Ocean City Cop
Carlson, Richard W.
I n the spring of 1962, age 21, I became a policeman for the summer in Ocean City, Maryland, a ten-mile-long island on the Atlantic and the state's most pop. ular summer resort. To hear cops on...
...I bought it, as well as a gunbelt and holster, handcuffs, a chrome whistle on a lanyard, and a blackjack, all for $5o...
...and Lt...
...Allen...
...She was hitting him pretty hard...
...The crabs, backs painted with risque names, would amble down a long, makeshift track with fifty or sixty cheering spectators crammed into the living room and balcony...
...I hung my clothes in a broom closet...
...I was five feet above the crown of the fellow's head...
...Police !"a phrase I'd been hoping to use but had not yet had the occasion...
...I twisted hard and he fell to the floor with a sob...
...He was annoyed...
...He made a couple of vengeful promises...
...Allen, Edsel's breath warm and damp on the back of my neck, the lieutenant said something like, "Carlson, you know that old house in the alley off 2nd...
...Ed stayed for free hamburgers from his girlfriend, a waitress named Technicolor, and I went back with Cassie and the lieutenant to see Chief Phillips...
...She still held on...
...A man sitting under the edge of the boardwalk spoke to her...
...These were Ed's two favorite songs, though his sentimental inclinations had been pretty well hidden until then...
...He said the man had exposed himself to Bonnie...
...The gun had such a long barrel it looked like a toy...
...their numbers had swollen to five or six hundred...
...So the judge went in the tank, he said...
...People were in a half circle surrounding a man and woman...
...One night, I took off my hat and tucked it in the small of my back under my coat...
...I am already planning to go, I said...
...The tourists walked Amy back to her boarding house...
...Amy had been on her way home from a beach party...
...The woman was remarkably strong and wouldn't stop kicking...
...Etc., ad barium...
...He started sprinting and I ran after him for five long blocks...
...First, he took Edsel to the vet and made Ed come in with him...
...This is a lot harder when your stomach is in the way, as was his...
...Many of them had been partying all the way from Washington, a four-hour drive...
...Wherever Louie was Dwelling was tops...
...Johnson was wearing a bright orange dress...
...Neither the lieutenant nor the chief had a clue...
...A small boy's voice said, "Dad, that policeman doesn't have a gun...
...A tourist came over and handed me my badge...
...He threatened to arrest Pledge unless he signed the notice and they were packed and gone in three hours...
...I went into a men's room, changed to a shirt and bathing suit, and headed out by the pool...
...The screw that secured it to my belt had snapped...
...Everett was so bombed he fell down after every swing...
...I called my friend Ed Crawford...
...I'd help get him hired...
...The three of us ended up rolling around on the wooden boardwalk in a pinwheel of flailing arms and legs, collecting splinters and cuts from loose nails...
...45 Lt...
...It was Pledge Knowles, one of my house mates...
...Or maybe they just needed a job...
...But, this is just for the summer...
...HE'S LIKE LBJ'S ADO PTED SON...
...For example, the only safe way to wake Ed in the morning was at a distance, preferably by throwing something at him...
...0 ne Friday night a boy came running up to me on the boardwalk...
...He was also menacingly strong...
...I turned, aimed at the glass, and fired...
...Would I rather be a waiter...
...The judge had told him I had thrown my badge and was "a goddamned grandstander...
...Cop" was a natural...
...Ed ripped the top off a can of baby talcum and dumped in the powder...
...Her husband (a Rhode Island state senator and on-fire New Deal liberal) was much less forgiving in his judgments...
...Is a little crawling that hard to do...
...We made him dress and carry his leaking suitcase with his good arm, all the 47 way down three flights of fire escape stairs to his car, a new DeSoto...
...Pills, mostly amphetamines, but also downers like Seconal and Nembutal, were becoming common...
...She liked crime stories and hated her job...
...I didn't take time to stare...
...I handed the gun and holster to a man I recognized as the manager of the hotel and asked him to hold it...
...She was rattled...
...Wes turned under the streetlight, stopped and gave them the finger...
...I saw a flash of bright yellow in the spray and recognized the oars...
...There was some truth to the charge so it stung...
...Looking for dolphins," he once told me when I asked what he did out there every morning...
...I was leaning against a store front talking to three girls from McLean High School when there was a loud bang from the tight middle of the crowd...
...As he walked around, his enormous German police dog "Edsel" was practically joined to his hip...
...One of the first things I did as a newly sworn member of the Ocean City Police Department was take a look at the concrete wall in the far corner of one of the four cells in the back of the station house...
...Pledge said that Bonnie Winters, a friend of ours who lived on the floor below us, had been propositioned by a guy...
...This movable raid, which we would engage in for an hour or two around midnight of the overnight shift, was designed solely to inhibit fornication and drinking on the vast stretch of beach and dunes...
...Someone, Pledge probably, had knocked down our beer can display and we hadn't yet gotten around to rebuilding it...
...His relationship with Bonnie was platonic, his love unrequited...
...I was bike-riding one morning with a girl from a college in Virginia named (with some irony, I thought) Southern Seminary, when the crabs hit the fan...
...Ed rose from the bed so fast even Edsel was intimidated...
...He said no...
...The judge yelled at me...
...I was on the 3 to 11 p.m...
...He literally fell out of the window, landing on his back...
...They were all unlocked so we didn't know which one...
...He was friendly and nice looking...
...The Johnsons wandered out about an hour later and drove away...
...I felt good...
...The room was boarded up from the lobby, and entrance was through a window from the porch...
...We made her dress and leave...
...The chief signed me up, handed me a copy of local misdemeanor ordinances and Maryland state law, and told me to learn them...
...He was his usual taciturn but sympathetic self...
...The guy had probably come through an unlocked window...
...detective who had been hired in the wake of the Labor Day riots of 196o...
...I grabbed Moser's tattooed forearm about half way to his elbow with the Claw, the pincers barely made it around, but it was enough...
...I called Cassie Mackin...
...He squeezed out all of Moser's toothpaste, sprayed a can of shaving cream into the mess, poured in two half-empty beer bottles, and walked around emptying ashtrays and then the wastebasket too...
...It belonged to a separate bedroom with its own outside entrance...
...He was in his early forties, very fit looking, dark hair...
...Ed and I failed to hook up a number of times...
...And Ed could say he resigned...
...Seize a wrist bone with them, or a forearm (or even a throat, as a cop I knew once did), ratchet the pincers closed with a light flick of the wrist, and Hulk Hogan would be on his knees in one second...
