Weren’t there any signs on this damn train that didn’t involve booze? Finally an ad I could smile at: the moon in black space; on it, someone had scrawled, “Alice Kramden was here, 1959.”
My smile faded as I remembered Sal Minucci’s raised fist, his Jackie Gleason growl. “One of these days, Gallagher, you’re goin’ to the moon. To the moon!”
It wasn’t just the murder case I missed. It was Sal. The easy partnership of the man who’d put up with my hangovers, my depressions, my wild nights out with the boys.
“Y’know how old I am?” the drunk shouted, almost falling over in his seat. He righted himself. “Fifty-four in September,” he announced, an expectant look on his face.
After a quick smirk in my direction, Manny gave the guy what he wanted. “You don’t look it,” he said. No trace of irony appeared on his Spanish altar boy’s face. It was as though he’d never said the words that were eating into me like battery-acid A.A. coffee.
The sudden jab of anger that stabbed through me took me by surprise, especially since it wasn’t directed at Delgado. No, you don’t look it, I thought. You look more like seventy. White wisps of hair over a bright pink scalp. The face more than pink; a slab of raw calves’ liver. Road maps of broken blood vessels on his
nose and cheeks. Thin white arms and matchstick legs under too-big trousers. When he lifted his hand, ropy with bulging blue veins, it fluttered like a pennant in the breeze.
Like Uncle Paul’s hands.
I turned away sharply. I couldn’t look at the old guy anymore. The constant visual digs Delgado kept throwing in my direction were nothing compared to the pain of looking at a man dying before my eyes. I didn’t want to see blue eyes in that near-dead face. As blue as the lakes of Killarney, Uncle Paul used to say in his mock-Irish brogue.
I focused on the teenagers making out in the rear of the car. A couple of Spanish kids, wearing identical pink T-shirts and black leather jackets. If I stared at them long enough, would they stop groping and kissing, or would an audience spur their passion?
Uncle Paul. After Daddy left us, he was my special friend, and I was his best girl.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but the memories came anyway. The red bike Uncle Paul gave me for my tenth birthday. The first really big new thing, bought just for me, that I’d ever had. The best part was showing it off to cousin Tommy. For once I didn’t need his hand-me-downs, or Aunt Bridget’s clucking over me for being poor. God bless the child who’s got her own.
I opened my eyes just as the Lex passed through the ghost station at Worth Street. Closed off to the public for maybe fifteen years, it seemed a mirage, dimly seen through the dirty windows of the subway car. Bright color on the white tile walls told me graffiti bombers had been there. A good place to check, but not until after City Hall. I owed Manny Delgado a trip to the Black Hole.
“Uh, Sergeant?”
I turned; a patronizing smile played on Delgado’s lips. He’d apparently been trying to get my attention. “Sorry,” I said, feigning a yawn. “Just a little tired.”
Yeah, sure, his look remarked. “We’re coming to Brooklyn Bridge. Shouldn’t we get off the train?”
“Right.” Leave Uncle Paul where he belongs.
At the Brooklyn Bridge stop, we climbed up the steps to the upper platform, showed our ID to the woman token clerk, and told her we were going into the tunnel toward City Hall. Then we went back downstairs, heading for the south end of the downtown platform.
As we were about to go past the gate marked NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT, I looked back at the lighted platform, which made a crescent-shaped curve behind us. Almost in a mirror image, the old drunk was about to pass the forbidden gate and descend into the tunnel heading uptown.
He stepped carefully, holding on to the white, bathroom-tile walls, edging himself around the waist-high gate. He lowered himself down the stone steps, the exact replica of the ones Manny and I were about to descend, then disappeared into the blackness.
I couldn’t let him go. There were too many dangers in the subway, dangers beyond the torch killer everyone was on the hunt for. How many frozen bodies had I stumbled over on the catwalks between tunnels? How many huddled victims had been hit by trains as they lay in sodden sleep? And yet, I had to be careful. My friend Kathy Denzer had gone after a bum sleeping on the catwalk, only to have the man stab her in the arm for trying to save his life.
