the Black Marble (1977)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  "Oh, never mind," he said. "Go ahead and eat Grishas food. Grisha, you eat Misha's food today."

  He hobbled toward the door again, looking at his watch, listing from side to side. Then he realized that a burrowing rodent from southern Russia could never jump high enough to eat a parakeet's food in a feeding tray five feet above his head.

  Valnikov managed to switch the food. Corn and barley for the gerbil, gravel and seed for the parakeet. Then he gave the little creatures water and looked at them.

  "Are you two even slightly appreciative," he moaned, "of the pain this is giving me?"

  Misha answered him. The parakeet had been swinging on his trapeze, his back to Valnikov. The emerald bird did a deliberate forward fall, gripping the tiny bar in his claws. When he was hanging upside down, staring directly into Valnikov's wet fiery eyes, Misha said: "Gavno ."

  Fifteen minutes later, Valnikov had parked his car and was weaving painfully toward the front door of Hollywood Police Station.

  The caseload for business burglary was never too bad on Friday. Monday, after the channel-lock and pry-bar thieves had plundered during the two days businesses were closed, Valnikov would have his table littered with burglary reports. But today would be all right. Except for the merciless throbbing in his skull.

  Two youngish homicide investigators the others called Frick and Frack were amusing themselves by telling ghoul stories to Irma Thebes, the foxy little investigator who worked the sex detail.

  "Irma," Frick grinned, "take a look at this suicide report."

  Irma grimaced, pretending she wasn't interested, but as always she read the report with abandon.

  "Dude severed both wrists, then turned on the gas jets in his walk-up, then hit himself in the head three times with a hatchet. The third time he managed to pierce his skull."

  'That ain't nothing," Frack said, leaning over her desk. "I had a broad last month cuts both wrists, then drinks D. D. T., then, get this, she tried to choke herself with a nylon stocking, using a wooden spoon for a tourniquet!"

  "Awful, that's awful," Irma grimaced, dying for more.

  Their unsmiling lieutenant, Woodenlips Mockett, interrupted by saying: "How's that murder from over on La Brea? Any progress?"

  "Naw, the victim ain't talking," Frick said, wanting to continue the game of Can You Top This for Irma Thebes.

  "What is this, amateur night?" Woodenlips Mockett snarled. "You getting anywhere or not?" Then he looked at Irma. "I mean on the murder case."

  "Well no, Lieutenant," the young detective said. "But that dude s a black militant and an ex-con. I think we find the guy done it we oughtta give him an ecology award."

  Dudley Knebel, a robbery detective, then said, "Got a suspect? I got a victim who'll I. D. anybody I show him. Owns the burrito stand over on Western."

  "That dingaling!" said a burglary dick they called Montezuma Montez. "Him and his wife, Hamhocks Hilda, they'll pick your partner out of a lineup, give them a chance."

  "Hey, is it true about Hamhocks Hilda, the way she makes hamburgers?" asked Frick.

  "It is the gospel, Jack," Montezuma Montez answered, grinning. "Captain Hooker seen it."

  "What's true?" asked Woodenlips Mockett, nervously.

  "Well, she's always pissed off at cops," Frick said. "Cause she gets robbed, oh, two, three times a month. And we never catch nobody. So you order a hamburger, she takes the meat and mashes it right up between her legs, right up on her greasy old Brillo pad."

  "I don't believe that!" cried Woodenlips Mockett, who had mooched two burgers from Hamhocks Hilda just the day before.

  "I swear, Lieutenant," Frack said. "When I busted her old man that time he went upside her head with a meat mallet, he told me what you gotta do is, you gotta always check the hamburger patty. See there's any little black curly hairs sticking out."

  "Well, that ain't no big thing," said Clarence Cromwell, one of two black detectives at Hollywood. "She cooks it, don't she? Ain't so bad anyways, less he tuned Hilda's greasy old organ jist before she made your burger, Lieutenant."

  Woodenlips Mockett waited a decent interval before hurrying out of the office to check with Captain Hooker to see if the men were lying to him again.

  Then a voice boomed through the slightly open door of the interrogation room. Nate Farmer, the other black detective unwillingly transferred to the sex detail from auto theft, was interviewing a rape victim who lacked credibility.

  She too was black. So was the alleged suspect. Blacks robbed, raped and murdered other blacks, more often than not. Same with whites. Hoodlums rarely bothered to discriminate.

