NYPD Green

by Luke Waters

  Pete had a point. Police work is not your nine-to-five job, and there’s not much room for teary-eyed sentiment. It’s easy to become hard, embittered, and cynical when you see people at their worst, humanity at its most depraved—and that’s just in the squad room! In seriousness, one morning, if you’re lucky, you wake up and decide you’ve had enough, and a few hours later you are “pulling the pin” and turning in your retirement papers. Next week, some other guy will be sitting in your seat. If you are unlucky, you stick with it and stop caring about the oath you took and the people who turn to you for help in a crisis.

  The NYPD is not like Cheers, the TV program. Here, nobody knows your name and if they do, guess what? They don’t care. We are all expendable and we all move on. I called everyone “buddy,” and I showed respect for every person I worked with, but the reality was few became friends. The rest were just guys I used to work with, same as any job. Same as life, I suppose. But with more corpses.

  Departures from Homicide normally didn’t leave much room for long goodbyes. Claude O’Shea, a fellow detective, spent his last five hours as a cop wringing another five hundred dollars in overtime out of the Job, and when he finally did decide to go he simply picked up his riot helmet as a souvenir for his son, debated whether he should take it or not, decided he would, and gave me a hug with tears in his eyes. I walked him to the door, watching as he lit his first cigar as a free man on the steps, then he went out onto Simpson Street and disappeared into the darkness.

  It happened in our office on a regular basis. A member of the team would suddenly stand up, say he’d had enough, and be retired by the end of the day.

  Kenny Umlauft went one better, managing to screw the boss, whom he’d never had much time for, choosing to sail off into one sunset as O’Toole prepared to fly into another. Kenny freely admitted that the only thing that stopped him from pushing our CO out one of our third-floor windows was the width of his arse, but he did drop the boss in it on the morning that O’Toole was preparing to leave for the Dominican Republic with his wife, who was from the island, on a long-anticipated family holiday. Kenny went home on Friday knowing that he was in charge of the squad for the next two weeks, but waited until Monday to ring the boss, who was at home packing, with the news that he was pulling the pin after more than twenty-five years in about twenty-five minutes.

  O’Toole spent half his holiday on the phone with us, trying to put out fires, making it a truly unforgettable vacation.

  At the end of my career I was running empty on empathy, just like the rest.

  “What have you got, Luke? Any Unusuals?” asked the sergeant or DT who picked up at the other end after I called in another murder.

  “Just a drug dealer, multiple convictions. Shot eight times in one of the low-rises. He’s at Lincoln, but he’s likely.”

  “Shot in the low-rises, eh? It really stings when you catch a bullet up there! Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.” Nobody would write about it in a newspaper, because none of us, out there in the real world, had any interest in this victim.

  Maybe Tarsnane was right. Maybe nobody cared.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  EYES WIDE OPEN

  Nobody pays much attention to the tall man pushing the shopping cart along the quiet city streets on November 18, 2007. He had rattled along the one-mile route several times this evening, disappearing into the darkness, crossing the bridge over Interstate 87, and turning towards Roberto Clemente Park. Months earlier the local families would have flocked here in the summer sunshine, picnicking, playing baseball, and killing time in canoes along the Harlem River.

  Tonight, with the city already in winter’s embrace, the waterfront serves a different purpose and the pedestrian struggles with the heavily loaded cart—grimly pushing across the mud and grass until he reaches the riverbank. He unloads more plastic sacks, then a suitcase, and slides them into the water below, watching as they bubble briefly, then sink into the freezing water. He turns and clatters back across the bridge once more. It was his final trip, but his night’s work is only beginning.

  A week later, and forty million Americans packed up and got back on the roads, piling into planes, trains, and automobiles, their annual Thanksgiving exodus over for another year. In that number was a sixty-five-year-old Jamaican immigrant named Elveda Wright, who was braving a five-hour journey along the most congested roadway in the country. Elveda was setting out, not returning, to check in with her daughter, Marlene Platt, who lived 240 miles down the I-95 corridor, which links D.C. with NYC.

