Grand Central Noir

by R. Narvaez

  She looked at me suspiciously a moment, then finally said, “He’s not here all the time.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “’bout an hour ago maybe, but I’m not too good with time.”

  “Where’s his spot?”

  “He moves around a lot. Maybe over by those tracks over there.” She indicated by bobbing her head past me, toward the east end of the terminal.

  “Can you describe him to me?”

  She laughed.

  “That’s funny.”

  “People think all us homeless people look alike. But he dresses up real good . . . for a homeless person. He’s got this gray jacket he wears. Looks like it came from a suit or something. And jeans. He always wears jeans. But they ain’t dirty jeans.”

  “I’ll find him,” I said, as I got up. “Listen, Lucy, thanks.” I opened my wallet and put another twenty on the table. “Take care of yourself,” I said, but I don’t think she heard me.

  Lucy’s description was right on target. Seated on a bench close to track 125, he was reading a newspaper, a carry-on bag at his feet. He looked like just another commuter. He ignored me until I got close enough so that I was standing only a couple of feet from him. Only then did he look up. We stared at each other a moment, sizing each other up.

  He looked to be in his early-to-late sixties and didn’t look as if he’d been on the streets. He was clean-shaven, his grey hair cropped short, almost military style. He was dressed just as Lucy had described and was wearing a clean white Oxford button-down shirt and a faded blue tie. I recognized that same stoic expression as the guy in the school paper.

  I sat down beside him, remaining silent for a moment. He paid me no attention. He was reading the Sports section of the Times.

  “Yankees or Mets?” I asked in an attempt to break the ice.

  He looked up.

  “You’re Donald Osborne, aren’t you?”

  I could feel an electric jolt coming from him, as he shot me a killer look.

  “I’m not here to cause you any trouble,” I said as soothingly as I could. “But you’re him, aren’t you?”

  “I used to be him. I’m not him anymore.”

  “That’s fine, because I’m only interested in the him you were, not the him you are now.”

  “Funny, ’cause I’m only interested in the now. What do you want?”

  “I found you after the cops picked up Lucy and found your medal. It wasn’t hard to track you from there. And as to why, well, someone wants to meet you. You served in Vietnam, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. They called me a war hero, but for the past forty-four years I’ve been trying to push that stuff out of my head. That and a lot of other stuff. I done some horrible things, other things, things I shouldn’t have done. I live this way ’cause I deserve to live this way. Hell, maybe I don’t deserve to live at all. At least down here there’s people I can help, and no one pays any attention. We’re all invisible here. Invisible in plain sight. I ain’t nothin’ anymore. It can be rush hour, packed, and I’ll be sipping my coffee and going through the trash, and sometimes I’ll notice a kid staring at me. I wish I could say something to put them at ease. They look so scared and confused. Like the rest of the world, only we don’t show it.

  “They said it was my fault. We were crying like babies, worse than that, ’cause we were armed and we knew what we were doing, but it was us or them and self-preservation won out. Sometimes, when I’m lowering myself down the tracks for the night, between closing the terminal and the dawn of rush hour, I feel like I’m going down that foxhole. But alone. We’re born alone, we died alone.”

  I wanted to stop him, to get him back on track, but I couldn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to. He had to get this out and maybe I was the only one who would listen to him.

  “I like going to the public library. It’s the only place in the world I feel safe. Where life’s predictable. Where I can have control. I knew this day would come. What now?”

  “Does the name Karyn Shaw mean anything to you?”

  “Jesus.” He almost whispered, putting his hands up and covering his eyes. “God help me.”

  “She’s your daughter?”

  “I don’t have anyone. Except maybe people like Lucy, people who are as bad off as me. We look out for each other, you know.”

  “You’re sure you don’t have a daughter?”

  “She’s not my daughter. I don’t know her.” He said, but he was looking ahead in a way that told me he was looking back, looking back at a picture that included Karyn.

  There wasn’t any point in going further. Either Osborne was lying or Karyn was mistaken. Either way, I was at a dead end, so I left him a couple of twenties and took off.

