Come Out Tonight Read online

  Same old, same old. Mrs. Levinson came in again and insisted her health plan covered Fosamax, even though we had gone through the whole plan with her last month, and it didn’t. A bunch of people tried to buy Oxycontin without prescriptions, and then there were the usual ton of prescriptions for Somnolux, Lunesta, Sonata, and Rozerem, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, some benzodiazapines, a few tricyclic antidepressants: all the stuff we need because we can’t sleep, we can’t relax, we’re stressed, we’re anxious, we’re tense. Welcome to New York.

  Then I was out, and I grabbed a cab to St. Vincent’s. By the time I was there it was a few minutes after five, so I got my visitor’s badge, took the elevator upstairs, and went down the hall to Sherry’s room. There she was: this time lying on her side. The nurse must have turned her so she wouldn’t get bed sores. Her eyes were still closed. She looked just like she was asleep. Sweet and peaceful, like Sunday mornings in bed. I pulled up a chair and watched her, remembering the last Sunday morning when I stood there, watching her sleep.

  Sunday morning, only two days ago, I woke up to the sun in my eyes. Sherry was lying at my side, long brown hair fanned out around her, soft, red lips kissing the pillow. “You came after all,” I said out loud, but she was so soundly asleep, she didn’t hear me. I watched her lie there for a few minutes before I got up, made some coffee and went out for the New York Times and some lox and bagels and cream cheese. I looked in on her when I came back in. The sun had warmed up the room, and she’d kicked off the covers in her sleep. Obviously, she hadn’t bothered to put anything on when she slipped into bed the night before. I stood there till I couldn’t stand it any more, stripped off my t-shirt and sweat pants and climbed on top of her.

  Her eyelashes twitched, then opened. She looked at my face, then the rest of me. “Again?” she asked, laughing.

  I wasn’t listening, kissing the valley between her sweaty breasts, brushing my lips against her midriff, her belly, her bush. She arched her back in pleasure until I fully entered her. Then she let out a little squeal of pain.

  “Gentle,” she said. “I’m still a little sore.”

  I might have asked her what she meant, except I was too much in the moment. “Gentle,” I said, and humped her as gently as I could. It didn’t take long. Between the sun and the natural heat I’d built up looking at her naked body, I was half done when I started....

  There was a voice at my back. “Mr. Jackman?”

  I turned around to see a tall, lean, thirty-something woman coming into the room. Something about her - the butch hair, the New York attitude or the Filene’s jacket, I don’t know what - screamed cop. “I’m Detective Donna Sirken from the NYPD,” she said, flipping out her police badge.

  “How do you know my name?” I asked.

  “Police records,” she said. “I figured you most likely to be the boyfriend. How is Miss Pollack doing?”

  “She’s in a coma.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “There something I can do for you, Detective?”

  “Not really. It’s just that, because you didn’t report the incident till later that evening, we never got to examine the victim,” she said as she approached the bed.

  “The nurses have her file...”

  “They gave me permission to check under her fingernails,” the detective said, lifting up Sherry’s right hand, and turning it over. She scraped under the nails with a couple of q-tips, then placed them in a plastic bag. “There’s not much here. They must have cleaned her up.”

  “You think she scratched the guy?” I asked.

  The detective was examining Sherry’s hands, her scalp, her skin. “If she had a chance,” she said.

  “You got any leads?” I asked.

  “Not yet...you mind taking your shirt off, Mr. Jackman?”

  “What? Here? Me?” But, really, I had nothing to hide. I took off my shirt.

  The detective looked me over. “That scratch on your shoulder. When did you get that?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Big scratch,” she said, staring.

  “Wouldja believe rough sex?” I grinned. She didn’t grin back.

  “Okay, thanks. You can put your shirt back on.” She stuffed the specimens into a small black bag. “I’ll give this in, but I doubt that we have anything. I guess I’ll be back when she wakes up,” she said and walked out, passing the nurse coming in.

