Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  On “Black Friday” of 1929, financiers and brokers like Philip L. Hehmeyer crept out onto ledges outside their windows and leaped to the street to die. Back in ’29, the windows of office buildings in New York’s Financial District were so constructed as to provide easy access to suicide. In the World Trade Center of today, it is impossible to actually open a window without special tools.

  Besides, it was 1982, not ’29. And Hehmeyer knew that no matter what, he always had his luxurious apartment on Sixty-second Street just a few doors east of Fifth Avenue and Central Park, his antique Jaguar motorcar, his collection of paintings now on loan to museums throughout the United States and his venture capital investments in dozens of new and thriving small businesses.

  And he had his business ability. How else had he managed to keep the firm going back when his two former partners were indicted on charges of plotting millions in phony tax losses by manipulating the market for crude oil futures? Philip Leland Hehmeyer had kept his head. He alone ran things until his partners were cleared. Then, in 1979, he split from them and became independent.

  Phil Hehmeyer was by every measure a winner.

  He lived on the Upper East Side, in a fabulous stone town house in a neighborhood where some of the wealthiest people in the world lived.

  He was quick and smart; he had a million stories from his days as a Memphis newspaper reporter and the year he captained a sailboat from New York to St. Thomas, remaining in the Virgin Islands to manage a saloon; he was an outstanding amateur golfer and a pal of Jack Nicklaus, the pro, whom he personally watched win his fifth Masters championship in 1975 in Augusta, Georgia; he frequently went tarpon fishing off the Florida coast; he loved the primitive pleasure, the manly camaraderie of sitting in a swamp blind at dawn with a shotgun at the ready for the first sign of geese breaking across the sky; he belonged to a country club out on Long Island and a chic health spa in Manhattan.

  He worried about his business losses in the philosophical way traders must worry about such things, so his friends said. What worried him more today was the big picture, the real news beyond such titillations as a presidential press conference. The collapse of the Mexican economy, for instance, which just that week was evidenced by a fall of the peso’s value every bit as precipitous as the boom of numbers on Wall Street’s big board. He was so worried, he was reading, for the third time, Adam Smith’s book Paper Money.

  He worried, too, that he smoked too many Winston cigarettes and that no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t seem to shake the habit.

  There was Dom Perignon champagne in his office, for occasions when the market was good. Otherwise, there were the makings for bullshots—vodka and beef broth. Hehmeyer didn’t know which to drink today.

  The night before, he had put his fiancée since Christmas, Susan McCadden Carr, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prominent cotton magnate from Mississippi, into a taxicab. She was headed to LaGuardia airport for a quick trip South to make arrangements for a family funeral. She would be back soon. Their wedding day was two weeks off.

  He hadn’t felt much like going to work, for he knew it would be a bad week for him. Nobody likes to show up for his own beating. But so many people depended on him.

  Sometimes the burden of other people’s expectations were an awful lot for him to shoulder. He was thirty-seven years old.

  “Achtung!”

  It was the sergeant’s little way of calling order to the night-tour muster. Officers Ciffo, Truta and the rest stiffened for a few seconds, then resumed slouches. Blue-shirted backs were beginning to perspire. The sergeant, who strongly resembled Art Carney as Ed Norton, studied a clipboard full of special notices from Inspector Short’s office, one of the few in the station house chilled to meat-locker temperature.

  The sergeant called roll. Everyone seemed either “here” or “present.”

  “Okay, let’s see about any special instructions today,” the sergeant said, noisily riffling through the papers. “Oh yeah, up there at the Greek Embassy, watch out for people backin’ into the place.”

  Laughter as he searched the day’s hot sheet for bona fide memoranda.

  There was still the matter of a fellow by the street name of “Kano,” very much wanted for murdering a family of four by setting their apartment on fire; known to be heavily armed. … There was a lunatic hanging around lately outside Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ apartment house on Fifth Avenue at East Eighty-sixth Street, “posing as some kind of cockamamie author, so you’re welcome to scoop up the little scribbler and set him on the Toonerville Trolley to Ding Dong School.” … And, as usual during the start of the afternoon rush hour, “try to scare the living hell out of the squeegee boys at the Queensboro Bridge.”

