Morning came to Kennedy in the usual manner, ricochet radiance striking his pillow early. He got up slowly, like an athlete feeling bruises, limping slightly as he crossed the room, rubbing his face, touching the tender places in his memory where the dream had left its marks. Dudley threaded himself in and out of Kennedy’s legs, half in an attempt to get breakfast on the road and half of it nothing more than an amiable greeting from one survivor to another. Kennedy stood at the bathroom sink with his hands on either side and looked carefully at the image in the mirror.
Whatever was happening to him wasn’t easily detected. He stood for a while, leaning on the sink, staring at his reflection in the pitted mirror. His short arms were covered with red hair; his hands where they lay on the porcelain surface were broad, strong. One knuckle rode high on the tendons, a souvenir from a Bronx dealer who had ducked his head forward just as Kennedy had thrown a sucker punch at him. The hand healed eventually, but the knuckle didn’t.
What was working on the detective now was the unfamiliar sensation that he was outside the core of things. All the years he’d been on the force, he’d never given more than a passing thought to what he was doing. Part of this came from the job itself, composed as it was of second-by-second decisions, snap judgments, action taken on the balls of your feet, at a dead run, many times at the highest pitch of nerves. Like most good cops, Kennedy had lived so long on adrenaline and a kind of careless adolescent joy in the game, trading on his wits, his street sense, his inborn skywalker’s balance, that he never noticed the erosion of his contemplative side. Few cops care to indulge in self-examination, partly because it’s a hindrance to the work; it clouds the instinct, slows the reactions in a subtle way that frequently proves fatal. And partly because most policemen who have been effective in the field have done things they’d rather not think about, things they’d rather not see dragged out into the daylight for the civil-liberties guys to poke around in. And there were other kinds of memories, the ones that came up on you from your blind side, stuff you told yourself you could cover up very nicely with a couple of coats of Jack Daniel’s. So how was it that all the things he had trained himself never to think about seemed to be thinking about him?
After a shave and a shower he felt distinctly revived. He sat at the small round table where he ate his breakfast, idly breaking off sections of sugar donut and feeding them to Dudley, watching the sunlight move over the cat’s fur. Dudley’s single eye opened and closed as he ate. A trace of white sugar powder had stuck to his rough black nose.
“Hey, hammerhead. Clean your face off.”
Dudley looked up from his donut pieces. Part of his tongue was sticking out of his mouth. The overall effect made Kennedy feel a little better about life.
Reaching over the table to brush away the sugar, he stroked the cat under the whiskers, running the side of his hand back toward the animal’s neck. Dudley pushed his large delta-shaped head up into Kennedy’s hand. A low chirruping sound came from his chest.
“You’re supposed to purr, hammerhead. Not chirp. Birds chirp. Cats don’t chirp. It’s embarrassing to have a roommate who chirps.”
Dudley settled onto the tabletop, enjoying the sound of Kennedy’s voice, watching his face as the man talked.
“Duds, old chap. How was your night? Bad night? You go out, get laid? You get to that blue-point over at Lon Ky’s yet? You stayed in, huh? You’re a lying son of a bitch, you know. I think I saw you in that tree outside Roderigo’s last night. Am I right? Were you up there freaking out your buddy? Hah?”
Perhaps there was something in Kennedy’s voice, a subharmonic, an unfamiliar demisemiquaver. With his tongue still caught between his teeth, the cat stared solemnly at the man, one forepaw extended, claws flexed.
“No comment, hah? You have a good night, later on? You sleep right through? Nothing … disturb you? You didn’t hear anything?”
The tone made the cat restless. “Rrroowr.”
“Yeah? That’s what you always say.”
Stokovich called a general conference for the task force at 0845 hours. The skeleton crew stayed around for the start of it, nodding over their coffee, propped up against the filing cabinets, collars loose, ties pulled off. A huge black-bearded man with blood on his knuckles lay on the holding-cell floor, greasy black jeans pulled taut over a belly like a spinnaker, arms out wide, chin up, mouth open, wheezing, putting out fumes Kennedy could smell across the room. Kolchinski, Wolf Maksins, and Detective Frank Robinson were all leaning against the bars of the cage. Maksins was trying to lob roasted peanuts into the man’s open mouth. Kolchinski and Robinson were providing him with moral support and forward fire data.
The general conference was standard procedure. At least once a week, under Stokovich about three times a week, all the shifts in Kennedy’s Detective Area Task Force gathered together in the squad room to go over the progress each detective, or each unit, had made on various investigations. Stokovich ran the meeting and made whatever alterations in duty assignments he felt were necessary as the cases progressed. This morning, with members of the graveyard shift still around, there were eleven men in the room. There were no women detectives in this Task Force. Stokovich had a problem with female detectives. He hated them. He’d work with them on certain cases, he believed that he was always polite and respectful to them, he believed that he would never do anything to impede the career of a woman detective, no matter what kind of an incompetent bitch she truly was, and he did his level best to keep them out of his squad. He felt this even more strongly about black female detectives.
Like Wolfgar Maksins, like others in the squad, Lieutenant Stokovich was quite capable of polite contempt for black cops. It was typical of them, however, that they would have gone cheerfully into a fire fight to rescue Detective Frank Robinson, who was as thoroughly black as it is possible to get. If you had called them on this, most of them would have looked at you with that dead-eyed glare that cops reserve for anyone who isn’t a cop. How could an outsider understand that Frank Robinson wasn’t a black—he was a cop.
This magical eradication of racial identity was a common thing, wrought by the daily fires of New York life and squad-room friendship. In every masculine community there are three trials by which each male member will be judged and disposition carried out on his soul, and at none of these trials will a single word be spoken in open court. In male cop societies the first trial is a test of heart. Does this newcomer have a spine? Can he defend his place and his dignity? Has he made his mark on the street? Does he have the balls to go in first? The second trial is mind. Is he stupid enough to go in first every time? Or will he learn how to use his balls? And the third test is a trial of loyalty. Can this man be loyal, and if so, to whom is his loyalty given? If it’s given to the Commissioner, the borough bosses, and the administration, then he fails. If it’s placed on the anvil, between the Book and the Street, if he can step back from it and leave it there, at the mercy of the caprices of cop fate, knowing that there is no way to do a cop’s job in the way the city truly calls for it to be done without placing his reputation and his career and sometimes his freedom at risk—if he can leave his loyalty on that anvil, then he passes. These decisions are made about every man and woman who comes to work as a cop, and the only way to achieve the respect and affection of other detectives is to be found worthy. There is no other way. No legislation, no departmental memorandum, no fiat from the fourteenth floor, and no quota hiring system can ever accomplish it. Frank Robinson had passed. Oliver Farrell had failed. Robinson would always be a man among men. Farrell had been born insubstantial and would die invisible and there would never be one goddam thing he could do about it. Nobody in the squad room ever talked openly about this part of the job, but nobody ever missed the effect of it either.
“Christ, Maksins, I think Eddie’s dead!”
Wolf came over from the cage to get a better look. He and Frank Robinson were standing on either side of Kennedy’s desk, looking down on him with counterfeit compassion.
“You want us to call a priest, Eddie? You may have died during the night.”
Maksins was holding something behind his back. When Kennedy looked up from his papers, the huge blond brought his heavy hand out. He was holding a crucifix. He pushed this across the desk at Kennedy.
“Stand back, Van Helsing! This will hold him off!”
Robinson laughed. “No, get a sunlamp! Jesus, Eddie. What’d you do last night? Last time I saw eyes like that, man was three days in Maspeth Creek.” The smile went away as he got a longer look at Kennedy. “Got the flu, Eddie?”
Kennedy was pleased to see Stokovich coming out of his office wearing his executive face.
“No, no, Frank. Got a little wrecked with Wolfie last night. Slept lousy. Give me a break, hah?”
Robinson wanted to dig a little, but Stokovich was already talking. Leaning up against the bulletin board, he got right into it, in his fashion, letting the men catch up however they could.
“Okay, okay, listen up. I’ve got that little shit Sorvino on the phone this morning. Some of you guys are letting your case-summary copies disappear between here and the DA’s office. I told the DA that we’d have all case briefings in his hands every afternoon. That’s every afternoon, Kolchinski. I read your summary on that Hell’s Angels asshole and it’s a nice piece of work. I don’t see much from the canvass. You give the second platoon a bounce again, I think you’ll get something from the street this afternoon. There’s a regular club meeting in Jersey, so maybe the neighbors will have more to say without those shmucks in the area. You get anything from Daphne over there?”
“Not a lot, sir,” Kolchinski said. “He had the flag up when we took him, the whole nine yards of liquid sky straight up the arm. He tapped it in when we came through the door and he’s been on the nod ever since. I’d like Maksins here to give me a hand when we question him. Guy’s a monster and I don’t want to dance with him again. It took three men to take him out of the Scorpio this morning. But he’ll roll over. He’s gonna be sick soon.”
Kennedy looked across the room at Kolchinski. Ben was a heavy-featured Pole with a hairless skull. He could bench-press four hundred pounds. It was not usual for him to ask for anyone’s help with a suspect. Stokovich shook his head.
“Not Maksins. I got plans for you, Wolfie. You have a court call today?”
“No, sir. They’ve gone into chambers to jack their way around the Fourth.”
Stokovich looked down at a clipboard. “You’ve got Seaforth hearing that? ‘Go Forth and Sin No More.’ Good luck with that dildo. He rolls over on the Fourth like he had a coin slot in his back. So you’ve got some time?”
Maksins didn’t talk much. When he did, it was in a voice that didn’t go with the narrow-hipped body: a tenor voice that hit each consonant hard, like a xylophone player learning the scale. English was a second language to him.
“Yes, sir. I have the time. I was going to go over to Fourteenth Street, look-see if our fist-fucker is back in business and kick some fluffs over on Christopher Street.”
Maksins was trying to locate a young Cuban male prostitute who had been seen in the company of an older gay male at a hellfire club. The older man had later been discovered dead in his Barrow Street town house. The M.E.’s report suggested that the cause of death was a human fist inserted into the man’s rectum. A black leather glove with chromed nailheads had been found at the scene. The body was trussed and suspended by its ankles. There were also some satanic nuances. Satanism was making converts in the demimondaine latitudes of Manhattan gays. It was ironic that a womanizer like Wolfgar Maksins had been assigned to the case. Ironic but also appropriate. He was a good-looking man, and he found it easy to get information from the secretive and cellular gay community. He had learned to use this lever. He wasn’t above some low-level flirtation if it would free up a conversation. Now and then this flirtation would be taken too literally. This was always a mistake.
Stokovich turned away before Maksins had finished speaking—pushing the room, demanding more and better and sooner. Kennedy watched him from his desk and felt a sense of diminishment, a lack in himself. Where the hell did Stokovich get the energy?
“Okay. Who’s next? Robinson? You’ve got a lecture at the Academy, don’t you? You get that Friction Ridge handbook I sent you? Yeah? Good. You were supposed to run down those Armenians. Anything? No? Well, why don’t you try our buddies down on Mulberry? These Gypsies hit three old moustache petes and a widow on Hester Street. They’re jerking off all over the San Gennaro society too, so get Deke here to go on the street for you. Okay, Deke?”
Fratelli smiled his pirate’s smile, and touched the side of his sharply hooked nose with a forefinger. He was dressed in his Armani best again today, a double-breasted black suit in raw silk, patent-leather loafers, a charcoal-gray shirt, and a thin scarlet tie. Fratelli had been born on Mott Street. He had a cousin in an honored society. Fratelli would finish his career in Intelligence, handing the news both ways, helping the NYPD work with the Sidernese factions. Deke Fratelli was another new-minted sergeant whose rank was in limbo pending the outcome of the Guardians’ suit. Unlike Maksins, Fratelli took it lightly. He understood that a race was like a family, and your family was supposed to use whatever it took to help you along in life. It worked for him; it worked for the Irish too. Why the hell shouldn’t the blacks put a branch into the spokes if it could get a few more black men into management? Deke believed that his rank would hold. He had scored in the top seven percent citywide.
“Don’t have to, boss. I was going to tell Frank anyway, story is that the Gypsies are in a room at the Holland right now. I’ve got two guys from Midtown South sitting on them. Soon as we wrap here, me and Frank’ll bop over and bag ’em.”
Stokovich looked at Fratelli for a second. “Shit, Deke, do I want to know how you did that?”
“Maybe we owe a favor—a guy needs a break on street parking or something.”
“I don’t want to know. You scare me, Fratelli. Eddie, what’s the story on the Ruiz kid?”
Kennedy had the sheet under his hand. “I took the grandfather up to the M.E.’s and got a positive. Kearny sent the package over this morning. Can you ask Patrol if the ACU guys and the RMPs could look for a primary crime-scene location? Probably indoors. There’ll be a lot of blood. It’ll be someplace like one of those DAMP projects, or a warehouse. Whoever did it, I figure they had something going with the kid. I’ve got a sheet from Toxicology says the kid was whacked out on speed when he died. Looks like a drug hit—maybe the kid was getting fast with the bank. He was sharp enough to think of it. Pendleton sent up the tape. I’m going to play it for some of the Anti-Crime guys, see if we can get a matchup. Computer has nothing on the kid. Teletype’s got nothing. No prints available either. We’re looking for a Salvadoran chick named Nadine, a hooker who works for that asshole Mantecado. Kid was with her. It all ties into Los Hermanos. I’d like to talk to whatever narco guys we have on that store. And on the Muro thing, we haven’t tagged that Olvera guy. He wasn’t in the church on Myrtle, so we’ll have to get back out there sooner or later. Mokie Muro’s supposed to be in the Bronx, I hear?”
Stokovich nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. I can’t get any help from Quantico, but everything we have says that Mokie and this Tinto guy are the ones we want. That’s yours, Eddie.”
A kind of pressure wave went through the room. It was gone in a second, as Stokovich went down his case lists, and the talk went around as the Task Force traded information, offered suggestions, and the work assignments got handed out in a way that only seemed casual. Stokovich knew how to run men, from the rear, with an easy hand and no negotiations allowed. As the meeting broke up, Farrell came over to Kennedy and asked him where the Green Book was. When Farrell asked Kennedy for the book, Kennedy knew what was coming.
Hell. He had known yesterday.
In Stokovich’s office, on the wall facing his desk, Stokovich kept a pair of eight-by-ten color photos of the twin suns of his professional life: Richard J. Nicastro, the hardcase Chief of Detectives, and Benjamin Ward, the Commissioner. When Kennedy came into the office, Stokovich was leaning back in his padded swivel chair with his feet up on his blotter, writing in a small black leather notebook with a gold lieutenant’s shield embossed on the cover. Stokovich wrote in blue marker, in a controlled hand, quickly and concisely.
