The Choirboys

EIGHT

7-A-1: SPERMWHALE WHALEN

AND BAXTER SLATE

At first, Spermwhale Whalen was uncommonly quiet at roll-call on a smoggy June afternoon, just two months before the choir practice killing. Spermwhale was not over the death of a son who claimed to despise him as much as he loved the son. Actually, they hardly knew each other.

Baxter Slate, his partner, was never a boisterous young man so it was not unusual that he said very little while half the nightwatch hooted and jeered at Roscoe Rules and Lieutenant Finque.

“Damn it, Lieutenant, I resent the investigators showing my picture all the time to rape victims,” Roscoe Rules complained. “I didn’t know they were doing it till last month.”

“Apparently they just noticed that your picture mixes well with white sex suspects,” Lieutenant Finque replied, getting a migraine as he always did at rollcall these days.

“Yeah, well I shoulda got suspicious when that pussy kiddy cop caught me in civvies and asked to let her snap a Polaroid a me to test out the new camera.”

“No harm, Roscoe,” Sergeant Yanov grinned.

“No? That cunt’s been using my picture in a mug shot showup every fucking time a paddy rapes somebody around here!”

“She can’t help it you look like such a deviate,” Spermwhale said, as his partner Baxter Slate grinned. “I think she’ll stop, Roscoe, by the time two or three victims pick you out of the lineup.”

“They’d probably have the right guy,” said Harold Bloomguard.

“Naw, he can’t even get a blue veiner, let alone a diamond cutter,” said Calvin Potts. “We ever get a limp dick bandit around here he’ll be a prime suspect.”

“Very funny Potts, very fucking funny,” Roscoe Rules said murderously as he unconsciously pulled on his limp dick.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do, Rules,” the lieutenant said. “Now onto the next subject of our supervisors’ meeting. That is: excessive force complaints. The captain says he had an awful lot of paper work to do because an officer on the morning watch broke a suspect’s arm with a wristlock. Just be careful in the future. Remember, a wristlock is very hard to put on if a man resists, so don’t get carried away.”

“Question, Lieutenant,” Baxter Slate said.

“Yes?”

“If a man didn’t resist, why would you ever put it on in the first place?”

Sergeant Yanov saved his superior officer by taking control of the rollcall and saying, “How about my reading the crimes. Here’s a sex story Might perk up your evening.”

And as Sergeant Yanov rescued his lieutenant from further embarrassing faux pas, Lieutenant Finque smoldered. Yanov related so easily with men, was so obviously well liked, that Finque knew he had to be a rotten supervisor. This belief was bolstered in that Yanov had been working for him three months and had never yet been capable of catching a policeman with his hat off or smoking in public view. Lieutenant Finque made a note to mention to Captain Drobeck that Yanov, at thirty-four just a few months younger than Lieutenant Finque, was probably too young and inexperienced to be an effective field sergeant and should be encouraged to go into the detective bureau.

Captain Drobeck would be the first to agree with such a proposal because he had hated Yanov ever since the sergeant openly disagreed with the captain at a meeting of all the Wilshire Division supervisors. Yanov refuted an “administrative suggestion” from the captain and argued that he would willingly fool the chief of police and lie to the mayor, and to his own wife if he still had one, but never to his men. Because he never asked his chief, mayor or wife to fight for him or save his ass.

Captain Drobeck wrote on Sergeant Yanov’s rating report: “Is yet too young and immature to grasp the fundamentals of supervision.”

To get even with the troops Lieutenant Finque interrupted Sergeant Yanov’s reading of the noteworthy crimes. Lieutenant Finque decided to inform them of what he had just heard prior to rollcall: that a Superior Court jury had acquitted a man charged with the murder of Los Angeles police officer.

“Acquitted?” thundered Spermwhale Whalen when the lieutenant announced it, but even Spermwhale’s bellow was lost in the deafening clamor which went up in that room.

The accused was thought to be a narcotic dealer. He went to a hotel with an undercover officer who posed as a buyer, and a third man, a police informant. The officer was prepared to make a large buy but as it turned out the accused had no drugs. He did have a small caliber pistol with which he shot and killed the officer who returned fire ineffectively before his death. The accused stole the suitcase full of money and ran out the door but was arrested immediately by other officers hiding outside.

The police called the shooting a straight ripoff operation in which the plan was to steal the money. The informant testified that the defendant grabbed the suitcase and fired without warning. The defendant’s testimony was that the slain officer unaccountably drew his gun and the defendant, thinking he was to be ripped off, fired first to protect himself. The investigating officers scoffed. They said it was a “dead bang” case. A cinch. The evidence was overwhelming. There was an eyewitness. The defendant’s story was desperate and ludicrous. He was acquitted.

The judge, upon hearing the verdict, proclaimed that he was shocked. But he was not nearly as shocked as the twenty-eight men in Lieutenant Finque’s rollcall who would never become accustomed to shocking jury verdicts. It took five minutes to quiet them down and get several questions answered. But they weren’t questions. They were statements of indignation and disbelief. Outcries. Then threats. Then a violent obscene damning of the jury system.

Baxter Slate, perhaps the most articulate choirboy, said grimly that this bulwark of democracy was actually a crap game in which twelve telephone operators, mailmen, public utilities employees, pensioners and middle aged housewives, with no knowledge of the law and less of the sociopath, make irrevocable decisions based upon their exposure to movies like Twelve Angry Men and television shows like Perry Mason.

Lieutenant Finque let them rail until he was sure their stomachs were as sour as his always was because of them. He beamed contentedly. He wasn’t even afraid of them at the moment.

Their outrage was so complete that they quickly talked themselves out. One moment shrill trembling voices. Questions unanswered and unanswerable. Then silence. Defeat. Depression. And smoldering fury.

Lieutenant Finque sent them out to do police work with one further blandishment: “You men take with you the captain’s last warning from the supervisors’ meeting. Any wetfoot hotdogs who like to put a shoe in the carburetor better stand by. The next preventable traffic accident is going to mean the commander comes down on the captain, who’s going to come down hard on me and I’m going to have to come down hard on you!”

Finally Spermwhale Whalen spoke. He said, “I know shit rolls downhill. But why am I always livin in the valley?”

Herbert “Spermwhale” Whalen despised the new station Wilshire Division had moved to in early 1974. Daily he would drive by the dilapidated, inadequate old building on Pico Boulevard which, by God, looked like a police station. He longed for the old days.

Spermwhale, at 260 pounds with the pig eyes of a whale, was aptly named. He was of Irish Catholic stock, divorced three times, considering himself thus excommunicated. “It’s just too bad I ain’t rich enough to’ve got a fancy annulment approved by the Pope like all these rich cunts and cocksuckers you read about. Then I coulda stayed in the church.”

It was a refrain often heard at MacArthur Park choir practice when Spermwhale was almost in the tank, a fifth of bourbon or Scotch in the huge red hand. “Now I gotta go to hell cause I’m excommunicated!”

And if Father Willie Wright was drunk enough and suffering from his frequent attacks of overwhelming guilt for having just dismounted Ora Lee Tingle or Carolina Moon, claiming his plump little wife would only ball him dispassionately twice a month, he would say softly, “I’ll be with you, Spermwhale. I’m afraid I’ll be with you!”

Baxter Slate was a good partner for Spermwhale Whalen because he didn’t talk too much and give Spermwhale a headache. Also he had almost five years on the job, having been sworn in on his twenty-second birthday. Spermwhale, a nineteen year veteran, considered anyone with less time a fuzz nutted rookie and couldn’t stand to work with rookie partners.

Also Baxter didn’t complain when Spermwhale would occasionally pick up a streetwalking prostitute whom Spermwhale knew from his old days on the vice squad, saying, “It’s time for a little skull.” Were he to be caught it would mean their jobs, and Spermwhale Whalen was just months away from a pension. It was a calculated risk and Spermwhale sweated it out each time because the LAPD brass definitely did not approve of uniformed officers in black and whites getting a little skull.