  * * *

  I called Karyn and asked her to meet me the next morning in the Atrium, 10 a.m.

  “You found him?” she asked, and I could tell she was excited.

  “Yes and no.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  The next day, Karyn was at the same table, waiting for me.

  “So, where is he?”

  “He says he doesn’t have a daughter.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “He’s telling the truth, isn’t he?”

  She paused a moment before answering. “No.”

  “Sure he is. He’s not your father, is he?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m good at what I do, Karyn. Things just didn’t add up. You’re not exactly who you led me to believe you were.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I did some research on you and Donald Osborne. You two are connected, but not the way you want me to believe. He’s not your father, but he did have something to do with your father.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Your father didn’t disappear after you were born, he was killed. By Donald Osborne.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  After finding Osborne, I’d gone back to read more copies of the school paper, that weren’t available online. I read them on microfilm at the Public Library, hoping I wouldn’t run into Osborne thus possibly destroying his last refuge. Osborne wound up joining the anti-war group, and was a participant in a bombing of the on-campus recruitment center. The bomb went off at night. The group said they didn’t intend to hurt anyone. Unfortunately, the night custodian was polishing the floors and was blown to bits.

  “Osborne let on that he’d done some horrible things, and he wasn’t just talking about Vietnam. I knew there was something else and when I researched him I found that when he got back from the war he joined an extreme anti-war movement, one that was violent in nature. He was involved in a bombing at a university where your father was a custodian at the recruitment center. He was killed and Osborne became a fugitive. And even though there’s no proof that Osborne planted the actual bomb, that’s what you believe happened. You hired me to find him and it doesn’t take much imagination on my part to figure out why.”

  “I don’t have a father because of him.”

  “That may be true, Karyn, but believe me he’s paid for it over the years. You wouldn’t want to be him. You wouldn’t want to be leading the life he’s led. He’s suffered enough, more than if you did anything to him. Trust me, you’ve had your revenge. Just by knowing one of the men who died at his hands had a daughter, is enough to make his life even more miserable. I don’t know what you had in mind but my advice is, drop it, let it go. Move on.”

  She dropped her head for a moment. When she raised it again I could see tears forming in her eyes.

  “I lost my father because of him.”

  “I know. And you can’t get him back by taking revenge on Osborne. You’ll only be allowing him to ruin your life more than he already has. Believe me, you’re better off than he is.”

  “I want to see for myself.”


  “I can’t stop you, but I don’t think you should, and I won’t help you by telling you how to find him.”

  “I can hire someone else.”

  “Sure you can, but you won’t because you know I’m right.” I took out my wallet and pulled out the check she’d given me the day before. I stared at it a moment, then handed it back to her.

  “I could take your money and I should. I did what you paid me to do. But I won’t. And believe me, this is not the kind of thing I usually do, and I know I’ll hate myself in the morning for doing it. But I’m making a point here. I’m giving you a chance to start all over again, to erase yesterday from record. Take the money, Karyn, and forget about Donald Osborne.”

  I got up and walked away. Away from Karyn Shaw, away from a grand that should have been mine. I might regret it in the morning but right now I was feeling pretty good about myself.

  I knew it wouldn’t last long, but for now it was worth it.

  Fat Lip’s Revenge

  - by Ron Fortier

  SO, YOU WANT TO HEAR about my experiences working as a cop at the Grand Central Terminal? You’re putting together a documentary on the old girl and want to know if I know any really good stories. Brother, do I have stories. But, yeah, there is one that stands out above all the others. Unique, you know what I mean. A gem of a tale that I do love telling folks.

  Okay, then, I’m Michael Muldoon and I’ve been a Transit Authority cop for going on eight years now. But this story I’m going to tell you started long ago, back some thirty or so years and is about a character named Rawley “Fat Lip” Crawford. He’s a black dude who was born and raised in Harlem, pretty much on the wrong side of tracks in more ways than one. His old man had been killed in Vietnam leaving Fat Lip’s mother to raise him and his two older sisters. I guess that was the problem as Mrs. Crawford did okay with the girls but bringing up a rambunctious boy on the streets of Harlem by herself was just too much for her. As much as she wanted to prevent it, Fat Lip was going to get himself into trouble no matter what she did.

