Leinau pulled off the FDR and took the exit ramp that ran into Park Row. In a few minutes, the squad cur rolled into the underground garage at Police Plaza.
“Up off your keister, sweetheart,” Monahan said, looking back at Monique Mansfield. “It’s upstairs we go, kiddo.”
On the way up the elevator to Central Booking, Monique licked her lips and sidled up against Monahan. Monahan laughed at her. Leinau studied her face.
Upstairs, Leinau took her to the fingerprint desk and began rolling her palms and tips through black ink, all the while studying her vaguely familiar face. Monique was clearly rattled by this, unaccustomed as she was to having men stare at her face rather than her bust. She was nervous and quiet as Leinau pressed her fingertips into the neat squares on the white three-by-five FBI standard print identification forms, left and right.
“Say,” Leinau finally asked her, a bell ringing somewhere inside his head, “you female?”
A very indignant Monique Mansfield tossed her blond tresses over her back and said, “Yeah, what you think, copper? What do you want, proof or something?”
“Wait here,” Leinau said. He gave her a wet towel so she could wipe up the mess of ink on her hands. “Just wait right here.”
“So where would I go, already?”
“Yeah. So wait.”
Leinau walked over to Monahan, who was busy with a couple of large black books, property of the Major Crimes Squad. The mug shots weren’t helping, nor were the psyche sheets of known torches in New York City.
For months, Monahan had been after someone he knew only as “Kano.” He’d put a lot of money out on the street to various informers in the Nineteenth, as well as the Seventeenth and Twenty-third precincts. He’d come up with a street name, Kano. And he kept hearing that Kano was extremely dangerous. A “human bomb,” according to one of his stoolies, who never went anywhere without a couple of revolvers tucked inside his shirt, a hand grenade clipped to his belt and a carload of dynamite, gasoline cans, waterproof fuse wire, blasting caps, asbestos gloves, an M-l carbine with telescopic sights and a Uzi collapsible submachine gun.
But Monahan was chasing a phantom, he began to think. Every time he had a lead and showed up, Kano had vanished. Did he ever exist? Unless he caught up with this Kano soon, Monahan knew he would have to admit desperation and release to the newspapers a composite police sketch. If he saw his mug in the papers, a cockroach like Kano would correctly conclude that the cops were having a very difficult time of it. He could breathe easier. Cops don’t tell the public what they’re looking for unless they’ve practically given up—and then what’s to lose?
“Matty,” Leinau said, slapping Monahan’s back. “I’m over there getting the toots’ John Henrys, right? Then it hits me. Our Monique Mansfield used to be Sheldon Schwartz.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. If you ever get your eyes off those incredible gozonda nuts of hers and look at the face, you’re looking at old Sheldon Schwartz, second-story man.”
Monahan walked with Leinau back to the fingerprint desk. Monique daintily wiped her hands.
“Hey, you’re right,” Monahan said. “Shelly Schwartz. How you been, Shelly? Things aren’t what they used to be, eh?”
Monique stuck her tongue out.
“I’m not that Sheldon Schwartz anymore,” she said.
Then she put her fingers beneath the straps of her blouse and pulled it down quickly, flashing an enormous pair of white breasts tipped in pink. She thrust herself forward and practically slapped Monahan in the face with her stupendous breasts. Then she covered herself when she saw cops converging on her from every corner of the big Central Booking room.
“Where you living now, Sheldon?” Leinau asked.
“The Upper East Side. Where else? And it’s not Sheldon, if you please. To you, it’s Miss Mansfield.”
Monahan whistled. “You must have some angel, Shelly. These operations are pricey.”
“I’m living with Johnny Rod.”
Monahan looked at Leinau. “That’s supposed to be someone we know, Charlie?”
“Big porno star. Got a schlong like a goddamn donkey. So I guess Sheldon here went and did the whole thing for Johnny. Probably even the old slit in the melon.”
