The Sticking Place Page 6

  “Why can’t we go to the park?” Luke asked.

  Shimmer clucked his tongue.

  “The park’s no place to generate numbers,” Hartson said. “At night, the place is packed with perverts looking for anonymous sex. Now, I don’t care who does what to who, but we’re talking about a public place here and these guys have taken the park over because they keep complaining to the gay activists who lobby the politicians, who tell the brass we’re all homophobes just out for a cheap thrill. It’s a Catch-22 because we need recordable contacts for our journals to stay out of trouble and we’re ordered to ignore the illegal shit that’s going on in the middle of my beat. The result is, the sex stuff spills over into the ravines and bushes in the daytime and the family picnics and volleyball games are forced out of the area.”

  Hartson slapped his flashlight against an open palm again. The implication was pretty clear. He wanted to clunk Luke upside the head and knock some sense into him.

  “I’m starting to see the problem,” Luke said after a long deliberation. “But what can we do about it?”

  “You’re the smart guy,” Hartson said. “You tell me. But do it straight from your head without any of your stupid quotations. If you’re capable of thinking for yourself, that is.”

  This time Shimmer broke the tension. “The City Council, in its infinite wisdom, has declared that topless bars are police regulated businesses. We can do our part to keep them regulated and live up to Farnsworth’s anthem at the same time. It don’t get much better than that.”

  The truce was offered. Luke only needed to accept it.

  He was no expert on police training, but he knew the only way to get trained was to actually do something. “Why are you making Denny sit in the car?”

  Shimmer’s eyelids fluttered like a porcelain top on a boiling teapot. “It’s none of your fucking business, that’s why,” he shouted.

  Luke thought Shimmer’s head might teeter off his neck and crack into pieces on the sidewalk.

  “Way to get along, Luke,” Hartson said.

  14

  ONCE HARTSON GOT THE SITUATION CALMED DOWN, Shimmer explained the advantages to regulating Cindy’s bar, the first destination for the peripatetic trio. Namely, that Cindy’s boasted three stages with dancers performing two-song sets instead of the four-song sets at other clubs. Since the dancing girls only flicked off their skimpy tops during the last song, the shorter sets, combined with the three stages, meant Cindy’s sported more naked tits per second than any of its competitors, making it a tit-rich environment.

  Shimmer pulled aside the black leather entrance flap and the trio of officers saw a leggy strawberry blonde grasping a pole with both hands. She wrapped a thigh around it as her hips undulated in and out and up and down and her hands stroked the pole in front of an open mouth.

  Their entrance into Cindy’s was halted by a piercing shriek coming from a nearby sidewalk.

  “Where’s ‘Yat?”

  The shrieking woman stood in front of a bustling tattoo parlor around the corner from Cindy’s. In her forties, she wore a faded maroon housecoat and corduroy slippers with holes at the big toes. Her hair did a Don King imitation and her caterwauls sent pedestrians scurrying around her and into the street.

  “What the fuck is a Yat?” Shimmer asked.

  The woman caught her breath and enunciated clearly. “Where is he at? Where is that sumbitch at? I know he be in one of these titty bars somewhere.”

  “Where is who at?” Shimmer asked.

  “My good for nothing man be in one of these titty bars and I just know it, because it’s his payday, and I ain’t leaving until I find his tired ass and drag it home.” The woman ran a trembling palm over her hair and pulled in a deep breath. “Then his ass is mine’s. He think he can bring that tired-ass paycheck down here and drink beer and stare at them titties and buy him some ass until it all gone. I know exactly what he think he going to do but he ain’t, because I’ll drag his tired ass home!”

  “Ma’am,” Shimmer implored. “I need you to help me out here. You’re creating a disturbance and I might have to arrest you. You don’t want that now, do you?”

  “But our money?” the woman pleaded. “He’ll spend it all on whores and drinking and we got a grandbaby to feed.”

  Shimmer’s demeanor instantly changed. His shoulders slumped and the timbre of his voice softened.

