But we did not get that far before her telephone rang. Commander Penn answered it and I watched the pleasant evening drain from her face.
'Where?' she quietly said, and I knew the tone of voice quite well. I recognized the frozen stare.
I was already opening the hall closet door to fetch my coat when she said, I'll be right there.'
Snow had begun drifting down like ashes when we arrived at the Second Avenue subway station in the squalid section of lower Manhattan known as the Bowery.
Wind howled and blue and red lights throbbed as if the night were injured, and stairs leading into that hellhole had been cordoned off. Derelicts had been herded out, commuters had been detoured, and news vans and cars were arriving in droves because an officer with the Transit Police Homeless Unit was dead.
His name was Jimmy Davila. He was twenty-seven. He had been a cop one year.
'You better put these on.' An officer with an angry, pale face handed me a reflective vest and surgical mask and gloves.
Police were pulling flashlights and more vests out of the back of a van, and several officers with darting eyes and riot guns flashed past me down the stairs. Tension was palpable. It pulsed in the air like a dark pounding heart, and the voices of legions who had come to aid their gunned-down comrade blended with scuffing feet and the strange language radios speak. Somewhere far off a siren screamed.
Commander Penn handed me a high-powered flashlight as we were escorted down by four officers who were husky in Kevlar and coats and reflective vests. A train blew by in a stream of liquid steel, and we inched our way along a catwalk that led us into dark catacombs littered with crack vials, needles, garbage and filth. Lights licked over hobo camps set up on pallets and ledges within inches of rails, and the air was fetid with the stench of human waste.
Beneath the streets of Manhattan were forty-eight acres of tunnels where in the late eighties as many as five thousand homeless people had lived. Now the numbers were substantially smaller, but their presence was still found in filthy blankets piled with shoes, clothes and odds and ends.
Grimy stuffed animals and fuzzy fake insects had been hung like fetishes from walls. The squatters, many of whom the Homeless Unit knew by name, had vanished like shadows from their subterranean world, except for Freddie, who was roused from a drugged sleep. He sat up beneath an army blanket, looking about, dazed.
'Hey, Freddie, get up.' A flashlight shone on his face.
He raised a bandaged hand to his eyes, squinting as small suns probed the darkness of his tunnel.
'Come on, get up. What'd you do to your hand?'
'Frostbite,' he mumbled, staggering to his feet.
'You got to take care of yourself. You know you can't stay here. We got to walk you out. You want to go to a shelter?'
'No, man.'
'Freddie,' the officer went on in a loud voice, 'you know what's happened down here? You heard about Officer Davila?'
'I dunno nothing,' Freddie swayed and caught himself, squinting in the lights.
'I know you know Davila. You call him Jimbo.'
'Yeah, Jimbo. He's all right.'
'No, I'm afraid he's not all right, Freddie. He got shot down here tonight. Someone shot Jimbo and he's dead.'
Freddie's yellow eyes got wide. 'Oh no, man.' He cast about as if the killer might be looking on — as if someone might want to blame him for this.
'Freddie, you seen anybody down here tonight you didn't know? You seen anybody down here who might have done something like that?'
'No, I ain't seen nothing.
' Freddie almost lost his balance and steadied himself against a concrete support. 'Not nobody or nothing, I swear.'
Another train burst out of the darkness and blew past on southbound tracks. Freddie was led away and we moved on, sidestepping rails and rodents moiling beneath trash. Thank God I had worn boots. We walked for at least ten minutes more, my face perspiring beneath my mask as I got increasingly disoriented. I could not tell if round bright lights far down the tracks were police flashlights or oncoming trains.
'Okay, we've got to step over the third rail,' Commander Penn said, and she had stayed close to me.
'How much farther?' I asked.
'Just down there, where those lights are. We're going to step over now. Do it sideways, slowly, one foot at a time, and don't touch.'
'Not unless you want the shock of your life,' an officer said.
'Yeah, six hundred volts that won't let go,' said another in the same hard tone.
We followed rails deeper into the tunnel as the ceiling got lower. Some men had to duck as we passed through an arch. On the other side, crime scene technicians were scouring the area while a medical examiner in hood and gloves examined the body. Lights had been set up, and needles, vials, and blood glistened harshly in them.