The Blue Knight (30 page)

Then the excitement I’d felt for a moment began to fade and was replaced with a kind of fear that grew and almost smothered me until I got hold of myself. This was too much. This was all
much
too much. Cassie was one terrible responsibility, but I needed her. Cruz told me. Socorro told me. The elevator boy in the death room of the hotel told me. The old blubbering drunks in Harry’s bar told me. I needed her. Yes, maybe, but I didn’t need this other kind of responsibility. I didn’t need
this
kind of cross. Not me. I walked into the other room where the juvenile officer was sitting.

“Listen, pal,” I said. “This kid in here is waiting for his uncle. I explained the arrest to his sister and cited her back. I gotta meet a guy downtown and I’m late. How about taking care of him for me and I’ll finish my reports later.”

“Sure, Bumper. I’ll take care of it,” he said, and I wondered how calm I looked.

“Okay, kid, be seeing you,” I said, passing through the room where the boy sat. “Hang in there, now.”

“Where you going, Bumper?”

“Gotta hit the streets, kid,” I said, trying to grin. “There’s crime to crush.”

“Yeah? Here’s the phone number. I wrote it down on a piece of paper for you. Don’t forget to call us.”

“Yeah, well, I was thinking, my landlord is a cheap bastard. I don’t think he’d ever go for eight bucks. I think you’d be better off not doing his place anyway. He probably wouldn’t pay you on time or anything.”

“That’s okay. Give me your address, we’ll come by and give you a special price. Remember, I can kick back a couple bucks.”

“No, it wouldn’t work out. See you around, huh?”

“How ’bout us getting together for a ball game, Bumper? I’ll buy us a couple of box seats.”

“I don’t think so. I’m kind of giving up the Dodgers.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, jumping to his feet. “We’ll do your gardening for four dollars, Bumper. Imagine that! Four dollars! We’ll work maybe three hours. You can’t beat that.”

“Sorry, kid,” I said, scuttling for the door like a fat crab.

“Why did you ever mention it then? Why did you ever say ‘maybe’?”

I can’t help you, boy, I thought. I don’t have what you need.

“Goddamn you!” he yelled after me, and his voice broke. “You’re just a cop! Nothing but a goddamn cop!”

I got back in the car feeling like someone kicked me in the belly and I headed back downtown. I looked at my watch and groaned, wondering when this day would end.

At the corner of Pico and Figueroa I saw a blind man with a red-tipped cane getting ready to board a bus. Some do-gooder in a mod suit was grabbing the blind man’s elbow and aiming him, and finally the blind man said something to the meddler and made his own way.

“That’s telling him, Blinky,” I said under my breath. “You got to do for yourself in this world or they’ll beat you down. The gods are strong, lonesome bastards and
you
got to be too.”

SEVENTEEN

A
T ELEVEN-FIFTEEN
I was parking in front of Seymour’s to meet Cruz. His car was there but I looked in the window and he wasn’t at the counter. I wondered where he could be. Then I looked down the block and saw three black-and-whites, two detective cars, and an ambulance.

Being off the air with the kid I hadn’t heard a call come out, and I walked down there and made my way through a crowd of people that was forming on the sidewalk around the drugstore. Just like everybody else, I was curious.

“What’s happening, Clarence?” I said to Evans, who was standing in front of the door.

“Didn’t you hear, Bumper?” said Evans, and he was sweating and looked sick, his coffee-brown face working nervously every-which way, and he kept looking around everywhere but at me.

“Hear what?”

“There was a holdup. A cop walked in and got shot,” said a humpbacked shine man in a sailor’s hat, looking up at me with an idiotic smile.

My heart dropped and I felt the sick feeling all policemen get when you hear that another policeman was shot.

“Who?” I asked, worrying that it might’ve been that young bookworm, Wilson.

“It was a sergeant,” said the hunchback.

I looked toward Seymour’s then and I felt the blood rush to my head.

“Let me in there, Clarence,” I said.

“Now, Bumper, No one’s allowed in there and you can’t do anything. . . .”

I shoved Evans aside and pushed on the swinging aluminum doors, which were bolted.

“Bumper, please,” said Evans, but I pulled away from him and slammed my foot against the center of the two doors, driving the bolt out of the aluminum casing.