  His voice thundered through the room: "So he's been takin a piece for six months, and you been enjoyin it, and now all of a sudden you find your little belly gettin big and you're all of a sudden a child a seventeen, and your social worker says the county'11 pay for your little whelp if you put your boyfriend in jail for rape! Well I ain't gonna go for it!"

  "Last rape victim I handled turned out to be a call girl with twenty-two arrests," Irma Thebes observed.

  "Didn't know she was raped till the check bounced, huh?" said Frick.

  A Cuban boy, eleven years of age, was sitting in the squad room listening wide-eyed to the raging black detective. The boy was a renowned Hollywood bicycle thief. They allied him Earl Scheib Lopez, in honor of the auto painter who could paint any car for $49.95. Earl Scheib Lopez boasted that he could paint any hot bike for a buck and a quarter, in ten minutes, and have enough sniffable paint left to get three of his pals loaded.

  Earl Scheib Lopez always had his jeans stuffed with coins and he was now playing nickel-dime blackjack with Fuzzy Spinks, of auto theft, who could tolerate the little bike bandit ever since the day he rolled over (for a fifty-buck snitch fee) on a Cuban gang who had hijacked a load of Ferraris, and Fuzzy got a leg up toward Investigator III. Earl Scheib Lopez used the fifty scoots to buy two cases of aerosol paint cans and there were three hundred bikes stolen in Hollywood in the next two weeks.

  His latest arrest was for a bit of derring-do: On a whim, the little crook had jumped on a display bike in a department store downtown, ridden it through five screaming sales clerks, down the escalator, and out on the street making a getaway clear to Hollywood in twenty minutes. But he had underestimated his fame. The Central Division investigators had no trouble identifying the bike bandit: only Earl Scheib Lopez was that kind of swashbuckler.

  But he wasn't swashbuckling now. He was playing blackjack very quietly with Fuzzy Spinks, who was baby-sitting him until they could release him to grandma, who was getting sick and tired of taking a bus to police stations and courtrooms for Earl Scheib Lopez. One day, after his third arrest in one month, she had made an extra bus trip. This one to the "Glass House," Parker Center downtown, to the office of the chief of police. The old woman waited patiently for two hours to see the chief's adjutant and then explained through an interpreter in polite and formal Spanish that she had come to sign the necessary American documents-to put Earl Scheib Lopez in the gas chamber.

  Fuzzy could see that the little thug was very anxiously listening to the mean-looking black detective yelling at his "rape victim."

  "You ever pull any rapes yet, Earl?" Fuzzy asked, peering at the boy over his bifocals, actually trying to get a peek at Earl's cards because the ante was up to thirty-five cents.

  "No way!" Earl said, staying on fourteen while Fuzzy busted.

  "Yeah, well don't ever try it. These detectives here can look right up a broad's unit and check her lands and grooves. Just like the muzzle of a gun. Understand?"

  "Yeah?" Earl Scheib Lopez said, pretty damned impressed for once.

  'They match em up with the marks on your rape tool, and you get twenty goddamn years. Get me?"

  "Yes, sir! ' Earl Scheib Lopez said. He was showing a king of diamonds.

  "You hitting?" the old cop asked hopefully, since he had to hit sixteen and was down to his last ninety cents.

  "Damn it!" Max Haffenkamp, from resident
ial burglary, slammed the phone down. "Hollywood's turned into a frigging ghetto! People're so evasive they won't even say hello, they think it's a cop."

  "Tell em you found their welfare check," Clarence Cromwell said. "Then they'll talk to you honkies."

  "Lord, I hope there's a gang killing tonight," said Frick. "I need some overtime, make my car payment."

  "I'm losing weight, Irma," Frack leered, sucking in his chest. "Stomach like a washboard. You could wash your lace underwear on my tummy. Anytime."

  Just then the rape victim stormed out of the interrogation room yelling: "Well if you won't bust that sucker, I'm goin to the F. B. I, cause I ain't his escape goat. And you nigger!" She aimed a skinny finger at Nate Farmer. "You I'm suin for defecation of character!"

  All the yelling was interrupted when a radio voice came over the monitor. It was the police helicopter.

  'This is Air Six," the radio voice said. "Anything for us?"

  And then, as always, three or four ex-vice cops called out suggestions:

  "Yeah, bomb the dopers on Sunset."

  "Strafe the pimps on Hollywood Boulevard."

