Tainted Evidence

by Robert Daley

  "These people live like pigs," said Muldoon when they were again on the landing. "It's hard to have any sympathy for them."

  "You see the mirror?”

  "And the razor blades on the coffee table.”

  "A little snorting party, I guess."

  But the detectives were not there to enforce the narcotics laws, they had had no warrant, and they did not wish to test in court their assertion that they had been "invited" into the apartment.

  The midget had said Jonas might be on the roof.

  They went up two more flights of stairs, moving quietly. Carefully also, because there were no hall lights this high up and some of the steps were missing from the staircase. One could break a leg.

  At the roof door the detectives took their guns out. If the murderer was out there he might have heard something. He must know that sooner or later the law would come for him.

  He might start shooting at the first head that appeared.

  Muldoon pushed Barone aside. He was senior detective and had the right to go first. "Fucken mutts don't scare me," he muttered.

  But his heart beat accelerated, his gun hand began to sweat. He had never been shot on a rooftop, but it could happen any time. Tonight, for instance. He felt tense, but intensely alive, and he kicked the door open, banging it all the way back, and waited for a reaction, listening hard. He was about to step out into darkness, no streetlights or headlights, starlight only. There would be no normal human traffic to impose, or at least tend to impose, society's code of conduct on Jonas--or on anyone else who might be out there. The typography of this particular roof was unknown to him. There would be structures concealing who knew what, especially parapets to hide behind and shoot from--perfect shooting blinds.

  There was no response to the door banging open.

  Muldoon looked at Barone. They stared at each other a moment, after which Muldoon stepped out into the night.

  Barone was right behind him.

  Their heads darted around as they tried to check out simultaneously every direction from which shots might come.

  In addition to the normal clutter of rooftops, this one was littered with discarded furniture--a sprung sofa, a doorless refrigerator, some broken tables and chairs--and with garbage in plastic bags.

  Just then Muldoon spied movement.

  It was in the shadow of the elevator housing. There was so little light that at first he thought it was someone sleeping, and then as it went on moving, that it was two people under a blanket making love. All these thoughts took only an instant. On Muldoon's part there was no hesitation, and he ran over and rammed his gun down six inches from their heads.

  "Police, freeze," he shouted.

  Too late he saw it was only a loosely tied garbage bag moving in the night breeze. When he turned around, Barone was smirking at him.

  "It coulda been him," said Muldoon, acutely embarrassed.

  "Yes of course," said Barone still smirking.

  They checked the roof out thoroughly. Jonas was not out there. No one was out there. The guns went back into the holsters, and they paused to admire the view, or rather Barone did. To the south was the line of skyscrapers, to the east and west the two rivers. The city seemed ablaze with light.

  "I love this city," said Mike Barone.

  "It's a shithole," responded Dan Muldoon.

  "I like the bridges the best. Look at the George Washington over there all lit up."

  Instead Muldoon gestured toward the littered rooftop. "In Harlem, what do you do when you purchase a new living room suite? You carry the old one up onto the roof and leave it there. Same with your garbage. No wonder Harlem stinks the way it does."

  They started down the stairs, and three flights below startled a young couple. The girl was about l5, the boy no older. To Barone the girl seemed young, innocent, pretty and he said so.

  "Innocent," scoffed Muldoon. "When I was going up she was going down--she was giving the kid a blowjob. Dumb bitch'll be pregnant in a month. She'll have five babies before she's 20--from five different mutts--and be on welfare the rest of her life.”

  This was possibly true and Barone nodded sadly. "She was a pretty girl, though."

  As they continued to descend their footsteps were loud on the stairs. "You ever make it with a black woman, Mike?”

  Barone grinned. "No comment."

  Muldoon fell silent for a time. "Ol' Mike likes the ladies," he said.

  "The voice of envy talking," said Barone. "Detective Muldoon hasn't been able to get laid in five years.” They had reached the lobby and he glanced at his partner. "If you'd get your clothes cleaned once in a while you'd help your chances a lot."

  Muldoon was stung, but said nothing.

  "And about every decade or so you should buy a new outfit. Just a suggestion, you understand."

  Muldoon was trying to think up a suitable retort. "Fuck you," he said, for nothing else had come to mind.

  When they came to their car the midget was gone and Muldoon started cursing.

  Barone only laughed. "You didn't really expect him to wait around, did you?"

  "When I find that fucken midget I'm going to cut his little balls off."

  They got into their car.

  "Well anyway," said Barone, "I sure did admire your technique up there on the roof--the way you got the drop on that garbage bag."

  "Drive the car," Muldoon said.

  "Superb technique. I was awestruck. You should be in the police academy demonstrating it to recruits. They'd be awestruck too, I bet."

  Since he could think of no clever rejoinder Muldoon remained silent. He did not like to be teased, but from Barone he would take it, if it did not happen too often.

