Paul Bacon

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

  I arrived at roll call to learn that Clarabel was not coming in. According to our supervisor, she had used one of her regular vacation days to spend yet another day recovering from the collar. I wondered if she might have magnet-bed, too; or maybe something else was keeping her in bed, like the slimy arms of our old company sergeant.

  The normally foul mood of the four-to-twelve squad was lifted when Sergeant Ramirez announced that a cop from MSU had been transferred to the Two-eight. A weak round of applause came from the six or seven cops in attendance.

  Carlyle looked around the room. “Where’s the new kid?”

  The sergeant said, “He just called the desk to say he’d be a little late. Apparently he’s lost.”

  “How do you get lost in Manhattan?” said Carlyle. “The streets are all friggin’ numbered.”

  “Better late than never,” said the sergeant.

  I had a bad feeling about our new blood. “What’s the guy’s name?” I asked.

  The sergeant looked down at her roster and said, “Haldon.”

  Oh, no. Haldon. I slapped my forehead.

  Carlyle saw me and said, “Jesus, Bacon. What’s wrong with him?”

  “What? Oh, nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to prejudice Haldon’s coworkers against him. They’d figure it out themselves. “He was in my academy company. Very nice guy.”

  “Nice?” Carlyle said with a snarl.

  “Glad you like him,” said the sergeant. “He’s your partner tonight.”

  “Two liberals in the same sector, boss?” Carlyle said. “Does Inspector Benesch know about this?”

  A half hour later, Haldon was perched in the passenger seat of my patrol car. With bright eyes full of civic duty, he gazed at the passing street scene like a shepherd watching over his flock.

  “I’m really glad to be out of MSU,” he said. “I hated writing summonses. They make people so mad.”

  “You’ll write plenty of summonses on patrol,” I assured him. There were three violations taking place in front of our windshield at that very moment.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “As long as I can make some good collars.”

  “What’s a good collar?”

  “Like domestic violence. Doesn’t it feel good to lock up those kinds of perps?”

  “If you want to lock up their victims, too, then yes, it feels amazing. Otherwise, I recommend taking complaint reports only as needed to cover yourself and shitcanning every collar you can.”

  “But what about drug dealers? And bank robbers and child pornographers? You can’t ignore them, can you?”

  “Couldn’t say. I haven’t met any.”

  “You haven’t met any drug dealers in the Two-eight?” he said.

  “We see them all the time, but they always see us first. They’re not idiots.”

  “The cells back at the house were all full, though. Somebody must be doing their jobs.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I explained. “We’re all working, but patrol collars aren’t terrorists with global reach. They’re for street fights or shoplifting—a total waste of everyone’s time. The average perp is mentally ill, homeless, and ready to be locked up again the next day. The only reason to arrest them is if you want the OT, or because a perp crossed some line that can’t be ignored.”

  Haldon looked disappointed.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said, staring out the windshield.

  “Come on,” I said, “tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Back at the academy,” he said, “you helped us study how to do things the proper way, and now you just sound like a hairbag.”

  “Is that so?” I said. “Check back with me in six months.”

  “What about this fight?” he said. “Are you just going to ignore it, too?”

  “What fight?” I said.

  “Right there,” he said, pointing out my window.

  I looked to my left and saw two young men brawling on the other side of the street.

  “God damn it!” I said, pounding my fist on the steering wheel as the flow of traffic pulled us past the scene. When I reached a space in the oncoming lane, I switched on the roof lights, pulled the car into a tight U-turn, and drove back to the fight.

  “Should I call an eighty-five?” Haldon asked me as I pulled up to the curb.

  “No! Don’t call anyone. Just stay here,” I said, slamming on the brakes and jumping out of the car.

  “Don’t you want your baton?” Haldon yelled out the window.

  Outside the vehicle, I got a raging case of tunnel vision, ignoring everything except my mission to end the fight before either party suffered visible injuries, which would necessitate an arrest. They were both large young men, but by the time I hit the sidewalk, I had such a head of steam that I easily separated them. I grabbed one of them by the jacket and tossed him up against a chain-link fence.

  The other man immediately declared himself the winner. “That’s right, bitch!” he shouted. “See what the popo thinks about your punk-ass mouth!”

  I still had the first man against the fence when I turned to the other and said, “What, you wanna get locked up? Get the fuck out of here!”

  A small crowd of onlookers had gathered, and they complained about my language as the other man stomped away cursing just as fluently.

  “Wait, wait! It wasn’t me,” said the man in my grasp. “I just told that nigger off, and he started to fight me.”

  I said nothing while waiting for the other man to turn the corner and disappear. Then I let my guy go.

  He straightened out his jacket and said, “Ain’t you gonna do nuthin’?”

  “I just did sumthin’,” I said. “I saved you from a beat-down.”

  The hecklers continued to shout at me as I walked back to the car. After getting inside and shutting my door, I shifted the transmission into drive, but before I could pull away, I felt a wave of lightheadedness. I put the car back into park, laid my head against the seat, and rolled up the windows to cut down on the screaming.

  “Are you okay?” Haldon said. “Do you want me to drive?”

