the New Centurions (1971)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Roy heard four car doors slam and three uniformed officers responding to the hot shot call came running toward the front door while another came in the side door Light had entered.

  "Search them," said Light as the men were pushed outside, and Light walked across the floor to the cashier's cage with Roy.

  "Who pushed the button?" Light called to the gathering circle of employees, most of whom were unaware that something unusual was happening until the policemen rushed through the door.

  "I did," said a tiny blond woman who stood three windows away from where the two men had been doing business.

  "Were they trying to rob the place or not?" asked Light impatiently.

  "Well, no," said the woman. "But I recognized the one in the hat. He's the one who robbed us with a gun last June. He robbed my window. I'd know him anywhere. When I saw him this morning, I just pushed the button to get you here quick. Maybe I just should have phoned."

  "No, I guess it's okay to use the silent button in cases like that," Light grinned. "Just don't push the button when you want us here to arrest a drunk out front."

  "Oh no, Officer. I know that button is for emergencies."

  "What were they doing?" asked Light to the pretty Mexican girl who worked the counter where the men were standing.

  "Just paying a bill," said the girl. "Nothing else."

  "You sure about that guy?" Light asked the timorous blond.

  "I'm positive, sir," said the woman.

  "Good work, then," said Light. "What's your name? The robbery detectives will probably be calling you in a little while."

  "Phyllis Trent."

  "Thanks, ma'am," said Light and he walked long-legged across the lobby while Roy followed.

  "Want us to take them?" asked the day watch officer who had the two men handcuffed and standing next to his radio car.

  "Damn right," said Light. "We're morning watch. Man, we want to go home. That guy have anything in that left front pocket? He sure wanted to get in there."

  "Yeah, a couple joints, wrapped in a rubber band, and a little loose pot in his shirt pocket in a sandwich bag."

  "Yeah? How about that. I thought it was a gun. If that asshole had decided to go for it quick, I'd have figured it was a gun for sure. He'd be crossing the river Jordan about now."

  "The river Styx," smiled the day watch officer, opening the door for the man in the black leather jacket, handcuffed now.

  As they were driving to the station, Roy thought several times he should let the whole incident pass, but he sensed Light was unhappy with the way he had handled the situation in the lobby. Finally Roy said, "How did you tumble to them being suspects, Light? Did one of the employees give you a sign?"

  "No," said Light, chewing on the filter of a cigarette, as they sped north on Central Avenue. "They were the only likely-looking pair in the place, didn't you think?"

  "Yes, but for all we knew it was a false alarm."

  "Why didn't you stop them before I came up, Fehler? They were almost out the door. And why didn't you have your gun ready?"

  "We didn't know for sure they were suspects," Roy repeated, feeling the anger well up.

  "Fehler, they were, in fact, suspects, and if old stingy brim had brought his iron with him this trip, you'd be laying back there on that floor, you know that?"

  "Goddamn it, I'm not a rookie, Light. I didn't think the situation warranted me drawing a gun, so I didn't."

  "Let's clear the air, Fehler, we got a whole month to work together. Tell me something truthfully, if they'd been white would you've been quicker to take positive action?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that you're so goddamn careful not to offend black people in any way that I think you risk your goddamn life and _mine__ so's not to look like a big blond storm trooper standing there frisking a black man in a public place in front of all those black people. What do you think of that?"

  "You know what's wrong with you, Light? You're ashamed of your people," blurted Roy, and it was out before he could retract it.

  "What the hell do you mean?" asked Light and Roy cursed himself but it was too late now and the words he was repressing had to be released.

  "Alright Light, I know your problem and I'm going to tell you what it is. You're too damned tough on your people. You don't have to be cruel to them. Don't you see, Light? You feel guilty because you're trying so hard to pull yourself from that kind of degrading ghetto environment. You feel shame and guilt for them."

  "I'll be damned," said Light, looking at Roy as if for the first time. "I always knew you were a little strange, Fehler, but I didn't know you were a social worker."

