Mairead Keenan tried to imagine exactly what her husband was doing right this very minute as she sat on a flower-patterned Early American couch, hands folded in her pregnant lap, eyes fixed on the brass clock that was the center-piece of her freshly spray-waxed coffee table.
It was nearly half-past eleven, which she knew to be Tommy’s quitting time this week.
The house was, as usual, antiseptically clean. Each night after trundling the girls off to bed, Mairead performed a manic cleaning routine. It didn’t matter whether Tommy was home or not. What mattered at that time of day was the cleaning. Her mother in Ireland, back home “on the other side” beyond the Atlantic, used to instruct her daughters, “The body responds to regularity in all things.”
Thus, every stick of furniture in the large Riverdale apartment was wiped and polished nightly, every square inch of floor was swept or vacuumed or scrubbed. Then the kitchen was washed down, followed by the sterilization of both bathrooms—each equipped with toilets ever on guard against incursions of bacteria with their supplies of inky blue, chemically treated tank water.
After this, Mairead would shower for perhaps the third time of the day, then dust her body with talcum and, if Tommy were home, perhaps daub some Paris Moon behind her ears. Whether or not he was there for all this, she would slip into a peignoir and take her place, rather regally, in what she insisted on calling the “parlor.” Each night she had visions of engaging her husband in the sort of sophisticated, witty and tender conversations she was forever reading in her substantial collection of romance novels. But mostly, Tommy was gone, and even when he was there, she mostly read her novels anyway.
If Tommy were home, in his usual place in front of the twenty-five-inch Early American console color television set with remote control unit, she would attempt one of her idealized conversations, usually opening with something like, “I know this is silly of me, darling, but a little chat could be amusing.” Her husband would look at her for several seconds, then roll his eyes heavenward and say something like, “Nobody who lives on planet Earth talks like that.” And then he would return to the business of the television schedule.
And so one by one, Mairead added little tasks to her evenings, until she developed her elaborate household routine, which served both to justify the purpose of her life and to blot out the dreary facts of her life—the constant din of television, the job of marketing for food and preparing meals that never varied from the fourteen-day menu recommended by Betty Crocker for maximum nutritional balance, the afternoon gossip with the other mothers down in the park, her husband’s customary absence and his sexual frigidity.
Among her lesser routines was the reverent way she ran her fingers over two of the picture frames on a section of parlor wall devoted to important Keenan family mementos. One was a very large framed montage of snapshots taken of a towheaded boy named Sean. He would have been a high school senior now. He was the Keenans’ first baby, dead fourteen years tomorrow. Only once since the funeral at Good Shepherd had Tommy Keenan made any reference to that morning they found little Sean in his crib bed, his skin blue and cold, inexplicably dead. If Mairead broached the subject, her husband would silently leave the house.
The other picture frame contained a photograph of Tommy Keenan at the age of twenty-two, his hair so thick and his face ruddy and unworn by the work that lay ahead of him. It was his police academy photograph and the retoucher had made his teeth impossibly white, his eyes blazingly clear and brave and his cheeks miraculously free of the acne that used to plague her husband back then. Below the photograph was a copper plate containing his name, the date he was officially sworn in as a police officer of New York City and a poem:
A Policeman’s Prayer
Dear Lord, be with me on my beat this day, and every day.
Grant that each weary block I walk may ease a brother’s way.
Let me be kindly to the old, and to the young be strong;
But let me triumph over those whose acts are cruel or wrong.
And when my own last summons comes and I stand in Your Court,
Lord, may my rest with You be long, my punishment be short.
Mairead closed her eyes to stem a flow of tears. She wanted with all her heart to believe Tommy was punching out, or whatever it was that the men did when they quit their tours. She wanted him to be walking to his car, getting in and driving straight home to Riverdale.
But she knew better.
She wiped an eye and returned her hands to her lap. She looked at the clock—a wedding gift from her mother, with the inscription “For all time”—and tried to imagine what the Nineteenth Precinct station house looked like inside. She’d seen the old limestone building only once, and then from a car window. That was five years ago when Tommy had last taken her anywhere besides package tours to Ireland, where he spent all day and all night in the pubs and she visited her mother and girlhood friends, family gatherings—his—or Emerald Society dinner dances, which Tommy believed were politically important for whatever chance he might have one day at significant promotion within the department.
Tommy had driven past the precinct house on East Sixty-seventh Street that night so that Mairead could see the place where he was determined his career would finally take off. “The mayor lives in the precinct,” he told her excitedly, his arm slipped over her shoulder as she peered through the car window, “and the commissioner, too. A cop can get himself a little notice here, his work can mean something when the right people see it and all the right people are here to see, right?”
They were late for the theater because Mairead had been rushed through her cleaning routine. Otherwise, Tommy might have shown his wife the precinct house, his new surroundings, his new lease on life.
He wasn’t cross with her for making them late, though. Nothing could spoil his fine mood, it seemed. He was so full of himself that night. And Mairead thought it might well be the first night in a very long while when they would make love properly, when she wouldn’t have to coax a half-dozing man from the parlor sofa and drag him to bed and then do what she had to do to satisfy her own cravings. Yes, it might be the night she would be fulfilled and yet unashamed. She might not have to confess that week to the priest, who agreed with her each time that making her hus band’s penis hard when he was woozy with sleep and liquor and then pushing it between her legs was an awful lot like rape.
The day before, Tommy had come home with a pair of tickets to the Broadway musical A Chorus Line. Mairead nearly fainted with surprise and joy. She knew all about the play, of course, from talking with the women in the park. But never did she think her husband would take her to see such a thing.
“And we’ll have dinner afterward, too,” he told her. “It’s a celebration.”
Then he took his wife into his arms and they danced across the parlor to an imaginary song. The dance was over when Tommy banged his knee on the Hoover upright.
The dinner was at a place called Mama Leone’s, a cavernous Italian restaurant in Times Square popular with tourists and infrequent theater-goers from the suburbs. To Mairead, it was elegant and magical, as if she’d actually stepped into one of her paperback romances. She was swept away by the excitement of the play she’d just seen and by the sight of the strolling violinists in their tuxedoes and starched white shirts.
The occasion was Tommy Keenan’s reassignment. For far too many years, he’d worked the city-wide Sex Crimes Squad. Now he had won a spot in the Nineteenth, a prestige precinct.
Whenever he talked of his work, Mairead wanted to cover her ears with her hands and scream. It was horrifying, sickening. All the perversity in the world! But that night, at the magical restaurant, Mairead had no trouble listening to her husband’s proud talk of the future, of the things he wanted to accomplish as a police officer.
Her mind drifted as he spoke. She felt girlish listening to him, adoring him, and it seemed as if she were returned in time to one summer night in Gaelic Park in the Bronx. She had let Tommy Keenan, the boy she’d only just met that night in the park, make love to her. He was good to her. He was strong and he knew it and held her as if he thought he might break her in two. She did not confess this sin to the priest.
A month later, she told Tommy Keenan that she was pregnant. “Are you sure?” he asked her. She assured him that the doctor was as certain of it as she. “I’m so happy,” he said. And he proposed to her.
They were married at Good Shepherd Church in the Inwood section of upper Manhattan, where one of the younger priests who knew of their whirlwind romance and guessed what might be at the root of it took Mairead aside and whispered in her ear, “The second child takes nine months, the first one can come anytime. So don’t you worry now. You just make your husband a good home.”
Sean was born and then he died. And time, like a vandal, passed.
That night on the town five years ago, Mairead knew even while it was happening, could never be the same as the night when Mairead and Tommy were so innocent and so passionate, that night in Gaelic Park.
