The Choirboys (39 page)

"Sorry, Scuz, I just. I just wanted to win the game."

"I oughtta kick your ass for gettin hurt."

"I didn't get hurt, just this scratch oh my neck."

"You coulda got killed! For what? A game? I ask you don't get hurt. That asking too much?"

"Sorry, Scuz."

"There's lots a vice sergeants in this town that'd pat you on the ass and write you an attaboy for bringing down the whores. But I ain't one a them. Risking your life for a shitty vice pinch! I thought you was smart!"

Then Sergeant Scuzzi paced around the vice office stepping on his shoestrings, and Harold sat quietly with the other two new lads on the block. Sam Niles and Baxter Slate were falling down drunk after having sat in the bar for three hours waiting for Scuz and Harold Bloomguard who were busy with other things. The two choirboys had swilled free drinks all evening.

"You kicking me off the squad?" Harold asked sheepishly.

"I oughtta kick you all off. Christ, you almost get killed and these other two twenty-six year old rummies get swacked sucking up bourbon."

"I was drinking Scotch, Scuz," said Sam Niles who held his head in both hands.

"Shut up, Niles!" Scuz said, relighting his cigar which was so badly chewed there were soppy flakes of tobacco stuck all over his lips and chin.

"Okay, you three just watch it from now on. Bloomguard, you need a keeper. I'm gonna supervise you personal. Make sure you stay alive the weeks you're here. Slate, you and Niles better keep your boozing under control, hear me?"

"Yes, Sergeant," Baxter Slate said. He was sitting woodenly, trying to convince Sergeant Scuzzi that he was cold sober.

"Fucking kids," Scuz said, shaking his head at the three repentant choirboys. "And another thing, Slate and Niles, I'd like to know how Pete Zoony got that knot on his face tonight. He was working fruits with you two a little earlier, wasn't he?"

"Yes, Sergeant," Baxter Slate said.

"Don't call me sergeant."

"Yes, Scuz," said Baxter Slate, who was trying to keep from vomiting.

"Lotta fucking mysteries around here," said Scuz. "Okay, you three go home and get some sleep. I want you in good shape tomorrow night. Gonna try to take a big poker game. And I'll be along to make sure you don't get killed!"

The three choirboys left then. Baxter vomited in the parking lot and felt much better. Sam said his headache was going away. Harold was buoyant from getting three whores his first night on vice. They wanted to go to choir practice but thought they better heed Scuz's advice. Then they decided to stop at the park just to see if any of the choirboys were still there.

"Drive by Pico and Western on our way," Harold said as Baxter aimed his Volkswagen in an easterly direction, not as sober as he thought he was.

"What for?"

"Wanna show you guys how far we ran," Harold said.

"Who gives a shit?" Sam Niles said, already sorry he had decided to come along to choir practice.

"Come on, lemme just show you," Harold pleaded, and Baxter smiled understandingly and said, "Sure, Harold."

When they got to the intersection, Harold insisted they circle the block and told the interested Baxter Slate and the disinterested Sam Niles how the chase began. He showed them Fred's house and the house where he drew down on the young black man.

"You know it's sad working vice," Harold said. "Those girls were young. All the girls I busted tonight were young."

"Their job demands the hope and vigor of youth," Baxter Slate said. He was beginning to feel better, reviving in the night air.

"Maybe so," Harold said. "Maybe so."

"Just like our job," Baxter added.

"If we're going to choir practice, let's go," Sam Miles said, sitting in the back seat of the Volkswagen with his long legs turned sideways, not enjoying his cigarette because his body wanted more oxygen than he was giving it.

"Right here is where she swung at me and scratched me," Harold said as Baxter stopped, ready to make a right turn on the red.

Then Harold said, "Wait a minute, Baxter. Pull over, will you?"

"Now what, Harold?" Sam Miles sighed, taking off his steel rims and wiping his eyes.

But Harold had hopped out of the Volkswagen as soon as Baxter parked and he stooped, picking up something from the gutter.

