Delta Star

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “They’re filthy. They shit everywhere,” Rumpled Ronald said weepily. “My old lady lets them outa their cage and they fly all over the house. How would you like parakeet shit in your Cream of Wheat?”

  “I never even cook Cream of Wheat, living alone like I do,” Dilford said. Now he was getting weepy and feeling sorry for himself. “You should see my bacon, Dolly. It’s all green with hair on it. I hate living alone. Nobody cares for me!”

  “How do you kill the parakeets?” Leery wanted to know.

  “It’s for great truths like these that you stay in business and don’t retire to Sun City,” Mario Villalobos noted. “It’s not the money.”

  “I spray them in the snoot with a little spray starch,” Rumpled Ronald said. “It’s a merciful death and undetectable. They just do a little header right off the perch.”

  “I think you’re disgusting,” Dolly said, pugnaciously. “Somebody oughtta squeeze your carotid artery.”

  “Somebody oughtta squeeze my prick till I scream!” Hans cried to the groupies, making Dolly call him a pervert.

  “I love to see tiny girls get hostile,” Dilford said. “Hey, Leery, I wanna buy Dolly a drink and break down her resistance.”

  “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Leery said happily, while he poured the booze, grabbed Dilford’s dough and leered like a gargoyle.

  “There’s a place in Nevada this wholesome,” Mario Villalobos said. “It’s called The Mustang Ranch.”

  “I like that!” Hans suddenly shrieked in his irritating singsong voice while one of his groupies sucked on his neck. “She said you should never run over a Mexican on a bike cause it might be yours!” Then Hans remembered the counterfeit Mexican and said, “No offense, Mario.”

  Just then the door opened and a lithe slender figure with shoulder-length hair floated through the gloom and smoke and sat at the bar, silently signaling for whiskey. They all quieted down a bit. They were vaguely troubled by him and didn’t know why. It was The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

  The others resumed their conversation when The Gooned-out Vice Cop swallowed the double shot of bar whiskey. He stared at his mirror image in Leery’s spider web of a pub mirror. The Gooned-out Vice Cop smiled ever so slightly at his bifurcated face, green from neon light. The Gooned-out Vice Cop signaled for another, drank it down, left his money on the bar and stood up.

  In the time he had been coming to Leery’s he had never spoken to anyone, and Dilford impulsively decided to make him speak. Dilford said, “Better be careful. Leery’s bar whiskey’ll make you go blind.”

  The Gooned-out Vice Cop just smiled serenely with eyes like bullet holes and said, “That’s all right. I’ve seen enough. Haven’t you?”

  And then he floated through the gloom and smoke out onto smog-shrouded Sunset Boulevard.

  It was a fairly ordinary night at The House of Misery, all things considered. The only thing unusual happened when The Bad Czech tried to pay the evening’s tab with his credit card.

  “You know I don’t take credit cards no more,” Leery said. “Too much hassle. Cash on the barrelhead.”

  “Long as I been comin here, you ain’t gonna honor my card?” The Bad Czech glared, and with a melodramatic flourish slammed his hand down on the bar, nearly flattening the embossed name on the plastic card.

  As old as he was, Leery still had the eyes of a vulture. He looked down at the card and said, “Well, I sure as hell ain’t gonna honor that card. Not unless your name’s Lester Beemer.”

  “What’re you talkin about?” The Bad Czech said, picking up the credit card and trying to read it. But he was seeing two credit cards, two Leerys, two Jane Waynes.

  Then two Mario Villaloboses walked up to him and said, “What’s the name on that card?”

  “Lester Beemer,” Leery said. “Better call bunco-forgery. The Czech’s trying to hang bad paper.”

  “Goddamn! Where’d I get this card?” The Bad Czech demanded of Leery.

  “How the hell do I know?” Leery grumbled. “I just want my money. You owe me thirty-three bucks.”

  “Hon, where’d I get this card?” The Bad Czech demanded of both Jane Waynes propping him up.

  “I dunno, Czech,” she answered, “but I gotta hire a wheelbarrow and get you home.”

  “Where’d I get this credit card, Cecil?” The Bad Czech demanded of his partner Cecil Higgins, who was snoring louder than Ludwig, with whom he shared the pool table.

  “Can I have that credit card until tomorrow, Czech?” Mario Villalobos asked the monster cop. “When we’re both sober enough to think?”

