Latent Hostility…(Sort of)

Starsky and Hutch have different techniques when it comes to interrogations.

Originally published in the 2006 SHareCon zine.

He was a dripping blob. If sweat equaled guilt then we had him. Water was running off him like a faucet. He didn’t smell too good either.

My partner was playing his usual good cop role. He could do the bad cop routine. But we found most bad guys were less than intimidated by blond hair, blue eyes, and a gorgeous smile. (Well, I thought it was gorgeous. I didn’t tell him that. But when he was smiling the sun was shining in my world.)

Bad cop is a natural for me. I don’t have to reach too deep to find hostility in regards to the criminal element. This turkey was taking his sweet time with creative excuses and colorful lies. The room was rotten with his B.O. Hutch was breathing through his mouth and trying to look sympathetic, understanding and kind. But he was starting to wilt in the stench.

“Mr. Danvers, excuse us a moment, would you?” he said breathlessly. “My partner and I need to confer on another matter not related to your case.”

“Duh call?” asked Drippy.

“Who would you like to call, sir?” asked Hutch breathily.

“Mudder. Rebecca.”

“Your mother is Rebecca, sir?”

“Nah, mudder’s Mrs. Danvers. Day off, see? Works for Rebecca at Manderley. She’ll know.”

“We’ll arrange for that phone call as soon as possible, sir.”

Drippy grunted again. Probably from the exhaustion of delivering that dissertation.

We exited the steam room. And as soon as I shut the door, Hutch exhaled and started coughing. “He stinks.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“I mean, he really reeks. I wonder if it’s a medical condition?”

“Yeah, no showeritis.”

He smiled at my brilliant witticism. “Good one, Starsk.”

“You want some candy? How about a soda?”

“No, thanks.”

“So, what do you think? Crazy Eddie?”

“We did that the last two interrogations.”

“I like Crazy Eddie. Especially the part where I go ballistic and throw you against the wall.”

“Starsky, do you enjoy overpowering me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You picked me up and slammed me against that wall pretty hard last time.” He reached for my bag of M&M’s and shook out a pile into his hand. “Maybe you have latent hostility towards me.”

“Only when you steal my candy. Give it back. Anyway, I wanted to make it look good. Like I was really crazy.”

“I see.”

“Stop psychoanalyzing me. Okay? I am not latent.

“Are you sure?” He reached for my candy again and touched my hand. He stroked it lightly. Surprised, I pulled away.

“See? Hostile. Maybe I should play bad cop.”

“Yeah, you and Bambi.”

“I can be tough if I want to be. I just think you get more from them, if they start to trust you.”

“We can be the next two weeks getting Drippy to trust you enough to tell you what he knows.”

“I know that.” He took the cup from my hand and drank.

“Help yourself,” I said, and watched him swallow.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” We stood in the hall by the vending machines trying to come up with an idea to move the questioning along. I knew that Crazy Eddie worked. All my partner had to do was submit to a little roughing up, that’s all.

Time limped on. Hutch wasn’t saying anything. No ideas seemed to be coming my way from the brains of the outfit. Was he waiting for me to come up with a good idea? Should I try again?

“Well?” he said, with sort of a flirtatious tilt of his head.

“Well, what?”

“Any suggestions?”

“I told you. Crazy Eddie. It works.”

“Fine. Whatever you want.”

We went back into the interrogation room. The suspect in the meantime had had time to come up with more excuses, alibis, why he didn’t do it and blahblahblah. He was planning to drag it out until Christ came back on his happy horse. He knew how the game was played. But we changed the rules on him.

So, after some more hemming and hawing and listening to him play his violin to the tune of ‘You Got the Wrong Guy,’ I went into Crazy Eddie mode. Maybe I should explain how the routine works.

I lose my temper. I start jumping up and down and swearing. I act nuts. Hutch gets up and tries to calm me down. I grab him and throw him gently against the wall… or not so gently. It depends on the energy of the moment. I’m a method actor. My range moves between Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in STREETCAR and Nicholson’s Jack Torrance in THE SHINING with nuances of Wile E. Coyote in the use of props. That’s how we play it.

Okay, that’s how I played it. All he had to do was take it. Just go with the flow, follow my lead, read my signals, and let me do it. But no, what he really wanted to do was direct. There I was pretending to struggle with him in order to convince the suspect that not only was I crazier than a loon, but his trusty good cop pal was at my mercy. That was the psychological turning point, in my opinion. But did I get any real cooperation from my partner? Do I ever?

Sure, he let me pick him up and toss him against the wall eventually. But the whole time I was whispering directions in his ear. Things like: relax, let me do it, it’ll be over in a minute, stop fighting me, you said I could. Then, instead of cooperating, his natural fighting qualities and what I perceive as his latent hostilities towards my superior grasp of acting technique took over and we really started in.

So then I had to really slam him against the wall. Because for one thing, if I let it go on he’d end up overpowering me and there went the angelic social worker persona. And for another thing, our suspect really seemed to be enjoying two guys struggling with each other. Personally, I didn’t want to end up some perps’ masturbatory fantasy.

Okay, so with Drippy I added a little something extra to the routine. Big deal. The usual move was to push-lift-slam. But this time I added a grind. I don’t know why. I was in character — that’s all I can tell you.

My character required me to not only overpower my unwilling victim, but to do it flirtatiously. I was going for a mix of Dr. Frankenfurter in ROCKY HORROR, scary but attractive, and Sean Connery as Agent 007 — a license to kill, but let me seduce you first. It came off more as Fuzzie Palumbo. (He was a guy in our neighborhood who became a professional wrestler. Before that he was a cross-dresser.)

