Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  REQUEST: Notify Commr Mulroony, Manhattan central D.B., ASAP.

  Valentine remarked on the bulletin and Detective Yorio, looking him up and down, grinned. “We haven’t caught up with him yet,” he said.

  “Show us the unusuals file, Ty, huh?” Maguire asked.

  Yorio shoved a green cloth-bound clip book across the desk.

  “Take a good look,” Maguire said, opening it for Valentine.

  The rookie read the first report, all about a Dutch socialite, she was said to be, who lived in a permanently leased seven-room suite at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Her name was Gabriella Lagerwall.

  The night before, so it seemed, Mrs. Lagerwall, widow of a Swiss industrialist, was in the company of a pair of Arab businessmen—Ala Almire Alphabili and Abdul Rahan Soria by name.

  The three of them had dined at Lutèce, then had had drinks at Regine’s and were back at the Pierre just before midnight.

  According to the report, Mrs. Lagerwall had just entered Alphabili’s own two-room suite when a pair of perpetrators in ski masks and guns jumped the trio. They were promptly handcuffed and thrown on a bed where their legs were taped together and pillowcases secured around their heads.

  The perpetrators then turned on the shower and a radio to cover the ruckus of ripping through everything in the suite and everything carried or worn by the estimable Mrs. Lagerwall and friends. The perpetrators insisted on calling the Arabs “prince.”

  Maguire stopped Valentine and asked, “Got to the bottom line yet?”

  Valentine read on. When he came to the inventory of stolen goods he gasped.

  Mrs. Lagerwall had lost a sixty-two-carat diamond and emerald necklace, which she said was worth “about a million” but which her friend Alphabili said was worth more like five million. Alphabili himself lost $8,000 in cash, which he had stuffed in the various pockets of his suit, a $10,000 diamond-studded wristwatch, a $4,000 diamond ring and $30,000 in cash, which was in his briefcase. Soria lost some $20,000 in cash, which he’d carried in his pockets.

  Valentine whistled. “Inside job?”

  “You might make detective grade real soon, boy,” Maguire said.

  Valentine then began the second report, this one about someone named Howard Doyle, who was executive producer of WABC-TV News. It seemed Mr. Doyle had been arrested on a weapons charge that morning at three o’clock outside his apartment building on East Seventy-seventh Street.

  Doyle was colorfully garbed as he was booked. He wore a cowboy suit, complete with ten-gallon hat, fur vest, a silver and turquoise belt and fringed leather chaps. He also wore a .357 magnum six-shot revolver strapped to his waist, a gun which would have won the West and considerably more as well. The arresting officer noticed the gun when Doyle was found hollering on East Seventy-seventh and in the act, so it appeared, of pulling off the arm of Kathy Cartusciello, the young lady said to share Doyle’s household.

  The perpetrator took a few swipes at the officers, it was alleged, and was subsequently booked on charges of criminal possession of a dangerous weapon.

  Maguire closed up the book. “Up where I live, which is Riverdale, you hardly ever hear of stuff like this.”

  Then Maguire and the rookie left the Detective Unit. In the corridor, a pair of cops were discussing a particularly odious rape case of a month or so earlier. The incident had occurred uptown, in a tiny Italian enclave of East Harlem, in the Twenty-third Precinct, just north of the Nineteenth’s northern border, East Ninety-sixth Street.

  “You know the spik bastards who raped the nun with the broomstick and carved her up?” one of the cops asked his buddy.

  “Yeah.”

  Two small-time burglars were surprised in the act of performing their trade at St. Cecilia’s Church at 112 East 106th Street. They stood on the landing of a stairway, confronted by a frail young nun, so frightened she probably would never have remembered their faces well enough for a line-up identification anyway, if only the punks were wise enough to flee right then and there. But they didn’t run.

  Instead, the burglars knocked down the nun, then took turns raping her. With their knives, they carved some twenty-six crosses into her flesh. Then they finished her off by jamming a broomstick into her vagina, leaving her there in the stairwell of the parish church bleeding and terrorized nearly into insanity.

