The Choirboys Read Free Page B

them line control over everything in a given area. But if the plan were to be newsworthy it needed a word or words to make it sound sophisticated, military and
dramatic
.
    It came to Deputy Chief Lynch in a dream one night after he saw
Command Decision
on “The Late Show.”
    “Territorial Imperative!” he screamed in his sleep, terrifying his wife.
    “But what’s it mean, sir?” his adjutant asked the next day.
    “That’s the beauty of it, stupid. It means whatever you want it to mean,” Chief Lynch answered testily.
    “I see! Brilliant, sir!” cried the adjutant.
    One often read in the Los Angeles newspapers that the chief of police was shuffling his officers around in the interest of “Territorial Imperative.”

TWO

THE BODY COUNT

    D eputy Chief Adrian Lynch could sit for hours and stare at stacks of paper and suck on an unlit pipe and look overworked. This alone would not have made him a success however if he had not been the driving force behind Team Policing and the Basic Car Plan which everyone knew were the pet projects of the Big Chief.
    “Team Policing” was nothing more than the deployment as often as possible of the same men in a given radio car district, making these men responsible not only for uniform patrol in that district but for helping the detectives with their follow-up investigation. The detectives (now called “investigators”) resented the encroachment of younger patrol officers in the investigative work. The patrol officers in turn resented a phase of the Basic Car Plan which in reality was the plan itself. It was the Basic Car Plan Meeting. It was resented by everybody.
    This meeting usually took place at a school or auditorium in the district patrolled by the given car. It was more or less a glorified coffee klatch to which doughnuts were added as an enticement. They were picked up free, compliments of a large doughnut chain. Police administrators could swear that crime had dropped because two dozen lonely old ladies had coffee and doughnuts with two charming, well groomed, young uniformed policemen who couldn’t wait to get rid of the old ladies so they could get off duty and meet some young ladies.
    When Deputy Chief Lynch was still a commander he had had the foresight to transfer to his office an enterprising youngpoliceman who had been a second lieutenant in Vietnam and was an absolute master of the body count. Officer Weishart made sure that all Basic Car meetings in divisions commanded by Lynch would take place in school buildings adjacent to crowded playgrounds. Officer Weishart supplied not only coffee and doughnuts for the pensioners in the neighborhood but cookies and punch for the children. He enticed hundreds of kids from the streets to set foot inside the auditorium wherein they would be duly logged.
Each
time they came and went. If anyone had ever bothered to audit Officer Weishart’s statistics he would have discovered that to accommodate the mobs reported, the grammar school auditorium would have had to be the size of the Los Angeles Coliseum.
    But Team Policing and the Basic Car Plan had created lots and lots of new jobs for officers of staff rank. Therefore lieutenants made captain, captains made commander and commanders made deputy chief, and everyone had all the time they needed to think up new things for the working cops to do aside from catching crooks, which most of the new captains, commanders and deputy chiefs knew nothing about.
    If Deputy Chief Lynch had an Achilles’ heel which might someday preclude his elevation to chief of police it was his lubricious lusting after his secretary, Theda Gunther, the wife of Lieutenant Harry Gunther, who every time he turned around found himself transferred farther and farther from his Eagle Rock home, which allowed his wife more and more time with Deputy Chief Lynch who wished there was a police station for Lieutenant Gunther even farther from downtown than West Valley Station.
    If the body count at the Basic Car