Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  Leinau, on the other hand, owned a haircut he hadn’t much changed since 1966, save for the length of his sideburns from year to year. He had a thin moustache that got wet every time he ate something, a nose with lots of broken veins, the inevitability of gravity around the waist of a nearly middle-aged man who watched games rather than played them and a shaving rash on a neck that betrayed a fondness for sweets. But Leinau puffed on his Individualé and delighted, without the slightest self-consciousness about it, in the aura of William W. Whitson’s good fortune and worldliness. Leinau didn’t begrudge Whitson a bit of it and there was only the slightest chance that any of it would rub off on him.

  “I like the way you do business, Whitson.”

  “Thanks.” He turned around when he heard the steward, who glided along with a silver tray and an espresso cup and saucer. “Ah, I see. Henry has taken care of you.”

  “Yeah. Just like downtown.”

  “As I understand it, ah …”

  “Leinau. Detective.”

  Whitson smiled and folded his hands in his lap. “Yes, Detective Leinau. As I understand it, you’ve spoken to the superintendent of my building and you’ve spoken to the maid. My wife, of course. What have you determined?” Leinau sipped half the espresso, then puffed the cigar. “I’ve determined that you’re careless about where you keep your wife’s valuable jewelry.”

  “Yes, we should have had it in the bank. Or here in my office, at least. After all, I’m not very far from home.”

  “So you’ve never had any trouble in your building. Is that why you were sort of lax, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so?”

  “I don’t mind what you say, Detective Leinau. And you’re quite correct. To my knowledge, there has never been a robbery in my building.”

  “Thought so. I didn’t bother checking with the computer. You ever see the people who run computers? All they know how to do is tell you that computers are great when they work, but they never work because people don’t know how to run them. They just claim the whole damn world is going to be a wonderful place when we have computers fouling everything up.

  “Well, I digress. Anyway, I figured you didn’t have problems that way. Of course, you had insurance, I suppose. I don’t imagine I have to tell you that, do I?”

  “No, sir. I try to attend to business matters as best I can.”

  “Yeah, I know. I can tell. You got a swell place here, that’s for sure. You got to take care of business real good to have a spread like this. Jesus, what’s the rent here, anyway?”

  Whitson smiled benevolently and said nothing.

  “Oh yeah. You don’t ask prices. What’s wrong with me, huh? Hey, you’d know if we traded places and you saw where I had to work, Mr. Whitson. What a dump!”

  Whitson tilted his head back and laughed. “Like Bette Davis in the movies,” he said. “She walked into a place and said, ‘What a dump!’”

  “Yeah, well, I think the writer of that line worked in the Nineteenth PDU for a spell. Say, how come it was half a day before we got the call on this anyway? Did something happen at our end, or what? Boy, if it did I’m sure sorry, Mr. Whitson. We try to stay right on top of things, you know. Man, what a delay if it was our fault! But honest to god, it was like a half day before I knew about it and I was the detective on the catch for new cases then, so I should have gotten word first thing.”

  “Well,” Whitson said, his debonair coolness chipped ever so slightly, “I wanted to have a chance to take a look at things myself. I had to make sure my wife was all right, of course.”

  “Oh yeah. A guy’s got to look after the little woman. Some women need a lot of care. But not yours, Mr. Whitson. She seemed pretty capable to me.”

  “What?” Whitson turned away from Leinau and called for Henry. “Get me a … oh, an anisette with coffee.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Nice to get to know your undertaker long before the time comes, sir. That Henry’s going to do a bang-up job with you.”

  “What?”

  “Henry. The steward. The guy who moves around like an undertaker with—”

  “I mean, Detective Leinau, what about my wife?”

  “Oh yeah. What’s her name, anyway? I don’t think I ever got it.”

  “Tildy. Short for Matilda.”

  “Would that make it Bill and Tildy? I like that.”

  “Detective Leinau, I’m a busy man.”

