Just five blocks from the Nineteenth Precinct station house, where Sergeant Laffey’s able crew straggled one by one to work and where Detective Leinau claimed his favored desk under the Muzak speaker in the second-floor PDU and started talking up the idea of a summer “cruise to nowhere” off Long Island Sound, Mrs. William W. Whitson removed her diamond rings and set them down on the butcher block in the center of her elegant kitchen so she might begin her morning task of arranging red and yellow roses in eight identical cut-glass vases.
The other detectives generally tuned out Leinau’s pitch on the cruise deal for the very good reasons that it was only Christmas now and everyone was tapped out and the prospect of three or four days confined on a boat with Leinau did not conjure up anyone’s visions of Shangri-la. The officers of the burglary detail tried but failed, as usual, to tune out Jack Clark and his morning pep talk.
Today, Clark pounced on the opportunity to address unjaded ears. He approached the sergeant’s visitor, Valentine, and wheezed in a very exaggerated fashion, placed his hand over his heart and rolled his eyes back toward the landing of the long stairway he had just climbed en route to the Penthouse.
“God, what a privilege it is to enter this precinct house day after day,” he said. “A landmark building, rich in the heritage of this great crossroads of the world, making us ever mindful of our special mission. This building, where men and women have spent their lives vouchsafing the city for democracy!”
Clark pointed a finger at Valentine. “And you! You probably think of this place as just another dirty old building!”
In the Whitson kitchen, one of twelve rooms in a genuine penthouse apartment, Mrs. Whitson listened carefully to Maria, her Puerto Rican maid, bubble on about her husband Juan’s latest project—guaranteed to make him a millionaire, if only he could find some way of raising the necessary start-up capital. Mrs. Whitson understood about half of Maria’s words, the Puerto Rican vernacular being only faintly related to the Castilian dialect she had learned at Sarah Lawrence in order to help her father in his Canary Island fish cannery enterprises, which hadn’t helped her there either.
Juan’s newest scheme had something to do with running a yacht around Manhattan, up the East River from the Thirty-fourth Street helipad landing past the United Nations and the grand perched apartment houses of Beekman and Sutton Place and River House, past Coogan’s Bluff and around the Harlem River bend and through the Columbia University boat house and Spuyten Duyvil Creek, down the broad Hudson and under the George Washington Bridge, finally around the Battery and back again to the East Side at Thirty-fourth Street. All during the slow evening sail, there would be music and dancing and even a gourmet dinner served.
That was Juan’s dream. This time.
The last time, it involved purchasing alternate use rights in dormant cemeteries, as it were, from the families of the long-deceased with an eye toward garden apartment complexes in the outer boroughs.
She hadn’t ever met Juan, a baker by trade, and Mrs. Whitson doubted she ever would, when she thought about it all. She and her husband had each shrugged off subtle and not so subtle requests for capital investment. Tuning out such requests was a knack that came with breeding.
And so Mrs. Whitson listened attentively for the purpose of accustoming herself to Maria’s Spanish. She had only just hired her six months ago and communication was very difficult still at times. Mrs. Whitson remembered fondly the late 1940s and early 1950s when it was still possible to get an English girl, so happy they were to leave the bomb-devastated London for a new life in the States.
She asked Maria a few questions about any experience Juan might have that would qualify him to oversee such a complicated business as a floating restaurant that would cater to the moneyed set, since such a dinner setting would surely be costly. Her question was meant to keep the conversation going, it wasn’t really asked in genuine interest.
Maria chattered on, encouraged by Mrs. Whitson’s inquiries.
“We’ll see,” Mrs. Whitson said finally, ending the conversation. Her flowers were finished and she picked up her diamonds and began slipping them back on her fingers. Maria watched, her dark eyes shining brightly, as three sparkling rings were set back in place.
Mrs. Whitson smiled at her.
“My husband will be entertaining at half-past five, you know,” she said.
Yes, Maria remembered from yesterday. She would have the room readied. Not to worry.
“All right then, I’ll just do what I have to do now in the way of errands—”
María turned her head at the sound of an urgent knocking at the kitchen door, which led to a service area, elevator and stairway. Along with the knocking was the super’s voice, a man named Mickey.
Mrs. Whitson stopped herself. “What can that be? If it’s Mickey, he usually calls up on the intercom.”
Maria stepped to the door.
“Mickey?” she asked.
“Yeah. Can you open up?”
