by Jack Webb
It’s not like that every watch, but even a comparatively quiet eight hours on the freeway leaves McGrew bushed. Even without trouble, he has ridden 200 miles, and he is delighted to radio his “139.”
McGrew then bikes home, does a little gardening, fools around with the kids for awhile and finally goes off into a room alone to work on his hobby. Nighttimes, McGrew draws cartoons and sells them to the magazines.
V
Always, you come back to crime.
You play it hard and fast and cagey. A policeman’s salary won’t cover a verdict for false arrest.
Early on a spring morning, Policemen Robert Coffman and Jack Carter are working the night watch out of Central Division. At 1:26 a.m., a 459 sends them to the apartment building at 251 Loma Drive, and the night’s fun begins.
Returning from a show, a couple find their apartment has been thoroughly looted. Clothing, linen, books, and pictures are strewn about; closets and drawers have been emptied. About $1,700 worth of jewelry and clothing are missing.
To the police, the method of entry is obvious. The burglar placed a garbage can near the rear bedroom window, climbed atop it, then cut the screen, pried open the window, and entered.
But one thing bothers them. On the living room table, $70 in cash is lying in plain view. Why didn’t he take it?
Either he didn’t see it, which doesn’t make much sense, considering his thoroughness, or the couple’s return scared him off. In that case, he might still be around the neighborhood.
Carter remains in the apartment to get a description of the missing property, and Coffman scouts the neighborhood. On the parkway, near a parked car, he finds pieces of a broken piggy bank. He brings them back, and the victim’s wife identifies them.
Now a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) license search discloses that the car is registered to a woman in Sherman Oaks, a good distance away. The car seems worth a stakeout. If the burglar used it, he should come back for it.
For an hour, then two, and finally three hours, Carter and Coffman watch the car. Just before dawn, they are ready to give up. But they’ve wasted three hours; and they may as well sit tight another half hour till it’s good and light.
In a few more minutes, a man rounds the corner, passes the apartment house without a glance at it and heads toward the car. The officers hold back. Maybe he’s a poker player coming home late or a guy just off the graveyard shift. Let’s wait a minute.
Near the parked car, the man looks about cautiously, then walks up and quickly unlocks the door. From a hundred feet down the street, Coffman comes pounding toward him.
For a moment, the suspect seems about to take off, but Coffman is on him. He gives him a quick shake for a gun, then asks his name.
“Arthur John Stark.”
“You’re up pretty late, aren’t you?”
“I’m old enough. I guess forty-eight is old enough.”
Mr. Stark doesn’t understand this routine at all. He has never been arrested in his life, and he doesn’t like this kind of treatment. What does Coffman think he is, a criminal or something?
Coffman stalls a moment. The car, Mr. Stark?
Belongs to a friend, Mr. Stark explains easily, and he has just borrowed it for the night. Anything wrong about that?
Coffman chews it over. The answer is pat and yet somehow a bit evasive. Mr. Stark’s good-citizen bluster seems a bit uneasy. But the move is up to the officer. If he takes him in and Mr. Stark is pure, there’ll be hell to pay.
Coffman studies the car, looks into the back seat. It is covered with clothing.
“You’ll have to come downtown, Mr. Stark,” he says quietly.
Stark is booked in Central Jail on suspicion of burglary, and Coffman sweats it out while the Burglary Division runs a make on Mr. Stark. He is far, far from pure.
Beginning at the age of nineteen, and that goes back to the Twenties, Mr. Stark has been in trouble. In Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, and California. He has done time in San Quentin and Folsom prisons.
A report comes in on the car he had “borrowed” from a friend. It is stolen.
Stark was convicted of burglary on May 3, 1956, and sent to San Quentin as a two-time loser.
Be a damned good one.
VI
Sure, you’d had two or three beers, but that wasn’t what caused it. The big, arrogant white Cadillac cut the corner sharp, forcing you to smack into a parked car. The Caddy keeps going, and when the radio cruiser shows up, there you are all alone, with a broken grille on your car.
