Codes of Betrayal

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  For three years, Johnson had claimed to be working on the next “big cop book,” and the best way to needle him was to say you were working on your book. He believed everyone.

  The team of Hoffman and Smith came into the squad office, dragging a frightened, bone-skinny woman by the arm.

  “Tried to pick my damn pocket, can you beat it? I’m on the subway; just as I get off, there’s this hand reaching …” He held up the thin hand. The lightweight sleeve of a torn coat slid down the woman’s arm, revealing needle tracks. “Sit here,” he instructed her. He leaned to Nick. “She’s in a helluva bad way. Four months’ pregnant. Gonna try to get her into detox.”

  Hoffman only looked like a monstrous uncaring bastard. He was really softhearted under certain circumstances. It was known that he had a drug addict son doing time in a rehab somewhere in Minnesota. He had taken it very hard; hadn’t been able to follow the edicts of the “tough love” group his wife insisted they join. Against all advice, he had hugged his kid and told him that he loved him and would love him forever. He didn’t let anyone know that he would take the kid back over and over again, no matter what.

  Hoffman poured a mug of hot coffee from a sticky pot and thrust it at the woman, who jumped. Not realizing how loud and threatening his voice sounded, he bellowed at her, “I’m gonna give ya this cuppa, now promise not to boff on me, okay?”

  Nick told him, “Hoff, she don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Look at her—you’re scaring the hell outta her.”

  Hoffman shrugged and backed off, then remembered something. “Hey, Nicholas, my man. You goin’ to that big seventy-fifth birthday party for your grandfather, right? Waddya gotta do, kiss the ring before you kiss his cheek?”

  “You’ll never know, Hoff.”

  A new member of the squad, a skinny Puerto Rican named Silvio but called Slick, listened in. He didn’t know if he resented the nickname or not. He walked over to Nick.

  “Hey, no kiddin’, O’Hara—your grandfather is that guy Ventura, the big mob guy?”

  Only certain guys are permitted to joke about someone’s family. Slick was not one of them.

  Nick stiffened and looked down at the smaller man. “Something you want to discuss with me about my family, Slick? ’Cause if there is, there’s a coupla things I wanna talk to you about your mother.”

  Eddie grabbed Nick by the arm and tugged him to the door, waving Slick off. He whispered to Nick, “Christ, Nickie, c’mon, don’t be mean. You know how those PRs are about their mothers.”

  As they walked down the stairs, Nick said loudly, “Sure, because they don’t know who their fathers are!”

  A furious voice called after them, “I heard that. I heard that.”

  There was laughter coming from the ready room, as the eight-to-four guys were being relieved by the four-to-one A.M. men.

  “C’mon, that’s Del White in there,” Nick said. They entered the room, anticipating. He was the squad’s storyteller.

  “Nick, my man, lemme tell y’all about what happened to me on my watch through the night. You notice I’m still here at what? Four P.M. Had to collar a guy, damned if I didn’t, just as I went off last night.”

  Detective Second Grade Delaware White’s skin glistened ebony pure. He was handsome, meticulous, a regular GQ dandy.

  “So I stop off at Healy’s for a quick one and walk into the middle of a real ongoing brawl—fists and beer flying.”

  He had a magnetic voice, and he seemed to disappear into the scene he was depicting. Guys paused in their paperwork—those on the telephone only paid half attention to the voices coming from the receiver.

  “So I tried to keep out of it—hell, I’d done my job of work, but wouldn’t you know it? Right in front of my face, this stupid-looking little Irishman, I mean a right off of the boat donkey,” he glanced at the Irish guys who waited him out, “no offense, honest, but this man, he even had those little pointy ears your Irish fairies have.”

  McFyphe looked up from his typing. “We Irish don’t have fairies, so be careful what you say, Mr. White.”

  Nick called out, “Leprechauns.”

