April,2009
SFC HEADQUARTERS DOCTRINE
"Read by Thousands Round' the World!"
25 April 2009: "M-16 Days" Simulated Ammo Seminar in Sacramento A full gamut of interactive training was run, numerous scenarios and a real blast was had by all. The first day started with the usual briefing and initial training mission and goals. Then we stepped outside in the 90 degree heat to shoot up the landscape. Keith Miller's school has a great, private back lot/driveway and we used completely every inch. The machine gun velocities hurt and caused some pain concerns and compliance. the materials I taught come from my police and military training and extensive research, veteran ideas, plus the improvisation from reality encounters.
Team Rockford was the surviving champs, defeating the Teams Rat Patrol and Vic Morrow's Combat Raiders. (These guys are not trying to hide their faces, but cover them from the pain of being shot)
(Team Nancy Pelosi declared they had lost by Saturday afternoon and Harry Reid came by in a limo and took them all to an expensive brunch on taxpayer money.)
We started out with simple weapons familiarization. Walking, running, flanking, crawling with machine guns and pistols. Weapon transition drills. Just to check velocity and trajectory. Real marksmanship, malfunctions, reloads, and other live fire issues cannot be taught with sims like these. Visit the range. We did some fire and maneuver drills - sorely missing drills for the range monkey. With sims you can actually learn to manipulate a real, enemy that is dodging pain and suppressive fire.
"Darn it when these targets shoot back!" Keith Miller challenges his lane shooter with some return fire. "Everybody has a plan until the enemy starts that...darn..."shooting-back-thing!"
So, Next the target shoots back just a little. No sense having abstract distractions like people yelling and poking at you, standing beside you while you are shooting. Its too abstract! How about having someone shooting at you when you are shooting? Reduce the abstract!
All part of slowly easing the range monkey into interactive fire encounters.
From the familiarization phase we moved to my Gauntlet Module. Again, easing the training progression into full interaction fire. The hidden bad guys are little more than shoot/don't shoot, 2-dimensional "pop-up" targets. 3-D comes later.
Shoot/Don't shoot Gauntlet. Everybody went through the Gauntlet twice. It changes every time.
Next we went into the convoy ambush drills.
We did the full drive-bys with right side and left-side fire and then simulated being caught in ambushes where the vehicle is stuck, or the driver is shot and killed. So many, MANY survival tricks are learned with each and every run.
Team Rockford play the bad boys and set up some simulated breakdowns to corner, steer and control convoys and escorts. Note the suicide doors on this vehicle. These doors can be packed with telephone books, metal panel or ballistic materials to add a unique cover in some operations.
Needless to say, these evolved into VIP bodyguard exercises. The troops quickly learned of the high fatality rates when using the conventional, live-fire training methods. The troops began to modify the ideas based on real incoming, fire problems. Team Rockford did better than anyone else I have supervised over the years. STILL-they lost people, but frequently saved the VIP.
No gun weekend would be complete without working through the Break Heart Pass Module. How to get across ANY gap while under fire, A hallway? An Alley? A door? A mountain pass? The teams used suppressive fire and speed tricks. Then we keep opening the gap wider and wider. Then we put wounded troops in the gap to rescue.
And next came the Miami-Dade Shoot-out scenarios and the unpredictable WalMart Madness, common, parking lot shoot-outs scenarios, but this time WITH machine guns, because, after all, it was machine gun weekend!
Followed by Sunday afternoon special sessions in both pistol and long gun disarming and then a de-brief recap.
Of course, I had a little help organizing the training for the weekend. Much thanks to the Duke.
