the Choirboys (1996)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Tommy Rivers, reduced to a shroud of flesh on a little skeleton, eventually died from the blow of a hammer that a healthy child could probably have survived. Lena Rivers was arrested, giving Bruce Simpson the opportunity to titillate Doris Cuber with his purple prose. And Baxter Slate quit being a Juvenile officer because he thought he was the worst one in history and intensified his relationship with Foxy Farrell. He only broke it off when during their mating she bit into his chest so savagely she tore the skin and kissed him with a bloody mouth crooning, "You liked it, Baxter! You liked it, you bastard! Admit it, you pig motherfucker! Want me to do it again? Or do you want me to tell you what I did to Goldie last night after I left you? Goldie's cock is so."

  And then Baxter was weeping for shame and fury and was backhanding Foxy Farrell and more blood was on her mixing with his blood. Then her eyes glassed over and grabbed his wrists and the words dripped like blood from thin dark lips "That's enough. I know what you like, honey. It's okay. Mama knows. Mama knows."

  So after he stopped being a kiddy cop and after he stopped thinking so much about the things Foxy Farrell had taught him about himself which he never, should have learned and after, he started dating other women and trying to enjoy a more ordinary sex life, Baxter Slate became the only choirboy to kill a man in the line of duty. He killed the ordinary guy.

  Baxter and Spermwhale liked to meet for coffee with the other north end cars, particularly 7-A-29, manned by Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard. They would meet at about 7:00 P. M. on week nights at the drive-in on Olympic Boulevard when the air wasn't too busy.

  Policemen always asked, "How's the air?" or "The air busy?" referring to the radio airwaves which directed their working lives. "Quiet air" was what the policemen longed for so that they could be free to cruise and look for real crooks instead of being twenty five year old marriage counselors to fifty-five year old unhappily married couples.

  To Baxter Slate quiet air meant only a prolonged coffee break at the drive-in, where they might meet one or two other radio cars and hope an angry citizen didn't call the station and report them for bunching up and wasting taxpayers' money by swilling coffee instead of catching burglars and thieves.

  It was usually the same outraged citizen who, when getting a traffic ticket by a policeman who was not drinking coffee, would demand to know why he was writing tickets instead of catching burglars and thieves. The same question about burglars and thieves was asked of narcotics officers by dopers and of vice cops by whores, tricks and gamblers. And of motor cops by drunk drivers.

  Burglars and thieves sometimes complained that they only committed crimes against property, not like muggers and rapists. Muggers and rapists never faulted policemen at all, which caused the choirboys to comment that as a rule muggers and rapists were the most appreciative people they contacted.

  But Baxter just wanted to drink coffee on the night he killed the ordinary guy. He was content to sit at the drive-in with Spermwhale and joke with the carhops.

  While Baxter and Spermwhale drank their coffee a Porsche pulled in beside them and Spermwhale remarked to the lone driver that her blonde hair was complemented by the canary yellow Porsche.

  The girl laughed and said, "How many girls do you stop for tickets because their hair coordinates with their paint job?"

  "None that I ever wrote a ticket to," Spermwhale leered as Baxter automatically put his hand on his gun because a man shuffled over to the left side of the car with his hand inside a topcoat.

  It was seventy-five degrees that night but the man wore his tan trench coat turned up. He also wore a black hat with a wide brim that had been out of style for twenty years but was now coming back. His face was round and cleft like putty smashed by a fist.

  He reached inside his coat, and while Spermwhale talked to the girl with canary hair, he flipped out toy handcuffs and a plastic wallet with a dime store badge pinned inside. He said, "I'm working this neighborhood. Any tips for me? Anybody you're after? Be glad to help out."

  Baxter relaxed his gun hand and still sitting behind the wheel of the radio car, looked up at the man, at the vacant blue eyes peering out from under the hat brim, with a hint of a mongoloid fault in those eyes. Baxter guessed the man's mental age to be about ten.

  Spermwhale just shook his head and said, "Partner, you're a born blood donor," because Baxter Slate dug through their notebook and found some old mug shots of suspects long since in jail and gave them to the retardee who could hardly believe his good fortune.

