WHITE

by Neal Arbic

  But the 60s brought change.

  Laughter shattered Jack’s memories. His eyes opened. He sneered. “Fuckin’ hippies.”

  The flowery-dressed teenagers didn’t notice him. They giggled and strutted down the street.

  He retreated and slammed the door, jarring the picture on the wall: a black and white of his wife, dead for eight years. From his gloomy living room he tossed the fresh paper into the kitchen. It landed on yesterday’s paper still wrapped in its elastic, surrounded by all of last week’s papers – still unopened. The pile of papers stood next to another pile and another. Stack after stack of unopened newspapers covered the whole kitchen floor.

  Jack slumped in a faded club chair. The small end table beside him was crowded with empty scotch bottles, the closest: near-empty. He stared at the blank glass screen of his small TV.

  There was a knock at the door. He groaned. On his way, he caught a glimpse of an afro out his window. Jack stopped. Through the blinds, he inspected the young black man in tight slacks, a white t-shirt and red windbreaker with racing strips. His afro was high and wide with pride, complemented by long sideburns. Jack cursed under his breath, “F’christsakes.”

  Jack swung open the door. “Get off my property!”

  The door slammed in the young man’s face. Jack stormed back to his chair.

  The young man gave the closed door a fuck you with his eyes. Born in the south, hitting adolescence in an LA ghetto, enrolled into an all-white college; he was used to frosty receptions. He fished a folded paper from his pocket, flipped it open and checked the address. This was the place. It was little comfort. He knew how to play it cool, but his gut danced. Taking a moment to restore a skillful poker face, he adjusted the gun under his jacket. The greatest risk was just coming here, so he might as well play it out. He took a deep breath of morning air, then knocked three times – loud.

  Before Jack could sit, he heard the knocks. Jack reached for the holster slung over his chair, pulled out his .38 and popped open the cylinder. It was loaded. He swung the door open and pointed the gun. “Get lost! You goddamn-”

  The young man held a police badge. Jack paused, his eyes examining the police shield designating rank and number.

  The black man’s wide eyes examined Jack’s gun with disbelief. “You Detective Middleton?”

  The gun lowered. The old man’s eyes lingered on the badge. “Yes.”

  “I’m Officer Hicks. Delware Hicks. You requested a detective applicant from Narcotics?”

  “You’re black.”

  Delware detected fresh scotch on the old man’s breath. “Yes, I know.”

  Jack withdrew into the house. The young man stood eyeing him.

  Jack glanced back. “Well, come in. Shut the door, will ya!”

  The living room smelt like stale cigar smoke. Dust covered a battered table, a bulky Victor Victrola gramophone, a pile of heavy 78rpm platters leaning against its clawed legs. A grimy radio with myriad dials still had its art deco charm. The place had a woman’s touch: faded flowered curtains, yellowed laced table top dollies, but their condition said she was long gone.

  Jack lowered himself into his chair and pointed to a sofa. “Sit!”

  Delware noted a shelf of World War Two memorabilia: an Air Force insignia, a Good Conduct Medal, a Purple Heart, a glass vial holding what looked like shrapnel – Delware blinked –a Congressional Medal of Honor, its starred blue ribbon wrapped around tarnished brass knuckles.

  Jack scratched his unshaven face. “Why the hell did you come here? Couldn’t you wait ‘til I got to the station? And which idiot told where I live?” Jack didn’t wait for answers. “Let’s see your ID.”

  From the edge of the lumpy sofa, Delware handed over a wallet. Jack inspected the LAPD laminate, stared at its young black face. “I asked for the youngest applicant they had, didn’t know they’d send me a coon.”

  Delware winced. Jack caught it and challenged him with a purposeful stare. Delware flinched. Jack’s face was solid granite, his eyes spooky; there was an almost supernatural concentration in them. Under that unrelenting stare, Delware was forced to speak his mind. “I’m a black man.”

  “I don’t care what you are…as long as you’re not a first prize dummy with a lousy attitude. I just didn’t know they were sending me a coo-” Jack stopped himself.

  Delware pushed a clenched fist into the sofa; his voice trembled. “I’m a law officer like you. No different. And if you’re going to refer to my race: I’m black.”

  Not even a minute in and Jack had already found the kid’s soft spot. He congratulated himself by poking it again. “Well, let’s not get all emotional about the fact you’re a spook.”

  Blood pumped into Delware’s ears. He detected the slightest smirk on the old man’s face. Is he goading me?

  Jack handed the wallet back. “So you want to be a detective? You know there are no…black…detectives in Homicide?”

  Delware rose, surprised to find his legs a little shaky. “I need to use your bathroom.”

  Jack’s eyebrows rose. He had grown old in a segregated army and police force; his southern roots were a world of drinking fountains clearly marked White and Colored.

  Delware’s defiant eyes stared back. He had grown up in a south of white-only restaurants, white-only theatres, white-only bathrooms. Legally, segregation had ended only four years earlier.

  The change in the law tipped the scales for Jack. His eyes relented. He gave a reluctant, “Sure,” and pointed his thumb blindly over his shoulder.