It was surprising that Spermwhale would take such a risk. He often said that a sergeant who caught him doing something for which he could be fired would never get back to the station alive, because he, Spermwhale Whalen, would kill any cock-sucker who tried to keep him from making his twenty years and getting that irretrievable pension. Anyone Spermwhale didn’t like was either a “cunt,” a “gelding,” a “eunuch,” or a “cocksucker,” and that included almost all civilians, certainly all police brass and station supervisors (except Sergeant Nick Yanov) and all employees of the Civil Service Department who had designed nitpicking promotional exams which had frustrated him all these years and kept him from advancing past the basic policeman rank.

It was especially galling in that Spermwhale Whalen was a major in the Air Force Reserve and often ran into LAPD lieutenants and captains, also military reservists, who, during summer military exercises, had to salute him.

Spermwhale was proof positive that polish was not necessary to achieve staff rank in the United States Air Force Reserve, just as Commander Moss was proof positive that common sense was not needed to achieve staff rank in the Los Angeles Police Department.

But Spermwhale Whalen was just possibly one of the coolest most competent transport pilots in the 452nd Wing. He had flown in World War II and later in Korea until he left the Air Force and joined the police department. He was the only Los Angeles police officer in history to engage in one of his country’s wars while still an active member of the department. His remarkable feat was accomplished by flying C-124 Globemasters on three and four day missions from March Air Force Base to Danang in 1966 and 1967, almost being shot down twice by Communist surface to air missiles. Spermwhale was, for this reason, a minor legend in the department. In those years it had been fun for the Wilshire policemen to play straight man for Spermwhale among police officers from other stations, saying things like:

“Oh, Marvin, where’d you go on your days off?”

“Disneyland with my sister’s kids, how about you?”

“Fishing with Simon and his girlfriend up to Big Bear Lake, and how about you, Spermwhale?”

“Danang. Wasn’t much happenin. Few rocket attacks is all.”

Spermwhale seldom took two days off a week in those years. Like many policemen, he preferred to work nine and ten days straight to string his days off together. But his were for combat missions for which he was paid a bonus by the government of the United States to give to his three wives, each of whom had borne him a child before the divorce. When Spermwhale was off flying and the nightwatch sat bored in the assembly room, someone would always say when a low-flying aircraft roared over making an approach to LA International:

“Well, sounds like Spermwhale’s late for rollcall again.”

Spermwhale bore a Z-shaped scar which began in the fur of one black tufted eyebrow, crossed the flattened bridge of his nose, swooped under his right eye and came back onto the nose showing white in the swatch of red veins. Once at choir practice Carolina Moon asked him how he had gotten that scar.

“Landin in the rain with half my tail shot away.”

“Where, Spermy? Where’d it happen?”

An extraordinary thing happened: Spermwhale could not remember. Not for almost a full minute. The alcohol had temporarily debilitated his brain but it was more than that. He had flown so many missions for his government in which he had been asked to kill or cause the deaths of Oriental people that they had started to run together: Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese. He truly couldn’t answer. Not immediately.

“Oh yeah,” he said finally. “Korea. Jesus Christ! Korea. Jesus Christ! I couldn’t remember which war!”

After the Vietnam War ended, Spermwhale still flew but of course lost a good deal of his military pay and had a difficult time paying off the three wives and keeping enough to drink and take out a broad when he got lucky. It was for economic reasons more than anything else that he became a faithful choirboy and put up with the younger policemen who gave him such a headache. At choir practice there was always free booze supplied by Roscoe Rules and Spencer Van Moot. And there was sometimes Carolina Moon whom Spermwhale fell in love with at every single choir practice. The fat girl and the fat policeman would go off hand in hand for a stagger around the duck pond, sucking at a bottle of Scotch and cooing like doves. The other choirboys called them the campus couple.

Both Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate were in a foul mood after rollcall. What had them generally pissed off was that they were both just now feeling the loss of pay from a four days’ suspension.

The suspension had resulted from Lieutenant Elliott “Hardass” Grimsley’s deciding to celebrate his fortieth birthday by going out in the field for the evening and showing the station commander, Captain Drobeck, that he could be as big a prick as Captain Drobeck any old day and that even though he had only been a lieutenant eight months, his nine years as a field sergeant had given him plenty of experience at being a prick.

Captain Drobeck on the other hand had recently tried to demonstrate he was not a prick but a prince, during a formal inspection conducted by Deputy Chief Lynch himself. Every patrol officer in Wilshire Station wore lintless blue and polished black leather for that inspection. They were formed into three sweating platoons.

Captain Drobeck, with his plumy white mane freshly done, was resplendent in his blues, wearing all the campaign ribbons he earned in Patton’s Third Army. The Wilshire policemen knew that he had only been a clerk typist in that army and not a tank commander as he hinted and they often whispered that Captain Drobeck never retreated but backspaced lots of times.

Deputy Chief Lynch always showed up for ceremonies after a twenty minute wait, just as he answered the phone after a three minute wait. Captain Drobeck fussed nervously with his trouser creases and hoped his shoes were spit shined well enough by his adjutant, Sergeant Sneed, who learned such things while a trombone player in the U.S. Army band. The captain waved to Ardella Grimsley the wife of Lieutenant Elliott “Hardass” Grimsley. She stood on the sidewalk by the parking lot where a dozen other spectators waited with cameras.

During one of the anxious moments, Lieutenant Grimsley nodded and winked at his wife of twenty years who wore a hat, gloves, and incredibly enough, a corsage for the occasion. Ardella Grimsley beamed and blew her husband a sweeping kiss which was answered by a horrendous fart in the rear ranks and a voice saying, “And here’s a kiss for you!”

“WHO DID THAT?” Lieutenant Grimsley screamed, almost literally scaring the crap out of the already nervous Captain Drobeck.

“What the hell’s going on, Grimsley?” demanded the captain.

“Somebody farted!”

“Is that so terrible?”

“At my wife!”

“I don’t understand you, Grimsley.”

Just then, Sergeant Sneed, called Suckass Sneed by the men, came running forward from his place at the rear of the first platoon.

“I think it was a colored voice, sir,” he whispered breathlessly to the captain. “I mean a black voice.”

“If I may” said Officer Baxter Slate, who stood in the front rank, “a voice may have timbre, resonance, even pitch but it is singularly without color.” He said it with a wide easy grin at Captain Drobeck which Lieutenant Grimsley knew was phony but which was so well done it was impossible to accuse him of insubordination.

Captain Drobeck, sure of the affection of his men, smiled benevolently and said, “Please, gentlemen, let’s calm ourselves. This is perfectly silly.”

“It’s not silly, Captain. Somebody insulted my wife,” Lieutenant Grimsley answered.

“Please, Lieutenant, please!” Captain Drobeck whispered. “The deputy chief is going to be here any minute and you’re acting like a child. My god, I can’t believe this.”

“It was personal, sir. It was vicious!”

“All right, all right, will you settle for an apology? It was undoubtedly some young policeman’s idea of a joke. Christ, most of these men here are closer to twenty than thirty They’re kids! I’ll have the boy apologize and we can forget it.” Captain Drobeck turned to the platoon of men and showed his toothy paternal grin and said, “Okay, fellas. Let’s fess up. Who farted?”

And he laughed uproariously with the men as he waited for the culprit to reply so he could show the men how silly Hardass Grimsley was and how magnanimously he could forgive the insult to Ardella Grimsley who was one of those garrulous bitches Captain Drobeck couldn’t stand in the first place.

But a funny thing happened: nobody fessed up.

“Come on now, boys,” Captain Drobeck laughed, but the laughter was a little strained. “Just cop out whoever you are. Tell Lieutenant Grimsley it was an accident and it’s all forgotten.”

And the laughter continued but was not joined in this time by Captain Drobeck who smiled patiently and waited for the guilty party to show Lieutenant Grimsley how he, Captain Drobeck, could relate with his men.

