The Choirboys (8 page)

And then there was the dairy stop where Spencer got his daily allotment of buttermilk and yogurt, one quart for each partner, which Willie likewise refused. Each night at 10:00 P. M. the manager walked swiftly to his car under the protective beam of Spencer's spotlight. Then there were other stops, if he could get them in, at various men's shops on Wilshire Boulevard where Spencer and salesmen tossed around Italian names like Brioni and Valentino and which invariably ended in Spencer's trying on something in a fine cabretta leather jacket over his blue police uniform. Father Willie sat bored in the dressing room holding his partner's Sam Browne, gun and hat while Spencer preened.

Sometimes a new salesman would make the mistake of quoting the retail price to the tall policeman and would find himself cowering before an indignant stare, a twitching toothbrush mustache and a withering piece of advice to "Check with the manager about my police discount."

Father Willie often thought about asking for a new partner but he didn't want to hurt Spencer's feelings. Spencer had tried for years to find a partner like Father Willie, who would not accept his rightful share of free cigarettes, wholesale merchandise and free liquor. It had gotten to be tedious for Spencer breaking in new partners:

"You smoke?"

"No, Spencer."

"Today you do, I'll take both packs if you don't want them."

And inevitably a partner would become greedy. "I'll take a pack today, Spencer."

"What for? You don't smoke."

"I'll give them to my brother. What the hell, three packs a day I'm entitled to."

Spencer got to keep Willie's share of petty booty in every case. And Father Willie never complained when Spencer scrounged up some liquor for choir practices.

"We're having a retirement party for one of our detective lieutenants," Spencer would inevitably lie to a long suffering liquor store proprietor who would take two bottles of Scotch from the shelf behind him.

"We're having a big big party." Spencer would smile benignly until the proprietor would get the message and bring up another two bottles.

But Spencer was considerate about spreading it around and rarely went to the same liquor store more than once a month for anything but cigarettes. The cigarette stop however was a relentless daily ritual. It was said that during the Watts riot of 1965, Spencer drove a half burned black and white with every window shot out ten miles to Beverly Boulevard, his face streaked with soot and sweat, and managed to make all three cigarette stops before the stores closed at 2:00 A. M.

Spencer Van Moot had accepted a thousand packs of cigarettes and as many free meals in his time. And though he had bought enough clothing at wholesale prices to dress a dozen movie stars, he had never even considered taking a five dollar bill nor was one ever offered except once when he stopped a Chicago grocer in Los Angeles on vacation. The police department and its members made an exact distinction between petty gratuities and cash offerings, which were considered money bribes no matter how slight and would result in a merciless dismissal as well as criminal prosecution.

It was not that the citizens and police of Los Angeles were inherently less debased than their Eastern counterparts, it was that the West, being a network of sprawling young towns and cities, did not lend itself to the old intimate teeming ward or ghetto where political patronage and organized crime bedded down together. The numbers racket, for instance, had been a dismal failure in western America. The average citizen of Los Angeles hadn't the faintest idea how it worked. Yet in the Pennsylvania steel town where Spencer Van Moot was born every living soul had played numbers and consulted dream books for winners and contributed to organized crime's greatest source of revenue in that region. The bookies came door to door. They even accepted children's penny bets. Western criminals had found it impossible to organize a crazy quilt collection of several communities which existed inside the 460 square mile limits of the city, where there was an automobile for every adult. The city had geography and history going for it.

So it was that Spencer Van Moot's supplication provided about half of the beverage consumed at choir practice, the rest provided by Roscoe Rules who bullied the free booze from cowering liquor store owners on his beat.

After making his various stops and depositing his treasures in the back of his camper truck in the station parking lot, Spencer began whining again about his unhappy domestic life.

"I mean how can you understand a woman, Padre?" Spencer complained as the setting sun filtered through the smog and burned Father Willie's sensitive, bulging blue eyes.

"I don't know, Spencer." Father Willie sighed, and wondered how long Spencer would use him as a sounding board tonight. Sometimes when he was lucky the complaining would stop after the first two hours of their tour of duty.

"I'm forty years old, Father Willie," Spencer griped, touching his twenty dollar haircut which he got free in a Wilshire Boulevard styling parlor. "Look at my hair, it's getting gray. Why should I live in such misery."

"I'm twenty-four," Father Willie reminded him, "and you have more hair than I do. Who cares if it's gray."

"She's a bitch, Padre. It's hell, believe me," Spencer whined. "She's worse by far than my first two wives put together. And she's turned her kids against me. They hate me more than she does because she tells them lies about me, that I drink a lot and run around with other women."

"That's not a lie, Spencer," Father Willie reminded him. "You do drink a lot and run around with other women."

"It's nothing to tell teenagers, for god's sake!" Spencer answered. "I never shoulda married an older broad with kids. Damn, forty-two years old and her legs're turning, green. Green, I tell you! And here I am with only four years to go until I can pull the pin and retire. And what happens, she gets knocked up."

"Maybe it'll work out, Spencer," Father Willie offered as his partner drove east on Eighth Street away from the sun's dying harsh rays.

"Work out? Work out? Four years to my pension and she's gonna foal, and then how can I retire with a little rug rat crawling around?"

"Oh well," Father Willie shrugged. "Oh well."

"A man gets drunk and careless and screws himself into another ten years on the job. It ain't fair."

"Oh well," said Father Willie.

"Everything happens to me!" Spencer said.

Spencer Van Moot was interrupted for a moment by catching a glimpse of a seventy year old pensioner who lived in a Seventh Street fleabag called the Restful Arms Motel. He pushed his wheelchair down the sidewalk backward with his foot as he held his useless arthritic hands in his lap. The pensioner was trying to get to the mom-and-pop market one block west where he could buy two cans of nutritious dog food for his dinner.

