Forced Entry

by Stephen Solomita

  Two hours later, he was standing across the street from 337-11 37th Avenue and wondering just what kind of bullshit DeadDog was tossing these days. Except for a trio of moving men filling their truck with furniture, there wasn’t another black face anywhere on the street. Born was wearing his working clothes: nondescript Levis, cheap sneakers, a down jacket that reversed from black to blue and a throwaway Yankee baseball cap. His hair was close-cropped, without any of the fashionable designs black barbers shave into the scalps of their customers.

  “You got to be cool on the streets, my man,” DeadDog had explained. “These boys with the fancy cars and the dope ropes all gon’ do long bits. Y’all shove yo shit in the man’s face, he get you if it take twenty years. Shit, the pig got all the money, he can afford to wait. Y’unnerstan’ what ah’m sayin’? We talkin’ survival here.”

  But this scene didn’t have any cool to it. If coming into a white neighborhood (as far as Born Miller was concerned, the Orientals were even whiter than the maggots) and opening a crack den wasn’t throwing it in the pig’s face, he wasn’t a stoned-out coke freak. Born Miller was accustomed to tenements and projects, had never been outside Harlem until mama took him to the circus on his fifth birthday. He could deal with situations that would paralyze ordinary citizens; could, for instance, creep through an abandoned tenement on a pitch-black moonless night in search of a dealer. Or of prey.

  Unfortunately, there were no abandoned tenements in Jackson Heights. The apartments and the two family homes, Born Miller noted in amazement, were nearly spotless. Even the shrubbery and the lawns had the look of a neighborhood holding its own against the tide of urban decay. How could DeadDog be such a fool? Anyone trying to work these streets would be busted in a minute. This was a place you came to do a quick rip-off, then subway up to Corona where the brothers lived. But even as he started to turn away, a black woman, Yolande Montgomery, came through the door of 337-11 and walked left, toward Broadway.

  “Man,” Born Miller said out loud, “the sister’s a damn bulldyke. This shit is wrong.” Born Miller didn’t like it when things didn’t make sense; he didn’t like being confused. In fact, that was the only good thing about jail—you were never confused. It always came straight at you. Not like this shit. He knew he wasn’t ready for it, not after two days of crack, but he couldn’t seem to walk away, either. Then his eye found a stairwell leading to a long unused basement door and he walked down the steps without hesitation, pulling out the pipe stem as he went.

  Five minutes later, his head was on straight, but he still couldn’t bring himself to enter the building. “Ain’t no up to this scene,” he whispered to the neurons popping off inside his head. “DeadDog know how bad I hate these white motherfuckers. Can’t do mah shit when the maggots be on my case.” Finally, too stoned to stand still, he walked back along 37th Avenue, trying to mix with the pedestrians, but the shoppers, whites and Asians for the most part, made him even more uncomfortable. No matter how good the crack felt, he was aware of its darker side, of its potential for terror and panic. He felt like a declawed, toothless lion wandering among a herd of elephants. If they stampeded, he’d be trampled in a second.

  Impulsively, he turned into the Happy Sea Produce Market. He hadn’t eaten in a couple of days, maybe an apple or some grapes would help take the edge off. He was rummaging through the apples when he noticed Mee-Suk Park looking at him. Her glance was casual, actually benevolent, but Born Miller felt it burn him as furiously as the perfunctory commands of the Correction Officers on Rikers Island. Why was that damn gook watching him? Was he some kind of freak that she should stare at him like that? He hated the Koreans worse than the Jews. At least the Jews hired blacks to front for them. The slopes didn’t trust nobody.

  He strutted to the cash register, staring straight into her eyes. If the bitch was a Jew, he thought, she’d have turned away by now The gooks were motherfucking hard to read. He couldn’t see anything in her eyes as she took his apples, dumped them on the scale, then punched the buttons on the register with practiced skill. When he paid her, she slapped the change down on the counter, ignoring his outstretched palm, and proceeded to the next customer. In an instant, the panic changed to anger. He had two pockets stuffed with crack vials and a .44 pressing against his gut. Why should he fear a slanty-eyed cunt?