  “Ah, that’s it, that’s what he looked like, one of those. Those little guys you haul out for the St. Patrick’s Parade. Anyway, this dumb dude holds off and slams Magee the barkeep right in the chops, and Magee grabs onto me and yells, ‘Arrest this bastard before I kill him.’ So I had to take the man into custody. By now, we’ve got a coupla off-duty guys trying to straighten things out, but my little friend lands one on me. So I cuffed the culprit and begin to read him his rights.”

  White covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head.

  “I check with my little card, to make sure I say everything in the right order. Then I look at the guy and he has a really nutty look on his face, so I go, “What? What’s up? Do you understand what I’m tellin’ you? And he looks at me and says, ‘Jesus, I thought you was supposed to read that to you people. Why you readin’ this shit to me?’”

  McFyphe, without looking up from his report, asked, “Well, isn’t it just for you people?”

  White ignored him. “So I ask him, nice, y’know. And just which people are you referring to, m’man? I can see this little … guy … is working hard now. He gotta be careful, so he says, ‘the Negro people?’ I glare at him. He tries again—’the black people.’ I tell him to try again. ‘Okay, I mean the Afro-American … African Americans … Jesus Christ, you people keep changing who you are every other day, how the hell are we supposed to know what to call ya?’”

  The detective had a contagious laugh, and in the pause, McFyphe asked, “So now come, Del-a-ware, you people call each other ‘nigger’—hell, I hear it all the time on the street and in that rap music and all—so how come we can’t? Use the word, I mean?”

  White smiled, put his heavy hand on McFyphe’s shoulder, and said softly, “Just don’t try, brother, just don’t try. I tell you this as a friend.”

  He turned back to his audience. He hadn’t finished. “So I book the guy and I tell him: listen, my man, I want you to know something. You have just been arrested by the best goddamn cop in New York City, and I want you to remember my name, okay? The guy nods. So I straighten up, look him right into his beady, shifty little eyes, and I tell him: I am White! Talk about a confused Irishman!”

  CHAPTER 2

  AS HE TURNED OFF the parkway and headed up the winding road that lead to his home, Nick regretted that he hadn’t touched base with Kathy. He hadn’t been home in two days. He and Ed had to work around the clock chasing down an elusive informant, whom they hadn’t found until the very early hours of the morning. By then it was too late to head for home, or even call. What was the point of waking his wife up at four in the morning to tell her what she already knew: that he was stuck? Three hours later she’d just be getting up again, to head out for her teaching job at the high school.

  And he hadn’t called today because, well, he’d see her soon.

  That of course was rationalization. He hadn’t touched base with her in more than forty hours because he didn’t want to hear the sound of her voice. The pained Okay; I understand; sure.

  There had been a time when she did understand. And when he did call, no matter what the time, day or night. When they were young and newly married, she worked for her teaching degree at Queens College and he worked round the clock in uniform. They were happy in the small two-room apartment in an old building in Forest Hills; they couldn’t wait to see, talk, touch each other. She’d come wide awake at the sound of his key in the door. They’d make love even if he was tired and bored from a long uneventful eight hours on patrol, or overly excited by the unexpected, wildly implausible events every cop encounters.

  She’d tell him about her student teaching classes: how much she liked the kids, how guilty she felt when she really couldn’t warm up to a particular student. He’d tell her about his amazement when he watched a group of women in their mid-thirties being booked for prostitution. All
housewives from a community in Long Island, working the motels for some extra cash, for mortgage payments, clothes, an extra car. One even was sending her kid to a private school to protect her from the riffraff in the public school.

  They talked about the odd things people did, the peculiar way lives were lived. He couldn’t get over the way total strangers confided in him: men and women both, telling him their deepest thoughts and hopes, their sex lives, some of their darkest deeds and regrets. Nick had a sympathetic manner, but he was often uneasy about what was told to him. But he could tell Kathy anything. Actually, whatever he saw or encountered didn’t seem complete until he shared it with her.

