by F. P. Lione
“I forgot. I went in hungover the next day and got sick on a prisoner—”
“Sick as in vomited?” She scrunched up her face.
“Yeah.” I smirked.
“And you went back the next day? I would have quit.”
I almost said that was her answer to everything, but I held my tongue.
“At least now everyone will forget about Mike Rooney losing the prisoner,” I said.
“I would think so. Did they think up a new name for you yet, or do they expect you to do that?” she asked. She knew about my reputation for making up names.
“Not yet,” I said. “But barf bags were handed out at roll call, a new addition to our gear.”
She laughed hard enough to make me smile. Then she asked how I liked Fiore. I told her about the guy I dragged off the street and how mad he got about it. Then I told her about the God stuff.
“He sounds like Nancy,” she said.
“Nancy who?”
“Remember that lady, Nancy, who worked with me at Macy’s? The one I used to call ‘Church Lady’?”
“The one who sat with you at the wake when Grandpa died?”
Wakes are very important in an Italian family. Besides the grieving spouse or child repeatedly throwing themselves on the ninety-year-old body of the deceased, screaming, “Why, God, why?” there is a certain conduct that must be observed. Flowers must be sent. And if a family member does not attend the wake, there is at least a twenty-year waiting period until the mourners will speak to you again. Friends who come more than one day to the wake elevate their status in friendship—they become like family. Sending food to the family in the days that follow is also a plus.
I remembered a nice older woman sitting next to Denise at the funeral home and being in St. Michael’s for the funeral mass. The day after the funeral she sent an expensive fruit platter from a very good Korean market to my grandmother’s apartment. The family was impressed.
“She’s been like a second mother to me,” Denise said. “I love her. She’s one of those born-again Christians. She always prays for me, teaches me verses and stuff. I went to church with her a few times, remember?”
“Not really. I remember her, but not you going to church with her. What church?”
“Abundant Life Christian Center on Richmond Avenue.”
“The big brick one?”
She nodded. “That’s the one.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s nice. The music is different and the way they pray is different. But it’s so peaceful. I still go once in a while.” She paused. “Why? Do you want to go?”
“Why would I want to go?” I asked, surprised.
“It would give you something to talk about with your new partner.”
“I’m sure we can find other things to talk about,” I said dryly.
She shrugged. “If he’s anything like Nancy, he’s okay.”
“He’s okay,” I said. “I just hope he’s not shaky.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know. I guess someone so bent on always doing the right thing that he’d rat to the bosses about some petty thing he should be keeping his mouth shut about.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “Like some guy at a deli not charging you for your food. So you throw a couple of bucks down on the counter to cover it because he won’t ring you up.” Some guys don’t throw money down, but I do—probably not what it would cost me, but I won’t take the food for free.
“Nancy wouldn’t rat on me,” Denise said. “She would talk to me, try and show me how to do the right thing. She’d never hurt me.”
Actually, I’d never heard that Fiore had screwed anyone over. And I’d found him pretty interesting in the couple of days I’d worked with him. He was smart and funny in a G-rated kind of way. And I found out he did a lot of fishing off Long Island and goes out for shark and tuna every year out of Montauk Point. He said he was going fishing at the end of August and asked if I wanted a spot on the boat. I guess fishing was one thing we had in common. My best friend, Mike Ellis, had a house down the Jersey shore this summer, and I was going there next weekend. We did a lot of fishing and waterskiing or tubing with his boat. We’d charter a boat and go out to fish for shark and tuna or whatever else was running. There’s nothing like it.
Denise and I spent the next hour or so going over the food for our party. Denise said she would shop because I wouldn’t have the time. I had to work that night and had a doubleheader in the morning. Then I had grand jury on Wednesday for the robbery from the other night. I had taken Thursday off for the Fourth of July, and I was going down the Jersey shore for my weekend off.
