The Delta Star (15 page)

Chapter E
ight
MOTHER OF THE YEAR

Mario
V
illalobos thought it advisable not to tell his colleagues in the squadroom that the Russians were coming. At least not until he’d heard from his breathless caller at ten o’clock. That is, if he did call, and if the fruitcake caller had some information about Missy Moonbeam, and if he was able to keep his head clear enough of Russian spies to talk coherently. Fruitcake and caviar. It was a first for Mario Villalobos, since foreign agents usually didn’t find Hollywood street whores of strategic interest. Nevertheless he was awaiting the call, proving that even homicide detectives are not immune to soap opera.

Meanwhile, Rumpled Ronald had been awarded a gold watch at roll call for having successfully completed twenty years’ police service. The watch was made of chocolate candy, wrapped in foil. Rumpled Ronald told Jane Wayne that she could stop painting the no-bite medicine on his fingernails because he didn’t think he’d be biting them anymore. Rumpled Ronald stood and took a bow and ate the gold watch and made a little speech which indicated that his pension made him more or less immortal, and that nothing could hurt him now.

Three hours later he was flat on his back at the hospital where The Den Mother worked as a nurse, and he was in too much pain even to think about letting her give him a blow job. It happened when they got a call from The Mother of the Year.

She lived on Westlake, south of Seventh Street. She was seventy-two years old and had been in a wheel chair for ten years. Her legs were arthritic and her fingers were as gnarled as oak and nearly as black from the number of cigarettes she smoked. Like most of the other elderly people in her apartment house, she lived on social security and bemoaned the influx of Asians, all of whom she called Chinamen, and of Latin Americans, all of whom she called niggers.

Her name was Aggie Grubb, but from this day forth, whenever she was discussed by the cops at Rampart Station she would be known as The Mother of the Year. She put in a call to the station because her little boy wouldn’t get out of the house and stop sponging off her.

“I just can’t make my boy get out,” she said sadly to the cop who took the call. “He just sits around all day eating up what little food I have, and he won’t get a job, and he won’t do nothing I tell him to do. Can you send a policeman by here to talk to Albert and make him behave and get a job?”

“How old is Albert, ma’am?” the desk officer asked.

“He’s thirty-nine years old,” she said. “And I’m a poor crippled lady in a wheel chair and he won’t do nothing I tell him. What’s a poor old mother to do, Officer?”

The desk cop also had a poor old mother who wasn’t in such hot shape, and he said, “You stop fretting, ma’am. We’ll send a car by and have a talk with Albert. Is he living with you?”

“Yes, but he promised it was only temporary,” she said, “and he’s been here three months and I just don’t have no food left, hardly.”

“Now, now, don’t you cry,” the desk cop said, picturing his dear old mother. “We’ll just try to talk sense to Albert and see if we can make your life easier for you.”

“Thank you, son,” Aggie Grubb said.

The call was given to Sunney Kee and his partner Wilbur Richfield. They were an odd couple, Sunney and Wilbur. Because the black cop had the last name of a famous oil company, he was called Thirty-weight Richfield. And naturally, when he was teamed with someone as small as Sunney, the little Asian refugee became “Twenty-weight Kee.”

Actually, it wouldn’t have mattered how much weight they had that day. It wouldn’t have done any good at all. When they knocked on the door, they heard her screeching wheel chair rolling across the cracked linoleum floor. Then the door creaked open.

“Good morning, Officers,” Aggie Grubb said.

The veins throbbed blue in her twisted hands. Her dress did not cover her white skeleton knees. When she smiled her single tooth glinted. Then she looked closer through her bifocals at the little Chinaman and big nigger. She couldn’t conceal her disappointment. If she was some rich old lady from the West Side, they’d send her real cops, Aggie Grubb thought.

“We got a call that you’re having a family dispute,” Wilbur Richfield said.

“Might as well come on in,” Aggie Grubb said. “Maybe you can talk some to my boy, Albert. Make him go live somewheres else. I can’t be supporting him no more. Me on social security, with arthritis? That boy don’t respect his mother.”

“Where is he?” Wilbur Richfield asked.

“Where he always is,” Aggie Grubb said. “In bed till noon. Then he gets up and makes himself a dozen eggs and goes back to sleep till night. I just can’t be feeding that boy no more.”

“Okay,” Wilbur Richfield said. “Where’s the bedroom at?”

“Through there,” she said, motioning down the hall with twisted stick-fingers. “First door on the left.”

