Except for the big, square Dick Tracy jaw and those times he must don the official crisp powder-blue shirt, his shiny inspector’s badge, the slim black four-in-hand tie and the navy twill coat and trousers tailored to accommodate a gun belt, Paul Short looks not so much like the commander of a New York police precinct house as he does the worldly proprietor of an upper Madison Avenue art gallery.
His sartorial choices tend toward hopsack blazers, silk ties of deep hues, pleated slacks and butter-soft loafers. Often, he arrives for his tour of duty at the Nineteenth with a rosebud in his lapel. His silver hair is carefully cut.
The aesthetic is important. It wouldn’t matter if a commander of the South Bronx precinct popularly known as “Fort Apache” clothed himself exclusively in rayon or polyester and wore two-toned patent-leather shoes. But if a cop with visions of high command doesn’t know why such fabrics do not befit an Upper East Side precinct inspector, he’ll not likely get the post; and it’s unlikely that anyone would think to tell him why.
But clothes alone do not make the man in the case of Paul Short.
To be a precinct commander anywhere in New York City, Short was telling Valentine one day amid repeated calls from the commissioner’s office downtown on “delicate” cases and calls from neighborhood big shots and would-be big shots and brief visits from line officers handling cases in which the inspector had requested briefings, is pretty much a matter of having to switch one’s personality gears, to change with the times even though you may not agree with either the times or the changes. On the whole, Inspector Short believes cops in New York, if not elsewhere in the country, are much improved.
Not that everything was wrong back when Short was a street cop, he adds. It’s just that there has been a natural progression going on.
In 1954, Paul Short left his job as an airlines mechanic, where he was never once required to shoot anybody, and became a foot patrolman. “I was your regular beer-drinking, cigar-smoking cop like you don’t see too much anymore these days,” he says to Valentine. Officer Paul Short went to Emerald Society meetings, the principal fraternity of the main ethnic group of the New York City Police Department, and precinct dances. He got married early and stayed married. He worked hard at his job, too, and earned a reputation as an unusually tenacious cop. If a crook had Paul Short on his tail, it was like Joe Louis used to say, “He can run, but he can’t hide.”
There was the case of the Cuban giant, for instance:
“I was in the Bronx and that guy was the second guy I shot in my career. The other one was a taxicab stick-up artist and a junkie and isn’t even worth mentioning. But the Cuban! I’ll never forget it, mainly because he was enormous, close to seven feet. Also, because when I got him, it was the day before I made sergeant.
“He was a rapist, this guy …”
When Short says this, you understand the ferociously unspoken contempt of an Irish Catholic cop and family man for the loathsome rapist. His eyes go dead and cold and just about murderous. Valentine would see this expression many more times. And he would share the sentiment. He would also admire the control.
“… He liked to get the nurses. Then he’d take their money by threatening to pay them another visit.
“The guy was incredible. Three times already, he’d escaped police traps.”
One of those traps, the one just before Short finally brought him down, involved an apartment-house corridor. The Cuban had telephoned one of his victims and the young woman, in turn, called the police. So Paul Short rounded up the three biggest cops he could find in the Bronx and the four of them staked out the hallway on the nurse’s floor. The Cuban arrived, right on schedule. When the cops moved in on him, the Cuban giant beat up the three big men and slammed past Short down the stairway to disappear into the street.
But that day before making sergeant, Short finally got his man. The Cuban, as per his habit, called up one of his victims and demanded that she meet him in a Bronx bar—with money. Otherwise, he said, she would die. Short was notified.
Posing as a neighborhood saloon patron, Short sauntered into the pub with a sack of groceries, as if he’d just been doing the day’s marketing for his wife, and ordered a shot and a beer.
“The guy made me right away. Don’t ask me how, but he made me. Some of these guys can smell cop. So he comes at me, this huge thing. He’s a karate expert. He hits me so hard in the head I can’t see anymore. I’m down on the floor and my head’s split open and I can barely see. I figure this isn’t right.”
Officer Short peeled himself up off the barroom floor and staggered to the street. The big Cuban was in no hurry, remembering the heap of medium-build cop he’d just left back in the pub.
Short started following the Cuban, his .38 police special drawn. The big Cuban started running when he got a look at the fire in Short’s eyes. There was Short, head flowing with blood, about a foot shorter than the Cuban, fully authorized to shoot to kill. The rapist, big and tough as he was, was frightened out of his mind. They ran for blocks, the dark giant panting and shouting, the loco Irish cop screaming and shooting behind him. Few things in the world are more terrifying than a stampeding, gored bull—or a cop who won’t give up.
