The Blue Knight (5 page)

I jumped in my car and decided to cruise by the Dragon for one last shot at it. When I parked out back, a hype in the doorway saw me and ran down the steps to tell everybody inside the heat was coming. I took my baton, wrapped the thong around my hand which they teach you not to do now, but which I’ve been doing for twenty years, and I walked down the concrete stairway to this cellar bar, and through the draped doorway. The front is framed by a pink dragon head. The front doorway is the mouth of the beast, the back door is under the tail. It always made me mad just to see the big dumb-looking dragon-mouth door. I went in the back door, up the dragon’s ass, tapping my stick on the empty chairs and keeping my head on a swivel as I let my eyes get accustomed to the gloom. The pukepots were all sitting near the back. There were only about ten customers now in the early afternoon, and Marvin, all six feet six inches of him, was at the end of the bar grinning at a bad-looking bull dyke who was putting down a pretty well-built black stud in an arm wrestle.

Marvin was grinning, but he didn’t mean it, he knew I was there. It curdled his blood to see me tapping on the furniture with my stick. That’s why I did it. I always was as badge heavy and obnoxious as I could be when I was in there. I’d been in two brawls here and both times I knew Marvin was just wetting his shorts wishing he had the guts to jump in on me, but he thought better of it.

He weighed at least three hundred pounds and was damned tough. You had to be to own this joint, which catered to bookmakers, huggermugger whores, paddy hustlers, speed freaks, fruits and fruit hustlers, and ex-cons of both sexes and all ages. I’d never quite succeeded in provoking Marvin into attacking me, although it was common knowledge on the street that a shot fired at me one night from a passing car was some punk hired by Marvin. It was after that, even though nothing was ever proved, that I really began standing on the Dragon’s tail. For a couple of months his business dropped to nothing with me living on his doorstep, and he sent two lawyers to my captain and the police commission to get me off his back. I relented as much as I had to, but I still gave him fits.

If I wasn’t retiring there’d be hell to pay around here because once you get that twenty years’ service in, you don’t have to pussyfoot around so much. I mean no matter what kind of trouble you get into, nobody can ever take your pension away for any reason, even if they fire you. So if I were staying, I’d go right on. Screw the lawyers, screw the police commission. I’d land on that Dragon with both boon-dockers. And as I thought that, I looked down at my size thirteen triple E’s. They were beat officer shoes, high top, laces with eyelets, ankle supporting, clumsy, round toes, beat officer shoes. A few years ago they were actually popular with young black guys, and almost came into style again. They called them “old man comforts” and they were soft and comfortable, but ugly as hell, I guess, to most people. I’d probably always wear them. I’d sunk my old man comforts in too many deserving asses to part with them now.

Finally Marvin got tired of watching the arm wrestlers and pretending he didn’t see me.

“Whadda you want, Morgan,” he said. Even in the darkness I could see him getting red in the face, his big chin jutting.

“Just wondering how many scumbags were here today, Marvin,” I said in a loud voice which caused four or five of them to look up. These days we’re apt to get disciplinary action for making brutal remarks like that, even though these assholes would bust their guts laughing if I was courteous or even civil.

The bull dyke was the only righteous female in the place. In this dive you almost have to check everybody’s plumbing to know whether it’s interior or exterior. The two in dresses were drags, the others were fruit hustlers and flimflam guys. I recognized a sleazy bookmaker named Harold Wagner. One of the fruit hustlers was a youngster, maybe twenty-two or so. He was still young enough to be offended by my remark, especially since it was in front of the queen in the red mini who probably belonged to him. He mumbled something under his breath and Marvin told him to cool it since he didn’t want to give me an excuse to make another bust in the place. The guy looked high on pot like most everyone these days.

“He your new playmate, Roxie?” I said to the red dress queen, whose real name I knew was John Jeffrey Alton.

“Yes,” said the queen in a falsetto voice, and motioned to the kid to shut his mouth. He was a couple inches taller than me and big chested, probably shacking with Roxie now and they split what they get hustling. Roxie hustles the guys who want a queen, and the kid goes after the ones who want a jocker. This jocker would probably become a queen himself. I always felt sorry for queens because they’re so frantic, searching, looking. Sometimes I twist them for information, but otherwise I leave them alone.

