Delta Star

by Joseph Wambaugh

  The stench of pork was overpowering. Rotten pork. And gamy chickens that restaurants in Chinatown or Korea Town or Thai Town had disposed of. The four cops looked at each other, and Dolly thought she might just vomit.

  There was a community kitchen serving the entire building. It was at the end of the darkened hall, and when Dilford yelled, “Police Department. Who called?” and got no response, the cops walked into the kitchen, which was the size of Leery’s dance floor.

  It had one apartment-size gas range and oven. Two hot plates were on the sink and the kitchen housed a noisy old refrigerator. Jane Wayne nudged open a door and saw it was a darkened pantry. Suddenly a dark scum of water began to flow out on the floor into the kitchen from the pantry.

  Except that it wasn’t water.

  It was a wave of roaches. Jane Wayne, despite her macho ways, let out a yelp and instinctively pulled up her pants legs. So did Rumpled Ronald, who instantly wondered if roaches carried plague. So did Dilford and Dolly, Dilford saying, “Back! Back!” to the wave of roaches, scrambling, crawling, flowing around their feet like sewer water. Dilford stomped on a few dozen, and shiny bodies crackled like bacon frying. Dolly said, “Let’s get out of here!”

  Which they did. And fast.

  “Eeeee!” Rumpled Ronald cried as he shook some roaches off his pant leg.

  “Disgusting!” Jane Wayne cried, shivering.

  “Revolting!” Dolly cried, remembering the mushroom that moved.

  Then they saw the paws in the petunias.

  At first they didn’t know they were paws. They looked just like two white petunias among the pink and mauve ones. They were tucked inside the petunias, and the entire bouquet was wrapped in foil and left outside one of the doors on the first floor of the apartment house as though it were a love offering.

  Dolly thought for a moment it was the dusky light and shadows on the napless, greasy, urine-befouled carpet. Then she bent down and looked. She gingerly touched the paws in the petunias. She felt the little black nails and the rigored toes.

  “What the hell is this?” Dolly said.

  Rumpled Ronald said, “It’s two paws, is what. Dog paws in the petunias. Jesus! It’s gonna be disease and pestilence that gets me on the next-to-the-last day. Don’t get that thing near me.”

  “Dog paws?” Jane Wayne said incredulously. “Real dog paws?”

  “They’re real all right,” Rumpled Ronald said. “The Chinese gangs send them as warnings. They also send dog’s heads. There’s a lot a heads and paws around here but I ain’t never seen a dog’s body. Wonder what they do with the body?”

  “You been to Fu’s for lunch lately?” Dolly said, turning chartreuse around the mouth.

  “Fu woks his dogs,” Dilford said, but nobody laughed.

  “Somebody probably didn’t make their extortion payment,” Rumpled Ronald said as they ascended the stairs. “Maybe somebody works in a shop in Chinatown or … OH, SHIT!”

  They found the dog’s head. It had been a dirty bone-colored mixed-breed. The dog’s head was attached to a door on the second floor. A swatch of muddy-looking blood had coagulated on the door where the head was attached. It was a dire warning all right. The head was pinned to the door by an eight-penny nail driven through the animal’s distended tongue. The ragged mutilated collar of fur was peeled back from the severed neck, and the dog, obviously killed nearby, had bled quite a lot onto the floor outside the door of the doomed man’s apartment. A baby rat had been happily frolicking in the gluey ooze, and ran with a blood-glistened grin right past the faces of Dolly and Dilford, who were nose-high with the second-story landing.

  Dilford drew his revolver and was trying to show he wasn’t nervous by making a few more cracks about the menu at Fu’s Fast Foods. The others were silent. Dolly was grimly trying not to vomit.

  “Police!” Dilford shouted in the second-floor hallway, in the seemingly deserted apartment house.

  There were signs everywhere of Southeast Asian boat people jammed into the filthy little rooms. Paying exorbitant rents to the slumlord who, as it turned out, was one of the fun-loving Westsiders who paid $10,000 for a gold-plated .38 revolver engraved with his name by Bijan, the Happy Iranian of Rodeo Drive, who had created them for the design-conscious clients at his Beverly Hills men’s store.