...She was treading water and was tired...
...And the good thing is, chief, he's polite, and good-natured...
...T he beach highway to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, was through a mostly uninterrupted swath of deserted, grassy sand dunes...
...It was early in the summer and I hadn't yet acquired sufficient experiential aggression...
...The chief had already heard about the clash...
...One of them yelled at Wes who was walking up the beach...
...She was from Hagerstown, Maryland, and chattered a lot about her horse, who had the Freudian handle of "Dagger," and who she seemed to miss greatly...
...I thought being a cop would help me psyche people out, license me as a kind of pragmatic shrink to analyze the orb's patients up close...
...He began throwing clothes from the closet and bureau into it...
...Eff Off" had to sit doubled over with his wrist near the floor...
...The lieutenant found Pledge and Rufus sleeping in a bedroom...
...I laid the groundwork with the chief for Ed's employment...
...Well," I said, "it's always been a choice of one or the other—or the priesthood...
...R-Bob" was short for Rowing Bob...
...and Mrs...
...I was amazed by the pomp...
...I've never even heard of his job...
...Edsel let go just as quickly when one of Ed's flailing fists caught him like a jack-hammer on the top of his head...
...I just haven't been invited, and I'll be stuck on the periphery...
...She'd spent the previous year, after college, as a police reporter covering murders, shootings, rapes, arson, and general mayhem in Baltimore...
...Self-Righteous...
...He was obviously leaving...
...All winter in college I nourished the idea of coming back the next summer and signing up...
...Both had been up all night...
...I thought she was drunk but her eyes were too unfocused and weird...
...This drew quite a bit of blood, frightening him, and enabling me to get him cuffed...
...Vice President Lyndon Johnson would be there, she said...
...Allen fired Ed...
...The caterer, from a Capitol Hill bistro by the name of "The Place Where Louie Dwells" had invited us in for snacks in a room next to the kitchen...
...Rolled out flat, I could see he was tall and skinny...
...She agreed with him...
...The trick would be to arrange it so that Ed and I were never on the same shift at the same time, since one of us would be without a firearm...
...This was inhabited by a very tanned, broad- faced fellow in his 3o's named R-Bob, who ran a beach stand renting surf mats and umbrellas and was similarly employed in Fort Lauderdale in the winter...
...The man was trying desperately to pull free...
...I got him some coffee and sent him to the police barracks to take a shower...
...The American Spectator • August 1997 I was having trouble finding a vantage point outside to watch from...
...At 2 a.m...
...I was feeling vengeful...
...I was flattered and so I shut up...
...I set it high...
...What happened...
...The chief had briefed us that morning...
...Decaying crabs have a particularly vile, repellent odor...
...Of course, this kindness offered a useful justification to a cop for confiscating booze, taking it home, and drinking it himself...
...The thought had not yet occurred that we lived there, although at some point it finally did...
...He did sound quite convincing, however...
...Moser couldn't move his left arm...
...I walked down the side street away from the boardwalk...
...I thought I'd shot myself...
...Cassie would be covering it for her paper and had press ducats for two...
...Sometimes the lieutenant would ask me to walk Edsel on the beach at sunrise...
...I said, and changed the subject...
...Really...
...She said, "Dickie, you were such a little hoodlum...
...I was gratified to see that my initials, scratched in the year before with a ball-point pen, were still there...
...Jim Jarman got a German police dog later in the summer named "Rex...
...0 n Friday of Labor Day weekend, with posters announcing the "3rd Annual Riot" tacked all over town, a crowd of beer-guzzling teenagers gathered at 9th Street and Boardwalk...
...Some were carrying champagne bottles...
...They said Moser had an arrest for burglary in the fifties but no convictions they could find...
...She missed it...
...Allen had asked me to be part of the town's idea of an honor guard and stand by the entrance to the Carousel when the Vice President and dignitaries arrived...
...Ed claimed that in high school he accidentally knocked out his mother when she tried to shake him in the morning...
...I knew this because I had spent a night on the floor of the Ocean City jail the previous Labor Day weekend in the stumbling wake of the "2nd Annual Ocean City Riot," a gathering in which I was peripherally involved...
...I never liked that boy Ed much anyway, though I know he was a friend of yours," he said that night...
...Cassie and I helped R-Bob pull his old boat up on the sand...
...LBJ and Mrs...
...Mrs...
...Candyce, who had considerable wit, got up and read a poem she'd written about Edsel and Ed and Lt...
...The public has never heard of him, she said...
...He owns this place...
...He's like LBJ's adopted son...
...He wasn't scheduled for work until three...
...The first time it happened, Ed was on the 3 to and I was working the overnight...
...The night before, I'd been so adrenalized by my scuffle with the Owing Mills couple that I forgot my gun...
...Betting and drinking games would revolve around each race and considerable tumult would be generated...
...This derived from his practice of laboring an ancient, unpainted rowboat through the surf every morning using oars he'd made from tent poles to which he had wired yellow traffic signs...
...The woman shook free, and watched the man reeling backwards, holding his bleeding nose...
...She kissed him back...
...To a once rebellious, pretentiously literate former teenager like me, being a policeman was irony tasty enough to bring home to feed Mama...
...The judge will accept an apology...
...The boy was strapping but punky, like a freshman football player...
...It was owned by a friend of mine's father, who put me up in the empty dining room, which was closed for the summer...
...She couldn't remember...
...She showed us an ID...
...Many crabs made their mark...
...The man immediately wimped out...
...We are talking the Morality Police...
...She checked the paper's morgue back in Baltimore, but they had nothing on Moser...
...0 cean City boosted the size of its police force from a dozen or so in winter to forty-five in summer...
...Neighbors thought we were in there "laying down the law," and responding to their calls...
...Although we had a shift-schedule for their use, I would often have to grab some sleep in the police barracks, where I kept a bunk and a locker...
...I was on duty, it was late, and I wanted to get back to my post in case the lieutenant came by checking on me...
...I sat on the bed and woke them up...
...THAT'S BOBBY BAKER, SHE SAID...
...I could see Bonnie's friend's window across the alley...
...The door opened and a muscular guy in his early forties stepped through with eyes as weird as hers...
...I leaped from the roof and landed much harder than I expected...
...The mayor told me a city policeman might be living there...
...Pledge was a dinner waiter at Josie and Maria's at Oh and Philadelphia...
...Leave them alone...
...We were keen to arrest Moser for statutory rape...
