by Robert Cea
My breathing leveled off; I was so happy to be in that room, looking at this lieutenant who I’d probably be a few years down the road once I got the street out of my system. I smiled broadly. “Well, Nicky, I’m just working it, I love doing what we do—” He raised his hand quickly.
“Before you go any further, Bobby, I wanted to push the move for you, you’re ready for your shield. This gun bullshit is good for bosses like me, but you guys in the street are an inch from getting jammed up, you understand that, yes? Last thing I want is to see a sharp young guy like yourself getting poled by some defense attorney and his drugdealing client.” I didn’t understand why he just didn’t tell me I was transferred. Was he trying to apologize for allowing it to happen that quickly? “So I made some calls to expedite the fifty-seven . . .” He slowly shook his head from side to side, as if he was trying to understand it. I now felt the room close in on me. “A flag came up in your folder, stated you could not be moved from the unit. There is some investigation going on, don’t know who has it. Now, if it were field internal affairs, you’d be able to move, so it’s got to be IAB or . . .”
“Or…?” escaped from my mouth.
“Or higher up the ladder.” He was studying me for emotion; I know my face was flushed from embarrassment, but mostly from fear, fear of the unknown, which is a way of life on this job.
“You know, Bobby, you screw up once on the job, you’re pretty much out on your ass. There is the one-strike rule; they either fire you or you’re back in the bag working in this shithole with these friggin’ maniacs. Sometimes it’s not fair, but it is what it is.”
“Nicky, if this is about money, I never took a nickel.”
“Cool; so if that’s what they’re looking for, let them look, and you don’t have anything to worry about, yes?”
“I mean, I’m no angel, boss, but I am only doing what I’m paid to do, trying to get the pistols and the shooters off the street. That’s what I’m all about.”
“Bobby, listen to me, for what it’s worth. I do believe two things. I believe there is a case someone has open on you, and I do believe you aren’t rippin’ anyone out there. But there are other ways of getting hammered by these guys; you understand? This thing blows over, I’ll get you to wherever it is you want to go, but until then, watch what you do out there and be very, very careful. These guys are so crafty, they’ll turn someone without them even knowing it. Or… they got someone in here.”
“Someone in here” scared me as much if not more than had they turned someone on the outside. It was very clear to me at this point that the ways of the street were catching up with me. I was sure I was the target. I didn’t know what collar it was that I’d gotten pinned for, maybe it was all of them, but I knew that it was time to regroup. It was the first time I was really scared for my future, and things would only get worse.
11
“Monster”
Even with all the bullshit that was going on, there was still the day-to-day job of putting animals away. One such animal was a pattern rapist. He’d struck in Flatbush, all the way deep into the 7-1, and into the northwestern sections of Brooklyn. Now he was hitting zone eleven—the Badlands. He was a brutal rapist with particular tastes. Number one, he would deface his victims’ bodies post-rape by jamming a brick in a mouth or a metal pipe in a uterine canal or other orifices of the body, and he liked shitholes like the Badlands. The garbage dumps, the forgotten docks, the burned-out and ruined factories, this was his canvas; and now he was very close to home. His victims were all found near the vast waterfronts of Brooklyn. My very first impression of the scene was that he liked the dichotomy of his chosen locations: a river separating all the beauty that Manhattan had to offer from all the hell that these parts of Brooklyn had to offer. He was given a name by the various units who had the unlucky duty of investigating these rapes: He was called the Monster. At the time, the crimes weren’t on my radar. There was no picture, not even a sketch at this point, and he was careful in his methods, taking his four female victims down from behind. There was a tiny task force from the sex-crimes unit attached to it, so I figured they did what they did best and I didn’t think about it again—until that warm spring morning.
Conroy and I had a tour change, so we were overlapping with Patty and Billy. We heard the job come over the radio as a 10-10, past assault. Billy jumped on the job, as he was around the corner from the scene; generally, the plainclothes units were not supposed to take calls from the precincts, but Billy must’ve been raised up by the job for a reason. Then he called for the PDU, sex crimes, and the precinct boss, so we knew that this was a victim of the Monster. Conroy swung the car in a U-turn, heading to the scene.
