Malone started to enter the apartment when Brady called him. The lieutenant turned and the sergeant handed him plastic gloves.
“Thanks,” Malone said, putting the gloves on. “I almost forgot them. Make sure that no one enters the scene without them.”
Malone stood looking down at the tub, shaking his head in disbelief. He knelt down and, with his forefinger, he carefully wiped the slime off the handcuffs. “Smith and Wesson,” he observed, twisting his head, trying to read the serial numbers. “We might be able to trace them.”
“How long do you figure?” O’Shaughnessy asked.
“It’s hard to tell,” Malone said, glancing from the body up to the partially opened window. “From the degree of decomposition and the maggot castings … I’d say about a week.” Malone stood up and faced his detectives. “I want this apartment field stripped. Overlook nothing. Gather up her telephone book, her checkbook, savings book. I want to know her medical history. Who her friends were. Her enemies. I want to know who she was making it with. If she was a switch hitter. Gay. Where did she work? When Forensic arrives, tell them I want the crime scene sketch done in the coordinate method.”
“The Forensic boys ain’t going to like that. It’s a lot of work,” Heinemann said.
“I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck what the Forensic boys like. I want an imaginary line drawn through every room in this apartment and every piece of broken glass, paper, wood, anything, connected to the line by distances.”
“Do you want to call in some extra detectives?” O’Shaughnessy asked.
“When I notify the Borough, I’ll ask for a few to help with the initial canvasses. I don’t like too many men working on a case. They fall over each other.” Malone’s face hardened. “Let me reemphasize what I said before. I don’t want to see anyone inside this apartment unless they’ve got a reason to be here. No cops using the telephone to call their girlfriends or picking up souvenirs.”
“We got the message,” O’Shaughnessy said.
“Okay, call in the rest of the Squad and let’s get to work. We’re going to take this one nice and easy. One step at a time, just like they say you do it at the Academy: Who? What? When? Where? How? and Why?” Malone said, elbowing past the detectives on his way to call Inspector Zambrano.
When Malone returned five minutes later he found a photographer snapping pictures of every room from every angle and a detective measuring distances from the imaginary line and calling them off to his partner, who entered them on the crime scene sketch. Fingerprint technicians were spreading powder and dusting with plumed brushes. Detectives were sticking their noses into every nook and cranny of the apartment, searching for physical evidence. Anything that was considered of value was tagged and placed into plastic evidence bags.
Brady had stationed himself outside the apartment. A rope barrier had been erected in front of the door. There were signs prohibiting entrance into the crime scene area. As detectives arrived from the Borough, the sergeant entered their names and times of arrival into the crime scene log. Malone dispatched teams of detectives to canvass the Chatham Tower complex for witnesses, friends of the victim, anyone who might know something. Additional teams were sent to interview storekeepers, garage attendants, people who worked in the housing complex, bus drivers who had nearby routes.
Bo Davis and Gus Heinemann canvassed the parked cars within a five-block radius of the scene. Every license plate was written down. Later they’d be run through the National Crime Information Center. Perhaps the killer had panicked and run from the scene, leaving his car. The building’s underground garage was canvassed for unauthorized vehicles.
Jake Stern was on his knees in the apartment searching the bottom of the linen closet. Malone looked down at him. “Anything?”
Stern crooked his body, straining to look under the bottom shelf. He reached his hand under and ran it along the shelf.
“Nothing?”
“Lou, the meat wagon is here,” an anonymous voice announced.
“Send them in,” Malone said, without turning to look.
Two attendants walked into the apartment lugging a body bag, its wide straps dragging on the floor.
With impersonal detachment the morgue attendants laid the bag alongside the tub and went about their job.
Detectives stopped working and gathered around to watch. Policemen are no different from civilians and firemen when it comes to death. The same thoughts cross their minds: She’s dead. I’m alive. Someday I’ll be dead. I wonder how long I’ve got to live. What will it be like, nothingness?
