Free The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh

riot of 1965, Spencer drove a half burned black and white with every window shot out ten miles to Beverly Boulevard, his face streaked with soot and sweat, and managed to make all three cigarette stops before the stores closed at 2:00 A. M.
    Spencer Van Moot had accepted a thousand packs of cigarettes and as many free meals in his time. And though he had bought enough clothing at wholesale prices to dress a dozen movie stars, he had never even considered taking a five dollar bill nor was one ever offered except once when he stopped a Chicago grocer in Los Angeles on vacation. The police department and its members made an exact distinction between petty gratuities and cash offerings, which were considered money bribes no matter how slight and would result in a merciless dismissal as well as criminal prosecution.
    It was not that the citizens and police of Los Angeles were inherently less debased than their Eastern counterparts, it was that the West, being a network of sprawling young towns and cities, did not lend itself to the old intimate teeming ward or ghetto where political patronage and organized crime bedded down together. The numbers racket, for instance, had been a dismal failure in western America. The average citizen of Los Angeles hadn't the faintest idea how it worked. Yet in the Pennsylvania steel town where Spencer Van Moot was born every living soul had played numbers and consulted dream books for winners and contributed to organized crime's greatest source of revenue in that region. The bookies came door to door. They even accepted children's penny bets. Western criminals had found it impossible to organize a crazy quilt collection of several communities which existed inside the 460 square mile limits of the city, where there was an automobile for every adult. The city had geography and history going for it.
    So it was that Spencer Van Moot's supplication provided about half of the beverage consumed at choir practice, the rest provided by Roscoe Rules who bullied the free booze from cowering liquor store owners on his beat.
    After making his various stops and depositing his treasures in the back of his camper truck in the station parking lot, Spencer began whining again about his unhappy domestic life.
    "I mean how can you understand a woman, Padre?" Spencer complained as the setting sun filtered through the smog and burned Father Willie's sensitive, bulging blue eyes.
    "I don't know, Spencer." Father Willie sighed, and wondered how long Spencer would use him as a sounding board tonight. Sometimes when he was lucky the complaining would stop after the first two hours of their tour of duty.
    "I'm forty years old, Father Willie," Spencer griped, touching his twenty dollar haircut which he got free in a Wilshire Boulevard styling parlor. "Look at my hair, it's getting gray. Why should I live in such misery."
    "I'm twenty-four," Father Willie reminded him, "and you have more hair than I do. Who cares if it's gray."
    "She's a bitch, Padre. It's hell, believe me," Spencer whined. "She's worse by far than my first two wives put together. And she's turned her kids against me. They hate me more than she does because she tells them lies about me, that I drink a lot and run around with other women."
    "That's not a lie, Spencer," Father Willie reminded him. "You do drink a lot and run around with other women."
    "It's nothing to tell teenagers, for god's sake!" Spencer answered. "I never shoulda married an older broad with kids. Damn, forty-two years old and her legs're turning, green. Green, I tell you! And here I am with only four years to go until I can pull the pin and retire. And what happens, she gets knocked up."
    "Maybe it'll work out, Spencer," Father Willie offered as his partner drove east on Eighth Street away from the sun's dying harsh rays.
    "Work out? Work out? Four years to my pension and she's gonna foal, and then how can I retire with a little rug rat crawling around?"
    "Oh well," Father Willie shrugged.