“Yes, Officer?” Harold Bloomguard winked.
Father Willie, thinking faster than his partner, said loud enough for the whore to hear, “Partner! We just got a hot call!” and he dropped the car into low.
“You’re in a red zone, buster!” yelled Spencer Van Moot as Father Willie pulled out. “Don’t be here when I come back!”
“Now don’t be scared, honey,” said the girl as the radio car sped away “They jist love to scare off our tricks. Got nothin else to do, jist hassle people.”
“And they’re never around when you need them,” Harold added.
“Tha’s right.”
Then the girl looked up as a white Lincoln pulled in behind Harold and a big suntanned man waved to the girl. She looked him over but opened Harold’s door and got inside.
“Motherfucker looks like a cop to me,” she said. “They borry these big shiny cars and try to fool us sometimes.”
“Cop?” cried Harold Bloomguard, trying his hand at acting now that the attractive, sweet smelling whore was sitting next to him, looking much less exotic and threatening.
“Now, you jist calm down, honey Ain’t no cause to git scared.”
“Cop?” repeated Harold Bloomguard, speaking in dry monosyllables, trying to remember the good opening lines Scuz had fed him as he drove east on Pico.
The whore pretended to be fixing her lipstick in the rearview mirror but was actually watching for a vice car.
“Now jist calm right down. Ain’t no worry about cops. Those two told you bout the parkin ticket? I got a friend pays them off. Fact he pays off all the black and whites and all the vice in this district for me. So see, we kin jist have us a nice party and don’t have to worry bout nothin.”
“Party?” Harold wanted a more explicit word for a better case. His hands were sweating and slipping on the steering wheel.
“Party. You know? Love. Half and half. French. Whatever you wants.”
“Oh yeah, I want!” Harold turned south on Oxford, hoping she would hurry and mention the money, too nervous to appreciate her billowy breasts as she dabbed at her lipstick and making sure there was no vice car slipping behind them with lights out.
“You got twenny-five dollars, sweetie?”
“Sure.”
“That’s the tariff. And it’s cheap for all you get.”
Then Harold turned west on Fourteenth Street and the girl said to turn left on Western but Harold turned right.
“Hey!” she said suspiciously but Harold pressed the accelerator to the floor, sped north for half a block, screeched across the southbound traffic lanes and skidded into the market parking lot while the whore yelled, “Gud-damn!” and bounced around in the car. Then Harold saw Scuz in the vice car sitting in the dark at the rear of the market. Only then did he feel heady and elated.
He pulled off his glasses, the triumphant unmasking of an undercover man, and said, “You’re under arrest!”
“Oh shit,” she replied.
Then for effect Harold put the glasses back on, skidded to a stop beside Scuz, pulled them off again and said, “You’re under arrest, young lady!”
“You already said that. I got ears, stupid,” said the whore.
Scuz shuffled around the car and opened the door for the whore as Harold decided he should show her his badge.
“Don’t bother, Harold. She knows who you are-now. I’ll baby-sit Bonnie here. We’re old pals. You go out and see you can get another one.”
The girl stalked gloomily to the back door of the vice car and said, “Sergeant, where’d you get this little devil? He don’t look nothin like a cop.”
“See? See, Harold?” grinned Scuz, puffing happily on his cigar, delighted with the professional accolade.
“You’re so young,” Harold said to the girl as she slid across the seat of Scuz’s car. Harold noticed her smooth brown legs for the first time and her pretty mouth and shapely natural hairdo.
“She’s even younger than you, kid,” Scuz said, closing the door and getting in the front seat where he could blow cigar smoke out the window and not suffocate the whore. “See you can get us another one that easy, Harold.”
“You’re so young and pretty,” said the saddened choirboy. “How’d you get started in this business?”
“Oh no!” the whore cried, slumping back in the seat, appealing to Scuz.
“Harold, just go on back out, see you can get another one,” Scuz said. “Let Bonnie here rest her sore feet.”
Harold Bloomguard emptied his gas tank driving and made himself dizzy circling around and around the block looking for another whore so Sergeant Dominic Scuzzi could write a good progress report for that psycho of a captain, while a sullen young whore named Bonnie Benson got sick from the air befouled by Dominic Scuzzi’s ten cent cigar.
While this was happening Sam Niles and Baxter Slate were sitting in a cozy dark cocktail lounge much farther north on Western Avenue where there was obviously little chance for a vice arrest but lots of chances for free drinks which the management gladly supplied Pete Zoony and his fellow vice cops.
Pete sat in the booth with Baxter and Sam and sipped a Scotch on the rocks, using the ice to rub on the bruise which Roscoe Rules had put on his jawbone before he put a much larger one on Roscoe.
Finally Pete said, “Mind if my partner and me disappear for a while? We gotta check out an answering service supposed to be taking call girl action. More than one or two guys’d look suspicious. Be back in an hour. We’ll raise Scuz on the radio and tell him where you are, so either he’ll pick you up or we will. Meantime, drink all you want and get a beef dip, they’re pretty good. It’s all on the house.”
“Sure, Pete,” Baxter said.
After the vice cop left, Sam said, “Wonder how big her tits are? Wish she had a couple friends.”
Baxter Slate downed his bourbon and ordered a double. “Just as well drink like a vice cop,” he grinned as they sat on tufted seats and felt fortunate to be out of the toilet. “Guess you might say we had a fruitless night.”
“That sounds like something Harold would say,” Sam yawned, starting to look bored. “Just like everything else. It’ll start to be a drag.”
“What?”
“Vice work. Jesus, what a way to make a living.”
“Did you feel embarrassed, like we were peeping toms or something?”
“Christ, yes. You see enough shit on the streets without going to rest rooms to look for more.”
And then Baxter, who was getting a glow from the bourbon, said, “There’re worse jobs than vice.”
“What for instance?”
“Juvenile.”
“Oh yeah. I always wondered what made you leave so soon.”
“Just didn’t like it,” Baxter said, draining his glass and signaling to the waitress.
She looked even more bored than Sam Niles as she padded across the carpet in a silly tight costume which was supposed to push her breasts up and out and make her look like a sexy tavern wench instead of what she was: a blowsy divorcée with three young children who were running wild because she worked nights and wasn’t supervising them.
“Don’t think I’d like Juvenile either,” Sam Niles said, ordering a double Scotch. “Bad enough working with adults without taking crap from bubblegummers.”
“You handle some dangerous little criminals over and over again and you can’t get them off the streets because of their tender age. Despite the fact that they’re more predatory and lack an adult’s inhibitions. But I could live with that. It was the other things that bothered me. The children as victims.”
“Can’t let it bother you,” Sam Niles said as he drained his glass. “Must water their drinks here. Oh well, the price is right.” And he was ready to signal for another round.
“You know, you expect certain dreadful cases,” Baxter continued, “like the child molester who loved to see little girls tied up and screaming. Or the four year old I saw on my first day in court when her mother’s boyfriend was brought in and she started crying and a policewoman said to me, ‘He stuck it in one day and gave her gonorrhea.’”