I couldn’t let him go. Turning to Delgado, I said, “Let’s save City Hall for later. I saw some graffiti at Worth Street on the way here. Let’s check that out first.”
He shrugged. At least he was being spared the Black Hole, his expression said.
Entering the tunnel’s blackness, leaving behind the brightly lit world of sleepy riders, a tiny rush of adrenaline, like MSG after a Chinese dinner, coursed through my bloodstream. Part of it was pure reversion to childhood’s fears. Hansel and Gretel. Snow White. Lost in dark woods with enemies all around. In this case, rats. Their scuffling sent shivers up my spine as we balanced our way along the catwalk above the tracks.
The other part was elation. This was my job. I was good at it. I could put aside my fears and step boldly down into murky depths where few New Yorkers ever went.
Our flashlights shone dim as fireflies. I surveyed the gloomy underground world I’d spent my professional life in.
My imagination often took over in the tunnels. They became caves of doom. Or an evil wood, out of Lord of the Rings. The square columns holding up the tunnel roof were leafless trees, the constant trickle of foul water between the tracks a poisonous stream from which no one drank and lived.
Jones Beach. Uncle Paul’s huge hand cradling my foot, then lifting me high in the air and flinging me backward, laughing with delight, into the cool water. Droplets clinging to his red beard, and Uncle Paul shaking them off into the sunlight like a wet Irish setter.
Me and Mo, we’re the only true Gallaghers. The only redheads. I got straight A’s in English; nobody’s grammar was safe from me—except Uncle Paul’s.
I thought all men smelled like him: whiskey and tobacco.
As Manny and I plodded along the four-block tunnel between the live station and the dead one, we exchanged no words. The acrid stench of an old track fire filled my nostrils the way memories flooded my mind. Trying to push Uncle Paul away, I bent all my concentration on stepping carefully around the foul-smelling water, the burned debris I didn’t want to identify.
I suspected Delgado’s silence was due to fear; he wouldn’t want a shaking voice to betray his tension. I knew how he felt. The first nighttime tunnel trek was a landmark in a young transit cop’s life.
When the downtown express thundered past, we ducked into the coffin-sized alcoves set aside for transit workers. My heart pounded as the wind wake of the train pulled at my clothes; the fear of falling forward, landing under those relentless steel wheels, never left me, no matter how many times I stood in the well. I always thought of Anna Karenina; once in a while, in my drinking
days, I’d wondered how it would feel to edge forward, to let the
train’s undertow pull me toward death.
I could never do it. I’d seen too much blood on the tracks.
Light at the end of the tunnel. The Worth Street station sent rays of hope into the spidery blackness. My step quickened; Delgado’s pace matched mine. Soon we were almost running toward the light, like cavemen coming from the hunt to sit by the fire of safety.
We were almost at the edge of the platform when I motioned Delgado to stop. My hunger to bathe in the light was as great as his, but our post was in the shadows, watching.
A moment of panic. I’d lost the drunk. Had he fallen on the tracks, the electrified third rail roasting him like a pig at a barbecue? Not possible; we’d have heard, and smelled.
I had to admit, the graffiti painting wasn’t a mindless scrawl. It was a picture, full of color and life. Humanlike figures in bright primary shades, grass green, royal blue, orange, sun
yellow, and carnation pink—colors unknown in the black-and-gray tunnels—stood in a line, waiting to go through a subway turnstile. Sexless, they were cookie-cutter replicas of one another, the only difference among them the color inside the black edges.
A rhythmic clicking sound made Delgado jump. “What the hell—?”
“Relax, Manny,” I whispered. “It’s the ball bearing in the spray-paint can. The vandals are here. As soon as the paint hits the tiles, we jump out and bust them.”
Four rowdy teenagers, ranging in color from light brown to ebony, laughed raucously and punched one another with a theatrical style that said We bad. We real bad. They bounded up the steps from the other side of the platform and surveyed their artwork, playful as puppies, pointing out choice bits they had added to their mural.
It should have been simple. Two armed cops, with the advantage of surprise, against four kids armed with Day-Glo spray paint. Two things kept it from being simple: the drunk, wherever
the hell he was, and the fact that one of the kids said, “Hey, bro, when Cool and Jo-Jo gettin’ here?”
