The Sixty-eighth Precinct is stationed onSixty-fifthStreet between Third and Fourth Avenues, straddling the approximate boundary of Bay Ridge andSunsetPark. On the south side of the street a housing project loomed; across from it, the station house looked like something from Picasso's cubist period, all blocky with cantilevered cubes and recessed areas. The structure reminded me of the building that houses the Two-three inEast Harlem, and I learned later that the same architect designed them both.
The building was six years old then, according to the plaque in the entranceway that mentioned the architect, the police commissioner, the mayor, and a couple of other worthies making a bid for municipal immortality. I stood there and read the whole plaque as if it had a special message for me. Then I went up to the desk and said I was there to see Detective Calvin Neumann. The officer on duty made a phone call,then pointed me to the squad room.
The building's interior was clean and spacious and well lit. It had been open enough years, though, to begin to feel like what it was.
The squad room contained a bank of gray metal file cabinets, a row of green metal lockers, and twin rows of five-foot steel desks set back to back. A television set was on in one corner with nobody watching it. Half of the eight or ten desks were occupied. At the water cooler, a man in a suit talked with a man in his shirtsleeves. In the holding pen, a drunk sang something tuneless in Spanish.
I recognized one of the seated detectives but couldn't recall his name. He didn't look up. Across the room, another man looked familiar. I went up to a man I didn't know and he pointed out Neumann, two desks down on the opposite side.
He was filling in a form, and I stood while he finished what he was typing. He looked up then and said, "Scudder?" and pointed to a chair. He swiveled around to face me and waved a hand at the typewriter.
"They don't tell you," he said, "the hours you'regonna spend typing crud. Nobody out there realizes how much of this job is clerical."
"That's the part it's hard to get nostalgic about."
"I don't think I'd miss it myself." He yawned elaborately. "Eddie Koehler gave you high marks," he said. "I gave him a call like you suggested. He said you're okay."
"You know Eddie?"
He shook his head. "But I know what a lieutenant is," he said. "I haven't got a whole lot to give you, but you're welcome to it. You may not get the same cooperation from Brooklyn Homicide."
"Why's that?"
"They drew the case to start with. It got called in originally to the One-oh-four, which was actually wrong, it should have been ours, but that happens a lot. Then Brooklyn Homicide responded along with the One-oh-four, and they took the case away from the precinct guys."
"When did you come into it?"
"When a favorite snitch of mine came up with a lot of talk coming out of the bars and bakeries on Third under the expressway.A nice mink coat at a real good price, but you got to keep this quiet because there's a lot of heat. Well, July's a funny time to sell fur coats inSunsetPark. A guy buys a coat for hisseñora, he wants her to be able to wear it that night. So my guy comes to me with the impression thatMiguelito Cruz has a houseful of stuff he's looking to sell and it just might be he hasn't got sales slips for many of the items. With the mink and a couple other items he mentioned, I remembered theTillary job onColonial Road, and it was enough to get a judge to issue a search warrant."
He ran a hand through his hair. It was medium brown, lighter where the sun had bleached it, and it was on the shaggy side. Cops were starting to wear their hair a little longer around about then, and the younger ones were beginning to show up in beards and moustaches. Neumann, though, was clean-shaven, his features regular except for a nose that had been broken and imperfectly reset.
"The stuff was in Cruz's house," he said. "He lives over on Fifty-first, the other side of theGowanus Expressway. I have the address somewhere if you want it. Those are some pretty blighted blocks over by the Bush Terminal Warehouse, if you know where that is. A lot of empty lots and boarded-up buildings and others nobody bothered boarding up, or somebody opened them up again and there's junkies camped out there. Where Cruz lived wasn't so bad. You'll see it if you go over there."
"Helive alone?"
He shook his head."With hisabuela.His grandmother. Little old lady, doesn't speak English, she probably ought to be in a home. Maybe they'll take her in at theMarien -Heim,it's right in the neighborhood. Old lady comes here fromPuerto Rico, before she can learn English she winds up in a home with a German name. That'sNew York, right?"