Finally, with a crack of fire that thudded into its mark, the big Cuban stumbled and fell, his legs full of lead.
“That was the easy part of it,” Short recollected. “Any cop will tell you the same today. Some things haven’t changed all that much. The collar’s nothing sometimes compared to talking a victim into testifying against the perpetrator in court. Well, I managed to get one of the nurses to come through for us and we put away the Cuban pretty good that time.”
Things were considerably different, operationally, when Paul Short cut down the Cuban as a beat cop in the Bronx. Today, Inspector Paul Short has something like seventy-two hours of paperwork on his hands when one of his men uses his gun in the line of service. There is an immediate hearing with the duty captain, or precinct inspector; there is an interview with the district attorney, then with a lawyer from the Policeman’s Benevolent Association; there is a session, maybe more, with a police psychologist; there might be an interview with an officer from Internal Affairs Division; there might be a videotaping of the officer’s testimony; there is a second interview with the precinct commander, who makes a decision with the officer on the question of continued psychological counseling. Back when he was Officer Short, there wasn’t anything nearly like it. You just told your commander at the precinct house and then you lived with it, which was sometimes not the easiest thing in the world to do.
“I lived with that one real easy, let’s just say,” Short said.
In those old days of not so very long ago, the street cop in New York and other big cities around the country had profoundly more discretion than he does today. Justice, if it was justice, was swift indeed. An old-line cop worked in a system that seemed quartered by function: bust them, beat them, try them and fry them.
At times, the old ways seemed right and proper enough, even if they were a tad crude. At times, stripping away the sentiment of contemporary civil libertarianism, the old ways seemed practical. But in the long run, the percentage was not good. Cops came to work like an occupational army in a mean and beaten town. “Us against them,” as Short puts it. And all that happened was that the cops were divorced from the people they served. It didn’t say much for managerial methods, either.
“Way back, a cop didn’t think anyone was in charge,” Short said. “God forbid you should call a car for assistance. You just walked your post and took care of what came up. Guys in the cars didn’t like to be bothered and let you know it by chewing up your ass.
“I don’t think I even talked to a captain until I was a lieutenant. Now I’m commander of this precinct and the guys think nothing of coming in here to talk to me.”
Which suits Short just fine. He likes to know what’s going on and he likes the banter.
Tony Ciffo stuck his head through the door when Short recognized his knock.
“The desk’s holding a delicate for you, boss,” Ciffo said.
“Thanks, Tony.”
Before he picked up the private line on his desk, Short said to Valentine, “We’re all going to start calling him Chief-O now. Ciffo doesn’t sound so good.”
Short made notes on a pad with a Mont Blanc fountain pen and then hung up after some additional chitchat with the commissioner’s office.
“Comes with the territory here in the Nineteenth,” Short said. “We’ve got heavyweights. Lots of cases are delicate, referred from the commissioner or the mayor himself. They both live up here.”
A series of delicates interrupted the conversation.
Short had to deal with the local exigencies of international political tensions, none of which would crop up in the course of a business day for the police chief of, say, Omaha. There are hints from anonymous callers, self-serving no doubt, that pipe bombs would be rolled into the Lebanese tourist office on Park Avenue in response to the Israeli military sorties into Palestinian Liberation Organization guerrilla camps; there would be a general picket-line protest outside the French Mission to the United Nations, the subject of which was French armaments shipments into the Middle East; it might be wise to keep an eye on the Egyptian mission due to the fighting between Coptic Christians and the majority Moslems.
The Nineteenth Precinct of Manhattan contains more than three dozen foreign missions to the United Nations or consulate offices, including the Russians, directly across the street from the Nineteenth, on East Sixty-seventh Street. Short’s men are responsible for security duty, which consists of round-the-clock uniform guards in the “boxes” stationed outside the mission buildings. Most of the missions, particularly the Russians and the PLO on East Sixty-fifth Street, have their own security people working inside and quietly on the outside. The Russians are sometimes seen with submachine guns.
“So,” Short said, resuming his conversation with Valentine, who was taking notes for a lecture he was preparing for a meeting of the East Side Republican Club, “in a way everything’s delicate here, you might say. It’s so attractive for criminals, we have to do a lot of preventive work. We haven’t got time for bullshit cases. We don’t cover the sheet by rounding up a few junkies or something like that. It’s futile and it doesn’t really help all that much.
“Well, right there is my philosophy about running the Nineteenth and it gets me into trouble with community groups all the time. If I wanted to really please the Republican Club, to name a group, I’d haul in all the hoors …”
Short says hoors, the way the Irish do in upper Manhattan and the Irish neighborhoods of the northern Bronx.
