Thirty-eight potential courtroom witnesses were on Gill’s list, which he compared with the list held by the two special Central Robbery Division detectives. “This big job is going to be to get them all down here on a hot night to sit around looking at some guy they’ve been having nightmares about anyway, you know.”
“I mean, I been doing this long enough to know what’s going through their minds when they come in here. You’ll see. They’re scared, like somehow the guy’s going to see them through that glass that’s just a mirror on his side. They know in their heads that it’s a mirror to him, but the last time they saw this character, he was holding a gun on them that looked to them like a goddamn cannon.
“People really do have nightmares about this sort of thing. And they don’t want to relive them. I don’t know if I can blame them.”
Gill went to the holding cell to check on the suspect. Valentine went along.
“Look at him,” Gill said. The suspect sat on a chair in the cage, a man maybe five-foot-ten with a droopy brown moustache. His clothing looked like it might have been of good quality once. “His family won’t have anything to do with him anymore. He’s a misfit.”
The suspect stared at Gill and Valentine, but it was doubtful that he could focus. His eyes were watery and senseless.
“The guy’s been doing drugs for a long, long time,” Gill said. “His family’s had him in and out of hospitals all over the country, but it’s a lost cause. Good family, too. I’ve known this guy for a while now and I’ve been after him. So finally I’ve nailed him and I’ve got a line-up going and we’re going to put this one away. And what do I think about him? I can’t help feeling sorry for him, that’s what.”
Gill shook his head. He exhaled a weary breath.
“When this guy first started,” Gill said, “he had a good car and good clothes, good everything. A Rolex watch this guy had, for crying out loud. Think a guy like me’s ever going to have a Rolex? What the hell does it mean with this guy?
“I don’t know. It’s all gone for him now, all of it and all the money he borrowed from his family, too. He sold it all because he’s a junkie.
“Here you’re looking at a guy who wasted his time. That’s what cops deal with mostly, when you come down to it, guys who waste their time. What a goddamn pity.”
In all, thirty-eight of the fifty-one people who swore they would do their duty as citizens and come by the precinct house for Detective Gill’s line-up actually followed through. A good ratio, especially for a night of good television and a sky that threatened rain.
One by one, the shopkeepers of the Upper East Side entered the squad room and peered through the glass at the men sitting in a sort of semicircle, the perpetrators and the decoys instructed to stare at themselves in the mirror that was their side of the glass.
Thirty-three shopkeepers were dead certain that the sorrowful man with the droopy brown moustache was the man who had stood across the counter from them one day, gun in hand, threatening to kill them unless they turned over all the money in the till. Most of them took several quick looks through the glass, as if they were afraid of arousing anger in the sad-looking man who once, incredible as it seemed at this moment, had made their blood race with fear for their lives and treasures.
He didn’t look much like a desperate gunman now; nor then, actually, though no right-minded New Yorker sees much percentage in challenging the sincerity of an armed man, especially one whose finger trembles at the trigger. He looked more like someone’s terribly troubled younger brother. He looked helpless and doomed and ultimately pathetic, as if he knew exactly what people thought of him as they inspected him through the trick glass, as if he were an insect or a reptile.
His name was Tim. And he had come to perhaps the end of an odyssey that can only be understood as an irony of innocence, a special sort of lousy break that afflicts some of the most respectable families.
For the past several years, Tim had subsisted on the Upper East Side. He lived in a series of apartments east of Third Avenue in the Yorkville district, where rents can sometimes be cheap and where the more obviously disreputable sorts have long encroached on the better sensibilities of others. (The German-American Bund once held rallies to praise der Führer where now stands a branch of the Israeli Bank Leumi.) Mostly, his parents paid the rent for him, as an insurance policy against Tim’s coming back to darken their door in the tonier environs of Lenox Hill. They’d had quite enough of their only son—their only ripple in two placid and abundant lives.
