The Blue Knight

NINE

THE NEXT MORNING I worked on my badge for five minutes, and my boondockers were glistening. I was kind of disappointed when Lieutenant Hilliard didn’t have an inspection, I was looking so good. Cruz looked awful. He sat at the front table with Lieutenant Hilliard and did a bad job of reading off the crimes. Once or twice he looked at me and rolled his eyes which were really sad this morning because he was so hung over. After rollcall I got a chance to talk to him for a minute.

“You look a little crudo,” I said, trying not to smile.

“What a bastard you are,” he moaned.

“It wasn’t the mescal. I think you swallowed the worm.”

“A complete bastard.”

“Can you meet me at noon? I wanna buy you lunch.”

“Don’t even talk about it,” he groaned, and I had to laugh.

“Okay, but save me your lunch hour tomorrow. And pick out the best, most expensive place in town. Someplace that doesn’t bounce for bluecoats. That’s where we’re going for my last meal as a cop.”

“You’re actually going to pay for a meal on duty?”

“It’ll be a first,” I grinned, and he smiled but he acted like it hurt to grin.

“Ahí te haucho,” I said, heading for the car.

“Don’t forget you have court this afternoon, ’mano,” he said, always nagging me.

Before getting in my black-and-white I looked it over. It’s always good to pull out the back seat before you leave, in case some innocent rookie on the nightwatch let one of his sneaky prisoners stash his gun down there, or a condom full of heroin, or a goddamn hand grenade. It takes so long to make a policeman out of some of these kids, nothing would surprise me. But then I reminded myself what it was like to be twenty-two. They’re right in the middle of growing up, these babies, and it’s awful tough growing up in that bluecoat as twenty-two-year-old Establishment symbols. Still, it chills my nuts the way they stumble around like civilians for five years or so, and let people flimflam them. Someday, I thought, I’ll probably find a dead midget jammed down there behind the friggin’ seat.

As soon as I hit the bricks and started cruising I began thinking about the case I had this afternoon. It was a preliminary hearing on a guy named Landry and the dicks had filed on him for being an ex-con with a gun, and also filed one count of possession of marijuana. I didn’t figure to have any problems with the case. I’d busted him in January after I’d gotten information on this gunsel from a snitch named Knobby Booker, who worked for me from time to time, and I went to a hotel room on East Sixth Street on some phony pretext I couldn’t completely remember until I reread the arrest report. I busted Landry in his room while he was taking a nap in the middle of the afternoon. He had about two lids of pot in a sandwich bag in a drawer by his bed to give him guts when he pulled a robbery, and a fully loaded U.S. Army forty-five automatic under his mattress. He damned near went for it when I came though the door, and I almost blew him up when he started for it. In fact, it was a Mexican standoff for a few seconds, him with his hand an inch or so under the mattress, and me crouching and coming to the bed, my six-inch Smith aimed at his upper lip, and warning about what I was going to do if he didn’t pull his hand out very very slow, and he did.

Landry had gotten out on five thousand dollars’ bail which some old broad put up for him. He’d been a half-assed bit actor on TV and movies a few years back, and was somewhat of a gigolo with old women. He jumped bail and was rearrested in Denver and extradited, and the arrest was now four months old. I didn’t remember all the details, but of course I would read the arrest report and be up on it before I testified. The main thing of course was to hold him to answer at the prelim without revealing my informant Knobby Booker, or without even letting anyone know I had an informant. It wasn’t too hard if you knew how.

It was getting hot and smoggy and I was already starting to sweat in the armpits. I glanced over at an old billboard on Olive Street which said, “Don’t start a boy on a life of crime by leaving your keys in the car,” and I snorted and farted a couple times in disgust. It’s the goddamn do-gooder P.R. men, who dream up slogans like that to make everybody but the criminals feel guilty, who’ll drive all real cops out of this business one of these days.

As I pulled to the curb opposite the Grand Central Market, a wino staggering down Broadway sucking on a short dog saw me, spun around, fell on his ass, dropped his bottle, and got up as though nothing happened. He started walking away from the short dog, which was rolling around on the sidewalk spilling sweet lucy all over the pavement.

“Pick up the dog, you jerk,” I called to him. “I ain’t gonna bust you.”

“Thanks, Bumper,” he said sheepishly and picked up the bottle. He waved, and hustled back down Broadway, a greasy black coat flapping around his skinny hips.

I tried to remember where I knew him from. Of course I knew him from the beat, but he wasn’t just a wino face. There was something else. Then I saw through the gauntness and grime and recognized him and smiled because these days it always felt good to remember and prove to yourself that your memory is as sharp as ever.

They called him Beans. The real name I couldn’t recall even though I’d had it printed up on a fancy certificate. He almost caused me to slug another policeman about ten years ago and I’d never come close to doing that before or since.

The policeman was Herb Slovin and he finally got his ass canned. Herb was fired for capping for a bail bondsman and had a nice thing going until they caught him. He was working vice and was telling everybody he busted to patronize Laswell Brothers Bail Bonds, and Slim Laswell was kicking back a few bucks to Herb for each one he sent. That’s considered to be as bad as stealing, and the Department bounced his ass in a hurry after he was caught. He would’ve gone behind something else though if it hadn’t been that. He was a hulking, cruel bastard and so horny he’d mount a cage if he thought there was a canary in there. I figured sooner or later he’d fall for broads or brutality.

It was Beans that almost caused me and Herb to tangle. Herb hated the drunk wagon. “Niggers and white garbage,” he’d repeat over and over when something made him mad which was most of the time. And he called the wagon job “the N.H.I. detail.” When you asked him what that stood for he’d say “No Humans Involved,” and then he let out with that donkey bray of his. We were working the wagon one night and got a call on Beans because he was spread-eagled prone across San Pedro Street blocking two lanes of traffic, out cold. He’d puked and wet all over himself and didn’t even wake up when we dragged him to the wagon and flipped him in on the floor. There was no problem. We both wore gloves like most wagon cops, and there were only two other winos inside. About ten minutes later when we were on East Sixth Street, we heard a ruckus in the back and had to stop the wagon and go back there and keep the other two winos from kicking hell out of Beans who woke up and was fighting mad for maybe the first time in his life. I’d busted him ten or twenty times for drunk and never had any trouble with him. You seldom have to hassle a stone wino like Beans.

They quieted down as soon as Herb opened the back door and threatened to tear their heads off, and I was just getting back in the wagon when Beans, sitting by the door, said, “Fuck you, you skin-headed jackass!” I cracked up laughing because Herb was bald, and with his long face and big yellow teeth and the way he brayed when he laughed, he did look like a skin-headed jackass.

Herb though, growled something, and snatched Beans right off the bench, out of the wagon into the street, and started belting him back and forth across the face with his big gloved hand. I realized from the thuds that they were sap gloves and Beans’s face was already busted open and bleeding before I could pull Herb away and push him back, causing him to fall on his ass.

“You son of a bitch,” he said, looking at me with a combination of surprise and bloodred anger. He almost said it like a question he was so surprised.

“He’s a wino, man,” I answered, and that should’ve been enough for any cop, especially a veteran like Herb who had twelve years on the job at that time and knew that you don’t beat up defenseless winos no matter what kind of trouble they give you. That was one of the first things we learned in the old days from the beat cops who broke us in. When a man takes a swing at you or actually hits you, you have the right to kick ass, that goes without saying. It doesn’t have to be tit for tat, and if some asshole gives you tit, you tat his goddamn teeth down his throat. That way, you’ll save some other cop from being slugged by the same pukepot if he learns his lesson from you.

But every real cop also knows you don’t beat up winos. Even if they swing at you or actually hit you. Chances are it’ll be a puny little swing and you can just handcuff him and throw him in jail. Cops know very well how many fellow policemen develop drinking problems themselves, and there’s always the thought in the back of your mind that there on the sidewalk, but for the gods, sleeps old Bumper Morgan.

Anyway, Herb had violated a cop’s code by beating up the wino and he knew it, which probably saved us a hell of a good go right there on East Sixth Street. And I’m not at all sure it might not’ve ended by me getting my chubby face changed around by those sap gloves because Herb was an ex-wrestler and a very tough bastard.

“Don’t you ever try that again,” he said to me, as we put Beans back inside and locked the door.

“I won’t, if you never beat up a drunk when you’re working with me,” I answered casually, but I was tense and coiled, ready to go, even thinking about unsnapping my holster because Herb looked damned dangerous at that moment, and you never know when an armed man might do something crazy. He was one of those creeps that carried an untraceable hideout gun and bragged how if he ever killed somebody he shouldn’t have, he’d plant the gun on the corpse and claim self-defense. The mood was interrupted by a radio call just then, and I rogered it and we finished the night in silence. The next night Herb asked to go back to a radio car because he and I had a “personality conflict.”

Shortly after that Herb went to vice and got fired, and I forgot all about that incident until about a year later on Main Street, when I ran into Beans again. That night I got into a battle with two guys I’d watched pull a pigeon drop on some old man. I’d stood inside a pawnshop and watched them through binoculars while they flimflammed him out of five hundred bucks.

They were bad young dudes, and the bigger of the two, a block-faced slob with an eighteen-inch neck was giving me a pretty good go, even though I’d already cracked two of his ribs with my stick. I couldn’t finish him because the other one kept jumping on my back, kicking and biting, until I ran backward and slammed into a car and a brick wall, with him between me and the object. I did this twice and he kept hanging on and then somebody from the crowd of about twenty assholes who were gathered around enjoying the fight barreled in and tackled the little one and held him on the sidewalk until I could finish the big one by slapping him across the Adam’s apple with the stick.

The other one gave up right then and I cuffed the two of them together and saw that my helper was old Beans the wino, sitting there throwing up, and bleeding from a cut eye where the little dude clawed him. I gave Beans a double sawbuck for that, and took him to a doctor, and I had the Captain’s adjutant print up a beautiful certificate commending Beans for his good citizenship. Of course, I lied and said Beans was some respectable businessman who saw the fight and came to my aid. I couldn’t tell them he was a down-and-out wino or they might not have done it. It was nicely framed and had Beans’s real name on it, which I couldn’t for the life of me remember now. I presented it to him the next time I found him bombed on East Sixth Street and he really seemed to like it.

As I remembered all this, I felt like calling him back and asking him if he still had it, but I figured he probably sold the frame for enough to buy a short dog, and used the certificate to plug the holes in his shoe. It’s always best not to ask too many questions of people or to get to know them too well. You save yourself disappointment that way. Anyway, Beans was half a block away now, staggering down the street cradling the wine bottle under his greasy coat.

I took down my sunglasses which I keep stashed behind the visor in my car and settled down to cruise and watch the streets and relax even though I was too restless to really relax. I decided not to wait, but to cruise over to the school and see Cassie, who would be coming in early like she always did on Thursdays. She’d feel like I did, like everything she did these last days at school would be for the last time. But at least she knew she’d be doing similar things in another school.

I parked out front and got a few raspberries from students for parking my black-and-white in the no parking zone, but I’d be damned if I’d walk clear from the faculty lot. Cassie wasn’t in her office when I got there, but it was unlocked so I sat at her desk and waited.

The desk was exactly like the woman who manned it: smart and tidy, interesting and feminine. She had an odd-shaped ceramic ashtray on one side of the desk which she’d picked up in some junk store in west L.A. There was a small, delicately painted oriental vase that held a bunch of dying violets which Cassie would replace first thing after she arrived. Under the plastic cover on the desk blotter Cassie had a screwy selection of pictures of people she admired, mostly French poets. Cassie was long on poetry and tried to get me going on haiku for a while, but I finally convinced her I don’t have the right kind of imagination for poetry. My reading is limited to history and to new ways of doing police work. I liked one poem Cassie showed me about wooly lambs and shepherds and wild killer dogs. I understood that one all right.

The door opened and Cassie and another teacher, a curvy little chicken in a hot pink mini, came giggling through the door.

“Oh!” said the young broad. “Who are you?” the blue uniform shocked her. I was sitting back in Cassie’s comfortable leather-padded desk chair.

“I am the Pretty Good Shepherd,” I said, puffing on my cigar and smiling at Cassie.

“Whatever that means,” said Cassie, shaking her head, putting down a load of books, and kissing me on the cheek much to the surprise of her friend.

“You must be Cassie’s fiancé,” the friend laughed as it suddenly hit her. “I’m Maggie Carson.”

“Pleased to meet you, Maggie. I’m Bumper Morgan,” I said, always happy to meet a woman, especially a young one, who shakes hands, and with a firm friendly grip.

“I’ve heard about Cassie’s policeman friend, but it surprised me, seeing that uniform so suddenly.”

“We’ve all got our skeletons rattling, Maggie,” I said. “Tell me, what’ve you done that makes you jump at the sight of the fuzz?”

“All right, Bumper,” Cassie smiled. I was standing now, and she had me by the arm.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” said Maggie, with a sly wink, just as she’d seen and heard it in a thousand corny love movies.

“Nice kid,” I said, after Maggie closed the door and I kissed Cassie four or five times.

“I missed you last night,” said Cassie, standing there pressed up against me, smelling good and looking good in her yellow sleeveless dress. Her arms were red tan, her hair down, touching her shoulders.

“Your dinner date tonight still on?”

“Afraid so,” she murmured.

“After tomorrow we’ll have all the time we want together.”

“Think we’ll ever have all the time we want?”

“You’ll get sick of seeing me hanging around the pad.”

“Never happen. Besides, you’ll be busy launching that new career.”

“I’m more worried about the other career.”

“Which one?”

“Being the kind of husband you think I’ll be. I wonder if I’ll be really good for you.”

“Bumper!” she said, stepping back and looking to see if I meant it, and I tried a lopsided grin.

I kissed her then, as tenderly as I could, and held her. “I didn’t mean it the way it came out.”

“I know. I’m just a very insecure old dame.”

I could’ve kicked my ass for blurting out something that I knew would hurt her. It was like I wanted to hurt her a little for being the best thing that ever happened, for saving me from becoming a pitiful old man trying to do a young man’s work, and doing brass balls police work was definitely a young man’s work. I never could’ve been an inside man. Never a jailer, or a desk officer, or a supply man handing out weapons to guys doing the real police work. Cassie was saving me from that nightmare. I was getting out while I was still a man alive, with lots of good years ahead. And with somebody to care about. I got a vicious gas pain just then, and I wished I wasn’t standing there with Cassie so I could pop a bubble breaker.

“I guess I’m the silly one,” said Cassie.

“If you only knew how bad I want out, Cassie, you’d stop worrying.” I patted her back like I was burping her when really I was wishing I could burp myself. I could feel the bubble getting bigger and floating up in my stomach.

“All right, Bumper Morgan,” she said. “Now what day are we actually leaving Los Angeles? I mean actually? As man and wife. We’ve got a million things to do.”

“Wait till tomorrow night, me proud beauty,” I answered. “Tomorrow night when we have some time to talk and to celebrate. Tomorrow night we make all the plans while having a wonderful dinner somewhere.”

“In my apartment.”

“Okay.”

“With some wonderful champagne.”

“I’ll supply it.”

“Police discount?”

“Naturally. My last one.”

“And we celebrate tomorrow being the last day you’ll ever have to put on that uniform and risk your neck for a lot of people who don’t appreciate it.”

“Last day I risk my neck,” I nodded. “But I never did risk it for anyone but myself. I had some fun these twenty years, Cassie.”

“I know it.”

“Even though sometimes it’s a rotten job I wouldn’t wish on anyone, still, I had good times. And any risks were for Bumper Morgan.”

“Yes, love.”

“So get your heart-shaped fanny in gear and get your day’s work done. I still got almost two days of police work left to do.” I stepped away from her and picked up my hat and cigar.

“Coming by this afternoon?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tonight,” she said. “I’ll get away before midnight. Come to my apartment at midnight.”

“Let’s get some sleep tonight, baby. Tomorrow’s the last day for us both on our jobs. Let’s make it a good one.”

“I don’t like my job as well since you charged into my life, do you know that?”

“Whadda you mean?”

“The academic life. I was one of the students who never left school. I loved waddling around with a gaggle of eggheads, and then you had to come along so, so… I don’t know. And now nothing seems the same.”

“Come on down, kid, I like your earthy side better.”

“I want you to come tonight,” she said, looking me dead in the eye.

“I’d rather be with you tonight than with anyone in the world, you know that, but I really ought to go by Abd’s Harem and say good-bye to my friends there. And there’re a few other places.”

“You mustn’t disappoint people,” she smiled.

“You should try not to,” I said, heating up from the way she looked me in the eye just then.

“It’s getting tough to make love to you lately.”

“A couple more days.”

“See you tomorrow,” she sighed. “I think I’ll jump you here in my office when I get my hands on you.”

“On duty?” I frowned, and put my hat on, tipping it at a jaunty angle because, let’s face it, you feel pretty good when a woman like Cassie’s quivering to get you in bed.

“Good-bye, Bumper,” she smiled sadly.

“Later, kid. See you later.”

As soon as I cleared after leaving Cassie I got a radio call.

“One-X-L-Forty-five, One-X-L-Forty-five,” said the female communications operator, “see the man at the hotel, four-twenty-five South Main, about a possible d.b.”

“One-X-L-Forty-five, roger,” I said, thinking this will be my last dead body call.

An old one-legged guy with all the earmarks of a reformed alky was standing in the doorway of the fleabag hotel.

“You called?” I said, after parking the black-and-white in front and taking the stick from the holder on the door and slipping it through the ring on my belt.

“Yeah. I’m Poochie the elevator boy,” said the old man. “I think a guy might be dead upstairs.”

“What the hell made you think so?” I said sarcastically, as we started up the stairs and I smelled the d.b. from here. The floorboards were torn up and I could see the ground underneath.

The old guy hopped up the stairs pretty quick on his one crutch without ever stopping to rest. There were about twenty steps up to the second floor where the smell could drop you and would, except that most of the tenants were bums and winos whose senses, all of them, had been killed or numbed. I almost expected the second story to have a dirt floor, the place was so crummy.

“I ain’t seen this guy in number two-twelve for oh, maybe a week,” said Poochie, who had a face like an ax, with a toothless puckered mouth.

“Can’t you smell him?”

“No,” he said, looking at me with surprise. “Can you?”

“Never mind,” I said, turning right in the hallway. “Don’t bother telling me where two-twelve is, I could find it with my eyes closed. Get me some coffee.”

“Cream and sugar?”

“No, I mean dry coffee, right out of the can. And a frying pan.”

“Okay,” he said, without asking dumb questions, conditioned by fifty years of being bossed around by cops. I held a handkerchief over my nose, and opened a window in the hallway which led out on the fire escape in the alley. I stuck my head out but it didn’t help, I could still smell him.

After a long two minutes Poochie came hopping back on his crutch with a frying pan and the coffee.

“Hope there’s a hot plate in here,” I said, suddenly thinking there might not be, though lots of the transient hotels had them, especially in the rooms used by the semipermanent boarders.

“He’s got one,” nodded Poochie, handing me the passkey. The key turned but the door wouldn’t budge.

“I coulda told you it wouldn’t open. That’s why I called you. Scared old man, Herky is. He keeps a bolt on the door whenever he’s inside. I already tried to get in.”

“Move back.”

“Going to break it?”

“Got any other suggestions?” I said, the handkerchief over my face, breathing through my mouth.

“No, I think I can smell him now.”

I booted the door right beside the lock and it crashed open, ripping the jamb loose. One rusty hinge tore free and the door dangled there by the bottom hinge.

“Yeah, he’s dead,” said Poochie, looking at Herky who had been dead for maybe five days, swollen and steamy in this unventilated room which not only had a hot plate, but a small gas heater that was raging on an eighty-five degree day.

“Can I look at him?” said Poochie, standing next to the bed, examining Herky’s bloated stomach and rotting face. His eyelids were gone and the eyes stared silver and dull at the elevator boy who grinned toothlessly and clucked at the maggots on Herky’s face and swollen sex organs.

I ran across the room and banged on the frame until I got the window open. Flies were crawling all over the glass, leaving wet tracks in the condensation. Then I ran to the hot plate, lit it, and threw the frying pan on the burner. I dumped the whole can of coffee on the frying pan, but the elevator boy was enjoying himself so much he didn’t seem to mind my extravagance with his coffee. In a few minutes the coffee was burning, and a pungent smoky odor was filling the room, almost neutralizing the odor of Herky.

“You don’t mind if I look at him?” asked Poochie again.

“Knock yourself out, pal,” I answered, going for the door.

“Been dead a while hasn’t he?”

“Little while longer and he’d have gone clear through the mattress.”

I walked to the pay phone at the end of the hall on the second floor. “Come with me, pal,” I called, figuring he’d roll old Herky soon as my back was turned. It’s bad enough getting rolled when you’re alive.

I put a dime in the pay phone and dialed operator. “Police department,” I said, then waited for my dime to return as she rang the station. The dime didn’t come. I looked hard at Poochie who turned away, very innocently.

“Someone stuffed the goddamn chute,” I said. “Some asshole’s gonna get my dime when he pulls the stuffing out later.”

“Bunch of thieves around here, Officer,” said Poochie, all puckered and a little chalkier than before.

I called the dicks and asked for one to come down and take the death report, then I hung up and lit a cigar, not that I really wanted one, but any smell would do at the moment.

“Is it true they explode like a bomb after a while?”

“What?”

“Stiffs. Like old Herky.”

“Yeah, he’d’ve been all over your wallpaper pretty soon.”

“Damn,” said the elevator boy, grinning big and showing lots of gums, upper and lower. “Some of these guys like Herky got lots of dough hidden around,” he said, winking at me.

“Yeah, well let’s let him keep it. He’s had it this long.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean we should take it.”

“Course not.”

“It’s just that these coroner guys, they get to steal anything they find laying around.”

“How long’s old Herky been living here?” I asked, not bothering to find out his whole name. I’d let the detective worry about the report.

“Off and on, over five years I know of. All alone. Never even had no friends. Nobody. Just laid up there in that room sucking up the sneaky pete. Used to drink a gallon a day. I think he lived off his social security. Pay his rent, eat a little, drink a little. I never could do it myself. That’s why I’m elevator boy. Can’t make it on that social security.”

“You ever talk to him?”

“Yeah, he never had nothing to say though. No family. Never been married. No relatives to speak of. Really alone, you know? I got me eight kids spread all over this damn country. I can go sponge off one of them ever’ once in a while. Never gonna see old Poochie like that.” He winked and tapped his chest with a bony thumb. “Guys like old Herky, they don’t care about nobody and nobody cares about them. They check out of this world grabbing their throat and staring around a lonely hotel room. Those’re the guys that swell up and pop all over your walls. Guys like old Herky.” The elevator boy thought about old Herky popping, and he broke out in a snuffling croupy laugh because that was just funny as hell.

I hung around the lobby waiting for the detective to arrive and relieve me of caring for the body. While I was waiting I started examining both sides of the staircase walls. It was the old kind with a scalloped molding about seven feet up, and at the first landing there were dirty finger streaks below the molding while the rest of the wall on both sides was uniformly dirty, but unsmudged. I walked to the landing and reached up on the ledge, feeling a toilet-paper-wrapped bundle. I opened it and found a complete outfit: eyedropper, hypodermic needle, a piece of heavy thread, burned spoon, and razor blade.

I broke the eye dropper, bent the needle, and threw the hype kit in the trash can behind the rickety desk in the lobby.

“What’s that?” asked the elevator boy.

“A fit.”

“A hype’s outfit?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you know it was there?”

“Elementary, my dear Poochie.”

“That’s pretty goddamn good.”

The detective came in carrying a clipboard full of death reports. He was one of the newer ones, a young collegiate-looking type. I didn’t know him. I talked to him for a few minutes and the elevator boy took him back to the body.

“Never catch old Poochie going it alone,” he called to me with his gums showing. “Never gonna catch old Poochie busting like a balloon and plastered to your wallpaper.”

“Good for you, Poochie,” I nodded, taking a big breath out on the sidewalk, thinking I could still smell the dead body. I imagined that his odor was clinging to my clothes and I goosed the black-and-white, ripping off some rubber in my hurry to get away from that room.

I drove around for a while and started wondering what I should work on. I thought about the hotel burglar again and wondered if I could find Link Owens, a good little hotel creeper, who might be able to tell me something about this guy that’d been hitting us so hard. All hotel burglars know each other. Sometimes you see so many of them hanging around the lobbies of the better hotels, it looks like a thieves’ convention. Then I got the code-two call to go to the station.

