Chapter 4
When I got to the station, I went through my usual morning rituals.
I logged on a variety of social networking sites to review the pages of my current crop of suspects. I often found additional information on cases and even leads on new crimes. Sometimes these un-savvy criminals even post photos of their handiwork.
The site also helps me with advanced warning when one of my suspects reaches the bottom of the pits they call lives and begin doing some exploratory drilling to find an even lower place than they had already settled.
A bit of work can save a life, solve a crime or just give me the edge I need to make doing my job a little easier.
I also checked the logs from the night before and did a quick read on a couple of reports that would need my attention. After covering the basics, I logged into DOTCOP on my computer and went to the query screen.
Running a plate is a nasty violation of departmental rules that could find me detecting the proper amount of ketchup on a burger in my new career in professionally fried foods.
After a couple of keystrokes, I found the “she” that was clogging my thoughts was one Lynn Kelly and she lived about ten blocks from me.
It’s funny how you can live near someone and never run into them. If I had met Kelly before, I’m sure I would have remembered her.
Lynn. Kelly. The name meant nothing to me on paper, yet when I said the name aloud, it felt like I had already said it a million times.
I was obsessing, a skill I mastered years ago. I went back to the pending cases and started making calls.
From the prior night’s reports, I found out Mrs. Griffin’s favorite piece of porch furniture was stolen and daydreaming about a girl did not justify the eighty year-old great granny being off her rocker for a minute more than it would take to find and return the chair.
I also had four new attempts to fraudulently obtain credit for unresponsive patients at the local long term care home documented and ready for investigation. Exciting stuff.
A bald, ugly head popped into the doorway of my office. “Project call!” the bald head that belonged to Morris yelped in a singsong voice, too happy for this early in the morning.
“Oh, joy. Want a partner?” I asked, relieved to get away from calling credit card fraud offices and searching for porch furniture for a few minutes. Morris waved for me to join him.
Morris, aka, Bobby Morris, is a Sergeant with enough time on the force to know how to take care of himself. We’d been friends since childhood and I respect his knowledge of the job, although I’d never tell him that.
Morris is a little slow on the uptake but tenacious once he bites into a case- or a bacon cheeseburger. Either way, there is very little that gets by Bobby when he is on the job.
At six foot-four and tipping the scales at two hundred forty pounds, Morris is a black-haired moose capable of helping most of our frequent fliers see the positives of skipping a round of rasslin’ before handcuffing.
And for those who didn’t, well, he’s up to that too. Morris also carried a Taser for a year already and longed for the day when he would finally get to pull the trigger on his virgin equipment. Morris was never very good with virginity.
We arrived at Sanderson Manor and found our way to apartment D7, drawn by the cop come-hither calls of yelling and screaming that passed for polite domestic conversation in this complex. A quick knock brought a pissed-off Harriet Fowler to the door.
“I want that fat fuck out! Now!” Fowler screeched in what was probably her most feminine voice as she motioned us into the small, government-subsidized apartment.
Morris took Mr. Fat Fuck, also known as Julius Barr, into the living room while I spoke with Fowler in the kitchen.
According to Fowler, Barr was responsible for pot holes, ear infections and the rising cost of yogurt in the supermarket, not to mention global warming and the plague. Given that vermin transmitted plague, I had to give her that last one.
Fowler wanted Barr gone from the apartment. Yesterday.
I could see and hear Morris having the same conversation with Barr in the living room. On a domestic call, officer safety (and with Fowler and Barr, officer sanity) depends on watching your partner’s back because these volatile situations have a way of blowing up on you.
I looked around the apartment. Empty cereal boxes, dirt, garbage, broken toys, dirty diapers and dirty laundry. The couple had four children, three girls and a boy, from about a year to four years and all but the four year-old were in diapers.
The four year-old was in filthy superman undies and all of the children were obviously upset at the ongoing fight.
Being brought up in this atmosphere was bad for the kids and just by looking at their sad faces, the emotional scars, along with the lack of social development brought on by neglect, was blatantly obvious.
The kids were a production of Fowler and Barr but both occasionally debated the actual paternity of one or another of the little ones.
Fowler had actually thrown Barr out of the apartment permanently a few years back, leading to a stream of men in and out of the apartment, with the occasional stay by Barr. The last staycation led to the birth of the youngest child.
Barr was currently living elsewhere. Apparently, Fowler had a new BFF and Barr objected to not seeing the kids. According to Fowler, Barr’s real objection was to paying child support and I had to give her that one too.
It’s the kids that get me. I wouldn’t care if these two idiots beat each other into the ground, verbally and physically. Hell, I might even bet a couple of bucks on Fowler (she had the weight and reach on Barr). They were a perfect match for each other, violent, ignorant, disrespectful slugs without goals or dreams.
These pussbags devoted their lives to drinking, drugs and fighting and they appeared happiest when doing one, two or all three at the same time.
That left little time for minor annoyances like their children.
But the kids had no way out of this mess. They had no one to tell them, to show them, the life they were living was not the only way to live. They had no one who really cared about them.
I knew the situation because I dealt with the happy couple, first, in a flop house downtown and later, in this apartment, on average, about once a month the whole time I was in patrol.
These parasites lived and acted like animals before they had kids but the stress of the children just exacerbated the situation.
As a result, the kids got minimal attention from adults too wrapped up in their own worlds to care. I saw nothing but more hell for the kids in the future and, considering what they saw on a daily basis, they would become the people their parents were now, in another fifteen or so years.
