World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  He cleared the doorway and the hallway and waited with the super for the emergency squad and the detectives to come. The super told him the woman had to be very young, twenty-five at the most, and that she spoke no English. Her name was Gonzales and she was from Colombia. Every morning the woman went out with her son, the boy actually wasn’t a baby, he was closer to five, and took him to an apartment house halfway down the block and across the street. She left the boy with somebody in the building. She came back at night, picked up the boy, and went up to the sixth floor with him and never came down. Nobody in the apartment building knew the woman. The Puerto Ricans spoke too quickly for her to understand them well, and she couldn’t say a word in English.

  When the emergency squad and the detectives got there, Dermot didn’t know why but he went upstairs to the woman’s apartment. In the kitchen, where you came in, there was a table with loose aluminum legs and two chairs. The refrigerator had a half-finished bowl of chicken noodle soup. Otherwise there wasn’t even a cracker in the place. The next room, the bedroom, had two mattresses on the floor with old covers on them. The living room was a playroom for the baby. The floor was covered with puzzles and rubber balls. One of the window sills had fur bears sitting on it. The other window sill was the one with the open window. The detectives had the woman’s purse out and they were going through the closets. The purse had no money in it. Dermot took a look at the bankbook one of the detectives found. It showed the woman had a balance of $1.23. The super was telling them that she had two months’ security paid on the apartment and that she had stopped paying the rent and was letting the security get used up. He said she had told him with hand motions and the like that she had lost her job. Dermot was looking out the open window and thinking that at least it was easy on the little boy. In the middle of the night you take a kid out of bed and even if he has his eyes open he really doesn’t know what’s going on. The window frame was dusty and the detectives showed him there were no marks on it at all. The kid never even put his hand out to touch anything when the mother threw him out the window. Then she went out after him.

  Dermot went downstairs onto the avenue and finished the tour and went home. When he came to work the next night, Sunday night, he went up to the detective squad room and asked about the woman and the boy. The guy working; Rand, told him the bodies were in the morgue. They hadn’t been able to find out anything about her or whether she had any relatives. They had come up with a form she had from Goldwater Memorial, the hospital for welfare people. Dermot asked Rand about the apartment house where she used to leave the boy. It turned out nobody knew exactly which apartment house she took the boy into, and that it takes three hours to canvass an apartment house. Even then, you can’t do it unless you have at least two families home on every floor. With Puerto Ricans, you never know when they’re home. It could take a week.

  When Dermot finished his tour at eight o’clock in the morning, he left the precinct and called his wife and said he’d be home late and he went back to the avenue and started in on the first building across the street from where the woman lived. The detective was wrong. It didn’t take three hours to canvass a building. It took over four hours of Dermot’s talking with his hands to Puerto Ricans and trying to convince people he wasn’t there to arrest somebody. He came out with nothing.

  When he came to work for the Monday-night midnight shift, Dermot told Rand that he’d be in the neighborhood after work if it would do him any good. Rand said he’d help canvass a couple of buildings.

  He wasn’t around when Dermot finished in the morning, so Dermot went to see the superintendent himself and he got the name of the real-estate office where the Gonzales woman had rented the apartment. It was up on Broadway, in Brooklyn, and Dermot had to hang around an hour waiting for it to open. The two guys gave him a whole pile of old applications. It took two hours to go through them. The full name was Aura Gonzales and she listed two adults and one child. That meant the husband must have run out on her. Where it said employment, she had put down “Stein form. 6 W. 36.” The place was not listed in the Manhattan book.

  Dermot got on the subway and went over to Manhattan and got onto Thirty-sixth Street, which is in the middle of the garment center, and he went from place to place about “Stein form.” until late in the afternoon. Finally he found a freight elevator guy in one of the buildings who said that was an old name, Stein, and now the place was called Berger. He took Dermot up to the floor the place was. It was after five and it was locked for the night. Dermot went down with the elevator guy to where they kept a book on the building’s tenants. This Berger’s home address was Great Neck, out in Nassau.

