The Blue Knight (18 page)

“Where’re your packages?” I asked, and he squinted from the bright sunshine and peered into the car from the passenger side. His family all stood like a row of quail, and watched me.

“We didn’t see nothing we liked, Officer. We ain’t got much money. Got to shop careful.” He talked with his hands, hips, all his muscles, especially those dozen or so that moved the mobile face, in expressions of hope and despair and honesty. Oh, what honesty.

“What’s your name?”

“Marcos. Ben Marcos.”

“Related to George Adams?”

“Sure. He was my cousin, God rest him.”

I laughed out loud then, because every Gypsy I’d ever talked to in twenty years claimed he was cousin to the late Gypsy king.

“I know you don’t I, Officer?” he asked, smiling then, because I had laughed, and I didn’t want to leave because I enjoyed hearing the peculiar Hit to the Gypsy speech, and I enjoyed looking at his unwashed children who were exceptionally beautiful, and I wondered for the hundredth time whether a Gypsy could ever be honest after centuries of living under a code which praised deceit and trickery and theft from all but other Gypsies. Then I was sad because I’d always wanted to really know the Gypsies. That would be the hardest friendship I would ever make, but I had it on my list of things to accomplish before I die. I knew a clan leader named Frank Serna, and once I went to his home in Lincoln Heights and ate dinner with a houseful of his relatives, but of course they didn’t talk about things they usually talked about, and I could tell by all the nervous jokes that having an outsider and especially a cop in the house was a very strange thing for the clan. Still, Frank asked me back, and when I had time I was going to work on breaking into the inner circle and making them trust me a little because there were Gypsy secrets I wanted to know. But I could never hope to do it without being a cop, because they’d only let me know them if they first thought I could do them some good, because all Gypsies lived in constant running warfare with cops. It was too late now, because I would
not
be a cop, and I would
never
get to learn the Gypsy secrets.

“We can go now, Officer?” said the Gypsy, holding his hands clasped together, in a prayerful gesture. “It’s very hot for my babies’ mama here in the sun.”

I looked at the Gypsy woman then, looked at her face and she was
not
a hag, and not as old as I first thought. She stood much taller now and glared at me because her man was licking my boots and I saw that she had once been as pretty as her daughter, and I thought of how I had so often been accused of seeing good things in all women, even ones who were ugly to my partners, and I guessed it was true, that I exaggerated the beauty of all women I knew or ever saw. I wondered about that, and I was wallowing in depression now.

“Please, sir. Can we go now?” he said, the sweat running down the creases in his face, and on his unwashed neck.

“Go your way, Gypsy,” I said, and dug out from the curb, and in a few minutes I was parked and walking in the court building.

TWELVE

B
EEN WAITING FOR YOU
, Bumper,” said the robbery detective, a wrinkled old-timer named Miles. He had been a robbery detective even before I came on the job and was one of the last to still wear a wide-brimmed felt hat. They used to be called the “hat squad,” and the wide felt hat was their trademark, but of course in recent years no one in Los Angeles wore hats like that. Miles was a stubborn old bastard though, he still wore his, and a wide-shouldered, too-big suit coat with two six-inch guns, one on each hip, because he was an old robbery detective and the hat squad legend demanded it and other policemen expected it.

“Sorry I’m late, Miles,” I said.

“That’s okay, the case just got sent out to Division Forty-two. Can you handle this by yourself? I got another prelim in Forty-three and a couple of rookie arresting officers for witnesses. If I ain’t in there to tell this young D.A. how to put on his case, we might lose it.”

“Sure, I’ll handle it. Am I the only witness?”

“You and the hotel manager.”

“Got the evidence?”

“Yeah, here it is.” Miles pulled a large manila envelope out of his cheap plastic briefcase and I recognized the evidence tag I had stuck on there months ago when I made the arrest.

“The gun’s in there and the two clips.”

“Too bad you couldn’t file a robbery.”

“Yeah, well like I explained to you right after that caper, we were lucky to get what we did.”

“You filed an eleven-five-thirty too, didn’t you?”

“Oh yeah. Here’s the pot, I almost forgot.” Miles reached back in the briefcase and pulled out an analyzed-evidence envelope with my seal on it that contained the marijuana with the chemist’s written analysis on the package.

“How many jobs you figure this guy for?”

“I think I told you four, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“Now we think he done six. Two in Rampart and four here in Central.”

“It’s a shame you couldn’t make him on at least one robbery.”

“You’re telling me. I had him in a regular show-up and I had a few private mug-shot show-ups, and I talked and coaxed and damn near threatened my victims and witnesses and the closest I could ever come was one old broad that said he
looked
like the bandit.”

“Scumbag really did a good job with makeup, huh?”

“Did a hell of a job,” Miles nodded. “Remember, he was an actor for a while and he did a hell of a good job with paint and putty. But shit, the M.O. was identical, the way he took mom and dad markets. Always asked for a case of some kind of beer they were short of and when they went in the back for the beer, boom, he pulled the forty-five automatic and took the place down.”

