The Glitter Dome

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Gibson Hand was sitting alone behind a two-way mirror in the back room of the store watching Days of Our Lives. The door was open a crack when he heard, “Up against the wall, motherfuckers!”

  Jesus Christ, they all said that! He turned down the television, picked up the Ithaca shotgun, and released the safety, using his thumb and forefinger to avoid even a tiny click.

  The white bandit wore a Porky Pig rubber mask that covered his entire head. He also wore gray cotton work gloves. The mask was too big. It sucked in and out against his face with every breath. He held an old U.S. Army automatic in his right hand and waved it back and forth at the faces of the two petrified store clerks.

  Gibson Hand knew the stakeout team outside must be moving in by now. He waited for the bandit to get the loot. Get the bread, white boy! Quit wavin that big ol motherfucker around like that. Get the money, boy. Get the money.

  Gibson Hand was sweating, holding the shotgun at port arms, waiting until they got it and headed for the door. Then the clerks are safe. Then the gunman’s back is to you. Then you can “shoot the money.” Right through the asshole’s back. And then you can yell: “Stop! Police!” After he’s safely dead.

  Gibson Hand knew that the cops who yelled first and gave their crazy fuckin selves a chance to get wasted did their work on celluloid, not in real life. Where the fuck is the brother?

  And there he was. Damn! The brother was one of those dumb old raghead niggers, probably been in jail the last twenty years and didn’t notice nobody wore silky-straights anymore, not even pimps. He wore a face mask only. It was Dracula. He wore his hair processed and had his marcelled hairdo wrapped up in a rag. And he wore those old-fashioned wingtips with all the holes. Shoes with a thousand eyes, they used to say. Where the fuck did he get those old shoes? Nobody wears do-rags no more, you dumb nigger! Gibson Hand wiped his sweaty eyes on his sleeve.

  The black half of the Oreo team walked over to the two-way mirror and looked at himself through the eyeholes of the Dracula mask. It was plastic, not rubber. It didn’t suck in and out when he breathed. He just looked dumb. A dumb nigger with a vampire face and a rag on his dumb fuckin head. Holding a sawed-off ten-gauge. Looking right into the sweat-bathed face of Gibson Hand, whom he could not see.

  Now the paddy had the loot. The brother was looking in the mirror. He was still looking when Gibson Hand impulsively pressed the gun muzzle to the glass and unleashed a dozen massive pellets of double-aught buckshot. The mirror blew up in the vampire’s face.

  The white Oreo bandit started screaming in shock and terror when his partner, minus his mask and most of his head, hurtled across the floor of the liquor store spilling blood so fast it greased the skids. The dead body slid all the way, crashing against the liquor counter.

  The white Oreo bandit was still screaming in shock and terror when Gibson Hand leaped out of the back room, his Ithaca exploding the second Oreo bandit literally out of his penny loafers and into eternity. (Even he wore outdated shoes. They were both parolees from Folsom and still dressed for the early ’60s. Poor old Cal Greenberg was the only one who felt sorry for them, wondering if they still listened to Glenn Miller.)

  Then Gibson Hand went over to his second kill and pulled the Porky Pig mask from the twitching cadaver. When his backup team came running into the store, they found Gibson Hand holding the mask up beside his face, saying, “Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”

  It was the locker room story of the month. But unfortunately, a news team from the scurrilous television station that Captain Woofer hated happened by while monitoring police calls, and caught Gibson Hand doing a reprise of the Porky Pig impression for a surprised group of detectives. The bastards did an editorial on the eleven o’clock news saying that Gibson Hand’s only competitor was Iran’s Ayatollah Blood who had chortled over the remains of the dead Americans. And Gibson Hand had been transferred right back to Hollywood Patrol, in despair, since there wouldn’t be nearly as many opportunities to kill people and do other good police work.

  So Gibson Hand was back walking Hollywood Boulevard with Buckmore Phipps. And unknown to the two street monsters, the first break in the Nigel St. Claire murder case was about to occur. A marine was pissing in a clay pot.

  The marine in question was an eighteen-year-old private first class from Minneapolis named Gladstone Cooley. A second-generation Swede on his mother’s side, he had inherited the best of the Viking bloodline. He was tall and, as they said in the modeling studios, built like Michelangelo wished David had been built. His hair and skin were gold and his eyes were cobalt blue. His only physical defect was an occasional pimple on the torso from applying too much scented baby oil for his posing sessions. He had a room-temperature I.Q., which made him extremely obliging, hence an excellent artist’s model and a pretty fair marine.

