There is a man called Joe—just that and nothing more—who summers above ground on the Upper East Side and winters below ground, about twenty-six blocks south and a few blocks crosstown in a steam tunnel that runs under a hotel famous the world over.
As far as the cops are concerned, “Joe” is good enough, so long as he minds his own business and doesn’t hurt anyone. Joe knows the rules and he observes them. Besides, it’s against his nature to hurt anyone. And besides, he forgot his last name.
He sleeps, like the troll of the nursery story, beneath the Queensboro Bridge on First Avenue at East Fifty-ninth Street. Joe knows the long-established customs of the “house” as it were. He cozies up against the east pylon with the rest of the men, leaving the west side for the women who have no homes.
Joe stays dry on rainy nights and relatively unnoticed in these bridge shadows. He is also pretty much ignored by passersby, young couples with plenty of money in their pockets to spend at all the bars and nightclubs nearby.
Within a few blocks of where Joe and the others slumber in dark huddles, there is a cluster of comedy showcase clubs—Dangerfield’s, Catch a Rising Star, the Comic Strip and Who’s on First. Here would-be comedians try out their repertoires and rarely stray from six-joke categories—drugs, bodily elimination, Jews, genitalia, the agony of dating and the funny things that homeless people like Joe do and say every day on the streets of New York.
Joe doesn’t care what they say about him, as long as they don’t hurt him. He had a friend once who was stabbed while he slept on a bench down near Madison Square Park.
His winter digs consist of bundled newspapers tucked into a niche of a steam tunnel that runs past an elevator specially built to carry Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair up to the presidential suite of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel from a specially built railroad siding. Joe remembers voting for Roosevelt once, which he says is about the time he forgot his last name and maybe his first, too, though “Joe” sounds right.
Near where he sleeps in the winter, in the tunnel, Joe heats food on a particularly hot section of steam pipe, which is part of a vast system that snakes out in all directions from Grand Central Station to supply heat to most of Midtown Manhattan. He even has a sort of washing machine rigged up in his niche, in the form of a rubber hose attached to a pipe valve that leads into a bucket where the steam bubbles through a load of water and clothes. There is a steam main farther down that serves as a drying rack.
“Don’t like it in them steam tunnels,” Joe says, sucking audibly before the words whoosh out. He has a tracheotomy hole at the bottom of his neck and speaks by drawing air into his stomach, then belching it out in short phrases. “Too goddamn hot.”
“But thank God the pipes is there … I’d freeze here under the bridge. … But I’d rather be under the bridge … if I could, all year. I like the Upper East Side.”
Joe likes the Upper East Side because he can make the most money panhandling for the least effort. He doesn’t look threatening and he doesn’t drink, which is especially unusual under the circumstances.
“Don’t like the taste.… Puts you off your toes anyway.
… They can get you when you’re not careful.”
Joe gets a little over $300 monthly as a disabled veteran. The checks are mailed to a sister in Brooklyn, who needs most of it for medicine. Joe won’t stay with her because “I can’t stand the old bitch.” Not regularly anyway. But on winter days when he can’t get through the unmarked brass door on the Forty-ninth Street side of the Waldorf to descend into his niche, or when even the doorless opening to the tunnel system at the lower level of Grand Central has been sealed off by security men, Joe relents and travels to Brooklyn.
“Don’t like it, though. … The goddamn subways are dangerous, I’m tellin’ you!”
If he’s at his sister’s home, Joe spends most of the time in a warm bath.
“You never know when you get the chance next.… You got to stay clean as you can.… Like everything else uptown, you got to be the best.… So I like to be the cleanest bum in New York.
“I keep clean and I keep myself uptown … often as possible. I stay safe there. Down in the tunnels one winter … some guy comes up to me … no cop uniform or nothin’, but he says he’s a cop. … Says he’s plainclothes, like this one cop I know uptown… and he says I got to pay him or move along, that’s the law.… So he takes seven bucks off me.
“Things are gettin’ pretty bad … when a bum gets ripped off in a tunnel under the Waldorf, for God’s sake.”
The plainclothes cop Joe knows is named Ed Smith, with the Nineteenth Precinct Street Crimes Unit—the SCUM patrol. Smith was instructed in the finer points of blending into the street scene by none other than Joe the bum.
“He’s one of my contacts, you might say,” Smith said. “Joe hears a lot and he sees a lot and no matter what he looks like, he’s not stupid or out of his mind. He’s just ignored. It’s like he’s air or something, like he’s blind and deaf.
