the Choirboys (1996) (16 page)

"Calvin!" Francis said from the other bedroom where there were twin beds and colorful plastic gimcracks on an old dresser and a painted Formica shelf covered with pictures of daisies, apparently to make the dreary bedroom look as though a child slept there.

Francis was on his knees between the beds, his hat and flashlight on the floor beside him, the beam shining under the bed lighting the body of the five year old boy.

Calvin dropped to his knees, removed his hat and using Francis' flashlight, looked under. The bundle was drenched in blood, the pajamas shredded around the tiny huddled body unrecognizable as a child except for some short blond hair not blood soaked.

"Musta crawled under there to get away from him," Calvin said hoarsely. "The killer musta crawled after him and cut the kid up there under the bed. Just laid there under that bed slashin and slashin. Musta been that way. It's clean all around the outside a the bed. The little thing hidin under the bed and the killer crawlin under after him with the knife. There ain't no God, Francis! I swear there ain't!"

Then Francis was on his feet, throwing the bed aside and pulling at the little form, dragging it through the viscous red puddle until Calvin stopped him.

"Don't touch that body!"

"I think I saw him move, Calvin! I think maybe he's still alive!"

"Francis!" Calvin shouted, jerking his partner up as the little body thudded softly to the floor, splashing heavy drops onto the dirty wallpaper. "His insides are all over the fuckin floor! Look!" And he pointed at the ominous red blossoms. "Look at the blood! Look at the face! That child's dead, Francis."

Francis Tanaguchi looked at his partner for a moment, looked at his own bloody hands, then said, "Oh. I can't see too good without my glasses. I guess I should wear my glasses."

"Let's go call the dicks," Calvin said, gently leading his partner out of the apartment which in thirty minutes was swarming with detectives, fingerprint specialists, photographers, deputy coroners and high ranking police administrators who had nothing to do with the investigation but who were always the ones who acted as spokesmen on the television news.

Deputy Chief Lynch was there, his hairpiece a little askew because he had just been in a motel with Theda Gunther.

Commander Moss was there, waving and grinning until he finally persuaded a newsman to take his picture. He pretended that he was examining a lift of a latent fingerprint found on the side of the television set. He held the lift upside down as he scrutinized it. Then he waved with both arms at the newsmen as he was leaving, his blond wavy hair glowing under the lights. One journalist said he acted like a Rose Queen on a flower float There were few clues left by the killer. The latent print was found to have belonged to the victim, Mrs. Mary Stafford. An old boyfriend of hers was ultimately arrested for the murders but the evidence was not sufficient for a complaint. Commander Moss' picture never appeared in the newspapers.

It was later that night, with a child's blood still lodged in the creases of his fingers, that Francis Tanaguchi raised a plastic periscope and began that last obsessive U-boat attack on Wolfgang Werner and big Olga. Then he called for a choir practice and drank and worried about the nightmares sure to come.

Chapter
EIGHT

7-A-l: Spermwhale Whalen
and Baxter Slate
.

At first, Spermwhale Whalen was uncommonly quiet at rollcall on a smoggy June afternoon, just two months before the choir practice killing. Spermwhale was not over the death of a son who claimed to despise him as much as he loved the son. Actually, they hardly knew each other.

Baxter Slate, his partner, was never a boisterous young man so it was not unusual that he said very little while half the nightwatch hooted and jeered at Roscoe Rules and Lieutenant Finque.

"Damn it, Lieutenant, I resent the investigators showing my picture all the time to rape victims," Roscoe Rules complained. "I didn't know they were doing it till last month."

"Apparently they just noticed that your picture mixes well with white sex suspects," Lieutenant Finque replied, getting a migraine as he always did at rollcall these days.

"Yeah, well I shoulda got suspicious when that pussy kiddy cop caught me in civvies and asked to let her snap a Polaroid a me to test out the new camera."

"No harm, Roscoe," Sergeant Yanov grinned.

"No? That cunt's been using my picture in a mug shot showup every fucking time a paddy rapes somebody around here!"

"She can't help it you look like such a deviate," Spermwhale said, as his partner Baxter Slate grinned. "I think she'll stop, Roscoe, by the time two or three victims pick you out of the lineup."

