The Choirboys

by Joseph Wambaugh

It started with Sam Niles deciding to drive Kimberly bananas much as Celeste Holm tried to drive Ronald Colman bananas on a movie Sam had seen on “The Late Show.” He felt a little silly that night as he lay in his twin bed, knowing that he had made enough noise coming home from work to wake up the landlady down stairs. He knew that Kimberly could not possibly sleep through his drawer banging, toilet flushing, door slamming, shoe dropping, and would have to respond as Sam lay in the darkness with his back to her and forced out a muffled hilarious laugh guaranteed to drive her wild.

  After the third stream of laughter he heard Kimberly stir in her bed and say, “Sam, are you drunk or what?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s so damn funny at three A.M.?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then please let me sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  And moments later Sam Niles was giggling more hilariously than before, because, by God, it worked! He knew she would soon be beside herself with jealousy, curiosity and debilitating rage. Then Sam began chuckling in earnest, his body and bed shaking.

  Finally Kimberly spoke again. “Sam, honey.”

  “Yes?”

  “No offense, but any guy who won’t screw his wife and giggles a lot really should try to get himself together on Hollywood Boulevard. Why don’t you put on my yellow miniskirt and go out strolling. You might get lucky.”

  So Sam Niles angrily decided that what worked for Celeste Holm would not work on Kimberly Cutler Niles. He was not yet convinced that Oscar Wilde was right and Aristotle was wrong: that life imitates art. So he went back to television for an answer to his domestic misery And he found it on “The Late, Late Show.”

  It was John Wayne telling Maureen O’Hara that there’d be no locked doors in their marriage as he broke down a three inch oak door and threw the stunning redhead onto their four-poster, breaking it to the ground.

  Like so many policemen, Sam Niles was a John Wayne fan, though he had never fallen prey to the malaise the Los Angeles police psychologist called the “John Wayne Syndrome,” wherein a young hotdog responds with independence, assurance and violence to all of life’s problems and comes to believe his four inch oval shield is as large as Gawain’s ever was. Roscoe Rules, who swaggered and talked police work every waking moment and wore black gloves and figuratively shot from the hip and literally from the lip, was surely suffering from the syndrome. But though Sam Niles had never been a hotdog or black glove cop, he admired the direct, forceful, simplistic approach to life found in a John Wayne film. And he was given the chance to be the Duke that very week.

  It started over Sam’s bitching about Kimberly’s cooking which like everything else in their marriage had deteriorated to the point that even she could hardly eat it. It ended with her in angry tears, which was not unusual, and running into the bathroom and locking the door, which was extremely unusual.

  “Goddamn women,” Sam Niles muttered in consummate frustration, hurling his half-eaten plate of food against the wall, his stomach afire from the poisons he was manufacturing.

  Sam found himself standing in front of the bathroom door, making a fist and shouting, “There’ll be no locked doors in our marriage, Kimberly Cutler Niles!”

  And when there was no answer he John Wayned the door, kicking it right next to the lock and sending it crashing across the bathroom to smash into the wall and crack the porcelain toilet.

  The door exploded. It made a loud boom. But nothing like the boom his Smith amp; Wesson.38 made in the hands of Kimberly Cutler Niles as she stood inside the bathroom, half out of her mind, watching the door sailing past.

  Then Sam Niles was lying flat on his stomach from his feet trying to run backward. Then he was kneeling on his broken glasses pleading, “Please Kimberly! Please don’t kill me! Oh, God!” And then there was another explosion and a third, and Sam Niles was up and crashing through the aluminum screen door and running down the walk and across the street to a vacant lot where he lay trembling in the knee-high weeds, watching the front of the apartment building, waiting for a wrathful figure to emerge from the darkness. Ready to run like a turpentined cat as far as his legs could carry him from the maniacal Kimberly Cutler Niles.

  The police were called by three neighbors that night, but the walls and concrete walks of the apartment building had played tricks with the sound of gunfire and no one knew the shots had come from the Niles’ apartment. It was finally thought that someone had driven by and shot up the place. Two detectives worked for three weeks on the theory that an unknown assailant had a grudge against the apartment house manager who sweated off ten pounds during the investigation. Kimberly bought a new door and toilet and had the interior bullet holes patched before she moved out and filed for her divorce.

