Wednesday, August 22
1445 hours
The South Bronx
Of all the things a detective hates in the world, and he hates a lot of things, there isn’t anything he hates more than having to ride in the back seat of an unmarked Plymouth four-door with those little moon-shaped hubcaps. But it was Zeke’s car and Butch wasn’t going to give up the shotgun seat, so Butler and Keogh got into the back and they pulled out of the lockyard at the 46th in front of all the uniform guys getting ready for the second platoon.
“Thanks, Zeke. The whole precinct thinks I’ve been busted for killing a cop.”
Butch Johnson turned around to stare at Frank in the back seat as if Frank were something that came shrink-wrapped air mail from Sweden. Butler kicked the seat-back.
“All right, you dickweeds, we gotta talk.”
Keogh sent a look to Butler that could have taken a year off his life if Butler had noticed it.
Zeke didn’t turn around. He just grunted and kept driving. They were on a rising crest of hill that gave them a view across the Harlem River to the massed projects and threadbare parks of northern Manhattan. Keogh stared out through the side window at the scene and thought about the last conversation he’d had with Art Pike.
There was a crowd around: harness cops who were there on other business, a couple of nurses, and an intern from Korea named Wong who looked to be about eleven years old. Pike was already in one of those no-back hospital gowns they use to keep you humble while they box and file you somewhere in the attic. Pike’s teeth were out and his cheeks were hollow and gray. But he was smiling up at Frank Keogh as if his troubles were over. Maybe they were. They tried to wheel him away through the swing doors but he caught Keogh’s hand.
“I see you looking at me. I can tell what you’re thinking. But you have no right, Frank. You don’t know what it is to be old. You think it’s just a matter of carrying the weight. But it’s not like that. It’s like after twenty years, the weight doesn’t weigh anything, like what was holding you down when you were a kid, you took it seriously. But when you get older you see it ain’t shit. You see they’re all just as bad as everybody else. Cops, the assholes. What are you gonna do about that, Frank? None of it means a thing, kid.”
Did Pike still think that, when whoever killed him came into the room in the middle of the night? Did he hear the footsteps in the hall? Was he awake and thinking about it when it happened?
“Frank, are you gonna tell these mopes, or am I?”
“Shut up, Pat.”
“Shut up Frank, you are such an asshole. Zeke, have you talked to Myra Kholer yet?”
“Who the fuck is Myra Kholer?”
Butler looked across at Keogh and raised his eyebrows in a question. “Keogh? Frank? Come on!”
Butch Johnson fumbled through his memo book. “Yeah, I got a Myron Kholer, was the cop who drove Keogh home. Took an RMP from the Four-Oh off the computer at Lincoln. Weisberg says this Kholer dropped Keogh off in Yonkers and went back to check in the RMP. RMP is down as back in the yard by oh-three-hundred hours.”
“That’s Myra, Butch! Frank, Zeke here isn’t gonna bust some PW for using a Department vehicle for personal use. All Zeke wants to do is clear the case—right, Zeke?”
Zeke turned around to stare at Butler.
“This Kholer guy’s a broad? A cute broad?”
“Does Miss Piggy have a hand up her skirt?”
Zeke and Butch looked at each other.
“Ahh, shit. Let’s go get something to eat.”
The B and V Steakhouse used to be one of John Keogh’s favorite places in the Bronx, back in the days when the Hunts Point section wasn’t a reasonable facsimile of Beirut or Mexico City.
Back then it had been a pretty nice part of town, a slope of residential apartments with some trees and some parks and kids playing football in the alleys. It had gone through some changes now, and the B and V was a last outpost of civilization in a brutal landscape of ruined buildings, barred-up and caved-in shops, rusted car hulks decaying into the gutters, wolf-eyed men and boys carrying on business out of vans and in the reeking basements of fading projects. At night the lights were dim and yellow and the sound of sirens was as steady as smoke from a stack.
