Frankie Paradise didn’t seem to have a weak spot. Could that be?
Short thought about this for a while. It didn’t add up. He’d been a cop long enough to know that everybody had a weak spot. If he could touch that spot just right, even a smooth operator like Frankie Paradise would sing himself right up the river. Finally, it occurred to Short that Frankie Paradise had the oldest and the biggest weak spot in the annals of crime history: a dumb blonde for a girl friend.
Instead of shadowing Paradise, Short went for a tap on Blondie’s telephone.
Among other calls that Frankie might not be so happy to know about, Short discovered that Blondie’s assistance in Paradise’s informal pharmaceutical enterprise was to provide certain inquirers with five numerals. Over and over again, Blondie would issue the same five digits.
These days, maybe the telephone company has high-speed computers and possibly someone who knows how to operate them in order to isolate a set of five digits attached to a small collection of exchange codes. Back in the days when Short was chasing after Paradise, though, he had to rely on the inevitable slip-up on the part of the dumb blonde girl friend. His patience was rewarded.
One fine day, Blondie said, “Ravenswood … whoops, I’m not supposed to say that …”
It was all Short needed to know that the safe house was in the Ravenswood district of Queens. He checked through telephone company records and located an address.
Then, armed with the necessary court papers, Short paid a visit to the house one night while his partners resumed playing subway games with Frankie Paradise. He secreted himself in the closet of one of the several bedrooms in the large Queens home. And there he stayed for ten days, waiting for the mouse to enter the trap.
Paradise was nabbed in the act of retrieving a kilo of heroin from a false bottom to one of the bedroom dressers. Short made the collar with no resistance, though plenty of grudging respect for his prowess and patience. Paradise had in his pockets at the time about $50,000 in cash, a pittance in comparison to the value of the heroin in the dressers.
Now, with nearly thirty years on the job, and assignment to a gentler sort of precinct, Short was confronted with the case of the vanished dowager.
Her name was Eleanor Moore Montgomery, aged eighty-eight. Ten days earlier, she was to have arrived at a Southampton dinner party. On the day she vanished, the doorman at her apartment building, 875 Fifth Avenue, flagged her a taxicab. Presumably, she was taken to her garage, at First Avenue and Seventy-second Street, where she would take out her Mercedes and motor on out to Long Island alone.
A former fashion editor at Vogue magazine, Mrs. Montgomery had been lately fascinated with Eastern mysticism in the person of one Panna Kamla, who had his own room in Mrs. Montgomery’s spacious apartment.
The two of them, in fact, Mrs. Montgomery and Kamla, were co-authors of a coffee-table book few had ever heard of, The Meaning of My Mantra, all about the Kamla world-view. The book was a sort of bible for the foundation Mrs. Montgomery had established, along with her guru, Kamla.
Kamla was unavailable for questioning.
“Sometimes it’s first thing in the morning when the cop has to go to the morgue,” the desk sergeant was telling Valentine. “So what’s good for him is good for a Community Affairs guy, right?”
Valentine nodded and was off once again with the fun-loving Ralph and Ed.
The New York Medical Examiner’s Office is situated in a big, battleship-gray hulk of a building at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue in the Kip’s Bay district of Manhattan, near the Bellevue Hospital complex. The saloons and restaurants serving the neighborhood of resident physicians, medical technicians and interns reverberate with tales of visits by the likes of Valentine the rookie cop.
Valentine walked into the building and found it full of white-smocked medical personnel and cops getting signatures for deposits of corpses that had found their way to the morgue. The smell of the place was a blend of formaldehyde and dead wino.
There was a main bank of steel beds and vaults in a cavernous room with slippery, immaculate tiles. An orderly helped an intern and a cop locate a vault containing the body of the young man who had died in the little apartment on York Avenue, the musician from Ohio.
The body, with its toe tag connecting it to the Nineteenth Precinct, was shifted onto a steel surgical table with sheets cascading over the sides to the floor. Then the body was wheeled into a small operating room off the main bank. Whenever there is an unwitnessed death, anywhere in New York City, there is at the very least a preliminary autopsy performed, even though the cause of death might be clear as day. On such rules of pro forma are thousands of careers built in New York.
Valentine watched as interns scrubbed up. Then for the next quarter of an hour or so, he watched with increasing wooziness the routine incisions made on the body of the young man with the gray skin as his body was probed for any signs of evidence that would indicate foul play.
Blood was drained through the arms by a pair of tubes implanted in the dead wrists. Tissue was extracted from the roof of the mouth and the frontal portion of the brain for later chemical analysis.
As they worked, the chief resident made oral observations about the young man they examined. Another intern operated a tape recorder to preserve these notations. Valentine could hear it all, distanced as he was from the mass of toxic flora that lay dead on the operating table, for the interns spoke into a microphone suspended above the corpse.
“In this case,” the chief intern intoned, “there isn’t a great deal more fluid to be extracted from the body. But it’s been my experience that there always is something in there, always something a little wet left inside the body that’s been dead for days, even months.”
For the benefit of the novice observer, the intern continued:
“Now, we’re going to have to do something a little unorthodox here, something we didn’t do customarily in medical school. What we have to do is drain the pelvic fluids by way of the penis.”