Kennedy stood in the center of the room, watching the bank of Motorola handsets charging in their racks as the big white GE clock ticked through three minutes. Kennedy was working hard on holding in his temper. Being able to keep other people waiting was Stokovich’s reward for ten years of having had it done to him. One of the prices you paid for the badge was being treated like a child.
Stokovich finished with a flourish, snapped the book shut, and took his feet off the desk.
“Eddie, I’m gonna pull you off the Ruiz thing. You know why?”
Kennedy shrugged. “I know it’s got the spooks all over it. Do I get to find out what the hell is going on?”
“What do you care? You don’t have enough other work, we’ll find you some. I got homicides up the ying-yang in the Green Book.” Stokovich had good antennae. Kennedy was off, and he’d been off ever since he came in yesterday.
Kennedy walked over and sat down in the oak chair in front of the commander’s desk. Stokovich offered him a stick of Dentyne.
“It just pisses me off a little, Bruno. I have this ACU guy, Stradazzi—I get the feeling he knows more about the Ruiz case than I do. He’s got spook written all over him, but I talk to a friend in Personnel and I get a simple Italian patrolman with no marks—no marks at all, you know—which is interesting. Everybody’s got some shit on their records, even before you get out of the Academy. But not Stradazzi. Hey, that’s okay by me, Bruno. What gets me is you. You know goddam well that Stradazzi is with State, or he’s one of your FBI trainees, or he’s from Justice, or the DEA. Christ, maybe he’s from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. So he’s a liaison guy. Why not say so? Am I in or out around here? What’s the big secret?”
“Eddie … you know I can’t tell you every fucking bit of stuff goes on in the squad. I’ll tell you this. You got a sheet from one of the Field Associates.”
It seemed to Kennedy that the floor of Stokovich’s office had dropped about three feet. His stomach did a slow roll. “A Field Associate! Those shits rat on Patrol, not on detectives! What the fuck are you telling me!”
Stokovich raised a hand, palm out, and spoke soothingly, softly, as if to a child.
“Eddie, take it easy. I put it wrong. What I mean is, you pissed off somebody yesterday, and whoever you pissed off is one of Internal Affairs’ little stoolies. So whoever it is filed a formal complaint against you and you’re going to have to talk to a couple of dorks from Internal Affairs. Just routine.”
Kennedy stood up. “Routine! You tell me I have to take a call from a pair of college-boy suits from IAD! No fucking way, sir, all due respect, sir. I have a couple of questions, sir. Have you filed a PD468-123 on me, sir?”
“No, Eddie, it’s not that—”
“Are you instituting a command discipline here, and if you are, on what schedule? Schedule A? Did I miss a meal somewhere? Maybe I don’t have my locker secured or properly tagged? No? Shit, don’t tell me I engaged in unnecessary conversation? God, not that! Or, holy shit, sir, you don’t mean to tell me that I have failed to maintain a neat and clean personal appearance? I mean, I know my eyes are a little red, but red eyes aren’t a uniform violation, are they? If they are, you better file on that dork Bozeman because every time he goes for a walk they have to warn off the seven-twenty-sevens from La Guardia!”
In spite of himself, Stokovich had to laugh.
“Or, wait, is it Schedule B? That’s it, a fucking Schedule B? Let’s see … Nope, here’s my gun! And … Yep, here’s my shield! And my ID. You want to check them out, sir? Or is it Schedule C? Am I going to hear from the departmental advocate?”
“Eddie, will you sit down and shut the fuck up!”
“Has the Zone Commander filed a PD468-121? Charges and specifications, all seven copies, sir? If so, sir, then I formally request a goddam lawyer, sir!”
“Sit down, Kennedy, or I will slap your ass with a command discipline! You’re only two months shy of getting your last CD cleared off your sheet, so don’t be an asshole about this. Sit, will you? Eddie? Come on!”
Kennedy stayed where he was for a full minute. Out in the squad room there was absolute silence. It pressed against the wall. He managed to cap his anger long enough to sit down. Stokovich, for all his ambition, had always been a fair man. Kennedy could not believe that his commander was about to let one of the notorious Field Associates start a precedent by filing on a gold shield.
Field Associate! What a name! Spy, snitch, stoolie, fink, rat, weasel—they were closer to the mark. Kennedy had heard—hell, the whole Department had heard—about this latest scheme from the Commissioner’s office. Nobody knew just how many Field Associates there were. Department gossip put it at maybe four or five snitches in each precinct, for a total of close to four hundred of them in all five boroughs. The rumor had it that they were recruited by Internal Affairs while they were still in the Academy. Staff instructors in the classes kept an eye out for trainees who had the right qualities—Christ only knows what those were—and one day the kid got a visit from a member of IAD. The deal was simple: Complete your training; go to your assignment; take up your patrol duties like any ordinary police officer. Ride in the RMPs, or walk a post with a Portable. Make your friends. Keep your nose clean. And report to us regularly about the men and women you work with. Let us know if they’re doing anything they shouldn’t be doing. Take down their names and badge numbers and get back to us, in secret, with your shit list. Oh yeah, and don’t for heaven’s sake worry about your buddies finding out what you’re up to, because your name will never come into it. The guy you’re ratting on will never know where the accusation came from. Just give us the names, and we’ll do the rest.
“The rest” had become pretty well known in the NYPD. Each precinct had someone called the Integrity Control Officer. Usually a lieutenant or better, the Integrity Control Officer had only one precinct responsibility, and that was to insure that everybody in the precinct, every civilian and every Member of Service, stayed straight. They were a direct result of the Knapp Commission scandals of the early seventies. Kennedy had once looked up the “Duties and Responsibilities of the Integrity Control Officer” in the Patrol Guide. They were worth remembering.
The Integrity Control Officer …
• Develops an Integrity Control Program … responsive to Precinct conditions.
• Observes precinct conditions and visits Corruption Prone locations at irregular hours.
• Assists the Precinct Commander in developing sources of information among members of the command regarding integrity matters.
• Gathers information from all sources regarding criminals residing, frequenting, operating, or employed within the precinct and determine if unnecessary contact exists between such persons and Members of the Service.
• Instructs uniformed members during roll call training on the proper methods of identifying, reporting, and combatting corruption.
• Maintains rapport with uniformed Members of the Service … to seek symptoms of corruption.
• Conducts investigations … in response to official communications received from Patrol Borough Field Internal Affairs units.
• Compiles, maintains, and updates CONFIDENTIAL PERFORMANCE PROFILE of subordinate members, verifies the PROFILE annually with the CENTRAL PERSONNEL INDEX of the Personnel Bureau, and forwards all necessary PROFILE information to member’s Commanding Officer when member is transferred.
• Conducts CONFIDENTIAL PERFORMANCE PROFILE check when new members are assigned to Command.
• Inspects Time Cards, Overtime Records, Property.
• Maintains … CORRUPTION PRONE LOCATION FILE.
• Develops liaison with Patrol Borough Field Internal Affairs Unit to exchange information for self-initiated anti-corruption programs.
Kennedy had read all this with mixed emotions. The Serpico case had triggered the worst political and ethical crisis ever encountered by a North American police department, and a depressing number of the resulting allegations raised by the Percy Whitman Knapp Commission had proven to be true. Although there were a number of cases in which members of the NYPD had been skimming profits from narcotics investigations, or stealing heroin from evidence vaults and reselling it to the syndicate, most of the men and women in the NYPD had felt, with some justice, that they had all been inferentially ruined by the Knapp hearings. Kennedy knew many good cops who had been driven out of the service by the scandals, or who had turned into drones and toadies like Oliver Farrell, just to stay out of trouble. Many of the so-called corrupt practices of the NYPD were simple procedural faults. But in the hysterical aftermath of the Knapp Commission, when the New York press discovered that papers could be sold at staggering rates by crucifying some confused and frightened patrolman for everything from public swearing to alleged brutality, the survivors of that holocaust, including current Commissioner Benjamin Ward, had decided to purge the force of thousands of experienced officers. They were considered tainted by the fact that they were in uniform and had served during the sixties and seventies.
Ward and the brass at One Police Plaza got their chance on June 30, 1975, when New York’s Deputy Mayor James A. Cavanagh ordered the dismissal of nineteen thousand civil servants by midnight. The city of New York came within inches of bankruptcy in the next year, until the Municipal Assistance Corporation, chaired by investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn, managed to put together a workable funding arrangement for the city. But by the time the fires had stopped burning in everybody’s bank accounts, seven thousand New York City police officers had been fired or forced into early retirement. No one believed that every one of these seven thousand men and women had been let go because of the Knapp Commission traumas, but some of those dropped were rumored to have been on departmental hit lists.
In a way, the NYPD has been shaped by these two disasters. The Knapp Commission assaulted the pride of the department, and the Big Mac crisis of 1975 drove out most of its experienced, streetwise officers. In 1983 fewer than half the uniform patrol officers had more than three years of experience on the street. And it showed.
Many of the outrageous patrol-side incidents making headlines in 1985 could be traced back to a serious shortage of skilled and seasoned officers, or to the changes in experienced officers whose pride and spirit had been cracked fatally during the 1970’s. Kennedy, like every other member of the force, knew that when you have a year in which more than a hundred revolvers are lost, an accident a day is reported in the squad cars, there is routine drug and alcohol abuse in the patrol function, and hiring quotas allow substandard recruits into the system to please various ethnic voting blocs, then you are asking for just what the city was getting: trouble in the NYPD. And when the administration of the NYPD had such serious doubts about its own officers that it sent permanent moles out into the precincts to spy on fellow members, then you had a managerial class that had virtually lost its entire police force. The NYPD practice of running full-time grab-bag entrapment and intelligence operations against its own people had outraged police departments all over Canada and the United States. As far as Kennedy was concerned, the surprising fact wasn’t that so many officers had no pride and no interest in the job; it was that so many of them still cared.
He didn’t know, and he was sure Stokovich didn’t know, whether the mole who had filed on Kennedy was reporting to the Precinct Integrity Control Officer, or direct to some operative at Internal Affairs. The usual reaction to negative reports from Integrity Control officers, or from Field Associates, was to set up a sting operation against the accused man. The stings were sometimes obvious, sometimes less so. Kennedy’s first partner had run afoul of an IAD sting, one of the classics: the mysterious magical bank drop. Even a membership in the Honor Legion hadn’t stopped the IAD slicks from going after him.
The man had been on a routine post patrol when an apparent purse snatching had taken place about halfway up the block. A black male had raced past a woman, snagging her purse as he went by, the typical tactic. The woman screamed, and Kennedy’s partner had gone after the purse snatcher on foot. The black male raced around a far corner and ducked out of sight. By the time the police officer had reached the corner, the man was gone. But a brown business envelope was lying in the alley. When he picked it up he could see that the envelope held three ten-dollar bills. There were no other identifying marks, and no other paper inside. Just thirty dollars in a brown envelope. Of course when he got back out on the street, the woman was gone as well. Maybe in Bent Forks, Nebraska, or Climax, Pennsylvania, or another small town, the policeman would have taken it right to the only bank and handed it over to Maudie behind the counter. In New York City, after spending the next half-hour trying to find the woman, he called in a report. When a buddy in an RMP suggested they keep a ten each and hand in the last one at the desk, he agreed. The IAD guys came out of the woodwork and busted him for corruption.
There were a hundred similar scams, each one run against an unsuspecting officer after he had been fingered by an anonymous accuser as “corruption-prone.” They left money lying around, or they offered him a free meal at a local greasy spoon. They tried to sell him a carton of cigarettes that had “fallen off a truck” or a shirt at a discount. They tried to get him to accept a free drink at a local bar, or they arranged for him to be offered a “civil servant discount” at a grocery. And every time the officer went for it, the slicks would rise up out of the ground as if it had been sown with dragon’s teeth, and another cop’s career hit the wall. Was it fighting corruption or was it entrapment? Was the cop a criminal or a victim? And what cop could ever be bought so cheaply? It was a farce!
Detective Kennedy was entitled to his anger; he knew that you can’t do the job without being in technical violation of at least ten obscure regulations in one of the Big Three bibles: the Patrol Guide, 620 pages; the Detective’s Guide, over 500 pages; or the Administrative Guide, pushing a flat 1,000 pages this year. It was widely believed by the membership that the guides had been written the same way the Internal Revenue guide had been written, so deliberately prolix and confusing, salted with hidden contradictions and procedural cul-desacs, that on any day every working cop was in violation of something. It made a kind of sense to Kennedy, because as long as they had you on paper violations, they had your career in the palms of their hands. They could break you anytime. You lived and worked on their sufferance. Even Oliver Farrell, who had managed to pare the job down to a few safe moves, had run afoul of a couple of regulations last year. And no detective in the NYPD could forget that Detective Eddie Egan, the cop who had broken the French Connection, was rewarded for his services by being hounded out of the NYPD on precisely this kind of paperwork violation. And when he had hit the street, Eddie Egan owed a month in back rent and had exactly $89.79 in the bank.
“I am calm, Bruno. But no way am I hanging around to talk to the slicks on this one. I’m a goddam Gold Shield Second Grade and I’m fucking well not going to do it! They can have the shield if they want it. Just let them come ahead and take it off me themselves.”
Stokovich exhaled slowly, settling into the chair. For a long while the two men sat in the small hot room and looked at each other. Kennedy watched the light change on the side of Stokovich’s cheek. He had cut himself, shaving probably, below the ear. Kennedy felt a sweet calmness slide over him. He had taken his position. Whatever came out of it, he could live with it.
“Eddie … I didn’t think you’d get this pissed off about some Department bullshit. You and me, we’ve had more shit flying around our file folders than most of the guys in the Task Force.”
“Yeah, Bruno, that’s true. And you’ve also got forty-eight departmental citations and awards. I have nineteen, including the Combat Cross with the celery. You’re in the Honor Legion. So’s Wolf Maksins. Deke Fratelli was up for the Medal of Honor the year before last, and I think he should have gotten it. Kolchinski has three Merit Medals, a Combat Cross, and there isn’t a man out in the squad room who doesn’t have bars up the ying-yang for police duty. Look at that plaque. The whole Task Force got a third Unit Citation in 1983. You’re a lieutenant in the goddam NYPD and you and I we do not take shit from IAD and we sure as shit take no shit from moles and snitches and I for one want to have this snitch standing right up here in front of me. So should you, Bruno.”
