The New Hollywood Sinkhole

Be that as it may . . . Ford's attorney's, meanwhile, have counter-sued and won a temporary restraining order against Birke, who had been leaving long, threatening messages on Ford's answering machine in the middle of the night as part of his "guerrilla campaign" against the show. An excerpt: "I'm not gonna rest until an illegal-alien family has kicked you out of your house . . . and the school that your kids go to is completely taken over and your kids are thrown into a gulag because they speak English."

Hang on now - can we book these people on Springer?

Death Hollywood StyleClub 7969, at the corner of Santa Monica and Fairfax in West Hollywood, was packed as usual last Friday night. Fridays and Mondays are drag night at the club, and flocks of trannies in full feather turn out for the midnight stage show. The drag revue also draws a large contingent of transsexual prostitutes and their johns, including, until recently, the house celebrity, Atison Seiuli, a.k.a. Shalimar, who was riding with Eddie Murphy in his Land Cruiser when the pair got stopped by the LAPD a year ago this week.

Seiuli died two weeks ago, falling to her death from the roof of her apartment building on South Berendo Street in Koreatown. According to Rampart homicide detectives, Seiuli, wearing only panties and a bra, had locked herself out of her apartment and was trying to lower herself from the roof to her fifth-floor window with a towel tied to a railing. The towel was 6 to 10 inches too short, says Detective Andy Cicoria, and Seiuli fell trying to make the jump. A neighbor found the body on the street directly below Seiuli's apartment at 6:30 a.m., and she was pronounced dead of her injuries at 6:46 a.m. by the paramedics. "I am 100 percent sure it was an accident," says Cicoria.

But among Seiuli's friends and colleagues at Club 7969 there are rumors, and talk of conspiracy. "It was too strange," says Vicky, an ex-hooker turned porno star, who used to work the streets with Seiuli. "A hooker who has survived being raped at gunpoint and threatened with a knife just doesn't slip and fall by accident." Other girls who worked alongside Seiuli - who ask to remain anonymous - say Seiuli claimed to have received threats since her encounter with Murphy last year, warnings that she "keep her mouth shut." Why haven't the cops looked into these things? Vicky wants to know. She can't believe, and the other girls can't either, that a woman who survived a life so dangerous and seedy could die do innocently.

But the evidence on the street where Seiuli died is compelling enough: outside the 5th floor window long fingernail marks are dug into the concrete walls, trailing down the building; further down is long, swooping scape mark where she hit on the way down; then a broken branch on the narrow hedge below. Finally, on the sidewalk a perfect imprint of Seilui's face, a makeup death mask, dark eyebrows, pink cheecks, ruby lips, embedded into the pavement by the blunt force of her fall.

-Edited by Sam Gideon Anson