  Dermot went to a cafeteria and had a cup of coffee, then looked him up in the book and called him. A woman answered and said he wouldn’t be home for another half hour. Dermot sat in the cafeteria reading a paper and falling half-asleep. He called again at six-forty-five. The guy said he couldn’t remember the woman working for him, he runs a girdle factory and a lot of women work sewing machines for him. Dermot asked if he could come back to his place so he could go through some records with him. The guy moaned like a bastard. Dermot told him if he didn’t come in he was coming out after him.

  Dermot walked around to stay awake and then stood in front of the place on Thirty-sixth Street. The street was deserted and cold. The guy pulled up in a Cadillac at eight o’clock. He was hissing his breath out while the night watchman took them upstairs. Berger went through his records, and he found her name and a husband’s name, Jorge, and an address up in the Bronx, 1401 Teller Avenue. Berger said the Gonzales woman hadn’t worked in his place for four months, so the address might be old.

  Dermot took the subway up to the Bronx. There was no Gonzales on the doorbells. So he got the super, who had only been working a month, and he didn’t know anything about a Gonzales. But he gave Dermot the name of a woman on the third floor who was from South America and who might have known the woman or the husband. The woman was home and she was pretending she didn’t know what it was all about, but she did know, and Dermot kept pushing. Finally, she said he had moved across the street to 1404A Teller Avenue.

  He wasn’t home and Dermot couldn’t go any more. He had the next day off. He went home to get some sleep. It was midnight by the time he got to bed, and he lay there telling Phyllis about it, every step of the thing. They were both excited. Dermot fell asleep. Phyllis went out and slept on the couch with the alarm set for four-thirty a.m. so she could make breakfast and not have to wake him up until exactly five.

  He was at the apartment in the Bronx at six a.m. He pounded on the door for five minutes before Gonzales answered it. He understood what Dermot was telling him. He giggled when he heard the bodies were in the morgue. Sometimes South Americans giggle when they’re shocked and they don’t mean anything by it. The guy was like a little boy. He didn’t know what to do. He had been separated from the woman for six months. Dermot asked him why he hadn’t sent her any money. He shrugged. He said he didn’t even know where she was living. Dermot took him to the morgue on First Avenue in Manhattan and had him claim the bodies. Now he needed some money. They went all the way up to the Bronx again, got the bankbook, came back to the garment center, and almost emptied the bank account. Gonzales had $310 in the bank. That is a hell of a lot of money for a guy like this, although not so much when you realize that he walked out on a wife and baby and never paid anything.

  From the bank, Dermot took him over to the Holy Redeemer Church on Central Avenue in Brooklyn, a few blocks away from where she had jumped, and told the story to the priest on duty. After he heard how much Gonzales had, he finally said he would handle it, that there could be a funeral on Friday morning. Dermot told Gonzales to call his job and say he wouldn’t be in for the next two days, Thursday and Friday. Gonzales said, “Should I tell it to my boss that you said I should not come to work?”

  Dermot told him, “Just tell him your wife and baby died.”

  He said, “Oh, that’s good,
that I will tell him.”

  The uniform kept Dermot from stopping to celebrate on the way home. He told himself he would go home and change and go out and party. When he got into the house, at one in the afternoon, he didn’t feel like going out again. The house was empty, the bed made, and pajamas fresh out of the dryer were folded on top of the pillows. He put them on, got into bed, and stretched out. He was not going to report finding the husband. He didn’t want to spoil the thing with a detective or a desk lou saying anything, good or jealous, about it. He wanted this one for himself. He wanted the feeling, pure, clean, to run through him without anyone touching it. He lay in bed listening to the daytime sounds of the neighborhood. A hammer knocking on wood, a United Parcel truck squealing while stopping for a delivery, a carriage squeaking while the mother walks the street jiggling the baby to sleep.

