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the wrong end of the Coachella Valley, thirty minutes and millions of bucks away from Glamour. A captain at Palm Springs P.D. told the carrot-top cop he’d consider letting Nelson apply after he “proved himself” for a year or two at one more police department, hinting that it was Nelson’s last chance.
    The paternal grandfather of Nelson Hareem had been a rug peddler from Beirut, but his three other grandparents were pure Okie from Bakersfield and Barstow. Nevertheless, because of his grandfather and his surname, he bore the brunt of every Arab or Iranian joke in vogue. And of course, because of his reputation, everyone began to call him Dirty Hareem.
    Some cops thought that at the root of Nelson Hareem’s aggressiveness was a little-man’s complex, and because he was only five foot seven, they’d dubbed him Half-Nelson. He’d been given his walking papers by both of his previous police chiefs for being unacceptably “eager.” Once, when he’d choked out a San Bernardino County deputy D.A. who’d stopped at a minimarket to buy some nonprescription sleeping pills after a long and arduous trial in which he was prosecuting two outlaw bikers for beating the crap out of a cop.
    Young Nelson had been cruising by the minimarket and spotted a bulge under the prosecutor’s jacket as the lawyer was leaving the store with his Sominex. And Nelson was sure he was looking at the armed bandit who’d robbed six liquor stores in the area. How was he to know (he later pleaded) that this prosecutor had received a death threat from the biker gang and so carried a concealed firearm even when he went to his daughter’s first Cotillion dance, which was where he was headed that evening.
    After the prosecutor revived from five minutes of convulsive twitching brought on by Nelson’s carotid chokehold—with his wife, daughter and three other little girls in Cotillion chiffon screaming hysterically in his Volvo station wagon—the lawyer became a tad less diligent in prosecuting those bikers for breaking the bones of a cop. In fact, the prosecutor offered to drop the felony charge and let them cop a plea to malicious mischief. That caper put an end to Nelson Hareem’s career in San Bernardino County.
    In Los Angeles County he was even more eager. While patrolling an alley with his car lights out just after midnight, Nelson had spotted a prowler lurking around the side window of a very fancy house in a silk-stocking residential district. Nelson got out of his patrol car and crept quietly into a neighbor’s yard, climbed a six-foot wall that divided the properties, and was shocked and outraged to see that the prowler was watching an unsuspecting woman undress in her bathroom. Nelson was even more shocked and outraged when the guy started whacking his willy. When the woman turned and uttered a plaintive little scream at the prowler, Nelson launched himself into space, down on the guy’s head, who, it turned out, was the owner of the house, and the biggest commercial real estate developer in town. He also was president of the local Kiwanis, as well as a contributor to the political coffers of a state senator, a U.S. Congressman, and Nelson’s boss, the Mayor.
    Until that night no one knew that the real estate developer and his wife had an arrangement where once every other week or so, she’d undress very provocatively in front of the window and then scream when she saw him milking the mamba. For which she’d get to overdraw her Neiman Marcus charge card with total impunity. It was a good deal for both of them, until their local policeman, Officer Nelson Hareem, went ballistic and put the hog flogger in a neck brace for three weeks.
    Nelson capped it off two weeks later by accidentally firing a shotgun inside his patrol car. When he dashed inside the station to inform his long-suffering lieutenant of an “accidental discharge,” the older cop said it was