“Well, it worked. I scared the guy right into my lap, right? So what happens in court today when I tell this story?
“The judge asks me, ‘Is it true, Officer, that you said to this man’s friend that there was a police order out to kill him? Where do you get off telling that to anyone?’
“So I tell the judge, ‘Look, Your Honor, no one ever told me I had to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth except here in court, where I always tell the truth. But out there? On the street? So what if I tricked a guy into walking into the station house so I could make a collar where nobody gets hurt?’”
Simon almost fell off his chair laughing. “What happened?”
“The jury loved it.”
“We don’t hurt nobody, Miguel?”
“We don’t have to, my friend. We don’t have to.” Nonetheless, Herman worried about the suspicious lump under Miguel’s shirt. Hadn’t Miguel always managed to control the situation, though? Hadn’t Miguel always managed to have things go exactly the way he wanted? And hadn’t Herman always benefited by friendship with the dashing Miguel?
Now, though, there was that bulge under his shirt. And Miguel was watching everyone as they walked through the park, sizing them up. Herman didn’t want trouble. He didn’t feel safe outside his own neighborhood uptown. Here, everyone spoke English, all the time. How could anyone feel comfortable?
“Listen to me, Herman. Nobody gives a fight here. They’re rich and they’re insured and they know better. They just hand it over.”
Miguel’s words calmed Herman. Sure, Miguel knew what he was doing. As usual, he had only to trust Miguel.
“Okay,” Miguel said. “That one.”
He pointed to an attractive young woman, maybe thirty years old, an Anglo, professional, the sort of Upper East Side woman who writes long letters to relatives in the Middle West hoping to dissuade them of exaggerated notions of crime in the Big Apple. She walked purposefully, sure to be leaving the park for home at this hour, going on halfpast eleven.
“Come on, Herman.”
The two rose, Herman a little dizzy from hours of smoking marijuana. Miguel was tense and alive, his strong, slim body moving through the shadows of the park like a long-legged cat of the wilds.
They followed the woman out of the park, staying a full block behind. She didn’t see them. They kept close to the walls of the big stone apartment houses on East End Avenue. And she didn’t hear them. Their sneakers muffled every step.
She turned into a doorway at East Seventy-ninth Street.
“Come!” Miguel whispered. “I know that place. No doorman.”
Miguel took a knife from his belt. Herman’s face, if it could have been seen, went white. He followed Miguel, though. Miguel knew what he was doing. Herman looked around the street as he followed Miguel, hurrying now to keep up with him. No one. A taxi two blocks down. Parked cars. A couple of winos down the way. No trouble, just like Miguel said.
Miguel went through the door, followed by Herman.
She went through a second door into a courtyard just as they made their way through the door that hadn’t quite swung shut yet. Miguel rushed to this second door, caught it. Now they were behind her. Now she noticed them.
Her hand was in her purse. The purse dropped to the ground. In her hand was a set of keys.
Herman breathed a sigh of relief. He thought she might have a gun in her hand. Now Miguel would just have to take the purse. Like he said, she’d just hand it over. No trouble.
“Hey, this I like,” Miguel said, closing the distance between the woman and himself. He put the knife against her breasts. Then he put his left arm around her shoulders and drew her face to his. He kissed her, thrusting his tongue into her mouth. “Yeah, this I like very, very much.”
He dropped his left hand from her shoulders and it trailed down the young woman’s back. She started to scream, but Miguel pressed the tip of his knife between her breasts and instead she sucked in air, terrified.
“Pick up the purse.”
Herman obeyed Miguel. Miguel ripped a gold chain off the woman’s neck. Then to the victim, Miguel said, “You’re going to get it now, baby.” He grasped the top of her shirt and started ripping it.
Someone screamed.
It wasn’t the victim.
It was someone from a window overhead.
“Leave her alone! Leave her alone! You scum!”
An old woman’s croaky voice.