Denise said she would be going back and forth to her apartment with my truck for the rest of the day to move her stuff. I put my air conditioner on high so I wouldn’t hear her moving around as she unpacked. It was now 1:00, and I set my alarm clock for 8:00 p.m.
I got up at 8:27, having hit the snooze button three times. I showered and shaved and put on old faded jeans and a black T-shirt. I kept my gun in my workbag since I wouldn’t be wearing it at my game tomorrow and would have to keep it somewhere.
I could smell the food from upstairs, so Denise must have cooked. I looked in her room. Boxes were strewn everywhere, and there was a new bedcover on her bed and new curtains. I could hear her talking to someone as I came down the stairs.
She turned to me as she hung up the phone. “Dad said they listed the house with a real estate agency. Mom was supposed to have done it already and the judge got mad and listed it himself.”
“That was Dad on the phone?” I asked.
“Yeah, he said they would be here on Friday to put up a sign and asked us not to take it down.”
“I won’t take it down.”
“I will.” She giggled.
“Denise, we’re too old to play the ‘Let’s make everyone think the house is haunted so they won’t buy it’ game. They’re gonna sell the house.”
Denise changed the subject. “You hungry?”
I nodded. “What smells so good?”
“Sal sent over dinner, and it’s incredible. Salmon with tomato and artichoke hearts over bowtie pasta in a cream sauce.”
My mouth started to water. I should’ve been a fireman like Sal—great food, great hours, and no guns.
I left at 10:15 and got to work early. It was still hot enough to use the air conditioner in the car. The roads were clear through to midtown. I changed, got a cup of coffee, and sat in the muster room listening to the bantering before roll call. It was too early in the season for anyone but the diehards to be interested in baseball; if the Mets and Yankees were still doing good in September, the room would be buzzing about that. There was talk about our playoff game tomorrow against the four-six precinct and a shooting on 8th Avenue during the four-to-twelve.
A rookie with less than six months on the job had shot himself in the leg trying to get his gun out, thus ruining his chances of ever having a career in police work. He’d chased a guy who stole fruit from an outdoor stand down into the subway. He said the gun went off as he pulled it from his holster. Trust me, he was running down the stairs with his gun out and his finger on the trigger when it went off. It’s over, kid, go home and be an accountant, because you’ll never live this down. At least the guys weren’t talking about me puking on a perp.
Everyone filed in as Sergeant Hanrahan called attention to the roll call. “There is a thirteen-year-old black male reported missing from the 114th precinct. He was last seen outside Madison Square Garden wearing white high-tops, a yellow FUBU shirt, white shorts, and a black-and-yellow do-rag tied around his head.”
“How do you spell do-rag?” Mike Rooney yelled out. Laughter echoed throughout the room, and the jokes continued as we filed out of the room.
Fiore got the keys from Rice and Beans while I went for my radio. When I got to the radio room, I threw the bull with Vince Puletti about the rookie shooting himself and met Fiore out
side a few minutes later. He had cleaned out the car, saving the newspaper. We threw our hats in the back, books on the dash, and we were off. I found a barf bag stuffed into the side of the console and threw it out the window as I drove.
We stopped first at 35th and 9th where Fiore went into a deli. I wanted a bagel, but since they were stale I got a soda instead. Fiore got himself coffee and a muffin. It was 11:30 and we had no jobs yet, so we drove over to the parking lot on 37th Street to eat. We heard Central put a job over for South Adam.
“You have a 54, possible EDP suicide at 79 East 32nd Street, apartment 4 George.”
I pictured a possible domestic incident where an EDP threatens to kill himself and his family. I heard the other sectors respond, then Fiore.
We arrived around the same time as three other sectors. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Fiore put his head down before we got out of the car.
“Hey, Guts and Glory!” McGovern and O’Brien called out as we walked up.
“Shut up, O’Brien,” I called back.
He laughed and asked how my tummy felt.
