Skells

by F. P. Lione

  He sounded sane enough when he talked to the family in the waiting room. He called the female in and brought her into a room.

  About twenty minutes later, as he was taking the EDP into a room and leaving Joe and me in the waiting room, I told him we had to make a notification. He held up his finger, saying he’d be right back. He returned with a folder and opened it, pointing to a phone number. “She’s been here before,” he said. “That’s her mother’s number.”

  “Thanks, doc,” I said, writing the mother’s number in my memo book, along with her name.

  I called the mother from the phone inside the office the guards use. She didn’t seem scared that someone was calling so late and didn’t react to the news that her daughter was in Bellevue. She sounded old and weary, like she’d gotten this call a lot of times before. She didn’t ask if the daughter was okay, just thanked me and hung up the phone.

  The doctor came out about a half hour later, saying he was going to admit her. Joe wrote down the admission number on the aided card with the doctor’s name, and we left the waiting room.

  We reloaded our guns, waved to the guard, and took the elevator back down to the main floor.

  18

  It was 2:00 when we drove back across town and started patrolling our sector. The radio was quiet, and we parked in the lot on 37th Street, reading the paper while we waited for a job.

  I was reading an article about police officers avoiding misconduct penalties. It looked like the ACLU was at it again, complaining that the police department only disciplined 24 percent of the officers charged with brutality and other misconduct substantiated by CCRB, the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

  “Look at this.” I handed Joe the article. “CCRB does more harm than good. Before Dinkins, at least it was cops running it. They knew how to weed out the real complaints from baloney ones.”

  The cops used to run CCRB, but it was changed to civilians under the Dinkins Administration.

  “We can thank Teddy Roosevelt for CCRB,” Joe said. “He initiated it when he was police commissioner at the turn of the last century, when the cops were really out of control.”

  “Yeah, but Joe, it’s nothing like that now,” I said, but he was reading the article. The ACLU was complaining that the police department was being too lenient in disciplining the cops and the punishment wasn’t harsh enough for them. They questioned the effectiveness of the review board, and federal prosecutors were looking to see if the department had failed to aggressively punish officers implicated in brutality cases.

  “They want to be tougher on the cops,” I said, “but think we should feel sorry for the skells and let them get away with anything they do.”

  “I know,” Joe said. “They’re so concerned about the criminal’s rights, but not the victims that they brutalize. They love to manipulate the Constitution, and in doing so, they’ve made our judicial system so twisted that it baffles logic.”

  The article aggravated me. I’m not saying that cops shouldn’t be punished for brutality, but so many of the complaints against us are a sham. The ACLU loves to put the screws to cops.

  “Let the department discipline us more and let’s see what the city’s gonna do when they can’t get any more cops to work here,” I said.

  “This is true,” Joe said. “They can cover it up all they want, but we know how many cops are leaving and what the caliber is of the new cops that they’re getting.”

  Cops can now have a misdemeanor conviction and still get on the job. You can fail the physical in the Academy forty times as long as you pass it once. FD gives you one shot—if you fail, you’re out. When I came on, fifty thousand people took the cop test, and now they can’t get eight thousand people to take it.

  A lot of it comes down to pay. If they paid us more, they’d get a better caliber of cop to choose from. It’s like the old saying, “You get what you pay for.”

  “Remember that Russian cop that came on in January?” Joe asked.

  “The female?”

  “Yeah, the one who couldn’t speak English. What’s gonna happen when you get a department full of second-rate cops?” he asked.

  “Maybe the city will wake up and give us a raise,” I said.

  Sometimes when I hear the guys talking, I picture us cops being overrun by the perps because there’s no new cops and all the old-timers are leaving.

  We sat there and talked about the sad state of the new recruits. We talked about Romano, another good cop leaving. He didn’t realize it yet, but he would have eventually been okay with the job. Once you got past his rookie insecurity, he was actually pretty good at this.

  We had no jobs, but we’d been so busy lately, I wasn’t complaining. I smoked and read the paper, then drove over to the Sunrise for more coffee. We picked up Romano at a quarter to five and went back to the precinct.

  We passed out on the benches in the lounge and went back out at six.

  The sun was up, and there was a small breeze blowing. It was cool, probably in the sixties.

  We stopped on 34th Street for coffee and bagels fresh out of the oven. I got an everything with butter, Romano got poppy with butter, and Joe got a pumpernickel with cream cheese.

  We drove Romano back up to his post and sat with him while we ate. At 6:40 Central put a call over the air for a 52, which is a dispute, at a deli on 35th Street. Then she came back and gave it to us.

  “South David,” Central radioed.

  “South David,” Fiore responded.

  “I have a customer-owner dispute.” She gave a 35th Street address.

  “10-4,” Fiore said.

  I knew the deli. It was more like a luncheonette that got a pretty good breakfast and lunch crowd. We tossed Romano out of the car and took 7th Avenue down.

  We parked outside the deli and walked inside, past the now empty display bins that would later hold fruit, flowers, and ice-filled cold water and beer. When the stuff is outside, there’s a guy out there making sure no one steals anything.

