The Deuce

by F. P. Lione

  Fiore put his head down. I thought he was done talking, but he surprised me by saying, “I’ll never understand why people would rather believe that God is cruel. They live their lives without him, patting themselves on the back when they succeed at something, yet blame him when they fail. Every tragedy is called an act of God. The problem is most people don’t make an effort to know God, to have a relationship with him.”

  “How can you have a relationship with someone you can’t see? Someone you don’t even know exists?” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation.

  “If you ask him, he’ll make it real to you,” Fiore said.

  “Who will make what real to who? What are you talking about?” I didn’t get any of this.

  “If you ask Jesus into your heart and into your life, he’ll give you everything that matters.”

  I was quiet for a minute, actually thinking about what he said.

  “Well, what about the ones that can’t ask him?” I challenged. “That’s where his grace and mercy come in. Take the guy tonight. He was put in front of me, and I prayed for him. I prayed that he would come to know God, to believe that Jesus died for him, and to give his life to him.”

  “You pray for everyone you come across?” This surprised me. We meet so many people, he’d be praying all night.

  “Just about. When I answer a job I pray for the people involved.”

  “What about that blonde the other night?” I smirked.

  “What blonde?” He seemed clueless.

  “The one in Times Square who asked you for directions.” Personally, I’d never forget her.

  “In fact, I did pray for her,” he said seriously.

  “I prayed for her too,” I said with a smile. “But she didn’t come home with me like I wanted.”

  He shook his head. “Tony, that blonde is the last thing you need right now.”

  “How do you know what I need?” I could feel myself getting angry.

  “Because it’s the same thing everyone needs, a relationship with Jesus.”

  “Do you really believe all that stuff in the Bible?” I asked.

  “What stuff?”

  “All those stories about Jesus. Don’t you think they stretched them? I mean, who’s gonna know? It happened a couple of thousand years ago. By the time it got to us, don’t you think the story changed?”

  He closed his eyes and composed himself. “Tony, the stories in the Bible are true. No one stretched them, they wrote them down exactly as they happened.” He sounded like he was talking to an idiot.

  “So you expect me to believe that Jesus took a couple of loaves of bread and a couple of fish and fed five thousand people?” That one always bugged me.

  Fiore shrugged. “I support a wife and three kids on our salary.”

  I guess he had a point.

  4

  We parked on 39th Street, eating sandwiches in the car. I had a roast beef and Muenster with mustard and tomato. Fiore had turkey, lettuce, tomato, and mayo. We talked about everything but God.

  Before my partner got hurt we had been trying to figure out the MO on some burglars called the Harper brothers. They were hitting garment and jewelry manufacturers. All of the hits were on 39th Street between 7th and 9th Avenues. We knew their name was Harper because a cop on the four-to-twelve working South David grabbed one walking on 39th Street. He had a big army backpack with a thick rope hanging out of it. The cop stopped him, looked in the bag, and found a grapnel hook attached to the rope. The guy was taken back to the station house and questioned. His backpack also held gloves, a flashlight, a crowbar, and a handheld hatchet with a ham-merhead tip. Unless he was going rock climbing in midtown Manhattan, he was up to something.

  His name was Terence Harper, brother to William, Daniel, and Robert Harper. All locked up twice for the same burglaries—garments. Two other guys were caught with them and suspected to be working with them. They were all from Hell’s Kitchen, which is in the north precinct.

  Over the past couple of months six big garment companies were hit for a hundred grand in garments each. Every time, the thieves hit on a midnight that I was working. That was when I stopped handing in my unnecessary alarm forms. The alarms had been tripped three times, and Central wasn’t putting them over anymore. Technically it wasn’t my fault, but it was my sector all the same.

  Now Fiore and I were on surveillance, watching in particular three addresses. Fiore asked for details, so I explained this to him that these three buildings were connected by roofs and had been hit twice already. The way I figured, the thieves were entering the building in the late afternoon, early evening. The garment workers exited the building between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. Most of the workers don’t speak much English so no one would question anybody. All the perps would have to do was wait in the lobby and grab the stairway door as workers came out. Then the perps could go up to the roof and wait it out. The roof doors open from the inside, and there are ledges in the back of the building every two or three stories. This would be where the grapnel hooks came in handy. Since the three buildings were connected, the perps could jump onto another building, exiting from that one. Every building in Midtown has an alley behind it.

  The super at one address said he saw one of the Harper brothers talking to the workers unloading trucks. The guy was probably trying to find out what was going on in the area or who was finishing up on large shipments of garments. The super also said he found ropes and a crowbar on the roof. These were taken into evidence at the last burglary since the super said they weren’t his and didn’t belong there. Unless the CO made it a priority and put some plainclothes on it, catching the Harper brothers would be difficult, relying on the alarms. If we stayed in the area we might get lucky and catch them going in or out of a building.

  Like I said, we talked about a lot of things on this watch. Fiore asked me what Times Square was like when I came on the job. Having come over from Queens two years ago, he missed seeing it before the Disney invasion, back when Mid-town was a war zone.

  When I started here twelve years ago I walked a foot post up on the Deuce. These days people came to Times Square to see The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast, Good Morning America’s studios, and other tourist attractions. Back in the late eighties and early nineties when I came on, Midtown was full of welfare hotels. Places like the Strand Hotel, the Meridian, the Elk, and the Holland were some of the worst. Some are closed now, but in their heyday, something was going on every night of the week.

  It was then I learned what the department was really about. The NYPD was all about numbers. Fudging the numbers to make it look like they were keeping crime down when all they were doing was banging down the charges. Robberies got banged down to grand larceny, grand larceny to petit larceny, or if the person didn’t see who took his property, it became lost property. The bottom line is how many collars you get, how many tags you write, and whether they were parking or moving violations. The NYPD keeps numbers on everything, like a business. They rate each precinct in the city for stats on how long it takes for each job to get answered. If more than three jobs weren’t given to patrol in a certain amount of time, we fall into what’s called backlogged. COs will do anything not to be one of the top five commands for being backlogged or not answering 84 on the scene.

  Back when I first started I thought I could change things, make a difference somehow. It didn’t take long to realize that not only did the public hate us but also that the brass was willing to feed us to the wolves if it served their purpose. The old-timers who were about to retire used to say they felt sorry for us. I figured they were just old and nostalgic about the way things were when they came on. Nothing could have prepared me for the things I would see.

  I’ve worked the midnight tour my whole career. I was thrust onto a foot post in the middle of Times Square where my academy training was basically useless. The sector cars would come on backlogged forty or fifty jobs from the four-to-twelve with more jobs coming in. The foot posts like me would have
to go off post within a block to answer jobs for them. The Police Department does not want backlog, so we would have to have everything answered by the time the day tour started. Meals weren’t taken until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. after the bars closed and things quieted down. We used to close off 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue because of the volume of people walking around. Back then if you had a collar, you processed the arrest yourself. Drugs were rampant, and shootings, robberies, and domestic disputes happened every night of the week. Crack was the up-and-coming drug, and prostitution was the way to get it. I saw starved, filthy street whores who would do anything for a vial of crack.

  I remember trying to cuff a guy who had smashed in the face of an elderly man coming from the theater with his wife. The perp had hit the man with a pipe as he walked past, grabbed his wallet, and left him bleeding on the sidewalk. I saw him do it from across 7th Avenue and caught up with him half a block down. As I was trying to cuff him one liberal woman stood there and asked in her cultured Upper East Side voice if it was really necessary to throw him on the ground that way. I showed her the elderly man, whose face was now unrecognizable with all the blood and exposed tissue. I told her to go ask him if I was using unnecessary force. She had the nerve to curse at me.

  We pulled so many weapons off the street we didn’t have time to voucher them all. A gun collar I always vouchered, but knives, box cutters, and razors I collected in a box in my locker and disposed of regularly.

  After my third year I had more knowledge than cops with ten years in quieter precincts. I would psyche myself up with the other guys in the locker room by playing Guns and Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” before going out. As we pumped up to the music we would turn our hats backward and slap our nightsticks into our hands while we made our way out.

  The Deuce was the busiest street in the city. There were more jobs handled there than in any other block. Plenty of 85s with officers needing assistance for arrests and 13s where cops were involved in shootings every night of the week. Probably more robberies and commercial burglaries happened in midtown Manhattan than in anyplace else in the city.

  Specialized foot posts were assigned to 42nd through 45th streets between Broadway and 7th because the employees coming in and out of the New York Times were being robbed almost daily by perps using guns and knives.

  Then the police commissioner came up with “Operation Take Back.” This ingenious action was geared to “take back the streets” in the precincts where crime was rampant. Along with Times Square, the 75 precinct in East New York, the 34 precinct in Washington Heights, and any other busy precinct would have cops from all over the city volunteer or be forced to work overtime. Everyone thought they would be getting the overtime until the lieutenant came around and gave out minor violations and took the overtime away. Out of twenty cops who came, at least sixteen would get minor violations. The lieutenant would say your hair was too long, your shoes weren’t shiny enough, you forgot your watch, or you had two sets of cuffs on your belt, and then hit you with a violation. That violation would take back your overtime. Imagine that—cops volunteering to work overtime in the busiest precincts in the city and the NYPD brass hammering them over the head with minor violations to swindle them out of the overtime pay.

  I worked three years on a foot post and three years in a sector car in Times Square. Now crime is different in Times Square. With the tourists came the scammers and the pickpockets. Drugs are still a problem but on a smaller scale. The statistics say crime is down, but that depends on how you look at it. Violent crime is down, but the other stuff is still there. The prostitutes are still there, and so are all the triple-X places—they just don’t advertise in the tour books. The city had been trying to move those places out of Midtown since Disney came along.

  Fiore and I talked about the old Times Square until we went back to the precinct for our meal. We had eaten in the car, so I slept through my hour meal. The rest of the tour was uneventful.

  Afterward I changed into beige Dockers shorts and a dark blue golf shirt and drove over to 9th Avenue to meet Mike Rooney in the bar. The morning was overcast and humid, one of those respiratory alert days. Mike was at the bar but didn’t stay long as his stewardess wife had flown in the night before and wanted him home. He had a couple of beers with me and left by 9:15.