Excitedly you tell the policemen what happened. Being angry, you talk a little too loud, and perhaps you wave your arms. One of the officers wrinkles his nose. “You been drinking, Mac?”
“Two or three beers,” you say belligerently. “What the hell has that got to do with being cut off!”
The cops exchange glances. Never, in police history, has it been four or five beers. Never, never more than two or three beers.
“Think I’m drunk,” you say. “Look!”
You touch your finger to your nose. One of the officers has gone back to make a radio call, and, drawing an imaginary line to the police car, you walk it straight toward him. Or almost straight, anyhow.
“Take it easy, Mac,” says his partner. “AID will be right here.”
In no time, an Accident Investigation car swings up beside the cruiser. There’s a little talk among the policemen, and then the AID man comes over to you, carrying a narrow, ten-inch-long cardboard cylinder.
He takes out a balloon and a couple of glass tubes which have some kind of chemicals inside. He hands you the balloon and says, “Go ahead, blow into it.”
“What’s this!”
“Go ahead, blow. We’re taking a sample of your breath.”
You hesitate suspiciously. It’s a trap.
“What are you afraid of? You only had two or three beers, didn’t you?”
So you exhale into the balloon. He quickly turns a mouth valve to trap the breath inside, and then he runs the breath into one of the glass tubes. “This is for the lab,” he says. “Now blow again.”
The second time, he runs the breath into the other tube. It mixes with some chemicals, and there seems to be a faint discoloration. “We’ll have to check downtown, Mac,” he says.
Now you begin to sweat. You did have only two or three beers. The big Caddy did cut you off, but nobody saw it. Your whole case rests in two little glass tubes.
You go along with the officers, and you really sweat it out, waiting for the lab report. Finally, one of the radio men comes out of a back room at Headquarters.
“Take it easy, Mac,” he says. “Like you said, it was only two or three beers. Now, are you sure you didn’t get even part of the Caddy’s license number?”
For the exoneration, which probably saved you from a “502” conviction as a drunken driver, you can thank a pretty young policewoman. Chestnut-haired, brown-eyed Geraldine Lambert, wife of an LAPD lieutenant, is one of the few policewoman forensic analysts in the country.
A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles, Geraldine began her career as an analytical chemist with the Eastman Kodak Processing Laboratory. When she became a policewoman, she broke in the usual way with juvenile and jail assignments and a hitch in DAPs, or Deputy Auxiliary Police, the departmental youth group.
For almost a decade now, she has been in the Crime Lab, learning the fascinating intricacies of blood analysis under LAPD’s chief chemist, Ray Pinker. She has been one of the two women chosen to serve on the Chemical Test Committee of the National Safety Council, and has been voted “Policewoman of the Year” by the Exchange Club of Los Angeles.
At a cost of more than $12,000 for ingredients alone, Geraldine packs 4,000 chemical “Intoximeter” kits a year. Not all return. Of the drunks that annually fill the balloons with telltale whiskied breaths, some 3,200 plead guilty and obviate the need of Intoximeter analysis.
But 800 a year dispute the drunk charge. Then the fine eye
of science draws a bead on the facts. The Intoximeter tells the story.
Sometimes the accused is right. Sometimes he loses. The Intoximeter cost to the city, LAPD knows, is more than worth it, not only in nailing down some “502” convictions, but in clearing the innocent.
Often drivers in ill health like diabetics fail the field sobriety tests. Geraldine clears them. And sometimes defendants on other charges try to act drunk to mitigate their offenses. Geraldine’s chemistry exposes the subterfuge. Whatever she finds, her testimony is almost always accepted by the courts.
The breath sample turned over to the Crime Lab is measured for the proportion of alcohol in the bloodstream. Magnesium perchlorate crystals in the Intoximeter tube have trapped the alcohol which is first steam-distilled and measured for quantity. By relating the quantity to the volume of breath taken as a sample, the proportion of alcohol in the bloodstream is ascertained. In turn, this can be translated into degrees of drunkenness.
