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of retired Deputy Chief Lorenzo Muirfield, who after retirement was appointed by the mayor to the board of police commissioners. Chip was a law-school dropout, disappointing his Uncle Lorenzo, who decided to redeem his nephew by pushing him to the top of Lorenzo’s chosen profession. (When it came to nepotism the Hollywood film studios had nothing on the police department.)
    Chip Muirfield was only twenty-seven years old and had been a policeman for just four years, most of it in administrative jobs. He had been temporarily assigned to Rampart Detectives on a loan to give him some “seasoning,” as his uncle put it when he begged the favor. And to prepare Chip for the quick ascension up the bureaucratic ladder which was to be his destiny. This kid had so much topspin you couldn’t keep him inside the baseline, everyone said. He’d taken to detective work with a fervor. Especially homicide, because he loved to look at dead bodies, the gorier the better. And he discovered much to his delight that Melody Waters, the only female on the homicide team, shared his fascination with mutilated corpses.
    Melody was a cute-as-a-button brunette, five years older than Chip, and the only female officer on the Los Angeles Police Department with the balls to wear a shoulder holster like Clint Eastwood. Very few male detectives had the balls to wear a shoulder holster like Clint Eastwood. Chip Muirfield also wore a shoulder holster. The other cops said it was a love story: Dirty Harry meets Dirty Harriet.
    Mario Villalobos sat at the homicide table and rubbed his aching eyes and looked at the two happy young hot dogs who had found each other in their shoulder holsters, and he wondered if he could afford to pull the pin when he got twenty-five years in. But he really couldn’t afford to, not with the second divorce just final. Not with two teenaged sons to support from his first marriage. He was ever grateful that the brief second one was childless. He might have had to stay for thirty in order to get the maximum pension. As it was, he longed to retire at twenty-five years. Then he happened to glance down at Chip Muirfield’s feet. The kid was wearing suede saddle oxfords!
    It was not the same police department that Mario Villalobos had joined back in the early sixties, before the street riots and Vietnam, when dinosaurs like The Bad Czech were the rule and not the exception. Mario Villalobos III in those days had felt obliged to explain away his Spanish surname to every policeman he worked with: “No, I’m not Mexican. No, I’m not even Spanish, for chrissake. Well, I mean I had one freaking grandparent who migrated from Spain to England but he never spoke Spanish again. In fact, he married my grandma in Wales. I know I’m dark, but … no, I can’t speak Welsh! Only Richard Burton can speak Welsh. And my mother was an Okie from Muskogee. If I was a Mexican I’d admit it!”
    But even if a partner was convinced, there’d be the directed calls from communications to meet a motor cop or a traffic unit to translate for some poor wetback they were booking for drunk driving. Only to repeat: “Yes, I know I have a Mexican name. It’s Spanish really, but I can’t speak … Aw, shit!”
    Until finally, one night while on patrol in Watts in 1965, when half the city seemed to be burning and a fire storm was lighting up the sky in the west for twenty miles, a wise old cop from San Pedro who had been moved in for riot duty said to him, “Kid, I was you I’d take advantage a my name. I mean, here you go around apologizing to everybody cause you got a name like a beaner and cause you’re dark enough to pass for one. I see the department changing a lot by the time you grow up and get whiskers. If this riot means anything I think they’re gonna be pushing the minorities up the totem pretty soon. I was you, I’d be a Mexican. Know what I mean?”
    And the old cop was almost right. After the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment