by Merry Murder
Under the circumstances, it was just as well that I’d pulled duty. I wouldn’t have had anyplace to go besides the corner pub, as it happened—or, if I could stand it, the easy chair in front of my old Philco for a day of Christmas in Connecticut followed by Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street followed by A Christmas Carol followed by March of the Wooden Soldiers followed by Midnight Mass live from St. Patrick’s.
Every year since my divorce five years ago, I’d dropped by my ex-wife’s place out in Queens for Christmas Eve. I’d bring champagne, oysters, an expensive gift, and high hopes of spending the night. But this year she’d wrecked my plans. She telephoned around the twentieth to tell me about this new boyfriend of hers—some guy who wasn’t a cop and whose name sounded like a respiratory disease. Flummong—and how he was taking her out to some rectangular state in the Middle West to meet his parents, who grow wheat. Swell.
So on the twenty-fourth, I got up at the crack of noon and decided that the only thing that mattered was business. Catching bad guys on the final, frantic shopping day—that was the ticket. I reheated some coffee from the day before, then poured some into a mug after I picked out something small, brown, and dead. I also ate a week-old piece of babka and said. “Bah, humbug!” right out loud.
I put on my quilted longjohns and strapped a lightweight. 32 automatic Baretta Puma around my left ankle. Then I pulled on a pair of faded grey corduroys with holes in the knees, a black turtleneck sweater with bleach stains to wear over my beige bulletproof vest and my patrolman’s badge on a chain, a New York Knicks navy-blue stocking cap with a red ball on top, and Army-surplus boots. The brown-paper bag for my PTP I’d saved from the past Sunday when I’d gotten bagels down on Essex Street and shaved last.
I strapped on my shoulder holster and packed away the heavy piece, my . 44 Charter Arms Bulldog. Then I topped off my ensemble with an olive-drab officer’s greatcoat that had seen lots of action in maybe the Korean War. One of the side pockets was slashed open. Moths and bayonet tips had made holes in other places. I dropped a pair of nickel-plated NYPD bracelets into the good pocket.
By half past the hour, I was in the Bleecker Street subway station near where I live in the East Village. I dropped a quarter into a telephone on the platform and told the desk sergeant at Midtown South to be a good guy and check me off for the one o’clock muster. A panhandler with better clothes than mine and a neatly printed plywood sandwich sign hanging around his shoulders caught my eye. The sign read, TRYING TO RAISE $1,000,000 FOR WINE RESEARCH. I gave him a buck and caught the uptown D train.
When I got out at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, the weather had turned cold and clammy. The sky had a smudgy grey overcast to it. It would be the kind of afternoon when everything in Manhattan looks like a black-and-white snapshot. It wasn’t very Christmaslike, which suited me fine.
Across the way, in a triangle of curbed land that breaks up the Broadway and Sixth Avenue traffic flow at the south end of Herald Square, winos stood around in a circle at the foot of a statue of Horace Greeley. Greeley’s limed shoulders were mottled by frozen bird dung and one granite arm was forever pointed toward the westward promise. I thought about my ex and the Flummong guy. The winos coughed, their foul breath hanging in frosted lumps of exhaled air, and awaited a ritual opening of a large economy-sized bottle of Thunderbird. The leader broke the seal and poured a few drops on the ground, which is a gesture of respect to mates recently dead or imprisoned. Then he took a healthy swallow and passed it along.
On the other side of the statue, a couple of dozen more guys carrying the stick (living on the street, that is) reclined on benches or were curled up over heating grates. All were in proper position to protect their stash in the event of sleep: money along one side of their hat brims, one hand below as a sort of pillow. The only way they could be robbed was if someone came along and cut off their hands, which has happened.
Crowds of last-minute shoppers jammed the sidewalks everywhere. Those who had to pass the bums (and me) did so quickly, out of fear and disgust, even at this time of goodwill toward men. It’s a curious thing how so many comfortable middle-class folks believe vagrants and derelicts are dangerous, especially when you consider that the only people who have caused them any serious harm have been other comfortable middle-class folks with nice suits and offices and lawyers.