Word to the wise. If you don't come to one of these simulated pistol and/or M-16 weekends? You need your testosterone level checked and your head-examined. Boys and girls, its 2009. You CANNOT call yourself a combat shooter unless you also do some kind of sims, (or are a vet and have dodged the real thing. Even then there is a formula for modern, sims training)
The formula being the average "one-hour gun training." Once you get a workable mastery of your live-fire, firearm, (range, range and more range) then each future gun training hour should, on average, be 15 minutes live-fire for familiarization again, and then 45 minutes shooting at moving and thinking people who are shooting back. You are not learning how to gun fight unless there are people who can, will and are shooting back at you. Period. Adios, amigos
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16 April 2009: Andy Lady's Big Breakdown | Conclusion
Several days passed and I got caught up in other pending cases. Each day a number of burglary crime reports were taken by patrol and passed out amongst the detective squad. They all looked the same to me. Usual entry. Usual stuff stolen. Late one afternoon, I got the call I was waiting for from the C.I. “Meet me.”
Since college star Michael Black was now involved, meeting at the Science Building was not so smart an idea. We tried a factory parking lot on the west side.
“Cletus, Lady and Black and another guy they call Nacho have been busy,” The C.I. told me. He steered me toward a number of house and apartment burglaries in the city and county.
Now comes the really boring part I’ll zip over here. I had to take all this info, match them to crime reports and review the crimes scenes and find whatever sold things I could and match them altogether. Tedious. When the dust settled, I could really only add a few more warrants onto Andy Lady and a new one for Cletus Butch. If I could get Butch or Lady to confess? I could rope Michael Black into some felonies. I had no idea who Nacho was.
Time to shut all else down and arrest Andy Lady. Lady first. Then Cletus. If I got the two of them together? So be it. For two days and nights, with binoculars, coffee and Dr. Peppers, Ranger baseball on the AM radio, Big Mac's and a swelling load of new, assigned cases ignored on my desk, I did as best I could to concentrate on the apprehension of Andy Lady. I watched the apartments, the bars, hangouts, everywhere he might be found. The green Plymouth was not to be seen. The second afternoon, I called Waco P.D. and told them about the new warrants and that maybe Lady went home?
About six p.m. of the third day, I pulled up into the police station back parking lot by our wing at City Hall. Visions of Andy Lady driving to Waco were depressing my head. If he were caught down there, I’d probably have to take a day trip and interview him there. Maybe two day trips to work the deals?
This parking lot offers a view of the main street out front. As I reached around the front seat to straighten out the mess in the interior of my car, my eye caught something out on the main street. Traffic whizzed by a stalled auto, and some people stood by it. The hood on the stalled car was up. I stood up. I noticed the stalled auto was green and I chuckled, thinking of Lady. Chuckling, that is, until I saw a large black male bending over the engine. What? It was a Plymouth. A Plymouth Valiant! And standing on the nearby sidewalk holding a baby was the fair "Lady" Lady.
Well, I just flat couldn't believe it. Andy Lady, man on the run, wanted, avoiding the law for three days had broken down right in front of the police station ... and me! I strutted across the lot and into the street, to Andy. Andy looked at me, folded his arms and shook his head. "ANDY Lady?" I said.
"Yeah," he replied.
"YOU, are under arrest for three counts of burglary," I said, turned him around, pulled on folded arms and cuffed him, just fifty feet from the station's front door.
I marched him across the front lot and into the lobby. The woman followed us in, where she put on a show in the lobby, hollering something insane. Something about “ this is harassment...my baby...he can’t do this...” the usual horseshit. “Can you call a wrecker. There’s a green Valiant stalled right out front. Put it in the pound.” I told the LT. through the bullet proof window at the front desk. I needed to search that car and contents. Since his head was inches from the carburator when I put the habeas grabus on him, and the vehicle was incidental to the arrest when I found him, I figured the car was mine for a legal inventory search. (he had stolen stuff in it, I discovered later)
"Just shut up Denise," muttered Andy as he was led away.
“Well, what I am supposed to do?” she asked.
“Get me out!” Andy barked.
“I ain’t got no car. I ain’t got no money. How am I supposed to do that?”
Booked in and all cozy and confined, I laid my battle plans out to Andy. I could probably drop some of the burglaries if he’d confess. No promises of course. Just the old “easy way or the hard way” conversation. Andy wouldn’t confess.
“I got nothin’ to say.”
“Then I got nothin’ to say back, except “ten years, bubba. Ten years.”