The woman who ran the B and V was Argentinian. She and her husband had been serving up tapas and chilies rellenos and back ribs in napalm sauce to a couple of generations of NYPD detectives assigned to the mid-Bronx sectors. Frank remembered sitting around in the dark red-and-black interior with his father many years ago, watching his father talk to his buddies, listening to the stories, seeing his father as an elemental force, trying to stand in his presence with some shred of dignity, seeing the cop world as a dark terrain lit by unexpected eruptions of passion and violence, seductive and repellent.
Now, in the ruins of the neighborhood, Keogh and the others came back to the B and V partly out of loyalty to the woman who had run it as a police club for so many years. They knew that if the neighborhood realized the cops had gone elsewhere, the little family business would go down in days.
Zeke Parrot sat on his haunches like a tired bull in a corner of the back booth and stared hard at Keogh as Keogh tried to tell his story without making himself look like too much of a complete bastard. By the time they got through a bottle of Glenmorangie, Butch was relaxing a little and Butler was getting a laugh out of both of them ending up with policewomen on the same night.
Butch said that as a family man he thought Frank was dicking around with some very dangerous stuff and it was too damn easy to fuck up a marriage. Zeke Parrot looked like he was prepared to believe that Keogh had spent the whole night with Myra, but Keogh knew that as soon as he got the chance, he’d be off to call Myra and find out just when it was they’d finished up with the flesh trading, and whether that left Keogh enough time to do whatever it was that Keogh had done. Finally, Zeke pushed himself up and out of the booth. When he came back about ten minutes later, he was a different man, relaxed, wry, just a little embarrassed.
Zeke didn’t really give much of a damn what other men did with their body parts, as long as it didn’t include killing people they didn’t have permission to kill. He and Butch had spent most of the morning watching Peter Zouros—they all called him Zero—take Art Pike apart down at the Medical Examiner’s offices.
Butler came out with it finally, asking for details. It wasn’t really any business of his, but in the way of cops, Zeke and Butch were prepared to talk about the thing in general terms.
Butch, who was something of an autopsy fan, told them about it with his mouth stuffed full of chili, his unshaven pink cheek stretched out like a spinnaker.
“Man, you don’t know how old a guy is until you seen him on the table, you know? Last time I saw Art was in the elevator at Thirty Rock. He looked good. Nice suit. Pink.”
Zeke shook his head. “What? The suit?”
Butch gave his partner a look full of Christian forgiveness.
“Nah! His skin. His skin was pink. ‘Course, then he was full of blood, right. It’s your blood that gives you your pink color, y’know?”
Butler looked at Zeke. “What about Zeke here?”
That stopped Butch for a second.
“Well … underneath.”
“Underneath what?” asked Butler, apparently puzzled.
“Zeke’s pink … underneath.”
Zeke looked away, sighing. Butch pulled his brows down to make the point. He didn’t want to come right out and say anything about Zeke’s color.
Butler leaned forward and asked with intense seriousness, “You did that?”
“Did what?” said Butch.
“You checked underneath Zeke to see if he’s pink?”
This stopped Butch.
“Underneath Zeke’s what?”
Zeke let out a long slow sigh.
“Jesus,” said Butler, “how would I know? You’re his partner.”
Keogh was suddenly tired. This was the way cops usually handled death, any death that was close. But he needed to know what the Homicide guys knew, if anything.
“Look, Butch … how did it … how did Pike get it?”
Butch raised his massive shoulders in a shrug, lifting his hands up in front of him in a classic Zeke Parrot gesture. They’ve been together a long time, thought Keogh.
“Ugly, Frank. Pike died ugly. Man, we seen some shit, you know. Zeke, you remember that bathtub thing, guy was tortured by some kids, they sprayed paint up his nose, cut him up? Finally drowned him face-down in a tub? Most killings, it’s like a reflex thing, unless it’s a gay killing, which are pretty bizarre. This one, well, I can tell you the guy was in no hurry. Also, he knew something about anatomy. Also, a joker.”
Zeke answered that. “The nurse, the night nurse who got it. Sharon Zeigler? Whoever did this, he did a number on her was exactly, I’m saying exactly, like the stuff Jack the Ripper did in England. Opened her up like a can of sardines and flipped her out all over the bed. Right down to the position of the legs.”
