For one thing, he was bonkers over mace canisters. Prankster Frank’d mace anything. In the winter he’d mace the patrol cars, just inside the grill where the vent hoses are. Then when they’d turn on the heater on a cold night they’d be crying like their dog died before they realized what happened. He’d also mace their radio mikes. They didn’t know it until they picked it up to talk and their eyes started watering from the gas residue. Or he’d mace a helmet before a big inspection. That was a gas, all right. Standing there at attention with a helmet down over the nose and the eyes on fire. Prankster Frank Zamelli made lots of death wishes surface.
A variation on the mace was the bag-and-poopsicle routine where he’d scoop up a pile of warm dog crap with a bag and popsicle stick, and stash it up under the dashboard of a patrol car if the cops were dumb enough to leave it unlocked when he was within five miles. He just loved to hide out somewhere and watch two befuddled cops leap out of their car and sniff around each other like cocker spaniels after checking shoe bottoms.
Even civilian employees weren’t safe when Frank was in a prankster frenzy. There was a very buxom married secretary at his old station who was secretly dating the captain, and who spurned all Frank’s advances.
It was rumored that she was hosed down by the captain every time her old man flew down to L.A. on business, but she affected chastity and carried herself like Princess Di. Finally, when an overheated Prankster Frank wouldn’t take yes for an answer after he asked if she’d like him to stop asking her for dates, she said, “Listen, maybe you don’t appreciate subtlety. Let’s put it this way: I’ll date you when Jeane Kirkpatrick becomes a Playboy bunny.”
Then Frank was ordered by his sergeant to stop “pestering” the boss’s secretary. The word came from the captain himself who referred to Frank as “the wop cop.” The ethnic slur did it. They got on Prankster Frank’s list. But he couldn’t very well mace the Waspy bitch or the captain. What he could do was wait until she went home one night and attack the photo cube she displayed on her desk. It was full of pictures of her preppy nineteen-year-old daughter who was vying for Miss California and whom she treated like a nun with the holy stigmata. Prankster Frank slipped a picture of his own into the side of the cube that faced toward the squad room where several passing detectives later did a take and said, “Who’s that?”
“My daughter!” the secretary answered proudly until the third detective asked the same question. It gave her pause because they all knew very well whose pictures were in the cube. Then she turned it around and screamed.
Prankster Frank had inserted a shot he found in Hustler magazine, a beaver shot, a yawning beaver shot. In color.
When she ran into the captain’s office to demand the head of Prankster Frank, her boss and not-so-secret lover tried to calm her down by pointing out that she had no proof it was the dirty dago and it might be better to make no more of it for the moment. Until she pointed to the trophy table behind him and a portrait of his wife, Rosey, and their son, Buster, who was posing cheek to cheek with his doting mother on his tenth birthday. Except that the face in the picture no longer belonged to Buster. The captain’s snotty little kid now had the kisser of a local junkie with a Zulu hairdo. Buster looked like Rupert the Hype who looked like Leon Spinks after Larry Holmes beat the living shit out of him making him uglier than ever.
The thing that finished off Prankster Frank was a reign of terror at the county jail that was almost traced to him. It started when a drunk described him to his face in twenty-seven words ending with “guinea prick.” The drunk also started screaming about suing for false arrest and police brutality until Prankster Frank got a headache from all the motor-mouthing. He was going on vacation soon and didn’t want any court subpoenas, so instead of giving his own name at the county slammer as arresting officer, he impulsively listed his name as Officer U. F. Puck along with a bogus serial number.
The reign of terror was launched. For the next couple of weeks Prankster Frank disposed of seven slime-mouths by booking them drunk at the county jail, arrested by U. F. Puck. Prankster Frank then told a few other cops how easy it was to dispose of smart-mouth pukes who were “almost” drunk enough to book legitimately. Pretty soon there were lots of borderline drunks with very bad attitudes being booked by Officer U. F. Puck.
Then the jig was up. Especially since Officer Puck never showed up for trial and was described by outraged defendants as a tall white man, a short black man, a fat Mexican.
One defendant was absolutely certain that Officer Puck was Chinese-American and he ought to know, he said, because he was Chinese and they spoke the same dialect.
There was a big internal investigation over this one, which involved three police agencies. Prankster Frank Zamelli was ordered to take a polygraph exam but said he was insulted that his word as an officer and gentleman was being challenged, and he was sick of the damp climate in the Bay area, which was making his knee joints ache, and he was going south around Palm Springs where he was told people lived longer than goat herders in Abkhazia.
Six months later, Prankster Frank was working for Chief Paco Pedroza after Sergeant Harry Bright found Frank to be a good lad who might need extra supervision. Paco actually came to appreciate Frank’s tricky ways as long as they got results. For instance, one day the county sheriff’s deputies were trying to serve a search warrant on a Mineral Springs crank dealer, and they asked Paco if any of his cops knew the dealer’s M.O. They wanted to get in the house fast with their search warrant before the crystal got flushed and other evidence got destroyed.
“Noooooo problem,” said Prankster Frank, who knew that the crystal chemist had a restored 1965 Ford Mustang he loved more than ether. Thirty minutes later, the scruffiest-looking dope cop from the sheriffs squad was being “arrested” by Officer Zamelli who, in full uniform, was dragging the undercover cop down the street with his hands cuffed behind him, yelling loud enough to wake the neighborhood, most of whom were asleep by ten o’clock.
Prankster Frank made lots of noise when he stomped up on the porch of the two-story frame house with his “suspect” by the arm. He leaned on the bell until he heard a voice from the upstairs window say, “Yeah, whaddaya want?”
“It’s the police!” Prankster Frank yelled. “Somebody in this house own a Mustang?”
“What about it?” the man’s voice asked with some alarm.
“I caught this guy lifting the car radio. I think he busted in with a tire iron. The paint’s all scratched and the window’s busted and …”
The crank dealer slid down the banister. Prankster Frank heard two bumps and in ten seconds the “chemist” in his bare feet and bathrobe threw open the door yelling, “My Mustang? This fuckface tore up my vintage Mustang?”
While the crank dealer was being restrained from attacking the “prisoner,” all the deputies swooped in. The chemist found himself changing places with the little fuckface and soon sat bellowing in the same handcuffs while the dope cops strolled leisurely through the methamphetamine smorgasbord, scooping up drugs in both hands.
Paco Pedroza admired resourceful cops like Prankster Frank, but then, Frank never played tricks on his chief. Nor on the sergeants. First of all, he liked Sergeant Harry Bright too much, and second, he was scared shitless of Sergeant Coy Brickman who was not really mean but looked mean. Prankster Frank didn’t like guys who stared at you like they hadn’t blinked since 1969. He only played pranks on the other eight members of the Mineral Springs police force. One of his favorite victims was of course Wingnut Bates.