In Cop-Speak, citizens and skells.

  The uniform reinforced this view. Everywhere you went, the good guys were relieved to see you, while the bad guys avoided eye contact and drifted toward the exits. Good guys and bad guys, citizens and skells. It wasn’t all that hard to tell them apart, and you related to them accordingly.

  This changed when you left the uniform in the closet and walked around outfitted by Robert Hall. I’m sure I still looked like a cop; that had remained true after I’d turned in my badge and gun, and now, half a century later, some trace of the police officer is evidently there to be seen. Elaine says it’s the way I look at people—as though I have a perfect right to look at them, as though it’s my job to eyeball them and take their measure. I don’t think I do that as much as I once did, but now and then I catch myself at it, so I know it remains a part of how I exist in the world.

  Well, you can observe a lot that way, can’t you?

  In plainclothes, I don’t suppose I did any less observing. But I found myself talking to people, and in a way that was less mindful of the distinction between good guys and bad guys, citizens and skells. I noticed the way Vince talked to people on the stroll, the working girls mostly, but also their pimps when we encountered them. Some of them looked the part—oversize purple hats, dark or mirrored sunglasses, suits from Phil Kronfeld’s, long low convertibles that were mostly tailfin—but not all of them ran that strongly to type. The common denominator was race; they were all what Mahaffey might call Norwegians.

  The ones I encountered, that is, although I came to learn that pimping wasn’t exclusively an African-American occupation. There were white pimps, and from more than one source I heard of a fully observant Hasidic Jew from Borough Park, with side locks and a full beard and the black hat and all, who had half a dozen girls working out of a house on Avenue M in Midwood. If he didn’t exist, he at the very least starred in an enduring urban legend.

  What I got to know—which I suppose anybody with an open mind could have figured out faster than I did—was that working girls were people, too, and so were the men who ran them, and the men who paid them for their services. They were all just playing the cards they’d been dealt, living the lives they’d been handed, and, well, doing the best they could.

  And what else, really, does anybody do? I don’t know how many AA meetings I’ve been to, but the number’s certainly a high one, and I’ve heard a great many people tell their stories. A lot of them have had things to say about their parents, and a lot of those parents would seem ill-suited to their roles. Stunning neglect, appalling mental and physical and sexual abuse, on and on and on.

  But the conclusion, almost invariably, has been that Daddy did the best he could. Or Mommy, or both of them. And this almost tautological business of having done one’s best can’t be reserved exclusively for parents.

  So we’re all of us doing the very best we can?

  Outlier examples are hard to swallow. That cop in Minneapolis, with his knee on a man’s neck, was he doing his best? Did Ted Bundy do his best? Did Hitler?

  Maybe. Maybe it’s just a definition of the universal human condition, maybe whatever one does, however heinous, is the best one could do with what one has been given.

  Or not. What do I know? I never got to take third-year Latin.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The point was I started talking to people on the street, hookers and pimps and other hangers-on. I let them know that my interests were far-ranging, and that they could possibly do themselves some good by sharing information with me.

  In other words, I was lining up sources. Snitches, if you will. Vince, who’d been working the same Brooklyn streets for most of his career, already had a fair number of people in the neighborhood who’d feed him information, and I was building on the example he’d set me.

  Nothing happened for a while, and I figured I was wasting my time, albeit in an interesting fashion. And then one day a very low-level pot dealer gave me the side eye and said, “You didn’t hear this from me, right?” and went on to pin a name on the unidentified shooter who’d stepped up next to a gray Buick Riviera waiting for a light at the corner of Sixth Street and Seventh Avenue to turn from red to green. With two witnesses at the scene, he’d fired three bullets into the head and chest of the unaccompanied driver and scurried across the street to where another car was waiting for him.

  Black man, dark clothes, average height, average weight. That was all the two witnesses could come up with, and all they knew about the getaway car was it had four tires. The victim was of Portuguese descent, born in the Azores, owned a laundry and dry cleaners half a mile from the crime scene, lived above the store. No arrest record, nothing on his sheet but parking tickets, and none of his neighbors had anything to say about him, beyond the one woman who complained that his shop reeked of the cheap cigars he smoked.

  We didn’t get the case, a couple of uniforms were first on the scene and a couple of detectives from our precinct picked it up, only to have it taken away from them by Brooklyn Homicide when nothing led anywhere. The victim’s life looked blameless, his marriage appeared to be solid, and no one had any reason to call him a nasty name, let alone blow his brains out.

  “Wrong guy,” my snitch said. “Wrong Buick Riviera. Guy burned two people bad in a coke deal, but it was a different guy in a different car. Fool shot the wrong man, and now he wants to get paid, but who’s gonna pay him for shooting the wrong man? He out there looking for the right man to shoot, but that man, he most likely drove his Buick Riviera clear to Georgia by now.”