  Born Miller was what police like to call an opportunistic thief. He had no special modus operandi, but was content to accept whatever the day happened to offer. Thus, when he saw the New York Telephone envelope lying on the counter, he automatically noted the address: Yong Park, 337-11 37th Avenue, Apartment 3H. He looked around the store again, counting the Oriental faces busy with the fruits and vegetables. Koreans, Born Miller knew, worked very hard. Most of the time, the whole family was involved, especially when it was busy. Maybe he’d make a quick stop in 3H before he checked out DeadDog’s scene. Everybody know the gooks ain’t trustin’ no banks. Might be any kind of money hidden behind the mattress.

  On the way back to the Jackson Arms, he stopped in the stairway to really do his head up, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be coming down for a couple of days. Not until he connected for enough smack to grease the runway. When he walked across the street to 337-11, he was buzzing from his crotch to his eyeballs, but he noted the broken front door with surprise. Definitely wrong for honkey heaven. And someone had torn out the mailboxes, jimmied them with a steel bar so they hung out like broken teeth. And the elevator smelled of piss, the door closing in little jerks, the cage shaking so wildly that Born thought he was back in the projects.

  Apartment 3H, as Born expected, had two double-bolt locks in addition to the landlord-supplied burglar’s special under the doorknob. DeadDog had introduced him to the fundamentals of lock-picking in Rikers, but he didn’t have the patience to spend weeks setting up a score. He knew there was a much simpler way and once he had 3H properly placed within the geography of the Jackson Arms, he went back outside the building, to the rear, and began to climb the appropriate fire escape.

  It was after three o’clock and most of the housewives had gathered up their broods and retired to the kitchen. The sun had begun to drop behind the skyline of Manhattan; it peered dimly through gathering clouds. None of this, though it undeniably aided him, ever pierced the glow suffusing Born Miller’s brain. In his mind, the deed was already accomplished and he stopped on the first landing to listen to the voices in apartment 1H while he fired up the pipe.

  Five minutes later, he was outside Yong Park’s window, staring, undismayed, at the window gate. “Pussy shit,” he said, then climbed to the railing and casually executed a graceful leap to an adjoining window ledge. He was prepared to crack the glass with the butt of his newly acquired .44, but the window slid upward at his touch and he was inside without making a sound.

  He listened carefully for a moment, crouched by the side of a bed, but there was no one in the apartment. Only the soothing hiss of crack dancing up and down his spine. Still cautious, he went from room to room, carefully opening doors, his “tool,” his .44, in his hand.

  The trick when doing burglaries, he knew, was to get in and out as fast as he could. It was like banks, in a way. Every second counted. Unless you were so fuckin’ stoned, your mind was on Pluto. Unless you were so fuckin’ stoned, you were hopin’ the assholes’d show up.

  Born Miller giggled, as he thrust the barrel of the Bulldog .44 into his waistband and pulled out the pipe. This time the crack lit up what he called “the safety zone.” He had the revolver, a dozen vials filled with tiny white pellets, a pocketful of twenty-dollar bills and every hope of a big score in the great here and now. That was the safety zone. The Cave of the Untouchable. Fresh and tight.

  He started in the back, in the adult bedroom, with the mattress and the boxspring, slicing the covers neatly, working his hand around the yellowing foam. Nothing. He went to the bureaus, pulling out the drawers, overturning them on the bed, examining the contents. He ripped open a jewelry box, snarling at
the cheap costume pieces, then smashed it to pieces on the top of the bureau.

  “Sweet baby, show me gold.” He stuffed the two chains and the earrings that tumbled out of the secret drawer into his pockets, knowing this was only the beginning, then yanked both bureaus away from the wall, examining the backs for taped packages, tipping them against the bed so he could check the bottoms. The wall mirror followed, crashing to pieces.

  He was on top of his game, now, working up a real sweat. After all those months in Rikers, his act was tight. Bad Born Miller come up to breathe. Check him out.

