Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  LaGravanese grunted and started chewing an apple. “This fucking frustration gets to be as familiar as your Jockey shorts after a while, you know?”

  Monahan knew. He had to get LaGravanese off that noisy apple or he’d go a little nuts. “Say, what about the end of the joke?”

  “Oh yeah,” LaGravanese said. “Where were we?”

  “The pig with the wooden leg had just saved the guy with the place in the country for the second time.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. So anyway, there they are, the two friends standing in the barnyard with that pig that had the wooden leg. So George, the guy from the city, says, ‘Look, I wasn’t going to insult your pig or anything. And I certainly never would, now that I know about the incredible things he’s done for you. I was just curious, that’s all, about why he has that wooden leg.’

  “Well, Mike just stands there with sort of a dumb look on his face like his friend George is supposed to understand. He says to George, ‘Well, a great pig like that—you don’t want to eat him all at once.”’

  Jimmy O’Brien drove his car everywhere. He didn’t used to, but now he was afraid to leave it out on the street near his home in Eastchester, the Bronx. He hadn’t made payments on it in six months and the bank was telephoning his wife every day and threatening letters from an attorney came every week without fail.

  A city marshal had come by the house one day to impound the car, but O’Brien had enough cash on hand to make a bargain and he kept the car. Long enough, that is, to get it over to a shop in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he’d had it painted red and where he’d managed to buy license plates from Illinois with counterfeit stickers.

  Jimmy O’Brien felt safe enough to ignore several more payments. He kept the car parked in a different neighborhood, just to make sure.

  The phone calls and the lawyer’s letters started up again. And O’Brien had lately seen the city marshal snooping around his neighborhood.

  Both men knew how the game was played now. O’Brien had to keep the car out of sight. The marshal had to find it, wherever it was, impound it and return it to the bank’s lawyer to collect his fee.

  The marshal was a small black man with a nasty mouth and an authoritarian personality. He was a man who seemed to enjoy rooting about in people’s private troubles. Every day, he saw the raw anxieties that so many people try so hard to hide; every day, he, Marshal Royal Billings, dealt with tenants being evicted by their landlords and people like Jim O’Brien.

  The more a guy like O’Brien resisted, the more Royal Billings enjoyed the challenge of his job, which was taking away the things people needed but couldn’t afford and returning them to big banks and landlords for fairly brisk fees. Royal Billings was doing the right thing, of course, and it was a nasty job.

  But the way he did it made otherwise gentle folks listen to their more violent angels.

  Jimmy O’Brien sat in a saloon on Lexington Avenue near East Eighty-fourth Street, the only bar on the Upper East Side that serves shots and beers and the only bar in the Nineteenth Precinct where every last customer seems to be wearing a twill work shirt with his first name embroidered on the pocket.

  O’Brien looked out the window. His car was safe and sound, good for the next hour at the meter just outside.

  He downed a second shot and then started on a second Budweiser chaser. O’Brien shut his eyes for a moment and listened to the sounds of Crystal Gayle singing about cheating on the juke, the voices of the other men in the bar—most of them white and Southern or border state, just like him—and he breathed deeply of the muzzy beer smell of the place.

  For one brief second of longing, Jimmy O’Brien was transported back home. To a simpler place and time, when no white man had to take any lip from some uppity coon.

  “That nigger’s going to get his,” O’Brien said aloud.

  Part II

  Chapter 13

  “I sort of hate to say it,” Tony Ciffo was saying, “but I try my best not to get involved. Doesn’t sound so good, does it? Especially me being a cop. Well, maybe it’s best. I don’t know. What I do know for sure is that you can always count on the weirdest thing in the world happening once a day, at least.

  “Did I ever tell you why I bought the car and started driving in from Brooklyn to work?

  “Oh boy!” Ciffo slapped his head as he drove, up Park Avenue to where he would cross over at Eighty-sixth, aimlessly eastward, keeping an ear cocked for the radio calls.

  “All the time, I used to take the subway. I took the D train, which is the line that the Guardian Angels call ‘The Zoo.’ Well, I used to ride at night a lot and the zoo was in full bloom then, I’ll tell you.

  “One night, I’m going back home after eleven and after we cross over the bridge into Brooklyn, I’m one of three people in a car. There’s me at one end minding my own business. I’m in my street clothes. And down at the other end of the car are a skinny white woman and sitting across from her a big, beefy black guy who’s sort of growling or something.

  “So I’m watching these two. And I know that sooner or later, unless the black guy is just a psycho who likes to make strange noises, I’m probably going to have to get involved. God, I’m groaning to myself, you know? Why in hell am I riding the subway? There’s no way I can be just a plain innocent bystander. I’m a cop and so I’m always on duty. That’s the law. I can’t just ignore something or I’m up on charges by Internal, see.

  “Anyway, pretty soon the big guy gets up and stands in front of the woman and he starts yelling at her. Now I know what I have to do.

  “So I get up and I walk over there and while I’m walking, the guy starts putting his hands on her shoulders and she’s really scared.

  “I shout at him and he turns around and goes for something in his coat, which later turns out to be a knife. I took out my shield real quick and identified myself as a cop and told him to just relax and everything would be all right. I don’t like to get these guys any more tense than they already are.

  “So then I do what you’re supposed to do, which is to put yourself physically in between the people in a situation like this. I’m standing now with my back to the woman, who is scared out of her mind, and this guy with a knife in his coat. Again, I tell the guy to just lay off, maybe come down to the other end of the car with me and talk about whatever’s on his mind. I’m real friendly with him, which usually sort of catches them off guard and works to the cop’s advantage.

  “But this time, it’s no go. He starts swinging at me and I took a few pretty good shots. Thank God he didn’t use the knife. Well, he was a lot taller than me, but his swings were pretty wild and I missed most of them, so I figured I could do what had to be done.

  “I start hitting back, which just infuriates the guy and so I had to sort of pound him pretty good. The guy is lying on the floor of the train against a door and pretty soon someone’s punching me in the back.

  “It’s the woman! She’s screaming at me, ‘How dare you hurt my husband? How dare you hurt him!’ Jesus, I never figured for a minute they were together.

  “That’s a true story. I swear. And that’s why I don’t take the subway in. No more, man. I just don’t want to know what’s going on sometimes.”

  His partner, Jean Truta, reached across the front seat of the car and poked him in the ribs.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t mean about the D train. God, anything could happen and does. I mean, I don’t believe you when you say you don’t want to get involved. What a lie that is! You forget, I see you in action.”

  Something white and wet hit the windshield.

  “First snow of the season!” Ciffo said. “Christmas is coming. Oh boy, watch out!”

  Jack Clark ended his tour at four, showered in the basement locker room and then walked from the precinct house over to Madison Avenue where a certain shop sold a piece of Moroccan art he figured on buying his wife
that Christmas, if he could nick the price down a bit.

  It was a clammy, windy sort of early winter day in New York, the sort of raw weather guaranteed to bring on influenza. You bundle up against the cold air and the dank humidity makes you sweat, so you open up a bit and then start shivering when the cold gets you again.

  The outdoor air is bad enough, but coming as it does at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, it is particularly bad in combination with the routinely overheated shops. The jostling crowds are not what make New Yorkers tense and quarrelsome at this jolly season so much as the schizophrenic atmospheres of hot, dry stores and frigid mugginess outside.

  For thousands, it is an intolerable season in New York, a city which does its absolute best to remind everyone that if you’re alone for the holidays you might as well dig yourself a nice little hole in the ground and say good-bye. Festive announcements ring everywhere—East Side, West Side and all around the town. It’s a wondrous time, a gorgeous plumpudding sort of time, if you have money in your pocket and maybe a little in the bank, if you have the love of some good people, a safe harbor of a home, if you have reasonable hopes, if you can live most of your days without fear. That eliminates several million New Yorkers in one way or another.

  There is a side of the New York Christmas orgy that cops begin to dread on the day after Thanksgiving. While millions of brightly colored greeting cards float through the post office swearing peace and goodwill, while happy skaters at the Rockefeller Center picture-postcard rink glide rosy-cheeked past the gilded statue of Prometheus and the giant pine tree glittering with thousands of green and red and gold lights, there is an agony about to explode with grim repetition—the holiday blues, so-called.

  Wives with long-standing grievances court danger when they nag their husbands; burglaries, the special concern of Jack Clark and his colleagues, will inevitably rise as single professional apartment dwellers spend less and less time in their flats, more time drinking, more time shopping; those who cannot cope with the disparity between television plenty and their own mean poverty begin staring sullenly at people on the streets, especially those with the brimming shopping bags, and they grow angrier as Christmas Day nears; the unemployed middle class nurse their shame, or bitterness if it’s been a while; the hungry are required to be grateful for the seasonal charity when encountered by newspaper reporters who specialize in what are called “human interest” stories; the lonely, who are legion, are ignored a little less than usual, but it doesn’t help much. Some of them can’t or won’t take it anymore.

  It is the time of year when every cop in the city figures he’ll sooner or later see something nobody wants to hear about because as far as everyone seems to be concerned, the whole world is supposed to be wrapped up in ribbon and foil and candy canes.

  Jack Clark calls it the time of year “when cops try to get in and out of the job without everything getting to them, which it can at Christmas; the time you have to keep thinking about whatever it is you have of a life outside the job, when you just want to do what you have to do at work and then get the hell home as fast as possible afterward.”

  As Clark rounded the corner at Madison Avenue, an old woman he didn’t know, would never hear of, stood at a lace-festooned window four floors over an apartment house rear court that was clean and pleasant when she first came to America with her young husband.

  She lived in the East Eighties, in a big old squat building in Yorkville, one of the first houses to become solid German during the big immigration of the 1920s. She used to grow roses in one spot down in the courtyard that drew a halfday’s sun. Children used to play down there, they used to sing songs in English, songs they learned in the American schools, and their German-speaking mothers would beam with pride.

  The courtyard was a filthy place now. The old woman stared down at it through her windows, covered by an accordionlike web of rusted steel grating, with padlocks so big and heavy that she had trouble dealing with them on those rare days she was brave enough to open up and pretend she wasn’t living in a prison of sorts.

  There was glass and rubbish all over the ground below, filth the super didn’t bother picking up because there was no use to his labors. The trash would return in a matter of hours. One day last week, she opened a rubbish can and a rat jumped out at her. She fell and cut her knee and it hurt her to walk back upstairs, write a note of warning for the back door and then walk all the way back up to her apartment. She noticed the day after that her note had been spray-painted with an obscenity.

  Children were often in the courtyard these days, but they were not young children. They were teenagers, most of them less than sixteen. All of them smoked marijuana and played loud radios and cussed like the thugs they would become. On summer nights, the marijuana smoke would float up and through her windows and make her sick.

  As she looked on this cold gray day down into her courtyard, one of the super’s two Doberman pinschers barked insanely, the beast’s breath crystallizing in the air. The dog barked on the exact spot where she and her late husband, Franz, had once taken coffee and crullers with the Sunday newspapers in the two wicker chairs they thought nothing of leaving outside for their use, just as everybody else in the building did. Last week, for the fourth time that year, her mailbox in the lobby had been pried open.

  Well, it hadn’t much mattered. Long ago, she had had her Social Security check and her husband’s pension check mailed directly to her bank account. Only bills came now, and a dwindling number of letters from old friends at Christmastime. Her children knew only the telephone and none of them lived in New York and long distance was so expensive they would complain.

  The day her mailbox was broken again was the day she tried to kill herself.

  She drew a good full tub of hot water and put some oil into, it and eased herself in after stopping up the drain and the overflow slot. Her intention was to fall asleep and sink down into the water and she would drown in the warmth. But when the tenant down below, someone with a loud and thumping stereo that played from the moment he rose until well after midnight, complained about water seeping into his bathroom, the super was at the door. He marched right into the bathroom and shut off the water, then took hold of her arms and yanked her out of the tub all naked and wet and humiliated.

  You can’t kill yourself if it means inconveniencing someone.

  The dog had barked now for an hour, steadily, madly. The old woman walked slowly to her kitchen and took down a tin from on top of the refrigerator, inside of which was a key.

  She walked back to the window, slid it open and shivered, then fitted the key inside the padlocks. It took her several minutes to twist them free. She pushed open the grates and a wet, nasty wind filled her apartment.

  With more agility than she’d been able to summon in the past dozen years, the old woman stepped up onto a chair, then to the sill. Below was the degraded courtyard. Behind her was a spotlessly clean house. She’d used scouring powder to scrub the bathroom fixtures earlier that day. The dishes had been washed and dried and stacked. Fresh flowers were in a vase on top of an old upright piano.

  No one knew what she thought as she stood on that sill, nor how long she remained there, although detectives from the Nineteenth PDU guessed it was long enough to take stock of her decision—several times over. It appeared she had shifted her weight from foot to foot, indicating that she had remained there on the sill for some time, maybe as long as half an hour.

  It was easy enough to guess her motives, though, once her children were interviewed by the police. Her son said, “Mother told me, the last time I saw her, which was three months ago, that she got so lonely sometimes she thought about killing herself.”

  Her son hadn’t known of the bathtub incident.

  “I was making plans to come visit her,” he told police.

  But he hadn’t telephoned his mother. It was to be her surprise.

  She left no note, no word and no inconvenience this time. She simply jumped, silently, t
o her immediate death.

  Jack Clark had never seen her before. A short, heavy woman with thick white hair and yellowed skin. Her eyes were bad, one of them bouncing around out of control, the other filmed with cataracts. She had a man’s torn brown topcoat on and a rag around her neck to keep out the chill air. And she had only one mitten, which she wore alternately, one hand and then the other.

  She was chanting something. Clark couldn’t hear the words yet over the traffic noise and the chatter of holiday shoppers like himself who crowded Madison Avenue in the upper Sixties. The thing that was unmistakably pathetic about her was that she knelt, knees pressed against the cold, hard pavement, with a brass cup full of pencils thrust out in whichever hand wore the mitten.

  He was a half block away when he noticed her, when she turned her head and he saw that face, the injured eyes and the constantly moving mouth, set in a smile that didn’t belong. He stopped for a moment, then started again.

  Clark walked slowly toward her. Others, he noticed, walked quickly by. A few stopped to inspect the pencils, some of them dropped a coin into the cigar box on the pavement in front of her knees.

  She kept right on chanting. As he got closer, Clark heard the words “Merry Christmas to us, one and all … Merry Christmas to us, one and all … Merry Christmas …”

  New Yorkers are confronted every day with a huge assortment of grotesqueries on the streets, everything ranging from the simply objectionable to the horribly pitiful to the deranged screamers and mumblers. Even this latter group knows enough to stay away from the tonier districts of the Upper East Side. But every so often, someone like the white-haired woman on her knees with a brass cup set up on a corner like Madison and Sixty-eighth and everyone just tried to cope with it as best they could. It was inconvenient, but one couldn’t escape everything in the city, after all.

  As if in a trance, Clark found himself walking straight past the woman on her knees, like the overwhelming majority of holiday shoppers. Nobody would fault him for ignoring her. Certainly she wouldn’t; she couldn’t even see him. Besides, she wished everyone a Merry Christmas, whether they bought her pencils or no.