The New Centurions

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “I bet it’s the white apartment building,” said Lucy pointing toward the three-story stucco with an imitation stone facade.

  “Eighteen thirteen. That’s it,” said Gus parking in front and wondering if he had enough money to buy a decent dinner tonight. With anyone else he ate hamburgers or brown bagged it, but Lucy ate well and liked a hot dinner. He went along with her, pretending this was what he wanted too, even though he had less than five dollars to last until payday, and less than a half tank of gas in his car. Monday night he had an argument with Vickie over the check to his mother which had shrunk to forty-five dollars a month because John was in the army, thank God.

  The argument was so violent it made him sick. Lucy had noticed his depression the next evening. And now he thought of how he had blurted it out to Lucy that night, and how kind she had been and how ashamed he had been and still was that he had told her. Yet it had lifted his spirits. And come to think of it, she hadn’t asked to eat in a real restaurant since that night, and she had insisted on buying the coffee or Cokes more often than she should.

  It was built to wear only for a time, like so many southern California apartment houses. Gus parked in front and they climbed the twenty-four steps to the second floor. Gus noticed that the metal railing, which only vaguely resembled wrought iron, was loose. He drew his hand back and guessed that someday a drunk would stagger from his apartment door and hit the railing and plunge twenty feet to the concrete below, but being drunk, he would probably receive only abrasions. Apartment twenty-three was in the back. The drapes were drawn and the door was closed, and this alone made Gus suspect there was no one home, because in all the other occupied apartments the doors were open. All had outside screen doors and the people were trying to catch the evening breeze because it had been a hot smoggy day.

  Gus knocked and rang the tinny chime and knocked again. Finally, Lucy shrugged and they turned to go and Gus was glad because he didn’t feel like working; he felt like driving through Elysian Park pretending to look for juvenile drinkers and just look at Lucy and talk to her perhaps on the upper road on the east side near the reservoir which looked like black ice in the moonlight.

  “You the cops?” whispered a woman who suddenly appeared inside the dusty screen door of apartment number twenty-one.

  “Yes. Did you call?” asked Gus.

  “I’m the one,” said the woman. “I called but I said I didn’t want nobody to know I called. They aren’t home now, but the kid’s in there.”

  “What seems to be the problem?” asked Gus.

  “Well, come on in. It looks like I’m going to get involved anyway,” she muttered holding the screen and licking the absurdly made-up lips which were drawn on halfway to her nose. In fact, all her makeup had a theatrical exaggeration designed for an audience that must be far far away.

  “I talked to some Lieutenant Whatzizname and told him that place isn’t fit for pigs most of the time and the kid gets left alone and I never see him outside hardly. Last night he was screaming and screaming and I think the old man was beating him ’cause the old lady was screaming too.”

  “Do you know the people in that apartment?” asked Gus.

  “Lord, no. They’re trash,” said the woman, uncoiling a wiry wisp of blond hair with gray roots. “They only been living here a month and they go out almost every night and sometimes they have a babysitter, a cousin or something, staying with their kid. And sometimes they got nobody staying with him. I learned a long time ago to mind my own business but today it was so damn hot they had the door open and I happened to walk by and the place looks like a slit trench and I know what a slit trench is because I like war novels. There was dog crap from this dirty little terrier they got, and food and other crud all over the floor and then when they left the kid today I just said what the hell, I’ll call and remain anonymous but now it looks like I can’t be anonymous, huh?”

  “How old is the child?” asked Gus.

  “Three. A little boy. He hardly never comes outside. The old man’s a souse. The mother seems okay. Just a dirty little mouse, you know what I mean. A souse and a mouse. I think the old man pushes her around when he’s drunk, but it don’t matter much to her probably, because she’s usually drunk when he is. Fine neighbors. This place had class a few years ago. I’m moving.”

  “How old are they? The parents?”

  “Young people. Not thirty I don’t think. Dirty people though.”

  “You sure the little boy’s in there alone? Right now?”