  And that’s as much as I remember, and way more than anybody needs to know, about that particular case. I passed on what I’d learned, but not where I’d learned it, to one of the original detectives, who handed it on to the appropriate detective at Brooklyn Homicide. It was, everybody agreed, the kind of case that could only be solved this way, with someone ratting out the perpetrator, because no other connection existed between Senhor Oliveira and the man who killed him, who were both doing their best.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Along with the shooter’s name and motive, my snitch passed along the address where he could most likely be found, and enough information about the driver of the getaway vehicle so that both men were soon in custody. The shooter hadn’t gotten rid of the murder weapon—he figured it would be useful when he got a chance to shoot the right person, thus completing the assignment and assuring he’d get paid.

  Right. Meanwhile, his accomplice took a look at the tea leaves and went for a plea, and turned up in court to testify against the shooter, who wound up having an audible argument with his lawyer. “Tell ’em I made an honest mistake! I shot the wrong person!”

  It was a strategy his attorney declined to pursue, but it made the tabloids and the local news, and that was enough to inspire the lawyer to request a mistrial. Fat chance. The jury wasn’t out long enough to order sandwiches, and the sentence was life without parole. If he’s still alive, he’s probably still inside.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Funny thing. The defense he argued for, the honest mistake argument, worked once. In the Old West, as I heard it told, and back in the late nineteenth century. One man was in a hotel room with a prostitute when another man kicked in the door and came in with two guns, blazing away until both were empty. He missed his intended victim but killed the woman, and he was subsequently arrested and charged with her murder.

  He swore he hadn’t meant to kill her, that he didn’t even know her and had nothing against her. And the judge agreed that murder implied intention, and the defendant had clearly held no intention of inflicting harm of any sort upon the victim. He’d set out to murder her companion, but had failed altogether in that attempt, and thus the only crime he’d committed consisted of breaking down a door, and the prosecution had neglected to level that charge against him. Not guilty, case closed. Next!

  I can’t swear that it ever happened, and it does sound too good to be true. Still, it makes its point.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I’d described my tip as having come from a local source my partner and I had jointly developed, and Vince and I both wound up with a commendation in our files. Vince was grateful for this, but told me it was really all my doing. “I never paid much attention to that mope,” he said. “Always there, and what he was selling was mostly seeds and stems, and he must have been his own best customer, because I never saw him that he wasn’t stoned. Even if something went down right in front of him, you wouldn’t expect him to notice.”

  I said I thought my snitch was probably high all the time, but maybe not as high as he let you think.

  “There’s drunks like that,” Vince allowed.

  And anyway, he hadn’t seen anything, hadn’t left the corner or been anywhere near the site of the shooting. He’d received a report from a woman he knew, who also happened to be a woman the shooter knew.

  “Biblically,” I said, “in both instances. She was our guy’s girlfriend, and then the other guy made a move on her, and all our guy wound up with was a resentment.”

  What I wound up with, along with the commendation, was a strong belief in the value of cultivating sources. Because you really never knew who might find out something useful and pass it along to you. So I found myself spending more and more of my time in places where the people I encountered had the potential of telling me something I’d be glad to know.

  If I’d been an investigator for the Securities and Exchange Commission, I suppose I’d have found those likely snitches in banks and brokerage houses and board rooms, and they might have been every bit as interesting as all my hookers and shoplifters and drunks and junkies.

  But maybe not.

  It had never been unusual for me to stop somewhere for a drink once I was off the clock, and increasingly I took to seeking out bars that were on the shady side, and spending more time in them. Two hours some nights. Or three, or more.

  A lot of hours I might have spent with my wife and young son, and spent instead with, well, shady people.

  I told myself it was work, and it was. I couldn’t put in for overtime, or get reimbursed for the dollars I laid down on bar tops, but I was receiving genuine value for my money. At best I was forging relationships and picking up information, but at the very least I was having a couple of drinks, and that never failed to seem like a good idea.

  And where would I have been otherwise? Home?

  If you’d asked me, and if you’d picked a time when I felt like talking, I’d have told you I was happy with my wife and glad to be married. I might have pulled out my wallet and shown you a picture of my son.

  And that was true enough. The whole truth? No, hardly that. But true enough.

  So why was it taking me so long to get home from work? Because I was devoting those hours to becoming a little bit better at my job. And wasn’t that to everyone’s benefit?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The machine that answered my phone on Polhemus Place would seem impossibly primitive in today’s world of voice mail. It would play my outgoing message: “Hi, I’m not here to take your call. Leave your name and number at the tone and I’ll get back to you.” Then there’d be a tone, and it would record whatever the caller said in the next five minutes or so.

  If I wanted to listen to a message, I had to be there in person to press the appropriate button, and after I’d played the message I could keep it or erase it. There may already have been machines that allowed you to access your messages remotely, and that would have been handy, but that wasn’t the kind I had.

  And any answering machine at all was apt to surprise a fair number of the people who reached it. Early on, most of my callers rang off without leaving messages, though some stayed on the line after the tone, waiting a minute or two for something to happen.

