Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  “You’re told a lot of stuff and you see a lot of people you’ve never really paid much attention to before. But the academy doesn’t really teach anything besides the fact that you’re about to learn so fast and furious it’s going to scare you pretty bad sometimes. If the academy can make you understand that and if you think you can cope with it, then you’ll be all right. Maybe.

  “So then you’re put out on the street. Smith and you and I all went through that first time out there.

  “I was assigned uptown in the Twenty-eighth and I also was called in to work the Columbia campus in Morningside when all those kids took it over. The war was still on and I was a veteran and I knew better than any of those kids what bugfuckery the war was. And the kids spit in our faces, remember? And they tossed shit over us, literally. Remember?

  “You know what I mean when I tell you how much that part of it hurt.”

  “I know,” Laffey said.

  “Yeah. But you keep right on going on. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a cop. You’re supposed to be the good soldier and you’re supposed to do your job even though they’re doing all that stuff to your head.

  “But every day you keep seeing things that make you sick in the gut. You start just naturally hating all these people you have to deal with. God, I’d just once like to see somebody besides cops spend a day dealing with what we see.

  “Well, I mean you have to believe that it does something to you when you go out on a call and you don’t know what the hell kind of sickness you’re going to find. Maybe some guy who just made a bloody pulp out of his wife. Maybe a little baby with cigarette burns all over its body because mama couldn’t put up with the noise.

  “I’ve seen little boys with big guns killing other little boys. And girls, maybe twelve, pregnant. Babies having babies. You got your junkies and their needle nightmares, and coke heads and people who don’t know anything about misery making jokes about it.

  “And worst of all, you have those pimps. Always the pimps out there, laughing at us all.

  “Like I say, you get to hate a lot. Things and people. Then one day, something happens. It happens in different ways with different cops, but for me, what happened was that I started seeing where these people came from. I started feeling their hatred instead of mine. You’re on this one side of the line pretty much your whole life, then with what you get to see on this job, you cross over that line.

  “You go right through this series of stages as a cop, right through a circle you make for yourself, like I said. It’s quite a ride, boy.”

  “So, I’ve heard.”

  Ignoring the response, Clark went on. “First, you get out there on the streets and you want to save everybody from all the bad guys, just like you believed a cop could do back when you were a kid and just the way it seems like it’s going to be when you’re still in the academy and you can’t wait to get on with it.

  “Next, you start hating a lot of the people you’re supposed to be helping, which is pretty easy when half of them are spitting in your face and the other half are figuring up ways of blowing you away.

  “But then a funny thing happens. You start thinking like some of them. You start actually empathizing with the bad guys.”

  “That’s where Smith is?”

  That’s where Ed Smith was. And his circle was about to swallow him up.

  There were three of them and they were doing just about everything in their power to attract the sort of trouble that makes a lot of people who live quiet lives west of the Hudson River believe that Manhattan is an island madhouse.

  Two were blond and the other redheaded and they all had big blue eyes and lived in suburban Indianapolis, where they were studying to be fashion designers at a community college not widely known for producing innovators in haute couture. Midway through their two-year course of studies, they decided to throw in together on a trip to the Big Apple and a look at the fashion capital of the United States, where they were certain their futures lay.

  They wandered aimlessly around Times Square on the night in question, gape-jawed and high-heeled with the sort of neon-sign tourist expression of simultaneous fear and fascination that reads money in the bank to entrepreneurs of the Great White Way, legitimate and otherwise. They would learn in very short order that New York isn’t very much like My Sister Eileen would have it; they would learn that New York doesn’t always issue tender embraces to its visitors, not even fair-haired, blue-eyed flowers of Indiana maidenhood. But the possible danger of the place, much as they had discussed it back home, was the furthest thing from their uncautious minds; the promise of something unexpected in their lives, for once, even if it was dangerous, was fatally glamorous that night. And who knew when they might return next to this Emerald City?

  There was nothing at all like Times Square back home, of course. Nothing remotely so chaotic, so squalid, so oddly beautiful, so uniquely illusory and alluring. Certainly nothing so outrageously sexy.

  Cheap hotels, blazing billboards that turn night into mazda day, record shops that blare their audio wares into the streets around the clock, smut parlors, informal pharmaceutical trade at every other step (“Pass me by, you don’t get high!” whispers the reed-thin young black man in the shadows), morose prostitutes sizing up their clientele from among the passing parade of convivial conventioneers and motorists gliding slowly by with New Jersey and Connecticut license plates fastened to their station wagons, impresarios of dubious physical culture studios (“C’mon, rubberneck! Sex for dinner! Live boy-girl acts! It’s showtime!”) and gaunt men and women staring dumbly and dead-eyed from the doorways of a hundred dives, their ulcerated junkie ankles bulging out the tops of their ragged shoes from all the times they smacked up down there when the veins in their arms and necks and the backs of their papery hands couldn’t rope up tight enough for the fix.

  All that and Broadway, too. Rehearsal halls and prop shops, costume lofts, photo studios, producers’ suites, theatrical pubs full of loud singing, press agents’ offices, wig-makers and flymen and the ghosts of a thousand shows, fat dowagers waddling beneath tentlike mink stoles, angular young women in flowing evening gowns with sequins glittering in all the right places, tall dark men in tuxedoes with bright red boutonnières and silvery temples, Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz limousines and long-hooded Rolls-Royces and chauffeurs with black-brimmed caps, hansom cabs driven by raw-faced actors temporarily between engagements dressed up in top hats and tails and patched denim jeans, street-corner violinists with tin cups and high hopes of recitals one day at Alice Tully Hall, policemen in gleaming leather riding boots up on horseback and clopping over the night pavement—and the magnificent old theaters and opera houses, a string of pearls in the tenderloin of Times Square, the place Diamond Jim Brady said was lit by a midnight sun.

  They were three ingénues, blind to the fact that New York is not the movie set it seems at first gasp, blind to the curly-haired man with the tight smile following about a half block behind in the Lincoln, waiting for his chance.

  Any cop in New York could have seen it coming. The setup was routine and low-risk, as easy for a creep like Angelo as swiping a hot apple pie set out to cool on a windowsill in Indiana.

  Since the shots were fired somewhere in the vicinity of Third Avenue and East Sixty-ninth Street, the case ultimately wound up for disposition at the Nineteenth Precinct PDU. Specifically, it landed on Detective Lauver’s cluttered desk, since he was catching.

  There they sat beside his desk, embarrassed and sobbing now and then; Lauver riffled through the notes he’d made on the case and spent an equal amount of time in another useless task, which was trying to keep his pipe lit. The facts of the case, such as they were, had been distilled from telephone calls Lauver had made, most of them futile, and nearly an hour of his time dealing with three semihysterical out-of-towners with mascara and tears streaming, like the Niagara, down their wised-up faces.

  In his time, Lauver has seen just about every kind of truth and e
very kind of lie and most every instance of the irresistible attraction of these two opposites.

  Detectives and certain others—priests, tax examiners, bill collectors, buyers of used cars—learn by experience that truth is rarely a pure commodity. Everyone lies a little bit and sometimes a lot when they talk to cops. Facts are hard to come by when they have to be picked out of the shade. That’s why some cops seem awfully slow. It takes a long while sometimes to separate the facts from the not so factual.

  So Lauver listened and sometimes took down a note, but not too many because he didn’t feel right about what he was hearing. There wasn’t anything very scientific about his listening methods, or the way he watched the women, searching them for signs of something that might read more substantial than the story they choked out. Under such cir cumstances, there isn’t much place for anything so neat and tidy as scientific process. Or time.

  In the absence of time, especially, all a cop has to work with is instinct as best he can temper it. And that’s what Lauver was dealt with now because these three were in some big hurry to get back home to Indiana.

  Frenchy, Bandana Bill and Whispering Ed shared a quart bottle of rye and a good-sized joint on a traffic island in the middle of Houston Street at First Avenue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They sat in a row on a blue and gray pinstriped mattress with half its stuffing eaten away by rodents. Every once in a while, Bandana Bill would laugh, a crazed sort of merry sound, and say, “I wonder what the rich people are doing tonight.”

  The rye came courtesy of Whispering Ed, and the marijuana, an even rarer treat for the three, was Bandana Bill’s contribution. Frenchy took off his leg and rubbed his stump and wondered if the fat lady on the eastbound side of Houston would cross over for the westbound bus stop. She looked like she might have money and some spare pity and maybe Frenchy could snag a few coins so he wouldn’t feel so much the freeloader.

  Whispering Ed told Bandana Bill that he smelled worse than usual and Bill laughed. Frenchy elbowed Ed and pointed to the fat lady crossing the street.

  “Here comes my swell,” Frenchy said.

  Unusual, thought Whispering Ed, since it was nearing nine o’clock. But there she was, big and lively and wearing brand-new leather boots and a good coat, eyes trained squarely on three dirtbags sitting in a row on a mangy old mattress. Whispering Ed didn’t much trust straight folks who looked into bums’ eyes. He stuffed the rye bottle into a brown paper bag and held it between his legs.

  “Watch out you don’t get that bottle mixed up with your dork,” Bandana Bill said to him.

  “Shhh!” said Frenchy.

  Frenchy waved his wooden leg a little bit to make sure the fat lady saw it. The leather straps made dull smacking sounds against pine shaped like a man’s thigh. Frenchy stuck out his free hand and grunted as sorrowfully as he could muster, which was considerable.

  The fat lady smiled and said nothing. Then she reached into a big leather handbag and rummaged around a second or two and pulled something out. She stooped in front of Frenchy and her face turned red. Then she stuffed whatever it was in her plump hand into Frenchy’s grimy paw, stood up straight and walked off to the bus stop on the westbound side.

  Frenchy looked dumbly at his hand, not quite believing his good fortune. He held a crisp green one-dollar bill.

  He looked up and just stared at the retreating broad back of the fat lady and his voice cracked as he called out to her. She didn’t turn around.

  “Oh my God!” Frenchy yelled, his words muffled in the mist-filled air. “A dollar! Oh, thank you, lady, please. Oh, thank you!”

  Bandana Bill and Whispering Ed were shown the prize. Ed whistled and Bill started laughing, a little more crazy than usual.

  “I wonder—”

  “Yeah, we know,” Whispering Ed interrupted him.

  Then Bill laughed very loudly and stuck out his hand. Frenchy, his partner, gave him the dollar so that Bill could stash it away in his blue and red bandana for safekeeping. He wore it wrapped three times, tightly, around his skinny neck. In the folds were the necessities of life—tobacco, matches, coins, toothpicks, bread, handbills passed out on street corners by out-of-work actors, good for sizable discounts on franchise hamburgers.

  “I’m all right?” Frenchy asked him.

  “Yeah, you’re all right,” Bandana Bill said.

  Their sometime companion, Whispering Ed, said after a while, “Looks like our kind of night. We got us a bottle of real stuff, a joint and a real live buck.”

  “Where’d you say you got the whiskey?” Bill asked Ed.

  “Didn’t say.”

  Bandana Bill had his suspicions about everybody except Frenchy, whose brain was so wrecked he couldn’t harm anyone if he wanted to. He’d named Ed “Whispering Ed” one day just that summer because, he said, “You’re like some sort of whisper in a crowded room. Like we know you’re here with us, but you don’t make yourself plain.” Ed liked the moniker so much he used it whenever he was in the company of what he called his friends with “real names that mean something, that tell a story.” Like Frenchy, who lost a leg in the Normandy invasion, then stayed on and married a local girl and lived with her in her village until she died one day in childbirth and he went gently mad with grief.

  “You done this once before,” Bandana Bill pressed. “You play Lotto or what?” He laughed and his nose dribbled. He cleaned himself with the hardened fabric of his coat sleeve.

  “I didn’t ask where you got the dope, did I?”

  Bill thought about this for a moment, then laughed.

  “I’m all right?” Whispering Ed asked.

  “Yeah, you’re all right.”

  Ed passed the bottle and Bill took a long pull of it, then gave it to his partner.

  “I’m just celebrating,” Ed volunteered.

  “You’re all right,” Frenchy told him.

  They conserved the rye over the next two hours, drinking the way the homeless drink, small swallows at a time to keep numb and warm without getting drunk and careless. The alcohol is used to insulate, not to libate. Sometimes the end result is the same, though, and a bum falls too deeply asleep, too numb to the threats around him.

  And there was the dope. It made them happy and if you’re living on the street, happiness is dangerous because it makes you trust too many people.

  They shouldn’t have let Frenchy strap on his leg and go off with his dollar and some coins Bandana Bill gave him for that pint of Mad Dog 20/20. They should have saved it. Bill should have kept it against his neck.

  The redheaded one spoke when Lauver asked the girls to take it from the top, one more time.

  “Well, we wanted to go over to one of those restaurants on the Upper East Side because we hear that’s where you can meet some nice men and it’s where all the singles are and everything. And it’s safe.

  “We didn’t know where to go or anything, but we figured we’d just get over there and we’d walk around and we’d see something we liked and that’s how we’d do it …”

  One of the blondes put in, “Besides, it was looking really icky where we were. There were only these big black guys around and we were scared and everything, you know?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” Lauver said.

  “So anyway,” the redhead continued, “the guy came by in his limousine and he stopped and got out and talked to us. He said his name was Angelo and he said he was worried about us walking around where we were because a lot of ugly things happen to women from out of town.”

  “Weren’t you suspicious of him?”

  “Well, a little. But he seemed so nice and everything. Anyway, he said he’d just dropped off his boss at a restaurant and was looking around for a place to sit with the limo for three hours and saw us while he was driving around.

  “He said he could take us somewhere nice if we’d like, right in the limo, and he didn’t have to worry about being out of contact because his boss could always just telephone the car and if he was outside the car, his
beeper would beep and he’d be in contact with his boss in just a few minutes anyway.”

  “I said it was pretty strange that he’d just offer to take us around town,” the other blonde said.

  “No you didn’t,” the redhead said.

  “Yes I did. Didn’t you hear me?”

  Lauver said, “Let’s just hear the story again, okay?”

  The redhead said something under her breath to the blonde and continued talking.

  “Well, this Angelo said something like, ‘If you feel better about it, you can pay me for the ride like you’d pay a taxi driver. Or we could just go places and you could pay my way, you know?’

  “I guess that did make us feel better about him—”

  “Like I said,” the blonde interrupted.

  “Anyway,” the redhead said loudly, “we got in and he just drove us around and showed us things and was like a sort of tour guide. It was real nice.”

  “And the telephone in the limo never rang?”

  “No. We just drove around. He took us up to the Rainbow Grill and we had a drink there, then we drove around some more and we went by the United Nations and this little piano bar at the top of a hotel near there and that was really nice because we seemed like we were right up among the buildings instead of on top of them like at the Rainbow. Just a different way of looking at it all.”

  “Anyway,” Lauver said. He looked at his wristwatch and tried lighting his pipe again.

  “Yeah, anyway, we started going to a few of the places on First and Second and Third avenues on the Upper East Side and they were really something. I really liked Maxwell’s Plum the most.

  “So everyplace we were, everybody kept asking us if we were from out of town and what we did, you know? And most of the time, guys would ask us if we’d like to take a line of coke, but we said no to that.

  “We were getting hungry, so Angelo suggested we could go to this place he knew where a whole lot of celebrities always came in to eat. And he was nice about it, at first. He said we didn’t have to buy him a whole dinner and maybe he’d have to get back to work anyway.