The estrangement began almost the moment Tim graduated from high school, where he’d been an excellent though unimaginative student, and began classes at Columbia University, which might as well have been a different planet.
It was the early 1960s. Tim attended his classes at Columbia, read dull textbooks and listened to dull lectures. None of it was anywhere near as compelling as the street politics of the day, the great struggles for civil rights at home and an end to the war abroad. Scholastically, Tim got along for a while, barely.
Like lots of other privileged students across the country in those times, Tim was swept up in the excitement of momentous causes and the chaos of assassination, forbidden heroics of anticolonial guerrillas in a country he’d never heard of before, racial conflicts and urban rioting, violent music and violent protest against cops and anyone else in authority—and drugs, which sometimes offered a context for it all. The world was exploding with change and it would never again be the same; yet everywhere, colleges offered up the same old gray lessons, government leaders continued to blame all troubles on communist bogeymen and parents were frightened to pieces by the sudden passion that seemed to seize their children, passion they often considered to be personal threats.
All the security and sophistication and opportunity and material comfort available to families like Tim’s were no guarantee against the pain of passage through the 1960s. Nothing in Tim’s life could prepare him for the maelstrom of divergent thought on the Columbia campus or the exotic street life of nearby Harlem. And nothing could have prepared Tim’s parents for their son’s attraction to a culture that ran so wildly counter to their own.
The Columbia campus was a bazaar of radical politics and hundreds of social activist movements; neighboring Harlem was a vast drug emporium. Forbidden thought, fueled by drugs, was a thrilling intoxication. And disastrous for a rich kid from the Upper East Side who couldn’t possibly avoid minefields in such unfamiliar terrain. Already, Tim was a man and this was only his first cross-cultural experience. Was the world of his parents real—or were Columbia and Harlem real? Or was there no reality? Growing up in Lenox Hill is as insulating in its splendid way as growing up in some quiet Middle Western suburb.
Tim grew up in a community where Sunday brunch in chic neighborhood restaurants was a family routine. His mother played bridge on weekday afternoons with other idle women, or else she took tennis lessons. The corner delicatessen stocked Iranian Beluga caviar. The coffee table in the living room was strewn with copies of The New Yorker, Town & Country and Saturday Review. His father had a job that left him with clean fingernails at the end of the day. Tim’s wardrobe was acquired mostly at Barney’s and Paul Stuart with his father’s Diners Club card. Never did it occur to Tim that certain allegiances were implied by all this. And few could predict a decade following the Eisenhower years when everyone would have to choose sides on almost everything.
Ten weeks after starting Columbia, Tim’s friends included a voodoo queen from 125th Street, a Marxist revolutionary who belonged to something called the “Mad Dogs” and a drug baron who convinced him that blowing grass and dropping acid and shooting silver into his veins now and then made profoundly more sense than bombing Asian jungles in the name of a holy war against communism.
Tim’s parents were like a lot of others of the Upper East Side’s moneyed and educated households. They held the notion that they were basically liberal-minded on social issues, but always they voted on the basis of wh
at they might stand to lose if the subjects of their egalitarian sympathies gained on them too quickly. In the superheated 1960s, much of Tim’s generation looked on such time-worn hypocrisy as a newly discovered frontier of intolerable evil.
Angry words between fathers and sons in the 1960s were like stabs to the heart. The first time Tim came home to denounce his father’s “bourgeois mentality,” a hard line was drawn. Tim’s mother and father retreated into the rigid ideological sureties of Americanism, so-called, and seemed to know what it meant. Tim soon came to believe most truly in whatever fierce and friendly brand of convictions were close at hand.
Strong ideas filled an intellectual vacuum in lots of households, Tim’s included. With few guideposts for handling inflammatory rhetoric and scary ideas, family loyalties and tolerances became the first casualties of the nation’s first living-room war between generations, a war compounded by televised carnage from Vietnam. So it was at even Tim’s house.
