Chapter 36

I sat on the long sofa watching a baseball game on the small black and white television set parked against the opposite wall. It was a cheap model that I had picked up at the police auction of confiscated items a couple of months ago.

Consuela’s little girl Maria was watching the baby in the crib and feeding it toys to play with the concentration that only a small child could gather like magic from an invisible cloak. The girl didn’t look anything like her short pleasantly plump mother doing her best to hide her top heavy breasts from view. Not that Consuela was shy or anything like that it was more that she wanted desperately to blend into the background knowing that the middle of the herd was the best place to be for one’s mental health. I looked at the nanny with her prematurely grey hair and studied her for a moment as I pretended to watch the game. The sharp girl with the innocent eyes caught me looking and I thought she blushed but it was difficult to tell because she had darker than normal skin tone.

I was not looking at her out of any sense of sexual interest but merely out of curiosity wondering what had brought her to New York City. I confess I was interested about her back story on her relocation to the Big Apple. It was a time of migration of many Spanish speaking people from Puerto Rico into the city and politics aside, I suspected the main reason was the American dream driving the hordes of new residents to assimilate faster than any other wave of new residents into the city. There was talk of the island becoming the fifty-first state but the climate was not right and in my opinion it would stay only a quasi-state for a long time into the future because of economic reasons hidden from the general public.

My Uncle Joe’s staff was working overtime to get ready for the big trial in the offing and one of the things that had changed about his department was the increase in internal security. I noticed that nothing was ever left on top of a desk after working hours. He had purchased enough heavy metal file cabinets with steel bars and huge combination locks on each one. Only the workers that used the files knew which ones were which. There were no outside labels on any drawer to give an intruder any indication of what was inside. The carbon paper and the typewriter tapes were all burned each evening and new ones distributed each morning. It any of the staff had files to be destroyed they immediately went into the burn bags for shredding and incineration in the attic burn room.

Each day at different times, the office would be swept for any recording device either audio or visual and the green bulb would be lit to let the workers know it was safe to talk about the case. If the red light was on, everyone kept their mouth shut. He was discussing with the Department of Justice the feasibility to get a “bubble room” like they had in the military where they could hold all meetings about the progress of the coming trial.

One of the Top Secret items of the case was exactly who would be charged and what the charges would be.

Needless to say, the entire Internal Affairs Department, some members of the Attorney General’s office and higher headquarters downtown were like cats on a hot tin roof waiting for the results of the Grand Jury deliberations.

Only a few of the staff, including myself, knew the answers to those questions and in all honesty I was not quite satisfied with the answers. I thought that the prosecutor was a little too cautious in the selection of the accused and that the charges needed to be expanded in the FBI style of throwing everything at the defendants including the kitchen sink to make certain their defense lawyers were constantly on the go researching and investigating all of the evidence.

We had a bit of a false alarm on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning with the office alarms going off and warning us of a break-in at the office.

It turned out to be an unscheduled cleaning crew cleaning the windows and the floors in their annual spring cleaning effort in all departments. In their defense, the maintenance people had no idea of the sensitivity of the department at that point in time and were basically out of the loop in internal police matters.

As it happened, I was in church with Julie and Consuela’s daughter Maria after being persuaded by my wife that I needed the spirit of religion to guide my sinful steps.

That was fine with me because I had harbored a sense of loss after falling away from the pomp and circumstance of religious activities and it often relaxed me to read from the Good Book every now and then trying to figure out what the words actually meant in plain old English.

I remembered that my only adult instance of religious fervor was just before an almost suicidal mission in a combat zone giving me no choice but to turn off my brain and follow orders hoping for a happy ending at the other side.