "What is happening out there?"

"That's just Morning Watch warming up on the range," he said. "I take it you're new here?" I fumbled around for a bedside light, knocking over my open bottle of nail polish. "You mind leaving that out?" he mumbled. "What's say we grab another minute of shut eye before we double back, nobody has to know."

Dabbing at the spilled polish with a Kleenex, I put my hand on something in the general shape of a pistol. I'd never even touched a gun before, let alone slept with one by my head. "Is this thing loaded?" I whispered. He laughed again, louder this time. Cops don't tend to do much laughing with perfect strangers, upsets the power balance. You get any reaction at all out of a cop and believe me you've earned it. I guess he wasn't all cop that night any more than I was a total knockout one more drooling loser had to go and get all stupid over. We were just a pair of voices, finding each other in the dark. I held my ears against another round of bullets. "Relax over there, I just told you it was the good guys. I'm Chuck, by the way."

"Cherry," I replied. "Chuck and Cherry, we should start a folk band." I guess by the third time he laughed, we were both pretty much done for, whether or not we knew it yet. He said I'd never have to be afraid of anything again, even as a civilian employee. "You're either one of us or you're not," he told me, as if there were only two choices in life.

I should have made a run for it right there. This was only supposed to be a day job, not some kind of life sentence -- or worse yet, a death sentence. How am I going to be a movie star if I end up in witness protection? As for him, what he knew, when he knew it -- if he actually knew anything -- I still haven't figured that out. That night, though, I'd already started falling for the only guy in my whole life who'd ever asked me to leave the lights out. "I should really go," I whispered, leaving him in the shadows. "I'm supposed to meet with the captain." Bam. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.

4. Locked and Fully Cherry

Georgia May said I couldn't man the front window of Hollywood Division all tarted up like a tranny hooker working the doughnut shop on the northeast corner of Highland and Santa Monica Boulevard -- her words, not mine. I was wearing a perfectly tasteful little black dress I picked up somewhere -- possibly in my stripper ex-roommate's laundry basket. "Why don't you just give me a uniform like yours? I could rock that look with the right belt and a pair of kitten heels."

"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."

"Natural? You do know I've got a polygraph."

"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."

5. Nobody Likes a Complicated Blonde

Even the captain's pencils were a little too sharp for comfort. He had a pile of them splayed out on his desk like a game of Pick-Up-Stix, or some kind of puzzle you might be the one to solve. "Not seeing a lot of bite marks," I said, figuring I'd play along. "Guess you're not the type to go chewing his own pencil." There went that big, huge reluctant laugh of his. Like I say, cops don't like to give a girl that kind of power, leastwise not until she's been properly bagged and tagged. If he'd already put together I was the mysterious girl he'd slept beside in the dark of a holding cell a few nights back, he wasn't letting on.

"Normally I'd start with why you're interested in police work," he said. "In your case I'm asking why not."

"Seriously? Nobody likes cops, unless we're dialing nine-one-one, and even then things could go either way." I told him working here would be strictly a day job, until I hit the lottery, became famous for starring in anything other than a sex tape, or married well and moved to the Hills, whichever came first.  "Too much information?" I added.

Concealing a little smile he wasn't about to offer again free of charge, he opened a manila folder, browsing my job application. "I see you worked as a housekeeper for an Arab sheik. Care to elaborate on that?"

"Not really," I said.

He shut the folder and looked at me over his glasses. Turns out he has really nice eyes. Softer than you'd think. Maybe a little too tired, considering our work day had just begun. I wondered if anyone had made him breakfast. "Police records may not sound all that exciting to a young girl like you, but you're going to have access to some very sensitive information. If you've got a few problems in your past, we might be able to work with that -- but only if you're willing to come clean up front."

"So my old boss might have been a terrorist!" I blurted out. "That perv had more porn stashed under his bed than Saddam Hussein. Did you ever hear he was internet stalking Darryl Hannah? True story. Or maybe that was Castro." He gave in to a fit of uncontrolled laughter, growing more annoyed with every undignified snort. "Who are you?" he finally managed.

"Who are you?" I was dying to reply. Typical cop, the guy wouldn't tip his hand if you reached over and broke it in half. Awards and commendations obscured his walls, stamped with the official seal of one government tool or another. A glass case held some kind of  military medal (Army? Air Force? Marines?), alongside a stainless steel yo-yo inscribed "Jeremy, 7-15-03" (Date of birth? Date of death? Dating a guy named Jeremy?).

