Ghosts

The fireworks started at about 10:30.

They started with a so-called “family dispute” on Mason and Sixth. Not too many years ago Mason Avenue had been known far and wide as la Vía de Putas—Whore Street. The hookers along that seedy stretch of Puerto Rican turf had since left it for greener pastures downtown, where they could turn a trick in a massage parlor for a quick forty to eighty dollars, depending on the services rendered. La Vía de Putas was now simply la Vía—the Street—a combination of pool parlors, porno bookshops, porn-flick theaters, greasy spoons, mom-and-pop grocery stores, a dozen or more bars, and a storefront church dedicated to saving the souls of those who frequented the area. Except for the church—which squatted in one-story religious hopefulness between the grimy buildings sandwiching it—the classy emporiums lining the Street were on the ground floors of tenements that housed people who were willing to settle for grubby surroundings in return for some of the cheapest rents to be found anywhere in the city. It was in one of these apartments that the family dispute took place.

The two patrolmen responding to the call were confronted with a distinctly unholidaylike scene. There were a pair of bodies in the living room, both of them wearing nightgowns, both of them the victims of a shooting. One of them, a woman, was sitting dead in a chair near the telephone, the receiver still clutched in her bloody hand. It was she, they later learned, who had placed the call to Emergency 911. The second victim was a sixteen-year-old girl, sprawled face downward on the patched linoleum, similarly dead. The woman who’d placed the call to 911 had said only, “Send the police, my husband is going crazy.” The patrolmen had expected a family dispute, but not one of such proportions. They had knocked on the apartment door, received no answer, tried the knob, and then entered somewhat casually—this was Christmas Day, this was Hanukkah. Now they both drew their pistols and fa

On the radio in the car downstairs, they reported to Desk Sergeant Murchison that it looked like they had a double homicide here, not to mention somebody with a gun behind a locked door. Murchison called upstairs to the squadroom. Pee Wee Wizonski, who was catching, took his holster and pistol from the drawer of his desk, motioned to Hal Willis across the room, and was out through the gate in the railing even before Willis put on his coat. Murchison downstairs put a call through to Homicide and also to the Emergency Squad covering this section of the city. If there was a guy with a gun behind a locked door, this was a job for the volunteer Emergency cops, and not mere mortals. The Emergency cops were already there when Wizonski and Willis made the scene. Together the detectives from the Eight-Seven looked a lot like Mutt and Jeff or Laurel and Hardy. Wizonski was the biggest detective on the squad; Willis was the smallest, having just barely passed the Police Department’s five-foot-eight height requirement. The RMP patrolmen filled them in on what had happened upstairs, and they all went up to the fourth floor again. The Emergency cops, wearing bulletproof vests, went in first. Whoever was behind the locked door fired the moment he heard sounds in the apartment, so they abandoned all notions of kicking in the door. In the corridor outside, the assembled cops held a high-level conference.

The two Homicide men assigned to the case were named Phelps and Forbes. They looked a lot like Monoghan and Monroe, who were home just then, opening Christmas gifts. (The men of the Eight-Seven would later learn that Monoghan’s wife had presented him with a gold-plated revolver; Monroe’s wife had given him a video cassette home recorder upon which he could secretly play the porn tapes he picked up hither and yon in the city.) Phelps and Forbes were disgruntled about having to work on Christmas Day. Phelps was particularly a

“We go near that door,” Phelps said, “that spic in there’ll blow our fuckin’ heads off.”

“Think we can hit the window?” one of the Emergency cops asked.

“What floor is this?” the other one said.

“The fourth.”

“How many in the building?”

“Five.”

“Worth trying a rope from the roof, don’t you think?”

“You guys keep him busy outside the door,” the first Emergency cop said. “One of us’ll come in the window behind him.”

“When you hear us yell,” the second Emergency cop said, “kick in the door. We’ll get him both ways.”

The patrolmen who were first at the scene had meanwhile talked to a lady in an apartment down the hall who told them there were two daughters in the family—the sixteen-year-old they’d found dead on the floor and a ten-year-old named Consuela. They reported this to the cops working out their strategy in the hallway, and all of them agreed they had what was known as a “hostage situation” here, which made it a bit risky to come flying in the window like Batman. The two Emergency cops were in favor of trying it, anyway, without asking for help from the Hostage Unit. But Phelps and Forbes vetoed them and asked one of the patrolmen to go downstairs and call in for a hostage team. Nobody yet knew whether ten-year-old Consuela was indeed behind that locked door with whoever was shooting the gun or out taking a stroll in the snow instead.

A genuine hostage situation normally brought a lot of muck-a-mucks to the scene, even if the scene happened to be in a Puerto Rican section of town. By 11:00 that morning, when the two Hostage Unit cops arrived, there were four sergeants, a lieutenant, and a captain standing in the crowded hallway with all the others. The captain was in charge of the operation now, and he laid his plans like someone about to storm the Kremlin, telling the Emergency cops he did indeed want a man on a rope from the roof coming down to the window while the Hostage cops talked to the guy through the door. He wanted bulletproof vests on everybody, including the man coming down on the rope. He wanted Wizonski and Willis in vests as backups behind the Hostage cops at the door. The Emergency cop who pla

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Meyer Meyer and Bob O’Brien caught a somewhat more elevated squeal. Ordinarily Meyer did not enjoy working with O’Brien. This had nothing to do with O’Brien’s personality, skill, or courage. It had to do only with O’Brien’s peculiar penchant for getting into situations where it became necessary for him to shoot somebody. O’Brien did not enjoy shooting people. In fact, he went to enormous lengths to avoid having to draw his pistol. But people eager to get shot seemed naturally to gravitate toward him. As a result, because cops don’t like to get shot any more than civilians do, and because working with O’Brien increased the possibility that there would be an exchange of unwanted gunfire, most of the cops on the 87th tried to arrange it so that they were not too often partnered with him. O’Brien, perhaps wrongly, had been dubbed a hard-luck cop. He himself believed that if anywhere in this city there was a man or a woman with a weapon, that weapon would somehow be used against him, and he would have to defend himself. He once told this to the girl he was engaged to marry; she broke the engagement the following week, small wonder.