TEN

CODE TWO MEANS HURRY UP, and whenever policemen get that call to go to the station they start worrying about things. I’ve had a hundred partners tell me that: “What did I do wrong? Am I in trouble? Did something happen to the old lady? The kids?” I never had such thoughts, of course. A code-two call to go to the station just meant to me that they had some special shit detail they needed a man for, and mine happened to be the car they picked.

When I got to the watch commander’s office, Lieutenant Hilliard was sitting at his desk reading the morning editorials, his millions of wrinkles deeper than usual, looking as mean as he always did when he read the cop-baiting letters to the editor and editorial cartoons which snipe at cops. He never stopped reading them though, and scowling all the way.

“Hi, Bumper,” he said, glancing up. “One of the vice officers wants you in his office. Something about a bookmaker you turned for them?”

“Oh yeah, one of my snitches gave him some information yesterday. Guess Charlie Bronski needs to talk to me some more.”

“Going to take down a bookie, Bumper?” Hilliard grinned. He was a hell of a copper in his day. He wore seven service stripes on his left forearm, each one signifying five years’ service. His thin hands were knobby and covered with bulging blue veins. He had trouble with bone deterioration now, and walked with a cane.

“I’m a patrol officer. Can’t be doing vice work. No time.”

“If you’ve got something going with Bronski, go ahead and work on it. Vice caper or not, it’s all police work. Besides, I’ve never seen many uniformed policemen tear off a bookmaker. That’s about the only kind of pinch you’ve never made for me, Bumper.”

“We’ll see what we can do, Lieutenant,” I smiled, and left him there, scowling at the editorials again, an old man that should’ve pulled the pin years ago. Now he’d been here too long. He couldn’t leave or he’d die. And he couldn’t do the work anymore, so he just sat and talked police work to other guys like him who believed police work meant throwing lots of bad guys in jail and that all your other duties were just incidental. The young officers were afraid to get close to the watch commander’s office when he was in there. I’ve seen rookies call a sergeant out into the hall to have him approve a report so they wouldn’t have to take it to Lieutenant Hilliard. He demanded excellence, especially on reports. Nobody’s ever asked that of the young cops who were TV babies, not in all their lives. So he was generally avoided by the men he commanded.

Charlie Bronski was in his office with two other vice officers when I entered.

“What’s up, Charlie?” I asked.

“We had some unbelievable luck, Bumper. We ran the phone number and it comes back to an apartment on Hobart near Eighth Street, and Red Scalotta hangs around Eighth Street quite a bit when he’s not at his restaurant on Wilshire. I’m betting that phone number you squeezed out of Zoot goes right into Reba McClain’s pad just like I hoped. She always stays close by Red, but never too close. Red’s been married happily for thirty years and has a daughter in Stanford and a son in medical school. Salt of the earth, that asshole is.”

“Gave nine thousand last year to two separate churches in Beverly Hills,” said one of the other vice officers, who looked like a wild young head with his collar-length hair, and beard, and floppy hat with peace and pot buttons all over it. He wore a cruddy denim shirt cut off at the shoulders and looked like a typical Main Street fruit hustler.

“And God returns it a hundredfold,” said the other vice officer, Nick Papalous, a melancholy-looking guy, with small white teeth. Nick had a big Zapata moustache, sideburns, and wore orange-flowered flares. I’d worked with Nick several times before he went to vice. He was a good cop for being so young.

“You seemed pretty hot on taking a book, Bumper, so I thought I’d see if you wanted to go with us. This isn’t going to be a back office, but it might lead to one, thanks to your friend Zoot. What do you say, want to come?”

“Do I have to change to civvies?”

“Not if you don’t want to. Nick and Fuzzy here are going to take the door down. You and me could stiff in the call from the pay phone at the corner. Your uniform wouldn’t get in the way.”

“Okay, let’s go,” I said, anxious for a little action, glad I didn’t have to take the uniform off. “Never went on a vice raid before. Do we have to synchronize our watches and all that?”

“I’ll do the door,” Nick grinned. “Fuzzy’ll watch out the window and keep an eyeball on you and Bumper down at the pay phone on the corner. When you get the bet stiffed, Fuzzy’ll see your signal and give me the okay and down goes the door.”

“Kind of tough kicking, ain’t it, Nick, in those crepe-soled, sneak-and-peek shoes you guys wear?”

“Damn straight, Bumper,” Nick smiled. “I could sure use those size-twelve boondockers of yours.”

“Thirteens,” I said.

“Wish I could take down the door,” said Fuzzy. “Nothing I like better than John Wayne-ing a goddamn door.”

“Tell Bumper why you can’t, Fuzzy,” Nick grinned.

“Got a sprained ankle and a pulled hamstring,” said Fuzzy, taking a few limping steps to show me. “I was off duty for two weeks.”

“Tell Bumper how it happened,” said Nick, still grinning.

“Freakin’ fruit,” said Fuzzy, pulling off the wide-brimmed hat and throwing back his long blond hair. “We got a vice complaint about this fruit down at the main library, hangs around out back and really comes on strong with every young guy he sees.”

“Fat mother,” said Charlie. “Almost as heavy as you, Bumper. And strong.”

“Damn!” said Fuzzy, shaking his head, looking serious even though Nick was still grinning. “You shoulda seen the arms on that animal! Anyway, I get picked to operate him, naturally.”

“’Cause you’re so pretty, Fuzzy,” said Charlie.

“Yeah, anyway, I go out there, about two in the afternoon, and hang around a little bit, and sure enough, there he is standing by that scrub oak tree and I don’t know which one’s the freakin tree for a couple minutes, he’s so wide. And I swear I never saw a hornier fruit in my life ’cause I just walked up and said, ‘Hi.’ That’s all, I swear.”

“Come on, Fuzzy, you winked at him,” said Charlie, winking at me.

“You asshole,” said Fuzzy. “I swear I just said, ‘Hi, Brucie,’ or something like that, and this mother grabbed me. Grabbed me! In a bear hug! He pinned my arms! I was shocked, I tell you! Then he starts bouncing me up and down against his fat belly, saying, ‘You’re so cute. You’re so cute. You’re so cute.’”

Then Fuzzy stood up and started bouncing up and down with his arms up against his sides and his head bobbing. “Like this I was,” said Fuzzy. “Like a goddamn rag doll bouncing, and I said, ‘Y-y-y-you’re u-u-u-under a-a-a-arrest,’ and he stopped loving me and said, ‘What?’ and I said, ‘YOU’RE UNDER ARREST, YOU FAT ZOMBIE!’ And he threw me. Threw me! And I rolled down the hill and crashed into the concrete steps. And you know what happens then? My partner here lets him get away. He claims he couldn’t catch the asshole and the guy couldn’t run no faster than a pregnant alligator. My brave partner!”

“Fuzzy really wants that guy bad,” Charlie grinned. “I tried to catch him, honest, Fuzzy.” Then to me, “I think Fuzzy fell in love. He wanted the fat boy’s phone number.”

“Yuk!” said Fuzzy, getting a chill as he thought about it. “We got a warrant for that prick for battery on a police officer. Wait’ll I get him. I’ll get that prick in a choke hold and lobotomize him!”

“By the way, what’s the signal you use for crashing in the pad?” I asked.

“We always give it this,” said Charlie, pumping his closed fist up and down.

“Double time,” I smiled. “Hey, that takes me back to my old infantry days.” I felt good now, getting to do something a little different. Maybe I should’ve tried working vice, I thought, but no, I’ve had lots more action and lots more variety on my beat. That’s where it’s at. That’s where it’s really at.

“Reba must have some fine, fine pussy,” said Fuzzy, puffing on a slim cigar and cocking his head at Charlie. I could tell by the smell it was a ten- or fifteen-center. I’d quit smoking first, I thought.

“She’s been with Red a few years now,” said Nick to Fuzzy. “Wait’ll you meet her. Those mug shots don’t do her justice. Good-looking snake.”

“You cold-blooded vice cops don’t care how good-looking a broad is,” I said, needling Charlie. “All a broad is to you is a booking number. I’ll bet when some fine-looking whore thinking you’re a trick lays down and spreads her legs, you just drop that cold badge right on top of her.”

“Right on her bare tummy,” said Nick. “But I’ll bet Reba has more than a nice tight pussy. A guy like Scalotta could have a million broads. She must give extra good head or something.”

“That’s what I need, a little skull,” said Fuzzy, leaning back in a swivel chair, his soft-soled shoes propped up on a desk. He was a pink-faced kid above the beard, not a day over twenty-four, I’d guess.

“A little skull’d be the first you ever had, Fuzzy,” said Nick.

“Ha!” said Fuzzy, the cigar clenched in his teeth. “I used to have this Chinese girlfriend that was a go-go dancer…”

“Come on, Fuzzy,” said Charlie, “let’s not start those lies about all the puss you got when you worked Hollywood. Fuzzy’s laid every toadie on Sunset Boulevard three times.”

“I can tell you yellow is mellow,” Fuzzy leered. “This chick wouldn’t ball nobody but me. She used to wet her pants playing with the hair on my chest.” Fuzzy stood up then, and flexed his bicep.

Nick, always a man of few words, said, “Siddown, fruitbait.”

“Anyway, Reba ain’t just a good head job,” said Charlie. “That’s not why Scalotta keeps her. He’s a leather freak and likes to savage a broad. Dresses her up in animal skins and whales the shit out of her.”

“I never really believed those rumors,” said Nick.

“No shit?” said Fuzzy, really interested now.

“We had a snitch tell us about it one time,” said Charlie. “The snitch said Red Scalotta digs dykes and whips and Reba’s his favorite. The snitch told us it’s the only way Red can get it up anymore.”

“He is an old guy,” said Fuzzy seriously. “At least fifty, I think.”

“Reba’s a stone psycho, I tell you,” said Charlie. “Remember when we busted her, Nick? How she kept talking all the way to jail about the bull daggers and how they’d chase her around the goddamn jail cell before she could get bailed out.”

“That broad got dealt a bum hand,” said Nick.

“Ain’t got a full deck even now,” Charlie agreed.

“She’s scared of butches and yet she puts on dyke shows for Red Scalotta?” said Fuzzy, his bearded baby face split by a grin as he pictured it.

“Let’s get it over with,” said Charlie. “Then we can spend the rest of the day shooting pool in a nice cool beer bar, listening to Fuzzy’s stories about all those Hollywood groupies.”

Nick and Fuzzy took one vice car and I rode with Charlie in another one. It’s always possible there could be more than one in the pad, and they wanted room for prisoners.

“Groovy machine, Charlie,” I said, looking over the vice car which was new and air-conditioned. It was gold with mags, a stick, and slicks on the back. The police radio was concealed inside the glove compartment.

“It’s not bad,” said Charlie, “especially the air conditioning. Ever see air conditioning in a police car, Bumper?”

“Not the ones I drive, Charlie,” I said, firing up a cigar, and Charlie tore through the gears to show me the car had some life to it.

“Vice is lots of fun, Bumper, but you know, some of the best times were when I walked with you on your beat.”

“How long’d you work with me, Charlie, couple months?”

“About three months. Remember, we got that burglar that night? The guy that read the obituaries?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, not remembering that it was Charlie who’d been with me. When they have you breaking in rookies, they all kind of merge in your memory, and you don’t remember them very well as individuals.

“Remember? We were shaking this guy just outside the Indian beer bar near Third, and you noticed the obituary column folded up in his shirt pocket? Then you told me about how some burglars read the obituaries and then burgle the pads of the dead people after the funeral when chances are there’s nobody going to be there for a while.”

“I remember,” I said, blowing a cloud of smoke at the windshield, thinking how the widow or widower usually stays with a relative for a while. Rotten M.O., I can’t stand grave robbing. Seems like your victim ought to have some kind of chance.

“We got a commendation for that pinch, Bumper.”

“We did? I can’t remember.”

“Of course I got one only because I was with you. That guy burgled ten or fifteen pads like that. Remember? I was so green I couldn’t understand why he carried a pair of socks in his back pocket and I asked you if many of these transient types carried a change of socks with them. Then you showed me the stretch marks in the socks from his fingers and explained how they wear them for gloves so’s not to leave prints. You never put me down even when I asked something that dumb.”

“I always liked guys to ask questions,” I said, beginning to wish Charlie’d shut up.

“Hey, Charlie,” I said, to change the subject, “if we take a good phone spot today, what’re the chances it could lead to something big?”

“You mean like a back office?”

“Yeah.”

“Almost no chance at all. How come you’re so damned anxious to take a back?”

“I don’t know. I’m leaving the job soon and I never really took a big crook like Red Scalotta. I’d just like to nail one.”

“Christ, I never took anyone as big as Scalotta either. And what do you mean, you’re leaving? Pulling the pin?”

“One of these days.”

“I just can’t picture you retiring.”

“You’re leaving after twenty years aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but not you.”

“Let’s forget about it,” I said, and Charlie looked at me for a minute and then opened the glove compartment and turned to frequency six for two-way communication with the others.

“One-Victor-One to One-Victor-Two,” said Charlie.

“One-Victor-Two, go,” said Nick.

“One-Victor-One, I think it’s best to park behind on the next street east, that’s Harvard,” said Charlie. “If anybody happens to be looking they wouldn’t see you go in through the parking area in the rear.”

“Okay, Charlie,” said Nick, and in a few minutes we were there. Eighth Street is all commercial buildings with several bars and restaurants, and the residential north-south streets are lined with apartment buildings. We gave them a chance to get to the walkway on the second floor of the apartment house, and Charlie drove about two hundred feet south of Eighth on Harvard. We walked one block to the public telephone on the southwest corner at Hobart. After a couple of minutes, Fuzzy leaned over a wrought iron railing on the second floor and waved.

“Let’s get it on, Bumper,” said Charlie, dropping in a dime. Charlie hung up after a second. “Busy.”

“Zoot give you the code and all that?”

“Twenty-eight for Dandelion is the code,” Charlie nodded. “This is a relay phone spot. If it was a relay call-back we might have some problems.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, standing behind the phone booth so someone looking out of the apartment wouldn’t see the bluesuit.

“A call-back is where the bettor or the handbook like Zoot calls the relay, that’s like I’m going to do now. Then every fifteen minutes or so, the back office calls the relay and gets the bettor’s number and calls the bettor himself. I think we’d have a poor chance with that kind of setup because back office clerks are sharper than some dummy sitting on the hot seat at a phone spot. Last time we took Reba McClain it was a regular relay spot where the bettor calls her and she writes the bets on a Formica board and then the back office calls every so often and she reads off the bets and wipes the Formica clean. It’s better for us that way because we always try to get some physical evidence if we can move quick enough.”

“The Formica?”

“Yeah,” Charlie nodded. “Some guys kick in the door and throw something at the guy on the hot seat to distract him so he can’t wipe the bets off. I’ve seen cops throw a tennis ball in the guy’s face.”

“Why not a baseball?”

“That’s not a bad idea. You’d make a good vice cop, Bumper.”

“Either way the person at the phone spot doesn’t know the phone number or address of the back office?” I asked.

“Hell no. That’s why I was telling you the chances are nil.”

Charlie dropped the dime in again and again hung it up.

“Must be doing a good business,” I said.

“Red Scalotta’s relay spots always do real good,” said Charlie. “I know personally of two Superior Court judges that bet with him.”

“Probably some cops too,” I said.

“Righteous,” he nodded. “Everybody’s got vices.”

“Whadda you call that gimmick where the phone goes to another pad?”

“A tap out,” said Charlie. “Sometimes you bust in an empty room and see nothing but a phone jack and a wire running out a window, and by the time you trace the wire down to the right apartment, the guy in the relay spot’s long gone. Usually with a tap out, there’s some kind of alarm hooked up so he knows when you crash in the decoy pad. Then there’s a toggle relay, where a call can be laid off to another phone line. Like for instance the back office clerk dials the relay spot where the toggle switch is and he doesn’t hang up. Then the bettor calls the relay and the back can take the action himself. All these gimmicks have disadvantages though. One of the main ones is that bettors don’t like call-back setups. Most bettors are working stiffs and maybe on their coffee breaks they only have a few minutes to get in to their bookie, and they don’t have ten or fifteen minutes to kill waiting for call-backs and all that crap. The regular relay spot with some guy or maybe some housewife earning a little extra bread by sitting on the hot seat is still the most convenient way for the book to operate.”

“You get many broads at these phone spots?”

“We sure do. We get them in fronts and backs. That is, we get them in the relay phone spots as well as back offices. We hear Red Scalotta’s organization pays a front clerk a hundred fifty a week and a back clerk three hundred a week. That’s a good wage for a woman, considering it’s tax free. A front clerk might have to go to jail once in a while but it ain’t no big thing to her. The organization bails them out and pays all legal fees. Then they go right back to work. Hardly any judge is going to send someone to county jail for bookmaking, especially if she’s female. And they’ll never send anyone to state prison. I know a guy in the south end of town with over eighty bookmaking arrests. He’s still in business.”

“Sounds like a good business.”

“It’s a joke, Bumper. I don’t know why I stay at it, I mean trying to nail them. We hear Red Scalotta’s back offices gross from one to two million a year. And he probably has at least three backs going. That’s a lot of bread even though he only nets eleven to sixteen percent of that. And when we take down these agents and convict them, they get a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine. It’s a sick joke.”

“You ever get Red Scalotta himself?”

“Never. Red’ll stay away from the back offices. He’s got someone who takes care of everything. Once in a while we can take a front and on rare occasions a back and that’s about all we can hope for. Well, let’s try to duke our bet in again.”

Charlie dropped in his dime and dialed the number. Then he looked excited and I knew someone answered.

“Hello,” said Charlie, “this is twenty-eight for Dandelion. Give me number four in the second, five across. Give me a two-dollar, four-horse round robin in the second. The number two horse to the number four in the third to the number six in the fourth to number seven in the fifth.”

Then Charlie stiffed in a few more bets for races at the local track, Hollywood Park, which is understood, unless you specify an Eastern track. Midway through the conversation, Charlie leaned out the phone booth and pumped his fist at Fuzzy, who disappeared inside the apartment building. Charlie motioned to me and I took off my hat and squeezed into the hot phone booth with him. He grinned and held the phone away from his ear, near mine.

I heard the crash over the phone, and the terrified woman scream and a second later Nick’s voice came over the line and said, “Hello, sweetheart, would you care for a round robin or a three-horse parley today?”

Charlie chuckled and hung up the phone and we hopped back in the vice car and drove to the apartment house, parking in front.

When we got to the second floor, Fuzzy was smooth talking an irate landlady who was complaining about the fractured door which Nick was propping shut for privacy. A good-looking, dark-haired girl was sitting on the couch inside the apartment crying her eyes out.

“Hi, Reba,” Charlie grinned as we walked in and looked around.

“Hello, Mister Bronski,” she wailed, drenching the second of two handkerchiefs she held in her hands.

“The judge warned you last time, Reba,” said Charlie. “This’ll make your third bookmaking case. He told you you’d get those six months he suspended. You might even get a consecutive sentence on top of it.”

“Please, Mister Bronski,” she wailed, throwing herself face down on the couch and sobbing so hard the whole couch shook.

She was wearing a very smart jersey blouse and skirt, and a matching blue scarf was tied around her black hair. Her fair legs had a very light spattering of freckles on them. She was a fine-looking girl, very Irish.

Charlie took me in the frilly sweet-smelling bedroom where the phone was. Reba had smeared half the bets off a twelve-by-eighteen chalkboard, but the other bets were untouched. A wet cloth was on the floor where the board was dropped along with the phone.

“I’ll bet she wet her pants again this time,” said Charlie, still grinning as he examined the numbers and x’s on the chalkboard which told the track, race, handicap position, and how much to win, place or show. The bettor’s identification was written beside the bets. I noticed that K.L. placed one hell of a lot of bets, probably just before Charlie called.

“We’re going to squeeze the shit out of her,” Charlie whispered. “You think Zoot was shaky, wait’ll you hear this broad. A real ding-a-ling.”

“Go ahead,” Nick was saying to someone on the phone when we came back in the living room. Fuzzy was nodding politely to the landlady and locking her out by closing the broken door and putting a chair in front of it.

“Right. Got it,” said Nick, hanging up. A minute later the phone rang again.

“Hello,” said Nick. “Right. Go ahead.” Every few seconds he mumbled, “Yeah,” as he wrote down bets. “Got it.” He hung up.

“Nick’s taking some bets mainly just to fuck up Scalotta,” Charlie explained to me. “Some of these guys might hit, or they might hear Reba got knocked over, and then they’ll claim they placed their bet and there’ll be no way to prove they didn’t, so the book’ll have to pay off or lose the customers. That’s where we get most of our tips, from disgruntled bettors. It isn’t too often a handbook like Zoot Lafferty comes dancing in, anxious to turn his bread and butter.”

“Mister Bronski, can I talk to you?” Reba sobbed, as Nick and then Fuzzy answered the phone and took the bets.

“Let’s go in the other room,” said Charlie, and we followed Reba back into the bedroom where she sat down on the soft, king-sized bed and wiped away the wet mascara.

“I got no time for bullshit, Reba,” said Charlie. “You’re in no position to make deals. We got you by the curlies.”

“I know, Mister Bronski,” she said, taking deep breaths. “I ain’t gonna bullshit you. I wanna work with you. I swear I’ll do anything. But please don’t let me get this third case. That Judge Bowers is a bastard. He told me if I violated my probation, he’d put me in. Please, Mister Bronski, you don’t know what it’s like there. I couldn’t do six months. I couldn’t even do six days. I’d kill myself.”

“You want to work for me? What could you do?”

“Anything. I know a phone number. Two numbers. You could take two other places just like this one. I’ll give you the numbers.”

“How do you know them?”

“I ain’t dumb, Mister Bronski. I listen and I learn things. When they’re drunk or high they talk to me, just like all men.”

“You mean Red Scalotta and his friends?”

“Please, Mister Bronski, I’ll give you the numbers, but you can’t take me to jail.”

“That’s not good enough, Reba,” said Charlie, sitting down in a violet-colored satin chair next to a messy dressing table. He lit a cigarette as Reba glanced from Charlie to me, her forehead wrinkled, chewing her lip. “That’s not near good enough,” said Charlie.

“Whadda you want, Mister Bronski? I’ll do anything you say.”

“I want the back,” said Charlie easily.

“What?”

“I want one of Red’s back offices. That’s all. Keep your phone spots. If we take too much right away it’ll burn you and I want you to keep working for Red. But I want his back office. I think you can help me.”

“Oh God, Mister Bronski. Oh Mother of God, I don’t know about things like that, I swear. How would I know? I’m just answering phones here. How would I know?”

“You’re Red’s girlfriend.”

“Red has other girlfriends!”

“You’re his special girlfriend. And you’re smart. You listen.”

“I don’t know things like that, Mister Bronski. I swear to God and His Mother. I’d tell you if I knew.”

“Have a cigarette,” said Charlie, and pushed one into Reba’s trembling hand. I lit it for her and she glanced up like a trapped little rabbit, choked on the smoke, then took a deep breath, and inhaled down the right pipe. Charlie let her smoke for a few seconds. He had her ready to break, which is what you want, and you shouldn’t wait, but she was obviously a ding-a-ling and you had to improvise when your subject is batty. He was letting her unwind, letting her get back a little confidence. Just for a minute.

“You wouldn’t protect Red Scalotta if it meant your ass going to jail, would you, Reba?”

“Hell no, Mister Bronski, I wouldn’t protect my mother if it meant that.”

“Remember when I busted you before? Remember how we talked about those big hairy bull dykes you meet in jail? Remember how scared you were? Did any of them bother you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you sleep in jail?”

“No, they bailed me out.”

“What about after you get your six months, Reba? Then you have to sleep in jail. Did you see any dildoes in jail?”

“What’s that?”

“Phony dicks.”

“I hate those things,” she shuddered.

“How would you like to wake up in the middle of the night with two big bull dykes working on you? And what’s more, how would you feel if you really started liking it? It happens all the time to girls in jail. Pretty soon you’re a stone butch, and then you might as well cut off that pretty hair, and strap down those big tits, because you’re not a woman anymore. Then you can lay up in those butch pads with a bunch of bull daggers and a pack of smelly house cats and drop pills and shoot junk because you can’t stand yourself.”

“Why’re you doing this to me, Mister Bronski?” said Reba, starting to sob again. She dropped the cigarette on the carpet and I picked it up and snuffed it. “Why do men like to hurt? You all hurt!”

“Does Red hurt you?” asked Charlie calmly, sweating a little as he lit another cigarette with the butt of the last one.

“Yes! He hurts!” she yelled, and Fuzzy stuck his head in the door to see what the shouting was about, but Charlie motioned him away while Reba sobbed.

“Does he make you do terrible things?” asked Charlie, and she was too hysterical to see he was talking to her like she was ten years old.

“Yes, the bastard! The freaky bastard. He hurts me! He likes to hurt! That fucking old freak!”

“I’ll bet he makes you do things with bull daggers,” said Charlie, glancing at me, and I realized I broke him in right. He wasn’t a guy to only stick it in halfway.

“He makes me do it, Mister Bronski,” said Reba. “I don’t enjoy it, I swear I don’t. I hate to do it with a woman. I wasn’t raised like that. It’s a terrible sin to do those things.”

“I’ll bet you don’t like taking action for him either. You hate sitting on this hot seat answering the phones, don’t you?”

“I do hate it, Mister Bronski. I do hate it. He’s so goddamn cheap. He just won’t give me money for anything. He makes me always work for it. I have to do those things with them two or three nights a week. And I have to sit here in this goddamn room and answer those goddamn phones and every minute I know some cop might be ready to break down the door and take me to jail. Oh, please help me, Mister Bronski.”

“Stop protecting him then,” said Charlie.

“He’ll kill me, Mister Bronski,” said Reba, and her pretty violet eyes were wide and round and her nostrils were flared, and you could smell the fear on her.

“He won’t kill you, Reba,” said Charlie soothingly. “You won’t get a jacket. He’ll never know you told me. We’ll make it look like someone else told.”

“No one else knows,” she whispered, and her face was dead white.

“We’ll work it out, Reba. Stop worrying, we know how to protect people that help us. We’ll make it look like someone else set it up. I promise you, he’ll never know you told.”

“Tell me you swear to God you’ll protect me.”

“I swear to God I’ll protect you.”

“Tell me you swear to God I won’t go to jail.”

“We’ve got to book you, Reba. But you know Red’ll bail you out in an hour. When your case comes up I’ll personally go to Judge Bowers and you won’t go to jail behind that probation violation.”

“Are you a hundred percent sure?”

“I’m almost a hundred percent sure, Reba. Look, I’ll talk for you myself. Judges are always ready to give people another chance, you know that.”

“But that Judge Bowers is a bastard!”

“I’m a hundred percent sure, Reba. We can fix it.”

“You got another cigarette?”

“Let’s talk first. I can’t waste any more time.”

“If he finds out, I’m dead. My blood’ll be on you.”

“Where’s the back?”

“I only know because I heard Red one night. It was after he’d had his dirty fun with me and a girl named Josie that he brought with him. She was as sick and filthy as Red. And he brought another guy with him, a Jew named Aaron something.”

“Bald-headed guy, small, glasses and a gray moustache?”

“Yeah, that’s him,” said Reba.

“I know of him,” said Charlie, and now he was squirming around on the velvet chair, because he had the scent, and I was starting to get it too, even though I didn’t know who in the hell Aaron was.

“Anyway, this guy Aaron just watched Josie and me for a while and when Red got in bed with us, he told Aaron to go out in the living room and have a drink. Red was high as a kite that night, but at least he wasn’t mean. He didn’t hurt me. Can I please have that cigarette, Mister Bronski?”

“Here,” said Charlie, and his hand wasn’t quite as steady, which is okay, because that showed that good information could still excite him.

“Tastes good,” said Reba, dragging hard on the cigarette. “Afterwards, Red called a cab for Josie and sent her home, and him and Aaron started talking and I stayed in the bedroom. I was supposed to be asleep, but like I say, I’m not dumb, Mister Bronski, and I always listen and try to learn things.

“Aaron kept talking about the ‘laundry,’ and at first I didn’t get it even though I knew that Red was getting ready to move one of his back offices. And even though I never saw it, or any other back office, I knew about them from talking to bookie agents and people in the business. Aaron was worrying about the door to the laundry and I figured there was something about the office door being too close to the laundry door, and Aaron tried to argue Red into putting another door in the back near an alley, but Red thought it would be too suspicious.

“That was all I heard, and then one day, when Red was taking me to his club for dinner, he said he had to stop by to pick up some cleaning and he parks by this place near Sixth and Kenmore, and he goes in a side door and comes out after a few minutes and says his suits weren’t ready. Then I noticed the sign on the window. It was a Chinese laundry.” Reba took two huge drags, blowing one through her nose as she drew on the second one.

“You’re a smart girl, Reba,” said Charlie.

“I ain’t guaranteeing this is the right laundry, Mister Bronski. In fact, I ain’t even sure the laundry they were talking about had anything to do with the back office. I just think it did.”

“I think you’re right,” said Charlie.

“You got to protect me, Mister Bronski. I got to live with him, and if he knows, I’ll die. I’ll die in a bad way, a real bad way, Mister Bronski. He told me once what he did to a girl that finked on him. It was thirty years ago, and he talked about it like it was yesterday, how she screamed and screamed. It was so awful it made me cry. You got to protect me!”

“I will, Reba. I promise. Do you know the address of the laundry?”

“I know,” she nodded. “There were some offices or something on the second floor, maybe like some business offices, and there was a third floor but nothing on the windows in the third floor.”

“Good girl, Reba,” Charlie said, taking out his pad and pencil for the first time, now that he didn’t have to worry about his writing breaking the flow of the interrogation.

“Charlie, give me your keys,” I said. “I better get back on patrol.”

“Okay, Bumper, glad you could come.” Charlie nipped me the keys. “Leave them under the visor. You know where we park?”

“Yeah, I’ll see you later.”

“I’ll let you know what happens, Bumper.”

“See you, Charlie. So long, kid,” I said to Reba.

“Bye,” she said, wiggling her fingers at me like a little girl.

ELEVEN

IT WAS OKAY driving back to the Glass House in the vice car because of the air conditioning. Some of the new black-and-whites had it, but I hadn’t seen any yet. I turned on the radio and switched to a quiet music station and lit a cigar. I saw the temperature on the sign at a bank and it said eighty-two degrees. It felt hotter than that. It seemed awfully muggy.

After I crossed the Harbor Freeway I passed a large real estate office and smiled as I remembered how I cleaned them out of business machines one time. I had a snitch tell me that someone in the office bought several office machines from some burglar, but the snitch didn’t know who bought them or even who the burglar was. I strolled in the office one day during their lunch hour when almost everyone was out and told them I was making security checks for a burglary prevention program the police department was sponsoring. A cute little office girl with a snappy fanny took me all around the place and I checked their doors and windows and she helped me write down the serial number of every machine in the place so that the police department would have a record if they were ever stolen. Then as soon as I got back to the station, I phoned Sacramento and gave them the numbers and found that thirteen of the nineteen machines had been stolen in various burglaries around the greater Los Angeles area. I went back with the burglary dicks and impounded them along with the office manager. IBM electric typewriters are just about the hottest thing going right now. Most of the machines are sold by the thieves to “legitimate” businessmen who, like everyone else, can’t pass up a good buy.

It was getting close to lunch time and I parked the vice car at the police building and picked up my black-and-white, trying to decide where to have lunch. Olvera Street was out, because I’d had Mexican food with Cruz and Socorro last night. I thought about Chinatown, but I’d been there Tuesday, and I was just about ready to go to a good hamburger joint I know of when I thought about Odell Bacon. I hadn’t had any bar-b-que for a while, so I headed south on Central Avenue to the Newton Street area and the more I thought about some bar-b-que the better it sounded and I started salivating.

I saw a Negro woman get off a bus and walk down a residential block from Central Avenue and I turned on that street for no reason, to get over to Avalon. Then I saw a black guy on the porch of a whitewashed frame house. He was watching the woman and almost got up from where he was sitting until he saw the black-and-white. Then he pretended to be looking at the sky and sat back, a little too cool, and I passed by and made a casual turn at the next block and then stomped down and gave her hell until I got to the first street north. Then I turned east again, south on Central, and finally made the whole block, deciding to come up the same street again. It was an old scam around here for purse snatchers to find a house where no one was home and sit on the stoop of the house near a bus stop, like they lived at the pad, and when a broad walked by, to run out, grab the purse, and then cut through the yard to the next street where a car would be stashed. Most black women around here don’t carry purses. They carry their money in their bras out of necessity, so you don’t see that scam used too much anymore, but I would’ve bet this guy was using it now. And this woman had a big brown leather purse. You just don’t get suspicious of a guy when he approaches you from the porch of a house in your own neighborhood.

I saw the woman in mid-block and I saw the guy walking behind her pretty fast, I got overanxious and pushed a little too hard on the accelerator, instead of gliding along the curb, and the guy turned around, saw me, and cut to his right through some houses. I knew there’d be no sense going after him. He hadn’t done anything yet, and besides, he’d lay up in some backyard like these guys always do and I’d never find him. I just went on to Odell Bacon’s Bar-b-que, and when I passed the woman I glanced over and smiled, and she smiled back at me, a pleasant-looking old ewe. There were white sheep and black sheep and there were wild dogs and a few Pretty Good Shepherds. There’d be one sheep herder less after tomorrow, I thought.

I could smell the smoky meat a hundred yards away. They cooked it in three huge old-fashioned brick ovens. Odell and his brother Nate were both behind the counter when I walked in. They wore sparkling white cook’s uniforms and hats and aprons even though they served the counter and watched the register and didn’t have to do the cooking anymore. The place hadn’t started to fill up for lunch yet. Only a few white people ate there, because they’re afraid to come down here into what is considered the ghetto, and right now there were only a couple customers in the place and I was the only paddy. Everyone in South L.A. knew about Bacon’s bar-b-que though. It was the best soul food and bar-b-que restaurant in town.

“Hey, Bumper,” said Nate, spotting me first. “What’s happening man?” He was the youngest, about forty, coffee brown. He had well-muscled arms from working construction for years before he came in as Odell’s partner.

“Nothin to it, Nate,” I grinned. “Hi, Odell.”

“Aw right, Bumper,” said Odell, and smiled big. He was a round-faced fat man. “I’m aw right. Where you been? Ain’t seen you lately.”

“Slowing down,” I said. “Don’t get around much these days.”

“That’ll be the day,” Nate laughed. “When ol’ Bumper can’t git it on, it ain’t worth gittin.”

“Some gumbo today, Bumper?” asked Odell.

“No, think I’ll have me some ribs,” I said, thinking the gumbo did sound good, but the generous way these guys made it, stuffed full of chicken and crab, it might spoil me for the bar-b-que and my system was braced for the tangy down-home sauce that was their specialty, the like of which I’d never had anywhere else.

“Guess who I saw yestiday, Bumper?” said Odell, as he boxed up some chicken and a hot plate of beef, french fries, and okra for a takeout customer.

“Who’s that?”

“That ponk you tossed in jail that time, ’member? That guy that went upside ol’ Nate’s head over a argument about paying his bill, and you was just comin’ through the door and you rattled his bones but good. ’Member?”

“Oh yeah, I remember. Sneed was his name. Smelled like dogshit.”

“That’s the one,” Nate nodded. “Didn’t want him as a customer no how. Dirty clothes, dirty body, dirty mouf.”

“Lucky you didn’t get gangrene when that prick hit you, Nate,” I said.

“Ponk-ass bastard,” said Nate, remembering the punch that put him out for almost five minutes. “He come in the other day. I recognized him right off, and I tol’ him to git his ass out or I’d call Bumper. He musta ’membered the name, ’cause he got his ass out wif oney a few cuss words.”

“He remembered me, huh?” I grinned as Odell set down a cold glass of water, and poured me a cup of coffee without asking. They knew of course that I didn’t work Newton Street Station and they only bounced for the Newton Street patrol car in the area, but after that Sneed fight, they always fed me free too, and in fact, always tried to get me to come more often. But I didn’t like to take advantage. Before that, I used to come and pay half price like any uniformed cop could do.

“Here come the noonday rush,” said Nate, and I heard car doors slam and a dozen black people talking and laughing came in and took the large booths in the front. I figured them for teachers. There was a high school and two grade schools close by and the place was pretty full by the time Nate put my plate in front of me. Only it wasn’t a plate, it was a platter. It was always the same. I’d ask for ribs, and I’d get ribs, a double portion, and a heap of beef, oozing with bar-b-que sauce, and some delicious fresh bread that was made next door, and an ice-cream scoop of whipped butter. I’d sop the bread in the bar-b-que and either Nate or Odell would ladle fresh hot bar-b-que on the platter all during the meal. With it I had a huge cold mound of delicious slaw, and only a few fries because there wasn’t much room for anything else. There just was no fat on Odell’s beef. He was too proud to permit it, because he was almost sixty years old and hadn’t learned the new ways of cutting corners and chiseling.

After I got over the first joy of remembering exactly how delicious the beef was, one of the waitresses started helping at the counter because Odell and Nate were swamped. She was a buxom girl, maybe thirty-five, a little bronzer than Nate, with a modest natural hairdo, which I like, not a way-out phony Afro. Her waist was very small for her size and the boobs soared out over a flat stomach. She knew I was admiring her and didn’t seem to mind, and as always, a good-looking woman close by made the meal perfect.

“Her name’s Trudy,” said Odell, winking at me, when the waitress went to the far end of the counter. His wink and grin meant she was fair game and not married or anything. I used to date another of his waitresses once in a while, a plump, dusky girl named Wilma who was a thirty-two year old grandmother. She finally left Odell’s and got married for the fourth time. I really enjoyed being with her. I taught her the swim and the jerk and the boogaloo when they first came out. I learned them from my Madeleine Carroll girlfriend.

“Thanks, Odell,” I said. “Maybe next time I come in I’ll take a table in her section.”

“Anythin’ funny happen lately, Bumper?” asked Nate after he passed some orders through to the kitchen.

“Not lately… Let’s see, did I ever tell you about the big dude I stopped for busting a stop sign out front of your place?”

“Naw, tell us,” said Odell, stopping with a plate in his hand.

“Well, like I say, this guy blew the stop sign and I chased him and brought him down at Forty-first. He’s a giant, six-feet-seven maybe, heavier than me. All muscle. I ran a make on him over the radio while I’m writing a ticket. Turns out there’s a traffic warrant for his arrest.”

“Damn,” said Nate, all ears now. “You had to fight him?”

“When I tell him there’s this warrant he says, ‘Too bad, man, I just ain’t going to jail.’ Just that cool he said it. Then he steps back like he’s ready.”

“Guddamn,” said Odell.

“So then it just comes to me, this idea. I walk over to the police car and pick up the radio and say in a loud voice, ‘One-X-L-Forty-five requesting an ambulance at Forty-first and Avalon.’ The big dude, he looks around and says, ‘What’s the ambulance for?’ I say, ‘That’s for you, asshole, if you don’t get in that car.’

“So he gets in the car and halfway to jail he starts chuckling, then pretty soon he really busts up. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘You really flimflammed my ass. This is the first time I ever laughed my way to jail.’”

“Gud-damn, Bumper,” said Odell. “You’re somethin’ else. Guddamn.” Then they both went off laughing to wait on customers.

I finished the rest of the meat, picked the bones, and sopped up the last of the bread, but I wasn’t happy now. In fact, it was depressing there with a crowd of people and the waitresses rushing around and dishes clattering, so I said good-bye to Nate and Odell. Naturally, I couldn’t tip them even though they personally served me, so I gave two bucks to Nate and said, “Give it to Trudy. Tell her it’s an advance tip for the good service she’s gonna give me next time when I take a table in her section.”

“I’ll tell her, Bumper,” Nate grinned as I waved and burped and walked out the door.

As I was trying to read the temperature again over a savings and loan office, the time flashed on the marquee. It was one-thirty, which is the time afternoon court always convenes. It dawned on me that I’d forgotten I had to be at a preliminary hearing this afternoon!

I cursed and stomped on it, heading for the new municipal court annex on Sunset, near the Old Mission Plaza, and then I slowed down and thought, what the hell, this is the last time I’ll ever go to court on duty. I may get called back to testify after I’m retired, but this’ll be the last time on duty as a working cop, and I’d never been late to court in twenty years. So what the hell, I slowed down and cruised leisurely to the court building.

I passed one of the Indian bars on Main Street, and saw two drunken braves about to duke it out as they headed for the alley in back, pushing and yelling at each other. I knew lots of Payutes and Apaches and others from a dozen Southwest tribes, because so many of them ended up downtown here on my beat. But it was depressing being with them. They were so defeated, those that ended up on Main Street, and I was glad to see them in a fistfight once in a while. At least that proved they could strike back a little bit, at something, even if it was at another drunken tribal brother. Once they hit my beat they were usually finished, or maybe long before they arrived here. They’d become winos, and many of the women, fat five-dollar whores. You wanted to pick them up, shake them out, send them somewhere, in some direction, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere an Indian wanted to go. They were hopeless, forlorn people. One old beat cop told me they could break your heart if you let them.

I saw a Gypsy family walking to a rusty old Pontiac in a parking lot near Third and Main. The mother was a stooped-over hag, filthy, with dangling earrings, a peasant blouse, and a full red skirt hanging lopsided below her knees. The man walked in front of her. He was four inches shorter and skinny, about my age. A very dark unshaven face turned my way, and I recognized him. He used to hang around downtown and work with a Gypsy dame on pigeon drops and once in a while a Jamaican switch. The broad was probably his old lady, but I couldn’t remember the face just now. There were three kids following: a dirty, beautiful teenage girl dressed like her mother, a ragtag little boy of ten or so, and a curly-haired little doll of four who was dressed like mama also.

I wondered what kind of scam they were working on now, and I tried to think of his name and couldn’t, and I wondered if he’d remember me. As late as I was for court, I pulled to the curb.

“Hey, just a minute,” I called.

“What, what, what?” said the man. “Officer, what’s the problem? What’s the problem? Gypsy boy. I’m just a Gypsy boy. You know me don’t you, Officer? I talked with you before, ain’t I? We was just shopping, Officer. Me and my babies and my babies’ mother.”

“Where’re your packages?” I asked, and he squinted from the bright sunshine and peered into the car from the passenger side. His family all stood like a row of quail, and watched me.

“We didn’t see nothing we liked, Officer. We ain’t got much money. Got to shop careful.” He talked with his hands, hips, all his muscles, especially those dozen or so that moved the mobile face, in expressions of hope and despair and honesty. Oh, what honesty.

“What’s your name?”

“Marcos. Ben Marcos.”

“Related to George Adams?”

“Sure. He was my cousin, God rest him.”

I laughed out loud then, because every Gypsy I’d ever talked to in twenty years claimed he was cousin to the late Gypsy king.

“I know you don’t I, Officer?” he asked, smiling then, because I had laughed, and I didn’t want to leave because I enjoyed hearing the peculiar Hit to the Gypsy speech, and I enjoyed looking at his unwashed children who were exceptionally beautiful, and I wondered for the hundredth time whether a Gypsy could ever be honest after centuries of living under a code which praised deceit and trickery and theft from all but other Gypsies. Then I was sad because I’d always wanted to really know the Gypsies. That would be the hardest friendship I would ever make, but I had it on my list of things to accomplish before I die. I knew a clan leader named Frank Serna, and once I went to his home in Lincoln Heights and ate dinner with a houseful of his relatives, but of course they didn’t talk about things they usually talked about, and I could tell by all the nervous jokes that having an outsider and especially a cop in the house was a very strange thing for the clan. Still, Frank asked me back, and when I had time I was going to work on breaking into the inner circle and making them trust me a little because there were Gypsy secrets I wanted to know. But I could never hope to do it without being a cop, because they’d only let me know them if they first thought I could do them some good, because all Gypsies lived in constant running warfare with cops. It was too late now, because I would not be a cop, and I would never get to learn the Gypsy secrets.

“We can go now, Officer?” said the Gypsy, holding his hands clasped together, in a prayerful gesture. “It’s very hot for my babies’ mama here in the sun.”

I looked at the Gypsy woman then, looked at her face and she was not a hag, and not as old as I first thought. She stood much taller now and glared at me because her man was licking my boots and I saw that she had once been as pretty as her daughter, and I thought of how I had so often been accused of seeing good things in all women, even ones who were ugly to my partners, and I guessed it was true, that I exaggerated the beauty of all women I knew or ever saw. I wondered about that, and I was wallowing in depression now.

“Please, sir. Can we go now?” he said, the sweat running down the creases in his face, and on his unwashed neck.

“Go your way, Gypsy,” I said, and dug out from the curb, and in a few minutes I was parked and walking in the court building.

TWELVE

BEEN WAITING FOR YOU, Bumper,” said the robbery detective, a wrinkled old-timer named Miles. He had been a robbery detective even before I came on the job and was one of the last to still wear a wide-brimmed felt hat. They used to be called the “hat squad,” and the wide felt hat was their trademark, but of course in recent years no one in Los Angeles wore hats like that. Miles was a stubborn old bastard though, he still wore his, and a wide-shouldered, too-big suit coat with two six-inch guns, one on each hip, because he was an old robbery detective and the hat squad legend demanded it and other policemen expected it.

“Sorry I’m late, Miles,” I said.

“That’s okay, the case just got sent out to Division Forty-two. Can you handle this by yourself? I got another prelim in Forty-three and a couple of rookie arresting officers for witnesses. If I ain’t in there to tell this young D.A. how to put on his case, we might lose it.”

“Sure, I’ll handle it. Am I the only witness?”

“You and the hotel manager.”

“Got the evidence?”

“Yeah, here it is.” Miles pulled a large manila envelope out of his cheap plastic briefcase and I recognized the evidence tag I had stuck on there months ago when I made the arrest.

“The gun’s in there and the two clips.”

“Too bad you couldn’t file a robbery.”

“Yeah, well like I explained to you right after that caper, we were lucky to get what we did.”

“You filed an eleven-five-thirty too, didn’t you?”

“Oh yeah. Here’s the pot, I almost forgot.” Miles reached back in the briefcase and pulled out an analyzed-evidence envelope with my seal on it that contained the marijuana with the chemist’s written analysis on the package.

“How many jobs you figure this guy for?”

“I think I told you four, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“Now we think he done six. Two in Rampart and four here in Central.”

“It’s a shame you couldn’t make him on at least one robbery.”

“You’re telling me. I had him in a regular show-up and I had a few private mug-shot show-ups, and I talked and coaxed and damn near threatened my victims and witnesses and the closest I could ever come was one old broad that said he looked like the bandit.”

“Scumbag really did a good job with makeup, huh?”

“Did a hell of a job,” Miles nodded. “Remember, he was an actor for a while and he did a hell of a good job with paint and putty. But shit, the M.O. was identical, the way he took mom and dad markets. Always asked for a case of some kind of beer they were short of and when they went in the back for the beer, boom, he pulled the forty-five automatic and took the place down.”

“He ever get violent?”

“Not in the jobs in Central. I found out later he pistol-whipped a guy in one of the Rampart jobs. Some seventy-year-old grocery clerk decided he was Wyatt Earp and tried to go for some fucked-up old thirty-two he had stashed under the counter. Landry really laid him open. Three times across the eyes with the forty-five. He blinded him. Old guy’s still in the hospital.”

“His P.O. going to violate him?”

“This asshole has a rabbit’s foot. He finished his parole two weeks before you busted him. Ain’t that something else? Two weeks!”

“Well, I better get in there,” I said. “Some of these deputy D.A.’s get panicky when you’re not holding their hands. You get a special D.A. for this one?”

“No. It’s a dead bang case. You got him cold. Shouldn’t be any search and seizure problems at all. And even though we know this guy’s a good robber, we ain’t got nothing on him today but some low-grade felonies, ex-con with a gun and possession of pot.”

“Can’t we send him back to the joint with his record?”

“We’re going to try. I’ll stop in the courtroom soon as I can. If you finish before me, let me know if you held him to answer.”

“You got doubts I’ll hold him?” I grinned, and headed for the courtroom, feeling very strange as I had all day. The last time I wore a bluesuit into a courtroom, I thought.

