the Choirboys (1996) (2 page)

Deputy Chief Lynch was a man to reckon with because he had thought of the most printable slogan in the history of the department. It was the slogan for a simple plan to spread out the staff officers geographically, giving them line control over everything in a given area. But if the plan were to be newsworthy, it needed a word or words to make it sound sophisticated, military and dramatic.

It came to Deputy Chief Lynch in a dream one night after he saw Command Decision on "The Late Show."

"Territorial Imperative!" he screamed in his sleep, terrifying his wife.

"But what's it mean, sir?" his adjutant asked the next day.

"That's the beauty of it, stupid. It means whatever you want it to mean," Chief Lynch answered testily.

"I see! Brilliant, sir!" cried the adjutant.

One often read in the Los Angeles newspapers that the chief of police was shuffling his officers around in the interest of "Territorial Imperative."

Chapter
TWO

The Body Count
.

Deputy Chief Adrian Lynch could sit for hours and stare at stacks of paper and suck on an unlit pipe and look overworked. This alone would not have made him a success however if he had not been the driving force behind Team Policing and the Basic Car Plan which everyone knew were the pet projects of the Big Chief.

"Team Policing" was nothing more than the deployment as often as possible of the same men in a given radio car district, making these men responsible not only for uniform patrol in that district but for helping the detectives with their follow-up investigation. The detectives (now called "investigators") resented the encroachment of younger patrol officers in the investigative work. The patrol officers in turn resented a phase of the Basic Car Plan which in reality was the plan itself. It was the Basic Car Plan Meeting. It was resented by everybody.

This meeting usually took place at a school or auditorium in the district patrolled by the given car. It was more or less a glorified coffee klatch to which doughnuts were added as an enticement. They were picked up free, compliments of a large doughnut chain. Police administrators could swear that crime had dropped because two dozen lonely old ladies had coffee and doughnuts with two charming, well groomed, young uniformed policemen who couldn't wait to get rid of the old ladies so they could get off duty and meet some young ladies.

When Deputy Chief Lynch was still a commander he had had the foresight to transfer to his Office an enterprising young policeman who had been a second lieutenant in Vietnam and was an absolute master of the body count. Officer Weishart made sure that all Basic Car meetings in divisions commanded by Lynch would take place in school buildings adjacent to crowded playgrounds. Officer Weishart supplied not only coffee and doughnuts for the pensioners in the neighborhood but cookies and punch for the children. He enticed hundreds of kids from the streets to set foot inside the auditorium wherein they would be duly logged. Each time they came and went If anyone had ever bothered to audit Officer Weishart's statistics he would have discovered that to accommodate the mobs reported, the grammar school auditorium would have had to be the size of the Los Angeles Coliseum.

But Team Policing and the Basic Car Plan had created lots and lots of new jobs for officers of staff rank. Therefore lieutenants made captain, captains made commander and commanders made deputy chief, and everyone had all the time they needed to think up new things for the working cops to do aside from catching crooks, which most of the new captains, commanders and deputy chiefs knew nothing about.

If Deputy Chief Lynch had an Achilles' heel which might someday preclude his elevation to chief of police it was his lubricious lusting after his secretary, Theda Gunther, the wife of Lieutenant Harry Gunther, who every, time he turned around found himself transferred farther and farther from his Eagle Rock home, which allowed his wife more and more time with Deputy Chief Lynch who wished there was a police station for Lieutenant Gunther even farther from downtown, than West Valley Station.

If the body count at the Basic Car Plan meetings was Chief Lynch's greatest accomplishment as a police officer his most thrilling by far was fornicating with Theda Gunther on top of the desk of that goddamn religious fanatic, Assistant Chief Buster Llewellyn.

They had gotten drunk in Chinatown the night Lynch suggested it, and there had almost been a slight scandal when they staggered into the police building at 2:00 A. M.

It had been a mad coupling for both of them what with the possibility of being caught in such a hallowed spot. Theda Gunther ripped off Deputy Chief Lynch's hairpiece in the throes of orgasm, and he, instinctively grabbing for the three hundred dollar toupee, had a premature withdrawal, leaving evidence all over the irreplaceable hand tooled blotter with Llewellyn's religious slogans engraved on all four corners.

