by F. P. Lione
The guy was about sixty, short and grubby. He had arms like Popeye and a tattoo of a topless mermaid on his right forearm. He still carried the pipe, which Fiore politely asked him to get rid of.
He rode us up to the fourteenth floor, and we checked the roof and found it secure. We started the long walk down the stairwells to check each floor to see if any stairwell doors had been tampered with. The building was hot, and I felt like I was suffocating. The odor of urine, stale cigarettes, and who knew what else hit us the whole way down. I was feeling nauseous to begin with, and the stench was making it worse.
Fiore, on the other hand, was lively as ever, asking me questions that I had to suck in air to answer. My back was drenched with sweat, and perspiration from my forehead was starting to drip into my eyes. I turned the questions on him and quietly asked him some so I wouldn’t have to talk.
The stairwells in most buildings of that type are used for fire escapes, with access allowed every fifth or sixth floor. In this building there was no reentry to the stairwell until the tenth floor. I motioned Fiore for quiet, and we walked onto the tenth floor to see if it was secure. Our footsteps echoed in the empty building, and we kept our voices low so they wouldn’t carry in the empty corridors.
Between the tenth and fifth floors I found out that Fiore had twelve years on the job, two more than I did. He was thirty-six years old and lived in Holbrook, Long Island. He grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He worked in Queens for most of his career but got tired of driving. He now took the Long Island railroad for free into Penn Station and could read and sleep on the train instead of driving. I also found out that he loved to fish and was a diehard Yankee fan. Last year he’d caught the World Series detail at Yankee Stadium, which he calls the highlight of his career. He also added that his father was a Met fan and loved the Brooklyn Dodgers.
“Don’t you mean the Los Angeles Dodgers?” I asked. “The Dodgers left Brooklyn back in the fifties.”
“He’s one of those people who could never accept the ‘Brooklyn Bums’ moving to California.” He chuckled. “He knows more about baseball than anyone I know, and he never lets me forget that the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series. It doesn’t matter to him that the Yankees have won more championships than any other team in baseball; in his mind the Dodgers were the best. He grew up in Brooklyn and used to watch them play at Ebbets Field. Once they moved to California, he had no use for them.”
I’d met some old-timers like that. I’m a Yankee fan myself.
We reached the fifth floor reentry and found the floor undisturbed. There was no sign of break-in on any floor. The men must have left the building when the super went to get his pipe.
My head was really starting to pound after walking down all those stairs, but Fiore was throwing the bull with the super like we had all night. Two more alarms came over the radio while we stood there, and I was getting aggravated. I wanted some aspirin and a cold soda and it didn’t look like Fiore was going to shut up anytime soon.
“Joe, we’re getting more jobs, and I want to get something to drink,” I said impatiently. I looked at my watch for effect, and Fiore finally said good night to Al, the super. He tried to get away, but Al kept talking. There were two more handshakes and some more talk about Al’s friends who worked days at our precinct. Al swears he gives us information on truck burglaries and that once he’d chased down three guys who robbed an old man. He’d then flagged down an RMP to take away the offenders. I rolled my eyes until Fiore finally wrapped it up and suggested we head to a deli on 43rd Street.
“Are you gonna do that at every alarm?” I asked as Fiore finished writing up his unnecessary alarm form.
“Yeah,” he said, still writing.
“So if we have twenty alarms, you’re gonna do all twenty?” “Yeah, why?” He looked over at me.
“Cause you’re better off not filling them out.”
“Why?”
Now at this point I decided to let Fiore know I’m as stupid as I liked people to think. In fact, I had a college degree. An associate’s degree, but a degree all the same. I didn’t go to John Jay and study criminal justice; I went to the College of Staten Island and studied biology for two years. I left school when my parents started having problems, and worked as a carpenter until I went into the police academy. With my credits from the academy I’m only about thirty credits shy of my bachelor’s. I keep saying I’ll go back and finish. I just never seem to get around to it.
I lit a cigarette as I explained it to him.
