Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  Peter went home with Nadine that night and made love to her and told her she was beautiful, a lie she had been waiting to hear from a man for many years. When she woke, she found him busy in her kitchen. He was so sweet. And a pretty fair hand with breakfast.

  He didn’t have to go to work that day, he told her. Nadine did.

  “Why don’t you just take your time? Stay around here as long as you like,” she said.

  Then just as she left, she asked him, “Will I see you when I get home, I hope?”

  “If you want,” he said. “I’d like that very much. My God, what a way to meet. What a story we’ll have for our grandchildren.”

  Detective Enterlin had heard this same tale, with only slight alterations, for three years. Peter had been a very busy man. Enterlin personally had twenty-eight young women complainants and there were that many and more in the suburban communities around New York and New Jersey and even more that she would never hear about.

  Peter was at home in Nadine Weinstock’s apartment when she returned, all right. He said he’d taken care of everything in regard to his own place, but he would be really short on funds until his insurance company paid off.

  Nadine loaned him several hundred dollars and wondered the next day where she could have misplaced her diamond earrings.

  She didn’t see Peter for two days, then he called her and asked if they might get together, his treat. His insurance company had come through early for him.

  The dinner was wonderful and Peter was expansive, telling Nadine of his dreams of independence in business, wealth and what he would do with it and with whom he would share it. “It could be you,” he told her.

  Another lie that chained her to Peter. He spent the night at her place. And again, his day was free. Nadine went off to work, returned to find Peter fussing around her kitchen and fixing the refrigerator, which made too much noise. The next day she was missing cash and another piece of jewelry, a ring of no particular value she had purchased at a crafts show in Maine.

  Peter expressed alarm when she told him that she thought someone had been stealing her belongings. He was convincing. She didn’t see him for another week, during which time her television set, stereo system, the rest of her jewelry and a mink wrap were stolen on Thursday. The police came and looked around and asked if anyone had a key to her place.

  Yes, she said. Her boy friend. But she was sure it couldn’t be him.

  She replaced her belongings, little by little. But they would be stolen again, promptly after one of Peter’s furtive but entirely charming visits.

  Then one evening Nadine returned to the singles bar where she’d met Peter. And there he was. She wasn’t seen by him. But she watched Peter go through his act, watched him leave the bar with the somewhat homely young woman.

  That became her first call to the Nineteenth Precinct and her first contact with Detective Enterlin.

  Now, on Christmas Eve, for God knows what reason, Peter had telephoned Nadine and asked her to meet him at this laundromat. For lack of anything better to do, Nadine even brought a bag of laundry along with her. Detective Enterlin sat in a plastic chair inside the laundromat and watched dryers spin around on Christmas Eve. Outside, a few doors down, Herbert Charles looked at a ten-year-old photograph, the only one available, of the man who would make the night pay off, hopefully.

  The photo was very blurred and Charles couldn’t make very much of it. The profile wasn’t much more helpful. White male, approximately thirty-eight, brown hair, brown eyes, even features, five feet and ten inches, medium build.

  Charles tried to think how many women this man had bedded in his years and he shook his head. Charles was a man who had every sort of pleasure and every sort of problem he wanted to know about all wrapped up in his wife.

  Peter was late.

  Fifteen minutes had gone by since the time Peter said he would be at the laundromat. Detective Enterlin told Nadine to continue waiting for him, to walk home with him if he showed. She and Charles would go to her building. Maybe they’d scared him off, she suggested.

  Another twenty minutes passed as Enterlin and Charles waited, parked outside Nadine’s building on York Avenue. They talked about daughters.

  “I can’t complain,” Enterlin said. “She stayed home the whole time, right through her engagement and all. I remember her saying to me, ‘Why should I move out on my own? I want to save up my money and stay right here. Then we’ll be able to get a real nice place.’”

  “That’s exactly the way it was with my older daughter. The same thing,” Charles said. “But my younger girl! Oh boy, she just knew it all. She had to have her own place. Well, she did all right.”

  Enterlin saw him first.

  “My God, we’ve got him,” she said.

  Charles saw Nadine pulling her laundry in a little cart. “The guy can’t even pull her laundry cart?” he said. He studied the picture he was holding and then looked at Peter, in the flesh, as he made his way around the corner toward the entrance of Nadine’s building. “I expected some sort of Adonis, I must say. Look at this guy. Does he have a wart or something on his nose, or am I seeing things?”

  “You’re not seeing things.”

  Charles chuckled.

  “I’m going to go in right after them,” Enterlin said. “Pull up right after they go inside the door. Let me get beyond the second door before you come in.”

  Nadine and Peter walked through the first door. Enterlin stepped out of the car and walked into the doorway behind the two. A grandmotherly woman with a neat red hairdo was not a suspicious character so far as Peter was concerned. He held the inner door open for her after Nadine had used her key.

  Nadine walked ahead toward the elevator and Peter ran a comb through his hair quickly, glancing at himself in a small mirror on the lobby wall.

  “Peter?” Detective Enterlin asked the man with the pronounced wart on his nose.

  Nadine started crying softly, her face averted.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Detective Enterlin, Nineteenth Precinct. This is Detective Charles.”