  Now he got the nickname “Fat Lip” because of all the street brawling he did early on, and it seemed like every other day he’d come home with his bottom lip swollen, cut and bleeding. After seeing him like this half a dozen times, the other kids on the block started calling him “Fat Lip” and it stuck.

  By the time he was sixteen, he got into the fighting game and boxed for a few years as a light featherweight. I mean he was always a tall and lanky kid with very little meat on his bones. He never did finish high school and after dropping out he thought boxing could be his meal ticket to a brighter future. Of course, that was a pipe dream and his now famous bottom lip really took a pounding until it got so mangled, its shape remained pretty much twice the size of his upper lip.

  Two years was pretty much all he could take, never stringing enough wins to make him appealing to any of the regular fight club managers in town. When he stopped being able to get bouts, his boxing career was over. It was soon after this that his one uncle, Max Crawford, took pity on him and gave him a job as a mechanic in his garage shop over in East Harlem. Lo and behold, it turns out Fat Lip had a way with car engines and everything Max taught the kid, he drank up like a sponge. He even let him move in to the small two-room apartment over the station. Fat Lip got to loving cars, both fixing them and driving them.

  Now the latter is how he came to the attention of a two-bit crook Brooklyn crook named Charlie Atwater. Atwater was thirty at the time and a career criminal with an ever-growing rap sheet as long as your arm. He’d done a few years in stir mostly for armed robbery of liquor and Mom and Pop stores.

  Again, this was all about thirty years ago, and most of the tale I got straight from Fat Lip. Up until that summer afternoon that Atwater and his pal, Butch Levins, walked into his uncle’s garage to find him, Fat Lip had never set eyes on the two. Atwater told the kid he had a proposition for him and they should meet later to discuss it. Fat Lip says that took place at a diner down the street that night after he got done working.

  Basically what Atwater and Levins had planned was to rob a downtown jewelry story and were looking for a wheelman, someone to drive their getaway car. Someone who was good with cars and could get them out of Manhattan before the cops knew what hit them. They had asked around and been told Fat Lip Crawford was the man to see. Now Fat Lip was no saint, remember, but he was still cautious. Having two men, both complete strangers, come up and ask him to help them pull a heist wasn’t an everyday occurrence. At first he was hesitant to go along with their offer until Atwater said they would split the take three ways. All Fat Lip had to do was drive them to the target, stay in the car, and then get them the hell out of Dodge when the job was done and for that he’d get one third of the haul. Naturally Atwater had no problems exaggerating his claims that they’d most likely each end up with thousands of dollars each.

  Again, keep in mind I’m talking the 1980s here. And for a guy who never had much all his life, what Atwater was saying had its desired affect. The temptation was too great for Fat Lip to pass up and in the end he signed on to be their wheelman.

  * * *

  Now keep in mind, most of the story I got from Fat Lip himself long after it all went down. On my own, out of natural curiosity as a cop, I did some digging through the precinct files and was able to piece together how it all went down. Atwater was a smart cookie with balls. Pulling a daylight heist in the middle of Manhattan would be tricky enough, but he had a rather unusual gimmick on his side: the weather. You see, after casing the jewelry store, he then began watching the long-range weather forecast on the evening news. His idea was to pull the job during a rainy day so that visibility would be poor for both witnesses and the police attempting to chase them down.

  Finally, in mid-June a weather pattern settled in predicting to bring at least two days of heavy rains. Atwater called Fat Lip and told him the job was on. That night, after work, Fat Lip took a bus into the Bronx and boosted a Mustang, which he then parked in the back of his uncle’s garage covering it with an old canvas tarp so the old man wouldn’t see it.