The building was old but well kept. The white cement face was accented with black window boxes that held flowers and vines on the first floor. Big containers in the front courtyard bloomed with flowers. When we entered the front lobby door of the building, the sergeant was coming off the elevator with the complainant. She looked like a bohemian, mid-thirties with curly brown hair. Her face was free of makeup, and freckles stood out on her face and arms. Her clog shoes made a clopping noise as she walked.
She said that her boyfriend had been depressed lately about the way his art career was going. He’d gone down to the laundry room to do wash about two hours earlier and hadn’t come back. She was afraid to check on him because he had been talking about killing himself.
She showed us the door to the stairwell that led to the laundry room. The only light came from an alcove at the bottom of the stairs, making the stairwell dim and shadowy. The bottom of the stairs had an open doorway leading into the laundry room. The bright lights from the laundry room threw some light to the stairs. We walked down in single file, cuffs jingling and gun belts squeaking. My heart started to hammer as I approached the bottom of the stairs, and I could feel sweat trickle down my back.
We saw him as soon as we walked in the doorway of the laundry room. The sergeant, Fiore, and I walked inside while the rest stayed back near the entrance. The room had ten-foot ceilings with pipes running along the length of the room. He was hanging from the ceiling, a metal square-backed chair overturned beneath him. He had used several bungee cords and tied them together. I could see the tightened knots joining cords of different sizes and colors. The room was strangely quiet; there was no noise from the machines as he hung there.
His face was swollen and distorted, his dark eyes open and vacant as a doll’s. His feet were swollen, his body limp. His body slowly swayed and made a rhythmic creak as the cord strained against the pipe. I swore the body was moving down closer to the floor. We stood transfixed watching him sway back and forth.
“I guess he didn’t have enough change for the machine,” Mike Rooney barked out.
Everyone laughed nervously. Leave it to Rooney to snap us out of it. Fiore walked over and grabbed the guy’s arm to stop him from swaying. I was glad he did; it was bothering me. The heat must have been getting to Fiore. I noticed even he had started to get damp. We all got quiet again and watched the now-still corpse.
Most cops never get used to seeing things like this. They don’t teach you how to deal with it in school or the academy. The stuff nobody wants to talk about. This guy we would think about long after we left here. The emptiness we didn’t want to feel.
There was a letter, along with a pair of flip-flops, by the second washing machine. The laundry he would never do was in a basket on top of the machine. It was addressed to Devon, who I guessed was the girlfriend. The note said he was sorry he was such a failure. He didn’t want her to blame herself, but he was tired of feeling this way. My hands started to shake, so I put the letter down. In an abstract kind of way I wondered what it was that threw him over the edge and made everything so meaningless. He obviously had some money, his girlfriend was pretty—what was the deal? What was so bad in his life that he didn’t want to fight for it? What made him hang himself in the basement for me to find him?
We didn’t hear the girlfriend come down the stairs; she just appeared in the doorway. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed, “No, no!” The sergeant put his hands on her shoulders and moved her out of the room, back up the stairs. He turned to us before he went up. “South Adam will handle this with us. You guys go back to patrol.”
We went back upstairs where a small crowd had gathered in the lobby to see what was happening. We walked through them and outside to our car.
I lit a cigarette as soon as I hit the street, my hands shaking as I struck the match. Fiore put over to Central that we were 98, driving off back to our sector.
Mondays are usually quiet, so I had too much time to think about the guy hanging in the basement. It was still pretty early, almost 1:00, too early for me to go to the bar and drink until he disappeared from my mind. I couldn’t have a drink until the morning, after my ball game. I never gave much credit to the Alcoholics Anonymous people, but even I knew that wanting a drink in stressful situations is a sign of trouble.
I threw my cigarette out the window and headed west. Fiore was quiet, his head down. I guessed he was praying; normally I would have thought up some wisecrack, but this time I wanted to let him pray.
“That was pretty sad,” I said a couple of minutes later. He nodded.
