Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  “What would I be doing?” Chris asked.

  “Your job would be to gather intelligence,” the inspector said. “The DA wants to know all there is to know about what’s going on among the Greeks, how they’re organizing, what they’re up to. You would go in and find out.”

  “Well, but—I’m really happy where I am,” Chris said. “I have a good partner and, well, I just think I’d rather stay put.”

  The inspector smiled. He was a marine captain in the reserves, Chris knew, but he didn’t look tough. He had a round chubby face and a friendly smile.

  “You’ll have carte blanche,” the inspector continued, as though he hadn’t even heard what Chris had said. “You’ll have money to finance the operation, as much as you need. We’ll leave that up to you, because you’ll be working alone.”

  “It’s not that,” Chris said. “I wouldn’t mind working alone. But I’m really happy where I am. I’m a street cop, and I really don’t want to do something else. But thank you, sir. Thanks anyway.” Nobody spoke. “Thank you,” Chris said again.

  “Chris, we have interviewed twenty men for this job,” the inspector said. His voice was quiet. “And we don’t want any of those men. We want you.”

  “I’d really rather stay in the Bronx, Inspector,” Chris said, a bit desperately. “I like what I’m doing there, and I think I’m doing a good job. But thank you, anyway.” For God’s sake, stop saying thanks, he told himself.

  Nobody spoke. One man drummed his fingers on the table, frowning. Chris felt he had to say something more. “I do undercover narcotics and street crimes,” he said, feeling idiotic for telling them what he knew they already knew. “I like my work, and I like my partner, and I think we’re doing good work, I really do.” He stopped talking, not knowing what else in the world he could possibly say.

  “Chris, we don’t just want you for this job,” the inspector said. “I’m saying we need you.”

  Chris took a long, deep breath. “I just don’t think I want to do it, sir,” he said. “I mean, I really don’t. I—I’d have to think about it.”

  The inspector stopped smiling. “All right then, Chris,” he said abruptly, in an irritated voice. “You think about it, and get back to me.”

  “Yes sir, thank you, Inspector,” Chris said, getting up quickly. He nodded at the stern-faced men around the table, who just looked at him. He left the room as hastily as he could. He hurried out the front door, not speaking to anyone, and up the block to the subway. He was halfway back to Forest Hills when he realized they hadn’t offered him coffee.

  Back home, he called the station to say he was taking some lost time—time that was coming to him—and he’d be in on Monday. He changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and made a pot of coffee. His mind was made up. He knew he didn’t want the job. But he thought he ought to wait a couple of hours before he called the inspector.

  No way did he want the job. He’d told the truth when he said he was happy where he was, and he didn’t want to rock that boat. He liked his work, and he liked the camaraderie of the 4-oh. He wasn’t thinking now of the times he’d felt like an outcast; all he could think of now were the good times there. When a cop who had worked there, then had been transferred, had a family tragedy, the guys at the 4-oh had still cared. Jeff’s house had caught fire one night, when he was at work. His ten-year-old son had died in the blaze, and his wife and two other children were badly burned. Chris and some guys had been sitting around, talking about what they could do to help, when somebody thought of a benefit. Several cops at the 4-oh had boxing experience, some with Golden Gloves. Chris had boxed with the Police Athletic League, as a kid.

  They set up a gym in the 4-oh basement and half a dozen guys, including Chris, went in for some serious training. He sparred two, three hours a day for six weeks and got himself in top shape. At 160 pounds, he was matched with a cop named Ralph, same weight. Flyers went out to other precincts; as the word spread, tickets were snapped up, and the match had to be relocated from the 4-oh basement to the auditorium of the Methodist Church at 141st Street and Willis Avenue.

  Four days before the event, Ralph broke his wrist. Nobody seemed available to take his place. Then a guy named Nolan said, “I’ll box you, Chris.”

  Chris stared at him. Nolan was a very big person. He had a farm upstate where he spent his days off, pitching hay.

  “Nolan, you’ve got to be kidding,” Chris said mildly. “You outweigh me by fifty pounds.”

  “What’s the matter?” Nolan demanded. “You afraid to fight me?”

