Investigation (7 page)

“At this point, I doubt it. But someone used a car to carry those bodies over to Peck Avenue. While Jefferson is typing up the girl’s statement, his partner is checking out how and where she spent the night. I’d say she rings true.”

“We gotta keep right on top of this case, Joe. You realize that, don’t you?” For about the third time in three minutes, Tim checked his watch. “If we don’t wind this thing up fast and clean, that bastard upstairs could replace me, Joe. He could justify it, and how the hell would that look in my credentials? Getting bounced over a headline case could screw me up, but good.” Tim stood up, swung around and kicked his wastebasket. It was metal and the ringing sound lasted for about fifteen seconds. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and turned around to me.

“We’re going upstairs in about ten minutes, Joe, to brief him. From what’s been coming in all day, this Keeler dame is a flat-out tramp. If her husband didn’t help her, and if she didn’t have her car last night, the chances are that the guy who helped her is someone listed in her pink book, right?” He rubbed some coins together inside his pocket and whistled tunelessly. Then, “According to the neighbors, Keeler hardly spent any time at all with her kids. This elderly woman—Mrs. Silverberg?—practically raised them from the time they were born. I want you to talk to Mrs. Silverberg first thing tomorrow, Joe. She’s at the Long Island Jewish Hospital. She can probably give you the lowdown on the little mother and some of her playmates.” His eyes got that glazed look again, then, as though talking to himself, he said, “No one else could have done it. It
had
to be the mother.”

Tim turned and faced the traffic outside his window on Queens Boulevard and seemed to go into a trance. I glanced absently at the collection of black-framed photographs that took up most of the wall over the green leather couch that Tim’s wife had bought him for a birthday present. Most of the pictures were of Tim shaking hands with someone or other who was in the process of presenting Tim an award in the shape of an engraved brass plaque mounted on wood. Most of the awards were hanging along the back wall of Tim’s office over the long narrow conference table.

There were a few familiar faces in the pictures besides Tim’s: Bobby Kennedy standing off to one side as Tim accepted the Irishman-of-the-Year Award from some hearty-looking Irishman back in the early sixties; Tim and his wife, Catherine, flanking stocky Richard Daley (they had been engaged then and Catherine had been a delegate to Chicago in 1968; the occasion of the picture had been some Communion breakfast in New York). Daley’s expression was murderous, his eyes glinting and tough, and both Tim and Catherine looked reverent and impressed.

The only outsized memento was the framed, yellowing front page of the old
New York Mirror,
the thick black headline saying
HERO ROOKIES SAVE 10 KIDS IN B’KLYN BLAZE.
There we were on the front page, Tim and me, the hero rookies, our faces younger and more innocent than either of us had ever been, handing over the last-saved kid into the arms of an ambulance attendant. Three of the kids died subsequently, but we both got first-class commendations anyway. It was that particular incident that more or less determined the direction of Tim’s future career in the department.

“Hell,” Tim had said to me the next day in the hospital, where he was resting up from smoke inhalation and I was awaiting surgery on the torn cartilage of my right knee, “I’m not going to end up burning my ass for a bunch of little nigger kids left alone by their whore of a mother. I’m signing up at Delehanty’s for the next sergeant’s exam and if you have any brains at all you’ll come with me.”

I spent three weeks on sick leave and then four weeks on light duty while my knee was healing. I was assigned to a desk job at the old Bureau of Criminal Identification, where I made a few useful contacts and performed a few “favors” for a couple of people in positions to reciprocate if and when I needed a favor. Which is something that Delehanty’s doesn’t teach you: how and under what circumstances to pile up favors owed. And when to call in debts.

In the next couple of years, while I worked foot patrol out of the old Twenty-third Precinct in Harlem, Tim was collecting sergeant’s stripes and managed to get himself assigned to a spot in Manhattan headquarters, which gave him plenty of time to study for the lieutenant’s exam. I liked my job; I liked the people up there. It wasn’t the way it is now, when even a black cop’s life is on the line the minute he sets foot outside the precinct house. If you were a good guy, you made a certain number of friends—among the local shopkeepers, ginmill owners and customers, neighborhood working stiffs as well as neighborhood sharpies. It was like any other situation: people were suspicious at first, then once they sized you up, once they accepted you, once you had an established working relationship and people knew what they could expect from you, you knew what to expect from them.

