THE NEXT DAY, SATURDAY, was, theoretically, Jim Tilley’s day off. Unfortunately, just like in the movies, real detectives work whatever hours the job demands. A detective might, for instance, spend a month sitting through a series of eight-hour stakeouts, his life as regular as any clock-puncher’s, then suddenly be assigned to a case (like Levander Greenwood’s) where the public demands an immediate arrest. Then all bets are off and he works fourteen-hour days until his family can’t (or won’t, more likely) recognize him.
This is only one of a number of ways in which cops are the victims of the criminals they pursue. Even worse is the tendency of most cops to carry the job home. In spite of the inevitable macho barroom attitude, certain memories repeat themselves, like the words of familiar songs, for days or even weeks before they’re finally buried deep enough to display themselves only in nightmares. As he pulled on his running shoes, Jim Tilley remembered clearly the first time it happened to him. He had dreamed of it only moments before.
The incident had taken place about three o’clock on a warm October afternoon. A drunk had stepped in front of a bus on Myrtle Avenue just as the driver turned his head to check the side mirror before pulling into traffic. The bus wasn’t going very fast when it hit the man, but it picked him up anyway. Picked him up and tossed him through the rear window of a double-parked Buick.
Tilley saw the whole thing coming, saw the drunk stagger toward the curb, the bus driver’s head swivel to the right, the enormous steering wheel starting to spin. He yelled for the man (his name turned out to be Sam Watson) to stop, but his voice only blended with the boozy haze surrounding all those reflexes which keep human beings from stepping in front of buses.
Mr. Watson’s throat was cut to the bone by the window glass and he was spurting blood on the occupants of the Buick, an elderly black lady and her two grandchildren. For a moment the scene froze that way, the only movement being the pulsing jets of blood spraying the passengers of the car. Then the old lady jumped out into the street and began to scream at the bus driver. She called him an “ignorant, nappy-haired homeboy,” said he was “common” and “trash.” Meanwhile, the driver’s eyes never left Sam Watson’s body. Tilley thought the poor bastard was in shock, but when he pulled him away and told him to wait in the bus, the driver turned and shook his head, disgustedly.
“Fucking asshole.” He pointed over at the dead man. “You believe that fucking asshole? This is my third accident. They’re gonna fry me for this. Man, I got kids.”
“Common trash. You hear me, homeboy?” the woman shouted as he disappeared into the bus. The two kids wouldn’t stop crying. They were young, maybe six or seven, and they held hands and bawled as they waited for Granny to regain enough composure to comfort them.
Tilley couldn’t shake the memory for weeks. Not the ugliness or even the blood. He had seen death coming and been unable to defeat it. Whenever he closed his eyes, it was there again. Sam Watson lurching toward the curb, the bus pulling away, the enormous force of the impact despite the slow speed, the dark, emaciated body flying through the air like an enormous dart, piercing the glass. For about ten seconds Sam Watson’s legs stuck straight up in the air, then slowly fell to the top of the Buick’s trunk. The blood, dark in the shadows, covered the inside of the windows. In his dreams it drenched the two kids and the old woman.
“What am I gonna do about this car?” the old woman asked him as he took down her name for the report. “You don’t suppose Mr. Trash over there is gonna clean up his mess?”
Tilley was on the job three months when Sam Watson bought it and for the first couple of days he couldn’t sleep at all. It was like someone had painted the scene on the back of his eyelids so that whenever he tried to close them, the bus started moving all over again. Then it got better. By the third night he was so exhausted he went out the minute he hit the pillow and didn’t dream until nearly daybreak. By the seventh day it was only an occasional flash and now, finally, an instant of panic when he saw a pedestrian walk too close to a moving bus.
Louise Greenwood and Marlee came home with Jim Tilley just as Sam Watson had done, along with Rose Carillo and her two children. The only difference was that now he recognized the scenario and he knew it’d work itself out if he gave it enough time. That’s why, at 5 AM on Saturday morning, he’d abandoned any hope of a night’s sleep. He jumped into his shorts and a PAL t-shirt, laced up well-worn Nikes and trotted to the walkway over the East River Drive. A series of thunderstorms had passed through the city around 2 AM, flashing enough thunder and lightning to jolt him out of the trance he’d been substituting for sleep. A Canadian front trailed behind the storms and by the time he reached Carl Schurz Park, the temperature was twenty-five degrees cooler than it had been when he’d gone to sleep and a fresh breeze was blowing down the East River. He hit the bricks eagerly. There are aches and pains, Tilley was convinced, for which running was the only cure.
