"We gotta sue the fuckin city for nearly every raise we get," Spermwhale continued. "I'm sick a payin dues to the Protective League. I get more protection from a two year old box a rubbers!"

"Anyone for changing the subject?" Sergeant Nick Yanov suggested, as the lieutenant held his throbbing head and, vowed to check Spermwhale Whalen's personnel package to see how many more months he had to go before retirement. And to ask the captain if there weren't a place they could transfer him until then. Like West Valley Station which was twenty-five miles away.

Lieutenant Finque's eyes were starting to get as red and glassy as Roscoe Rules' always were. Of late the lieutenant always had drops of grainy white saliva glued to the corners of his mouth from his incessant sucking of antacid tablets.

"I'm going to change the subject, change the subject," Lieutenant Finque announced strangely. "The captain inspected the shotgun locker and found a gun with cigars stuffed down the barrel! If that happens again somebody's going to pay!" No one had to turn toward Spermwhale who was the only cigar smoker on the watch. "Young coppers they hire these days'll rip you off for anything," said Spermwhale. "Gotta hide your goods, Lieutenant."

Lieutenant Finque had begun losing weight of late what with his migraines and acid stomach and inability to relate with Captain Drobeck who had turned down three dinner invitations this month despite the fact that Lieutenant Finque had done everything he could think of to woo the captain, including joining his American Legion Police Post. The lieutenant knew he should be clear headed what with the ordeal of studying for the captain's exam three hours a day when his wife and children would leave him alone. And here at the job he had to deal with recalcitrant uglies like Spermwhale Whalen."

"Let's read some crimes," the watch commander said, picking up a sheaf of papers. "There was an ADW on a teacher at the high school. Says here a thirty-four year old schoolteacher had just started her third period whena"

"Kind of late in life, ain't it?" Francis Tanaguchi giggled and Lieutenant Finque jerked spasmodically and tore the report.

Lieutenant Finque blinked several times and simply could not regain the thread. "This report's terrible. It's sloppy. Who did it?" And his eyes were so watery he couldn't read the name.

"Just a few pencigraphical errors, sir," said the culprit, Harold Bloomguard.

"Uha Intelligence has a rumor," Lieutenant Finque said, forgetting the crimes and going on disjointedly to a note in the rotating folder. "We may have a riot in the vicinity of Dorsey High School between four and four thirty this afternoon. Some militanta"

"A half hour riot?" said Calvin Potts and Lieutenant Finque's thread came totally unraveled. He began talking to Sergeant Yanov on his right as though they were alone in the room.

"You know, Yanov, there's a rumor that these young Vietnam vets they're hiring these days are smoking pot. You see how hard it is to make them keep their hair off their collars and their moustaches trimmed? And there's a rumor about fragging! Someone heard some policemen talking about bombing a watch commander!"

"I'll read the crimes," Sergeant Yanov said abruptly, putting a steadying hand on Lieutenant Finque's arm while the assembly of policemen looked at one another in growing realization. "Let's see, here's one to perk up your evening. A rapist stuck his automatic down in his belt while he made the victim blow him and he got so excited he shot his balls off right in the middle of the headjob!"

The explosion of cheers startled the shit out of Lieutenant Finque who thought he was being fragged. He only kept from jumping up because Sergent Yanov's strong left hand held his arm pressed to the table top as the sergeant regained control of the rollcall.

"Keep an eyeball out for Melvin Barnes," Sergeant Yanov continued. "His picture's on the board. Local boy and he's running from his parole officer. He'll be around Western Avenue. He likes to run because he's a celebrity on the avenue when the cops're looking for him. But he'll be around because he doesn't mind getting busted. He's an institutional man. There're thousands like him."

"Amen," Spermwhale Whalen said. "Ask me, I think half the fuckin population craves some kind a institution or other. They can't get it, they'll get taken care of some other way. If we just made our jails comfortable, gave the boys some pussy and all, shit, we couldn't blast em out on the streets. Be a lot cheaper makin em happy and keepin em inside the rest a their lives than runnin them through the fuckin system over and over again while a few people get hurt along the way."

"You got lots of ideas, Spermwhale," said Harold Bloom-guard. "Ever consider getting perverted to sergeant?"

As Sergeant Yanov got everyone in a better frame of mind to go out into the streets, Lieutenant Finque sat going through some envelopes which came to him through department mail. The voice of Yanov and the others seemed far away. He never noticed Francis Tanaguchi grin at his partner Calvin Potts when the lieutenant tore open the last envelope. It was a crime lab photo of a ninety year old black woman who had been dead for three weeks when her body was found and the picture taken. Her white hair was electric. Her silver eyes were open and her blackened tongue protruded. The note attached to the photo said, "Dear Lieutenant Finque, how come you don't come to see me no more now that you transferred to the westside? You cute little blue eyed devil!"