“Exactly?” said Keogh. “How do you know?”
Zeke nodded to Butch. Butch said, “Frank, I got a book tells you all about that thing. Shows drawings. Gets into all the short strokes.”
“Why the fuck would a man do something like that? You gonna go to Quantico on this? See if anybody at the BSU has caught a guy mimicking old killings?”
The FBI maintained a special research and stats-analysis unit at its training academy down in Quantico, Virginia. It was called the Behavioral Science Unit. The specialty was serial killing. The psychologists and detectives assigned to it had worked on most of the major homicide cases in the United States and Canada. They collected data from every law enforcement agency. If killings similar to this had taken place anywhere in the world, they’d have the cross-index on it.
“Damn right,” said Zeke. “Going out today.”
“What about Pike? He … get some knife work too?”
Zeke didn’t answer Keogh’s question. He seemed to be thinking it over. Butch waited a bit and then said, “Well, Frank, he got some. But we can’t really get into the details. I mean, we trust you guys, but we got this thing sealed up. We can’t have some asshole coming in and confessing and giving us scene-of-crime details, and then later his lawyer asks us who did we tell, and boom goes the confession. We had cases killed that way.”
Keogh knew they were right. Intimate knowledge of the homicide details was a critical means of testing a confession. And it had happened that killers who had later regretted their admissions had found lawyers who could get the confession squashed in court by showing that some of the details had been discussed with other cops.
Keogh had a brief stroboscopic image of a glittering blade in a path of blue-green light, and Art Pike’s face surfacing into the light like a gaffed fish. He tried to shake it out of his head. Zeke caught the gesture.
“You okay, Frank?”
“Yeah. Anything we can do?”
The two Homicide cops looked at each other. There seemed to be a flicker of tension. Something was decided in a set of the brows and a twist of the mouth. Finally, Zeke looked at Keogh.
“There is something we could ask you guys. You ever catch any ligature cases when you were working the task force?”
“Some,” said Butler. “Nothing special. Frank?”
“Yeah. Clotheslines. Panty hose. Once a tie some guy got for Christmas, he used it to strangle his wife next day. Fishing lines. A coat hanger. Can’t remember anything else. Why?”
Butch answered that. Keogh had the impression this was a routine, something they had thought about and were now running out in front of Keogh and Butler. Why they would be doing this, now that Keogh’s alibi had been pretty well established—that was something else.
“Weirdest thing I ever seen, Frank. Some kinda thin cord, like silk or something. Only it’s not. Had a knot in the middle, a weird kind of braided thing. Like chink pigtails. Only more complicated. The knot was right in the center of Pike’s Adam’s apple. Like it was there to crush it? Pulled from behind and knotted in the back. Tied together. Pulled in hard.”
“Lot of muscle in the pull,” said Zeke.
“Yeah,” said Butch, glancing at his partner as if looking for some sign. “Damn near took his head right off. Cord was out of sight in his throat, and there was a lot of swelling around it. You got the idea the thing was done … slow, if you get what I’m saying. The guy … you get the idea he enjoyed what he was doing.”
Butler was thinking about it. “What do you mean, like a ritual or something? Satanists?”
Zeke cut in. “We can’t get into all of this, Pat. You know that. We’re doing the usual shit: medical records, personnel files, got the parking attendant to go over all the tickets, get the license number of every car in the hospital lots, public and staff cars. We’re running all of them through CATCH and FINEST—for once the Feds are helping, looking for perps and skells. We dusted the room, and the CSU guys tried for latent prints on Pike.”
“Get any?”
Zeke looked cagey. “Some. They fumed him, the iodine gun? He’d been undressed by the nurses, so there were latents on his upper arms and his ankles. On his back. We got prints of everybody who got near him, everybody on the staff. They all had a good reason for putting their hands on him, and they all came up with pretty good corroboration about where they were. So far, we got dick.”
Keogh was trying to keep the picture of Art Pike’s naked body on the table out of his mind, Pike’s body cracked open like a lobster, shiny slick shapes in a blue light from a lamp, and Pike’s face staring up, black and surprised.
