Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

“You bastard!” Marvin sputtered. “You assaulted my customer. You bastard! I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Go right on, Marvin,” I said, while the tall kid screamed and tippy-toed to the door because the upward thrust of the wristlock was making him go as high as he could. The smell of pot was hanging on his clothes but the euphoria wasn’t dulling the pain of the wristlock. When you’ve got one that’s really loaded you can’t crank it on too hard because they don’t react to pain, and you might break a wrist trying to make them flinch. This guy felt it though, and he was docile, ow, ow, owing all the way out. Marvin came around the bar and followed us to the door.

“There’s witnesses!” he boomed. “This time there’s witnesses to your dirty, filthy false arrest of my customer! What’s the charge? What’re you going to charge him with?”

“He’s drunk, Marvin,” I smiled, holding the wristlock with one hand, just in case Marvin was mad enough. I was up, high up, all alive, ready to fly.

“It’s a lie. He’s sober. He’s sober as you.”

“Why, Marvin,” I said, “he’s drunk in public view and unable to care for himself. I’m obliged to arrest him for his own protection. He has to be drunk to say what he did to me, don’t you agree? And if you’re not careful I might think you’re trying to interfere with my arrest. You wouldn’t like to try interfering with my arrest would you, Marvin?”

“We’ll get you, Morgan,” Marvin whispered helplessly. “We’ll get your job one of these days.”

“If you slimeballs could have my job I wouldn’t want it,” I said, let down because it was over.

The kid wasn’t as loaded as I thought when I got him out of there into the sunshine and more or less fresh Los Angeles air.

“I’m not drunk,” he repeated all the way to the Glass House, shaking his mop of blond hair out of his face since I had his hands cuffed behind his back. The Glass House is what the street people call our main police building because of all the windows.

“You talked your way into jail, boy,” I said, lighting a cigar.

“You can’t just put a sober man in jail for drunk because he calls you a pig,” said the kid, and by the way he talked and looked, I figured him for an upper-middle-class student hanging out downtown with the scumbags for a perverse kick, and also because he was at heart a scumbag himself.

“More guys talk themselves into jail than get there any other way,” I said.

“I demand an attorney,” he said.

“Call one soon as you’re booked.”

“I’ll bring those people to court. They’ll testify I was sober. I’ll sue you for false arrest.”

“You wouldn’t be getting a cherry, kid. Guys tried to sue me a dozen times. And you wouldn’t get those assholes in the Dragon to give you the time of day if they had a crate full of alarm clocks.”

“How can you book me for drunk ? Are you prepared to swear before God that I was drunk?”

“There’s no God down here on the beat, and anyway He’d never show his face in the Pink Dragon. The United States Supreme Court decisions don’t work too well down here either. So you see, kid, I been forced to write my own laws, and you violated one in there. I just have to find you guilty of contempt of cop.”

AFTER I GOT THE GUY BOOKED I didn’t know what the hell to do. I had this empty feeling now that was making me depressed. I thought about the hotel burglar again, but I felt lazy. It was this empty feeling. I was in a black mood as I swung over toward Figueroa. I saw a mailbox handbook named Zoot Lafferty standing there near a public phone. He used to hang around Main and then Broadway and now Figueroa. If we could ever get him another block closer to the Harbor Freeway maybe we could push the bastard off the overpass sometime, I thought, in the mood for murder.

Lafferty always worked the businessmen in the area, taking the action and recording the bets inside a self-addressed stamped envelope. And he always hung around a mailbox and a public phone booth. If he saw someone that he figured was a vice cop, he’d run to the mailbox and deposit the letter. That way there’d be no evidence like betting markers or owe sheets the police could recover. He’d have the customers’ bets the next day when the mail came, and in time for collection and payment. Like all handbooks though, he was scared of plainclothes vice cops but completely ignored uniformed policemen.

So one day when I was riding by, I slammed on the binders, jumped out of the black-and-white, and fell on Zoot’s skinny ass before he could get to the mailbox. I caught him with the markers and they filed a felony bookmaking charge. I convicted him in Superior Court after I convinced the judge that I had a confidential reliable informant tell me all about Zoot’s operation, which was true, and that I hid behind a bush just behind the phone booth and overheard the bets being taken over the phone, which was a lie. But I convinced the judge and that’s all that matters. He had to pay a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine and was given a year’s probation, and that same day, he moved over here to Figueroa away from my beat where there are no bushes anywhere near his phone booth.

As I drove by Zoot, he waved at me and grinned and stood by the mailbox. I wondered if we could’ve got some help with the Post Office special agents to stop this flimflam, but it would’ve been awful hard and not worth the effort. You can’t tamper with someone’s mail very easy. Now, as I looked at his miserable face for the last time, my black mood got blacker and I thought, I’ll bet no other uniformed cop ever takes the trouble to shag him after I’m gone.

Then I started thinking about bookmaking in general, and got even madder, because it was the kind of crime I couldn’t do anything about. I saw the profits reaped from it all around me, and I saw the people involved in it, and knew some of them, and yet I couldn’t do anything because they were so well organized and their weapons were so good and mine were so flimsy. The money was so unbelievably good that they could expand into semilegitimate businesses and drive out competition because they had the racket money to fall back on, and the legitimate businesses couldn’t compete. And also they were tougher and ruthless and knew other ways to discourage competition. I always wanted to get one of them good, someone like Red Scalotta, a big book, whose fortune they say can’t be guessed at. I thought all these things and how mad I get everytime I see a goddamn lovable Damon-Runyon-type bookmaker in a movie. I started thinking then about Angie Caputo, and got a dark kind of pleasure just picturing him and remembering how another old beat man, Sam Giraldi, had humbled him. Angie had never realized his potential as a hood after what Sam did to him.

Sam Giraldi is dead now. He died last year just fourteen months after he retired at twenty years’ service. He was only forty-four when he had a fatal heart attack, which is particularly a policeman’s disease. In a job like this, sitting on your ass for long periods of time and then moving in bursts of heart-cracking action, you can expect heart attacks. Especially since lots of us get so damned fat when we get older.

When he ruined Angie Caputo, Sam was thirty-seven years old but looked forty-seven in the face. He wasn’t very tall, but had tremendous shoulders, a meaty face, and hands bigger than mine, all covered with heavy veins. He was a good handball player and his body was hard as a spring-loaded sap. He’d been a vice officer for years and then went back to uniform. Sam walked Alvarado when I walked downtown, and sometimes he’d drive over to my beat or I’d come over to his. We’d eat dinner together and talk shop or talk about baseball, which I like and which he was fanatic about. Sometimes, if we ate at his favorite delicatessen on Alvarado, I’d walk with him for a while and once or twice we even made a pretty good pinch together like that. It was on a wonderful summer night when a breeze was blowing off the water in MacArthur Park that I met Angie Caputo.