The lieutenant blinked and twitched and hoped he could get out of the station this night alive without being either framed or fragged. He stood up suddenly and said something unintelligible to Sergeant Yanov before walking out the door.

That night someone put a taped roll of freeway flares attached to a cheap alarm clock under the watch commander's desk when Lieutenant Finque was out having coffee. At 10:00 P.M. the bomb squad was, at Wilshire Station assuring the captain by telephone that it was not dynamite but only a prank evidently played by some member of the nightwatch. At 11:00 P.M. Lieutenant Finque left Daniel Freeman Hospital severely tranquilized. He was off sick for seven days with something not unlike combat fatigue. Due to his splendid record as a whistle salesman he was taken downtown and made the adjutant of Chief Lynch. He was definitely an up-and-comer.

At six feet two inches and 185 pounds Sam Niles was not a particularly big man but next to Harold Bloomguard he felt like Gulliver. Harold Bloomguard was, at 149 pounds on a delicate frame, the smallest choirboy of them all. He had gorged himself with a banana-soybean mixture for three days to pass his original police department physical.

The choirboys always said that what Harold lacked in physical stature he made up for in physical weakness. Both Ora Lee Tingle and Caroline Moon had beaten him in arm wrestling on the same night at choir practice, and Harold, who usually loved fun and frolic, waded off in his underwear and sulked with the ducks on Duck Island. He wouldn't come back until all of the choirboys had either gotten drunk or gone home.

"What's it all about, Harold? What's it all about, Harold?" cried Whaddayamean Dean to the lonely white figure huddled in the darkness of Duck Island which was a thirty by thirty mound of dirt and shrubbery in the middle of the large duck pond they called MacArthur Lake.

"What'd he say, Dean?" asked Harold Bloomguard's partner, Sam Niles, as Whaddayamean Dean rejoined the choirboys who were trying to persuade Carolina Moon to pull that train even if she was tired from being on her feet all night hustling drinks at the Peppermint Club in Hollywood.

"What'd who say?"

"Harold! Who the hell were you just off yelling at, for chrissake!"

"I don't know," said Whaddayamean Dean, his brow screwed in confusion.

"Harold Bloomguard, goddamnit!" said Spermwhale, who got more pissed off at Whaddayamean Dean than anyone since Spermwhale more or less looked after him when he was drunk like this.

"You were yelling at Harold over on Duck Island, weren't you?" asked Ora Lee Tingle patiently as Francis Tanaguchi crawled around behind her on the grass in his LAPD baseball shirt with number 69 on the back and pinched her ample buttocks and yelled when she punched him in the shoulder and knocked him over the cushiony Carolina Moon who grabbed him and smothered him in her enormous breasts and chubby arms and said, "Ya cute little fuckin Nip, ya!"

"I admit I was yelling but I don't remember at who," said Whaddayamean Dean, wishing everyone would stop picking on him and just let him drink and lie down on top of Ora Lee Tingle and rest his brain for a while. "I think I heard someone answer."

"Well, you simple asshole, what'd he say?" demanded Spermwhale.

"I think he said, 'Quack quack.'"

As all the choirboys moaned and fell over and rolled their eyes disgustedly, Spermwhale grabbed Whaddayamean Dean by the back of the Bugs Bunny sweatshirt and said, "That was a fuckin duck! Ducks say quack quack. Harold don't say quack quack. You was talkin to a duck!"

"At least he didn't, yell at me," Whaddayamean Dean sniffled and a large salty globular tear rolled out his left eye. "I don't know what you mean. What're you trying to say? Why is everybody picking on me? Huh? Huh?"

And so they gave up and left Whaddayamean Dean to finish his vodka and within three minutes he forgot that everyone had been picking on him and that Harold Bloomguard was almost naked and alone with the ducks on Duck Island. As a matter of fact, everyone forgot Harold Bloomguard but Sam Niles, and he would like to have forgotten.

At 5:00 A.M., when only the two girls and three of the choirboys were left sprawled on their blankets, Sam Niles stripped down and waded through the sludge to Duck Island, knocked the sleeping ducklings off Harold Bloomguard's shivering body, shook, him awake and dragged him through the cold dirty water to his blanket and clothes. But Sam decided that Harold was too covered with filth to put him in Sam's Ferrari so he broke the lock on the park gardening shed with a rock and found a hose with a strong nozzle. Then he forced the protesting Harold Bloomguard to stand shivering on the grass and be sprayed down from head to foot before drying in the blankets and dressing.

"I'd never do this to you, Sam!" Harold screamed as the merciless jet of water stung and pounded him and shriveled his balls to acorns.

