Free Manhattan 62 by Reggie Nadelson Page A

Jesus, faggoty suede boots,” he said. “Black turtleneck, what the hell is that?”
    After I finished school and the academy, and I was a working cop, I got myself the apartment here on Hudson Street, on the far west fringes of Greenwich Village. The area was still rough, the tenements inhabited by immigrants and dockworkers, who kept chickens in the scruffy backyards. People were hard up. Single men lived alone in rooms with a gas ring. Rolled their own smokes, or picked up pennies from the sidewalk to make the quarter for a pack of Pall Mall.
    My place had been a cold-water flat back then, the toilet in the hall, the bathtub in the kitchen, but I got it fixed up, bathroom and all. I could play my music loud as I wanted and I spent summer nights on my fire escape, listening to the stuff coming in on the radio from the south, or WUFO in Buffalo. Didn’t have to listen to my father call it “monkey music”.
    In those days, there were a few other cops who lived around the Village. I used to run into one of them, an Italian called Frank who lived on Perry Street; he had pretty long hair for a cop, but he was sharp as hell, and we would sometimes drink together, or play a little pool. He had been in Korea, like me. He had the kind of guts I never had. Everyone knew how corrupt the system was, and years later he fought it, and he got shot in the face for his trouble.
    Hudson Street wasn’t part of the Greenwich Village of cafés, and galleries, cobblestone streets, brownstones and redbrick houses. But at the White Horse, a couple of blocks up, I met writers, and I liked them; I liked the life.
    I started drinking there when I moved into my apartment. Sometimes I met girls who asked about that Welsh poet who drank himself to death. Told them I knew him, and I was there that fatal night. It was a great pick-up line.
    People fought over politics like it was life and death, and I heard stuff I had never thought about. Sometimes the conversations turned into fights that went on all night. One time this skinny writer, Michael something, tells me about what he calls the other America, whatever the hell that is, but they’re pretty happy to have an Irish cop. I know the Irish songs. When I bring Nancy by, Mailer looks her up and down, and Baldwin says she can call him Jimmy. She’s impressed, unlike my pa who says to me, “Fucking Dorothy Day, Catholic Workers, my goddamn ass. What kind of Catholic is she? She’s a goddamned Red.”
    Again, the goddamn phone rang; again, I stumbled to the kitchen. It was one of the guys in the office. Voice almost inaudible.
    â€œHow come you’re whispering?”
    â€œJust listen to me. The coroner, the ghoulish one, you know, with three strands of hair he combs over that bald head? He examined the man from the pier. Said far as he could tell, the wounds matched those from the girl on the High Line. Says it’s the same knife. Same everything.”
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œI have to get off, Pat. That’s all I got.”
    â€œWhat’s the hurry,” I said. “Hello?” But he had hung up. I tried calling back. As soon as he heard my voice, he put the receiver down. I called the station house again; the sergeant said, “Get your rest, Pat.”
    What the hell was going on? Was it that bastard Logan? Was I no longer welcome in my own precinct?
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I said.
    â€œJust get some damn rest,” the sergeant said, and I told him to put me through to my boss. When Murphy picked up the phone, he told me the same thing he had told me the night before: get some rest.
    Somebody, and it had to be somebody higher up, didn’t want me on the case. Again, I thought about Logan, the bastard on the pier who told me I was off it, that I was not wanted.
    I stumbled upstairs to the Perinos’ apartment to check on Tommy. He was OK, and his father was home, so I went back to my bed, feeling like