SERGEANT PAUL “PORKY” DUNLAP hated everything about his job as Community Affairs Officer of the 115th Precinct on Northern Boulevard and 92nd Street in Queens. The position had been created more than fifteen years before, after the scandals exposed by the Knapp Commission, on the theory that an individual police officer whose only duty was to present a positive front to the communities served by the various precincts, would act as some kind of counter to the negative image created by the special prosecutors relentless attack on corrupt policemen.
At the time, an ambitious Sergeant Paul Dunlap (who had not yet eaten his way to his nickname) had seen the position of Community Affairs Officer as a pathway to rapid advancement in the department. Twelve years later, having failed the lieutenant’s exam twice (the last time in 1984, after which he’d given up) he knew the position for what it actually was—an endless parade of bullshit lunches and jerk-off dinners, a hairbag nonstop flight to retirement. The Elks Club, the Knights of Columbus, the East Elmhurst Improvement Group, the Jackson Heights Merchants’ Association, every goddamn church in the precinct…the list was endless.
Two years after stepping into the role of Community Affairs Officer, Sergeant Dunlap, though he still hoped to escape his fate by passing the lieutenant’s exam, had realized several things. First and foremost, no Community Affairs Officer would ever make an arrest unless he happened to step into the middle of a robbery while off-duty. Second, and nearly as important, without good collars and without passing the lieutenants exam, there was no place for him to go in the job. Third, he couldn’t give the position of Community Affairs Officer away.
Four years into the job, after failing the lieutenant’s exam for the first time, he had made several futile attempts to get free, at one point feigning illness for so long, the precinct Integrity Officer began an investigation into possible misuse of sick time. As a result, he was ordered back to work and found himself in the office of Captain Serrano, Precinct Commander, where he was told that his options were Community Affairs or early retirement. He could expect no transfers, either to another precinct or to another position.
“Hey, shmuck,” Serrano had explained, “wake up and die right. You got a perfect job you could do until you’re sixty-five when you gotta take retirement. You get to wear a suit every day and you never gotta sit on a toilet waitin’ for some junkies to do a deal. What’s the matter with Community Affairs? It’s pig fuckin’ heaven.”
“Then how come nobody wants it?” Dunlap had countered. What bothered him most was the feeling that he wasn’t a real cop. While the others bragged about street encounters, vicious fights, important arrests, Porky Dunlap kept his mouth shut in the squad room and stayed away from cop bars.
“Because most cops’re stupid kids who still wanna play cowboys and Indians,” Serrano patiently explained.
“They laugh at me, Captain,” Dunlap moaned. “It’s like I should be on Madison Avenue instead of the One One Five. I don’t get respect from anybody.”
“Tough shit. Do ya fuckin’ job or hand in ya papers. Every house gotta have a Community Affairs Officer and you’re mine.”
Porky Dunlap put on seventy-five pounds in the next two years, ballooning up from one eighty-five to more than two sixty. Nobody cared. He was the invisible man in the precinct and only the odd businessman bothered to dig a sly elbow into the flab surrounding his ribs.
During that same period, the sergeant developed four basic speeches. One each on drugs, robbery, street crime, and burglary. He gave one of these four, depending on the place, the circumstances, and the hot crime of the day, to any group requesting his services, even to the smirking high school students jammed into the auditorium for his annual talk on the dangers of drugs. Inevitably, some of the seniors remembered the speech from prior assemblies and laughed out loud when Paul Dunlap described the agonies of a heroin junkie trying to kick the habit.
And so the years went by: eight, ten, twelve, fifteen. Porky learned to do his job well; he was recognized by the more influential citizens in the community (if not by the cops in the One One Five) and called upon whenever the good folks needed reassurance. His life became routine and monotonous and even though his paycheck bloomed, what with all the appearances at night time meetings of this or that organization, he never quite lost the sense of being a civilian employee instead of a third generation New York City cop. His best buddy in the house was a computer operator who ran the network connecting the precinct with the mass of information stored in the state files.
This explained Porky Dunlap’s utter consternation when Sylvia Kaufman knocked firmly on his door, then entered without waiting for permission. He’d been casually daydreaming about the speech he planned to give to the American Legion that evening and the endless rounds of drinks the Legionnaires would buy once he was finished. It was a pleasant dream. Far more pleasant than the old lady who, still without permission, pulled a chair over to his desk and sat down.
“Are you the Community Affairs Officer?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m Sergeant Dunlap.” Porky’s manners and speech had been honed by frequent contact with influential civilians. He smiled automatically while his mind raced over the possibilities. The kind of people he ordinarily dealt with never entered the precinct unless they were actually filing a complaint in a criminal action. In which case they went to one of the real detectives. Not him. “What can I do for you?”
