When Harry Met Minnie

by Martha Teichner

  Stephen discovered that Jeffrey Mendoza, Carol’s friend the landscape designer, had her ashes. He and his partner, Chuck Sklar, the children’s endocrinologist at Sloan Kettering, who had been at Carol’s side when she died, couldn’t attend, so Stephen collected the urn well in advance. I had Harry’s ashes and those of her cat, Bruno.

  “We can mix them together,” Stephen suggested. “The container from the crematorium is really ugly. So are the ones Harry and Bruno are in.” I’d shown him the plain wooden boxes. “Carol would be horrified. She would expect to go out in style,” he said, chuckling over the phone. “I have a collection of really pretty small baskets and lacquer boxes. And antique, carved scoops. Some are bone. Some are wood. I have silver ones as well.” Stephen, the architect, designing a beautiful way to do a sad thing. “I’ll come over early, before we go to Battery Park. We can divide up the ashes, so everybody has some to scatter.”

  “I want to keep half of Harry’s,” I said. “He was my dog, too. I told you about the little shrine I have in my closet where I keep Piggy’s ashes and Goose’s. When I die, I want them buried with me. Minnie’s, too.”

  “What time should I come by?”

  Knowing Stephen was always late, I said, “Before five. We’ll need time to get everything ready.”

  What could go wrong?

  Plenty.

  On Sunday, five o’clock came and went. No Stephen. Needless to say. Five-fifteen. Five-thirty. Still no Stephen. I began to get nervous. At about five forty-five, my phone rang. Stephen.

  “Bring some ID to the corner, something that shows you live on the block, so I can get the cop to let me turn onto Twenty-second Street.”

  “What?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Your street is closed. I told the cop I needed to park by your place because I had to bring in the ashes and all the other stuff. He won’t let me.”

  Stephen sounded agitated. I could tell because his voice tends to get higher when he’s worked up. I remembered all those calls from his car and the night Carol died.

  “Okay, I’ll be right there. I’ll look for a utility bill or something.” I rummaged around and found one, grabbed my passport, phone, and keys, then headed down the street. I could see bumper-to-bumper traffic on Tenth Avenue, going nowhere. There was a barrier at my corner. I wondered why. The Gay Pride parade was over. The published list of street closures hadn’t included my neighborhood. I’d been indoors most of the afternoon. What on earth was going on?

  I spotted Stephen, practically belly to chest with a much-taller cop, the two of them silhouetted in the late-afternoon sun, their body language confrontational. Uh-oh. When I reached them, I said, “Officer, here’s my identification and a utility bill to show I live on this block, so that you can let my friend bring his car in.” The cop, who had been ranting at Stephen, while he ranted back, turned in my direction. A good-looking guy in his twenties, he had lots of thick dark hair. He was bright red, bust-a-gasket red, and sweating.

  “He ran over me and left me to die!”

  I wasn’t sure I heard right. “Officer, here’s my passport and a utility bill to show you that I live on this block. This is a friend of mine. We’re supposed to be scattering someone’s ashes this evening, someone dear to both of us. We need to transport the urn and other things, and they’re heavy. He needs to get to my house, so we can do that. Could he please drive his car as far as my building?”

  “He ran over me and left me to die,” the cop bleated again, looking as if he might cry.

  “Excuse me, I don’t understand.” He was very much alive, his uniform crisp and fresh.

  “He defied my order to stop. He ran over me. My foot.”

  Stephen: “I was trying to park. You … you … jumped in front of my car.”

  The cop: “You disobeyed my order. My foot. My foot is crushed. You tried to kill me.”

  I looked down at his feet. He had a dusty scuff mark on the toe of one of his black boots, no indentation, just a scuff. I had just seen him walk, perfectly normally, without so much as a hint of a limp.

  Stephen: “I did not try to kill you. When I tried to turn out of traffic, you jumped in front of my car.” Stephen had reached full tenor. The cop was borderline hysterical, his voice even higher than Stephen’s. I looked around and noticed that a couple of other officers, who had been standing on the far side of Tenth Avenue, had edged in closer. A crowd of gawkers had appeared. I heard a siren getting louder. A patrol car was nudging its way through the traffic on Tenth. It reached the corner and stopped. Someone dragged the barrier aside and it turned onto Twenty-second Street. Two officers got out and approached.