“So anyway, I talk to him once in a while. He teaches me things about being invisible. And once he came across some really good skinny, which gave me a really great collar.
“From Joe I learned that you do three basic things so no one pays attention to you. One, you lie down and act like you’re dead. In this city, almost everyone will walk right by. In the Nineteenth, they might think to call the precinct house or something and report the nasty old dead person. Second, you lie down and act like you’re stoned and nobody wants to touch you because you’re a dirtbag with no money. And third, you look at people’s faces. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is intimidated when a bum looks at them. Maybe it’s guilt. Yeah, I think it’s guilt.
“Also, it’s important to remember your place. When you’re a bum, you’re always deferring. That’s if you want to stay on the street. If you don’t defer to people, if you start making trouble, that’s when they come after you with the nets and bag you off to Bellevue. You know? The Toonerville Trolley to Ding Dong School. So you defer. You don’t go walking down the middle of the street whistling a tune. It doesn’t look right. You hug the curb, or the buildings, on the shady side of the street. Out of the way of everybody. You sort of crouch, too. People expect bums to crouch. And shuffle.”
All this instruction has been important to Ed Smith’s career as a SCUM patrol cop. When he first started out, back in the Times Square precinct before his transfer to the Nineteenth, Smith didn’t have the finer points of being a bum firmly in mind. The test came one day as he lay in a gutter at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West Forty-sixth Street.
“I was on a post watching for the punks who snatch chains,” Smith said. “It was a Wednesday, when the ladies from Jersey in the pant suits come over on the buses for the matinees. So I’m lying in the gutter, sort of, waiting for trouble.
“From the corner of my eye, I see this guy moping along, you know? He’s scoping out the crowd and he’s waiting for his moment. He’s not noticing me at all and everybody’s stepping all over me, so I figure I’m doing all right. I see this mope ready to rip off this lady and I’m ready to jump up and nail the guy.
“Just then, the lady passes by me and stops. She leans over and talks to me.
“‘Can I help you?’ she says. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
“I said to her, ‘Get away, lady, I’m a cop.’
“But now it’s too late. I see the mope has me made when he spots us talking, even though he can’t hear what I said about being a cop.
“See? I wasn’t invisible. You have to get to the point where people just don’t care about you, so they look right through you and don’t even feel sorry about you. You have to force them to ignore you before you become invisible.”
Joe taught him well and it paid off one morning shortly after dawn, on East Seventy-ninth Street. Smith saw them, but the eight of them must have thought he was invisible.
“… Conduct prejudicial to the good order and efficiency of the department.”
He read it through half-frame spectacles, waited for Officer Cibella Borges or her attorney, both of them seated across from him, to say something in response.
First Deputy Police Commissioner William Devine asked Officer Borges if she understood. She said nothing. Her attorney said he understood the “allegation here.”
Officer Borges, even though she’d been around lawyers long enough to know how they could make even the most incriminating set of facts seem utterly insignificant, could not now understand the percentage in prolonging this process. Her attorney had advised going the whole route—departmental trial, the works. And she had agreed. But now, in the cold light of the confession she’d just made to Commissioner Devine, it seemed such an empty exercise.
“Allegation,” her lawyer said. Her confession was, in lawyerese, a mere “allegation.”
“… I’m certain,” he’d added, “that when the extenuating circumstances are known and weighed against Officer Borges’ exemplary record, she will be cleared of the charges. And there is the matter of timing, as we have said. Cibella Borges posed for these pictures before she was sworn as an officer …”
But it was all words. A lawyer’s words against the evidence of the pictures in that magazine.
Cibella Borges wanted more than anything in the world at that moment to crawl into a hole and die. That morning, she’d joked with the photographer who took her pictures, a scrawny young man she’d met one day walking on the Upper West Side, along the Columbus Avenue “quiche belt.” Then after she’d talked with him, she cried and said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be working as a cop again.”
Commissioner Devine and her lawyer were talking. Her lawyer penciled the charges on a notepad as Devine read it again from a typed report. It had all been decided, even before she came in to own up to it all!
“Conduct prejudicial to the good order and efficiency of the department.”
She asked what would happen next, interrupting her own lawyer.
The press would be notified, Devine said …
If it were a male officer, the department brass would be hiding it from the press!
… and then there would be a hearing set before Departmental Trials Commissioner Jaime A. Rios.
It would all cost so much money!
