The Choirboys

ELEVEN

SERGEANT DOMINIC SCUZZI

With a galloping heartbeat Harold Bloomguard entered the opened door of the vice squad office on the first night of his vice assignment. Harold was twenty-five minutes early. He wore a conservative gray suit, white button-down shirt, a paisley tie and traditional wing tip brogues.

The office was open but empty when Harold arrived. It looked different from the detective squad room. It was much smaller. And more cluttered. Covering one wall were three large street maps dotted with multicolored pins. Certain streets were covered with green pins signifying prostitution activity. Other streets were sporadically dotted with pins marking suspected bookmaking locations: cashrooms in the southerly black neighborhoods, phone spots in the northerly white neighborhoods. Cocktail lounges were marked where handbooks and agents operated.

There was a painted motto over the door. It said: “What you say here, What you see here, What you hear here, Let it stay here, When you leave here.”

Harold Bloomguard read that motto with shining eyes. He shook back his thin, ginger-colored hair and smiled enchantedly. For a dreamy moment he sipped from a frothy goblet in Bombay, Macao, Port Said: white linen suits, narrow teeming passages, mingled aromas of spice, rich dried fruit, dusky succulent women, clawing danger. The mystique of the secret agent enveloped this room.

Just then a swarthy unshaven overweight man of fifty in a dirty short sleeve dress shirt shuffled through the door in run over sneakers. He looked Harold up and down and said, “You don’t look big enough to fight, fuck or run a footrace. You one a the new kids on the block?”

“I’m… I’m… are you a policeman?”

“I’m a sergeant. I run the nightwatch.” The man shambled to a desk, rummaged through piles of papers until he found a cigar, belched three times before he offered his hand and said, “Name’s Dom Scuzzi. You can call me Scuz. You Slate, Niles or Bloomguard?”

“Bloomguard… Sergeant.”

“I said call me Scuz. Ain’t no formality in the vice squad. Not since I got rid a that prick, Lieutenant Cotton-Balls Klingham. I’ll never understand how he got on the squad. Cotton-Balls. One hundred percent sterile like they say on the box. Everything about him was sterile, especially his conversation.”

Sergeant Scuzzi paused long enough to puff on the cigar and belch once or twice before continuing. “Anyways, we got rid a him. Can’t tell you how I did it. But I’ll always be beholding to one a your nightwatch blue-suits, name a Spermwhale Whalen, for giving me the idea. How long you been at Wilshire?”

“Almost two years. You know, Sarge … Scuz, I’ve seen you around but…”

“That’s Scuz. Don’t rhyme with fuzz. Rhymes with loose. That’s Scooose. As in scuse a me.”

“Scooose.”

“That’s it! I ain’t been here at this station too long.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you around, but I always thought you were…”

“A janitor?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I don’t mind. My old man’s a janitor. Supported nine kids pushing a broom. Never talked a word a English, hardly. I don’t mind looking like a janitor. The other two loaners look good as you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look good. I mean good. How tall’re you?”

“Five eight.”

“Weigh about a hundred fifty?”

“Just about.”

“How the hell you get on the department?”

“I stretched and ate bananas and stuff.”

“You look good. Here.” Scuz pulled open the drawer of his desk, propped his tennis shoes up in front of him, leaned back, puffed his cigar and said, “Try em on.”

Harold picked up the horn rimmed glasses, held them to his eyes and said, “They’re clear glass.”

“Sure. Makes you look even less like a cop if that’s possible. You’re gonna be a real whore operator, my boy. Glad you wore a suit tonight. You’re definitely the suit and tie type. Tell em you’re an accountant. Here.”

And Scuz reached back in the drawer, rummaged through it for a few seconds and found a packet of business cards which said, “Krump, Krump and Leekly Certified Public Accountants.”

“Any broads get cute with you trying to guess if you’re a cop, just lay a card on her. Tell her it’s your private business phone and she can call you during business hours. That’s our straight-in line here. We got a girl works here on the daywatch who’s good at conning callers. If a whore won’t go for you tonight she’ll go for you tomorrow night after she checks you out with our girl.”

“I don’t know anything about vice, Scuz,” Harold said, relaxing in the chair in front of the unshaven sergeant who reached inside his shirt and scratched his belly which was almost as big as Spermwhale’s, and puffed the cigar blissfully with his eyes closed.

“Now don’t go worrying… what’s your first name?”

“Harold.”

“Harold, don’t worry about nothing. I never let my coppers get hurt, specially not a loanee like you who I gotta return to the patrol lieutenant in a couple weeks in as good a shape as I borrowed him. There ain’t nothing to working whores. They offer you a sex act for money. Got it? Sex, money. You in the service?”

“Marines.”

“Overseas?”

“Vietnam.”

“All right,” Scuz nodded, chewing his cigar, leaning back in the chair, hands behind his head. “Overseas the broads got it made. Fucky sucky five bucks. See, they saw what every whore said in war or peace for five thousand years. Sex, money. Now, these whores today know that there’s a thing called entrapment, which means you can’t plant an evil idea in their heads, as if that was possible. So in effect they’re gonna wanna say sucky fucky and let you say the price. Or they’re gonna say the price and let you say sucky fucky. Get it?”

“I think so.”

“It’s just a game but I don’t wanna see you perjure yourself for a shitty little whore pinch so you play it straight. Figure out a way to make her say the whole thing: Sucky fucky five bucks. But of course it ain’t five bucks, it’s twenty on the street. And she ain’t gonna say sucky fucky usually. She’s gonna say French or half and half or party, and all these words been construed by the black robed pussies that sit on the bench to be words with sexual connotations. So soon as she says one a these words and she mentions money, Boom! Bring her down. Hook her up. You got a legal pinch. Got it?”

“God, I hope so,” said Harold.

“Well, just don’t entrap them. Course you’re gonna run into guys who say, bullshit, she says sucky fucky and gets cute about the price, I pull out the iron and zoom her. I say no. Nice and legal.”

“Sucky fucky, five bucks,” said Harold.

“You got it, kid, I knew you was smart!” Scuz said, moving the cigar from the right side of his mouth to the left. “Course she might throw you a curve.”

“Like how?”

“She might say, ‘I think you look like a cop. If you ain’t a cop, take out a twenty dollar bill and wrap it around your cock and wave it at me.’ One did that to me once.”

“What’d you do?”

“I only had a ten,” said Scuz, closing his eyes, enveloping himself in a shroud of cigar smoke which was starting to choke Harold Bloomguard. “But don’t worry about these brain teasers. Don’t happen too much. Most girls’re just gonna say…”

“Sucky fucky, five bucks.”

“I like you, kid,” said Scuz. “Wanna cigar?”

“No thanks, Scuz,” Harold said, thinking about inviting the vice sergeant to choir practice, just as Sam Niles and Baxter Slate came through the door.

Scuz opened his eyes, peeked through the cloud of smoke which hung over him and shook his head disapprovingly at the two strapping six footers, at their hair styled just over the ears, but not long enough to offend the station captain totally Baxter wore tie dyed jeans, a denim jacket and a red velvet shirt. Sam Niles wore a buckskin shirt over a tank top, brushed denims and Wallabees. His neat brown moustache did not drop down around the lip far enough to anger the same station captain and his sideburns did not quite flare out into mutton-chops. The steel rimmed goggles did not help mitigate the whole picture.

“Shit!” Scuz said, fanning the smoke away from his face. “You look just like two healthy, clean cut, twenty-six year old studs, which is what you are. You look like young cops. Why can’t you look sick and puny like him?” And Scuz pointed to Harold Bloomguard who decided not to invite him to choir practice.

“This is a sergeant,” said Harold Bloomguard to Sam and Baxter in case they wouldn’t believe it.

“Just call me Scuz,” said Scuz.

“Anything wrong with the way we look?” Sam Niles asked.

“No, you can’t help it,” Scuz said. “It wouldn’t even help if I made you funky. You just got copper written all over you. It’s okay you guys can work in the trap.”

“Trap?” said Baxter Slate.

“Fruits,” Scuz said, dropping his feet to the floor and remembering they had not shaken hands, offering his hairy paw to both policemen. “What’s your first names?”

“Sam, Sam Niles.”

“Baxter Slate.”

“Okay, guys, glad to have you. Hope you enjoy the two weeks here. Anyways, you can work fruits with the regular team tonight and maybe tomorrow, then you can have some fun on the weekend working a Wilshire Boulevard bar. We got a complaint there’s a big game going on in the back room a this cocktail lounge after closing time. Gotta check it out. Give you some front money maybe. See how you operate. Call it Secret Service money. The department is cheap. Cheapest fucking outfit you ever saw. The money’s just for flash. You spend as little as you have to and bring the rest back. You lose it or somebody burns you for it, I gotta shoot myself like a Jap general. You don’t wanna see old Scuz fall on his sword, do you, Sam?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“Scuz.”

“Scuz.”

“You, Baxter?”

“No, Scuz.”

“Okay, boys, then when your partners get here and start your teaching, pay attention to what they tell you. They’ll tell you better than me. Just remember a couple things. One is that we work a misdemeanor detail and I don’t want any man hurt for a shitty little misdemeanor. Don’t get hurt. Got it, boys?”

And as Harold Bloomguard gulped nervously all three young men nodded at Scuz. “And another thing, I’m sorry I gotta give you some a the shitty jobs but we get a vice complaint we gotta investigate it. I wish I could just let you work fun things like gambling and call girls and bookmaking back offices and fancy bars with good drinks, but that usually ain’t what we gotta do. So try to have fun but don’t get hurt. That’s the only rule I got. You let yourself get hurt and I’ll break your arm!”

