Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

“What happened, Bumper?” asked Charlie, running out on the fire escape, out of breath.

“Did you get all the right records, Charlie?”

“Oh my God, what happened?”

“He fell.”

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t think so, Charlie. He’s making a lot of noises.”

“I better call for an ambulance,” said Charlie. “You better stay here.”

“I intend to,” I said, and stood there resting against the railing for five minutes watching Fishman. During that time, Nick and Charlie went down and unfolded him and mopped at his face and bald head, which was broken with huge lacerations.

Charlie and me left the others there and drove slowly in the wake of the screaming ambulance which was taking Fishman to Central Receiving Hospital.

“How bad is your leg cut?” asked Charlie, seeing the blood, a purple wine color when it soaks through a policeman’s blue uniform.

“Not bad, Charlie,” I said, dabbing at the cuts on my hands.

“Your face doesn’t look bad. Little cut over your eye.”

“I feel fine.”

“There was a room across from the back office,” said Charlie. “We found a gas-fed burn oven in there. It was fired up and vented through the roof. They would’ve got to it if you hadn’t crashed through the window. I’m thankful you did it, Bumper. You saved everything for us.”

“Glad I could help.”

“Did Fishman try to fight you or anything?”

“He struggled a little. He just fell.”

“I hope the little asshole dies. I’m thinking what he means to the organization and what he is, and I hope the little asshole dies, so help me God. You know, I thought you pushed him for a minute. I thought you did it and I was glad.”

“He just fell, Charlie.”

“Here we are, let’s get you cleaned up,” said Charlie, parking on the Sixth Street side of Central Receiving where a doctor was going into the ambulance that carried Fishman. The doctor came out in a few seconds and waved them on to General Hospital where there are better surgical facilities.

“How’s he look, doctor?” asked Charlie, as we walked through the emergency entrance.

“Not good,” said the doctor.

“Think he’ll die?” asked Charlie.

“I don’t know. If he doesn’t, he may wish he had.”

The cut on my leg took a few stitches but the ones on my hands and face weren’t bad and just took cleaning and a little germ killer. It was almost seven o’clock when I finished my reports telling how Fishman jerked out of my grasp and how I got cut.

When I left, Charlie was dictating his arrest report to a typist.

“Well, I’ll be going now, Charlie,” I said, and he stopped his dictation and stood up and walked with me a little way down the hall and looked for a second like he was going to shake hands with me.

“Thanks, Bumper, for everything. This is the best vice pinch I’ve ever been in on. We got more of their records than I could’ve dreamed of.”

“Thanks for cutting me in on it, Charlie.”

“It was your caper.”

“Wonder how Fishman’s doing?” I said, getting a sharp pain and feeling a bubble forming. I popped two tablets.

“Fuzzy called out there about a half hour ago. Couldn’t find out much. I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll bet Red Scalotta has to get a new accountant and business advisor. I’ll bet Fishman’ll have trouble adding two-digit numbers after this.”

“Well, maybe it worked out right.”

“Right? It was more than that. For the first time in years I feel like maybe there is some justice in the world, and even though they fuck over you and rub it in your face and fuck over the law itself, well, now for the first time I feel like maybe there’s other hands in it, and these hands’ll give you some justice. I feel like the hand of God pushed that man down those stairs.”

“The hand of God, huh? Yeah, well I’ll be seeing you, Charlie. Hang in there, old shoe.”

“See you, Bumper,” said Charlie Bronski, his square face lit up, eyes crinkled, the broken tooth showing.

The locker room was empty when I got there, and after I sat down on the bench and started unlacing my boondockers, I suddenly realized how sore I was. Not the cuts from the glass, that was nothing. But my shoulder where I fell in that alley, and my arms and back from dangling there on that fire escape, when I couldn’t do what any young cop could do-pull my ass up six feet in the air. And my hands were blistered and raw from hanging there and from clawing at the concrete wall trying to get that boost. Even my ass was sore, deep inside, the muscles of both cheeks, from kicking against that steel reinforced door and bouncing off it like a tennis ball, or maybe in my case like a lumpy medicine ball. I was very very sore all over.

In fifteen minutes I’d gotten into my sport coat and slacks, and combed my hair as best I could, which just means rearranging what resembles a bad wiring job, and slipped on my loafers, and was driving out of the parking lot in my Ford. The gas pains were gone, and no indigestion. Then I thought of Aaron Fishman again, folded over, his gouged head twisted under the puny little body with the big cardboard box on top. But I stopped that nonsense right there, and said, no, no, you won’t haunt my sleep because it doesn’t matter a bit that I made you fall. I was just the instrument of some force in this world that, when the time is right, screws over almost every man, good or bad, rich or poor, and usually does it just when the man can bear it least.

IT WAS DARK NOW, and the spring night, and the cool breeze, even the smog, all tasted good to me. I rolled the windows down to suck up the air, and jumped on the Hollywood Freeway, thinking how good it would be at Abd’s Harem with a bunch of happy Arabs.

Hollywood was going pretty good for a Thursday night, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards both being jammed with cars, mostly young people, teeny boppers who’ve literally taken over Hollywood at night. The place has lost the real glamour of the forties and early fifties. It’s a kid’s town now, and except for a million hippies, fruits and servicemen, that’s about all you see around the Strip and the main thoroughfares. It’s a very depressing place for that reason. The clubs are mostly bottomless skin houses and psychedelic joints, but there’re still some places you can go, some excellent places to eat.

I’d come to know Yasser Hafiz and the others some ten or twelve years ago when I was walking my beat on Main Street. One night at about two a.m., I spotted a paddy hustler taking a guy up the back stairs of the Marlowe Hotel, a sleazy Main Street puke hole used by whores and fruits and paddy hustlers. I was alone because my partner, a piss-poor excuse for a cop named Syd Bacon, was laying up in a hotel room knocking a chunk off some bubble-assed taxi dancer he was going with. He was supposed to meet me back on the beat at one-thirty but never showed up.

I hurried around the front of the hotel that night and went up the other stairway and hid behind the deserted clerk’s desk, and when the paddy hustler and his victim came that way down the hall, I jumped inside the small closet at the desk. I was just in time because the paddy hustler’s two partners came out of a room two doors down and across the hall.

They were whispering, and one of them faded down the front stairway to watch the street. The second walked behind the desk, turned the lamp on and pretended to be reading a newspaper he carried with him. They were black of course. Paddy hustling was always a Negro flimflam and that’s where the name came from, but lately I’ve seen white hustlers using this scam on other paddies.

“Say, brother,” said the hustler who was with the paddy. I left the door open a crack and saw the paddy was a well-dressed young guy, bombed out of his skull, weaving around where he stood, trying hard to brush his thick black hair out of his eyes. He’d lost his necktie somewhere, and his white dress shirt was stained from booze and unbuttoned.