Skells

by F. P. Lione

  Last winter my sister, Denise, got wind that Marie was at it again. Denise hired a private investigator, who followed Marie and another detective from the 5th, Bobby Egan. Denise showed up at my apartment with pictures, a PI’s report, and a copy of the lease that Marie and Egan signed for an apartment in Bay Ridge. Denise hasn’t gone to my father. She wants to wait till Marie screws my father out of money he took from my mother—he sold our family’s house out from under her. Then Denise wants to let him know that she knew all along.

  “No, I still don’t know if I’m gonna tell him. Denise wants to let Marie take his money from him first. She said if I tell him, she’ll never speak to me again,” I said. “Normally I wouldn’t believe her, but she told my father Christmas Eve that she’d never talk to him again, and so far she hasn’t.”

  “I feel sorry for Denise, she’s hurting,” Fiore said, then added, “Do you think Marie would really take his money?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “She’s vicious—”

  “Central to South David,” Central interrupted.

  “South David,” Fiore countered.

  “We have a possible stabbing at the corner of four-o and nine,” which is across from the back of Port Authority.

  “10-4,” Fiore said as I drove to 9th Avenue, going the wrong way on 40th Street.

  3

  I pulled up next to the curb where a female was kneeling over the body of a man lying on the sidewalk. Joe and I stepped out of the car and saw the bloodstain on his chest, so we got on the radio to call for an ambulance.

  “Central, we have a confirmed stabbing at four-o and nine. We need a bus forthwith.”

  Lying down, the guy looked about five foot seven. He had on worn-out jeans, no socks, and beat-up sneakers, but the T-shirt looked new, making the bloodstain more prominent. I pulled a pair of latex gloves out of my memo book and threw the memo book on the dashboard.

  They had been doing some drinking, the air around us reeked of it. The female was sobbing, “Talk to me, baby, come on, Shorty.” They were young, early twenties, and had that crackhead look about them.

  “What happened?” I asked, kneeling down next to him.

  “Get an ambulance,” she sobbed.

  “There’s one on the way. Tell me what happened,” I repeated.

  “I can’t,” she sobbed. “Get an ambulance.”

  Fiore and I looked at the body. The guy’s movements were exaggerated, almost like he was in slow motion. I could see the tear in the front of his shirt where the bloodstain was. Blood wasn’t spurting out, more like seeping. I put my hand on his chest and put pressure on the wound to slow the bleeding down.

  His breathing was shallow, and I looked at Joe. “Put a rush on that bus—” but Fiore was already on the radio.

  “South David to Central, I need a rush on that bus—do you have an ETA?” Fiore said, asking for the estimated time of arrival.

  “Two minutes out,” Central responded.

  “Where’s the ambulance?” the girl screamed.

  “It’s on the way. You need to calm down and tell me what happened,” I said firmly enough to get her attention.

  “Someone stabbed him!” she sobbed.

  “Who stabbed him?” Joe asked her as he looked around. The chances were nil that we’d find the knife with prints on it at the scene, but stranger things have happened.

  “He ran down 9th Avenue,” she said and went back to begging Shorty to talk to her.

  “What does he look like?”

  She looked up, trying to compose herself. “Um, six foot, wearing a blue Yankee hat.” She paused and stared, then said, “Black shorts, black shirt, sneakers.”

  “Did you know his name?” Joe asked.

  “Easy,” she said with a nod.

  “Easy?”

  “Yeah, I only know him by his street name,” she sobbed.

  Joe put a description over the air, saying the stabber ran down 9th Avenue four minutes in the past, then the ranks got stupid over the radio.

  “Central, did you say cheesy?” It sounded like Rooney to me.

  “No,” Central answered the moron in her emotionless voice, “that’s easy, Eddie-Adam-Sam-Yellow.”

  “Easy come, easy go,” someone chirped.

