Mitchell Smith

by Daydreams

  Then, viewed somewhat nearer in a change of lens that incidental pause apparently made time for, the lover-his guarded adult’s eyes now seen wide and wondering, certain as a baby’s to be pleased-reached out to the black man and recommenced his ardencies, and the blond woman, closer to them, pale as the sheet on which they played, stretched a slender left arm out and under to grasp the white man’s rigid sex and hold it-as if to anchor him from floating away, arched and kicking, out of consciousness from sheer delight.

  “Turn that dirt off,” said the First Deputy.

  As if hearing, and on cue-her companions distracted the blond woman turned her head to confront the hidden camera’s vantage, and, her narrow face forthcoming as a child’s, grinned, and merrily rolled her eyes.

  The Lieutenant, who hadn’t moved to the First Deputy’s command, stooped with alacrity when his Colonel nodded-and pushed a button to OFF.

  Silence-into which the Lieutenant introduced small sounds, disconnecting and packing up.

  Then, the First Deputy, struck by the superior weight of witness over report, said, “Holy Mary . . .” reached to his redlacquered box, opened it, and took out a cigarette.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Two buttered bagels, four Danish-a prune, all the others I’m takin’

  cheese. Five coffees and a tea. Lemon.”

  The refreshment-cart woman-a small, slender young black girl with slanted eyes, who wore her hair straightened to seem to hang softly to her shoulders-refused to take the long detour down the supply corridor to the Squad’s office, which meant that the morning duty officer (Serrano, this week) had to go out to the hall every morning at eleven to get the orders.

  She stood now, silent, unfriendly, looking at her own dark reflection in the coffee urn’s bright, curved steel while Serrano collected his order, took a throwaway paper tray from the stack beside the wooden stirrers, loaded his goods, then handed her a twenty to change.

  “How you doin’, honey?” he said. Serrano was a friendly man, balding, dark, small, and diffident. -Nothing from her, though (perhaps an expression of slight distaste, then back to her own reflection).

  Appeared to believe he was coming on to her. -Fat chance. He hadn’t stooped that low, that he’d try to make a cart woman—especially a stuck-up black one. It was too bad; she was nice looking, or would be, if she’d smile a little.

  Serrano wanted people to like him, and didn’t see why they shouldn’t. He felt he was a pretty nice-looking guy. —Getting a little thin on top, but still a nice-looking guy.

  He’d never let himself go-never started to act like a son-of-a-bitch on the job, either. Never roughed anybody up he didn’t have to…. He’d been married, once, when he was a kid.

  She handed him his change, bent to the wide handle and shoved the heavy cart into motion, brushing past him, heading down the long strip of indoor-outdoor gray carpet, past the elevators-service elevators in this I corridor-heading way down the hall to Accounting and Personnel. -Those offices, she took her cart into.

  “Take it easy, sweetheart!” She’d come around. It was a question of time. People could tell when other people meant no harm. -After all, she didn’t know him. No way she could know what kind of guy he was, just ordering coffees and shit like that.

  When Serrano came back with the food and coffee, Ellie was already stuck in Leahy’s office, wishing she’d smoothed her skirt better before she sat down; it was almost new, a summer stripe in light pink-and-gray linen that went with her gray blazer perfectly, and she was probably sitting nice big wrinkles into it. Ellie could hear Serrano’s distribution through the open door. -By the time she got out there, her coffee would be cold.

  She had the only chair in the little room, except for Leahy’s burdened swivel. The squad commander’s office had been the large walk-in sink-and-storage closet for the much larger L-shaped supply room. The Commissioner’s i Squad occupied the supply room; their commander, this storage closet. The big sink, flanked now by a small metal-legged Formica table supporting a hot plate, yellow plastic cups, plastic sugar dispenser and a small coffeepot, was the Squad’s kitchen-traffic to and from it constantly wearing away the Lieutenant’s solitary dignity.

  A detective would knock, and-if a tough guy like Nardone or Samuelson-would then come lurching in without a say-so, banging the door open, bearing a plastic glass with a spoonful of instant pink lemonade waiting on its bottom. Use the sink-not a word of apology-and barge right out again, stirring his lemonade with a white plastic spoon hoarded from the coffee cart.

