The Glitter Dome by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

want this case?”
    The Weasel and the Ferret were jazzed up from winning all the loot, and they particularly enjoyed seeing Schultz and Simon suffer. The giant homicide detectives were possibly the only team of officers in the L.A.P.D. who still wore their hair in crewcuts. They had to drive all the way downtown to City Hall to find a barber who remembered how to cut them. Occasionally, when Schultz was feeling particularly militant, he’d ask for medium whitewalls and come off looking like a Wehrmacht tank commander. The Weasel said the two hunkers blotted out the. sun when they entered the squadroom. The Ferret said the mastodons registered 5.3 on the Cal Tech Richter when they walked down the stairs.
    Hearing the behemoths bitching and moaning to Al Mackey for taking over the Nigel St. Claire case, the Weasel said, “I don’t know why Mackey and Welborn should get that hot homicide. After all, Schultz and Simon solved three and a half homicides last month.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, three and a half?” asked the Ferret, always anxious to play Mr. Bones to the Weasel’s interlocutor.
    â€œThe fourth one refused to die.”
    â€œYeah, but if he had, who woulda told Schultz and Simon who killed him?”
    â€œThat’s true. They ain’t never found a bad guy unless somebody pointed him out.”
    And so forth. But even though he was a daredevil who carried a long knife in his motorcycle boot, the Ferret was wise enough to keep his voice down when he was dumping on Schultz and Simon, who had once threatened to squeeze both narcs into little hair balls and hang them from his rearview mirror.
    The Weasel decided to console the big detectives with some hot information. Schultz and Simon had been distraught of late since losing a murder case wherein a boulevard cowboy named William Bonney Anderson, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, had blown away three good citizens of Hollywood, two for money, one for fun, and was found not guilty by reason of diminished capacity, after two psychiatrists (it was always the same shrinks the defense dug up in these cases) convinced the jury that Billy the Kid’s destiny was preordained the moment his mother laid on him the name of the notorious outlaw.
    The Weasel slipped Schultz and Simon the address and phone number of a former and present Hollywood mental case named Pat Garrett Williams, who, the Weasel was convinced, would consider himself officially deputized if given one of those “Have you hugged a vice cop today?” buttons that the gay community was recently flaunting. Then he could be shown a mug shot, given a throwaway gun, and programmed to relive the century-old killing of the Kid by blowing William Bonney Anderson right out from under his fucking Stetson the next time he went to the coffee shop on McCadden Place to pick up a drag queen.
    â€œIt might work!” Schultz said.
    â€œSounds feasible,” Simon said. “You two hairballs come up with a good idea once in a while.”
    Schultz even let the Weasel rub his crewcut for luck before hitting the bricks today, since the narcs hoped to culminate a big hash bust in the Hollywood hills. In fact, Schultz and Simon seemed so enthusiastic about owning their own certifiably psycho vigilante that they didn’t even look up when Al Mackey and Martin Welborn stuffed the story of Nigel St. Claire into its final resting place in a case envelope and set out toward square one.
    Square one was not necessarily the scene of the crime. Square one was where the body was found. If they were going to clear this one for Captain Woofer, the crime scene might have to be the goddamn French Riviera, Al Mackey said. It was going to take more than their nimble inventive ways to clear this killing. They might actually have to solve this one.
    When they got close to the parking lot of the bowling alley on Gower Street, Al Mackey looked around and said, “We’re going to have one hell of a time