"You're not getting in my Ferrari covered with that green slimy duck shit," said Sam Niles who had a thundering headache.

"I loaned you part of the down payment!" reminded Harold and shrieked as the spray hit him in the acorns, waking up Roscoe Rules who saw two nearly nude men by the gardening shack and figured it was a pair of park fairies.

Roscoe belched and shouted, "All you faggy bastards in this , park better keep the noise down or I'll make you do the chicken!" And then he went back to sleep.

When Harold was relatively clean Sam Niles vowed that somehow, someday, he would rid himself of Harold Bloomguard who was by his own admission a borderline mental case.

Sometimes Sam Niles felt that he had always been burdened with Harold Bloomguard, that there had never been a time in his life when there was not a little figure beside him, blinking his large hazel eyes, cracking his knuckles, scratching an ever-present pimply rash on the back of his neck with a penknife and worst of all unconsciously rolling his tongue in a tube and blowing spit bubbles through the channel into the air.

"It's sickening!" Sam Niles had informed Harold Bloomguard a thousand times in the seven years he had known him. "Sickening!"

And Harold would agree and swear never to do it again, and whenever he would get nervous or bewildered or frightened by one of the several hundred neurotic fears he lived with, he would sit and worry and his tongue would fold in two and little shiny spit bubbles would drop from his little pink mouth.

Sam Niles realized that at twenty-six, just four months older than Harold Bloomguard, he was a father figure. It had been that way since Vietnam where Harold Bloomguard more or less attempted to attach himself to Sam Niles for life, taking his discharge two months later than Sam and following him into the Los Angeles Police Department after returning to his family home in Pomona, California, where Harold's father practiced law and his mother was confined in a mental hospital.

It was always the same, with Harold begging Sam to sit quietly and help him interpret his latest dream full of intricate symbols, Sam always protesting that if Harold were really "worried about joining his mother in the funny place, he should see a psychiatrist. The problem was that Harold Bloomguard always believed that it was her weekly session with a shrink that put his mother in the hospital in the first place, and until she went into psychotherapy when Harold was overseas, she was more or less an ordinary neurotic. So Sam Niles became the only psychiatrist Harold Bloomguard ever had and it had been this way since Sam took pity on the skinny weak little marine.

"Sam, I gotta tell you about the dream I had last night," Harold said as they left Wilshire Station at change of watch and drove into the gritty personal night world of police partners, most intimate perhaps because they might have to depend upon each other for their very lives.

"Yes, Harold, yes," Sam sighed and pushed his fashionable, heavy, steel rimmed goggles up on his nose and promised himself to get his eyes examined because he was becoming more nearsighted than ever.

He cruised steadily through the traffic as Harold said, "There was this black cat that crossed my path and I was very afraid and couldn't understand it and I reached in my pocket and pulled out an eight inch switchblade to defend myself from I don't know what as I walked down this dark street with apartments on both sides. God, it was awful!"

"So what happened then?"

"I can't remember. I think I woke up."

"That's it?"

"Sure. It's horrible! Makes my hands sweat to think about it."

"What's so horrible?"

"Don't you see? The knife is phallic. The cat is a pussy. It's black. Black pussy. I'm unconsciously wanting to rape a black woman! Just before I crack up like my mother that's what I'll probably do, rape a black woman. Watch me very carefully around black women, Sam. As a friend I want you to watch me."

"Harold, I've watched you around black women and white women. You're perfectly normal with women. For God's sake, Harold!"

"I know, I know, Sam. You think it's my imagination, these deep stirrings in my twisted psyche. I know. But remember my mother. My mother is mad, Sam. The poor woman is mad!"

And Sam Niles would push up his slipping glasses, finger his brown mustache, light a cigarette and search for something else for Harold to worry about, which was generally the way to shut him up when any particular obsession was getting too obsessive.

"Harold, you know you're losing some hair lately? You noticed that?"

"Of course I've noticed," Harold sighed, touching his ginger colored sideburns. He admired Sam Niles' deep brown hair and his several premature gray ones in the front. Harold admired everything about Sam Niles, always had from the days when Sam was his fire team leader at the spider holes, and though they were in the same police academy recruit class, Harold always treated him with the deference due a senior partner and let him be the boss of the radio car. Harold even admired Sam's steel rimmed goggles and wished he was nearsighted so he could wear them.

Sam Niles admired almost nothing about Harold Bloom-guard and especially did not admire his annoying habit of amusing himself with doubletalk.

Harold would tell about a traffic accident that befell 7-A-77 the night before which resulted in a "collusion at the interjection" of Venice and La Brea. Or when Sam asked where he would like to take their code seven lunch break Harold might say, "It's invenereal to me."