  When word of the atrocity spread through the Italian communities around the city—from Hunt’s Point up in the Bronx downtown to the social clubs of Mulberry Street and over to Bensonhurst in Brooklyn—the newspapers were only beginning to hear about it. No one needed the papers to know that the Mafia had put up $5,000 for the privilege of meeting the two rapists.

  The punks, meanwhile, had sense enough to leave town. Or to try.

  One of them was caught in Chicago on a traffic violation and shipped back to New York on a no-frills flight. His accomplice was found hiding in a tenement on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, en route to LaGuardia and a night flight anywhere.

  Now they were at Riker’s Island in protective, segregated lock-up after having pleaded guilty as charged. The Mafia offer still stood.

  “They got their own special security at Riker’s,” the cop said. Other cops started listening. “And it’s some goddamn Jesuit priest counselor with Corrections who won’t let anybody near them because of the threats from the other spiks.”

  An older cop ventured his opinion. He was the old-line, old-school cop, the kind with a wide back split by sweat. He exuded squad-car odor, the smell of close quarters and Pall Mall cigarettes and coffee in styrofoam cups. Younger officers smelled of Brut.

  “So nowadays,” the older cop said, “we got to make appointments with a goddamn priest to get near a couple of spiks who confess to plugging up a nun? Hell, they could clear up twenty, thirty, forty goddamn cases on the burglary load easy. And you can’t even talk to them? Jesus H. Christ, you know? It’s getting so the only thing that makes any sense at all anymore is to retire, get the hell out of this insane asylum and take a job down in Florida with the Coconuts Police Department.”

  Back in the Community Affairs office, Ciffo was pounding his fist onto the top of a desk.

  “What was the call?” Maguire asked him.

  “It was the Chapman broad again.”

  Maguire explained to the rookie, “She’s our biggest complainer in the precinct. She’s always at the community meetings going on and on about the kids in the neighborhood and how they make noise playing ball and so on.

  “Now Tony here, being our youth officer, naturally used to be asked to the meetings. He’s not allowed anymore on account of the last time when he told Mrs. Chapman that the city had purchased four alligators to eat all the bad children.”

  Ciffo felt the need to defend himself. “Well, isn’t that just about what she wants? Doesn’t she want to see them all killed or something horrible short of that? Maimed maybe. They’re not so bad, you know. Most of them are really fine kids. My God, the cranks here! They should see the kids in my neighborhood on Bath Avenue in Brooklyn. They’d be out there kissing the kids around here on the Upper East Side if they could see the kids where I live.

  “I don’t know, I think some of these people up here are so detached from reality it’s unbelievable. I mean, I sometimes think the richer they are the more they don’t want to deal with anybody, anytime.”

  A couple of cops, more old-timers somewhere in their mid- to late fifties, with plans to open bait and tackle shops on Long Island Sound or hunting lodges up in the Adiron-dacks just as soon as their pension checks started up, wandered past Maguire and Ciffo. They went to a cabinet near the washbasin.

  One of them jammed a key into the cabinet and pulled out a small handgun and slipped it into his belt. Then he walked with his partner out toward the hallway.

  “Lemme see the extra piece,” one of the cops said. “What do you have, some throwdown?”

  The cop pulled a small gun from his belt. “It ain’t no throwdown. What do you t
hink, I’m a crook? This ain’t the bad old days.”

  In the “bad old days,” some New York cops were known to carry small, concealed pistols which they would throw down on the street after they’d shot someone. Then, during the departmental inquiry which would follow, the cop could claim that the perpetrator pulled a pistol on him and he shot in self-defense.

  “Jesus, what a little dink gun. What’re all the rubber bands for anyway?”

  “So it don’t slip down into my Jockeys.”

  “You cheap hump. Whyn’t you buy a holster? Unless it is a throwdown.”

  “It ain’t a throwdown, I’m telling you. I just feel better with it.”

  Ciffo’s partner walked in, Officer Jean Truta, her blond hair rolled up under her cap, the top of her white flak jacket peeking out above her shirt collar like a steel-lined T-shirt.

