Paul Bacon

by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All

  Samuels was friendly, but the cop in the radio room was more emblematic of my early treatment at the Two-eight. The man looked me over suspiciously when I stepped up to get my radio. Instead of handing me one of the units that were neatly stacked on the shelf in front of him, he reached for the back wall and pulled one out of a charger. I noticed that the charger light was showing red, indicating that the battery was still low.

  Clarabel came up behind me, ripped the radio out of my hand and waved it in the other cop’s face. “Will you give him one that’s charged?” she said. “He’s not from fucking IAB, all right?”

  Perplexed, I accepted a freshly charged unit and slid it into the holster on my belt.

  “Come on,” Clarabel said, nudging me down the narrow hall. “We already got a thirty in our sector.”

  As we walked out the back door toward the precinct parking lot, I asked Clarabel, “What’s a thirty again?”

  She said, “What have you been doing in MSU?”

  “Don’t ask,” I said.

  “It’s a robbery in progress,” she said, stepping into the car.

  I got in on the passenger side and strapped myself in for my first radio run, feeling like I was in good hands. Then, over the next ninety seconds, Clarabel managed to cross the entire precinct at top speed, running red lights and barging into oncoming traffic.

  We reached our location so fast that I wondered if we had traveled through a wormhole and arrived before the reported incident had taken place, because nothing was going on—just a few kids gathered in front of a convenience store.

  “Another bullshit job,” Clarabel said. “Happens all the time.”

  “So all the heavy jobs I’ve been hearing on the radio are nothing?” I asked.

  “Not all, but most of the calls we respond to are either some shit the caller makes up to get us there faster, or some mistake on Central’s part.”

  “Central makes mistakes?” I said. “That’s not very comforting.”

  “It’s not always her fault. She just goes by what the 911 operator sends her. And when it’s not exactly clear, or when she doesn’t have time to ring the callback, she just puts it over the air sounding as serious as possible, in case it really is a heavy job.”

  I still couldn’t believe we’d risked our lives for no reason, so I scanned the surrounding area for signs of illegal activity. I pointed to the kids in front of the convenience store. “What about those guys?” I said.

  “Yeah, they’re probably the reason we got called,” Clarabel admitted, “but not because they were robbing anyone. They may just be pumping the corner, and someone doesn’t want them there.”

  “Like a concerned neighbor?”

  “Or a different drug dealer,” she said, and the group of kids began to mope away. “See? They’re leaving. We just made someone’s day.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “I think.”

  Over the next hour, we responded to three more calls for help: a murder that turned out to be a noise complaint in disguise; a fire in a stairwell where we found only traces of pot smoke; and a ten-thirteen (officer down) placed by an anonymous cell-phone caller claiming that a cop was being stabbed to death on the roof of a seven-story walkup. The ten-thirteen brought in four sector cars, taking everyone in the rundown off the street for about fifteen minutes. In this time, we later found out, two robberies occurred on the opposite side of the precinct with a common MO: a group of kids beating people to the sidewalk to take their jewelry and pocket money.

  As we were driving away from the bogus ten-thirteen, I said to Clarabel, “Is it me, or are we a little understaffed here?”

  “You picked this place,” she said.

  “And I thought people in the squad would be a little happier to get a new cop.”

  “They just think you’re a plant from Internal Affairs, is all. They can’t figure why anyone would want to come here.”

  “Well, I’m not in IAB.”

  “That’s what I told them,” she said, then took her eyes off the road long enough to leer at me. “But just between us, you are, aren’t you?” “Uh!” I said, “Why would you even think that?”

  “Don’t be offended,” she said. “You just always seemed a little different, even back at the academy. You studied mad-stupid hard, you kissed all the instructors’ butts, and you always tried not to offend anyone.”

  “I didn’t kiss anyone’s butts!”