“Dozen eggs,” Wilbur Richfield said to Sunney Kee when they walked down the musty hallway. “Even The Bad Czech don’t eat a dozen eggs.”

Albert Grubb ate a dozen eggs. And he ate a pound of bacon with them. And he ate ten pieces of toast. And he drank a gallon of milk when his mother had it. And then he was still hungry.

“Is that one man under there?” Wilbur Richfield said to Sunney Kee when they opened the bedroom door and looked at the human shape snoring under the mountain of blanket.

“Is that one man under there?” Wilbur Richfield said to The Mother of the Year, who was snuffling and cackling from her wheel chair in the kitchen.

“Big boy, ain’t he?” she said. “You shouldda saw his old man.”

Wilbur Richfield, a fifteen-year cop, looked at his little Southeast Asian partner, and looked at The Mother of the Year, and looked around the room.

Albert Grubb had pinups on the wall. All the pinups wore skimpy bathing suits and were covered with oil and had unbelievable bodies. All of the pinups were men. Body builders. The largest man on those pinups did not have a chest like Albert Grubb.

There was a set of dumbbells on the floor beside the bed. Wilbur Richfield said to Sunney Kee, “I never thought ya could get that much weight on a dumbbell.”

Sunney Kee was also getting a very bad feeling. He looked up and smiled at his partner, but not with conviction.

“Wake the lazy boy up!” Aggie Grubb croaked from her wheel chair in the kitchen.

And Wilbur Richfield bit the bullet and said, “Albert, wake up!”

The sleeping giant stirred and changed gears a bit, but the snoring continued. Like a chain saw. His head was twice as big as Ludwig’s.

“Wake up!” Wilbur Richfield said, and this time he tapped Albert Grubb on his size 16 foot with his stick. Like Ludwig, Albert Grubb didn’t like to be touched by foreign objects while he slept.

He raised his head. It was a bald head, clean-shaven, formed like something that goes into a gun
—
a
105 howitzer. He had a face like a huge oatmeal doughnut. His shapeless nose was blackhead-studded. He said, “Who the fuck’s that?”

Sometimes, living up to what they imagine their image should be, cops do foolish things because of machismo. The foolish thing that Wilbur Richfield did, ignoring the instincts setting off whistles and sirens in his head, was not to use his rover radio unit to call for a backup unit right now. And two backup units would have been better.

Sunney Kee, who was half the size of Wilbur Richfield, and a rookie, and therefore not saddled with dangerous macho yokes, smiled affably at Albert Grubb and said to his partner, “One second.” He stepped into the kitchen, took out his rover and requested the backup. Code-two, which meant hurry up.

Then he quickly returned to the bedroom, where Wilbur Richfield was surveying the colossus on the bed. Albert Grubb was as tall as The Bad Czech. But even bigger. He was lying on his back looking up at Wilbur Richfield and Sunney Kee, and he was feeling very, very cranky.

There were lots of things the cops didn’t know about Albert Grubb but which they were going to learn. One thing was that Albert Grubb didn’t get his muscle mass at Jane Fonda’s exercise salon. He got his muscles from a place far away. In a prison in northern California where he had spent the last eleven years of his life. Where he had nothing to do all day except pump iron and be given ice cream and candy and cigarettes by other members of the Aryan Brotherhood for whom he served as hit man. Albert Grubb had hated niggers and slopeheads long before he went to prison and joined the Aryan Brotherhood. Albert Grubb hated niggers and slopeheads even if they didn’t wear blue uniforms and wake him up in the morning. And of course he hated everyone in blue uniforms even if they weren’t niggers and slopeheads.

There was something else that Wilbur Richfield and Sunney Kee didn’t know about Albert Grubb: he was an institutional man.

Albert Grubb had been out of prison only three months, but he had left a trail like Hansel and Gretel in the forest. And still they hadn’t rescinded his parole. Upon being released from prison, he had failed to report to his parole officer. Next, he had “forgotten” to show up for a job interview. Next, he had been “unable” to get a driver’s license because he couldn’t pass the exam. Then another missed opportunity for a job interview. Then, when he showed up at the parole office, he had liquor on his breath. Obviously. And his eyes were dilated from amphetamines. Obviously. And still they had not rescinded his parole.