  “Time to roll,” Ciffo said to Maguire. “Time to go out checking on all the bad boys and girls of this great city of ours. Hold down the fort, right, Johnny?”

  He caught Valentine by the shoulder and pulled him along with him. “You come on with us in the car,” he said, “or we’ll see what might be up for you at the desk, right?”

  “You got the nice car today?” Ciffo asked Truta as they walked down the stairway into the lobby. Valentine followed behind them.

  “The heater works, so don’t complain,” she said.

  Ciffo turned around to Valentine. “Nothing but the best up here in the One-Nine.”

  They reached the desk and the sergeant asked Ciffo about Valentine. Then the sergeant grinned and crooked a finger at the rookie in the blazer and slacks.

  “Up there in Community Affairs,” the sergeant said, “you’ll be doing mostly Mickey Mouse at the social clubs. Want to see what real cops see?”

  Valentine nodded, uncertainly.

  The sergeant waved over the very two cops who had had the conversation about the advisability of acquiring a holster for the throwdown revolver. The sergeant handed them a piece of paper.

  “Need a couple of uniforms right away on a stink stiff,” the sergeant said. “Take the kid here with you so he can see what that’s like.”

  Ralph and Ed by name, the officers and Valentine left the station house, got into a blue-and-white at the curb and headed east on Sixty-fifth Street toward an apartment building at York Avenue near Rockefeller University. The sky was beginning to darken at the end of an unusually chilly day in early September.

  “Ever been on a stink-stiff call, kid?” Ralph asked Valentine. He sat in the front passenger seat, twisted around to talk to the Community Affairs officer in the back.

  “No,” Valentine answered, “but I was at a floater once.”

  Ralph and Ed whistled.

  “So, you know what we’re after here?” Ralph asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Sometimes this can be worse than a floater, you know,” Ed warned, looking back at Valentine by way of the rearview mirror. “They tell you that? At the academy, they say you need strong feet and legs. But they should tell you that you better have besides that some pretty strong guts.”

  Valentine wouldn’t soon forget the floater call. He had accompanied two veteran officers from a Flushing precinct house in Queens, two officers with old-fashioned big bellies not unlike Ralph and Ed. Ordinarily, the medical examiner for the County of Queens would have sent around a truck for the job, but it was a Sunday and the morgue was short-handed, so the station house obliged.

  When they arrived at the scene, Valentine was struck by the large number of ghoulish neighborhood kids hanging around in the shallow waters of Flushing Bay, wading out into the murky water after a gray and greasy lump of something that used to be a living human being. The veteran cops handed the kids a grappling hook and they pulled the thing in close enough to haul onshore. Pieces of the body fell away in shreds as the boys pulled it in.

  “Come on now, Valentine, leave us not be shy,” one of the cops said. Then he gave Valentine a pair of huge rubber gloves with stains all over them. The gloves covered Valentine’s forearms as well as his hands. He helped the cops, similarly gloved, pull to shore a carcass so bloated and discolored and misshapen that it was impossible to tell anything such as sex, race or age about something only vaguely human. And the thing smelled so powerfully that several of the teenagers who had thought the whole spectacle a matter of weekend entertainment sneaked away to vomit privately.

  Valentine and the other cops rolled up the hulk in a police-issue black plastic body bag, then lifted it and set it down into the trunk of the squad car. They peeled off their gloves and tossed them into the trunk as well.

  On the way to the morgue, a distance of some seven miles, Valentine received a lecture on floaters in particular and long-dead bodies in general:

  “Know why it’s so important to wear gloves?” one of the veteran cops asked. “’Cause of the toxic flora. Stuff grows on a stiff and nothing’s more toxic than that. We oughta get hazard pay messing around with toxic flora, that’s what I say.”

  Valentine needed very badly to be sick.

  “Happens all the time out there in the bay shallows,” the other veteran cop rattled on as he weaved in and out of church traffic on a Sunday in Queens. “Guys that got neutralized last winter and tossed into the drink somewheres start popping up all over town in the spring when the water warms up.”

