“This day and age, a rookie would never have the opportunity I had then. It was a freak opportunity, of course, but I sure did run with it,” Charles said.
He became the official go-between in the city’s negotiations with Miles Davis, a well-known international performer who was beaten senseless by the New York Police Department for behaving like some uppity nigger. Never mind about the big photograph in the billboard right under the noses of the cops who beat him.
Davis settled with the city out of court for what was then a considerable sum, even though it was far short of the fantastical $10,000,000 figure. He settled for $250,000.
“We had one hell of a party,” Charles said. “Back then, I had to sort of sneak on over to the party. You know, I was the city representative and the city was the bad guy in the piece. But I’ll tell you now I had a great time at that party.”
Herbie Charles is still in contact with the jazz musicians he met during that period.
In ’56 he was a little worried that his function with the police department might be related strictly to cases involving racial controversy. Charles was and is, after all, a calm, reassuring man, intelligent and quiet and fair. In short, a good man to put into a volatile setting, and during the late 1950s men of such cool stability were rare when it came to racial matters.
Two years after his handling the Miles Davis matter, with a level-headed diplomacy not in the highest councils of government today, let alone in a rookie foot patrolman, Herb Charles would show his superior officers that his temperament was a good police quality across the board. It happened the day before Thanksgiving, 1958.
Officer Herbert Charles was walking his beat in Times Square, as usual. At one point he stood outside a saloon on Seventh Avenue called the Pick-a-Rib, popular with gamblers, journalists and other lowlifes.
Charles stood with his back to the window of the Pick-a-Rib, watching the passing parade of Times Square. It was a peaceable day. The theaters would have matinees that afternoon, a Wednesday, and most New Yorkers would stay away from Times Square in droves in their weekly sharing of the heart of the city with little old ladies from out of town. There would be an early performance that night, then the theaters would close down for the holiday.
Herbert Charles watched the street, said hello to some shopkeepers he knew as they passed him by and he thought about the dinner his wife and his mother were planning, jointly, for tomorrow’s holiday. It was a first cooperative effort and, Charles hoped, a pleasant one. Herb Charles liked peace in his household since he had little of that on the job.
He heard a crash of glass behind him, then felt shards of it rip into the exposed skin of his neck. He ducked his head reflexively and a bullet whizzed by, striking a telephone booth.
Suddenly, from the barroom door, came somebody Charles knew—Officer Jimmy McDermott, an Irish cop he’d been friendly with many times after tour.
“There’s been a shooting, Herbie,” McDermott told Charles. “I’ll go turn it in. You take over here.”
McDermott, senior to Charles, ran up Seventh Avenue. Charles went into the bar and found five dead men.
“From the position of them, I knew only that someone had just taken shots at these guys, maybe just five to eight shots, and nailed everyone. It looked like some plan, except that the five guys were in all different places around the horseshoe bar.”
Somebody told Charles that the killer was the guy who just ran out the door.
Jimmy McDermott the cop?
A backup uniform team came into the bar. Charles had them take over and ran up Seventh Avenue in search of the fleeing Jimmy McDermott, dreading what he might come across, if he was able to catch up to him.
Never in his life had Charles run like he did that November afternoon. He was one of a handful of cops in the city who knew that cops were just as easily brutal as the next guy, just as corruptible and just as redeemable. And that’s what made Charles run that day. He was a cop, a black cop when simply that combination made you a controversial man, and he was a believer in the possibility that one honest soul could change a society in need of changing. He’d picked the New York City Police Department to change.
He sighted McDermott, walking along Seventh. He called out. McDermott spun around and drew a gun out of his pants pocket and fired. Charles ducked and McDermott took off again.
His lungs and legs ached and he was afraid for his life, but Herb Charles knew he was chasing, for whatever reason, a madman who was a threat to innocent people.
From out of nowhere, it seemed, a pair of detectives he knew appeared on a corner. They saw the fleeing McDermott. One of the detectives knew him and called out. McDermott answered with a shot. Then the detectives saw Charles in pursuit.
“We’ll radio!” one of them called as Charles passed them by in full sprint.
In a second or two, a squad car jumped the curb and cut off McDermott, who fired on it.
Charles drew his gun, dropped to his knees and assumed the firing stance. But he didn’t have to shoot. Another cop did and McDermott fell.
Charles was credited with the capture and he earned a gold shield for it, becoming now Detective Herbert Charles.
“What we found out after all that was a whole lot of nothing,” Charles said. “We reconstructed what happened and it played like this:
“McDermott walks into the Pick-a-Rib and takes a spot standing at the bar. There are five guys, all of them very big gamblers, standing around the bar, but they’re not talking to one another. They’re just there, that’s all. McDermott takes a gun out and starts firing. He’s got a couple shots that go wild, which I felt with the glass flying out all over me, but he gets all five, one at a time, bing-bang-bing-bang-bing, right in the forehead and they fall backward dead as doornails.
“The only thing we know is that the dead guys are gamblers, that’s all. We don’t have any hint of any trouble in McDermott’s life. Everybody and his brother talked to his widow, trying to figure out what the hell happened and we get exactly nowhere. Nothing makes any sense.