  One time I made what was supposed to be a quick stop on my way home to Syosset, only to discover that my entire message tape was full. It was all the work of one woman, and she was desperate to reach her sister in Maspeth, but she kept getting my number, probably because she kept dialing it, and her patience waned even as her frustration mounted. “You keep saying you’re not there to take my call. If you’re really not there then why do you keep picking up the phone?” and “I know this is the right number, you stupid son of a bitch! I’ve been dialing this number all my life. Why are you answering the wrong number? What’s the matter with you?”

  And so on.

  The handful of people who called me intentionally got the number from one of the business cards I’d handed out. I’d had a job printer a few blocks from the stationhouse run off a batch of one or two hundred, whatever the minimum was, and the text was equally minimal: Three lines—my first and last name, my new phone number, and LEAVE MESSAGE.

  I got the idea of handing out cards from the Brooklyn Homicide detective who’d given me one of his. I don’t think I ever found a reason to call him, but he was the first cop I knew who had a business card, and I was impressed, and by the time we made the move to Syosset, I had worked out how everything could fit together, business cards and an apartment and a telephone and a machine to answer it.

  These days just about everybody over the age of ten has a phone in his pocket, and every new patrolman picks out one of a dozen designer templates and orders a few hundred business cards from whatever cop shop supplied the rest of his gear.

  For me, the cards were a good move even if nobody ever dialed the number. A lot of my conversations on street corners and in saloons worked their way around to invitations to let me know if anything came to mind, or if there was some confidential information they wanted to pass on. My card was something they could take away from the conversation, something tangible that would bring the moment back to mind when it surfaced the next day in a purse or pocket.

  And now and then there’d be a message:

  “Uh, this here’s Billy at the parking lot. If you get a chance.”

  Or

  “Not saying who this is, but somebody should take a look at Roger McAlpin for that thing on Seventh Street. That’s Tall Roger, Roger that limps, you know who I mean.”

  Like that.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It was sometime during the first year in Syosset that someone suggested I think about the Sergeants Exam. It was a way to move up in the Department, and the higher rank brought a higher salary. As a police officer, you were represented by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association; sergeants had their own union, called not surprisingly the Sergeants Benevolent Association, and it may have had a little more clout than the PBA.

  At first I thought the whole thing was out of reach for me, but then I had a look at a few pages of sample questions, and I figured it was a test I could pass. There were things you had to know, which would entail a few weeks of study, but it seemed to me that a majority of the questions were the sort they asked you in high school reading comprehension tests. If you could read a fairly complex paragraph and make sense out of what you’d read, the City of New York was ready to hand you the keys to the precinct house, or at least give you a seat at the front desk.

  I told Vince I was thinking about it. “Bill Walsh says I should take it,” I said, “and the sooner the better. He’s got the flash cards he used when he was studying for it, and he says I can borrow them.”

  Walsh was a desk sergeant at the Seven-Eight, and more approachable than most. Vince said, “Flash cards.”

  “He said they were helpful.”

  “I looked at the questions once. Not that I thought I could be a sergeant, not that I even wanted to, but out of curiosity. I got a headache reading them.”

  I knew what he meant. One question that didn’t have any obvious connection to police work presented you with a batch of facts: Susan is older than Mark but younger than Rita. Five years ago, Mark was one and a half times Shirley’s age. Rita’s younger brother is a year older than Shirley’s sister—

  “You could pass it,” Vince said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you’ve got the mind for it. You could take the questions apart and figure them out. And the hard facts, the stuff you have to study for, you and Anita could run those flash cards until you were letter-perfect. You’d have to put in the work, but that’s the thing. You’d do it, you’d take your best shot, you’d put your ass in the chair and get the work done.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And then what?”

  He’d lost me.

  “You pass the test,” he said, “and probably with flying colors. That qualifies you to be a sergeant, and you’re on the list when an opening comes up. ‘Officer Scudder, there’s a sergeant’s slot open at the One-Two-Two.’ That’s right on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island, and don’t ask me how I remember the address. ‘It’s yours if you want it, Officer Scudder, or you can wait for something to open up in the ass end of Queens.”

  “I don’t think—”

  He waved away whatever I was going to say. “Where they wind up putting you is pretty much beside the point, Matt. It’s easier or harder to get to from Syosset, that’s all, and it’s probably temporary anyway, because they’ll move you again a few years down the line when you sit the Lieutenants Exam. Because that’s what all of this is about, isn’t it? Making something of yourself, moving up in rank.”

  “You think it’s a bad idea?”

  “I think it’s the way a cop gets ahead. You like Bill Walsh?”

  I said I liked him well enough. I didn’t know him all that well, but he’d always struck me as one of the good guys.

  “You want to be Bill Walsh? Come in every morning, sit at his desk, do what he does?”

  I’d never really thought about it.

  “What you and I do,” he said, “is walk around and drive around and knock on doors and sometimes kick ’em in. We go around being cops. What the sergeants and the loos and the captains do is see to it that we do our jobs right. You take the sergeants exam, you’re on track to stop being a cop and start being a boss of cops. That’s important, take away the department’s organization and administration and we’re all of us cut off at the knees.”