The Blue Knight (16 page)

“One-Victor-Two, go,” said Nick.

“One-Victor-One, I think it’s best to park behind on the next street east, that’s Harvard,” said Charlie. “If anybody happens to be looking they wouldn’t see you go in through the parking area in the rear.”

“Okay, Charlie,” said Nick, and in a few minutes we were there. Eighth Street is all commercial buildings with several bars and restaurants, and the residential north-south streets are lined with apartment buildings. We gave them a chance to get to the walkway on the second floor of the apartment house, and Charlie drove about two hundred feet south of Eighth on Harvard. We walked one block to the public telephone on the southwest corner at Hobart. After a couple of minutes, Fuzzy leaned over a wrought iron railing on the second floor and waved.

“Let’s get it on, Bumper,” said Charlie, dropping in a dime. Charlie hung up after a second. “Busy.”

“Zoot give you the code and all that?”

“Twenty-eight for Dandelion is the code,” Charlie nodded. “This is a relay phone spot. If it was a relay call-back we might have some problems.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, standing behind the phone booth so someone looking out of the apartment wouldn’t see the bluesuit.

“A call-back is where the bettor or the handbook like Zoot calls the relay, that’s like I’m going to do now. Then every fifteen minutes or so, the back office calls the relay and gets the bettor’s number and calls the bettor himself. I think we’d have a poor chance with that kind of setup because back office clerks are sharper than some dummy sitting on the hot seat at a phone spot. Last time we took Reba McClain it was a regular relay spot where the bettor calls her and she writes the bets on a Formica board and then the back office calls every so often and she reads off the bets and wipes the Formica clean. It’s better for us that way because we always try to get some physical evidence if we can move quick enough.”

“The Formica?”

“Yeah,” Charlie nodded. “Some guys kick in the door and throw something at the guy on the hot seat to distract him so he can’t wipe the bets off. I’ve seen cops throw a tennis ball in the guy’s face.”

“Why not a baseball?”

“That’s not a bad idea. You’d make a good vice cop, Bumper.”

“Either way the person at the phone spot doesn’t know the phone number or address of the back office?” I asked.

“Hell no. That’s why I was telling you the chances are nil.”

Charlie dropped the dime in again and again hung it up.

“Must be doing a good business,” I said.

“Red Scalotta’s relay spots always do real good,” said Charlie. “I know personally of two Superior Court judges that bet with him.”

“Probably some cops too,” I said.

“Righteous,” he nodded. “Everybody’s got vices.”

“Whadda you call that gimmick where the phone goes to another pad?”

“A tap out,” said Charlie. “Sometimes you bust in an empty room and see nothing but a phone jack and a wire running out a window, and by the time you trace the wire down to the right apartment, the guy in the relay spot’s long gone. Usually with a tap out, there’s some kind of alarm hooked up so he knows when you crash in the decoy pad. Then there’s a toggle relay, where a call can be laid off to another phone line. Like for instance the back office clerk dials the relay spot where the toggle switch is and he doesn’t hang up. Then the bettor calls the relay and the back can take the action himself. All these gimmicks have disadvantages though. One of the main ones is that bettors don’t like call-back setups. Most bettors are working stiffs and maybe on their coffee breaks they only have a few minutes to get in to their bookie, and they don’t have ten or fifteen minutes to kill waiting for call-backs and all that crap. The regular relay spot with some guy or maybe some housewife earning a little extra bread by sitting on the hot seat is still the most convenient way for the book to operate.”

“You get many broads at these phone spots?”

“We sure do. We get them in fronts and backs. That is, we get them in the relay phone spots as well as back offices. We hear Red Scalotta’s organization pays a front clerk a hundred fifty a week and a back clerk three hundred a week. That’s a good wage for a woman, considering it’s tax free. A front clerk might have to go to jail once in a while but it ain’t no big thing to her. The organization bails them out and pays all legal fees. Then they go right back to work. Hardly any judge is going to send someone to county jail for bookmaking, especially if she’s female. And they’ll never send anyone to state prison. I know a guy in the south end of town with over eighty bookmaking arrests. He’s still in business.”

“Sounds like a good business.”

