The New Centurions

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “The girl is your business,” said Ralston. “You can come off duty if you want, but I’d hate for someone to burn up the eating spot I cultivated for years. He used to charge me half price and now it’s free.”

  “Don’t worry,” Serge repeated. “And that girl doesn’t interest me like that, for God’s sake. I’ve got enough female problems without a kid that can’t speak English.”

  “You single guys,” Ralston sighed. “I should have those problems. You got one lined up tonight after work?”

  “I got one,” Serge answered without enthusiasm.

  “She got a friend?”

  “Not that I know of,” Serge smiled.

  “What’s she look like?” Ralston leered, now that the hunger drive was apparently slaked.

  “A honey blonde. All ass,” Serge answered, and that about described Margie who lived in the upstairs rear of his apartment building. The landlady had already warned him about being more discreet when he left Margie’s apartment in the morning.

  “A real honey blonde, huh?” Ralston murmured.

  “What’s real?” asked Serge, and then thought, she’s real enough in her own way, and it doesn’t matter if the glistening honey is the fruit of the hairdresser’s art because everything of beauty in the world has been tinted or somehow transformed by a clever artisan. You can always discover how it’s done if you look closely enough. But who wants to look? During those times when he needed her, Margie was plenty real, he thought.

  “What’s a bachelor do besides lay everything in sight?” asked Ralston. “You happy being alone?”

  “I don’t even want a roommate to share expenses. I like being alone.” Serge was the first to get up and turned to look for the girl who was out of sight in the kitchen.

  “Buenas noches, Señor Rosales,” Ralston called.

  “Ándale pues,” shouted Mr. Rosales, over the din of a too loud mariachi record that someone had played on the jukebox.

  “You watch TV a lot?” asked Ralston when they were back in the car. “I’m asking about single life because me and the old lady aren’t getting along very good at all right now and who knows what might happen.”

  “Oh?” said Serge hoping Ralston would not bore him with a long account of his marital problems which so many other partners had done during the long hours on patrol when the night was quiet because it was a week night, when the people were between paydays and welfare checks, and were not drinking. “Well, I read a lot, novels mostly. I play handball at least three or four times a week at the academy. I go to movies and watch a little TV. I go to a lot of Dodger games. There isn’t all the carousing you think.” And then he remembered Hollywood again. “At least not anymore. That can get old, too.”

  “Maybe I’ll be finding out,” said Ralston, driving toward Hollenbeck Park.

  Serge took the flashlight from under the seat and placed it on the seat beside him. He turned the volume of the radio up slightly, hoping it would dissuade Ralston from trying to compete with it, but Serge felt certain he was going to hear a domestic tirade.

  “Four-Frank-One, clear,” said Serge into the mike.

  “Maybe you can entice little Dolores Del Rio to your pad if you play your cards right,” said Ralston as the Communications operator acknowledged they were clear. Ralston began a slow halfhearted residential burglar patrol in the area east of the park which had been hard hit by a cat burglar the past few weeks. They had already decided that after midnight, they would prowl the streets on foot which seemed to be the only effective way to catch the cat.

  “I told you that babies don’t interest me,” said Serge.

  “Maybe she’s got a cousin or a fat aunt or something. I’m ready for some action. My old lady shut me off. I could grow a long moustache for her like that actor that plays in all the Mexican movies, what’s his name?”

  “Pedro Armendariz,” said Serge without thinking.

  “Yeah, that guy. It seems like he’s on every marquee around here, him and Dolores.”

  “They were even the big stars when I was a kid,” said Serge gazing at the cloudless sky which was only slightly smoggy tonight.

  “Yeah? You went to Mexican movies? I thought you don’t speak Spanish.”

  “I understood a little when I was a kid,” Serge answered, sitting up in the seat. “Anybody could understand those simple pictures. All guns and guitars.”