While Tim and his passions were unacceptable to his parents, he was welcomed warmly in every place his parents and their ilk were considered the enemy. His father and mother began drinking heavily; Tim began using drugs rather heavily. And so the world foundered.
With each of his drug episodes, Tim consolidated his rejection of home. And with each new drug episode, he was dazzled by what he took to be life on the cutting edge of a vast social changeover—or so it seemed to the media.
In a few years, at the very height of the war in Vietnam, Tim’s college career sputtered to a finish, along with several million of his brain cells.
Then of narcotic and economic necessity, Tim became a fairly successful subdealer of marijuana, Quaaludes, LSD, heroin and, toward the end, cocaine. He was the perfect distributor for a while, the product of a rich white family just when others like him were fascinated with the concept of drugs as recreation. His drug baron friend, black and inarticulate, needed front men like Tim for the emerging new mainstream American market.
Tim serviced the Columbia campus, easily identifiable to his clientele as the nonstudent hanger-on with the Jaguar and all the pocket money. But his market expanded from the campus back to the familiar environs of the Upper East Side, where Tim took a succession of apartments, each one a step down from the last as his own personal drug expenses rose and as more and more respectable types such as himself entered the business and cut into his territory.
As Tim filled more and more of his idle hours—and days and weeks—with drugs, he grew increasingly detached from friends and associates and increasingly irrational and irresponsible about business. Selling illicit goods, such as drugs, has always been a business that requires trust and dependability. Those successful in the business are, by and large, those whose use of the product is the least—or nonexistent. The successful drug dealers in New York deal in cash and lots of it. Dealers on the skids begin using product as currency and they begin selling off their possessions for their cash. Tim was slipping very fast. His customers abandoned him far more swiftly than had his parents in earlier years; his friends had better things to do than hang around with Tim, and holding down a job was an idea that never occurred, not any more than getting straight.
Tim became a burglar and a stickup artist.
He knew enough to stay around the Upper East Side, where he could still look like he fit the neighborhood. And he stuck to nonviolent methods of raising cash for his drugs and other of life’s necessities. He stole old lady’s purses and he pried open apartment doors in buildings that catered to young single professionals who were mostly absent during the business hours.
When he came across a pistol in one apartment job, he began carrying it with him wherever he went. No particular reason. One day—he can’t remember just when—he walked into a shop on Lexington Avenue and pulled the pistol on the owner and walked out with nearly $900 in cash. The experience was considerably less wearing on what was left of his nerves than the anxiety he knew each time he popped open an apartment door.
So he held up dozens and dozens of shops after that and his income soared. Fencing jewelry and small appliances stolen from young urban professionals—“yuppies”—was very profitable.
With a larger income, Tim spent proportionately more on drugs. And then something snapped. He stopped caring about his appearance and was evicted from his apartment for panicking the other tenants by running through the corridors screaming and howling in one of his more terrifying hallucinations.
When he was busted in the Seventeenth Precinct by a pair of plainclothes officers from Central Robbery Division, Tim first heard himself called what he had indeed become—a “dirtbag.”
And now, tonight at this line-up, thirty-three solid citizens, his parents’ sort, were ready to go to court to testify that Tim was also an armed robber.
He’d been allowed to call his parents that night. They declined to speak to him.
When the line-up was over, Detective Gill took Tim back to the small holding cell in the precinct house. Later that night, he would be returned to Riker’s Island, first stop on what would be a long and lonely journey to Sing Sing Prison.
Tim sat on a stool in holding, a steel wire mesh box four feet by six feet by seven feet high on the second floor of the station house. As a boy, he’d seen the holding cell when he and his sixth grade classmates took a school field trip through the Nineteenth Precinct house. A grinning, potbellied policeman, a friendly Irish cop, showed the kids how the door opened and shut and warned them to “keep your noses clean now so’s you stay out of the slammer.” Tim laughed bitterly now.