“It’s a joke, Bumper. I don’t know why I stay at it, I mean trying to nail them. We hear Red Scalotta’s back offices gross from one to two million a year. And he probably has at least three backs going. That’s a lot of bread even though he only nets eleven to sixteen percent of that. And when we take down these agents and convict them, they get a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine. It’s a sick joke.”

“You ever get Red Scalotta himself?”

“Never. Red’ll stay away from the back offices. He’s got someone who takes care of everything. Once in a while we can take a front and on rare occasions a back and that’s about all we can hope for. Well, let’s try to duke our bet in again.”

Charlie dropped in his dime and dialed the number. Then he looked excited and I knew someone answered.

“Hello,” said Charlie, “this is twenty-eight for Dandelion. Give me number four in the second, five across. Give me a two-dollar, four-horse round robin in the second. The number two horse to the number four in the third to the number six in the fourth to number seven in the fifth.”

Then Charlie stiffed in a few more bets for races at the local track, Hollywood Park, which is understood, unless you specify an Eastern track. Midway through the conversation, Charlie leaned out the phone booth and pumped his fist at Fuzzy, who disappeared inside the apartment building. Charlie motioned to me and I took off my hat and squeezed into the hot phone booth with him. He grinned and held the phone away from his ear, near mine.

I heard the crash over the phone, and the terrified woman scream and a second later Nick’s voice came over the line and said, “Hello, sweetheart, would you care for a round robin or a three-horse parley today?”

Charlie chuckled and hung up the phone and we hopped back in the vice car and drove to the apartment house, parking in front.

When we got to the second floor, Fuzzy was smooth talking an irate landlady who was complaining about the fractured door which Nick was propping shut for privacy. A good-looking, dark-haired girl was sitting on the couch inside the apartment crying her eyes out.

“Hi, Reba,” Charlie grinned as we walked in and looked around.

“Hello, Mister Bronski,” she wailed, drenching the second of two handkerchiefs she held in her hands.

“The judge warned you last time, Reba,” said Charlie. “This’ll make your third bookmaking case. He told you you’d get those six months he suspended. You might even get a consecutive sentence on top of it.”

“Please, Mister Bronski,” she wailed, throwing herself face down on the couch and sobbing so hard the whole couch shook.

She was wearing a very smart jersey blouse and skirt, and a matching blue scarf was tied around her black hair. Her fair legs had a very light spattering of freckles on them. She was a fine-looking girl, very Irish.

Charlie took me in the frilly sweet-smelling bedroom where the phone was. Reba had smeared half the bets off a twelve-by-eighteen chalkboard, but the other bets were untouched. A wet cloth was on the floor where the board was dropped along with the phone.

“I’ll bet she wet her pants again this time,” said Charlie, still grinning as he examined the numbers and x’s on the chalkboard which told the track, race, handicap position, and how much to win, place or show. The bettor’s identification was written beside the bets. I noticed that K.L. placed one hell of a lot of bets, probably just before Charlie called.

“We’re going to squeeze the shit out of her,” Charlie whispered. “You think Zoot was shaky, wait’ll you hear this broad. A real ding-a-ling.”

“Go ahead,” Nick was saying to someone on the phone when we came back in the living room. Fuzzy was nodding politely to the landlady and locking her out by closing the broken door and putting a chair in front of it.

“Right. Got it,” said Nick, hanging up. A minute later the phone rang again.

“Hello,” said Nick. “Right. Go ahead.” Every few seconds he mumbled, “Yeah,” as he wrote down bets. “Got it.” He hung up.

“Nick’s taking some bets mainly just to fuck up Scalotta,” Charlie explained to me. “Some of these guys might hit, or they might hear Reba got knocked over, and then they’ll claim they placed their bet and there’ll be no way to prove they didn’t, so the book’ll have to pay off or lose the customers. That’s where we get most of our tips, from disgruntled bettors. It isn’t too often a handbook like Zoot Lafferty comes dancing in, anxious to turn his bread and butter.”

“Mister Bronski, can I talk to you?” Reba sobbed, as Nick and then Fuzzy answered the phone and took the bets.

“Let’s go in the other room,” said Charlie, and we followed Reba back into the bedroom where she sat down on the soft, king-sized bed and wiped away the wet mascara.

“I got no time for bullshit, Reba,” said Charlie. “You’re in no position to make deals. We got you by the curlies.”

