Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

“Why not a baseball?”

“That’s not a bad idea. You’d make a good vice cop, Bumper.”

“Either way the person at the phone spot doesn’t know the phone number or address of the back office?” I asked.

“Hell no. That’s why I was telling you the chances are nil.”

Charlie dropped the dime in again and again hung it up.

“Must be doing a good business,” I said.

“Red Scalotta’s relay spots always do real good,” said Charlie. “I know personally of two Superior Court judges that bet with him.”

“Probably some cops too,” I said.

“Righteous,” he nodded. “Everybody’s got vices.”

“Whadda you call that gimmick where the phone goes to another pad?”

“A tap out,” said Charlie. “Sometimes you bust in an empty room and see nothing but a phone jack and a wire running out a window, and by the time you trace the wire down to the right apartment, the guy in the relay spot’s long gone. Usually with a tap out, there’s some kind of alarm hooked up so he knows when you crash in the decoy pad. Then there’s a toggle relay, where a call can be laid off to another phone line. Like for instance the back office clerk dials the relay spot where the toggle switch is and he doesn’t hang up. Then the bettor calls the relay and the back can take the action himself. All these gimmicks have disadvantages though. One of the main ones is that bettors don’t like call-back setups. Most bettors are working stiffs and maybe on their coffee breaks they only have a few minutes to get in to their bookie, and they don’t have ten or fifteen minutes to kill waiting for call-backs and all that crap. The regular relay spot with some guy or maybe some housewife earning a little extra bread by sitting on the hot seat is still the most convenient way for the book to operate.”

“You get many broads at these phone spots?”

“We sure do. We get them in fronts and backs. That is, we get them in the relay phone spots as well as back offices. We hear Red Scalotta’s organization pays a front clerk a hundred fifty a week and a back clerk three hundred a week. That’s a good wage for a woman, considering it’s tax free. A front clerk might have to go to jail once in a while but it ain’t no big thing to her. The organization bails them out and pays all legal fees. Then they go right back to work. Hardly any judge is going to send someone to county jail for bookmaking, especially if she’s female. And they’ll never send anyone to state prison. I know a guy in the south end of town with over eighty bookmaking arrests. He’s still in business.”

“Sounds like a good business.”

“It’s a joke, Bumper. I don’t know why I stay at it, I mean trying to nail them. We hear Red Scalotta’s back offices gross from one to two million a year. And he probably has at least three backs going. That’s a lot of bread even though he only nets eleven to sixteen percent of that. And when we take down these agents and convict them, they get a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine. It’s a sick joke.”

“You ever get Red Scalotta himself?”

“Never. Red’ll stay away from the back offices. He’s got someone who takes care of everything. Once in a while we can take a front and on rare occasions a back and that’s about all we can hope for. Well, let’s try to duke our bet in again.”

Charlie dropped in his dime and dialed the number. Then he looked excited and I knew someone answered.

“Hello,” said Charlie, “this is twenty-eight for Dandelion. Give me number four in the second, five across. Give me a two-dollar, four-horse round robin in the second. The number two horse to the number four in the third to the number six in the fourth to number seven in the fifth.”

Then Charlie stiffed in a few more bets for races at the local track, Hollywood Park, which is understood, unless you specify an Eastern track. Midway through the conversation, Charlie leaned out the phone booth and pumped his fist at Fuzzy, who disappeared inside the apartment building. Charlie motioned to me and I took off my hat and squeezed into the hot phone booth with him. He grinned and held the phone away from his ear, near mine.

I heard the crash over the phone, and the terrified woman scream and a second later Nick’s voice came over the line and said, “Hello, sweetheart, would you care for a round robin or a three-horse parley today?”

Charlie chuckled and hung up the phone and we hopped back in the vice car and drove to the apartment house, parking in front.

When we got to the second floor, Fuzzy was smooth talking an irate landlady who was complaining about the fractured door which Nick was propping shut for privacy. A good-looking, dark-haired girl was sitting on the couch inside the apartment crying her eyes out.

“Hi, Reba,” Charlie grinned as we walked in and looked around.

“Hello, Mister Bronski,” she wailed, drenching the second of two handkerchiefs she held in her hands.

“The judge warned you last time, Reba,” said Charlie. “This’ll make your third bookmaking case. He told you you’d get those six months he suspended. You might even get a consecutive sentence on top of it.”

“Please, Mister Bronski,” she wailed, throwing herself face down on the couch and sobbing so hard the whole couch shook.

She was wearing a very smart jersey blouse and skirt, and a matching blue scarf was tied around her black hair. Her fair legs had a very light spattering of freckles on them. She was a fine-looking girl, very Irish.

Charlie took me in the frilly sweet-smelling bedroom where the phone was. Reba had smeared half the bets off a twelve-by-eighteen chalkboard, but the other bets were untouched. A wet cloth was on the floor where the board was dropped along with the phone.

“I’ll bet she wet her pants again this time,” said Charlie, still grinning as he examined the numbers and x’s on the chalkboard which told the track, race, handicap position, and how much to win, place or show. The bettor’s identification was written beside the bets. I noticed that K.L. placed one hell of a lot of bets, probably just before Charlie called.

“We’re going to squeeze the shit out of her,” Charlie whispered. “You think Zoot was shaky, wait’ll you hear this broad. A real ding-a-ling.”

“Go ahead,” Nick was saying to someone on the phone when we came back in the living room. Fuzzy was nodding politely to the landlady and locking her out by closing the broken door and putting a chair in front of it.

“Right. Got it,” said Nick, hanging up. A minute later the phone rang again.

“Hello,” said Nick. “Right. Go ahead.” Every few seconds he mumbled, “Yeah,” as he wrote down bets. “Got it.” He hung up.

“Nick’s taking some bets mainly just to fuck up Scalotta,” Charlie explained to me. “Some of these guys might hit, or they might hear Reba got knocked over, and then they’ll claim they placed their bet and there’ll be no way to prove they didn’t, so the book’ll have to pay off or lose the customers. That’s where we get most of our tips, from disgruntled bettors. It isn’t too often a handbook like Zoot Lafferty comes dancing in, anxious to turn his bread and butter.”

“Mister Bronski, can I talk to you?” Reba sobbed, as Nick and then Fuzzy answered the phone and took the bets.

“Let’s go in the other room,” said Charlie, and we followed Reba back into the bedroom where she sat down on the soft, king-sized bed and wiped away the wet mascara.

“I got no time for bullshit, Reba,” said Charlie. “You’re in no position to make deals. We got you by the curlies.”

“I know, Mister Bronski,” she said, taking deep breaths. “I ain’t gonna bullshit you. I wanna work with you. I swear I’ll do anything. But please don’t let me get this third case. That Judge Bowers is a bastard. He told me if I violated my probation, he’d put me in. Please, Mister Bronski, you don’t know what it’s like there. I couldn’t do six months. I couldn’t even do six days. I’d kill myself.”