Fugitive Nights by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

woman had worked on the tot for fifteen minutes in the back of a police car while Breda drove a screaming code-three run to the receiving hospital. The child was DOA despite the effort, and Breda’s partner started to cry and couldn’t stop.
    Two bluesuits from their own division happened to be in the emergency ward taking an ADW report from a poolshark who’d been beaned with a nine ball tossed by a guy he’d hustled out of fifty bucks.
    When the male cops saw the young woman bawling her eyes out, one of them asked Breda, “What’s a matter? Did we mace each other by accident and run our mascara?”
    The other said, “What’s a matter, we having a little P.M.S. attack, are we?”
    Breda glared at them with her pimp-killer grin, and said, “As far as I’m concerned, P.M.S. comes from PUKEY MEN’S SHIT, YOU HEMORRHOIDS!”
    In the old days, you could just about depend on the guys to call for a female backup every time somebody arrested a fighting-mad dyke who wore leather and spikes and greased-back hair. The guys got off by putting the female officer in the back seat with the dyke and cooing stuff like, “No playing patty-fingers on the way to the station, girls !”
    And there were citizens who, after calling the police, would gape dumbfounded when a female cop stood on the threshold. They’d usually say, “They sent a woman’ ?” And Breda would usually answer, “Yeah. Don’t you feel silly ?”
    Rape or sex crimes involving kids usually got kissed off to a female cop. The men would call for them and when they arrived, it was always, “Won’t talk to me. Needs a woman’s touch. Catch you later. Bye.”
    And then the male would be off to the donut shop with the other guys while the female might spend the rest of her watch with a woman or child who might’ve been abused in ways that came back to you in the night. That was one of the reasons Breda had never used alcohol as a sedative. She didn’t want the alcoholic wormies at three A.M., because that bed got awfully crowded when you loaded it with little kids. All those little kids …
    She’d worked sex crimes with kiddie victims for such a long time that when she went back to detective duty with grownups, she’d found herself talking like a diaper dick, interrogating forty-year-old burglars and sounding like Mister Rogers: “Now, see, Harry, you have the right to remain silent. Do we understannnnnd siii-lent?”
    Those sex crimes that were not filed by the D.A. because of insufficient evidence were often memorable. Like the five-year-old girl with new cigarette burns over old ones, who kept repeating, “I’m a bad girl. Daddy did it cause I’m a bad girl.” And that child was put back in the home!
    The wormies at three A.M.: Boss, I’m outta here! I need a vacation!
    When Mommy or Daddy, or Mommy’s boyfriend actually killed a child, when she’d attend postmortems with homicide dicks—those from the gag-and-giggle school of corpse-cops—they’d always make sure she was with a particular pathologist who liked to post a body like he was doing caesar salad for the pathologist’s picnic. No tying things off to keep the bile in place, no way. Just mince, dice and toss. And all that lettuce and cucumber and bell pepper—which were really tiny bits of a former human child—would stick to her sleeves.
    She could deal with the clipping of fingers for hydrating fingerprints, but she hated the smell of burning bone when they sawed off the skull cap. The other corpse-cops knew it, and made sure she was up close and personal.
    It was hard not to retch when they had a “decomp,” one covered with enough “rice” to open a live-bait shop. The pathologist would take a swipe at the “rice” and she might find herself wearing a pair of maggots on her lapel.
    How’s your tummy? Shall we