A silver desk frame sat empty behind the glass (I mean, seriously?) -- while a platinum ring (Wedding? Fraternity? Spy decoder?) had been set on its side as though defied to roll off and disappear at any time. I couldn't quite make out the engraving without squinting, and I wasn't about to give him the pleasure of catching me doing it.

Nobody likes a complicated blonde, so I took my chances and gave it to him straight. "Let's just cut to the chase," I declared, getting extra cozy in my chair. "I don't want this job. I just need it. I have no credit, wicked bad taste in men and a super spotty driving record. But this is the first time in my whole life that I have ever been questioned by the police about anything more serious than how fast I was going in a school zone. I hated school. School sucked and I wasn't popular with the other girls. Go figure. You, on the other hand, have a whole lot of paper stacked up down there, and given your nasty secret smoking habit, when the whole joint goes up in flames you'll only have yourself to arrest. So what's it going to be, Chuck?"


"Captain," he corrected me. "I'm only Chuck when the lights are out." He shot me a knowing look, and might even have tossed in a wink, though it's entirely possible I imagined both.

"I'm Cherry all the time," I shot back, totally the victor in our little game of cat and captain. I picked up his pencil and gave it a good hard nibble to remember me by. "Am I going to get my own desk?"

6. Assault with a Deadly Cherry

My stripper friend Rita let me couch dive with her again, provided I agree not to wear a lot of clothes around the house, and also to act surprised should she suddenly photograph me eating, drinking or taking a pee. "Upskirting" was all the rage in the specialty pervert market she was set on cracking, so most days started with her under the kitchen table shooting up as I sat cross-legged eating my Cheerios. "I really have to get off the pole," she said, zooming in for the money shot. "You're not the only one with a dream."

"Please don't shoot my face," I told her. "I really need to keep my nose clean now that I'm in with the cops."

"The cops are some of my best customers," she scoffed. "Your pals at Hollywood Division tend to get extra generous when they come in and pretend they're working."

"Wait, you're telling me our officers are partying on duty?" Never in a million years had it occurred to me that my crackhead, pole dancing roommate would be the go-to source for dish on my mysterious new boss, but I couldn't stop thinking about him so I took a shot. "Ranking officers? Like, you know,  captains?"

"I don't do titles," she said. "I like to get on a first name basis with a guy when I'm giving him a lap dance, creates an illusion of vague interest. Don't open your eyes."

She had me sitting very still on the bathroom sink in my underwear, applying a practice set of permanent eyelash extensions for her advanced cosmetology class. "I don't know what you're so surprised about," she said. "Cops and strippers have always gotten along. We're the peanut butter and chocolate of the sex trade." 

Here I thought I was the one with the questionable track record and I still had no idea if the captain was a good cop or a bad cop. "Okay, so do you know a guy named Chuck?" I prodded. "Little older, seriously blue eyes. Laughs a lot, then wishes he hadn't. Not sure if he's married. Cops don't wear wedding rings, did you know that? Gives too much away in the field."

"Are you kidding me right now?" She stood back to admire her handiwork, hoping she hadn't contributed to creation of some deluded long-lashed monster fantasizing about a future in law enforcement.  "You've been there for, what, two weeks and suddenly you're Mariska Hargitay?" 

"Well, I am an actress," I said. "You want to play a cop, all you've got to do is act like one."

"You can prance around town in a meat dress all you want, but that don't make you Lady Gaga." I heard her snap a few frames with her camera and reflexively crossed my legs. "Trust me," she warned, "you don't want nothing to do with any of those guys."

"Why not?

"I said trust me."

"Rita? Why can't I open my eyes?"

"Jesus Christ, you're swelling up like crazy. Hang on." She ran to get the manual as my eyelids began to grow to the size of peaches. By the time she broke down and got me dressed, dropping me alone outside the emergency room and taking off for work, nobody was sure whether the bonding glue or the overdose of liquid remover had caused such a severe allergic reaction.


What happened next was all such bad timing -- losing my vision for three days straight, having to call in sick, getting hit with a nineteen hundred dollar hospital bill I had no legit way to cover. What's that they say about desperate times calling for desperate measures? Considering the things I'd already begun to see in and around Hollywood Division -- most especially about myself --  part of me wishes I'd stayed blind forever.

7. Another Dead Sunset Stripper

There was nothing original about a dead hooker on Sunset Strip. They would show up on scattered mornings like my grandma's day lilies, causing an early stir around Hollywood Division, not much to look at by sundown.

What was unusual about the latest case I sat transcribing late one night was the fact that our guys had nabbed the suspect red handed in the act of dismembering the corpse and packing her in a suitcase to catch the next Greyhound bus out of town.

Another bizarre twist was that the victim was my roommate, Rita. I didn't know this at the time, thank God, as I scrambled to assemble her killer's arrest file while wearing a pair of clean panties I'd borrowed from her just a few hours earlier in a pinch. There had been no way to identify the victim, and Rita didn't look much like herself in the crime scene photos. It would be some time after she went missing before I connected all the dots, and it wouldn't have done her any good, me losing my head just when she needed a friend to do right by her without knowing it. Sometimes it's good when smart isn't your thing. Makes you the last person to end up with too much information.

Normally I'd be working alone in back with a wicked case of the yawns, another police issue pencil pusher transcribing burglary and shoplifting reports droning from my head phones. The station was all abuzz that night, though, with normally expressionless gumshoes running around the joint like their hair was on fire. They seemed to be looking at me, of all people, to organize their witness statements and field notes on what would for sure be an open and shut case. Crazy how things tend to go the most wrong when you're most determined to get it all right.

Though the arresting officer, Muñoz, Mark, Badge Number 7162, who'd been first on the scene, was getting huge props from the crazy crush of press camped outside, I couldn't help noting he didn't seem to know the difference between there, their and they're on his incident report. Not that I was ever all up in that grammar and usage crap, but hello, it's called spell check -- you might want to start with the correct plurals and possessives when opening a high profile homicide investigation. Matter of fact, it might have been those little mistakes -- undotted i's, criss-crossed t's -- that made me take a second look at any of it. The D.A. loves paperwork about as much as much as cops hate it, which is why a monkey could have done my job of making sure the file was in order.


It wasn't. Obviously, that's where the trouble started.

Poor Rita. Whatever she'd gotten herself into, she didn't deserve to end up like that. Imagine getting hacked up with a buzz saw in some flea bag motel on the northeast corner of Hollywood and Franklin, with nobody on the case but the dumbest blonde you ever met.

8. Miranda Rights and Wrongs

It wasn't the murder of another no-name stripper causing all the excitement in and around LAPD Hollywood Division, but rather the identity of her killer, Dr. James Dean "J.D." Hollister, a perfectly respectable, twenty-eight-year-old orthopedic surgery resident at UCLA who'd been apprehended in a motel room during the highly skillful removal of her head.

According to Nancy Grace -- who couldn't stop yakking about the guy if she'd been the one whose face and body were found in two separate rooms --  Hollister had sailed through Harvard on a full scholarship. Working alone by a desktop TV shrieking "shocking new updates!" from "reliable, inside sources!" I learned that Hollister -- in custody just a floor above me -- had gone on to graduate with honors from Johns Hopkins Medical School and perform the first successful hand re-attachment surgery in the U.S. Engaged to be married to a former Miss U.S.A. and self-made dot com millionairess, he had surmounted overwhelming odds, having survived a childhood bout of mumps that rendered him totally deaf. 

What I'm getting at with that last tidbit of information regarding the subject's hearing problem is that anybody looking for someone to blame for what happened next might want to start with Nancy Grace.

"I'm deaf," Hollister had told Officer Muñoz, who kicked in his motel room door, gun drawn, after responding to a call from a pair of lusty Swedish guests whose love making was repeatedly interrupted by the squeal of a chain saw. Though Hollister had only uttered those two simple words, I came across a copy of the blood-smeared, hand-written note he traded back and forth with officers from there. "I'm innocent," he scrawled, obviously a comedian as well as a deaf-mute, considering he'd just been ordered to drop Rita's head. "Call my lawyer."

"You're under arrest," Muñoz scribbled, placing him into custody. Though the officer was careful to emphasize that he read the suspect his rights at that point, what was glaringly missing from the report, I suddenly noticed -- to my complete horror -- was a shred of evidence the suspect had heard them.

Hey, I'm no genius, but seriously, dude? The ADA implications alone were enough to blow the whole freaking case out of the water -- don't get me started on a little thing called the United States Constitution. Oh, hell yes I've heard of it, I took the GED! No idea who Miranda was, but that chick had some damn rights for chrissake. I slammed shut the case file, to discover the captain standing in the shadows, flicking that signature Zippo to sneak a cigarette. "Rough night," he said, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke.

