The Choirboys (47 page)

"And Harold?"

"I'll tell Harold the guy in the room was a deputy from the sheriffs department and I decided to give him a break. I can take care of Harold. You tell that fucking whore you bought me off for fifty bucks. Then everybody's happy."

When Sam stood and turned to go out the door, Baxter Slate called desperately, "Sam!"

"What is it, Baxter?" Sam answered without looking at his friend."

"It's. it's just that I was afraid to park my own car near here. I took a cab from Pico and La Brea. And I gave her every dime. Well." and then he tried another twisted smile which was so unlike Baxter Slate's easy grin it made Sam Niles want to turn and run. "Could you maybe drop Harold at the station and think of some excuse to come back? I could use the ride. I'm too weak to walk, Sam."

Then Sam dug in his pockets and found seven dollars and some change. "Here!" he said, throwing the money on the bed "Catch a cab!"

"You. you couldn't. I wouldn't mind waiting if you could drive me, Sam. I could wait out front. I'd really appreciate. I could maybe meet you after you get off work and talk. explain."

"Goddamnit, I gave you my last dollar for a cab! What the fuck do you want from me?"

"Nothing, Sam. Nothing. Thanks for the money," said Baxter Slate.

And as Sam Niles jerked the bedroom door open he heard Baxter Slate say, "It's not evil, Sam. I haven't enough dignity to be evil."

Then Sam was stalking down the hall to the living room where Gina Summers was sidling up to Harold Bloomguard and trying to convince him that his partner could not possibly have heard what he thought he heard and why doesn't everyone just forget the whole thing?

"Come on, let's go, Harold," Sam said.

"Go?"

"Yeah, go. We made a mistake."

"A mistake?"

"Goddamnit, let's go! We made a mistake!"

As Sam started for the front door with his bewildered partner trailing behind, Gina Summers then made the mistake of saying, "Well I coulda told you that. You'll be lucky if I don't sue over this. You'll be lucky."

She was astonished by how quickly Sam Niles moved as he whirled and grabbed her by the throat and pinched off the carotid artery with his powerful right hand. Gina Summers came up off the floor, naked, clinging to his wrist with both hands, fighting for breath, gaping at Sam Niles' unblinking iron gray eyes, slightly magnified by his steel rimmed glasses.

"If I ever hear you complain about anything, "he whispered, "I'll be back here. And if you're not here I'll be where you are, baby. You groove on handing out pain? Well maybe you don't know what it is to feel pain. I'll show you. Can you dig it?"

And as Gina Summers nodded and gripped his wrist and gurgled, Sam Niles released her throat and she fell to her knees, gasping. The two policemen burst out the door quicker than they had come in.

Sam Niles literally hurtled down those six flights, leaving Harold half a landing behind. He hated Harold Bloomguard like he never had before. As he hated Baxter Slate. They were weaklings. They were bleeders. They were sick, wretched, disgusting.

Sam Miles got dizzy as he flew down those stairs and swung past the landings holding the handrails. Hating them. They bleed. They need. Like the Moaning Man as he lay there bleeding and needing past the grave. Hands reaching out. They never let you alone. Reaching past death. Until someone touched them. He despised them all. He hated them as he had hated his weak sick disgusting parents. Sam Niles had never needed anyone. Except for one minute, sixty seconds in his life. He stopped on the last landing and waited for the puffing little man who had seen him need that one time. And he feared that if Harold had ever mentioned that moment in the suffocating blackness of that cave, he would now, at this moment, draw his revolver and shoot him dead on the staircase. But Harold had never talked about it. Not even to Sam. Sam hoped that Harold had somehow forgotten it in his own terrible fear. Sometimes Sam Niles even believed that it never had happened.

"What's the hurry, Sam?" Harold stammered, trying to catch his breath before the last flight of steps. Never once suggesting they use the elevator because he understood his partner better than his partner dreamed. "What's the rush?"