  “Believe me,” he told Mrs. Yat. “I understand your problem. You describe Mr. Yat for us and we’ll bring him home. That’s a promise from me to you. But only if you’ll promise me you’ll go home.”

  “The name ain’t Yat, it’s Brown. John Brown.” The woman looked Shimmer up and down. “Okay,” she said, a hint of hope infusing her words. “I’ll let you figure out where he at. And just so you’d know, I wouldn’t whup his ass like I said. I only want him back where he belong.”

  The three officers set off with Mr. Yat’s description, address and phone number scribbled on the back page of Shimmer’s notebook. He was tall and skinny and wearing a black Oakland Raider’s jacket and cap, a virtual felony in San Diego.

  The search for Mr. Yat would be incorporated into their quest for numbers to fill their journals.

  They wrote tickets to pedestrians and filled out Field Interview Forms on prostitutes and drug dealers. They even tutored a batch of sailors who comprised the criminal element’s most likely customers and eventual victims.

  “Stay downtown and you might as well wear a shirt with a bulls-eye on it,” Shimmer warned them. “You’ll lose your paycheck to some Three-Card Monte scam or hand a wad of money over to some pimp who’ll claim he’ll be right back with the merchandise. You’ll never see him or your money again. Then you’ll call us and claim you were minding your own business and got robbed, and we’ll figure out you’re lying in about a nanosecond. So don’t bother to call us for that shit, because we ain’t a collection service!”

  Hartson joined in. “Don’t get fooled by that bull crap you hear on the radio that talks about San Diego’s some kind of paradise. Trust me, boys, look around and you’ll see. This is no fantasy land.”

  With several contacts under their belts, the trio finally got lucky at the corner of Third and Broadway where Mr. Yat teetered on the edge of the curb. His presence fulfilled two functions at once. He represented both a quantifiable citizen’s contact and Shimmer’s chance to keep his promise to the wronged wife waiting patiently at home for her wayward husband.

  “You must be the famous Mr. Yat,” Shimmer said.

  “No, sir.” The drunk slurred his words through tight lips and wobbled on shaky legs, hovering precariously close to the cars turning west onto Broadway. “Name’s Brown.”

  “You live at 3213 Clay Street?” Shimmer asked.

  “I do. Yes, sir.”

  “That makes you Yat,” Shimmer said. “And it’s obvious you’ve had too much to drink. But this is your lucky day because I intend to do you a favor. I won’t throw your ass in jail if you let us give you a ride home.”

  The three officers walked a forlorn Mr. Yat the couple of blocks back to the rear of Johnny’s. Once they got there, Shimmer surprised Luke by asking Hartson to take Yat home.

  “I have to say,” Luke said as they made the drive, “I’m a little confused by all this. Mr. Yat here’s been drinking, but he’s not really a danger to himself or to anybody else for that matter. Besides that, I know taking him home’s a violation of department policy, so, I guess what I’m asking is, what gives?”

  The muscles in Hartson’s jaw worked a little. “It’s about time I told you a little about Shimmer since you’ve already made up your mind about him,” Hartson said.

  The sharpness in Hartson’s tone stung a little.

  “A couple years back, Shimmer killed a guy who was holding his wife hostage and threatening to slit her throat. Shimmer did everything right, but the asshole still managed to separate her neck from her shoulders in the process. She bled out in front of him.

  “
That same week, his kid drowned in their pool. We were friends back then. His wife used to come to the One-Five-Three Club when she could find a babysitter and the three of us would have a blast telling jokes and knocking back a few beers. Now she hates his guts and I can tell its killing him. She’s told me herself he used to be her hero. For Shimmer, taking care of Mr. Yat’s like doing something he can’t do for his own wife.”

  Luke sat, stunned by Hartson’s insight and his willingness to share it. “Why didn’t he take Yat home and get some of the glory for himself then?”

  “He’s a complicated guy,” Hartson said.

  The pair dropped Mr. Yat off and told dispatch they were back in service. The dispatcher responded with a call. “Unit Fifty-one-Frank, respond to a possible jumper at the top of the Community Concourse parking structure.”

