Briefly, a noise complaint led us to a couple who admitted they may have raised their voices but assured us it wouldn’t happen again. No marks on either of them, no signs of a fight, and then we looked a little further and found their little girl, six or seven years old, and the victim of serious physical abuse. Bruises, cigarette burns. Everything you can imagine.

  And no case to be made. The kid was scared silent and the parents put up a united front of denial. These days you’ve got a Special Victims Unit and specialists trained to interrogate juvenile victims, but we had nowhere to go with it.

  Mahaffey took a dozen photos of the kid. This was before cell phones, let alone cell phone cameras, but he got hold of a camera and shot a roll of film, and when he picked up the prints we drove into Manhattan and found the bar where the father did his drinking, with his construction crew buddies.

  We passed the pictures around, and Vince said, “Look, we’re cops. Our hands are tied. But yours aren’t.” And we got out of there, and they did our work for us, and made a good job of it.

  It’s in one of the books, I forget which one. In more detail than I’ve given it here, and recounted pretty much the way it happened.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Vince and I spent a few years in plainclothes before I got the bump up to detective. Sometimes the only difference was what met the eye; instead of the blue bag with the bright gold buttons, we were outfitted by Robert Hall. We might still be in a standard squad car, responding to the same calls and handling them in the same way as when we’d been in uniform.

  But sometimes we were in an unmarked car, and sometimes we drew an assignment where it was important we not be instantly recognizable as police officers. Nothing you’d call deep cover, no secret missions to infiltrate a drug deal or a mob heist, but—

  Well, here’s an example. There was a two-block stretch of Prospect Park West that had a long history as a stroll, which is to say street-level working girls hung out there to solicit customers. Periodically Brooklyn Vice would run an operation that would result in a batch of arrests—and, for a week or two, less pedestrian traffic on the stroll—until things returned to normal.

  That was the Vice Squad’s job and not ours, and they were welcome to it. But now and then complaints at the precinct level would lead someone to dispatch a couple of plainclothes officers to circulate among the girls and spread the word that calling out to passers-by was a no-no, and you should wait for the John to make an overture. Or that your negotiation with a motorist should be conducted on a side street, not where you were blocking traffic on the avenue. Or that there were certain hours when we were happy to leave you alone, and other hours when we’d collar you just for being there.

  And so on.

  Once or twice a girl came up with a few bucks, thinking to buy her way out of an arrest that wasn’t going to happen anyway. Mahaffey wouldn’t take it. “No, that’s all right,” he’d say gently. “You keep your dough, honey. You’re gonna be okay.”

  And to me, a few minutes later: “What do I want with their money? They work hard for it.”

  But wouldn’t it just go to a pimp?

  “Only if they got it to give to him, and they’re in trouble if they don’t. Ah, Jesus, it’s a hard old world. That girl just now? What did she say her name was? Was it Bonnie or Bunny, because it was hard to tell.”

  I said it could have been either.

  “And it’s just her street name anyway, so they called her something else ten, fifteen years ago when she was jumping rope and playing jacks. ‘A—my name is Annie, my husband’s name is Al. We live in Alabama and we sell aardvarks.’”

  “Aardvarks?”

  “Something with an A. Back in her jump rope days, you figure she said to herself that what she would do with her life was spend it blowing white guys in parked cars? The world’s a bastard. Life just happens to people.”

  Syosset.

  If we were going to move out of Brooklyn, I suppose it was as good a place as any. It’s about thirty miles away, on the North Shore of Long Island, in Nassau County. Drive time to the city depended on traffic, but you didn’t have to drive; the Long Island Rail Road would get you to Penn Station—or to Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, in Brooklyn.

  It was probably a good place for my sons to grow up. The schools were decent.

  There were times when I blamed Syosset for the erosion of our marriage—not Syosset specifically, but our having moved away from where we’d been. I’m sure it played a role, but I’m just as sure that the marriage was only following a predetermined route. All the move did was give it a tailwind.

  And I suppose the relocation was predictable enough. The way it came about was nothing special. We had a second kid on the way, and our apartment was starting to feel too small. If we had another boy, the two of them could share Mikey’s small room—but this was before prenatal ultrasound, and we didn’t know what we’d be getting, and my mother-in-law was certain Anita was going to have a girl.

  Either way, we felt we could use more room. And it would be nice to have a yard where the kids could play, and where we could do the things families did—grill hot dogs over charcoal briquettes, have a car and a garage to keep it in, and mount a backboard over the garage and shoot baskets. And mow the lawn, and curse the crabgrass. And rake leaves in the fall, and shovel snow in the winter.

  And so on.

  At the time, there was an NYPD regulation that all members of the department had to reside within the five boroughs of New York. The underlying principle was reasonably sound. The idea was that while you were only working for the city during your hours on the clock, you provided a reserve police presence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  There was an accompanying regulation requiring you to carry your service revolver wherever you went, on or off duty. You might be at D’Agostino’s picking up a loaf of bread, with nothing on your mind but the sandwich you were going to make when you got home, but if some kid with a switchblade decided to hold up the cashier, you were there on the spot to blow his head off.