Andy had another breakdown. Andy couldn't make his bond and caught a fast rash of "cell fever", that incurable disease where suspects are legally detained in a jail for so long that words of confessions and truths spill from their festering mouths. The expression "deal" mysteriously appears on their foreheads. The fever can set in after five minutes or five years. It all depends. After two more days, Andy contacted the jailer to tell him he needed to see me.
Andy and I relaxed at my office because he could start to see a little daylight. Andy really wasn’t such a bad guy, being an unemployed, scumbag thug and all. But, I usually get along with most of my criminals. When they see me years later they would often wave "hi" at me. I treat them square. When I saw them years later, and I usually did, they remembered me giving the a square deal, and we’d work new problems out together. Its the big jailhouse shuffle and I play the fiddle. Oh, they don’t really like me, I just play a good fiddle.
So Andy fully confessed to the crimes. He named Butch as his accomplice, and he told me all he could about Michael Black. There were angles and evidence I could work on Black that could lead to a conviction.
With Andy in jail, within days Cletus "skied" (a local colloquialism for flying on a plane) to Alabama where he began working in a funeral parlor near his old home town. The C.I. revealed a soap opera story about this. The Lady Lady had no where to go but back to the Cletus roach haven. Cletus offered her a deal. If he could sleep with Lady Lady, he would promise to gather up enough money to pay Andy's bond. Being ever so loyal, Lady gave him whatever money she had left and allowed for this indiscretion, The informant later told me, it was a real "slam bam, thank you maam", where Butch re-zipped his pants, took her money and hit the "friendlier skies" to Montgomery, Alabama, with no attempts to bond Andy out and no goodbyes to his own live-in girlfriend and their baby. Having seen the seventy percent of Denise Lady as I did, I do believe Cletus might qualify for an insanity defense.
It took a while, but Montgomery County Deputies eventually approached Cletus while he was digging a grave and arrested him. Yup! There’s irony there all right. He hired a local attorney and some kind of long-distance deal was worked out with our D.A. that involved his new crimes in Alabama. They kept him there. Adios and good riddance. Mr. Michael Black? Within a few weeks of the Andy Lady arrest, the local newspapers ran a few major headlines - Black was drafted by the the New Orleans Saints football team! Which lead me to a big picture dilemma. I had cases on Black in development. I had a solid one and then a few others pending some results. I like to wait if possible and overwhelm a suspect with a tidal wave of problems, so I had a small doom-and-gloom Black Box of case files. I asked for a meeting with Jerry Cobb the District Attorney, and one morning we sat around his office contemplating the fate and future of one Michael Black.
“If he goes to jail on multiple felonies,” I said, “he will loose his shot in the pros. They won’t take a rookie like this. He will have no other options in life and will become a career criminal. We will, in essence, help create a career criminal. Otherwise, he has a chance to straighten up and play a career in pro football. It’s better than probation or parole!” A lot of Black’s crimes were money crimes. Maybe, just maybe, if he’d make a lot of pro money? He loose some desire to steal and rob?
Then and there, Cobb and I agreed to forego prosecution and gamble on Black and the rigid life of pro-football, which was known to work for at least some bad guys. If he screwed up while in the pros, it then became an NFL problem and they have better ways and means to solve a screw-up than we do. We just have the state pen. Nobody else knew about this meeting, but Black had heard we were after him. And, he knew two of his old accomplices were in jail. More reasons to stay to clean, worry and get the hell out of Texas.
Black made the pros. Two, maybe even three years after Black started with the Saints, one Saturday morning I was working the weekend and night shifts. My desk phone rang.
“Detective Hochheim,” I said. “Detective, this is Bum Phillips, the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.”
“Yeah. What can I do for you?” Sure. I was taken aback. Trying to process this.
“We are about to get on a plane today for Dallas and play the Dallas Cowboys tomorrow afternoon at Texas Stadium. I am told there will be police waiting on the field to arrest Michael Black. This true?”
“No sir.” We talked just a bit and I did not reveal anything that might hinder Black’s career. The conversation lasted no more than a few minutes. As I recall? The Cowboys won. HA!
