“No, I was just saying. What happened was, I’m working in this place and one of your sons came up and said hello.”
“Which one?”
“You got to forgive me, but I get mixed up with the names. The one we had with us one day. The twenty-year-old.”
“That’s Eddie. He goes into those places. So what’s the problem?”
“Well, he knew me and I knew his face and he comes up and I have the bartender give him all the beer he wants. You know.”
“So?” Scannell said. He was shifting back and forth on his feet.
“I have to tell you. He said to me, do I know anything about you having a girlfriend.”
“He said that?”
“I’m afraid he did.”
“When was this?”
“The other weekend. Of course you know what I said, Inspector.”
“I know that.”
“I told him, you’re crazy, have another beer and stop listening to people who are jealous that your father is a successful man.”
“So then what did he say?” Scannell said.
“No, that took care of it, Inspector. He was satisfied. In fact, I think I got it out of his mind forever.”
Scannell nodded.
“I hate working that second job for money, but I guess in this case it was good I was there,” Myles said.
Myles became silent, which to Scannell was more painful than a loudspeaker held to his ear.
“You know, you mentioned to me about wanting to be in the detective division,” Scannell said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell you the truth, I was just thinking about it the other morning. They got a way of putting a patrolman into a squad right away and then getting him a shield later. Make a good arrest or something. They do in special cases. Say there’s an organized crime case and one of the relatives is in the department. Or if the patrolman speaks a language and a squad needs him. It can be done sometimes right away, with no review boards or anything. Then later, you just give the guy his shield and his money.”
“I have special knowledge of the Bronx,” Myles said.
“A lot of guys know the Bronx,” Scannell said.
“I was on a softball team my last year in the neighborhood and I went out and got this kid Flores, he didn’t look Spanish, just so when we played a Spanish team he could listen to them talk and tell us when they were going to bunt, things like that.”
“That was good,” Scannell said.
“Maybe I could do something like that again,” Myles said.
“Maybe,” Scannell said. He squeezed Myles’ arm, winked and gently pushed Myles toward the escalator. As Myles went down, he saw Scannell walking to the sweater counter again. Myles was proud of the way he had made up the story instantaneously, standing right there on his feet, putting the key into the lock with his eyes closed. Scannell was so terrified of having his romance uncovered that he would shoot himself before asking his son, even most casually, if he had bumped into Myles lately.
On the following Monday, Myles was assigned as a patrolman to the Twenty-ninth Homicide detective squad in the Bronx. The lieutenant, Martin, assured Myles that only time would be required before the gold shield and extra pay were forthcoming.
“With your hook, you could hump a nun and make it,” Martin said.
“I was told I had to make a good case before that happened,” Myles said.
“Put it this way. You won’t be hurting yourself,” Martin said.
“Then I’ll make it on my own,” Myles said.
“You won’t have any trouble,” Martin said. “We got a world war going on up here.”
Now, in church, Myles shifted around in his seat and the squeaking reminded him that he had been sitting here for some minutes daydreaming in God’s face. He got up and walked out of the silent church.
Outside, when he tried to start the car, nothing happened. He got out, but even before lifting the hood he knew the battery was stolen. He walked toward a group of men who were standing up at the corner. Without noticing Myles, they began walking away. They went down to 138th Street, stood in front of Ana’s Bar for a moment and then two of them went in and the others continued down the street. Myles decided to walk into the bar. If it were night, he never would do it alone, for the procedure that Martin had set down for him called for the back of the bar to be checked, particularly the men’s and ladies’ rooms, before settling down to any business. But the place was so familiar to Myles that he walked toward it, remembering the day when it was called the County Cavan and a kid named Big Richie O’Brien, who had a forehead like a cement ledge, looked out the saloon window at the first Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood.
“You think they should come here?” he said to Myles.
“No,” Myles said.
“To where we live?” Big Richie said.
Myles remembered that one guy in the bar, Jackie Walsh, tried to catch Richie by the arm, but Richie was out in the street, walking across to the Puerto Ricans, there were three or four of them, Myles couldn’t remember, and there was a lot of running when Richie went after them with his huge cement head nodding in anger and the baseball bat he had hidden behind his right leg suddenly swinging out. Big Richie swung the bat and one Puerto Rican, in a white shirt, tried to raise a hand to stop it and the bat slapped through the hand and went onto the side of the Puerto Rican’s face. The Puerto Rican’s whole head bulged to the right, as if he had a pound of gum stuffed in his mouth. The Puerto Rican fell on his back. Big Richie O’Brien began to swing the bat, golf style, but not exactly golf because Richie didn’t use a real backswing. He just kept bringing the bat back a little and slamming it into the Puerto Rican’s head. Myles could see the Puerto Rican’s white shirt turn completely red. He didn’t count how many times Big Richie hit the Puerto Rican, and it all happened so quickly nobody stopped it. It was the first time in his life that Myles had seen somebody kill a man, and he had seen it from the window of this bar he now entered.
He took only two steps inside the front door and stopped. An old barmaid, wearing a white kerchief under a straw hat, stood with her arms folded. The two men who had walked in from the street drank beer near the door; three others sat in the dimness at the far end. The youngest in the place was in the back playing pool.
