TWO

JIM TILLEY WAS LATE for the celebration, but neither Jim’s wife, Rose, nor their guests, Stanley Moodrow and Betty Haluka, were waiting to begin the party. Jim Tilley was a New York City cop. His time belonged to the NYPD and the two friends sitting comfortably in Rose and Jim’s living room were well aware of it.

“It’s cop macho,” Moodrow explained to Rose and Betty. “Sleeping in the station house. Drinking fifteen cups of coffee a day. Wearing the same clothes. Detectives brag about it in the bars. Even if you know it’s a lotta crap, you still have to do it. Backing away from a hot investigation is like backing away from a suspect on the street.”

“Actually, there isn’t any hot investigation,” Rose said. “Jim was only supposed to go in for a few hours to prepare some evidence for trial. They’ve got him doing paperwork.”

They went on this way for a long time (well into their second drink) before Jim Tilley made a weary appearance. He managed to greet his stepchildren, Lee and Jeanette, as he came down the hallway into the living room, but then sank into a chair and began to rub at reddened eyes with both fists. Rose, who would have liked a hug, settled for a quick peck on the cheek before heading into the kitchen to give a bowl of Irish stew the three-minute, microwave special. Moodrow had called for the impromptu party (the friends were close enough to call and enjoy spur of the moment parties), but he knew that Tilley would have to unburden himself before the celebration could proceed. He settled back in his chair and took a healthy pull at a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon. Maybe Tilley’s story would be a good one.

“Rose told us you were only going in for a short time,” Betty said. “If we’d have known you were going to work twelve straight hours, we’d have had our celebration tomorrow night. There’s really not that much to making a firm decision not to live together, anyway.”

Tilley looked up and shrugged. “I should have stayed on patrol. I love the gold shield, but I definitely should’ve stayed on patrol.”

“How’d you get so dirty?” Moodrow asked. “Didn’t I teach you to make the uniforms do the dirty work?”

Jim Tilley, much to Betty’s surprise, took the question seriously. “The precinct’s supposed to be cleaned every night,” he responded, “but whatever dirt there is, I was under it all afternoon.”

Moodrow looked for a sign that his friend was able to joke about his day, but Jim Tilley was obviously weary. His ordinarily handsome Irish face was pinched and anxious. He looked, to Moodrow, like an aging parish priest. “You wanna take a hit on this before you tell the story?” Moodrow continued. He offered his bourbon, but Tilley drew back in disgust, reaching instead for his wife’s bloody mary which he drained at a gulp. Betty, who’d been sipping at her own bloody mary, tried to stop him, but she was on her second drink and just a little too slow. At first Tilley had no reaction, but then a tear began to blossom in the corner of his right eye. It grew until his eye couldn’t hold it anymore, then rolled down his cheek, only to be followed by another and another and another.

“Holy shit,” he cried, desperately pressing a cocktail napkin against the stream of mucus issuing from both nostrils. “Who made this drink?”

Betty grinned. “I did. Stanley calls them ‘Bloody Bettys.’ ”

“It’s very hot. Do you always make it this hot?”

“I use cayenne and horseradish. The horseradish makes it chewy.”

“You look like Dracula,” Moodrow observed, sipping at his rejected bourbon. “In that movie with Frank Langella. Remember? His eyes got bright red before he bit people.”

Tilley had nothing to say in return, but his anxiety was slowly disappearing as the Stolichnaya (almost two ounces) made the jump from his belly to his blood stream. His eyes continued to tear, of course, but he no longer cared.

“I feel like a dumb animal beaten into submission,” he declared. “The goddamn job is like being in the army. It’s a military organization. The assholes at the top say ‘jump,’ and if you don’t get your feet off the ground, they put you in front of a firing squad.”

“This is a shock?” Moodrow asked pleasantly. “Being a cop is like being a soldier. So take a lesson. A sergeant in the army knows he can’t confront the system head-on, no matter how much he hates it. So he learns to manipulate it. He squeezes it for whatever juice it’s got to give.”

“Well, today the system squeezed me,” Tilley said. “This was supposed to be a nothing day for me and, instead, I got turned into orange juice.”

Rose came back into the room, bearing a plate of Irish stew, a fork, a napkin and an unspiced red drink that looked just like a bloody mary. “How did it get so screwed up?”

Having found a sympathetic audience (and a second drink), Tilley began to unburden himself. He and his team were near the end of a year-long attempted-murder investigation involving a crack dealer with a long string of priors. The case was straightforward: the dealer, Ernesto ‘Babu’ Fariello, identified by a witness, had been arrested an hour after the shooting with a 9mm in his belt. Ballistics, upon comparing the patterns of lands and grooves in slugs found at the scene with slugs fired through Babu’s weapon, had sealed Fariello’s fate. There was no need for eyewitnesses—they might get a conviction even if the victim failed to show up. Nor would witnesses be needed for a second group of felonies that fell into their laps: Tilley and another Detective had tossed Babu’s apartment after the arrest and discovered three and a half ounces of cocaine, along with the paraphernalia needed to turn it into crack.