Or in court Harold would ask the DA if he had any "exterminating evidence." And then ask if the DA wanted him to "draw a diaphragm." On and on it went and became almost as unbearable as the plinking spit bubbles.

But none of that was as bad as Harold Bloomguard's relentlessly sore teeth. He claimed he was a sufferer of bruxism and that he ground his teeth mercilessly in his sleep. If the nightmares were memorable the night before Harold would eat soup and soppy crackers during code seven.

But as with Harold's other maladies, Sam Niles suspected it was imaginary. He had once demanded to see Harold Bloomguard's teeth at choir practice and Ora Lee held Harold's head in her comfy lap while Father Willie struck matches for all the choirboys to examine Harold's molars which were not flat and worn down but were as sharp and serviceable as anyone's.

"They are worn down, I tell you," Harold said that night in the park. And he opened his mouth wider as Sam struck matches and everyone looked at his teeth.

"Let's see yours to compare, Roscoe," said Father Willie who was already very drunk.

Roscoe Rules only agreed because he wanted to take Harold's place on Ora Lee's lap and cop a feel. But while they were comparing, Father Willie accidentally dropped a match down Roscoe's throat.

Then everyone started yelling frantically with Roscoe who got up and began jumping around.

"Gimme a drink!" Roscoe shrieked.

"Give him some bourbon!" shouted Spermwhale.

"No, it'll start a fire in his tummy!" yelled Ora Lee Tingle.

"Give him the fuckin bourbon then!" yelled Spermwhale.

But Roscoe had panicked and run for the duck pond and was on his belly drinking pond water.

"He'll get typhoid!" shouted Ora Lee Tingle.

"He might at that!" yelled Spermwhale hopefully.

"Stop, Roscoe, you'll get typhoid!" Carolina Moon yelled.

"Do what feels best, Roscoe!" shouted Spencer Van Moot.

A few minutes later, Roscoe walked back to the blankets very calmly and frightened everybody because, though he had a blister on his tonsils, he was actually smiling.

"Gee, I'm sorry, Roscoe!" said the terrified Father Willie as he sat down next to Roscoe and punched Roscoe's arm playfully. "You're not mad at me, are ya?"

And Roscoe still smiled as he said, "Heavens, no, Padre! Let's have a drink."

"Sure!" said the choirboy chaplain. "Here, have a shot of vodka."

"No," Roscoe smiled, pointing at his throat. "No thank you. Think I'd prefer beer."

"Oh sure, Roscoe," Father Willie said eagerly. "I'll get it."

Roscoe said quietly, "I think there's a full six-pack down by the water."

"There is? I'll get it for you," Father Willie said.

"I'll help you," Roscoe said, putting his arm around Father Willie's shoulder and strolling with him toward the duck pond.

Thirty seconds later the other choirboys were running headlong toward the pond to rescue the screaming padre whose neck was in the arm of Roscoe Rules who was trying his best to make Father Willie do the chicken. It took four choirboys to overpower Roscoe and pin him until he promised not to choke or kneedrop the chaplain. He only relented when Ora Lee Tingle promised him she'd let him be engineer the next time she pulled the choo choo.

Ironically it was Harold Bloomguard who got Sam Niles the temporary duty assignment to the vice squad which he had been hoping for. When asked by the vice lieutenant to work the squad for two weeks because they needed some new faces to Use on the street whores, Harold had surprised the lieutenant by saying, "I know I don't look like a cop, I'm so little and all, but why don't you take my partner, Sam Miles, too? He doesn't look like a cop either."

"You kidding?" Lieutenant Handy 'said. "He's the dark haired kid with a mustache, isn't he?"

"Yeah."

"Got cop written all over him."

"He wears glasses," offered Harold. "Not too many policemen wear glasses, sir."

"No way. The girls'd make him for a cop in a minute. You're the one I want. We'll dress you up in a Brooks Brothers suit and they'll swarm all over you."

"Well sir," Harold said shyly. "I sure do appreciate it. You're the first one in the four and a half years I've been on the job who offered to put me in plainclothes. And I really do appreciate it. Buta"

"Yeah?"

"You see, Sam and I were in the same outfit in Nam. And we've been radio car partners here at Wilshire fora"

"Okay. Look, I can bring in two more of you bluesuits for the two weeks.! I'd already decided on Baxter Slate because he seems like a heads-up guy, and I'd decided on some morning watch kid. But if you just gotta have Miles, okay. I'll bring him along instead of the morning watch rookie."

"That's great, Lieutenant," Harold said. "You won't be sorry. Sam's the greatest cop I've ever worked with. And the greatest guy."

"Yeah, yeah, okay. We'll use you till the middle of August. Gonna have a little crusade against the whores. Let you know more about it later."