  “Oh, come on,” she said with unbearable certainty. “You’re a major butt kisser.”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE NEXT TWO MONTHS were a haze of futility and frustration—nearly two hundred false alarms, and only a dozen real instances of police action. I had almost given up on atonement when Clarabel and I found an actual need for our services. Until now, most of our public contact had fallen into one of three categories: people on drugs, people fighting over drugs, and people shoplifting items to sell for drugs. We had yet to save anybody from anything but themselves, and never for very long. So when we had the chance to intervene in a child-custody case, I thought we might have stumbled into something meaningful.

  The call originally came over as a missing person, a procedure requiring hours of notifications to other precincts and agencies, usually just long enough for most subjects to return home. With this in mind, Clarabel and I arrived at the complainant’s apartment looking for any excuse to declare the call unfounded—aka “squashing” or “shitcanning” a job, which was never easy with missing persons. In cop dramas, complainants are usually advised to wait twenty-four hours before filing a report on their missing loved ones, but this was not how it worked for us. No matter when the subject disappeared, if they met any one of a list of criteria, we were forced to drop everything and start the process. These requirements included being younger than eighteen or older than sixty, mentally handicapped, suicidal, or on some kind of psychiatric medication. That plausibly described about nine tenths of New York City, so we ended up filling out a fair number of missing-person reports.

  True to form, the complainant who met us at the location, a woman in her seventies named Evelyn McCauley, described a situation we could not ignore. Miss McCauley said her fifteen-year-old foster son, a deeply disturbed schizophrenic named Marcel, was late coming home from school and needed his medicine right away.

  “If he doesn’t get back on his meds soon,” she said, “I can’t be held accountable for what happens. I’ve done my part by calling the police, now good-bye.”

  “Where are you going?” Clarabel asked.

  “It’s on you now,” Miss McCauley replied, and began closing her door. “Please leave me alone.”

  Clarabel put her hand on the door and said, “We need a lot more information if we’re going to do a report.”

  “I don’t want you to do a report. I want you to lock him up,” the woman said, then pulled the door shut.

  Clarabel and I stared at each other in wonder.

  “What do we do now?” I said. “Break the door down? The kid sounds like he needs help.”

  “They all do,” said Clarabel. “And since she’s not cooperating, we could just shitcan it, but she brought up medication. Man, Lieutenant Davis is gonna be ticked. This lady’s playing games, and we’ve only got two sectors out to night.”

  As platoon commander, our lieutenant’s performance was measured by how many times our precinct went into “backlog”: times that Central was holding more than two unanswered jobs in our command. Every instance of backlog required a typed memorandum to the borough to explain the circumstances, as well as assigning blame and making recommendations for the future. It was a bad number to pull, and not the kind of thing Lieutenant Davis usually let happen. We raised the lieutenant on the radio, knowing he would arrive quickly and make a decision, so we wouldn’t have to.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Davis—a hefty man with bugged-out eyes and an oddly pink complexion—came up the stairs ten minutes later, looking like he was ready to have a heart attack
. I had initially attributed his reddish coloring to sunburn, but in the coming weeks it never faded the slightest bit. Whether it was just his natural appearance, the symptom of a chronic rash, or the result of a poorly administered chemical peel, it made him look as if he was being possessed by Satan. Lieutenant Davis always seemed to be in an outlandish hurry to get things done, as though hell yawned before him if he missed a deadline.

  Reaching the top step with obvious difficulty, the lieutenant took a deep breath and said, “This better be good.”

  Clarabel brought him up to speed on the situation, and the lieutenant looked at his watch. “Let’s just find the kid,” he decided. “We don’t have time for the paperwork.”

  “Outstanding,” I said, happily knocking on Miss McCauley’s door again.

  The woman shouted from inside the apartment, “I told you, I don’t care where he is! Just lock him up and get him out of my life!”

  Lieutenant Davis shouted back, “I think you do care where he is, Miss McCauley! Or you wouldn’t have called us!”

