By the time the German dame with a bad habit invited me in to feed a different need, I knew I was in trouble. I had returned from the war with a piece of tin on my chest and a hole in my soul.
After fighting WWII in the Pacific, being a cop, doing the right thing, that seemed like the best way to do right for all the things I had done wrong.
I managed to immediately annoy my uniform beat partner as we scoured a dirty alley for a ditched piece. He didn’t like my no-nonsense, law–and-order attitude. Truth is, neither did I.
I had been a pushy prick before the war, then dropped into the Officer corps, and I consistently made bad decisions. I was a pompous arrogant prick, and I was going to be around for a while.
After pawing the piece, we moved on to tracking down the owner, matching the serial number against the ledger of a chatty gun store clerk. Eventually I interrogated a suspect, and that’s when things when south.
His face was expressive, his eyes liquid and alive. Both of our mouths wiggled strangely around some words, but our bodies twitched with gestures, as if our heads were attached to spastic ragdolls. I asked him a question, and I would end up asking this question 5 or 6 times until my superior was finally happy with the answer. The hard work and massive luck paid off, I was made detective, with no idea how I got here.
Stumbling forward, I moved from Traffic, to Homocide, to Vice, and finally Arson. I would work these cases, guessing my way through interrogations never once getting more than 50% of the questions right. I gave up driving, forcing the poor chump at my side to chauffeur me around, unless there was a chase to be had.
Car chases, foot chases, gun fights. I was a sloppy mutt with all of them, unable to hit anything with the first shot, smacking into everything in sight with the car, and banging off of chest high railings and doorframes while jogging after mugs.
I kept slugging, making poor decision after decision, until finally I left behind everything that I claimed was important to me and fell in with a junkie lounge singer.
The city of angels wants to be a dark and grimy place, dirty from bottom to the top. In the end, it’s more of a dusty, sunny/rainy place, where bad people do bad things to not-quite as bad people.
It was a too familiar place, and with déjà vu I waited for the German broad to tell me her daughter was her sister, because, in this town, I had heard it all before.
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