  “I can well imagine, sir. I’m busy myself, so I know how it is.” Leinau smiled benevolently now.

  “You said something about my wife. What did you mean?”

  “When I got there, sir, I met a woman completely in charge of herself after an event I’ve seen rattle some pretty tough folks. She didn’t have a hair out of place, and I didn’t have a sense that anybody had anything to do with it but her. She’s the most self-confident person I’ve come across in a long time.”

  “Tildy’s a game girl.”

  “And a smart one, and completely honest, in my book.”

  “She told you about this ‘Juan’ person?”

  “Oh yes. She told me everything. She had it all written down, you know. Everything that everyone said, as best as she could remember it. She wrote it down right away so she wouldn’t forget. That’s what she told me.”

  “Well then, I suppose it’s true.”

  “If she said it?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s what I thought. I pegged her honest. She can handle herself pretty well, too, from the way she described what happened. I mean, keeping that one piece of jewelry like she did.”

  “The wedding band.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet you’re glad about that, eh? In the family so long and all and the sentimental value of it and everything.”

  “Tildy performed magnificently. I’m sure we’re in agreement here. I’m not at all sure what we’re accomplishing with this conversation, though.” Whitson took a peek at the wristwatch beneath the french cuff on his left wrist.

  “You in a hurry to get somewhere, Mr. Whitson? Am I keeping you or something?”

  Whitson tried to keep cool. “Tildy told you about the situation with the maid’s boy friend, Juan?”

  “Yeah, but I figure it’s nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I figure that’s not the angle here. You don’t think Juan has anything to do with it either, do you?”

  Whitson stuttered and Leinau knew he was on the right track.

  “Mr. Whitson, you’ve got some troubles here at the office that might have something to do with all this, don’t you?”

  Henry glided over with Whitson’s coffee and anisette and Whitson looked very grateful. Leinau grinned at him and puffed on the Individualé.

  Whitson, a quick learner, tried putting Leinau off guard. “Would you like to take one of those cigars for later, Detective Leinau? What about the rest of the squad? Any cigar smokers? These are the best, I hear. I don’t smoke them myself, but Henry here has excellent taste and tells me that this is just the thing for a man who loves truly fine tobaccos.”

  “Hey, thanks a lot, sir.” Leinau opened the humidor and took three of the Individualés, which emptied the humidor, and put them into his inside breast coat pocket. He had no intention of sharing them with anyone.

  “Enjoy.”

  “Oh, I will, that’s for sure.” Leinau picked up the little espresso cup and finished off its contents. “Nice. You got your own machine for this back there? I’d like one for myself. Saw it in the housewares section at Bloomingdale’s once. A hundred and eighty clams! Man, I can’t afford that. I suppose you’d be willing to get it for me, though, right?”

  “I’d get it. What?”

  “An espresso machine. You’d get it for me, right?”

  “Well, I might.” Whitson grew very red in the face.

  “Tell you what would be even cheaper for you, as if that’s not cheap enough,” Leinau said. “Just come clean for me.”

  Whitson shook his head. �
�You win.” He stood up, slapping his long supple thighs as he did so. He walked toward the antique table in the center of the office and slid open a long drawer. He removed a bundle of letters and smacked them against the palm of his hand as he returned to the window where Leinau was waiting for the plain truth.

  “You ought to come work for me, Detective Leinau. I could make it quite worth your while. You’re quite good at maneuvering a conversation. That’s what you’d need with the access I’d give you.”

  “I’m a cop, Mr. Whitson. It’s like being an actor, I think. It’s in your blood.” He thought of all the times he threatened to take early retirement, open a bait shop on the Sound.

  “You could leave for a while.”

  “What? And quit show business?”

  Whitson laughed and sat down. “All right, all right. See these?” He handed Leinau the bundle of letters. “They’re demands that I pay up a million dollars.”

  “What’s the point of the shakedown?” Leinau started opening up the letters, all of them, he noticed, postmarked New York.

  “The usual.”

