Fugitive Nights by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

have enchiladas for lunch or would you like a meatball sandwich ?
    There were other kinds of guys, good partners. She thought she was in love with one, a training officer at Wilshire Division. They were married in her rookie year and she got immediately pregnant with their only child. He’d been a decent husband, it’s just that he should’ve been somebody else’s husband. They’d both sensed it during their first year together, but by then Lizzy was on the way.
    Her ex-husband had gone on to become a police commander, later had remarried, and had eventually retired to a job as police chief in a small city in Washington. He’d had two other children and saw Lizzy less and less as the years passed, but he’d always sent the child-support payments, and was generous even after Lizzy was eighteen and his obligation was over.
    Breda had never married again and tried not to date cops unless she was absolutely desperately lonely. The last time she was that lonely was shortly before she’d decided to pull the pin and take her pension.
    That guy had been a gorgeous lieutenant who specialized in those intense gazes he thought were real spoon-benders. She recalled an evening in the coffee room at Hollywood Station just before her retirement, when he’d shared with her his opinions and philosophy on police discipline.
    It seemed that one of the officers had been caught in his patrol car getting serviced supremely by a cop groupie who had balled half the night watch and most of the morning watch during her groupie career. In that the groupie was not a professional prostitute, Breda’s lieutenant thought that firing Charlie would be a harsh penalty. After all, in the good old days (cops were big-time reminiscers) even he’d committed an indiscretion or two. Wink!
    Breda said to the gorgeous lieutenant, “It’s okay with me if good old Charlie skates, but tell me something, what if it was one of our female officers? How would you feel then?”
    And the lieutenant, an otherwise liberated supervisor, made it plain that he’d never entertained such a thought. A female officer? Female officers were different. He’d always been pleased with his reputation as a nonsexist police supervisor (pro-choice all the way), but Breda Burrows had just pitched one up there that he couldn’t hit. The fact is, it was unthinkable.
    â€œThat’s unthinkable !” he said.
    â€œWhy is it?” she asked. “What if it was me out there in uniform listening to Ravel’s Bolero on a ghetto blaster, getting done by some guy in the front seat of a radio car? Would you think I should be fired?”
    He blinked and stroked his handsome jaw and stared at Breda Burrows, this woman he’d dated! as though she’d just offered to jerk off a gerbil. He had to come up with an answer, especially after the first words to slide out of his mouth had been the dreaded, sexist: “It’s different. ”
    â€œWhy do you think it’s different?” Breda persisted, with the little grin that annoyed him.
    â€œBecause …” He turned pomegranate-pink and sputtered, “because … your trousers would be down! And your Sam Browne! You’d be disarmed! And out of uniform!”
    Breda decided to turn it off, all the bad-time memories, when she drove her Z into the driveway. Her house was a three-bedroom stucco with a composite roof, air-conditioning, two and a half bathrooms, and a yard big enough for a pool that she couldn’t afford to build. Seven thousand pools around there and she had to cool off with a lawn sprinkler, but at least the house was in Cathedral Canyon, well protected from the winter winds that could blow the paint off a car and the tits off a kangaroo rat, or so the realtor had told her when she sold Breda the house back in the protected cove of the mountain range. There was no big church with spires or Gothic arches in Cathedral City. The town got