That's for Life

On December 20, 2006, I woke up at around five o’clock in the morning, one hour before I typically arise, and did something I never do that early in the day. I checked my e-mail. My inbox contained a message from a woman whom I only knew casually through my best friend and former partner in the police department. Her name is Denise, and my friend Stephen hired her to work in the shop he owned. I helped out at his store fixing his computers and doing some counter work with the customers. Denise and I often talked and joked when we were there together, but our relationship was strictly professional as we were both married and had families. Besides, she was Stephen’s friend from childhood.

I was curious to see a message from Denise, but not shocked. I did give her the address, not one that I use for personal e-mails, but a Yahoo! e-mail address I give to people I am “iffy” about. The subject line caught my attention, though.

“Urgent! Please read!”

It wasn’t spam, and I didn’t think she would hit me up with some sort of business scheme; but, for the life of me I couldn’t think of a single issue where I’d need to speak to her in a hurry.

Stephen closed his shop up a few months earlier. Business in the shipping and receiving world was bad, especially since he had to compete with FedEx and UPS. Cutting his losses, he decided to sell collectibles on EBay and enjoy his well deserved pension from the NYPD. Denise started a new business with her husband and by then I got a job with my current employer at the college. With that said, I had no real reason to have any contact with Denise unless Stephen was involved.

I opened the e-mail.

“Mike, call me the moment you read this. It is important. Even if it is two o’clock in the morning, please call. I need to speak to you!”

She included her home phone, her cell phone, and the number to the business her and her husband owned together. At five a.m. I wasn’t going to call anybody, especially a woman I was only casually acquainted with; and, not with my wife in the shower getting ready for work a few yards away in our master bathroom. I didn’t want to have to withstand the district attorney style grilling she'd give me if I was caught calling a thirty-something woman from the secretive confines of our computer room at the crack of dawn.

I waited until I got to work. My job keeps me in front of a computer all day and I can check my e-mail messages at will. I opened My Yahoo!, navigated to my inbox, found her cell phone number, and then I called her up.

“Mike, oh my God Mike. It’s about Stephen.” She was bawling, weeping uncontrollably.

“What Denise, what happened?” My stomach tightened.

“He died. He died last night. He had a heart attack.” She said something else but I didn’t understand it.

I was reminded of that old joke where the guy was bluntly informed “The cat died;” but, it wasn’t the humor in that gag which struck me, it was the lack of preparation for the sad news he was given which was the punch line.

There was no "wind up" to her delivery. She blurted "he died," just like that.

The relationship you have with somebody and how you are given bad news about them says an awful lot about how people think of your association with that person. Stephen was my friend since 1989. We worked together in a squad car for almost six years, backed each other up each other on the streets, and knew things about each other which our families were not aware of. Still, I found it odd that the only person to reach out to me during that initial period of shock and mourning was a woman I was affiliated with through my part-time employment.

Once, only a few years ago, Stephen helped me out by giving me a job, insisting on paying me to set up his computer network. Times were a bit tough for me and my family as I was recently retired from the police department. I had brand new computer certifications, but no experience. One evening, when we were locking up his store, I thanked him, told him how much he was helping me, and I added that I did not think I could pay him back. With a raised hand, he cut me off and said “Hey, we rode in a sector car together. That’s for life.”

“He died?” That was all I could muster in response.

She gave me the details stating that he picked up his son Jimmy, his only child, from the airport. Jimmy had come home from college to be with his parents for the holidays. Stephen was divorced, but he bought a home around the block from his ex-wife to be close to his son and to help raise him. To his credit, he maintained an amicable relationship with her for their son's benefit. I only met his former spouse, Terry, once as they had been separated for many years. That night, he took his son home to meet his new girlfriend, a woman whom he had been seeing for about two months. The three of them had plans to go out for dinner. When he was preparing for a shower, he fell to the floor and was unable to be revived.

I hung up with Denise and ran outside my building. It was a crisp, clear day, and I ignored the cold. The folks in my office couldn’t help but overhearing what I said to Denise, but they politely refrained from asking what was going on until I eventually told them about my friend's passing.

