The Rest of the Story
By Audrey
The Torino’s back seat stunk. Leg room was non-existent, the naugahyde or vinyl or whatever it was that lined the seat was
too slippery, and my constant leaning forward to catch their conversational
tidbits was causing my neck to cramp.
Not that they were talking much.
It was damn hot, unusually sticky for Los
Angeles County. I was down to my rolled
up shirt-sleeves, my one good sports coat balled up with my one good tie in the
corner of the immaculate floorboard.
They, on the other hand, wore two shirts each, Hutchinson with a
relatively sedate Hawaiian shirt over his t-shirt, Starsky with a bowling shirt
over his.
“Aren’t you hot with two shirts on?” I
asked, aiming the question at neither one in particular. My earlier questions had been answered with
non-specific grunts. Maybe this time
I’d get lucky, albeit with a stupid question.
The passenger turned to me. Exhausted and aloof blue eyes stared out
between strands of sweaty blond bangs.
This close up, I could see scrapes on his left cheek that had escaped my
notice earlier this morning. “Yep,” he
answered simply, before turning back to face the streets ahead of him.
“Then why
don’t you take one off?” I asked again,
pushing my luck.
The detective turned back around. “We have a choice. Get made as cops when we walk down the street with our holsters
in plain view, or get made as cops when we are the only morons wearing more
than one shirt on a 90 degree day.”
Then he shook his head in disgust, though
whether at the topic or my question, I didn’t know for sure.
“The department makes the choice for us,”
he continued. “No exposed weapons on
plainclothes officers in the public view unless necessary for blah, blah,
blah.” His point made, his head snapped
back to face forward once again. His
partner made no indication that he had heard, or cared about, the exchange.
I settled back to make some notes. It was the longest string of words I’d heard
from either man all day…unless you count that morning.
*
That morning I had finally found myself
in Captain Dobey’s office after spending 20 minutes waiting downstairs with the
desk sergeant. Now the captain was on
the phone, and I was annoyed. Waiting
is not my strong suit.
“No, you can’t have them,” he yelled into
the phone. “I’m short three guys
already. And until the promotional test
gets out of the courts, I’ll continue to be short. Borrow them from Vice!”
And with that, he slammed the receiver down.
Dobey turned his attention to me. “Damn manpower shortages,” he raged. “Child Protective Services wants some of my
men, Vice wants some of my men, Community Services wants some of my men. And when do I get to demand more men? Tell me that! My people are working double, triple overtime just to get the job
done. Maybe I’ll just tell the citizens
to stop getting murdered.” His voice
cracked in grief and fatigue.
Then he paused in his tirade.
“Who the hell are you again?” he asked, turning the volume down ever so
slightly.
“Robert McKesson. Bob.
Los Angeles Times.” His face
registered nothing. I forged ahead.
“Reporter,” I
added, for unnecessary clarification.
Still
nothing.
“Following your detectives for a month
for a series in the paper, and maybe a book?
You know? Like the ‘New
Centurions’?” I threw in that last bit
for good measure. It’s one of my
favorite books, and a lot of people still remember the movie from a few years
ago.
His broad, brown face softened into a
welcoming, if slightly rehearsed, smile.
“Oh yes, Mr. McKesson. That’s
today, huh? Welcome to the BCPD. Pardon my, um….”
“Outburst?” I supplied. He grimaced, and I continued on. “That’s OK.
And call me Bob. Mr. McKesson is
my dad. But you made an interesting
point on the phone there, something maybe we can talk about later: how the
court rulings are affecting manpower.”
Dobey immediately looked cautious. I could have kicked myself. One of the ways I had justified this story
to my editors was to bring in the subject of recent court rulings on minority
promotions and hiring. But obviously
this was a sore subject for Dobey.
“I’m teaming you with one of my most
seasoned detective pairs,” he said, ignoring my heavy hint. He ambled over to his office door, opened
it, and bellowed, “Starsky! Hutchinson! In my office!”
