Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  But that night at Mama Leone’s, she believed, was truly a night that would change the years of trouble, a night when Tommy Keenan might put his pains and memories behind him. That night he looked like his rookie photograph when he smiled, when he talked.

  When they returned home, Tommy wasn’t interested in making love to his wife. And for the first time, Mairead complained—and bitterly.

  And Tommy Keenan said, just before he left her to go out drinking alone, “Sex with you only means a dead baby in the morning.”

  Now she sat, waiting.

  The baby kicked and Mairead allowed herself to enjoy the sensation. It had happened sinfully, as with the girls. Mairead had dragged him from couch to bed, until breath thick and stinking of beer, and she’d stroked his penis until he was hard enough to fill her.

  Another baby, this time maybe a boy. This time, maybe Tommy might get better.

  She watched as the clock struck its soft eleven-thirty chimes. Then she leaned forward for the tenth time and straightened the magazines on the coffee table—People, the Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping and the Catholic Messenger.

  This time, just maybe Tommy Keenan would get into his car and come straight home.

  “¿Habla inglés?”

  Herman stared into the cop’s face. Reflected lights from the flashing red of the squad cars that filled the avenue played in the big cop’s eyes. The cop held Herman’s upper right arm in a very tight grip. Herman’s wrists were bound even tighter, with steel cuffs. More cops arrived, cars full of them. Herman was surrounded by an army of blue uniforms now, police badges, drawn nightsticks, drawn revolvers, the smell of leather and gunfire, the vengeful sounds of a swarm of neighborhood onlookers who formed a semicircle around the scene of the crime.

  He tried to answer. Herman’s mouth opened, but he couldn’t form words, not with Miguel’s dead eyes looking up at him from the blood-spattered sidewalk. His thoughts were in Spanish, but he spoke English to the cop squeezing his arm.

  “So fast,” he said, his voice soft and reedy. He looked down to Miguel. “It all ended, so fast.”

  “The creep speaks English,” a cop said. “Go ahead and read him.”

  Again, the cop with his hand clamped over Herman’s arm asked. “¿Habla inglés?”

  Herman looked up and nodded dumbly. The cop squeezed his arm hard.

  “Yes,” Herman said.

  “All right,” the cop said. “Listen up, then.”

  He cleared his throat and sounded almost brotherly as he recited the Miranda warning to Herman, who trembled at the words and was suddenly thankful for the support of the cop’s fingers dug into his upper arm:

  “You have the right to remain silent. … Any statements you make may be used against you in a court of law…. You have the right to an attorney before answering any questions, or to have an attorney present at any time.… If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be furnished you free of charge.… Now that I have told you this, do you understand your rights?”

  Herman understood. He’d heard the words dozens of times in his young life, mostly spoken by tough-talking actors in TV cop shows. Now it was real, depressingly real. Herman and the cop were players on a very real stage. And the semicircle of curious onlookers was their audience.

  The crowd cheered when the cop finished reading Herman his rights.

  Older officers appreciated the irony of this. A cop named Collins said, “Listen to the rubbernecks, will you? I’m old enough to remember when the Supreme Court handed down the Miranda warning law and everybody thought it was a big hot victory for the radical-liberals. Nowadays it’s the voice of authority.”

  A testament to the power of video imagery. After a few hundred thousand cop dramas where a staccato-voiced heavy snaps off the Miranda and then packs the thug off to the slammer, the reading of constitutional rights against self-incrimination and statutory rights to legal counsel ceases to be a libertarian pronouncement and sounds, instead, like something ruthlessly fascist. In New York, neighborhood crowds turned out on the occasion of a fresh neighborhood crime often cheer what they believe to be at least the sound of swift justice and the only sound they might hear is the reading of rights to a suspect spread against a wall.