The doors flew open with a crash and I was inside and running through a checkstand toward the rear of the big drugstore. It seemed like the store was a mile long and I ran blind and light-headed, knocking a dozen hair spray cans off a shelf when I barreled around a row of display counters toward the popping flashbulbs and the dozen plainclothesmen who were huddled in groups at the back of the store.

The only uniformed officer was Lieutenant Hilliard and it seemed like I ran for fifteen minutes to cover the eighty feet to the pharmacy counter where Cruz Segovia lay dead.

“What the hell . . .” said a red-faced detective I could barely see through a watery mist as I knelt beside Cruz, who looked like a very young boy sprawled there on his back, his hat and gun on the floor beside him and a frothy blood puddle like a scarlet halo fanning out around him from a through-and-through head shot. There was one red glistening bullet hole to the left of his nose and one in his chest which was surrounded by wine-purple bloodstains on the blue uniform. His eyes were open and he was looking right at me. The corneas were not yet dull or cloudy and the eyes were turned down at the corners, those large eyes more serious and sad than ever I’d seen them, and I knelt beside him in his blood and whispered,
“’Mano! ’Mano! ’Mano!
Oh, Cruz!”

“Bumper, get the hell out of there,” said the bald detective, grabbing my arm, and I looked up at him, seeing a very familiar face, but still I couldn’t recognize him.

“Let him go, Leecher. We got enough pictures,” said another plainclothesman, older, who was talking to Lieutenant Hilliard. He was one I should know too, I thought. It was so strange. I couldn’t remember any of their names, except my lieutenant, who was in uniform.

Cruz looked at me so serious I couldn’t bear it. And I reached in his pocket for the little leather pouch with the beads.

“You mustn’t take anything from him,” Lieutenant Hilliard said in my ear with his hand on my shoulder. “Only the coroner can do that, Bumper.”

“His beads,” I muttered. “He won them because he was the only one who could spell English words. I don’t want them to know he carries beads like a nun.”

“Okay, Bumper, okay,” said Lieutenant Hilliard, patting my shoulder, and I took the pouch. Then I saw the box of cheap cigars spilled on the floor by his hand. And there was a ten-dollar bill there on the floor.

“Give me that blanket,” I said to a young ambulance attendant who was standing there beside his stretcher, white in the face, smoking a cigarette.

He looked at me and then at the detectives.

“Give me that goddamn blanket,” I said, and he handed the folded-up blanket to me, which I covered Cruz with after I closed his eyes so he couldn’t look at me like that.
“Ahí te huacho,”
I whispered. “I’ll be watching for you,
’mano
.” Then I was on my feet and heading toward the door, gulping for breath.

“Bumper,” Lieutenant Hilliard called, running painfully on his bad right leg and holding his hip.

I stopped before I got to the door.

“Will you go tell his wife?”

“He came in here to buy me a going-away present,” I said, feeling a suffocating pressure in my chest.

“You were his best friend. You should tell her.”

“He wanted to buy me a box of cigars,” I said, grabbing him by the bony shoulder. “Damn him, I’d never smoke those cheap cigars. Damn him!”

“All right, Bumper. Go to the station. Don’t try to work anymore today. You go on home. We’ll take care of the notification. You take care of yourself.”

I nodded and hurried out the door, looking at Clarence Evans but not understanding what he said to me. I got in the car and drove up Main Street, tearing my collar open to breathe, and thought about Cruz lying frail and naked and unprotected there in the morgue and thinking how they’d desecrate him, how they’d stick that turkey skewer in him for the liver temperature, and how they’d put a metal rod in the hole in his face for the bullet angle, and I was so damned glad I’d closed his eyes so he wouldn’t be watching all that.

“You see, Cruz,” I said, driving over Fourth Street with no idea where I was going. “You see? You almost had me convinced, but you were all wrong. I was right.”

“You shouldn’t be afraid to love,
’mano
,” Cruz answered, and I slammed on my brakes when I heard him and I almost slid through the red light. Someone leaned on his horn and yelled at me.

“You’re safe, Bumper, in one way,” said Cruz in his gentle voice, “but in the way that counts, you’re in danger. Your soul is in danger if you don’t love.”

I started when the light was green but I could hardly see.

“Did you believe that when Esteban was killed? Did you?”