Dobey sat back down at his desk. Two men walked in, weariness evident in
every step. Both wore holstered guns
over sweat-stained t-shirts. One –
blond, tall, lanky– headed immediately for the other empty chair in the room
and settled slowly into it. He moved
stiffly. His head bowed slightly as he
pinched the bridge of his nose in a tired gesture. As he moved his hand upward, his sleeve slipped, revealing a
nasty scrape on his elbow and upper arm.
It looked like road rash.
The other – brunet, shorter, compact –
perched himself on the arm of the chair, resting his hand on his partner’s
shoulder. It was a casual maneuver and
yet, at the same time, looked oddly protective.
Captain Dobey turned to me. “Mr. McKesson…um, Bob… Meet Detective
Sergeants Dave Starsky and Ken Hutchinson.”
Dobey then turned to his detectives.
“McKesson here is a reporter from the LA Times. He’s got permission for a month’s
ride-along. Doing a story about…What are
you doing a story about again?”
I relaxed my face into my best
cop-friendly expression. “Just trying
to bring a human face to the police force.
With the…well…everything…going on right now on the streets and in the
courts, we kind of lose track of what it is you do, every day, to keep the
citizens safe. You know…” I trailed off
as the dark-hared detective, Starsky, rolled his eyes at his captain.
“OK, here’s the drill,” Starsky said in a
tone of voice that suggested he’d rather be cleaning toilets than escorting me
around town. “No questions or comments
in front of perps. Save the criticisms
and opinions for the office. You buy
your own food. No food in my car. You sit in the back seat. Good luck finding the back seat in Hutch’s
car. Before you even think of asking,
no - you can’t hold my gun. Anyone
shoots at you, duck. And if we ride at
night, so do you.” His hand tightened
on Hutchinson’s shoulder. Apparently
that was the signal to go, as the pair rose from the chair – Hutchinson with
the help of Starsky’s hand on his elbow – and exited Captain Dobey’s office
without another word.
I sat there, speechless, wondering what I
had done to make them angry. Had I
made a mistake?
Dobey shook his head. “I have to apologize for my men,” he said
softly. “Detective Hutchinson came out
of a deep cover assignment yesterday… The hard way…and Starsky was barely there
in time to pick up the mess. They have
to start all over again, they haven’t had a day off in weeks, and they are not
likely to get one anytime soon.”
“That’s just what I’m looking for,
Captain,” I said eagerly, my spirits buoyed once again. “The citizens don’t know what’s going
on. They just see the negative news
stories. They don’t see the men on the
front line, doing the job every day.
I’m not a crime reporter, just a features guy. I’m not out to ‘get’ anyone.”
The office door opened again. Starsky stuck his head inside. “We’re heading out, Cap. You coming or what?” he asked, jerking his
chin in my direction.
“Heck, yeah,”
I said, hopping out of my chair and rushing after him.
*
Both men grabbed clean shirts from the
backs of their chairs before we headed out of the office. Hutchinson tapped his partner on the
arm.
“Composite ‘n’
list,” the blond said cryptically.
“Yeah, OK,
downstairs in five,” Starsky answered.
Hutchinson swerved away from us and
ducked into an office labeled “Records and Information”. We headed for the staircase. On the way down, I tried to make sense of
the abbreviated exchange between the two partners.
“What’s a
composite?” I asked.
“Picture of a
suspect.”
“And a list?”
Starsky rolled his eyes at me for the
second time in 10 minutes. “A list is a
bunch of information in a column on a piece of paper. I hear they use them in the real world too.”
I ignored the sarcasm and pressed
on. “This have anything to do with the
case your partner was undercover on?”
“Dobey fill
you in?”
“Just that you
have to start all over again. Sounds
like a bitch of a case.”
“Yeah,” he said, offering no further
enlightenment. We walked out of the
stairwell and into the front lobby.
“Hiya,
Peters,” the detective greeted the desk sergeant. “What’s shakin’?”
“Not much,
Starsk. Heard you guys got real screwed
last night. Hutch OK?”
“Spent the night at Memorial. They think he messed up a disk again when that
guy dinked him with the car. Not much
we can do about it now, though. Maybe
we’ll schedule something surgical this fall.”
