Clear Blue Sky

by F. P. Lione

  On the other side of that is Michele, who knows they don’t like her and doesn’t see that changing. “It’s like they have this little club, Tony,” she said once. “And they let me know right from the beginning that I’m never getting in. And Stevie’s too young to understand it right now, but someday he will. And what will we tell him? That it’s because he’s your stepson that he’s not good enough? I never want him to feel that kind of rejection.”

  Neither did I, but I was hoping that as long as he didn’t feel it from me that it wouldn’t matter what they thought.

  Since I didn’t want to talk about my family anymore, I switched the radio over to the Brooklyn citywide channel to see how the night detail was going at the West Indian Day parade. There was a lot of chatter on the radio, and I could already hear the chaos.

  “Shots fired on Utica Avenue . . .”

  “I need a bus forthwith . . .”

  “Suspect running northbound on Utica Avenue toward Lincoln Place . . .”

  “This is Lieutenant Robinson, dispatch Brooklyn North task force to Utica Avenue and Eastern Parkway . . .”

  “It’s starting already,” I said.

  “I hate this detail,” Joe said, closing his eyes.

  “You ever work the detail the night before?” I asked.

  “Once. Never again,” he said.

  I felt the same way. While the big parade isn’t until Labor Day, there’s a lot of buildup into it. The morning of the parade there’s a predawn celebration, so things are cooking all night.

  The whole thing started back in the 1940s up in Harlem when someone got a permit to close off Lenox Avenue for the parade. It’s supposed to be a Lenten celebration, but for some reason it’s held on Labor Day. It was held there up until 1961 when a band marcher bashed a spectator over the head with his steel drum that he wore around his neck. Apparently, the guy tried to take his instrument and he knocked him in the head with it, and next thing you know, bottles and bricks are flying. Ten people were arrested, and that was the end of it. A couple of years later another rock fight broke out and the permit was revoked.

  They moved it to Brooklyn after that in the form of block parties in Crown Heights. Then in 1971 another parade permit was given to hold the parade on Eastern Parkway and parade eastbound to the Grand Army Plaza through Crown Heights and Flatbush.

  Brooklyn has the largest West Indian community outside the Caribbean, and the parade draws close to two million people. It’s a wild party with lots of steel drums and reggae music with calypso and other dancers. Some of the costumes are colorful and provocative, while others are ghoulish and devilish, freaky stuff. It evolved from a nineteenth-century festival for freeing the slaves.

  In recent years the parade has become dangerous. There’s so many stabbings and shootings in the course of a few hours that it’s almost impossible to keep it under control. Things are thrown out of buildings at the crowds and at the cops. Gang colors are worn, and shootings erupt out of nowhere, with innocent bystanders catching bullets.

  Two years ago when I was still with my ex-girlfriend Kim I worked the night detail. I thought I’d be working at one of the mobile command centers, but I wound up getting a foot post in one of the residential areas.

  I was with three other cops from my precinct, all East Long Islanders looking to make some overtime. We wound up being separated into foot posts on different blocks. When we got there and the place looked like a war zone with the litter and the haze of smoke in the air, one of the cops broke out in hives. The litter was worse than the Fourth of July—that’s all paper from the fireworks. Plus everything else, there were bottles, garbage, and boxes, and the smell of incense, pot, and barbeque was making us nauseous. We worked the midnight, but it could have been the middle of the day with the amount of street traffic, music playing, and people partying outside.

  For the most part the West Indians are nice people. It’s the punks, the Brooklyn boys starting trouble over “Who dissed me?” “You lookin’ at me?” and “Who looked at my girl?” Crap like that.

  My post was in front of a four-story building. The people in the building were nice enough. A group of about six kids between fifteen and eighteen were saying, “Hey, officer,” and “Can we get ya something?” I told them to pick me up a soda, which they did. It was in a can, so I knew they didn’t poison me. I shook their hands and told them not to do any smoking in front of me and we’d be okay.

  There was this one female trying to get me to go into her apartment with her. She would come in and out of her apartment during the course of the night asking if she could “get me anyting” and offering me food and drinks. She looked sultry in a banana yellow halter dress with a matching headband. Her accent sounded exotic, and I remember her catching me watching her as she walked up toward Eastern Parkway. At about 6:30 that morning when I was about dead on my feet, she came walking up again. She smiled and said, “Come on inside, officer, take a break. Take your shoes off. You must be tired.” When I hesitated she said, “I’ll make you breakfast, maybe some chocolate cake?” Her eyebrows went up with the question.

  “Sorry, I can’t leave my post,” I said, trying to sound serious but sounding like something out of Dragnet instead. She laughed and shrugged, swaying suggestively as she walked inside.

  I switched back to channel 9 on the radio and went back to reading the paper. I heard Joe start to snore and got out of the car to smoke another cigarette, wondering if I’d ever be able to quit. I seemed to average between one and three days without smoking before I found myself so agitated that I went back to it. I finally decided to wait until after the wedding, when all the stress died down, before I even attempted it again.

  At about 2:30 Central came over with an alarm. “South David.”

