The Choirboys (18 page)

It was entertaining for the choirboys to stake out the police parking lot after end-of-watch and see Lieutenant Grimsley trudge through the dark, sleepy after a hard night of paper work, and get into his car only to come flying out five seconds later and fall on his ass from the duck excrement on his shoes. It was said that his wife nagged him for month about the green slime she would find stubbornly clinging to the creases of the leather upholstery.

The choirboys also put a particularly fierce black gander in Lieutenant Grimsley's locker at the station which resulted in an investigation by officers of Internal Affairs Division which lasted a week.

Harold Bloomguard, the protector of ducks and all animals, in each case volunteered to take the hissing, squawking birds and get rid of them after the duck shit hit the fan. This should have made him a logical suspect since he mysteriously showed up after each duck attack but Lieutenant Grimsley was too outraged to put two and two together. Besides, it was extremely hard to add two and two when your personal belongings were dripping and foul smelling and an enraged loathsome creature had been banging on your head with its bill.

There were minor attacks wherein the siren on the Lieutenant's police car was fixed so that it wailed and could not be shut off when he started the engine. And his baton, which he kept in the door holder, was removed, carefully sawed in half and replaced.

But the coup which utterly demolished Lieutenant Grimsley and made him a slave to Spermwhale Whalen and precipitated his transfer occurred when Spermwhale bribed a black whore named Fanny Forbes, who was tall and curvy and slender despite her years, to entertain Lieutenant Grimsley. Spermwhale Whalen told her in which restaurant the lieutenant ate on Thursday nights when he could break away from his duties which consisted of signing routine reports and trying to catch policemen loafing in the station when they should be handling their calls.

It took Fanny Forbes, who posed as a tourist from Philadelphia, exactly twenty-five minutes to talk Lieutenant Grimsley into driving her and her bogus suitcase, containing the dirty laundry of Spermwhale Whalen, to a motel on La Brea. He parked his black and white on a side street and insisted on carrying her bag up the back stairs while she registered alone.

Eight minutes after she registered, and while Lieutenant Grimsley, naked except for his black police socks, was hotly kissing the well worn source of her income and whispering endearments like, "Oh baby, you don't seem like a Negro. You look like a Samoan" Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate crept up the same back stairway and opened the door which the whore had left unlocked.

The two choirboys waited a few minutes more, their ears to the door, and heard Lieutenant Grimsley panting so loudly they were afraid they'd miss the prearranged signal from Fanny Forbes.

"She's really got him sucking wind."

"Yeah!" Spermwhale whispered, his hat in hand, ear pressed to the door, waiting, waiting.

And then they heard it, the signal: "Oh honey!" cried the whore. "You got balls like a elephant and a whang like a ox!"

Just as Spermwhale burst through the door Lieutenant Grimsley was in the throes of blissful agony. When he withdrew and jumped from the bed his face was like a dead man's.

"Okay, who called the pol. Lieutenant Grimsley!" cried Spermwhale Whalen.

"What're you men doing here?" cried Lieutenant Grimsley.

"We got a call a woman was being raped in this room! We had no idea!" cried Baxter Slate.

"Musta been some cop hating neighbor saw you come in with the young lady!" cried Spermwhale Whalen.

"How humiliatin!" cried the whore.

"Let's keep our voices down," whispered Lieutenant Grimsley, still motionless and pale.

"Sir, there's some dew on the lily," offered Spermwhale Whalen.

"Oh," said Lieutenant Grimsley, coming to his senses and wiping his whang with his jockey shorts while Fanny Forbes lay nude on the bed and winked at Spermwhale Whalen who was possibly enjoying the sweetest moment of his life.

"Well, we better be goin. Hardass," Spermwhale grinned, as Lieutenant Grimsley toppled clumsily over on the bed trying to get his pants on two legs at a time.

"Yes, well, meet me at Pop's coffee shop, will you, fellas? I'd like to buy you a cup of coffee and talk over a few things before we go back in."

"Sure. Hardass," Spermwhale grinned, playfully mussing up Lieutenant Grimsley's hair.

