by Robert Cea
“We’re just taking in the ambience… plus, we hear the rotty is spectacular.” This time I laughed out loud at Pirelli’s humor. He started to dance to the music. “Hey, DJ, you got any good salsa or Latin tango? We need to get this party started right.” He danced his way over to the dead man; he was immersed in the music. Conroy looked at me with a jolt of excitement.
“Tatico, go in my car and get my camera.”
I ran outside to retrieve the Polaroid camera. I did not look at Billy when I passed him. I knew what his eyes were going to say. When I returned, Pirelli, Conroy, and Mahoney were dragging the bloody body toward the bar. “Jesus Christ, this guy is dead, fucking weight,” Pirelli said, to much laughter.
“Fucking bumba-clot devil’s work.” The unamused bartender poured himself a double, then just sat back and watched.
“Hey, Nat E. Dread, we ask for any shit, we’ll pull on your dreads; in the meantime, you shut the fuck up. This is an important crime scene,” Pirelli said as he placed the dead man’s red, black, and green knit Rasta hat over his own head. Conroy grabbed the camera and shot Pirelli wearing the Rasta hat. The camera spit out the picture. Conroy bent down and helped Mahoney and Pirelli lift the man up to a bar stool. At that point, the bartender ran out from the bar and into a back room. The DJ, however, was enjoying the show.
“Ya, man, you the Babylon bosses, man, you some crazy motherfuckers, hey, Officers, you mind if I…” The DJ, holding up a giant joint, said this from the microphone hooked up to the speakers. “Can I smoke up some ganja, boss?”
Mahoney laughed. “Yeah, just don’t Bogart all of it though, with them big lips a yours.” Even the DJ laughed at that one as he lit up the giant splif. While I helped hold the dead man up on the chair, Conroy ran behind the bar and popped open some more beers. He swiped a pair of Ray-Ban glasses off the speed rack. He handed us each a beer, slid a bottle in the dead man’s hand, and placed the glasses on his half-closed eyes. Then he looked at Billy.
“Devlin, c’mon, take the shot.”
Billy just smiled and played it off really cool. “I’m gonna wait out front in case the patrol supervisor comes; I’ll come in if I see him rolling up.”
He turned to walk out. Conroy asked him again, “C’mon, at least take one picture.”
“Nah, I’ll let you guys catch the Kodak moment.”
The DJ sucking on that bazooka joint appeared in a cloud of smoke. “I take the picture, man.” He laughed as he snapped and pulled each picture out. Billy ducked his head back into the club.
“Lieutenant’s rolling up.”
“Which one?” Mahoney asked.
“Rosenberg.” This time Billy had a slight smile on his face because he knew to what extent every cop in the precinct would go to play practical jokes on Lieutenant Marvin Rosenberg. Marvin was the boss in the precinct who got jammed up for botching a major triple homicide in the Midtown South precinct. He was the same lieutenant who, while driving home every night, talked to a cardboard cutout of the Budweiser girl, and the same man who was whacked on thorazine 24-7. When he was young he’d found his father with his head blown off from a self-inflicted shotgun blast, and clearly had never recovered. Marvin was kind of squeamish around any DOAs. He had no idea what he was walking into.
He was totally bald, so he always wore his police hat cocked at an odd angle. He was also overweight, and a chain-smoker who wore huge wire-rimmed glasses, the kind that David Berkowitz was wearing upon his capture. As a matter of fact, that is exactly who Rosenberg resembled, a fatter, older, and balder version of the famed serial murderer. Cigarette dangling from his lips, he ambled up to Mahoney, who pretended to be busy with his memo book. Mahoney saluted the visibly nervous lieutenant. “How ya doin’, Lieu.”
“How are you, Sarge? Thought this was a DOA?” He was puffing hard on the Virginia Slims cigarette. He toked hard whenever he was nervous, which was 99 percent of the time.
“Yeah, Lieu, you know what, you need to talk to the bartender, he’s a little upset, sitting behind the bar; he apparently knew the DOA.”
“Yeah, okay, but where’s the DOA?”
“He’s in the basement, Lieu. You need to take a statement from this guy, he saw the whole thing.”
