Sometimes there dawns the day when being a cop is something approaching triumphant satisfaction, namely when one of life’s little injustices can be countered by the simple fact of career.
Such a day was had one gray Wednesday in December by Billy McBride and Carl Altner, neighbors out in suburban Suffolk County who, like suburbanites the world over, car pool it to work—which in their case happens to be the plainclothes burglary detail under the command of Sergeant John Laffey, Nineteenth Precinct, Manhattan.
It was shortly after nine o’clock when they slipped onto the Long Island Expressway, McBride at the wheel. The morning rush was another memory and there was now plenty of time to cruise into the city by ten o’clock for another day’s round of mostly walking the streets of the Upper East Side on the lookout for shifty-eyed nervous types who didn’t quite belong on the scene, especially the ones carrying large canvas bags that were just the ticket for hauling off other people’s property. If they were lucky at this unending game, which Altner and McBride sometimes were, they might wind up the day with a good solid red-handed collar on which they might also hang up a lot of backlog.
All of which they talked about just as they passed over the Nassau County line and entered slightly heavier traffic. A very impatient eighteen-wheel semitrailer truck loomed in McBride’s rearview mirror, though he heard the behemoth before seeing it, actually.
The trucker blasted his diesel whistle over and over again, apparently urging the two plainclothes cops in the nondescript car in front of him to get going beyond the fifty-five miles per hour that McBride had set on his cruise control. McBride ran up to sixty, but the trucker was still agitated, all the more so since he was unable to pass at the moment.
McBride had no choice but to run up to sixty-five miles per hour. Otherwise, the truck threatened to bash into the rear end of his car.
Then the truck did bump the back end of McBride’s car. Once, then again, then again.
McBride floored the accelerator pedal and cleared up a space in the adjacent lane for the giant truck to pass around a slower-moving vehicle. All the while, the trucker kept blasting his diesel whistle.
Finally, when the trucker passed by McBride’s car, Altner leaned out and caught the eye of the trucker.
“I show him my tin,” Altner told Sergeant Laffey later that morning, when he finally got into the station house, “and you know what the idiot did? He gave me the finger! Can you believe it? He sees I’m a cop and he just gives me the finger.”
“So what did you do?” Laffey asked.
“I tried not to do my usual wild-man routine and then we chased him, that’s what.”
The trucker, when it apparently occurred to him that he could be in big trouble, veered off the freeway at the nearest exit ramp, his cargo nearly spilling over by the weight of centrifugal force.
The huge vehicle careened around the ramp curves, with McBride and Altner in very hot pursuit, knowing that an eighteen-wheel truck had to stop somewhere very soon, as it would simply not be sufficiently agile to outmaneuver a speeding car. Luckily for all concerned that morning, there happened to be lurking in a speed trap on a particular bend of that ramp a squad car belonging to the Nassau County Sheriff’s Department.
And now, just like in the movies, there was a high-speed parade of a chase—the berserk trucker, the suburban commuter and the sheriff’s deputy, who was immediately on the radio for reinforcements.
It was all over in a few miles. The truck pulled over to the side of the road. Actually, one of its tires blew and the trucker was forced over. He jumped out of the truck, snarling at McBride and Altner, who rushed him, and the uniformed deputy, who had no idea how in the world it was that the fellows in sweaters and jeans in the car happened to have handcuffs and manacles. For all he knew, he had three speeding citations to write, along with a reckless-driving collar on the trucker.
“All in all, slapping a guy in the bracelets on the way to work is a pretty good way to start off a day,” Altner said.
“Listen up, Sleeping Beauty!”
It was Ciffo’s third attempt to rouse Keenan from a deathlike slumber in the convertible sofa in the living room of his flat in Brooklyn. Keenan lay on his back, arms thrust out from his sides and palms up, his legs straight and still. His mouth was open and his breathing shallow, nearly nonexistent, eyes half open but rolled back and looking like a pair of eggs left outdoors all winter. The fumes from the man were enough to call out a city health inspector.