“I know, Mister Bronski,” she said, taking deep breaths. “I ain’t gonna bullshit you. I wanna work with you. I swear I’ll do anything. But please don’t let me get this third case. That Judge Bowers is a bastard. He told me if I violated my probation, he’d put me in. Please, Mister Bronski, you don’t know what it’s like there. I couldn’t do six months. I couldn’t even do six days. I’d kill myself.”

“You want to work for me? What could you do?”

“Anything. I know a phone number. Two numbers. You could take two other places just like this one. I’ll give you the numbers.”

“How do you know them?”

“I ain’t dumb, Mister Bronski. I listen and I learn things. When they’re drunk or high they talk to me, just like all men.”

“You mean Red Scalotta and his friends?”

“Please, Mister Bronski, I’ll give you the numbers, but you can’t take me to jail.”

“That’s not good enough, Reba,” said Charlie, sitting down in a violet-colored satin chair next to a messy dressing table. He lit a cigarette as Reba glanced from Charlie to me, her forehead wrinkled, chewing her lip. “That’s not near good enough,” said Charlie.

“Whadda you want, Mister Bronski? I’ll do anything you say.”

“I want the back,” said Charlie easily.

“What?”

“I want one of Red’s back offices. That’s all. Keep your phone spots. If we take too much right away it’ll burn you and I want you to keep working for Red. But I want his back office. I think you can help me.”

“Oh God, Mister Bronski. Oh Mother of God, I don’t know about things like that, I swear. How would I know? I’m just answering phones here. How would I know?”

“You’re Red’s girlfriend.”

“Red has other girlfriends!”

“You’re his
special
girlfriend. And you’re smart. You listen.”

“I don’t know things like that, Mister Bronski. I swear to God and His Mother. I’d tell you if I knew.”

“Have a cigarette,” said Charlie, and pushed one into Reba’s trembling hand. I lit it for her and she glanced up like a trapped little rabbit, choked on the smoke, then took a deep breath, and inhaled down the right pipe. Charlie let her smoke for a few seconds. He had her ready to break, which is what you want, and you shouldn’t wait, but she was obviously a ding-a-ling and you had to improvise when your subject is batty. He was letting her unwind, letting her get back a little confidence. Just for a minute.

“You wouldn’t protect Red Scalotta if it meant your ass going to jail, would you, Reba?”

“Hell no, Mister Bronski, I wouldn’t protect my mother if it meant that.”

“Remember when I busted you before? Remember how we talked about those big hairy bull dykes you meet in jail? Remember how scared you were? Did any of them bother you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you sleep in jail?”

“No, they bailed me out.”

“What about after you get your six months, Reba? Then you have to sleep in jail. Did you see any dildoes in jail?”

“What’s that?”

“Phony dicks.”

“I hate those things,” she shuddered.

“How would you like to wake up in the middle of the night with two big bull dykes working on you? And what’s more, how would you feel if you really started
liking
it? It happens all the time to girls in jail. Pretty soon you’re a stone butch, and then you might as well cut off that pretty hair, and strap down those big tits, because you’re not a woman anymore. Then you can lay up in those butch pads with a bunch of bull daggers and a pack of smelly house cats and drop pills and shoot junk because you can’t stand yourself.”

“Why’re you doing this to me, Mister Bronski?” said Reba, starting to sob again. She dropped the cigarette on the carpet and I picked it up and snuffed it. “Why do men like to hurt? You all hurt!”

“Does Red hurt you?” asked Charlie calmly, sweating a little as he lit another cigarette with the butt of the last one.

“Yes! He hurts!” she yelled, and Fuzzy stuck his head in the door to see what the shouting was about, but Charlie motioned him away while Reba sobbed.

“Does he make you do terrible things?” asked Charlie, and she was too hysterical to see he was talking to her like she was ten years old.

“Yes, the bastard! The freaky bastard. He hurts me! He likes to hurt! That fucking old freak!”

“I’ll bet he makes you do things with bull daggers,” said Charlie, glancing at me, and I realized I broke him in right. He wasn’t a guy to only stick it in halfway.

“He
makes
me do it, Mister Bronski,” said Reba. “I don’t enjoy it, I swear I don’t. I hate to do it with a woman. I wasn’t raised like that. It’s a terrible sin to do those things.”

“I’ll bet you don’t like taking action for him either. You hate sitting on this hot seat answering the phones, don’t you?”