  I ignored him as Central’s voice came over the radio, “Two-eight Henry, check and advise on a dispute at One-eighteen and Douglass.”

  Another adrenaline rush kicked in like a nostril full of cocaine. I quickly gathered my wits, shifted the car out of park, and drove to the location.

  We arrived at 118th Street and Frederick Douglass Avenue a few minutes later and found no dispute taking place. I shut off the engine and waited a few minutes on the corner to see if someone might approach us about the call. No one materialized, so I turned the car on and drove away. As soon as we started moving, Haldon picked up his radio, keyed the mike button, and was about to give Central a final disposition before I shouted, “Wait, for chrissake! Don’t give back the job yet!”

  “. . . for chrissake! Don’t give back the job yet! ” said my radio, an echo of my own voice on the air. I hoped no one recognized me.

  “Sorry, Bacon,” said Haldon.

  “Sorry, Bacon,” said my radio.

  I whispered to Haldon, “Take your thumb off the mike button, please.”

  Haldon did as I said, though he didn’t seem happy about it. He laid his radio in his lap and said, “If we don’t give the job back, Central can’t give us another one.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  I wanted to reduce our workload as much as possible because it was an unusually warm night. A sudden spike in temperature flushed out all the apartment buildings at once, sending more people—and more criminals—out into the otherwise pleasant evening. Robberies eased off a bit for all the extra eyes around, but calls about fighting, noise, and drug dealing were typically off the hook.

  Warmer nights also brought out the motorcycle hellions, boys in their late teens who rode around in large motorized packs that sounded like a choir of chainsaws. In a show of pure bravado, they drove illegal off-road motocross equipment in highly illegal
ways—riding on sidewalks, drag racing, popping wheelies. Their tremendous noise and the long ribbons of toxic blue smoke they left in their wakes disturbed the air in a way I could feel long after they were gone. I personally wished the most horrific accidents on all of them. Unfortunately, my hands were tied; chasing the hellions only made them drive faster. Harlem was as busy as most parts of Manhattan during rush hour, and the chances of a bystander getting hurt were even higher if we gave pursuit. I had to comfort myself thinking how short these reckless young men’s lives were shaping up to be, because nothing made me feel as impotent as sitting in a police car and ignoring such an obvious menace.

  This feeling was particularly strong when stopped at a red light and surrounded by taxpaying citizens, as happened a few minutes after Haldon and I left the scene of the nondispute.

  “Excuse me, officer,” said a dapper man on the sidewalk. “Did you see all those kids on motorcycles?”

  “I sure did,” I said.

  The man seemed shocked. “Are you out of gas or something?”

  “No. Thanks, though,” I said, giving him a wan smile, then glaring back at the traffic light, willing it to change.

  “Wuh! Tell me your badge number, officer,” he said, patting his jacket pockets for a pen. “This is just the kind of laziness . . .”

  When the light turned green, I let my foot do the talking. I stepped on the accelerator, listening with plea sure as the man’s shouts faded into the distant rumble of motorcycles down Lenox Avenue. I let out a satisfied, “Ahhhh,” and smiled at Haldon.

  “You know, he had a point,” said my temporary partner. “If we don’t do something about them, who will?”

  “Men with big machine guns, I hope.”

  CHAPTER 28

  AFTER MY NIGHT WITH HALDON, I spent all weekend in bed thinking about Clarabel. If she was still in regular contact with Moran, I concluded, they must be an item. As for our kiss, it had taken place under the most favorable circumstances—in the dark, in the woods, during a weird, unguarded moment I couldn’t possibly replicate. Clarabel was probably spoken for, and that was probably for the best. She and Moran were two of a kind, both of them shrewd, fearless, and maddeningly sexy. Seeing things in these terms, I realized I never had a chance with Clarabel. I’d never wooed a woman like her in my life. If it was manliness I’d lacked before, why would things be any different just because I was a cop? Some women might have been impressed, but Clarabel was a cop, too.

  Giving up my designs on her left me wondering what was left for me on the job. Her friendship alone wasn’t worth the trouble of wearing a uniform every night. I needed something more than a steady paycheck and the promise of a pension after twenty years to keep me going. Being a cop was ruining my health, sapping my energy, and making me nuts. Inertia was a big reason why I chose to stay, but I also clung to the idea that I, as a police officer, had a special purpose. After 9/11, after the rigors of thirty months on the job, quitting in the wake of a romantic defeat seemed childish. If I still hadn’t figured out how I would serve the public as a cop, I thought maybe I would someday, if I just stuck it out long enough.

  I went back to the Two-eight the following week with a new outlook. Patience would be my virtue, and I would make the best of every moment until that magical something fell out of the sky to show me my true purpose. I stopped swearing in uniform, I no longer waited to give jobs back to Central, and I even partnered up with Haldon a few times when I didn’t have to. I greeted all my constituents with the same warmth and friendly outlook that I’d had at the start, and most of them reciprocated.

  Magnet-bed did not go away, however, nor did the main reason I still succumbed to it. Overtime was my enemy, and every night I came home late, I woke up feeling ten years older than when I’d gone to sleep. Over the next few months, magnet-bed overcame my noblest intentions and turned me back into a hairbag; I found myself trying to shitcan every job that came over the radio.