  When Delware reached a door, Jack jumped with a violent, “Hey!”

  Delware spun around.

  Jack yelled. “Not that door! The one on the left!” He muttered as he sat. “No one goes in there…not even me.”

  ***

  In the cramped bathroom Delware found an unwashed toilet: rimmed dark brown, speckled with black dirt. He grimaced at the stench. “Goddamn. To think brothers marched and died for the right to share this shit.”

  Delware leaned back on the door for a long minute. He didn’t unzip his pants. His bathroom ploy had paid off. He had pegged the old geezer: Jack was no die-hard racist, not if he let a black man use his bathroom. At some point, the old man may have had a black friend or co-worker, maybe even feelings for a black woman. His new partner was like all old timer cops - a real cowboy, trigger happy, pistol-whipping confessions, breaking a hundred laws to enforce one, talking like it was still 1947. Delware despised racial trash talk, but this old man could be his ticket to something higher.

  Looking in the mirror, smiling at his dark African good looks, he slid his hands into his pants, pulling back his jacket just enough to reveal the tip of his badge and holster. Delware nodded approvingly and whispered, “Baaaadd mothafucka.”

  He flushed the toilet with his boot and went back into the hall. He eyed the stacks of unwrapped newspapers on the kitchen floor.

  Delware flopped down on the couch, a smiling Black Power stud. He leaned back and asked with ambitious eyes, “So what do you need me to do?”

  Jack’s dull eyes saw the kid was thinking about making the Detective Bureau: no more patrols or uniforms, having the inside track on headlining murders and every other cop in LA stepping aside when you arrived. But sooner or later, you were left with the bodies. And every day brought more: the five dead children who played with dynamite, the two week old boy with his head cut off by his mother, the fifteen year-old boy who blew his head off with a shotgun, the husband’s face staring at his 70 year-old wife who had been raped and murdered, and over the weekend, the severely mutilated body of a pregnant Sharon Tate. Jack knew LA seduced young cops, not its bright sunshine or tanned beach beauties, but those midnight murmurings over the police shortwave, the weird intimacy of walking into a stranger’s bedroom in the middle of the night, their half naked body lifeless at your feet. You saw those chaotic moments, not sentimental casket death, but raw, violent, never pretty death. But in Homicide, when those cases remained open,
unchecked, unsolved - those victims became your children. The faces you thought about between sips of coffee and swigs of scotch.

  For the briefest moment, Jack wanted to tell the young man to forget about it. Go back to a foot patrol and handing out tickets. Where you checked in at four and left the winos behind at midnight, because there was no checking out of Homicide Division. No end to thinking about open cases. Those bodies followed you home, from that day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.

  Delware’s eyes shifted to the gramophone’s giant horn, its metal logo of black and white dogs listening intently to a giant Victrola horn. A Hank Williams 78rpm record lay beside it on the worn fake Persian rug. “You from the south, Detective Middleton?”

  Jack snapped, “What?”

  “I don’t know many white men in California who eat grits.” Delware’s eyes edged toward an old cereal bowl beside Jack’s chair.

  Jack glanced at the crusty bowl. “My father was. We’d visit…family, vacation.”

  “Your TV’s unplugged. There’s a lot of dust on that cord.”

  Jack grinned at the kid’s attempt to interrogate. “I pulled the plug in ’61, kid.”

  Delware raised an eyebrow. “You don’t read newspapers, don’t watch TV…do you know the first man walked on the moon last month?”

  “Ask me if I give a damn.” Jack snorted. “I’m not as hep as I use to be.”

  “Hep?” Delware held back a laugh. “You mean hip.”

  Jack sneered, leaned over and pulled something from the other side of his chair. Delware was shocked by what was handed to him: The Beatles’ White Album. Nothing could be more contrary to this room and man: the pristine glow of the all white cover, its modern pop art starkness. Delware owned the album, but seeing it here, touching it now, made no sense at all, as if someone was playing a joke. He muttered, “What is this?”

  Jack’s gruff voice snapped, “Evidence.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. That’s why you’re here. I need to understand these lyrics. It’s all screaming to me. Goddamn noise you kids listen to. Can’t understand a word they’re saying.”

  “Why do you need to understand the lyrics?”

  “They were written in blood on the walls of the crime scene.”

  “The Tate murders!”

  “Yes, how do you know?”

  “It made yesterday’s front page – in every newspaper across the country.” Delware leaned towards the kitchen of unwrapped papers. “I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.”

  The mockery in the young man’s voice was not lost on Jack. He frowned, staring at his kitchen. “I got a psychopath. And he listens to that record. It’s important to him. I think he’s one of yours.”

  “A black?”

  Jack glanced at him. “A hippie.”

  Delware looked doubtful. “That’s pretty far out.”

  “And I say it’s even money that drugs have something to do with this.”

  Delware looked back at the album. “So these are the words written in blood.”

  “It reminds me of a case in ‘48 – a satanic cult. Ritual murders. Now this psycho – left messages from that record. If he kills by it, he’ll live by it. That’s how I find him. But I need to figure out the message. I need to understand this horseshit you hippies talk.”

