Police Blotter

by Fish, Robert L. ;

  Police Blotter

  Robert L. Fish

  This book is dedicated with respect, admiration, and affection, to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law

  DR. & MRS. LOUIS N. KATZ

  1

  A police precinct in a large city is a filter bed, a giant sieve straining the sewage of crime that flows endlessly through its dingy corridors and across its police blotter, leaving behind the tragic stains of grief and horror, of fear and disappointment, of terror, hopelessness and helplessness, and too often of pain and blood. Occasionally humor is registered on the scrawled pages that receive and delineate the daily naughtiness of the neighborhood, but very seldom. In general there is little to induce a smile in the brutally cold facts of the record; little to amuse in the words burglary, rape, switch-blade, gunshot-wound, assault, or suicide …

  The sluices that feed this mammoth disposal plant are kept at high flow by the constant influx of monitored information, furnished through the modern miracle of present day communication.

  From a radio car, voice distorted by the mechanical apparatus:

  “Amsterdam and Seventy-fourth; smash-and-grab—a jewelry store. We caught one of them trying to get away, some young punk with a gun. There were two more kids with him, split up and run down different alleys. The beat patrolman went after them. Jackson’s checking with the owner on the loss and then we’ll be in. We’ll be bringing Mighty Mouse, here, along with us …”

  Or from a call-box:

  “Sergeant? This is Michaels here, calling from Box 794. Better send the wagon down here. I got a character handcuffed to the box, here, thinks he’s tough.” There is a certain taut satisfaction in the almost-breathless voice. “Or anyways, he thought he was tough up to a couple of minutes ago. I think I talked him out of it. And drunk? Man—if he was only half as tough as that breath of his …!”

  Or from individuals, sometimes identified; usually not:

  “Police? Is this the police? Hey, listen, they’s a guy beating up on his wife in an apartment right across the court from here—the shade’s up and everything! You guys better get over here before he kills her; she’s screaming bloody murder!” The voice is high, tense, excited, its owner suddenly important, a part of the crime news, a witness to dire events, a potential mention in a newspaper article. “My God, he’s slapping the bejasus out of her—he’s beating her to death—he’s killing her! You guys better get over here on the double …!”

  Occasionally from the telephone company:

  “Police? This is a telephone supervisor.” The voice is cool, impersonal, attempting to demonstrate that telephone supervisors are above perturbation, are part of the mechanized coldness of their instruments. “One of our operators has just reported a call asking for a connection to the police. She says the voice sounded hysterical, but before she could ring you people she says she heard the instrument fall, or a noise of that nature, and now there is no response. The line is still open. The address listed in our records for that telephone number is …”

  Or sometimes a visit in person, a man staggering grotesquely up the worn stone steps of the precinct itself, holding his stomach tightly with bloody fingers, trying to push through the heavy doors with his shoulder, saying in a surprised tone of voice to no one in particular, “I’ve been hurt. She stabbed me …”

  Sirens have their own particular wail, and here you note it. Cars race from the precinct garage; men hurry down the stairs from the squad-room, shrugging themselves into topcoats, patting their chests hurriedly to assure the presence of service revolvers—and notebooks and pencils. Typewriters clatter with the uneven rattle of untrained fingers, banging out endless reports on multiple colored forms; telephones ring and are answered, or ring and keep on ringing; cell doors clang shut or swing open—the hinges couldn’t care less which way they turn. People sit sullen and nervous, or fearful, or angry, or bored, on the plain wooden benches to the side of the sergeant’s desk. A precinct is a monstrous ant-hill of activity, of restless movement, all directed at the interminable and seemingly senseless task of clearing enough space from the blotter to allow room for new crimes to clog it once again.

  Day and night, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, year after year after year. Unceasing. Endless.… Crime may be organized, but one thing it never demanded was the eight-hour day.…

  Monday–10:15 A.M.