I was in a rotten mood thinking nobody would roust the Dragon after I was gone. They were all glaring at me now, especially Marvin with his mean gray eyes and knife mouth.

One young guy, too young to know better, leaned back in his chair and made a couple of oinks and said, “I smell pig.”

I’d never seen him before. He looked like a college boy slumming. Maybe in some rah-rah campus crowd beer joint I’d just hee-haw and let him slide, but here in the Pink Dragon the beat cops rule by force and fear. If they stopped being afraid of me I was through, and the street would be a jungle, which it is anyway, but at least now you can walk through it watching for occasional cobras and rabid dogs. I figured if it weren’t for guys like me, there’d be no trails through the frigging forest.

“Oink, oink,” he said again, with more confidence this time, since I hadn’t responded. “I sure do smell pig.”

“And what do pigs like best?” I smiled, slipping the stick back in my baton ring. “Pigs like to clean up garbage, and I see a pile.” Still smiling I kicked the chair legs and he went down hard throwing a glass of beer on Roxie who forgot the falsetto and yelled, “Shithouse mouse!” in a pretty good baritone when the beer slid down his bra.

I had the guy in a wristlock before he knew what fell on him, and was on my way out the door, with him walking backwards, but not too fast in case someone else was ready.

“You bastard!” Marvin sputtered. “You assaulted my customer. You bastard! I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Go right on, Marvin,” I said, while the tall kid screamed and tippy-toed to the door because the upward thrust of the wristlock was making him go as high as he could. The smell of pot was hanging on his clothes but the euphoria wasn’t dulling the pain of the wristlock. When you’ve got one that’s really loaded you can’t crank it on too hard because they don’t react to pain, and you might break a wrist trying to make them flinch. This guy felt it though, and he was docile, ow, ow, owing all the way out. Marvin came around the bar and followed us to the door.

“There’s witnesses!” he boomed. “This time there’s witnesses to your dirty, filthy false arrest of my customer! What’s the charge? What’re you going to charge him with?”

“He’s drunk, Marvin,” I smiled, holding the wristlock with one hand, just in case Marvin was mad enough. I was up, high up, all alive, ready to fly.

“It’s a lie. He’s sober. He’s sober as you.”

“Why, Marvin,” I said, “he’s drunk in public view and unable to care for himself. I’m obliged to arrest him for his own protection. He
has
to be drunk to say what he did to me, don’t you agree? And if you’re not careful I might think you’re trying to interfere with my arrest. You wouldn’t like to try interfering with my arrest would you, Marvin?”

“We’ll get you, Morgan,” Marvin whispered helplessly. “We’ll get your job one of these days.”

“If you slimeballs could have my job I wouldn’t want it,” I said, let down because it was over.

The kid wasn’t as loaded as I thought when I got him out of there into the sunshine and more or less fresh Los Angeles air.

“I’m not drunk,” he repeated all the way to the Glass House, shaking his mop of blond hair out of his face since I had his hands cuffed behind his back. The Glass House is what the street people call our main police building because of all the windows.

“You
talked
your way into jail, boy,” I said, lighting a cigar.

“You can’t just put a sober man in jail for drunk because he calls you a pig,” said the kid, and by the way he talked and looked, I figured him for an upper-middle-class student hanging out downtown with the scumbags for a perverse kick, and also because he was at heart a scumbag himself.

“More guys talk themselves into jail than get there any other way,” I said.

“I demand an attorney,” he said.

“Call one soon as you’re booked.”

“I’ll bring those people to court. They’ll testify I was sober. I’ll sue you for false arrest.”

“You wouldn’t be getting a cherry, kid. Guys tried to sue me a dozen times. And you wouldn’t get those assholes in the Dragon to give you the time of day if they had a crate full of alarm clocks.”

“How can you book me for
drunk
? Are you prepared to swear before God that I was drunk?”

“There’s no God down here on the beat, and anyway He’d never show his face in the Pink Dragon. The United States Supreme Court decisions don’t work too well down here either. So you see, kid, I been forced to write my own laws, and you violated one in there. I just have to find you guilty of contempt of cop.”

