Joseph Wambaugh - The Choirboys

But there are other ways to become police legends, that is, by a single action or reaction which is so outrageous that within twenty-four hours it is the subject of every rollcall in the city Roscoe Rules was about to become that kind of legend.

That fateful night started pretty much as every other night with Roscoe driving and discussing the merits of fast cars, hotshot chase driving, devastating weapons and ammunition, and even women, since his wounded testicles were once more intact and functioning. As he talked, Roscoe as always unconsciously squeezed, kneaded and pulled at himself.

The salmon smoggy sun had dropped suddenly that evening. They were driving through their district at dusk, looking for traffic tickets which Roscoe believed in writing at the beginning of the watch. Often, a motorist could blow a red light at eight miles an hour during the busy late hours and Roscoe would ignore him or not even see him if he had already written his ticket for the night.

They passed a construction crew building a new elementary school in a black neighborhood near Washington Boulevard, and Roscoe yelled “Building new cages, huh?” to a white man in a hard hat who grinned and raised a hammer.

“The air’s quiet,” Roscoe remarked, lighting a Marlboro. “Not too many radio calls in Wilshire, but I got a feeling it’s gonna be a busy Thursday night. Animals got their welfare checks today Should be lots a action.”

A battered Texas Chevrolet driven by a grim looking white man with faded eyes pulled up next to them at a red light. The woman passenger, gaunt and weak, had difficulty rolling down the window. She was holding a baby in her arms, and one of the four blond children in the back seat helped her.

“Suh,” she said, “kin you tell us where the Gen’ral Hospital is?”

“Sure,” Roscoe answered. “Just go straight on this street to the Harbor Freeway and turn right. Keep going ten miles. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank ye,” she smiled, and again battled the window which was jammed in the bent frame.

Whaddayamean Dean looked at his partner quizzically and Roscoe explained, “Fuck this white trash. They’re worse’n niggers, coming here and making us pay for their little milk-suckers. General Hospital, my ass. Wonder what they’ll say when they find themselves looking at the ocean?”

Roscoe then spotted a black man in a business suit walking on Western Avenue with a young white woman in a green tailored jacket and skirt. She was obviously not one of the white prostitutes who worked the area so Roscoe kept his voice low when he drove by looked in their direction and said, “Price of pork what it is, and a spade can still buy a white pig for ten dollars?”

“You know, I never drove in a pursuit,” Whaddayamean Dean observed as he saw an LAPD traffic car zooming past them to overtake a speeder on Olympic Boulevard.

“Remember one thing, babe,” Roscoe said, his voice dropping an octave as it always did when he assumed the role of training officer, “don’t never try to overtake a fast car on the outside when you’re going in a turn. Most cars’ll flip on a piece of spit. Hit him on the inner rear fender and he’ll eat the windshield. I once saw a freeway car drive a motherfucker right into an abutment by doing that. Sucker’s car blew up like a howitzer shell. Took four pricks off the welfare rolls permanent . And you gotta know when your engine’s gonna flame out. These hogs probably only top out at a hundred ten so you push it very long you’ll probably throw a bearing, drop a rod and blow the engine. That’s embarrassing in a good pursuit. Makes you feel stupid.

“In addition to knowing your car you gotta know all your equipment,” Roscoe continued, “like that peashooter you’re carrying. I wish I could talk you into buying a Magnum and carrying some good, gut ripping hollow points in it. I want a gun that’ll stop some scrote when I need him stopped. After the prick’s dead I’ll worry about the ammunition being department approved. I ever tell you about that abba dabba burglar my partner shot when I used to work the Watts car? Ripping off a gas station when he set off the silent alarm. We were carrying those peashooters like you got. That sucker could run the hundred in ten flat till my partner shot him, and then he ran it in nine-nine. So I made a vow to get rid a this worthless ammo and get me some killing stuff. I made a study of velocity and shock.”

And then they got their first bloody call of the night. “Seven-A-Eighty-five. A possible jumper, Wilshire and Mariposa,” said the communications operator. “Handle the call code three.”

Roscoe preferred working an extra car, called an “X-car,” because instead of saying “Seven-X-Eighty-five” or “Seven-X-ray-Eighty-five,” he could improvise by saying, “Seven-Exceptional-Eighty-five,” or “Seven-Exciting-Eighty-five.”

Roscoe was falling in love with the voice of the radio operator on frequency ten whom he had never seen. So Roscoe picked up the mike, pushed the button to send, made three kissing sounds and said, “This is Seven-Ay-ya-Eighty-five. I say Seven-a-for-Atomic-Eighty-five, rrrrrajah on the call.”

Then he released the button, turned to Whaddayamean Dean and said, “That’ll make her wet her pants.”

And the radio operator, who was a fat, fifty-nine year old housewife with six children older than Roscoe Rules, turned to the operator on her left and said, “That guy on Seven-A-Eighty-five sounds like an insufferable prick.”

• • •

A janitor named Homer Tilden had placed the jumper call when a twenty-two year old receptionist named Melissa Monroe returned to the office some three hours after the building closed and demanded to be let in on the pretext of having left an important document there.

“I never shoulda let her in, it’s my fault, all my fault,” the plump black janitor later sobbed to detectives.

Then the janitor pictured the pert smiling girl with the jazz age bob, who always yelled “Night, Mr. Tilden!” when she left at night, and he burst into tears like a child.

When Roscoe Rules and Dean Pratt arrived, red lights flashing and siren screaming, there was already a small group of morbid onlookers who had come across from the Ambassador Hotel. Homer Tilden led the two policemen to the elevator and up to the twenty-first floor where the young woman sat on the window ledge of her own office, feet dangling, looking down curiously at the crowd gathering. In the distance the wail of a fire department emergency vehicle trapped by Wilshire Boulevard night traffic three blocks west.

“Don’t come near me,” the girl said calmly her hair blowing wispily around her tiny ears as the two policemen ran from the elevator and burst into the office.

“Go downstairs,” Roscoe said to Homer Tilden who was holding his chest and panting as though he had run the twenty-one stories instead of taking the elevator.

“Maybe I…”

“Go downstairs!” Roscoe repeated. “There’s gonna be other people coming.”

And as the janitor obeyed, Roscoe Rules began to imagine a picture and write-up in tomorrow’s Los Angeles Times if he could save the beautiful jumper. She was a fox and would surely rate an inside front page photo, along with her savior.

“Look, miss,” Roscoe said and stepped forward. But the girl moved inches closer to her destiny, and Roscoe froze in his tracks.

“Maybe we better back off, partner,” Dean whispered, looking for the moment far younger than his twenty-five years, his freckles swimming in streams of sweat.

“We don’t back off nothing,” Roscoe whispered back. “She’s a dingaling, and there’s ways to handle them.” Then to the girl Roscoe said, “Nothing’s as bad as that. Come on in. Let’s jaw about it.”