“… for a possible DOA.”
“We could use that,” Randall said. “It’s in and out and we need another job before we turn in.”
Finnegan took the microphone.
“Special unit Nineteen-A. We’ll take it.”
“Stand by, S-U Nineteen.”
The electrical storm made the static on the radio worse than usual. Several minutes passed before the dispatcher returned to Randall and Finnegan. Calls of higher priority than someone’s finding a possible dead body were broadcast.
“That special unit, Nineteen-A,” the dispatcher’s disembodied voice said.
Finnegan responded. Randall readied pen to pad.
“See about possible DOA, 1170 Second Avenue, Apartment 6R.”
“Got it?” Finnegan asked.
“Yeah. We got a long climb ahead of us, partner.”
Randall drove the radio car to number 1170, a narrow old tenement building. They locked the car and rang the lobby bell of the apartment on the top floor, rear. It took several rings before someone upstairs buzzed open the door.
They climbed the steep, rickety wooden flights, rising nearer and nearer toward the top, where they saw a frightened man with a mop of thinning black hair leaning over the corridor railing. “Up here,” he called to the officers.
Finnegan and Randall took two steps at a time the rest of the way up. They confronted the caller outside an open door to the rear apartment.
He wore pajama bottoms and a soiled terry-cloth robe. The top of his head was bare skin and he had a part on his left side, close to the ear. What seemed to be a foot of black hair shot through with gray hung in strings on the left side, hair that was ordinarily sprayed into place over the top and down the right side.
“I think she’s dead, Officers,” the man said. “I didn’t do nothing. She just died, I think.”
As he spoke, he filled the small corridor at the top of the building with the staleness of his brandied breath. The inside of the apartment smelled like a tavern.
Randall and Finnegan followed the man with the stringy hair into the apartment.
It was not much bigger than a cell, with a small convertible sofa extended and a naked, overweight woman slumped between the end of the bed and a refrigerator. The collision of her head with the refrigerator had put a fairsized dent in the door. Her buttocks were arched high into the air, rising over the edge of the bed, with the rest of her body jammed between bed and refrigerator. She didn’t seem to be breathing.
“What happened, sir?” Finnegan asked.
“Well, sir, we were, you know, making love. Yeah. I think she couldn’t take it. She just sort of collapsed and then, down she went.”
“Are you saying you screwed the lady to death?” Randall asked.
“Oh, no. I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t kill her, honest, Officer!” The man in the robe with the hair hanging off his shoulder began sobbing.
Meanwhile, the fat lady made a noise.
Finnegan got down on all fours to look at her face, which was mashed against the floor. “You say something?”
There was another noise.
“Give me a hand,” Finnegan said to Randall.
Randall squeezed himself over the fat lady’s rump and stood between the body and a wall. He grabbed her under her right shoulder while Finnegan hoisted the left. Together, they managed to flip the huge woman up from the floor, onto the bed on her back.
Her face was the color of strawberries with all the blood that had rushed to her head. Her eyes fluttered. Finnegan tossed a sheet over the big, doughy naked body and both he and Russell were mightily relieved.
She made a few gasping sounds. Randall and Finnegan moved away, her fumes making them nauseous.
“You two been doing a little drinking here, huh?” Randall asked the horrified man in the robe.
Before answering, a very relieved man who thought for several agonizing minutes that his girl friend had died on him in coitus, sat down on a wooden chair and reached unsteadily for a bottle of Four Roses and a glass on a little table overloaded with liquor.
“We weren’t hurting nothing,” the man said.
“She’s all right,” Randall told him, “but one of these days the two of you are going to overdose on this stuff. It happens, you know.”
“So I hear,” the man said. He put back the bottle of Four Roses and swallowed hard.
“You live here, or does she?” Finnegan asked. He started writing up the call in his notebook.
“It’s my dump. And Flo there, she’s no hooker, I want you to know.”
Flo snored.
Smith was not quite dozing when he heard the sound he’d waited for, the slightest scraping of steel against concrete. It came from the corner of Madison Avenue. He couldn’t look yet. They would be coming his way. He listened.
When he judged that they were walking quickly, he slowly sat up, keeping his legs straight, dangled out in front of him into the street. The smallest movement could alert them.
He waited until they entered his field of vision. He would not use the radio until they used the big steel trash container they carried, until the sound of the container smashing through the plate-glass display window of the boutique would provide him the cover he needed to alert Hooper and the others.
Three of them hefted the trash container. There were two others in the cab section of a van that moved slowly alongside them on the street. Smith could make out most of the New Jersey license plate fixed to the front of the van. He didn’t move a muscle.
The driver of the van looked directly into Smith’s doorway. Smith watched him through slitted eyes. Then the driver looked away, not thinking what he saw was of any importance.
He watched as the trash basket was raised up over the shoulders of the three black men who had carried it from the corner. And though his entire body was tingling, he didn’t move, waiting until the basket would crash through the window and monopolize their attention for the vital few seconds he would need to radio the van’s license plate number to Hooper, who would relay it to General Dispatch.
He took a deep breath to calm himself. The steel trash basket was thrown in an arc. At the moment it hit the plate-glass window, Smith grabbed his PTP. Nothing moved but his arm and his mouth.