Ciffo put his foot to the side of the couch and rocked it back and forth roughly. “Up and at’em! Let’s roll out!”
Gradually, he succeeded in winning Keenan’s attention.
The eyes fluttered and a hand moved, to ward off the invasion of sunlight.
“Oh my God, I’ve died and gone to hell and Lucifer turns out to be an Italian cop,” Keenan said.
“So you’re all right, Paddy? You can make with the jokes after the night you had. Unbelievable, the Celtic constitution, I’m telling you.”
“Maybe not so much as you’d think,” Keenan said. And as he spoke his meaning became clear. He looked anything but the picture of a man capable of keeping inside him the contents of the previous night’s excesses.
Ciffo gave him a hand and pulled him to his feet. The bed Keenan left behind was awash with perspiration.
“Go say your morning offerings, knight of Gotham’s constabulary,” Ciffo said. He pointed in the direction of a bathroom in the hallway. “Go pray to the porcelain god.”
Keenan put a hand over his mouth and turned his head halfway around. His eyes slitted in pain and his lips began rambling, as if they held back a ghastly sea of sickness.
“The can’s that way,” Ciffo said, pushing him hard in the correct direction.
In a half hour, Keenan emerged, sadder and maybe wiser. He was reasonably presentable, though his eyes were traced with red lines and he had to be careful to grip things for support as he moved through Ciffo’s bachelor apartment, wending his way to a little eat-in kitchen where Ciffo manned a coffee percolator.
“I have,” Keenan announced, though he did not go so far as to point a finger in the air, “performed my morning toilette. And I apologize for my inconvenience, trusting that this shall remain a confidence between discreet gentlemen.”
“You call your wife, Tommy? She have any idea where the fuck you are?”
Keenan didn’t say anything for a few seconds. His wife knew where the best dishes were, the ones that came out whenever the Irish came calling from the other side; she knew where the aerosol furniture dusting wax was; she knew where the half-dozen cans of Comet cleanser that she bought on special at the Riverdale Pathmark were; she knew where to lay her hands on some paperback novel about times that never were and circumstances beyond all likelihood. But no, she did not know where her husband was at this moment.
“That my whereabouts matters is debatable, Tony my friend … highly debatable. Take it from me.”
“For now. Sit down and drink this, you hump. What’s your tour today?”
“Noon-eight.”
“That’s what I thought. You haven’t got much time.” “Time’s a crook and a thief, some say. But time’s all we’ve got as well.”
“Save the philosophy for the cups,” Ciffo said. “You have to be a cop in a few hours.”
Keenan sat. He let the steam rise from a cup of coffee and work through his nostrils, still sharp-smelling from his session in the bathroom.
There was a small radio on the table, which Ciffo turned to the 1010 frequency, WINS-AM, the all-news station. The police officers learned—in addition to the fact that the day would be perfect for suicide, gray, cold and clammy—that a Bronx mother had turned around for a few critical seconds in a shopping mall and had her young son snatched off the face of the earth; housing cops in lower Manhattan were treated at Bellevue after being bitten by an apartment full of Haitian illegals who were incensed by their raid, coming as it did right in the middle of a “solemn religious ceremony,” so the lawyer called it, involving the sacrifice of twelve chickens and a goat; a bag lady died of the overnight cold, her blue-skinned, swollen body discovered by a Chelsea news vendor beneath a pile of cardboard scraps on the corner of Twenty-ninth Street and Tenth Avenue; a pair of bright-eyed New York City cops ran down a startled, albeit berserk and allegedly drug-ridden truck driver on the L.I.E. in Nassau County on their way to work, and there were six shopping days until Christmas.
“The thought crosses my mind sometime every day.” “Life’s a goddamn crock.” Keenan rubbed his head, which hurt like hell. It would be the first day of his long period of punishment on bow-and-arrow duty that he would be delighted with the stress-free make-work assignment.
“Life might be a crock, pal, but there aren’t too damn many volunteers for early exit that I know of. Except maybe you.”
Keenan rubbed his head again and moaned.
