The Blue Knight

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “On duty?” I frowned, and put my hat on, tipping it at a jaunty angle because, let’s face it, you feel pretty good when a woman like Cassie’s quivering to get you in bed.

  “Good-bye, Bumper,” she smiled sadly.

  “Later, kid. See you later.”

  As soon as I cleared after leaving Cassie I got a radio call.

  “One-X-L-Forty-five, One-X-L-Forty-five,” said the female communications operator, “see the man at the hotel, four-twenty-five South Main, about a possible d.b.”

  “One-X-L-Forty-five, roger,” I said, thinking this will be my last dead body call.

  An old one-legged guy with all the earmarks of a reformed alky was standing in the doorway of the fleabag hotel.

  “You called?” I said, after parking the black-and-white in front and taking the stick from the holder on the door and slipping it through the ring on my belt.

  “Yeah. I’m Poochie the elevator boy,” said the old man. “I think a guy might be dead upstairs.”

  “What the hell made you think so?” I said sarcastically, as we started up the stairs and I smelled the d.b. from here. The floorboards were torn up and I could see the ground underneath.

  The old guy hopped up the stairs pretty quick on his one crutch without ever stopping to rest. There were about twenty steps up to the second floor where the smell could drop you and would, except that most of the tenants were bums and winos whose senses, all of them, had been killed or numbed. I almost expected the second story to have a dirt floor, the place was so crummy.

  “I ain’t seen this guy in number two-twelve for oh, maybe a week,” said Poochie, who had a face like an ax, with a toothless puckered mouth.

  “Can’t you smell him?”

  “No,” he said, looking at me with surprise. “Can you?”

  “Never mind,” I said, turning right in the hallway. “Don’t bother telling me where two-twelve is, I could find it with my eyes closed. Get me some coffee.”

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “No, I mean dry coffee, right out of the can. And a frying pan.”

  “Okay,” he said, without asking dumb questions, conditioned by fifty years of being bossed around by cops. I held a handkerchief over my nose, and opened a window in the hallway which led out on the fire escape in the alley. I stuck my head out but it didn’t help, I could still smell him.

  After a long two minutes Poochie came hopping back on his crutch with a frying pan and the coffee.

  “Hope there’s a hot plate in here,” I said, suddenly thinking there might not be, though lots of the transient hotels had them, especially in the rooms used by the semipermanent boarders.

  “He’s got one,” nodded Poochie, handing me the passkey. The key turned but the door wouldn’t budge.

  “I coulda told you it wouldn’t open. That’s why I called you. Scared old man, Herky is. He keeps a bolt on the door whenever he’s inside. I already tried to get in.”

  “Move back.”

  “Going to break it?”

  “Got any other suggestions?” I said, the handkerchief over my face, breathing through my mouth.

  “No, I think I can smell him now.”

  I booted the door right beside the lock and it crashed open, ripping the jamb loose. One rusty hinge tore free and the door dangled there by the bottom hinge.

  “Yeah, he’s dead,” said Poochie, looking at Herky who had been dead for maybe five days, swollen and steamy in this unventilated room which not only had a hot plate, but a small gas heater that was raging on an eighty-five degree day.

  “Can I look at him?” said Poochie, standing next to the bed, examining Herky’s bloated stomach and rotting face. His eyelids were gone and the eyes stared silver and dull at the elevator boy who grinned toothlessly and clucked at the maggots on Herky’s face and swollen sex organs.

  I ran across the room and banged on the frame until I got the window open. Flies were crawling all over the glass, leaving wet tracks in the condensation. Then I ran to the hot plate, lit it, and threw the frying pan on the burner. I dumped the whole can of coffee on the frying pan, but the elevator boy was enjoying himself so much he didn’t seem to mind my extravagance with his coffee. In a few minutes the coffee was burning, and a pungent smoky odor was filling the room, almost neutralizing the odor of Herky.

  “You don’t mind if I look at him?” asked Poochie again.

  “Knock yourself out, pal,” I answered, going for the door.

  “Been dead a while hasn’t he?”

  “Little while longer and he’d have gone clear through the mattress.”