Herman grabbed at Miguel’s arm, was afraid when he couldn’t find it in the darkness, even more afraid when finally he did manage to catch it. He felt Miguel’s fear.
“Leave her alone. You scum! I just called the cops!”
Miguel and Herman looked up. One by one, the window ledges filled with the young woman’s neighbors. Lights were popping on, each one seeming like some gigantic accusing search beam that trapped them over and over again in white glare. Then one by one, the windows filled with shouting, cursing neighbors.
Now it was Miguel who followed as Herman fled the courtyard and the blaze of all that dangerous light. The young woman, so meek and frightened only seconds before, stood in the light and the might of her neighbors’ avenging shouts, her shirt tom, her fists upraised. She shrieked threats of her own at the retreating figures of those who would have raped and robbed her.
They clattered through the small lobby, then out the second door into East End Avenue. Instinctively, they ran uptown. Uptown, where it was safe.
Only the winos they saw earlier were in their way. The shouting neighbors could no longer be heard. Maybe they would get away. Herman made a vow to himself as he ran, his lungs bursting and his feet pounding heavily over the pavement, that he would never again leave where he belonged, East Harlem.
Then someone shouted. A command.
This time, it was no old lady in a windowsill; nor was it a chorus of hollering neighbors safe from on high. This shout came from the street.
“Freeze!”
Herman’s head spun around. He looked straight past one of the winos, his tall form partially illuminated by a street-lamp. Then he looked back at the wino, heard him shout, “Freeze!”
It took several suspended seconds for Miguel and Herman to realize that the wino was a cop, that he had the drop on them. Then they saw another wino, another cop. The backup man, maybe ten feet away near a skinny plane tree in a planter box. There was the dull sound of a squad-car siren from somewhere nearby.
Herman heard a growl from Miguel. He turned to see Miguel turn up the edge of his shirt, saw him thrust his hand into his belt, saw the big gun slip out.
Miguel growled again.
He and Herman took off up the avenue, Herman with his hand clutched over Miguel’s arm. Then Miguel broke free of the grip and twisted around. Herman turned his head.
“Freeze! Police!” one of the cops shouted.
Miguel raised his gun in the direction of the shouting cop.
Herman saw the plainclothes cop, legs spread, knees bent, arms outstretched, a glistening .38 police special held in both hands.
“Freeze! Police!”
Miguel’s hand jerked the big gun.
There was a shot. Not from Miguel’s gun.
Another shot and Miguel fell to the sidewalk.
Blood flowed from Miguel’s neck, poured out onto the sidewalk.
Herman dropped the woman’s purse. He had forgotten he held it.
The cop with the drawn gun approached slowly, aimed his gun alternately at Herman and at Miguel’s sprawled body. There was the smell of gunpowder streaming from the .38.
Herman’s hands were high in the air.
A pair of uniformed cops jumped out of the squad car that roared up the curb and one of them snapped the steel bracelets on Herman’s wrists. The other plainclothes cop, his voice amazingly steady despite his heaving chest, stood close to Herman’s ear and said, “You’re busted, creep.”
The other plainclothes cop stood over Miguel, his .38 still held in both his hand
s. His eyes were wild with fright, nearly brimming over. At his feet, Miguel was dead. Officer Dominick Salvato had killed him.
A uniformed officer used a handkerchief to pick up Miguel’s weapon. It was a pellet gun.
Chapter 7
Mairead Keenan tried to imagine exactly what her husband was doing right this very minute as she sat on a flower-patterned Early American couch, hands folded in her pregnant lap, eyes fixed on the brass clock that was the center-piece of her freshly spray-waxed coffee table.
It was nearly half-past eleven, which she knew to be Tommy’s quitting time this week.
The house was, as usual, antiseptically clean. Each night after trundling the girls off to bed, Mairead performed a manic cleaning routine. It didn’t matter whether Tommy was home or not. What mattered at that time of day was the cleaning. Her mother in Ireland, back home “on the other side” beyond the Atlantic, used to instruct her daughters, “The body responds to regularity in all things.”