“… and I’d have all the cars towed and we’d bust up all the kids’ big radios. But I’d be tying up my men on bullshit that takes them to court all day and the burglars would be stealing the people blind in the meantime.
“That’s the big problem here, burglary. We got career burglars. This is a very attractive place for them, like I said. Some guy goes back to Williamsburg, for instance, and he tells his pals that he scored for two grand up here and one of his buddies says, ‘What the hell am I doing busting my ass for fifteen dollars on Amway Street?’ So this second guy gets himself a Brooks Brothers suit like his pal and an attaché case like yours and pretty soon we’ve got two career burglars. They get on the subway in the morning and they head uptown for Fifty-ninth Street, where my command starts. It’s just like they’re going to work. That’s a big problem and that’s why we’re pretty heavy on plainclothes officers here. How do you tell the bad guys from the good guys when they dress the same?
“We’ve got the usual sort of thing, too. Lots of hoors on Eighty-sixth Street. Sometimes our detectives make directs on them, which is picking them up for questioning in hopes that they can get some information helpful to some investigation. But they’re pretty wise about that sort of thing. I have our uniforms run them in on occasion for soliciting, just to keep a presence, or an appearance of a presence. They’re pretty wise to that, too.
“Anyway, we practically know them all by name and their career histories. There’s Crystal, for instance. She got shot in the head by a john a while back, but the doctors decided removing the bullet would be a bigger risk than not. She’s back there, same old corner, hooking like always.”
Short shook his head.
“I don’t like to get our officers too involved with the pross. You run the risk of exposing your men to corruption just once too often and it’s not worth it. Just little stuff, but it’s not good. Like maybe a pross will offer a feel, or maybe some hotel will pay to be left alone. You have to trust your men, but you have to be reasonable, too.”
He shook his head again.
“More and more, if you want to be a good commander, you’ve got to think about the private lives of your men. Their private stresses. Cops are part of the society, too, you know, and they’re subject to all the same troubles. Everything’s seemed to change so much, you know, from the Vietnam War onward.
“Years ago, as cops, we wouldn’t put up with the things we see today on the streets and now some of those things are thought to be practically normal. We’ve got entirely new attitudes about drugs and sexual mores and life-styles. All of that turmoil affects cops, too.
“I remember years ago that all the trouble you’d see with a cop’s life is how it was going for him at home. You used to be able to tell a divorced cop just by looking at him, and there weren’t too many anyway.
“Today! Hah! Today, the phone’s ringing off the hook sometimes with wives and girl friends complaining about support payments being held up.”
Once more, he shook his head.
“I shouldn’t be talking about cops like they were only men. One of the biggest changes around here is all the women officers we’ve got nowadays.”
At one end of the officers’ locker room, men’s division, in the dank basement of the Nineteenth Precinct station, Jack Clark, as usual, was complaining about unkempt colleagues. Clark works the burglary detail in plainclothes. His ensembles run toward ripped jeans, scuffed leather jackets, sweat shirts and always some sort of seedy hat. The reason for his fastidious nature is, therefore, mostly a mystery.
“Some of these guys,” he says, sniffing the locker-room atmosphere, “don’t hit the rain room too often, if you catch my drift.”
He had a special contempt for the man who lockered next to him, a sweat-soaked officer whose locker door hung open, its contents ripe with the same fragrance that affected its owner. He had just placed the uniform he’d managed to pick off his body into the locker.
“What’s that uniform?” Clark asked. “You shoot it out of a gun into the locker?”
“Hey, Clark, you keep your damn locker the way you want to and I’ll keep mine the way I want.”
“Okay,” Clark said, “just so long as nothing jumps out of yours and bites me.”
“Take a look at one of New York’s finest,” another cop said, swinging open the doors to an immaculate locker, one that Clark would approve.
The inside of the door was plastered with five pages of the September ’82 number of something called Beaver, the “wildlife” magazine. The photo spread in question consisted of five color poses and one black-and-white of a dark-eyed and obviously authentic brunet model to whom the magazine had given the nom de plume Nina.
Nina was almost wearing a red teddy with white lace trim. The straps were loosened down around the shoulders of the fetching femme, the bodice dipped below high, tiny breasts with prominent dark red nipples. The bottom edge of the garment grazed her navel. She wore dark hose with black elasticized tops and spikey black leather pumps. A puff of red feather accented her bouffant hairdo.
