Watching The Detective
Eve Marx
Tom T. Undercover Detective.
Word Count 612
When I was in my 20’s, I met Tom T., a New York City homicide detective in his early 40’s. We both lived on the same side of the street in Greenwich Village. Even before we were introduced, I had my eye on him as he was extremely attractive in a pirate-y sort of way. He had black hair and a black beard, and dark brown eyes and wore Native American silver rings on every finger. He had a satin bomber jacket with the words “Film Trucks” embroidered across his back. After we’d been seeing each other for a few weeks, he shared he’d worked a long time undercover in the narcotics division, which is where he developed a taste for high-grade blow.
My time with Tom was glamorous and heady. In addition to investigating crime, he was a member of the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion pictures; his specialty was high falls and fire suits. He regularly worked as James Brolin’s stunt double. Off-duty, he often did security jobs on film sets if they were shooting in New York. At a bar downtown called the Buffalo Roadhouse he introduced me to film actors and directors and producers, and television stars. He always introduced me as his fiance, which was a joke. One day when he was working security on a film called “Grace Quigley,” I came home to find him snorting coke in our living room with one of the film’s principals. It wasn’t Katherine Hepburn.
Horrible as it sounds, certain details of Tom’s detective work enthralled me. I was drawn to gruesome crime scene Polaroids: headless, armless, legless torsos; torched bodies; stabbing victims; a fully grown human being stuffed into a garbage can. Once, desperate to break a case that was going nowhere, he invited me to pore over the diary of a high-profile victim, a young, wealthy, white, female grad student brutally murdered in her downtown loft by an unknown assailant. To be frank, he had a hard time reading her handwriting. The primary suspect was a transient male she’d met while doing social work at a Bowery mission for her grad program school. The victim documented their encounters in her diary, including a mention she’d invited the man to her residence. The night of her murder, she threw a big party. Dozens of people were inside her loft. It was a nightmare for the forensic team attempting to obtain fingerprints. Tom showed me Polaroids of the victim lying half-dressed on her futon, strangled with her own toaster cord. Much to his chagrin, the case was never solved.
My friends were uncomfortable around Tom, not just because he was so much older, but because he was a cop. Every single one of my friends at the time was engaged in some illegal or illegitimate activity, whether it was smoking marijuana or illegally subletting their apartment or working off the books. One night we went to a party held at the fancy Upper East Side apartment of my boss, who was dating an unsavory-seeming character I’d briefly met at the office. I was accustomed to unsavory characters in the workplace because I was an associate editor at a pornographic magazine. I brought Tom to the party. I asked if he would leave his gun at home. We’d been dating a year, and I knew he carried his service revolver everywhere as was required by the police department. We weren’t at the party for fifteen minutes when he said we had to go.
Why? I asked.
Because I’m the guy responsible for locking up your boss’s boyfriend who did time in prison for armed robbery, and he definitely made me.
We left.
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Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child. Follow Eve on Twitter here.