Still, nobody fessed up.

“I just can’t understand this,” Captain Drobeck said. “I’ve given you every opportunity to show some maturity here and I think Lieutenant Grimsley deserves it. Now, by God, I’d like the young man to just apologize to the lieutenant and it’ll all be forgotten. But we can’t wait all day and I expect it to be done immediately.”

But nobody copped out.

Captain Drobeck was suddenly not laughing nor was he smiling. He was fidgeting with the crease in his uniform pants and nodding angrily. “All right, that’s the way it’s going to be, huh? By god, you wanna act like kids I can treat you like kids. You want the field sergeant to start coming down on you, huh? Well that can be arranged, I assure you. Now this is your last chance. If the man that farted isn’t man enough to admit it I want the man next to him to do it.”

And the man next to him obediently did it. His fart was louder than the first.

“ATTEN-HUT!” screamed Captain Drobeck and the platoon snapped to attention. The captain began pacing the rear ranks like a lion, muttering viciously as he looked each man in the eye and tried to apply some detective techniques he had learned from reading books on investigation when he studied for the captain’s exam. He looked for nervous twitches, telltale blinking. The trouble was he was so nervous waiting for Deputy Chief Lynch and now so angry himself that his own eyes were winking like semaphores.

After he paced the entire platoon he strode angrily to the front and whispered to Suckass Sneed, “You find out who did it, hear me?”

“Yes sir. The first or the second fart?”

“I want that man! ‘The first one!”

“It was a colored voice, I mean a black voice, I’m sure of it,” said Sneed. “That narrows it down to six.”

Just then Deputy Chief Lynch’s car arrived. The incident was set aside temporarily. The inspection was conducted and it was a great success. Captain Drobeck thanked the chief for his gracious compliments and assured him the credit was due to the loyalty of the men.

Thirty minutes after the inspection, Captain Drobeck was in a cubicle in the restroom relieving his rumbling bowels from the tension of the day. He had the morning paper there and was grunting happily and smoking his pipe. Suddenly the door to the restroom burst open and someone released a terrible, vengeful fart. Before the footsteps ran back out a voice said, “Take that, you jive turkey!”

Captain Drobeck never solved the mystery. But one thing was certain: it was a colored voice.

On one of his weekly evenings out on the streets, Lieutenant Grimsley caught eight officers with their hats off, one smoking in public and three others drinking coffee which proved to have been gratuitously received. Just before calling it a night, he added to his score by bagging Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate staked out on a stop sign at 11:00 P.M. on a residential street where a car didn’t pass more often than once every half hour. Both officers were slumped in their seats, heads resting against the windows. But like any veteran policemen, they could rely on years of experience to trigger signals in deep slumber when 7-A-1 was mentioned among the ceaseless garbled almost unintelligible radio messages.

Legally speaking, Lieutenant Hardass Grimsley was a strict constructionist. He could not prove his suspicions that Spermwhale and Baxter were asleep, so their suspension papers said:

Officers failed to remain alert in that officers assumed a position of repose in a parked policed vehicle with eyelids pressed together, breathing heavily and regularly Four days.

In addition, through diligent police work, Lieutenant Grimsley found a bag of avocados in the trunk of the black and white, which he traced to Francis Tanaguchi, who, it turned out, accepted them gratuitously from a Japanese produce market wherein the owner was proud of Francis’ being a Japanese policeman, not knowing that Francis was Mexican at heart and would use the avocados in making guacamole which he would ladle into his tacos. Spermwhale and Baxter were given an additional punishment of a divisional admonishment which read:

I hereby admonish you in that you accepted some avocados from another officer who received them from a private party who was not, in fact, morally correct in giving the avocados without recompense. Moreover, the other officer was guilty of moral turpitude for accepting the free avocados. The acceptance of gratuities is against Department regulations and you were aware of this regulation at the time you imprudently accepted the avocados from the officer who was also aware when he imprudently accepted the avocados from the man who should have been more prudent.

Francis Tanaguchi was not given an admonishment or any other penalty because the community relations officer, Lieutenant Gay, was trying to make public relations inroads with the Oriental community by putting Officer Tanaguchi up as a model policeman. He persuaded Captain Drobeck not to let Lieutenant Grimsley reprimand Francis officially. Lieutenant Grimsley acceded to the decision since it came from the station captain but he was frustrated because there wasn’t something he could get on the old Japanese who gave Francis the avocados. He asked the vice squad to keep an eye on the market in case the old man should sell beer to minors. And he certainly put Lieutenant Gay and Francis on his list.

But if Lieutenant Gay Francis Tanaguchi and the old Japanese were on Lieutenant Grimsley’s list, Lieutenant Grimsley was certainly on Spermwhale Whalen’s list.

“His dance card’s all filled up,” Spermwhale vowed at choir practice when the whole night had been spent on plotting revenge.

“I get the first waltz,” said Francis Tanaguchi, who sat in the dark on a blanket under a tree.

The choirboys began various subtle attacks on Lieutenant Grimsley which ultimately ended up in his transfer from Wilshire Station because according to the station captain he was getting too chummy with certain officers.

The officers he was apparently getting so chummy with were two of the MacArthur Park choirboys, namely Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate, who when they were finished with him could actually walk into Lieutenant Grimsley’s office and muss up his lint covered, thinning hair and say things like, “How about a day off tomorrow, Hardass?” When no one else under the rank of lieutenant ever dared to address him even by his first name, Elliott.

This remarkable familiarity was accomplished by some groundwork supplied by Francis Tanaguchi which included shimming the door of the lieutenant’s private car and putting three MacArthur ducks in the back seat.

It was entertaining for the choirboys to stake out the police parking lot after end-of-watch and see Lieutenant Grimsley trudge through the dark, sleepy after a hard night of paper work, and get into his car only to come flying out five seconds later and fall on his ass from the duck excrement on his shoes. It was said that his wife nagged him for months about the green slime she would find stubbornly clinging to the creases of the leather upholstery.

The choirboys also put a particularly fierce black gander in Lieutenant Grimsley’s locker at the station which resulted in an investigation by officers of Internal Affairs Division which lasted a week.

Harold Bloomguard, the protector of ducks and all animals, in each case volunteered to take the hissing, squawking birds and get rid of them after the duck shit hit the fan. This should have made him a logical suspect since he mysteriously showed up after each duck attack but Lieutenant Grimsley was too outraged to put two and two together. Besides, it was extremely hard to add two and two when your personal belongings were dripping and foul smelling and an enraged loathsome creature had been banging on your head with its bill.

There were minor attacks wherein the siren on the Lieutenant’s police car was fixed so that it wailed and could not be shut off when he started the engine. And his baton, which he kept in the door holder, was removed, carefully sawed in half and replaced.

But the coup which utterly demolished Lieutenant Grimsley and made him a slave to Spermwhale Whalen and precipitated his transfer occurred when Spermwhale bribed a black whore named Fanny Forbes, who was tall and curvy and slender despite her years, to entertain Lieutenant Grimsley Spermwhale Whalen told her in which restaurant the lieutenant ate on Thursday nights when he could break away from his duties which consisted of signing routine reports and trying to catch policemen loafing in the station when they should be handling their calls.

It took Fanny Forbes, who posed as a tourist from Philadelphia, exactly twenty-five minutes to talk Lieutenant Grimsley into driving her and her bogus suitcase, containing the dirty laundry of Spermwhale Whalen, to a motel on La Brea. He parked his black and white on a side street and insisted on carrying her bag up the back stairs while she registered alone.

Eight minutes after she registered, and while Lieutenant Grimsley, naked except for his black police socks, was hotly kissing the well worn source of her income and whispering endearments like, “Oh baby, you don’t seem like a Negro. You look like a Samoan!” Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate crept up the same back stairway and opened the door which the whore had left unlocked.

The two choirboys waited a few minutes more, their ears to the door, and heard Lieutenant Grimsley panting so loudly they were afraid they’d miss the prearranged signal from Fanny Forbes.

