Willie was sure that if he grew one it would look like Francis Tanaguchi’s sparse and sad one, which many old women could duplicate.
It was a peaceful, untraumatic rollcall that afternoon. Lieutenant Finque was on a day off and Sergeant Yanov sat before them alone at his table on the platform.
“Got an unusual one last night,” Sergeant Yanov said, trying to look through the crimes to find one that might amuse the watch. “Guy tried to shove a Pepsi bottle in his wife’s giz after he caught her stepping out on him.”
“I took that report,” said Sam Niles. “It was nothing. The bottle didn’t have the cap on it.”
“Reminds me of the guy stuck a screwdriver up his ass to scratch his prostate. Remember that, partner?” Roscoe asked Whaddayamean Dean. “Couldn’t get it out and the wife called the police. That was funny!” Rules chuckled as he pulled at his crotch and made Harold Bloomguard sick.
Then Roscoe blushed and got angry when Sergeant Yanov said, “By the way an unnamed officer turned in a report last night where he wrote a pursesnatcher was l-e-r-k-i-n-g and p-r-a-y-i-n-g on his victims. Check the dictionary if you’re not sure. These reports end up in courts of law. Makes us look dumb.”
“I told you to check my spelling, goddamnit,” Roscoe whispered to Dean Pratt who smiled weakly and said, “Sorry, partner.”
“One word of advice,” Sergeant Yanov said. “The captain is uptight about the pissy wino they found sleeping in the back of Sergeant Sneed’s car. They suspect one of you guys put him there.”
“Me? Why me all the time?” Francis Tanaguchi cried when all eyes turned to him.
“Gee, rollcalls are quiet without the lieutenant here,” observed Spermwhale Whalen, who then turned to Willie Wright and said, “Hey, kid, how about comin in the bathroom with me? My back’s hurt and I ain’t supposed to lift nothin heavy.”
Spencer Van Moot was happy when rollcall ended early It gave him more time to shop. Spencer was, at forty the second oldest choirboy, next to fifty-two year old Spermwhale Whalen, the two of them the only choirboys over thirty. Spencer Van Moot had convinced Harold Bloomguard that he should be accepted as a MacArthur Park choirboy because he was only temporarily married, was hated by his wife Tootie and her three kids and would probably soon be thrice divorced like Spermwhale Whalen.
Harold welcomed the complainer Spencer Van Moot for the same reason he welcomed Roscoe Rules. He invited Spencer Van Moot because he was the most artistic scrounger and promoter at Wilshire Station.
Spencer knew every retail store within a mile of his beat. His “police discounts” had furnished his house princely. He wore the finest Italian imports from the racks of the Miracle Mile clothing stores. He dined superbly in one of three expensive restaurants near Wilshire and Catalina which were actually in Rampart Division. Retailers became convinced that Spencer Van Moot could ward off burglars, shoplifters, fire and vandalism. That somehow this tall blond recruiting poster policeman with the confident jaw and the small foppish moustache could even forestall economic reversal.
Despite his natural morose nature and his self pitying complaints about his unhappy marriage, he was accepted at once by the choirboys. He arrived with a dowry of three cases of cold beer and four bottles of Chivas Regal Scotch. And he brought his partner, Willie Wright.
Willie was one of the smallest choirboys, along with Francis Tanaguchi and Harold Bloomguard, under five feet nine inches tall. Willie in fact had stretched to make five feet eight and was almost disqualified when he took his first police physical. He was a devoutly religious young man, raised as a Baptist, converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses when he married Geneva Smythe, his high school sweetheart. Willie was now twenty-four and Geneva twenty-five. She, like Willie, was short and chubby. She took Watchtower magazines door to door three times a week. Willie accompanied her on his days off.
Spencer Van Moot loved him as a partner because Willie thought it was crooked to accept gifts or wholesale prices from retail stores, thereby leaving Spencer a double share of everything he could promote. The only concession Willie would make was a nightly free meal in one of Spencer Van Moot’s gourmet restaurants.