“I’ll take a wild guess about what happened to you last night,” Ciffo said. “Her name was Dory.”
“Tony, now that we have covered our mutual dissatisfaction with New York and life in general, shall we turn to the subject of women?”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“Oh well, you may invoke the name of our Lord and Savior. Many have at times such as these. But it hasn’t ever done much good. I’m afraid there is no help from the heavens in the battle between the sexes. It’s God’s joke, you know.”
“Do I have to listen to this? You’re sounding like Clark more and more every day.”
“God, as I was saying, has been having a lifelong joke watching us men and women.” Keenan sneezed once, then again. “He is an ironist. He created us with totally opposing sensibilites and yet placed us in a system requiring that we be intimate with each other.”
“For a drunk, you talk pretty, Keenan.”
“I have said it before and I’ll say it again. Sometimes, my friend, drinking is the answer.”
Ciffo looked at his wristwatch and wanted Keenan to know he was impatient, that he’d had enough of this. Ciffo was the sort of man who could tolerate all sorts of human foibles, but he never saw much percentage in coddling a whiner one inch beyond his purpose, which in this case was to expose Tommy Keenan to Tommy Keenan and hope it would light some sort of fire under his seat.
“Tommy, you sound like a case for I.A.D. if you don’t start getting hold of yourself,” Ciffo said. “You’re how many months on restricted duty now? You going to make some sort of career out of going to the corner deli for your sergeant’s damn coffee? The whole damn station house knows you’re tapping into a dolly on the side. Where the hell do you think you are, you dumb hump? We’re the cops. We’re not exactly what you’d call libertines, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“You’re going to call the I.A.D.?” Keenan looked at Ciffo and blinked.
“I don’t think I have to, man. You might as well be wearing a sandwich sign that says ‘Please Put Me on Conduct Trial’ and parading up and down in front of the division boys on your goddamn lunch hour.”
Keenan bolted up out of his chair and the coffee he’d started to drink fell to the floor. “Where the hell do you get off talking to me like that, Tony?”
Ciffo stood. He was a half head shorter than Keenan, but Keenan and everyone else knew about Ciffo and how height bore no relationship to the prowess and sweep of his left hook. Keenan thought about taking a swing at Ciffo, but not for long.
Keenan doubled his right hand into a fist and made threatening gestures with it and Ciffo laughed at him.
“Look at you, Tommy. You got that real smart mouth, but you got nothing to back it up, nothing but dumb.”
Keenan sank back into his chair.
“That’s the trouble with lots of people, Tony.” He looked at the splinters of china all over Ciffo’s kitchen floor, the streams of black coffee he’d spilled. Mairead would have been horrified. “Sorry about making more mess than you found last night, pal.”
“Sorry’s not enough. You’re a cop in trouble with himself, which makes it bad for all of us.”
Ciffo picked up the broken bits of china with his fingers.
“Now get the hell out, Tommy. Fix your head and do us all a big favor.”
Sergeant John Laffey sat down at his gray steel desk after he’d cluttered up the surface with the things he would need for the long day ahead of him: a PTP radio which he’d tested for battery strength first thing when he walked through the door of the Penthouse; a .22-caliber pistol with small belt clip; the New York Times and the Daily News, which carried a piece about Nicky Barnes and how he’d probably sing to the feds about heroin wars in Harlem in hopes of a pardon from President Reagan, a large, well-thumbed spiral notebook indexed for three academic subjects; two textbooks with protective dust jackets bearing the logo for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice; a bulletproof vest, one of two he owned, this one covered in white duck fabric textured like pimpled thermal underwear; and a brown paper bag, which, when empty, would shield the PTP radio from sight as he walked around the city on the prowl for burglars.
Laffey enjoyed the work of being a cop well enough; he gloried in measuring his professional role against all the other segments of American society. He looked the very modern model of the ordinary New York cop dancing along the edge of middle age, but civilians usually revealed interesting prejudices when they talked to Laffey and then told other civilians that he was “pretty damned articulate—and a cop, too.” This is what interested Laffey about himself and others—those who were not police officers, those who did not come up quite the way he had. It is what gave his conversation its philosophical tone.