She was an uneducated girl from a very tiny village back on the other side. But one night in New York, she had loved Tommy Keenan and considered the pleasure of it a solemn compact. She would make a life for them, a home, and she would try to be a useful and understanding wife to a policeman.
Over the years, Mairead understood her husband far better than he realized. She knew about his work, about what he saw assigned to the Sex Crimes Squad. And she understood that what he saw was wrecking his life and probably hers. She knew it every time she saw the agonized confusion in Tommy Keenan’s eyes as he looked, with an odd contempt, at her naked body.
But that night at Mama Leone’s, she believed, was truly a night that would change the years of trouble, a night when Tommy Keenan might put his pains and memories behind him. That night he looked like his rookie photograph when he smiled, when he talked.
When they returned home, Tommy wasn’t interested in making love to his wife. And for the first time, Mairead complained—and bitterly.
And Tommy Keenan said, just before he left her to go out drinking alone, “Sex with you only means a dead baby in the morning.”
Now she sat, waiting.
The baby kicked and Mairead allowed herself to enjoy the sensation. It had happened sinfully, as with the girls. Mairead had dragged him from couch to bed, until breath thick and stinking of beer, and she’d stroked his penis until he was hard enough to fill her.
Another baby, this time maybe a boy. This time, maybe Tommy might get better.
She watched as the clock struck its soft eleven-thirty chimes. Then she leaned forward for the tenth time and straightened the magazines on the coffee table—People, the Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping and the Catholic Messenger.
This time, just maybe Tommy Keenan would get into his car and come straight home.
“¿Habla inglés?”
Herman stared into the cop’s face. Reflected lights from the flashing red of the squad cars that filled the avenue played in the big cop’s eyes. The cop held Herman’s upper right arm in a very tight grip. Herman’s wrists were bound even tighter, with steel cuffs. More cops arrived, cars full of them. Herman was surrounded by an army of blue uniforms now, police badges, drawn nightsticks, drawn revolvers, the smell of leather and gunfire, the vengeful sounds of a swarm of neighborhood onlookers who formed a semicircle around the scene of the crime.
He tried to answer. Herman’s mouth opened, but he couldn’t form words, not with Miguel’s dead eyes looking up at him from the blood-spattered sidewalk. His thoughts were in Spanish, but he spoke English to the cop squeezing his arm.
“So fast,” he said, his voice soft and reedy. He looked down to Miguel. “It all ended, so fast.”
“The creep speaks English,” a cop said. “Go ahead and read him.”
Again, the cop with his hand clamped over Herman’s arm asked. “¿Habla inglés?”
Herman looked up and nodded dumbly. The cop squeezed his arm hard.
“Yes,” Herman said.
“All right,” the cop said. “Listen up, then.”
He cleared his throat and sounded almost brotherly as he recited the Miranda warning to Herman, who trembled at the words and was suddenly thankful for the support of the cop’s fingers dug into his upper arm:
“You have the right to remain silent. … Any statements you make may be used against you in a court of law…. You have the right to an attorney before answering any questions, or to have an attorney present at any time.… If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be furnished you free of charge.… Now that I have told you this, do you understand your rights?”
Herman understood. He’d heard the words dozens of times in his young life, mostly spoken by tough-talking actors in TV cop shows. Now it was real, depressingly real. Herman and the cop were players on a very real stage. And the semicircle of curious onlookers was their audience.
The crowd cheered when the cop finished reading Herman his rights.
Older officers appreciated the irony of this. A cop named Collins said, “Listen to the rubbernecks, will you? I’m old enough to remember when the Supreme Court handed down the Miranda warning law and everybody thought it was a big hot victory for the radical-liberals. Nowadays it’s the voice of authority.”
A testament to the power of video imagery. After a few hundred thousand cop dramas where a staccato-voiced heavy snaps off the Miranda and then packs the thug off to the slammer, the reading of constitutional rights against self-incrimination and statutory rights to legal counsel ceases to be a libertarian pronouncement and sounds, instead, like something ruthlessly fascist. In New York, neighborhood crowds turned out on the occasion of a fresh neighborhood crime often cheer what they believe to be at least the sound of swift justice and the only sound they might hear is the reading of rights to a suspect spread against a wall.
