Deadly Debut

by New York Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime

  My dad? Involved in this, whatever it was? Officer Do It By The Book? How could that be? And I remembered the look Sandy had given me when he said good people could be messed up by my questions. What did he know?

  I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t seem to breathe. Jimmy joined me then, and asked what was wrong, but I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, tell him. I couldn’t tell anyone. It was probably way past time to talk to someone above me about Mr. Rivera, but now I couldn’t, not if my dad was in some kind of trouble. Even if it was a trouble he chose.

  MAYBE if I hadn’t been so distracted, I would have wondered why Rivera’s store was already closed in the early evening. Normally, he did a brisk business in late-night desperation for cigarettes, a six-pack, diapers, condoms, and lottery tickets. It wasn’t until much later, when Jimmy and I were on patrol in the dead of night, that the uneasiness finally hit me.

  We went back, peered into the store windows, tried the door, checked the window security gates. There was nothing, until we finally saw a thin line of light coming from the metal hatch that covered the sidewalk chute down to the basement. No window in the front, so we slipped silently around to the back.

  Guns out, holding our breaths, bent low, we crept up to the ground-level basement window and lay right down on the pavement to see in. Sure enough, there was Mr. Rivera, tied in a chair, bleeding, and two men. One was the menacing man I’d seen in the store, still in dark glasses.

  The other was Sandy.

  I cursed under my breath, shook my head, and put my finger to my lips when Jimmy turned to me with a question on his face. He moved away from the window to call it in. Rivera shouted, “Go on an’ hit me again. I don’t care. I got no more. You bled me dry, you mother . . .” They cracked him across the jaw before he finished. Jimmy and I looked at each other and knew we had to go in right now, hoping our back-up was on the way. Jimmy kicked in the flimsy back door.

  What came after was massive confusion, shouting, running, a gun being fired. More cops came in behind us. A window broke. Someone untied Rivera. Then someone hit me in the face.

  Next thing I knew, I lay on the floor and a light was shining in my eyes. I heard sirens and cursing, and someone shouting that it was a mistake, didn’t they know who he was? People in EMS uniforms were lifting a stretcher.

  And my father was there.

  “Dad?”

  “Come on, kiddo.” He helped me up. “I’m going to run you over to the hospital. Ambulance has the other guy. They said I can take you.”

  “I don’t need a hospital.” I touched my cheek and winced. “I just need some ice.”

  “Yeah, well, I know you’re tough, but your mother would never forgive me if I didn’t get you checked for a concussion.”

  As we drove through the empty early morning streets, I was just able to mutter, “What did I miss?”

  “Not so much. Two men arrested.”

  My head was starting to hurt as much as my cheek, but I had to know. “Rivera?”

  “Ambulance. He was hurt pretty bad but conscious. Jimmy’s okay.”

  “What was it? Did Rivera finally say?”

  “He couldn’t talk much, but from the little we got, looks like some kind of protection racket. We’ll be looking for more, and I’m damn sure we’ll find it.” Then he said, “Nice work, baby girl,” but he sounded grim.

  My brain had finally started to work. I struggled to sit up straight. “Dad! What were you doing there? And you were there before, too, weren’t you? The bald man in the car like Mom’s? The other guy—was that Sandy?” I felt like a dope for not guessing sooner.

  During the long silence that followed, I dreaded hearing his answer and I dreaded hearing any lies he might tell. I wished I hadn’t even asked.

  “You knew about that day? I had no idea what Sandy was up to. He said he was stopping in for a candy bar.” Another long silence. “I’ve been keeping an eye on him lately. That’s why I was there tonight. I followed him because I was worried about you.” Dad finally muttered, “I thought you were dating him.”

  Then I really sat up, astonishment overcoming pain. “What are you talking about? Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “Yeah, that’s what your mother said, too, but just listen. Honey, he’s a player. Always has been, and the older he gets, the younger the girls are. Who knows what they see in him? Besides,” he said, “someone saw you.” He flinched at my indignant gasp. “Outside Bridge Tavern, looking affectionate.”

  “You spy on me? Is that what you are saying?”