A very black kid with a nylon stocking on his head answered, “Jo-Jo be comin’ with Pinto. Cool say he might be bringin’ Slasher and T.P.”
Great. Instead of two against four, it sounded like all the graffiti artists in New York City were planning a convention in the Worth Street ghost station.
“Sarge?” Delgado’s voice was urgent. “We’ve gotta—”
“I know,” I whispered back. “Get on the radio and call for backup.”
Then I remembered. Worth Street was a dead spot. Lead in the ceiling above our heads turned our radios into worthless toys.
“Stop,” I said wearily as Manny pulled the antenna up on his handheld radio. “It won’t work. You’ll have to go back to Brooklyn Bridge. Alert Booth Robert two-twenty-one. Have them call Operations. Just ask for backup, don’t make it a ten-thirteen.” A 10-13 meant “officer in trouble,” and I didn’t want to be the sergeant who cried wolf.
“Try the radio along the way,” I went on. “You never know when it will come to life. I’m not sure where the lead ends.”
Watching Delgado trudge back along the catwalk, I felt lonely, helpless, and stupid. No one knew we’d gone to Worth Street instead of the Black Hole, and that was my fault.
“Hey,” one of the kids called, pointing to a pile of old clothes in the corner of the platform, “what this dude be doin’ in our crib?”
Dude? What dude? Then the old clothes began to rise; it was the drunk from the train. He was huddled into a fetal ball, hoping not to be noticed by the graffiti gang.
Nylon Stocking boogied over to the old drunk, sticking a finger in his ribs. “What you be doin’ here, ol’ man? Huh? Answer me.”
A fat kid with a flat top walked over, sat down next to the drunk, reached into the old man’s jacket pocket, and pulled out a half-empty pint bottle.
A lighter-skinned, thinner boy slapped the drunk around, first lifting him by the scruff of the neck, then laughing as he flopped back to the floor. The old guy tried to rise, only to be kicked in the ribs by Nylon Stocking.
The old guy was bleeding at the mouth. Fat Boy held the pint of booze aloft, teasing the drunk the way you tease a dog with a bone. The worst part was that the drunk was reaching for it, hands flapping wildly, begging. He’d have barked if they’d asked him to.
I was shaking, my stomach starting to heave. God, where was Manny? Where was my backup? I had to stop the kids before their friends got there, but I felt too sick to move. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk. It was as though every taunt, every kick, was aimed at me, not just at the old man.
I reached into my belt for my gun, then opened my vest’s back pouch and pulled out the slapper. Ready to charge, I stopped cold when Nylon Stocking said, “Yo, y’all want to do him like we done the others?”
Fat Boy’s face lit up. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Feel like a cold night. We needs a little fire.”
“You right, bro,” the light-skinned kid chimed in. “I got the kerosene. Done took it from my momma heater.”
“What he deserve, man,” the fourth member of the gang said, his voice a low growl. “Comin’ into our crib, pissin’ on the art, smellin’ up the place. This here our turf, dig?” He prodded the old man in the chest.
“I—I didn’t mean nothing,” the old man whimpered. “I just wanted a place to sleep.”
Uncle Paul, sleeping on our couch when he was too drunk for Aunt Rose to put up with him. He was never too drunk for Mom to take him in. Never too drunk to give me one of his sweet Irish smiles and call me his best girl.
The light-skinned kid opened the bottle—ironically, it looked as if it once contained whiskey—and sprinkled the old man the way my mother sprinkled clothes before ironing them. Nylon Stocking pulled out a book of matches.
By the time Delgado came back, with or without backup, there’d be one more bonfire if I didn’t do something. Fast.
Surprise was my only hope. Four of them, young and strong. One of me, out of shape and shaky.
I shot out a light. I cracked the bulb on the first shot. Target shooting was my best asset as a cop, and I used it to give the kids the impression they were surrounded.
The kids jumped away from the drunk, moving in all directions. “Shit,” one said, “who shootin’?”
I shot out the second and last bulb. In the dark, I had the advantage. They wouldn’t know, at least at first, that only one cop was coming after them.