A noisy crowd of cops surrounded Monique Mansfield, who defended her femininity by flashing her breasts and smiling to the cheering onlookers in blue.
Then the sergeant on duty tapped Monahan on the shoulder.
“You Monahan of the Nineteenth?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Drop a dime back to your house.”
Monahan stepped away to make the call, then hurried back to where Leinau and the others were being entertained by the former Sheldon Schwartz.
“You don’t need me, Charlie. I got a line and we may set up for Kano.”
“Your torch?”
“Yeah, the guy that did the job on Second Avenue and
Ninety-third, killed the family trapped on the fifth floor.” “Get out of here.”
Between five o’clock and a quarter before six on most weekday afternoons, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on Twenty-third Street disgorges itself of a small army of women office workers. Maybe half this army aspires to standard, straightforward career goals. And maybe the other half hold down jobs temporarily, until an important theatrical producer has sense enough to cast them in a Broadway smash hit. In any event, they need good clothes and accessories. In New York, clothes make the woman, so some women will say.
These office workers are exquisitely dressed, despite their rather low salaries, thanks to a certain breed of entrepreneur who greets them during this crucial forty-five-minute period. Their merchandise is offered from the trunks of cars and is known as “swag stuff,” the term “swag” being an acronym for “stolen without a gun.” None of the customers has ever been known to ask questions about the impossible bargains.
An evening dress by Halston, ordinarily selling for $800 in a boutique on the Upper East Side, is a quick $50 and no sales tax. A $150 Liz Claiborne denim jump suit for $10; a leather skirt from West Bay, $25 instead of the normal $140; a red mohair and lambswool jacket by Betty Hanson, maybe $200 uptown, just $20 from the fast-talking peddler on Twenty-third Street.
There are many such locations around the city where “swag sales” are held afternoons, all of them having in common large numbers of customers who scramble down into subways and go directly home with their bargains and who can just as quickly forget about the fact that they have purchased the latest harvest of goods boosted from the best shops in the city, those in the Nineteenth Precinct.
For a time, it can go very well indeed for the thieves. If they’re smart, they ditch anything they cannot immediately sell. There are smart thieves, and then there are thieves who are not so smart.
The peddlers working Twenty-third Street were doing a land-office business for a time, with no overhead and plenty of satisfied customers. Hundreds of women were able to wink away their suspicions and dress far beyond their budgetary abilities. And there was the very special bonus to this particular gang of peddlers, eight effeminate black men doing a very big “smash and grab” business uptown. They kept the best of what they stole for themselves—truly a gang belonging to the age of specialization.
Ed Smith would soon have their number.
Chapter 9
Police informers—or, as they’re called behind their backs, “stool pigeons,” “blabs,” “stoolies” or “snitches”—come in three basic stripes: the guy who gives away his stuff for free, for reasons that range from paranoia to the fact that there is no honor whatsoever among thieves; the guy who is savvy enough to know when he’s in a position to negotiate the value of uncommon knowledge; and a guy like “Orange Lips,” something of a fixture at the Nineteenth Precinct Detective Unit.
Orange Lips is so named for the peculiarly vivid hue of his most prominent facial feature. His mouth looks like the business end of a Day-Glo orange toilet plun
ger, sliced vertically. Every month or so, he winds up in the Nineteenth PDU for one of two reasons. Either he needs a fast sawbuck for a good night’s sleep (coincidentally the very same price for a hit of your bargain smack) and is willing to spill about someone he figures the cops would want on some nickel beef (he wouldn’t want to get a colleague in any serious trouble), or else he’s sitting in a steel chair connected by handcuffs to the rim of a steel desk bolted to the floor while a detective books him on a nickel beef all his own, something like a purse snatch maybe. Orange Lips tries to slither out of his predicament by trading on some skinny about someone who might be a really important collar and sometimes he helps himself.
He doesn’t smell much better than he looks, which is why the cops who book him like to have something burning in an ashtray between them and Orange Lips. And that makes two reasons why black officers make themselves scarce when Orange Lips makes the scene.