  Or something like that.

  I’ll say this, you got used to it. You’d hear someone say that he felt naked without a gun on his hip, and that wasn’t far from the truth, because about the only time you didn’t have that gun on your hip was when your clothes were off. That’s an exaggeration, you weren’t required to carry once you crossed your own threshold, but disarming yourself wasn’t always automatic once you got home. I was pretty good about that, before I did much of anything else I’d stow my holstered gun in the top drawer of the highboy dresser, but there were times I’d forget, and I’d be watching television or playing with the boys and realize I was still carrying.

  If you invited me over to your house for dinner, I’d show up armed. But what I might do, after a few minutes, was transfer my weapon from its holster to some suitable horizontal surface—a table top, a bookshelf. This was a ritual, with an implicit message: I’m at ease here, I can let my guard down, it’s as if I were in my own home.

  I didn’t invent this. I saw other cops do it, and I figured it out, and adopted it myself when the occasion seemed right. It was a choice I might or might not make in a social situation, and it gave me a way of taking my own emotional temperature. If something held me back from disarming myself, well, maybe that was telling me something. Maybe I wasn’t quite as comfortable around you as I might have thought I was.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  When I gave it all up, the job and everything that went with it, it all took a while to get used to. Going about unarmed was part of it, and not the biggest part; I think I was more conscious of not carrying a badge, of no longer being a law enforcement officer, than I was of not having a holstered gun on my person.

  And, of course, not going about armed brought with it, along with a predictable feeling of vulnerability, an offsetting sense of relief. The last time I’d drawn my service revolver I had fired it—with good reason, but certainly with mixed results.

  That comes later. I suppose we’ll get there, though I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It was Anita’s second pregnancy that got us out of Brooklyn. But the need for an extra bedroom didn’t compel us to move all the way out to Nassau County. I was earning a decent salary, logging occasional overtime hours, and, in plainclothes as in uniform, my partner and I continued to draw some undeclared income that the City of New York had nothing to do with. I could have afforded a larger apartment, and my father-in-law had his eye on a house that was coming on the market.

  It was in Bensonhurst, on Bay Ridge Avenue, and maybe a five-minute walk from the house he owned. It was a duplex, the property of a friend of George Rembauer’s who’d recently sold his home appliances store and was looking to move, as soon as he and his wife made up their minds between Florida and Arizona.

  The price would be good, I was assured, and there was a solid and reliable tenant installed in the upper flat, and we’d have the lower to ourselves—a living room, a big kitchen, three bedrooms. Plenty of room for our growing family, and such a convenient location.

  The last thing I wanted was to be closer to my in-laws. As it was, we were over there once a week for dinner, a standing date I contrived to miss whenever I could find a pretext. And more often than I’d have preferred I came home to our apartment to find one or both of her parents there—bringing something for Mikey, or some leftover eggplant parm for us.

  The two of them never gave me any real reason to dislike them, but I managed fine without one. I found my mother-in-law needy and manipulative, and I just plain didn’t care for George. I managed to convince myself, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that he knocked his wife around. Something rang a bell, something about the way they were with each other reminded me of various couples Vince and I encountered in Park Slope.

  I can’t say what it was. George wasn’t much of a drinker, and I doubt the police had ever been called to his house. And there were no marks I ever noticed on her face, no bruises, no broken bones. I never asked Anita directly, that can of worms never cried out to be opened, but I steered a conversation or two in that direction.

  Once I found a way to tell her about a domestic Vince and I had responded to. “It’s remarkable,” I said, “how widespread it is. A lot of families look like a cross between Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best, and then you look a little closer and find out the guy’s pretty free with his hands.”

  Nothing. And maybe there was nothing there, maybe he was just what he seemed to be, a solid citizen, an honorable husband and father. Maybe I just wanted to think the worst of him.

  I remember one conversation, around the time Michael was born. “You made that promise, right? To bring them up Catholic?”

  I had. The priest would have preferred it if I’d converted, but had to be satisfied with the pledge I’d made. George, brought up Lutheran, had done the same. “It’s not a big deal,” he assured me. “All it meant was she went to St. Athanasius for grammar school. That was fine, it was a good school, and at that age you’d just as soon have them with their own kind. Then we sent her to the public high school, because the last thing me or my Catholic wife wanted was for our kid to get the idea of becoming a nun.”

  Not likely, I thought.

  “But it’s all crap,” he said. “You don’t have to believe it and neither does the kid. You pretend to go along with it, and your kid pretends, and everything works out fine.”

  That was George, in a rare confidential mood. You know what? On the basis of absolutely no evidence whatsoever, and with no one left alive to say one way or the other, I still think the sonofabitch beat his wife.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  We got to Syosset by following the road of least resistance. Herb Polander, a cop a year or two senior to me, had moved there some months ago, and invited us out for Saturday dinner, which he grilled for us in his backyard. He showed us the house, the neighborhood, the school. Before the move, he and his wife and kid had lived with his in-laws in Marine Park, and that remained his official address as far as the NYPD was concerned. “So we still live in Brooklyn,” he said, “except we don’t. More and more of the guys are doing this, as more and more of the old neighborhoods—well, you know.”

