Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s car is...

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s car is safe for now.

Encino attorney Robert Rentzer had asked county marshals to seize Bradley’s 1987 Oldsmobile in the City Hall garage as payment for $17,000 the city owes one of his clients.

But the marshal’s office said no Thursday, telling the attorney that he needed a writ of mandate--a court order signed by a judge--to collect a judgment against a government agency.

“It has nothing to do” with Bradley, Marshal’s Lt. Charles Hopton explained. “We would treat it the same if it was against someone the marshal’s office didn’t like.”

Rentzer vowed to return as early as next week with the order to take possession of His Honor’s wheels. The attorney is angry because his client won the judgment against the Los Angeles Police Department in July and the city attorney’s office still hasn’t submitted the paper work to the City Council for approval.

The mayor had no comment, a spokesman said Thursday.

And he didn’t need a ride home, either.

East Pasadena resident John Becker showed up at his house Wednesday and discovered, to his surprise, that someone had kicked in his rear door. Becker armed himself with the only weapon he had in his car, a crossbow with arrow, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said. When the intruder slashed at him with a knife, Becker shot him in the shoulder with an arrow.

The intruder escaped, but area hospitals have been advised to be on the lookout for a man with an arrow wound.

You can dine, bank, pick up film, drop off your income-tax check, and even give blood without leaving your car. So the big “DRIVE THRU” sign at a Christmas tree lot near Fox Hills Mall in West Los Angeles seemed to indicate a logical next step. But a worker there said it’s all a misunderstanding. The sign, visible from the San Diego Freeway, merely means you can park on the property. You still have to get out and smell the needles.

The three were landmark nightspots in Los Angeles half a century ago. They’re long gone but their ghosts remain in the signs atop newer restaurants that have taken their names.

- Shanghai Red’s, a respectable eatery in Marina del Rey, is nothing like the San Pedro dive of that name that called itself the roughest waterfront bar in the world. It was run by one Charles Eisenberg, an ex-sailor who had picked up his nickname while running an earlier joint in China. Red, who used to stick a lighted cigarette behind his ear rather than bother with an ashtray, died in 1957, and the Beacon Street bar died with him.

- Tomaine Tommy’s, a sedate restaurant in Long Beach, is a decided contrast to sound-alike Ptomaine Tommy’s, which was a tiny U-shaped counter with a few booths on North Broadway in Lincoln Heights. The proprietor, Tommy De Forest, was credited by many with inventing the “size,” a hamburger adorned with chili and “flowers” (onions). Actors, fighters and others squeezed inside for more than three decades until Tommy went broke and died in 1958.

- The Trocadero, a restaurant in up-scale Irvine, lacks the semi-notorious reputation of its Sunset Boulevard namesake, which was founded in 1934 by Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter. The Troc, a favorite of Hollywood types, was rumored to house a secret gambling parlor. Errol Flynn could be counted on to get in a fistfight near the bar every once in a while. Alas, the Troc folded in 1946. A billboard sits on the site today.

Makeup!

Southern California’s 53 hospitals are aggressively pushing themselves for film roles, capitalizing on empty beds as well as unused patient wings, floors and entire buildings. But Modern Healthcare magazine points out that the facilities don’t always play themselves.

The facade of a building at Hollywood Presbyterian portrayed a courthouse in ABC’s “Liberace.” And an unused building at California Medical Center downtown will star in another television movie as a dilapidated hotel.