At Third Avenue and Sixty-fifth, a car with California plates pulled alongside Ciffo and Truta after having made an illegal right turn on a red light. The driver, a middle-aged woman wearing a blond wig and sunglasses with red plastic bows, threw her hands up to her cheeks when she saw the police officers in the squad car next to her. She pushed a power button on the arm console and the driver’s-side window whooshed down. A blast of iced air escaped her car.
“Oh my goodness,” she said to Officer Truta, “I’m sorry, I forgot. In California, you can make a right on red.”
Then the California woman noticed Officer Truta’s gender.
“My goodness, you’re a lady!” she said.
Officer Truta blushed.
Then the Californian said, “Say, you’re cute!”
Ciffo told her to take it easy on the right turns while in New York.
“Okay, well, ta-ta, officers!” Her electronic window whirred up and she was off.
Dinnertime at the house is spent by most officers in the third-floor lounge, which is air conditioned and which has a nonprofit communal coffee urn, color cable television atop an abandoned green steel cabinet too rickety to hold drawers full of files anymore, two folding steel cafeteria tables of the type seen in public high schools everywhere and an eclectic collection of overstuffed chairs, wood frame couches and permanently scorched aluminum ashtrays. Officers on break sit mostly alone, or with their partners, munching sandwiches brought from home or slapped together by the counterman at a delicatessen on Third Avenue.
Down in the basement, some officers use the police gym to work out during breaks. Periodically, most of the newer officers work out at the first sign of occupational hazard—a puffy stomach from all the riding and waiting in squad cars, from the sandwiches, from the free doughnuts here and there throughout the precinct. Ciffo went downstairs to lift weights while Truta, in the third-floor lounge, opened up a brown bag containing mostly fruits and low-calorie items.
One of the officers in the lounge had been good enough to stop by a Burger King that day before work to buy a half dozen or so pairs of special red and blue cellophane eyeglasses secured in stiff white paper with drawings of hamburgers on the sides. The glasses were necessary for optimum appreciation of Gorilla at Large, the three-dimensional movie scheduled that night on WOR-TV. A few other officers had brought special 3-D glasses as well and there were about ten pairs circulating around the lounge as the film began.
The movie—starring Lee J. Cobb, Cameron Mitchell, Raymond Burr and Lee Marvin—concerned the escape of a gigantic circus gorilla who enjoyed biting and pummeling human beings and a love triangle involving the beautiful female trapeze artist, a shady ringmaster and an earnest young swain who was the only man in the world who truly understood that the beast was a gentle fellow deep down inside. The story and the special effects held about two dozen New York cops in an amused thrall during a break in the day’s crime wave.
Down on the first floor, meanwhile, Keenan worked the complaint desk.
This is a small room containing a tiny, beat-up wooden desk with drawers full of a variety of printed forms. On top of the desk is a green and gray Smith-Corona manual typewriter, its keys coated with dust and grime. Keenan’s job was to enter the appropriate data in the forms when incensed citizens made their way through the lobby and past a confusing and somewhat threatening sign pointing to his desk. The sign has large block lettering and an arrow beneath pointing the way. But instead of reading COMPLAINT ROOM, HAVE A SEAT, the vandalized sign reads DEATH SQUAD, HAVE A SEAT. Beyond the sign is a wall plastered over with wanted posters for various killers, armed robbers, extortionists, psychopathic revolutionaries and rapists. In almost every case where the poster photograph shows the alleged perpetrator to be black, there is a crudely scrawled addendum, “Send back to Africa.”
An upset citizen would have to go to the complaint desk to register objection to such things as motorists who attempt to run down pedestrians. Usually, the citizen can barely contain his rage and operates under the belief that he is the only pedestrian who has ever had an encounter with a murderous motorist. And usually the officer who must work the complaint desk is, like Keenan, on bow-and-arrow duty. The citizen is upset. And certainly Keenan was upset at the ignominy of having to type up complaints, which were, practically speaking, little more than receipts for use when and if the incensed citizen cared to spend a grueling day of noise and red tape and delays at the civil complaint court on lower Broadway, business hours only. Mostly, the complaint forms were eventually discarded when the citizen calmed down over the next forty-eight hours and figured the percentage of justice to be gained against the irritation factor in dealing with minor court bureaucracy.
