by F. P. Lione
On the way back to the precinct the radio was bombarded with “Hiyo Silver,” “There’s a new sheriff in town,” and “Algebra, this is no place for you!” from The Little Rascals. Then I heard the clip-clop of horse hooves being tapped on the dashboards of the RMPs to the theme song of Bonanza while someone sang “Happy Trails.” Cops always do this stuff. It breaks up the monotony of the job.
We followed Walsh as he went down 9th Avenue on the horse. Except for almost getting whacked by the cabbie on 45th Street and going back and forth between a trot and a full stop, he didn’t do too bad.
The perp that had been riding the horse looked nervous seeing Walsh ride him, and I saw him wince every time Walsh came to a corner and pulled back on the reins to stop the horse.
“Relax,” I said to him. “Nothing’s gonna happen to the horse.”
“He has no idea how to ride a horse,” he said in his snotty British accent.
I had no idea what one of those blue-blooded fox-hunt types looked like, but I didn’t think he was it. He was right about Walsh though—he had no idea how to ride a horse.
Walsh waited on the horse by the front steps of the precinct while we parked the car. When we walked up with the cameraman and the horseman in cuffs, he asked, “What should I do with him? Should I just tie him up out here?”
“Tie him up in the side yard where peddlers keep the vendor carts,” I said. The last thing we needed was someone stealing the horse and Walsh losing five vacation days. I could hear Central calling us with reports of someone riding the horse through the Lincoln Tunnel.
“Can I check on him?” the horseman asked, nodding toward the side yard where Walsh was taking the horse.
“You can, but he might not recognize you with the cuffs on,” I said.
“You’re not as funny as you think,” he said.
“Sure I am.” I smiled and grabbed his elbow. I walked him over and let him take a look at the horse before we went inside.
Lieutenant Coughlin was at the front desk when we came in.
“Whaddaya got?” he asked, looking at whatever he was writing.
“I got four under for harassment,” Bruno said.
Coughlin peered over the top of his eyeglasses, “Where’s the horse?” obviously having heard Bruno’s transmission earlier.
“He’s in the side yard,” I said.
“Is he tied up?”
“We tied him to the dumpster in case he wants to graze,” I said, watching Coughlin’s mouth twitch. “And if he fertilizes the alleyway, it won’t smell any different.”
The sarge came in with the mouthpiece and the female. The mouthpiece looked mad, and the female looked humiliated. Her face was blotchy as if she’d been crying. Rooney and Connelly followed with the complainant, who was still on her cell phone, probably calling her lawyer.
Joe went behind the desk and grabbed the block of wood shaped like a .38 that held the keys to the gun lockers. He took my, Bruno’s, and his guns and put them in the lockers behind the desk.
“Terr, can you buzz us in and come in the back?” Joe called as we stood in front of the gate leading to the back by the cells.
“Right now, with everyone watching? I knew you’d come around, baby.” She beamed at Joe. “Does anyone have a breath mint?” she yelled to the room.
“I need you to search the female, Terr,” Joe said seriously.
“Anything for you,” she said, smiling, as Joe shook his head.
The female looked horrified. I guess she forgot you get searched when you’re arrested. The four perps were looking at the “Stop! No firearms beyond this point” sign, and I saw them reading the other signs posted around the door on white eight-by-ten-inch pieces of paper. Their eyes got big when they saw the “No weapons beyond this point,” “All prisoners must be handcuffed when entering this area,” “All prisoners must be handcuffed when leaving this area,” and “Authorized personnel only” signs and an extra “No weapons beyond this point” sign in case you didn’t see it the first time.
They do this so a prisoner can’t go for your gun in the close quarters of the cells. I’ve heard stories where this has happened and cops have gotten shot, but it’s never happened here.
We walked them past the fingerprinting machine, and I saw the perps eyeing the “Bad guys are watching” sign that has a picture of a guy that always reminds me of the Hamburglar. We took them back to the holding pen/arrest-processing room. We process the arrest in the room with the prisoners so we can watch them and make sure they don’t hurt other prisoners or themselves.
