The Choirboys

TEN

7-A-29: SAM NILES AND

HAROLD BLOOMGUARD

Lieutenant Finque had a splitting migraine at rollcall on the night Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard met the Moaning Man and called for choir practice.

The migraine was brought about by his defense of the Police Protective League, the bargaining agent manned by Los Angeles police officers for the department.

“How the fuck can the Protective League do anything for us?” Spermwhale demanded. “As long as brass’re members of the league. Don’t you see, the league gotta be more like a real union. It’s management against labor. You people are management. Only the policeman rank and maybe sergeants should be in the league. The rest of the brass are the enemy, for chrissake!”

“That’s not true!” Lieutenant Finque said. “The commanders and the deputy chiefs are just as much police officers as…”

“My ass, Lieutenant!” Spermwhale roared. “When did you last hear of a deputy chief gettin TB or a hernia or whiplash or pneumonia or shot or beat up or stabbed? Only cop’s disease they ever get is heart trouble and that’s not cause they have to jump outta radio cars and run down or fight some fuckin animal who wants to make garbage outta them, it’s cause they eat and drink so much at all those sex orgies where they think up ways to fuck and rape the troops!”

“How many deputy chiefs or commanders ever get suicidal?” Baxter Slate asked suddenly, and for a moment the room was quiet as each man thought of that most dangerous of policemen’s diseases.

“Yeah, it’s usually the workin cop who eats his gun,” Spermwhale said as he unconsciously thought of at least ten men he had served with who had done it.

“I’d hate to be a member of this department if we ever go from the Protective League to a labor union,” Lieutenant Finque solemnly announced with the consuming hatred and distrust of labor unions that was prevalent in those police officers who had sprung from the middle class and whose only collective bargaining experiences had been as Establishment representatives facing angry sign wavers on picket lines.

“Protective League my ass!” Spermwhale Whalen said. “They take our dues and wine and dine politicians while I eat okra and gumbo at Fat Ass Charlie’s Soul Kitchen.”

“I thought you like eatin like a home boy Spermwhale,” Calvin Potts grinned.

“We gotta sue the fuckin city for nearly every raise we get,” Spermwhale continued. “I’m sick a payin dues to the Protective League. I get more protection from a two year old box a rubbers!”

“Anyone for changing the subject?” Sergeant Nick Yanov suggested, as the lieutenant held his throbbing head and vowed to check Spermwhale Whalen’s personnel package to see how many more months he had to go before retirement. And to ask the captain if there weren’t a place they could transfer him until then. Like West Valley Station which was twenty-five miles away.

Lieutenant Finque’s eyes were starting to get as red and glassy as Roscoe Rules’ always were. Of late the lieutenant always had drops of grainy white saliva glued to the corners of his mouth from his incessant sucking of antacid tablets.

“I’m going to change the subject, change the subject,” Lieutenant Finque announced strangely. “The captain inspected the shotgun locker and found a gun with cigars stuffed down the barrel! If that happens again somebody’s going to pay!”

No one had to turn toward Spermwhale who was the only cigar smoker on the watch. “Young coppers they hire these days’ll rip you off for anything,” said Spermwhale. “Gotta hide your goods, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Finque had begun losing weight of late what with his migraines and acid stomach and inability to relate with Captain Drobeck who had turned down three dinner invitations this month despite the fact that Lieutenant Finque had done everything he could think of to woo the captain, including joining his American Legion Police Post. The lieutenant knew he should be clear headed what with the ordeal of studying for the captain’s exam three hours a day when his wife and children would leave him alone. And here at the job he had to deal with recalcitrant uglies like Spermwhale Whalen.

“Let’s read some crimes,” the watch commander said, picking up a sheaf of papers. “There was an ADW on a teacher at the high school. Says here a thirty-four year old schoolteacher had just started her third period when…”

“Kind of late in life, ain’t it?” Francis Tanaguchi giggled and Lieutenant Finque jerked spasmodically and tore the report.

Lieutenant Finque blinked several times and simply could not regain the thread. “This report’s terrible. It’s sloppy Who did it?” And his eyes were so watery he couldn’t read the name.

“Just a few pencigraphical errors, sir,” said the culprit, Harold Bloomguard.

“Uh… Intelligence has a rumor,” Lieutenant Finque said, forgetting the crimes and going on disjointedly to a note in the rotating folder. “We may have a riot in the vicinity of Dorsey High School between four and four thirty this afternoon. Some militant…”

“A half hour riot?” said Calvin Potts and Lieutenant Finque’s thread came totally unraveled. He began talking to Sergeant Yanov on his right as though they were alone in the room.

“You know, Yanov, there’s a rumor that these young Vietnam vets they’re hiring these days are smoking pot. You see how hard it is to make them keep their hair off their collars and their moustaches trimmed? And there’s a rumor about fragging! Someone heard some policemen talking about bombing a watch commander!”

“I’ll read the crimes,” Sergeant Yanov said abruptly, putting a steadying hand on Lieutenant Finque’s arm while the assembly of policemen looked at one another in growing realization. “Let’s see, here’s one to perk up your evening. A rapist stuck his automatic down in his belt while he made the victim blow him and he got so excited he shot his balls off right in the middle of the headjob!”

The explosion of cheers startled the shit out of Lieutenant Finque who thought he was being fragged. He only kept from jumping up because Sergent Yanov’s strong left hand held his arm pressed to the table top as the sergeant regained control of the rollcall.

“Keep an eyeball out for Melvin Barnes,” Sergeant Yanov continued. “His picture’s on the board. Local boy and he’s running from his parole officer. He’ll be around Western Avenue. He likes to run because he’s a celebrity on the avenue when the cops’re looking for him. But he’ll be around because he doesn’t mind getting busted. He’s an institutional man. There’re thousands like him.”

“Amen,” Spermwhale Whalen said. “Ask me, I think half the fuckin population craves some kind of institution or other. They can’t get it, they’ll get taken care of some other way. If we just made our jails comfortable, gave the boys some pussy and all, shit, we couldn’t blast em out on the streets. Be a lot cheaper makin em happy and keepin em inside the rest a their lives than runnin them through the fuckin system over and over again while a few people get hurt along the way.”

“You got lots of ideas, Spermwhale,” said Harold Bloomguard. “Ever consider getting perverted to sergeant?”

As Sergeant Yanov got everyone in a better frame of mind to go out into the streets, Lieutenant Finque sat going through some envelopes which came to him through department mail. The voice of Yanov and the others seemed far away. He never noticed Francis Tanaguchi grin at his partner Calvin Potts when the lieutenant tore open the last envelope. It was a crime lab photo of a ninety year old black woman who had been dead for three weeks when her body was found and the picture taken. Her white hair was electric. Her silver eyes were open and her blackened tongue protruded. The note attached to the photo said, “Dear Lieutenant Finque, how come you don’t come to see me no more now that you transferred to the west-side? You cute little blue eyed devil!”

The lieutenant blinked and twitched and hoped he could get out of the station this night alive without being either framed or fragged. He stood up suddenly and said something unintelligible to Sergeant Yanov before walking out the door.

That night someone put a taped roll of freeway flares attached to a cheap alarm clock under the watch commander’s desk when Lieutenant Finque was having coffee. At 10:00 P.M. the bomb squad was at Wilshire Station assuring the captain by telephone that it was not dynamite but only a prank evidently played by some member of the nightwatch. At 11:00 P.M. Lieutenant Finque left Daniel Freeman Hospital severely tranquilized. He was off sick for seven days with something not unlike combat fatigue. Due to his splendid record as a whistle salesman he was taken downtown and made the adjutant of Chief Lynch. He was definitely an up-and-comer.

At six feet two inches and 185 pounds Sam Niles was not a particularly big man but next to Harold Bloomguard he felt like Gulliver. Harold Bloomguard was, at 149 pounds on a delicate frame, the smallest choirboy of them all. He had gorged himself with a banana-soybean mixture for three days to pass his original police department physical.

