Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  O’Brien shook his head no.

  “I just saved your ass from a really big problem. If you’d have knifed that guy, you’d be sitting up in the cage at the Nineteenth Precinct station house on your way to Riker’s booked for attempted murder.”

  O’Brien let out a whoosh of air and began trembling.

  “So look at it this way, pal. You lose your car today, but on the other hand, it’s the luckiest day of your life I happened to walk by and catch all this about to come down.”

  “Well, maybe—”

  “Maybe nothing, pal. I saved your ass. Now come along with me like a friendly guy, okay?”

  O’Brien walked meekly alongside Clark as they made their way toward the subdued Marshal Billings, in the company of John Laffey and Carl Trani.

  Billings’ papers were inspected. They seemed in order.

  Clark took O’Brien’s car keys and walked back down the block toward the bar, waved to the fellows inside, then opened the car and drove it back to the marshal.

  Nobody was hurt. O’Brien had not been humiliated too badly. And most people in the neighborhood were unaware that something heroic had taken place that Friday afternoon.

  Clark was a little shaky when it was all over, but his recovery was, as usual, rapid.

  He first telephoned Dory and reached her Sanyo.

  “Hello,” said the machine. “This is Dory Smith …”

  “No it isn’t,” Keenan said, wondering where she was in the apartment as she listened to her messages come in, screening out calls from people she wasn’t receiving. That included him, of course.

  “… I’m not here right now …”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “… But if you leave your name, the time of your call and a number where I can reach you—”

  Keenan slammed down the telephone. He started to dial his number up in Riverdale, but was interrupted. Under the circumstances, he was happy for it.

  A man in a heavily stained overcoat stood in front of him. There was a line of drool sliding down one side of his mouth. But other than that, and the condition of his coat, he looked all right. His hair was combed and he held a hat in his hand. He was clean-shaven and his teeth were good.

  “They sent me in to see you, Officer,” he said.

  “Oh did they now? Sit right down and let me get to your concerns,” Keenan said.

  The drooling man sat down on a cracked plastic chair, an orange colored thing that might have been at home in a cheap Cantonese restaurant. Keenan stood up and poked his head around a corner. The desk sergeant on duty rolled his eyes.

  “I thought so,” Keenan said to no one but himself.

  He sighed and returned to his desk. The drooling man was drawing a swastika on a corner of the desk top with a dull pencil. Keenan ignored it and sat down.

  “What’s your name, sir?” Keenan asked.

  The drooling man covered up his art work with an elbow. “Let’s just keep this confidential.”

  “Suit yourself. What can I do for you besides try and guess your name?”

  “I’m here to help you.”

  “Rumplestiltskin!”

  “What?”

  “That’s it, isn’t it? Your name is Rumplestiltskin?”

  “No.” The drooler looked very confused.

  “Tom, Dick? Harry?”

  The drooler brightened. “Yeah, it’s Harry. How did you know?”

  “Hey, I’m a cop. What do you think? It’s my business to know these things.”

  “Of course. Forgive me. I should have known that.”

  “But there’s one thing, Harry. I don’t know what you’re doing here. It’s got to be pretty important, or you wouldn’t be wasting valuable police time. Am I right?”

  “I assure you I am here on a vital mission.” The drooler crossed his legs.

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  “I need first to look at all your mug shots.”

  “The mug shots. Why, Harry?”

  Why fight it? Keenan dialed up to the PDU. Leinau answered. After telling Leinau what he had sitting in front of him, including the business of the swastika drawn on the desk top, Keenan held the telephone receiver a few inches away from his head in order to protect his eardrums.

  In a few seconds, Leinau was downstairs in the little public reception room off the lobby where Keenan sat with the mysterious drooler. He crooked his finger at Keenan.

  “Excuse me, Harry. You wait here while I discuss this with a colleague.”

  Harry grinned and went back to work on the desk top with his pencil.

  “That the nutjob?” Leinau asked, jutting his jaw toward Harry, who was hunched over Keenan’s desk.