Herman was shoved into the back of a squad car and taken off to the precinct house for booking, during which time it would be discovered, to no one’s particular surprise, that he didn’t have any people at home who were able to hire him a lawyer. Toward morning, he would be taken to Riker’s Island until court arraignment and subsequent trial, during which time he would meet a lot of the guys from his neighborhood. In the meantime, his name would go into the overnight hopper at the public defender’s office and someone who never heard of him would draw the assignment. And Herman would talk to a lot of officers and detectives at the Nineteenth, “so I can get some very heavy shit off my chest.”
On East End Avenue, a couple of detectives did the forensic evidence tasks, but just the basics since there were four eyewitnesses to the shooting. They bagged up Miguel’s pellet gun in glassine, photographed his body from all angles, chalked the outline of the body and photographed that while the medical examiner’s crew was wrapping up the remains to haul off in the meat wagon.
Gradually, the crowd began dispersing.
The woman whose bag was stolen was interviewed and comforted and told to expect a call in the morning from a detective.
Officer Dominick Salvato wanted to be sick.
“It’s your collar all the way, Dom,” his partner told him.
“Thanks,” Salvato said. He reholstered his .38 and discovered that his entire body shook just like his right hand.
“Let’s go to the house.”
“Yeah,” Salvato agreed.
He felt a lot of hands on him, his fellow officers helping him into a squad car. Everyone knew the private little hell in store for Dominick Salvato.
He was a cop who’d just killed someone he didn’t know, a boy whose life, no matter how wasted, would no longer have the chance for redemption. In television shows, the cop who shoots down the menacing punk is supposed to be a big hero. And we can all see it coming from a long way off anyway. In real life, it doesn’t play anything like that. Real life is far too much for television to handle, and far too fast.
Dominick Salvato sat in the back of the squad car, which was hemmed in on all sides by other squad cars and by crowds of cops and civilians moving through the avenue. He felt hundreds of eyes bum into him. Fellow cops, strangely speechless as they looked at him; neighborhood residents, their faces a mix of admiration and gratitude and fear; the men in the medical examiner coats as they walked by with a dead boy in a body bag, the thin, flat lump on the stretcher. They all took a look at the guy who just killed someone, as if he’d done it wantonly, as if he was proud of himself, as if he knew much more than what he saw in that few life-and-death seconds on a darkened street.
What he saw was a frightened figure, two of them. One aimed a gun. Dominick Salvato was frightened, too, and did what he had to do to protect himself and maybe others, other cops, people who lived in the neighborhood. He didn’t know.
The boy he’d shot, Miguel, had raised a pellet gun. It wouldn’t have done much harm, given the distance between them. But how could he have known?
Salvato would be told later, by the department lawyer from headquarters and by Inspector Short and by his partner, that he was clearly in the right. He would learn that Miguel was an animal.
But Salvato knew, too, what it was like to watch a boy’s eyes close in death by his hand.
“It was all …” he said in the squad car on a steaming summer’s night. “It was all, so fast. It ended so fast.”
Herman had said the same thing. Salvato could think of nothing else but the same, the speed of a deathly moment.
Dominick Salvato didn’t feel anything at all like a hero as he rode, in silence, to the precinct house. Heroes don’t feel like vomiting.
They sat in a booth at the back of an all-night luncheonette near her place, which was a railroad flat on Ninety-fifth Street near First Avenue. Keenan’s hands were sweating. He tried to decide what he wanted to have happen with the rest of the night, if anything.
“How long have you been a cop?” she asked.
