THE VIC WAS A little kid.
The cops hated that.
Officers with kids of their own hated standing here at night inside this bright-lit Laundromat, listening to the child’s young mother as she sat sobbing in a molded orange plastic chair. Even if they were childless, they hated it because—unlike the drug dealers, wife beaters, drunk drivers, and other skels who comprised the greater part of the victim pool—this kid was an innocent. And they hated the fact that the shooting robbed them of their most potent weapon against the death they faced every day: their ability to joke. Dark humor could be discovered in the grisliest of adult crime scenes, but not even the most hardened wisecracker could find anything funny about a dead kid.
Several uniforms stood out in front of the Laundromat, making sure that the onlookers, residents of the housing project across the street, stayed behind the cordon. Normally the homeboys in the crowd would have been busy eye-fucking the police, but even they were subdued by the sight of the small corpse visible through the window.
Jack stood just inside the door, taking in the crime scene. After almost a week on the Berrios case he was still free to pursue it, but he’d been put back in the task force catching rotation, and this was his new case.
On a normal evening, the scene inside would have been loud, like a men’s club, with groups of detectives standing around chatting amiably above the corpse, but the grave murmur of voices tonight was broken only by the occasional squawk of a walkie and the loud tichit! and FLASH of the Crime Scene photographer’s camera. The room bustled with men in varied attire: uniformed patrol cops, detectives in suits, undercovers in jeans and sweatshirts, the ME’s boys in pale blue scrubs. In the middle of the narrow fluorescent-bright room, a Crime Scene detective knelt to set numbered yellow stands next to bullet casings on the floor. Another detective stooped over a measuring tape, calling off the casings’ distances from the small body, which lay under one of the Laundromat’s folding tables.
In a back corner, the kid’s mother sat clutching a pile of clean socks to her chest as if it were a doll; she was sinking into deep shock. Jack recognized Marry Lutz from the Seven-oh, a bullnecked, crew-cut detective, gently trying to extract a statement.
Anselmo Alvarez stood watch over the corpse. The Crime Scene chief shook his head gravely as Jack approached. Below the table, little basketball sneakers stuck out from under a white sheet. A red pool seeped out from the side onto the blue linoleum. Alvarez pulled back the sheet: the vic was approximately seven years old, male, black. A bullet wound gaped purple in his gaunt little chest. White soap grains dusted his close-cropped hair.
The detectives looked down in silence. What could you say?
Lutz flipped his steno pad closed and left the mother to her grief. He came over.
“Ay, Leightner, how’s it goin’?”
“What’s the story?”
Lutz ran a hand over his flat hair. “From what we’ve been able to put together, this all started because of a broken dryer in the basement of the projects over there. A black male resident comes over here to finish his laundry. The place is full, so he takes somebody else’s clothes out of a machine.” Lutz pointed to where a Crime Scene detective wearing an air-filter mask was brushing print powder over the front of a dryer. “A white male comes in, ‘Hey, why’re you taking my clothes out when they’re still wet?’ They talk some shit. The white guy leaves, but five minutes later he comes back with a nine and pops off a few rounds. The kid was in the way.”
The case sounded like a grounder: there’d been several witnesses to the shooting, and two of them even knew where the perp lived.
Lutz glanced around. “The Crime Scene guys are going nuts because there’s a round unaccounted for, but they’ll find it.” The number of bullets had to match the number of casings.
One of the uniforms at the door came over and tapped Lutz on the shoulder. “Excuse me, sir. You’ve got a call.”
The detective trotted off.
A minute later, he returned, smiling grimly. “We got the bastard. Another criminal genius—he went straight to his mother’s apartment, in his own fucking building. Some uniforms picked him up.”
Lutz stepped away to spread the good news. A muted cheer went up in the room. Alvarez bent over the little corpse.
Jack drifted out of the Laundromat. He stopped to talk to one of the uniforms. “I’m Jack Leightner with Brooklyn South Homicide. Do me a favor: if Detective Lutz comes looking for me, tell him I’ll meet him down at the Seven-oh in a little while.”
Below the concrete seawall, waves sloshed gently against the shore. It was cooler here because of the wind off the water. Out on the dark bay, the Statue of Liberty raised her torch and, beyond that, tiny orange lights twinkled on the Staten Island and Jersey shores. The Garden Pier was a tiny park, a patch of concrete down at the end of Conover Street, just beyond a city auto pound and a vast abandoned warehouse. In the dark, Jack could just make out the huge faded white letters on the side: Red Hook Stores.
He sat on a wooden bench inhaling the briny air. Tonight the Hook didn’t tighten his chest. Tonight it was home. Out on the water, distant buoys rang gently, soothing. Far to the south, the light-beaded cables of the Verrazano Bridge swooped across to Staten Island. The park was a good place to clear your head of bad pictures.
Even if there wasn’t a heaven, he thought, God ought to make one for the little kids.
When he himself was growing up, he’d spent a lot of time down here. There were no official parks back then. You clambered out onto the rocky coastline, or snuck out onto one of the company docks.
The White Rock soda factory was just around the bend. The workers were all locals, and when the bosses weren’t looking they’d hand out free cases to family and friends. Every household on these streets had as much soda as they could drink. Jack and his buddies tied rope around the cases and lowered them into the bay to cool.
Soda wasn’t the only thing that magically made its way from the waterfront into the streets. In the days when the docks were crazy-busy, before security cameras and computerized inventories, crates disappeared so regularly from shipments it was like a neighborhood toll. There was a trade in evaporated goods. Why take the bus to the stores downtown when you could buy a toaster or a bottle of booze from the back of someone’s car for a fraction of the price? One legendary time, part of a clothing shipment disappeared off a dock—suddenly it seemed like every man in the neighborhood had happened to buy the same brown suit.
Out on the bay, the Staten Island ferry slid past like a glowing apartment building. A couple of seagulls appeared overhead, pieces of paper tugged by the wind; they planed off, cawing, and disappeared into the night.
The good old days. It was easy to see them through rosy glasses of nostalgia, but Jack knew better, Yes, there was sometimes trouble in the projects now, but when he was a kid crime had flourished like barnacles on the piers, the Mob working hand in hand with the longshoremen’s union to loot and pillage the incoming shipments, to control who worked and who didn’t, who fed their families and who starved. When he was a boy, the top mobster had been Albert Anastasia of Murder Inc., also known as “Big Al” and “The Mad Hatter.” Neighborhood kids used to scare each other whispering about his chief enforcer, the notorious pipe-wielding Totto Mack, nicknamed “Totto” for Salvatore and “Mack” because he was almost as big as one of the trucks shouldering down to the docks.
In 1957, Anastasia was whacked by Larry and Joey Gallo while he sat in a barber’s chair in Manhattan’s Park Sheraton Hotel. After that, Jack saw members of the Gallo gang standing around on Hook corners in their dark wool coats, porkpie hats, pointy black shoes. “If I ever see you talking to those bums,” his father told him, “you’ll never leave this house again.”
Some things got better. Just a few yards away from where Jack sat now, a giant concrete pipe had once opened out onto the bay. Back then, before anybody called themselves an environmentalist, the neighborhood’s raw sewage funneled directly into the water. On a hot summer day that didn’t stop kids from jumping in.
His brother Petey, two years younger, liked to joke around a lot. Acting as if he’d been shot by Al Capone (Red Hook’s most famous criminal son), he’d hold his side and fall into the water…
Nobody could figure out why Jack and his brother were so different. Jack didn’t like to swim—he wasn’t very good at it—but Petey had been a champ. He’d won a trophy for it over at the Bay Street pool. Not to mention his prowess at baseball. Adults in the neighborhood used to stop him on the street all the time, tell him how much they enjoyed watching his games. The kid was blessed. A natural athlete, handsome, always grinning. Even the old man rarely raised his hand against him. Everybody loved Petey.
Jack sighed and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes, pushing away the memories of his brother. Over thirty-five years he’d become very adept at that.
He stood up and looked at his watch. Detective Lutz was probably wondering where the hell he was.
Which was only a couple of blocks away from 7 Coffey Street.
After almost a week’s work, he had no idea why Tomas Berrios had been killed, or even where. He had a corpse, and a possible witness in the barge captain, but not a shadow of a suspect. If he wrote the case off now, nobody but the guy’s family would particularly care, though Sergeant Tanney wouldn’t be thrilled to see another Unsolved added to the year’s stats.
Blocks away, a dog barked. It was eerie how sound traveled in the neighborhood, each shout or car horn as distinct as an object in the desert.
Jack took one more deep breath of the ocean air. He’d go check in with Lutz, punch out, and then…What? He was not far from Sheila’s apartment, but surely it was better to be alone than to put up with her bitterness. Bad sex wasn’t necessarily better than no sex at all.
Here he was, half a century old—shouldn’t he have figured life out a little better by now?
One afternoon, after Ben was born, he and his wife had taken the baby on a walk through Prospect Park. They crossed a stone bridge over a lily-pad-covered lake. It was autumn and brilliant red and yellow leaves were falling on the water, perfect as a calendar picture. He looked at his young wife and little Ben burbling away in the stroller and it struck him that they were a family. After all the doubts and worries of the pregnancy, suddenly he was completely happy and sure that he’d made the right choices.
Now he was going to go home and drink a beer and watch TV by himself.
How had he screwed it all up?
“Where d’you go?” Lutz asked when they met back at the Seven-oh.
“I had to make some calls. How’s the case?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“You got good witnesses?”
“Are you kidding? I should start a glee club—I’ve never seen so many yos willing to sing in my life. For once they had a chance to stick it to a white guy. You wanna talk to the perp?”
“No, thanks. I’m gonna call it a night.”
On the way back to Midwood, his beeper went off. He pulled over in front of a deli and checked the number: Gary Daskivitch.
The young detective picked up on the first ring. “That you, Jack?” He sounded excited—it must be a good break.
“What’s up?”
“You doing anything tomorrow night?”
“No, I’m off. Why?”
“I talked to Jeannie.”
“Who?”
“My wife. Remember what we were talking about? She’s got someone for you, and she’s free tomorrow.”
Jack scratched his ear. “Tomorrow? What are you talking about?”
“I talked you up to Jeannie; Jeannie talked you up to her friend. Bing—she wants to go out with you.”
“Listen, kid—I appreciate the effort…” He was about to tell the younger detective to mind his own business, that he was a grown man and perfectly capable of getting his own dates—but he realized that wasn’t true. Aside from Sheila, who didn’t quite count, he hadn’t been on a “date” for many months.
He watched a teenage couple smooching on the corner outside the deli, kissing as if they were each other’s only source of air.
“Gary,” he said. “The truth is, I’m just too old for this stuff.”
“Too old! Jack, listen—I’ve seen this woman. If you say no, you’re making a big mistake.”