For the next fifteen minutes six regular vice officers straggled into the squad room and said hello to Scuz who continued to befoul the entire room with the cheap cigar. The vice cops introduced themselves all around and worked in their logbooks and vice complaints.

The regular vice cops looked like Hollywood’s version of Tripoli buccaneers, Turkish brigands or Viking warriors. One, a black, looked like a Sudanese caravan raider. All were young men, fiercely moustachioed and bearded with enough hair to stuff a mattress. They wore stylishly funky clothes like most young people. Yet beneath it all they were carefully washed and sprayed and powdered. They were so baroque and theatrical they had to be cops. Only Dominic Scuzzi could fool the street people.

“This one here’s Harold Bloomguard,” Scuz said to his troops. “Look at him. This is what I been trying to tell you guys about how you should look. Ain’t nobody gonna make him for the heat, right?”

“Right,” answered the Viking.

“Then why don’t you guys try to look like him? Why do you wanna look like you walk a beat for Attila the Hun?”

“Scuz, I ain’t looked like Harold since I was twelve years old,” said a Turkish brigand while Harold blushed at the laughter.

The three loanees were given a further briefing and within an hour they were heading for their vice cars.

“One more thing I almost forgot,” Sergeant Scuzzi said, stopping the squad of men in the doorway. He sat back down, lit a new cigar and said, “You new kids listen. If you go sneaking and peeking and prowling around backyards, you gotta always pay attention to the size a the dog shit. Got me?”

Then Scuz put his tennis shoes up on the desk and leaned back and puffed while a persistent fly who wanted desperately to light on the vice sergeant’s pungent flesh decided to fly from the choking polluted clouds. Fleeing for his very life.

The three new kids on the block found themselves standing in the parking lot just before dark, each with a tiny flashlight the other vice cops lent them since their three and five cell lights were unwieldy on the vice detail. They waited for each of the three teams to pick one of them and were totally bewildered when no one did.

As Pete Zoony a loose limbed vice cop with a woolly dust colored hairdo and a Fu Manchu moustache, got in his car he turned to the three loanees and said, “We’re not being unfriendly, it’s just that Scuz is gonna come slipping and sliding out the door in a couple seconds. He can’t relax when there’s new guys around. Thinks you’ll get killed if he don’t break you in personally. Tomorrow night you’ll work with us and we’ll get better acquainted. Oh, oh. Here he comes.”

And the three choirboys turned to see Scuz shuffling through the door, stepping on the frayed ends of his shoelaces and scratching his balls, which was easy to do given the shiny baggy gabardine pants ready to wear through. Then he banged his little flashlight on the heel of his hairy hand, puffed a cloud of smoke into the summer breeze and scuttled across the parking lot, just stepping back in time to keep a black and white from running over him.

The officer driving, who was Roscoe Rules, said to Whaddayamean Dean, “Fucking janitors they hire these days look like goat shit! Oughtta make that prick clean up or fire him!”

As Scuz reached the three choirboys and his teams of regular vice cops who sat grinning in their cars, he said to Pete Zoony “Don’t mind if I take the new kids out, do you, Pete? Just for tonight. I ain’t got nothing to do anyways except the progress report for our psycho captain. Can’t seem to think a any good lies to put in there tonight.”

“No, we don’t mind, Scuz,” Pete Zoony said. “Just tell us where you’re gonna take em so we don’t bunch up in the same place.”

“Well, we got that three-eighteen about the shithouse up there in the department store.”

“Yeah.”

“And I might try this wimpy little kid here out on the whores on Western. Don’t he look terrific?” And Scuz threw a heavy arm around the wimpy little kid and hugged him.

Five minutes later, Sergeant Scuzzi was driving north on La Brea in a four door, five year old Plymouth which looked every bit like a detective car and disappointed the choirboys.

Sam Niles sat in the back seat with Baxter Slate and Harold sat in front, nervously blowing spit bubbles off his tongue which plinked on the dashboard as he scratched the strawberry rash on the back of his neck with a little penknife. Sam Niles decided then that Harold and Scuz would make perfect partners.

“This ain’t much of an undercover car, is it, boys?” Scuz remarked as they bumped and pounded over dips in the asphalt.

“Not much,” Baxter Slate said. He looked at Scuz in disbelief but not without affection from time to time.

“Cheap outfit, boys. I mean we work for a cheap outfit. Be amazed how little Secret Service money I get. End up spending my own bread more often than not. Think we can go in the bar and nurse one drink for three hours? Shit, they know we’re cops when they see how fucking stingy we are.”

“Where we going first, Scuz?” Harold asked, perspiring because the sun had not yet set and it was muggy for Los Angeles. And because he was very nervous.

“Boys, I gotta take you to a trap first off tonight. And I gotta apologize which I don’t like to do cause I always feel a cop shouldn’t have to apologize for doing his job. But the truth is — and don’t tell your lieutenant old Scuz told you this when you go back to patrol-but the truth is that most of a vice cop’s job is just public relations. See, we can say we’re protecting the city’s morals and point to statistics to prove it, but fact is we ain’t doing much a anything. So you might say Scuz, what the hell we doing it for? And I say, boys, it’s part a the game. Every business has its PR department where they manufacture bullshit, right? General Motors got it. U.S. Steel got it. AT amp;T got it. For sure the While House got it and City Hall. We can tell all the folks who pay our salary that we’re guarding the morals a the citizens from the degenerates that wanna pay money to suck, fuck or gamble with someone they ain’t married to outta the privacy a their own bedroom. You only work this vice detail for eighteen months and then you’re out. I say it’s a little break from routine for me so I work it but I ain’t got no illusions about cleaning up maggots. In the first place how do I know I ain’t just a maggot myself, you stand back and look at the whole picture in general?”

The choirboys glanced at one another and gave Scuz no argument.

“So anyways that’s my philosophy about vice work. And you kids’re gonna work for me for a couple weeks. And since you’re doing a job that ain’t gonna help nobody anyways, I just don’t want you to get hurt, see? So let’s say you run into some six foot six fruit with nineteen inch arms who’s a foot fetishist. And he buys a pair a black satin shoes from the shoe department a this store I’m taking you to, and takes the shoes into the shitter where he pulls out a can a whipped cream which he shoots all over the shoes. And then he stands there and licks the whipped cream off. Whadda you do about it, seeing as how you’re gonna be behind a wall looking through a screen into the john and protecting the public morals?”

“Huh?” said Harold Bloomguard.

“I asked, whaddaya gonna do about this weird guy?”

“Well, I dunno, Scuz,” Harold said, blowing a spit bubble while Sam Niles toyed with his moustache and shook his head disgustedly, as Baxter Slate’s wide smile grew wider with affection for Scuz.

“Harold, my boy” Scuz said. “First place, I gave you a hint. I said the weirdo has nineteen inch arms!”

“Oh, I see!” said Harold. “Shine him on. Pass him by.”

“You got it!” Scuz said, driving only fifteen miles per hour which was driving Sam Niles to distraction. “Course there ain’t no misdemeanor here in the first place. So happens that some guys like to eat whipped cream off black satin shoes. Just wish they’d do it home and we wouldn’t get no calls about it but thing is they like to do it in public. Anyways there ain’t no law against it I know, so you just hope he gets full a whipped cream in a hurry and gets the hell out before someone calls the station and the station turns the problem over to the vice squad. Ready for another hypothetical?”

“Sure, Scuz,” grinned Baxter Slate, accepting a cigarette from the lethargic Sam Niles who was wondering how it was he had wanted to work vice.

“Okay you’re in the trap, peeking through the screen and some dude walks in the john and he pulls down his jeans and there inside the underwear he carries a toothbrush and a feather. And his dick’s all wrapped in rubber bands and rags to make it bulge outta his tight pants. And he sits down on the pot and reaches down in the toilet water and after he unwraps it he starts splashing cold water up on his dong. And he brushes it off with the toothbrush. Then he pulls out the feather and tickles his balls and when all this is done he’s able to take a leak, which he does sitting down, and then he leaves. Any violation there?”

“None,” Baxter Slate said.

“Okay, what if there ain’t no door on any a the toilets, which there ain’t because the manager a this department store is trying to discourage the fruits who like to meet here and poke their cocks through glory holes and all that. Now there he is, no door, just side walls around the toilet and everybody walks in can see him, including little kids.”

“Well…” Baxter hesitated.

“And just to mix you boys up a little, let’s say that our vice complaint which brought us here in the first place is from some lady lives near here and her kids always come use this rest room on the way home from school, and she says they got propositioned by some grown up fruits and don’t her kids got no rights?”

“Well…” Baxter Slate hesitated.

“Sure, if the fruits didn’t get a naughty kick outta doing it in public johns because it’s guilt and sin and fun and anal obsession and everything all mixed up and it ain’t the same in a private room, well then we wouldn’t have to come here at all. But that ain’t the case and it’s pretty hard to tell the lady her kids just have to put up with some dude propositioning them or blowing some other dude in front a them in the shithouse, ain’t it, Harold?”

“I guess so, Scuz.”

“Agree, Baxter?”

“I guess. Seems as though there should be some other solution.”

