Philly Noir

The Detective Savant

noreply@blogger.com (Meldrick Lewis) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:43:00 +0000

Well, the shooting made it into the Daily News. Great. We would be on administrative leave for weeks so we decided to meet with a few guys from our squad after their shift. We went to Finnegan's Wake, a local Irish Pub across from the fire administration building, their headquarters. The first guy that met us there was Bernie Nusbaum. His father was the first Jew to make it to Homicide. But it was a well deserved promotion. He was an outstanding detective in every sense of the word. His son followed in his footsteps. Not only into the police department, but into Homicide. We called Bernie the "savant detective". He could solve cases that anyone else would look at and say, there's no way we'll clear that. He was a cesspool of knowledge. He kind of reminded us of that character on Law & Order, but with no personality. Benie would just stare at the wall for hours at work.

THE LATEST . . . PART 5

noreply@blogger.com (Meldrick Lewis) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 20:06:00 +0000

GIRDLES and FAT LADIES

The internal affairs investigator came out to the waiting area and brought me back to his desk. He was short and heavyset, almost dumpy looking. He had a gut that was so huge he would have to take someone else's word for it to see if shoes were tied. I guess that was why he wore penny loafers. His plaid jacket was probably in style when he wore it for his first holy communion. His necktie only reached halfway down his shirt. I wasn't sure if that was because his gut was so big or he liked wearing ties the way we did in Catholic school. If his collar wasn't unbuttoned and his tie loosened, I would have bet it was a clip on. He smelled like a combination of stale cigarettes and B.O. He sat down carefully at his desk. He wedged his massive carcass into his chair, squeezing himself between the arms of the chair like a fat lady squeezing herself into an old girdle. His desk was an extension of himself, slovenly and piled high with papers and files. As if it was part of a running gag, a jelly doughnut sat leaking a red glob of an unknown flavor onto a paper napkin.

"Listen", he said leaning forward. "This should be pretty simple." He picked up the doughnut and licked the filling. It was a disgusting sight that would be burned into my retinas for a long time. A small bit of filling fell onto his tie. He wiped it off with his thumb, which he promptly licked to ensure that he didn't miss any. A closer examination of his tie revealed that I could probably identify the last four meals that he ate while wearing it.

He had me tell him everything that happened. It was fairly straightforward. I didn’t really see what happened. I rushed in I heard Rob yell and spun around as he fired his gun. I had all the details minus the real details. That was always a question. What if your partner got in a questionable shooting? Do you lie to help him out? Do you tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may? Well, it didn’t really matter. This was a pretty clean shooting as those things go. An almost murderer with a rap sheet as long as your arm, drugs and a stolen gun in his apartment. Back in the day you would have described his Roscoe as a “Saturday night special”. Now it’s just another gat used by the average shit stick. Department policy and politics would result in us being off the streets for several weeks. Rob longer than I because he actually fired the shot that killed Ali. Luckily politics would not be overplayed in this case. As is often the case a clean shoot can become a nightmare when factors beyond your control, beyond the events actually surrounding the shooting come into play. People with agendas and prejudices sticking their two cents in, attempting to capitalize on something they have no business with or understanding about, that can ruin lives and careers.

PART 4

noreply@blogger.com (Meldrick Lewis) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 05:02:00 +0000

MICHAEL THE POLOCK

I sat and thought about everything. About me, Michael Abromowicz. The Polock cop. Probably destined to be a cop having been named after the Patron Saint of police officers, Michael the Archangel. My mother, Helena (God rest her soul) wanted to name me after Saint Stanislas, the famous Jesuit and patron of Poland. But my father always loved the story of Michael and the good angels in the battle fought in heaven against Satan. He always said since he was a boy he could picture Michael fighting Satan and throwing him out of heaven. As a kid I got the nickname "Z". It started out with my last name. Some kids at St Elizabeth's School used to call me Mike alphabet. "A to Z" they would say. Eventually they shortened it to "Z" and it stuck.

I was raised in a working class polish neighborhood in Baltimore with a staunch Catholic upbringing. Altarboy with a stay at home mom. That was the norm. Dad was a dock worker loading freighters in the harbor. He worked a couple of jobs to keep me, my brother and three sisters clothed and fed. Mom was always sweeping the four feet of front steps we had. She was the Mayor of Howard Street. She knew everyone and everyone's business. I was the oldest of her five kids. She was a deeply religious woman who not so secretly wished that I would become a priest.