  One night in January 2005, Clarabel and I responded to a call that even the most grizzled hairbag could not squash—a DOA. Dead people could not be ignored or talked out of their predicament. Regardless of who they were or how they may have died, their passing required us to summon—and wait for—a host of other parties to come to the scene: EMS, our patrol supervisor, our platoon commander, precinct detectives, the county coroner, the morgue-wagon attendants, and, if possible, a next of kin.

  The job initially came over the radio as an “offensive odor” coming from an apartment near 124th Street and Lenox Avenue, one of the most run-down blocks in the precinct. Dilapidated brownstones lined the street, many of them occupied by squatters who lived without heat, electricity, or running water. The whole block was a giant bouquet of offensive odors, so the fact that we’d been summoned on behalf of one particular smell meant we were probably on our way to finding a decomposed body of some kind. It might have been a dead person or a dead animal.

  Hoping it would be the latter, Clarabel and I made every attempt to spin the person who placed the initial call to 911. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy from the outset. The young woman appeared at her door with a lit cigarette in her mouth and an unlit cigarette in her hand. Her apartment was filled with smoke, like she’d been puffing away for hours.

  “Oh, finally,” she said. “Thank you, thank you. I’m dying up here.”

  “What’s wrong, ma’am?” I said.

  “Can’t you smell it?” she said.

  I had noticed a foul stench in the hallway, but it wasn’t any worse than the smell of the mice that sometimes died under the floorboards of my apartment.

  “That’s not normal?” I said.

  “No!” she said.

  Clarabel asked her, “Where’s the smell coming from?”

  “Three-B,” the woman said, pointing down the hallway.

  “Who lives there?” said Clarabel.

  “George Thompson,” said the woman. “Or at least he used to.”

  “Does Mr. Thompson have any pets?” asked Clarabel.

  “Pets? No,” said the woman. “Why?”

  “You’re sure?” said Clarabel. “Maybe he keeps a cat and doesn’t want the landlord to know.”

  “I’m sure,” the woman said, crossing her arms.

  “Any particular reason to think he’s passed away?” I asked her, hoping she would come up short.

  “You mean besides that nasty-ass smell?” she said. “Well, I ain’t seen him in three days, and I usually see him all the time.”

  “You don’t think he’s out of town?” I said. “He could be visiting relatives and forgot to take out the trash.”

  “He ain’t got no relatives. He just a lonely old man.”

  “How old is he?” Clarabel asked.

  “Sixty, maybe seventy,” said the woman.

  “Does he drink much?” said Clarabel.

  “Oh, hell yeah. Like a fish,” the woman said, nodding deeply, as if this would convince us he was a goner.

  I said, “Maybe he’s just passed out.”

  The woman was losing her patience. “Passed out for three days?”

  Clarabel said, “Hey, we can’t go barging into people’s homes without a good reason, all right?”

  “Then follow your damn nose,” the woman said, and slammed her door in our faces.

  I stared at the door for a while, speechless.

  Clarabel said, “What’s your problem?”

  “I can’t believe we just did that,” I said. “Someone’s dead, and we’re quibbling over pets and taking out the trash.”

  “I’m just doing my job,” Clarabel pointed out. “You’re the one who’s always in a hurry to sign out on time.”

  “Yeah,” I said with a heavy sigh, resigning myself to the usual rush. I looked at my watch and saw we had four and a half hours left in our tour. If I was very lucky, we might finish this job before magnet-bed set in.

  The doorknob on apartment 3B was locked. This wasn’t surprising, but it meant we had to wait for s
omeone from the fire department to come and bust the door open. While we waited, Lieutenant Davis raised us on the radio every twenty minutes for status reports because as always our squad was low on manpower.

  Three status reports later, a pair of firefighters came up the stairs dressed in T-shirts, suspenders, and grimy yellow wading pants. One was carrying a crowbar.

  Both of them frowned when they reached the top level and took in the stench. One of the men said, “DOA?” and we nodded.

  “How long?” he said.

  “Three days,” said Clarabel.

  “Really?” said the fireman. “This is bad, but a three-day decomp should be much worse. You guys sure it’s a dead person in there?”

  “Yes, thank you, we’ve already been through this,” I told him. “Could you just open the door, please?”

  The fireman laughed and said, “Yes, sir, officer. Right away.”

  As he and his partner walked past us, Clarabel looked at me in disbelief. I told her I was sorry, but it didn’t wipe the scowl off her face.

  The fireman stepped in front of Mr. Thompson’s door. I took a few steps in the other direction and turned away. This was my second DOA, and I was dreading the next few moments of horrible discovery.

  I heard a loud crack, and one of the firemen shouted, “Ho-ly shit!” “What the hell is that?” said the other.

  I turned back around and saw them pulling Mr. Thompson’s door shut as though there was a dangerous animal behind it. “Whew,” one of the men gasped.

  They started walking toward the stairs, and I said, “Wait. We need to get in there.”

  “The lock’s busted,” said one. “Enjoy.”