King Of The Hoboes

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Book excerpt

Chapter One

Veronika Heydrich was a liar.

It was her fatal flaw, the demon that followed her all the days of her life. They called it storytelling when she was a little girl, fibbing in grade school, and exaggerating in high school. During her University days they called it her Heydrich spin, and as an undercover cop they called it a natural gift. Only it had made a wreck of her personal life and destroyed almost every relationship she ever had. She was the kind of girl who could swear on all she held dear and look you straight in the eye while lying through her teeth. She crushed many people throughout her life who thought they had come with her to the moment of truth, only to have her renege in an ultimate betrayal. For them it was a bridge burned forever, for her it was just another sad episode in the story of her life. 

She had been a mistress at rationalization, perhaps her greatest sin, her ability to lie to herself. She made herself believe that she was better off having severed relationships with those who could not help her get ahead, those who expected to suffer a setback in favor of truth. She could not think of a single situation where the lie could not have eventually become the truth, where she had not been able to prevail by turning fantasy into reality. She could not think of one person who had walked away from her who had truly become a loss in her life.

Actually there was one. Evan Carlow had walked away, and her partner turned lover turned fiancée turned rival had been missed. She had never gotten that close to a man before, and it was almost as if she had finally found her soulmate. They had moved in together, they had set a wedding date, but she just couldn’t stop lying and he finally had enough. When he moved out he took a piece of her heart with him, and she realized she had to get him back so she could put herself back together.

They had been partners on the field, and they voluntarily split up to assist on separate sting operations for the NYPD. Police Chief Joel Madden had been her guardian angel throughout her career, and he knew that giving her and Carlow some space was the best thing for them. Everyone knew they had a personal relationship, and they were true professionals who left it at home when they put on their badges in the morning. He also knew they were one of his best undercover teams, and he hoped it was going to work out to the benefit of the NYPD. Veronika knew it would be to her benefit as well.

There had been rumors about a police investigation developing over the homeless movement in New York City as an estimated sixty thousand persons listed were being recruited into an activist movement. IMU, or I Am You, had become a rallying cry that began on Facebook, then began appearing on patches and stickers appearing on backpacks and shopping carts among the destitute. At first it was seen as a reproach to the affluent, but recently there were concerns that a militant group had professed an ulterior motive.

Word had spread that the King of the Hoboes, Adolf Hyatt, had come to NYC with the express purpose of uniting the homeless of New York in an activist movement. Hyatt had been allegedly crowned as King of the hobo underground network that had existed for over two hundred years. Members of the network had been interviewed over the decades, and it was seen as an exotic facet of Americana unique to its society and culture. Artists and poets across the decades had extolled the traveling spirit of wanderers across the country, and ‘riding the rails’ was stuff that legends were made of. Only the thought of homeless people uniting in a militant cause was alarming people still experiencing the long-term effects of 9/11.

Police activity among the homeless was not unusual. It was a running joke among the law enforcement community that every other vagrant on the streets of Washington DC was most likely a Secret Service agent.     However, the eyes of the law had not been trained on the homeless themselves as persons of interest. It was an exceedingly unpleasant task in the eyes of NYPD officials, who foresaw a multitude of problems should the investigation come to light.

The prevailing concern was that humanitarian groups might withdraw their support for the homeless community, which would cause greater stress on an already overburdened social services system. There was also the crisis issue regarding the skyrocketing number of families and at-risk children who were on the streets with no permanent place of residence. The NYPD would be loathe to demonize them as a side effect of a campaign against a rogue group whose existence had not officially been confirmed.

Veronika had been flipping through the case files as she made coffee and toast in her kitchenette in her SoHo loft on Prince Street. She loved the neighborhood and the local ambiance, a world apart from her upper-class beginnings in Southampton. From the time she enrolled at New York University and pursued her degree in law enforcement, she knew that this was the place where she belonged. It greatly helped her develop her chameleon skills, as she convinced most people she was an aspiring starlet complete with a resume she had developed by way of a string of auditions she had with different off-Broadway theatre groups. No one ever suspected her of being a cop, and those who crossed from one of her worlds to another were generally sworn to secrecy.

The phone rang, and her heart leaped when she saw it was Evan on caller ID. She raced across the living room and rolled across her convertible sofa, snatching it from the charger before he hung up on the recorded message.

“Evan.”

“Hey, beautiful, how’s it going?”

“I don’t like that you hang up without leaving a message. I practically have to tackle the phone just to talk to you. I do have a cell phone, you know.”

“I don’t do messages or cell phones unless it’s an emergency, you know that. Anyway, did you decide if we were gonna bid on the job?”

“I don’t know, Evan. It’s a filthy environment and disgusting people. It was bad enough having to mingle with those geeks during that hacker case, let alone those gangbangers in that crack gang. Now you’re wanting to disguise us as a couple of bums.”

