by F. P. Lione
He gave out the color of the day (red), the sectors, and foot posts, and ended with, “Be careful out tonight. As Bruno learned last night, there’s all kinds of weapons out there.”
“What is wrong with you, Galotti? What are you doing here?” Rooney barked. “You could have been out for at least a week.”
“But I feel okay,” he said with a shrug.
Rooney shook his head. “What a dope.”
We stopped to get our radios and threw the bull with Vince for a couple of minutes before we went out to the car.
I drove to the corner, and Romano went in for the coffee and the paper again without complaining. This time he went the extra mile and got blueberry muffins all around.
We ate the muffins on the way up to 44th Street. Romano and I got out to have a cigarette with our coffee and talked to Joe through the window as he thumbed through the Daily News.
“Ah, again with this stuff,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The West Nile stuff. Did you know the country spent fifty million dollars getting rid of the mosquitoes?” He shook his head as he read on. “Listen to this: the battle plan is less pesticide spraying and stiffer fines for anybody who has standing water on their property.”
“Are you kidding me? Anything for the city to make money,” I said, disgusted. “Now we get fined if there’s a puddle in our backyard. I love how they throw everything back on us.”
Joe laughed. “You gotta hear this. The city put together ‘rapid response teams’ that move in when infected dead birds are found and spread larvicide and remove standing water.”
“What are they gonna use, a straw? I wish I could have that job,” I said sarcastically. “It probably pays eighty grand a year and the only qualification is being related to someone at City Hall.” I flicked my cigarette and got back in the car.
“Pick me up for my meal?” Romano asked.
“Nick, have we ever forgotten to pick you up for your meal?” I asked.
He was still thinking about it when we drove away. “There was a dispute across the street from me,” I said. “Domestic?” he asked.
“Yeah, this psycho across the street was knocking his wife around,” I said, telling him the story.
“She should leave,” he said.
“I think she’s afraid of him.”
“Smart girl, she should be,” he said.
I was driving westbound on 42nd Street when we got a call for an alarm.
“South David, we got a 10-11 at 330 West 40th Street, fifth floor.”
Before Fiore could answer, I heard Romano on the air.
“Robbery post 4 to Central, I’ll take that job. Have David disregard.”
“The little brownnose,” I said. “He’s definitely sleeping with my sister.”
Joe busted out laughing, and we heard Galotti come over the radio.
“Robbery post 5 on the back.”
Central came back over with, “Robbery 4, the firm name is Extravagant Fabrics, Suite 510.”
“10-4.”
“We might as well go up there,” I said. “There’s a magnetic lock on the door to the building, and those two won’t be able to get in.” I’d responded there before and had to wrestle with the door.
330 West 40th is between 8th and 9th, and when we pulled up in front of the building, Romano and Galotti were already there wrestling with the door.
The street was deserted. Gates were down over storefronts, and I could see litter strewn along the curb. The building was old, seven stories high, with an intricate design carved into the stone. Over the door was colored tile work set to look like a garden.
Galotti was shining his flashlight into the vestibule when we got out of the car. I put my radio in my pocket and stuck my nightstick through the loop in my gun belt.
“Listen,” Romano said. “You guys didn’t have to come here—we can handle this.”
“You can’t even get in the door,” I said. “How are you gonna handle it?”
“It looks secure,” Galotti said, still shining his flashlight inside.
“It’s on the fifth floor, BrunO’how can you say it looks secure?”
It was a glass door with a metal recess cut into it where the handle is. I grabbed the handle with both hands on top of each other, one-potato two-potato style. I braced my body and yanked with enough force that the magnets holding the door in place separated. The wobble sound reverberated in the air around us. The perps know how to do this too, which is how they get in the buildings half the time.
“How did you do that?” Bruno asked, sounding impressed.
“You like that, huh?”
“Close it again, let me try,” he said.
“So you can break the door? Get inside. Are you handling this job or not?” I said.
The lighting in the lobby was dim. The elevators were to our left, and on our right, above the stairwell door, was a camera. It was set so you could see who walked out of both the stairway and the elevators.
“Smile, you’re being watched on camera,” I said, and we all looked up at it.
The elevator was open, and I checked the key panel next to the elevator. The fifth floor wasn’t keyed off, so I told Joe to press 5.
“Five lights up, we’re in business,” Fiore said.
Joe pressed the “close door” button. The door closed, and the elevator kicked up.
When the elevator stopped and the door opened, we heard the ping echo in the hallway, letting whoever was in here know we were there.
It was a long hallway with every other light lit, but we could see where we were going. We listened for sounds of movement, but there was silence.
There was a big metal door in front of us that said “Cosmic Enterprises” in red letters on the door.
“That’s not it,” Romano whispered. It was an L-shaped hallway, and Romano walked around the corner to the right. He went about ten feet down the hallway and stopped in front of a metal door. He put his ear next to the door and tried the knob, pulling on the door. We could hear it was locked, and he started walking back toward us.
I looked to the left of the elevator and saw a door a little farther down the hallway that looked partly open. I walked from the elevator to get a better look, and I heard Romano say, “Everything looks secure.”
