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Chapter 12
The four
gray-wrapped pols clustered in the light of the candlelike outdoor fixture
made of black iron and cone of perpetual fake flame flickering in the
night dark.
"Just two
left," the corporal said almost soundlessly; he let his fingers speak for
him as he drew them across the rental lists. "A Mrs. Ruth Gomen in two
eleven and an Allen Mufi in two twelve. Which'll we hit first?"
"The Mufi
man's," one of the uniformed officers said; he smacked his plastic and
shot nightstick against his fingers, eager in the dim light to finish it
up, now that the end had at last come into sight.
"Two twelve
it is," the corporal said, and reached to stroke the door chimes. But then
it occurred to him to try the doorknob.
Good. One
chance out of several, a minor possibility but suddenly, usefully true.
The door was unlocked. He signaled silence, grinned briefly, then pushed
the door open.
They saw
into a dark living room with empty and nearly empty drink glasses placed
here and there, some on the floor. And a great variety of ashtrays
overfilled with crushed cigarette packages and ground-out butts.
A cigarette
party, the corporal decided. Broken up, now. Everyone went home. With the
exception perhaps of Mr. Mufi.
He entered,
shone his light here and there, shone it at last toward the far door
leading deeper into the over-priced apartment. No sound. No motion. Except
the dim, distant, muted chatter of a radio talk show at minimal volume.
He trod
across the wall-to-wall carpet, which depicted in gold Richard M. Nixon's
final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery
below. At the far door he trod on God, who was smiling a lot as He
received his Second Only Begotten Son back into His bosom, and pushed open
the bedroom door.
In the big
double bed, pulpy-soft, a man asleep, shoulders and arms bare. His clothes
heaped on a handy chair. Mr. Allen Mufi, of course. Safe and home in his
own private double bed. But - Mr. Mufi was not alone in his very own
private bed. Involved with the pastel sheets and blankets a second
indistinct shape lay curled up, asleep. Mrs. Mufi, the corporal thought,
and shone his light toward her, with mannish curiosity.
All at once
Allen Mufi - assuming it was he - stirred. He opened his eyes. And
instantly sat bolt upright, staring fixedly at the pols. At the light of
the flashlight.
"What?" he
said, and he rasped with fear, a deep, convulsive release of shaking
breath. "No," Mufi said, and then snatched for some object on the table
beside his bed; he dove into the darkness, white and hairy and naked, for
something invisible but precious to him. Desperately. He sat back up then,
panting, clutching it. A pair of scissors.
"What's that
for?" the corporal asked, shining the light in to the metal of the
scissors.
"I'll kill
myself," Mufi said. "If you don't go away and - leave us alone." He stuck
the closed blades of the scissors against his hair-darkened chest, near
his heart.
"Then it
isn't Mrs. Mufi," the corporal said. He returned the circle of light to
the other, huddled up, sheet-covered shape. " A wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am
one-time gang- bang? Turning your foxy apartment into a motel room?" The
corporal walked to the bed, took hold of the top sheet and blankets, then
yanked them back.
In the bed
beside Mr. Mufi lay a boy, slender, young, naked, with long golden hair.
"I'll be
darned," the corporal said.
One of his
men said, "I've got the scissors." He tossed them onto the floor by the
corporal's right foot.
To Mr. Mufi,
who sat trembling and panting, his eyes startled with terror, the corporal
said, "How old is this boy?"
The boy had
awakened now; he gazed fixedly up but did not stir. No expression appeared
on his soft, vaguely formed face.
"Thirteen,"
Mr. Mufi said croakingly, almost pleadingly. "Legal age of consent."
To the boy
the corporal said, "Can you prove it?" He felt intense revulsion now.
Acute physical revulsion, making him want to barf. The bed was stained and
damp with half-dried sweat and genital secretions.
"ID," Mufi
panted. "In his wallet. In his pants on the chair."