“McDermott, so far as his closest buddies knew, was no gambler. He didn’t owe any juice guys money and he never had any reason to borrow so much as a yard in his whole life anyway. He was a good, solid Irish cop and a family man. A straight shooter in more ways than one, as it happened.
“To this day, nobody knows why. No connection was found between McDermott and any of the guys he killed and there was no particular connection that tied the five together. Nothing in McDermott’s background gave us a hint.
“It might have been that he would have skipped town or something. That’s the only conclusion you could draw. My first instinct was to help a fellow officer and if I hadn’t thought about what we call ‘worst scenario’ now, well maybe he’d have killed someone else.”
The way Keenan saw it, the first thing he had to do was get hold of Dory Smith. Maybe she’d be cooled down by now.
He telephoned her apartment from a pay phone on Lexington Avenue. He didn’t want anyone hearing at the station house.
She answered on the first ring, which surprised him. For a solid week, all he’d received was her answering machine and she hadn’t returned his calls.
“Hi,” he said.
She recognized his voice, of course. She’d been waiting to hear from him, hoping desperately to hear.
“Tommy, I’m so glad you called.”
“I have to see you.”
“When?”
“What about tonight?”
“Tonight’s Christmas Eve. What about your family?”
“I’ll handle it. I have to see you.”
“Good,” she said. “I don’t feel like being alone for the eighth year in a row.”
“I can be there at seven.”
Ed Smith and his ex-wife, Ruth, and their daughter, Eve, had dinner at Gage & Tollner in downtown Brooklyn. He’d been seeing Ruth every day since he knocked on her door, wondering every day if it would be possible to step back in time.
Tonight, as they walked through snowy streets and listened to the crunching beneath their feet, each holding a hand of their little girl and hoisting her up into the air between them when she jumped over some imaginary hill, Ruth said to him, “Could you see yourself married to me again?”
How could he answer a question like that? He could only think to ask her the question in reverse. And the answer to that would be no. For the past several days, he’d shown her the face she wanted to see, the face of a man fully possessed of power and confidence. But it wasn’t real. Smith had stayed cleaned up for a very long time now and he wasn’t growing into it. He felt conspicuous on the street, though his work hadn’t suffered particularly. He was just in a different mode, that’s all. He could return to being a bum if he wanted, any time.
He was good at it. All that it required to be a man nobody wanted to pay any attention to, especially women, was to take on the look of a man beaten down, saddened beyond repair. People want to move on to others when they encounter such a man.
For a few days, Ed Smith had at least looked like the sort of man Ruth wanted. He hadn’t asked a single question about Darryl, though he was burning to know what had happened. More than that, he wanted to get back to his own closed-up little world, God help him.
But there she was, so beautiful in the moonlight of Christmas Eve, proposing to him. Could this have happened last year? Or next?
He struggled to keep in mind two truths he’d developed for himself over the years. Both had to do with women.
The first truth was that women are creatures who operate by a code that no one, to Smith’s knowledge, had ever been able to crack. The second was a little more complicated.
Of all the divorced couples Ed Smith knew, there was the common element of a residual struggle to keep the union together. This usually occurred just before the ink had dried on the final decree. Suddenly, there were new statements of undying love and affection.
Smith used to think this crazy because he’d felt the same way twice himself. But when he saw it happen with other people, over and over again, he began to understand the phenomenon for what it was, a basic human need to hang on to the only thing that can be owned or fully known, the past. Probably, it kept the human species alive and well, this urge to stay together.
But there was a requirement that had to be met by all the couples that none fully realized until it was either too late or until they understood themselves to be twice romantically blessed. The requirement was that you had to fall in love with her, or him, all over again, knowing even more than you knew the first time around. It was a difficult trick and most people Smith knew took it far too lightly.
Here was Ruth, though, proposing to him on Christmas Eve, with their little girl bouncing along with the pure joy of the occasion. Ruth, it seemed, had fallen in love with Ed Smith all over again. Or had she fallen in love with the image he’d set out deliberately to project? Was this what he’d been trying to get from her, after all? Just this moment and nothing more?
“I’ve been thinking about it, if that’s what you mean,” he said to her.
She smiled. “We’ve got time to talk later.”
They had a fine dinner and went home to Ruth’s place on Pineapple Street. Smith stayed over.
He awoke from a sound sleep screaming. The usual night-mare.
Keenan hadn’t said anything about dinner. He hadn’t said anything at all about why he had to see her, but Dory had a full table set out for him in her little apartment.
The last time he saw her, the night he slept off a drunk in his car and Ciffo had taken him home, Dory had set out dinner, too. She asked him then his intentions and he told her that sounded oddly antique to him, but he didn’t believe that; it was just something to say at that moment.
“Are you going to divorce her?” she asked.
Keenan hadn’t thought about that. He hadn’t thought about marrying Dory Smith, either, which would be a reason for seeking a divorce from Mairead. He told her this.
“I’m to be your mistress, is that it?”
