Petty Crimes
By Bill Bernico

The call came in around two a.m. while I was working the graveyard shift with my partner, Leo Fisk.  An anonymous woman caller reported seeing a body lying on the sidewalk near the corner of Western and Belmont.  When we got there, the street was dark and quiet and deserted.  In the doorway of a liquor store we found the body of a man apparently in his sixties.  He wore a dirty brown suit and scuffed shoes.  If his shirt had had a collar, it would have undoubtedly had a ring around it.  I recognized the man lying before me.  It was Willy Logan, a local lowlife who frequented the bars in this neighborhood.

He lay face up, his upper body on the sidewalk and his lower body still in the doorway.  The side of his head had a three-inch gash with streams of blood that had run out onto the sidewalk and pooled up around his head.  There was another puddle near the body.  It was urine.  It looked like the guy got hit on the head while he was in the act of relieving himself.  His zipper was down and little Willy was still hanging out.  Written in the victim’s blood on the liquor store window was one word—PIG.

“Either someone hates cops,” I said, “or someone with the nickname of Pig likes to sign his work.  Better get the crime lab and a photographer down here, Leo,” I said, pulling my pen out and making notes on my pad.  Leo walked back to the car and called our situation in to the desk.  Within thirty minutes, two lab employees and a photographer had what they needed.  Several minutes later the ambulance carried Willy back to the morgue, leaving Leo and me to try to make some sense out of what we’d found.

“How do you figure this one, Bill?” Leo said, scratching his head.  “I mean the guy’s obviously taking a leak when someone else comes up from behind and slugs him.  What could they possibly want from Willy?  He didn’t have a pot to piss in—literally.”

“I know,” I said.  “Besides, nothing on the body was disturbed.  The way we found him must have been exactly as he fell.”

“And such a petty crime,” Leo said.

“Huh?”

“Public urination.”

“Oh yeah,” I said.  “Nobody said they all have to make sense.  Let’s go, Leo.  Our shift’s about up.”

Nine days had passed since we’d found Willy in the doorway.  It was just after seven and the sun was beginning to duck down behind the buildings.  We were on our way to supper when the call from the precinct diverted us.

“Car nine,” the voice on the car radio said, “see the man.  One one eight Sycamore Street.  Code three.”

Leo picked up the mic and held it to his mouth.  “Car nine, ten-four.”  He replaced the mic to the clip on the dash and grabbed the portable, magnetic red light that lay on the seat next to him.  He opened his window and slapped the light against the roof.  Then he flipped the switch on the dash and the siren tore a hole in the silence as we sped to the scene.

As we pulled up to the address on Sycamore we saw a man standing at the curb waving us down.  We pulled up to the curb and got out.  Leo approached the man, who was pointing to the corner pedestrian crossing.  In the middle of the intersection lay the body of a man.  At first glance I assumed he’d been hit by a car but upon closer examination I found tat he’d died of a single bullet hole to the chest.  The entrance wound was about the size of my little finger but I could have stuck my fist in the exit wound in his back.

I walked back over to where Leo and the man on the curb were talking.

“Bill, this is Mr. Hubert,” Leo said.  “Says he saw the victim get it.  Says he was watching the neighborhood out his window, like he always does at night.  Says the victim was standing on the corner, as if he was waiting to cross the street, and suddenly he started for the opposite corner.  You know, kitty-corner, when the shot rang out and the victim fell right where he is now.”

“Mr. Hubert,” I said, “did you say you saw the victim crossing the street kitty-corner?”

“Yes I did,” Hubert said.

“And which way was he headed?”

Hubert pointed toward the northeast corner.  “That way.  He started over there.”  Hubert pointed to the opposite corner.

I looked at Leo and tossed my head in the direction of the intersection.

“Thank you, Mr. Hubert,” Leo said.  “We’ll need your statement downtown.  We’ll stop by your apartment on our way back and pick you up.  Shouldn’t take more than fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be here,” Hubert said.

Leo reached into the squad car and grabbed the mic.  He requested an ambulance and the same photographer we’d had on the first case nine days earlier.  We returned to the victim and Leo stayed with the body while I mentally lined up the place where I thought the bullet might have come from.  The bullet had entered the victim’s chest just above the right nipple and exited near the left kidney.  That put the shooter up high enough to be able to shoot down at such an angle.