Valentine was confused.
“We take a suture …”
Valentine’s eyes were perversely glued to the grisly procedure. A flaring pain shot through his own pelvis in some involuntary physical sympathy.
“… and wind it around the base of the penis. Then we wrap it up tight.”
The intern wound the suture around the corpse’s penis a half-dozen times, then wound the other end around his fingers.
“Right,” he said into the microphone. “Now, I’ll hold it taut while my associate works on some pressure points at the neck. I’ll wait for the signal.”
The other intern fingered the corpse’s neck. Then, suddenly, he yelled, “Pull!”
The intern with the suture wrapped around his fingers gave a fierce tug. At that precise moment, as the dead man’s penis was yanked hard, there came from below the operating table, hidden under the draped sheets, a bloodcurdling scream of pain. For several horrifying seconds suspended in time, it seemed to Valentine, the scream floated from the dead man’s own lips like some nightmare come true.
An orderly crawled out from beneath the wheeled operating table laughing gleefully.
Valentine, the butt of the joke, very nearly fainted.
Ralph and Ed were laughing so hard they almost fainted, too.
Chapter 3
“You’re not married, if I hear right.”
“No,” Valentine said.
“Course not. You wouldn’t be sitting here in this dump with me now, would you? Not if you had a good woman to go home to.”
“That would depend a lot on the women, I’d say.”
Keenan laughed, but the joke was a sad one for him. He ordered another schnapps and lager, his fourth setup. He drank the liquor down quickly and his lips stretched back as it burned nicely in his throat. He sipped the lager. Keenan was a thirty-eight-year-old cop with sixteen years on the force, a wife and two kids at home up in Riverdale. His wife, Mairead, was expecting their third.
They sat in a dingy saloon in upper Manhattan, far from the Nineteenth Precinct and its chic streets. Keenan stopped at the place most days after work, the Hibernian by name.
“Wouldn’t you?” Keenan asked.
“Wouldn’t I what?”
“Ah listen, I can read your mind, college boy. You went to college now, didn’t you? Sure you did.” Keenan waved his hand, unsteadily. “What I meant was, if you were me, wouldn’t you work up an awful big thirst every day and come into a place like this?”
Keenan was currently assigned to the “bow-and-arrow squad,” which meant that he would not be allowed to carry a gun until such time as his attitude improved. Usually, bow-and-arrow duty lasted for a specified time and for a specific reason or reasons. That was bad enough. You take away a cop’s gun and you take away the pride and trust he’s won in being allowed to carry it in the first place. In Keenan’s case, bow-and-arrow was indefinite. A depressed cop endangers the public.
“Yeah, maybe. Maybe I would come into this place, just like you,” Valentine said. “Yeah. Sometimes drinking is the answer.”
Keenan slapped him on the back. “You don’t look any worse for the wear yet, but you sound like you’ve been run over a few times yourself, eh, college boy? Hey, supposing I told you I had some college myself? Surprise you?”
Valentine shook his head.
“Ah, ’tis true. This business takes the finer edges off anyone, real quick. That’s what happened to me. Besides which, the company I keep at home and the company you can start keeping as a cop ain’t too fuckin’ mentally stimulating sometimes.
“Anyway, I like you, college boy. You’re going to be good for my intellectual development.”
They ordered another round. Valentine was astonished by Keenan’s capacity.
Keenan looked at the mirror that backed the bar, looked at the images of all the bottles, all different colors and shapes and infinitely more where they came from, all of them reflected in the glass. He swirled his beer. Then he turned to Valentine on the stool next to his.
“I wanted to be a writer when I came over from the other side, that’s the truth,” Keenan said. “So you want to know how it was then, or do you want to know how it was I got to be a fucked-up cop?”
“Whatever you want to tell me, I’ll listen.”
“Then I’ll tell you both tales, my friend.” Keenan ordered another round of drinks.
“When I came over, I was just old enough to have the memory of it burn into my brain for good. We sailed over, just like in all the movies. I was ten. You can’t imagine how it was for a wee boy. I come from a small village outside Dublin and all my life I was hearing about this place, New York and America. I was warned about America, I met the Irish-Americans when they came back to strut around, I saw all the cinema I could, I decided America was the only place in the whole world to be and, please God, I hoped my father could see his way to getting us all over there.
“Well, by God, he did get us over.”
Keenan stoped talking for a few seconds and his eyes misted. Valentine looked the other way because he was embarrassed by Keenan’s intimacy. Well, he’d agreed to go along with Keenan for a few lifters, hadn’t he?
“One day, I was on the boat with the family, actually going over the seas to America. And we sailed into the harbor at New York and I saw the Statue of Liberty with the sun settling down behind her.
“I’d seen the pictures of this a thousand times in books and on the television in Ireland, but the pictures didn’t do justice to the experience. That’s how I decided I wanted to be a writer. For justice.”
Keenan laughed and Valentine asked him, “What did you do about it?”
“I read a lot, everything I could get. And I did well in school. Then I went to college. Tuition was free at City.”