  That seemed to be all of an official nature.

  “Remember now,” the sergeant said, “you got to get them there shoes shined up. Now, we don’t got no wax here, so’s you’re going to have to spring for it yourself. But you notice we do have this electronic buffer right here in the muster room that I’d like you all to get to know real well.

  “Okay, that’s all. Have a good tour.”

  There is an important rule of thumb strictly observed by police officers all over the city of New York, even on the Upper East Side: when you’re in the vicinity of a clean, safe toilet, use it, no matter what. You never know when you may see one again on your tour. Ciffo went upstairs to the second-floor men’s room while Truta went out to Lexington Avenue in search of an available squad car to begin the rounds.

  There was a new bit of poetry inked upon a fresh coat of paint over an often-painted section of wall above the officers’ latrine:

  They paint this place to hide

  the pen, but the

  Shithouse poet has struck again!

  Down on the street, Ciffo joined Truta in a dented squad car. The air conditioner blasted hot air instead of cold, just as it had the other night. “Typical New York cop car,” Ciffo said. “Nothing but the best for New York’s finest.” He worked the dial on a portable radio to a top-forty soft-rock station, then started to light up a Marlboro. Truta glared at him and put away the pack with a roll of his eyes.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he said. “Look out, desperadoes, here we come!”

  “Queensboro?” Truta asked.

  “Absolutely. I feel like striking fear into the hearts of our little squeegee pals.”

  Truta navigated the squad car through streets clogged with shoppers, businessmen, clerks and rich Upper East Side matrons with Caucasian facial features and skin darkened incredibly by a combination of chemicals and unnaturally long periods in the sun, precisely timed. They had trails of unusual brown spots on their cheeks and collarbones, leopard-like, and they carried multitudes of brightly colored paper bags chock full of a day’s purchases.

  The rich women with the bags loading down their tanned arms passed by Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue at Fifty-ninth and paid little heed to an obese blind woman with torn hosiery and many similarly bright paper bags. The blind woman’s bags, however, were creased and somewhat dog-eared from many trips about town with the things she needed to perform each day for her living.

  “She’s called ‘Baby,’” Ciffo said of the blind lady. “She doesn’t like to be called a bag lady.”

  Baby was singing an especially rousing rendition of “Tomorrow” from the hit Broadway show Annie. There was a cup nearby so that people could make contributions. Few did. None of the rich women with bags did, as if somehow repelled.

  Baby had chosen the name for herself back when social workers somewhere in the Midwest—she doesn’t remember exactly—had her sterilized and took away her out-of-wed-lock infant. Baby chose her name because, she said, “I’m a lady who likes babies, so I’ll be called ‘Baby.’”

  Once, Baby ventured inside Bloomingdale’s after a day’s performance on the street outside. She went to the doll department at Christmastime. She held a doll in her arms and ran her fingers over the doll’s plastic
face, felt eyes and a nose and lips and a chin and throat, hair and belly and legs. Store detectives, acting on the complaints of customers lucky enough to have eyes that worked but who were sickened by the sight of a blind woman feeling a doll’s face, escorted Baby back out to the street.

  Baby never complained about it. The cops in the Nineteenth Precinct look out for her, figuring that she probably will need protection sooner or later in a neighborhood full of people who can’t stomach her appearance.

  At the bridge, Truta and Ciffo used the car to chase youngsters and others not so young who swooped in on commuters with squeegees and pails of soapy water and scrubbed automobile windshields whether or not the driver agreed to such a service. The wipers would scatter fast and the game was afoot.

  Occasionally, Truta would close in on a gang of squeegee-wielding miscreants, trapping them in an apartment-house driveway. Ciffo leaped out of the passenger seat, his nightstick raised. He snarled and the youngsters ran some more.