“Seems like,” Scuz said, “but there ain’t. Not for us. We got the problem and the complaint. We gotta do something and that something is to make at least one arrest so when the lady calls back because some other fruit tried to grope her kid, we can show her that we took action on her last complaint. See, boys, there’s just a million problems in this world that there ain’t no solutions to and cops get most of those kind.”

“So how would you handle the guy who doesn’t bother any children and just does his number with the toothbrush and feather?” asked Sam Niles whose pose was always boredom whether or not he was bored.

“I shoot him,” Scuz answered.

“You what?” Harold exclaimed.

“I shoot him. With this,” Scuz said, pulling a pink plastic water pistol from the pocket of his baggy gabardines. “I just shoot him through the screen where I’m peeking. First it confuses him, then it scares him soon’s he realizes where it’s coming from. See, I don’t add to his thrill by bracing him and threatening him or any a that shit. Just makes him wanna come back some more. Remember, guilt and punishment and stuff from his kiddy days is partly the reason he has to do all this in a public place. So I just shoot him with my gun. Pretty soon he don’t know who or what’s behind that wall. Sometimes he yells, ‘Who’re you? You store security? You a cop? Who’s shooting me?’”

“What do you say?” asked Harold.

“Nothing. I just shoot him again. It’s humiliating. It degrades him in a way he can’t stand. See, he might wanna degrade himself with the stuff he does in a public shitter but he can’t take the kind of humiliation I give him. I’m saying to him with my water gun that his little act ain’t worth no more than a few squirts a water. That he can’t stand. I’ve seen em go out in tears and never come back. At least not to that rest room and that’s all I can worry about at the moment. Make any sense?”

“Maybe it does at that,” Baxter Slate said as Scuz lit another cigar and turned on Wilshire Boulevard.

“See, I don’t wanna get in a big fight with these guys. I don’t wanna hurt them but I sure don’t wanna have them hurt me or my boys. So I spend most of my time figuring out how I can satisfy the citizens that make the vice complaints and keep my boys from getting hurt at the same time. I know most vice supervisors wouldn’t agree with me but I don’t think it’s too bad a way to run a vice squad.”

“Not bad at all, Scuz,” grinned Baxter Slate, rolling down the window to let out some of the smoke.

“Reason we gotta work this department store tonight is they stay open till nine, and some fruit picks up some cat in the rest room couple weeks ago and offers him ten bucks to let him give the guy a headjob which is okay except he don’t have no money after he does it. And to keep from getting his skull caved in he agrees to let the guy buy ten dollars’ worth a merchandise on his credit card. And the butch guy goes out and buys a hundred dollar suit and tells the fruit if he don’t sign for it he’ll do a fandango on his gourd with his boots. So then the fruit comes and complains about the cowboy. So I say to the guys in the dicks’ bureau, you got an extortion, maybe a credit card hustle, you ain’t got no vice squad case. But our captain says, ‘I think you better take a three-eighteen, Sergeant, and let your vice boys make an arrest there.’ See, he always calls me ‘Sergeant’ when he’s on the rag which is most a the time. So anyways we gotta work the trap in the john and I hope we make a pinch tonight so I can put this vice complaint to bed. I don’t like to make my guys sit around smelling shit.”

A few minutes later the battered vice car bumped into the parking lot at the rear of the large Wilshire Boulevard department store where shoppers were carrying bundles and fighting each other for parking places and stealing packages out of each other’s cars, as smoggy summer darkness finally fell on Los Angeles.

As Scuz led the three choirboys into the building and to the storage room which was attached to the rest room on the second floor, Baxter Slate spotted a man sitting on the floor of the corridor leading from the rest room. A stack of ten newspapers was on the floor beside him. His legs were folded under him like hinged sticks. His right hand was a claw, his left was worse. He scratched at the wall like a mutilated insect, unable to gain his feet. He was a forty year old newspaper vendor and several times a day he had to leave his newsstand to use the rest room in the department store. He had cerebral palsy but could usually get to the rest room and back to his chair quite easily often selling a paper or two along the way. Tonight he was suffering from a summer cold which weakened him like an attack of pneumonia would disable a healthy man.

Scuz turned around and saw two of the choirboys looking down the hallway at the man. Sam Niles wanted to help the man stand up but hated to attract attention to himself and make the other policemen think he was a do-gooder. Baxter Slate wanted to help the man stand up but was afraid the man would interpret his gesture as patronizing and snarl him away with righteous indignation. So both Sam and Baxter pretended not to see the man lolling on the floor and averted their eyes self-consciously. And felt guilt because they were unable to help.

Just then Harold Bloomguard saw the man. He didn’t think much of anything. He just said, “Oh,” walked down the corridor, took the palsied newspaper vendor by the arm and started to raise him up.

Then Scuz, who wondered why his parade had slowed, turned and saw Harold Bloomguard. He didn’t intellectualize either. He walked past Sam and Baxter and joined Harold who almost had the man to his feet.

“Stumbled, huh?” Scuz said, bending over and picking up the fallen man with one arm as easily as a doll, while he gathered up the stack of newspapers with the other. “Slippery goddamn floors in this store. Someone always going on their ass.”

He half carried the man to a bench near the rear door and seated him there with the stack of papers beside him as the man perspired and panted, unable to speak.

“Got the late edition?” Scuz asked, taking a coin from his pocket and putting it in the lap of the man as he took a paper from the stack and folded it into the back pocket of his gabardines. “Feel okay, partner? Want me to take you anywheres?”

The man managed a twisted smile and shook his head, and Scuz nodded, saying, “See you around, partner.” Then he shuffled off down the hall with Harold Bloomguard at his side and the other choirboys trailing.

As Scuz passed an old man people-watching on a bench by the elevator, he said, “Here you go, Dad,” dropping the paper beside the threadbare pensioner. “It’s a late edition. I ain’t got time to read it.”

“Well, thanks,” said the old man as Scuz opened the door of the storage room and led the three choirboys to the platform.

Two men could stand and look through a heavily screened one by two foot opening into the lighted rest room where shoplifters hid merchandise under their clothing and where men publicly masturbated and buggered each other, forcing Sergeant Dominic Scuzzi to force the choirboys to peek and smell shit.

They weren’t in the trap ten minutes before a man in a candy striped shirt and double breasted blue blazer walked in, looked nervously in each toilet stall and, finding himself alone, withdrew his penis and wrote a lazy S on the rest room floor from wall to wall.

“That deserves a shot,” whispered Scuz from the platform in the darkened room. “See if I remembered to load it. Yeah, I did.” And he put his pink plastic water pistol up to the screen and gave the man two bursts.

The man looked up at the ceiling for leaky pipes, saw none and tried to write some more. Scuz gave him two more bursts which caused him to cry out and walk around the rest room for another puzzled look into each toilet stall. Then Scuz gave him another burst and the man screamed and ran outside.

“He was easy,” Scuz said, stepping down from the platform to let Sam Niles have a look. “Reason I ran him off is I suspect he’s one a these pissy pork pullers. Takes a leak and beats off and cuts out. Guy can do most anything legally long as he’s alone. Gotta catch one that does his number with somebody else. Then we can make a pinch and close the vice complaint and get the fuck outta here and say we protected the people’s morality. Until somebody else makes another vice complaint. Some fun, hey, boys?”

“Yeah,” muttered Baxter Slate as Sam Niles grimaced disgustedly and longed for a cigarette because he couldn’t have one in the close dark room.

“Tell you what,” Scuz said. “I’m gonna leave you two guys here and take Harold with me for a pass down Western Avenue. See if we can catch ourselves a whore. Now I don’t like leaving two new guys here like this so I’ll be sending a team to come and sit with you. You two guys just hang loose and wait here and don’t go busting nobody unless a murder is being committed before your eyes, got me?”

“Uh huh,” Sam Niles said.

Scuz opened the door to the outside corridor and let Harold out into the light. Then Scuz turned and said, “You get bored you might amuse yourselves by betting quarters whether the next guy in will be a helmet or a anteater.”

“What’s that mean?” Baxter Slate asked.

“Circumcised or uncircumcised,” said Scuz as he shoved another cigar between his teeth. Then he threw his pink water pistol to Sam Niles saying, “Careful, it’s loaded.”

The first man into the rest room stepped up to the urinal and emptied his bladder. The two choirboys looked at each other and wondered how they had gotten here. He was an anteater.

The second man was also an anteater. However, the third, fourth and fifth were helmets. The sixth was an anteater and cost Baxter Slate twenty-five cents. The seventh was a helmet and Baxter won the money back. Neither man cared what the eighth one was. The ninth was an anteater but he soon turned into a helmet because he sat down on the toilet and began playing with himself after looking at a picture of Raquel Welch in a movie magazine. But then he looked at a picture of Warren Beatty and seemed just as excited.

Sam Niles gave him four bursts with the pistol and he ran out cursing, wiping the wet pages of the magazine on his shirt.

Baxter Slate said, “I can’t take two weeks of this.”

Sam Niles offered Baxter a cigarette, opened the door for ventilation and nodded.

Meanwhile Sergeant Dominic Scuzzi was sitting in the parking lot of a food market near Pico and Western briefing an exceedingly nervous Harold Bloomguard.

“So I’m gonna be right here in the parking lot,” Scuz said as Harold nodded and compulsively blew spit bubbles and cleaned the bogus horn rimmed glasses for the third time and made ready to get in his own car, a three year old Dodge Charger which they had picked up at the station parking lot after leaving Sam and Baxter.

