The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh

his driver's license.
    "I'll see you in court!" Murray Fern sputtered as he snatched his copy and license from Father Willie's hand. "I'll have a lawyer. I'll beat you. I'll make you go to court on your day off and I'll make you look like the dumb shit you are!"
    He spun around and jammed the ticket, pen and license into his coat pocket. But when he jerked his hand out, a tiny .25 caliber automatic clattered to the pavement.
    "Oh shit," said Murray Fern bleakly as Spencer Van Moot quickly pulled and pointed his .38 at the fat man's eyes.
    "Who says there's no God?" Father Willie grinned happily.
    "I only carry a gun when I make bank deposits," croaked Murray Fern. "I know it's against the law but I'm a businessman! You're not gonna put me in jail for something as petty as this?"
    "Who says there's no God?" Father Willie repeated as he drew his handcuffs.
    By the time the two policemen obtained the booking approval and ran a record check on Murray Fern who had three drunk driving arrests, but no other criminal record, the fat man had threatened every officer at Wilshire Station with a lawsuit. It was 8:30 P. M. when they stood with Murray Fern in front of the booking officer, Elwood Banks, a fifty-year old black man and former partner of Spencer Van Moot.
    "How's the retail trade in Los Angeles holdin up?" he asked Spencer when they brought the prisoner inside the lockup.
    "Fair to middling, Elwood," Spencer answered. "Booking this guy for CCW."
    "Kinda old to be playin with guns, ain't you, Dad?" commented Elwood Banks, looking up from his typewriter as he inserted a booking form.
    "I'll sue you too, you bastard," Murray Fern warned. "Just one more smart remark and I'll put you on the lawsuit."
    Sitting on a bench to the side of the booking cage, waiting to be fingerprinted, was a tall, once powerful derelict with a bloody wet bandage over one eye. He was forty-eight years old, looked sixty-five, and had fought with the officers who had arrested him for plain drunk. The assault on the officers made him a felon now, but his fourteen page rap sheet included fifty-four arrests for only plain drunk and vagrancy, so now he would be tried and sentenced as a misdemeanant.
    Elwood Banks knew the derelict as Timothy "Clickety-clack" Reilly, so called because his ill-fitting false teeth clicked together when he talked. Elwood Banks had booked Clickety-clack three times in the past, had never known him to be violent and rightly guessed that the young arresting officer, Roscoe Rules, had antagonized the derelict. His smashed nose and scarred eyes should have been a tip-off to Roscoe. Clickety-clack had Once been a ranked heavyweight.
    When Clickety-clack was brought inside the station by Roscoe he had merely said what he said to every arresting officer from Boston to Los Angeles: "I could whip you, Officer. In a fair fight I could whip you from here to East Fifth Street, know that?"
    And most arresting officers answered something like: "Yeah, Clickety-clack, I know you could-in a fair fight But if you try it, it ain't gonna be a fair fight cause my partner and me and half the nightwatch are gonna work out on your gourd with our sticks and do the fandango on your kisser. But in a fair fight you'd kick my ass, that's for sure."
    And Clickety-clack would be satisfied. But on this night when he made the same speech to Roscoe Rules, Roscoe replied, "Oh yeah, you're gonna whip me, old man?"
    And then in the corridor of Wilshire Station by the front desk in the presence of luscious Officer Reba Hadley whom he was trying to impress, Roscoe Rules took off his hat, slammed it on the desk, stood on the balls of his feet in front of the hulking derelict, put on his black gloves dramatically, both fists on his hips and said, "You think you can whip my ass, you wrinkled wart? You stinking tub a puke. Think you can whip me in a fair fight, huh?"
    And Clickety-clack just said, "Yeah." And from a corner of his all but destroyed brain, he found a memory, a