“She’s really got him sucking wind.”

“Yeah!” Spermwhale whispered, his hat in hand, ear pressed to the door, waiting, waiting.

And then they heard it, the signal: “Oh honey!” cried the whore. “You got balls like a elephant and a whang like a ox!”

Just as Spermwhale burst through the door Lieutenant Grimsley was in the throes of blissful agony. When he withdrew and jumped from the bed his face was like a dead man’s.

“Okay, who called the pol… Lieutenant Grimsley!” cried Spermwhale Whalen.

“What’re you men doing here?” cried Lieutenant Grimsley.

“We got a call a woman was being raped in this room! We had no idea!” cried Baxter Slate.

“Musta been some cop hating neighbor saw you come in with the young lady!” cried Spermwhale Whalen.

“How humiliatin!” cried the whore.

“Let’s keep our voices down,” whispered Lieutenant Grimsley still motionless and pale.

“Sir, there’s some dew on the lily,” offered Spermwhale Whalen.

“Oh,” said Lieutenant Grimsley, coming to his senses and wiping his whang with his jockey shorts while Fanny Forbes lay nude on the bed and winked at Spermwhale Whalen who was possibly enjoying the sweetest moment of his life.

“Well, we better be goin… Hardass,” Spermwhale grinned, as Lieutenant Grimsley toppled clumsily over on the bed trying to get his pants on two legs at a time.

“Yes, well, meet me at Pop’s coffee shop, will you, fellas? I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee and talk over a few things before we go back in.”

“Sure … Hardass,” Spermwhale grinned, playfully mussing up Lieutenant Grimsley’s hair.

Lieutenant Grimsley was actually glad when, three weeks later, Captain Drobeck suggested that he was getting too chummy with certain officers and perhaps should think about a transfer. Lieutenant Grimsley was glad because he was sick and tired of Spermwhale Whalen sitting on his desk and winking and mussing up his hair every time he came in to have a report approved.

Fanny Forbes complaind when Spermwhale only slipped her a ten dollar bill, but when he reminded her that it was ten bucks more than she had gotten for similar activity with himself, she shrugged and accepted the stipend.

But on the night they caught the Regretful Rapist, both Spermwhale and Baxter were still mightily pissed off from receiving the four days’ suspension for sleeping with the avocados. Lieutenant Grimsley had by then been transferred to Internal Affairs Division where he could catch lots of errant policemen.

The arrest of the Regretful Rapist was possibly the best pinch Baxter Slate had ever made. The rapist had sexually attacked more than thirty women at knifepoint on the streets of Los Angeles and got his name from apologizing profusely after each act and sometimes giving the women cab fare when the attack was finished. The rapist had been fortunate in that not one of his victims had violently resisted and it was unknown how far he would have gone with his eight inch dagger if he had met a real fighter. Nevertheless, he was rightly considered an extremely dangerous man, not only to the female citizens he preyed upon, but to any potential arresting officer.

The night they caught the rapist had been a fairly uneventful night. The first call of the evening was to warn a resident of a twenty-three room house in Hancock Park that he should not go outside to swat flies in the afternoon, particularly when he had to climb a ladder to get them, and especially when his next door neighbor’s daughter, a nineteen year old blonde, just happened to be washing her Mercedes 450 SL and couldn’t help seeing that he was stark naked beneath his bathrobe, which kept flapping open.

The second call of the evening had been to take a burglary report at an air conditioning manufacturer’s whose company had been closed for three days. They heard the burglary victim’s opinion which Spermwhale had heard perhaps a thousand times in his police career:

“It must’ve been kids who did it,” said the victim, since burglary victims of both residential and commercial burglaries hate to consider the prospect of a grown man viciously and dangerously violating the sanctity of their premises by his presence. If there is nothing taken, or if property of any value whatsoever is left behind, the victims invariably allay their fear of prowling deadly men with the refrain, “It must’ve been kids.”

Spermwhale just nodded and said, “Yeah, kids,” and noted that the burglar went through the file cabinet by opening the drawers bottom to top so that he would not have to push the drawers shut thus taking a chance of leaving a fingerprint. That he had carefully ransacked all file boxes, drawers and logical places where money is hidden. That he had pocketed only easy to carry items. That he had stolen fifteen rolls of postage stamps which could be sold for eighty cents on the dollar and had left, closing the self-latching door behind him so that any doorshaking watchman would find nothing amiss during the evening rounds.

“All the good stuff he didn’t even touch,” the vice president of the company said. “The typewriter, the calculator. Anyone but kids would’ve taken something besides stamps, wouldn’t he, Officer?”

“Oh sure. Had to’ve been kids,” Spermwhale agreed as the vice president managed a relieved smile. Spermwhale wrote “Stamp and money burglar” in the MO box of his report.

Spermwhale had lapsed into a very bad mood when they took the burglary report to the station that night. He had just been turned down by Lieutenant Finque on his request to hang a picture of his old friend Knuckles Garrity in the coffee room. Garrity had been a Central beat cop for fifteen years and finished out his twenty-five year career at Wilshire Station where he and Spermwhale were radio car partners. Just before Garrity was to have retired on a service pension he became involved in his third divorce and was found shot to death in his car in the station parking lot.

The car was locked from the inside with the keys in the ignition and his service revolver was on the seat beside him. Yet, despite all logic, Spermwhale refused to believe that his partner had not been murdered. He had to be given three special days off to get his thoughts together. Finally he accepted Knuckles Garrity’s obvious suicide and became the partner of Baxter Slate and eventually a MacArthur Park choirboy.

Spermwhale Whalen had been broken in on a Central beat by Knuckles Garrity who told his rookie partners that a policeman only needed three things to succeed: common sense, a sense of humor and compassion. That none of these could be taught in a college classroom and that most men could succeed without one of the three, but a policeman never could. Spermwhale shivered for an instant, wondering how Knuckles had lost his sense of humor.

Spermwhale obtained the last picture ever taken of Knuckles in his police uniform and had it enlarged and framed with a brass plate on the bottom of the picture which said simply:

Thomas “Knuckles” Garrity

E.O.W. 4-29-74

It was on a lovely April afternoon with arrows of sunlight darting through the smog that Knuckles Garrity went End-of-Watch forever in the old police station parking lot on Pico Boulevard.

But the lieutenant said the picture would have to come down from the coffee room wall and that Spermwhale Whalen should take it home because Knuckles Garrity was not killed on duty like the other dead officers in the pictures which hung in the station.

“He was!” Spermwhale growled to the lieutenant who handed him the picture and turned away from the burning little eyes of the fat policeman.

“Listen, Whalen,” Lieutenant Finque explained. “It’s the captain’s decision. Garrity shot himself, for God’s sake.”

Spermwhale Whalen very quietly said, “Knuckles Garrity died as a direct result of his police duties. As sure as any cop who was ever blown up in a shootout. Knuckles Garrity was the best fuckin cop we ever had in this station and that cunt of a captain should be proud to have his picture on the wall.”

“I’m sorry” the lieutenant said, turning and walking back to his office, leaving Spermwhale with the picture in his enormous red hands.

“I could shoot somebody,” said Spermwhale Whalen when he got back in the radio car after the incident.

Baxter Slate fired up the engine and turned on the lights as darkness settled in.

“Anybody in particular?”

“The captain. The lieutenant maybe. Anybody” Spermwhale said, not knowing that in exactly two hours he would shoot somebody and that it would give him almost as much pleasure as if it had been the captain or the lieutenant.

But before Spermwhale had that pleasure he and Baxter received a call in 7-A-85’s area because Roscoe Rules and Whaddayamean Dean were handling a call in 7-A-33’s area because Spencer Van Moot and Father Willie had received a fateful call which almost made them the only team in LAPD history to get beaten up by a man three feet tall:

“Seven-A-Thirty-three, Seven-A-Thirty-three, see the woman, three-eleven suspect, First and Harvard.”

