Excerpt from Little Boy Blue
Every cop I've ever known, no matter how callous, dreaded being the messenger of death. More than
any other assignment, it ripped away a piece of your soul. Usually I avoided it by passing
the job off to my partner, the Great Joe Gregory. Not this time, he told me in the parking lot at John F. Kennedy International airport. Absolutely not.
"I got history with this woman," he said.
"No problem," I said. "I'll tell her." But I could hear the echoes of my own history: a woman holding the body of her son in her arms.
A woman whose screams followed a young cop from the third floor of a Bronx tenement,
through the streets, to the precinct locker room, then everywhere for the last three decades.
"One good thing, pally," Gregory said. "At least Cookie already knows the kid's been shot. It won't be a total surprise."
Eleven hours earlier, young Johnny Boy Counihan, an airport cargo
handler, was murdered as he walked into the middle of a huge cash robbery outside a TWA
loading dock. The chief of detectives notified his mother, Cookie, but didn't give her the
complete details. He omitted the fact that her twenty-eight-year-old son had been
butchered in a hail of automatic weapons fire, apparently by a crew of mafia wannabees. He also avoided those three blockbuster letters: DOA.
Gregory said, "I'm going to ask the chief if I can help out on this case."
"Don't bother. He has a standing rule against letting cops work on cases involving partners or family."
"Yeah, but J.C.'s not like a recent partner. We were only rookies when we last worked together."
Cookie's husband, J.C. Counihan was Joe Gregory's first radio car
partner in the seven-five precinct in Brooklyn. J.C. retired five years ago and moved to
Florida. Last summer he suffered a massive stroke and was confined to a nursing home. We
were waiting for the flight carrying his wife, who would hear the worst news of her life, alone. From me.
"I just feel like I should be doing something," Gregory said.
"I didn't think you'd even spoken to J.C. in years."
"Yeah, but still, the poor bastard, helpless down there. It's the right thing to do."
The air was cool and crisp. Long shadows darkened the street in
front of the terminal as we crossed. Gregory held up his hand with a cop's aplomb, halting a white limo and a Holiday Inn courtesy bus.
"Gate B Sixteen," Gregory said, squinting at the arrivals screen.
"How long have you known Cookie?" I asked.
"Oh shit, how long. Before they were married. I remember a double date. Me and JC took Cookie and some bimbette to Jones Beach. Long time ago."
"How about the kid?" I asked. "Ever meet him?"
"Not that I can remember. I didn't see that much of them after they got married."
Cops develop a bond in their first assigned precincts, a bond
that extends beyond the job and carries an eternal responsibility. J.C. helped get Joe
into the Detective Bureau; Joe always wangled Yankee tickets for J.C. It is this infinite
repayment of favors, called honoring your contracts, that greases the very wheels the NYPD runs on.
"Tell me this, Ryan," Gregory said. "What's the deal with the cop coat? Was he a buff, or what?"
To make matters worse young Johnny Boy had been wearing an obsolete NYPD woolen overcoat that had belonged to his father.
"Old uniforms are trendy," I said. "Kids buy them
in thrift shops in Soho. I've seen kids wearing West Point capes, Russian Army coats, and every once in awhile, one of our old overcoats."
Guards at the security checkpoint decided they needed a
supervisor to approve our carrying guns past that point. As we waited, I watched the
people; airports have the best crowds. I noticed jogging outfits had replaced business suits as the favored travel attire.
"So this poor kid," Gregory said, as we walked toward the gate, "dies because he's wearing a trendy freaking thirty pound horse blanket of a cop coat."
"So goes the current thinking."
"I don't get the airline food, either. You believe he was actually going out the door just to get airline food?"
The robbery occurred at two minutes after midnight on the Sunday
after Thanksgiving, the busiest air travel weekend of the year. Johnny Boy had been
working a double shift. His fellow employees surmised he was probably leaving to scoff a
hot airline entree from a steward's cart. That was Johnny Boy's usual practice when stuck on double shifts.
"What I'm saying," Gregory said, "is who the hell goes out of his way for free airline food?"
"Like you never went out of your way for a free meal."
"Yeah, to the Plaza, the Four Seasons...."
"Those restaurants made the cops eat in the kitchen," I said.
"The point remains, it was definitely not airline food."
Flight 164 from Fort Lauderdale was on time. A man in
tiger-striped pants lugged a crate of oranges on his shoulder. Cookie Counihan was among
the last of the tanned travelers appearing in the passenger loading bridge. Gregory
pointed her out, then walked away. I waved to her, rehearsed the words one more time, took a last deep breath, and Mrs. Cookie Counihan was in front of me.
"He's dead, isn't he?" she said.
I nodded. Just nodded.
"My husband was a cop a long time," she said. "I know exactly what 'seriously injured' means."
Cookie Counihan was a big woman with a clear pretty face, the
type of face that made our GI's go to war. Blue eyes, red lips, and skin so pale her color
flushed when she spoke, as if the words caused red liquid to splash and spread. Like when
she saw Joe Gregory and her strong facade crashed. I looked around for a loose chair, as
Gregory wrapped his arms around her and held her, as her knees buckled and the sobbing came fast and hard.
"Joey," she said. "They sent you."
Joe Gregory's shirt was damp with tears, and black with a mascara
smudge in the shape of a small half-moon. Gregory had been my partner for most of two
decades. He was the toughest cop I'd ever known, and, occasionally, the most tender. This
time he even managed to look shy when she said, "You still look good."
We walked toward the baggage claim, Cookie between us, talking
about Johnny Boy. All of us nodding our heads sadly. Gregory watched Cookie intently, the
worry causing his face to glow a shiny crimson. But Cookie was getting strong again. She
said that Johnny Boy was a little slow, but a hard worker, and well liked at TWA. She said
he had the same split nationality as I did. He looked like her side of the family, but
loved the Irish roots of his father. Not a day went by when Johnny wasn't wearing the green.
"How's J.C. doing?" Gregory asked.
"Not good, Joey," she said. "And I have to be honest with you, it's all my fault."
"No it's not, Cook," Gregory said. "The Man upstairs runs the show."
Her eyes watered, and I saw it again, in her face, the dance of colors. I felt a sudden appreciation for this woman whose complexion violated the privacy of her thoughts.
"Thanks," she said. "But it was all my idea to move to Florida. J.C. was never happy. He missed New York, he missed being a cop. Me...I
adjusted. Him...you had to see the puss on him. He looked just like his mother, so unhappy. Life was agony. Every day was agony."
Cookie Counihan's hair was a tinsel-silver blonde, curled wildly,
and parted in the center. She walked quickly with short, heel-toe steps. Over her arm she
carried a bright red woolen coat with a copy of People magazine jammed in the pocket.
"Was JC active?" I said. "Did he play much golf?"
"Don't make me laugh with the golf," she said. "J.C. Counihan followed people for fun."
"Followed what people?"
"Bad guys. Everybody was a bad guy. All I heard was: 'Look at that guy, he's bad news. Check that creep, he's up to no good. Look at this skell here,
that one there.' Skells, creeps, it's all I heard. Twice he left me at the mall in Boca Raton. He drives off on some wild goose chase. I had to get the bus home."
"J.C. Counihan was a bloodhound on wheels, pally,"
Gregory said, looking over Cookie's head. "He taught me all I know about tailing."
I said, "It's a mistake for cops to retire without something to do."
"He was doing," she said. "Following is doing.
Outside places taking pictures is doing. At home he had his ear glued to the police
scanner for hours and hours. So he was doing, don't say he wasn't doing."
"I didn't mean that," I said. "I meant exercise wise. My father lives down there, plays golf every day. He's in his eighties and he's healthier than I am."
"My husband is sixty-one," she said. "And he's never getting better."
The line at the escalator was held up by a group of frightened
third world types who'd never seen one before. Close encounters with crowds of newly arrived foreigners always made me appreciate the bathing habits of Americans.
"You should have seen my guest bedroom," she said.
"It was supposed to be for company, it looked like the Fifth Precinct. Charts on the
wall, pictures of our neighbors. I took them all down. Can you believe it, our neighbors? J.C. thinks they're in the Witness Protection Program."
"Nothing wrong with that," Gregory said. "Cops are acting normal when they're suspicious."
"Nothing changes; you guys always stick together. But I'll
tell you this: my husband used to call the local cops from pay phones to report things,
and he'd talk in this phony Spanish accent. That's not normal. He used to write letters
about people he suspected, but he used the rental typewriter in Kinko's so no one could
trace it. Don't tell me that's normal behavior. That might be cop behavior, but that's not normal behavior."
Late arrivals raced toward the departure gates, faces flushed and
sweating. I'd read that heart attack was the leading cause of death at JFK. They averaged
one a day. Joe Gregory looked like he could be today's statistic.
"Now this," Cookie said, sighing. "My son was the one thing that gave my husband joy."
"Does JC know about Johnny Boy?" I asked.
"Not yet," she said. "It's going to kill him when he hears. He's going to blame himself for getting Johnny Boy his job with TWA."
"I didn't know that," Gregory said.
"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. J.C. knew everybody at the airport."
The three of us stood together at the baggage carousel. I
knew that this last contract, a job for his son, would weigh heavily on J.C. Counihan. Joe
Gregory was silent, watching a skinny kid in black jeans push his way through the crowd,
never seeming to find the right place to stand. I knew what he was thinking: pickpocket. I
tried to make conversation, but ran out of things to say long before the conveyor belt lurched to a start.
"Where did it happen?" Cookie said.
"Outside the TWA building, near the loading dock," I said.
"I want to go there."
"No, you don't," I said.
She didn't answer me. She looked toward Joe Gregory, who turned
away to face the limo con artists and the homeless hustlers scamming for tourist luggage
with discarded courtesy carts. I watched Gregory's eyes darting around the room, as
designer suitcases and taped cardboard boxes tumbled down the chute. Cop's eyes. Watching
everything, every movement. Yet, something was wrong. It was as if he was unable to stop, unable to focus on one thing.
All my instincts told me it was wrong to allow a mother to stare
down at the fading outlines of her son's blood. But there was so much I didn't know. As a
cop for three decades I'd learned that black and white were merely shades of gray. Maybe
it would be cathartic, a way of saying goodbye. Standing next to Cookie I realized how little I understood about grief at its bottom.
"I gave birth to him," she said. "I want to see where he died."
Please report any technical problems to the webmaster.
Copyright 2000-2008 Edward Dee
To order books from Amazon.com, please click on these links:
The Con Man's Daughter
Nightbird
Little Boy Blue
Bronx Angel
14 Peck Slip
| 
