The Patriots' Club

23

“Look who’s back,” said Detective Second Grade Mike Melendez as John Franciscus walked into the squad room. “Night shift ain’t enough for you, Johnny? Hey, I got a shift you can take.”

“Short Mike. How you doin’? Tell you the truth, heating’s going berserk at the house,” Franciscus lied, stopping at Melendez’s desk, rapping his knuckles twice as if knocking. “Place is like a sweatbox. Got a guy coming at noon to take a look at it. Just what I need. Put another C-note into the house.”

Melendez stood up from his desk, stretching his six-foot-eight-inch frame, and headed toward the hall. “You doing a four-to-one? Didn’t see you on the roster.”

“No. Figured in the meantime I’d take care of some paperwork, maybe catch a few Z’s in the duty room.”

Melendez gave him a look as if he were certifiable. “Make yourself at home.”

Franciscus walked to the back of the squad room, saying his hellos to the guys. A New York City detective’s day was divided into three shifts: “eight-to-four,” “four-to-one” (which actually ended at midnight), and the night shift. Twice a month you did a “back-to-back,” meaning you did a four-to-one and an eight-to-four the following day. Since most of the cops lived upstate, they’d fitted out the duty room with a couple of cots and plenty of fresh sheets.

The detectives’ squad room for Manhattan North was located on the sixth floor of an unmarked brick building on 114th Street and Broadway. They shared the building with SVU-the special victims unit-child protective services, and the local welfare office. It was a real crowd of jollies from morning till night. But the squad room itself was a haven: large, clean, and heated to a pleasant sixty-six degrees. A row of desks ran down each side of the room, separated by a wide aisle. The floor was old freckled linoleum, but spotless. The walls were standard-issue acoustical tile. A bulletin board covered with shoulder patches from visiting cops hung on one wall. Franciscus preferred it to the pictures that hung across the room. There in a row were the ranking policemen in the New York City Police Department. The big muckety-mucks. The commissioner, his deputy, the chief of police, and the chief of detectives. Once he’d dreamed of having his picture up there too, but things happened.

Just then, Melendez sauntered over.

“Pickup already go through?” Franciscus asked. Every morning at eight, a paddy wagon stopped by to haul the night’s take down to 1 Police Plaza, or “One PP,” for formal booking and arraignment.

“Half hour ago. Your boy went along nice and easy.”

“Still not talking?”

“Not a peep. What’s up with that?”

“Don’t know. I’m heading over to see Vicki. See if she can dig something up for me.”

“You got a name?”

“Not his, unfortunately. Something else the complainant was talking about.”

“Who? Mr. Wall Street?”

Franciscus nodded. “Amazing a kid like that can make it. You see his body art. ‘Never Rat on Friends.’ You love it? I had something nifty like that on my shoulder, they would have kicked my butt out of OCS.”

“Doesn’t matter where you come from anymore. It’s what you can do. How you handle yourself. Look at what Billy did with his GED.”

Melendez’s kid brother, Billy, had worked as a trader with a foreign exchange firm doing business out of Tower 2, eighty-fifth floor. No one above eighty-four made it out. “God bless, Mike.”

“Amen,” said Short Mike Melendez. “Oh, the lieutenant said something about seeing you later. He’s in his office, you feel so inclined.”

“You want to take odds on that?” As union trustee, Franciscus was in constant demand to answer questions about health care, retirement, and the like. The lieutenant had his thirty in, and was set to retire in a month’s time. For weeks, he’d been harping on how to take his pension.

Franciscus had hardly sat down and gotten comfortable when he saw Lieutenant Bob McDermott amble from his office. McDermott raised a hand. “Johnny. A word.”

Franciscus labored to his feet. “You still thinking of taking insurance? Don’t.”

McDermott shook his head and frowned, as if he wasn’t interested in talking about himself. “Got a sec? Need to tell you something.”

“Actually, I’m just on the way to IT. Got a lead I want to check on.”

“It’ll just take a minute.” McDermott put a hand on his shoulder and walked with him toward his office. Given the lieutenant’s easygoing nature, it might as well have been a stickup at gunpoint. McDermott shut the door behind him and walked to his desk. “Got a report here from your doctor.”