  “Nolan, you’re fifty pounds heavier,” Chris repeated.

  Then the other guys chimed in. “C’mon, Chris, it’s for Jeff’s kids.”

  Even though the auditorium held six hundred people, the crowd was SRO. The commissioner came, the mayor, newspaper reporters, TV crews, the works. A regulation ring was set up, all very professional. Emergency Service stood by with oxygen. Cops sold beer and peanuts among the noisy throng as a doctor checked out the boxers.

  Chris and Nolan had the first bout, three two-minute rounds. Each fighter was introduced, to deafening cheers. Chris clenched his hands above his head, in the big, black gloves, and tried to wave. Mac was the timekeeper. He banged the bell. Chris and Nolan came out swinging.

  Hey, I’m a boxer! Chris thought with delight. He threw a quick jab, another quick jab. Nolan was swinging wide. Chris was right-handed, but he could box southpaw, and he hit Nolan with such a counterpunch that the crowd went wild. The bell rang. “You boxed his ears off!” Mac hissed to Chris.

  But as he sat sweating in his corner, a towel draped around his shoulders, Chris felt he was in trouble. When he and Nolan faced off for the second round, he knew he was. “It was like I’d waved a red flag in front of a bull,” Chris remembered. “I’d embarrassed him, and he was going to get even. We were both cops, but that night we were just two boxers. He came at me like a tank—charging, charging.”

  The third round was even worse. Nolan hit Chris so hard that he dislocated his shoulder. “Mac, Mac, hit the bell, hit the damn bell!” Chris yelled. “It’s not two minutes yet!” Mac yelled back. So Chris spent the rest of the round just trying, basically, to keep out of Nolan’s way.

  Melba Tolliver, a television reporter, approached Chris afterward. “What makes a man like you get in that ring and take such punishment?” she asked. Chris clutched his right shoulder with his left hand and tried to smile for the camera. “The police department takes care of its own,” he said stoutly, as a guy waved a can of beer back and forth in front of the camera. “Hey, what are you interviewing him for? He lost!” The following Sunday, the photograph in The News showed Chris bent over, grimacing in pain, obviously trying to dodge Nolan, who was just as obviously beating the hell out of him.

  Still, it was a wonderful night, Chris always said—mentally, spiritually and morale-wise. A night that had made him glad to belong to the 4-oh. A night that, as he remembered it, made him absolutely sure he didn’t want to leave.

  The inspector’s secretary said he wasn’t available at the moment. Was there a message? Feeling relieved that he didn’t have to speak to the inspector, and a bit ashamed at feeling so relieved, Chris said yes, there was a message. “Please tell him thanks, I really appreciate it, but I have to say no.”

  He was glad when that was over. Still, he felt restless as he roamed around the apartment, not knowing quite what to do with the rest of the day. He put an opera record on the stereo—Maria Callas, one of his favorites.

  He wished he had his drums, which were packed away in a closet at his mother’s house, because you couldn’t play drums in an apartment building. When he was still in uniform, his drums had been a good backup. When he’d waded into a crowd on a street corner at the 4-oh, suspecting trouble, he found a bunch of young guys setting up a combo, with conga drums, bass, and guitar. “Hey, man, you’re not going to break this up, are you?” one of them asked.

  Chris looked around at the faces surrounding
him, in the sudden silence. “Hey, no, I like music,” he said cheerfully. “Let me sit in.” He didn’t know the conga, but what the heck, percussion is percussion, he thought. He took off his hat, sat on a garbage can lid and hit the drums. The crowd was clapping and stomping, making such a racket that Chris didn’t notice the radio car pulling up. By the time he saw the gleam of gold on the cap of the cop headed his way, there was nothing he could do but sit there.

  “What’s going on here?” the sergeant demanded.

  Chris thought fast. “Well, this is good public relations,” he answered. “Kind of like—like community work with the people, you know?”

  The sergeant snorted. “What an answer,” he said. “How could I write you up? But don’t let it happen again!”

  Chris felt relieved that he’d escaped a reprimand, and he felt even better when, as he walked away, he heard someone say to the drummer, “Hey, man, you better burn your hands—the cop is better than you are!”

