The Choirboys (32 page)

Oscar Mobley had not been heard from for several months, apparently content to have a car with a red body, red bumpers, red tires, red hubcaps and red grille, but with unpainted windows and headlights. Then something happened on the night Sam and Harold met Oscar Mobley.

"Seven-A-Twenty-nine, see the woman, male mental case, Eleventh and Irolo, code two."

"Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, roger," Harold responded as Sam picked up speed a little and drove through the nighttime traffic to the residential neighborhood of Oscar Mobley.

"It's about time you got here," said the caller, Mrs. Jasper, the next door neighbor of Oscar Mobley. Her hair was wet with red paint and a blue cotton dress she held in her hands was covered with the stuff "I just asked that crazy nut Oscar why he was painting his headlights and windshield red, that's all I did."

"Wait a minute," Sam Niles said as he and Harold stood in the street with Mrs. Jasper, her husband, her brother and eight other neighborhood men and women who had almost decided to lynch the frail Oscar Mobley until someone had the presence of mind to call the police.

"Oscar started to paint his car again tonight," said Mr. Jasper, a man with receding hair and a parrot's face, who was even more frail than Oscar Mobley and who had no stomach for fighting for Mrs. Jasper who could have licked Oscar Mobley and Mr. Jasper at the same time on her worst day.

"Yeah, we know about Oscar," Sam Niles said.

"Well he started to paint again," Mr. Jasper continued. "He ain't done that for three, four months now. He won't ever tell anyone on the street why he paints his car red and we asked him a thousand times, maybe a million. He just smiles and keeps painting and won't answer you. Well tonight he done what the judge told him not to do, he started painting the headlights and the windows red, and my wife just came out on the front porch and asked him why."

"That's all I done and that crazy little."

"Please, ma'am, one at a time," Harold said.

"Well, my little woman just comes out and sees him there under the streetlight, painting everything red and she asks him why he's doing it and he says something she can't hear and she thinks at last maybe she's gonna learn the secret of why Oscar Mobley paints his car red and she just walks over."

"Out of curiosity," added Mrs. Jasper.

"Out of curiosity," said Mr. Jasper, "and when she gets close she says, 'Oscar, why do you paint your car red?' And he don't say a word. Then he done it."

"Done. did what?" asked Harold.

"Painted me red!" Mrs. Jasper shouted. "The little son of a bitch started painting me. I got the paintbrush in my mouth and I couldn't breathe. He was painting my hair and neck and arms. If he hadn't a surprised me I'd a knocked the little bastard down the sewer, but pretty soon I couldn't even see for the paint in my eyes. And I turn and run for the house and he chases me painting my."

"Her ass," said Mr. Jasper.

"Yes, the dirty beggar even did that to me and I've been scrubbing with paint thinner till my skin's almost wore off. Look at me!"

Harold shined the flashlight past Mrs. Jasper's face so as not to hit her eyes with the beam and it was true, her face and neck were a splotched and faded red like a pomegranate. "Well, it's time someone did something about Oscar," Sam Niles sighed and he and Harold got their batons and put them in the rings on their Sam Brownes and went to find Oscar Mobley and let Mrs. Jasper make a citizen's arrest on him for painting her red.

As Sam expected, Oscar Mobley did not open the door when he pounded and rang the bell.

"It's unlocked, Sam," Harold said when he turned the knob of the front door of the little three room house where Oscar lived with two cats and a goldfish.

Sam shrugged and readied his revolver and Harold Bloomguard also fingered his gun, ready to touch the spring on the clamshell holster. Both men entered the darkened kitchen and tiptoed toward the narrow hallway to the tiny bedroom where a lamp burned.

Sam went in first, his gun out in front and he said quietly, "Mr. Mobley, if you're in here I want you to come out. We're police officers and we want to talk to you. We won't hurt you. Come out."

There was no answer and Sam entered the room, seeing nothing but an unmade bed, a box of cat litter, a broken down nightstand with an old radio on it, a pile of dirty clothing on the floor and a napless overstuffed chair.

