TILLEY WOKE UP EARLY the next morning and went for what he now thought of as a “cleansing” run. It was hot and rainy, a perfect combination for a jogger—the steady drizzle cooled without chilling and he ran his usual three miles in twenty-two minutes. He didn’t think very much about what he would have to do that night. His mind kept returning to Rose in her hospital bed, to Levander beating her, stabbing her. There’s a reality to being a cop that parallels the feelings of any hunter after his prey. That the prey consists entirely of criminals, which obliges them to undertake the hunt, only serves to heighten the pleasures of the stalk, especially as the end approaches. That end was as far as Jim Tilley’s imagination could stretch and when he arrived home, he was mentally prepared for whatever the night would bring.
Moodrow wanted Tilley to go into the men’s shelter on Lexington Avenue, an enormous armory that takes up an entire square block between 24th and 25th Streets. Once inside, he would locate and remove a small-time pusher without showing a badge or a gun.
To say that New York’s shelters are places of violence is to oversimplify the case by plenty. But it is a fact that on freezing cold nights many of the city’s homeless have to be dragged into the shelters against their will, because the Mayor decided, some time ago, that force is preferable to grainy photos of frozen bodies in the tabloids. The homeless, for their part, usually explain their reluctance to accept a warm bed by insisting the dangers inside the shelter are more real than the weather outside; even when the temperature outside is ten degrees; even when the wind is blowing.
Tilley should have been afraid, like any fighter (or soldier, for that matter) going into combat. New York City’s system of projects, welfare hotels and shelters is predicated on the belief that everyone is entitled to a bed. Literally. Every single person who does not have a place to sleep, must be given a bed.
An apartment is the desired end, of course, and the low income housing projects stand at the top of the ladder, but the housing shortage precludes the possibility of quick placement in a project. Next come the city-owned tenements, abandoned by their owners and seized by the city for back taxes. They are usually in far worse condition than project apartments, but they are, at least, homes: permanent, located in residential neighborhoods and close to schools and shopping. The hotels are the next step down. Although some Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels still exist to serve homeless adults, most of the welfare hotels are reserved for families with dependent children. By political definition, they are temporary. But only if you define “temporary” as including stays of eighteen months and longer.
Still, the hotels, with their allocation of one family to one room, are far better than the shelters which, at best, have dormitory-style living conditions. The system was originally designed so that families wouldn’t have to spend more than a few nights in shelters, but just as there’s a shortage of apartments, there are not enough hotel rooms to go around either, and many families are put up at special “family” shelters for weeks at a time.
But family shelters are still not the bottom. Not even close to it. In family shelters, despite the degradation, there still remains a sense of something to protect, even if it’s only the children. At the absolute bottom of the system are all-male and all-female shelters for adults who have no place to sleep. Typically, they consist of a single, large room, often with a concrete floor, in which hundreds of numbered beds have been arranged in neat rows, like vegetables in a farmer’s field. Into these beds are sent New York’s poorest; its most crazy; its most violent; its most addicted. No one can be turned away. Mumblers, drooling over foul, unwashed clothing, sleep next to ex-convicts with less tolerance for odor than a hawk for a rat. Radios blare. Drugs are smoked, snorted and shot. Humans shower and eat. Sex is given and taken. All under the careful scrutiny of a security staff paid so little as to guarantee corruption as surely as the wages of the Tijuana cop sanctify the giving and taking of bribes.
This is why many homeless people prefer the comfort of concrete to the clean sheets of the shelters. But, just as there are people in our society who thrive in jail, there are people, men and women, who have come to accept life in the shelters, who live there as if in extended families, separating into factions and competing for the crumbs—dope, food, a particular bed next to a particular lover—like convicts struggling over prison pleasures.
That’s where Tilley was going to go. In with those people. The cliché is that all prizefighters are scared, at one time or another. But the only thing that ever scared Jim Tilley was losing. At that moment, coming up 88th Street, he couldn’t wait to get started and he went up the steps to his apartment like Rocky on that monument in Philadelphia. Fuck you, Pinky Mitchell. Here I come. Rose loves me, you bastard, and I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ ass.