  "I'm your friend, Light," said Roy. "That's why I'm telling you."

  "Yeah, well listen, friend, I don't look at a lot of these people as black or white or even as people. They're assholes. And when some of these kids grow up they'll probably be assholes too, even though I feel sorry as hell for them right now."

  "Yes, I understand," said Roy, nodding tolerantly, "there's a tendency of the oppressed to embrace the ideals of the oppressor. Don't you see that's what happened to you?"

  "I'm not oppressed, Fehler. Why do white liberals have to look at every Negro as an oppressed black man?"

  "I don't consider myself a liberal."

  "People like you are worse than the Klan. Your paternalism makes you worse than the other kind. Quit looking at these people as Negroes or problems. I worked a silk stocking division out on the west side when I first came out of the academy and I never thought of a Caucasian asshole in terms of race. An asshole is an asshole, they're just a little darker here. But not to you. He's a Negro and needs a special kind of protective handling."

  "Wait a minute," said Roy. "You don't understand."

  "The hell I don't," snapped Light, who had now pulled to the curb at Washington and Central and turned in the seat to face Roy squarely. "You been here over a year now, haven't you? You know the amount of crime in the Negro divisions. Yet the D. A. won't hardly file a felony assault if it's a Negro victim and suspect involved. You know what the detectives say, 'Forty stitches or a gunshot is a felony. Anything less is a misdemeanor.' Negroes are expected to act that way. White liberals have said, 'That's alright, Mister Black man,' and they're always careful to say _Mister. '__That's alright, you have been oppressed and therefore you are not entirely responsible for your actions. We guilty whites are responsible,' and what does the black man do then? Why, he takes full advantage of his tolerant white brother's misplaced kindness, just like the white would do if the positions were reversed because people in general are just plain assholes unless they got a spade bit in their mouths. Remember, Fehler, people need spades, not spurs."

  Roy felt the blood rush to his face and he cursed his stammer as he struggled to master the situation. Light's outburst had been so unwarranted, so sudden... "Light, don't get excited, we're not communicating. We're not..."

  "I'm not excited," said Light, deliberately now. "It's just that sometimes I've been close to busting since I started working with you. Remember the kid at Jefferson High School last week? The robbery report, remember?"

  "Yes, what about it?"

  "I wanted to tell you this then. I was choking on my frustration the way you patronized that little bastard. I went to high school right here in southeast L. A. I saw that same kind of shakedown every day. The blacks were the majority and the white kids were terrorized. 'Gimme a dime, motherfucker. Gimme a dime or I'll cut yo' ass.' Then we gave whitey a punch in the mouth whether or not we got the dime. And these were _poor__ white kids. Poor as us, sometimes from mixed marriages and shack jobs. You didn't want to book that kid. You wanted to apply your double standard because he was a downtrodden black boy and the victim was white."

  "You don't understand," said Roy bleakly. "Negroes hate the whites because they know they're faceless nonhuman creatures in the eyes of the whites."

  "Yeah, yeah, I know that's what intellectuals say. You know, Fehler, you're not
the only cop that's read a book or two."

  "I never said I was, goddamn it," said Roy.

  "I tell you Fehler, those white boys in my school were without faces to _us.__ What do you think of that? And we terrorized those poor bastards. The few I ever got to know didn't hate us, they were afraid of us, because of our numerical superiority. Get off your knees when you're talking to Negroes, Fehler. We're just like whites. Assholes, most of us. Just like whites. Make the Negro answer to the law for his crimes just like a white man. Don't take away his manhood by coddling him. Don't make him a domestic animal. All men are the same. Just keep him on a mean spade bit with a long shank. When he gets too spirited, jerk those reins, man!"

  AUGUST 1962

  Chapter 10

  THE LOTUS EATERS

  SERGE LISTENED TO the dreary monotone of Sergeant Burke who was conducting roll call training. He looked around the roll call room at Milton and Gonsalvez and the new faces, all of whom he knew by now since his return to Hollenbeck. He remembered how Burke's roll call training used to bore him and still did. But he was no longer annoyed by it.