  On his three-day passes from Camp Pendleton he made up to four hundred dollars posing for artists and photographers in Hollywood. He made an additional two hundred as a call boy for discriminating gay customers, got free accommodations in a North Hollywood motel for simply being on call, and had seen American Gigolo twenty-two times. He was planning a twenty-third viewing the day he was pissing in the clay pot.

  Actually, it wasn’t the first time he had been called upon to piss in a clay pot. It wasn’t that uncommon around Hollywood. The artist’s studio was a small one on the second floor, over a head shop where they sold water pipes, roach holders, and star-spangled cigarette papers. Gladstone Cooley had to drink a quart of Pepsi-Cola every twelve minutes when called upon for this particular modeling service. The sculpting instructor who hired him claimed that the uric acid added vitality to the clay and made the sculptures come to life. But even with his I.Q., Gladstone Cooley figured they were just Golden Shower Kids, and if they wanted to pay him fifty bucks an hour, he’d keep pissing in their pot of modeling clay.

  Except that inevitably one of the eleven artists who sculpted clay on the long table upon which the marine posed nude except for a Navajo headband would ask Gladstone to be a dear and give a few squirts to the artist’s personal clay heap on the table before him.

  Gladstone was an obliging boy and always tried, as long as they kept him supplied with bottles of Pepsi-Cola. (A company which hurt his feelings by refusing to let him endorse their product with his modeling work and help them win the war against Coca-Cola.)

  On this particular day he had pissed in three individual clay heaps in addition to the common vat. Then an argument broke out between an artist who didn’t get any individual service and another who did. And try as he might, Gladstone Cooley couldn’t squeeze out a drop for the angry artist, even after guzzling two quarts of Pepsi back to back. It was, of course, the pressure of performance. Given the vicious argument and shrill threats flying back and forth, he had simply dried up.

  The jealous artist who didn’t get his clay pissed on got so mad he picked up his clay pile and threw it at the one who did. This caused a fight which the instructor couldn’t quell, and which made Gladstone Cooley want to go back to his peaceful rifle platoon. And he would have, except that the one who had received more piss than he deserved responded to the thrown clay by picking up a drenched clay ball and hurling it at his antagonist. It missed and sailed out the open window and down to Hollywood Boulevard, where it knocked Buckmore Phipps’ hat off. The Endless Chain.

  When Buckmore Phipps’ hat went sailing, he was standing on the boulevard laying a parking ticket on a purple Cadillac convertible owned by a despondent black pimp who was trying in vain to convince Gibson Hand, as a brother, to give him a break. He was going to jail in two days anyway, after sentencing on a case where some whore claimed he broke her leg. Who would believe that anybody would ruin good merchandise like that except some dumb fuckin women’s libbers on the jury?

  Gibson Hand sucked on his cigar and nodded sympathetically at the pimp. And every time the pimp would scurry back to plead with the implacable Buckmore Phipps, Gibson Hand would take the cigar out of his mouth and c
ontinue his surreptitious burning of the pimp’s convertible top. By the time the pimp was ready to drive away, and Buckmore Phipps’ hat was knocked off his block-shaped head, Gibson Hand had managed to burn a hole the size of a Susan B. Anthony dollar in the pimp’s convertible top, striking a blow for the libbers on the jury.

  “Who the fuck knocked my hat off?” Buckmore Phipps cried when his blue police cap went flying into the street and was run over by the departing pimp in the Cadillac.

  Buckmore Phipps picked up the squashed lid and said, “Gibson, who knocked my fuckin hat off?”

  Gibson Hand hadn’t seen the clay missile and thought Buck-more Phipps’ hat had simply fallen off when he stuck the traffic ticket on the pimp’s window.

  “I didn’t see nobody knock your hat off, Buckmore. The pimp couldn’t a did it.”

  “Gibson, somebody knocked my fuckin hat off,” Buckmore Phipps said, his face crimson, his eyes narrowing murderously. “AND LOOK AT THE FUCKIN THING!”

  The pimp’s Cadillac had turned it into one flat hat, all right. The visor was torn loose. The gleaming hat piece was bent and dangling. The grommet was twisted like a pretzel.

