Miss Rudin. I never thanked her, I never thanked any of them. I thought of her when I made plainclothes, thought of making the trip to the Bronx and telling her that her teaching had won me a promotion, but it never got any further than a few lines of conversation in my mind.

  I remember how her voice broke when she told me and Marcia Ippolito that we wouldn’t be able to take third-year Latin. I can see why the school authorities wouldn’t greenlight a class with only two students in it, but all the same I’ve always regretted it.

  And would my life be different if I’d taken a third year of Latin? Jesus, look where Caesar got me. If I’d spent a year with Cicero, who knows how far I might have risen? I could have wound up as the fucking Commissioner.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I shouldn’t close the book on Vince Mahaffey without mentioning one other element I learned to leave out of my reports.

  I think the term for it is rough justice. I suppose you could classify Vince as a pragmatist, a believer in whatever worked. That showed in the laws he elected not to enforce, the choices he made, like letting a delivery block a sidewalk, that greased the wheels of commerce even as they put a few bucks in our pockets.

  He had the same loose approach to going by the book in other areas as well, including those cases where there were no wheels of commerce involved, and no money changing hands. Many of the calls we got were domestics, a term reserved for situations arising among family members, or close associates, or residents of a building. Every patrolman I ever knew dreaded domestics, because they had the least upside—no one ever got a promotion because he calmed down a wife who was trying to stab her husband—along with the greatest possible potential for disaster. Because, whatever you did, she might very well stick a knife in the son of a bitch, and very possibly in you as well.

  The ideal outcome in a domestic was to calm things down and restore order without having to make any arrests. Usually at least one of the parties involved was drunk, and if he or she could be induced to sleep it off, it would cease to be a police matter. It might not qualify as a long-term solution, because sooner or later another bottle would lead to another argument, and very likely another call to the precinct. But that would occur on some other evening, and ideally on somebody else’s watch.

  I was six feet tall, and Vince stood about two inches taller than I, and was broader and heavier. Our size was a definite asset on the job, and this was particularly so in domestics; we looked as though we could handle ourselves physically, and that gave us an edge.

  At the time, height was a requirement. They wanted you to be at least 5’8”, though the absolute cutoff was 5’7”. Around the time I left the force, you started to hear a lot of objections to the requirement. It was seen as discriminatory. Women tended to be shorter than men, and female candidates who would otherwise have been qualified came up, well, short. This was also the case with various ethnic groups—Latinos, Asians. Which was all fine with the faction that would have preferred keeping the NYPD predominantly male and Irish, but it eventually went by the boards.

  Which, on balance, was what needed to happen. But it’s disingenuous to pretend there isn’t a downside, one that shows up when a big wild-eyed drunk who’s already had plenty of practice slapping his wife around is confronted by a woman who has to get up on her toes to reach five feet. Yes, she’s got a gun she can point at him, but is that what you want?

  I don’t think Vince ever drew his gun in a domestic, not that I can recall. It was rare enough that it ever left his holster, and I know he never fired it except at the shooting range. Sometimes, when a confrontation was getting tense, he might get ahold of his nightstick, but bare hands were usually all he needed to use.

  And sometimes he used them. He’d take hold of a troublesome drunk, push him up against a wall. Swing him around, yank his arm up behind his back. Maybe slap his face. Maybe throw a punch.

  Sometimes it went a little further.

  One time I remember, a top-floor apartment in a tenement on one of the numbered streets where the Slope and Sunset Park abut one another. A man and a woman, both of them drunk, and this wasn’t the first time they’d made enough noise for one of the neighbors to call it in.

  We climbed four or five flights of stairs, whatever it was, and that didn’t do anything to improve our mood, and neither did the sight of the two of them, him in an undershirt and a pair of boxers, her in some kind of housedress. He was as tall as Vince and must have weighed two-fifty, a lot of it fat, but there had to be some muscle under the flab. She wasn’t a whole lot smaller herself, a big woman gone to fat.