  The five months from January to June which he had spent in Hollywood Division was by now a grotesque candy-striped memory which seemed to have never happened. Though he had to admit it had been educational. Everyone in Hollywood is a phony, a fruit, or a flim-flam man, a partner had warned him. At first the glamour and hilarity fascinated him and he slept with some of the most beautiful girls he would ever see, satin blondes, silky redheads, dark ones he avoided, for those were all he had in Hollenbeck Division. They were not all aspiring actresses, these lovely girls who are drawn to Hollywood from everywhere, but they all yearned for something. He never bothered to find out what. As long as they yearned for him for a few hours, or pretended to, that was all he asked of them.

  And then it all began to depress him, especially the intense look of the revelers when he got to know them. He shared an apartment with two other policemen and he could never go to bed before three o'clock because the blue light would be burning, indicating that one of them had been lucky and please give them some more time. They were very lucky, his roommates, who were equally handsome, wholesome-looking, and accomplished handlers of women. He had learned from them, and by being a roommate had been satisfied with the chaff when the chaff was a pale trembling creature who was all lips and breasts and eyes. It didn't even matter if she ate bennies frantically and babbled of the prospective modeling job which would thrust her into the centerfold of _Playboy.__ And there was another who, in the middle of the heated preliminaries of lovemaking said, "Serge, baby, I realize you're a cop and all, but I know you're no square and you wouldn't mind if I smoked a little pot first, would you? It makes it all so much better. You should try it. We'll be so much better lovers." He thought about letting her do it, but the bennies were only a misdemeanor and marijuana was a felony, and he was afraid to be here while she did it, and besides, she had annihilated his ego and desire with her need for euphoria. When she disappeared into the bedroom for the marijuana, he put on his shoes and coat and crept out the door, an ache in his loins.

  There were lots of other girls, waitresses and office girls, some of whom were ordinary, but then there was Esther, who was the most beautiful girl he had ever met. Esther who had called the police to complain about the peepers who were a constant annoyance to her, but her apartment was on the ground floor and she dressed with her drapes open because she "just loved the cooling breezes." She seemed genuinely surprised when Serge suggested she draw her drapes at night or move to an upstairs apartment. It had started out passionately between them but she was totally unique, with her moist lips and face and hands. Her eyes too were moist as was most of her torso, particularly the ample breasts. A fine layer of not unpleasant perspiration covered her during the lovemaking so that sleeping with Esther was like a steam and rub, except it was not as therapeutic--because even though a night-long bout with Esther left him exhausted, he did not feel cleansed from the inside out as he did when he left the steam room at the police academy. Perhaps Esther could not open his pores. Her heat was not purgative.

  Her style of love had begun strangely enough, but then a few of her more bizarre improvisations began to repel him slightly. One bawdy Saturday, he had become drunk in her apartment, and she had become drunk too except she drank only a fourth as much as he. She made frequent trips to the bedroom which he did not question. Then that evening when he was preparing to take her and she was more than ready, they had tumbled and clawed their way to the bed and suddenly the things she was whispering through the drunken mist became coherent. It wasn't her usual string of obscenities and he listened stunned to what she suggested. Then it was not passion but frenzy he saw in the moist eyes and she stepped half naked to the closet and dragged out various accouterments, some of which he understood and others he did not. She told him that the young couple next door, Phil and Nora, whom he had decided were a pleasant pair, were ready for a "fabulously exciting evening." If he would only say the word they would be there in a minute and it could begin.

  When he left Esther's apartment a moment later she was uttering a stream of grotesque curses that made him shiver with nausea.

  A few nights later Serge was asked by his partner, Harry Edmonds, why he was so quiet and although he answered that there was nothing wrong, he was deeply aware that he was unhappy in Hollywood where life was ethereal and complicated. The most routine call became impossible in this place. Burglary reports would often turn into therapy sessions with unhappy neurotics who had to be subjected to a crude psychoanalysis to determine the true deflated value of a wristwatch or fur coat stolen by a Hollywood burglar who often as not turned out to be as neurotic as his victim.