“Let’s not go there,” I said. “Everyone and their mothers are gonna be there, plus sex crimes has the case.”
Conroy shot me a look. “All of a sudden rape isn’t a collarable offense in this car? Wake up, Rob.”
I was embarrassed. He had a way of making me feel less adequate, but in hindsight, he was so right. I was still blinded by the crimes that I knew: guns, robberies, shootings, murder. Rape was foreign to me, maybe because I didn’t want to think about that type of human degradation, but I was going to get a firsthand look as Conroy sped to the scene.
We arrived at a sanitation truck depot just off Hamilton Avenue, between the 7-6 and the 7-2 precincts. It was stuck between the Red Hook Houses, the Gowanus Canal, and the hundreds of abandoned, broken-down lofts and factories that dotted the Brooklyn piers of Sunset Park. One of the sanitation workers had noticed the victim walking aimlessly in between the trucks, her clothes ripped, her face bloodied.
Billy and Pirelli’s car was parked out front when we arrived, the radio chattering with transmissions, and sirens in the distance. I knew this was going to be a mob scene in minutes. Conroy walked to Pirelli, and I lagged behind. The woman was walking in small, tight circles, dazed and in shock. She would cry and then she’d stop, look at her bare wrist, and say that she had to pick up her children from school. Then she’d look into the sky and remind herself that the kids did not have an umbrella. It was heartbreaking to me. A beautiful woman, a mother, beaten, humiliated, and raped. Her hair was disheveled and matted with grime and dirt and her own blood, though I could tell that it was styled nicely, indicating that she wasn’t a hooker and she had some sort of means. I watched as Billy gently talked to her. He wrapped a blanket around her, separating his body from hers so as not to place her in any more discomfort. He let her sip from a water bottle, then he doused a towel with the water and gently patted a bled-out gash on her chin. His face was full of genuine concern. He’s as real as it gets, I thought. It suddenly struck me, out of the blue, that I’d lost my way. What Billy was doing, and the compassion and humanity that fueled it, were no longer a functioning part of me. I was mesmerized by the scene, proud of Billy and what we as cops do, but I felt like I was no longer on that team, the team that is out there to help. My idea of helping had gotten tainted somewhere along the way. I only saw guns and shooters, and pulling them off the streets was a way of helping, that is true, but there are other facets of this job that I turned away from, really heroic stuff that I took for granted. I realized I wanted to get it back, somehow, if it wasn’t too late. I heard Conroy’s voice break through my stream of thought.
“Rob…”
I focused. Conroy and Pirelli were right in front of me, talking.
“Tell him what Tanner said.” Conroy was also watching the woman and looking around the area trying to decipher where she’d come from and how the rapist had pulled her in without any of the workers seeing. I was rocked right back into the miserable situation that I was trying so hard to block out in my head, every second, for the last forty-eight hours.
“Didn’t know if it was IAB or bigger. No movement on my part, which tells him it’s big.” I said this with my eyes on Devlin; the only thing that mattered to him at that moment was this poor beaten-down woman, and I respected him greatly for it.
“Just me,” I said.
“If they’re watching you, then they’re watching all of us.” Conroy said this with condescension. He was treating me in much the same way he treated Cholito or the hundreds of other street mopes we dealt with every day, except he was subtler. Not subtle enough, I thought.
Pirelli turned on the coolness. “Only thing they could have is turning these little pricks on for info, and that’s a factoid out here. No way they’re into us for that, and if they are, fuck ’em, our word against theirs. They ain’t got audio or a videotape, they got balls. What do they think, we can do straight eights out here without dealing with these scumbags? They could suck my dick… talk to me, John.”
“Tell him what else he said.” He seemed accusatory this time, like he was my guardian and the curfew I’d broken had to be explained to the headmaster. I looked at him, hoping that he’d see I was riding on a very thin nerve ending. I know he saw how that manifested itself in the street—a beat down. I just hoped that he understood that it could happen here as quickly.
“He said it could be on the inside as well, maybe a cop rolled.”