Thus, every stick of furniture in the large Riverdale apartment was wiped and polished nightly, every square inch of floor was swept or vacuumed or scrubbed. Then the kitchen was washed down, followed by the sterilization of both bathrooms—each equipped with toilets ever on guard against incursions of bacteria with their supplies of inky blue, chemically treated tank water.
After this, Mairead would shower for perhaps the third time of the day, then dust her body with talcum and, if Tommy were home, perhaps daub some Paris Moon behind her ears. Whether or not he was there for all this, she would slip into a peignoir and take her place, rather regally, in what she insisted on calling the “parlor.” Each night she had visions of engaging her husband in the sort of sophisticated, witty and tender conversations she was forever reading in her substantial collection of romance novels. But mostly, Tommy was gone, and even when he was there, she mostly read her novels anyway.
If Tommy were home, in his usual place in front of the twenty-five-inch Early American console color television set with remote control unit, she would attempt one of her idealized conversations, usually opening with something like, “I know this is silly of me, darling, but a little chat could be amusing.” Her husband would look at her for several seconds, then roll his eyes heavenward and say something like, “Nobody who lives on planet Earth talks like that.” And then he would return to the business of the television schedule.
And so one by one, Mairead added little tasks to her evenings, until she developed her elaborate household routine, which served both to justify the purpose of her life and to blot out the dreary facts of her life—the constant din of television, the job of marketing for food and preparing meals that never varied from the fourteen-day menu recommended by Betty Crocker for maximum nutritional balance, the afternoon gossip with the other mothers down in the park, her husband’s customary absence and his sexual frigidity.
Among her lesser routines was the reverent way she ran her fingers over two of the picture frames on a section of parlor wall devoted to important Keenan family mementos. One was a very large framed montage of snapshots taken of a towheaded boy named Sean. He would have been a high school senior now. He was the Keenans’ first baby, dead fourteen years tomorrow. Only once since the funeral at Good Shepherd had Tommy Keenan made any reference to that morning they found little Sean in his crib bed, his skin blue and cold, inexplicably dead. If Mairead broached the subject, her husband would silently leave the house.
The other picture frame contained a photograph of Tommy Keenan at the age of twenty-two, his hair so thick and his face ruddy and unworn by the work that lay ahead of him. It was his police academy photograph and the retoucher had made his teeth impossibly white, his eyes blazingly clear and brave and his cheeks miraculously free of the acne that used to plague her husband back then. Below the photograph was a copper plate containing his name, the date he was officially sworn in as a police officer of New York City and a poem:
A Policeman’s Prayer
Dear Lord, be with me on my beat this day, and every day.
Grant that each weary block I walk may ease a brother’s way.
Let me be kindly to the old, and to the young be strong;
But let me triumph over those whose acts are cruel or wrong.
And when my own last summons comes and I stand in Your Court,
Lord, may my rest with You be long, my punishment be short.
Mairead closed her eyes to stem a flow of tears. She wanted with all her heart to believe Tommy was punching out, or whatever it was that the men did when they quit their tours. She wanted him to be walking to his car, getting in and driving straight home to Riverdale.
But she knew better.
She wiped an eye and returned her hands to her lap. She looked at the clock—a wedding gift from her mother, with the inscription “For all time”—and tried to imagine what the Nineteenth Precinct station house looked like inside. She’d seen the old limestone building only once, and then from a car window. That was five years ago when Tommy had last taken her anywhere besides package tours to Ireland, where he spent all day and all night in the pubs and she visited her mother and girlhood friends, family gatherings—his—or Emerald Society dinner dances, which Tommy believed were politically important for whatever chance he might have one day at significant promotion within the department.