  Herman was shoved into the back of a squad car and taken off to the precinct house for booking, during which time it would be discovered, to no one’s particular surprise, that he didn’t have any people at home who were able to hire him a lawyer. Toward morning, he would be taken to Riker’s Island until court arraignment and subsequent trial, during which time he would meet a lot of the guys from his neighborhood. In the meantime, his name would go into the overnight hopper at the public defender’s office and someone who never heard of him would draw the assignment. And Herman would talk to a lot of officers and detectives at the Nineteenth, “so I can get some very heavy shit off my chest.”

  On East End Avenue, a couple of detectives did the forensic evidence tasks, but just the basics since there were four eyewitnesses to the shooting. They bagged up Miguel’s pellet gun in glassine, photographed his body from all angles, chalked the outline of the body and photographed that while the medical examiner’s crew was wrapping up the remains to haul off in the meat wagon.

  Gradually, the crowd began dispersing.

  The woman whose bag was stolen was interviewed and comforted and told to expect a call in the morning from a detective.

  Officer Dominick Salvato wanted to be sick.

  “It’s your collar all the way, Dom,” his partner told him.

  “Thanks,” Salvato said. He reholstered his .38 and discovered that his entire body shook just like his right hand.

  “Let’s go to the house.”

  “Yeah,” Salvato agreed.

  He felt a lot of hands on him, his fellow officers helping him into a squad car. Everyone knew the private little hell in store for Dominick Salvato.

  He was a cop who’d just killed someone he didn’t know, a boy whose life, no matter how wasted, would no longer have the chance for redemption. In television shows, the cop who shoots down the menacing punk is supposed to be a big hero. And we can all see it coming from a long way off anyway. In real life, it doesn’t play anything like that. Real life is far too much for television to handle, and far too fast.

  Dominick Salvato sat in the back of the squad car, which was hemmed in on all sides by other squad cars and by crowds of cops and civilians moving through the avenue. He felt hundreds of eyes bum into him. Fellow cops, strangely speechless as they looked at him; neighborhood residents, their faces a mix of admiration and gratitude and fear; the men in the medical examiner coats as they walked by with a dead boy in a body bag, the thin, flat lump on the stretcher. They all took a look at the guy who just killed someone, as if he’d done it wantonly, as if he was proud of himself, as if he knew much more than what he saw in that few life-and-death seconds on a darkened street.

  What he saw was a frightened figure, two of them. One aimed a gun. Dominick Salvato was frightened, too, and did what he had to do to protect himself and maybe others, other cops, people who lived in the neighborhood. He didn’t know.

  The boy he’d shot, Miguel, had raised a pellet gun. It wouldn’t have done much harm, given the distance between them. But how could he have known?

  Salvato would be told later, by the department lawyer from headquarters and by Inspector Short and by his partner, that he was clearly in the right. He would learn that Miguel was an animal.

  But Salvato knew, too, what it was like to watch a boy’s eyes close in death by his hand.

  “It was all …” he said in the squad car on a steaming summer’s night. “It was all, so fast. It ended so fast.”

  Herman had said the same thing. Salvato could think of nothing else but the same, the speed of a deathly moment.

  Dominick Salvato didn’t feel anything at all like a hero as he rode, in silence, to the precinct house. Heroes don’t feel like vomiting.

  They sat in
a booth at the back of an all-night luncheonette near her place, which was a railroad flat on Ninety-fifth Street near First Avenue. Keenan’s hands were sweating. He tried to decide what he wanted to have happen with the rest of the night, if anything.

  “How long have you been a cop?” she asked.

  They were the first words between them for some time, since they had spoken briefly back at the house and she’d given him the location of the restaurant and he’d suggested that she go along and he would meet her later. Dory Smith’s hands were sweating, too, and her heart pounded. She was attracted to Keenan, excited by her first night as an auxiliary cop, even though she’d done nothing more than stand on a curb near some klieg lights in her uniform and occasionally ask someone to stay behind the wooden police barricade. It was a polite crowd of gawkers who happened by the theater premiere.