  Charles stood behind Enterlin now. She had left a wad of paper stuck in the door so he could get inside.

  “We have bench warrants for your arrest, Peter. Now I’m going to read you your rights while Detective Charles puts the handcuffs on you.”

  “Let’s go, pal,” Charles said. “Maybe you know the drill?”

  Charles placed a hand on the shoulders of a very bewildered Peter Michaels and assorted aliases and guided him to the wall opposite the elevator. He placed a foot between Peter’s legs and gently kicked his feet apart.

  “Hands on the wall, over your head,” he told Peter.

  Charles patted down the suspect, pulled his arms behind his waist and snapped on a pair of cuffs. “Too tight?” he asked Peter.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry, man. I’ll loosen them a bit if I can.”

  Detective Enterlin read him his rights. He understood.

  Nadine Weinstock sobbed and bit her lip and stood near the elevator with her laundry cart while the man she had loved, no matter what he’d done, was taken away from her. She had had him taken away. He didn’t look back.

  Peter’s jeans were awfully tight for a man with a paunch and he had trouble getting into the cramped back seat.

  “You’re eating too well these days, Peter,” Detective Enterlin said. She took the driver’s seat while Charles climbed in back with the suspect and tried his best to do something about the tightness of the cuffs.

  “It won’t be long, man,” Charles said. “It’s the rules, you know.”

  “Does Nadine know?” Peter asked.

  Enterlin turned around and looked at Peter before she started up the car. “Should she know something, Peter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Detective Charles chuckled. “Peter, my man, you’re a legend in your own time.”

  Chapter 18

  When the holidays had passed, but still l
ong before the air would warm, Cibella Borges was officially dismissed as a police officer of New York City. It was finally over for her and she was happy about that part of it, at least. She talked to reporters in her lawyer’s office and hoped that part of it would be over, too.

  “I knew they were going to fire me, but I kept hoping and praying,” she said. “I liked my job very much.”

  She didn’t think she would but she sobbed. The newspaper photographers elbowed each other for the best angle at capturing the moment in a picture, the fall of the “nudie cop, Naughty Nina.”

  Her lawyer, Michael Vecchione, insisted his client had broken neither the law nor the rules of official conduct of the police department as spelled out in the handbook. What else could he say? What would anyone expect him to say?

  “When she posed for the magazines,” Vecchione said, “she was not a police officer.”

  It was a defense that had been totally unsuccessful where it counted, which was during Borges’ departmental trial. The hearing officer, Departmental Trials Commissioner Jaime Rios, rejected the defense and sided with the prosecuting officer, who simply noted that civilian employees of the police department were subject to the same rules and regulations as sworn personnel and that’s just what the handbook said. Cibella Borges was a civilian police employee at the time of the photo sessions with Beaver magazine and the call that a judge had to make involved whether her conduct was detrimental to the department and her function as a part of that department—not whether she was an officer or a clerk. It was a bit of hair that Vecchione simply could not split, no matter how mightily he tried.

  Vecchione’s only success came in winning Borges a string of pretrial delays, mostly due, he said, to her schedules for surgery. Now he told the press that he would file appeals.

  What else was he expected to say?

  But Cibella Borges, for her part, wanted to clear up questions that had nothing to do with lawyers or courts or handbooks. She wanted the reporters to know, for instance, that she did not pose “for the money.” She posed, she said, because she had doubts about her sexuality, that she was terribly confused about her femininity and that—rightly or wrongly—she thought that spreading her legs for the pages of a magazine purchased by lonely men might prove her femininity.

  “My doctor told me I had to go in for another operation,” she said, “and that there was something wrong with my insides. My reaction, like any other female, was I thought I had cancer.

  “But I could see it in his face. He told me I could never have kids. I was twenty-two years old.”

  The reporters wrote down her comments in their notebooks, with neither question nor challenge to whatever she had to say on this, her final day of attention from them.

  Even so, this final press confrontation—which had begun with the tabloid headline writers and their delightful tags and with Cibella Borges’ pro forma lies—was winding down as a sort of pornography, a very pathetic sort.

  “I wanted to feel like a woman!” Cibella declared.

  There was a terrible pause and then Cibella’s shoulders heaved and she began sobbing uncontrollably and covering her face with her hands. She sat up straight when she had regained some of her control and the photographers danced again. It had been far more dignified posing naked, posing lewdly, for a single photographer in his studio than this. Now dozens of photographers, lenses for faces, pushed and shoved in order to best show the multitudes what Cibella Borges looked like now—stripped of her emotional stability.

  Newspaper publishers would always have the best of both worlds. They could profit by pornography by teasing their readers with snappy headlines, they could even show the downfall of the headlined lady. They could do this and they didn’t even have to pay Cibella for the privilege. And they would sell more copies of their newspapers than the likes of Beaver or Pub or Girls on Girls could ever hope.

  The cameras clicked.

  “I was somewhere else when I met the photographer,” she said of Tony Currin, whose testimony helped damn her, “and I thought I had nothing to lose.

