Free Three Ways to Die by Lee Goldberg Page A

trying to get into the industry and didn't know that a "pilot" was TV-speak for a sample episode of a proposed TV show.
    Her name was LeSabre and she was a telemarketer for skin care products. I knew that because Irma started the day by asking everyone to introduce themselves, say what they did for a living, and how they got their ticket.
    A lot of people got ticketed through the mail, nabbed by intersection cameras that caught them running a red light. LeSabre was one of them.
    "I was in the intersection, making a left turn, when the light turned red," LeSabre said. "Everybody knows the rule is three cars."
    "That's the accepted practice, but it's not the law," Irma said. "Like talking on your cell phone during sex."
    It was a joke that made no sense and went a long way towards explaining why Irma was still teaching traffic school instead of starring in a sitcom.
    The guy in the wheelchair was named Morris and he fixed watches. His traffic violation was a D.U.I.
    "You were drunk-driving?" Irma asked incredulously.
    "In my wheelchair," Morris said. "I had a few too many beers and got ticketed weaving in an erratic and dangerous manner outside the boundaries of the crosswalk."
    "And a cop wrote you up for that?" The guy next to me said.
    He had a deeply tanned, pock-marked face and wore a t-shirt with no sleeves, presumably so he could show off his muscles and the tattoo on his right arm of a big-boobed woman with hard nipples.
    "What the officer did was ridiculous, but legal," Irma said. "Like guys who wear toupees."
    Eight more hours of this, I thought. Kill me now.
    "What an asshole," the tattoo guy said.
    Morris nodded. "The judge took pity on me, knocked it down to a minor traffic violation, and let me come here to get it off my record."
    "He should have thrown out the fucking ticket," the tattoo guy shook his head with disgust.
    Irma turned to him. "And you are?"
    "Titus Watkins," he said.
    "What do you do for a living, Titus?"
    "I'm in construction," Titus said.
    "How did you get your ticket?"
    "I got it driving in the car pool lane. Then the cop got me for crossing a single yellow line instead of waiting to exit at a broken white line. Then he cited me for not wearing a seat-belt."
    "How much did the ticket cost?" asked Richie Nakamura, a 16-year-old who was cited doing 50-miles-per-hour on a residential street in his Dad's BMW.
    "Twelve hundred bucks," Titus said.
    "You must have done something to piss the cop off," Richie said.
    "I did a few years in prison for armed robbery," he said. "After that, the cops shit on you forever."
    Irma quickly turned to me, eager to change the subject. She asked me my name and profession.
    "Kevin Dangler, I'm a writer."
    "Books or screenplays?" Irma asked.
    "Both," I said.
    "Anything we would have read or seen?"
    "An episode of VIP ," I said.
    "That show was cancelled five years ago," a lady behind me said. The bitch.
    "Yeah, I know," I said.
    "So what have you written lately?" Irma said.
    "This and that," I said.
    I still liked to think of myself as a writer, but the truth is, the only money I was making at it was as a reporter for The Acorn, which I don't tell people, because it sounds like a kid's magazine with a cartoon squirrel on the cover.
    Actually, that would be a step up.
    The Acorn is a freebie community newspaper in the valley that covers the big stories that the Los Angeles Times and the Daily News are afraid to touch. Like the spat between the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District and the Triunfo Sanitation District over a proposal to share a water storage tank. Or the theft of a portable CD player and case full of John Denver CDS from the passenger seat of an unlocked Mazda 626. Those were my big stories that week.
    Perhaps Irma, who probably spent a lot of time being ashamed of herself, sensed my shame. She dropped the line of questioning and asked me how I got my ticket.
    I told her was caught doing 80 miles-per-hour on the Ventura Freeway and she moved on through the