We were quiet again.
“I bet his friggin’ art is worth something now,” I finally said. “It’s always worth more after you’re dead.”
“I doubt his girlfriend sees it that way.”
“Yeah, she was pretty torn up.”
I parked on 37th Street in an empty parking lot by some office buildings. The street held mostly office buildings ranging from about twelve to twenty-eight stories. Most of the ground-floor gates were locked down for the night. We watched the rats, continuing the conversation.
“Did you know that next to eating your gun, hanging is the next favorite form of suicide among cops?” I asked Fiore.
“Really?” He looked surprised.
“Yup. I mean, cops eat their guns like ninety percent of the time, but the rest is mostly hanging. After hanging, it’s jumping off bridges or buildings, I’m not sure which, the city has so many of both.”
Fiore stared at me with a funny look on his face. “How do you know all this?” he asked.
“Remember when Tommy Moffit ate his gun last year?”
He nodded.
“Well, they sent some people to the precinct after that. They were talking about suicide among cops. They gave us the phone number for the confidential help line. They were talking about stress on the job, crap like that. It just stuck with me, you know? I mean, if you have a gun, why would you hang yourself?”
I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, so I turned my attention back to the rats. I lit a cigarette and cracked my window. The garbage from the offices sat by the curb, waiting for the private sanitation truck to pick it up. The rats ran back and forth in a straight line, three or four at a time, to the garbage and back to whatever hole they’d crawled out of. I could hear the bags rustle as they scavenged through them and feasted. These were healthy rats, the size of small cats. During the next half hour or so, I watched twenty to thirty rats go back and forth to the bags.
The sanitation truck finally made it to the block. I could hear the brakes squeak from three blocks away and wondered why all garbage trucks squeak like that. As it got closer I could hear the clamor of the compressor on the truck. It stopped a couple of feet past each building as it made its way down the block. The driver passed us, and I could see his partner standing on the back of the truck, holding the handle and ju
mping off before the truck stopped. I was curious to see what would happen when he hit the rats, but apparently he’d done this before. He kicked the bags, and the rats ran as he flipped the bags at lightning speed into the back of the truck.
Watching the truck distracted me from thinking about Tommy Moffit and the day he died. We had worked together the night before. My partner John was off, and the boss put me with Tommy. He was a nice guy from Long Island, with a couple more years on the job. He was in a different squad than me so he had to be back the following night. We had a good night at work. We went out for drinks the next morning and got pretty lit. Something hilarious had happened the night before that I can’t remember now, but I do remember both of us laughing about it at the bar. We laughed so hard that tears ran down our faces and our sides hurt.
Like I said, we had a good night and plenty of laughs the next morning. I never knew anything was wrong. He went home, had a fight with his wife, locked himself in his bedroom, and ate his gun. There was a rumor going around that his wife shot him and tried to make it look like a suicide. I never believed it. I don’t know why, but I knew she didn’t do it.
Statistically more cops die committing suicide than are killed in the line of duty. Significantly more. Most of them are white males, patrol cops, not sergeants, detectives, or lieutenants. And most are in their thirties, and alcohol and relationships play a part. The suicides seem to happen in waves. If a lot of cops are killed in the line of duty that year, there is less suicide. If a police corruption scandal comes down, there is more suicide. Less crime, more suicide; more crime, less suicide. Go figure.
It didn’t escape my notice that I fit into the category most at risk for suicide. I drank too much, slept too much, and spent most of my waking hours without sunlight. Lately I had no interest in women, which was a bad sign. I guess when I packed up my old girlfriend Kim’s stuff it opened my eyes to the shallow relationship we had. After two years all that she’d left behind fit into a shoe box. A tube of crazy glue for those acrylic nails she was so obsessed with, two CDs of Mariah Carey, a pair of drawstring pajama pants, and a bottle of Midol. No love notes, no tears, nothing. The saddest part was I didn’t even miss her.
