Ed Smith made himself as comfortable as possible, stretching out in the doorway carelessly, one leg dangling over a step into the path of anyone passing by. Passersby avoided the slobbering wino sleeping it off on the street, even a street on the Upper East Side, which tells you just how far gone the city is.
The air was misting up and maybe there would be one of those late summer nighttime electrical storms. The news-papers and the cardboard Smith sat on crackled. He felt good. He felt secure, too, even though Joe always said no sober bum should ever feel safe on the street, what with all the mean folks around who made sport of the homeless sometimes.
Smith lit a cigarette. He didn’t smoke, except when staked out on decoy like this. A lit cigarette was a signal to those who might harm him just for kicks that he was wide awake and watching out for himself. The swells like their derelicts red-eyed and looking scared as hell.
Like any experienced cop, Smith’s eyes and ears went on a sort of automatic pilot. His eyes would lock in on essential sights as they swept Seventy-ninth Street, missing nothing; his ears filtered out a city throbbing with noise for the faintest summons of a fellow officer over the PTP radio in the crumpled brown paper bag next to him.
Smith smoked and watched and listened. He knew it would be a terribly long night, this hunt. But he was confident. Everything felt right.
Inevitably, he thought about his life, which divided itself into three plateaus all sharing the same end, his bitter lone-liness.
Tonight, he thought about hunting and how much he loved it—as a cop and up in the Adirondacks, where he’d be in a few weeks for the opening of the deer season. He loved even his first hunting experience, even though it had been frightening.
He was seven then, which was just about the last time Ed Smith could remember his life being relatively easy. His father had not yet abandoned the family, never to be heard from again, and home was a comfortable bungalow on a good street in Jackson Heights, one of those streets with curb cuts for front driveways, which was the new style of all the proud new postwar frame houses purchased for zero down by all the heroic veterans. Some of those heroes would begin realizing that a mortgage and a housewife and peacetime were nothing after chasing Hitler and Tojo around the world and liberating villages where the slim young women would throw flowers in their jeeps.
For Ed Smith’s father, the war’s end was a personal tragedy. A much-decorated commando leader, now Smitty was a displaced person living in a dreary, albeit clean, refugee camp called Jackson Heights.
Ed Smith remembered little of his father. Only that he went off to a job somewhere in a factory each morning, always dressed in starched gray twill workman’s pants and matching shirt with a black steel lunchbox prepared the night before by his mother; he frequently woke the entire house, all five rooms full of sleeping relatives, with his screaming nightmares; and, of course, Ed remembered the first hunt.
His father had taken his son, alone. Ordinarily, he would drive upstate with a work mate or one of his brothers. But for some reason that made his mother cry, Ed Smith’s father prepared the car for himself and his son. And they were off.
They stopped overnight in a little town about halfway and the boy and his father took dinner in a tavern that had sleeping rooms to rent for hunters from the city. The boy was puzzled as to why his father and he sat at a table off from all the others, who made the stopover dinner a loud and fraternal evening. The boy watched his father drink with anger in his face.
The next day they waited for hours in a blind in the mountain forest. When a huge, heavily antlered buck stepped tentatively into the forest clearing ahead of them, the boy froze in a sudden, unexpected terror. He was unable to pull the trigger of the big, oily rifle that his father had put into his arms.
The boy had shot the thing before. He’d known about hunting from his uncles, from other boys older than he. But he couldn’t make his finger pull the trigger.
Behind him, he could feel his father’s breath on his neck; he could sense his father’s anger and disappointment. He was afraid and ashamed.
“Kill him!” his father hissed.
The buck’s nostrils flared and his ears twitched and the animal focused all senses toward the blind, alert to the slightest presence of danger.
“Kill him, you sniveling little bastard!” his father hissed again.
The buck’s knees bent, positioned for flight. But the animal, too, was frozen in his fright and the boy sensed that. Then the boy felt a numbness, then fire in his armpit that held the butt of the rifle stock. His hands felt heavy. There was a thudding in his head. Then an explosion.