  Usually, just before Dermot fell asleep, there was this little knife-blade pricking his insides: What happens if I die while I’m asleep? This time there was no knife. Everything inside him, right to the back of his brain, was under a warm blanket.

  He never came close to feeling like this again.

  4

  IN 1964, DERMOT DAVEY was in plainclothes in Brooklyn, which is like saying he was President of the United States. The first day he went out with his partner, Buddy Lennon, they drove to a restaurant in Brooklyn where there was a numbers business. They got there at eleven o’clock on a cold, bright morning. The inside of the place was a barroom with a white tile floor that was clean enough to eat off, with a couple of tables along the wall, and then in the back was the main restaurant. There were five or six guys sitting at a round table in one corner of the barroom, and Lennon started to walk over to them and one of them held up his hand. “Be right with you fellas,” he said.

  Lennon changed direction and went to the bar. He and Dermot sat on stools. There was an old man bent down polishing bottles along the bottom of the back bar. He did not look up. One of the men from the table came walking across the floor. His heels sounded like hammers on the tile floor. He was a little under thirty. Black hair slicked straight back, even with the sunlight flooding through the windows you couldn’t see a dot of dandruff or lint or dust on the hair. His skin was smooth, the way you look from barber-shop shaves. He had olive oil in his skin and big white teeth.

  “Hi, guys,” he said.

  “Nicky,” Lennon said.

  “What’s your name?” he asked Dermot,

  “Davey.”

  “Davey what?”

  “Davey’s my last name.”

  “Oh. What’s your first name?”

  Anger ran through Dermot, but Lennon looked at him hard and said, “His first name is Dermot.”

  “Oh, that’s your name. Dermot Davey. Now I know.”

  His hand slapped the bar. “Give us a drink here,” he said. The old man behind the bar stood up. Lennon and Dermot ordered Scotch. “Good luck to you, fellas, I got a lot of things to do,” he said. He picked his hand up from the bar, turned his back, and walked away. His heels tapped hard on the tile floor. He liked to hear himself walk.

  There was a hundred-dollar bill on the bar where his hand had been. The old man took it and made change. He put tens, singles, and silver in front of them. Lennon sipped his Scotch. Dermot gulped his. Lennon picked up his half of the change and Dermot quickly did the same. They walked through the door without a word, without looking back.

  From there, it only was a matter of time until retirement. The standards were gone. Dermot and Lennon arrested a bookmaker named Russo, who was working out of an apartment in Williamsburg. Russo was charged with taking bets on a phone. The true charge was that he took bets on the phone without getting an O.K. from the plainclothes division. A few weeks later, Lennon told Dermot there would be a thousand dollars if court testimony made it clear Russo was not on the phone and was in another room when the arrest took place. Which would make the affidavit useless and force the judge to release Russo. On the morning of the case, Russo was in the hallway outside the courtroom. Lennon and Davey came up to him. Russo turned his palm up. His thumb covered several hundred-dollar bills, folded in half. “First say something good,” Russo said.

  Russo’s lawyer was hit by a virus on the way to court. He called the judge and the case was put over for five days. When Dermot and Lennon walked out of the building, they saw Russo standing at the curb, snapping his fingers and whistling. He was looking up at the sky.

  Five days later, when Russo came to court, his face was scratched and his suit badly wrinkled. Lennon got on the stand and said Russo was in the living room and not on the phone. The assistant district attorney muttered about stupid affidavits. Russo swaggered out. Dermot and Lennon hustled after him. In the hallway, Russo’s bloodshot eyes squinted as his hand went into his pocket. “Thanks, guys, buy yourselves a hat,” he said. He handed Dermot a bill. At this time, when you bought a cop a hat it meant you gave him twenty dollars. Which is what Russo handed Dermot. When Lennon saw his twenty-dollar bill, his face turned beet-red. He started shouting. The courtroom door swung open. The attendant said the judge wanted to know what the trouble was. Russo waved good-by. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said.

