I asked Leo if anybody ever failed the written test. “You’d be surprised,” he said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I suppose you’d have to say he was a racist. Not the way George Wallace was a racist, not the way the white supremacists are racists. But for Vince Mahaffey there was a line drawn through the human race, and white people were on one side of it and everybody else was on the other.

  On the job, he treated people pretty much the same irrespective of their color. If two men of different races got into it and we were called to the scene, he didn’t automatically assume the white guy was in the right. But he noticed the difference, he was always aware of it, and I’m sure the black people with whom he had contact were aware of his awareness.

  If he spotted a young black male in a predominantly white neighborhood, he paid attention. He’d keep an eye on the guy, and if something triggered his cop instincts he might take the next step. You have to honor those instincts and act on them, you can’t do the job right if you don’t, but there’s always the question of just how much something like skin color serves to give shape and focus to one’s instincts.

  Did he ever use the N-word?

  No, but in all the years I carried a badge I don’t think I heard the word come out of a cop’s mouth more than half a dozen times, and the men involved were drunk and off-duty. One lesson they leaned on hard at the Academy was that racial and ethnic slurs had no place in an officer’s vocabulary.

  That wasn’t enough to change your attitudes and perceptions, but it set limits on how you talked about them.

  And you could always figure out a work-around. I never heard Vince say the N-word, but he made frequent use of another N-word.

  Of a description of two men seen fleeing from the scene of a liquor store robbery: “Turns out it was a couple of Norwegians. How’s that for a surprise?”

  Vince wasn’t the only cop to employ Norwegian as a code word for African-American. He’d started out at the Six-Eight in Bay Ridge, where the bulk of the city’s Norwegian population lived, mostly around Ovington Avenue. I’m sure some of them got drunk and beat their wives, and I don’t doubt that a few of them committed felonies and shot drugs, but by and large they were a stereotypically law-abiding lot. So referring to black criminals as Norwegians was a way to avoid sounding like a racist, and ironic in the bargain.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I remember a call we got. It couldn’t have been early on in our partnership, because we’d already made the switch to plainclothes. A burglary in progress on President Street, and the call wasn’t entirely accurate because the burglar had quit the premises before the homeowners returned home to find their front door ajar.

  They’d done what you’re supposed to do, which is call it in and wait outside, and they were waiting for us on the porch of a three-story frame house. They looked like what they were, a professional couple in their early thirties, spending their free time converting a triplex into a one-family home. They both wore glasses, to slightly different effect; he looked like a bookworm and she looked like a hot librarian.

  They hadn’t heard any sounds within, he told us, and he figured whoever broke in was long gone, but—

  Vince told him he’d done the right thing, and we stepped past them and went in with drawn guns. That felt foolish, because you knew the house was empty, but at the same time you were on edge, because what if it wasn’t?

  We checked all three floors, and I remember the incident now and then when Elaine’s watching one of her house shows on HGTV, because it was a renovation in progress. Back on the porch, we told the couple they could go on in, and maybe they could take a quick look around and see what was missing.

  “Gonna be hard to tell,” the husband said. “Place is a work in progress, and progress is slow when you do it yourselves. Some day it’ll be straight out of House Beautiful, but when we left this morning the place was a mess.”

  Vince told him that much hadn’t changed, but why didn’t they have a look around? While they did, we waited on the porch and wondered if they might have bitten off more than they could chew. “Imagine doing all of that yourself,” I said, “and living in the place while you’re doing it.”

  An older man had paused on the sidewalk, and Vince walked over and asked him if lived in the neighborhood and if he’d noticed anything earlier in the day. Like what? Like somebody on the porch, or trying the door.

  “I mind my own business,” the fellow said. “I got no particular interest in these people.”

  Right.

  The homeowners came back to report that, as far as they could tell, the forced door was the only indication anybody had been in the house. If anything was missing, they hadn’t noted its absence. Vince said they could take their time and file a burglary report for insurance purposes at leisure, but it looked like a kid or kids wanting a peek inside, and running off once their curiosity had been satisfied.

  “At any rate,” Vince said, “not a professional burglar. You have any trouble with your neighbors?”

  A frown. “What kind of trouble?”

  “I don’t know. Anybody you might have had words with, anybody who might not have neighborly feelings toward the two of you?”

  “And why would that be?”

  “Hey, no reason,” Vince said. “There’s questions we’re taught to ask when there’s been a break-in. Nothing important.”

  “Just routine,” the man said levelly.

  “That’s it.”

  Back in the car, he said, “‘And why would that be?’ Jesus, you’re as black as the ace of spades and your wife’s all blond hair and blue eyes, and the two of you just bought your way into the middle of a white working-class neighborhood and booted out some long-term residents so you can fill all three floors with half-breed pickaninnies.”

  “It’s probably just as well you didn’t say that.”

  “What’s the difference? That’s what he thinks he heard.” And, a few minutes later, “I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it.”

  “People with an attitude?”

  “That much I’m already used to. When you’re a cop everybody you meet’s got an attitude. No, the other.”

