by Fred Galvin
“Oh, I don’t have much time or inclination to sit in front of the TV and watch movies or shows. So, British murder mysteries? Have you learned anything that can help us nab this Alonzo character?”
“Actually the Brits do a pretty good job. Their cases are intriguing and the acting is good. They have a wry sense of humor and can be very sarcastic, something that I’m sure you’d enjoy.”
Then I realized she’d done it again. She had revealed nothing about herself and redirected my question right back at me. I surrendered, took a long pull of RC, and growled out another belch.
“My, my, but aren’t we gaseous tonight. Please keep them coming out from the top and not the bottom. It’s too cold to have the windows open.”
I harrumphed, lifted my left cheek, and ripped a good one.
She laughed and opened her window. “Oh Mamba, save me. Tell me, did you learn that from one of your British shows?”
“Yes, even the refined British fart while on a stakeout. And who or what is Mamba?”
Uncharacteristically she did open the door a crack to let me peer in at a bit of the internal Ronnie. Either that or she was just messing with me—again. “Sweetie, Mamba is a female voodoo priestess. Best to leave it at that.”
Voodoo? Hmmm. Yeah, she was probably right, so I decided not to go there, at least not tonight. But I did file “mamba, female voodoo priestess” away for another time, maybe to catch her off guard. I brought up Pandora on my phone and asked her, “Any requests?”
With a wink and a devilish smile, she said, “How about some reggae? Do you have a Bob Marley station in your queue?”
I surrendered, found Bob Marley radio, and added him to my list of stations. My phone started playing Redemption Song. Ronnie closed her eyes and began to sway to the music. I had to admit, I did like the beat.
After a while it looked like the night may go on for some time so we fell back into a game of sorts that we played on stakeouts. We would alternate asking questions, just making general observations, or even telling terrible jokes. There were no boundaries except that the questions or observations could not be of a personal nature and should border on the inane. Unless a question was rhetorical in nature, the questioner must know the answer. You couldn’t just leave the other person hanging. No limits on the jokes.
I started. “Okay. When did women in the Western world start shaving their underarms and why?”
Ronnie blinked a couple of times, grinned, and said, “Do you think all women in the West shave their underarms? Do you think I do?”
“I know for a fact that not all Western women shave their pits. One look around the precinct on a night of hooker busts proves that point. As for you, I’m not going there.”
“No, you certainly are not. My guess would be sometime in the late 1800s. So, what’s the answer?”
I cleared my throat and sat up a bit straighter, professorially. “Well, until 1915 there was really no need for women to shave. After all, who ever saw female underarms, anyway? Even the word was considered a bit scandalous with it being so near other interesting body parts. But then came the sleeveless dress and the rest is history.”
Ronnie just stared at me. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Hey, you ought to know by now that I prepare for my assignments. Your turn.”
“Right.” She thought for a few seconds then lifted her index finger. “I saw two cool T-shirt messages on the subway yesterday and made a mental note. One read IN MY DEFENSE, IT WAS A FULL MOON. The other one read TELL ME IN THE MORNING. I’M SMARTER IN THE MORNING. I thought they were clever.”
“Actually I believe there is some validity to the full moon one and I’m dumb as a box of hammers in the morning but by bedtime I’m Einstein.” That was met with an exaggerated eye roll. I cleared my throat once again. “This horse walks into a bar … ”
“STOP! If I hear that horse joke again, any horse joke again, well, just remember I’m carrying a gun, it’s loaded, and I know how to use it!”
After two more hours, Alonzo finally surfaced. He calmly strutted up the street toward the entrance to Building IX like no one was interested in him but they should be. No doubt it was him: tall, skinny, hoodie, Yankees ski hat, pants way down his waist almost to his knees, head down with that cocky strut typical of young toughs. Ronnie and I exited the Crown Vic and circled, our weapons ready. She fell in behind him and I walked toward him between the parked cars. He didn’t see us until I stepped in front of him, flashed my shield, and said, “Good evening, Alonzo.” He looked at me, his eyes wide, and turned to run … right into Ronnie’s Glock 17 pointed at his face.
“Freeze, Alonzo, and keep your hands where I can see them.”
I guess he knew he was done. He put his hands up and actually said, “Okay bitch, you got me.”
I cuffed him from behind and whispered in his ear, “You’re going to want to treat my partner with more respect.”
“Fuck you. And fuck her too.”
He cringed and yelped as I tightened the cuffs significantly. I got in his face. “Excuse me? What was that you said? I believe you were about to apologize to my partner. Right?” I yanked his arms up and out. It had to hurt.
He grimaced and looked down at Ronnie and muttered, “Sorry.”
I yanked harder. “I’m not sure she heard you.”
“I’m sorry!”
