The Choirboys (36 page)

"Niles! Slate!" Roscoe exclaimed as his fellow choirboys jumped on Pete Zoony to keep something terrible from happening which could get them all in trouble.

"You cocksucker!" shouted the outraged Pete Zoony, desperate to play catchup with Roscoe.

"Me, cocksucker? Me, cocksucker? You got a lotta guts, ya fag!" said Roscoe Rules.

It took a full five minutes to get Pete Zoony calmed down and Roscoe filled in on the prank that backfired. Finally the glassy eyed Pete Zoony smiled tightly and said, "No hard feelings, Rules," and swung a roundhouse left which caught Roscoe on the right cheekbone and dumped him into a toilet stall, wherein both choirboys switched their attack to the cursing, raging Roscoe Rules who might have shot Pete Zoony to death were it not for Sam Niles keeping a wristlock on his gun hand.

The toilet stakeout was called off for the night then and there. Sam Niles would not release his wristlock on Roscoe until Baxter Slate had taken Pete Zoony out of the rest room to the parking lot in the rear. They found a pay phone and had Pete's partner pick them all up to rendezvous with Scuz and Harold Bloomguard.

When Spermwhale Whalen heard about the incident later that night at choir practice, he shook his head and said, "Someone's always punchin Roscoe Rules. Kid, you oughtta wear a catcher's mask."

"Greetings and hallucinations!" cried frightened Harold Bloomguard to the first street whore he spotted after cruising the streets for twenty minutes.

"Say what?" the tawny black girl said as she stopped on the sidewalk and cautiously approached the Charger which was parked under the streetlight in the red zone at Pico and Western.

She wore mint green pants, skin tight to the ankles where they flared out over patent green clogs. Her stomach was bare and she wore a green halter top which tied at the neck. Harold was sure he had seen her several times before but Scuz had assured him that the girls have a difficult time recognizing uniform cops when they see them in plainclothes. To whores, as to most people, the patrol cop is a badge and blue suit and little more.

"Hello hello!" said Harold Bloomguard, turning off his headlights and bravado as the girl approached the car, walking with the traffic so that customers could pull to the curb without making an illegal U-turn that might draw a police car.

"Well, hi there, baby," smiled the whore when she saw how "good" Harold looked.

But just then a set of headlights behind them flashed a high beam and a black-and-white pulled up beside him, preparing to write a parking ticket, thus doing its bit to combat prostitution. It was Spencer Van Moot and Father Willie.

"Okay, sir," Spencer said as the radio car double parked. "Let's."

And then Spencer found himself looking into the tense, bespectacled face of his fellow choirboy, Harold Bloomguard, whom he knew was on temporary vice loan.

"Yes, Officer?" Harold Bloomguard winked.

Father Willie, thinking faster than his partner, said loud enough for the whore to hear, "Partner! We just got a hot call!" and he dropped the car into low.

"You're in a red zone, buster!" yelled Spencer Van Moot as Father Willie pulled out. "Don't be here when I come back!"

"Now don't be scared, honey," said the girl as the radio car sped away. "They jist love to scare off our tricks. Got nothin else to do, jist hassle people."

"And they're never around when you need them," Harold added.

"Tha's right."

Then the girl looked up as a white Lincoln pulled in behind Harold and a big suntanned man waved to the girl. She looked him over but opened Harold's door and got inside.

"Motherfucker looks like a cop to me," she said. "They borry these big shiny cars and try to fool us sometimes."

"Cop?" cried Harold Bloomguard, trying his hand at acting now that the attractive, sweet smelling whore was sitting next to him, looking much less exotic and threatening.

"Now, you jist calm down, honey. Ain't no cause to git scared."

"Cop?" repeated Harold Bloomguard, speaking in dry monosyllables, trying to remember the good opening lines Scuz had fed him as he drove east on Pico.

The whore pretended to be fixing her lipstick in the rear-view mirror but was actually watching for a vice car.