Something didn’t sound quite right in his voice, but before Mrs. Whitson could register any objection, Maria opened the kitchen door.
Both Maria and Mrs. Whitson shrieked when Mickey was thrown headlong into the kitchen. His body slid across the glossy terrazzo floor, landing painfully against the butcher block. One of the vases full of water and roses was jarred and fell off the edge, the blossoms and the water covering Mickey’s head and the glass shattering on the floor.
Two men had shoved Mickey and both wore knit ski masks, only their hot eyes and their lips visible. They wore leather gloves and tight-fitting pants and jackets. And both aimed guns at Mrs. Whitson and Maria.
“This is a holdup!” one of them shouted. He held his weapon in both hands and crouched, as if he thought someone might bolt from the kitchen.
Mrs. Whitson thought the man was black by hearing his voice. She stared at him, tried to see what she could of him. Yes, she thought, he was black.
The other man spoke to Maria, who was crying. She was upset and couldn’t possibly understand English at that moment. So he asked her in Spanish where the plastic garbage bags were kept. Maria showed him while the black man asked Mrs. Whitson if she had any rope in the house.
“Certainly not!” she said, not certain why his question offended her.
Mickey tried sitting up, but the black man pointed his gun at him and yelled something Mrs. Whitson didn’t quite hear. Then he asked Mrs. Whitson, “Your husband have plenty of neckties, does he? Good. Let’s go get’em.”
She and the black man with the gun pointed at her back walked from the kitchen through a pantry, a dining room, a music chamber, an anteroom and the living room before reaching the corridor that led to the master bedroom and the wardrobe alcove where William W. Whitson housed his clothing and accessories. The gunman helped himself to an armful of foulards, which he carried back to the kitchen and used to bind up Mickey the super.
The other gunman, meanwhile, had been given a box of green plastic garbage bags. “Let’s go,” he said to his partner.
“Okay,” the black man said. He turned to Mrs. Whitson and said, “Lady, you and the maid here are going to give us all the jewelry and then we’re going to be on our way nice and happy and you’re going to stay here, safe and sound if everything goes just fine. Understand?”
“Quite,” Mrs. Whitson said.
The black man looked at Mickey, his arms tied behind him and lashed to one leg of the butcher block, a huge piece that would prevent his moving from the kitchen to any other room.
“You sure he’ll be all right?” the other gunman, the one who spoke Spanish, asked.
Mickey twisted around and tried to get a good look at the two gunmen in the ski masks.
The black man brought a foot down heavily on Mickey’s head, mashing his face to the floor. Mrs. Whitson winced at the sound of bone against floor. Poor Mickey. He’d been the super for eight years now. And such a capable man. How did he allow this to happen?
“Let’s move!” said the black man, clearly the robber in charge.
Maria held Mrs. Whitson’s arm as the two women were marched at gunpoint from the kitchen and along the route Mrs. Whitson had taken before. This time, the black man had said, they would clean out jewelry and valuable clothing.
Mrs. Whitson led the men directly to the dresser that contained her best jewels. She sighed. Never had she and her husband even considered keeping the pieces in a bank vault. Now she handed over gem-crusted rings, necklaces, pendants, bracelets and brooches.
“I’m not going to part with this,” she said. She pointed to her gold wedding band, an ancient ring that had belonged to her husband’s grandmother and had become hers some thirty-five years ago. “It’s a family heirloom and I’m going to keep it. You’re getting enough as it is.”
Maria trembled. The black man seemed stunned. He didn’t answer her, speaking instead to his partner:
“Look through the closets, man.”
His partner crammed two plastic garbage bags with a full-length mink, a lynx wrap and the jewelry.
“Get some more of her old man’s ties from the other room there,” the black man told his partner. He waved his gun in the general direction of Mr. Whitson’s wardrobe area.
“Come on now. We’re going to make our exit, ladies.”
Mrs. Whitson and Maria were tied up with more of the Whitson neckties and, like Mickey the super, lashed to legs of the kitchen butcher block.
The two gunmen in ski masks fled the kitchen, into the service corridor and down the long stairway to the street.
Mickey managed to slip loose just as they disappeared into the corridor. He ran out after them.
He would later tell Detective Leinau that he stayed “at a distance, so they wouldn’t spot me” and that he saw them flag down a taxicab going uptown on Park Avenue.
“I got so mad at what they’d done that I picked up a trash can off the corner and just about threw it at them,” Mickey would say.