  Stephen and I tried to tell the two officers that we needed their help, but they had come to execute some sort of divide-and-conquer play. One positioned his body between us and the cop who had confronted Stephen. The other took the cop by the arm, supporting him as he hobbled toward the patrol car, limping badly all of a sudden. With each step, he winced and groaned. I couldn’t believe it.

  Instead of allowing us to explain, the other half of the divide-and-conquer team demanded our names, addresses, and telephone numbers and walked off, leaving us standing by ourselves in the street.

  More police arrived and a big red SUV, a fire emergency-medical vehicle. Two EMTs rushed to the patrol car where Officer Left-to-Die was now sitting sideways in the back seat with his legs sticking out of the open door. They leaned over his supposedly crushed foot. I watched them take off his boot and sock, then bend his ankle and bare toes.

  I looked around and saw my neighbors staring, gossiping among themselves, a few pointing. I felt like an animal in a circus. On the periphery of this gathering stood a stone-faced, older police officer in the cleanest, stiffest, whitest white shirt I think I’ve ever seen, not a wrinkle anywhere. Appearing to give orders to the two younger officers at his side, he had rank written all over him.

  I called Ann King and told her what was happening. She lived around the corner on Twenty-third Street and soon joined us, carrying a canvas bag containing what was supposed to be the wine and hors d’oeuvres for our toast. I asked her to phone the other people who were supposed to scatter Carol’s ashes and to suggest we all meet at my apartment instead of Battery Park. I gave her my keys, so she could let them in.

  Next, an ambulance showed up, lights flashing, siren blaring. With amazing speed, doors opened, a stretcher appeared, and Officer Left-to-Die was lifted onto it. He was bundled into the back and rushed to a hospital. I heard a couple of New York cynics muttering, “Eh, he figures he’ll have a pension for life, that guy” and “He’s got it made now.”

  The show goes on, I thought, and began counting uniforms. Seventeen. Fifteen cops, most of whom were by then chatting with one another and laughing, plus the two fire department EMTs, who were filling out some sort of forms inside the red SUV. Seventeen! I marveled. All this because Stephen got himself into an argument over turning onto my street. Only in New York.

  More than an hour into this little drama, Stephen’s battered Land Rover was still stopped at the intersection, still holding up traffic on Tenth Avenue. The front tires were turned to the right, toward the barrier now blocking Twenty-second Street again. I watched a police photographer take pictures. Other officers looked up at light poles and the stoplight checking for security cameras.

  Stephen and I began talking to two relaxed, seen-it-all guys, who said they were from the Tenth Precinct, the jurisdiction in charge of policing my neighborhood. They were the only officers who seemed willing to listen. Just then, another divide-and-conquer team moved in. “Sir, could you please come with us for a moment,” they asked, but didn’t give Stephen the option to say no. He looked back at me, confused, as they pushed him toward the fence at Clement Clarke Moore Park. I continued talking with the two men from the Tenth Precinct.

  “I’m a reporter,” I said, and identified myself. “I’ve covered police activity of one kind or another for more than forty
years, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

  “We tried to step in,” one of them replied. “We were prepared to give your friend a warning and just let it go at that, but it was taken out of our hands. Somebody complained up the chain of command.” He nodded at the stern officer in the very white shirt. “What you don’t know is that this is tangled up in a turf battle. The guy who went to the hospital, he isn’t an actual cop. He’s a civilian traffic enforcement agent.” The other one went on, “They’re not really trained. We have problems with them all the time. But the Traffic division protects them.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw activity where Stephen stood surrounded. His arms were behind his back. A cop was pulling plastic ties tight around his wrists.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  The Tenth Precinct guys glanced over. “I guess we’re gonna have to take him in. Don’t worry, it’ll just be like someone getting arrested at a demonstration. He’ll be out in an hour, an hour and a half. It’s nothing, a misdemeanor. Won’t even go on his record.”

