“Mr. Perlmutter,” I heard my name. “Mr. Perlmutter, wake up.”
I opened my eyes. The princess was gone. A nurse was standing above me.
“Mr. Perlmutter, your grandson is here,” she said. I smiled at her.
How nice, I thought. Then I remembered I didn’t have a grandson.
I sat up in bed and saw Tommy Bigelow. He looked like a wet schnauzer. His wiry hair was soaked and packed down on his head. His clothes hung from his frail body like he had been swimming in them. “Tommy, what are you doing here?”
“I came to take care of you, in case those two guys from last night came back,” he said, and then he sneezed.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“I walked.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know. I started around five o’clock.”
I looked at the clock. It was eight-thirty at night. I had been sleeping for a few hours. “You walked for three and a half hours?”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
“Does anyone know you’re here?”
He shook his head, no. He looked like he was going to pass out. I asked the on-duty nurse to take his temperature. I called Officer Matt McGrady. Matt was relieved to hear that Tommy was with me. His foster parents had already reported him missing. The nurse interrupted to tell me the kid had a temperature of 101. Matt said he would call the foster parents and come right over. Just then the kid collapsed on the floor.
Matt McGrady and I convinced the hospital staff to admit Tommy Bigelow to the hospital that night. We signed an agreement that said we were totally responsible for him. Tommy was tucked safely into the empty bed in my room. He was suffering from dehydration and exhaustion. Tommy’s foster home, I was told, was over seven miles away. I wondered what had possessed the kid to undertake such a hike in a rainstorm, in the dark.
They gave Tommy fluids intravenously and pills for his fever. Matt and I watched him. Matt wouldn’t take his eyes off the kid.
“You like him, don’t you?” I said to Matt.
Matt sighed. “Yeah, I like him a lot. But I’m concerned about him. The kid needs a father.”
“What about you?” I wasn’t joking.
“I’ve thought about it.” Matt’s answer didn’t surprise me. “My whole family loves him. I love the kid, too. But I’m having trouble enough making ends meet now. I couldn’t afford another mouth to feed.”
“I understand,” I said with a yawn.
They gave me another pain pill, and I was asleep before Matt McGrady left the room.
With Tommy there to protect me, the two you-pay-you-die guys did not return that night.
In the morning, Tommy looked much better, and I felt much better. When they took the catheter out of Mr. Johnson he felt much better. We were examined and found fit to travel. We were given breakfast.
“Tommy, why did you walk here last night?” I asked.
He just shrugged and didn’t look at me.
“You could have been hit by a car or something,” I told him.
He shrugged again and he looked up at me. “I tried to call lots of times but no one answered,” he explained. “So, I got worried.”
I remembered the constant ringing of the phone yesterday while I was under the spell of Alicia Fine. He was concerned, and now I was concerned.
“You know, Tommy,” I said softly, “I’m not Barney Ross.”
“You’re my Barney Ross,” Tommy said.
It was the second time in my life someone said that to me. The first time I felt honored by my grandfather’s exaltations. This time I felt cornered by a young boy’s expectations.
Paradise is where I am.
- Voltaire
Mal Tanenbaum, Tommy’s foster father, came to the hospital the next morning to take Tommy home. “I’m embarrassed,” he said to me. “We didn’t even know he was gone until late last night.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” I told him. “It’s not easy taking care of kids.”
“Mr. Perlmutter” - Mal put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder – “there are 500,000 kids in American foster care. My wife and I do our best. But sometimes a kid falls through the cracks.”
“Not this kid,” I said.
Tommy seemed to like Mal, but I didn’t sense any love between them.
Shortly after they departed, Steve Coleman arrived to take me home. We looked into Dominick Amici’s room on the way out, but he was sleeping. He didn’t look good. We stopped at the nurse’s station, and I asked for Nurse Premice. She was gone for the day after her night shift.
Steve and I went directly to the Boca Heights pool area to relax. We ordered two sodas from the snack counter and sat in the shade of a table umbrella.
“My brother-in-law is pissed off you haven’t returned his calls,” Steve said.
I pulled several pink message slips from my shirt pocket. “Tell Togo I haven’t returned anyone’s call,” I said. “I haven’t even read my messages.”
Steve’s cell phone rang. “I can’t take this call here, it’s against club rules.” He got up from the table. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I heard him answer the phone as he hurried from the forbidden zone.
I surveyed the pool area. It was pristine now, but I could imagine the bedlam caused by out-of-town, out-of-control grandchildren and overindulgent grandparents overwhelming the place during school vacation.
I watched a stout Boca Heights woman get out of the pool. She had been swimming laps. She wrapped a towel over her ample shoulders and patted herself down.
“Another day in paradise,” she said to another stout lady on a lounge.
“Yes, another day in paradise,” her friend agreed, looking up from her reading.
They smiled at each other, sharing a delicious secret.
Another day in paradise? I asked myself, still under the influence of painkillers. Is it paradise for that Haitian worker, cutting foliage over there?
The landscaper, wearing a wool stocking hat, was wielding a power tool that looked like something out of Stephen King’s imagination.
