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“Noooo!” Shawna cried. “We miss you! We really, really miss you!”
“I miss you, too, Shawna. Like you wouldn’t believe,” Mary Catherine said. “I feel like I’ve been gone a year. How long has it been?”
“Ten years,” I said.
“Guess what we named the puppy, Mary Catherine?” Fiona said, holding him up to the screen.
“Tell me,” Mary Catherine said, smiling widely.
“Jasper!” the kids cried out together.
“And don’t forget that the hamster’s name is now Puddles. That suggestion was me own, actually, on account of his reaction each time I pick up the nervous little fella,” Seamus said as the little ones giggled.
“I love you all. That includes Jasper and Puddles. I’ll be home to you as soon as I can. Bye now,” Mary Catherine said as she clicked off the connection.
“Not soon enough, Mary Catherine,” I mumbled to the blank gray screen.
CHAPTER 83
AFTER DROPPING THE KIDS off at school, I drove up on a loud commotion by the Harlem squad’s office building on 125th Street.
As I parked behind a donut cart near the corner of Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, I could see a one-legged homeless guy on the plaza in front of the building. He was putting on some kind of a show. Jumping around energetically like a middle-aged black pogo stick, he was shaking a coin-filled coffee cup while singing the Marvin Gaye classic “Let’s Get It On” at the top of his lungs.
Was he harmless? Dangerous? Bath-salted? I wondered as I stepped toward him. Entertaining? Definitely.
“Well, hello there, sir. Tucker Johnson’s the name,” the man said, jingling the change in his coffee cup like a tambourine as he hopped toward me with a surprising athletic alacrity. “You have a request? What can ol’ Tucker sing for you? You like the Platters? I do a real nice ‘Twilight Time.’”
I shook my head. I could smell the cheap wine off him from ten feet. Handicapped people are able to accomplish a lot of amazing things that deserve applause. But drinking oneself into oblivion by eight-thirty in the morning isn’t one of them.
“I don’t mind you hanging out, Tucker. You just can’t hang out here making so much noise, bothering the good people of the world trying to go to work. No singing until noon. At least. Also, getting sober first might be nice.”
“Ah, man. I ain’t hurtin’ no one,” he said. “I’m just tryin’ to spread a little sonic joy out here this morning. Plus this is my work, man. You gonna put an artist outta work?”
“Fine,” I said. “How does ten bucks sound to go away?” I reached into my wallet.
“Twenty sounds better,” Tucker said, getting surly.
“Twenty what?” I said, staring at him sternly. “Days in jail for disturbing the peace?”
“On second thought, ten’ll do just fine,” Tucker said, brightening.
The crowd waiting at the donut cart on the corner of 125th gave me a cheer as I escorted Tucker Johnson on his way. I took a modest bow before heading back toward the building. And why not? Not even in the office yet and I’d already solved my first civil disturbance of the day.
But before I got even halfway to the building’s front door, my phone rang. It was Arturo.
“Mike, I just picked up the office phone. A cop stationed over at Harlem Hospital said Rachel Wecht just came in, in terrible shape.”
I stopped in my tracks. Rachel Wecht was Roger’s new punk rock girlfriend, I remembered.
“Apparently, Roger really did a job on her last night,” Arturo continued. “They were smoking crack, and he went nuts and threw her out a second-story window face-first. She broke both her arms and cheekbones and knocked out her front teeth. The good news is she spilled the beans on Roger’s location. He stays at the Charles H. Gay shelter for men out on Wards Island.”
“Come down on the double, Arturo,” I cried as I headed back for the car. “I’ll meet you in the lot. We can’t let this guy get away again.”
CHAPTER 84
A SEEMINGLY ENDLESS CSX freight train was slowly making its way from Queens to the Bronx across the Hell Gate Bridge as we came through the Triborough Bridge toll for the island made up of Randall’s and Wards islands.
In the middle of the East River between the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens, Randall’s and Wards was a weird area. It housed the FDNY Fire Academy and a New York State Police facility, but its most infamous institution was the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, a dizzying network of massive tan brick buildings with barred windows that had once been the largest mental asylum in the entire world.