  Then it would happen all over again until about half-past five, when the traffic moved too briskly for the youngsters to dare approach the cars.

  A call came over the radio.

  “Undesirable needs a sweep. Vicinity Madison and Sixty-first.”

  Truta reached for the radio microphone when Ciffo failed to make any move. Ciffo groaned.

  “SU-8 can take the undesirable,” Truta radioed back to the dispatcher. “Tell me what you can.”

  “God, I hate this,” Ciffo said, talking over the dispatch.

  “… just hanging around, not doing any harm or anything, a white female in her thirties, well-dressed, writing things on a pad and sitting in stairwells.”

  “What’d I tell you?” Ciffo said.

  Truta responded to the dispatcher. “Got it. You need a hear-back?”

  “Discretionary.”

  Truta drove to an art gallery in the Sixties, between Madison and Park avenues. Ciffo grumbled all the way. In the stairwell of the gallery, closed for the day, was the woman described by the dispatcher. She wore a long, quality denim skirt and a clean white blouse. Her hair was brown with streaks of silver, drawn back neatly in a bun. Her skin and eyes were clear. She held a small pad of paper and a pencil and made notes of things she saw as she looked around her. She jotted down names and numbers of things, occasionally a scribbled line of something to describe a stoop or a window or a plant.

  She had several large paper bags with her, which were set out on the steps of the stairwell as she sat, crouched just below the surface of the street to make her notes. Officers Truta and Ciffo approached her, carefully.

  “Hi,” Ciffo said, “how are you this afternoon? Hot, isn’t it?”

  The woman didn’t answer his question, but was put at ease by Ciffo’s manner. Then she smiled at Ciffo and said, “I suppose someone has complained about me again?” Her voice was a cultivated one. There was no trace of a hard life in it, no rasp of cigarettes or liquor.

  “You know, I got to tell you that you have to leave the stairwell here and move along now,” Ciffo said. “I hope you don’t mind too much.”

  The woman rose gracefully, gathered up her bags, her pad and pencil and said, “Of course not.” She smiled with great dignity.

  Ciffo and Truta returned to the car. They circled the block a few times. The woman walked, stopping occasionally to make notes. She never looked directly at the squad car that followed her, but she was aware of it.

  “Poor thing,” Ciffo said. “She wouldn’t have hurt anyone. It’s always the same old thing, even when they’re just starting out. The owner of the gallery doesn’t want her around and he sure as hell doesn’t want her pissing in his stairwell and disturbing the customers the next day, so he calls the cops.”

  Ciffo reached for a cigarette, but left the pack in his pocket. “I wonder what in hell her story is. She looks okay now, but she’s off her nut and she’s got herself her first set of bags. Now she’s a rookie bag lady. God, what’s going to happen to her after her first winter on the streets? You want to find out, but you just don’t have the time to find out about everything you see.

  “Sometimes you make it a point to find out anyway. You made the time. And then they don’t want your help. Maybe they know there isn’t anything we can do, really. They don’t want anything to do with us. We try to be nice to them and I guess that’s about what we should be doing under the circumstances.”

  Jean Truta, the psychology student, is getting her academic training in a very practical way by being a cop. Most particularly by coming into contact with bag ladies and other strange fauna of the Upper East Side.

  “This is an ironic city in a very ironic world,” she said. “The bag ladies. They either belong in mental institutions, or they were in them before and they weren’t properly treated; which makes me wonder if they ever should have been put into existing mental institutions in the first place. You could go round and round—”

  The police dispatcher’s voice crackled again over the radio.

  “Shots in the lobby of apartment building …”

  Ciffo grabbed the mike and listened. He jotted down the house address, East Seventy-ninth Street at Third Avenue.

  “Two squads confirm respond. Backup required …”

  “SU-8 will back up,” Ciffo said.

  “Roger Backup SU-8.”

  Truta yanked the wheel of the squad car hard and turned east, driving straight and fast down a tree-lined street. Ciffo flipped the sound and light switches below the dash.

