Cops and Robbers

Joe

There were camera crews from two of the television news programs that showed up to cover it. The way we handled that, Paul and I were the first car that reached the scene after the call came in, so Paul got interviewed by the one crew and I got interviewed by the other.

I wasn’t nervous at all. I’d never been interviewed personally on television before, but of course I’d watched the news sometimes when other guys did it, at the scene of an explosion or a big water-main break or something like that. Three times I’d seen guys I actually knew in real life being interviewed. Also, sometimes while taking a shower I’d run a fantasy kind of interview in my head, the questions and the answers and all, and how I’d hold my face. So you might say I was pretty well rehearsed.

The way they set things up for the interview, they put the camera so it was facing the building, so the building would show behind me and the interviewer while we were doing our thing. It was one of those huge office buildings being constructed there, and the hardhats kept steady working away at it all through the interview. One of their number had got himself killed, but that had only held their interest for maybe five minutes. Where money is concerned, you keep your mind on the job, you get it done.

These buildings are going up all over town, big glass and stone boxes full of office space. Practically none of them have apartments in them, because who wants to live in Manhattan? Manhattan is a place you work in, that’s all.

The buildings have been going up ever since the end of the Second World War. Good times, bad times, boom, recession, it doesn’t matter, they just keep going up. For the last ten years or so, most of them have been on the east side of midtown, Third Avenue and Lexington Avenue, around there. The first thing you know, they’ll give Third Avenue a classier name, the way they did with Fourth Avenue when the big office buildings went up on it and it was turned into Park Avenue South.

Anyway, that’s the section where most of the new buildings are concentrated, but there’s others going up all over the place. The World Trade Center way downtown. Sixth Avenue across from Rockefeller Center. And a couple up in my precinct, including this one where they’d just had the death and where I was going to get myself interviewed.

A guy I was talking to in a bar a couple years ago said it was his opinion that the main characteristic of New York is that it’s going through all the phases of the phoenix at once. You remember reading about the phoenix in high school? That’s what he said New York was; but all at once. New York is living, and it’s on fire, and it’s dying, and it’s ashes, and it’s being reborn, all at the same time and all the time. And boy, those buildings look it, coming up out of brick rubble where yesterday’s buildings were knocked down, coming up new and clean and pretty, and every once in a while killing somebody along the way.

The interviewer was a light-colored spade, with a moustache. You could see he thought he was the hottest thing in Bigtown. He and the director and the sound man and a couple other people fussed around a while, getting everything set, and then they started the interview. Somebody had written a little lead-in paragraph for the interviewer to say, and he had it on a clipboard he held in his other hand. The hand without the microphone, I mean. He had it on the clipboard, but he’d memorized it, because once he started talking he never looked at the clipboard at all.

Here’s how it went: “Tragedy struck today at the site of the new Transcontinental Airlines Building on Columbus Avenue when a worker fell thirty-seven stories within the uncompleted building to his death. Patrolman Joseph Loomis was among the first at the scene.” Then he turned to me and said, “Officer Loomis, could you describe what happened?”

I said, “The decedent was a full-blooded Mohawk Indian employed in putting the steel framework of the building up. What they call working the high iron. His name was George Brook. He was forty-three years of age.”

The interviewer had been looking me straight in the eye the whole time I talked, as though I was hypnotizing him. As soon as I stopped, he whipped the microphone from my mouth back to his and said, “What apparently went wrong, Officer Loomis?”

I said, “Apparently his foot slipped. He was on the fifty-second story, which is as high as they have so far reached, and he fell thirty-seven stories and landed on the concrete floor at the fifteenth. He fell through the interior of the building, and the fifteenth is the highest story that they have a floor finished and put down.”

Zip, the microphone went back over to him, and he said, “He found death thirty-seven stories down.” Zip, the microphone came back to me.

I said, “No, he was probably dead from about the fortieth story on down. He kept hitting different metal beams on the way. They knocked some parts off him.”

A spade can’t turn white, but he tried. His eyes looked panicky, and very fast he said, “There are many full-blooded Mohawk Indians working the high iron, aren’t there, Officer Loomis?”

He wanted to change the subject? I didn’t give a damn. I said, “That’s right. There’s a couple tribes of them live over in Brooklyn, they’re all steelworkers.”

Zip. “That’s because they have a special affinity for heights, isn’t it?” Zip.

I said, “I don’t think so. They come down pretty often. About as often as anybody else.”

You could see I’d suddenly caught his attention. He was interested in spite of himself. He said, “Then why do they do it?”

I shrugged. I said, “I suppose they have to make a living.”

Not on television. His eyes filmed over, and in the furriest of brush-off voices he said, “Thank you very much, Officer Loomis,” and turned away from me, ready to go into a closeout spiel.

Screw him. Just to louse up his timing, I said, “My pleasure,” as he was opening his mouth again. Then I turned around and walked off.

I watched it that night, and all they used was the very first part of what I’d said. The rest was something the interviewer did on his own after I’d left; he stood in the same spot, with the construction going on behind him, and told you what happened. He said, among other things, “He found death thirty-seven stories down.” So much for accuracy, the bastards.

I don’t know what Paul said, but he didn’t get on the tube at all. He claimed afterwards it was anti-Semitism.