Hollywood Tough (2002) (5 page)

"Thanks, Skipper," Shane said.

"Good to have you back on the team. Anything else I can do for you?"

Then Shane remembered Nicky Marcella's request. "Yeah, Cap . . . one thing. It's a favor for an old C
. I
. of mine. Guy used to give me some good felony bait."

"Yeah?" There was a warning in the way Haley said that one word. Cops didn't like doing favors for civilians, even confidential informants.

He told the captain what Nicky wanted--how he had a star-maker part for Carol White, but couldn't find her.

"Movies?" Haley said. "We gonna give this girl her big break?"

"Something like that. Only you're not supposed to say `movies,' you're supposed to say 'film.' "

"How 'bout we say 'bullshit'?"

"Really." Shane grinned as Haley sat back down, turned to his computer, and started pushing keys.

Haley finished inputting her name, keyed it to the Traffic Division, and waited while the computer searched.

"Nothing in DMV registrations or traffic," he said. "Maybe she doesn't have a car."

"Well, while we're at it, try the main arrest computer downtown. If she's a friend of my old C
. I
., she might have something pending in the courts."

Haley raised an eyebrow but turned back to the computer.

Shane was looking at Bud Haley's back. The captain was a fit, gray-haired man, probably in his late fifties, but he looked much younger. He had smile lines around his eyes and mouth, reminding Shane more of a friendly scoutmaster than a cop. All of a sudden, the screen lit up. There were at least twenty entries on the arrest log.

"Hello, hello," Haley said. "Carol White's been busy."

Shane came around the desk and looked over his shoulder.

"Pavement princess," Haley said. "She's been down six times for prostitution in the last six months . . . two stretches in Sybil Brand--short jolts--first a month, then eighteen weeks. Let's see . . . We also have a pandering on film beef from two years back, so she was doing some porno loops for somebody. This your actress?"

"I don't know, maybe it's another girl."

"Carolyn White. She hooks under the name Crystal Glass." He leaned back reflectively. "Pretty good street name, but my favorite's still a girl we kept busting in North Hollywood, named Lotta Pussy." Haley hit a button and Carol's yellow sheet started printing out on the laser jet across the office. Then the captain went to the last arrest report and pulled it up on his screen. "Last place of business is a motel down in Rampart called the Ho-Tell Motel. Her pimp's named Paul 'Black' Mills. His arrest record is probably a list of female assault charges that got dropped before court." As he spoke, he was punching up Paul Mills on the computer, and soon, two pages of withdrawn complaints popped up on the screen. "And the beat goes on," Haley sighed. "Carol White tested positive for drugs, six out of six arrests, so this girl's probably not gonna be at next year's Academy Awards. She's headed for a viewing room at Forest Lawn instead."

Shane walked across the office, picked up the yellow sheet, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

"Anything else?" Haley asked.

"Yeah, can you punch up Farrell Champion?" Shane asked. His heart was beating hard in his chest. It surprised him that he would fire all of his own adrenal jets at the idea of a computer run on Farrell Champion. He immediately knew that it was because he was breaking his promise to Alexa, but his gut told him there was something wron
g t
here.

"The movie guy?" Haley was saying. "The big-time Oscar-winning producer?"

"He hasn't won an Oscar, just been nominated." "Right . . . and he's the one who wants to hire this strawberry, this Carol White person, and make her a star?" "No, it's an unrelated matter."

"Jesus, Shane . . ." But for some reason Haley spun his chair around and started punching in Farrell Champion's name, probably because he was just as interested as Shane in knowing what kind of trouble the famous celebrity producer might have gotten himself into.

The screen came back empty.

"Clean as Crisco," Haley said, and swiveled around to look up at Shane. "Anybody else? How 'bout Tiger Woods or Minnie Mouse?"

Shane had been thinking about asking for a run on Nicky Marcella, but decided he'd worn out his welcome. He'd do it himself Monday after he went back on duty. He smiled, then picked up his gun and badge.

"Thanks for the good fitness rep, Skipper."

"You earned it," Haley said.

Shane was quickly out the door of the captain's office. He stopped at an empty homicide desk, picked up a phone, and dialed an LAPD extension. A woman's voice answered the phone. "Records and Identification Division."

"Is Lee Fineburg around?" Shane asked.

"Fineburg . That's Records Services Section, Special Duties. One moment please. I'll switch you."

In a few seconds he heard Lee Fineburg's voice. "Lee? It's Shane Scully." *

"Shane, you is da man." Fineburg's voice grinned over the line. Shane pictured the skinny geek who was also the LAPD racquetball champion. "I need a quick favor, and it has to stay covered."

"Covert ops. Love it."

"I just ran a guy named Farrell Champion through the regular mainframe downtown and he came back empty." "No criminal beefs . . . okay."

"No. Not just no criminal beefs, no nothing. No parking tickets, no fender benders, nothing. A blank screen."

"Kinda unusual," Lee said. "Most people at least have a loud party once in a while."

"Would you do me a favor and run a deep background on this guy? Start five years ago. He sort of appeared out of nowhere in the late nineties, and there are all of these romantic stories about where he came from and what he did before Hollywood. Gunrunner in Libya is one I remember reading, and a diamond hunter in South Africa, bullshit stuff, probably planted by studio flacks, but it keeps showing up in magazines."

"We're talking about the movie guy, right?"

"Right. And maybe you could run him through NCIC in Washington. . . ."

"Sounds juicy."

"Just a precaution. I'm sure it's nothing."

"Okay, I'll call when I get something. Your Venice number still good?"

"Yep. Same cell, too."

"Got it all on my PalmPilot so I gotcha covered." Shane got into his car and drove down to Rampart looking for the Ho-Tell Motel on Adams.