“Seven-A-Thirty-three, roger on the call,” Father Willie automatically answered and then turned suddenly to Spencer. “She say First and Harvard?”

“Yeah,” Spencer replied absently.

“A wienie wagger at First and Harvard!” said Father Willie.

Spencer was puzzled for a moment and then said, “Oh.”

“Filthy Herman!” they both cried at once and then a noisy string of obscenities from the black and white startled a woman pedestrian waiting for the light to change on Beverly Boulevard.

“Niles and Bloomguard are out fucking off again!” Spencer whined. “Why aren’t they handling the call? It’s their area!”

“Darn it!” Father Willie said. “No, wait a minute, I saw them in the station penciling out an arrest report.”

“Filthy Herman!” Spencer groaned as the black and white came to a stop in some heavy evening traffic near the Wilshire Country Club, which further angered the policeman.

“Just put your mind in neutral with the car, partner,” Father Willie advised. “We aren’t going anywhere in this traffic for a while.”

“Goddamnit!” snapped Spencer, yelling to any motorist within earshot. “If you’re gonna camp here, pitch a fucking tent!”

The reason that Spencer Van Moot was so angry and Father Willie so apprehensive was Filthy Herman. He was a legless wienie wagger who lived in a boarding-house near First and Harvard owned by his daughter Rosie Muldoon who struck it rich by marrying an extremely successful anesthesiologist and now could afford to keep her father, Filthy Herman, in a piece of rental property across town from her.

It was ordinarily a good arrangement. The house was large and Herman often had it filled with other alcoholics who congregated in the Eighth Street bars, a half mile from Herman’s home. Filthy Herman was somewhat of a celebrity on Eighth Street, partly because of his grotesque physical presence. He was a torso in a wheelchair. Both legs had been amputated at the buttocks when he was thirty-seven years old, a powerful ironworker until a steel beam crushed him. He was also a celebrity because, with the monthly allowance from the daughter who visited him once a year on Christmas, Herman would buy drinks for every man who could not afford to buy his own. This meant that Filthy Herman had a group of some thirty to forty admirers and hangers-on among his Eighth Street entourage. What he didn’t spend on drinks for the house he gambled away in gin rummy games or with the many bookies who frequented the area.

About twice a year, for no apparent reason, Filthy Herman would live up to his name and his normal alcoholic binge would end with his standing on two inch stumps on the wooden porch of his home, naked except for a Dodger baseball cap, screaming, “My cock’s dragging the ground, how about yours?” Which indeed it was, what with the absence of legs.

Then the unfortunate radio car officers who got the call would be subjected to a barrage of incredible obscenities, empty bottles, beer cans, spitting, bites on the leg and surprisingly painful punches from the gnarled fists of Filthy Herman, who at fifty was not devoid of the strength acquired while an ironworker.

Any officer who had worked the division long enough had seen the legless torso of Filthy Herman bouncing across the asphalt as he was dragged cursing into the station by two disheveled policemen. Because of his physical impairment he was a pathetic sight when cleaned up and no judge had ever given him more than sixty days in the county jail for battery on a police officer.

The outraged victim of Filthy Herman was standing with her husband on the northwest corner of First and Harvard when the policemen arrived. Spencer sighed, parked on the east side of Harvard, slowly set the brake and turned off the headlights. He grabbed his flashlight and baton and followed Father Willie across the street.

“You call?” Father Willie asked the fortyish mousy woman who held a white toy poodle to her face and deferred to her tight lipped husband, a big man in a loose golf sweater and checkered pants.

“My wife was walking the dog,” the man sputtered. “Just out walking our dog and she passed a house up there on Harvard and this filthy little animal, this creature, exposed himself to her!”

“Where’d it happen?” Father Willie asked, opening his report book and leaning against a car at the curb, his hat tipped back as he wrote.

“Back up the street,” the man said. “The third or fourth house.”

“You see it, sir?” Father Willie asked.

“No, my wife ran home and got me, and I came back here with her and she pointed out the house, but there was nobody on the porch. I was going to kill him.” And the man put his arm around the skinny woman who clutched the toy poodle more tightly lip quivering.

“What’d he do, ma’am?” asked Willie as he filled in the blanks for type of crime and location.

“He exposed himself! I told you!” said the man.

“Have to hear it from the witness,” Spencer said.

“He yelled something horrible to me as I walked by” the woman answered brokenly. “And he showed himself. Oh, he was a horrible creature!”

“What’d he look like?” asked Father Willie, writing a cursory narrative.

“He… he had no legs!” cried the woman. “He was a horrible ugly little creature with, oh, I don’t know, grayish hair and a horribly twisted body. And he had no legs! And he was naked! Except for a blue baseball cap!”

“I see,” said Father Willie and then, unable to resist, “Did you notice anything unusual about him?”

And the woman answered, “Well, he had a tattoo on his chest, a woman or something. His porch light was on and I could see him very well.”

“What’d he say to you when you passed?”

“Oh, God!” the woman said and the poodle yapped when she squeezed it to her face.

“Do we have to?” the man asked. “I’d like to go back and kick that little freak clear off the porch.”

“You could,” shrugged Spencer, “but he’s a wiry little guy. Probably bite you in the knee and give you lock-jaw.”

“He said… he said… God!” the woman sobbed.

“Yeah,” Spencer encouraged her.

“He said, ‘I ain’t got no left knee and no right knee, but look at my wienie!’ Oh, God!”

“Yeah, that’s our man all right,” said Father Willie grimly. “Filthy Herman!”

After taking the complaining party’s name, address and other routine information, the two policemen told them to go home and let the law deal with the little criminal. And they knew they stood a good chance of being punched in the balls or bitten on the thigh if they weren’t careful. In that Filthy Herman was a legless man, not one team of policemen had ever had the good sense to call for assistance when arresting him. It was a matter of pride that two policemen with four legs between them should not have to call brother officers to help with this recurring problem.

“I’d like to punt the little prick sixty yards,” Spencer said nervously as they climbed the steps to the darkened house of Filthy Herman.

“Wish we had a gunnysack to put him in. I hear he bites like a crocodile,” said Father Willie, leading the way with his flashlight beam trained on the doorway.

The officers banged on the door and rang the bell several times until Spencer finally said, “Let’s cut out. We tried. He’s probably in there hiding. Let the dicks get a warrant and go down on Eighth Street during the day and pluck him off the bar at one of those gin mills where he plays the horses.”

“Fine by me,” Father Willie breathed, starting to imagine he heard a ghostly dragging chain above him in the dark old house. He looked up and saw dust falling from the porch roof which was sagging and full of holes and patched in several places with plywood and canvas.

Then they heard canvas tear and shingles fell on their heads as Filthy Herman sprung his surprise which put Spencer in Central Receiving Hospital for observation.

Spencer Van Moot was jolted forward almost out of his shoes, leaving his hat and flashlight behind as he flew crashing through Filthy Herman’s front door while Father Willie stared in shock.

Father Willie slowly and incredulously realized what had happened when Filthy Herman came swinging back out the door, suspended by a heavy chain, and spit as he passed. Then he swung back in toward the doorway screaming, “C’mon and fight, you big sissy!” and spit again.

Detectives who filed felony charges against Filthy Herman for the violent assault against Spencer Van Moot were to piece together the story the next day. The self-confessed attacker said he had become tired of being dragged off to jail every time he got a little bit drunk and flogged his dummy on the porch. Filthy Herman had decided to frustrate the next arrest by chaining himself to an ancient steel and porcelain freestanding bathtub in the second story bathroom of his home. He had acquired a fifty foot piece of chain from a fellow horse player on Eighth Street who worked at a wrecking yard, and with a tempered steel lock supplied by the same friend, had crisscrossed his torso, using the chain like the bandolier of a Mexican bandit. Then he encircled his waist and locked it in the front.

