the Choirboys (1996) (17 page)

"Oh, Marvin, where'd you go on your days off?"

"Disneyland with my sister's kids, how about you?"

"Fishing with Simon and his girlfriend up to Big Bear Lake, and how about you, Spermwhale?"

"Danang. Wasn't much happenin. Few rocket attacks is all." Spermwhale seldom took two days off a week in those years. Like many policemen, he preferred to work nine and ten days straight to string his days off together. But his were for combat missions for which he was paid a bonus by the government of the United States to give to his three wives, each of whom had borne him a child before the divorce. When Spermwhale was off flying and the night watch sat bored in the assembly room, someone would always say when a low-flying aircraft roared over making an approach to LA International: "Well, sounds like Spermwhale's late for rollcall again." Spermwhale bore a Z-shaped scar which began in the fur of one black tufted eyebrow, crossed the flattened bridge of his nose, swooped under his right eye. and came back onto the nose showing white in the swatch of red veins. Once at choir practice,Carolina Moon asked him how he had gotten that scar.

"Landin in the rain with half my tail shot away."

"Where, Spermy? Where'd it happen?"

An extraordinary thing happened: Spermwhale could not remember. Not for almost a full minute. The alcohol had temporarily debilitated his brain but it was more than that. He had flown so many missions for his government in which he had been asked to kill or cause the deaths of Oriental people that they had started to run together: Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese. He truly couldn't answer. Not immediately.

"Oh yeah," he said finally. "Korea. Jesus Christ! Korea. Jesus Christ! I couldn't remember which war!"

After the Vietnam War ended, Spermwhale still flew but of course lost a good deal of his military pay and had a difficult time paying off the three wives and keeping enough to drink and take out a broad when he got lucky. It was for economic reasons more than anything else that he became a faithful choirboy and put up with the younger policemen who gave him such a headache. At choir practice there was always free booze supplied by Roscoe Rules and Spencer Van Moot. And there was sometimes Carolina Moon whom Spermwhale fell in love with at every single choir practice: The fat girl and the fat policeman would go off hand in hand for a stagger around the duck pond, sucking at a bottle of Scotch and cooing like doves. The other choirboys called them the campus couple.

Both Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate were in a foul mood after rollcall. What had them generally pissed off was that they were both just now feeling the loss of pay from a four days' suspension.

The suspension had resulted from Lieutenant Elliott "Hard-ass" Grimsley's deciding to celebrate his fortieth birthday by going out in the field for the evening and showing the station commander, Captain Drobeck, that he could be as big a prick as Captain Drobeck any old day, and that even though he had only been a lieutenant eight months, his nine years as a field sergeant had given him plenty of experience at being a prick.

Captain Drobeck on the other hand had recently tried to demonstrate he was not a prick but a prince, during a formal inspection conducted by Deputy Chief Lynch himself. Every patrol officer in Wilshire Station wore lintless blue, and polished black leather for that inspection. They were formed into three sweating platoons.

Captain Drobeck, with his plumy white mane freshly done, was resplendent in his blues, wearing all the campaign ribbons he earned in Patton's Third Army. The Wilshire policemen knew that he had only been a clerk typist in that army and not a tank commander as he hinted and they often whispered that Captain Drobeck never retreated but backspaced lots of times.

Deputy Chief Lynch always showed up for ceremonies after a twenty minute wait, just as he answered the phone after a three minute wait. Captain Drobeck fussed nervously with his trouser creases and hoped his shoes were spit shined well enough by his adjutant, Sergeant Sneed, who learned such things while a trombone player in the U. S. Army band. The captain waved to Ardella Grimsley, the wife of Lieutenant Elliott "Hardass" Grimsley. She stood on the sidewalk by the parking lot where a dozen other spectators waited with cameras.

During one of the anxious moments, Lieutenant Grimsley nodded and winked at his wife of twenty years who wore a hat, gloves and, incredibly enough, a corsage for the occasion. Ardella Grimsley beamed and blew her husband a sweeping kiss which was answered by a horrendous fart in the rear ranks and a voice saying, "And here's a kiss for you!"

