Bernie calmed down as we entered the law firm’s reception area on the thirty-seventh floor, where we were greeted by Caty Duffy’s supervisor, Yolanda Bellow, an attractive African-American woman. Before Bernie could break the bad news, she said that Frank had already informed everyone of Caty’s untimely passing. Bernie must’ve sensed something was not quite right, because he immediately went to work on her, asking endless questions about the victim: the type of clothes she wore, conversations she’d had that day. Did she take any mysterious breaks? A lot of sick days? How did she look? Did she wear sleeveless shirts? Drink a lot of cranberry juice? Any unusual pills? Any indication of a secret life? I knew he was still hopeful that the poor woman was a weekend junkie, and a closet hooker.
Finally Bernie asked if he could check out Caty’s desk.
Yolanda led us to Caty’s work station. After she left, a red haired woman seated nearby watched intently as Bernie went through Caty’s desk drawers. Ketchup packs, Kleenex, lip gloss, cinnamon-flavored gum, nothing out of the ordinary. When he took out the drawers and inspected their undersides, I walked over to the redhead.
“What’s he looking for?”
“Anything that might help us solve her murder.”
“I just can’t believe this happened,” she said, sipping a cup of coffee.
“Were you friends with Caty?”
“Not really friends, but friendly.”
“Do you know anyone who was close with Caty?”
She looked around. “Vince Reynolds in accounting,” she said in a low tone, then picked up a sheet of paper and walked away.
By now Bernie had finished searching Caty’s work station, so I reported my conversation to him and we went back to reception and asked for Mr. Reynolds in accounting.
“Accounting is down on fifteen.”
We took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, where the doors opened almost on top of the receptionist’s desk. Bernie asked for Vince Reynolds.
“Have a seat,” the receptionist said, indicating a waiting area then picking up the phone.
“Do me a favor and let me talk to him alone,” Bernie said to me.
“Why?”
“’Cause if he was having an affair with Caty, he’d probably be more inclined to open up with another guy.”
About five minutes passed before a dashing type in a nice suit emerged. He was probably forty, but could pass for ten years younger.
“Vince?” Bernie rose and took a couple of steps away from me. I heard them talking quietly back and forth for a while.
I watched Vince closely as he was talking to Bernie. I could see him twisting his lips and contracting his face. as if trying to knot up his tear ducts. Bernie whispered into his ear. He answered most of the questions simply with a nod. Bernie thanked him and, after staring at the carpet for a moment, his hands sunk in his pockets, Vince returned to his cubicle in the back.
“Yep,” he said when we were back in the elevator.
“Yep what?”
“Twice a week after work at the King’s Court Hotel.”
“Twice a week!” I realized what he was talking about. “Wow! Who paid?” The place wasn’t cheap.
“The room was on a corporate account and they used it when it was available,” Bernie said. “He said the husband didn’t know, which leads me to wonder if he didn’t find out and O.J. her himself.”
“So I guess she stayed in the hotel after Vinny left that day,” I said.
“Vince said he had to leave to meet his wife, and Caty would routinely take a shower while waiting until it was time to catch the bus to Union City.”
“Maybe Vin’s wife did it.”
“Sure, maybe we have an imitator imitating the imitator,” Bernie kidded, apparently mocking his earlier theory that two of the killings were by a different murderer.
As we reached the street and started walking among the crowds, I asked, “So do you think the killer knew either of them?”
“No,” he said. “I think he found an empty room in the hotel he could gain access to, then he waited for the first shapely woman who passed by and that just happened to be Caty.”
“He never did that before.”
“You know, I’m beginning to think it’s all the work of one killer after all. But whoever it is, he probably heard the news conference like everyone else and just figured, hey, if no blonde hookers are available I’ll just grab anyone,” Bernie hypothesized. “Most of these guys have a victim profile, but they can also be incredible opportunists.”
As we were heading toward Eighth Avenue on Forty-first, we spotted a guy in a bright red day-glo vest who was touching a pencil-like object to each lamppost he passed.
“Excuse me,” Bernie said, flashing his badge, “but what the fuck are you doing?”
“This is an AC locater,” the man said, holding up the small wand. “I work for Con Ed, and we’re checking for live lampposts ’cause of that woman who just died downtown.”