“Let’s book,” another cried. “Ain’t worth stayin’ here to get shot.”
I ran up the steps, onto the platform lit only by the moonlike rays from the other side of the tracks. Yelling “Stop, police,” I waded into the kids, swinging my illegal slapper.
Thump into the ribs of the kid holding the kerosene bottle. He dropped it, clutching his chest and howling. I felt the breath whoosh out of him, heard the snap of rib cracking. I wheeled and slapped Nylon Stocking across the knee, earning another satisfying howl.
My breath came in gasps, curses pouring out of me. Blood pounded in my temples, a thumping noise that sounded louder than the express train.
The advantage of surprise was over. The other two kids jumped me, one riding my back, the other going for my stomach with hard little fists. All I could see was a maddened teenage tornado circling me with blows. My arm felt light as I thrust my gun deep into the kid’s stomach. He doubled, groaning.
It was like chugging beer at a cop racket. Every hit, every satisfying whack of blackjack against flesh made me hungry for the next. I whirled and socked. The kids kept coming, and I kept knocking them down like bowling pins.
The adrenaline rush was stupendous, filling me with elation. I was a real cop again. There was life after detox.
At last they stopped. Panting, I stood among the fallen, exhausted. My hair had escaped from my knit hat and hung in matted tangles over a face red-hot as a griddle.
I pulled out my cuffs and chained the kids together, wrist to wrist, wishing I had enough sets to do each individually. Together, even cuffed, they could overpower me. Especially since they were beginning to realize I was alone.
I felt weak, spent. As though I’d just made love.
I sat down on the platform, panting, my gun pointed at Nylon Stocking. “You have the right to remain silent,” I began.
As I finished the last Miranda warning on the last kid, I heard the cavalry coming over the hill. Manny Delgado, with four reinforcements.
As the new officers took the collars, I motioned Manny aside, taking him to where the drunk lay sprawled in the corner, still shaking and whimpering.
“Do you smell anything?” I asked.
Manny wrinkled his nose. I looked down at the drunk.
A trickle of water seeped from underneath him; his crotch was soaked.
Uncle Paul, weaving his way home, singing off-key, stopping to take a piss under the lamppost. Nothing unusual in that, except that
this time Julie Ann Mackinnon, my eighth-grade rival, watched from across the street. My cheeks burned as I recalled how she’d told the other kids what she’d seen, her hand cupped over her giggling mouth.
“Not that,” I said, my tone sharp, my face reddening. “The kerosene. These kids are the torch killers. They were going to roast this guy. That’s why I had to take them on alone.”
Delgado’s face registered the scepticism I’d seen lurking in his eyes all night. Could he trust me? He’d been suitably impressed at my chain gang of prisoners, but now I was talking about solving the crime that had every cop in the city on overtime.
“Look, just go back to Brooklyn Bridge and radio”—I was going to say Captain Lomax, when I thought better—“Sal Minucci in
Anti-Crime. He’ll want to have the guy’s coat analyzed. And make sure somebody takes good care of that bottle.” I pointed to the now-empty whiskey bottle the light-skinned boy had poured kerosene from.
“Isn’t that his?” Manny indicated the drunk.
“No, his is a short dog,” I said, then turned away as I realized the term was not widely known in nondrunk circles.
Just go, kid, I prayed. Get the hell out of here before—
He turned, following the backup officers with their chain gang. “And send for Emergency Medical for this guy,” I added. “I’ll stay here till they come.”
I looked down at the drunk. His eyes were blue, a watery, no-color blue with all the life washed out of them. Uncle Paul’s eyes.
Uncle Paul, blurry-faced and maudlin, too blitzed to care that I’d come home from school with a medal for the best English composition. I’d put my masterpiece by his chair, so he could read it after dinner. He spilled whiskey on it; the blue-black ink ran like tears and blotted out my carefully chosen words.
Uncle Paul, old, sick, and dying, just like this one. Living by that time more on the street than at home, though there were people who would take him in. His eyes more red than blue, his big frame wasted. I felt a sob rising, like death squeezing my lungs. I heaved, grabbing for air. My face was wet with tears I didn’t recall shedding.
A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Page 41