“My hospitalization?” she asked. “Meanwhile, what about my medical care? I told you, it’s very important to me just now.”
Devine said he would look into that matter, nodding to her lawyer. He didn’t know that the department could withhold fringe benefits as well as salary.
Up until now, he had been courteously patient. Now Devine looked at his wristwatch and made sure that Cibella Borges and her attorney noticed his concern for time. It was three forty-five on a very gray, wet afternoon.
Officer Borges rose from her chair and wobbled slightly. Her lawyer held her elbow. She seemed even smaller than her four feet, eleven inches. So tiny and fragile. She thought about all the money she would need for her defense. She thought about blowing her brains out.
She could pass the hat up at the Nineteenth Precinct house, among the female officers anyway. And who knows, maybe a few of the guys might kick in.
Maybe she could win the support of somebody like Gloria Steinem! After all, there was the Linda Lovelace case. All Cibella Borges had done was pose for a magazine.
And what about the guys who just so happened to have seen her in the magazine? What were they doing reading Beaver anyway? Or what were they doing while they were reading Beaver? She knew damn well the magazine was all over the city, in every precinct house in all five boroughs, probably. The hypocrisy made her as sick to her stomach as her own damn foolishness.
A year and a half on the force, down the toilet. The meritorious citation for helping to apprehend three gun-wielding stick-up artists. Her green belt in karate. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that a bunch of cops saw her naked in a magazine that most people never heard of and complained about it.
Well, maybe it would all wash away. Maybe she could make them see, make them understand.
First of all, she wasn’t even a cop when she posed for Beaver. She taught typing and self-defense at the Police
Academy, that’s all. When she posed, her job at the academy was just a job. She might as well have worked at the YMCA.
On top of it all, she had applied for a police officer slot, only to be rejected for medical reasons.
Her lawyer had said the department would have a very, very rough time dismissing her for something she did before becoming a cop, even if it might possibly reflect badly on her subsequent position. Her lawyer had already let this fact leak to the press and, in response to reporters’ questions, the brass agreed with her lawyer that firing her outright would be very tough indeed.
Officer Borges allowed herself to smile.
Between the sympathy she might arouse among women officers and feminists generally and the legal technicality of her status with the department when she posed for Beaver…perhaps, just perhaps, she might beat it. Maybe she could hold on to the job that made her mother so proud of her, the job that made her the neighborhood heroine, the job with the big future.
As she walked to the door leading out of Devine’s office, Cibella Borges’ mind was filled with the confidence that truth would out, that justice would be done, that a good officer like her wouldn’t be let go because of a particularly delicate indiscretion. She would be able to tell her story. Any woman would understand.
But why?
She shook her head, but this basic question wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t convince herself of any reason she tried. And her confidence evaporated as quickly as it had swelled.
She thought for a moment of the men she knew who had tattoos on their arms, or chests or the backs of their hands. Stupid, juvenile designs like hearts or snakes, skulls and crossbones, sailing ships, anchors, mermaids and knives. Most stupid of all, some girl’s name from their adolescence, usually accompanied by flowers and lies like “forever.” How embarrassed the men were for these indiscretions. But no one punished them for being young fools, no one took their jobs away as long as they kept their sleeves rolled down.
The tattoos would last as long as the skin they covered. But how long would a magazine last?
Cibella Borges could walk on a beach and no one would know she once posed for lewd photos in a filthy magazine. A man with a tattoo had a permanent, blazing neon sign of stupidity—for which he’d had to pay! At least Cibella Borges could say they’d paid her.
A scribble of fear played through her head.
… What if they found out the other thing?
Detectives Matty Monahan and Charlie Leinau drove down the FDR Drive along the East River, Leinau at the wheel. Their destination was Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Their guest, in the back seat guarded by an extremely redfaced young officer sweating in his blue uniform, was one Monique Mansfield, a platinum blonde whose fetching dé-colletage was the cause of the young officer’s color and perspiration. Miss Mansfield smirked and crossed her legs.
It was a baloney bust, if Monahan and Leinau had ever seen one.
Monique had taken a call to some freak’s apartment, hadn’t enjoyed the scene too well and then had left with a little hazard pay—the customer’s Ming dynasty vase in the vestibule gallery. The creep noticed it was gone right off and managed to slip out of his rubber underwear long enough to call the Nineteenth and report a burglary. A couple of uniforms bagged her two blocks from the freak’s town house just off Madison Avenue in the Seventies, which is a neighborhood where you don’t see too many bouffant blondes in spike heels, black mesh stockings, leather double-slit skirts and off-the-shoulder chain-link blouses walking around in the middle of the afternoon with priceless Chinese vases under their arms.