  I smelled bacon when we walked in, and I could see a couple of the tables were filled with people eating breakfast. The register and deli counter were on our right, with the cigarettes overhead, and to our left was the buffet island they used for the hot food at lunch. Past the deli counter was an old staircase leading down to the basement, and in the back about twelve tables were set up. The tables were in an L shape, with the last few of them behind the staircase.

  A Korean guy, who I guessed was the owner, came through the doorway in the back of the deli. I could see he was aggravated as he walked quickly toward us.

  “This guy,” he said and pointed toward the back of the store. “He do this every morning when he come in here! I tired of it!” He was waving his hands now. “I no want him in store no more!”

  “What’s he doing?” Joe asked.

  “He make a mess in the bathroom and no clean it up! Every time!”

  We walked into the back and saw a Mexican kid, maybe eighteen years old, holding on to the doorknob of the bathroom. His left foot was planted against the wall, and the other was on the floor to keep him balanced. I saw the door moving in and out where someone was pulling from the inside and yelling, “Let me out!”

  When the kid saw us, he let go of the door and it flew open. An older guy, I didn’t know if he was Spanish or light-skinned black, went to lunge at the kid. The kid got in a fighting stance, and the older one picked up his right arm and drew it back like he was gonna hit him.

  “Hold on there, slugger,” I said.

  “He can’t lock me in the bathroom!” The guy was a skell, wearing green cutoff work pants, sneakers with no socks, and a threadbare black tank top. He was grubby, with gray matted hair and a beard.

  The kid backed away, and the owner, who was right behind Joe and me, told him, “Okay, okay, you go back to work.”

  The skell grabbed two white plastic bags filled with his stuff and came out of the bathroom.

  “Buddy, are you making a mess in the bathroom?
” Joe asked him.

  He mumbled, “I didn’t make no mess.”

  I stepped past him and pushed the door open to look inside. The floor was soaked, and there was white powder in the sink, on the toilet, and soaking into the water on the floor. Paper towels were strewn everywhere, and the water in the sink was running. I guess he was washing up. There was toothpaste in the sink, and he didn’t have the rank smell the homeless usually do. He smelled, but not enough to clear the store.

  “He lock door when he go in there,” the owner was saying. “He stay there long time.”

  “Who made the mess?” I asked the skell.

  “That was in there before I went in!” he yelled, sounding strange.

  I thought a second and said, “This is what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna go back in there and clean up the mess.”

  “No!” He stamped his foot.

  “Clean it up,” I said.

  He put his bags down and started to go in the bathroom, when he stopped and said, “No! I won’t clean it! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. It’s someone else’s mess!”

  I didn’t want to cuff this guy; he was pathetic. I looked at Joe, who was looking at him and not doing me any good. I pulled out my cuffs and said, “Okay, turn around,” as I grabbed his arm. He started doing a sort of dance, bouncing from one foot to the other, saying, “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”

  We were all quiet for a second, and it hit me that he was acting like a child would. For some reason, I got the feeling this guy was abused as a child.

  Normally I would have been harder on him, but I felt bad for him. He was like a child trapped in a man’s body. A wave of compassion for him hit me, and I said, “Just clean it up, then you can go.”

  He went back into the bathroom and cleaned it up, mumbling, “I didn’t do it! You can’t make me clean it!” the whole time.

  “I don’t want him here no more,” the owner said.

  “How about once he cleans the mess, we’ll let him know if he comes back again we’ll lock him up?” I asked.

  “Okay,” he said as he gave a clipped nod.

  When he came out, I looked in to see how he did. He had cleaned the powder but left a couple of bundles of paper towels on the floor.

  “Pick up the papers,” I told him.

  “No! I won’t do it!” he chimed and stamped his feet. Instead of yelling, I said, coaxing him, “Come on, pick up the paper and you’re all done.”

  He picked up the paper and threw it in the garbage.

  “Listen,” I told him. “The owner doesn’t want you here anymore. If we have to come back here for you, I’ll have to lock you up.” I held up the cuffs to him.

  “Okay,” he said, nudging his toe against his plastic bag like a five-year-old. “I won’t come back.”

  He left the store, and Joe and I went back out to the RMP. I was writing the job in my memo book when a bug-eyed, hippie-looking lady walked over to the RMP. She had long salt-and-pepper hair and was wearing a brown jacket over a wrinkled skirt and sandals. She had a newspaper tucked under her arm, and she pulled it out and wrote down the number of the RMP. Then she came over to the driver’s side, and I could see her looking at my name and shield number out of the corner of her eye.

  “How you doing?” I asked her.

  She started writing again on the paper. “I’m okay.” She nodded and stared at me with her bug eyes and walked away.

  “I guess I’ll be hearing from the ACLU,” I told Fiore.

  “Second time this week,” he said.

  “Second time?”

  “Yeah, well, first time this week. Last week it was the ten-million-dollar lawsuit,” he chuckled. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah.”