Susanna was making breakfast when he entered his apartment. The kids were sitting together on the couch in the living room, watching cartoons.
“How are they doing?” Tilley asked his mother.
“They sit together whenever they’re awake. I don’t think they believe us. About Rose being all right.”
Tilley went to the phone in his bedroom, called St. Vincent’s, asked for the paging operator and identified himself as a NYPD detective. Then he asked for Doctor Samuel Morris. The operator, apparently unimpressed, put him on hold for fifteen minutes before Samuel Morris came on the line, his voice dripping exhaustion.
“This is Detective Tilley,” Tilley said, “calling about Rose Carillo. You said I should call you.” He could feel his breath catch in his throat as he waited for the doctor to speak.
“I saw her not more than ten minutes ago. She’s okay. Running a little fever, but we expected that.”
“Listen, Doctor, I have a problem with her children. I can’t really convince them she’s all right. I don’t know the kids real well and they don’t trust me. Is there any way they could see her?”
“I think you should let that go for a few days. Her face is very swollen and she’d probably frighten them. But, if she’s awake, I could have her call them. Give me the number and I’ll go to work on it.”
“You know something, Morris?” Tilley said. “You’re a goddamn miracle.”
“Fuck you, too, pal.”
Ten minutes later the phone rang and a groggy Rose Carillo managed to speak to her children. Though she meant to reassure them, her advice was very practical. “I did a very dumb thing,” she told each in turn. “I was safe with Jim and Susanna and I left anyway. Don’t make the same mistake. Stay where you are no matter what. Now I’m safe again and I won’t leave until I can come back to you. But I’ll call you everyday to let you know that I’m all right.”
The children listened in silence, only Jeanette asking a simple question: “Did Daddy do this to you?”
Rose answered, “Yes,” then began to drift away. Finally a nurse came on and explained to the children about sleep helping their mother to get better.
Susanna took the phone and, very gently, hung it up. The children looked at each other, then went back to the couch and their cartoon, still sitting next to each other, still obedient to the only hope in their lives—Rose Carillo.
By three o’clock, too excited to stay away, Tilley was walking up to Moodrow’s door. He knocked loudly (the bell didn’t work) and waited a few minutes. Nothing. This didn’t mean, of course, that no one was home. Moodrow, who, when awake, appeared to watch everything, fell into utter oblivion when he slept. That was one of the reasons he’d given Tilley a set of keys. And also the reason why Tilley worked the keys quietly and gently in the lock. He was early and he didn’t see any reason to wake up his partner.
But he was just as glad to hear the shower running in the bathroom down the hall. He wasn’t off the roller coaster, by any means, but he was growing more used to its sudden twists and turns. Studying Moodrow’s information would give him an outlet for his excess energy and he started to call to his partner when the bathroom door opened and a woman walked out. She was nude and only partially dry and she didn’t notice Tilley at the end of the hall. In an instant, he understood the pleasures of the voyeur. Despite the sense of himself as a peeping Tom (and despite his feelings about Rose) he experienced that sudden flush in the crotch which precludes taking any steps to turn the situation off.
She was short and heavy-set, though not actually fat, with strong, heavy thighs, a thick triangle of jet-black pubic hair and large, sloping breasts. That his attention did not, at first, go to her face and her features indicates, perhaps, a lack of social consciousness. That he spent almost a full minute trying to see the top of her pussy through that black forest, convicts him of the charge. She was young, no more than twenty-five, and for the life of him, he couldn’t see how Moodrow managed to get her into his apartment. He even considered the possibility that she was some sort of relative, in which case he was going to look awful bad if Moodrow came out and found him staring at her. Nevertheless, he was too fascinated (and too excited) to step away. He did, however, finally manage to raise his eyes far enough to get a good look at her features. It was the waitress from the Lip Cafe. Her inky hair and the wet platinum spikes, which now lay flat against the sides of her head, left no doubt.