A graduate student had recently been electrocuted along with her dog by a live junction box in the East Village. I remembered that her dog had been electrocuted first; she died trying to rescue him.
“Were you around here two days ago?” Bernie asked.
“I’ve been checking all the lampposts in this whole area the past two days.”
Bernie took out a photo of Caty Duffy’s face, taken at the morgue, and showed it to the guy. “You don’t remember seeing her?”
“Are you kidding,” the worker replied with a grin.
“She might’ve been fighting with someone,” I added. “She might’ve screamed.”
“If I saw that, I would’ve helped her,” he said.
“How about this guy?” Bernie asked, taking out a mug shot of Nessun O’Flaherty.
“You know what,” said the worker. “I actually do remember this clown. He was pissing against a lamppost on Ninth Avenue as I was trying to get a reading.”
“You’re sure it was him?”
“Yeah, and when I told him the post could be live, he said that’d be the only buzz he could get without paying a hooker.”
“He actually said hooker?”
“Yeah.”
It hardly seemed like much to go on, but Bernie pointed out that O’Flaherty’s SRO was only a few blocks from the crime scene and suggested we pay him a surprise visit.
“And charge him with public urination?”
Bernie didn’t reply.
I asked him, “Where’d you get that photo of Caty?” I didn’t know he had visited the morgue that day.
“Another great weapon Bert left me, in addition to his collection of bow ties, was the simple Boy Scout slogan: Be prepared.”
“You really miss him, don’t you?”
“It was kinda like having your mother for a partner. Nothing was ever good enough. But, in fairness, he would’ve had this case closed by now.”
It was freezing cold inside O’Flaherty’s fleabag hotel. Before he got to the clerk’s little office, I stopped Bernie and asked him what we were doing there.
“Call it intuition.” He used that secret word. “I just feel like something’s up.”
“Based on what?” I asked. “We have no new evidence. We were up here already with his PO, when we could’ve tossed his room and you didn’t want to. So isn’t this just a waste of time? Don’t we need to talk to Frank Duffy?”
Bernie stared at me. “Last I checked, I’m in charge.”
He stepped up and asked Hal, the ex-cop clerk, if he had seen the convicted sex offender early last night, around the time of Caty’s murder.
“Nope. He’s on a binge right now, so he might’ve been in his room.”
“A drinking binge?”
“Yeah. I saw him with a gallon-size plastic bottle of scotch yesterday morning.”
“When did this binge start?”
“Probably yesterday, but who knows?”
“Is he up there now?”
“No, I saw him leave about ten minutes ago.”
“What’s up with the heat?” I asked shivering. It was even colder in the building than outside. “Is the boiler broken?”
“No, it’s just a little slow in warming up.” Inside Hal’s little booth a small space heater was churning at his feet.
“I want to grab him where he feels the most vulnerable. Let the little roach feel like he has nowhere to crawl,” Bernie explained to me. Turning to Hal, he asked, “Mind if we wait in the hallway in front of his room?”
“Tell you what,” said the clerk, reaching behind him. “This is the key to the room right before his. It’s a little warmer in there.”
“Great, thanks,” Bernie said taking it.
We’d just missed the elevator, which was as slow as the geriatrics who used it, so we took the stairs. As we climbed, I suggested that if Caty was killed last night and O’Flaherty was drunk all yesterday, there was no way he would’ve been physically able to commit the murder, especially if he didn’t drug her first.
“Trust me,” Bernie responded, “alcohol affects different people differently. Most get horny and lazy, but there are a few who get angry and energized.”
When we reached the top floor, Bernie listened outside O’Flaherty’s door for a minute, then he knocked. No answer. He tried the door and it opened. He looked inside briefly, then closed it again quickly.
“I’m not going to blow this on some technicality,” he said, and we went down the hall to the room Hal had offered us. Inside was a stripped, stained mattress on a heavy metal frame. An old end table held a clunky intercom phone. It didn’t feel any warmer in the room than it did in the hallway.
As we sat there, I realized that if some mystical revelation were ever to occur, this had to be the time and place for it. I focused on my breathing and tried to evict my ego from the random thoughts that buzzed through my head. Soon only one image remained: the postcard of the Diana statue on O’Flaherty’s wall. I didn’t know why I had envisioned the image, but why had he taped the postcard up in the first place? What Nessun had suggested to me at the station—and it struck me as incredibly odd—was the notion that the killer had targeted a certain kind of victim entirely with the hope of luring me out. It made me wonder if he hadn’t fashioned this clue just for me. Being a cop, I’m kind of a warrior, I guess, but how could he have known what else I had in common with Diana?