“Jesus, Eddie … okay, okay. I see your point. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should raise the shit over this one. It’s not an IAD complaint, exactly. It’s a complaint through the Equal Rights office, under ‘Prohibited Conduct.’ One ‘A,’ it says. ‘Racial slurs’ and ‘prejudice toward any racial group.’ Relax! Relax, Eddie! I know it’s bullshit. But the IAD guys have to investigate it. Can you think of anybody you pissed off yesterday?”
“Yeah. Bergman. Sergeant Bergman. He was desk officer at the Eighth yesterday, gave me a hard time about getting Marco Stradazzi brought in. Said I bypassed the chain. Also, maybe I was a little hard on a PW name of Stokes.”
“Stokes? Don’t tell me, a short black broad, nice body, eyes like she spends her weekends cutting the balls off boy scouts from Westport?”
“Yeah! That’s her. How come you know her?”
“She’s a steward for The Guardians. She’s always on the prod around the white guys. Ask Robinson about her. She’s a good cop, but she sees Klansmen under her bed. Frank had her once, on a canvass a couple months back. Remember the case? Nineteen-year-old retarded kid was into all those sexual assaults by the Con Ed plant on Fourteenth? Stokes was on the third platoon, four to midnight. Robinson wanted a few people to go through the shit on the roof of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt School, on Avenue D near Fourteenth? The sergeant told Stokes and a couple of other officers to climb up onto the roof and poke around. Stokes told the sergeant no, she wouldn’t.”
“What do you mean, she wouldn’t? She’s a cop.”
“She’s a black female cop. That’s different. She said the sergeant was only sending her up onto the roof because it was too shitty a detail for his favorite guys. He was sending her because she was a woman and a black, and that was racial prejudice. She said she’d go to the EEO if she had to. She knew her fucking rights!”
“Was the sergeant handing her a shit detail? You know, busting her balls? She’s an abrasive bitch.”
“Well, Robinson says no. The suspect was tossing clothing and evidence onto the roof. But the roof was covered with pigeon shit, old garbage. Nobody wanted to go up. Robinson says she was standing nearby, looking bored. Says the sergeant hardly looked at her, just told her to get up there and look around. Robinson doesn’t think he was ragging her ass. Anyway, she didn’t have to do it.”
“Sergeant backed down?”
“Yeah. More trouble if he chases her up there. She’d go straight to headquarters. He’d have to prove that he wasn’t a racist son of a bitch, which he is, anyway. I tell you, Eddie, it’s a different force today.”
“Bruno … you think she’s the mole?”
Stokovich shook his head. “Nah … she’s right up front with it. A mole, he’d be a party guy, everybody’s bud. See him at all the rackets—he’d know your favorite scotch. Stokes is a ball-breaker but she’s no mole.”
“So where do we go from here? The mole could have been any one of twenty different officers who came and went at the crime scene yesterday. What do you want to do?”
Stokovich thought it over for a minute.
“Look, Eddie … this Ruiz case is right smack into a narco operation. Give me the Ruiz case, I can muscle it through without having to go official. I’ll take it from here. You’ve got solid leads, and I know the narcotics man in the sector. And I can work with Stradazzi. Guy’s not with anybody outside, but he’s got a rabbi downtown. He’s being cut in on some Intelligence operations. You can do this …”
Stokovich flipped a carbon copy of an EMS report onto Kennedy’s lap.
“EMS scraped this turkey off the rails at the Twenty-third Street IND around midnight last night. He had a stack, and a gold chain with a mezuzah on it. Mezuzah was reported stolen from a kid named Jamie Spiegel, got himself stabbed over on West Forty-sixth Street about an hour before. Spiegel is in Bellevue. You look into this. I’d like to know how the John Doe on the tracks got himself from A to B. I think he got some help. You take this, it gets you out of the building for a while. I stall the EEO and the slicks. Time works its magical spell. The papers get lost. IAD and the EEO guys get bored, find some other shmuck to hassle. When in doubt, ask for it in triplicate. How about it?”
It looked good to Kennedy.
“What about Mokie Muro? And that Olvera guy? Days are going by here, Bruno. We gotta do something about those bastards. This Muro thing, it’s working on me. All of us. I think those shits are up in the Bronx.”
Stokovich was nodding. “Yeah, and don’t we have a citywide out on them? We got every cop in the city jumping out of his skin on that one.”
“Yeah, well, you got me doing this jumper.”
Stokovich shrugged and popped another stick of gum.
“So? Do both. What’s the matter? You a cop or what? Take the city’s money—”
“Do the city’s work. Who can I have?”
Stokovich locked his hands behind his head and pulled hard. “Rrrrooowff! Jesus Christ I’m getting stiff. You ever going to go to work, Kennedy? Take Wolfie. He needs a run. But keep a leash on him. He bites somebody, it’s your ass!”
Maksins was leaning against the bars of the holding tank, watching the biker, listening to him talk in his sleep. He had his suit jacket thrown over a shoulder, a custom-cut white shirt, pleated navy-blue slacks, a thin lizard-skin belt with a gold buckle. The butt of a large revolver was hanging out of a molded-leather Jackass rig on Maksins’ left side.
When Maksins saw Kennedy heading across the room, he came over to his desk. The room had cleared out. Most of the men didn’t like to hang around when somebody was locking horns with the lieutenant. The fact that Maksins was still in the room meant that Stokovich had probably told him beforehand that he and Kennedy would be working together this shift. Maksins tugged at the crease of his navy-blue slacks and sat down on the edge of Kennedy’s desk, pulling out his revolver. He put it down on top of a case file. Kennedy picked it up and turned it in the light.
It was a heavy blued piece with a vented rib running along the top of the barrel. The hand grips were oversized, shaped in zebrawood, crazily striped. The weapon must have weighed close to four pounds.
“You got it, hah?”
Maksins took the piece back, popped the cylinder out and spun it twice with a flick of his thumb. “Yes, I did. Had a time getting it by Tactics. Stokovich had some moaning and groaning to do about the thing. But I made it. Dan Wesson Model Fifteen. Four interchangeable barrels. Quick shift front sights. Had to send away for a special Jackass harness. You like it?”
Kennedy wasn’t a weapons fan. His duty gun was a Chief with a .38 Special load. Now and then he wore his Airweight in an ankle holster. It depended on the clothes he was wearing. Chief, Airweight, it didn’t matter. He was lousy with both.
“It’s a cannon, Wolfie. You fire this inside the city limits, you’ll blow out windows all the way up Fifth. Nice looking, though.”
Maksins put it away and actually sat there scuffing the toe of his loafer over the linoleum, his head down, stalling.
Finally: “You know, Eddie, I had the shines on my case pretty bad, year before I came down here.”
Kennedy knew the story. He let Wolf tell it.
“You know, Knapp may have fucked up Patrol. I know the guys major in doing the dog now, as far as narco busts or numbers. Integrity officer sees you even talking to a policy runner or a bookie, even a pusher, before you know it you’re bagged for ‘seen-in-corruption-prone-location-with-known-perpetrators.’ So now you can’t talk to any of your best street sources—the bankers, the guy who runs the bar, the local pimps. The guys who are most likely to help you with the serious cases because they’ve got a vested interest in seeing the block stay quiet. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, well, after Knapp you have these snitches all over. They see you talking to a bad guy—pow. Right away, they make you for association. Knapp sent the bosses into a tizzy. You can’t even make a simple drug collar now unless you’ve got a supervisor at your back. You know the TOP changes that went through all the departments? Temporary Operating Procedures? When I was in Narcotics, we couldn’t even do a stop-and-frisk, turn a guy’s pockets, until we had a boss there with us. Not to protect the perp. To make sure that we weren’t just stripping the guy and taking his money. This is in Harlem, right? All because a few guys in Preventative and Enforcement Patrol got into shaking down the dealers and the pushers and levying the fine right on the spot. I mean, that’s really all that Bob Leuci and his squad was doing. Best way to get the assholes off the street was to take away their capital. The courts wouldn’t do it. So the narco squads did it on their own. I did it. I kicked their asses off the street and I took away their money. The PEP guys did it too. So, did the silks on the Knapp commission ever ask about the rate of drug busts? Did they ever ask if there were fewer black kids dying in puke because of a hot shot or toxic smack? No, they didn’t. The Knapp lawyers only wanted to nail cops. I was working in Harlem and I know that the PEP guys did real work—they scared the piss out of pushers and dealers. What did Knapp or Goodman ever do besides bust good cops?”
Kennedy had never heard such a speech from Maksins. “Hey, Wolfie, if you’re trying to hand me Bob Leuci as a good cop, what about his partners? He wore a wire against his own.”
“Yeah. He did. They had him by the balls. You read his book?”
“Yeah, I read it. What about it?”
“Read it again, Eddie. Leuci, he’s learned something. I think the guy wishes he’d never so much as waved at one of those three-piece suits from Justice. I say the guy’s trying to send his squad a message. He figured he could get it across in his own book. He did, too.”
Kennedy got up and put on his coat. “Wolfie, you are a very strange person. I did not hear you say what you just said about Harlem. I think you should be very careful about saying things like that around here.”
Maksins looked over toward Stokovich’s office door.
“Him? He sees it just the same way, Eddie.”
“No, he doesn’t, Wolfie. He can’t.”
Maksins and Kennedy followed a nurse with wispy blue hair and an orthopedic brace on her left leg down a long hall reeking of Lysol to Jamie Spiegel’s ward in Bellevue Hospital. There were four beds in the room. A plump woman wearing a pastel-striped dress got up when the detectives came into the room. She went right at them, stopping them in the middle of the ward, wearing a blend of hostility and supplication, smelling of floral perfume and medicinal hand cream. She held a white vinyl purse as big as a pullman pillow over her breasts. Her cheeks had been dusted with something like white flour and her mascara had run down into the creases under her eyes. She was distracted enough to have allowed it to dry there.
“That,” she declared, gesturing over her shoulder in the direction of a slope of starched sheeting from which ran several clear plastic tubes—“that is my son. I want you to know that I am dis-gus-ted, ab-so-lute-ly dis-gus-ted at the way you have allowed the worst elements of the city to as-sault an innocent young child in the very lobby of his hotel! I fully in-tend to—”
Kennedy flipped out his shield. “Ma’am, I’m Detective Kennedy and this is Sergeant Maksins. Are you the mother of Jamie Spiegel? If so, ma’am, we are very sorry for what has happened, and we’d like to hear the story from your son. Can you step outside and have a word with Sergeant Maksins while I talk to your boy?”
Kennedy could feel Maksins cringing from a yard away, but the woman went with him, her voice rising and falling in a harsh snappish cadence, like a lapdog with a grievance.
The boy on the bed appeared to be sleeping as Kennedy stepped closer. He looked a little shrunken, as if he had pulled away from the flesh that covered him. He had skin like milky water, and he smelled of cigarette smoke. A hesitancy in his breathing made Kennedy think the boy was only pretending to sleep.
“Mr. Spiegel? I’m Detective Kennedy. Can I talk to you for a moment?”
The boy opened his eyes and looked about the room. “Is she gone? My mother?”
Kennedy grinned at the kid. “Yeah, she’s gone. What the hell happened to you?”
The kid looked younger than the twenty-one years set down on his chart. He stared down the coverlet at a spot on his midriff where a tube ran out from under a gauze band. A tousle of curly hair angled out from the back of his head. He sighed and looked up at Kennedy.
“I sure screwed up this time. Do you have to tell my mother what I was doing when I got stabbed? I mean, what a putz!”
“What were you doing?”
“I … ahh, I was …”
Kennedy got it immediately. “You were catching the skin flicks along Forty-second Street? Kid, if I can keep it from your mom, I will. But you’re twenty-one and I think getting stabbed is kind of a drastic punishment for taking in a few porn shops. Want to tell me about it?”
Jamie did. He talked easily and with self-deprecating humor about his night on The Deuce. Kennedy kept his face straight and wrote steadily in another brand-new steno pad. Now and then he’d ask the boy to go over a detail, or to explain precisely where he had been when a particular move was made. Spiegel seemed to fear that he was somehow liable for damages, or open to charges, for having caused such a fuss along 46th Street. He was in some pain, and the wound, although draining well, had been deep. He didn’t seem to know much about the kind of weapon. He did say that he heard a snicking sound just before he was stabbed. Kennedy suggested a switchblade, although he knew from the ESU report that a butterfly knife had been found on the body of their prime suspect in the case. Spiegel said no, it had been a more complicated sound, a series of sounds really, like a ratchet or a chain. When the knife went in, Jamie had tried to believe that it was just a punch. He hadn’t really felt the cut. But then the man had knocked him down, and as he fell he knew he’d been cut.
“The guy, the one who stabbed me? You be careful with him, eh? He likes to hurt people. The other one, he was out of it. I don’t think he really wanted to hurt me, you know? But that one, the guy with the marks all over his face? He liked it. He was into it, you know?” When he realized the ambiguity of the phrase, Spiegel laughed and then winced. Kennedy liked him.
The boy had a fairly clear memory of the evening. Although he’d been frightened, he had managed to notice quite a bit. He gave Kennedy a good description of both muggers. He described the one who stabbed him as a racist. The man had called him a Jewboy. The name had had an odd effect on the mugger. The more he had used it, the closer he had come to stabbing Spiegel.
“It was funny, you know? Like he wanted to do it to me all along? Like he was mad at me for something? I don’t know what. I was the one being killed.”
Were any names used? The boy thought about it for almost four minutes. Kennedy waited in silence.
“Yes. The crazy one? The one who stabbed me? He called me a bunch of names. Dickhead, Jewboy. And when I was … after I had fallen down? He said, ‘Hey crush-crush,’ and then something about a guy named Jake? And another name. But he said it. Crush-crush … and this guy Jake.”
“Jake probably meant a cop. They call cops ‘jakes’ on the street. Can you think of that other name?”
He tried, lying on the bed in a patched green hospital gown, tubes in his stomach, tubes up his nose. He tried very hard. Kennedy had a brief flash of the boy lying nude on a flat perforated-steel table with Charlie Marcuse leaning over him, bringing a scalpel down under a beam of sulphurous light, the edge glittering and Charlie’s rubber fingers settling into the puffy blue skin under the boy’s throat. A pump labored in the background.
“No, Mr. Kennedy. I can’t get the name. I didn’t feel so good at that point. I’m sorry.”
Kennedy snapped the pad shut. “Forget that, kid. I’m the one who’s sorry. Get some sleep.”