“Is it?” I asked. I put my finger to my mouth and the four of us started to walk toward the open door. As the elevator door closed, I heard someone’s shoes squeaking and I turned toward them.
“It’s not me,” Joe said.
Romano took a couple of steps. “Not me either.”
We all looked at Galotti.
“They’re new,” he said.
We started to walk down the hall again, squeak, squeak, squeak. I unlocked my gun as I approached the door and took out my flashlight.
The door had no handle, just a push bar from the inside that someone had accessed. I entered the premise and moved to my right, letting my eyes adjust to the dark room.
I smelled something, and water too, like the smell after it rains.
Joe and I had our flashlights off, but Romano and Galotti turned theirs on. They were holding them up and away from their body with the beam pointing straight ahead. They teach you this in the Academy. The theory is if you hold the flashlight away from you and someone shoots at you, they’ll miss, aiming for the light.
Joe and I have been around long enough to know to look for a light switch instead of fumbling around in the dark, hoping you don’t get shot.
One of them crashed into something that sounded like a metal wastepaper basket, and then I heard the thud of someone hitting something solid.
“Joe, get the light before they kill themselves,” I said.
I heard the click of the switch, and the light above us came on.
I saw the overturned basket and the table they walked into. There was a black curtain next to me running the entire length of the premise. Next to the light switch was an electric panel box.
I moved the curtain with my flashlight, but it was pitch-black in the room beyond us. Once I moved the curtain, I felt the humidity, and a strange smell hit me. It smelled like an herb, but not the basil or oregano that Grandma grows on her windowsill. Then I realized what the smell was.
“Joe, see if one of the circuit breakers will turn on the lights in there,” I said.
Joe started clicking the switches, and we squinted and heard the buzz of the lights as they flicked on in different parts of the room.
I pulled the curtain all the way across and turned to look at Joe. He blinked, and the four of us leaned in past the curtains to get a better look.
The first thought that went through my head was, This room is worth a lot of money.
“What is it?” Galotti asked.
“It’s pot,” Romano said.
The room was an open loft that looked about seventy-five feet long by thirty feet wide. There were long tables throughout the room with hundreds and hundreds of pot plants in different stages of growth from small to several feet high.
They had some operation going here. We walked deeper into the room to look at the setup. We saw heat lamps, rotating grow lights, and humidifiers.
Fiore was on the radio. “South David to South Sergeant.” “Go ahead, South David.”
“Can you 85 us, 330 West 40th Street, fifth floor, no emergency?”
“10-4.”
“Let’s search the premise,” I said quietly. “Be very quiet, ‘cause whoever’s stuff this is, they’re not gonna be happy that we found it.”
If you calculated the street value of one mature pot plant, which I think is about a thousand dollars, you were talking some big money here.
We walked down through the rows of tables, looking under them. We got to the main door of the premise and tried the light switch next to the door. Florescent lights went on overhead, but nothing like the grow lights they had for the plants.
There was a bathroom with just a sink and a toilet, with the roll of toilet paper sitting on top of the tank.
Next to the bathroom was a closet with gardening tools, soil, thermometers, and containers for the plants. There was also a pile of black plastic bags and duct tape that they used to cover the windows, which was why it was so dark in here.
There was an irrigation system set up using PVC pipe above the pots on each table. It looked to be set on a timer, kind of like the sprays of mist you see in the produce aisle of the grocery store.
“South David on the air.” Hanrahan came over the radio.
“South David,” Fiore responded.
“Can you come down and open the door?”
“10-4, someone will be right down.”
“I’ll go,” Bruno said.
“Take Romano with you. And be careful—whoever left that door open might be coming back.”
Fiore and I went back to our search and found a small office next to the bathroom. It held a desk, a phone, no computer, and nothing on the walls. A TV with a VCR built into it sat across from the desk on a small wooden table. The TV was on, and we could see the lobby downstairs. We watched Galotti and Romano get off the elevator and disappear out of sight when they reached the front door.
“Look at this,” I said, scanning the room. “Farming in Midtown.”
Joe sighed. “This is gonna be an all-night thing.”
Hanrahan came in with Noreen, his driver, followed by Romano and Galotti.
He whistled as he looked around the place. “How’d you get in here?” he asked.
“Someone left the door open. Welcome to Cosmic Industries,” I said.
We walked him through the place. He was trying to get an estimate on how many plants were there, but there were too many to count.
“Oh,” Noreen said out of nowhere. “You know who died?” “Who?” We all turned to look at her.
“Remember the rubber band man from up on 43rd Street?”
“Did he die? He’s been here forever,” Hanrahan said.
“He’s been here as long as I’ve been here,” I said.
“Why’d they call him the rubber band man?” Fiore asked.
“He used to play music in his mouth with rubber bands,” I said. He was a skell. He was harmless enough and played those stupid rubber bands so people would throw him a buck as they walked by. When I first came on, I had Romano’s post. We worked six-to-twos then, actually it was 5:00 in the afternoon until 1:30 in the morning.
“Every night like clockwork he would come stumbling up 8th Avenue at 11:30, drunk out of his mind. As soon as he crossed 43rd Street, about twenty feet off the corner he would collapse on the grating in the sidewalk,” I said.
