Grief Street

Kowalski’s gaze fell on the crumpled Post. “You seen this Hockaday in the papers probably. Freaking reporters!”
    “Hockaday files a complaint on you. How about that?”
    “Can you believe it? Who’s this guy to be talking? Not so long ago they took him over to this Jersey tank. Took the pissbum six months to dry out.”
    “A cop filing on a cop.” Matson whistled in admiration. “Never would’ve happened when Joey Adams was still funny.”
    They drove through heavy traffic for another ten minutes without saying anything.
    Kowalski threw down his cigar, thoughtfully aiming for a shallow puddle of spilled Yoo-Hoo. He made it, and the cigar guttered out. Matson attempted to ignore what he saw out the right side of the windshield: a suspicious man on top of a building. If Matson stopped, it meant spending even more time with Kowalski. On the other hand, Kowalski might be seeing the same thing he was; if Matson failed to stop, then Kowalski had grounds for writing him up on a neglect citation.
    “Sorry, Sarge, looks like we got us a mope,” Matson said, deciding ultimately against the risk of a citation. He slowed up the car, stopping parallel to a florist’s panel truck parked on West Street on the uptown side of Canal. He twisted around for a look out the rear window. Kowalski turned as well. Matson said, “Up on that roof, see him?”
    The mope was holding on to a bicycle and poised near the edge of a six-floor loft building fronting on Canal Street. He peered down over the lanes of Holland Tunnel traffic, then retreated backward about twenty feet with the bicycle. He looped one leg over the bike seat and then half-rolled and half-walked to the roof edge again, where he stopped. He went back and forth several times in this manner, as if he were dry-running a mighty cycle leap clear off the roof.
    “You make anything in the way of physical ID?” Kowalski asked, squinting. He reached for glasses in a pocked leather case in the breast pocket of his coat.
    “White guy. Thirties. Dark hair, real greasy. Some kind of lines smeared on his forehead.”
    “Freaking strung-out bedbug,” Kowalski said, a groan somewhere in his voice. He held black horn-rimmed glasses in place. One of the stems was broken. “Some of your bedbugs, they like soaking their heads in Vaseline or some other kind of goo. Don’t ask me why. Once I seen a guy do up his hair in duck fat. Some of them, they like schmutzing up their faces, too. Burnt cork, axle grease—or else plain old-fashioned turds. Don’t ask me why.”
    “What do you think this guy’s up to?”
    “Trying to get his balls up for a swan, I’d say.” Kowalski turned forward. He pointed one of his salami fingers at the shortwave on the dashboard. “You want to call it in, Officer Matson?”
    “Oh, yeah...”
    “Tell them we need the net boys.” Kowalski turned back for another look out the rear window. “Aw, Jesus—forget it!”
    “What’s the matter?” Matson asked, dropping the mike. “Guy ain’t a swanny after all. Get a load of what he’s: doing. The freaking psycho, better he should splatter.”
    The man with the painted face and shiny hair had dropped the bicycle somewhere back at the middle of the rooftop. Standing now at the loft’s precipice, hands at his crotch, he sent a long arc of urine six storeys down onto the Jersey-bound entrance lanes to the tunnel.
    “Neglio, he calls me too hard-assed!” Kowalski barked. He turned and motioned for Matson to head onward uptown. After a few blocks, he said, “Let me tell you something, Matson my young friend. Deal with the wackos of this freaking city as long as me...”
    Then, once again, Kowalski went off somewhere by himself.
    “Sarge?”
    “What?”
    “Deal with the wackos for a long time—and what?”
    “Some days, your own black ass’ll turn into cement.” Kowalski snorted. Then he looked blankly out a side window. “Other days, you come across some bedbug and you think, the terrible things of the world come on from little stuff we overlook. After a while, you see how the little stuff freaking accumulates.”

Six

    T he old man in the black suit with a yarmulke somehow riding the crown of his bare, bony head stood at the front wall, rocking stiffly from the waist like he was a toy duck bobbing into a water glass. I could hear him chanting clear back where I was: “Rodef shalom... Rodef shalom.. . Rodef shalom ...” His voice was parched.
    “Old fellow’s been standing there