18. Paparazzo Don't Preach

You know you're in trouble when your only friend left in the world is named Attila, and he claims to come from a long line of Huns -- as if being genetically incapable of taking no for an answer is anything to brag about. Atti Hunnic was a freelance paparazzo from somewhere or another in Eastern Europe, without a trace of an accent to back up his long-winded stories about reporting from Budapest before the wall came down. "Wait, why was there a wall?" I'd ask, suspiciously. "Go back and start again." Always a shady character in my book, Atti had grown more lathered up than ever over me of all people becoming his "reliable unnamed source" rocking the increasingly messy "Dismembered Dancer" scandal inside Hollywood Division. As both the victim's oldest friend and a police employee who'd unknowingly worked on the early investigation, I was the big story everyone else was missing. Hellbent on convincing me of this, Atti met me at Big Wangs to watch a bunch of know-it-all lawyers duke it out on Nancy Grace. "See how the defense is already poking holes in the prosecution's case?" he'd say, swiping Buffalo sauce from his face like a vampire at happy hour. "You, my friend, are a hole."

"Okay, a, I'm not your friend. And b, I'm not a hole."

"Take a look in the mirror, for Chrissake -- you're a blondeshell waiting to happen." A shocked and indignant Jane Velez-Mitchell barked, "This! Just! In! The pedicurist claiming to service every top stripper in Hollywood is hawking a new line of nail polish called Run, Run Rita!" Atti totally lost it, beer foaming from his mouth. "Everybody else is getting paid -- the mother, the madame, the funeral director -- hell, Netflix bought pay-per-view rights to the verdict. Are you absolutely sure you don't know anything?"

"I just ink and stamp," I lied. "Sometimes black, sometimes green. The occasional splash of red to wake up somebody in the D.A's office."

"You know something," he insisted yet again. "You just don't know you know it." The defense was already playing both sides of the fence -- shoddy police work and intricate police conspiracy. How could we be a bunch of buffoons and a clan of evil geniuses all at the same time? "Juries like to be confused, makes it easier to throw in the towel and acquit," was Atti's opinion. "They're already calling it a rush to judgment."

"How long are you supposed to wait once you've ordered the freak to drop the redhead's head?" Given the gruesome details around the arrest, it wouldn't instill much confidence were that showy brother-sister defense team to get the charges reduced to sexual abuse of a corpse. Though investigators refused to release details to back up Hollister's ridiculous claim that Rita was dead by the time he found her, the apparent mob hit on her landlord only helped muddy the waters. "Something doesn't smell right there," Atti insisted. "Like it or not, babe, you're the missing link."

"Will you stop with that already? I told you I never met any landlord." Okay so I might have seen him around, but believe me, there weren't any formal introductions. What was the point of getting into all that when I was already in trouble with Internal Affairs? "Failing to report suspicion of criminal activity in my place of residence," I huffed. "What could possibly be criminal about purchasing diet pills with a perfectly valid prescription from that nice horse doctor in Tijuana?"

"You're a hole," Atti repeated. "You know what happens to girls who know too much?"

"I'm not smart enough to know too much!" I freely admitted. "The thing is, cops have this way of pointing the finger back at you when you start asking too many questions. Do you really think I'm in some kind of danger?"

"Do the math, blondie." He reached for the check, like always -- though I started to wonder if he was keeping a tab against some huge imaginary payday. "You need to start writing things down.  Get yourself a journal, keep it somewhere safe."

"How about I post it on the internet?" I said sarcastically.

"Love that!" he practically sang. "Let's keep it anonymous, though, slowly build up a following before, boom! We go viral."

"I was kidding, Atti." He was dead serious. "Keep a recording device handy. Nothing showy, mind you."

"You mean wear a wire? I don't even like wearing underwires!" I trailed him into the blinding sun overexposing Cahuenga Boulevard. "Besides, what if somebody sees it? When you're built like me there's a lot of talk about what you've got going on underneath."

"Information is power, kiddo. Come on, I know a great little spy store, very popular with the spurned West Side wife looking for dirt on some fat cat. How are you set for cash?"

For the record, I never had any intention of being on that guy's payroll. I'd turned him down flat when my job was the worst thing I had to lose. Now the idea of spilling my guts to the wrong person about the wrong thing seemed to carry way worse consequences than a high interest credit card. I didn't know who to trust any more than I knew why that suddenly felt so terrifying. I hadn't had a lick of access to the investigation since the day I handed over that botched arrest report. If that infuriating prick of a captain -- who seemed to have lost all interest in me these days -- had done something to fix it, he certainly hadn't shared it with me.

And so what if Rita's landlord was in with the mob?  Nobody had come sniffing around for the rent since Rita's mother finished personally turning over the joint. "Where's the money?" she snorted. "Where's the big fancy car and the pricey jewelry from all the rich boyfriends? What have you girls been doing out here all these years, making tacos?"

"Atti, I don't want your money," I said. "Just get my back -- should that ever become necessary -- and we'll call it even."

"Suit yourself, blondie." He hopped into a black Escalade he used like a paid assassin to shoot celebrities from behind darkened windows. Puttering behind in the old heap of a Mustang my cheating ex-boyfriend never finished restoring, I knew it was time to put on my big girls pants. I had no idea the kind of trouble I was in, but getting out alive meant relying on my brains, as crazy as that felt to a ditz like me. Like the man said, looks fade, but dead is forever.