  "Napalm the fruits on Selma Avenue."

  And so forth.

  Suddenly Frick threw his arrest reports to Frack. "Rape and murder. Rape and murder. I'm getting sick of it!" Frick cried.

  "Hmph," Clarence Cromwell snorted. "You the one doin all the rape and murder, chump. Killin time and screwin the city."

  All conversations, bitching, and dramatic outcries were suddenly interrupted. It became breathlessly still.

  Dora Simpson, the record clerk from downstairs, sashayed into the squad room, dropped some reports on the desk of Woodenlips Mockett, and wriggled out again.

  "With those lungs, that girl could stay underwater for days" Fuzzy Spinks sighed.

  Dora Simpson had gone unnoticed during ten years of employment with the Los Angeles Police Department, until she transferred from Northeast Station to Hollywood Station. Then she had begun dating a retired plastic surgeon with a Pygmalion complex.

  Dr. Henry Sprackle took a centimeter off the bridge of her nose and two off the tip. He implanted nearly a pound of foam in her sagging breasts and buttocks. He whacked away the loose flesh from under her chin and eyes and hacked off two and a half inches of belly fat.

  Finally, he threw away her cat s-eye horn-rims and had her fitted with tinted contact lenses. He took her to Elizabeth Ar- den's for a Farrah Fawcett feather-cut and she was almost perfect. Then he took her to Frederick's of Hollywood and bought her ten pairs of crotchless black underwear and she was perfect.

  Dora Simpson was born again, but no Baptist preacher had a hand in it. A former ugly duckling was now the object of many a wet dream at Hollywood Station, and indeed all over the Los Angeles Police Department. They said that Deputy Chief Digby Bates, the most notorious swain among the ranking brass, had offered the area commander four additional patrol officers if he would release Dora Simpson for a transfer.

  Frick and Frack were insane over her. The two young cops had worked together six years, both in patrol and detectives, and they'd bedded the same station house groupies for so long they'd begun to have similar erotic fantasies. Most of them these days involved Dora Simpson because they thought of her as an android. She wasn't human. She was sculpted in the laboratory of Dr. Henry Sprackle.

  All that jiggly stuffing in there! Imagine searching for the surgical scars! Would she do anything her master told her? It was wildly decadent and perverse. Frick said that as soon as his second divorce was final he was going to propose to her. Frack said that he was going to propose to Dr. Sprackle, since Dora Simpson as an android was not in a position to accept on her own behalf.

  She was the station house celebrity for sure. Everyone called her Spareparts Simpson.

  "Looks like you're goin to a funeral, and it's yours,'' Clarence Cromwell said when Valnikov weaved through the maze of tables and coffee-drinking detectives with his second cup of tea.

  The voices. The noise. The painful cacophony of two dozen detectives wearing out the only essential tools of an investigator: pencil and telephone.

  "Light workload, Clarence?'' Valnikov asked.

  "Nothin to it," Clarence Cromwell said. Broad-chested with a face as creased and shiny as old leather, he was a twenty-five-year cop who had also worked "downtown" in better days.

  Covering for a high-rolling girlfriend who passed some bad checks had been Clarence's downfall and earned him a transfer ('There is no such thing as a disciplinary transfer in the Los Angeles Police Department. Of course, you understand that, Sergeant Cromwell? This is merely an administrative readjustment.") back to where he started, Hollywood Station. But if one saw the glass half Rill, well, it wasn't as bad as 77di Street Station, which policed Watts, and was the armpit of detective duty. Hollywood dicks wasn't such bad duty, considering.

  But poor Clarence Cromwell was withering on the vine. He wore a big moustache and a medium Afro and Italian suits. He was rushing resentfully into middle age, drinking too much, but not nearly like Valnikov. He was still wearing two shoulder holsters which thrilled the hell out of cop groupies but weren't much better than ballast these days.

  When Clarence had worked robbery-homicide downtown, those twin Colt magnums had blown away four bandits in six short happy years.

  On the night following the last shoot-out, a Chinatown groupie sidled up to the still shaking detective at a bar and grabbed him by the crotch and said, "I wanna see your other magnum, Clarence. Baby, you look like Sidney Poitier wishes he looked."

  Those were the days.

  "You okay?" Clarence Cromwell asked when he saw Valni- kov's trembling hands.

  "I'm all right, Clarence," Valnikov smiled, losing the thread of what the burglary report was all about.