  I knew what he meant. I’d probably known all along.

  “You see it more and more, but not in the Slope, not in a white neighborhood in Brooklyn. Greenwich Village, Times Square, wherever you got your actors and artists. If I ran into the two of them in some hippy coffeehouse on Macdougal Street, would I react the same as on a front porch on President Street?”

  He answered his own question. “Probably not, but I’d still take notice of them. But less than I would have five years ago. The more you run into it, the less impact. Like anything else in life, like a fucking Beetle.”

  He lost me there. A ladybug? Ringo Starr?

  “A VW, a Volkswagen. When people first started driving them, you took notice every time you saw one. Now you pay about as much attention as when it’s a Ford or a Chevy. They’re all over the place, they’re just part of the landscape.”

  I said something about VWs and mileage, and we talked a little about cars, and then he said, “So what’s your take on the break-in?”

  “When nothing was missing,” I said, “I wondered for a minute if maybe the lock failed to engage when they left the house. But someone had definitely forced the door.”

  “Somebody with some kind of pry bar, with a little brute force to back it up. I thought kids, but I don’t think so. This was somebody who didn’t exactly know how to jimmy a lock, but he knew how to try.”

  “So a neighbor?”

  He nodded. “Not kids and not a pro, so that’s what’s left. Somebody who doesn’t want a black guy living on the same block, especially one with a white wife. I think the break-in was to send a message.”

  “That would fit with leaving the door ajar. ‘No, you didn’t forget to lock up. You locked it and I opened it, and I can do that anytime I want to.’”

  “Something like that. You know what I think? I think he might have had ideas of trashing the place, and one look told him not to bother. The best way to make their lives miserable was to leave everything the way he found it.”

  “When they finally finish—”

  He shook his head. “Never happen. He works and she works, and I can’t swear to it but my guess is she’s got a bun in the oven. There’s a little roundness to her belly that doesn’t completely go with the rest of her. Both of them working and she’s pregnant, and they’ve got a disaster area covering three floors, and there’s always another tool to buy and more materials to pay for, plus a day’s only got so many hours in it. No, you don’t want them for neighbors, just leave ’em alone and let the house do your work for you.”

  “They’ll give up.”

  “Wouldn’t you? They may stick it out longer than most, because he’s a man who’s got something to prove, but even so he’ll call it quits before the house does. Matt, when you write this up—”

  “Bare bones,” I said.

  “Right, and colorblind. Evidence of entry by person or persons unknown. Oh, and make it that the residents just took a quick look-see and couldn’t rule out the possibility of theft. In case something does turn up missing, or he decides he wants to report it that way.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I wrote up our report of the incident. Early on, that had become my job.

  He started grooming me for it the day he handed me that first ten-dollar bill. His two index fingers picked out the keys and typed up the report, and invited me to read it. It was a straightforward account in serviceable prose, telling how we’d come upon a delivery that was blocking sidewalk traffic at such-and-such a location, and how at our direction the store’s proprietor and the deliveryman set about promptly remedying the situation.

  Aside from the occasional awkward phrasing, the report’s only faults were sins of omission. There was no mention of the twenty dollars, obviously, or of the fact that we left the scene essentially as we’d found it, and that any remedying of the situation would have to wait upon the convenience of the persons involved.

  He asked if it looked all right to me, and I said that it did.

  “It’s a matter of putting in and leaving out,” he said. “You say something’s a fact, it better be. If you don’t want to mention a guy’s got a dog, so you don’t mention it, and if you get called on it you say you didn’t think it was important. Or, what’s the word, relevant. But whatever you do, you fucking well don’t say it was a cat.”

  And a few days later, after a relatively uneventful shift, he suggested I take a shot at writing up the report. I had less trouble with the words than with the typewriter—the ribbon needed changing—and I went through our day and wrote up what had come up and how we’d responded. When I was done I read it through once or twice. There was a word I would have changed, but this was before computers, and would have meant retyping the whole page. I decided to wait and see what other changes he’d want me to make.

  By the time he’d finished reading, he was nodding his head. “Yeah,” he said, “they were right.”

  Huh?

  “Said you were my ticket into plainclothes. ‘The kid can write. Get him doing your reports and before you know it you’ll be packing your blue bag in mothballs.’”

  Did that mean it was all right?

  “There’s one word here—”

  The one I’d wanted to change, and his objection was the same as mine. I don’t remember the word or the context, but it made for a sentence that commented on what we saw instead of simply recounting it.

  I said I knew what was wrong with it, and how to fix it.

  “Other than that,” he said, “it’s fucking perfect. They’re right. You got a gift.”

  I’d have enjoyed the praise more if I’d thought it was warranted. I said all I’d done was write it up the way it happened.

  “That’s what everybody does,” he said, “or tries to do. And nine times out of ten it winds up sounding like it got messed up on its way through some cop’s excuse for a brain. This here, it’s the way you talk. I read it and I can hear you talking to me.”