  “I saw them leave, Officer. I’m sure. He’s in there. He’s a quiet little guy. Never hear a peep out of him. He’s in there.”

  “What apartment is the landlady in? Well need a passkey.”

  “Martha went to the movies tonight. She told me she was going. I never thought about the key.” The woman shook her head and tugged at the frayed waistband of the olive stretch pants that were never meant to be stretched so much.

  “We can’t just break the door down on this information.”

  “Why not? The kid’s only three and he’s in there alone.”

  “No,” said Gus, shaking his head. “He could be in there and maybe they took him when you weren’t looking. Maybe a lot of things. We’ll just have to come back later when they’re home and try to get invited inside to take a look around.”

  “Goddamn,” said the woman. “The one time in my life I call a cop and try to do a decent thing and look what happens.”

  “Let me go try the door,” said Gus. “Maybe it’s open.”

  “The one time I call the cops,” said the woman to Lucy as Gus stepped outside and walked down the walkway to number twenty-three. He opened the screen and turned the knob and the door slid open.

  “Lucy,” he called, and stepped inside the stifling apartment, looking carefully for the “dirty little terrier” that might suddenly grab him by the ankle. He stepped around a moist stinking brown heap in the center of the floor and decided the dog must be large for a terrier. Then he heard the pat pat on the vinyl tile floor and the gaunt gray dog appeared from the bathroom, looked at Gus, wagged his stumpy tail, yawned, and returned to the bath-room. Gus glanced in the empty bedroom and pointed to the pile in the floor when Lucy entered and she walked around it and followed him into the living room.

  “Dirty people,” said the woman, who had followed Lucy inside.

  “This certainly isn’t bad by unfit home standards,” explained Gus. “It has to be really dangerous. Broken windows, leaky stove. Clothes hanging over an open flame. Knee-deep in defecation, not just a pile in the floor. And garbage laying around. Clogged toilet. I’ve seen places where the wall seems to move and then you realize that it’s a solid sheet of roaches. This isn’t bad. And there’s no child in that bedroom.”

  “He’s here I tell you!”

  “Look for yourself,” said Gus, and stood aside as the woman bounced into the bedroom. Her cheeks shook with every step, she walked so heavily.

  It was now quite dark and Lucy switched on the hall light and walked toward the small bathroom.

  “He’s got to be here,” said the woman. “I watched them leave.”

  “Gus!” said Lucy, and he came to the bathroom door as she switched on the light and he saw the little boy on the floor by the bathtub curled up with the dog on a pile of bath towels. The boy was asleep and even before Lucy turned on the light Gus saw the absurd purple rings around his eyes and the swollen mouth cracked and raw from a recent beating. The boy slobbered and wheezed and Gus guessed the nose was broken. The coagulation had the nostrils blocked and Gus saw the way the hand was bent.

  “Dirty people,” whispered the woman, and then began crying at once, and Lucy took her out without Gus saying anything. Lucy was back in a moment and neither of them spoke as Lucy lifted him in her arms and took him to the bedroom where he didn’t awaken until she had him dressed. Gus marveled at her strength and how she gently managed the broken wrist and never woke him until they were starting out of the apartme
nt.

  The boy saw Gus first when he awoke and the swollen eyes stared for a second and then through pain or terror the fearful moaning started which never ceased for the hour they were with the boy.

  “We’ll be back,” said Gus to the woman who stood sobbing in the doorway of her apartment. Gus tried to take the boy when they started down the stairway, but when he touched the boy he recoiled and uttered a shriek. Lucy said, “It’s okay, Gus, he’s afraid of you. There, there, darling.” And she patted him as Gus shined his light on the stairway for her. In a few moments they were driving to Central Receiving Hospital and each time Gus got too near the little boy, the moan became a terrible cry so he let Lucy handle him.

  “He doesn’t even look three years old,” said Gus when they parked in the hospital parking lot. “He’s so little.”