  The following day, under dark clouds and constant, heavy rainfall, he, Atwater, and Levins carried out the robbery. It went like clockwork with Atwater and Levins charging into the small jewelry store wearing Halloween masks and waving their guns in the air. In five minutes they had filled two black satchels with diamonds, pearls, and other assorted gems that would later be valued at eighty thousand dollars.

  Fat Lip sat in the Mustang, revving its engine, and when his partners exited the shop and jumped aboard, he let go the clutch and floored the muscle car making a quick get-away long before any patrol car could arrive on scene. He kept the pedal to the floor and wove them through the tight city streets until they were roaring over the Brooklyn Bridge. Two hours later they were deep into the woods of New Jersey. Earlier in the day they had left Levin’s Chevy Impala in an old abandoned barn. They abandoned the hot Mustang, switched cars, and then drove back into the city as clean as angels.

  They dropped Fat Lip off at his uncle’s place. Atwater had told the naïve driver that it would take him a few weeks to find a fence and convert the stolen jewels into cash. Then they would all get together and split their ill-gotten gains. Poor Fat Lip had bought into it hook, line, and sinker. He had no clue what was coming his way.

  Three days later the cops came barging into the garage with a warrant to search the place and Fat Lip’s apartment. Uncle Max was ready to blow a gasket and kept yelling at the cops that he’d call a lawyer and sue them. Meanwhile, the two detectives and three blues searched the place. It was later revealed in court that they had received an anonymous phone call saying Fat Lip Crawford was one of the men behind the downtown jewelry heist. Try to imagine Fat Lip’s shock when, while tossing his belongings, one of the bulls finds a small silk bag hidden beneath some shirts in his bedroom dresser. In the bag were two diamond broaches; part of the haul from the robbery.

  Fat Lip was ar
rested and taken in for booking and arraignment. Two days later a Grand Jury indicted him for grand theft and he was held over for trial. His bail had been set at ten thousand dollars, a sum far beyond his means to produce.

  Now I know what you’re thinking; that Charlie Atwater set him up to take the fall. Of course he did, and it didn’t take Fat Lip long to figure it out for himself. At the advice of the public defender appointed for him by the court, he spilled the beans and told the cops everything. The trouble was, by then both Atwater and Levins had vamoosed for parts unknown, leaving the kid to take the fall all by his lonesome.

  Atwater had been savvy enough to know if he threw the authorities a bone, it would appease them just enough so as to have no real desire to man a lengthy, expensive manhunt for he and Levins. Oh sure, their faces were sent out via the FBI channels and would end up on the Most Wanted List. But hey, with close to eighty grand between the two of them, creating new identities wherever they ended up wouldn’t be hard at all.

  Meanwhile, poor Fat Lip went to trial and was sentenced to twenty-five years at Sing Sing. His mother was devastated and as he was led off in cuffs to begin his new life behind prison walls, she stood weeping her eyes out, supported by his two sisters.

  Over the next ten years, she and the girls would come to visit him whenever it was possible for them to make the trip. But then his sisters both got married and stopped coming. During his tenth year of incarceration his mother came down with cancer and died within six months of being diagnosed. He was given special leave to attend the funeral, under guard of course.

  Ironically, it took place on a cold and rainy day.

  * * *

  Okay, I know, I’m getting way off track here what with Fat Lip’s history and all and this is supposed to be story about the Grand Central. Just let me grab another beer, my throat’s kind of dry, and we’ll get to that part.

  * * *

  Better, thanks. Like I said earlier, I’ve been working here at Grand Central Terminal for going on eight years now and I love the place. I mean, it’s almost impossible not to from the first time you walk into it from 42nd Street and see the Main Concourse with its high ceiling all painted up like the stars in heaven. Did you know those stars are on there backwards? Yup. The two guys who did it somehow got their prints turned around and didn’t realize it till the job was done. When the owners, the Vanderbilt family, found out, they told everyone that the ceiling was done to show how God looked down on the sky from his lofty perspective. Yeah, it’s a cool story. Honestly, there are hundreds of them about the station.