“I’m from the Twenty-ninth Homicide,” Myles said. Everybody looked and said nothing. “Somebody just took the battery out of my car.”
At the end of the bar, a voice muttered, “A homicide man trying to find a battery. Does that mean some dude took the battery out and murdered it?”
“What’s that?” Myles said. The guy who had done the muttering looked like a lion.
“Yo no se de que hablas,” Teenager said.
“I asked about a battery,” Myles said evenly. “If somebody helps me find my battery now, maybe someday I can help with one of their problems. You know?”
“Bateria?” Teenager said.
“Battery,” Myles said.
“Yo ni tengo un carro.”
The barmaid slapped a hand to her mouth. Myles could see that the young guy playing pool was smiling broadly as he lined up a shot.
“What’s that?” Myles said.
“He say that he doesn’t even own a car,” Benny Velez said. The barmaid’s hand remained over her mouth.
“What about you?” Myles asked.
“Cachara,” Benny said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I have a very old, bad car.”
“I asked for a battery, not what kind of car you have.”
Teenager, sitting on the far side of Benny, now gave a great yawn to attract attention. His left arm came in front of Benny, removing Benny from the conversation. Then Teenager threw his head back and stretched more, showing Myles his body. Teenager held his left arm high in the air and stretched that side of his torso.
“Estoy esperando cojer el numéro para comprar un carro,” he said.
“He said he is wai
ting to hit the number and then he will buy a car,” Benny said.
“Quatro dieciséis,” Teenager said.
“His number is four sixteen,” Benny said.
Teenager tilted his body, dropping his left arm and bringing up the right arm. He yawned loudly again.
Whistling, Myles went to the phone, and keeping his eyes off Teenager to let him know that he wasn’t worth looking at, he called the precinct.
“What am I running, a car repair shop?” Martin, the lieutenant yelled. Then he said he was sending a detective named Hansen down. Myles felt good; he liked Hansen. For an instant, he forgot his pose and his eyes went to Teenager’s. The two looked at each other with distaste and Myles was ready to forget about it, just another Spic in a saloon, when Teenager yawned loudly again and then slammed his right hand down on the bar and caused the glasses to jump.
“Cogí el numero! Ahora voy a comprar un carro.”
“He says he hit the number and now he is going out to buy a car,” Benny said.
Head high, sneering, Teenager slid off the barstool and walked to the front door. He brushed past Myles and, singing loudly, went out to his Mercedes, waved to the bar window as he got in and, tires shrieking, pulled away.
“What was that supposed to be, smart?” Myles said to Benny Velez, who did not answer.
“What was his name?” Myles asked.
“Some guy comes in here.”
“I know that. I want to know his name.”
Benny spread his palms.
“I asked you for the name,” Myles said.
Benny said nothing. In the rear, the young guy playing pool put down the cue and stuffed his hands into his pockets.
“Officer, do you have reasonable cause to believe that a crime has been committed?” Maximo asked.
“Yes. Somebody stole my battery.”
“Officer, do you have reasonable cause to believe that somebody in here committed the crime?”
“Who are you?” Myles said.
“That’s not the question. The question is, do you have reasonable cause to believe that one of us here committed a crime?”
Myles fixed his eyes on Maximo as he would a motorist caught passing a red light, but Maximo’s eyes, rather than waver or lower, grew more direct and intense. Myles knew that it was his turn to speak, and he considered some smart Bronx remark and then grew wary that this Spic would talk back and make him feel foolish. He turned abruptly, walked outside and stood on the streetcorner until Hansen drove up with the battery.
“Fresh punk,” Myles said as he got the battery from Hansen’s trunk.
“The bar?” Hansen said.
“Some fresh punk in there smartasses me.”
“They’ll do that.”
“They won’t do it again.”
“You’ll probably get your chance,” Hansen said. “That place is always trouble.”
“You wouldn’t mind it if he did it on his own. He had this big guy going for him, so he puts on a show.”
Hansen looked in the bar window. “What big guy?”
“The guy left already.”
“Oh. Because I’m looking in there and I don’t see any big guy. At least not the guy I’m thinking of.”
“Who’s that?”
“Teenager.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know their names.”
“Teenager is a guy with a big beard and a lot of hair. Powerful-looking body.”
“That sounds like him,” Myles said.
“I don’t even like to give him the respect of using his street name,” Hansen said. “To me, he’s just another bum they build jailhouses for. He just got out of one. He’ll spend all his time looking for ways to get right back in.”
“Him and his friend with the mouth better stay the fuck out of my way,” Myles said, with disdain, but with the size of the one and the tough eyes of the other making him uncertain inside.
“You won’t get many chances to miss Teenager,” Hansen said. “Before he went away the last time, he was in so many places around here we thought he was a whole family. They got him for narcotics. That left us with a whole lot of files on guys got killed around here.”
“Where are the files?” Myles asked.
“We got an office full of them,” Hansen said.
“Am I allowed to look at them?” Myles said.
“Of course you are. The cases don’t belong to anyone.”