He knew it wasn’t any one thing bothering him here. True, it was the first time he had worked into the interior of a crime, into the bowels. He had known criminal and victim, quick arrests and questioning detectives, but hadn’t understood that violent crime never occurs in a vacuum, that it spreads back through families, back through communities. Beyond that, Moodrow had him thoroughly frightened. There was no way to know what he would do next. Prime example: Did the scene at Katjcic’s come about as a result of Rose Carillo’s sob story? Or was Moodrow pissed off because his snitch had cheated on him? Moodrow told his partner (he laughed while he did) that he had no intention of keeping his promise to Rose Carillo and Tilley found himself believing that no cop would be so suicidal as to agree to commit murder in front of a witness, partner or not. Yet, as Moodrow made the explanation, his eyes were as blank and unyielding as the eyes of a dead fish in a storefront window.
And suppose Moodrow did kill Greenwood? Where would Tilley be if he failed to report Moodrow’s promise to, for instance, Captain Epstein? What if, in going back over Moodrow’s record, the headhunters got wise to their game of Kill the Motorcycle? It was one thing for the Captain to sic Moodrow on the underbelly of the Lower East Side when the only career to be destroyed was Moodrow’s. Now there was Tilley’s career as well. The name of the game in the NYPD, a game shared by all civil servants, is “Cover Your Ass.”
In between his considerations of Stanley Moodrow and his potential for career-threatening behavior, Rose Carillo’s features floated like a ghost in a cheap black-and-white movie. And not the helpless woman who described Greenwood’s brutal attacks, but the laughing girl who’d teased Moodrow about his drink. Tilley couldn’t believe she didn’t know how beautiful she was. All women know the value of that commodity, know how to package and sell it. Or so he assumed.
One thing was certain. The fifteen-year-old girl who’d walked through the Port Authority bus terminal was not the Rose Carillo who’d calmly told of her struggle to be rid of Levander Greenwood. She’d said it was the birth of her son that gave her the strength to fight. Imagine the irony, then, of that fight leading directly to the abuse of the children she wanted to protect.
The sun rose on Tilley’s left, turning the sky over the houses on Roosevelt Island a flaming orange. It burned, a soft, luminous copper, in ten million panes of midtown skyline. The sky in the west, behind the buildings, was still dark and the air, cleaned by the rain, was so clear the massive towers stood out like volcanoes in some piece of Spielberg movie trickery. Tilley recalled taking a cousin out to Boulevard East in Weehawken, to the spot where Aaron Burr had killed Alexander Hamilton, and looking east over the Hudson River to where the aircraft carrier Intrepid was berthed. He remarked that the Intrepid looked like a rowboat. Less than that, a gray dot against the massive skyline of Manhattan.
There are times when the city simply shrinks you down to size. When somehow you can step outside it long enough to feel its power. The sunrise burning in the windows slowed the runners, though they didn’t speak to each other. Anyone who runs the Drive sees this sight sooner or later and almost everyone slows down long enough to acknowledge it. In the shadow of Roosevelt Island, the East River reflected an ice-blue sky and looked clean enough to drink. The tide in New York Harbor was pulling rapidly south across the face of Queens and Brooklyn and an oil barge, headed north for depots in the Bronx, was having trouble making headway.
Tilley started running again, more slowly this time. Louise Greenwood’s image floated up, pleading with the school principal. Psychology had been his first major at Fordham. After a few courses, he’d switched to Political Science, but he’d learned enough to believe there was no hope for the Levander Greenwoods of this world. The criminal psychopath is beyond the reach of modern medicine and responds only to drug therapy, which, as Marlee remembered, renders the person dead-in-life, as if the government had decided to take a mental life because it didn’t have the guts to take a physical life.
Now Louise Greenwood clung to the idea of Jesus reaching out a hand to ‘save’ her child. If only Moodrow would spare Levander Greenwood’s physical body, the Lord would spare his soul. Still, her assumption (that the police were prepared to kill her son on sight) was outdated. In the 50s, before Escobar and Miranda, when the police were immune to any punishment but that of the department, cop killers were never brought in. Tilley had this scoop from his ex-cop uncles, now retired to beer and the barroom. They delivered the information at every family gathering along with their estimates of how far the department (and the city and America) had fallen from the pinnacle of its majesty. A pinnacle reached, not incidentally, during their tenure and which they referred to as B.M.: Before Miranda.