“Well, check this out. I talked to Lieutenant Shreve this morning. He had a long discussion with Captain Willard the other day. They’re pretty sure that if this job goes over, you’ll get upped. Chief Madden will probably put you in for a gold badge.”

“Oh my gosh, Evan, that’s fantastic!” she gushed. “Well, I guess there’s nothing left to discuss. Let’s do it.”

“There’s a lot to talk about before we commit to this,” he insisted. “There’s a lot we don’t know---nobody knows---about these people. It’s a complex, multicultural society with lots of distinctive protocols and behavioral patterns. Murder is just as much a way of life with some of these people as it is for the Mafia or any other gang culture. Most of these people live day to day, hand to mouth, and betrayal can be considered a capital offense. If they find out we’re conning them, our lives could easily be at risk.”

“We spent months taking down a crack gang whose signature mark was leaving informers with their throats slit in the middle of the street,” Veronika went back into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee before buttering her toast. “I should think that we will be at far less risk amidst a bunch of bums.”

“Problem is, you wouldn’t know who’s bringing it, who it’s from or where they’re going,” Evan insisted. “At least when you think a gangster’s looking for you, you can see it coming. You can defend yourself. Do you think we can get set every time somebody dressed like shit turns the corner? Even worse, if they do make the hit, they might never be brought to justice. How do you find someone who has no identification, no address, no background? It’s a serious problem, and they want you to know there will be serious risks.”

“I’m in, Evan. They put that gold badge on the table and I’m in. Look, I’ll meet you at your place at noon.”

She ate her breakfast, then stripped for her shower as she checked herself in the mirror. She was a big girl, standing 5’8” and 140 pounds, a classic Nordic beauty with thick blonde waist-long hair. She had a knockout figure with a large bosom, a 24-inch waist and well-muscled things and calves. She had narrow, ice-blue eyes that seemed cruel at times, offset by thick lips that were quick to smile at her advantage. She made it a point to go to the gym twice a week and ate what she called rabbit food when by herself to keep her hourglass figure. She knew her beauty had a lot to do with her getting ahead in life, and did whatever it took to keep her running in the fast lane.

She threw on a black jumpsuit, white sneakers and shades, tied her hair back in a loose bun, and headed down to the street for a quick run up to Washington Square Park and back so as to be on time to meet Evan at his Gramercy Park apartment. Veronika saw it as another subtle difference between them, the plainclothes cop and the undercover detective. She was making it in SoHo at fifty grand, while Evan was living in one of the more prestigious neighborhoods in town with his $90k salary. She was the one taking the risks, playing the point and sticking her neck out, while he was the lifeline always ready to pull her out of a jam. She decided it was time for her to get paid for the risks she was taking, time to collect the gold star.

As she jogged along, she never failed to notice how there was not a whole lot of peace and joy in the faces of the people on the street. She always knew it was a struggle to make it in New York, as far back as her first days at NYU. She remembered how most of her schoolmates did their best to make ends meet with part-time jobs and care packages from home. When she joined the NYPD and left home shortly before her father died, her inheritance and new salary were enough to get her into a SoHo loft. Still, it was no cakewalk. When the home in Southampton was sold, there was no nest to fly home to. Yet, she was not going to become one of the cheerless masses. She found her place and she would keep it at all costs.                          Meeting Evan was one of the highpoints of her post-graduate life. He was a full-blooded Irishman just as she was one hundred percent German. He brought much of his ethnic charm and high-spiritedness into their relationship, just as she maintained her German sense of order and stoic determination. They became a formidable team on the field when Captain Ty Willard first teamed them up. When the partnership blossomed into romance, they tried to keep it quiet at work as best they could. Only Evan eventually had to declare his position to protect it against the alpha males that abounded throughout the force. They spent most of their time together on the field and off, but at the break of dawn they each went back to their own home.

She understood the need for freedom, what the old-school Germans called lebensraum. She put a lock on her door back home as a teenager, and lived a model life in an immaculate room as compensation to her parents. Yet she would have given it all away if her privacy had been taken from her, and her parents knew and respected that. Evan knew it as well, and if he had given her an ultimatum to move in with him, he would have lost her forever. He knew that she would come into his home at the time of her choosing, and he knew the wait would be well worth it.

The bums on the street knew the price of freedom. So did the teenage mothers wheeling their kids along in their cheap, ragged strollers. They could have headed South and found a city where the cost of living was much lower, and the assisted living was much more dignified. Yet when they woke up, they would not see the NYC skyline, experience the Big Apple hustle and bustle. This was the greatest city on earth, and a bum would die broke and starved beneath a bridge than leave it behind. It kept students in cold-water flats living on Ramen, and unwed mothers collecting welfare with a State-issued piece of plastic as the only thing in their purse. New York got to be part of one’s DNA, and Veronica knew what that was all about.