"WHO DID THAT?" Lieutenant Grimsley screamed, almost literally scaring the crap out of the already nervous Captain Drobeck.

"What the hell's going on, Grimsley?" demanded the captain.

"Somebody farted!"

"Is that so terrible?"

"At my wife!"

"I don't understand you, Grimsley."

Just then, Sergeant Sneed, called Suckass Sneed by the men, came running forward from his place at the rear of the first platoon.

"I think it was a colored voice, sir," he whispered breathlessly to the captain. "I mean a black voice."

"If I may," said Officer Baxter Slate, who stood in the front rank, "a voice may have timbre, resonance, even pitch but it is singularly without color." He said it with a wide easy grin at Captain Drobeck which Lieutenant Grimsley knew was phony but which was so well done it was impossible to accuse him of insubordination.

Captain Drobeck, sure of the affection of his men, smiled benevolently and said, "Please, gentlemen, let's calm ourselves. This is perfectly silly."

"It's not silly, Captain. Somebody insulted my wife," Lieutenant Grimsley answered.

"Please, Lieutenant, please!" Captain Drobeck whispered. "The deputy chief is going to be here any minute and you're acting like a child. My god, I can't believe this."

"It was personal, sir. It was vicious!"

"All right, all right, will you settle for an apology? It was undoubtedly some young policeman's idea of a joke. Christ, most of these men here are closer to twenty than thirty. They're kids! I'll have the boy apologize and we can forget it." Captain Drobeck turned to the platoon of men and showed his toothy paternal grin and said, "Okay, fellas. Let's fess up. Who farted?"

And he laughed uproariously with the men as he waited for the culprit to reply so he could show the men how silly Hardass Grimsley was and how magnanimously he could forgive the insult to Ardella Grimsley who was one of those garrulous bitches Captain Drobeck couldn't stand in the first place.

But a funny thing happened: nobody fessed up.

"Come on now, boys," Captain Drobeck laughed, but the laughter was a little strained. "Just cop out whoever you are. Tell Lieutenant Grimsley it was an accident and it's all forgotten."

And the laughter continued but was not joined in this time by Captain Drobeck who smiled patiently and waited for the guilty party to show Lieutenant Grimsley how he, Captain Drobeck, could relate with his men.

Still, nobody fessed up.

"I just can't understand this," Captain Drobeck said. "I've given you every opportunity to show some maturity here and I think Lieutenant Grimsley deserves it. Now, by God, I'd like the young man to just apologize to the lieutenant and it'll all be forgotten. But we can't wait all day and I expect it to be done immediately." But nobody copped out.

Captain Drobeck was suddenly not laughing nor was he smiling. He was fidgeting with the crease in his uniform pants and nodding angrily. "All-right, that's the way it's going to be, huh? By god, you wanna act like kids I can treat you like kids. You want the field sergeants to start coming down on you, huh? Well that can be arranged, I assure you. Now this is your last chance. If the man that farted isn't man enough to admit it I want the man next to him to do it."

And the man next to him obediently did it. His fart was louder than the first.

"ATTEN-HUT!" screamed Captain Drobeck and the platoon snapped to attention. The captain began pacing the rear ranks like a lion, muttering viciously as he looked each man in the eye and tried to apply some detective techniques he had learned from reading books on investigation when he studied for the captain's exam. He looked for nervous twitches, telltale blinking. The trouble was he was so nervous waiting for Deputy Chief Lynch and now so angry himself that his own eyes were winking like semaphores.

After he paced the entire platoon he strode angrily to the front and whispered to Suckass Sneed, 'You find out who did it, hear me?"

"Yes sir. The first or the second fart?"

"I want that man! The first one!"

"It was a colored voice, I mean a black voice, I'm sure of it," said Sneed. "That narrows it down to six."

