He went to the PDU duty log book near the sergeant’s office to sign himself out. Inside the office were Monahan and Orange Lips. Lauver poked his head inside.
“How you doing with him?” he asked.
“Orange Lips here is about to earn his keep, so he says.”
Lauver waved and was gone.
“How do you know about this?” Monahan asked Orange Lips.
“Shee-it, man, I start tellin’ you that and I’m out of business, you know?”
“You ever do a job with Kano?”
“Not my kind of people, man.”
“So how is it you know about him? The guy’s good and he’s professional and he’s quiet about it. You’re out of his league, dirtball. What do you know about him?”
“I tole you, man. I got ears. People got mouths and I got ears, you know? You want me to tell you what I know, or you want to sit here jivin’ tonight? Makes no never mind to me.”
Monahan figured him for being square on this one. If a small potato like Orange Lips managed to hear something about someone as shrewd and canny as Kano, then it had to be worth something. He decided to bite on it. One more shot at nailing the bastard before turning over the police sketch to the newspapers.
“So spill, Orange Lips.”
“Hey, not so fast, my man. Not so fuckin’ fast! You know, I got myself in a little jam here and now I got to look out for number one, right?”
“Better stop wasting my time or you’re number shit, my man.”
Monahan watched the sweat bead up on Orange Lips’ forehead and neck and he knew he had the snitch where he wanted him, desperate to get uptown someplace for a hit at a shooting gallery. He reached into his breast coat pocket and pulled out a Hershey chocolate bar. Orange Lips rubbed his mouth and his eyes fell half shut and he trembled visibly. He needed a rush and he needed it fast. A candy bar might hold him for a while.
“What’s the matter, Orange Lips? You seem tense.”
Orange Lips almost fell out of his chair. He righted himself and he giggled. “You want this firebug dude real, real bad, man. How much you want this bad dude?”
Monahan pushed himself back in the sergeant’s swivel chair and unwrapped the chocolate. Orange Lips seemed ready to lunge at him.
“How old are you, Orange Lips? Fifty or so?”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.”
“Yeah, that’s about it. I don’t know. Fifty, I guess.”
“Not too much in this life more pathetic than a fifty-year-old junkie snitch, you know?”
Orange Lips was growing weak. “Let’s deal here, man.”
“You’re old enough to remember the good old days of cop hell, right? You know, when we wanted something bad and somebody like you was holding out on us, playing games with us.”
“Shee-it!”
Monahan bit off the tip of the chocolate bar and Orange Lips whimpered.
“Picture how it used to be,” Monahan said. “Rubber hoses, those nice leather truncheons. I want Kano so bad, I don’t mind telling you that I’d like to take you right now to a little museum us old-timers have right here at the precinct house, a little room with no windows where we keep stuff from the good old days. Get the picture?”
“Ah, shee-it. I was just tryin’ …”
“You know we’ll make it right by you, dirtbag. You want out of here on the nickel beef? Talk, my man.”
Monahan leaned forward and waved the chocolate bar under Orange Lips’ nose.
“I know,” Orange Lips gasped, “I know this place he goes regular-like for his gasoline.”
Monahan smiled.
“Let’s talk,” he said. “Then I’ll think about giving you this candy bar.”
“No, you can’t go in. No, you can’t take any pictures. Why don’t you just go on home now?”
The uniformed officer spoke to a woman in hair rollers with an Instamatic camera slung around her neck. They stood in the fourth-floor corridor of an apartment house on Eighty-first Street a half block east of Third Avenue.
“But I live here!” the woman in the hair rollers shrieked. “She’s a friend of mine.”
“Why would you want to go and take a picture of her, lady?”
“None of your business, that’s why. Who do you think pays your salary, flatfoot?”
Detective Lauver stepped out of the elevator, a Polaroid camera in hand.
“What’s he going to do with that?” the woman hollered.
“He’s a police detective, ma’am. It’s official business.”