“He ever get violent?”

“Not in the jobs in Central. I found out later he pistol-whipped a guy in one of the Rampart jobs. Some seventy-year-old grocery clerk decided he was Wyatt Earp and tried to go for some fucked-up old thirty-two he had stashed under the counter. Landry really laid him open. Three times across the eyes with the forty-five. He blinded him. Old guy’s still in the hospital.”

“His P.O. going to violate him?”

“This asshole has a rabbit’s foot. He finished his parole two weeks before you busted him. Ain’t that something else? Two weeks!”

“Well, I better get in there,” I said. “Some of these deputy D.A.’s get panicky when you’re not holding their hands. You get a special D.A. for this one?”

“No. It’s a dead bang case. You got him cold. Shouldn’t be any search and seizure problems at all. And even though we know this guy’s a good robber, we ain’t got nothing on him today but some low-grade felonies, ex-con with a gun and possession of pot.”

“Can’t we send him back to the joint with his record?”

“We’re going to try. I’ll stop in the courtroom soon as I can. If you finish before me, let me know if you held him to answer.”

“You got doubts I’ll hold him?” I grinned, and headed for the courtroom, feeling very strange as I had all day. The last time I wore a bluesuit into a courtroom, I thought.

This courtroom was almost empty. There were only three people in the audience, two older women, probably the kind that come downtown and watch criminal trials for fun, and a youngish guy in a business suit who was obviously a witness and looked disgusted as hell about being here. Since these courtrooms are for preliminary hearings only, there was no jury box, just the judge’s bench and witness box, the counsel tables, the clerk’s desk, and a small desk near the railing for the bailiff.

At least I’ll be through hassling with this legal machinery, I thought, which cops tend to think is designed by a bunch of neurotics because it seems to go a hundred miles past the point where any sane man would’ve stopped. After a felony complaint is filed, the defendant is arraigned and then has a preliminary hearing which amounts to a trial. This takes the place of a grand jury indictment and it’s held to see if there’s good enough cause to bind him over to superior court for trial, and then he’s arraigned again in superior court, and later has a trial. Except that in between there’re a couple of hearings to set aside what you’ve done already. In capital cases there’s a separate trial for guilt and another for penalty, so that’s why celebrated California cases drag on for years until they cost so much that everybody gives up or lets the guy cop to a lesser included offense.

We have a very diligent bunch of young public defenders around here who, being on a monthly salary and not having to run from one good paying client to another, will drive you up a wall defending a chickenshit burglary like it was the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. The D.A.’s office has millions of very fine crimes to choose from and won’t issue a felony complaint unless they’re pretty damned sure they can get a conviction. But then, there aren’t that many real felony convictions, because courts and prisons are so overcrowded. A misdemeanor plea is accepted lots of times even from guys with heavyweight priors.

All this would make Los Angeles a frustrating place to be a cop if it weren’t for the fact that the West in general is not controlled by the political clubhouse, owing to the fact that our towns are so sprawling and young. This means that in my twenty years I could bust
any
deserving son of a bitch, and I never got bumrapped except once when I booked an obnoxious French diplomat for drunk driving after he badmouthed me. I later denied to my bosses that he told me of his diplomatic immunity.

But in spite of all the bitching by policemen there’s one thing you can’t deny: it’s still the best system going, and even if it’s rough on a cop, who the hell would want to walk a beat in Moscow or Madrid, or anywhere in between? We gripe for sympathy but most of us know that a cop’s never going to be loved by people in general, and I say if you got to have lots of love, join the fire department.

I started listening a little bit to the preliminary hearing that was going on. The defendant was a tall, nice-looking guy named John Trafford, about twenty-seven years old, and his pretty woman, probably his wife, was in the courtroom. He kept turning and making courageous gestures in her direction which wasn’t particularly impressing Judge Martha Bedford, a tough, severe-looking old girl who I had always found to be a fair judge, both to the people and the defense. There was a fag testifying that this clean-cut-looking young chap had picked him up in a gay bar and gone to the fag’s pad, where after an undescribed sex act the young defendant, who the fag called Tommy, had damn near cut his head off with a kitchen knife. And then he ransacked the fruit’s pad and stole three hundred blood-soaked dollars which were found in his pocket by two uniformed coppers who shagged him downtown at Fifth and Main where he later illegally parked his car.

The defense counsel was badgering the fruit, an effeminate little man about forty years old, who owned a photography studio, and the fruit wasn’t without sympathy for the defendant as he glanced nervously at his friend “Tommy,” and I thought this was darkly humorous and typical. Weak people need people so much they’d forgive anything. I didn’t think the defense counsel was succeeding too well in trying to minimize the thing as just another fruitroll, since the hospital record showed massive transfusions and a hundred or so sutures needed to close up the neck wounds of the fruit.

The young defendant turned around again and shot a long sad glance at pretty little mama who looked brave, and after Judge Redford held him to answer on the charges of attempted murder and robbery, his lawyer tried to con her into a bail reduction because the guy had never been busted before except once for wife beating.