  Still there was no answer in the upstairs hallway. Most were out doing their unskilled labor in the many shops and businesses owned by Thais, Koreans, Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Chinese, or in the downtown sweatshops owned by round-eyes who considered themselves keepers of the American dream by sweating the Asian boat people as diligently as they’d sweated the Mexicans before them. The four cops—now with guns rehol-stered, since there seemed to be no more mutilated animals lying around to scare the crap out of them—decided to try the third floor in the hopes of finding out who the hell called the police in this spooky place.

  The four cops climbed to the third floor, their Sam Brownes creaking, keys jingling, breath coming hard, not from the easy climb but from the anticipation of more Oriental warnings left on people’s doorsteps by cutthroats the boat people had failed to elude as they had eluded others in their journeys across treacherous seas in terrifying boats, hoping to escape rape, robbery and murder, only to find it again and again during their journeys.

  These were the lucky ones, those survivors who had been miraculously delivered to freedom here in central Los Angeles, where gangsters from their own and neighboring countries nailed dog’s heads to their doors if they didn’t cough up their hard-earned greenbacks.

  “Screw it,” Dilford said. “I don’t know who the hell called and I don’t care. This place makes The House of Misery look happy. Let’s get outa here.”

  Then they heard a woman moan. It was the kind of moan that is almost a chant, the moan of people who have watched the skies too many years for fire and explosion, who have nothing more than cries of anguish with which to entice mercy from oppressors.

  “Who the hell’s that?” Jane Wayne said.

  And the tall young woman crept toward the third door on their left, one from which the brass door number had long since been stolen, along with the copper plumbing now replaced by plastic. Jane Wayne, using her stick, tapped on the door and all four cops stood well clear of it. The moaning rose and fell in tinkling, chantlike undulations.

  Then the door was opened by a little boy of nine. He was a frail child with lashless eyes. He bore a homemade haircut that left him with whitewalls clear to the top of his head.

  “You speak English?” Dilford asked, and the child, wearing an “I love L.A.” T-shirt and short pants and hand-me-down sandals tied to his feet with strings, only stared. Unblinking.

  “Shit,” Dilford said nervously. Then he stuck his head into the apartment, which had been divided in half with a plywood partition by the ever-resourceful slumlord in order to double the number of tenants in each apartment.

  Dilford said, “Hey, anybody here speak English?”

  The chantlike moans from the back room stopped momentarily and resumed. Then a man walked out of the moaning room. He was ageless, had spiny black hair, was gray-yellow and gaunt. He wore pants six sizes too large, tied by a cracked leather belt. He wore rubber shower sandals with a thong between the toes. He wore a dirty sweat-stained undershirt.

  And he wore a thousand cuts.

  “I don’t need this shit,” Rumpled Ronald blurted. “I only got another day and a half.” But Rumpled Ronald left the company of the three young cops and came forward. He took the ageless man by the arm and nodded.

  “Okay?” Rumpled Ronald said. “Okay? No hurt. Okay?” And he pulled up the dirty sleeveless undershirt, baring the bony torso of the ageless man, and he said, “A thousand cuts. I don’t need this shit.”

  And the ageless man, who did not understand a word of English, looked at the rumpled cop as though to say, “Neither do I.”

  Although Dilford was senior to Jane Wayne and Dolly, and with his three years of polic
e service fancied himself a salty veteran, he had not worked long in Asian neighborhoods, not among the boat people.

  “The Chinese gangs do it,” Rumpled Ronald said. “This guy doesn’t look Chinese.” Then to the ageless man he said, “Cambodia? You?”

  The ageless man stared at the wall, accepting whatever fate might be his. The little boy with the lashless eyes stared at the police officers, unblinking.

  “What happened to him?” Dolly said. Then she came forward and touched his right arm. Every inch of flesh between his throat and navel was crisscrossed by slivers of scab and healing tissue, as though his entire body had been written on in Arabic script.

  “They use sharp knives,” Rumpled Ronald said. “They don’t cut arteries. They want the guy to be able to work and earn the money to give them their payoffs.”

  “Payoffs for what?” Jane Wayne cried.