The choirboys always said that what Harold lacked in physical stature he made up for in physical weakness. Both Ora Lee Tingle and Caroline Moon had beaten him in arm wrestling on the same night at choir practice, and Harold, who usually loved fun and frolic, waded off in his underwear and sulked with the ducks on Duck Island. He wouldn’t come back until all of the choirboys had either gotten drunk or gone home.

“What’s it all about, Harold? What’s it all about, Harold?” cried Whaddayamean Dean to the lonely white figure huddled in the darkness of Duck Island which was a thirty by thirty mound of dirt and shrubbery in the middle of the large duck pond they called MacArthur Lake.

“What’d he say, Dean?” asked Harold Bloomguard’s partner, Sam Niles, as Whaddayamean Dean rejoined the choirboys who were trying to persuade Carolina Moon to pull that train even if she was tired from being on her feet all night hustling drinks at the Peppermint Club in Hollywood.

“What’d who say?”

“Harold! Who the hell were you just off yelling at, for chrissake!”

“I don’t know,” said Whaddayamean Dean, his brow screwed in confusion.

“Harold Bloomguard, goddamnit!” said Spermwhale, who got more pissed off at Whaddayamean Dean than anyone since Spermwhale more or less looked after him when he was drunk like this.

“You were yelling at Harold over on Duck Island, weren’t you?” asked Ora Lee Tingle patiently as Francis Tanaguchi crawled around behind her on the grass in his LAPD baseball shirt with number 69 on the back and pinched her ample buttocks and yelled when she punched him in the shoulder and knocked him over the cushiony Carolina Moon who grabbed him and smothered him in her enormous breasts and chubby arms and said, “Ya cute little fuckin Nip, ya!”

“I admit I was yelling but I don’t remember at who,” said Whaddayamean Dean, wishing everyone would stop picking on him and just let him drink and lie down on top of Ora Lee Tingle and rest his brain for a while. “I think I heard someone answer.”

“Well, you simple asshole, what’d he say?” demanded Spermwhale.

“I think he said, ‘Quack quack.’”

As all the choirboys moaned and fell over and rolled their eyes disgustedly, Spermwhale grabbed Whaddayamean Dean by the back of the Bugs Bunny sweatshirt and said, “That was a fuckin duck! Ducks say quack quack. Harold don’t say quack quack. You was talkin to a duck!”

“At least he didn’t yell at me,” Whaddayamean Dean sniffled and a large salty globular tear rolled out his left eye. “I don’t know what you mean. What’re you trying to say? Why is everybody picking on me? Huh? Huh?”

And so they gave up and left Whaddayamean Dean to finish his vodka and within three minutes he forgot that everyone had been picking on him and that Harold Bloomguard was almost naked and alone with the ducks on Duck Island. As a matter of fact, everyone forgot Harold Bloomguard but Sam Niles, and he would like to have forgotten.

At 5:00 A.M., when only the two girls and three of the choirboys were left sprawled on their blankets, Sam Niles stripped down and waded through the sludge to Duck Island, knocked the sleeping ducklings off Harold Bloomguard’s shivering body shook him awake and dragged him through the cold dirty water to his blanket and clothes. But Sam decided that Harold was too covered with filth to put him in Sam’s Ferrari so he broke the lock on the park gardening shed with a rock and found a hose with a strong nozzle. Then he forced the protesting Harold Bloomguard to stand shivering on the grass and be sprayed down from head to foot before drying in the blankets and dressing.

“I’d never do this to you, Sam!” Harold screamed as the merciless jet of water stung and pounded him and shriveled his balls to acorns.

“You’re not getting in my Ferrari covered with that green slimy duck shit,” said Sam Niles who had a thundering headache.

“I loaned you part of the down payment!” reminded Harold and shrieked as the spray hit him in the acorns, waking up Roscoe Rules who saw two nearly nude men by the gardening shack and figured it was a pair of park fairies.

Roscoe belched and shouted, “All you faggy bastards in this park better keep the noise down or I’ll make you do the chicken!” And then he went back to sleep.

When Harold was relatively clean Sam Niles vowed that somehow, someday he would rid himself of Harold Bloomguard who was by his own admission a borderline mental case.

Sometimes Sam Niles felt that he had always been burdened with Harold Bloomguard, that there had never been a time in his life when there was not a little figure beside him, blinking his large hazel eyes, cracking his knuckles, scratching an ever-present pimply rash on the back of his neck with a penknife and worst of all unconsciously rolling his tongue in a tube and blowing spit bubbles through the channel into the air.

“It’s sickening!” Sam Niles had informed Harold Bloomguard a thousand times in the seven years he had known him. “Sickening!”

And Harold would agree and swear never to do it again, and whenever he would get nervous or bewildered or frightened by one of the several hundred neurotic fears he lived with, he would sit and worry and his tongue would fold in two and little shiny spit bubbles would drop from his little pink mouth.

Sam Niles realized that at twenty-six, just four months older than Harold Bloomguard, he was a father figure. It had been that way since Vietnam where Harold Bloomguard more or less attempted to attach himself to Sam Niles for life, taking his discharge two months later than Sam and following him into the Los Angeles Police Department after returning to his family home in Pomona, California, where Harold’s father practiced law and his mother was confined in a mental hospital.

It was always the same, with Harold begging Sam to sit quietly and help him interpret his latest dream full of intricate symbols, Sam always protesting that if Harold were really worried about joining his mother in the funny place, he should see a psychiatrist. The problem was that Harold Bloomguard always believed that it was her weekly session with a shrink that put his mother in the hospital in the first place, and until she went into psychotherapy when Harold was overseas, she was more or less an ordinary neurotic. So Sam Niles became the only psychiatrist Harold Bloomguard ever had and it had been this way since Sam took pity on the skinny weak little marine.

“Sam, I gotta tell you about the dream I had last night,” Harold said as they left Wilshire Station at change of watch and drove into the gritty personal night world of police partners, most intimate perhaps because they might have to depend upon each other for their very lives.

“Yes, Harold, yes,” Sam sighed and pushed his fashionable, heavy, steel rimmed goggles up on his nose and promised himself to get his eyes examined because he was becoming more nearsighted than ever.

He cruised steadily through the traffic as Harold said, “There was this black cat that crossed my path and I was very afraid and couldn’t understand it and I reached in my pocket and pulled out an eight inch switchblade to defend myself from I don’t know what as I walked down this dark street with apartments on both sides. God, it was awful!”

“So what happened then?”

“I can’t remember. I think I woke up.”

“That’s it?”

“Sure. It’s horrible! Makes my hands sweat to think about it.”

“What’s so horrible?”

“Don’t you see? The knife is phallic. The cat is a pussy It’s black. Black pussy I’m unconsciously wanting to rape a black woman! Just before I crack up like my mother that’s what I’ll probably do, rape a black woman. Watch me very carefully around black women, Sam. As a friend I want you to watch me.”

“Harold, I’ve watched you around black women and white women. You’re perfectly normal with women. For God’s sake, Harold…”

“I know, I know, Sam. You think it’s my imagination, these deep stirrings in my twisted psyche. I know. But remember my mother. My mother is mad, Sam. The poor woman is mad!”

And Sam Niles would push up his slipping glasses, finger his brown moustache, light a cigarette and search for something else for Harold to worry about, which was generally the way to shut him up when any particular obsession was getting too obsessive.

“Harold, you know you’re losing some hair lately? You noticed that?”

“Of course I’ve noticed,” Harold sighed, touching his ginger colored sideburns. He admired Sam Niles’ deep brown hair and his several premature gray ones in the front. Harold admired everything about Sam Niles, always had from the days when Sam was his fire team leader at the spider holes, and though they were in the same police academy recruit class, Harold always treated him with the deference due a senior partner and let him be the boss of the radio car. Harold even admired Sam’s steel rimmed goggles and wished he was nearsighted so he could wear them.

Sam Niles admired almost nothing about Harold Bloomguard and especially did not admire his annoying habit of amusing himself with doubletalk.

Harold would tell about a traffic accident that befell 7-A-77 the night before which resulted in a “collusion at the interjection” of Venice and La Brea. Or when Sam asked where he would like to take their code seven lunch break Harold might say “It’s invenereal to me.”