...The next day Ed went home to New Hampshire...
...There was a lot of drinking out of paper bags...
...This was an iron device a little like one handcuff...
...Maybe she's 18, I thought...
...The woman was unclear about what caused the right...
...Good guy...
...The mayor called our landlord in Virginia Beach and asked him to give the renters the boot...
...I stopped by the front desk and learned the fellow's name was Wes Moser...
...I told him to take the bus down to Ocean City if he was interested...
...I liked him immediately...
...Pledge was very upset...
...He was 41 years old...
...It was widely believed that Judge Robins would impose the death penalty for public urination if he could...
...No Hobson's Choice, that...
...He said it was a fun job...
...He was a hefty, friendly, dark-haired, 52-year-old former Baltimore P.D...
...Jones had always liked me, even during my most ill-behaved period...
...I'd sat on the same bench many times just before sunup listening to the ocean and fantasizing about how many gumballs I could blow out on the sand with one bullet...
...Amy pulled loose and ran out onto the sand and up the steps...
...Topper Jones, the mother of my closest boyhood friend...
...I crashed onto my knees and elbows...
...Two or three people were sleeping in the living room amidst a very large rubble heap of beer cans...
...He and his friends would bet on this, the object being to pitch your crab into one of the hotel's ground floor light wells...
...On the edge of the boardwalk, across from the motel, was a green wooden bench...
...He was a city councilman...
...I stood up and asked the judge if I could say something...
...Some of the more exaggerated complaints had been piling up on the mayor's desk...
...It was dark...
...A couple of cop friends, who knew we lived in the house, usually headed off trouble by answering the calls themselves and then staying for a beer...
...When he wouldn't let go I punched him in the face, drawing a little blood from his nose...
...There are going to be a lot of hookers there...
...Lights began to flick on in the motel...
...One day Amy told me about a problem she'd had the night before...
...I missed...
...She was laughing...
...LOOKING FOR DOLPHINS,- HE ONCE TOLD ME WHEN I ASKED WHAT HE DID OUT THERE EVERY MORNING...
...People who saw it told me they thought he'd been decapitated...
...I desperately crashed through the crowd, retrieving it from against a wall...
...He was aloof and distracted, pining for the lieutenant presumably...
...Rufus Bing, another house mate and a bouncer there, said he thought Pledge was dead...
...She and I talked for a few minutes...
...I walked through the alley...
...I listened to the ocean at my back...
...The lieutenant drove Ed and Edsel for treatment...
...We watched Wesley Moser drive towards the bridge and back to Baltimore, just like in a movie...
...42 August 1997 The American Spectator tattoos on his arms, and had something large and more complicated tattooed on his chest, which later turned out to be a bull-dog...
...It was Rowing Bob...
...In the afternoons, carrying a huge window screen from the hotel, he would sift the sand for coins and other goodies...
...A good question, Madam," I said...
...Even when she yelled he wouldn't let go...
...The boardwalk was deserted and heavy with ocean mist...
...The next summer, age 22, he became a general assignment reporter for UPI in San Francisco...
...A teenage boy about a dozen feet to the side of me, and wearing cutoff Levi's and a great deal of acne, threw a full Coke can at the lieutenant...
...Pay dirt, as they say...
...I moved closer...
...She deflated like a balloon...
...I was on foot patrol and wandered through the crowd...
...Everybody else was treated like a potential meal...
...She came back with me to the Sea Scape to get my six-shooter from the manager...
...Allen had decided to raid our house...
...Bonnie walked away and locked herself in the ladies room...
...It was to this area that Jim Jarman and I were sometimes assigned to patrol at night in a dune-buggy...
...I t was our rented house, inhabited by six women and five men, and sometimes as many as loo of their friends, that was at the root of Ed's demise...
...He had not but he had rented mats to some Silver Spring, Maryland girls a few weeks before...
...He didn't take a bribe...
...We had a little farewell at the Beach Club...
...HE WAS CHAIN-SMOKING BY THE SANDY ROAD AND TALKING TO THE OCEAN CITY MAYOR...
...The woman swam too yards out past the breakers and couldn't seem to get back...
...They'd heard about the dust-up...
...We didn't bother to knock...
...It hit their feet and bounced into a forest of legs...
...It landed short by a foot, bounced and spewed into the air...
...The strongest of them was that I wanted to be a writer...
...The lieutenant came back with my badge...
...We would race up a dune with our buggy lights out, flicking them on when we hit the top and were pointing down the opposite slope...
...The explosion from the horse-pistol in the stillness was a remarkable thing...
...Sent off on my beat, I began walking up Baltimore Street to find Ed and our revolver...
...They had a bad case of bed-head and his nose was swollen...
...The vet pronounced recovery with bed rest and some light duty...
...A congressman named "Fats" Everett of Tennessee was playing against Senator Gale McGee of Wyoming...
...She took the beer, chatted with him for a while, and he kissed her...
...Okay, I said, I'll give it to him...
...I woke Moser up by opening a beer bottle and pouring it over his head...
...You can't stay here, she said...
...I dropped the badge on the floor with my ruined shirt and walked out...
...The mayor and city council wanted him to recruit younger policemen with hopes they would "get along better" with vacationing college students than the local men traditionally hired as constables every summer...
...He was having difficulty focusing his eyes, but his face was very red and I knew he was going to swing at me...
...We handcuffed the two of them to a chain that secured an "AmVets" gum-ball machine to a bench on the boardwalk...
...When she came out he was gone...
...I cannot believe you are a policeman...
...It wasn't even the Hilton...
...Cassie listened to Lt...
...Wes was staying alone, and other than having an eye for the ladies, said the clerk, he was no trouble, a valued customer...
...He told me to sit back down...
...N ear the end of the summer, Cassie asked me if I wanted to go to a good party...
...It was a delicious violation of his civil liberties, even in 1962...
...When he came back, wearing a pair of clean shorts he'd taken from my locker, we sat in the lieutenant's empty office and he told me a story...
...The chief told me to hide and catch him...
...We were disapThe American Spectator • August 1997 pointed she wasn't a juvenile...
...Ed grabbed me when the lieutenant went out the door...
...The lieutenant told me that was when he recognized him...
...The American Spectator • August 1997 Ed was hired...
...Where's our gun, he said, you didn't give it to me...
...Johnson drove up in a limousine...
...There was definitely a lot going on up there...
...As she put his bill down, he grabbed her fingers...
...He looked familiar, she thought it might be the man from the window, but she wasn't certain...