  “For the right to exist, for chrissake!” Rumpled Ronald looked at his watch and counted the minutes.

  “I’m reporting this to the Asian Task Force,” Dolly said, her voice trembling. “These people have got to learn to come to the police for protection and …”

  “What is that?” Jane Wayne said suddenly.

  Jane Wayne, who stood almost as tall as Dilford, was looking into the squalid little moaning room.

  “What is that?” Dilford said, and both Dolly and the rumpled cop walked cautiously over to the doorway.

  A woman was kneeling and moaning. She was perhaps thirty years old, not ageless like the man. But she had the same look about her. The look that said: Whatever you do to me cannot be worse than what has already been done. And I expect no better. In short, she had the look of the boat people.

  “It’s a baby doll,” Dolly said, standing on tiptoes to see over the broad shoulder of Jane Wayne.

  “It’s a baby!” Dilford said. “I think.”

  One couldn’t be sure. It was lying naked on a straw sleeping mat. The windows were covered with musty velvet drapes left over from a time long past, not stolen by previous tenants, because they were so torn and stained by the Latino illegals who occupied these rooms before the boat people came. It was dark in the room and the baby did not stir. The woman knelt beside the naked baby and chanted her moan of anguish.

  “Is that baby sick?” Dolly asked.

  “Is that baby dead?” Dilford asked.

  “That’s a strange-looking baby,” Jane Wayne said. “It’s all … deformed.”

  And the tall young woman squinted through the gloom into the squalid corner of the room where the baby lay. Then she walked softly into the room, past the moaning woman, and stood over the deformed baby.

  Except that it wasn’t deformed.

  Jane Wayne groaned when she saw the gleaming splinter of bone protruding through the shoulder. The left leg was jack-knifed and nearly touched the hip of the baby where the broken shards of bone had not torn the flesh. But they had torn through near the elbow. The child’s left arm was fractured into two pieces and the crimson slivers punctured the flesh. There was very little blood.

  The mother of the baby had not tried to rearrange the body into the whole child it had been. She had merely knelt beside the broken naked infant and moaned.

  Jane Wayne and Rumpled Ronald were very glad that Dilford and Dolly had gotten the call. They only stayed long enough to call the detectives and the police department’s Asian Task Force, and await the arrival of a translator, Vietnamese as it turned out.

  They stayed long enough to learn who killed the baby. It was the ageless man, the baby’s father, who, the translator explained, had been in America less than two years. Who had seen his parents, two sons, and his former wife killed in the war. By the time he finally arrived in America he was sick and tired of rape and robbery and torture and murder, and he flatly refused to pay when three lieutenants of a former South Vietnamese colonel who owned a string of grocery stores in Los Angeles decided that all the expensive military training given them years ago by the United States government should not be wasted. These lieutenants decided they should receive compensation for the years of broken promises and the final defeat of their country, so they began their own guerrilla war, a reign of terror against the people in the Vietnamese communities. But occasionally a stubborn customer, like the ageless man, just got sick and tired of it and decided that they shouldn’t have the Vietnamese version of a mink blanket from Bijan’s, not if his family was sleeping without any blankets. And he decided not to cough up twenty percent of his weekly paycheck for the right to exist. Hence, the thousand cuts.

  And after the thousand cuts, the moaning woman told the translator that her husband stopped working and became very despondent. And one afternoon the baby wouldn’t stop crying.…

  When the Beverly Hills investment counselor who put together income-property investment syndicates heard about one of his nameless tenants being arrested for murder, he concocted a gross-out gag for the gang at the Polo Lounge.

  “One of our tenants been watching Monday Night Football,” he told them. “And apparently he liked the way our red-hot running backs spike the football into the turf after scoring a touchdown. This morning he tried to spike his baby! Six points! Just goes to show, these boat people can learn a lot in America!”

  “Tell that one like it is, Howard Cosell!” his date giggled.

  Δ Δ Δ

  While Dilford and Dolly were assisting the detectives, Jane Wayne and Rumpled Ronald resumed patrol. The rumpled cop felt absolutely certain he would be killed in a traffic accident and hoped it would be merciful and swift. He was now thirty-three hours from his pension.