“We’re gonna go before the judge tomorrow,” Tilley complained, “and the Lieutenant asked me to make sure the chain was intact, which is a sign of favor in the job…”

“What chain?” Rose asked.

“The chain of evidence. That’s what I’m leading up to. See, the only evidence that matters here is the gun.”

“What about the cocaine?”

“No gun, then no probable cause to enter the mutt’s apartment, capisch?” Tilley noted Betty Haluka’s confirming nod. Betty was a Legal Aid lawyer and knew everything there was to know about ‘probable cause.’ “Mostly it’s just a routine job. You trace the route of the evidence, from first contact into the courtroom. First contact was the witness giving us the perp’s name. This we have on a sworn statement, which I locate in the file. It’s also in the grand jury transcripts. Then me and Joe Baker took the gun off the perp and brought it into the house, so I go back in the file and find the original complaint form and the follow-ups. Both me and my partner, on the day we made the bust, recorded the circumstances in writing, like we’re supposed to. The 9mm is in the report, along with a serial number and a note that Joe is gonna take the piece down to the property clerk’s room and make a request for a laboratory examination. I go back in the file and find copies of the property clerk’s invoice and the lab request form. The ballistic report is also in the file, along with a letter of transmittal from ballistics to the property clerk at the courthouse which means it’s up to the district attorney to get the physical gun into the courtroom. Sounds perfect, right?”

“A hundred percent,” Betty assured him. “If Fariello was my client, I’d advise him to plead.”

Tilley grinned as he lifted his drink to his lips and carefully sipped. “Now there’s only one more thing I need to complete the file before I take it over to the district attorney’s office where I already have an appointment with an assistant DA. This isn’t a trial, by the way. This is a hearing on the evidence and if we don’t get the gun admitted, the perp’s lawyer will ask for a dismissal and probably get it. So, like I said, there’s only one more thing I need to complete the file and seal the mutt’s fate and that’s the original of the property clerk’s invoice, which is why I hustle on down to the property clerk’s room and ask the property clerk, Sergeant Joseph Blatt, who happens to be the only Jewish alcoholic in the NYPD, for the original. I even give him my receipt with all the numbers right on it.”

“And he can’t find it,” Moodrow said brightly. “Surprise, surprise.”

“Shit,” Jim shook his head. “You think they screw it up this bad in the real world?”

“How would we know?” Rose observed. “We never worked in the real world. We always worked for the city.”

Tilley, his question having been purely rhetorical, ignored her comment. “Well, Blatt doesn’t have the property clerk’s invoice. Those invoices are numbered consecutively and cross-referenced by complaint number and Blotto Blatt has numbers 55432 and 55434, but no 55433. At first he says he never filled out the form, that I’m crazy, so I remind him that I have the investigator’s flimsy in my hand and that he signed it and that if he doesn’t cooperate I’m gonna beat the fuck out of him.”

“Wrong move,” Moodrow observed neutrally. Nourished by the company of his friends and the bourbon in his bloodstream, he could afford to be philosophical. “I worked with Blotto Blatt for twenty-five years. The schmuck’s been pushed so far back in the job, he’s practically invisible. I got fifty bucks sayin’ that he offered to meet you any time, any place.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“Did he mean it?” Betty asked.

Tilley shrugged. He’d been a fighter, professional and amateur, for years. Everybody in the room knew he could tear Blotto Blatt to pieces. “Drunks mean everything they say, but the guy’s a wreck. On slow tours, he sneaks into the back of the property room and drinks until he’s unconscious. No, there was nothing I could do to the schmuck and by the time I figured it out, he was pissed off and wouldn’t help at all. I had to go through every piece of evidence stored in the property room with the lieutenant blowing fire down my neck like a goddamned dragon.”

“How could he blame you?” Rose Tilley laid a protective arm across her husband’s shoulders, despite the fact that Jim Tilley, finishing his second bloody mary, was feeling no pain whatsoever.

“All the lieutenant knows is that a big collar is going down the toilet and there’s no point in blaming Blotto Blatt, because Blatt is too blotto to give a damn. Which leaves me. I swear I went through everything in the goddamned precinct. Boxes, envelopes, bags…I saw shit from 1952. I saw bags of dope which aren’t even supposed to be kept in a precinct anymore. I found jewelry from burglaries that should have been turned back to the victims. And every inch of it was covered with this fine dusty powder. It came off the crap in clouds and I breathed it until my spit turned black. Then, after I was ninety percent finished and totally filthy, the lieutenant gets a call from the assistant district attorney, a lady named Connie Helprin, who told us hours ago that she’d searched through every scrap of paper in her case file and the original was not in her possession. Now she says she just found it. She says it was stuck to the back of the request for laboratory analysis. Blatt must’ve sent both over when the gun went to ballistics.”