  Someone else started singing “It ain’t easy being blue,” and I went to lower my radio so the girlfriend wouldn’t have to hear the remarks. I heard Hanrahan’s voice come over the radio with, “Stay off the air, we got a stabbing in progress.” Cops do this stuff to amuse themselves—we didn’t say he was likely to die, so they didn’t know how serious this was.

  A car screeched to a stop behind ours, and I heard Hanrahan tell Central that he was on the scene—“South Sergeant to Central 84.”

  Shorty was getting that look that people get right before the lights go out. “Look at me, buddy,” I said, trying to get him to focus on me. His eyes started to get that vacant look, like a doll’s eyes. I shook him a little. “Come on, the ambulance is on the way.” He wasn’t looking too good, but I’ve seen it happen a lot with these skells—we figure they’re dying, and a week later they’re back up on 8th Avenue, smoking crack.

  We heard the sirens from the ambulance coming, and the female started to scream again, saying, “Don’t leave me!”

  Fiore tried to draw her attention away from him by asking, “Why’d the guy stab him?”

  “He was making a play for me,” she answered Fiore, but she was looking at Shorty.

  “This guy?” Fiore asked.

  “No, Easy, the one who stabbed him.”

  “Where’d this happen?”

  “Next to the Port, where we been staying.” She nodded toward Port Authority.

  She meant the cardboard condos, a little neighborhood for skells halfway up the block from Port Authority. The skells throw up some cardboard boxes, add a shopping cart to hold their stuff, and call it home.

  EMS arrived, pulling up in front of our car. Rooney and Connelly showed up next and double-parked next to our RMP.

  “Whadda we got?” Hanrahan asked, looking at the victim, then at me.

  “We got a likely,” meaning likely to die.

  “South Sergeant to Central,” Hanrahan radioed.

  “Go ahead, South Sergeant,” Central responded.

  “Have South PDU respond to four-o and nine; we got a likely,” Hanrahan said, calling the precinct detective unit over to the crime scene. He told Noreen, Rooney, and Connelly to close off 40th Street and wait for the detectives. If the guy died, it would be up to them to call homicide.

  “It started over by the cardboard condos and made its way over here,” Fiore told the sarge so they’d know to cordon off the area where it started half a block away.

  We’ve worked with these two EMS before. One was a heavy-set guy in his forties, with wire-rimmed glasses and light brown hair. The female was nice, chubby, with short black hair and a lot of silver stud earrings. They gave us a quick nod as they started working on him.

  “We’re gonna rush him to Bellevue now,” the male said, snipping the shirt at the collar with a scissor and ripping it off the rest of the way. For some reason I noticed the writing on the T-shirt; it said “Welcome to New York, Now Go Home.” EMS saw my blood-soaked glove pressing on the wound and said, “Let me see it.”

  I lifted my hand to show it to him.

  “Keep your hand on it,” he said.

  Joe grabbed the victim under the shoulders, and I put my left hand underneath him. The two EMS grabbed his feet and under his backside, and we heaved him up onto the stretcher and got him into the bus. His girlfriend got in with us and sat on the bench on the right side of the ambulance.

  “Tony, stay with the bus and keep me advised of his status,” Hanrahan said.

  Fiore was behind us as we took 9th Avenue down to 34th Street.

  The victim’s head and arms were limp, and he must not have had a pulse, ’cause the female EMS yelled “Clear!” so I could move my hand while she gave him a zap wi
th the defibrillator. She put an air bag in his mouth and we started CPR. I tried to remember the sequence of chest compressions to air bag with CPR. I kind of winged it; I did about ten and she gave him a couple of shots with the air bag.

  I buckled my knees into the stretcher to keep myself balanced and kept both hands on his chest. The bus was moving with the sirens going, and I could tell when we were getting to the intersection because the driver changed the signal to a fast, continuous whoop. Every time he stopped, I had to plant my feet to keep from moving forward and then backward when he took off.

  By the third traffic light on 34th Street, I had my balance and we had gotten into a rhythm with the CPR. The blood was coming out of the wound now, running down either side of his chest. I wondered if I was making it worse by pressing it, but the female EMS worker wasn’t telling me to stop. I was starting to feel helpless here, and I was aware of the girlfriend sobbing and trying to hold on with the movement of the ambulance.