  The women were close and talked on the phone every day, but Elveda had not heard from the younger woman in almost a week. Marlene was a nurse’s aide who lived in the Bronx with her adult sons—Nashan, a twenty-two-year-old hospital worker, and his brother Lamar, a twenty-four-year-old barber. When Marlene’s birthday and Thanksgiving both passed with no word, an increasingly worried Elveda set off to find out what had happened. She finally arrived at the family’s apartment at 1610 University Avenue at about three p.m.

  Her knocks on the door, like most of her phone calls over the past seven days, went unanswered. She decided to walk to the barbershop where her older grandson worked to check that everything was okay. Lamar Platt had been unhelpful and vague with his grandma over the phone, offering no clue as to where the rest of the family were staying. He was equally uncooperative face-to-face and refused to hand over the key to the apartment.

  Elveda called the police and the responding officers learned from neighbors that they hadn’t seen Marlene or her younger son Nashan in several days. Only Lamar had been spotted, coming and going to work, and now he stood outside his home, staring as one of the cops climbed inside through a window.

  The officer was hit with an almost overpowering smell of bleach, which pervaded the apartment, and he coughed as he called out the names of the missing residents. His cries echoed through the empty rooms, unanswered.

  When Elveda Wright stepped inside with the other patrolman she confirmed that the purse and ID the officers had just found belonged to her daughter.

  The call went out that Patrol might have a homicide and Detective Stephen Geary caught the case out of the 46, while I responded from Simpson Street. Though the circumstances were suspicious, all we had at that stage were two missing persons but no real evidence that foul play had been committed.

  We ran a search on the new “Real Time” computer and we learned that a week earlier Marlene Platt had called 911 to report that she was being threatened at her home, possibly with a gun. Patrol had responded but had difficulty in speaking to her, and when they eventually did make contact she assured them that she was safe. The call had been a mistake, so the job was logged as a 10-90Y, or “Unnecessary.”

  Relations between Lamar and Marlene had been strained, and he explained to his distraught grandmother that they’d had a fight and Marlene got cut. He’d had to clean up a stain with a bottle of bleach and the kitchen mop. Elveda was furious and disbelieving; she reacted angrily and demanded he tell her what had become of her family. We decided to take Platt down to the 46 where we could question him further and he was fully cooperative as we made our way to the car. Patrol remained to control the crime scene and soothe our complainant as CSU took the usual samples and photographs.

  “Listen, Lamar,” Geary said, “it’s clear that something went down at the apartment. That’s okay, but we need to know the details. We have to find your mother and brother to make sure they are safe, so come on, pal, help us out here.

  “So, where are they now? Tell us so we can help them,” Geary, a small, soft-spoken former schoolteacher, urged.

  That’s when our conversation veered way off the beaten track. Or rather, into the park.

  “They’re in the river,” Platt replied.

  I glanced at Geary, took a breath, and turned back to the other man.

  “The river, Lamar?” I said, trying to match his casual tone.

  Platt nodded and was about to tell us more when sudde
nly his voice trailed off.

  “Don’t really want to talk ’bout it now,” he said, his mood darkening.

  We cajoled him to continue and explained that once CSI got there they’d give us the details anyway.

  It actually worked.

  “I shot ’em both, in their sleep. Mom was in the living room. I shot Nashan in the bedroom, in the back of his head. Then I chopped ’em up, man, and I put some bits in bags, and some in luggage, and put ’em in a cart with weights. When I got to the park, I dumped ’em in the river,” he continued, adding that it took several trips to get rid of all the body parts.

  Lamar Platt later gave us a detailed written confession at the 46. He outlined how he’d used a serrated knife and a machete to dismember his victims, even telling us where to find the tools in the apartment. We returned to the crime scene and immediately found them, before checking out Nashan’s bed. It was clean, just as we suspected.