This courtroom was almost empty. There were only three people in the audience, two older women, probably the kind that come downtown and watch criminal trials for fun, and a youngish guy in a business suit who was obviously a witness and looked disgusted as hell about being here. Since these courtrooms are for preliminary hearings only, there was no jury box, just the judge’s bench and witness box, the counsel tables, the clerk’s desk, and a small desk near the railing for the bailiff.

At least I’ll be through hassling with this legal machinery, I thought, which cops tend to think is designed by a bunch of neurotics because it seems to go a hundred miles past the point where any sane man would’ve stopped. After a felony complaint is filed, the defendant is arraigned and then has a preliminary hearing which amounts to a trial. This takes the place of a grand jury indictment and it’s held to see if there’s good enough cause to bind him over to superior court for trial, and then he’s arraigned again in superior court, and later has a trial. Except that in between there’re a couple of hearings to set aside what you’ve done already. In capital cases there’s a separate trial for guilt and another for penalty, so that’s why celebrated California cases drag on for years until they cost so much that everybody gives up or lets the guy cop to a lesser included offense.

We have a very diligent bunch of young public defenders around here who, being on a monthly salary and not having to run from one good paying client to another, will drive you up a wall defending a chickenshit burglary like it was the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. The D.A.’s office has millions of very fine crimes to choose from and won’t issue a felony complaint unless they’re pretty damned sure they can get a conviction. But then, there aren’t that many real felony convictions, because courts and prisons are so overcrowded. A misdemeanor plea is accepted lots of times even from guys with heavyweight priors.

All this would make Los Angeles a frustrating place to be a cop if it weren’t for the fact that the West in general is not controlled by the political clubhouse, owing to the fact that our towns are so sprawling and young. This means that in my twenty years I could bust any deserving son of a bitch, and I never got bumrapped except once when I booked an obnoxious French diplomat for drunk driving after he badmouthed me. I later denied to my bosses that he told me of his diplomatic immunity.

But in spite of all the bitching by policemen there’s one thing you can’t deny: it’s still the best system going, and even if it’s rough on a cop, who the hell would want to walk a beat in Moscow or Madrid, or anywhere in between? We gripe for sympathy but most of us know that a cop’s never going to be loved by people in general, and I say if you got to have lots of love, join the fire department.

I started listening a little bit to the preliminary hearing that was going on. The defendant was a tall, nice-looking guy named John Trafford, about twenty-seven years old, and his pretty woman, probably his wife, was in the courtroom. He kept turning and making courageous gestures in her direction which wasn’t particularly impressing Judge Martha Bedford, a tough, severe-looking old girl who I had always found to be a fair judge, both to the people and the defense. There was a fag testifying that this clean-cut-looking young chap had picked him up in a gay bar and gone to the fag’s pad, where after an undescribed sex act the young defendant, who the fag called Tommy, had damn near cut his head off with a kitchen knife. And then he ransacked the fruit’s pad and stole three hundred blood-soaked dollars which were found in his pocket by two uniformed coppers who shagged him downtown at Fifth and Main where he later illegally parked his car.

The defense counsel was badgering the fruit, an effeminate little man about forty years old, who owned a photography studio, and the fruit wasn’t without sympathy for the defendant as he glanced nervously at his friend “Tommy,” and I thought this was darkly humorous and typical. Weak people need people so much they’d forgive anything. I didn’t think the defense counsel was succeeding too well in trying to minimize the thing as just another fruitroll, since the hospital record showed massive transfusions and a hundred or so sutures needed to close up the neck wounds of the fruit.

The young defendant turned around again and shot a long sad glance at pretty little mama who looked brave, and after Judge Redford held him to answer on the charges of attempted murder and robbery, his lawyer tried to con her into a bail reduction because the guy had never been busted before except once for wife beating.

Judge Redford looked at the defendant then, staring at his handsome face and calm eyes, and I could tell she wasn’t listening to the deputy D.A. who was opposing the bail reduction and recounting the savagery of the cutting. She was just looking at the young dude and he was looking at her. His blond hair was neatly trimmed and he wore a subdued pin-striped suit.

Then she denied the motion for bail reduction, leaving the huge bail on this guy and I was sure she saw what I saw in his face. He was one to be reckoned with. You could see the confidence and intelligence in his icy expression. And power. There’s real power you can feel when it’s in a guy like this and it even gave me a chill. You can call him a psychopath or say that he’s evil, but whatever he is, he’s the deadly Enemy, and I wondered how many other times his acts ended in blood. Maybe it was him that ripped the black whore they dug out of a garbage pile on Seventh Street last month, I thought.

You’ve got to respect the power to harm in a guy like him, and you’ve got to be scared by it. It sure as hell scared Her Honor, and after she refused to lower the bail he smiled a charming boyish smile at her and she turned away. Then he looked at his teary wife again and smiled at her, and then he felt me watching and I caught his eye and felt myself smiling, and my look was saying: I know you. I know you very well. He looked at me calmly for a few seconds, then his eyes sort of glazed over and the deputy led him out of court. Now that I knew he hung around downtown, I thought, I’d be watching for that boy on my beat.

The judge left the bench and the deputy D.A., a youngster whose muttonchops and moustache didn’t fit, started reading the complaint to get ready for my case.

Timothy Landry, my defendant, was led in by a deputy sheriff. A deputy public defender was handling the case since Landry was not employed, even though Miles figured he’d stolen ten thousand or so.

He was a craggy-looking guy, forty-four years old, with long, dyed black hair that was probably really gray, and a sallow face that on some guys never seems to get rosy again after they do some time in the joint. He had the look of an ex-con all over him. His bit movie parts were mostly westerns, a few years back, right after he got out of Folsom.

“Okay, Officer,” said the young D.A., “where’s the investigator?”

“He’s busy in another court. I’m Morgan, the arresting officer. I’m handling the whole thing. Dead bang case. You shouldn’t have any problems.”

He probably had only a few months’ experience. They stick these deputy D.A.’s in the preliminary hearings to give them instant courtroom experience handling several cases a day, and I figured this one hadn’t been here more than a couple months. I’d never seen him before and I spent lots of time in court because I made so many felony pinches.

“Where’s the other witness?” asked the D.A., and for the first time I looked around the courtroom and spotted Homer Downey, who I’d almost forgotten was subpoenaed in this case. I didn’t bother talking with him to make sure he knew what he’d be called on to testify to, because his part in it was so insignificant you almost didn’t need him at all, except as probable cause for me going in the hotel room on an arrest warrant.

“Let’s see,” muttered the D.A. after he’d talked to Downey for a few minutes. He sat down at the counsel table reading the complaint and running his long fingers through his mop of brown hair. The public defender looked like a well-trimmed ivy-leaguer, and the D.A., who’s theoretically the law and order guy, was mod. He even wore round granny glasses.

“Downey’s the hotel manager?”

“Right,” I said as the D.A. read my arrest report.

“On January thirty-first, you went to the Orchid Hotel at eight-two-seven East Sixth Street as part of your routine duties?”

“Right. I was making a check of the lobby to roust any winos that might’ve been hanging around. There were two sleeping it off in the lobby and I woke them up intending to book them when all of a sudden one of them runs up the stairs, and I suddenly felt I had more than a plain drunk so I ordered the other one to stay put and I chased the first one. He turned down the hall to the right on the third floor and I heard a door close and was almost positive he ran into room three-nineteen.”

“Could you say if the man you chased was the defendant?”

“Couldn’t say. He was tall and wore dark clothes. That fleabag joint is dark even in the daytime, and he was always one landing ahead of me.”

“So what did you do?”

“I came back down the stairs, and found the first guy gone. I went to the manager, Homer Downey, and asked him who was living in room three-nineteen, and he showed me the name Timothy Landry on the register, and I used the pay telephone in the lobby and ran a warrant check through R and I and came up with a fifty-two-dollar traffic warrant for Timothy Landry, eight-twenty-seven East Sixth Street. Then I asked the manager for his key in case Landry wouldn’t open up and I went up to three-nineteen to serve the warrant on him.”

“At this time you thought the guy that ran in the room was Landry?”

“Sure,” I said, serious as hell.

I congratulated myself as the D.A. continued going over the complaint because that wasn’t a bad story now that I went back over it again. I mean I felt I could’ve done better, but it wasn’t bad. The truth was that a half hour before I went in Landry’s room I’d promised Knobby Booker twenty bucks if he turned something good for me, and he told me he tricked with a whore the night before in the Orchid Hotel and that he knew her pretty good and she told him she just laid a guy across the hall and had seen a gun under his pillow while he was pouring her the pork.

With that information I’d gone in the hotel through the empty lobby to the manager’s room and looked at his register, after which I’d gotten the passkey and gone straight to Landry’s room where I went in and caught him with the gun and the pot. But there was no way I could tell the truth and accomplish two things: protecting Knobby, and convicting a no-good dangerous scumbag that should be back in the joint. I thought my story was very good.

“Okay, so then you knew there was a guy living in the room and he had a traffic warrant out for his arrest, and you had reason to believe he ran from you and was in fact hiding in his room?”

“Correct. So I took the passkey and went to the room and knocked twice and said, ‘Police officer.’”

“You got a response?”

“Just like it says in my arrest report, counsel. A male voice said, ‘What is it?’ and I said, ‘Police officer, are you Timothy Landry?’ He said, ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ and I said, ‘Open the door, I have a warrant for your arrest.’”

“Did you tell him what the warrant was for?”

“Right, I said a traffic warrant.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. I heard the window open and knew there was a fire escape on that side of the building, and figuring he was going to escape, I used the passkey and opened the door.”

“Where was he?”

“Sitting on the bed by the window, his hand under the mattress. I could see what appeared to be a blue steel gun barrel protruding a half inch from the mattress near his hand, and I drew my gun and made him stand up where I could see from the doorway that it was a gun. I handcuffed the defendant and at this time informed him he was under arrest. Then in plain view on the dresser I saw the waxed-paper sandwich bag with the pot in it. A few minutes later, Homer Downey came up the stairs, and joined me in the defendant’s room and that was it.”

“Beautiful probable cause,” the D.A. smiled. “And real lucky police work.”

“Real luck,” I nodded seriously. “Fifty percent of good police work is just that, good luck.”

“We shouldn’t have a damn bit of trouble with Chimel or any other search and seizure cases. The contraband narcotics was in plain view, the gun was in plain view, and you got in the room legally attempting to serve a warrant. You announced your presence and demanded admittance. No problem with eight-forty-four of the penal code.”

“Right.”

“You only entered when you felt the man whom you held a warrant for was escaping?”

“I didn’t hold the warrant,” I reminded him. “I only knew about the existence of the warrant.”

“Same thing. Afterwards, this guy jumped bail and was rearrested recently?”

“Right.”

“Dead bang case.”

“Right.”

After the public defender was finished talking with Landry he surprised me by going to the rear of the courtroom and reading my arrest report and talking with Homer Downey, a twitchy little chipmunk who’d been manager of the Orchid for quite a few years. I’d spoken to Homer on maybe a half-dozen occasions, usually like in this case, to look at the register or to get the passkey.

After what seemed like an unreasonably long time, I leaned over to the D.A. sitting next to me at the counsel table. “Hey, I thought Homer was the people’s witness. He’s grinning at the P.D. like he’s a witness for the defense.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the D.A. “Let him have his fun. That public defender’s been doing this job for exactly two months. He’s an eager beaver.”

“How long you been going it?”

“Four months,” said the D.A., stroking his moustache, and we both laughed.

The P.D. came back to the counsel table and sat with Landry, who was dressed in an open-throat, big-collared, brown silk shirt, and tight chocolate pants. Then I saw an old skunk come in the courtroom. She had hair dyed like his, and baggy pantyhose and a short skirt that looked ridiculous on a woman her age, and I would’ve bet she was one of his girlfriends, maybe even the one he jumped bail on, who was ready to forgive. I was sure she was his baby when he turned around and her painted old kisser wrinkled in a smile. Landry looked straight ahead, and the bailiff in the court was not as relaxed as he usually was with an in-custody felony prisoner sitting at the counsel table. He too figured Landry for a bad son of a bitch, you could tell.

Landry smoothed his hair back twice and then seldom moved for the rest of the hearing.

Judge Redford took the bench again and we all quieted down and came to order.

“Is your true name Timothy G. Landry?” she asked the defendant, who was standing with the public defender.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Then she went into the monotonous reading of the rights even though they’d been read to Landry a hundred times by a hundred cops and a dozen other judges, and she explained the legal proceeding to him which he could have explained to her, and I looked at the clock, and finally, she tucked a wisp of straight gray hair behind her black hornrimmed glasses and said, “Proceed.”

She was a judge I always liked. I remembered once in a case where I’d busted three professional auto thieves in a hot Buick, she’d commended me in court. I’d stopped these guys cruising on North Broadway through Chinatown and I knew, knew something was wrong with them and something wrong with the car when I noticed the rear license plate was bug-spattered, but the license, the registration, the guy’s driver’s license, everything checked out. But I felt it and I knew. And then I looked at the identification tag, the metal tag on the door post with the spot-welded rivets, and I stuck my fingernail under it and one guy tried to split, and only stopped when I drew the six-inch and aimed at his back and yelled, “Freeze, asshole, or name your beneficiary.”

Then I found that the tag was not spot-welded on, but was glued, and I pulled it off and later the detectives made the car as a Long Beach stolen. Judge Bedford said it was good police work on my part.

The D.A. was ready to call his first witness, who was Homer Downey, and who the D.A. needed to verify the fact that he rented the room to Landry, in case Landry later at trial decided to say he was just spending the day in a friend’s pad and didn’t know how the gun and pot got in there. But the P.D. said, “Your Honor, I would move at this time to exclude all witnesses who are not presently being called upon to testify.”

I expected that. P.D.’s always exclude all witnesses. I think it’s the policy of their office. Sometimes it works pretty well for them, when witnesses are getting together on a story, but usually it’s just a waste of time.

“Your Honor, I have only two witnesses,” said the D.A., standing up. “Mr. Homer Downey and Officer Morgan the arresting officer, who is acting as my investigating officer. I would request that he be permitted to remain in the courtroom.”

“The investigating officer will be permitted to remain, Mr. Jeffries,” she said to the public defender. “That doesn’t leave anyone we can exclude, does it?”

Jeffries, the public defender, blushed because he hadn’t enough savvy to look over the reports to see how many witnesses there were, and the D.A. and I smiled, and the D.A. was getting ready to call old Homer when the P.D. said, “Your Honor, I ask that if the arresting officer is acting as the district attorney’s investigating officer in this case, that he be instructed to testify first, even if it’s out of order, and that the other witness be excluded.”

The D.A. with his two months’ extra courtroom experience chuckled out loud at that one. “I have no objection, Your Honor,” he said.

“Let’s get on with it, then,” said the judge, who was getting impatient, and I thought maybe the air-conditioner wasn’t working right because it was getting close in there.

She said, “Will the district attorney please have his other witness rise?”

After Downey was excluded and told to wait in the hall the D.A. finally said, “People call Officer Morgan,” and I walked to the witness stand and the court clerk, a very pleasant woman about the judge’s age, said, “Do you solemnly swear in the case now pending before this court to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

And I looked at her with my professional witness face and said, “Yes, I do.”

That was something I’d never completely understood. In cases where I wasn’t forced to embellish, I always said, “I do,” and in cases where I was fabricating most of the probable cause, I always made it more emphatic and said, “Yes, I do.” I couldn’t really explain that. It wasn’t that I felt guilty when I fabricated, because I didn’t feel guilty, because if I hadn’t fabricated, many many times, there were people who would have been victimized and suffered because I wouldn’t have sent half the guys to the joint that I sent over the years. Like they say, most of the testimony by all witnesses in a criminal case is just lyin’ and denyin’. In fact, everyone expects the defense witnesses to “testilie” and would be surprised if they didn’t.

“Take the stand and state your name, please,” said the clerk.

“William A. Morgan, M-O-R-G-A-N.”

“What is your occupation and assignment?” asked the D.A.

“I’m a police officer for the City of Los Angeles assigned to Central Division.”

“Were you so employed on January thirty-first of this year?”

“Yes, sir.”

“On that day did you have occasion to go to the address of eight-twenty-seven East Sixth Street?”

“Yes, sir.”

“At about what time of the day or night was that?”

“About one-fifteen p.m.”

“Will you explain your purpose for being at that location?”

“I was checking for drunks who often loiter and sleep in the lobby of the Orchid Hotel, and do damage to the furniture in the lobby.”

“I see. Is this lobby open to the public?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Had you made drunk arrests there in the past?”

“Yes, I had. Although usually, I just sent the drunks on their way, my purpose being mainly to protect the premises from damage.”

“I see,” said the D.A., and my baby blues were getting wider and rounder and I was polishing my halo. I worked hard on courtroom demeanor, and when I was a young cop, I used to practice in front of a mirror. I had been told lots of times that jurors had told deputy D.A.’s that the reason they convicted a defendant was that Officer Morgan was so sincere and honest-looking.

Then I explained how I chased the guy up the stairs and saw him run in room three-nineteen, and how naturally I was suspicious then, and I told how Homer showed me the register and I read Timothy Landry’s name. I phoned R and I and gave them Landry’s name and discovered there was a traffic warrant out for his arrest, and I believed he was the man who had run in three-nineteen. I wasn’t worried about what Homer would say, because I did go to his door to get the passkey of course, and I did ask to see the register, and as far as Homer knew about the rest of it, it was the gospel.

When I got to the part about me knocking on the door and Landry answering and telling me he was Timothy Landry, I was afraid Landry was going to fly right out of his chair. That was his first indication I was embellishing the story a bit, and the part about the window opening could have been true, but the bastard snorted so loud when I said the gun was sticking out from under the mattress, that the P.D. had to poke him in the ribs and the judge shot him a sharp look.

I was sweating a little at that point because I was pissed off that a recent case made illegal the search of the premises pursuant to an arrest. Before this, I could’ve almost told the whole truth, because I would’ve been entitled to search the whole goddamn room which only made good sense. Who in the hell would waste four hours getting a search warrant when you didn’t have anything definite to begin with, and couldn’t get one issued in the first place?

So I told them how the green leafy substance resembling marijuana was in plain view on the dresser, and Landry rolled his eyes up and smacked his lips in disgust because I got the pot out of a shoe box stashed in the closet. The P.D. didn’t bother taking me on voir dire for my opinion that the green leafy substance was pot, because I guessed he figured I’d made a thousand narcotics arrests, which I had.

In fact, the P.D. was so nice to me I should’ve been warned. The D.A. introduced the gun and the pot and the P.D. stipulated to the chemical analysis of the marijuana, and the D.A. introduced the gun as people’s exhibit number one and the pot as people’s number two. The P.D. never objected to anything on direct examination and my halo grew and grew until I must’ve looked like a bluesuited monk, with my bald spot and all. The P.D. never opened his mouth until the judge said, “Cross,” and nodded toward him.

“Just a few questions, Officer Morgan,” he smiled. He looked about twenty-five years old. He had a very friendly smile.

“Do you recall the name on the hotel register?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” said the D.A. “What name, what are we…”

The judge waved the D.A. down, not bothering to sustain the objection as the P.D. said, “I’ll rephrase the question, Your Honor. Officer, when you chased this man up the stairs and then returned to the manager’s apartment did you look at the name on the register or did you ask Mr. Downey who lived there?”

“I asked for the register.”

“Did you read the name?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was the name?”

“As I’ve testified, sir, it was the defendant’s name, Timothy G. Landry.”

“Did you then ask Mr. Downey the name of the man in three-nineteen?”

“I don’t remember if I did or not. Probably not, since I read the name for myself.”

“What was the warrant for, Officer? What violation?”

“It was a vehicle code violation, counsel. Twenty-one four-fifty-three-A, and failure to appear on that traffic violation.”

“And it had his address on it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you make mention of the warrant number and the issuing court and the total bail and so forth on your police report?”

“Yes, sir, it’s there in the report,” I said, leaning forward just a little, just a hint. Leaning was a sincere gesture, I always felt.

Actually it was two hours after I arrested Landry that I discovered the traffic warrant. In fact, it was when I was getting ready to compose a plausible arrest report, and the discovery of a traffic warrant made me come up with this story.

“So you called into the office and found out that Timothy G. Landry of that address had a traffic warrant out for his arrest?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you use Mr. Downey’s phone?”

“No, sir, I used the pay phone in the hall.”

“Why didn’t you use Mr. Downey’s phone? You could’ve saved a dime.” The P.D. smiled again.

“If you dial operator and ask for the police you get your dime back anyway, counsel. I didn’t want to bother Mr. Downey further, so I went out in the hall and used the pay phone.”

“I see. Then you went back upstairs with the key Mr. Downey gave you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You knocked and announced yourself and made sure the voice inside was Timothy Landry, for whom you had knowledge that a warrant existed?”

“Yes, sir. The male voice said he was Timothy Landry. Or rather he said yes when I asked if he was Timothy Landry.” I turned just a little toward the judge, nodding my head ever so slightly when I said this. Landry again rolled his eyeballs and slumped down in his seat at that one.

“Then when you heard the window opening and feared your traffic warrant suspect might escape down the fire escape, you forced entry?”

“I used the passkey.”

“Yes, and you saw Mr. Landry on the edge of the bed as though getting ready to go out the window?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And you saw a metal object protruding from under the mattress?”

“I saw a blue metal object that I was sure was a gun barrel, counsel,” I corrected him, gently.

“And you glanced to your right and there in plain view was the object marked people’s two, the sandwich bag containing several grams of marijuana?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have no further questions of this witness,” said the P.D., and now I was starting to worry a little, because he just went over everything as though he were the D.A. on direct examination. He just made our case stronger by giving me a chance to tell it again.

What the hell? I thought, as the judge said, “You may step down.”

I sat back at the counsel table and the D.A. shrugged at my questioning look.

“Call your next witness,” said the judge, taking a sip of water, as the bailiff got Homer Downey from the hall. Homer slouched up to the stand, so skinny the crotch of his pants was around his knees. He wore a dirty white shirt for the occasion and a frayed necktie and the dandruff all over his thin brown hair was even visible from the counsel table. His complexion was as yellow and bumpy as cheese pizza.

He gave his name, the address of the Orchid Hotel, and said he had been managing the place for three years. Then the D.A. asked him if I contacted him on the day of the arrest and looked at his register and borrowed his passkey, and if some ten minutes later did he come to the defendant’s room and see me with the defendant under arrest, and how long had the defendant lived there, and did he rent the room to the defendant and only the defendant, and did all the events testified to occur in the city and county of Los Angeles, and Homer was a fairly good talker and a good witness, also very sincere, and was finished in a few minutes.

When direct examination was finished the public defender stood up and started pacing like in the Perry Mason shows and the judge said, “Sit down, counsel,” and he apologized and sat down like in a real courtroom, where witnesses are only approached by lawyers when permission is given by the judge and where theatrical stuff is out of the question.

“Mister Downey, when Officer Morgan came to your door on the day in question, you’ve testified that he asked to see your register, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ask you who lived in three-nineteen?”

“Nope, just asked to see the register.”

“Do you remember whose name appeared on the register?”

“Sure. His.” Downey pointed at Landry, who stared back at him.

“By him, do you mean the defendant in this case? The man on my right?”

“Yes.”

“And what’s his name?”

“Timothy C. Landowne.”

“Would you repeat that name, please, and spell it?”

My heart started beating hard then, and the sweat broke out and I said to myself, “Oh no, oh no!”

“Timothy C. Landowne. T-I-M…”

“Spell the last name please,” the P.D. smiled and I got sick.

“Landowne. L-A-N-D-O-W-N-E.”

“And the middle initial was C as in Charlie?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. He’s been staying at the hotel for four, five months now. And he even stayed a couple months last year.”

“Did you ever see the name Timothy G. Landry on any hotel records? That’s L-A-N-D-R-Y?”

“No.”

“Did you ever see the name anywhere?”

“No.”

I could feel the D.A. next to me stiffen as he finally started to catch on.

“Did you at any time tell Officer Morgan that the man in three-nineteen was named Timothy G. Landry?”

“No, because that’s not his name as far as I know, and I never heard that name before today.”