Wolf had Mrs. Spiegel backed up against the wall outside the room. He was leaning over her, one hand on the wall, the other in his lizard-skin belt. It took Kennedy a second or two to realize that Maksins was flirting with the woman. She was staring up at him, brightness in her eyes, holding her breath, her hands clutching the huge white bag. Maksins pushed himself off the wall and extended his hand. Mrs. Spiegel took it. Kennedy thought she would lick it, but she folded it into one of her hands and disappeared in a puff of rouge and white powder. Maksins had unexpected talents.
They fought traffic all the way across 34th Street to Ninth Avenue and worked their way around toward Midtown Central. Maksins listened to the Patrol Division Communications cross-talk while Kennedy bulled his tan Chrysler around cabs and trucks and through the masses of jaywalkers at every major intersection. The sun was high above, shining down into the streets between the walls and storefronts of lower midtown. There was a two-hour period this late in the season when daylight came right down to the ground level. The cross-talk was full of “south eddie” and “north charlie” and an angry ACU car telling Communications “no further no further” and somebody else wanted “any housing for a missing person?” You could tell the white Bronx voices and the black Brooklyn voices and the upstate twang of an older male down at Communications. “Nine Eddie, you’re ten ninety-eight stand by. One Adam, K. One Adam report of two male blacks breaking into an auto at Beaver and Broadway. Nothing further. One Adam, K? South Boy, you’re out on a sixty-one. Ten four.”
“What d’you listen to that stuff for? If there’s a city-wide, we’ll hear the beep. Wolfie?”
“I don’t know, Eddie. Makes me feel like a cop, I guess. Mrs. Spiegel says the kid’ll be laid up for a couple of weeks. You get anything out of him?”
“Enough.”
At Midtown Central the desk officer referred them to a harried plainclothes cop by the name of “Peruggio, Anthony B., up the stairs and to your left. Sir. Have a nice day. Sir.” They found Peruggio arguing with a Crime Unit man in a dirty Knicks jacket. They wandered around the cluttered squad room for a while, turning over report sheets and flirting with the black PW on the typewriter at the far end of the room. Finally Peruggio told the Anti-Crime Unit man to do something anatomically improbable and headed in their direction with a face on him that could shatter glass.
“You here about that jumper last night? I got the sheet in the office. Which one’s Kennedy? You Kennedy? Look, I always wanted to tell you, you did a nice job on that chicken hawk up in the Bronx. You’re the one, aren’t you? Eighty-sixed the fucker? I ain’t got the wrong Kennedy, have I?”
Kennedy concentrated on keeping his reaction small, not letting anything show. This happened from time to time.
“Yeah. I’m that Kennedy. You have the EMS report? I hope somebody took shots.”
Peruggio pushed through a litter of papers, photos, tapes, letters, envelopes, type balls, empty cigarette packs, finally coming up with a large manila envelope which he threw across the desk. It opened when it hit, spilling a fan of glossy 8 × 10’s out onto the floor. Wolf scooped them up in one low motion and dropped them in front of Kennedy.
“Oh, fuck,” said Kennedy.
In four of the twelve shots there were two bloody heaps of clothing and tissue, about six feet apart, shadowed and hard in the white glare of a powerful flash. It took you a moment or two to sort out the body parts and the bits and make some kind of coherent guess as to just what it was you were looking at. When you did, you got it like a gestalt, all in one corruscating and searing jolt.
“Leave it to the uptown trains, huh? Barreled right into him, spread him out like a bialy widda shmeer, huh? One of the guys from Emergency Services hooped into his boots over it. You see this little pulpy bit over here? Halfway to the wall? No, down from that. Guy’s liver, would you believe it? Fucking liver pops right out. Not a mark on it, either. Coulda picked it up, hosed it down, and fried it right up. With onions, huh, Kennedy? So what the fuck you want with this dipshit, anyway? You’re homicide now, ain’t you?”
Maksins waited for Kennedy to answer this one. He pulled the shots together and sat down in a hard metal chair, easing his Dan Wesson out and turning it in his huge hands, his pale-blue eyes on Kennedy.
Peruggio lit a stogie as Kennedy laid it out for him. The jumper’s effects had included an item, a gold mezuzah on a link chain, that had been taken from a stabbing victim up on West 46th last night. They had interviewed the boy at Bellevue and he had given them reason to believe that there were two men working in concert and that one of the men was still at large.
Peruggio sucked wetly on the stogie. He had a blond gunfighter’s moustache, stained with tobacco juice. He looked like a short-timer; he had a big belly and heavily veined hands, and he carried his piece in an ankle holster. Whatever he hadn’t seen in the NYPD he had read about later. A jumper was yesterday’s news.
“You got a jumper here—he’s dead. You got a maybe accessory to felony assault. You got a kid with a scar who when the case comes to trial a year from now, he’s bored with the whole thing, he don’t wanna come to Noo Yawk anymore. You got the kid’s meshugana or whatever. Why you wanna go jerking around looking for somebody else?”
“We think your jumper was pushed.”
Peruggio snorted into his cigar. “So what? How the hell will you make that stick? Even if you find this kid, what makes you think he’ll roll over? You got zip witnesses. I know, because we turned that place upside down and as usual everybody was suddenly struck blind and deaf. Maybe the kid confesses, you get him after his shyster talks to him, and suddenly he was coerced into an ill-advised admission of guilt by two brutal cops. Give it up, Kennedy!”
Kennedy got a little tactless. “Look, ahh, Tony, you on the Mayor’s Committee or something? Why do you want this thing shitcanned? You want to call this suicide?”
“Hey! I don’t give a fuck if you call it chicken cacciatore! I’m just saying why call it a murder when you can call it a suicide and we all go for a drink, huh? You don’t have enough murders in this city, you gotta go make one up?”
Maksins and Kennedy sighed and stood up. There had been some pressure coming down from Administration to lower the murder stats in New York this year. I Love New York, the Murder Capital of the World. Some of the bosses had made it clear that an iffy call between murder and suicide could be called suicide. Enough calls like that, et voila! The murder rate in New York has dropped. Everybody wins! It looked like Peruggio was slightly slanted.
“Well, thanks for your input, Sergeant. We’ll just run the usual checks on it. If you don’t mind, hah?” Kennedy put his hand out. Peruggio puffed on the cigar for a while, staring at Kennedy. He tossed a file folder onto his desk and pulled some papers out of a drawer. “Okay, hotshot. There you go. And top o’ the marnin’ to yez!”
Maksins got up and collected the papers again. As they were leaving Peruggio’s office, he was calling upstairs. That didn’t matter to either of them.
They had a link between the Spiegel knifing and a John Doe killed an hour later. The victim had given them a description that seemed to fit what was left of the John Doe. And best of all, he had given them a name. They went to the computer room of the precinct. The female attendant was busy running a clipboardful of names for the station Crime Units. A couple of black patrolmen were standing in the hall when Kennedy and Maksins came up. They tipped their hats back, smiled, scuffed a little. Gold shields get that kind of treatment in the NYPD. One of the patrolmen offered to get the men a couple of coffees. Maksins and Kennedy said yes, thanks, that would be great. The attendant raised her hand, held up five fingers. Five minutes? Kennedy nodded. They waited in the hall with the patrolman eyeing both of them, obviously hungry for his own gold.
Well, that’s how you get it, thought Kennedy. A gold shield is different from anything else in the NYPD. Technically, a gold-shield detective is a simple patrolman. He’s not a sergeant. He’s not even headed in that direction. The gold-shield designation is a separate fork in the promotion lines within the NYPD. He’s chosen from the uniform ranks, tested in something like plainclothes Anti-Crime work, or in small-time narcotics undercover assignments. If he shows wit, nerve, some ambition, and a major helping of style, he loses his “tin” and gets a “gold.” He gets that chiseled gold badge, and he becomes part of the mythical elite of the NYPD. But he’s technically a patrolman on special duty. He gets paid according to three grades: third, second, and first grade, with first being the highest. The pay is called grade money. A second-grade gold shield ranks with a sergeant, although he has slightly more unofficial status than a detective sergeant. First grade brings more money. Most of the active gold shields in the NYPD are third grade. Kennedy was a second-grade gold. By the time a man or woman gets to first grade, he or she is close to retirement. Few ranks in the NYPD have the special aura of freedom and power that a gold detective’s shield can deliver. But unlike sergeants, lieutenants, and so on, a gold shield—because he is always a patrolman operating on special duty with grade money—can be broken back to uniform with terrible speed. It’s called “flopped back to the bag” and it can happen to a gold shield with the kind of random, unpredictable, and devastating effect of a cardiac stroke. One day you make some boss unhappy, or you screw up magnificently by losing a prisoner or blowing a publicized case. The gold is gone. You are in uniform, on a portable beat, saluting a boy-child linebacker from an upstate high school.
The attendant waved to them from the CATCH room. CATCH stands for Computer-Assisted Terminal Criminal Hunt, and it delivers NYSIIS, or Criminal Identification Numbers. They are actually two separate systems, but they work together in a very effective way. CATCH uses a hard-copy microfilm file to deliver full-size photographs of every man and woman ever formally photographed during an in-state booking process. The computer terminal connected to the CATCH system carries disk memory codes indicating which microfilm file a suspect’s photo has been stored under. The names are cross-referenced and updated regularly. It takes the attendant about five minutes to search all possible variations of a name, including street names or aliases, legally altered names, nicknames, typical abbreviations, and a range of similar-sounding or phonetically linked names. The search area can be narrowed by entering the investigating officer’s opinions about the race of the suspect, his age, any prior convictions, even a possible address or a known associate. The system takes up a large room in several city precincts, and it can be used by any officer or detective with a good reason. A printer delivers hard-copy data along with a facsimile photograph of the wanted person. The only way a suspect can have his photo deleted from the CATCH system is to apply through a lawyer and have the records purged. This rarely happens. Kennedy was going to the CATCH system first, before doing any other investigating, because he had one solid clue that, with some luck and a good operator on the CATCH machine, might shorten the whole case. In his steno pad, under a long column of scratched notes, he had printed the words:
The Spiegel boy had been pretty specific about the names. Kennedy had gone back to the names three times, each time asking the question as if it had never been asked before. He got the same name, or a variable of it that was too close to argue about, and Kennedy believed it was a solid lead. The shadowy alternate name, the one Spiegel had been unable to recall, might have been the man’s birth name. Unless the kid had been quite confused, Kennedy was sure that the name he had heard was a street name. Muggers, street people, pushers, even undercover cops—they all had a string of operating names, a different name for a different circle or a different block. Kennedy talked it over with the woman in the cotton-candy red hairdo. She thought it over for a while, drumming on the keypad in front of her. Finally, she typed CRUTCH onto the green monitor. She typed the search code, hit ENTER, and sat back. In thirty seconds, three NYSIIS number codes appeared.
Each NYSIIS number indicated a film wheel and frame number. One was an actual name, but it belonged to a criminal who had been sent to Attica only six months before. The second man was a cripple, which was how he got the nickname. He was definitely out. The third name was a young black male with a string of felonies. Possible. Kennedy made a note of all the NYSIIS files, and the attendant took down the coordinates of his microfilm mug shot.
CROSS delivered up seventeen possible suspects. The street name was popular, although most of the people who used it were either white southerners or female. They asked for a hard-copy printout of eight of the CROSS items.
CRUSH gave the detectives sixteen possible names. Three of them used the street name in a different spelling: one CRRUSH, one KRUSH, and one KRUSH-GROOVE. Kennedy rejected the KRUSH-GROOVE on an instinct. This felt right. The kid was here somewhere. He could smell the kid.
They went down the list of CRUSHes first. There were nine black CRUSHes. One was listed DOA Lenox Hill three months ago. One was in Attica, according to the best information. Kennedy made a note of his name and address anyway. It had happened before. A guy gets out of Attica on a parole or a work-release, and he’s back in the neighborhood without anybody telling the local precinct, let alone CATCH or FINEST computer terminals.
Two were wanted for armed robbery by the FBI. Kennedy wrote them out, but rated them at the bottom. New York was a hot town for any FBI targets. There were more FBI men in New York than in Washington. It wasn’t likely that an FBI armed robbery suspect would be mugging kids on The Deuce.
The fifth had been paralyzed in a shooting incident at the Caamanos Bar in Alphabet City. Coincidence, but irrelevant.
The sixth CRUSH was a stripper in Long Island City. Out, but let’s take her name anyway.
Seven was DOA Yonkers a year ago. Out. Not a lucky street name, either.
Eight was a definite possible—a string of felony assaults, some “criminal sale of controlled substance,” all five degrees for this kid, D felony, C felony, B felony, an A-11 felony, and an A-1 felony. Kid was a slow learner. Kennedy made a note.
Nine was a minister in something called the Unification Church of Schaefer City. Possible.
KRUSH gave them a boy with a series of felony assaults; a couple of hits for fraudulent accosting, probably for a three-card monte scam; criminal possession of stolen property, under second degree; a couple of weapons charges. The sheet was nasty but not big-time nasty. The kid was the right age, sixteen years old. His name was Dennis McEnery, and he’d been in and out of Spofford like a bread van. The profile was right. He showed an address on West 114th Street, near Morning-side Park. He was cross-referenced to an Apollo McEnery, same address, the subject of an outstanding homicide investigation. Apollo McEnery had had a series of street names, including Greek, Creed, Sundown, and The Duke. He had been found behind a building in his home area on February 17, 1984. Dennis McEnery was sometimes known as Skate. He had been sent to Rikers Island last year. The file listed his caseworker as well.
Kennedy straightened up from the table. Maksins was riffling through a pile of computer paper and writing down notes on the edges.
“Wolf … how’d you like to give the Spiegel kid a call? Ask him, does the name Dennis McEnery mean anything to him? Let him take his time.”
Maksins went out to make the call. Kennedy and the operator went back to the terminal. They skipped CROTCH for no particular reason other than that it was a dumb name, and went through seventy-six CHRISes before Maksins came back from the phone. He had a very lupine leer in place, which was only natural.
“Spiegel says it was Dennis! The John Doe called his partner Dennis. Or Dennis called his partner that. Who is the John Doe?”
Kennedy didn’t agree there could be any doubt. “The kid was certain about the build, the body type, the skin, everything. No way the John Doe is Dennis McEnery. I figure our guy here, Krush, he’s the shover, not the shovee.”
Maksins shrugged. “I still don’t see how you figure this. How’d they link the mezuzah, the cash, all the goods, to the stabbing up on Forty-sixth? That’s Midtown Central and the jumper is in the Eleventh. They post it on the teletype. I can’t believe Central Street Crime was that fast on the night shifts. Usually, you don’t get teletype CSCU until the next day, if you’re lucky.”
