The Choirboys (40 page)

"I see you will soon be cured of that which you believe to be cancer in your breast," the Gypsy said in Spanish to the undercover policewoman. "And this thing which is not a cancer, but an evil visitation, will leave your body. And you will feel twenty years old again and enjoy your man in bed as you have never enjoyed him before. And your luck will change. Your husband will find a better job that will pay as much as twelve thousand dollars a year. All this will happen if you keep the charm I am going to give you and if you faithfully say the words I am going to teach you and if you donate three hundred dollars to me which I shall use to support the orphans of my native land."

But instead of crossing the Gypsy's palm with three hundred scoots, Nena Santos crossed the Gypsy's wrists with sixteen bucks worth of steel, and Margarita Palmara was busted.

Harold Bloomguard and Sam Niles were only two of the vice cops detailed to the stakeout across the street, and after getting the signal from Nena Santos, they went inside to meet the Gypsy and drive her to jail where she would be booked and released on bail that afternoon. Ultimately she was made to come to court and pay a fine of 150 dollars before she moved to El Monte, California, where she was able to make fourteen thousand dollars telling fortunes before being arrested again. It kept her and her children in fine style even after an angry judge then fined her 250 dollars to teach her a lesson.

But before she was taken from the house that day she left a curse or two behind.

Harold Bloomguard, along with Sergeant Scuzzi, Sam Niles and Baxter Slate, was roaming around the Gypsy's chicken coop waiting for the woman to make arrangements with a neighbor to take care of the children until she could bail out. In a little bedroom of the chicken coop the officers found a frightened seven year old Gypsy girl in a communion dress.

She was a husky child, with a broad peasant face and black hair which grew too far down her forehead. Her skin was so dark it made the antique Communion dress look marshmallow white to Harold Bloomguard.

"Como se llama?" Harold Bloomguard asked with an atrocious accent which embarrassed Sam Niles and made him snort in disgust.

In fact every time Harold made a good natured attempt to speak Spanish to people it embarrassed Sam Niles who said he knew enough Spanish to keep his mouth shut by not trying to speak it.

Sam argued with Harold Bloomguard later when Harold claimed the homely little girl was beautiful and that her dress was charming, when Sam could see it was a hand-me-down and almost gray from so many washings. Sam said that she was nothing but an ugly little thief who would grow up to be an ugly big thief like her mother.

As they were leaving the house the angry Gypsy turned a sagging chamois face to the gathering of vice cops and said in English, "You believe I not have power? That I cheat people? Very well then. I prove you are wrong. I can cure. I can make sick. You!" And the golden bracelets clanged as she pointed a scrawny finger at Harold Bloomguard. "You shall get the sickness!"

It was a terrified and bleary eyed Harold Bloomguard who was in the district attorney's office the next day nervously blowing spit bubbles as he filed a complaint against the Gypsy for grand theft. He was absolutely certain that the prosecution of the Gypsy would seal his fate.

It was actually weeks before Harold stopped asking other choirboys to feel his breasts for suspicious lumps he knew lurked beneath the flesh. He only desisted when one night at choir practice Spermwhale Whalen agreed to feel the left one and got Harold in a headlock and stroked his tiny nipple lasciviously and said, "Harold, this's givin me a blue veiner!" And threw Harold down on the grass, dropping on top of him, making the little choirboy scream for help. After that Harold suffered in silence and never asked anyone to feel his breasts.

Alexander Blaney didn't know he was going to be an admitted homosexual and arrested at age eighteen and a half, when at the age of fourteen he started noticing the cruel looking men with pasty jailhouse complexions who would stare at him in the park rest rooms. But he became aware early on that MacArthur Park was more than a place for old men to play at lawn bowling or for immigrants to kick a soccer ball or city dwellers to sit on the grass and picnic, throwing crumbs to the ubiquitous ducks in the large pond.