Pirelli looked slowly at Devlin, then tilted his head at Conroy. I saw the anger well up his neck and settle somewhere behind his eyes. “No, no, don’t even go there,” I said. “Not in a million fuckin’ years, bet my life on it.” Devlin may have been a lot of things, but he was no rat; I was sure of this.
Pirelli and Conroy looked to each other once again and slowly walked toward the woman and Billy. Then Conroy stopped and turned to me, slowly, Pirelli hovering. “Then maybe it’s your little pal Cholito ratting us out.”
I was a second from cold-cocking him. Pirelli tried to say something, but I just held my hand up to him, not taking my eyes off Conroy. He was obviously trying to draw lines in the sand; I wasn’t having it. “What, all of a sudden you ain’t got no workers out here, John? Maybe it’s the thousand motherfuckers you got out here working your dime, maybe it’s someone from your past, John, maybe they were looking at you and while you were off taking a dump somewhere they saw me. So get this divide-and-conquer shit out of your head.” I stepped very close to him; I wanted him to know that he should not try and create rifts between any of us, and if he wanted to take it a step further, I was with him. He simply looked away. He was good. He’d never once been baited into a fight; I was sure something was in the mail between the two of us. He then looked back at me and at Patty.
“If it’s not that junkie, then it has to be Shah,” John said. “They have to know we’re in bed with him, even if he isn’t the one who’s rolling. They see the biggest dealer of boy right in our faces and the prick never gets collared…they must’ve thought he was papering us or think we been on his dick to get padded…so maybe they started an investigation behind it.”
Either way this was cut up, we were in bed with the Shah, only thing was, he wasn’t padding us, or at least I knew he wasn’t padding me. That chilling feeling enveloped me again, the one that told me I really didn’t know everything about John. Maybe he and the Shah had something hooked from way back in the day. Now I was full-blown paranoid— I needed to find out for myself.
“So, the Shah’s reign of power is going to come to an end.” John said this matter-of-factly, as if he’d already tactplanned it out, almost as if it had already been done. This raised me up. Why would he pound his guy, one he’s worked with for so many years, so easily so quickly?
“That’s a real scummy move, John,” I said.
“What’s the matter, this guy on your dick all of a sudden?”
“No, John, just wanna play it straight with our snitches, that’s all, brother.”
He moved to me slightly; he delivered the lines with calm clarity: “There is blowback firing right at us, and I know the prick for ten years. Safe to say, it very well could be him. Maybe it’s not, but I ain’t taking any chances. This motherfuck would do us in a hot fuckin’ second. You, my man, are way too close to these pricks. You need to wake the fuck up to the fact that he is a scumbag drug dealer who’s gonna get played. He ain’t my friend, and he definitely ain’t your friend, and don’t ever forget it… and by the way, he’s mine to do with what I like, not yours.”
I had been incredibly naive to think that we were all gentlemen and that there were rules that had to be adhered to. The Shah was going to get got one way or another, with or without me, just part of the game.
I went home stressed. If I saw anything in my rearview— cars, trucks, bicycles, vendors, whatever—I’d think they were all watching me. I instantly was aware that I had a shelf life on this job, and it ended when they decided that my time clock would be punched for good. All these years I’d put in, and for what?
The drive home down those pretty streets didn’t help these feelings of fear and paranoia and self-loathing for placing myself in this mess. Mia had been putting on a great face all these months, putting up with my bullshit selfcenteredness. She accepted the fact that I would not meet any of her work friends for dinner, or go with them on their weekend sailing trips. She transitioned easily between her job and her home life while I dreamed of being back out in those ghetto streets. She and that house and our future had become inferior to me. My primary focus was to try and ride this investigation out without getting too bloodied, and then I would get out of the Badlands and into an OCCB unit to gain my gold shield. I still believed in the job and I still had a crazy jones for the street, but somewhere inside me I realized I’d have to settle down and create some kind of normal life with Mia.