For about two hours I was in shock and denial. In order to make some sense of what happened, I called the county coroner’s office. A polite woman who answered the phone knew whom I was referring to off the top of her head.

“Yes, sir, he was brought in last night. His ex-wife is coming to claim his body.”

He was no longer a person, but a body.

After muttering a few polite words of thanks, I hung up. The Dean offered me the rest of the day off and I refused. The best way to deal with his passing, as unexpected as it was for a forty eight year old man to drop dead, was to simply put my head down and work.

After hanging up with the corner's office and conferring with my supervisor, I called my wife to tell her about Stephen.

“What do you mean he died?” She asked with the same incredulity which I had when I spoke with Denise. “Isn’t he supposed to come over tomorrow?”

She was right. He was due to come by the next day for an informal visit just before Christmas and I was looking forward to seeing him. Instead, I was going to attend his wake.

The next evening I arrived at the funeral home and was curiously pleased to see marked, New York City police cars among the clogged streets and parking lots nearby. Hundreds showed up to pay their respects. If you knew Stephen you loved him. He was smart, funny, gregarious, and had a bit of a mischievous side to him. But, he was loyal to a fault. As I wended my way through the dozens of officers congregating on the front steps of the funeral home, some I knew well, others only vaguely, it struck me that as good of a friend as I was to him, I was only one of many hundreds whose lives he touched; and, I am ashamed to admit that I was a tad jealous.

Denise arrived with her husband and sought me out. She explained that she did not know my telephone number and found my e-mail address on a scrap of paper at the bottom of her pocketbook. It was a minor miracle considering that I gave it to her a year before. Stephen’s son Jimmy was remarkably poised for a young man who watched his dad die only two nights earlier. And then I saw Terry.

A receiving line formed in front of her as she took up a spot near his casket. Terry arranged the funeral, the wake, and his burial. She even dug through his closets and found all of the items for his dress uniform, including his name plate, shield, tie, collar brass, and other insignia. She’d done well, and I was touched, as she and her son were the only family Stephen had in the world.

“Hi Terry, you don’t remember me, but I’m Michael, Stephen’s friend.” I offered my hand and she took it and looked me in the eye.

“You’re Michael?” At first, I thought she didn’t hear me. Then she repeated herself.

“You’re Michael? Oh my goodness. You’re all Stephen ever spoke about.”
She stepped back and looked me up and down. Then, she smiled, but not in a happy way; but as if to confirm a suspicion.

“All these years,” she continued “all I ever heard was ‘Mike and I did this, and ‘Mike and I did that.’ He spoke about you all the time, more than anyone in this room.” Of course, she didn’t include their son in that comparison.

It didn’t occur to me that I was crying until she offered me a tissue. We talked a bit more and then I paid my respects to my buddy resting in a coffin.

Outside, I mingled with the cops, some in uniform and others in dark colored suits, on the front steps. Most of them wore grim expressions while they talked shop and reminisced about the good old days when Stephen was alive. I couldn’t wait to get the hell away from them. I was reminded of how much my life had changed since leaving "The Job" as I was now used to the more comfortable and safe environment the college has to offer. It was also obvious that one of the last connections to my former life in law enforcement, my friend and partner, was erased forever.

In the months following Stephen’s death, I was unable to get a hold of his son in spite of his acknowledgement that we should stay in touch. In addition, Denise has remained aloof. I do not want to interfere with her life; and in fact, we had no relationship at all except for when we worked at our mutual friend’s business. Every once in a while when I hear a joke that he would have laughed at, or when I see a gadget he would have enjoyed, or when I stumble on a difficult memory from my days on patrol, I think of him.

Early in my early career as a rookie, a veteran cop who was about to retire offered me this adage:

“On this job, you’ll have secrets which you won’t tell your wife, your parents, your priest, or anyone that you know, except your partner. Those things die with you.”

Man, was he right about that. As of today, I have nothing but a few photos to remind me of the time I had with my friend. In many ways, it is as if he never existed. There is no one else who I can turn to and talk about all of the things I did with him, and no one who will understand except other cops; and, still there are things that even they should not be privy to. All of that died with my partner.