...She was very disoriented...
...Follow me," he said...
...Thursday nights, when Ed and I were off duty, were always the most egregious and the most damaging to the house's public image...
...The cop who had locked me up was a high school history teacher in Delaware during the winter...
...He wouldn't talk to me other than to say "eff off repeatedly...
...Another cop, Dick Schwartz, came running up...
...The lieutenant then drove Ed to the doctor where he was treated for puncture wounds of the thigh...
...The chief said he didn't want me to...
...The cell, which they shared with two other people, was 5 feet wide, 6 feet long and 7 feet high...
...He just doesn't like to be pushed around, if you know what I mean...
...I watched him take her back to a room...
...I was lying on the roof right over his head when he crept up, opened a window, and began to climb through...
...M ost O.C...
...I could rent a small house for almost nothing, shoot ducks in the fall, and try and write a book...
...I turned down the chief's offer, but agreed to stay on for another week...
...Some bottles bounced off the front of a store and a lucky toss brought down the globe on a street light...
...I walked to the Sea Scape Motel...
...The job paid $6o a week and a free bunk in the police barracks next to City Hall, if you wanted it...
...RICHARD W. CARLSON, former director of the Voice ofAmerica and president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is president of KingWo rld Public Television of New York and Los Angeles...
...for the summer lived on the first floor...
...I caught him on the chest by a handful of tank top...
...Ed was zonked out in the other bedroom...
...She said, "I think it had something to do with food...
...Bonnie was asleep in the bed she shared with another waitress, a lissome junior at the University of Maryland...
...He was drinking a beer and offered her one...
...She screamed and knocked my feet out from under me...
...What is this all about, I asked...
...This was a four-story woodenlabyrinth of weathered shingles with white trim, built in the early twenties or before, with a long veranda facing the ocean...
...A soft drink was a dime...
...Ed and I had devised a kind of Potemkin Pistol — a blackened knob of wood vaguely resembling a gun butt, for use if we missed each other at shift change...
...He was fast becoming very upset...
...He then assigned me for a few days of orientation to a regular police officer, Jim Jar40 August 1997 The American Spectator man...
...R-Bob played his homemade ukulele in a credible imitation of Arthur Godfrey...
...The sound of wheels thumping over wet boards appealed...
...I was sitting with my shirt rolled in a ball on my knee...
...Aaah, and he's staying at the Plimhimmon Hotel, I said...
...The American Spectator • August 1997 C assie was packing boxes in her apartment when I stopped by...
...I used to think that the rear springs wouldn't handle much more of this abuse...
...Allen with Edsel straining on a lead, antediluvian teeth flashing and throwing off spit, moved into the crowd, scattering panicky kids down the boardwalk...
...I worked the overnight...
...The next day, after he cut me loose, I sat in the morning sun outside the jail pampering my hangover and chatting him up...
...The huge pile of trash, with a sleeping man and two women at its perimeter, admittedly gave a strong, albeit false, impression of great degeneracy...
...He was grandfatherly in appearance with a thatch of white hair and a pink face...
...Pledge had run into Bonnie at the Beach Club before he ran into the window...
...Moser was not totally subdued...
...In this case, Pledge had been arrested and was being held on bond for crashing through a plate glass window at a boardwalk bar and dance spot called the Beach Club...
...People began rushing in different directions and a number of kids were knocked down...
...Ed was very short, but tough as a carbuncle, and just as touchy...
...I was transfixed by this indefati48 August 1997 • The American Spectator gable fellow when Cassie pointed down the beach and said, look at this...
...I climbed up on the roof...
...He handed her a $3 tip and said, 'We saw each other today...
...That night Ed got off duty at II while I went on...
...The vehicles were crammed with senators, congressmen, lobbyists, Hill staffers, and a remarkable number of women whose youth and good looks distinguished them from the rest of the disembarking crowd...
...The chief did know, although I didn't tell him how much Ed hated being bullied...
...Two hours later she had been waiting on tables at the English Diner...
...Jarman and I broke it up regularly...
...After the girl dressed, and was in the buggy, I went and buried the guy's clothes in the sand, including his wallet...
...If they were there he'd hidden them well...
...Maybe she's his girlfriend, even his wife...
...he was always cooking at about zoo degrees...
...I liked the idea of driving a police car alone down the long, wooden boardwalk...
...A pile of odoriferous dead crabs had been piled on the balcony for that night's pitching competition and the doors were open...
...Senator Cannon of Nevada and Senator Smathers of Florida were two of them...
...I locked them up overnight...
...I asked him if he had ever heard of Moser...
...The man I'd arrested was a prominent fellow, an appointed state commissioner, the lieutenant said...
...I CONFISCATED ENOUGH BEER THAT SUMMER TO OPEN A SALOON...
...Ed pulled Moser's clunky Samsonite suitcase down from a closet...
...He beamed at Moser, who was sitting on his knees, the veins on his neck pushing against his skin like little fire hoses...
...After an hour of walking around feeling conspicuous, and fearful the fellow would get in through the back when I was watching the front, I had a police epiphany...
...I needed some future book blurbs of my own...
...she asked...
...Although we asked him not to, Pledge invariably compounded their ire by winging dead crabs off the balcony...
...Also, the fact was that I had read too many Nelson Algren and James Jones novels, and had become impressed by jacket blurbs listing colorful and in-congruous descriptions of the author's past, like "rodeo rider, short-order cook, private eye, merchant seaman, hobo...
...It has been outlawed as inhumane for years...
...she said...
...The complainants were getting more annoyed and more persistent...
...Ed sat down on the bed...
...Jarman took me to a gun shop where I bought a used, chrome-plated .38 caliber revolver with white plastic grips embossed with the heads of long-homed steers...
...It was about ii a.m...
...Crouching there I could see all sides of the house...
...A final motive: I had already developed the writer's infatuation with irony...
...Kids were dancing to a portable radio...
...Twisting it lightly would close two iron pincers...
...I like you...
...Why don't you have a drink with me...
...His wife is a member of the Junior League or the Garden Club or something like that...
...The ribbon had writing on it, probably death before dishonor...
...She ran out and grabbed my hands...
...I brought my ripped shirt and broken watch with me...
...I don't want you to arrest anybody unless you see them commit murder...
...I felt like I'd been trapped by an octopus," she said...
...To hear cops on TV shows like "America's Most Wanted" tell it, they all joined the force because they wanted to "give something back to the community" or because police work is "about helping people...
...Her friend suddenly jumped up...
