The Devil in Silver

Coffee’s death was reported in the New York Post and Daily News, only a day after it happened. Small items. Not even a quarter of a page. The day after that, the Daily News ran a longer feature that highlighted the poor supervision at New Hyde. There was mention of how the suspect (listed as Kufi Acholi) assaulted two staff members before menacing a fellow patient. This second, longer article included a photo of Kufi looking absolutely homicidal. Where had they found the picture, buried in an abattoir? It made Coffee (or Kofi or Kufi, poor guy) resemble, at least in spirit, that famous old woodcut of a wild man: on his knees and wearing rags, a baby in his mouth and a woman’s severed head in the background. The woodcut is of a man who believes he’s a werewolf. That’s how the photo in the Daily News article made Coffee seem. Like something inhuman, too bizarre to be real. The kind of monster any sane person would hope to see killed in a thunderstorm of gunfire. Good riddance. Coffee’s photo inspired only one emotion. Horror.

Not that Pepper and Loochie and Dorry had the luxury of pondering such an injustice to their friend’s memory. The direct aftermath of the takeover was arrest. Once Josephine and Scotch Tape were freed, they fingered the other three as coconspirators. While Coffee was wheeled into the emergency room of NHH, the others were handcuffed and placed into three separate cruisers.

Though an NYPD tactical unit had been called in, Loochie, Dorry, and Pepper were held on the New Hyde Hospital campus. The hospital’s security chief was completely ineffective when it came to preventing a mess, but he was better at sweeping up afterward. All he had to do was make sure the trio was driven from Northwest to New Hyde’s main building. There, he handed them over to actual officers employed by the New York City Department of Health and Hospitals Police. (The main building was operated by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, a city agency, so it was entitled to a security detail made up of NYPD officers. But Northwest—along with two other units—was operated by a private organization called the New Hyde Health and Hospital Corporation. Its security was contracted out to a low-budget security firm that would have trouble guarding a Waffle House.)

When Loochie, Dorry, and Pepper were taken to the main building’s detention “center” (two conference rooms and an out-of-order bathroom), they were officially being handed over to police custody but without—here’s the important part—without having to leave the New Hyde campus. How do you keep a family problem within the family? You don’t let the children out. Only Loochie had a short detour when she was taken away to have her hand cleaned, stitched up, and bandaged. By the next day, all three patients would be returned to the custody of Northwest’s security detail. They’d be driven four minutes across campus and returned to the psychiatric unit. Most systems barely work, but those same systems cover their asses much more successfully.

And Coffee? His body went to the emergency room. Then, briefly, to the Intensive Care Unit. Then, last, to the hospital’s morgue, a place the staff called the “Rose Cottage.”

Loochie and Dorry were originally supposed to spend the night together in one of the two detention rooms. But if they were in the same room, Loochie made a habit of trying to tear Dorry’s head from her neck. Dorry didn’t fight back, either. So the cops had to separate the pair. Loochie spent the night in one room and Dorry in the other. (Neither room had beds, so they slept in chairs.) Pepper had to spend the night in the out-of-service bathroom. Which actually wasn’t as terrible as it sounds. It had been out of service so long that the place was cleaner than either detention room.

Once alone, Loochie and Dorry fell into fitful sleep.

Kofi was at rest in the Rose Cottage.

Pepper sat on the toilet in that bathroom. He couldn’t get comfortable enough to drift off, so instead, all night, he remembered: Pepper and Loochie had gone flat on the floor when the cops started shooting. They were handcuffed only moments after Kofi fell.

The police left the Devil to itself. They didn’t touch it. They moved around the body. Peeked at it and, just as fast, averted their eyes.

It lay on the floor, facedown. It didn’t move, or even seem to breathe. Pepper and Loochie entertained the wish that it had died somehow. A stray bullet maybe. Could that happen? Could the Devil die? But when Josephine and Scotch Tape appeared, it moved again. It whimpered. Seeming to call out for their help.