Kennedy thought so too. “I don’t know, Wolfie. I didn’t catch this case anyway. Stokovich had it on his desk. You know how he prowls around downstairs, picking up the gossip. I think he came across it accidentally. Peruggio did get the effects out on to FATN and I guess somebody up at Midtown was listening, because they called him right up and got a positive on the goods. Stokovich is the man who called it a possible homicide. He jerked me off the Ruiz case and gave me this one.”
Maksins was still working this through when Kennedy had signed the record sheet for the CATCH operator. They went down to the main floor and signed out at the desk. It occurred to Kennedy that they might put out an FATN for a Dennis McEnery, with a bullet for the desk officers at the 26th and the 28th precincts. Calls like that were only put out on the air in a hotpursuit case. Too many outsiders had access to monitoring equipment. Maksins said he’d take care of that, and Kennedy went outside to get some air. The precinct house smelled of the same thing that all precinct houses smell of: dust and dead air, sweat and coffee and shoe leather and sixty years of somebody else’s problems.
The car had been parked in the shade, but for the past hour it had been out in the sun, so when Kennedy cracked it open the dashboard and the vinyl bench seat shimmered in the overcooked air. He reached inside and took out the radio. It burned his fingers. So did the door handle when he leaned back into it.
“One-oh-four to Central, K?”
“One-oh-four, K.”
“Central, get me the Task Force, Lieutenant Stokovich.”
There was some cross-talk on the patrol channel. Kennedy listened to it idly, the way a man will follow the action of a game, hearing it but not letting any of it reach him. The block was crowded with blue-and-white patrol cars. Over everything in the bright street, over the hot chrome and the dusty paint and the tiers of dull-paned windows looking down into the street and above the ragged roof lines, Manhattan sounded throughout, a susurrus, like the sound of a crowd in a distant stadium or the slow sliding retraction of tide on a gravel beach. It carried you up and rolled you over and drove you down day after day, a murmurous roaring, a whispering vibrato rumor of strange half-heard calls, a familiar name, a soft suggestion, a hiss or a cry almost heard, almost remembered. In New York they learn not to hear it, because once it gets your attention you can never be free of it. If you said any of this to Kennedy he wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.
… South boy south charlie shots fired shots fired that’s at B’way and Twenty-eighth see the woman no no eighty-five me at base that’s a ten fifty-four we’ve got a man down send a bus yes yes hold it up there no further no further are you out there north ida see the portable see the portable radio check central radio check north portable yes portable I read you five by five central k north boy north boy k north boy central yes north boy we have a barricaded EDP at the Holland House room two twenty-five slow it down slow it down all units we’ve got a bus on the scene no further no further emergency services is on the scene …
Kennedy caught the Holland House reference and sent up a small prayer that it wasn’t Fratelli or Robinson who was involved. EDP meant emotionally disturbed person, and a barricaded EDP was a bad situation. If he picked up a Signal Thirteen, Kennedy was going to go right over.
A uniform patrolwoman stepped in front of him. “Sir? Are you Detective Kennedy? There’s a Lieutenant Stokovich on the landline inside? He’s asking for you?”
Going back into the precinct house was like stepping into a stone chapel, shadowed and cool after the heat on the street. Kennedy took a phone from the operator behind the duty desk.
“Kennedy?”
“Yes, it’s me, Bruno. I just wanted to let you know we’ve got a positive on that John Doe jumper. We saw the Spiegel kid and he gave us a lead, turns into an address on West a Hundred-fourteenth Street. Kid named Dennis McEnery. Wolfie’s putting it out on FINEST. You want us to let the guys at the Two-seven pick him up?”
“No, Eddie. You don’t want to do the dog around the squad room right now. Besides, Internal called and I told them you were in a hot-pursuit situation and couldn’t be reached. I mean, they know that’s crap, but why don’t you fire on up to the Two-seven and chase their butts around for a while? I’ve got the Duty Captain on my ass with this one. The Spiegel kid’s a tourist, so he wants the muggers scooped fast. This case isn’t going to be a priority for the Two-seven. They’ve got troubles of their own. How’s Wolfie?”
Maksins came across the large hall toward Kennedy, balancing two coffees and a pile of glazed donuts, a patrolman’s lunch.
“Wolfie’s okay. Am I taking him to Harlem?”
“Jesus! Wolfie in Harlem! That oughta be interesting. Sure, take him along. Tell him Sorvino wants him to do a lineup with those Angel assholes. He’s supposed to bring his witnesses in whenever he can swing it. Eddie, you keep him out of trouble up there. Wolfie’s a nice kid but he’s got an attitude about the blacks, eh?”
Kennedy looked up at Maksins, who was devouring a donut and smiling at a brace of PWs behind the desk.
“Hey, Wolfie. We’re goin’ down memory lane.”
Stokovich laughed and cut off. Maksins said, “Where?”
“Harlem.”
Maksins stopped chewing.
“Harlem?”
Kennedy headed for the door. “Yeah. North of here. Remember, Wolfie?”
Down the steps of the station house, Maksins squinted into the light, closing up behind Kennedy, and said, “Yeah, Eddie, I remember.”
All the way up Eighth Avenue, Kennedy thought about Porfirio Magdalena Ruiz, and Maksins emptied and reloaded and emptied and reloaded his Dan Wesson with the zebra-striped grips and the interchangeable front sights. They switched the set to the uptown frequency when they got to Columbus Circle, bouncing over the ruts and potholes, working their way through the pedestrians milling around at the western edge of the hotel row.
The Columbus monument was surrounded by smalltime coke and smack dealers, bums and winos, pushcart peddlers, undercover cops, tourists, couples. A lot went on in a gore formed by the intersection of Eighth and Broadway and Central Park South. They broke through the pack and headed straight up Central Park West. The trees and glens of the park swept by off Maksins’ right shoulder. He rolled the window down and flicked off the air conditioning. A dry wind blew dust and the scent of ripe greenery, dead leaves, blue scorch-smoke from a pushcart stand, diesel fumes, horse manure, pretzels, cigarette smoke; not fresh air, not a zephyr from the coast or even a hint of salt water, but New York air, spicy and rich and close. On Kennedy’s side, block after block of clean bright apartment towers went by: spotless granite facades and reliefs of robber barons, bronze casement windows hung with heavy damask, here and there on the lower floors the sheen of brass, or the fragmented scintillations of a clustered chandelier. They bounced over a section of thick metal plating, both of them holding on to the dash, as the Dakota loomed up on their left, a Victorian pile, turreted and spired, cloaked in its own light and air, like a faded painting. They drove at forty miles an hour, taking every light, past the mansions and the apartment towers with the canopies and the uniformed doormen, the carved wooden doors, the smoked-glass doors, the discreet brass plaques, the buildings with old bronze numbers coated in verdigris, the broad walks, the little dogs in fans of five tugging and yapping, dragging a young black girl in nurse’s whites around the corner at 96th, the buildings failing only a little but still failing as the border of Harlem got closer, and the sunny little doorsteps got older and grubbier.
Maksins was still in a good mood. He counted off a door, a canopy, another door, three people at the side of a long black car, a woman with long blunt hair and a broad red mouth, laughing, tossing her head in the afternoon light, an old man waving to them from a bench in the shade, a Porsche, a Porsche, a Mercedes and a Porsche, a woman wheeled by a bored black maid, southbound taxis cruising at the curbline, a balloon-seller losing his hat, a blind closing, coming down slowly but steadily. Central Park West was alien territory to Wolfie. Somebody else ran things here.
At 96th Street and Central Park West the beat falters, recovers; there’s another fading pile and the Porsches are falling away. The park is denser past Maksins’ window. They bounce across a loose steel grid. There’s a crack, a bong, a rolling boom from the roadway, and here’s where Gershwin gets off, at Duke Ellington Place. They pound over the fault line at 110th Street. There’s a burned-down supermarket on their left. Three black boys are kicking a burning ashcan over at the edge of Frederick Douglass Circle. Wolfie puts his piece away. He’s in Harlem.
Drunk and rolling, Maksins had once driven into Harlem on his way to racket at Saint John the Divine; he’d come jolting over the potholes at 111th Street, singing “Dixie” at the top of his throat, when the railyard scene from Gone With the Wind had taken him over. He had a sensation of riding a crane, a boom, a dolly, whatever the hell they called it, up into the sky at the northern end of Central Park. Whatever the machinery, he had gone up five hundred feet and Harlem was spread out in front of him in exactly the same way that the railway station in the movie was littered with wounded Confederates, rows and rows of them in blankets, arranged in files, tagged and orderly, but wounded. Harlem had looked just like that: rows and rows of low flat roofs, set out in ranks, set down in files, all of them out of the combat, flat on their backs. Waiting for Scarlett O’Hara to come along. He had been drunk and fanciful, nor did he mention the illusion to Kennedy now, but whenever he crossed 110th Street he felt the same sensation, going up fast, seeing it all at once.
There are hills and high places in Harlem where Wolfie used to park his car and open a beer and look south toward midtown and lower Manhattan. If he set it up right, putting it at the top of Park, at the corner of 125th Street, a few long strange blocks east of the Apollo Theater, Wolfie could see the floodlit crest of the Helmsley Building all the way down at 44th Street, and behind it a dark rectangle, the Pan Am Building, the white pinnacle of the Citicorp Center tower, the arcs and bars of the Chrysler Building, and the illuminated steppes of the Empire State Building. All around these landmarks, a compressed glittering wall of lit spires, pulsing lights, the city itself blazed away in the dark like a ship far out at sea.
That’s how Wolfie had seen it, as a young cop, like a freighter at least a thousand miles away from the low flat brownstones of Harlem, as if all of Harlem were floating in the dark, floating in the wake of that receding, shining city.
Grace McEnery’s front parlor had a woven rug on the plastered wall, an American Primitive scene cranked out by a computer-driven loom in Pittsburgh, endlessly generating blurry and confused echoes of Edward Hicks and Winslow Homer. The rug had been nailed to the plaster above a vinyl couch the color of an old tangerine, and there was a carpet on the floor beneath a spindly Danish table with rubber caps on its legs. At one end of the room there was a kitchen, scrubbed and spotless. A hall led away toward the rear of her ground-floor flat to three small boxlike bedrooms, each with a single overpainted window covered with a rusted mesh screen. Her bedroom had a crucifix above the bed, quite a fine one, in carved rosewood. The Christ figure writhed on it in pious counterfeit pain, far less convincing than Grace McEnery’s hands.
“My boy is not home,” she said to the two detectives standing in the door. “He has gone to my sister’s place in Great Notch—that’s near Little Falls? In Jersey? He left on Monday morning, took the bus from the Port Authority. I can’t remember just when he was supposed to call me, but if you want you can call me back later, I can let you know the bus he took?”
Grace McEnery had dense and gleaming black hair which she wore in a scarlet kerchief, pulled so severely back that it seemed to stretch the skin at her temples. She was young, perhaps no older than thirty-five, but she was growing heavy in the face and hips from eating foods too starchy and too cheap—canned macaroni, canned spaghetti, cheap white bread and pasta from the Sloan’s store—making her food stamps last at the expense of the body she used to have. She was still beautiful, and she looked directly at the policemen, speaking carefully and calmly, not shaking more than one would expect. Whenever she forgot about them, her feet would tap restlessly on the table leg, but when she became aware of this she compressed her lips and tightened her body again, angry with herself.
The detectives at the 27th had been having a bad day when Maksins and Kennedy pulled up—a break-in at the General Grant Houses, a nurse raped on her way to Saint Luke’s Hospital, and a number of smaller collisions around the precinct area. They’d been only too happy to let Kennedy and Maksins go over alone to the McEnery flat on West 114th. They knew Dennis fairly well. He’d been arrested by the precinct Street Narcotics Unit guys for some minor drug offense and a few felony assault raps. He hadn’t made much of an impression on any of the detectives, but they all remembered his older brother, whom they referred to simply as Apollo. A good-looking kid, said one of the men, leading a handcuffed girl out of a holding cell. Could have been a great defensive end. Went to the same school as the Perry kid, who’d been shot by a cop.
Kennedy stopped at the door. “What, Exeter?”
“Shit, no,” the man said. “P.S. One-thirteen. Perry was in a grade ahead. Funny how the shit turns out up here. Perry goes to Exeter and gets shot a block from home. Apollo could have been anything he wanted, even gone to Exeter. Everybody wanted to go to Exeter in this neighborhood—any kid who knew the Edmund Perry story. But Apollo had to be a shmuck. He blew his shot at ABC grants.”
“That’s still open, isn’t it? His case?”
“Yeah. But there’s a lot of stuff happening. The Task Force has it in their book, but I think it was somebody from the Bronx, one of those Cuban wackos. Good luck with the mother. And go easy on her, will you? She’s a nice lady, had a lot of bad luck.”
Kennedy and Maksins knew Mrs. McEnery was lying, but there was something about the room and the way she held herself that made Kennedy want to be as gentle as he could. He stood and listened for a good five minutes, letting her wind down, letting her do what she could for her kid. Maksins was less sympathetic. He radiated supressed aggression and impatience so clearly that Kennedy asked him to go and talk to the old man sitting in the back bedroom, listening to an old Philips radio and drawing wetly on a scorched Medico pipe. Maksins thumped off down the hall. As soon as he was gone, Kennedy raised his hand, palm out, and came closer to the woman on the couch.
“Mrs. McEnery, we know your boy’s a good boy. The way we see it, he probably got into something he couldn’t control. Now you know and I know that he can’t just go off to Jersey because his youth worker has to see him every week and he has to tell her when he goes, which didn’t happen. Now all we want to do is talk to him, maybe he had nothing to do with the … incident.”
Kennedy had not told Mrs. McEnery that there was a John Doe lying on a gurney downtown and that her son was their prime suspect in the death. He had found over the years that it was better to deliver bad news in small doses, so that people didn’t get too hysterical.
“I’m telling you that my son is so in Jersey! You can ask his Uncle Ray! He was going to tell his worker but he couldn’t get through to her, her phone was busy, and when he went over to tell her she was out of the office.”
“Can you give me your sister’s phone number? If your sister can vouch for the fact that Dennis was at her place yesterday evening, then that’s the end of it.”
“She don’t have no—She doesn’t have any phone right now. They’re having some trouble with the lines.”
“Then how was he going to phone you?”
“He was going to use a phone next door.”
“Can you give me your sister’s address? I’ll have a State car drop in and talk to him.”
“She’s not in right now. That wouldn’t do any good.”
“Isn’t she expecting your son?”
“Yes, but they were going to go for a drive. My son had to go out there because he was supposed to drive the car—they had to go for a drive and—”
Kennedy shook his head slowly.
