Free The Delta Star by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

said, muttering, “Prick!” under her breath.
    “Let’s do it,” Dilford said, parking the radio car and jerking open the door, muttering “Bitch!” under his breath.
    The drag queen was wearing a red lame dress and silver pumps with ankle straps, and was also feeling pretty bitchy that day in that not a single trick had been had. And it was smoggy and the drag queen’s boyfriend Pablo had not slapped him around lately, no matter how bitchy the queen acted or regardless of how much he deserved it.
    The drag queen had once been the happiest hod carrier in Havana, lunching on bricklayers, so to speak. Then Castro got it in for homosexuals and started throwing them into jails for crimes against the state, finally loading them on leaky boats and sending them to Miami. In short, this drag queen had been very unhappy the last few years and was in no mood for some stinking roust by a couple of cops. Which is exactly what the queen said when they stopped him.
    “I was not doing noth eeng ,” the drag queen said. “I am in no mood for some steen king roost!”
    “Watch your mouth, seesler!” Dilford said. “And open that purse so my leetle partner can take a look.”
    It took only a few minutes of Dilford’s smart-mouthing and mock Spanish accent before the big drag queen got really bitchy and said, “Th ees ees not Cuba. Ee f I have done someth eeng wrong, take me to ya le!”
    “Listen, rat breath,” Dilford sneered, standing nose to nose with the tall drag queen. “I’ll take you to Yale. I’ll take you to Harvard, or I’ll take you to the fucking dog pound if I feet like it. So don’t give me any of your …”
    But that was almost all he said that day, other than when he was on the sidewalk, howling like a bloodhound. Dolly had always been a football fan and she said that the drag queen didn’t have to take any steps like place-kicker Jan Stenerud. But the drag queen did a Jan Stenerud on Dilford, all right. The queen kicked Dilford’s balls so hard he had pubic hair in his throat for a week, Dolly said. And Dolly became a more popular girl around Rampart Station because she took out her stick and, using the toe of it, buried it in the crotch of the drag queen, right up his panty girdle. It caused the drag queen to join Dilford down on the sidewalk, howling like a coyote.
    That was a very noisy afternoon on Alvarado. Especially when the paramedics were loading Dilford into the ambulance, while he held his wounded testicles. Dilford was foaming like a mad dog and cursing the former President of the United States for being outfoxed by Fidel Castro, and cursing the Catholic Church for helping to settle the Cubans here in central Los Angeles. Dilford’s eyes were about as deranged as The Bad Czech’s when he began to imagine that his sucked-up testicles would never fall into place. As the paramedic was closing the door, Dilford screamed: “Thanks a lot, Jimmy Carter, you dumb cracker! Ooooohhhh! Thanks a lot, Pope John Paul, you dumb polack! Ooooohhhh, my nuts!”
    As Dilford was being driven away by ambulance, the last thing he saw was his partner Dolly chattering away with Jane Wayne and three other cops. Dolly was warning that the girls should always use a pencil eraser to unload their shotguns so they didn’t break a fingernail.
    “Goddamn acrylic nail job costs fifty bucks,” Dolly complained to Jane Wayne, who looked at Dolly’s fingernail and clucked sympathetically while Dilford nursed his nuts and moaned.
    Those bad old days were in the past. Things weren’t much better now but they were quieter. Dilford and Dolly weren’t openly hostile anymore. They were resigned to finishing out this month as partners, so they turned one persecuted face to another persecuted face only when it was absolutely necessary.
    It was to be their Boat People Day, as Dilford explained it that night at Leery’s Saloon, when Dolly got so bombed that she bought drinks for the entire gaggle of losers in The House of