Sam was about to check under the bed when he and Harold were scared half out of their wits by the naked Oscar Mobley who suddenly leaped out from behind the overstuffed chair, painted red from head to foot, arms outstretched.

"Up popped the devil!" yelled Oscar Mobley cheerfully!

It was miraculous that neither officer shot him. Both were exerting at least a pound of trigger pull on their guns which like all department issued guns had been altered to fire only double action. They stood, shoulders pressed together, backs to the wall, gaping at Oscar Mobley who posed, arms extended, grinning proudly, the paint hardly dry on his small naked body.

Everything had been painted: the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet, his hair, face, body, genitals. He had managed with a roller to get the center of his back. He had neglected his teeth only because he forgot them. He had not painted his eyeballs only because he started to and it hurt.

As Sam Niles later stood in Oscar Mobley's kitchen and smoked to steady his nerves, the equally shaken Harold Bloomguard patiently persuaded Oscar Mobley that despite the beautiful paint job he should wear a bathrobe to go where they were going because it was a nippy evening and he might catch cold.

After agreeing that Elwood Banks, the jailor at Wilshire Station, might object to their bringing in a man who painted himself red since it would be messy to try to roll fingerprints over the coat of red enamel, Sam and Harold took Oscar Mobley where he belonged: Unit Three, Psychiatric Admitting, of the Los Angeles County General Hospital. The hospital now had a grander name: Los Angeles County, University of Southern California Medical Center. But it would forever be General Hospital to the indigent people it served.

Oscar Mobley was admitted, later had a sanity hearing wherein he steadfastly refused to tell anyone why he painted his car, himself, and Mrs. Jasper red, and went to a state hospital for six months where he refused to tell anyone else his secret.

After his release he moved to a new neighborhood, took a job delivering throwaway circulars, did it beautifully for eight-days, then painted his boss and his boss' wife red and was recommitted to the state hospital. But all this happened long after Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard took him to Unit Three, in time to miss code seven though they were starving, and just in time to meet the Moaning Man.

The call came just after 11:00 P. M. "Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, shot fired vicinity of Ninth and New Hampshire."

"Rampart Division," Sam Niles said to Harold Bloomguard who nodded, picked up the mike and said, "Seven-A-Twenty-nine reporting that the call is in Rampart Division."

"Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, stand by," said the radio operator as she checked with one of the policemen who supervise the girls and assign the call tickets.

"Goddamn Rampart cars've been pulling this shit too often lately," Sam said to Harold who didn't mind handling the call in someone else's division because Sam had been exceedingly quiet and Harold was getting as bored as Sam always was.

"If we have to handle this one, next time a Rampart car gets a call in our area we'll just let the bastards handle it," Sam said. "Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, handle the call in Rampart Division," said the radio operator. "No Rampart units available."

"Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, roger on the call," Harold Bloomguard said as Sam Niles pushed up his drooping steel rimmed glasses and threw a cigarette out the window saying, "They're probably all over on Alvarado eating hamburgers, the lazy pricks."

Sam drove slowly on the seedy residential streets, mostly a white Anglo district, but with some black and Latin residents. He shined the spotlights on the front of homes and apartments, hoping not to find anyone who may have phoned about shots being fired. Sam Niles wanted to go to an east Hollywood drive-in and eat cherry pie and drink coffee and try to score with a waitress he knew.

"There it is," Harold said as Sam's spotlight beam lighted a chinless withered man in a bathrobe who waited in front of a two story stucco apartment house. The door glass had been broken so many times the panes were replaced by plywood and cardboard.

Sam took his time parking, and Harold was already across the narrow street by the time Sam gathered up his flashlight and put his cigarette pack in his pocket and locked the car door so someone didn't have fun slashing the upholstery or stealing the shotgun from the rack.

"Heard a shot," the old man said. His eyes were a quiet brown like a dog's.

"You live here?"

"Yep."

"You the manager?"

"Nope, but I got a passkey. I help out Charlie Bates. He's the manager."