  "Gosh, thanks!" said the play detective. "I'll get right on the case! I'll find these guys! I'll help you make the pinch!"

  "Okay, just give us a call when you find them," Baxter smiled as the young man shuffled away, beaming at the mug shots.

  After being unable to entice a telephone number from the laughing girl in the yellow Porsche, Spermwhale looked at her license number and ran a DMV check over the radio, wrote down her name and address. Then he leaned out the window of the police car and said, "You know, you remind me of a girl used to live up in Hollywood on Fountain, next to where I used to live."

  The girl looked stunned and said, "You lived on Fountain?"

  "Yeah," Spermwhale said convincingly. "There was this girl, lived in the six thousand block. I used to see her coming out her apartment. I fell in love with her but I never met her. Once I asked the manager of her building what her name was and he said, Norma. You sure look like her."

  "I look. but that's me! My name's Norma!" And then she saw Baxter grinning and she reddened and said, "Okay, how'd you know? Oh yeah, my license plate. Your radio. Oh yeah."

  "But it coulda happened like that," Spermwhale said, his scarred furry eyebrows pulled down contritely.

  "Well, since you have my name and address, I might as well give you my phone number," said the girl with the canary hair who was impressed with the powers of the law and by Baxter's good looks.

  While Spermwhale flirted, Baxter sipped coffee and thought of how the smog had been at twilight. How blue it was and even purple in the deep shadows. Poison can be lovely, thought Baxter Slate.

  Then another radio car pulled into the drive-in and parked in the last stall near the darkened alley and Baxter decided he'd leave Spermwhale to romance the blonde. Baxter left his hat and flashlight but took his coffee and strolled over to talk with the other choirboys.

  And at that moment the rear door window on the passenger side of 7-A-77's car shattered before his eyes! Then the front fender went THUNK!

  Calvin Potts screamed "SOMEBODY'S SHOOTIN AT US!" Baxter Slate dove to the pavement as the doors to the black and white burst open. Calvin and Francis were down with him crawling on their bellies and no one else, not even Spermwhale who had a blue veiner, even noticed. Then Spermwhale turned down the police radio which had begun to get noisy and looked across the parking lot at the three choirboys on their bellies just as his windshield shattered and he went flying out the passenger door even faster than Lieutenant Grimsley when they put the angry ducks in his car.

  "Did you see the flash?" yelled Baxter, who was on his knees scrambling for the protection of his black and white as business went on around them as usual. Car radios blared cacophonously. Dishes clattered; Trays clanged. People slurped creamy milkshakes. Chewed blissfully on fat hamburgers. Gossiped. No one perceived a threat. No one noticed four blue suited men crawling on their bellies. Finally, a miniskirted carhop stopped and said to Baxter, "Lose your contact lens or something, honey?"

  Then all four policemen were on their feet running for a fence which separated the parking lot from the alley where the shots had to have come from.

  Baxter got his wits about him and yelled, "Spermwhale, go call for help!"

  Then gingerly shining his light through the darkness, Francis Tanaguchi shouted, "There's a rifle in the alley!"

  Calvin Potts crawled forward out of sight for a few minutes, then, crouching, ran back out of the alley carrying a modified .22 caliber rifle with a tommy gun grip and an infrared sco
pe lovingly mounted on the stock. The gun could fire hollow points almost as fast as you could pull the trigger, and what possibly saved the policemen was that the sniper had jammed the gun in his excitement.

  Baxter Slate was the first to suggest driving around to the street on the west, and while Francis and Calvin quickly cleared glass from the seat, Baxter was squealing out, knocking coffee cups all over the parking lot as the siren of the nearest help car could already be heard in the distance.

  Spermwhale asked to be dropped near the mouth of the alley on the next residential block west while Baxter circled one block farther on the theory that a man could run very far and fast after just having tried to ambush some policemen.

  On St. Andrew's Place, Baxter Slate saw a dark running shadow. He jammed down the accelerator and the next sixty seconds became a fragmented impression as he screeched to a stop beside the running figure and jumped out in the darkness, gun drawn. He was met by a fanatical scrambling charge by what turned out to be a weaponless man. For once Baxter Slate did not intellectualize. He simply obeyed his instinct and training and emptied his gun at point blank hitting the man three times out of six, one bullet crashed through the left frontal lobe killing him almost at once, discovered that unlike choreographed slow motion movie violence, the real thing is swift and oblique and incoherent.

