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Joe Cullen had had your average St. Patrick's Day: He'd done some odd jobs around the house, gone to an AA meeting, bought a baseball cap, watched a black man with a broad back shoot a narrow black man with a gold tooth in the face.
Baseball caps had been à la mode for so long they were nearly old hat; girls and women, little boys, grownup boys, old-boys and good ole boys, wore them outdoors and in, at work and play, in every season. A glacier when it came to styles, Cullen finally bought one, at Paragon, a replica of a St. Louis Cardinals cap from the nineteen forties, navy blue crown, cherry red visor, cherry red button and letters, S, t, and L, all intertwined, in the hope of hurrying Spring along.
"Good choice," the salesclerk said. "You a Cardinal fan?"
Cullen shook his head. "I like the letters."
"Baskerville, I think, is the font," the salesclerk said. "They look like the initials in an illuminated manuscript?The Book of Kells, the Très Riches Heures de Jean, duc de Berry." Balding, with a beer belly, maybe he did look a little monkish.
Cullen laughed. "Selling sporting goods is just a vocation?"
"I'm a Mesopotamian archaeologist," the salesclerk said.
"Mesopotamia is...."
The clerk nodded gloomily. "Iraq. Not much market these days for specialists in irrigation systems at Ur of the Chaldees. The cradle of civilization and we sure did fucking rock it, didn't we?....What's your line?"
"I'm a, uh, police officer. A detective."
"Homicide?"
"Occasionally."
"Do you always hesitate before you say what you do? 'I'm a, uh, police officer.' Like it's not quite socially acceptable?"
Cullen didn't hesitate at all before saying, "A lot of the time, if I hesitated before I said what I did, some scumbag would punch me out."
The clerk put up a hand in peace. "Sorry. You've got it tough, I know. And I'm a bitter old academic selling playthings." He held out the cap. "You want to wear it?"
Cullen didn't feel stylish anymore. For one thing, he was still smarting from his fiftieth birthday, three months earlier; for another, he was naturally (or preternaturally) self-conscious; for yet another, he didn't want to dance on the grave of a bitter old academic's career. So he lied: "It's for my son. We're the same size."
"You want it in a bag, then."
"Please."
"Your son might be interested in knowing: the Cards won four pennants and three World Series in the Forties. They beat the Yanks in forty-two, lost to them in forty-three, beat the Browns in forty-four?a streetcar series, and the Red Sox in forty-six." He shrugged. "Recent archaeology?something to do."
"Thanks. He'll like knowing that. Thanks."
Winter had its heels dug in and wasn't leaving town anytime soon, but to practice his warm weather saunter Cullen dawdled through the Union Square green market, the Paragon bag under his arm, tempted by garlic chains and bouquets of rosemary, by jugs of dark cider and loaves of bread weighty with nutritiousness, by cut flowers and buds and potted herbs. Evening would undoubtedly find him at his local supermarket, picking over the weary lettuce, the petrified tomatoes, sniffing suspiciously at purported chicken and alleged beef, trying to find one can of anything that wasn't dented, one jar of a spice that wasn't garden mint. But he was a long way from home, his neighborhood being in darkest Queens, and he didn't want to shlep still more bags all over town. And he had never been good at being good to himself; he could whip up a feast for friends and family, but fed himself the fare of a prisoner in the bing.
At the flagpole in the center of the square, overlooked by the text of the Declaration of Independence ("When in the Course of human events," Cullen glimpsed. "We hold these truths....The Present King of Great Britain has refused....He has forbidden....He has dissolved....He has obstructed...."), two old black men sat on either side of an old shopping cart listening on an old radio to new jack swing: Bell Biv DeVoe, "Poison." A closer look told Cullen they were young men aged prematurely and suddenly: work boys turned baseheads.
Near Fourteenth Street, behind the subway kiosk, an albino work boy who hadn't become his own best customer reached under the sleeve of his long leather duster to squelch an electronic chirp: his beatmaster summoning him to phone home.
"Raise up," Cullen said quietly into the work boy's ear, and the work boy, just for a moment, could feel himself falling off the top of the world. Then he recovered, and laughed.
"Shit, the big boys running out a ree-cruits."
"What time you got?"
The work boy's white eyes got pale red with hostility. "Don't front me, big boy, fuck you need with the time?"
