the New Centurions (1971)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Roy was told that Whitey had been a foot policeman in Central Division for almost twenty years and that he could never get used to working in a radio car. That was probably why he insisted on calling the station a half dozen times a night to talk to his friend, Sam Tucker, the desk officer.

  After a few moments, Whitey swaggered back to the car and settled back, lighting his third cigar of the evening.

  "You sure like to use that call box," said Roy with a forced smile, trying to conceal the anger brought about by the boredom of working with a useless partner like Whitey when he was brand-new and eager to learn.

  "Got to ring in. Let the desk know where you're at."

  "Your radio tells them that, Whitey. Policemen have radios in their cars nowadays."

  "I'm not used to it," said Whitey. "Like to ring in on the call box. Besides, I like to talk to my old buddy, Sam Tucker. Good man, old Sammy."

  "How come you always call in on the same box?"

  "Habit, boy. When you get to be old Whitey's age, you start doing everything the same."

  It was true, Roy thought. Unless an urgent call intervened, they would eat at precisely ten o'clock every night at one of three greasy spoon restaurants that served Whitey free meals. Then, fifteen minutes would be spent at the station for Whitey's bowel movement. Then back out for the remainder of the watch, which would be broken by two or three stops at certain liquor stores for free cigars and of course the recurrent messages to Sam Tucker from the call box at Twenty-third and Hooper.

  "How about driving through the produce market?" said Whitey. "I never took you in there yet, did I?"

  "Whatever you say," Roy sighed.

  Whitey directed Roy through bustling narrow streets blocked by a maze of trucks and milling swampers who were just coming to work. "Over there," said Whitey. "That's old Foo Foo's place. He has the best bananas in the market. Park right there, kid. Then we'll get some avocados. They're a quarter apiece, right now. You like avocados? Then maybe a lug of peaches. I know a guy on the other side of the market, he has the best peaches. Never a bruise." Whitey lumbered out of the car, and put on his hat at a jaunty beat officer's angle, grabbed his baton, probably from force of habit, and began twirling it expertly in his left hand as he approached the gaunt Chinese who was sweating in a pair of khaki shorts and an undershirt as he threw huge bunches of bananas onto a produce truck. The Chinese bared his gold and silver bridgework when Whitey approached and Roy lit a cigarette and watched in revulsion as Whitey put his baton in the ring on his belt and helped Foo Foo toss bananas onto the truck.

  Professional policeman, Roy thought viciously, as he remembered the suave, silver-haired captain who had lectured them in the academy about the new professionalism. But it seemed the fat cop stealing apples died hard. Look at the old bastard, thought Roy, throwing bananas in full uniform while all the other swampers are laughing their heads off. Why doesn't he retire from the Department, and then he could swamp bananas full time. I hope a tarantula bites him on his fat ass, Roy thought.

  How they could have sent him to Newton Street Station, Roy could not understand. What was the sense of giving them three choices of divisions if they were then ignored and sent arbitrarily from the academy to a station twenty miles from home. He lived almost in the valley. They could have sent him to one of the valley divisions or Highland Park or even Central which was his third choice, but Newton Street he had not counted on. It was the poorest of the Negro divisions and the drabness of the area was depressing. This was the "east side" and he already had learned that as soon as the newly emigrated Negroes could afford it, they moved to the "west side," somewhere west of Figueroa Street. But the fact that the majority of the people here were Negro was the one thing that appealed to Roy. When he left the Department to be a criminologist he intended to have a thorough understanding of the ghetto. He hoped to learn all that was necessary in a year or so, and then transfer north, perhaps to Van Nuys or North Hollywood.

  When they finally left the produce market, the back seat of the radio car was filled with bananas, avocados and peaches, as well as a basket of tomatoes which Whitey had scrounged as an afterthought.

  "You know you got a right to half of these," said Whitey as they loaded the produce into his private car in the station parking lot.

  "I told you I didn't want any."

  "Partners got to share and share alike. You got a right to half of it. How about the avocados? Why don't you take the avocados?"