“Hey!” I suddenly heard, “You sound like a pug with a head cold!”
“Sorry.” I guess my Pranayama, my breath of fire, had gotten too loud and intense. I closed my eyes, breathed through my mouth, and stopped wondering about O’Flaherty and the goddess Diana, and myself.
“When they built the Towers,” Bernie broke in, “they also put up all these medium-size buildings around them, so there was some architectural transition between the colossal skyscrapers and the rest of the neighborhood,” Bernie said. “Now that the Towers are gone, those transitional buildings make no damn sense.”
Looking out the window, I saw what had sparked his comment. Looking eastward over the snow-encrusted lots whose buildings had recently been leveled, behind a turn-of-the-century theater that was being retrofitted as a multiplex, above the Disney store and Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, there was a clear view of some of the skyscrapers that made up the new Times Square complex.
“Bernie, I wanted to tell you that my assignment’s almost over and—”
“What was the address of Caty’s office building again?” he interrupted, staring transfixed at the new high-rises.
“Three Times Square.”
“And that was on the northeast corner, right?”
“Yeah, the one with the flyswatter roof,” I recycled his joke.
“What did that security guard say?” he asked urgently. “How were those buildings addressed?”
“Christ! I think Number One is the Times Tower, the old skyscraper with the Zipper. The Reuter’s Building on the northwest corner is Number Three. Number Four on the northeast corner is the Condé Nast Building. I think Number Five is southwest. Number Seven is the southeast one.”
“What about Number Two?” he asked with a slight twitch of his right eye.
“I think he said that was a couple of blocks further up.”
Bernie dug into his coat pocket, pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages, then asked, “What about numbers Eight and Nine?”
“Fuck!” Bernie said, and started quickly scribbling something into his book. When he was done, he looked at what he had written and gasped: “That’s why he cuts their heads off! ’Cause Number One was below the shoulders and Two is a few blocks up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The bodies are on their backs facing north. On the vic’s right shoulder is always the number three. On the left is the number four, on the right leg is five, on the left is six.”
“You’re saying the numbers correspond to the addresses of the buildings?”
“Yes! It’s got to be O’Flaherty. Those new buildings signify the destruction of his old neighborhood. They represent everything he hates.”
“That’s a bit of a stretch.”
“Want to know what’s a stretch? Those clunky bracelets he puts on their left wrists? They’re meant to resemble those flyswatters on the top of the Condé Nast Building,” he pointed out the window. “And the cards and crap he sticks in their right hand is that surfboard thing on the Reuters Building.”
“Still, even if the killer is mimicking Times Square, that still doesn’t prove O’Flaherty did it. Most of the suspects lived around here.”
Bernie simply planted himself at the window and stared eerily out. I folded my arms together, sat in silence, and watched as the afternoon sky darkened.
“There were seven buildings in the World Trade Center complex too,” he finally said, clearly still obsessed by his months of cleanup at Ground Zero.
“O’Flaherty might not even come back until tomorrow.” I rubbed my freezing hands together.
Bernie opened his cellphone and punched in a speed-dial number.
“Alex,” he said. “Listen, we’re waiting for O’Flaherty at his SRO,” Pause. “Grab a pen.” Pause. “On my desk is Nessun O’Flaherty’s file. He was originally arrested way back on some kind of statutory rape charge. Call his tail—”
“Danny Rasdale,” I prompted.
“Right, call Rasdale and find out who O’Flaherty’s original vic was—who he raped twenty years ago. In fact, check if she still lives here and, if so, bring her in for an interview.” He paused while Alex was speaking, but then yelled impatiently. “Call right the fuck now! ’Cause I think we caught a break here, but we have to move quick. Find out where she is. Pronto. I’ll be there with him soon.”
Bernie flipped off his phone and sat on the bed, leaning against the wall while I stared out the window. Exhaling on the cold, filthy glass, I wrote the name Gladyss Holden on it. As I wiped it off, I noticed movement below. In the adjacent lot, I saw a big, hairy rat slowly make its way across the hardened crust of snow toward some distant crack. I had a sudden realization that I hadn’t seen rats in a while. The city really had made progress in eliminating undesirables. For a moment, I was nostalgic for the urban wilderness. The rat seemed vaguely bucolic, more like an evicted squirrel or an endangered groundhog.