They were the first words between them for some time, since they had spoken briefly back at the house and she’d given him the location of the restaurant and he’d suggested that she go along and he would meet her later. Dory Smith’s hands were sweating, too, and her heart pounded. She was attracted to Keenan, excited by her first night as an auxiliary cop, even though she’d done nothing more than stand on a curb near some klieg lights in her uniform and occasionally ask someone to stay behind the wooden police barricade. It was a polite crowd of gawkers who happened by the theater premiere.
Keenan smiled. “Long enough so that no one thinks to ask what I might have been before I was a cop. Nobody’s ever surprised that I’m a cop, either. It shows, I guess.”
Dory smiled. “You’re a thoughtful one, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean? Thoughtful for a cop?”
“And paranoid.”
“Yeah, maybe paranoid, too. You know what they say. If you’re not paranoid these days, you’re not thinking straight.”
She considered this and then answered, “In this city, maybe you’re right.”
“How long have you been in New York then?”
She resented the question, even though she knew such resentment was unfair. Keenan asked her innocently enough, but even relative newcomers to New York bristie at being revealed as immigrants.
“About five years,” she answered.
“And you want to be an actress, I suppose? A good-looking girl from the heartland and all?”
“It’s not so unusual.”
“No. Sorry.” Keenan knew his talk was clumsy. “No more so than wanting to be a cop, I expect.”
A heavyset waitress shuffled to their booth and took a pencil stub from behind her ear, held it over a smudged pink and white pad. “What’ll it be, dearies?”
Keenan ordered coffee and a tuna sandwich, which he didn’t want. He wanted beer. Dory Smith ordered eggs and tea.
“What’s it like?” she asked.
“What, tuna?”
The waitress laughed and tapped him appreciatively on the shoulder as she waddled off to the kitchen.
“Oh, I know what you mean,” Keenan said. “What’s it like being a cop, eh?”
“No, what’s tuna like?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d like you,” Keenan said. He folded his arms in front of him on the table. “The way I figure, everything that goes on between men and women comes down to how funny it is they ever get together in the first place. It’s the laughs that are the important things.”
“Are you married?”
She said it calmly, which surprised her. She supposed he was and she supposed there might be a point at which it was every bit as important as laughs, even though she told herself now that it didn’t matter. Why should it matter? Were they doing something wrong?
Keenan answered quickly and struggled to keep his face from becoming any hotter than it was.
“Yes, I’m married. Yes, I’m unhappy. No, I’m not thinking about divorce. Yes, it’s because of the kids and I know all about how that’s not a legitimate reason these days. Anything else you need to know about it?”
“What’s her name?”
Keenan wiped his forehead. “Mairead.”
“And your children?”
Keenan told her. He told her their ages, too.
“What’s in store for us?” he asked when she stared at him blankly.
“I don’t know. What’s it like being a cop?”
“You change the subject awfully damned fast, don’t you?”
“I’m thinking about one thing and I want to hear you talk about something else, that’s all.”
“Jesus help me. Women!”
The waitress set down their food, almost breaking the plates. She winked at Dory and walked away.
They’d taken a few bites when Dory asked, “You’d rather be someplace else, right? Maybe at my place having a drink?”
“Maybe.”
“So maybe we’ll go there.”
One of the enduring mysteries of life’s annoying moments in New York is the insistence of Manhattan car owners on equipping their vehicles with burglary alarm systems that scream unendingly into the night, touched off by the slightest jostling of the car. Never in the entire history of auto burglar alarm sirens has the contraption led to the arrest of a burglar.
A hefty percentage of the time the siren is set off accidentally by the owner, who becomes furious with the hardware for making all the commotion but who is still incapable of understanding how the thing could possibly annoy anyone else.
If anything, the auto alarm siren is the burglar’s best friend. If a car starts shrieking, there is an automatic warning to all within hearing range, which is considerable in a city where conversations on the sidewalk echo up and down buildings, to steer clear of a place where a criminal—and maybe a criminal with a gun—is plying his trade. A telephone call to the police, if ever made, will usually be placed long after a burglar’s one or two minutes’ need for com pletion of the job, and it will be handled as a low-priority complaint about excessive noise by the officer on the switchboard.
