Wacky Walker would obviously be on the first stage to Watts, and I gravely accepted the fact that there was nothing I could do about it.
Wacky and I had resolved our differences that weekend through booze and poetry. I had gone over to his apartment Sunday bearing gifts—a crisp C-note as payment for his green-reading duties, handcuffs and gun, a bottle of Old Grand Dad and a limited edition volume of the early poetry of W. H. Auden. Wacky was delighted and almost wept in his gratitude, causing me to feel the strangest detachment; love mixed with pity and bitter resentment at his dependence on me. It was a feeling I would carry with me until the end of the last season of my youth.
I walked into the muster room for the immortal police ritual of Monday morning roll call. The room was noisy, and filled with cigarette smoke. Gately, the muster sergeant, needed a shave as usual.
I found a seat next to Wacky. He was staring into his lap, pretending to read traffic reports. As I sat down, I glanced at his real reading material: enclosed in the traffic holder was a copy of the
Gately made it brief. No drunk arrests—the Lincoln Heights drunk tank had flooded during the recent heavy rains—and lots of traffic summonses; the city attorney wanted shitloads of them—the heavy implication being that the city needed moola. We were told to lay off the streetwalkers on West Adams, and to look out for a stickup team: two Mexican gunsels had hit a liquor store and a couple of markets on the Southern border of the division, near the Coliseum. The dicks had learned from eyewitnesses that they drove a souped-up white Ford pickup. They were packing .45 automatics. When Gately mentioned this there was an immediate reaction in the room—this is why we are all here, every cop in the room seemed to be thinking. Even Wacky stirred and looked up from his Eliot. He pointed his right index finger at me and cocked his thumb. I nodded; it was why I was there, too.
We got our black-and-white from the lot and cruised east on Pico to Hoover, then south toward the Coliseum. Wacky wanted to spend some time warning local merchants about the Mexican heisters. He was in an effusive mood and wanted to gab with his 'constituents.'
We parked, and Wacky insisted that I accompany him to talk to Jack Chew. Jack Chew was a Chinaman with a Texas drawl. He owned a little market-butcher shop at Twenty-eighth and Hoover and said things like, 'Ah, sooo, pardner.' Wacky loved him, but he hated Wacky because he helped himself to the canned litchi nuts that Jack kept behind the counter for the cops on the beat. Jack was very courtly and Old World: he liked to offer or be asked, and he thought that Wacky was a pig for grabbing.
He was behind the meat counter when we walked into his openair store, wrapping up some kind of candied duck for an old Chinese lady.
'Hey there, Jack,' Wacky called, 'where'd you get that quacker? I thought the guys at Rampart told you to quit raiding Westlake Park. Don't you know all those used rubbers they got floating round in the lake spoil the flavor? The guys at Rampart told me the ducks wear the rubbers at night to keep their beaks warm. Whither thou, O quacker beak; Peter juice and soon you'll peck; O noble duck, Such bad, bad luck; To end at Jack's you're really fucked.'
Jack groaned and the old woman giggled as Wacky did his Frankenstein imitation, walking toward her slowly, arms extended, groaning deeply.
'Fuck you, Walker,' Jack said. To me he said, 'Ah, sooo, Officer Freddy,' then handed me an open can of litchi nuts. Jack spoke a few words to the woman in Chinese. She left, giggling and waving at Wacky.
'They all love me, Jack. What is it about me?' Wacky said. 'But this isn't a social call.'
'Good,' Jack said.
Wacky laughed and went on, 'Jack, we got some bad hombres operating on this side of the range, carrying hardware. They like little markets like yours, and being greasers they probably don't know that Chinamen are tough giver-uppers. They're in their mid twen—'
Wacky didn't get to finish. A young woman ran into the market. She was opening her mouth to scream, but no sound was coming out. She grabbed at Wacky's arm.
'Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,' she choked.
Wacky held both her hands to her sides. He spoke calmly. 'Yes, dear. 'Officer.' Now what's wrong?'