  Gus waited in the hallway while they worked on the boy and when a second doctor was called in to look at the arm, Gus peered through the door and saw the first doctor, a floppy-haired young man, nod to the second doctor and point to the little boy whose battered face, green and blue and purple in the naked light, looked as though it had been painted by a surrealist gone mad. “Dig the crazy clownface,” said the first doctor with a bitter smile.

  Lucy came out in fifteen minutes and said, “Gus, his rectum was stitched up!”

  “His rectum?”

  “It had been stitched up! Oh Christ, Gus, I know it’s usually the father in these sex things, but Christ, I can’t believe it.”

  “Was it a professional stitching job?”

  “Yes. A doctor did it. Why wouldn’t the doctor notify the police? Why?”

  “There are doctors,” said Gus.

  “He’s afraid of men, Gus. He was just as much afraid of the doctor as he was of you. The nurse and I had to pet him and talk to him so the doctor could get near him.” Lucy looked for a moment like she would cry but instead she lit a cigarette and walked with Gus to the phone and waited until he phoned the watch commander.

  “He’s a bright child,” said Lucy, as Gus waited for the lieutenant to come to the phone. “When the nurse asked him who did that to his rectum, he said, ‘Daddy did it ’cause I’m a bad boy.’ Oh Christ, Gus . . .”

  It was eleven o’clock before they completed their reports on the boy who was admitted to General Hospital. The parents hadn’t returned home yet and Lieutenant Dilford had another team staked out on the apartment. Gus and Lucy resumed patrol.

  “There’s no sense thinking about it,” said Gus when Lucy was silent for a half hour.

  “I know,” she said, forcing a smile and Gus thought of her comforting the child and thought how beautiful she had looked then.

  “My gosh, it’s almost eleven,” said Gus. “You hungry?”

  “No.”

  “But can you eat?”

  “You eat. I’ll have coffee.”

  “Let’s both have coffee,” said Gus, driving to a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard where there were booths for two and anyone who noticed them would think they were lovers or perhaps a young married couple. Gus thought of how he was wrinkling at the corners of his mouth much like his mother. He smiled, because on second thought no one would believe he was a young lover.

  When they were seated in the booth in the bright spacious restaurant Gus noticed the rusty smear on the shoulder of her dress and he thought again of how she had been with the child, of how strong she was in every way and how capable. He wondered what it would be like to live your life with someone whom you did not have to take care of and he wondered what it would be like to have someone take care of you occasionally, or at least pretend to. The anger started to build when he thought of Vickie and his mother and at least the army could take care of his brother for a few years. Gus vowed that if his mother let John freeload off her when he returned from the service that she would do it on her county check because he would refuse to give her another cent. As soon as he thought this he knew it was a lie because he too was basically a weakling, his only strength being that he could earn a living. When it came down to it he would go on giving them money because he was too much of a weakling to do otherwise. How much easier would life be, he wondered, being married to a strong girl like Lucy.

  “You’ve got blood on your dress,” said Gus, nodding to the smear on her shoulder and he was immediately sorry he said it because he should be trying to cheer her up.

  “I don’t care,” she said, not bothering to look at it, and something had been building up in him. At that moment he almost blurted something. If those steady eyes had been on him instead of on the table he probably would have blurted it but he didn’t, and was glad he didn’t, because she probably would have looked at him sadly and said, “But that’s not what I meant at all.”

  Gus noticed the three teenage girls in the large booth across from them gossiping in shrill voices and smoking compulsively as they tried in vain to handle the two little boys who kept slipping unnoticed to the floor and scampering down the aisle between the booths.

  One of the girls with a proud bulging belly smiled often at the children of her adolescent girlfriends, who had no doubt long since found the mystery of motherhood to be quite different from what had been anticipated. All three girls had ugly hairdos, high, teased, and bleached, and Gus thought that Vickie had been a mother that young. Then the guilt, which he knew was foolish, began to come again, but he forgot it when one of the young mothers grabbed the red-haired tot and cracked him across the face as she whispered, “Sit down and behave you little son of a bitch.”