  I prayed now for his life, and if he was gonna die, I asked God to give him a chance to make things right, to let him meet Jesus. I prayed for the doctor and EMS workers to get him back here so he wouldn’t have to die this way. He was just a kid.

  When we got to Bellevue there was a doctor and nurse waiting outside for us, and they helped us get the stretcher out and took over the CPR. They had him inside in a couple of seconds and put him in the first trauma room inside the emergency room.

  They were announcing a code on the overhead PA system and about thirty people charged into the room, including the nurse who was handling the drunk when we were there earlier.

  The girlfriend tried to go in the room with him, but I made her stay in the hall with me. Fiore came in through the emergency room doors, and the three of us stayed out of the way and let them do their thing.

  “Busy night, eh?” someone asked.

  I looked over and saw the two cops from the 17th. The one who was talking to us was big, with short black hair.

  “Yeah, I thought we were done here before,” I said.

  “Did his wife really blow him off the toilet?” he asked, smirking.

  “Indirectly,” I said with a shrug, then added, “We’ll probably go see how he’s doing.”

  “They transferred him to the burn center at Cornell,” he said.

  “Really?” That surprised me.

  He nodded. “It was pretty serious.”

  “He seemed okay, but EMS dropped him on his face, so who knows,” I said.

  The commotion of the code was still going on inside the room. The door opened, and I saw the doctor who met us outside take off a pair of bloody gloves, step on a foot latch, and drop them into a garbage pail with a red bag.

  “Is there anyone here with the young man?” he asked Fiore.

  “She came in the ambulance,” Fiore said as he nodded toward the girlfriend leaning against the wall about ten feet away from us.

  She looked up at the doctor, and the three of us walked over to her. The doctor introduced himself and asked if she was the next of kin.

  “I’m his girlfriend,” she said. I hadn’t looked at her before, I was too focused on her boyfriend. She had curly brown hair tucked behind her ears. She was wearing jean shorts, a tattered black tank top, and red rubber flip-flops. Her feet were dirty, and her front tooth was chipped.

  The doctor went into his spiel about the internal bleeding being so severe they couldn’t control it and he was sorry but the patient expired.

  The girlfriend had a blank look and then asked, “Is he dead?”

  The doctor blinked, not realizing she was clueless about everything he just said. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  She let out a wail, folding her arms around herself. She collapsed against the wall and slid down to the floor. The doctor looked uncomfortable. Joe leaned down and rubbed her shoulder, talking in a soothing voice to her.

  “Can I see him?” she sobbed.

  “Sure,” the doctor nodded, grateful to be done with the bad news.

  I got the doctor’s name and the victim’s time of death while Joe helped her up and walked her into the room. He waited outside the open door. She was leaning over her boyfriend, kissing his face and telling him she would always love him. I wanted to get out of there, so I told Joe, “I’m gonna go out and raise the sarge.”

  “No problem, I’ll stay here and make sure she’s okay,” Fiore said.

  I walked out through the automatic doors and lit a cigarette. “South Sergeant on the air?”

  “South Sergeant,” Hanrahan responded.

  “Can you roll over to 9?” Which is point to point, a private conversation so that the news, Central, and the police groupies can’t hear us.

  “South Sergeant on the air.”

  “Sarge, this is South David. The likely didn’t make it,” I said. I gave him the pronounced time and the doctor’s name. “Anything else you want me to get?” I asked him.

  “Do the aided card, the complaint report for the stabbing, and get all the info on the female who was with him. Wait for the detectives to get there, then come back to four-o and nine.”

  We waited until 4:30, when two detectives from Manhattan homicide showed up. They were old-timers in their fifties, an Italian guy and an Irish guy, both dressed in off-the-rack suits.

  The Italian guy talked to the victim’s girl, and the Irish guy identified himself as Detective Mahoney and asked Joe and me to walk outside with him.