"You foundTillary's possessions in the Cruz apartment?"
"Oh, yeah.No question. I mean the serial numbers matched on the record player. He tried to deny it. What else is new, right? 'Oh, I buydis stuff onde street, it was some guy I met in a bar. Idoan knowhees name.' We told him, sure,Miguelito, but meanwhile a woman got cut bad in the house this stuff came out of, so it sure looks like you'regonna go away for murder one. The next minute he's copping to the burglary but insisting there was no dead woman when he was there."
"He must have known a woman got killed there."
"Of course, no matter who killedher. It was in the papers, right? One minute he says he didn't see the story, the next minute he didn't happen to recognize theaddress, you know how their stories keep changing."
"Where does Herrera come in?"
"They're cousins or something. Herrera lives in a furnished room on Forty-eighth betweenFifth and Sixth just a couple of blocks from the park.Lived there, anyway. Right now they're both living at the Brooklyn House of Detention and they'll be living there until they move upstate."
"They both have sheets?"
"Be a surprise if they didn't, wouldn't it?" He grinned. "They're your typical fuckups. A few juvenile arrests for gang stuff. They both beat a burglary charge a year and a halfago, a judge ruled there wasn't probable cause to justify a frisk." He shook his head. "The fucking rules you have to play by. Anyway, they beat that one, and another time they got collared for burglary andplea-bargained it to criminal trespass and got suspended sentences for it. And another time, another burglary case, the evidence disappeared."
"It disappeared?"
"It got lost or misfiled or something, I don't know. It's a miracle anybody ever goes to jail in this city. You really need a death wish to wind up in prison."
"So they did a fair amount of burglary."
"It looks like.In-and-out stuff, nickel-and-dime crap. Kick the door in, grab a radio, run into the street and sell it on the street for five or ten dollars. Cruz was worse than Herrera. Herrera worked from time to time, pushing a hand truck in the garment center or delivering lunches, minimum-wage stuff. I don't thinkMiguelito ever held a job."
"But neither of them ever killed anybody before."
"Cruz did."
"Oh?"
He nodded."In a tavern fight, him and another asshole fighting over some woman."
"The papers didn't have that."
"It never got to court. There were no charges pressed. There were a dozen witnesses reporting that the dead guy went after Cruz first with a broken bottle."
"What weapon did Cruz use?"
"A knife.He said it wasn't his, and there were witnesses prepared to swear they'd seen somebody toss him the knife. And of course they hadn't happened to notice who it was did the tossing. We didn't have enough to make a case of weapon possession, let alone homicide."
"But Cruz normally carried a knife?"
"You'd be more likely to catch him leaving the house without underwear."
THAT was early afternoon, the day after I'd taken fifteen hundred dollars from Drew Kaplan. That morning I'd bought a money order and mailed it to Syosset. I paid my August rent in advance, settled a bar tab or two, and rode the BMT toSunsetPark.
It's in Brooklyn, of course, on the borough's western edge, above Bay Ridge and south and west ofGreen-WoodCemetery. These days there's a fair amount ofbrownstoning going on inSunsetPark, with young urban professionals fleeing theManhattan rents and renovating the old row houses, gentrifying the neighborhood. Back then the upwardly mobile young had not yet discovered the place, and the population was a mixture ofLatins and Scandinavians. Most of the former were Puerto Ricans, most of the latter Norwegians, and the balance was gradually shifting fromEurope to the islands, from light to dark, but this was a process that had been going on for ages and there was nothing hurried about it.
I'd walked around some before my visit to the Six-eight, keeping mostly within a block or so ofFourth Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare, and orienting myself intermittently by looking around for Saint Michael's Church. Few of the buildings stood more than three stories, and the egg-shaped church dome, set atop a two-hundred-foot tower, was visible a long ways off.
I walked north onThird Avenue now, on the right-hand side of the street, in the shade of the expressway overhead. As I neared Cruz's street I stopped in a couple of bars, more to immerse myself in the neighborhood than to ask any questions. I had a short shot of bourbon in one place, stuck to beer otherwise.
