"Settle, Czech, settle," Jane Wayne said to the street monster, who was starting to froth like Ludwig. He was making everyone extremely nervous. The Bad Czech's face was scratched and bruised from the foot pursuit and his demented eyes were pinwheeling tonight.
"The Bad Czech looks like he's been chasing parked cars," Dolly whispered.
"The Bad Czech looks like he's been blocking punts," Dilford whispered.
"How da ya like my new political poster, Czech?" Leery asked, trying to change the subject and console the rabid beat cop. Up on the wall was a homemade sign which said Jerry Brown uses Vaseline. Gore Vidal uses Polygrip. The only difference is age. vote straight republican.
"I better be on the eleven o'clock news, that's all I gotta say." The Bad Czech was too cranky to be diverted by politics.
"At eleven o'clock I'll only be sixty-one minutes from my pension!" Rumpled Ronald announced. "It looks like I might make it! Except that my heart's starting to skip beats. Wouldn't that be one for the book? Heart attack at five minutes to twelve? Wouldn't that be something?"
"The Czech's about as cranky as the bus driver we busted today," Dilford said to Cecil Higgins. "He beat the crap outa this sixty-three-year-old blind man who started bitching at the driver for missing his bus stop. Driver didn't have an excuse except he was tired of unsatisfied customers."
"L. A. wasn't always like this," Cecil Higgins felt obliged to tell the younger cops.
"The world wasn't always like this," Rumpled Ronald said, taking his pulse. "I just wanna get outa this world alive!"
Things suddenly became subdued at The House of Misery. A group of ten civilians came roaring in and took over the dance floor. There were six young men and four young women, members of an insurance adjustors' softball league. They had some weeks earlier found Leery's Saloon after a game at Dodger Stadium and now came in from time to time after softball games.
They had been drinking beer and eating Cracker Jacks and were all wearing their team shirts and baseball hats. They put ten quarters in the jukebox and started some play-punk dancing to the Circle Jerks. They were genuinely having such good clean fun that the cops, who usually evinced only about as much paranoia and xenophobia as the Kremlin, were plunged into utter depression and started drinking with a vengeance.
Rumpled Ronald even forgot to count the minutes, so despondent was he after watching the young people. "Can you remember when you could have fun like that?" he asked Cecil Higgins, who just stared into the bottom of his glass.
"I can't remember back that far," Cecil Higgins said.
"It's really something to see . .. regular people having fun," Dilford said wistfully, as one pretty young woman jumped up on a chair and started dancing soft rock while the others whistled and cheered.
Even The Bad Czech was captured by the sight of the young people dancing and singing and offering to buy beer for the clutch of jaded strangers who had moved to one end of the barroom and were watching them with eyes full of suspicion.
Jane Wayne said, "It seems like a lifetime ago that I could feel like that. They don't know how ... it really is."
"How what is?" Dolly asked.
"All of it," Jane Wayne said. "They don't know about ... paws in petunias and other things."
"I used to be like that girl," Dolly said to Dilford, never taking her eyes from the carefree blonde dancing on the chair in her team shirt with her baseball hat turned around backward. "I sometimes think I'd like to try to be like that again. I date civilians but it just never works out when they learn about me. They get intimidated by a girl that carries a gun. Emasculated, I guess. They know we see things. That we're ... different."
"I stopped being a girl more than a year ago," Jane Wayne said, still watching the pretty girl dancing.
"Me too," Dolly said. "I'm a cop now. And that's all."
They turned away from the pretty girl and went back to their drinks, nostalgia dissolved. They hardly noticed when the young softball players finished their beers and waved cheerful goodbyes to Leery and breezed out the door singing, "We are the champions."
"They just don't know, "Jane Wayne said. "Another Scotch, Leery. A double."
"They're children," Dolly said. "Another bourbon, Leery. A double."
They didn't envy the young people. The moment had passed. Jane Wayne turned a cynical smile to Dolly's cynical smile and they gave each other a nod of understanding. And drank. They were both twenty-three years old.
With the civilians gone, the cops spread out to their usual places at the long bar and resumed what they did best at this time of night: bitching.
