“Yeah?” Sam answered, totally bored with the stakeout and his two weeks of vice duty. “The other one that good looking?”
“Oh, I guess they don’t exactly look alike. But they’re both sisters at heart.”
Sam Niles never bothered to ask Baxter to explain the allusion. He was just glad it was their last night on vice and that the choir practice they had planned should be a memorable one.
The choir practice which celebrated the return of the three choirboys from the tour of vice squad duty was bound to be a memorable one. After all Roscoe Rules outdid himself when he scrounged fifteen bottles of booze from the liquor stores of Wilshire Division in a single night.
“I tell you the captain’s throwing a big big party goddamnit,” he informed some of the more reluctant proprietors who were offering only one fifth to Roscoe, wearing his black gloves, standing tall and menacing.
And what Roscoe couldn’t scrounge with intimidation Spencer Van Moot obtained by his incredible rapport with the merchants on his beat. They said they couldn’t wait for his retirement from the police department when he would open a retail store on the Miracle Mile and implement his merchandising genius for the mutual benefit of all.
Therefore there was enough liquor, wine and beer to kill them all, and trays of foil covered barbecue, salami, pastrami, roast beef and turkey, not to mention German potato salad, bean salad, sourdough rolls and condiments.
Strangely enough, despite the humiliation of his arrest, or perhaps because of it and the overwhelming guilt it engendered, Alexander Blaney was back in MacArthur Park for every homosexual contact from then on. It had never been more enticing now that he was aware of the possibility of vice officers and the courts and the impersonal retribution of the law.
So at eighteen and a half, with a genuine affection for policemen which was a remnant of his numerous trips to Rampart Juvenile Division and which was not vitiated by his single arrest by the Rampart vice officer, Alexander Blaney loved to sit across the water at night in the cool enveloping darkness and feed the ducks and listen to the antics of the choirboys and wonder if Calvin Potts was the only black man among them and if Francis Tanaguchi was as comical to look at as he was to listen to and to hope that Whaddayamean Dean would never become like his partner Roscoe Rules.
He had never let the choirboys see him, but on this night, when gunfire would shatter the sylvan stillness, he revealed himself to the two roommates, Ora Lee Tingle and Carolina Moon. The plump cocktail waitresses trotted across the grass from the yellow Buick which they always left on Park View Street when they got off work.
Alexander had been lying very still listening to the crickets chirp and watching Jupiter, the only star one could see in the Los Angeles summer sky when it was very smoggy. Alexander watched for it ever since he heard the policeman called Baxter telling the others that it was reassuring to at least have one great star pierce the smog and that Baxter would find the sky unbearably lonely without it.
As the laughing, chattering girls approached, Alexander was afraid he might frighten them sitting there in the dark, so when they got within thirty feet the boy called out, “Hi, nice evening isn’t it?”
“Real nice,” Carolina said, slowing a bit until she saw the slender harmless boy lying in the grass with three ducklings.
“Whatcha doing out here in the dark, honey?” asked Ora Lee Tingle as Alexander looked at her massive bustline and wide hips and sticky upswept blonde hair and thought she looked exactly as he pictured her.
“Just feeding the ducks,” said Alexander.
“Watch yourself, honey,” Carolina said. “There’s rapists around here.”
“Yeah,” Ora Lee giggled, “and we’re gonna go join a bunch of em.”
They hurried off across the grass and Alexander heard Carolina say, “Feeding the ducks. Sure.”
All ten choirboys were there that night and already half drunk an hour after arriving. They wore their usual summertime choir practice garb: safari jackets, sweatshirts, tank tops, LAPD baseball or basketball shirts, faded jeans and denim, Nike and Adidas athletic shoes, or Wallabees. They wore nothing which would be ruined if someone fell or was pushed in the duck pond when a choir practice got rough. They were absolutely delighted when Ora Lee Tingle and Carolina Moon surprised them by bouncing across the grass at 1:00 A.M. The girls were still wearing their mesh stockings and short skirts which barely covered their red ruffled panties. They wore peasant blouses with laced midriffs which forced their enormous breasts up and out, guaranteed to drive bar patrons wild and keep them swilling booze at $1.85 a throw.
“Surprise! The boss let us off early!” yelled Carolina as both fat girls literally threw themselves into the festivities by bouncing on the blanket of their favorite, Francis Tanaguchi, burying the little choirboy under a total of three hundred and ten pounds of young willing flesh as he joyfully screamed, “You girls just gotta do a part in my dirty movie! Now part your legs and let’s see how you act!”
The choir practice had officially begun. As usual, they first had to ventilate with a gripe session. Spermwhale began it by complaining about Lieutenant Finque who had brought charges of Conduct Unbecoming an Officer against the night-watch desk officer, Lard Logan, resulting in a five day suspension.
“That eunuch, Finque!” Spermwhale growled. “Snuck around like a spy and nailed Lard for remarks to citizens which he decides are unprofessional. I can’t wait till I get my twenty in so I can tell that gelding what I think a him!”
“What happened to old Lard?” Roscoe beamed, thrilled that Spermwhale was actually talking to him.
“First one, this dingaling came in off the street and told Lard she wants to see the captain. Naturally he tries to shine her on. Finally she starts tellin him her problem which is that her sixteen year old girl got knocked up from swimmin in the L.A. High School pool. And her little girl’s a virgin and she read that spermatozoa can swim and she wants the crime lab to go make a sperm count in the pool so she can sue the Board of Education. And all Lard did was listen patiently and say, ‘Lady if the water done it it musta been awful hard water.’ And boom! The lieutenant writes him up for cue-bow.”
“Well that ain’t enough to get five days for,” Roscoe observed.
“No, but then the lieutenant adds another count when Lard takes this theft report from some rich broad in the Towers who had her two Persian cats ripped off. Just for a gag he writes in the MO box: ‘Suspect deals in hot pussy’”
“I’d say fuck that lieutenant,” Roscoe said. “Probably be a good one at that. He’s enough of a cunt!”
“Then poor Lard gets shanked in the back by the lieutenant for making his press statement, hear about that, Sam?”
“Haven’t heard anything,” Sam Niles yawned, bored by all the talk of Lieutenant Finque.
“You remember the slut roamed into Sears and had the baby in the rest room?”
“What about her?”
“She cut the cord with her fingernails and just dumped the little toad in the trash can and left it for the janitor to find next day. And the dicks couldn’t prove the baby ever drew breath and she cried all over the courtroom and they couldn’t find her guilty of manslaughter or nothin. Anyways, some dude from one a these Right to Life groups comes into the station to interview the detectives on how they felt about it and the dicks kissed him off down to the desk officer who happened to be Lard. And Lard says, ‘You want my opinion, the little third-generation welfare pig shoulda been sterilized when she turned fourteen so she wouldn’t be runnin around foalin in every shit-house in town. Far as a crime’s concerned she did the taxpayers a favor. Only crime she should be found guilty of is litterbug.’”