A long time ago, we rode in a sector car together. That’s for life.

Author’s note: The original story about Stephen’s death “Goodbye to a True Friend” can be read here. It was written the morning after he passed away.





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Confessions of a Blood-Stained Twit

Notice to readers: names of the individuals in this story have been changed to protect the innocent, and the stupid.

In early 1990 I was a young rookie cop walking a beat in New York City. I was part of a field training unit sent out to patrol a housing development in upper Manhattan. It was a four-to-twelve shift on a January evening and I was deployed with a group of about twenty other rookies and a training sergeant to cover an area in Harlem. While patrolling alone, I rounded the corner at 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue and I was confronted by an extremely tall man, well over six feet in height. He was wearing a long white jacket with a white, brimless cap, and he was covered with deep, red blotches of blood. My initial suspicions were immediately quelled when I realized he was a worker from the nearby meat packing plant. The man, whom I’ll refer to as Ned because I like that name for this story, was talking on a payphone and hung up when he saw me approaching.

“That was fast, I just called you, Officer.” He said.
“You just called me? I didn’t get any calls.” I checked the volume knob on my bulky, police-issue, handheld radio to see if I inadvertently left it off.
“I just called nine-one-one.” He told me. It was at the moment that the central dispatcher alerted my unit to this individual at our location. I answered and informed the dispatcher that I was on the scene. My sergeant, a street smart young woman, Sgt Wertz (I like that name for her) responded also that she was on the way to that location to meet me and she ordered all other training units to respond as well. It was a slow tour, and I knew that she wanted to instruct us young cops on how to write a proper field report, and nothing more.

Confident that I could handle this situation myself, I opened my memo book and took the cap off a ball point pen and started to interview my “complainant.”

“Why did you call the police?” was the obvious question.” Ned smiled and placed his hands on his blotchy, maroon and white butcher’s coat.

“Okay Officer, it’s like this. You see, I’m a bookie. Now, I know that’s against the law, but I had an argument with a woman who owes me money, and it might have gotten a bit out of control, and I might have pushed her a little, and I just wanted to call you guys and set the whole thing straight before she did.”

I put the memo book back into my back pocket and took another look at the blood stains on his uniform. Precisely at the moment when he completed his pitch to me about telling his side to the story which hadn’t been reported yet by the other person involved, Sgt. Wertz and a small platoon of cops turned the corner where I came from and appeared behind me. I’ll never forget Ned’s eyes widening and saying “Whoa” out loud.

Sgt. Wertz took command. After a few moments of questioning, Ned told a tale of asking a woman he knew for the sum of forty dollars which she allegedly owed him for betting on a ball game. Ned was enlightened enough to understand that cops tend to make sort of a frowny face when it comes to illegal gambling; but, as an otherwise law abiding citizen, he enlisted the aid of the police to assist with this somewhat thorny issue involving him and one of his betting clients.

“Where is this woman now?” Sgt. Wertz asked. Ned took a few steps westward and pointed to one of the corner buildings on the opposite side of the development. She allowed Ned to lead the way as we all escorted this young entrepreneur who suddenly became quiet. We learned what floor the woman lived on and what apartment she was in and Sgt. Wertz asked me and two other cops in my squad to accompany her to the apartment. She ordered the rest of the squad to wait in the lobby, all sixteen of them, and keep and eye on Ned.

The woman’s apartment was on the sixth floor at the end of the hallway. We knocked, and knocked again, and waited. As we were about to leave, someone’s eye appeared in the peephole. The door opened abruptly. There was a woman living there as Ned informed us, and she looked to be about one hundred years old if she was a day.

“How did you know that I needed you?” she asked. Sgt. Wertz looked at me. I shrugged.

“Do you need the police for any reason?” Sgt. Wertz asked. Cops always ask questions we know the answer to. It’s a method to catch people in a lie, though in this case Wertz was asking out of habit.

“Why yes, Officer. I don’t have a phone, and I couldn’t call.”

“Do you know a tall man wearing a white jacket and a hat?”

