Rhapsody In Blue

By Lev Grossman Sunday, Apr. 11, 2004
    • The junkie is tall and pale and goofy looking, in a T shirt and bike shorts, and Edward Conlon doesn't have a whole lot of obvious sympathy for him — he calls him Big Bird behind his back. Big Bird used to be an electrician till he realized his true calling, namely, shooting smack. A few days ago, one of Big Bird's fellow junkies conked him on the head with a chunk of concrete — the chunk is in Conlon's desk, in fact, with blood and hair still on it — and it's Conlon's job to find the guy who did it.

    Conlon is a detective in New York City's 44th Precinct, in the South Bronx, a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium, not far from the legendary Fort Apache. At 39, he has a bit of that seedy-sexy Chris Noth charm to him — late Chris Noth, more Mr. Big than Detective Logan. But Conlon has another calling too: he's an author. His book, Blue Blood (Riverhead; 562 pages), is a memoir of his first seven years as a New York City cop, and it may be the best account ever written of life behind the badge.


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    Conlon got a diploma from Harvard, but he comes from a cop family, and after graduation he drifted back to New York City and the Job. His real education began at Police Service Area 7, also known as Claremont Village, a rough housing project in the Bronx, and that's where Blue Blood begins. "The ghetto could be a world of three-dimensional, 360 insult," he discovers, "where no one had enough so they ruined what they had, and then came looking for yours." He learns to turn his hat around while patrolling dark stairwells — to minimize telltale reflections — and to expect a sergeant to touch a beat officer's shield after a winter patrol to make sure it's cold. He learns that the crackheads he keeps in line make more money panhandling than he does. He learns how to turn a criminal into a C.I.--a confidential informant — and how to break down a drug operation by sight into buyers, sellers and lookouts, and how to answer unanswerable questions like "What the f___ are you gonna do about it?"

    Today Conlon is cruising the neighborhood for the junkie who brained Big Bird, steering with one hand and juggling multicolored case files with the other, head swiveling constantly to scan the sidewalks. He drops by a project tower to do a "vertical patrol," which means taking the elevator to the roof and trotting down 16 condom-and-crack-vial-strewn flights to the ground. A crowd of teenagers loiters in front of the entrance. "Let's see how many of these guys break when they see us," Conlon says as he gets out of the car. None do, though we get a catcall of "federal agent!," a reference to Conlon's snappy detective suit.

    It's a slow day, but the lulls between the action sequences are when most police work gets done, and they're also where the real riches of Blue Blood lie. Conlon has a mook's job, but he does it with a mandarin's eye. He analyzes the subtle semiotics of "jerkology," the interrogator's art of cajoling a prisoner into confessing--"of convincing a perp to trust you more than he trusts himself, and then betraying that trust." Empty hours of patrol time fill up with banter, and Conlon transcribes it with a verve reminiscent of Mamet:

    "This nose, in my family, it goes a long way back."

    "It goes a long way forward, too."

    "I'm saying there's a lot of history there."

    "Geography, too."

    The amazing thing about Blue Blood is that where a lesser writer would just have gone numb, Conlon stays alive to the humor and the sadness and the ironies of life even in the teeth of the city's everyday assault — bricks (and, once, a canned ham) thrown from rooftops, the festering bitterness of precinct-house feuds, the bizarro underworld of the midnight shift, the agony, both Dantean and Sisyphean, of sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center that has been moved to Staten Island. Conlon has no ambitions as a whistle-blower or a hero — he's neither a Serpico nor a Supercop — and that keeps Blue Blood free of distortion and full of perspective. The result is a document with a testimonial force equal to that of Michael Herr's Dispatches.

    At the end of the day Conlon heads to a culinary establishment known as Jimmy's Diner. Big Bird has a phone number for his assailant, and Conlon has traced it to a fax machine there. The kindly woman behind the counter regrets to inform us that she doesn't recognize the phone number, and anyway Jimmy's doesn't have a fax machine, and are we sure we have the right Jimmy's? There's more than one, you know. Just like that the trail goes dead. "You try to get people involved in the story," Conlon says with a shrug, on his way back to the car. "Sometimes they care, sometimes they don't." It didn't work this time. In Blue Blood, it does.