  “That fuck,” Dermot said later. “That dirty fuck robbed us.”

  Dermot lasted in plainclothes for seventeen months. When he was flopped out of the division and put back into uniform he had sixteen thousand dollars in a bank under his mother-in-law’s name. In uniform in the 125th in Ridgewood, he depended on small things for extra money. He went around with the men from the gas company, shutting off the gas in houses where the bill had not been paid. A city marshal accompanied the men from the gas company. The city marshal had legal papers which he said allowed him to enter any house, even if the people were not at home. The gas-company men still wanted a cop with them when they went around. One of them told Dermot he would get three dollars a house.

  “Hey, there should be a pound,” Dermot said.

  “We’re doin’ seven houses, it’s not like you’re only gettin’ the one,” the gas-company man said.

  “Still it should be a pound, you’re from a big company,” Dermot said.

  “It’s not a company, it’s a utility. What’s the matter with you, all utilities are cheap.”

  Nobody was home at the first stop, in a six-family apartment. The landlord, a German, saw the big seal and the signatures on papers that looked legal. The German nearly saluted. He opened the tenant’s apartment. The gas-company guys pulled out the gas meter and capped the pipes. When the people who lived in the apartment came home they would have to set the couch on fire if they wanted coffee.

  The second house they went to was on Wyckoff Avenue. The apartment was on the ground floor. A black guy with half-shut eyes opened the door. He was in a sweatshirt. The city marshal showed him the papers. The black guy stood in the doorway looking at them.

  “Well, you see …” he said.

  “No, you have to let us in or he’ll arrest you and put you in jail,” the city marshal said.

  “You an officer?” he said.

  One of the gas-company guys took Dermot by the arm and brought him into the light. “See, police,” the gas-company guy said. “You got to let us in or he’ll arrest you.”

  The black guy shrugged and let him in. A fat woman sat on a broken couch in the living room, holding a little girl. The girl looked at Dermot wide-eyed.

  “You take out the gas?” the woman asked.

  Dermot didn’t answer.

  “He police,” the little girl said.

  The next house they went to was a two-story shingled place on Irving Avenue. Nobody answered. The city marshal brought out a tool bag and went to a first-floor window. He took the window out of the frame and climbed in. The gas-company man, McDonough his name was, said he was glad Dermot was with him. “These people here aren’t like niggers,” he said. “Niggers are so dumb, you see that, all you have to do is tell them they’re going to jail. But white people,
they know you’re full of shit.”

  The city marshal opened the front door and let them in. The two guys from the gas company were halfway down the front hallway, going to the cellar door, when a door opened. Black curly hair came out. Under the black curly hair was enormous shoulders. The curly hair was shaking. The man was trying to wake up.

  “Gas company,” the city marshal said.

  The guy pushed the door open. He hissed at them. “Sssssss!” and a German shepherd flew into the air in the hallway. The dog was stopped in mid-air because the guy in the door was hanging on to the collar. The marshal stumbled back. The gas company men began pushing to get out of the hallway. One of them swung a wrench while he was trying to run. It hit Dermot on the back of the head. Dermot’s scalp froze, and he stopped to hold his head.

  “Ssssss!” The man was crouched down, walking the dog right at Dermot. The dog fought the air to get free. Dermot’s hand moved automatically to his right side. He had backed out onto the stoop before he had made his mind up. The man stopped with his dog at the doorway.

  “I’ll arrest that wop fuck,” Dermot said.

  “Forget it,” the city marshal said.

  “Forget my ass. You got a court order.”

  “What we got is a lot of bullshit to fool the niggers with,” the city marshal said. “This paper is good for only toilet paper. Don’t get into it or you’ll get yourself in trouble too.”

  The gas-company men decided they had enough for the day. One of them handed Dermot six dollars. “Two houses,” he said.