Precinct 19

by Thomas Adcock

  He was. But more than that, he was amazed by his wife.

  “Now then,” Mairead said, drawing her hands together below her chin, “we’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to do about our problem, aren’t we?”

  On the way back to the house, when they’d decided to call it quits for the tour, Clark and Trani spotted a woman standing near a car on Lexington Avenue at Sixty-third, her hands waving. As they drove closer, they heard her shouting.

  Inside the car was a man, also shouting.

  “Easy does it, Carl,” Clark said. “Looks like a domestic. You know how these things go. They can blow up like nothing else in the business.”

  “Yeah, I know. Just watch your mouth, Jack.”

  Clark shrugged. He stopped the car parallel to the black Mercedes. Trani walked slowly around the front of the car, noting the license plate. He pulled his shield from under his shirt and let it hang from the chain.

  “Police officers, ma’am,” he said.

  He thought he heard her snarl.

  Clark, meanwhile, motioned for the man at the wheel to roll down the passenger-side window. The procedure in a domestic was to separate the parties and talk calmly, one officer to each in order to defuse the situation.

  The man rolled down his window.

  “Look, we’re just having a little argument here, Officer,” he said. “Nothing serious.”

  “Sure sounds serious, pal. Can I help?” Clark asked.

  “Well, no. We just broke up tonight, that’s all.”

  “Oh, that’s pretty tough sometimes. You going to be all right? She doesn’t sound at all well.”

  He looked back over his shoulder. Trani was talking to her quietly, hands in the pockets of his jacket.

  “She’s the nervous type.”

  Clark laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” the woman shouted. “I heard that! Whose side you want to be on, anyway? You’re all fucking alike. Men! Feh!”

  Trani told her to hush.

  “Don’t tell me to keep my voice down!” she screamed. “This is New York Fucking City and it’s the noisiest fucking place on planet Earth and I’ll do my part to make it a little fucking noisier if you don’t fucking mind!”

  Clark said to the man in the Mercedes, “Yeah, see what you mean. Can’t you take this someplace else, like your apartment or something?”

  “Are you nuts, Officer?”

  “Well, hell, look what I’m doing for a living.”

  The woman walked around Trani to get a better view of Clark in the unmarked police car.

  “You two boys having a pretty good fucking laugh about all this, huh?” she shrieked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ‘no ma’am’ me!”

  Trani tried talking to her, reached out a hand to touch her arm. “Listen—”

  The woman spun around and clawed him. She managed to sink her nails into the top of his wrist, caught them there and squeezed, embedding her nails even deeper into his skin.

  “Jesus Christ!” Trani yelled.

  The woman clawed at him with her other hand. Blood spattered her coat and face.

  Clark jumped out of the car and ran around the front of the car. He grabbed the woman’s elbows and pressed them together behind her back. She bucked backward, raised her foot and tried to kick Clark in his testicles.

  Trani had the cuffs out, snapped her up and then he and Clark each took an arm and led her, screaming and cursing, to the squad car. They bent her double over the rear deck.

  “You’re going to have to be quiet if you want to hear your rights, lady,” Clark said.

  “My God, you’re going to actually arrest her?” the man in the Mercedes said.

  “You got it, pal,” Clark said. “Stick around a minute, we’re going to need your name.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “You’re telling me,” Clark said.

  The woman calmed herself. She went completely limp, actually. Clark radioed for a backup unit and when it arrived placed the handcuffed woman in back and had her run into the station house and held in the women’s lockup until he got there to do the paperwork.

  “Carl,” he said to Trani, “I think we’d better get a look at that.”

  After taking the particulars from the man in the Mercedes, Clark took Trani to Lenox Hill Hospital at Park and Seventy-seventh. He radioed over the PTP for Laffey and called him to join the watch at the hospital.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” Laffey said as he held Trani’s hand in his, turning it over. “But these things have a way of spreading down to the worst places. Heard of a guy who lost his limbs and it started just this way.”

  Trani’s eyes grew. He was a bit of a hypochondriac, but he lived, after all, in a city where more people are bitten each year by human beings than by rats.

  “Listen, Carl. You got clean underwear?” Laffey asked.

  Trani pulled his hand away.

  “Aw, it’s not going to be all that bad,” Laffey said. “The doctors will probably tell you you can’t jerk off for a few days. What do they know?”

  Back at the station house, Clark worked up the paper. Laffey ordered a booking charge of felonious assault, since the victim was a police officer. Otherwise, it would have been simple assault at best.

  “But you know what the hell’s going to happen,” Laffey said. “She’ll get it busted down. She’ll show up in court with a nice skirt and white gloves and she’ll be sugar and spice and everything nice.”

  But the booking would be good enough to get her jailed overnight, which was the idea.

  Chapter 20

  Matty Monahan threw in the towel, which is to say he put through papers to release a police composite sketch of the man he’d hunted for so long—Kano the arsonist and killer. He signed the release and the sketch, along with information advising readers to call detectives at the special number—577-TIPS—that would appear in the Daily News and the Post tomorrow. With the Times, you never knew. A new agrarian research breakthrough in Katmandu could knock a little matter like a killer on the loose in New York right off the page.