"I hear some detective from West L. A. smoked it," Cecil Higgins announced, and that quieted even The Bad Czech.
"Another victim of U. C. A.," Dilford said, which is how he referred to the Ultimate Cop Affliction.
"Right in the mouth as usual," Cecil Higgins sighed.
"Change the subject," Dolly said. "It's one thing to have to wear that thirty-eight-caliber crucifix, without worrying about eating it."
"Whatcha gonna do with that pension, Ronald?" Leery asked, halfheartedly wiping a beer mug which he'd halfheartedly washed.
"Do with it? I ain't doing nothing with it. You think I can afford to retire and live on forty percent a my salary?"
"Well why all the worry about living till midnight?" Leery wanted to know.
"Jesus Christ, Leery!" Rumpled Ronald said. "Because I got it then. No matter what. If I ended up in prison some day, it don't matter. It's mine. They'd have to send my monthly pension checks to San Quentin."
"Any cop goes to San Quentin, it don't matter he's gettin a pension or not," Cecil Higgins said, looking at The Bad Czech. "You'd be the richest con in the joint but your asshole'd still be big enough to accommodate four monkeys on mopeds and the Soap Box Derby."
"I don't care," Rumpled Ronald said, scratching his rumpled belly, rubbing his rumpled face, which was starting to get numb from the booze. "I just wanna own myself. If my old lady kicks me out, I won't have to get an old wino dog and some newspapers for blankets and settle down on skid row. At least I won't have to do that."
"My ex-wife threw me right out in the street," Dilford cried out suddenly, and the others noticed that he was pretty bombed and feeling extra sorry for himself.
"And after you did the manly thing," Dolly said sarcastically. "Got her replumbed instead of facing the knife yourself."
"/ got a vasectomy. You know I did!" Dilford said boozily.
"Sure, after you were single again," Dolly said, more sarcastically. "So you wouldn't knock up some groupie."
"Go ahead, stick up for a woman you don't even know," Dilford said. "Never mind sticking up for your partner. She threw me right in the street, my ex-wife did. Right in the street!"
"Was that the time you was gone on a three-day binge with that typist from the police commission?" Cecil Higgins wanted to know. "They say you banged that little homewrecker right on Leery's pool table, Dilford."
"I'd still like to know what happened to my cue ball," Leery said, considering the possibility.
"And after you got that pansy nurse at the hospital to bandage your head and give you a room and pose as a doctor, and tell your wife you'd been in a traffic accident and had amnesia. You went to lots a trouble for your wife, Dilford," Rumpled Ronald said sympathetically, starting to get numb in the fingers.
"I even had to wreck in the side a my pickup truck to make it look good," Dilford whined. "That truck's had three face-lifts! And still she kicked me out! The heartless bitch. They're all heartless bitches!"
"My first wife was always kickin me out," Cecil Higgins said. "She had a habit a throwin my clothes out in the driveway. I wore out more clothes by runnin over them than I ever did wearin them. Least she wasn't ugly like the one I'm married to now. And this one's into pain. Mine."
It was ten-thirty when Hans and Ludwig came in, without a single groupie from Chinatown. Hans was morosely drunk. Ludwig was apparently sober, but did not get up
on the bar.
"Ludwig understands that Gertie's dead," Hans said, in his lachrymose singsong voice.
"Bullshit," The Bad Czech said, as they watched Ludwig lumber over to the three-coffin dance floor and lie down.
"See that?" Hans said. "He didn't even get up on the pool table. When he saw Gertie laying dead he understood perfectly. I can't cheer him up."
"That's crazy," The Bad Czech said. "Dogs ain't got brains like that."
"He wouldn't have a single beer tonight," Hans said. "I tell you he knows. He saw Gertie all busted up and covered with blood and he knows his pal's gone for good."
"I don't doubt nothin no more," Cecil Higgins said. "You tell me Ludwig knows, I believe it. You tell me Ludwig wants a stress pension, I believe it. I don't know what's real and what ain't real no more."
"It makes me sad to see Ludwig sleeping on the floor," Jane Wayne said. "Make him get on the pool table, Hans."