"What the hell're you doing, Harold?" Sam asked.

"Look!" Harold Bloomguard said, stepping over to the car.

It was a springblade knife: four inches of steel with a sequined handle. A woman's knife, feminine, well honed. The point had been broken off and Harold felt his heart make light hollow thuds as he walked to the vacant newsstand. He used the broken blade of the knife to dig the tiny triangle of steel out of the wooden wall. It was throat high and deeply imbedded.

"What're you doing, Harold?" Sam Miles demanded and was surprised when Harold snarled, "Shut up, Sam!"

Then the ugly chip of steel popped out and fell into Harold's palm and he looked at it for a moment. Harold Bloomguard propped the knife against the curb and disposed of it cop style with a sharp blade-snapping heel kick.

Baxter Slate figured it out first. "Any chance of getting a lift off the knife, Harold?"

"Rough fancy surface on the handle," Harold said. "No chance for prints. No chance."

Sam Niles started to ask Harold if he still felt sorry for the whores, but when Harold turned toward Baxter, Sam saw how tired and bitter Harold Bloomguard's mouth looked.

There were still a few dogged choirboys in the park when they arrived at 4:00 A. M., but Carolina Moon had gone home and Ora Lee Tingle had not been able to make it. Harold thought the night air was strangely chilled for the end of July. They adjourned when Francis Tanaguchi said that tonight's choir practice was a bummer.

Chapter
TWELVE

Alexander Blaney
.

Alexander Blaney was not a choirboy but he had witnessed his share of choir practices. He had even come to know some of the choirboys by name as he sat alone two hundred feet across the grass in the darkness of MacArthur Park and listened to the lusty voices carry over the water.

Alexander Blaney often wished he could meet the choirboys, at least some of them. He knew of course that they were off-duty policemen. He wondered what Father Willie looked like and the one called Dean who cried a lot when he was drunk. And he would have liked to meet Harold Bloomguard who was always protecting the ducks of MacArthur Park. There was one he didn't want to meet, not under any circumstances. He didn't want to meet Roscoe Rules whose talk was full of threats and violence. He didn't know what it meant to do the chicken but he was certain he wouldn't like it if Roscoe Rules made him do the chicken.

Alexander Blaney had grown up less than three blocks from MacArthur Park and was well known by some of the Juvenile officers at nearby Rampart Police Station. He was not known to the choirboys of Wilshire Station. Alexander was a handsome boy, even more handsome than Baxter Slate. He had dark curls and bright blue eyes, and though he was six feet tall, he hardly ate, weighing only 130 pounds.

Alexander Blaney was known by Rampart Juvenile officers because since the age of fourteen he had come to them with complaints about men who allegedly accosted him in MacArthur Park where he had played as long as he could remember. Alexander, an only child, had usually played alone. Since the neighborhood ground Alvarado Street was predominantly white with a sprinkling of Cubans and Indians, it was not considered a ghetto. His parents never knew about the halfway houses nearby or of the number of men frequenting MacArthur Park who had spent years behind bars buggering young men who were not half as handsome and vulnerable as Alexander Blaney.

This is not to say that the neighborhood made Alexander Blaney what he was. No one, not even Alexander Blaney, knew what made him what he was. What he was not was the golden young conqueror his father had read about in his salad days when he dreamed of being more than a semi-invalid elevator operator. But if the lad had never acquired his namesake's taste for battle and glory, he had developed the sexual preference of the Greek warrior. For Alexander Blaney was, at eighteen and a half, a rubber wristed, lisping, mincing faggot.

While Alexander Blaney began getting accustomed to being gay and could not fool anyone by trying to hide that fact, Harold Bloomguard, nearing the end of his two weeks of vice duty, got drunk and came to the same conclusion.

"You're what?" Sam Niles asked as he and Sam sat alone in a vice car on a nighttime whore stakeout after having drunk six pitchers of beer in a beer bar they failed to operate effectively.

"I'm afraid I'm turning homosexual, Sam," said the beery choirboy. "And I'm terrified. I'm probably going to shoot myself or go to live with my mom in the funny place!"