  Sirens blooped and screamed and the muscles tensed in Truta’s neck as she drove, all her training concentrated on the immediate job of making good time safely, responding to the unknown moment, a moment that must be presumed to be extremely dangerous. Ciffo did what the nondriving partner is supposed to do under the circumstances of the call. His eyes swept the sidewalks and cross streets for signs of anyone who might not be able to hear the squad car’s warning system or see its lights. If he saw something, he would alert the driver, but the two would not speak until they arrived at the scene. Each needed absolute concentration in these critical minutes of response time.

  All around the speeding blue-and-white, its top lights blazing in an early gray twilight, the people of blasé Manhattan stood transfixed. Heads popped out of apartment windows. Diners stopped eating and watched the street scene from the bistros. Children and adults alike on the sidewalks, their eyes huge, watched the squad car sailing swiftly through the street, the officers inside a blur, the siren and the lights piercing the calm bustle. In New York there is no other shared experience so exciting, so riveting, so seductively thrilling as the sight of a squad car rocketing through the streets; everyone is most alive when his mortality, or a cop’s mortality, is in the balance.

  The silence inside a speeding blue-and-white is a terrifying and exhilarating thing. There is the sensation of a red heat that spreads through the body, a sensation that does not change, no matter how many times a cop finds himself hurtling through and over Manhattan’s avenues and streets in response to violence somewhere in the night. Taxicabs and limousines and trucks and ordinary automobiles screech to curbsides, some of them, anyway, braking and yielding to cops rushing to danger, perhaps to their deaths. It has happened so often.

  There is a frozen moment of unspoken tribute offered to cops by every New Yorker whose flesh goes bumpy at the sight of the frantic blue-and-white racing by: “I hope they catch him! Glad it’s not my job!” And God help the New York cops, they love it.

  A half-dozen squad cars were already converged on the scene by the time Ciffo and Truta arrived, blazing red and white lights flashing atop the vehicles drawn in a semicircle at the curb, beneath a long green awning at the front of a luxurious apartment building, at the foot of a long red carpet where tenants alit from Cadillacs and Lincolns and sometimes Rolls-Royces. Glass panels on either side of a double-door entrance were shattered, shards of destruction blown everywhere inside the lobby. Something with a wide-range bla
st had powered the explosion, possibly an automatic weapon of some sort, probably a shotgun.

  Plainclothes cops, their badges flying at the ends of brass chains tucked inside their shirts as they walked the streets unobtrusively watching for people with larceny on their minds, combed a parking garage at one side of the large building. A pair of uniforms checked a rear garden. Another team questioned a very frightened, elderly doorman, who had seen nothing from the chair he occupied just inside the lobby.

  No one, apparently, had been hurt.

  “Probably a passing car,” a cop said. Others agreed.

  Though it was unlikely the gunman was inside the building, as he clearly had shot from the outside and the doorman had seen no one enter through the lobby, uniformed officers with guns drawn did a floor-by-floor search of the building—just in case anyone had heard anything; in case anyone had a suspicion that might turn up a lead.

  Nothing.

  Random violence that might always be a mystery is not yet the norm for the Nineteenth Precinct, but it is certainly routine. If cops thought about it too long, they would be no good. It’s too spooky.

  Philip Leland Hehmeyer had bolted the door of his fourth-floor apartment when he returned home at the end of a long and very dismal day, the sort of day when a commodities broker finds the two principles of his professional performance most taxing. To do the job, one has to put on a show for one’s clients; one also has to put on a show for oneself.

  Hehmeyer had been good at performing for a very long time.

  He had lived well by it.

  Near a wall of framed newspaper clippings of Jack Nicklaus’ championship rounds in Augusta was a blackboard. There was also a gun cabinet containing the weapons he used in swamp blinds.

  Hehmeyer wrote two sentences on the blank slate:

  Someone had to do it.

  Self-awareness is silly.

  Chapter 4

  Ciffo took the wheel for the drive back to the “house” at East Sixty-seventh for the dinner break. Truta sat on the passenger side humming along with the radio.