Without hesitation the attendants plunged their bare hands into the red muck. They lifted the body. Slime sloughed off. Maggots rained to the floor. The crust was broken. A new abomination rose from the tub.
The lower part of Sara Eisinger’s jaw dangled from one socket. Her battered body was halfway between the tub and body bag when the jaw clattered to the floor.
The body was placed into the canvas bag. One of the attendants bent to scoop up the jaw. He nonchalantly tossed it into the bag.
“Don’t close it up,” Malone said, kneeling to examine the front of the body. He spread his hands under her neck and slowly ran them down over the body feeling for entrance wounds, something taped to the body. He felt under her deflated breasts. Her armpits. He pushed her legs apart. “Jesus Christ. Look at this.”
Protruding from Sara Eisinger’s vagina was the curved end of a curtain rod.
3
Evening of the same day
Malone sat in his office that evening reviewing the fives on the Eisinger homicide. Outside in the squad room a detective was interviewing a female complainant who insisted she had been raped by her common-law husband. As he flipped the pale blue pages of the Supplementary Complaint Reports he was struck, not for the first time, by the impersonal tone of the narratives: time and place of occurrence; physical description of the crime scene; victim’s name and pedigree; name and addresses of persons interviewed; name, shield number and command of MOFs on the scene, and notifications made. Malone wondered if there was anyone who would miss Sara Eisinger.
Malone tossed the case folder into the active basket, then arched his back and stretched. He reached down and slid out the bottom drawer and took out the quart bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a glass. He blew the glass clean; the booze would sterilize it. Drink in hand, he got up and walked over to the window. He grinned when he saw the black man on the corner of Canal Street hustling tourists in a three-card monte game. Shmucks. They’ll never learn.
Malone’s office was a sterile cubicle with dirty green-and-gray cinderblock walls, a locker, two filing cabinets, and a glass cabinet-type bookcase that contained the Patrol Guide, Penal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, and stacks of unread department orders. His desk was green metal with a gray Formica top and a glass covering—standard PD issue. Taped to the wall behind the desk was a large piece of cardboard with important telephone numbers.
He moved back to his desk and went to kick in the open bottom drawer when he noticed the ormolu picture frame sticking out from beneath the Manhattan Yellow Pages. It had been a long time since he had stared at her photograph and remembered. He lowered himself into the chair and reached back into the drawer to pull the frame out from under the thick book and set it up on the desk in front of him. He poured more bourbon into his glass and toasted the photograph, staring into her large black eyes. He could still remember the exact date he had snapped it. Sunday, May 4, 1960: over twenty-two years ago. He had caught her preening in front of the seal pit in the Prospect Park zoo, a cheerful nymph with short, coal-black hair and a pixie nose.
She was eighteen. He was twenty.
Dan Malone and Helen Frazer fell in love. Their heads were full of dreams about their future. He was going to earn his B.A. in history from Brooklyn College and become a policeman and go on to become the chief of detectives of the largest police department in the world. Helen Frazer was going to earn her Ph.D. in psychology and become a child
psychologist. They were going to marry and live happily ever after.
A marriage that started in bliss and ended in shit, he thought, as he drank. Their union lasted eight years, nine months, and twenty-four days. In the beginning they shared a lot. Each day ended with long, full reports on the day’s experiences. By the end of their first year together they had both earned their degrees. She was doing graduate work at Hunter College and was active in both the Literary and Psychology Clubs. In January of their second year of marriage he was appointed to the police department. The metamorphosis from civilian to cop began immediately. His first class at the Academy was a “Don’t” class: Don’t get involved off duty; Don’t discuss the job with civilians; Don’t look to be a hero; Don’t be a boss fighter; Don’t ever trust newspapermen, lawyers, junkies, or hookers.