...He grinned, waved and pointed to his genitals...
...Both Ed and I had bunks in the police barracks, so they assumed we lived there...
...I confiscated enough beer that summer to open a saloon...
...HE LO 46 August r997 • The American Spectator Edsel growled and put his nose near Ed's face just as Lt...
...After ten minutes of yelling to her I took off my uniform and gear and swam out to her...
...One of them said a man had tried to rape her after she went with him on the beach at night...
...Public Transit bus...
...Some names in this article have been changed for reasons of privacy...
...Candyce suddenly tuned in, sat up, looked at the tableau, and became hysterical...
...Cassie Mackin from the Baltimore News-Post and Ed, who was in uniform, came over to our table...
...IN FACT, OUR RENTAL HOUSE BEGAN TO LOOK LIKE A STATE LIQUOR STORE...
...He was chain-smoking by the sandy road and talking to the Ocean City mayor...
...Rex was as wary of Edsel as I was...
...I had a friend from Sweet Briar College named Amy who ran a crab-cake stand...
...at least for that moment before he sunk his large teeth into Ed's naked groin...
...Disturbing Ed in bed was dangerous, particularly if he had been drinking the night before...
...HE WAS A PILLHEAD, AND HE WAS OLD ER THAN OKED...
...The woman, who had long red hair and was attractive, was holding the man's shirt with her left hand and doggedly hitting him in the face with her right...
...The mayor and council just hated the idea that young people might be making out in the dunes...
...Happy, heavy-drinking guests were splashing in the heated pool, and playing touch football on the beach...
...She was also kicking him...
...Of course, any shooting would have to be done without Ed as he was leaving town, and leaving gunless to boot...
...Moser climbed out of bed with his fists balled...
...Amy fed me free every afternoon...
...People were friendly...
...Amy was short, naïve, and cute...
...I had a fold-up cot...
...The possibility of embarrassment kept me from knocking on his door...
...We did this one night and so badly frightened a couple that the girl, in only her underpants, ran down the beach and into the surf...
...It was so close to my face I had a burn on my right ear...
...They'll pay you to have an interesting day every day...
...The man and woman were brought into court with six or seven other prisoners...
...I couldn't separate them...
...Go to a city, get a job on a paper, become a reporter...
...It was a family...
...Pledge had been doing the twist, leaned back on one foot, and fell backwards through the window...
...One day as I drove with Lt...
...That's Bobby Baker, she said...
...The summer is over...
...I called the state police barracks...
...R-Bob thought the girls had gone home...
...With Edsel backing him up with threatening sounds, and after checking ID's, he ordered everybody out...
...She said it looked like a woman...
...Her boyfriend had driven off, and left her behind...
...She told R-Bob the man was muscular and tattooed...
...It really hurt...
...r he pair was married and lived in leafy Owings Mills, Maryland...
...The big chrome revolver skidded across the boardwalk toward the dancing couple...
...She certainly didn't seem afraid of him...
...He took her by the arm and led her down the hall...
...Ed leaped in at me...
...Jones, at least, was apparently no longer holding that against me...
...It wouldn't occur to him that I didn't have a gun...
...Worried that the chief would think Ed looked too...abbreviated, I stressed his brute strength and success in saloon disputes...
...The man was a realtor in Baltimore...
...He was a printer from Baltimore...
...I wrote Moser's name and home address in my note book...
...The judge looked, and then listened politely to my story...
...Chained to it was the AmVets' gumball machine, perched on an iron stand...
...I spent my first week in town at the Shoreham Hotel at 4th Street and Boardwalk...
...Get out, he ordered...
...Pledge had a way of making me feel I was competing with him for empathetic intensity...
...For sure, she said...
...How did you know that...
...Marijuana and cocaine had yet to catch on with white kids, at least on the Eastern Shore...
...Wesley Moser wasn't the only pillhead I met that summer...
...Joyce Brothers...
...Bring a bathing suit, she said...
...This was not such a big deal...
...I loved dogs, but Edsel made me nervous...
...Lieutenant Ira Allen always held an inspection at the beginning of our shift...
...Two boys picked up a wire trash can and threw it at a store window about twenty feet away...
...Moser wasn't there...
...Six college girls working in O.C...
...The girl said she met Moser at the amusement park at the end of town...
...A fried crab-cake the size of a hamburger patty, on a bun with lettuce and tomato, was 500...
...Cassie looked at me...
...Allen gave Ed's exposed shoulder a solid shove with his foot...
...Two hundred fifty or more people passed me after greeting Bobby Baker and the locals...
...It was a busy night and some tourists fell in behind me...
...I went to his chambers before court...
...Cassie was a reporter for the Hearst paper in Baltimore, covering "Shore Society" for the summer...
...In a bedroom, a sleeping bag and a tangle of clothes were rolled in a corner...
...I let Pledge out of the cell...
...Ed was going through his bureau drawers looking for pills or whatever he might find...
...Bonnie got up and looked...
...The problem's name was "Wes...
...This activity instigated the most irritated complaints...
...Hundreds of gumballs, many of them powdered or in pieces, flew into the air and out over the sand...
...I thought she couldn't breathe, although she was successfully kicking him in the shins...
...We woke the girl up and talked to her while Moser slept on...
...This wasn't the Carlyle Hotel...
...I released the pressure and made him get up...
...I tried to figure out who the hookers were...
...I said I didn't know...
...At the end of May, Ed and I had joined some friends—Rufus Bing and "Pledge" Knowles— in renting the second floor of a wood-frame house in an alley off znd Street, a half block from the beach...
...In thinking about it I can see why he didn't much care for me...
...He had been very offensive to her...
...He was lying on his back, inert in a large pool of glass shards...
...The sergeant said we cops could head back to town or go in to eat...
...She pointed to a dark-haired fellow...
...Neighbors, and the owner of a hotel whose back rooms looked down on our balcony, were always calling the cops about the noise and occasional all-night parties...
...Cassie and I were close friends...
...shift when Chief Phillips told me to get out of my uniform and into plainclothes...
...I turned the lights on in the small room, which had a sink, but no shower or toilet...
...The boy, a high school student from Falls Church, Virginia, was locked up overnight with forty-seven other people, mostly teenagers...
...I could see a crowd forming in the distance as we approached...
...AN ENTIRE WALL HELD ROW UPON ROW OF EMPTY CANS, SOME 500 BY MID-JULY...
...He had just arrived back at his parents' home in New Hampshire from college...
...They had been celebrating high school graduation...