  Stephen was walked to the Tenth Precinct car and maneuvered into the back seat the way suspects are in television shows, with a hand on his head.

  “Do you drive?” The officer who had reassured me held up Stephen’s keys.

  “Yes.”

  “Here.” He handed them to me and asked me to sign a receipt. “Someone will call you in a little while. If you haven’t heard from us by eight-thirty, give the precinct a call.”

  Car doors slammed, and Stephen was driven away. The crowd drifted off. The street was opened to traffic, the barrier moved aside. Where had all the cops gone? It was as if they had evaporated.

  I was standing alone next to Stephen’s car, now double-parked on Twenty-second Street. I got in. The front seat was pulled so far forward, the steering wheel was practically against my chest. I couldn’t figure out how to move it back. I also couldn’t find the switch for the dome light or the air-conditioning dials or the lights or anything else it normally takes thirty seconds to locate in a rental car. I did find the ignition, though, and managed, by some miracle, to get the thing into a parking spot in front of my building. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the windows close, so they stayed open. I hoped nobody would break in.

  A wire-mesh bin was sitting on the passenger seat, in it, lovely boxes. A woven wicker one had a cutout photo of Carol as a young woman stuck to it. Another box, made out of some exotic streaked wood, had a card attached with a gold, embossed bull terrier on it. Harry’s name was hand-printed in calligraphy. A third looked like a little trunk with brass findings. BRUNO was printed on a hand-colored picture of a tiger. There were scoops, and Stephen’s straw hat.

  By the time I carried the bin into my apartment, Ann King had opened the wine she’d brought and found glasses in my kitchen. Mary Corliss and Alan Wade were there, too. We were all too shocked to say much. We waited. No one called.

  At eight-thirty, I phoned the Tenth Precinct and asked the duty officer about Stephen, when he’d be released.

  “Oh, the Felony Assault with Grievous Bodily Harm guy. He’s not getting out.”

  “What? Felony? You must have him mixed up with somebody else. The officers who took him away said he’d be released in an hour or an hour and a half.”

  “No, he’s going to be transported downtown to One Hundred Centre Street to be charged.”

  “Could I please speak with one of the officers who brought him in?”

  “I’ll have him call you.” He took my phone number and hung up.

  Ann, Alan, and Mary stared at me. We kept repeating the word felony, trying to comprehend.

  “Why One Hundred Centre Street?” I asked. I remembered the tall gray building all the way downtown where I’d had to report for jury duty several times.

  “It’s the criminal courts building,” Alan said.

  The phone rang.

  It was Stephen. “The Tenth Precinct officer was really nice and gave my phone back to call you. He wasn’t supposed to.” All of Stephen’s personal possessions had been confiscated when he arrived at the station.

  “What’s going on?” I sounded frantic even to myself. “The guy at the desk told me you were being charged with felony assault. That’s serious.”

  “Yeah. Because I supposedly injured a cop. Aggravated assault with grievous bodily harm. They’re transporting me down to One Hundred Centre Street and putting me in the jail in the basement till I’m charged, probably not till tomorrow morning.”

  “Jail!” I was practically shouting. Then the practical side of me took over. “I have an early assignment tomorrow, so I’ll give your car keys to Ann King. Contact her when you get out. What about Wally? Is there somebody who can take care of him?”

  Stephen’s beautiful old golden retriever, Teddy, had died. Now he had a puppy, named Wally.

  “My neighbor.” He gave me his neighbor’s phone number. “Tell her that there’s a spare key hidden in the fuse box opposite my front door. Wally plays with her dog all the time.”

  I grabbed my second cell phone. “Stay on the line. Let me call her, in case she’s not home, and we have to come up with somebody else.”

  I dialed the number. His neighbor answered. Startled, she couldn’t quite take in what I was telling her. “Hello, my name is Martha Teichner.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m calling on behalf of Stephen Miller Siegel, who is about to go to jail and desperately needs you to take care of Wally.” I realized I sounded like one of those Nigerian money scammers, minus the money part. Why would she believe me? “He’s on the phone in my other ear. I need to make sure you have Wally before the police make him hang up.”