“Yes, yes. You have him? He’s the one. He did it to us.” Then the old woman turned around and shouted, as only an extremely elderly person can “Henry! It’s the police!” Henry turned out to be her husband who was older than his wife. No kidding, the woman was ninety three and the husband was ninety four. They had a very different story to tell than Ned did.

For about three or four days, Ned, who worked in the meat packing plant nearby as I deduced from his attire, confronted the woman and her husband while he took his lunch break and they were sitting in the bench in front of their apartment building. Each day, he’d ask them for money, and they’d tell him to get lost. Only, Ned didn’t get lost; and on that day, he followed them into the lobby of their building as they tried to escape his persistent and increasingly menacing presence.

The woman and her husband shuffled onto the elevator together and watched as the door closed on Ned’s face. That didn’t stop clever Ned as he ran up the stairs and met them as they came off the elevator. She screamed and fought as Ned tried to rip her pocketbook off her shoulder. Her husband pushed and shoved at him too and Ned knocked her over and dragged her down the hallway by the pocketbook strap. When he was able to yank the pocketbook free, the husband started beating Ned about the head and shoulders with his cane. Ned wisely dropped the bag and ran fled, unable to subdue a couple in their nineties. The first thing he did was to locate a payphone and call the police to get his side of the story in first before they did. That’s where we came in.

Sgt. Wertz heard enough and contacted the other officers guarding Ned in the lobby. “Put him in handcuffs” was all she said. The cop who answered said “10-4” but left the radio keyed long enough for us to overhear Ned in the background saying “Hey wait, I called the police, I called the police.”

I rode in the back seat of the patrol car with Ned, as he writhed in discomfort with his hands cuffed behind his back. The cop driving the RMP (that’s NYPD cop terminology for a police car: Radio Motor Patrol) ignored Ned as he ranted and complained to me, the senior officer behind the wheel, and to anyone who drove past us oblivious to his plight.

“You can’t lock me up, I’m the one who called the police.” He kept repeating.

“That’s right, you called the police, and we thank you.” I said.

“No Officer, I called you guys, so you can’t lock me up.”

“What? No way, you don’t think…” The other officer and I laughed out loud. It was clear that Ned truly believed that if a person called the police first, he was immune from being arrested no matter what he was accused of. Though Ned was the first person I encountered in my police career who acted under this misapprehension, I met many more folks like him during the course of my career who believed that they would be absolved of their crimes if they called nine-one-one before the other guy did.

“Hey hey, Ned, knock it off, you’re way too loud.” The other officer said. He stopped the car and chirped the siren at a garbage truck which was blocking the side street we were on.

“No, no. I’m not supposed to get arrested, this is wrong.” He griped. I couldn’t believe it. I never met anyone so dim-witted.

“What’s wrong is that you robbed somebody and called the police on yourself.” he turned around and looked Ned in the eye. “You have the right to remain silent…use it.”

Ned was a dumb guy, but he knew useful legal advice when he heard it. Not a word came out of his mouth and he drove with us the rest of the way to the precinct with his chin in his chest. Poor Ned, maybe he would have been a better bookie than a robber; but I’m willing to bet he never called the police again.





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Red & White and Christmas Lights

Dear Readers,
I wrestled with whether or not I should post this on my blog. Briefly, at around 1:30 a.m. on December 2, 2007, I published this piece with a few more details than what is present now, and I received a very supportive and very insightful comment from an excellent blogger and new reader to Mr. Grudge. My reluctance to share this story overpowered me and I removed the post and graciously contacted the author of the comment and explained the removal. After further contemplation, I edited out identifying details and I decided to post this story again because I want to make a statement regarding the need for all of us to cherish what we have and to not take our lives or our families for granted. Thank you. -Mr. Grudge

December 2, 2007, 12:57 a.m.: It is late and I am writing this piece because I cannot sleep. I’m sitting across from our Christmas tree and the colorful lights are reflecting off the screen of my laptop, as well as blinking lights from outside our window. In order to try to fall asleep, I thought I would write about my day.

December 1, 2007, 10:30a.m.:
When my father heard me coming in is door of his home this morning with my children, he greeted us with the same giant hug he always did even when my mother was alive. Our plan was to help my father move some furniture and then eat lunch together while unbeknownst to the kiddies, my wife sneaked off to the store to buy the final, “big” present that Santa Claus will be bringing them this year.