It’s a small room, about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. To the immediate right are the height markings for mug shots. Next is the pen with the anchored bench with metal loops for handcuffs, and then outside the pen are two benches for the female prisoners. There’s a wall of gated windows and a desk where the cops sit and do the paperwork.
The room was filled with the stink of feet and the sound of snores coming from the cell. I spotted Walter the drunk passed out on the bench in the cell. Everyone knows Walter. He’s homeless and drinks up on 8th Avenue and 42nd Street. We’re always locking him up for spitting at the tourists who won’t give him any money when he’s panhandling.
Walter was dressed for winter even though it was 70 degrees outside. He wore a blue wool cap, an aqua-colored plaid jacket, and fleece pants with a hole in the knee. His worn laceless sneakers were lying on the floor haphazardly, and he wore dingy gray socks that were white once and would probably stick to the wall if you slapped them up against it.
Terri Marks took the female into the stairwell to toss her while Joe stood within earshot of her, watching us.
Galotti and I tossed the other three, taking their wallets, cigarettes, lighters, and keys. I wanted to give them the full experience of their arrest, so I took their belts and shoelaces in case they tried to hang themselves. I let them keep their cash. If they’d had a lot of money on them, I would have vouchered it, but none of them had more than sixty bucks.
We put the three males in the cell and watched their faces as the gate clanged shut and the two bolts slid home. This is my favorite part of the arrest, when all arrogance is gone and reality sets in.
“Can I have a cigarette?” the mouthpiece asked, not so loud now.
“Nope. This is a smoke-free environment,” I said, lighting a cigarette with his lighter.
You’re not supposed to smoke, but we usually let the perps smoke unless, like this guy, they have no respect for cops. Then we use their lighters and make them breathe secondhand smoke.
I saw Joe smirk and shake his head, and for some reason I remembered that I haven’t been in church for two weeks. I collared up the last two weekends, trying to save as much money as I can before I get married. I guess it’s beginning to show, ’cause I find myself cursing more, losing my temper easier, and letting my Bible collect dust on the floor next to my bed. I told myself that once November came I’d be in church every Sunday again.
Since Walter was asleep on the bench, there was only room for one of the three male perps to sit. The cameraman sat next to Walter’s feet, but the smell hit him, and he moved to the floor and leaned up against the metal bars of the cell. The other two were standing, and the female was cuffed to the bench outside the cell with her head down, looking at the floor.
Joe and I left Bruno to process the arrest. We went back out and got our guns out of the lockers behind the desk. Hanrahan was talking to the lou when we came out.
“What are you gonna do with them?” Joe asked the lou.
“Since the camera recorded the event, it’s considered investigatory evidence. We’ll give it to the DA and let them figure it out.” He shrugged. “It’s aggravated harassment, we’ll ACD them.” (ACD is basically a misdemeanor with a court appearance. They also wouldn’t get back their camera worth a hundred grand without the assistant district attorney’s okay. This would inconvenience them and make them think twice about playing games again.)
Joe and
I went back out to the RMP and drove down to 9th Avenue and over to 34th Street to take a look at our sector. We patrol our sector by driving east to west from 9th Avenue to 5th Avenue and north to south from 34th Street to 40th Street. This gives us a look at the whole thing, which we wouldn’t get just driving the avenues like some cops do. Since it was Labor Day weekend, the city was pretty quiet. It was the last weekend for the beachgoers to hit the Jersey Shore or Long Island, and for the first time since Memorial Day I didn’t have to battle the Sunday night traffic while driving in to work.
I stopped for coffee at the Sunrise Deli on the corner of 40th and 7th and drove over to the parking lot on 37th Street just off 8th Avenue while we waited for a job.
Joe and I each took a paper. He took the Daily News and I took the Post. The only thing the papers seemed to be talking about these days was the mayoral election. I scanned an article about Herman Badillo, Mike Bloomberg’s opponent in the Republican primary. He was complaining that Bloomberg was upping his charity giving here in the city, trying to buy New Yorkers. I didn’t want to hear it. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all full of it.