After being practically dragged to the first choir practice by Spencer, Willie Wright discovered something totally extraordinary: that choir practice was fun, more fun in fact than anything he had ever done in his young life. He was accepted by the other choirboys almost from the start because he entertained them by preaching squeaky sermons. He told them how wrong it was to drink and lust after the two camp followers, Ora Lee Tingle and Carolina Moon, who often turned up at choir practice. But then when drunk he turned into an evil eyed little mustang.
Harold Bloomguard dubbed him official chaplain of the MacArthur Park choirboys. He was thereafter known as The Padre, Father Willie Wright.
The night that Father Willie Wright personally called for choir practice was the night he found the brother in the basement. It had begun much like every other night, with Spencer Van Moot driving the radio car madly to all of his various stops before the stores closed. First he had to make three cigarette stops where he picked up two packs of cigarettes for each of them, which Father Willie didn’t use. Father Willie suspected quite rightly that Spencer wholesaled the cigarettes to his neighbors.
And then there was the dairy stop where Spencer got his daily allotment of buttermilk and yogurt, one quart for each partner, which Willie likewise refused. Each night at 10:00 P.M. the manager walked swiftly to his car under the protective beam of Spencer’s spotlight. Then there were other stops, if he could get them in, at various men’s shops on Wilshire Boulevard where Spencer and salesmen tossed around Italian names like Brioni and Valentino and which invariably ended in Spencer’s trying on something in a fine cabretta leather jacket over his blue police uniform. Father Willie sat bored in the dressing room holding his partner’s Sam Browne, gun and hat while Spencer preened.
Sometimes a new salesman would make the mistake of quoting the retail price to the tall policeman and would find himself cowering before an indignant stare, a twitching toothbrush moustache and a withering piece of advice to “Check with the manager about my police discount.”
Father Willie often thought about asking for a new partner but he didn’t want to hurt Spencer’s feelings. Spencer had tried for years to find a partner like Father Willie, who would not accept his rightful share of free cigarettes, wholesale merchandise and free liquor. It had gotten to be tedious for Spencer breaking in new partners:
“You smoke?”
“No, Spencer.”
“Today you do. I’ll take both packs if you don’t want them.”
And inevitably a partner would become greedy. “I’ll take a pack today Spencer.”
“What for? You don’t smoke.”
“I’ll give them to my brother. What the hell, three packs a day I’m entitled to.”
Spencer got to keep Willie’s share of petty booty in every case. And Father Willie never complained when Spencer scrounged up some liquor for choir practices.
“We’re having a retirement party for one of our detective lieutenants,” Spencer would inevitably lie to a long suffering liquor store proprietor who would take two bottles of Scotch from the shelf behind him.
“We’re having a big big party.” Spencer would smile benignly until the proprietor would get the message and bring up another two bottles.
But Spencer was considerate about spreading it around and rarely went to the same liquor store more than once a month for anything but cigarettes. The cigarette shop however was a relentless daily ritual. It was said that during the Watts riot of 1965, Spencer drove a half burned black and white with every window shot out ten miles to Beverly Boulevard, his face streaked with soot and sweat, and managed to make all three cigarette stops before the stores closed at 2:00 A.M.
Spencer Van Moot had accepted a thousand packs of cigarettes and as many free meals in his time. And though he had bought enough clothing at wholesale prices to dress a
dozen movie stars, he had never even considered taking a five dollar bill nor was one ever offered except once when he stopped a Chicago grocer in Los Angeles on vacation. The police department and its members made an exact distinction between petty gratuities and cash offerings, which were considered money bribes no matter how slight and would result in a merciless dismissal as well as criminal prosecution.