  “That is a bummed-out bonnet, Buckmore,” Gibson Hand clucked sadly.

  “Some motherfucker’s gonna pay!” Buckmore Phipps said, looking around wildly. Just as another slimy clay ball came flying out the second-story window.

  There was a real donnybrook going on upstairs now. Gladstone Cooley had jumped off the table and was already slipping into his black bikini underwear when they all started throwing things. The piss and Pepsi were dripping down the walls and everyone was screaming and yelling too much to hear Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand taking the stairs three at a time with vengeance in their hearts.

  It was Buckmore Phipps who quelled the pandemonium by yelling: “WHO THE FUCK BUSTED ME IN THE BEAN?”

  A silent covey of artists scurried around picking up their berets, locating their sculpting tools, gathering their courage for one quick dash out the door. Except that a black cop with a face like a rabid Doberman was blocking the doorway jamb to jamb with the spread of his shoulders.

  “I can explain, Officers,” said a mincing black artist in a lime ascot. “It was just …”

  “Up against the wall, you gay-rilla!” Buckmore Phipps snarled. “Nobody’s explainin nothin until I find out who knocked my hat off!”

  It was fortunate that neither Buckmore Phipps nor Gibson Hand suspected what was used to moisten the clay ball or there probably would have been screaming sculptors falling from the windows like confetti that day.

  “Who the fuck’re you?” Gibson Hand demanded of the quivering marine, who was desperately trying to squeeze into his French jeans. He wore them so tight he had to lie down to zip up. He usually stuffed the crotch of his bikinis with sponge rubber to look more valuable on the street, but today he wasn’t bothering. He was just sweating to get into those goddamn jeans. At last he prevailed, jumped to his feet, and said, “Private First Class Gladstone Cooley, sir! United States Marine Corps!”

  Then both Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand started lowing like cattle. Another marine! Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand had served with the Fifth Marines and were mortified that Selma Avenue and the gay bars were full of them.

  “You know, Buckmore, they oughtta jist do their recruitin for the Corps at the Hollywood Y.M.C.A., the way things are these days,” Gibson Hand said.

  As all the sculptors were standing in terror against the dripping walls awaiting orders from the street monsters, Gibson Hand spotted a fourteen-year-old girl trembling in the closet where the clay pots were stacked. She was a day-worker whose job it was to mop up the excess piss from the floor and to make Pepsi runs as required.

  “Get your ass outa there, lil sis,” he said, and the freckled runaway crept out with her gaze locked on her battered moccasins.

  “Where you from, kid?” Buckmore Phipps asked.

  “Culver City,” she squeaked.

  “When you run away from home?” Gibson Hand asked.

  “Two days ago. I been staying in this apartment over in East Hollywood with a friend.”

  Gibson Hand offered a rare glimpse of his paternal side. “Well, you go ahead on and stay in East Hollywood with your friends. But if you do, I’d just go and O.D. right now, I was you, before some a those East Hollywood dudes bust in your pad. That way, you won’t feel them cuttin your fuckin throat with a beer opener. And they’ll have to settle for rapin your slimy body after you’re dead, which they don’t like to do nearly so much cause they like to hear you kick and scream. NOW GIT YOUR SCUM SUCKIN ASS ON OUTA HERE AND BACK TO CULVER ClTY!”

  When the runaway was running hell-bent down the staircase, Buckmore Phipps turned to Gibson Hand and said sincerely, “That was sweet, Gibson. It takes heart to counsel a runaway kid.”

  Then they got down to business. Two of the sculptors, one a Greek, the other a Turk, naturally blamed each other for the errant clay ball that had knocked Buckmore Phipps’ hat into the gutter. Buckmore Phipps asked Gibson Hand which one they should book.

  “I don’t give a shit,” he shrugged. “They’re both greaseballs, ain’t they?”

  They were about to drag both greaseballs down the steps while they tried to figure out a booking charge when Gladstone Cooley said, “Sir, I hope you don’t have to report me to my commanding officer or anything.”

  “Lemme see your marine ID card,” Gibson Hand said impulsively.

  Buckmore Phipps scowled at the Pfc. and said, “If they had jarheads like you back in the big war, they’d a had to take that flag and suck it or fuck it to get it up on Iwo Jima.”

  And when Gibson Hand snatched the marine liberty card from Gladstone Cooley, a scrap of paper came with it.