“What’s the problem here?” Lauver asked the uniform.
“The problem is, I’m a friend of hers,” the woman said, jabbing her finger into Lauver’s chest, “and I want to see what happened to her.”
Lauver took out his notebook. “You’re a friend of hers? What’s your name? I guess we have your address.”
“My name?”
“Oh yes. For the record, you know. And maybe for testimony.”
“I don’t want to get that involved.”
“You’re a friend of hers, you say?”
“Well, we see each other sometimes.”
“What’s your name?”
“I have something on the stove.”
“You better go attend to that, then.”
“Yeah, well … maybe I’d just better.”
Lauver and the uniform watched as she waddled down the hallway. She turned and looked over her shoulder at them, glaring angrily at the policemen, then turned a corner and headed down a corridor to her own door. The officers listened as she slammed the door behind her.
“The resident ghoul,” the uniform said.
“Yeah. I’ve seen plenty of their kind before. Okay, what do we got here?”
“One dead fat lady, lived alone. Take a deep breath and see for yourself.”
Lauver took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his nose. The uniform pushed open the door to apartment 4-D. Two more uniforms were inside, stepping around a living room that looked like it had been burglarized every day for years.
Furniture was upended, clothing was strewn everywhere. Papers, books, beer cans and what looked to be several hundred medicine bottles covered the floor. An antique chest in the vestibule leading to the living room was tipped over and one of the drawers broken. Personal correspondence and canceled checks spilled out of the only quality piece in the place.
Copies of True Confessions magazine, the Midnight Globe and the National Enquirer scandal sheets as well as the New York Post tabloid daily lay in piles around a sagging couch near a window that looked out on the building’s gray air shaft. Some of the magazines and newspapers were more than two years old.
There was a television set opposite the couch, an enormous Mediterranean-style cabinet model, wedged between a pair of tall bookcases laden with paperback romance nov els. The books were neatly stacked, the only sign of order in the flat. The television set was on, tuned to the Merv Griffin show on New York’s WNEW, Channel 5. Merv was busy interviewing a television actress Detective Lauver had never heard of complaining about how she’d been libeled by the National Enquirer.
Lauver poked through some of the papers, letters mostly. He learned she had a son upstate and a married daughter living in Connecticut. There was a letter, too, about a month old, from a nurses’ association informing her that the check enclosed was the last she would receive and recommending that she seek public assistance.
“Oh God,” Lauver said. “Why is it always so much the same?”
He looked at the window ledge, piled with old medicine vials.
“What is all this stuff anyway?” Lauver leaned over and took a look at the labels.
“Antiflatulence. What’s that mean?”
“It means the old lady farts so much she can’t stand it so she went and got pills for it,” one of the uniforms said.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Where is she?” Lauver asked.
“In a closet in the bedroom
, facedown. We haven’t touched her.”
“I’ll take a look in the kitchen first,” Lauver said.
It was just off the living room, a small galley containing new appliances, plenty of cupboards and a long Formica counter. Lauver took a handkerchief from his back pocket and used it to open the cupboards. They were bare. He opened the refrigerator and found a can of unopened beer, six empties, an aged onion and a jar of mustard. The range top showed no signs of ever having been used.
But the long counter was covered with medicine bottles, many of them half full.
“More of these antiflatulence pills,” Lauver said. “This gal had a big problem.”
He stepped back into the living room and said to one of the uniforms, “All right, let’s see her.” The cops started walking toward the bedroom. On the way, Lauver poked his head into the bathroom door. Inside, the bathroom was eerily clean, even sweet-smelling.
When he stepped into the bedroom, he choked at the smell. He took his pipe from a side pocket and lit it, filling the air with something to mask the odor of the dead woman.
Like the living room, her bedroom was filthy. Even more so. The bedding was soaked with urine and feces.