After taking a complaint from a particularly incensed citizen who wished to give a complete physical description of a motorist he claimed had leaped out of a car after having a door kicked and dented by the complainant, who the driver had allegedly attempted to run down in cold blood, Keenan had had enough. He needed air, he needed freedom from tension and chickenshit. He wanted badly to punch the last complainant in the face, but he did what he was supposed to do by giving the citizen an official piece of paper that seemed to satisfy the situation, at least that night. Keenan said the perpetrator might be prosecuted for criminal threatening. He advised the complainant, now solemn with the thought of facing the mad driver again in a courtroom, to go through the legal system by showing up in civil court first thing on Monday.
Keenan waited for the complainant to make his way slowly out of the precinct house, then he left himself and went for an ice cream. He returned with a cup of Sedutto double chocolate fudge and sat on the precinct-house stoop, alone, spooning thick confection into his mouth.
Tony Ciffo, his capillaries aglow from the exercise down in the gym, wandered out onto the stoop. He felt so good he thought he might talk to Keenan.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“Not good, Tony. I don’t know what the fuck life means anymore. Do you?”
“The marriage, huh?”
Keenan didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
“Well, good luck, pal,” Ciffo said. “It’s kind of like a prison, isn’t it? I’m just glad I did my time already, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah.”
An extremely attractive young woman passed by on the street, the sort of sleek woman who predominates on the Upper East Side. College-educated, a professional woman, a cultured woman, a woman who talked about something other than the grocer and the children, a woman who might show a man like Keenan that the world is a very big place with many things to do.
But the chances of Keenan hooking up with such a woman for anything more than a short-term sexual fling, if even that, were remote. Keenan knew it and watched her pass. Perhaps the woman knew it, too.
Keenan called to her, “What do you think it means?”
She turned. Ordinarily, a woman like her would ignore a conversation struck up on the street, but the man sat on the steps of a police station. The man was a cop. “What?” she asked.
“What does life mean?’ Keenan asked.
She turned on her heel and continued down East Sixty-seventh toward Lexington, then right, perhaps to the subway station at Sixty-eighth Street or perhaps to Hunter College and some affair far beyond Keenan’s world.
Ciffo walked down the stairs to the street, then turned and looked at Keenan, who was staring blankly at his ice cream.
“Listen, pal,” he said to Keenan, “life is more than a cup of ice cream.”
Keenan said, “It’s half a cup.”
Philip Hehmeyer, the young, hardworking, highly respected tycoon soon to be wed, sat in his expensive, tasteful apartment, alone. He wasn’t receiving. He wasn’t answering his telephone. He drank into the night.
When he’d had enough—quite enough—he took his favored shotgun from the cabinet near the mementos of Jack Nicklaus’ smashing victory at the Masters, the one he used to hunt geese.<
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Then he walked into his kitchen. He put both barrels of the shotgun into his mouth and pulled the triggers. His body collapsed to the floor in a heap. Brains and blood spatiered the room.
Hehmeyer lay there until the following Monday. Someone noticed right away that he hadn’t shown up for work. His telephone was of no use. An associate went uptown to his apartment and checked, knowing that Hehmeyer, smart and professional though he was, might be a very troubled man.
A “family spokesman” informed the Nineteenth Precinct detective squad that Eleanor Moore Montgomery had apparently become confused while driving through Long Island. All was well now and she was home on Fifth Avenue, safe and sound. Nothing was mentioned of Panna Kamla.
Officer Cibella Borges of the Public Morals Division, lately of the Nineteenth Precinct, had been telling cops for days now that she hadn’t posed for any magazine called Beaver. Whoever “Nina” was, she said, there was nothing in the magazine about her being a cop.
Maybe this “Nina” chick was Cibella Borges’ Doppelgänger, her exact double. That had to be it!