The block whereMiguelito Cruz had lived with his grandmother was as Neumann described it. There were several vast vacant lots, one of them staked out in cyclone fencing, the others open and rubble-strewn. In one, small children played in the burned-out shell of a Volkswagen beetle. Four three-story buildings with scalloped brick fronts stood in a row on the north side of the block, closer toSecond Avenue than to Third. The buildings abutting the group on either side had been torn down, and the newly exposed brick side walls looked raw except for the graffiti spray-painted on their lower portions.
Cruz had lived in the building closest toSecond Avenue, closest, too, to the river. The vestibule was a lot of cracked and missing tiles and peeling paint. Six mailboxes were set into one wall, their locks broken and repaired and broken again. There were no bells to ring, nor was there a lock on the front door. I opened it and walked up two flights of stairs. The stairwell held cooking smells, rodent smells,a faint ammoniac reek of urine. All old buildings housing poor people smell like that. Rats die in the walls, kids and drunks piss. Cruz's building was no worse than thousands.
The grandmother lived on the top floor, in a perfectly neat railroad flat filled with holy pictures and little candle-illuminated shrines. If she spoke any English, she didn't let me know it.
No one answered my knock at the apartment across the hall.
I worked my way through the building. On the second floor, the apartment directly below the Cruz apartment was occupied by a very dark-skinned Hispanic woman with what looked like five children under six years old. A television set and a radio were playing in the front room, another radio in the kitchen. The children were in constant motion and at least two of them were crying or yelling at all times. The woman was cooperative enough, but she didn't have much English and it was impossible to concentrate on anything in there.
Across the hall, no one responded to my knock. I could hear a television set playing and went on knocking. Finally the door opened. An enormously fat man in his underwear opened the door and walked back inside without a word, evidently assuming I would follow. He led me through several rooms littered with old newspapers and empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans to the front room, where he sat in a sprung armchair watching a game show. The color on his set was curiously distorted, giving the panelists faces that were red one moment and green the next.
He was white, with lank hair that had been blond once but was mostly gray now. It was hard to estimate his age because of the weight he was carrying, but he was probably somewhere between forty and sixty. He hadn't shaved in several days and may not have bathed or changed his bed linen in months. He stank, and his apartment stank, and I stayed there anyway and asked him questions. He had three beers left from a six-pack when I went in there, and he drank them one after another and padded barefoot through the apartment to return with a fresh six-pack from the refrigerator.
His name wasIlling, he said, PaulIlling, and he had heard about Cruz, it was on television, and he thought it was terrible but he wasn't surprised, hell no. He'd lived here all his life, he told me, and this had been a nice neighborhood once, decent people, respectedtheirselves and respected their neighbors. But now you had the wrongelement, and what could you expect?
"They live like animals," he told me. "You wouldn't believe it."
ANGEL Herrera's rooming house was a four-story red brick building, its ground floor given over to a coin laundry. Two men in their late twenties lounged on the stoop, drinking their beer from cans held in brown paper bags. I asked for Herrera's room. They decided I was a cop; the assumption showed in their faces, and the set of their shoulders. One of them told me to try the fourth floor.
There was a reek of marijuana smoke floating on top of the other smells in the hallway. A tiny woman, dark and bright-eyed, stood at the third-floor landing. She was wearing an apron and holding a folded copy of ElDiario, one of the Spanish-language newspapers. I asked for Herrera's room.
"Twenny-two," she said, and pointed upstairs. "But he's not in." Her eyes fixed on mine. "You know where he is?"
"Yes."
"Then you know he is not here. His door is lock."
"Do you have the key?"
She looked at me sharply."You a cop?"
"I used to be."
Her laugh was loud, unexpected. "Wha'dyou get, laid off? They got no work for cops, all the crooks in jail? You want to go in Angel's room, come on, I let you in."