Still, it came off. (Maybe that’s not the right phrase.) It worked. Drippy started talking, Hutch started taking notes like a madman. We got the confession. End of story. Fini. Curtain down. Nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actor. An Oscar on my mantel. My own production company because what I really want to do is produce.

You’d think.

Hutch had that look. That “you-have-crossed-a-line-here-pal-and-I-am-not-happy-not-by-a-long-shot-I-fucking-mean-it-why-are-you-still-in-my-presence-you-turd?” look.

I knew that look. I hated that look. I’d seen it before. (Rarely, but I had seen it.)

He was busy. Busy with the report. He’d put me on hold with no background music. Maybe I did rough him up with too much realism. But I had a head of steam on when I moved into him and a real determination to get out of Drippy’s putrid presence.

Maybe my emotions overwhelmed me.

“I was going for realism,” I told him… again.

I got type type type for an answer.

“So, what do you want to do tonight?”

He said: Type, type. Type. Type. Type.

“Finish the report and then what?”

He answered: Typetypetype. Type!

“Have something to eat? Go home? Kill me?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

Type. Type. “Eat.”

“You inviting me?”

Typetypetype. “No.”

“Maybe I made it too real, huh?”

Type. Type. Type. “You think?”

“Hey, what was that noise, anyway?”

“You mean the sound of my head when it hit the wall?”

“Oh. That’s what it was. Sorry.”

He ripped the page out of the typewriter, grabbed a pen, held it in a death grip and signed his name at the bottom. “Where’s the 1218 form?”

Finally! I was needed. I was elevated from turd-dom. I was… I was… I was unable to find the form.

Okay, right here you need to understand about the 1218. The 1218 superseded the 1217 and before that 1217 used to be 1216. When I started being a cop, it was the 1213 form. Maybe that 13 has something to do with it. But these forms suck, no matter what the hell the number is.

There are four pages of teeny tiny tedious print spaced real tight. Line after line of stupid, inane, garbageola that you have to fill in. Even if it doesn’t apply, you have to fill it in. You have to say N/A for not applicable. If you leave a line blank, one line, one damn line, they kick it back to you as N/A not acceptable. I hated the form; it hated me.

And re-entry from the outer limits of the planet Turd was now jeopardized as my craft tumbled out of control in a free-for-all of flinging files furiously.

“It’s right here! Here! Somewhere!”

“Where?” he asked sweetly.

“Close by. I just had it.” By now I was scrabbling through the wastebasket and the taco wrappers from lunch.

“Can’t you find it?”

“I just had it.” I dumped out the wastebasket and started sorting garbage from paper.

“Oh, look,” he said. “Here it is.” He pulled it out from under a file on his desk.

“I hate you,” I said, palms greasy with salsa du jour. “You know that?” He squared up the entire report, including the 1218, tapped it on the desk and sandwiched it in an official folder. Then he stood up and looked down at me as I finished refiling the wastebasket contents from paper to taco wrappers to used Kleenex. At least we were alone in the office and I only had one witness to my garbage grope. He strolled towards the door while I got up. “That’s it? You leaving me with the last word? I can’t believe it.”

He turned around and came back. “You might want to try for a little less realism in your Crazy Eddie routine.”

“I can do that.”

“Good. You might also consider your latent tendencies towards me.”

“You callin’ me a homo?”

“I meant latent hostility, Starsky.”

“Oh.”

“Though one never knows, does one?”

“Says you.”

“I do. Goodnight.”

“Okay. Go.”

“I will.”

“Latent?” I wanted to know.

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t going to mention it, but…”

“You said you’d never bring that up,” he said, looking all worried.

“I didn’t mean that. I meant the other thing…”

“You mean when you added that extra twist to Crazy Eddie?”

“Yeah.”

“Goodnight.”

“That’s it? No feedback? No response?” I asked.

“What do you want me to say?”

“What did you think?”

“I thought it was totally uncalled-for, out of place and embarrassing to be humped in public.”

“Drippy’s not public.” Hutch gave me the Glacier-Blue look — head high, proud, eyes cool blue. I gave him back the Paul Muni Special.

We faced off and stood there looking at each other. I gave him an air kiss. The corners of his mouth came up in a maybe smile. Who was going to cave?

“Pick a number…” he said finally.

“Sixty-nine?”

“No,” he said with irritation. “Let me finish, would you please? A number between one and three.”

“Oh. Two.”

“Wow! What powers of cognition. You win.”

“Yeah? My party?”

“Your party.”

We work hard. We play hard, especially after breaking a big case. We drank beer at the Pits. It was a dive, but it was our dive. We played pinball as though our lives depended on it. We acted like kids instead of cops. We challenged and insulted each other. We pushed, nudged, and shoved just so we could touch each other.

“You tilt, you lose,” Hutch said as he pocketed the twenty bucks.

“The machine is fixed. I’ve done that move a million times and I never tilted once.”

“You mean the copulation contortion?”

“The what?”

“Never mind. I won fair and square. And you know it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Your place or mine?”

We ordered a pizza and played Monopoly. I bought up all the railroads and utilities in a sound economic move. Hutch bought everything that was yellow, green, and dark blue. He built hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk. He sipped a beer and waited for me to land on his frickin’ resort. And when I did, he bankrupted me. He laughed at my ruin.

I had no choice. I had to jump on top of him. I had to. He forced me to.

What else could I do?

I had to wrestle him down and stretch out on top of him. I had to squirm my way between his legs and shut him up with my tongue in his mouth. I had to do the bump and grind.

You know… latent hostility (sort of).