“Jesus Christ,” Tilley said involuntarily.
She drew a quick breath, then recognized him. Letting the towel casually fall to cover her body, she stared at him without blinking. “You see anything you like?”
“I saw everything I like,” he answered truthfully.
“Everything?” She cocked an eyebrow, turned her back and began to walk toward the bedroom. “Moodrow’ll be back in a few minutes.” Her large, round ass rose and fell with each step. Tilley could almost feel its warmth on his fingertips. At the doorway, she turned back to him and giggled. “I love guns,” she said. “I love them. How come your partner has so many guns?”
Before Tilley could move, she was inside and he heard the door close, firmly. He wandered into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. On the table, on a large piece of white oaktag paper, was a detailed floor plan of the Lexington Avenue armory. And a note which read: “Out bagel hunting. Be back in fifteen minutes. Say hello to Gretchen.”
Ten seconds later he was lost in the floorplan. The Lexington Avenue armory, now used entirely as a men’s emergency shelter, is really one large (4,000+ square feet) room, holding six hundred beds on its concrete floor with small areas on each side of the building partitioned off for special use. Moodrow’s drawing indicated a large security force in a twenty-foot, north-south corridor by the main entrance. On the south, a stairway led to a second floor of offices, the headquarters for Social Services. On the north was a dayroom, separated from the sleeping area by a wall, with a dozen long tables and benches. In the back, on the western wall, were the toilets, showers and sinks. The center, the heart of the building, was the real home for the homeless. A concrete-floored room with a curved, black ceiling hanging forty feet above. It held an ocean of beds with six security desks scattered against the outer walls.
“So what’s ya name?”
She came upon him so suddenly, he answered without thinking: “Tilley.” Not Detective Tilley, or Jim Tilley. He had never, to his knowledge, identified himself with his last name before.
“I’m Gretchen,” she said, extending a hand. Her spikes, he noticed, now stood straight and sparkled with glitter. “Pleased to meet you.”
He took her hand and shook it, then asked, as casually as he could manage, “Have you known Moodrow long?” Moodrow never talked about himself. Tilley didn’t know, for instance, if Moodrow had any family in the neighborhood or what he did with his time off.
“Everybody knows Moodrow,” she replied, somewhat ambiguously. “He’s like Mr. Purple. You know that guy who used to get horseshit from the park and bring it to his garden? Then they took down his garden and built a building.” She peered intently into Tilley’s eyes. “Mr. Purple. You know who I’m talking about?”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t been on the Lower East Side long. Anyway, that’s not what I meant about Moodrow.”
“So what’d you mean?”
Tilley looked at her for a moment. There was a nasty edge to her voice, despite a naive midwestern twang. He thought of Rose and the comparison had him instantly annoyed. “What are you gonna do, Gretchen, bust my balls? This ain’t the right time.”
She gave him a “who cares” shrug and turned away. “If you wanted to know how long I’ve been fucking him, you should have asked me.”
Two minutes later, she and her attitude were both gone. Five minutes later, Moodrow walked in. He was whistling.
“Hey, Jimmy. How’s Rose feeling today?”
“She’s all right. You don’t seem too concerned, though.”
“That’s because I called St. Vincent’s about an hour ago. I talked to the cop in charge of her security. He says she’s okay. He’s seen much worse.”
“Well, I just wanna know if it hurt.”
“What hurt?” Moodrow’s perplexed look pleased his partner immensely.
“When you played that game with your .38.”
He sat in the chair and giggled. “Yeah, it hurt.”
“How come you’re so sure?”
“Cause we took turns. You want a bagel?”
Tilley was hungrier than he thought and went through two hot onion bagels, spread with lox and cream cheese, while Moodrow outlined the campaign.