“Ouch,” Sergeant Peters said in
sympathy. I looked at the two
sergeants, mouth agape. Hit by a
car? Slipped disk? My wife was practically crippled for a week
with a bad disk once. That Hutchinson
was still walking around was astounding, let alone working a case. But any comment I might have made on the
subject was interrupted by the sudden reappearance of the man under
discussion.
“She’s on it,” Hutchinson said to his
partner. “Hey, Peters,” he tossed the
greeting over his shoulder as the two detectives and I walked out the door,
Starsky lightly steering the other man with a hand on the small of his
back. “Hey, Hutch,” the veteran desk
sergeant replied, wincing as he saw the visible results of Hutchinson’s
misadventure the night before.
*
Starsky suddenly spun the Torino’s
steering wheel in his hands and landed the car into a curb next to a coffee
shop. I wished, not for the first time
that morning, that the detectives’ vehicle had seatbelts in the back.
“What the hell, Starsk?” Hutchinson said,
exasperated. I wondered the same
thing. Had he seen a suspect? Were we going to question someone? I could barely suppress my excitement as I
leaned closer to hear his response.
“I’m hungry,” Starsky said in a tone of
voice that very nearly approximated a toddler’s whine. “We haven’t eaten since yesterday. My blood sugar is about two.”
Hutchinson let out a noisy sigh. “No, your mental age is about two. And what about this morning? You ate my breakfast tray. One minute I’m in the john, next minute I
come out and my breakfast is gone.”
“You’re kidding, right? You weren’t going to really eat that. Not enough organic tofu, dried vegetables
and denatured grains or whatever in it.
Besides, hospital food isn’t real food.
I want real food.”
I grinned at their verbal exchange, the
first sign I’d seen all morning that they were normal human beings. Hutchinson grabbed the radio, let dispatch
know we were eating (or at least that’s what I assumed all that code-speak
meant) and slowly unfolded his body from the car. I was in pain just watching him.
The three of us walked into the
restaurant and headed for a booth. I
briefly wondered which one I would sit next to before they made the point moot,
by sharing one side, shoulders touching.
I took my position on the other side of the table, aware that I needed
to get to know these guys, gain their trust, before they were going to reveal
case details to me. And I needed case
details, to make the series more real.
“Can I ask you guys a few questions about
yourselves while we’re waiting, you know, just basic stuff?” I asked, after we
had given our orders to the waitress. I
noted with interest that Starsky had ordered a double cheeseburger with fries,
despite the fact that it was only 10:00 am, while Hutchinson ordered nothing at
all.
The partners exchanged a glance. I must have met with their preliminary
approval, since Starsky answered “Yeah, shoot.”
“OK, real
basics here. Names with spelling?”
“David
Starsky, s-t-a-r-s-k-y.”
I looked at
Hutchinson.
“Clyde Eunice
Mandrake Hutchinson.
h-u-t-c-h-i-n-s-o-n.”
I started
writing, then paused. Hadn’t Captain
Dobey called him Ken?
“Ken’s my nickname,” he said in answer to
my questioning look. Starsky snorted
into his water glass. Hutchinson jabbed
him with his elbow, and Starsky laughed harder. Obviously I was being had.
“Blondie’s name is Kenneth Hutchinson,”
Starsky blurted out between snorts and giggles.
“Nice job, Starsk…remind me to invite you
to my next high-stakes poker game,” Hutchinson joked, showing me the first real
smile I’d seen from him since I’d met him.
It animated his face briefly, before he sank back into his world-weary
funk.
“OK, note to self, they have a sense of
humor,” I said in an exaggerated drawl, pretending to scribble furiously on my
notebook. “But seriously, how old are
you? And how long have you been on the
force?”
“34 and 34,” Starsky said, pointing to
his partner and himself. “Went to
academy in ’68, partnered in uniform in ‘69.
Then despite my extraordinary good looks and above-average intelligence,
Hutch made detective first, in ‘73. I
caught up a few months later, and we’ve been partners again ever since…” It was
Hutchinson’s turn to snort in his water, but I noticed he didn’t verbally
contradict anything Starsky had said.