  Monahan sat hunched over the forms on a desk at the Nineteenth PDU on St. Patrick’s Day. He wore his regulation bright green necktie and filled in the blanks: dark-skinned Hispanic male, thirty to forty years old, five feet seven, black hair and moustache.

  Someone in the public information office at Police Head quarters downtown would type up the information from Monahan’s standard form as a news release and then deliver it immediately to the local press, as if it were hot stuff, which it wasn’t. Monahan put the carbons of the form in his inactive file.

  Detective Joe Simon, too, pushed a file into inactive status. Absolutely nothing was forthcoming on the Paul McRae murder.

  People say you can’t get away with murder. You can. Killers do, every day.

  An officer named Wisneski poked his head through the door of the detective squad room. The first Irish detective he saw was Theresa Enterlin.

  “You hear about the St. Paddy’s parade?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “They canceled it. Changed it to the St. Pulaski parade.”

  “Listen, Wisneski. You hear about the Polish car pool?”

  “Okay, what?”

  “It meets at work.”

  A private school off Fifth Avenue at East Ninety-fifth Street, and the apartment building that houses Robert and Lola Redford, had trouble during the night.

  Robert Redford wasn’t much help in the case of his home. He slept through it.

  A burglar made his way up a fire escape outside the Redford home, then broke through a bathroom window and climbed inside, probably not knowing whose home he’d just entered and probably caring not a whit.

  Lola Redford heard noises.

  She crept out of her bed, leaving her husband where he was, slumbering peacefully the last few hours before his run around the Central Park Reservoir.

  Lola put on her slippers and ma
de her way to the bedroom door. She peeked through a crack and saw a shadowy form making his way through her home.

  Bob would probably just make a whole lot of noise, so she let him alone. She waited until the intruder got into the living room, at the opposite end of the huge apartment.

  There was a telephone in a carpeted hallway. If she could make it to the phone, quickly and quietly, she could dial 911 and report the crime in progress.

  In less than three minutes, there were two uniformed officers on the rooftop of the Redford building, two in the shadows at the bottom of the fire escape and detectives in the lobby as well as in the rear court, where the burglar was most likely to return—the same way he’d entered, according to Mrs. Redford.

  She crept back into bed beside her husband and listened. The burglar returned through the bathroom window and she breathed a deep sigh of relief.

  When the officers knocked at the door, she made them coffee and woke her husband.

  In the case of the private school, Officers Ciffo and Truta weren’t allowed to be of much help.

  Sometime during the night or early in the morning, the headmistress told Ciffo and Truta, fully two blocks away from the school lest anyone see police uniforms intruding on the peace and calm of the private school, that whoever it was who had been making violent threats against one of the teachers had struck again.

  “Again?” Ciffo asked.

  The headmistress, perhaps thirty-five years of age, with dark brown hair and mesh hosiery and green eyes and a silk eyelet blouse that Ciffo particularly enjoyed, said, “Oh yes, again.”

  “What happened the first time?” he asked.

  “Well, you must understand, we have a slight labor relations problem here at the school,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “The faculty is completely French. We offer our staff one- and sometimes two-year contracts. They have begun circulating a petition demanding a full tenure arrangement instead, as they do not wish to return to France necessarily.”

  “And who is being threatened?”

  “Well,” the headmistress said, “the one teacher who apparently refused to sign the petition.”

  “What’s the nature of the threats?”

  “One day she arrived in her classroom to find a swastika painted on her desk. Another day it was chicken livers with needles stuck in them. And now …”

  She handed Ciffo a piece of paper.

  Ciffo handed it to Truta. “I can’t read this,” he said. “It’s in French.”

  “Well, neither can I.”

  “Oh, I forget in my worry. Here,” the headmistress said, “I’ve made English translations.”

  Neatly typed on a sheet of crisp white paper was:

  We will have your skin. You are on the side of the pigs.

  You will die. You’ve been warned!

  Officers Dennis MacDonald and Basil Reece were called to a Food Emporium supermarket on Third Avenue at Eighty-second Street, where the store’s security personnel had detained a shoplifter. The radio dispatcher called it “Food Euphoria.”

  MacDonald and Reece followed the store manager down into the basement of the supermarket, where a dejected young man sat on a crate in the middle of a large storeroom, surrounded by the staff of beefy stockmen and three of the store’s butchers, all of them with forearms roughly the size of Virginia hams.

  The alleged shoplifter wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Okay, let’s have you tell me what he got,” MacDonald said to the store manager, a young woman with a clipboard and a paper hat.

  “We caught him with three legs of lamb in his shirt,” she said.

  “Jesus!” MacDonald said. He asked the shoplifter for identification.

  “So it’s Hector?”

  Hector nodded.

  “You always carry ID with you when you go boosting, Hector?”

  Hector didn’t seem to understand.

  MacDonald took the supermarket manager aside. “Look,” he said to her, “you realize we have to have the three legs of lamb if we’re going to make a case?”

  “You do?”

  “Of course. It’s material evidence. Where is it?”

  “Well, we put it back in the case. We sold one of them.”

