Cold Blooded Murder
A Policeman's Tale, Part 16
Rudy Garcia: Don't you cops ever believe anybody?
Bumper Morgan: We keep trying.
~Joseph Wambaugh, The Blue KnightThe Wild Frontier
One morning you are standing in the living room of an upstairs apartment on the west side of the city. Outside, kids are screaming in the grimy complex jungle gym and out on the street a corn vendor is ringing his little bell so that people will come buy an ear of corn slathered in rancid mayonnaise from a plastic jug that has been sitting in the sun for two weeks. He skedaddles when he sees you coming but you long ago gave up giving a shit about the small army of corn vendors who come from god knows where. The corn vendors enrage a certain class of citizen whose other bugaboo is gas powered leaf blowers. If they see either one they immediately call 911. At any one time there are half dozen calls lingering on the board for these taxpayer top priorities. Mostly the calls just sit on the big board, getting pushed farther and farther to the bottom, and are cleared with an eye roll and an effortless Gone on Arrival. But sometimes the reporting party, usually a middle-aged woman with a severe haircut and a water bottle who just came home from her three hour Funk Zone colonic, demands an officer respond to absorb her salvo of righteous citizen angst about food borne illnesses or the cascading catastrophe of environmental evils caused by short-stroke internal combustion. But there is an even more determined citizen who not only calls it in, but adds emphasis to the emergency by claiming to be Congresswoman Lois Capps.
You’ve been to this complex before because it is full of immigrant families and west side peanutheads who loaf around Bohnett Park eye-fucking the traffic all day. The immigrants have transplanted their tribal feuds from Mexico to Santa Barbara so that there are daily underlying cultural tensions between Guadalajarans and Jaliscans, between the families from Michoacan and those from Tamaulipas or Colima. It’s under the surface but it’s there and it’s related by degrees to the drug war that is endlessly raging in the places they came from.