  “And that’s good? Because it just seems to me like the easy way to do it.”

  “Easy,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “You keep taking the easy way out, okay? And start saving up.”

  For what?

  “Suits,” he said. “Which you’ll need three or four of when your uniform goes in the mothballs.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  At the time, I took all this with a whole shaker of salt. I was able to see that my reports were better phrased than the ones Vince had been doing, that my sentences were easier to follow and less clunky, but I was trying to satisfy whatever cop wound up reading it, not to get some city editor to give me a byline.

  I decided Vince was either all too easily impressed with my writing, or else he was making a show of it so I’d take over a task he found burdensome. But the fact of the matter is I enjoyed the writing I did at each day’s end.

  Part of what I enjoyed, I’m sure, was knowing I was doing something that had already earned me praise. I’d just been assured that I was good at this, and it’s no more than natural to want to do what one’s good at.

  But it did more than that. Sitting at the typewriter and reporting the events of the previous eight hours was a way of reviewing them and putting them in perspective. I suppose that’s a benefit of keeping a diary, something I’ve never been inclined to do.

  The reports had an advantage over writing in a diary, because they were emphatically not for my eyes only. Whether or not a superior officer read them in the ordinary course of things, as soon as I filed a report it became a part of the record, there to be consulted and examined and cited if some other incident linked up with an action or observation of ours.

  Say we responded to a domestic, and the battered wife insisted she’d fallen down of her own accord, and the neighbor who’d called it in should mind her own business. You wouldn’t believe how often this happened, and we always knew the wife was lying, that she’d fallen because her drunk husband had given her a smack in the mouth, but there was nothing we could do about it. The trick was to write it up in a way that made clear what had happened without spelling it out.

  And suppose a week or a month later he hits her again, and maybe he uses something harder than his hand this time, and she winds up in the hospital or the morgue. Any previous complaints? And somebody winds up reviewing our report.

  Another element of writing the reports was that of omission. I had to leave out the things we weren’t supposed to do. That initial twenty dollars, ten for Mahaffey and ten for me, was not by any means a matter of one and done. There was a lot my partner was prepared to overlook, and a lot of profitable handshakes involved. It was mostly a matter of violations—a blocked loading dock, whatever—but it wasn’t impossible to buy your way out of some actual criminal acts. Always nonviolent, essentially victimless, but unquestionably an incident where to go by the book was to make an arrest.

  “Can we talk this over, Officer?” That was the right way to open the conversation, and those who were savvy enough to know the phrase were halfway home.

  Could we talk it over? Sometimes we could, sometimes we couldn’t. That was Vince’s call to make. If we busted the perpetrator, that of course went in the report. If we talked and he walked, I had some choices. I could report that we’d let him off with a warning, I could say that the lack of evidence had forced us to cut him loose, or, in the absence of any complainants or eyewitnesses, I could leave the entire incident off the books. We’d talk it out, Vince and I, and then I’d work out how to fit words to the tune.

  One thing I never did, obviously, was leave open the possibility that money had found its way into our pockets.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Some did, though.

  The first ten dollars wasn’t enough to change a man’s life, but looked at in a certain way, that’s exactly what it did. All it felt like in the moment, I have to say, is that I’d passed a test. Vince and I had already been partners, but the partnership had gone to another level. (I could say we’d become partners in crime, but while that might be technically accurate, it never felt like that.)

  There are cops—not many of them, but some—for whom the badge is a license to steal, and that becomes their primary job. They’ll respond to calls and make arrests, but that’s out of a need to keep up appearances.

  And, of course, you never know what’ll pay off in the long run. You collar some mope for burglary and you’ve burnished your record with an arrest, and some months later the burglar’s lawyer comes to learn that you’ve been known to be a reasonable man, and he or his representative has a conversation with you, and in court your testimony is a little shaky, and you fall apart under cross-examination, and the case doesn’t even go to the jury. The judge dismisses it, and later you tell the guys in the bar that there’s nothing lower on earth than a defense attorney, a prick who trips you up with a whole bunch of words, and everybody assures you that you did everything you could.

  And then some.

  Vince and I never did anything like that, and had nothing but contempt for the handful of officers who did. We’d never call them on it, or pass the word to the Rat Squad. Blue is blue, after all, and thicker than water. They were still cops but they were crooked cops, and that’s not how we saw ourselves.

  What were we then, in our own eyes? That’s hard to say with certainty, because I found it easy enough to avoid thinking about it much. The extra income made it a whole lot easier to get by on a policeman’s salary, especially once Anita and I were married and the babies started coming. First Mike and then Andy, and stuff to buy and new bills to pay, and only one of us working. You could raise a family on a cop’s base pay, plenty of people did it, but it was a lot easier if you had a little extra coming in.

  I’m not sure exactly how Vince saw it, because our supplementary income was never the subject of a heart-to-heart. We didn’t have many of those, long deep conversations where we got into who we really were and how we really saw ourselves and the world. A handful over the years, and always tucked away in a booth at some gin joint where nobody knew us.