  “South David,” Fiore said automatically, bringing the radio to his mouth with his eyes still closed.

  “There’s a 10-11 at 4 West 38th Street.”

  “Do you have a premise name and floor number?” he asked, getting the alarm info with his eyes open now.

  “Goldman’s Jewelers, suite 1215.”

  “10-4,” Fiore said, sticking the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

  I put the car in drive and drove the wrong way down to 9th Avenue when Central came back with, “South David, I’m getting multiple alarms for this job, and Holmes Security is responding.”

  A single alarm can go off for a lot of different reasons, but multiple alarms mean someone is running through the place.

  “This should break up the night,” Joe said as I floored it.

  I had the turret lights on as I drove eastbound on 38th Street. I heard the other sectors come over the radio:

  “South Sergeant responding.”

  “South Henry responding.”

  “South Adam responding.”

  Burglary, robbery, and grand larceny are big crimes in Midtown because of all the commercial establishments. The fact that it was a three-day weekend made it prime for someone to hit. On a long weekend someone can set off an alarm on Friday and sit on it until Sunday. The security people will respond on Friday and see nothing out of place and figure it’s a false alarm. They hit it again on Saturday with the same results, and by Sunday we don’t come back. Then they hit at 3:00 in the morning on Sunday, drilling into the safe from the floor above or below it, and no one is due back in the building until Tuesday.

  Other times they can overcome the alarm system using telephone wires and a box. The alarm system sends a beacon through the phone lines to the security office. When the line is cut, the beacon isn’t sent and the alarm is set off. When they overcome the system, they’ll connect their homemade box to the phone lines. The box will send a false beacon to the security office, letting everyone at the security office think everything’s okay. Then they have three days to empty the place at any time.

  At 7th Avenue I heard South Sergeant and South Adam radio Central that they were 84, and I wondered where they were that they got there before u
s.

  When I hit 6th Avenue I shut the lights off, just in case anyone was watching for us.

  Rooney and Connelly pulled up with Joe and me in front of the twenty-story yellow brick building. The scaffolding that had been in front of it all summer when they resurfaced the building was gone, giving the front a new look. There was no activity outside the building, and someone had stuck a nightstick in the door to keep it open for us.

  The elevators were to our right, and Sarge, Noreen, Garcia, Davis, and an old-timer from Holmes Security were already inside holding the elevator door for us.

  Rooney and Connelly stepped in, and I told the sarge Joe and I would cover the stairs. Across from the elevators was the door to the stairwell. When we stepped inside the stairwell doors there was a five-by-five-foot foyer with an arched doorway that led to the staircase. I stepped through the vestibule to the staircase and saw that the stairs went down to the basement and to the upper floors of the building. It was actually an outside staircase that had been closed in at some point. There were windows on each landing, and we could hear street noises as we entered the stairwell.

  The place had a musty smell of urine, and it always amazes me that people will urinate in any stairwell. We see it in office buildings, apartment buildings, you name it. It’s disgusting. How hard can it be to find a bathroom or go outside to relieve yourself?

  We turned our radios all the way down so that if we got a blast from Central anyone in the stairwell wouldn’t hear it. I was a little taken aback by the street noise and tried to filter it out to see what else I could hear. There was the hum of the overhead fluorescent lights as they flickered, but other than that there was nothing.

  As we started to move toward the steps we heard the sound of muted footsteps a couple of floors up. The stairs were cement, and we were hearing a softer thud rather than the hollow sound you get from the metal ones.

  Joe pointed up the stairs, and we backed up into the vestibule past the arched doorway because it looked like we were gonna run into whoever was on their way down.

  As the footsteps got louder, we pulled out our guns. I moved to one side of the archway, and Joe moved to the other. From there we couldn’t see the second-floor landing, and we wouldn’t be able to see whoever it was until they were on us.

  I once heard an old-timer say that the job was 90 percent boredom and 10 percent terror, and for some reason that flashed through my mind now.

  I heard the footsteps getting closer, and while I couldn’t tell how many people it was, I knew it was more than one. I felt my heart start pounding and a flash of heat as I started to sweat. I heard what sounded like metal scraping, and I was thinking they were dropping their tools.

  Our guns were punched out in front of us. We didn’t know if they’d come down with guns or what. We heard the movement, but it didn’t seem to be coming any closer.

  I thought maybe they got down the stairs and were behind the arched doorway and were behind the wall from us, but when I leaned into the stairwell there was nobody there.

  As I stepped back I looked at Joe and shrugged. He shrugged back and gave me a “Where are they?” look. I grabbed my radio and called the sarge.

  “South David to South Sergeant,” I said keeping my voice low.

  “South Sergeant.”

  “Boss, there’s movement in the stairwell.”

  “Where?”

  “I thought they were coming down to the first floor, but they must have stopped up on the second or third floor. We’re gonna go up and investigate it,” I said.

  “10-4.”

  As I approached the stairs I looked up into the upper floors and saw nothing but empty handrails. I had my gun pointed upwards toward the second floor with Joe backing me up.