I delivered a lot of babies; broke up a hundred family Saturday-night fights; arrested more than twenty rapists even though I knew that when it’s black on black the case is odds on to be dumped. I saved—or at least prolonged—a couple of lives, using first-aid techniques. I collected twelve more commendations before I killed a man and nearly got killed myself.

I went into a tenement to try and reason with some lunatic who had slashed his wife’s throat, then castrated and stabbed her lover. Before I said one reassuring word, he managed to sink his knife into the side of my neck so that within seconds we were in close, intimate contact, his knife in me, my revolver dug into the soft tissue of his throat just beneath his jaw. My shot blew half his head off, and as he died he dragged his knife down along my neck and across my chest. I got a first-class commendation for killing that guy, although the general opinion was that I was a dumbbell for having allowed myself to get cut: that I should have come in shooting and saved conversation for later. An opinion with which, of course, I finally agreed.

While I was recuperating, with thirty-six stitches making a jagged pattern down my throat and chest, Tim Neary came to wise me up. He had just passed pretty high on the lieutenant’s list and was already beginning to study for the captain’s exam. Tim was a lot smarter than me in a lot of ways. For instance, he knew how to use what I had collected over the years. About a week after I spoke with Tim, a lieutenant from the Bureau of Special Services visited me on behalf of his newly appointed squad commander, a deputy inspector I had done a favor for when he was still a captain. I followed Tim’s instructions: said all the right things, looked blank at all the right times. I was assigned to the B.O.S.S. as a third-grade detective when my recuperation was over.

The squad handled all kinds of undercover surveillance assignments, ranging from illegal activities of various political dissidents to wildcat-strike threats by leaders of municipal unions, to discreet background investigations of individuals proposed for high city-government appointive office. We acted more as an information-collecting unit than as an enforcement branch of the department. The squad also handled security assignments, and since I spoke a passable French (my wife, Jen, is French-Canadian), I drew a lot of the glamour escort jobs: seeing to the safety of visiting foreign dignitaries or heads of government attending sessions of the U.N.; keeping between the body I had to protect and the various emotional demonstrators who had carried old political grievances to the streets of New York on behalf of citizens still in the mother country.

I felt sorry for the uniformed cops assigned to handle the political protesters; for the most part, the guys assigned to these various functions didn’t know what the hell the whole thing was all about, but they ended up being the only visible form of “oppression.” While the poor slobs on the street were yelling and shoving and provoking their own arrests, I was with the targets of their anger, be they Russian or Chinese or Cuban or Israeli or whatever, who were usually socializing politely with one another, drinking and eating at any number of gourmet luncheons, dinners or receptions. The closest thing to antagonism at these affairs would be one diplomat bragging to another about the marvelous custom tailor he had located in New York and then smugly and undiplomatically refusing to give the name of said tailor.

Occasionally, some nut in Hollywood would come up with some kind of gimmick to publicize an about-to-open film, and, the Mayor being ever anxious to attract film-makers back to New York and being himself one of the beautiful people who loved to mix it up with movie stars, we would be handed over as taxpayer-paid personal bodyguards to an assortment of producers, directors, male and female stars and celebrities. Some of the guys got sore about these assignments. I found them interesting: like a visit to a foreign world.

Even the hardest old-timers in the squad, the impossible to impress, would always remember the special assignments to the Secret Service contingent traveling to New York with John F. Kennedy. Usually, when you’re assigned to a top government official, you never get beyond a polite “Good morning,” but at the end of the day J.F.K. would wave a mob of us into the hotel suite, kick off his shoes, yank down his tie, break out the booze and egg us on to tell him our “war stories” about life on the streets of New York. I always had the feeling he was a buff; that under other circumstances he’d have been one helluva Irish cop, with that quick sharp wit and incisive way of getting right to the center of things with a few fast remarks.