In the winter the subway would keep him warm. I laughed out loud and said, “The tourists would say, ‘Officer, look at that guy, he’s wasted! He can’t even walk.’ I’d tell them, ‘He’ll be all right—watch, he’ll go right up to that grating and collapse.’ Sure enough he did. The tourists would look amazed and ask, ‘How did you know that?’ ‘It’s a gift,’ I’d tell them.
“Now, who told you he died?” I asked.
“They found him dead on his grating this morning on the day tour. The detectives had to notify someone, and they were asking around to see if anybody knew his real name.”
I was getting a little nostalgic about it. The rubber band man’s been here all these years, someone who was part of the scenery. It was a shame he died alone on the sidewalk, and I hoped he was drunk enough that he just fell asleep.
“Nick, he’s on your post. Did you know him?”
“Who?”
“The rubber band man, what do you think we’re talking about here?” Noreen said. “The skell that sits on the grating on 43rd Street right off 8th Avenue.”
Romano seemed to be thinking about it. “John Harris,” he nodded. “Yeah, he played the rubber bands. What about him?”
“That’s his name?” Noreen asked.
Romano nodded, and she looked at Hanrahan. “Did the detectives ever find out his name?”
“I’ll call them,” Hanrahan said, and I saw him write John Harris in his memo book.
“What about him?” Romano repeated.
“He’s dead,” Noreen snapped. “Are you even listening?”
“What do you mean he’s dead? I was just talking to him last night right before Bruno got shot with the mace.” Romano looked upset. “He seemed fine to me.”
“Nick, he was sick,” I said. “You see how he looked, his stomach all bloated, his arms and hands all swollen. He had that sore on his leg—it was disgusting.”
“He was a good guy,” Romano said. “He was in Vietnam. He’s not as old as he looks. We used to talk a lot when things were slow.”
“Do you know anything about him?” Hanrahan asked, looking curiously at Romano.
“He was married, well, divorced I think. He said his wife still lived in Brooklyn, Flatbush I think. He was a truck driver for an outfit out in Red Hook before the booze got him.”
“Well, now we know he was a veteran,” Hanrahan said. “They can track down the next of kin through the VA.”
We actually had a moment of silence for the guy. I felt a little ashamed that Romano knew so much about him, that he bothered to find out the guy’s name. I never did. I’d just say, “Hey, rubber band man,” and he’d smile his drunken smile and say, “Evenin’, Officer.” I didn’t know anything about him except he drank Thunderbird and wet his pants.
Hanrahan got on his cell phone and called the desk. We listened to his half of the conversation.
“Lou, we got a loft here filled with marijuana plants…Maybe a couple hundred…They were answering a job, an alarm on the fifth floor…Tony, was this the alarm?”
“No,” I said, “the premise is around the corner.”
“Extravagant Fabrics,” Romano threw in.
“No, it wasn’t the premise for the alarm. They saw the door open and investigated.” He listened again. “Hold on a second. Tony, is this your
job?”
“No, it’s Romano and Galotti’s.”
He got back on the cell. “It’s robbery posts 4 and 5’s job. David was just backing them…I don’t know, might be possible…All right, give them a call.”
He hit the end button on his cell and asked, “Did you search the premise?”
“There’s an office over there.” I pointed to it. “It’s got a camera taping the lobby downstairs.” I filled him in with the rest of the details, that the premise was unoccupied. “It’s possible whoever came in to check on it went out the back door and didn’t realize he left it open.” Him being high was a definite possibility. “There’s no alarm system set up here,” I added.
“Yeah, they don’t want us responding,” Hanrahan said. Hanrahan’s cell phone rang to the theme from Friends. We all looked at him, and he said, “My daughter did it, and now I can’t get the friggin’ thing off it.”
He hit the send button and said, “Yeah…I’ll feel more comfortable with all four of them doing it…Uh huh.”
I love listening to one side of a conversation.
“I’ll take Hennessy and Pizzolo off of foot posts and put them in, David. Okay, good,” he said and disconnected.
“Okay,” he started, “OCCB said they’ll send somebody down in the morning with a warrant and a tractor trailer. They asked if we can have someone sit on it for the night in case whoever’s growing this comes back here. If you four want to do it, the lou said get the keys to the Anti-Crime car and you can watch the front door from up the block.”
We looked at each other. “Sure,” we said with a shrug. Better than working patrol.
“You can go back to the house and get changed out of the bag and pick up the car. Noreen and I will sit on the block until you get back,” Hanrahan said.
As we went to leave, Hanrahan added, “You’re sure nobody saw you, right?”
“Not unless they’re seeing all the cars out front now,” I said. “Oh, we’re gonna have to take the tape out of the VCR and put another one in.”
I went into the office and opened the metal cabinet where they kept the tapes. I hit eject and popped out the tape that was in there and added it to the pile they had with tapes labeled with dates and times. We’d wind up taking the tapes and vouchering them once we got the warrant. I put a new tape in the machine but didn’t hit record, hoping they’d think they forgot to do it.