Detective West walked into the PDU with Orange Lips. Detective Herbert Charles, seated in a far corner and content with catching up on paperwork, looked up quickly and suddenly decided he needed to go out to dinner. Herb Charles is black and the thought of having to appear in a possible lineup next to Orange Lips is not a favored notion.
Detective Charles would make a call and the word would get around that Orange Lips was in the house. In a few minutes, a lot of black officers would suddenly opt for dinner—outside the house.
For Orange Lips is reserved that most damning insult—the racial slur served up by his own. There has been more than one black officer heard to complain bitterly when roped into lineup with Orange Lips, “that ugly nigger who stinks like some weight lifter’s jockstrap.”
“See you, Herbie,” Detective West said to the black cop walking quickly out the door.
“Yeah, sure.” Detective Charles scowled at Orange Lips as he passed.
For the most part, Orange Lips is harmless as a criminal because he is ineffectual. He couldn’t hurt anyone for the same reason. And by certain practical measure, he is a rather useful citizen, since he fingers a few losers every month and the city is a better place for his efforts, ignoble as they may be. As the unsightly and unwanted stray cat serves us by making an occasional meal of the even more unsightly rat, so Orange Lips performs his civic obligation by his station as a snitch.
As Detective Matty Monahan wheezed upstairs to the PDU, called back to the house to receive an important call on a case he’d give his left nut to bust open, Detective West, a long-burning cigar assisting him, typed out an arrest card with Orange Lips’ name on it. Orange Lips, who kept rubbing his unusually dry mouth with his free hand, was not having it his way.
Monahan spotted Orange Lips and groaned. He looked for the lieutenant, Stein.
“Where’s the looey?” Monahan asked.
“Dinner, man,” Detective Charles said. “’Bye.”
“They call me out of Central Booking for this? For Orange Lips?” Monahan asked this of anyone, but no one was listening. He flapped his arms a bit and headed toward West and Orange Lips.
“That the dude?” Orange Lips asked when he raised his eyes to Monahan.
Detective West nodded and continued typing.
“He’s got something for me?” Monahan asked West.
West nodded. “Maybe, maybe not. He’s been a bad boy again, though.”
“Shee-it!” Orange Lips said. “You pigs tryin’ to mess up my mind. I ain’t done nothin”cept play chicken a little, man.”
“He was the lookout on a boost,” West explained.
In his own defense, Orange Lips offered, “Hey, man, they tole me there ain’t no law bein’ the chicken outside.”
Monahan sighed. “You know the drill by now,” he said to Orange Lips. He started to walk away, but West got up from his chair and steered him off to a corner of the squad room, out of Orange Lips’ earshot.
“He might just have something for you on Kano,” West said. “Yeah, I know, he’s high tonight. But what he told me sounds really solid and I thought enough of it to get you called back home. This is no shit, Matty. Talk to him yourself when I’m done with the Mickey Mouse, okay?”
Monahan looked over toward Orange Lips.
“Shee-it!” Orange Lips said, frightening a petite woman who walked in with her young son to speak to someone about her “goddamn ex-husband who’s going to wind up killing us.”
Orange Lips wiped his mouth and giggled. The woman with the boy in tow sat down at Detective Herman’s desk. Ray Herman is particularly good at listening down through hysteria to whatever essential facts there might be that would constitute police interest in a complaint walking in off the streets.
“I’ll get him a candy bar,” Monahan said to West. “Looks like he’s in for a very rough night.”
Detective Herman smiled through a familiar story told by a spurned woman, this time one named Vicki Balaton. Her husband dumped her for a “two-bit whore from the office” and now that he’s living with “the slut” he thinks he has the right to “shove my little boy’s face in his degenerate life-style.”
Mrs. Balaton’s son calmly removed a notebook and some papers from his school book bag. Herman guessed the boy to be in the fourth grade or so and asked him about the school patch on his blue blazer. Mrs. Balaton shut up for five seconds or so.
