Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  MacDonald turned his attention to an R.I.P. call on the squad-car radio. Weir quieted.

  “R.I.P. is for ‘Robbery in Progress,’” MacDonald told Reece. “Or ‘Rest in Peace.’ Take your pick.”

  Then he radioed a response:

  “Unit eleven is right around the corner from that R.I.P.”

  “All yours, eleven. Need one back-up unit …”

  Reece jotted the address in his note pad. MacDonald stepped on the accelerator and the squad car roared down the street to the avenue, then downtown to East Sixty-fourth Street. No lights, no siren. And high hopes of making a red-handed collar.

  According to the dispatcher, neighbors reported two men going through an empty town-house window. The block in question, between Madison and Park avenues, was filled with town houses worth millions of dollars, the contents hard to get at—though not impossible for the elite of professional burglars. Making a collar under such circumstances would guarantee several letters of gratitude from the neighborhood and, if the arrests managed to clear up a number of unsolved high-ticket burglary cases, maybe an officer’s career could get a nice boost.

  MacDonald eased the car to a halt a few doors west of the empty house. Occupants probably out to Southampton until sometime after Labor Day … second-floor windows standing open, unusual … iron grille work leading to open windows, perfect for illegal entry …

  “Here we go,” MacDonald said, tapping at his bulletproof vest. “Quiet and steady as she goes, all right?”

  Reece, even though a rookie, was obviously a good pick as an officer. He hadn’t been through anything like this, but he was able to keep the presence of mind a cop has to have when the threat of physical peril is thrown in his face. He was nervous, but it made him alert and careful. His eyes would miss nothing.

  Reece held a corner of the iron grille for MacDonald, who hoisted himself quickly through a window. Then Reece mounted the grille, now held by a neighbor. He, too, popped through the window, catlike.

  A small group of neighbors, hushed, gathered discreetly in the street to wait for the officers to emerge, possibly with a burglar caught in the act.

  The door of the town house opened and MacDonald marched two boys, about twelve years each, out the door in front of him. He carried his nightstick at his side. Reece followed.

  Then MacDonald lectured the boys, “Next time your ball bangs through a window like that, you just lost a ball. Get it?”

  The boys were cool and insolent. One of them wore expensive running shoes, easily $100 the pair. This one said to MacDonald, “Just call Bill Walters. You know him?”

  “Don’t hand me any names. Names don’t mean anything to me, kid. Except yours. What is it?” MacDonald opened a pad of juvenile report forms. “And your partner’s name, too.”

  “Will there be a record?” the boy with the overpriced shoes asked.

  “No, not this time. Your parents will be notified. You’re in the system, though. Next time, we go the whole route.”

  “You don’t have to call our parents. Just call Bill Walters.”

  “We’ll call your parents.”

  “We know our rights.”

  “Good for you. You know your names?”

  MacDonald got the names, then he and Reece got back in the squad car and resumed patrol.

  “God, these kids are wise up here,” MacDonald said. “They pretty much know nothing’s going to happen to them. And what they do is scare hell out of people when they pull something like that.

  “Sometimes I like to say that every call up here is E.S.P., ‘East Side Paranoia.’ A house like that is worth so damn much! There’s so much to lose! Well, a lot of times a call turns out just like this, nothing. But you always have to be prepared. That’s how you’re going to live to retire from being a cop. You prepare for the worst every time. And when you get a light one, well, you loosen your bulletproof vest maybe and you wipe your brow and you’re thankful it was a light one.” Officers Jimmy Sullivan and Mike Ward took one final job before rolling back to the house for a cool shower before heading home. The day was routine and hot. The temperature still hovered in the nineties, even though the sun had set. The humidity level was in the seventies.

  The call would be easy. A report from another mugging victim.

  It would not, however, be comfortable. The old lady involved, Mrs. Helen Braunstein, had the heat on in her apartment on Park Avenue at the corner of East Eightieth Street. Sullivan and Ward exchanged pained glances, then sat down to a huge dining-room table at Mrs. Braunstein’s direction. They sweltered. She talked.