  Several times in its existence the Three-Two, of course it wasn't the Three-Two then, was counted the richest and most desirable part of the island. It was called Harlem Plains, or the valley of Harlem. There were lush farms supplying produce for New York City, eight miles south. There were the estates and mansions of families that had been there since the days of the Dutch. Many people still had Dutch names. Well into the l800s some kept slaves. There were hills and streams, and pure water to drink. There were magnificent views of the rivers. There was a blacksmith's shop and a small cluster of houses, and this was Harlem Village. There was a stagecoach line, but transportation to and from the distant city was mostly by steamboat, though only during the warm months, for in winter the rivers froze.

  The cops who patrol the Three-Two today rarely know anything about its origins.

  The Civil War freed those slaves who were left, and after two hundred years the soil was depleted anyway. The farms became run down. Many were abandoned. The former slaves stayed on, working at menial jobs, Harlem's first black colony, though an extremely small one. Shantytowns sprang up inhabited mostly by Irish immigrants who were considered lazy and dirty, shiftless, dangerous.

  By the late eighteen hundreds the population of New York City was l.l million and growing. Waves of foreigners, usually poor and sometimes destitute, kept crowding in downtown near the docks. They brought with them disease and still more crime. They made people who could afford it want to get away. Harlem, the part of it that is now the Three-Two, became New York's first suburb. Tree lined boulevards were laid out, wide streets. Elegant new brownstones were built from designs by the city's best architects.

  The city engulfed its suburb. Between l878 and l881 three elevated railroad lines were pushed north into Harlem, and the real estate boom was on. Apartment buildings went up, some of them six stories high, skyscrapers. Residential buildings, it seemed, would never go higher. Each apartment had many big rooms. Everything was of the best quality, and the people who moved in were of the best quality.

  Now real estate speculators began to bid up the price of lots. The rents went up and up and up. Too much was constructed in too short a time and in 1905 the boom collapsed.

  Numbers of buildings stood empty. Banks foreclosed. Speculators short of capital lost everything. O
thers, to save what they could, rented for the first time to negroes. They found they could get inflated rents from negroes who, because no one wanted them nearby, were used to paying more for housing than anyone else. Unlike the few already established in Harlem, who had lived mostly under the el tracks or on the marshes along the rivers or in other undesirable locations, the new negroes moved into the newest buildings, into spacious apartments built originally for rich whites. And though the rents were high, they were able to pay them by renting out rooms or even parts of rooms to the hordes of immigrants arriving every day from the deep south, ex field hands for the most part, the uneducated and often uncouth sons and daughters of slaves, come to try life in the bright lights. These immigrants were mostly young. They frequently had only rudimentary ideas of sanitation. They had no families yet, they had no experience living in cities, and it was in Harlem that they first tasted their new freedoms.

  Employment agencies proliferated, bringing women up on contracts, but not men. The women were able to find work as domestics, but often the men who moved north could find nothing at all. They could get menial jobs only, and not many of them. They couldn't even become prize fighters, for the State Boxing Commission had outlawed interracial bouts, and the sporting crowd had no interest in watching two blacks maul each other.

  When they couldn't get work, many men went back where they came from, and before long there were more women than men in Harlem. Those men who were left were unable to support themselves, much less families. They lived off the women. They lived as a result with low or non-existent self esteem. Sociologists later wrote learned tomes about it. From the women's point of view there were not enough men to go around. Women learned to go after other women's men; it seemed to many of them that they had no choice. They acquired the reputation for being what was then called "loose.” So the sociologists said. The emasculation of black manhood, the undermining of black family structure, is not a new thing. It existed from the very beginning.

  Today's cops do know--vaguely--about black men, black women and black families, but most are too young and incurious to know or care how it started.

  Once the negroes were solidly established in Harlem, the rest of the whites sold out and moved out.

  Upon reaching New York the other immigrants had mostly started out in the sordid streets and narrow tenements of lower Manhattan, whereas the Harlem negroes inherited parks, and tree lined boulevards, and elegant buildings with huge rooms. Nonetheless, within ten years Harlem was a slum.

  Wherever there is poverty there is crime, and so crime in Harlem was immediate, though not at the level that was to come, and it did not get the publicity that was to come. Blacks robbed blacks, blacks murdered blacks, and the white city took no notice. The newspapers were not interested. The news never left Harlem. Blacks knew better than to assault whites, however. It happened, but it was rare. Violence against whites was not tolerated, justice was always swift and usually draconian. It was not quite the Ku Klux Klan of the south, but almost, and the people of Harlem were aware of this.

  Which meant that Harlem, for whites, was as safe as their own homes, safer. In the Twenties it was the place white tourists came to laugh and drink and listen to the new jazz music. Harlem had the best speakeasies, and the best clubs, which were filled night after night by free spenders from downtown or out of town. Harlem was a tourist attraction of the first magnitude.

  In l937, after winning the heavyweight championship, Joe Louis toured Harlem. This was not Louis's home town, he was from Detroit. Nonetheless, there was an astonishing turnout, there had never been anything like it before. The streets overflowed with laughing, weeping negroes, perhaps l00,000 of them, perhaps more, who seemed to see Louis as the first great hero Black America had ever had or was ever likely to have. There had been others: Marcus Garvey, Frederick Douglass, even a fighter named Jack Johnson who operated mostly abroad. But those men were the past and only dimly remembered. They were not seen in newsreels, heard on the radio--and they did not make headlines for smashing down white men. For the first time negroes could hold up their heads.