A de-brief? Cletus did time in Alabama. Lady did time and moved back to Waco. A guy nicknamed Nacho was arrested some months later for other crimes. For the next few years, I read in the sports pages that Black was involved in some minor, public scrapes. Then he calmed down. He wound up playing a full career in pro football, virtually problem-free. Got married, had kids and a nice mansion. Lots of complainants got their stuff back. Lots of cases got cleared by arrest. Lots of police and city administrators smiled. All thanks to Andy Lady’s breakdown.
Me? Hell, I just got some new cases...
Adios, amigos
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12 April 2009: Andy Lady's Big Breakdown | Part Three A short visit with my old friend and prosecutor Fred Marsh at the DA’s office was awarded with an Andy Lady, probable cause warrant for burglary. Now, if I waited a few days and let the Black, Cletus, Lady crime team pull together a bit and do some more crimes, and I waited to let my C.I. find out about them? I could get all three and finally get something solid on the elusive Michael Black. But alas - I am also officially employed to prevent and interrupt crimes. What if someone got hurt during these crimes? The word obligated also comes to mind. So, I turned my sedan west from the Courts building and toward the Butch Cletus apartment.
Andy Lady’s dark green car was on the apartment parking lot. I checked out on the car radio for a warrant service at the address. Yeah, I was alone. Today's times that's a no-no. Life is lonely sometimes. But this was the 1980s and we all arrested a lot of people alone. I was in my 30s, working out all the time and doing karate and jujitsu. And I had a big gun. This was a hornet’s nest, but I felt like I had a big net. And, worse come to worst, I was not ashamed to run back outside and scream like a scared, cheerleader for help.
I knocked on the door. Shinola Letisha Gonzola Smith answered. That was Cletus Butch’s girlfriend. I can’t say that was her name exactly. It just sounded something like that. She was very sleepy, it being one in the afternoon and all.
“My name is Hock with the police department,” and I did that badge thing. “looking for Andy Lady.”
“Andy Lady?”
“Andy Lady. The guy who owns that green car outside and whose been staying here for oh...about three weeks now?”
“Andy!”
“Yeah. Andy. Andy Lady.”
Dimolia Quenisha Delupe Johnson stepped away for the door (like I said - I can’t remember the name). I got a look at her and she was wearing a soiled pair of panties and a bra. The soils must have come from the small baby laying on a soiled towel on the soiled, living room carpet.
“DeNISE!” she yelled. She walked me to a bedroom door and I saw the place was running with roaches. She opened the door and there was the Lady Lady. In all her splendor. The fair Lady Lady was stretched out on a bed with a sheet covering about 25% of her. The wrong 25%. A sheet corner laid over her left leg. She was naked and she was big girl. She too was real, real sleepy and acted like she needed to rub herself awake with her two hands. Must have been you know...like a morning ritual. I mean to say, an afternoon ritual.
“Oh my,” she sighed, stretching. This was no doubt, supposed to shock and embarrass any conservative nice, white boy on a business visit. I guess Pat Boone or Joel Olsteen would have blushed, stuttered and stumbled back outside. Drop to their knees, vomit and pray. I just stared at her. Denise stuck her finger in her mouth and then stuck this finger into her belly button. If she planned on filling that thing up with saliva its was going to take a number of trips to the well because the girl had herself a big-ass naval.
“Name’s Hock,” I repeated. “Police.” Badge thing again. “Where’s Andy?”
“He gone. He went to the store to get some milk for the baby.”
“What store?’
“I don’t know. The 7-11.” I saw a crib against the wall and inside was the Lady Baby.
“I think they in Lewsiville,” Swanona Tonyana Laswisha Jones said from the original place the architects once called “a kitchen.” Hard to tell with the piles of garbage and beer cans and all.
I took a business card from my pocket and laid it atop a dresser. “Tell Andy, I need to speak with him, will ya’. Here’s my card.”
“Speak about what?” Denise asked, still trying to fill that belly button up.
“He’s a witness to a crime,” I said with a small smile.
