Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

“I don’t know, fifty, fifty-five.”

“Think they’ll hurt him?”

“Why should they? He doesn’t even know what he’s doing. They can see that. They just fucked up, that’s all. Why should they hurt a dummy?”

“Because they’re slimeballs.”

“Well, you never know,” Charlie shrugged. “They might. Anyway, we got the warrant, Bumper. By God, I kept my promise to you.”

“Thanks, Charlie. Nobody could’ve done better. You got anybody staked on the place?”

“Milburn. He works in our office. We’ll just end up busting the broad, Terry. According to the dummy she’s the only one ever comes in there except once in a while a man comes in, he said. He couldn’t remember what the man looked like. This is Thursday. Should be a lot of paper in that back office. If we get enough of the records we can hurt them, Bumper.”

“A two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine?” I sniffed.

“If we get the right records we can put Internal Revenue on them. They can tax ten percent of gross for the year. And they can go back as far as five years. That hurts, Bumper. That hurts even a guy as big as Red Scalotta, but it’s tough to pull it off.”

“How’re you going in?”

“We first decided to use Bobby. We can use subterfuge to get in if we can convince the court that we have information that this organization will attempt to destroy records. Hell, they all do that. Fuzzy thought about using Bobby to bang on the lower door to the inside stairway and call Terry and have Terry open the door which she can buzz open. We could tell Bobby it’s a game or something, but Nick and Milburn voted us down. They thought when we charged through the door and up the steps through the office door and got Terry by the ass, old Bobby might decide to end the game. If he stopped playing I imagine he’d be no more dangerous than a brahma bull. Anyway, Nick and Milburn were afraid we’d have to hurt the dummy so they voted us down.”

“So how’ll you do it?”

“We borrowed a black policewoman from Southwest Detectives. We got her in a blue dungaree apron suit like the black babes that work pressing downstairs. She’s going to knock on the downstairs door and start yelling something unintelligible in a way-out suede dialect, and hope Terry buzzes her in. Then she’s going to walk up the steps and blab something about a fire in the basement and get as close to Terry as she can, and we hope she can get right inside and get her down on the floor and sit on her because me and Nick’ll be charging up that door right behind her. The Administrative Vice team’ll follow in a few minutes and help us out since they’re the experts on a back-office operation. You know, I only took one back office before so this’ll be something for me too.”

“Where’ll I be?”

“Well, we got to hide you with your bluesuit, naturally, so you can hang around out back, near the alley behind the solid wood fence on the west side. After we take the place I’ll open the back window and call you and you can come on in and see the fruits of your labor with Zoot Lafferty.”

“What’ll you do about getting by your star witness?”

“The dummy? Oh, Fuzzy got stuck with that job since he’s Bobby’s best pal,” Charlie chuckled. “Before any of us even get in position Fuzzy’s going in to get Bobby and walk him down the street to the drugstore for an ice cream sundae.”

“One-Victor-One to Two, come in,” said a voice over frequency six.

“That’s Milburn at the back office,” said Charlie, hurrying to the radio.

“Go, Lem,” said Charlie over the mike.

“Listen, Charlie,” said Milburn. “A guy just went in that doorway outside. It’s possible he could’ve turned left into the laundry, I couldn’t tell, but I think he made a right to the office stairway.”

“What’s he look like, Lem?” asked Charlie.

“Caucasian, fifty-five to sixty, five-six, hundred fifty, bald, moustache, glasses. Dressed good. I think he parked one block north and walked down because I saw a white Cad circle the block twice and there was a bald guy driving and looking around like maybe for heat.”

“Okay, Lem, we’ll be there pretty quick,” said Charlie, hanging up the mike, red-faced and nodding at me without saying anything.

“Fishman,” I said.

“Son of a bitch,” said Charlie. “Son of a bitch. He’s there!”

Then Charlie got on the mike and called Nick and the others, having trouble keeping his voice low and modulated in his excitement, and it was affecting me and my heart started beating. Charlie told them to hurry it up and asked their estimated time of arrival.

“Our E.T.A. is five minutes,” said Nick over the radio.

“Jesus, Bumper, we got a chance to take the office and Aaron Fishman at the same time! That weaselly little cocksucker hasn’t been busted since the depression days!”

I was still happy as hell for Charlie, but looking at it realistically, what the hell was there to scream about? They had an idiot for an informant, and I didn’t want to throw cold water, but I knew damn well the search warrant stood a good chance of being traversed, especially if Bobby was brought into court as a material witness and they saw his I.Q. was less than par golf. And if it wasn’t traversed, and they convicted the clerk and Fishman, what the hell would happen to them, a two-hundred-fifty-dollar fine? Fishman probably had four times that much in his pants pocket right now. And I wasn’t any too thrilled about I.R.S. pulling off a big case and hitting them in the bankbook, but even if they did, what would it mean? That Scalotta couldn’t buy a new whip every time he had parties with sick little girls like Reba? Or maybe Aaron Fishman would have to drive his Cad for two years without getting a new one? I couldn’t see anything to get ecstatic about when I considered it all. In fact, I was feeling lower by the minute, and madder. I prayed Red Scalotta would show up there too and maybe try to resist arrest, even though my common sense told me nothing like that would ever happen, but if it did…

“There should be something there to destroy the important records,” said Charlie, puffing on a cigarette and dancing around impatiently waiting for Nick and the others to drive up.

“You mean like flash paper? I’ve heard of that,” I said.

“They sometimes use that, but mostly in fronts,” said Charlie. “You touch a flame or a cigarette to it and it goes up in one big flash and leaves no residue. They also got this dissolving paper. You drop it in water and it dissolves with no residue you can put under a microscope. But sometimes in backs they have some type of small furnace they keep charged where they can throw the real important stuff. Where the hell is that Nick?”

“Right here, Charlie,” I said, as the vice car sped across the parking lot. Nick and Fuzzy and the Negro policewoman were inside and another car was following with the two guys from Administrative Vice.

Everybody was wetting their pants when they found out Aaron Fishman was in there, and I marveled at vice officers, how they can get excited about something that is so disappointing, and depressing, and meaningless, when you thought about it. And then Charlie hurriedly explained to the Ad Vice guys what a uniformed cop was doing there, saying it started out as my caper. I knew one of the Ad Vice officers from when he used to work Central Patrol and we jawed and made plans for another five minutes, and finally piled into the cars.

We turned north on Catalina from Sixth Street before getting to Kenmore and then turned west and came down Kenmore from the north. The north side of Sixth Street is all apartment buildings and to the south is the Miracle Mile, Wilshire Boulevard. Sixth Street itself is mostly commercial buildings. Everybody parked to the north because the windows were painted on the top floor of the building on this side. It was the blind side, and after a few minutes everybody got ready when Fuzzy was seen through binoculars skipping down the sidewalk with Bobby, who even from this distance looked like Gargantua. With the giant gone the stronghold wasn’t quite so impregnable.