It is surprising that burglais themselves don’t set off alarms when they find a car with something inside worth stealing. It is not so surprising that New Yorkers awakened by a siren that has shrieked on in the middle of the night become sometimes so frustrated that they themselves jump into their jeans and sneakers and take a baseball bat down to the street to bash out the windows of the offending car, whose owner is probably off somewhere sleeping peacefully.
Keenan pointed all this out to Dory Smith as they left the luncheonette and walked up First Avenue from Eighty-eighth Street toward Dory’s apartment on Ninety-fifth. The shrill blare from a white Jaguar cut through his head like a nail. Dory covered her ears as they walked.
A young woman, yelling something up the avenue in the vicinity of the Jaguar, raised what appeared to be a crowbar over her head, as if to bring it smashing down hard on the hood of the sports car. Her threat of vandalism met with the shrill blare of the Jaguar’s driver, a very drunk, middle-aged blond woman with a white fur wrap around her shoulders.
The driver and the rudely awakened young woman with the crowbar stood hollering at one another across the hood of the car, which made nearly as much noise as the women.
Keenan began trotting toward the scene, toward what might turn out to be an altercation. He stopped when he saw a squad car pull out from a side street, lights flashing.
Officers Tony Ciffo and Jean Truta stepped out of the squad car. Truta held her hands up, flat-palmed, to the young woman with the crowbar.
“We’ll take care of it,” she said. “Don’t make it worse for yourself, okay?”
The crowbar was lowered.
Ciffo looked at his wristwatch. “How long has it been going off?” he asked the young woman, a tenant of the apartment building near the shrieking car.
“About a goddamn half hour! What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to write up a summons, ma’am,” Ciffo said.
He stepped around the front of the car and held a hand out. The blond woman with the fur wrap caught it just in time to keep from falling.
“This your car?” Ciffo asked her.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Can you turn it off?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do, Officer.” She waved a small key in her hand and then climbed back into the car and ducked her head under the dash. “The little devil is somewhere around here, I don’t know.”
Ciffo counted to twenty. He didn’t like drunks, especially drunk women.
“We’ve got a complainant here who says your burglar alarm has been going beyond the ten-minute limit prescribed by the law,” Ciffo said.
The blonde popped her head out the door of the car. One of her breasts bobbled out the top of her gown. She worked it back inside.
“I’m doing my best, Officer.”
“Have you got some identification?” Ciffo asked.
“Identification?” she said, filling the air between them with liquor fumes. “Officer, I’m not so sure I even exist!”
Ciffo counted to twenty again. It was useless talking with her. He leaned against the Jaguar while she fiddled with her key under the dashboard.
The complainant walked sternly away from Officer Truta and said to Ciffo, “Officer, I want you to shoot the car.”
“I can’t shoot a car, lady. Sorry, but it’s slightly against the rules, you know?”
“But I want that siren killed! Who do you think pays your salary anyway?”
Ciffo counted to twenty. Officer Truta suppressed laughter and wrote up the summons, attaching it to the Jaguar’s windshield.
Then, suddenly, the siren died.
The drunken blonde stepped out, victorious.
Ciffo stopped a cruising taxicab and made sure the blond Jaguar owner had sufficient carfare, then sent her along home. The Jaguar would be towed and the fine would have to be paid—in full and in cash—if she ever wanted it back. Maybe she’d learn a lesson if it cost her a few hundred dollars.
Keenan passed by with Dory Smith and they each looked as guilty as if they’d just boosted something from a shop only to run right into a cop on the street, namely Tony Ciffo.
Seeing Ciffo there looking at him suspiciously, Keenan felt the need for some sort of comment.
“Don’t worry,” he said to Ciffo. “It’s not like I know what I’m doing.”
Then he and Dory hurried along to her apartment.