The Blue Knight (10 page)

“Bumper, after we get married and settled in our home, what would you say to
us
becoming foster parents? Not really adopting a child if you didn’t want to, but being foster parents, sharing. You’d be someone for a boy to look up to and learn from.”

“A kid! But I never thought about a family!”

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and after seeing Nancy and hearing about their life, I think about how wonderful it would be for us. We’re not old yet, but in ten or fifteen more years when we
are
getting old, there’d be someone else for both of us.” She looked in my eyes and then down. “You may think I’m crazy, and I probably am, but I’d like you to give it some thought.”

That hit me so hard I didn’t know what to say, so I grinned a silly grin, kissed her on the cheek, said, “I’m end of watch in fifteen minutes. Bye, old shoe,” and left.

She looked somehow younger and a little sad as she smiled and waved at me when I’d reached the stairway. When I got in my black-and-white I felt awful. I dropped two pills and headed east on Temple and cursed under my breath at every asshole that got in my way in this rush-hour traffic. I couldn’t believe it. Leaving the Department after all these years and getting married was change enough, but a kid! Cassie had asked me about my ex-wife one time, just once, right after we started going together. I told her I was divorced and my son was dead and I didn’t go into it any further. She never mentioned it again, never talked about kids in that way.

Damn, I thought, I guess every broad in the world should drop a foal at least once in her life or she’ll never be happy. I pushed Cassie’s idea out of my mind when I drove into the police building parking lot, down to the lower level where it was dark and fairly cool despite the early spring heat wave. I finished my log, gathered up my ticket books, and headed for the office to leave the log before I took off the uniform. I never wrote traffic tickets but they always issued me the ticket books. Since I made so many good felony pinches they pretty well kept their mouths shut about me not writing tickets, still, they always issued me the books and I always turned them back in just as full. That’s the trouble with conformists, they’d never stop giving me those ticket books.

After putting the log in the daywatch basket I jived around with several of the young nightwatch coppers who wanted to know when I was changing to nights for the summer. They knew my M.O. too. Everybody knew it. I hated anyone getting my M.O. down too good like that. The most successful robbers and burglars are the ones who change their M.O’s. They don’t give you a chance to start sticking little colored pins in a map to plot their movements. That reminded me of a salty old cop named Nails Grogan who used to walk Hill Street.

About fifteen years ago, just for the hell of it, he started his own crime wave. He was teed off at some chickenshit lieutenant we had then, named Wall, who used to jump on our meat every night at rollcall because we weren’t catching enough burglars. The way Wall figured this was that there were always so many little red pins on the pin maps for nighttime business burglaries, especially around Grogan’s beat. Grogan always told me he didn’t think Wall ever really read a burglary report and didn’t know shit from gravy about what was going on. So a little at a time Nails started changing the pins every night before rollcall, taking the pins out of the area around his beat and sticking them in the east side. After a couple weeks of this, Wall told the rollcall what a hell of a job Grogan was doing with the burglary problem in his area, and restricted the ass chewing to guys that worked the eastside cars. I was the only one that knew what Grogan did and we got a big laugh out of it until Grogan went too far and pinned a full-blown crime wave on the east side, and Lieutenant Wall had the captain call out the Metro teams to catch the burglars. Finally the whole hoax was exposed when no one could find crime reports to go with all the little pins.

Wall was transferred to the morning watch, which is our graveyard shift, at the old Lincoln Heights jail. He retired from there a few years later. Nails Grogan never got made on that job, but Wall knew who screwed him, I’m sure. Nails was another guy that only lived a few years after he retired. He shot himself. I got a chill thinking about that, shook it off, and headed for the locker room where I took off the bluesuit and changed into my herringbone sport coat, gray slacks, and lemon yellow shirt, no tie. In this town you can usually get by without a tie anywhere you go.

Before I left, I plugged in my shaver and smoothed up a little bit. A couple of the guys were still in the locker room. One of them was an ambitious young bookworm named Wilson, who as usual was reading while sitting on the bench and slipping into his civvies. He was going to college three or four nights a week and always had a textbook tucked away in his police notebook. You’d see him in the coffee room or upstairs in the cafeteria going through it all the time. I’m something of a reader myself but I could never stand the thought of doing it because you had to.

“What’re you reading?” I asked Wilson.