  The nurse walked up to the bed, checked the monitors, and began to change the IV bag. “I hate to tell her, but even if Sherry does wake up,” she said to me, “it’s unlikely she’ll ever remember what happened.”

  DONNA SIRKEN

  I’m Donna Sirken, Detective Second Grade with the 24th Precinct, NYPD. Homicide assigned me to the Sherry Pollack case Thursday, May 1st, following the return of Officers Anderson and Koslowski from Henry Jackman’s third floor apartment at 260 W. 100th St.

  Of course, it’s not like I can spend quality time on any one case. As usual in a city where uniformed bodies are down some two thousand from six years ago, I also have five more cases of manslaughter, rape and routine mayhem currently on my desk. I haven’t gotten a new computer since I joined this precinct, almost four years. Paper supplies are rationed. Donuts are few and far between, regardless of what you may have seen on TV. My office, if you want to call it that, is so small, you have to move the chair to open and close the door. Add to that the fact that detectives are not in a supervisory capacity, so I have to do everything myself. And salary! Let me just say that New York’s Finest start their new recruits at $25,000 a year, half (!) of what they’re paying elsewhere. Anyway, don’t get me started.

  Returning to the Pollack case….Anderson reported that though the victim had been found in the morning, the crime wasn’t called in till the evening, and by the time the two of them had gotten there, Miss Pollack had long since been transported to St. Vincent’s. Moreover, when they arrived at his apartment, the boyfriend was in the process of spraying Lysol all over the living room, which he nevertheless insisted he had not touched. For the record, the crime scene looked as if there had been a struggle. Cabinets had been ransacked, a floor lamp knocked to the floor, a heavy African statue revealing the victim’s blood but no fingerprints of any kind turned up in the vicinity of where Miss Pollack had been found.

  When asked why he had not called the police without delay, Jackman answered that with all the shock and confusion, calling the police had been the last thing on his mind. Anyway, he said, he called us the moment he came home, but the problem was that the dispatcher didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She said she’d relay the information, but that evening was prime crime time, and she couldn’t say when exactly, but someone would be over. Unfortunately, this sounds like your usual dispatcher Why-would-I-want-to-talk-to-you-when-I-have-better-things-to-do New York attitude. I’d write a note to the guys upstairs, but they’d just tell me that our dispatchers were the New York Finest in action: tough, brave, on their toes and intensely focused, and if they were occasionally rude or jaded, it comes with the territory.

  So in the meantime, Jackman had decided to wash the rug he’d thrown up all over. As for the Lysol, he said he was just getting rid of the smell of the puke. Officer Anderson told him he was potentially destroying evidence, but according to both officers, Jackman shrugged it off. Anderson, naturally, was skeptical of the boyfriend’s story. Either the guy was just plain dumb or he was concealing something.

  Koslowski, on the other hand, concluded Jackman couldn’t have done it; he seemed like too nice a guy. Note to self: A & K are like cheese and chalk. Suggest to higher-ups that they be reassigned to other partners before one kills the other.

  Continuing on. The following morning, May 2nd, I visited the victim in her hospital room. Miss Pollack was still out cold. Potential brain damage, the doctor said. What a shame. I understand she’s a star researcher at the prestigious Vandenberg Institute – a co-discoverer of Somnolux, the new sleep drug that everybody’s so hyped
about. From her resume on the web, it’s obvious she is very bright, very up-and-coming. But if Pollack doesn’t come to, she’s just another New York statistic. It just makes me sick.

  It’s hard enough for a woman to get ahead in this city, without being cut down once she’s finally made it to the top. Oh, it’s true all the things they say about New York. If you can make it here you can make it anywhere. If you can’t take the heat, then get out of Hell’s Kitchen. That New York toughens you up, makes you sharper, and forces you to be more persistent. I don’t dispute any of that, but it’s only half the story. What New York does to people is to put them through a caldron of fire, yes, and sometimes what comes out is a shiny, hard glaze, all but indestructible. Other times, what comes out is a cracked, burnt mess. But there’s always more clay where that came from, so we glorify the process, and throw out the failures. What a wonderful town.