It was not that the citizens and police of Los Angeles were inherently less debased than their Eastern counterparts, it was that the West, being a network of sprawling young towns and cities, did not lend itself to the old intimate teeming ward or ghetto where political patronage and organized crime bedded down together. The numbers racket, for instance, had been a dismal failure in western America. The average citizen of Los Angeles hadn’t the faintest idea how it worked. Yet in the Pennsylvania steel town where Spencer Van Moot was born, every living soul had played numbers and consulted dream books for winners and contributed to organized crime’s greatest source of revenue in that region. The bookies came door to door. They even accepted children’s penny bets. Western criminals had found it impossible to organize a crazy quilt collection of several communities which existed inside the 460 square mile limits of the city where there was an automobile for every adult. The city had geography and history going for it.
So it was that Spencer Van Moot’s supplication provided about half of the beverage consumed at choir practice, the rest provided by Roscoe Rules who bullied the free booze from cowering liquor store owners on his beat.
After making his various stops and depositing his treasures in the back of his camper truck in the station parking lot, Spencer began whinning again about his unhappy domestic life.
“I mean how can you understand a woman, Padre?” Spencer complained as the setting sun filtered through the smog and burned Father Willie’s sensitive, bulging blue eyes.
“I don’t know, Spencer,” Father Willie sighed, and wondered how long Spencer would use him as a sounding board tonight. Sometimes when he was lucky the complaining would stop after the first two hours of their tour of duty.
“I’m forty years old, Father Willie,” Spencer griped, touching his twenty dollar haircut which he got free in a Wilshire Boulevard styling parlor. “Look at my hair, it’s getting gray. Why should I live in such misery.”
“I’m twenty-four,” Father Willie reminded him, “and you have more hair than I do. Who cares if it’s gray.”
“She’s a bitch, Padre. It’s hell, believe me,” Spencer whined. “She’s worse by far than my first two wives put together. And she’s turned her kids against me. They hate me more than she does because she tells them lies about me, that I drink a lot and run around with other women.”
“That’s not a lie, Spencer,” Father Willie reminded him. “You do drink a lot and run around with other women.”
“It’s nothing to tell teenagers, for god’s sake!” Spencer answered. “I never shoulda married an older broad with kids. Damn, forty-two years old and her legs’re turning green. Green, I tell you! And here I am with only four years to go until I can pull the pin and retire. And what happens, she gets knocked up!”
“Maybe it’ll work out, Spencer,” Father Willie offered as his partner drove east on Eighth Street away from the sun’s dying harsh rays.
“Work out? Work out? Four years to my pension and she’s gonna foal, and then how can I retire with a little rug rat crawling around?”
“Oh well,” Father Willie shrugged. “Oh well.”
“A man gets drunk and careless and screws himself into another ten years on the job. It ain’t fair.”
“Oh well,” said Father Willie.
“Everything happens to me!” Spencer said.
Spencer Van Moot was interrupted for a moment by catching a glimpse of a seventy year old pensioner who lived in a Seventh Street fleabag called the Restful Arms Motel. He pushed his wheelchair down the sidewalk backward with his foot as he held his useless arthritic hands in his lap. The pensioner was trying to get to the mom-and-pop market one block west where he could buy two cans of nutritious dog food for his dinner.
“Things could always be worse, Spencer.”
“Oh sure, I’m gonna be unloading shitty diapers at forty years old and…”
“You’ve got a new camper. You can get away with your wife sometimes and go fishing.”
“Oh sure. I got a new camper. I’m so thrilled, so happy! I’m in debt again. I was getting insecure not owing money.”
“It’ll work out.”
“Yeah, it will. I’ll be dead soon. No one in my family lives very long. I got an uncle that died of old age at forty-five. That’s what the doctor said. Every organ in the man’s body was old, dissipated. I won’t last long. At least then I’ll be rid of my old lady I tell you, Padre, she’s got a tongue so sharp it’s a wonder she don’t cut her mouth to pieces and bleed to death.”
“You want to come to church with Geneva and me?” Father Willie offered. “Some of the best Witnesses I know came to God later in life. And what with the early deaths in your family…”
“Goddamnit, I ain’t dead yet!” Spencer cried, suddenly frightened. “Padre, gimme a chance! I ain’t lived yet!”