Tony Currin sat in the hearing room at Police Headquarters in lower Manhattan wearing light-sensitive aviator glasses, which made him look pretty much in character. Cibella Borges sat opposite Currin, next to her lawyer. She wore a high-collar sweater and a plaid skirt and looked like a teenager who attended an all-girls high school.
Deputy Police Commissioner Jaime Rios was the judge. The prosecuting officer, Captain Henry Harrison, handed Rios a number of photographs of the defendant in the sweater and plaid skirt. They were poses of considerably different tone than those that had appeared in magazines Rios mentioned in passing that he’d never before encountered—Beaver, Pub and Girls on Girls.
Rios looked at the photographs. “Objections?” he asked Cibella Borges’ lawyer.
“No objections.”
Rios couldn’t look at Cibella Borges, though he must have wondered at the contrast he faced. Indeed, the photographs Captain Harrison presented seemed to support the claim of “posing for licentious photographs … simulating sodomy and/or masturbation.” The question Rios had to decide, of course, was whether such poses brought discredit to the department, apart from the question of how in the Sam Hill this petite suspended cop before him today could possibly be taken seriously as a vice officer.
“Now I’ll call Mr. Currin,” Captain Harrison said.
Duly sworn, Tony Currin told Deputy Commissioner Rios on questioning by Captain Harrison that he had taken something approaching a quarter million photographs of nude women. Then he testified as to how Officer Cibella Borges became one of the pantheon.
“I just came up to her on the street and told her she would be a perfect centerfold, that she was pretty and had a woman’s body and the face of a child.
“She said she was interested and was glad that she had met me.”
That was in April of 1980, he said. Cibella Borges, then a civilian clerk working for the New York City Police Department, first auditioned for the publisher of Beaver by stripping off her clothes in his office to “make sure she had no disfiguring marks,” according to Currin.
Then there were two photo sessions. Cibella Borges earned $150 each time.
Currin completed his testimony, cool as could be, and then left the hearing room. Except for the inconvenience of a long subway ride downtown from his Upper West Side studio, a man like Tony Currin was able to walk out a door, simple as that, and resume his life and pursuit of happiness.
Officer Borges felt chilled. It was a common discomfort for her lately, since she’d lost five pounds. She could ill afford the loss. Now she weighed eighty-five. Dark lines grew deeper by the day beneath her eyes and they burned now because, try as she might, she couldn’t draw tears.
Jimmy O’Brien’s mistake, apart from the whole matter of stubborn pride in hanging onto the automobile he believed he needed, was in not varying his patterns. Anyone who made the simplest effort at surveillance of his Eastchester home would know that Jimmy O’Brien rose each workday about six o’clock, left his house by seven after the usual argument with his wife and took a bus to the Fordham section of the Bronx to pick up his altered car.
He would drive the car to his job at the warehouse on upper Madison Avenue, then drive down to the bar on Lexington and Eighty-fourth Street for the usual two or three drinks before the trip home to Eastchester, via bus from whatever spot he found to park the car in Fordham.
Royal Billings, the intrepid city marshal, figured out the routine after a while. He’d tried a few times to get into the car and duly impound the camouflaged property of the bank, but he couldn’t handle it by himself, what with all the sophisticated antitheft deterrents O’Brien had purchased for it.
Marshal Billings’ mistake was to become angered. Impounding someone’s car was just a job, not a crusade for righteousness. Besides, it was advisable policy to take it easy while taking it and Billings let that basic rule go by the wayside in this case.
Billings compounded his mistake by trusting in the sense of textbook right and wrong on the part of someone who stood to lose a car.
Billings thought he would be smart and bring along two of his buddies, both of them black, on Friday late afternoon when he knew the car he was after would be parked outside a certain bar on Lexington Avenue in the Eighties.
Just like clockwork, Jimmy O’Brien and his pals were drinking inside the bar—a bit more freely than usual, as it was Friday and payday. Every so often, as was his habit, O’Brien looked out the window to check on his car.
At one checking period, O’Brien’s beer-soaked eyes took in the view of a small black man with an incongruous five-pointed star of a badge on his shirt standing in front of his car while two younger black men worked levers and wires down between the window cracks and into the slits under the hood in order to open up the car, start it and presumably steal it.
“Holy shit! There’s a bunch of niggers stealing my car!” O’Brien hollered.
The clientele of the bar was electrified. A dozen and a half men, happy to be given the opportunity to work out a little racial hostility, marched through the door to the street behind the red-faced O’Brien, who had a large knife in hand.