“Thank you, Mister Downey,” said the public defender, and I could feel Landry, grinning with his big shark teeth, and I was trying hard to come up with a story to get out of this. I knew at that moment, and admitted to myself finally and forever, that I should’ve been wearing my glasses years before this, and could no longer do police work or anything else without them, and if I hadn’t been so stupid and had my glasses on, I would’ve seen that the name on that register was a half-assed attempt at an alias on the part of Landry, and even though the traffic warrant was as good as gold and really belonged to him, I couldn’t possibly have got the right information from R and I by giving the computer the wrong name. And the judge would be sure of that in a minute because the judge would have the defendant’s make sheet. And even as I was thinking it she looked at me and whispered to the court clerk who handed her a copy of the make sheet and nowhere in his record did it show he used an alias of Landowne. So I was trapped, and then Homer nailed the coffin tight.

“What did the officer do after you gave him the key?”

“He went out the door and up the stairs.”

“How do you know he went up the stairs?”

“The door was open just a crack. I put my slippers on in a hurry because I wanted to go up there too so’s not to miss the action. I thought something might happen, you know, an arrest and all.”

“You remember my talking to you just before this hearing and asking you a few questions, Mister Downey?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you remember my asking you about the officer using the pay phone in the lobby to call the police station?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and I had a foul taste in my mouth and I was full of gas and had branding iron indigestion pains and no pills for them.

“Do you remember what you said about the phone?”

“Yes, sir, that it didn’t work. It’d been out of order for a week and I’d called the phone company, and in fact I was mad because I thought maybe they came the night before when I was out because they promised to come, and I tried it that morning just before the officer came and it was still broke. Buzzed real crazy when you dropped a dime in.”

“Did you drop a dime in that morning?”

“Yes, sir. I tried to use it to call the phone company and it didn’t matter if I dialed or not, it made noises so I used my own phone.”

“You could not call out on that phone?”

“Oh no, sir.”

“I suppose the phone company would have a record of your request and when they finally fixed the phone?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” said the D.A. weakly. “Calls for a conclusion.”

“Sustained,” said the judge, looking only at me now, and I looked at Homer just for something to do with my eyes.

“Did you go upstairs behind the officer?” asked the P.D. again, and now the D.A. had slumped in his chair and was tapping with a pencil, and I’d passed the point of nervous breathing and sweat. Now I was cold and thinking, thinking about how to get out of this and what I would say if they recalled me to the stand, if either of them recalled me, and I thought the defense might call me because I was their witness now, they owned me.

“I went upstairs a little bit after the officer.”

“What did you see when you got up there?”

“The officer was standing outside Mister Landowne’s room and like listening at the door. He had his hat in his hand and his ear was pressed up to the door.”

“Did he appear to see you, or rather, to look in your direction?”

“No, he had his back to my end of the hall and I decided to peek from around the corner, because I didn’t know what he was up to and maybe there’d be a big shootout or something, and I could run back down the stairs if something dangerous happened.”

“Did you hear him knock on the door?”

“No, he didn’t knock.”

“Objection,” said the D.A. “The witness was asked…”

“All right,” said the judge, holding her hand up again as the D.A. sat back down.

“Did you ever hear the officer knock?” the judge asked the witness.

“No, sir,” said Homer to the judge, and I heard a few snickers from the rear of the court, and I thanked the gods that there were only a few spectators and none of them were cops.

“Did the officer say anything while you were there observing?” asked the P.D.

“Nothing.”

“How long did you watch him?”

“Two, three minutes, maybe longer. He knelt down and tried to peek in the keyhole, but I had them all plugged two years ago because of hotel creepers and peeping toms.”

“Did you… strike that, did the officer say anything that you could hear while you were climbing the stairway?”

“I never heard him say nothing,” said Homer, looking bewildered as hell, and noticing from my face that something was sure as hell wrong and I was very unhappy.

“Then what did he do?”

“Used the key. Opened the door.”

“In what way? Quickly?”

“I would say careful. He like turned the key slow and careful, and then he pulled out his pistol and then he seemed to get the bolt turned, and he kicked open the door and jumped in the room with the gun out front.”

“Could you hear any conversation then?”

“Oh yeah,” he giggled, through gapped, brown-stained teeth. “The officer yelled something to Mister Landowne.”

“What did he say? His exact words if you remember.”

“He said, ‘Freeze asshole, you move and you’re wallpaper.’”

I heard all three spectators laugh at that one, but the judge didn’t think it was funny and neither did the D.A., who looked almost as sick as I figure I looked.

“Did you go in the room?”

“Yes, sir, for a second.”

“Did you see anything unusual about the room?”

“No. The officer told me to get out and go back to my room so I did.”

“Did you notice if anything was on the dresser?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Did you hear any other conversation between the officer and the defendant?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all?”

“The officer warned him about something.”

“What did he say?”

“It was about Mister Landowne not trying anything funny, something like that. I was walking out.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, it’s something else not exactly decent.”

“We’re grown up. What did he say?”

“He said, ‘You get out of that chair and I’ll shove this gun so far up your ass there’ll be shit on the grips.’ That’s what he said. I’m sorry.” Homer turned red and giggled nervously and shrugged at me.

“The defendant was sitting in a chair?”

“Yes.”

“Was it his own gun the officer was talking about?”

“Objection,” said the D.A.

“I’ll rephrase that,” said the P.D. “Was the officer holding his own gun in his hand at that time?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you see the other gun at that time?”

“No, I never saw no other gun.”

The P.D. hesitated for a long, deadly silent minute and chewed on the tip of his pencil, and I almost sighed out loud when he said, “I have no further questions,” even though it was much too late to feel relieved.

“I have a question,” said Judge Bedford, and she pushed her glasses up over a hump on her thin nose and said, “Mister Downey, did you happen to go into the lobby any time that morning before the officer arrived?”

“No.”

“You never went out or looked out into the lobby area?”

“Well, only when the officer drove up in front. I saw the police car parked in front, and I was curious and I started out the door and then I saw the officer climbing the front steps of the hotel and I went back inside to put a shirt and shoes on so’s to look presentable in case he needed some help from me.”

“Did you look into the lobby?”

“Well, yes, it’s right in front of my door, ma’am.”

“Who was in the lobby?”

“Why, nobody.”

“Could you see the entire lobby? All the chairs? Everywhere in the lobby area?”

“Why sure. My front door opens right on the lobby and it’s not very big.”

“Think carefully. Did you see two men sleeping anywhere near the lobby area?”

“There was nobody there, Judge.”

“And where was the officer when you were looking into the empty lobby?”

“Coming in the front door, ma’am. A couple seconds later he came to my door and asked about the room and looked at the register like I said.”

My brain was burning up now like the rest of me, and I had an idiotic story ready when they recalled me about how I’d come in the lobby once and then got out and come in again when Homer saw me and thought it was the first entry. And I was prepared to swear the phone worked, because what the hell, anything was possible with telephone problems. And even if that bony-assed, dirty little sneak followed me up the stairs, maybe I could convince them I called to Landry before Downey got up there, and what the hell, Downey didn’t know if the marijuana was on the dresser or in the closet, and I was trying to tell myself everything would be all right so I could keep the big-eyed honest look on my kisser because I needed it now if ever in my life.

I was waiting to be recalled and I was ready even though my right knee trembled and made me mad as hell, and then the judge said to the public defender and the D.A., “Will counsel please approach the bench?”

Then I knew it was all over and Landry was making noises and I could feel the shark grin as his head was turned toward me. I just stared straight ahead like a zombie and wondered if I’d walk out of this courtroom in handcuffs for perjury, because anybody in the world could see that dumb shit Homer Downey was telling the stone truth and didn’t even know what the P.D. was doing to me.

When they came back to the table after talking with the judge, the D.A. smiled woodenly at me and whispered, “It was the name on the register. When the public defender realized that Homer didn’t know Landry’s real name, he asked him about the register. It was the register that opened it all up for him. She’s going to dismiss the case. I don’t know what to advise you, Officer. I’ve never had anything like this happen before. Maybe I should call my office and ask what to do if…”

“Would you care to offer a motion to dismiss, Mister Jeffries?” asked the judge to the public defender, who jumped to his feet and did just that, and then she dismissed the case, and I hardly heard Landry chuckling all over the place and I knew he was shaking hands with that baby-faced little python that defended him. Then Landry leaned over the public defender and said, “Thanks, stupid,” to me, but the P.D. told him to cool it. Then the bailiff had his hand on my shoulder and said, “Judge Redford would like to see you in her chambers,” and I saw the judge had left the bench and I walked like a toy soldier toward the open door. In a few seconds I was standing in the middle of this room, and facing a desk where the judge sat looking toward the wall which was lined with bookcases full of law books. She was taking deep breaths and thinking of what to say.

“Sit down,” she said, finally, and I did. I dropped my hat on the floor and was afraid to stoop down to pick it up I was so dizzy.

“In all my years on the bench I’ve never had that happen. Not like that. I’d like to know why you did it.”

“I want to tell you the truth,” I said and my mouth was leathery. I had trouble forming the words. My lips popped from the dryness every time I opened my mouth. I had seen nervous suspects like that thousands of times when I had them good and dirty, and they knew I had them.

“Maybe I should advise you of your constitutional rights before you tell me anything,” said the judge, and she took off her glasses and the bump on her nose was more prominent. She was a homely woman and looked smaller here in her office, but she looked stronger too, and aged.

“The hell with my rights!” I said suddenly. “I don’t give a damn about my rights, I want to tell you the truth.”

“But I intend to have the district attorney’s office issue a perjury complaint against you. I’m going to have that hotel register brought in, and the phone company’s repairman will be subpoenaed and so will Mister Downey of course, and I think you’ll be convicted.”

“Don’t you even care about what I’ve got to say?” I was getting mad now as well as scared, and I could feel the tears coming to my eyes, and I hadn’t felt anything like this since I couldn’t remember when.

“What can you say? What can anyone say? I’m awfully disappointed. I’m sickened in fact.” She rubbed her eyes at the corners for a second and I was busting and couldn’t hold on.

“You’re disappointed? You’re sickened? What the hell do you think I’m feeling at this minute? I feel like you got a blowtorch on the inside of my guts and you won’t turn it off and it’ll never be turned off, that’s what I feel, Your Honor. Now can I tell the God’s truth? Will you at least let me tell it?”

“Go ahead,” she said, and lit a cigarette and leaned back in the padded chair and watched me.

“Well, I have this snitch, Your Honor. And I’ve got to protect my informants, you know that. For his own personal safety, and so he can continue to give me information. And the way things are going in court nowadays with everyone so nervous about the defendant’s rights, I’m afraid to even mention confidential informants like I used to, and I’m afraid to try to get a search warrant because the judges are so damn hinky they call damn near every informant a material witness, even when he’s not. So in recent years I’ve started… exploring ways around.”

“You’ve started lying.”

“Yes, I’ve started lying! What the hell, I’d hardly ever convict any of these crooks if I didn’t lie at least a little bit. You know what the search and seizure and arrest rules are like nowadays.”

“Go on.”

Then I told her how the arrest went down, exactly how it went down, and how I later got the idea about the traffic warrant when I found out he had one. And when I was finished, she smoked for a good two minutes and didn’t say a word. Her cheeks were eroded and looked like they were hacked out of a rocky cliff. She was a strong old woman from another century as she sat there and showed me her profile and finally she said, “I’ve seen witnesses lie thousands of times. I guess every defendant lies to a greater or lesser degree and most defense witnesses stretch hell out of the truth, and of course I’ve seen police officers lie about probable cause. There’s the old hackneyed story about feeling what appeared to be an offensive weapon like a knife in the defendant’s pocket and reaching inside to retrieve the knife and finding it to be a stick of marijuana. That one’s been told so many times by so many cops it makes judges want to vomit. And of course there’s the furtive movement like the defendant is shoving something under the seat of the car. That’s always good probable cause for a search, and likewise that’s overdone. Sure, I’ve heard officers lie before, but nothing is black and white in this world and there are degrees of truth and untruth, and like many other judges who feel police officers cannot possibly protect the public these days, I’ve given officers the benefit of the doubt in probable cause situations. I never really believed a Los Angeles policeman would completely falsify his entire testimony as you’ve done today. That’s why I feel sickened by it.”

“I didn’t falsify it all. He had the gun. It was under the mattress. He had the marijuana. I just lied about where I found it. Your Honor, he’s an active bandit. The robbery dicks figure him for six robberies. He’s beaten an old man and blinded him. He’s…”

She held up her hand and said, “I didn’t figure he was using that gun to stir his soup with, Officer Morgan. He has the look of a dangerous man about him.”

“You could see it too!” I said. “Well…”

“Nothing,” she interrupted. “That means nothing. The higher courts have given us difficult law, but by God, it’s the law!”

“Your Honor,” I said slowly. And then the tears filled my eyes and there was nothing I could do. “I’m not afraid of losing my pension. I’ve done nineteen years and over eleven months and I’m leaving the Department after tomorrow, and officially retiring in a few weeks, but I’m not afraid of losing the money. That’s not why I’m asking, why I’m begging you to give me a chance. And it’s not that I’m afraid to face a perjury charge and go to jail, because you can’t be a crybaby in this world. But Judge, there are people, policemen, and other people, people on my beat who think I’m something special. I’m one of the ones they really look up to, you know? I’m not just a character, I’m a hell of a cop!”

“I know you are,” she said. “I’ve noticed you in my courtroom many times.”

“You have?” Of course I’d been in her courtroom as a witness before, but I figured all bluecoats looked the same to blackrobes. “Don’t get down on us, Judge Bedford. Some coppers don’t lie at all, and others only lie a little like you said. Only a few like me would do what I did.”

“Why?”

“Because I care, Your Honor, goddamnit. Other cops put in their nine hours and go home to their families twenty miles from town and that’s it, but guys like me, why I got nobody and I want nobody. I do my living on my beat. And I’ve got things inside me that make me do these things against my better judgment. That proves I’m dumber than the dumbest moron on my beat.”

“You’re not dumb. You’re a clever witness. A very clever witness.”

“I never lied that much before, Judge. I just thought I could get away with it. I just couldn’t read that name right on that hotel register. If I could’ve read that name right on the register I never would’ve been able to pull off that traffic warrant story and I wouldn’t’ve tried it. And I probably wouldn’t be in this fix, and the reason I couldn’t really see that name and only assumed it must’ve been Landry is because I’m fifty years old and farsighted, and too stubborn to wear my glasses, and kidding myself that I’m thirty and doing a young man’s job when I can’t cut it anymore. I’m going out though, Judge. This clinches it if I ever had any doubts. Tomorrow’s my last day. A knight. Yesterday somebody called me a Blue Knight. Why do people say such things? They make you think you’re really something and so you got to win a battle every time out. Why should I care if Landry walks out of here? What’s it to me? Why do they call you a knight?”

She looked at me then and put the cigarette out and I’d never in my life begged anyone for anything, and never licked anyone’s boots. I was glad she was a woman because it wasn’t quite so bad to be licking a woman’s boots, not quite so bad, and my stomach wasn’t only burning now, it was hurting in spasms, like a big fist was pounding inside in a jerky rhythm. I thought I’d double over from the pain in a few minutes.

“Officer Morgan, you fully agree don’t you that we can call off the whole damn game and crawl back in primeval muck if the orderers, the enforcers of the law, begin to operate outside it? You understand that there could be no civilization, don’t you? You know, don’t you, that I as well as many other judges am terribly aware of the overwhelming numbers of criminals on those streets whom you policemen must protect us from? You cannot always do it and there are times when you are handcuffed by court decisions that presume the goodness of people past all logical presumption. But don’t you think there are judges, and yes, even defense attorneys, who sympathize with you? Can’t you see that you, you policemen of all people, must be more than you are? You must be patient and above all, honest. Can’t you see if you go outside the law regardless of how absurd it seems, in the name of enforcing it, that we’re all doomed? Can you see these things?”

“Yes. Yes, I know, but old Knobby Booker doesn’t know. And if I had to name him as my snitch he might get a rat jacket and somebody might rip him off…” And now my voice was breaking and I could hardly see her because it was all over and I knew I’d be taken out of this courtroom and over to the county jail. “When you’re alone out there on that beat, Your Honor, and everyone knows you’re the Man… The way they look at you… and how it feels when they say, ‘You’re a champ, Bumper. You’re a warlord. You’re a Knight, a Blue Knight…’” And then I could say no more and said no more that day to that woman.

The silence was buzzing in my ears and finally she said, “Officer Morgan, I’m requesting that the deputy district attorney say nothing of your perjured testimony in his report to his office. I’m also going to request the public defender, the bailiff, the court reporter and the clerk, not to reveal what happened in there today. I want you to leave now so I can wonder if I’ve done the right thing. We’ll never forget this, but we’ll take no further action.”

I couldn’t believe it. I sat for a second, paralyzed, and then I stood up and wiped my eyes and walked toward the door and stopped and didn’t even think to thank her, and looked around, but she was turned in her chair and watching the book stacks again. When I walked through the courtroom, the public defender and the district attorney were talking quietly and both of them glanced at me. I could feel them look at me, but I went straight for the door, holding my stomach, and waiting for the cramps to subside so I could think.

I stepped into the hall and remembered vaguely that the gun and narcotics evidence were still in the courtroom, and then thought the hell with it, I had to get out in the car and drive with the breeze in my face before the blood surging through my skull blew the top of my head off.

I went straight for Elysian Park around the back side, got out of the car, filled my pockets with acid eaters from the glove compartment, and climbed the hill behind the reservoir. I could smell eucalyptus, and the dirt was dry and loose under my shoes. The hill was steeper than I thought and I was sweating pretty good after just a few minutes of walking. Then I saw two park peepers. One had binoculars to see the show better. They were watching the road down below where couples sit in their cars at any hour of the day or night under the trees and make love.

“Get outta my park, you barfbags,” I said, and they turned around and saw me standing above them. They both were middle-aged guys. One of them, with fishbelly pale skin, wore orange checkered pants and a yellow turtleneck and had the binoculars up to his face. When I spoke he dropped them and bolted through the brush. The other guy looked indignant and started walking stiff-legged away like a cocky little terrier, but when I took a few steps toward him, cursing and growling, he started running too, and I picked up the binoculars and threw them at him, but missed and they bounced off a tree and fell in the brush. Then I climbed the hill clear to the top and even though it was smoggy, the view was pretty good. By the time I flopped on the grass and took off my Sam Browne and my hat, the stomach cramps were all but gone. I fell asleep almost right away and slept an hour there on the cool grass.

THIRTEEN

WHEN I WOKE UP, the world tasted horrible and I popped an acid eater just to freshen my mouth. I laid there on my back for a while and looked up at a blue-jay scampering around on a branch.

“Did you shit in my mouth?” I said, and then wondered what I’d been dreaming about because I was sweaty even though it was fairly cool here. A breeze blowing over me felt wonderful. I saw by my watch it was after four and I hated to get up but of course I had to. I sat up, tucked in my shirt, strapped on the Sam Browne and combed back my hair which was tough to do, it was so wild and wiry. And I thought, I’ll be glad when it all falls out and then I won’t have to screw around with it anymore. It was hell sometimes when even your hair wouldn’t obey you. When you had no control over anything, even your goddamn hair. Maybe I should use hair spray, I thought, like these pretty young cops nowadays. Maybe while I still had some hair I should get those fifteen-dollar haircuts and ride around in a radio car all day, spraying my hair instead of booking these scumbags, and then I could stay out of trouble, then no judge could throw me in jail for perjury, and disgrace me, and ruin everything I’ve done for twenty years, and ruin everything they all think about me, all of them, the people on the beat.

One more day and it’s over, thank Christ, I thought, and half stumbled down the hill to my car because I still wasn’t completely awake.

“One-X-L-Forty-five, One-X-L-Forty-five, come in,” said the communications operator, a few seconds after I started the car. She sounded exasperated as hell, so I guess she’d been trying to get me. Probably a major crisis, like a stolen bicycle, I thought.

“One-X-L-Forty-five, go,” I said disgustedly into the mike.

“One-X-L-Forty-five, meet the plainclothes officer at the southeast corner of Beverly and Vermont in Rampart Division. This call has been approved by your watch com-mander.”

I rogered the call and wondered what was going on and then despite how rotten I felt, how disgusted with everything and everybody, and mostly this miserable crummy job, despite all that, my heart started beating a little bit harder, and I got a sort of happy feeling bubbling around inside me because I knew it had to be Charlie Bronski. Charlie must have something, and next thing I knew I was driving huckety-buck over Temple, slicing through the heavy traffic and then bombing it down Vermont, and I spotted Charlie in a parking lot near a market. He was standing beside his car looking hot and tired and mad, but I knew he had something or he’d never call me out of my division like this.

“About time, Bumper,” said Charlie, “I been trying to reach you on the radio for a half hour. They told me you left court a long time ago.”

“Been out for investigation, Charlie. Too big to talk about.”

“Wonder what that means,” Charlie smiled, with his broken-toothed, Slavic, hard-looking grin. “I got something so good you won’t believe it.”

“You busted Red Scalotta!”

“No, no, you’re dreaming,” he laughed. “But I got the search warrant for the back that Reba told us about.”

“How’d you do it so fast?”

“I don’t actually have it yet. I’ll have it in fifteen minutes when Nick and Fuzzy and the Administrative Vice team get here. Nick just talked to me on the radio. Him and Fuzzy just left the Hall of Justice. They got the warrant and the Ad Vice team is on the way to assist.”

“How the hell did you do it, Charlie?” I asked, and now I’d forgotten the judge, and the humiliation, and the misery, and Charlie and me were grinning at each other because we were both on the scent. And when a real cop gets on it, there’s nothing else he can think about. Nothing.

“After we left Reba I couldn’t wait to get started on this thing. We went to that laundry over near Sixth and Kenmore. Actually, it’s a modern dry cleaning and laundry establishment. They do the work on the premises and it’s pretty damned big. The building’s on the corner and takes in the whole ground floor, and I even saw employees going up to the second floor where they have storage or something. I watched from across the street with binoculars and Fuzzy prowled around the back alley and found the door Reba said Aaron was talking about.”

“Who in the hell is Aaron, Charlie?”

“He’s Scalotta’s think man. Aaron Fishman. He’s an accountant and a shrewd organizer and he’s got everything it takes but guts, so he’s a number two man to Scalotta. I never saw the guy, I only heard about him from Ad Vice and Intelligence. Soon as Reba described that little Jew I knew who she was talking about. He’s Scalotta’s link with the back offices. He protects Red’s interests and hires the back clerks and keeps things moving. Dick Reemey at Intelligence says he doesn’t think Red could operate without Aaron Fishman. Red’s drifting away from the business more and more, getting in with the Hollywood crowd. Anyway, Fuzzy, who’s a nosy bastard, went in the door to the laundry and found a stairway that was locked, and a door down. He went down and found a basement and an old vented furnace and a trash box, and he started sifting through and found a few adding machine tapes all ending in fives and zeros, and he even found a few charred pieces of owe sheets and a half-burned scratch sheet. I’ll bet Aaron would set fire to his clerk if he knew he was that careless.”

Charlie chuckled for a minute and I lit a cigar and looked at my watch.

“Don’t worry about the time, Bumper, the back office clerks don’t leave until an hour or so past the last post. He’s got to stay and figure his tops.”

“Tops?”

“Top sheets. This shows each agent’s code and lists his bettors and how much was won and lost.”

“Wonder how Zoot Lafferty did today?” I laughed.

“Handbooks like Zoot get ten percent hot or cold, win or lose,” said Charlie. “Anyway, Fuzzy found a little evidence to corroborate Reba, and then came the most unbelievable tremendous piece of luck I ever had in this job. He’s crawling around down there in the basement like a rat, picking up burned residue, and next thing he sees is a big ugly guy standing stone still in the dark corner of the basement. Fuzzy almost shit his pants and he didn’t have a gun or anything because you don’t really need weapons when you’re working books. Next thing, this guy comes toward him like the creature from the black lagoon and Fuzzy said the door was behind the guy and just as he’s thinking about rushing him with his head down and trying to bowl him over on his ass, the giant starts talking in a little-boy voice and says, ‘Hello, my name is Bobby. Do you know how to fix electric trains?’

“And next thing Fuzzy knows this guy leads him to a little room in the back where there’s a bed and a table and Fuzzy has to find a track break in a little electric train set that Bobby’s got on his table, and all the time the guy’s standing there, his head damn near touching the top of the doorway he’s so big, and making sure Fuzzy fixes it.”