When a large truck sped up Eighth Avenue, we could feel the old building shake.
“If there’s an earthquake, you’re supposed to stand in a doorway, right?” Bernie tried for some small talk.
“I guess, but I’m more worried about freezing to death.”
“I can’t stop wondering what it must’ve been like for them,” he said quietly. “Those poor bastards didn’t even have time to . . . If this building started to collapse, I’d jump out the window.”
“You wouldn’t survive the fall.”
“But at least they’d have my corpse to bury. When I think of the rotting crap we found.” He nodded sadly. “Without a lab test we couldn’t be sure if they were someone’s remains or their lunch. And poor Bert, having to go through that in his condition.”
“You mean with cancer.”
“It wasn’t cancer,” he said softly. “And everyone knew it wasn’t cancer.”
Bernie didn’t say what it was, but I’d figured it out when I was told his young wife Juanita had died of AIDS.
I breathed into my cupped palms, trying to warm them up. A view of Times Square from a distant window hardly seemed like a smoking gun, even if the carved numbers did line up. As the icy minutes grew colder, I warmed myself with thoughts of Noel, wondering if he might be thinking of me while he was in sunny LA.
When I was awakened from my daydream by Bernie’s snoring, I realized I was shivering uncontrollably. I suddenly felt bad for the cub reporter Bernie had stuck in the back of the patrol car. It wasn’t even five o’clock and the sky was black as charcoal.
“I’m fucking freezing.” I said, rising to my numb feet. “There’s a deli on the next block. Want a coffee?”
“Light and sweet,” he mumbled without opening his eyes.
I peeked out the door. An old lady was standing there in a night-gown like a frozen ghost. As I walked past her, I realized she was leaning against the radiator, which emitted a faint hiss as if letting out its dying breath.
“You should call the Heat Hotline and complain,” I suggested, though I don’t think she heard me. “You can call 311 and they’ll put you through.”
I took the stairs down, dashed through the lobby and out to the well-heated corner deli, where I got on the end of a long line. I was grateful that it moved slowly enough for me to get my core temperature back up. When it was my turn I ordered two cups of coffee, and in another minute I was back in the meat-locker lobby holding the burning hot brown bag. Seniors were standing around and the clerk was watching his portable TV as I raced through.
When the dented elevator door opened, I patiently waited as the frozen lady who had been holding onto the radiator slowly exited. Suddenly a violent force slammed into me, throwing me forward. As I fell to the floor, I whacked my forehead against the back wall of the elevator. The hot coffee, crushed under my chest, scalded me from my belly to my neck. As I struggled to get up, my assailant jumped on my back. Grabbing my hair he tried to slam my head against the floor. The elevator doors slid shut with him on top of me.
My first instinct was to go for my pistol, but with his weight on top of me I was unable to grab it.
“My fucking knee hasn’t been the same since you hit me, you bitch!”
A sharp punch to my right kidney was followed by a succession of blows. I shoved my hand down and grabbed my piece from its holster.
Sensing what I was doing, O’Flaherty flopped forward, his chest pressed down on my back. His hands reached under my arms just as my elbow was pulling it up. Feeling his hands dig in under me, I shoved my piece down below my waist, so it was out of his reach. Pissed that he couldn’t snatch the grip, he shoved his hands further down into my underwear.
“You motherfucker!”
“Fuck you, cunt!” he screamed back. Unable to reach any farther, his cracked yellow claws dug into my belly like a wild animal’s. Finally he grabbed my hips and started dry-humping my ass.
“You fucking cocksucker!” I shouted as I reached down and found the top of my Glock. As he frantically ground his loins into my buttocks, I slowly worked the gun up between my flattened body and the filthy, wet elevator floor.
Just as I pulled it up, he grabbed hold of it and tried to yank it from my hand. Just as he succeeded, I pushed the release lever, popping the ammo clip out of the bottom. But there was still one bullet left in the chamber.
Breathing deeply and conjuring up what had to be Kundalini strength, I hoisted his bucking ass up in the air just as he squeezed the trigger. My head slammed against the floor as the shot went off. Feeling the burning sensation, I feared I had been hit.
