Then all four policemen were on their feet running for a fence which separated the parking lot from the alley where the shots had to have come from.
Baxter got his wits about him and yelled, “Spermwhale, go call for help!”
Then gingerly shining his light through the darkness, Francis Tanaguchi shouted, “There’s a rifle in the alley!”
Calvin Potts crawled forward out of sight for a few minutes, then, crouching, ran back out of the alley carrying a modified.22 caliber rifle with a tommy gun grip and an infrared scope lovingly mounted on the stock. The gun could fire hollow points almost as fast as you could pull the trigger, and what possibly saved the policemen was that the sniper had jammed the gun in his excitement.
Baxter Slate was the first to suggest driving around to the street on the west, and while Francis and Calvin quickly cleared glass from the seat, Baxter was squealing out, knocking coffee cups all over the parking lot as the siren of the nearest help car could already be heard in the distance.
Spermwhale asked to be dropped near the mouth of the alley on the next residential block west while Baxter circled one block farther on the theory that a man could run very far and fast after just having tried to ambush some policemen.
On St. Andrew’s Place, Baxter Slate saw a dark running shadow. He jammed down the accelerator and the next sixty seconds became a fragmented impression as he screeched to a stop beside the running figure and jumped out in the darkness, gun drawn. He was met by a fanatical screaming charge by what turned out to be a weaponless man, and for once Baxter Slate did not intellectualize. He simply obeyed his instinct and training and emptied his gun at point blank range, hitting the man three times out of six, one bullet cracking through the left frontal lobe killing him almost at once. He discovered that unlike choreographed slow motion movie violence the real thing is swift and oblique and incoherent.
After intensive interrogation by the Robbery-Homicide Division shooting team and after his own reports were written, a pale and tense Baxter Slate met the other nine choirboys at MacArthur Park and tried to fill them in as best he could on the details. The trouble was there weren’t any.
The young man’s name was Brian Greene, and luckily for Baxter his fingerprints were found on the rifle. He was twenty-two years old. He was white. He had no arrest record. He had no history of mental illness. The Vietnam War was long over and he was not a veteran. He was not a student. He cared nothing about politics. He was a garage mechanic. He had a wife and baby.
Francis was beside himself that night at choir practice, not so much in fear but rage. And finally despair.
“So quit talkin about it,” Calvin said. “I’m sick a hearin about it. The asshole tried to shoot us and it’s over and that’s it.”
“But Calvin, don’t you see? He didn’t even know us. We’re just… just… blue symbols!”
“Okay so we’re blue,” Calvin reminded him. “You only see black and blue around the ghetto when the sun goes down.”
“But we were on Olympic Boulevard. That’s not a ghetto. He was white. Why’d he shoot? Who was he? Doesn’t he know we’re more than bluecoats and badges? It’s weird. I don’t know where these people are coming from. I dunno.”
“I dunno where you’re comin from,” Calvin said angrily.
“I dunno where I’m coming from either,” Francis said. “I don’t know where my head is.”
“What fuckin Establishment did we represent to him?” Spermwhale demanded to know. “I’m tired a bein a symbol! I’m not a symbol to my ex-wives and ex-kids. Why does an ordinary guy wanna shoot me?”
And all the choirboys looked at each other in the moonlight but there were no answers forthcoming.
“I didn’t want to kill him,” Baxter Slate said quietly. “I never wanted to kill anybody.”
It was suddenly cold in the park. They were ecstatic when Ora Lee Tingle showed up and hinted she might pull that train.
TEN
7-A-29: SAM NILES AND
HAROLD BLOOMGUARD
Lieutenant Finque had a splitting migraine at rollcall on the night Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard met the Moaning Man and called for choir practice.
The migraine was brought about by his defense of the Police Protective League, the bargaining agent manned by Los Angeles police officers for the department.
“How the fuck can the Protective League do anything for us?” Spermwhale demanded. “As long as brass’re members of the league. Don’t you see, the league gotta be more like a real union. It’s management against labor. You people are management. Only the policeman rank and maybe sergeants should be in the league. The rest of the brass are the enemy, for chrissake!”
“That’s not true!” Lieutenant Finque said. “The commanders and the deputy chiefs are just as much police officers as…”
“My ass, Lieutenant!” Spermwhale roared. “When did you last hear of a deputy chief gettin TB or a hernia or whiplash or pneumonia or shot or beat up or stabbed? Only cop’s disease they ever get is heart trouble and that’s not cause they have to jump outta radio cars and run down or fight some fuckin animal who wants to make garbage outta them, it’s cause they eat and drink so much at all those sex orgies where they think up ways to fuck and rape the troops!”
“How many deputy chiefs or commanders ever get suicidal?” Baxter Slate asked suddenly, and for a moment the room was quiet as each man thought of that most dangerous of policemen’s diseases.
“Yeah, it’s usually the workin cop who eats his gun,” Spermwhale said as he unconsciously thought of at least ten men he had served with who had done it.
“I’d hate to be a member of this department if we ever go from the Protective League to a labor union,” Lieutenant Finque solemnly announced with the consuming hatred and distrust of labor unions that was prevalent in those police officers who had sprung from the middle class and whose only collective bargaining experiences had been as Establishment representatives facing angry sign wavers on picket lines.
“Protective League my ass!” Spermwhale Whalen said. “They take our dues and wine and dine politicians while I eat okra and gumbo at Fat Ass Charlie’s Soul Kitchen.”
“I thought you like eatin like a home boy Spermwhale,” Calvin Potts grinned.
“We gotta sue the fuckin city for nearly every raise we get,” Spermwhale continued. “I’m sick a payin dues to the Protective League. I get more protection from a two year old box a rubbers!”
“Anyone for changing the subject?” Sergeant Nick Yanov suggested, as the lieutenant held his throbbing head and vowed to check Spermwhale Whalen’s personnel package to see how many more months he had to go before retirement. And to ask the captain if there weren’t a place they could transfer him until then. Like West Valley Station which was twenty-five miles away.
Lieutenant Finque’s eyes were starting to get as red and glassy as Roscoe Rules’ always were. Of late the lieutenant always had drops of grainy white saliva glued to the corners of his mouth from his incessant sucking of antacid tablets.
“I’m going to change the subject, change the subject,” Lieutenant Finque announced strangely. “The captain inspected the shotgun locker and found a gun with cigars stuffed down the barrel! If that happens again somebody’s going to pay!”
No one had to turn toward Spermwhale who was the only cigar smoker on the watch. “Young coppers they hire these days’ll rip you off for anything,” said Spermwhale. “Gotta hide your goods, Lieutenant.”
Lieutenant Finque had begun losing weight of late what with his migraines and acid stomach and inability to relate with Captain Drobeck who had turned down three dinner invitations this month despite the fact that Lieutenant Finque had done everything he could think of to woo the captain, including joining his American Legion Police Post. The lieutenant knew he should be clear headed what with the ordeal of studying for the captain’s exam three hours a day when his wife and children would leave him alone. And here at the job he had to deal with recalcitrant uglies like Spermwhale Whalen.