At first, the boy thought his skull had somehow detonated. Then he saw the thick spray of maroon blood shower the air of the forest clearing beyond the sights of his rifle, the ugly black hole between the buck’s crazed eyes; the buck crumpling in death.
Ed Smith, age seven, had killed with a single, clean shot: his first shot and his first blood.
Something had taken the boy through that momentary, stark fear. He felt a deep and primal satisfaction moving swiftly through his body. His skin glowed, his breath came in rushes, his lips pulled back in a triumphant grin. He felt a tingling in his testicles.
He felt his father’s approving hand on his shoulder.
“Go cut off his ear, boy,” his father said. “You earned it.”
His father handed him a bayonet, “taken off a dead Nazi,” he said. Ed Smith walked through the forest, the wet, brown, dead leaves sticking to his boots, his legs shaking as he neared the fallen animal.
Before he put the knife to the buck’s ear, Ed Smith turned around, just in time to see his father’s back, disappearing through the trees. The boy cried, then calmed himself, afraid his father might catch him.
But he was all alone in that woods and the dead animal was a frightening thing to a small boy hundreds of miles from home, his father’s footsteps fading away in the vastness.
He sat down and waited, but no one came near. The boy didn’t want to stay near the dead animal at night, so as best he could, he backtracked his way through the forest to the lodge where they had begun that morning.
His father’s car was nowhere to be seen. His father was gone. It was the last anyone would see of the man.
The owner of the lodge telephoned the sheriff’s department and Ed Smith stayed with a policeman and his wife until an uncle arrived, a day later, to take the boy back home to the city.
Ed and his sister, two years older, managed to live a fairly normal life despite their abandonment. Their mother didn’t permit much discussion of it, referring to it as the “family embarrassment.” She seemed relieved to have her husband gone, in fact, and it was only when Ed was twenty years old and a student at City University that he learned of his mother’s long, secretive love affair with her brother-in-law—the family’s secret breadwinner all his years of growing up.
He began immediately to have nightmares of his own, one recurring dream in particular in which his father, in hunting gear, chased his uncle through the Adirondack woods and killed him—killed his own brother, his rival for his own wife. He started looking for his father then, even growing into the habit of searching the faces of vagrants in Bowery hotels in lower Manhattan.
Briefly, he was happily married to an actress he met while a student at City University. Her name was Eve and she lived with a big, well-adjusted perfectly normal family in an enormous apartment in Washington Heights.
Eve’s father found the couple a modest apartment in the neighborhood and Ed went to work as a carpenter after dropping out of school while Eve studied drama and voice downtown and auditioned for everything that seemed right for her. She came home nights stimulated, Ed arrived home exhausted. He watched television, she wanted to talk and they usually compromised with a fight.
Eve began coming home later and later. Then one night she burst into the apartment with flowers and champagne, her eyes wild with excitement. She had won a part! Of course, it meant going out of town for a while, but it was a real start at her career—at last!
Ed’s young wife toured for two months, through the Middle West and the Pacific Northwest. Occasionally, Eve would telephone. She sent letters three times, stuffed with newspaper clippings from towns he couldn’t imagine would ever do a young actress any good, mostly just notices that the show would be playing at the local American Legion Hall or someplace like that.
He saw her two more times after the tour. Once, the day she arrived back in New York arm-in-arm with her director to tell her husband face-to-face that these things sometimes happen and if he was any kind of man at all, everyone concerned could still be friends. Ed Smith didn’t want to be friends.
He quit his job and hit the road, leaving his little apartment in Washington Heights to Eve and her lover. Before he left town, he retained a lawyer for Eve, who filed an uncontested divorce suit and that was that.
Did he always suspect Eve of something like this? Is that why he squirreled away the money he would live on for the next year, when he didn’t pick up day labor jobs along the way, as he hitchhiked through all but ten states? And what in the world did he think he was looking for?
He returned, at last, to New York and was promptly drafted into the army for a hitch in Vietnam. Before he realized it, he became something of a legendary commando. And he began dreaming the dream again of his father running through the woods after his uncle.