  Or, as my own father-in-law had put it, you’d just as soon have your kids with their own kind.

  The road of least resistance. We never looked anywhere but Syosset. Polander steered me to a real estate agent, who showed us half a dozen houses. They all looked about the same to me, but Anita had a clear favorite, and the agent said he thought a firm offer ten percent below the $50,000 asking price stood a good chance of being accepted. “But don’t go with the round figure,” he advised. “Ten under is forty-five, but make your offer, oh, $44,693. That way it looks as though you’ve used some secret formula, and you’re not about to budge.”

  I did as suggested, even though it didn’t make much sense to me, and the seller’s response was that he’d take forty-five even. I said fine, and that was that.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I could have used the Rembauer house as my official address, but I never really considered it. Instead I went back to my landlady on Garfield Place to see if by any chance my old apartment was available. It wasn’t, but she steered me to a friend of hers who had something suitable around the corner on Polhemus.

  It was a convenience. I could keep some changes of clothing there, could grab a quick shower on a long hot day, even lie down for a nap. If we wound up working a double shift, I could bed down on Polhemus Place and save myself a commute.

  Or if there was something to keep me in town, a game at the Garden, a night on the town with a couple of fellow officers. Or if I was too late to catch that last train, or too drunk to trust myself in expressway traffic.

  And if I brought someone home with me, well, that was my business, wasn’t it?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I never did go back and knock on the redhead’s door on Carroll Street. Something shifted when Anita and I took our vows, and that kind of lapse looked to be part of the past.

  I remember a door Vince and I knocked on together, a woman who’d been on the scene when a hit-and-run driver ran a red light and killed an elderly pedestrian. (The victim, I happen to recall, was 62. Well, that seemed elderly at the time.)

  Our witness invited us in, trotted out a plate of cookies, and answered our questions without giving us much that was likely to prove useful. Once we were out of there, Vince said, “I guess you noticed that’s there for you if you want it.”

  Evidently there’d been some verbal cues and significant glances aimed my way, enough to make it clear to my partner that our witness wouldn’t mind getting to know me better. It had all sailed right past me.

  “The message I get is you’re genuinely out of the game,” Vince said. “Or you never would have missed it.”

  I suppose I was, but it turned out that the game was more like football or basketball than baseball. Just because you took yourself out of it didn’t mean you couldn’t get off the bench and come back in.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I didn’t bring many women to the Polhemus apartment. Four or five over the several years I rented it. Given the choice, I’d opt for her place—but there weren’t too many in that category, either. I didn’t chase, and I don’t think I was compulsive about it, but I suppose I was like that fellow from Tammany Hall. I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.

  The first such opportunity came around some months before our move to Syosset. I finished an uneventful shift and wrote up a mostly accurate account of it, and I had a drink with some fellow officers. “I better head home,” I told them, and I walked a block or so toward our apartment before I found myself stopping at a bar that looked interesting, where I wound up in conversation with a woman who worked as a legal secretary. It turned out her boss had represented a mope Vince and I had collared for aggravated assault, and she’d been in court when I’d been called to testify.

  “After you held up on cross,” she said, “we knew we were screwed.”

  At some point she complained about the jukebox, and I said it would be nice if we could find some place quieter, and she looked pointedly at the fourth finger of my left hand. “Either that’s a disguise,” she said, “or you’re married.”

  “It’s a disguise that fools most people,” I said, “but I’m glad you saw right through it.”

  Did she roll her eyes? Probably. Then she stood up, and I followed her out of there and went home with her. An hour or two later she touched my wedding ring and said, “Oh, well. It’s not like it’s the first time.”

  Except it was, for me. But she didn’t need to know that.

  It’s hard to remember how I felt about it. Guilt-ridden? I don’t think so. I was aware that I’d crossed a particular line, but all that really seemed to be changed was how I saw myself. Previously I’d been a faithful husband, albeit one whose fidelity had never really been tested, and now I no longer fit that category.

  Had I harmed Anita? Not if she didn’t know about it, and she certainly wasn’t going to hear it from me.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  But that was never the point of the apartment on Polhemus, and I don’t think I ever brought anyone there more than once. It was, as noted, a convenient place to grab a nap when I had time to kill, and a comfortable place to spend the night when I had reason to avoid the long drive home.

  But what got me there almost daily was the need to check my answering machine.

  I hadn’t foreseen any of that when I took the place. I didn’t expect to have a phone installed, let alone a device to answer it and record messages. All of that was a consequence of the shift from uniform to plainclothes, and probably owed a lot to that one assignment we’d pulled, toning down the action on Prospect Park West.

  What I learned there, talking with working girls and pimps and other hangers-on, was something a lot of people are born knowing—that people are people. That’s not something they teach you at the Academy, nor does it suddenly dawn on you when you start walking around in a blue uniform. On the contrary, you find yourself seeing the human race as composed of two types of people, good guys and bad guys.