Alexander saw and understood the eye signals, the furtive smiles, the men who met and paired off to disappear in the bushes at night or to meet and join inside the rest room where vice officers often arrested them and sometimes got in bloody fights before the eyes of the boy.

The lad was once reading a book on the grass by a park rest room when he was startled by the noise inside and saw a huge ex-convict they called The Hippo crashing through the door, beaten to a bloody pulp by a cursing, burly vice cop whose lip was split and hanging loose and who was playing catchup on The Hippo with a sixteen ounce sap.

Alexander Blaney saw far more than that in the same park rest room. He once saw a young man masturbating at a urinal and watched in fascination until the young man stepped away and ejaculated against the dirty tile wall between the urinal and toilets only to have a white haired man with flesh like onionskin and arms like pencils get up off the toilet and wipe the semen off the wall with his fingers and put it in his mouth. He smiled at Alexander Blaney and sickened the boy.

And it was about that time that Alexander Blaney became known to Rampart Juvenile officers. The boy would come in at least once a month to report a lurid sex act he had observed in MacArthur Park. Once he claimed to have seen a big man sitting on the toilet with his trousers at his ankles stuffing his penis in his own rectum. And then there was the hermaphrodite who found Alexander Blaney lying-on the grass composing madrigals to his music teacher. Alexander was fifteen and the busty hermaphrodite showed the boy her undeveloped penis and said she liked women not men, having been given male hormone shots since birth. And when darkness fell proved it was a lie by attempting to rape Alexander.

And all of the lad's stories were more or less taken with a grain of salt until at sixteen he finally came to the Juvenile sergeant and said that a handsome young man had dragged him away into the bushes and made Alexander Blaney orally copulate him and in turn forcibly performed the same act on Alexander. When he was finished with his account, the Juvenile sergeant said, "Is this the first time, Alexander?"

And Alexander Blaney cried and said yes and he wanted the police to arrest the young man but didn't know his name. The Juvenile sergeant bought the boy an ice cream bar and walked him to the door and told Alexander he wanted to talk to his parents.

When the boy was gone the sergeant said, "Well, Alexander finally turned himself out. We won't be seeing him anymore." And the sergeant was right. Alexander Blaney came out of the closet at that time and was promptly beaten bloody by a high school friend whom he made the mistake of propositioning and who had hitherto liked and befriended him.

Alexander, who had always been a sensitive, nervous lad, then began getting even thinner than usual and suffered from insomnia as well as weight loss and spent many tearful evenings with his mother and father saying over and over, "But I don't know why I'm gay, I just am."

His mother wept and his father pleaded with him not to be what he could not help being. Finally, after many homosexual encounters, most of them in MacArthur Park, which terrified, excited, degraded and confused the boy, he was arrested by a Rampart Division vice officer.

The vice officer was to Alexander Blaney not unlike the first young man whom he had reported to the police for dragging him unwillingly into the bushes. The vice officer was tall and clean, and Alexander, not knowing he was a vice officer, was unable to control the tremble in his voice when their eyes met. They sat not far apart on the grass where Alexander tossed popcorn to the ducks, some of which he actually knew one from the other.

But the vice officer was not anxious to work fruits and wanted Alexander Blaney to get on with an offer so he could bust him and go to a favorite bar to shoot snooker for the remainder of his tour of duty.

Therefore when Alexander said shyly, "I don't meet too many people here," the vice cop replied, "Do you have something in mind or not?"

And Alexander, startled by the young man's boldness, almost decided to say, "No, no I have nothing in mind," but he was afraid to lose the young man who looked so clean and decent.

Alexander said, "Well, I thought we might go to a movie and get to know each other."

The vice cop sighed impatiently and said, "Look, do you suck or not?"

Alexander felt like crying because this one would be no better than most and probably even more cruel than some. Alexander arrogantly replied, "Yes, I'll do that. If that's all you want. I guess I can do that all right."

The vice officer whistled for his partner who was hiding behind the trees and showed his badge to Alexander Blaney and looked disgusted when the boy lowered his head to weep. The vice cop later wrote in his arrest report: "Defendant stated: 'I'll suck you or do anything you want. I guess I can do that all right.'"

