Cold Blooded Murder
A Policeman's Tale, Part 23
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.”
~Raymond Chandler
Rules
There are rules of long-term survival and they are all related and some of them you better learn fast. The first rule is: don’t argue with drunks or street loons—it’s pathetic and you will only look and feel stupid. And don’t lecture anybody on their life choices. There is nothing more cringe-inducing than a cop who goes lecturing Eastside Krazies with Santa Bruta tattoos on their foreheads about the hazards of gang life, or middle-aged white broads with crazy-lipstick-face who have saddled their heroin addiction with a Suboxone addiction and so cratered their promising career as the Sr. Vice President of Whatever. You might as well try lecturing a closet door. Just don’t do it. They will only resent you for it and anyway it isn’t really your job to figure out why people do what they do. It isn’t your charge to reach into that funnelweb of human psychology and flip the make better choices switch. That road leads to early burnout, alimony and child support, and the pair of ruined huaraches you favor while manning your trinket stall at the Saturday Art Market on Cabrillo Boulevard. Sorting through the wreckage of our failing republic for mere psychology—for the reasons Little Johnny climbed the trellis outside the Montessori Inn with a butcher knife—might be good for the mountain of retired dicks at the Vadoq Society who are trying to unravel the mystery of the Keddie Murders, but when you walk into the lobby of the Montessori Inn with your camera and your Black & Decker tool box full of CSI shit, it’s a long way from being helpful.
And anyway, you can smell the blood before you see it. You are met in the hotel lobby by a cop whose eyes tell you everything. Big eyes mean big problems. A warning: get ready. She’s a good cop and she doesn’t rattle but you can tell this one is going to be special by the layers of Stand-the-Fuck-By written all over her face. You set your gear down while the hotel clerks lurk behind their lobby desk trying to pretend everything is just fine—nothing to see here, and would you like a pamphlet for the Carriage Museum or the Channel Islands Tour? They have a hotel full of guests hiding from midwestern blizzards on the American Riviera and the entire second floor of their business looks like the Tate-Labianca murders. That’s a tough one to sort through when all you ever did was sign up to work the night-audit so you could whittle away at the ever-increasing cost of your rent and tuition.
Care for a mint?
So you glove up. That’s a rule you can never forget. The department will sometimes make this hard to do, because the nitwit in charge of buying gloves will order nothing but small, or extra small, latex gloves. Everyone is always being held accountable in little ways except the person who buys the gloves. There will be a thousand boxes full of Gloves for the Lollipop Guild, for sure, but not a single box of gloves for grown men anywhere in the station. You don’t always know this until it’s too late, when you try to pull them on and can’t get them past your knuckles, when you now have to touch a gremlin covered in layers of human waste, an active carrier of communicable diseases and blood borne pathogens. You now get to reach into his pocket where he keeps his dental floss picks and his miniature dildo keychain, his teeners of meth and his wads of Kleenex and his mystery bits of goo and slime. You’ll reach all the way in there hoping not to get nicked by an uncapped needle or a razor blade while he’s telling you these aren’t even his pants, that the little chunks of crack cocaine that look like yellowing teeth punched out of a human skull actually belong to his imaginary roommate in the imaginary apartment they share on an imaginary street.
The first time someone tells you These aren’t my pants you start laughing because you are now starring in your own episode of Cops. There aren’t any cameras following you around East Yanonali Street, somewhere between the shit treatment plant and Calvary Chapel where Jesus reigns supreme, but you are in it all the way up to your elbows. And how are you going to sort out the psychology of that?
Okay, buddy, you say, I’ll stipulate: Not your pants. It’s not your meth, either. Not your crack. Not your vinegar-reeking chunk of heroin wrapped up in a Wrigley’s foil. It’s not your gun under the seat. That’s not your wife you just hit with a golf club. That’s not your Rambo knife in the CVS shopping bag. What was I thinking, and how did I become so…presumptuous? And the best part of all this, you think to yourself, is how magnanimous it all is. How egalitarian, this world view, because in the end nothing belongs to anybody and nobody can ever be wrong on stolen land.