Lauver held his breath, took a look in the closet and saw her there on the floor, an obese ball of graying flesh in a thin cotton housedress, her splotched legs tucked up beneath her and her arms outstretched.
He left the room for air, set his Polaroid and then returned, snapping off several pictures of the dead woman in the closet.
“What do we know from the doorman?” Lauver asked a uniform when he’d finished the camera work.
“He said she used to be a nurse at Metropolitan, that she’s about fifty-five or so and that she’d been working as a private nurse at a hundred bucks a day.”
“Jesus, what a pig. Who’d hire her for anything, let alone as a nurse?”
“The doorman says she’s an alky, as if you couldn’t tell. Says she has hallucinations all the time and always calls up the super to get rid of wolves that keep coming into her apartment, stuff like that.”
“Jesus, you’d think it might be homicide if you didn’t know about her, I mean from the looks of the place when I walked in,” Lauver said.
“The doorman says the place is always like this. He says the porters come in about every other week or so and pick up everything, at least, and haul off the empties. But it gets right back to the same condition.”
“Yeah, okay,” Lauver said. “I’ll take one more look and then I think we can call the morgue on this one.”
Lauver returned to the bedroom closet, his pipe puffing wildly. He used his foot to turn over the dead woman and get a look at her face.
“There’s no blood here,” he said. “My guess, it’s her liver that’s all puffed up and oozing poison. That’s what happens with them.”
He took his foot away and the body fell heavily to the floor of the closet again.
One of the uniforms said, “You know, she had this little cat or dog dish out in the kitchen, but we didn’t find any animal.”
“Maybe it’s under her,” Lauver said.
“Hey, then it is homicide!”
Lauver groaned. It was time for him to leave with his Polaroid pictures, which he would attach to the form he would have to type up back at the house, which he would do as fast as he could and then move on to something else. Something else would not necessarily be pleasant; it would just be something else.
What was it that sent so many sick, suicidal people into closets? Lauver asked the question a long time ago, when he was a young officer himself, when he saw his first moldering body in an unkempt apartment with the pall of someone’s final, sadly quiet desperation. Someone told him that people regress when they relinquish their instinct for survival, when they submit to death. And often, they seek the safety of hidden confinement in a small, dark place. Like a dog or a cat in unfamiliar surroundings. Often, the suicide victim will creep off into a closet, then lie down with a belly full of poison and die.
Lauver used to wonder about the people who would take their own lives. He used to wonder how many times they crept into closets and wept, why everyone who knew them well—friends and family members—was always surprised to discover all the signs of their lonely agony.
In the car riding back to Sixty-seventh Street, he used his handkerchief to try cleaning his nose of the acrid smell of the dead woman and her apartment. He wasn’t successful.
“Lasts for days sometimes,” he said. “That’s the terrible thing about it, the stink and how it keeps reminding you of what you just saw. It would be all right if you could just walk out the door and forget the sights, but there’s that smell that won’t go away, sticking there somewhere in your nose hairs.
“That’s why the uniforms back there make bad jokes. You have to when things like this become such a damn routine in your life. I mean, if you start thinking about the lives of all these lonely people here in New York—like if you start trying to figure out each time exactly what crazy thing it was that drove them into a closet, for God’s sake—then you’re going to go nuts yourself pretty quick.
“Those guys back there are waiting for the morgue unit now and they’re probably making more jokes. Let me tell you, it’s a scary thing walking into someplace where you know you’re there to look for the dead body. So can you blame those guys? You have to whistle in a graveyard, you know?”
New York doesn’t roll up its sidewalks at night like some cities around the country. Instead, it rolls up its storefronts.
All over the city, beginning about five o’clock in some districts, display windows are covered over with steel gratings of variously ugly design. There are vertical bars, chain-link and solid-steel plates that retract by day. In most neighborhoods, the solid steel is covered over with spray-painted words denoting a host of sexual suggestions or reminders of exactly which youth gang makes claim to that particular block. Uptown and down, with a single exception, every commercial block of Manhattan takes on a sort of Sovietized look—gray and shuttered and depressing. The style, born in the general urban vandalism of the 1960s, is known as “riot Renaissance.” It has helped stabilize insurance rates for the shopkeepers and it’s probably more humane than keeping German shepherds about.