Thus, your two or three beers might leave a trace of alcohol in the bloodstream. But so long as you run under .05 per cent on the test, you are chemically sober, and the courts will so agree.
From .05 to .10 per cent indicates that the subject has been drinking; .10 to .15 you are possibly under the influence of alcohol. From .15 to .25, you are under the influence of liquor and should not be driving. At .25 per cent you are obviously intoxicated; at .35 per cent you are a common drunk and probably unable to take care of yourself; and at .40 per cent, whether you are aware of it or not, you have passed out.
Beyond that, the percentages begin to indicate a grim prognosis. At .50 per cent, you have imbibed a lethal amount of good fellowship.
Sometimes, Geraldine’s beakers and burners avert an improper booking. There was, for example, the known San Pedro alcoholic, found one night slumped behind the wheel of his parked car. He was out cold.
It would have been the most obvious thing in the world to book him as a drunk. Instead, the officers awakened him and made him take the Intoximeter test.
Geraldine’s report was an eye-opener. His blood alcohol level was only .02 per cent! Further investigation disclosed the alcoholic had gulped a vial of paraldehyde in an effort to avoid the DTs.
On another occasion, a husband beat his wife to death in their home in San Fernando Valley and then fled over the hill into Hollywood. Furnished with his description, detectives easily picked him up. Too easily, it seemed to them. He was found staggering through the streets, a half-empty wine bottle in his pocket, and, even if he hadn’t been wanted for murder, he would have been bagged as a drunk.
The detectives promptly called for an AID car to give him the Intoximeter test. He proved out at .07 per cent, just possible tipsiness.
Later at his trial, the man tried to plead that he had been drunk and didn’t know what he was doing when he killed his wife. The State then introduced the Intoximeter finding, and he was convicted.
More and more, police throughout the nation are using scientific chemical tests for intoxication, but LAPD is already testing another device which may prove to be both simpler and cheaper. While it uses chemicals, as does the Intoximeter, refills are only sixty cents against $2.50. The instrument can be used at the booking desk or even plugged into the cigarette fighter of a police car, and you don’t need a chemist to read the results. The device feeds the breath past a photoelectric cell and snaps a picture of the breath content, which can be used in court.
In a way, there is an appropriate irony in the new, quiet kind of detective work that Geraldine Lambert and Ray Pinker pursue far from the scene of a crime or drunken-driver accident. These offenders have not hesitated to spill blood, and by blood they are betrayed.
A .25 per cent reading in the bloodstream cannot be concealed; the blood-soaked handkerchief of a killer can be washed white, and yet, under Pinker’s benzidine test, there will be a damning, blue-green chemical reaction. The guilty can dilute blood 300,000 times, and still Pinker will find it.
So far as science knows, blood is practically indestructible through age. It has been found in the marrow of Egyptian mummies several thousand years old. It is almost always there to point to a criminal.
Out, out, damned spot. But it will not out.
VII
Always, you come back to crime. And the street.
That is where the policeman lives, fights, sometimes dies.
In the Wilmington area down by the harbor, Policeman Dallas W. Walters, Harbor Division Warrants Detail, has just come out of a store. Three armed thugs surround him.
It’s a stickup, and the smart thing is to let them have his money, his gun, his badge.
Walters fights.
It’s three-to-one, and he catches three slugs, one in each leg and the third in the shoulder. He goes down, but he’s still shooting. He kills one bandit and critically wounds the second.
The odds are even now; so the third drags his wounded companion into a car and runs.
In no time, nine officers in four cars have reached the scene, but everybody has gone except Walters lying in the street and his kill nearby. One radio car follows the ambulance that takes the badly wounded officer to the hospital, and there is a little reunion in Emergency. The wounded gunman had been dropped there by his pal. Later, the third man is found hiding in the trunk of the escape car.