I went over to the sports section. Giuliani was making a last-minute deal to build new stadiums for the Mets and the Yankees before he left the mayor’s office. He’s a big Yankee fan, so I was surprised that he included the Mets in it. He called it a win-win deal. Since there’s no such thing, I was immediately suspicious, and as I got further into the article I saw why. The deal was between the city and the owners of the two New York ball clubs. The deal was valued at $1.6 billion. The teams would split the cost, and our taxes wouldn’t go up—like that would ever happen. Then it said that it was a nonbinding agreement and the new incoming mayor didn’t have to go through with it. I’d bet money we’ll never see the new stadiums.
“How’d it go with Vinny?” Joe asked.
“Huh?” I asked, still reading.
“Vinny, the bachelor party, what’d he say when you talked to him?”
I looked over at him. “Oh.” I shook my head. “I must be outta my mind with the whole wedding thing. If it was up to me, I’d elope, but Michele won’t do it.”
“What happened?” He chuckled.
“I had a fight with him. He’s insisting on throwing me a bachelor party the way he wants it. I told him forget it, I’m not going. Then my father jumps in and goes off on me, screaming about the wedding and how I’m so selfish—”
“I thought he wasn’t talking to you.”
“He wasn’t talking, he was yelling,” I said. “Vinny called me this morning and asked me to meet him at Grandma’s for dinner so we could talk. I used to go every Sunday; now I only go if I have to. My father was there, and aside from him yelling at me for being selfish, he didn’t say a word.”
Joe knows enough about my family that nothing they do surprises him much anymore. He comes from a nice stable family, and I wonder if a lot of this isn’t entertainment for him. When I started working with him I still lived with my brother, Vinny, in the house we grew up in. My parents had both moved out, leaving me and Vinny to renovate the three-bedroom colonial in Shore Acres on Staten Island. Occasionally my sister, Denise, would move back in, usually in the summer because the house sat right on the water, on the Narrows of New York Bay.
My mother was an alcoholic up until last summer when she went into rehab and has been sober ever since. Ironically, it was the same time I went on the wagon, but unlike me, she never fell off. I hit a bar last Christmas and tossed back a couple after a brawl with my family, but it didn’t do much damage. My mother’s doing good, and this summer she started going to school for nursing at a community college in Pennsylvania where she lives.
The argument Joe and I were talking about was about my and Vinny’s weddings. Vinny got engaged last Fourth of July and picked October for his wedding. I got engaged in February and picked November for my wedding, and the whole family is in an uproar.
The uproar is more over the fact that they don’t like my fiancée because she’s not Catholic and has a little six-year-old son, Stevie. She’s never been married and opted to keep the baby when the father wanted nothing to do with the whole thing.
Vinny and I are each other’s best men and have to throw each other bachelor parties. Since I’ve been walking with God I don’t want the strippers and the prostitutes, but Vinny does. Vinny’s fiancée, Christie, doesn’t seem to mind him having one last wild night, and everyone seems to feel Michele should feel the same way. But she doesn’t, she’s furious. So now I’m stuck in the middle and everyone is mad at me.
“What I don’t understand is why Vinny is mad at you for not having what he wants at your bachelor party,” Fiore said. “It’s your night. It should be what you want.”
“Yeah, well, I could have gotten away with it if we could do the fishing trip, but it’s too late in the season for it. I told Vinny to make it this weekend, when I was going out fishing anyway with a bunch of guys from the precinct. I told him we’d get a bigger boat and take everyone out, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He’s not even talking to me,” I said miserably.
I don’t remember Vinny ever not talking to me, and I didn’t know how to handle it. He’s the peacemaker in the family, which makes things worse. It’s like they think if Vinny’s mad at someone, that person must be wrong because Vinny’s never mad at anyone.
“Your family is so manipulative,” Joe said.