After his tour, he was back in New York at square one—a job as a carpenter. Each day he would show up at the union hiring hall, most days win a job and go home with a six-pack of beer and a long evening of television.
He took the police examination finally, and passed with flying colors. He was screened for any psychological problems and passed again. Then he was assigned to the Police Academy, where he excelled in boxing and marksmanship. And where he found a home.
Within his first year as a rookie cop, he met and married a public relations woman who worked at a Manhattan hospital. They tried for two years for a baby, then finally, after medication for her extremely high acid count in her blood system, they at last conceived. Ed Smith, who loved being a cop more than any other work he’d ever known, was lobbied day and night by his wife to take up some safer occupation now that the baby was on the way and all.
Instead, Ed took all the overtime duty he could. He learned he had become a father seven hours after the fact and across town from the hospital. His wife had found her own way there. Ed Smith, off duty, spent an entire afternoon and half the evening talking to Joe in his “home” under the Queensboro Bridge.
His wife rarely failed to remind him of this incident and then began finding new shortcomings on a daily basis, though she had little opportunity to complain since Ed was mostly working or hanging around with his cop buddies or prowling around Bowery saloons and hotels for God-only-knew-what.
When his daughter was old enough to enter nursery school, Ed Smith’s wife was hired back in her old public relations position. She said she needed the job “to keep my sanity.” Ed got a job he’d long wanted, a job that matched his obsession. He was made a plainclothes officer with the Nineteenth Precinct SCUM patrol. He was proud of the assignment, considered it a great promotion; he was proud of his ability to take the guise of the bum nobody wants to see. His wife loathed all of it, especially Smith’s appearance, his practiced gauntness, his hollow-eyed sadness.
Not long into her resumed career, she met a medical salesman who wore good cologne and impeccably tailored clothes and kept his nails well manicured. His name was Darryl, which confused Smith, for it didn’t seem to fit.
Dumped for a man named Darryl. Smith didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. What he did do, though, was bury himself in his work. His only friends were cops, and not too many of them, and Bowery bums. Lots of them.
He’d been divorced five years now.
He never saw his wife and only rarely spoke to her by telephone, then only to ask about his daughter. He never visited the girl, or so his ex-wife and daughter thought.
Sometimes Ed would wander over to the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood where Darryl and his ex-wife made their new and stylish life. Smith would hang around the playground near the promenade along the East River, just to watch the little girl swing or slide or dig around in the sandboxes with the other children.
Occasionally, Smith would see his ex-wife there, too. Sometimes even old Darryl, togged out in his Ralph Lauren “rough wear,” commercially faded jeans and a stone-washed shirt under a pricey leather blazer.
Ed Smith was invisible to them all.
Each time he visited the playground and saw his daughter, sometimes the whole family, he would move a little closer. Still, he was unrecognized. Not only unrecognized, unseen.
… In the humid still of the night, crouched in a doorway of Seventy-ninth Street, Ed Smith decided he might be half-cracked at the least. Lonely, half-cracked and a cop. He allowed a vague worry to creep into his mind. He liked his life.
He felt a storm coming on. Smith sat up and leaned out of the doorway, taking a quick look up and down Seventy-ninth. The first big wet drops splattered down onto the street, wetting his face. There was the glow of lightning up over the building across the street, then thunderclaps only seconds later. He moved back inside the doorway and lit a cigarette.
Then he picked up his PTP.
“Hoop,” he called softly into the radio microphone concealed inside the paper bag.
“Yeah, Ed. Come on.”
“Sure hope you’re making out all right safe and sound and dry in that car.”
“Thanks for the concern. So what do you think about tonight?”
“I think we stay, Hoop.”
“You’re that sure of what you saw?”
“I am. This rain will just make it easier for them, by their way of thinking.”
“Okay, we’re game.”
“You’re on.”
According to the bartender, he wasn’t gay, which was how so many of these things seemed to play.
