Golden Orange

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Depends on what gets you off,” Buster said. “Me, I can’t stand the thought a lookin at another computerized police report with all those little boxes on ’em. I’ve filled in more little boxes in my time than a gynecologist. I’m ready for a career change.”

  “What could you do? All you know is police work, right?”

  “Somethin akin to my trainin. Maybe a job in a lab. Maybe shockin mice till they go bonkers. That’s like police work. Only in police work, I’m one a the fuckin mice! Now let’s go write some beer tickets, kid.”

  On their way to ticket the early-morning boozers in the parking lot by the Newport Pier they ran into Cockatoo Clyde. As usual, the little fat man was surrounded by parrots and cockatiels, canaries and love birds. They perched on his shoulders, or on his head, or sat obediently on temporary perches that encircled him on the sidewalk. Clyde did shows for tourists and bimbettes.

  Buster found the vivid and beautiful creatures strangely depressing. He had a terrible feeling something was going to happen on this scorching day. Something that wouldn’t be beautiful. In fact, he got a sinking feeling in his stomach when Hadley paused and disgusted a bimbette by saying to her: “Know how to turn a canary into a hummingbird? Cut off its feet!”

  “You’re real smooth and sophisticated,” Buster said to his partner. “Like dago red in a fruit jar.”

  They continued walking along Ocean Front. When they got to Fifteenth Street, they saw a pair of young Asians looking into the window of a BMW 325i. The local cops say that when two or more Vietnamese go within fifty feet of a German car, there’s de facto probable cause to stop and frisk. They say that Vietnamese thugs down from Westminster’s Little Saigon can strip a radio out of a Mercedes faster than you can tune it to a Dodgers game.

  The two Asians spotted the cops and started moving fast, toward Balboa Boulevard.

  Buster was much too hot and tired, but Hadley said, “He’s carrying something!” Then he yelled: “Hold it!”

  And the chase was on! The taller Asian held the BMW radio like a football.

  Buster put out a call for assistance over his hand set before lumbering after the fleeing Asians. Hadley, who had good speed for his size, powered along in a hang-it-out sprint. The young cop was almost sideswiped by a red pickup on Balboa Boulevard, and a kid with a baseball hat on backwards stuck his head out the window and yelled, “You’d write me a jaywalking ticket for that, you shithead!”

  The shorter and slower Asian headed east toward Main Street, a shady tree-lined thoroughfare near the old post office. The other Asian doubled back toward the beach. Hadley figured they had their wheels parked back there, maybe in the vicinity of the BMW, but since the tall one was carrying the radio, Hadley stayed with him, hoping Buster could keep up with the slower shorter one.

  Meanwhile, Buster was trucking along breathlessly, cursing Asian boat people and rookie partners and the Santa Ana winds and his life in general as he ran across the boulevard by the Balboa Cinema. A car had to careen toward the oncoming traffic lanes, forcing Buster to leap on top of a parked car to keep from getting creamed. Another car screeched and fish-tailed and dove to a stop just in time.

  Horns were blowing and people were screaming, but no harm was done except to Buster’s nervous system as a geyser of adrenaline blew through him. Then Buster, too, wondered if they might’ve stashed their car somewhere near the place where they’d first been spotted. He chugged back toward the beach.

  The taller Asian ran back to the sidewalk along Ocean Front, dodging in and out among strollers, skaters, runners, loiterers, and cyclists in Spandex. With the radio still under his arm he juked and jibed, and looked back at Hadley once too often.

  He crashed into the three jogglers. Red balls went flying. Bodies covered in polka dots and stripes did back flips and cartwheels and whoop-de-doos. Thejogglers smashed into two kids on beach bikes who collided with two skaters going the other way. People shouted and screamed, arms flailing, legs akimbo. Metal and flesh skidded along the pavement. Big wheels and little ones spun upside down in the air. Hadley plunged through all of it without losing a step.

  And he made it to the corner. Where he stepped on one little red ball, a joggler’s ball, belonging to the girl who could sprint all-out while keeping four of them in the air.

  The young cop’s legs went horizontal! He did a head-first, belly-flopping, boogie-boarding slide along fifteen feet of sidewalk, upending a tourist from Tacoma who had already decided that folks were a little different in California.