Now the press was calling. The Daily News and the Post, the city’s tabloids, were already speculating in big, black, lurid headlines that played over and over again in Cibella Borges’ dreams about her being a “cheesecake cop” and the true identity of “Naughty Nina.” Now they wanted her to make a “clean breast of it,” as the Post put it with a smirk.
Deputy Police Chief John Guido told reporters about his receiving “anonymous calls” alerting him to the magazine layout. The press didn’t bother challenging the legitimacy of anonymity in this case. Guido, unchallenged, said that if Officer Borges didn’t happen to have an exact double who happened to have posed in the buff for the likes of Beaver, then she was in very serious trouble. She might be found by departmental trial, he said, to be guilty of “conduct unbecoming to the department” and subject to punishment ranging from a reprimand to outright dismissal.
Why, supposing Officer Borges was the model in the pornographic photo spread, reporters were told! The first time she had to testify in a case where she’d arrested someone on a morals charge—a hooker, say, or maybe even a pornographer—the defense lawyer would simply have to trot out the September ’82 number of Beaver and ask the good officer about her moral standards.
Meanwhile, though never much of a mover in the newsstands around the city, Beaver magazine was having something of a bull market at the Nineteenth.
A newsstand operator on Fifth Avenue by the name of Frank Senior sold out within an hour of the Beaver delivery. “I guess the cops bought them,” he said.
Meanwhile, for those cops who could manage to remain clothed while associating with publishers of magazines featuring photos of naked women in variously compromised poses, there were several more games on the season schedule for the Nineteenth Precinct men’s softball club, whose membership included many readers of the September ’82 issue of Beaver. The sponsor of their club was Penthouse magazine, a circumstance not considered compromising or even titillating by Deputy Chief Guido or the city’s tabloid headline writers.
Dory Smith had been raped.
For three years this single fact of her thirty-two-year-old life dominated her thoughts and her identity. Friends would bring it up when they talked to her, trying to help; and if her friends didn’t bring up the subject, Dory would herself, sometimes with total strangers.
Friends invited her to lots of parties right after it happened. Always, the parties included a lot of nice men. Dory’s friends tried to help in this way. Dory was certain the nice men had been told of her tragedy because they always seemed so uneasy around her. Usually, she would say to them, “You don’t know this about me, but I was raped once.” Then would ensue several hours of conversation, during which these nice men would shrink from even the mildest, the most normal party flirtations when it came to A Rape Victim.
Gradually, her friends drifted away and Dory was saddened by it, though at the same time oddly relieved. There seemed to be no more common ground in the relationships. She wondered, was it because her friends hadn’t also been raped?
Sometimes, she dreamed of her rapist’s face. And the dream was sometimes quite the opposite of nightmare. She would wake, sexually aroused and ashamed of herself. She would then take a very long shower, but it didn’t help her return to sleep. Horrible nightmares would have been far more restful, she thought.
For the past year practically the only people she saw were her co-workers and the members of her therapy group. Her colleagues were all women and, like her, seamstresses hired at very low pay by a theatrical costume shop. The owner was a homosexual man whom she would see a few minutes each week when he came by with the pay envelopes. Her therapy group was composed entirely of women, including the psychologist. Dory didn’t much like these women because she felt oddly insulted to be among them. They were all either ugly or obese or loud-mouthed or in some other manner repulsive or at least off-putting. Dory Smith was an attractive woman, quiet and intelligent. She wanted to be an actress. She didn’t belong with these ugly women.
And yet, she hadn’t been to an audition since the rape, though she still told her married sister back in Missouri that she simply had to remain in New York, where the “chances for my break” were. Her sister argued that Dory lived a “grasshopper’s life,” what with her low pay, most of which went for rent, and her hermit’s existence.