Tilley suspected that Moodrow knew this when he made his promise to Mrs. Greenwood. As he’d predicted, there would probably be a hundred cops present when Greenwood was taken, not to mention photographers, journalists and the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s one thing to take out an anonymous perp in a burnt-out tenement in Brooklyn, quite another to publicly execute Levander Greenwood.
Which meant, Tilley hoped, that unless Greenwood decided to fight it out, Rose Carillo would probably not get her wish. Nonetheless, the murder of a policeman (first-degree murder) is a special crime in New York State and carries with it a mandatory life sentence. Realistically speaking, “life” means something less than an actual lifetime, but cop killers in New York cannot expect to spend less than thirty years in prison. Add to this Greenwood’s half-dozen other murders and he would undoubtedly receive one of those unimaginable three-hundred-year sentences given out by New York judges in cases where reporters outnumber spectators.
Her fear that Levander would escape was even less realistic. Not that it wasn’t possible, but the chance of being killed in traffic does not keep one out of automobiles. Perhaps, though, the mouse walking by the caged cat still trembles with terror. Maybe certain fears cannot be erased. Seeing her once again, her eyes fixed on Moodrow’s, Tilley realized that Levander’s life, even in prison, was the last remaining bar on her own cage. That without him, she would be free. Then he remembered the children.
All the while he continued to run effortlessly, as if he could dissipate the agitation in his mind through the automatic rhythms of running. Instead of coming back up the drive, he crossed over the traffic onto 64th Street and ran west toward Central Park before heading back uptown. He had the women tucked into safe places, having worked through to the resolution of the Greenwood case. Moodrow, on the other hand, continued to trouble him. Not that the resolution of his conflict with the big cop wasn’t equally simple. Tilley knew he couldn’t hope to control Moodrow, but he could report him. Or request a new partner without specifying a reason.
Fifth Avenue, across from the Park, was still in shadow as he made his way past 79th Street. In spite of the early hour and the weekend, the limos and radio cars were lined up in front of the canopies, ready to transport high-power executives to their offices. A lone cop, a uniform driving a motor scooter, was standing alongside a double-parked Lincoln with a DIAL 4311 sign in the front window. The driver, a turbaned Sikh with a jet black beard, was complaining loudly. “Why you do this to me? This is Saturday and whole city is quiet? Why are you writing me this ticket? Forty dollars. You hear this? I work whole day I only make forty dollars.”
The cop went about his business as if he was writing up an empty vehicle. Tilley, approaching and curious, slowed down enough to attract the cop’s attention, and the uniform threw him a challenging look.
“Detective Tilley,” Tilley said confidently. “Everything under control?”
“Yeah. Sure. Fuckin’ scumbags think they can park wherever they want.”
Tilley shrugged and picked up the pace. There were detectives, he knew, who approached their jobs the way that cop wrote tickets on a Saturday morning. Make the quota, then go home. It’s all time-in on the pension. That magical, twenty year, half-pay, yellow brick road that keeps cops in line.
Is that what he wanted? When Moodrow and he were alone in the backyard with the biker motorcycles, they were completely in sync. Again, with Peter Katjcic lying in that filthy bed, he had no doubts at all. Only later, when he made that lame explanation of his promise to Rose Carillo, did Moodrow start to scare him again.
Tilley slowed down at Park and 85th. Like all serious runners, he walked the last few blocks to give his legs a chance to cool down. One thing seemed certain, his partnership with Stanley Moodrow was leapfrogging him over the mediocrity in the job. Big cases win the attention of the administrators at One Police Plaza as well as the eyes of the media. And Levander Greenwood was as big as they got, a genuine maniac busily engaged in the eradication of his fellow citizens. His face was on page four of the Daily News every day.
Most rookie detectives fortunate enough to be assigned to such a case would sit at the bottom of a task force, maybe answering the hot line published in the papers. Moodrow and Tilley were like parasites on Levander Greenwood’s underbelly, chewing their way inside. Suddenly he found himself imagining the final scene: Greenwood trapped in a room, the reporters asking questions, the cameras turning. Was he so frightened of Moodrow that he wanted to play the rookie detective to some asshole from Levittown?
He was hooked. And it only took six miles to realize it. Six miles to run out the emotional kinks of the last twenty-four hours. Still, he felt much better. He was satisfied with a resolution to protect himself even as he slid deeper into the muck, and he wasn’t at all surprised to find Moodrow waiting for him when he got home.