There was absolute silence as Rosenberg walked carefully behind the bar to the corpse we’d arranged on the bar stool. We had made the DJ cut the music for supreme effect. I had to bite my lip to stop from laughing as the lieutenant approached, as shaky as a torch on a crack stem. On the bar’s wooden platform was the corpse, with his head between his legs, holding a beer. He must’ve appeared to be crying, because the lieutenant, who could definitely understand the man’s grief, walked up to him. “Hey, fella, sorry for your loss, but I need to…” The man did not acknowledge Marvin and it was then that Marvin noticed a photograph in his hand. He lifted it up and recognized us four cops and this man now sitting behind the bar. He looked at us and shrugged his shoulders. He looked back down to the man and nudged him gently with his knee. “Guy, c’mon, I need to…” The man tipped over and kept tipping; at this point, the DJ blasted the music to an eardrum-splitting decibel, and Marvin saw the man’s bloody innards hanging out of his now-open shirt. Coupled with the jolt of the music, he jumped back and with the highest pitch I had ever heard erupt from a man’s mouth, he screamed and kept on screaming. He backed out of the bar holding his genitalia, then headed straight for the door. He was not amused, but he knew where he was working and that these things were everyday occurrences in the loony bin that was now his home. As he passed Mahoney, who was doubled over in laughter, he yelled, “This ain’t fuckin’ funny! You handle this mess till PDU gets here, ya fuckin’ moron. You’re a lucky cocksucker you ain’t assigned to the precinct, a lucky son of a bitch!”
I could not stop laughing; the only person who was not laughing was Billy Devlin. I had completely lost sight of the trees in the forest.
Cholito was apparently put on wavers behind his bagdipping episode and the beat down he’d received, so he was not seen in the street for a couple of days. I knew the one person who would have information on the DOA and the shooter in the Tuff Gong club was Shah King. Now, John Conroy had swung out, so we would get to the Shah before John did. I was driving and saw him sitting on a bench in front of Flag Pole* on Columbia Street. He walked over to our car without a care in the world. He didn’t like us; we were the schmucks who were working for the white man’s welfare paychecks, pretending to believe that we were actually making a difference, that we mattered out there. Only thing we were doing was costing him extra money to place lookouts all over the city. He ducked his head into the passenger window, and with much effort, shook Billy’s hand and mine.
“Wassup, dawg?” he asked with an aloof, velvety voice laced with the slightest bit of contempt. He was king shit and he knew it. He figured he had us in his pocket because he went way back with Conroy. Billy disliked him, and so did I; the difference was that I knew I had to work with this scumbag until he could be played. I was going to kill him with kindness, and then kill him for real.
I handed him the picture of the dead man from Tuff Gong. The corpse was surrounded by the four of us, five homies having a beer. Pirelli was wearing the Rasta’s hat and the Ray-Bans, Conroy and Mahoney were using their thumbs to pull up his eyelids, which did nothing other than show the whites of the dead man’s eyes. This gave him the eerie look of a dread-locked Zulu zombie. I was toasting my beer with the corpse’s beer. Billy could not stand to look at the picture. His contempt for all of us, and everything we were doing and becoming, was building.
The Shah forced a laugh. “Oh, shit, the dude’s dead?” I nodded and he continued laughing. “Damn, remind me not to die around you crazy motherfuckers.” He handed me back the picture. His forced laughter ended abruptly as he looked away and waited. He knew why I’d given him the Polaroid and he knew what we were there for. Without looking at us, and with the seriousness of cancer, he asked, “Where Con at, Tatico?”
&
nbsp; “Vacation.” I smiled; I didn’t want to raise him up because he did not have to give me shit. He was the property of Conroy and Conroy was the property of the Shah. So I playfully tapped his arm as he looked intensely down the street. “We kind of inherited you till he gets back, you cool with that?”
He did not like having to deal with another set of cops who clearly weren’t anywhere near the vicinity of his universe. After a long and quiet pause, he said, “Eddie Griffin, Rasta ma’fucker, from downtown Flatbush. He hang over at Gowanus, got that weed spot off of Baltic. Gots some basshead ho he fuckin’ at 227. You catch that motherfucking island nigga’ right now in all probability you were to drive by. He wearing one a them matching shorts and shirt things that the bitches wear. Can’t miss him, yellow on yellow.” He turned to walk away; over his shoulder, with much distaste, he said, “You owe me behind this one, Tatico, yeah you do.”