The exception to the rule is that section of the Nineteenth Precinct with the city’s most impressive collection of outrageously beautiful and enormously expensive art and fashion boutiques—from Madison Avenue eastward to Second Avenue, from Sixty-first Street north to Seventy-ninth. There are French designer shops offering Primrose Bordier linens and towels; the tastefully bucolic waves of Laura Ashley—dresses and pinafores, diaries and wallpapers of English bunched floral patterns; stationers that stock old-fashioned cardboard file folders, black with scarlet ribbons, to be used as “cellar books” with sheets for records and wine-tasting notes; a shop specializing in ostrich handbags and briefcases, with ostrich change purses for the budget-conscious at about $3,000; a ladies’ wear shop with $800 silk shirt-dresses, “slightly démodé,” it is explained to browsers; galleries crammed full of paintings and sculptures that cost more than most Americans earn in years. This short stretch of a very long avenue contains something of the best to wear and to eat and to hang on one’s wall from every corner of the planet—the very best that money can buy with not the slightest hint of a Rodeo Drive sort of elegant vulgarity.
People who have money enough to live in the area enjoy strolling Madison Avenue and the side streets by night, window-shopping for the things they might purchase the next day with American Express Gold Cards. It would not do the shopkeepers well to deny their customers such simple pleasures of an evening’s exclusive promenading.
There are others besides the residents of this fabulous neighborhood who enjoy the window-shopping, however. For instance, there was a gang of eight black men anyone would take for eight extremely well-dressed black women.
One early September night, the eight were most particula
rly struck by the new fall collection on display at a place on East Seventy-ninth called Gussied Up, Ltd. Words like “divine” and “heavenly” escaped the lips of the eight women (men) dressed in gowns, high heels and fur wraps clustered around the glass and looking in with very wide eyes.
Among those who heard those appreciative sounds was a sad-looking man dressed in greasy, ragged cast-offs picked out of street trash containers. His appearance was in such wild contrast with the sleek fashions in the windows, his demeanor so opposite that of the chic neighborhood promenade that absolutely no one looked at him, even though he approached one and all with a filthy, open-palmed hand and breath laced with cheap wine and pleaded for “spare change.” The more he thrust himself at the people passing by the windows, the more invisible he became.
It was an easy matter for him to eavesdrop on the eight fashionable, though curiously muscular women in front of Gussied Up. To them, he did not exist. But to him, a man who made a career of studying the movements of anyone who looked even slightly out of place on his beat, the eight women might as well have worn sandwich-board signs advertising the fact that they were thieves.
Ed Smith chuckled to himself, though he could have done so aloud and no one would have noticed. “Drag queens!” he thought. “Who would have suspected?”
Smith walked his practiced unsteady line toward the eight transvestites admiring the window display and after hearing one of them say, “I’m keeping that lace teddy for myself,” deliberately bumped into her (him). She (he) said, “ish!” and Smith made an elaborate production of tipping an imaginary hat to her (him).
“’Scuse me, ma’am,” Smith said. “Can you spare any change?”
She (he) made a sniffing sound and returned her (his) gaze to the beautiful frocks in the window.
“Have a wonderful day, ma’am,” Smith said. Then he crossed the street, carrying his filthy wad of newspapers and cardboard with him. He set them down in the doorway of a shop and sat atop them, lit up a cigarette and smiled.
After the eight transvestite thieves had moved along, Smith unwrapped one of his newspapers, inside of which was a radio, his PTP short-wave used to keep in contact with his fellow SCUM patrolers—Sergeant John Hooper and Officers Joseph LaBrie and John Jaroneczwk.
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