“Besides,” the bartender added, “I don’t run that sort of place here. Jesus Christ, you guys ought to know that. All these horny stewardesses around here? There ain’t a market for fag joints.”
He was found at half-past two in the morning, on Third Avenue just south of Seventy-ninth Street, only two and a half blocks from Ed Smith’s stakeout.
He was a white male of average height and build, handsome and meticulously dressed, somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-four years of age, so the detectives on the scene estimated. A professional man of some sort, judging by his hands and clothes. No jewelry, no billfold, nothing in his pockets whatsoever. Either a robbery or made to appear a robbery.
He had been savagely beaten in the back of the head, probably caught by surprise. Knocked to the ground and then repeatedly beaten, most likely with a bat. Blood mixed with the rain-soaked sidewalk, ran over the curb into the gutter. Uniformed officers held umbrellas over the gapeeyed body while detectives took photographs and made notes of what they saw.
There were only three clues: a label inside his blazer from I. Magnin of San Francisco; a laundry marking inside his shirt collar, the initials “McC”; and a middle-aged man, silver-haired and mildly intoxicated, who happened upon the crowd gathered around the body. He nervously told a cop, then Detective Joe Simon, “I saw him, not twenty minutes ago, just down the avenue. He was drinking at the same place I was.”
Simon took him aside and questioned him.
“Sort of a talkative guy,” the witness said. “People would come in for a drink or two and he’d start up a conversation, then they’d leave and he’d wait for someone else to come along. I was on the other side of the room. Never talked to him myself.”
“Did you happen to hear just what he was talking about with all these customers?” Simon asked.
The witness thought for a moment. “Nope, can’t say I did. I didn’t have much reason to pay any sort of attention to something like that anyway.” He laughed, even as the stranger on the street oozed blood. “Had my hands full trying to interest a certain young lady in spending a little time with an old fellow. Know what I mean?”
Simon grinned, white teeth flashing under his black moustache. “Did you see anything like an exchange of money?”
“Money? No, nothing like that.”
“Okay, thanks a lot.” Then Simon took the man’s name and address, home and business telephones and said good night. But the witness hung around with the growing crowd, watching the body until the morgue came to take it away.
Next stop would be the bar, where Simon wouldn’t learn much more than maybe he wasn’t homosexual. It didn’t appear to be a drug thing, either, though maybe Simon would know more about that sometime tomorrow after the autopsy. Most people who dealt drugs used them.
The crowd grew so large that automobile traffic began slowing as well. Even in a downpour at two-thirty in the morning, the people came to see sudden, violent death. The officers holding the umbrellas moved aside and four more officers covered the corpse with a tarpaulin.
“Any unit at Second Avenue and Eighty-ninth …”
Officers Randall and Finnegan were sitting in a radio car at Second and Eighty-sixth, drinking sharp-tasting coffee from Styrofoam cups and eating doughnuts that made their fingertips sticky. They had been talking about the latest development in the case of Cibella “Naughty Nina” Borges, then stopped to hear the nature of the call just a few blocks from their location.
“… for a possible DOA.”
“We could use that,” Randall said. “It’s in and out and we need another job before we turn in.”
Finnegan took the microphone.
“Special unit Nineteen-A. We’ll take it.”
The electrical storm made the static on the radio worse than usual. Several minutes passed before the dispatcher returned to Randall and Finnegan. Calls of higher priority than someone’s finding a possible dead body were broadcast.
“That special unit, Nineteen-A,” the dispatcher’s disembodied voice said.
Finnegan responded. Randall readied pen to pad.
“See about possible DOA, 1170 Second Avenue, Apartment 6R.”
“Got it?” Finnegan asked.
“Yeah. We got a long climb ahead of us, partner.”
Randall drove the radio car to number 1170, a narrow old tenement building. They locked the car and rang the lobby bell of the apartment on the top floor, rear. It took several rings before someone upstairs buzzed open the door.
They climbed the steep, rickety wooden flights, rising nearer and nearer toward the top, where they saw a frightened man with a mop of thinning black hair leaning over the corridor railing. “Up here,” he called to the officers.