  "Son of a bitch," Roy blurted, "I don't want it! Look here, I'm just out of the academy. I've got eight months more to do on my probationary period. They can fire me on a whim anytime between now and then. No civil service protection for a probationer, you know. I can't be taking gratuities. At least not things like this. Free meals--cigarettes--coffee--that stuff seems to be traditional, but what if the sergeant saw us in the produce market tonight? I could lose my job!"

  "Sorry, kid," said Whitey with a hurt expression. "I didn't know you felt that way. I'd take all the heat if we'd got caught, you should know that."

  "Yeah? What would I use as an excuse? That you put a gun to my head and forced me to go with you on that shopping tour?"

  Whitey completed the transfer of fruit without further comment and didn't speak again until they were back patrolling their district, then he said, "Hey, partner, drive to a call box, I got to ring in again."

  "What the hell for?" said Roy, not caring what Whitey thought anymore. "What's going on? You got a bunch of broads leaving messages at the desk for you or something?"

  "I just talk to old Sam Tucker," said Whitey with a deep sigh. "The old bastard gets lonesome there at the desk. We was academy classmates, you know. Twenty-six years this October. It's tough on him being colored and working a nigger division like this. Some nights he feels pretty low when they bring in some black bastard that killed an old lady or some other shitty thing like that, and these policemen shoot off their mouth in the coffee room about niggers and such. Sam hears it and it bothers him, so he gets feeling low. Course, he's too old to be a cop anyway. He was thirty-one when he came on the job. He ought to pull the pin and leave this crappy place."

  "How old were you when you came on, Whitey?"

  "Twenty-nine. Hey, drive to the call box on Twenty-third. You know that's my favorite box."

  "I ought to know by now," said Roy.

  Roy parked at the curb and waited hopelessly while Whitey went to the call box and talked to Sam Tucker for ten minutes.

  Police professionalism would come only after the old breed was gone, Roy thought. That didn't really trouble him though, because he had no intention of making a career of police work. That reminded him he had better get busy and register for the coming semester if he hoped to keep on schedule and complete his degree as planned. He wondered how anyone could want to do this kind of work for a career. Now that the training phase was over, he was part of a system he would master, learn from, and leave behind.

  He glanced in the car mirror. The sun had given him a fine color. Dorothy said she'd never seen him so tan, and whether it was the uniform or his fitness she obviously found him more desirable and wanted him to make love to her often. But it may have been only because she was pregnant with their first baby and she knew that soon there would be none of it for a while. And he did it, though the enormous mound of life almost revolted him and he pretended to enjoy it as much as he did when she was lithe with a satin stomach that would probably bear stretch scars forever now that she was pregnant. That was her fault. They had decided not to have children for five years, but she had made a mistake. The news had staggered him. All his plans had to be changed. She could no longer work as a senior steno at Rhem Electronics, and she had been making an excellent wage. He would have to stay with the Department an extra year or so to save money. He would not ask his father or Carl for assistance, not even for a loan now that they all knew he would never enter the family firm.

  Trying to please them was the reason he changed his
major three times until he took abnormal psychology with Professor Raymond, and learned from the flabby little scholar who he was. The kindly man, who had been like a father, had almost wept when Roy told him he was leaving college to join the Los Angeles Police Department for a year or two. They had sat in Professor Raymond's office until midnight while the little man coaxed and urged and swore at Roy's stubbornness and at last gave in when Roy convinced him he was tired and probably would fail every class next semester if he remained, that a year or two away from the books but in close touch with life would give him the impetus to return and take his bachelor's and master's degrees. And who knows, if he were the scholar that Professor Raymond believed he could be, he might even keep right on while he had the momentum and get his Ph. D.

  "We might be colleagues someday, Roy," said the professor, fervently shaking Roy's dry hand in both his moist soft ones. "Keep in touch with me, Roy."

  And he had meant to. He wanted to talk with someone as sensitive as the professor about the things he had learned so far. He talked with Dorothy, of course. But she was so involved in the mysteries of childbirth that he doubted that she listened when he brought home the tales of the bizarre situations he encountered as a policeman and what they meant to a behaviorist.