  Their coffee was half drunk when Lucy said, “Have you been thinking about the little boy, Gus?”

  “Not at all,” said Gus.

  “Isn’t it hard not to?”

  “No it’s not. Not after you get the hang of it. And you should learn that as soon as you can, Lucy.”

  “What should I think about?”

  “Your own problems. That’s what I’ve been doing. Worrying about my own petty problems.”

  “Tell me about your problems, Gus,” said Lucy. “Give me something else to worry about.”

  “Well, we haven’t made a juvenile arrest for three days. The boss is going to be getting on us. That’s something to worry about.”

  “Do you really like juvenile work, Gus? I mean all things considered do you like being a kiddy cop?”

  “I do, Lucy. It’s not easy to explain, but it’s like, well, especially with the little ones, I like the job because we protect them. Take the boy tonight. His father will be arrested and maybe the D.A. will be able to show that he did those things to the boy and maybe he won’t. The boy will be a very bad witness or I miss my guess. Maybe the mother will tell the truth, but that’s doubtful. And by the time the lawyers, headshrinkers, and criminologists have their say, nothing much will happen to him. But at least we got the boy out of there. I’m sure juvenile court won’t give him back to them. Maybe we’ve saved his life. I like to think that we protect the children. To tell you the truth, if the door’d been locked I would’ve broken it down. I’d just about made up my mind. We’re the only ones who can save the little kids from their parents.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to take a man like that and make him confess?” said Lucy, smashing her cigarette butt in the ashtray.

  “I used to think I could torture the truth out of people,” Gus smiled, “but after I was a policeman for a while and saw and arrested some of the really bad ones, I found that I didn’t even want to touch them or be with them. I’d never make the grade in a medieval dungeon.”

  “I had a very proper and square upbringing,” said Lucy, sipping her coffee as Gus stared at a place on her white collarbone where the brown hair touched it and caressed it when she moved her head even slightly. He was disgusted because his heart was racing and his hands were clammy. So he stopped staring at that tender patch of flesh. “My dad teaches high school, like I told you, and Mother would have trouble believing that a parent would even let his child go around without freshly washe
d drawers. They’re good people, you know? How can good people conceive of the existence of really bad people? I was going to be a social worker until I found what L.A.P.D. was paying policewomen. How could I ever be a social worker now that I’ve caught the scent of evil? People aren’t basically good after all, are they?”

  “But maybe they’re not bad, either.”

  “But they’re not good, damn it. All my professors told me they were good! And people lie. God, how they lie. I can’t get over how people lie.”

  “That was the single most difficult thing for me to learn,” Gus said. “I believed people for my first year or so on the job. No matter what anybody said. I wouldn’t even listen to Kilvinsky. All my life I believed what people told me was the truth, and I was a lousy policeman until I got over that mistake. Now I know they’ll lie when the truth would help. They’ll lie when their lives depend on the truth.”

  “What a rotten way to make a living,” said Lucy.

  “Not for a man. For a woman, maybe. But you’ll find someone and get married. You won’t be doing this all your life.” Gus avoided her eyes when he said it.

  “I’ll be sure not to marry a policeman. That would mean I couldn’t escape it.”

  “Cops are terrible husbands anyway,” Gus smiled. “Divorce rate is sky high.”

  “You’re a cop and you’re not a terrible husband.”

  “How do you know?” he said, and then was caught and trapped by the brown eyes.

  “I know you. Better than I’ve ever known anyone.”

  “Well,” said Gus, “I don’t know . . . well . . .” and then he gave up and succumbed to the unblinking eyes, a happy gray rabbit surrendering to the benevolent lethal embrace of the fox and he decided that wherever the conversation went from here he would go with it willingly. Now his heart hammered joyfully.

  “You’re a good policeman,” she said. “You know how things are and yet you’re gentle and compassionate, especially with kids. That’s a rare thing you know. How can you know what people are and still treat them like they were good?”