I did the math in my head. “So on and off, you guys have worked
together for nine years now? That’s
longer than a lot of marriages I know of.”
Our food arrived. I sipped at soup as I continued peppering
the two men with questions. “Speaking
of which, either of you married? Kids?”
“Not I,” Starsky
said, slapping at Hutchinson’s hand as his partner grabbed a French fry.
“Nor I,” Hutchinson mumbled around a
clump of fries. He reached over the
table for the ketchup bottle, dumped a bunch on a bread plate, and continued to
snatch fries from Starsky’s plate. For
his part, Starsky continued periodically swatting at Hutchinson’s hand, but
made no serious effort to stop him from eating. In fact, Starsky himself didn’t seem to be eating much at all,
taking more time than strictly necessary to meticulously slice his cheeseburger
in two with a butter knife.
“It’s hard to stay married in this job,”
Starsky said. “Lots of us try,” he shot
a meaningful look at his partner as he spoke, “but the hours and pay just
aren’t what a lot of wives want to deal with.”
Obviously there was a story here, maybe a
marriage for one or both. But I figured
there would be plenty of time to discuss this later. I moved on to another topic.
“Why did you become cops…I mean, police
officers?” I remembered too late that some policemen didn’t like the moniker
“cops”.
They didn’t seem to mind, at least not
enough to say anything about it. “I had
a little bit of a rough time as a kid…,” Starsky began.
Hutchinson interrupted with a laugh. “You could paper your bedroom with his juvie
record,” he joked. His hand snaked over
to his partner’s plate and grabbed half of the cheeseburger.
“Anyway,” Starsky continued, ignoring the
comment, “Luckily I figured out it was easier on this side of the law. Got out of the army, and the rest is
history. Ya know, Hutch, they make
menus for everyone in this place,” he said, directing the last comment at his
cheeseburger-stealing partner.
“Hmmpf,” Hutchinson replied with a
mouthful of food. He put down the remains
of the cheeseburger. “Excuse me, nature
calls,” he rose slowly, and headed toward the washroom.
“Not hungry
after all?” I asked Starsky after Hutchinson left.
“I’m starved,” he answered, to my
surprise. “But I knew he wouldn’t eat
that hospital crap, and I don’t think he ate much yesterday either. He can’t take painkillers on an empty
stomach without throwin’ up. And the
health freak’s a sucker for French fries.
He needs to eat. So I just had
to create the opportunity, encourage him with some token protests every now and
then, and wah-lah.”
“The
cheeseburger?” I asked with a smile, anticipating the answer.
“The cheeseburger was an added bonus,” he
replied with a lop-sided grin. “I
sliced it up to make it easier for him to grab, but I didn’t really think he’d
go for it.” The detective paused,
dunking one of the remaining French fries in ketchup and munching quickly.
I was impressed, both with the complexity
and compassion of his explanation.
“Sounds like you know him pretty well,” I commented.
“Well…uh…yeah,”
he said, surprise evident on his face.
“He’s my partner, isn’t he?”
*
Back in the car, it appeared we were
driving aimlessly around the city. “So
what’s on the agenda today?” I asked.
“A little beat-stomping today. Gotta remind the pervs that we are still
here,” Starsky responded, never taking his eyes off the road. “I’ve been gone for a couple of days now,
and Hutch here hasn’t been seen by the citizenry in almost a month.”
“Hey, there’s
Smitty,” Hutchinson interrupted, pointing to his right.
“Good catch, buddy.” And with that, Starsky revved up the Torino
and catapulted us toward an intersection where a small group of people were
gathered. They scattered as we approached. But one, an older man who looked a little
worse for wear, did not scatter fast enough.
Starsky was out of the car and on top of him with a set of handcuffs
before I could even blink. His partner
stood a short distance behind, gun drawn, covering him. I hadn’t even seen Hutchinson get out of the
car, but it occurred to me that the whole thing had gone down smoothly and
quickly, without words - without even a plan, as far as I could tell.
Starsky had Smitty up against the
car. “Whaddaya know, Smitty?” the
detective asked the obviously startled man.
