Sid started muttering. Jack put the card back. “Let’s hear how it sounds.”
Hudgens cleared his throat. “It’s Christmas morning in the City of the Angels, and while decent citizens sleep the sleep of the righteous, hopheads prowl for marijuana, the weed with roots in Hell. Tammy Reynolds and Rock Rockwell, movie stars with one foot in Hades, toke sweet tea in Tammy’s swank Hollywood digs, not knowing they are playing with fire without asbestos gloves, not knowing that a man is coming to put out that fire: the free-wheeling, big-time Big V, celebrity crimestopper Jack Vincennes, the scourge of grasshoppers and junk fiends everywhere. Acting on the tip of an unnamed informant, Sergeant Vincennes, blah, blah, blah. You like it, Jackie?”
“Yeah, it’s subtle.”
“No, it’s circulation nine hundred thousand and climbing. I think I’ll work in you’re divorced twice ’cause your wives couldn’t stand your crusade and you got your name from an orphanage in Vincennes, Indiana. The Biggg Veeeee.”
His Narco tag: Trashcan Jack–a nod to the time he popped Charlie “Yardbird” Parker and tossed him into a garbage bin outside the flub Zamboanga. “You should beat the drum on _Badge of Honor_. Miller Stanton’s my buddy, how I taught Brett Chase to play a cop. Technical advisor kingpin, that kind of thing.”
Hudgens laughed. “Brett still like them prepubescent?”
“Can niggers dance?”
“South of Jefferson Boulevard only. Thanks for the story, Jack.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it. It’s always nice seeing you.”
You fucking cockroach, you’re going to wink because you know you can nail me to that moralistic shitbird William H. Parker anytime you want–cash rousts going back to ’48, you’ve probably got documentation worked around to let you off clean and crucify me–
Hudgens winked.
Jack wondered if he had it _all_ down on paper.
CHAPTER FOUR
The party in full swing, the muster room SRO.
An open bar: scotch, bourbon, a case of rum Trashcan Jack Vincennes brought in. Dick Stensland’s brew in the water cooler: Old Crow, eggnog mix. A phonograph spewed dirty Christmas carols: Santa and his reindeer fucking and sucking. The floor was packed: nightwatch blues, the Central squad–thirsty from chasing vagrants.
Bud watched the crowd. Fred Turentine tossed darts at Wanted posters; Mike Krugman and Walt Dukeshearer played “Name That Nigger,” trying to ID Negro mugshots at a quarter a bet. Jack Vincennes was drinking club soda; Lieutenant Frieling was passed out at his desk. Ed Exley tried to quiet the men down, gave up, stuck to the lock-up: logging in prisoners, filing arrest reports.
Almost every man was drunk or working on it.
Almost every man was talking up Helenowski and Brownell, the cop beaters in custody, the two still at large.
Bud stood by the window. Garbled rumors tweaked him: Brownie Brownell had his lip split up through his nose, one of the taco benders chewed off Helenowski’s left ear. Dick Stens grabbed a shotgun, went spic hunting. He credited that one: he’d seen Dick carrying an Ithaca pump out to the parking lot. The noise was getting brutal–Bud walked out to the lot, lounged against a prowler.
A drizzle started up. A ruckus by the jail door–Dick Stens shoving two men inside. A scream; Bud cut odds on Stens finishing out his twenty: with him watchdogging, even money; without him, two to one against. From the muster room: Frank Doherty’s tenor, a weepy “Silver Bells.”
Bud moved away from the music–it made him think of his mother. He lit a cigarette, thought of her anyway.
He’d seen the killing: sixteen years old, helpless to stop it. The old man came home; he must have believed his son’s warning: you touch Mother again and I will kill you. Asleep–cuffs on his wrists and ankles, awake–he saw the fuck beat Mother dead with a tire iron. He screamed his throat raw; he stayed cuffed in the room with the body: a week, no water, delirious–he watched his mother rot. A truant officer found him; the L.A. Sheriff’s found the old man. The trial, a diminished capacity defense, a plea bargain down to Manslaughter Two. Life imprisonment, the old man paroled in twelve years. His son–Officer Wendell White, LAPD–decided to kill him.