  At ten minutes past nine, that night, Serge and Edmonds received a call to an apartment on Wilcox not far from Hollywood station.

  "This is a pretty swinging apartment house," said Edmonds, a young policeman with sideburns a bit too long and a moustache that Serge thought ridiculous on him.

  "You got calls here before?" asked Serge.

  "Yeah, the manager's a woman. A dyke, I think. She only rents to broads far as I can see. There's always some beef here. Usually between the manager and some boyfriend of one of the female tenants. If the girls want to have girl parties, she never bitches."

  Serge carried his eight by eleven notebook under his arm and tapped on the manager's door with his flashlight.

  "You call?" he asked the lean, sweater-clad woman who held a bloody towel in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  "Come in," she said. "The girl you want to talk to is in here."

  Serge and Edmonds followed the woman through a colorful green-gold and blue living room into the kitchen. Serge thought the black sweater and close-fitting pants very becoming. Although her hair was short it was silver-tipped and styled attractively. He guessed her age at thirty-five and wondered if Edmonds was right that she was a lesbian. Nothing in Hollywood could surprise him anymore, he thought.

  The quivering brunette was seated at the kitchen table holding a second towel, ice-filled, to the left side of her face. Her right eye was swollen shut and her lower lip was turning blue but was not badly cut. Serge guessed the blood must have been from her nose which was not bleeding now and didn't look broken. It wasn't a particularly good-looking nose at best, he thought, and he looked at her crossed legs which were nicely shaped, but both knees were scraped. The torn hose hung from her left leg and had fallen down around the shoe, but she seemed too miserable to care.

  "Her boyfriend did it," said the manager, who waved them to the wrought iron leather-padded chairs which surrounded the oval table.

  Serge opened his notebook, leafing past the burglary and robbery reports and removed a miscellaneous crime report.

  "Lover's quarrel?" he asked.

  The brunette swallowed and the tear-filled eyes overflowed into the blood-stained towel.

  Serge lit a cigarette, leaned back and waited for her to
stop, realizing vaguely that this might not be _complete__ melodrama since the injuries were real and probably quite painful.

  "What's your name?" he asked, finally, as he realized it was ten o'clock and their favorite restaurant preferred that they eat before ten-thirty when the paying customers needed most of the counter space.

  "Lola St. John," she sobbed.

  "This is the second time that bastard beat you, isn't it, honey?" asked the manager. "Give the officers the same name you were using when you made the last report."

  "Rachel Sebastian," she said, dabbing at the tender lip and examining the towel.

  Serge erased the Lola St. John and wrote the other name across the top.

  "You prosecute him last time he beat you?" Serge asked. "Or did you drop the charges?"

  "I had him arrested."

  "Then you dropped the charges and refused to prosecute?"

  "I love him," she muttered, touching the lip with a pink tongue tip. An exquisite jewel formed at the corner of each eye, gumming with mascara.

  "Before we go to a lot of trouble, are you going to go through with the prosecution this time?"

  "This time I had it. I will. I swear by all that's holy."

  Serge glanced at Edmonds and began filling in the boxes on the crime report. "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-eight."

  That was the third lie. Or was it the fourth? Sometime he meant to count the lies at the completion of a report.

  "Occupation?"

  "Actress."

  "What else you do? When you're between acting jobs, I mean."

  "I'm sometimes night manager and hostess at Frederick's Restaurant in Culver City."

  Serge knew the place. He wrote "carhop" in the space for victim's occupation.

  The manager uncoiled and crossed the kitchen to the refrigerator. She refilled a clean towel with ice cubes and returned to the battered woman.

  "That son of a bitch is no good. I won't have him back here, honey. I want you for a tenant and all, but that man cannot come in this building."