  “Well, I was just preparing something for Henry and me. Life must go on, after all,” she said.

  “Can you tell us just what happened?” Ward asked.

  “I put out my arm to stop one of them from running right into me on his skateboard. The other one grabbed my clutch bag and they were gone. It was instantaneous. Never in a million years would I have suspected them. They were nice-looking boys. Blond, very fair, about twelve, I think.”

  “Now, what are you missing?”

  Henry Braunstein wandered in, a cloud of cigar smoke preceding him. He moved slowly in his house slippers.

  “Well, my clutch bag, of course. And eighty-five dollars. And my faraway glasses. That’s what I call them, the glasses I use for seeing far away, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Her husband said, “You had eighty-five dollars on you? Why were you carrying so much?”

  “Because I had to market for two days,” she said.

  “So, you couldn’t have written a check?” Braunstein turned to the officers. “Tell her. She could have written a check. Am I right?”

  Ward smiled.

  “I thought you’d complain,” Mrs. Braunstein said to her husband. To the officers, “He always complains like this.”

  “What bag did they steal from you?” Braunstein asked her.

  “My small one.”

  He turned to Ward and Sullivan and said, “She made that one herself.”

  “The bag was worthless,” Mrs. Braunstein said.

  “What do you mean?” Braunstein sputtered. He caught his cigar before it fell from his mouth. “She made it herself, officers. It was white with little pearls on it. I loved that bag.”

  “The important thing here,” Ward said, making some final notations on the robbery form, “is that you didn’t get hurt, Mrs. Braunstein. You’ve got to be aware, all the time you’re out, especially when you get up there in years. I’m just glad you didn’t get knocked down.”

  Hurriedly, Ward and Sullivan made their way out of the Braunstein apartment. There is a realistic fear of suffering heat prostration under such circumstances.

  Soaking wet with perspiration, Ward and Sullivan needed desperately to get to the station-house locker room. But first, there was a special call.

  Sullivan drove the squad car to the nearest telephone booth. Ward got out. “I’ll drop the dime this time out,” he said. He dialed the station-house desk sergeant, then returned to the car and told Sullivan, “We go to Tricia Nixon’s apartment building, where some guy needs to get into his sister-in-law’s apartment because she might be dead. Nice and delicate.”

  The apartment house was a high rise on East Eightieth Street near Second Avenue, a nondescript gray brick affair with nondescript men in suits and sunglasses sitting around the lobby earning their livings by watching the comings and goings of folks who lived near an ex-President’s daughter. Ward and Sullivan were taken to an upper floor of the building by the superintendent, accompanied by a nervous middle-aged man.

  “She just returned from Minneapolis,” the nervous man said, “where she was in a hospital for alcoholics. She seemed all right, but now she’s not been heard from. My wife is out of her mind with worry. We call, we come by, but there’s no answer.”

  “Take it easy, sir. We’ll be able to get in now. You’ve done the right thing. The super can always call the police in cases like this and we�
��ll be able to take a look,” Ward said.

  The super opened the door with a pass key.

  Inside, there were only the most expensive of furnishings. The walls were covered with excellent and valuable art. And everywhere, strewn across the floors and all the furniture, were empty liquor bottles.

  “Jesus!” the man said. “This is worse than I imagined.”

  “Well, we’ll see if it’s the worst,” Ward said.

  He and Sullivan proceeded to make their way through the rubble of bottles and glasses. They searched through a well-stocked library, through closets brimming over with furs and gowns and expensive suits, through the well-appointed kitchen, through all the rooms that they would never have for themselves and their families.

  “She was last in Minneapolis?” Ward asked the nervous man.

  “Well, we heard she came back to New York.”

  “Nothing much we can do,” Ward said.

  “I guess not,” the brother-in-law said. “God, I need a drink.”

  Ward and Sullivan, the ashen-faced brother-in-law and the superintendent returned to the lobby in silence.