I never became a priest. I did enter religious life for a short time right after high-school. I was a novice at a Trappist Abbey in South Carolina. It didn't take me long to decide that the strict silence bothered me more than I thought it would. Although I enjoyed the structured life, the daily work and the time with God, I decided that I could not live without female companionship. My life of service eventually took another direction and I traded in one uniform for another.

My oldest sister is a Sister. A Claire. A Franciscan nun. Another sister is an ER nurse and my baby sister is an unhappy stay at home mom with an abusive drunk for a husband. My brother is a Baltimore City firefighter. Our parents were always proud of their children.

My partner was a another story altogether. He was raised above the Mason Dixon line in Philadelphia. His parents were of a different breed. He was an only child. His father was an editor of a suburban newspaper and his mother was a secretary for a law firm. He had been a "latch key kid". They had expected him to become a lawyer or a doctor. He joined the US Navy right out of high-school and became a corpsman. He wound up being assigned to the Marines. He was in Beirut in 1983 when a suicide bomber drove his truck and blew up the Marine barracks. Little did he know back then that was the was the start of many terrorist attacks. Rob had not been brought up in a religious family. He said that after what he saw in Beirut he couldn't understand how anyone could believe in God. He asked me one day "What kind of God would allow that to happen?" It was the kind of question that you weren't expected to answer. He would ask that rhetorical question out loud more than once. He went to college under the GI bill and decided after getting a degree that he wanted to become a cop. His parents had temporarily held out hope that he would "make something of himself" after getting a degree. His mother was glad that he was successful and happy at what he did for a living. His father was disappointed that he did not exceed his own expectations. He was secretly proud of what his son did and stood for.

I found that cops generally fell into one of two categories. They were either very religious or strong atheists. All the evil and carnage that humans are capable of doing to each other made you lean in one direction or another. I carried a pocket rosary with me everyday, Rob carried a shark shaped keychain bottle opener. "I'm a fuckin' drinker and I'm a predator for predators..."

So here I sit waiting to tell my story. I stared at my shoes. Well worn but comfortable. I noticed that they had blood spatter across the toes. I hadn't noticed that before now.

PART 3

noreply@blogger.com (Meldrick Lewis) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:33:00 +0000

CHANDLER'S HIP POCKET

I sat in the Internal Affairs office with an old metal fan blowing from a corner of the room. The IA office was in one of the older more run down buildings that the police department had. I wondered if they did that on purpose, for effect. No one liked coming here anyway. It was never for anything good. It was like going to the vice principal's office when you were a kid. But my partner was always fond of saying, "If someone ain't makin' a complaint about you you ain't worth a shit". He didn't mean you should be causing trouble. He meant that if you were doing REAL police work you were bound to piss people off. For most folks the easiest way to get back at a cop was to file a citizen's complaint.

I sat and thought. I stared at the fan. It was old. It looked like it came with the building. It reminded me of those 1940's private eye movies. I half expected a long legged blonde to come through the door looking to hire a detective. It made me remember a line from a Raymond Chandler story ... "She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket..." That guy was great. A different era and a different world to police.

I thought about the medics doing there thing on Ali. They had some breathing tube in his mouth and using the bag device to breathe for him. That was never good. They started TWO IV's. That was never a good sign either. At least they didn't have to do CPR. At least... Maybe it would be better if he died.

PART 2

noreply@blogger.com (Meldrick Lewis) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:40:00 +0000

GOLDFISH and DYNAMITE

I put my raid jacket on. It had POLICE in large letters on the back with police over the right breast and a detectives badge over the left. It was designed so that we fulfilled the legal requirement of “displaying the badge of authority” and to make people KNOW we were cops when we served warrants. Rob and I didn’t need jackets for everyone in this neighborhood to know we were cops. We drove the Ford Crown Vic, the quintessential police car. We were both white and had close cropped hair. If we had arrived a little later in the day we would have been greeted with street corner kids shouting, “Five-Oh!”

