Free The Delta Star by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

Misery. The afternoon began, appropriately enough, in Fu’s Fast Foods, a Chinese version of an American greasy spoon, where cops ate because it was free to them or half price. Since there were no spoons in Fu’s, Dilford called Fu’s a greasy stick joint, but he ate there anyway. And he provided wonderful lunchtime conversation for the ever-suffering Dolly, who was starting to roll her eyes a lot, just like her lanky partner. She’d even started to whine like Dilford when she was bitching back at him. Partners often took on each other’s characteristics, usually the worst ones.
    “You oughtta go in that kitchen sometime,” Dilford said through a mouthful of mu shu pork as he clicked his sticks expertly and looked toward the take-out counter, where the boxes of chow m e in were being bought by Mexican factory workers as fast as Fu could get them up.
    “Why would I wanna go in the kitchen?” Dolly said, eating her shrimp fried rice gingerly, extremely doubtful as to the true nature of the “shrimp.”
    “Fu’s so good he can fry a cockroach without making it dance. All that old oil in those woks goes up on the ceiling and drops back on the floor. In fact, it isn’t a floor. It’s more like an oil slick. The cockroaches can’t even walk on it without cleats.”
    “Jesus Christ!” Dolly yelled, leaping up and knocking her plate off the table. “My mushroom moved)”
    The later events of their Boat People Day were what caused Dolly to get so drunk at Leery’s that she bought drinks for the house. And that is about as drunk as anyone ever got.
    It was an “unknown trouble” call, which is very unsettling to police officers who, finding police work unpredictable enough, would prefer to have a more precise idea of the nature of their radio calls. In this case, a neighbor recently arrived from Cambodia by way of Bangkok had trouble explaining the problem to the operator at communications, hence the unknown-trouble call.
    Jane Wayne and her partner Rumpled Ronald-now only thirty-four hours and fifty minutes from his pension and thus fearing just about everything, especially unknown-trouble calls-had arrived at the apartment building near Ninth and Catalina streets before Dilford and Dolly arrived.
    Jane Wayne’s shag was purple-streaked in the sunlight from her recent cellophane job, and she looked brazenly handsome in her tailored blues, with her broad shoulders, crimson mouth and narrow hips.
    “We’ll back you up,” Jane Wayne said, uncoiling her long body from the radio car while her partner reluctantly followed, feeling his forehead for the tenth time this morning.
    “I think I’m getting a fever,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be something? Drop dead from an Asian virus the day before my pension?”
    It was near Korea Town, and many of the buildings were occupied by boat people, like the Cambodian who placed the call. Those who had survived war and famine, pirates and cutthroats, and arrived in California alive.
    The apartment house was one of the many stucco buildings with Spanish tile roofs built in the late 1920’s for the burgeoning population in central Los Angeles. It was pressure-packed with refugees now, and like the Latinos on other streets in other pressure-packed apartment buildings, they had to park their battered cars blocks away, since each apartment unit contained three or four times the people it was built to house. Parking tickets often wiped out the meager salaries these boat people earned in a day, working as they did in the same kinds of places that hired the illegals from Latin America.
    The stench of pork was overpowering. Rotten pork. And gamy chickens that restaurants in Chinatown or Korea Town or Thai Town had disposed of. The four cops looked at each other, and Dolly thought she might just vomit.
    There was a community kitchen serving the entire building. It was at the end of the darkened hall, and when Dilford yelled, “Police Department. Who called?” and got no response,