Bad Call Read online

  A call has come in. There’s a man down, on the street, outside a certain address in Jackson Heights. It isn’t a residential address. He’s in front of a block of one-story stores. He has been stabbed, and it’s a legitimate rush. I know exactly where it is. I also immediately know who the victim is, but I can’t say how. Lenny knows, too. So do Leroy and Enrico. We had the last call, and this one is theirs. We all agree that we know who it is.

  You get ESP on a job like this. You can walk into a room and someone’s unconscious and bleeding and his family is telling you what happened and you know instantly it’s a lie. The same kind of thing happens when certain calls come in.

  These certain calls are usually repeat customers. A man with epilepsy goes drinking and has a grand mal on the sidewalk or in the street, in front of his favorite bar. We know who it is by the location. A woman won’t take her insulin and pigs out on candy. We know her from her address. Other times a call will come in and one of us will have a premonition. I’m notorious among the ambulance crew for the number of times I’ve called a dry floater when we get a DOA summons. Dry floater is the clumsy term we use to describe a decomposing body—bloated up like a floater but on dry land.

  In this case, our experience, not instinct, tells us the victim is somebody we know.

  This particular individual is an Asian male about fifty. I believe he’s Chinese. Over the years, we’ve memorized his résumé. He’s a merchant seaman and goes to sea for extended periods of time. When he comes back, he and his German wife sit down for some cards and conversation and lots and lots of booze.

  After a time, who knows how long, he beats her to a pulp.

  I’ve seen this happen again and again—and I am a mere part-timer. I would not even attempt to guess at how many times this cycle of abuse has been repeated. I don’t think she even says uncle and calls 911 until he’s been beating on her a few days and she can’t see or breathe through her nose or the alcohol runs out and she really starts to feel the pain.

  They have no furniture to speak of in their tiny apartment, besides a card table and a couple of wooden crates for chairs. There’s a little cooking alcove off to the side, and I assume they have a bedroom and toilet, but we’ve never been farther than the main room, where all the action happens.

  They’re usually dressed in greasy sweaters and coats, even in summer, which is when I see them. Correction—I paid them a visit over Christmas vacation once. They have one lamp, and they keep the curtains drawn. It’s always dark as hell in there, which is okay by me. Who wants to see it that well anyway. I would describe the decor as Mid-Twentieth-Century Squalid.

  They look like homeless people, squatters in their own home.

  She never says much when we come. Most of the time, she can’t. He says nothing. The cops, who know him well, take him in, but I don’t think she ever presses charges. We always take her to EGH, and I suppose she takes a cab home or walks—it’s not that far a walk.

  As near as I can piece things together, this one-sided bout usually comes just before he’s supposed to head out to sea again. Once he has sailed, the missus has some time to recover, and maybe they make some kind of ship-to-shore amends or something. When he returns, they start all over.

  We don’t often get to see closure, doing what we do. This is one of the reasons I see life as a series of loosely connected—or completely unconnected—episodes. We pick people up and treat them and get them to the hospital and drive out of their lives. It is rare for us to learn what happened to somebody. Sometimes we ask, when it’s a call that has affected us emotionally. Sometimes we avoid asking for the same reason. Most of the time we try to forget about as many cases as we can, and move on.

  I never understood why this couple stayed together or why he wasn’t locked up. Even more depressing is the thought that, as bad as things were, they needed each other. He needed a punching bag, and she was there for him to meet that need. That’s a hard one to swallow. I hate to say it, but I wish this could have been Lenny’s and my call. I’m so sure it’s the Asian guy.

  I really want to see him dead. Is that a horrible thing to say. I don’t know anymore.

  It’s going to be a long wait for Leroy and Enrico to return with the skinny on this.

  When they return, they play it back for us, in living color. It’s almost exactly the way I pictured it. Make that exactly.

  They’re pulling up to the stores that are right around the corner from this couple’s apartment. In the growing darkness, they’re following a trail of blood they can barely see along the sidewalk, as if they were tracking a wounded rhino into the bush to finish him off.

  Then there he is. The rhino.

  It’s the Asian seaman, just as we all thought. There’s an enormous knife blade sticking out of his back, just below the ribs. Meaning it went through from the front.

  Enrico looks at me and in a perfect deadpan says, Mikey, it didn’t look like no accident. Holy crap. Caruso cracked a joke. I wasn’t even sure he could talk.

  Leroy says the blade went in at an upward angle, from the front. It went in low. Wife height. Sounds like he got it, then crawled from the apartment all the way around the corner and stopped in front of the stores. I wonder where he was going.

  He was 100 percent dead. The proverbial doornail. Not a drop of blood left in his miserable body.

  It’s hard to tell what Leroy, Lenny, and Enrico are feeling. Three Easter Island heads. I’d never play poker with any of them. But as for me, I feel like cheering out loud.

  Well, good for you, Mrs. Popeye. Good for you.

  So maybe their story is not a novel or even a novella. Certainly not a poem by any stretch of the imagination. I guess I can’t say that it really has a beginning—even though it must—because I don’t know that part. But it sure as hell has a middle.

