12
The four gray-wrapped pols clustered in the light of the candlelike outdoor fixture made of black iron and cone of perpetual fake flame flickering in the night dark.
“Just two left,” the corporal said almost soundlessly; he let his fingers speak for him as he drew them across the rental lists. “A Mrs. Ruth Gomen in two eleven and an Allen Mufi in two twelve. Which’ll we hit first?”
“The Mufi man’s,” one of the uniformed officers said; he smacked his plastic and shot nightstick against his fingers, eager in the dim light to finish it up, now that the end had at last come into sight.
“Two twelve it is,” the corporal said, and reached to stroke the door chimes. But then it occurred to him to try the doorknob.
Good. One chance out of several, a minor possibility but suddenly, usefully true. The door was unlocked. He signaled silence, grinned briefly, then pushed the door open.
They saw into a dark living room with empty and nearly empty drink glasses placed here and there, some on the floor. And a great variety of ashtrays overfilled with crushed cigarette packages and ground-out butts.
A cigarette party, the corporal decided. Broken up, now. Everyone went home. With the exception perhaps of Mr. Mufi.
He entered, shone his light here and there, shone it at last toward the far door leading deeper into the over-priced apartment. No sound. No motion. Except the dim, distant, muted chatter of a radio talk show at minimal volume.
He trod across the wall-to-wall carpet, which depicted in gold Richard M. Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery below. At the far door he trod on God, who was smiling a lot as He received his Second Only Begotten Son back into His bosom, and pushed open the bedroom door.
In the big double bed, pulpy-soft, a man asleep, shoulders and arms bare. His clothes heaped on a handy chair. Mr. Allen Mufi, of course. Safe and home in his own private double bed. But—Mr. Mufi was not alone in his very own private bed. Involved with the pastel sheets and blankets a second indistinct shape lay curled up, asleep. Mrs. Mufi, the corporal thought, and shone his light toward her, with mannish curiosity.
All at once Allen Mufi—assuming it was he—stirred. He opened his eyes. And instantly sat bolt upright, staring fixedly at the pols. At the light of the flashlight.
“What?” he said, and he rasped with fear, a deep, convulsive release of shaking breath. “No,” Mufi said, and then snatched for some object on the table beside his bed; he dove into the darkness, white and hairy and naked, for something invisible but precious to him. Desperately. He sat back up then, panting, clutching it. A pair of scissors.
“What’s that for?” the corporal asked, shining the light into the metal of the scissors.
“I’ll kill myself,” Mufi said. “If you don’t go away and—leave us alone.” He stuck the closed blades of the scissors against his hair-darkened chest, near his heart.
“Then it isn’t Mrs. Mufi,” the corporal said. He returned the circle of light to the other, huddled up, sheet-covered shape. “A wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am one-time gangbang? Turning your foxy apartment into a motel room?” The corporal walked to the bed, took hold of the top sheet and blankets, then yanked them back.
In the bed beside Mr. Mufi lay a boy, slender, young, naked, with long golden hair.
“I’ll be darned,” the corporal said.
One of his men said, “I’ve got the scissors.” He tossed them onto the floor by the corporal’s right foot.
To Mr. Mufi, who sat trembling and panting, his eyes startled with terror, the corporal said, “How old is this boy?”
The boy had awakened now; he gazed fixedly up but did not stir. No expression appeared on his soft, vaguely formed face.
“Thirteen,” Mr. Mufi said croakingly, almost pleadingly. “Legal age of consent.”
To the boy the corporal said, “Can you prove it?” He felt intense revulsion now. Acute physical revulsion, making him want to barf. The bed was stained and damp with half-dried sweat and genital secretions.
“ID,” Mufi panted. “In his wallet. In his pants on the chair.”
One of the team of pols said to the corporal, “You mean if this juve’s thirteen there’s no crime involved?”
“Hell,” another pol said indignantly. “It’s obviously a crime, a perverted crime. Let’s run them both in.”
“Wait a minute. Okay?” The corporal found the boy’s pants, rummaged, found the wallet, got it out, inspected the identification. Sure enough. Thirteen years old. He shut the wallet and put it back in the pocket. “No,” he said, still half enjoying the situation, amused by Mufi’s naked shame but becoming each moment more and more revolted by the man’s cowardly horror at being disclosed. “The new revision of the Penal Code, 640.3, has it that twelve is the age of consent for a minor to engage in a sexual act either with another child of either sex or an adult also of either sex but with only one at a time.”
“But it’s goddamn sick,” one of his pols protested.
“That’s your opinion,” Mufi said, more bravely now.
“Why isn’t it a bust, a hell of a big bust?” the pols standing beside him persisted.
“They’re systematically taking all victimless crimes off the books,” the corporal said. “That’s been the process for ten years.”
“This? This is victimless?”
To Mufi, the corporal said, “What do you find about young boys that you like? Let me in on it; I’ve always wondered about scans like you.”
“‘Scans,’ “Mufi echoed, his mouth twisting with discomfort. “So that’s what I am.”
“It’s a category,” the corporal said. “Those who prey on minors for homosexual purposes. Legal but still abhorred. What do you do during the day?”
“I’m a used-quibble salesman.”
“And if they, your employers, knew you were a scan they wouldn’t want you handling their quibbles. Not after what those hairy white hands have been handling outside the workday. Right, Mr. Mufi? Even a used-quibble salesman can’t get away morally with being a scan. Even if it’s no longer on the books.”
Mufi said, “It was my mother’s fault. She dominated my father, who was a weak man.”
“How many little boys have you induced to go down on you during the last twelve months?” the corporal inquired. “I’m serious. Are these all one-night stands, is that it?”
“I love Ben,” Mufi said, staring fixedly ahead, his mouth barely moving. “Later on, when I’m better off financially and can provide, I intend to marry him.”
To the boy Ben, the corporal said, “Do you want us to take you out of here? Return you to your parents?”
“He lives here,” Mufi said, grinning a little.
“Yeah, I’ll stay here,” the boy said sullenly. He shivered. “Cripes, could you give me the covers back?” He reached irritably for the top blanket.
“Just keep the noise level down in here,” the corporal said, moving away wearily. “Christ. And they took it off the books.”
“Probably,” Mufi said, with confidence now that the pols were beginning to depart from his bedroom, “because some of those big overweight old police marshals are screwing kids themselves and don’t want to get sent up. They couldn’t stand the scandal.” His grin grew into an insinuating leer.
“I hope,” the corporal said, “that someday you do commit a statute violation of some kind, and they haul you in, and I’m on duty the day it happens. So I can book you personally.” He hawked, then spat on Mr. Mufi. Spat into his hairy, empty face.
Silently, the team of pols made their way through the living room of cigarette butts, ashes, twisted-up packs, half-filled drink glasses, to the corridor and porchway outside. The corporal yanked the door shut, shivered, stood for a moment, feeling the bleakness of his mind, its withdrawal, for a moment, from the environment around him. He then said, “Two eleven. Mrs. Ruth Gomen. Where the Taverner suspect has to be, if he’s anywhere around here at all, it being the last one.” Finally, he thought.