Grief Street

department politics, dead rats, my friend’s murder—I felt like a guy trying to drink water from a fire hose.
    I legged it up Ninth Avenue to West Forty-seventh Street, Along the way, I thought about Becker's threat. I thought! about how a rabid cop gunning for me would know how to keep his hands clean.
    When I turned the corner and saw the synagogue, I; thought about the last time I saw my friend...
    ... and what he told me that day, what he called me.
    All the more reason for watching my back?

Five

    J oseph Kowalski was spread out across most of the backseat. He was reading the “Strictly for Laughs” column by Joey Adams in the Post, and actually laughing. Or at least it seemed that way to the rookie officer driving the squad car. Who could tell? A laugh out of Kowalski was the same as a snarl out of anybody else, this being one of the reasons cops had tagged him King Kong.
    The sergeant had a wide face, moist and white like pizza dough and too full of flesh to wrinkle. Kowalski’s dough face concealed his age—maybe fifty, then again maybe sixty-five—and also his mood. The rest of him was clearly evident; he was just plain all-around fat. His legs and arms were like boiler room pipes. His gut was hard-bloated. His fingers Were unbending and uniformly thick, like ten stiff salamis. Everything he held in his hands appeared to be too small, deluding the tabloid newspaper with the chunky headlines.
    When he was finished laughing (or whatever), Kowalski tossed the Post to the sticky floor of the squad car. The newspaper thudded into place with all the other refuse Kowalski had generated in fifteen minutes of heading back uptown from One Police Plaza after a disagreeable appointment with Inspector Tomasino Neglio: an empty can Yoo-Hoo chocolate soda, cellophane from a twin pack of Hostess cupcakes, a trio of Snickers candy bar wrappers. He lit up a Te-Amo cigar and looked out a dusty side window at the traffic crawling up Washington Street.
    “I ought to phone up that Joey Adams someday,” Kowalski said, turning to address the back of the driver’s head. “I got this joke I made up. You want to hear, Matson?”
    “Okay.”
    “How many New York cops does it take to throw a perp down a flight of stairs?”
    “I don’t know, Sarge. How many?”
    “Fuck you. He fell.”
    “Very choice material.”
    “Sure it is.” Sergeant Kowalski did not laugh at the choice material. Neither did the rookie Matson. “Good as anything Joey Adams thinks is hilarious,” Kowalski said. “That freaking guy, he don’t know what time it is. He’s writing in a whole different age. Know what I’m saying?”
    “No.”
    “Reading the guy nowadays, it’s like stabbing myself in my heart for the old once-upon-a-times. Like when there was black-and-white sodas at Schrafft’s and Miss Rheingold and the Automat and the Polo Grounds. And those columnists writing swifties in the tabs, which used to carry genuine comics like Moon Mullins and Alley Oop —not this lefty garbage like Doonesbury.” Kowalski sighed. He turned again to the side window. His breath made little fog circles on the glass. “Like they say, gone with the wind. Except for Joey Adams, who’s getting lame from the memory. In other words I’m saying Joey ain’t funny. He’s a sad freaking mastodon tramping through a jungle he don’t recognize anymore.” Kowalski puffed, reflectively. “Maybe that’s what I am, too.”
    “A mastodon?”
    Officer Matson was sorry he said that; sorrier yet for the way he said it, with a stifled smirk. It was an easy thing for a young cop to see the sergeant as an old joke, to call him King Kong behind his back. But God help it if a rookie let on about the joke directly—especially a good-looking, young black rookie out of college like Ty Matson.
    “Mastodons, they all supposedly went and died a long time ago.” The way he said this, Kowalski sounded like a mourner at his best friend’s wake. He had turned forward and taken the cigar from his lips. He now stared off into some gray, unseen horizon. Matson considered the surprisingly humble face reflected in the rearview mirror: was the fat sergeant remembering something sad or having a stroke?
    “We all right, Sarge?”
    “I was just thinking...” Kowalski’s voice trailed off to some private, hushed place.
    So far as Matson or most anybody else at Sex Crimes knew, contemplation was not the sergeant’s style. Yet there he was, King Kong Kowalski with his big