  Lieutenant Leahy was a fat man in his fifties, with a rosebud mouth and small, upturned Irish nose. A girl had once told him he looked like Captain Bligh-by which she meant the old Charles Laughton version on TV.

  Leahy had hard, china-blue eyes, and an odd handshake; first, one felt a cushioned squeezing, unpleasantly soft with fat-then, surfacing against one’s palm like weights of metal pressing through a pillow, a consider able pressure of bone and muscle. Leahy always held his grip long enough, on a handshake, to be certain that these last were felt.

  It was a numbing grip, unpleasantly challenging-a bully’s grip-and had likely been learned as a fat boy’s offensive defense in a tough Newark high school. The Lieutenant was from New Jersey, originally.

  This surprising handshake, and his manner on the jobbrusque and tough-talking-were Leahy’s only social aggressions. Even with his latent physical power, so perfectly cloaked by the fat swelling in every motion within his trouser thighs, tugging inside his shirt to open it despite his buttons, pouring softly over his collar all around even possessing this submerged, potent muscle and bone, his position as commander of the Squad, the Lieutenant was shy as a turtle in any but his purely professional capacity-there, he was occasionally stubborn, often angry, never cruel.

  After his wife had left him, she phoned him one Sunday afternoon, out of the blue, and said awful things.

  This fat man, who had struggled with great courage from the beginning of his service in the Department to deal with the tidal urges of his appetite, managing by heroic measures of starvation and denial to meet and pass physical examinations that might have ruined his career if he had not been able to lose, from time to time, twenty pounds … thirty pounds … fifty or sixty pounds of fat barely in time for his annual visits to the police surgeon’s office-this obese man, exhausted rather than strengthened by these struggles, and whose great reliance had always been on a steady and energetic talent for proper paperwork, now sat sausaged into his clothes, waiting with Ellie for snack comfort (his prune Danish, his coffee with three sugars) while looking up from his swivel chair to accept from Captain Anderson-tall, lean (almost bony), handsome in a light-gray summer-weight wool suit-a small stack of reports, one by one.

  Ellie sat and Nardone stood against the wall behind her, waiting. The four of them crowded the storage closet.

  “What about Harrison?” Ellie and Nardone had been working on and off for some weeks on the case of Wilfred Harrison, a British Member of Parliament for Iseley who was a registered heroin addict and a spokesman for the conservative wing of the Labor Party. Harrison-invited to the city with a British trade delegation (Aquascutum, Burberrys, etc.) to arrive in October-presented a nice problem in law enforcement, since, NYPD had been informed, he intended to carry his British-legal supply of pop with him-to shoot up, possibly, in Gracie Mansion, right after lunch.

  The newspapers had had this story for some time, and were not being helpful.

  :‘Fuck Harrison,” said Lieutenant Leahy.

  ‘-But don’t give him lunch,” joked Captain Anderson in his pleasing baritone, handing Leahy the last of the files. Anderson glanced at Ellie to see if she got it, and saw that she did. He was wearing a blue-and-cream tie, a white shirt. “We need your activity reports on these,” he said. “Some Internal Affairs people are spending way too much money.”

  “But, what about the Gaither thing?” Ellie could see that important case already flown out of their hands, bac
k to the regular squads.

  “You two have that,” Anderson said. “-They still have that one, don’t they, Ed?” Leahy’s full name was Phillip Edwin Leahy.

  “Oh, sure,” Leahy said, “-they’re assigned to that.”

  “We don’t expect anything fast on that one,” Anderson said.

  “No?” Nardone, from the wall.

  ,‘We want you to take your time on that one. Careful handling. -No use embarrassing a few honest citizens for wetting their wee-wees until we really have a solid case made. Chief wants this one handled in a grownup kind of way no reporters at all. Absolutely no leaks, no bullshit.”

  Nardone said, “Uh-huh.”

  “Any questions at all develop on that one, you check with Ed, or you check with me. O.K.? -Now, the Internal Affairs problems are a little more front-and-center.

  We want to get on that one fast, so I’ll need your activity reports and summaries upstairs every couple of days. -All right, Ed?”