“Yeah,” Franciscus said lightly. “Saw him last week.” But inside him, his gut tightened.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Nothing to tell. Just the usual.”

“That’s not what it says here.”

Franciscus waved away the report. “Ah, that’s bullshit,” he said. “Just some minor blockage. He gave me a load of pills. No problem whatsoever.”

“EKGs don’t lie.” McDermott settled his gaze on Franciscus. “Johnny, did you know that you had had a heart attack?”

“It wasn’t a heart attack. It was just a…” Franciscus tried to keep up the bluster, but couldn’t quite bring it off. The thing about the lieutenant was that he was truly a good guy, probably better suited to the clergy than the police. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clue,” he said, at length. “I just took it for another lousy day. You know… the job.”

“Says here you have an eighty percent occlusion of five of your principal arteries. Eighty percent! Johnny, your heart’s a walking time bomb. Why haven’t you scheduled a procedure?”

“A procedure?” Franciscus pulled a face. “Come on. I quit smoking five years back. I haven’t had anything stronger than a beer in ten years. I’ll be okay.”

“Look at you. You’re gray as a ghost,” said McDermott with genuine concern.

“It’s friggin’ winter. What do you expect, George Hamilton? Besides, you don’t look so hot yourself.” Franciscus looked away, feeling miserable for the cheap shot.

McDermott tossed the manila folder that held Franciscus’s future onto his desk. “Sit down.”

Franciscus took a seat. “Look, Bob, let me ex-”

“Please, John.” McDermott rocked in his chair for a moment. The two men exchanged glances. Franciscus shrugged. McDermott said, “I looked at your file. You got thirty-four years in, plus three military. Some people would call that a career. You should be following me out the door.”

“And then what? You got a job lined up at OTB for me, too?”

“I’d be happy to. You know that.”

“Don’t bother. I don’t want to be a fink, looking over a guy’s shoulder making sure he’s not slipping an extra twenty out of the till.”

“Here’s what you do. Have the procedure. File for disability. You retire on four-fifths pay for life. Nontaxable. You know the rules, Johnny. No police officer is allowed to work with a life-threatening condition.”

“This ain’t the balloon the doc was talking about,” said Franciscus. “It’s the friggin’ chain saw right down the middle. No cop’s allowed back on the job after open-heart surgery.”

“You got eighteen months to go before mandatory retirement. What are you trying to do to yourself?” McDermott twirled in his seat and threw a thumb toward the window. “You want to die out there?”

For a few moments, the two sat in silence. Franciscus listened to the sounds of the office: the clicking of the computer keyboards; the sudden, raucous laughs and catcalls; the constant opening and closing of doors. All of it added up to the rattle and hum of a vibrant, necessary organization. He’d always thought that being a detective was the greatest job in the world. God had to have invented it, it was so much fun.

“You’re telling me it’s over,” he said, hardly a whisper.

“You’re sixty-two years old, John. Think of the rest of your life.”

“I got more to give.”

“Of course you do. Give it to your family. Give it to your kids. Your grandkids. I want to see the paperwork requesting surgery by this afternoon. Something happens to you now, with you knowing about your condition and not doing anything about it, you’ll be on your own. Insurance won’t touch you. This can’t wait.”

“I’ve got something else that can’t wait,” said Franciscus. Rising from his chair, he felt more like a hundred than sixty. “Excuse me, Lieutenant.”

McDermott pushed back his chair and pointed a finger at the retreating figure. “I want those forms on my desk by five!”

Franciscus made his way to the rest room and splashed cold water in his face. Yanking a few paper towels free, he dried his cheeks, his forehead, his chin, while studying himself in the mirror. Funny thing was that he couldn’t see the disease that was ravaging his heart, robbing the muscle of its precious blood supply, causing its very walls to decay. He was gray, but then he’d always been that shade. It wasn’t a question of eating badly. If anything, he was too skinny. For six months, he’d been following that low-carb diet, and now, like half the other guys in the squad, he was bone thin, his eyes looking like Super Balls ready to pop out of their sockets. He didn’t even feel too bad, not counting getting a little more winded climbing the stairs than he used to, and the way he sweated like a racehorse at the drop of a hat.