  As it turned out, the translator’s statement by the ageless man caused problems for Jane Wayne, as did the act of baby spiking, as did the thousand cuts. Ditto for nailing dog heads to people’s doors and tucking paws in the petunias. Jane Wayne decided she didn’t like any of these things a bit. After sixteen months as a police officer, Jane Wayne wanted to go to Leery’s Saloon tonight and talk to Dolly and ask if baby spiking and paws in the petunias weren’t different from cops-and-robbers and car chases and fun things she had always expected from police work.

  Except that the more she thought of it, she couldn’t wait until tonight. Jane Wayne, who wore her makeup too severe (the female officers had to wear it more “natch-your-all,” according to the captain), suddenly noticed that her mascara was starting to run. Jane Wayne, who drove the black-and-white while Rumpled Ronald rode shotgun and took his pulse, was starting to cry.

  The tall young woman hadn’t cried since she was twelve years old and her mother died of cancer. She couldn’t believe it. Jane Wayne furtively wiped her eyes and smeared her mascara and glanced at Rumpled Ronald. He didn’t notice, and these days wouldn’t see an elephant on the sidewalk unless it directly threatened his life. Jane Wayne knew she had to talk to someone. Pronto.

  There was only one person who would do. She had an overwhelming urge to find her favorite sex object, not because he was her favorite sex object, but because he was the only person she knew who was absolutely, positively, undoubtedly, certifiably crazy, and therefore might understand. She began cruising the Alvarado beat, searching for The Bad Czech.

  Δ Δ Δ

  After hanging the wino and fighting with the stubborn chopstick, The Bad Czech was pretty well under control for the rest of the day. That is, he was doing ordinary things like lipping Cubans.

  The Bad Czech had never stopped reciting his list of grievances against the former President for being outfoxed by Fidel Castro.

  “Patriots!” he moaned. “Freedom lovers. Sure. There was thirty-two freedom lovers on those fuckin boats from Cuba, and one hundred and twenty-five thousand thieves, rapists, murderers, lunatics, insane persons and faggots! Why couldn’t Billy Carter have been President? You could get him drunk and talk to Billy!”

  Lipping Cubans meant that every time The Bad Czech encountered someone he considered to be a Cuban hoodlum, after a pat-down for weapons and preliminary ques
tions as to what the thug was up to, The Bad Czech would suddenly grab the lower lip of the suspect and pull it down to see if there was a tattoo.

  Fidel Castro, when he was outfoxing Jimmy Carter, went to the trouble of tattooing all the lunatics, insane persons, murderers, robbers and drag queens whom he loaded on the leaky boats and sent to Miami, the reason being that if any of them ever tried to sneak back into Cuba they would be readily identified by that tattoo. At first some tried to bite the tattoo and obliterate it. Until the Cuban authorities smashed their teeth with rifle butts.

  The more he thought of it as he foraged about his beat, lipping Cubans, the more The Bad Czech decided to write in Fidel Castro’s name the next time he voted for a United States President. Castro was his kind of guy.

  The Bad Czech, ever a diligent cop, kept a little notebook full of the names, addresses and descriptions of all the tattooed people he lipped. Ditto for those Cuban boat people who wore an additional tattoo on the left hand, a practice of the Cuban prison gangs identifying their criminal specialty, be it mugging, burglary, rape or murder.

  Cecil Higgins thought it was unsanitary to lip Cubans, and tried in vain to convince The Bad Czech that some day he was going to get rabies sticking his hands in people’s mouths.

  “Czech, ain’t you lipped enough people for one day?” Cecil Higgins griped. “How ‘bout you go wash your hands? I’m gettin queasy thinkin where your mitts’ve been.”

  The Bad Czech obediently went inside Leo’s Love Palace, kicked two fruits and a dope peddler out of the rest room, and washed his hands and face, deciding to sit in the park and feed the ducks and call it a day.

  Jane Wayne spotted Cecil Higgins and was out of her car when The Bad Czech emerged from the saloon. While Cecil Higgins walked over to the radio car to try to persuade Rumpled Ronald that the odds of surviving a day and a half were excellent, Jane Wayne approached The Bad Czech and walked him into the doorway of Leo’s Love Palace, out of view.