Free No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart by Larry Beinhart Page A

look at but the
walls. I rapped, and the bruising on my knuckles convinced me they
were real plaster and solid. The molding was some sort of hard wood
under the paint. I could tell because someone had lifted it and I
could see where the paint was chipped .... Oh!
    A minute or two of gentle prying and there she was. A
very nice job too, the transformer clipped directly into an A.C. line
and no battery to wear out.
    I took mine. I left theirs in place. Then I went to
meet Captain Robert E. L. Deltchev at Culpeper County Police
Headquarters.
    I had visualized the place as a southern courthouse
and county jail, reeking of dark cruel secrets, petty power politics,
injustices racial and otherwise, lit in 1940s Warner Brothers
Neo-Realism. But the station was merely overused, overcrowded, 1950s
strictly brick and functional. An Anywhere USA cop house.
    The cop at the glassed-in front desk looked to be
forty-five minutes past mandatory retirement. The cable-aud-jack
phone system he was plugged into was twenty years past it. He had a
wad in his cheek that he chomped with bovine regularity. Between
chaws he told me, "Captain ain't heyah."
    "When will he be in?" I asked.
    "Don't rightly know," the cop said, then
started answering the phone and plugging the lines into the right, or
wrong, extensions. That went on for some time and he ignored me
without any apparent effort.
    "I have an appointment," I said. He nodded
and blew a bubble. That disappointed me; I had really hoped for
tobacco.
    "Maybe you could call him. I bet he has a police
car, and I bet it has a radio. And remind him that he has an
appointment."
    "Don't rightly think so," he said and went
back to the switchboard as lights and bells went off.
    I waited. Several other people came and went, cops
and civilians. The oddest group was led by a very large man in
uniform with pockmarked slabs for a face who blew in like a destroyer
on patrol. An intense-looking woman dressed as a New Jersey housewife
and what had to be a plainclothes cop bobbed along in his wake. Ten
minutes later, they came charging back out.
    After they left I asked the cop at the desk once
again, "When and where am I going to find Deltchev?"
    "Why didn't you speak to him while he was here?"
he answered, then started on a new piece of gum.
    "When was he here?"
    "He just left."
    "Either I've seen this movie before or I read
the book," I mumbled.
    "What books that?”
    "Is Deltchev coming back?" I growled.
    "Mostly he does," he said, working up to a
new bubble.
    "I'm going out to get some coffee; can I get you
some more gum?" I said.
    " That's right nice. That really is. I like that
double-bubble grape flavor," he replied and even offered me a
nickel. I took it.
    It was authentic southern coffee, which resembles
real coffee only in that they both start with water and are normally
served warm. If a New York coffee shop palmed off the stuff on an
N.Y.P.D. cop, they would be promptly and rudely busted for fraud. And
although there were cows in Virginia--from what I had seen of
Culpeper, probably right in town--the white stuff they gave me to put
in the warm, tan liquid was a powder built in Ohio. 'They did not
have Danish. They had sweet rolls. I don't really know what wheat
gluten is, but I think that's what the rolls were made of. And sugar.
    Now that I knew what Deltchev looked like—a
pock-marked naval destroyer--I waited outside where I could wonder
where the scent of magnolia blossom had gone to. Three hours after I
arrived, and three more cups of warm tinted water, Deltchev steamed
in again. He was still with the same group, and I tailed along like
just another piece of jetsam caught in his wake.
    When we all got trapped in a traffic jam trying to
enter the door of Deltchev's office, he became aware of my presence.
    "Who are you?"
    I introduced myself and reminded him of the
appointment that was now three hours late.
    "I do not have the time to spare at this time,"
he announced.
    "Look, Captain, I flew down