Now he was almost a block past her and he couldn’t remember taking the steps. In another block, he’d be at the shop dickering over the price of a Moroccan objet d’art. Morocco! He thought of the exotic little back streets of Casablanca, full of cafés and beggars and forbidden pleasures. In the tourist districts, there was a popular wisdom about beggars. You shouldn’t put a single dirham in even one grimy hand because then the whole mob of them would follow you around. It occurred to Clark in Morocco that that was pretty ugly nonsense and so he defied it. He would travel the little back streets and make a habit of putting a little something into every beggar’s hand or cup. And he was always thanked for his generosity.
All it cost him now to turn around and start walking back to the old woman on her knees wishing peace and goodwill with no guarantee of even simple civility was a momentary wave of embarrassment. It proved a false embarrassment at that, anyway. No one cared that Jack Clark went back to the blind woman and dropped a fiver into her cup any more than they cared he had passed her up the first time.
He felt better than he had in days.
“It doesn’t hurt us to take the attitude once in a while, ‘Hey, I’ve got it and this guy doesn’t, so I’ll give him something,’” Clark reasoned.
For a change, he’d done something about someone’s misery that didn’t involve busting anyone. For a change, he’d come across someone who had found the way. Too often, especially at Christmastime, he had to deal with people who lost their way, like the lonely old woman on the sill.
The 10-19 came over the radio in the last hour of their tour. Officer Ciffo pulled the squad car over to the corner of Park Avenue and Seventy-eighth.
The district radio dispatcher often cannot afford the time necessary to broadcast assignments requiring lots of detail. In those nonemergency cases, a 10-19 is issued, meaning the squad is requested to telephone the precinct desk at the very earliest opportunity.
“Got a dime?” Ciffo asked as Officer Truta gathered up her pad and opened the passenger door.
“Yeah, but give me one of yours anyway,” she said. “I’m always coming out on the short end of these things.”
“Here’s a quarter, kiddo. Knock yourself out.”
Ciffo watched her dial the station-house number in the phone booth, knowing what they were likely to face in a few minutes. She made some notes and returned to the car.
“So we’ve got a DOA possible, right?”
“Yeah,” Truta said, closing the door. She read the address of a high rise on East Seventy-second Street between Second and First avenues.
“Jesus H. Christ, what did I tell you?” Ciffo said. “It’s starting, all right. ’Tis the season to be jolly and all that. What’s with this one?”
“She’s sixty-eight, lives alone, had heart surgery a few months ago. Her son up in Albany has been trying to call her for the last three hours and all he gets is a busy signal and he’s out of his mind with worry. He even had the super go up to her apartment and knock on the door and call him back. The super said he didn’t hear anything. He asked him to go into the apartment and he said he couldn’t do that without the police—”
“So here we go.”
“—so here we go. We’re supposed to call him collect up in Albany the minute we get inside that apartment and find out what’s what.”
The snow fell heavier, pelting the windshield of the squad car. Tony Ciffo, thirty-five years old, thought about the day not far off when his own mother would die.
At the apartment building, the staff was waiting for the police. The super, two porters, the doorman, a security guard. There were also several tenants.
“A good building,” Truta said. “The people stick together here.”
Ciffo got out of the car, heavily, like he weighed twice what he did. He worked himself up into a smile.
“Hi, how are you doing?” he said to the doorman who let him and Truta in.
The tenants who had gathered started twittering. Ciffo took his hat off and said, “Listen, folks, we’ll let you all know, okay? Right now, we have to get up there quick, so why don’t you wait right here and when we come down, we’ll let you know. Help us out, okay?”
Then to the super, “Let’s go.”
Ciffo smiled at the small group of worried people in the lobby as the elevator doors shut and the super pressed the button to the eleventh floor.
“Mrs. Rotare was the nicest lady I ever had in this building and that’s the truth,” the super said. His name was Freddy. “All the time, she’s got something nice to say to you, even when it’s a big problem in her apartment I got to take care of.
“She had her little weird points, like everyone does. You get to see a lot of weird things about people when you’re a super.” Freddy thought a second, then added, “When you’re a cop, too, right?”
“Right,” Ciffo said. He looked at his watch.
“Like every time she tossed her daily stuff down the hatch,” Freddy went on, “it was mostly wine bottles and astrology magazines. Who knows? She never hurt anybody anyway, not like some people I could mention live here in the building.
“Jeez, I’m going to miss old Mrs. Rotare. Who knows what’ll move in after her. Some of these people who get in here, man-oh-man, I’m telling you …”
Freddy let the image fade away as the elevator door, at long last, opened to the eleventh-floor corridor. Ciffo stepped out of the car, followed by Truta, who still wore her hat. A woman somewhere in her thirties carrying a black plastic garbage bag and dressed in a powder-blue terry-cloth robe and slippers let out a little scream when she saw the officers.
The woman in the robe dropped the garbage bag, spilling egg shells and coffee grinds and unidentifiable bits of tissue paper all over the carpeted floor. Something liquid and milky splashed on her ankles.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered loudly. “Who are you coming after?”
“You been behaving yourself?” Ciffo asked her.
She blinked. “Me?”
“Yeah, we’re the heat.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Truta said to her. “You’ll just encourage him.”
Freddy didn’t know what to think. “You always take this stuff so light?”
“We’re not taking anything light,” Ciffo said. “We’re trying to keep our heads straight. You’d know how it is if you’ve been on this kind of call more than once.”
They stopped in front of the last apartment door at the east end of the corridor.
Ciffo knocked. Nothing.
“Okay,” he said to Freddy, “open it up.”
The super took out his passkey and slid it into the lock, then stepped back, like he expected something to leap out the door at him.
Ciffo and Truta took deep breaths and proceeded slowly through the door.
“I smell bread,” Ciffo said.
“Yeah,” Truta agreed.
There was a small kitchen off the vestibule. Ciffo poked his head around the corner. The aroma of cinnamon and raisins filled the vestibule. Truta looked over his shoulder. They both stared at a sweet-faced, white-haired woman about five feet tall. She had square wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a violet and yellow flower-patterned apron around her ample waist and a quizzical look in her bright brown eyes.
“Yes?” she said.
Ciffo and Truta blinked.
“Um, are you all right?” Truta asked the old woman.
“Speak up,” Mrs. Rotare said.
“She says,” Ciffo asked, walking into the kitchen like he was visiting his mother’s house, “are you feeling all right, sweetheart?”
“Well, I’m just fine,” she said to Ciffo. “How are you, son?”
“Couldn’t be better. Do you know why we’re here?”
“No,” she said. “But I don’t suppose you’re going to hurt me, are you?”
“Naw, don’t you worry, darling,” Ciffo said. He draped an arm around her shoulders and she giggled. “Listen, tell me something, will you? Your
son up in Albany has been trying to reach you on the telephone for hours. Something wrong with the phone?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mrs. Rotare said.
“Well, let’s just go and look, okay?”
“Certainly, Officer.”
Ciffo and Truta followed her to a living room running wild with chintz and doilies. There was an aqua-colored telephone on a stand near an enormous Queen Anne chair, one of the models the New York Telephone Company calls a “designer phone.” The designer was French, apparently, with a fascination for ersatz brass curlicues.
“Oh look at that,” Mrs. Rotare said. “I see the problem right there. Look, the cord is unplugged. See that?”
“Listen, darling, why don’t you sit down and call up your son?” Ciffo said.
“Speak up, won’t you?” Mrs. Rotare said.
Ciffo raised his voice. “I said, why don’t you call up your son? He’s waiting to hear from you.”
“Oh, he was calling for me? Yes, you said that. You’ll forgive me, but I’m a little surprised.” Mrs. Rotare touched at her hair in several places and sat down on the chair next to the telephone. “He always gets nervous if I’m not right here when he calls, but I can’t always be sitting next to this thing waiting, can I?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, I am, half the time anyway.”
“Mrs. Rotare,” Officer Truta asked, “the super knocked on your door and you didn’t answer. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I was either sleeping or I was in the kitchen and couldn’t hear.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re all right,” Truta said.
“Thanks, honey.”
“Well, maybe we’d better go now,” Ciffo said.
“Do you have to?” Mrs. Rotare sat with her hands folded in her lap. “I just made some bread, you know. You could have some. Would you like that?”
“Well, we have a great big city out there, you know. Lots of bad guys.” Ciffo laughed and so did Mrs. Rotare.
“Yes, well. Maybe another time?”
“Sure. Meanwhile, give me your telephone number,” Ciffo said, taking his pad out of his pocket. “I’m going to call you up once in a while and see how you’re doing.”
“Oh! Oh, I’d like that.” She gave him the number and he left, with Truta following him into the hallway.
Mrs. Rotare caught Truta by the sleeve. Out of Ciffo’s earshot, she asked her, “Will he really call me?”
“He really will, yes.”
Ciffo was through for the night and, as was his custom after a safe tour, he looked up at the sky and said a little thank-you when he hit Sixty-seventh Street in an off-duty status. He tightened his collar and walked west, to where his Renault Fuego was parked, next to a pile of construction materials in the next block.
The snow had stopped, leaving a fresh white dusting that made the streets slippery. Good and clean, though. Street-lamps made amber pools of light on white sidewalks. It was a good night to be grateful that all was right in the world, at least for yourself; it was a good night to be on your way home.
There was a silver Ford Grenada parked just behind Ciffo’s Fuego. It was Keenan’s car. And inside it, there was Keenan, more white-faced than usual, shivering, alone and, Ciffo guessed, probably drunk.
Ciffo groaned. “Jesus H. Christ, you can’t win. I stop taking the subway and I buy a car and now this.”
He rapped on the window. Though his eyes were wide open, Keenan jumped like he’d just been awakened.
Keenan fumbled with the window knob, managed to crack open a slit and said, “Hiya, Tony. How was the tour, pal?”
“How long you been sitting there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What tour did you work today?”
“The middle.”
“So you were off at eight. What, you visit the dolly or something?” Keenan didn’t respond.
“How long you been sitting in a cold car there?”
“I don’t know.”
Ciffo groaned again. “Come out of there,” he said.
“Yeah, all right,” Keenan said. “I get it. You think I’m stinking drunk, right?”
“I know you’re stinking drunk.”
“So what the hell?”
“So you live in Riverdale, that’s what. You don’t think you’re going to drive up there, do you?”
“Of course not.” Keenan slammed his shoulder against the inside of the driver’s door, a difficult way to open up a car. It then occurred to him to try the catch and the door opened. He stepped out into the street, somewhat indignantly. “There, now here I am, a fine upstanding citizen indeed. And I’m knowing that drinking and driving don’t mix, Officer.”
Keenan belched softly. “Oh hell, Tony, I was waiting here anyway to get myself straight. I was planning on either sobering up, falling asleep or freezing to death, whichever came first.”
“Give me your damn keys.”
Keenan obeyed and Ciffo locked up the Ford.
“Let’s go,” Ciffo said, taking Keenan’s elbow and steering him around to the passenger side of his own car. “You need some straightening up, all right. What’ll it be, your place or mine?”
“What do you take me for? That’s a filthy suggestion. Besides, you’re not my type.”
“Jesus H. Christ, just get in the car.”
Chapter 14
Sometimes there dawns the day when being a cop is something approaching triumphant satisfaction, namely when one of life’s little injustices can be countered by the simple fact of career.
Such a day was had one gray Wednesday in December by Billy McBride and Carl Altner, neighbors out in suburban Suffolk County who, like suburbanites the world over, car pool it to work—which in their case happens to be the plainclothes burglary detail under the command of Sergeant John Laffey, Nineteenth Precinct, Manhattan.
It was shortly after nine o’clock when they slipped onto the Long Island Expressway, McBride at the wheel. The morning rush was another memory and there was now plenty of time to cruise into the city by ten o’clock for another day’s round of mostly walking the streets of the Upper East Side on the lookout for shifty-eyed nervous types who didn’t quite belong on the scene, especially the ones carrying large canvas bags that were just the ticket for hauling off other people’s property. If they were lucky at this unending game, which Altner and McBride sometimes were, they might wind up the day with a good solid red-handed collar on which they might also hang up a lot of backlog.
All of which they talked about just as they passed over the Nassau County line and entered slightly heavier traffic. A very impatient eighteen-wheel semitrailer truck loomed in McBride’s rearview mirror, though he heard the behemoth before seeing it, actually.
The trucker blasted his diesel whistle over and over again, apparently urging the two plainclothes cops in the nondescript car in front of him to get going beyond the fifty-five miles per hour that McBride had set on his cruise control. McBride ran up to sixty, but the trucker was still agitated, all the more so since he was unable to pass at the moment.
McBride had no choice but to run up to sixty-five miles per hour. Otherwise, the truck threatened to bash into the rear end of his car.
Then the truck did bump the back end of McBride’s car. Once, then again, then again.
McBride floored the accelerator pedal and cleared up a space in the adjacent lane for the giant truck to pass around a slower-moving vehicle. All the while, the trucker kept blasting his diesel whistle.
Finally, when the trucker passed by McBride’s car, Altner leaned out and caught the eye of the trucker.
“I show him my tin,” Altner told Sergeant Laffey later that morning, when he finally got into the station house, “and you know what the idiot did? He gave me the finger! Can you believe it? He sees I’m a cop and he just gives me the finger.”
“So what did you do?” Laffey asked.
“I tried not to do my usual wild-man routine and then we cha
sed him, that’s what.”
The trucker, when it apparently occurred to him that he could be in big trouble, veered off the freeway at the nearest exit ramp, his cargo nearly spilling over by the weight of centrifugal force.
The huge vehicle careened around the ramp curves, with McBride and Altner in very hot pursuit, knowing that an eighteen-wheel truck had to stop somewhere very soon, as it would simply not be sufficiently agile to outmaneuver a speeding car. Luckily for all concerned that morning, there happened to be lurking in a speed trap on a particular bend of that ramp a squad car belonging to the Nassau County Sheriff’s Department.
And now, just like in the movies, there was a high-speed parade of a chase—the berserk trucker, the suburban commuter and the sheriff’s deputy, who was immediately on the radio for reinforcements.
It was all over in a few miles. The truck pulled over to the side of the road. Actually, one of its tires blew and the trucker was forced over. He jumped out of the truck, snarling at McBride and Altner, who rushed him, and the uniformed deputy, who had no idea how in the world it was that the fellows in sweaters and jeans in the car happened to have handcuffs and manacles. For all he knew, he had three speeding citations to write, along with a reckless-driving collar on the trucker.
“All in all, slapping a guy in the bracelets on the way to work is a pretty good way to start off a day,” Altner said.
“Listen up, Sleeping Beauty!”
It was Ciffo’s third attempt to rouse Keenan from a deathlike slumber in the convertible sofa in the living room of his flat in Brooklyn. Keenan lay on his back, arms thrust out from his sides and palms up, his legs straight and still. His mouth was open and his breathing shallow, nearly nonexistent, eyes half open but rolled back and looking like a pair of eggs left outdoors all winter. The fumes from the man were enough to call out a city health inspector.
Ciffo put his foot to the side of the couch and rocked it back and forth roughly. “Up and at’em! Let’s roll out!”
Precinct 19 Page 21