  And you couldn’t ask for a better ending.

  Go Figure

  If Isaac Newton were alive today, he’d surely be working in the projects instead of under some apple tree. Things are always falling in the projects, mostly from the roof, sometimes out of windows. Cinder blocks, bicycles, bottles, used hygienic materials. Cats. Dogs. People. You name it, it flies.

  Right now, we’re on a big rush call to Long Island City: it’s a baby out a window. That’s about as big as a big rush gets. I’m on with Sammy today. He can be a really terrifying guy. Also, highly entertaining. He’s a wild man, no question, an incomparable two-fisted drinker, a scholar (B school), and general all-around bad boy. Who wouldn’t be, with this job plus graduate school.

  He is without a doubt the scariest driver on the team. I don’t think he even knows that the accelerator pedal has any intermediate positions other than full down or full up. We were hurtling up Fifty-Seventh Avenue on a rush call last year when the massive hood of the ambulance came unlatched and went vertical, smashing up against the windshield and completely blinding us at a speed of maybe sixty miles per hour.

  I was terrified; Sammy was jubilant. He must have taken it as a personal challenge from the hood, daring him to keep on going as fast as he could. He was actually accelerating. Finally the novelty wore off, and he stopped and called us out of service.

  And yet, when we have a patient on board, Sammy is nothing but business—and he’s really good at this business, as he seems to be with everything he pursues. I hope he lives long enough to enjoy the fruits of his considerable talents.

  Right now, I believe we’re going as fast as it’s possible to go in the borough of Queens in an ambulance. Full siren all the way. I hate the siren, but I’m so keyed up that I’m not even thinking about it. All I can think of is baby out a window. Which floor. What did it land on. Is it dead yet. Must not be if they put a rush on the call. Central tends to be pretty careful about this; they don’t want emergency responders to take unnecessary risks. If it’s a possible DOA, they’ll say so up front. Good for them.

  Look at this crowd. There must be a couple thousand people here. I wonder how many are her
e because they heard about the baby out the window and how many are just hanging out, enjoying the late-summer day. Someone’s waving to us above the crowd. It’s a cop, and he’s making the stay where you are sign. They’re bringing the baby out to us.

  It’s a baby boy. Apparently, he fell three full stories. Somebody says he landed on a bush first, before hitting the ground. The ground around here is like concrete. What incredible luck to hit a bush. I mean, the bush. It’s one of the only shrubs of any kind in the entire project. Sammy takes him from the officer and hands him to me.

  He has a glazed look on his face, and his pupils are not responding. I can hardly feel a pulse, but he is definitely alive. Aside from some abrasions on his head, there don’t seem to be any major external injuries.

  But something isn’t right. In the code used in the hospital with newborns, we’ve got an FLK. Funny-looking kid. (It usually means there’s something pretty bad going on—not that the kid is actually funny looking.)

  Not knowing how he looked before he fell is a problem. I’ve practiced my Spanish a lot, riding with Jose, but it’s still not good enough to ask his mother, who is completely hysterical, whether or not her kid has always looked like this. It’s kind of a delicate question, and I don’t want to risk insulting her. I’m sure we could find somebody in the crowd who’s fluent enough to ask her what we want to know, but there’s no time. I do manage to ask Mom her baby’s name, which is Juan. Sammy helps Mom up into the bus, and I get in next to her with her baby, Juan, in my arms.

  All the way back, Sammy is hitting the siren. I would normally not want him to, with a baby on board, but Juan isn’t responding to the din. Or at all, really. Sammy is driving fast but not nearly as fast as he was on the way to the call.

  He has radioed Central to tell St. John’s what to expect: infant less than one year with possible internal injuries including suspected skull fracture.

  I swear this baby’s head is getting bigger as I’m looking at it. He’s almost beginning to look hydrocephalic. When we get to St. John’s, they’ve reserved an operating table in the OR, just for him.

  Two things we almost always do with babies and infants when head injuries are known or suspected: we swaddle them so they can’t move their arms or legs, and then we tape them down to the OR table with wide strips of adhesive tape. Even with a relatively minor head injury, where sutures may be necessary, they never give anesthetics or sedatives. Not when it’s a head injury. Anyway, Juan isn’t making a fuss at all, although a sedative for Mom wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  They don’t do anything at all to Juan, other than get him into X-ray as fast as they’re able. Nobody is saying anything until we see the film.

  When we do, it’s not good.

  I have seen my share of shocking things at this point in my days and nights on the ambulance. But I’ve never seen anything like this.

  Juan’s skull is a soft-boiled egg. The kind you eat from an eggcup. The kind that has had the top of its shell neatly chipped off all around by the edge of a knife. The top of Juan’s skull is separated from, and clearly visible floating above, the lower portion of his skull.

  Now we know why Juan is looking strange—and he’s looking even stranger by the minute. He’s bleeding heavily into the skin under his scalp and around the sides of his head. His head is filling up with blood like a balloon. He has to get up to surgery immediately. It may already be too late—no telling what the pressure from all this bleeding has done to his brain at this point.