  Suddenly, the cop driving made a U-turn on Northern Boulevard and pulled into a Burger King drive-in restaurant. Valentine heard the body bag bounce in the trunk as the squad car went over a concrete traffic bump.

  “Hungry?” the cop asked as he eased the squad car into a parking slot near a microphone where one could order up whoppers and milkshakes. “I get a little discount here.”

  Then he said, “Don’t worry about the stiff in the back, kid. He won’t be eating much.”

  Now, as he rode in the back of another squad car, this time on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Valentine hoped to God for a little more formality to the proceedings he was about to encounter. He hoped that this time there would be someone on the way from the morgue at the very least.

  The apartment building on York Avenue was squat and lime green and crisscrossed with rusting fire escapes and probably contained as many apartments as legally permissible plus several more in consideration of a hundred-dollar bill for the super and a private deal with the rental agent involved. Stewardesses and certain others would put up with just about anything in order to call the Upper East Side home.

  The foyer smelled of dog shit. There the super was waiting, wide-eyed and speaking an incoherent dialect of Spanish, tinged with muscatel. His arms flailed as he directed Officer Ralph and Ed and the cop in the blue blazer, Valentine, down a first-floor hallway toward the darkened rear hold of the building, then up a spindly staircase.

  A couple of cops who had heard the call on the radio were already on hand, standing just outside the door to apartment 2-I. The unmistakable odor of dead flesh stung Valentine’s nose. He knew the routine: first, the uniformed officers would enter the premises and sweep the scene for evidence of foul play; then, assuming there was none, the officers would notify the medical examiner if that office was not already informed; then they would make contact with the desk officer on duty; then they would give a preliminary report of their findings to the precinct Detective Unit; then they would question a few neighbors; then they would return to the station house and write up their reports.

  Valentine saw one of the other officers with a body bag hanging around his shoulders and his stomach began hurting.

  “Better light up the cigars on this one,” an officer outside the door said.

  The super used a house key to open the door. The stench was like a mailed fist. Lighters clicked and cigars and cigarettes burned. Anything to cover the smell. The super howled something in Spanish and retreated.

  Valentine and others, hands held over their noses, stepped into the fetid apartment. Water trickled through a radiator
below the single window, which framed a view of brown brick. Cardboard and tape had replaced a pane of glass. There was a draft around the floorboards that kicked up dust. Mouse droppings lay thick in the corners.

  There was a cot against the wall. Next to the cot, on the floor, lay a clarinet with a cracked reed. Above the cot, taped to the wall, were color snapshots of a young man with red hair standing in front of a large frame house with a veranda, along with people who must have been a family. Ohio Gothic types. There was a snap of the young man with another youthful, all-American bunch. Young musicians grouped around a portable stage in a high school gymnasium somewhere far from the glitter and sometimes the loneliness of Manhattan.

  On the cot, beneath a pile of everything made of cloth that the tenant owned, was what appeared to be an extremely thin young man with brittle hair the color of carrots. His eyes were open, though yellowed over with death. The sockets had turned black and the skin was gray. East River gray.

  He had starved to death in the richest, most glamorous neighborhood in the world—Precinct 19, Manhattan.

  Chapter 2

  Except for the big, square Dick Tracy jaw and those times he must don the official crisp powder-blue shirt, his shiny inspector’s badge, the slim black four-in-hand tie and the navy twill coat and trousers tailored to accommodate a gun belt, Paul Short looks not so much like the commander of a New York police precinct house as he does the worldly proprietor of an upper Madison Avenue art gallery.

  His sartorial choices tend toward hopsack blazers, silk ties of deep hues, pleated slacks and butter-soft loafers. Often, he arrives for his tour of duty at the Nineteenth with a rosebud in his lapel. His silver hair is carefully cut.

  The aesthetic is important. It wouldn’t matter if a commander of the South Bronx precinct popularly known as “Fort Apache” clothed himself exclusively in rayon or polyester and wore two-toned patent-leather shoes. But if a cop with visions of high command doesn’t know why such fabrics do not befit an Upper East Side precinct inspector, he’ll not likely get the post; and it’s unlikely that anyone would think to tell him why.