  I stretched out my stay until 10:30, taking my time so that the appraiser would be gone by the time I got home. If Marie warned the appraiser to wait for me, he would have waited for up to two hours. She’d probably hear about it.

  After Mike left I watched one of the talk shows on the TV over the bar. An overweight sixteen-year-old with bleached-blonde hair was confessing that she was sleeping with her sister’s husband while babysitting their three kids. The sister was off in a back room, oblivious to the drama being played out for the audience. When she came onstage, she hugged her sister and said that they were as close as sisters could be. Then the overblown little sister slams her with the fact that she’s been sleeping with her husband, and baboom. It all breaks loose. The sisters started duking it out, and security guards pulled them apart while the girls yelled, “Bleep bleep, you bleeping bleep.” I can read lips. They ended it with the husband coming on the stage and leaving with the little sister while the wife collapsed in sobs. What a world.

  I left at 10:30. A closed lane on the Verrazano cost me three minutes, plus a ten-minute stop at Montey’s deli for bread and cold cuts, and that put me at my door at 11:13. A red Honda Accord was parked in front of the house. When I got out of my truck, the guy who I guessed was the appraiser got out of the Accord. It was hot and sticky by now, but this guy was dressed in brown dress slacks with a light brown blazer. We shook hands, and he introduced himself as John Randazzo from East Shore Appraisals.

  He was really a nice guy, so I felt a little guilty for making him wait. He didn’t ask what took so long, just waved away my apology for being late. As we walked up to the house Denise pulled up, her sporty white Celica chirping to a halt at the curb. She went around to the back and pulled a box out of the hatchback. She obviously wasn’t on her lunch hour since she was dressed in denim shorts, a peach tank top, and no shoes.

  “What’s this?” I asked, nodding toward the box.

  “I thought I’d come and stay until the house is sold. It’s the last time I’ll be moving back and forth. Figured I’d spend my last summer next to the water,” she said with a sad smile.

  “Putting your furniture in the basement again?” I sighed.

  She nodded.

  “No work today?”

  “Called in sick. Can I use your truck later to pick up some of my stuff?”

  “Sure. If you want I’ll give you a hand later, okay?”

  Denise turned to Randazzo. “So, what’s it worth?”

  He seemed taken aback, then shrugged. “A lot. The property alone is worth a quarter of a million. The size of the house and the fact that it’s by the water will bring it over four hundred thousand. I’ve taken pictures of the outside and did some preliminary comparisons to other homes in the area, and it’s impressive. Why are you selling, if you don’t mind my asking? I mean, people don’t sell much in here.”

  “My parents are divorced, and the house is being divvied up between them,” I said.

  Randazzo nodded. “The builders love it here,” he said. “They tear down these older homes, leave up a wall or two to save on filing fees. Then they build something they can sell for a million or more.”

  I noticed he talked with his hands. I do too, being Italian. But not like this. His hands flew in every direction as he talked, his pen waving back and forth like a weapon. On closer inspection I noticed that Randazzo had an artificial tan from a tanning salon. My old girlfriend used to go tanning, so I can tell the difference. He also had a clear nail polish manicure and very white teeth. He seemed harmless, just a little vain.

  The area we live in grew to be exclusive over the past decade or so when they started building co-ops with waterfront
views. The properties here are bigger than other areas of the Island, and the views of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Verrazano Bridge skyrocket the prices. Most of the people who lived here were working class people. Many of them sold out to builders, so now doctors, lawyers, and judges are moving in.

  “How long do you think it will take to sell?” I asked.

  “Honestly? About a week.”

  “How long after that would we have to move?”

  He shrugged. “It takes a couple of months to close, maybe by September.”

  We went into the house so he could finish taking pictures and measuring the place. I put my food on the table and grabbed my baseball bag out of the front closet. I went up to my room and got my baseball uniform and socks. This year’s uniforms were black shirts with red letters and the Commissioner’s league symbol in white. I had a doubleheader tomorrow morning after work and put my gear by the front door so I wouldn’t forget it.

  I saw Denise walk Randazzo out to his car, stopping to talk by the curb. I cut a whole loaf of Italian bread and put slices of mozzarella cheese along it. I layered Genoa salami and hot cherry peppers then drizzled some olive oil and a splash of vinegar on top. I grabbed two cans of Coke, glasses, and ice and put half the sandwich on a plate for Denise. I used the wax paper from the salami as a plate and was chomping away when she came back in.

  “I tried to get Randazzo to sabotage the appraisal, but he said he could get fired,” she said.

  I smiled. It wasn’t beneath my sister to use her looks to get what she wanted, and usually it worked. We sat at the kitchen table and ate our lunch, leaving the doors to the deck open. The sandwich was delicious—the mozzarella was so fresh it was still warm, and the saltiness of the cheese complemented the bite of the hot peppers and the paper-thin salami. As we ate, I filled her in on Fiore and some of the stuff that had been going on at work.

  “Why didn’t you tell me your partner got hurt?” she asked between bites. She waved her hand in front of her mouth to show how hot the peppers were.