Finnegan and Randall took two steps at a time the rest of the way up. They confronted the caller outside an open door to the rear apartment.
He wore pajama bottoms and a soiled terry-cloth robe. The top of his head was bare skin and he had a part on his left side, close to the ear. What seemed to be a foot of black hair shot through with gray hung in strings on the left side, hair that was ordinarily sprayed into place over the top and down the right side.
“I think she’s dead, Officers,” the man said. “I didn’t do nothing. She just died, I think.”
As he spoke, he filled the small corridor at the top of the building with the staleness of his brandied breath. The inside of the apartment smelled like a tavern.
Randall and Finnegan followed the man with the stringy hair into the apartment.
It was not much bigger than a cell, with a small convertible sofa extended and a naked, overweight woman slumped between the end of the bed and a refrigerator. The collision of her head with the refrigerator had put a fairsized dent in the door. Her buttocks were arched high into the air, rising over the edge of the bed, with the rest of her body jammed between bed and refrigerator. She didn’t seem to be breathing.
“What happened, sir?” Finnegan asked.
“Well, sir, we were, you know, making love. Yeah. I think she couldn’t take it. She just sort of collapsed and then, down she went.”
“Are you saying you screwed the lady to death?” Randall asked.
“Oh, no. I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t kill her, honest, Officer!” The man in the robe with the hair hanging off his shoulder began sobbing.
Meanwhile, the fat lady made a noise.
Finnegan got down on all fours to look at her face, which was mashed against the floor. “You say something?”
There was another noise.
“Give me a hand,” Finnegan said to Randall.
Randall squeezed himself over the fat lady’s rump and stood between the body and a wall. He grabbed her under her right shoulder while Finnegan hoisted the left. Together, they managed to flip the huge woman up from the floor, onto the bed on her back.
Her face was the color of strawberries with all the blood that had rushed to her head. Her eyes fluttered. Finnegan tossed a sheet over the big, doughy naked body and both he and Russell were mightily relieved.
She made a few gasping sounds. Randall and Finnegan moved away, her fumes making them nauseous.
“You two been doing a little drinking here, huh?” Randall asked the horrified man in the robe.
Before answering, a very relieved man who thought for several agonizing minutes that his girl friend had died on him in coitus, sat down on a wooden chair and reached unsteadily for a bottle of Four Roses and a glass on a little table overloaded with liquor.
“We weren’t hurting nothing,” the man said.
“She’s all right,” Randall told him, “but one of these days the two of you are going to overdose on this stuff. It happens, you know.”
“So I hear,” the man said. He put back the bottle of Four Roses and swallowed hard.
“You live here, or does she?” Finnegan asked. He started writing up the call in his notebook.
“It’s my dump. And Flo there, she’s no hooker, I want you to know.”
Flo snored.
Smith was not quite dozing when he heard the sound he’d waited for, the slightest scraping of steel against concrete. It came from the corner of Madison Avenue. He couldn’t look yet. They would be coming his way. He listened.
When he judged that they were walking quickly, he slowly sat up, keeping his legs straight, dangled out in front of him into the street. The smallest movement could alert them.
He waited until they entered his field of vision. He would not use the radio until they used the big steel trash container they carried, until the sound of the container smashing through the plate-glass display window of the boutique would provide him the cover he needed to alert Hooper and the others.
Three of them hefted the trash container. There were two others in the cab section of a van that moved slowly alongside them on the street. Smith could make out most of the New Jersey license plate fixed to the front of the van. He didn’t move a muscle.
The driver of the van looked directly into Smith’s doorway. Smith watched him through slitted eyes. Then the driver looked away, not thinking what he saw was of any importance.
He watched as the trash basket was raised up over the shoulders of the three black men who had carried it from the corner. And though his entire body was tingling, he didn’t move, waiting until the basket would crash through the window and monopolize their attention for the vital few seconds he would need to radio the van’s license plate number to Hooper, who would relay it to General Dispatch.