“Well, what…”

“Lemme finish,” Charlie laughed. “Anyway, Fuzzy gets the train fixed and the big ox starts banging Fuzzy on the back and shoulders out of sheer joy, almost knocking Fuzzy’s bridgework loose, and Fuzzy finds out this moron is the cleanup man, evidently some retarded relative of the owner of the building, and he lives there in the basement and does the windows and floors and everything in the place.

“There’re some offices on the second floor with a completely different stairway, Fuzzy discovers, and this locked door is the only way up to this part of the third floor except for the fire escape in back and the ladder’s up and chained in place. This giant, Bobby, says that the third floor is all storage space for one of the offices on the second floor except for ‘Miss Terry’s place,’ and then he starts telling Fuzzy how he likes Miss Terry and how she brings him pies and good things to eat every day, so Fuzzy starts pumping him and Bobby tells him how he hardly ever goes in Miss Terry’s place, but he washes the windows once in a while and sometimes helps her with something. And with Fuzzy prodding, he tells about the wooden racks where all the little yellow cards are with the numbers. Those’re the ABC professional-type markers of course, and he tells about the adding machine, two adding machines, in fact, and when Fuzzy shows him the burned National Daily Reporter, Bobby says, yeah, those are always there. In short, he completely describes an elite bookmaking office right up to the way papers are bundled and filed.”

“You used this Bobby for your informant on the search warrant affidavit?”

“Yeah. I didn’t have to mention anything about Reba. According to the affidavit, we got the warrant solely on the basis of this informant Bobby and our own corroborative findings.”

“You’ll have to use the poor guy in court?”

“He’ll certainly have to be named,” said Charlie.

“How old a guy is he?”

“I don’t know, fifty, fifty-five.”

“Think they’ll hurt him?”

“Why should they? He doesn’t even know what he’s doing. They can see that. They just fucked up, that’s all. Why should they hurt a dummy?”

“Because they’re slimeballs.”

“Well, you never know,” Charlie shrugged. “They might. Anyway, we got the warrant, Bumper. By God, I kept my promise to you.”

“Thanks, Charlie. Nobody could’ve done better. You got anybody staked on the place?”

“Milburn. He works in our office. We’ll just end up busting the broad, Terry. According to the dummy she’s the only one ever comes in there except once in a while a man comes in, he said. He couldn’t remember what the man looked like. This is Thursday. Should be a lot of paper in that back office. If we get enough of the records we can hurt them, Bumper.”

“A two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine?” I sniffed.

“If we get the right records we can put Internal Revenue on them. They can tax ten percent of gross for the year. And they can go back as far as five years. That hurts, Bumper. That hurts even a guy as big as Red Scalotta, but it’s tough to pull it off.”

“How’re you going in?”

“We first decided to use Bobby. We can use subterfuge to get in if we can convince the court that we have information that this organization will attempt to destroy records. Hell, they all do that. Fuzzy thought about using Bobby to bang on the lower door to the inside stairway and call Terry and have Terry open the door which she can buzz open. We could tell Bobby it’s a game or something, but Nick and Milburn voted us down. They thought when we charged through the door and up the steps through the office door and got Terry by the ass, old Bobby might decide to end the game. If he stopped playing I imagine he’d be no more dangerous than a brahma bull. Anyway, Nick and Milburn were afraid we’d have to hurt the dummy so they voted us down.”

“So how’ll you do it?”

“We borrowed a black policewoman from Southwest Detectives. We got her in a blue dungaree apron suit like the black babes that work pressing downstairs. She’s going to knock on the downstairs door and start yelling something unintelligible in a way-out suede dialect, and hope Terry buzzes her in. Then she’s going to walk up the steps and blab something about a fire in the basement and get as close to Terry as she can, and we hope she can get right inside and get her down on the floor and sit on her because me and Nick’ll be charging up that door right behind her. The Administrative Vice team’ll follow in a few minutes and help us out since they’re the experts on a back-office operation. You know, I only took one back office before so this’ll be something for me too.”

“Where’ll I be?”

“Well, we got to hide you with your bluesuit, naturally, so you can hang around out back, near the alley behind the solid wood fence on the west side. After we take the place I’ll open the back window and call you and you can come on in and see the fruits of your labor with Zoot Lafferty.”

“What’ll you do about getting by your star witness?”

“The dummy? Oh, Fuzzy got stuck with that job since he’s Bobby’s best pal,” Charlie chuckled. “Before any of us even get in position Fuzzy’s going in to get Bobby and walk him down the street to the drugstore for an ice cream sundae.”

“One-Victor-One to Two, come in,” said a voice over frequency six.

“That’s Milburn at the back office,” said Charlie, hurrying to the radio.

“Go, Lem,” said Charlie over the mike.

“Listen, Charlie,” said Milburn. “A guy just went in that doorway outside. It’s possible he could’ve turned left into the laundry, I couldn’t tell, but I think he made a right to the office stairway.”

“What’s he look like, Lem?” asked Charlie.

“Caucasian, fifty-five to sixty, five-six, hundred fifty, bald, moustache, glasses. Dressed good. I think he parked one block north and walked down because I saw a white Cad circle the block twice and there was a bald guy driving and looking around like maybe for heat.”

“Okay, Lem, we’ll be there pretty quick,” said Charlie, hanging up the mike, red-faced and nodding at me without saying anything.

“Fishman,” I said.

“Son of a bitch,” said Charlie. “Son of a bitch. He’s there!”

Then Charlie got on the mike and called Nick and the others, having trouble keeping his voice low and modulated in his excitement, and it was affecting me and my heart started beating. Charlie told them to hurry it up and asked their estimated time of arrival.

“Our E.T.A. is five minutes,” said Nick over the radio.

“Jesus, Bumper, we got a chance to take the office and Aaron Fishman at the same time! That weaselly little cocksucker hasn’t been busted since the depression days!”

I was still happy as hell for Charlie, but looking at it realistically, what the hell was there to scream about? They had an idiot for an informant, and I didn’t want to throw cold water, but I knew damn well the search warrant stood a good chance of being traversed, especially if Bobby was brought into court as a material witness and they saw his I.Q. was less than par golf. And if it wasn’t traversed, and they convicted the clerk and Fishman, what the hell would happen to them, a two-hundred-fifty-dollar fine? Fishman probably had four times that much in his pants pocket right now. And I wasn’t any too thrilled about I.R.S. pulling off a big case and hitting them in the bankbook, but even if they did, what would it mean? That Scalotta couldn’t buy a new whip every time he had parties with sick little girls like Reba? Or maybe Aaron Fishman would have to drive his Cad for two years without getting a new one? I couldn’t see anything to get ecstatic about when I considered it all. In fact, I was feeling lower by the minute, and madder. I prayed Red Scalotta would show up there too and maybe try to resist arrest, even though my common sense told me nothing like that would ever happen, but if it did…

“There should be something there to destroy the important records,” said Charlie, puffing on a cigarette and dancing around impatiently waiting for Nick and the others to drive up.

“You mean like flash paper? I’ve heard of that,” I said.

“They sometimes use that, but mostly in fronts,” said Charlie. “You touch a flame or a cigarette to it and it goes up in one big flash and leaves no residue. They also got this dissolving paper. You drop it in water and it dissolves with no residue you can put under a microscope. But sometimes in backs they have some type of small furnace they keep charged where they can throw the real important stuff. Where the hell is that Nick?”

“Right here, Charlie,” I said, as the vice car sped across the parking lot. Nick and Fuzzy and the Negro policewoman were inside and another car was following with the two guys from Administrative Vice.

Everybody was wetting their pants when they found out Aaron Fishman was in there, and I marveled at vice officers, how they can get excited about something that is so disappointing, and depressing, and meaningless, when you thought about it. And then Charlie hurriedly explained to the Ad Vice guys what a uniformed cop was doing there, saying it started out as my caper. I knew one of the Ad Vice officers from when he used to work Central Patrol and we jawed and made plans for another five minutes, and finally piled into the cars.

We turned north on Catalina from Sixth Street before getting to Kenmore and then turned west and came down Kenmore from the north. The north side of Sixth Street is all apartment buildings and to the south is the Miracle Mile, Wilshire Boulevard. Sixth Street itself is mostly commercial buildings. Everybody parked to the north because the windows were painted on the top floor of the building on this side. It was the blind side, and after a few minutes everybody got ready when Fuzzy was seen through binoculars skipping down the sidewalk with Bobby, who even from this distance looked like Gargantua. With the giant gone the stronghold wasn’t quite so impregnable.

In a few minutes they were all hustling down the sidewalk and I circled around the block on foot and came in behind the wooden fence and I was alone and sweating in the sunshine, wondering why the hell I wanted this so bad, and how the organization would get back on its feet, and another of Red’s back offices would just take as much of the action as it could until a new back could be set up, and Aaron would get his new Cad in two years. And he and Red would be free to enjoy it all and maybe someone like me would be laying up in the county jail for perjury in the special tank where they keep policemen accused of crimes, because a policeman put in with the regular pukepots would live probably about one hour at best.

This job didn’t make sense. How could I have told myself for twenty years that it made any sense at all? How could I charge around that beat, a big blue stupid clown, and pretend that anything made any sense at all? Judge Redford should’ve put me in jail, I thought. My brain was boiling in the sunshine, the sweat running in my eyes and burning. That would’ve been a consistent kind of lunacy at least. What the hell are we doing here like this?

Then suddenly I couldn’t stand it there alone, my big ass only partly hidden by the fence, and I walked out in the alley and over to the fire escape of the old building. The iron ladder was chained up like an ancient fearsome drawbridge. A breach of fire regulation to chain it up, I thought, and I looked around for something to stand on, and spotted a trash can by the fence which I emptied and turned upside down under the ladder. And then in a minute I was dangling there like a fat sweaty baboon, tearing my pants on the concrete wall, scuffing my shoes, panting, and finally sobbing, because I couldn’t get my ass up there on a window ledge where I could then climb over the railing on the second floor.

I fell back once, clear to the alley below. I fell hard on my shoulder, and thought if I’d been able to read that hotel register I’d never have been humiliated like that, and I thought of how I was of no value whatever to this operation which was in itself of no value because if I couldn’t catch Red Scalotta and Aaron Fishman by the rules, then they would put me in jail. And I sat on my ass there in the alley, panting, my hands red and sore and my shoulder hurting, and I thought then, if I go to the dungeon and Fishman goes free, then I’m the scumbag and he’s the Blue Knight, and I wondered how he would look in my uniform.

Then I looked up at that ladder and vowed that I’d die here in this alley if I didn’t climb that fire escape. I got back on the trash can and jumped up, grabbing the metal ladder and feeling it drop a little until the chain caught it. Then I shinnied up the wall again, gasping and sobbing out loud, the sweat like vinegar in my eyes, and got one foot up and had to stop and try to breathe in the heat. I almost let go and thought how that would make sense too if I fell head first now onto the garbage can and broke my fat neck. Then I took a huge breath and knew if I didn’t make it now I never would make it, and I heaved my carcass up, up, and then I was sitting on the window ledge and surprisingly enough I still had my hat on and I hadn’t lost my gun. I was perched there on the ledge in a pile of birdshit, and a fat gray pigeon sat on the fire escape railing over me. He cooed and looked at me gasping and grimacing and wondered if I was dangerous.

“Get outta here, you little prick,” I whispered, when he crapped on my shoulder. I swung my hat at him and he squawked and flew away.

Then I dragged myself up carefully, keeping most of my weight on the window ledge, and I was on the railing and then I climbed over and was on the first landing of the fire escape where I had to rest for a minute because I was dizzy. I looked at my watch and saw that the policewoman should be about ready to try her flimflam now, so, dizzy or not, I climbed the second iron ladder.

It was steep and long to the third floor, one of those almost vertical iron ladders like on a ship, with round iron hand railings. I climbed as quietly as I could, taking long deep breaths. Then I was at the top and was glad I wouldn’t have to make the steep descent back down. I should be walking out through the back office if everything went right. When Charlie opened the back door to call to me, I’d be standing right here watching the door instead of crouched in some alley. And if I heard any doors breaking, or any action at all, I’d kick in the back door here, and maybe I’d be the first one inside the place, and maybe I’d do something else that could land me in jail, but the way I felt this moment, maybe it would be worth it because twenty years didn’t mean a goddamn thing when Scalotta and Fishman could wear my uniform and I could wear jail denims with striped patch pockets and lay up there in the cop’s tank at the county jail.

Then I heard a crash and I knew the scam hadn’t worked because this was a door breaking far away, way down below, which meant they’d had to break in that first door, run up those steps clear to the third floor and break in the other door, and then I found myself kicking on the back door which I didn’t know was steel reinforced with a heavy bar across it. It wouldn’t go, and at that moment I didn’t know how sturdy they had made it and I thought it was a regular door and I was almost crying as I kicked it because I couldn’t even take down a door anymore and I couldn’t do anything anymore. But I kicked, and kicked, and finally I went to the window on the left and kicked right through it, cutting my leg. I broke out the glass with my hands and I lost my hat and cut my forehead on the glass and was raging and yelling something I couldn’t remember when I stormed through that room and saw the terrified young woman and the trembling bald little man by the doorway, their arms full of boxes. They looked at me for a second and then the woman started screaming and the man went out the door, turned right and headed for the fire escape with me after him. He threw the bar off the steel door and was back out on the fire escape, a big cardboard box in his arms crammed with cards and papers, and he stopped on the landing and saw how steep that ladder was. He was holding tight to the heavy box and he turned his back to the ladder and gripped the box and was going to try to back down the iron stairs when I grabbed him with my bloody hands and he yelled at me as two pigeons flew in our faces with a whir and rattle of wings.

“Let me go!” he said, the little greenish sacs under his eyes bulging. “You ape, let me go!”

And then I don’t know if I just let him go or if I put pressure against him. I honestly don’t know, but it doesn’t really make any difference, because pulling away from me like he was, and holding that box like Midas’s gold, I knew exactly what would happen if I just suddenly did what he was asking.

So I don’t know for sure if I shoved him or if I just released him, but as I said, the result would’ve been the same, and at this moment in my life it was the only thing that made the slightest bit of sense, the only thing I could do for any of it to make any sense at all. He would never wear my bluesuit, never, if I only did what he was asking. My heart was thumping like the pigeon’s wing, and I just let go and dropped my bleeding hands to my sides.

He pitched backward then, and the weight of the box against his chest made him fall head first, clattering down the iron ladder like an anchor being dropped. He was screaming and the box had broken open and markers and papers were flying and sailing and tumbling through the air. It did sound like an anchor chain feeding out, the way he clattered down. On the landing below where he stopped, I saw his dentures on the first rung of the ladder not broken, and his glasses on the landing, broken, and the cardboard box on top of him so you could hardly see the little man doubled over beneath it. He was quiet for a second and then started whimpering, and finally sounded like a pigeon cooing.

“What happened, Bumper?” asked Charlie, running out on the fire escape, out of breath.

“Did you get all the right records, Charlie?”

“Oh my God, what happened?”

“He fell.”

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t think so, Charlie. He’s making a lot of noises.”

“I better call for an ambulance,” said Charlie. “You better stay here.”

“I intend to,” I said, and stood there resting against the railing for five minutes watching Fishman. During that time, Nick and Charlie went down and unfolded him and mopped at his face and bald head, which was broken with huge lacerations.

Charlie and me left the others there and drove slowly in the wake of the screaming ambulance which was taking Fishman to Central Receiving Hospital.

“How bad is your leg cut?” asked Charlie, seeing the blood, a purple wine color when it soaks through a policeman’s blue uniform.

“Not bad, Charlie,” I said, dabbing at the cuts on my hands.

“Your face doesn’t look bad. Little cut over your eye.”

“I feel fine.”

“There was a room across from the back office,” said Charlie. “We found a gas-fed burn oven in there. It was fired up and vented through the roof. They would’ve got to it if you hadn’t crashed through the window. I’m thankful you did it, Bumper. You saved everything for us.”

“Glad I could help.”

“Did Fishman try to fight you or anything?”

“He struggled a little. He just fell.”

“I hope the little asshole dies. I’m thinking what he means to the organization and what he is, and I hope the little asshole dies, so help me God. You know, I thought you pushed him for a minute. I thought you did it and I was glad.”

“He just fell, Charlie.”

“Here we are, let’s get you cleaned up,” said Charlie, parking on the Sixth Street side of Central Receiving where a doctor was going into the ambulance that carried Fishman. The doctor came out in a few seconds and waved them on to General Hospital where there are better surgical facilities.

“How’s he look, doctor?” asked Charlie, as we walked through the emergency entrance.

“Not good,” said the doctor.

“Think he’ll die?” asked Charlie.

“I don’t know. If he doesn’t, he may wish he had.”

The cut on my leg took a few stitches but the ones on my hands and face weren’t bad and just took cleaning and a little germ killer. It was almost seven o’clock when I finished my reports telling how Fishman jerked out of my grasp and how I got cut.

When I left, Charlie was dictating his arrest report to a typist.

“Well, I’ll be going now, Charlie,” I said, and he stopped his dictation and stood up and walked with me a little way down the hall and looked for a second like he was going to shake hands with me.

“Thanks, Bumper, for everything. This is the best vice pinch I’ve ever been in on. We got more of their records than I could’ve dreamed of.”

“Thanks for cutting me in on it, Charlie.”

“It was your caper.”

“Wonder how Fishman’s doing?” I said, getting a sharp pain and feeling a bubble forming. I popped two tablets.

“Fuzzy called out there about a half hour ago. Couldn’t find out much. I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll bet Red Scalotta has to get a new accountant and business advisor. I’ll bet Fishman’ll have trouble adding two-digit numbers after this.”

“Well, maybe it worked out right.”

“Right? It was more than that. For the first time in years I feel like maybe there is some justice in the world, and even though they fuck over you and rub it in your face and fuck over the law itself, well, now for the first time I feel like maybe there’s other hands in it, and these hands’ll give you some justice. I feel like the hand of God pushed that man down those stairs.”

“The hand of God, huh? Yeah, well I’ll be seeing you, Charlie. Hang in there, old shoe.”

“See you, Bumper,” said Charlie Bronski, his square face lit up, eyes crinkled, the broken tooth showing.

The locker room was empty when I got there, and after I sat down on the bench and started unlacing my boondockers, I suddenly realized how sore I was. Not the cuts from the glass, that was nothing. But my shoulder where I fell in that alley, and my arms and back from dangling there on that fire escape, when I couldn’t do what any young cop could do-pull my ass up six feet in the air. And my hands were blistered and raw from hanging there and from clawing at the concrete wall trying to get that boost. Even my ass was sore, deep inside, the muscles of both cheeks, from kicking against that steel reinforced door and bouncing off it like a tennis ball, or maybe in my case like a lumpy medicine ball. I was very very sore all over.

In fifteen minutes I’d gotten into my sport coat and slacks, and combed my hair as best I could, which just means rearranging what resembles a bad wiring job, and slipped on my loafers, and was driving out of the parking lot in my Ford. The gas pains were gone, and no indigestion. Then I thought of Aaron Fishman again, folded over, his gouged head twisted under the puny little body with the big cardboard box on top. But I stopped that nonsense right there, and said, no, no, you won’t haunt my sleep because it doesn’t matter a bit that I made you fall. I was just the instrument of some force in this world that, when the time is right, screws over almost every man, good or bad, rich or poor, and usually does it just when the man can bear it least.

FOURTEEN

IT WAS DARK NOW, and the spring night, and the cool breeze, even the smog, all tasted good to me. I rolled the windows down to suck up the air, and jumped on the Hollywood Freeway, thinking how good it would be at Abd’s Harem with a bunch of happy Arabs.

Hollywood was going pretty good for a Thursday night, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards both being jammed with cars, mostly young people, teeny boppers who’ve literally taken over Hollywood at night. The place has lost the real glamour of the forties and early fifties. It’s a kid’s town now, and except for a million hippies, fruits and servicemen, that’s about all you see around the Strip and the main thoroughfares. It’s a very depressing place for that reason. The clubs are mostly bottomless skin houses and psychedelic joints, but there’re still some places you can go, some excellent places to eat.

I’d come to know Yasser Hafiz and the others some ten or twelve years ago when I was walking my beat on Main Street. One night at about two a.m., I spotted a paddy hustler taking a guy up the back stairs of the Marlowe Hotel, a sleazy Main Street puke hole used by whores and fruits and paddy hustlers. I was alone because my partner, a piss-poor excuse for a cop named Syd Bacon, was laying up in a hotel room knocking a chunk off some bubble-assed taxi dancer he was going with. He was supposed to meet me back on the beat at one-thirty but never showed up.

I hurried around the front of the hotel that night and went up the other stairway and hid behind the deserted clerk’s desk, and when the paddy hustler and his victim came that way down the hall, I jumped inside the small closet at the desk. I was just in time because the paddy hustler’s two partners came out of a room two doors down and across the hall.

They were whispering, and one of them faded down the front stairway to watch the street. The second walked behind the desk, turned the lamp on and pretended to be reading a newspaper he carried with him. They were black of course. Paddy hustling was always a Negro flimflam and that’s where the name came from, but lately I’ve seen white hustlers using this scam on other paddies.

“Say, brother,” said the hustler who was with the paddy. I left the door open a crack and saw the paddy was a well-dressed young guy, bombed out of his skull, weaving around where he stood, trying hard to brush his thick black hair out of his eyes. He’d lost his necktie somewhere, and his white dress shirt was stained from booze and unbuttoned.

“Wha’s happening blood?” said the desk clerk, putting down his paper.

“Alice in tonight?” said the first one, acting as the procurer. He was the bigger of the two, a very dark-skinned guy, tall and fairly young.

“Yeah, she’s breathin’ fire tonight,” said the other one. He was young too. “Ain’t had no man yet and that bitch is a nymphomaniac!”

“Really,” said the procurer. “Really.”

“Let’s go, I’m ready,” said the paddy, and I noticed his Middle East accent.

“Jist a minute, man,” said his companion. “That whore is fine pussy, but she is a stone thief, man. You better leave the wallet with the desk clerk.”

“Yeah, I kin put it in the safe,” said the bored-looking guy behind the desk. “Never tell when that whore might talk you into a all-night ride and then rob your ass when you falls asleep.”

“Right, brother,” said the procurer.

The paddy shrugged and took out his wallet, putting it on the desk.

“Better leave the wristwatch and ring too,” warned the desk clerk.

“Thank you,” the paddy nodded, obeying the desk clerk, who removed an envelope from under the counter, which he had put there for the valuables.

“Kin I have my five dollars now?” asked the first man. “And the clerk’ll take the five for Alice and three for the room.”

“All right,” said the paddy, unsteadily counting out thirteen dollars for the two men.

“Now you go on in number two-thirty-seven there,” said the desk clerk, pointing to the room where the first one had come out. “I’ll buzz Alice’s room and she be in there in ’bout five minutes. And baby, you better hold on ’cause she move like a steam drill.”

The paddy smiled nervously and staggered down the hall, opening the door and disappearing inside.

“Ready, blood?” grinned the desk clerk.

“Le’s go,” said the big one, chuckling as the clerk turned off the lamp.

I’d come out of the closet without them seeing, and stood at the desk now, with my Smith pointed at the right eyeball of the desk clerk. “Want a room for the night, gentlemen?” I said. “Our accommodations ain’t fancy, but it’s clean and we can offer two very square meals a day.”

The procurer was the first to recover, and he was trying to decide whether to run or try something more dangerous. Paddy hustlers didn’t usually carry guns, but they often carried blades or crude saps of some kind. I aimed at his eyeball to quiet down his busy mind. “Freeze, or name your beneficiary,” I said.

“Hey, Officer, wha’s happenin’?” said the desk clerk with a big grin showing lots of gold. “Where you come from?”

“Down the chimney. Now get your asses over there and spread-eagle on the wall!”

“Sheee-it, this is a humbug, we ain’t done nothin’,” said the procurer.

“Shit fuck,” grumbled the desk clerk.

This was in the days when we still believed in wall searches, before so damn many policemen got shot or thumped by guys who practiced coming out of that spread-eagled position. I abandoned it a few years before the Department did, and I put hot suspects on their knees or bellies. But at this time I was still using the wall search.

