No fee. But could I kick? I felt the pressure of Irene’s thigh again, and I decided, why hell, no, I couldn’t kick.
Big Talk
by Kris Neville
Alf was no psychiatrist, but it was easy to figure out a guy who was always boasting about all the women in his life.
When Gil Bratcher, the photographer, first came on the night shift, he told Alt Sweeney, the reporter, “We’ll get along all right, Sweeney. fust don’t go around covering flophouse cuttings. I hate them scabby winos. And stay out of fag joints. I hate them swishes even worse than the bottle babies. They make me sick in the gut.” On each shift, from his first one four nights ago, he usurped the wheel of the radio car and clung to it with his huge, meaty hands until morning. “I’ll tell ’em where they can stuff it if they think I’ll stay on this damned night shift,” he said.
The city — lying beyond the car like a smoked-out cigar butt, stale and dead — was wholly without compassion. Only in tomorrow’s headlines would the crimes and accidents and domestic tragedies of the night assume color and depth and the breath of life.
As if in answer to some obscure problem he had been silently considering, Gil announced emphatically, “They ought to put all them pansies and winos on an island out in the Pacific somewhere, and then drop one of them hydrogen bombs on ’em. Blast their damned guts halfway across the ocean.”
The emotionless voices from the police radio murmured above the monotonous rhythm of the motor.
“You agree?” Gil demanded.
Alf Sweeney spat through the window. “I thought you were going to get off the night shift,” he said.
“I’ll get off it. Give me time.”
Alf shrugged heavily. “I’ve been on it for two years.”
The collar of the white shirt Gil had worn for three shifts was unbuttoned beneath his crudely knotted tie. Above damp lips, his tiny eyes were heavy. During conversations, he scrutinized defiantly the texture of the speaker’s skin, the movement of the speaker’s lips, the pulsing of the breath in the speaker’s nostrils. When he entered unfamiliar buildings, his dark eyes darted about suspiciously, marking out avenues of retreat in the event he were set upon by superior force.
When the “woman screaming” call came over the radio, the photographer grunted, “Want it?” His tone was surly. His face was bloated from lack of sleep.
Alf, the reporter, was watching the darkened buildings flow past from shadows and silence into shadows and silence. He wore a green sports jacket over a solid blue sports shirt. On his bony, loose-jointed frame, the jacket seemed no better than a hand-me-down from an elder brother, and the pencil and yellow copy paper that bulged from the pocket gave his whole body an appearance of desolation and futility. His sensitive, unhandsome face was colorless but for the heavy black of his eyes and beard and eyebrows. Without looking around, he said, “Not one a week are copy.”
Gil bent forward slightly. “You want it?”
Alf blinked myopically. “Let it go.”
“It’s up to you,” Gil said. “Whatever you want to do.”
“Go over there if you want to.”
“You give the orders. What do you want to do?”
“Let it go, go over there,” Alf said. “I don’t care.”
“Okay,” Gil said disgustedly. “Let it go.”
“Not on my account,” Alf said, still watching, beyond his reach, the city slide past the car. “It’s over on Temple, that’s all. It’d be gone anyway.”
“You give the orders.”
“Let it go, then.”
The car moved two blocks.
“You want me to drive now?” Alf asked.
“I’m all right,” Gil said.
Calls were coming in on the radio with increasing frequency. There was a prowler at 3971 Highland; a fight outside a Hill Street bar; a drunk down at 6th and Manton; a minor traffic accident on La Brea. Car 302 out for coffee.
“I thought you might be tired,” Alf said.
Wearily, Gil said, “I’m all right.”
“Small stuff tonight.”
“Bars close in a little while. Maybe we’ll have some bloody damned traffics.”
There was a drunk in a car at Wilshire and Burlington; there was a missing child, seven years old, blue eyes, brown hair, dressed in a pink frock, last seen in the Vermont area; there was a suspect number three who had a felony record but who was not presently wanted; there was a speeder heading south on Santa Monica Boulevard pursued by car 97. There was a suspect number one: no record, no want.
The car telephone began its muted whirr.
Alf’s skinny neck craned alertly. He unhooked the instrument. “Yes?... Yes, uh-huh. Right away, right... Yeah, okay, I will.” He returned the receiver to its prongs. “Mulvey Hospital, Gil.”
Gil made a U-turn on the deserted street and headed back downtown.
“Some woman just been beat up,” Alf said.
“That was the Temple Street call a while ago,” Gil said. “I told you we should’ve gone over.”
Alf spat a shred of tobacco off his tongue.
“She won’t want her picture in the paper,” Gil said, and laughed softly to himself. “Motel row. Maybe if she acts right, I’ll see to it that she don’t get any publicity.”
Alf said nothing.
“They don’t mind you asking. Take it from me; they don’t mind.” The photographer’s tone was aggressive to forestall contradiction. He made moist, kissing sounds. “Maybe this one’s one of them bobby-soxers. Hot stuff. I covered a motel row back in ’49. Regular little tiger. The guy with her was wanted on the Bronson stick-up. She played ball, so I played ball.”
“The Old Man don’t go for that,” Alf said.
Gil, mouth open, snorted heavily. “What the hell? What’s one picture more or less?”
To the left, the bare bones of a projected apartment house cast an insubstantial shadow.
“You got a wife,” Alf said quietly.
Gil chuckled confidentially. “What she don’t know won’t hurt her.” He tilted his head and winked at the reporter. “I keep Loreen happy, see? I keep Loreen real happy.”
Alf shrugged and lit a cigarette. The skeleton of an incompleted speedway — as yet connected to nothing and no more than a scratch on the surface of the land — lay across the site of the old Bank of America building.
“The Times crew’s over in the Valley,” Gil said. “The News bunch is at the train wreck. We’ll be the only ones on this one. Yep, I don’t think she’ll want her picture in the paper.”
Alf blew smoke at the windshield. “The Old Man’ll be sore as hell if the other car didn’t shoot the train.”
Gil ran a light at 8th. “You worry too much.”
“Julian’s probably out drunk,” Alf said. “They said he hasn’t phoned in for over an hour.”
“He’s at the wreck, for God’s sake. Don’t worry — it’s his headache.” He took his hands off the wheel long enough to dismiss Julian with a gesture of disgust. “Man, you’re eager. All the time, eager. I could have got that leaper story last night in five minutes. What’d you want to hang around so damned long for?”
“I had to wait for the medical examiner,” Alf said.
Gil laughed softly, deep in his throat. “The cop really come boiling back when I lit that firecracker right behind him, didn’t he? You see him?” He patted the wheel and snorted in amusement. “Purple, by God. He was so mad he nearly busted a gut. What the hell could he do? He think he could run in a newspaperman? Huh?” He waited for approval and appreciation.
“Take it easy, Gil,” Alf said.
Gil gunned the motor for a second and then eased off the accelerator. “This slow enough for you, Alf?” he said when they had gone another block. “You’re the boss.” The car was going fifteen miles an hour.