  “Were you the first officers to the scene?” he asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “Yeah, it was our job,” I said. Since he was smoking, I kicked one up too as Fiore stepped back from the cloud of smoke.

  “You get it as a pickup or from Central?” he asked, taking out a pen and notebook.

  “From Central,” I said. He looked at our names and the shield numbers on our chests, then checked our collar brass for our command and wrote them down.

  We went through the deal, filling him in on the stabbing. He scribbled away in his notebook as we talked.

  “This guy Easy, either of you know him?” Mahoney asked, still writing.

  “Not by name. Maybe if we saw the face, we’d recognize him,” I said.

  “His stuff is still at the cardboard condos,” Joe said. “Easy doesn’t know the victim’s dead; he’ll probably go back up to the condos to get his stuff.”

  Mahoney nodded, smoked, and wrote.

  The automatic doors opened, and the other detective walked out with the victim’s girlfriend. She wasn’t crying anymore, just subdued, with a dazed look about her.

  “As soon as you point his stuff out, we’ll bring you back here,” the detective was saying.

  “Will they let me see him again?” she asked hopefully.

  “I don’t know, you can ask them,” he said. The truth was, by the time she got back, he’d be in the morgue and they’d be working on someone else in that room.

  “We’ll take her back to where they’re staying, and she’ll show us the perp’s stuff,” the detective said to Mahoney. He turned to Joe and me. “We’re gonna need the complaint number and the aided number.”

  “No problem,” Joe said. “We’ll get it when we get back to the house.”

  We left the hospital at 5:00. Joe and I took 34th Street back across town. We stopped at a deli on the corner of Lexington to pick up coffee. We were an hour past our meal, and we were tired now. We’d probably be at the scene for a while and needed to stay awake.

  Fortieth Street was cordoned off with crime scene tape when we got there. Sergeant Hanrahan’s RMP was parked in the middle of the intersection so no cars could get through. Romano was there redirecting traffic southbound on 9th Avenue. The crime scene tape would keep anyone from walking on the sidewalk and interfering with the evidence gathering.

  “How’s it goin’, Nick?” I asked as we walked over.

  “Hey Tony, Joe,” he said. “Where’s my coffee?”

  “If we knew they pulled you
off post for this, we would have gotten you some,” Fiore said.

  “Did the guy die here or at the hospital?”

  The rookies are always preoccupied with death.

  “In the ambulance; they couldn’t get him back.”

  “Friggin’ skells,” he said as he shook his head.

  While we have a lot of deaths in Midtown, we don’t have a lot of murders. I guess murder is relative in New York, but Midtown being a commercial area, the crime is different. In places around the city that are more residential, where drugs and gangs play a part, there’s more murder.

  In Midtown we get a lot of robbery, burglary, scams, and other fun stuff like that. I’ve seen death by car accident, suicide, overdose, strokes, and heart attacks, but the ratio of death by murder isn’t all that high. In the ten years I’ve been here, I’ve seen people die a thousand different ways. The skells stab and beat each other, but usually they’re like the Terminator—you just can’t kill them. But not tonight.

  Hanrahan was talking to one of the detectives, who had on his blue windbreaker with Crime Scene plastered across the back. The other detective, in a matching jacket, was taking measurements and pictures and writing the information down on his clipboard.

  The two detectives from Manhattan homicide were there with the victim’s girlfriend. She was pointing to the spot where we found him on the curb, and then she pointed up toward the cardboard condos by Port Authority. The Italian detective had his hand on her elbow, and they walked up toward where the whole thing started.

  Mahoney was asking Hanrahan, “Did you find the weapon?”

  “No.” Hanrahan shook his head. “We did a search three blocks down on 9th and up the side streets and came up negative.”

  The crime scene detective was branching out now, taking pictures of the area surrounding where we found the body. The other one walked up to the cardboard condos and was bagging up stuff and marking it. I was guessing it was Easy’s stuff, but I guess it could have been the victim’s as well.