No wonder Conroy’s top-dog collar man in all of the city, I thought. Shah King had a direct line jacked into everything that happened and was about to happen, not just there, but all over the city, and by default that meant that John Conroy did as well. I saw how easy life on the street would be if I had the Shah in my pocket like Conroy did, and I thought how unbelievably fast my career was going to change once I started working with King Kong of the Badlands; that was a premonition I should have analyzed very carefully. Had I been more like Mia—analytical, rational in my reasoning— things would have been very different.
We drove to Baltic Street where the Gowanus Houses stood like giant gray cell blocks in the southeasternmost part of the precinct. These projects had been built much later than the Red Hook Houses, so they were taller, and that was the only difference I could see between the two. They both bred animals, they both were rancid and smelled like urine, and they both were home to the Shah’s burgeoning dope spots. Technically, this was what we’d been brought from the 6-7 for, to collar shooters like Eddie Griffin. This was going to get us another commendation for sure, I thought.
My eyes were all over the street. I was looking for yellow on yellow. The tour was ending and I wasn’t able to find my soft target, as there were just too many people in the streets. Occasionally I’d spot something yellow, key on it, but lose it quickly in the many tiny walkways that connected the twelve or so buildings with each other. Our tour was an eleven to seven, so the late summer sun was dropping westward, toward Red Hook and beyond. It was at the angle that told me not to chase this cat west, I’d be blinded by the sun, giving him the advantage. But what good would it do without finding this murderous fuck? I thought. I was like a dog without his bone. I just drove and drove and drove, swooping back and forth from one side of the street to the other. The Gowanus Houses were situated in a tight eight-squareblock radius, west on Hoyt Street, south on Baltic to east on Bond Street, then north up Warren Street, then swing back around and do it all over again. Billy was getting impatient and started whining about turning the car in.
“Rob. Guy just clipped somebody. He ain’t gonna stick around waiting to get collared. He’s in the wind.”
“Bullshit, Billy, you think Shah just gave us that headsup to make us drive the fuck around in circles? He knows who the fuck we are. He wouldn’t have told us just anything or fed us disinformation.”
“Well, then somebody tipped off this Griffin dude, ’cause I don’t see no yellow on yellow.” He tapped the LED clock on the dash, “Seven-oh-five, Rob, let’s go back in. Common sense says if he is stupid enough to be out here today, then guess what, he’s gonna be out here tomorrow.”
“Common sense” told me different, which is why Billy was no longer flying in my air space. The shooting was fresh, day old. I felt the shooter was going to stick around, collect some money from this weed spot of his, reason being that the word on the street would take a little time to filter back to the cops as to who the shooter was. Griffin figured he had a day, two at the very most. I figured we only had tonight to grab him before he busted out of his spot and headed to another part of Brooklyn to kill again. I was as impatient with Billy as he was with me. He had been with me for almost three years by this point; he knew what I was all about, what my street mind-set had developed into. I would never lose in these streets, under no circumstances would I go home empty-handed, beat by some street animal, some murderer who thought he could do whatever the fuck he wanted to do whenever the whim arose, just pull out and start blasting at some mope on a dance floor, no regard for anyone or anything. This was a Jamaican trait—shoot first, don’t ask any questions later, and don’t leave anyone to answer any questions later, period. The more I thought about this perp, the more I hated him and what he stood for, and the longer it took me to find him, the more I wanted to get him. The further Billy twisted my balls, the longer I was staying out there. I was ready to pistol-whip Billy, the frenzy that was playing havoc in my head was going to manifest itself on Billy if he didn’t shut the fuck up, I thought. I knew this was going to end up rather badly. If we were splitting up, it was going to be a DefCon One–type divorce, and tonight, with the lights dimming over the Gowanus Houses, that scenario might occur sooner rather than later.