  After an intensive interrogation by the Robbery-Homicide Division shooting team and after his own reports were written, a pale and tense Baxter Slate met the other nine choirboys at MacArthur Park and tried to fill them in as best he could on the details. The trouble was there weren't any.

  The young man's name was Brian Greene, and luckily for Baxter his fingerprints were found on the rifle. He was twenty-two years old. He was white. He had no arrest record. He had no history of mental illness. The Vietnam War was long over and he was not a veteran. He was not a student. He cared nothing about politics. He was a garage mechanic. He had a wife and baby.

  Francis was beside himself that night at choir practice, not so much in fear but rage. And finally despair.

  "So quit talkin about it," Calvin said. "I'm sick a hearin about it. The asshole tried to shoot us and it's over and that's it."

  "But Calvin, don't you see? He didn't even know us. We're just. just. blue symbols!"

  "Okay, so we're blue," Calvin reminded him. "You only see black and blue around the ghetto when the sun goes down."

  "But we were on Olympic Boulevard. That's not a ghetto. He was white. Why'd he shoot? Who was he? Doesn't he know we're more than bluecoats and badges? It's weird. I don't know where these people are coming from. I dunno"

  "I dunno where you're comin from," Calvin said angrily.

  "I dunno where I'm coming from either," Francis said. "I don't know where my head is."

  "What fuckin Establishment did we represent to him?" Spermwhale demanded to know. "I'm tired a bein a symbol! I'm not a symbol to my ex-wives and ex-kids. Why does an ordinary guy wanna shoot me?"

  And all the choirboys looked at each other in the moonlight but there were no answers forthcoming.

  "I didn't want to kill him," Baxter Slate said quietly. "I never wanted to kill anybody."

  It was suddenly cold in the park. They were ecstatic when Ora Lee Tingle showed up and hinted she might pull that train.

  Chapter TEN

  7-A-29: Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard.

  Lieutenant Finque had a splitting migraine at rollcall on the night Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard met the Moaning Man and called for choir practice.

  The migraine was brought about by his defense of the Police Protective League, the bargaining agent manned by Los Angeles police officers for the department.

  "How the fuck can the Protective League do anything for us?" Spermwhale demanded. "As long as brass're members of the league. Don't you see, the league gotta be more like a real union. It's management against labor. You people are management. Only the policeman rank and maybe sergeants should be in the league. The rest of the brass are the enemy, for chrissake!"

  "That's not true!" Lieutenant Finque said. "The commanders and the deputy chiefs are just as much police officers as."

  "My ass, Lieutenant!" Spermwhale roared. "When did you last hear of a deputy chief gettin TB or a hernia or whiplash or pneumonia or shot or beat up or stabbed? Only cop's disease they ever get is heart trouble and that's not cause they have to jump outta radio cars and run down or fight some fuckin animal who wants to make garbage outta them, it's cause they eat and drink so much at all those sex orgies where they think up ways to fuck and rape the troops!"

  "How many deputy chiefs or commanders ever get suicidal?" Baxter Slate asked suddenly, and for a moment the room was quiet as each man thought of that most dangerous of policemen's diseases.

  "Yeah, it's usually the workin cop who eats his gun," Spermwhale said as he unconsciously thought of at least ten men he had served with who had done it.

  "I'd hate to be a member of this department if we ever go from the Protective League to a labor union," Lieutenant Finque solemnly announced with the consuming hatred and distrust of labor unions that was prevalent in those police officers who had sprung from the middle class and whose only collective bargaining experiences had been as Establishment representatives facing angry sign wavers on picket lines.

  "Protective League my ass!" Spermwhale Whalen said. "They take our dues and wine and dine politicians while I eat okra and gumbo at Fat Ass Charlie's Soul Kitchen."

  "I thought you liked eatin like a home boy, Spermwhale," Calvin Potts grinned.