"Now jist calm right down. Ain't no worry about cops. Those two told you bout the parkin ticket? I got a friend pays them off. Fact he pays off all the black and whites and all the vice in this district for me. So see, we kin jist have us a nice party and don't have to worry bout nothin."

"Party?" Harold wanted a more explicit word for a better case. His hands were sweating and slipping on the steering wheel.

"Party. You know? Love. Half and half. French. Whatever you wants."

"Oh yeah, I want!" Harold turned south on Oxford, hoping she would hurry and mention the money, too nervous to appreciate her billowy breasts as she dabbed at her lipstick and making sure there was no vice car slipping behind them with lights out.

"You got tweiny-five dollars, sweetie?"

"Sure."

"That's the tariff. And it's cheap for all you get." Then Harold turned west on Fourteenth Street and the girl said to turn left on Western but Harold turned right. "Hey!" she said suspiciously but Harold pressed the accelerator to the floor, sped north for half a block, screeched across the southbound traffic lanes and skidded into the market parking lot while the whore yelled, "Gud-damn!" and bounced around in the car. Then Harold saw Scuz in the vice car sitting in the dark at the rear of the market. Only then did he feel heady and elated.

He pulled off his glasses, the triumphant unmasking of an undercover man, and said, "You're under arrest!"

"Oh shit," she replied.

Then for effect Harold put the glasses back on, skidded to a stop beside Scuz, pulled them off again and said, "You're under arrest, young lady!"

"You already said that. I got ears, stupid," said the whore. Scuz shuffled around the car and opened the door for the whore as Harold decided he should show her his badge.

"Don't bother, Harold. She knows who you are-now. I'll baby-sit Boring here. We're old pals. You go out and see you can get another one."

The girl stalked gloomily to the back door of the vice car and said, "Sergeant, where'd you get this little devil? He don't look nothin like a cop."

"See? See, Harold?" grinned Scuz, puffing happily on his cigar, delighted with the professional accolade.

"You're so young," Harold said to the girl as she slid across the seat of Scuz's car. Harold noticed her smooth brown legs for the first time and her pretty mouth and shapely natural hairdo.

"She's even younger than you, kid," Scuz said, closing the door and getting in the front seat where he could blow cigar smoke out the window and not suffocate the whore. "See you can get us another one that easy, Harold."

"You're so young and pretty," said the saddened choirboy. "How'd you get started in this business?"

"Oh no!" the whore cried, slumping back in the seat, appealing to Scuz.

"Harold, just go on back out, see you can get another one," Scuz said, "Let Bonnie here rest her sore feet."

Harold Bloomguard emptied his gas tank driving and made himself dizzy circling around and around the block looking for another whore so Sergeant Dominic Scuzzi could write a good progress report for that psycho of a captain, while a sullen young whore named Bonnie Benson got sick from the air befouled by Dominic Scuzzi's ten cent cigar.

While this was happening Sam Niles and Baxter Slate were sitting in a cozy dark cocktail lounge much farther north on Western Avenue where there was obviously little chance for a vice arrest but lots of chances for free drinks which the management gladly supplied Pete Zoony and his fellow vice cops.

Pete sat in the booth with Baxter and Sam and sipped a Scotch on the rocks, using the ice to rub on the bruise which Roscoe Rules had put on his jawbone before he put a much larger one on Roscoe.

Finally Pete said, "Mind if my partner and me disappear for a while? We gotta check out an answering service supposed to be taking call girl action. More than one or two guys'd look suspicious. Be back in an hour. We'll raise Scuz on the radio and tell him where you are, so either he'll pick you up or we will. Meantime, drink all you want and geta beef dip, they're pretty good. It's all on the house."

"Sure, Pete," Baxter said. After the vice cop left, Sam said, "Wonder how big her tits are? Wish she had a couple friends."

Baxter Slate downed his bourbon and ordered a double, "just as well drink like a vice cop," he grinned as they sat on tufted seats and felt fortunate to be out of the toilet. "Guess you might say we had a fruitless night."