  “No, no, it’s a cop bar. Someone saw you. Spying? What do you think I am?”

  I didn’t have the energy to take him up on that one then and there. I would, though, sometime down the road.

  “Hey, here we are.” Since he’d called it in, hospital workers rushed up to the car, opened the door, eased me out into a wheelchair. “No more talk now.” His relief would have been comical if I’d been in any condition to appreciate it.

  We continued later, as we waited in an emergency room cubicle.

  “I was only asking his advice about Rivera. And he warned me off, that lying phony. And then, I didn’t want you to know, when I started wondering about him. I thought you might be . . . that you’d be hurt.” I swallowed the next words. My dad would never know I’d been wondering about him, too.

  We’d been protecting each other.

  “That time when I told you about all this? Why did you seem so surprised?” I still had to know.

  “We broke up something like this, years ago, right there, me and Sandy.” He shook his head.

  “He was a great guy, Sandy, all those years, except for the women. A great cop. Who the hell did he turn into? If he needed the dough, dammit, I wish he would have come to me.” My father stopped, looked away so I couldn’t see his face.

  Then they came to take me for X-rays. After, I slept, and they woke me up every two hours to look at my eyes and ask me my name and age. Every time, there was my dad, dozing in a dark corner of the room.

  I woke up the next afternoon with a fierce headache and bruised face, and they said I could leave. Now Mom was there, too—with clean clothes, make-up for the bruises, and Chinese food—and they took me home.

  In the end, it was pretty much what it had seemed, a small-time punk trying to become a bigger one and a cop who was willing to help out for a piece of the action. Small store owners, many of them immigrants, were not too sure that this wasn’t the normal American way of doing business, many convinced by an officer’s involvement that they had nowhere to turn. Small potatoes, as crime rings go. Small, unless you were one of the victims.

  Once word got out that Sandy had been arrested, a whole neighborhood of business owners came forward, ready to make statements. My partner and I couldn’t buy our own hot dogs or soda or coffee on the street. We were invited to a Jamaican barbecue and a Palestinian wedding and were guaranteed a lifetime of manicures at the Korean nail salon.

  Mrs. Rivera and Omar kept the little grocery going until Mr. Rivera was out of the hospital.

  And I finally introduced my parents to my boyfriend. He isn’t a cop, but the real estate agent who found me my apartment. He wears a tie to work every day and is sure I will get my detective shield in record time.

  STRIKE ZONE

  Terrie Farley Moran

  EDGAR Allan Poe killed him.

  That’s not what they wrote in the Journal-American or any of the other New York dailies, of course. Those newspapers got carried away with gang violence and how maybe it was the Fordham Baldies did the deed. The papers called the Baldies the most dangerous gang the Bronx had ever spawned. But Edgar Allan Poe was the one who killed him. I know. I was there.

  MOST of the girls I’d played boxball and jumped rope with, a summer or two before, were spending the summer of 1961 watching the neighborhood boys play softball on a dusty field that took up the whole south end of St. James Park. In the early part of that summer, the girls had clustered in the shad
e of a big oak tree on our own grassy scrap of the park. We would braid plastic key chains and experiment with Flame Glo and Tangee lipsticks borrowed from older sisters or stolen from Woolworth’s, while arguing over which put blonder sun streaks in our hair, lemon juice or peroxide. We giggled about Bobby Vee and Frankie Avalon and tried all the latest dance steps from American Bandstand. Someone always had a transistor radio, a small plastic box blasting out tinny rock and roll.

  By August, the music still sounded tinny, but everything else had changed. One by one, each girl claimed her own space on the benches facing the ball field, and stretched out her tan, freshly shaven legs clad in short-shorts. The fortunate ones sat ramrod straight to show how nicely they’d “filled out” as our mothers would say. Girls who were best friends in July now sat on separate benches, because of a shared crush on some skinny sixteen-year-old boy with a pack of Luckies stuck in the rolled-up sleeve of his tee shirt. We stopped being a crowd of girls and became a bunch of Sputniks revolving around the boys.

  Long before Labor Day, I left St. James Park behind and moved my outdoor afternoons to Poe Park, a block or two away. There, I wandered around, looking for my spot, a place to hang out, maybe even a new crowd of girls.

