Sidewalk Sleeper – Homeless/indigent person. First mentioned in Vengeance in Death, when “the Homicide bullpen of Cop Central smelled like day-old coffee and fresh urine.” Peabody told Eve “Bailey had a sidewalk sleeper in for questioning on a knifing. The sleeper didn’t like being held as a witness and expressed his displeasure by emptying his bladder on Bailey’s shoes. From all reports, said bladder was unusually full.”[1]
In Holiday in Death, Sarabeth Greenbalm reflected on her life in Allentown, Pennsylvania before moving to New York five years ago: “Stripping in Allentown had been a dead-end situation, netting her just enough per week to keep her from becoming another sidewalk sleeper.”[2]
Sidewalk sleepers figured prominently in Conspiracy in Death, where a group of rogue surgeons stole organs from them in several cities, including New York. Snooks, Gimp, and Jilessa Brown lived in their cribs in Sleeper Village in the Bowery, with Snooks and Brown being killed when their organs were harvested.[3]
“For the sidewalk sleepers, January in New York brought vicious nights with a cold that could rarely be fought back with a bottle of brew or a few scavenged illegals. Some gave in and shuffled into the shelters to snore on lumpy cots under thin blankets or eat the watery soup and tasteless soy loaves served by bright-eyed sociology students. Others held out, too lost or too stubborn to give up their square of turf. And many slipped from life to death during those bitter nights. the city had killed them, but no one called it homicide.”[4]
Eve also mentioned to Peabody that the previous evening, “Roarke has this dinner/dance thing for some fancy charity. Save the moles or something. Enough food to feed every sidewalk sleeper on the Lower East Side for a year.”[4]
When they died, the unclaimed and the indigent, the city cremated their bodies after forty-eight hours. Their bodies were dealt with during the night shift and sent out to the crematorium (Clemment was mentioned as a Receiving supervisor at one of these city-contracted crematoriums in Divided in Death).[5] Other mentions.[6]
References:
- ↑ Vengeance in Death, Chapter 3
- ↑ Holiday in Death (ISBN 0-425-16371-7), pp. 47-49
- ↑ Conspiracy in Death (ISBN 0-425-16813-1), p. 181
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Conspiracy in Death, Chapter 1
- ↑ Divided in Death (ISBN 0-425-19795-6), pp. 238-240
- ↑ Kindred in Death (ISBN 978-0-399-15595-6), p. 124