Cullen waggled a thumb at the Zeckendorf Towers. "You used to be able to see the Con Ed clock from here. Now you can't. It's a shame. Progress. So what time you got, work boy? Piss boy."
The work boy kept his eyes fastened on Cullen's as he peeled back his cuff to reveal a TNI Motorola wristwatch pager.
"I'll be damned," Cullen said, and walked on. He rarely profiled off-duty, but he tried to keep all rollers, big and little, back on their heels. From that posture, they sometimes punched out one another, and that was something, wasn't it?
On Broadway:
A blonde in a Yankee cap awed by a baroque pool table in the window at Blatt Billiards, a Latina in a Texas A&M cap crossing Great Jones Street against the light, an Oriental woman in a Rhythm Nation cap coming out of Ed Debevic's?they all looked great to Cullen and he wished he had the balls to let his hat out of the bag, slap it on, be down with the jam.
Sitting at a cafe table in the lobby of the Angelika Film Center, waiting for his espresso to cool, Cullen finally eased the cap out, taking care that the bag didn't crackle and pop, a spy practicing tradecraft. Holding the hat down between his knees, he worked a roll into the visor and pinched a crease into the crown. When it was no longer quite so pristine, he nonchalanted the cap on, and, after a beat, peeked sideways at a framed poster on the wall.
He saw reflected in its glass a furtive fifty-year old man in a rumpled old brown tweed sport coat, a holey old navy turtleneck sweater, tan twill pants from a J. Crew catalogue or from the Salvation Army, you couldn't tell the difference, formerly white Head tennis sneakers that had played one too many games of racquetball, a little boy's hat.
He took the cap off and returned it to the bag. He had a son, he hadn't been lying about that, and would make a nineteenth birthday present of it to him in September, would suggest that a hat with a little history behind it would make a nice change from the Bollé (Put 'em on your face) cap that his son claimed he took off to shower and to sleep.
(Cullen had a daughter too, and her birthday?her sweet sixteenth?was only eight weeks away, and he could have given her the hat. A fashion pointman, though, she had recently and suddenly stopped wearing baseball caps, declaring that they were no longer rope (fashionable, his daughter's mother, Cullen's ex-wife, translated), they were for people who "made movies" (made fools of themselves).
Cullen looked into the glass again, this time at the poster. It was in French, for a 1956 French picture:
Et Dieu Crée La Femme
Un film de Roger Vadim
avec Brigitte Bardot
interdit au moins de 15 ans
Bardot had been Cullen's first lover. In 1956, thirteen years old, and indeed forbidden from buying a ticket for And God Created Woman at the box office of the Trylon Theater, in Rego Park, Queens, he and some friends (Ira Schwartz, Chuck Story, Tom Valentine, Dave Blankenstein, maybe others) had sneaked in through the fire exit, and had discovered the reason for the prohibition: hard breasts, careless hair, pouty lips.
Beginning that afternoon, Cullen scoured movie magazines and scandal sheets for photographs of Bardot; he clipped them out and cached them in a manila envelope that he hid between mattress and boxsprings. (He astonished his mother by every morning making his bed, with hospital corners, without being threatened with horsewhipping, and, on laundry day, stripping it and remaking it before she even waked.) Night after night, lying on his back like a luge driver, the bedclothes a pup tent over his knees, a flashlight tucked under his chin, a different provocative pose for a talisman, he careered down the swift steep run to eerie, sticky, flabbergasting orgasm.
Nearly four decades later, Cullen had accepted an invitation into his son's bedroom (his kids lived with their mother and her second husband, and they allowed their natural dad in their sanctuaries, knowing his writ no longer ran there), and had been stunned to find not hidden away but nearly life-size on the wall, black lace bustier and that old familiar moue, looking right at him through an accroche-coeur looped around one eye like a monocle, none other than Bardot. She seemed glad to see him, still horny after all these years.
His daughter, tagging along though not strictly welcome, corrected Cullen's misapprehension: the young woman on her brother's wall was just an epigone named Claudia Schiffer, "spokesbreast," Tenny Cullen put it, for a blue jean company. The Bardot look was back, abetted by implants and collagen injections, and movie-makers like James Cullen were falling for the fakes.
(Still: wouldn't the geneticists be interested in knowing that like father's autoerotic plaything, like son's?)