  Hadley yelped, rolled over and gaped in horror at his knees and shins. The stolen car radio lay broken in the street ten feet away. The cassette player was jammed and a tape had popped out. Hadley limped over, retrieved the stolen property and sat down on the curb.

  Buster had been prowling through the alleys behind the row of rental units along the beach, looking for a likely car that might belong to the two suspects, when he spotted the tall Asian two hundred yards farther west along the beachfront!

  The thief was now bare-chested, using his shirt to mop sweat and blood from the abrasions on his chest, arms and forehead. He looked like he’d been dipped in olive oil, his lean sweaty body and shiny black hair gleaming in the pitiless sunlight. Buster yelled: “Stop, you little slopehead, or I’ll blow you back to the boonies you came from!”

  The Asian was losing it, running in slow motion. He wasn’t breathing, he was rattling. He turned a corner away from the beachfront, back toward Balboa Boulevard again. Where he had his luckiest break of the week. He had just enough time to dance off the sidewalk.

  When Buster rounded the corner—having decided to sprint all-out for another fifty yards and then, fuck it—he wasn’t so lucky.

  An exploding palette! Color! A kaleidoscope of emerald green and blood scarlet and lemon yellow and cobalt blue! Buster heard exotic cries he hadn’t even heard in the jungles of Vietnam! Shrieks and whistles and screams! Colors dove and swooped and wheeled and hovered before his eyes!

  Buster Wiles found himself sitting splaylegged on the sidewalk. Cockatoo Clyde sat opposite him, looking every bit as dazed as Buster, but a lot more terror-stricken. Clyde was swarmed on by birds scurrying to safety. His cockatoos and parrots and canaries and cockatiels and lovebirds and parakeets screamed in rage and fear, even biting at their master in confusion.

  Buster was covered with a mosaic of feathers and bird shit. Terror-loosened bird bowels had simply let go! Buster was awash in green and white, and strangely enough, a kind of magenta slime. He could taste bird shit: It was even dripping down his nose.

  “I got a headache,” the dazed cop said in a soft demented voice to the equally dazed bird man. “If you promise not to bitch to my boss about me scarin your birds, I promise I won’t tear your face off and eat it.”

  The bird man gaped at the ferocious, bloodied, psychotic-looking cop, and said, “Can I just say something, Officer?”

  Buster’s voice was so soft he could hardly hear himself speak. He said, “Yes, if it’s not critical of me. Because life is fuckin me over real bad and I feel like I might have a stroke any minute now, and I’m jist about as dangerous as an English soccer fan. So if I was you, I wouldn’t say nothin critical.”

  Cockatoo Clyde gulped and said, “I was just going to tell you, Officer, that the man you’re chasing staggered into the alley over there and fell down.”

  It took Buster Wiles about two minutes to get to his feet and limp toward the alley. Halfway down, the Asian was leaning against the wall of a garage. He wasn’t going to run, but he wasn’t going to go the easy way. He just stood there, waiting for Buster.

  Buster Wiles’s temples throbbed with pure fury. His eyeballs were seared, swollen with rage. He advanced toward the Asian, who stood stoically but with some defiance in his delicate face. He wasn’t really as young as Buster had first thought. His face said: “Where I come from I got used to men with guns beating the living shit out of me. One more time won’t matter.”

  S
uddenly, a ten-year-old Pontiac chattered through the alley, almost pinning Buster to a telephone pole before he leaped to safety! He found himself on his ass again. The Pontiac was driven by the other Asian, who squealed to a stop near his pal, just as a Newport Beach patrol unit slammed to a stop at the opposite end of the alley.

  The driver started to reverse the Pontiac without having rescued his partner, but Buster was on his feet and had drawn his revolver, very willing to crank off every round. The car stalled and the driver leaped out and tried to run back out of the alley with the rejuvenated partner hot behind him.

  Buster smacked the little one with his side-handle baton when the guy tried to scamper past. The little one did a forward somersault, but got up running, blood streaming down the back of his head. The tall one made it past Buster.