He wiped his upper lip and drank with the satisfaction of a powerful need met. Keenan was telling someone exactly what he wanted. Valentine was the new guy at the station house and Keenan had caught his ear before anyone could warn him off.
“Also, I had to get a job because Mairead was pregnant. And of course, that meant marriage. So I married a little girl from the very next village over from mine. Something had to give, and it was college because I had to be practical, see. I was studying to become a journalist.”
“So instead you became a cop.”
“A telephone installer first, my friend. You know how it is. You get something good for yourself and then you take the police exam and wait to be called. It takes a while, right?”
“Why did you want to be a cop?”
“A fine question! And coming from a cop himself. Well, it’s deserving then of a fine answer, but I’m sorry I haven’t got one. Maybe I wanted to be a cop for justice, too. Maybe I wanted to be a cop because every little boy in the world wants to put on the blue uniform and wear a badge on his chest and a gun on his hip. Maybe I wanted to impress Mairead back in our courting days. Maybe I wanted to help people. I forget just which it was.”
“Sounds to me like you’re about ready to quit the force.”
“Oh no. You’d have me wrong. I can’t quit being a cop any more than I could quit my wife or my kids. That’s the way I’m constructed.”
Keenan tossed back a final schnapps. Time to get home.
“But I wouldn’t mind changing a thing or two,” he said. “I’m like most cops in this city. I spend years making good, clean collars and nobody gets hurt. I spend years making things good for my wife and my babies. For that, I get no recognition. Now I wonder why it isn’t just the other way around?
“So I come here after work. I come here because I’m in a position where I can either drink or cry. Drinking is so much more subtle, isn’t it?”
By nine o’clock in the morning, it was eighty degrees and the humidity level was nearly the same. By midafternoon, just before the night tour, it was so bad in Manhattan you could lift the heat with your hands.
Keenan woke up at half-past two in the afternoon, his head heavy with alcohol and nine hours of breathing air artificially cooled and dried by a machine wedged in the bedroom window of his apartment. He thought the same thing he thought every day when he woke, what he’d watched on television in the living room, where he’d fallen asleep. Sometimes it occurred to him in the haze of arousal that Mairead must have moved him into the marital bed sometime after the second episode of Mary Tyler Moore; sometimes it occurred to him that he hadn’t made love to his wife in a very long time.
Mairead had long ago left the apartment with the children. They would be in the nice, safe park down below, the children playing with the other boys and girls in the sandbox. Mairead would spend the afternoon in artificially cheerful conversation with the other housewives.
He looked out the tightly sealed bedroom window, down to the wide, rippled Hudson River and out over the New Jersey Palisades. Keenan had been to Jersey several times, on trips down to the shore on steaming days like this, and he’d been upstate and over the border once into Ontario. Otherwise, his travels had yet to include anything of America much farther west than his bedroom window.
Keenan showered quickly, dressed and had time enough to fix himself eggs and bacon. He took an elevator down to the underground garage and fired up his air-conditioned Ford for the drive over the Henry Hudson Bridge down Manhattan’s West Side Highway, over the potholes to the exit at 125th Street, where he drove crosstown to the East Side. He liked driving through the blight of 125th Street. He liked the sense of threat he felt in Harlem in the dog days of summer. At least it was something real, something palpable; it was life.
Tony Ciffo sat on a beach at Jacob Riis Park in Queens, where it was cool and the air was salty dry. His hair curled tighter in the sun and his skin grew browner by the second. He looked at his wristwatch and swore. Next to him was a pleasant, attractive, intelligent woman. She was a blond psychology student who happened also to be his partner, Officer Jean Truta.
They packed up their things and left the beach.
Towels and swimsuits in canvas bags changed places in the back end of Ciffo’s brand-new Renault Fuego with four forward speeds on a stick shift with NYPD duffel bags containing starched blue summer-issue short-sleeve shirts, summer-weight navy-blue wool twill pants, shiny black oxfords and bulletproof vests.
Then Ciffo and Truta headed into the city. They would have a ride-along that night on their tour, Valentine.
Philip Leland Hehmeyer hadn’t felt like going to work at the World Trade Center that day, but he did. So many people depended on his being there. And anyway, it wouldn’t look good if he took a day off for no good reason after having been elected just two months ago chairman of the New York Cotton Exchange.
No good reason.
In an hour, the New York Stock Exchange would close with the official gaveler’s thudding finale of a remarkable week’s trading. Despite the recession of August 1982, the Dow Jones industrial average had soared a whopping eighty-one points. President Reagan and his staff were jubilant and press conferences were hastily arranged in order to trumpet the success of the Administration’s economic policies, evidenced by the record-setting confidence of Wall Street, no less.
Not everyone was a celebrant of the remarkable week’s trading. Hehmeyer’s experience was not the stuff of White House hurrahs. On Monday, he personally lost nearly $64,000 in cotton trading, though he managed to cover it; the losses of his clients would be greater and he would have to face their wrath soon; he made some money on Thursday in gold; but today, Friday, by his penciled calculations, his personal losses in futures trading would be $58,803.75.
He toted up these losses in a sleek and sweeping office high over the most important city in the world.
Precinct 19 Page 4