Or in court Harold would ask the DA if he had any “exterminating evidence.” And then ask if the DA wanted him to “draw a diaphragm.” On and on it went and became almost as unbearable as the plinking spit bubbles.

But none of that was as bad as Harold Bloomguard’s relentlessly sore teeth. He claimed he was a sufferer of bruxism and that he ground his teeth mercilessly in his sleep. If the nightmares were memorable the night before Harold would eat soup and soppy crackers during code seven.

But as with Harold’s other maladies, Sam Niles suspected it was imaginary. He had once demanded to see Harold Bloomguard’s teeth at choir practice and Ora Lee held Harold’s head in her comfy lap while Father Willie struck matches for all the choirboys to examine Harold’s molars which were not flat and worn down but were as sharp and serviceable as anyone’s.

“They are worn down, I tell you,” Harold said that night in the park. And he opened his mouth wider as Sam struck matches and everyone looked at his teeth.

“Let’s see yours to compare, Roscoe,” said Father Willie who was already very drunk.

Roscoe Rules only agreed because he wanted to take Harold’s place on Ora Lee’s lap and cop a feel. But while they were comparing, Father Willie accidentally dropped a match down Roscoe’s throat.

Then everyone started yelling frantically with Roscoe who got up and began jumping around.

“Gimme a drink!” Roscoe shrieked.

“Give him some bourbon!” shouted Spermwhale.

“No, it’ll start a fire in his tummy!” yelled Ora Lee Tingle.

“Give him the fuckin bourbon then!” yelled Spermwhale.

But Roscoe had panicked and run for the duck pond and was on his belly drinking pond water.

“He’ll get typhoid!” shouted Ora Lee Tingle.

“He might at that!” yelled Spermwhale hopefully.

“Stop, Roscoe, you’ll get typhoid!” Carolina Moon yelled.

“Do what feels best, Roscoe!” shouted Spencer Van Moot.

A few minutes later, Roscoe walked back to the blankets very calmly and frightened everybody because, though he had a blister on his tonsils, he was actually smiling.

“Gee, I’m sorry, Roscoe!” said the terrified Father Willie as he sat down next to Roscoe and punched Roscoe’s arm playfully “You’re not mad at me, are ya?”

And Roscoe still smiled as he said, “Heavens, no, Padre! Let’s have a drink.”

“Sure!” said the choirboy chaplain. “Here, have a shot of vodka.”

“No,” Roscoe smiled, pointing at his throat. “No thank you. Think I’d prefer beer.”

“Oh sure, Roscoe,” Father Willie said eagerly. “I’ll get it.”

Roscoe said quietly, “I think there’s a full six-pack down by the water.”

“There is? I’ll get it for you,” Father Willie said.

“I’ll help you,” Roscoe said, putting his arm around Father Willie’s shoulder and strolling with him toward the duck pond.

Thirty seconds later the other choirboys were running headlong toward the pond to rescue the screaming padre whose neck was in the arm of Roscoe Rules who was trying his best to make Father Willie do the chicken. It took four choirboys to overpower Roscoe and pin him until he promised not to choke or kneedrop the chaplain. He only relented when Ora Lee Tingle promised him she’d let him be engineer the next time she pulled the choo choo.

Ironically it was Harold Bloomguard who got Sam Niles the temporary duty assignment to the vice squad which he had been hoping for. When asked by the vice lieutenant to work the squad for two weeks because they needed some new faces to use on the street whores, Harold had surprised the lieutenant by saying, “I know I don’t look like a cop, I’m so little and all, but why don’t you take my partner, Sam Niles, too? He doesn’t look like a cop either.”

“You kidding?” Lieutenant Handy said. “He’s the dark haired kid with a moustache, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Got cop written all over him.”

“He wears glasses,” offered Harold. “Not too many policemen wear glasses, sir.”

“No way. The girls’d make him for a cop in a minute. You’re the one I want. We’ll dress you up in a Brooks Brothers suit and they’ll swarm all over you.”

“Well sir,” Harold said shyly “I sure do appreciate it. You’re the first one in the four and a half years I’ve been on the job who offered to put me in plainclothes. And I really do appreciate it. But…”

“Yeah?”

“You see, Sam and I were in the same outfit in Nam. And we’ve been radio car partners here at Wilshire for…”

“Okay Look, I can bring in two more of you blue-suits for the two weeks. I’d already decided on Baxter Slate because he seems like a heads-up guy, and I’d decided on some morning watch kid. But if you just gotta have Niles, okay I’ll bring him along instead of the morning watch rookie.”

“That’s great, Lieutenant,” Harold said. “You won’t be sorry. Sam’s the greatest cop I’ve ever worked with. And the greatest guy.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. We’ll use you till the middle of August. Gonna have a little crusade against the whores. Let you know more about it later.”

Sam Niles never knew about Harold’s meeting with the vice squad lieutenant and was a little nonplussed when he heard that Harold Bloomguard was also being brought in.

“I’ve been trying for thirteen months to get a crack at vice,” Sam Niles said to his partner on the night he was told. “What made them ask you, I wonder?”

“I dunno, Sam,” Harold said. “Tagging along on your coat-tails, I guess.”

But before they took their temporary vice assignment, Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard were to have an experience which prompted Sam Niles to call for choir practice. It was before they worked vice, and before the August killing in MacArthur Park. Sam and Harold were to meet the Moaning Man.

They made a pretty good pinch, or almost did, five minutes out of the station that evening. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Without question, the skinny hype in a long sleeved dress shirt at the corner of Fourth and Ardmore had to be suffering. And he had to be a hype, standing there on the sidewalk so weak and sick he didn’t see the black and white gliding down the street against the late afternoon sun with Sam Niles behind the wheel and Harold Bloomguard writing in the log.

The hype was a Mexican: tall, emaciated, eyes like muddy water. He had recently recovered from hepatitis gotten from a piece of community artillery passed from junkie to junkie in an East Los Angeles shooting gallery.

“There’s one that’s hurtin for certain,” Sam Niles said as he pulled the black and white into the curb, going the wrong way on the street.

Harold jumped out the door before the addict saw them. The addict spun and tried to walk away from Harold but Sam trotted up, grabbed him by the shirt and spun him easily into Harold’s arms.

“Just freeze and let my partner pat you down,” Sam Niles said and the hype responded with the inevitable, “Who me?”

“Oh shit,” said Sam Niles.

As Harold finished the pat down on the front, neck to knee, and moved his hands around to the back, the hype made what he thought was a quick move for his belt but was grabbed in a wristlock by Sam Niles who lifted him up, up on his tippy toes and made him forget the other hurts plaguing him.

“Easy, goddamnit, easy!” yelped the hype.

“I told you not to make any sudden moves, baby.” Sam crooked his arm around the hype’s throat and applied just enough of a vise to the carotid artery to show him that the colorless odorless gas he breathed could be even more sweet and precious than the white crystalline chemical he had for twenty years buried in his arms and hands and legs and neck and penis.

“I got it, Sam.” Harold stripped a paper bindle from the inside of the hype’s belt where it had been taped.

“Pretty makeshift bindle, man,” Sam Niles said, removing the pressure from the neck but keeping a wristlock which made the Mexican stand tall, sweating in the sunlight.

“Okay okay, you got it,” the hype said and Sam released the pressure.

“You sick?” Harold Bloomguard asked.

“Lightweight, lightweight,” the hype said, wiping his eyes and nose on his shoulder while Sam Niles handcuffed his hands behind his back. “Listen, man, you don’t wanna book me for that little bit a junk. I shoulda fixed. That’ll teach me.”

“Sick as you are, how come you didn’t shoot it up?” Sam Niles asked when the hype was safely cuffed.