  Another Newport Beach patrol unit pulled up on the other end of the alley, and Buster, along with a female cop named Babs Morris, found themselves rolling on the sidewalk with the shorter thief, a biting, spitting, gouging little boat person who didn’t want to go to jail that day. Buster was already exhausted and Babs Morris didn’t have all that much upper-body strength. The little Asian managed to slug her twice on the side of the face and kick Buster in the groin.

  A crowd of college kids, already drunk by noon, came pouring out onto the street from where they’d been watching a game of volleyball on the beach, and immediately took sides with the game little Asian. Buster got the guy in a chokehold, while Babs Morris looked for the handcuffs that he’d kicked out of her hand. Buster tried his best to pinch off the Asian’s carotid arteries with what was left of his strength.

  The college kids yelled things like:

  “You don’t have to kill the guy!”

  “Let him up, for chrissake, he can’t breathe!”

  “Does it take two cops to arrest one little guy?”

  “Just put the handcuffs on him and stop hurting him!”

  By then, there were five patrol units screeching toward the alley with lights gumballing. Two cars slid to a stop and the cops jumped out and piled on. One of them knelt on the Asian’s back, and at last he submitted to handcuffs and was dragged to a police car.

  Buster rolled over and looked at the crowd still yammering and twittering. To him those college kids looked like they were standing on the other side of an aquarium. Or he was.

  He staggered to his feet and limped toward the mob of kids. He picked out one who was making chirping noises like the Bedouin women in desert movies. The kid quieted down when Buster was six feet away, when he saw a pair of eyes emitting a death beam.

  The kid said, “Hey! Hey, wait a minute!” when Buster slowly drew out his handcuffs. “You can’t arrest me! I haven’t done anything!”

  Those violet eyes floated in a sea of lava. Those eyes were coming at the kid like little purple asteroids from a galaxy far away.

  Buster was lunatic-furious. He said, “I ain’t gonna arrest you! I’m gonna deputize you!” Then Buster snatched the kid’s arm. And while the crowd started hollering about police brutality and civil rights and such, Buster bent that arm straight up, and whispered, “Do you swear to uphold the law and defend the Constitution? Yes? Fine! I hereby deputize you!” Then he slapped the handcuffs in the kid’s hands and said, “Now let’s see you go catch the one that got away without hurtin him! Make sure any bruises and broken bones belong to you, not him, YOU LITTLE MAGGOT SUCKIN FRATERNITY VERMIN!”

  A sergeant who had just arrived, ran up, took Buster in tow and pointed him toward a patrol car. Then he went to the college kid, retrieved Buster’s handcuffs and said, “He was hit in the head by the suspect. Concussion. You understand.”

  While Buster sat in the sergeant’s car for safekeeping, the crowd of college kids went back to volleyball and drinking beer. And the patrol units at the scene cleaned up the carnage of the day.

  Hadley rode back to the scene of the car burglary and pointed out the BMW to a patrol officer, who ran a radio check on the license plate. It came back as an LAPD stolen, with a hold-for-crime-scene-investigation, and the unusual request to notify West L.A. detectives when the stolen car was recovered. And just after a tow truck arrived to hook up the stolen car, there was another radio message that Hadley and Buster should go to the station.

  While they were being driven to Newport Beach PD by Officer Babs Morris, who had a black eye, Hadley said, “That BMW wasn’t even jimmied! Probably the jerkoff that owns it left it unlocked! Might as well write ‘steal me!’ on it, you leave a BMW unlocked up there in L.A.”

  Buster didn’t seem to be hearing Hadley. His bell was still ringing and he couldn’t focus all that well. Finally he said, “Somethin’s wrong. This is supposed to be a safe place to do police work. Yet in the same week, I get shot at for stealin a dead mouse and almost killed by a fuckin cockatoo.”

  Babs Morris turned and looked at Buster Wiles very strangely. With her one good eye.

  When they got to the station Sammy Vogel was waiting for them.

  “You mean, this ain’t about me jackin up that smart-mouth college kid?” Buster said. “I was figurin he probably called in to beef me.”

  The bald little detective scratched his shiny pink jaw and said, “That BMW you guys impounded? It was hot.”

  “Yeah, we know,” Hadley said, “with a request to notify LAPD.”