  The benches were filled with grown-ups who lived in the five- and six-story apartment buildings towering around the park. The women would knit or crochet, gossiping away the afternoon. Old men sat in groups of four or five and played cards or checkers at small stone tables.

  In the open area circling the bandstand, a chubby, blond man in a crisp white uniform leaned against a pushcart, his bulk almost hiding the ice cream pop logo. He flirted with young mothers who bought small cups of vanilla for their toddlers.

  Closer to the Kingsbridge Road underpass, an old man, his khakis and navy T-shirt covered with a long white apron, sat on the last bench next to the subway stairwell. He tossed salted pretzels with a long-handled fork and spread candied peanuts over the hot coals burning in his shiny metal cart. Sugar water from the peanuts dripped onto the coals, and the sweet sizzle made the whole corner smell like a cotton candy machine at the parish bazaar.

  What made Poe Park different from the other neighborhood parks was the cottage—Edgar Allan Poe’s little white home with the dark green trim. It sat in the northwest corner of the park and was pretty much ignored by everyone.

  About my second or third day hanging out, I saw a girl, older than me, maybe a woman, come out of the cottage. She sat on a bench, opened a red pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, popped one in her mouth, and struck a match. All in one motion, she blew out the match and crossed her legs. I walked over and sat beside her.

  “What’s in the house?” I wondered aloud.

  She just sat and smoked. The hand without a cigarette worried itself along the pleats of her soft pink and powder-blue skirt. Finally, uncrossing her legs, she dropped her cigarette and ground the butt with the heel of her penny loafer. She raised her shoulders and moved her face to within a few inches of mine. Her pageboy hairdo slued toward me.

  “You live around here.” Sort of a statement, sort of a question.

  I nodded.

  “And you’ve never been inside?”

  I shook my head.

  “Let’s go then. I show people around the cottage a few hours a week. I’m majoring in American lit at Fordham.”

  Her name was Eloise and she came from some small town in Massachusetts.

  We stepped into the cottage. Kitchen. Sitting room. Bedroom. Eloise pointed to a dark wooden rocking chair and told me Poe had sat there, day after day, mourning his young wife who’d died in the cottage back in 1847.

  She asked me to sign a visitors’ book and gave me a pamphlet about the life of Edgar Allan Poe. I shoved it in my pocket. Eloise smiled. “Sure, biography can be boring, but not Poe’s. You should read it. You should read this, too.”

  She handed me a leaflet with a poem, “The Bells,” printed on one side and a picture of the cottage on the other, and invited me to come back anytime. I figured I’d stop to see her again, if only for something to do.

  I sat on a bench with the pamphlet and read about iron bells and silver bells, golden bells, and so on. I read it again. Until that moment, the bell Sister rang to call us to class, the clang of a fire truck rolling by, the peal of church bells on Sunday morning—all sounded the same. But they weren’t the same. They would never be the same for me again.

  THE next afternoon, I went to the library and found a slim book of poems that included a few written by Edgar Allan Poe. I checked the book onto my hardly-used library card and ran over to the park. I wanted to show Eloise, but the cottage gate was locked. I sat on a bench and began to read.

  That became my summer. Once or twice a week, I scouted the library for anything written by Poe. Nearly every afternoon, I would find a spot under a tree, lean against the trunk, and read some haunting or romantic poem. Sometimes I would see Eloise, and we would talk about whatever poem I was reading. Within weeks, I began to read Poe’s stories. I liked the mysteries, but it was The Tell-Tale Heart that got me hooked. Imagine killing someone and hearing the constant beating of the victim’s heart forevermore. In the story, that heartbeat drives the killer to confess. I got chills when he cried, “I admit the deed!”

  When school reopened, I would rush home to do my chores. Then, book in hand, I’d fly down the stairs from our third-floor walk-up, across the top of the Kingsbridge Road underpass, and into the park.