"Might as well," Leery shrugged. "Many jizz stains as there are now, a few more ain't gonna hurt nothing. Maybe I oughtta just pour a bowl full a beer for Ludwig," Leery mused. He thought it over and said, "Naw, if he is able to think about Gertie, it wouldn't be good for his head."
"What a relief!" Cecil Higgins cried. "For a second I thought you was gonna give away a free drink, Leery! I thought for a second I really had lost my mind!"
The eleven o'clock news came and went. The Bad Czech couldn't believe it. They had not used his interview segment.
When Mario Villalobos showed up at 11:30 for a nightcap, a terrified drunk who had roamed into the bar three minutes earlier was running out onto Sunset Boulevard, hysterical.
"Don't go in that place, mister!" he warned Mario Villalobos. "There's a giant madman throwing beer glasses at the television set! And a woman in a black fur coat looks like she's dead on the pool table!"
Chapter EIGHT
MOTHER OF THE YEAR
Mario villalobos thought it advisable not to tell his colleagues in the squadroom that the Russians were coming. At least not until he'd heard from his breathless caller at ten o'clock. That is, if he did call, and if the fruitcake caller had some information about Missy Moonbeam, and if he was able to keep his head clear enough of Russian spies to talk coherently. Fruitcake and caviar. It was a first for Mario Villalobos, since foreign agents usually didn't find Hollywood street whores of strategic interest. Nevertheless he was awaiting the call, proving that even homicide detectives are not immune to soap opera.
Meanwhile, Rumpled Ronald had been awarded a gold watch at roll call for having successfully completed twenty years' police service. The watch was made of chocolate candy, wrapped in foil. Rumpled Ronald told Jane Wayne that she could stop painting the no-bite medicine on his fingernails because he didn't think he'd be biting them anymore. Rumpled Ronald stood and took a bow and ate the gold watch and made a little speech which indicated that his pension made him more or less immortal, and that nothing could hurt him now.
Three hours later he was flat on his back at the hospital where The Den Mother worked as a nurse, and he was in too much pain even to think about letting her give him a blow job. It happened when they got a call from The Mother of the Year.
She lived on Westlake, south of Seventh Street. She was seventy-two years old and had been in a wheel chair for ten years. Her legs were arthritic and her fingers were as gnarled as oak and nearly as black from the number of cigarettes she smoked. Like most of the other elderly people in her apartment house, she lived on social security and bemoaned the influx of Asians, all of whom she called Chinamen, and of Latin Americans, all of whom she called niggers.
Her name was Aggie Grubb, but from this day forth, whenever she was discussed by the cops at Rampart Station she would be known as The Mother of the Year. She put in a call to the station because her little boy wouldn't get out of the house and stop sponging off her.
"I just can't make my boy get out," she said sadly to the cop who took the call. "He just sits around all day eating up what little food I have, and he won't get a job, and he won't do nothing I tell him to do. Can you send a policeman by here to talk to Albert and make him behave and get a job?"
"How old is Albert, ma'am?" the desk officer asked.
"He's thirty-nine years old," she said. "And I'm a poor crippled lady in a wheel chair and he won't do nothing I tell him. What's a poor old mother to do, Officer?"
The desk cop also had a poor old mother who wasn't in such hot shape, and he said, "You stop fretting, ma'am. We'll send a car by and have a talk with Albert. Is he living with you?"
"Yes, but he promised it was only temporary," she said, "and he's been here three months and I just don't have no food left, hardly."
"Now, now, don't you cry," the desk cop said, picturing his dear old mother. "We'll just try to talk sense to Albert and see if we can make your life easier for you."
"Thank you, son," Aggie Grubb said.
The call was given to Sunney Kee and his partner Wilbur Richfield. They were an odd couple, Sunney and Wilbur. Because the black cop had the last name of a famous oil company, he was called Thirty-weight Richfield. And naturally, when he was teamed with someone as small as Sunney, the little Asian refugee became "Twenty-weight Kee."
