Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

“Yeah, I guess you might say I live off my beat, all right. ’Course I don’t do much jousting.”

“Just rousting ?”

“Yeah, I’ve rousted a couple thousand slimeballs in my time.”

“So you’re my Blue Knight.”

“Wait a minute, kid,” I said. “You’re only getting a former knight if you get me.”

“What do you mean, ‘if’?”

“It’s okay to shuck about me being some kind of hero or something, but when I retire I’m just a has-been.”

“Bumper,” she said, and laughed a little, and kissed my hand like Glenda did. That was the second woman to kiss my hand today, I thought. “I’m not dazzled by authority symbols. It’s really you that keeps me kissing your hands.” She did it again and I’ve always thought that having a woman kiss your hands is just almost more than a man can take. “You’re going to an important job. You’ll be an executive. You have an awful lot to offer, especially to me. In fact, you have so much maybe I should share it.”

“I can only handle one woman at a time, baby.”

“Remember Nancy Vogler, from the English department?”

“Yeah, you want to share me with her?”

“Silly,” she laughed. “Nancy and her husband were married twelve years and they didn’t have any children. A couple of years ago they decided to take a boy into their home. He’s eleven now.”

“They adopted him?”

“No, not exactly. They’re foster parents.” Cassie’s voice became serious. “She said being a foster parent is the most rewarding thing they’ve ever done. Nancy said they’d almost missed out on knowing what living is and didn’t realize it until they got the boy.”

Cassie seemed to be searching my face just then. Was she thinking about my boy? I’d only mentioned him once to her. Was there something she wanted to know?

“Bumper, after we get married and settled in our home, what would you say to us becoming foster parents? Not really adopting a child if you didn’t want to, but being foster parents, sharing. You’d be someone for a boy to look up to and learn from.”

“A kid! But I never thought about a family!”

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and after seeing Nancy and hearing about their life, I think about how wonderful it would be for us. We’re not old yet, but in ten or fifteen more years when we are getting old, there’d be someone else for both of us.” She looked in my eyes and then down. “You may think I’m crazy, and I probably am, but I’d like you to give it some thought.”

That hit me so hard I didn’t know what to say, so I grinned a silly grin, kissed her on the cheek, said, “I’m end of watch in fifteen minutes. Bye, old shoe,” and left.

She looked somehow younger and a little sad as she smiled and waved at me when I’d reached the stairway. When I got in my black-and-white I felt awful. I dropped two pills and headed east on Temple and cursed under my breath at every asshole that got in my way in this rush-hour traffic. I couldn’t believe it. Leaving the Department after all these years and getting married was change enough, but a kid! Cassie had asked me about my ex-wife one time, just once, right after we started going together. I told her I was divorced and my son was dead and I didn’t go into it any further. She never mentioned it again, never talked about kids in that way.

Damn, I thought, I guess every broad in the world should drop a foal at least once in her life or she’ll never be happy. I pushed Cassie’s idea out of my mind when I drove into the police building parking lot, down to the lower level where it was dark and fairly cool despite the early spring heat wave. I finished my log, gathered up my ticket books, and headed for the office to leave the log before I took off the uniform. I never wrote traffic tickets but they always issued me the ticket books. Since I made so many good felony pinches they pretty well kept their mouths shut about me not writing tickets, still, they always issued me the books and I always turned them back in just as full. That’s the trouble with conformists, they’d never stop giving me those ticket books.

After putting the log in the daywatch basket I jived around with several of the young nightwatch coppers who wanted to know when I was changing to nights for the summer. They knew my M.O. too. Everybody knew it. I hated anyone getting my M.O. down too good like that. The most successful robbers and burglars are the ones who change their M.O’s. They don’t give you a chance to start sticking little colored pins in a map to plot their movements. That reminded me of a salty old cop named Nails Grogan who used to walk Hill Street.

About fifteen years ago, just for the hell of it, he started his own crime wave. He was teed off at some chickenshit lieutenant we had then, named Wall, who used to jump on our meat every night at rollcall because we weren’t catching enough burglars. The way Wall figured this was that there were always so many little red pins on the pin maps for nighttime business burglaries, especially around Grogan’s beat. Grogan always told me he didn’t think Wall ever really read a burglary report and didn’t know shit from gravy about what was going on. So a little at a time Nails started changing the pins every night before rollcall, taking the pins out of the area around his beat and sticking them in the east side. After a couple weeks of this, Wall told the rollcall what a hell of a job Grogan was doing with the burglary problem in his area, and restricted the ass chewing to guys that worked the eastside cars. I was the only one that knew what Grogan did and we got a big laugh out of it until Grogan went too far and pinned a full-blown crime wave on the east side, and Lieutenant Wall had the captain call out the Metro teams to catch the burglars. Finally the whole hoax was exposed when no one could find crime reports to go with all the little pins.

Wall was transferred to the morning watch, which is our graveyard shift, at the old Lincoln Heights jail. He retired from there a few years later. Nails Grogan never got made on that job, but Wall knew who screwed him, I’m sure. Nails was another guy that only lived a few years after he retired. He shot himself. I got a chill thinking about that, shook it off, and headed for the locker room where I took off the bluesuit and changed into my herringbone sport coat, gray slacks, and lemon yellow shirt, no tie. In this town you can usually get by without a tie anywhere you go.

Before I left, I plugged in my shaver and smoothed up a little bit. A couple of the guys were still in the locker room. One of them was an ambitious young bookworm named Wilson, who as usual was reading while sitting on the bench and slipping into his civvies. He was going to college three or four nights a week and always had a textbook tucked away in his police notebook. You’d see him in the coffee room or upstairs in the cafeteria going through it all the time. I’m something of a reader myself but I could never stand the thought of doing it because you had to.

“What’re you reading?” I asked Wilson.

“Oh, just some criminal law,” said Wilson, a thin youngster with a wide forehead and large blue eyes. He was a probationary policeman, less than a year on the job.

“Studying for sergeant already?” said Hawk, a cocky, square-shouldered kid about Wilson’s age, who had two years on, and was going through his badge-heavy period.

“Just taking a few classes.”

“You majoring in police science?” I asked.

“No, I’m majoring in government right now. I’m thinking about trying for law school.” He didn’t look right at me and I didn’t think he would. This is something I’ve gotten used to from the younger cops, especially ones with some education, like Wilson. They don’t know how to act when they’re with old-timers like me. Some act salty like Hawk, trying to strut with an old beat cop, and it just looks silly. Others act more humble than they usually would, thinking an old lion like me would claw their ass for making an honest mistake out of greenness. Still others, like Wilson, pretty much act like themselves, but like most young people, they think an old fart that’s never even made sergeant in twenty years must be nearly illiterate, so they generally restrict all conversation to the basics of police work to spare you, and they generally look embarrassed like Wilson did now, to admit to you that they read books. The generation gap is as bad in this job as it is in any other except for one thing: the hazards of the job shrink it pretty fast. After a few brushes with danger, a kid pretty much loses his innocence, which is what the generation gap is really all about-innocence.