  We kept hearing outside noises: cars, horns, the squeal of brakes. I heard a bus on 5th Avenue as I reached the first landing between the floors. I saw a window at the second-floor landing and realized that was where the street noise was coming from. As we approached the second-floor landing my eyes and gun were focused on the third floor to see if anyone was above us.

  I looked out the window and saw that two of the four bars that covered it were cut on the bottom and bent out. I pointed to the window to show Joe and pointed to my eyes and up to the third floor to let Joe know to watch it.

  Joe went up the stairs toward the third floor as I reached for the second-floor stairwell door. It had a “No Reentry” sign with a “#2” above it, but I gave it a pull anyway. It was locked, which I figured it would be because we hadn’t heard a door open or close.

  I went back over to the window and started pushing on the bars that were cut. They didn’t budge. I could tell the cuts were new. There was no rust on them, and I could see tiny metal filings, which would have been blown away by the wind if they’d been there any length of time.

  Joe came back down and said quietly, “The door’s locked, no reentry on the third floor.”

  “They must’ve used a pry bar to bend the bars enough to get through, but I don’t see one laying around. We’re not gonna be able to follow them through the window,” I said as I tried to push back and forth on the bars, showing that they wouldn’t move.

  Then we heard Hanrahan tell Central we had a confirmed burglary. My pulse kicked up a little. I can’t help it. I love this stuff.

  3

  I looked out into the alley behind the building. There was some light coming from the building but not enough to see what was down there. Joe and I pointed our flashlights out the window, but all we saw was garbage and the heating and air conditioning units from the buildings. Then we heard glass breaking in the alley on the 38th Street side, and Joe got on the radio.

  “South David to South Sergeant.”

  “Go ahead, South David.”

  “Sarge, I think they’re in the alleyway right now. We can’t get in there from here, and we can’t see where they’re at.”

  “See if you can find an entrance into the alley. I’ll send South Eddie down.”

  We heard him tell Central to have the K-9 unit respond, and then Rooney radioed us. “South David on the air?”

  “Go ahead,” Fiore said.

  “Where do you want us to search?”

  “Mike, go over to 38th Street and see if there’s any activity on the street there.”

  I remembered a parking lot on 37th Street that would give us access to the alley behind the building and got on the radio again to Rooney so in case something happened back there someone would know where we were.

  “Mike, we’re going in through the parking lot on 37th to check behind the buildings.”

  “10-4.”

  Joe and I walked westbound on 37th Street, looking for anyone sitting in a car with an engine running, anyone walking on the street or coming out of one of the buildings.

  I didn’t think anyone would be jumping roofs. They came far enough downstairs to put them at street level.

  There were a couple of things they could do right now. They could gain access to one of the buildings and hole up until the next day. If they rented a place they would stay there or exit out one of the buildings to a waiting car. I didn’t think they’d hit the 6th Avenue subway. They usually plan this kind of thing right and have radios to communicate to a driver in a waiting car or have a backup place if they need to hide.

  When we got to the parking lot, which is about a quarter of the block off 5th Avenue, I saw three cars parked westbound on the north side of 37th Street. You can park on the street here after 7:00 p.m., and as I got closer I saw the TLC plates of two black Lincoln livery cabs.

  As we walked up on them I heard the engines running and looked inside. The first guy was reading an Arabic newspaper, oblivious to us. The driver of the second car looked over as we walked past. He had a guilty look, but that could have been for anything—worried about being summonsed, using someone else’s cab, you name it. He was watching a mini TV perched on his dashboard and plugged in to the cigarette lighter. Both drivers l
ooked like they were from Pakistan or Bangladesh or somewhere in the Mideast like most New York cabbies.

  I wrote both the plate numbers down and moved to the third car, a black Mercedes CL500 that was unoccupied. The owner was probably in the club across the street, an upscale dark redbrick building with green marble accent. I know it’s a good club because we never get calls there. There’s a huge smoked glass window in the place that no one’s ever been thrown through.

  Central came over the radio with “South Sergeant on the air?”

  “Go ahead, Central,” I heard Sarge reply.

  “There are no K-9 units available.”

  “10-4.”

  “I guess Dog Man took Shane to the beach for the weekend,” I said to Joe. Dog Man is what we call our K-9 cop.

  “You’d think he’d be in on a long weekend,” Joe said. “This is when they always hit.”

  Without the dog to track the scent of these guys, they’d be even harder to find.

  Joe and I went into the parking lot and saw that the light in the back of the lot by the alley was out, leaving the whole back area in darkness.

  As we walked back there we saw that the bulb was burned out rather than that someone had smashed it. The lot had been closed since 7:00 p.m., and the workers were gone. Any cars left there after 7:00 are on their own. There were no cars in there. People are too afraid of having the cars broken into. Plus, the overnight charge is ridiculous. At the back of the lot were the black-framed metal lifts used to stack the cars when the place gets packed. To the right of the lifts was a fifteen-foot pit that we’d have to go through to get into the alley behind the building. I have no idea what it’s for, except that it’s the bottom of what used to be an old outside stairwell that was removed and not filled in when they built the lot.