  I started to feel uncomfortable, but I guess that was what she wanted. I wondered why she did that. She didn’t come out of the deli, so she couldn’t have seen what went on there. The funny thing is even if she was in there, she would have only seen the cops toss a homeless man out of the deli when all he was trying to do was wash himself. On the other hand, we can’t let this guy go into someone’s place of business and trash the place.

  I don’t know why we never get to put complaints in against all the people who harass us. She was probably just one of those people who hate cops, but I wrote the whole thing down in my memo book, including a description of her, the date, the time, the location of the deli, and our conversation verbatim—even if it was only five words between us.

  “You writing this down?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah, with the date and time and the fact that you heard the whole thing,” I said.

  “I wrote it down too,” he said.

  We picked up Romano at his post and headed back to the precinct. I went down to the locker room to change and signed out by 7:50.

  I stopped in Brooklyn on my way home. I got off the Fort Hamilton Parkway exit and drove to 73rd Street. I parked my truck across the street from the address where Denise had said Marie and Bobby Egan have their rendezvous and watched the apartment.

  The block was full of brownstones, probably worth close to a million bucks apiece the way real estate is in New York. Actually these were light, made out of limestone, but still considered brownstone. They’re not railroad rooms, I’ve been in those. There’s no hallways in them and there’s no windows in the inside room, but they’re not the kind that you stand at one end of the house and can see through to the other. They used to be one-family houses, and over the years they’ve been broken down to accommodate three or four families. Marie and Egan’s was the front basement, probably a studio. I sat there for about a half hour. I don’t know why I was doing it; I guess I just wanted to see for myself. If my father didn’t want to believe me, that’s his business—at least that’s what I told myself.

  I took 4th Avenue and got back on the ramp to cross the bridge at 92nd Street. There was no traffic, so it only took me about ten minutes to get home.

  There was a black Acura parked in front of my house in my usual spot, so I swung around and parked across the street. There was someone sitting in the Acura, and I thought for a second it might be Ralph. I took my gun out of my bag and stuck it in the waistband of my pants before I got out of my truck.

  My old girlfriend Kim got out of the Acura and watched me cross the street.

  “Hey, Tony,” she said. Her blond hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, sleek and straight hanging down her back. She was dressed in tight black pants, high-heeled black shoes, and a light-colored button-down shirt. She was heavy on the jewelry. She had diamond studs in her ears, a diamond the size of a dime around her neck, and a gold watch with a diamond-encrusted face on it.

  “What are you doing here?” I was in no mood for games. No one ever came here, and every day that week someone had been knocking on my door with some kind of drama.

  “Aren’t you happy to see me?” she asked. As I got closer, I saw that the arrogance she had last time I saw her was missing. She looked unsure for once, and maybe a little sad.

  “Not really,” I said honestly. “Why aren’t you at work? You don’t want to make the boss unhappy.” I didn’t want to be sarcastic, but she did leave me for him.

  “I’m sleeping with the boss,” she said, just as honestly. “I can come in whatever time I want.”

  “Did he buy you the car?” I said as I nodded toward the Acura.

  “Yes.”

  “How much did it cost you?”

  “More than you’d think,” she said.

  This was probably the only honest conversation we’d ever had.

  “I heard you’re getting married,” she said sadly.

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “The Long Island one you were telling me about at Mike Ellis’s dad’s wake?”

  “Yeah, same one.”

  “I saw Mike’s girlfriend, Laura, on the boat yesterday,” she said, meaning the Staten Island Ferry. “She told me her and Mike went to your engagement party.”

 
“I still don’t get why you’re here, Kim.” I didn’t know where she was headed with this.

  “My mother has breast cancer,” she said, trying not to cry. “She’s dying.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. I liked her mother, and she liked me. It was Kim who thought I was beneath her. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’m sorry to show up like this. I wanted to talk to you.” She shrugged and gave me a sad smile. “I don’t know, maybe I’m rethinking things. Like with you, I think I made a mistake.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” I said.

  “Maybe it is. But if things don’t work out with—”

  “Michele,” I said.

  “With Michele, maybe you could give me a call,” she said with a shrug.

  “You made your choice.”

  “It was wrong, Tony, okay? I made a mistake. I just wanted…” She seemed to be looking for the right word. “More.”

  “Well, you got it.”

  “We were good together,” she said.

  “No, we weren’t, not really. If we were any good, you wouldn’t have taken off like that,” I said, surprised that there was still a bite to it.

  “Can we go inside and talk?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  The truth was I was tempted. Not because I still cared about her, but because once she went inside, it wouldn’t be three minutes before I got her into bed. In fact, forget the bed, the lawn would be okay with Kim. She’s the adventurous type. All of a sudden I was tired of waiting, tired of being good. I thought of Fiore and how he’d tell me to pray, but I didn’t feel like praying. I felt like feeling like a man again, and I didn’t want to wait until November. That was what I wanted.

  What I said was, “Because I’m tired, and I don’t think Michele would appreciate you being here.”

  Fiore would have said turning her down made me more of a man. But that was easy for him to say—he didn’t have to wait till November to sleep with his wife.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said, looking a little embarrassed.