  From the looks of them, they’d both taken a few slaps and punches. We walked in and found them squared off, staring at each other, and then they were both staring at us.

  “You can both get out of here,” she said. “Who the fuck invited you, anyway?”

  Vince said something designed to cool things down. We’d received a complaint of noise, and we had no choice but to respond to it, and if we could all cooperate we’d nip this problem in the bud. And so on, and it was nothing I hadn’t heard him say before, and it usually moved matters toward a peaceful resolution.

  But oil on troubled waters held no appeal for these two. The husband started railing at some absent neighbor who he’d decided must have been the complainant, and had a lot to say about just what he would do to him the next time he laid eyes on him, the son of a bitch. And the woman, who had one hand wrapped around a fifth of Calvert Extra, tried to take a drink from what turned out to be an empty bottle.

  This was apparently the last straw, and she glanced at the bottle and then at us, and then turned a little to her left and looked at the kitchen sink.

  And swung the bottle full force against the sink.

  I think they get this from movies. An actor, never the hero, takes hold of a whiskey bottle by the neck and smashes it against a bar or a tabletop, and it’s been prepped so that the end breaks off and he’s left with a nasty-looking weapon in his hand.

  It doesn’t work that well in real life, and it didn’t work at all well for this particular Jack Elam wannabe. The bottle pretty much exploded, sending shards and fragments everywhere, and she wound up with nothing in her hand but the bottle’s disembodied neck.

  And she was bleeding. One or more pieces of flying glass had given her lacerations of her hand and arm, and the wounds were superficial but the blood was real, and she stood there in shock, unable to do anything but stare at the blood.

  I moved to help her, but she still had a grip on the neck of the bottle, and its jagged end made it a weapon, though not a very useful one. I tried telling her to open her hand and let the thing drop, but the message wasn’t getting through, and Vince had also turned toward her and was approaching, looking for a safe way to disarm her, and something made me glance at the husband just in time to see him grab an iron from its perch on an ironing board. He wrapped his big fist around it and snatched it up, and he’d already begun to swing it in a wide arc when I called out my partner’s name.

  Vince moved, and just in time. The iron didn’t miss by much. The momentum cost the husband his balance, and he stumbled forward and might have fallen to the floor, but Vince caught hold of him by the undershirt and straightened him up, and the guy cocked a fist, ready to keep going, and Vince hit him in the chest, a little below the heart, and threw him up against the wall, and followed it up with eight or ten or a dozen body punches, alternating lefts and rights, working that beer barrel of a torso like a heavy bag.

  When he stopped, winded, the guy fell to the floor. It was nothing but the wall and the punches that had been keeping him upright. He wasn’t unconscious, he hadn’t taken any blows to the head, but the fight had gone out of him, along with almost everything else. He was moaning, low-pitched and rhythmically, and I’m not sure he was even aware he was doing it.

  I disarmed the woman, which is to say I took the neck of the broken bottle out of her hand and set it aside. She’d quit resisting, and didn’t seem to be following what was going on. I sat her down at the kitchen table and took an inch-long sliver of glass out of her arm and looked around for something I could use to clean her wounds.

  Vince told me not to bother, that he didn’t see anything anywhere, not a dish towel or a piece of clothing, that wouldn’t be more likely to cause infection than to do her any good. Cuts like those would close themselves, he said. They weren’t the kind of wound you bled to death from.

  “Exsanguination,” he said, pleased to have found the word. “Like that poor bastard on Prospect Avenue. When was that, March? April?”

  It had been sometime in the spring. Neighbors noticed a smell, told the building’s super, who let himself in and called it in the minute he saw the body. Young man, late thirties, single, lived alone in an apartment furnished mostly in empty bottles. Worked for years in a Court Street law office, not as a lawyer but as what would now be called a paralegal, although I don’t think you heard the term much back then.