  Lieutenant Clancy of New York’s Fifty-second Precinct leaned back from the thick stack of reports on his desk, lit a cigarette, and flipped the burnt match in the general direction of the waste-basket in one corner of the tiny room. He swiveled his chair to stare out of the window of the shabby office. In the bright sunlight of the fine autumn day the clothing strung across the heights of the canyon formed by the walls of the old tenements, and even the rows of dented galvanized garbage cans, took on a slightly less objectionable air; but only slightly. One of these days, Clancy thought, more than half-seriously, I’ve got to buck for a promotion, if only to rate an office with a better view. This one, in addition to being slightly larger than a bread-box, is depressing, even on a lovely day.

  A lovely day … The words and the thought touched his memory; he came to his feet and went to stand by the window, staring out at the accumulated rubbish and debris that served in place of a lawn for the narrow areaway. A woman leaned out of a window overhead, shaking out a rug. Clancy’s thoughts went back to the previous day …

  Lieutenant Clancy was a slender man, a bit taller than medium-height, with dark gray eyes, neatly chiseled features, and a very firm chin. His clothing, which was so standard as to be almost a uniform with him, consisted of a drab blue suit, usually sprinkled with cigarette ash, a cheap white shirt, and a plain blue necktie which he seldom bothered to unknot to remove, and which demonstrated this fact by having a tendency to curl. It may only have been trying to hide. Streaks of gray were beginning to mark his temples, but his hair, which was light in color to begin with, successfully masked this admission of middle age.

  Some people—like Policewoman Mary Kelly—thought the graying temples made Clancy look distinguished. Clancy didn’t think about it at all, except to feel more ancient every time he faced himself in a mirror. As a general rule, Clancy’s thoughts were confined to his job at the Fifty-second Precinct to the exclusion of everything else; it was the one fault Mary Kelly found in him. It seemed to her that Clancy should be thinking of settling down—with a wife, of course. Someone who understood him, who understood his work, who appreciated not only his problems, but who appreciated him as a person, as well. Someone like Mary Kelly, to be exact. Not a young girl, but not all that old, either. Nor that poorly built, nor that bad-looking; someone who had been waiting for a man like Clancy for a long while.

  It was not that Clancy was unaware of her interest. It was the thought of the lovely day that had brought his memory back to the previous day, when he and Mary Kelly had had dinner together in her small but neat flat, and afterwards had gone down to sit on the grooved steps of the old brownstone, watching the children play in the street, listening to the muted screams of delight, the muffled sounds of distant traffic, the even beat of strolling footsteps in the growing darkness.

  “It’s been a lovely day,” Mary Kelly had said softly, placing her hand as if by accident on Clancy’s arm. “It’s been a lovely day, and now it’s a lovely night.”

  Clancy hadn’t answered. A lovely night, he had thought analytically; warm and clear. A good night for mugging strolling lovers in the park, for pushing dope without looking out of place standing alone on a street corner waiting for customers, for breaking into apartments of people who had taken advantage of the beautiful fall weather for one last week-end in the country before being incapsulated in their burrows for the winter. A l
ovely night for crime.

  “Nice,” Mary Kelly had murmured.

  “Yeah,” he had answered almost harshly, and then felt ashamed of himself. It certainly wasn’t Mary Kelly’s fault that some people took advantage of the good weather to rob and steal and kill, the same as others took advantage of it to play golf, or walk in the park, or go for a drive in the country and watch the trees take on the rich warm tones of autumn. He had pulled away from her hand, coming to his feet rather abruptly, stepping down to the sidewalk.

  “I’m sorry,” he had said, his voice curt and cold despite his thoughts, despite his good intentions. “I guess I’m just not good company for anyone tonight …”

  Clancy stared through the window and sighed. Yes, it had been a lovely week-end—perfect weather with bright sun and cloudless skies, with cool evenings and gentle breezes; and the pile of reports on his desk clearly demonstrated it. A gang rumble in a school playground, with a fifteen-year-old stabbed and a thirteen-year-old beaten half to death with a bicycle chain; twelve cases of breaking and entering; a wild midnight chase by a patrol car after a speeding stolen pick-up truck, resulting in a crash that killed the driver and put his two passengers, both teen-agers, female, in the hospital. One was in fair condition, but they wouldn’t be able to tell about the other until they saw how she responded to the transfusions; by the time they had managed to extricate her from the wreckage and had performed the emergency amputation of her leg, she had lost an estimated two quarts of blood.