...The father said, "Well, son, maybe they don't trust him...
...You got porked, boy," he said...
...He was in pants, no shirt, and bare feet...
...R-Bob was conventionally clean-shaven but nurtured a thick patch of hair on each cheekbone, making him look much like the Cowardly Lion...
...The house, whose owner lived in Virginia, was so crowded and so busy with constant partying and heavy drinking that beds on both floors were at a premium...
...Two old men walking above on the boardwalk stopped and yelled through the boards...
...He lived in the old Plimhimmon Hotel on znd Street for a month every summer and spent his time seducing teenage girls...
...They were well dressed and in their forties...
...We ambled on down to the Plimhimmon Hotel...
...The other fellow thought I'd shot him...
...The council was right in its suspicions about the dunes to the north...
...I put the barrel four inches from the glass and fired again...
...The husband smirked as he passed...
...And I did...
...I dropped the cuff and hit him on the head hard with my ash nightstick, the only person to be so struck by me the entire summer...
...41 R-Bon WOULD ROW ARDUOUSLY ABOUT FOR AN HOUR OR TWO, A QUARTER MILE FROM SHORE...
...A number of politicians, many of whom are dorks at their core, were done up for the occasion, sporting matched sets of shorts and shirts in bright floral colors, as well as black ankle socks and black shoes as counterpoint to their white legs...
...When I unlocked the crowded cell, a fellow in the shadows came to the bars...
...A woman in a bathrobe leaned down from a window...
...The man and woman joined their lawyer and began heading out of court...
...Edsel ignored her, as did Ed and Lt...
...My God, Topper, it's Dickie...
...Not the name I preferred, but a dreaded childhood handle: "Dickie, Dickie Carlson...
...Wes" had pulled her bra down under her shirt, and it was hanging around her waist...
...I was afraid she would struggle but she didn't I helped her back in through the surf...
...Ignore everything else...
...That's silly...
...They would be screaming crude non sequiturs like "Come on Vulva" and "Go Scrotum...
...This couple, I thought, is in for a rough ride...
...Around so p.m...
...Allen never knew I lived in the house he raided...
...He was trembling so badly I could hardly get the handcuffs on him...
...Suddenly, his head snaked forward and he bit me on the shoulder, right through my shirt...
...The lieutenant and Edsel walked over to the bed...
...They wanted to be cops so they could be paid to be adrenalized...
...Chief Phillips walked onto the boardwalk with a bullhorn and declared an emergency curfew...
...In fact, between Ed and me our rental house had begun to look like a state liquor store...
...She came over to my house the next evening for a party...
...They were followed by a long string of limousines and seven chartered buses, one of them with a band, all of them with a bar aboard...
...I shouted at him loudly, probably something dramatic like "Halt...
...He didn't know their names...
...They heard that in Rehoboth Beach, I thought...
...The judge was talking...
...tifi Postscript: Dick Carlson, with Catherine Mackin's help, was hired as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Times a few months after he left Ocean City...
...I found Cassie at an enormous buffet table, a literal groaning board...
...Jim was a local boy from Worcester County, about 24, married and living in nearby Berlin...
...It was a four-story motel and it was kind of garish...
...I went to the window...
...She was wearing a dress, he had on a sports jacket...
...I thought you might be a criminal by now...
...I talked to the beach boy R-Bob, at his boardwalk and 4th Street stand the next day...
...44 August 1997 • The American Spectator This was my beat at the time...
...He jumped up and started running for the fence...
...There was little concern for physical security in those days...
...Ed was humming a song called "Alley Oop" and looked immensely satisfied...
...Just in case, I hung an arm over my holster as he walked by...
...It had a short iron bar as a handle...
...Since I was going to ride in the front, and because there was no protective screen between front and back, I handcuffed each of them by one hand to the seat belt loops on the floor in front of them...
...I don't think he'd known where I was but he did now...
...The emphasis was on school teachers and third-year law students...
...0 ne morning about 2 a.m., I walked a prisoner into the jail...
...I asked Captain Hudson, who was sitting next to me, what he thought happened...
...He was looking right at me...
...His wife told me that...
...I leaped to my feet and pulled my horse pistol from the waistband of my shorts...
...In the morning, court was held on the second floor of city hall, over the police department, Judge James B. Robins presiding...
...I don't mean politicians, I mean prostitutes...
...Edsel had prehistorically large teeth, like an alligator...
...He dumped all of Moser's toiletries in, taking the time to empty bottles of mouthwash, shampoo, aftershave lotion, and a full bottle of Vaseline Hair Tonic into the jumble of clothes...
...The doctor said Edsel missed canceling a future line of Crawfords by millimeters," claimed Ed...
...Ed had it jammed in his holster like a painted potato...
...The tattoo on his chest was of a bulldog with a ribbon around his neck and a flag behind him...
...A flight bag in a closet had more clothes and a paper bag with two or three hundred Dexedrine capsules...
...I twisted it...
...She never really got over it, said Ed, who still felt guilty...
...He looked sympathetic, as if we were brothers in our humiliation...
...Allen offered to go talk to the judge...
...One night during my first week on the job, as I strolled the crowded boardwalk done up in my new cop's outfit, practicing nightstick twirls for the amusement of passers-by, someone shouted my name from a restaurant door...
...Cassie was a couple of years older than me, a thin, pretty blonde with freckles and a Catholic girl's school upbringing...
...On the way back into town Lt...
...The lieutenant said I should grow up...
...Two dozen Ocean City Chamber of Commerce members had gathered with the mayor and council and a scraggly bunch of reporters near the motel entrance to await the motorcade from Washington...
...She was 19, visiting from Timonium, Maryland, working in a beauty parlor there...
...I tried to pry his arms loose...
...He said he was there to crash the party, get some dinner, and meet some girls...
...Could there be a more interesting summer job, she said...
...But he offered a deal...
...Jones was when Topper Junior and I had been arrested for buying booze—and for stealing the car in which we were caught drinking...
...I'd never heard of him either, I said...
...On a postcard from Lake Winnipesaukee he said he'd gotten a job running a snow-cone stand...
...The clerk said he had to go back to Baltimore for some reason...
...There was a naked man in the window of the hotel next door, she said...
...It was about u feet across the alley...
...The judge would get all narrow-eyed on the bench if he didn't like the defendants, as if he were a judge at Nuremberg and had just learned what the Third Reich had really been up to...
...The American Spectator • August 1997 A lifetime of judicial fascism and Judge Robins picks this very moment to become a liberal...
