Authors: Patrick Abbruzzi
“Where are you now?
”
he asked.
“I’m home. That was my mom who answered the phone. I have a son who has asthma and when he gets a bad attack I usually stay home,” she said.
“Is there anything I can do for you?
”
“You already have. Believe me,” Terry offered. “Look, Charlie, I know you are married. I want you to know that I would never hurt you or do anything to jeopardize your marriage.”
He didn’t know how she found out he was married but could only assume she had spoken to some of the other guys in the precinct.
“I wanted to let you know that,” she said quietly, “and I would like to see you again whenever it’s good for you; that is, if you want to see me again.”
She had given him an out right there. He could have said no to this whole crazy idea and still felt like a man, but he could not resist the excitement. He felt desire growing deep in his groin.
“What night do you come back into work?
”
he asked.
“I’m on my days off now. My next shift is Sunday night,” she said.
“Okay. Listen, I won’t be back until Monday night but I’ll be honest – I don’t think I can last until Monday night. Can I call you before that time?
”
he asked.
“I would love that, Charlie,” she murmured.
“Okay. I’ll call you,”” he said.
“Goodnight, Charlie.”
The conversation ended and he smiled as he made his way back to the muster room for the roll call, feeling as if a great weight had been lifted off of his chest. A shadow of guilt was mixed in with his relief because of the things he’d told Terry, and because he’d been given an opportunity to end this before it started but he chose not to. So much for a Catholic upbringing and the guilt it produces.
Five
As usual, Charlie was assigned to make the coffee run and he was almost glad that Terry was not going to be there. He also felt like a rubber band being stretched from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other.
He decided to release the entire matter from his mind and give himself a much deserved break and figured he would call Terry sometime during his swing of two days off. He returned back to the station house with the coffee order and felt worry-free for the first time in days.
Before long he had finished all his routine work and he and Lt. A. finally made it out to patrol. Charlie hoped the lieutenant would have another good story to tell but he also knew it would likely get busy soon. Either way was good for him.
Lt. A. had been a cop on patrol for eighteen years and was also a member of the Street Crime Suppression Unit. He was good at observation and making arrests. Although the department frowned on supervisors making arrests, because they were supposed to supervise and not spend time in court, the lieutenant frequently asked the guys if there was anyone who wanted to get on the sheet and make an arrest. Late tours were good for overtime because most family disputes required the arresting officer to be present in court in the morning. Dealing with drunken drivers was also good for overtime. If the lieutenant knew who was catching he would ten-eighty-five them to the scene and give them any collar he observed.
Most RMP teams handled their jobs quickly because they wanted to be available later on during the tour for the real heavies they knew were going to occur. If a sector got a radio run and Lt. A. was in the vicinity, he would direct Central to have the unit remain available and he would handle the assignment. All the guys knew the lieutenant was a working boss and would be out there like all the rest of the men on patrol. The difference was he just didn’t ride around and give orders. There weren’t many like him left.
As Charlie and Lt. A. began their patrol, they soon found out that this night was like any other Friday night. There were bar fights, vehicle accidents, phony gun runs and disorderly groups everywhere.
The radio dispatcher called 120 sector F-Frank to handle a dispute at Van
Duzer Street and St. Paul’s Avenue. Charlie and Lt. A. had been sitting on Van Duzer Street in the parking lot of Taco Bell adjacent to St. Paul’s Avenue looking for red lighters. When the call came through, the lieutenant acknowledged it instead of Sector F and asked the female dispatcher if she had any further information. She radioed back with a specific house number on Van Duzer St. and Lt. A. quickly reminded her that there were two different intersections where Van Duzer Street and St. Paul’s Avenue intersected, which not many people knew except, of course, for the regular sector teams. Lt. A. had been assigned to sector F for twelve years when he was a police officer in the 120
th
, so knew the precinct boundaries like the back of his hand.
“Charlie, you don’t mind if we handle the job, do you?” asked the boss.
“Lou, you don’t have to ask me,” was Charlie’s polite response.
They pulled up to the side of the building roughly one hundred feet from where they had been parked and both men exited the vehicle after notifying Central they were on the scene. They slipped their night sticks into the metal ring on their gun belts, specifically made to secure the batons, then the lieutenant approached the entrance with caution. He knocked heavily upon the thick, wooden door and Charlie noticed that, even with all the time the lieutenant had on the job, he still remembered to stay to one side of the doorway as he knocked. After what felt like an eternity, a woman answered the door. It was obvious she had been crying.
“Come in please. Close the door behind you.”
As she turned around, she screamed, “It’s the police!
”
As soon as she spoke Charlie knew she was from the
deep south. She had an accent so thick you could just picture her on a rural farm in Georgia.
She had on a pair of
velcro hip huggers that were about two sizes too small. As a result, they accentuated her obesity, which was sickening to look at. Her long blonde hair was very matted and in dire need of washing and brushing, and she had some scars on her face but none that looked recent. The woman led the officers into a small kitchen area where they observed a man sitting at a small wooden table which only had three chairs instead of the customary four. The dirty white cabinets were covered with at least several months of grime and grease and, like the woman’s hair, were also in need of a good cleaning.
The sink was full of dirty dishes covered in caked on food from who knew how long ago. Food was scattered all over the small kitchen area and there were several pieces of broken dishes and plates also covering the bare linoleum floor.