“Well, I only meant with poor health and all…”
“Poor health? Poor health? I’m too young to be thinking about dying. Jesus, partner, you’re getting morbid!”
It was almost an hour before Spencer fully recovered from the suggestion of his imminent demise. He had the worst sick record on the nightwatch. He was tall and strong, in the prime of life, and had seen vats of spilled blood and acres of mutilated flesh in his sixteen years of police work, but he became faint when he’d scratch his finger. He could bear any pain but his own.
Just before dark they passed the Mary Sinclair Adams Home for Girls, a funded institution where young women who were pregnant and indigent could be cared for. It was a converted two story home two blocks east of Hancock Park and had once been a palatial residence of an eighty year old virgin who died envying young girls the fun they had growing round bellies.
There was a teenage girl with an eight month stomach standing in front of the house: cigarette dangling, eyebrows plucked to nothing, eyes shadowed to three inch black orbs, talking to three young men on chopper motorcycles.
“The Stork Club,” Spencer remarked, shaking his head disgustedly “They go in there, drop a frog and cut out.”
“I hear the county’s okayed the installation of interuterine devices in some of these girls they place in foster homes,” Father Willie said.
“Someone shoulda plugged my old lady’s birdbath and I wouldn’t be in this fix,” Spencer answered, blowing a cloud of smoke out the window. “Old dried up sponge, I don’t know how she ever got knocked up. I’ll just have to cut down on expenses, live like a goddamn Trappist monk. I won’t be able to eat like a human being anymore, that’s all.”
“It’ll work out all right,” Father Willie said. Then, “Spencer, we’ll still be able to eat roast duckling with orange sauce, won’t we?”
“Oh sure.”
“With glazed carrots and shallots?”
“Oh, we’ll still eat at our restaurants for free just like we always have,” said Spencer, allaying Father Willie’s fears. “I meant at home I’ll have to starve. My wife and kids’ll have to go without and maybe wear old clothes with patches.”
Father Willie felt like suggesting Spencer could make patches with some of the fourteen Italian suits which hung in his closet, when he spotted a Lincoln blow the red light on Wilshire and Western. The Lincoln pulled over the moment Father Willie tooted his horn.
“You just have to learn to budget,” Spencer sighed as they gathered up hats and ticket book and flashlights now that dusk had settled. “Mail your check for the telephone bill to the gas company and theirs to the electric company. By the time they send them back and forth you can balance your checkbook.”
Father Willie nodded as they got out of the black a
nd white Matador and walked forward, crisscrossing so that Father Willie, whose turn it was, could approach the driver’s side while Spencer went to the other side and shined the light in the window to protect Father Willie’s approach.
The driver, a balding fat man about Spencer’s age, smiled and said, “What’s the problem, boys?” He offered Father Willie his driver’s license without being asked.
“You were a full second late on that red light, sir,” Father Willie said, his light on the license, checking that it was not expired, noting the Beverly Hills address in Trousdale Estates.
“That doesn’t seem possible,” the man said, getting out of the car and following the little officer to the police car where Spencer waited in the headlight beam between the two cars.
“Careful, sir,” Father Willie warned, as a car sped by very close to the Matador which was stopped behind the Lincoln, three feet farther into the traffic lane to protect the approaching officer from being picked off by a motorist who might be driving HUA which meant: Head Up Ass.
“Officer!” the fat man appealed to Spencer as Father Willie began to write the ticket on the hood of the radio car. “Surely I wasn’t late on the red light, and if I was I didn’t mean it.”
He offered Spencer his business card which said, “Murray Fern’s Stereo Emporium.”
Spencer Van Moot’s eyes brightened with visions of a new stereo system in his barroom at home. At wholesale, of course. He was about to suggest to his partner that Mr. Fern probably deserved some professional courtesy when he saw that it was too late. The ticket was already started, and since they were numbered it was impossible to cancel one without a report and explanation. So Spencer shrugged sadly and handed the business card back to the man.
“You gonna write me a ticket?” Murray Fern asked Father Willie.
The Choirboys Page 6