  Geary and I grabbed the mattress and turned it back over to its original position. Sure enough, it was covered in dark stains. After shooting his brother in the head and butchering his corpse, he’d simply flipped the mattress over and slept on the reverse side for the next week, getting up and going in to work as if nothing had happened. Rooting through a cabinet drawer, we soon found the shells for his .38-caliber revolver, which ATF later confirmed was stolen in Birmingham, Alabama, ten years earlier. We located the shopping cart nearby with mud from the park embedded in the wheels. Our forensics technicians were busy spraying almost every surface area in our crime scene with Luminol, which reveals even cleaned blood with a bluish green hue under a special lamp.

  Detective Sam Gilford blocked off the windows and moved his light in a slow arc.

  “There’s your blood, guys,” he declared.

  You didn’t need a degree in chemistry to see what had happened here—1610 University Avenue was more than a slaughterhouse: it was a house of horrors straight out of a slasher movie. Close to where we stood, the ceilings, walls, floor covers, and kitchen sink were covered with splashes of blue, and the glow from the stains continued on just about every other surface in the apartment. Even the knobs on the TV screen, the remote control, and the sofa cushions glowed under Gilford’s lamp as Forensics got to work, taking several swabs, each carefully sealed in an evidence bag.

  Back in the kitchen one of the other Crime Scene techs was grimly cutting through the pipe underneath the sink, which was also dropped entirely into a plastic bag and tagged with a bar-coded sticker. Meanwhile, a K-9 handler led Pal, a specially trained cadaver dog, from room to room, just in case Lamar had tired of the two-mile round trips to Roberto Clemente Park and stuffed some of his relations’ remains under the floorboards.

  We let them get on with the science bit and headed back to the 46 for another chat with our suspect, who sat drawing a picture of dark, brooding faces and a ticking clock. He was still cooperative and revealed more details of where to find the remains of his mother and brother, before he recorded his confession on videotape with the assistant district attorney present.

  Geary and I drove back to the Harlem River as the sun rapidly set, casting long shadows over our second crime scene. The waterfront was full of feverish activity. The NYPD Aviation Unit was hovering in a helicopter above. They had already made several sweeps of the river as the spotter tried to distinguish any distinctive shapes in the freezing water below. Divers from the Water Unit, clad in wet suits and sub-aqua gear, repeatedly submerged and resurfaced empty-handed. The senior command called a halt to the search for the night but the next morning one of the divers rose from the murky depths holding a plastic sack. Back on dry land we opened it to examine a lump of what, tests would later show, was Nashan Platt’s buttock—remnants of the shorts he wore in bed still clinging to the decomposing flesh.

  Other remains were uncovered as the divers continued their grim search, and one came up holding the most gruesome discovery of the entire investigation: a waterlogged piece of luggage which was dragged onto the bank. An officer pulled the zipper back to reveal a dreadlocked human head, one eye still wide open, the other drooping, half shut, the mouth slightly ajar. The features were those of the missing woman.

  Lamar had been straight with us from the start. Marlene Platt was indeed in the river, just as he’d said.

  We never recovered his dead brother’s head, just some small parts of his watery remains. The swirling current had most likely carried them away. Nature has her own methods of recycling and renewal, but the remains we did find, along with the evidence and signed confessions, were enough to charge our killer with one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder.

  Lamar Platt came to trial before the Bronx State Supreme Court on March 11, 2010, nearly three years later. He sat impassively in an orange Department of Corrections jumpsuit listening to the evidence, and we learned that he was psychotic and his mental illness was made worse by his marijuana habit. Lamar agreed to a deal worked out between his defense counsel and ADA David Birnbaum. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison for each murder, to be served consecutively.

  He opted for prison rather than an indefinite stay in a psychiatric hospital—not much of a choice, really.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  COP OUT

  The scene plays out in slow motion. The teenager stands over his victim, a Tech-9 pointed at the back of the store owner’s head.