"Nothing!' Sam said viciously. "There's no rush. None at all. Five minutes later in the car Sam Niles shouted, "Goddamnit, he was a deputy sheriff I know from court! You don't know him. Never mind his fucking name. I wanted to give him a break. He told me he had a wife and kids and was going to a psychiatrist. I made a decision and I DON'T WANT TO EVER TALK ABOUT IT AGAIN!"

And though they never did, Harold Bloomguard scratched his neck with a penknife and blew spit bubbles not only that night but the next afternoon when Baxter Slate suddenly called off sick, saying he had the flu. Harold heard Sam Niles question Baxter's partner Spermwhale Whalen as to whether he had heard from Baxter. Harold saw that Sam seemed troubled that Spermwhale had not.

When Baxter Slate did not come to work the Thursday of choir practice and Sam Niles was jumpy as a cat while putting on his uniform, Harold Bloomguard developed a brand new rash all over his neck and began to suspect that Gina Summers' trick was not a deputy sheriff after all.

The choirboys were happy that Thursday afternoon in the assembly room because Sergeant Nick Yanov was conducting the rollcall alone. But Nick Yanov entered the room grimly and didn't seem to hear a few jokes directed his way from men in the front row. Though his jaws were as dark and fierce as always from his incredibly thick whiskers which he had shaved only three hours earlier, his forehead and Baltic cheekbones were white. He was white around the eyes. His hands were, unsteady when he lit a cigarette. The men quieted down. Something was very wrong with Nick Yanov.

He took a deep puff on the cigarette, sucked it into his lungs and said, "Baxter Slate's dead. They just found him in his apartment. Shot himself. Spermwhale, you'll be working a report car tonight. Seven-U-One is your unit. Would you like to go down now and get your car?"

The rollcall room was deathly still for a moment. No one moved or spoke as Nick Yanov waited for Spermwhale. One could hear the hum of the wall clock. Spermwhale Whalen finally said to the sergeant, "Are you sure?"

"Go on down and get your car, Spermwhale," said Nick Yanov quietly. But as shaky as Spermwhale looked when he gathered his things and walked through the door, Harold Bloomguard looked even shakier when he looked at Sam Nile who had broken out in a violent sweat and had ripped open his collar and was having trouble getting enough air.

Then Sam jumped up and burst through the door behind Spermwhale Whalen. Harold Bloomguard started up, thought better of it and sat back down.

Nick Yanov called the roll and dismissed the watch without's another word.

There was speculation and many rumors in the parking lot about Baxter Slate's suicide, and several members of the Wilshire night watch spent a lingering fearful evening handling calls, cruising, smoking silently, trying to avoid thinking of that most terminal of all policemen's diseases. Wondering how one catches it and how one avoids it.

None of the choirboys took the initiative to do police work that night. It was as though a monotonous routine would be somehow comforting, reassuring. The only thing out of the ordinary done by a nightwatch radio car was that 7-A-29 drove to West Los Angeles Police Station, the area in which Baxter Slate had resided because he loved Westwood Village and the cultural activities at UCLA and the theater which showed foreign films and a small unpretentious French restaurant with wonderful wines.

"I'd like to see the homicide team. Whoever's handling Officer Slate's suicide," Sam Niles said to the lone detective in the squad room.

"All gone home, Officer. Can you come back tomorrow?"

The detective wasn't much older than Sam and like Sam he had a mustache. His suit coat was thrown over a chair. He wore an uncomfortable looking shoulder holster.

"I'd like to see the death report on Baxter Slate," Sam Niles said.

"I can't go into homicide's cases. Come back tomorrow. You can talk to."

"Please," said Sam Niles. "I only want to see the report. Please."

And the detective was about to refuse, but he looked at Harold Bloomguard who turned and walked out of the office, and he looked at Sam Niles who did not walk away. He looked at Sam's face and asked, "Was he a friend?"

"Please let me see the report. I have to see it. I don't know why."

"Have a seat," the detective said and walked to a filing cabinet drawer marked "Suicides-1974" and pulled out a manila folder, removed the pictures in the file which Sam Niles definitely did not want to see and gave the file to the choirboy.

