Forced Entry

by Stephen Solomita

Moodrow, a glass of bourbon in his hand, was intrigued, despite his intention to keep out of it. “What’s the ‘big lie’?” he asked.

  Betty grinned at Moodrow, unconsciously leaning toward him and away from Jim Tilley. “Once upon a time there was a politician named John Whore. This politician, in his endless quest for re-election, went out and took a poll. He asked the voters what they wanted to do about crime and the voters said, ‘Please kill all the criminals. But if you can’t kill them, throw them in jail and keep them in jail until the flesh rots off their bones.’

  “John Whore (as a responsible servant of the people should) passed this message down to the police who began to make more and more arrests. At first, everybody was pleased as punch. The population of upstate prisons went from twelve thousand in the early seventies to more than forty-five thousand today. But then John Whore took a second poll and this time the voters said, “ ‘Hey, you guys are doin’ a great job. Really great. Just don’t make us pay for it.’

  “Now here’s the truth, Jim: a little over ten thousand criminals were sentenced for felonies in the Bronx last year. Nine thousand five hundred involved defendants who pleaded guilty. That’s plea bargaining, right? Only five hundred involved trials. And those five hundred equaled the largest number of cases that, given the number of judges, Assistant DAs and courtrooms, can be tried. Understand what I’m saying? If the nine thousand five hundred criminals who plea bargained their way into lighter sentences all decided to ask for a trial, the system would come to a complete stop. Likewise, if the judges decided to send every one of those criminals to jail, the jails would be so overcrowded that some other judge would force the state to let most of them go. All this because a politician took a couple of polls.”

  “So everybody pays,” Rose Carillo said. “If they don’t pay with money, they pay with bullshit courtrooms and junkies crawling through their windows.” Now that the kids were in their rooms, she was playing catch-up with rum and cokes. Her first instinct was to like Betty Haluka, recognizing Betty as a fellow survivor. But Rose had once been the victim of a brutal husband and had felt, firsthand, the effects of a criminal justice system that seemed to be failing everyone and she couldn’t shake off the simple solution to crime which had all the criminals safely in jail. “Because if those people go back out on the street, they’re gonna hurt other people. You know that.”

  Betty said nothing for a moment, looking inward for the right words. When she did begin to speak, her voice was very gentle, as if she sensed the experience that lay behind Rose’s question. “There’s three kinds of defendants. First, there’s the druggies. Crack or dope, it’s all the same. They go out and commit minor crimes to keep themselves high. Or they become small-time dealers for the same reason. That accounts for ninety percent of my clients. Second, there are people like Henry Lopez, who Stanley told you about, who’re actually innocent. They get it worst, because the system is set up to force defendants to plea bargain. Third, there are psychopathic criminals capable of such mindless violence, no argument on Earth could justify their continued freedom. I can’t get used to them. Not even after twenty years in Legal Aid. Not after a thousand years in Legal Aid.”

  “But you defend them, too,” Rose said. “You have to. And sometimes they go back out because of your defense.”

  Betty thought about it for a moment, weighing her answer carefully. “Actually, they go back out because of plea bargaining. The cops made more than a hundred thousand arrests last year. I’m counting misdemeanors, too. The courts can’t deal with that and sometimes really bad people slip through the cracks. But remember, it’s almost always the District Attorneys office that sets the deal. I try to haggle, but the deal is usually presented as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. It’s only when the prosecution’s case is weak and they’re afraid to go into a courtroom that anything like ‘bargaining’ takes place.”

  “And how do you handle that?” Moodrow asked, sitting on the edge of his seat. “When you know someone should be put away forever and you hear the judge give him two years?”

  “Or her,” Betty smiled. “We get women crazies, too.”

  “Her or him,” Tilley said. “How does it feel?”

  “Do you like everything about being a cop?” Betty asked. “You don’t have to do shit work sometimes?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “When I have no choice, I do it and try to forget about it. Like everyone else involved in the justice industry. Like the Assistant DAs and judges and even the cops.”

  “Do you ever have a choice?” Rose asked, sensing something behind Betty’s answer.