Jim walked upstairs with us. He stood just below the second floor landing so his eyes were about even with the second floor. He pointed to the middle apartment and said. “That’s it”. A guy was coming out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel and glared at Jim as he walked by. Rob said to Jim, “Man, he was eyeball fuckin’ YOU!” Jim either didn’t hear him or was ignoring him. Although it made him look like a coward, the sheer act of pointing out a suspect’s apartment in front of other people was really an act of courage. Helping the police was not a popular pastime any more. It had a tendency to have serious repercussions in a neighborhood.

Rob and I went up and stood on either side of the apartment door, Rob knocked on the door. He didn’t pound on it like I did on the front door. That type of knock telegraphed “police”. This was a regular knuckles on the wood type knock. Rob waited a few seconds and after getting no answer, knocked again. The Super, Jim said “I didn’t bring my keys. I’m gonnna go home and get ’em. I’ll come right back and open the door.”

We waited at the door. We could hear movement inside the apartment. There was a large gap under the door. There must have been windows on the east side of the apartment because the morning sun was throwing huge shadows across the floor that we could see in the hallway. “Who is it?” the voice yelled out from the apartment. Rob and I looked at each other and raised our guns. The door opened and Ali’s face looked through the small opening he had created. Rob shouted, “POH-LICE!” as we pushed open the door. As I entered the apartment I heard Rob yell, “don’t fucking move. Get your hand…” As I spun around I heard three shots ring out. In the confined space of that apartment they sounded like dynamite in a phone booth.

Years of shooting qualification rounds with hearing protection on the range didn’t prepare me for this. I couldn’t hear ANYTHING. For a few seconds it seemed like things were moving in slow motion. Ali had three holes in his chest and lay face down on the floor motionless. I handcuffed him behind his back. This time I was the one who said it, “Fuck!” Rob was at the window on the radio. “44 D - David to radio”. The dispatcher didn’t answer. ”44 D - David to radio PRIORITY!!” “44D proceed.” Rob told them, “I have shots fired. We have been involved in a shooting and we’ll need EMS and …” he didn’t finish. He unclicked the radio. He yelled “Fuckface!” and kicked Ali.

I rolled Ali over. He was still breathing. But it was bad. His mouth hung open, and he gasped for air like a goldfish that fell out of the bowl. I pulled up his blood soaked tee shirt. There were three tightly grouped holes. If this were the range, the instructor would be complimenting Rob. With each gasp pinkish, bloody foam bubbled from the holes. Next to the door in the apartment was a bed. Rob flipped one of the pillows over to reveal a small handgun. In the seventies they called them Saturday night specials. The gun was a .22 caliber derringer. It had electrical tape wrapped around he handle. Rob said, “He kept reaching for this.” “I never even saw it” I said, almost ashamed.

In the room there were all types of drug packaging supplies. There were small and large baggies, a scale, blunt wrappers and marijuana stems and seeds in the trash. Rob took one of the gallon zip lock bags and placed it over Ali's bubbling wounds, covering that with a pillow case that I took off the bed and wadded up. There were some things you never forgot how to do. His time as a Marine Corps medic came back immediately. Sucking chest wounds were a common battlefield injury. “Shit! Now I have his fucking blood on me! And this is a brand new tie. A GIFT!" Rob was disgusted and now he had blood all over him. This was not the start to a good day.

I could hear sirens coming. After years of working the street you could definitely tell the difference. I heard police cars and a fire truck.

Some of the other people who lived in the apartment were standing outside of the room. One or two were inching there way inside. The first uniform cop to show up had to take his stick out to get people to clear the hallway.

NICETOWN

noreply@blogger.com (Meldrick Lewis) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:19:00 +0000

An Occasional Story In Installments

It was a hot and humid summer morning. The kind of morning that made your shirt feel more like contact paper. We had tracked him to a small apartment building in the middle of the city. It was early, the twilight time for gangstas, addicts and killers. Real people were just waking up. But those who lived in the alternate universe, this neighborhood, were just ending their day. You could walk through this area of the city at noon and find almost no one around. But come back at three in the morning and it was a bustling metropolis. Hos, addicts, dealers even small kids were all out and about. The polar opposite of the rest of society.