  “This is a freakin mystery!” The Bad Czech cried, giving the card to the detective. “I hate mysteries!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT WAS A DAY TO REMEMBER, all right. First, because all of the losers who had been at The House of Misery the night before, thereby evincing at least an unconscious death wish, had the world-class hangover usually reserved for The Bad Czech. Secondly, because a marathon foot pursuit, destined to go down in police folklore, took place. And finally, because a good cop died.

  Everyone was looking a bit demented that morning. The Bad Czech was completely bonkers because he couldn’t for the life of him figure out where his credit card was and how he had one belonging to a Lester Beemer.

  “I dunno, Mario!” he groaned to the detective, who questioned him immediately after roll call.

  “When was the last time you saw your own credit card, Czech?” Mario Villalobos coaxed. “Try to think.”

  “Try to think? Try to think?” The Bad Czech moaned. “Do you know what my head feels like?”

  “About like mine,” Mario Villalobos said.

  “Well how the hell can I think?” The Bad Czech was feeling extra sorry for himself and was extra cranky, so there was no point continuing.

  “If it occurs to you later, gimme a call,” Mario Villalobos said.

  “What’s so important about the credit card anyways?” Cecil Higgins asked.

  “Probably nothing,” Mario Villalobos said. “It’s just that the name Lester came up in a homicide I’m handling.”

  “Ordinary name,” Cecil Higgins said. “I got a cousin name a Lester. Gud-damn! What’s Leery put in that rotgut he serves, Agent Orange? I feel like a fruit fly that got maced. I gotta go out and get some fresh smog in my lungs.”

  “Okay,” Mario Villalobos said. “Call me if you remember, Czech.”

  Before being permitted to get some fresh smog in their lungs, The Bad Czech and Cecil Higgins were grabbed by the weary day-watch lieutenant, who, having lost Pipeline Jones on the hand grenade caper, was down to one sergeant. The lieutenant was not a snitch like Pipeline Jones, and The Bad Czech didn’t dislike him as much as he generally disliked supervisors, but the lieutenant hadn’t been known to do any work of any kind for at least fifteen years. Answering a telephone or signing a report fatigued him so, he’d have to recuperate with a two-hour lunch break. The troops referred to him as Too-Tired Loomis.

  “Cecil, you and The Czech come in here, will you?” he said as the beat cops were limping toward the back door with thumping heads.

  “What’s up, Lieutenant,” Cecil Higgins mumbled.

  “I need someone to help out on the desk for a bit,” Too-Tired Loomis sighed. “I gotta do everything around here. I’m short one sergeant. I’ve got the regular desk people doing my roster. I don’t know what everyone expects of …”

  “Okay, Lieutenant,” Cecil Higgins sighed. “C’mon, Czech, let’s work the desk for a while and let the lieutenant rest. He’s exhausted from all the tension.”

  Five minutes later, while working the front desk at Rampart Station, The Bad Czech got a call from the Laser Lady.

  “Oh God!” The Bad Czech said, holding his hand over the mouthpiece. “Cecil, it’s the Laser Lady. Why don’t you talk to her?”

  “I can’t take it when she’s feelin grumpy. Is she in her God-bless-you mood today? Or her fuck-your-mother mood?”

/>   “I dunno,” The Bad Czech sighed, resigning himself to whichever mood she was in. Then into the phone, “Okay, it’s me again. Gimme the grid coordinates.”

  The Laser Lady said, “The grid coordinates are thirty-six latitude and forty-five longitude. You must hurry, Officer. They’re shooting lasers right into my head!”

  “Okay, okay,” The Bad Czech said, holding his own head in his hand, elbow on the desk, furry eyebrows protruding through fingers as thick as shotgun barrels.

  “Do you have the shield up to forty-five milligrams?” the Laser Lady asked frantically.

  “Yeah, yeah,” The Bad Czech muttered.

  “Well then, raise it to sixty-five milligrams, you stupid fucking cocksucking donkey!” the Laser Lady screamed.

  “Ow!” The Bad Czech whined. “Cecil, she’s yellin in my ear! I’m gettin a migraine! You talk to her!”

  “Gud-damnit, Czech, my head’s hurtin too. Jist raise the fuckin shield where she wants it. I can’t do everything.”