Franciscus chucked the towels into the trash and stood up straight. Shoulders back. Chin up. Like a cadet on graduation day. He felt something in his back pop. Grimacing, he let his shoulders fall where they wanted. He sure as shit wasn’t a cadet anymore. He smiled sadly at his reflection. He’d been lying about not noticing the heart attack. In fact, he’d had two of ’em. Both times, he’d been aware of a sharp, piercing pain radiating from his chest up the side of his neck, extending down his left arm, making his fingers tingle. The pain had been fleeting, lasting maybe a minute or two. He’d written it off as a pinched nerve, or a bout of bursitis. But he’d known. Somewhere inside him a voice had whispered the truth.

He left the rest room and walked to an office down the hall. “You in, Vick?”

A pretty, generously bosomed Hispanic woman answered from her seat at a bank of desktop computers. “Oh, hi, Johnny. Always open for you.”

Vicki Vasquez was the class of the squad. She wasn’t a cop, so to speak, but a data administrator, meaning it was her job to deal with the deluge of paperwork Franciscus and his fellow police officers generated. As usual, she was dressed nicely, wearing gray slacks and a neatly pressed white blouse with a string of pearls at her neck.

“Got a name I need you to run.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Bobby Stillman.”

“One l or two?”

“Try either way.” Franciscus pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. He could never get enough of her perfume. Rosewater and almonds. He loved the stuff. There was a time when he and Vicki had been hot for each other, but nothing ever came of it. Franciscus had been married at the time. As much as he wanted to jump Vicki’s bones, he couldn’t do it to his wife and kids.

“I’m not expecting anything. Just a name a guy mentioned last night. Made me curious.”

Part of Vicki’s job was to run prints, B-numbers, and aliases through the mainframe at 1 Police Plaza downtown. People kept talking about installing a system where the detectives could do it on their own, but Franciscus figured that was a long way off. They were still getting used to e-mail.

“Nothing with one l,” said Vicki. “I’ll try two.” She typed in the name a second time, chatting all the while. “Did you hear that the lieutenant is retiring? Isn’t that a shame? Maybe it’s time you took his place. Can’t be a first grade forever.”

“Yeah, I heard. Bob’s been chewing my ear off for a month about what kind of pension he should take. Either standard or with-”

“Oh my,” said Vicki Vasquez suddenly, putting a hand to her mouth.

“You got a nibble?”

“Oh my,” she said again. “It’s an alias. Bobby Stillman, a.k.a. Sunshine Awakening, Roberta Stillman, Paulette Dobrianski…”

“Sunshine what?” Franciscus scooted closer, his nose up in the air like a bloodhound who’d caught a scent.

“Sunshine Awakening.”

“You mean we’re talking about a woman?”

“Roberta Stillman, yes,” said Vicki Vasquez. “Open warrant in connection with a capital homicide. You really hit the jackpot here.” She read from the screen. “ ‘Sought for questioning in connection with the murders of Officer Brendan O’Neill and Sergeant Samuel K. Shepherd. July 1980.’ ” She spun in her chair, practically pushing her boobs into his face. “Don’t you remember? Bunch of leftover hippies that bombed some computer company in Albany. They called themselves the Free Society. There was a big shoot-out. They killed the officers who’d come to question them. SWAT came and trapped them in this house. The standoff was on TV live. I sat in my kitchen eating ice cream the whole time. I think I gained five pounds.”

“You shittin’ me? Pardon my French. “

Vicki Vasquez shook her head. “Your Bobby Stillman is a cop killer. Reward’s still open. Fifty thousand dollars.”

Franciscus brushed the hair off his forehead. A cop killer with fifty thousand dollars on her head. No kiddin’. He was done feeling like an old man. He was back to twenty with wild hair.

“Thank you, Vick,” he said, taking her face in his hands and kissing her forehead. “You’re a beaut!”