The poster was one of a pair on either side of a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out onto Mercer Street, Silver Towers, the NYU gym, dutiful joggers plodding around its second-story outdoor running track. The other poster, also in French, was for an American movie:
L'Homme Tranquille
Le plus grand triomphe de John Ford
John Wayne Maureen O'Hara Barry Fitzgerald
Made in Ireland, full of blarney and mischief, The Quiet Man would be a movie to see on St. Patrick's Day?and was in fact on television that night, Channel 9, eight o'clock, Cullen had noted in the listings in his newspaper on the way into Manhattan on the subway. Maybe he'd watch it, if the low-budget road movie he was at the Angelika to see, tempted by some good reviews and an ad featuring (plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose) a rangy woman in debilitated jeans, lizard-skin cowboy boots, black racerback tank top, black gambler's hat, wasn't cinema enough for one day.
Irish on his father's side (Bantry, County Cork, Munster Province, Eire), Joseph Patrick Cullen had taken some personal time this March seventeenth, not to celebrate the Apostle of Ireland but to do errands around his neighborhood and in his apartment, one river, many miles and a couple of locked doors from the mayhem that went by the name of the St. Patrick's Day parade.
Once upon a more innocent time, Cullen had taken his kids to the parade. They had painted their faces green, worn green carnations, eaten green bagels and green lemonade, skirled back at the pipers, made jokes about kilts, sported "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" buttons and emerald cockades, and let themselves be tweaked by ruddy drunks. March up Fifth Avenue, Stagger Down Third: that had been the day's rather innocuous motto. Nowadays, a more suitable slogan would be Maraud Uptown, Pillage Down. Saint Patrick's Day had become a day for learning or for being reminded that hooligan and donnybrook were Irish in origin.
Starting just after rush hour, pairs and threesomes and quartets of pale boys with bad complexions funneled into midtown from the outer boroughs, from the island, from up the Hudson Valley and down the Jersey shore. They wore little green plastic derbies and tophats on their heads and on their gaunt bodies jackets proclaiming their allegiance to schools with names like Holy Blissful Martyr, Shantytown Catholic, Our Lady Queen of Abject Weeping; they clutched beer in bags in their fists, they spoke in bellows, belches and barfs. Frail, pale girls trailed after them, like mute ghosts.
Then the parade got started, and the lads got belligerent. From the Forties to the Eighties, from Fifth to Madison to Park to Lex to Third, from noon to four or five or six, one long slugfest?one donnybrook?ensued. Meanwhile, the older generation, these boys' fathers and uncles and elder brothers, stirred things up indoors. At Blarney Stones and Blarney Roses, at O'Thises and McThats all over midtown and the East Side, men drank and fought, fought and drank, drank and fought and pissed and bled and vomited.
Where were the cops? the city's non-Celtic population often wondered of a blood- and piss- and vomit-stained St. Patrick's Day afternoon. A lot of them were busy beating the shit out of one another. Even in a police station, especially in a police station, St. Paddy's Day, in the words of Captain Jacob Neuman, Joe Cullen's commanding officer, was "a day to remember to forget to come in." Cops who all year long were of no particular religion or national origin, they were just boyz 'n' girlz, just cops, showed up on St. Paddy's Day with their beliefs and their backgrounds emblazoned on their sleeves?or, more accurately, balanced on their shoulders, from whence they dared anyone to knock them. Sure enough, without fail, someone would try, and push would lead to shove and shove to blow and blow to pummel to thwack to clobber. Sides were taken, markers called in, new obligations incurred. Words between a couple of micks could lead to a scrum of hostility involving blacks, Italians, Jews, Poles, WASPS and women. Cullen had never seen drawn guns, but he'd heard about them.
All in all, reasons to stay home, to fix a dripping faucet, prep a peeling hallway for repainting, rewire and rehang a mirror, move furniture around to vacuum in places that hadn't been vacuumed in years; to go out of the house only as far as the hardware store for a scraper and Spackle, to the dry cleaner to drop off a spring suit, to the Italian grocery for a loaf of bread and some fresh linguine, maybe later to a movie at the local zillionplex, something safe and familiar?Home Alone Again or Three Men and a Grandma or Die Hardest.