Sam read the perfunctory death report which listed the landlady as the person discovering the body. The person hearing the shot was a neighbor, Mrs. Flynn. He saw that Baxter's mother who was in Hawaii had not been contacted as yet. His married sister in San Diego was the nearest relative notified. The speckled pup which Baxter had been caring for since he found her on the street outside Wilshire Station was taken to the animal shelter where she would soon be as dead as her master. The narrative told him nothing except that Baxter had fired one shot into his mouth at 11:00 A. M. that morning on a sunny smogless delightful day.

In the file was a note to the milkman which Baxter had written asking that two quarts of skim milk be left. The handwriting was scratchy, halting, not the sure flowing stroke of Baxter Slate. No more than that horrible grimace of consummate humiliation in Gina Summers' apartment had been a Baxter Slate grin.

The report said that several books were scattered around the table where the body was found. Baxter Slate had gone to his Classics at the end. Disjointedly. Desperately. The detective had torn several pages from the clothbound texts. He had thought the pages marked by that same spidery scrawl might prove enlightening.

One marked passage from Socrates read: "No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death."

Another from Euripides said: "When good men die their goodness does not perish, but lives though they are gone. As for the bad, all that was theirs dies and is buried with them." Baxter had marked a passage from Cicero, the only one not specifically mentioning good and evil and death. It made Sam Niles moan aloud which startled the nightwatch detective. It Said: "He removes the greatest ornament of friendship who takes away from it respect."

Sam removed his glasses and cleaned them before reading the last page. The page was powdery from dried blood. Sam's hands were shaking so badly the nightwatch detective was alarmed. Sam read it and left the squad room without thanking the detective for his help. The passage was underlined. It simply said: "What is it, Catullus? Why do you not make haste to die?"

Chapter
FOURTEEN

The Moaning Man
.

At the end of that tour of duty on the day Baxter Slate died, the choirboys were more anxious for a choir practice than they had ever been. When Father Willie asked quietly, "Are we still going to have choir practice?" Spencer Van Moot said angrily, "Of course we're having choir practice. What the fuck's wrong with you?"

Never had the choirboys drunk so obsessively in MacArthur Park. They were snarling at each other and guzzling sullenly, all except Roscoe who had gotten a station call to transfer an overflow of five drunks from Wilshire to Central Jail and had not yet shown up at choir practice by 1:00 A. M.

Before they could be too thankful for the absence of Roscoe a blue panel truck appeared from nowhere, grinding and rumbling across the grass in MacArthur Park with its lights out, clanking to a stop under the trees in the darkest shadows.

"I was hopin I could get drunk painlessly," Calvin Potts said as Roscoe Rules, still in uniform, jumped out of the drunk wagon and came trotting across the grass.

"Hey!" yelled Roscoe cheerfully, which was enough to make everyone mad to begin with, "I was on my way back to the station but I couldn't wait to tell you!"

"Tell us what, Roscoe?" Spermwhale grumbled. He was lying on his blanket, a can of beer on his huge stomach, looking up at the moonless, smog-filled summer sky which even hid Baxter Slate's great star.

"Down at Central Jail after I transported the drunks I ran into a guy I know. Works homicide downtown. Guess what they found when the coroner posted Baxter Slate's body? Whip marks! All over his back! Whip marks! They think he musta been a pervert. I always said he was weird, but whip marks!"

"What? What did you say?" Sam Niles said as he sat in the darkness on the cool grass and cut his hands when he suddenly tore an empty beer can in half.

"Well I liked him as much as the next guy," said Roscoe, "but kee-rist, whip marks on his back! The dicks think he was some kind a freak or pervert. You know how faggy he always talked."

Then Roscoe Rules was even more astonished than Gina Summers had been at how quickly Sam Niles could move. Roscoe was hit twice with each of Sam's fists before he fell heavily on his back. Sam lifted him by the front of his uniform and hit him so hard the third time that Sam's glasses flew farther than the chip from Roscoe's tooth.

Spermwhale Whalen overpowered Sam and several others restrained Roscoe who tried to kneedrop Sam as he lay pinned to the ground by Spermwhale, and the park was alive with shouting choirboys and quacking ducks, and four park fairies came running to the sounds of fighting.