“Oh, just some criminal law,” said Wilson, a thin youngster with a wide forehead and large blue eyes. He was a probationary policeman, less than a year on the job.

“Studying for sergeant already?” said Hawk, a cocky, square-shouldered kid about Wilson’s age, who had two years on, and was going through his badge-heavy period.

“Just taking a few classes.”

“You majoring in police science?” I asked.

“No, I’m majoring in government right now. I’m thinking about trying for law school.” He didn’t look right at me and I didn’t think he would. This is something I’ve gotten used to from the younger cops, especially ones with some education, like Wilson. They don’t know how to act when they’re with old-timers like me. Some act salty like Hawk, trying to strut with an old beat cop, and it just looks silly. Others act more humble than they usually would, thinking an old lion like me would claw their ass for making an honest mistake out of greenness. Still others, like Wilson, pretty much act like themselves, but like most young people, they think an old fart that’s never even made sergeant in twenty years must be nearly illiterate, so they generally restrict all conversation to the basics of police work to spare you, and they generally look embarrassed like Wilson did now, to admit to you that they read books. The generation gap is as bad in this job as it is in any other except for one thing: the hazards of the job shrink it pretty fast. After a few brushes with danger, a kid pretty much loses his innocence, which is what the generation gap is really all about—innocence.

“Answer me a law question,” said Hawk, putting on some flared pants. We’re too GI to permit muttonchops or big moustaches or he’d surely have them. “If you commit suicide can you be prosecuted for murder?”

“Nobody ever has,” Wilson smiled, as Hawk giggled and slipped on a watermelon-colored velvet shirt.

“That’s only because of our permissive society,” I said, and Wilson glanced at me and grinned.

“What’s that book in your locker, Wilson?” I asked, nodding toward a big paperback on the top shelf.

“Guns of August.”

“Oh yeah, I read that,” I said. “I’ve read a hundred books about the First World War. Do you like it?”

“I do,” he said, looking at me like he discovered the missing link. “I’m reading it for a history course.”

“I read T. E. Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
when I was on my First World War kick. Every goddamn word. I had maps and books spread all over my pad. That little runt only weighed in at about a hundred thirty, but thirty pounds of that was brains and forty was balls. He was a boss warrior.”

“A loner,” Wilson nodded, really looking at me now.

“Right. That’s what I dig about him. I would’ve liked him even better if he hadn’t written it all so intimate for everyone to read. But then if he hadn’t done that, I’d never have appreciated him. Maybe a guy like that finally gets tired of just enjoying it and
has
to tell it all to figure it all out and see if it means anything in the end.”

“Maybe you should write your memoirs when you’re through, Bumper,” Wilson smiled. “You’re as well known around here as Lawrence ever was in Arabia.”

“Why don’t you major in history?” I said. “If I went to college that’d be my meat. I think after a few courses in criminal law the rest of law school’d be a real drag, torts and contracts and all that bullshit. I could never plow through the dust and cobwebs.”

“It’s exciting if you like it,” said Wilson, and Hawk looked a little ruffled that he was cut out of the conversation so he split.

“Maybe so,” I said. “You must’ve had a few years of college when you came on the Department.”

“Two years,” Wilson nodded. “Now I’m halfway through my junior year. It takes forever when you’re a full-time cop and a part-time student.”

“You can tough it out,” I said, lighting a cigar and sitting down on the bench, while part of my brain listened to the youngster and the other part was worrying about something else. I had the annoying feeling you get, that can sometimes be scary, that I’d been here with him before and we talked like this, or maybe it was somebody else, and then I thought, yes, that was it, maybe the cowlick in his hair reminded me of Billy, and I got an empty tremor in my stomach.

“How old’re you, Wilson?”

“Twenty-six,” he said, and a pain stabbed me and made me curse and rub my pot. Billy would’ve been twenty-six too!

“Hope your stomach holds out when you get my age. Were you in the service?”

“Army,” he nodded.

“Vietnam?”

“Yeah,” he nodded.

“Did you hate it?” I asked, expecting that all young people hated it.

“I didn’t like the
war
. It scared hell out of me, but I didn’t mind the
army
as much as I thought I would.”

“That’s sort of how I felt,” I smiled. “I was in the Marine Corps for eight years.”

“Korea?”

“No, I’m even older than that,” I smiled. “I joined in forty-two, and got out in fifty, then came on the police department.”