Actually, it wouldn't have mattered how much weight they had that day. It wouldn't have done any good at all. When they knocked on the door, they heard her screeching wheel chair rolling across the cracked linoleum floor. Then the door creaked open.
"Good morning, Officers," Aggie Grubb said.
The veins throbbed blue in her twisted hands. Her dress did not cover her white skeleton knees. When she smiled her single tooth glinted. Then she looked closer through her bifocals at the little Chinaman and big nigger. She couldn't conceal her disappointment. If she was some rich old lady from the West Side, they'd send her real cops, Aggie Grubb thought.
"We got a call that you're having a family dispute," Wilbur Richfield said.
"Might as well come on in," Aggie Grubb said. "Maybe you can talk some to my boy, Albert. Make him go live somewheres else. I can't be supporting him no more. Me on social security, with arthritis? That boy don't respect his mother."
"Where is he?" Wilbur Richfield asked.
"Where he always is," Aggie Grubb said. "In bed till noon. Then he gets up and makes himself a dozen eggs and goes back to sleep till night. I just can't be feeding that boy no more."
"Okay," Wilbur Richfield said. "Where's the bedroom at?"
"Through there," she said, motioning down the hall with twisted stick-fingers. "First door on the left."
"Dozen eggs," Wilbur Richfield said to Sunney Kee when they walked down the musty hallway. "Even The Bad Czech don't eat a dozen eggs."
Albert Grubb ate a dozen eggs. And he ate a pound of bacon with them. And he ate ten pieces of toast. And he drank a gallon of milk when his mother had it. And then he was still hungry.
"Is that one man under there?" Wilbur Richfield said to Sunney Kee when they opened the bedroom door and looked at the human shape snoring under the mountain of blanket.
"Is that one man under there?" Wilbur Richfield said to The Mother of the Year, who was snuffling and cackling from her wheel chair in the kitchen.
"Big boy, ain't he?" she said. "You shouldda saw his old man."
Wilbur Richfield, a fifteen-year cop, looked at his little Southeast Asian partner, and looked at The Mother of the Year, and looked around the room.
Albert Grubb had pinups on the wall. All the pinups wore skimpy bathing suits and were covered with oil and had unbelievable bodies. All of the pinups were men. Body builders. The largest man on those pinups did not have a chest like Albert Grubb.
There was a set of dumbbells on the floor beside the bed. Wilbur Richfield said to Sunney Kee, "I never thought ya could get that much weight on a dumbbell."
Sunney Kee was also getting a very bad feeling. He looked up and smiled at his partner, but not with conviction.
"Wake the lazy boy up!" Aggie Gru
bb croaked from her wheel chair in the kitchen.
And Wilbur Richfield bit the bullet and said, "Albert, wake up!"
The sleeping giant stirred and changed gears a bit, but the snoring continued. Like a chain saw. His head was twice as big as Ludwig's.
"Wake up!" Wilbur Richfield said, and this time he tapped Albert Grubb on his size 16 foot with his stick. Like Ludwig, Albert Grubb didn't like to be touched by foreign objects while he slept.
He raised his head. It was a bald head, clean-shaven, formed like something that goes into a gun-a 105 howitzer. He had a face like a huge oatmeal doughnut. His shapeless nose was blackhead-studded. He said, "Who the fuck's that?"
Sometimes, living up to what they imagine their image should be, cops do foolish things because of machismo. The foolish thing that Wilbur Richfield did, ignoring the instincts setting off whistles and sirens in his head, was not to use his rover radio unit to call for a backup unit right now. And two backup units would have been better.
Sunney Kee, who was half the size of Wilbur Richfield, and a rookie, and therefore not saddled with dangerous macho yokes, smiled affably at Albert Grubb and said to his partner, "One second." He stepped into the kitchen, took out his rover and requested the backup. Code-two, which meant hurry up.
Then he quickly returned to the bedroom, where Wilbur Richfield was surveying the colossus on the bed. Albert Grubb was as tall as The Bad Czech. But even bigger. He was lying on his back looking up at Wilbur Richfield and Sunney Kee, and he was feeling very, very cranky.
the Delta Star (1983) Page 14