“That’s better.” I loosened the cuffs one notch. Then I removed a knife from his hoodie pocket and a pistol from the back pocket of his jeans. “Alonzo Williams, you are under arrest for the murder of Deshawn Harris. You have the right to remain silent … ”
Chapter 4: Jen, Libby, Ken, and Stoopball
I had mentioned earlier that I retired from the NYPD about two years ago. The job was becoming more of a chore than I wanted it to be. I began to dread going into the precinct and really began to begrudge the endless hours away from Jen. When I came home late at night, or early in the morning, I was more and more unable to detach and leave the work behind. I hung up my spikes (baseball metaphor), actually put my wingtips in the closet (not as colorful). I knew Jen would be delighted. She had never put any pressure on me to retire but I knew she would be pleased when I told her of my decision.
Jen worked part-time from home and it would be easy for her to walk away from her job. She was a brilliant software programmer and had been employed twenty-two years by a large national commercial bank (not to be named here, but it rhymes with face, mace, race, pace … use your imagination) until her job, along with 120 others, was eliminated as the result of a RIF, or reduction in force. RIFs are typically perpetrated by the corporation’s Human Resources Department at the direction of the board of directors, most of whom, in this case anyway, knew squat about how to run a bank from the street level where banker-meets-customer, a.k.a. The Trenches.
Please forgive this brief editorial rant, but I must go on …
Corporate America had become very cold and unfeeling, especially since the Great Recession of the late 2000s. Loyalty, seniority, quality of work, dedication to the company and to clients, work ethic, quality first-class employees and more seemed not to matter when decisions were made to cut expenses. Rather than trimming excessive and redundant executive positions along with outrageous executive bonuses, golden parachute severance packages (even if fired for incompetence), and travel, or reducing frivolous expenditures or financially supporting political candidates and causes, the first decision to come out of board rooms was to trim the workforce. Damn the torpedoes, a.k.a. people’s lives! Identify and eliminate the most-costly positions and figure out later how to provide products and services in a competitive manner with fewer and less-talented people making far less in wages. Their formula was simple: work them harder for the same or less pay. If they don’t like it, get someone else, cheaper.
End of rant, almost …
As was common with such moves, the banks were dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that their RIFs and the associated
reduced expenses also reduced their ability to efficiently support their systems, and thus their clients and customers. So, wide-eyed with panic, they offered to take back several high-quality former employees, Jen among them, as consultants working from home to bail them out. They would pay them by the hour, no benefits included. As a result, Jen, now an independent contractor, could write her own ticket. She ended up making twenty-two percent more than when she worked full-time on-site and insisted her hours not exceed twenty-five per week. Go figure. All I can say is, with the inmates running the banking asylums, it’s a good thing the government insures customers’ deposits and provides the bailout safety nets that failing banks need to keep on banking—and failing. It’s the circle of banking life.
Now is the end of rant, really.
One evening shortly after I had told her I wanted out, we were lying in bed reading. She put down her Kindle e-reader and, in the typical fashion of the caring person she was, she put me first. “Dan, are you sure about this? Police work has been your life. This is a big decision and I don’t want you to regret it.”
I hugged her, wondering how I could have possibly been so lucky as to be loved by this woman. “Yes, I’m sure. But I have to disagree with you on one point. You have been, are, and always will be my life. Police work has been just that, police work. True, I’ve had a passion for it over the years and it’s been satisfying to find and put bad guys away for horrendous crimes. But it has always just been a means to an end. I’ve grown weary of it keeping me away from you so much. It’s time for “us” time. It’s time for us to do some of the traveling you’ve always wanted to do. You’ve been so patient and we haven’t gone anywhere significant. Thank you for being you.”
She propped herself up on an elbow. “Well then, detective, if that’s your final answer then I have to say I couldn’t be happier. Yes, it’s finally time for us time.” I loved how she just lit up and took to the idea that we were actually going to do this and go see some of the world. “Yes! I do want to do some traveling.”
“Okay, so where do you have in mind? Italy? France? A cruise, maybe Alaska? San Francisco? LA? Central Park? Greenwich Village? How about Brooklyn?”
“Wise guy. The first five destinations all sound great and I want to go to them, except maybe LA. But first, Libby!”
“Libby? Where’s Libby?”
A twinkle showed in her eye. “Not where, but what.”
“Huh?”
“How long have we lived in New York City? Don’t answer that, I know how long. And we have never been to the Statue of Liberty.”
The dim light in my dim brain got brighter. “Oh, that Libby.” I scratched my head. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. We’ve never been out there to see her, have we? Okay. The first thing on our list will be to head down to The Battery and take the ferry out to visit Libby.”
“And Ellis Island.”
“And Ellis Island. I believe both our grandparents came here through Ellis Island. Maybe we could look up some old records and find them.”
~~~
I gave my thirty-day notice to Captain Billy Smart, but not before telling Ronnie. Thirty days was standard for a detective and allowed plenty of time for turnover of all the cases. I offered more but Billy insisted thirty days was fine.