“This broad. Fucking broad. She was gonna pick me up here. Take me home. I was supposed to score and she was supposed to meet me here. She had the outfit and she digs on me. Oh Christ…” And he looked lovingly at the bindle in Harold’s hand and said, “Look, I’ll work for you. Gimme a break and I’ll tell you where you can bring down a guy that deals in ounces. Just gimme a chance. I don’t want no money, just a break. I’ll be your main man for free. You can leave a little geez for me hidden away sometimes when you rip off a doper’s pad. Just stash a dime bag or two in a corner and after you’re gone with the guys I roll over on, I’ll skate on in and pick it up. We can work like partners. You guys’ll make more busts than the narcs! How about it?”

“Let’s go,” Sam Niles said, shoving the hype toward the police car but Harold’s eyes widened as he envisioned the sick addict having international dope connections.

He said, “Sam, let’s hear him out.”

“Harold, for God’s sake, this junkie’d say anything…”

“And burglars, Christ, I know a million of them!” the hype said, still handcuffed, talking desperately to Harold as Sam Niles tried to aim him toward the open door of the police car. “Mostly daytime burglars. All dopers. Lazy broads lay around in bed so long these days it’s pretty hard to rip off the pads in the morning like we used to, but I still know lots and lots of burglars. Want a burglar, Officer…?”

“Bloomguard.”

“Officer Bloomguard, yeah. Want a burglar, Mr. Bloomguard?”

“Why not listen to him, Sam?” Harold asked as Sam Niles tried to push the addict down into the back seat of the police car.

“And tricks. Man, I can teach you a few tricks. You could learn something from me, Mr. Bloomguard. I been around this world over forty years. Been shooting dope since I was fifteen and I’m still alive. Listen, you know how to tell a hype even if he’s healthy? Look for burn holes in his clothes and blisters on his fingers. When he’s geezing and on the nod, he’ll burn himself half to death when he’s smoking cigarettes. That ain’t a bad tip, is it?”

“Not bad,” said Harold Bloomguard. “Sam, lemme just talk to him for a minute.”

Sam Niles dropped his hands in disgust, threw his hat in the radio car, sat on the front fender of the black and white while the hype told Harold Bloomguard of his miserable life and his jealous rage at a girlfriend who had been cheating on him.

“… and I got me some plans for that bitch, Mr. Bloomguard. I’m gonna wait down the hall in her apartment house and when her new boy comes sneaking in, I’m gonna creep up behind him, see? I’m gonna hit him over the gourd with a wrench then I’m gonna drag him into the broom closet and pull down his pants and fuck him! Yeah! And then I’m gonna drag his beat-up, fucked over ass to my old lady’s door and ring the bell and say “Here, bitch! Here’s your girlfriend!”

“This guy’s got style!” Harold Bloomguard said to Sam Niles who replied, “Oh yes. Real panache. Let’s invite him to choir practice, Harold.”

“And listen, Officer, because you been nice enough to listen to me I’m gonna save you from embarrassment. Guess what? You want the real truth? I ain’t even sure you can get me booked. Know why?”

“Why?” asked Harold Bloomguard while Sam Niles was ready to throw the hype and Harold into the car.

“Because I think I mighta got burned on this score. This rotten motherfucker I bought the dope from sometimes tries to sell you pure milk sugar and hope you don’t catch him for a few days. He’s so strung out he’ll do anything to make a little bread.”

“You think this is milk sugar?” Harold asked and took the bindle out of the pocket of his uniform shirt as Sam Niles got off the car, stepped on his cigarette, adjusted his steel rimmed glasses and said, “Harold, let’s go.”

“I think it’s probably milk sugar,” the hype nodded, “and you’re gonna have to let me go soon as you run one of those funny little tests at the station. Taste it. I think it’s pure sugar.”

“Harold!” Sam Niles said as Harold opened the bindle curiously, making sure that the hype’s hands were securely cuffed behind him.

“Harold!” Sam Niles said, stepping forward just as Harold licked his finger to touch the sugar and just as the hype made good his promise to teach Harold a few tricks.

The addict blew the gram of heroin out of the bindle into the air and Sam Niles watched the powder fall to the Bermuda grass at his feet and disappear.

“Oh God,” said Harold Bloomguard, dropping to his knees, pulling up grass, looking for the evidence the hype had just blown away.

The addict held his breath for a moment as Sam Niles stepped forward towering over him, gray eyes smoldering. But then Sam Niles wordlessly unlocked the addict’s handcuffs, put them in his handcuff case, returned the key to his key ring, took the car keys from the belt of his Sam Browne and got behind the steering wheel while Harold Bloomguard crawled around the grass searching for a few granules of powder.

“I don’t think you could even pick it up with a vacuum,” the hype said sympathetically. “It’s very powdery. And there was only a gram.”

“Guess you’re right,” said Harold Bloomguard, getting in the police car beside the silent Sam Niles just in time to keep from losing a leg as Sam squealed from the curb heading for the drive-in for a badly needed cup of coffee.

“Sorry, Sam,” Harold smiled weakly not looking at his grim partner.

The junkie waved bye-bye and decided that Harold was a very nice boy. The addict hoped that all five of the sons he had fathered to various welfare mothers would turn out that nice.

It was almost ten minutes before Harold Bloomguard spoke to Sam Niles which was probably a record for Harold Bloomguard who sat and tried to think of something conciliatory to say.

Unable to think of something he decided to entertain Sam.

“It was consti-pa-tion, I know,” sang Harold Bloomguard to the melody of “Fascination,” watching Sam Niles who did not smile, which forced Harold to sing, “I’ll be loving you, maternally With a love that’s true…”

Getting only a languid sigh from Sam Niles he switched to a livelier melody and sang, “Gee, but it’s great after eating my date, walking my baby back home.”

Finally Sam Niles spoke. He said, “Harold, I don’t mind your dumb songs but if you don’t stop stratching those pimples on your neck with that penknife, I’m gonna stick it up your ass.”

And then Harold tried to forget about losing the heroin by remembering a disturbing dream he had last Thursday and had not yet discussed with his partner. And as he concentrated he folded his tongue into a long pink tube and blew little spit bubbles which plinked wetly on the dashboard and made Sam Niles grind his teeth.

“Sam, there’s something I’d like your advice about.”

“Yes, yes, yes. What the hell is it this time?”

“I think I’m getting impotent.”

“Uh huh.”

“I haven’t awakened one morning in the past week with a diamond cutter. Or even a blue veiner.”

“You’re not impotent.”

“How do you know that, Sam? I mean how do you know it’s not happening to me? I was reading about impotency recently and…”

“Stop reading, Harold. That’s part of your problem. You read about these diseases and then you’ve got the symptoms.”

“You think it’s hypochondria but…”

“You’re going to choir practice too often. Cool it for a while. Too much booze makes a limp noodle. Also you’re getting old. Twenty-six. You’re over the hill. At your age you should drink Vano starch instead of booze.”

“It’s not funny Sam. It’s serious.”

“Really scares you, huh, Harold?”

“Indeed,” said Harold and Sam Niles gritted his teeth again. He had come to hate the word “indeed” because it was one of Harold’s favorite expressions.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Harold. Being impotent wouldn’t be too bad for you because Carolina Moon and Ora Lee Tingle are just about the only broads you ever ball lately and I think you only do that to be a respectable member of an unrespectable group that gets drunk once a week and gangbangs two fat cocktail waitresses.”

“That’s not fair of you to say that, Sam. You know some of us don’t approve of more than one guy mounting the same girl the same night. You and Baxter and Dean never do it. You know I don’t.”

“You did it last week!”

“I didn’t!”

“Then what the hell were you and Ora Lee doing off in the bushes?”

“Only fooling around. I just can’t board the train like horny old Spencer or that pig Roscoe Rules.”

“Did you have a blue veiner?”

“A diamond cutter as a matter of fact.”

“Then what makes you think you’re impotent?”

“Because I haven’t woke up for a week with anything but a limp noodle!”

“So you’ll be low man on the scrotum pole at the next choir practice,” said Sam Niles, turning a Bloomguardism against him.

“God, that’s cruel, Sam.”