He found it on the corner of Adams and Gilbert. It was one of those uninteresting boxlike structures that had gone up all over L
. A
. in the fifties, under the name of "clean-line" architecture. It had a sloping roof, stucco walls, and a big faded sign out front that read: HO-TELL MOTEL, and under that FREE CHEWING GUM. The chewing gum was for hookers after oral sex. "Free chewing gum" was street code for a hot-cot motel. The sign also meant you could rent rooms by the hour.

Shane pulled into the motel parking lot and got out. The lot was half-empty, but it was only eleven A
. M
. He walked toward the office's large plate-glass window, which was protected by steel bars and had burglar alarm tape across the bottom. Shane looked inside. The office was deserted, so he opened the door and entered. The room had one vinyl couch and an end table with a pottery lamp that was pushed against the wall. The lampshade was broken and sat at
a j
aunty angle, like a drunk sleeping it off in the corner.

Shane rang the little bell. A man with an Arabic-looking face and skeletal demeanor came out of the back room to stare at him. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette.

"You want room? Come by hour, day, or week," the man said in broken English.

"I'm looking for Carol White. She sometimes uses the name Crystal Glass. I understand she frequents this motel for business."

"Carol White . . . No . . . no . . . not got a Carol White." He didn't check the register book, so he knew her.

Now Shane had the big cop decision. What wallet do I go for? The badge or the billfold? The badge could clam this guy up because he was renting rooms to whores. The billfold would probably produce a better result but cost Shane money; money he wasn't sure he could get back from Nicky. Finally, he reached for his billfold, pulled out a twenty, and laid it on the counter.

The Arab looked down at the Jackson as if it were a dead cockroach the maids had missed.

Shane added another twenty and then a third. Sixty bucks was his limit. There was a market for information in L
. A
.

"Hey, Abdul," Shane said, leaning in and making his voice hard, "are you trying to piss me off and destroy my cooperative spirit?"

"No sir. Crystal, she a friend?" .

"Right. She performs services on me." The man stared at Shane deadpan. "Do I have to spell it out?"

"Maybe across street on corner. She got corner there, she not there, you try Snake Charmers Bar next door. Sometimes she go rest it there."

"Thank you."

Then the Arab did a David Copperfield on the three twenties; they disappeared before Shane's very eyes.

She wasn't on her corner, but Shane found Crystal Glass in the Snake Charmers Bar next door.

Chapter
5.

The Snake Charmers had wood floors, a small stage painted black, and a bar on the far side of the room. When Shane came through the door, an African-American dancer with a pockmarked complexion was standing in the center of the stage doing a slow coffee grind, while Tina Turner sang "Tiny Dancer" from the old-fashioned Wurlitzer. An overweight blond stripper sat in a metal chair with a towel tucked under her armpits, watching her colleague with listless, dead-eyed indifference. Morning dancers in nude clubs were on the bottom rung in show business, just one step from unemployment. There was a glass full of quarters on top of the jukebox; each dancer would put several in and pick her songs, then do her set and sit down. Shane looked around, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see a few people sitting in the imitation leather booths that lined the walls. The windows had been boarded up and painted over to keep it dark inside. Shane walked up to the bartender, who had burly shoulders, a shaved head, and was watching a baseball game with the volume turned off on a small black-and-white TV set that was just below the bar top.

"Is Carol White around?" he asked the man, who looked up, immediately making Shane as a cop. The bartender was in his mid-forties and bald. He had green tattoos on his arms the kind you get in prison because the only colo
r a
vailable in the joint was the green institutional ink supplied by the government to the penal system. The man didn't answer Shane, but looked back down at the TV.

"How about Crystal Glass?" Shane persisted. "Sometimes she uses that name."

The bartender kept ignoring him, so Shane reached out and slapped the ex-con hard across the side of the head. That brought him up fast.

"What the fuck?!" the man snarled.

"Sorry," Shane said. "You had a big yellow wasp about to land on your bald head there."

"Hey, this ain't the fuckin' police department, and I ain't four-one-one."

"This bar ain't gonna be open much longer either, unless you give me a little respect."

The ex-con glowered at him, flexing his right hand, which had the word fuck tattooed across the first four knuckles. Classy guy.

"Eat me, cop."

Shane reached out and again slapped him hard across the side of his head. It was an open-handed slap that made more noise than damage. Suddenly everybody in the bar stopped talking and was watching. The stripper had stopped in the middle of her grind and stood in the center of the stage, her breasts sagging, hands on chunky hips. Everybody, including Shane, wondered what would happen next.

"Lemme ask you one more time before I go through this place and confiscate everybody's bag of sparkle," Shane said. "Is Crystal Glass in here?"

It was a hard moment for the bartender. He didn't like getting punk-slapped in front of his dancers, but he knew that if Shane wanted, he could make a mess of the morning business. Finally he nodded at the far booth on the right, and Shane smiled and put down a twenty.

"For your trouble."

He turned and walked up to the booth the bartender had indicated. The girl sitting there was hard to evaluate at first. From a distance, in the low light, she seemed quite beautiful. Long blond hair and a luscious body. She was dressed in a low-cut minidress, no jewelry, and some eye glitter. But the closer he got to her, the more this changed. It was as if someone was turning a time-distance dial on his first-impression meter, until as he was sliding into the booth, she looked old and used up. He could see the tangles in her hair, the droopy eyes, and the extra weight that was hanging from under her arms. Grime caked her wrists, while unhealthy skin and this morning's oozing track mark completed the depressing picture. Up close, Carol White was tarnished, dirty, and aging fast. She projected carnal desperation. But the remnants of her looks were still there. Like a child peeking around a curtain, he could still see the residue of teenage beauty.