“Fuck!” he cursed as he collapsed on top of me. Angrily he shoved the hot muzzle of my pistol hard into the back of my skull and pulled the trigger again. Click. I lost bladder control.
“Cocksucker!”
I frantically twisted to my side and finally knocked him off me. As we rolled around on the coffee-drenched floor, he cursed at me nonstop. Suddenly a blow hit me across the mouth. Another, sharper one across my nose brought him closer to me. I used everything I had to grab his wrists and yank him forward, taking away his space to wind up and punch me. But now his saggy, bristly face was just above mine, and he tried to shove his rotting tongue into my mouth. I clenched my jaws shut and dug my fingers into his side until he rolled over. Then we struggled until that fucking elevator door finally slid open.
As soon as it did, Bernie reached in and grabbed O’Flaherty by his hair, peeling him away from me, and threw him backwards onto the hallway floor.
“‘Are you shot?”
Without any sign of his foot problems, Bernie raced down the hall, catching up with O’Flaherty just before he could slam the door of his room behind him. I grabbed my bullet clip and slipped it back into my gun, then rose on wobbly legs, fell to my knees, and rose again. As I was pulling my pants up, I suddenly vomited. Straightening up, I gingerly felt my head. The flash from the gun blast had singed my hair; there was pain, but no blood.
Slowly I stumbled down the hallway after my partner. When I reached O’Flaherty’s room, I saw that Bernie had cuffed him and was dragging him screaming into his disgusting bathroom.
“Close that door,” he yelled. As I did, I saw him kicking O’Flaherty repeatedly in the crotch and belly. His bum foot seemed to have miraculously recovered.
“Don’t do this,” I said to Bernie, struggling to catch my breath. “You’re going to blow the arrest.”
“Stay out!” he shouted, closing the bathroom door. I could hear O’Flaherty screaming for help, but I felt nauseous and frail. The struggle had left me covered in sweat and utterly exhausted. Having my own pistol grabbed from me and pointed at my skull was as close to death as I had ever come.
As the adrenaline in my system ebbed, it took all my strength just to stay seated on the bed and stop myself from trembling and crying. My ribs and back throbbed with pain where I’d been punched. When I pulled up my shirt and looked at my stomach, it was burning bright red from the hot coffee. Three purplish-red gashes ran down the center of my belly into my pubic hair.
“You fucking dare shoot at a cop!”
I looked inside the bathroom and saw that Bernie had O’Flaherty on the floor. He was kneeling on his ass, while yanking him back by the collar of his cheap trenchcoat, pulling his neck back so far I thought it would snap.
“She kneecapped me!” O’Flaherty gagged.
“Let me fix that for you, you fucking—” Bernie shifted his weight onto O’Flaherty’s bum knee. The man howled in agony.
“Bernie, stop it!” I said.
“He got me too, goddamn it. Didn’t you, pal!” Bernie shouted.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“He was the one who whacked me over the head while I was sleeping in my car!” Bernie said, yanking O’Flaherty’s neck back farther. Pushing the cuffed man forward, he shoved his face right into his black-stained toilet. When I made an effort to stop him, he shoved me out of the room and closed the door. My muscles and nerves throbbed and twitched with pain. I was too shaken up to stand any longer. This had to be what they meant by being in shock.
“Bernie,” I said, kicking the door. “Remember Diallo! Abner Louima! You wanna drag this department through that shit all over again?”
“Take a look at yourself in the mirror,” he yelled. “Then tell me Amadou Diallo!”
Catching sight of myself in a small oval wall mirror, I jumped. My upper lip was split and blood was streaming out of both my nostrils. My nose didn’t seem to be broken, but several cuts and bruises were rising on my cheek and forehead.
The crackling of the police radio over O’Flaherty’s gurgling broke my exhausted trance. I heard official policespeak, although it sounded like a foreign language. The bathroom door popped open, revealing Bernie calmly holding his radio in one hand as he requested an ambulance and backup. With his other hand he was still plunging O’Flaherty’s face deep into his filthy toilet bowl, as if cleaning it with a johnny stick.