Barr brayed, “Tell him about the drugs and the young boys you screw in the bed we used to share, Lard ass!”
I tried to calm Barr. “You shouldn’t be making these accusations without proof,” I said, lamely, knowing he was probably right and this call was going south fast.
Fowler, repeating her pet name for Barr, yelled back, “Ya fat fuck! You’re just jealous because you can’t get a drunken fifty year-old bar bitch to fuck you and I can get any man. You got nothing on me, ya fat fuck!”
Whoa. Point for Fowler. She could get any man, provided he was blind, deaf, had no feeling in his fingers, was desperate and had no fear of infection, flesh-eating or otherwise.
Of course, Fat Fu..ah, Mr. Barr really did have a good record with the ladies as well. Crack whores are not known for their discriminating tastes. A little product and love blooms anew.
“You want proof?” Barr yelled, getting up and heading for the kitchen. “I’ll give you freakin’ proof!” Morris gripped his taser as Barr entered the kitchen, reached into a cabinet and pulled out a black pouch, similar to an electric shaver case. Handing it to me, Barr said, “Here’s your God damned proof!”
I said, “I can’t open that.”
Barr replied, “Fine, I will.”
Inside was a comp
lete drug smoking kit. A pipe, pipe cleaners, screens for crack smoking and a dime bag of weed. We all stood there, speechless for a second.
Rarely do even the dumbest of criminals hand a police officer a solid misdemeanor without even being asked but I get the ones who are polite enough to go the extra step and open the case for me!
I took the case and said, “Ok, who owns this?”
Suddenly, what had just happened registered in the empty voids that pass for the minds of the two love birds. Two sets of eyes were suddenly checking out the cracks in the floor with an intensity seen only in brain surgeons and pedophiles, faces glued to a schoolyard fence.
Then, in unison, both said, “It’s not mine!”
Morris took Barr outside while I got the latest bio from Fowler.
With the exception of a new cell number, I had everything, from memory, before my “Mother of the year” candidate could regurgitate the information. Frequent fliers do make paperwork easier, if nothing else.
I explained to Fowler that since neither claimed the package, I’d charge them both and they would receive paperwork in the mail. Fowler nodded, without a word of denial. I took the evidence with me, dodged the cockroach that was aiming for my shoe and headed for the door.
I walked out to where Morris and Barr were discussing women.
Barr looked at me and said, “I gave it to her for her birthday.”
“Beautiful,” I thought to myself. I thought about asking if Barr wanted to admit to kidnapping the Lindberg kid but then I’d have to explain what I meant and I didn’t have a PowerPoint projector and ten hours to spare for that history lesson.
“So you know I’m charging both of you?” I asked.
“Yeah. I know. She just pisses me off, cursing in front of the kids, bringing men in… The kids, you know, they’re mine and I worry,” Barr pleaded.
I just shook my head.
“Look,” I said. “She doesn’t want you here anymore and your name is not on the apartment lease, so you have to leave. Unless she invites you, don’t come back.”
Barr said, “But what if I want to see my kids?”
I told Barr that was a civil issue and that he would have to get a lawyer and arrange for a custody hearing. Barr nodded. We both knew he just wasn’t interested enough to spend money he could use to buy drugs to rent a lawyer. Barr got in his car and left.
Morris was laughing as I got into the car. “What are you so happy about?” I questioned.
“When Fat fuck handed you the case, Fuckin’ A! You should have seen your eyes when he opened it and the weed almost fell out!” Morris said, choking with laughter.
“Yeah, that was almost as funny as your face now as I’m handing you the evidence for your case,” I responded.
“Aw, c’mon, Rog!” Morris begged. “They like you. They’ll plead out for you!”
“Alright, but you owe me lunch,” I demanded.
Morris smiled over his assumed victory. I was only kidding about not taking the case but I got lunch out of the deal. Score one for the home team.
About the Author:
The author, W. D. James, grew up in the backyard slag piles made famous by Harry Chapin but missed out on the bananas by a couple of years, a fact that haunts him to this day.
James was educated in public schools and attended Mansfield University but escaped, mere credits short of alumni status, thereby avoiding daily requests for donations, a move that saved hundreds of otherwise-condemned trees from the paper mill.
While at Mansfield, James edited the school newspaper and was a voice of mellow relaxation on the campus radio station. Listeners, both of them, said he was “a DJ, I think. Right?”
James worked in many jobs, from dishwasher to vice president of a dysfunctional supply company to his current position as professional mediator, social worker, confidant and general target of the public’s anger, aka: a police officer.
James resides with his wife, Margie and daughters Miranda and Sunshine (Margie is a proud hippie- guess who named the child). A black lab, Damnit, rounds out the family.
While the James family lives in a dachau on the river Dungh, James can often be found taking the occasional sanity break in the great Pacific Northwest and attending painful reunions in the not-so-great northeast.
James prefers not to write his own biographies but begrudgingly offered this copy when warned by his editor that no royalties would be paid without a completed book. With that bit of knowledge, copy was quickly produced.
James is currently working on a sequel to “In Another Life,” to be released after Damnit learns not to eat flash drives and power cords and the vet retrieves chapters six to twelve from the latest stool sample. It may be a while.
Find WD James on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wdjamesink
Follow him on Twitter: @WDJamesink
Visit the author’s website at www.wdjamesink.com
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