FIVE

A
FTER
I
GOT THE GUY BOOKED
I didn’t know what the hell to do. I had this empty feeling now that was making me depressed. I thought about the hotel burglar again, but I felt lazy. It was this empty feeling. I was in a black mood as I swung over toward Figueroa. I saw a mailbox handbook named Zoot Lafferty standing there near a public phone. He used to hang around Main and then Broadway and now Figueroa. If we could ever get him another block closer to the Harbor Freeway maybe we could push the bastard off the overpass sometime, I thought, in the mood for murder.

Lafferty always worked the businessmen in the area, taking the action and recording the bets inside a self-addressed stamped envelope. And he always hung around a mailbox and a public phone booth. If he saw someone that he figured was a vice cop, he’d run to the mailbox and deposit the letter. That way there’d be no evidence like betting markers or owe sheets the police could recover. He’d have the customers’ bets the next day when the mail came, and in time for collection and payment. Like all handbooks though, he was scared of plainclothes vice cops but completely ignored uniformed policemen.

So one day when I was riding by, I slammed on the binders, jumped out of the black-and-white, and fell on Zoot’s skinny ass before he could get to the mailbox. I caught him with the markers and they filed a felony bookmaking charge. I convicted him in Superior Court after I convinced the judge that I had a confidential reliable informant tell me all about Zoot’s operation, which was true, and that I hid behind a bush just behind the phone booth and overheard the bets being taken over the phone, which was a lie. But I convinced the judge and that’s all that matters. He had to pay a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine and was given a year’s probation, and that same day, he moved over here to Figueroa away from my beat where there are no bushes anywhere near his phone booth.

As I drove by Zoot, he waved at me and grinned and stood by the mailbox. I wondered if we could’ve got some help with the Post Office special agents to stop this flimflam, but it would’ve been awful hard and not worth the effort. You can’t tamper with someone’s mail very easy. Now, as I looked at his miserable face for the last time, my black mood got blacker and I thought, I’ll bet no other uniformed cop ever takes the trouble to shag him after I’m gone.

Then I started thinking about bookmaking in general, and got even madder, because it was the kind of crime I couldn’t do anything about. I saw the profits reaped from it all around me, and I saw the people involved in it, and knew some of them, and yet I couldn’t do anything because they were so well organized and their weapons were so good and mine were so flimsy. The money was so unbelievably good that they could expand into semilegitimate businesses and drive out competition because they had the racket money to fall back on, and the legitimate businesses couldn’t compete. And also they were tougher and ruthless and knew other ways to discourage competition. I always wanted to get one of them good, someone like Red Scalotta, a big book, whose fortune they say can’t be guessed at. I thought all these things and how mad I get everytime I see a goddamn lovable Damon-Runyon-type bookmaker in a movie. I started thinking then about Angie Caputo, and got a dark kind of pleasure just picturing him and remembering how another old beat man, Sam Giraldi, had humbled him. Angie had never realized his potential as a hood after what Sam did to him.

Sam Giraldi is dead now. He died last year just fourteen months after he retired at twenty years’ service. He was only forty-four when he had a fatal heart attack, which is particularly a policeman’s disease. In a job like this, sitting on your ass for long periods of time and then moving in bursts of heart-cracking action, you can expect heart attacks. Especially since lots of us get so damned fat when we get older.

When he ruined Angie Caputo, Sam was thirty-seven years old but looked forty-seven in the face. He wasn’t very tall, but had tremendous shoulders, a meaty face, and hands bigger than mine, all covered with heavy veins. He was a good handball player and his body was hard as a spring-loaded sap. He’d been a vice officer for years and then went back to uniform. Sam walked Alvarado when I walked downtown, and sometimes he’d drive over to my beat or I’d come over to his. We’d eat dinner together and talk shop or talk about baseball, which I like and which he was fanatic about. Sometimes, if we ate at his favorite delicatessen on Alvarado, I’d walk with him for a while and once or twice we even made a pretty good pinch together like that. It was on a wonderful summer night when a breeze was blowing off the water in MacArthur Park that I met Angie Caputo.

It seemed to be a sudden thing with Sam. It struck like a bullet, the look on his face, and he said, “See that guy? That’s Angie Caputo, the pimp and bookmaker’s agent.” And I said, “So what?” wondering what the hell was going on, because Sam looked like he was about to shoot the guy who was just coming out of a bar and getting ready to climb aboard a lavender Lincoln he had parked on Sixth Street. We got in Sam’s car, getting ready to drive over to catch the eight o’clock show at the burlesque house out there on his beat.