Across Broadway, beyond the bottle gang around the stone Greeley, I recognized a mope I’d busted about a year ago for boosting out of a flash clothes joint on West Fourteenth street. He was a scared kid of sixteen and lucky I’d gotten to him first. The store goons would have broken his thumbs. He was an Irish kid who went by the street name Whiteboy and he had nobody. We have lots of kids like Whiteboy in New York, and other cities, too. But we don’t much want to know about them.
Now he leaned against a Florsheim display window, smoking a cigarette and scoping out the straight crowd around Macy’s and Gimbels. Whiteboy, so far as I knew, was a moderately successful small-fry shoplifter, purse snatcher, and pickpocket.
I decided to stay put and watch him watch the swarm of possible marks until he got up enough nerve to move on somebody he figured would give him the biggest return for the smallest risk, like any good businessman. I moved back against a wall and stuck out my hand and asked passers-by for spare change. (This is not exactly regulation, but it guarantees that nobody will look at my face and it happens to be how I cover the monthly alimony check. ) A smiling young fellow in a camel topcoat, the sort of guy who might be a Jaycee from some town up in Rockland County, pressed paper on me and whispered, “Bless you, brother.” I looked down and saw that he’d given me a circular from the Church of Scientology in the size, color, and shape of a dollar bill.
When I looked up again, Whiteboy was crossing Broadway. He tossed his cigarette into the street and concentrated on the ripe prospect of a mink-draped fat lady on the outside of a small mob shoving its way into Gimbels. She had a black patent-leather purse dangling from a rhinestone-studded strap clutched in her hand. Whiteboy could pluck it from her pudgy fingers so fast and gently she’d be in third-floor housewares before she noticed.
I followed after him when he passed me. Then, sure enough, he made the snatch. I started running down the Broadway bus lane toward him. Whiteboy must have lost his touch because the fat lady turned and pointed at him and hollered “Thief!” She stepped right in front of me and I banged into her and she shrieked at me. “Whyn’t you sober up and get a job, you bum you?”
Whiteboy whirled around and looked at me full in the face. He made me. Then he started running, too.
He darted through the thicket of yellow taxicabs, cars, and vans and zigzagged his way toward Greeley’s statue. There was nothing I could do but chase him on foot. Taking a shot in such a congestion of traffic and pedestrians would get me up on IAD charges just as sure as if I’d stolen the fat lady’s purse myself.
Then a funny thing happened.
Just as I closed in on Whiteboy, all those bums lying around on the little curbed triangle suddenly got up and blocked me as neatly as a line of zone defensemen for the Jets. Eight or ten big, groggy guys fell all over me and I lost Whiteboy.
I couldn’t have been more frustrated. A second collar on a guy like Whiteboy would have put him away for two years’ hard time, minimum. Not to mention how it would get me a nice commendation letter for my personal file. But in this business, you can’t spend too much time crying over a job that didn’t come off. So I headed east on Thirty-second toward Fifth Avenue.
At mid-block. I stopped to help a young woman in a raggedy coat with four bulging shopping bags and three shivering kids. She set the bags on the damp sidewalk and rubbed her bare hands as I neared her. Two girls and a boy, the oldest maybe seven, huddled around her. “How much farther?” one of the girls asked.
I didn’t hear an answer. I walked up and asked the woman, “Where you headed, lady?” She looked away, embarrassed because of the tears in her eyes. She was small and slender, with light-
brown skin and black hair pulled straight back from her face and held with a rubber band. A gust of dry wind knifed through the air.
“Could you help me?” she finally asked. “I’m just going up to the hotel at the corner. These bags are cutting my hands.”
She meant the Martinique. It’s a big dark hulk of a hotel, possibly grand back in the days when Herald Square was nearly glamorous. Now it’s peeling and forbidding and full of people who have lost their way for a lot of different reasons—most of them women and children. When welfare families can’t pay the rent anymore and haven’t any place to go, the city puts them up “temporarily” at the Martinique. It’s a stupid deal even by New York’s high standards of senselessness. The daily hotel rate amounts to a monthly tab of about two grand for one room and an illegal hotplate, which is maybe ten times the rent on the apartment the family just lost.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
She didn’t hesitate, but there was a shyness to her voice. “Frances. What’s yours?”