On finishing the scraping and the rewiring and the vacuuming, though, Cullen had started feeling feisty. He didn't like the idea of being held prisoner in his apartment, in his rather stiff neck of the woods, by a bunch of rowdy drunks. If he were spending personal time, he wanted to have something to show for it: a baseball cap, maybe; the mild buzz produced by rangy women in debilitated jeans, lizard-skin boots, black tank tops, black gambler's hats.
So that that would be the extent of the buzz, he went to the Thirty-first Street step meeting. He had eighty-eight days, he was working on eighty-nine. Kathy was there, the scion of alcoholic grandparents who had fifteen children, half of them alcoholics or addicts, and seventy-five grandchildren, half of them alcoholics or addicts. Kathy had six months.
And so it happened that Joe Cullen, half-Irish police detective, Homicide occasionally, was sitting in the lobby of a hip movie theater, toying with a cup of strong coffee, an early birthday present for his son in a bag at his elbow, hearing without listening to Lisa Stansfield on the stereo ("All Around the World"), looking without seeing out a window just as, right outside the window, just across Mercer Street, on a sidewalk a few yards north of West Houston, a black man with a broad back shot a narrow black man with a gold tooth in the face.
Cullen yanked his off-duty .32 out of his ankle holster and his shield out of an inside breast pocket. He ran to the double glass door and shouldered through. A grey-haired man in a beret, a woman in a red parka and aviator sunglasses, a big guy with a beard and no hips for his jeans to hang on to, were converging on the box office, reaching for their wallets, checking the timetable. Cullen stepped into their midst and up to the window.
"Hey, buddy, there's a line." The big guy, out loud.
"Oh, great. Nice manners." The woman, sotto voce.
"Jeez," the grey-haired man, under his breath.
The cashier, a punk with violet hair, crossed her arms, ready to take a stand against crashers. "You'll have to wait your?"
"Call the police." Cullen held his shield up to the window. "I'm a police officer. A man's been shot. Call nine...one...one."
He quickstepped down the stairs.
The light was against him, but he slammed a hand on the fender of a taxi just pulling away from the intersection, and ran across in front of it. The cabbie straightarmed the horn.
Ten seconds? Fifteen? Twenty? No more time than that could have ticked off between the crime and Cullen's arrival at the scene of the crime. It had to be a record?a personal best, absolutely; an NYPD mark, undoubtedly; a standard to be held up to law enforcement personnel from Akron to Youngstown, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, pretty goddamn likely.
The black man with the broad back was gone. No trace. Nothing. He didn't exist, he hadn't existed; it was as though nothing had happened. The narrow black man was splayed on the sidewalk, yes, like spilled paint, like Peter Pan's shadow. But, hey, let's face it, admit it, be honest, is this the first time you've seen this shit or what? You've seen drunks, you've seen junkies, you've seen so-called homeless people spread out on the floor wherever the fuck the felt like it, doing whatever the fuck they felt like, sleeping, boozing, doping, peeing in their pants, shitting in their pants, jerking the fuck off right out in the fucking open. This is normal, this is life, this is what is going the fuck down, this is New fucking York City.
A couple of college girls had come out of the NYU gym and were walking south on Mercer. Surely they'd seen something; they'd been walking south on Mercer when the narrow black man got punched out and they were walking south on Mercer now. They'd been playing squash. They had their squash racquets in special squash racquet bags slung over their shoulders. They were wearing rope droopy sweatshirts?Russell Athletic on the left, Lehigh on the right?and rope Lycra tights and rope complicated sneakers with pumps and cantilevers and big tongues and fat laces. Not movie-makers, they weren't wearing baseball caps; they had headbands. Cullen was late again for a fashion bandwagon.
Other witnesses: A SoHo artist, hair dyed black, big black blazer, short black pegged pants, black fake leather portfolio, wetting the toes of his big black shoes in NoHo, daydreaming of being the next Salle or Fischl or Kostabi; a Hispanic kid in a knitted skullcap and an 8-ball jacket, two years ago a jacket you could get killed for, now nobody gave a shit about it, they wouldn't take it off you if you gave it up; an old Italian woman, you could take her out of Palermo but you couldn't take Palermo out of her, dressed as darkly as the SoHo artist, but not because it was fun, she had had fun once, a night she dreamed she kissed the gashes in Jesus's feet; a strawberry blonde in an electric blue Patagonia shell, a three-year old in a stroller, a five-year old standing on the stroller's rear axle, an infant in a Snugli on her chest, a puzzled look on her face, as in the old joke: "What prick did this to me?"