  I had my own tinny radio, a beige and green boxy thing. I would carry it with me whenever there was a Yankee game. I wasn’t interested in the softball games those other girls sat around watching in St. James Park, and I wasn’t interested in the boys who played them. The only boys who interested me in 1961 were the M&M boys. Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, the stars of the New York Yankees. Truth be told, Mantle was kind of old, but that Roger Maris, now he was cute, and at fifteen, I was just old enough to notice.

  The Yankees were having a great year, then. Bats hot, gloves like magnets. This was the year one of the M&Ms would break Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs in one season. For months, Mantle and Maris were neck and neck. All summer, if the Yankees were playing, you could walk down any street in the Bronx and hear the game blaring from a hundred television sets. Bars sold “Yankee Specials” during game time: beer and hotdogs with a side of peanuts. By the time I started hanging out in Poe Park, Clancy’s Corner Tavern was offering a beer on the house to everyone whenever Mantle or Maris hit a home run.

  Then Mickey Mantle hurt his hip. Like a racehorse that loses steam on the final turn, he just s-l-o-w-e-d down. By September, it was only Roger against the Babe. And, as it turned out, me against Joey Naclerio.

  MY mother sent me to the butcher one day, telling me to buy ground chuck for meat loaf. I took the long way through Poe Park. Walking to my right, but looking to my left, checking if the cottage gate was unlocked, I bumped into someone. “I’m sorry” was out of my mouth before I turned to see if I had crashed into some old person. That always required more than a simple “I’m sorry.”

  Joey Naclerio stood deliberately blocking my path. He lived on the second floor of my building with his sister Anna and their parents. On warm days, when the apartment doors were open, I would creep up to the second-floor landing and peek between the banister rails, hoping his apartment door was closed. Too often, it wasn’t. Joey would be leaning against the doorjamb, dressed in a muscleman tee tucked into dungarees, his garrison belt pulled tight. I would slide around the corner, facing him, my back touching the cast iron banister post. As soon as the heel of my foot hit the first step to the next landing, I’d turn and run to the third floor. Even with all the doors open and the mothers bustling around in their kitchens, I didn’t want to be alone with Joey Naclerio in the hallway. Not even for a second.

  As I raced to the safety of my home, he would say something in a soft, oily voice that sounded dirty, although his words were innocent enough. “Not for nothing, why wa
ste your time reading stupid books?” or “Hey, Bookworm, next time you’re going to the library, call for me.” Lately, he was taking shots at the Yankees.

  “Bookworm, that Maris is such a stiff. He’s never gonna tie the Babe.” And, “There ain’t been a real baseball team in New York since the Giants left the Polo Grounds.”

  Now here he was, blocking my path. He grabbed my arm. “Where you goin’, Bookworm?”

  I pulled away. “None of your business.” I stepped to my right and tried to pass, but he blocked me again.

  “Hey, if you’re going to the library, I could walk you.”

  I gave him a shove. “Get away. I’m going to the store for my mother. She’s waiting for me, so she can make supper.”

  “Did your ma tell you I pulled her grocery cart up the stairs the other day? Anything for Bookworm’s ma.” He stepped aside and sat on the iron railing, winding his feet around the second rung, and motioned me to come closer. I turned and headed toward the butcher. Joey called after me, “Bookworm, what’s your hurry?”

  AS September shifted toward October, the apartment doors stayed closed, and I didn’t meet Joey in the hallway or on the street, but I was always on the lookout. One afternoon, I was coming home from the library, listening to the Yankee game on my transistor. I sat on the fence in front of Poe Cottage, so that Edgar could bring Roger luck. My stomach felt tight all through Tony Kubek’s at-bat. Then Roger Maris stepped to the plate. He was within a couple of runs of tying Babe Ruth’s record. I held my breath, waiting for the pitch, the swing, and Mel Allan’s “Going, going, gone!”

  Someone crept up behind me and smacked the radio out of my hand. Another hand swooped down and caught it just before it hit the ground. I slid off the fence, grabbing at the radio. And looked right into the eyes of Joey Naclerio. He hid the radio behind his back and spoke over my shoulder to Benny Isaacson. “Can you believe Bookworm spends all her time reading this Poe guy and cheering the Yankees? We play our balls off over at St. James, but she don’t come to watch no more.”