I opened the window and gasped involuntarily. As the cold air filled my lungs, I looked again at the postcard of the Goddess of the Hunt statue that was taped to O’Flaherty’s wall. I grabbed it and stared at it for a moment as a very palpable force rose out of me. I tried to regain composure, steadily breathing the freezing air. Suddenly I felt I was being pulled forward. I dropped the postcard and grasped the ancient wooden window frames with both hands to keep from tumbling downward. With my head entirely outside the room, I saw that there was an adjacent window between this room and the next that looked like it had been bricked up decades ago. Something small, dark, and compact hung in it like a pendant, barely visible in the darkness.
I reached back for one of O’Flaherty’s t-shirts and, using the tips of my fingers, tried pulling at the object, which was stubbornly wedged in a crack where the concrete had eroded, between the old bricks. Soon there was a bit of play. What I was holding was a wooden handle. In another moment I was able to pry it from the cement crevice. It was a large, thick knife.
Back inside the room, I turned on the bedside lamp. I could make out a rinse of dried blood, not only on the blade, but all along the wooden handle as well.
“Got him,” I whispered. Then shoving my way into the bathroom, I yelled to Bernie, “We’ve got him!”
Bernie was still drowning O’Flaherty, and cursing at him all the while.
“Stop it before you blow the case! I’ve got it!”
“What do you got?”
“The murder weapon!” I held it up.
In order to inspect the knife, Bernie released O’Flaherty, who rolled onto his side on the bathroom floor. He was coughing up toilet water, gasping for air. His swollen, purple hands were still cuffed tightly behind his back. The detective carefully took the t-shirt in which I held the knife. Putting on his reading glasses, he held the weapon up to the lamplight in the bedroom and carefully studied the thick layers of blood that had coagulated and dried on the blade and along the handle. Far from cleaning the knife the way he had cleaned every other aspect of the crime scene, O’Flaherty was evidently proud of the caked strata, a sensual talisman of his savagery.
Bernie returned to the bathroom and shoved the blade toward O’Flaherty’s dripping face. “I don’t even need luminol to check this. It’s all right there, fuckface. All your little blood sacrifices.”
“Brutality . . . unlawful . . . search . . . civil suit,” O’Flaherty gasped, still hyperventilating.
“Ass rape . . . slapped around by monsters . . . lethal . . . injection,” Bernie mimicked his gasps.
“I was the victim! . . . They . . . ripped me off . . .” he continued as Bernie handed me back the weapon and called Crime Scene.
I couldn’t look at O’Flaherty again, so I waited in the hallway. To think I’d ever wanted to be in homicide. Bernie must’ve sensed my doubts, because he opened the door and said, “If you were a male cop, instead of punching you out he would’ve just executed you as soon as he got you in the elevator.”
“Have you ever been attacked?”
“Two weeks ago, remember?” he said, gently rubbing his crown. “Anyone can get blitzed from behind.”
“If you hadn’t come when you did . . .” I couldn’t talk any more. We heard sirens outside and Bernie quickly recapitulated what had happened, leaving out his little water torture. We had to get our stories straight to protect each other. In another moment, the first cops, including Sergeant McKenner, raced up the stairs.
“You okay, Gladyss?” he said inspecting my cuts and bruises.
“A little banged up, but—”
“When are you due back in NSU?”
“In a few days.”
“Thank God for that.”
A moment later the elevator opened and the supporting cast of technicians and EMS workers came flooding out. The uniforms took O’Flaherty downstairs, while the paramedics checked me out and treated me for cuts and trauma. When I showed them the burn marks on my stomach, one large medic with thick black hair pointed to the scratches trailing down my belly and below my belt. “Did he do that?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you mind opening your pants?” he asked. No one else was around, so I unbuckled my pants and pulled them down, along with my underwear, to the top of my pubes to show where the scratch marks ended.
“Did he penetrate you?” he asked, looking up at me.
“Christ, no!”
Any kind of penetration legally constituted a rape. If his fingers had been longer, or my torso any shorter, technically I would’ve been violated. He delicately swabbed a yellowish-brown liquid on the eight-inch scrapes and that was it.
“He mainly just hit me on the back and ribs,” I said sternly.
“They’ll take care of you at the hospital.”
The rank and file started pouring in, then sergeants, lieutenants, and the ADA.
“Why’s he wet?” the lieutenant in charge asked Bernie. “He’s claiming you stuck his head in the toilet.”