  Luke acknowledged the call. Then a sudden thought struck him with all the wallop of a baseball bat to the gut. “I’m sort of wondering,” he said. “How come you know so much about what Shimmer’s wife thinks?”

  “You’re the smart guy,” Hartson said. “You figure it out.”

  15

  “IS THAT SOME KIND OF THREAT?” Francie wanted to know. “I don’t care if you jump, but I’ll need to know your name first to make it easier on me.” Francie goose-stepped to the precipice and stood on his tip-toes. He pressed his belly against the concrete barrier and peeked over.”

  There was no answer.

  “It’s a long way down,” Francie said. “I saw a guy jump from here once and his head popped like a water balloon when it slapped bottom. There’ll be a big mess for somebody to clean up down there. That what you want, somebody else cleaning up your mess?”

  The would-be jumper glanced down to the 1200 block of Second Avenue to see a police car rounding into the bottom floor.

  Francie pressed on. “What’s your name?”

  Tense jaws and gritted teeth spat out an answer. “What difference does it make to you? You don’t give a shit.” The muscular man glowered down at Francie. He wore a tight rugby shirt tucked into polyester pants. His sturdy legs quivered atop a rectangular concrete slab that jutted several feet above the top floor of the structure.

  Hartson’s unit pulled next to the other police car. He joined Francie, and Luke took up a post with Francie’s nearly apoplectic trainee. Her face looked as if it had just suffered a Bell’s palsy with its two halves replicating the ancient masks of comedy and tragedy. Her name was Andee Bradford.

  “I think my FTO’s lost it,” she said.

  Luke combined observation and supposition with facts he’d learned from classmates as he sized up Bradford. Her first name was a female version of her grandfather’s, and her dad’s first signal of disappointment over his siring a girl child. She stood under five-feet-tall and her chest commandeered a bra with a cup size somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, which explained why Luke couldn’t recall ever seeing a man look her in the eyes.

  Although a trainee like Luke, she’d already earned a reputation for two noteworthy things. She held the academy record for timed pushups due to the short distance her arms needed to bend before her chest touched the wrestling mat. That really stung Luke who’d held the record for exactly two minutes before she took her turn.

  She’d also single-handedly broken up a donnybrook at 25th and Imperial Streets on her first day of patrol when the pillow that allowed her to see over the dashboard fell into the gutter as she slid out of the car. The sight of her stooping to scoop the cushion up from the street sucked the tension out of the festering crowd and parted the combatants who found the situation too funny to keep fighting.

  “What’s going on?” Luke asked her.

  “I’ve got paperwork,” Francie said to the jumper, ignoring the arrival of the other officers. “It’ll be easier if I know who you are. If you jump, we have to wait for the coroner before my trainee can check your pockets, but if you cooperate a little, we can get off on time.”

  “I’m supposed to be considerate of you, is that the idea?”

  “Let me put it to you this way,” Francie said. “I’d be willing to bet there’s at least one moron out there,” Francie waved his arm toward the horizon, “who loves you. When you jump, it’ll be incredibly inconsiderate to them. If you do something nice for me, I can tell them about it and they won’t be so pissed off.”

  Hartson pushed past Francie to take over the negotiations. “His name’s Charles Henreid,” he said.

  Luke leaned toward Bradford and took her into his confidence. “We arrested this guy for drunk driving a couple days ago.”

  “Stay away from me or I’ll jump,” Henreid said.

  “There you go with that threat again. Either get on with it or come down from there and quit wasting our time,” Francie said.

  Luke knew Hartson couldn’t get close without risking falling or being pushed off and he and Bradford needed to stay out of the way to let Hartson establish some rapport.

  “I’m a rational man,” Hartson said. “I won’t risk my life to save yours. Let’s just you and me talk a few minutes.”

  Henreid squatted. Luke followed his gaze as he stared eastward toward the Presidio Tower in Balboa Park that jutted majestically above the Museum of Man in the distance. The bright floodlights at the base of the tower shone upward along its smooth façade, projecting an opalescent contrast to the dark night around it.

