Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

Lefler’s helmet was dazzling white and tilted forward, the short bill pulled down to his nose. I drove up beside him and yelled, “That’s a gorgeous skid lid you got there, boy, but pull it up a little and lemme see those baby blues.”

Lefler smiled and goosed his bike a little. He was even wearing expensive black leather gloves in this heat.

“Hi, Bumper,” said Crandall, taking his hand from the bar for a minute. We rode slow side by side and I grinned at Lefler, who looked self-conscious.

“How’s he doing, Crandall?” I asked. “I broke him in on the job. He’s Bumper-ized.”

“Not bad for a baby,” Crandall shrugged.

“I see you took his training wheels off,” I said, and Lefler giggled and goosed the Harley again.

I could see the edge of the horseshoe cleats on his heels and I knew his soles were probably studded with iron.

“Don’t go walking around my beat with those boots on, kid,” I yelled. “You’ll be kicking up sparks and starting fires.” I chuckled then as I remembered seeing a motor cop with two cups of coffee in his gloved hands go right on his ass one time because of those cleats.

I waved at Lefler and pulled away. Young hotdogs, I thought. I was glad I was older when I came on the job. But then, I knew I would never have been a motor officer. Writing traffic tickets was the one part of police work I didn’t like. The only good thing about it was it gave you an excuse to stop some suspicious cars on the pretext of writing a ticket. More good arrests came from phony traffic stops than anything else. More policemen got blown up that way, too.

I decided, what the hell, I was too jumpy to lay around the park reading the paper. I’d been like a cat ever since I’d decided about Friday. I hardly slept last night. I headed back toward the beat.

I should be patrolling for the burglar, I thought. I really wanted him now that I only had a couple days left. He was a daytime hotel creeper and hitting maybe four to six hotel rooms in the best downtown hotels every time he went to work. The dicks talked to us at rollcall and said the M.O. run showed he preferred weekdays, especially Thursday and Friday, but a lot of jobs were showing up on Wednesdays. This guy would shim doors which isn’t too hard to do in any hotel since they usually have the world’s worst security, and he’d burgle the place whether the occupants were in or not. Of course he waited until they were in the shower or napping. I loved catching burglars. Most policemen call it fighting ghosts and give up trying to catch them, but I’d rather catch a hot prowl guy than a stickup man any day. And any burglar with balls enough to take a pad when the people are home is every bit as dangerous as a stickup man.

I decided I’d patrol the hotels by the Harbor Freeway. I had a theory this guy was using some sort of repairman disguise since he’d eluded all stakeouts so far, and I figured him for a repair or delivery truck. I envisioned him as an out-of-towner who used the convenient Harbor Freeway to come to his job. This burglar was doing ding-a-ling stuff on some of the jobs, cutting up clothing, usually women’s or kids’, tearing the crotch out of underwear, and on a recent job he stabbed the hell out of a big teddy bear that a little girl left on the bed covered up with a blanket. I was glad the people weren’t in when he hit that time. He was kinky, but a clever burglar, a lucky burglar. I thought about patrolling around the hotels, but first I’d go see Glenda. She’d be rehearsing now, and I might never see her again. She was one of the people I owed a good-bye to.

I entered the side door of the run-down little theater. They mostly showed skin flicks now. They used to have a halfway decent burlesque house here, with some fair comics and good-looking girls. Glenda was something in those days. The “Gilded Girl” they called her. She’d come out in a gold sheath and peel to a golden G-string and gold pasties. She was tall and graceful, and a better-than-average dancer. She played some big-time clubs off and on, but she was thirty-eight years old now and after two or three husbands she was back down on Main Street competing with beaver movies between reels, and taxi dancing part-time down the street at the ballroom. She was maybe twenty pounds heavier, but she still looked good to me because I saw her like she used to be.

I stood there in the shadows backstage and got accustomed to the dark and the quiet. They didn’t even have anyone on the door anymore. I guess even the weinie waggers and bustle rubbers gave up sneaking in the side door of this hole. The wallpaper was wet and rusty and curling off the walls like old scrolls. There were dirty costumes laying around on chairs. The popcorn machine, which they activated on weekend nights, was leaning against the wall, one leg broken.

“The cockroaches serve the popcorn in this joint. You don’t want any, Bumper,” said Glenda, who had stepped out of her dressing room and was watching me from the darkness.

“Hi, kid.” I smiled and followed her voice through the dark to the dimly lit little dressing room.

She kissed me on the cheek like she always did, and I took off my hat and flopped down on the ragged overstuffed chair behind her makeup table.

“Hey, Saint Francis, where’ve all the birdies gone?” she said, tickling the bald spot on my crown. She always laid about a hundred old jokes on me every time we met.

Glenda was wearing net stockings with a hole in one leg and a sequined G-string. She was nude on top and didn’t bother putting on a robe. I didn’t blame her, it was so damn hot today, but she didn’t usually go around like this in front of me and it made me a little nervous.

“Hot weather’s here, baby,” she said, sitting down and fixing her makeup. “When you going back on nights?”

Glenda knew my M.O. I work days in the winter, night-watch in the summer when the Los Angeles sun starts turning the heavy bluesuit into sackcloth.

“I’ll never go back on nights, Glenda,” I said casually. “I’m retiring.”

She turned around in her chair and those heavy white melons bounced once or twice. Her hair was long and blond.

She always claimed she was a real blonde but I’d never know.

“You won’t quit,” she said. “You’ll be here till they kick you out. Or till you die. Like me.”

“We’ll both leave here,” I said, smiling because she was starting to look upset. “Some nice guy’ll come along and…”

“Some nice guy took me out of here three times, Bumper. Trouble is I’m just not a nice girl. Too fucked up for any man. You’re just kidding about retiring, aren’t you?”

“How’s Sissy?” I said, to change the subject.

Glenda answered by taking a package of snapshots out of her purse and handing them to me. I’m farsighted now and in the dimness I couldn’t really see anything but the outline of a little girl holding a dog. I couldn’t even say if the dog was real or stuffed.

“She’s beautiful,” I said, knowing she was. I’d last seen her several months ago when I drove Glenda home from work one night.

“Every dollar you ever gave me went into a bank account for her just like we agreed at first,” said Glenda.

“I know that.”

“I added to it on my own too.”

“She’ll have something someday.”

“Bet your ass she will,” said Glenda, lighting a cigarette.

I wondered how much I’d given Glenda over the past ten years. And I wondered how many really good arrests I’d made on information she gave me. She was one of my big secrets. The detectives had informants who they paid but the bluesuits weren’t supposed to be involved in that kind of police work. Well, I had my paid informants too. But I didn’t pay them from any Department money. I paid them from my pocket, and when I made the bust on the scam they gave me, I made it look like I lucked onto the arrest. Or I made up some other fanciful story for the arrest report. That way Glenda was protected and nobody could say Bumper Morgan was completely nuts for paying informants out of his own pocket. The first time, Glenda turned me a federal fugitive who was dating her and who carried a gun and pulled stickups. I tried to give her twenty bucks and she refused it, saying he was a no-good asshole and belonged in the joint and she was no snitch. I made her take it for Sissy who was a baby then, and who had no dad. Since then over the years I’ve probably laid a thousand on Glenda for Sissy. And I’ve probably made the best pinches of any cop in Central Division.