Laffey started his adult life as a construction worker, then went to college and quit after two years when he got sick of it. He went back into construction, a chancy business. He took the police civil service examination and hoped for the best, which came along in 1969, a year of massive new hiring in New York’s police department. John Laffey was called and told to report to the Police Academy and he was a happy man, as he’d just gotten married and by his lights that meant he was required to bring to the deal a solid, steady job.
The job gave him more. Laffey was forced to see everyday life in an entirely new light, just as everyone saw him largely by the color of his uniform. For some cops, the world is diminished in the professional process; for others, like Laffey, the world becomes a much larger and infinitely more fascinating place, sometimes as a defense against the forces that circumscribe the lives of those who not only look ordinary, like Laffey, but who are ordinary.
The coffee steamed up Laffey’s glasses, so he took them off and put them on the desk next to his pistol. He dipped the edge of his bagel into the coffee, shrugged his shoulders and then resigned himself to a bite.
“I keep eating this stuff every day like I do and pretty soon I’m not going to be able to make it up here to the Penthouse,” he said to Valentine from Community Affairs, who sat in a molded plastic chair, winded after the climb to the very top of the Nineteenth Precinct station house.
There was plenty of room here for Laffey’s small command, which was the plainclothes burglary detail. Elsewhere in the house, things were terribly cramped, though there was the sense of being near the center of things. The price of spaciousness, which everyone talked about but which no one really wanted, was a long climb up five steep flights of dingy stairs and an unnerving echo to everything you said and did once you reached the summit, where you wouldn’t be perched for long anyway, since the work of the detail was mostly walking around the streets.
Laffey’s position at the exterior of things, as it were, denoted the low seniority of his command. The burglary detail was a relatively new one, created by Inspector Short as evidence of his commitment to the theory of preventive police work, and its clout in the precinct pecking order had yet to be firmly established. In fact, there was some threat to its continued existence once Short retired, which would be within the year; already, there was some administrative carping as to how the burglary detail duplicated the work of Sergeant Hooper’s anticrime unit.
Laffey liked to talk about the downward trend of the large graph lines superimposed over a map of the Nineteenth Precinct, which was the only thing covering the government-green walls besides a collection of photographs and wanted posters of various antisocial specimens. Fewer and fewer burglaries occurred as the months passed and Laffey was particularly proud of pointing out how only a few arrests could reduce a whole lot of incidence. This sort of thing was emphasized in red print on his graph, insets in lined sectors of the Nineteenth Precinct map broken down into quadrants.
The trouble, and Laffey knew it well, was that a commander isn’t so dramatically commanding when he has to make his case for survival with charts and graphs. Collars is the name of the game when you’re vying for more desirable squad-room space, for instance, especially in as highly visible a precinct as the Nineteenth.
Toward the effort, Laffey had personally assembled his crew—Jack Clark, Kathy Waters, Carl Trani, Billy McBride and Carl Altner. Five officers, Valentine suggested, who were pretty good examples of what he and Laffey had been talking about down in the lobby where they met, a conversation that continued up in the Penthouse as they waited for the squad to assemble for the midday tour that was being run this week. The subject of the talk was the difference in outlook, it seemed to Valentine, between cops back in the 1960s and cops today.
“I hear all kinds of things about that,” Laffey said. “And I listen to the theories whenever they come up.
“The one that seems to be stylish now is that cops are different today because they are more sensitive to the things the rest of society started being sensitive about back in the sixties.
“Then there’s the theory that since most of us cops now are from that postwar baby boom that we’re more in tune with all the struggles of the sixties, which were fought by everybody in the postwar baby boom. So we’re supposed to be sympatico, you know?
“Well, I respectfully suggest that there isn’t any particular difference between cops back in the sixties and cops today. And I think I know what I’m talking about, since I’m thirty-six years old and I’m from that postwar baby boom and my decade of coming into adulthood was the sixties.”
Laffey took another bite of his bagel, happy to have put Valentine quite off balance.