“I don’t want you roaming too far, Harold, got me? Just go a block or so down Western and no more than a couple blocks east on Pico. You get a broad in the car, you get your offer like I told you, then badge her and bring her back here quick. She wants to jump out, let the bitch do it. You drive here to me and we’ll just cruise on back and scrape her off the street. You don’t go roaming more than a couple blocks from me, right?”

“Right,” said Harold.

“You nervous, Harold?”

“No. Not too much,” he lied.

“Got a comb?”

“Yeah.”

“Comb you hair back off your forehead. You goddamn kids all gotta look like rock singers. Comb it back. Show your high forehead. Makes you look even more square than you already look.”

Scuz turned the rearview mirror for Harold who parted his ginger hair and combed it back.

“Help if you had some greasy kid stuff,” said Scuz, who put the glasses on Harold when he was finished.

“I look okay?”

“Shit, ain’t nobody gonna make you, Harold. Nobody.”

“Guess I’m ready then.”

“Okay try going east on Pico there, circle south on Oxford, maybe, then back to Western. I want you close to me.”

As Harold fired up the Charger, Scuz fired up a fresh cigar and swatted at a swarm of gnats which had discovered him.

Meanwhile, as Harold Bloomguard began his maiden voyage into the land of vice, things were happening in the store where two revolted choirboys sat smelling human defecation in a dark and stuffy room.

First, Pete Zoony the veteran vice cop with the woolly hair and the Fu Manchu strolled into the rest room, grinned up at the screened hole on the wall and said, “Don’t bother making a bet. I’m a Jew.”

“How long we have to stay in here?” asked Sam Niles, whose voice boomed through the vent hole and echoed off the tile of the rest room.

“Scuz called us on the radio,” Pete Zoony said, examining his teeth in the mirror. “Told my partner to drop me here to sit with you. Said to give it an hour, no more. We wanna close this complaint bad. Wish we had a drunk wagon like Central. I’d have them carry two sleeping winos inside and leave them in the same toilet stall, then call the store manager to witness the orgy we discovered. After that we could close the complaint.”

“Well, nothing’s happened since we’ve been here,” Baxter said. “Maybe the fruits stopped coming here.”

“Maybe so. Think I’ll mosey outside and see there’s any new broads I haven’t met. When you come out for a break take a look at the set of tits works the perfume counter right across from junior miss clothes. I hear a policeman from North Hollywood’s balling her. Dynamite! Catch you later.”

And Pete Zoony was out the door looking for willing young clerks when he spotted two uniformed policemen entering the office of store security. Out of curiosity he sauntered across the floor and caught one of the three night security officers coming out.

“What’s happening?” Pete Zoony asked the plainclothes security officer who knew all the vice cops from the rest room watch.

“Shoplifter. No big thing. Second time we caught her. Gonna put her in the slammer this time to see if it discourages her. Make her steal from Sears instead of us.”

Pete Zoony nodded and decided to go leer at the girl who balled the North Hollywood policeman but had been coyly resisting Zoony’s persistent advances.

Then one of the uniformed policemen came out of the security office and headed straight for the rest room. Pete Zoony, who generally worked daywatch vice, was not known by many bluesuits on the nightwatch. He made a regrettable error in judgment by deciding to have a little fun and entertain the two new kids on the block. He followed the uniformed cop into the rest room.

“Roscoe Rules!” whispered Sam and Baxter simultaneously when the door to the rest room opened.

Then it was a matter of trying to suppress giggles as Roscoe, a helmet, relieved himself at the urinal and afterward stepped to the sink singing some Stevie Wonder.

He took off his cap carefully and teased his mousy hair, making it fall over the ears as much as possible without offending the lieutenant. Then he squeezed a watery pimple on his nose, straightened his tie and smiled with satisfaction while Baxter and Sam leaned on each other, smothering back the laughter. Their fellow choirboy stepped from the mirror, put the hat squarely on his head, held both fists against his hips and stood spraddle legged and broad shouldered, admiring the whole picture. And Sam Niles almost fell off the platfrom in muffled hysterics just as the rest room door flew open again and Pete Zoony came swishing in.

“Sam! Sam!” Baxter whispered, pulling his friend back to the screen as Pete minced past Roscoe Rules singing, “I Got a Crush on You, Sweetie Pie!”

He stepped to the urinal, peeked coyly over his shoulder at the unbelieving policeman and pretended to be taking a leak while he batted his eyelashes at the choirboy.

“Well I’ll be a motherfucker!” said the outraged Roscoe Rules.

“Oh, I hope you’re not!” Pete Zoony squealed as he zipped up his pants and swished across the room to the washbasin where he put a few drops of water on his fingers and patted his cheeks.

He dabbed daintily with a paper towel, singing, “Couldja coo, couldja care…”

“You got a lot a guts, you know that?” Roscoe Rules said as Pete Zoony peeked at him from time to time and giggled.

“Why whatever do you mean, Officer?” Pete lisped.

“You… you, you come in here and act like… like I’m a civilian!”

“Well I don’t care what you are. You’re just cute as can be, is all you are,” said Pete Zoony, primping in the mirror as the choirboys behind the wall desperately tried to see through their tears.

“Goddamn you! How dare you talk to a police officer like this! Gimme some identification!” Roscoe sputtered.

“Gosh, don’t get so upset,” Pete Zoony lisped. “I mean just because a person pays you a compliment.”

“You break out some ID right now,” Roscoe demanded and Pete Zoony was preparing to pull his police badge from his back pocket when he erred, not knowing Roscoe Rules.

“Now, I’m gonna show you my driver’s license, see, but I want you to promise you won’t ask for my phone number cause I don’t know you that well yet.”

“You fag! You insolent fucking sissy!” screamed Roscoe Rules.

“Well!” said Pete Zoony huffily, so carried away with his role that he underestimated the light in Roscoe’s close set eyes. “You wouldn’t make fun of a person because he’s crippled, wouldja? Huh?”

“You bastard!” Roscoe shrieked.

Pete Zoony pursed his lips and smacked a little kiss and said, “Oh, you’re so cute when you’re all mad! You blue meanie!”

Then Roscoe Rules reared back and slapped Pete Zoony across the moustache with the heel of his hand, catching him flush on the jaw and the vice cop was skidding across the slippery floor and banging against the metal trash can.

The two choirboys in the trap yelled, “No, Roscoe!” and jumped down from the platform and out the door, running down the corridor to the rest room.

They entered in time to intercept Pete Zoony who was growling and cursing and sliding on the floor attempting to get his feet under him as the bewildered Roscoe Rules looked up at the walls and ceiling, certain that he had heard ghostly voices shout his name.

“Niles! Slate!” Roscoe exclaimed as his fellow choirboys jumped on Pete Zoony to keep something terrible from happening which could get them all in trouble.

“You cocksucker!” shouted the outraged Pete Zoony, desperate to play catchup with Roscoe.

“Me, cocksucker? Me, cocksucker? You got a lotta guts, ya fag!” said Roscoe Rules.

It took a full five minutes to get Pete Zoony calmed down and Roscoe filled in on the prank that backfired. Finally the glassy eyed Pete Zoony smiled tightly and said, “No hard feelings, Rules,” and swung a roundhouse left which caught Roscoe on the right cheekbone and dumped him into a toilet stall, wherein both choirboys switched their attack to the cursing, raging Roscoe Rules who might have shot Pete Zoony to death were it not for Sam Niles keeping a wristlock on his gun hand.

The toilet stakeout was called off for the night then and there. Sam Niles would not release his wristlock on Roscoe until Baxter Slate had taken Pete Zoony out of the rest room to the parking lot in the rear. They found a pay phone and had Pete’s partner pick them all up to rendezvous with Scuz and Harold Bloomguard.

When Spermwhale Whalen heard about the incident later that night at choir practice, he shook his head and said, “Someone’s always punchin Roscoe Rules. Kid, you oughtta wear a catcher’s mask.”

• • •

“Greetings and hallucinations!” cried frightened Harold Bloomguard to the first street whore he spotted after cruising the streets for twenty minutes.

“Say what?” the tawny black girl said as she stopped on the sidewalk and cautiously approached the Charger which was parked under the streetlight in the red zone at Pico and Western.

She wore mint green pants, skin tight to the ankles where they flared out over patent green clogs. Her stomach was bare and she wore a green halter top which tied at the neck. Harold was sure he had seen her several times before but Scuz had assured him that the girls have a difficult time recognizing uniform cops when they see them in plainclothes. To whores, as to most people, the patrol cop is a badge and blue suit and little more.

“Hello hello!” said Harold Bloomguard, turning off his headlights and bravado as the girl approached the car, walking with the traffic so that customers could pull to the curb without making an illegal U-turn that might draw a police car.

“Well, hi there, baby,” smiled the whore when she saw how “good” Harold looked.

But just then a set of headlights behind them flashed a high beam and a black and white pulled up beside him, preparing to write a parking ticket, thus doing its bit to combat prostitution. It was Spencer Van Moot and Father Willie.

“Okay, sir,” Spencer said as the radio car double parked. “Let’s…”

And then Spencer found himself looking into the tense, bespectacled face of his fellow choirboy Harold Bloomguard, who he knew was on temporary vice loan.

“Yes, Officer?” Harold Bloomguard winked.

Father Willie, thinking faster than his partner, said loud enough for the whore to hear, “Partner! We just got a hot call!” and he dropped the car into low.

“You’re in a red zone, buster!” yelled Spencer Van Moot as Father Willie pulled out. “Don’t be here when I come back!”