She had a taupe beauty mark below one eye and dazzling white teeth, perfectly straight and even except for a bit of space between the two bottom front incisors. The lower portions of the photographs were explicit enough to be of some use to Nina’s gynecologist.
There was a block of text accompanying the layout, which explained Nina’s favorite fantasy, the one about taking on more than one stud at a time.
“Doesn’t look like any cop I’ve ever seen,” one of the cops in the locker room said.
“Sure about that?” the cop with the open locker asked. “Little bitty thing around here, not even five feet? Not a bad cop, either. She was decorated not long ago for bringing down three strong-arms.”
“She’s not at the One-Nine anymore,” another cop said. “Haven’t you heard? She’s been transferred downtown to Public Morals.”
The cop laughed and added, “When word about this gets around, boy, there’s going to be some heavy dung going to hit the old propeller. You heard it here first.”
The delicate was very old and very rich and she hadn’t shown up at the appointed time for dinner in Southampton.
The Nineteenth was full of them. Rich old women who lived out lonely marriages for the big payoff: wealthy widowhood. Trouble with them was that they went a little loopy from all the wasted years and now here they were with plenty of cash, but very little sense. They were perfect marks for all manner of smooth scam, the more exotic the better. Mostly, the old family retainer from some Park Avenue law office would settle accounts when they got their teats caught in the wringer, so to speak. But sometimes the police were unavoidable. That’s when the commissioner’s office would call up Paul Short.
There was a day when a delicate case meant something far more important to Paul Short’s job than what the term meant for him today. There were the days back in Harlem, in the sixties, when his exploits were the stuff of cop movie legend. In fact, his partner then was Sonny Grosso, creator of TV’s “Kojak.” The “Kojak” pilot written by Grosso, The Marcus Nelson Murders, was, in fact, the story of Grosso and Short and their incredible adventures as two of the most productive narcotics cops in New York City and, therefore, the world.
There was the Frankie Paradise case, for instance:
As a narc, Short worked out of the city-wide Major Violators Squad. He’d been after Frankie Paradise for months, knowing that somewhere in the city Paradise had the biggest stash of heroin anyone had known about all in one place since the French Connection bust.
Paradise was a slippery character. He had a half-dozen Cadillacs, but he never used them. He went everywhere by subway, which was how Short knew the stash had to be somewhere within the city limits. The problem was to find Paradise’s safe house, which is what it had to be, since Paradise liked to sleep with his stash to know it was safe and sound.
For months, Short and his partners worked an “A, B, C, D tail” on Paradise, meaning four different cops would be used to follow him, the four in communication with PTP radios and alternating to throw off any suspicion of a tail, any sign of the same man in close proximity. And for months, Short and the others were frustrated by Paradise’s uncanny ability to make them. Before Short and the other tails gave up, Paradise had taken them on a tour of all 239 route miles of the New York City subway system, through all three separate lines several times, through all 458 stations and back again to point zero.
Frankie Paradise didn’t seem to have a weak spot. Could that be?
Short thought about this for a while. It didn’t add up. He’d been a cop long enough to know that everybody had a weak spot. If he could touch that spot just right, even a smooth operator like Frankie Paradise would sing himself right up the river. Finally, it occurred to Short that Frankie Paradise had the oldest and the biggest weak spot in the annals of crime history: a dumb blonde for a girl friend.
Instead of shadowing Paradise, Short went for a tap on Blondie’s telephone.
Among other calls that Frankie might not be so happy to know about, Short discovered that Blondie’s assistance in Paradise’s informal pharmaceutical enterprise was to provide certain inquirers with five numerals. Over and over again, Blondie would issue the same five digits.
These days, maybe the telephone company has high-speed computers and possibly someone who knows how to operate them in order to isolate a set of five digits attached to a small collection of exchange codes. Back in the days when Short was chasing after Paradise, though, he had to rely on the inevitable slip-up on the part of the dumb blonde girl friend. His patience was rewarded.
One fine day, Blondie said, “Ravenswood … whoops, I’m not supposed to say that …”
It was all Short needed to know that the safe house was in the Ravenswood district of Queens. He checked through telephone company records and located an address.
Then, armed with the necessary court papers, Short paid a visit to the house one night while his partners resumed playing subway games with Frankie Paradise. He secreted himself in the closet of one of the several bedrooms in the large Queens home. And there he stayed for ten days, waiting for the mouse to enter the trap.
Paradise was nabbed in the act of retrieving a kilo of heroin from a false bottom to one of the bedroom dressers. Short made the collar with no resistance, though plenty of grudging respect for his prowess and patience. Paradise had in his pockets at the time about $50,000 in cash, a pittance in comparison to the value of the heroin in the dressers.
