Cops and Robbers

Tom

Sometimes on the night shift Ed and I go out and do a turn around the precinct in our Ford, rather than sit in the Detective Division squadroom and wait for the calls to come in. The night shift is when you get most of your street crime, and it sometimes helps to be out there and in movement; often, when a squeal comes in, we’re already in the neighborhood, and can get to it faster with instructions from the dispatcher than if we’d actually taken the phone call from the complainant ourselves.

So that’s what Ed and I were doing that night, around one in the morning. This was nearly a week after the robbery. Joe and I hadn’t talked about the robbery at all since the morning after in the car, and I hadn’t yet made my phone call to Vigano. I hadn’t worked out in my own head any reasons for not calling Vigano, I just hadn’t seemed to get around to it.

The robbery itself had stayed hot news for three or four days. It was linked up with some department-store holdups in Detroit from a couple of years ago that had also involved guys wearing police uniforms, but that seemed to be about the only lead the authorities had. An interdepartmental memo had come through, asking everybody to think back to the day of the robbery and try to remember anything unusual they might have noticed in connection with any patrol car on that day, or with any other member of the force. That was about the extent of the investigation within the Police Department, but even that was too much for the PBA. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which I must admit is very rarely benevolent about much of anything, raised such a stink about that memo, and the implication it contained that police officers might actually have been involved in the crime, that the Commissioner himself called a press conference to apologize and say the memo had been “ill-judged.” And that had been about the last newsworthy item in connection with the robbery; for the last day or two, there’d been nothing about it on television at all.

It was beginning to look as though we hadn’t made any mistakes in planning the job or pulling it off. Now all we had to do was not make any of the normal post-crime mistakes, such as getting drunk in public and talking about what a sharp operator you are, or hiding the loot some place where it could be found by the wrong person, or spending the money right away in a big spree, or quitting our jobs and taking off to live a completely different life. We knew all the mistakes, we’d seen them all from the other side. So far, we seemed to have done all right for ourselves.

Before the robbery, I’d thought it would be very tough to come back to work after it, that I’d have a hard time going through the regular grind knowing I had a million dollars salted away. But the fact was, I seemed to enjoy the job more than I had in years. The robbery had been like a vacation. It was true I didn’t actually have Vigano’s million dollars yet, but I took it for granted I was going to get it, and I didn’t care. Except for that morning with the hangover, I’d been actually happy to go to work every day I’d had duty since the robbery.

Partly I suppose it was the vacation idea; committing the robbery had been such a total break in the routine that it gave the routine a kind of fresh lease on life. But also, for the first time in my life I could look forward to an end of the routine. I mean, an end other than death or retirement, neither of which prospect had ever cheered me very much. But now the routine was going to end at a time when I’d still be young enough to enjoy it. And rich enough to enjoy it, too; a hell of a lot richer than I’d ever thought I was going to be.

Who wouldn’t be happy working six months for a salary of one million dollars?

Then there was another thing. Weather affects crime, believe it or not. If it’s too hot or too cold, too rainy or too snowy, a lot of crimes just don’t get committed; the people who would have committed them stay at home and watch television. This last week had been very hot, and my tours had been quiet and peaceable. I’d caught up with a lot of my back paperwork, I’d relaxed, I’d taken it easy. Even if I weren’t being paid a million dollars for it, I wouldn’t have minded very much working this last week.

Which changed, all of a sudden. And it was a very small thing that made it change, small and stupid. I never really entirely understood why it made such a big difference inside my head.

It was the night Ed and I were on the night shift, and out driving around in the Ford. Things had been quiet for about an hour until a little after one o’clock a call came in that somebody had been attacked over in Central Park. We were pretty close to the park at the time, so Ed, who was driving, said, “Shall we head on over there?”

The squeal hadn’t been directed to us, though we’d heard it on the radio. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

“Fine,” he said.

There was no urgency, since we weren’t the primary team responding to the squeal, so we drove over without siren or red light, and stopped near the park entrance at West 87th Street. We got out of the car, unlimbered the pistols in our hip holsters, left the guns holstered, and walked into the park.

We could see the group ahead of us, down the black-top path and under one of the old-fashioned street lights they have in there. One guy was sitting on the black-top, and three others were standing around him. One of the standing men was in uniform, all the others were in civvies.

When we got a little closer, I could make out the faces. I didn’t know the patrolman, but the other two standing men were detectives from my precinct; one was named Bert and the other Walter. They were talking to the guy sitting on the ground.