  For the record, even though it looked like Miss Pollack had been totally sanitized by the hospital staff - her head wound was completely bandaged and off limits to further inspection - I scraped under her fingernails. Forensics has since found nothing there.

  Meanwhile, at the hospital, I met the boyfriend for the first time. Henry Jackman is not a particularly impressive specimen. With no distinguishing features: thirtiesh, tallish, baldish, he’s the type of person best described in approximations.

  Asked him to take off his shirt and discovered a big scratch on his surprisingly hairy left shoulder. No explanation other than, “Wouldja believe rough sex?” with a lascivious grin. A little insensitive, I’d say, considering his girl friend was just almost clubbed to death, but consistent with the total lack of concern about destroying evidence. Normally, I’d go with Anderson’s assessment that Jackman is just plain dumb, but the smart-alecky smirk makes me question that. Hopefully, I’ll get the full story from Miss Pollack when and if she wakes up.

  After Jackman left, I asked the nurse whether the parents had shown up yet.

  “Not that I know of,” she answered.

  “Were they notified?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” she said again. So much for getting any information there. I pulled out my cell phone to call the precinct, but there wasn’t as much as a dial tone. I walked over to the window; still no signal.

  My cell never works well in a hospital – too much steel, too many beeping, cross-talking devices. So I took the elevator down to the lobby, crossed a cavernous thoroughfare crowded with white and green-uniformed professionals, smiling, balloon-carrying visitors, and anguished families, everyone talking in a polyglot of languages, and none of them looking where they were going. A tall black orderly more interested in his iPhone than in noticing who was in front of him practically knocked me over, then glared at me as if it was my fault. “Watch it, Buster,” I said, turning my back on him, and stepping out the revolving door onto the sidewalk where the reception was better. As I took out my cell to call Ricardo at the precinct desk, I glanced back through the window to see the orderly still standing there, glaring at me. I guess he doesn’t like bossy white women who won’t back down.

  Well, what you see is what you get with me. I am a bossy white woman who won’t back down. And it took me a lot of years to get to this point. I joined the force as a beat cop when I was 20. I’m 37, so you do the math. I may have started out an innocent young recruit, full of self-righteousness and enthusiasm, making the world safe for humanity. But seventeen long years of scratching my way up the pole, fighting off the old boys’ network, as well as, for that matter, some of the old boys themselves, has sanded down the self-righteousness, jaded most of the enthusiasm, leaving, you guessed it: a bossy white woman who won’t back down.

  And somewhere along the way, after battling the guys who asked me to get them coffee, who dismissed my successes as the result of feminine intuition not logic, or who simply didn’t want to partner with a woman, I changed my career path to detective. This way I’m not above or below them. I make up my own mind and do my own thing. And solve a lot of cases, I might add.

  Meanwhile, I was asking Ricardo to obtain Sherry Pollack’s contact numbers, telling him to call Vandenberg if necessary and to get back to me ASAP. I sat down on a bench and waited. More people streamed past, some hobbling, some in wheel chairs, plenty of conclaves of white coats heavy in conversation. Finally, my cell rang.

  “I’ve got one home number and one office number listed under Phillip Pollack, MD of Riverside, California.” Ricardo reported. “Plus two cells, one for Phillip and one Rhonda. I’ve emailed them to you.”

  “Thanks, Ricardo,” I said and hung up. I got up from the bench. St. Vincent’s is this humongous complex between the Hudson River and Broadway, with crisscrossing walkways between the buildings and beds of neglected begonias and pansies struggling to survive inside cement borders.

  I punched in the home number as I followed one path with a view of the Hudson. As it rang, I watched the Circle Line steam along the shore, a couple of dozen tourists hanging off the side.

  A heavily accented “hello” sounded on the line, the “h” more of a “j”. I asked to speak to either Dr. or Mrs. Pollack. A stream of Spanglish followed, from which I gathered that neither one of them was in. To a question which might have been “would you like to leave a message” but could have been anything, really, I said, “No, thanks.”