  “Giving the old tap, tap, tap to somebody besides the wife?”

  “God, man, you could have some understanding.”

  “I do.”

  Whitson sipped the coffee while Leinau looked at the letters. “How did you know about them?” he asked Leinau.

  “I didn’t. You told me.”

  “But you knew something.”

  “Your wife. Tildy. She told me that she thought something was troubling you for a long time. You never had any trouble in the building before, the business with Juan was just too pat. It didn’t look to me like the two guys who robbed your wife just waltzed in and knocked on anybody’s door.

  “There’s something more than meets the eye, see. That’s why there’s us detectives. The only thing I could figure that couldn’t be nailed down was your wife’s feeling that there was some sort of trouble with you. That and the fact that there was no way in hell that they could have gotten into your building without the super being involved, right? I mean, you’ve got half the Third Reich fugitives working that building as security.

  “So, usually, you find connections between inside jobs and unseen trouble. I thought your wife’s intuition was pretty sound and I figured right away maybe you pulled the strings yourself as an insurance scam. It’s that time of year, you know. All over this neighborhood, people are reporting lots of burglaries and robberies and whatnot and getting the little police reports we make out and then making a date with their insurance agents. Helps with the old cash flow.”

  “But that’s not the case.”

  “Yeah, I can see now. You’re being shook.”

  “They threatened me with a show of force if I didn’t come through and this is it.”

  “You should have come to us a long time ago, Mr. Whitson.

  Whitson didn’t say anything for a while. Leinau read, once in a while chuckling.

  “Detective Leinau, just when did my wife tell you what you say she did? I think she would have told me about such a conversation.”

  “Oh,” Leinau said, raising his head and smiling. “I talked to her on the telephone from the lobby of your building, just before I came up. You don’t think I’d want you to be tipped, do you?”

  Whitson shook his head. “Amazing. Come work for me.”

  Leinau said he’d think about it when he was through with the case, but he didn’t mean it. He pored through the letters, finished every one of them, and then returned to the latest, dated just a week earlier.

  “The writer here says he wants a meeting. Says he’ll show you what sort of evidence he’s got, what you’d stand to lose in a divorce proceeding.”

  “Yes.”

  Leinau looked at the wardrobe against the far wall, distant enough so that a man’s features would be blurred, close enough so that his general outline would be recognizable.

  “Mr. Whitson, I’m going to ask you to do a favor for me.”

  “You want the espresso machine after all?”

  “Maybe later. Right now, would you just walk over to that clothes rack or whatever?”

  “Sure.” Whitson rose and walked to the wardrobe. When he got there, he turned to Leinau and said, “All right?”

  “Put on the hat.”

  Whitson put on the black felt homburg. He pitched it so that it nearly covered his left eye.

  “Okay, now pick up the cane and hold it like you’re standing somewhere waiting for your mistress or somebody like that.”

  Whitson ignored what might have been insolence from a man he couldn’t respect. He respected Leinau immensely, and if he ever came out of this alive, he’d buy him an espresso machine for every day of the year.

  “Turn around.”

  Whitson turned around. He spent the next ten minutes taking poses while Leinau considered his next move.

  Chapter 17

  Herb Charles floated through the swinging doors of the Nineteenth PDU, all smiles, and popped his head into Lieutenant Stein’s office. Detective Charles is not a demonstrative sort and yet he gave a thumbs-up sign to the boss.

  “You hit big on Wingo, Herbie?” Stein asked.

  “I hit big on a stash of video equipment,” Charles said. “We going to get rid of one hell of a lot of paper tonight, Loo.”

  Stein got up from his desk. “Yeah, what do you have, Herbie?”

  “I sweated our boys overnight and what do you know if it didn’t work like a charm. You know the boys we got the other day for ripping off apartment lobby TV monitors?”

  “Boys is right. They were scared out of their minds.”

  “Sure were. It worked.”

  “You recovered yet?” Stein asked.