Except that they weren't witnesses, they hadn't seen a thing. How the narrow black man came to be splayed on the sidewalk, like spilled paint, like Peter Pan's shadow, none of them had any idea. What they did know, they knew it for sure, was that standing astride the narrow black man, wearing a rumpled tweed coat, a holey turtleneck, twill pants that might be brand new or might be used up, shabby tennis sneakers, a small ugly gun in his right hand, was a wide-eyed, fifty-year old white man who had very likely splayed him.
That was how fast Cullen had gotten to the crime scene?so fast he looked like a perpetrator who had never left?so much like a perpetrator that the couple of college girls, the SoHo artist, the old Italian woman, the young mother, thrust out accusing fingers at him, screamed, "Gun, gun, he's got a gun, ohmigodlookouthesgotagun," and something, just like that probably, in Italian, and turned, and ran.
Cullen put his .32 away. He kept his shield in his hand, so he could wave it at the uniforms from the first conditions car to get there, so they wouldn't punch him out. He kneeled and slipped his fingers around the narrow black man's neck. No pulse, just a dry, still artery.
The uniforms from the first conditions car were right out of some TV cop show: a homely, gawky bleached blonde named Wisniewski; a hunk named Della Femina. Without ever having seen them, Cullen knew everything about them: They called each other Noosk and Del, when he wasn't calling her a stupid polack and she wasn't calling him a stupid wop. He hated that she wasn't prettier, she hated that he was beautiful. Once, feeling vulnerable after somebody's birthday or somebody's funeral, they necked in his car at the curb in front of her building; they went up the stoop and in the door and up the stairs to the landing outside her apartment before they got a grip, and, breathless and disheveled, agreed that they couldn't go any farther, they'd have to just remember this. (Besides, she lived with her sister, who had Down's syndrome, and he was engaged to a woman named Angela, whom he'd known since the third grade.) They trusted each other more than ever now, and never let each other down. One of them would get punched out one day, and the other would never find as good a partner.
"So, uh, Sergeant," Wisniewski said after she and Della Femina had gotten the picture, "what do we do here, whose job is this? I mean, we never caught a job where a cop was an eyewitness."
"It's your job," Cullen said. "You'll hand it on to your Squad."
"So, uh, for now, we should like, interview you?" Della Femina said.
"And anyone else who saw anything."
They laughed nervously and got out their notebooks.
"So, uh," they said in unison.
Cullen smiled. "Why don't I just talk to one of you? The other should call the Squad."
Noosk looked at Del, who shrugged. Noosk shrugged too, and they laughed nervously and Del want back to the whitetop and got on the radio.
"So, uh, you don't know who he is?" Wisniewski said.
"His I.D.s all say he's Arverne Dale, he's nineteen, lived in the Bronx." Cullen handed her the narrow man's wallet.
She peeked into the wallet's pockets, closed it, wondered what to do with it, slipped it in her right front pants pocket. "Don't worry, I won't forget where I put it."
Worried that he'd forget what little he'd seen, Cullen said, "The perp was African-American, five-ten, two-thirty, close-cut fade in back?I saw only the back of his head, black baseball cap, black satin jacket, like a team jacket, but no lettering, black chinos, black hightops. The piece was small?not a snubnose, maybe a Raven, or a baby nine. He had it out and up and fired it just as I noticed them. I didn't see them come together, they could've been there for a while, one of them could've just walked up or gotten out of a car or dropped from the sky, I just don't know. Arverne went down, the perp stepped away. He didn't look back. A truck went by, a step-van, it blocked my view. The perp didn't run east, I would've seen him on my way out. He could've run south or west or north. I just don't know. He could've gotten in a car. The one thing I noticed was Arverne's gold front tooth. You can't see it anymore, but it was there."
Wisniewski looked up from writing in her notebook, a light in her eye. "He could've skipped on that step-van, the perp."
Cullen nodded, shrugged, shook his head, which just about covered everything. "He could've. I don't know."
Wisniewski looked back at her notes, then up again at Cullen. "This is great, Sarge. I mean, having a cop for a witness is just great."
Cullen didn't nod, didn't shrug, didn't shake his head, which just about covered everything too. He gave Wisniewski his card and went back inside the Angelika.
The movie had started, his espresso was cold, someone had stolen his baseball cap.
)