“So the cord, the rope, whatever? It was still on him? You get anything off that?”
Butch looked at Zeke before answering Keogh.
“It’s called a ligature. Yeah. Weird, right? Zero had to dig around a little for it, because we wanted it off in a piece. You can’t untie something like that, because the ligature, the way the knot is tied—everybody does it different. Everybody has his own way of tying the knots. You know, you learn it in boot or scouts and for the rest of your life you’re tying your shoes or the roof-rack on with the same knot. So the lab has it for fibers and shit, and we got a couple of strange prints off Pike’s forehead. So it all comes down to who would want to ace Pike. Sorry about thinking it was you, Frank.”
Zeke looked at him. “The Feds get this. They file the prints until we can give them some better information. But I’m asking them to go through the computer to see has anybody else used this modus operandi, right? They got a record there of all homicides nationwide. The VICAP system? If anybody else has used this kind of knot, used a cord like this, then it’ll kick out a buncha names.”
“You think it’s some psycho from out of state?”
Zeke’s mouth was full. Butch answered for him.
“Nah. We just do that shit to cover it off for the boss. He’ll ask us for sure. You wanna know what we think, you keep it to yourself, guys? Okay? We’re looking at the family of those kids you and Pat took out last week.”
Butler and Keogh had already thought of that, but they kept quiet. It was rare enough for Homicide cops to be this open about a case without trying to stunt-fly around them. Butler ordered another bottle.
“The Rodrigues kid has an older brother in the Ching-a-Lings, and the Goncalves kid has cousins. We were looking at the news videos of that thing. By the way, Frank, that was a nice piece of work. You, too, Pat. Anyway, that Lewis guy from the Eyewitness station did a long thing about the hostage negotiator and they even had a picture of Pike on the news. Ran it twice.”
“Shit. How’d they get that?”
“You’d never believe it, Frank. They used a telly lens to get a shot of Art in the truck. Some dildo left the doors open. They had a good shot of Art talking on the phone.”
Zeke wiped his face with a big cloth napkin. “Yeah, and a good one of you, too, Frank.”
That shook him. He hadn’t seen the news videos. And Tricia hadn’t said anything. “What shot? Where?”
“You was coming down a stairway. How come you wear that blue suit anyway? I thought all you ESU guys had to wear those flak jackets and the Buck Rogers suits with your ball caps on backwards. Anyway, it was you. Showed you clear as a mug shot, and the Remington and everything.”
“They name me?” This was not good news.
“Damn right they did, the cocksuckers. Right out loud too. Man, those news guys are real dickheads. Voice-over said Detective Frank Keogh of the Emergency Services Unit. And there you was with the rifle and everything. I thought you knew.”
Butler’s face looked a little pale as well.
“Me too? Was I on camera?”
“Just the back of your head. You don’t dress as nice as Frank here. You was wearing those cowboy boots, the blue ones. Man, you looked like a drug dealer or something.”
Butler and Keogh thought that over while Zeke and Butch argued about dessert like a married couple.
If the person-or-persons-unknown who had killed Art Pike were doing it for some Latin vendetta, and they knew who the sniper was, then Keogh was in danger and so was his family. Butler and Keogh could get some police protection for their families, a regular squad car past the front doors or even an officer staying with them in their houses, but in the long run there was only one reliable way to deal with the problem. Zeke and Butch could see the idea taking shape in their faces. Zeke Parrot held up a huge black hand the size of a pot roast and looked very sternly over it at them.
“Now wait just a fucking minute, you guys. You go messing around in this investigation, we’re gonna nail your nuts to a stool, the both of you. This is a homicide investigation, not one of your cowboy stunts. All we need is for the D.A. to hear you been whacking around our chief suspects and we’ll have the ACLU and all those maggots on us like shit on a hamster! Butler, I know you. You half-killed that Armenian guy last year and all he did was phone you at home.”
“You tell Pulaski about this?”