  They’d let him go, reluctantly, because he was just missing too many days. So there was no employer to notice him not showing up for work, and but for the smell of decomposition he might have spent a month or more on his bathroom floor. That’s where they found him, wearing a pajama top but no bottoms. He’d been standing at the toilet, evidently, and he’d lost his balance and fell, and his forehead slammed into the top edge of the porcelain bowl.

  That may have been enough to render him unconscious, or the booze he’d been drinking could have done that. Either way, he lay where he’d landed, and the fall opened up a big gash in his scalp, and scalp wounds bleed a lot more abundantly than superficial nicks and scrapes.

  So he lay there and bled out. I don’t suppose he ever knew what happened to him, any more than if he’d died in his sleep, though no one ever said of bleeding out on the bathroom floor that it was a good way to go.

  It happens a lot, actually. I saw a few cases over the years, and drink was always a factor, although God knows you don’t have to be drunk to bleed to death from a scalp wound. And there was a prominent actor who died like that, and it’s my understanding that he was a drunk. A functioning alcoholic, as they say; he was still getting regular work and fulfilling his obligations, though that didn’t do him a lot of good at the end.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  When we got out of that top-floor flat, we left nothing but peace and quiet behind us. The wife still sat at the kitchen table, where I’d put her, and you’d have thought she was frozen in place. She didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t show any expression, though her eyes were open. I guess she must have been in a blackout, and giving a good impression of a zombie.

  Her husband was on the floor where he’d fallen, asleep or passed out. Vince had rolled him onto his side, so that if he vomited he wouldn’t choke on it. “If he was gonna puke,” he said, “he probably woulda done it by now, but why take the chance?”

  “You just saved his life,” I said, and he said, “Yeah, I’m a fucking angel of mercy,” and we let ourselves out and let the snap-lock seal the door behind us. On the way downstairs I said the shift couldn’t end soon enough to suit me, and Vince pointed out that we still had two and a half hours to go. We’d been inside that apartment for fifteen minutes tops.

  And it was the rest of the evening that got top billing when I wrote it up, because we responded to a call that brought us to the scene of a robbery in progress. Two men, who turned out to be father and son, held up a liquor store, no doubt as an exercise in male bonding. Shots were fired and two people were wounded, one seriously, but ours wasn’t the first vehicle to respond. We were too late to hear the gunfire, but right on time to call for the ambulance.

  Afterward I drove us back to the stationhouse, and on the way Vince showed me the souvenir he’d taken, an unopened fifth of Old Forester. “The store owner’s got enough on his mind,” he said. “He’s got a bullet in his shoulder, nothing too serious, but his arm-wrestling days may be over. Plus there’s the guy he shot, who’ll probably recover in time to accept his trophy for Father of the Year, but maybe not, and all because he couldn’t just hand over the money in the register.”

  “He’d been robbed one time too many.”

  “So he went for his gun instead, and we had shots fired instead of a peaceful little holdup. Or maybe he saved his own life when he grabbed up that little Smith, because once the guns come out who knows what’ll happen? If my grandmother had wheels she coulda been a pushcart.”

  “But she’d still be your grandmother.”

  “You’re goddam right she would. Old Forester. I was reaching for Old Grand-Dad, which was standing right next to it, and he coulda been a pushcart, too. You think Mr. Bluestone’s gonna miss this bottle?”

  “He’d want you to have it.”

  “Or he’d shoot me, but he can’t because they took the gun away from him. I’d open this right now if I didn’t know better. But it can wait. Just having it’s a comfort, you know?”

  I knew.

  Back at the precinct, I wrote our report. Most of it dealt with the liquor store holdup, but I didn’t leave out the husband and wife in the top-floor apartment. In response to another tenant’s complaint, we’d arrived to find the apartment unlocked and both parties unresponsive. There’d been a domestic dispute with evidence of some violence, and she bore superficial injuries from a broken bottle, which we’d cleaned, and which didn’t appear to require further attention.

  And so on.