  Keenan smiled. “Long enough so that no one thinks to ask what I might have been before I was a cop. Nobody’s ever surprised that I’m a cop, either. It shows, I guess.”

  Dory smiled. “You’re a thoughtful one, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean? Thoughtful for a cop?”

  “And paranoid.”

  “Yeah, maybe paranoid, too. You know what they say. If you’re not paranoid these days, you’re not thinking straight.”

  She considered this and then answered, “In this city, maybe you’re right.”

  “How long have you been in New York then?”

  She resented the question, even though she knew such resentment was unfair. Keenan asked her innocently enough, but even relative newcomers to New York bristie at being revealed as immigrants.

  “About five years,” she answered.

  “And you want to be an actress, I suppose? A good-looking girl from the heartland and all?”

  “It’s not so unusual.”

  “No. Sorry.” Keenan knew his talk was clumsy. “No more so than wanting to be a cop, I expect.”

  A heavyset waitress shuffled to their booth and took a pencil stub from behind her ear, held it over a smudged pink and white pad. “What’ll it be, dearies?”

  Keenan ordered coffee and a tuna sandwich, which he didn’t want. He wanted beer. Dory Smith ordered eggs and tea.

  “What’s it like?” she asked.

  “What, tuna?”

  The waitress laughed and tapped him appreciatively on the shoulder as she waddled off to the kitchen.

  “Oh, I know what you mean,” Keenan said. “What’s it like being a cop, eh?”

  “No, what’s tuna like?”

  “Yeah, I thought I’d like you,” Keenan said. He folded his arms in front of him on the table. “The way I figure, everything that goes on between men and women comes down to how funny it is they ever get together in the first place. It’s the laughs that are the important things.”

  “Are you married?”

  She said it calmly, which surprised her. She supposed he was and she supposed there might be a point at which it was every bit as important as laughs, even though she told herself now that it didn’t matter. Why should it matter? Were they doing something wrong?

  Keenan answered quickly and struggled to keep his face from becoming any hotter than it was.

  “Yes, I’m married. Yes, I’m unhappy. No, I’m not thinking about divorce. Yes, it’s because of the kids and I know all about how that’s not a legitimate reason these days. Anything else you need to know about it?”

  “What’s her name?”

  Keenan wiped his forehead. “Mairead.”

  “And your children?”

  Keenan told her. He told her their ages, too.

  “What’s in store for us?” he asked when she stared at him blankly.

  “I don’t know. What’s it like being a cop?”

  “You change the subject awfully damned fast, don’t you?”

  “I’m thinking about one thing and I want to hear you talk about something else, that’s all.”

  “Jesus help me. Women!”

  The waitress set down their food, almost breaking the plates. She winked at Dory and walked away.

  They’d taken a few bites when Dory asked, “You’d rather be someplace else, right? Maybe at my place having a drink?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So maybe we’ll go there.”

  One of the enduring mysteries of life’s annoying moments in New York is the insistence of Manhattan car owners on equipping their vehicles with burglary alarm systems that scream unendingly into the night, touched off by the slightest jostling of the car. Never in the entire history of auto burglar alarm sirens has the contraption led to the arrest of a burglar.

  A hefty percentage of the time the siren is set off accidentally by the owner, who becomes furious with the hardware for making all the commotion but who is still incapable of understanding how the thing could possibly annoy anyone else.

  If anything, the auto alarm siren is the burglar’s best friend. If a car starts shrieking, there is an automatic warning to all within hearing range, which is considerable in a city where conversations on the sidewalk echo up and down buildings, to steer clear of a place where a criminal—and maybe a criminal with a gun—is plying his trade. A telephone call to the police, if ever made, will usually be placed long after a burglar’s one or two minutes’ need for com pletion of the job, and it will be handled as a low-priority complaint about excessive noise by the officer on the switchboard.