...He had fallen on the ground by the fence...
...He saw me coming at him and turned to run...
...Sometimes, Carlson, you are such a phony...
...When the judge called their case a man in his fifties stood up...
...He had also left his clothes, a blanket and a six pack of beer...
...She wouldn't admit being the one who pulled him away from the window when Bonnie was watching...
...I stared at the gumball machine...
...He wouldn't tell the story unless Ed did...
...He kept holding up various discoveries, laughing and doing a commentary on Moser's bikini underwear, his porno-picture collection with himself featured in some of the shots, and his assemblage of imaginative sex devices...
...Moser's arm was looking awfully white below the Claw...
...This four-hour-a-day job supplied him daily contact with waitresses his age, excellent tips, one free meal every afternoon, and all the uneaten steak, sourdough rolls, asparagus spears, crab cakes, blobs of flan, and other barely nibbled 43 upon food he could grab off plates being bussed into the kitchen, wolfing it down on the spot, or dropping it into a doggie bag for later...
...I took off my badge and held it out...
...011ie Hudson had more than a passing acquaintanceship with porking, as he had been chief until the mayor demoted him and hired Jack Phillips...
...I realized then he was probably the guy who grabbed Amy two weeks before...
...I could hear a siren coming up Baltimore Avenue towards the Sea Scape...
...Reports of a gunshot were bringing police reinforcements...
...It was a rowboat coming through the surf towards the beach...
...I walked over and sat down...
...At inspection we would line up in the city hall parking lot, and the lieutenant would brief us and walk around...
...He was exceedingly drunk and had knocked himself out when his head hit the window...
...He had taken a bite out of Jim Jarman once, apparently just as a warning...
...As I was running towards them I felt my gun and holster fly right off my hip...
...Now Ed was really tossing the room...
...A regular stream of complaints about the house had been flowing into the police department...
...They looked like two people who'd spent the night riding a Trailways bus...
...The chief had asked me to stay on through the winter...
...My feelings were a little hurt, but I had been working to perfect the cynical and semi-clever riposte as a good defense...
...t. Allen and Edsel caught up with me at City Lunch where I'd gone to cool off...
...It was directed at John Knowles, a.k.a...
...He sat up in bed...
...She asked me what I was going to do...
...The next day I said good-bye to Chief Phillips, to my friend Lt...
...He squeezed Moser's nose between thumb and forefinger and twisted it half way around his face...
...After I'd unhitched the man from the gumball machine, he'd become more belligerent, and I had a difficult time loading him and his wife into the back of the police car that had come to haul them to jail...
...They are friendly with Governor Tawes...
...I quit, I said...
...A man at a table greeted her when she served him...
...Bonnie said before she went back to work that afternoon, she she was at another girl's apartment, a block from our house...
...Ed joined me...
...Pledge's personal habits left much to be desired but he was a generous fellow and brought home many a heavy doggie bag to share with his doggy house mates...
...One said "Ped Xing...
...Pledge was in love with Bonnie, a senior at Goucher College in Baltimore, and a waitress at the English Diner...
...He sported heart and dagger-style AS A KEY TO POLICE THINKING YOU SHOULD KNOW "THE CLAW" WAS ONCE QUITE POPULAR WITH DEPARTMENTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY...
...He gave me a hard look on his way out...
...A defense lawyer at the magistrate's court wasn't that common...
...Beer was running through his hair...
...We gave her a ride back into town...
...He gave me a badge, number 76...
...I planned to wait inside but the owner didn't want me to...
...I didn't turn around...
...R-Bob would row arduously about for an hour or two, a quarter mile from shore...
...So what...
...I remember the back bumper of our police car scraping busily across the asphalt as we drove into the city parking lot carrying more beer in the trunk than the Budweiser salesman...
...The Carousel's interior was done in various shades of lavender...
...I had left the party to change into my uniform and go on duty...
...This was not a happy experience, particularly for the man, and it took a little physical wrangling...
...The owner met us there...
...This was considered an occupational perk...
...One was Moser, snoring deeply, the other was a young, very plump girl with long brown hair...
...She took his order, served his food, and tried to avoid looking at him...
...It was my prerogative to set their bail...
...I went and got my gym bag from the car...
...He'd rowed all the way from 4th Street, a long haul...
...Would you know this guy if you saw him again, I asked her...
...I locked him back up and walked over to our house...
...I came back as the bar closed and our friends poured onto the dark street...
...Allen, patted Edsel on his broad head, and got a ride out of Ocean City with a local waterman...
...It sounded like a 2o-gauge shotgun, though it turned out to be a powerful firecracker, like a depth charge...
...to chase cars and people, to exercise authority, to exact a little justice, maybe to impose their will on somebody else...
...The man was standing in a window a floor above...
...I made them lie on their bellies while we waited for a police car...
...I don't know...
...Before he could work himself into a more troublesome snit, I grabbed the wrist of his bad arm with the Claw and brought him down in the dirt...
...a citation book, a brass call-box key, and an ash nightstick...
...The men offered to call the police...
...0 n my first morning, I walked to the police station and met the chief of police, V. Jack Phillips...
...Edsel, whimpering, his eyes rolling like dice in a cage, sat down quietly on the floor next to Ed...
...There was no shower, but there was a bathtub and toilet connected to the dining room...
...HE LIVED ALONE IN THE OLD PLIMHIMMON HOTEL ON 2ND STREET FOR A MONTH EVERY YEAR AND SPENT HIS I IMF SEDUCIN G TEENAGE GIRLS...
...IT HAS BEEN OUTLAWED AS INHUMANE FOR Y EARS...
...An entire wall held row upon row of empty cans, stacked floor to ceiling, more than five hundred of them by mid-July...
...I holstered our gun, we left city hall together, and walked down to the Plimhimmon, a 34o-room wooden hotel built around 1880...
...Pledge...
...The last time I had seen Mr...
...He didn't need it anyway...
...And I had been greatly distracted by something else...
...R-Bob was a fixture at his rental stand on the beach at 4th Street, and he was enterprising...
...I'll get it, I'll get it, I said, sounding like Jack Benny...
...He was a great guy but always seemed on the losing end of activities...
...I couldn't believe the judge wasn't going to send them to the state pen, or at least have them clearing brush alongside the road to Girdletree with the other convicts...
...He said that a man was beating a woman in front of the Sea Scape Motel...
...He said if he caught him in Ocean City again he would shoot him...
...He was strong...
