The Choirboys

Read The Choirboys for Free Online Page A

Book: Read The Choirboys for Free Online
Authors: Joseph Wambaugh
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Police Procedural
his nose.
    "Don't argue with me, man!" Roscoe said. His nostrils splayed as he sensed the fear on the man who stood hangdog before him.
    "What's your name?" Roscoe then demanded.
    "Charles ar-uh Henderson," the hod carrier answered, and then added impatiently. "Look, I wanna go back inside with my family. I'm tired a all this and I just wanna go to bed - I worked hard."
    But Roscoe became enraged at the latent impudence and snarled, "Look here, Charles ar-uh Henderson, don't you be telling me what you're gonna do. I'll tell you when you can go back inside and maybe you won't be going back inside at all. Maybe you're gonna be going to the slam tonight!"
    "What for? I ain't done nothin. What right you got."
    "Right? Right?" Roscoe snarled, spraying the hod carrier with saliva. "Man, one more word and I'm gonna book your ass! I'll personally lock you in the slammer! I'll set your hair on fire!"
    Whaddayamean Dean called down to Roscoe and suggested that they switch hod carriers. As soon as they had, he tried in vain to calm the outraged black man.
    A few minutes later he heard Roscoe offer some advice to the Mexican hod carrier: "If that loudmouth bitch was my old lady I'd kick her in the cunt."
    Twenty years ago the Mexican had broken a full bottle of beer over the head of a man for merely smiling at his woman. Twenty years ago, when she was a lithe young girl with a smooth sensuous belly, he would have shot to death any man, cop or not, who would dare to refer to her as a bitch.
    Roscoe Rules knew nothing of machismo and did not even sense the slight almost imperceptible nickering of the left eyelid of the Mexican. Nor did he notice that those burning black eyes were no longer pointed somewhere between the shield and a necktie of Roscoe Rules, but were fixed on his face, at the browless blue eyes of the tall policeman.
    "Now you two act like men and shake hands so we can leave," Roscoe ordered, "Huh?" the Mexican said incredulously, and even the black hod earner looked up in disbelief.
    "I said shake hands. Let's be men about this. The fight's over and you'll feel better if you shake hands."
    "I'm forty-two years old," the Mexican said softly, the eyelid flickering more noticeably. "Almost old enough to be your father. I ain't shaking hands like no kid on a playground."
    "You'll do what I say or sleep in the slammer," Roscoe said, remembering how in school everyone felt better and even drank beer after a good fight.
    "What charge?" demanded the Mexican, his breathing erratic now. "What fuckin charge?"
    "You both been drinking," Roscoe said, losing confidence in his constituted authority, but infuriated by the insolence which was quickly undermining what he thought was a controlled situation.
    Roscoe, like most black-glove cops, believed implicitly that if you ever backed down even for a moment in dealing with assholes and scrotes the entire structure of American law enforcement would crash to the ground in a mushroom cloud of dust.
    "We ain't drunk," the Mexican said. "I had a can of beer when I got home from work. One goddamn can!" He spoke in accented Cholo English: staccato, clipped, just as he did when he was a respected gang member.
    Then Roscoe Rules pushed him back into an alcove away from the eyes of those down the hall who had made their own peace by now and were preparing to go back into their apartments to fix dinner. Roscoe pulled his baton from the ring and hated this sullen Mexican and the glowering black man and even Whaddayamean Dean whose nervousness enraged Roscoe because if you ever let these scrotes think you were afraid.
    Then Roscoe looked around, guessing there were a dozen people between them and the radio car, and started to realize that this was not the time or place. But the Mexican made Roscoe Rules forget that it was the wrong time and place when he looked at the tall policeman with the harder cruder larger body and said, "I never let a man talk to me like this. You better book me or you better let

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