Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

One more day and it’s over, thank Christ, I thought, and half stumbled down the hill to my car because I still wasn’t completely awake.

“One-X-L-Forty-five, One-X-L-Forty-five, come in,” said the communications operator, a few seconds after I started the car. She sounded exasperated as hell, so I guess she’d been trying to get me. Probably a major crisis, like a stolen bicycle, I thought.

“One-X-L-Forty-five, go,” I said disgustedly into the mike.

“One-X-L-Forty-five, meet the plainclothes officer at the southeast corner of Beverly and Vermont in Rampart Division. This call has been approved by your watch com-mander.”

I rogered the call and wondered what was going on and then despite how rotten I felt, how disgusted with everything and everybody, and mostly this miserable crummy job, despite all that, my heart started beating a little bit harder, and I got a sort of happy feeling bubbling around inside me because I knew it had to be Charlie Bronski. Charlie must have something, and next thing I knew I was driving huckety-buck over Temple, slicing through the heavy traffic and then bombing it down Vermont, and I spotted Charlie in a parking lot near a market. He was standing beside his car looking hot and tired and mad, but I knew he had something or he’d never call me out of my division like this.

“About time, Bumper,” said Charlie, “I been trying to reach you on the radio for a half hour. They told me you left court a long time ago.”

“Been out for investigation, Charlie. Too big to talk about.”

“Wonder what that means,” Charlie smiled, with his broken-toothed, Slavic, hard-looking grin. “I got something so good you won’t believe it.”

“You busted Red Scalotta!”

“No, no, you’re dreaming,” he laughed. “But I got the search warrant for the back that Reba told us about.”

“How’d you do it so fast?”

“I don’t actually have it yet. I’ll have it in fifteen minutes when Nick and Fuzzy and the Administrative Vice team get here. Nick just talked to me on the radio. Him and Fuzzy just left the Hall of Justice. They got the warrant and the Ad Vice team is on the way to assist.”

“How the hell did you do it, Charlie?” I asked, and now I’d forgotten the judge, and the humiliation, and the misery, and Charlie and me were grinning at each other because we were both on the scent. And when a real cop gets on it, there’s nothing else he can think about. Nothing.

“After we left Reba I couldn’t wait to get started on this thing. We went to that laundry over near Sixth and Kenmore. Actually, it’s a modern dry cleaning and laundry establishment. They do the work on the premises and it’s pretty damned big. The building’s on the corner and takes in the whole ground floor, and I even saw employees going up to the second floor where they have storage or something. I watched from across the street with binoculars and Fuzzy prowled around the back alley and found the door Reba said Aaron was talking about.”

“Who in the hell is Aaron, Charlie?”

“He’s Scalotta’s think man. Aaron Fishman. He’s an accountant and a shrewd organizer and he’s got everything it takes but guts, so he’s a number two man to Scalotta. I never saw the guy, I only heard about him from Ad Vice and Intelligence. Soon as Reba described that little Jew I knew who she was talking about. He’s Scalotta’s link with the back offices. He protects Red’s interests and hires the back clerks and keeps things moving. Dick Reemey at Intelligence says he doesn’t think Red could operate without Aaron Fishman. Red’s drifting away from the business more and more, getting in with the Hollywood crowd. Anyway, Fuzzy, who’s a nosy bastard, went in the door to the laundry and found a stairway that was locked, and a door down. He went down and found a basement and an old vented furnace and a trash box, and he started sifting through and found a few adding machine tapes all ending in fives and zeros, and he even found a few charred pieces of owe sheets and a half-burned scratch sheet. I’ll bet Aaron would set fire to his clerk if he knew he was that careless.”

Charlie chuckled for a minute and I lit a cigar and looked at my watch.

“Don’t worry about the time, Bumper, the back office clerks don’t leave until an hour or so past the last post. He’s got to stay and figure his tops.”

“Tops?”

“Top sheets. This shows each agent’s code and lists his bettors and how much was won and lost.”

“Wonder how Zoot Lafferty did today?” I laughed.

“Handbooks like Zoot get ten percent hot or cold, win or lose,” said Charlie. “Anyway, Fuzzy found a little evidence to corroborate Reba, and then came the most unbelievable tremendous piece of luck I ever had in this job. He’s crawling around down there in the basement like a rat, picking up burned residue, and next thing he sees is a big ugly guy standing stone still in the dark corner of the basement. Fuzzy almost shit his pants and he didn’t have a gun or anything because you don’t really need weapons when you’re working books. Next thing, this guy comes toward him like the creature from the black lagoon and Fuzzy said the door was behind the guy and just as he’s thinking about rushing him with his head down and trying to bowl him over on his ass, the giant starts talking in a little-boy voice and says, ‘Hello, my name is Bobby. Do you know how to fix electric trains?’

“And next thing Fuzzy knows this guy leads him to a little room in the back where there’s a bed and a table and Fuzzy has to find a track break in a little electric train set that Bobby’s got on his table, and all the time the guy’s standing there, his head damn near touching the top of the doorway he’s so big, and making sure Fuzzy fixes it.”

“Well, what…”

“Lemme finish,” Charlie laughed. “Anyway, Fuzzy gets the train fixed and the big ox starts banging Fuzzy on the back and shoulders out of sheer joy, almost knocking Fuzzy’s bridgework loose, and Fuzzy finds out this moron is the cleanup man, evidently some retarded relative of the owner of the building, and he lives there in the basement and does the windows and floors and everything in the place.

“There’re some offices on the second floor with a completely different stairway, Fuzzy discovers, and this locked door is the only way up to this part of the third floor except for the fire escape in back and the ladder’s up and chained in place. This giant, Bobby, says that the third floor is all storage space for one of the offices on the second floor except for ‘Miss Terry’s place,’ and then he starts telling Fuzzy how he likes Miss Terry and how she brings him pies and good things to eat every day, so Fuzzy starts pumping him and Bobby tells him how he hardly ever goes in Miss Terry’s place, but he washes the windows once in a while and sometimes helps her with something. And with Fuzzy prodding, he tells about the wooden racks where all the little yellow cards are with the numbers. Those’re the ABC professional-type markers of course, and he tells about the adding machine, two adding machines, in fact, and when Fuzzy shows him the burned National Daily Reporter, Bobby says, yeah, those are always there. In short, he completely describes an elite bookmaking office right up to the way papers are bundled and filed.”

“You used this Bobby for your informant on the search warrant affidavit?”

“Yeah. I didn’t have to mention anything about Reba. According to the affidavit, we got the warrant solely on the basis of this informant Bobby and our own corroborative findings.”

“You’ll have to use the poor guy in court?”

“He’ll certainly have to be named,” said Charlie.

“How old a guy is he?”