  “Okay, okay,” The Bad Czech said to the Laser Lady. “We usually gotta call Jet Propulsion Laboratory to raise it to sixty-five milligrams, but I’m doin it now. There, you feel better?”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful, Officer!” the Laser Lady cried. “All the lasers are being deflected now. Thank you very much.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” The Bad Czech said grumpily. “Kin I hang up now?”

  “You’ve been very kind, Officer,” the Laser Lady said. “God bless you.”

  After The Bad Czech hung up he said, “Her headache’s all better and mine’s worse. I feel like they’re shootin lasers in my fuckin head.”

  Just then Too-Tired Loomis trudged exhaustedly to the desk bringing with him the smallest male officer in Rampart Division. Sunney Kee was half Chinese, half Thai. He was twenty-two years old, had been in America only four years, yet could speak, read and write English with such excellence that he was at the top of his police academy graduating class. And though he was hardly taller than Dolly, he had come close to setting a new police academy record for the dreaded obstacle course which the recruits had to conquer. Of course he had a pronounced accent and was quite hard to understand when speaking over the radio or on the telephone.

  It was really bad when he was teamed up with Carlos Delgado, a young cop from Ecuador, who when trying to broadcast license number VVA 123, actually said, “Beek-tore, beek-tore, adam, wan, two, tres.”

  It drove the communications operators bonkers but in the era of Equal Employment Opportunities, they all had their little crosses to bear.

  “Sunney can help you out,” Too-Tired Loomis said. “His partner had to go to court.”

  “Help out?” The Bad Czech said. “Why can’t he jist take over and let us get out to our beat?” He was dying to get to Leo’s Love Palace and drink an Alka-Seltzer and some raw egg in tomato juice.

  “Sunney has trouble making himself understood on the telephone,” Too-Tired Loomis said. “I can’t be translating for him all day. Do you know how much work I have to do because Sergeant Jones went and got himself scared half to death by a hand grenade?”

  “Aw, Sunney kin talk okay, Lieutenant,” Cecil Higgins moaned.

  “I don’t know,” Too-Tired Loomis said, scratching his gray head, looking doubtfully at the ever-affable Sunney Kee, who hadn’t stopped smiling since he got this job which paid a good middle-class wage and allowed him to support his parents and six sisters.

  The Bad Czech said, “What if I show ya he can say somethin real hard?”

  “I don’t know,” Too-Tired Loomis said. “How hard?”

  “I got it,” The Bad Czech said. “How about if I kin teach Sunney to say Magilla Gorilla?”

  “Okay,” Too-Tired Loomis said wearily. “Make him say an understandable Magilla Gorilla and I’ll be satisfied he can work the desk.”

  “There ain’t nothin to it, Sunney,” The Bad Czech said. “Why, when my old man came to this country from Czechoslovakia, he probably talked funnier’n you.”

  Sunney Kee just nodded and smiled agreeably.

  Thirty minutes later Sunney Kee was not smiling. The Bad Czech, sweating 80-proof bourbon, with his head banging like the shotguns on the police range, was staring dementedly at the little rookie, saying, “No, no, no! Goddamnit! I told you a hunnerd times now! Go-ril-la. Go-ril-la. It’s easy. Say it.”

  Sunney Kee, who was also starting to sweat right through his blue uniform, looked fearfully up at the crazed gray eyes of the monster cop and said, “Go-lee-la. Go-lee-la!”

  “No! No! No!” The Bad Czech screamed, causing Cecil Higgins to say, “Czech, take Sunney in the coffee room. Git some orange juice. You’re jist makin your head worse and my head worse and you’re scarin the eggrolls outa poor Sunney.”

  “Say gorilla,” The Bad Czech said, his voice flat and deadly. “I got a world-class hangover. I got a carnival in my colon. I gotta get out to my beat. Say gorilla, Sunney. Or I’ll kill ya!”

  “Go-lee-la,” Sunney Kee said, looking up in terror into the blood-crimson demented eyes of The Bad Czech.

  Δ Δ Δ

  Meanwhile, there was trouble on The Bad Czech’s beat. A woman with wooden teeth was being whacked around like a tetherball.