  So then I called their office number but all I got was a phone message. “If you’d like to make an appointment, change an appointment, press one; if you have an emergency or are a doctor, press two; wish to leave a message, press three….” I hung up and called Phillip’s cell, getting a recording in a deep male voice. Finally, I called the last number I had, and a woman’s voice answered. I figured it was Rhonda.

  “Hello?” she said. “Who is this?”

  In the background, I heard that same deep male voice say, “Rhonda, how many times do I have to tell you not to answer it if you don’t recognize the caller?”

  “It’s about your daughter,” I managed to yell, hoping she’d hear it before she clicked off.

  A moment passed, during which I heard the noise of city traffic: car horns, whistles, sirens – LA, I guessed - before the voice resumed. “Who is this?” the woman asked.

  “I’m Detective Donna Sirken of the New York City Police Department, Ma’am,” I said. “Am I speaking to Rhonda Pollack?”

  “Is there something wrong?” the woman asked, a little quaver in her voice. She never answered my question as to who she was, but I didn’t press it. It was Rhonda’s cell phone, after all.

  “Who is it, Rhonda?” the male voice asked in the background. That clinched it.

  “I’m afraid your daughter Sherry was the victim of an attack,” I told her. “She’s in the hospital.”

  “Who is it, Rhonda?” the same voice repeated, louder.

  “But we just…,” she said, before the phone was, from the sound of it, ripped out of her hand, and the male voice got on.

  “Who is this?” he growled, a man obviously used to getting his way.

  I repeated my name and department. In the background, I heard Rhonda softly whimpering. I pictured her husband waving her away.

  “And what is this about?” he demanded against the far off sound of a jack hammer.

  I repeated what I had told his wife.

  “Is my daughter alive?” he asked, nothing if not to the point.

  “Yes, but in a coma. Sherry was lucky enough to have been found by her boy friend and rushed to St. Vincent’s hospital.”

  In the distance I could hear his wife wailing, “How could this have happened?”

  “Do they know who did this…this awful thing?” Dr. Pollack asked.

  “But will she wake up?” Rhonda wanted to know in the background.

  “Shhh,” he told her.

  “No, but it’s early yet,” I replied.

  “No fingerprints?”

  “No, I’m afraid not, Dr. Pollack. But I’m giving this my full attention.
Can we meet? Do you think you’ll be able to fly in?” I asked. “I’m sure you’ll want to see your daughter, and we could use some background information on Sherry.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Pollack said. “We’ll make reservations right away on the red eye flight to New York.”

  “But Phil,” I heard in the background.

  “If you give me a flight number, someone can pick you up,” I offered.

  “No, no need at all, detective. We’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow morning. Good bye.”

  * * *

  The next morning I slept in till eight. The only red eye flight I had found coming into New York from LA was an Air Tran stopping in Atlanta and getting in eight thirty at LaGuardia. Figuring on no delay, no baggage, and no trouble picking up a cab, they could theoretically be at the hospital by nine thirty. I took a shower, dressed, and reckoned I could grab a coffee at the Starbucks at 168th and Broadway. I’d planned on taking the Q train to 42nd Street and catching the Seventh Avenue local to 168th, saving the precinct a few dollars. But by the time I was ready, it was near nine, and I knew I’d have to ditch the Starbucks and grab a cab.

  Unfortunately, by the time I got downstairs there was a steady drizzle along with a gusty wind. Pedestrians had their umbrellas unfurled, and the cabs were all whizzing past, lights off, none stopping. I pulled my rain hood up a notch tighter, and walked down to the light at 64th. I stood there steadfast with my right arm out like a Nazi salute while cabs continued to speed past until the light changed, and they had to stop. Four cars down was a northbound cab, light off, but no passenger inside as far as I could see. I ran over and wrenched the door open.

  “I’m off-duty,” the cabby announced, not looking back. I stood steadfast in the threshold, drenched, rivulets running off my hood until he looked back at me. After a moment of standoff, he waved me in. “Where to?” he sighed.