O’Brien and the others from the bar made some primitive noises in the general direction of Billings and his assistants. Billings made sure everyone saw his handsome badge, then began taking a few steps back when he realized this display seemed to heat up the situation.
A man in a red beret, a leather bomber jacket and gloves, faded jeans and construction boots bounded across Lexington and seemed to be talking into a paper bag.
The man in the beret acted out of what seemed to be pure instinct. He positioned himself between O’Brien and his knife and Marshal Billings, who was unsteadily unbuttoning a coat pocket to go for the pistol he was duly authorized to carry in a concealed fashion, even though he should never have any use for it if he had a brain the size of a walnut.
“All right, gentlemen,” the man in the beret said. “Let me introduce myself.”
Slowly, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a metal chain, which secured his NYPD badge.
He looked first at Marshal Billings. “Okay, Marshal Dippity-Do, I’m the real item. Jack Clark’s the name. Stay cool now, or there’s going to be a lot of real trouble here.”
The crowd behind O’Brien started hollering. Clark smiled at them and held up his hands. Meanwhile, Clark’s fellow burglary detail cops—Sergeant Laffey and Carl Trani, along with four uniformed officers on foot patrol who received the call as well—backed up his street meditations by gently moving Billings and his two friends with the levers a block away from the barful of workmen, who missed out on the chance to tear them apart.
“Gentlemen,” Clark said to O’Brien and the others, “we have today struck a blow for civilization. You have all done yourselves proud. I thank you and my children thank you.”
The men went back into the bar, most of them confused.
Clark chuckled and crooked a finger at O’Brien, who obeyed the summons.
“Got yourself trouble, eh pal? Listen, I understand. Sorry as hell, but if that guy’s straight and he’s a marshal and all, there’s not a whole lot you and I can do about his taking your car, you know,” Clark said.
He put an arm around O’Brien’s shoulders. “You know what just happened here, though?”
O’Brien shook his head no.
“I just saved your ass from a really big problem. If you’d have knifed that guy, you’d be sitting up in the cage at the Nineteenth Precinct station house on your way to Riker’s booked for attempted murder.”
O’Brien let out a whoosh of air and began trembling.
“So look at it this way, pal. You lose your car today, but on the other hand, it’s the luckiest day of your life I happened to walk by and catch all this about to come down.”
“Well, maybe—”
“Maybe nothing, pal. I saved your ass. Now come along with me like a friendly guy, okay?”
O’Brien walked meekly alongside Clark as they made their way toward the subdued Marshal Billings, in the company of John Laffey and Carl Trani.
Billings’ papers were inspected. They seemed in order.
Clark took O’Brien’s car keys and walked back down the block toward the bar, waved to the fellows inside, then opened the car and drove it back to the marshal.
Nobody was hurt. O’Brien had not been humiliated too badly. And most people in the neighborhood were unaware that something heroic had taken place that Friday afternoon.
Clark was a little shaky when it was all over, but his recovery was, as usual, rapid.
He first telephoned Dory and reached her Sanyo.
“Hello,” said the machine. “This is Dory Smith …”
“No it isn’t,” Keenan said, wondering where she was in the apartment as she listened to her messages come in, screening out calls from people she wasn’t receiving. That included him, of course.
“… I’m not here right now …”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“… But if you leave your name, the time of your call and a number where I can reach you—”
Keenan slammed down the telephone. He started to dial his number up in Riverdale, but was interrupted. Under the circumstances, he was happy for it.
A man in a heavily stained overcoat stood in front of him. There was a line of drool sliding down one side of his mouth. But other than that, and the condition of his coat, he looked all right. His hair was combed and he held a hat in his hand. He was clean-shaven and his teeth were good.
“They sent me in to see you, Officer,” he said.
“Oh did they now? Sit right down and let me get to your concerns,” Keenan said.
The drooling man sat down on a cracked plastic chair, an orange colored thing that might have been at home in a cheap Cantonese restaurant. Keenan stood up and poked his head around a corner. The desk sergeant on duty rolled his eyes.
“I thought so,” Keenan said to no one but himself.
He sighed and returned to his desk. The drooling man was drawing a swastika on a corner of the desk top with a dull pencil. Keenan ignored it and sat down.
“What’s your name, sir?” Keenan asked.
The drooling man covered up his art work with an elbow. “Let’s just keep this confidential.”