Tommy had driven past the precinct house on East Sixty-seventh Street that night so that Mairead could see the place where he was determined his career would finally take off. “The mayor lives in the precinct,” he told her excitedly, his arm slipped over her shoulder as she peered through the car window, “and the commissioner, too. A cop can get himself a little notice here, his work can mean something when the right people see it and all the right people are here to see, right?”
They were late for the theater because Mairead had been rushed through her cleaning routine. Otherwise, Tommy might have shown his wife the precinct house, his new surroundings, his new lease on life.
He wasn’t cross with her for making them late, though. Nothing could spoil his fine mood, it seemed. He was so full of himself that night. And Mairead thought it might well be the first night in a very long while when they would make love properly, when she wouldn’t have to coax a half-dozing man from the parlor sofa and drag him to bed and then do what she had to do to satisfy her own cravings. Yes, it might be the night she would be fulfilled and yet unashamed. She might not have to confess that week to the priest, who agreed with her each time that making her hus band’s penis hard when he was woozy with sleep and liquor and then pushing it between her legs was an awful lot like rape.
The day before, Tommy had come home with a pair of tickets to the Broadway musical A Chorus Line. Mairead nearly fainted with surprise and joy. She knew all about the play, of course, from talking with the women in the park. But never did she think her husband would take her to see such a thing.
“And we’ll have dinner afterward, too,” he told her. “It’s a celebration.”
Then he took his wife into his arms and they danced across the parlor to an imaginary song. The dance was over when Tommy banged his knee on the Hoover upright.
The dinner was at a place called Mama Leone’s, a cavernous Italian restaurant in Times Square popular with tourists and infrequent theater-goers from the suburbs. To Mairead, it was elegant and magical, as if she’d actually stepped into one of her paperback romances. She was swept away by the excitement of the play she’d just seen and by the sight of the strolling violinists in their tuxedoes and starched white shirts.
The occasion was Tommy Keenan’s reassignment. For far too many years, he’d worked the city-wide Sex Crimes Squad. Now he had won a spot in the Nineteenth, a prestige precinct.
Whenever he talked of his work, Mairead wanted to cover her ears with her hands and scream. It was horrifying, sickening. All the perversity in the world! But that night, at the magical restaurant, Mairead had no trouble listening to her husband’s proud talk of the future, of the thi
ngs he wanted to accomplish as a police officer.
Her mind drifted as he spoke. She felt girlish listening to him, adoring him, and it seemed as if she were returned in time to one summer night in Gaelic Park in the Bronx. She had let Tommy Keenan, the boy she’d only just met that night in the park, make love to her. He was good to her. He was strong and he knew it and held her as if he thought he might break her in two. She did not confess this sin to the priest.
A month later, she told Tommy Keenan that she was pregnant. “Are you sure?” he asked her. She assured him that the doctor was as certain of it as she. “I’m so happy,” he said. And he proposed to her.
They were married at Good Shepherd Church in the Inwood section of upper Manhattan, where one of the younger priests who knew of their whirlwind romance and guessed what might be at the root of it took Mairead aside and whispered in her ear, “The second child takes nine months, the first one can come anytime. So don’t you worry now. You just make your husband a good home.”
Sean was born and then he died. And time, like a vandal, passed.
That night on the town five years ago, Mairead knew even while it was happening, could never be the same as the night when Mairead and Tommy were so innocent and so passionate, that night in Gaelic Park.
She was an uneducated girl from a very tiny village back on the other side. But one night in New York, she had loved Tommy Keenan and considered the pleasure of it a solemn compact. She would make a life for them, a home, and she would try to be a useful and understanding wife to a policeman.
Over the years, Mairead understood her husband far better than he realized. She knew about his work, about what he saw assigned to the Sex Crimes Squad. And she understood that what he saw was wrecking his life and probably hers. She knew it every time she saw the agonized confusion in Tommy Keenan’s eyes as he looked, with an odd contempt, at her naked body.
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