Just then Deputy Chief Lynch's car arrived. The incident was set aside temporarily. The inspection was conducted and, it as a great success. Captain Drobeck thanked the chief for his gracious compliments and assured him the credit was due to the loyalty of the men. Thirty minutes after the inspection, Captain Drobeck was in a cubicle in the restroom relieving his rumbling bowels from the tension of the day. He had the morning paper there and was grunting happily and smoking his pipe. Suddenly the door to the restroom burst open and someone released a terrible, vengeful fart. Before the footsteps ran back out a voice said, "Take that, you jive turkey!"

Captain Drobeck never solved the mystery. But one thing was certain: it was a colored voice.

On one of his weekly evenings out on the streets, Lieutenant Grimsley caught eight officers with their hats off, one smoking in public and three others drinking coffee which proved to have been gratuitously received. Just before calling it a night, he added to his score by bagging Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate staked out on a stop sign at 11:00 P. M. on a residential street where a car didn't pass more often than once every half hour. Both officers were slumped in their seats, heads resting against the windows. But like any veteran policemen, they could rely on years of experience to trigger signals in deep slumber when 7-A-l was mentioned among the ceaseless garbled almost unintelligible radio messages.

Legally speaking, Lieutenant Hardass Grimsley was a strict constructionist. He could not prove his suspicions that Spermwhale and Baxter were asleep, so their suspension papers said:

Officers failed to remain alert in that officers assumed a position of repose in parked police vehicle with eyelids pressed together, breathing heavily and regularly. Four days-.

In addition, through diligent police work, Lieutenant Grimsley found a bag of avocados in the trunk of the black and white, which he traced to Francis Tanaguchi, who, it turned out, accepted them gratuitously from a Japanese produce market wherein the owner was proud of Francis' being a Japanese policeman, not knowing that Francis was Mexican at heart and would use the avocados in making guacamole which he would ladle into his tacos. Spermwhale and Baxter were given an additional punishment of a divisional admonishment which read:

I hereby admonish you in that you accepted some avocados from another officer who received them from a private party, who was not, in fact, morally correct in giving the avocados without recompense. Moreover, the other officer was guilty of moral turpitude for accepting the free avocados. The acceptance of gratuities is against Department regulations and you were aware of this regulation at the time you imprudently accepted the avocados from the officer who was also aware when he imprudently accepted the avocados from the man who should have been more prudent.

Francis Tanaguchi was not given an admonishment or any other penalty because the community relations officer, Lieutenant Gay, was trying to make public relations inroads with the Oriental community by putting Officer Tanaguchi up as a model policeman. He persuaded Captain Drobeck not to let Lieutenant Grimsley reprimand Francis officially. Lieutenant Grimsley acceded to the decision since it came from the station captain but he was frustrated because there wasn't something he could get on the old Japanese who gave Francis the avocados. He asked the vice squad to keep an eye on the market in case the old man should sell beer to minors. And he certainly put Lieutenant Gay and Francis on his list.

But if Lieutenant Gay, Francis Tanaguchi and the old Japanese were on Lieutenant Grimsley's list, Lieutenant Grimsley was certainly on Spermwhale Whalen's list.

"His dance card's all filled up," Spermwhale vowed at choir practice when the whole night had been spent on plotting revenge.

"I get the first waltz," said Francis Tanaguchi, who sat in the dark on a blanket under a tree.

The choirboys began various subtle attacks on Lieutenant Grimsley which ultimately ended up in his transfer from Wilshire Station because according to the station captain he was getting too chummy with certain officers.

The officers he was apparently getting so chummy with were two of the MacArthur Park choirboys, namely Spermwhale Whalen and Baxter Slate, who when they were finished with him could actually walk into Lieutenant Grimsley's office and muss up his lint covered, thinning hair and say things like, "How about a day off tomorrow, Hardass?" When no one else under the rank of lieutenant ever dared to address him even by his first name, Elliott.

This remarkable familiarity was accomplished by some groundwork supplied by Francis Tanaguchi which included shimming the door of the lieutenant's private car and putting three Mac Arthur ducks in the back seat.