Dory agreed with her sister, although she offered an explanation for her pathetic situation. She wrote to her sister to inform her that no matter what she might read of the glamour of New York, especially the glamour of the Upper East Side, where she lived in an apartment the size of a Missouri kitchen, it was entirely possible for an attractive young woman to go weeks without having a substantial conversation with anyone. Once, Dory wrote, she had gone without speaking a word to anyone at all for four straight days. She could have talked to someone, Dory told her sister, if she was willing to run the risk of being raped while taking an evening stroll on Fifth Avenue or the risk of idiotic chatter by hanging around in Upper East Side singles bars.
Dory’s sister never asked in letters about her “sex life,” as she used to put it before The Rape. Dory’s sister wrote to her as if there was no such thing as a male of the species.
No matter how many times Dory would write in her letters of how lonely she was, how much she would like to meet a good, gentle man, there was no response from her sister. Soon, Dory’s sister would go the way of her friends.
One spring morning Dory read a newspaper story about the New York City police auxiliary. There was a photograph accompanying the story, a picture of men and women who worked in precinct houses throughout the city for no pay, assisting the police in things such as traffic control and certain station office duties and crowd duty. She remembered how really sensitive the two police officers had been who came to her apartment the night she was raped. Dory wanted to meet good men, men with whom she could feel safe and men who might understand that crimes happen to good people like her, who ought not to be further victimized by their friends’ pity.
She thought about joining the Nineteenth Precinct auxiliary unit for several days. Then she went ahead and did it and didn’t tell her sister.
Chapter 5
Generally speaking, the New York City mugger is young and male and remarkably able-bodied. He is either unnaturally afraid of working for wages or salary, or he is wildly unsuited for straight jobs, or there don’t happen to be such things in the scope of his friends, family and associates; in any event, he requires a steady cash flow to support a fondness for drugs.
Like the rodent, the mugger customarily shuns daylight and he is not apt to stray too far from home on his nocturnal prowlings. Mostly, he travels in packs of like-minded fellows, all of whom are savvy to measuring the prospects of everyone on a given street in terms of exactly who might give exactly what sort of trouble if requested to surrender money or jewels.
Like the pra
ctical businessman, the mugger likes to ply his trade for maximum return on minimum risk.
Unless he’s psychotic. Or frightened.
Otherwise, a good cop, even a mediocre cop, can easily spot a “mope” out “scoping for a score” in most quarters of New York. Cops who work Community Affairs details and speak before neighborhood clubs and civic organizations are constantly offering up the same picture of the New York mugger. Elderly women are warned that they happen to be the muggers’ number one choice, followed in descending order by elderly men, children with lunch money, women of any age so long as they don’t look too athletic and men smaller than them.
New York City, with its huge numbers of pedestrians day and night, is a muggers’ paradise. Everybody knows it, victim and mugger alike. Everybody watches everyone else and some are pretty good at prevailing over the odds of being hit in the head or knocked off their feet and robbed.
In the Nineteenth Precinct, though, muggings tend not to be so mundane as in the rest of the city. For one thing, the potential stakes are much more rewarding for the mugger. For another, the Nineteenth Precinct mugger is the elite craftsman of his guild. Just as the Upper East Side in general attracts the best and brightest and richest of the city-at-large, so, too, does it attract the wiliest of criminals, muggers included.
Mrs. Quent sat in a canary-yellow silk damask chair near a bank of windows on the twenty-first floor of her apartment building on East Eighty-fifth Street just off Park Avenue. She wore an elaborate sort of oriental robe and a boa. Her hair was stiff with too much spray and, in the frenzy of preparing herself to receive Officers Basil Reece and Dennis MacDonald, not to mention the circumstances of violence, her lipstick strayed rather wide of the mark and there was a small blotch of eyeliner on the very thin bridge of her very aristocratic nose.
Behind her, through the window, was a stunning view of Central Park and its reservoir. Robert Redford, when he was in town and staying at the apartment he owned on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Ninety-fourth Street, ran around the reservoir daily. Once, Mrs. Quent had seen him, though she herself was hardly a runner. She said her heart did “a little race of its own” as she watched the movie star’s blond hair bouncing along and a few other parts of him that bounced as well.
Precinct 19 Page 6