The department went higher-education crazy in the late sixties and started to replace members of the various squads and bureaus, regardless of experience and performance, with college-educated men. Half the guys I worked with began hustling back and forth between assignments and classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, frantically compiling credits. I figured that either my years of various police experience qualified me or they didn’t qualify me for the job I had been doing for the last five years; which had earned me promotion to second-grade detective.

I got bounced—without prejudice—from the B.O.S.S. at the beginning of 1967, and Tim, who had just made captain and was assigned to a precinct in Brooklyn, arranged for me to be assigned to the Queens Homicide Squad.

I hated Homicide. I hated everything about it, including some of the guys I worked with who liked to pretend that they were instrumental in “solving” a case. Any cop worth his shield knows that unless a homicide is committed by someone close to the victim, the odds are that the perpetrator will remain at large. Unless you get lucky and an informant comes through for you. Informants—what the Hollywood cops call “snitches”—are the backbone of any successful police department. The informant is generally the scum of the earth, and when his usefulness is over, any cop would throw him to the wolves without a blink. Which is not exactly the cute relationship of the television-series Homicide Squad hero who sleuths out solutions week after week, using ten bucks’ worth of information and a head full of clever ideas. And who feels an off-the-cuff affection for his “snitch” and vows to revenge his death, should he get caught by his fellow hoods.

I worked Homicide for four years and was promoted from second to first grade, which meant my salary was at captain’s level, same as Tim’s. Of course, I could always be dumped all the way back to patrolman. Tim, with his civil-service rating, could never be lower than captain and had a wide-open future into the upper-echelon appointive ranks. Once his political friends were in position to help.

On the wall space between the two windows behind Tim’s desk were mementos of his graduation from the sixteen-week-long F.B.I. training session which Tim had attended in Washington, D.C., in 1969. There was a two-foot-square replica of the F.B.I. official insignia, all blue and gold with white lettering:
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
at the top of a circle;
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
at the bottom of the circle. Inside the circle, a badgelike emblem, the top half gold with a blue scale, showing, I guess, the quality of justice, the bottom half striped red and white like a peppermint stick. Beneath the badge was a sort of unfurling ribbon divided into three sections, proclaiming
FIDELITY—BRAVERY—INTEGRITY.

Centered beneath this was an expensively framed photograph of Tim Neary having his hand shaken by J. Edgar Hoover. Tim’s face was wooden, his eyes riveted on the somewhat pop-eyes that seemed to look right through him.

Tim had confided to me, years ago, after a couple of drinks too many, that there seemed to be something a little “strange” about the Director. (That’s what you called him if and when you talked about him at all: the Director.)

Tim told me how he and other graduates of the F.B.I. training session had been rehearsed for the graduation ceremony to the point where every man in the room, regardless of his age, rank, experience and professional position, was reduced to a dry-mouthed nervous little kid afraid to so much as blink or swallow when in the Presence. Not to mention the emotional condition of the F.B.I. instructors responsible for their training and their successful completion of the prescribed course. They had been rehearsed as to the precise number and length—in inches—of the steps to take when approaching the Director for presentation of the diploma; the exact distance to maintain between them; how far to extend the left hand for the diploma and the right hand for the handshake. Which had been, Tim confided, warm, moist, loose and heavy. They had been told to say nothing more or less than “Thank you, Mr. Director”; to release the handshake immediately, drop the eyes respectfully, turn and noiselessly return to their assigned seats. There was to be no coughing, throat-clearing, whispering, slouching; there were to be no crossed legs; feet were to remain motionless, neatly aligned, whether standing or sitting. No excess movement of any kind in the room, including blinking or facial twitching.

The Director did not care for any of the above behavior.

Today, everyone and his publisher is telling “strange” J. Edgar Hoover stories, making accusations and telling jokes right on television, but this was in 1969. Tim came over to my house at six the next morning after our little drinking session, woke me up, held my arm in a killing grasp and made me swear to God, on the foundation of old friendship, that I would forget that he had ever mentioned anything at all about the Director. Of course I swore, and we never mentioned the matter again.