  When he was sure Kimberly was in class Sam Niles came back and got his clothes, ready to bolt out the door any second. He found his belongings on the living room floor. There was a note beside his gun which read, “Who’s got the biggest balls now, hero?”

  Sam Niles never fully appreciated a John Wayne film after that night.

  But he wasn’t thinking too much about Kimberly Cutler or John Wayne the night the hype blew their case away and they arrested the man who painted himself red.

  Both Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard had heard of the man who painted himself red. But prior to the contact with him he was known only as the man who painted his car red. His name was Oscar Mobley and he was fifty-eight years old, white, unmarried, lived alone, was unemployed and liked to paint his car red. It would never have been called to the attention of the Los Angeles Police Department if it weren’t for the fact that Oscar Mobley did it with a paintbrush and bucket and did it perhaps once a month. The policemen who knew him said that his fifteen year old Ford outweighed a Cadillac limousine, so thick were the coats of peeling red enamel.

  And yet Oscar Mobley would probably never have become the subject of rollcall gossip if it weren’t that he would occasionally paint his headlights red and drive along Wilshire Boulevard at night, making cars pull over. Oscar Mobley had many warnings and traffic tickets over painting his headlights red, but just as it appeared that he would give up painting his headlights red, Oscar Mobley suddenly for no apparent reason painted all the windows of his car red, and unable to see through a red opaque windshield, got himself into a traffic accident on Washington Boulevard. He was ordered by a traffic court judge never ever to paint his headlights or windshield red again.

  Oscar Mobley had not been heard from for several months, apparently content to have a car with red body red bumpers, red tires, red hubcaps and red grille, but with unpainted windows and headlights. Then something happened on the night Sam and Harold met Oscar Mobley.

  “Seven-A-Twenty-nine, see the woman, male mental case, Eleventh and Irolo, code two.”

  “Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, roger,” Harold responded as Sam picked up speed a little and drove through the nighttime traffic to the residential neighborhood of Oscar Mobley.

  “It’s about time you got here,” said the caller, Mrs. Jasper, the next door neighbor of Oscar Mobley Her hair was wet with red paint and a blue cotton dress she held in her hands was covered with the stuff. “I just asked that crazy nut Oscar why he was painting his headlights and windshield red, that’s all I did…”

  “Wait a minute,” Sam Niles said as he and Harold stood in the street with Mrs. Jasper, her husband, her brother and eight other neighborhood men and women who had almost decided to lynch the frail Oscar Mobley until someone had the presence of mind to call the police.

  “Oscar started to paint his car again tonight,” said Mr. Jasper, a man with receding hair and a parrot’s face, who was even more frail than Oscar Mobley and who had no stomach for fighting for Mrs. Jasper who could have licked Oscar Mobley and Mr. Jasper at the same time on her worst day.

  “Yeah, we know about Oscar,” Sam Niles said.

  “Well he started to paint again,” Mr. Jasper continued. “He ain’t done that for three, four months
now. He won’t ever tell anyone on the street why he paints his car red and we asked him a thousand times, maybe a million. He just smiles and keeps painting and won’t answer you. Well tonight he done what the judge told him not to do, he started painting the headlights and the windows red, and my wife just came out on the front porch and asked him why.”

  “That’s all I done and that crazy little…”

  “Please, ma’am, one at a time,” Harold said.

  “Well, my little woman just comes out and sees him there under the streetlight, painting everything red and she asks him why he’s doing it and he says something she can’t hear and she thinks at last maybe she’s gonna learn the secret of why Oscar Mobley paints his car red and she just walks over…”

  “Out of curiosity,” added Mrs. Jasper.

  “Out of curiosity,” said Mr. Jasper, “and when she gets close she says, ‘Oscar, why do you paint your car red?’ And he don’t say a word. Then he done it.”

  “Done… did what?” asked Harold.