  He wished he could talk to Phil. They talked on the phone at least once a week. But with the hour time difference, Phil would still be at his desk in St. Louis, and Chris didn’t want to interrupt him there. He felt he could tell Phil anything, even something he wasn’t supposed to talk about, but if there were people around, Phil wouldn’t be able to talk freely.

  Phil had made the FBI, as Chris had known he would. Early one Sunday morning, Chris had driven him to Penn Station, where Phil was catching a train to Quantico for training. They laughed and talked and reminisced over coffee at the station restaurant, then had walked to Track 25. At the very last minute, Phil threw his arms around Chris and said, “So long, Partner.” Chris thought it must have looked like a scene from some B movie: two macho cops standing there, trying to look tough, tears running down their cheeks. After training, Phil was assigned to St. Louis. He and his wife, Judy, had adopted a baby boy and named him after Chris.

  He wished Liz would call, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t. She got as wrapped up in her work as he did in his. It probably wouldn’t even occur to her to call. Although their second anniversary was coming soon, Chris still felt a little like a newlywed, partly because he had waited so long to marry, partly because even after they were married, their careers often separated them, and whenever they got together, it seemed new.

  Chris had always liked women and felt comfortable around them. He thought that, in general, women were smarter than men. But somehow the notion of marriage had eluded him all through his twenties; he’d been a late bloomer. He had his first date when he was seventeen, with a nice girl, Beth, who was in his civics class. Chris remembered those days, the late 1950s, as “Archie and Veronica time,” sweet, nostalgic days when boys wore chinos, girls wore angora sweaters and pleated skirts, and everybody wore saddle shoes.

  In those fond days, “going steady” meant hand-holding at the movies, the privilege of planting a chaste goodnight kiss on the cheek. Chris went steady with Beth for nearly two years, partly because it was much easier to have a steady girl than to keep gathering up his nerve to ask girls for dates. As unlikely as it seemed, for such an apparently confident guy, Chris was shy. In his whole life he’d never approached a girl to say hello or to ask her to dance. He could never bring himself to say, “Hi, my name’s Chris, what’s yours? and what are you doing tomorrow night?” He knew other guys did that, and he wished he could too, but for some reason, he absolutely couldn’t.

  When his family moved to Queens, Chris was considered a smart, streetwise guy from Manhattan by the boys who had grown up in an area that Chris considered “East Cupcake, USA.” Wearing the Dukes of Manhattan black-and-yellow sweater helped his image along. But he was never as experienced or daring as he was thought to be. He’d grown up without any serious romance, and only one close call.

  The year he graduated from high school, he was at a party at somebody’s house, in the basement rec room. The lights were low; in the darkness, Chris and Beth were dancing to a record by The Platters. Chris had had several beers, then some jug wine, and as he and Beth danced “The Fish”—a close, inside kind of dance—it suddenly seemed to both of them that it was a swell idea to drive down to Delaware or Maryland, where they could be married right away, without a waiting period. They were heading south in his red car, Beth snuggled up against him, when whoosh! his head suddenly cleared. What the heck am I doing? he asked himself, and he made a sharp U-turn at the next break in the divided highway.

  Once he began playing in nightclubs, approaching women was no longer a problem. Women approached him. For some reason, women seemed drawn to drummers. He found it astonishing that they would just walk up to him and stand there, openly flirting, sometimes when they had a guy waiting back at their table. He remembered one lady who had kept reaching out to try to touch his hair, telling him over and over that his curls were very sexy.

  That surprised him, too, because he’d always hated his curly hair. Once, when he was scuffling with another boy on the street, a neighbor had leaned out her window and, seeing Chris only from the back, with his black curls tumbling to the collar of the pink shirt Katrina had made for him, she had screamed at the other boy, whom she knew: “Jimmy! You, Jimmy! You stop hitting that girl!” Chris was so mortified that he’d gone to a barbershop to have his hair straightened. Afterward, though his hair wasn’t really curly anymore, it wasn’t what you would call straight, either; it sort of stuck out stiffly around his head, like jangled wires, and it stunk to high heaven. So he had let his hair return to its natural curly mass which, he came to realize, was a romantic asset, encouraging women to want to mother him or go to bed with him, or both.