  One man had spent the lovely Saturday afternoon soaking rags and old newspapers in kerosene and placing them in neat bundles beneath the stair-well of an old cold water walk-up on Eighty-eighth Street, and had then dropped a burning match into the pile and walked calmly outside. There were two tenants dead, one of them a six-months-old infant, male, and four firemen in the hospital suffering from smoke inhalation; it was a miracle the Fire Department had managed to prevent the entire block from going up in flames.

  The arsonist had been apprehended in front of the burning building, watching the towering flames and the clouds of acrid choking smoke with open-mouthed joy, crooning softly to himself and quietly clapping his hands together. He was well known to the Arson Squad and one week out of Mattewan, certified as completely cured. So that case, at least, was one that would not clog the blotter, if that fact could bring satisfaction to the occupants of the two shelves in the morgue, and the four men cruelly gasping their lungs out at Bellevue.

  Clancy dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out almost savagely. He swung back to his desk and reseated himself, reaching again for the pile of reports. Beyond the cold listing of crimes, and the assignment of personnel for their investigation, the size of the pile clearly indicated one fact even more important: they were damned short of men. The precinct was strained beyond its resources, and in addition to the excessive workload brought on by the unusually fine fall weather, there was another factor. The United Nations was in special session and most of the foreign heads of government had personally come to New York for the meeting. And some of these heads of government were considered both legitimate and worthy targets by some of their countrymen. As a result, each precinct had had to donate men to strengthen the UN detail, which left them even shorter than usual. Plus the fact that the fine weather, for reasons only a doctor could possibly explain, had also laid up a larger number than usual of the precinct complement with colds, viruses, and assorted forms of grippe.

  Clancy shook his head. Let it snow, he thought; let it rain and hail and even tornado, if there is such a verb—let it do anything to cut down the burden of crime. Let it get so cold and nasty that the bad boys all pack their suitcases and fly out to Las Vegas, or down to Miami Beach. Or let more recruits get smart and pass the Civil Service examinations. Or—even better—let crime take a holiday. He smiled sardonically to himself. His other wishes were possible, even if not probable; the last one was really a dream.

  The telephone at his elbow rang stridently, interrupting his thoughts. He pushed the pile of reports to one side—not so much because he needed the room, but because he was weary of looking at them—and lifted the receiver. His other hand automatically pulled a pad into place and picked up a sharpened pencil.

  “Yes?”

  “Lieutenant? This is the desk. They’ve got a subway jumper over at the Eighty-sixth Street IRT. Jennings called it in. He was on traffic duty on the corner there and the guy who makes change come up and told him. He’s down there now.”

  Clancy nodded and scratched a mark on the pad that had nothing to do with the information he had just received. “Do they have any make on him?”

  “You mean the jumper? Not that I know of; Jennings didn’t say. All he said was a guy jumped in front of a train there.”

  Clancy made two more marks on his pad, neither of which was significant. “Who do you have to send out?”

  “Nobody.” The sergeant amended his statement. “Kaproski’s here, up in the squad-room. He come in awhile ago. He’s typing up a report on them park muggings. All the other boys are out.”

  “Gomez, too?”

  “He reported sick this morning, Lieutenant. Flu or something.”

  “How about Stanton?”

  The desk sergeant took a deep breath. “They was an old man found dead in a house over on the Drive this morning; it happened before you come in, Lieutenant. Stanton’s over there with Keller.” He paused. “You want I should send Kaproski?”

  Clancy thought a moment. “No; let Kap finish what he’s doing. I’ll take it myself. I’m sick and tired of looking at these reports, anyway.” He dropped the phone back on its hook and pulled himself to his feet; from force of habit he tore the top two sheets from the pad, wadded them, and tossed them into the waste-basket. He took his worn topcoat from a hook back of the door, his battered hat from its accustomed place on top of one of the filing cabinets, and walked down the corridor to the desk.