Alexander pled guilty to a lesser misdemeanor after the city attorney dropped the lewd conduct violation in the plea bargaining session, and Alexander Blaney had a police record. But the thing which he could not forget, and which made him burn with humiliation, was that the vice cop didn't seem to care one way or the other what happened to him. If he had hated homosexuals and beaten him up Alexander would have found it more tolerable. It's just that he was nothing to the policeman, and even in court the vice officer didn't seem to recognize him and just shrugged when the city attorney asked him if he had any objection to Alexander's lawyer getting the charge reduced and pleading him guilty.

The tour on vice for the three choirboys ended on an unsuccessful note in that a call girl they had been staking out never took the bait which was a phone call from Baxter Slate who was given a duke-in name of Gaylord Bottomley. A snitch said Bottomley was a savings and loan executive who had introduced certain circumspect friends to the exotic call girl.

The snitch was a paid confidential informant who belonged to Pete Zoony and the moustachioed vice cop jealously guarded his informant's identity. Real policemen, unlike movie cops, actually cherish and protect a good informant as they would a sibling. Informants are people to be bribed, threatened, cajoled, but above all protected. It was not uncommon for a policeman to guard the identity of a good snitch even from a partner he rode with nightly.

As Pete Zoony said, "I never gave a snitch's righteous name since I been on the job. Once we ripped off some dopers and some stupid cop calls me on the radio and gives the snitch's name right over the air! But we always used a code name and he didn't get a rat jacket behind it. Nobody knows my snitch's name, not even my lieutenant. Nobody."

Pete's informant told them about Gina Summers who lived in a thousand-a-month apartment near Wilshire Boulevard, Allegedly she was a specialist in applying just the required amount of imaginative punishment to genteel but eager customers who paid from fifty to five hundred dollars for her unique services.

Sam and Baxter had watched one man and sometimes two a night come and go and often saw the voluptuous brunette herself leaving and entering the apartment. None of the vice cops had been able to operate her successfully. The informant had told them that the vivacious girl had a chamber of horrors in her bedroom closet which included ancient thumbscrews, brands, scourges and other collector's items. Actually most were seldom needed. Customers could usually be satisfied by less painful acts of degradation such as a urine shower. And often an ordinary spanking with a leather belt would do them just fine.

Because she was such an extraordinary hooker the vice cops naturally wanted to arrest her badly but the hours of stakeouts were to no avail.

On a sultry August night Baxter Slate watched through binoculars as she undressed before an open window on the sixth floor of her apartment house, and said to Sam, "If that bitch weren't a brunette she'd remind me a lot of a nude dancer I used to know."

"Yeah?" Sam answered, totally bored with the stakeout and his two weeks of vice duty. "The other one that good looking?"

"Oh, I guess they don't exactly look alike. But they're both sisters at heart."

Sam Niles never bothered to ask Baxter to explain the allusion. He was just glad it was their last night on vice and that the choir practice they had planned should be a memorable one.

The choir practice which celebrated the return of the three choirboys from the tour of vice squad duty was bound to be a memorable one. After all Roscoe Rules outdid himself when he scrounged fifteen bottles of booze from the liquor stores of Wilshire Division in a single night.

"I tell you the captain's throwing a big big party, godarnnit," he informed some of the more reluctant proprietors who were offering only one fifth to Roscoe, wearing his black gloves, standing tall and menacing.

And what Roscoe couldn't scrounge with intimidation Spencer Van Moot obtained by his incredible rapport with the merchants on his beat. They said they couldn't wait for his retirement from the police department when he would open a retail store on the Miracle Mile and implement his merchandizing genius for the mutual benefit of all.

Therefore there was enough liquor, wine and beer to kill them all, and trays of foil covered barbecue, salami, pastrami, roast beef and turkey, not to mention German potato salad, bean salad, sourdough rolls and condiments.