“The boss did. Pulaski’s already got the C.O. at the Four-Five running extra patrols by your place on City Island. And, Butler, the Yonkers cops are sitting on Junie, so just relax, will ya? We’re just trying to warn you—watch your asses. But none of that Tombstone Cops shit you guys are famous for, huh? This isn’t Bronx Vice, you know.”
Whatever Keogh and Butler planned to do about the Ching-a-Lings, the idea was not to have to go to war with Zeke Parrot and Butch Johnson over it. Keogh and Butler had been together long enough to know what the other man was thinking, and they’d been cops long enough to know how to fake absolute sincerity.
Keogh’s eyes were wide and innocent.
“So you’re saying the Yonkers cops are sitting on Pat’s wife?”
“Yeah. All day.”
Butler smiled at Keogh.
“Well, Junie’ll like that.”
There’s a school of philosophical thought that holds the view that God is a kind of cosmic adolescent who got the keys to the universe while his parents were out having dinner at the in-laws’ and that the last sixty quintillion years of the space-time continuum has been run by God in roughly the same way a brainless teenaged boy would handle a turn at the wheel of his father’s Testarossa.
Another school maintains that the devil is only God when he’s drunk.
Keogh was a lapsed Catholic—most Catholics are lapsed Catholics—who was usually of the opinion that God was paying no more attention to the universe than his son Robbie paid to the ant farm he had stoutly maintained he would love and cherish for eternity only a year ago, and which was now running energetically into chaos at the south end of the family lawn up in City Island, half in and half out of the very pricey aquarium that Tricia had brought home one day from the pet store.
This view of celestial malfeasance was about to be irrefutably confirmed. Tricia had noticed that the RMPs from the 45th were going past their bungalow on Schofield Street about three times as often as normal. She also noticed—as she sat in the sunny front room of the tiny red-brick house with the long rolling front lawn that led down to the clean white curb—that the cops in the cruisers were paying more than the usual perfunctory attention to passers-by on the sidewalk and that they were staring a lot at the driveway and the shrubs around the house.
So Tricia, who was a cop’s wife and who knew a lot of other cops’ wives, decided to find out from one of them why it was that the Commanding Officer of the Four-Five had given orders to his patrol cars to keep a close watch on Frank Keogh’s house.
She had about a half hour before she had to report for O.R. duty at the cardiac unit at Bellevue, in midtown Manhattan, so while she dialed and talked, she kept an eye out for Custer, who was still missing. There was a picture of Custer up on the wooden mantel over the living-room fireplace, side by side with pictures of Keogh in various styles of uniform, Tricia in her nursing school graduation gown, Robbie as a kid, sitting rather unsteadily in front of a cloudy backdrop in his first long pants, an idiot grin on his chubby face. It was this chubby face and the idiot grin that Tricia still saw whenever she looked at Robbie now, and it was that gift which allowed her to ride out her son’s current incarnation as Teenager From Hell. There were pictures of John Keogh, Frank’s bulldog father, in his dress blues a year before his wife’s death. Another shot of him in plainclothes being honored by the city at a Mayor’s dinner, John’s crew-cut hair bristling with his pride, and his immobile cop’s face twisted into a parody of gratitude.
There were black-and-white photos of John’s wife—Frank’s mother, Madelaine—a forties-style black-and-white of her leaning on her forearm, her lips full and pouty, her heavy black hair shining, a softness in her eyes that suggested she was looking at or thinking about someone she was very much in love with. Tricia liked the shot of Frank’s mother, and felt that Madelaine was someone who would have understood what it was like to be married to a Keogh and the NYPD. But she had never known the woman.
Frank sometimes tried to get Tricia to take the pictures of his father down, but she always refused, as gently as she could. Frank wouldn’t talk much about his father, so the pictures stayed there as Tricia’s way of keeping the memory in the air. She felt that it was unnatural for a father and a son to have such animosity between them after all these years, after all the brimstone of adolescence had cooled and their lives had solidified into definable shapes and patterns.
The room itself was all Tricia, done in deep greens and the cherry-red of mahogany panels, here and there a vase of silk flowers she had arranged herself. It was a very English room, down to the patterned Persian rug and the bow window and the huge flowered sofa and the brass screen in front of the fireplace. She had worked very hard to make it a sanctuary for them, away from the brutality and the ugliness of Frank’s job.