Lynch feared that Llewellyn might immediately recognize the night deposit for what it was. He might send the blotter to the crime lab and seek the assistance of some smartass like his adjutant, a surly former detective. Chief Lynch didn't know what a former detective might be able to uncover.

When the case of the MacArthur Park killing came to his attention Deputy Chief Lynch listened to all the details, including the stories of lurid fantastic orgies involving officers and station house groupies. He became angrier than anyone had ever seen him. He wanted to jail the officers. Due to his accident on Llewellyn's desk he had become a nervous wreck. For three weeks Theda Gunther as usual rubbed her hot curvy body all over him when they passed in the office but he was as flaccid as linguini. She eventually got huffy and stopped calling him old donkey dick.

Of course Chief Lynch wasn't the only one affected by the killing. Wilshire Station Captain Stanley Drobeck was fuming because he had to write a thirty page report to the chief of police about the MacArthur Park incident with all available information on the drinking, the degenerates and the dead body. This on top of the Captain Cunkle scandal which itself took ten pages to describe.

Captain Drobeck felt that a station captain truly had the hot seat in the police department. All the big chief did was make speeches and hog headlines. It was the captains who were deluged by paper work, who made the decisions and who were there. It certainly wasn't the big chief and it wasn't Deputy Chief Adrian Lynch, who, Drobeck knew, spent the entire day trying to seduce his secretary, Theda Gunther, whose lieutenant husband was not likely ever to get transferred any closer to downtown and had taken to riding a motorbike to save gas.

Captain Drobeck despised libertiries like Deputy Chief Lynch and Captain Cunkle of Wilshire Detectives, who had been the cause of his latest and largest internal discipline matter before the MacArthur Park killing.

Cunkle was a loathsome veteran detective who had somehow managed to pass his promotion exams without more than a high school education and had conned his way past the promotion, boards. When former Inspector Moss convinced the chief he should change the designation of "inspector" to "commander" it was Cunkle who said that the public associated the title of "inspector" with a police officer and that "commander" was purely a military term and that he wanted to be a cop not a soldier.

It had been Captain Drobeck's recent pleasure to recommend ten days' suspension for a single, male, twenty-five year old policeman who had been found to be living with a single, female, twenty-three year old bank teller. The charge was conduct unbecoming an officer, or CUBO, called "cue-bow" by , the policemen. He had recommended twenty days for a policewoman in the same circumstances in that a female officer should be even more above reproach than a male.

When Captain Cunkle was finally caught by a private detective in a motel with Hester Billings, the wife of a prominent attorney, Captain Drobeck made the following recommendation to Deputy Chief Lynch:

Despite the risk of being accused by the rank-and-file officers of applying a double standard if this confidential investigation leaks, I am recommending that you take no action against Captain Wesley Cunkle, who, as you know, was caught in a compromising position with a female person not his wife. The enclosed photos were taken by a well-known private investigator, himself a former police officer, thoroughly unscrupulous, but reportedly discreet. The negatives will be destroyed if the demand of his employer, the female person's husband, is met.

The demand is: a quick divorce without alimony and with custody of the children for Mr.______

There is some complication in that' Captain Cunkle is, as you know, to be elevated to the rank of Commander on the next transfer list If he is not promoted, the field policemen may lose confidence in their leaders and get wind of this scandal despite our efforts to keep it stonewalled.

Respectfully, Chief Lynch read the correspondence and looked at the photos of Captain Cunkle naked on his knees on the floor of a motel his eyes glazed by martinis and lust. Then the chief looked at Mrs. Billings spread-eagled on the bed unaware of Private Investigator Slim Scully snapping his Nikon for all he was worth.

"What do you think, sir?" asked Captain Drobeck who personally delivered the confidential reports and series of photos to the chief.

"Damn, she's got a hairy box!" Chief Lynch whistled.

At the same moment that Captain Drobeck was making his recommendation to Deputy Chief Lynch concerning the secret matter of Captain Cunkle, an early nightwatch rollcall was being conducted at 77th Street Station. An alcoholic twenty-five year policeman named Aaron Mobley said to the sergeant in charge of the rollcall, "Goddamnit, I don't mind how much pussy Cunkle eats, but why does a working copper get a suspension for the same thing a captain does?"