A cheap padlock secured the door of Room 22. She tried three keys before finding the right one, then opened the door and entered the room ahead of me. A cord hung from the bare-bulb ceiling fixture over the narrow iron bedstead. She pulled it,then raised a window shade to illuminate the room a little more.
I looked out the window, walked around the room,examined the contents of the closet and the small bureau. There were several photographs in drugstore frames on top of the bureau, and half a dozen unframed snapshots.Two different women, several children. In one snapshot, a man and woman in bathing suits squinted into the sun, the surf behind them. I showed the photograph to the woman and she identified the man as Herrera. I had seen his photo in the paper, along with Cruz and the two arresting officers, but he looked completely different in the snapshot.
The woman, I learned, was Herrera's girlfriend. The woman who appeared in some of the other photos with the children was Herrera's wife inPuerto Rico. He was a good boy, Herrera was,the woman assured me. He was polite, he kept his room neat,he didn't drink too much or play his radio loud late at night. And he loved hisbabies, he sent money home toPuerto Rico when he had it to send.
FOURTH Avenue had churches on the average of one to a block- Norse Methodist, German Lutheran, Spanish Seventh-Day Adventists, and one called the Salem Tabernacle. They were all closed, and by the time I got to it, so was Saint Michael's. I was ecumenical enough in my tithing, but the Catholics got most of my money simply because they kept longer hours, but by the time I left Herrera's rooming house and stopped for a quick one at the bar on the corner, Saint Michael's was locked up as tight as its Protestant fellows.
Two blocks away, between a bodega and an OTB parlor, a gaunt Christ writhed on the cross in the window of a storefrontiglesia. There were a couple of backless benches inside in front of a smallaltar, and on one of them two shapeless women in black huddled silent and motionless.
I slipped inside and sat on one of the benches myself for a few moments. I had my hundred-fifty-dollar tithe ready and I'd have been as happy giving it to this hole in the wall as to some more imposing and long-established firm, but I couldn't think of an inconspicuous way to manage it. There was no poor box in evidence, no receptacle designed to accommodate donations. I didn't want to call attention to myself by finding someone in charge and handing him the money, nor did I feel comfortable just leaving it on the bench, say, where anybody could pick it up and walk off with it.
I walked out of there no poorer than I'd walked in.
I spent the evening inSunsetPark.
I don't know if it was work, or if I even thought I was doing TommyTillary any good. I walked the streets and worked the bars, but I wasn't looking for anyone and I didn't ask a lot of questions.
OnSixtieth Street east ofFourth Avenue I found a dark beery tavern called the Fjord. There were nautical decorations on the walls but they looked to have accumulated haphazardly over the years- a length of fishnet, a life preserver, and, curiously, a Minnesota Vikings football pennant. A black-and-white TV sat at one end of the bar, its volume turned down low. Old men sat with their shots and beers, not talking much, letting the night pass.
When I left there I flagged a gypsy cab and got the driver to take me toColonial Road in Bay Ridge. I wanted to see the house where TommyTillary had lived, the house where his wife had died. But I wasn't sure of the address. That stretch ofColonial Road was mostly brick apartment houses and I was pretty sure that Tommy's place was a private house. There were a few such houses tucked in between the apartment buildings but I didn't have the number written down and wasn't sure of the cross streets. I told the cabdriver I was looking for the house where the woman was stabbed to death and he didn't know what the hell I was talking about, and seemed generally wary of me, as though I might do something unpredictable at any moment.
I suppose I was a little drunk. I sobered up on the way back toManhattan. He wasn't that enthusiastic about taking me, but he set a price of ten dollars and I agreed to it and leaned back in my seat. He took the expressway, and en route I saw thetowerofSaint Michael 's and told the driver that it wasn't right, that churches should be open twenty-four hours a day. He didn't sayanything, and I closed my eyes and when I opened them the cab was pulling up in front of my hotel.
There were a couple of messages for me at the desk. TommyTillary had called twice and wanted me to call him. SkipDevoe had called once.
It was too late to call Tommy, probably too late for Skip.Late enough, anyway, to call it a night.