"Oh please! Why me? Why me?" cried Sam Niles, slumping down in the car seat and pushing up his steel rims, so he could look to a heaven he did not believe in, to a God he knew did not exist. "All right, let's get this over with. When did you discover you were gay?"

"Just this week working the traps. You see, I started to wonder if a guy couldn't begin to identify, what with seeing that all the time, and with identifying comes acceptance and then. well, once I wondered if I might get a blue veiner watching that stuff sometime, and if I did it would mean I'm turning. And I'd have to kill myself."

"And did you get a blue veiner?"

"Well no, but maybe it's only my straight inhibitions stopping it. See what I mean?"

"I see," said Sam, lighting a cigarette. "And what's your next move? Gonna shoot yourself over on Duck Island?"

"I don't know," Harold belched. "You know how insanity runs in my family. I'll probably end up with Mom no matter what."

"You know, Harold, I think having you around might be more effective than electroshock. Your mother'll probably cure herself just to get away from you."

"Don't get testy with me, Sam. You're the only real friend I've got. I'm a sick man."

"You've been a sick man since you joined my fire team in Nam! You've been a sick man all your life, I'm sure. But somehow you survive all this by telling me all the screwy loony goofy neurotic fears you have THAT I DON'T WANNA HEAR ABOUT! I tell you, I'll be the one doing the nudie tap dance with your mom in the state hospital!"

"Sam, you can tell your problems to me. I'd love to hear about your fears and."

"I don't want you to be my confessor. I don't need a confessor, Harold."

"Everybody should tell his problems to someone, Sam, and you're my best."

"Don't say it, Harold," Sam interrupted, trying to calm himself. "Please don't say I'm your best anything. We've been together a long time, I know. God, how I know."

"I'm sorry, I'll never burden you again," Harold said boozily.

"Oh yes you will. In a day or two you'll tell me you've discovered you're a sadist and you want me to keep an eye on you in case you start sticking pencils in somebody's eyeballs."

"I'm sorry, Sam. I never meant to be a burden." They sat quietly for a moment and then Sam said, "Harold, did you ball Carolina Moon Tuesday night at choir practice?"

"Sort of, but only because I was drunk. And first."

"Well anyone who likes pussy enough to screw that fat bitch can't be a fruit, okay?"

"You know I never thought of that!" said Harold Bloomguard, brightening. "I never thought of that! Thanks, Sam. You always come through for me. If it weren't for you."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," said the bored and disgusted Sam Niles.

Then Harold Bloomguard thought a moment and said, "How do I know I'm not bisexual?"

Harold Bloomguard's fears of being a bisexual were soon displaced by a more pressing fear when he decided he had cancer. Harold's discovery of the cancer came as a result of Scuz giving them the vice complaint against the Gypsy fortune teller, Margarita Palmara, who lived in back of a modest wood frame cottage near Twelfth and Irolo. The tiny building had been painted a garish yellow but was otherwise not unlike other homes in the area. The residence of Margarita Palmara was a garage apartment which had been converted from a chicken coop. The husband of Margarita Pahnwa literally flew the coop one day and left Mrs. Palmara to fend for her five children which she did in Gypsy fashion by con games, shoplifting and fortune-telling to supplement the welfare check. But then she had the good luck to tell a woman thought to be dying of a radium treated cancer that she would soon get well, and lo, she did. From then on Margarita Palmara was called upon by neighborhood women, who hailed from a dozen Latin countries, to cure everything from acne to leukemia. Just prior to the Wilshire vice detail's receiving a complaint from a disgruntled patient, Mrs. Palmara had quickly earned more than ten thousand dollars from the Spanish speaking women of the neighborhood. Never one to overdo a good thing she was thinking it was time she flew the coop herself before the cops heard about her.

But she waited a bit too long and the cops did hear about her. A middle aged Mexican-American policewoman named Nena Santos was ordered to pose as a neighborhood housewife and attempt to operate Margarita Palmara to get a violation of law.