  Her true name was unknown, but all the people around MacArthur Park called her Wooden Teeth Wilma. She was a harmless ragwoman who wore Hedda Hopper hats and miniskirts and boots that showed off her bony, varicosed, sixty-five-year-old legs, which she thought were beautiful. She was not as unkempt and dirty as most ragwomen, so it was thought that she might have a little income and actually live somewhere. Some policeman years earlier had started a rumor that she had been married to a cop, and when he was shot and killed by a bandit she haunted the area he used to patrol. It was probably without substance, but even cops need a little soap opera in their lives, so they chose to believe it and she was given handouts from time to time by The Bad Czech and Cecil Higgins.

  As to the wooden teeth, it was a total mystery. She would only smile slyly when asked why she had dentures made of wood, and where she got them. She didn’t talk much, since even rag-women in MacArthur Park thought it imprudent to tell all. The only answer she gave was that she had heard George Washington also had wooden teeth and look how people loved him.

  But Earl Rimms didn’t love George Washington or Wooden Teeth Wilma. Earl Rimms didn’t love anybody. He had spent all of his forty-five years learning that love is expensive. Love can cost, and hate can pay.

  Earl Rimms was not very discriminating when it came to victims, as long as they were defenseless. And he believed in quantity, not quality, so he’d steal the purse of just about anyone over the age of sixty who might break a hip or a shoulder when he knocked her to the ground.

  The heat was on in his Watts neighborhood and old black women were starting to fight back. Earl Rimms wasn’t getting any younger himself, so he’d decided to move to central Los Angeles last year. He had been arrested here twice by Cecil Higgins and The Bad Czech, who were well aware of his record of senseless brutality to robbery victims. The beat cops had come to hate him as much as he hated everyone.

  When Wooden Teeth Wilma made the near-fatal mistake of strolling past Earl Rimms that Tuesday morning, he couldn’t have known that the loony old lady carried only food for the ducks and dog food for herself in her oversized plastic purse. Earl Rimms was feeling particularly bummed because his girl friend threatened to call the cops when he took half of her welfare money and knocked her down the steps for resisting. He was thinking of what he was going to do to that ungrateful bitch when he finished with his day’s work.

  Wooden Teeth Wilma was wondering where The Bad Czech and Cecil Higgins were this morning. Maybe it was their day off, she thought, but there were no other beat cops around Alvarado. Traffic was medium light on this overcast, rather balmy Tuesday morning. The ducks always seemed more cheery when the weather was balmy.

  She said, “Good morning!” to Earl Rimms.

  He punched he
r so hard in the stomach that her wooden dentures shot from her mouth clattering across the pavement. He grabbed the red plastic purse at the same moment and jerked the frail woman, who whipped around him like a tetherball. She wanted to let go but was unable.

  In order to keep someone from stealing her red plastic purse full of food for the ducks, she had wrapped the purse strap around her wrist. Earl Rimms was a powerful man and he whipped her in an arc until she slammed into a park bench cracking six ribs. On another pass she crashed into a palm tree, breaking her hip and the strap of the purse.

  A Costa Rican newspaper vendor who was working on the corner saw the incident and started yelling. Earl Rimms ran like hell through the park and disappeared in the foot traffic on Alvarado with the duck food and Alpo hors d’oeuvres. Wooden Teeth Wilma ended up in the hospital and would unquestionably be on a walker for the rest of her life. When The Bad Czech heard about this later in the day from the Costa Rican newspaper vendor, he got mad enough to commit murder. And he did just that.

  Δ Δ Δ

  Mario Villalobos had no luck at all on the telephone to Caltech. No one at the division of chemistry knew a “Lester,” nor why a deceased person named Missy Moonbeam a.k.a. Thelma Bernbaum might have the number in her purse.

  The coincidence of the name Lester on The Bad Czech’s mysterious credit card seemed to be just that, a coincidence. Mario Villalobos decided to send Chip Muirfield and Melody Waters over to Western Avenue in east Hollywood just to see if by chance they could spot a tall, black-haired guy in a dark pinstripe suit who might fit the hotel clerk’s description of the man he saw leaving the hotel when Missy Moonbeam did her header.

  “Take a pass or two down the avenue,” Mario Villalobos told the shoulder holster kids. “The hotel clerk said he saw the guy talking to some street whores near the little newsstand north of Santa Monica. If you see a middle-aged guy in pinstripes, have a talk with him. If you feel hinky about him or if his name’s Lester, bring him in.”

  “Okay if we stop for brunch first, Mario?” Chip Muirfield asked. “I’m feeling awful hungry and …”