Halfway up the block I found the entrance to an alley.  I drew my service revolver and cautiously made my way further in.  On the left side of the alley I found a fire escape with the ladder still hanging down.  Whoever shot the victim must have come back down and fled through the alley.

The ambulance arrived and drove the body back to the morgue.  Leo and the photographer joined me in the alley.  The two of us proceeded up the fire escape.  I told the photographer to wait here for us.  The building was a three-story job from the thirties.  In the corner of the roof we found a single spent cartridge from a rifle.  Looked to be a 30-30 cartridge and it hadn’t been lying there long.  I inserted my pencil in the open end and slipped it into a small envelope I carried in my pocket.

Scratched into the tiles that lined the edge of the roof I found a hastily scribbled note that said, “That’s a no no.”

“What do you make of that, Bill?” Leo said.

“I don’t know.  It could have been there for some time or just since tonight.  It looks fresh enough to be from tonight.  As far as what it means, well, that’s anyone’s guess.”

Leo leaned over the edge of the roof and called to the photographer to join us.  He got the shots he needed of the roof area and the scribbled note and we all returned to the street.  Leo and I took our seats in the squad and just sat there in silence for a few seconds.  In a few moments Leo broke the silence.

“Another senseless killing,” he said.  “I don’t get it.  There doesn’t seem to be any connection between the two victims.  This guy was one of the upper crust and wouldn’t be caught dead with Willy.”

“We’ll they’re together now,” I said.

We’d learned that the Sycamore Street shooting victim’s name was Peter Masterson, a forty-five-year-old father of three.  He’d had the bad fortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For the next few days things to be getting back to normal.  Then the other shoe dropped.  It had now been only four days since the jaywalker took one in the chest in the intersection.  And it had been less than two weeks since we found the two Willies hanging out on Western Avenue. 

It was Friday night and Leo and I were near the end of our shift and were heading back to the precinct.  We cruised along Larchmont Street talking about baseball, good food, the upcoming holiday, anything but our recent cases.  The thought of them was depressing and we tried not to take our work home with us.

The call on the radio interrupted our conversation.  The dispatcher told us to see a woman at Miller’s Department Store.  Miller’s was located on the southwest corner of East Sixty-Eighth Street and Mitchell Avenue.  When we got there, we found a woman standing on the sidewalk in front of the store.  Her name was Mildred Campbell.

She told us that she had detained a shoplifter who had tried to leave the store with three candy bars in his pocket.  The woman had called the police.  Before we arrived, the suspect had managed to break free and fled on foot down Mitchell Avenue.  That was about three minutes ago.  She said he was a young man, probably in his twenties, with blonde hair and a slim build.  He was wearing a bright blue windbreaker, jeans and some outrageous sneakers with a vivid design on the side.  We told the woman we’d be back for her statement after we’d patrolled the neighborhood.

Leo slid in behind the wheel and I rode shotgun.  We started out search on Mitchell and drove as far as we thought someone could run in under five minutes.  Nobody we saw on Mitchell matched the description of the assailant.  We turned onto Seventy-Eighth Street and worked our way back toward the store, scanning the blocks in between.

As we rounded the corner onto Seventieth and Mitchell I spotted a blue windbreaker in an alley between the blocks and told Leo to circle back.  I got out and approached on foot while Leo drove around the block and drove in from the other direction.  I cautiously entered the alley with my revolver drawn.  The blue windbreaker I’d spotted was the one we were looking for.  The assailant was still wearing it, but her was slumped down against a brick wall, his head hanging low.

Leo drove up as I knelt down beside the boy.  There was a length of rope around his neck and it had been pulled so tight that his tongue hung out further than I thought a tongue could.  His eyes bulged out in terror and his face was a dark shade of violet.  I quickly released the knot in the rope but I was probably two minutes late.  He’d stopped breathing.

Leo lifted the boy’s head so we could get a good look at his face.  Written on his forehead in bright red lipstick were two words—“Bad Boy.”  Leo released his head and let it slump again and stepped back.

“Boy, that’s one store with a strict policy against shoplifting,” Leo said.  “They take their petty crimes seriously, don’t they?  I wonder what they do to holdup men.”

I looked up at Leo.  “What’d you say?”