There was no place to hold Miss Mansfield at the house, as the last available spot for a female prisoner had been taken by a junkie with dry heaves and fairly violent hallucinations. Lieutenant Stein didn’t think too much of hav ing her hang around the PDU squad room, so Monahan and Leinau were elected to take her downtown and while they were there they could attend to some paperwork anyway.
“I’m thinking seriously of taking that terminal leave plan, you know,” Leinau said. He shook his head up and down.
“Oh Jesus, here we go again on the second anniversary of Leinau threatening to quit.”
“No, no. This time I mean it. Jesus Christ, who needs all this shit?” Leinau looked into the rearview mirror. Monique had taken the remark personally and looked hurt. “Sorry, old girl.”
“Hmphh!”
“So twenty years and I’m out on my pension,” Leinau continued with Monahan. “Sounds good. You got to do something for money and to keep busy, though.”
“What would you do, you hump? The only thing you’re fit for is being a cop and living vampire hours. Christ, what do you sleep, two hours a night or what? No wonder you think like this.”
Leinau waved his hand.
“Everybody’s got to settle down, pal. Vampires, too. Listen, you know where the old New Rochelle Creek bait and tackle shop was?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, nobody’s been there for years, right? The place burned to the ground. I figure I get the place and start up the business again.”
“This I got to see. Leinau selling fucking worms up in New Rochelle.”
“On the whole Sound, close in, there was only that place and City Island where you could buy worms. Don’t sell worms short, Monahan. I could make a fortune.”
“Yeah, you and Ralph Kramden. You’ll die of boredom first, you hump.”
“Maybe. And maybe I’d die bored and rich.”
“Leinau, you’re just going to die on the job, period. And it’s going to be old age because you’re too fucking weird to be killed.”
Leinau waved his hand again.
“Okay,” he said to Monahan. “You think you pay a lot for steak these days? What about a pound of worms? You pay maybe six bucks for a pound of top sirloin at the old Sloan’s, right? Figure out what a pound of worms costs, buddy—at the rate of three bucks for a dozen of those suckers.”
“What’d you say happened to the bait and tackle shop?”
“Burned to the ground.”
“You better first see about why it burned, that’s my advice. Maybe someone fucking torched it because it belonged to some dick like you with enemies five or six miles long, you know?”
Leinau pulled off the FDR and took the exit ramp that ran into Park Row. In a few minutes, the squad cur rolled into the underground garage at Police Plaza.
“Up off your keister, sweetheart,” Monahan said, looking back at Monique Mansfield. “It’s upstairs we go, kiddo.”
On the way up the elevator to Central Booking, Monique licked her lips and sidled up against Monahan. Monahan laughed at her. Leinau studied her face.
Upstairs, Leinau took her to the fingerprint desk and began rolling her palms and tips through black ink, all the while studying her vaguely familiar face. Monique was clearly rattled by this, unaccustomed as she was to having men stare at her face rather than her bust. She was nervous and quiet as Leinau pressed her fingertips into the neat squares on the white three-by-five FBI standard print identification forms, left and right.
“Say,” Leinau finally asked her, a bell ringing somewhere inside his head, “you female?”
A very indignant Monique Mansfield tossed her blond tresses over her back and said, “Yeah, what you think, copper? What do you want, proof or something?”
“Wait here,” Leinau said. He gave her a wet towel so she could wipe up the mess of ink on her hands. “Just wait right here.”
“So where would I go, already?”
“Yeah. So wait.”
Leinau walked over to Monahan, who was busy with a couple of large black books, property of the Major Crimes Squad. The mug shots weren’t helping, nor were the psyche sheets of known torches in New York City.
For months, Monahan had been after someone he knew only as “Kano.” He’d put a lot of money out on the street to various informers in the Nineteenth, as well as the Seventeenth and Twenty-third precincts. He’d come up with a street name, Kano. And he kept hearing that Kano was extremely dangerous. A “human bomb,” according to one of his stoolies, who never went anywhere without a couple of revolvers tucked inside his shirt, a hand grenade clipped to his belt and a carload of dynamite, gasoline cans, waterproof fuse wire, blasting caps, asbestos gloves, an M-l carbine with telescopic sights and a Uzi collapsible submachine gun.