I almost argued with him, but he was right. They do this stuff all the time. Before I met Joe I never noticed this stuff, or if I did I just drank until I didn’t notice it anymore. My parents divorced years ago when my father had a thing on the side with his current wife, Marie, a man-eating shark who lives to make all of us miserable. Last spring Denise found out Marie’s been fooling around on my father with a detective she works with at the 5th precinct. She works as a civilian there, and like my father, this guy is a lot older than her. I guess she bagged him the same way she bagged my father, with her youth and cleavage. We had a blowout when I told my father she was fooling around on him. He called me a liar, and he hasn’t spoken to me since. I’ve been keeping my distance from the family, making excuses why I can’t go to my grandmother’s house for dinner, which is where the family usually meets.
Last year when I stopped drinking and started going to church it was like the family spun off its axis and realigned, and I’m not sure where we are.
Whenever I’m there I understand why people fall off the wagon and go back to drinking. The hardest times I have not drinking are when I’m with them.
“And Michele isn’t helping anything. She says if there’s prostitutes at my bachelor party she won’t marry me,” I added.
“Can you blame her?” Joe said.
I looked over at him. If it was anyone else they would have said she was wrong. But Fiore is different—Captain America, I call him. He always does what he thinks is right, and nobody ever gives him any grief over it. When I try to do what’s right I get reamed from every angle.
“I understand where she’s coming from, Joe, but she’s the one that wanted the wedding. She knows how my family is, and she should have expected this,” I said.
He smirked. “So you’re saying it’s her fault?”
“No, I’m saying she’s not the one that has to deal with them. And Vinny has a point. Up until the time I met her I would have wanted exactly what he’s planning, and now all of a sudden I change the rules,” I said and got out of the car to light a cigarette.
“What do you want to do, Tony? Do you want to start off your marriage making your brother happy or making your wife happy? Because Vinny won’t compromise what he wants for you,” Joe said, stepping out of the car with me.
He had a point. Vinny didn’t care what I thought or how upset Michele would be about it. He wanted to throw me a wild party that would go down in the history books. At first he wanted it to be one big party for the both of us, a weekend in Atlantic City with about thirty guys with lots of drink
ing, gambling, strippers, and hookers. I knew I couldn’t do that, and I told him I just wanted to go out to dinner with him, my father, Joe, and a couple of friends, and I’d throw him the party he wanted. We first talked about it when we were at my grandmother’s apartment for my birthday in June. When Michele realized what kind of party Vinny was having, we had the biggest fight we ever had. She wanted to know what would be at the party, and I said I didn’t know, and she lost it, saying that I was lying to her and if this was the kind of stuff I did, she didn’t think I would be a good role model for Stevie, whether or not he ever found out about it.
“Since you’re so smart, what would you do?” I asked Joe, raising my voice a little. It was easy for him. His family wasn’t like mine. He also didn’t live his life one way and then wake up one day and change everything like I did. My family doesn’t understand me anymore, and they feel I’m being influenced by Joe and Michele, which I guess is true.
“Tony, I can’t tell you what to do,” he said quietly, but I could hear the laugh in his voice.
“I know that, Joe. I’m asking what you would do if you were me.”
He thought for a minute. “I’d tell Vinny that we were going out to dinner like you want and if anyone didn’t like it they could stay home,” he said with a shrug.
“What about his party?” This was the one I was having trouble with.
“I’d pay for him to have the party he wants like you said you would, but I wouldn’t go. If he gets mad, he gets mad, but that’s not your problem.”
“I don’t know, Joe. I’m so stressed out about this. My grandmother told me the family is calling her asking why I’m not getting married in a Catholic church. She said some of them might not come because of it.” I took my last drag and flicked my cigarette toward the back of the parking lot.
“I think Granny’s got her own agenda,” Joe said, looking at me as we got back in the car. “She wants to get rid of Michele and Stevie and have you back just the way you were.”
Sometimes I feel like my family, my blood, are on one side, pulling me back, and God, Joe, Michele, and Stevie are on the other side, pulling me forward, and I’m in the middle wondering if I’m gonna lose a limb if I go in either direction. Things have changed so much over the past year. It’s like my family is uncomfortable around me now, and even when they don’t say a word, I know they don’t approve of me. They liked me better when I was drinking and fighting and sleeping around.