  “That’s him.”

  “He come with anything? Like a bag or something?”

  “Just the opposite. He came in missing something. About three or four million brain cells, I’d say.”

  “These guys are easy to laugh at,” Leinau said. “But sometimes they’re not really so damn funny.”

  “Well, he seems all right.”

  “Yeah, all of them do at first,” Leinau said.

  Leinau was there in 1973.

  A slightly built Puerto Rican walked into the lobby of the Nineteenth Precinct, carrying a brown paper grocery bag.

  “Yes sir?” the desk sergeant asked.

  “Um, I want—”

  Those were the only words anyone heard him speak. The Puerto Rican, a man of about thirty years and perhaps 120 pounds, pulled a .38 revolver from his belt and calmly aimed it at the sergeant, cocked the hammer and squeezed off a single shot which opened a gaping red hole in the sergeant’s throat. The bullet ripped through the back of the sergeant’s neck and slammed into the plaster wall behind the big desk.

  The Puerto Rican dropped the weapon and screamed something in Spanish, something even the Spanish-speaking officers standing about in the lobby didn’t understand, and hoisted himself up to the rail of the desk. He began scrambling over the top as the sergeant fell backward, both his hands clasped over the hole in his throat, blood oozing through his fingers.

  An officer named Gonzalez waited for the madman to make it clear over the top, then pulled at his arms and got him down onto the floor behind the desk and tried restraining him. Two other officers came running and now three of them, all big men, tried to contain the flailing Puerto Rican.

  The little man on the bottom was throttled in the face and chest and stomach and still he could not be held down. One by one, he threw off the big cops. Then he rose and came out from behind the desk to a lobby full of cops with guns drawn.

  His eyes were drawn to a lieutenant standing near the desk, his service revolver aimed at his face. “Freeze!” the lieutenant shouted.

  The Puerto Rican rushed him, grabbed the lieutenant’s revolver as it fired, a bullet sinking into his chest. Blood rushed from the hole, but the little man kept coming.

  The little man wrestled the lieutenant’s gun away from him and now he started firing the gun into the air, wild shots as he screamed in some insane emotional release. He began lowering the gun. Maybe there were two shots left. It was no time for calm counting.

  A dozen police specials started firing in his direction, round after round of fire whizzing past the Puerto Rican. Incredibly, only one slug ripped through an arm. The rest of them, scores of bullets, peppered the wall behind the desk.

  The inspector rushed from his office and placed his revolver against the Puerto Rican’s ribs. He emptied the gun into the Puerto Rican’s belly and still he struggled, still he had the strength to fight off the dozens of arms trying to pull at him, trying to subdue him.

  The inspector withdrew the revolver, and the Puerto Rican, an eerie laugh exploding from his mouth, stumbled around the lobby in the direction of the complaint room. Several officers put a few more shots into his body, now striped red with blood and doubled over.

  Finally, the Puerto Rican fell to the floor.

  “Like a damn sac
k of potatoes,” Leinau told Keenan. “He fell right about where you’re standing now.”

  Keenan looked back at Harry. His shoulders were moving to the task of writing obscene words on the desk top.

  “After it was all over, they counted up the number of slugs the little guy took. Twenty-one in all. The sergeant lived, believe it or not.

  “And somebody thought to take a look at what the little maniac brought with him in the bag. He had enough Molotov cocktails in there to blow this house to Jersey.”

  Keenan thought for a minute. “There’s a big flag behind the desk now,” he finally said.

  “Covers a lot of sins.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Keenan said. “So what’ll I do with Harry in there?”

  “I’d ask him very politely to leave if I were you. Me, I got my own troubles. Some rabbi’s upstairs with a letter from a nutjob down in Texas who says he’s on his way to New York. The rabbi used to have a congregation in Texas, in the town where the letter’s postmarked.”

  “What’s the letter say?”

  “Oh, it’s a real statement of brotherhood, boy. It says this Hanukkah the rabbi’s going to ‘drink the blood of the malignancy in your womb.’”

