The Choirboys (37 page)

"Hey, miss," yelled Sam and held up two fingers and sighed languorously as the waitress brought another round while Baxter Slate held his empty drink in both hands and stared at rings on the table.

"Listen, Baxter," Sam said. "We have crime in direct proportion to freedom. Lots of freedom, lots of crime. All I know for sure is something I've believed all my life. And it was verified for me in Vietnam and certified in the four and a half years I've been a cop. It's that people are nevermore pathetic than when they're asking themselves that absurd, ridiculous, laughable question, 'Who am I?' "

And then it was Sam's turn to spill several drops as he tipped his glass. He paused, wiped off his mustache, pressed the nosepiece of his glasses and said, "If most people ever let themselves find the answer to that question they'd go into the toilet and slash their wrists. Because they're nothing! The sooner you understand that, the sooner you can do police work without torturing yourself."

"I wouldn't be telling you this, Sam, if it weren't for this," Baxter Slate apologized, holding up the glass. "Sometimes I try to tell my partner but Spermwhale's only interested in paying off his ex-wives." And Baxter tried a broad Baxter Slate smile which did not work because there was fear in his bourbon-clouded green eyes. "After I left Juvenile I started experiencing strange flashes in the middle of the night. I could almost see glimpses of what it is not to be, to have life go on without you. It happens in a half sleep. It's happened a lot since I killed that man. Have you ever experienced it?"

And then Sam Niles touched his mustache and said, "No." And Baxter Slate, who always believed his friends, did not know that Sam Niles was lying. "I wish some broads'd come in. I wish the drinks weren't so watered down," Sam Niles said. "Sam, I know you're right about people being nothing. All my life, all my religious training in Dominican schools was built on an explicit belief in evil. But there is none. Man hasn't the dignity for evil. And if there's no evil there's very likely no goodness! There're only accidents!"

"Please, Baxter," Sam Niles said, "I'm just a cop. I don't. I'm not."

"Sorry, Sam," said Baxter Slate, draining the bourbon and turning green watery eyes to his friend. "I don't always go on like this. I'm not usually such a silly pseudo intellectual horse's ass. Ask Spermwhale."

And then he managed a real Baxter Slate grin, candid, disarming, and tried to make light of it "It's that I know you just got your degree in political science. I love to talk to someone who won't get mad at me for using an adverb or two."

Then Sam Niles managed an embarrassed chuckle because it was over. "Okay, Baxter, it is nice not having to move your lips when you read so as not to offend a Philistine like Roscoe Rules."

Sam Niles was starting to like his friend Baxter Slate so much he never, wanted to see him again.

And while Baxter and Sam were getting drunk and being horses' asses, and while Baxter secretly thought of the ordinary guy he killed and the tortured child he let die, Harold Bloomguard finally found another whore.

The Cadillac Eldorado had not been there on his last pass, Harold was sure of it. Then he saw the white girl saunter out of the bar and head for the car. Harold tried to get over to the number two lane but the car behind him began hitting his headlight dimmer switch and blowing his horn. Harold drove two blocks east of Western Avenue, turned his Dodge around and came back. The white girl was gone. But in her place was a black girl who opened the door of the silver Eldorado, had an afterthought, turned and went into the bar.

Harold started to head for the vice car to ask Scuz if he could go in the bar. But he thought about it a moment and knew what the answer would be. Then he thought about getting a two-banger on his first night as a vice cop and he parked the car on Western Avenue, put his gun, handcuffs and badge under the seat, locked the car, wiped his moist hands on his handkerchief and entered.

The tavern was not a white man's cocktail lounge. It poured an extraordinary amount of hard liquor and the bartender didn't like to be troubled with fancy drinks. There was a jukebox playing Tina Turner, the volume turned five decibels higher than Harold could bear. There was a pool table on the side crowded with men playing nine ball at a dollar a ball and filling the room with blue tobacco smoke. There was a back room where nightly crap games attracted dozens of customers and occasional vice cops. As with most black men's crap games there was always a set of crooked dice in use and sometimes two sets, with one crooked gambler using shaved cubes against another.