  Ralston quieted down and the radio droned on and he relaxed again. He found himself thinking of the little dove and he wondered if she would be as satisfying as Elenita who was the first girl he ever had, the dusky fifteen-year-old daughter of a bracero who was well worn by the time she seduced Serge when he himself was fifteen. He had returned to her every Friday night for a year and sometimes she would have him, but sometimes there would be older boys already there and he would go away to avoid trouble. Elenita was everybody’s girl but he liked to pretend she was his girl until one June afternoon when the gossip blazed through the school that Elenita had been taken from school because she was pregnant. Several boys, mostly the members of the football squad, began to talk in frightened whispers. Then came the rumor a few days later that Elenita was also found to have been syphilitic and the frightened whispers became frantic. Serge had terrible fantasies of elephantine pus-filled genitals and he prayed and lit three candles every other day until he felt the danger period had passed even though he never knew for sure if it had, or even whether poor Elenita was really so afflicted. He could ill afford thirty cents for candles in those days when the part-time gas pumping job only netted nine dollars a week which he had to give to his mother.

  Then he felt guilty for thinking about the girl Mariana like this because eighteen years, despite what the law said, did not make you an adult. He was twenty-six now and wondered if another ten years would do the job for him. If he could continue to profit from all the lies and cruelty and violence this job had shown him, maybe he could grow up sooner. If he could quit seeing a saint in the tawny face of a perfectly healthy little animal like Mariana he would be so much closer to maturity. Maybe that’s the part of being a Chicano I can’t shake off, Serge thought, the superstitious longing—brown magic—The Sorceress of Guadelupe—or Guadalajara—a simple bastard yearning for the Madonna in a miserable Mexican restaurant.

  14

  THE OPERATOR

  “NO WONDER PLEBESLY gets more whore offers than anybody else on the squad. Look at him. Does this boy look like a cop?” roared Bonelli, stocky, middle-aged and balding, with dark whiskers which when they were two days old were dirty gray. They always seemed at least two days old, and whenever Sergeant Anderson objected, Bonelli just reminded him that this was Wilshire vice squad and not a goddamned military academy and he was only trying to look like the rest of the assholes out on the street so he could fit in better as an undercover operator. He always addressed Anderson by his first name which was Mike and so did the others because it was customary in a vice squad to be more intimate with your supervisors, but Gus did not like or trust Anderson and neither did the others. He was on the lieutenant’s list and would probably someday be a captain at least, but the lanky young man with the blond sparse moustache was a natural disciplinarian and would be better, they all concluded, in a patrol function which was more GI than a vice squad.

  “One whore Gus got last week never did believe he was a cop,” laughed Bonelli, throwing his feet up on the table in the vice office and spilling some cigar ashes on a report which Sergeant Anderson was writing. Anderson’s lips tightened under the pale moustache, but he said nothing, got up and went to his own desk to work.

  “I remember that one, Sal,” said Petrie to Bonelli. “Old Salvatore had to save Gus from that whore. She thought he was a PO-lice impersonator when he finally badged her.”

  They all laughed at Petrie’s affected Negro dialect, even Hunter, the slim Negro officer who was the only Negro on the night watch. He laughed heartily, but Gus laughed nervously partly because they were roasting him but pa
rtly because he could never get used to Negro jokes in front of a Negro even though he had been a vice officer for three months now and should be accustomed to the merciless chiding which went on ritually every night before they went out to the streets. Each of them subjected the other to cracks which stopped at neither race, religion, or physical defects.

  Yet the six policemen and Sergeant Handle, who was one of them, went to Bonelli’s apartment at least once a week after work and played pool and drank a case of beer at least. Or sometimes they went to Sergeant Handle’s house and played poker all night. Once when they had gone to Hunter’s apartment which was here in Wilshire Division in the racially mixed neighborhood near Pico and La Brea, Bonelli had made a whispered remark to Hunter that he had been kicked in the shoulder by a whore while making a lewd conduct arrest and that at his age arthritis might set in. Bonelli couldn’t pull the sleeve of his outrageous Hawaiian shirt over the hairy shoulder to show Hunter because the shoulder was too large, and finally, Bonelli said, “Anyway, the bruise is the color of your ass.” When Hunter’s lithe mahogany-colored wife Marie, who had entered the room unnoticed, said, “What, red?” with a perfectly sober expression, Gus began to enjoy the camaraderie which was not affected or strained and did not pretend that being policemen made them brothers or more than brothers.