  “What brings you up here tonight, Mr. Henreid?” Hartson asked.

  “Maybe he took a cab,” Francie said.

  Hartson ignored the heckling. “What do your friends call you? Is it Chuck, Charlie, or Charles?”

  Henreid didn’t answer.

  “My name’s T.D.,” Hartson continued. “My partner over there is Francie.”

  “You can call me Officer O’Malley,” Francie interrupted.

  For Luke, Francie’s animosity was positively Shakespearean. There was just no rational explanation for how angry he was, just as there was no rational explanation for the hatred of Edmund in King Lear, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing or Iago in Othello.

  “What do you really want from me?” Henreid demanded. “You want me to get down from here so you can throw me in jail again?”

  “Let’s start with why you want to kill yourself.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand much,” Hartson assured him. “But I’m willing to listen.”

  “I just got out of jail and that truck you and your partner took from me was how i earned my living. How stupid are you anyway?”

  “I was just doing my job,” Hartson told him. “You were too drunk to drive, and you know it. You can’t go blaming your problems on somebody else all the time.”

  Luke wondered if all his actions as a cop had such far reaching consequences for people’s lives.

  Francie interrupted his thoughts. “It’s colder than my ex-wife’s side of the bed up here with this breeze whipping through. Could you get on with this thing, so I can get in the car and turn the heater on?”

  Luke couldn’t tell whether the words constituted an invitation for Henreid to jump or to climb down and surrender.

  “What’s got him so pissed off?” Luke asked Bradford.

  “It beats me,” she said. “He was reading a letter from one of his kids over coffee and the next thing I know, we’re answering this call and he’s gone completely off his nut.”

  “It’s the middle of August for Christ’s sake,” Hartson said to Francie. “Nobody’s cold here in the middle of August.”

  “I am.”

  Hartson turned toward Henreid. “Ignore him,” he said. “Let’s just you and me talk and see if we can’t come to an understanding.”

  Henreid stood tall again and edged closer to the brink of the concrete super-structure. “Why’d you have to impound my truck?” Henreid said. “I can’t afford to get it back, which means I can’t pay the rent.”

  “What else could I do?” Hartson asked.


  “Turn your head,” Henreid said. “I don’t want you to see me jump.”

  “No.” Hartson demanded. “If you go, you’ll go, knowing you’re taking my guts with you.”

  Henreid slid to the center of the slab. “I’ve lost everything,” he said. He turned toward the Presidio Tower again. “My wife used to cup my face and tell me I was the best thing that ever happened to her. She won’t even let me talk to my baby anymore. She says she won’t let our daughter grow up knowing her daddy gambled our lives away.”

  Henreid heaved an enormous sigh that sounded like a train engine blowing steam into its silent surroundings. “I’m a gambler and I’d be better off dead.”

  “Ah, geez,” Francie blurted out. “Is this shit supposed to make me cry? You used to have a wife, used to have a baby, used to have a this, used to have a that and lost it all to gambling. I think I’m about to puke.

  “Let me tell you something, pal,” Francie’s pitchy voice piped higher as he tapped insistent fingers against his metal flashlight. He leaned toward Henreid who stood again. “I got kids too. Now, I live in a dump of an apartment with some other asshole whose wife dumped him. You don’t see me crying and threatening to kill myself, do you?”

  Luke’s mouth gaped open. He knew Hartson was the other asshole.

  “You think I’m kidding, but I’m not,” Francie insisted.

  “No,” Henreid said. “I can see you’re serious.”

  “Shut up and listen for once,” Francie said. “I used to be a school principal who took care of other people’s kids all day. Now, some other guy’s raising my kids and I’m babysitting assholes like you in the middle of the night.” Francie thumped his flashlight against his chest. “This fucking job is my addiction. This uniform yanked me away from everything I cared about. You think I care what happens to you?”

  “Shut up, Francie,” Hartson demanded. “Get in your fucking car and take your trainee out of here before I come over there and kick your ass.”