  Some of the mounting tension between them began as he became more and more involved in the criminal justice system. He couldn’t believe the way the law, as written and practiced, bent over backward to favor the criminal. The bad guys walked free while citizens started to live behind expensive, decorative bars and triple locks and signal devices. He’d lock a guy up and meet him hours later on the street, bailed out or d.o.r.

  When Kathy argued that some bad guys were bound to benefit from laws that were necessary to protect the innocent, Nick gave up arguing. Her government classes taught her one thing; his reality showed him another. Nick had never seen an innocent guy stay locked up. He sure as hell saw plenty of guilty perps walk free, grinning at their victims. The randomness of the system was overwhelming. A guy walked on the whim of a judge; on a technicality because someone was careless; or because the DA just couldn’t be bothered, and agreed to a deal without really knowing what was involved. He watched vicious, violent crimes bargained down and adjudicated for time served. And, on occasion, he’d seen the bad guys walk because of something much more sinister: outside interference. Manipulation. Corruption.

  Kathy maintained her schoolgirl innocence and confidence. In one bitter argument, he told her he was glad she hadn’t become a lawyer. She’d have that revolving door spinning.

  She had influenced him, though, to continue college—and he had to admit he loved his classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The courses were repeated, day and night, to accommodate the working tours for the cops going for their degrees. The civilians in the classes didn’t know the way the criminal justice system really worked. They just read the books and the learned opinions. No one told them about the deals cops had to make with the scum of the earth, who would become your informant-partner in order to reach even lower scum. No one taught them the difference between theory and practice.

  The kids Kathy taught in her senior high school government classes were suburban kids—mostly from intact families, with an average share of drug, alcohol, and sex abuse in their backgrounds. What she didn’t experience, on a day-to-day basis, was the kind of charged atmosphere in which a mob of high school kids would be ready to kill a best friend or casual acquaintance over a dirty look, an unintentional jostle, an offhand remark. Nick knew those kids—knew where they were coming from. He even knew the sociology behind it all. What he didn’t know was what the fuck was the solution.

  The slow decline of their marriage was caused by so many things: his long, irregular hours. His growing inability to discuss his work. Too many disagreements, too much theorizing. Cops tended to socialize with each other, and he admitted that he could be prone to their us-against-them attitude.

  But it wasn’t that either. Not really. Partly, it was women. It was a given, on the job; in uniform or out: A cop represented power and authority, and there was a wide and strange contingent of women who were turned on by the idea of a gun, handcuffs, and the absolute power to deprive someone of their liberty, even of their life. Not only submissive women; some very strong, dominant women just wanted, for a brief period of time, not to be the one making the moves and the decisions. It was a form of play, except cops’ wives wouldn’t see it that way.

  Nick hadn’t gotten into anything serious; nothing important, anyway. Hell, in this day of AIDS and other diseases, it wasn’t like the days he heard about from the old-timers. There were one or two women he’d met in the course of investigations. One complainant asked him to come over one evening to discuss the case she was involved in as a victim; her businessman husband was out of town and she was alone in her Park Avenue apartment and maybe he could just tell her about one thing or another? Nick would call home: he got stuck on an interview, not to worry.

  A whiff of perfume as he stripped off his clothes for his shower gave him away. The feeble explanation—some dweeb of a hooker went around spraying the crap on everyone in the squad room—was met with a cold stare. “They don’t make Chanel in a spray,” his wife observed through tight lips.

  After a while, whenever he stayed away from home, whether it was for a legitimate reason or not, he felt guilty. And so of course he acted guilty, and that made him mad. And Kathy madder.

  And another problem: Nick’s love of gambling. It started when he was in the service. What the hell else did a young single guy have to do with his time and money? It was fun, recreational. The betting never got too heavy. Sure, a few guys lived from payday to payday wiped out, but sometimes they hit on the numbers; made the point in a dice game; beat the odds in a tight horse race. Played their cards right.

  When he was a young cop, he’d pick up a tip—there was always a tip or two floating around the house. Third race at Hialeah, horse named Blame Me—that was irresistible—twenty-to-one and you wouldn’t swear a fix was in, but shit, a fix was in. Sometimes there was a big payoff. Sometimes not. Most times not, but what the hell, you play your walking-around money, not the rent.