He enjoyed the structured curriculum at the Academy, learning the law, police procedures, traditions. Twice a week, in the afternoons, policemen from some of the city’s busy houses would come to the Academy to conduct informal sessions with the recruits. It was those sessions that would absorb his mind. He would sit wide-eyed and attentive, listening to the experiences of street cops, learning his tradecraft: Never stand in front of a closed door, the person on the other side might fire through it and kill you; When responding to a 10:30 be mindful that the stickup team might have a backup lurking nearby; Remember that a woman or child can kill you just as dead as a man; A woman in a nun’s habit is no guarantee that she’s a nun; In a crowd stay with your partner, don’t get separated; Pull your holster around your front in order to protect your groin and to prevent anyone from coming up from behind and ripping your gun from your holster.
After school, outfitted in recruit grays, he would ride the Lexington Avenue subway uptown to their one-bedroom Yorkville apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street. Usually they would make love and then go out to eat. Luciano’s was on Madison Avenue. They both liked Italian food and were too young to worry about calories.
Upon graduation from the Academy he was assigned to the Seven-nine on patrol. The Seven-nine was one of the five precincts that made up the old Thirteenth Division: the Seven-three, Seven-seven, Eight-oh, and Eight-eight. The occupying force of Bed-Stuy, a ghetto ripe with decay and violence. It was during those fledgling years in the Seven-nine that the marriage soured.
There were many cops who were content to do their eight hours and go home. Then there were the active ones, the cops to whom time meant nothing, who doggedly searched out crime and the criminals. Malone was such a cop. As his arrest record soared so did the time he had to spend in court. They were spending less and less time together, the inevitable outcome of a cop’s giving more to the Job than to a marriage.
The Seven-nine’s watering hole was Leroy’s Lounge on Gates Avenue. A smoke-filled room of glittering glass globes, pulsating lights, and soul music. After a four-to-twelve tour, the cops would go to Leroy’s to unwind. The session lasted until four in the morning. Policemen’s wives have dubbed those tours the “four-to-fours.” They despise them. During the four-to-fours Malone was further indoctrinated into the folklore of the department. The rookies went to listen to angry, cynical men recite the epic tales and legends of the Job. Sipping a flat beer, he would listen as ex-detectives told why they had been flopped back into uniform. Someone else was always at fault. Many claimed that a girlfriend or ex-wife in whom he had confided things dropped a dime or wrote an anonymous letter. He heard vice cops tell how girlfriends, the horses, and booze had eaten up all their ill-gotten money. For the first time he heard of the high suicide rate, the divorce rate, even the arrest rate. “I never thought of getting locked up until I came on this fucking job,” an old-timer had confided during a four-to-four.
Another old-timer: “Kid, this is the only job in the world where you can go to work hungry, horny, broke, and sober and have all those needs taken care of by the end of your tour.”
Helen was alone most of the time now. She kept herself busy with schoolwork and school activities. She told herself that it was the newness of the job that enthralled him. It would wear off in time and they would settle into the normal routine of living. But one morning after a late tour he received a telephone notification at home. He had been transferred into the Detective Division. The sudden promotion was not the result of a blazing gun battle or a spectacular arrest but came about because of the intercession of his Uncle Pat with the then chief of detectives. His uncle and the chief had been radio car partners. That was how men became detectives—contacts.
As a detective third grade he was seldom home. Lovingly prepared dinners went uneaten. Concerts went unheard, shows unseen. He was always busy with investigations or extraditions. Not to mention tails, plants, and testimony before the grand jury and the court. And the paper, the ubiquitous triplicates and quadruplicates. He accepted the long hours and the frustrations. He reveled in it; she came to revile it.
One night after a fifteen-hour tour he came home and undressed quietly. He was bone-weary. He slipped into bed, close to her, caressed her breasts and prodded her warm body with his. She grunted annoyance, slapped him with her hip, and turned away, tugging and tucking the blanket under.
When they awoke in the morning they were silent and tense. She was angry because she was always alone, losing her husband to the damn police department. He was pouting because she had denied him loving. They had their morning coffee and remained in bed reading the Sunday papers, each scrupulously keeping to their own side of the bed.