  The weapon the gunman grips between his fingers is beloved of drug lords for the ease with which it can be illegally converted into a fully automatic submachine gun. All of this matters little to the man lying with his face pressed against the floor of Cap Urban, the small, narrow shop which he owns—selling ball caps and T-shirts to passersby on the Grand Concourse.

  The armed teen pulls the charging handle of his weapon, loading a round into the chamber, and pulls the trigger, killing the store owner instantly, the blood seeping slowly out the entry hole and spreading from under his prone body in a dark pool across the wooden floor.

  Four police officers stand with arms folded, pistols holstered, staring impassively at the scene. One calmly drinks coffee, another scribbles in a spiral-bound notebook, while two others seem to be doing little more than propping up a wall a few feet away. They are calm, unemotional, and unhurried. Attention, rather than action, is what is required now.

  “Hey, Rick, can we see the perp’s face? Rewind the tape and get pictures, will ya?” asked Barry Sullivan, a well-dressed detective in his early forties.

  Rick Garcia stepped forward—he had a way with technology. All of us brought something different to the game, and we were a rather oddly matched team—at this stage, I’d been moved from the B-Team, with the guys I’d worked with for a while, to this new team, and we were just getting used to each other.

  Barry Sullivan was a stylish, articulate black man who’d grown up in the Bronx and knew more than any of us how the locals thought and behaved. Rick Garcia was Puerto Rican, a computer genius known as “Gigabyte Garcia,” and a native Spanish speaker, ensuring that Hispanic witnesses who felt uncomfortable making a statement to me would open up to him without hesitation.

  Jimmy McSloy served in Warrants prior to joining us in the Bronx Homicide A-Team and was good at tracking down people who didn’t want to be found. He was the son of an NYPD inspector, raised in Long Island.

  Patrol and EMS were on scene when we arrived, but it was too late for the owner of Cap Urban. Amou Fall was a thirty-two-year-old Senegalese immigrant, a devout Muslim, and a keen amateur soccer player. He left behind four grieving brothers, one of whom worked in their other store—Amou’s other brothers were still living with their parents back home in Africa.

  CSU technicians arrived and got to work while we continued to review the store tape and recordings from external cameras overlooking the entrance, which had been installed by the city in an attempt to deter attacks such as this.

  We compared these recordings to the pictures off the store’s secur
ity system and immediately picked up the youths leaving Cap Urban. They looked like any other trio of teens as they ran out onto East 167th Street and towards the nearby subway. One carried a basketball under his arm; all of them sported backpacks slung across shoulders. I was so intent taking notes that I barely noticed the uniformed cop standing beside me who let out a shout as Rick froze the pictures and started to replay the images, frame by frame.

  “Jesus, Detective! I jus’ stopped that kid a few minutes ago!” the cop said excitedly. “Plus, I got his information,” he continued, fumbling in his pocket for his memo book.

  “Where did you stop him?” I asked, unable to believe our good luck.

  “In the subway, ’bout two blocks away,” the Transit cop, whose name was Jorge Arbaje-Diaz, replied. “I heard the radio run on the suspects, when I spot this kid holdin’ a basketball, just like the perp, and he’s, you know, sweating, man, really sweating. Gave me some bull ’bout how he’s shooting hoops in the park, but I search him anyways. Didn’t find no gun or hats or nothing, so I let him go.”

  Having just committed murder, most people wouldn’t be foolish enough to give a police officer their real name, but in stressful situations we all do things we later regret. I headed out to the curb to enter the name into the computer system through the terminal we carry in our cars.

  The details appeared on-screen within seconds. Terrell Lamar, seventeen, had an arrest for marijuana possession, and there was little doubt in our minds that this was one of the gang. Thanks to Arbaje-Diaz stopping our perp in the subway, within hours we had him and his nineteen-year-old accomplice, Joshua Hughes, in custody. Neither of them would give up the third youth, who both claimed was the one who pulled the trigger. Snitching could get you killed in this neighborhood, either by the perp or by one of his family.

  Our suspects blamed the victim for his own death.