For the next fifteen minutes six regular vice officers straggled into the squad room and said hello to Scuz who continued to befoul the entire room with the cheap cigar. The vice cops introduced themselves all around and worked in their logbooks and vice complaints.
The regular vice cops looked like Hollywood’s version of Tripoli buccaneers, Turkish brigands or Viking warriors. One, a black, looked like a Sudanese caravan raider. All were young men, fiercely moustachioed and bearded with enough hair to stuff a mattress. They wore stylishly funky clothes like most young people. Yet beneath it all they were carefully washed and sprayed and powdered. They were so baroque and theatrical they had to be cops. Only Dominic Scuzzi could fool the street people.
“This one here’s Harold Bloomguard,” Scuz said to his troops. “Look at him. This is what I been trying to tell you guys about how you should look. Ain’t nobody gonna make him for the heat, right?”
“Right,” answered the Viking.
“Then why don’t you guys try to look like him? Why do you wanna look like you walk a beat for Attila the Hun?”
“Scuz, I ain’t looked like Harold since I was twelve years old,” said a Turkish brigand while Harold blushed at the laughter.
The three loanees were given a further briefing and within an hour they were heading for their vice cars.
“One more thing I almost forgot,” Sergeant Scuzzi said, stopping the squad of men in the doorway. He sat back down, lit a new cigar and said, “You new kids listen. If you go sneaking and peeking and prowling around backyards, you gotta always pay attention to the size a the dog shit. Got me?”
Then Scuz put his tennis shoes up on the desk and leaned back and puffed while a persistent fly who wanted desperately to light on the vice sergeant’s pungent flesh decided to fly from the choking polluted clouds. Fleeing for his very life.
The three new kids on the block found themselves standing in the parking lot just before dark, each with a tiny flashlight the other vice cops lent them since their three and five cell lights were unwieldy on the vice detail. They waited for each of the three teams to pick one of them and were totally bewildered when no one did.
As Pete Zoony a loose limbed vice cop with a woolly dust colored hairdo and a Fu Manchu moustache, got in his car he turned to the three loanees and said, “We’re not being unfriendly, it’s just that Scuz is gonna come slipping and sliding out the door in a couple seconds. He can’t relax when there’s new guys around. Thinks you’ll get killed if he don’t break you in personally. Tomorrow night you’ll work with us and we’ll get better acquainted. Oh, oh. Here he comes.”
And the three choirboys turned to see Scuz shuffling through the door, stepping on the frayed ends of his shoelaces and scratching his balls, which was easy to do given the shiny baggy gabardine pants ready to wear through. Then he banged his little flashlight on the heel of his hairy hand, puffed a cloud of smoke into the summer breeze and scuttled across the parking lot, just stepping back in time to keep a black and white from running over him.
The officer driving, who was Roscoe Rules, said to Whaddayamean Dean, “Fucking janitors they hire these days look like goat shit! Oughtta make that prick clean up or fire him!”
As Scuz reached the three choirboys and his teams of regular vice cops who sat grinning in their cars, he said to Pete Zoony “Don’t mind if I take the new kids out, do you, Pete? Just for tonight. I ain’t got nothing to do anyways except the progress report for our psycho captain. Can’t seem to think a any good lies to put in there tonight.”
“No, we don’t mind, Scuz,” Pete Zoony said. “Just tell us where you’re gonna take em so we don’t bunch up in the same place.”
“Well, we got that three-eighteen about the shithouse up there in the department store.”
“Yeah.”
“And I might try this wimpy little kid here out on the whores on Western. Don’t he look terrific?” And Scuz threw a heavy arm around the wimpy little kid and hugged him.
Five minutes later, Sergeant Scuzzi was driving north on La Brea in a four door, five year old Plymouth which looked every bit like a detective car and disappointed the choirboys.
Sam Niles sat in the back seat with Baxter Slate and Harold sat in front, nervously blowing spit bubbles off his tongue which plinked on the dashboard as he scratched the strawberry rash on the back of his neck with a little penknife. Sam Niles decided then that Harold and Scuz would make perfect partners.
“This ain’t much of an undercover car, is it, boys?” Scuz remarked as they bumped and pounded over dips in the asphalt.
“Not much,” Baxter Slate said. He looked at Scuz in disbelief but not without affection from time to time.
“Cheap outfit, boys. I mean we work for a cheap outfit. Be amazed how little Secret Service money I get. End up spending my own bread more often than not. Think we can go in the bar and nurse one drink for three hours? Shit, they know we’re cops when they see how fucking stingy we are.”
“Where we going first, Scuz?” Harold asked, perspiring because the sun had not yet set and it was muggy for Los Angeles. And because he was very nervous.
“Boys, I gotta take you to a trap first off tonight. And I gotta apologize which I don’t like to do cause I always feel a cop shouldn’t have to apologize for doing his job. But the truth is — and don’t tell your lieutenant old Scuz told you this when you go back to patrol-but the truth is that most of a vice cop’s job is just public relations. See, we can say we’re protecting the city’s morals and point to statistics to prove it, but fact is we ain’t doing much a anything. So you might say Scuz, what the hell we doing it for? And I say, boys, it’s part a the game. Every business has its PR department where they manufacture bullshit, right? General Motors got it. U.S. Steel got it. AT amp;T got it. For sure the While House got it and City Hall. We can tell all the folks who pay our salary that we’re guarding the morals a the citizens from the degenerates that wanna pay money to suck, fuck or gamble with someone they ain’t married to outta the privacy a their own bedroom. You only work this vice detail for eighteen months and then you’re out. I say it’s a little break from routine for me so I work it but I ain’t got no illusions about cleaning up maggots. In the first place how do I know I ain’t just a maggot myself, you stand back and look at the whole picture in general?”
The choirboys glanced at one another and gave Scuz no argument.
“So anyways that’s my philosophy about vice work. And you kids’re gonna work for me for a couple weeks. And since you’re doing a job that ain’t gonna help nobody anyways, I just don’t want you to get hurt, see? So let’s say you run into some six foot six fruit with nineteen inch arms who’s a foot fetishist. And he buys a pair a black satin shoes from the shoe department a this store I’m taking you to, and takes the shoes into the shitter where he pulls out a can a whipped cream which he shoots all over the shoes. And then he stands there and licks the whipped cream off. Whadda you do about it, seeing as how you’re gonna be behind a wall looking through a screen into the john and protecting the public morals?”
“Huh?” said Harold Bloomguard.
“I asked, whaddaya gonna do about this weird guy?”
“Well, I dunno, Scuz,” Harold said, blowing a spit bubble while Sam Niles toyed with his moustache and shook his head disgustedly, as Baxter Slate’s wide smile grew wider with affection for Scuz.