The Choirboys

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “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 bec
ause 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 shing
les 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.