Lieutenant Grimsley was actually glad when, three weeks later, Captain Orobeck suggested that he was getting too chummy with certain officers and perhaps should think about a transfer. Lieutenant Grimsley was glad because he was sick and tired of Spermwhale Whalen sitting on his desk and winking and mussing up his hair every time he came in to have a report approved.

Fanny Forbes complained when Spermwhale only slipped her a ten dollar bill, but when he reminded her that it was ten bucks more than she had gotten for similar activity with himself, she shrugged and accepted the stipend.

But on the night they caught the Regretful Rapist, both Spermwhale and Baxter were still mightily pissed off from receiving the four days' suspension for sleeping with the avocados. Lieutenant Grimsley had by then been transferred to Internal Affairs Division where he could catch lots of errant policemen.

The arrest of the Regretful Rapist was possibly the best pinch Baxter Slate had ever made. The rapist had sexually attacked more than thirty women at knifepoint on the streets of Los Angeles and got his name from apologizing profusely after each act and sometimes giving the women cab fare when the attack was finished. The rapist had been fortunate in that not one of his victims had violently resisted and it was unknown how far he would have gone with his eight inch dagger if he had met a real fighter. Nevertheless, he was rightly considered an extremely dangerous man, not only to the female citizens he preyed upon, but to any potential arresting officer.

The night they caught the rapist had been a fairly uneventful night. The first call of the evening was to warn a resident of a twenty-three room house in Hancock Park that he should not go outside to swat flies in the afternoon, particularly when he had to climb a ladder to get them, and especially when his next door neighbor's daughter, a nineteen year old blonde, just happened to be washing her Mercedes 450 SL and couldn't help seeing that he was stark naked beneath his bathrobe, which kept flapping open.

The second call of the evening had been to take a burglary report at an air conditioning manufacturer's whose company had been closed for three days. They heard the burglary victim's opinion which Spermwhale had heard perhaps a thousand times in his police career:

"It must've been kids who did it," said the victim, since burglary victims of both residential and commercial burglaries hate to consider the prospect of a grown man viciously and dangerously violating the sanctity of their premises by his presence. If there is nothing taken, or if property of any value whatsoever is left behind, the victims invariably allay their fear of prowling deadly men with the refrain, "It must've been kids."

Spermwhale just nodded and said, "Yeah, kids," and noted that the burglar went through the file cabinet by opening the drawers bottom to top so that he would not have to push the drawers shut thus taking a chance of leaving a fingerprint. That he had carefully ransacked all file boxes, drawers and logical places where money is hidden. That he had pocketed only easy to carry items. That he had stolen fifteen rolls of postage stamps which could be sold for eighty cents on the dollar and had left, closing the self-latching door behind him So that any doorshaking watchman would find nothing amiss during the evening rounds.

"All the good stuff he didn't even touch," the vice president of the company said. "The typewriter, the calculator. Anyone but kids would've taken something besides stamps, wouldn't he, Officer?"

"Oh sure. Had to've been kids," Spermwhale agreed as the Vice president managed a relieved smile. Spermwhale wrote "Stamp and money burglar" in the MO box of his report.

Spermwhale had lapsed into a very bad mood when they took the burglary report to the station that night. He had just been turned down by Lieutenant Finque on his request to hang a picture of his old friend Knuckles Garrity in the coffee room. Garrity had been a Central beat cop for fifteen years and finished out his twenty-five year career at Wilshire Station where he and Spermwhale were radio car partners. Just before Garrity was to have retired on a service pension he became involved in his third divorce and was found shot to death in his car in the station parking lot.

The car was locked from the inside with the keys in the ignition and his service revolver was on the seat beside him. Yet, despite all logic, Spermwhale refused to believe that his partner had not been murdered. He had to be given three special days off to get his thoughts together. Finally he accepted Knuckles Garrity's obvious suicide and became the partner of Baxter Slate and eventually a MacArthur Park choirboy.

Spermwhale Whalen had been broken in on a Central beat by Knuckles Garrity who told his rookie partners that a policeman only needed three things to succeed: common sense, a sense of humor and compassion. That none of these could be taught in a college classroom and that most men could succeed without one of the three, but a policeman never could. Spermwhale shivered for an instant, wondering how Knuckles had lost his sense of humor.