  “Once in a while, you have to even up,” Betty said, her voice darkening. “You have to step outside the boundaries of professional ethics. If you don’t, you go crazy.” Even as she went ahead with her story, she had a sense that she shouldn’t be saying this, but somewhere between the alcohol and Stanley Moodrow, she’d lost her sense of self-preservation. It drowned in sudden trust. “About six months ago, I went to one of the court pens, where they keep the prisoners, to confer with a burglar/rapist named Morton Heller. He told me he had to speak to me in private; there’s something I had to know. Usually, that means a client wants to inform on someone in exchange for less time.

  “So I arranged for a conference room which took about three hours, because there aren’t enough of them, either, and I went in to talk with Mr. Heller. Fortunately, I had enough sense to let the Court Officer cuff him to the table. That’s standard procedure, but most of the time I don’t bother. I want my clients to trust me.”

  Suddenly, the three of them, Moodrow, Tilley, and Rose, were sitting on the edge of their seats. All slightly drunk and waiting, like kids, for their bedtime story.

  “The minute I came into the room, he started telling me about the women he raped and how he couldn’t wait to get out of jail so he could crawl into my room next. He told me exactly how he’d hurt me and what he’d do sexually and how he’d make me pretend to like it. And while he explained all this, he masturbated with his free hand.

  “Nice, right? Of course, I’d seen all the complaints (he was up for four counts of rape along with assorted assaults, atrocious assaults, and robberies) and the depositions the victims gave were really bad. The rape was the least of it; he beat them, cut them, terrified them. And he dragged it out. He came into their apartments just after they went to bed and he stayed all night.

  “Well, Morton Heller was stupid as well as disturbed and he had this sense of his own power, of his invulnerability, that set him up nicely for what I decided to do to him. I said, ‘Look, Heller, you can sit around jerkin’ off if that’s what you want, but I think there’s a good chance you could beat this.’

  “The truth is I had just come from a meeting with the Assistant DA and I knew the case against Heller was rock solid. The DA was offering twelve years to life for a plea bargain, which means Heller would have to do at least ten, even if he took a plea. Heller, by the way, was only twenty-five, so if he did ten, he’d still be young when he came out. Young enough to ruin some more lives.

  “Anyway, Heller stopped playing with himself and asked me how I could get him off. I said I didn’t think all the victims would show. I ran down a line of bullshit about two of the victims failing to pick him out of a lineup. I told him I’d contact any witnesses who could give him an alibi. I told him that since he never turned on the lights in his victims’ apartments, the identifications wouldn’t hold up.

  “Maybe I should have been an actress, because the asshole bought the whole bit. I went back to the Assistant DA and informed him that my client was determined to go to trial and there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. You realize that once I speak to the client, the prosecution can’t get near him without tainting the case, so there was no way the Assistant DA could get a hint of what I was doing. He just shrugged his shoulders and we went before the judge and got a trial date.

  “About halfway through the trial, Heller figures it out and goes crazy. Fortunately, I was
questioning a witness at the time, so there was enough space between us for the court officers to get to Heller before Heller got to me. He tried to tell the judge what I’d done to him, but every defendant blames the lawyer when a case goes bad, so the judge didn’t want to hear about it. He asked Heller if he’d like to change his plea to guilty and Heller was so crazy by this time he agreed.

  “Boom! Down comes the gavel and two weeks later, the judge sentences Heller to the max on every charge: four counts of rape; four counts of sodomy; two counts of felonious assault; two counts of aggravated assault; four counts of kidnapping; four counts of robbery. It adds up to life plus a hundred and forty-five years. Case closed.”

  There is a unique moment in the lives of lovers. A mostly unremembered eyeblink that inevitably drowns in a wave of lust. It is the moment when man and woman are naked for the first time; when eyes slide across vulnerable flesh. Betty Haluka looked over at the giant who walked toward her. His body ran in a straight line, from his armpits across his ribs, his waist, his hips, his thighs. The difference—the ultimate injustice—in size between men and women passed quickly through her consciousness. He was monstrously big; she could exert no physical force against him. To voluntarily accept that surrender; to knowingly be that vulnerable—she could not complete the act without trust. The emotion was implied in the touch of his lips on hers and when her nostrils were full of the fragrance of the hairs on his chest, she took hold of him and leaned forward to whisper in his ear.