After his crime against the woman with the poodle, Filthy Herman had been in the bathroom on the second floor when he saw the officers arrive. He had planned to fight it out there in the bathroom but suddenly the swashbuckling plan burst forth. He crawled out on the porch roof, dragging his chain, until he was just over the unsuspecting officers at the front door beneath him. And without anticipating the consequences, he yelled, “Geronimo!” and pitched forward through a hole in the porch roof, swinging down and in, striking Spencer Van Moot behind the neck with 150 pounds of beefy torso and propelling the policeman through the front door, splitting it in two and knocking the doorjamb ten feet across the room. Then he was swinging back and forth, screaming obscenities, spitting, snapping and challenging the bewildered Father Willie.

When Father Willie eventually came to his senses with Filthy Herman swaying dizzily in front of his eyes, the choirboy began yelling, “You dirty little bugger!” and swinging the nightstick wildly until he broke it on Filthy Herman’s head.

Then by the time the neighbors, who were sick and tired of the crashing and screaming, called for additional police, Father Willie had Filthy Herman punched silly.

It took an hour and a half to get Filthy Herman dragged back up on the roof by his chain, pulled into the bathroom and covered with a bathrobe until an officer from Central Property could arrive with bolt cutters large enough to handle the heavy links.

Spencer Van Moot was in the hospital for three days with neck and back spasms. Father Willie was on light duty for a week with two broken bones in his right hand. Filthy Herman had one tooth knocked loose, two black eyes and a broken nose.

Both Filthy Herman and his daughter wept in each other’s arms in court three weeks later and Herman was eventually put on probation for one year with the stipulation that he drink no alcoholic beverage. One week after the sentence Filthy Herman got drunk again, masturbated from the step of a fire truck and threw a fire extinguisher at an amazed fireman. Filthy Herman got six months in jail for that one, which proved what all policemen already knew: it’s more risky to beat up firemen because they’re popular.

So, while Spencer was meeting his Waterloo at the hands of Filthy Herman, Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate had to meander south into the ghetto of Wilshire Division, which would probably not be called a ghetto in any other large city in the world, to answer a call that ended up being just another attempt by Clyde Percy to get into Camarillo State Hospital.

Clyde Percy was a seventy year old black man who lived in the vicinity of the Baldwin Hills reservoir. Because in the great flood of 1963 he had plunged into the raging water and rescued a drowning woman who was trapped in her overturned car, Clyde Percy was presented with a commendation by the City of Los Angeles, the first official praise he had ever been given in his entire life. Now he simply couldn’t wander too far from the scene of his triumph and was the object of numerous radio calls. People would find Clyde Percy asleep in their unlocked cars or in the storage sheds of small businesses, and once, in a pièce de résistance, he slept all night on a posture perfect mattress in the window of a department store in the Crenshaw shopping district. The next morning he was discovered by passing shoppers still in the store window, fully clothed, muddy shoes and all. He was snoring peacefully, slobbering out the side of his toothless mouth, dreaming of some woman far far back in his memory, holding onto an erection which only came in sleep. Clyde got ninety days that time.

“Wonder why Spencer Van Moot and Father Willie weren’t assigned the call,” Spermwhale grumbled to Baxter Slate. “I’ll bet they’re off in some fuckin clothin store buyin some Lord Fauntleroy bow tie for Spencer or some tooty fruity boots. Man’s forty years old and he dresses like an interior decorator or somethin.”

The radio call which Spermwhale and Baxter Slate received concerned an open door a tremulous security guard had found while making his rounds at a furniture store on the east side of Crenshaw. The security officer had heard ghostly sounds coming from within the store and though the sun had not yet set, it was dim and shadow filled inside. The guard was seventy-five years old and didn’t really want to be a security guard but if he relied on Social Security to support him and his seventy-three year old wife they’d have to eat dog food five days a week instead of two.

“Go on about your rounds,” Spermwhale told the old man. “We’ll check it out.”

“I’ll be right over there across the street by my car if you need me,” the guard promised. “I’ll be close to my radio in case you need help.”

“Sure,” Spermwhale said, “stay there in case we need you.”

And he patted the guard on the shoulder and pointed him toward his car which was not across the street as he thought but in the parking lot back of the building. The old man lost his car at least once a night.

When they were alone and dusk was deepening, Baxter said, “We’re calling for another car, aren’t we?”

“Nope,” said Spermwhale, “it’s just old Clyde Percy.”

“Who?”

“Clyde the lifeguard. The old dingaling that pulled the broad outta the sewer back in the flood. Ain’t you heard a him? He’s always gettin busted for somethin or other.”

“How do you know it’s him?”

“His MO. He breaks into places right after they close and he eats up whatever’s around and goes to sleep. I know it’s him because a the noises the doorshaker said he made. Like a ghost. They always say that, people who call in.”

“What’s the noise?”

“He cries. Sits in there and cries. He sounds like a mournful moose. I tell you it’s Clyde Percy in there.”

But just in case, Baxter Slate unlocked the Ithaca shotgun from the rack and jacked one in the chamber when they walked single file into the darkened store looking for the mournful moose.

It was a small furniture store which advertised entire living room sets for six hundred dollars. Clyde Percy would have none of the cheap furniture. They found him in the rear on the second floor by the manager’s office sprawled out on a nine hundred dollar tufted Chesterfield, eating a half empty bag of potato chips and a banana, which one of the clerks had left behind. He wore his regular attire, which was two dirty undershirts and three outer shirts with a ragged colorless turtleneck sweater over all, a pair of stout flannel pants over longjohn underwear, run over combat boots and a World War II flier’s hat without the goggles.

“H’lo, Clyde,” Spermwhale said as Baxter lowered the riot gun and ejected the live round from the chamber.

“Aw right, Officer, aw right,” said Clyde Percy, grinning happily and standing at attention, his purple lips smeared with banana, his skin blue-black in the shadows. “Y’all caught me fair an square. Don’t need no handcuffs. I’m gonna come peaceable. Course if you wanna use handcuffs it’s okay too.”

“Ain’t seen you around for a while, Clyde,” Spermwhale said as they walked the old man down the stairs, each policeman holding an elbow because he reeked of wine and staggered on the landing.

“Got locked up last November. Jist in time for Thanksgivin. Ain’t missed a Thanksgivin at Central Jail in twenny-eight years.”

“You’ve been in jail since November?” Baxter asked as he navigated down the steep stairs gingerly, holding Clyde and the shotgun and now needing a flashlight in the gloom.

“No suh,” Clyde Percy said. “This time a wunnuful thing happened to ol Clyde. I was sent to Camarilla State Hospital. The public defender say ol Clyde’s crazy. An first I din’t wanna go cause I likes your jail. I likes the sheriff’s jail even better, no offense to you officers. He tell me, Clyde, we gonna get you sent to this crazy hospital and you gonna like it even better’n jail. So I say okay, and off I go up to Camarilla, and know what? They gives me a job up there teachin.”

“Teaching?” Baxter said and stumbled with Clyde at the bottom of the stairs, dropping his riot gun and flashlight, kicking the light under a counter in the dark.

While the two policemen got down on their knees to look for the last flashlight, Clyde Percy picked up the riot gun helpfully and was holding it cradled in his arms like a baby when Sergeant Nick Yanov came through the front door.

“Holy shit!” yelled Nick Yanov, drawing, crouching, throwing his flashlight beam on Clyde Percy who had lifted the gun to his shoulder upside down and started eating potato chips over the prone bodies of the two policemen.

“Drop the fucking gun or I’ll blow you away!” Nick Yanov screamed.

The next few minutes involved several panic stricken shouts after which Spermwhale sat the sergeant down on a display couch, gave him a cigarette and convinced him they were alive, that Baxter had unloaded the magazine when he ejected the live round, that Clyde Percy was a harmless old acquaintance of Spermwhale Whalen’s and that Sergeant Yanov should remain on the couch until his legs steadied.

“Sure glad it was you, Sarge,” Spermwhale Whalen said to the chesty, bristle jawed sergeant. “If it was one a them other cunt supervisors he’d a probably cut old Clyde in half and we’d a ended up with another suspension for lettin Clyde get wasted.”