“Harold, you’re not impotent. Take my word. And you’re not going to end up in a rubber room like your mother. But I might end up there if you keep using me for your shrink. Now if you only wanna wake up with a hard on, then ask the captain to put you on the morning watch. When you’re out there at about sunrise, waking up in a radio car, after trying to sleep with an upset stomach from the crazy hours and the greasy eggs you ate at two A.M., and the nervous sleep in some alley where you’re worrying about a sergeant catching you and you’re longing for all the normal things people do at that hour like being flaked out in a warm bed with a warm friendly body, you know what? You’ll wake up with the hardest diamond cutter you ever had. Try it if you don’t believe me.”

“Morning watch, huh? Don’t think I’d mind that. How about it, will you go with me?”

“No, I think you’d be better off going it alone with a new partner. Who knows? Maybe you’ll catch one with an MS in abnormal psych.”

Harold Bloomguard thought it over for five seconds and said, “I think I’ll stick with you, Sam. We’ll just have to come up with another solution for my impotency.”

Then they received a routine radio call to the south end where a black man had thrown a pot of hot soup on his teenage daughter and beaten the mother over the head with the pot lid. But since he was gone and the girl had already been removed to the hospital by ambulance there wasn’t much to do but take the report from the mother and phone the hospital for the treatment information on the child.

After dark they received another routine call, this time on the north end to a small house inhabited by a disheveled white woman, who was barefoot in a torn dress, with three small children literally hanging on her clothing. She lurched from dragging the weight but also from the pint of bourbon she had consumed that afternoon.

Sam Niles let Harold Bloomguard handle it since somehow Harold always did anyway, excitedly jumping into a conversation with a distraught married couple or the victim of a burglary with every sort of advice, wanted or otherwise. Harold’s notebook bulged with the addresses of referral agencies that ostensibly provided a remedy for any malaise Los Angeles had to offer.

The tired eyed woman had called them to report that her teenage daughter had threatened to run off with a forty-nine year old piano tuner who lived next door. Harold Bloomguard promised to arrange an appointment with juvenile officers at Wilshire Station the next morning, then he advised the mother to try to help police ascertain if she had been taken advantage of by the older man.

“If she been what?” the woman asked as Sam Niles turned on his flashlight and prepared to descend the porch steps.

“Taken advantage of,” Harold said as Sam was halfway down the walk heading for the radio car.

The woman nodded dumbly and Harold said, “Well, I’m very glad we could be of service. I certainly hope we can help the young lady get back on the track tomorrow, ma’am, and if there’s any way we can expedite matters prior to your appointment, you just call us back and we’ll be here at once.”

“Ex-pee-dite?” mumbled the woman as the lassitudinous Sam Niles, hands in his pockets, hoped the little bubblegummer’s keys had been well pounded by the piano tuner so she could get out of this house, even to go to the home for unwed mothers.

“So long, ma’am,” Harold said cheerfully as he took off his hat and opened the door of the radio car, turning back to wave at the stooped woman who now had no less than seven children flocked around her on the sagging wooden porch in the dim light of a naked bulb. “By the way, wherever did all these children come from?”

“From fuckin,” yelled the woman, wondering how the little policeman could be so stupid as not to know that.

“Now you know where they came from, Harold,” Sam said as he drove away.

It was always like this with Harold Bloomguard and always had been. Yet for reasons impossible to explain Sam could not rid himself of the clinging little man any more than the weary woman could rid herself of the clinging children.

But I didn’t fuck to get him, thought Sam Niles. I just got fucked the day I accepted him into my fire team in Nam. And then Sam Niles felt the fear sweep over him as he thought of Vietnam and for a second he actually hated Harold Bloomguard. It always came this way: first fear at the memory and then a split second of incredible hatred which he assumed was for Harold Bloomguard who knew the secret of the cave. And relief for Harold’s never having revealed the secret to anyone, for never having mentioned the secret even to Sam Niles.

If he’d just bring it up once, thought Sam Niles, but he never did. And that was perhaps the reason he could never rid himself of Harold Bloomguard.

“You know, Sam, I think it’s time I got married,” Harold suddenly announced, interrupting Sam’s fearful reverie.

“Anybody I know? Ora Lee maybe? Or Carolina?”

“Don’t be silly Sam.”

“If it’s Ora Lee be sure to rent her out to us once a week for choir practice.”

“I’m serious, Sam,” Harold said as Sam Niles winked his headlights at an oncoming car and cruised west on Beverly Boulevard, glancing in store windows, most of which were darkened by now.

“So who’re you going to marry?” Sam asked, not truly interested.

“I dunno. I haven’t met her yet. I wonder what she’ll be like?”

“Just like the girl that married dear old dad,” said Sam Niles, thinking it would be rather difficult to find one like the mother Harold described to him, who up until the day he went overseas had twisted the tops off the catsup bottles and pried the lids from the cottage cheese containers, replacing them gently so that Harold would not strain himself when getting something to eat.

But she was never there to care for him again, after a certain summer afternoon when Harold was in Vietnam and her psychiatrist was on vacation in Martinique and Mrs. Bloomguard decided she was Ann Miller and did a naked tap dance in front of the Pomona courthouse and had to be taken to the screw factory to get rethreaded.

As they patrolled the nighttime streets and Harold complained that perhaps he should never get married because his mother’s insanity might be congenital, Sam Niles was reminded of his own fifteen month marriage which had just been finally dissolved last year.

His ex-wife, Kimberly Cutler Niles, was a tall athletic student he had met in a college night class. She was a blonde tawny cat of a girl with daring amber eyes that looked inquisitively and boldly at you. She was bright, articulate, personable. She said Harold Bloomguard was a doll and asked Sam to invite him home to dinner often. And incredibly enough she could cook. Not like a twenty-two year old student wife can cook but like a cook can cook. She was tidy and their little apartment was always immaculate. Harold Bloomguard loved her like a sister. He was ecstatically happy for his best friend, Sam Niles. Kimberly was darling. Sam Niles hated her guts.

But he didn’t hate her at first, that came later. They were probably married three weeks before he started to hate her. But he didn’t know that he hated her after three weeks, he just knew that she made him terribly uncomfortable. She was as terrific in the sack as he knew she would be the first night they met in class. She had introduced herself by shaking hands smoothly and firmly and saying, “I knew you were a Taurus. I just love bulls.”

And moments later she was chatting glibly about tennis which interested Sam, saying, “You’re a pretty good sized boy but I’ll bet you could get into size thirty-three tennis shorts. My brother left some at my place when he went away to school. Want them?”

“Sure, I’d like to play with you,” Sam said with a hint of a smile so he could withdraw gracefully but she delighted him by saying, “You could probably get into much smaller tennis shorts given the opportunity couldn’t you, Sam?”

And Sam Niles had a blue veiner going on a diamond cutter and was impulsively married within four months, wondering, as did Kimberly Cutler, how the hell it all happened.

The first thing Sam Niles didn’t like about being married to Kimberly Cutler was having to sleep in the same bed with another human being. It wasn’t that Kimberly wasn’t carnal and syrupy, she certainly was. But prior to marriage he had seldom had to spend a whole night in a bed with anybody. And early on, Kimberly’s doubts were heightened by Sam’s saying that he’d like to trade their king size bed for twins.

“That’s unnatural,” Kimberly told him as they lay in their king size bed unable to sleep.

“What’s unnatural about it?”

“Newlyweds should sleep in the same bed, for God’s sake.”

“Where does it say that?”

“Sam, don’t you enjoy me in bed?”

“That’s dumb. Do I act like I enjoy you?”

“As a matter of fact you act like a man who does a pretty good act of making love. Oh, I don’t mean fucking. You like that all right. I mean loving. You don’t really give yourself. You hold lots and lots back from me. It’s purely physical, your love-making.”

“All this because I want twin beds. Kim, it’s just that my old man and old lady were drunks and we were so goddamn poor I grew up on the floor. Or when we could rent a pad with a bed I always had to share it with two brothers. And I’m talking about a little bed, an army surplus cot. Christ, I felt like a married man at seven years old, always crowded into bed with one or both brothers. I just can’t bear it anymore to be …”

“Close?”

“Yeah, close.”