  While waiting for Whitey, Roy tilted the car mirror down and examined his badge and brass buttons. He was tall and slim but his shoulders were broad enough to make the tailored blue shirt becoming. His Sam Browne glistened and his shoes were as good as he could get them without the fanatical spit shine that some of the others employed. He kept the badge lustrous with a treated cloth and some jeweler's rouge. He decided that when his hair grew out he would never cut it short again. He had heard that a butch haircut sometimes grows out wavier than before.

  "You're absolutely beautiful," said Whitey, jerking open the door and flopping into the seat with a fatuous grin at Roy.

  "I dropped some cigarette ash on my shirt," said Roy, tilting the mirror to its former position. "I was just brushing it off."

  "Let's go do some police work," said Whitey, rubbing his hands together.

  "Why bother? We only have three more hours until end of watch," said Roy. "What the hell did Tucker tell you to make you so happy?"

  "Nothing. I just feel good. It's a nice summer night. I just feel like working. Let's catch a burglar. Anybody show you yet how to patrol for burglars?"

  "Thirteen-A-Forty-three, Thirteen-A-Forty-three," said the operator and Whitney turned up the volume, "see the woman, landlord-tenant dispute, forty-nine, thirty-nine south Avalon."

  "Thirteen-A-Forty-three, roger," said Whitey into the hand mike. Then to Roy, "Well, instead of catching crooks, let's go pacify the natives."

  Roy parked in front of the house on Avalon which was easy to find because of the porch light and the fragile white-haired Negro woman standing on the porch watching the street. She was perhaps sixty and smiled timidly when Roy and Whitey climbed the ten steps.

  "This is it, Mr. PO-lice," she said, opening the battered screen door. "Won't you please come in?"

  Roy removed his hat upon entering and became annoyed when Whitey failed to remove his also. It seemed that everything Whitey did irritated him.

  "Won't you sit down?" she smiled, and Roy admired the tidy house she kept which looked old and clean and orderly like her.

  "No, thanks, ma'am," said Whitey. "What can we do for you?"

  "I got these here people that lives in the back. I don't know what to do. I hopes you can help me. They don't pay the rent on time never. And now they's two months behind and I needs the money terrible bad. I only lives on a little social security, you see, and I just got to have the rent."

  "I appreciate your problem, ma'am, I sure do," said Whitey. "I once owned a duplex myself. I had some tenants that wouldn't pay and I had a heck of a time. Mine had five kids that like to've torn the place down. Yours have any kids?"

  "They does. Six. And they tears up my property terrible."

  "It's rough," said Whitey, shaking his head.

  "What can I do, sir? Can you help me? I begged them to pay me."

  "Sure wish we could," said Whitey, "but you see this is a civil matter and we only deal in criminal matters. You'd have to get the county marshal to serve them with a notice to quit and then you'd have to sue them for unlawful detainer. That's what they call it and that would take time and you'd have to pay a lawyer."

  "I don't have no money for a lawyer, Mr. PO-lice," said the old woman, her thin hand touching Whitey beseechingly on the arm.

  "I appreciate that, ma'am," said Whitey, "I sure do. By the way, is that corn bread I smell?"

  "It sho' is, sir. Would you like some?"

  "Would I?" said Whitey, removing his hat and leading the old woman to the kitchen. "I'm a country-raised boy. I grew up in Arkansas on corn bread."

  "Would you like some?" she smiled to Roy.

  "No, thank you," he said.

  "Some coffee? It's fresh."

  "No ma'am, thank you."

  "I don't know when I had such good corn bread," said Whitey. "Soon's I finish, I'm going back and talk to your tenants for you. They in the little cottage in the rear?"

  "Yes, sir. That's where they is. I sure would appreciate that and I'm going to tell our councilman what a fine PO-lice force we have. You always so good to me no matter what I calls for. You from Newton Street Station, ain't you?"

  "Yes, ma'am, you just tell the councilman that you liked the service of old Whitey from Newton Street. You can even call the station and tell my sergeant if you want to."