  The lieutenant talked us into Miss McCauley’s apartment, where we found the woman sitting on her couch crying.

  Clarabel sat down next to her and said, “You said something before about Marcel being at his older sister’s house the last time he ran away. All we want to do is call her and see if she knows where he is.”

  “No,” Miss McCauley said, “He’s there!”

  “Oh, fantastic,” said the lieutenant. “So he is there.”

  “Not Marcel,” Miss McCauley said. “Him! ”

  “Him who?” said the lieutenant.

  “That, that . . . maaaaaaaannnn!” Miss McCauley screamed.

  Clarabel said, “Ma’am, please. If you’ll just let us call Marcel’s sister, I promise we’ll leave you alone.”

  “All right,” the woman finally relented. “But don’t believe his filthy, rotten lies. He’s beneath us, beneath us all!”

  “Whose lies?” asked Clarabel.

  Lieutenant Davis whispered to Clarabel, “Who fuckin’ cares, all right? Just get the phone number.”

  While Miss McCauley continued to wail about the unidentified man, the lieutenant borrowed her cordless telephone to call Marcel’s older sister.

  “Hello, sir,” the lieutenant said when he made a connection, “This is Lieu—”

  “Oh Lord God!” Miss McCauley screeched. “He’s filling you with lies. Lies! ”

  The lieutenant cupped the mouthpiece and said, “He hasn’t said anything but hello, all right? The quicker I finish this call, the quicker we’ll be—”

  “Lies! Lies!” the woman repeated.

  Lieutenant Davis carried the phone down the hall to the bathroom, then shut the door behind him. Fifteen minutes later, he came out with a defeated look and put the cordless handset back on its base. Ignoring Miss McCauley, the lieutenant said to Clarabel and me, “You guys get all the info?”

  We nodded.

  “Good,” the lieutenant said. “You’re doing a missing report. Let’s get going.”

  “Who’s the guy, lieu?” I said.

  “Tell you later,” the lieutenant said, then motioned us toward the door.

  Out on the sidewalk, I asked the lieutenant, “Who was the horrible guy she was screaming about?”

  The lieutenant said, “Probably the sanest, most intelligent person I’ve ever spoken to on this job.”

  “Figures,” said Clarabel. “That lady is wack.”

  “His name’s Larry, and he’s married to Marcel’s older sister. They’ve been trying to adopt the kid for years, but Miss McCauley is his legal foster mom, and she won’t have it.”

  Clarabel said, “Is Larry a junkie or something?”

  “He’s a computer programmer, for crying out loud,” said the lieutenant. “Lives in Brooklyn Heights on Pineapple Street. I can’t even afford to live on Pineapple Street.”

  “So he’s legit?” said Clarabel.

  “As far as I can tell,” said the lieutenant. “He wouldn’t tell me where Marcel was, though. I had a feeling the kid was sitting right next to him. Larry’s probably afraid that if he tells us, we’ll come out to Brooklyn to get the kid—which, by the way, is not happening when we have four cops in the rundown.”

  “So, no missing?” I said hopefully.

  “Yes missing,” said the lieutenant. “We don’t have the kid in the Two-eight, so we gotta do a report, to cover our butts in case he winds up dead somewhere. Which of you guys is taking it?”

  Clarabel looked at me expectantly.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s my turn.”

  “Okay, Suarez, I’m putting you in a sector with Samuels. He comes off meal in five minutes,” the lieutenant said, corralling my partner toward his patrol car.

  I drove back to the station house to contact every precinct where the boy might show up dead. I typed up the missing-person long form in quadruplicate, then faxed it to the many concerned parties, including the Housing Authority (in case he wound up dead in the projects), the Transit Authority (in case he wound up dead on a subway), as well as all our adjacent commands: the Three-two in Central Harlem, the Two-five in Spanish Harlem, the Two-six surrounding Columbia University, and the Central Park Precinct. All this—in addition to completing a Domestic Incident Report, as well as generating a complaint report number using the department’s bug-ridden computer system—took roughly three and a half hours.