Walters recovers, and only now and then, mostly in rainy weather, do the old wounds ache. He’s satisfied.
As they say in the squadrooms, “Be a damned good one.”
Sometimes, because women and children are in the crossfire, you play it soft, pianissimo, and just as dangerously.
“Al, this is Dee.”
“What!”
“Dee. Dee Lightner. The cop.”
The phone is suddenly silent.
“Al! I’m phoning from nearby.”
“Wait a minute…”
“The place is surrounded, Al. I want you to come out and surrender.”
“Gimme a chance! I gotta think.”
“You can take it the easy way. Or the hard way.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’m coming up after you. Up to the door. When I ring the bell, shove your gun through the door and you follow it. Hands behind your head.”
“Okay, okay.”
The phone goes silent again.
“Come on, Al. I mean it. I said it’s a deal.”
“Okay. But don’t let them shoot me. Please! Don’t shoot me!”
“You do it right, Al, and nobody will shoot you.”
The phone clicks dead.
Policeman DeWitt C. Lightner comes out of the booth. “He said okay,” he tells the FBI agent waiting there. They look speculatively at each other. “Let’s hope he means it,” the G-man says.
Together, they drive a block to Firebird Avenue in Whittier, east of Los Angeles. They park across the street from the shabby little frame house where badman Albert J. Kostal is holed up.
Kostal is treacherous and quick on the trigger. He is wanted for robbery and perhaps two murders. Eleven days earlier, he had busted out of an eighth-floor detention pen of the Los Angeles Hall of Justice, taking two pals with him.
The pals were quickly caught, but Al had remained at large till an anonymous, early morning tip to the FBI had located his hideout. Now all police agencies in the Los Angeles area have blocked off the district. They are going to take Al the easy way or dig him out with shotgun, pistol, and triple-chaser.
But there are women, maybe children, in the little frame house, and Dee Lightner offers his plan. He knows Al pretty well, having returned him from Kansas City to Los Angeles just a few months before as an escapee from Folsom, the maximum-security prison.
Al was doing life, and now the state’s bookkeepers are calculating how much more he owes for his two escapes. It’s a lot to ask a man like that to hand out his gun, butt first. If he decides to play the long odds, he might shoot Dee and try a break. Or make him run interference as a shield. Or yank
him inside as a hostage.
Five minutes after the phone call, Dee Lightner walks across the silent, deserted street, walks up the path and onto the porch, presses the doorbell. There is no answer.
Inside, Al hears him, all right, but he wants to try a last caper.
He runs to the back door, hoping he can reach his getaway car stashed in the garage. He opens it, and four shotguns are raised against him. He hesitates in the doorway.
From behind the garage, a small child wanders uncertainly across the line of fire. Now, Al!
But a sheriff’s officer jumps out, pushes the boy to safety and regains cover. That breaks Al. Slowly he walks back inside and goes to the front door.
He opens it, hands his gun to Dee Lightner. He comes out, hands behind his head.
Be a damned good one.
But always, you come back to crime. And the street. TED Officer Michael J. McAndrews was safe and off duty in his own home when it happened.
McAndrews was recuperating from a bout with the flu, and the doctor had warned him, “Take it easy, boy. This thing is treacherous.”
“Sure,” Mike had said. “Don’t worry, Doc. I’ll take it easy.”
And then it happened right outside his own window. A kid crashed a car, a stolen car, it developed later, and McAndrews saw him fleeing. Two deputy sheriffs were chasing him on foot.
It’s always the cop’s job to assist. McAndrews joined the chase and though it winded him badly, he caught the kid. He held him till the deputies took over. And then Officer Michael J. McAndrews dropped dead of a heart attack.
Yes, like they say, be a damned good one.
THE SERGEANT
They call him the workhorse, my boy—
Backbone of the Force, my boy.
He’s the old three-striper—
