Cops of the Absurd

...it seems his pacemaker stopped ticking...

...Thus: "A fat cop with red hair suddenly got maudlin and tearfully announced, 'My wife's screwing a nigger...

...And Missy Moonbeam's trick book has a Caltech telephone number scribbled in it...

...If not, pick uptheA/eiv Yorker...

...You get to like a few of them, especially the female cops (like Jane Wayne, the Bionic Bitch), who never stop having to field the guff their male cohorts keep throwing at them...

...He is investigating the murder of a Hollywood whore named Missy Moonbeam who was thrown off the roof of the shoddy Wonderland Hotel...

...They attend a hilarious gathering of famous scientists, professors and their sloppily dressed students of both sexes...

...Then, The Bad Czech—the largest, meanest cop in the Rampart Station?comes upon Beemer's credit card while eating on the cuff in a Korean beanery...

...There is also an assorted gaggle of cop groupies, as well as the lovely Lupe Luna, who works at Caltech, the prestigious scientific institution where a goodly part of the zany action takes place...

...The Czech needs some cheering up...

...Chi-nese mostly.'" And so forth...

...As usual, his locale is Los Angeles, his characters cops who speak the language of the streets...

...Wambaugh's ebullience and his persistence with the jokes eventually wore me down, and, following the path of least resistance, I slipped into his mad, brutal world and permitted his war zone humor to pulverize me...

...In the end, they give as much as they take...

...Or: "One of the groupies, an emaciated girl with a splayed pelvis who looked like a toilet plunger on a barstool, said, 'Hey, Leery...

...You can bet your tacos and beer that The Delta Star is as crazy as it sounds...

...They are all manic, or depressive, in turn or simultaneously—burnt out from their impossible efforts on behalf of the beleaguered citizenry of their not so proud city...

...One of the recurring skits skitters around a K-9 cop named Hans and his partner Ludwig, a mammoth Rottweiler police dog who laps up beer at the bar and then retires to the top of the pool table, where he sleeps and has wet dreams...

...This time the ex-detective turned writer has probably done it again...

...I hear you're only shooting at cans these days...

...The people in The Delta Star, mostly a coven of cops from the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, seem to this reader at least to be escapees from a California nut house, whether they are boozing at Leery's Bar, also known as the House of Misery, or patrolling thezonked-out streets...

...All this leads back to an incident that occurred a year prior to the events in the story—the violationof restricted Swedish waters by a Soviet submarine carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes...

...Villalobos follows his nose and finds himself at Caltech with The Bad Czech and Hans, thank goodness without Ludwig...

...Can you believe it?' "Which caused Cecil Higgins, a grizzled black beat cop, to say, 'You shouldn'ta married a nigger.' '"No offense, Cecil,' the maudlin cop said...

...As a result he calls himself a "fakeMexican...

...it only makes them more bitter...

...Ultimately, Villalobos discovers a badger game engineered by Lester Beemer and a Nobel-prize hungry professor, a game in which the late Missy Moonbeam and a gay male named Dagmar were the players...

...The plot, what there is of it, is carried along by tired, middle-aged, blase Mario Villalobos, a homicide detective whose Hispanic name shields a WASPish persona...

...Mexi-ca/w, Puerto Ri-cans....' "Well versed by the cops in the multiethnic makeup of the Rampart Division, a third groupie said, 'Naw, The Czech only shoots at knees...

...I f you can permit yourself to appreciate the street humor, you will find the book a howl...

...Golcz" Every time Joseph Wambaugh sits down at his typewriter, a new best seller rolls out...

...Elsewhere, a private eye named Lester Beemer has been found dead from a heart attack in a motel room...

...No doubt because of his own police past, Wambaugh has a warm spot—perhaps hot is a better word—in his heart for his brutalized, mean and sentimental ex-brethren...

...He ain't beat up nobody for, oh, two three days now.' " 'Hey, Czech,' another groupie giggled...

...I didn't see you there in the dark.' '"Next time I'll click my eyeballs so's you can see me,' Cecil Higgins said...

...At first I resisted, but I have to admit that finally I found myself overcome and laughing out loud...

...Most of the book is composed of a series of comic skits staged in Leery's Bar, where the cops hang out after work, before work, and in between...

...It is during this cocktail party that they meet Ignacio Mendoza, a mad Peruvian professor of chemistry, and convince him to join them in the wild chase for Missy Moonbeam's murderer...

...A Swedish member of the Nobel Prize committee is involved, too...

...The booze doesn't seem to drown their sorrows...