But there was a vitality in the bar and Harold was excited as well as frightened when he saw that aside from the white girl, he was the only paddy in the place. Then he got a good look at the brassy blonde in the open red satin coat who sat on a bar stool holding an eight month pregnancy against the vinyl-covered cushioned railing.

It was ambition and curiosity, but mostly youth, which drove Harold Bloomguard to one of the empty stools on the near side of the bar as several black men at the pool table stopped the game and slipped any money from the table into their pockets until they were satisfied that Harold was a trick and not a cop. The black girl who had almost gotten into the Eldorado was sitting next to the white girl and she, like the bartender, looked Harold over carefully and became satisfied that he could not possibly be The Man.

Then she smiled and said, "Why don't you sit over here?" And she moved to the right and gave Harold the bar stool between the two of them.

"Why not? It's invenereal to me where I sit," said Harold, using a Bloomguardism they didn't seem to understand or appreciate.

"What'll you have, chief?" asked the bartender, a graying black man with a bass voice that could drown out Tina Turner any old day."

"A Bombay martini straight up, very dry, with a twist, please."

The bartender just leaned on the bar and stared at Harold while the two girls edged closer. Then the bartender said, "I been workin hard all night, chief. Can't you make it easy on me?"

"Give him what the fuck he wants," said the black girl, who was taller than Harold and outweighed him but who was solidly proportioned, buxom and attractive.

"Look, I ain't trickin with him," the bartender said. "Besides, I ain't got no more Bombay."

"J&B, and water?" offered Harold Bloomguard, rightly assuming from the number of black bandits who asked for J&B Scotch before sticking up a liquor store that the bartender would have no problem filling that order.

"Comin up," the bartender said. "You buyin for the ladies?"

"Indeed," said Harold Bloomguard, and he immediately thought of Roscoe Rules who disapproved of Harold's saying "indeed" because it made him sound like a fag.

After the three of them had their drink, the blonde with the eight month pregnancy put her hand on Harold's thigh and said, "Got a match?"

Harold picked up the match pack from the bar and found that he couldn't get it working. He was crestfallen when the blonde took the pack from his hand and lit her own cigarette. The choirboy feared that his nerves might give him away, but it had the opposite effect in that most inexperienced tricks were every bit as frightened as Harold Bloomguard.

"My name's Sabrina," said the big black girl who had a sensual glistening mouth.

"My name's Tammy," the pregnant blonde said. She had terrible teeth she was going to have pulled as soon as she dropped her frog and adopted it out and could hustle enough money to see a dentist, which she was having trouble doing what with her grotesque shape.

"My name's Harold Leekly. I'm a certified public accountant."

"Nobody asked you what you did," said Sabrina. "Why'd you say that? Maybe you're a cop."

"A cop!" cried Harold. "Ha ha! A cop!"

The bartender put the three drinks in front of them and said, "If this sucker's a cop, I'm a astronaut."

Then the blonde put her hand on Harold's thigh again and moved it up his leg. The leg began to tremble as Harold realized that Sabrina had her hand around his waist and both girls were smiling and making incoherent small talk and patting him down caressingly, expertly, just to reassure themselves. Then Sabrina put her hand on his right leg, the quiet one. It began to shake worse than the other "You shakin like a paint mixer," Sabrina said. "But we gettin outta here in a minute. We goin somewheres to quiet you down."

"Where we going?" Harold asked, thinking that if he swallowed the Scotch it might help relax him.

"Maybe to our pad, baby," Tammy smiled, showing her decaying fangs.

"That'll be eight dollars, chief," the bartender said as the girls gathered up their cigarettes and purses.

"For three little drinks?" Harold said. The bartender straightened up and glared down at him and Harold added, "Oh yes indeed, very good drinks, too, I must say!"

