So here I was, all set for a sergeancy after only two years on the force. None of the other three men who took the exam with me was even close to my score. But what happened, I got caught with the new ethnic policy. Joe Persons, a nice enough guy, but a semiliterate near-moron, who had failed the exam for five years in a row, finally made a minimum passing score of 75. So the Board made him a sergeant instead of me because he was black. I was bitter, of course, but I was still willing to live with the decision and wait another year. Joe had been on the Florence City force for ten years, and if you took seniority into account, why not let him have it? I could afford to wait another year. But what happened was incredible. The chief, a sharp cracker from Bainbridge, Georgia, called me in and told me that I would be assigned to Sergeant Persons full-time to do his paperwork for him. I got hot about it, and quit then and there, without taking the time to think the matter out. What the chief was doing, in a tacit way, was making it up to me. In other words, the chief hadn’t liked the Board’s decision to make Joe Persons a sergeant instead of me any more than I had. By giving me the opportunity to do the sergeant’s actual work, which Persons was incapable of handling, he was telling me that the next vacancy was as good as mine, and laying the groundwork to get rid of Sergeant Persons for inefficiency at the same time.
I figured all this out later, but by that time it was too late. I had resigned, and I was too proud to go back and apologize to the chief after some of the angry things I had said to him.
To shorten the story, although it still makes me sore to think about the raw deal I was handed in Florence City, I came down to Miami and landed a job with National Security as a senior security officer. In fact, they could hardly hire me quickly enough. National has offices in every major city in the United States, and someday — in a much shorter period than it would have taken me to become the chief of police in Florence City — I’ll be the director of one of these offices. Most of the security officers that National employs are ex-cops, retired detectives usually, but none of them can write very well. They have to dictate their reports, which are typed later by the girls in the pool. If any of these reports ever got out cold, without being edited and rewritten, we would lose the business of the department store industry receiving that report in five minutes flat. That is what I do: I put these field reports into some semblance of readability. My boss, The Colonel, likes the way I write, and often picks up phrases from my reports. Once, when I wrote to an operator in Jacksonville about a missing housewife, I told him to “exhaust all resources.” For about a month after that, The Colonel was ending all of his phone conversations with, “Exhaust all resources, exhaust all resources.”
So down at National Security, I am a fair-haired boy. Four years ago I started at $10,000, and now I’m making $15,000. I can also tell, now, from the meetings that they have been asking me to sit in on lately, “just to listen,” The Colonel said, that they are grooming me for a much better job than I have already.
If this were a report for National Security I would consider this background information as much too sketchy, and I would bounce it back to the operator. But this isn’t a report, it’s a record, and a record is handy to keep in my lockbox at the bank.
Who knows? I might need it someday. In Florida, the guilty party who spills everything to the State’s Attorney first gets immunity...
We were on the second round of martinis when we started to talk about picking up women. Hank, being the acknowledged authority on this subject, threw out a good question. “Where, in Miami,” Hank said, “is the easiest place to pick up some strange? I’m not saying the best, I’m talking about the easiest place.”
“Big Daddy’s,” Eddie said.
I didn’t say so, but I agreed with Eddie in my mind. There are Big Daddy’s lounges all over Miami. Billboards all around Dade County show a picture of a guy and a girl sitting close together at a bar, right next to the bearded photo of Big Daddy himself, with a caption beneath the picture in lower-case Art type: Big Daddy’s — where you’re never alone... The message is clear enough. Any man who can’t score in a Big Daddy’s lounge has got a major hang-up of some kind.
“No,” Hank said, pursing his lips. “I admit you can pick up a woman in Big Daddy’s, but you don’t always score. Right? In fact, you might pick up a loser, lay out five bucks or so in drinks, and then find her missing when you come back from taking a piss.”
This was true enough; it had happened to me once, although I had never mentioned it to anyone.
“Think, now,” Hank said. “Give me one surefire place to pick up a woman, where you’ll score, I’ll say, at least nine times out of ten.”
“Bullshit,” Don said. “Nobody scores nine times out of ten, including you, Hank.”
“I never said I did,” Hank said. “But I know of one place where you can score nine times out of ten. Any one of us at this table.”
“Let’s go,” I said, leaping to my feet.
They all laughed.
“Sit down, Fuzz,” Hank said. “Just because there is such a place, it doesn’t mean you’ll want to go. Come on, you guys — think.”
“Is this a trick question?” Eddie said.
“No,” Hank said, without smiling, “it’s legitimate. And I’m not talking about call girls either, that is, if there’re any left in Miami.”
“Coconut Grove is pretty good,” Eddie said.
“The Grove’s always good,” Hank agreed, “but it’s not a single place, it’s a group of different places. Well, I’m going to tell you anyway, so I’ll spare you the suspense. The easiest place to pick up a fast lay in Miami is at the VD clinic.”
We all laughed.
“You’re full of it, Hank,” Don said. “A girl who’s just picked up the clap is going to be turned off men and sex for a long time.”
“That’s what I would have thought,” Hank said. “But apparently it doesn’t work that way. It was in the Herald the other day. The health official at the clinic was bitching about it. I don’t remember his name, but I cut out the piece and I’ve got it up in my apartment. He said that most of the girls at the clinic are from sixteen to twenty-two, and the guys and girls get together in the waiting room to exchange addresses and phone numbers because they know they’re safe. They’ve all been treated recently, so they know there’s no danger of catching anything. Anyway, according to the Herald, they’ve brought in a psychologist to study the problem. The health official wants to put in separate waiting rooms to keep the men and women apart.”
“Would you pick up a girl in a VD clinic?” Don asked Hank.
Hank laughed. “Not unless I was pretty damned hard up, I wouldn’t. Okay. I’ll show you guys the clipping later. Here’s a tougher question. Where’s the hardest place in Miami to pick up a woman?”