The boy smiled. “St. Stephen’s of Hungary,” he said. “I’m in the third grade.”
“What’s your name?” Detective Herman asked.
“You got a gun on you?”
Herman lifted his sport coat and showed the boy his service revolver, tucked in its belt clip holster.
“Man-o-man!” The boy started writing in his notebook. He looked up, then wrote down what he saw, in notes.
“What’s your name?”
“Greg.”
Mrs. Balaton wanted to talk some more, so she told her son to stop bothering Detective Herman.
“He’s not bothering me, ma’am,” Herman said.
“Oh.”
“Greg,” Herman asked the boy, “what are you writing?”
“I’m going to do a story about this for my paper.”
“You have a school paper?”
“Well, not really the official school paper or anything like that.” He fished out three copies of an oversized mimeograph sheet, something called, “Eye Spy,” from his book bag.
“What kind of stories do you write?”
“Oh, me and Anthony—that’s my pal—we try to make about twenty pages and we have news and weather and sports stories. Mostly, we write stories about stuff that happens to us. Like now. Like seeing a gun on a policeman’s belt like this.”
“What do you think about having to carry a gun around like I do?”
“I think it’s neat.”
“It’s not, Greg. It’s sort of too bad. Do you understand?”
“Well, I think so.”
“Fine. You think about why it’s too bad I have to carry around a gun. Listen, what do you do with your paper anyway?”
“Me and Anthony sell it for a dollar.”
Herman took a dollar out of his pocket and bought the latest number.
Mrs. Balaton was considerably calmer.
“Do you think your husband is violating visiting rights?” Herman asked her.
“He is violating visiting rights,” she said. “I don’t think he is, I know he is.”
“Yes, I see. But there is criminal law and there is civil law. Understand what—”
“The law is shee-it!” Orange Lips shouted.
Mrs. Balaton jumped.
“What’s he here for?” Greg asked.
“Look, Mrs. Balaton,” Detective Herman said. “See that guy over there?”
She leaned forward and whispered to Herman, “You mean that man with the big orange lips?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. We mostly deal with fellows like that. Now, has your husband acted in some criminal way here?”
“Well—”
“I didn’t
think so. If you think your husband is in violation of the legal points of your divorce decree and the visitation rights spelled out in the legal judgment, then what you’re going to have to do is see your attorney about this and make your complaints before the civil court. This just isn’t a police case at this point, you see. And I hope for your sake, Mrs. Balaton, that it never is.”
She dropped her head and her shoulders started quivering. Herman reached into his back pocket and then gave her his handkerchief.
When she composed herself, Herman said, “Take it easy on everybody, all right? Call me if you think you need us. Really.” He gave her his card, then she and the boy got up to leave.
“So long, Greg,” Herman said.
“’Bye, and thanks,” he said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Balaton added. “Thanks.”
Herman rubbed his forehead and then stood up to walk around the squad room a bit. As usual, everyone was involved in a million cases at once and the noise level of the place was the best evidence of that. He strolled over to Detective Lauver’s desk.
“How come you didn’t catch that one?” Herman asked. “You’re our domestic expert,” Lauver said.
“Maybe so. Nice kid she’s got there, you know. I hope he doesn’t crack up under it all.”
“I suppose you’ll never know.”
Herman shrugged.
Detective West, a telephone receiver cradled between his shoulder and his ear, shouted, “Who’s up around here?”
“I’m catching,” Lauver answered. “What’s the line?”
“Three.”
Lauver picked up on it and started writing notes on a pad.
He asked someone on the other end of the line a series of short questions: “Look like she was alone?… Windows normal?… You talk to the doorman? … What about the door locks?… Things been thrown around?”
He hung up the phone.
“What do you have?” Herman asked.
“Uniform call from a building on Eighty-first and Third. They got something that doesn’t look right. Maybe it’s just a lonely one, I don’t know.”
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