My wife and I had a somewhat delicately timed plan to get the thing into our house. After leaving my Dad’s place, I was to take my daughter home first and then drop my son of at his friend’s house for a play date, and my wife was going to bring our daughter for her violin lesson, and I was to then go to the store alone and pick up present, and then high-tail it back to our house to hide the box in our garage. Then, I was to go back and retrieve our son, and we were all going to meet back home and then go out for dinner. Sounds like a plan, right?

At around 2:00 p.m., we said our good byes to my dad and my wife called on my cell phone to confirm, as only a wife would, that I understood everything I had to do, and that I had the receipt, and I wouldn’t be dopey enough to blurt out that I was going to pick up their gift which is supposed to be from Santa Claus to our kids.

I ended the call with her and decided to call her back and tell her that I would drop our son off at his friend’s house first and then take our daughter home so I wouldn’t have to crisscross the neighborhood and I could do everything in one shot. As my wife listened, she stopped me and said “Let me hang up, there’s something going on outside. I’ll call you right back.”

Moments later, my cell phone rang. She told me that it looked like there was some sort of accident in front of our neighbor’s home a few doors down from us. This particular family has children the same age as ours and our eight year old son is friends with their son. The same thought went through both of our minds as we feared that the boy may have been hit by a car. I asked a lot of questions, forgetting who my audience was in the back seat, and my son started to worry aloud. “Is that my friend, daddy? Is Jared alright?” I assured him that Jared wasn’t hurt, although I wasn’t actually sure, and my daughter chimed in with her own questions. I held my hand up to my daughter to quiet her down so I could hear my wife. Ordinarily, she’s pretty calm under pressure, but she sounded anxious.

“Hold on, I can’t hear you,” she said “there’s a helicopter, its right over the house. I have to go. I’ll call you right back."
It’s about thirty minutes to my father’s house from ours. The ride back is the same, of course; but after this series of cell phone calls, it was turning into a ten minute drive and I was cutting people off to get home. All sorts of images were popping into my head about someone’s poor child laying in the street and his or her parents in anguish. I tuned the radio to my kid’s favorite station and pretended everything as just fine.

About five minutes later, my cell phone rang again. I could tell that my wife was on her cell phone and not the cordless one in our kitchen. The sirens in the background were a dead giveaway that she was outside.

“Try not to react,” she said in the same serious tone one uses to deliver bad news. “Some one was killed...murdered...across the street.”

The details were sketchy, but about eight houses down the block, a person, (I am not going to reveal names or my relationship to this family, and I am deliberately keeping out certain details) was dead, murdered apparently by an intruder. I was even queasier than when I believed one of the neighbor’s kid’s was hit by a car.

“Don’t come up our block,” she said “The whole street is blocked off. They’re still looking for whoever did it.”

In record time, I made it home, even after having to take a lengthier route though the crowded mall. In a bizarre scene in our quiet town, police were everywhere, swarming our yards, stringing up crime scene tape within just a few feet from our home, and several officers had police dogs which were sniffing the immediate area around the residence where the murder took place. All of my years of police experience meant nothing. This is my block, and they were folks I knew. Nothing can harden me to the fear of a killer stalking around my house evading the police.

December 2, 2007 1:31 a.m. update:
Around eight o’clock at night I called my father and told him what happened and he was shocked and frightened for us. I told him not to worry because there were an army of cops on the street and it was unlikely that anything would happen to us. My father said he’d pray for the victim; but, what surprised me was that he said he would even pray for the killer as he somehow has this evil within him, and that it is only right to help him with our faith. I am getting ready to turn off the Christmas tree lights now; but the red and white lights of the police car at the end of my driveway will flash all night outside.

Author's note: I am not in the habit of writing journal style posts like this of my every day life. Writing, as I've discussed often in this space offers a sense of closure, or therapy if you will, at times when one is in grief or turmoil. I did my best to leave out the pertinent details such as names and the particulars of the crime. There will be no further updates to this story. Thank you all for reading.

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