“Suit yourself. What can I do for you besides try and guess your name?”
“I’m here to help you.”
“Rumplestiltskin!”
“What?”
“That’s it, isn’t it? Your name is Rumplestiltskin?”
“No.” The drooler looked very confused.
“Tom, Dick? Harry?”
The drooler brightened. “Yeah, it’s Harry. How did you know?”
“Hey, I’m a cop. What do you think? It’s my business to know these things.”
“Of course. Forgive me. I should have known that.”
“But there’s one thing, Harry. I don’t know what you’re doing here. It’s got to be pretty important, or you wouldn’t be wasting valuable police time. Am I right?”
“I assure you I am here on a vital mission.” The drooler crossed his legs.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“I need first to look at all your mug shots.”
“The mug shots. Why, Harry?”
Why fight it? Keenan dialed up to the PDU. Leinau answered. After telling Leinau what he had sitting in front of him, including the business of the swastika drawn on the desk top, Keenan held the telephone receiver a few inches away from his head in order to protect his eardrums.
In a few seconds, Leinau was downstairs in the little public reception room off the lobby where Keenan sat with the mysterious drooler. He crooked his finger at Keenan.
“Excuse me, Harry. You wait here while I discuss this with a colleague.”
Harry grinned and went back to work on the desk top with his pencil.
“That the nutjob?” Leinau asked, jutting his jaw toward Harry, who was hunched over Keenan’s desk.
“That’s him.”
“He come with anything? Like a bag or something?”
“Just the opposite. He came in missing something. About three or four million brain cells, I’d say.”
“These guys are easy to laugh at,” Leinau said. “But sometimes they’re not really so damn funny.”
“Well, he seems all right.”
“Yeah, all of them do at first,” Leinau said.
Leinau was there in 1973.
A slightly built Puerto Rican walked into the lobby of the Nineteenth Precinct, carrying a brown paper grocery bag.
“Yes sir?” the desk sergeant asked.
“Um, I want—”
Those were the only words anyone heard him speak. The Puerto Rican, a man of about thirty years and perhaps 120 pounds, pulled a .38 revolver from his belt and calmly aimed it at the sergeant, cocked the hammer and squeezed off a single shot which opened a gaping red hole in the sergeant’s throat. The bullet ripped through the back of the sergeant’s neck and slammed into the plaster wall behind the big desk.
The Puerto Rican dropped the weapon and screamed something in Spanish, something even the Spanish-speaking officers standing about in the lobby didn’t understand, and hoisted himself up to the rail of the desk. He began scrambling over the top as the sergeant fell backward, both his hands clasped over the hole in his throat, blood oozing through his fingers.
An officer named Gonzalez waited for the madman to make it clear over the top, then pulled at his arms and got him down onto the floor behind the desk and tried restraining him. Two other officers came running and now three of them, all big men, tried to contain the flailing Puerto Rican.
The little man on the bottom was throttled in the face and chest and stomach and still he could not be held down. One by one, he threw off the big cops. Then he rose and came out from behind the desk to a lobby full of cops with guns drawn.
His eyes were drawn to a lieutenant standing near the desk, his service revolver aimed at his face. “Freeze!” the lieutenant shouted.
The Puerto Rican rushed him, grabbed the lieutenant’s revolver as it fired, a bullet sinking into his chest. Blood rushed from the hole, but the little man kept coming.
The little man wrestled the lieutenant’s gun away from him and now he started firing the gun into the air, wild shots as he screamed in some insane emotional release. He began lowering the gun. Maybe there were two shots left. It was no time for calm counting.
A dozen police specials started firing in his direction, round after round of fire whizzing past the Puerto Rican. Incredibly, only one slug ripped through an arm. The rest of them, scores of bullets, peppered the wall behind the desk.
The inspector rushed from his office and placed his revolver against the Puerto Rican’s ribs. He emptied the gun into the Puerto Rican’s belly and still he struggled, still he had the strength to fight off the dozens of arms trying to pull at him, trying to subdue him.
The inspector withdrew the revolver, and the Puerto Rican, an eerie laugh exploding from his mouth, stumbled around the lobby in the direction of the complaint room. Several officers put a few more shots into his body, now striped red with blood and doubled over.
Finally, the Puerto Rican fell to the floor.
“Like a damn sack of potatoes,” Leinau told Keenan. “He fell right about where you’re standing now.”
Keenan looked back at Harry. His shoulders were moving to the task of writing obscene words on the desk top.