Fiore cracked his window.
“The unnecessary alarms won’t matter to the nickel-and-dime burglars who hit delis for cigarettes and cash out of the registers. It won’t even matter for the more ambitious one that does the offices for computers. But for the serious guys who are purposely tripping the alarms three times so they can hit for a hundred grand in garments or a million in diamonds, then we got a problem. They know that once three of those forms are filled out within a month, Central is notified not to give that alarm out anymore.” I flicked an ash out the window, took a drag off my cigarette, and paused to look at him. “Sooo, when they hit, we won’t respond until the security company lets us know that there’s a confirmed burglary at that location.” I finished the last drag of my cigarette, tossed it out the window, and blew out hard for effect.
“I get it,” Fiore said, nodding. “So which ones should I fill out?”
“None of them,” I said with a smile.
Fiore digested this and then continued to write. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll fill out one for every job. At the end of the night you pick out the ones that I can give in, I’ll save the others and hand them in at the end of the month. That okay with you?”
I shrugged. “As long as you’re the one filling them out.”
By this time it was 12:30, and we still hadn’t stopped for coffee. We drove to a deli Fiore wanted to stop at on 43rd and 8th. I didn’t understand why he would go there, maybe the coffee was good. He got a cup of joe for himself and a package of Tylenol and a Coke for me. I popped the Tylenol and guzzled the Coke, hoping to sit down and read the Daily News Rice and Beans had left from the four-to-twelve.
I didn’t have time to let the aspirin take effect before the radio got busy and the night got chaotic. We had a family dispute on 9th Avenue, and then we answered a job on Broadway where the address was no good. Heading back from that, we answered a bank alarm out of our sector. We had a robbery at 34th and 8th and canvassed the area with the two complainants. We came up negative and filled out a complaint report. We had a robbery in progress on 39th and 7th, and on the way to the robbery we had an 85 (officer needs assistance) so we went there first. A foot post cop in Times Square had an arrest, so we were going to take the complainant back to the precinct while McGovern and O’Brien took the foot post and the perp.
While we were in Times Square with the foot post, a leggy blond who was centerfold material tried to get Fiore’s attention. She looked like a model or some big shot’s girlfriend. McGovern and O’Brien were tripping over themselves to get her attention. Even in my declining physical state I had to wipe the saliva from the side of my mouth. She was beautiful, tall, and wearing a short black skirt and a black halter top. She had on high-heeled sandals, not the thick ugly kind but the kind that made her legs look a mile long. Her blond hair went down to her waist, and she had big blue eyes, slightly slanted at the corners.
She didn’t notice us—it was Fiore she was after. In a purring voice she said, “Officer, can you help me get to Penn Station?”
O’Brien offered to carry her there, but she said, “I’m asking him,” and pointed at Fiore.
Fiore looked up at her, then looked back down at what he was writing and answered, “Walk straight down 7th Avenue to 32nd Street.”
I started to wonder if he was human.
By this time it was 2:00, and because we responded first to the officer needing assistance, we had to go back to the
robbery in progress on 39th and 7th.
The robbery in progress complainant turned out to be what we call a walking 61. A complaint report waiting to happen. We found him sitting on the corner of 39th and 7th with his head in his hands. He started yelling at us the minute we pulled up.
“Where were you guys? I’m bleeding, they took all my money, look!” he said, showing us his shorts.
When he stood up I almost laughed out loud. Both sides of his shorts had been cut with a razor. It looked like he was wearing a loincloth with black and red bikini underwear showing underneath. I thought about what my mother always said about underwear and accidents.
The liquor on his breath was obvious. He was about fifty years old, with a slight build. He had a European accent I couldn’t place, but I guessed Scandinavian. He wore a button-down white shirt over dark green cotton shorts that were slit up the sides, and brown leather sandals. I summed him up as wimpy. He should have just put a sign around his neck that said: Drunk Tourist, Rob Me. His left leg was bleeding, but it didn’t look serious. I could see where his tan line ended and his underwear started. He looked ridiculous.