Was it another day in paradise for the white bag boy loading oversized golf bags for oversized golfers onto standard-sized golf carts? Was the black short-order cook in the snack shack, sweating into the potato salad, in paradise? Maybe yes. Maybe no.
One person’s paradise can be someone else’s hell, I concluded.
Steve returned to the table, and I returned from the ozone. An hour later I was at my San Reno one-bedroom apartment. It was only noontime, and I was already exhausted. I closed all the window shades, flopped on the sofa, and began reading the twenty-eight phone messages.
I discarded Tommy Bigelow’s ten messages. The Palm Beach County News had called me three times asking for an interview. A call from the grievance committee informed me that Mrs. Mildred Feinberg had withdrawn her complaint against me. There was a message from Chief of Police Frank Burke asking me to contact him to set up an appointment. Burke was acting chief because the regular chief had been suspended for corruption. Matt McGrady and Barry Anson each had left a couple of messages for me and Togo called three times.
I returned Acting Chief Burke’s call first, as a professional courtesy. Burke greeted me with enthusiasm. He complimented my police work and said he wanted to meet at my earliest convenience. I said it was convenient now. Burke gave me directions to the Boca police station. It was on Second Avenue, a few miles south of the P.A.L. facility and the ecstasy lab.
The Boca Raton police station was a plain building directly across the street from a plain city hall, adjacent to an even plainer public library. I was expecting something more upscale.
The entrance to the building was modest, and the lobby looked like a high school foyer. A wall of honor with framed photos was the first thing I noticed.
DEDICATED TO THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO HAVE SERVED THE CITY OF BOCA RATON
There was an organizational chart displaying pictures of the command level, middle
level, and officer level of the department. The mission statement was prominently displayed:
TO ENHANCE THE QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE CITY OF BOCA RATON THROUGH PROGRESSIVE POLICE SERVICE IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE COMMUNITY
I walked to the front counter and rang the bell. A civilian woman came to the desk and slid open the glass window.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m Eddie Perlmutter, here to see Chief Burke,” I explained.
Her face lit up, and she turned to her fellow workers. “Hey, Eddie Perlmutter is here, the cop from Boston.”
There were six workers in the office. One man stood up at his desk and began clapping his hands. Then all of them were standing and clapping. I smiled. What else could I do? It was kind of embarrassing.
Acting Chief Frank Burke appeared while I was shaking hands with the staff.
“I figured you were causing all this commotion.” Burke smiled and patted me on the back. “Welcome.”
Burke was in his early forties. He had an athletic physique and wore his uniform well. His mustache was trimmed perfectly, his hair was cut short, and his smile was genuine. He looked like the hero, not me.
Burke gave me a complete tour of the station. We visited the computer room first.
“We couldn’t function without computers nowadays,” he said. “Every one of our 150 police cars is equipped with a Panasonic computer.”
“When I started on the force, computers were bigger than a police car.”
“I don’t know how you guys did it.”
“Hunches.”
We saw the evidence room. Burke referred to it as “the CSI lab.” We took a tour of the police chief’s office, the executive suites, conference rooms, meeting rooms, the internal affairs office, and the road patrol briefing room. In the detectives’ area, I was given a hero’s reception by several of the detectives on duty. A friendly German shepherd approached and rubbed my crotch with his nose.
Get out of my face, you Nazi bastard, Mr. Johnson growled at the dog.
“He’s sniffing for drugs,” a young detective explained.
“I could use some drugs in that area.” I got a pretty good laugh from the young guys with that one, but Mr. Johnson didn’t think I was funny.
I only struck out once, he protested.
Twice, I reminded him.
How about all the times I stood up for you?
Can we talk about this later?
Sure. But no more penis jokes. Okay?
Okay.
Our last stop was the basement. There were six holding cells and Burke pointed to one. “We’ve had one suicide in this area in our history,” Burke told me. “It was in that cell two years ago. A guy hung himself. It was our fault. He shouldn’t have had his belt. He was only in for a DUI where no one got hurt. Nobody figured he was suicidal. We don’t assume anything anymore. No shoelaces and no belts for prisoners, and regular inspections every twenty minutes or less.”
I just nodded.
We entered the DUI room where I passed the test. The tour lasted about an hour and ended at Frank Burke’s small, windowless office. Frank got us each a bottle of water and sat behind his desk. I sat facing him. “So, what do you think of our little station?” he asked.
“Impressive,” I said, “but isn’t the holding area small for a city this size?”
“We don’t hold anyone over eight hours unless absolutely necessary. We process paperwork and do probable-cause affidavits here, but we move the people out as fast as possible.”
“Who holds the bad guys after eight hours?”
“The correctional facilities in Palm Beach,” he told me. “Everyone arrested on criminal charges in Palm Beach County is supposed to be handled by the main detention center in Palm Beach. They fingerprint, photograph, and house the bad guys for as long as necessary. We can handle the photo and fingerprints here if the detention center is backed up. They have about 900 staff there and over 3,000 beds. They book over 55,000 people a year.”
“Are a lot of those beds filled by Boca criminals?” I asked. “Boca doesn’t strike me as a hotbed for crime.”
