Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

“I coulda told you it wouldn’t open. That’s why I called you. Scared old man, Herky is. He keeps a bolt on the door whenever he’s inside. I already tried to get in.”

“Move back.”

“Going to break it?”

“Got any other suggestions?” I said, the handkerchief over my face, breathing through my mouth.

“No, I think I can smell him now.”

I booted the door right beside the lock and it crashed open, ripping the jamb loose. One rusty hinge tore free and the door dangled there by the bottom hinge.

“Yeah, he’s dead,” said Poochie, looking at Herky who had been dead for maybe five days, swollen and steamy in this unventilated room which not only had a hot plate, but a small gas heater that was raging on an eighty-five degree day.

“Can I look at him?” said Poochie, standing next to the bed, examining Herky’s bloated stomach and rotting face. His eyelids were gone and the eyes stared silver and dull at the elevator boy who grinned toothlessly and clucked at the maggots on Herky’s face and swollen sex organs.

I ran across the room and banged on the frame until I got the window open. Flies were crawling all over the glass, leaving wet tracks in the condensation. Then I ran to the hot plate, lit it, and threw the frying pan on the burner. I dumped the whole can of coffee on the frying pan, but the elevator boy was enjoying himself so much he didn’t seem to mind my extravagance with his coffee. In a few minutes the coffee was burning, and a pungent smoky odor was filling the room, almost neutralizing the odor of Herky.

“You don’t mind if I look at him?” asked Poochie again.

“Knock yourself out, pal,” I answered, going for the door.

“Been dead a while hasn’t he?”

“Little while longer and he’d have gone clear through the mattress.”

I walked to the pay phone at the end of the hall on the second floor. “Come with me, pal,” I called, figuring he’d roll old Herky soon as my back was turned. It’s bad enough getting rolled when you’re alive.

I put a dime in the pay phone and dialed operator. “Police department,” I said, then waited for my dime to return as she rang the station. The dime didn’t come. I looked hard at Poochie who turned away, very innocently.

“Someone stuffed the goddamn chute,” I said. “Some asshole’s gonna get my dime when he pulls the stuffing out later.”

“Bunch of thieves around here, Officer,” said Poochie, all puckered and a little chalkier than before.

I called the dicks and asked for one to come down and take the death report, then I hung up and lit a cigar, not that I really wanted one, but any smell would do at the moment.

“Is it true they explode like a bomb after a while?”

“What?”

“Stiffs. Like old Herky.”

“Yeah, he’d’ve been all over your wallpaper pretty soon.”

“Damn,” said the elevator boy, grinning big and showing lots of gums, upper and lower. “Some of these guys like Herky got lots of dough hidden around,” he said, winking at me.

“Yeah, well let’s let him keep it. He’s had it this long.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean we should take it.”

“Course not.”

“It’s just that these coroner guys, they get to steal anything they find laying around.”

“How long’s old Herky been living here?” I asked, not bothering to find out his whole name. I’d let the detective worry about the report.

“Off and on, over five years I know of. All alone. Never even had no friends. Nobody. Just laid up there in that room sucking up the sneaky pete. Used to drink a gallon a day. I think he lived off his social security. Pay his rent, eat a little, drink a little. I never could do it myself. That’s why I’m elevator boy. Can’t make it on that social security.”

“You ever talk to him?”

“Yeah, he never had nothing to say though. No family. Never been married. No relatives to speak of. Really alone, you know? I got me eight kids spread all over this damn country. I can go sponge off one of them ever’ once in a while. Never gonna see old Poochie like that.” He winked and tapped his chest with a bony thumb. “Guys like old Herky, they don’t care about nobody and nobody cares about them. They check out of this world grabbing their throat and staring around a lonely hotel room. Those’re the guys that swell up and pop all over your walls. Guys like old Herky.” The elevator boy thought about old Herky popping, and he broke out in a snuffling croupy laugh because that was just funny as hell.

I hung around the lobby waiting for the detective to arrive and relieve me of caring for the body. While I was waiting I started examining both sides of the staircase walls. It was the old kind with a scalloped molding about seven feet up, and at the first landing there were dirty finger streaks below the molding while the rest of the wall on both sides was uniformly dirty, but unsmudged. I walked to the landing and reached up on the ledge, feeling a toilet-paper-wrapped bundle. I opened it and found a complete outfit: eyedropper, hypodermic needle, a piece of heavy thread, burned spoon, and razor blade.

I broke the eye dropper, bent the needle, and threw the hype kit in the trash can behind the rickety desk in the lobby.

“What’s that?” asked the elevator boy.

“A fit.”

“A hype’s outfit?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you know it was there?”

“Elementary, my dear Poochie.”

“That’s pretty goddamn good.”

The detective came in carrying a clipboard full of death reports. He was one of the newer ones, a young collegiate-looking type. I didn’t know him. I talked to him for a few minutes and the elevator boy took him back to the body.

“Never catch old Poochie going it alone,” he called to me with his gums showing. “Never gonna catch old Poochie busting like a balloon and plastered to your wallpaper.”

“Good for you, Poochie,” I nodded, taking a big breath out on the sidewalk, thinking I could still smell the dead body. I imagined that his odor was clinging to my clothes and I goosed the black-and-white, ripping off some rubber in my hurry to get away from that room.

I drove around for a while and started wondering what I should work on. I thought about the hotel burglar again and wondered if I could find Link Owens, a good little hotel creeper, who might be able to tell me something about this guy that’d been hitting us so hard. All hotel burglars know each other. Sometimes you see so many of them hanging around the lobbies of the better hotels, it looks like a thieves’ convention. Then I got the code-two call to go to the station.

CODE TWO MEANS HURRY UP, and whenever policemen get that call to go to the station they start worrying about things. I’ve had a hundred partners tell me that: “What did I do wrong? Am I in trouble? Did something happen to the old lady? The kids?” I never had such thoughts, of course. A code-two call to go to the station just meant to me that they had some special shit detail they needed a man for, and mine happened to be the car they picked.

When I got to the watch commander’s office, Lieutenant Hilliard was sitting at his desk reading the morning editorials, his millions of wrinkles deeper than usual, looking as mean as he always did when he read the cop-baiting letters to the editor and editorial cartoons which snipe at cops. He never stopped reading them though, and scowling all the way.

“Hi, Bumper,” he said, glancing up. “One of the vice officers wants you in his office. Something about a bookmaker you turned for them?”

“Oh yeah, one of my snitches gave him some information yesterday. Guess Charlie Bronski needs to talk to me some more.”

“Going to take down a bookie, Bumper?” Hilliard grinned. He was a hell of a copper in his day. He wore seven service stripes on his left forearm, each one signifying five years’ service. His thin hands were knobby and covered with bulging blue veins. He had trouble with bone deterioration now, and walked with a cane.