“Come by the apartment at eleven,” she said. “I’ll make sure I’m home by then.”
“That’s pretty early to leave your friends.”
“You don’t think I’d sit around drinking with a bunch of educators when I could be learning at home with Officer Morgan, do you?”
“You mean I can teach a teacher?”
“You’re one of the tops in your field.”
“You have a class tomorrow morning,” I reminded her.
“Be there at eleven.”
“A lot of these teachers and students that don’t have an early class tomorrow are gonna want to jive and woof a lot later than that. I think you ought to stay with them tonight, Cassie. They’d expect you to. You can’t disappoint the people on your beat.”
“Well, all right,” she sighed, “But I won’t even see you tomorrow night because I’ll be dining with those two trustees. They want to give me one final look, and casually listen to my French to make sure I’m not going to corrupt the already corrupted debs at their institution. I suppose I can’t run off and leave them either.”
“It won’t be long till I have you all to myself. Then I’ll listen to your French and let you corrupt the hell out of me, okay?”
“Did you tell them you’re retiring yet?” She asked the question easily, but looked me straight in the eye, waiting, and I got nervous.
“I’ve told Cruz,” I said, “and I got a surprise for you.”
“What?”
“I’ve decided that Friday’s gonna be my last day. I’ll start my vacation Saturday and finish my time while I’m on vacation. I’ll be going with you.”
Cassie didn’t yell or jump up or look excited or anything, like I thought she would. She just went limp like her muscles relaxed suddenly, and she slipped off the desk and sat down on my lap where there isn’t any too much room, and with her arms doubled around the top of my neck she started kissing me on the face and mouth and I saw her eyes were wet and soft like her lips, and next thing I know, I heard a lot of giggling. Eight or ten kids were standing in the hall watching us through the open door, but Cassie didn’t seem to hear, or didn’t care. I did though because I was sitting there in my bluesuit, being loved up and getting turned on in public.
“Cassie,” I gasped, nodding toward the door, and she got up, and calmly shut the door on the kids like she was ready to start again.
I stood and picked up my hat from the floor. “Cassie, this is a school. I’m in uniform.”
Cassie started laughing very hard and had to sit down in the chair I’d been in, leaning back, and holding her hands over her face as she laughed. I thought how sexy even her throat was, the throat usually being the first thing to show its age, but Cassie’s was sleek.
“I wasn’t going to rape you,” she said at last, still chuckling between breaths.
“Well, it’s just that you teachers are so permissive these days, I thought you might try to do me on the desk like you said.”
“Oh, Bumper,” she said finally, holding her arms out, and I came over and leaned down and she kissed me eight or ten warm times all over my face.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how I feel now that you’re really going to do it,” she said. “When you said you actually are finishing up this Friday, and that you told Cruz Segovia, I just went to pieces. That was relief and joy you saw on my face when I closed the door, Bumper, not passion. Well, maybe a little of it was.”
“We’ve been planning all along, Cassie, you act like it was really a shock to you.”
“I’ve had nightmares about it. I’ve had fantasies awake and asleep of how after I’d gone, and got our apartment in San Francisco, you’d phone me one bitter night and tell me you weren’t coming, that you just could never leave your beat.”
“Cassie!”
“I haven’t told you this before, Bumper, but it’s been gnawing at me. Now that you’ve told Cruz, and it’s only two more days, I know it’s coming true.”
“I’m not married to my goddamn job, Cassie,” I said, thinking how little you know about a woman, even one as close as Cassie. “You should’ve seen what happened to me today. I was flimflammed by a soft-nutted little kid. He made a complete ass out of me. He made me look like a square.”
Cassie looked interested and amused, the way she always does when I tell her about my job.
“What happened?” she asked, as I pulled out my last cigar and fired it up so I could keep calm when the humiliation swept over me.
“A demonstration at the Army Induction Center. A kid, a punk-ass kid, conned me and I started blabbing off about the job. Rapping real honest with him I was, and I find out later he’s a professional revolutionary, probably a Red or something, and oh, I thought I was so goddamn hip to it. I been living too much on my beat, Cassie. Too much being the Man, I guess. Believing I could outsmart any bastard that skated by. Thinking the only ones I never could really get to were the organized ones, like the bookmakers and the big dope dealers. But sometimes I could do things that even hurt them. Now there’s new ones that’ve come along. And they have organization. And I was like a baby, they handled me so easy.”
“What the hell did you do, Bumper?”
“Talked. I talked to them straight about things. About thumping assholes that needed thumping. That kind of thing. I made speeches.”
“Know what?” she said, putting her long-fingered hand on my knee. “Whatever happened out there, whatever you said, I’ll bet wouldn’t do you or the Department a damn bit of harm.”
“Oh yeah, Cassie? You should’ve heard me talking about when the President was here and how we busted up the riot by busting up a skull or three. I was marvelous.”
“Do you know a gentle way to break up riots?”
“No, but we’re supposed to be professional enough not to talk to civilians the way we talk in police locker rooms.”