  But they did have a secret which seemed to unite them more closely than normal friendship and that was the knowledge that they knew things, basic things about strength and weakness, courage and fear, good and evil, especially good and evil. Even though arguments would rage especially when Bonelli was drunk, they all agreed on very fundamental things and usually did not discuss these things because any policeman who had common sense and had been a policeman long enough would surely learn the truth and it was useless to talk about it. They mostly talked about their work and women, and either fishing, golf, or baseball, depending upon whether Farrell or Schulmann or Hunter was controlling the conversation. But when Petrie was working they talked about movies, since Petrie had an uncle who was a director, and Petrie was starstruck even though he had been a policeman five years.

  There were a few more cracks made about Gus’s meek appearance and how none of the whores could believe he was a policeman which made him the best whore operator on the watch, but then they began talking about other things because Gus never joked back and it was not as much fun as picking on Bonelli who had a caustic tongue and was quick at repartee.

  “Hey Marty,” said Farrell to Hunter who was trying to pencil out a follow-up to a vice complaint. He held his forehead in a smooth brown hand while the pencil moved jerkily and stopped often while Hunter laughed at something Bonelli said. It was obvious that Hunter would rather work with Bonelli than any of the others, but Sergeant Anderson figured the deployment carefully so that certain men were working on certain nights because he had fixed opinions on supervision and deployment. He informed them that he was very close to his degree in government and he had twelve units in psychology and only he was in a position to know who should work with whom, and Bonelli had whispered gruffly, “How did this cunt get on the vice squad?”

  “Hey, Marty,” Farrell repeated, until Hunter looked up. “How come you people are always complaining that there aren’t enough blacks in this job or that group or something and then when we do use enough you still bitch. Listen to this article in the Times, ‘The NAACP sought a class action on behalf of all the men on death row because it contends a disproportionate number of them are Negroes.’”

  “People are never satisfied,” said Hunter.

  “By the way Marty, you getting your share of that white liberal pussy that’s floating around the ghetto these days?” asked Bernbaum.

  “Marty’s going to pass the sergeant’s exam this time, ain’t you, Marty,” said Bonelli. “He’ll get forty points on his own and they’ll give him forty more for being black.”

  “And when we get to be on top, first thing I’m going to do is go after your woman, Sal,” said Hunter, glancing up from his report.

  “Oh, Christ, Marty, do me a favor, go after Elsie right now, will you? That bitch does nothing but talk about marriage anymore and me with three divorces behind me. I need another wife like . . .”

  “Do any of you have any rubbers?” asked Sergeant Anderson, suddenly walking into the working area of the vice office separated from his desk by a row of lockers.

  “No, if we think a broad is bad enough for rubbers, we generally get a head job,” said Farrell, his close-set blue eyes examining Anderson with humor.

  “I was referring to the use of rubbers for evidence containers,” said Anderson coldly. “We still use them to pour drinks into, don’t we?”

  “We got a box in the locker, Mike,” said Bonelli, and they became quiet when they saw he disliked Farrell’s joke. “Working a bar tonight?”

  “We’ve had a complaint about The Cellar for two weeks now. I thought we’d try to take it.”

  “They serving after hours?” asked Farrell.

  “If you could take time out from your joke writing and look at the vice complaints you’d see that the bartender at The Cellar lives in an apartment upstairs and that after two o’clock he sometimes invites customers up to the pad where he continues to operate a bar. After hours.”

  “We’ll try it for you tonight, Mike,” said Bonelli with his conciliatory tone, but Gus thought that the heavily browed brown eyes were not conciliatory. They fixed Anderson with a bland expression.

  “I want to work it myself,” said Anderson. “I’ll meet you and Plebesly at Third and Western at eleven and we’ll decide then whether to go together or separate.”

  “I can’t go at all,” said Bonelli. “I made too many pinches around there. The bartender knows me.”