  “You can forget about getting on top.”

  When Moodrow came back to himself, the F was pulling into the Continental Avenue station, one express and five local stops further than he’d planned to go. He glanced at his watch as he left the train to wait for an express going in the opposite direction and noted that he’d be a little late for the meeting with Betty’s Aunt Sylvia, which was no big deal. He didn’t expect much to come from his trip. Maybe, if the place wasn’t too far gone, he’d have a private talk with the pimp or one of the dealers. See if he couldn’t scare them away.

  SEVEN

  THE SECOND MEETING OF the Jackson Arms Tenants’ Association, Sylvia Kaufman noted from her position at the front of a hastily rented bingo room at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church, was going to be far better attended than the first. Unfortunately, the tenants, instead of uniting around their anger at the abomination that had taken place in the Parks’ apartment, were standing in little ethnic knots, talking among themselves as if protecting state secrets: five families of Koreans, with wives and children near the folded bingo tables; a dozen Asians, Hindu and Moslem, united in their distrust of the whites who, they believed, controlled their destinies; a large group of the old-timers, led by Mike Birnbaum, who liked to blame all problems on the ‘new people’; and, finally, the Hispanics (including a group of Mexicans she hadn’t known existed before this evening) surrounding the Cuban Almeydas and two Colombian families who’d been in the building for almost ten years.

  Curiously, none of the groups appeared to be intimidated and Sylvia wondered if they were showing off for each other or if they were too angry to be afraid. Certainly, some of the tenants were intimidated. Yong Park and his family had secluded themselves behind closed doors. Their fruit and vegetable business was shuttered while they prepared to move into a two-family building in Flushing, a building owned by Mrs. Park’s brother. And Myron Gold was going, too. Just like that. Announcing to Sylvia that his mother, Shirley, couldn’t take the winters anymore—not after the surgery. They were Florida-bound as soon as the paperwork could be completed on their Ft. Lauderdale condo.

  Shirley Gold had kept her head lowered all through that conversation, wanting to show neither her tears nor the unhealed scars from the cancer surgery on her jaw. She and Sylvia had been neighbors, if not friends, for decades; there should have been a better way to part. But Shirley Gold was tired. Haggard, really; and the tragedy that had fallen on the Park family only added to it.

  “So that’s it, Sylvia. We’re going down south where it’s warm all the time. Mom can’t take the winters and, to tell the truth, I can’t either.”

  As Sylvia expected, Myron had not even bothered to show up for the meeting. But he’d found the time to go from door to door, trying to sell the furniture they couldn’t take with them into the fully furnished condo.

  “Excuse me.”

  Sylvia, startled, looked up at the giant standing next to the desk at the front of the room. Somehow, she hadn’t noticed him coming. Which seemed, in light of his size, clearly impossible. The word “Alzheimer” clicked on in her consciousness, as it always did when she was forgetful. Even while he introduced himself, she wondered if everyone over fifty had the same association after a moment of inattention. Each time it happened, she consoled herself by recalling the day and date, a sure sign, she believed, of continuing intellectual continence.

  “Yes?” Looking into the small, dark eyes of the man who stared down at her, she felt that something was wrong with him. Or different, at least. Something strange, but not, in itself, threatening. Then she realized that he hadn’t smiled and he wasn’t blinking.

  “My name is Stanley Moodrow I’m a private investigator. I used to be a cop. Betty Haluka told me a little bit about your situation. She asked me to come down here tonight.”

  “Betty called me this afternoon,” Sylvia said, taking his hand. Her fingers, she noted, lay flat in his palm, like a baby’s head on a pillow. “I’m afraid I don’t have much time to talk tonight.”

  “Have you gone to the police?” he asked. “I know a lot of cops and I could probably help you out there.”

  “I phoned the precinct and Sergeant Dunlap assured me that he would be here tonight,” she replied politely. “Sergeant Dunlap is the Community Affairs Officer.”