  It’s odd that he showed so few external signs of trauma. The abrasions on his head would have probably been the same if he was being carried by someone who lightly brushed his head up against a brick wall. I have to think it was the fall three feet from the bush to the ground that did all the damage. But how in the world could that cause a fracture like this. It could just as well have been a fall from his crib. I thought babies’ bones were too flexible to end up cracked so sharply at the edges of a break. Obviously, I thought wrong.

  It’s been about an hour since Juan went up to the OR. One of the security guards has come down with the news that he didn’t make it. Not a surprise, really, but deeply disappointing nonetheless.

  I hate to see anybody die. But a child—I do hate that the most.

  I’m heading outside into the ambulance yard to think and smoke. I know tobacco is bad for you, but sometimes I believe it’s one of God’s most inspired gifts. One of those times is now. Like many of his gifts, it’s a double-edged sword.

  Let me see if I can begin to figure this out. You’ve got Sammy who thinks it’s great sport to aggressively court doom nearly every waking hour, laughing all the way.

  And then a completely innocent infant who falls three stories is miraculously saved by perhaps the only bush in the projects, then drops another few feet and ends up dead.

  Hundreds of calls ago, I resolved never to ask myself questions about things like these.

  But still.

  The Bear

  New York City is really not the the gargantuan monolith it seems to be when you look at it from afar. Get up close, and you’ll find it’s a motley collection of little villages that have grown into, over, around, and through one another. Just a bunch of small towns. And, as it is in all small towns, most everybody in their particular corner knows the details of most everybody else’s business, often in excruciating detail.

  They will tell you these details with little provocation. Actually, it’s hard to keep them from doing so.

  Am I surprised at 4:30 a.m. to see a crowd of a dozen or more people in front of this address, where we’ve been sent on a possible DOA. Not really, no. Not surprised at all. They’re here trying to get a look-see and ready to tell anyone who will listen what they know about the very public private life of the woman who is lying here possibly raped and definitely murdered in the vestibule of the apartment building we’re about to enter.

  There’s just enough light to see what we need to see. In the vestibule, on the floor by the entry buzzers and mailboxes, lies the corpse of an elderly, obese white female on her back with her clothing pulled up halfway and no underwear, naked from the abdomen down. Her face is unrecognizable, having been pounded into a mass of purple pudding, and her head is surrounded by a halo of pooled black blood.

  From the way her head is lying flat on the floor, it’s clear that the back of her skull has been bashed in on the terrazzo surface. Just to be sure, I guess. Looks like she’s been here at least a few hours. The livor mortis is about as dark as it’s going to get.

  The police have gone through her purse already, and we know who she is and that she lives—lived—in this building. There’s money in the purse, so it wasn’t a robbery. It was an extremely violent crime driven by motives we’ll never know unless they catch the guy and he confesses and we read about it in the Daily News. I’ve been told that rape is rarely the primary motive of an attack like this, an attack triggered by rage. The rape is more of a symptom.

  There are so many ways to kill another person. You can rank them in ascending order of violent personal involvement, from dropping a bomb on a stranger from thirty thousand feet to shooting them from fifty yards to stabbing or strangling them right up close. Or even hitting them on the head with a rock or a tree limb. But for maximum personal involvement, nothing tops a beating for savagery and sheer commitment. It has to be the most primitive way of all to end a life. How many times has this scene been repeated since we came down from the trees, I wonder. How much adrenaline has been pumped. What could spark this kind of rage.

  What could ever prevent it.

  Maybe someday humans will evolve who have no adrenal glands or limbic brain or whatever primitive anatomical structures team up to create this brutal havoc. Humans who are more like the benevolent big-eyed, big-headed aliens sci-fi writers dream up. Wouldn’t that be nice. No pesky endocrine plumbing to ruin your day or anyone else’s. No beatings. No rapes. No fury. No scenes like this one.

  Does anyone
here know what happened. Oh yes, indeed. The villagers have the lowdown, and they have it in astonishing detail.

  First of all, they say she was a lot older than she looked when she went out trolling the bars for younger guys to pick up and go home with. Did you know her personally, one of the cops asks no one in particular, trying to see if this is just malarkey from village gossips. All heads start nodding and all mouths answer in a single chorus, Oh yeah, sisi, that’s what she always did. Every night. You’d think if they were keeping tabs on her to that extent, they could have stopped something like this.

  Where are the busybodies when you really need them.

  They even know who did it. Jesus Christ, this is pretty amazing if it’s true. And I’m convinced it’s true. I’ve seen it often enough not to doubt it.

  Generally the cops know whodunit almost immediately by simple observation—just by evaluating the circumstances. You really can’t call them clues because that would imply they’re hidden. The cops are simply using Occam’s razor, although it’s safe to say most of them don’t know it by that name. It’s just ordinary deduction, based on a fourteenth-century English friar’s view that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Two people have a violent fight; one ends up dead. The living one says he doesn’t know what happened. Occam’s razor says it’s the guy still standing—the obvious choice. Anything more complicated—like an alibi—is almost certainly untrue.