“Okay, I will. Bye,” she said.
“Nice seeing ya, Denise.” I lied.
I walked out to my car. I told the police dispatcher I was alive and well, though I felt like I needed to take a bath in Raid. But I'd made my obligatory arrest attempt for the day. After all, I had a stack of other crimes of anxious, demanding complainants to work on. All wanting priority. "Where is my detective. NOW!" But, something else was going on right now too. The Cletus, Andy, Black, my C.I. stew stirred and boiled in a pot. A pot much bigger than Denise’s belly button, I hoped. In a day or two, dinner would be served, if the roaches didn’t get it first!
But, yeah, yeah, I did drive to the local 7-11 first and looked around. It was a bum steer, but the coffee sure was good. They didn't have all those damned, confusing flavors back then, with all those mixed nuts, ju-ju leaves, chocolate foam and shit. Just coffee-coffee.
Coming soon, part 4
Adios, amigos
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9 April 2009: Andy Lady's Big Breakdown | Part Two
I let the weekend stew on on this case. I had plenty of other things to do. Monday morning I got five new cases to work on. Weekend crime! Every Monday was like that. Assigned crimes from Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. We had weekend and evening shift detectives but they did not get assigned the brunt of cases that came in. These shifts were expected to work the streets, back up patrol and take emergency crimes in progress and cases. We rotated through the shifts so evenings and weekends were always a chance to catch up a bit, as well as work peak crime hours.
Working day shift that period, I still had to work at night quite a bit. Unpaid of course. We all had too or you would never get anything finished. We all did. If you didn’t care enough to so do? You simply weren’t a detective. Or a good, successful one anyway. Most of us lived and breathed this stuff anyway. I am not looking for your sympathy or admiration, I’m just recording the times for you.
So, Monday night I met the C.I. on a parking lot by one the University buildings. Not likely that Andy or Cletus would be hanging out there at the science building and see us together. The man told me that several of the Butch/Lady crime collaborations that were now some street-news. They even tried to sell our C.I. a jam box radio and a pair of dress shoes, but he told me that most of the stolen stuff went to particular pawn shop in south Dallas. He said Andy was from Waco and he drove a green Valiant. I passed the man his money and a bottle of whiskey. (As I have mentioned before, we maintained a liquor cabinet back at the CID office for such gifts.) Tuesday morning, right after getting two more new cases in a squad meeting, I called Waco CID and left a message asking about Andy Lady. Then I drove to south Dallas, into an area one might call a slum, or the projects, and I walked into the pawn shop. It was a crappy place full of junk, tools, jewelry, 8-track tapes and guns. A pawn broker does three things. He buys things outright, He "takes" things in as collateral to loan out money with interest. If the person never pays the money back, the broker keeps the items and then resells the items. And he sells things outright. All Texas brokers (and other states too) are required by law to show and/or send a copy of all transactions to their local police department.
I flashed a badge and asked for some ticket receipts since a day or two before the burglary. Since God hadn’t made computers for the common man yet, just the Pentagon, this meant me sitting at a worn, sticky desk in a stinky back room with piles of index-card sized, pawn ticket receipts. My thumb and eyes went into hand search mode while I had a soundtrack behind me running of the Tom Joiner FM radio show. Soul music. Joiner was famous at the time for running two radios shows a day. One in Dallas in the morning and one in Chicago at night. Each and every day Tom would fly back and forth to these cities! So, to the melodies of Smokie Robinson and Lionel Ritchie, I found several tickets for an Andy Lady! And some of the items pawned matched our restaurant workers missing stuff. Nothing found in the name of Butch Cletus.