“Did the lieutenant apologize?” Betty asked naively.

“The lieutenant said, ‘I knew it had to be somewhere.’ Then he went home.” Tilley broke out laughing and, after a brief hesitation, his friends joined in.

“I have to admit I’m ashamed,” Betty declared. “All these years I’ve been playing a game called ‘pound the paralegals.’ That’s what lawyers do when something goes wrong with the paperwork.”

“Businessmen play ‘smack the secretary,’ ” Rose chimed in. “In fact that’s the way the whole world runs. One monkey biting the other.”

“It’s not the same,” Tilley insisted. “A secretary could always quit and find another job.”

“So can a cop,” Rose quietly observed. Jim had been seriously considering the possibility of leaving the NYPD for more than a year.

“And do what?” Like all cops, Tilley believed that the meaning of the job and a cop’s relationship to that meaning, cannot be communicated to civilians. “So tell me, Betty,” he changed the subject. “What are we celebrating?”

Betty raised her glass solemnly. “After three weeks of intense cohabitation following the devastating fire in Stanley Moodrow’s apartment, Stanley Moodrow and Betty Haluka, for the sake of their loving and tender relationship, have decided to dwell apart. Stanley’s going to move out as soon as he can find a place to live.”

“Does that mean you’re officially homeless?” Rose asked.

“It’s not that funny,” Moodrow said. “Because a lot of homeless people start off with a burn-out. My building is old, like all the buildings on the Lower East Side, and rats live in the walls, like they do in most tenements. The fire marshall says one of them ate the wiring. He says they got his rat body in a plastic bag. I swear; I’m not bullshitting. His tail is curled up in a little circle. What I think I should’ve done is leave more garbage around, so the rat wouldn’t have had to eat electricity.”

“Isn’t the landlord going to fix the place up?”

“He says he’s gonna make repairs, but nothing happens.” Moodrow looked over at Rose and Betty, realizing just how much he loved these women. Rose’s face was model-perfect: small bowed mouth; dark, widely spaced eyes; jet-black hair framing soft, milky cheeks. Betty was heavier, with a strong nose and stronger jaw. Her face spoke of character, while Rose seemed every inch the spoiled princess. Of course, reality, as cops inevitably discover, rarely follows appearance. Betty had grown up in the safety of a middle-class home in Forest Hills while Rose had been severely abused for more than a decade. “I tell ya the truth, boys, I’m starting to get a little scared. I know that Betty’s right, that we’re both crazy and it’s important that we should live in different institutions, but the cost of apartments is kicking my butt. I thought I had connections, but the only cheap places (and there aren’t many of them) are in buildings that scare the crap out of me. The best thing I could find is a sublet in a yuppie co-op for thirteen hundred a month and…”

“This is called kvetching in Yiddish,” Betty interrupted, squeezing Moodrow’s hand. “Until I met Stanley, I didn’t think a Gentile could master it.”

“Damn,” Moodrow complained, “if you can’t whine to your friends, who can you whine to?”

“Are you telling me that thirteen hundred’s gonna bankrupt you?” Tilley said. “I always thought you were rich.”

“Yeah? Up till now I’ve been payin’ five bills a month, rent controlled. Now I gotta cough up thirteen. That comes out to nearly ten thousand dollars a year extra. Plus Betty’s Honda went into the tank, and I can’t get around by the subway unless I confine my life to Manhattan. You know how much they want for a new car? I’m screwin’ around with an old friend of mine who sells cars off the street, but a junker that doesn’t wanna start can make your life miserable. Also the second bedroom is a closet. It’s not big enough for the work I’m doing and I’m probably gonna have to rent an office. I thought when I got my pension, I was made for life, but everything keeps going up. Including all the crap I lost in the fire. Maybe I can live with my old furniture once the smell disappears, but I gotta replace everything else, including my wardrobe…”

“What about Social Security?” Tilley interrupted, grinning. “That should kick in any day now.”

“Stanley’s not eligible for Social Security,” Betty said.

“Stanley will never be eligible for Social Security,” Moodrow grunted. “And the next detective third-grade who brings it up is gonna have to have Stanley’s size thirteen pulled out of his ass.”

“You know what your problem is?” Tilley asked. “You’re too sensitive. You need a job.”

“You think I’m not working now? I’m out there every day.”

“Working for nothing is not the same as working,” Rose said. “It doesn’t drive you the same way.”

Betty nodded in agreement. “Ever since you stopped being a public cop and became a private cop, you’ve been working for friends and relatives. Being a crusader may be good for the soul, but it’s tough on the checkbook. You’re gonna have to take some paying jobs.”