  I walked to the pay phone at the end of the hall on the second floor. “Come with me, pal,” I called, figuring he’d roll old Herky soon as my back was turned. It’s bad enough getting rolled when you’re alive.

  I put a dime in the pay phone and dialed operator. “Police department,” I said, then waited for my dime to return as she rang the station. The dime didn’t come. I looked hard at Poochie who turned away, very innocently.

  “Someone stuffed the goddamn chute,” I said. “Some asshole’s gonna get my dime when he pulls the stuffing out later.”

  “Bunch of thieves around here, Officer,” said Poochie, all puckered and a little chalkier than before.

  I called the dicks and asked for one to come down and take the death report, then I hung up and lit a cigar, not that I really wanted one, but any smell would do at the moment.

  “Is it true they explode like a bomb after a while?”

  “What?”

  “Stiffs. Like old Herky.”

  “Yeah, he’d’ve been all over your wallpaper pretty soon.”

  “Damn,” said the elevator boy, grinning big and showing lots of gums, upper and lower. “Some of these guys like Herky got lots of dough hidden around,” he said, winking at me.

  “Yeah, well let’s let him keep it. He’s had it this long.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean we should take it.”

  “Course not.”

  “It’s just that these coroner guys, they get to steal anything they find laying around.”

  “How long’s old Herky been living here?” I asked, not bothering to find out his whole name. I’d let the detective worry about the report.

  “Off and on, over five years I know of. All alone. Never even had no friends. Nobody. Just laid up there in that room sucking up the sneaky pete. Used to drink a gallon a day. I think he lived off his social security. Pay his rent, eat a little, drink a little. I never could do it myself. That’s why I’m elevator boy. Can’t make it on that social security.”

  “You ever talk to him?”

  “Yeah, he never had nothing to say though. No family. Never been married. No relatives to speak of. Really alone, you know? I got me eight kids spread all over this damn country. I can go sponge off one of them ever’ once in a while. Never gonna see old Poochie like that.” He winked and tapped his chest with a bony thumb. “Guys like old Herky, they don’t care about nobody and nobody cares about them. They check out of this world grabbing their throat and staring around a lonely hotel room. Those’re the guys that swell up and pop all over your walls. Guys like old Herky.” The elevator boy thought about old Herky popping, and he broke out in a snuffling croupy laugh because that was just funny as hell.

  I hung around the lobby waiting for the detective to arrive and relieve me of caring for the body. While I was waiting I started examining both sides of the staircase walls. It was the old kind with a scalloped molding about seven feet up, and at the first landing there were dirty finger streaks below the molding while the rest of the wall on both sides was uniformly dirty, but unsmudged. I walked to the landing and reached up on the ledge, feeling a toilet-paper-wrapped bundle. I opened it and found a complete outfit: eyedropper, hypodermic needle, a piece of heavy thread, burned spoon, and razor blade.

  I broke the eye dropper, bent the needle, and threw the hype kit in the trash can behind the rickety desk in the lobby.

  “W
hat’s that?” asked the elevator boy.

  “A fit.”

  “A hype’s outfit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you know it was there?”

  “Elementary, my dear Poochie.”

  “That’s pretty goddamn good.”

  The detective came in carrying a clipboard full of death reports. He was one of the newer ones, a young collegiate-looking type. I didn’t know him. I talked to him for a few minutes and the elevator boy took him back to the body.

  “Never catch old Poochie going it alone,” he called to me with his gums showing. “Never gonna catch old Poochie busting like a balloon and plastered to your wallpaper.”

  “Good for you, Poochie,” I nodded, taking a big breath out on the sidewalk, thinking I could still smell the dead body. I imagined that his odor was clinging to my clothes and I goosed the black-and-white, ripping off some rubber in my hurry to get away from that room.

  I drove around for a while and started wondering what I should work on. I thought about the hotel burglar again and wondered if I could find Link Owens, a good little hotel creeper, who might be able to tell me something about this guy that’d been hitting us so hard. All hotel burglars know each other. Sometimes you see so many of them hanging around the lobbies of the better hotels, it looks like a thieves’ convention. Then I got the code-two call to go to the station.