“I said, I wonder what they do to holdup men.” Leo said, wondering if my hearing was going.

“No,” I said.  “Before that.”

“Huh?”

“You said something about petty crimes.”

“Oh,” Leo said, trying to remember his statement.  “I just said that I thought they took their petty crimes seriously.”

“That’s it, Leo,” I said.  “Petty crimes.  That’s our link, if it’s the same killer for all three homicides.”

“How’s that?” Leo said.

“Think about it,” I said.  Willy’s only apparent crime was public urination.  The second guy was cut down while he was jaywalking.  And this kid shoplifted three lousy candy bars.”

Leo said, “That’s what the word in Willy’s blood meant—PIG.  The killer wasn’t knocking cops.  He was calling Willy a pig for urinating in public.”

“And the note scratched in the roof tile, “That’s a no no,” was no doubt a reference to the guy jaywalking.  The words “Bad Boy” on this guy’s head have to be about the shoplifting.  Jesus Christ, who’s next, litterbugs?”

After the photographer and morgue attendants left with the body, Leo and I drove back over to Miller’s Store to talk with the clerk.  She was checking another woman out through the far register.  She closed her register drawer and put out her “Next Register Please” sign and came toward us.

“Did you catch the little thief?” she said in a weary voice.

I nodded.  “Yes, we did, Mrs. Campbell.  They took him downtown a few minutes ago.”

“And did you find the three candy bars he took?”

I nodded again.  “Yes we did.  They’ll be booked into evidence.”

“Boy, if I could get my hands on that little punk, I’d…”

“You’d what?” Leo said.

The woman felt a bit embarrassed by her outburst and composed herself.  “Oh, nothing.  It’s just I get so damned tired of these hoodlums coming in here and helping themselves to whatever they want and thinking they can just walk out of here, like we didn’t see ‘em.”  She wiped her knuckle against her lips and bit down, trying not to flare up again.  “Will I get to see this guy at the lineup?  Will I at least get to give him a piece of my mind?”

“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Campbell,” Leo said.

Her hand came away from her mouth and dropped to her side in a fist.  “Why not?”

I put my hand on the woman’s shoulder.  “Because he’s dead.”

The woman’s eyes widened.  “Dead?  That soon?  How?  Where?”

“A few blocks from here,” I said, “in the alley.”

The woman’s wide eyes narrowed and she threw her head back and laughed a good belly laugh.  “Boy, that’s swift justice.  How’d you manage that?”

“We didn’t,” Leo said.  “Someone else got there before we did.  Mrs. Campbell, did you notice anyone else in the store around the same time as the shoplifter?”

She thought for a moment, biting her lip.  “No, can’t say that I…”  Wait, there was one guy that looked a little out of place.  Well, maybe out of place isn’t exactly the right phrase.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, this other guy I remembered because he bought strange items, items that didn’t exactly go together.”

“What did he buy?” Leo said from over my shoulder.

The woman stared upward, trying to recall.  “He got a black felt-tip marker, a bag of jelly beans and a tube of lipstick.  Strange combination, wouldn’t you say?”

“What did he look like?” I said.

“Well, I’d say he was about your size,” she said, looking me up and down.  “He had brown hair and that fashionable stubble they call a beard.  If you ask me, it just looks like they were too lazy to shave for a couple of days.”

“What else can you tell us about him?” Leo said, making notes in his book.  “Any distinguishing marks, tattoos, scars, any strange speech patterns?”

“Nope,” she said, “aside from that stupid beard, he looked like a thousand other guys.  I see people all day long, every day and after a while, they all start to look alike.  Know what I mean?”

“Would you know him again if you saw him?” I said.

“Hard to say,” she said.  “I only saw him for a moment and besides, most of the time I almost never look up from the register.  I just punch in the totals and make change while the people just file past me.  I got sick of making small talk years ago and just kind of adopted that habit.  Helps keep my sanity.”

“Thank you Mrs. Campbell.  We’ll be in touch.”

Leo and I drove back to the station house and sorted though our evidence files, looking for anything to go on, anything that might help us locate the psycho who’d taken it upon himself to punish the perpetrators of several petty crimes.

We decided we’d head back to the neighborhood around Western and Belmont and start asking a few questions.  Unlike Willy, we had almost nothing else to go on, so this was as good a place as any to start.