The humming in my head was at a fever pitch when I rolled up to the front of our kick-ass house. I turned up the radio and let the car idle for a few extra moments because I knew once the engine turned off, that ringing in my ears was just going to get louder and louder. The only way I found I could stop the ringing was by drinking myself silly with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Mia allowed me this vice; I think that she just wanted to see some kind of emotion from me, even if it was drunken nonsense. She had said many times that my silence had made her paranoid. I had to laugh at the thought. She had no idea what paranoia was, and I wasn’t about to tell her.
She was preparing dinner in the yard, on the outdoor stove, when I arrived. She looked stunning, as usual. Of course, I didn’t acknowledge this, I had other things on my mind. I went right to the bar and poured a giant glass of bourbon. The table was set beautifully with candelabras, a lace tablecloth, fine crystal; bouquets of flowers even lined the walkways. Candles in votive jars were hung from the beech tree, and more candles lined the deck that looked out into the endless blue of the Long Island Sound. I sat in the deck chair and drank.
She walked to me slowly, cautiously, and pecked me on the forehead; I felt her soft hand gently brush my chest. “Oh, honey you look so tired.” She whispered this as she placed her face next to mine.
“Why are you home so early?” I asked, drinking the mind-numbing liquor without kissing her back.
She moved back to the oven. “Told you, baby, doctor’s appointment.”
It was at that moment that I saw something that did not compute—a cigarette butt. I bent down and picked it up. Then I walked to the garbage can, where there was an empty beer can. I picked it out, then showed them to her. “What’s this?”
“Garbage?” She was cool. She was not guilty, but paranoia is as powerful a drug as TKO.
I walked to her slowly. “We don’t smoke, and I haven’t had a beer in this house in days, so…”
“So I gave it to the bathroom guy; why the big investigation?”
“Don’t be sarcastic with me, Mia. Don’t fuckin’ do it. I deal with that bullshit all day long; I will not accept it from you.”
She put down her utensils, tilted her head at me. I knew this was not going to be pretty, but in my mind I was right and I was going to find the bathroom guy and fucking shoot him.
“You will not
accept it from me…excuse me! Who do you think you are, and what exactly is it that you’re insinuating? Robert?”
She never called me Robert, and from her tone, I felt that I was overhearing another unhappy couple argue. I could not let it go. “What, you have a couple of beers with the bathroom guy, he comes back here, smokes a cigarette. You guys walk the fuckin’ pier? What, Mia, fuckin’ tell me.”
She walked to me with a jump in her step. This was the first time I had seen this side of her. She was not of the streets, way too smart for me to play her.
“Ask me what it is you want to ask me, Robert.” She was face-to-face with me; I knew I was already in it, though something was telling me to tail down and walk away. It was her eyes, full of anger but with a wanting behind them. I know that all she wanted was to be happy with me, for us both to enjoy this great life, but I could not break through this barrier I had to put up. I felt sorry for her, and I felt sorry for me, but I was a hardened animal by this point in my life. I had no time for any of it.
“You want to ask me if we fucked?” She smiled; she knew the buttons to push. “Yeah, we fucked on the pier”— she leaned really sexy, and whispered—“and he was fucking fabulous.”
I grabbed her by her arm. “All of a sudden you’re a fuckin’ comedian?”
She ripped her arm out of my grip, fell backward, then jumped back in my face. She pointed her finger under my nose; she was seething. “Don’t you ever grab me like that again, you hear me! If you think this is Brooklyn, you are sadly mistaken. You will leave that bullshit in the ghetto or wherever the fuck it is you got it, because there will be no next time, Robert!”
I pointed back in her face; I was not backing down. Though the truth is, I should never have been up to begin with.
“You don’t know what the fuck is going on out there. How do you know who this prick is? He could be staking out the house right now. You’re so wrapped up in all this highsociety nonsense and living in some fantasy world in a fucking bubble that you don’t have a clue to how easy you are, how easy anyone is! Do you know the fucked-up people who are out there, do you? Do you have any idea how fucked up a world this is?” I was livid. The image of that poor woman walking naked and bloodied in the piles of garbage was something that was hard to forget. I saw Mia there, but I could not tell her. I was angry because I did know how fucked up the world was, and how, where we were living, was so not in the real world. I was wrong; that was as real as it gets.