“Nuthin’! I don’t know nuthin’!” Smitty
responded.
I stepped out of the car to get a closer
look, and was assailed with the smell of alcohol and BO almost
immediately. The release I had signed
stated I would stay a reasonable distance away from officers performing their
duties. In this particular case, I
didn’t mind at all.
“You know you’ve got at least two
outstanding warrants for B and E. And
maybe some for the rest of the alphabet too, for all I know. What made you think you could just hang out
on this corner without a care in the world?” Hutchinson asked, holstering the
largest gun I had ever seen. I’d have
to beg later to get a good look at the thing.
“Word was you guys wasn’t around
lately. Next time I saw ya I was goin’
to turn myself in. Truth!”
“Uh huh,” Starsky said, finishing up his
task of frisking the man. “I would have
paid money to see that.” He reached
into the car window and grabbed the radio microphone. “This is Zebra 3; we need a black-and-white for a prisoner
transport at 3rd and Main.”
“10-4 Zebra 3. ETA five minutes,” a female voice answered.
I got back in the car to make some more
notes. Starsky and Hutchinson remained
outside, chit-chatting with their captive while waiting for a squad car to pick
him up. Smitty looked relatively
relaxed talking with the detectives, as if he’d done this many times
before. I wondered how much of the life
of a detective is made up of these small moments, simply reinforcing to the
citizenry that they are, in fact, still there.
*
The black-and-white took off, an unhappy
Smitty ensconced inside. The detectives
got back in the Torino. Hutchinson
settled gingerly into the passenger seat, while his partner bounced into his
chair with more energy and enthusiasm.
“More
beat-stomping ahead?” I asked, proud of my new grasp of cop-lingo.
It was as if I hadn’t spoken. They looked at each other for a long moment
in wordless communication. Then came a
volley of verbal shorthand that left me breathless.
“Who would
have known?” Starsky asked.
“Had to be a
firefighter,” Hutchinson responded.
“Your shift?”
“Maybe
battalion.”
“The guy in
the car?”
“No one knew
him.”
“But he’s all
we have, and he’s gone.”
“Yeah, he’s
the key.”
“He knew ya’d
be there.”
“And knew I’d
be on that side.”
“Man, Hutch,
he almost--”
“I know, Starsk, I know… Had to be a
firefighter,” Hutchinson repeated.
“Had ta be,”
Starsky echoed.
I could barely suppress my excitement. This had to be it. This had to be the case.
The key to turning my series from ordinary to extraordinary. But how to get them to talk about it to me? I tentatively entered their conversation.
“Is that who
you were undercover as? A firefighter?”
The pair jumped, obviously having
forgotten my presence momentarily. “A
paramedic,” a startled Hutchinson answered.
“Why?” I
asked.
The detectives exchanged another
glance. Starsky took a deep
breath. “Since you’re gonna be with us
for a month,” he started, “you might as well know the story. But it doesn’t leave this car, not until we
say. You’ll get your story, I
promise. Deal?”
“Deal,” I
agreed.
“In a nutshell, there’s a headcase
killing hypes, dumping their bodies in buildings and setting them on fire. The buildings, not the hypes. Of course that distinction is kinda lost on
the victims, who are too dead to care much.
On top of that, in a couple of these fires, people have been hurt… you
know, squatters, firefighters, passers-by, that kind of thing.” Starsky’s hands waved as he talked. I made a note to include the hand-waving in
my story; it was quite distinct.
I scribbled another reminder on my
notepad: find out what ‘hype’ means.
Hutchinson took up the story. “I
went under as a fire department paramedic.
There was some thought that he may be an off-duty firefighter, given the
expertise with which the fires were set.
The idea was I could put an ear to the ground, keep an eye out for
suspicious employees and catch the department gossip. Plus all the psychological profiles showed that this scumbag
probably stuck around to see the results of his handiwork. So maybe I’d see him at a fire scene.”
A sudden wiggling movement in the front
seat distracted us briefly. It appeared
Starsky was attempting to empty all his pockets, while trying to keep the
Torino on the road at the same time. “I
never got my cuffs back,” he complained.