"That sounds like something Harold would say," Sam yawned, starting to look bored. "Just like everything else. It'll start to be a drag."

"What?"

"Vice work, Jesus, what a way to make a living."

"Did you feel embarrassed, like we were peeping toms or something?"

"Christ, yes. You see enough shit on the streets without going to rest rooms to look for more."

And then Baxter, who was getting a glow from the bourbon, said, "There're worse jobs than vice."

"What for instance?"

"Juvenile."

"Oh yeah. I always wondered what made you leave so soon."

"Just didn't like it," Baxter said, draining his glass and signaling to the waitress.

She looked even more bored than Sam Niles as she padded across the carpet in a silly tight costume which was supposed to push her breasts up and out and make her look like a sexy tavern wench instead of what she was: a blousy divorcee with three young children who were running wild because she worked nights and wasn't supervising them.

"Don't think I'd like Juvenile either," Sam Niles said, ordering a double Scotch. "Bad enough working with adults without taking crap from bubblegummers."

"You handle some dangerous little criminals over and over again and you can't get them off the streets because of their tender age. Despite the fact that they're more predatory and lack an adult's inhibitions. But I could live with that. It was the other things that bothered me. The children as victims."

"Can't let it bother you," Sam Niles said as he drained his glass. "Must water their drinks here. Oh well, the price is right." And he was ready to signal for another round.

"You know, you expect certain dreadful cases," Baxter continued, "like the child molester who loved to see little girls tied up and screaming. Or the four year old I saw on my first day in court when her mother's boyfriend was brought in and she started crying and a policewoman said to me, 'He stuck it in one day and gave her gonorrhea.'"

Sam Niles wished a couple of unattached girls would come in and end Baxter's stories.

"What I wasn't prepared for were the other things." Baxter's speech was beginning to slur as he stared at the glass, for the first time failing to smile and thank the waitress who put a fresh one in front of him. "You should see what the generic term 'unfit home' can mean. The broken toilet so full of human excrement that it's slopping over the top. And a kitten running through the crap and then up onto the table and across the dirty dishes. Brown footprints on the dishes which won't even be washed."

"Can't we change the subject? I've literally smelled enough shit for one night."

"And a boy who's a man at nine years of age. And wants to bathe his filthy little brothers and sisters and tries to, except that he accidentally scalds the infant to death."

"Baxter."

"And a simple thing like a bike theft," Baxter Slate continued, looking Sam Niles in the eyes now. "Do you know how sad a bike theft can be when there's only one broken down bike in a family of eight children?"

"That kind of thing doesn't phase me, Baxter, you know that?" Sana Niles said angrily, and his speech was thick and boozy. "I have only two words of advice for guys like you and Harold Bloomguard. Change jobs. If you can't face the fact that the world is a garbage dump, you'll jump off the City Hall Tower. Christ, when I was a kid we never had any bikes, broken or not. My brother and I made a tether ball out of a bag of rags and I tied it to a street sign. That's the only toy I remember. Baxter, you can't save the world."

"But you see, Sam, I thought I could!" Baxter said, spitting some bourbon on his velvet shirt as he drank excitedly. "I thought it was possible to save the world-the world of the one specific child I was dealing with. Sometimes I would work as hard as I could to get a kid out of his environment and into a foster home. And he would run back to his degradation. Once handled a case of child abuse at a county leased foster home where I'd placed a little child. She'd been beaten up by the foster mother and I had the job of arresting the foster mother and taking the child out of the very home I had placed her in."

"So what?"

"The child had marks on her stomach. Strange cuts, almost healed. She was only three years old, Sam, and she wouldn't talk to me. She got hysterical around policewomen too. Finally I was the one to find out what the marks were. They were letters: L. D. B., which turned out to be the initials of an old boyfriend of the foster mother. She put them on the little girl with a paring knife. I'd placed the kid in that foster home to save the world of that one specific child. I was the worst Juvenile officer the department's ever had!"