“Hooper … Hooper!”
“Go.”
“It’s a hit. Three on the smash and two more in a van for the grab. Maybe more in the van. Jersey plate number Harry Apple Two-Three-Six-Seven. Repeat.”
“Jersey, Harry Apple Two-Three-Six-Seven.”
“Three just jumped out the side of the van,” Smith said. “Doors open. They’re loading up.”
“How many perps is that?”
“Three on the smash … two in the cab, three more.”
“Eight. Okay. I’ll set up uniforms at the corners and relay the plate,” Hooper said. “La Brie’s on foot now, on his way from Madison. Jaroneczwk’s rounding in from Park. When you see my unmarked pull up and light up like a cherry, we’re going to make us a nice bunch of collars, check?”
“Right. Out.”
Smith let himself smile.
Maybe a minute passed, plenty of time, even with the silent alarm any professional thief knows he’s tripped. They worked efficiently, smoothly, moving the display-window items—furs, beaded evening gowns and jewelry accessories—from mannequins to the van. The three men who had tossed the heavy trash basket through the window were somewhere inside the store, removing garments from the racks. The two men in the van’s cab stayed put.
Smith didn’t move until he saw La Brie, just a movement in the shadows, coming from the right. He sat up slightly and then saw Jaroneczwk on his left. La Brie and Jaro-neczwk stopped, both of them maybe forty feet away from the boutique.
Then the gray-blue Chevrolet, the unmarked car driven by Hooper, moved in from Park Avenue, traveling at a normal speed. Hooper hit the brakes hard when he got alongside the van. The light he’d attached to the roof lit up, making circles of r
ed spin around in the street.
Smith leaped up from his doorway and reached behind him for his .38, pulled it out of the holster at the back of his belt with his right hand and lifted the police shield out from the top of his shirt, letting it fall over his chest on the chain.
He heard Hooper shouting, “Police! Freeze!”
Hooper stood, both hands holding his revolver, just in front of the van and the startled driver.
The driver lurched the van forward. Hooper stepped out of the way to avoid being hit. He fired his revolver into the air and shouted again, “Police! Freeze!”
The van stopped.
The thief in the passenger side of the van ripped open his door and started running wildly toward Park Avenue. He slipped in the glass shards on the sidewalk and screamed as an arm slashed open and he bled.
Three more jumped out of the display window, their arms crammed with gowns and furs and coats. They scattered. Two ran toward Madison Avenue and La Brie, who took a firing-range stance with his revolver and commanded them to halt, the other across the street past Hooper directly into Smith’s arms.
Smith held his revolver in the air and used his chest and belly to knock into the thief with arms overflowing. He fell back and landed on his back in the street, the clothes spilling into the rain-soaked street.
“You’re busted, drag queen!” Smith snarled. He stood over his man, the thief’s eyes wild with fear; Smith lowered the gun and aimed at the heart. “What’s the matter, your panties filling up?”
Suddenly, the whole street was alive with the invasion of squad cars. Windows in apartments flew open, heads popped out over the sills.
La Brie knocked down one of the two thieves who came his way and a uniform cuffed him while La Brie chased after the other. Hooper manacled the driver of the van and ran toward Jaroneczwk, who tackled a man who came his way.
Uniforms moved in toward the shop and nailed the rest. One by one, the thieves were lined up against the window of the shop next to Gussied Up, Ltd., hands up against the glass, legs spread. Uniforms ran their hands down their sides, around their waists and between their legs. No guns were taken.
Smith’s man lay on his stomach in the middle of Seventy-ninth Street while the cop who looked like a wino cuffed him up and patted him down for weapons.
“You have the right to remain silent …” Smith began in a monotone. “Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law—”
“I heard that shit before,” the thief said, dresses and women’s sportswear scattered around him.
“Good, queenie,” Smith said. “Then let’s say it together, shall we? From the top? You have the right to remain silent …”
Chapter 11
The celebration took place in a saloon near Grand Central Station, down in the Seventeenth Precinct. Inspector Short sticks pretty close by the book when it comes to the rule about off-duty get-togethers. It’s a simple and sensible rule and it applies city-wide. You drink with your buddies from the precinct anywhere but in the precinct. If there’s trouble, God forbid, then at least it won’t have happened where you have to work the next day. And that avoids a lot of potential compromises.
Sergeant Hooper and Officers La Brie and Jaroneczwk—and, if he were there, Ed Smith—couldn’t buy a drink. Their money was no good on this day after their big bust. That was the custom when the collars were as important as this one. Hooper figured that the gang might take the fall for better than two dozen break-ins. It was the most significant piece of work since the formation of the Nineteenth Anticrime Unit and good, solid collars more than anything else secured a command like Hooper’s.
“A thing of beauty,” Inspector Short had proclaimed it.
The block had been sealed off with backup squads, the stakeout was well figured and completely undetected, cops would be able to testify as to being eyewitnesses to the crime and there was physical evidence all over the place. The thieves couldn’t bear to run away without the garments, couldn’t part with them even though they might have had a chance of escape if they hadn’t been so encumbered.
Smith, Hooper, Jaroneczwk and La Brie had no trouble hauling the gang off to the lockup, but they needed lots of help picking up after them. Dresses and shoes, costume jewelry, sportswear, intimate wear, sweaters and hosiery from everywhere on Seventy-ninth Street.
Jack Clark, from the burglary detail, wandered into the bar and ordered up a green devil for the men of the hour.
“Where’s Smith?” he asked Hooper.
“Well, you know, he doesn’t go in for this sort of thing.”
Clark shook his head and pulled off his hat, this one a red beret with a black tassel, one of a large collection of headgear. “The guy gets weirder by the day.”
“You ever heard of a perfectly sane cop, Jack?”
“I never heard of anyone who was perfectly sane, let alone cops. You ever read Karl Menninger?”
Hooper and the other officers who heard Clark groaned, which was something that always urged Clark on to ever greater recitations of ever more obscure esoterica. Properly inspired, Clark could hold forth on subjects ranging from Bert Convy pictures to the metaphors of La Grande Illusion, from Brooklyn cheese cake to carré d’agneau au miel, caramelisé as served in his favorite bistro in Casablanca’s French quarter, from Spike Jones to Erik Satie and his rebellious young followers, Les Six. Now the topic was cop neuroses, and Clark being Clark, there would be no stopping him from delivering an absolute filibuster.
“Menninger, in the event you men have heard of the guy, is a shrink who croaked some years back. He remains the only shrink who didn’t belong in a straitjacket,” Clark explained.
“He had this really intense interest in veterans and how war fucks us over, which applies to everybody in this bar today, I would guess just offhand—”
“Is there no shuttin’ him the fuck up?” a cop at the bar asked.
Tony Ciffo, next to him, said, “We ought to listen to Clark every so often. He’s a half-smart guy in a mostly stupid world.”
“—As I was saying,” Clark said, clearing his throat, “this guy Menninger talked about everybody being a little nuts sometimes. I’m quoting from memory now: ‘We know that in the unconscious we are all mad, all capable of a madness which threatens constantly to emerge—sometimes does emerge, only to be tucked away again out of sight, if possible.”’
Clark waited for some reaction, but instead saw a lot of faces fall asleep. He would not be deterred, though.
“Well,” Clark said, “that sure sounds like a lot of cops I know, right?”
“All I got to say,” said Sergeant John Laffey, who clapped an arm over Clark’s shoulder, “is that when they do Jack Clark’s autopsy someday, I want to be there with a chain saw to start cutting into his head to see what oozes out.”
“Ah well, then,” Clark said, “shall we all continue in the grandest tradition of human folly? Shall we separate ourselves on the basis of who is smart enough to learn abstractly and those who won’t understand diddley-squat unless they step in it up to their knees?”
Laffey clapped him on the shoulder again and said, “Jack, even you should be able to notice that no one’s listening to you.”
“And so you are right, mine sergeant. We shall ignore our brother Smith in his obvious hour of lonely peril.”
“Is that what this was all about?”
Clark sighed. “It’s what it’s always about. I’m my brother’s keeper, you see.”
“You know where he is?”
“I think he’s with the people who know him better than we do even, down where we can tell he’s gone full circle as a cop. I’d like to tell you my theories on that point, sergeant. Have you got a minute perhaps?”
“Jesus, Clark. What, are you wired or something? Got a little Peruvian flake out of the property room?”
“I’m high on life, mine Sergeant. Sometimes I’m down on life, tonight I’m high on life. Let us repair to a table in the corner and I’ll press
on.”
“Oh God, make it brief.”
They sat down and ordered a pair of Moose Heads.
“So, what’s eating you now, Clark?”
“I’ve been trying to think like Smith lately, trying to figure what might happen to a guy like that in, say, a year.”
“Anything could happen, like anything could happen to us.”
“Not so. You and I have a root or two in our lives. Smith? He’s more likely your time bomb than you or me.”
“It’s just as likely me as him,” Laffey said.
“Oh, is that so? Maybe I should have a little talk with your wife about those new sergeant’s death benefits then?”
“Get serious.”
“Of course. How quickly you change your mind. I shall return to being serious. What do you think’s going to happen to Smith?”
“I don’t know.”
“The way I figure it,” Clark said, “he’s more advanced than the average cop. It takes a long time for a cop to figure out what Smith has.”
“What’s that?”
“Okay. You grow up like we did, right? Average guys, sort of middle to your lower middle class. Sunnyside, Queens, sort of guys, right? You have your share of troubles as a kid, even with the cops in your neighborhood. And maybe those cops even hit you once in a while when you deserved it. That’s the way it was.
“You do a couple of things you don’t want anyone to know about, to this day. You got some worst thing you never told and never will tell, maybe both. But basically, you come out of everything all right. At least you’re not talking to yourself on street corners or sitting in a closet nights drinking warm beer and making telephone calls. At least as far as the world is concerned, you’re normal.
“So one day you become a cop.
“You go through the academy and all that stuff and the mayor shakes your hand and you put on the .38 and for the rest of your life, probably, you’re going to feel naked without that piece.
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