“You never want to get close to anybody.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I’m saying that you won’t let yourself get close to anyone. I can’t understand how you could be friends with Harold so long. He’s a sweet little guy but he’s like glue. How do you stand it?”

“Whaddaya mean?” Sam asked, then added, “Jesus, I’m starting to sound like Dean.”

“There’s something about Harold. You’ve yelled his name in your sleep.”

“So maybe I’m fruit for Harold.”

“You don’t like people, Sam. You’ve had a mean rough life with weak parents and you hate them even though they’re dead. You won’t even see your brothers and sisters unless you have to. It’s very sad. You don’t really want to be close to anyone. Not even me.”

“There oughtta be a law against people taking Psych 1b,” Sam Niles said.

“But why do you stay friends with Harold, Sam? You’re so different. You’ve both been in war and police work, yet he still sees honey where you see slime. He’s always enthusiastic, you’re always bored. Why do you let him crowd you? There’s something, something in the marines. In Vietnam…”

“My mother always told us it cost a nickel a minute to burn a light,” Sam Niles said as he switched off the lamp, leaving Kimberly Cutler Niles to wonder in the darkness. “Of course it doesn’t cost a nickel but I’m a creature of habit. It was just another thing that lousy drunken bitch lied about.”

And Sam rolled over, wishing the king sized bed was a twin, and went to sleep, yelling in the night about a spider hole and a cave, which Kimberly Cutler knew would never be explained, not to her.

From then on the marriage deteriorated very quickly, especially after Sam Niles began to attend various choir practices with various groups of choirboys, much to the disapproval of Harold Bloomguard who tried to hint that he should go home to Kimberly.

Three months later two bitter young people lay side by side in their twin beds, both doing poorly in their college classes because of their miserable relationship. They seethed over an argument they had about one watching television when the other was trying to study.

“So I’ll just quit school in my senior year,” Sam said. “Why’s a cop need an education anyway? No more than a trash collector. That’s all we do, clean up garbage.”

“The garbage is in your mind, Sam.”

“Fine, I’ll just feed on it. That’s what pigs do, isn’t it?”

And then bitter silence until Kimberly made a gambit. “Sam, do you wanna come over here and make love to me?”

“No, I’d rather have a wet dream.”

“Well then go up on Hollywood Boulevard and pick yourself up a queer if I can’t turn you on, you cocksucker!”

“Just like a woman. Never tell a man to go out and get some pussy. Too vain to think another woman might be able to do what you can’t. It’s go get a fag, never a broad.”

“Fuck you!”

“Tennis, anyone?” said Sam Niles, and that was the last word spoken that night.

Two nights later, after they had not seen each other except as she came and went to class and he to the police station, Sam came in after getting off the nightwatch. He found Kimberly sleeping soundly, but as he looked at her long tan body, the blue veiner he brought with him became a diamond cutter. He quickly stripped and got in her bed, nudging her.

“Hi, Kim,” he whispered.

“Oh Christ, what time is it?”

“Two thirty maybe. I wake you up?”

“Oh no, Sam, I’ve been lying here worrying about you getting shot like those idiotic cops’ wives on television. Where were you? Out drinking with the boys again?”

Then Sam was up close, breathing in her ear, touching her with a diamond cutter, saying, “This’ll keep you awake.”

“Only if you stick it in my eye,” replied Kimberly and she didn’t mind at all when Sam slammed out the door, half dressed.

The next night was perhaps the worst since they were both thinking about sex, hoping they could bring some of the drama back into their lives, neither wanting to make the move across the two feet of carpet to the other’s bed.

“You wanna come to my bed?” Kimberly finally asked pugnaciously.

“What do you have in mind, a prizefight?”

“Goddamnit, do you or don’t you?”

“Aren’t you too tired tonight?”

“I’m too tired every night after I’ve been studying for four hours and you come tripping in at some godawful time.”

“Well I’m a policeman and I work godawful hours!”

“You wanna get in bed with me?”

“Sure, but I’m tired too. Just for once, why don’t you come to my bed?”

“If we had one bed we wouldn’t have to be walking a beat across the goddamn carpet.”

“All right, I’ll come to your bed.”

“Not if it’s too much trouble.”

“You want me to or not?”

“All right, all right.”

Sam Niles pulled himself up and walked two steps and lay down beside Kimberly Cutler Niles, and after three minutes of silence wherein neither of the stubborn young people stirred, Sam finally said, “Shall we both put it in and toss a coin to see who has to move?”

Five minutes later it was Kimberly who was half dressed and slamming out the door.

The honeymoon was definitely over, but like so many people, Sam and Kimberly needed a dramatic moment to convince them of what they should have known. Six days later they got it.

It started with Sam Niles deciding to drive Kimberly bananas much as Celeste Holm tried to drive Ronald Colman bananas on a movie Sam had seen on “The Late Show.” He felt a little silly that night as he lay in his twin bed, knowing that he had made enough noise coming home from work to wake up the landlady down stairs. He knew that Kimberly could not possibly sleep through his drawer banging, toilet flushing, door slamming, shoe dropping, and would have to respond as Sam lay in the darkness with his back to her and forced out a muffled hilarious laugh guaranteed to drive her wild.

After the third stream of laughter he heard Kimberly stir in her bed and say, “Sam, are you drunk or what?”

“No.”

“Then what’s so damn funny at three A.M.?”

“Nothing.”

“Then please let me sleep.”

“Okay.”

And moments later Sam Niles was giggling more hilariously than before, because, by God, it worked! He knew she would soon be beside herself with jealousy, curiosity and debilitating rage. Then Sam began chuckling in earnest, his body and bed shaking.

Finally Kimberly spoke again. “Sam, honey.”

“Yes?”

“No offense, but any guy who won’t screw his wife and giggles a lot really should try to get himself together on Hollywood Boulevard. Why don’t you put on my yellow miniskirt and go out strolling. You might get lucky.”

So Sam Niles angrily decided that what worked for Celeste Holm would not work on Kimberly Cutler Niles. He was not yet convinced that Oscar Wilde was right and Aristotle was wrong: that life imitates art. So he went back to television for an answer to his domestic misery And he found it on “The Late, Late Show.”

It was John Wayne telling Maureen O’Hara that there’d be no locked doors in their marriage as he broke down a three inch oak door and threw the stunning redhead onto their four-poster, breaking it to the ground.

Like so many policemen, Sam Niles was a John Wayne fan, though he had never fallen prey to the malaise the Los Angeles police psychologist called the “John Wayne Syndrome,” wherein a young hotdog responds with independence, assurance and violence to all of life’s problems and comes to believe his four inch oval shield is as large as Gawain’s ever was. Roscoe Rules, who swaggered and talked police work every waking moment and wore black gloves and figuratively shot from the hip and literally from the lip, was surely suffering from the syndrome. But though Sam Niles had never been a hotdog or black glove cop, he admired the direct, forceful, simplistic approach to life found in a John Wayne film. And he was given the chance to be the Duke that very week.

It started over Sam’s bitching about Kimberly’s cooking which like everything else in their marriage had deteriorated to the point that even she could hardly eat it. It ended with her in angry tears, which was not unusual, and running into the bathroom and locking the door, which was extremely unusual.

“Goddamn women,” Sam Niles muttered in consummate frustration, hurling his half-eaten plate of food against the wall, his stomach afire from the poisons he was manufacturing.

Sam found himself standing in front of the bathroom door, making a fist and shouting, “There’ll be no locked doors in our marriage, Kimberly Cutler Niles!”

And when there was no answer he John Wayned the door, kicking it right next to the lock and sending it crashing across the bathroom to smash into the wall and crack the porcelain toilet.

The door exploded. It made a loud boom. But nothing like the boom his Smith amp; Wesson.38 made in the hands of Kimberly Cutler Niles as she stood inside the bathroom, half out of her mind, watching the door sailing past.