But Monahan was chasing a phantom, he began to think. Every time he had a lead and showed up, Kano had vanished. Did he ever exist? Unless he caught up with this Kano soon, Monahan knew he would have to admit desperation and release to the newspapers a composite police sketch. If he saw his mug in the papers, a cockroach like Kano would correctly conclude that the cops were having a very difficult time of it. He could breathe easier. Cops don’t tell the public what they’re looking for unless they’ve practically given up—and then what’s to lose?
“Matty,” Leinau said, slapping Monahan’s back. “I’m over there getting the toots’ John Henrys, right? Then it hits me. Our Monique Mansfield used to be Sheldon Schwartz.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. If you ever get your eyes off those incredible gozonda nuts of hers and look at the face, you’re looking at old Sheldon Schwartz, second-story man.”
Monahan walked with Leinau back to the fingerprint desk. Monique daintily wiped her hands.
“Hey, you’re right,” Monahan said. “Shelly Schwartz. How you been, Shelly? Things aren’t what they used to be, eh?”
Monique stuck her tongue out.
“I’m not that Sheldon Schwartz anymore,” she said.
Then she put her fingers beneath the straps of her blouse and pulled it down quickly, flashing an enormous pair of white breasts tipped in pink. She thrust herself forward and practically slapped Monahan in the face with her stupendous breasts. Then she covered herself when she saw cops converging on her from every corner of the big Central Booking room.
“Where you living now, Sheldon?” Leinau asked.
“The Upper East Side. Where else? And it’s not Sheldon, if you please. To you, it’s Miss Mansfield.”
Monahan whistled. “You must have some angel, Shelly. These operations are pricey.”
“I’m living with Johnny Rod.”
Monahan looked at Leinau. “That’s supposed to be someone we know, Charlie?”
“Big porno star. Got a schlong like a goddamn donkey. So I guess Sheldon here went and did the whole thing for Johnny. Probably even the old slit in the melon.”
A noisy crowd of cops surrounded Monique Mansfield, who defended her femininity by flashing her breasts and smiling to the cheering onlookers in blue.
Then the sergeant on duty tapped Monahan on the shoulder.
“You Monahan of the Nineteenth?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Drop a dime back to your house.”
Monahan stepped away to make the call, then hurried back to where Leinau and the others were being entertained by the former Sheldon Schwartz.
“You don’t need me, Charlie. I got a line and we may set up for Kano.”
“Your torch?”
“Yeah, the guy that did the job on Second Avenue and
Ninety-third, killed the family trapped on the fifth floor.” “Get out of here.”
Between five o’clock and a quarter before six on most weekday afternoons, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building on Twenty-third Street disgorges itself of a small army of women office workers. Maybe half this army aspires to standard, straightforward career goals. And maybe the other half hold down jobs temporarily, until an important theatrical producer has sense enough to cast them in a Broadway smash hit. In any event, they need good clothes and accessories. In New York, clothes make the woman, so some women will say.
These office workers are exquisitely dressed, despite their rather low salaries, thanks to a certain breed of entrepreneur who greets them during this crucial forty-five-minute period. Their merchandise is offered from the trunks of cars and is known as “swag stuff,” the term “swag” being an acronym for “stolen without a gun.” None of the customers has ever been known to ask questions about the impossible bargains.
An evening dress by Halston, ordinarily selling for $800 in a boutique on the Upper East Side, is a quick $50 and no sales tax. A $150 Liz Claiborne denim jump suit for $10; a leather skirt from West Bay, $25 instead of the normal $140; a red mohair and lambswool jacket by Betty Hanson, maybe $200 uptown, just $20 from the fast-talking peddler on Twenty-third Street.
There are many such locations around the city where “swag sales” are held afternoons, all of them having in common large numbers of customers who scramble down into subways and go directly home with their bargains and who can just as quickly forget about the fact that they have purchased the latest harvest of goods boosted from the best shops in the city, those in the Nineteenth Precinct.
For a time, it can go very well indeed for the thieves. If they’re smart, they ditch anything they cannot immediately sell. There are smart thieves, and then there are thieves who are not so smart.
The peddlers working Twenty-third Street were doing a land-office business for a time, with no overhead and plenty of satisfied customers. Hundreds of women were able to wink away their suspicions and dress far beyond their budgetary abilities. And there was the very special bonus to this particular gang of peddlers, eight effeminate black men doing a very big “smash and grab” business uptown. They kept the best of what they stole for themselves—truly a gang belonging to the age of specialization.
Ed Smith would soon have their number.