Spermwhale obtained the last picture ever taken of Knuckles in his police uniform and had it enlarged and framed with a brass plate on the bottom of the picture which said simply:

Thomas "Knuckles" Garrity E. O. W. 4-29-74

It was on a lovely April afternoon with arrows of sunlight darting through the smog that Knuckles Garrity went End-of-Watch forever in the old police station parking lot on Pico Boulevard.

But the lieutenant said the picture would have to come down from the coffee room wall and that Spermwhale should take it home because Knuckles Garrity was not on duty like the other dead officers in the pictures which hung in the station.

"He was!" Spermwhale growled to the lieutenant who handed him the picture and turned away from the burning little eyes of the fat policeman.

"Listen, Whalen," Lieutenant Finque explained. "It's the captain's decision. Garrity shot himself, for God's sake."

Spermwhale Whalen very quietly said, "Knuckles Garrity died as a direct result of his police duties. As sure as any cop who was ever blown up in a Shootout. Knuckles Garrity was the best fuckin cop we ever had in this station and that cunt of a captain should be proud to have his picture on the wall."

"I'm sorry," the lieutenant said, turning and walking back to his office, leaving Spermwhale with the picture in his enormous red hands.

"I could shoot somebody," said Spermwhale Whalen when he got back in the radio car after the incident.

Baxter Slate fired up the engine and turned on the lights as darkness settled in.

"Anybody in particular?"

"The captain. The lieutenant maybe. Anybody," Spermwhale said, not knowing that in exactly two hours he would shoot somebody and that it would give him almost as much pleasure as if it had been the captain or the lieutenant.

But before Spermwhale had that pleasure he and Baxter received a call in 7-A-85's area because Roscoe Rules and Whaddayamean Dean were handling a call in 7-A-33's area because Spencer Van Moot and Father Willie had received a fateful call which almost made them the only team in LAPD history to get beaten up by a man three feet tall:

"Seven-A-Thirty-three, Seven-A-Thirty-three, see the woman, three-eleven suspect, First and Harvard."

"Seven-A-Thirty-three, roger on the call," Father Willie automatically answered and then turned suddenly to Spencer. "She say First and Harvard?"

"Yeah," Spencer replied absently.

"A wienie wagger at First and Harvard!" said Father Willie.

Spencer was puzzled for a moment and then said, "Oh."

"Filthy Herman!" they both cried at once and then a noisy string of obscenities from the black and white startled a woman pedestrian waiting for the light to change on Beverly Boulevard.

"Niles and Bloomguard are out fucking off again!" Spencer whined. "Why aren't they handling the call? It's their area!"

"Darn it!" Father Willie said. "No, wait a minute, I saw them in the station penciling out an arrest report."

"Filthy Herman!" Spencer groaned as the black and white came to a stop in some heavy evening traffic near the Wilshire Country Club, which further angered the policeman.

"Just put your mind in neutral with the ear, partner," Father Willie advised. "We aren't going anywhere in this traffic for a while."

"Goddamnit!" snapped Spencer, yelling to any motorist within earshot "If you're gonna camp here, pitch a fucking tent!"

The reason that Spencer Van Moot was so angry and Father Willie so apprehensive was Filthy Herman. He was a legless wienie wagger who lived in a boardinghouse near First and Harvard owned by his daughter Rosie Muldoon who struck it rich by marrying an extremely successful anesthesiologist and now could afford to keep her father, Filthy Herman, in a piece of rental property across town from her.

It was ordinarily a good arrangement The house was large and Herman often had it filled with other alcoholics who congregated in the Eighth Street bars, a half mile from Herman's home. Filthy Herman was somewhat of a celebrity on Eighth Street, partly because of his grotesque physical presence. He was a torso in a wheelchair. Both legs had been amputated at the buttocks when he was thirty-seven years old, a powerful ironworker until a steel beam crushed him. He was also a celebrity because, with the monthly allowance from the daughter who visited him once a year on Christmas, Herman would buy drinks for every man who could not afford to buy his own. This meant that Filthy Herman had a group of some thirty to forty admirers and hangers-on among his Eighth Street entourage. What he didn't spend on drinks he gambled away in gin rummy games or with the many bookies who frequented the area.