That was why Tricia was in a way offended and angry when she noticed the unusual attention from the local precinct cars. Maybe there was a good reason for the protection, or maybe it was just officiousness and drama. But whatever it was, the sight of those blue-and-whites rolling slowly up and down in front of her house bothered her the way weeds in her carefully tended rock garden offended her, as crude eruptions of the subterranean in the quiet green glade of this house and her life.
She called Bert Pulaski’s wife, who was sweet to talk to in the way of sheltered cop-wives but who knew little of her husband’s work, and no, Bert had not said anything to her about cars for Keogh’s house in City Island.
Tricia tried to reach Pat Butler’s wife in their house up in Yonkers, but Junie had the answering machine on, one of her cute little tapes with a Barry Manilow song in the background, Junie sounding like a cross between Garbo and a cabbie, saying she wanted to be alone today. Junie Butler was Tricia’s closest friend in the incestuous substructure of the NYPD, but Junie’s relationship with Pat was on rough ground. Frank never said anything, but Tricia suspected that Butler was sleeping around a little. Tricia’s job down at Bellevue put her in contact with a lot of young healthy males. She had been attracted to a couple of them, and had even gotten into some steamy fondling at a staff party last year, but she believed that infidelity would crack an already strained marriage. And, when she looked at it head-on, she was in love with Frank, even if he was a clone of his hard-nosed father.
Well, so far no results. She decided to dig a little deeper into it for another ten minutes, then give it up and go to work. Frank would tell her when he got home. Maybe.
Butler and Keogh had both worked Vice in the Bronx area a couple of years back, so they had a pretty good idea of where to start looking for Flavio Rodrigues’s older brother Fausto. Fausto was a middle-level consignment crack and coke dealer whose franchise territory covered the area around the El Niño Bar and the Concourse to Third, and from 160th down to 149th Street, an area of the South Bronx known as Melrose to the city planners and as Little Lebanon to the NYPD cops assigned to keep the lid on it.
This part of the South Bronx mainly consisted of ragged red-brick buildings jutting up out of vast expanses of rubble-covered vacant lots surrounded by chicken wire and the rusted remains of stolen cars, patches of scrub grass, and mud. Even the dirt here was dangerous; hard clay shot through with shattered glass and broken bottlenecks, tin-can blades, old needles, the occasional bullet case.
Back in the days when Frank and Pat had gone hell-for-leather over this territory, hard on the heels of some fleet little gentleman of the street, Frank or Pat would sometimes look down at what they were scampering across and think, Jesus, what are the archaeologists going to think of us when they dig through this stuff in a thousand years. The earth of the South Bronx was packed with the throwaway dreams of America: bottle caps and switchblades, condoms and blood, Coke bottles full of piss, cans of Bud Lite and Coors, slabs of concrete and jutting spars of girders, slat fences, stands of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace and ragweed, a wheel rim, a cat with its legs cut off and a trail of its own blood fifty yards long, black birds dead in the storm drains. Kids like coyotes set fires in the basements; crack dealers and cops flew across the face of this landscape like wild dogs in God’s Own Junkyard. Vice had been sweet that way—“intense” was how Butler described it in those days, after they’d just gone boot-first into a room fall of cranked-up Puerto Ricans or brought down some kid with a flying tackle, and Butler would pick himself up or check Frank for bullet wounds and they’d look at each other with the dust coming down and say, well, that was intense, huh, Frank? Yeah, they’d say it like a koan or a prayer, putting the seal on it, adding it to the list. That was intense.
They were rolling down Third in Butler’s grass-green Riviera, listening to the radio talk and playing Tom Waits tapes. Butler thought that if there was anybody could write the theme song for Little Lebanon, it would be Tom Waits, and he had practically every tape the man had ever done. They were listening to him do “Blind Love” and going down Third at around 150th, looking out for Fausto Rodrigues.