  "We gotta sue the fuckin city for nearly every raise we get," Spermwhale continued. "I'm sick a payin dues to the Protective League. I get more protection from a two year old box a rubbers!"

  "Anyone for changing the subject?" Sergeant Nick Yanov suggested, as the lieutenant held his throbbing head and, vowed to check Spermwhale Whalen's personnel package to see how many more months he had to go before retirement. And to ask the captain if there weren't a place they could transfer him until then. Like West Valley Station which was twenty-five miles away.

  Lieutenant Finque's eyes were starting to get as red and glassy as Roscoe Rules' always were. Of late the lieutenant always had drops of grainy white saliva glued to the corners of his mouth from his incessant sucking of antacid tablets.

  "I'm going to change the subject, change the subject," Lieutenant Finque announced strangely. "The captain inspected the shotgun locker and found a gun with cigars stuffed down the barrel! If that happens again somebody's going to pay!" No one had to turn toward Spermwhale who was the only cigar smoker on the watch. "Young coppers they hire these days'll rip you off for anything," said Spermwhale. "Gotta hide your goods, Lieutenant."

  Lieutenant Finque had begun losing weight of late what with his migraines and acid stomach and inability to relate with Captain Drobeck who had turned down three dinner invitations this month despite the fact that Lieutenant Finque had done everything he could think of to woo the captain, including joining his American Legion Police Post. The lieutenant knew he should be clear headed what with the ordeal of studying for the captain's exam three hours a day when his wife and children would leave him alone. And here at the job he had to deal with recalcitrant uglies like Spermwhale Whalen."

  "Let's read some crimes," the watch commander said, picking up a sheaf of papers. "There was an ADW on a teacher at the high school. Says here a thirty-four year old schoolteacher had just started her third period when."

  "Kind of late in life, ain't it?" Francis Tanaguchi giggled and Lieutenant Finque jerked spasmodically and tore the report.

  Lieutenant Finque blinked several times and simply could not regain the thread. "This report's terrible. It's sloppy. Who did it?" And his eyes were so watery he couldn't read the name.

  "Just a few pencigraphical errors, sir," said the culprit, Harold Bloomguard.

  "Uh. Intelligence has a rumor," Lieutenant Finque said, forgetting the crimes and going on disjointedly to a note in the rota
ting folder. "We may have a riot in the vicinity of Dorsey High School between four and four thirty this afternoon. Some militant."

  "A half hour riot?" said Calvin Potts and Lieutenant Finque's thread came totally unraveled. He began talking to Sergeant Yanov on his right as though they were alone in the room.

  "You know, Yanov, there's a rumor that these young Vietnam vets they're hiring these days are smoking pot. You see how hard it is to make them keep their hair off their collars and their moustaches trimmed? And there's a rumor about fragging! Someone heard some policemen talking about bombing a watch commander!"

  "I'll read the crimes," Sergeant Yanov said abruptly, putting a steadying hand on Lieutenant Finque's arm while the assembly of policemen looked at one another in growing realization. "Let's see, here's one to perk up your evening. A rapist stuck his automatic down in his belt while he made the victim blow him and he got so excited he shot his balls off right in the middle of the headjob!"

  The explosion of cheers startled the shit out of Lieutenant Finque who thought he was being fragged. He only kept from jumping up because Sergent Yanov's strong left hand held his arm pressed to the table top as the sergeant regained control of the rollcall.

  "Keep an eyeball out for Melvin Barnes," Sergeant Yanov continued. "His picture's on the board. Local boy and he's running from his parole officer. He'll be around Western Avenue. He likes to run because he's a celebrity on the avenue when the cops're looking for him. But he'll be around because he doesn't mind getting busted. He's an institutional man. There're thousands like him."

  "Amen," Spermwhale Whalen said. "Ask me, I think half the fuckin population craves some kind a institution or other. They can't get it, they'll get taken care of some other way. If we just made our jails comfortable, gave the boys some pussy and all, shit, we couldn't blast em out on the streets. Be a lot cheaper makin em happy and keepin em inside the rest a their lives than runnin them through the fuckin system over and over again while a few people get hurt along the way."