“He hangs out further west, near Eighth Street,” said Sam. “That’s where he lives too. Not far from my pad, in fact. I been looking to see him for a few days now. I got it straight that he’s the one that busted the jaw of Mister Rovitch that owns the cleaners where I get my uniforms done.” Sam was talking in an unnaturally soft voice. He was a gentle guy and always talked low and quiet, but this was different.

“What’d he do that for?”

“Old guy was behind on interest payments to Harry Stapleton the loan shark. He had Angie do the job for him. Angie’s a big man now. He don’t have to do that kind of work no more, but he loves to do it sometimes. I hear he likes to use a pair of leather gloves with wrist pins in the palms.”

“He get booked for it?”

Sam shook his head. “The old man swears three niggers mugged him.”

“You sure it was Caputo?”

“I got a good snitch, Bumper.”

And then Sam confessed to me that Caputo was from the same dirty town in Pennsylvania that he was from, and their families knew each other when they were kids, and they were even distant relatives. Then Sam turned the car around and drove back on Sixth Street and stopped at the corner.

“Get in, Angie,” said Sam, as Caputo walked toward the car with a friendly smile.

“You busting me, Sam?” said Caputo, the smile widening, and I could hardly believe he was as old as Sam. His wavy hair was blue-black without a trace of gray, and his handsome profile was smooth, and his gray suit was beautiful. I turned around when Caputo held out a hand and smiled at me.

“Angie’s my name,” he said as we shook hands. “Where we going?”

“I understand you’re the one that worked over the old man,” said Sam in a much softer voice than before.

“You gotta be kidding, Sam. I got other things going. Your finks got the wrong boy for this one.”

“I been looking for you.”

“What for, Sam, you gonna bust me?”

“I can’t bust you. I ain’t been able to bust you since I knew you, even though I’d give my soul to do it.”

“This guy’s a comic,” said Caputo, laughing as he lit a cigarette. “I can depend on old Sam to talk to me at least once a month about how he’d like to send me to the joint. He’s a comic. Whadda you hear from the folks back in Aliquippa, Sam? How’s Liz and Dolly? How’s Dolly’s kids?”

“Before this, you never really hurt nobody I knew personally,” said Sam, still in the strange soft voice. “I knew the old man real good, you know.”

“He one of your informers, Sam?” asked Caputo. “Too bad. Finks’re hard to come by these days.”

“Old guy like that. Bones might never heal.”

“Okay, that’s a shame. Now tell me where we’re going. Is this some kind of roust? I wanna know.”

“Here’s where we’re going. We’re here,” said Sam, driving the car under the ramp onto the lonely, dark, dirt road by the new freeway construction.

“What the fuck’s going on?” asked Caputo, for the first time not smiling.

“Stay in the car, Bumper,” said Sam. “I wanna talk with Angie alone.”

“Be careful,
fratello
,” said Caputo. “I ain’t a punk you can scare. Be careful.”

“Don’t say
fratello
to me,” Sam whispered. “You’re a
dog’s
brother. You beat old men. You beat women and live off them. You live off weak people’s blood.”

“I’ll have your job, you dumb dago,” said Caputo, and I jumped out of the car when I heard the slapping thud of Sam’s big fist and Caputo’s cry of surprise. Sam was holding Caputo around the head and already I could see the blood as Sam hammered at his face. Then Caputo was on his back and he tried to hold off the blows of the big fist which drew back slowly and drove forward with speed and force. Caputo was hardly resisting now and didn’t yell when Sam pulled out the heavy six-inch Smith and Wesson. Sam knelt on the arms of Caputo and cracked the gun muzzle through his teeth and into his mouth. Caputo’s head kept jerking off the ground as he gagged on the gun muzzle twisting and digging in his throat but Sam pinned him there on the end of the barrel, whispering to him in Italian. Then Sam was on his feet and Caputo flopped on his stomach heaving bloody, pulpy tissue.