  “I got a confirmed recovery. The stuff’s up in a roach hole in the Two-Three. A couple of uniforms opened up the place on a warrant and I’m going on up now.”

  “Nice work, Herbie. Really nice.”

  “Okay, Loo. See you.”

  Charles put on his coat and his trademark hat, an upturned plaid porkpie. He went down to the lobby and signed out for an unmarked car. He took Valentine along with him for the ride up to East Harlem.

  “Everybody’s involved in crime and drugs these days,” Charles said as he drove the car through the early evening traffic up Park Avenue. “And I mean everybody. From the bottom of our society to the top.”

  He shook his head. “Man, it wasn’t always that way. It makes me really feel my age, all this stuff. Sometimes, though, like right now, the fact that we have this big criminal dilettante group sort of works in our favor.

  “This is a pretty good case of when sweating your suspects works. We brought these boys in and we popped them right into the slammer on an overnight. You do a little paper delay and you can keep kids like this two nights over.

  “Mostly, a night is all it takes. Some have better stomachs than the others. Anyway, after a night or two of seeing what the mental midgets look like who’ll be spending most of their lives in the system one way or another and our boys are pretty receptive when we ask, ‘How about helping us now?’

  “I’ll tell you, some of them ask us if they can help in any little way. You ever spend a night in the overnight lockup and you’ll understand. These guys start thinking about the fact that the creatures they’re locked up with have been there years and years all together and they sweat real good.

  “So it doesn’t do us much good just to lock somebody up and throw away the key. Sweating works. It’s better if we can get some of the property back in property crimes like this. So, we’re open to deals.

  “You manage to work up a pretty good roster of snitches that way, too. Ah, what a system, huh? Sometimes it doesn’t always seem right, but I’ve been at this a long time now and it’s better today, that’s for sure. A lot better.”

  Herb Charles was a rookie cop in 1956, then one of so few black police officers that there were only two prospects for him, so it seemed. He would be forever
on a foot patrol in Times Square, his precinct assignment, or because he was black he might possibly fall across some unique opportunity for attention—and, hopefully, advancement.

  In Charles’ case, the latter happened.

  Charles’ opportunity for attention came on the occasion of a scuffle between Miles Davis, the jazz musician, and New York’s finest outside the old Birdland.

  A lot of people were calling the cops “New York’s Whitest” at that time, an expression given extra coinage the night Miles Davis was beaten up.

  For days the marquee of Birdland was ablaze with neon word of Miles Davis’ scheduled concert. Outside, there were billboards with Davis’ photograph prominently displayed.

  On the afternoon of the concert the Birdland management requested a police watch, what with expectations of a large crowd bound to be disappointed when they found there would be no tickets available for day-of-performance rates that night. The musicians had scheduled a rehearsal inside the hall and most arrived early and entered Birdland through the stage door.

  Not Miles Davis.

  Davis walked up to the police cordon and tried walking through as if he were the star, which he was.

  “Nobody through here,” a cop said.

  Miles Davis ignored the remark and tried getting through anyway and a few more cops told him that nobody was allowed through. So Davis introduced himself.

  It was no soap. “Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t care if you’re Uncle Remus, you ain’t getting through here,” a cop said. Something like that.

  Davis was highly irritated. He pointed to the billboards right behind the cops, the ones with his photo. What transpired after that is still at issue, as there was never any trial. The word “nigger” came up several times during the melee that pursued. One thing led to another and Miles Davis was hospitalized after being beaten with a nightstick.

  The dust hadn’t begun to settle when Davis’ attorneys filed separate $10,000,000 lawsuits against the following: six cops, personally; the city of New York; the mayor; the music hall; the police commissioner. Quite obviously, lawsuits of this nature are subject to some extensive pretrial negotiation and some are even settled out of court.

  The trouble with the Davis case was that the musician refused to talk to anyone connected with the city—most especially the police department—who happened to have a white face. Enter Herbert Charles, rookie police officer of the Times Square precinct.