  "Why I'll do that, I surely will, Mr. Whitey. Can I get you some more corn bread?"

  "No, no thank you," said Whitey, wiping his entire face with the linen napkin the old woman got for him. "We'll have a little talk with them and I bet they get your rent to you real quick."

  "Thank you very much," the old woman called, as Roy followed Whitey and his flashlight beam down the narrow walkway to the rear of the property. Roy's frustration had subsided in his pity for the plight of the old woman and his admiration of her neat little house. There weren't enough like her in the ghetto, he thought.

  "It's too damned bad that people would take advantage of a nice old woman like that," said Roy as they approached the rear cottage.

  "How do you know they did?" asked Whitey.

  "What do you mean? You heard her."

  "I heard one side of a landlord-tenant dispute," said Whitey. "Now I got to hear the other side. You're the judge in all these dispute calls we get. Never make a decision till both sides present their cases."

  This time Roy bit his lip to enforce his silence. The absurdity of this man was beyond belief. A child could see the old woman had a just grievance and he knew before the door opened that the cottage would be a filthy hovel where miserable children lived in squalor with deadbeat parents.

  A coffee-colored woman in her late twenties opened the door when Whitey tapped.

  "Mrs. Carson said she was going to call the PO-lice," said the woman with a tired smile. "Come in, Officers."

  Roy followed Whitey into the little house which had a bed-room in the back, a small kitchen, and a living room filled by the six children who were gathered around an ancient television with a dying picture tube.

  "Honey," she called, and a man padded into the room from the back, wearing frayed khaki trousers and a faded blue short-sleeved shirt which revealed oversized arms and battered hardworking hands.

  "I just didn't think she'd really call the law," he said with an embarrassed smile at the officers, as Roy wondered how the cottage could be kept this clean with so many small children.

  "We're two weeks behind in our rent," he drawled. "We never been behind befo'

  'cept oncet and that was fo' three days. That ol' lady is mighty hard."

  "She says you're over two months behind," said Roy.

  "Looky here," said the man, going to the kitchen cupboard and returning with several slips of paper. "Here's last month's
receipt and the month befo' and the one befo' that, clear back to January when we fust came here from Arkansas."

  "You from Arkansas?" said Whitey. "Whereabouts? I'm from Arkansas too."

  "Wait a minute, Whitey," said Roy, then turned back to the man. "Why would Mrs. Carson say you were behind in your rent? She said you never pay her on time and she's told you how she needs the money and that your kids have destroyed her property. Why would she say that?"

  "Officer," said the man, "Mrs. Carson is a very hard lady. She owns most of this side of Avalon from Fo'ty-ninth Street on down to the co'ner."

  "Have your children ever destroyed her property?" asked Roy weakly.

  "Look at my house, Officer," said the woman. "Do it look like we the kind of folks that would let a chil' tear up a house? Once James there broke her basement window chucking a rock at a tin can. But she added that on our rent payment and we paid fo' it."

  "How do you like California?" asked Whitey.

  "Oh, we likes it fine," smiled the man. "Soon's we can save a little we wants to maybe buy a small house and get away from Mrs. Carson."

  "Well, we got to be going now," said Whitey. "Sure sorry you're having troubles with your landlady. I want to wish you good luck here in California, and listen, if you ever happen to make any down-home Arkansas meals and have some left over you just call Newton Street Station and let me know, will you?"

  "Why, we'll do that, sir," said the woman. "Who'll we ask fo'?"

  "Just say old Whitey. And you might tell the sergeant old Whitey gave you good service. We need a pat on the back once in a while."

  "Thank you, Officer," said the man. "It's surely a comfort to meet such fine _po__-licemen here."

  "So long, kids," shouted Whitey to the six beaming brown faces which by now were gazing reverently at the policemen. They all waved good-byes as Roy followed the fat blue swaggering figure back down the narrow walkway to the car.

  While Whitey was lighting a cigar Roy asked, "How did you know the old lady was lying? You probably answered calls there before, right?"