Reed Coleman - The James Deans

It hadn’t been my intention to ask directly about John Heaton. I was thoroughly aware how little that approach had brought me. No, this time someone else would do the pleading for me. If I had to spend several hundred dollars of Thomas Geary’s money to convince Domino it was in her best interest to act on my behalf, so be it. I couldn’t afford to count on her phantom sympathies. I had a second scotch before heading downstairs.

I didn’t have to wait very long for her to pop out of the dressing room, and she saved herself the embarrassment of fending me off with that lame bullshit about the house rules. Today she was wearing denim shorts and a tube top.

“Whaddya want?”

“To buy you a drink and talk some business.”

She laughed. “Shit, I never heard that line before, especially not from a cop.”

“We must not know the same cops,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, that must be it, ‘cause the cops I know never use the words ‘buy’ and ‘business.’ Their vocabulary only includes words like ‘free’ and ‘on the house.’”

“I was wrong. I guess we do know the same cops, but that’s not the kinda business I’m interested in.”

“You’re a man, right?”

“The last time I checked, yeah.”

“Then you’re interested in that kinda business.”

She wasn’t wrong. She was a commodity. That’s what Glitters was, a kind of commodities exchange. Only here, no one traded on their futures, just their yesterdays and todays. Though I wasn’t interested in using her body, I guess I was hoping that John Heaton might be. Wit had it right: using people was what made the world go round.

“Yeah, okay, maybe I am,” I confessed. “Can I buy you that drink?”

“Sure, stud, why not?” She shrugged her shoulders. I turned to go up the stairs, but she stopped me, slipping her arm through mine. “Screw the stairs, we’ll go out the side door.”

She led me the opposite way down the hall, through a door marked PRIVATE, through a storage room, and out a steel door that fed us into an alley that stank of cat piss and garbage. In other words, it smelled like any other alleyway in the city. As soon as the door clicked shut behind us, Domino pressed herself against me, but I ducked out of the way. If she was offended by my reluctance, she didn’t show it. Once again, she looped her arm through mine and started us toward the street. We didn’t quite make it.

As we passed several steel Dumpsters, Domino unhitched herself from me. A strong hand reached out of the shadows, yanking hard on my left wrist. I was thrown completely off balance. Domino was running down the alley toward the street, her sandals clickity-clacking against the grimy cobblestones. A steel fist drove itself so hard into my gut that you could have seen the knuckles on the skin of my back.

“Oh, fuck!” I gasped with the breath the punch forced out of my lungs, the words tasting like regurgitated scotch.

When I tried to recover, a bat struck me across the backs of my knees and I collapsed into a bag of bruised flesh and bone. Knowing, experienced hands patted me down. My.38 was pulled out of the holster I kept clipped to my belt. Its cylinder was opened. The falling bullets pinged off my forehead and face. The cylinder was snapped shut. Metal creaked as the lid to a Dumpster was lifted. Something clanged against the metal. My gun, most likely. A shoe pressed down on my cheek, squeezing my jaw against the paving stones.

“Next time, asshole, take the hint. Come around here again and it’ll be your teeth, not bullets, bouncin’ off the floor. Get it?”

When I didn’t answer immediately, the foot pressed down even harder on my face.

“I get it,” I gurgled.

“What?”

“I get it. I get it.”

The shoe was off my face, but the pain stayed behind. I was in no shape to do anything but listen to two sets of feet retreating unhurriedly back down the alley toward the club. After about five minutes, the pain eased enough for me to sit up and get my bearings. I rubbed my jaw, wiping the grit off both sides of my face. I tried standing to test out my knees. They both burned with pain. The surgical one wasn’t any less stable than usual. Actually, the doctors hadn’t left enough tissue in there to damage. My good knee was of more concern. It responded pretty well, and I went about collecting my bullets and searching the myriad Dumpsters for my.38.

I didn’t need to be a rocket scientist or even an ex-cop to figure out what had just taken place. It was to laugh. Domino, in her way, had introduced me to John Heaton or, rather, had smoothed the way for him to introduce himself to me. All that and it hadn’t cost Thomas Geary a penny. But it had cost me. I’d be back to collect, and when I came back, I’d have my head up instead of up my ass.

It had been my experience that pain seldom evoked pleasant memories. This morning did nothing to dissuade me from that view. Sure, my gut ached, my jaw, too, but that pain didn’t come with any baggage, not even a carry-on. My knee, however, was quite another story. It usually ached in damp weather. You can’t have all that I’d had done to it and expect a free ride. Today was different. Today it hurt like a bastard, like it hadn’t hurt since right after the second surgery. I stood there in the bathroom watching my hands shake as much from remembering those days as from the freshness of the pain.

It was August of 1977. Copwise, it had been a good few weeks. Word was out that the department was reconsidering the freeze on promotions. Something that was owed me as far back as Marina Conseco’s rescue. I’d also been making a shitload of overtime since the July blackout. And now that Son of Sam had extended his franchise to Brooklyn, that overtime was only likely to increase. By snuffing out the life of Stacy Moskowitz and putting a bullet into Robert Violante’s eye, Sam had unknowingly set in motion the end to both our careers.

When they captured him and brought him in for arraignment, they bused a bunch of us in from precincts all around the city to work security and crowd control. Today, it’s hard to recall just how huge Sam’s capture was. This pudgy little bar mitzvah boy from the Bronx had held the city in his murderous grasp for months. He had set off the biggest manhunt in New York’s long history, perhaps the biggest manhunt in the history of the United States. Unless you lived through those days, it would be easy to forget the other factors which had so frayed our collective nerves.

The city was teetering on the edge of fiscal collapse. We had just endured one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record, and in mid-July the city was plunged into a blackout. In ‘65, during the first big blackout, there was no looting to speak of, but in ‘77 the town went nuts. The looting and rioting went on for days. In some ways, it almost felt disconnected from the blackout itself. It was as if years of resentment over Vietnam and the failed promises of the sixties boiled up to the surface in one crazy, angry moment. And casting a shadow over it all was the Son of Sam.

So after Sam’s arraignment and the press conferences, after the handshakes and backslapping, they shipped us back to our precincts. In my absence, the maintenance crew had waxed the precinct floors for the first time in months. I never did find out why they had chosen that particular day. Anyway, on my way to the locker room, one of the precinct detectives called out to me, busting my chops about how I had looked on TV, standing there behind Sam and Detective Ed Zigo. When I turned to answer back, I slipped on a piece of carbon paper some careless schmuck had thrown on the newly waxed floor.

They tell me my knee got so twisted up that some of the guys got nauseated just looking at me. Luckily, I guess, I was knocked silly when my head hit the floor. But by the time I got to the ER at Coney Island Hospital, the pain had made itself intimately familiar. I had known that pain to differing degrees every day since. That day in August of ‘77 was the last time I ever wore my police blues.