One of the
team of pols said to the corporal, "You mean if this juve's thirteen
there's no crime involved?"
"Hell,"
another pol said indignantly. "It's obviously a crime, a perverted crime.
Let's run them both in."
"Wait a
minute. Okay?" The corporal found the boy's pants, rummaged, found the
wallet, got it out, inspected the identification. Sure enough. Thirteen
years old. He shut the wallet and put it back in the pocket. "No," he
said, still half enjoying the situation, amused by Mufi's naked shame but
becoming each moment more and more revolted by the man's cowardly horror
at being disclosed. "The new revision of the Penal Code, 640.3, has it
that twelve is the age of consent for a minor to engage in a sexual act
either with another child of either sex or an adult also of either sex but
with only one at a time."
"But it's
goddamn sick," one of his pols protested.
"That's your
opinion," Mufi said, more bravely now.
"Why isn't
it a bust, a hell of a big bust?" the pols standing beside him persisted.
"They're
systematically taking all victimless crimes off the books," the corporal
said. "That's been the process for ten years."
"This? This
is victimless?"
To Mufi, the
corporal said, "What do you find about young boys that you like? Let me in
on it; I've always wondered about scans like you."
"'Scans,' "
Mufi echoed, his mouth twisting with discomfort. "So that's what I am."
"It's a
category," the corporal said. "Those who prey on minors for homosexual
purposes. Legal but still abhorred. What do you do during the day?"
"I'm a
used-quibble salesman."
"And if
they, your employers, knew you were a scan they wouldn't want you handling
their quibbles. Not after what those hairy white hands have been handling
outside the workday. Right, Mr. Mufi? Even a used-quibble salesman can't
get away morally with being a scan. Even if it's no longer on the books."
Mufi said,
"It was my mother's fault. She dominated my father, who was a weak man."
"How many
little boys have you induced to go down on you during the last twelve
months?" the corporal inquired. "I'm serious. Are these all one-night
stands, is that it?"
"I love
Ben," Mufi said, staring fixedly ahead, his mouth barely moving. "Later
on, when I'm better off financially and can provide, I intend to marry
him."
To the boy
Ben, the corporal said, "Do you want us to take you out of here? Return
you to your parents?"
"He lives
here," Mufi said, grinning a little.
"Yeah, I'll
stay here," the boy said sullenly. He shivered. "Cripes, could you give me
the covers back?" He reached irritably for the top blanket.
"Just keep
the noise level down in here," the corporal said, moving away wearily.
"Christ. And they took it off the books."
"Probably,"
Mufi said, with confidence now that the pols were beginning to depart from
his bedroom, "because some of those big overweight old police marshals are
screwing kids themselves and don't want to get sent up. They couldn't
stand the scandal." His grin grew into an insinuating leer.
"I hope,"
the corporal said, "that someday you do commit a statute violation of some
kind, and they haul you in, and I'm on duty the day it happens. So I can
book you personally." He hawked, then spat on Mr. Mufi. Spat into his
hairy, empty face.
Silently,
the team of pols made their way through the living room of cigarette
butts, ashes, twisted-up packs, half-filled drink glasses, to the corridor
and porchway outside. The corporal yanked the door shut, shivered, stood
for a moment, feeling the bleakness of his mind, its withdrawal, for a
moment, from the environment around him. He then said, "Two eleven. Mrs.
Ruth Gomen. Where the Taverner suspect has to be, if he's anywhere around
here at all, it being the last one." Finally, he thought.
He knocked
on the front door of 211. And stood waiting with his plastic and shot
nightstick gripped at ready, terribly and completely all at once not
caring shit about his job. "We've seen Mufi," he said, half to himself.
"Now let's see what Mrs. Gomen is like. You think she'll be any better?
Let's hope so. I can't take much more of that tonight."
"Anything
would be better," one of the pols beside him said somberly. They all
nodded and shuffled about, preparing themselves for slow footsteps beyond
the door.
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