  Beyond the lure of the curls and the dark eyes, Chris was attractive to women because of his genuine empathy. In the late sixties and early seventies, with the women’s movement just dawning, and particularly in the macho milieu of the 4-oh, Chris was a standout feminist, though he never would have used that term. He was especially sympathetic to women who had been raped. He thought it ridiculous and wrong that in order to get a conviction, eyewitness corroboration of a woman’s story was needed. As cops put it bluntly, the guy needed a glass ass. Because rape victims tended not to have witnesses handy, and because so many suspects therefore went free, Chris was especially pleased when one didn’t. After a series of rapes in the 4-oh neighborhood, with a blind woman and a fifteen-year-old girl among the victims, Chris and his partner at the time, Mac, had identified the rapist. When they heard on the street that the man had fled to Puerto Rico, their quest seemed futile. Still, they staked out his apartment, because they’d also heard his wife was pregnant. They had a hunch he’d want to be back for the birth.

  Week after week, on their own time, they sat in their unmarked car, smoking cigarettes, drinking endless cups of coffee. When they saw a man appear in the lighted fourth-floor window one night, they almost didn’t believe what they saw.

  “What do you think?” Chris asked.

  “Let’s go up,” Mac said.

  They radioed the station, then Chris took the front door, while Mac went up to the roof. When the woman opened the front door, and the man saw Chris, he headed out the window. Chris dove out after him, and they grappled on the fire escape. Meantime, up on the roof, Mac was using his flashlight to fight off a guard dog. Chris was being pushed backward over the railing when Mac came bounding down the steps and pounced. Chris told a newspaper reporter that the man had been “as strong as a bull,” so the story labeled him “The Bronx Bull Rapist.”

  Two women had made positive IDs, and one woman’s husband had been able to finger the guy. That woman had been followed home from the subway and forced at knifepoint to the top-floor landing, where she was sodomized. When her assailant was running down the stairs, he passed a man coming up—the woman’s husband, on his way home from work. Amazingly, the suspect had even boasted of his crimes. “If you put my picture in the paper, you’ll hear from forty women I raped,” he told Chris.

  With the IDs and the admission, Chr
is felt they had a rock-solid case. But at the arraignment, the judge remanded the guy on only five hundred dollars bail. Chris was so enraged that as the judge stepped down, Chris hurled his briefcase at the bench, using both hands, and was nearly cited for contempt.

  When the trial got underway, Chris thought the judge was more concerned with the well-being of the defendant than of the women. “Did you have anything to eat, Mr. Rodriguez?” Chris parroted him later. “Did the police officer read you your rights, Mr. Rodriguez? Did you understand the police officer when he read you your rights? Are you very sure you understood, Mr. Rodriguez?”

  Chris had decided, early in his career, that a detached cynicism was his most viable response in a courtroom. It was theater of the absurd, he felt, with stock players saying the same lines over and over; an unbalanced chess game with too many pawns. So he’d trained himself not to get upset when somebody he’d nailed was turned loose, for one reason or another. Thieves, muggers, pushers were going to be back on the street sooner or later, probably sooner, so Chris had developed his own simple philosophy. “My job is to take the man off the street and see that he’s locked up. Then I have to do the paperwork, get to court on the right day, be there on time, bring in the evidence, and make sure my testimony is correct. After that, what happens, happens. My act is over.”

  Only once had he screwed up his act. “Did you advise my client of his rights?” a defendant’s lawyer asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Chris said.

  “And how did you advise my client of his rights?”

  “Well, I just advised him of his rights.”

  “You just told him?” the lawyer pressed.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You didn’t read them?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Do you know them that well, Officer?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then please recite the rights for this court now,” the lawyer said, as Chris went blank. Totally blank. He knew the rights upside down and backward, and he also knew that he could sit on that witness stand forever and a day without being able to recite them. He felt like a total jerk, especially when the lawyer then made a motion to suppress.