“You stayed in a long time,” he said.

“Too long. The war scared me too, but sometimes peace is just as bad for a military man.”

I didn’t tell him the truth because it might tune him out, and the truth was that it
did
scare me, the war, but I didn’t hate it. I didn’t exactly like it, but I didn’t hate it. It’s fashionable to hate war, I know, and I wanted to hate it, but I never did.

“I swore when I left Vietnam I’d never fire another gun and here I am a cop. Figure that out,” said Wilson.

I thought that was something, having him tell me that. Suddenly the age difference wasn’t there. He was telling me things he probably told his young partners during lonely hours after two a.m. when you’re fighting to keep awake or when you’re “in the hole” trying to hide your radio car, in some alley where you can doze uncomfortably for an hour, but you never really rest. There’s the fear of a sergeant catching you, or there’s the radio. What if you
really
fall asleep and a hot call comes out and you miss it?

“Maybe you’ll make twenty years without ever firing your gun on duty,” I said.

“Have you had to shoot?”

“A few times,” I nodded, and he let it drop like he should. It was only civilians who ask you, “What’s it feel like to shoot someone?” and all that bullshit which is completely ridiculous, because if you do it in war or you do it as a cop, it doesn’t feel like anything. If you do what has to be done, why
should
you feel anything? I never have. After the fear for your own life is past, and the adrenalin slows, nothing. But people generally can’t stand truth. It makes a lousy story so I usually give them their clichés.

“You gonna stay on the job after you finish law school?”

“If I ever finish I might leave,” he laughed. “But I can’t really picture myself ever finishing.”

“Maybe you won’t want to leave by then. This is a pretty strange kind of job. It’s . . . intense. Some guys wouldn’t leave if they had a million bucks.”

“How about you?”

“Oh, I’m pulling the pin,” I said. “I’m almost gone. But the job gets to you. The way you see everyone so exposed and vulnerable. . . .And there’s nothing like rolling up a good felon if you really got the instinct.”

He looked at me for a moment and then said, “Rogers and I got a good two-eleven suspect last month. They cleared five holdups on this guy. He had a seven-point-six-five-millimeter pistol shoved down the back of his waistband when we stopped him for a traffic ticket. We got hinky because he was sweating and dry-mouthed when he talked to us. It’s really something to get a guy like that, especially when you never know how close you came. I mean, he was just sitting there looking from Rogers to me, measuring, thinking about blowing us up. We realized it later, and it made the pinch that much more of a kick.”

“That’s part of it. You feel more alive. Hey, you talk like you’re Bumperized and I didn’t even break you in.”

“We worked together one night, remember?” said Wilson. “My first night out of the academy. I was more scared of you than I was the assholes on the street.”

“That’s right, we
did
work together. I remember now,” I lied.

“Well, I better get moving,” said Wilson, and I was disappointed. “Got to get to school. I’ve got two papers due next week and haven’t started them.”

“Hang in there, Wilson. Hang tough,” I said, as I locked my locker.

I walked to the parking lot and decided to tip a few at my neighborhood pub near Silverlake before going to Cruz’s house. The proprietor was an old pal of mine who used to own a decent bar on my beat downtown before he bought this one. He was no longer on my beat of course, but he still bounced for drinks, I guess out of habit. Most bar owners don’t pop for too many policemen, because they’ll take advantage of it, policemen will, and they’ll be so many at your watering hole you’ll have to close the goddamn doors. Harry only popped for me and a few detectives he knew real well.

It was five o’clock when I parked my nineteen-fifty-one Ford in front of Harry’s. I’d bought the car new and was still driving it. Almost twenty years and I only had a hundred and thirty thousand miles on her, and the same engine. I never went anywhere except at vacation time or sometimes when I’d take a trip to the river to fish. Since I met Cassie I’ve used the car more than I ever had before, but even with Cassie I seldom went far. We usually went to the movies in Hollywood, or to the Music Center to see light opera, or to the Bowl for a concert which was Cassie’s favorite place to go, or to Dodger Stadium which was mine. Often we went out to the Strip to go dancing. Cassie was good. She had all the moves, but she couldn’t get the hang of letting her body do it all. With Cassie the mind was always there. One thing I decided I wouldn’t get rid of when I left L.A. was my Ford. I wanted to see just how long a car could live if you treated it right.