“Let me take a look, then,” Myles said.
“You may not have to. He’ll give you plenty of fresh ones,” Hansen said.
“I’ll give this guy some personal attention,” Myles said.
Hansen became preoccupied with his pipe. He was a man who preferred to conduct his life without turbulence. When he was fourteen, his parents moved from La Grange, Georgia, to New York, but when Hansen arrived he found he was going to be set back a year in school; instead of being a first-year high school student he would be back with the children in elementary school. Rather than face this humiliation, he went back to La Grange and lived alone through four years of high school.
He grew used to the silence of living alone, and by the time he finished high school and came to New York, he seemed to be a man whose nervous system had been scraped out of him. In his first summer as a policeman, he chased an armed man who had just robbed a grocery store. The man ran with a bag of money in one hand and a gun in the other. Hansen, running on country-boy legs, drew close enough to the gunman to be able to fire at him and knock him down even if the shot were taken while in full stride. Hansen, however, told himself that he would shoot only if the gunman turned around; until then he would keep running after the man. The gunman’s legs began to wobble at 127th Street and 7th Avenue and he turned into a playground and saw fencing on all sides of him and, gasping for air, trying to think of some magic that would lift him out of this dead-end cage, he heard Hansen’s voice saying to him, not shouting at him, but saying to him, calmly, “There’s no way out of here. Now just throw the gun down so’s neither of us gets hurt.” The gunman dropped his weapon and turned around with his hands up. Hansen liked it that way. Stay placid and stay alive.
In 1958, on a day tour in Harlem, Hansen responded to the call of a man stabbed in Blumstein’s department store on 125th Street. He found bedlam on the sidewalk and inside, Martin Luther King on a couch with a brass letter opener sticking out of his chest. Immediately, he saw that King, using Georgia-boy calmness, was not allowing any part of his body to move and thus risk further damage from the letter opener. The woman who had stabbed him, Izola Ware Curry, sat in a haze in handcuffs in the next room.
“You just stay still,” Hansen said to King, who heard clearly but did not move his eyes, lips or a finger in response.
Hansen then pointed out to a captain that the crowd outside by now was so large that it was impossible to have King brought out on a stretcher and not have people rush forward to touch him and, in doing so, perhaps drive the letter opener into his heart. The crowd most certainly would attempt to tear apart the deranged woman, Izola Ware Curry.
“How do we stop them?” asked the captain, Irish, looking to the black cop for special knowledge.
“I’d have more ambulances and patrol cars called to the front entrance. Let them come out there on 125th Street with their sirens going to attract all the people. Then we’ll have one ambulance and a couple of patrol cars come to the back entrance on 124th. With no sirens or anything. Take Dr. King out that way and then I’ll take the woman the same way afterward.”
King was carried out to an ambulance on an empty street and the Ware woman moved to a patrol car with only a few store employees watching. The captain received so many commendations for his native Irish canniness in time of strife that he had the strange experience of being bothered by his conscience. He recommended that Hansen be placed in the detective bureau.
It was chance that placed Myles with Hansen, but now Myles wanted to make it a partnership. He had no trouble with Hansen’s co
lor, because when on duty almost all cops regard themselves as state issue. Besides, Hansen, a black, was disliked by Puerto Ricans more than whites, a fact that Myles found comforting. More important, Myles felt, was that in the vortex of a crisis, Hansen would seek to minimize rather than raise the possibility of danger.
The only negative point about Hansen was the way he could embarrass Myles about his secret relationship with a woman, as he proceeded to do now as Myles, the battery in, was about to drive away.
“When are you on again?” Hansen said.
“Wednesday night, Myles said.
“I guess that ties you up. No, I got it wrong. Thursday’s the day you get with your woman.”
“What are you talking about?” Myles said.
“I got you clocked,” Hansen said. “Thursday’s your female day.”
“Wrong,” Myles said. “Thursday I’ll be going through those files on this guy inside.”
7
TEENAGER’S CAREER IN AMERICA had started when he arrived in New York, nine years earlier, at 2:00 P.M. of a fall day whose breezes, coming off the sparkling bay beside the airport and the ocean beyond the bay, carried hidden in them the first hints of winter. Teenager had thirty-seven dollars with him. On the plane, Teenager had shown a man a note with his uncle’s address and under it the man had printed instructions: “Walk to 93rd Street and ask again.” Teenager and Lydia rode the airport bus to the West Side Terminal and 42nd Street. In the men’s room, he met a Puerto Rican who was changing paper in the towel machine. The Puerto Rican told him which direction to walk to 93rd Street.
“When did you come here?” Teenager asked him.
“Nine years ago.”
“How long have you had this job?”
“I been working here three years.”
“Is this a good job?”
“Only once in a while some drunk comes in here, pisses on your shoes.”
Teenager and Lydia walked up Broadway to 93rd Street in bright fall sunshine and found number 330 West, a brown-stone with a broken basement window and a bag of garbage spilled open on the bottom step. Teenager could make out the word “superintendent” on the bell to the basement door. His ring brought a gray-haired man in a sweatshirt to the door. A cigarette, half of it wet, hung from the man’s mouth.
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