“I need this stuff.” I told the broker. And we found it all and set it aside. I went out to my sedan and retrieved a Polaroid camera from the trunk and photographed the stack of stuff. Then I made copies of the receipts on a copy machine. I would make a phone call later and fax a report to the Dallas Police Pawn Shop Detail as soon as possible and they would go about legally seizing this stuff in their system and protocol. Asking them to do all this first, would take too much time. Many days. Weeks even, as that pawn squad worked all the metroplex requests for help on any and everything to do with the hundreds of Dallas pawn Shops. Faster to go myself and look. I would also ask the Detail for a city wide sweep of Butch and Lady’s names. On the drive back I thought once again of the naive and small-thinking minds of some thugs and hoods back then. Some pros would commit hideous crimes and leave the country. Or at least the state! We had many flee to Mexico. But the small-minded would often leave our city and hide out just in neighboring Dallas or Ft. Worth! As if it were France or China? But you have to understand how untraveled and uneducated some criminals are and how they also need some kind of a support-system to operate within. That is why we use to watch the “momma’s” house. Mom was a common hide-out. It was quite typical for an Andy Lady type to leave Waco and think he was in France or China and pull crimes and pawn stolen stuff and think he could evade the law. And Butch was just Andy’s support system three hours from home. It was just a different era back then.
That night, I made several clandestine passes by the Cletus apartment in my own private, “family” car - a Ford Thunderbird and I spotted Lady’s car parked outside. I got the license plate.
Wednesday morning I got several more new cases assigned to me (are you getting the picture of my life yet?) and a phone call from a Waco detective.
“Andy Lady! You know where that somabitch is?”
“Yes we do! Kinda'. Within 25 square miles,” I said.
“I have two burglary arrest warrants for him.”
“I will soon have one of my own. I will catch him for the both of us. Fax me copies of your warrant. Send us a 'believed to be in your area' teletype. Then give me a couple of days,” I said.
I scribbled my probable cause (PC) case together on a pad of yellow, legal-sized paper. Elementary, my dear reader:
PC 1- The cook saw Butch trolling the business lot of the victim on, or about and during the offense times.
PC 2- Butch knew the victim.
PC 3- Butch and Andy hang out together.
PC 4 - Andy’s car was seen at Butch’s apartment.
PC 5- Andy pawned several items of the victim’s stolen property.
PC 6- Butch is already wanted for several, similar crimes.
All probable cause. Enough for a fast arrest warrant to give me a little ass-and-door kicking power. Back then, it was common practice to get one of the District Attorney's prosecutors to review and draw up arrest warrants. Then we boogied to a judge’s office for signature. I packed for a visit to the DA's office.
But, my phone rang. It was the C.I. “I better tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
“You know Michael Black? Michael Black, the football player?”
“Yup.” I certainly did. Black was a local, college football player. Trouble. Hailed from St Louis, with a criminal history as long as the interstate from Missouri to Texas. Black was big lineman (as in 6’8”), bad and mean, and a bit of a local underworld hero, a fence who sold some dope and coke. He had participated in some robberies, specializing in robbing dope dealers. These crimes went unreported, as well as his stealing from his teammates, friends, and associates. His wild man grimace and bald-headed, bulldozing size meant all the victims feared Black’s threats and reputation. I myself had one case where Michael Black was positively identified kicking in a girl’s apartment door and seen carrying items out. In the end, the girl would not press charges and the eye-witness went squirrel on me and completely chickened out too. He had threatened both of them and I couldn’t prove a thing. When I tried to question Black about it all, the mother-fucker just winked at me and walked off. A wink is as good as a nod to a blind man - without evidence. What's the word - Shred - that's it. Yeah. Not a shred.
“Well you know...Black was with Lady and Butch yesterday. They are scheming something up.”
“Scheming! Don’t know what it is?”
“Don’t know what it is, but looky’ here. I’ll try and find out.”
“Let me know, right away. Try to let me know when you see Andy Lady.” I hung up the phone and sat staring for a moment, as the Waco arrest warrant faxes came rolling in off the machine. How, I wondered, how can I best play all this out? My mind wandered to a publicity photo I’d collected once of Black in uniform. The guy was a power lifting monster. How can I get Andy Lady, get Cletus Butch AND get this bigger score...one Michael Black? My lieutenant strolled in, laid another crime report on my desk and said,
“This guy thinks he knows who vandalized his car.”
Riiiiiiigght... Another case. A scratched car no less. I put it on the stack on my desk that never, ever went away.