  “That’s because it was stolen during a residential burg where a woman and her daughter got murdered,” Vogel said. “The car belonged to the victim.”

  That stoked young Hadley. “A double murder? They know who did it?”

  “No,” Vogel said, “but they know about a serial murderer with the same M.O. They call him the Audio Killer.”

  “I got a headache,” Buster said. “Whaddaya want us to do?”

  “Just wait here at the station for LAPD, is all. Don’t go anywhere. They probably wanna see if your suspect could have anything to do with their case.”

  “No way,” Buster said. “Our gooks were jist two opportunists. Happened to see a BMW that wasn’t locked and went for the radio.”

  “I got the radio back,” Hadley said to Vogel, “but the guy I was chasing got away.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t suppose LAPD cares about a recovered radio. They’re looking for a serial killer. Any chance for prints on it?”

  “Sure,” Hadley said. “I picked it up real careful. The guy’s prints’re all over it.”

  “I mean the killer’s prints!” Vogel said. “Not your guy. The guy that killed the people and stole the car. His prints. He’s fruity over cassette players, this Audio Killer. He mighta played one of his tapes on that car radio.”

  Suddenly Hadley reached into a half-ripped pocket of his shorts and took out the audiocassette, holding it by the edges. He said to Vogel, “I almost forgot about this. It popped out.”

  Vogel took the cassette from the battered young cop. It was plain, without a commercial label. It had Betsy scrawled across it.

  Vogel crossed the squad room to a cassette machine on top of a filing cabinet. He put the cassette in the machine, holding the edge between his thumb and forefinger. He punched the button on the machine.

  There were two other detectives in the squad room. Everyone stopped when, after a few seconds of tape hissing, they heard a woman weeping hysterically. Then she cried out: “Pleeeeease! Pleeeeease!”

  Then she tried to scream, but it was muffled by something. Then someone made gargling noises.

  Then they heard the tape hissing again, followed by someone panting into the mike. Then there was a gasp and something that sounded like wheezing. Then the tape hissed again. Then it all stopped.

  Buster looked at Hadley but nobody spoke. The action on the tape resumed with the sound of a small child crying. Then a man’s voice said, “Mustn’t cry, Betsy. There’s no need to cry.”

  The child’s voice said, “Where’s my mommy? I want my mommy.”

  The male voice said, “Sure, Betsy. You’ll be with your mommy soon. Re
al soon.”

  Then the child was screaming in terror. Then she was screaming in agony. They could easily detect the difference. The screaming went on for perhaps thirty seconds before it was muffled, and a man’s panting excited voice said, “Betsy. Betsy!”

  Then the sound stopped and the tape hissed again.

  Buster and Hadley waited in the lunch room for the LAPD detectives. Buster had a diet drink while Hadley just sat quietly. But the hair on Buster’s forearms was still electric, and he shivered up his back as he thought about the tape. He had watched Hadley’s young face go gray during the playing of the cassette. There had been a white line around the cop’s mouth, his lips were pressed so tightly together, and Buster thought he’d seen tears in the kid’s eyes.

  The LAPD detectives arrived at 5:15 P.M., apologizing for the delay. They seemed satisfied that the Asian thieves had nothing to do with their double murder, but they were extremely excited to get the cassette. A dusting for latent prints had produced nothing except smudges from Hadley’s own fingers. But the voice of the serial murderer was on that tape, their first and only lead to the Audio Killer.

  “I’m gonna have our boss write you guys an attaboy,” one of the detectives said.

  Ordinarily, Hadley would’ve been thrilled by a commendation, but he’d been subdued since hearing the Betsy tape. After the LAPD cops were gone, and Buster and Hadley had had their abrasions tended to and were in the locker room changing to civvies, Hadley finally said, “Know how old the little girl was? Betsy?”

  “No.”

  “Three years old. I asked them and they said she was three years old.”

  “Yeah, well,” Buster said. “Well.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Guys from Santa Ana PD always say that here in our town a beer ticket’s a felony, right? And they always ask, whadda we get? One-point-seven homicides in a bad year? Well, I’d rather be here and deal with a million frauds and ripoffs than deal with one a those kinda homicides. Or something like the Randy Kraft case.”