“Now don’t be scared, honey,” said the girl as the radio car sped away “They jist love to scare off our tricks. Got nothin else to do, jist hassle people.”

“And they’re never around when you need them,” Harold added.

“Tha’s right.”

Then the girl looked up as a white Lincoln pulled in behind Harold and a big suntanned man waved to the girl. She looked him over but opened Harold’s door and got inside.

“Motherfucker looks like a cop to me,” she said. “They borry these big shiny cars and try to fool us sometimes.”

“Cop?” cried Harold Bloomguard, trying his hand at acting now that the attractive, sweet smelling whore was sitting next to him, looking much less exotic and threatening.

“Now, you jist calm down, honey Ain’t no cause to git scared.”

“Cop?” repeated Harold Bloomguard, speaking in dry monosyllables, trying to remember the good opening lines Scuz had fed him as he drove east on Pico.

The whore pretended to be fixing her lipstick in the rearview mirror but was actually watching for a vice car.

“Now jist calm right down. Ain’t no worry about cops. Those two told you bout the parkin ticket? I got a friend pays them off. Fact he pays off all the black and whites and all the vice in this district for me. So see, we kin jist have us a nice party and don’t have to worry bout nothin.”

“Party?” Harold wanted a more explicit word for a better case. His hands were sweating and slipping on the steering wheel.

“Party. You know? Love. Half and half. French. Whatever you wants.”

“Oh yeah, I want!” Harold turned south on Oxford, hoping she would hurry and mention the money, too nervous to appreciate her billowy breasts as she dabbed at her lipstick and making sure there was no vice car slipping behind them with lights out.

“You got twenny-five dollars, sweetie?”

“Sure.”

“That’s the tariff. And it’s cheap for all you get.”

Then Harold turned west on Fourteenth Street and the girl said to turn left on Western but Harold turned right.

“Hey!” she said suspiciously but Harold pressed the accelerator to the floor, sped north for half a block, screeched across the southbound traffic lanes and skidded into the market parking lot while the whore yelled, “Gud-damn!” and bounced around in the car. Then Harold saw Scuz in the vice car sitting in the dark at the rear of the market. Only then did he feel heady and elated.

He pulled off his glasses, the triumphant unmasking of an undercover man, and said, “You’re under arrest!”

“Oh shit,” she replied.

Then for effect Harold put the glasses back on, skidded to a stop beside Scuz, pulled them off again and said, “You’re under arrest, young lady!”

“You already said that. I got ears, stupid,” said the whore.

Scuz shuffled around the car and opened the door for the whore as Harold decided he should show her his badge.

“Don’t bother, Harold. She knows who you are-now. I’ll baby-sit Bonnie here. We’re old pals. You go out and see you can get another one.”

The girl stalked gloomily to the back door of the vice car and said, “Sergeant, where’d you get this little devil? He don’t look nothin like a cop.”

“See? See, Harold?” grinned Scuz, puffing happily on his cigar, delighted with the professional accolade.

“You’re so young,” Harold said to the girl as she slid across the seat of Scuz’s car. Harold noticed her smooth brown legs for the first time and her pretty mouth and shapely natural hairdo.

“She’s even younger than you, kid,” Scuz said, closing the door and getting in the front seat where he could blow cigar smoke out the window and not suffocate the whore. “See you can get us another one that easy, Harold.”

“You’re so young and pretty,” said the saddened choirboy. “How’d you get started in this business?”

“Oh no!” the whore cried, slumping back in the seat, appealing to Scuz.

“Harold, just go on back out, see you can get another one,” Scuz said. “Let Bonnie here rest her sore feet.”

Harold Bloomguard emptied his gas tank driving and made himself dizzy circling around and around the block looking for another whore so Sergeant Dominic Scuzzi could write a good progress report for that psycho of a captain, while a sullen young whore named Bonnie Benson got sick from the air befouled by Dominic Scuzzi’s ten cent cigar.

While this was happening Sam Niles and Baxter Slate were sitting in a cozy dark cocktail lounge much farther north on Western Avenue where there was obviously little chance for a vice arrest but lots of chances for free drinks which the management gladly supplied Pete Zoony and his fellow vice cops.

Pete sat in the booth with Baxter and Sam and sipped a Scotch on the rocks, using the ice to rub on the bruise which Roscoe Rules had put on his jawbone before he put a much larger one on Roscoe.

Finally Pete said, “Mind if my partner and me disappear for a while? We gotta check out an answering service supposed to be taking call girl action. More than one or two guys’d look suspicious. Be back in an hour. We’ll raise Scuz on the radio and tell him where you are, so either he’ll pick you up or we will. Meantime, drink all you want and get a beef dip, they’re pretty good. It’s all on the house.”

“Sure, Pete,” Baxter said.

After the vice cop left, Sam said, “Wonder how big her tits are? Wish she had a couple friends.”

Baxter Slate downed his bourbon and ordered a double. “Just as well drink like a vice cop,” he grinned as they sat on tufted seats and felt fortunate to be out of the toilet. “Guess you might say we had a fruitless night.”

“That sounds like something Harold would say,” Sam yawned, starting to look bored. “Just like everything else. It’ll start to be a drag.”

“What?”

“Vice work. Jesus, what a way to make a living.”

“Did you feel embarrassed, like we were peeping toms or something?”

“Christ, yes. You see enough shit on the streets without going to rest rooms to look for more.”

And then Baxter, who was getting a glow from the bourbon, said, “There’re worse jobs than vice.”

“What for instance?”

“Juvenile.”

“Oh yeah. I always wondered what made you leave so soon.”

“Just didn’t like it,” Baxter said, draining his glass and signaling to the waitress.

She looked even more bored than Sam Niles as she padded across the carpet in a silly tight costume which was supposed to push her breasts up and out and make her look like a sexy tavern wench instead of what she was: a blowsy divorcée with three young children who were running wild because she worked nights and wasn’t supervising them.

“Don’t think I’d like Juvenile either,” Sam Niles said, ordering a double Scotch. “Bad enough working with adults without taking crap from bubblegummers.”

“You handle some dangerous little criminals over and over again and you can’t get them off the streets because of their tender age. Despite the fact that they’re more predatory and lack an adult’s inhibitions. But I could live with that. It was the other things that bothered me. The children as victims.”

“Can’t let it bother you,” Sam Niles said as he drained his glass. “Must water their drinks here. Oh well, the price is right.” And he was ready to signal for another round.

“You know, you expect certain dreadful cases,” Baxter continued, “like the child molester who loved to see little girls tied up and screaming. Or the four year old I saw on my first day in court when her mother’s boyfriend was brought in and she started crying and a policewoman said to me, ‘He stuck it in one day and gave her gonorrhea.’”

Sam Niles wished a couple of unattached girls would come in and end Baxter’s stories.

“What I wasn’t prepared for were the other things.” Baxter’s speech was beginning to slur as he stared at the glass, for the first time failing to smile and thank the waitress who put a fresh one in front of him. “You should see what the generic term ‘unfit home’ can mean. The broken toilet so full of human excrement that it’s slopping over the top. And a kitten running through the crap and then up onto the table and across the dirty dishes. Brown footprints on the dishes which won’t even be washed.”

“Can’t we change the subject? I’ve literally smelled enough shit for one night.”

“And a boy who’s a man at nine years of age. And wants to bathe his filthy little brothers and sisters and tries to, except that he accidentally scalds the infant to death.”

“Baxter…”

“And a simple thing like a bike theft,” Baxter Slate continued, looking Sam Niles in the eyes now. “Do you know how sad a bike theft can be when there’s only one broken down bike in a family of eight children?”

“That kind of thing doesn’t faze me, Baxter, you know that?” Sam Niles said angrily and his speech was thick and boozy “I have only two words of advice for guys like you and Harold Bloomguard. Change jobs. If you can’t face the fact that the world is a garbage dump, you’ll jump off the City Hall Tower. Christ, when I was a kid we never had any bikes, broken or not. My brother and I made a tether ball out of a bag of rags and I tied it to a street sign. That’s the only toy I remember. Baxter, you can’t save the world.”

“But you see, Sam, I thought I could!” Baxter said, spilling some bourbon on his velvet shirt as he drank excitedly. “I thought it was possible to save the world-the world of the one specific child I was dealing with. Sometimes I would work as hard as I could to get a kid out of his environment and into a foster home. And he would run back to his degradation. Once I handled a case of child abuse at a county licensed foster home where I’d placed a little child. She’d been beaten up by the foster mother and I had the job of arresting the foster mother and taking the child out of the very home I had placed her in.”

“So what?”

“The child had marks on her stomach. Strange cuts, almost healed. She was only three years old, Sam, and she wouldn’t talk to me. She got hysterical around policewomen too. Finally I was the one to find out what the marks were. They were letters: L.D.B., which turned out to be the initials of an old boyfriend of the foster mother. She put them on the little girl with a paring knife. I’d placed the kid in that foster home to save the world of that one specific child. I was the worst Juvenile officer the department’s ever had!”

“Hey, miss,” yelled Sam and held up two fingers and sighed languorously as the waitress brought another round while Baxter Slate held his empty drink in both hands and stared at rings on the table.

“Listen, Baxter,” Sam said. “We have crime in direct proportion to freedom. Lots of freedom, lots of crime. All I know for sure is something I’ve believed all my life. And it was verified for me in Vietnam and certified in the four and a half years I’ve been a cop. It’s that people are never more pathetic than when they’re asking themselves that absurd, ridiculous, laughable question, ‘Who am I?’”