  TEN

  CODE TWO MEANS HURRY UP, and whenever policemen get that call to go to the station they start worrying about things. I’ve had a hundred partners tell me that: “What did I do wrong? Am I in trouble? Did something happen to the old lady? The kids?” I never had such thoughts, of course. A code-two call to go to the station just meant to me that they had some special shit detail they needed a man for, and mine happened to be the car they picked.

  When I got to the watch commander’s office, Lieutenant Hilliard was sitting at his desk reading the morning editorials, his millions of wrinkles deeper than usual, looking as mean as he always did when he read the cop-baiting letters to the editor and editorial cartoons which snipe at cops. He never stopped reading them though, and scowling all the way.

  “Hi, Bumper,” he said, glancing up. “One of the vice officers wants you in his office. Something about a bookmaker you turned for them?”

  “Oh yeah, one of my snitches gave him some information yesterday. Guess Charlie Bronski needs to talk to me some more.”

  “Going to take down a bookie, Bumper?” Hilliard grinned. He was a hell of a copper in his day. He wore seven service stripes on his left forearm, each one signifying five years’ service. His thin hands were knobby and covered with bulging blue veins. He had trouble with bone deterioration now, and walked with a cane.

  “I’m a patrol officer. Can’t be doing vice work. No time.”

  “If you’ve got something going with Bronski, go ahead and work on it. Vice caper or not, it’s all police work. Besides, I’ve never seen many uniformed policemen tear off a bookmaker. That’s about the only kind of pinch you’ve never made for me, Bumper.”

  “We’ll see what we can do, Lieutenant,” I smiled, and left him there, scowling at the editorials again, an old man that should’ve pulled the pin years ago. Now he’d been here too long. He couldn’t leave or he’d die. And he couldn’t do the work anymore, so he just sat and talked police work to other guys like him who believed police work meant throwing lots of bad guys in jail and that all your other duties were just incidental. The young officers were afraid to get close to the watch commander’s office when he was in there. I’ve seen rookies call a sergeant out into the hall to have him approve a report so they wouldn’t have to take it to Lieutenant Hilliard. He demanded excellence, especially on reports. Nobody’s ever asked that of the young cops who were TV babies, not in all their lives. So he was generally avoided by the men he commanded.

  Charlie Bronski was in his office with two other vice officers when I entered.

  “What’s up, Charlie?” I asked.

  “We had some unbelievable luck, Bumper. We ran the phone number and it comes back to an apartment on Hobart near Eighth Street, and Red Scalotta hangs around Eighth Street quite a bit when he’s not at his restaurant on Wilshire. I’m betting that phone number you squeezed out of Zoot goes right into Reba McClain’s pad just like I hoped. She always stays close by Red, but never too close. Red’s been married happily for thirty years and has a daughter in Stanford and a son in medical school. Salt of the earth, that asshole is.”

  “Gave nine thousand last year to two separate churches in Beverly Hills,” said one of the other vice officers, who looked like a wild young head with his collar-length hair, and beard, and floppy hat with peace and pot buttons all over it. He wore a cruddy denim shirt cut off at the shoulders and looked like a typical Main Street fruit hustler.

  “And God returns it a hundredfold,” said the other vice officer, Nick Papalous, a melancholy-looking guy, with small white teeth. Nick had a big Zapata moustache, sideburns, and wore orange-flowered flares. I’d worked with Nick several times before he went to vice. He was a good cop for being so young.

  “You seemed pretty hot on taking a book, Bumper, so I thought I’d see if you wanted to go with us. This isn’t going to be a back office, but it might lead to one, thanks to your friend Zoot. What do you say, want to come?”

  “Do I have to change to civvies?”

  “Not if you don’t want to. Nick and Fuzzy here are going to take the door down. You and me could stiff in the call from the pay phone at the corner. Your uniform wouldn’t get in the way.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said, anxious for a little action, glad I didn’t have to take the uniform off. “Never went on a vice raid before. Do we have to synchronize our watches and all that?”

  “I’ll do the door,” Nick grinned. “Fuzzy’ll watch out the window and keep an eyeball on you and Bumper down at the pay phone on the corner. When you get the bet stiffed, Fuzzy’ll see your signal and give me the okay and down goes the door.”