“Come on, get in the car, and we’ll look around,” I said and drove down 39th Street toward 8th Avenue.
Fiore started getting a description of the two perps. According to the wimp, two males in their teens slit one side of his pants. When he realized what was going on, one of the kids punched him in the face. They then slit the other leg and took his wallet, which had 530 dollars in fifty-dollar denominations and two traveler’s checks worth a thousand dollars each in it. The guys then ran up 7th Avenue. One kid was wearing black shorts and a big red T-shirt. The other wore black shorts, a tight, shiny silver shirt, and a red hat. The complainant told us he’d put his wallet and money in his front pockets because his tour book told him about the pickpockets that frequent midtown Manhattan.
“Well, buddy, I guess they were on to you,” I said dryly.
“Were the colors they were wearing significant?” he asked. It sounded like “seeknificant.”
“Why, those colors didn’t look good on them?” I asked.
“No, were they gang colors?” He managed to say all this with his lips blown up like an inflated tire tube.
I assured him it wasn’t gang related.
Fiore put this over the radio as I drove toward Port Authority. It was about forty-five minutes after the robbery, and the perps were probably long gone. I figured they’d already run to the subway station at 40th and 8th, making this canvass useless.
Port Authority was still somewhat busy despite the late hour. A group of five teenagers was standing in a circle talking, and there were people coming in and out of the building with a scattered few taking refuge from the heat. Every time the automatic doors opened a blast of cold air would rush out from inside.
“Take a look over there,” Fiore told the complainant we now knew as Carl Hansen. “There’s a guy in that group with a silver shirt minus the red hat.”
I slowed almost to a halt so he could get a better look. Hansen rolled the window down and squinted at the group, who paid no attention to us.
“That’s him! That’s him! That’s the guy right there, he cut me!” Hansen screamed out the window.
I shook my head at his stupidity. Fiore got out of the car, walking quickly toward the front of Port Authority. I shut the car off, grabbed the keys and my nightstick, and followed Fiore. Before I could stop him, Hansen jumped out of the car after us and started yelling and pointing, “That’s him, silver shirt, silver shirt!”
I sighed audibly. I wasn’t in the mood for this.
The kid saw us coming and tried to act nonchalant; his friends looked confused. Hansen was acting like the kid coming back to the school yard with his big brother after the bully had slapped him stupid. Fiore had the radio in his left hand and his right hand on his gun.
The kid’s eyes widened when he saw Hansen coming up with Fiore, and then he bolted. He ran down to 41st Street, heading west toward 9th Avenue. Fiore was about half a block ahead of me. I groaned and took off after them, passing Hansen, who was running after Fiore and looking like a stripper with a breakaway skirt. The material was flapping up, and his bikini underwear showed off his backside.
The whole time the kid yelled, “I didn’t do nothing, I didn’t do nothing!” while Hansen yelled, “That’s the guy! Get him!” I could hear our footsteps echoing under the overhead walkway connecting the Port Authority buildings, my handcuffs jiggling as I ran. Forty-first Street was deserted except for a few postal trucks parked for the night in back of the post office. Garbage bags lined the streets, waiting for the private sanitation pickup. I caught whiffs of the trash as I ran past. I thought the kid would continue to run westbound, but instead he cut through the bus ramp that would bring him over to 40th Street. I saw Fiore was keeping up with him and turned right on 40th Street. We passed two Port Authority cops who joined in after me when they realized we were chasing a perp.
From there the kid ran diagonally toward 9th Avenue. As he approached West 39th Street, he saw a sector car going the wrong way north on 9th Avenue. Fiore must have put it over the radio as I heard another car coming south on 9th Avenue. When the kid realized he had nowhere to go, he slowed down near the corner.
As I approached, Fiore grabbed the kid from behind and put him up against a private sanitation truck parked on the corner. By this time I was sucking wind. I heard myself gasping for breath, and I listened to my heartbeat slamming rapidly in my ears. I was sweating profusely and slowed myself down to a walk, taking in big gulps of air.