I recognized him, too. Not individually; I mean I recognized his type. He was a homosexual, young and slender and delicate, wearing tight pale-blue chinos and white sandals and a white fishnet shirt. He was pretty obviously what’s called a cruiser, a faggot who hangs around one of the gay areas of the city looking to get picked up. They very frequently get beat up, too, and sometimes they get killed. They also have a higher incidence of VD than any other group in the city. I won’t say it’s a kind of life I understand.

At the moment, this one was scared out of his mind, terrified, trembling all over. He was so fragile-looking, he looked as though he might break his own bones with all that shivering he was doing.

When we got close enough to hear voices, it was the boy on the ground who was talking. He could hardly speak; his voice was trembling and his throat apparently kept closing up on him. All the time he struggled to talk, his hands kept fluttering around. I hate to say they fluttered like butterflies, but that’s what they reminded me of.

He was saying, “I don’t know why he’d do it. There wasn’t any reason, there was just— There wasn’t any reason. Everything was fine, and then—” He stopped talking, and let the fluttering of his hands finish the story.

Walter, one of the plainclothesmen, preferred words to hands. Not sounding at all sympathetic, he said, “Yeah? Then what?”

The hands fluttered to his throat. “He started to choke me.” The street-light glare was in his face as he looked up at us, bleaching out whatever color was left in it, reducing his face to little more than a twisting mouth and staring eyes. With that face, and the gracefully twitching hands, he suddenly also reminded me of pantomimists I’ve seen on television. You’ve seen them; they cover their faces with white make-up, and wear dark clothing and white gloves, and they pretend to be in love, or to be an airplane, or to be mixing a martini. This one seemed to be doing a pantomime impression of terror.

Except that he was talking. Hands still at his throat, he said again, “He choked me. He was screaming awful things, terrible, and just choking me.” His hands trembled at his throat.

Walter, still not sympathetic, said, “What was he saying?”

The expressive hands came down, flattening out. “Oh, please,” he said. “Oh, just terrible things. I don’t even want to remember them.”

Walter’s partner Bert was grinning a little as he watched and listened, and now he said, “What did you say you were doing just before the attack?”

Evasiveness cut through the young man’s agitation. Suddenly nervous as much for his present situation as for what had happened to him in the past, he gestured vaguely with both hands, looked away from us all, blinked, and said, “Well—” He stopped, ducked his head, twisted his shoulders around. “We were just talking, just—” He looked up at us again, looking like the heroine of a silent movie melodrama, and said, “Everything was fine, there wasn’t any reason at all.”

“Talking,” Bert said. He jerked his head to the right and said, “Over there in the bushes at two in the morning.”

He clasped his hands together. “But there wasn’t any reason to choke me,” he said.

I wondered why he kept reminding me of silent things — pantomimists and silent movies — when he was steadily talking. Of course, as much as anybody was really listening to him, he might as well have been silent. He’d thought he’d found a friend, and he’d been betrayed, and that was most of the pain he was showing us. But we’d all seen it before, and we had other ways to describe it. All Walter and Bert were hearing — and all I’d be hearing, if I was the one who’d have to fill out the report on this — were the facts. Like that old police show on television used to say, all we want are the facts, ma’am.

Walter was saying now, “Can you give us any identification on him?”

“Well...” He thought about it, sitting there in the middle of us, and said, “He, uh, he had a tattoo.” He said it as though he were proud of having remembered, and expected a gold star.

Ed said, “A tattoo?” The incredulity in his voice was almost comic.

I looked at Ed beside me, and saw he was grinning. Looking down at that poor jerk and grinning. I thought, Ed’s a nice guy, he’s really a very nice guy, decent and straight. What the hell was he doing grinning down at some poor bastard who’s been betrayed and choked and humiliated by some other son of a bitch?

And me, too. I was in the ring around the guy, one of the five cops standing around him, brought out to do our duty to protect him from bodily harm.

I took a step backward, as though to get out of the circle. I really didn’t understand it myself, it was just a feeling I had, that I didn’t want to be a part of this anymore.

The guy on the ground was explaining about the tattoo. “On his forearm,” he said. “His, uh, his left forearm.” He pointed to his own left forearm. “It was in the shape of a torpedo,” he said.

Walter laughed, and the guy pouted at him. He was getting over his fear now, and his normal mincing mannerisms were returning to him.

That wasn’t the way God had made him. And none of us were the way God had made us, either.

I remembered again that hippie talking about what the city does to people, and that none of us had started this way.

Bert was saying, “What about a name? He give you any kind of name before you went off in the bushes with him?”

He raised his eyes again, and clasped his hands in his lap. Christ, he looked like Lillian Gish. Wistfully, remembering having liked the bastard, he told us, “He said his name was Jim.”

I took another step backward and looked up at the sky. It was one of those rare nights in New York when you can see a few stars.