Coming soon, part 3 Adios, amigos
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5 April 2009: Andy Lady's Big Breakdown | Part One For three solid days, I carried an arrest warrant around in my back pocket for Andy Lady. It was burning a hole. When I arrested him it was rather an unusual event and that is why I am telling you this tale of Andy Lady and the Lady Lady - his charming, common-law wife Denise, of whom I’ve seen stem-to-stern, head-to-toe naked, twirling a finger alluringly in her belly button and then licking her fingertip.
Forget the naked lady story for a minute - I’ll get to that later - and let me tell you first about Andy Lady. Andy was a big dude up from Waco, Texas, to visit friends, run a little drugs and burglarize strangers. Things were too hot for Andy back in Waco. Pending charges. Lady imported with him this girl and their illegitimate infant, all via his 1974 green Plymouth Valiant. Lady had an old friend in our city named Butch Cletus who out him up. A place to land. A base to operate.
When Lady first arrived, he dropped the girl and the baby off at Clete's low-rent, roach-ridden apartment, and took off with Butch and another local fellow, for some serious drinking, woman-chasing and home invasions. The next night became the next. Then the next. Late one of these binge nights, Butch and Andy kicked in the apartment door of a night shift restaurant worker named Raoul Intrepedo. Butch had a friend, who had a friend, who knew Raoul. They took Raoul’s TV, stereo, what jewelry, etc. The usual.
Raoul came dragging home at 4 a.m. to find the new major disarray in his life. Busted door. Busted stuff. Gone stuff. Patrol did the crime reporting. Crime Scene did a little crime scening. The next morning I got handed the crime report, and I was expected, next in the cycle of life, to do a little detecting.
It was evening before I got a chance to check in with him, back at the restaurant.
“I know who did this to me,” he told me.
“You do? Who?”
“Butch Cletus.”
“Butch Cletus.” I repeated. “Sounds familiar. How do you know?”
“Listen to my amigo. He’s a cook. He knows all these lizards.” He walked me back to the kitchen.
This meeting over a hot stove with the aproned amigo resulted in the following statement: “I can see out into the parking lot from where I cook. I was cooking and I saw them, driving VERY slow. They were out there in Butch's car, straining to see inside. They were looking to see who was at work. I just know it. When I heard that Raoul was robbed the next day? I knew they saw him at work and hit his apartment, man!"
“We wuz’ robbed!” Robbed. Lots of people who are victims of theft or burglary like to say they “were robbed.” Robbed. Robbed. Robbed. They’d know what robbery really meant if they were really robbed. Besides burgled is an odd word, isn’t it?
The amigo cook knew where Butch lived. I think he knew a lot of lizards. So, I went there the next morning - to the apartment office that is, as I wanted to circle the target a few revolutions before moving in. Walk softly now, but carry a bigger shovel later. The apartment complex manager opened Butch’s file wide for me, as they all did for us back then. Ahhh, a time I affectionately refer to as “the good ol’ days” when scumbags weren’t protected by every paranoid citizen. From this lease file, I had his horsepower from birth date to social security number on down to his mama’s last known address.
Back at the station, I ran all these numbers. Butch had a criminal history with us and he’d been worked before. We' d even had a drug C.I. (that’s a confidential informant for you unwashed out there) inside Butch's crowd. Which obviously was my next stop. I called DPS Narcotics office and an old friend there suggested this C.I. was trustworthy, and where I might find him.
The C.I. worked in a convenience store and I wandered in and looked over the sorry display of magazines until all the customers were gone. I introduced myself and my situation. Told him "Bobby" sent me from the State. This C.I. told me he knew Cletus real well and that he had some new house guests in. An Andy Lady and Denise Lady. He told me that for some pocket money he would pay a visit on his old friend and collect more information. I told him this was a magic deal that could be arranged.
He’d eventually tell me a lot for $50 and a bottle of booze but he forget to tell me Denise was confirmed belly-button twirler...
Part 2 coming soon.... Adios, amigos
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Adios, amigos
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