The Delta Star by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online Page B

That poor bastard had probably smoked as much as Maxie Steiner, which meant he smoked almost as much as Mario Villalobos. The thought of finally going end-of-watch as the result of something as relentless as lung cancer scared the crap out of Mario Villalobos. Better to look his .38 in the eye and smoke it. As he stared at that lung on the gut pan, gleaming like a chunk of anthracite, he got so tense his hands started to shake. To settle them he lit a cigarette, the thirteenth of the day.
    Well, if he didn’t die from lung cancer, and if mid-life crisis wasn’t terminal, and if he survived this feeling of dread and despair which more or less clouded every waking moment, he might soon start looking on the bright side. His youngest son, Alec, was nearly eighteen, which meant the child-support payment would end. His oldest son, Frank (he would never permit his boys to be cursed with a handle as Hispanic as Mario when followed by a Villalobos), was safely warehoused in San Diego State majoring in surf bunnies, and bleeding his old man for about $200 a month. The detective didn’t mind the $200 donation as much as the child-support payment for Alec which the court ordered him to pay. In any case the court-ordered payment would soon be stopped and he could send money to Alec directly, of his own free will. He’d still be as bankrupt as International Harvester but at least it would be by choice, and that made all the difference. A man like Mario Villalobos needed at least to pretend to order his own destiny, but he’d been a cop long enough to know that a vagary of fortune probably had as much to do with destiny as any exercise of free will, in the world he inhabited. That is, in the emotionally perilous world of the policeman, where nothing is as it seems.
    If he could only stop his hands from trembling. This was something new in his life. He’d noticed for several years that Maxie Steiner’s hands shook for most of the morning. He felt like taking his own pulse but he was afraid to know, and he didn’t want to resemble Rumpled Ronald with the look of doom on his face.
    When Chip and Melody had finally arrived, Mario Villalobos thought he could see it in their shining eyes: incipient romance. Or was it just their common love of gore? It was so touching he wanted a double vodka.
    “Glad you two could make it,” Mario Villalobos had said to the brunchers.
    “Sorry, Mario,” Chip Muirfield apologized. “We couldn’t get served as fast as …”
    “Okay, okay,” the detective said, feeling every one of his forty-two years whenever he looked at the surfer’s body and seamless face of Chip Muirfield.
    Mario Villalobos was once a good police department handball player, but he was now soft in the belly. He had to let out his pants to a size 35. He weighed more than 190 pounds now, and whereas he used to be nearly six feet tall, he was now less than five eleven. Middle age. He was shrinking in height, expanding in girth. He didn’t have a frame large enough to carry 200 pounds. What would he look like in five more years? Could it be worse than this, smack in the vortex of a world-class mid-life crisis?
    While the shoulder holster kids dived into their work, he looked around at the stacks of stiffs waiting to be sawed, chopped, sliced and emptied. There were racks of cadavers in the “reefer” rooms, bodies of unidentified John and Jane Does which could be kept refrigerated for months. There were bunches of bodies in the “decomp” room, decomposed bodies, lying putrid under ceiling fans which could never dispose of the unforgettable smell. There were gurneys loaded with corpses, in one case two on a gurney: a shriveled pair of pensioners, married fifty years, who died as a result of an unvented heater and lay sandwiched in death as they had lain sandwiched in life during damp and drafty nights in their pensioners’ hotel. He wondered how many of them had survived a world-class mid-life crisis. Or if anyone ever did. Or