  He took down the large cross hanging on the wall by the headboard with every intention of pissing all over it. Show the slopes where his head was at. But when he tossed it on the bed, the back slid out in his hand and a roll of bills tumbled onto the mountain of clothing already placed on the torn mattress.

  The bills, a thick stack of twenties and fifties, were in his hand almost before they hit the bed. He cradled them in his palm as if holding a lover’s breast. A little voice whispered, “Get out quick. Get in. Get out.” It was DeadDog’s voice, but this was too good to be believed. He sat on the edge of his bed, pulled out the pipe, inflated his brain to its proper level and was preparing to count the loot, when he heard the front door slam shut, the sharp clack of multiple locks being thrown, the sing-song voice of an older woman lecturing a child.

  Born Miller looked around the room calmly, noting both the chaos and the open window. “Check this shit,” he whispered softly. The pipe was still in his hand and he was tempted to light it instead of either fleeing or preparing for battle, but he put it back into his pocket and strolled, his shoulder dipping with each step as he picked his way through the debris, to the open window. The old lady (he could almost see her wrinkled face screwed up so far her eyes were black lines against pale yellow skin) was still jabbering away. Why should he fear something so ugly? He flashed back to his first years in school, to a handful of Oriental children who always knew the answer. To the sullen grandmas waiting to see them safely home.

  He looked at the window ledge and imagined himself stepping out and making the leap to the fire escape. There was a time he would have done it just to impress the homeboys on St. Nicholas Avenue, but DeadDog had cut that macho shit dead.

  “You come in the window; you go out the door,” DeadDog had told him as they lay together on the cot in DeadDog’s cell. “You ain’t never take nothin’ you can’t hide in yo pocket. No televisions. No VCRs. No stereos. Y’unnerstan’ what ah’m sayin’? You don’t give the man no reason to search yo ass, so once you out the door, you home free.”

  Out the mother-fuckin’ door, he thought. Ain’t no gook gon’ push Born Miller through no window. Fuck, no. Not when the boy got himself a .44 near touchin’ his dick.

  He crept to the door and listened closely. The old lady and the kid were still going at it, the sharp meaningless sounds chipping away at his head. The need for the goddamned pipe was beginning to fill him and he knew he wasn’t about to get to it until after he offed the bitch. He wanted to crash through the door and just do it, but he remembered DeadDog’s instructions on cool, on how that urge to get the shit over with had put him in Rikers in the first place. Quickly, his ears still glued to the voices outside, he found a pair of panty hose in the pile on the bed, ripped one leg off them and pulled it over his face. “Okay, maggot,” he whispered, “here I come.”

  He dropped to the floor and looked through the keyhole just as the old woman began marching the child along the hallway toward the bathroom. The kid was tiny, no more than three or four, and she was crying silently. The granny was as ageless as her body was shapeless, a sausage stuffed into a pink housedress. Her eyes, as she came right toward him, were tiny and lost in her wrinkled, ivory face.

  He waited until he had just enough room to open the door before he rushed out into the hallway, the pistol raised above his head. The old lady, suddenly mute, stared up at him and her eyes widened until they were nearly as round as his.

  “That’s a favor, bitch,” he said, bringing the butt of the gun down across the top of her head. “Makin’ them eyes round. People gon’ think you white.” He raised the gun again, but she was already dropping to the brown carpet. Blood was dripping from the tips of her stiff, black hair and the housedress had ridden up, bunching around her hips. Born Miller stared down at her heavy thighs, at the white strip of cotton running between her open legs.

  “Ain’t this some shit,” he whispered. His crotch was already aflame as his fingers busied themselves with the pipe and a small vial of tiny white pellets. “Party time,” he announced to the pipe, to the warm buzz pulsing in his body, to the little girl with the red ribbon in her hair.