"Come on," said the florid sergeant. "We been yakking about this for two days. I'd rather do it than talk about it. Let's read off the crimes."

Finally, Ruben Wilkie, a twenty-six year cop who was the partner of Aaron Mobley, had the last word: "He gobbles one beaver and gets promoted. I've ate close to three hundred bearded clams in my time and never even got a commendation!"

But perhaps the very last word on the subject was uttered by Police Commissioner Howie Morton. The police commissioners were political appointees, titular department heads, who knew little about police work but were generally harmless since the true power rested with the chief. Police Commissioner Morton was a white Anglo. The board always had at least one black, one Mexican-American, one Jew and, of late, one woman. It had never had a Persian, a Filipino or a Navajo and never would until those ethnic groups acquired a political base in Los Angeles.

Police Commissioner Morton was able to learn about the supersecret Captain Cunkle scandal because he had a distant cousin, a garage mechanic at Southwest Station, who overheard the janitors saying they were sick of hearing about it. Commissioner Morton persuaded a sergeant who worked Internal Affairs Division to obtain the photos for him. The last word on the Commander Cunkle scandal was hence uttered by Police Commissioner Morton. He looked at the photos and whistled. "Damn, she's got a hairy box!"

Chapter
THREE

Cue-bow
.

Commander Hector Moss was popular at functions wherein people with causes wanted a member of the police department to beat up verbally.

Commander Moss, the perennial toastmaster, always wore handcuffs on the front of his belt. When he stood before a DAR meeting; and had the ladies agog with his wavy blond hair and stories of crime and violence, the coat would be pulled open and the handcuffs would appear. Sometimes the right side of his coat slipped open to show a chrome plated Smith and Wesson Combat Masterpiece tugging down at the alligator belt, custom made to support the weight of the heavy gun. Commander Moss, had been in various administrative jobs since being promoted to sergeant sixteen years ago. The gun had never been fired. The ammunition was so old it is doubtful it could fire. Commander Moss got the stories of crime and violence from police reports which crossed his desk each day. Commander Moss was an excellent storyteller.

The MacArthur Park killing had in truth been a godsend. Hector Moss thrived on crisis and longed to prove his rapport with the media. Besides, he desperately needed something to relieve the boredom of sitting and poring through the house organ, called The Beat Magazine, making sure that as always there was nothing in it more cerebral than who had a baby and who died and that there was at least one picture of some vacationing motor cop in Mexico grinning at a dead fish.

There had never been a controversial article in that magazine to stir up or reflect the opinion of the street cops. He often said that if someone ever organized those ignorant bastards, look out. Commander Moss was like a slaver who lived in fear of native footsteps on the decks in the night.

At this hour, on a hot August afternoon with the officers involved in the killing being sweated in the interrogation rooms of Internal Affairs Division, Commander Moss decided on a technique he believed was essential for dealing with any reporters who might belatedly get onto the story of the dead body in MacArthur Park. He didn't wait to be phoned by the enemies who worked for what he considered a loathsome left wing rag. He phoned his favorite reporter with the other paper, after he made sure the reporter had heard something about the case from a different source.

"I wanted you to know about it as soon as I had the full story," said Commander Moss, smiling at the telephone. "It appears an off-duty officer had an accident with a gun in MacArthur Park at about two A. M. I hope you can soft-pedal it for the sake of the seven thousand fine boys and girls in this department. Yes, it was a tragedy all right. A young man is dead. Yes. One officer's relieved from duty pending an investigation. Yes, yes, there is some evidence of drinking. I don't know, could've dropped the gun and it went off. I just don't know yet. Been a policeman almost five years. Vietnam vet: Right. Yes, there's some evidence the officer was with friends. To level with you, Pete, there's a strong possibility some policemen bought a sixpack of beer and stopped in the park on the way home to unwind and talk. Yes, that's Conduct Unbecoming an Officer. We call it cue-bow. Choir practice? No, don't believe I know that term. Choir practice? No, never heard of it."