  "Got any bodies in jail today, Val?"

  Valnikov looked at Clarence Cromwell and just shrugged pathetically. Clarence Cromwell lit a cigarette and looked at Valnikov's hands again.

  Clarence Cromwell had been there many many times. Valnikov was one of four or five detectives Clarence Cromwell would bother with. First, because he knew Valnikov from robbery-homicide in better days. And secondly, because Valnikov was a veteran with more than twenty years service, most of it in the detective bureau. If there was anything Clarence Cromwell despised more than the police brass it was RE-cruits.

  Clarence Cromwell looked around in disgust. Fuckin RE- cruits. Add up the total service of the whole burglary detail and there wouldn't be three hash marks total. Except for himself and Valnikov. Fuzz-nutted kids. Like that little brother, Nate Farmer, always hollerin. Thinks he's some kind a black Kojak, or somethin. And those two kids Frick and Frack. All they ever thought about was their cocks. Homicide detectives, my ass.

  Not detectives-"investigators." Now they were all "investigators." At least that's what the business cards said. That's what the brass decided they should be called nowadays. And they did "team policing." Whatever the hell that is. Nobody knew. Four "teams" of "investigators" working their little areas. Teams, my ass. This ain't no football game, Chief. Police work is a whole bunch of decisions you got to make your own self out on those streets. Except that every few years the brass had to come up with some new catchword to justify the budget. 'Team policing." All it did was add a whole bunch of new chiefs to supervise fewer Indians. Some stations used to get by with one captain. Now they had to have three. And a whole fliclan sack full of lieutenants. They were about as useful as Woodenlips Mockett's balls. And Clarence knew they hadn't been used in years.

  Clarence leafed through Valnikov's reports quickly and said, "You ain't got no bodies in jail. Get your ass on home, I'll cover for you. Shit, you're so full a Russian potata juice you're all swole up like a toad."

  "That's real nice of you, Clarence." Valnikov tried to smile, but it hurt. Hurt to smile. "I'm okay."

  Clarence Cromwell knew better. And it wasn't just the hangover. Valnikov was not okay. He was not anything like the dete
ctive who worked homicide downtown for fifteen years. That man was quiet and shy, but he was alert. This guy next to him was just some shipwreck victim. Clarence Cromwell pitied him, but he didn't know him.

  Clarence looked around at the roar of activity, at the grinding paper mill. Papers everywhere. Take away my gun and car, but please don't take my pencils. Nobody noticed yet how extra bad Valnikov looked today: "Val, you got a comb?"

  "A comb?" Valnikov looked at Clarence like he didn't understand the word. Like he didn't talk English anymore. "Yeah, Val, you know, a fuckin comb."

  Clarence wondered if he could be using drugs. Naw, he thought, a lush like Val don't go smokin dope.

  "Here's a comb, Val. I used to ride a old sorrel horse in Griffith Park, had neater lookin hair than you got. Go comb your hair, at least. You look like a skid row blood donor.

  What're they payin for a pint a blood these days, ten bucks for positive, twelve for negative?"

  "Pardon?" Valnikov said.

  "Gud-damn, man! Go in my locker and get yourself a clean necktie. Looks like you washed that one in vodka. Git your skit together, Val!"

  But it was too late. Clarence Cromwell looked up and locked eyes with Captain Hooker, who nodded toward his office.

  "There's jist one thing savin your ass, Val," Clarence Cromwell whispered before he stood up. "Me." Then he was gone toward the captain's office.

  Valnikov just sat and stared blankly at his crime reports, and trembled, and thought he could hear the voices of a Slavonic choir. Far away. In the frozen Siberia of his mind.

  Natalie Zimmerman was furious. She took long-legged strides back and forth, from wall to wall in Captain Hooker's private office. The giant strides were stretching the woolen skirt tight across her thighs.

  Well now, old Nat's wheels ain't too bad, Clarence Cromwell thought, as he sat down. Ain't too bad at all.

  "I do my job, Captain!" she said, voice shaking.

  "I know you do, Natalie. You get straight upper-ten ratings, don't you?"

  "Look, Captain, I wanna make Investigator Three."

  "You will, I'm sure."

  "Not if I work with that . . . with Valnikov. Because I'll get as bad as he is, you make me his partner!" She finally stopped pacing, flopped down in the chair next to Clarence Cromwell and brushed a wisp of frizzy buckskin-colored hair from her forehead.