It wasn’t that the aggressive paparazzi were interested in shooting photos of the director, but Brangelina, moving fast, had emerged from the crowd right behind the Ressler foursome. Things got very unruly very quickly, and the frightened UCLA coed began whimpering when an obese paparazzo with a camera hanging from a strap around his neck and a Styrofoam cup in his hand backed against her, mashing her into Ressler’s hired limousine.
Nate had stepped in then with pap pressing on all sides and hooked a low elbow very hard into the belly of the fat guy, causing him to let out a woooo, double over, and spew Jamba Juice all over other paparazzi. Nobody in that crush of nighttime fans, including other pap, had seen the surreptitious elbow chop, and even the groaning paparazzo didn’t know what had hit him. But Rudy Ressler saw it, as did one of the security aides of the LAPD chief of police. The aide waited by the chief’s ominous-looking SUV with its dark-tinted windows.
When the Ressler party got into their limo, the director turned and said to Nate, “Thank you for helping us, Officer. If there’s anything I can ever do for you…” And he handed Nate a business card.
Hollywood Nate said, “You may regret that rash remark, sir.” And he took the badge wallet from his pocket to show Rudy Ressler his SAG card, and said, “At the station they call me Hollywood Nate because of this.”
“I’ll be damned,” the director said. He laughed out loud, turning to his companions and saying, “This officer is a SAG member. Only in Hollywood!”
“Have a good evening, sir,” Nate said with a hopeful smile.
“Call me when you get a chance, Officer. I’m serious,” the director replied, looking at Hollywood Nate appraisingly this time.
Before the limousine pulled away, Nate heard Rudy Ressler say to the driver, “We’re dropping Ms. Franchon at her sorority house and then you can take the rest of us to Mrs. Brueger’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Do you remember where it is from last time?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Ressler,” the driver said.
The limousine drove off, leaving the other cars blowing horns and flashing their high beams at the inevitable traffic jam, and the paparazzi still snapping pictures. Hollywood Nate decided to take a better look at the chief’s SUV and at the LAPD security aide standing beside it, who looked familiar. When he got closer, he recognized the wide-bodied, balding, mustachioed Latino cop in the dark three-piece business suit. It was Lorenzo “Snuffy” Salcedo, an old friend and classmate who had served with Nate in 77th Street Division when they were boots fresh out of the police academy, as well as later, when Snuffy had worked patrol at Hollywood Station for two years.
Snuffy had served nine years in the navy before becoming a cop and was ten years older than Nate. But he wasn’t showing the effects of his forty-eight years. He had competed in power lifting in the Police Olympics and had a chest like a buffalo. Snuffy had acquired his nickname from his habit of tucking a pinch of Red Man chewing tobacco inside his lower lip and spitting tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup. Some cops mistakenly thought that he was dipping snuff. Nate remembered that their training officers at 77th had threatened to make Snuffy drink the contents of his cup if they caught him, but at Hollywood Station, once he was off probation, he’d kept his lip loaded most of the time. He was always the division champ when it came to chatter and gossip, in a profession where gossip was coin of the realm.
Back then, their late sergeant, whom they’d called the Oracle, was often tasked by the watch commander to deal with Snuffy’s droopy ’stash. But the Oracle would simply say to him, “Zapata is dead, Snuffy. Trim the tips off that feather duster next time you’re clipping your nails.”
Snuffy seldom did and the Oracle didn’t really care. Then Nate thought of how much he missed the Oracle, who’d died of a massive heart attack on the Walk of Fame in front of Hollywood Station. The stars in marble and brass on that part of Wilcox Avenue were not there to commemorate movie stars but as memorials to the Hollywood Division coppers who had been killed in the line of duty.
Nate’s reminiscing stopped when Snuffy Salcedo left the LAPD chief’s SUV at the curb and jogged toward the red carpet parking area, arms outstretched. Under the mustache his toothy grin was glinting arctic white from all the lights on Hollywood Boulevard.
Nate said, “Snuffy Salcedo, I presume?”
Snuffy said, “Hollywood Nate Weiss! Where the fuck you been and how are you? Abrazos, ’mano!”
He gave Nate a rib-crushing embrace, and up close Nate saw that bulge under Snuffy’s lower lip.
Snuffy said, “I saw you spear that chubby pap, you rascal. Glad to see you still got the chops you learned back in the day with me.” Then he did an Elvis impression and sang, “Down in the ghet-to!”
Nate said, “I see you still got that revolting wad of manure inside your lip. Does the big boss let you drive with a cup of tobacco juice in the cup holder?”
“It disappears when Mister shows up,” Snuffy said.
Many of the veteran LAPD cops had never accepted this chief of police, the second one to be imported from the East Coast since the Rodney King riots. This chief had come seven years ago, and when the coppers referred to him privately, it was not with “Chief” before his surname but with “Mister,” the ultimate invective, meaning that he was just another imported civilian politician and could never be a real LAPD copper.
“So how do you like driving for this one?” Nate asked.
“Have you ever had a colonoscopy?” Snuffy said.
“Why’ve you stayed in Metro all these years, Snuffy?” Nate asked. “Aren’t you sick of it yet?”
“The overtime money driving for this one has been keeping me where I am,” Snuffy said. “Mister is the first LAPD chief to need security aides everywhere but in his bathtub. You’d think a guy that’s been married as many times as he has woulda picked a babe that cooks this time around, but there’s no food in their house and they go out every night to eat. On his weekend days off, he even needs us with him. We’re a full-service detail with this one. There’s five of us security aides and we’re all getting richer than Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.”
“I had a feeling his Irish twinkle might mask a gloomy Celtic interior,” said Nate.
Snuffy Salcedo said, “In addition to an ego that makes him think the MetLife blimp should have his face on it instead of Snoopy’s, I think Mister’s got something like OCD. He has a thing about stoplights and he counts them. I might get yelled at if I take a route with too many of them. And he’s obsessed with wiping his face with Kleenex. If there was even half the oil coming out of Mister’s pores that he thinks there is, we wouldn’t need any more imports from Saudi Arabia. Since I don’t have a degree in abnormal psychology, I just concentrate on the overtime money when he’s like that. By the way, did you get married again?”
“Not a chance,” Nate said. “And no kids.”
“You were so lucky her casabas never got to producing dairy products. Me, I’ll be paying for our kids till Jesus returns.”
“Even without kids I know what divorce costs,” Nate said, nodding. “Twelve months of eating Hungry-Man nukeable food until I could afford an occasional lamb chop.”
“I used to call mine RK,” Snuffy said, “because during sex she was about as active as roadkill. Yet she talked me into paying for a boob job for both her and her sister, and she went wild after that. Four new mammaries and I had no access to any of them. I was the boob.”
Nate said, “Me, I’m not gonna marry another Jewish woman no matter what my mother wants. My ex turned scary mean the minute her blood sugar rose with morning orange juice. It took a while after the divorce till she stopped breaking eggs on my car.”