Butler was pretty convinced that Pike had been killed by a Ching-a-Ling, maybe a hired hitter doing it for his pachuco compadre Fausto. You could never tell about the Ching-a-Lings. They were a very bad crowd. A Ching-a-Ling had gotten into a small argument at a candy store over in the 46th Precinct area a year back. The owner of the store had told the biker to get out and backed up the threat with a tire iron he kept under the counter. The guy was a family man, one of the last surviving Italians from the old days, and he was sick of taking attitude from some Mohawk-headed biker who couldn’t speak English, let alone Italian.
The Ching-a-Ling went out to his bike and tugged a Mac-10 out of his saddlebag. He stood on the steps of the little candy store and emptied a fall magazine into the owner. When the guy’s kid came running around from the back to see what was happening, the biker shot him twice in the head.
Another Ching-a-Ling was suspected of the execution of a detective who was giving them a hard time. The cop had been sitting in a tavern near Fordham when a couple of bikers walked in and lit up the place with machine-gun fire. It wasn’t out of the ballpark for a Ching-a-Ling to decide that Pike and the others involved in the Bolsa Chica shooting ought to pay for it. It would be a good PR move for the gang, show the street that not even the lajaras could fuck with them. That was why Keogh and Butler were about to fuck with them in a very memorable way.
Butler had pulled a CATCH shot of Fausto Rodrigues from the computer room at the 46th. CATCH was an acronym for Computer Assisted Terminal Criminal Hunt. You asked the operator to find the NYSIIS or Criminal Ident number of the guy, and then the machine would refer you to a microfiche file of possibles. Then you got a blowup of the microfiche and went looking for him.
Keogh had a good idea of what they were going to do to this Fausto character. He was a little worried about the paper trail.
Butler waved it away, singing “Walkin’ Spanish” to himself. “No problem, as Alf says, buddy. I know the operator. She’ll dump the request. Anyway, all we’re gonna do is talk to the guy, explain how we would appreciate it if he and his buddies would assist us in our inquiries.”
“Assist us, huh?”
Keogh picked up the file on Fausto. The boy was beautiful, fine-boned and black-eyed, with expensive white teeth, a certain style about him, as though at some point in his line there had been some quality. But he was strictly middle-management for the Ching-a-Lings.
He had a credit line of five grand a week on coke or crack, whatever was selling. He’d pick it up on Sunday from another level of supply. They’d front him against his credit line. The supply would put a “5” down beside Fausto’s name in his debt book. Fausto would take the drugs to one of his storefronts, a transient hotel, a room in a tenement, a basement somewhere. There’d be a slot in the door and the door would be reinforced with steel or wooden beams.
Fausto would leave the drugs in the care of one of his girlfriends. Up until last week, his younger brother Flavio would help out in that area.
Then Fausto would put on some nice threads and go cruise his franchise, looking for people who were looking for him, keeping an eye out for competition, for people trying to sell in his protected franchise. Cops he could give a shit about, because Fausto never carried any dope and if you wanted to buy from him, it would go something like this.
Fausto would be hanging out in El Niño or Franz Sigel Park, he’d be working on his chill and staring slitty-eyed at the girls going by, and you’d come up and say, Hey Fausto, how’s it goin?
If Fausto knew you, he’d look away around the park to see who’s watching. Then he’d say, Hey, pachuco, que tal?
You’d say, Well, you know I doin’ this and that.
Yeah? Un poco poquito, hey?
The talk would go ’round.
So … Fausto. You know anybody holding?
He’d say, Hey, man, I don’ know personally. Not into that no more, you know?
Yeah, well, I am, man. You think of anybody?
Fausto would look pained, staring into the sun.
Hey, man, I don’ know. I hear maybe you could get some hielo, some ice.
Hielo? Hielo would be good.
Well, you know, man, you ain’t heard it from me, but you could go over to Los Lobos, you know?
Sure, man. On One Fifty-fourth? The place with the roses on it, in the yard?
I heard some guy say maybe you could get something.
So you go over to Los Lobos and line up with the rest of the guys in the hall. When you get to the door you say what you want and you hand the cash through the slot.