And then it was Sam’s turn to spill several drops as he tipped his glass. He paused, wiped off his moustache, pressed the nosepiece of his glasses and said, “If most people ever let themselves find the answer to that question they’d go into the toilet and slash their wrists. Because they’re nothing! The sooner you understand that, the sooner you can do police work without torturing yourself.”

“I wouldn’t be telling you this, Sam, if it weren’t for this,” Baxter Slate apologized, holding up the glass. “Sometimes I try to tell my partner but Spermwhale’s only interested in paying off his ex-wives.” And Baxter tried a broad Baxter Slate smile which did not work because there was fear in his bourbon-clouded green eyes. “After I left Juvenile I started experiencing strange flashes in the middle of the night. I could almost see glimpses of what it is not to be, to have life go on without you. It happens in a half sleep. It’s happened a lot since I killed that man. Have you ever experienced it?”

And then Sam Niles touched his moustache and said, “No.” And Baxter Slate, who always believed his friends, did not know that Sam Niles was lying. “I wish some broads’d come in. I wish the drinks weren’t so watered down,” Sam Niles said.

“Sam, I know you’re right about people being nothing. All my life, all my religious training in Dominican schools was built on an explicit belief in evil. But there is none. Man hasn’t the dignity for evil. And if there’s no evil there’s very likely no goodness! There’re only accidents!”

“Please, Baxter,” Sam Niles said, “I’m just a cop. I don’t… I’m not…”

“Sorry, Sam,” said Baxter Slate, draining the bourbon and turning green watery eyes to his friend. “I don’t always go on like this. I’m not usually such a silly pseudointellectual horse’s ass. Ask Spermwhale.”

And then he managed a real Baxter Slate grin, candid, disarming, and tried to make light of it. “It’s that I know you just got your degree in political science. I love to talk to someone who won’t get mad at me for using an adverb or two.”

Then Sam Niles managed an embarrassed chuckle because it was over. “Okay, Baxter, it is nice not having to move your lips when you read so as not to offend a Philistine like Roscoe Rules.”

Sam Niles was starting to like his friend Baxter Slate so much he never wanted to see him again.

And while Baxter and Sam were getting drunk and being horses’ asses, and while Baxter secretly thought of the ordinary guy he killed and the tortured child he let die, Harold Bloomguard finally found another whore.

The Cadillac Eldorado had not been there on his last pass, Harold was sure of it. Then he saw the white girl saunter out of the bar and head for the car. Harold tried to get over to the number two lane but the car behind him began hitting his headlight dimmer switch and blowing his horn. Harold drove two blocks east of Western Avenue, turned his Dodge around and came back. The white girl was gone. But in her place was a black girl who opened the door of the silver Eldorado, had an afterthought, turned and went into the bar.

Harold started to head for the vice car to ask Scuz if he could go in the bar. But he thought about it a moment and knew what the answer would be. Then he thought about getting a two-banger on his first night as a vice cop and he parked the car on Western Avenue, put his gun, handcuffs and badge under the seat, locked the car, wiped his moist hands on his handkerchief and entered.

The tavern was not a white man’s cocktail lounge. It poured an extraordinary amount of hard liquor and the bartender didn’t like to be troubled with fancy drinks. There was a jukebox playing Tina Turner, the volume turned five decibels higher than Harold could bear. There was a pool table on the side crowded with men playing nine ball at a dollar a ball and filling the room with blue tobacco smoke. There was a back room where nightly crap games attracted dozens of customers and occasional vice cops. As with most black men’s crap games there was always a set of crooked dice in use and sometimes two sets, with one crooked gambler using shaved cubes against another.

But there was a vitality in the bar and Harold was excited as well as frightened when he saw that aside from the white girl, he was the only paddy in the place. Then he got a good look at the brassy blonde in the open red satin coat who sat on a bar stool holding an eight month pregnancy against the vinyl-covered cushioned railing.

It was ambition and curiosity, but mostly youth, which drove Harold Bloomguard to one of the empty stools on the near side of the bar as several black men at the pool table stopped the game and slipped any money from the table into their pockets until they were satisfied that Harold was a trick and not a cop.

The black girl who had almost gotten into the Eldorado was sitting next to the white girl and she, like the bartender, looked Harold over carefully and became satisfied that he could not possibly be The Man.

Then she smiled and said, “Why don’t you sit over here?” And she moved to the right and gave Harold the bar stool between the two of them.

“Why not? It’s invenereal to me where I sit,” said Harold, using a Bloomguardism they didn’t seem to understand or appreciate.

“What’ll you have, chief?” asked the bartender, a graying black man with a bass voice that could drown out Tina Turner any old day.

“A Bombay martini straight up, very dry, with a twist, please.”

The bartender just leaned on the bar and stared at Harold while the two girls edged closer. Then the bartender said, “I been workin hard all night, chief. Can’t you make it easy on me?”

“Give him what the fuck he wants,” said the black girl, who was taller than Harold and outweighed him but who was solidly proportioned, buxom and attractive.

“Look, I ain’t trickin with him,” the bartender said. “Besides, I ain’t got no more Bombay.”

“J amp;B and water?” offered Harold Bloomguard, rightly assuming from the number of black bandits who asked for J amp;B Scotch before sticking up a liquor store that the bartender would have no problem filling that order.

“Comin up,” the bartender said. “You buyin for the ladies?”

“Indeed,” said Harold Bloomguard, and he immediately thought of Roscoe Rules who disapproved of Harold’s saying “indeed” because it made him sound like a fag.

After the three of them had their drink, the blonde with the eight month pregnancy put her hand on Harold’s thigh and said, “Got a match?”

Harold picked up the match pack from the bar and found that he couldn’t get it working. He was crestfallen when the blonde took the pack from his hand and lit her own cigarette. The choirboy feared that his nerves might give him away, but it had the opposite effect in that most inexperienced tricks were every bit as frightened as Harold Bloomguard.

“My name’s Sabrina,” said the big black girl who had a sensual glistening mouth.

“My name’s Tammy” the pregnant blonde said. She had terrible teeth she was going to have pulled as soon as she dropped her frog and adopted it out and could hustle enough money to see a dentist, which she was having trouble doing what with her grotesque shape.

“My name’s Harold Leekly I’m a certified public accountant.”

“Nobody asked you what you did,” said Sabrina. “Why’d you say that? Maybe you’re a cop.”

“A cop!” cried Harold. “Ha ha! A cop!”

The bartender put the three drinks in front of them and said, “If this sucker’s a cop, I’m a astronaut.”

Then the blonde put her hand on Harold’s thigh again and moved it up his leg. The leg began to tremble as Harold realized that Sabrina had her hand around his waist and both girls were smiling and making incoherent small talk and patting him down caressingly, expertly just to reassure themselves. Then Sabrina put her hand on his right leg, the quiet one. It began to shake worse than the other.

“You shakin like a paint mixer,” Sabrina said. “But we get-tin outta here in a minute. We goin somewheres to quiet you down.”

“Where we going?” Harold asked, thinking that if he swallowed the Scotch it might help relax him.

“Maybe to our pad, baby,” Tammy smiled, showing her decaying fangs.

“That’ll be eight dollars, chief,” the bartender said as the girls gathered up their cigarettes and purses.

“For three little drinks?” Harold said. The bartender straightened up and glared down at him and Harold added, “Oh yes indeed, very good drinks, too, I must say!”

Harold tipped the bartender fifty cents which drew a sneer and a grumble and he followed the girls outside, remembering that Scuz had warned him that under no circumstance was he to go into a room with a whore because of the danger involved. He was hoping the girls would have given the offer before now and since they hadn’t he decided to push it.

“By the way what am I gonna get when we get where we’re going?”

“Don’t be in such a hurry, you cute little blue eyed jitterbug,” Sabrina smiled as she fished the Cadillac keys out of a red leather handbag.

“Am I going with you?” Harold asked, thinking frantically for an excuse not to.

Sabrina answered, “No, you follow us in your car.”

“Okay,” Harold said, much relieved. “But I wanna know what’s gonna happen. How do I know I’m gonna like it?”

“Oh, you gonna like it,” Sabrina said, and she stepped over to him, there on the corner of Pico and Western, under the streetlights in full view of passing cars, and gave his genitals a squeeze.

“Woooo,” said Harold Bloomguard, pulling back in embarrassment. “Woooo.”

“I was just gonna tell you what you’re getting,” Sabrina said, as Harold stood off a few steps and blushed and swung his arms around, wondering if anyone had seen that.

He knew that he had just been “honked,” as the vice cops called it, in a public place and that Scuz had said something about honking being a misdemeanor. But he couldn’t remember if it applied only to fruit cases or whores as well. And he couldn’t remember if the honking precluded the need for a money offer.

And as he stood there considering the next move, Tammy bounced over to him, grabbed his arm and said, “Let’s go, cutie,” and she gave him two more toots with a thumb and forefinger.

“Wooooo,” said Harold Bloomguard, honked again.

“Gud-damn, man!” Sabrina said testily. “We ain’t got time to stand around here all night and listen to you woo woo. Follow us down the street there where it’s dark. We gonna talk about money.”

“Money,” said Harold Bloomguard, grateful to Sabrina for solving his problem.

He ran across Pico to his car, made a U-turn in a gas station and pulled back onto Pico facing east, following the slow moving Cadillac which turned right onto Oxford where it was residential. And very dark. The Cadillac pulled into the first available parking space on the right. Harold pushed his borrowed glasses up on his nose like his partner Sam Niles and found a parking space fifty feet farther south.