Sam and me drove back alone without talking. Sam was breathing hard and occasionally opened a window to spit a wad of phlegm. When Sam finally decided to talk he said, “You don’t have to worry, Bumper, Angie’ll keep his mouth shut. He didn’t even open it when I beat him, did he?”

“I’m not worried.”

“He won’t say nothing,” said Sam. “And things’ll be better on the street. They won’t laugh at us and they won’t be so bold. They’ll be scared. And Angie’ll never really be respected again. It’ll be better out here on the street.”

“I’m just afraid he’ll kill you, Sam.”

“He won’t. He’ll fear me. He’ll be afraid that
I’ll
kill
him
. And I will if he tries anything.”

“Christ, Sam, it’s not worth getting so personally tied up to these assholes like this.”

“Look, Bumper, I worked bookmaking in Ad Vice and here in Central. I busted bookmakers and organized hoodlums for over eight years. I worked as much as six months on
one
bookmaker. Six months! I put together an investigation and gathered evidence that no gang lawyer could beat and I took back offices where I seized records that could prove,
prove
the guy was a millionaire book. And I convicted them and saw them get pitiful fines time after time and I
never
saw a bookmaker go to state prison even though it’s a felony. Let somebody else work bookmaking I finally decided, and I came back to uniform. But Angie’s different. I know him. All my life I knew him, and I live right up Serrano there, in the apartments. That’s
my
neighborhood. I use that cleaners where the old man works. Sure he was my snitch but I liked him. I never paid him. He just told me things. He got a kid’s a schoolteacher, the old man does. The books’ll be scared now for a little while after what I done. They’ll respect us for a little while.”

I had to agree with everything Sam said, but I’d never seen a guy worked over that bad before, not by a cop anyway. It bothered me. I worried about us, Sam and me, about what would happen if Caputo complained to the Department, but Sam was
right
. Caputo kept his mouth shut and I admit I was never sorry for what Sam did. When it was over I felt something and couldn’t put my finger on it at first, and then one night laying in bed I figured it out. It was a feeling of something being
right
. For one of the few times on this job I saw an untouchable touched. I felt my thirst being slaked a little bit, and I was never sorry for what Sam did.

But Sam was dead now and I was retiring, and I was sure there weren’t many other bluesuits in the division who could nail a bookmaker. I turned my car around and headed back toward Zoot Lafferty, still standing there in his pea green slack suit. I parked the black-and-white at the curb, got out, and very slow, with my sweaty uniform shirt sticking to my back, I walked over to Zoot who opened the package door on the red and blue mailbox and stuck his arm inside. I stopped fifteen feet away and stared at him.

“Hello, Morgan,” he said, with a crooked phony grin that told me he wished he’d have slunk off long before now. He was a pale, nervous guy, about forty-five years old, with a bald freckled skull.

“Hello, Zoot,” I said, putting my baton back inside the ring, and measuring the distance between us.

“You got your rocks off once by busting me, Morgan. Why don’t you go back over to your beat, and get outta my face? I moved clear over here to Figueroa to get away from you and your fucking beat, what more do you want?”

“How much action you got written down, Zoot?” I said, walking closer. “It’ll inconvenience the shit out of you to let it go in the box, won’t it?”

“Goddamnit, Morgan,” said Zoot, blinking his eyes nervously, and scratching his scalp which looked loose and rubbery. “Why don’t you quit rousting people. You’re an old man, you know that? Why don’t you just fuck off outta here and start acting like one.”

When the slimeball said that, the blackness I felt turned blood red, and I sprinted those ten feet as he let the letter slide down inside the box. But he didn’t get his hand out. I slammed the door hard and put my weight against it and the metal door bit into his wrist and he screamed.

“Zoot, it’s time for you and me to have a talk.” I had my hand on the mailbox package door, all my weight leaning hard, as he jerked for a second and then froze in pain, bug-eyed.

“Please, Morgan,” he whispered, and I looked around, seeing there was a lot of car traffic but not many pedestrians.

“Zoot, before I retire I’d like to take a real good book, just one time. Not a sleazy little handbook like you but a real bookmaker, how about helping me?”

Tears began running down Zoot’s cheeks and he showed his little yellow teeth and turned his face to the sun as he pulled another time on the arm. I pushed harder and he yelped loud, but there were noisy cars driving by.