the Choirboys (1996)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Captain Drobeck, sure of the affection of his men, smiled benevolently and said, "Please, gentlemen, let's calm ourselves. This is perfectly silly."

  "It's not silly, Captain. Somebody insulted my wife," Lieutenant Grimsley answered.

  "Please, Lieutenant, please!" Captain Drobeck whispered. "The deputy chief is going to be here any minute and you're acting like a child. My god, I can't believe this."

  "It was personal, sir. It was vicious!"

  "All right, all right, will you settle for an apology? It was undoubtedly some young policeman's idea of a joke. Christ, most of these men here are closer to twenty than thirty. They're kids! I'll have the boy apologize and we can forget it." Captain Drobeck turned to the platoon of men and showed his toothy paternal grin and said, "Okay, fellas. Let's fess up. Who farted?"

  And he laughed uproariously with the men as he waited for the culprit to reply so he could show the men how silly Hardass Grimsley was and how magnanimously he could forgive the insult to Ardella Grimsley who was one of those garrulous bitches Captain Drobeck couldn't stand in the first place.

  But a funny thing happened: nobody fessed up.

  "Come on now, boys," Captain Drobeck laughed, but the laughter was a little strained. "Just cop out whoever you are. Tell Lieutenant Grimsley it was an accident and it's all forgotten."

  And the laughter continued but was not joined in this time by Captain Drobeck who smiled patiently and waited for the guilty party to show Lieutenant Grimsley how he, Captain Drobeck, could relate with his men.

  Still, nobody fessed up.

  "I just can't understand this," Captain Drobeck said. "I've given you every opportunity to show some maturity here and I think Lieutenant Grimsley deserves it. Now, by God, I'd like the young man to just apologize to the lieutenant and it'll all be forgotten. But we can't wait all day and I expect it to be done immediately." But nobody copped out.

  Captain Drobeck was suddenly not laughing nor was he smiling. He was fidgeting with the crease in his uniform pants and nodding angrily. "All-right, that's the way it's going to be, huh? By god, you wanna act like kids I can treat you like kids. You want the field sergeants to start coming down on you, huh? Well that can be arranged, I assure you. Now this is your last chance. If the man that farted isn't man enough to admit it I want the man next to him to do it."

  And the man next to him obediently did it. His fart was louder than the first.

  "ATTEN-HUT!" screamed Captain Drobeck and the platoon snapped to attention. The captain began pacing the rear ranks like a lion, muttering viciously as he looked each man in the eye and tried to apply some detective techniques he had learned from reading books on investigation when he studied for the captain's exam. He looked for nervous twitches, telltale blinking. The trouble was he was so nervous waiting for Deputy Chief Lynch and now so angry himself that his own eyes were winking like semaphores.

  After he paced the entire platoon he strode angrily to the front and whispered to Suckass Sneed, 'You find out who did it, hear me?"

  "Yes sir. The first or the second fart?"

  "I want that man! The first one!"

  "It was a colored voice, I mean a black voice, I'm sure of it," said Sneed. "That narrows it down to six."

  Just then Deputy Chief Lynch's car arrived. The incident was set aside temporarily. The inspection was conducted and, it as a great success. Captain Drobeck thanked the chief for his gracious compliments and assured him the credit was due to the loyalty of the men. Thirty minutes after the inspection, Captain Drobeck was in a cubicle in the restroom relieving his rumbling bowels from the tension of the day. He had the morning paper there and was grunting happily and smoking his pipe. Suddenly the door to the restroom burst open and someone released a terrible, vengeful fart. Before the footsteps ran back out a voice said, "Take that, you jive turkey!"

  Captain Drobeck never solved the mystery. But one thing was certain: it was a colored voice.

  On one of his weekly evenings out on the streets, Lieutenant Grimsley caught eight officers with their hats off, one smoking in public and three others drinking coffee which proved to have been gratuitously received. Just before calling it a night, he added to his score by bagging Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate staked out on a stop sign at 11:00 P. M. on a residential street where a car didn't pass more often than once every half hour. Both officers were slumped in their seats, heads resting against the windows. But like any veteran policemen, they could rely on years of experience to trigger signals in deep slumber when 7-A-l was mentioned among the ceaseless garbled almost unintelligible radio messages.

  Legally speaking, Lieutenant Hardass Grimsley was a strict constructionist. He could not prove his suspicions that Spermwhale and Baxter were asleep, so their suspension papers said:

  Officers failed to remain alert in that officers assumed a position of repose in parked police vehicle with eyelids pressed together, breathing heavily and regularly. Four days-.

  In addition, through diligent police work, Lieutenant Grimsley found a bag of avocados in the trunk of the black and white, which he traced to Francis Tanaguchi, who, it turned out, accepted them gratuitously from a Japanese produce market wherein the owner was proud of Francis' being a Japanese policeman, not knowing that Francis was Mexican at heart and would use the avocados in making guacamole which he would ladle into his tacos. Spermwhale and Baxter were given an additional punishment of a divisional admonishment which read:

  I hereby admonish you in that you accepted some avocados from another officer who received them from a private party, who was not, in fact, morally correct in giving the avocados without recompense. Moreover, the other officer was guilty of moral turpitude for accepting the free avocados. The acceptance of gratuities is against Department regulations and you were aware of this regulation at the time you imprudently accepted the avocados from the officer who was also aware when he imprudently accepted the avocados from the man who should have been more prudent.