  “Kind of tough kicking, ain’t it, Nick, in those crepe-soled, sneak-and-peek shoes you guys wear?”

  “Damn straight, Bumper,” Nick smiled. “I could sure use those size-twelve boondockers of yours.”

  “Thirteens,” I said.

  “Wish I could take down the door,” said Fuzzy. “Nothing I like better than John Wayne-ing a goddamn door.”

  “Tell Bumper why you can’t, Fuzzy,” Nick grinned.

  “Got a sprained ankle and a pulled hamstring,” said Fuzzy, taking a few limping steps to show me. “I was off duty for two weeks.”

  “Tell Bumper how it happened,” said Nick, still grinning.

  “Freakin’ fruit,” said Fuzzy, pulling off the wide-brimmed hat and throwing back his long blond hair. “We got a vice complaint about this fruit down at the main library, hangs around out back and really comes on strong with every young guy he sees.”

  “Fat mother,” said Charlie. “Almost as heavy as you, Bumper. And strong.”

  “Damn!” said Fuzzy, shaking his head, looking serious even though Nick was still grinning. “You shoulda seen the arms on that animal! Anyway, I get picked to operate him, naturally.”

  “’Cause you’re so pretty, Fuzzy,” said Charlie.

  “Yeah, anyway, I go out there, about two in the afternoon, and hang around a little bit, and sure enough, there he is standing by that scrub oak tree and I don’t know which one’s the freakin tree for a couple minutes, he’s so wide. And I swear I never saw a hornier fruit in my life ’cause I just walked up and said, ‘Hi.’ That’s all, I swear.”

  “Come on, Fuzzy, you winked at him,” said Charlie, winking at me.

  “You asshole,” said Fuzzy. “I swear I just said, ‘Hi, Brucie,’ or something like that, and this mother grabbed me. Grabbed me! In a bear hug! He pinned my arms! I was shocked, I tell you! Then he starts bouncing me up and down against his fat belly, saying, ‘You’re so cute. You’re so cute. You’re so cute.’” />
  Then Fuzzy stood up and started bouncing up and down with his arms up against his sides and his head bobbing. “Like this I was,” said Fuzzy. “Like a goddamn rag doll bouncing, and I said, ‘Y-y-y-you’re u-u-u-under a-a-a-arrest,’ and he stopped loving me and said, ‘What?’ and I said, ‘YOU’RE UNDER ARREST, YOU FAT ZOMBIE!’ And he threw me. Threw me! And I rolled down the hill and crashed into the concrete steps. And you know what happens then? My partner here lets him get away. He claims he couldn’t catch the asshole and the guy couldn’t run no faster than a pregnant alligator. My brave partner!”

  “Fuzzy really wants that guy bad,” Charlie grinned. “I tried to catch him, honest, Fuzzy.” Then to me, “I think Fuzzy fell in love. He wanted the fat boy’s phone number.”

  “Yuk!” said Fuzzy, getting a chill as he thought about it. “We got a warrant for that prick for battery on a police officer. Wait’ll I get him. I’ll get that prick in a choke hold and lobotomize him!”

  “By the way, what’s the signal you use for crashing in the pad?” I asked.

  “We always give it this,” said Charlie, pumping his closed fist up and down.

  “Double time,” I smiled. “Hey, that takes me back to my old infantry days.” I felt good now, getting to do something a little different. Maybe I should’ve tried working vice, I thought, but no, I’ve had lots more action and lots more variety on my beat. That’s where it’s at. That’s where it’s really at.

  “Reba must have some fine, fine pussy,” said Fuzzy, puffing on a slim cigar and cocking his head at Charlie. I could tell by the smell it was a ten- or fifteen-center. I’d quit smoking first, I thought.

  “She’s been with Red a few years now,” said Nick to Fuzzy. “Wait’ll you meet her. Those mug shots don’t do her justice. Good-looking snake.”

  “You cold-blooded vice cops don’t care how good-looking a broad is,” I said, needling Charlie. “All a broad is to you is a booking number. I’ll bet when some fine-looking whore thinking you’re a trick lays down and spreads her legs, you just drop that cold badge right on top of her.”