“Hock.” I picked up her bags, two in each hand. “Hurry up, it’s going to snow,” I said. The bags were full of children’s clothes, a plastic radio, some storybooks, and canned food. I hoped they wouldn’t break from the sidewalk dampness.
Frances and her kids followed me and I suppose we looked like a line of shabby ducks walking along. A teenage girl in one of those second-hand men’s tweed overcoats you’d never find at the Goodwill took our picture with a Nikon equipped with a telephoto lens.
I led the way into the hotel and set the bags down at the admitting desk. Frances’s three kids ran off to join a bunch of other kids who were watching a couple of old coots with no teeth struggling with a skinny spruce tree at the entry of what used to be the dining room. Now it was dusty and had no tables, just a few graffiti-covered vending machines.
Frances grabbed my arm when I tried to leave her. “It’s not much. I know that. But maybe you can use it all the same.” She let me go, then put out a hand like she wanted to shake. I slipped off my glove and took hold of her small, bone-chilled fingers. She passed me two dimes. “Thanks, and happy Christmas.”
She looked awfully brave and awfully heartsick, too. Most down-and-outers look like that, but people who eat regularly and know where their next dollar will likely come from make the mistake of thinking they’re stupid and confused, or maybe shiftless or crazy.
I tried to refuse the tip, but she wouldn’t have any of that. Her eyes misted up again. So I went back out to the street, where it was starting to snow.
The few hours I had left until the evening darkness were not productive. Which is not to say there wasn’t enough business for me. Anyone who thinks crooks are nabbed sooner or later by us sharp-witted, hard-working cops probably also thinks there’s a tooth fairy. Police files everywhere bulge with unfinished business. That’s because cops are pretty much like everybody else in a world that’s not especially efficient. Some days we’re inattentive or lazy or hungover—or in my case on Christmas Eve, preoccupied with the thought that loneliness is all it’s cracked up to be.
For about an hour after leaving Frances and the kids at the Martinique, I tailed a mope with a big canvas laundry sack, which is the ideal equipment when you’re hauling off valuables from a place where nobody happens to be home. I was practically to the Hudson River before I realized the perp had made me a long time back and was just having fun giving me a walk-around on a raw, snowy day. Perps can be cocky like that sometimes. Even though I was ninety-nine percent sure he had a set of lock picks on him, I didn’t have probable cause for a frisk.
I also wasted a couple of hours shadowing a guy in a very uptown cashmere coat and silk muffler. He had a set of California teeth and perfect sandy-blond hair. Most people in New York would figure him for a nice simple TV anchorman or maybe a GQ model. I had him pegged for a shoulder-bag bus dipper, which is a minor criminal art that can be learned by anyone who isn’t moronic or crippled in a single afternoon. Most of its practitioners seem to be guys who are too handsome. All you have to do is hang around people waiting for buses or getting off buses, quietly reach into their bags, and pick out wallets.
I read this one pretty easily when I noticed how he passed up a half empty Madison Avenue bus opposite B. Altman’s in favor of the next one, which was overloaded with chattering Lenox Hill matrons who would never in a thousand years think such a nice young man with nice hair and a dimple in his chin and so well dressed was a thief.
Back and forth I went with this character, clear up to Fifty-ninth Street, then by foot over to Fifth Avenue and back down into the low Forties. When I finally showed him my tin and spread him against the base of one of the cement lions outside the New York Public Library to pat him down, I only found cash on him. This dipper was brighter than he looked. Somewhere along the line, he’d ditched the wallets and pocketed only the bills and I never once saw the slide. I felt fairly brainless right about then and the crowd of onlookers that cheered when I let him go didn’t help me any.
So I hid out in the Burger King at Fifth and Thirty-eighth for my dinner hour. There aren’t too many places that could be more depressing for a holiday meal. The lighting was so oppressively even that I felt I was inside an ice cube. There was a plastic Christmas tree with plastic ornaments chained to a wall so nobody could steal it, with dummy gifts beneath it. The gifts were strung together with vinyl cord and likewise chained to the wall. I happened to be the only customer in the place, so a kid with a bad complexion and a broom decided to sweep up around my table.