He hardly considered her such. A mistress was a woman who was supported financially, which he couldn’t do. A mistress was a woman who provided a married man an extra sexual outlet, but their relationship was only minimally sexual, Keenan reminded Dory.
She began crying then. Keenan reached over to touch her and she made a sort of growling sound. She clawed him and drew blood.
He left her that night and drove around to two or three saloons down in the Seventeenth Precinct. He never remembered driving back up into the Nineteenth and parking near Tony Ciffo’s Fuego.
… Now, on Christmas Eve, they were back as they were. Dory said she wanted a “fresh start.” Keenan wanted to end it between them, but it sure was going to be hard, what with the giddy mood she was in. She had a present for him, she kept saying.
They looked at each other with very pleasant faces, but they couldn’t find much to talk about. When they first started seeing one another, they talked into the night, into many mornings, and Keenan was in his “glory,” she had said, so funny and articulate, drunk or no.
It never occurred to Dory Smith what Keenan had in mind in the way of an announcement that evening. Otherwise, she might not have told him midway through their meal that she was pregnant.
Detective Theresa Enterlin was one hour away from quitting her tour to go home on Christmas Eve. So was Detective Herbert Charles.
Then came the telephone call from Nadine Weinstock.
Detective Enterlin heard her out, calmed her down as best she could, and said, “You’re just going to have to go ahead with it. Don’t worry, we’ll be right there with you. There’s no danger in this and you’ll be helping a lot of other young women. Okay?”
She wrote down information on a pad for several minutes, then went to Detective Charles’ desk and spoke to him about it.
“Well, you know we’re likely to get the collar on this,” he said. “And you know that means we’ll be stuck here two, maybe three hours longer with the booking and the paper on it.”
“What choice do we have?”
“Little. Make that none. How many cases will it wipe away?”
“Over seventy.”
“Let’s tell the boss. I’m with you.”
“Thanks,” Enterlin said.
“You’re welcome, but I don’t think there’s any choice here.”
“Thanks anyway.”
In another ten minutes, Detectives Enterlin and Charles were off in an unmarked car to the corner of Second Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street, a block from a place called Elaine’s, the famous watering hole frequented by such celebrities as Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. But the place Enterlin and Charles were concerned with was an all-night laundromat, the suggested rendezvous point.
There, Nadine Weinstock was to meet a man she knew as Peter Michaels, also known by various others as Michael Peters, Peter Michaelson, Peter Mitchell, Peter McMaster and Michael Patterson. Peter was wanted in three states—New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—on a total of seventy-six complaints, some of which had gone as far as the preliminary examination stage, of theft, alienation of affection, unlawful use of automobiles and forgery.
All the charges against Peter involved his prodigious talent for making lonely young single women, most of his victims residents of Manhattan, fall absolutely in love with him. If Nadine Weinstock’s story was any indication, his pattern was pretty much unvaried. Detective Enterlin had first heard of the mysterious Peter three years ago. Nadine Weinstock was the only woman she could manage to keep angry enough to help her engineer an arrest.
About eight months ago, Nadine Weinstock and a girl friend went and did what they vowed, for perhaps the tenth time, they would never stoop to doing again. They dropped into one of the dozens of Upper East Side singles bars.
Peter was smitten with Nadine Weinstock, a slight, pleasant-looking young woman with wavy red hair and brown eyes and a long, slightly crooked nose wh
o bit her nails rather badly and worked as a researcher for a scientific publishing firm. Her parents had staked her to a first apartment in the city, a bright place in a large, well-secured building on York Avenue at Ninety-first Street, and they hoped for the best.
Nadine Weinstock was like a lot of other young men and women on the Upper East Side, migrants from moneyed suburbs who stay in the city for a requisite period, marry as well as they can and then move back to the sort of places they came from in the first place. They are both attracted to the city and repelled by it and the Upper East Side allows for a glimpse of urbanity without having to actually get one’s feet too terribly wet. With very little preparation for the urban challenge in the way of character and texture, the Nadines of the Nineteenth Precinct are perfect opportunities for the likes of Peter. His job is achingly simple. He simply talks to them gently in a saloon where the drinks are overpriced and the patrons are overly trustful.
He told her that he worked in the fur trade and he was pleasant and funny and low-keyed. He bought her a drink and then said he had to find a hotel somewhere because the most unbelievable thing had happened to him.
“What?” she asked. They always did.
“Nothing that can’t be repaired in a few days, anyway. Maybe a week. It’ll set me back, but I’ll make it.”
“What?”
Peter had been robbed, he said, and he’d ducked into this bar to have himself a drink when he realized that his keys had been stolen along with his billfold and that since he was new to the city he hadn’t left keys with anyone. He wouldn’t be able to get into his apartment without having the door broken down, since the super didn’t have a key for the private dead bolt he’d installed.
“Well, it’s a mess. I’m just lucky I’m sort of paranoid and keep some cash in my shoe, that’s all.”
She bought him a drink. Then she had another. And he said he’d really have to be going. But he didn’t go and she didn’t seem to mind and he knew he had her.
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