  “Might be a good idea for you to go in with one of us,” said Bernbaum, scratching his wiry brush of red hair with a pencil. “We could have a drink and leave. They wouldn’t suspect the joint was full of cops. They’d probably be satisfied that everything was cool after us two left.”

  “I think there’s a couple of whores working in there,” said Hunter. “Me and Bonelli were in there one night and there was an ugly little brunette and another old bat that sure looked like hookers.”

  “Alright, we’ll all meet at Andre’s Restaurant at eleven and talk it over,” said Anderson going back to his desk. “And another thing, the streetwalkers are getting pretty thick out there on Sunday and Monday nights, I hear. They must know those are the vice squad’s nights off so some of you are going to start working Sundays.”

  “You guys see those magazines the day watch picked up at a trick pad?” asked Bernbaum, and the conversation again picked up now that Anderson was finished.

  “I seen enough of that garbage to last me a lifetime,” said Bonelli.

  “No, these weren’t regular nudie mags,” said Bernbaum. “These were pinup mags, but somebody had taken about a hundred Polaroid pictures of guys’ dicks and cut them out and stuck them on the girls in the magazines.”

  “Psychos. The world is full of psychos,” said Farrell.

  “By the way, are we working fruits tonight, Marty?” asked Petrie.

  “Lord, no. We busted enough last week to last all month.”

  “Think I’ll go on days for a while,” said Bernbaum. “I’d like to work books. Get me away from all these slimes you have to bust at night.”

  “Well I’ll guarantee you, bookmakers are assholes,” said Bonelli. “They’re mostly Jews, ain’t they?”

  “Oh yeah, the Mafia’s all Jews too,” said Bernbaum. “I think there’s a few Italian bookmakers up on Eighth Street last I heard.”

  Gus felt Bonelli look at him when Bernbaum said it and he knew Bonelli was thinking about Lou Scalise, the bookmaking agent and collector for the loan sharks whom Bonelli hated with a hatred that now made Gus’s palms sweat as he thought of it.

  “Incidentally, Petrie,” said Marty Hunter, slamming the logbook, “the next time we take a fighter,
how about using the sap on him, not on me. Last night we take Biff’s Cocktail Lounge for serving a drunk and when we try to bust the drunk he starts a fight and I get sapped by my partner.”

  “Bullshit, Marty. I just grazed your elbow with the sap.”

  “Anytime more than one policeman jumps a suspect the policeman ends up getting hurt,” said Farrell. “I remember the night we had that fairy lumberjack.” They laughed and Farrell looked appealingly to Bonelli. “Yeah the guy was a lumberman from Oregon. And he’s a suckor not a suckee. Comes to L.A. and wears eye shadow. Anyway, he’s swishing around Lafayette Park and gropes Bonelli, remember, Sal?”

  “I’ll never forget that asshole.”

  “Anyway, there were five of us in the park that night and for fifteen minutes we all battle that puke. He threw me in the pond and threw Steve in there twice. We thumped the shit out of each other with saps and it finally ended when Sal held his head underwater for a few minutes. He never did get sapped or even hurt and every one of us policemen had to get patched up.”

  “Funny thing,” said Bernbaum, “when Sal had him about half drowned and he was panicky and all, know what he does? He yells, ‘Help, police!’ Imagine that, with five policemen all over him, he yells that.”

  “He know you were policemen?” asked Gus.

  “Sure he knew,” said Farrell. “He said to Bonelli, ‘Ain’t no cop in the world can take me.’ He didn’t figure on five, though.”

  “I had a guy yell that one time when I was in full uniform,” said Bernbaum. “Funny what people say when you’re wrestling them off to jail.”

  “Garbage,” said Bonelli. “Garbage.”

  “You handle these assholes, you got to wash your hands before you take a leak,” said Hunter.

  “Remember the time the swish kissed you, Ben?” said Farrell to Bernbaum, and the ruddy-faced young policeman winced in disgust.

  “Walked into a bar where we got a complaint some fruits were dancing,” said Hunter, “and this little blond swish flits right up to Ben as we were sitting at the bar and plants a smack right on his kisser and then he dances away into the dark. Ben goes to the head and washes his mouth with hand soap and we leave without even working the joint.”