To square my pad for the night, I figured I had to make some sort of bust, even a Mickey Mouse. So after my festive meal (Whopper, fries, Sprite, and a toasted thing with something hot and gummy inside it). I walked down to Thirty-third Street and collared a working girl in a white fake-fox stole, fishnet hose, and a red-leather skirt. She was all alone on stroll, a freelance, and looked like she could use a hot meal and a nice dry cell. So I took her through the drill. The paperwork burned up everything but the last thirty minutes of my tour.
When I left the station house on West Thirty-fifth, the snow had become wet and heavy and most of midtown Manhattan was lost in a quiet white haze. I heard the occasional swish of a car going through a pothole puddle. Plumes of steam hissed here and there, like geysers from the subterranean. Everybody seemed to have vanished and the lights of the city had gone off, save for the gauzy red-and-green beacon at the top of the Empire State Building. It was rounding toward nine o’clock and it was Christmas Eve and New York seemed settled down for a long winter’s nap.
There was just one thing wrong with the picture. And that was the sight of Whiteboy. I spotted him on Broadway again, lumbering down the mostly blackened, empty street with a big bag on his back like he was St. Nicholas himself.
I stayed out of sight and tailed him slowly back a few blocks to where I’d lost him in the first place, to the statue of Greeley. I had a clear view of him as he set down his bag on a bench and talked to the same bunch of grey, shapeless winos who’d cut me off the chase. Just as before, they passed a bottle. Only this time Whiteboy gave it to them. After everyone had a nice jolt, they talked quickly for a couple of minutes, like they had someplace important to go.
I hung back in the darkness under some scaffolding. Snow fell between the cracks of planks above me and piled on my shoulders as I stood there trying to figure out their act. It didn’t take me long.
When they started moving from the statue over to Thirty-second Street, every one of them with a bag slung over his shoulder, I hung back a little. But my crisis of conscience didn’t last long. I followed Whiteboy and his unlikely crew of elves—and wasn’t much surprised to find the blond shoulder-bag dipper with the cashmere coat when we got to where we were all going. Which was the Martinique. By now, the spindly little spruce I’d felt sorry for that afternoon was full of bright lights and tinsel and had a star on top. The same old coots I’d seen when I helped Frances and her kids there were standing aro
und playing with about a hundred more hungry-looking kids.
Whiteboy and his helpers went up to the tree and plopped down all the bags. The kids crowded around them. They were quiet about it, though. These were kids who didn’t have much experience with Norman Rockwell Christmases, so they didn’t know it was an occasion to whoop it up.
Frances saw me standing in the dimly lit doorway. I must have been a sight, covered in snow and tired from walking my post most of eight hours. “Hock!” she called merrily.
And then Whiteboy spun around like he had before and his jaw dropped open. He and the pretty guy stepped away from the crowd of kids and mothers and the few broken-down men and walked quickly over to me. The kids looked like they expected all along that their party would be busted up. Frances knew she’d done something very wrong hailing me like she had, but how could she know I was a cop?
“We’re having a little Christmas party here. Hock. Anything illegal about that?” Whiteboy was a cool one. He’d grown tougher and smarter in a year and talked to me like we’d just had a lovely chat the other day. We’d have to make some sort of deal. Whiteboy and me. and we both knew it.
“Who’s your partner?” I asked him. I looked at the pretty guy in cashmere who wasn’t saying anything just yet.
“Call him Slick.”
“I like it,” I said. “Where’d you and Slick get all the stuff in the bags?”
“Everything’s bought and paid for, Hock. You got nothing to worry about.”
“When you’re cute, you’re irritating. Whiteboy. You know I can’t turn around on this empty-handed.”
Then Slick spoke up. “What you got on us, anyways? I’ve just about had my fill of police harassment today, Officer. I was cooperative earlier, but I don’t intend to cooperate a second time.”
I ignored him and addressed Whiteboy. “Tell your friend Slick how we all appreciate discretion and good manners on both sides of the game.”