“Seven-A-Thirty-three, Seven-A-Thirty-three, see the woman, three-eleven suspect, First and Harvard.”
“Seven-A-Thirty-three, roger on the call,” Father Willie automatically answered and then turned suddenly to Spencer. “She say First and Harvard?”
“Yeah,” Spencer replied absently.
“A wienie wagger at First and Harvard!” said Father Willie.
Spencer was puzzled for a moment and then said, “Oh.”
“Filthy Herman!” they both cried at once and then a noisy string of obscenities from the black and white startled a woman pedestrian waiting for the light to change on Beverly Boulevard.
“Niles and Bloomguard are out fucking off again!” Spencer whined. “Why aren’t they handling the call? It’s their area!”
“Darn it!” Father Willie said. “No, wait a minute, I saw them in the station penciling out an arrest report.”
“Filthy Herman!” Spencer groaned as the black and white came to a stop in some heavy evening traffic near the Wilshire Country Club, which further angered the policeman.
“Just put your mind in neutral with the car, partner,” Father Willie advised. “We aren’t going anywhere in this traffic for a while.”
“Goddamnit!” snapped Spencer, yelling to any motorist within earshot. “If you’re gonna camp here, pitch a fucking tent!”
The reason that Spencer Van Moot was so angry and Father Willie so apprehensive was Filthy Herman. He was a legless wienie wagger who lived in a boarding-house near First and Harvard owned by his daughter Rosie Muldoon who struck it rich by marrying an extremely successful anesthesiologist and now could afford to keep her father, Filthy Herman, in a piece of rental property across town from her.
It was ordinarily a good arrangement. The house was large and Herman often had it filled with other alcoholics who congregated in the Eighth Street bars, a half mile from Herman’s home. Filthy Herman was somewhat of a celebrity on Eighth Street, partly because of his grotesque physical presence. He was a torso in a wheelchair. Both legs had been amputated at the buttocks when he was thirty-seven years old, a powerful ironworker until a steel beam crushed him. He was also a celebrity because, with the monthly allowance from the daughter who visited him once a year on Christmas, Herman would buy drinks for every man who could not afford to buy his own. This meant that Filthy Herman had a group of some thirty to forty admirers and hangers-on among his Eighth Street entourage. What he didn’t spend on drinks for the house he gambled away in gin rummy games or with the many bookies who frequented the area.
About twice a year, for no apparent reason, Filthy Herman would live up to his name and his normal alcoholic binge would end with his standing on two inch stumps on the wooden porch of his home, naked except for a Dodger baseball cap, screaming, “My cock’s dragging the ground, how about yours?” Which indeed it was, what with the absence of legs.
Then the unfortunate radio car officers who got the call would be subjected to a barrage of incredible obscenities, empty bottles, beer cans, spitting, bites on the leg and surprisingly painful punches from the gnarled fists of Filthy Herman, who at fifty was not devoid of the strength acquired while an ironworker.
Any officer who had worked the division long enough had seen the legless torso of Filthy Herman bouncing across the asphalt as he was dragged cursing into the station by two disheveled policemen. Because of his physical impairment he was a pathetic sight when cleaned up and no judge had ever given him more than sixty days in the county jail for battery on a police officer.
The outraged victim of Filthy Herman was standing with her husband on the northwest corner of First and Harvard when the policemen arrived. Spencer sighed, parked on the east side of Harvard, slowly set the brake and turned off the headlights. He grabbed his flashlight and baton and followed Father Willie across the street.
“You call?” Father Willie asked the fortyish mousy woman who held a white toy poodle to her face and deferred to her tight lipped husband, a big man in a loose golf sweater and checkered pants.
“My wife was walking the dog,” the man sputtered. “Just out walking our dog and she passed a house up there on Harvard and this filthy little animal, this creature, exposed himself to her!”
“Where’d it happen?” Father Willie asked, opening his report book and leaning against a car at the curb, his hat tipped back as he wrote.
“Back up the street,” the man said. “The third or fourth house.”
“You see it, sir?” Father Willie asked.
“No, my wife ran home and got me, and I came back here with her and she pointed out the house, but there was nobody on the porch. I was going to kill him.” And the man put his arm around the skinny woman who clutched the toy poodle more tightly lip quivering.
“What’d he do, ma’am?” asked Willie as he filled in the blanks for type of crime and location.
“He exposed himself! I told you!” said the man.
“Have to hear it from the witness,” Spencer said.
“He yelled something horrible to me as I walked by” the woman answered brokenly. “And he showed himself. Oh, he was a horrible creature!”
“What’d he look like?” asked Father Willie, writing a cursory narrative.
“He… he had no legs!” cried the woman. “He was a horrible ugly little creature with, oh, I don’t know, grayish hair and a horribly twisted body. And he had no legs! And he was naked! Except for a blue baseball cap!”
“I see,” said Father Willie and then, unable to resist, “Did you notice anything unusual about him?”
And the woman answered, “Well, he had a tattoo on his chest, a woman or something. His porch light was on and I could see him very well.”
“What’d he say to you when you passed?”
“Oh, God!” the woman said and the poodle yapped when she squeezed it to her face.
“Do we have to?” the man asked. “I’d like to go back and kick that little freak clear off the porch.”
“You could,” shrugged Spencer, “but he’s a wiry little guy. Probably bite you in the knee and give you lock-jaw.”
“He said… he said… God!” the woman sobbed.
“Yeah,” Spencer encouraged her.
“He said, ‘I ain’t got no left knee and no right knee, but look at my wienie!’ Oh, God!”
“Yeah, that’s our man all right,” said Father Willie grimly. “Filthy Herman!”
After taking the complaining party’s name, address and other routine information, the two policemen told them to go home and let the law deal with the little criminal. And they knew they stood a good chance of being punched in the balls or bitten on the thigh if they weren’t careful. In that Filthy Herman was a legless man, not one team of policemen had ever had the good sense to call for assistance when arresting him. It was a matter of pride that two policemen with four legs between them should not have to call brother officers to help with this recurring problem.
“I’d like to punt the little prick sixty yards,” Spencer said nervously as they climbed the steps to the darkened house of Filthy Herman.
“Wish we had a gunnysack to put him in. I hear he bites like a crocodile,” said Father Willie, leading the way with his flashlight beam trained on the doorway.
The officers banged on the door and rang the bell several times until Spencer finally said, “Let’s cut out. We tried. He’s probably in there hiding. Let the dicks get a warrant and go down on Eighth Street during the day and pluck him off the bar at one of those gin mills where he plays the horses.”
“Fine by me,” Father Willie breathed, starting to imagine he heard a ghostly dragging chain above him in the dark old house. He looked up and saw dust falling from the porch roof which was sagging and full of holes and patched in several places with plywood and canvas.
Then they heard canvas tear and shingles fell on their heads as Filthy Herman sprung his surprise which put Spencer in Central Receiving Hospital for observation.