Then Harold carefully reached down, found his two inch off-duty gun, which he had decided to carry working undercover, and his badge and handcuffs. He shoved the gun and cuffs inside his belt in the back, put the badge in his back pocket and affected a jauntiness he did not feel as he quickly walked back to the Cadillac, to the whores waiting in the darkness.

Harold stepped up on the sidewalk, leaned in the passenger window, looked at Tammy’s pathetic teeth and said, “Well, girls, let’s bring this pimple to a head. Get down to business. How…”

“Git in,” said Sabrina.

“Well before…”

“Get in,” Tammy said, pushing the Cadillac’s door open.

“Shouldn’t we …”

“We gonna talk business after you inside,” Sabrina said. Then she purred, “We want you here between us where we can feel your hot little body so maybe we kin git you to give us another dollar or two for our work.”

“Slide over me, honey,” Tammy said as Sabrina pushed the electric switches which took the white leather seats back and down.

As he was gingerly lifting himself across Tammy’s enormous belly, he worried that she might feel the gun, but she didn’t. And he thought how sad it was that a pregnant girl should be doing this kind of work, and while he was feeling sad she reached up between his legs and squeezed, making him say, “Woo woo,” and sit down on her hand.

“Ouch!” she cried, pulling her hand out. “You fucking near broke my wrist!”

“Sorry,” said Harold.

Then he began to wonder if he was doing the right thing by getting in the car. But he knew he was very close to bringing in a two-banger and he just couldn’t stop now.

“You got fifty dollars, sweetie?” Sabrina asked abruptly.

“Sure.”

“Well let’s see it.”

“Later, after we get where we’re going.”

“Ain’t goin nowhere. We gonna do it right here.”

“We are?”

Then it occurred to Harold that he had been honked and he had been solicited for money, but no one had specifically mentioned a sex act and he wondered if the arrest would be legal without it and just then Tammy honked him again and he grabbed her hand.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Harold said, desperately trying to remember the phrases Scuz had told him which would not be construed as entrapment.

“Why you just sittin there blowin bubbles off your tongue?” Sabrina asked.

The air was close in the darkness of the Cadillac with both big women pressing him. Then Harold remembered a word: “I’m looking for excitement!” he cried.

“Well, no shit!” said Tammy, and she honked him again but harder this time because she was getting sick and tired of dicking around with the little creep.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Sabrina demanded and she leaned back against the driver’s door and pulled her dress midway up her thigh.

“I just wanna know what I’m gonna get,” Harold said, and now his voice was hoarse and parched and he feared he was going to lose it all.

“We tryin to show you!” said Sabrina. “You wanna do it or talk about it, man?”

“Talk about what?” asked Harold Bloomguard who was oh so close to his arrest.

“Ballin! Frenchin! What the fuck you think?” shouted Sabrina.

“Sucky fucky five bucks, oh thank you,” whispered Harold Bloomguard who felt he had his case at last.

“What?”

“Sabrina!” said Tammy as she adroitly unzipped Harold’s pants and shoved her hand inside. “He’s hung like a hummingbird. He don’t wanna ball. He’s some kinda freak! Probably wants to beat on us with his shoe or something!”

“No, I don’t,” said Harold Bloomguard, pulling her hand from his pants and trying to rezip, but getting caught on the shirttail of his white dress shirt which protruded six inches from his fly.

“What’s goin on here?” Sabrina demanded.

“Yeah!” said Tammy.

“Nothing,” said Harold Bloomguard, struggling with the zipper.

“Feel my pussy if you ain’t a freak!” Sabrina ordered and took Harold’s hand and dropped it on her thigh.

“Let’s get in my car and go to some romantic place,” said Harold Bloomguard as his cold wet hand slipped off Sabrina’s warm dry flesh.

“Shit,” said Sabrina.

“Crapsake,” said Tammy.

“You a freak,” said Sabrina.

“I’m not!” said Harold.

“You a freak!” Sabrina shouted.

“Like hell!” Harold Bloomguard answered indignantly.

Then he pulled free from Sabrina, reached over Tammy’s belly, opened her door and crawled over her lap until he was on the street.

“You a freak!” screamed Sabrina, thinking they had lost the fifty dollar trick.

“I not a freak!” shouted Harold Bloomguard, reaching in his back pocket and exultantly pulling his shield. “I a cop!”

And while the two whores stared dumbstruck, Harold reached inside the car and grabbed both purses and the car keys from the ignition.

“Hey!” Sabrina gathered her wits too late to stop him. “Now I’ve got your keys and I’ve got your purses so you’re not going anywhere but with me!” said Harold Bloomguard, ripping off the horned rimmed glasses to show them the real man beneath the disguise. “Just don’t try anything funny!”

“Well I’ll be gud-damned,” said Sabrina to Tammy who was about to cry. “PO-lice Department got to be mighty hard up these days to be hirin little cock-a-roaches like this!”

“Out of the car!” demanded the little cock-a-roach, reaching back for his handcuffs, remembering that Scuz had said that in vice cases you always handcuff two suspects and sometimes one if there’s any doubt at all.

“We goin with you, man, but you ain’t gonna be puttin those things on no pregnant lady, hear me?” Sabrina said as the three were standing on the sidewalk beside the Cadillac.

Harold Bloomguard thought it over, decided not to force the issue now that they were obeying so nicely and put the handcuffs back in his belt, saying, “All right, but behave yourselves.”

As they walked slowly to Harold’s car on the dark sidewalk, Harold Bloomguard started to feel a little sad once again.

“You’re both so young,” said Harold. “Bet you’re not over twenty-five, are you?”

When the miserable whores failed to reply Harold said, “Ever been arrested before?”

“Bout thirty times,” said Sabrina.

“Bout forty times,” said Tammy.

“Oh,” said Harold. And he tried to cheer them up by saying something funny “I have no altourniquet but to do my job.” Then he added, “I’m sorry about you and your baby and all.”

“Why?” snapped Tammy, dabbing at her tears. “You didn’t put it in my belly. You couldn’t even get it up when I was playing with your dick, for chrissake.”

“Well, it’s not that I find either of you unattractive,” Harold explained, “it’s just that I’m a vice off…”

And then Sabrina started to groan and the groan quickly turned into a wail and then to a deathless shriek.

“RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAPE!”

Sabrina grabbed Tammy’s hand and then Tammy started to do it:

“RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAPE!”

“Don’t do that,” said Harold Bloomguard but they didn’t listen to him. Harold looked around at the darkness and the houses and said, “You’re resisting arrest, you know.”

“RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAPE!” screamed the two whores in unison, and then, Sabrina leading, they started to run north on Oxford, hand in hand. Lights began coming on. Doors opened. A woman put her head out a window.

“I’m a policeman,” said Harold Bloomguard. She closed the window.

Then Harold slung his purses over his arm and began jogging after the two whores, finding it easy to keep up at first, not particularly frightened now, just confused and embarrassed, wondering what the next move should be, wishing he had never presumed to catch a two-banger.

A strange thing happened. The two whores began to outdistance him as they turned west on Fourteenth Street and crossed over to the north sidewalk still screaming for help. Now Harold’s heart began working a bit hard and he sprinted to catch up. Tammy turned and saw him closing in and dashed for the porch of the nearest house on the north side of the street where the front yards were small and the old houses were bunched together.

“Help! Help!” Tammy screamed as she banged on the door with one hand and held her belly with the other.

It was a sixty-five year old white man who came to the door, pulling his pants up and struggling with a bathrobe.

“What’s going on here?” he said, switching on the light and squinting through the darkness.

“Help us!” Sabrina pleaded, standing on the porch next to Tammy, catching her breath.

Harold blocked the steps, holding his badge in his hand. “I’m a police officer!” he panted. “Go to your phone and call for help! Give your address!”

“Don’t believe him!” Tammy said, leaning against the porch railing. “Please help me. I’m gonna have a baby!”

“I order you to call the police right now!” said Harold Bloomguard.

“But you say you’re the police,” the old man said, scratching his gray jaw stubble and looking from one to the other.

“I order you!” said Harold Bloomguard.

“Now just a minute, young fella, this’s my house!” the old man said.

“Fred, you come in here and leave those lunatics be!” said a shrill voice inside.

Then Sabrina grabbed Tammy’s hand and both girls pushed past Harold and began running back down the sidewalk the way they had come.

“I order you to get me some help, Fred!” Harold Bloomguard yelled as he turned and pursued the girls.

“Maybe you’re a cop and maybe not. I wish you’d all stay for a while so I can find out what’s happening!” the disappointed old man answered, but Harold Bloomguard had to concentrate on the prostitutes who had now passed a house where five young black men had been playing cards in the kitchen and were now attracted to the commotion out front.

The young men laughed as the girls ran past and the tallest one blocked the sidewalk and drained a bottle of beer and then tapped the bottle on his hand. Harold Bloomguard stopped.

“What for you chasin those little girls, man?” the youth demanded.

Harold Bloomguard puffed and panted and stood his ground. He reached for his badge and said, “I’m a police officer. Let me pass.”

Then the others laughed and the tall one said, “That ain’t no real badge. How I know who you be? I think you better jam off, baby. Leave those little girls alone.”

Suddenly Harold Bloomguard was gripped by strangely exhilarating rage. “Okay, asshole, I’m not a cop,” he said, pulling his gun and pointing it at the mouth of the young black man. “I’m a rapist! What the hell you gonna do about it?”