  SIX

  February 27

  THE SUBWAY PLATFORM WAS nearly empty when Stanley Moodrow boarded the F Train at the Houston Street Station, despite the hour. It was six o’clock in the evening and the rush was in full swing, but there were few commuters (and less work) that far south on the F Train’s run through Manhattan. Later, as the F passed through midtown before turning out to central Queens, the subway cars would fill until commuters, exiting or entering, would have to force their way through the doors. It was the worst part of the day for a majority of New Yorkers, this extraction of a second payment for their daily bread. They understood the phrase “by the sweat of your brow”; the eight-hour day is a forgotten idea to most of them. But this other labor—to be stuffed into featureless subway cars on a rainy Tuesday evening, to ride for an hour (if everything was running on time) with the stink of wet wool, or, worse yet, the stench of a homeless beggar, pitiful or not, sharp enough to bring tears to your eyes…It was too much. It was unfair.

  Moodrow, on the other hand, was oblivious to his surroundings. Already comfortable on a bench near the doors separating his car from the next (two adolescents, smelling cop all over him, had fled the seats the moment he entered), he could allow himself the luxury of daydreaming. The only benefit of rush-hour subway rides is the lower potential for the kind of violence that keeps the tabloids humming. At the height of the morning and evening crush, the muggers rest, while the pickpockets and the perverts wait for the car to give a sudden, covering lurch.

  Being neither pervert nor pickpocket (and with zero potential to be a victim of either), Moodrow could ignore the commuters and concentrate on his memory of the previous Saturday evening, especially Betty Haluka’s determination in the face of Jim Tilley’s complaints. Because Tilley, as Moodrow expected, hadn’t been able to hold his cop resentment inside, despite Rose Carillo’s attempts to soothe him. Not after the first few drinks.

  “Well, I’m Irish,” he’d said, his voice carefully neutral in deference to Stanley Moodrow, “and we don’t have very good imaginations, so I’d just like to understand how it feels to work with those people. You know what I’m talking about? To take some pig who stabbed his best friend fifteen times and get him off because the arresting officer didn’t do the paperwork right. How does it feel to put that man back out on the street?”

  Betty looked over at Moodrow, as if expecting help, but Moodrow had no help to give. Jim Tilley was articulating the anguish of every New York cop. The department was making more and more good arrests (despite the restraints imposed by Miranda) and it was extremely disheartening to see a man originally charged with attempted murder out on the streets after doing six months for simple assault.

  “Do you understand why?” Betty asked Moodrow.

  “Maybe,” he shrugged, “but I’m retired now and I always thought the system was bullshit, anyway. Besides, I never argue with my mouth full.” So saying, he shoved a handful of Doritos into his mouth and chewed judiciously.

  With no help from her date, Betty raised her glass for a refill and eyed Jim Tilley carefully. She might, she knew, have appealed to Rose. Rose would certainly try to head off any potential ugliness. But Elizabeth Shirley Haluka didn’t appeal for help in situations she thought she could handle. Not after
a third glass of burgundy and two plates of Irish lamb stew. Not after a second iced Stoli (without the twist). And especially not after making an irrevocable decision to take the giant ex-flatfoot, Stanley Moodrow, into her bed that night. She knew why Moodrow was leaving her to face Jim Tilley. It was because he wanted her, too. Wanted her enough to take a chance.

  “I don’t like it,” Betty finally answered, sipping at her iced vodka. “But it’s not my fault. Most of those ‘technicalities’ come about because some gung-ho cop decides he can see a bag of dope lying on a dresser from his position on a rooftop sixty feet away. Or because, in his zeal for aggressive law enforcement, the same moron conducts an illegal search and the murder weapon can’t be used in court. And, even with that, I don’t get those kinds of dismissals in more than two percent of my cases. It’s not really a factor.”

  “Look,” Tilley said, catching a meaningful look from Rose Carillo that prompted him to ask his question without anger. “Two months ago, I pulled a speed freak named Ronald Starise off another speed freak named Vera Blisso. Starise cut her face in a barroom argument; there were fifteen witnesses. Me and my partner hauled Vera to Bellevue and they spent four hours stitching her up. Pumped three units of blood into her while they were sewing. Yesterday I heard Starise got sentenced to a year for assault. I don’t think that’s right.”

  “Well, don’t blame me,” Betty said. “I don’t even know the guy. Besides, you’re talking about plea bargaining. The big lie. That’s not anything the defense controls. Unless the case is very weak, the DA makes the offer.”