O'Hara was still outside. A window had opened on the second floor, and a man bearing a strong resemblance to Uriah Heep was leaning out. O'Hara shone his light up at him. "Hey you! Is this lady nahmal down hee-an?"
"She'sh not much of a conversnationalisht, but she doeshn't give me no trouble," the strange old man yelled back, showing that if anything, he was no one to judge.
"He's downstairs!" the lady shriked appearing again in her window. There was a lot of crashing around inside, and Whalen's flishlight beam shone out through the basement windows. One of them was broken. Someone had gotten, in, and appeared to have also gotten cat.
"Who else lives hee-ah?" O'Hara shouted upstairs as he entered the building and started up the stairs. Uriah was waiting for us on the second floor in wild-eyed confusion. "He'sh an epileptic," he whinnied, pointing up at the third floor. "Take it eashy on him."
The officers banged on the third-floor door and its mysterious occupant burst out on the landing. None of us, seasoned officers included, was prepared for the sight of a pale, fish-colored man in camouflaged bikini underwear, crying. "Has there been a shooting?"
We beat a hasty retreat, postponing the investigation until the basement tenants came home and reported the break-in.
"Fahkin nahts up they-ah," hissed O'Hara.
We stopped momentarily on the street to watch an undercover drug bust which had occurred on the corner during our tour of the funhouse. We left as one of the narcs was shaking down a pimply young suspect.
And so it went, for seven hours on the beat.
WHALEN and O'Hara are good, hardworking cops, and largely unappreciated. We felt the same hostile sidewalk stares that they did. We saw few people thank them. We watched them grab a man who had his hands around the throat of a young woman in a barroom doorway. The woman called them pigs.
The officers said they are frustrated sometimes that manpower is short and some suspects get away on plea bargains or technicalities. Sometimes the cops wonder what they're doing out there.
"Sometimes it's futile," said O'Hara, "but you have to do it. Otherwise everybody would be doing anything they want out they-ah. And to the guy on the street who goes to work, it means we'll come if he calls. You have to have something, right? It's bettah than nuthin."