  “I shouldn’t be over there very long,” he said to the sergeant, slipping one arm into his coat. “If I’m held up I’ll call in.”

  The sergeant nodded. “You want a car, Lieutenant?”

  “I’ll take my own,” Clancy said. He slid the other arm into his coat and shrugged it into place. “It’s right outside and you can usually find a place to park over there.” The phone on the desk rang as he turned to the heavy doors of the precinct; the sergeant’s voice stopped him as he was pushing them open.

  “Hold it, Lieutenant. It’s Captain Wise. He wants to talk to you.”

  Clancy paused with a frown, shrugged, and then walked back to the desk, taking the phone from the sergeant’s outstretched hand. “Sam? What is it? I was just on my way out. There was a subway jumper over at the Eighty-sixth Street IRT.”

  The voice of his superior came to him over the instrument. Captain Sam Wise sounded exactly the way he looked and the way he was—stolid, strong, dependable, and very, very Brooklyn. “Are we that short of men you got to go yourself, Clancy?”

  “Shorter,” Clancy said curtly. “Do you have to see me right away, or can it wait? I want to get going; these subway things tie traffic up for hours.”

  “What I had to say, it’s waited this long it can wait a little longer,” Captain Wise said philosophically. “It wasn’t all that important. Just see me when you get back.”

  “Right.”

  “And better wear boots,” the captain added, in a sad attempt to lighten what he felt was an unhappy mood in his subordinate. “Those jumpers are pretty messy sometimes.”

  “I know,” Clancy said with no emotion at all in his voice. He hung up, straightened his hat, pushed through the doors, and trotted down the steps to the curb.

  Monday–10:50 A.M.

  A uniformed policeman was stationed at the uptown side of the Eighty-sixth Street IRT station, shunting people away from the entrance. He recognized Clancy and gave him a half-salute, even while his other hand reached out restrainingly to stop a potential customer of the subw
ay.

  “Hi, Lieutenant.”

  Clancy grunted wordlessly and pushed past. He trotted down the empty stairway, fumbling in his pocket for change. The changer, standing wide-eyed outside of his booth, walked back inside and shoved a token over the sill. Clancy dropped it in the turnstile and rammed his way through. One hidden part of his brain automatically marked the expenditure for inclusion on his next expense account; he dismissed the thought and walked across the platform.

  The train had braked to a stop about three-quarters of the way into the station; the lead car was beyond the visible portion of the platform, hidden from Clancy’s view by the corner of a newspaper kiosk, now folded and locked into a box-shape that looked like a packaged piano. The lights of the subway cars were in bright contrast to the normal gloom of the dingy station; the doors of those cars that were alongside the platform had been opened, and those passengers who had not left the scene for more assured transportation were being held back from the front end of the paralyzed train by a second uniformed policeman.

  Clancy walked quickly around the shuttered newspaper stand and towards the front of the train; a third uniformed policeman was seated on one of the benches there, his arm supporting the motorman solicitously. The trainman had his head buried in his hands. Across the multiple tracks passengers on the downtown platform were staring curiously through the gloom of the dim station, attempting to determine what was taking place.

  The policeman on the bench looked up at Clancy’s arrival; it was Jennings of the Traffic Detail. He began to get to his feet; his movement caused the motorman to raise tortured eyes. He saw the tall thin detective standing over him and scrambled hastily to his feet, unconsciously recognizing authority. His hand went out hesitatingly as if to touch Clancy; he swallowed.

  “I couldn’t help it,” he said in a high voice, bordering on hysteria. “Honest to Christ I couldn’t help it! Like I told the officer here, I was coming into the station like I always do, following the lights, just starting to slow down, when he jumped off right in front of me! Right in my face! I swear to God I couldn’t do anything about it. I slammed on the brakes but I couldn’t stop in time.…”