“Damn it! Did I leave them on
Smitty?”
Hutchinson shook his head
affectionately. “It’s not my day to baby-sit
your cuffs, Starsk. Try driving in a
straight line for a while, and we’ll look at the next light.”
He resumed his story. “Anyway, I was assigned to the station that
was catching most of the fires. Over
the past month, we responded to a half-dozen fires with bodies inside. Other shifts and stations responded to a
half-dozen more. Of those, maybe five
of the victims fit the MO of a confirmed druggie.”
I amended my previous note to read hype
= drug addict and underlined it.
Hutchinson continued. “Another was a prostitute with a
questionable heroin history, and the rest were homeless people who probably
started the fires themselves while smoking on their money-stuffed mattresses.” He grinned, but the smile was without
humor. “Of the five possibles, I was at
three of them. I saw no one at the
scene out of the ordinary, no off-duty employees acting strange, nothing inside
the building in the way of evidence, nothing at all.”
“Until last night, when some moron tried
to kill you,” Starsky interjected, placing a protective hand on his partner’s
upper arm.
“Yeah.
Until last night. I was standing
next to a fire engine, talking to one of the firefighters, when a car drove by
and hit me. It wasn’t an accident; the
side of the engine where I was hit was cordoned off against traffic because of
the hoses. I went flying, but not
before I and several other people saw the guy’s face. Not to mention the parting shot of him yelling ‘fucking cop pig’
as he drove by. Lucky for me he hadn’t gotten
up too much speed. All those hoses in
the way I guess.” Hutchinson shook his
head at the memory.
“I was parked a block away, since I’d
been following them whenever they got a call that seemed a likely match,”
Starsky said. “I heard the radio traffic
and hauled ass.”
“Only a couple of people knew I was
undercover,” Hutchinson said with a puzzled shrug. “The station captain, my paramedic partner, obviously the top
brass. Now of course, it’s all shot to
hell, thanks to our friend in the yellow Ford Pinto.”
I twisted around in the slippery back
seat, trying to reach the pen I had dropped while taking notes. “So did they guy in the Pinto kill
the…hypes?” I asked as I stretched my hand under Starsky’s impeccably clean seats. Wow, second use of cop-lingo in a matter
of minutes, Bob. “And set the
fires?”
“No idea,” Starsky answered. “But given how Hutch was made, we can pretty
much assume some fire department involvement.”
“Your paramedic partner?” I asked. All that groping under seats turned up
nothing. I dug in my jacket pocket for
another pen.
“I don’t think so,” Hutchinson
answered. “I’ve been working with the
guy for a month, got to know his family, hung out after work. He’s squeaky clean.”
“So I gotta ask,” I started, new pen in
hand. “How does a cop work undercover
as a paramedic? I’d think patient
safety would be an issue.”
The pair exchanged another one of those
information-laden glances. “I went to
medical school,” Hutchinson replied. It
was a simple response, but tension was obvious in the set of his jaw and the
flash of his eyes.
“Did you make
it to MD?” I asked.
“Left in ’68 to go to the academy,” he
answered shortly. “Let’s go Starsk.” He began to rummage in the glove
compartment, perhaps for the wayward handcuffs. Obviously I’d hit a sore spot.
I let him off the hook with another subject change.
“So where are
we headed now?” I asked.
“Back to Metro,” Starsky replied. “We have to book Smitty still. And get my cuffs back.”
“But didn’t the officers who picked him
up handle that?” I was confused. It hadn’t occurred to me that detectives
would handle that kind of procedural crap.
“It’s not like TV,” Hutchinson said. “For everyone we bring in, there’s a ton of
paperwork, procedure and other bullshit.
It’s easy to blow half a day on petty stuff. It’s part of being a Zebra unit; we have a beat on top of our
homicide duties, and that takes up time.”
*
“…and after we beat-stomped, we went back
to Metro and did paperwork, and then they had to attend some stupid in-service
training thing so I made excuses and left early. I didn’t know cop work could be so exciting and so boring all at
the same time, ya know?” I excitedly
explained to my wife that evening.