  “Painted me red!” Mrs. Jasper shouted. “The little son of a bitch started painting me. I got the paintbrush in my mouth and I couldn’t breathe. He was painting my hair and neck and arms. If he hadn’t a surprised me I’d a knocked the little bastard down the sewer, but pretty soon I couldn’t even see for the paint in my eyes. And I turn and run for the house and he chases me painting my…”

  “Her ass,” said Mr. Jasper.

  “Yes, the dirty beggar even did that to me and I’ve been scrubbing with paint thinner till my skin’s almost wore off. Look at me!”

  Harold shined the flashlight past Mrs. Jasper’s face so as not to hit her eyes with the beam and it was true, her face and neck were a splotched and faded red like a pomegranate.

  “Well, it’s time someone did something about Oscar,” Sam Niles sighed and he and Harold got their batons and put them in the rings on their Sam Brownes and went to find Oscar Mobley and let Mrs. Jasper make a citizen’s arrest on him for painting her red.

  As Sam expected, Oscar Mobley did not open the door when he pounded and rang the bell.

  “It’s unlocked, Sam,” Harold said when he turned the knob of the front door of the little three room house where Oscar lived with two cats and a goldfish.

  Sam shrugged and readied his revolver and Harold Bloomguard also fingered his gun, ready to touch the spring on the clamshell holster. Both men entered the darkened kitchen and tiptoed toward the narrow hallway to the tiny bedroom where a lamp burned.

  Sam went in first, his gun out in front and he said quietly “Mr. Mobley, if you’re in here I want you to come out. We’re police officers and we want to talk to you. We won’t hurt you. Come out.”

  There was no answer and Sam entered the room, seeing nothing but an unmade bed, a box of cat litter, a broken down nightstand with an old radio on it, a pile of dirty clothing on the floor and a napless overstuffed chair.

  Sam was about to check under the bed when he and Harold were scared half out of their wits by the naked Oscar Mobley who suddenly leaped out from behind the overstuffed chair, painted red from head to foot, arms outstretched.

  “Up popped the devil!” yelled Oscar Mobley cheerfully.

  It was miraculous that neither officer shot him. Both were exerting at least a pound of trigger pull on their guns which like all department issued guns had been altered to fire only double action. They stood, shoulders pressed together, backs to the wall, gaping at Oscar Mobley who posed, arms extended, grinning proudly, the paint hardly dry on his small naked body.

  Everything had been painted: the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet, his hair, face, body, genitals. He had managed with a roller to get the center of his back. He had neglected his teeth only because he forgot them. He had not painted his eyeballs only because he started to and it hurt.

  As Sam Niles later stood in Oscar Mobley’s kitchen and smoked to steady his nerves, the equally shaken Harold Bloomguard patiently persuaded Oscar Mobley that despite the beautiful paint job he should wear a bathrobe to go where they were going because it was a nippy evening and he might catch cold.

  After agreeing that Elwood Banks, the jailor at Wilshire Station, might object to their bringing in a man who painted himself red since it would be messy to try to roll fingerprints over the coat of red enamel, Sam and Harold took Oscar Mobley where he belonged: Unit Three, Psychiatric Admitting, of the Los Angeles County General Hospital. The hospital now had a grander name: Los Angeles County, University of Southern California Medical Center. But it would forever be General Hospital to the indigent people it served.

  Oscar Mobley was admitted, later had a sanity hearing wherein he steadfastly refused to tell anyone why he painted his car, himself and Mrs. Jasper red, and went to a state hospital for six months where he refused to tell anyone else his secret.

  After his release he moved to a new neighborhood, took a job delivering throwaway circulars, did it beautifully for eight days, then painted his boss and his boss’ wife red and was recommitted to the state hospital. But all this happened long after Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard took him to Unit Three, in time to miss code seven though they were starving, and just in time to meet the Moaning Man.

  The call came just after 11:00 P.M. “Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, shot fired vicinity of Ninth and New Hampshire.”

  “Rampart Division,” Sam Niles said to Harold Bloomguard who nodded, picked up the mike and said, “Seven-A-Twenty-nine reporting that the call is in Rampart Division.”