“Move your legs back, desk clerk!” I said to the smaller one, who was being cute, barely leaning forward. He only shuffled his feet a few inches so I kicked him hard behind the right knee and he screamed and did what I told him. The scream brought the paddy out.

“Is something wrong?” asked the paddy who was half-undressed, trying to look sober as possible.

“I’m saving you from being flimflammed, asshole,” I said. “Get your clothes on and come out here.” He just stood there gaping. Then I yelled, “Get dressed, stupid!” my gun in my left hand still pointing at the spread-eagled paddy hustlers, and my handcuffs in my right hand getting ready to cuff the two hustlers together, and my eyes drilling the dipshit victim who stood there getting ready to ask more dumb questions. I didn’t see or hear the third paddy hustler, a big bull of a kid, who’d crept up the front stairway when he heard the ruckus. If he’d been an experienced hustler instead of a youngster he’d have left the other two and gone his way. But being inexperienced, he was loyal to his partners, and just as I was getting ready to kick the paddy in the ass to get him moving, two hundred pounds falls on my back and I’m on the floor fighting for my gun and my life with all three hustlers.

“Git the gun, Tyrone!” yelled the desk clerk to the kid. “Jist git the gun!”

The procurer was cursing and hitting me in the face, head, and neck, anywhere he could, and the desk clerk was working on my ribs while I tried to protect myself with my left arm. All my thoughts were on the right arm, and hand, and the gun in the hand, which the kid was prying on with both his strong hands. For a few seconds everything was quiet, except for the moans and breathing and muffled swearing of the four of us, and then the kid was winning and almost had the gun worked loose when I heard a godawful Arab war cry and the paddy cracked the desk clerk over the head with a heavy metal ashtray.

Then the paddy was swinging it with both hands and I ducked my head, catching a glancing blow on the shoulder that made me yelp and which left a bruise as big as your fist. The fourth or fifth swing caught the procurer in the eyes and he was done, laying there holding his bleeding face and yelling, “YOW, YOW, YOW,” like somebody cut his nuts off.

The kid lost his stomach at this point and said, “Aw right, aw right, aw right,” raising his hands to surrender and scooting back on his ass with his hands in the air until he backed against the wall.

I was so sick and trembling I could’ve vomited and I was ready to kill all three of them, except that the desk clerk and the procurer looked half-dead already. The kid was untouched.

“Stand up,” I said to the kid, and when he did, I put my gun in the holster, reached for my beavertail, and sapped him across the left collarbone. That started him yelling and bitching, and he didn’t stop until we got him to the hospital, which made me completely disgusted. Up until then I had some respect for him because he was loyal to his friends and had enough guts to jump a cop who had a gun in his hand. But when he couldn’t suffer in silence, he lost my respect. I figured this kind of crybaby’d probably make a complaint against me for police brutality or something, but he never did.

“What can I do, sir?” asked the paddy after I had the three hustlers halfway on their feet. I was trying to stay on mine as I leaned against the desk and covered them with the gun. This time I kept my eyes open.

“Go downstairs and put a dime in the pay phone and dial operator,” I panted, still not sure how sober he was, even though he damn near decapitated all of us. “Ask for the police and tell them an officer needs assistance at the Marlowe Hotel, Fifth and Main.”

“Marlowe Hotel,” said the paddy. “Yes, sir.”

I never found out what he said over the phone, but he must’ve laid it on pretty good because in three minutes I had patrol units, vice cops, felony cars, and even some dicks who rolled from the station. There were more cops than tenants at the Marlowe and the street out front was lined with radio cars, their red lights glowing clear to Sixth Street.

The paddy turned out to be Yasser’s oldest son, Abd, the one the Harem was named for, and that was how I got to know them. Abd stayed with me for several hours that night while I made my reports, and he seemed like a pretty good guy after he had a dozen cups of coffee and sobered up. He had a very bad recollection of the whole thing when we went to court against the paddy hustlers, and he ended up testifying to what I told him happened before we went in the courtroom. That part about saving my ass, he never did remember, and when I drove him home to Hollywood after work that night, in gratitude for what he did for me, he took me in the house, woke up his father, mother, uncle, and three of his brothers to introduce me and tell them that I saved him from being robbed and killed by three bandits. Of course he never told them the whole truth about how the thing went down in a whorehouse, but that was okay with me, and since he really thought I saved him instead of the other way around, and since he really enjoyed having been saved even though it didn’t happen, and making me the family hero, what the hell, I let him tell it the way he believed it happened so as not to disappoint them.

It was about that time that Yasser and his clan had moved here from New York where they had a small restaurant. They had pooled every cent they could lay hands on to buy the joint in Hollywood, liquor license and all, and had it remodeled and ready to open. We sat in Yasser’s kitchen that night, all of us, drinking arak and wine, and then beer, and we all got pretty zonked except Abd who was sick, and I picked out the name for the new restaurant.

It’s a corny name, I know, but I was drunk when I picked it and I could’ve done better. But by then I was such a hero to them they wouldn’t have changed it for anything. They insisted on me being a kind of permanent guest of Abd’s Harem. I couldn’t pay for a thing in there and that’s why I didn’t come as often as I wanted to.

I drove in the parking lot in back of Abd’s Harem instead of having the parking lot attendant handle the Ford, and I came in through the kitchen.

“Al-salām ’alaykum, Baba,” I said to Yasser Hafiz Hammad, a squat, completely bald old man with a heavy gray moustache, who had his back to me as he mixed up a huge metal bowlful of kibbi with clean powerful hands which he dipped often in ice water so the kibbi wouldn’t stick to them.

“Bumper! Wa-’alaykum al-salām,” he grinned through the great moustache. He hugged me with his arms, keeping his hands free, and kissed me on the mouth. That was something I couldn’t get over about Arabs. They didn’t usually kiss women in greeting, only men.

“Where the hell you keep yourself, Bumper?” he said, dipping a spoon in the raw kibbi for me to sample it. “We don’t see you much no more.”

“Delicious, Baba,” I said.

“Yes, but is it ber-fect?”

“It’s ber-fect, Bubba.”

“You hungry, eh, Bumper?” he said, returning to the kibbi and making me some little round balls which he knew I’d eat raw. I liked raw kibbi every bit as good as baked, and kibbi with yogurt even better.

“You making labaneeyee tonight, Baba?”

“Sure, Bumper. Damn right. What else you want? Sfeeha? Bamee? Anything you want. We got lots of dish tonight. Bunch of Lebanese and Syrian guys in the banquet room. Ten entrées they order special. Son of a bitch, I cook all goddamn day. When I get rest, I coming out and have a goddamn glass of arak with you, okay?”

“Okay, Baba,” I said, finishing the kibbi and watching Yasser work. He kneaded the ground lamb and cracked wheat and the onion and cinnamon and spices, after dipping his hands in the ice water to keep the mixture pliable. This kibbi was well stuffed with pine nuts and the meat was cooked in butter and braised. When Yasser got it all ready he spread the kibbi over the bottom of a metal pan and the kibbi stuffing over the top of that, and another layer of kibbi on top of that. He cut the whole pan into little diamond shapes and then baked it. Now I couldn’t decide whether to have the kibbi with yogurt or the baked kibbi. What the hell, I’ll have them both, I thought. I was pretty hungry now.

“Look, Bumper,” said Yasser Hafiz, pointing to the little footballs of kibbi he’d been working on all day. He’d pressed hollows into the center and stuffed them with lamb stuffing and was cooking them in a yogurt sauce.

Yeah, I’ll have both, I thought. I decided to go in and start on some appetizers. I was more than hungry all of a sudden and not quite so tired, and all I could think of was the wonderful food of Abd’s Harem.

Inside, I spotted Ahmed right away, and he grinned and waved me to a table near the small dance area where one of his dancers could shove her belly in my face. Ahmed was tall for an Arab, about thirty years old, the youngest of Yasser’s sons, and had lived in the States since he was a kid. He’d lost a lot of the Arab ways and didn’t kiss me like his father and his uncles did, when the uncles were here helping wait tables or cooking on a busy weekend night.

“Glad you could come tonight, Bumper,” said Ahmed with a hint of a New York accent, since his family had lived there several years before coming to Los Angeles. When he talked to the regular customers though, he put on a Middle East accent for show.

“Think I’ll have some appetizers, Ahmed. I’m hungry tonight.”

“Good, Bumper, good,” said Ahmed, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners when he grinned. “We like to see you eat.” He clapped his hands for a good-looking, red-haired waitress in a harem girl’s outfit, and she came over to the table.

Abd’s Harem was like all Middle East restaurants, but bigger than most. There were Saracen shields on the wall, and scimitars, and imitation Persian tapestries, and the booths and tables were dark and heavy, leather-padded, and studded with hammered bronzework. Soothing Arab music drifted through the place from several hidden speakers.

“Bring Bumper some lamb tongue, Barbara. What else would you like, Bumper?”

“A little humos tahini, Ahmed.”

“Right. Humos too, Barbara.”

Barbara smiled at me and said, “A drink, Bumper?”

“All right, I’ll have arak.”

“If you’ll excuse me, Bumper,” said Ahmed, “I’ve got to take care of the banquet room for the next hour. Then I’ll join you and we’ll have a drink together.”

“Go head on, kid,” I nodded. “Looks like you’re gonna have a nice crowd.”

“Business is great, Bumper. Wait’ll you see our new belly dancer.”

I nodded and winked as Ahmed hurried toward the banquet room to take care of the roomful of Arabs. I could hear them from where I sat, proposing toasts and laughing. They seemed pretty well lubricated for so early in the evening.

The appetizers were already prepared and the waitress was back to my table in a few minutes with the little slices of lamb’s tongue, boiled and peeled and seasoned with garlic and salt, and a good-sized dish of humos, which makes the greatest dip in the world. She gave me more humos than any of the paying customers get, and a large heap of the round flat pieces of warm Syrian bread covered with a napkin. I dipped into the humos right away with a large chunk of the Syrian bread and almost moaned out loud it was so delicious. I could taste the sesame seeds even though they were ground into the creamy blend of garbanzo beans, and I poured olive oil all over it, and dipped lots of oil up in my bread. I could also taste the clove and crushed garlic and almost forgot the lamb tongue I was enjoying the humos so much.

“Here’s your arak, Bumper,” said Barbara, bringing me the drink and another dish of humos a little smaller than the first. “Yasser says not to let you ruin your dinner with the tongue and humos.”

“No chance, kid,” I said, after swallowing a huge mouthful of tongue and bread. I gulped some arak so I could talk. “Tell Baba I’m as hungry as a tribe of Bedouins and I’ll eat out his whole kitchen if he’s not careful.”

“And as horny as a herd of goats?”

“Yeah, tell him that too,” I chuckled. That was a standing joke between Yasser and Ahmed and me that all the girls had heard.

Now that the starvation phase was over I started to feel pain in my leg and shoulder. I poured some water into the clear arak, turning it milky. I glanced around to make sure no one could see and I loosened up my belt and smiled to myself as I smelled the food all through the place. I nibbled now, and tried not to be such a crude bastard, and I sipped my arak, getting three refills from Barbara who was a fast and good waitress. Then the pain started to go away.

I saw Ahmed running between kitchen, bar, and banquet room, and I thought that Yasser was lucky to have such good kids. All his sons had done well, and now the last one was staying in the business with him. The Arab music drifted softly through the place and mingled with the food smell, and I was feeling damn warm now. In about an hour the band would be here, a three-piece Armenian group who played exotic music for the belly dancer that I was anxious to see. Ahmed really knew his dancers.

“Everything okay, Bumper?” Ahmed called in an Arab accent since other customers were around.

“Okay,” I grinned, and he hurried past on one of his trips to the kitchen.

I was starting to sway with the sensual drums and I was feeling much better, admiring the rugs hanging on the walls, and other Arabian Nights decorations like water pipes that kids used now for smoking dope, and the swords up high enough on the walls so some drunk couldn’t grab them and start his own dance. Abd’s Harem was a very good place, I thought. Really an oasis in the middle of a tacky, noisy part of Hollywood which was generally so phony I couldn’t stand it.

I noticed that Khalid, one of Yasser’s brothers, was helping in the bar tonight. I figured as soon as he saw me I’d get another big hairy kiss.

“Ready, Bumper?” said Barbara, smiling pretty, and padding quietly up to my table with a huge tray on a food cart.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, looking at the dishes of baked kibbi, kibbi with yogurt, stuffed grape leaves and a small skewer of shish kebab.

“Yasser said to save room for dessert, Bumper,” said Barbara as she left me there. I could think of nothing at times like these, except the table in front of me, and I waged a tough fight against myself to eat slowly and savor it, especially the grape leaves which were a surprise for me, because Yasser doesn’t make them all the time. I could taste the mint, fragrant and tangy in the yogurt that I ladled over the grape leaves, pregnant with lamb and rice, succulent parsley, and spices. Yasser added just the right amount of lemon juice for my taste.

After a while, Barbara returned and smiled at me as I sat sipping my wine, at peace with the world.

“Some pastry, Bumper? Baklawa?”

“Oh no, Barbara,” I said, holding my hand up weakly. “Too rich. No baklawa, no.”

“All right,” she laughed. “Yasser has something special for you. Did you save a little room?”

“Oh no,” I said painfully, as she took away the cartload of empty plates.

Arabs are so friendly and hospitable, and they like so much to see me eat, I would’ve hated to do something horrible like upchucking all his hard work. My belly was bulging so much I had to move the chair back two inches, and my shirt was straining to pop open. I thought of Fat-stuff in the old “Smilin’ Jack” cartoon strip and remembered how I used to laugh at the poor bastard always popping his buttons, when I was young and slim.

A few minutes later Barbara came back with an oversized sherbet glass.

“Moosh moosh!” I said. “I haven’t had moosh moosh for a year.”

Barbara smiled and said, “Yasser says that Allah sent you tonight because Yasser made your favorite dessert today and thought about you.”

“Moosh moosh!” I said as Barbara left me, and I scooped up a mouthful and let it lay there on my tongue, tasting the sweet apricot and lemon rind, and remembering how Yasser’s wife, Yasmine, blended the apricot and lemon rind and sugar, and folded the apricot puree into the whipped cream before it was chilled. They all knew it was my very favorite. So I ended up having two more cups of moosh moosh and then I was really through. Barbara cleared the table for the last time and Ahmed and Yasser both joined me for ten minutes.

There’s an Arab prayer which translates something like, “Give me a good digestion, Lord, and something to digest.” It was the only prayer I ever heard that I thought made a lot of sense, and I thought that if I believed in God I wouldn’t lay around begging from Him and mumbling a lot of phony promises. This particular Arab prayer said all I’d say to Him, and all I’d expect of Him, so even though I didn’t believe, I said it before and after I ate dinner in Abd’s Harem. Sometimes I even said it at other times. Sometimes even at home I said it.

When the Armenians arrived, I was happy to see the oud player was old Mr. Kamian. He didn’t often play at Abd’s Harem anymore. His grandsons Berge and George were with him, and anyone could see they were his grandsons, all three being tall, thin, with hawk noses and dark-rimmed blazing eyes. Berge would play the violin and George, the youngest, a boy not yet twenty, would play the darbuka drums. It was just a job to the two young ones. They were good musicians, but it was old Kamian I would hear as he plucked and stroked those oud strings with the quill of an eagle feather. It’s a lute-like instrument and has no frets like a guitar. Yet the old man’s fingers knew exactly where to dance on that oud neck, so fast it was hard to believe. It gave me goose bumps and made it hard to swallow when I saw that old man’s slender, brittle-looking fingers dart over those twelve strings.

Once I was there in the afternoon when they were rehearsing new dancers, and old Kamian was telling Armenian tales to Berge’s children. I sat there hidden behind a beaded curtain and heard Kamian tell about the fiery horses of Armenia, and pomegranates full of pearls and rubies, and about Hazaran-Bulbul, the magic nightingale of a thousand songs. He made me feel like a kid that day listening to him, and ever since, when I hear him play the oud, I could almost climb aboard one of those fiery horses.

Another time when I was here late at night listening to Mr. Kamian play, his oldest son Leon sat with me drinking scotch and told me the story of his father, how he was the only survivor of a large family which totaled, cousins and all, half of a village that was massacred by Turkish soldiers. Mr. Kamian was fifteen years old then, and his body was left in a big ditch with those of his parents, brothers, sisters, everyone in his entire world.

“The thing that saved him that day was the smell of death,” said Leon, who spoke five languages, English with only a slight accent, and like all Armenians, loved to tell stories. “As he lay there, my father wanted to be dead with the others. It wasn’t the sight or idea of death that made him drag himself up and out of that ditch, it was the smell of rotting bodies which at last was the only unbearable thing, and which drove him to the road and away from his village forever.

“For almost a year he wandered, his only possession an oud which he rescued from a plundered farmhouse. One night when he was huddling alone in the wilderness like Cain, feeling like the only human being left on earth, he became very angry that God would let this happen, and like the child he was, he demanded a sign from Him, and he waited and listened in the darkness, but he heard only the wind howling across the Russian steppes. Then he wondered how he could ever have believed in a God who would let this happen to Armenia. His tiny Christian island in a sea of Islam. There was no sign, so he strummed the oud and sang brave songs into the wind all that night.

“The very next night the boy was wandering through a village much like his had been, and of course he passed hundreds of starving refugees on the road. He took off from the road to find a place to sleep in the trees where someone wouldn’t kill him just to steal the oud. There in the woods he saw a black sinister shape rising from the ground, and the first thing the boy thought was that it was a dev, one of those fearsome Armenian ogres his nany used to tell him about. He raised the flimsy oud like it was an ax and prepared to defend himself. Then the dark form took shape and spoke to him in Armenian from beneath a ragged cloak, ‘Please, do you have something to eat?’

“The boy saw a child in the moonlight, covered with sores, stomach bloated, barely able to walk. Her teeth were loose, eyes and gums crusted, and a recently broken nose made it hard for her to breathe. He examined her face and saw that at no time could that face have been more than homely, but now it was truly awful. He spoke to her a few moments and found she was thirteen years old, a wandering refugee, and he remembered the proud and vain demand he had made of God the night before. He began to laugh then, and suddenly felt stronger. He couldn’t stop laughing and the laughter filled him with strength. It alarmed the girl, and he saw it, and finally he said, ‘The God of Armenians has a sense of humor. How can you doubt someone with a sense of humor like His? You’re to come with me, my little dev.’

“‘What do you want of me, sir?’ she asked, very frightened now.

“‘What do I want of you?’ he answered softly. ‘Look at you. What do you have to offer? Everything has been taken from you and everything has been done to you. What could anyone in the world possibly want of you now? Can you think of what it is, the thing I want?’

“‘No, sir.’

“‘There is only one thing left. To love you, of course. We’re good for no more than this. Now come with me. We’re going to find our Armenia.’

“She went with the half-starved, wild-eyed boy. They survived together and wandered to the Black Sea, somehow got passage, and crossed on foot through Europe, through the war and fighting, ever westward to the Atlantic, working, having children. Finally, in 1927, they and five children, having roamed half the world, arrived in New York, and from force of habit more than anything, kept wandering west, picking up jobs along the way until they reached the Pacific Ocean. Then my mother said, ‘This is as far as we go. This ocean is too big.’ And they stopped, had four more children, sixty-one grandchildren, and so far, ten great grandchildren, more than forty with the Kamian name that would not die in the ditch in Armenia. Most of his sons and grandsons have done well, and he still likes to come here sometimes once a week and play his oud for a few people who understand.”

So that was the story of old Kamian, and I didn’t doubt any of it, because I’ve known a lot of tough bastards in my time that could’ve pulled off something like that, but the thing that amazed me, that I couldn’t really understand, is how he could’ve taken the little girl with him that night. I mean he could’ve helped her, sure. But he purposely gave himself to her that night. After what he’d already been through, he up and gave himself to somebody! That was the most incredible thing about Mr. Kamian, that, and how the hell his fingers knew exactly where to go on that oud when there were no frets to guide them.

“You eat plenty, Bumper?” asked Yasser, who came to the table with Ahmed, and I responded by giving him a fat-cat grin and patting him on the hand, and whispering “Shukran” in a way that you would know meant thanks without knowing Arabic.

“Maybe you’ll convert me, feeding me like that. Maybe I’ll become a Moslem,” I added.

“What you do during Ramadan when you must fast?” laughed Yasser.

“You see how big Abd’s kids?” said Yasser, lifting his apron to reach for his wallet, and laying some snapshots on me that I pretended I could see.

“Yeah, handsome kids,” I said, hoping the old man wouldn’t start showing me all his grandkids. He had about thirty of them, and like all Arabs, was crazy about children.

Ahmed spoke in Arabic that had to do with the banquet room, and Yasser seemed to remember something.

“Scoose me, Bumper,” said the old boy, “I come back later, but I got things in the kitchen.”

“Sure, Baba,” I said, and Ahmed smiled as he watched his father strut back to the kitchen, the proud patriarch of a large family, and the head of a very good business, which Abd’s Harem certainly was.

“How old is your father now?”

“Seventy-five,” said Ahmed. “Looks good, doesn’t he?”

“Damn good. Tell me, can he still eat like he used to, say ten, fifteen years ago?”

“He eats pretty well,” Ahmed laughed. “But no, not like he used to. He used to eat like you, Bumper. It was a joy to watch him eat. He says food doesn’t taste quite the same anymore.”

I started getting gas pains, but didn’t pop a tablet because it would be rude for Ahmed to see me do that after I’d just finished such a first-rate dinner.

“It’d be a terrible thing for your appetite to go,” I said. “That’d be almost as bad as being castrated.”

“Then I never want to get that old, Bumper,” Ahmed laughed, with the strength and confidence of only thirty years on this earth. “Of course there’s a third thing, remember, your digestion? Got to have that, too.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Got to have digestion or appetite ain’t worth a damn.”

Just then the lights dimmed, and a bluish spot danced around the small bandstand as the drums started first. Then I was amazed to see Laila Hammad run out to the floor, in a gold-and-white belly dancer’s costume, and the music picked up as she stood there, chestnut hair hanging down over her boobs, fingers writhing, and working the zils, those little golden finger cymbals, hips swaying as George’s hands beat a blood-heating rhythm on the darbuka. Ahmed grinned at me as I admired her strong golden thighs.

“How do you like our new dancer?”

“Laila’s your dancer?”

“Wait’ll you see her,” said Ahmed, and it was true, she really was something. There was art to the dancing, not just lusty gyrations, and though I’m no judge of belly dancing, even I could see it.

“How old is she now?” I said to Ahmed, watching her mobile stomach, and the luxurious chestnut hair, which was all her own, and now hung down her back and then streamed over her wonderful-looking boobs.

“She’s nineteen,” said Ahmed, and I was very happy to see how good-looking she’d turned out.

Laila had worked as a waitress here for a few years, even when she was much too young to be doing it, but she always looked older, and her father, Khalil Hammad, was a cousin of Yasser’s, who lingered for years with cancer, running up tremendous hospital bills before he finally died. Laila was a smart, hard-working girl, and helped support her three younger sisters. Ahmed once told me Laila never really knew her mother, an American broad who left them when they were little kids. I’d heard Laila was working in a bank the last couple years and doing okay.

You could really see the Arab blood in Laila now, in the sensual face, the nose a little too prominent but just suiting her, and in the wide full mouth, and glittering brown eyes. No wonder they were passionate people, I thought, with faces like that. Yes, Laila was a jewel, like a fine half-Arab mare with enough American blood to give good height and those terrific thighs. I wondered if Ahmed had anything going with her. Then Laila started “sprinkling salt” as the Arabs say. She revolved slowly on the ball of one bare foot, jerking a hip to each beat of the darbuka. And if there’d been a small bag of salt tied to the throbbing hip, she would’ve made a perfect ring of salt on the floor around her. It’s a hot, graceful move, not hard at all. I do it myself to hardrock music.

When Laila was finished with her dance and ran off the floor and the applause died down I said, “She’s beautiful, Ahmed. Why don’t you con her into marrying you?”

“Not interested,” said Ahmed, shaking his head. He leaned over the table and took a sip of wine before speaking. “There’re rumors, Bumper. Laila’s supposed to be whoring.”

“I can’t believe that,” I said, remembering her again as a teenage waitress who couldn’t even put her lipstick on straight.