  “Doesn’t make any sense,” Keenan said.

  “Neither did the Puerto Rican. Nobody ever did find out what his gripe was. So what’s Harry’s beef in there?”

  “No beef. He says he’s here to help us.”

  “Just what we need. Got to go now, Keenan.”

  Keenan returned to the complaint room.

  “Harry, what the hell have you been doing to my desk?”

  The drooler looked up. He’d covered fully one third of Keenan’s desk with obscene words and drawings and dozens of little swastikas. “What?”

  “Harry, I’m only going to tell you this once. I haven’t got time to repeat myself, so listen carefully. I need your help.”

  “What is it, Officer?”

  “My colleagues have informed me that they’re after you.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’d better get out while the gettin’ is good, if you know what I mean.”

  “Who’s after me?”

  “No time to chat, Harry. You better get out of here. Run, Harry. Run, don’t walk.”

  Harry drew himself up, imperiously. “You’re nuts. I will not deal with psychopaths. Good day!” Then he turned and strutted through the lobby of the precinct house. He turned around and looked at Keenan before he went through the door to the street and scowled. “Nut!”

  “Well, he’s right,” Keenan said softly. He sat down behind his desk again and stared at the green telephone in front of him. Then he steeled himself and dialed home.

  Every year at Christmastime, for all five seasons Ed Smith had been divorced from his second wife, he cleaned up. The effect was stunning. Ed Smith would shed his Bowery-bum ensemble and, like the metamorphosis of a butterfly, he became a man who looked as if he might have strolled in from Harvard Yard.

  The tip-off to all concerned in the Nineteenth Precinct locker room was Smith’s use of the showers. That cleaning was in preparation for his visit to a men’s hair stylist on Madison Avenue, which was then followed by Smith’s visit to a Turkish bath on the Lower East Side, one of a handful in the city that wasn’t yet a homosexual xanadu.

  There in the Turkish bath, Smith would spend the late afternoon and early evening getting clean down to the very last pore of all the street grime he’d built up during the year.

  When he was through, he would take out clothing he wore at no other time from the suitcase he’d taken off the shelf of a closet in his tiny apartment. Pleated olive corduroy slacks, a red- and white-checked tattersall shirt, a navy-blue oiled-wool sweater, cordovan tassel loafers, a loden stadium coat, red woolen muffler and a gray tweed cap.

  He wore a wristwatch, too, a Baume and Mercier. It was the gift his wife had given him on their wedding day.

  When he left the Turkish bath, he felt like walking in the crisp wintery air. Besides, he had the usual thinking to do.

  He walked down Third Avenue and stopped at a place called Phebe’s at Fourth Street. A mildly trendy place popular, due to its prices, with actors and writers and others of uncertain incomes. Smith sipped an Old Parr scotch, neat, for nearly an hour. The perfect gentleman. He enjoyed the private joke of it and more than one attractive woman in the place found his appearance and the attitude he exuded quite worth watching.

  He left without speaking to anyone, though. And then he walked through a more familiar terrain. In less than a block, Third Avenue became the Bowery, and even though he looked the way he did, Ed Smith felt relaxed.

  “Bathroom for Customers Only” was the sign in every window of every cheap all-night spoon and every dump reeking of malt that served a watery shot of whiskey for a quarter and a forty-cent mug of beer for a chaser. The other men who walked about—not men, really, so much as dark shadows that moved—carried pale green flat bottles of Thunderbird in their pockets and asked him for spare change, which he gave over.

  There was a Salvation Army chorus standing beneath a streetlamp, red-faced and ragged and howling a rendition of “Silent Night.” Smith dropped a dollar into the red kettle hanging from a tripod and the soprano of the group smiled at him and nodded her head in thanks.

  He saw a familiar face loitering outside the Sunshine Hotel, beds for two and a half dollars in advance. He was a tall, skinny man of perhaps forty. He and Smith had gotten drunk together one summer afternoon that year and stood outside the Sunshine punching well-dressed shoppers who had to walk by the hotel on their way to the shops that carried expensive lamps and housewares at discount prices.