“I’ll take Officer Morgan over one of those terribly wholesome, terribly tiresome TV cops, and I don’t think there’s a gentle way to break up riots, so I think you should stop worrying about the whole thing. Just think, pretty soon you won’t have any of these problems. You’ll have a real position, an important one, and people working under you.”
“I got to admit, it gets me pretty excited to think about it. I bet I can come up with ways to improve plant security that those guys never dreamed of.”
“Of course you can.”
“No matter what I do, you pump me up,” I smiled. “That’s why I wanted you for my girl in spite of all your shortcomings.”
“Well, you’re my Blue Knight. Do you know you’re a knight? You joust and live off the land.”
“Yeah, I guess you might say I live off my beat, all right. ’Course I don’t do much jousting.”
“Just rousting?”
“Yeah, I’ve rousted a couple thousand slimeballs in my time.”
“So you’re my Blue Knight.”
“Wait a minute, kid,” I said. “You’re only getting a former knight if you get me.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?”
“It’s okay to shuck about me being some kind of hero or something, but when I retire I’m just a has-been.”
“Bumper,” she said, and laughed a little, and kissed my hand like Glenda did. That was the second woman to kiss my hand today, I thought. “I’m not dazzled by authority symbols. It’s really you that keeps me kissing your hands.” She did it again and I’ve always thought that having a woman kiss your hands is just almost more than a man can take. “You’re going to an important job. You’ll be an executive. You have an awful lot to offer, especially to me. In fact, you have so much maybe I should share it.”
“I can only handle one woman at a time, baby.”
“Remember Nancy Vogler, from the English department?”
“Yeah, you want to share me with her?”
“Silly,” she laughed. “Nancy and her husband were married twelve years and they didn’t have any children. A couple of years a
go they decided to take a boy into their home. He’s eleven now.”
“They adopted him?”
“No, not exactly. They’re foster parents.” Cassie’s voice became serious. “She said being a foster parent is the most rewarding thing they’ve ever done. Nancy said they’d almost missed out on knowing what living is and didn’t realize it until they got the boy.”
Cassie seemed to be searching my face just then. Was she thinking about my boy? I’d only mentioned him once to her. Was there something she wanted to know?
“Bumper, after we get married and settled in our home, what would you say to us becoming foster parents? Not really adopting a child if you didn’t want to, but being foster parents, sharing. You’d be someone for a boy to look up to and learn from.”
“A kid! But I never thought about a family!”
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and after seeing Nancy and hearing about their life, I think about how wonderful it would be for us. We’re not old yet, but in ten or fifteen more years when we are getting old, there’d be someone else for both of us.” She looked in my eyes and then down. “You may think I’m crazy, and I probably am, but I’d like you to give it some thought.”
That hit me so hard I didn’t know what to say, so I grinned a silly grin, kissed her on the cheek, said, “I’m end of watch in fifteen minutes. Bye, old shoe,” and left.
She looked somehow younger and a little sad as she smiled and waved at me when I’d reached the stairway. When I got in my black-and-white I felt awful. I dropped two pills and headed east on Temple and cursed under my breath at every asshole that got in my way in this rush-hour traffic. I couldn’t believe it. Leaving the Department after all these years and getting married was change enough, but a kid! Cassie had asked me about my ex-wife one time, just once, right after we started going together. I told her I was divorced and my son was dead and I didn’t go into it any further. She never mentioned it again, never talked about kids in that way.
Damn, I thought, I guess every broad in the world should drop a foal at least once in her life or she’ll never be happy. I pushed Cassie’s idea out of my mind when I drove into the police building parking lot, down to the lower level where it was dark and fairly cool despite the early spring heat wave. I finished my log, gathered up my ticket books, and headed for the office to leave the log before I took off the uniform. I never wrote traffic tickets but they always issued me the ticket books. Since I made so many good felony pinches they pretty well kept their mouths shut about me not writing tickets, still, they always issued me the books and I always turned them back in just as full. That’s the trouble with conformists, they’d never stop giving me those ticket books.
After putting the log in the daywatch basket I jived around with several of the young nightwatch coppers who wanted to know when I was changing to nights for the summer. They knew my M.O. too. Everybody knew it. I hated anyone getting my M.O. down too good like that. The most successful robbers and burglars are the ones who change their M.O’s. They don’t give you a chance to start sticking little colored pins in a map to plot their movements. That reminded me of a salty old cop named Nails Grogan who used to walk Hill Street.
About fifteen years ago, just for the hell of it, he started his own crime wave. He was teed off at some chickenshit lieutenant we had then, named Wall, who used to jump on our meat every night at rollcall because we weren’t catching enough burglars. The way Wall figured this was that there were always so many little red pins on the pin maps for nighttime business burglaries, especially around Grogan’s beat. Grogan always told me he didn’t think Wall ever really read a burglary report and didn’t know shit from gravy about what was going on. So a little at a time Nails started changing the pins every night before rollcall, taking the pins out of the area around his beat and sticking them in the east side. After a couple weeks of this, Wall told the rollcall what a hell of a job Grogan was doing with the burglary problem in his area, and restricted the ass chewing to guys that worked the eastside cars. I was the only one that knew what Grogan did and we got a big laugh out of it until Grogan went too far and pinned a full-blown crime wave on the east side, and Lieutenant Wall had the captain call out the Metro teams to catch the burglars. Finally the whole hoax was exposed when no one could find crime reports to go with all the little pins.
