Willie was one of the smallest choirboys, along with Francis Tanaguchi and Harold Bloomguard, under five feet nine inches tall. Willie in fact had stretched to make five feet eight and was almost disqualified when he took his first police physical. He was a devoutly religious young man, raised as a Baptist, converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses when he married Geneva Smythe, his high school sweetheart. Willie was now twenty-four and Geneva twenty-five. She, like Willie, was short and chubby. She took Watchtower magazines door to door three times a week. Willie accompanied her on his days off.
Spencer Van Moot loved him as a partner because Willie thought it was crooked to accept gifts or wholesale prices from retail stores, thereby leaving Spencer a double share of everything he could promote. The only concession Willie would make was a nightly free meal in one of Spencer Van Moot’s gourmet restaurants.
After being practically dragged to the first choir practice by Spencer, Willie Wright discovered something totally extraordinary: that choir practice was fun, more fun in fact than anything he had ever done in his young life. He was accepted by the other choirboys almost from the start because he entertained them by preaching squeaky sermons. He told them how wrong it was to drink and lust after the two camp followers, Ora Lee Tingle and Carolina Moon, who often turned up at choir practice. But then when drunk he turned into an evil eyed little mustang.
Harold Bloomguard dubbed him official chaplain of the MacArthur Park choirboys. He was thereafter known as The Padre, Father Willie Wright.
The night that Father Willie Wright personally called for choir practice was the night he found the brother in the basement. It had begun much like every other night, with Spencer Van Moot driving the radio car madly to all of his various stops before the stores closed. First he had to make three cigarette stops where he picked up two packs of cigarettes for each of them, which Father Willie didn’t use. Father Willie suspected quite rightly that Spencer wholesaled the cigarettes to his neighbors.
And then there was the dairy stop where Spencer got his daily allotment of buttermilk and yogurt, one quart for each partner, which Willie likewise refused. Each night at 10:00 P.M. the manager walked swiftly to his car under the protective beam of Spencer’s spotlight. Then there were other stops, if he could get them in, at various men’s shops on Wilshire Boulevard where Spencer and salesmen tossed around Italian names like Brioni and Valentino and which invariably ended in Spencer’s trying on something in a fine cabretta leather jacket over his blue police uniform. Father Willie sat bored in the dressing room holding his partner’s Sam Browne, gun and hat while Spencer preened.
Sometimes a new salesman would make the mistake of quoting the retail price to the tall policeman and would find himself cowering before an indignant stare, a twitching toothbrush moustache and a withering piece of advice to “Check with the manager about my police discount.”
Father Willie often thought about asking for a new partner but he didn’t want to hurt Spencer’s feelings. Spencer had tried for years to find a partner like Father Willie, who would not accept his rightful share of free cigarettes, wholesale merchandise and free liquor. It had gotten to be tedious for Spencer breaking in new partners:
“You smoke?”
“No, Spencer.”
“Today you do. I’ll take both packs if you don’t want them.”
And inevitably a partner would become greedy. “I’ll take a pack today Spencer.”
“What for? You don’t smoke.”
“I’ll give them to my brother. What the hell, three packs a day I’m entitled to.”
Spencer got to keep Willie’s share of petty booty in every case. And Father Willie never complained when Spencer scrounged up some liquor for choir practices.
“We’re having a retirement party for one of our detective lieutenants,” Spencer would inevitably lie to a long suffering liquor store proprietor who would take two bottles of Scotch from the shelf behind him.
“We’re having a big big party.” Spencer would smile benignly until the proprietor would get the message and bring up another two bottles.
But Spencer was considerate about spreading it around and rarely went to the same liquor store more than once a month for anything but cigarettes. The cigarette shop however was a relentless daily ritual. It was said that during the Watts riot of 1965, Spencer drove a half burned black and white with every window shot out ten miles to Beverly Boulevard, his face streaked with soot and sweat, and managed to make all three cigarette stops before the stores closed at 2:00 A.M.
Spencer Van Moot had accepted a thousand packs of cigarettes and as many free meals in his time. And though he had bought enough clothing at wholesale prices to dress a dozen movie stars, he had never even considered taking a five dollar bill nor was one ever offered except once when he stopped a Chicago grocer in Los Angeles on vacation. The police department and its members made an exact distinction between petty gratuities and cash offerings, which were considered money bribes no matter how slight and would result in a merciless dismissal as well as criminal prosecution.
It was not that the citizens and police of Los Angeles were inherently less debased than their Eastern counterparts, it was that the West, being a network of sprawling young towns and cities, did not lend itself to the old intimate teeming ward or ghetto where political patronage and organized crime bedded down together. The numbers racket, for instance, had been a dismal failure in western America. The average citizen of Los Angeles hadn’t the faintest idea how it worked. Yet in the Pennsylvania steel town where Spencer Van Moot was born, every living soul had played numbers and consulted dream books for winners and contributed to organized crime’s greatest source of revenue in that region. The bookies came door to door. They even accepted children’s penny bets. Western criminals had found it impossible to organize a crazy quilt collection of several communities which existed inside the 460 square mile limits of the city where there was an automobile for every adult. The city had geography and history going for it.
So it was that Spencer Van Moot’s supplication provided about half of the beverage consumed at choir practice, the rest provided by Roscoe Rules who bullied the free booze from cowering liquor store owners on his beat.
After making his various stops and depositing his treasures in the back of his camper truck in the station parking lot, Spencer began whinning again about his unhappy domestic life.
“I mean how can you understand a woman, Padre?” Spencer complained as the setting sun filtered through the smog and burned Father Willie’s sensitive, bulging blue eyes.
“I don’t know, Spencer,” Father Willie sighed, and wondered how long Spencer would use him as a sounding board tonight. Sometimes when he was lucky the complaining would stop after the first two hours of their tour of duty.
“I’m forty years old, Father Willie,” Spencer griped, touching his twenty dollar haircut which he got free in a Wilshire Boulevard styling parlor. “Look at my hair, it’s getting gray. Why should I live in such misery.”
“I’m twenty-four,” Father Willie reminded him, “and you have more hair than I do. Who cares if it’s gray.”
“She’s a bitch, Padre. It’s hell, believe me,” Spencer whined. “She’s worse by far than my first two wives put together. And she’s turned her kids against me. They hate me more than she does because she tells them lies about me, that I drink a lot and run around with other women.”
“That’s not a lie, Spencer,” Father Willie reminded him. “You do drink a lot and run around with other women.”
“It’s nothing to tell teenagers, for god’s sake!” Spencer answered. “I never shoulda married an older broad with kids. Damn, forty-two years old and her legs’re turning green. Green, I tell you! And here I am with only four years to go until I can pull the pin and retire. And what happens, she gets knocked up!”