"They'd probably have the right guy," said Harold Bloomguard.

"Naw, he can't even get a blue veiner, let alone a diamond cutter," said Calvin Potts. "We ever get a limp dick bandit around here he'll be a prime suspect."

"Very funny, Potts, very fucking funny," Roscoe Rules said murderously as he unconsciously pulled on his limp dick.

"Well, I'll see what I can do, Rules," the lieutenant said. "Now onto the next subject of our supervisors' meeting. That is: excessive force complaints. The captain says he had an awful lot of paper work to do because an officer on the morning watch broke a suspect's arm with a wristlock. Just be careful in the future. Remember, a wristlock is very hard to put on if a man resists, so don't get carried away."

"Question, Lieutenant," Baxter Slate said.

"Yes?"

"If a man didn't resist, why would you ever put it on in the first place?"

Sergeant Yanov saved his superior officer by taking control of the rollcall and saying, "How about my reading the crimes. Here's a sex story. Might perk up your evening."

And as Sergeant Yanov rescued his lieutenant from further. embarrassing faux pas, Lieutenant Finque smoldered. Yanov related so easily with the men, was so obviously well liked, that Finque knew he had to be a rotten supervisor. This belief was bolstered in that Yanov had been working for him three months and had never yet been capable of catching a policeman with his hat off or smoking in public view. Lieutenant Finque made a note to mention to Captain Drobeck that Yanov, at thirty-four, just a few months younger than Lieutenant Finque, was probably too young and inexperienced to be an effective field sergeant and should be encouraged to go into, the detective bureau.

Captain Drobeck would be the first to agree with such a proposal because he had hated Yanov ever since the sergeant openly disagreed with the captain at a meeting of all the Wilshire Division supervisors. Yanov refuted an "administrative suggestion" from the captain and argued that he would willingly fool the chief of police and lie to the mayor, and to his own wife if he still had one, but never to his men. Because he never asked his chief, mayor or wife to fight for him or save his ass.

Captain Drobeck wrote on Sergeant Yanov's rating report: "Is yet too young and immature to grasp the fundamentals of supervision."

To get even with the troops Lieutenant Finque interrupted Sergeant Yanov's reading of the noteworthy crimes. Lieutenant Finque decided to inform them of what he had just heard prior to rollcall: that a Superior Court jury had acquitted a man charged with the murder of a Los Angeles police officer.

"Acquitted?" thundered Spermwhale Whalen when the lieutenant announced it, but even Spermwhale's bellow was lost in the deafening clamor which went up in that room.

The accused was thought to be a narcotic dealer. He went to a hotel with an undercover officer who posed as a buyer, and a third man, a police informant. The officer was prepared to make a large buy but as it turned out the accused had no drugs. He did have a small caliber pistol with which he shot and killed the officer who returned fire ineffectively before his death. The accused stole the suitcase full of money and ran out the door but was arrested immediately by other officers hiding outside.

The police called the shooting a straight ripoff operation in which the plan was to steal the money. The informant testified that the defendant grabbed the suitcase and fired without warning. The defendant's testimony was that the slain officer unaccountably drew his gun and the defendant, thinking he was to be ripped off, fired first to protect, himself. The investigating officers scoffed. They said it was a "dead bang" case. A cinch. The evidence was overwhelming. There was an eyewitness. The defendant's story was desperate and ludicrous. He was acquitted.

The judge, upon hearing the verdict, proclaimed that he was shocked. But he was not nearly as shocked as the twenty-eight men in Lieutenant Finque's rollcall who would never become accustomed to shocking jury verdicts. It took five minutes to quiet them down and get several questions answered. But they weren't questions. They were statements of indignation and disbelief. Outcries. Then threats. Then a violent obscene damning of the jury system.

Baxter Slate, perhaps the most articulate choirboy, said grimly that this bulwark of democracy was actually a crap game in which twelve telephone operators, mailmen, public utilities employees, pensioners and middle aged housewives, with no knowledge of the law and less of the sociopath, make irrevocable decisions based upon their exposure to movies like Twelve Angry Men. And television shows like Perry Mason.