“She left her bank job over a year ago. Started belly dancing professionally. You never knew her when she was a real little tot. I remember when she was three years old and her aunts and uncles taught her to dance. She was the cutest thing you ever saw. She was a smart little girl.”

“Where did you hear she was tricking?”

“In this business you hear all about the dancers,” said Ahmed. “You know, she’s one of the few belly dancers in town that’s really an Arab, or rather, half-Arab. She’s no cheapie, but she goes to bed with guys if they can pay the tariff. I hear she gets two hundred a night.”

“Laila’s had a pretty tough life, Ahmed,” I said. “She had to raise little sisters. She never had time to be a kid herself.”

“Look, I’m not blaming her, Bumper. What the hell, I’m an American. I’m not like the old folks who wait around on the morning after the wedding to make sure there’s blood on the bridal sheets. But I have to admit that whoring bothers me. I’m just not that Americanized, I guess. I used to think maybe when Laila got old enough… well, it’s too late now. I shouldn’t have been so damn busy these last few years. I let her get away and now… it’s just too late.”

Ahmed ordered me another drink, then excused himself, saying he’d be back in a little while. I was starting to feel depressed all of a sudden. I wasn’t sure if the talk about Laila set it off or what, but I thought about her selling her ass to these wealthy Hollywood creeps. Then I thought about Freddie and Harry, and Poochie and Herky, and Timothy G. for goddamn Landry, but that was too depressing to think about. Suddenly for no reason I thought about Esteban Segovia and how I used to worry that he really would become a priest like he wanted to be when he returned from Vietnam, instead of a dentist like I always wanted him to be. That dead boy was about Laila’s age when he left. Babies. Nobody should die a baby.

All right, Bumper, I said to myself, let’s settle down to some serious drinking. I called Barbara over and ordered a double scotch on the rocks even though I’d mixed my drinks too much and had already more than enough.

After my third scotch I heard a honey-dipped voice say, “Hi, Bumper.”

“Laila!” I made a feeble attempt at getting up, as she sat down at my table, looking smooth and cool in a modest white dress, her hair tied back and hanging down one side, her face and arms the color of a golden olive.

“Ahmed told me you were here, Bumper,” she smiled, and I lit her cigarette, liberated women be damned, and called Barbara over to get her a drink.

“Can I buy you a drink, kid?” I asked. “It’s good to see you all grown up, a big girl and all, looking so damn gorgeous.”

She ordered a bourbon and water and laughed at me, and I knew for sure I was pretty close to being wiped out. I decided to turn it off after I finished the scotch I held in my hand.

“I was grown up last time you saw me, Bumper,” she said, grinning at my clownish attempts to act sober. “All men appreciate your womanhood better when they see your bare belly moving for them.”

I thought about what Ahmed had told me, and though it didn’t bother me like it did Ahmed, I was sorry she had to do it, or that she thought she had to do it.

“You mean that slick little belly was moving for ol’ Bumper?” I said, trying to kid her like I used to, but my brain wasn’t working right.

“Sure, for you. Aren’t you the hero of this whole damned family?”

“Well how do you like dancing for a living?”

“It’s as crummy as you’d expect.”

“Why do you do it?”

“You ever try supporting two sisters on a bank teller’s wage?”

“Bullshit,” I said too loud, one elbow slipping out from under me. “Don’t give me that crybaby stuff. A dish like you, why you could marry any rich guy you wanted.”

“Wrong, Bumper. I could screw any rich guy I wanted. And get paid damn well for it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Laila.”

“You old bear,” she laughed, as I rubbed my face which had no feeling whatsoever. “I know Ahmed told you I’m a whore. It just shames the hell out of these Arabs. You know how subtle they are. Yasser hinted around the other day that maybe I should change my name now that I’m show biz. Hammad’s too ordinary, he said. Maybe something more American. They’re as subtle as a boot in the ass. How about Feinberg or Goldstein, Bumper? I’ll bet they wouldn’t mind if I called myself Laila Feinberg. That’d explain my being a whore to the other Arabs, wouldn’t it? They could start a rumor that my mother was a Jew.”

“What the hell’re you telling me all this for?” I said, suddenly getting mad. “Go to a priest or a headshrinker, or go to the goddamn mosque and talk to the Prophet, why don’t you? I had enough problems laid on me today. Now you?”

“Will you drive me home, Bumper? I do want to talk to you.”

“How many more performances you got to go?” I asked, not sure I could stay upright in my chair if I had another drink.

“I’m through. Marsha’s taking my next one for me. I’ve told Ahmed I’m getting cramps.”

I found Ahmed and said good-bye while Laila waited for me in the parking lot. I tipped Barbara fifteen bucks, then I staggered into the kitchen, thanked Yasser, and kissed him on the big moustache while he hugged me and made me promise to come to his house in the next few weeks.

Laila was in the parking lot doing her best to ignore two well-dressed drunks in a black Lincoln. When they saw me staggering across the parking lot in their direction the driver stomped on it, laid a patch of rubber, and got the hell out.

“Lord, I don’t blame them,” Laila laughed. “You look wild and dangerous, Bumper. How’d you get those scratches on your face?”

“My Ford’s right over there,” I said, walking like Frankenstein’s monster so I could stay on a straight course.

“The same old car? Oh, Bumper.” She laughed like a kid and she put my arm around her and steered me to my Ford, but around to the passenger side. Then she patted my pockets, found my keys, got them, pushed me in, and closed the door after me.

“Light-fingered broad,” I mumbled. “You ever been a hugger-mugger?”

“What was that, Bumper?” she said, getting behind the wheel and cranking her up.

“Nothing, nothing,” I mumbled, rubbing my face again.

I dozed while Laila drove. She turned the radio on and hummed, and she had a pretty good voice too. In fact, it put me to sleep, and she had to shake me awake when we got to her pad.

“I’m going to pour you some muddy Turkish coffee and we’re going to talk,” she said, helping me out of the Ford, and for a second the sidewalk came up in my eyes, but I closed them and stood there and everything righted itself.

“Ready to try the steps, Bumper?”

“As I’ll ever be, kid.”

“Let’s get it on,” she said, my arm around her wide shoulders, and she guided me up. She was a big strong girl. Ahmed was nuts, I thought. She’d make a hell of a wife for him or any young guy.

It took some doing but we reached the third floor of her apartment building, a very posh place, which was actually three L-shaped buildings scattered around two Olympic-sized pools. Mostly catered to swinging singles which reminded me of the younger sisters.

“The girls home?” I asked.

“I live alone during the school year, Bumper. Nadia lives in the dorm at U.S.C. She’s a freshman. Dalai boards at Ramona Convent. She’ll be going to college next year.”

“Ramona Convent? I thought you were a Moslem.”

“I’m nothing.”

We got in the apartment and Laila guided me past the soft couch, which looked pretty good to sleep on, and dumped me in a straight-backed kitchen chair after taking off my sport coat and hanging it in a closet.

“You even wear a gun off duty?” she asked as she ladled out some coffee and ran some water from the tap.

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what she was talking about for a minute, I was so used to the gun. “This job makes you a coward. I don’t even go out without it in this town anymore, except to Harry’s bar or somewhere in the neighborhood.”

“If I saw all the things you have, maybe I’d be afraid to go out without one too,” she shrugged.

I didn’t know I was dozing again until I smelled Laila there shaking me awake, a tiny cup of Turkish coffee thick and dark on a saucer in front of me. I smelled her sweetness and then I felt her cool hand again and then I saw her wide mouth smiling.

“Maybe I should spoon it down your throat till you get sober.”

“I’m okay,” I said, rubbing my face and head.

I drank the coffee as fast as I could even though it scalded my mouth and throat. Then she poured me another, and I excused myself, went to the head, took a leak, washed my face in cold water, and combed my hair. I was still bombed when I came back, but at least I wasn’t a zombie.

Laila must’ve figured I was in good enough shape. “Let me turn on some music, Bumper, then we can talk.”

“Okay.” I finished the second cup almost as fast as the first and poured myself a third.

The soft stirring song of an Arab girl singer filled the room for a second and then Laila turned down the volume. It’s a wailing kind of plaintive sound, almost like a chant at times, but it gets to you, at least it did to me, and I always conjured up mental pictures of the Temple of Karnak, and Giza, and the streets of Damascus, and a picture I once saw of a Bedouin on a pink granite cliff in the blinding sun looking out over the Valley of the Kings. I saw in his face that he knew more about history, even though he was probably illiterate, than I ever would, and I promised myself I’d go there to die when I got old. If I ever did get old, that is.

“I still like the old music,” Laila smiled, nodding toward the stereo set. “Most people don’t like it. I can put on something else if you want.”

“Don’t touch it,” I said, and Laila looked in my eyes and seemed glad.

“I need your help, Bumper.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“I want you to talk to my probation officer for me.”

“You’re on probation? What for?”

“Prostitution. The Hollywood vice cops got three of us in January. I pleaded guilty and was put on probation.”

“Whadda you want me to do?”

“I wasn’t given summary probation like my lousy thousand-dollar lawyer promised. I got a tough judge and I have to report to a P.O. for two years. I want to go somewhere and I need permission.”

“Where you going?”

“Somewhere to have a baby. I want to go somewhere, have my baby, adopt it out, and come back.”

She saw the “Why me? Why in the hell me?” look in my eyes.

“Bumper, I need you for this. I don’t want my sisters to know anything. Nothing, you hear? They’d only want to raise the baby and for God’s sake, it’s hard enough making it in this filthy world when you know who the hell your two parents are and have them to raise you. I’ve got a plan and you’re the only one my whole damned tribe would listen to without questions. They trust you completely. I want you to tell Yasser and Ahmed and all of them that you don’t think I should be dancing for a living, and that you have a friend in New Orleans who has a good-paying office job for me. And then tell the same thing to my P.O. and convince her it’s the truth. Then I’ll disappear for seven or eight months and come back and tell everyone I didn’t like the job or something. They’ll all get mad as blazes but that’ll be it.”

“Where the hell you going?”

“What’s it matter?” she shrugged. “Anywhere to have the kid and farm it out. To New Orleans. Wherever.”

“You’re not joining the coat hanger corps are you?”

“An abortion?” she laughed. “No, I figure when you make a mistake you should have the guts to at least see it through. I won’t shove it down a garbage disposal. I was raised an Arab and I can’t change.”

“You got any money?”

“I’ve got thirteen thousand in a bank account. I’d like you to handle it for me and see that the girls have enough to get them through the summer while they’re living here in my apartment. If everything goes right I’ll be back for a New Year’s Eve party with just you and me and the best bottle of scotch money can buy.”

“Will you have enough to live on?” I asked, knowing where she got the thirteen thousand.

“I’ve got enough,” she nodded.

“Listen, goddamnit, don’t lie to me. I’m not gonna get involved if you’re off somewhere selling your ass in a strange town with a foal kicking around in your belly.”

“I wouldn’t take any chances,” she said, looking deep in my eyes again. “I swear it. I’ve got enough in another account to live damn well for the whole time I’ll be gone. I’ll show you my bankbooks. And I can afford to have the kid in a good hospital. A private room if I want it.”

“Wow!” I said, getting up, light-headed and dizzy. I stood for a second and shuffled into the living room, dropping on the couch and laying back. I noticed that the red hose on Laila’s crystal and gold narghile was uncoiled. Those pipes are fine decorator items but they never work right unless you stuff all the fittings with rags like Laila’s was. I often smoked mint-flavored Turkish tobacco with Yasser. Laila smoked hashish. There was a black-and-white mosaic inlaid box setting next to the narghile. The lid was open and it was half full of hash, very high-grade, expensive, shoe-leather hash, pressed into dark flat sheets like the sole of your shoe.

Laila let me alone and cleared the kitchen table. What a hell of a time. First the decision to retire. And after I told Cassie, everything seemed right. And then Cassie wants a kid! And a goddamn pack of baby Bolsheviks make an ass out of me. Humiliate me! Then perjury, for chrissake. I felt like someone was putting out cigars on the inside of my belly, which was so hard and swollen I couldn’t see my knees unless I sat up straight. But at least I got a back office, even if I did almost die in the pigeon shit.

“What a day,” I said when Laila came in and sat down on the end of the couch.

“I’m sorry I asked you, Bumper.”

“No, no, don’t say that. I’ll do it. I’ll help you.”

She didn’t say anything, but she got up and came over and sat on the floor next to me, her eyes wet, and I’ll be a son of a bitch if she didn’t kiss my hand!

Laila got up then, and without saying anything, took my shoes off, and I let her lift my legs up and put them on the couch. I felt like a beached walrus laying there like that, but I was still swacked. In fact, I felt drunker now laying down, and I was afraid the room would start spinning, so I wanted to start talking. “I had a miserable goddamn day.”

“Tell me about it, Bumper,” said Laila, sitting there on the floor next to me and putting her cool hand on my hot forehead as I loosened my belt. I knew I was gone for the night. I was in no shape to get up, let alone drive home. I squirmed around until my sore shoulder was settled against a cushion.

“Your face and hands are cut and your body’s hurting.”

“Guess I can sleep here, huh?”

“Of course. How’d you get hurt?”

“Slipped and fell off a fire escape. Whadda you think about me retiring, Laila?”

“Retiring? Don’t be ridiculous. You’re too full of hell.”

“I’m in my forties, goddamnit. No, I might as well level with you. I’ll be fifty this month. Imagine that. When I was born Warren G. Harding was a new President!”

“You’re too alive. Forget about it. It’s too silly to think about.”

“I was sworn in on my thirtieth birthday, Laila. Know that?”

“Tell me about it,” she said, stroking my cheek now, and I felt so damn comfortable I could’ve died.

“You weren’t even born then. That’s how long I been a cop.”

“Why’d you become a cop?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Well, what did you do before you became a cop?”

“I was in the Marine Corps over eight years.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I wanted to get away from the hometown, I guess. There was nobody left except a few cousins and one aunt. My brother Clem and I were raised by our grandmother, and after she died, Clem took care of me. He was a ripper, that bastard. Bigger than me, but didn’t look anything like me. A handsome dog. Loved his food and drink and women. He owned his own gas station and just before Pearl Harbor, in November it was, he got killed when a truck tire blew up and he fell back into the grease pit. My brother Clem died in a filthy grease pit, killed by a goddamn tire! It was ridiculous. There was nobody else I gave a damn about so I joined the Corps. Guys actually joined in those days, believe it or not. I got wounded twice, once at Saipan and then in the knees at Iwo, and it almost kept me off the Department. I had to flimflam the shit out of that police surgeon. You know what? I didn’t hate war. I mean, why not admit it? I didn’t hate it.”

“Weren’t you ever afraid?”

“Sure, but there’s something about danger I like, and fighting was something I could do. I found that out right away and after the war I shipped over for another hitch and never did go back to Indiana. What the hell, I never had much there anyway. Billy was here with me and I had a job I liked.”

“Who’s Billy?”

“He was my son,” I said, and I heard the air-conditioner going and I knew it was cool, because Laila looked so crisp and fresh, and yet my back was soaked and the sweat was pouring down my face and slipping beneath my collar.

“I never knew you were married, Bumper.”

“It was a hundred years ago.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“I don’t know. Missouri, I think. Or dead maybe. It’s been so long. She was a girl I met in San Diego, a farm girl. Lots of them around out here on the coast during the war. They drifted out to find defense work, and some of them boozed it too much. Verna was a pale, skinny little thing. I was back in San Diego from my first trip over. I had my chest full of ribbons and had a cane because my first hit was in the thigh. That’s one reason my legs aren’t worth a shit today, I guess. I picked her up in a bar and slept with her that night and then I started coming by whenever I got liberty and next thing you know, before I ship out, she says she’s knocked up. I had the feeling so many guys get, that they’re gonna get bumped off, that their number’s up, so we got drunk one night and I took her to a justice of the peace in Arizona and married her. She got an allotment and wrote me all the time and I didn’t think too much about her till I got hit the second time and went home for good. And there she was, with my frail, sickly Billy. William’s my real name, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“So anyway, I screwed up, but just like you said, Laila, there was no sense anybody else suffering for it so I took Verna and Billy and we got a decent place to stay in Oceanside, and I thought, what the hell, this is a pretty fair life. So I reenlisted for another hitch and before long I was up for master sergeant. I could take Verna okay. I mean I gotta give her credit, after Billy came she quit boozing and kept a decent house. She was just a poor dumb farm girl but she treated me and Billy like champs, I have to admit. I was lucky and got to stay with Headquarters Company, Base, for five years, and Billy was to me, like… I don’t know, standing on a granite cliff and watching all the world from the Beginning until Now, and for the first time there was a reason for it all. You understand?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You won’t believe this, but when he was barely four years old he printed a valentine card for me. He could print and read at four years old, I swear it. He asked his mother how to make the words and then he composed it himself. It said, ‘Dad. I love you. Love, Billy Morgan.’ Just barely four years old. Can you believe that?”

“Yes, I believe you, Bumper.”

“But like I said, he was a sickly boy like his mother, and even now when I tell you about him, I can’t picture him. I put him away mentally, and it’s not possible to picture how he looked, even if I try. You know, I read where only schizophrenics can control subconscious thought, and maybe I’m schizoid, I don’t doubt it. But I can do it. Sometimes when I’m asleep and I see a shadow in a dream and the shadow is a little boy wearing glasses, or he has a cowlick sticking up in the back, I wake up. I sit straight up in my bed, wide awake. I cannot picture him either awake or asleep. You’re smart to adopt out your kid, Laila.”

“When did he die?”

“When he was just five. Right after his birthday, in fact. And it shouldn’t have surprised me really. He was anemic and he had pneumonia twice as a baby, but still, it was a surprise, you know? Even though he was sick so long, it was a surprise, and after that, Vern seemed dead too. She told me a few weeks after we buried him that she was going home to Missouri and I thought it was a good idea so I gave her all the money I had and I never saw her again.

“After she left, I started drinking pretty good, and once, on weekend liberty, I came to L.A. and got so drunk I somehow ended up at El Toro Marine Base with a bunch of other drunken jarheads instead of at Camp Pendleton where I was stationed. The M.P’s at the gate let the other drunks through, but of course my pass was wrong, so they stopped me. I was mean drunk then, and confused as hell, and I ended up swinging on the two M.P.’s.

“I can hardly remember later that night in the El Toro brig. All I really recall was two brig guards, one black guy and one white guy, wearing khaki pants and skivvy shirts, dragging me off the floor of the cell and taking me in the head where they worked me over with billies and then to the showers to wash off the blood. I remember holding onto the faucets with my head in the sink for protection, and the billies landing on my arms and ribs and kidneys and the back of my head. That was the first time my nose was ever broken.”

Laila was still stroking my face and listening. Her hands felt cool and good.

“After that, they gave me a special courtmartial, and after all the M.P’s testified, my defense counsel brought out a platoon or so of character witnesses, and even some civilians, wives of the marines who lived near Verna and Billy and me. They all talked about me, and Billy, and how extra smart and polite he was. Then the doctor who treated me in the brig testified as a defense witness that I was unbalanced at the time of the fight and not responsible for my actions, even though he had no psychiatric training. My defense counsel got away with it and when it was over I didn’t get any brig time. I just got busted to buck sergeant.

“Is it hot in here, Laila?”

“No, Bumper,” she said, stroking my cheek with the back of her fingers.

“Well, anyway, I took my discharge in the spring of nineteen-fifty and fooled around a year and finally joined the Los Angeles Police Department.”

“Why did you do it, Bumper? The police force?”

“I don’t know. I was good at fighting, I guess that’s why. I thought about going back in the Corps when Korea broke out, and then I read something that said, ‘Policemen are soldiers who act alone,’ and I figured that was the only thing I hated about the military, that you couldn’t act alone very much. And as a cop I could do it all myself, so I became a cop.”

“You never heard from Verna?” asked Laila quietly, and suddenly I was cold and damp and getting chills laying there.

“About six years after I came on the job I got a letter from a lawyer in Joplin. I don’t know how he found me. He said she’d filed for divorce and after that I got the final papers. I paid his fee and sent her about five hundred I’d saved, to get her started. I always hoped maybe she found some nice working stiff and went back to the farm life. She was one who couldn’t make it by herself. She’d have to love somebody and then of course she’d have to suffer when something took them away from her, or maybe when they left on their own. She’d never learn you gotta suffer alone in this world. I never knew for sure what happened to her. I didn’t try to find out because I’d probably just discover she was a wino and a streetwalking whore and I’d rather think otherwise.”

“Bumper?”

“What?”

“Please take my bed tonight. Go in and shower and take my bed. You’re dripping wet and you’ll get sick if you stay here on the couch.”

“I’ll be okay. You should see some of the places I’ve slept. Just give me a blanket.”

“Please.”

She began trying to lift me and that almost made me laugh out loud. She was a strong girl, but no woman was about to raise Bumper Morgan, two hundred and seventy-five pounds anytime, and almost three hundred this night with all of me cold dead weight from the booze.

“Okay, okay,” I grumbled, and found I wasn’t too drunk when I stood up. I made my way to her bedroom, stripped, and jumped in the shower, turning it on cold at the end. When I was through I dried in her bath towel which smelled like woman, took the wet gauze bandage off my leg, and felt better than I had all day. I rinsed my mouth with toothpaste, examined my meat-red face and red-webbed eyes, and climbed in her bed naked, which is the only way to sleep, winter or summer.

The bed smelled like her too, or rather it smelled like woman, since all women are pretty much the same to me. They all smell and feel the same. It’s the essence of womanhood, that’s the thing I need.

I was dozing when Laila came in and tiptoed to the shower and it seemed like seconds later when she was sitting on the bed in a sheer white nightgown whispering to me. I smelled lilac, and then woman, and I came to with her velvet mouth all over my face.

“What the hell?” I mumbled, sitting up.

“I touched you tonight,” said Laila. “You told me things. Maybe for the first time in years, Bumper, I’ve really touched another person!” She put her hand on my bare shoulder.

“Yeah, well that’s enough touching for one night,” I said, disgusted with myself for telling her all those personal things, and I took her hand off my shoulder. Now I’d have to fly back to L.A. in a couple of weeks to set this thing up with Laila and her family. Everyone was complicating my life lately.

“Bumper,” she said, drawing her feet up under her and laughing pretty damn jolly for this time of night. “Bumper, you’re wonderful. You’re a wonderful old panda. A big blue-nosed panda. Do you know your nose is blue?”

“Yeah, it gets that way when I drink too much,” I said, figuring she’d been smoking hash, able to see right through the nightie at her skin which was now exactly the color of apricots. “I had too many blood vessels busted too many times there on my nose.”

“I want to get under the covers with you, Bumper.”

“Look, kid,” I said. “You don’t owe me a goddamn thing. I’ll be glad to help you flimflam your family.”

“You’ve let me touch you, Bumper,” she said, and the warm wide velvet mouth was on me again, my neck and cheek, and all that chestnut hair was covering me until I almost couldn’t think about how ridiculous this was.

“Goddamnit,” I said, holding her off. “This is a sickening thing you’re doing. I knew you since you were a little girl. Damn it, kid, I’m an old bag of guts and you’re still just a little child to me. This is unnatural!”

“Don’t call me kid. And don’t try to stop me from having you.”

“Having me? You’re just impressed by cops. I’m a father symbol. Lots of young girls feel like that about cops.”

“I hate cops,” she answered, her boobs wobbling against my arms, which were getting tired. “It’s you I want because you’re more man than I’ve ever had my hands on.”

“Yeah, I’m about six cubic yards,” I said, very shaky.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said, her hands going over me, and she was kissing me again and I was doing everything I could to avoid the pleasures of a thousand and one nights.

“Listen, I couldn’t if I wanted to,” I groaned. “You’re just too young, I just couldn’t do it with a kid like you.”

“Want to bet?”

“Don’t, Laila.”

“How can a man be so aware and be so square,” she smiled, standing up and slipping off the nightie.

“It’s just the bluesuit,” I said with a voice gone hoarse and squeaky. “I probably look pretty sharp to you in my uniform.”

Laila busted up then, falling on the bed and rolling on her stomach, laughing for a good minute. I smiled weakly, staring at her apricot ass and those thunder thighs, thinking it was over. But after she stopped laughing she smiled at me softer than ever, whispered in Arabic, and crept under the sheet.