He took a deep breath to calm himself. The steel trash basket was thrown in an arc. At the moment it hit the plate-glass window, Smith grabbed his PTP. Nothing moved but his arm and his mouth.
“Hooper … Hooper!”
“Go.”
“It’s a hit. Three on the smash and two more in a van for the grab. Maybe more in the van. Jersey plate number Harry Apple Two-Three-Six-Seven. Repeat.”
“Jersey, Harry Apple Two-Three-Six-Seven.”
“Three just jumped out the side of the van,” Smith said. “Doors open. They’re loading up.”
“How many perps is that?”
“Three on the smash … two in the cab, three more.”
“Eight. Okay. I’ll set up uniforms at the corners and relay the plate,” Hooper said. “La Brie’s on foot now, on his way from Madison. Jaroneczwk’s rounding in from Park. When you see my unmarked pull up and light up like a cherry, we’re going to make us a nice bunch of collars, check?”
“Right. Out.”
Smith let himself smile.
Maybe a minute passed, plenty of time, even with the silent alarm any professional thief knows he’s tripped. They worked efficiently, smoothly, moving the display-window items—furs, beaded evening gowns and jewelry accessories—from mannequins to the van. The three men who had tossed the heavy trash basket through the window were somewhere inside the store, removing garments from the racks. The two men in the van’s cab stayed put.
Smith didn’t move until he saw La Brie, just a movement in the shadows, coming from the right. He sat up slightly and then saw Jaroneczwk on his left. La Brie and Jaro-neczwk stopped, both of them maybe forty feet away from the boutique.
Then the gray-blue Chevrolet, the unmarked car driven by Hooper, moved in from Park Avenue, traveling at a normal speed. Hooper hit the brakes hard when he got alongside the van. The light he’d attached to the roof lit up, making circles of red spin around in the street.
Smith leaped up from his doorway and reached behind him for his .38, pulled it out of the holster at the back of his belt with his right hand and lifted the police shield out from the top of his shirt, letting it fall over his chest on the chain.
He heard Hooper shouting, “Police! Freeze!”
Hooper stood, both hands holding his revolver, just in front of the van and the startled driver.
The driver lurched the van forward. Hooper stepped out of the way to avoid being hit. He fired his revolver into the air and shouted again, “Police! Freeze!”
The van stopped.
The thief in the passenger side of the van ripped open his door and started running wildly toward Park Avenue. He slipped in the glass shards on the sidewalk and screamed as an arm slashed open and he bled.
Three more jumped out of the display window, their arms crammed with gowns and furs and coats. They scattered. Two ran toward Madison Avenue and La Brie, who took a firing-range stance with his revolver and commanded them to halt, the other across the street past Hooper directly into Smith’s arms.
Smith held his revolver in the air and used his chest and belly to knock into the thief with arms overflowing. He fell back and landed on his back in the street, the clothes spilling into the rain-soaked street.
“You’re busted, drag queen!” Smith snarled. He stood over his man, the thief’s eyes wild with fear; Smith lowered the gun and aimed at the heart. “What’s the matter, your panties filling up?”
Suddenly, the whole street was alive with the invasion of squad cars. Windows in apartments flew open, heads popped out over the sills.
La Brie knocked down one of the two thieves who came his way and a uniform cuffed him while La Brie chased after the other. Hooper manacled the driver of the van and ran toward Jaroneczwk, who tackled a man who came his way.
Uniforms moved in toward the shop and nailed the rest. One by one, the thieves were lined up against the window of the shop next to Gussied Up, Ltd., hands up against the glass, legs spread. Uniforms ran their hands down their sides, around their waists and between their legs. No guns were taken.
Smith’s man lay on his stomach in the middle of Seventy-ninth Street while the cop who looked like a wino cuffed him up and patted him down for weapons.
“You have the right to remain silent …” Smith began in a monotone. “Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law—”
“I heard that shit before,” the thief said, dresses and women’s sportswear scattered around him.
“Good, queenie,” Smith said. “Then let’s say it together, shall we? From the top? You have the right to remain silent …”