Judge Redford looked at the defendant then, staring at his handsome face and calm eyes, and I could tell she wasn’t listening to the deputy D.A. who was opposing the bail reduction and recounting the savagery of the cutting. She was just looking at the young dude and he was looking at her. His blond hair was neatly trimmed and he wore a subdued pin-striped suit.

Then she denied the motion for bail reduction, leaving the huge bail on this guy and I was sure she saw what I saw in his face. He was one to be reckoned with. You could see the confidence and intelligence in his icy expression. And power. There’s real power you can feel when it’s in a guy like this and it even gave me a chill. You can call him a psychopath or say that he’s evil, but whatever he is, he’s the deadly Enemy, and I wondered how many other times his acts ended in blood. Maybe it was him that ripped the black whore they dug out of a garbage pile on Seventh Street last month, I thought.

You’ve got to respect the power to harm in a guy like him, and you’ve got to be scared by it. It sure as hell scared Her Honor, and after she refused to lower the bail he smiled a charming boyish smile at her and she turned away. Then he looked at his teary wife again and smiled at her, and then he felt me watching and I caught his eye and felt
myself
smiling, and my look was saying: I know you. I know you very well. He looked at me calmly for a few seconds, then his eyes sort of glazed over and the deputy led him out of court. Now that I knew he hung around downtown, I thought, I’d be watching for that boy on my beat.

The judge left the bench and the deputy D.A., a youngster whose muttonchops and moustache didn’t fit, started reading the complaint to get ready for my case.

Timothy Landry, my defendant, was led in by a deputy sheriff. A deputy public defender was handling the case since Landry was not employed, even though Miles figured he’d stolen ten thousand or so.

He was a craggy-looking guy, forty-four years old, with long, dyed black hair that was probably really gray, and a sallow face that on some guys never seems to get rosy again after they do some time in the joint. He had the look of an ex-con all over him. His bit movie parts were mostly westerns, a few years back, right after he got out of Folsom.

“Okay, Officer,” said the young D.A., “where’s the investigator?”

“He’s busy in another court. I’m Morgan, the arresting officer. I’m handling the whole thing. Dead bang case. You shouldn’t have any problems.”

He probably had only a few months’ experience. They stick these deputy D.A.’s in the preliminary hearings to give them instant courtroom experience handling several cases a day, and I figured this one hadn’t been here more than a couple months. I’d never seen him before and I spent lots of time in court because I made so many felony pinches.

“Where’s the other witness?” asked the D.A., and for the first time I looked around the courtroom and spotted Homer Downey, who I’d almost forgotten was subpoenaed in this case. I didn’t bother talking with him to make sure he knew what he’d be called on to testify to, because his part in it was so insignificant you almost didn’t need him at all, except as probable cause for me going in the hotel room on an arrest warrant.

“Let’s see,” muttered the D.A. after he’d talked to Downey for a few minutes. He sat down at the counsel table reading the complaint and running his long fingers through his mop of brown hair. The public defender looked like a well-trimmed ivy-leaguer, and the D.A., who’s theoretically the law and order guy, was mod. He even wore round granny glasses.

“Downey’s the hotel manager?”

“Right,” I said as the D.A. read my arrest report.

“On January thirty-first, you went to the Orchid Hotel at eight-two-seven East Sixth Street as part of your routine duties?”

“Right. I was making a check of the lobby to roust any winos that might’ve been hanging around. There were two sleeping it off in the lobby and I woke them up intending to book them when all of a sudden one of them runs up the stairs, and I suddenly felt I had more than a plain drunk so I ordered the other one to stay put and I chased the first one. He turned down the hall to the right on the third floor and I heard a door close and was almost positive he ran into room three-nineteen.”

“Could you say if the man you chased was the defendant?”

“Couldn’t say. He was tall and wore dark clothes. That fleabag joint is dark even in the daytime, and he was always one landing ahead of me.”

“So what did you do?”

“I came back down the stairs, and found the first guy gone. I went to the manager, Homer Downey, and asked him who was living in room three-nineteen, and he showed me the name Timothy Landry on the register, and I used the pay telephone in the lobby and ran a warrant check through R and I and came up with a fifty-two-dollar traffic warrant for Timothy Landry, eight-twenty-seven East Sixth Street. Then I asked the manager for his key in case Landry wouldn’t open up and I went up to three-nineteen to serve the warrant on him.”

“At this time you thought the guy that ran in the room was Landry?”

“Sure,” I said, serious as hell.

I congratulated myself as the D.A. continued going over the complaint because that wasn’t a bad story now that I went back over it again. I mean I felt I could’ve done better, but it wasn’t bad. The truth was that a half hour before I went in Landry’s room I’d promised Knobby Booker twenty bucks if he turned something good for me, and he told me he tricked with a whore the night before in the Orchid Hotel and that he knew her pretty good and she told him she just laid a guy across the hall and had seen a gun under his pillow while he was pouring her the pork.