“Sir, there’s some dew on the lily,” offered Spermwhale Whalen.
“Oh,” said Lieutenant Grimsley, coming to his senses and wiping his whang with his jockey shorts while Fanny Forbes lay nude on the bed and winked at Spermwhale Whalen who was possibly enjoying the sweetest moment of his life.
“Well, we better be goin… Hardass,” Spermwhale grinned, as Lieutenant Grimsley toppled clumsily over on the bed trying to get his pants on two legs at a time.
“Yes, well, meet me at Pop’s coffee shop, will you, fellas? I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee and talk over a few things before we go back in.”
“Sure … Hardass,” Spermwhale grinned, playfully mussing up Lieutenant Grimsley’s hair.
Lieutenant Grimsley was actually glad when, three weeks later, Captain Drobeck suggested that he was getting too chummy with certain officers and perhaps should think about a transfer. Lieutenant Grimsley was glad because he was sick and tired of Spermwhale Whalen sitting on his desk and winking and mussing up his hair every time he came in to have a report approved.
Fanny Forbes complaind when Spermwhale only slipped her a ten dollar bill, but when he reminded her that it was ten bucks more than she had gotten for similar activity with himself, she shrugged and accepted the stipend.
But on the night they caught the Regretful Rapist, both Spermwhale and Baxter were still mightily pissed off from receiving the four days’ suspension for sleeping with the avocados. Lieutenant Grimsley had by then been transferred to Internal Affairs Division where he could catch lots of errant policemen.
The arrest of the Regretful Rapist was possibly the best pinch Baxter Slate had ever made. The rapist had sexually attacked more than thirty women at knifepoint on the streets of Los Angeles and got his name from apologizing profusely after each act and sometimes giving the women cab fare when the attack was finished. The rapist had been fortunate in that not one of his victims had violently resisted and it was unknown how far he would have gone with his eight inch dagger if he had met a real fighter. Nevertheless, he was rightly considered an extremely dangerous man, not only to the female citizens he preyed upon, but to any potential arresting officer.
The night they caught the rapist had been a fairly uneventful night. The first call of the evening was to warn a resident of a twenty-three room house in Hancock Park that he should not go outside to swat flies in the afternoon, particularly when he had to climb a ladder to get them, and especially when his next door neighbor’s daughter, a nineteen year old blonde, just happened to be washing her Mercedes 450 SL and couldn’t help seeing that he was stark naked beneath his bathrobe, which kept flapping open.
The second call of the evening had been to take a burglary report at an air conditioning manufacturer’s whose company had been closed for three days. They heard the burglary victim’s opinion which Spermwhale had heard perhaps a thousand times in his police career:
“It must’ve been kids who did it,” said the victim, since burglary victims of both residential and commercial burglaries hate to consider the prospect of a grown man viciously and dangerously violating the sanctity of their premises by his presence. If there is nothing taken, or if property of any value whatsoever is left behind, the victims invariably allay their fear of prowling deadly men with the refrain, “It must’ve been kids.”
Spermwhale just nodded and said, “Yeah, kids,” and noted that the burglar went through the file cabinet by opening the drawers bottom to top so that he would not have to push the drawers shut thus taking a chance of leaving a fingerprint. That he had carefully ransacked all file boxes, drawers and logical places where money is hidden. That he had pocketed only easy to carry items. That he had stolen fifteen rolls of postage stamps which could be sold for eighty cents on the dollar and had left, closing the self-latching door behind him so that any doorshaking watchman would find nothing amiss during the evening rounds.
“All the good stuff he didn’t even touch,” the vice president of the company said. “The typewriter, the calculator. Anyone but kids would’ve taken something besides stamps, wouldn’t he, Officer?”
“Oh sure. Had to’ve been kids,” Spermwhale agreed as the vice president managed a relieved smile. Spermwhale wrote “Stamp and money burglar” in the MO box of his report.
Spermwhale had lapsed into a very bad mood when they took the burglary report to the station that night. He had just been turned down by Lieutenant Finque on his request to hang a picture of his old friend Knuckles Garrity in the coffee room. Garrity had been a Central beat cop for fifteen years and finished out his twenty-five year career at Wilshire Station where he and Spermwhale were radio car partners. Just before Garrity was to have retired on a service pension he became involved in his third divorce and was found shot to death in his car in the station parking lot.
The car was locked from the inside with the keys in the ignition and his service revolver was on the seat beside him. Yet, despite all logic, Spermwhale refused to believe that his partner had not been murdered. He had to be given three special days off to get his thoughts together. Finally he accepted Knuckles Garrity’s obvious suicide and became the partner of Baxter Slate and eventually a MacArthur Park choirboy.
Spermwhale Whalen had been broken in on a Central beat by Knuckles Garrity who told his rookie partners that a policeman only needed three things to succeed: common sense, a sense of humor and compassion. That none of these could be taught in a college classroom and that most men could succeed without one of the three, but a policeman never could. Spermwhale shivered for an instant, wondering how Knuckles had lost his sense of humor.
Spermwhale obtained the last picture ever taken of Knuckles in his police uniform and had it enlarged and framed with a brass plate on the bottom of the picture which said simply:
Thomas “Knuckles” Garrity
E.O.W. 4-29-74
It was on a lovely April afternoon with arrows of sunlight darting through the smog that Knuckles Garrity went End-of-Watch forever in the old police station parking lot on Pico Boulevard.
But the lieutenant said the picture would have to come down from the coffee room wall and that Spermwhale Whalen should take it home because Knuckles Garrity was not killed on duty like the other dead officers in the pictures which hung in the station.
“He was!” Spermwhale growled to the lieutenant who handed him the picture and turned away from the burning little eyes of the fat policeman.
“Listen, Whalen,” Lieutenant Finque explained. “It’s the captain’s decision. Garrity shot himself, for God’s sake.”
Spermwhale Whalen very quietly said, “Knuckles Garrity died as a direct result of his police duties. As sure as any cop who was ever blown up in a shootout. Knuckles Garrity was the best fuckin cop we ever had in this station and that cunt of a captain should be proud to have his picture on the wall.”
“I’m sorry” the lieutenant said, turning and walking back to his office, leaving Spermwhale with the picture in his enormous red hands.
“I could shoot somebody,” said Spermwhale Whalen when he got back in the radio car after the incident.
Baxter Slate fired up the engine and turned on the lights as darkness settled in.
“Anybody in particular?”
“The captain. The lieutenant maybe. Anybody” Spermwhale said, not knowing that in exactly two hours he would shoot somebody and that it would give him almost as much pleasure as if it had been the captain or the lieutenant.
But before Spermwhale had that pleasure he and Baxter received a call in 7-A-85’s area because Roscoe Rules and Whaddayamean Dean were handling a call in 7-A-33’s area because Spencer Van Moot and Father Willie had received a fateful call which almost made them the only team in LAPD history to get beaten up by a man three feet talclass="underline"