“After it was all over, they counted up the number of slugs the little guy took. Twenty-one in all. The sergeant lived, believe it or not.
“And somebody thought to take a look at what the little maniac brought with him in the bag. He had enough Molotov cocktails in there to blow this house to Jersey.”
Keenan thought for a minute. “There’s a big flag behind the desk now,” he finally said.
“Covers a lot of sins.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Keenan said. “So what’ll I do with Harry in there?”
“I’d ask him very politely to leave if I were you. Me, I got my own troubles. Some rabbi’s upstairs with a letter from a nutjob down in Texas who says he’s on his way to New York. The rabbi used to have a congregation in Texas, in the town where the letter’s postmarked.”
“What’s the letter say?”
“Oh, it’s a real statement of brotherhood, boy. It says this Hanukkah the rabbi’s going to ‘drink the blood of the malignancy in your womb.’”
“Doesn’t make any sense,” Keenan said.
“Neither did the Puerto Rican. Nobody ever did find out what his gripe was. So what’s Harry’s beef in there?”
“No beef. He says he’s here to help us.”
“Just what we need. Got to go now, Keenan.”
Keenan returned to the complaint room.
“Harry, what the hell have you been doing to my desk?”
The drooler looked up. He’d covered fully one third of Keenan’s desk with obscene words and drawings and dozens of little swastikas. “What?”
“Harry, I’m only going to tell you this once. I haven’t got time to repeat myself, so listen carefully. I need your help.”
“My colleagues have informed me that they’re after you.”
“Oh?”
“You’d better get out while the gettin’ is good, if you know what I mean.”
“Who’s after me?”
“No time to chat, Harry. You better get out of here. Run, Harry. Run, don’t walk.”
Harry drew himself up, imperiously. “You’re nuts. I will not deal with psychopaths. Good day!” Then he turned and strutted through the lobby of the precinct house. He turned around and looked at Keenan before he went through the door to the street and scowled. “Nut!”
“Well, he’s right,” Keenan said softly. He sat down behind his desk again and stared at the green telephone in front of him. Then he steeled himself and dialed home.
Every year at Christmastime, for all five seasons Ed Smith had been divorced from his second wife, he cleaned up. The effect was stunning. Ed Smith would shed his Bowery-bum ensemble and, like the metamorphosis of a butterfly, he became a man who looked as if he might have strolled in from Harvard Yard.
The tip-off to all concerned in the Nineteenth Precinct locker room was Smith’s use of the showers. That cleaning was in preparation for his visit to a men’s hair stylist on Madison Avenue, which was then followed by Smith’s visit to a Turkish bath on the Lower East Side, one of a handful in the city that wasn’t yet a homosexual xanadu.
There in the Turkish bath, Smith would spend the late afternoon and early evening getting clean down to the very last pore of all the street grime he’d built up during the year.
When he was through, he would take out clothing he wore at no other time from the suitcase he’d taken off the shelf of a closet in his tiny apartment. Pleated olive corduroy slacks, a red- and white-checked tattersall shirt, a navy-blue oiled-wool sweater, cordovan tassel loafers, a loden stadium coat, red woolen muffler and a gray tweed cap.
He wore a wristwatch, too, a Baume and Mercier. It was the gift his wife had given him on their wedding day.
When he left the Turkish bath, he felt like walking in the crisp wintery air. Besides, he had the usual thinking to do.
He walked down Third Avenue and stopped at a place called Phebe’s at Fourth Street. A mildly trendy place popular, due to its prices, with actors and writers and others of uncertain incomes. Smith sipped an Old Parr scotch, neat, for nearly an hour. The perfect gentleman. He enjoyed the private joke of it and more than one attractive woman in the place found his appearance and the attitude he exuded quite worth watching.
He left without speaking to anyone, though. And then he walked through a more familiar terrain. In less than a block, Third Avenue became the Bowery, and even though he looked the way he did, Ed Smith felt relaxed.
“Bathroom for Customers Only” was the sign in every window of every cheap all-night spoon and every dump reeking of malt that served a watery shot of whiskey for a quarter and a forty-cent mug of beer for a chaser. The other men who walked about—not men, really, so much as dark shadows that moved—carried pale green flat bottles of Thunderbird in their pockets and asked him for spare change, which he gave over.