“A hotbed, no,” Burke concurred, “but it’s no paradise either.”
“Funny you should say that,” I commented. “Today I heard a woman at Boca Heights compare the place to paradise.”
“I don’t recall paradise having pimps and hookers,” Burke said, and his raised eyebrows suggested that I should understand his comment.
“Are you saying there are hookers and pimps in Boca Heights?”
“Sorry, I assumed you read about it in the paper,” Burke said.
“Read what?
“A guy named David Durant lived in the Shore Point community of Boca Heights and last year we busted him for operating an escort service from his house.”
“What? Hookers with AARP cards?”
“No.” Burke laughed. “The hookers weren’t from Boca Heights. Durant lived there, but he did most of his business with Miami escorts.”
“How did you catch him?”
“A disgruntled hooker turned him in.”
“He’s lucky she wasn’t a disgruntled postal worker,” I commented. “They shoot people when they’re disgruntled. So, with no more pimps in paradise, what keeps you busy?”
“There are 198 full-time police officers and 104 civilians employed by this department, and there’s plenty of crime to keep us all busy,” Burke stated.
“What type of crime is big around here?”
“Cyber fraud,” Burke said. “Boca has been described as the Capone Chicago of cyber fraud.”
“You’re not serious?”
“Yes, I am,” Burke confirmed. “In 2004 a Boca resident named Scott Levine was indicted for the largest computer-fraud scheme in U.S. history.”
“What did he do?”
“He stole detailed personal information on over a million people from a data aggregator named Axion. We worked with the FBI on that one.”
“I had no idea.”
“According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Boca is the computer spam capital of the world. An SEC member was quoted last year as saying that Boca was the only coastal town in southern Florida that had more sharks on land than in the ocean.”
“You could have fooled me,” I admitted. “But white-collar crimes don’t keep the street cop busy,” I noted. “What are the street problems?”
“Auto burglary is big,” he told me. “The old smash-and-grab routine. Smash a window, and grab what’s on the seat.”
“Takes about four seconds, right?”
“Right. And now we got the smash-and-grab-the-seat routine.”
“Yeah, I heard about that back in Boston,” I said. “I guess some of the seats are really valuable.”
“Yeah, the Honda sport seats are a favorite around here. They’re called performance jewels because they’re kinda sleek and they’re interchangeable with other Honda models like the Civic and the Acura. Those seats wholesale for about $2,500.”
“Snatching a seat sounds time consuming.”
“It takes a real pro about twenty-five seconds to do the job,” Burke said.
He told me about distraction crimes. “A guy posing as a contractor, or handyman, or maybe even a city worker, diverts a homeowner’s attention while their partner robs the house. Usually they target the elderly.”
“I was taught to respect my elders.”
“Yeah, well most of the sons of bitches around here consider the elderly to be nothing more than easy marks,” Burke said. “An old guy goes out to get his mail one morning, and two men stopped him, claiming they were there to fix his roof. While they were walking the property with the guy, two of their friends entered the house from the back and robbed it. The guy’s wife was inside. They stole the rings right off her fingers and broke her arm.”
“That’s bad,” I said.
“You must have had distraction crimes in Boston.”
“Yeah, but not the same kind of stuff,” I
said. “In Boston the distraction was usually a bat across the side of your head or a gun in your face.”
“We have plenty of that here too,” Burke said.
Burke talked about robberies and rapes in the area. He told me how a seventy-five-year-old woman was run over in a parking lot trying to stop a car because one of the passengers had snatched her purse. Her body got stuck under the car and they dragged the poor woman a couple of hundred yards trying to get to I-95. She was the mother of four and grandmother of eight. The three kids in the car were minors from Riviera Beach with previous criminal records.
“Were they tried as minors?”
“Of course.”
“Crazy.” I sighed. “Could you have pursued them if they left the Boca city limits?”
“We can go into Delray, but after that we have to refer it to the sheriff’s office.”
“It sounds like Boca is logistically difficult for police.”
“Correct. We have the north, south, and west districts to protect with sixteen cops per shift per district. Right now I have eighteen men sick, injured, or on vacation. We’re shorthanded a lot. The criminals always seem to be at full strength.”
“I know how you feel,” I commiserated.
“Then we have the airport, inlets, shorelines, and trains to patrol.”
“Sounds like a terrorist’s paradise,” I speculated.
“Another day in paradise,” Burke said. “By the way” - he changed the subject - ”that was terrific police work you did with those Russians.”
“Thanks, Chief,” I said.
“You’re too good at police work to be retired, Eddie. We could use a guy like you around here.”
“I’m too old to be a cop,” I said.
“I was thinking of private detective work,” Burke said. “All you need is a Class C detective’s license in this state. You could get a license with no trouble. With your experience in law enforcement we could help you get a license in no time.”
“I’m retired. Besides, you got plenty of good cops already.”
“Yes, we do,” Burke agreed. “I’m proud of the caliber of men we have on the force. But we could always use a super-cop.” He leaned forward in his seat. “You’re a natural, Eddie. It’s in your DNA. Even after you were shot you had the presence of mind to think about an illegal entry.”
Boca Knights Page 13