...TV cops these days all sound like that scary-looking Dr...
...The boy, wearing only a tee shirt, ran the other way...
...He was confused, but not completely...
...Such a Mr...
...cops were hesitant to arrest people a few years younger than themselves for simple possession of booze...
...the other "School Zone...
...I opened the bathroom door and found a girl, about 16 or 17, sitting on the edge of the bathtub...
...Bonnie said the man disappeared from the window when another person pulled him away...
...Pledge wanted me to let him go home but I couldn't...
...I'll give you an example...
...It was getting colder and I wore my trench coat over my uniform...
...Anything he couldn't sell was appended to the wall of his bedroom, tacked or taped up, and included dozens of cheap rings, a collection of pens, buttons, bangle bracelets, and a dental bridge with three teeth...
...I got a key to Moser's room from the night clerk...
...It was about midnight She'd had too many drinks and was wobbling along in the sand...
...I charged them with disorderly conduct and assault on a police officer, a felony...
...Also, they are lying...
...Bonnie sang "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," and Pledge sang "Scotch & Soda...
...Allen pulled his gun and said he would shoot Ed...
...HE OWNS THE P LACE...
...She was wearing underpants and a bra...
...He asked me to hold Edsel, who whined and danced and looked at me like I was steak tartare...
...I waited for him in the police station parking lot, where we usually made the trade ( a "guns for the gunless" project), but he was tied up taking an accident report and couldn't get back in time...
...It wasn't that he had a low boiling point...
...In return, he clouted her on the side of the head with his fist...
...She climbed naked out of bed...
...He said he represented the arrested couple...
...I thought I heard a key word, "...dismissed...
...Cassie came over...
...The couple was still dancing...
...Nat Mapp, climbed the back stairs to the top floor carrying an eviction notice signed by Judge Robins...
...The city council had some definite ideas about public behavior, even if the suspected activities were taking place in the dark, a long way from town...
...He would be back in a week...
...Ed crouched and got in Moser's face...
...My watch crystal was broken, my trouser knees were ripped out, I had splinters in my butt, and I was having trouble getting my breath, more from panic than exertion...
...For a skinny girl she had a lusty appetite...
...Moser was a big guy...
...I put on sneakers, shorts and a shirt...
...I didn't have a clue...
...He had tattoos on his arms and when he was in the window, a big tattoo on his chest...
...Certainly had my motives...
...Allen...
...Ed didn't have enough money for his own gun, so for $io I let him buy into mine...
...Edsel's only real interest was the lieutenant who he appeared to be in love with and was always flashing goo-goo eyes at...
...Ed had also just turned 21, the minimum age for the police department...
...Wham, she said, he pinned her to the cold sand...
...It worked...
...As a result of various screw-ups, Pledge had spent three years in a college fraternity without ever being initiated...
...His orders were devoid of nuance...
...I still have time to become a criminal...
...His face looked as red as mine felt...
...Actually, Pledge was fine...
...Even on a tight leash I knew he wasn't under my control...
...Not too comfortable...
...He was staring at the girls...
...Is that you...
...I met him one night as I was leaving a girl's room at the Plimhimmon —a girl from Blue Belle, Pennsylvania, who had invited me over...
...These were the nights Pledge would stage his regular indoor crab races...
...I almost went back to quitting...
...And the shop owner threw in something he called "The Claw...
...Ed found everything but pep pills or narcotics...
...Allen was disgusted...
...Also helpful, at least for the first month, were Ed and I going in and out in uniform...
...Cassie and I brought our drinks to the beach to watch a badminton game...
...He was a pillhead, and he was older than he looked...
...She repeatedly said she was fine, even when I didn't ask her, but she was seriously loaded...
...I threw your shirt away, he said...
...He's 31 years old, makes less than $400 aweek as secretary to the Senate Democrats, has gotten rich, and is one of the most powerful guys in Washington...
...He had her in some kind of wrestling hold, facing her with his arms around her waist and her head bent almost double against his chest...
...This loud cry was coming, I realized, from Mrs...
...I tried to say something...
...I stopped to use a hall bathroom...
...to see trouble and drama and dark emotion...
...Ira Allen, the story having gained considerable currency on the summer grapevine...
...There was a rip in my shirt where it had been pulled off...
...The can cracked the glass and bounced back...
...The color was everywhere, like some purplish, organic growth...
...Ed agreed...
...At least one of the buses, perhaps as a result of Baker's enormous clout, I now realize, was a D.C...
...The lieutenant, Edsel, and another cop, maybe Tiny McGee, or Sgt...
...We kept the unopened beer...
...My gun went off next to my ear...
...She looked like other people I'd seen who had taken pills and washed them down with booze...
...I was able to seize her wrist bone with the Claw...
...As a key to police thinking you should know the Claw was once quite popular with departments across the country...
...A girl named Candyce, who ran the "Paratroop" ride at Trimper's amusement park, was sleeping with him...
...He told me to be quiet...
...Allen is right," he said...
...The globe was three-quarters full, mostly with balls of black, red, and green...
...Two people were sleeping in the bed, covers to their waist...
...She also wouldn't admit taking any pills, nor say whether Moser had any...
...I turned off into the next alley without looking back...
...49 CASSIE POINTED TO A DARK-HAIRED FELLOW...
...About 9 o'clock, I watched a man slide over the fence and drop into the backyard...
...Edsel had a concussion...
...He demanded to know what we were doing in his room...
...At first it looked like the couple was dancing...
...I should apologize to Judge Robins...
...He was a writer and television correspondent for many years...
...I moved to separate them, or tried to...
...The party was on Saturday afternoon for the opening of the Carousel Motel on the beach a couple miles north of downtown...
...The fellow's name was Wesley Moser...
...I stood up and walked a few feet, maybe five, and drew my revolver...
...He seemed afraid that if a fight occurred it might damage the furniture...
...Allen was mostly interested in clean shirts and shined shoes...
...I couldn't seem to snap a handcuff on him...
...He remained close friends with Cassie, who was White House correspondent for ABC-TV when she died of cancer in the fall of 1982...
...Then he would get back up again and wobble into a ready position...
...He drove me to an address on Shad Row, an unoccupied but furnished single story, wood-shingled house with a For Rent sign in front...
...Ed had taken the entire contents of his top drawer and dumped them on the floor...
...His head, red and sore-looking, hair pasted to his forehead, one eye open but hooded, would explode from the covers like the monster in Alien, and his fists would be swinging...
Vol. 30 • August 1997 • No. 8