'Off . . . ic . . . er,' she got out, 'ma, ma—my neighbor . . . dead!'
'Where?' I said.
The woman pointed to Twenty-eighth Street. She started to run in that direction. I ran after her. Wacky followed me. She led us halfway down the block and up to an old, white wood-framed fourflat. She pointed up the stairs leading to the second story. The door was wide open.
'Uh, uh, uh,' she stammered, then pointed again and backed up against a row of mailboxes, biting at her knuckles.
Wacky and I looked at each other. We both nodded and Wacky gave me the beginning of a smile. We drew our guns and raced up the stairs. I entered first, into what had once been a modest living room. Now it was in a shambles: chairs, bookshelves, and cabinets were overturned and the floor was covered with broken glass. I held my breath, and advanced slowly, my gun held in front of me. Behind me, I could hear Wacky breathing hoarsely.
There was a small kitchen straight ahead. I tiptoed up to it. The white linoleum was broadly spattered with congealed blood. Wacky saw it and immediately tore back into the rear rooms of the apartment, completely forgetting caution. I ran after him, almost knocking him over in the bedroom doorway just as I heard his first exclamations of horror: 'Oh, God, Freddy!'
I pushed him aside, and looked into the bedroom. Lying on the floor on her back was a nude woman. Her neck was black and purple and twisted to the side. Her tongue was hugely swollen and stuck out obscenely. Her eyes bulged in their sockets. There were puncture wounds on her breasts and abdomen and deep gashes on the insides of her thighs. She was covered with dried blood.
I checked my watch—9:06 A.M. Wacky stared at the dead woman and then at me as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. His eyes moved back and forth frantically while he remained motionless.
I ran downstairs. The woman who had summoned us was still next to her open apartment door, still gnawing at her knuckles. 'The phone!' I yelled at her. I found it in her crowded front room and called the station, requested a team of detectives and a meat wagon, then ran back upstairs.
Wacky was still staring at the dead woman. He seemed to be committing to memory the details of her desecration. I walked through the apartment, writing down descriptions: the overturned furniture, the broken glass, and the configuration of the dried blood in the kitchen. I knelt down to check the carpet: it was a dark-orange phony Persian, but light enough so that the trail of blood was still visible. I followed it into the bedroom where the dead woman lay. Wacky suddenly spoke out behind me, causing me to almost leap through the ceiling: 'Jesus fucking Christ, Freddy. What a mess.'
'Yeah. The dicks and the coroner are on their way. I'm gonna keep looking around here. You go downstairs and get a statement from the woman.'
'Right.'
Wacky took off and I returned to my note-taking. It was just a homey middle-class apartment, clean and comfortable looking, not the kind of place that even a desperate hophead would burglarize, but that was what this looked like. Further investigation revealed a blood-soaked terry cloth bathrobe on the floor in the little dining room that separated the living room and kitchen. At the end of the kitchen was a door that led downstairs to what looked like a laundry room; there were bloody footprints on the rickety wooden steps.
I went through the apartment looking for the murder weapon and found nothing, no sharp instruments of any kind. I checked the victim again. She was a pretty brunette and looked to be in her middle twenties. She had a slender body and very light green eyes. She was wearing dark red toenail polish and lipstick that matched perfectly the color of her dried blood. Her body was sprawled in what seemed like reluctant acceptance of death, but her face, with its open mouth and bulging eyes, seemed to be screaming, No!
I went through the rooms again, looking for more details that might mean something. I found a bloody partial fingerprint on the hallway wall near the bedroom door. I circled it with my pen. There was a telephone stand in the living room with no phone on it, just an ornate crystal ashtray filled with matchbooks. One of them caught my eye —a colorful orange job with three stars on it, all arranged around a martini glass. The Silver Star. I poked in the ashtray. All the matchbooks were from bars and nightspots in the central L.A-Hollywood area. I looked around for smoking materials—pipes, cigarettes, or tobacco. Nothing. Maybe the woman was a barhopper or matchbook collector.