“And what if the people who need my services can’t afford to pay me?”

“Balance it out. Take some pro bono work. I’ve been doing that all through my career.” Betty snuggled up close to her lover. It was a warm, dry April evening, a rarity in New York. The windows were open and the sounds of the Lower East Side drifted up to the two couples. One of the things Betty liked about Moodrow was the feeling of safety that went hand in hand with his presence. Nothing could hurt her—not the muggers or the rapists or dealers or the addicts. “Even a crappy lawyer can make more in private practice or in a big law office than I made at Legal Aid, but when I graduated from law school, I wanted to do something good for people. Legal Aid gave me a chance to accomplish my aim without starving.”

“Well, I don’t know about any Legal Aid for retired cops, but it looks like I’m gonna take a paying job. I got a call this afternoon from a woman named Connie Alamare. You know the Hanoverians, Jim?”

“Down on Ludlow Street, by Canal, right? The cult.”

“Yeah, that’s them.” Moodrow picked absently at a tray of provolone cheese and chunks of Genoa salami rolled in pickled peppers. “What do you hear about them?”

Tilley laughed shortly. “From a police point of view, they couldn’t be better. I don’t know how many cults we have down here. At least a dozen. Most of them are religious, like the Hare Krishnas or the Transcendental Church of Jesus. I think the Hanoverians are based on some kind of psychology, but I couldn’t swear to it. We don’t hear much about them down in the Seven.”

“That’s because they don’t recruit on the street. Most of the members are middle class. They come to the Hanoverians for therapy and get sucked in. At least that’s what Connie Alamare claims. She says her daughter, Florence, moved into the commune ten years ago, then cut off relations with the family except for an occasional postcard. Connie Alamare kept trying to reach her daughter, but there was nothing until about three years ago. Florence sent Connie a snapshot of a son Connie didn’t know about. The kid was about two, and Connie started hoping for a reconciliation. Then the daughter disappeared altogether until six weeks ago when she was found in a lot in the Bronx. She apparently suffered some kind of a stroke and doesn’t communicate. Now Connie wants to find out what happened. She says she blames this cult for her daughter’s condition and she wants revenge and custody of her grandson. She also says she doesn’t care what it costs.”

“Stanley, you dog,” Betty cried, “you didn’t tell me about this.”

“I was savin’ it for a surprise.”

“I know who the Hanoverians are,” Rose said. “I remember an article in the Voice about the Hanoverians. They were involved in a custody battle and I think there were accusations about threats of violence.”

“I’m surprised to hear that,” Jim said, “because they have a reputation for being clean. There’s more drugs in some of the communes down here than on the street, but the Hanoverians are supposed to be above that.”

Moodrow broke in with a smile. “Isn’t it interesting that I spent thirty-five years working in this precinct, Rose has been living here for more than a decade, Jim’s currently a detective in the Seven, but none of us knows a goddamned thing about a commune with at least two hundred people in it? Now I have another surprise. Ten minutes after I hang up on Connie Alamare, I get a call from Franklyn Goobe.”

“The chief of detectives?” Tilley whistled his appreciation. Goobe’s nickname, in the job, was ‘Silk of All Silks.’ He was the ultimate unapproachable, as far removed from the main ranks of detectives as General Eisenhower from G.I. Joe.

“Yeah,” Moodrow responded nonchalantly. “That’s the way he is now, but I knew Goobe when he was coming up in the job. We never got along. I coulda lived on his monthly bill for hair spray. I think he would’ve liked to bust me back to patrol, but he was a practical man, like all politicians. He knew I was good and he liked to use me when he had business in the Seven, so he settled for making my life miserable in little ways. Anybody want another drink?”

Moodrow, holding his empty glass aloft, started to get up, but Rose pressed him back into the sofa. “Stay put,” she ordered, “and finish the story.”

“Well, apparently the cops did some kind of investigation into Florence Alamare’s physical condition without turning anything up. The suits are claiming natural causes. A seizure or something like that, but the old lady won’t let it rest. She’s got a lot of money and she used her lawyer to climb through the ranks until she found the ultimate buck-stopper, Franklyn Goobe. Then she started calling him every day, busting his chops, until he couldn’t take it anymore. That’s what he said. He called up to congratulate me on my new client and to give me the name of some hairbag in the Four One who’s supposed to help me ‘coordinate’ the investigation.”

Nobody said anything for a minute, then Jim Tilley spoke for all of them. “Stanley, are you sure you wanna get involved in this?”

“What am I gonna do? I gotta eat, right? I gotta pay the rent. And the insurance on the car. And all the rest of it. What I’m saying is for the kind of money she’s willing to pay, I at least have to go talk to her.”