  “You’ll get ‘em,” Leahy said, and sat back a little in his suffering chair. He was wearing a light-blue sports jacket that couldn’t close and button across his ‘shirt front. “-We’ll turn ‘em out.” He picked up the stack of reports, and held them out across his desktop. Ellie stood up, took them, and remained standing to see if Leahy had anything more to say.

  “That’s it,” he said. “-Get on ‘em.”

  “Won’t hurt,” Anderson said as Ellie turned to go, Nardone heaved forward off the wall, “-won’t hurt to be a tad obvious about these investigations. We’re as interested in correcting behavior as getting indictments.”

  Ellie picked up her bagel and coffee at her desk (Serrano had left them beside the phone with a note-You owe me twenty cents) and crossed the squad room’s narrow aisle to Nardone. They were lucky, their desks resting in the long leg of the squadroom L, where there were two vents along the back wall (decorated otherwise with bulletin boards and blackboards) though no windows. The short leg, around the corner to the right, was a four-desk Cubby, and airless. No vents. There, Graham and Classman sat crowded in with two young black detectives, only nominally members of the Squad. Nobody knew these young men’s assignment, which was believed to involve some scandal in the pari-mutuel system as odds were computed. And that notion might be mistaken, since the young men spoke very little, and were hardly ever in the office.

  Nardone was sitting straight up at his desk, leafing through the reports on the Internal Affairs people.

  Nardone always had tea at the morning break, never coffee, and never anything to eat, though when they went out he was liable to stop at the first Sabrett’s and buy three of the skinny, damp little hot dogs and eat them without onions or mustard-nothing to drink, either.

  “What a load this stuff is,” he said. “-I don’t know why we even got this shit. Here’s a guy; his wife’s aunt says he’s a crook. Says he’s buyin’ sports cars like they’re going’ out of style. -Says she don’t want to make trouble, but it’s her taxes, too.”

  “Don’t use that word taxes. Don’t use that word in my presence,”

  Samuelson said, walking by. Samuelson was the biggest detective on the Squad (salt-and-pepper hair cropped in an archaic crew cut, his nose jutting from a raptor’s great heavy-boned head very like the beak of one of those high-flying hunters) and, unlike many big, powerful men, he had a hasty temper. He’d been assigned to the Squad several years before for beating up a sergeant from Traffic after that officer attempted to extort money from Samuelson’s father (whose two delivery trucks had had no option but to doublepark at his underwear business on Thirty-seventh off Seventh Avenue).

  Nathan Samuelson had never been much of a businessman, but he’d been very gentle, and his huge son had loved him dearly. -Therefore the confrontation with the sergeant from Traffic, considerable of a horse himself (an ex-St. Joseph’s football player named Mike Grew).

  The fight ensuing remained something of a legend in Manhattan West, occurring as it had in the public purlieus of the precinct locker room.

  A row of lockers had been dented, the sergeant dented even more, and the matter had gone straight up the ladder to the Grand Hair-bags at Headquarters, had been mulled, turned and polished there, and finally adjusted and put away. The sergeant (his jaw lightly wired to heal) was told to wise up. Samuelson was transferred from Stakeout, where he had already assisted in killing two perps, to the Commissioner’s Squad, where his regular duty was to escort and safely convoy through the shoals and reefs of Manhattan a succession of visiting firemen-important and less so.

  These men, small, often brown or pale orange, Samuelson usually led, ponderous and protecting, from Bruno’s Pen & Pencil to a Soho disco named Peabody’s, and finally, often, to Harriet Picunis’ large apartment on Sixty-first Street-after a precautionary call to Morals to be certain of no pending harassment. There, amid a forest of white plastic Art Deco, Samuelson would sit on the lime upholstered living-room sofa reading paperback science fiction (until sufficient customers had arrived to make up a game of gin) while his charge or charges sported with whatever Puerto Rican girls Harriet was then supplied.

  Occasionally, pleased and weary, ready to go home to the Hilton, these foreigners sons of Thailand or Korea, Brazil or the Philippines-would emerge from a back bedroom (having been told of a certain confused, shy admiration held for them by a girl who’d thought herself lost to that sort of feeling forever) to discover their watchdog, mountainous in a folding chair, at play of gin with a choice selection of the City.