Now, with nearly thirty years on the job, and assignment to a gentler sort of precinct, Short was confronted with the case of the vanished dowager.
Her name was Eleanor Moore Montgomery, aged eighty-eight. Ten days earlier, she was to have arrived at a Southampton dinner party. On the day she vanished, the doorman at her apartment building, 875 Fifth Avenue, flagged her a taxicab. Presumably, she was taken to her garage, at First Avenue and Seventy-second Street, where she would take out her Mercedes and motor on out to Long Island alone.
A former fashion editor at Vogue magazine, Mrs. Montgomery had been lately fascinated with Eastern mysticism in the person of one Panna Kamla, who had his own room in Mrs. Montgomery’s spacious apartment.
The two of them, in fact, Mrs. Montgomery and Kamla, were co-authors of a coffee-table book few had ever heard of, The Meaning of My Mantra, all about the Kamla world-view. The book was a sort of bible for the foundation Mrs. Montgomery had established, along with her guru, Kamla.
Kamla was unavailable for questioning.
“Sometimes it’s first thing in the morning when the cop has to go to the morgue,” the desk sergeant was telling Valentine. “So what’s good for him is good for a Community Affairs guy, right?”
Valentine nodded and was off once again with the fun-loving Ralph and Ed.
The New York Medical Examiner’s Office is situated in a big, battleship-gray hulk of a building at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue in the Kip’s Bay district of Manhattan, near the Bellevue Hospital complex. The saloons and restaurants serving the neighborhood of resident physicians, medical technicians and interns reverberate with tales of visits by the likes of Valentine the rookie cop.
Valentine walked into the building and found it full of white-smocked medical personnel and cops getting signatures for deposits of corpses that had found their way to the morgue. The smell of the place was a blend of formaldehyde and dead wino.
There was a main bank of steel beds and vaults in a cavernous room with slippery, immaculate tiles. An orderly helped an intern and a cop locate a vault containing the body of the young man who had died in the little apartment on York Avenue, the musician from Ohio.
The body, with its toe tag connecting it to the Nineteenth Precinct, was shifted onto a steel surgical table with sheets cascading over the sides to the floor. Then the body was wheeled into a small operating room off the main bank. Whenever there is an unwitnessed death, anywhere in New York City, there is at the very least a preliminary autopsy performed, even though the cause of death might be clear as day. On such rules of pro forma are thousands of careers built in New York.
Valentine watched as interns scrubbed up. Then for the next quarter of an hour or so, he watched with increasing wooziness the routine incisions made on the body of the young man with the gray skin as his body was probed for any signs of evidence that would indicate foul play.
Blood was drained through the arms by a pair of tubes implanted in the dead wrists. Tissue was extracted from the roof of the mouth and the frontal portion of the brain for later chemical analysis.
As they worked, the chief resident made oral observations about the young man they examined. Another intern operated a tape recorder to preserve these notations. Valentine could hear it all, distanced as he was from the mass of toxic flora that lay dead on the operating table, for the interns spoke into a microphone suspended above the corpse.
“In this case,” the chief intern intoned, “there isn’t a great deal more fluid to be extracted from the body. But it’s been my experience that there always is something in there, always something a little wet left inside the body that’s been dead for days, even months.”
For the benefit of the novice observer, the intern continued:
“Now, we’re going to have to do something a little unorthodox here, something we didn’t do customarily in medical school. What we have to do is drain the pelvic fluids by way of the penis.”
Valentine was confused.
“We take a suture …”
Valentine’s eyes were perversely glued to the grisly procedure. A flaring pain shot through his own pelvis in some involuntary physical sympathy.
“… and wind it around the base of the penis. Then we wrap it up tight.”
The intern wound the suture around the corpse’s penis a half-dozen times, then wound the other end around his fingers.
“Right,” he said into the microphone. “Now, I’ll hold it taut while my associate works on some pressure points at the neck. I’ll wait for the signal.”
The other intern fingered the corpse’s neck. Then, suddenly, he yelled, “Pull!”
The intern with the suture wrapped around his fingers gave a fierce tug. At that precise moment, as the dead man’s penis was yanked hard, there came from below the operating table, hidden under the draped sheets, a bloodcurdling scream of pain. For several horrifying seconds suspended in time, it seemed to Valentine, the scream floated from the dead man’s own lips like some nightmare come true.
An orderly crawled out from beneath the wheeled operating table laughing gleefully.
Valentine, the butt of the joke, very nearly fainted.
Ralph and Ed were laughing so hard they almost fainted, too.