“The officer downstairs, the one behind the desk where you come in, suggested I speak to you about a crime I witnessed. My name is Sylvia Kaufman.”
Porky Dunlap shifted uncomfortably, well aware of the joke being played on the two of them. The woman had to be a nut and the Desk Sergeant simply wanted to get rid of her without being second-guessed by some lieutenant if the old lady’s grandson happened to work for CBS.
“When did this crime happen?” Dunlap asked. He was wondering what a complaint form looked like these days; he hadn’t filled one out in years.
“Last night. I was inside Annie Bonnastello’s apartment until nearly midnight. She had a stroke two years ago and she needs help with the heavy cleaning. Her apartment is on the first floor, the same as mine, but we’re on opposite sides of the building…”
“Could you give me the address of the place? Let me get a fix on it? The One One Five serves a pretty large area.”
“337-11 37th Avenue. Two blocks from where Broadway crosses Roosevelt Avenue.”
“That’s Jackson Heights, right?”
“Correct.” Sylvia paused, waiting for another question, her thin body rigidly straight. She was sixty-five years old, but still strong and confident. Illness, though she tended it in others, seemed quite foreign to her. True, she sometimes thought about death, but she fully expected to function right up to the end. No wasting diseases for Sylvia Kaufman, who’d spent thirty-five years in the public school system without taking a sick day. When Porky Dunlap kept silent, she went on with her recitation. “As I walked through the lobby to the western wing, which is where I live, I witnessed an act of public prostitution. I would like to file a complaint.”
At the sound of the words “public prostitution,” Porky Dunlap did a mental double take, though he maintained a concerned expression, the one he used when listening to the laments of recently burglarized businessmen after speeches at the Elks Club. “Prostitution? In public? In Jackson Heights? That’s pretty rare.” The question came automatically, because, at heart, Porky Dunlap was still a cop and when confronted with an unusual situation, cops instinctively probe.
“That’s what has me so worried,” Sylvia Kaufman said evenly. “We’re only a block from the el on Roosevelt Avenue, but our building has always been good. No drugs. No loud parties. Even when the Spanish started moving in twenty years ago and everyone said the neighborhood was going, we managed to keep it together. It’s just that lately…”
“Tell me exactly what you saw?” Dunlap asked.
Sylvia Kaufman took a deep breath. She’d grown up in a different era and remembered the old Catholic Legion of Decency with its list of condemned movies. Her friend, Annie Bonnastello, always consulted it before going to see a film. Nowadays, according to the media, girls threw away their virginity before puberty. But in her day, women didn’t talk about sex. “I saw a very young woman, a girl, really, performing an act of oral sex on a much older man.”
“Right in the hallway?”
“Yes. The man made obscene remarks to me. He invited me to join in.”
Though he kept the skepticism out of his voice, Porky Dunlap jumped to the same conclusion as the Desk Sergeant. Nut case. Now all he had to do was figure out how to get rid of her. “Did anyone actually touch you?”
Sylvia searched for a way to explain what she’d seen and how she’d felt. She’d been very tired when she left Annie’s apartment. Her eyesight wasn’t so good when she was tired and the hall was dimly lit. (It seemed to get dimmer and dimmer as the years went by.) She’d heard sounds, first. Someone was grunting and there was a wet sound that might have been a kiss. Sylvia’s first thought was that Fay Gelardi, who lived on the fifth floor, was at it with her boyfriend again. The one her parents hated; the one she was forbidden to see. Fay’s parents were old country and were deathly afraid of the kinds of corruption available to New York teenagers.
Sylvia, who thought of herself as tolerant, had cleared her throat by way of a warning, but the reaction she’d gotten was totally unexpected.
“Check out the old bitch. Hey, old bitch, what’s doin’?”
The images had suddenly jumped into focus. Two strangers, a man and a woman. The woman (just a girl, really) was on her knees and the man’s trousers were down around his ankles. She was holding his erection with one hand while she looked back and forth from Sylvia to her lover.
Sylvia took a deep breath. There had to be a way to express her sense of violation, of impending doom. She felt like the first human to spot the aliens in a science fiction movie.
“No,” she finally said, “the man had an orgasm, and I passed by them and went into my apartment.”
“Did you see any money actually change hands? How do you know it wasn’t a couple of kids who got carried away?”
“The man was in his forties, wearing a suit and tie. The girl was no more than eighteen. She wore some kind of bright pink jacket that looked like it was made of feathers and a very short skirt that barely covered her buttocks. The jacket was open and I could see her bra. It was red and designed to leave her nipples completely exposed.”
