Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

I saw a Gypsy family walking to a rusty old Pontiac in a parking lot near Third and Main. The mother was a stooped-over hag, filthy, with dangling earrings, a peasant blouse, and a full red skirt hanging lopsided below her knees. The man walked in front of her. He was four inches shorter and skinny, about my age. A very dark unshaven face turned my way, and I recognized him. He used to hang around downtown and work with a Gypsy dame on pigeon drops and once in a while a Jamaican switch. The broad was probably his old lady, but I couldn’t remember the face just now. There were three kids following: a dirty, beautiful teenage girl dressed like her mother, a ragtag little boy of ten or so, and a curly-haired little doll of four who was dressed like mama also.

I wondered what kind of scam they were working on now, and I tried to think of his name and couldn’t, and I wondered if he’d remember me. As late as I was for court, I pulled to the curb.

“Hey, just a minute,” I called.

“What, what, what?” said the man. “Officer, what’s the problem? What’s the problem? Gypsy boy. I’m just a Gypsy boy. You know me don’t you, Officer? I talked with you before, ain’t I? We was just shopping, Officer. Me and my babies and my babies’ mother.”

“Where’re your packages?” I asked, and he squinted from the bright sunshine and peered into the car from the passenger side. His family all stood like a row of quail, and watched me.

“We didn’t see nothing we liked, Officer. We ain’t got much money. Got to shop careful.” He talked with his hands, hips, all his muscles, especially those dozen or so that moved the mobile face, in expressions of hope and despair and honesty. Oh, what honesty.

“What’s your name?”

“Marcos. Ben Marcos.”

“Related to George Adams?”

“Sure. He was my cousin, God rest him.”

I laughed out loud then, because every Gypsy I’d ever talked to in twenty years claimed he was cousin to the late Gypsy king.

“I know you don’t I, Officer?” he asked, smiling then, because I had laughed, and I didn’t want to leave because I enjoyed hearing the peculiar Hit to the Gypsy speech, and I enjoyed looking at his unwashed children who were exceptionally beautiful, and I wondered for the hundredth time whether a Gypsy could ever be honest after centuries of living under a code which praised deceit and trickery and theft from all but other Gypsies. Then I was sad because I’d always wanted to really know the Gypsies. That would be the hardest friendship I would ever make, but I had it on my list of things to accomplish before I die. I knew a clan leader named Frank Serna, and once I went to his home in Lincoln Heights and ate dinner with a houseful of his relatives, but of course they didn’t talk about things they usually talked about, and I could tell by all the nervous jokes that having an outsider and especially a cop in the house was a very strange thing for the clan. Still, Frank asked me back, and when I had time I was going to work on breaking into the inner circle and making them trust me a little because there were Gypsy secrets I wanted to know. But I could never hope to do it without being a cop, because they’d only let me know them if they first thought I could do them some good, because all Gypsies lived in constant running warfare with cops. It was too late now, because I would not be a cop, and I would never get to learn the Gypsy secrets.

“We can go now, Officer?” said the Gypsy, holding his hands clasped together, in a prayerful gesture. “It’s very hot for my babies’ mama here in the sun.”

I looked at the Gypsy woman then, looked at her face and she was not a hag, and not as old as I first thought. She stood much taller now and glared at me because her man was licking my boots and I saw that she had once been as pretty as her daughter, and I thought of how I had so often been accused of seeing good things in all women, even ones who were ugly to my partners, and I guessed it was true, that I exaggerated the beauty of all women I knew or ever saw. I wondered about that, and I was wallowing in depression now.

“Please, sir. Can we go now?” he said, the sweat running down the creases in his face, and on his unwashed neck.

“Go your way, Gypsy,” I said, and dug out from the curb, and in a few minutes I was parked and walking in the court building.

BEEN WAITING FOR YOU, Bumper,” said the robbery detective, a wrinkled old-timer named Miles. He had been a robbery detective even before I came on the job and was one of the last to still wear a wide-brimmed felt hat. They used to be called the “hat squad,” and the wide felt hat was their trademark, but of course in recent years no one in Los Angeles wore hats like that. Miles was a stubborn old bastard though, he still wore his, and a wide-shouldered, too-big suit coat with two six-inch guns, one on each hip, because he was an old robbery detective and the hat squad legend demanded it and other policemen expected it.

“Sorry I’m late, Miles,” I said.

“That’s okay, the case just got sent out to Division Forty-two. Can you handle this by yourself? I got another prelim in Forty-three and a couple of rookie arresting officers for witnesses. If I ain’t in there to tell this young D.A. how to put on his case, we might lose it.”

“Sure, I’ll handle it. Am I the only witness?”

“You and the hotel manager.”

“Got the evidence?”

“Yeah, here it is.” Miles pulled a large manila envelope out of his cheap plastic briefcase and I recognized the evidence tag I had stuck on there months ago when I made the arrest.

“The gun’s in there and the two clips.”

“Too bad you couldn’t file a robbery.”

“Yeah, well like I explained to you right after that caper, we were lucky to get what we did.”

“You filed an eleven-five-thirty too, didn’t you?”

“Oh yeah. Here’s the pot, I almost forgot.” Miles reached back in the briefcase and pulled out an analyzed-evidence envelope with my seal on it that contained the marijuana with the chemist’s written analysis on the package.

“How many jobs you figure this guy for?”

“I think I told you four, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“Now we think he done six. Two in Rampart and four here in Central.”

“It’s a shame you couldn’t make him on at least one robbery.”

“You’re telling me. I had him in a regular show-up and I had a few private mug-shot show-ups, and I talked and coaxed and damn near threatened my victims and witnesses and the closest I could ever come was one old broad that said he looked like the bandit.”

“Scumbag really did a good job with makeup, huh?”

“Did a hell of a job,” Miles nodded. “Remember, he was an actor for a while and he did a hell of a good job with paint and putty. But shit, the M.O. was identical, the way he took mom and dad markets. Always asked for a case of some kind of beer they were short of and when they went in the back for the beer, boom, he pulled the forty-five automatic and took the place down.”

“He ever get violent?”

“Not in the jobs in Central. I found out later he pistol-whipped a guy in one of the Rampart jobs. Some seventy-year-old grocery clerk decided he was Wyatt Earp and tried to go for some fucked-up old thirty-two he had stashed under the counter. Landry really laid him open. Three times across the eyes with the forty-five. He blinded him. Old guy’s still in the hospital.”

“His P.O. going to violate him?”

“This asshole has a rabbit’s foot. He finished his parole two weeks before you busted him. Ain’t that something else? Two weeks!”

“Well, I better get in there,” I said. “Some of these deputy D.A.’s get panicky when you’re not holding their hands. You get a special D.A. for this one?”