  Outside, the brother-in-law reached into his pocket and pulled out a huge roll of currency. He said to Ward, “May I make a contribution to your pension fund?”

  Ward looked at the money for several seconds and then at the man offering it. The brother-in-law wiped his upper lip.

  “You keep it,” Ward said.

  Miguel and Herman sat on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and looked out over the river. Herman smoked a joint and the sweet smell of marijuana made a haze that shimmered off into the heat of the early evening.

  “You sure, Miguel?” Herman asked, puffing furiously on the joint.

  “Of course, my friend. I am sure. I have been watching that place for months now.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what, dummy?” Miguel said. “You don’t know that we’ve been living like two-bit spiks up there? We got to change our ways, man.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “I know so.”

  “Whatever you say, Miguel.”

  Chapter 6

  Officer Jack Clark made his way down the dark, dusty stairway from the “Penthouse,” more officially known as the plainclothes burglary detail squad room up on the fifth floor. He stopped at the second-floor corridor to gossip and noticed the platoon of auxiliary cops pouring out from the big room used for suspect line-ups.

  Keenan was wandering around. “What’s up with the hobby cops tonight?” Clark asked Keenan.

  “Movie premiere at the Gemini on Third Avenue. They’re going to do the crowd control,” Keenan said.

  Clark shook his head. “I just don’t see it. What possible beneficial use is served by these hobby cops? Jesus! Can you imagine if … oh, construction workers, say, had an auxiliary? Can’t you just hear the auxiliary construction worker walking up to a site and saying to the real guys, ‘Say, there, big boys, we’re going to lay a little beam for you, free.’”

  Clark’s boss, Sergeant John Laffey, walked out of the men’s room and said to Keenan, “You know, I don’t know if this is a cause-and-effect thing, but the more Clark here talks, the more I want to go take another dump.”

  “I mean it,” Clark said, “what the hell are they going to do tonight? Keep the folks from getting near the celebrities? Let’s suppose there’s some nutjob comes along, like they do whenever there’s celebrities all together in one place. Remember John Lennon?

  “So the nutjob gets shoved maybe by one of our hobby cops here. You think the nutjob is going to stop and say to himself, ‘Hey, wait a minute. This is an auxiliary officer. A fine, upstanding, public-spirited citizen who doesn’t carry a gun, just somebody interested in safeguarding democracy.’

  “So who’s the nutjob in that case? The psycho or the guy who puts on a fake policeman suit with a little bar of small print that says auxiliary and goes out in the street like a target and doesn’t even have sense enough to get paid for it?”

  Laffey said to Keenan, “There isn’t another sergeant in the whole damn city who wants Clark. I get him. I’m able to tell you who’s the nutjob, all right.”

  Keenan wasn’t listening to either one of them. His attention was distracted by the sight of one of the auxiliary cops, the posterior of the auxiliary cop to be exact. A woman. Keenan could have sworn he’d seen her somewhere before. The short, thick blue-black hair, green eyes and the slender figure, especially the switching posterior. The auxiliary uniform didn’t do much to flatter that figure. But Keenan remembered now when he’d last seen her, dressed in a summer blouse and shorts, crying.

  “See you guys,” he said to Clark and Laffey.

  Then Keenan followed the group of auxiliary cops down the final flight of stairs into the lobby, floating along after them as if drawn by some mysterious magnetic power. It was a very odd feeling for Keenan. It had been such a long time since he’d been so excited by the mere sight of a woman. His wife, his drinking, his job, the kids, Riverdale and its monotony, his unfulfilled dreams. They had all taken a toll, had dulled his most joyous of human senses.

  She stood off by herself, away from the group. The talkative hobby cops milled in a tight circle in the middle of the lobby, waiting for transportation to the Gemini, which seemed appropriate to Keenan. They were mostly youngish men, the sort of narrow-shouldered, slack-jawed, no-chin guys you could arm with good long flashlights and be certain of having a crack squad of movie-house ushers. There were a handful of women as well, but she seemed different, a woman who seemed comfortable in her femininity as opposed to the muscular women auxiliary cops who bound their breasts and tucked their hair carefully and tightly up under their hats.

