If you'll indulge a confession, I'm a happy guy sitting across from a cop -- or even a retired cop -- with my notebook on the table and a beer in my hand. They've all got stories, some funny, some dark, some of them even true.
That's what led me to call Joseph Wambaugh at his home in San Diego last week and see if he wanted to meet for dinner and a margarita or two at Villa Sombrero, a Highland Park institution and longtime hangout for him and other cops. The Sombrero was preparing to shut down, at least for now, because of a dispute between the restaurant owner and property owner.
But Wambaugh, who long ago gave up chasing bad guys to write about it, was pushing up against a hard deadline on a Hollywood project. He couldn't make the trip to L.A. but suggested I call his old detective partner and longtime pal Richard Kalk, who had put in more than a few good years at Villa Sombrero, especially after retiring and helping to open the nearby Los Angeles Police Historical Museum.
Kalk and I were set up two tablecloths away from Wambaugh's regular table. Behind Kalk was a lacquered portrait of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and 10 feet away was a poster-size photo of Wambaugh, an only-in-L.A. juxtaposition.
I looked across the table at Kalk, who Wambaugh describes as having "a face like a catcher's mitt," and sized him up as one lucky lug. As a Marine, he saw duty in Okinawa but no action. As a cop, he saw plenty of action in 30 years but never had to pull his trigger.
Kalk did a little moonlighting as a cop and partnered on a real estate investment that turned a tidy profit. He sunk his good fortune into a house in San Marino when they went for $75,000, and don't we all wish we were as smart? There, he raised two daughters with Heidi, the love of his life, who died in October 2006.
Wambaugh set Kalk up as a technical advisor on the NBC-TV series "Police Story." This led to a few snippets of screen time, with Kalk usually playing a cop. He was in "Shampoo," "The Onion Field," "The Blue Knight" and "The New Centurions."
"It was fun, but oh my goodness was it boring," Kalk said of his life as a Hollywood big shot. Six hours to adjust the sound or the lighting? Thank the good Lord for catering trucks.
Kalk socked away about $200 an episode to come up with story lines of his own or to find cops with fresh material straight off the streets. The cons, the cranks, the bungling bandits and crusading cops. Kalk and his mates had PhD's in fresh pulp.