“Beat-stomped?”
she asked quizzically.
I rambled on, oblivious to her
question. “Man, you shoulda seen that
cannon that Hutchinson carries. I’ve
never seen anything like that. And he’s
a miserable sonofabitch too, although I get the feeling I caught him at a bad
time. He’s got a bad back ya know, just
like yours. Starsky seems less like he
has a corn-cob up his ass. But they get
along fine, I guess. And they’re real
funny guys when they feel like it. Just
real closed off, too, like it takes them a long time to let someone in.”
“Bob…”
“And they work
so in sync, ya know, like a machine…”
“Bob…”
“I’m picking up so much stuff, I could do
a book easy. I know I could get a
three-parter out of the paper at a minimum…
“Bob!”
I
startled. “What, honey?”
“Shut up and eat dinner. You can continue your
little-boy-in-a-candy-store rant after the kids are in bed.”
I looked around the table. The girls were staring at me wide-eyed. Linda looked bemused. I hoped I hadn’t used too many curse words
in describing my day; I couldn’t really remember what I had said to her. I just knew how I felt when I was with the
detectives, like I was more alive, more a part of the city of my birth.
I took a deep
breath. “Sorry,” I said sheepishly, and
picked up my fork.
*
The next day I
had a lunchtime interview scheduled with Captain Dobey.
“How long have you been with the BCPD?” I
asked first, a softball question to lull him, I hoped, into a false sense of
security.
“More than 25 years now. Last nine as a captain,” Dobey
responded. He sat stiffly at his desk,
his hands folded over his stomach.
“Married? Children?”
“Been married
28 years. Two children.”
“Your detectives were telling me it’s
hard for a police officer to be married to a woman and the job at the same
time.”
Dobey considered the question with
obvious care. “We see a lot of things
on the streets that we don’t feel like we can talk about to civilians,” he
began. “Wives want to know everything,
and when we can’t tell them everything, they start to wonder if the job is more
important than they are.” He smiled
sheepishly. “I know that sounds, I
don’t know, sexist or something. But
that’s the way it is.”
“How about the
women on the force?” I asked.
“What about
them?” he responded tersely.
“Are they
married to the job?”
“I don’t know,” Dobey answered, “You’d
have to ask them.” He picked nervously
at a stray thread on his suit jacket.
I left that line of questioning
behind. I would have to handle the
volatile captain with more care.
“Starsky or Hutchinson ever married?”
I asked casually.
“Hutchinson
was for a few years early on. Starsky
was engaged, but she passed on.”
“Oh,” I said, momentarily at a loss for
words. I had suspected that Hutchinson
had a marriage under his belt. But
Starsky’s news was more unexpected. I
chose to leave the issue untouched for now, in favor of continuing the divorce
angle. “Uh, Hutchinson, did he get
divorced because of the job?”
“You’d have to ask him that,” he answered
shortly. “That’s none of my
business.” And none of yours either
was the implied second half of that statement.
I forged
ahead. “How many detectives are you in
charge of?”
“When we are fully staffed, about a
dozen, including the ones who float in and out from other departments. We haven’t been fully staffed in a long
time. I’ve got three sets I can count
on right now, with a few others paired temporarily due to illness, injuries,
and so on.”
“The business
in court, is it keeping you from hiring more?”
“Well, the commission does the hiring,
but yes. It’s keeping us understaffed,
definitely.” There was that wary look
again.
“Do you think the department hires enough
minorities?” I asked right out, remembering what I had promised my editor.
“That’s not
for me to say,” he answered. He started
fiddling with a pencil on his desk.
“That’s what
the courts said,” I countered.
Captain Dobey dropped the pencil and
leaned forward, pointing a finger at me.
“Now look. Back when I was
hired, it was the same old business. We
need more blacks. More Chicanos. More purples, and yellows, and greens. And then we had to fight like hell to prove
we weren’t hired to just fill up a quota, like a packing list at a warehouse. And if my son was hired tomorrow, he’d have
the same stupid fight, civil rights be damned.”
As he continued, his voice raised
incrementally with each word. “But if
you think you’re gonna get me to talk about what’s going on in court right now,
you are sadly mistaken. I’m just trying
to do my job as a squad captain, without enough men to do it. I’m too old to give a damn any more about
why they are hiring people, or what God-damned color they are, or what
God-damned color I am. They just need to
shut up and do it before more innocent citizens get killed.”
He pulled out
a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“I’m sorry if I upset you, Captain,” I
said, as calmly as I could. He was an
effective leader; I had felt his passion, and briefly shared his frustration.
“Damn right you upset me. I see fine men like Hutchinson out there
working when they can’t even see straight and it upsets me! It stinks!”
He took a deep breath. “It’s my
job as their captain to take care of them.
To keep them from turning down investigative dead-ends and taking stupid
risks. But sending out tired detectives
every day is a stupid risk in itself.
One of them is going to get hurt some day, and I’ll have to make that
phone call to their wife or mother. You
have no idea what it’s like, making that phone call...” He shook his head sadly.
“When was the
last time you had to do that?” I asked.
“I’d rather not get into that,” Dobey
replied. “Suffice it to say it involved
one of your dynamic duo out there.”
I wondered if I would get them to open up
about it. I had a whole month, but
after a day with them and a morning with their captain, I wondered if even that
would be anywhere near enough.
*
They weren’t starting work that day until
4pm. I had learned the day before that
the detective pairs rotated shifts: some starting at 8am, another at 4pm,
another at midnight. This was to assure
that they had plenty of time to hunt down leads and suspects that might not
keep bankers’ hours.
“It gives us more flexibility and less
overtime than traditional shifts,” Hutchinson had explained. “We might know that we have to stake someone
out later in the week, so we’ll pick a day we know we aren’t due in until 4:00. Or pre-schedule an 8 o’clock shift for a
mandatory court appearance. Or we’ll
swap amongst ourselves, a couple of mornings for a couple of midnights or
whatever, if we know we’ll need them.”
“Of course, we still get a lot of
overtime,” Starsky had interrupted.
“The criminals don’t usually give much of damn about our schedule. The money is nice, but I’d prefer sleeping
every now and then.”
So now I was sitting at Starsky’s desk,
waiting for the partners to come in and start their day…or night. After reestablishing their turf yesterday,
they were going to start all over again on their investigation, the one that
almost left Hutchinson dead.
Looking at their desks, I was struck by
the contrast. Starsky’s was as neat as
a pin. Hutchinson’s had piles of
papers, a wrapper from a protein bar and an empty aspirin bottle. I resolved to spend the day looking for more
contrasts, to find the differences in the two hard-nosed detectives.
As I scribbled
this down in my notebook, I heard voices behind me.
“They looked
like bugs to me. What was I supposed to
do?”
“Leave them alone. That’s what you are supposed to do. Unless you want to really learn how to take
care of them, don’t touch them.”
I turned around. The detectives were coming in the door. Hutchinson looked pissed off. Starsky looked confused.
“OK, so now I
know they weren’t bugs,” Starsky said, with a chagrined look on his face.
“Yes, and I can’t propagate more ferns if
you scrape them off. So hands off,”
Hutchinson said, sitting at his desk.
Starsky perched atop his partner’s desk
and winked at me. “So how do you grow
them, whaddya call it, sporns?”
“Spores.
It takes a lot of work, and more time than I have to explain,”
Hutchinson said as he sifted through the files on his desk. “But if you really want to know, I’ll show
you a book tonight.”
“Why not just
go to the plant store and buy more ferns, instead of growin’ new ones?”
“It’s the
challenge, Starsk. The challenge.”
Starsky kicked his feet up onto a nearby
chair. “Hey, Bob,” he said, turning his
attention to me.
“Ferns?” I
questioned.
“Ferns,” Starsky confirmed. “Hutch’s gotta fondle his plants, or they
wilt from lack of attention, ya know.”
“Shuddup, Starsk,” Hutchinson muttered,
continuing the paper-shuffling on his desk.
“Where the hell is that file?”
“The one with
the thing?” Starsky asked.