The Black Marble by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

constrictor and a baby alligator named Archie who was accidentally flushed down the toilet. She also had less exotic creatures like a Siamese cat, a standard poodle, and a miniature schnauzer bitch with terrific bloodlines who liked to amuse herself by chewing the hell out of Archie the alligator, who got sick and tired of it and went bye-bye down the john.
    The pup’s name was Tutu and she later had shown well, twice winning best of breed, until her mistress got bored with dog shows because lots of the young studs around there were geldings. And because Millie got sick and tired of Tutu’s handler always sniffing around like he was in heat. Millie Muldoon Gharoujian knew a fortune hunter when she saw one. Besides, the dog handler was at least fifty, about twenty years too old for her. Millie was seventy-six.
    A lackluster cop named Leonard Leggett was the instrument whereby Archie and Tutu were linked again in the Great Chain of Life. For when Archie took a powder, and found himself tumbling pell-mell in a wild surging torrent right through Millie’s new plumbing—while one of the studs in the round waterbed was going through Millie’s old plumbing—Archie eventually escaped with his life through a pipe vent. Then Archie began an incredible odyssey overland, living on bugs and grasshoppers and french fries which, lucky for him, lay like hordes of dead locusts on the streets of Hollywood. At last, Archie followed his instincts to the Los Angeles sewers, coming to rest in the wonderful, cool, filthy muck below the streets. There was enough tasty fare for a whole battalion of alligators: pastrami sandwiches, beef dips, the ubiquitous soggy french fries, and tons of half-eaten Big Macs and ribs from Kentucky Colonel. And there was plenty of game: rats, snakes, turtles, puppies, human fetuses, a full-term baby or two. Some of it live, most of it dead, the flotsam and jetsam of Los Angeles. People got tired of things very easily in the city and it was adios, down the sewer.
    But Archie found that peace and quiet were boring. In his dim reptile brain he perhaps remembered the bad old days when he was put upon by the schnauzer, and he became a tyrant in the sewers. He was soon five feet long, nose to tail, and still growing, rampaging around the sewers chewing the hell out of every hapless pet hamster or baby mouse that floated by on a Popsicle stick, right into the gaping maw of Archie the alligator. Then, one day, he made the mistake of chewing the hell out of the leg of Tyrone McGee, a sewer worker from Watts, who was sick and tired of being pushed around all his life and wasn’t about to take any crap even from an alligator. Not in his sewer, he wasn’t.
    Tyrone McGee did what he had always done when bullies picked on him. He went and got his big brother. In this case, big brother was Leonard Leggett, the lackluster cop, who reluctantly followed the bleeding sewer worker back down there in the dark and, shaking like a mouse on a Popsicle stick, dispatched Archie to the Big Sewer with three volleys from his Ithaca shotgun, giving Tyrone McGee a chance to grin malevolently at the belly-up sewer monster, and say, “Catch you later, alligator.”
    That same lackluster cop would make an insignificant bureaucratic decision which would decide the very destinies of four people: Madeline Whitfield, Philo Skinner, Natalie Zimmerman and A.M. Valnikov.
    Millie’s ex-dog handler, driven by anger for the massage parlor hussy, went for the Rolls-Royce three times. Each time a parking attendant came running by and Philo Skinner was forced to retreat to the safety of the street.
    So, as destiny is often decided by tiny vagaries of fortune, the dog was not stolen from the car. If she had been taken from the car, it would have been, technically speaking, a burglary from auto, and would have been handled by the auto theft detail at Hollywood Station. (Policemen, ever the civil servants, have been known to