Leo pulled the car up to the curb on Western and we each took one side of the street, asking the neighbors and merchants about the night that Willy took his last leak in public.  I started with the liquor store where Willy’s body was found.  The owner, Lester Tremont, said he’d closed the store at five minutes past twelve that night.  He didn’t remember seeing anyone at that time.  By the time he’d swept the place out and stashed the day’s take in the safe, it was nearly one a.m.  We took the call at two a.m. and that narrowed the window of opportunity to one hour.

I checked with a few other merchants on my side of the street and met Leo at the corner to compare notes.  I told him what I’d found out from Tremont and a few of the neighbors, but it was still no more than we had before.

“I talked with one guy,” Leo said, “who says he was getting home from his second shift job around one-thirty or so.  Says he heard some strange noises outside but just passed it off as a couple of drunks fighting over a bottle of wine.  A few minutes later he heard a vehicle with a loud muffler pulling away.  He was curious enough to peer over his back yard fence and saw an older pickup truck leaving around then.”

“Could he give you any more on the truck?” I said.

“Not much,” Leo said.  “Thinks it might have been a Chevy or GMC.  They both look alike and he knows enough to know that the body style wasn’t a Ford or Dodge.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” I said.  “May not mean anything, but what the hell.”  I held out my palm and Leo tossed me the car keys.  “Come on,” I said, “let’s see what we can dig up over on Sycamore Street.

It took us twenty minutes to drive over to the intersection where Peter Masterson had learned about jaywalking the hard way.  Mr. Hubert had given us enough information that night to pinpoint the time of death.  What we needed now was a witness who could identify the shooter.

I talked with one woman who remembered seeing a guy carrying what looked like a guitar case.  She’d been used to seeing guys like that in the neighborhood before since Broadway Music Store was just half a block away.  Yet something about this guy stood out in her mind.  The woman’s name was Mary Riley and she lived two doors east of the Music store.

“What was different about this guy,” I asked.

Mary thought for a moment.  “He didn’t look like the other musician types I’ve seen around here.  He was older, much older.  I’d say about thirty-five or so.  Most of those other longhaired scumbuckets are in their teens.  This guy couldda been their father.  I remember thinking, ‘what’s a coot like that doing with a guitar.’  Then he ran off down that alley.”  She pointed at the alley where the fire escape hung down.  “He didn’t have long hair.  Just a short, stubbly beard.”

Leo wrote fast, trying to get the woman’s statement.  He pressed hard and the lead in the pencil snapped and fell to the ground.  “Damn,” he said before catching himself.  “I mean, darn, I broke the lead.  Gimme your pencil, Bill.”

I gave him the mechanical pencil I carried and he continued taking notes.

“Notice anything else strange, Mrs. Riley?” I said.

She looked at Leo, who was still writing and pointed to his note pad.  “That’s Miss Riley.”

Leo wrote “Miss” over the top of the “Mrs.” he’d written earlier.  Mary smiled at Leo.  Leo looked at me.  I tried not to snicker.

“Anything else?” I repeated.

She thought and scrunched up her eyebrows.  “Nope.  ‘Cept…  She trailed off.  “Probably wasn’t important.”

“You never know,” I said.  “What is it?”

“Well,” she continued, “a little while after I saw the old guy with the guitar running I heard a loud car.”

“What do you mean by loud?” I said.

“You know,” Mary said, “like when they need some work on the tailpipe and it sounds like a motorcycle roaring away.”

Leo made his final notes and closed his book.  He started to put my mechanical pencil in his shirt pocket when I held my hand out, palm up.  I snapped my fingers and extended the palm again.  “Uh, uh,” I said.  I took my pencil from Leo and deposited it back in my shirt pocket.

We thanked Mary Riley and returned to the relative cool comfort of the squad car.  I pulled away from the curb and told Leo I wanted to stop downtown at the park and get a hot dog from the vender that I knew would be on my favorite corner in a few minutes.  We got there in ten minutes.

I parked one spot from the corner and the two of us got out and found the hot dog vendor just where I thought he’d be.  I turned to Leo, “you want one?”