  “This name’s familiar, Buckmore,” he said, looking at the paper. “I can’t remember where I heard it, but I heard it somewheres.”

  Buckmore Phipps read the note, which said “Nigel St. Claire” and gave a phone number. “Yeah, I heard that name somewheres lately. Who is this?” he asked the marine.

  But then a vagary of fortune not only saved the Greek and the Turk from bunking in the slam, but prompted an incident which made Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand not police legends as they’d always dreamed, but police laughingstocks.

  They heard a burglar alarm ringing loud and clear from outside the artists’ studio. Buckmore Phipps looked at Gibson Hand and at his watch and said, “It’s only three o’clock. Somebody’s testin his burglar alarm, is all.”

  “Pardon me, Officers,” said the Greek, who certainly didn’t want to share accommodations at the graybar hotel with a Turk. “If you’ll just look out the back window, it might be the Batbite Specialty Shop. He closed at noon today. I happened to be there and …”

  Gibson Hand strolled to the window, peeked out into the back alley, and saw the rear door of the Batbite Specialty Shop kicked off the hinges.

  “It’s a four-five-nine in progress, Buckmore! Let’s hit it!”

  So the sculpting class breathed a collective sigh of relief and pushed on out of there, along with Pfc. Gladstone Cooley, who was hastily handed his papers by the snarling black cop. The street monsters were already thundering down the rear stairway, about to catch a burglar with his mitts in the candy.

  Except that they didn’t sell candy at the Batbite Specialty Shop. They sold leather masks for slaves, ventilated leather paddles for masters, police nightsticks for slaves and masters. They sold handcuffs, scourges, and even iron maidens (it costs big bucks for some pleasures), and assorted other instruments which Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand had to admit would come in handy during some of their back alley interrogations.

  They caught a horsed-out junkie named Jukebox Johnson—a former disc jockey fallen on hard times—with a load of sadomasochistic magazines, making his second trip to a junkyard Chevy. Jukebox Johnson was one of those unfortunate thieves who always ran from the cops, even though he couldn’t run that fast, even when
he was facing drawn weapons and spotlights in the darkness. He’d been shot five times by cops over a fifteen-year span of unsuccessful burglaries.

  He was one of those crooks the cops talked about: “You know old Jukebox?”

  “Oh, sure, I shot him a couple times.”

  But today there was no need to shoot Jukebox Johnson. He was traveling at slow motion speed and thought he was highballing it. He had decided to pull the job after he got mellowed out on two grams of good heroin, and he was seeing flying giraffes and big colored bugs eating each other, when Gibson Hand picked him off the ground by the collar.

  “Jukebox, what in the fuck are you doin?” Buckmore Phipps said disgustedly. “I mean, this is broad fuckin daylight!”

  “Hi, Buckmore. Hi, Gibson.” Jukebox Johnson smiled sheepishly through a row of crooked black stumps. “I can explain. See, I met up with these S and M freaks. They carry a huge stick. Call it their board of education. The big one beats on his boyfriend all the time whether he needs it or not. They seem like a nice couple, though. They commissioned me to do this job. Told me they needed some more equipment for a party tonight. Offered me a whole piece of unstepped-on China white. What could I say?”

  “Damn! In broad daylight? I oughtta let you run down the alley and shoot you a couple times,” Gibson Hand said disgustedly.

  “What’s the trouble, Officers?” a man said, hurrying toward them from a Lincoln he’d just parked in the alley.

  “I’m sorry I did it, Buckmore,” Jukebox Johnson whined. “I get nervous around these freaks with all their whips and stuff. I been thinking about working for these other guys who’re into mugging and stickups, just to get my head straightened out.”

  “I’m Harvey H. Fairchild,” the man announced, presenting Gibson Hand with his business card. “One of my fellow shopkeepers told me the alarm had been set off and I got here as fast as I could.”

  So, while Gibson Hand kept the handcuffed Jukebox Johnson near their radio car, Buckmore Phipps took a burglary report from Harvey H. Fairchild and helped turn off the burglar alarm. Harvey H. Fairchild was friendly and pink, shaped like a teardrop. He sported lots of jewelry and a silk suit that Buckmore Phipps wouldn’t mind owning for his big nights at The Glitter Dome. Harvey H. Fairchild told Buckmore Phipps that he found selling the S&M toys lucrative but disgusting, and vowed that just as soon as he had a nest egg he was cutting out for a chicken ranch in Saugus.