Albert Grubb had only a 90 I. Q. but he was smart enough to know what was good for him and what was not. And he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why his parole officer didn’t know. Albert Grubb had had his sabbatical. He was sick and tired of life out on the street. He couldn’t bear the thought of getting up and going to another job interview for some boring job he didn’t want in the first place. Everyone expected him to do things which gave him a headache and made him grumpy. The fact is, Albert Grubb had an
ever-loving
, gut-twisting need to go home. Back to his eight-by-eight-foot cell. To his ice cream and weight lifting, and good-time rapes of every whiskerless kid in the yard, and bashing the faces of niggers and spies in the other prison gangs. To all the things that gave him pleasure.

The first of three backup units pulled up out front at about the instant that Albert Grubb raised up out of bed in his yellow-stained jockey shorts. The team of Jane Wayne and Rumpled Ronald was climbing the stairs to the apartment house at about the same instant that Albert Grubb picked up the dumbbell, hefted it, but decided he’d better not use weapons or they might shoot him.

Two other teams of cops were getting out of their radio cars at about the same moment that Wilbur Richfield decided that Albert Grubb could turn railroad tracks into monkey bars. At about the same moment that Albert Grubb let out a manic hyena laugh and said: “I’m glad they sent a slopehead and a nigger.”

Wilbur Richfield partially ducked the first punch that Albert Grubb threw. It only caught Wilbur Richfield in the shoulder. It only dislocated that shoulder.

Sunney Kee drew his stick and tried all the tricks he had seen growing up as a child in Bangkok and later in Taiwan, in all the Bruce Lee movies. But he found out, as had a thousand cops before him, that they work only for Bruce Lee. In real hand-to-hand combat, people like Albert Grubb just refused to cooperate with the various martial-arts moves as all of Bruce Lee’s enemies had done. Sunney Kee, who was small and quick and agile, was only making Albert Grubb madder by darting around the bedroom and slapping him with that nightstick, while Wilbur Richfield tried to reach his right-handed holster with his left hand, crying out in pain from the torn deltoid.

There was now absolutely no doubt in Wilbur Richfield’s mind that he should shoot down Albert Grubb like a rogue elephant. But Wilbur Richfield couldn’t get the holster unsnapped with his good hand, not when Sunney Kee came crashing into him after being thrown across the bedroom by Albert Grubb, who was just getting warmed up.

“Shoot him!” Wilbur Richfield screamed to the brave little rookie who still believed in the movies of Bruce Lee.

Sunney Kee didn’t obey his training officer. Instead, he stood up, assumed a martial-arts pose with his stick, and struck Albert Grubb right across the wrist, shoulder and knee before the behemoth had a chance to react. But alas, police academy instructors-who, like Bruce Lee, always have the cooperation of their subjects when demonstrating self-defense-did not always tell it like it is.

“You’ll break his wrist with that move,” Sunney Kee had been promised by his police academy instructor.

“You’ll paralyze his knee with that one,” another had promised.

“You’ll put him through the wall!” a dozen martial-arts films had promised Sunney Kee during his days as a devotee.

But all it did was make the Albert Grubbs of this world mad. In truth, given his size and power and love of pain, Albert Grubb might not have been stopped by Reggie Jackson with a Louisville Slugger.

“Shoot the motherfucker!” Wilbur Richfield screamed, thrashing with his ruined right arm, unable to get to the holster which had been twisted clear to the back of his Sam Browne when the body of Sunney Kee knocked him into the hallway.

And just when Sunney Kee, who had an I. Q. of 140, learned something that Albert Grubb with an I. Q. of 90 had known instinctively-that makers of martial-arts movies were full of shit-Albert Grubb landed a punch on top of the head of Sunney Kee, the portion of the body that the physical training instructor promised would break the fist of an attacker.

It nearly broke the skull of Sunney Kee. Actually, it knocked him loopy. Sunney Kee was trying to stand on boneless legs and was seeing all sorts of Taiwanese fireworks and couldn’t get the measure of the words that Wilbur Richfield was screaming at him: “Shoot the motherfucker!”

Albert Grubb then broke Sunney Kee’s jaw and splintered his cheekbone and smeared his nose over to where his right eye could almost look inside.

Sunney Kee never saw Rumpled Ronald slamming Albert
Grubb across his howitzer head with a stick, nor did he hear the four other cops who responded to the call, nor did he see Jane Wayne riding Albert Grubb like a jockey as the giant roared into the kitchen knocking over tables and chairs, spinning his dear old mother right out of her wheel chair onto the linoleum floor.