As I said, I told Ronnie first. As you probably have surmised, the bond between detective partners can be very strong and I wanted to be certain that she heard it from me rather than anyone else. She deserved to get it firsthand and start to prepare for a transition, whatever that may entail. Now I know that may sound presumptuous of me, that she would have to make a major difficult adjustment after I left, but all I had to do was switch the roles in my mind. If Ronnie told me she had decided to leave, my first reaction would probably be shock, followed quickly by dismay. The shock would result from the burst of the Ronnie-and-I-are-an-unbreakable-team-and-she’d-never-leave-me bubble and the dismay from who-the-hell-can-I-work-with-now? Both would be selfish reactions when I should be happy for her and thankful for the time we had together professionally.
I have always been a believer of ripping off the bandage quickly. So the next evening after Jen and I agreed that I would be stepping away, I knew I had to tell Ronnie. We were following up on a tip which had taken us across the Williamsburg Bridge, the good old WB, to Brooklyn. As I did whenever we happened to be in the borough known as Manhattan’s bedroom, I pulled the Crown Vic into the lot of one of our favorite diners, the EATS 24-7. It wasn’t our favorite because of the food or the ambience. Actually, the quality of the food was decent but the ambience was considerably lacking. We liked it because it was Brooklyn all the way, right down to the waitress, Flo. There was even an old picture of Ebbets Field hung crookedly over the counter. For the uninitiated, Ebbets Field was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball club before they broke my heart and moved to the moon, a.k.a. Los Angeles, in 1957. I was so crushed I went over to the Dark Side and have rooted for the Yankees ever since.
Short digression there. Onward …
I parked in a spot around the corner from the diner just vacated by a red Porsche. I remembered it because it had an unusual license plate. “BUX” I believe. We detectives notice stuff like that.
The EATS 24-7 was certainly not an upscale place, even by Brooklyn’s standards, but the food was acceptable by cop standards and the service was “entertaining” by anyone’s standards. Flo was behind the counter and looked up and recognized us, smiling squinting through the smoke curling into her eyes from the cigarette butt dangling from the corner of her mouth.
Cough, wheeze …
“Hey, izzat the D-Team Detectives? How yuz doon’? Plant yur cheeks on a coupla stools. What can I getcha?” (Translation from Brooklynese: “Is that Detectives Deckler and Deveaux? How are you two doing? Take a seat at the counter. What can I order for you?”)
We both smiled and I stepped forward and slipped into my best Brooklynese, which was pretty easy to do. “How ya doon’, Flo? Good to see ya.” (When in Rome, I mean Brooklyn … ) “Ronnie and I gonna grab a booth today. Bring us a black-no-sugar for me, a tea for my partner, and a coupla wedges o’ apple pie. Oh, and nuke the wedges, K? Thanks.”
“Yeah, sure, yuz got it.” That was Flo’s reply every time she took an order which she never, ever wrote down and never, ever screwed up.
Ronnie took the news of my retirement like the true professional she was and certainly better than I would have if the news was coming toward me rather than from me. She smiled warmly and said, “I’m happy for you and Jen. I thought this day might be coming around the corner but honestly I didn’t think it was the next corner.” Knowing the answer to her own next question, she asked it anyway. “Have you told Captain Smart yet?”
“You know that I haven’t. You’re the first to know after Jen. I plan on telling Billy this evening when we get back to the 7th.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that. So, was there a tipping point or has Jen finally knocked some sense into that skull?”
“Actually neither.” I went on to explain that I had been walking up to the decision for a while and I had just figured it was time. As for Jen, I told Ronnie that my wife would have never pushed me to retire. Sure, she was elated that we were going to finally be able to kick back, maybe do some traveling, but only after she was absolutely certain that it was what I really wanted did she show it.
We finished our coffee, tea, and pie and just chatted for a while, mostly about what plans Jen and I were making. On the way out to the car Ronnie grabbed my hands and turned me toward her holding my hands in hers. “Dan, I am so happy for you and I am seriously going to miss you. I wish you and Jen a long and happy retirement.”
I was touched by the gesture and her sincerity. Trying mightily to avoid the unmanly tear in the eye, I just squeezed her hand and managed to croak out, “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be around.”
Prophetic words indeed.
~~~
Ken Garner and I grew up together in Brooklyn
. He was the best stoopball player by far in all of the Williamsburg section. I suspect this included all of Brooklyn as well, if not all of New York City, and that’s saying something. For those who are not familiar with stoopball, let me explain.
Along with stickball, stoopball was New York’s inner-city neighborhood baseball game of sorts. It could be played with as few as two players or as many as would show up to play. All that was needed was a brick or cement stoop, preferably with at least two steps, and a Spaldeen ball. What’s a Spaldeen? Well, you may have heard this before from a previous story, if you were paying attention, but it bears repeating here. A Spaldeen was, and may very well still be a local New York term. It was a lively pink rubber ball, slightly smaller than a tennis ball and without the fuzz, with the manufacturer’s label “Spalding HI-BOUNCE BALL” stamped along the seam. “Spalding” became “Spaldeen” to all the New York kids. At twenty-nine cents apiece in the early sixties, it was the stickball and stoopball ball of choice among the more avid players.
