Cold Blooded Murder
A Policeman's Tale, Part 19
“A black, a Puerto Rican and a Mexican are in a car. Who's driving? The police.”
~Muhammad AliThe Cajun Kitchen Caper
There are gay cops. There are fat cops. There are skinny cops. There are cops with big noses and cops with pigeon toes. There are black cops and Mexican cops and Danish cops and English cops. There are mom cops and dad cops and swinger cops. There are cops who think the department is an excellent dating pool and send titty picks to other cops. There is a cop whose car runs on kitchen grease he collects from restaurants. There are scuba divers and triathletes and cops who can’t run at all. There are cops who wear velcro shoes and calculator watches. There are skydivers and urban cowboys and cops who fly off to Thailand on vacation to bang whores in Phuket. There are cops who smell bad and look like they put their uniform on backwards. There are the blue-veiner cops who slather themselves in hair products and have their uniforms tailored at Sinatras so their biceps look bigger. There are vain cops and humble cops and religious cops who never say more than three words to anyone. Non-consecutively. There are cops who call in sick if they stub their toe and there are cops with cancer who show up to smash bad guys anyway.
It takes a while, but you learn to love them, all of these cops in all of their weird stripes, because the great mistake is to underestimate their abilities on the street. The cop who never talks might be a bloodhound, and the obnoxious cop with corn kernal teeth might be the greatest interviewer you’ve ever seen, wearing down a sexual predator in the box with ruthless and relentless pressure—until the demon finally breaks weeping and shuddering and admitting that yes, he raped that girl in his City College security truck, and yes, there are others.
You fall in love with their wit, with their ability to think on their feet, with their courage to go toe-to-toe with street jackals and legal hyenas, to improvise solutions out of clusterfucks, to memorize facts and faces, to pull a name out of a hat, to calm a terrified child whose mother just smashed out every window of their house and destroyed a fifty gallon fishtank in a raging meth psychosis. You love them for what they do, and for how little they ask. You come to love them for the same reason Tim O’Brien loved his soldiers in Vietnam—you love them for the things they carry.
One morning you leave the station and go to breakfast in your piece of shit cold car that every gangster and dope dealer in the city knows is a cold car. That’s because the female fast-tracker whose job it is to get a new one—who hasn’t been on the streets in ten years, who once weighed three hundred pounds but had her stomach stapled and now looks like Karen Carpenter in the final hour—won’t do anything about it. The car is a total trash compactor, completely useless for surveillance or anything else, but you can’t fix stupid and there is nothing you can do about it. You just drive it and hope it won’t die when you need it most.
There are four of you. There’s a black cop, a redheaded cop, a musclebound cop, and you. You are all detectives and you’ve got time to kill between now and whatever happens next. You tell the world you are out checking addresses and go belching black smoke on shrieking springs through downtown—where there is a Bo Derek sighting on the sidewalk outside of Paseo Nuevo—to grab some chow at your favorite breakfast joint on Chapala and Canon Perdido—The Cajun Kitchen. For an old woman Bo still looks do-able and you are all laughing about her penchant for younger dudes when you pile into a booth by the window and order up.
There is a fresh rumor making the rounds that a sergeant is having sex problems at home, which is a topic that deserves some thorough examination over bacon and eggs. The troubled couple apparently hired an at-home therapist who slowly took over the bedroom. It started with demonstrations of inspiring methods for oral copulation but now the therapist makes the sergeant sit in the corner while she fucks his wife. It’s a woman on woman thing so it has all the requirements: a salacious rumor involving a sergeant nobody likes, with just enough kink to keep the rumor alive forever. Nobody even knows if it is true, but it’s out there, blowing through the detective bureau like a refreshing breeze, and anyway, a lead is a lead is a lead—such things can never be left unexamined.