“Trouble with the sixties was that the constant attacks against the cops were personal. Like at Columbia, when cops were taunted hour after hour. Most of us were in Vietnam and we came back and there we were on duty at Columbia and we saw these college kids urinating on the flag. I mean, what do you think most cops are going to be thinking when they see that?
“You had cops standing out there, day after day, with no duty rotation. Cops being taunted until they had to react. Of course they did, just like any other human being would.
“We’re supposed to rise above being spit at, being stoned, having shit flung at us, having the flag pissed on in front of us. But a human being can take only so much of that. And until someone invents robot cops, we’re stuck with human beings for cops.
“I think society has changed, not the cops. The cops are pretty much the same breed today as they were back then.
“Maybe it’s all been an aberration, though, and both society and the cops are the same, with certain improvements all round.
“I mean, remember those kids back in the sixties? The ones who got all the press? The ones who made all the noise and all the trouble for the cops, among others? They grew up in Dr. Spock homes. The theory was that you weren’t supposed to upset the poor darlings.
“Well, maybe they should have been upset at an earlier age. Maybe they should have learned that there was a world out there beyond Ozzie and Harriet and the suburbs.
“They got to be eighteen and nineteen and all of a sudden they left the golden nest and discovered there were things out in the real world like poverty and racism and cops who sometimes beat up on people. Well, fine.
“But before they got to be eighteen and nineteen and so damn wise and concerned about everything wrong with the big, bad world, their own little worlds were pretty damn good.
“They had fathers who worked as vice-presidents at places like Chase Manhattan, for God’s sake, and they lived up in Scarsdale and it never occurred to them that maybe the reason there was poverty and racism out there beyond Scarsdale was because there were places like Scarsdale in this world.
“Me, I grew up in three rooms over a flower shop with five people. I think I know something about poverty they didn’t know for a long time and never will in a practical sense anyway. And I saw racism a long time before they ever saw a black face, I’ll bet. And I’ve been cracked over the head with a nightstick and I didn’t like it then and now I’ll do something about it when I hear of some cop doing the same.
“So how come all there was was yelling?
“Things were getting better and things are getting better now. I knew that in the sixties. Hell, back in the twenties, they were lynching blacks down South. I’d say we’ve made at least some measurable progress, wouldn’t you?”
Valentine nodded his agreement.
“So, anyway, the kids in the sixties like you saw at Columbia were supposed to be the cutting edge of the decade. Every opportunity in the world handed to them on silver platters and somehow or other they get all steamed up in some blind rage which, as far as I can see, didn’t change all that much.
“I’m not saying they didn’t accomplish something. But I would say it was largely useless. Where did the rage get us? Where did it get them to taunt the cops like they did when they were supposed to be struggling for things for ‘the people’ as they called us? Who did they think ‘the people’ were, anyway?
“They were supposed to be smart kids, kids who had lots of time to read books. Me, I go to college now at the age of thirty-six, right? What I wouldn’t have given to have stuck at the books when I was eighteen. I had to work. They were supposed to be smarter than Irish mugs like me, but they weren’t even smart enough to be courteous, were they?
“How come they didn’t talk to me? How come they looked at me in a blue uniform and saw nothing but that blue? That’s smart?”
Laffey shook his head.
“They should have paid more attention to their books. Books tell you that human nature doesn’t change a single bit—and human nature includes cops, doesn’t it?
“That’s the lesson of literature. It’s what makes literature so great. You can read Shakespeare today, for instance, and he talks about the same things involving human nature we all know about today that everyone knew about when they were enjoying his plays the first time they were performed.
“Ever read ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’? It was true when it was written and it’s true today and it’ll be true tomorrow. Right?
“I wish Shakespeare would have written about cops. If Shakespeare would have written about New York cops, he would have written how they were polite and calm and how they care. That’s true today and it was true in the sixties.
“The only difference is in the way we’re seeing it all. People see the cop and they see that what he does is business, that the cop isn’t the enemy. They don’t make it personal, not like they did for a while there.”