"You scared me, Chuck."

"Captain," he corrected me. "I'm only Chuck with the lights out." That didn't sound as sexy as last time he said it. Now, it occurred to me, it might have been some kind of a challenge, or even the teeniest, tiniest little bud of a threat. Or maybe I just imagined all of that. Like I say, he seemed to have that effect on me, fantastically hypnotic. Sue me, the guy was hot. Smoking hot. Try being a bad actress forced to answer to a blue-eyed boss with a big, shiny badge and a whole lot of gun on his hip.

Totally flustered, more unsure than ever whether to kiss him or call a cop, I managed to reach around him and flip out the light. "You're not going to want to hear this," I whispered conspiratorially, my breath hot in his ear. "But something's wrong here, Chuck."

9. Nothing Says I Love You Like a Monogrammed Snatch

Not until her body parts could be reassembled for possible identification would Margarita Martin -- known in stripper circles as "Strawberry Margarita" after her auburn locks and salty humor -- be best remembered as a soulless social climber with a big, fake rack and a nasty drug habit. When I met Rita, though, she was just another fresh-faced Hollywood hopeful like me, hot off the bus from nowhere. She arrived with a rare bankable skill beyond her good looks and charm. "How's your pussy looking?" she asked by way of introduction, as we stood in a snaking line leading to some artsy-fartsy, ninety-nine-seat theater nobody went to anyway. "You up for some free deforestation?"

Fancying myself an up and coming starlet, I already sensed the potential value in honing that particular instrument. Turns out you get to know a lot about a girl while lying with your knees spread and feet together as she fingers your lady flower with hot wax. "Grow out your pubes next time and I'll do you a fuzzy heart," she boasted."We could even dye it pink. Meow."

She was also hoping to master pubic calligraphy in time for Valentine's Day. "Nothing says I love you like a monogrammed snatch," she promised. I told her I still hadn't gotten over my old boyfriend back in Petaluma, where he was hoping to open a body shop, even though he'd lost our entire life savings during a bachelor trip to Vegas. "Goddamn greedy strippers," she said, with eerie foreshadowing. "I say go ahead and bleed a guy dry, but hands off his bitch, bitch." Now there's a girl with scruples, I thought.

We became fast friends, making road trips south, using Rita's few words of Spanish to locate Mexican Phen-Fen we could peddle around at auditions. Waving us back across inspection in our tiny bikinis, damp towels sailing up from our waists as we blew them wet kisses, those poor bastards at border patrol couldn't have formed a reasonable objection at gunpoint. Oh, big deal if the stuff did turn out to blow up your heart -- it was still legal in places like Canada and Switzerland, and pretty much everywhere except Beverly Hills, where it was most sorely needed.

"Forget about that, we're on a schedule," Rita said, tapping her Hello Kitty watch. "We got bills to pay and dreams to chase before our asses fall." Every bit a pair of perfect nines in a town overrun by prom queens overplaying our hands, we bucked some high highs and low lows to cash in even the occasional chip. An auto show hostess gig there, a non-union Law Offices of Larry H. Parker commercial there. "If I'm not supposed to be an actress," Rita slurred another drunken night after another power agent she stopped screwing stopped returning her calls, "Who am I supposed to be?" 

I can't pinpoint the exact moment she gave up. Maybe it was a chicken and egg thing, the drugs and the demoralization, but we were barely into our twenties by the time she'd fallen from casting call, to booty call, to call girl, to drug-addled lap dancer grabbing up dollar tips at Starbutts. She always seemed to be working some alternative scheme on the side, however sketchy. I heard she'd been going to Mexico alone, bringing back more than diet pills, but I figured that was her business -- and one of us had to pay the rent.

Me, I ended up doing nights here alone, signing off on a botched homicide report -- all because the strange, new boss I'd fallen secretly in love with told me it was time to choose a side in life, the right one or the wrong one. "You'll have to figure that one out yourself," he said on his way out, casually popping a Lifesaver. "Because this conversation never happened." I'd been surviving this smoggy, gray area otherwise known as Hollywood for so long I had no idea which way to turn without some big, shadowy cop to lay down the law for me. It shouldn't come as a surprise that once I discovered the victim had a face, a name and a past I shared, I might have to re-evaluate my definition of right, wrong and Rita.