Bernie calmly relayed how he’d heard the gunshot in the elevator, then how he pulled O’Flaherty off of me. “The prick raced back into his room with me in pursuit. We struggled at the door. He hit me a few times, then managed to make it into the bathroom. We struggled some more, and when I finally was able to grab him I knocked him into the toilet, that’s all. I mean, it’s a small fucking room.”
“Where exactly was your partner during all this?” the lieutenant asked.
“Still near the elevator. She’d been beaten and burnt, almost shot. This guy was moving pretty quick.”
“Then what?”
“Then I was alone, fighting for my life. I mean, you know I’m not in the best of health. I’ve had this goddamn lung thing since the World Trade Center.”
“So why don’t I see a mark on you, while he’s all bruised up?”
“I was alone and the man had just shot my partner. I mean, I was fighting for my life here.”
“He’s claiming you cuffed him and tortured him.”
“With all due respect, after he fired at Chronou in the elevator, if I’d wanted to, you know I coulda just shot him, and been entirely within my rights.”
“What are you saying, we should be glad he’s not dead?” asked the captain, who had quietly entered and been listening in.
“Captain, you know me. I mean, you’ve accused me of getting rough over the years, so for me I’d call this exercising self-restraint.” One of the other cops chuckled.
“Okay, so you’re fighting with him in the bathroom, then what?”
“Only when I finally got him on the floor was I able to cuff him. And only after I got the cuffs on him could I radio for help.”
“So you weren’t drowning him in the shitter with his hands cuffed behind his back?”
“Hell no! I knocked him in there while we were fighting, but once I got him cuffed it was over.”
The story was loosely as we had rehearsed it.
“Exactly what time did you hear the shot in the elevator?” asked the captain.
“Give me a break. You know how fast this shit goes down.”
The captain turned to me. “You had gone down to the corner deli for a coffee?”
“Yes, sir. I was in the store a while ’cause there was a line.”
“Still, the clerk should be able to give us an idea of what time you left there,” the lieutenant said.
“They probably have a surveillance camera, maybe it’s time-stamped,” the captain added.
“I suppose so,” I replied.
As the lieutenant was about to ask me more questions the black-haired paramedic came to the rescue, pushing in a wheelchair and saying I really had to go to the hospital now.
He wanted to strap me in, but I insisted I could walk down to the ambulance. As soon as I rose to my feet, I found myself shaking. I walked along the hall and watched as the crime photographer began snapping photos of the filthy elevator floor: it was a dark interplay of piss, blood, coffee, and vomit—all mine.
Before I could give it any more thought, the paramedic returned with the wheelchair and we were going down in the freight elevator, packed with black garbage bags. Soon I was being lifted into the damn ambulance like some strange piece of living furniture. Just before they closed the back doors, Eddie O’Ryan appeared out of nowhere and jumped inside.
“I just heard you were shot!” he said, grabbing my hand.
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“They got him?” he asked.
“Yeah, and I found the murder weapon.”
Lowering his voice, he said, “He didn’t . . . You weren’t . . . raped?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?” He looked at me funny.
“I’d fucking know if I’d been raped, wouldn’t I!”
The paramedic who was sitting with us looked nervously away.
At St. Vincent’s Hospital on Twelfth and Seventh, I was given priority treatment. I told Eddie I really needed to be alone, so he gave me a pat on the back and told me to call if I needed absolutely anything.
The paramedic must’ve mentioned my scratches because an older female lieutenant I didn’t know, from Sex Crimes, sat down and delicately interviewed me. She carefully filled out a detailed report while an aide snapped Polaroids for evidence: unflattering photos of my face, my ribs, my lower back and forehead, the first and second degree burns on my chest and stomach. And the humiliating scratches across my belly, of course. I got a band-aid for the cut on my forehead and even a dab of ointment for the singe at the back of my scalp. The doctor gave me prescriptions for a burn ointment for my stomach, some antibiotics, and a mild painkiller – none of which I intended to take. A member of the PBA showed up and said I was entitled to so many sick days and counseling, then asked if I needed a representative or anything else. I told him no thanks. By the time the doctor offered me a sedative, I already felt steadier and didn’t want to go back to being groggy. He asked me if I had someone to look after me.
“My boyfriend’s waiting for me at home,” I lied to comfort him. A patrolman drove me to my door and waited until I closed it before he sped off.