  “I had an ‘I don’t care’ attitude. I wasn’t thinking about the department, I didn’t even think of the family. I was nervous and I was scared.”

  Then Vecchione talked again. Nobody bothered taking his picture.

  He went over his defense again, relating how he’d told Commissioner Rios that prior to Borges even thinking of posing in the buff—or not thinking, as the case was, according to his client—she had been officially disqualified for hiring as a cop because of her extensive history of surgery.

  Some eighteen months after posing for Beaver, as it turned out, though, Cibella Borges was notified that there had been a waiver in her case. Three days after that, she was inducted into training as a cop.

  Cibella Borges wept. The image of a dark-haired, darkeyed, diminutive Dominican beauty who had been a fair cop in her day was transmitted around the world via United Press International and the Associated Press.

  Her shame would live, her fame would die quickly.

  The late afternoon edition of the New York Post would commemorate the event thusly:

  I PRAYED FOR MERCY,

  SOBS FIRED NUDIE COP

  Girl gets boot over

  poses in skin mags

  Back in the Nineteenth Precinct station house, Cibella Borges’ sympathizers were male, her detractors female.

  “We felt sorry for her at first,” Officer Jean Truta said, “but then, as the story came out, more and more. Well, it’s not just that she doesn’t belong on the police force because of this, it’s much more.

  “It’s not easy being a woman and a cop at the same time. You can’t be just a ‘cop.’ You’re a ‘lady cop.’ When have you ever read about a ‘gentleman cop’? We’ve got something at stake here.

  “I feel sorry for her, but I can’t sympathize. There was a defense fund going around once. I didn’t contribute. I don’t think any of the women did.”

  On the very same day that Commissioner Rios handed down his ruling against Cibella Borges, two gentlemen cops were arrested in a Times Square bar in the tiny hours.

  They had allegedly been performing a striptease. After their strip, it was alleged, the gentleman officers raped and “sodomized,” according to the report, a woman on hand at the bar.

  The officers were fired.

  “We have a hell of a good chance, because the most important thing in something like this is controlling the location. And we’ve done that.”

  Detective Charlie Leinau was explaining the finer points of what he hoped would be a sting to his very eager listener, William W. Whitson.

  “And just by being able to do that, to set the place, we learned something about who we’re dealing with,” he said to Whitson. “Know what that is?”

  Whitson thought for a moment. On Leinau’s instruction, he’d followed the directions of his blackmailer and placed an ad in the personals section of the weekly Village Voice. In the ad he acknowledged receipt of the letters and said he would be willing to meet. But he added something, at Leinau’s instruction. The meeting place would be of his choosing or else he’d call the police.

  “Well, they didn’t quibble about it much,” Whitson said. “They seemed in a hurry to get it over with.”

  “And bingo! That’s it, exactly. We’re dealing with idiots. Not just greenhorns, but idiots. They can be intimidated. When you can intimidate your perps, you’ve got them by the balls, which is just where you want to have them. It feels so good when you squeeze them hard.”

  Whitson nodded, smiling with appreciation.

  “Lot like business, ain’t it?”

  “It is, indeed, Detective Leinau. It is indeed.”

  Leinau sipped his coffee through a hole he’d made in the plastic top. “I don’t know why I’m drinking this stuff out here. I could be in there, where it’s nice and warm.”

  He and Whitson sat in an unmarked squad car across from one of Leinau’s favored meeting spots, a
large coffee shop on a Park Avenue corner, adjoining a hotel used by Prince Rainier and his sort of crowd. Leinau checked his wristwatch. Still too early.

  The restaurant had big glass windows, one facing the avenue, the other the street. That way, squad cars could be situated in at least eight positions for a clear view of the entire dining room.

  Besides the door to the avenue, the only other way out of the restaurant was through a smaller doorway connecting the coffee shop with the hotel lobby by way of a small corridor lined with telephone booths, the handiest thing in the world for cops on a stakeout. Leinau had a man from the weekend anticrime squad sitting in one of those booths at this minute.

  It was a Saturday and it was twenty minutes to ten o’clock in the morning.

  Leinau had wanted a Saturday because there would be just enough people in the coffee shop to make the perps feel comfortable, but not the usual weekday crowd that would make it hard for the cops to maintain a close watch. Leinau also figured that the perps might have jobs. Perps didn’t like to take off work. It might create suspicion. It had played this way more than once. The hoods liked things smooth and trouble-free, just like the cops.

  “Did you check on Mickey like I told you?” Leinau asked. He was almost ready to make his move.

  “Of course. I gave him a twenty and told him I needed work done in the kitchen right away, this morning, as we’ll be entertaining tonight.”

  “And he never complained?”

  “Ordinarily, he would, even for the twenty. Not today, though.”

  “Great.”

  Mickey thought he was creating himself an alibi, should any little thing go wrong. What Mickey couldn’t figure was that the cops wanted to know exactly where he was at a specific time.

  “Poor fellow,” Leinau said. “Actually, he’s a very good super.”

  “Yeah, when he’s not shaking down the tenants.”

  Leinau picked lint off the lapel of his new topcoat.

  “I think I can get the I.R.S. to go along with this,” he said. “How do I look?”