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Are the Democrats forging ahead? Or are they just forging? I had to get
that in, but that’s all the politics this week.
Today I have another story that I’ve exhumed from my archives. It goes back
to the time when I was a captain in Queens, on the border of Nassau County.
It was a peculiar job, in that there were aspects of it similar to the job of
being a consul representing the U.S. in a foreign country. As such you often
found yourself traveling to remote areas to help out an American in trouble in
one of them, perhaps captured by a savage tribe in the backwoods. We did that
in Queens. Thousands of New York cops lived east of the border in Nassau and
Suffolk counties and when they got jammed up out there, it was the
responsibility of Queens to travel to them.
One night in May I found myself en route to Levittown in company with
Inspector Boland to investigate a major off-duty case, an officer in the emergency
room of Nassau County Medical Center after being shot in the stomach in his own
back yard. When we got to the hospital at one o’clock in the morning, we
found we wouldn’t be able to speak to the cop, whom I’ll call Officer Jones,
because he was under sedation in intensive care after repairs to his liver. His
partner was there off-duty, and he told us he had gotten threats at home on his
unlisted number, from people who objected to his narcotics work in Manhattan.
To him it looked like Jones might have been stalked by the same people for
the purpose of assassination.
Our next stop was at the local station house to see the detective on the
case. He told us that it had originated with the Nassau radio dispatcher, who had
gotten a call from Jones saying he’d been shot in the belly and he needed
help at his home. Nassau police hustled to the scene, where they found Jones
lying in a pool of blood on his kitchen floor. They got him into an ambulance and
off to the hospital at top speed. Other cops found his gun in the yard.
The perpetrators were long gone.
Marvin Boland and I looked at each other. Two conflicting instincts were
meeting inside both of us. One was the urge to help the cop, to do as much as we
could for him, to do whatever it took to help him survive. The other was the
urge to make sure we didn’t fall for a set-up, didn’t buy a story that would
later be exposed as a cover for the real one, probably some kind of lover’s
quarrel that got out of hand.
What did we have? Nothing directly from the cop, but a couple of written
statements from the first responders, who said he told them he heard his dog
barking in his yard at 8:00 and went outside to see what was wrong. In the dark
he tripped and fell off the back step. Looking up he saw the source of the
disturbance -- a black man holding a gun on him, and another one who snatched
Jones’ gun from his ankle holster, took aim and shot him with it. Not a word
was spoken. The last he saw of the men, they were vanishing over his back
fence and he was crawling around the yard looking for his gun. When he found it
he fired a shot in the air to get help, then staggered back into the house and
called 911. He collapsed on the floor before help arrived.
It was an “unusual occurrence” if there ever was one. Cops simply didn’t
get followed to their homes by assassins. But how could a man just make up a
story like that? When for all he knew he was bleeding to death? In civilized
America, crawling in his own blood in his own yard after being gut-shot by an
animal.
The first thing to do was to get the home picture straight. Why was Jones
alone in the house? Because his wife had moved out with the children, pending a
divorce. What kind of cop was he? A good one, we found out, with ten
citations and a slew of drug arrests. That explained the divorce. Good cops often
paid that kind of price.
What about the bar where he stopped on the way home? That was in the
statement he gave to the first responders. Had anything happened there? Something
that might have led to bloodshed in his back yard? But there was no point in
tracking down the bartender at three o’clock in the morning to get a statement
about some incident for the occurrence of which we had no evidence. No
predicate for the question, as lawyers say.
A better bet was an eight-year-old neighbor boy who had told the detective
that he saw the two perpetrators escaping over the fence. We left him in bed
too, but the detective told us he believed him. Good. Why would a child tell a
lie to cover up the truth about a shooting? He wouldn’t. Those assassins
were starting to take on reality at last.
In fact at 9:30 that morning it looked like they might have corporeally
manifested themselves in Bayshore, Long Island, not very far from Levittown. At
3:30 a Parkway cop had intercepted three black men in a stolen car . One of
them fired two shots at him before they surrendered. One escaped. But it looked
good. Shooting at cops was a strong link between the two incidents. Most
bad guys didn’t shoot at the police.
I was still hard at work at 9:30 because there was a report to be done and I
was doing it. We had finally left Nassau County an hour or two earlier after
arranging for the Nassau police to protect Jones in the hospital and his
partner at home until New York could take it over or the assassination threat was
ruled out. Now I was going step-by-step through the story, entering in the
names and affiliations of no less than twenty-seven people involved in it in
some way. The call from Bayshore was just another couple of paragraphs to be
added to the previous twenty.
Three days later all questions were answered and all mysteries unraveled.
Marvin and I went back to the hospital. Jones was sitting up and taking
nourishment, surrounded by nurses and note-taking cops. He told his story to us. It
was the same as it had been at the beginning. He fell off the back step
because the light didn’t work and the two men startled him so that he went for his
gun in his ankle holster and lost his balance doing it. He discounted the
idea of assassination. He was sure the men were burglars instead. He had never
been threatened, he said, and the ones to his partner had been made a long
time ago. The bar patrons had vouched for his sobriety, so had other people, and
he sounded fine, though in pain, on the 911 tape. The arrestees in Bayshore
weren’t our suspects. Did his wife come to visit him? I didn’t ask, but I
hoped so.
There’s a message here about gun control, but I don’t think it’s a mixed
one. The man was shot with his own gun, true, but there was another one on the
scene as well. The second suspect had an automatic and he put it to Jones’
head before the other man shot him. The message I get from this is that there
are people on the loose with guns in their hands, and unilateral disarmament isn
’t the answer to that. Believe it or not, it’s not the way to give peace a
chance.
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