The sergeant squirmed in his seat. He was taken with the old woman’s concise recitation of the events. Putting her in the “nut” category had relaxed him, but her manner was anything but typical of the confused elderly who occasionally wandered into the precinct. This woman was steady as a rock.
“The girl lives in apartment 1F with another woman,” Sylvia Kaufman continued. “Apartment 1F is a studio. They sleep all day and work at night.” She hesitated a moment, unsure of herself, then rushed on. “The building changed hands about two months ago. There’s a new management company. They fired the super and they haven’t hired anybody to replace him. We have to carry the garbage out ourselves. And there are empty apartments all through the building where people have been evicted. Precision Management says these apartments were not occupied by the individuals who signed the leases, but the former owner never cared. He just wanted his rent.”
“Hold up a second.” The story, though familiar enough in poor neighborhoods like Corona, a black slum which lay east of the precinct house, simply didn’t fit the pattern for Jackson Heights. Even in the 60s, when the Latinos had arrived, the majority of the entering Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Colombians had been hardworking and determined to exercise their right to a slice of the American dream. Street crime had never become a major problem.
Porky Dunlap, processing this information, was again caught up in the anomaly. The situation stunk of outside manipulation. Then he pushed the contradictions back and returned to reality. “If you have problems with the building, you have to go to HPD. Housing Preservation and Development. Get them to send out an inspector and write up the violations. As for the prostitution—unless you saw the money change hands and you can prove the money was given in return for sex, we can’t make an arrest. Now it’s true, public indecency is a misdemeanor, but it’s still your word against this girl’s. Even if we took your complaint and brought her in, we’d have to write a Desk Appearance Ticket and release her on her own recognizance. And you’d have to testify in court. The worst she’d get, assuming she was found guilty and had a history of prior arrests, is a fine or a few days in jail. And she’ll know who made the complaint and her pimp’ll know, too. You might find yourself subject to personal harassment without really accomplishing a damn thing. It’s not worth it.” Satisfied with his impromptu lecture, he sat back and waited for her to respond.
“Well, what am I to do? Simply ignore it? My husband and I lived in that building for thirty years. I pay three hundred dollars a month rent. If I had to leave, there’s no place in the city I could afford. Even with all the new people, I still have a lot of friends in the building. It’s like a community.”
“You should have brought your husband with you. The more people who sign a complaint, the more likely someone’ll take action. Always keep that in mind. Numbers impress.”
“My husband passed away in 1982,” Sylvia replied evenly.
“I’m sorry.” Suddenly Porky Dunlap found himself wishing he could really help, that he could be a cop for once, but the situation, assuming she was describing it accurately, was not a problem for the NYPD. “Look, your move is to organize the tenants. A strong tenants’ association can get action from any landlord. That’s what you really need. Put enough heat on the landlord and he’ll take action against this whore and her roommate.” He noted the look of dismay on her face; she’d expected the police to solve all her problems and now she was being asked to organize a mass movement. “Look,” he said, “as Community Affairs Officer, I’ve visited tenants’ associations during rent strikes. I know a little about how they work. You don’t organize all at once. First, make a list of the tenants you’ve known for the longest time. The ones you can count on. Get them together and explain the situation. See if they agree that something has to be done. How many units in the building?”
“Eighty.”
“How many vacant?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe fifteen.”
“That leaves about sixty-five occupied. If you can organize ten people and have them knock on five doors each, you can get in touch with nearly every tenant in the building. Get up a petition and take it to the landlord asking that the prostitutes be moved out. See, I don’t think you really have anything to worry about. Those buildings are pretty solid, not like the tenements, and I just can’t see a landlord allowing the property to fall apart. Sometimes when a building changes hands, it takes a little while for the new management to get organized. Still, the sooner you get organized, the better.”
Sylvia Kaufman knew she was being dismissed and she didn’t like it, despite the sergeant’s obvious sincerity. “Isn’t there a vice squad to go after the prostitutes?”
“There is,” Dunlap admitted, “but the penalty for prostitution is so light, enforcement is a waste of time. And arresting the girls doesn’t help, because the pimp’s certain to dump new girls in the same apartment. If you really want to put heat on prostitutes, get somebody to stay in the lobby and harass the customers. If the Johns can’t be anonymous, they’ll stop coming.” Porky Dunlap stood up, clearly indicating that the interview was over. “There used to be a time when a vice cop’d go up, have a few words with the whores or the pimp and they’d be on their way. Nowadays, unless we got the warrant in our hands, the scum just laugh in our faces.”