Lieutenant Finque let them rail until he was sure their stomachs were as sour as his always was because of them. He beamed contentedly. He wasn't even afraid of them at the moment.

Their outrage was so complete that they quickly talked themselves out. One moment shrill trembling voices. Questions unanswered and unanswerable. Then silence. Defeat, Depression. And smoldering fury.

Lieutenant Finque sent them out to do police work with the further blandishment: "You men take with you the captain's last warning from the supervisors' meeting. Any wetfoot hot-dogs who like to put a shoe in the carburetor better stand by. The next preventable traffic accident is going to mean the commander comes down on the captain, who's going to come down hard on me and I'm going to have to come down hard - on you!"

Finally Spermwhale Whalen spoke. He said, "I know shit rolls downhill. But why am I always livin in the valley?"

Herbert "Spermwhale" Whalen despised the new station Wilshire Division had moved to in early 1974. Daily he would drive by the dilapidated, inadequate old building on Pico Boulevard which, by God, looked like a police station. He longed for the old days.

Spermwhale, at 260 pounds with the pig eyes of a whale, was aptly named. He was of Irish Catholic stock, divorced three times, considering himself thus excommunicated. "It's just too bad I ain't rich enough to've got a fancy annulment approved by the Pope like all these rich cunts and cocksuckers you read about, Then I coulda stayed in the church."

It was a refrain often heard at Mac Arthur Park choir practice when Spermwhale was almost in the tank, a fifth of bourbon or Scotch in the huge red hand. "Now I gotta go to hell cause I'm excommunicated!"

And if Father Willie Wright was drunk enough and suffering from his frequent attacks of overwhelming guilt for having just dismounted Ora Lee Tingle or Carolina Moon, claiming his plump little wife would only ball him dispassionately twice a month, he would say softly, "I'll be with you, Spermwhale. I'm afraid I'll be with you!"

Baxter Slate was a good partner for Spermwhale Whalen because he didn't talk too much and give Spermwhale a headache. Also he had almost five years on the job, having been sworn in on his twenty-second birthday. Spermwhale, a nineteen year veteran, considered anyone with less time a fuzz nutted rookie and couldn't stand to work with rookie partners.

Also Baxter didn't complain when Spermwhale would occasionally pick up a streetwalking prostitute whom Spermwhale knew from his old days on the vice squad, saying, "It's time for a little skull." Were he to be caught it would mean their jobs, and Spermwhale Whalen was just months away from a pension. It was a calculated risk and Spermwhale sweated it out each time because the LAPD brass definitely did not approve of uniformed officers in black and whites getting a little skull.

It was surprising that Spermwhale would take such a risk. He often said that a sergeant who caught him doing something for which he could be fired would never get back to the station alive, because he, Spermwhale Whalen, would kill any cock-sucker who tried to keep him from making his twenty years and getting that irretrievable pension. Anyone Spermwhale didn't like was either a "cunt," a "gelding," a "eunuch," or a "cocksucker," and that included almost all civilians, certainly all police brass and station supervisors (except Sergeant Nick Yanov) and all employees of the Civil Service Department who had designed nitpicking promotional exams which had frustrated him all these years and kept him from advancing past the basic policeman rank.

It was especially galling in that Spermwhale Whalen was a major in the Air Force Reserve and often ran into LAPD lieutenants and captains, also military reservists, who, during summer military exercises, had to salute him.

Spermwhale was proof positive that polish was not necessary to achieve staff rank in the United States Air Force Reserve, just as Commander Moss was proof positive that common sense was not needed to achieve staff rank in the Los Angeles Police Department.

But Spermwhale Whalen was just possibly one of the coolest most competent transport pilots in the 452nd Wing. He had flown in World War II and later in Korea until he left the Air Force and joined the police department. He was the only Los Angeles police officer in history to engage in one of his country's wars while still an active member of the department. His remarkable feat was accomplished by flying C-124 Globemasters on three and four day missions from March Air Force Base to Danang in 1966 and 1967, almost being shot down twice by Communist surface to air missiles. Spermwhale was, for this reason, a minor legend in the department. In those years it had been fun for the Wilshire policemen to play straight man for Spermwhale among police officers from other stations, saying things like: