“Ever read ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’? It was true when it was written and it’s true today and it’ll be true tomorrow. Right?
“I wish Shakespeare would have written about cops. If Shakespeare would have written about New York cops, he would have written how they were polite and calm and how they care. That’s true today and it was true in the sixties.
“The only difference is in the way we’re seeing it all. People see the cop and they see that what he does is business, that the cop isn’t the enemy. They don’t make it personal, not like they did for a while there.”
Chapter 15
Just five blocks from the Nineteenth Precinct station house, where Sergeant Laffey’s able crew straggled one by one to work and where Detective Leinau claimed his favored desk under the Muzak speaker in the second-floor PDU and started talking up the idea of a summer “cruise to nowhere” off Long Island Sound, Mrs. William W. Whitson removed her diamond rings and set them down on the butcher block in the center of her elegant kitchen so she might begin her morning task of arranging red and yellow roses in eight identical cut-glass vases.
The other detectives generally tuned out Leinau’s pitch on the cruise deal for the very good reasons that it was only Christmas now and everyone was tapped out and the prospect of three or four days confined on a boat with Leinau did not conjure up anyone’s visions of Shangri-la. The officers of the burglary detail tried but failed, as usual, to tune out Jack Clark and his morning pep talk.
Today, Clark pounced on the opportunity to address unjaded ears. He approached the sergeant’s visitor, Valentine, and wheezed in a very exaggerated fashion, placed his hand over his heart and rolled his eyes back toward the landing of the long stairway he had just climbed en route to the Penthouse.
“God, what a privilege it is to enter this precinct house day after day,” he said. “A landmark building, rich in the heritage of this great crossroads of the world, making us ever mindful of our special mission. This building, where men and women have spent their lives vouchsafing the city for democracy!”
Clark pointed a finger at Valentine. “And you! You probably think of this place as just another dirty old building!”
In the Whitson kitchen, one of twelve rooms in a genuine penthouse apartment, Mrs. Whitson listened carefully to Maria, her Puerto Rican maid, bubble on about her husband Juan’s latest project—guaranteed to make him a millionaire, if only he could find some way of raising the necessary start-up capital. Mrs. Whitson understood about half of Maria’s words, the Puerto Rican vernacular being only faintly related to the Castilian dialect she had learned at Sarah Lawrence in order to help her father in his Canary Island fish cannery enterprises, which hadn’t helped her there either.
Juan’s newest scheme had something to do with running a yacht around Manhattan, up the East River from the Thirty-fourth Street helipad landing past the United Nations and the grand perched apartment houses of Beekman and Sutton Place and River House, past Coogan’s Bluff and around the Harlem River bend and through the Columbia University boat house and Spuyten Duyvil Creek, down the broad Hudson and under the George Washington Bridge, finally around the Battery and back again to the East Side at Thirty-fourth Street. All during the slow evening sail, there would be music and dancing and even a gourmet dinner served.
That was Juan’s dream. This time.
The last time, it involved purchasing alternate use rights in dormant cemeteries, as it were, from the families of the long-deceased with an eye toward garden apartment complexes in the outer boroughs.
She hadn’t ever met Juan, a baker by trade, and Mrs. Whitson doubted she ever would, when she thought about it all. She and her husband had each shrugged off subtle and not so subtle requests for capital investment. Tuning out such requests was a knack that came with breeding.
And so Mrs. Whitson listened attentively for the purpose of accustoming herself to Maria’s Spanish. She had only just hired her six months ago and communication was very difficult still at times. Mrs. Whitson remembered fondly the late 1940s and early 1950s when it was still possible to get an English girl, so happy they were to leave the bomb-devastated London for a new life in the States.
She asked Maria a few questions about any experience Juan might have that would qualify him to oversee such a complicated business as a floating restaurant that would cater to the moneyed set, since such a dinner setting would surely be costly. Her question was meant to keep the conversation going, it wasn’t really asked in genuine interest.
Maria chattered on, encouraged by Mrs. Whitson’s inquiries.
“We’ll see,” Mrs. Whitson said finally, ending the conversation. Her flowers were finished and she picked up her diamonds and began slipping them back on her fingers. Maria watched, her dark eyes shining brightly, as three sparkling rings were set back in place.
Mrs. Whitson smiled at her.
“My husband will be entertaining at half-past five, you know,” she said.
Yes, Maria remembered from yesterday. She would have the room readied. Not to worry.
“All right then, I’ll just do what I have to do now in the way of errands—”
María turned her head at the sound of an urgent knocking at the kitchen door, which led to a service area, elevator and stairway. Along with the knocking was the super’s voice, a man named Mickey.
Mrs. Whitson stopped herself. “What can that be? If it’s Mickey, he usually calls up on the intercom.”
Maria stepped to the door.
“Mickey?” she asked.
“Yeah. Can you open up?”
Something didn’t sound quite right in his voice, but before Mrs. Whitson could register any objection, Maria opened the kitchen door.
Both Maria and Mrs. Whitson shrieked when Mickey was thrown headlong into the kitchen. His body slid across the glossy terrazzo floor, landing painfully against the butcher block. One of the vases full of water and roses was jarred and fell off the edge, the blossoms and the water covering Mickey’s head and the glass shattering on the floor.
Two men had shoved Mickey and both wore knit ski masks, only their hot eyes and their lips visible. They wore leather gloves and tight-fitting pants and jackets. And both aimed guns at Mrs. Whitson and Maria.
“This is a holdup!” one of them shouted. He held his weapon in both hands and crouched, as if he thought someone might bolt from the kitchen.
Mrs. Whitson thought the man was black by hearing his voice. She stared at him, tried to see what she could of him. Yes, she thought, he was black.
The other man spoke to Maria, who was crying. She was upset and couldn’t possibly understand English at that moment. So he asked her in Spanish where the plastic garbage bags were kept. Maria showed him while the black man asked Mrs. Whitson if she had any rope in the house.
“Certainly not!” she said, not certain why his question offended her.
Mickey tried sitting up, but the black man pointed his gun at him and yelled something Mrs. Whitson didn’t quite hear. Then he asked Mrs. Whitson, “Your husband have plenty of neckties, does he? Good. Let’s go get’em.”
She and the black man with the gun pointed at her back walked from the kitchen through a pantry, a dining room, a music chamber, an anteroom and the living room before reaching the corridor that led to the master bedroom and the wardrobe alcove where William W. Whitson housed his clothing and accessories. The gunman helped himself to an armful of foulards, which he carried back to the kitchen and used to bind up Mickey the super.
The other gunman, meanwhile, had been given a box of green plastic garbage bags. “Let’s go,” he said to his partner.
“Okay,” the black man said. He turned to Mrs. Whitson and said, “Lady, you and the maid here are going to give us all the jewelry and then we’re going to be on our way nice and happy and you’re going to stay here, safe and sound if everything goes just fine. Understand?”
“Quite,” Mrs. Whitson said.
The black man looked
at Mickey, his arms tied behind him and lashed to one leg of the butcher block, a huge piece that would prevent his moving from the kitchen to any other room.
“You sure he’ll be all right?” the other gunman, the one who spoke Spanish, asked.
Mickey twisted around and tried to get a good look at the two gunmen in the ski masks.
The black man brought a foot down heavily on Mickey’s head, mashing his face to the floor. Mrs. Whitson winced at the sound of bone against floor. Poor Mickey. He’d been the super for eight years now. And such a capable man. How did he allow this to happen?
“Let’s move!” said the black man, clearly the robber in charge.
Maria held Mrs. Whitson’s arm as the two women were marched at gunpoint from the kitchen and along the route Mrs. Whitson had taken before. This time, the black man had said, they would clean out jewelry and valuable clothing.
Mrs. Whitson led the men directly to the dresser that contained her best jewels. She sighed. Never had she and her husband even considered keeping the pieces in a bank vault. Now she handed over gem-crusted rings, necklaces, pendants, bracelets and brooches.
“I’m not going to part with this,” she said. She pointed to her gold wedding band, an ancient ring that had belonged to her husband’s grandmother and had become hers some thirty-five years ago. “It’s a family heirloom and I’m going to keep it. You’re getting enough as it is.”
Maria trembled. The black man seemed stunned. He didn’t answer her, speaking instead to his partner:
“Look through the closets, man.”
His partner crammed two plastic garbage bags with a full-length mink, a lynx wrap and the jewelry.
“Get some more of her old man’s ties from the other room there,” the black man told his partner. He waved his gun in the general direction of Mr. Whitson’s wardrobe area.
“Come on now. We’re going to make our exit, ladies.”
Mrs. Whitson and Maria were tied up with more of the Whitson neckties and, like Mickey the super, lashed to legs of the kitchen butcher block.
The two gunmen in ski masks fled the kitchen, into the service corridor and down the long stairway to the street.
Mickey managed to slip loose just as they disappeared into the corridor. He ran out after them.
He would later tell Detective Leinau that he stayed “at a distance, so they wouldn’t spot me” and that he saw them flag down a taxicab going uptown on Park Avenue.
“I got so mad at what they’d done that I picked up a trash can off the corner and just about threw it at them,” Mickey would say.
Tony Currin sat in the hearing room at Police Headquarters in lower Manhattan wearing light-sensitive aviator glasses, which made him look pretty much in character. Cibella Borges sat opposite Currin, next to her lawyer. She wore a high-collar sweater and a plaid skirt and looked like a teenager who attended an all-girls high school.
Deputy Police Commissioner Jaime Rios was the judge. The prosecuting officer, Captain Henry Harrison, handed Rios a number of photographs of the defendant in the sweater and plaid skirt. They were poses of considerably different tone than those that had appeared in magazines Rios mentioned in passing that he’d never before encountered—Beaver, Pub and Girls on Girls.
Rios looked at the photographs. “Objections?” he asked Cibella Borges’ lawyer.
“No objections.”
Rios couldn’t look at Cibella Borges, though he must have wondered at the contrast he faced. Indeed, the photographs Captain Harrison presented seemed to support the claim of “posing for licentious photographs … simulating sodomy and/or masturbation.” The question Rios had to decide, of course, was whether such poses brought discredit to the department, apart from the question of how in the Sam Hill this petite suspended cop before him today could possibly be taken seriously as a vice officer.
“Now I’ll call Mr. Currin,” Captain Harrison said.
Duly sworn, Tony Currin told Deputy Commissioner Rios on questioning by Captain Harrison that he had taken something approaching a quarter million photographs of nude women. Then he testified as to how Officer Cibella Borges became one of the pantheon.
“I just came up to her on the street and told her she would be a perfect centerfold, that she was pretty and had a woman’s body and the face of a child.
“She said she was interested and was glad that she had met me.”
That was in April of 1980, he said. Cibella Borges, then a civilian clerk working for the New York City Police Department, first auditioned for the publisher of Beaver by stripping off her clothes in his office to “make sure she had no disfiguring marks,” according to Currin.
Then there were two photo sessions. Cibella Borges earned $150 each time.
Currin completed his testimony, cool as could be, and then left the hearing room. Except for the inconvenience of a long subway ride downtown from his Upper West Side studio, a man like Tony Currin was able to walk out a door, simple as that, and resume his life and pursuit of happiness.
Officer Borges felt chilled. It was a common discomfort for her lately, since she’d lost five pounds. She could ill afford the loss. Now she weighed eighty-five. Dark lines grew deeper by the day beneath her eyes and they burned now because, try as she might, she couldn’t draw tears.
Jimmy O’Brien’s mistake, apart from the whole matter of stubborn pride in hanging onto the automobile he believed he needed, was in not varying his patterns. Anyone who made the simplest effort at surveillance of his Eastchester home would know that Jimmy O’Brien rose each workday about six o’clock, left his house by seven after the usual argument with his wife and took a bus to the Fordham section of the Bronx to pick up his altered car.
He would drive the car to his job at the warehouse on upper Madison Avenue, then drive down to the bar on Lexington and Eighty-fourth Street for the usual two or three drinks before the trip home to Eastchester, via bus from whatever spot he found to park the car in Fordham.
Royal Billings, the intrepid city marshal, figured out the routine after a while. He’d tried a few times to get into the car and duly impound the camouflaged property of the bank, but he couldn’t handle it by himself, what with all the sophisticated antitheft deterrents O’Brien had purchased for it.
Marshal Billings’ mistake was to become angered. Impounding someone’s car was just a job, not a crusade for righteousness. Besides, it was advisable policy to take it easy while taking it and Billings let that basic rule go by the wayside in this case.
Billings compounded his mistake by trusting in the sense of textbook right and wrong on the part of someone who stood to lose a car.
Billings thought he would be smart and bring along two of his buddies, both of them black, on Friday late afternoon when he knew the car he was after would be parked outside a certain bar on Lexington Avenue in the Eighties.
Just like clockwork, Jimmy O’Brien and his pals were drinking inside the bar—a bit more freely than usual, as it was Friday and payday. Every so often, as was his habit, O’Brien looked out the window to check on his car.
At one checking period, O’Brien’s beer-soaked eyes took in the view of a small black man with an incongruous five-pointed star of a badge on his shirt standing in front of his car while two younger black men worked levers and wires down between the window cracks and into the slits under the hood in order to open up the car, start it and presumably steal it.
“Holy shit! There’s a bunch of niggers stealing my car!” O’Brien hollered.
The clientele of the bar was electrified. A dozen and a half men, happy to be given the opportunity to work out a little racial hostility, marched through the door to the street behind the red-faced O’Brien, who had a large knife in hand.
O’Brien and the others from the bar made some primitive noises in the general direction of Billings and his assistants. Billings made sure everyone saw his handsome badge, then began taking a few steps back when he realized this display seemed to heat up the situation.
The man in the beret acted out of what seemed to be pure instinct. He positioned himself between O’Brien and his knife and Marshal Billings, who was unsteadily unbuttoning a coat pocket to go for the pistol he was duly authorized to carry in a concealed fashion, even though he should never have any use for it if he had a brain the size of a walnut.
“All right, gentlemen,” the man in the beret said. “Let me introduce myself.”
Slowly, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a metal chain, which secured his NYPD badge.
He looked first at Marshal Billings. “Okay, Marshal Dippity-Do, I’m the real item. Jack Clark’s the name. Stay cool now, or there’s going to be a lot of real trouble here.”
The crowd behind O’Brien started hollering. Clark smiled at them and held up his hands. Meanwhile, Clark’s fellow burglary detail cops—Sergeant Laffey and Carl Trani, along with four uniformed officers on foot patrol who received the call as well—backed up his street meditations by gently moving Billings and his two friends with the levers a block away from the barful of workmen, who missed out on the chance to tear them apart.
“Gentlemen,” Clark said to O’Brien and the others, “we have today struck a blow for civilization. You have all done yourselves proud. I thank you and my children thank you.”
The men went back into the bar, most of them confused.
Clark chuckled and crooked a finger at O’Brien, who obeyed the summons.
“Got yourself trouble, eh pal? Listen, I understand. Sorry as hell, but if that guy’s straight and he’s a marshal and all, there’s not a whole lot you and I can do about his taking your car, you know,” Clark said.
He put an arm around O’Brien’s shoulders. “You know what just happened here, though?”
Precinct 19 Page 23