  -Attorneys, businessmen, politicians, criminals, and an occasional officer of the Fire or Sanitation Departments.

  These games, with the occasional Sanitation man already in over his head, would sometimes last till morning and the foreign visitor too timid to brave the night streets alone after so comforting a companion through the evening, found no alternative but to go to the kitchen for a sandwich and beer, and, later, to fall asleep on the sofa to a river in murmur of card talk, the masculine comforts of curses, burps, farts unrestrained, and cigar smoke whiffed from the table of play.

  It was odd how good company might improve a man.

  Often, by morning, that same creature who’d trotted like a spaniel behind Samuelson’s bulk the evening before, would, under the civilizing influence of women, cards, beer, and roast-beef sandwiches paved with horseradish and mayonnaise, stand revealed as not such a bad fellow at all, a man of some experience, and no fool. -And occasionally, no fool at cards.

  “Taxes killed my dad,” Samuelson said, “and the fuckers are on their way to killing me’-and walked on his way. His desk was the last in the left-hand row, across from a slender, aging black detective named Murray, generally believed by the Squad to be a queer, and to have been caught at it.

  It was known that Samuelson and Harriet Picunis had had a thing for a year or two, and some Squad members had bet it would destroy Samuelson’s marriage. But the thing was over, apparently, and no harm done. Nobody knew if Ruth had known about it or not. -If she had, she’d apparently decided to let it pass.

  Samuelson had built his family a cottage up in Otsego County-perhaps as a peace offering-and had then been struck, in those bosky environs, by a new school tax of brutal weight.

  Ellie smoothed her skirt-it had been badly wrinkled across the back-and perched comfortably enough on the side of Nardone’s desk, absently enjoying the light armor of her panty hose taut around her bottom, at her knees when she crossed her legs.

  “Look at this shit.” Nardone extracted another report.

  (The fluorescents of the squad room seemed, when one first walked in, to pour down a flood of white-yellow light, almost bright as the day outside-but, on the surfaces of paper, this brightness turned a dull violet, difficult to read by.) Ellie bent slightly, unwrapping her bagel, and was able, holding her head at the proper angle, to make out in the dense type that a detective named Johnson had been observed by a fellow officer to enter the establishment of a bookmaker named Porfirio Cruz,
pause in those premises for thirty minutes and a little more, then leave.

  “Are they kidding’ us,” Nardone said, “-Or what?”

  “Is that all they have?” Ellie said. The bagel had butter oozing out its edges.

  “Look at this . . . ‘Officer observed. What kind of crap is that?

  What are we supposed to do-surveil this Johnson? Go talk to this Cruz guy?-What the hell’s that going’ to get us?”

  “That’ll get us nothing,” Ellie said, and took her first bite.

  “That’s it. That’s just what it’s going’ to get us.” Nardone toot the top off his tea.

  “We could talk to that witness; he could know more than Johnson just going in there.”

  “Yeah, we could talk to him—if you can find his name in here.” He shook the report as if the man’s name might fall out onto his desk, might just miss his tea. “-You find that witness’s name in here, I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “Why are we getting this crap?-We have a major case to work!”

  Nardone’s phone rang, a minor addition to background conversations the singing of other phones throughout the squad room, the rattle and click of processor keys as two detectives across the aisle and two desks down entered and edited their previous day’s activity reports. -Second thoughts, emendations, corrections, completions. Leahy liked his file reports perfect-and provided only with those, would, more often than not, leave a man (or woman) alone.

  As Nardone commenced a conversation with an old informant calling from loneliness, Ellie took a second bite of bagel, pried the top from her coffee cup, took a paper of Nardone’s sugar, tore and poured it in, then tore a creamer paper and added that. She took the thin wood stirrer from his tea-though he tried to protect it, phoning-and mixed her coffee to light tan. It tasted slightly from the Styrofoam at first, then rushed over her tongue to soak the second bite of buttered bagel, joining with that rich flavor as if two veteran lovers, soft and kissing loose, had come to lie in Ellie’s mouth.