  It is surprising that burglais themselves don’t set off alarms when they find a car with something inside worth stealing. It is not so surprising that New Yorkers awakened by a siren that has shrieked on in the middle of the night become sometimes so frustrated that they themselves jump into their jeans and sneakers and take a baseball bat down to the street to bash out the windows of the offending car, whose owner is probably off somewhere sleeping peacefully.

  Keenan pointed all this out to Dory Smith as they left the luncheonette and walked up First Avenue from Eighty-eighth Street toward Dory’s apartment on Ninety-fifth. The shrill blare from a white Jaguar cut through his head like a nail. Dory covered her ears as they walked.

  A young woman, yelling something up the avenue in the vicinity of the Jaguar, raised what appeared to be a crowbar over her head, as if to bring it smashing down hard on the hood of the sports car. Her threat of vandalism met with the shrill blare of the Jaguar’s driver, a very drunk, middle-aged blond woman with a white fur wrap around her shoulders.

  The driver and the rudely awakened young woman with the crowbar stood hollering at one another across the hood of the car, which made nearly as much noise as the women.

  Keenan began trotting toward the scene, toward what might turn out to be an altercation. He stopped when he saw a squad car pull out from a side street, lights flashing.

  Officers Tony Ciffo and Jean Truta stepped out of the squad car. Truta held her hands up, flat-palmed, to the young woman with the crowbar.

  “We’ll take care of it,” she said. “Don’t make it worse for yourself, okay?”

  The crowbar was lowered.

  Ciffo looked at his wristwatch. “How long has it been going off?” he asked the young woman, a tenant of the apartment building near the shrieking car.

  “About a goddamn half hour! What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m going to write up a summons, ma’am,” Ciffo said.

  He stepped around the front of the car and held a hand out. The blond woman with the fur wrap caught it just in time to keep from falling.

  “This your car?” Ciffo asked her.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Can you turn it off?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, Officer.” She waved a small key in her hand and then climbed back into the car and ducked her head under the dash. “The little devil is somewhere around here, I don’t know.”

  Ciffo counted to twenty. He didn’t like drunks, especially drunk women.

  “We’ve got a complainant here who says your bur
glar alarm has been going beyond the ten-minute limit prescribed by the law,” Ciffo said.

  The blonde popped her head out the door of the car. One of her breasts bobbled out the top of her gown. She worked it back inside.

  “I’m doing my best, Officer.”

  “Have you got some identification?” Ciffo asked.

  “Identification?” she said, filling the air between them with liquor fumes. “Officer, I’m not so sure I even exist!”

  Ciffo counted to twenty again. It was useless talking with her. He leaned against the Jaguar while she fiddled with her key under the dashboard.

  The complainant walked sternly away from Officer Truta and said to Ciffo, “Officer, I want you to shoot the car.”

  “I can’t shoot a car, lady. Sorry, but it’s slightly against the rules, you know?”

  “But I want that siren killed! Who do you think pays your salary anyway?”

  Ciffo counted to twenty. Officer Truta suppressed laughter and wrote up the summons, attaching it to the Jaguar’s windshield.

  Then, suddenly, the siren died.

  The drunken blonde stepped out, victorious.

  Ciffo stopped a cruising taxicab and made sure the blond Jaguar owner had sufficient carfare, then sent her along home. The Jaguar would be towed and the fine would have to be paid—in full and in cash—if she ever wanted it back. Maybe she’d learn a lesson if it cost her a few hundred dollars.

  Keenan passed by with Dory Smith and they each looked as guilty as if they’d just boosted something from a shop only to run right into a cop on the street, namely Tony Ciffo.

  Seeing Ciffo there looking at him suspiciously, Keenan felt the need for some sort of comment.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to Ciffo. “It’s not like I know what I’m doing.”

  Then he and Dory hurried along to her apartment.

  Chapter 8

  There is a man called Joe—just that and nothing more—who summers above ground on the Upper East Side and winters below ground, about twenty-six blocks south and a few blocks crosstown in a steam tunnel that runs under a hotel famous the world over.