“Yes, sir!” Marvin Waterhouse said. “Right this second.”
Wingnut was disappointed, but it wasn’t the first time he’d lost an arrest when Ned Grogan wanted a pastrami or an enchilada or something. Wingnut figured his partner’d eat a stray dog.
As Marvin Waterhouse was starting to stagger into the crosswalk, Wingnut grabbed his elbow and said, “I better help you.”
Ned Grogan stayed on the far side of the crowded intersection and watched across six lanes of Disneyland traffic as Wingnut Bates, looking like a gun-toting Boy Scout, steered the New York tourist toward the taxi stand.
And then Marvin Waterhouse made a mistake that lots of easterners make when they come out west for the first time. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill and tucked it inside Wingnut’s Sam Browne belt.
It happened so fast that Marvin Waterhouse was half inside the cab when Wingnut looked at the money. The street was packed with cars and pedestrians, but nobody noticed Marvin’s gesture of New York gratitude. Except that Wingnut Bates felt a thousand eyes. The guy thought he was a grafter! He’d just been fucking bribed!
“We don’t do things like this!” Wingnut Bates cried, leaping toward the cab. “You can’t …”
It was too late. The door was slammed by Marvin Waterhouse and the cabbie drove off.
“HE BRIBED ME!” Wingnut screamed across the traffic noise to Ned Grogan who was trying to figure out if his rookie partner had gone crackers in the heat.
“What?” Ned Grogan yelled.
“I BEEN BRIBED!” Wingnut Bates screamed, running after the taxi, which had crossed the intersection but was stopped by traffic trying to get into the Disneyland parking lot.
“Wingnut, come back here!” Ned Grogan hollered, but Wingnut was hotfooting across the intersection trying to remember the penal-code section for bribing a public officer. He nearly caused two collisions as cars mashed on their brakes to avoid killing a uniformed cop.
Ned Grogan was caught on the wrong side of the six-lane intersection with the light timed to accommodate the Disneyland flow. The cop jumped into the patrol unit planning to spin a U-ee and shoot through the traffic, except that the second he pulled out into the lane his patrol unit was clipped by a tourist from Duluth, giving him a whiplash that put him off duty for a week. Ned Grogan managed to drag himself out of the wrecked patrol unit and saw to his horror that a huge crowd had gathered a block north and he could guess why. He picked up the radio and asked for help.
When Wingnut caught the taxi, the driver was startled. Marvin Waterhouse was very startled.
Wingnut came puffing up and jerked open the door. “We don’t do this!” he panted. “If I thought you had criminal intent I’d book you!”
“What’s wrong with you, kid?” Marvin Waterhouse was astonished. “Take it! I want you to buy a drink after work!”
“I’m not taking your money, mister,” Wingnut cried.
“Well, I don’t want it. Give it to a cop charity!” Marvin Waterhouse said stubbornly.
“You take it!”
“I ain’t taking it!” Marvin Waterhouse said.
Wingnut tried to shove the crumpled twenty into Marvin Waterhouse’s shirt pocket, but the drunk, on his own turf more or less, got belligerent. “Keep your hands off me!” he bellowed. “I ain’t taking nothing.”
By the time the first police car arrived at the scene, Marvin Waterhouse and Wingnut Bates were rolling around in the gutter in an all-out donnybrook. A crowd of about sixty people was watching, among them a couple of tanked-up ironworkers who didn’t like seeing a young cop beating on some middle-aged guy with tattoos. The hard hats started mouthing off and one thing led to another.
When it was over, Marvin Waterhouse and the two ironworkers went to jail for battery on a police officer. The miserable taxi driver lost a day’s pay sitting at the police station dictating statements. Wingnut Bates’s patrol car had to be towed to the garage and Ned Grogan had to be towed to the hospital for X rays and a neck brace.
The last thing Ned Grogan said as he was being hauled away by paramedics was “Tell Wingnut it was a real honor to witness such a display of law-enforcement integrity. I’m so proud. And tell the little jug-eared fuck, he better be ready to draw soon as I’m on my feet cause when I see him he’s gonna have about as much chance as a Bonwit Teller in Bangladesh.”
The incident with Marvin Waterhouse made the vice sergeant notice Wingnut Bates. He noticed that Wingnut looked as coplike as Alfalfa in The Little Rascals. Therefore he’d make an excellent undercover operator during the height of the tourist season when they were getting complaints of hugger-mugger whores roiling the out-of-towners, a bad thing in a town that boasted Disneyland.
When he asked Wingnut Bates if he’d like a temporary vice assignment the rookie jumped at it, especially since Ned Grogan would be coming back to duty soon and Wingnut was feeling as secure as a U-2 flight over Kamchatka, or the U.S. Football League.
Wingnut thought he was going to like being a vice cop, but they started playing tricks on him right away as vice cops are wont to do. For his first assignment he was told by a pair of older cops that he was going to operate a notorious call girl who posed as an outcall masseuse. She advertised in underground newspapers in a classified ad that said: “If you want me, call the number in this ad and tell me what you want and how much it means to you. Be specific, darling.”
The reason for the admonition to be specific was that the girl didn’t want any calls from vice cops, and like all hookers she was better acquainted with case law on entrapment than most Orange County lawyers. Any cop who phoned got a recorded message repeating the admonition and asking for a call-back number. The hooker would only then make the call and discuss the transaction. She did most of her business with male tourists so they didn’t mind leaving the telephone numbers of hotel rooms.
Wingnut was told that they wanted the hooker to become acquainted with his telephone voice so there would be no problem when he showed up later at the rendezvous. He was told by the other cops that he was to get on the telephone and read a carefully worded script.
After reading the vice cops’ message, Wingnut Bates said, “But isn’t that entrapment, saying stuff like this to a hooker?”
“Noooo problem,” the vice cops told him. “The laws on entrapment are constantly changing. Just say exactly what’s in the script.”
So, while Wingnut rehearsed his lines in the squad room until all three vice cops agreed that he had it just right, one of them dialed the hooker’s number. Only it wasn’t the hooker’s number. It was Wingnut’s home number. The vice cop waited until Wingnut’s new bride answered and then said, “Just a second,” into the phone. Only it wasn’t Wingnut’s new bride. It was her mother, Eunice, who didn’t think much of her Penny marrying a cop when she’d had an offer from a Costa Mesa dentist with some prospects in life.
When Eunice said, “Who is this?” the phone was handed to Wingnut Bates, who delivered his lines. He said, “Hello, lover-buns. Yes, I got your message and yes, I want you to sit on my nose and yes, fifty bucks is ooo-kay! Just talking to you I got me a woody bigger’n a thirty-eight-ounce Louisville slugger!”
And then Wingnut Bates heard his mother-in-law scream, “Willard! Willard! Have you gone crazy?”
That was the kind of thing that happened to new vice cops. Once he was operating a complaint about wienie waggers inside a movie house adjoining a dirty bookstore that was disturbingly close to Disneyland. The cinema was showing Doing Debbie Dirty, which starred a surprisingly hot-looking porn star with a supporting cast of thirty-seven guys. They put Wingnut down in the front row with instructions to come running toward the back of the theater if they gave a signal. A signal meant they’d caught some guy milking the anaconda. They also told him they hoped he’d worn a jockstrap because it would be very unprofessional if he were to grow a woody watching Debbie being done dirty.