There was a Salvation Army chorus standing beneath a streetlamp, red-faced and ragged and howling a rendition of “Silent Night.” Smith dropped a dollar into the red kettle hanging from a tripod and the soprano of the group smiled at him and nodded her head in thanks.
He saw a familiar face loitering outside the Sunshine Hotel, beds for two and a half dollars in advance. He was a tall, skinny man of perhaps forty. He and Smith had gotten drunk together one summer afternoon that year and stood outside the Sunshine punching well-dressed shoppers who had to walk by the hotel on their way to the shops that carried expensive lamps and housewares at discount prices.
Smith waved to him. The wino growled and spit at him.
Next to the Sunshine was the Bowery Mission. The 7:30 P.M. service was in full swing. The door was open and Smith could hear a nasal voice from up in the pulpit saying, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?”
Smith moved on. He didn’t have any particular quarrel with the religious, he just didn’t have much use for the type. At Grand Street, he flagged down a taxicab.
The driver looked him over carefully before stopping and admitting him into the back door.
“Don’t usually pick up many fares down here,” the driver said. “What the hell’s a guy like you doing hanging around here anyway?”
Smith could have guessed the next question.
“Say, ah … you lookin’ for some really good-quality stuff, pal? I got your Christmas trees now, you know? Little greenies that’ll put you on another planet.”
Smith didn’t say anything. He reached into the breast pocket of his stadium coat and opened his billfold for the driver. His NYPD shield had the effect of a crucifix on a vampire.
“Since it’s the holiday and all,” Smith said, “I’ll just pretend like I didn’t hear you.”
“I’ll take you wherever you want, no charge.”
“You’ll take me to Brooklyn Heights and if you high-flag it, I’ll make a complaint to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Smith gave him an address in Pineapple Street and sank back against the seat.
All the way over, he wondered if this would be the year he would actually knock on the door. Or would he get to the top of the stoop, enjoy the aroma of the wreath she always put out and then skulk away?
It wasn’t that he wanted to cause any trouble for her, or her husband. He wanted to see his daughter, sure. But that wasn’t the important thing, either.
“It’ll be a good excuse, though,” he’d told his friend Joe the other day when the two of them shared a cigarette under the Queensboro Bridge.
“What the hell’s it all about, then?” Joe had asked.
Smith didn’t know then, he didn’t know now as the taxi crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Ten minutes later, he was paying the driver, and as he stepped out into Pineapple Street, which looked like the Hollywood set used for the filming of Arsenic and Old Lace, he was no closer to the answer he’d sought for five years.
He walked up the stoop and there was the wreath. Smith raised his hand. Maybe he wouldn’t have knocked that year, either, but a car backfired in the next block and his hand fell against the wood reflexively. As long as he’d made contact, Smith reasoned, he’d give it an honest knocking.
It was quiet at night in Brooklyn. Smith always noticed that. And the Heights was perfect for his wife. But not for him. Smith didn’t approve of Brooklyn Heights any more than he approved of suburban towns. To him, it was a synthetic place, a place where people distanced themselves from reality, from any sign of how most of the people of the world lived. Here, the people wanted boutiques and designer ice-cream shops and Belgian waffle stands and news dealers who carried Paris Match. It seemed worse to Ed Smith than most of what he saw on the Upper East Side.
Smith heard footsteps from inside the house. A small light flicked on in a foyer and he saw a woman’s face peering out at him from a square of glass that ran alongside the door.
His wife! He didn’t recognize her at first. For years, he’d seen her only at a distance. Ruth looked more beautiful than the first time he’d seen her. The years washed away and Smith felt wobbly in the legs. And afraid.
The door swung open.
“Ed, my God! You look fantastic!” she said.
The two of them stood there staring at each other.
“Come in.” Ruth pulled him through the door, into the home she and her husband, Darryl, had made. She shut the door and Smith was as nervous as a cornered rat.
“Is Eve here?” he said. It was the only thing he could think of to say, his first words to this woman in years.
“No, not tonight. I’m sorry. You should have called.”
“Okay. Well, I can go—”
“No, stay. Come in with me. Sit with me for a minute.”
“Your husband.”
She laughed and took him by the arm. They walked through the foyer into the living room.
“Sit down,” she said. “And let me tell you something.”
Smith took a leather club chair, wondered if it was Darryl’s favorite. If the man had any sense, it would be.
“Eve’s visiting Darryl tonight, okay? He has his own apartment now.”
Smith’s face was full of a very stupid expression.
“Get it? It’s not working out with us any more.”