“Why do you do things like this to me,” Nick Yanov said, drawing heavily on the cigarette as some color returned to his face.

Then the two policemen and Clyde Percy helped the weak kneed Sergeant Yanov out of the store and to his car, Clyde Percy apologizing profusely for scaring him to death.

“Where’s the nearest gas station?” Sergeant Yanov asked as he got back in his black and white and threw his hat and light on the seat, running both hands through his heavy black hair.

“Why, you gotta take a crap?” Spermwhale grinned.

“No, I just did! I gotta clean up!” said Nick Yanov as he fired up the radio car and roared away.

“Good fuckin sergeant,” Spermwhale Whalen mused in an extremely rare moment, and then reverted to his old self. “Not like that eunuch lieutenant and that gelding captain and all the other cocksuckin sergeants on the nightwatch.”

“So what’s with the teaching you say you did at Camarillo?” Baxter asked when they got Clyde safely in the radio car and were on their way to jail to book him for drunk.

“I tell you, Officer,” said Clyde Percy munching toothlessly on potato chips, “it was such a fine place. They was all these kids, retarded, you know? Ain’t nobody come to visit em most a the time. They gives em jobs to keep em busy like makin these little balloon toys. You puts the balloons on the little blow-up stems like. So they gives me the job a helpin watch over all the kids. So I does things like make sure they kin attach balloons right and that they don’t fight too much and don’t fall on their heads and bite their tongues and so forth like that. And then one day I made a invention. I drills holes in this board to put the stems in and then the kids kin attach three balloons at once and makes it easier to hold em. One a the bosses there says to me, ‘Clyde, you jist about the best we ever have workin here.’ So I tells him bout the time I save the lady in the flood and he say, ‘Clyde, you kin stay here if you wants to.’”

“Why’re you out then?” asked Spermwhale, driving the black and white west on Venice Boulevard.

“They say one day they jist ain’t no more room, jist room for real crazy people and I ain’t that crazy. So that night I start sayin I’m the President and mayor, and like that. But they say it ain’t no good, Clyde, we know you ain’t really crazy like some folks, leastways you ain’t so crazy you gonna hurt somebody. And then I thought bout hurtin one a the technicians, punchin em or somethin, but they all so nice to me I couldn’t. So they put me out and here I is, back home agin.”

“That’s a goddamn shame,” Spermwhale said angrily, turning in his seat toward Baxter. “I seen fifty dollar a trick whores, and dopers and pimps, and thieves and assholes for three generations all on welfare and we can’t even afford a fuckin bed and three squares at a state hospital for Clyde. That pisses me off!”

“Think you kin do somethin to git me back there?” asked the old man, his blue lips flaked with potato chips, the left earflap of his flier’s cap turned up from the scuffle with Sergeant Yanov.

“By God, if there’s any justice in this miserable world, which there ain’t, somebody oughtta help you. Tell you what, you plead not guilty at your arraignment tomorrow. Then I’ll be in court on trial day. I’ll talk to the city attorney and tell him that you’re always walkin around the street threatenin everybody and sayin you’re the Easter Bunny and wavin your dong at housewives and stuffin dog shit in mailboxes and settin trash fires and in general bein a bigger pain in the ass than Francis Tanaguchi.”

“Francis who?”

“Oh, never mind,” Spermwhale said as they parked in the station parking lot and got out of the car. “Anyways, I’m gonna tell him you’re the Wilshire Division whacko and a horrible asshole and you shouldn’t be put away for ninety days for drunk like you usually are because you’re a dingaling. And then I’ll say I think you should get a sanity hearin and shipped off to Camarillo again.”

“Oh, Officer,” said Clyde, and the tears welled in the old man’s eyes and he even stopped eating potato chips. “Oh, I’ll be crazier than you say I is, I kin stand on my head…”

“No, don’t go too far,” Spermwhale said. “Just stare off in space and say somethin goofy every time somebody asks you somethin.”

“I’ll shoo skeeters that ain’t there,” said Clyde as they shuffled toward the steps of the station.

“Yeah, like that,” Spermwhale said as they half lifted the old man up the steps.

“I’ll punch a policeman right in the mouf,” said Clyde.

“No, don’t do that,” said Spermwhale.

“A public defender?” Baxter Slate suggested.

“No, no,” Spermwhale said as they opened the side door and took Clyde inside.

“A judge? How about a judge?” Baxter offered.

“No,” Spermwhale said, “let’s not overdo it. Just swat invisible mosquitoes or beat off at the jury or somethin.”

Then Clyde Percy came to a limping halt in front of the barred jail doors and looked up at Spermwhale, and Clyde’s face, dust covered, but charcoal black in places, was streaked and wet.

“I appreciates it, Officer,” he said to the fat policeman. “I wants to go back to the chirruns, back to Camarilla. I appreciates what you doin for me.” And then he took Spermwhale’s big hand in his and wept.

“Jesus, Clyde! Okay! Okay!” Spermwhale said, pulling his hand away and looking around to see if other policemen were looking. “It’s okay. You don’t have to … it’s gonna be all right. I don’t mind bein there in court. I ain’t got nothin to do anyways. Jesus, it’s okay. Quit cryin, will ya?”

Spermwhale Whalen did go to the court trial of Clyde Percy, and did succeed in getting a sanity hearing for the old man. But Clyde Percy was deemed not to be a hazard to himself or others and sane enough to be released. He was released, after which he walked one mile downtown, shoplifted a short dog of wine, poured it over his head and lay down in the middle of the intersection at First and Los Angeles streets, having to wait only ninety seconds until a police car heading into the police building was forced to stop, pick up the Baldwin Hills lifeguard and book him into Central Jail on a plain drunk charge. He was given ninety days in the county jail, which was better than nothing but a far cry from Camarillo State Hospital where he invented the device to help retarded children blow up balloons.

When Whaddayamean Dean broke into one of his numerous drunken crying jags at choir practice after hearing of the ultimate fate of Clyde Percy, Roscoe Rules called him a nigger lover and said the old cocksucker probably wanted to go back to Camarillo in the first place just to molest the little dummies.

Spermwhale Whalen was in a foul mood after they booked Clyde Percy. The mail drop had arrived at Wilshire Station and contained an eight by ten glossy photo sent to Spermwhale by his classmate, Sergeant Harry Bragg of the police department photo lab. The picture was a mug shot of Spermwhale Whalen’s eldest son, Patrick, who had died thirteen months earlier of a drug overdose. It was the only picture the boy had taken in the last two years of his life, this one when he was arrested for car theft in Van Nuys.

Spermwhale, the veteran of three failed marriages, had not seen much of the boy after adolescence, and he studied the photo carefully appreciating the skill of Sergeant Harry Bragg who had removed the booking number and profile shot, and blown up the full face part of the double mug shot until probably only a policeman would suspect from whence it had come.

Technically it was a successful picture, artistically a dismal failure. He could detect none of the boy’s considerable intelligence in the arrogant eyes and narrow mouth. The shoulder length hair was totally unfamiliar, as was a small fresh scar over the right eye. It was not the son he wanted to remember, not if he wished to keep the guilt from overtaking him.

Spermwhale was scowling and chewing a cigar to shreds when he and Baxter went back to the radio car. The night had become exceptionally black.

“What’s wrong with you?” Baxter asked.

“Nothin.”

“Look a little mad.”

“I ain’t mad. Why should I be mad? I make seventeen grand a year, don’t I? Course after income tax and pension contribution and Police Relief and Police Protective League and the credit union and three wives and rent, I have about a dollar thirty cents to eat on between paydays. And I just come off a four day suspension so I gotta stop eatin for about two weeks. So what’ve I got to be pissed off about?”

“That it? Money?”