  She was alone, her hat in her hand. She seemed amused by her own presence in the police lobby. Amused at herself, at her being dressed in blue twills with a whistle on a stout string secured to the epaulet on her left shoulder.

  “Excuse me.”

  She turned.

  “Excuse me,” Keenan repeated, his face shot red and his hands and armpits sweating, “but what’s your duty tonight?”

  She looked as if she didn’t understand.

  “Oh,” Keenan said. His right hand touched his hip where his service revolver ordinarily was kept. “I’m a cop.”

  Keenan reached into his back pocket and brought out a black leather wallet. He flipped it open to show her his shield.

  “I’m with the auxiliary,” she said. “Dory Smith.”

  Keenan took her hand and shook it.

  “Tommy Keenan,” he said.

  Then neither one of them said anything. Four of the auxiliary cops nearest the door left to climb into a squad car. Keenan had to speak now or maybe he’d never see her again.

  “Pardon me for askin’ but you’ve been here before, haven’t you? I recall. You were cryin’. What was it?”

  “Three years ago,” she said. “I was assaulted. And sure, I came here all right.”

  “What happened?”

  Dory took a deep breath. “I was raped.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Keenan said. “How are you now, dear?” She smiled. Usually, a man would go mingle with someone else once this was learned. This cop seemed genuinely interested in her well-being.

  “It’s not been easy, but I’m getting better. At least I think I am. My friends aren’t doing so well, though, those that are left anyway.”

  “I’m sorry about that, too. You shouldn’t be bitter. It’s a waste of time.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Officer. But it seems unavoidable sometimes.”

  Keenan smiled. “Sure, I know what you mean.”

  Most of the group of auxiliary cops started moving toward the door. Dory Smith moved along with the group, with Keenan striding alongside.

  “Look,” Keenan said, red-faced again, “when will you be finished up? There wasn’t much talk between us, but it was better than most of the talk around here. Maybe we could talk some m
ore, tonight somewhere? Wherever you like.”

  She stopped and smiled at him. “I was raped, you know,” she said.

  Keenan thought for a moment. “One way or another, we’ve all been raped, now haven’t we?”

  “Eleven-thirty.”

  Then she was gone.

  With the auxiliary cops cleared out of the big two-room suite on the second floor, Detective Marty Gill started arranging things for a line-up that night. He set chairs in a row in the back room, one for the suspect and about eight others for white males of average build with moustaches, which was the shorthand description of the perpetrator cooling his heels in the precinct lockup.

  Gill and two detectives from the city-wide robbery squad had a live one this time, a guy that might clear as many as two dozen cases from their load.

  “You can go to the well only so many times,” Gill said to Valentine, who had picked that night to hang out with the detectives. “This guy’s gone too often. He’s knocked over shopkeepers and clerks here in the Nineteenth, and down in the Seventeenth and Midtown North precincts, too.

  “We’re having the line-up for him here because it’s pretty easy for us to get his type from the armory over on Park Avenue.”

  The Seventh Regiment Armory on any given night has a hundred or so likely line-up prospects, young men playing squash or the like who get five or ten dollars apiece and a good story for their wives or girl friends for sitting around in a room while people look at them through a two-way mirror.

  Day-shift line-ups are generally held in the Seventeenth Precinct, in the East Thirties, Forties and Fifties, where there are plenty of messengers who like the idea of earning lunch money for a quick sit at the station house on East Fifty-fourth Street. Times Square was the place for line-ups if freakish types were necessary to flesh out the general description. And up in the East Harlem precinct on 102nd Street, Puerto Ricans wandered in every night volunteering for line-up duty.

  “One thing we don’t use in the line-ups anywhere is cops,” Gill said. “That’s because a lot of judges in the city believe that anybody can pick a cop from a crowd. Something about the way they carry themselves. I agree. I think I could pick out a cop on a beach in his briefs, you know?”