“Yes, I knew it was the God’s truth,” he said, and his sad eyes turned down at the corners and this time I
did
blow a red light and I heard tires squeal and I turned right going the wrong way on Main Street and everyone was honking horns at me but I kept going to the next block and then turned left with the flow of traffic.

“Don’t look at me with those goddamn turned-down eyes!” I yelled, my heart thudding like the pigeon’s wing. “You’re wrong, you foolish little man. Look at Socorro. Look at your children. Don’t you see now, you’re wrong? Damn those eyes!”

Then I pulled into an alley west of Broadway and got out of the car because I suddenly couldn’t see at all now and I began to vomit. I threw it all up, all of it. Someone in a delivery truck stopped and said something but I waved him off and heaved and heaved it all away.

Then I got back in the car and the shock was wearing off. I drove to a pay phone and called Cassie before she left her office. I crowded in that phone booth doubled over by stomach cramps and I don’t really know everything I said to her except that Cruz was dead and I wouldn’t be going with her. Not now, not ever. And then there was lots of crying on the other end of the line and talking back and forth that didn’t make any sense, and finally I heard myself say, “Yes, yes, Cassie. You go on. Yes, maybe I’ll feel different later. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You go on. Maybe I’ll see you there in San Francisco. Maybe someday I’ll feel different. Yes.”

I was back in my car driving, and I knew I’d have to go to Socorro tonight and help her. I wanted to bury Cruz as soon as possible and I hoped she would want to. And now, gradually at first, and then more quickly, I felt as though a tremendous weight was lifted from my shoulders and there was no sense analyzing it, but there it was. I felt somehow light and free like when I first started on my beat. “There’s nothing left now but the
puta
. But she’s not a
puta
,
’mano
, she’s not!” I said, lying to both of us for the last time, “You couldn’t tell a whore from a bewitching lady. I’ll keep her as long as I can, Cruz, and when I can’t keep her anymore she’ll go to somebody that can. You can’t blame her for that. That’s the way the world is made.” And Cruz didn’t answer my lie and I didn’t see his eyes. He was gone. He was like Herky now, nothing more.

I began thinking of all the wandering people: Indians, Gypsies, Armenians, the Bedouin on that cliff where I’d never go, and now I knew the Bedouin saw nothing more than sand out there in that valley.

And as I thought these things I turned to my left and I was staring into the mouth of the Pink Dragon. I passed the Dragon by and drove on toward the station, but the further I drove, the more the anger welled up in me, and the anger mixed with the freedom I felt, so that for a while I felt like the most vigorous and powerful man on earth, a real
macho
, Cruz would’ve said. I turned around and headed back to the Dragon. This was the day for the Dragon to die, I thought. I could make Marvin fight me, and the others would help him. But no one could stand up to me and at last I’d destroy the Dragon.

Then I glanced down at my shield and saw that the smog had made the badge hideous. It was tarnished, and smeared with a drop of Cruz’s blood. I stopped in front of Rollo’s and went inside.

“Give it a fast buff, Rollo. I’m in a hurry.”

“You know there ain’t a single blemish on this badge,” Rollo sighed.

“Just shine the goddamn badge.”

He glanced up with his faded eyes, then at my trousers, at my wet bloody knees, and he bent silently over the wheel.

“There you are, Bumper,” he said when he finished it.

I held the badge by the pin and hurried outside.

“Be careful, Bumper,” he called. “Please be careful.”

Passing by Rollo’s store front I saw the distorted reflection in the folds of the plastic sun covering. I watched the reflection and had to laugh at the grotesque fat policeman who held the four-inch glittering shield in front of him as he lumbered to his car. The dark blue uniform was dripping sweat and the fat policeman opened the burning white door and squeezed his big stomach behind the wheel.

He settled in his saddle seat and jammed the nightstick under the seat cushion next to him, pointed forward.

Then he fastened his shield to his chest and urged the machine westward. The sun reflecting off the hood blinded him for a moment, but he flipped down the visor and drove west to the Pink Dragon.

“Now I’ll kill the Dragon and drink its blood,” said the comic blue policeman. “In the
front
door, down the Dragon’s throat.”

I laughed out loud at him because he was good for no more than this. He was disgusting and pathetic and he couldn’t help himself. He needed no one. He sickened me. He only needed glory.