  I was walking out of the administrative office with twenty-four layers of freshly typed paperwork—enough carbon paper to stuff a sleeping bag—looking for the lieutenant to get his signature. I found him standing just outside the juvenile unit office, and I handed him the package.

  “I think this is everything,” I said. “I can’t imagine how there could be more.”

  “Shhh,” Lieutenant Davis said, then pointed over his shoulder into the adjacent office. “That’s the kid. That’s Marcel.”

  Looking past the lieutenant, I saw a teenage boy and a man in his thirties sitting next to each other on plastic chairs. Both were well dressed and staring back at me with polite smiles. I smiled at them in response, more stunned than anything, then looked back at the lieutenant.

  “When did they show up?” I asked him.

  “When did you finish your paperwork?” he said.

  “Just now.”

  “That’s when they always show up.”

  “And that’s the brother-in-law sitting next to him?”

  “Mm-hmm,” the lieutenant said. “Larry.”

  “Not the miscreants we’d been warned about, are they?” I said.

  “Which is good,” the lieutenant said, “because now they’re finally ready to go through child services to make the adoption happen. That’ll take a long time and uproot the kid for a while, but that’s not our problem. As long as he’s stuck in the ACS system, the old lady can’t call us every night for another missing report.”

  “So, you buy their story over Miss McCauley’s?” I asked.

  “I’d buy anything over her version,” the lieutenant said. “But something seems a little off about the boy. He won’t talk much.”

  “He’s probably shell-shocked from living with that woman.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” said the lieutenant.

  “So what do we do now?” I said.

  “You,” the lieutenant corrected me, “sit with the kid at Saint Luke’s.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “It’s just routine. We can’t release him to child services until he gets checked out by a doctor, in case he has a congenital heart problem or something.”

  More butt covering. “Which forms do I need?”

  “No forms,” he said. “Just keep him there until someone from child services comes. Take you an hour, tops.”

  I drove Marcel and Larry to the nearest hospital and found them the exact opposite of how Miss McCauley had described. Marcel, whose pharmaceutical lapse was supposed to send him into hysterics, was courteous and qui
et; Larry, the “liar,” was as believable as he could be. It only took a few minutes to see that they were as close as family members already, infusing this otherwise pointless task with a sense of purpose.

  While Marcel was being seen by a pediatrician, Larry and I sat down in the hospital waiting room to relax. I slumped down in a chair, stretched my legs, and started watching a Cosby Show rerun on a TV set built into the wall. The narcotic effect of the sitcom set in immediately, massaging innocuous jokes into my aching brain like hot body oil into sore muscles. It had been another unnerving week of heated arguments and dueling accusations, and it was a relief to end it on a note of canned laughter.

  Twenty minutes later, the doctor called me from the waiting room for a private meeting in his office.

  “I’ve managed to get a hold of child services,” he told me in a surprisingly bitter tone, “but it doesn’t look good. The woman I spoke to on the phone doesn’t seem to think Marcel’s injury is worth looking into, and she wants me to release him back into the perpetrator’s home.”

  “Perpetrator?” I said. “What injury?”

  “You didn’t see it?” he said.

  “No,” I said, feeling horribly remiss.

  The doctor handed me a Polaroid picture and said, “I just took this.”

  In the photo, I saw a cluster of four bloody scratch marks in roughly parallel lines about two inches long, like Marcel had been scratched by human fingernails.

  “Where is it?” I said.

  “His left shoulder,” said the doctor. “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, opening his door to let me out, “I have to get started on the paperwork, as I imagine you will too.”

  “Which paperwork?”

  “This is child abuse. Don’t you have to arrest the person who did this?”

  “I guess I do.”

  * * *

  I immediately called the precinct from a hospital phone. After ten rings, Harriet DuPree, the Two-eight’s most veteran cop, picked up the line.