Just then Harold Bloomguard saw the man. He didn’t think much of anything. He just said, “Oh,” walked down the corridor, took the palsied newspaper vendor by the arm and started to raise him up.
Then Scuz, who wondered why his parade had slowed, turned and saw Harold Bloomguard. He didn’t intellectualize either. He walked past Sam and Baxter and joined Harold who almost had the man to his feet.
“Stumbled, huh?” Scuz said, bending over and picking up the fallen man with one arm as easily as a doll, while he gathered up the stack of newspapers with the other. “Slippery goddamn floors in this store. Someone always going on their ass.”
He half carried the man to a bench near the rear door and seated him there with the stack of papers beside him as the man perspired and panted, unable to speak.
“Got the late edition?” Scuz asked, taking a coin from his pocket and putting it in the lap of the man as he took a paper from the stack and folded it into the back pocket of his gabardines. “Feel okay, partner? Want me to take you anywheres?”
The man managed a twisted smile and shook his head, and Scuz nodded, saying, “See you around, partner.” Then he shuffled off down the hall with Harold Bloomguard at his side and the other choirboys trailing.
As Scuz passed an old man people-watching on a bench by the elevator, he said, “Here you go, Dad,” dropping the paper beside the threadbare pensioner. “It’s a late edition. I ain’t got time to read it.”
“Well, thanks,” said the old man as Scuz opened the door of the storage room and led the three choirboys to the platform.
Two men could stand and look through a heavily screened one by two foot opening into the lighted rest room where shoplifters hid merchandise under their clothing and where men publicly masturbated and buggered each other, forcing Sergeant Dominic Scuzzi to force the choirboys to peek and smell shit.
They weren’t in the trap ten minutes before a man in a candy striped shirt and double breasted blue blazer walked in, looked nervously in each toilet stall and, finding himself alone, withdrew his penis and wrote a lazy S on the rest room floor from wall to wall.
“That deserves a shot,” whispered Scuz from the platform in the darkened room. “See if I remembered to load it. Yeah, I did.” And he put his pink plastic water pistol up to the screen and gave the man two bursts.
The man looked up at the ceiling for leaky pipes, saw none and tried to write some more. Scuz gave him two more bursts which caused him to cry out and walk around the rest room for another puzzled look into each toilet stall. Then Scuz gave him another burst and the man screamed and ran outside.
“He was easy,” Scuz said, stepping down from the platform to let Sam Niles have a look. “Reason I ran him off is I suspect he’s one a these pissy pork pullers. Takes a leak and beats off and cuts out. Guy can do most anything legally long as he’s alone. Gotta catch one that does his number with somebody else. Then we can make a pinch and close the vice complaint and get the fuck outta here and say we protected the people’s morality. Until somebody else makes another vice complaint. Some fun, hey, boys?”
“Yeah,” muttered Baxter Slate as Sam Niles grimaced disgustedly and longed for a cigarette because he couldn’t have one in the close dark room.
“Tell you what,” Scuz said. “I’m gonna leave you two guys here and take Harold with me for a pass down Western Avenue. See if we can catch ourselves a whore. Now I don’t like leaving two new guys here like this so I’ll be sending a team to come and sit with you. You two guys just hang loose and wait here and don’t go busting nobody unless a murder is being committed before your eyes, got me?”
“Uh huh,” Sam Niles said.
Scuz opened the door to the outside corridor and let Harold out into the light. Then Scuz turned and said, “You get bored you might amuse yourselves by betting quarters whether the next guy in will be a helmet or a anteater.”
“What’s that mean?” Baxter Slate asked.
“Circumcised or uncircumcised,” said Scuz as he shoved another cigar between his teeth. Then he threw his pink water pistol to Sam Niles saying, “Careful, it’s loaded.”
The first man into the rest room stepped up to the urinal and emptied his bladder. The two choirboys looked at each other and wondered how they had gotten here. He was an anteater.
The second man was also an anteater. However, the third, fourth and fifth were helmets. The sixth was an anteater and cost Baxter Slate twenty-five cents. The seventh was a helmet and Baxter won the money back. Neither man cared what the eighth one was. The ninth was an anteater but he soon turned into a helmet because he sat down on the toilet and began playing with himself after looking at a picture of Raquel Welch in a movie magazine. But then he looked at a picture of Warren Beatty and seemed just as excited.
Sam Niles gave him four bursts with the pistol and he ran out cursing, wiping the wet pages of the magazine on his shirt.
Baxter Slate said, “I can’t take two weeks of this.”
Sam Niles offered Baxter a cigarette, opened the door for ventilation and nodded.
Meanwhile Sergeant Dominic Scuzzi was sitting in the parking lot of a food market near Pico and Western briefing an exceedingly nervous Harold Bloomguard.
“So I’m gonna be right here in the parking lot,” Scuz said as Harold nodded and compulsively blew spit bubbles and cleaned the bogus horn rimmed glasses for the third time and made ready to get in his own car, a three year old Dodge Charger which they had picked up at the station parking lot after leaving Sam and Baxter.
“I don’t want you roaming too far, Harold, got me? Just go a block or so down Western and no more than a couple blocks east on Pico. You get a broad in the car, you get your offer like I told you, then badge her and bring her back here quick. She wants to jump out, let the bitch do it. You drive here to me and we’ll just cruise on back and scrape her off the street. You don’t go roaming more than a couple blocks from me, right?”
“Right,” said Harold.
“You nervous, Harold?”
“No. Not too much,” he lied.
“Got a comb?”
“Yeah.”
“Comb you hair back off your forehead. You goddamn kids all gotta look like rock singers. Comb it back. Show your high forehead. Makes you look even more square than you already look.”
Scuz turned the rearview mirror for Harold who parted his ginger hair and combed it back.
“Help if you had some greasy kid stuff,” said Scuz, who put the glasses on Harold when he was finished.
“I look okay?”
“Shit, ain’t nobody gonna make you, Harold. Nobody.”
“Guess I’m ready then.”
“Okay try going east on Pico there, circle south on Oxford, maybe, then back to Western. I want you close to me.”
As Harold fired up the Charger, Scuz fired up a fresh cigar and swatted at a swarm of gnats which had discovered him.
Meanwhile, as Harold Bloomguard began his maiden voyage into the land of vice, things were happening in the store where two revolted choirboys sat smelling human defecation in a dark and stuffy room.
First, Pete Zoony the veteran vice cop with the woolly hair and the Fu Manchu strolled into the rest room, grinned up at the screened hole on the wall and said, “Don’t bother making a bet. I’m a Jew.”
“How long we have to stay in here?” asked Sam Niles, whose voice boomed through the vent hole and echoed off the tile of the rest room.
“Scuz called us on the radio,” Pete Zoony said, examining his teeth in the mirror. “Told my partner to drop me here to sit with you. Said to give it an hour, no more. We wanna close this complaint bad. Wish we had a drunk wagon like Central. I’d have them carry two sleeping winos inside and leave them in the same toilet stall, then call the store manager to witness the orgy we discovered. After that we could close the complaint.”