  My memory of the evening is pretty vivid, but I can’t be sure of its time slot. It was after I was married, certainly, and after we’d made the move to plainclothes; I can be sure of that because, when I picked up the iron and returned it to the ironing board, Vince said, “Jesus, the bastard could have killed me.” And, a moment later: “Or he could have pressed my suit.”

  It was during the summer, I remember that, and it was probably three or four months after the birth of Michael, my elder son. So we’d still have been living in the apartment we’d moved to after the wedding, just a couple of blocks from Prospect Park. The following summer, when we knew that she was pregnant again, was when we started looking at houses, and thinking about things like decent schools.

  I’d bought a three-year-old Pontiac, but almost always walked to and from work unless it was raining. That night we’d been riding around in one of the squad cars, which at the time were mostly black-and-white Plymouth Furies. I filed my report and we got in Vince’s car and wound up parked on one of the avenues in front of a shuttered shop that’s only name seemed to be the service it offered: FLATS FIXED.

  He got out, motioned me behind the wheel, walked around the car and sat where I’d been sitting. He had a good grip on the bottle of Old Forester, and he got the cap off and offered the bottle to me. I didn’t often say no to a drink, but something made me shake my head, and he didn’t seem surprised. This was before anybody came up with the term designated driver, but that was how I saw my role that evening, and evidently so did Vince.

  He took a drink, capped the bottle. He said, “Calvert Extra. That’s what they were drinking, wasn’t it? That bottle she broke?”

  “I guess.”

  “You see ads for it. ‘The Soft Whiskey.’ Whatever that’s supposed to mean. Maybe they’re saying it doesn’t burn on the way down. It’s like you’re drinking colored water, but don’t worry, it’ll do the job. It doesn’t get you drunk, we’ll give you your money back.”

  He took another drink, replaced the cap. He studied the backs of his hands, showed them to me.

  “Body shots,” he said. “No marks on him, no marks on me. Well, he may be black and blue, but not where it’ll show. Hit a man in the face and you can break your hand, plus the effects on him are there for the world to see.”

  He’d been looking at the bottle, but now he turned his eyes to me. “I lost it,” he said. “A fucking iron. He didn’t miss me by much, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “That kind of situation, hitting him’s the right thing to do. You gotta come back at him, and it better be enough so he feels it at the time and still feels it the next day. You follow me?”

  I said I did.

  “But how much is enough? The old one-two, except it was more like the old one through ten.” His hands, closed into loose fists, moved alternately, just a few inches, as if he’d charged them with remembering the punches. “Ten,” he said, “or maybe it was twelve. I could’ve killed the son of a bitch.”

  “With body punches?”

  “When he wound up on the floor, I wanted to kick his teeth in. There was this chair next to him, and my hands wanted to pick it up and break it over his head.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I thought about it.”

  I said there were lots of things I thought about, and he asked if I was sure I didn’t want a drink, because whoever old Mr. Forester was, he made a pretty decent whiskey. “But nothing soft about it,” he said. “There’s a burn, but I always liked the burn.”

  I knew what he meant.

  “‘The Soft Whiskey’,” he said, “but there’s nothing soft about the empty bottle, and it’d be a pretty good weapon all by itself, but then the silly bitch smashes it and winds up with nothing in her hand but two inches of bottle neck and some broken glass. I’ll tell you, our job’d be a whole lot harder if people weren’t so fucking stupid.”

  He had me drive him home, told me to keep the car and pick him up the next day. I let him off in front of his apartment house and waited while he walked to the front door and let himself in. He was carrying the bottle of bourbon, its contents reduced by about half. So he must have put away twelve ounces of bonded bourbon, deliberately replacing the black metal cap after each long drink, but he crossed the broad sidewalk and managed the half dozen stairs without any sign he’d had anything stronger than tap water.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  One of the best things Mahaffey taught me was that you could get other people to do what you couldn’t do yourself. It was all in how he handled another domestic we caught, and it’s in one of the books, pretty much the way it happened.