“No, I think maybe you are the PO-lice,” the youth grinned, dropping the bottle to the sidewalk and stepping back for Harold to pass, as all the young men hooted and whistled while the chase continued.

The girls were plodding down Pico Boulevard now, trying to reach Western Avenue. Harold had to run hard to catch them, his purses still over the left arm, the gun in his right hand, the shirttail still protruding from his fly.

Sabrina ran into the street making a desperate lunge toward a car which had slowed on Pico at the sight of the two frantic women. She jerked the door open and was pleading with the man behind the wheel when Harold came running up behind, grabbed her hair and jerked her flat on her back as he fell, taking her with him.

Two women passing in a green Oldsmobile began to scream hysterically and the car screeched to a stop as Harold fumbled with his gun and purses.

“I’m a policeman!” Harold yelled to them, thinking that all a vice cop ever did was tell people he’s a policeman.

As Sabrina limped to her feet, Tammy teetered on the curb, puffing, blowing, staring vacantly into space. Then Sabrina was running toward Tammy and pulling her coat sleeve, and miraculously the pregnant girl began to run.

Harold still pursued, catching misty glimpses of people driving and walking by shaggv blurs. And he heard disconnected sounds as he wiped the sweat from his eyes and caught the two whores at the busy intersection.

Sabrina spun around and swung desperately at Harold but missed, and her hand slammed into the wooden wall of a vacant newsstand. She cried out and turned, but Harold grabbed her hair again and his neck was burning as Sabrina broke loose and fell into the street, crawling twenty feet into the center of the intersection where she sprawled on her stomach, her dress pulled up over her plump pantyless behind.

Tammy then limped frantically into the street, arms dangling, coat half torn from her back, belly bulging dangerously. She skidded while yet fifteen feet from her partner and toppled over slowly to her knees. Then she leaned forward, almost in slow motion, until her distended belly touched the asphalt. Harold knelt on the pavement and panted and stared for many seconds as she tottered on the enormous mound. Then she rolled over slowly and deliberately and floundered there belly up like a harpooned walrus. Tammy blocked two lanes of traffic and Sabrina one and a half.

The air was still razor sharp when Harold Bloomguard, taking large gulps of it, dragged Sabrina bumping and crying out of the traffic lane across the asphalt until her foot lay next to the hand of Tammy who was all but unconscious, lying there, panting softly, eyes closed, pink tongue protruding.

Harold finally had the chance to put his gun back in his waistband, and he handcuffed Sabrina’s ankle to Tammy’s wrist with no resistance whatever. Then he sat down in the traffic lane, in the glow of many headlights, as motorists yelled and blew horns and made every guess but the right one as to what the hell was going on.

Finally he heard the siren and instinctively behaved like a policeman trying to clear the intersection. He waved his purses at the motorists who became frightened and ran from their cars, leaving them abandoned and making things worse.

They came from all directions, painting the streets with rubber: radio cars, motorcycles, plainclothes units. Five separate hotshot calls had gone out. Neighbors complained of a man with a gun, a woman screaming, a purse snatch in progress, a man assaulting women and a mental case exposing himself. A code four, that suspects were in custody, was broadcast and still they came. Their emergency lights bathing Pico Boulevard in a crimson glow, lining up on both sides of the street, making the traffic jam more impossible.

Sergeant Yanov specifically put out an order for units to resume patrol. And yet they came. For policemen are by nature and training inquisitive and obtrusive. Twenty-one police units ultimately responded and a huge crowd gathered after Harold, Sabrina and Tammy had been whisked away. Officers and citizens asked many questions of each other which none could answer.

The prostitutes were treated at the emergency hospital for contusions and abrasions prior to being booked and Harold Bloomguard was surprised to discover a seven inch cut that began at his left earlobe, crossed the jawbone and ended on the neck. It was not a deep cut and only required a disinfectant.

“Must’ve gotten it from Sabrina’s fingernails,” Harold told Scuz when the girls were booked and they were back at the station composing a complicated arrest report.

“Harold, I thought you was smart,” Scuz said. “I told you these’re fucking misdemeanors. They ain’t worth nothing, these vice cases. Who told you to go out and get hurt?”

“Sorry, Scuz, I just… I just wanted to win the game.”

“I oughtta kick your ass for gettin hurt.”

“I didn’t get hurt, just this scratch on my neck.”

“You coulda got killed! For what? A game? I ask you don’t get hurt. That asking too much?”

“Sorry, Scuz.”

“There’s lots a vice sergeants in this town that’d pat you on the ass and write you an attaboy for bringing down the whores. But I ain’t one a them. Risking your life for a shitty vice pinch! I thought you was smart!”

Then Sergeant Scuzzi paced around the vice office stepping on his shoestrings, and Harold sat quietly with the other two new kids on the block. Sam Niles and Baxter Slate were falling down drunk after having sat in the bar for three hours waiting for Scuz and Harold Bloomguard who were busy with other things. The two choirboys had swilled free drinks all evening.

“You kicking me off the squad?” Harold asked sheepishly.

“I oughtta kick you all off. Christ, you almost get killed and these other two twenty-six year old rummies get swacked sucking up bourbon.”

“I was drinking Scotch, Scuz,” said Sam Niles who held his head in both hands.

“Shut up, Niles!” Scuz said, relighting his cigar which was so badly chewed there were soppy flakes of tobacco stuck all over his lips and chin.

“Okay you three just watch it from now on. Bloomguard, you need a keeper. I’m gonna supervise you personal. Make sure you stay alive the weeks you’re here. Slate, you and Niles better keep your boozing under control, hear me?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Baxter Slate said. He was sitting woodenly trying to convince Sergeant Scuzzi that he was cold sober.

“Fucking kids,” Scuz said, shaking his head at the three repentant choirboys. “And another thing, Slate and Niles, I’d like to know how Pete Zoony got that knot on his face tonight. He was working fruits with you two a little earlier, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Baxter Slate said.

“Don’t call me sergeant.”

“Yes, Scuz,” said Baxter Slate, who was trying to keep from vomiting.

“Lotta fucking mysteries around here,” said Scuz. “Okay, you three go home and get some sleep. I want you in good shape tomorrow night. Gonna try to take a big poker game. And I’ll be along to make sure you don’t get killed!”

The three choirboys left then. Baxter vomited in the parking lot and felt much better. Sam said his headache was going away. Harold was buoyant from getting three whores his first night on vice. They wanted to go to choir practice but thought they better heed Scuz’s advice. Then they decided to stop at the park just to see if any of the choirboys were still there.

“Drive by Pico and Western on our way,” Harold said as Baxter aimed his Volkswagen in an easterly direction, not as sober as he thought he was.

“What for?”

“Wanna show you guys how far we ran,” Harold said.

“Who gives a shit?” Sam Niles said, already sorry he had decided to come along to choir practice.

“Come on, lemme just show you,” Harold pleaded, and Baxter smiled understandingly and said, “Sure, Harold.”

When they got to the intersection, Harold insisted they circle the block and told the interested Baxter Slate and the disinterested Sam Niles how the chase began. He showed them Fred’s house and the house where he drew down on the young black man.

“You know it’s sad working vice,” Harold said. “Those girls were young. All the girls I busted tonight were young.”

“Their job demands the hope and vigor of youth,” Baxter Slate said. He was beginning to feel better, reviving in the night air.

“Maybe so,” Harold said. “Maybe so.”

“Just like our job,” Baxter added.

“If we’re going to choir practice, let’s go,” Sam Niles said, sitting in the back seat of the Volkswagen with his long legs turned sideways, not enjoying his cigarette because his body wanted more oxygen than he was giving it.

“Right here is where she swung at me and scratched me,” Harold said as Baxter stopped, ready to make a right turn on the red.

Then Harold said, “Wait a minute, Baxter. Pull over, will you?”

“Now what, Harold?” Sam Niles sighed, taking off his steel rims and wiping his eyes.

But Harold had hopped out of the Volkswagen as soon as Baxter parked and he stooped, picking up something from the gutter.

“What the hell’re you doing, Harold?” Sam asked.

“Look!” Harold Bloomguard said, stepping over to the car.

It was a springblade knife: four inches of steel with a sequined handle. A woman’s knife, feminine, well honed. The point had been broken off and Harold felt his heart make light hollow thuds as he walked to the vacant newsstand. He used the broken blade of the knife to dig the tiny triangle of steel out of the wooden wall. It was throat high and deeply imbedded.

“What’re you doing, Harold?” Sam Niles demanded and was surprised when Harold snarled, “Shut up, Sam!”

Then the ugly chip of steel popped out and fell into Harold’s palm and he looked at it for a moment. Harold Bloomguard propped the knife against the curb and disposed of it cop style with a sharp blade-snapping heel kick.

Baxter Slate figured it out first. “Any chance of getting a lift off the knife, Harold?”

“Rough fancy surface on the handle,” Harold said. “No chance for prints. No chance.”

Sam Niles started to ask Harold if he still felt sorry for the whores, but when Harold turned toward Baxter, Sam saw how tired and bitter Harold Bloomguard’s mouth looked.

There were still a few dogged choirboys in the park when they arrived at 4:00 A.M., but Carolina Moon had gone home and Ora Lee Tingle had not been able to make it. Harold thought the night air was strangely chilled for the end of July. They adjourned when Francis Tanaguchi said that tonight’s choir practice was a bummer.