“And so Dennis was going to … He had just got his license, you see …”
She was looking for something in the detective’s face, some sign that he wasn’t bad bull, some reason to believe that there was a way out of this for her son. When it came down to the two of them sitting in her place with the sound of the kids playing stickball in the street, car horns and radios playing, the day outside clear and bright, you could see that she was coming apart. This was why Kennedy didn’t hate the blacks, and why most of the street cops in the NYPD talked a rougher game than they played. You couldn’t sit on a chair in a woman’s front room and wait for her to give up a second son without making a connection with her. You could hate a people but you had to be working on a Fiberglas heart to hate the one in front of you. Every day of his life Eddie Kennedy had a chance to resist his humanity and save some of his strength to take home with him, and every day he couldn’t do it. Grace McEnery, looking at him out of thirty-five years of a life Kennedy could never really feel, saw this quality in him and it broke her. She stood up, seemed about to run, twisted her blouse under her hands, made a move to sit down again, and began to cry silently, from the throat at first, and then more deeply, until her body was shaken and wracked with the force of it. Kennedy waited a moment, his head down, feeling oddly false, as if he had stolen something of value and was here to make amends. The sounds of a broom sweeping back and forth across a wooden floor came down from the apartment above them. He looked around the room, at the Hitachi color TV and the Marantz stereo system, at another schoolboy photo of a young black man with a fine-planed open face, a bright insolent smile—a beautiful boy, really, too old to be Dennis. It had been framed in what looked like sterling silver. The rest of the room was austere and barren. The couch had been patched with tape over both of the armrests, skillfully and with care. Maksins coughed at Kennedy from the hall. At the sound, Grace McEnery raise her head again. When she saw Wolfgar Maksins standing in the room, his face a flat mask, holding a picture of her youngest boy, she gathered herself with a deep breath.
She spoke only to Kennedy. “He never came home last night. He said he was going to go to the Cosmo to see a movie. I don’t like to let him go out all the time but he’s almost grown now. He’s a good boy, but what’s he going to do, hanging around on the stoop? He’s got no job. I can’t keep him home all the time.”
Maksins broke into the speech. “Where is the kid, ma’am? It’s better for him if you just tell us where he is and we go get him. Somebody else gets him, they may not be so easy on him.”
She looked desolate, ashamed at what she had to say.
“I don’t know where he is, officer! He just never came home last night at all!”
“Lady, you let that kid—a record like he’s got—you let him run around all night long? How’d you know something bad hadn’t happened to him?”
She had no answer for that. The trouble was, she did know that something bad had happened to him. And she knew he was running from it.
They watched her as she got her nerve together.
“What was it? What are you after him for? Did he hurt somebody?”
Kennedy spoke up, to head off something vicious he could feel building up in Maksins. “Ma’am, we don’t know that for sure. We just need to talk to him. Do you know if he had any friends, any place where he might have gone, somebody who would give him a place to sleep?”
She was a tough woman. Kennedy could see her gathering her strength. How was it that a boy, two boys, could grow up with this kind of a woman for a mother, and both go so wrong? One dead, perhaps another going to Attica. How about a woman like Veronica Perry, a power in the PTA at the public school the kids from 114th Street attended? That woman had put her whole life into her kids. Grace McEnery was another in the mold, and it had gone even more badly for her sons.
“Yes, I know who he’d be with. He’s always hanging around with a boy named Denzel Willoughby. They hooked up together when Dennis was at Rikers last year. I told him not to be hanging out with that child. He’s a bad child and he was just going to get Dennis into trouble.”
Maksins was making notes. Kennedy kept her attention, trying to keep the connection. The feelings against police ran deep and permanently through Harlem. No one gave them anything, no one talked to them, and anyone who did was often driven out of the area by the anger of her neighbors. Even a woman who lost two sons.
“Do you know where this Denzel Willoughby lives, Mrs. McEnery? Could you give us an address?”
“No, he never would say where he lived. I know Dennis went there sometimes. I think it was up on a Hundred Forty-fourth Street, in a project up there.”
Maksins asked her if it might be the Drew Hamilton Houses.
“Maybe. It was a project up there, but I don’t know which one. But if Dennis is in trouble I can tell you right now that it was none of his doing. That other boy, he’s a mean child, never had any use for him at all.”
“Can you remember what he looked like?”
“Bad-looking boy, always preening himself and lifting weights. He had lumpy skin and he was always getting into fights.”
“He had lumpy skin, ma’am?”
“Yes, he has some kind of skin disease. Uncle Ray says it’s heredity, like that.”
Kennedy nodded to Wolfgar, who went outside to the car to get Farrell to search the NYSIIS lists for a Denzel Willoughby. As he left, the gray-haired older man who’d been sitting in the bedroom came into the room and sat down beside Grace McEnery. She wound her hand in his. He pulled on his pipe and sat next to her without speaking, staring at the floor, one foot resting on the other, his other hand laid flat along his thigh. There were heavy lines in his face, and his eyes were hidden under thick white brows.
An incongruous sense of social obligation led Grace McEnery to introduce the man as Raymond Washington. Kennedy leaned forward to offer his hand. The man did not look up and made no move to take it. Kennedy drew back again.
Maksins called from the door. “Eddie, we’ve got an address on the Willoughby kid. Come on.”
When Kennedy got up to leave, the old man followed him out to the detective’s car. There were people on every stoop. Maksins was leaning on the driver’s door of a blue-and-white marked NSU, talking to a hard-faced white sergeant with mirrored aviator glasses and a gunfighter’s moustache. Three younger officers, one of them a pale-blond woman, not much more than a girl, were sitting in the NSU car.
Kennedy waited for the old man to come down the steps, spilling ashes from his pipe, moving as if his joints were locking up. He got to the bottom step, sighed heavily, and stared about at the people on the block, and the people leaning out of upper windows, and the knots of surly black teens gathered in small groups up and down the sidewalk.
Kennedy, sensing that the man wanted to say his piece away from the mother, lit a cigarette and waited for him.
When Raymond Washington did finally raise his head, somebody from across the street called him an oreo. He paid no attention. “You goin’ after the boy now, Detective? You goin’ send that cracker you got with you after him?”
The man made no attempt to lower his voice. Maksins was easily close enough to hear, although he showed no sign. Kennedy said nothing.
“Grace, she don’t have a bit of sense about that boy, but you got to understand he growed up here, he be seein’ all the street dudes with pockets of cash, with Cadillacs, with suits on. His older brother, he was a street boss around here. Grace is a good woman, but no kind of good woman can keep a man out of trouble around a Hundred Sixteenth Street.”
Maksins got into the detective’s car and slammed the door hard. Kennedy shrugged at the old man.
“Mr. Washington, if the boy shows up around here, or he gives you a call, will you tell him to come in? He’s got to come in—you know that. There’s a call out on him. They’ll be looking for him. It’s a dangerous thing, up here. The cops are going to be nervous about him.”
“No, sir, I won’t tell that child to come in. And don’t be shuckin’ me, Mister Detective. You’ll put a car on the block and wait for him to come home. I just askin’ you, you keep that partner of yours off that boy. I see him, nothin’ make him happier than using that big old piece of his on Grace’s last child. I don’t think that boy’s a lost boy yet, but I tell you, you let that man kill her boy, you might as well come back here, put a bullet into her and be done with the whole family! Yessir!”
And that was that. He turned and began to work his way back up the steps. Kennedy watched him go. The old man’s braces were attached to the waist of his worn-out pants with safety pins. His heels were worn to the uppers.
When Kennedy got into the car, Maksins accelerated away, forcing a group of black boys to jump out of his path.
“Shit, Eddie. You can be a real pussy sometimes!”
“Yeah, Wolfie? Fuck you too.”
There was a strained silence in the car all the way to the corner. When Kennedy looked back he could see a crowd of boys around the McEnery flat. In Harlem, there is no good reason for talking to a cop, not a single one.
“Dancing shoes,” said Kennedy, mostly to himself. Maksins slammed on the brakes.
“What shoes? Eddie, what the hell is the matter with you these days?”
Kennedy didn’t look at his partner. “Mr. Washington, the old guy. He was wearing a pair of black patent-leather dancing shoes. You know, like they used to wear at the Cotton Club, in the movies?”
Maksins said nothing. He pulled away with a snarl.
There was no one home at the Willoughby apartment in the Drew Hamilton Houses on 144th Street. Although they had sent out a radio call for a Dennis McEnery, both men knew that life in the precincts up here was busy enough without taking on the work of a pair of alien DTs from Midtown. They had some hamburgers at a White Rock which Maksins insisted on eating inside. He leaned up against the windows of the place, his jacket undone, with a pair of Serengeti sunglasses on, working his way through the hamburger and staring at every black kid who came into the place. The reaction was always the same. They’d bop into the restaurant talking fast, laughing with friends, jumping and pushing each other, and then one of them would notice the two white men standing beside the door; he’d shove another, the word would go around, and they’d all shut up tight. Maksins liked the effect. He seemed to have an inexhaustible reserve of dislike for blacks. Kennedy took this shit for about three minutes, and then he went back out to the car, got in, closed all the windows, and turned on the air-conditioning. Cops with attitudes pissed Kennedy off.
The sergeants’ test. The goddamned sergeants’ test. The New York Police Foundation, the black police brotherhood called The Guardian Society, the Chief of Patrol, the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, the Mayor’s Office, the Affirmative Action people, the good fairies, the little people, and the fucking Dallas Cowgirls had spent years trying to develop a civil-service test that did not discriminate against ethnic minorities, specifically against black recruiting candidates. The muscle for this program came from the 1980 federal court decision of Judge Robert Carter, who had ruled that not only did New York City discriminate against minorities, but that the bias was entirely intentional. Kennedy had no real argument against this. New York City is now, and always has been, a constellation of dark stars, warring factions, competing elements. Here in Harlem you had Spanish Harlem, Black Harlem, Puerto Rican Harlem, Italian Harlem, gang wars, turf struggles. The same thing went on all over the five boroughs. It even went on in the midtown area, in places such as the diamond district, where orthodox Jews had established a monopoly that not even the Mafia had been able to counter, and in Wall Street, where Harvard M.B.A.’s saw to it that nobody else got a Bass Weejun in the door without the high sign from a Phi Beta Crimson.
Judge Carter had ruled that one out of every three new recruits should come from a minority, and that all subsequent promotions within the NYPD should accurately reflect this quota. The trouble was, one out of three minority members weren’t passing the tests. So, naturally, The Guardians, the brass at One Police Plaza, and the man from Gracie Mansion decided that rather than chase after a better class of recruit, perhaps by improving the inner-city school system, they would simply lower all the standards for getting into the Force.
The idea seemed to be that if minorities weren’t getting past the recruiting standards, then the recruiting standards were at fault. Which, in Kennedy’s opinion, was partly true but not wholly true.
Most of the experienced officers in the NYPD, including many of its blacks and Hispanics who had fought their way on to the force and up into the hierarchy the hard way, on the strength of their guts and their skill, felt that police work should not be treated like a democratic institution. The Police Force maintained order and enforced the laws of the land. This activity was not something the average senator or city councilperson could do. It required a basic set of physical, mental, and moral skills. If a recruit didn’t have the size, the education, or the moral character to do that job, then the recruit shouldn’t get the job.
The clash came when the minorities pointed out, with some historical justification, that it was precisely that bit of reasoning that had kept the downtrodden down and trodden-upon for lo these many years.
Kennedy’s father was an Irishman from Armagh. He knew the Troubles well, and he’d grown up at war with an occupying army that was a declared and ruthless oppressor, the Black and Tans, enforcers for the British occupation. Kennedy grew up hearing stories of the Irish revolt. The similarities between Belfast and Harlem were not lost on him. But the parallel broke down on the difference between Ireland and New York City. In spite of what many civil rights activists felt, Kennedy believed that the NYPD was not an occupying army, or the tool of a brutal regime. New York City was, in a cop’s world, a very tough town, with some extremely vicious people carrying on their businesses in it, and what a city like this needed wasn’t an ethnic hiring quota. It needed good cops.
If you could get good ethnic cops, then as far as Kennedy, and most of the reasonable cops on the force, saw it, may God bless you. But don’t for Christ’s sake hire midgets, or twits, or cokeheads, or petty criminals, which had happened now that the prior criminal record of a recruit was not an automatic disqualification. Kennedy hated to see what had happened to the reputation of the NYPD in 1985. Like a lot of cops, he felt that the OEEO and Judge Carter’s ham-fisted approach to minority hiring had led directly to the disgrace of the Force. It had also led to the institution of outrages like the Internal Affairs Field Associates and their grab-bag entrapment war against the whole patrol and detective function. The brass at One Police Plaza didn’t trust the quality of recruit it was being forced to accept. They responded by hiring them, and then setting informers and spies at work among them. It was a lousy situation. Kennedy was hardly surprised that there was so much bitterness in men like Wolfgar Maksins.
Funny thing was, Wolfie Maksins reminded Kennedy of his first partner, Al Weeks. Now there was a bitter man. Kennedy had gotten the guy as a partner mainly because nobody else with any pull at all would take the man on. Weeks liked to fight. If he wasn’t fighting with a punk or a psycho in the Bronx, he was quite ready to go after a fellow cop. He wanted only one thing: let the cop be white. He and Kennedy had their night on the roof of a tenement off Fordham. Hard to say what it was over. Kennedy just got tired of being called a mick, or a honky, or an ofay, or a faggot. Tired of being fucked over just because of the color of his skin. Afterward, they’d had a drink and a sweat at the police club. Weeks told him a few stories about being a black cop. Guy had a point. But.
A friend of Kennedy’s who worked in the personnel office had sent him an OEEO internal report that showed black representation in the Detective Bureau, specifically in the gold-shield ratings, was averaging out at twelve percent, and even higher when the Detective Bureau lost nine hundred officers after the 1975 financial crisis—a very high average.
Here in Harlem, and in the Bronx, Kennedy’s experience had led him to believe that people in need didn’t care very much about the color of a cop’s skin. What they did care about was the officer’s ability to do what they asked him to do.
There had been one final bit of bullshit affecting the general problem of race wars in the NYPD and on the streets of the city itself. It was generally believed that white cops were far more willing to shoot black people than were black cops. That was one of the main reasons for the quota system in the first place. Stokovich’s squad room library included an internal stat sheet that listed shooting-board investigations during the late sixties and early seventies. They showed that one out of every thirty-eight black policemen had shot and killed someone during this period, as opposed to one out of two hundred and fifty white cops. A few more than nineteen hundred black police officers had shot forty-four black people. Thirty thousand white cops in this same period had accounted for only sixty-four black deaths and twenty Hispanic deaths. The stats got a little muddy when he considered that black policemen are usually assigned to the roughest areas, but the point had some validity. The whole affair had been dealt with in a Police Science journal article published in December 1981, in which a researcher named James Fyfe had demonstrated that minority officers are more likely to have been involved in a fatal shooting than any white officer. Stokovich was using this report as justification for his prejudice against black female detectives. Which just goes to show that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Kennedy decided the thing was a bag of snakes and turned on the police radio to listen to the sound of Harlem until Maksins got tired of intimidating school kids.