  “Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, stand by,” said the radio operator as she checked with one of the policemen who supervise the girls and assign the call tickets.

  “Goddamn Rampart cars’ve been pulling this shit too often lately,” Sam said to Harold who didn’t mind handling the call in someone else’s division because Sam had been exceedingly quiet and Harold was getting as bored as Sam always was.

  “If we have to handle this one, next time a Rampart car gets a call in our area we’ll just let the bastards handle it,” Sam said.

  “Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, handle the call in Rampart Division,” said the radio operator. “No Rampart units available.”

  “Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, roger on the call,” Harold Bloomguard said as Sam Niles pushed up his drooping steel rimmed glasses and threw a cigarette out the window saying, “They’re probably all over on Alvarado eating hamburgers, the lazy pricks.”

  Sam drove slowly on the seedy residential streets, mostly a white Anglo district, but with some black and Latin residents. He shined the spotlights on the front of homes and apartments, hoping not to find anyone who may have phoned about shots being fired. Sam Niles wanted to go to an east Hollywood drive-in and eat cherry pie and drink coffee and try to score with a waitress he knew.

  “There it is,” Harold said as Sam’s spotlight beam lighted a chinless withered man in a bathrobe who waited in front of a two story stucco apartment house. The door glass had been broken so many times the panes were replaced by plywood and cardboard.

  Sam took his time parking, and Harold was already across the narrow street by the time Sam gathered up his flashlight and put his cigarette pack in his pocket and locked the car door so someone didn’t have fun slashing the upholstery or stealing the shotgun from the rack.

  “Heard a shot,” the old man said. His eyes were a quiet brown like a dog’s.

  “You live here?”

  “Yep.”

  “You the manager?”

  “Nope, but I got a passkey I help out Charlie Bates. He’s the manager.”

  “Why do we need a key?” Harold asked.

  “Shot came from up there.”

  And the man in the bathrobe pointed a yellow bony finger up to the front window on the second floor where a gray muslin drape flapped rhythmically as the gusts of wind blew and sucked through the black hole of an open window on what had become a chilled and cloudy night.

  “Give us the passkey, we’ll have a look,” Sam Niles said and later he wondered if h
e felt something then.

  It seemed he did. He was to recall distinctly wishing that a Rampart unit would feel guilty that Wilshire was handling their calls and perhaps come driving down Ninth Street to relieve them.

  The stairs creaked as they climbed and the whole building reeked, dank and sour from urine and moldy wool carpet on the stairs. They stood one on each side of the door and Sam knocked.

  The dying tree outside, the last on the block, rattled in the wind which rushed through the narrow hallway upstairs. The building was surprisingly quiet for one housing eighty-five souls. Sam reached up and unscrewed the only bulb at their end of the hall, and said, “We better be in the dark.”

  “Might be some drunk sitting in there playing with a gun,” Harold nodded and both policemen drew their service revolvers.

  Sam knocked again and the sound echoed through the empty hall which had no floor carpet, only old wooden floors caked with grime which could never be removed short of sanding the wood a quarter of an inch down. A mustard colored cat, displaying the indifference Sam Niles usually feigned, watched from the windowsill.

  The wind blew and it was a cold wind, yet Sam was to remember later that he was sweating. He tasted the salt running through his moustache into the dimple of his upper lip. Then they heard it.

  At first Sam Niles thought it was the wind. Then he saw the look on Harold Bloomguard’s face in the dark hallway when he moved into a patch of moonlight. He knew that Harold heard it and that it wasn’t the wind.

  Then they heard it again. The Moaning Man was saying:

  “Mmmmmm. Mmmmmmm. Mmmmmuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh.”

  Then Sam was sweating in earnest and Harold’s pale little face was glistening in the swatch of moonlight as he pressed himself against the wall, gun in his left hand. Sam Niles turned the key slowly and then kicked the door open with his toe and jumped back against the wall.

  “Mmmmm,” said the Moaning Man. “Uuuuhhhhh. Mmm-mmuuuuuhhhhh.”

  “Jesus Christ motherfucker son of a bitch!” Sam Niles, like many men, swore incoherently when he was frightened.