“You checked out this floorplan?” He swept his hand across the oaktag, scattering bagel crumbs and specks of dried onion on the floor. Tilley nodded, mouth full, and Moodrow went on. “The only thing you don’t know is that the area under the officers on the second floor is for storage. Blankets, linen, mattresses, tables, chairs. My understanding is that the area’s big enough to hide in, but crammed full of supplies.
“This front desk, here, is where security operates. What they try to do is control the situation by keeping out weapons and people who don’t belong. They do maintain a presence inside the big room, but they try to keep out of the way of the…fuck, I don’t know what to call them. My man says they’re all criminals, but he can’t treat them like criminals. He only intervenes in cases of violence. As far as drugs and sex goes, he don’t wanna know about it. His name’s Spender Crawford and he spent eight out of the last eleven years in the joint. He stays at an SRO hotel in Brownsville that he says makes the shelters look like nursery school.
“Anyways, whether security’s on the take or not, all the drugs and sometimes sex are done in the back, by the toilets and showers, and security don’t go in there. Deliberately don’t go in there so’s the…” He stopped for a second time, then chose the word ordinarily used to describe the mass of humans caged in a prison. “So the ‘population’ can have a place to get off. The day room, on the north wall, is used for meals and card games, a place for the men to hang out before they go to sleep.”
Moodrow went on for a few moments, describing details of the day room and the social services floor, and it struck Tilley, his mouth stuffed with food, that Moodrow was proceeding as if Tilley’s cooperation was understood. This was the plan—Stanley Moodrow’s plan—and Tilley was the hired gun who’d carry it out. Then Jim Tilley realized he didn’t give a shit about Moodrow’s presumptions and, impatient, interrupted him. “Can it be done?” he asked.
“Anything can be done,” he said, evenly.
“By who?”
Moodrow looked shocked, but Tilley only smiled and stuffed even more of the bagel into his face. He said, “Tell me the meat of it. Tell me how it can be done.” It came out sounding like a fart underwater. Tilley actually sprayed him with bits of cream cheese, but Moodrow, who knew exactly what he wanted, went on eagerly.
“Jimmy, it’s gonna be so fucking simple, you’re not gonna believe it. You’re gonna wish it was harder. You remember what I said about security? Mostly all their force is up front, by the main entrance. That’s because all the other doors, except for the fire doors, are locked. There’s a security guard assigned to the fire doors in the day room, but there’s no security on the western end, by the showers and toilets. Still, the population almost never fucks with those doors because they set off an alarm when you open them and that pisses off security enough so they put a man by the showers for two or three days. Which is bad for business, right?
“So what’re we talking about? A corridor, maybe twenty feet wide, with toilets, showers and sinks running from one end of the building to the other. This is where Pinky Mitchell works. He’s there every night, selling ten dollar bags of junk for which he pays nine dollars. And right down in this corner, by the showers, is a fire door that leads to an alleyway running along the western edge of the armory. You’re gonna go inside around six. Fake it so they give you a bed, which shouldn’t be hard because it’s summer and there’s always extra beds in the summer. Ten o’clock, I’ll be out in that alleyway. You take little Pinky Mitchell and push him through the door. The junkie weighs maybe a hundred twenty pounds and on top of that I got it from Spender that the corner by that fire door is very quiet. Very secluded. The reason being that anyone stupid enough to wander that far away from the population is subject to being raped by aggressive bi-sexuals who like to hurt as much as they like to fuck.”
“Sounds like jail,” Tilley said. “Sounds like prison.”
Moodrow stopped for a moment. He went to the stove and put up water for coffee. “Well, they got metal detectors at the front entrance. That ain’t to keep out the pacifists.”
“What if Mitchell don’t show?”
“Once you’re registered, you can come and go as you please. There’s a coffee shop on 28th and Lex. If it’s a no-go, come up there and meet me. I’ll hang around until a quarter of ten. Even if you think it’s a go and it don’t work out, I’ll come back at eleven. After that, it’s lights out. Now I got a mug shot of Pinky Mitchell and a walking description. Study it good. You go in at six.”