  Delware rolled his eyes. All these old-timers thought anyone under thirty was a hippie.

  Delware weighed the album in his hands. “You think the motivation is…from this?”

  “This guy’s motivation is he’s a psycho. I’ve seen these types of murders. It's got the signs of serial murder all over it; it’s only a matter of time before we see another. I want you to listen to this record, write out the lyrics. Start with the song Helter Skelter. I want that song by tomorrow. I need to understand what the hell you kids are up to.”

  Delware placed the album down beside him. “Do you know anything about hippies?”

  Jack picked his nose. “I know one when I see one: he looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like goddamn Cheetah.”

  Monday, August 11th, 1969, 12:05 AM

  Out of the downtown haze at Spring and 1st rose the white tower of Los Angeles City Hall – a monument from the 1920s boom and an LA icon ever since. Inside was housed LAPD Central Division Headquarters, and above them, the District Attorney’s office.

  Jack led Delware to the third floor and down a maze of corridors. Here Jack made sense. His old fedora hat and worn tweed suit shared the same era as the dull black speckled floor and decades-old lockers crammed along the walls.

  Jack looked back. “Ever been to the third floor?”

  Delware shook his head. Black officers were largely segregated and relegated to foot patrols. Delware knew he was one of the few blacks to pass these halls. The Detective Bureau: Vice, Robbery, Bunco had a token black officer each, but Homicide was an all-white inner sanctum.

  Fear and fierce pride sparked Delware as he entered. Homicide buzzed with ringing telephones and clacking typewriters. Officers shuffled amidst narrow aisles of old desks piled high with bloated files. Delware kept a cool exterior, yet his pulse raced. He was stepping into the coziest power structure in the LAPD, on the biggest case of the decade, hoping to be the Bureau’s first black Homicide detective once it was all over.

  Jack turned, his hand stopping Delware. “Just sit tight and keep your nose clean.” He waved a finger. “And don’t draw any attention to yourself.”

  Walking straight through the chaos - Jack stood out again: the oldest man in the room. Around him were middle-aged men in bright polyester blazers, slacks and sport jackets, a few had hair down to their collars, sporting mustaches and sideburns.

  Delware tried to occupy himself with the cork bulletin boards, scanning wanted sheets, procedural bulletins, mug shots. He turned his head to a large board crammed with color photos, the predominant color: red. His legs went numb. These were the Tate murders, the once beautiful people of LA, now butchered, chopped, drenched in their own blood from head to toe. He had seen death, but this was more than murder. This was sadistic, psycho slaughter. His eyes traced their flesh - hundreds of stab wounds. His pupils went wide; his throat dried. Those famous faces draped in blood, their cheeks, foreheads, noses disfigured by gaping slits. On the belly of one man was carved in long straight strokes: WHITE.

  A pale, young detective in a white shirt and black tie confronted Delware. “Can I help you?”

  Delware snapped out of it. “Excuse me?”

  The young officer’s hair was almost in his eyes. “Are you suppose to be here?”

  Delware puffed his chest, flashed his badge. “I’m with Detective Middleton.”

  The detective glanced at the badge, then the pictures of the Tate murders. “Oh, you’re with the old guy.” Connecting the dots, he leaned in and whispered, “You want to make detective?”

  Playing it cool, Delware shrugged. “Sure.”

  The detective gave him a clandestine smile and whispered, “Cool man. But...heads up. The old man hasn’t solved a case in six months, a real bum run, or he’s just getting senile.” He pointed to a marker board across the room. “See those open cases in red?”

  Delware nodded.

  “Twenty are his.” The detective turned back to Delware. “There’s no way he’s going to remain lead detective on this case. He has to take forced retirement at Christmas anyways. That’s how long he’s been with the Department.”

  The young man lit a cigarette. “And watch your back, the guy’s a psycho too. A few years ago, he punched the shit out of his partner, put him in the hospital. Now no one on the Bureau wants to be paired with the guy.”

  “How’s he still here then?”

  “Chief Parker. They were best friends, but now Parker’s gone. Still, be careful, Pat Boyle’s got the old man’s back.” He gave Delware a slight parting wave. “If you ask me, they’re just letting him ride it out till Christmas. So don’t get your hope
s up.”

  ***

  Captain Patrick Boyle couldn’t believe what he had read and didn’t like it. Inside his cramped office, he stewed, his old eyes straining behind horn-rimmed glasses, his enormous belly pushing into the desk, hairy arms protruding from rolled-up sleeves. He stared down at Jack Middleton’s First Summary Report for a third time. He moaned. It had been a shitty month. Two of his best detectives were on holiday, leaving a long line of open cases and complaints from the DA’s office. The whole Department was getting roasted alive in the press for a number of police shootings of unarmed black men. It was a PR disaster. The black community was up in arms and the Black Panthers were coming off as the good guys. All-white juries acquitting the officers involved only made things worse. The LAPD were fast becoming the most hated cops in America.