  Smith waved to him. The wino growled and spit at him.

  Next to the Sunshine was the Bowery Mission. The 7:30 P.M. service was in full swing. The door was open and Smith could hear a nasal voice from up in the pulpit saying, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?”

  Smith moved on. He didn’t have any particular quarrel with the religious, he just didn’t have much use for the type. At Grand Street, he flagged down a taxicab.

  The driver looked him over carefully before stopping and admitting him into the back door.

  “Don’t usually pick up many fares down here,” the driver said. “What the hell’s a guy like you doing hanging around here anyway?”

  Smith could have guessed the next question.

  “Say, ah … you lookin’ for some really good-quality stuff, pal? I got your Christmas trees now, you know? Little greenies that’ll put you on another planet.”

  Smith didn’t say anything. He reached into the breast pocket of his stadium coat and opened his billfold for the driver. His NYPD shield had the effect of a crucifix on a vampire.

  “Since it’s the holiday and all,” Smith said, “I’ll just pretend like I didn’t hear you.”

  “I’ll take you wherever you want, no charge.”

  “You’ll take me to Brooklyn Heights and if you high-flag it, I’ll make a complaint to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Smith gave him an address in Pineapple Street and sank back against the seat.

  All the way over, he wondered if this would be the year he would actually knock on the door. Or would he get to the top of the stoop, enjoy the aroma of the wreath she always put out and then skulk away?

  It wasn’t that he wanted to cause any trouble for her, or her husband. He wanted to see his daughter, sure. But that wasn’t the important thing, either.

  “It’ll be a good excuse, though,” he’d told his friend Joe the other day when the two of them shared a cigarette under the Queensboro Bridge.

  “What the hell’s it all about, then?” Joe had asked.

  Smith didn’t know then, he didn’t know now as the taxi crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Ten minutes later, he was paying the driver, and as he stepped out into Pineapple Street,
which looked like the Hollywood set used for the filming of Arsenic and Old Lace, he was no closer to the answer he’d sought for five years.

  He walked up the stoop and there was the wreath. Smith raised his hand. Maybe he wouldn’t have knocked that year, either, but a car backfired in the next block and his hand fell against the wood reflexively. As long as he’d made contact, Smith reasoned, he’d give it an honest knocking.

  It was quiet at night in Brooklyn. Smith always noticed that. And the Heights was perfect for his wife. But not for him. Smith didn’t approve of Brooklyn Heights any more than he approved of suburban towns. To him, it was a synthetic place, a place where people distanced themselves from reality, from any sign of how most of the people of the world lived. Here, the people wanted boutiques and designer ice-cream shops and Belgian waffle stands and news dealers who carried Paris Match. It seemed worse to Ed Smith than most of what he saw on the Upper East Side.

  Smith heard footsteps from inside the house. A small light flicked on in a foyer and he saw a woman’s face peering out at him from a square of glass that ran alongside the door.

  His wife! He didn’t recognize her at first. For years, he’d seen her only at a distance. Ruth looked more beautiful than the first time he’d seen her. The years washed away and Smith felt wobbly in the legs. And afraid.

  The door swung open.

  “Ed, my God! You look fantastic!” she said.

  The two of them stood there staring at each other.

  “Come in.” Ruth pulled him through the door, into the home she and her husband, Darryl, had made. She shut the door and Smith was as nervous as a cornered rat.

  “Is Eve here?” he said. It was the only thing he could think of to say, his first words to this woman in years.

  “No, not tonight. I’m sorry. You should have called.”

  “Okay. Well, I can go—”

  “No, stay. Come in with me. Sit with me for a minute.”

  “Your husband.”

  She laughed and took him by the arm. They walked through the foyer into the living room.

  “Sit down,” she said. “And let me tell you something.”

  Smith took a leather club chair, wondered if it was Darryl’s favorite. If the man had any sense, it would be.