"Things could always be worse, Spencer."

"Oh sure, I'm gonna be unloading shitty diapers at forty years old and."

"You've got a new camper. You can get away with your wife sometimes and go fishing."

"Oh sure. I got a new camper. I'm so thrilled, so happy! I'm in debt again. I was getting insecure not owing money."

"It'll work out."

"Yeah, it will. I'll be dead soon. No one in my family lives very long. I got an uncle that died of old age at forty-five. That's what the doctor said. Every organ in the man's body was old, dissipated. I won't last long. At least then I'll be rid of my old lady. I tell you, Padre, she's got a tongue so sharp it's a wonder she don't cut her mouth to pieces and bleed to death."

"You want to come to church with Geneva and me?" Father Willie offered. "Some of the best Witnesses I know came to God later in life. And what with the early deaths in your family."

"Goddamnit, I ain't dead yet!" Spencer cried, suddenly frightened. "Padre, gimme a chance! I ain't lived yet!"

"Well, I only meant with poor health and all."

"Poor health? Poor health? I'm too young to be thinking about dying. Jesus, partner, you're getting morbid!"

It was almost an hour before Spencer fully recovered from the suggestion of his imminent demise. He had the worst sick record on the nightwatch. He was tall and strong, in the prime of life, and had seen vats of spilled blood and acres of mutilated flesh in his sixteen years of police work, but he became faint when he'd scratch his finger. He could bear any pain but his own.

Just before dark they passed the Mary Sinclair Adams Home for Girls, a funded institution where young women who were pregnant and indigent could be cared for. It was a converted two Story home two blocks east of Hancock Park and had once been a palatial residence of an eighty year old virgin who died envying young girls the fun they had growing round bellies.

There was a teenage girl with an eight month stomach standing in front of the house: cigarette dangling, eyebrows plucked to nothing, eyes shadowed to three inch black orbs, talking to three young men on chopper motorcycles.

"The Stork Club," Spencer remarked, shaking his head disgustedly. "They go in there, drop a frog and cut out."

"I hear the county's okayed the installation of interuterine devices in some of these girls they place in foster homes," Father Willie said.

"Someone shoulda plugged my old lady's birdbath and I wouldn't be in this fix," Spencer answered, blowing a cloud of smoke out the window: "Old dried up sponge, I don't know how she ever got knocked up. I'll just have to cut down on expenses, live like a goddamn Trappist monk. I won't be able to eat like a human being anymore, that's all."

"It'll work out all right," Father Willie said. Then, "Spencer; we'll still be able to eat roast duckling with orange sauce, won't we?"

"Oh sure."

"With glazed carrots and shallots?"

"Oh, we'll still eat at our restaurants for free just like we always have," said Spencer, allaying Father Willie's fears. "I meant at home I'll have to starve. My wife and kids'll have to go without and maybe wear old clothes with patches."

Father Willie felt like suggesting Spencer could make patches with some of the fourteen Italian suits which hung in his closet, when he sported a Lincoln blow the red light on Wilshire and Western. The Lincoln pulled over the moment Father Willie tooted his horn.

"You just have to learn to budget," Spencer sighed as they gathered up hats and ticket book and flashlights now that dusk had settled. "Mail your check for the telephone bill to the gas company and theirs to the electric company. By the time they send them back and forth you can balance your checkbook."

Father Willie nodded as they got out of the black and white Matador and walked forward, crisscrossing so that Father Willie, whose turn it was, could approach the driver's side while Spencer went to the other side and shined the light in the window to protect Father Willie's approach.

The driver, a balding fat man about Spencer's age, smiled and said, "What's the problem, boys?" He offered Father Willie his driver's license without being asked.

"You were a full second late on that red light, sir," Father Willie said, his light on the license, checking that it was not expired, noting the Beverly Hills address in Trousdale Estates.

"That doesn't seem possible," the man said, getting out of the car and following the little officer to the police car where Spencer waited in the headlight beam between the two cars, "Careful, sir," Father Willie warned, as a car sped by very close to the Matador which was stopped behind the Lincoln, three feet farther into the traffic lane to protect the approaching officer from being picked off by a motorist who might be driving HUA which meant: Head Up Ass.

"Officer!" the fat man appealed to Spencer as Father Willie began to write the ticket on the hood of the radio car. "Surely I wasn't late on the red light, and if I was I didn't mean it."

He offered Spencer his business card which said, "Murray Fern's Stereo Emporium."

Spencer Van Moot's eyes brightened with visions of a new stereo system in his barroom at home. At wholesale, of course.

He was about to suggest to his partner that Mr. Fern probably deserved some professional courtesy when he saw that it was too late. The ticket was already started, and since they were numbered it was impossible to cancel one without a report and explanation. So Spencer shrugged sadly and handed the business card back to the man.

"You gonna write me a ticket?" Murray Fern asked Father Willie.

"Yes sir," Father Willie said; never looking up as he wrote.

"Why me? Why me?" Murray Fern demanded, reminding Father Willie of Spencer.

"You ran a red light, sir," Father Willie said, looking up for the first time then continuing with the citation.

"But I can't get another ticket. One more and they'll suspend my license. Christ, gimme a break!"

Father Willie did not answer but continued to write in embarrassed silence.

"Just my luck to get stopped by a couple of pricks," the fat man said as he paced in a tight circle. "A couple of ticket hungry, heartless pricks."

Now Spencer Van Moot no longer cared about a cut rate stereo set and looked around the rear of the car for a taillight violation that Willie could add to the ticket.

"A couple of two bit, ticket happy, stupid fucking pricks!" Murray Fern said as Father Willie continued his writing without comment.