Somebody in there will drop something into your hand and you don’t stand around testing it or asking about the Knicks, and if you take it home and red-flag the works into your arm and it kills you, well then, you just found out the cost of a ticket to heaven.
At the end of the week Fausto will go back to his supply with $5,000 in cash. Whatever Fausto has been able to get over and above that amount is his to keep. A good week will see him make $3,000. Sometimes as much as $5,000. Everybody is happy. Unless Fausto were to get busted and then tell Vice about his supply.
But that wasn’t likely either. Even if Fausto were to get popped in a SNAP program, Fausto’s supply is protected by the Ching-a-Lings, the same people who guarantee his franchise area in Melrose. If Fausto tried to burn a Ching-a-Ling supplier in return for some plea-bargain leverage, it would be a very bad trade.
Drug gangs in the South Bronx punish informers by cutting their throats and letting them bleed to death while a couple of the boys sodomize them. Then they leave the bodies propped up on their knees, naked. Then the guys at the 48th Precinct, maybe Zeke Parrot and Butch Johnson, get a call from an RMP and they have another name for their Green Book. Most of the names in a Homicide cop’s case file get there because of a drug dispute.
It was the Ching-a-Ling connection, and the way Pike died, that had brought Keogh and Butler out looking for Fausto Rodrigues. The idea of a Ching-a-Ling vendetta against a couple of SWAT cops and a precinct negotiator was business as usual. But wives and children called for some direct action. It called for something massive.
“Lincoln Hospital.”
“Hello, is Marjorie Reyjak there?”
“She’s in E.R. Who’s calling?”
“It’s Tricia Keogh. Can you call her?”
Bored sigh. “Yeah, just a minute.”
Tricia listened to phone Muzak for three minutes, looking around her room, wondering why she was being this persistent. Sometimes she didn’t know the contents of her own soul, let alone her husband’s. But there was something.
“E.R. Hello?”
“Marjorie, this is Tricia.”
“Well, hello. How are you?”
“Oh, good, good. How’s Mirko?”
“Rotten. He hates Albany. How’s Frank doing?”
“Well, he’s okay.”
“Not when I saw him last. They were pulling little metal balls out of his ankles last night.”
“Yeah. Well, he’s okay. Marjorie, did something happen last night? Anything you know?”
A pause. “Cops are such pricks.”
“Why?”
“For God’s sake, Tricia. Didn’t Frank tell you about Art Pike?”
“Yes. About the fight they had.”
A longer pause. “Tricia, didn’t Frank tell you that the guy was murdered last night?”
The familiar room faded and came back.
“No. No … I haven’t heard from Frank. How?”
“Messy. I wasn’t here. I got off around two this morning and when I got back in here this afternoon, there were crime ribbons all over Three West and there was Zeke Parrot standing around looking like thunder and Butch Johnson and it looked like every cop in the precinct. I can’t believe Frank wouldn’t tell you!”
Tricia could. So that’s why the extra patrols. Any time a cop died, every cop connected to the case put extra cover on his own family. And it was like Frank not to say anything to her about it until he could do it in person. She felt a little relief at knowing. Poor Marian.
“Margie, they have any idea who did it?”
“God, child. You think they’d tell us? They’ve been up in Records all day, and everybody had to fill out a form saying where they were, and anybody who couldn’t prove it had to talk to them in the cafeteria. It’s a zoo!”
“But Frank … Frank would have known about it last night, wouldn’t he?”
“No. It didn’t happen until later. They sewed Frank up and sent him home. I saw him go. This thing happened much later. They say around four or five in the morning.”
Tricia’s heart began to pound in her chest and her throat filled with ice.
“What time did he leave?”
Silence. “Well, honey … it’s hard to say.”
“Margie, don’t shit me. You just said you got off at two last night.”
“Yes … but it could have—”
“He got here at six-thirty.”
“Tricia, that’s nothing. He could have—”
“Who drove him home?”
“I don’t know.”
“You just said you saw him leave. Who was he with?”
“I don’t know. Some cops from the Four-Oh.”
“Any women?”
“Frank wouldn’t sleep with a cop!”
“Why not? I do.”