Lee Goldberg: McGrave

A man's status in Hollywood is measured by several key indices-the sticker price of his car, the cup size of his lover's boobs, the square footage of his property, and the value of whatever he happens to collect.

By those measures, business manager Ernie Wallengren is a very important man.

He has several German luxury cars, the cheapest of which costs $120,000. His wife has enormous designer boobs and, to hedge his bets, so does his mistress. His home in the Hollywood Hills (once owned by a movie star with a raging fetish for obese women dressed in latex) is 11,500 square feet of garish excess, with more Doric columns than the Parthenon. And his collection of ceramic antiquities, much of it looted from the Middle East and bought on the black market, is world-class, if artistically unappreciated by its owner, whose personal taste runs more towards power-tool calendars. Wallengren collects the stuff just to have a valuable collection of something.

He protects his investment with alarms, cameras, and round-the-clock personal security, supervised by Frank Russell, a forty-four-year-old ex-LAPD detective with a waistline measurement that matches his age and a new set of teeth to replace the ones he's lost to cigarettes, Scotch, and a well-placed kick by a 210-pound tranny, a blow that had actually been aimed at his then partner, John McGrave.

It went down like this: the transsexual drug dealer took offense when McGrave happened to say, while making the arrest, that it would take more than implants, surgery, and all the estrogen on earth to make him look like a woman, much less one that anybody would want to fuck.

McGrave has a way with people.

If Russell holds a grudge against McGrave for taking that tranny's kick, he isn't showing it tonight. He's invited McGrave over to the Wallengrens' mansion and is showing him the very old and outrageously expensive pots, plates, and cups that are on pedestals, in glass display cases, and in lighted niches all over the house.

Russell is wearing an expensive suit and shiny leather shoes. He needs to dress that way only if the Wallengrens are around, which they're not, so he's just showing off how much he makes, which would probably have been more effective if he'd left the price tags on his clothes, because McGrave doesn't know shit about fashion.

That much is obvious from what McGrave has on.

He's wearing a leather jacket that looks like it has been stained by the dribbles of a thousand greasy meals, dragged behind a car for miles, blasted with a shotgun, slashed with knives, and set on fire.

Because it has.

McGrave is wearing the story of his life over an aloha shirt and a. 357 Magnum in a shoulder holster.

He's also got on the same pair of Levi's that he's been wearing all week and a dirty pair of Adidas that he's worn every day for months.

The underwear and socks are clean because McGrave never knows if he might get laid, and there's no woman, whether she's a princess or a crack whore, who isn't turned off by dirty underwear.

Russell and McGrave are standing in front of a weathered, pitted, colorless clay pot on a pedestal.

"Impressive, isn't it?" Russell says.

McGrave squints at it. "What is it?"

"The newest addition to Wallengren's collection. A three-thousand-year-old chamber pot."

"So it's a toilet," McGrave says.

"It's a rare antiquity that's worth almost half a million dollars."

McGrave shakes his head. "You gave up being a cop to guard King Tut's crapper?"

"I'm making three times as much as I did as a detective, and I'm not permanently crippled or dead, which puts me way, way ahead of all of your previous partners. And I've got a kick-ass dental plan."

Russell flashes an overly broad smile to show off his set of unnaturally straight and white teeth. They look like porcelain.

"Nice," McGrave says. "You brush those with Ty-D-Bol?"

"Very funny."

"Where is everybody?"

"The Wallengrens are in Scotland, buying a castle."

"What for?"

"I don't know, maybe so they can spend their summers taking bagpipe lessons and fishing for the Loch Ness Monster," Russell says and leads McGrave through the living room towards a set of double doors at the end of a long hallway. "The point is, half of their antiquities collection will be moved there and they're going to need someone to protect it all. You could be that man."

"No," McGrave says. "I couldn't."

Russell opens the double doors to reveal a tiny room filled with flat-screen monitors showing various angles of the interior and exterior of the house. One of the screens shows a football game on ESPN. The game is a lot more interesting to McGrave than the chamber pot.

"It's a great gig," Russell says. "Just think, you could be living in a castle on a lake with a speedboat at the dock, a sports car in the garage, a full wine cellar, and nobody around half the time. You'll live like Scottish royalty. King Sean Fucking Connery. No more days and nights on the streets, no more dealing with gangbangers, junkies, whores, pushers, and pimps."

"There goes my social life."

"I'm serious, John."

"So am I," McGrave says.

"This could be a fresh start for you. You can walk away from the job before they throw you out."

"Do you know something that I don't?"

Russell looks at him incredulously. "They call you Tidal Wave McGrave, for Christ's sake."

"Because they love me."

"Because you destroy everything and everyone in your path. It adds up. And you can bet the brass are keeping a running tab. Pretty soon they're going to decide that your clearance rate isn't worth the cost."

"So you think it would be better for me to quit now and spend my days in a closet like this."

"It's a command center," Russell says. "And you'd be in Scotland, not here. It's a great opportunity, buddy."

"What about my weekends with my daughter?"

"For one thing, she can't stand you. For another, she's going off to college in a few months. Those weekends are going to be history soon anyway."

"You've given this a lot of thought."

"We were partners. We're supposed to watch each other's backs."

McGrave nods, watching the game. "So this great opportunity to go to another continent to protect stone potties has nothing to do with you banging my ex-wife."

Russell freezes and blinks hard. He didn't see that coming. "It's not what you think."

"You aren't banging her?"

"What I mean is, it's a relationship."

"So you're banging her all the time," McGrave says, turning to Russell.

"C'mon, John, let's be reasonable about this."

"Thanks for the job offer, Frank. But I think I'll pass. I'm glad to hear about the swell dental plan, though, because I think you're gonna need it."

McGrave smiles and shoulders past Russell, who tenses up, as if expecting a blow. But McGrave keeps on walking.

Doesn't mean the blow won't come later, and Russell knows it.

Russell closes the doors, turns around, and watches the security monitors as his former partner strides out of the house, gets into his police-issue Crown Vic in the cobblestone motor court, and drives off.

Only then does Russell relax.

He sits down in a chair, takes out his cell, turns his back to the monitors, and calls McGrave's ex-wife.

"This is gonna get ugly," he says.

McGrave speeds down the hill in his car, passing a Comcast cable service van parked on the street and a repair guy working at an open junction box, where he's plugged some kind of iPad-size video device into the wiring.

The repair guy is wearing an earpiece transmitter and looking intently at his iPad, where several windows are showing either an interior or exterior video feed of the Wallengren mansion.

"I'm in," the guy says in German. "Switching to recorded feed now."