Wall was transferred to the morning watch, which is our graveyard shift, at the old Lincoln Heights jail. He retired from there a few years later. Nails Grogan never got made on that job, but Wall knew who screwed him, I’m sure. Nails was another guy that only lived a few years after he retired. He shot himself. I got a chill thinking about that, shook it off, and headed for the locker room where I took off the bluesuit and changed into my herringbone sport coat, gray slacks, and lemon yellow shirt, no tie. In this town you can usually get by without a tie anywhere you go.
Before I left, I plugged in my shaver and smoothed up a little bit. A couple of the guys were still in the locker room. One of them was an ambitious young bookworm named Wilson, who as usual was reading while sitting on the bench and slipping into his civvies. He was going to college three or four nights a week and always had a textbook tucked away in his police notebook. You’d see him in the coffee room or upstairs in the cafeteria going through it all the time. I’m something of a reader myself but I could never stand the thought of doing it because you had to.
“What’re you reading?” I asked Wilson.
“Oh, just some criminal law,” said Wilson, a thin youngster with a wide forehead and large blue eyes. He was a probationary policeman, less than a year on the job.
“Studying for sergeant already?” said Hawk, a cocky, square-shouldered kid about Wilson’s age, who had two years on, and was going through his badge-heavy period.
“Just taking a few classes.”
“You majoring in police science?” I asked.
“No, I’m majoring in government right now. I’m thinking about trying for law school.” He didn’t look right at me and I didn’t think he would. This is something I’ve gotten used to from the younger cops, especially ones with some education, like Wilson. They don’t know how to act when they’re with old-timers like me. Some act salty like Hawk, trying to strut with an old beat cop, and it just looks silly. Others act more humble than they usually would, thinking an old lion like me would claw their ass for making an honest mistake out of greenness. Still others, like Wilson, pretty much act like themselves, but like most young people, they think an old fart that’s never even made sergeant in twenty years must be nearly illiterate, so they generally restrict all conversation to the basics of police work to spare you, and they generally look embarrassed like Wilson did now, to admit to you that they read books. The generation gap is as bad in this job as it is in any other except for one thing: the hazards of the job shrink it pretty fast. After a few brushes with danger, a kid pretty much loses his innocence, which is what the generation gap is really all about-innocence.
“Answer me a law question,” said Hawk, putting on some flared pants. We’re too GI to permit muttonchops or big moustaches or he’d surely have them. “If you commit suicide can you be prosecuted for murder?”
“Nobody ever has,” Wilson smiled, as Hawk giggled and slipped on a watermelon-colored velvet shirt.
“That’s only because of our permissive society,” I said, and Wilson glanced at me and grinned.
“What’s that book in your locker, Wilson?” I asked, nodding toward a big paperback on the top shelf.
“Guns of August.”
“Oh yeah, I read that,” I said. “I’ve read a hundred books about the First World War. Do you like it?”
“I do,” he said, looking at me like he discovered the missing link. “I’m reading it for a history course.”
“I read T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom when I was on my First World War kick. Every goddamn word. I had maps and books spread all over my pad. That little runt only weighed in at about a hund
red thirty, but thirty pounds of that was brains and forty was balls. He was a boss warrior.”
“A loner,” Wilson nodded, really looking at me now.
“Right. That’s what I dig about him. I would’ve liked him even better if he hadn’t written it all so intimate for everyone to read. But then if he hadn’t done that, I’d never have appreciated him. Maybe a guy like that finally gets tired of just enjoying it and has to tell it all to figure it all out and see if it means anything in the end.”
“Maybe you should write your memoirs when you’re through, Bumper,” Wilson smiled. “You’re as well known around here as Lawrence ever was in Arabia.”
“Why don’t you major in history?” I said. “If I went to college that’d be my meat. I think after a few courses in criminal law the rest of law school’d be a real drag, torts and contracts and all that bullshit. I could never plow through the dust and cobwebs.”
“It’s exciting if you like it,” said Wilson, and Hawk looked a little ruffled that he was cut out of the conversation so he split.
“Maybe so,” I said. “You must’ve had a few years of college when you came on the Department.”
“Two years,” Wilson nodded. “Now I’m halfway through my junior year. It takes forever when you’re a full-time cop and a part-time student.”
“You can tough it out,” I said, lighting a cigar and sitting down on the bench, while part of my brain listened to the youngster and the other part was worrying about something else. I had the annoying feeling you get, that can sometimes be scary, that I’d been here with him before and we talked like this, or maybe it was somebody else, and then I thought, yes, that was it, maybe the cowlick in his hair reminded me of Billy, and I got an empty tremor in my stomach.
“How old’re you, Wilson?”
“Twenty-six,” he said, and a pain stabbed me and made me curse and rub my pot. Billy would’ve been twenty-six too!
“Hope your stomach holds out when you get my age. Were you in the service?”
“Army,” he nodded.
“Vietnam?”
The Blue Knight Page 10