  “I’ll talk to him when he comes in.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Sylvia, though she was too busy to consider it for more than a moment, saw Pat Sheehan start to enter the room, only to freeze in his tracks when he saw Moodrow. Then Al Rosenkrantz squeezed by Pat, trying to say “hello” to everyone at once, while Pat retreated through the doorway.

  “Mrs. Kaufman.” Rosenkrantz wasted no time in coming up to her, ignoring the Yiddish epithet (which he didn’t understand, but which he was sure meant him no good) tossed at him, like spit, by Mike Birnbaum. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how badly I feel.”

  “Well, I think you should say that to Mrs. Park.” Sylvia stepped away from him. She wasn’t the injured party. Nor was she about to go into mourning. She wanted to save her home and she was determined to do it in the only way she could comprehend: by organizing and by raising money.

  “Is Park here?” Al Rosenkrantz asked. “He called us yesterday and begged to be let out of his lease. Of course, considering the awful thing that happened, we agreed immediately.”

  “No, Mr. Park isn’t here,” Sylvia said quietly. “He’s in his apartment.”

  “Is the granny going to be all right?”

  “Yong Park’s mother is still in the hospital. She’s all right physically, but she’s in shock. She won’t talk to anyone. Not even to her son.”

  “Such a waste…”

  “Mr. Rosenkrantz, I’d like to get started. I promised you a chance to speak to us, but I can’t give you the whole meeting.” Her resolve hardening, she watched Al Rosenkrantz, probably looking for Myron Gold, retreat to a chair off by itself.

  “Please, may I address the meeting? I got a message for these faygelah guests you invited.”

  That was Mike Birnbaum. As expected. Controlling Mike Birnbaum, though it was absolutely necessary, could easily turn out to be the most difficult part of her job.

  “May I address the meeting?” he repeated loudly.

  “I wish you wouldn’t, Mike,” Sylvia said, resurrecting a small piece of the union delegate who’d represented the teachers in her school for almost ten years. “Not until after we begin. I’ve done a few things today that I’d like t
o tell everyone about.”

  “Sylvia,” Birnbaum raised his hand to wave her off, “whatever you say is okay by me. I’m an old man. I can’t even be in charge of myself. But I got to say I think it’s meshugge you should invite people to this meeting who ain’t tenants.” He indicated Rosenkrantz, Moodrow, and Porky Dunlap, who’d come in as he was speaking. “Two I don’t trust and I don’t know. One I don’t trust and I do know.”

  Before Sylvia could frame a reply, Paul Dunlap approached her and began, without permission, to address the Jackson Arms Tenants’ Association. For a moment, she considered pushing him out of the way, but he was enormous and he wasn’t bullying her. He was enthusiastic. And she might need him later on…

  “My name is Paul Dunlap. Sergeant Paul Dunlap from the Hundred and Fifteenth Precinct on Northern Boulevard. I just want everyone to know that the man who broke into the Park apartment and attacked Mrs. Park, was cornered in Manhattan and killed after shooting at officers trying to arrest him. The man had jewelry in his pocket that Mr. Park identified as belonging to his mother, and there were other, chemical, identifications on his clothing. We’re completely convinced that we got the right man. The case has been closed.”

  Of course, Porky Dunlap had had nothing to do with the demise of Born Miller. Born Miller had been about to be arrested for trying to break into his mother’s apartment when he’d suffered a fit of temporary insanity (substance-induced) which had compelled him to pull his .44 on Patrolwomen Rita Mintz and Patty Ruthven. They’d pumped nine rounds into his chest before the pistol cleared his waistband.

  Even worse, though Sergeant Dunlap wasn’t about to announce it, the connection between Born Miller and the Park family had been made through a credit card in Park’s name which Miller had been carrying in his wallet. The jewelry had come as an afterthought, while the “chemical identifications” were entirely his invention.

  But Porky Dunlap, noting the smiles of relief on the faces in the room, was more than content to bathe in the gratitude due an overworked cop who had just made a timely arrest. It never occurred to Dunlap that his announcement would undercut the gravity of Sylvia Kaufman’s meeting, but Sylvia felt it. She felt the hope of organizing the tenants (which she defined as getting them to pay dues, to part with their money) slipping away from her, as it had on her first attempt to establish the Jackson Arms Tenants’ Association.