Then Sam Niles was lying flat on his stomach from his feet trying to run backward. Then he was kneeling on his broken glasses pleading, “Please Kimberly! Please don’t kill me! Oh, God!” And then there was another explosion and a third, and Sam Niles was up and crashing through the aluminum screen door and running down the walk and across the street to a vacant lot where he lay trembling in the knee-high weeds, watching the front of the apartment building, waiting for a wrathful figure to emerge from the darkness. Ready to run like a turpentined cat as far as his legs could carry him from the maniacal Kimberly Cutler Niles.

The police were called by three neighbors that night, but the walls and concrete walks of the apartment building had played tricks with the sound of gunfire and no one knew the shots had come from the Niles’ apartment. It was finally thought that someone had driven by and shot up the place. Two detectives worked for three weeks on the theory that an unknown assailant had a grudge against the apartment house manager who sweated off ten pounds during the investigation. Kimberly bought a new door and toilet and had the interior bullet holes patched before she moved out and filed for her divorce.

When he was sure Kimberly was in class Sam Niles came back and got his clothes, ready to bolt out the door any second. He found his belongings on the living room floor. There was a note beside his gun which read, “Who’s got the biggest balls now, hero?”

Sam Niles never fully appreciated a John Wayne film after that night.

But he wasn’t thinking too much about Kimberly Cutler or John Wayne the night the hype blew their case away and they arrested the man who painted himself red.

Both Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard had heard of the man who painted himself red. But prior to the contact with him he was known only as the man who painted his car red. His name was Oscar Mobley and he was fifty-eight years old, white, unmarried, lived alone, was unemployed and liked to paint his car red. It would never have been called to the attention of the Los Angeles Police Department if it weren’t for the fact that Oscar Mobley did it with a paintbrush and bucket and did it perhaps once a month. The policemen who knew him said that his fifteen year old Ford outweighed a Cadillac limousine, so thick were the coats of peeling red enamel.

And yet Oscar Mobley would probably never have become the subject of rollcall gossip if it weren’t that he would occasionally paint his headlights red and drive along Wilshire Boulevard at night, making cars pull over. Oscar Mobley had many warnings and traffic tickets over painting his headlights red, but just as it appeared that he would give up painting his headlights red, Oscar Mobley suddenly for no apparent reason painted all the windows of his car red, and unable to see through a red opaque windshield, got himself into a traffic accident on Washington Boulevard. He was ordered by a traffic court judge never ever to paint his headlights or windshield red again.

Oscar Mobley had not been heard from for several months, apparently content to have a car with red body red bumpers, red tires, red hubcaps and red grille, but with unpainted windows and headlights. Then something happened on the night Sam and Harold met Oscar Mobley.

“Seven-A-Twenty-nine, see the woman, male mental case, Eleventh and Irolo, code two.”

“Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, roger,” Harold responded as Sam picked up speed a little and drove through the nighttime traffic to the residential neighborhood of Oscar Mobley.

“It’s about time you got here,” said the caller, Mrs. Jasper, the next door neighbor of Oscar Mobley Her hair was wet with red paint and a blue cotton dress she held in her hands was covered with the stuff. “I just asked that crazy nut Oscar why he was painting his headlights and windshield red, that’s all I did…”

“Wait a minute,” Sam Niles said as he and Harold stood in the street with Mrs. Jasper, her husband, her brother and eight other neighborhood men and women who had almost decided to lynch the frail Oscar Mobley until someone had the presence of mind to call the police.

“Oscar started to paint his car again tonight,” said Mr. Jasper, a man with receding hair and a parrot’s face, who was even more frail than Oscar Mobley and who had no stomach for fighting for Mrs. Jasper who could have licked Oscar Mobley and Mr. Jasper at the same time on her worst day.

“Yeah, we know about Oscar,” Sam Niles said.

“Well he started to paint again,” Mr. Jasper continued. “He ain’t done that for three, four months now. He won’t ever tell anyone on the street why he paints his car red and we asked him a thousand times, maybe a million. He just smiles and keeps painting and won’t answer you. Well tonight he done what the judge told him not to do, he started painting the headlights and the windows red, and my wife just came out on the front porch and asked him why.”

“That’s all I done and that crazy little…”

“Please, ma’am, one at a time,” Harold said.

“Well, my little woman just comes out and sees him there under the streetlight, painting everything red and she asks him why he’s doing it and he says something she can’t hear and she thinks at last maybe she’s gonna learn the secret of why Oscar Mobley paints his car red and she just walks over…”

“Out of curiosity,” added Mrs. Jasper.

“Out of curiosity,” said Mr. Jasper, “and when she gets close she says, ‘Oscar, why do you paint your car red?’ And he don’t say a word. Then he done it.”

“Done… did what?” asked Harold.

“Painted me red!” Mrs. Jasper shouted. “The little son of a bitch started painting me. I got the paintbrush in my mouth and I couldn’t breathe. He was painting my hair and neck and arms. If he hadn’t a surprised me I’d a knocked the little bastard down the sewer, but pretty soon I couldn’t even see for the paint in my eyes. And I turn and run for the house and he chases me painting my…”

“Her ass,” said Mr. Jasper.

“Yes, the dirty beggar even did that to me and I’ve been scrubbing with paint thinner till my skin’s almost wore off. Look at me!”

Harold shined the flashlight past Mrs. Jasper’s face so as not to hit her eyes with the beam and it was true, her face and neck were a splotched and faded red like a pomegranate.

“Well, it’s time someone did something about Oscar,” Sam Niles sighed and he and Harold got their batons and put them in the rings on their Sam Brownes and went to find Oscar Mobley and let Mrs. Jasper make a citizen’s arrest on him for painting her red.

As Sam expected, Oscar Mobley did not open the door when he pounded and rang the bell.

“It’s unlocked, Sam,” Harold said when he turned the knob of the front door of the little three room house where Oscar lived with two cats and a goldfish.

Sam shrugged and readied his revolver and Harold Bloomguard also fingered his gun, ready to touch the spring on the clamshell holster. Both men entered the darkened kitchen and tiptoed toward the narrow hallway to the tiny bedroom where a lamp burned.

Sam went in first, his gun out in front and he said quietly “Mr. Mobley, if you’re in here I want you to come out. We’re police officers and we want to talk to you. We won’t hurt you. Come out.”

There was no answer and Sam entered the room, seeing nothing but an unmade bed, a box of cat litter, a broken down nightstand with an old radio on it, a pile of dirty clothing on the floor and a napless overstuffed chair.

Sam was about to check under the bed when he and Harold were scared half out of their wits by the naked Oscar Mobley who suddenly leaped out from behind the overstuffed chair, painted red from head to foot, arms outstretched.

“Up popped the devil!” yelled Oscar Mobley cheerfully.

It was miraculous that neither officer shot him. Both were exerting at least a pound of trigger pull on their guns which like all department issued guns had been altered to fire only double action. They stood, shoulders pressed together, backs to the wall, gaping at Oscar Mobley who posed, arms extended, grinning proudly, the paint hardly dry on his small naked body.

Everything had been painted: the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet, his hair, face, body, genitals. He had managed with a roller to get the center of his back. He had neglected his teeth only because he forgot them. He had not painted his eyeballs only because he started to and it hurt.

As Sam Niles later stood in Oscar Mobley’s kitchen and smoked to steady his nerves, the equally shaken Harold Bloomguard patiently persuaded Oscar Mobley that despite the beautiful paint job he should wear a bathrobe to go where they were going because it was a nippy evening and he might catch cold.

After agreeing that Elwood Banks, the jailor at Wilshire Station, might object to their bringing in a man who painted himself red since it would be messy to try to roll fingerprints over the coat of red enamel, Sam and Harold took Oscar Mobley where he belonged: Unit Three, Psychiatric Admitting, of the Los Angeles County General Hospital. The hospital now had a grander name: Los Angeles County, University of Southern California Medical Center. But it would forever be General Hospital to the indigent people it served.

Oscar Mobley was admitted, later had a sanity hearing wherein he steadfastly refused to tell anyone why he painted his car, himself and Mrs. Jasper red, and went to a state hospital for six months where he refused to tell anyone else his secret.