  I heard her moving, rummaging around, turning the knob on a lock. Hallelujah!

  “I’m going out the door.… I’m opening the fuse box.… Yup, here it is.… I’m going into Stephen’s apartment now.” Thumping noise. “I’ve got Wally. He’ll be fine.”

  To Stephen, “Is there anybody else I need to call? Do you have a lawyer?”

  “No, the only lawyer I’ve ever dealt with is a real estate guy, who negotiated a lease for office space. Oh, and the lawyer who did Carol’s will.” I heard another voice. Stephen said, “I’ve got to go.”

  Alan, Ann, Mary, and I looked up the penalty for conviction on charges of aggravated assault against a police officer. Up to fifteen years in prison. We stared at each other incredulous.

  Then somebody said, “I’m hungry.” We were all hungry. It was nine-thirty by then. We walked around the corner to a little Italian restaurant directly across Tenth Avenue from the spot where Stephen’s confrontation had occurred. We settled in for our meal and some red wine. We relaxed and laughed, but from time to time confessed to feeling guilty that we were enjoying ourselves while Stephen was in jail.

  On our way back to my apartment, I asked, “What would Carol have thought?”

  Ann and Alan laughed. Both said at once, “She would have thought the whole thing was hilarious.”

  * * *

  STEPHEN WAS CHARGED and then released in the morning. He was assigned a court-appointed attorney. A court date was set. His personal effects were still at the Tenth Precinct, so he had to go there and collect them. The officer who allowed him call me also let him keep the money he had in his pocket, so at least he was able to get a cab back to the station.

  When I spoke to him, he sounded cheerful, to my amazement. “It was an interesting experience.”

  “And that’s a euphemism for what?” I asked, but there was no sarcasm at all in his account of his night in jail.

  “They took me in through the loading dock in back of the building, where all the garbage cans are, and then down into the basement. The company was pretty congenial. There were a bunch of us all in the same cell. Nobody could sleep. They brought us some food, but it looked really bad, so I didn’t eat it. I was starving when I got out. The worst thing was that the air-conditioning was so cold
I could barely stand it.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “No, not really. There were some drunks and some guys in there for robbery and drugs. There was a transvestite, who’d been in the Gay Pride March. Somebody stole her wig, a really expensive wig, so she ran after him and smashed right into a cop by mistake. That’s why she was arrested. There was a kind of gallows humor. I was the only white person.”

  “What about the lawyer?”

  “I liked him. He couldn’t believe the charge and said not to worry, he would get it knocked down.”

  Sure enough, when investigators reviewed the various security-camera views of the scene, and Officer Left-to-Die’s medical report came back with no grievous bodily harm evident, the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor. Just as the officers from the Tenth Precinct had predicted, like a nonviolent demonstrator arrested at a protest. Stephen pleaded guilty. He was fined $250 and sentenced to attend a one-week anger-management class.

  A farce, yes, and given the outcome, pretty funny after all.

  * * *

  FOR WEEKS, CAROL’S ashes sat on my dining table in their woven wicker box, the cutout photograph of her face smiling up at me every time I passed by, her hair still dark in the picture, her lipstick very red, a hand posed against her cheek, like a glove model in a 1950s magazine. The wire-mesh bin with Stephen’s boxes and scoops remained exactly where I’d left them the night he went to jail.

  We decided to try again to scatter the ashes. Stephen emailed Carol’s friends. Nobody was available for months.

  “Let’s do it anyway,” Stephen said. “Soon. Let’s not wait.”

  On the afternoon of August 12, watching Stephen remove Carol’s picture from the top of her box, I felt strange, light-headed, as if I were trespassing in a sacred place. We opened it and took out the plastic bag containing her ashes. I added half of Harry’s and all of Bruno’s and mixed them around with one of the scoops. I held open a zipper bag and Stephen poured. A dusty cloud rose around the opening. When we each had approximately equal amounts, he closed his bag and replaced its wire tie, exactly the same kind people use when they measure out bags of bulk nuts at the supermarket. Plastic bags and wire ties. I expected something more reverential, less expedient, less throwaway.