I drove some more. Billy’s leg was tapping furiously up and down, one of his nervous habits that would occur during the questioning of some street animal who was just feeding us bullshit line after bullshit line. His leg would gyrate like a nuclear-fueled piston when he could no longer take the insolence and lies we were being fed; he would just swing around in the seat and hook off with a solid right hand to the unsuspecting man’s temple. One shot would feed his need for the truth. I understood this anger, which could erupt in a nanosecond. Most every street cat working the streets knows exactly what is going on: who’s selling, dealing, slinging, carrying; who’s wanted for crimes all the way up to multiple murders. But when they are caught dirty, the way of the street is straightforward. Give us the info we want or go to jail. You fuck up the food chain, you don’t fuck down, but some of these street guys just hated giving the cops anything and they were stupid enough to take a collar behind it. We of course could care less about some bullshit narc collar, so the last thing we wanted was to actually collar the mope. The more we’d try to reason this out with the perp, the less he’d give us and the more incensed we’d get. This went back and forth till we could not take any more of the jailhouse nonsense and the perp would end up with his pride lost and quite the knot on his head. This of course after Billy’s leg started to twitch just the way it was twitching at that very moment.
Time was running out; I just wanted another half an hour to look for the perp. In my bones I knew he was still there, and I did not think that anyone had tipped him, that was the stuffed shirt in Billy’s unconscious talking to him. I believed different. I was different. Our detail was not on the same frequency as the precinct’s was; we were on a city-wide band, so we would not get called in by the 7-6 dispatcher. We were on our own, though we still had to account for where we were and why we were not end of tour by now. I had an idea; I picked up the radio and said, “Zone crime, K.”
Central responded, “Go crime.”
“Central put us out sixty-two mechanical, flat tire.” Billy slammed his hand into the dash. I just stared at him; he knew this was a battle he’d have to win in the parking lot after the tour was over.
“I know he’s out here, Billy.”
“This is so fucked, Rob. You are out of control.”
He might have been talking to me, but I did not hear anything except my heart pounding. I wanted this man so badly, this feeling of wanting to catch him eclipsed all others; I wanted to show Devlin that we were on two different planes. He was taking the easy road, just like the rest of the cops who worked in this godforsaken place. He was willing to give up, and in my mind, it was the coward’s way out—and then I saw him, about two hundred yards due east. The perp stepped out of one of the buildings and walked the atrium north, heading toward Hoyt Street. His pot spot, as well as his girl’s apartment, was
in the other direction. He was walking casual, though he seemed to have purpose in his step. There was a bodega on the corner of Hoyt and Warren, so I figured he was going to buy cigarettes or a forty of something, then he’d walk back to the weed spot or his bass-head girl’s spot to tap that box for a while. We needed to get him now, while he was aboveground.
I pointed him out to Billy. This wasn’t about telling Billy told you so. I had none of that playing off in my head. I had eyes and heart only for the killer who was two football fields away from me at that moment.
I can only try to explain the feeling that we as cops get when we are so dogged in our work and then the intense determination pans out. It would place me in a state of euphoria. Just like TKO did for so many junkies—we were all getting high out there. I knew I was making a difference regardless of what the Shah thought and regardless of what my partner thought. This was one of those quiet victories, the one no one was ever going to hear or read about; it was one of those rare moments in life that tells you, you are exactly where you’re supposed to be.
I swung a quick U-turn after I watched Eddie Griffin walk into the bodega that sold low-end cigarettes at inflated prices and charcoal-brewed forties that told you you were in the ghetto. There was a billboard, an ad for a cheap wine cooler, on the side of the bodega and it showed a handsome black cat and a half-naked black woman staring at each other in front of a four-poster bed. Every billboard in the ghetto had all these handsome minority men and beautiful minority women slinging cigarettes, really cheap liquor, or ads for AIDS or pregnancy testing. These are great images for an eight-year-old to see on his way to school, I thought. And now to see the white devil roll up and take out one of the neighborhood’s finest, well, what hope would my predecessors have on the job? Young Johnny was being schooled at a very early age to worship all things that were bad in society and to turn away from the good. Every day on the job I knew that we were just tamping down the problem, there were just too many billboards, too many Eddie Griffins, and so many Johnnys learning how to worship and to hate.