After his release he moved to a new neighborhood, took a job delivering throwaway circulars, did it beautifully for eight days, then painted his boss and his boss’ wife red and was recommitted to the state hospital. But all this happened long after Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard took him to Unit Three, in time to miss code seven though they were starving, and just in time to meet the Moaning Man.

The call came just after 11:00 P.M. “Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, shot fired vicinity of Ninth and New Hampshire.”

“Rampart Division,” Sam Niles said to Harold Bloomguard who nodded, picked up the mike and said, “Seven-A-Twenty-nine reporting that the call is in Rampart Division.”

“Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, stand by,” said the radio operator as she checked with one of the policemen who supervise the girls and assign the call tickets.

“Goddamn Rampart cars’ve been pulling this shit too often lately,” Sam said to Harold who didn’t mind handling the call in someone else’s division because Sam had been exceedingly quiet and Harold was getting as bored as Sam always was.

“If we have to handle this one, next time a Rampart car gets a call in our area we’ll just let the bastards handle it,” Sam said.

“Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, handle the call in Rampart Division,” said the radio operator. “No Rampart units available.”

“Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, roger on the call,” Harold Bloomguard said as Sam Niles pushed up his drooping steel rimmed glasses and threw a cigarette out the window saying, “They’re probably all over on Alvarado eating hamburgers, the lazy pricks.”

Sam drove slowly on the seedy residential streets, mostly a white Anglo district, but with some black and Latin residents. He shined the spotlights on the front of homes and apartments, hoping not to find anyone who may have phoned about shots being fired. Sam Niles wanted to go to an east Hollywood drive-in and eat cherry pie and drink coffee and try to score with a waitress he knew.

“There it is,” Harold said as Sam’s spotlight beam lighted a chinless withered man in a bathrobe who waited in front of a two story stucco apartment house. The door glass had been broken so many times the panes were replaced by plywood and cardboard.

Sam took his time parking, and Harold was already across the narrow street by the time Sam gathered up his flashlight and put his cigarette pack in his pocket and locked the car door so someone didn’t have fun slashing the upholstery or stealing the shotgun from the rack.

“Heard a shot,” the old man said. His eyes were a quiet brown like a dog’s.

“You live here?”

“Yep.”

“You the manager?”

“Nope, but I got a passkey I help out Charlie Bates. He’s the manager.”

“Why do we need a key?” Harold asked.

“Shot came from up there.”

And the man in the bathrobe pointed a yellow bony finger up to the front window on the second floor where a gray muslin drape flapped rhythmically as the gusts of wind blew and sucked through the black hole of an open window on what had become a chilled and cloudy night.

“Give us the passkey, we’ll have a look,” Sam Niles said and later he wondered if he felt something then.

It seemed he did. He was to recall distinctly wishing that a Rampart unit would feel guilty that Wilshire was handling their calls and perhaps come driving down Ninth Street to relieve them.

The stairs creaked as they climbed and the whole building reeked, dank and sour from urine and moldy wool carpet on the stairs. They stood one on each side of the door and Sam knocked.

The dying tree outside, the last on the block, rattled in the wind which rushed through the narrow hallway upstairs. The building was surprisingly quiet for one housing eighty-five souls. Sam reached up and unscrewed the only bulb at their end of the hall, and said, “We better be in the dark.”

“Might be some drunk sitting in there playing with a gun,” Harold nodded and both policemen drew their service revolvers.

Sam knocked again and the sound echoed through the empty hall which had no floor carpet, only old wooden floors caked with grime which could never be removed short of sanding the wood a quarter of an inch down. A mustard colored cat, displaying the indifference Sam Niles usually feigned, watched from the windowsill.

The wind blew and it was a cold wind, yet Sam was to remember later that he was sweating. He tasted the salt running through his moustache into the dimple of his upper lip. Then they heard it.

At first Sam Niles thought it was the wind. Then he saw the look on Harold Bloomguard’s face in the dark hallway when he moved into a patch of moonlight. He knew that Harold heard it and that it wasn’t the wind.

Then they heard it again. The Moaning Man was saying:

“Mmmmmm. Mmmmmmm. Mmmmmuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh.”

Then Sam was sweating in earnest and Harold’s pale little face was glistening in the swatch of moonlight as he pressed himself against the wall, gun in his left hand. Sam Niles turned the key slowly and then kicked the door open with his toe and jumped back against the wall.

“Mmmmm,” said the Moaning Man. “Uuuuhhhhh. Mmm-mmuuuuuhhhhh.”

“Jesus Christ motherfucker son of a bitch!” Sam Niles, like many men, swore incoherently when he was frightened.

The moans sounded like cattle lowing. They came from inside. Inside in the darkness.

Finally Sam Niles moved. He dropped to his knees and with his flashlight in his left hand and gun in the right, crawled into the tiny apartment ready to switch on the flashlight and ready to shoot. He crept toward the bedroom which was just behind the cluttered kitchen.

Sam Niles smelled blood. And he felt the flesh wriggling on his rib cage and on his back and up the sides of his dripping neck into his temple when the Moaning Man said it again. But it was loud this time and plaintive:

“Mmmmm. Uuuuuhhhhh. Mmmmmuuuuuhhhhh!”

Then Harold Bloomguard, tiptoeing through the kitchen behind Sam who was on his knees, accidentally dropped his flashlight and the beam switched on when it hit the floor and Sam Niles cursed and jumped to his feet and leaped to the doorway his gun following the beam from his own flashlight in the darkness. And he met the Moaning Man.

He was sitting up in bed, his back pressed to the wall. He was naked except for undershorts. Every few seconds the wind would snap the dirty ragged drapes and the moonlight would wash his chalky body which otherwise lay in the slash of light. He held a 9mm. Luger in his left hand and had used it for the first and last time by placing it under his chin, gouging the soft flesh between the throat and the jawbone and pulling the trigger.

The top of the head of the Moaning Man was on the bed and on the floor beside the bed. The wall he leaned against was spotted with sticky bits of brain and drops of blood. Most of his face was intact, except it was crisscrossed with rivulets of blood in the moonlight, filling his eyes with blood. The most incredible thing of all was not that the Moaning Man was able to make sounds, it was that the gun he had killed himself with was clenched tightly in a fist across his body at port arms. He moved it back and forth in rhythm with the moans.

“Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” Sam Niles said as Harold Bloomguard gaped slackjawed at the Moaning Man whose gun hand was swaying, swaying, back and forth with the snapping of the drapes in the wind as he said:

“Mmmmmm. Uuuuuhhhhhhh Mmmmmuuuuuhhhhh.”

And Sam Niles knew that he never would have done what the terrified Harold Bloomguard did next, which was to walk slowly across that room, watching the Luger swaying in the hand of the Moaning Man, the pieces of skull crackling under his leather soles, crackling with each step, until he stood beside the bed.

Sam Niles would forever smell the blood and hear the wind and the snapping drapes and Harold’s shoes crackling on the fragments of bone and Harold’s teeth clicking together frightfully as he moved a trembling hand toward the Luger which the Moaning Man held in front, swaying to and fro as he said:

“Mmmmm. Uuuuu. Mmmmuuuuuhhhtherr!”

And then Harold Bloomguard spoke to the Moaning Man. He said, “Now now now. Hush now, I’m right here. You’re not alone.”

Harold Bloomguard gripped the wrist and hand of the Moaning Man and the moaning stopped instantly. The fist relaxed, dropping the pistol on the bed. The bloody eyes slid shut and overflowed. The Moaning Man died without a sound.

Both policemen remained motionless for a long moment before Harold Bloomguard controlled his shaking and said, “He was calling his mother, is all. Why do so many call their mother?”

“He was dead!” Sam Niles said. “He was dead before we saw him!”

“He only needed the touch of a human being,” said Harold Bloomguard. “I was so scared. So scared!”

Sam Niles turned and left Harold in the darkness with the Moaning Man and called for a detective to take the death report and he did not speak to Harold for the remainder of the watch and demanded a choir practice when they changed into civilian clothes later that night. It was a bitter night for choir practice and only half the choirboys showed up. But Carolina Moon was there so it wasn’t too bad.