Leo shook his head and I held up two fingers to the vendor.  He handed me two hot dogs on a napkin.  I squirted on my own mustard and spooned on some relish.  I took a bite and turned to Leo with my mouth full, muttering what I knew to be, “sure you don’t want some?” but what must have sounded to Leo like, “mmmm mmm mmmm mmmm mmmm?”

We took a seat on the bench and watched the throngs of people scurry past, all in a hurry to get somewhere.  Between my bites Leo said, “Ever notice how people these days all seem to be looking out for themselves?”

“Huh?”

“I mean no one cares about anyone but themselves these days.  Used to be people took pride in their cities, their neighborhoods and their houses.  Today people don’t even give each other eye contact, let alone smile or say ‘hi’.”

I swallowed another morsel of hot dog.  “Yeah.  And they’re all pigs, too.  Just look around you.  The city’s getting to be one big garbage dump.  Plenty of trashcans on each corner and people still drop their garbage wherever and whenever they fell like it.  The city would be money ahead to hire a full-time garbage cop.  What they pay him would be a lot less than it costs them to clean up this mess.”

Leo agreed and sat back on the bench.  He looked up the block and saw a man walking away from us and heading toward the curb.  Leo nudged me with his elbow.  “Look at that,” he said, as the man peeled back the wrapper on a candy bar and threw the wrapper in the street.  “That’s exactly what I was talking about.  Well, it’s time someone did something about it.”

Leo got up and started toward the man.  The man had his hand on the door handle of a pickup truck that was parked at the curb.  I followed Leo, trying not to spill the relish out of my second hot dog.  I was still taking bites when Leo caught up with the man.  He grabbed the man by the upper arm and spun him around.  Leo pointed down toward the candy wrapper on the ground.  He looked back at me.

“See what I mean, Bill?” Leo said.  “This is how the streets get so filthy.  He turned back toward the man.  “Pick that up.”

The man scowled and muttered, “pick it up yourself.  What are you, a cop or something?”  He broke free of Leo’s grip and took a step before Leo grabbed the arm again and spun the man around.  Leo held his shield up in the man’s face.  “Yeah,” he said, “as a matter of fact I am.”

I smiled and stood there watching Leo get all worked up over a small piece of litter.  The man’s face straightened visibly as he bent to retrieve the refuse.  “Sorry,” he said.

Leo took the wrapper from him and deposited it in his pocket.  “Evidence,” he said, smiling at the man.  He pulled out his ticket book and began writing.

“You’re giving me a ticket for that?” The man seemed indignant. 

Leo kept writing.  He looked at the truck parked there at the curb.  As he glanced at the parking meter the red flag flipped up signaling that the time was up on this meter.  “Ah, overtime parking on top of it all.”  He flipped the page over in the ticket book and started writing out the second summons.

“You must think you’re hot shit,” the man said.

Leo finished writing the parking ticket and tore both tickets out of his book and handed them to the man.  “Payable in ten days.”

“Don’t you have better things to do than harass decent citizens?”

“Decent citizens,” Leo said, “don’t throw garbage on the streets.”

The man turned away and mumbled again.  “What a petty crime.”

Something struck a chord.  For the first time since their encounter, Leo took a good look at the man.  He had brown hair and that fashionable stubble they call a beard.  Leo shifted his glance toward the truck.  It looked beat up enough that it could be in need of a muffler.  He leaned over to the window and looked in, behind the seat.  There was some sort of case.  It could have held a guitar.  It could have held a 30-30 rifle.

Leo and I drew our revolvers almost simultaneously.  I kept mine aimed at the man while Leo turned him around and patted him down.  He pulled a set of keys out of the man’s pocket and found a General Motors key.  It fit the truck door and Leo opened it and withdrew the case.  He laid it out on the hood of the car and popped the latches.  Inside he found a Winchester 30-30 rifle with a scope.  In the inner compartment Leo found a hastily scribbled note, a sort of a list, so to speak.  It listed the following:

• Public Urination
• Jaywalking
• Shoplifting
• Overtime parking
• Littering
• Overdue Library Book
• Speeding

The first three entries had been crossed off. 

“Good work, Leo,” I said, pulling my cuffs from my belt and slapping them on the man’s wrists.  I looked at the list and then up at the man.  “According to this, now you have to kill yourself.”  The man didn’t see the humor as Leo led him back up the block to our waiting squad car.