"Why do we need a key?" Harold asked.

"Shot came from up there."

And the man in the bathrobe pointed a yellow bony finger up to the front window on the second floor where a gray muslin drape flapped rhythmically as the gusts of wind blew and sucked through the black hole of an open window on what had become a chilled and cloudy night.

"Give us the passkey, we'll have a look," Sam Niles said and later he wondered if he felt something then.

It seemed he did. He was to recall distinctly wishing that a Rampart unit would feel guilty that Wilshire was handling their calls and perhaps come driving down Ninth Street to relieve them.

The stairs creaked as they climbed and the whole building reeked, dank and sour from urine and moldy wool carpet on the stairs. They stood one on each side of the door and Sam knocked.

The dying tree outside, the last on the block, rattled in the wind which rushed through the narrow hallway upstairs. The building was surprisingly quiet for one housing eighty-five souls. Sam reached up and unscrewed the only bulb at their end of the hall, and said, "We better be in the dark."

"Might be some drunk sitting in there playing with a gun," Harold nodded and both policemen drew their service revolvers.

Sam knocked again and the sound echoed through the empty hall which had no floor carpet, only old wooden floors caked with grime which could never be removed short of sanding the wood a quarter of an inch down. A mustard colored cat, displaying the indifference Sam Niles usually feigned, watched from the windowsill.

The wind blew and it was a cold wind, yet Sam was to remember later that he was sweating. He tasted the salt running through his mustache into the dimple of his upper lip. Then they heard it.

At first Sam Niles thought it was the wind. Then he saw the look on Harold Bloomguard's face in the dark hallway when he moved into a patch of moonlight. He knew that Harold heard it and that it wasn't the wind.

Then they heard it again. The Moaning Man was saying: "Mmmmmm. Mmmmmm. Mmmmmuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh."

Then Sam was sweating in earnest and Harold's pale little face was glistening in the swatch of moonlight as he pressed himself against the wall, gun in his left hand. Sam Niles turned the key slowly and then kicked the door open with his toe and jumped back against the wall.

"Mmmmm," said the Moaning Man. "Uuuuhhhhh. Mmmmmuuuuuhhhhh."

"Jesus Christ motherfucker son of a bitch!" Sam Niles, like many men, swore incoherently when he was frightened.

The moans sounded like cattle lowing. They came from inside. Inside in the darkness.

Finally Sam Niles moved. He dropped to his knees and with his flashlight in his left hand and gun in the right, crawled into the tiny apartment ready to switch on the flashlight and ready to shoot. He crept toward the bedroom which was just behind the cluttered kitchen.

Sam Niles smelled blood. And he felt the flesh wriggling on his rib cage and on his back and up the sides of his dripping neck into his temple when the Moaning Man said it again. But it was loud this time and plaintive: "Mmmmm. Uuuuuhhhhh. Mmmmmuuuuuhhhhh!" Then Harold Bloomguard, tiptoeing through the kitchen behind Sam who was on his knees, accidentally dropped his flashlight and the beam switched on when it hit the floor and Sam Niles cursed and jumped to his feet and leaped to the doorway, his gun following the beam from his own flashlight in the darkness. And he met the Moaning Man.

He was sitting up in bed, his back pressed to the wall. He was naked except for undershorts. Every few seconds the wind would snap the dirty ragged drapes and the moonlight would wash his chalky body which otherwise lay in the slash of light. He held a 9 mm. Luger in his left hand and had used it for the first and last time by placing it under his chin, gouging the soft flesh between the throat and the jawbone and pulling the trigger.

The top of the head of the Moaning Man was on the bed and on the floor beside the bed. The wall he leaned against was spotted with sticky bits of brain and drops of blood. Most of his face was intact, except it was crisscrossed with rivulets of blood in the moonlight, filling his eyes with blood. The most incredible thing of all was not that the Moaning Man was able to make sounds, it was that the gun he had killed himself with was clenched tightly in a fist across his body at port arms. He moved it back and forth in rhythm with the moans.