“All right, Six Adam, ahh, they’re not giving any description on this but according to the caller there’s a man on her fire escape and he’s waving a dead bird at her, K?”
beep … beep …
“Ah, Six Adam to Central, he’s waving a what at her?”
“Eight Frank to Central, we have a call-back?”
“Nah, Eight Frank, no call-back.”
“Six Charlie to Central, K?”
“Six Charlie?”
“Ah, we’re ninety-Z, Central.”
“Oooh, not for long, Seven Charlie.”
“Two Eddy to Central, K?”
“Two Eddy?”
“We’re hearing a ten-eleven at three thirty-two West a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street.”
“A what?”
The dispatcher was a young black woman with a heavy Bronx accent. She ran the net with an iron hand. Kennedy tracked the hectic cross-talk while he updated his Spiegel case notes. The time was 1533 hours, and whatever the schools were doing to slow down the crime rate in Harlem was going to be officially over in a few minutes. Maksins was talking into his portable. He had probably left it turned up while he ate his hamburger. Look at the guy, Kennedy thought: six two, an easy two hundred pounds, a weight lifter who looks like an ad for the Third Reich, a punk brush-cut and a piece of weaponry under his arm that could punch a hole through a concrete wall, talking into the radio and staring out the plate glass at Kennedy. If he could ever get over his reflexes, he’d be a good cop someday.
“Five Charlie, that was no cardiac, that was a seizure. Can we have a bus at One Thirty-Seven East a Hundred Twenty-ninth Street, apartment seven?”
“Five Charlie, ten four, the bus is on the way.”
“All units, on the Hudson Parkway at the tollbooth; she’s reporting a black male with a gun, a possible EDP. He’s harassing the people in the cars there.”
“Emergency Services, Central, we’re on the parkway. We’ll take that call.”
“Roger, ESU, we have a call-back on that. She says there are shots fired, repeat, shots fired. All units respond.”
“Central, was that the Hudson Parkway or the Hudson Bridge?”
“Ah, it’s from the toll sergeant at the Hudson Bridge. She’s reporting that shots have been fired. Stand by, I’m on a landline.… (Some static here, and the sound of an open carrier, agitated voices, and a siren whooping and falling away)
“ESU to Central, we’re on the Parkway. We’ll take that call—no further, no further!”
“All right, ESU, slow it down. All units, slow it down. Emergency Services is on the scene. No further.”
“Three Auto Recovery to Central.”
“Three Auto?”
“Central, one of the people we’re looking for is a sixteen-year-old black male last seen on the Bronx end of the Hudson Bridge going south into Harlem. We had units of the five-oh and the five-two in pursuit. We’re going to take that gun run at the tollbooth too!”
“Three Auto, that’s a possible black male EDP and shots have been fired. I have a complainant and a call-back on the landline and she says that they have a man down. Approach with caution, Three Auto. Emergency Services is on the scene.”
“ESU to Central, we’re not on the scene yet. Have you called for a bus?”
This cross-talk was suddenly interrupted by a rapid high-pitched beeping on all channels. Kennedy saw Maksins push himself away from the wall and head for the door of the White Rock.
“All units, all units, we have a Signal Thirteen at the emergency room, Harlem Hospital, Lenox and a Hundred Thirty-fifth. Shots fired. All units respond.…”
Shit! Holy hell could break loose up here in three minutes. Kennedy was backing out of the White Rock parking lot as Maksins jerked open the passenger door and clambered in.
“Eddie, where are you going?”
“There’s a Thirteen at Lenox and a Hundred Thirty-fifth, Wolfie! What do you think I’m doing!”
The radio was crackling and firing with taut, edgy cross-talk from units of the Two-Six, the Two-Eight, and the Two-Five. Every time a car got the air you could hear the sirens blaring in the background of the transmission. Even Street Crime Units and Neighborhood Stabilization Units were answering the citywide Code Thirteen, which means “officer needs assistance.” Coupled with a “shots fired,” it was a combination guaranteed to galvanize every field unit in any nearby precinct. Kennedy had hardly pulled out onto 145th Street when two RMPs from the 32nd Precinct went looping by him on their rims.
“Jesus, Wolfie, they’re coming down from the three-two! Belt up, will you?”
Maksins reached over and put a grip on the steering rim. He shut the radio off with his right hand and pulled Eddie’s portable out from under the briefcase on the bench seat between them. “It’s fucking off! Kennedy, they were calling us from the bureau at the two-seven. One of their SNAP guys says he saw the McEnery kid going into the Olympia Quad about two hours ago.”
Kennedy felt a warmth shooting up the back of his neck. What was he doing? This was no RMP and he wasn’t any patrolman from the 28th. The Signal Thirteen had just canceled his brains. And here it was again, the out-of-step sensation he’d been having all week. Maksins was watching him warily.
“Fuck, Wolfie, you’re right. Sorry. The Quad’s on the B’way at a Hundred and Seventh. It runs all day. Figures the kid would rack up there until dark and try for his block. Did the SNAP crew bag him?”
Maksins straightened up and belted in. “Nah … they’re running some op against a banker around the corner. They say not to come in like stormtroopers—just take the kid quiet or we’ll fuck up their collar.”
“Two hours past? Have they seen the kid come out?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t. Come on, Eddie, drive, will you? You see the guy in that NSU car, outside the McEnery broad’s apartment? Yeah? Well he says the McEnery kid is always hanging out around a Hundred and Sixteenth and he’s got a crew who play slow-pitch at the diamond in Morningside Park. If he’s not in the Quad we’ll do a Hundred and Sixteenth Street and shake up some of the shits over in the park. They’ll drop a dime on him. These people have no balls.”
Feeling a mixture of anger and embarrassment, Kennedy took it out on cabbies and pedestrians all the way down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard riding the gas and the brakes and saying little to Maksins. The wide street was lined with boarded-up shops and graffiti-covered walls. There were plenty of people about, all of them black and Hispanic, mainly young kids of several mixtures walking in and out of mom-and-pop stores, sipping Coca-Cola, throwing the Frisbee or playing with a hackey-sack ball. On Seventh the latest trend was preppy, and most of the black teens were wearing white Bermuda shorts and lime-green Izod shirts. At a basketball court five lean black boys hung on the chicken-wire fencing and catcalled at the DT car as it went racing past, Kennedy pounding the horn with his fist, making the siren yelp whenever a car wandered into his path or a gang of black kids took too long to cross at a light. By the time the two detectives reached Cathedral Parkway they were in a very bad mood.
The Thirteen at Lenox and 135th Street had drawn RMPs from all over Harlem. There were no detective units around to give Maksins and Kennedy a hand at the theater on Broadway, and neither man felt much like waiting. They flipped out their shields at the booth, pushing their way past a lineup of black teens. There was no way in the world anybody would have taken them for anything but cops.
The Quad was running four films on a Monday-to-Friday matinee schedule. The detectives looked at the show cards for the various screening halls. Rambo was running in the first, Brewster’s Millions in Two, Secret Admirer in Three, and Desperately Seeking Susan in the last room. It wasn’t hard to make a choice.
Screening Room One was close to capacity. Rambo was drawing very well even on a slow Tuesday afternoon. There were no white faces in the crowds in any of the rooms. Maksins stayed at the head of the ramps, covering the exit doors, while Kennedy tried to slide down the side aisle toward the front of the hall without attracting too much attention. If it hadn’t been for the action on the screen, he’d never have reached the midpoint. The 70-millimeter camera was lingering on Stallone’s latissimus dorsi as some devolved lout in a butch-cut cranked a current through him. Stallone was writhing and flexing magnificently, to the apparent delight of the teenage crowd in the hall. The girls were screaming, the boys were cheering, and nobody in the room was paying much attention to the obvious jake tippy-toeing down the sticky carpet in the marijuana-laden darkness.
The hall worried both men. It had a couple of exits down beside the screen, and it was full of people. If Krush was in here, and armed, he could make one hell of a mess out of the theater, cause a panic with a couple of shots, and stand a pretty good chance of getting out in the aftermath. Kennedy walked slowly and looked very carefully at every black male in the place, trying to make that eidetic connect-the-dots matchup on Dennis McEnery before McEnery realized there was a DT in the room. Maksins and Kennedy had looked at the CATCH photo again just before they got out of the car. If he was in here, Kennedy would know him.
But, Jesus, there are a lot of similarities in faces. There’s a kid with the right build, popping jujubes like Quaaludes, mesmerized by the screen. But the ears are wrong, the lobes are connected, not extended and full the way McEnery’s ears are. And the nose is flat and wide. What about the kid in front of him? Tall, clean lines, the right age. A moustache? Is it real? Yeah, it’s real. Okay, this one, six seats over, with his arm around the girl? No, the head’s wrong. Too heavy in the face, too.
Kennedy ran the internal scan along every seat and down each aisle, making the process as mechanical as he could, resisting the urge to leap from one to the other. This one? That one? He was close to the final eight rows now, and he was getting some attention from the crowd. Well, that’s all right now, thought Kennedy. He was close enough to cover the front, and if the kid ran back toward Maksins he was in for a thumping at the top of the ramp. Heads were turning all over the theater now, eyes widening in recognition, and a low murmur was starting to run through the kids. Kennedy got to the end of the aisle. The screen swept away off his shoulder in a vast distorted landscape across which abstract lines and colors split and formed, broke apart and clashed again while the solid thump of a heavy-caliber machine gun made the speakers rock above Kennedy’s head. Five young kids a few rows back started to stamp their feet. Fine, thought Kennedy. Raise some hell. Let’s scare this kid into moving.
The stamping was spreading over the room now. It grew into a booming. There was a motion out of place up there to the right, about halfway back. A face had dropped down; something was jostling a couple. A popcorn bag flew up in the air; a voice was raised, a high-pitched falsetto. There!
Dennis McEnery exploded out from the cover of a row of seat backs, leaping up into the aisle in a pinwheel of long legs and flailing arms and a wet white flash from his eyes as they caught the light from the screen. He gaped at Kennedy for a moment and then pelted up toward the door at the back.
“Go for it, bro! Fuck you, assholes!” The crowd was on its feet, yelling and chanting. Kids were crowding into the aisles as Kennedy pounded around the bottom of the theater and came up after McEnery. All he had to do was drive him into Maksins, who would be covering the upper exit.
Now the room was chaos. Faces and open mouths, cursing and pushing into his vision, kids laughing at him. The foot-stamping grew louder. Three heavyset black males got out of their seats and ran into his path, blocking his view of the fleeing boy. Kennedy backhanded one boy above the ear. He went down. A second man caught at Kennedy’s jacket. He could feel someone fumbling for his gun. This was getting crazy. He pivoted on his right heel, with his elbow up. He could feel bone on bone as his elbow took the youth in the cheekbone. Kennedy put his right hand down and brought out his gun. While he had no intention of using it, he had no intention of losing it either. The third boy decided that it was the better part of valor to get interested in the movie again. Other kids got out of his way, opening up a section of the aisle for ten feet. Kennedy saw a rectangle of white open up at the top of the aisle. It filled up immediately with Wolfgar Maksins. The McEnery boy skidded to a stop, sliding in the grease and the spilled Coke on the floor. He turned again, showing Kennedy wide white eyes full of feral intensity and shock. It crossed Kennedy’s mind to bring the gun up and tell the kid to stop, but the boy was showing no weapon, and the place was too crowded and too unpredictable. Let’s hope Wolfie sees it that way, thought Kennedy, bracing for an impact with the McEnery kid, now less than three rows away. Wolfie puts one into the McEnery kid, he thought, that slug won’t stop until it blows out a searchlight on the Empire State Building.
McEnery hesitated less than a tenth of a second. Up he went, a muscular, a superb leap really, landing on the balls of his feet along the line of seat backs, dancing and weaving like a slack-wire walker, moving fast and well, trapping the DTs in the aisle, now almost all the way to the far side of the theater. The crowd gave him a sustained cheer. Maksins jumped up on the seat backs and started to pursue him while Kennedy turned and raced toward the front of the theater, thinking that the whole goddam chase was coming dangerously close to vaudeville. Kids were backing away from all of them, sensing that the cops were getting angry, not wanting to draw any fire. Two girls screamed as McEnery landed in their laps. Then he was up again, running along the tops of the seats, leaping from row to row, bobbing and dancing in the projected beam, little droplets of water flaring like sparks off his slick stretched face as moved through the cone of light, blotting out the helicopter chase on the screen. Maksins was closing in fast, moving like a wingback over the rows, his face set and grim, but no gun in his hand. God help the kid, Kennedy said to himself. He’s being a serious pain here. When Wolfie gets to him, he is going to damage that boy. Maksins wavered in the cone, staggered, dropped one foot onto an empty seat, and then went down as his leather soles slid off the material. A rigid railback took him in the crotch and he fell between the rows, raging. Krush reached the exit door and was through it, caught for a flash in the outside light like a snapshot of a long-distance runner with his weight forward, on his toes, arms reaching for it, head down. And he was gone.
Maksins was back on his feet. He plowed through the rest of the aisle, shoving kids out of the way like a bull moving the locitos at Pamplona, bellowing curses, calling them every racist name he could think of, and he knew many.
Wolfie was out the same door, flashing the same stop-motion image, and then he was gone too. All the way to the exit door Kennedy listened for the heavy concussive boom of that goddam Dan Wesson Wolfie was pulling out as he went through the doorway. Kennedy slithered and scrambled up to the door as the crowd cheered and whooped and he felt a temptation to stop at the door and bow. He hit the door with the flat of his hand. It bounced off and back into the wall, and Kennedy lumbered out into the busy street, sweeping the cars and the crowd, checking the corners, looking hot and wild with his coat open and his shirt pulled out at the waist and his cheeks flushed from the scramble, almost in pain with the compulsion to detect that scrap of cloth, that bobbing motion, that ripple in the street scene that would tell him which way the kid had run. A clatter of metal and glass and a hoarse cry from behind him brought Kennedy around. There! A glimpse of Maksins’ wide back as he plowed through a pushcart peddler at the corner of 107th, sending burning pretzels and hot coals flying into the street, sending the black man rolling. Cursing, panting, fumbling for his keys, fumbling with the lock and the door handle, Kennedy piled into the car, started it, and came around in a tight-cranked lock-to-lock pivot with his off-side radial smoking and the positraction grinding. He let the wheel race between his fingers as the cruiser came around and then he shoved the pedal right into the matting.