  In a sense Joe Louis, and the black reaction to him, was the first stirring of black manhood in the United States. Nothing happened right away. World War II came. After it black athletes began to be accepted on professional teams. Also a tentative, non violent civil rights movement got under way in the south far from Harlem and seeming to have little to do with Harlem.

  Harlem during those years was preoccupied with something else entirely, for a man had stood up calling himself Malcolm X, part of a religion called the Nation of Islam. Malcolm was a man of passionate oratory. He seemed to be preaching hatred of whites, and revolution, and a number of other fiery young men listened to him, and crowded around him. The new religion acquired many converts. People began to call themselves Black Muslims and to take on Islamic names. But Malcolm got to be bigger than the leaders of the new religion wanted; he was shot to death in a hall where he had gone to speak--by his own people, apparently--before he could put his ideas into practice. This took place just over the line in the next precinct up, the Three-Four, into which blacks had begun to spread.

  The Black Panther party was formed. Its leaders preached outright violence against whites, particularly police officers, who were referred to as pigs--who began to be called pigs to their faces. Hatred of whites rose to new levels and in Harlem there were armed confrontations with the police. But the Panthers were infiltrated by undercover black cops and twenty one Panthers went on trial for conspiring to murder cops and blow up police stations. It was the longest trial in New York history, the jury did not believe such a conspiracy was possible, and all 21 were acquitted. But the trial wrecked the Black Panther Party anyway.

  Whereupon certain of the most violent Panthers formed an offshoot, called it the Black Liberation Army, and set out to prowl the streets shooting cops in the back. A few days after the end of the trial they gunned down two cops here in the Three-Two. It was a balmy May evening. In a street outside the Polo Grounds housing project the two young officers, one white, one black, were returning to their radio car after responding to a routine call. Two black men fell into step behind them, pulled out guns, shot them multiple times in the back, and then yanked out the two service revolvers and emptied them into the still writhing bodies.

  This Black Liberation Army had even less of a program than the Panthers and was even more loosely organized, perhaps four hundred people in all, some of them wives, girlfriends and more or less harmless hangers-on, but there were also about seventy five heavily armed gunmen who roamed the country ambushing cops in San Francisco, St. Louis, New Orleans and other cities, killing a number of them. In New York they assassinated four cops in all, and wounded a dozen others. Among those who survived, though as ruined hulks, were two who were machine gunned as they sat in their radio car. This was in the Two-Six, the next precinct over. Most of these Black Liberation Army members were killed or jailed, but it took ten years.

  A police department has a short memory--it is as short as a football team's. Today's players never heard of yesteryear. But the Black Liberation Army has remained part of police lore to this day, partly because their outrages reoccurred for so long, mostly because photos and plaques commemorating the dead cops still hang in shrines in the stationhouses.

  Harlem, meanwhile, continued to deteriorate. The heroin epidemic of the seventies became the crack epidemic of the eighties. Heroin had been mild compared to this. Heroin made people comatose. Crack made them violent. It gave a bigger high and a bigger drop and one needed repeated hits. It proliferated as heroin had never done. Before long it was being sold on front stoops, on street corners, in apartment house hallways, sometimes by children, sometimes openly. The police couldn't stop it, not in the Three-Two, not anywhere. No one could stop it.

  There were more and more guns on the street too, more and more rip-offs. Mostly the crack dealers robbed and shot only each other, but they tended when aroused to spra
y whole areas, and upright citizens sometimes got caught in the crossfire. Crack dealers came to be the best customers gun dealers had ever had. They bought more and more guns, which became more and more exotic--and lethal. They became collectors, almost connoisseurs. And of course all new weaponry had to be test fired, usually into courtyards or the air; you had to make sure the gun worked. On holidays gunfire became celebratory. A tourist--there had been no tourists now in sixty years--would have thought he was listening to a fireworks display. With so many bullets flying around they flew also into doorways, into open windows, they flew down streets, and inevitably they killed bystanders, some of them kids playing, some of them babies in carriages. For blacks in Harlem--blacks in America in general--life was bad and getting worse.

  To the cops who patrolled the Three-Two it seemed that the citizens around them had become increasingly alienated from the rest of the population, meaning the white population, a separate society increasingly outside the mainstream. Whites seemed more and more hated, themselves of course included. This was not something told to them, nor had they worked it out intellectually. It was something felt. However little they knew of the history of Harlem, or of blacks in Harlem, they felt it more strongly every night. There were no Malcolm X's making speeches, no Panthers shooting at them, and a few of them wondered sometimes why not. How long could they be so lucky. What was coming?

  Other cops never gave it a thought.

  Muldoon and Barone, bored by a night on which so little seemed to be happening, pulled up in front of a Chinese takeout place, and went inside.

  Small as it was, the tiny store was fortified. Behind a kind of barred ticket window a Chinese woman took orders from customers waiting on line. The rest of the wall was steel, with a steel door set in it. This was one of the ways store owners tried to minimize the frequent stick-ups in Harlem.

  Muldoon flashed his shield at the Chinese woman.