  MacDonald sighed. “What do you want to do here? I don’t think we have a case for court if you go and sell the evidence.”

  “Well, can’t you make a report?”

  “Sure.” MacDonald knew what he would have to do. He would have to try to scare Hector, who looked dumb as a fox.

  “I’ll have to make a report, too,” the manager said. She started scratching something onto a piece of paper in her clipboard. “Officer, how do you spell burglary?”

  “Never mind now,” MacDonald said wearily.

  He went to Hector, took his identification card and copied down the information. The manager would have to decline prosecution.

  “Hector,” MacDonald said. Doleful brown eyes were raised to the officer. “I’m telling you, next time you get caught at this, it’s a. felony. Understand? That means one year in the slammer. Got me?”

  Hector was marched upstairs between Reece and MacDonald. Customers stared at the three.

  Out on the street, MacDonald said to Hector, “Get out of here. Go home and be glad for what you have that’s yours fair and square.”

  Then he and Reece got back inside their squad car.

  “So two hours later, I’ll bet you, he’s uptown doing it again. He knows he can get away with it.”

  Ed Smith shook the administrator’s hand and left the big office. His beard had grown back since Christmas, but he kept it neatly trimmed now, and for the interview he’d worn a blue striped shirt and tie, a navy blazer and gray slacks.

  Ruth wanted him to call her immediately, but he wanted to savor the moment alone for a while, so he left the hospital where she worked as head of public relations and walked the streets, going nowhere in particular. Just walking, thinking.

  He found himself approaching the Queensboro Bridge and he wondered where Joe might be.

  “He’s taking a crap behind the piling, since you got to know so bad,” a leathery-faced bum said. “Got a spare cigarette or some change or somethin’? What do you think, information’s for free around here?”

  Smith gave the old man a cigarette and even lit it for him. He waited for Joe to reappear, which he did. Joe didn’t recognize Whispering Ed by sight.

  “Joe, I need to talk to you,” Ed said.

  Joe grabbed him by the arm. “Come on then, not here. What do you think, I want to be seen with you? Look at you. My pals will think I’m a fink or somethin’ and they’ll damn sure tag you now for a cop.”

  “That’s what I got to talk to you about.”

  “Come on, then.”

  Joe and Smith walked along the bridge’s south pilings. Overhead, the traffic roared and whooshed.

  “I might be leaving, Joe.”

  “What, New York?”

  “No, just the police department.”

  “You, not a cop?” Joe scratched his face. “Well, that’s a kick, ain’t it? Finally, you start looking like a nice young clean-cut cop instead of some smelly old bum and you right away start thinking of quitting.”

  “Well, there are reasons.”

  “Women.”

  Smith nodded.

  “They’re always trying to bend us out of shape. She wants you to quit, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I’m sort of neutral about the whole thing.”

  “That’s the trouble with the world today. Everybody’s neutral. There’s guys in charge, and that’s damn few. They run Russia and the U.S. and a few other places. Then there’s guys like me at rock bottom. Guys like you and ninety-nine and three-quarters percent of the rest of the world are in the middle and most of the time you’re all neutral.”

  “This doesn’t help me much, Joe.”

  “Nothing can. Walk around
with it a few days, that’s all I’d say. Course, I got time for that sort of thing.”

  On the way back to the station, Ciffo had Truta stop at a travel agency on Lexington.

  He returned to the car with a dozen brochures on Caribbean destinations. He flipped through them all the way back.

  “Listen to this,” he said. “The Cayman Islands, a scuba diver’s paradise … coconut trees …”

  “You couldn’t stay away from your mother’s cooking long enough to put on a scuba tank,” Truta said.

  “One more crack like that and I won’t take you along with me.”

  “Yeah, fat chance.” Truta pulled the car up to a rare spot right in front of the precinct house.

  Upstairs, in the detective squad room, they gave the case to Detective Mensch.

  “You’re going to love this one, Mensch,” Ciffo said.

  “Tony did. The headmistress was pretty cute,” Truta said.

  “Oh yeah? You talking about the one with the good legs and that white blouse and the green eyes? I didn’t notice.”

  “What do we got?” Mensch said.

  “Fingerprints, death threats and a fancy-schmancy school.”

  Mensch read over the material. “What’s these finger-prints?”

  “They had a private detective come and make fingerprints of the desk where the threat was found, the letter itself and the doorknob to the teacher’s classroom. The originals of all this stuff are with the private detective,” Truta said.

  “Hey, wish I was a private dick right about now,” Mensch said. “A couple of hundred bucks for a useless piece of work. They’re still trying to push that fingerprint nonsense, aren’t they? The guy’ll end up fingerprinting the whole damn school and then what? He’s got a bunch of fingerprints and some nice billings.

  “Jesus, we would have done it for free—if we’d have done it. Seems kind of a wasted effort to me.”

  Ciffo said, “Well, that’s what I told the headmistress. I said we had some pretty good experience with taking fingerprints and that we had an actual resident graphologist on the detective squad. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  Mensch shook his head. “What can I do about this?”

  “I guess they want to talk to a city detective. No uniforms, though. You’re supposed to go there and not say anything about being from the police, either.”