The lieutenant walked over to the stove and removed two large cast iron pots and placed them into the sink. Charlie knew this was the sign of an experienced cop. A good cop removed any and all signs of anything that might be used against him during the worst of all police assignments, the family dispute. He recalled that several years earlier a police officer actually lost his life when he was pushed and fell into a large broken mirror that had been used between a husband and wife during their argument. Theirs had been a real whopper of a dispute, with dozens of broken items littering the floor and counters.
The tall, slim man at the kitchen table had not spoken a word. His hair had been pulled back into a pony tail and tied with a rubber band, and he was wearing a pair of overalls covered in dry paint. There were so many colors on the overalls that it seemed as though the unidentified man might have painted a rainbow somewhere. His face was pock marked and had at least three days’ worth of growth on it. Tattoos covered his forearms with what appeared to be crosses and numbers, and a tattoo of a devil could be seen on the top portion of his left hand.
“What’s going on here?
”
Charlie asked.
The woman explained how the man never gave her enough money then would come home and beat her if dinner was not on the table. While Charlie was asking questions the lieutenant was walking around surveying the place. Before long Charlie noticed the lieutenant speaking to a teenage girl who was sitting on the kitchen floor adjacent to the stove. He didn’t think anything of it and continued asking questions. After a moment or two the lieutenant jumped up and began screaming at both the father and mother at the top of his lungs.
“Who the fuck is responsible for this?”
Charlie knew the lieutenant had a temper but wondered what he had heard to make him react this way.
“Where the hell are you fucking people from?
”
the lieutenant bellowed.
The husband became noticeably uncomfortable at the lieutenant’s use of language and Charlie began to wonder if they were going to have trouble with him.
“We just moved up from Georgia,” the man replied in his southern drawl.
“Yeah, well tonight you’re both going to jail,” Lt. A. exclaimed.
“What the fuck are you talking about?
”
asked the father.
“Charlie, look at this. Look at this fucking shit,” ordered the lieutenant.
Charlie walked over to where the young girl was sitting. It didn’t take him long to realize that the girl, who must have been all of thirteen or fourteen years old, was tied by a piece of rope to the pipes at the rear of the stove. As he looked closer he saw she was wearing a simple cotton dress which was wrinkled and smeared with grime. Her hair had not been combed and her face was dirty. As far as he could tell, she hadn’t bathed for several days at least.
What Charlie next observed was something he had not expected to see in a million years. The girl was not wearing any panties. There was caked blood on her inner thighs and dripping spots on the dirty linoleum floor directly beneath her. It was her time of the month.
The lieutenant was livid.
“Who the fuck tied her up like this?
”
he bellowed.
“Oh shit, Officer, that’s nothing,” the father explained, his tone matter-of-fact. “We have to tie her like that every month. When she has her monthly, all that damn fool girl wants to do is go out and mess with boys. She becomes a regular little slut.”
A closer look at the teenager’s wrists revealed scars and lacerations of varying ages, alluding to the fact that she had been tied up before.
“Charlie, if you don’t want this collar, I’ll call for another sector,” said Lt. A. in a hushed tone.
“No, Lou. It’s okay. I’ll take it,” answered Charlie.
Lt. A. called for another car to transport the young girl to St. Vincent’s emergency room so she could be checked out completely. He didn’t like the jealous tone the father had shown when he spoke about his daughter fooling around with boys. Sexual abuse by this father, upon his own daughter in this case, was entirely possible.
The girl mentioned she had an old aunt in the St. George area that had moved up from down south years before, so Lt. A. arranged for the aunt to care for the girl after her release from the hospital and until the courts could decide what to do with her.
Charlie went into the precinct with his collar and began the arrest procedures while the lieutenant went back to the muster room and worked on his own paperwork until Charlie was finished.
Charlie eventually went to court with the collars and learned some months later that the girl had eventually been returned to her parents. He didn’t see the girl again for six years. She must have been nineteen or twenty and was working the street near the Bay Street strip bars as a prostitute. After that he periodically read her name in the Staten Island Advance saying she had been busted for hooking, and a few years later he read that she had been found in an abandoned alley two blocks from where she lived. Her throat had been slit. Her killers were never found and Charlie believed no great effort was made to do so. After all she was just a local prostitute, so who cared?
Six
Charlie went home after he finished his arraignment at Criminal Court at 67 Targee Street. As usual he picked up the New York Daily News as well as some fresh bagels at his local Bagel Bistro. He knew today his wife would be home because she had Saturday and Sunday off.
He pulled into his driveway and saw his neighbor Mike in his own front yard. Mike had been on the force for about sixteen years but then was involved in a pretty serious RMP accident, and every time he saw Charlie he wanted to bullshit about the job. Although Mike had not been the operator of the vehicle involved in the accident, he had still sustained some serious injuries. The RMP was totaled and Mike eventually retired on an accidental disability pension. Eventually he had gotten himself a small part time job off the books to keep himself busy.
Charlie really never understood why some guys got off the job if they were still able to work in some capacity. He reasoned that the tax free disability pension was just too much to say no to.
He had also been involved in a serious RMP accident where the car had been totaled, but luckily he had been uninjured. In spite of this, everyone told him to start reporting sick and to claim pain in the head and neck but he just couldn’t do it. He loved the job and loved being a cop.