Goddamn goddamn that fucking little nigger and that asshole Wolfie. This was just what Stokovich had warned him about and this was just what Kennedy had been afraid of all day, drag-assing around Harlem with that goddamn werewolf for a partner! And when Wolfie found the kid, was he going to say, “Now, just hold up there a minute, son. We just want to ask you a few questions”? No fucking way! He was going to chase that poor little nigger until he got him backed into an alleyway or a Sloan’s or the Little Flower Baptist Church and then he’d use that mothering zebra-striped 105 on the kid and he’d put a hole through him so damn big you could put your arm in and not get any blood on your cuffs.
Did Wolfie have a drop gun? Was Wolfie stupid enough to think that a drop gun was going to help anybody out of the shitstorm? You just try to run a drop gun past Forensic and the Shooting Board these days! No cadaveric spasm? No sign of the automatic clamp a dying man puts on anything he’s holding when you shoot him? No way to tie the gun to the dead man? Adios, sonny. You’re gone. Kennedy tried to remember if he had ever seen Wolfie with a throwaway piece. God knows there were enough of them around the station house. They took little junk pieces off shits and skells every night of the week.
“Central, this is one-oh-four. I’m in pursuit of a black male suspect last seen on foot running north on Broadway at a Hundred and Seventh. Suspect is six one, one-sixty, clean-shaven black wearing jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt. Suspicion of felony assult. Suspect may be armed. Plainclothes officer is in foot pursuit. Any units in the area please respond.”
“One-oh-four, do you need a bus?”
“Negative, Central. I’m in vehicle pursuit northbound on Broadway. I do not have the suspect in sight. I do not have the officer in sight. There are no shots fired and no one is hurt. Just get me some cars, K?”
“Ten four, one-oh-four. All units in the area of B’way and One-oh-seventh, we have an armed black male six one wearing jeans and a gray shirt. Wanted for felony assault. Last seen on foot running northbound on B’way at a Hundred and Seventh Street. May be armed. There is a plainclothes officer in pursuit. No shots fired. No emergency.”
Three RMPs took up the call. Kennedy got the car to the next block and was pulling over to the curb to check the alleyways when Maksins called him on the radio, his voice coming in short bursts as he fought for breath.
“Eddie, where the hell are you?”
“I’m at One-oh-nine and the B’way, Wolfie! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. He’s a fleet little shit. I’m at the lot next to the Cathedral. I lost him crossing the Parkway. Come and get me, will ya?”
“Six Charlie to Central, K?”
“Six Charlie?”
“Central, we saw a male black answering that description going into the park at Manhattan and a Hundred Seventeenth Street. You have the unit eighty-five us here, we’ll do a sweep, K?”
“Central, this is one-oh-four. We’ll eighty-five Six Charlie.”
“Roger, one-oh-four. Six Charlie, that unit will eighty-five you. What is your present location?”
Kennedy pulled up opposite Saint John the Divine and watched Maksins ignore every car on the road as he crossed the street to the cruiser. They were rolling again as soon as Maksins slammed the passenger door, which he did with such force that the glove compartment door flipped open. He closed it with his knee, almost incoherent with rage.
Six Charlie was waiting for them at Manhattan and 115th Street, along with the same Neighborhood Stabilization car they had seen outside Mrs. McEnery’s apartment earlier in the day. Kennedy pulled up next to them and Maksins rolled down his window.
The driver of Six Charlie was a black man in a crisp summer uniform. He spoke as soon as they stopped moving.
“My Recorder is on foot in the park. The sergeant says we can have the rookies and I have Six Boy and Six Frank on the far side of the park. The guy you’re looking for, is he a lean sucker, runs like a deer?”
Kennedy leaned forward to speak across Maksins.
“Yeah, fast as hell. Was he wearing a gray sweatshirt? With a hood? Jeans all muddied up, like he’d slept in a ditch or something?”
The patrolman nodded. “Yeah, that’s him.”
The sergeant from the Stabilization Unit walked in between the cars. He leaned into Maksins’ window. Kennedy could see the interior of the car distorted in the man’s mirror lenses. Maksins looked like a pale mountain.
“We’ll sweep the park for you. I have a Portable up at the diamond, and two cars coming through from the other side. You want to take the drive up by Columbia?”
Kennedy shook his head. “No, we’ll stay here. You get your guys to do a foot sweep through if you can. Stay on the air. And remember, this kid isn’t John Fucking Dillinger, so tell your guys to be cool, hah?”
The sergeant never smiled. Kennedy couldn’t see anything but his own inverted reflection in the glasses.
“Sure. We’ll take him out nice and sweet. You guys sure tossed the Quad, I hear. We’ll catch shit from the manager for sure.”
Maksins growled at this. “Fuck the Quad. You get your buddies to kick that little nigger out anywhere along Manhattan. We’ll be waiting.”
The RMPs broke up, heading north and south, turning into the short, crowded cross streets, rolling slowly down the blocks. The brownstones were solid all the way to the hill, stoops and trash cans everywhere, and on every set of steps a group of blacks stood, women and men, small girls with their hair in ribbons and cornrows, wiry little boys with round cheeks and scraped knees, old men and women with lips sunken in over bare gums, young girls with smooth skin and full hips, and everywhere you looked, in threes and fours, lean black youths with closed-up faces, threatening, angry, sullen, full of resentment. The buildings needed paint, the brickwork was dirty and worn, and many of the windows were covered with boards or screened in heavy wire. The gutters were choked with scraps of paper and shreds of black rubber, beer cans, McDonald’s wrappers. As Kennedy drove the cruiser down a line of rusted cars on 115th Street, at least two hundred people watched them pass.
Maksins wasn’t surprised when Kennedy finally pulled to a stop thirty yards west of the McEnery flat on 114th Street and shut the engine off. Maksins was breathing hard.
“You okay, Wolfie?”
He didn’t answer right away. “Yeah. I’m okay. Just give me a minute, Eddie.”
Here, 114th Street was busy but not too busy. The action had drawn most of the kids up toward the park. There was no one on the steps in front of the McEnery place. The cruiser was fairly well hidden in a long row of parked cars, but Kennedy had a good line all the way down to the broad triangle formed by the intersection of St. Nicholas and Seventh Avenues, and beyond that, along a cluttered, dusty, and ragged line of tenements and cars and dense, scorched, and flattened earth, the wide flat stretch of Lenox Avenue and the bulk of the Martin Luther King Towers. Manhattan was full of tightly compressed visions like this. You could see a long way in Harlem, for all the good it did you.
Kennedy looked at his watch: 1655 hours. Almost five o’clock in the afternoon. Long shadows were crawling east from the lamp posts and steps, and the light was changing as the sun went down at their backs. Some of the heat was going out of the day. A slanted shaft of sunlight lay on the north side of 114th Street, tinting all the brickwork a deep sepia, and the street seemed to be lit from beneath, as if it were burning. The two detectives sat without speaking in the stale luminous air of the squad car as motes of dust drifted in the fading day and the digital clock on the dashboard clicked off twenty-two minutes. Now and then a burst of chatter from the radio would startle both men. The search in the park was coming up empty. A 54 on 118th Street at Manhattan pulled Six Boy off the hunt, and a 30 assault call from a Portable holding two at 38 Claremont across from Barnard College took Six Charlie. At 1717, Central passed the word that the NSU car had been redirected to a meeting at the station. Did 104 want any further? Kennedy said no thanks, and cut the radio off.
Dennis McEnery came out from between two derelict buildings on the near side of Seventh Avenue and stood, blinking in the sidelong sun, scuffed, panting, covered with dirt and sweat, his skin pulled like a drumhead over his cheekbones and his jawline, his lower lip sagging and pink. He shaded his eyes with a raised hand, still holding on to the railing of the tenement beside him as if there was some kind of help for him in the connection. He was on fire in the hot yellow light, a wavering flame sixty yards from home.
Maksins made a sound deep in his chest. Kennedy held the man in place with his right hand.
“Just wait, Wolfie. Where’s he going to go?”
Maksins moved his head in a tight circle, indicating the walls and the roof lines, taking in the whole long block in one economical gesture. “They’ll warn him. I’m tired of chasing this little bastard.”
“Where’s he gonna go, Wolfie? Just be still.”
Maksins wavered for a few seconds, knowing that Kennedy was right. Where was he going to run to? But he wanted that kid. Maksins told himself, sometimes, that he never liked to hurt people. And, sometimes, it was true.
Krush started to move west on the north side of 114th Street, on his toes, his hands out in front of him, an expression on his drawn, tight face that reminded Kennedy of something … something. Krush took another step, now staring up at the roof lines. Kennedy could see the street through the kid’s eyes now, see him raking the roof lines and looking into each shadowed doorway on the block. He was staring down the line of cars now, to him a continuous chain of headlights and grill sections, fat black rubber with worn-out treads. Kennedy could hear him thinking:
Do I know that car? Yes, that’s Rainy’s, and that Chevy it belongs to Mrs. Parker who works at Saint Luke’s and this old Pontiac here with the glow-in-the-dark crucifix hanging from the rearview that belongs to Leroy Delacorte who drove it all the way from someplace called Batten Rude or some such and this old mother yes I know you I do you’re the dark-green Cadillac de Ville I had a ride in you once when my brother was alive you belong to the Barnes man who runs the dealers on 116th Street. Last year, he let me fuck his best whore she was blond, but real blond with pure white skin and little blue veins running down the inside of her thighs all the way to her knees. She said her name was Dawn and she used to be a weather girl. Well, what the hell, Krush my man, you might as well go.…
“Come on, kid, come on,” said Eddie Kennedy, right out loud in the squad car full of hot dead air and strange liquid amber light, and at that moment, as if he’d heard him speak, Dennis McEnery stiffened his back and pushed off against the sidewalk of 114th Street, staggering as if the shove had come too suddenly. And now he was into it, up at speed within three long loopy strides, reaching for it, going for it, coming straight up the line of parked cars with the garbage-can stoops and the ruined tenement walls all around him. As soon as Kennedy put a hand on the door latch and the late afternoon sun glinted off his gold detective’s ring, he got it all at once like a telegram from his id.
Krush came up the street fast, laying his feet down and picking them up with a fine careless grace, rolling at the hip joints and taking in the air through a wide mouth, gasping, racing for the door step, sixty, fifty, forty, thirty yards from home. Is that Uncle Ray getting out of that car? What is old Uncle Ray doing in a car? There’s the door. He was only twenty yards from home.
Kennedy had the sun right at his back when he stepped into the kid’s path, so Dennis couldn’t really see who the man was. He kept trying to make the silhouette fit into the rounded, defeated contours of his Uncle Ray.
Kennedy stood there on the sidewalk watching two black boys race up a line of tenement stoops into a flat sideways sunset, the image of one superimposed and hovering over the other and then shifting back and forth.
Kennedy shook this confusion off, just a little alarmed at his state of mind. Concentrate, you asshole. Wake up. He heard the side door slam as Maksins got out into the street. The McEnery kid swerved madly into the road and tried to angle toward the steps of his apartment. Kennedy moved a few yards to intercept him. He watched the kid’s hands but there was nothing in them. McEnery’s eyes were closing, and a sound was coming from him as if from someone in pain. He tried to run right over Kennedy, but Kennedy took it all in the body and chest as his arms closed around the boy and he used all the kid’s speed and momentum to sweep him right up and lay him across the hood of the squad car. Maksins stepped up to the hood as Kennedy pulled the boy’s left arm around behind his back and snapped on a cuff. Kennedy could see the hammer back on Maksins’ .357, but Maksins’ index finger was not inside the guard. He had it laid up underneath the cylinders, according to the regs. When Wolfie shoved the barrel up against the boy’s neck just behind the left ear and called him a few bad names, Kennedy knew everything was going to be okay.
Kennedy pulled out a Frielich’s gun shop card with the Miranda rights printed on the reverse and started to read them off to Dennis McEnery. Around him in the street, people who had been nowhere were suddenly everywhere.
Maksins was a little rougher than he had to be when he put the kid in the back of the cruiser. Kennedy gave him all the room he needed. When he came around to get in behind the wheel he could not help but look for Uncle Ray. He was there, standing inside the patched screen door at the top of the tenement steps, watching Kennedy from the shadow, his face a cipher. He didn’t raise his hand or make any motion toward Kennedy or toward the cruiser where Grace’s boy sat slumped and weary in the back. But Kennedy felt something coming from the man and it was enough.
They went down Columbus as the last of the sunlight climbed the brickwork and the roof lines along the shops and cafes, and blue shadows lay in the doorways. At 72nd they pulled up in front of a David’s Cookies. Maksins went in and bought a tin of chocolate chip and three coffees, which the three of them shared. The streets were crowded on this Tuesday evening—white couples pushing baby strollers; a pair of young men jogging close together; people with clothes the color of ice cream and Reebok jogging shoes, headbands, Swatch watches, smooth well-tended skin, clear eyes. Dennis slouched in the back, traveling down Columbus Avenue past the Frusen Glädjé signs and the windows displaying Giorgio Armani suits and the café where all the people who work on the ABC daytime soaps can be seen at the corner tables in the greenhouse extension; returning the stares of the hundreds of people out strolling in their pastel jogging suits or their genuine British-Army-in-Africa khaki shorts with the cotton top seams, people dragging a brace of Akitas from Akitas of Distinction or sitting at the unsteady round sidewalk tables sipping Ramlösa, worrying about the progress of their in-vitro fertilization, listening, politely bored, to the troubles somebody’s two-year-old was having in his play group; passing block after block of the best and the brightest, the aggressive and the blessed and the fit, the trend setters, talking their talk in the West Side drawl, taking seriously the things that are said in Christopher Street and The Village Voice and The New York Times, thinking of their career paths and ambitions in terms of combat and duels, preening, stroked, swollen and fat with life, oblivious as livestock, bred to be praised and preyed-upon.
Maksins ate the last of the chocolate chip cookies, and the McEnery boy slept as Kennedy cleared the tangle at Columbus and Broadway. Colored lights played over the dusty surfaces of the squad car and illuminated the faces of the men inside. Kennedy looked over at Wolfie. He had the rapt expression of a man at a movie, in a trance at the opening frames. The car pounded over the flat iron plates at 57th Street. Broadway filled the screen.