  Francis Tanaguchi was not given an admonishment or any other penalty because the community relations officer, Lieutenant Gay, was trying to make public relations inroads with the Oriental community by putting Officer Tanaguchi up as a model policeman. He persuaded Captain Drobeck not to let Lieutenant Grimsley reprimand Francis officially. Lieutenant Grimsley acceded to the decision since it came from the station captain but he was frustrated because there wasn't something he could get on the old Japanese who gave Francis the avocados. He asked the vice squad to keep an eye on the market in case the old man should sell beer to minors. And he certainly put Lieutenant Gay and Francis on his list.

  But if Lieutenant Gay, Francis Tanaguchi and the old Japanese were on Lieutenant Grimsley's list, Lieutenant Grimsley was certainly on Spermwhale Whalen's list.

  "His dance card's all filled up," Spermwhale vowed at choir practice when the whole night had been spent on plotting revenge.

  "I get the first waltz," said Francis Tanaguchi, who sat in the dark on a blanket under a tree.

  The choirboys began various subtle attacks on Lieutenant Grimsley which ultimately ended up in his transfer from Wilshire Station because according to the station captain he was getting too chummy with certain officers.

  The officers he was apparently getting so chummy with were two of the MacArthur Park choirboys, namely Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate, who when they were finished with him could actually walk into Lieutenant Grimsley's office and muss up his lint covered, thinning hair and say things like, "How about a day off tomorrow, Hardass?" When no one else under the rank of lieutenant ever dared to address him even by his first name, Elliott.

  This remarkable familiarity was accomplished by some groundwork supplied by Francis Tanaguchi which included shimming the door of the lieutenant's private car and putting three Mac Arthur ducks in the back seat.

  It was entertaining for the choirboys to stake out the police parking lot after end-of-watch and see Lieutenant Grimsley trudge through the dark, sleepy after a hard night
of paper work, and get into his car only to come flying out five seconds later and fall on his ass from the duck excrement on his shoes. It was said that his wife nagged him for month about the green slime she would find stubbornly clinging to the creases of the leather upholstery.

  The choirboys also put a particularly fierce black gander in Lieutenant Grimsley's locker at the station which resulted in an investigation by officers of Internal Affairs Division which lasted a week.

  Harold Bloomguard, the protector of ducks and all animals, in each case volunteered to take the hissing, squawking birds and get rid of them after the duck shit hit the fan. This should have made him a logical suspect since he mysteriously showed up after each duck attack but Lieutenant Grimsley was too outraged to put two and two together. Besides, it was extremely hard to add two and two when your personal belongings were dripping and foul smelling and an enraged loathsome creature had been banging on your head with its bill.

  There were minor attacks wherein the siren on the Lieutenant's police car was fixed so that it wailed and could not be shut off when he started the engine. And his baton, which he kept in the door holder, was removed, carefully sawed in half and replaced.

  But the coup which utterly demolished Lieutenant Grimsley and made him a slave to Spermwhale Whalen and precipitated his transfer occurred when Spermwhale bribed a black whore named Fanny Forbes, who was tall and curvy and slender despite her years, to entertain Lieutenant Grimsley. Spermwhale Whalen told her in which restaurant the lieutenant ate on Thursday nights when he could break away from his duties which consisted of signing routine reports and trying to catch policemen loafing in the station when they should be handling their calls.

  It took Fanny Forbes, who posed as a tourist from Philadelphia, exactly twenty-five minutes to talk Lieutenant Grimsley into driving her and her bogus suitcase, containing the dirty laundry of Spermwhale Whalen, to a motel on La Brea. He parked his black and white on a side street and insisted on carrying her bag up the back stairs while she registered alone.

  Eight minutes after she registered, and while Lieutenant Grimsley, naked except for his black police socks, was hotly kissing the well worn source of her income and whispering endearments like, "Oh baby, you don't seem like a Negro. You look like a Samoan" Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate crept up the same back stairway and opened the door which the whore had left unlocked.

  The two choirboys waited a few minutes more, their ears to the door, and heard Lieutenant Grimsley panting so loudly they were afraid they'd miss the prearranged signal from Fanny Forbes.

  "She's really got him sucking wind."

  "Yeah!" Spermwhale whispered, his hat in hand, ear pressed to the door, waiting, waiting.

  And then they heard it, the signal: "Oh honey!" cried the whore. "You got balls like a elephant and a whang like a ox!"

  Just as Spermwhale burst through the door Lieutenant Grimsley was in the throes of blissful agony. When he withdrew and jumped from the bed his face was like a dead man's.

  "Okay, who called the pol. Lieutenant Grimsley!" cried Spermwhale Whalen.

  "What're you men doing here?" cried Lieutenant Grimsley.

  "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 Orobeck 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 complained 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 fini
shed 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 should take it home because Knuckles Garrity was not 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."