That’s the same thing.
“And besides, it wasn’t a kiss. It was…I don’t know what the hell it was.”
It was a kiss, that’s what the hell it was, Teddy said.
“Honey,” he said, “believe me, I…”
She shook her head.
“Honey, I love you. I wouldn’t kiss Jane Fonda if I found her wrapped under the Christmas tree tomorrow morning.” He smiled and then said, “And you know how I feel about Jane Fonda.”
Oh? Teddy said. And how do you feel about Jane Fonda?
“I think she’s…well, she’s a very attractive woman,” Carella said, and had the feeling he was plowing himself deeper than any of the snowdrifts outside. “The point I’m trying to make—”
I once dreamed Robert Redford was making love to me, Teddy said.
“How was it?” Carella asked.
Pretty good, as a matter of fact.
“Honey?” he said.
She watched his lips.
“I love you to death,” he said.
Then no more kisses, she said, and nodded. Or I’ll break your goddamn head.
6
The Mayor, when asked by reporters how he planned to get the streets clear before the heavy holiday traffic began, said with customary wit and style, “Boys, this is nothing but a simple snow job.” The members of the press did not find his remark amusing. Neither did the cops of the 87th.
Those who were unlucky enough to have caught the midnight to 8:00 A.M. shift on Christmas Day worked clear through to 10:00 in the morning, by which time the relieving detectives began arriving at the squadroom in dribs and drabs. There were eighteen detectives attached to the 87th Squad, and they divided among them the three shifts that constituted their working day, six men to each shift. The 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. shift (or—as it turned out—the 10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.) was shared by Meyer Meyer, Hal Willis, Bob O’Brien, Lou Moscowitz, Artie Brown, and a transfer from the Two-One named Pee Wee Wizonski. Wizonski was six feet four inches tall, weighed 208 pounds in his underwear and socks, and suffered a great many slings and arrows about being Polish. There was not a day that went by without someone in the squadroom telling another Polish joke. On Christmas Day (which was Wizonski’s holiday), Lou Moscowitz (who was celebrating Hanukkah) told about Pope John Paul II’s first miracle: He changed wine into water. Wizonski did not think the joke was funny. Nobody, including the Mayor, was having much luck with his jokes today.
The fireworks started at about 10:30.
They started with a so-called “family dispute” on Mason and Sixth. Not too many years ago Mason Avenue had been known far and wide as la Vía de Putas—Whore Street. The hookers along that seedy stretch of Puerto Rican turf had since left it for greener pastures downtown, where they could turn a trick in a massage parlor for a quick forty to eighty dollars, depending on the services rendered. La Vía de Putas was now simply la Vía—the Street—a combination of pool parlors, porno bookshops, porn-flick theaters, greasy spoons, mom-and-pop grocery stores, a dozen or more bars, and a storefront church dedicated to saving the souls of those who frequented the area. Except for the church—which squatted in one-story religious hopefulness between the grimy buildings sandwiching it—the classy emporiums lining the Street were on the ground floors of tenements that housed people who were willing to settle for grubby surroundings in return for some of the cheapest rents to be found anywhere in the city. It was in one of these apartments that the family dispute took place.
The two patrolmen responding to the call were confronted with a distinctly unholidaylike scene. There were a pair of bodies in the living room, both of them wearing nightgowns, both of them the victims of a shooting. One of them, a woman, was sitting dead in a chair near the telephone, the receiver still clutched in her bloody hand. It was she, they later learned, who had placed the call to Emergency 911. The second victim was a sixteen-year-old girl, sprawled face downward on the patched linoleum, similarly dead. The woman who’d placed the call to 911 had said only, “Send the police, my husband is going crazy.” The patrolmen had expected a family dispute, but not one of such proportions. They had knocked on the apartment door, received no answer, tried the knob, and then entered somewhat casually—this was Christmas Day, this was Hanukkah. Now they both drew their pistols and fanned out into the room. A closed door was at one end of it. The first patrolman—a black cop named Jake Parsons—knocked on the door and was greeted with an immediate fusillade of shots that ripped huge chunks out of the wood paneling and would have done the same to his head if he hadn’t thrown himself flat to the floor in instant reflex. Both cops backed out of the apartment.
On the radio in the car downstairs, they reported to Desk Sergeant Murchison that it looked like they had a double homicide here, not to mention somebody with a gun behind a locked door. Murchison called upstairs to the squadroom. Pee Wee Wizonski, who was catching, took his holster and pistol from the drawer of his desk, motioned to Hal Willis across the room, and was out through the gate in the railing even before Willis put on his coat. Murchison downstairs put a call through to Homicide and also to the Emergency Squad covering this section of the city. If there was a guy with a gun behind a locked door, this was a job for the volunteer Emergency cops, and not mere mortals. The Emergency cops were already there when Wizonski and Willis made the scene. Together the detectives from the Eight-Seven looked a lot like Mutt and Jeff or Laurel and Hardy. Wizonski was the biggest detective on the squad; Willis was the smallest, having just barely passed the Police Department’s five-foot-eight height requirement. The RMP patrolmen filled them in on what had happened upstairs, and they all went up to the fourth floor again. The Emergency cops, wearing bulletproof vests, went in first. Whoever was behind the locked door fired the moment he heard sounds in the apartment, so they abandoned all notions of kicking in the door. In the corridor outside, the assembled cops held a high-level conference.
The two Homicide men assigned to the case were named Phelps and Forbes. They looked a lot like Monoghan and Monroe, who were home just then, opening Christmas gifts. (The men of the Eight-Seven would later learn that Monoghan’s wife had presented him with a gold-plated revolver; Monroe’s wife had given him a video cassette home recorder upon which he could secretly play the porn tapes he picked up hither and yon in the city.) Phelps and Forbes were disgruntled about having to work on Christmas Day. Phelps was particularly annoyed because he hated Puerto Ricans, and was fond of repeating that if they’d all go back to that goddamn shitty island they’d come from, there’d be no more crime in this city. So here was a Puerto Rican family causing trouble on Christmas Day—assuming the bedbug behind the locked door was indeed Hispanic. “Hispanic” was the word the cops in this city used for anyone of even mildly Spanish descent, except for Phelps and many cops like him who still called them “spics.” Even the deputy mayor, who’d been born in Mayagüez, was a spic to Phelps.
“We go near that door,” Phelps said, “that spic in there’ll blow our fuckin’ heads off.”
“Think we can hit the window?” one of the Emergency cops asked.
“What floor is this?” the other one said.
“The fourth.”
“How many in the building?”
“Five.”
“Worth trying a rope from the roof, don’t you think?”
“You guys keep him busy outside the door,” the first Emergency cop said. “One of us’ll come in the window behind him.”
“When you hear us yell,” the second Emergency cop said, “kick in the door. We’ll get him both ways.”
The patrolmen who were first at the scene had meanwhile talked to a lady in an apartment down the hall who told them there were two daughters in the family—the sixteen-year-old they’d found dead on the floor and a ten-year-old named Consuela. They reported this to the cops working out their strategy in the hallway, and all of them agreed they had what was known as a “hostage situation” here, which made it a bit risky to come flying in the window like Batman. The two Emergency cops were in favor of trying it, anyway, without asking for help from the Hostage Unit. But Phelps and Forbes vetoed them and asked one of the patrolmen to go downstairs and call in for a hostage team. Nobody yet knew whether ten-year-old Consuela was indeed behind that locked door with whoever was shooting the gun or out taking a stroll in the snow instead.