  He made a lot of excuses to Kathy about short money on pay days: some guy’s kid had a terrible illness that insurance wouldn’t cover, so we all kicked in. There was a big drive for starving kids somewhere in some starving country. A coupla orphans at the scene of a double homicide were dressed in rags; been abused; no food, no toys, nothing. He went a little overboard—fifty bucks—but Christ, Kathy, those kids needed everything and they had nothing.

  They spoke about gambling and he tried to explain. Yes, he lost most of the time, but there was always that chance. Someone always wins. He agreed to set a maximum for betting money—not more than she spent on cosmetics, haircuts. Not important money, just walking-around money. But when an absolutely sure thing came along at Aqueduct and he laid down a heavy bet and it paid off—a coupla thousand bucks, for Christ’s sake—how the hell could he not play? After Peter was born, there was just enough money around—at least until Kathy went back to teaching—to cover necessities. He didn’t stop cold—he’d still get into the squad baseball, basketball pools—but he doled out his bets very carefully. Avoided getting into bad situations, which he had done a few times in the past.

  As he pulled into his driveway, Peter came toward him, followed by a couple of dogs. The oldest, Woof, was Peter’s. The others were temporary residents. Peter helped out at the local humane society, baby-sitting strays until they were permanently placed.

  Nick thumped the dogs one by one, while studying his son. Peter, at twelve, was at the tall and lanky stage. His face was not yet firmly defined; Nick could still see traces of a child’s softness around his mouth. But his eyes, amazingly black and thick-fringed, like his mother’s, no longer held their look of complete innocence and surprise at the world around him.

  By the time he worked his way into the house, Nick had managed a quick, hard hug for his son, a jostle with a few of the dogs.

  “Mom’s in the kitchen. Dinner’s almost ready.” There was that worried look on the boy’s face. It was hard to reassure him that everything was okay when he knew nothing was okay anymore.

  “Take care of these beasts, okay? See you later.”

  Kathy was pulling a roast chicken from the oven, and even with her back to him Nick knew exactly what to expect. Her body language was familiar. He moved aside as she put the pan on the counter. She turned to him, waiting.

  Her face was so familiar, too, with its traces
of the young girl he had married. Slight lines from the corners of her eyes—laugh lines, although he couldn’t seem to make her laugh much anymore. She had her dark brown hair pulled back from her face in a ponytail. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand as her large dark eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened. She was still as slim as a girl, and as conditioned as one of her high school students. She had always been considered “cute”: button nose, dimples, that attentive way of holding her head slightly to the side when she listened and got ready to voice her own opinion.

  Nick leaned forward and kissed her lightly on her mouth.

  “Sorry, babe. We got hung up last night and it was too late to call. Then we got stuck on a fixed post all day …”

  “Look, Nick, when you walk out that door, I literally don’t know if you’re ever coming back. With all the crazies out there …” Then she took a deep breath and he knew she had been planning to say this for a long time. “I don’t know if you’re alive or dead. It would help to know, so that I’d be ready for whatever plans I had to make.”

  He responded, reacting to her tone. “Hey, if I was dead, someone would have come to let you know. And you wouldn’t have to make any plans. The department would handle it. All you’d have to do would be to attend.”

  Of course, he had gone way too far. He always did when he knew he was wrong. He immediately regretted the pain reflected on her face and caught the way she ground her teeth and blinked hard. She turned away and he reached out for her.

  “Hey, babe, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I should have called. Okay, Kath?”

  She waited for a moment. “Can we have a nice, family kind of dinner tonight? Peter’s been all tensed up. For once can we at least try to fool him into thinking we’re a normal, happy family?”

  “Hey, I can put on an act as good as the next guy.”

  She turned the coldest stare in the world on him: her black eyes froze. Kathy was a small woman, and when she thrust her chin up she looked like an angry child, but there was nothing childish about her anger.