Harold tipped the bartender fifty cents which drew a sneer and a grumble and he followed the girls outside, remembering that Scuz had warned him that under no circumstance was he to go into a room with a whore because of the danger involved. He was hoping the girls would have given the offer before now and since they hadn't he decided to push it.

"By the way, what am I gonna get when we get where we're going?"

"Don't be in such a hurry, you cute little blue eyed jitterbug," Sabrina smiled as she fished the Cadillac keys out of a red leather handbag.

"Am I going with you?" Harold asked, thinking frantically for an excuse not to.

Sabrina answered, "No, you follow us in your car."

"Okay," Harold said, much relieved. "But I wanna know what's gonna happen. How do I know I'm gonna like it?"

"Oh, you gonna like it," Sabrina said, and she stepped over to him, there on the corner of Pico and Western, under the streetlights in full view of passing cars, and gave his genitals a squeeze.

"Woooo," said Harold Bloomguard, pulling back in embarrassment. "Woooo."

"I was just gonna tell you what you're getting," Sabrina said, as Harold stood off a few steps and blushed and swung his arms around, wondering if anyone had seen that.

He knew that he had just been "honked," as the vice cops called it, in a public place and that Scuz had said something about honking being a misdemeanor. But he couldn't remember if it applied only to fruit cases or whores as well. And he couldn't remember if the honking precluded the need for a money offer.

And as he stood there considering the next move, Tammy bounced over to him, grabbed his arm and said, "Let's go, cutie," and she gave him two more toots with a thumb and forefinger.

"Wooooo," said Harold Bloomguard, honked again.

"Gud-damn, man!" Sabrina said testily. "We ain't got time to stand around here all night and listen to you woo woo. Follow us down the street there where it's dark. We gonna talk about money."

"Money," said Harold Bloomguard, grateful to Sabrina for solving his problem.

He ran across Pico to his car, made a U-turn in a gas station and pulled back onto Pico facing east, following the slow moving Cadillac which turned right onto Oxford where it was residential. And very dark. The Cadillac pulled into the first available parking space on the right. Harold pushed his borrowed glasses up on his nose like his partner Sam Niles and found a parking space fifty feet farther south.

Then Harold carefully reached down, found his two inch off-duty gun, which he had decided to carry working Undercover, and his badge and. handcuffs. He shoved the gun and cuffs inside his belt in the back, put the badge in his back pocket and affected a jauntiness he did not feel as he quickly walked back to the Cadillac, to the whores waiting in the darkness.

Harold stepped up on the sidewalk, leaned in the passenger window, looked at Tammy's pathetic teeth and said, "Well, girls, let's bring this pimple to a head. Get down to business. How."

"Git in," said Sabrina.

"Well before."

"Get in," Tammy said, pushing the Cadillac's door open.

"Shouldn't we."

"We gonna talk business after you inside," Sabrina said. Then she purred, "We want you here between us where we can feel your hot little body so maybe we kin git you to give us another dollar or two for our work."

"Slide over me, honey," Tammy said as Sabrina pushed the electric switches which took the white leather seats back and down.

As he was gingerly lifting himself across Tammy's enormous belly, he worried that she might feel the gun, but she didn't. And he thought how sad it was that a pregnant girl should be doing this kind of work, and while he was feeling sad she reached up between his legs and squeezed, making him say, "Woo woo," and sit down on her hand.

"Ouch!" she cried, pulling her hand out. "You fucking near broke my wrist!"

"Sorry," said Harold.

Then he began to wonder if he was doing the right thing by getting in the car. But he knew he was very close to bringing in a two-banger and he just couldn't stop now. "You got fifty dollars, sweetie?" Sabrina asked abruptly.

"Sure."

"Well let's see it."

"Later, after we get where we're going."

"Ain't goin nowhere, We gonna do it right here."

"We are?"

Then it occurred to Harold that he had been honked and he had been solicited for money, but no one had specifically mentioned a sex act and he wondered if the arrest would be legal without it and just then Tammy honked him again and he grabbed her hand.