The building sat on the corner of two nondescript blocks. It was both run down and average for the area. A small window fan hummed from a ground floor apartment. The edges between the fan and the window were stuffed with newspaper that made it look like a giant hamster lived in there. In front of the building there was a dead rat stuck in a glue trap next to a used open diaper.

"Watch where you walk" I said to Rob almost as an after thought. Rob in his usual upbeat early morning persona griped, "I hate this funkin' neighborhood." Detective Rob Johnson had been my partner for several years. We didn't always agree on how to run a case but we had a lot in common and enjoyed working with each other.

I knocked on the door of the house. No answer. I knocked again. I went back to my car and got the large metal department issued flashlight. I banged so hard on the top corner of the door that it left a tight group of half moon craters.

From the third floor someone yelled, "Who IS it?" "THE POH-LISE" Rob shouted. "Open the fuckin' door". Rob used the "F" word like it was his favorite one. It was second nature to him and it rolled off his tongue so naturally that no one ever took offense to it unless he meant it that way.

An older black guy in his boxer shorts and stained 'beater' tee shirt opened the door. "Yeah?" I told him, "We're looking for Ali". "Who?" "Ali." I showed him a mug shot photo. "I ain't never seen him.", the guy replied. Rob asked "Who lives here with you?" "Nobody". The guy seemed impatient. "You fuckin' live here all by yourself?", Rob asked with his attitude. The guy said, "No, this is apartments. A bunch of folks lives here". The old guy's belly made him look like he was eight months pregnant with triplets. "Mind if we come in?" I asked. "Suit yourself" he said as he stepped back to let us in.

It had to be another fifteen degrees hotter inside the house. As it turned out the house was actually an apartment building. "Typical North Philly condo", Rob said. "Probably some rich fuck from the Main Line that owns the fuckin' place and collects a bizillion dollars a month for this rat hole."

Each floor had two "apartments" and there was one bathroom on two of the floors that they shared. A TV played loudly from the first floor apartment where the window fan was. We knocked on the door repeatedly but got no answer. That pissed Rob off. But we were not sure if Ali actually lived here. We had a warrant for his arrest for attempted murder but he no longer lived at the address on the warrant. We tried to scoop him up in the middle of the night but he wasn't where we heard he was going to be. One thing led to another and we wound up in this place. Rob knew we couldn't be too loud because we didn't want to let Ali know we were here if he actually was staying here.

We knocked on a few doors and showed Ali's photo. Nobody recognized his picture. That's what they said. Of course this was not a "police friendly" environment. We grabbed one guy who was just coming home. He actually looked like a hard working guy with a real job. He looked at the photo and said, "He doesn't look familiar. But people come and go here all the time. You want the landlord's number? He'll know." The guy paged through his cell phone and gave us the number for Jim the landlord. 267-508-2567.

We walked out onto the stoop, keeping the front door ajar so we could get back in. I kept an eye on the stairway as well as the street where a small pack of dogs ran around that included a Pit. It was the kind of dog that you would have to shoot in the noggin several times if he came at you. "I got him." Rob almost sounded surprised. "He doesn't know the name Ali, but he said he'd come right over. He only lives a couple of blocks away. Seemed pretty decent." I said, "I guess he ain't livin' in Lower Merion then, huh." "I guess not" Rob said as he put a raid jacket on.

A few minutes later Jim showed up. He pulled up in a plain looking Buick. It wasn't new but it wasn't a ghetto cruiser either. Jim wasn't actually the landlord. He was more like the super. A rich fuck from Radnor, not Lower Merion, owned the building. Jim collected the rent and did maintenance. The first floor apartment with the TV and fan was actually his office. "I keep that shit goin' so people think somebody's in there. I showed Jim the mug shot photo. "Oh, second floor middle" he said quickly. He said almost under his breath, "I knew that dude was trouble".

Images and Copyright

noreply@blogger.com (Meldrick Lewis) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 22:18:00 +0000

Many of the photographs posted here I took with a digital SLR. As for the others, I have made every effort to insure that images and information displayed on this blog are not under copyright, and that I have the freedom to use them. Please EMAIL me if you believe an image was used that was copyright protected. Information that was quoted has a link to the original source. Photos that are not listed are original by the blogger and arecopyrighted