“Money, who needs money? Just because I been cuffed around a little bit by the heavy hand a justice? Just because I lost four days’ pay? Shit, that ain’t nothin. I only got three ex-wives to support, and three ex-kids … no, two ex-kids to feed. And an ex-dog and my turtle. Course the turtle’s sometimes in hibernation so he don’t eat too much. It’s only fair that I got four days’ suspension for keepin those avocados Francis gave me. But the thing bothers me. I wonder if Lieutenant Grimsley and all them IAD headhunters get a finder’s fee when they nail a cop? Maybe they get a percentage of what the city saves off our paycheck when we get suspended. Ever think a that?”

“I could loan you twenty bucks till payday.”

“Fuck it, I don’t need money. Old Clyde Percy gets along without it, don’t he?”

“It’s pretty decent what you’re going to do for him,” Baxter Slate said. “The way you’re going to bat to get the old man back in the laughing academy.”

“Listen, partner,” Spermwhale said, and now the cigar was almost eaten and he was spitting black leafy tobacco out the window of the radio car, “just because I seem to care about people once in a while, don’t make no mistakes about me. Nineteen plus years a workin these streets has taught me that people are shit. They’re scum. Only reason I don’t treat em like Roscoe Rules or some a those black glove hotdogs is what’s that do for you? Gets you fired for brutality or an ulcer or somethin. For what? The human race is no fuckin good but workin with these rotten bastards is all we got, right? It’s the only game in town so you gotta play like you’re still in the game. If you don’t, if you drop out, you take your fuckin six inch Colt and see can you pull the trigger twice while you’re eatin it. I just don’t wanna off myself like so many cops do. So once in a while I do somethin that might look to you like I give a fuck about some of these scumbags. But there’s nothin more rotten than people.”

And the very next call of the night did nothing to change Spermwhale’s mind.

“Think I’ll go see my ex-wife tomorrow,” Spermwhale said to Baxter who had just suggested taking code seven at the half price restaurant north of Wilshire on Western.

“Which one?” asked Baxter.

“The second ex-wife,” Spermwhale said. “I like her best in some ways. She had the most balls. Took every dime I had. I like to see her once in a while and visit my ex-dog and my ex-car.”

“She still give you a little?”

“Wouldn’t want it. Her ass is so big she has to sit down in shifts. And she’s as old as runnin water. I like them young animals like Carolina Moon. Her fat’s all smooth and bouncy. I like em with enough strength to fight!”

“Gonna have to call a choir practice one of these nights,” said Baxter Slate, as the Regretful Rapist was pulling a black woman out of her Ford sedan just two blocks ahead and trying to drag her off behind a large trash dumpster in the darkness.

She screamed at two men passing by who just kept walking, observing the golden rule of city dwellers: Do unto others if you want to risk getting your fucking head blown off.

“I’m getting awfully hungry” Baxter Slate said as the Regretful Rapist was discovering that the black woman was almost as strong as he and was not going to submit, knife or no knife. The rapist was furiously trying to find the dagger she had knocked from his hand to plunge it into her throat.

“You know, there’s somethin about Nick Yanov reminds me a my youngest kid,” Spermwhale said as he lit a fresh cigar and Baxter glided slowly around the traffic consisting of diners looking for parking off La Cienega’s Restaurant Row, to avoid tipping valet parking lot attendants.

“Your kid isn’t that old,” Baxter said.

“No,” said Spermwhale, “but he just looks somethin like Yanov. You know, I’m afraid he’s gonna get in trouble like the others. Last time he came to see me he wouldn’t even accept some clothes I bought him. Only wants to hang around Venice Beach with the hippies. Don’t even want some clean underwear. You see, he can’t stand ownin anything. He only wants the clothes on his back. Can’t even stand the responsibility of changin his skivvies. I’m afraid if he ever went to jail and had someone make all his decisions for him, he might like it.”

Baxter Slate tried to think of something to change the subject because he didn’t want Spermwhale to start thinking of the oldest boy.

And the Regretful Rapist, not a bit regretful at the moment, grabbed the black woman by the throat and almost choked the life out of her before she succeeded in burying her teeth in his bicep and squirming free just long enough to manage a chilling scream which was nearly her very last.

“Jesus Christ, what was that?” Spermwhale jerked upright in his seat and grabbed the flashlight as Baxter wheeled the car around and screeched into the darkened parking lot, catching the screaming woman and the raging rapist full in the headlight beams as they fought on the ground.

Then Spermwhale, moving like a younger, slimmer man, was out of the car before it stopped, chasing the fleeing rapist across the parking lot shouting, “Stop, you motherfucker, or you’re maggot meat!”

Baxter Slate, finally getting his flashlight to work by banging it on his hip as he ran, caught up with Spermwhale who was standing motionless and aiming two handed at a running shadow eighty feet away. Then there were three explosions in Baxter’s ear and the Regretful Rapist dropped to the asphalt shrieking in terror from a slight wound which entered his lower back, broke two ribs, ricocheted around the rib cage, following the path of least resistance, and exited in the front, causing, aside from the broken ribs, little more than a flesh wound. And this caused Roscoe Rules at the next afternoon’s rollcall to scream loudly for the hundredth time that they should be permitted to carry dumdums and high velocity ammo.

When the two policemen got to the wounded suspect and stood over him, he shook his mop of sweaty hair out of his face and yelled in panic and shock, “You shot me in the back, you chickenshit!”

Spermwhale, panting heavily from excitement and exhaustion, yelled back, “There ain’t no rules out here, you cock-sucker! The Marquis of Queensberry’s just some fag over on Eighth Street!”

And the Regretful Rapist was caught. Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate each received a Class A commendation which was worth exactly nothing in terms of promotion, prestige or economic remuneration. They both offered to trade it for the four days’ pay which had been taken away for accepting the imprudent avocados, but the watch commander told them he didn’t think that was very funny.

Perhaps Spermwhale Whalen’s greatest contribution was the rapport he established with the rapist in the five hours they were together at the emergency hospital, the detective bureau and finally the General Hospital jail ward where they booked him.

It started when Spermwhale bought two candy bars for himself and his starving partner and discovered that he had punched the wrong button and got one full of caramel which he never ate because it stuck to his partial plate.

“Here, want some candy?” he asked the rapist as the young man was sitting handcuffed to a chair in the emergency ward.

“Thanks,” the rapist said, and Spermwhale noticed that his eyes were glassy and shining from tears, and though he had refused to speak to detectives, the fat policeman said, “Pretty good candy, ain’t it? You like candy?”

“It’s okay,” the rapist said, his large blue eyes moving around the room.

Then Spermwhale said, “I did you a favor by shootin you.”

The rapist turned, wiped his face on the shoulder of his torn jacket and said, “How’s that?”

“You woulda been booked in an LAPD jail. We wake our prisoners up at five A.M. and serve them meals of red death, Gainesburgers and donkey dicks. This way you’re gonna be in the hospital jail ward and then in the county jail when you heal up. Chow’s a hundred percent better. Same with the bed and cell. I did you a favor.”

“Thanks.”

“You know, I don’t blame you for what you done. I get the urge sometimes myself. Ugly guy like me and all the pussy around just teasin a guy with this no bra stuff and tight pants. Shit, they ask for it.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. We all got our bad habits. Hell, I can’t quit smokin and drinkin, how can I criticize you?”

The Regretful Rapist smiled at the fat policeman and eventually accepted two more candy bars with caramel and almonds and confessed to more than thirty rapes, including twelve which had never been reported to the police but were verified through a detective follow-up.

Spermwhale Whalen was given his usual subpar score the very next time he went before a board on a promotional exam. He had for years been wasting his off-duty time flying 200,000 pounds of mechanized and human cargo for his country instead of taking police science classes at night school.

As Captain Drobeck said at a private staff meeting, who in the hell wants supervisors and executives who were only good for flying airplanes and catching dangerous crooks like the Regretful Rapist? Besides, Spermwhale Whalen was unpolished and fat and had ridiculous feet. He wore a wide triple E shoe but his feet were an abnormally short size 7 1/2. It looked like he was walking on waffles.