The awkward silence was broken by the occasional turning of a page.
Finally she said, “I see Westenberg is doing the St. Matthew Passion at the cathedral in April. Want to go?” Her face was hidden behind the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times. He was relieved, the first conciliatory move had been made. “Who is the mezzo-soprano?” He put down the Week in Review section and reached across the separating space to push the paper away from her face. He saw that she was crying.
“I love you,” he said.
“What’s happening to us, Dan? We’ve become strangers. What is it about that job that consumes you? Tell me; I want to try to understand.”
“It’s the nature of the Job. Each tour I go to work intending to catch up on my paper, but I can’t. The cases keep coming in. Our squad catches five-handed. Every tour each one of us catches an average of twenty-three cases apiece. Some of them we can shitcan. The burglaries and robberies get a fast phone call to jerk off the complainant and then they’re filed. But you can’t can a homicide or a felonious assault or a rape or a shooting. There are people walking the street that I don’t have the time to go out and arrest. I telephone them and try to lure them into the Squad. It’s like shoveling shit against the tide. Unending.”
Dismayed, she grabbed his shoulders and shook. “But you love it!” He acknowledged her accusation with a nod. She threw herself into his arms. “Resign and go to law school. Teach. Drive a taxi. Anything so that we can live a normal life. I need my husband.”
“It’s in my blood. I can’t quit.”
“Will you promise that you will at least try to work fewer hours, be home more?”
“I’ll try,” he said doubtfully, reaching into her cleavage, playing with her semihard nipple.
The years passed. He had been promoted to sergeant and was the second whip of the Tenth Squad. Dr. Helen Malone was teaching child psychology at St. John’s and had a budding practice with the Jewish Family Service. They had become friendly bed partners who had discursive conversations and who engaged in passionless acts of sex. Helen Malone had learned to fake it.
He returned home one summer evening to find his wife sitting dejectedly on their bed, suitcases at her feet. He went and sat next to her, afraid to speak. He knew what she was going to say. She began to cry softly. “Dan, I don’t like what’s happening to us. I can’t live with it anymore. I’m leaving, for my own sanity.” He wanted to plead. She stopped him by placing a finger to his lips. “Please don’t m
ake it harder. I’ve made my decision.” She took his face in her hands and tenderly kissed his cheek. “I want you to know that I’ve never been unfaithful to you.”
His eyes brimmed. “Neither have I.”
Tears were stinging her lids. “I know.”
He still remembered it clearly, but the pain was less. He poured one more drink, returned the ormolu frame to its place beneath the Manhattan Yellow Pages, and pushed the drawer closed.
“Lieutenant, you got a call on two,” a detective in the squad room shouted.
Malone looked over at the blinking plastic button. He gulped his drink and yanked up the receiver.
“This is Captain Madvick from the chief of detectives’ office.” It was a pleasant enough voice.
“What can I do for you, Captain?” he asked, lowering himself onto the edge of the desk.
“The chief asked me to call. He wants to know if there is anything unusual about the Eisinger case.”
Malone stood up. Why was the chief of detectives interested in a run-of-the-mill homicide that was probably going nowhere?
“Nothing,” he answered, tucking the receiver under his chin and reaching for the case folder.
“Did you come up with any physical evidence or … er … property that was unusual?”
Malone pressed the earphone close. “What did you say your name was, Captain?”
“M-A-D-V-I-C-K.” He sounded annoyed.
“From the chief of detectives’ office?”
“You got it, Lieutenant.”
“And you’re calling from the office now?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll call you right back.” Malone hung up and looked up at the directory. He picked up the receiver and dialed.
“Chief of detectives.”
“Captain Madvick please.”
“Ain’t no Captain Madvick assigned here, pal.”
“This is Walter Farrell from the New York Times,” Malone lied. “I’m trying to get in touch with Captain Madvick. He used to be assigned there. I’m doing a story on the Rosenberg homicide. He was in charge of that case.”
One Police Plaza Page 3