The case against him was ironclad. He would be up the river for years, held forcibly in a place where hours and days and weeks become indistinguishable, where time is wasted, where drugs and cigarettes and liquor are coins of the realm.
Five and one half blocks from the Nineteenth Precinct, Tim’s parents drank cocktails on the terrace and didn’t speak of their son. To such people, the present and future become wasted if there is no reconciliation with the past.
“You ever try to tell parents how to raise their kids, though?” Detective Gill asked. “I can’t do that, you can’t do that. Nobody can do that. So like I said, we’re dealing with people who have wasted their time.”
“I know the feeling,” Joe Simon said.
Detective Simon spoke to Detective Bill Lent, whose thickset body had collapsed, with a dull thud, into a wooden chair behind a gray steel desk in the PDU quarters. Lent rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, an attempt to make the pressure of a day on the witness stand down in Manhattan Criminal Court go away.
“Jesus, I’d sooner run all over town on the streets on the hottest day in August than be on the stand,” Simon said. “You go to court and take all the raps from the lawyers for every damn word misspelled in your paperwork. It’s agony, man.”
“Oh yeah,” Lent agreed, “that’s the way it is. There’s just two ways a perp can maybe beat the rap. He can get his mouthpiece to either attack the merits of the collar, or the cop personally.
“Well, I suppose if I was the perp I’d do the same. What could I lose, you know? Maybe I could shave a couple years off the sentence by attacking the cop personally in court. Hell, it’s not going to add years, that’s for sure.
“I tell you, Joe, I call that kind of system ‘taking a bite out of the Apple,’ you know?”
Simon nodded his head, wearily. “Amen.”
Lent leaned his head back, resting on the chipped aqua wall behind him. Above his head were wanted posters for one William Morales, the Puerto Rican urban guerrilla fighting for the island’s independence from the U.S. by planting bombs in New York saloons, and a murder suspect called “Frenchie” Hernandez who wore a muscle shirt in his photograph and was said to be a frequent patron of Midtown gay bars.
The PDU was quiet now. Lieutenant Stein had gone to dinner, the sergeant’s office was empty, three other detectives were busy with a welter of paperwork. Detective Herman was busy taking a compl
aint from an attractive blond woman who claimed that her ex-husband was harassing her and her young son.
“What’s the case, anyway?” Simon asked.
“The slasher from the pleasant little uptown family. Nice folks. This guy and his two sons and his wife sucking up booze all day long for years and years and he’s the one who’s usually on the receiving end of it.
“Once, they castrated him. No shit. They actually carved his balls right out of the old sack. Another time, they took an ax to his head and cut him up so bad that little pieces of his skull came out.
“That’s not all. Man, over the years, they’ve knifed him in the gut and taken out his intestines and ripped him so bad the doctors had to take out most of his stomach.
“So one day, this guy finally says he’s going to cut his old lady’s throat, which he does. They’re all drunk, as usual, and the guy takes a big old butcher knife and stabs her five times in the back of the neck and then slashes her pretty good around the front.
“His sons take off after him and the guy slips them by jumping through the kitchen window. The super of the building sees him going down the fire escape with blood all over his hands, right?”
Lent took a long sip of coffee.
“So now I’ve got the job of finding this rum-dum who’s scared shitless, right? So what I did was find out who his buddies were, who he used to run with when he wasn’t drinking with his family. Well, I came up with the name and location of his best pal, a rum-dum just like the perp. The two of them are like twins, both run over by life, you know?
“So I told the perp’s buddy, ‘Look, do your pal a big favor, man. There’s an order out in this city that if any cop finds him, they’re supposed to blow his damn head off. He’s a dead man. I can’t do anything about the order to kill him, but I might be able to protect him if you bring him here to me and only me. Man, don’t let him get tangled up with any other cops. Another cop will kill him. I sort of understand what the guy’s been going through. Just make sure he gets to me, all right?’
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