Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

They quieted down as soon as Herb opened the back door and threatened to tear their heads off, and I was just getting back in the wagon when Beans, sitting by the door, said, “Fuck you, you skin-headed jackass!” I cracked up laughing because Herb was bald, and with his long face and big yellow teeth and the way he brayed when he laughed, he did look like a skin-headed jackass.

Herb though, growled something, and snatched Beans right off the bench, out of the wagon into the street, and started belting him back and forth across the face with his big gloved hand. I realized from the thuds that they were sap gloves and Beans’s face was already busted open and bleeding before I could pull Herb away and push him back, causing him to fall on his ass.

“You son of a bitch,” he said, looking at me with a combination of surprise and bloodred anger. He almost said it like a question he was so surprised.

“He’s a wino, man,” I answered, and that should’ve been enough for any cop, especially a veteran like Herb who had twelve years on the job at that time and knew that you don’t beat up defenseless winos no matter what kind of trouble they give you. That was one of the first things we learned in the old days from the beat cops who broke us in. When a man takes a swing at you or actually hits you, you have the right to kick ass, that goes without saying. It doesn’t have to be tit for tat, and if some asshole gives you tit, you tat his goddamn teeth down his throat. That way, you’ll save some other cop from being slugged by the same pukepot if he learns his lesson from you.

But every real cop also knows you don’t beat up winos. Even if they swing at you or actually hit you. Chances are it’ll be a puny little swing and you can just handcuff him and throw him in jail. Cops know very well how many fellow policemen develop drinking problems themselves, and there’s always the thought in the back of your mind that there on the sidewalk, but for the gods, sleeps old Bumper Morgan.

Anyway, Herb had violated a cop’s code by beating up the wino and he knew it, which probably saved us a hell of a good go right there on East Sixth Street. And I’m not at all sure it might not’ve ended by me getting my chubby face changed around by those sap gloves because Herb was an ex-wrestler and a very tough bastard.

“Don’t you ever try that again,” he said to me, as we put Beans back inside and locked the door.

“I won’t, if you never beat up a drunk when you’re working with me,” I answered casually, but I was tense and coiled, ready to go, even thinking about unsnapping my holster because Herb looked damned dangerous at that moment, and you never know when an armed man might do something crazy. He was one of those creeps that carried an untraceable hideout gun and bragged how if he ever killed somebody he shouldn’t have, he’d plant the gun on the corpse and claim self-defense. The mood was interrupted by a radio call just then, and I rogered it and we finished the night in silence. The next night Herb asked to go back to a radio car because he and I had a “personality conflict.”

Shortly after that Herb went to vice and got fired, and I forgot all about that incident until about a year later on Main Street, when I ran into Beans again. That night I got into a battle with two guys I’d watched pull a pigeon drop on some old man. I’d stood inside a pawnshop and watched them through binoculars while they flimflammed him out of five hundred bucks.

They were bad young dudes, and the bigger of the two, a block-faced slob with an eighteen-inch neck was giving me a pretty good go, even though I’d already cracked two of his ribs with my stick. I couldn’t finish him because the other one kept jumping on my back, kicking and biting, until I ran backward and slammed into a car and a brick wall, with him between me and the object. I did this twice and he kept hanging on and then somebody from the crowd of about twenty assholes who were gathered around enjoying the fight barreled in and tackled the little one and held him on the sidewalk until I could finish the big one by slapping him across the Adam’s apple with the stick.

The other one gave up right then and I cuffed the two of them together and saw that my helper was old Beans the wino, sitting there throwing up, and bleeding from a cut eye where the little dude clawed him. I gave Beans a double sawbuck for that, and took him to a doctor, and I had the Captain’s adjutant print up a beautiful certificate commending Beans for his good citizenship. Of course, I lied and said Beans was some respectable businessman who saw the fight and came to my aid. I couldn’t tell them he was a down-and-out wino or they might not have done it. It was nicely framed and had Beans’s real name on it, which I couldn’t for the life of me remember now. I presented it to him the next time I found him bombed on East Sixth Street and he really seemed to like it.

As I remembered all this, I felt like calling him back and asking him if he still had it, but I figured he probably sold the frame for enough to buy a short dog, and used the certificate to plug the holes in his shoe. It’s always best not to ask too many questions of people or to get to know them too well. You save yourself disappointment that way. Anyway, Beans was half a block away now, staggering down the street cradling the wine bottle under his greasy coat.

I took down my sunglasses which I keep stashed behind the visor in my car and settled down to cruise and watch the streets and relax even though I was too restless to really relax. I decided not to wait, but to cruise over to the school and see Cassie, who would be coming in early like she always did on Thursdays. She’d feel like I did, like everything she did these last days at school would be for the last time. But at least she knew she’d be doing similar things in another school.

I parked out front and got a few raspberries from students for parking my black-and-white in the no parking zone, but I’d be damned if I’d walk clear from the faculty lot. Cassie wasn’t in her office when I got there, but it was unlocked so I sat at her desk and waited.

The desk was exactly like the woman who manned it: smart and tidy, interesting and feminine. She had an odd-shaped ceramic ashtray on one side of the desk which she’d picked up in some junk store in west L.A. There was a small, delicately painted oriental vase that held a bunch of dying violets which Cassie would replace first thing after she arrived. Under the plastic cover on the desk blotter Cassie had a screwy selection of pictures of people she admired, mostly French poets. Cassie was long on poetry and tried to get me going on haiku for a while, but I finally convinced her I don’t have the right kind of imagination for poetry. My reading is limited to history and to new ways of doing police work. I liked one poem Cassie showed me about wooly lambs and shepherds and wild killer dogs. I understood that one all right.

The door opened and Cassie and another teacher, a curvy little chicken in a hot pink mini, came giggling through the door.

“Oh!” said the young broad. “Who are you?” the blue uniform shocked her. I was sitting back in Cassie’s comfortable leather-padded desk chair.

“I am the Pretty Good Shepherd,” I said, puffing on my cigar and smiling at Cassie.

“Whatever that means,” said Cassie, shaking her head, putting down a load of books, and kissing me on the cheek much to the surprise of her friend.

“You must be Cassie’s fiancé,” the friend laughed as it suddenly hit her. “I’m Maggie Carson.”

“Pleased to meet you, Maggie. I’m Bumper Morgan,” I said, always happy to meet a woman, especially a young one, who shakes hands, and with a firm friendly grip.

“I’ve heard about Cassie’s policeman friend, but it surprised me, seeing that uniform so suddenly.”