Fiore held the kid against the truck as he put his cuffs on him. He took the kid’s right wrist and put it behind his back. The Port Authority cops caught up with us as I held the kid’s left arm and shoulder against the truck.
The smell of the truck hit me so hard I stepped back. My mouth watered, and I felt bile rise in my throat. I came back up and tightened my grip on the kid. I was able to turn my head a little to the left before my stomach heaved. My last thought was that there had to be rotting fish in that truck.
2
Since I had vomited on the perp he automatically became my collar.
Mike Rooney started making gagging sounds as soon as he was on the scene. He was thrilled, because he still hadn’t lived down the time he lost a prisoner. Last year he left a female prisoner handcuffed to a bench inside the precinct while he went for a sandwich. She was double-jointed and got out of her cuffs, walking out unnoticed. I could understand how it happened; the station house is always crowded by the time the day tour starts. You don’t know who’s who around there unless they’re in uniform. Rooney walked for thirty days and lost a week’s vacation, but the guys won’t let him forget it, especially me.
Emptying my stomach on my prisoner took Rooney out of the limelight. And he took the lead in playing up my embarrassment, holding his side and laughing it up. Guys howled until tears rolled down their faces.
Fiore was the only one who didn’t think it was funny, and he got control of the situation in spite of the meatballs. He cuffed the perp and called Central, telling them to slow it down, we had the guy in custody. He asked me if I was okay. I nodded, breathing in deep breaths as the complainant caught up with us. He was gasping for breath and his sandals were making a scraping sound on the pavement.
“That’s him! You got him!” he yelled, still pointing, holding his chest.
The perp yelled to Hansen, “Yo, dude! I helped you!” He bent at the waist to accommodate his hands handcuffed behind him. “Tell them, that guy dissed you, man, punched you in your face and took your money. Remember I chased him? He dogged you, punched you in the face, look at your lip, man! I helped you, tell them!”
I should add here the reason Fiore didn’t tell him to shut up. At this point anything the perp says is considered a spontaneous utterance. Since he wasn’t questioned on it and blurted it out we can use it in court. What he was saying placed him at the scene with the o
ther offender.
“Well, who cut my pants?” Hansen lifted his pants to assault us again with the sight of his bikinis. “Who did this?” he yelled. “You did! I saw you. I’m bleeding!”
Everyone started laughing again, agitating the handcuffed kid, who thought they were laughing at him.
“I didn’t do anything. I try to help someone, and this guy—” he looked at me, “pukes all over me.”
Fiore leaned over and spoke quietly to the kid. “Buddy, what’s your name?” he asked.
The kid put his head to the side as if to control his anger. “Darrell,” he spat.
“Okay, Darrell, he didn’t puke all over you, he got a little on your shirt. And if you hadn’t made him chase you, he wouldn’t have gotten sick. I’ll tell you what, let’s go back to the precinct, I’ll get you another shirt, and we’ll straighten this whole thing out. Let me search you, and we’ll head back,” Fiore finished calmly.
He asked Darrell if he had anything sharp on him, and Darrell said he might have something sharp in his right back pocket. Fiore found six crisp fifty-dollar bills in his front left pocket, a crumpled five and two singles in his right front pocket, and a box cutter in his right back pocket. He patted him down to check for other weapons, finding none.
While Fiore took the perp back to the precinct, I walked back to 8th Avenue, spitting and swallowing to get the taste of vomit out of my throat. I picked up the car and drove it back to find Sergeant Hanrahan at the scene. He told us good job on the collar and asked if I was okay.
“I’m fine, just a little out of shape,” I lied.
By the time I got back to the precinct everyone had heard about it. They cheered when I walked in—this would go down in history. I thought about banging out sick for the next month, and I was already dreading roll call on Sunday. Cops are ruthless, me included. I’ve taunted every cop who ever did a stupid thing, so I was in for it.
