Wednesday, August 22
1940 hours
The South Bronx
They were coming down in a swing through Crotona Park—Keogh and Butler feeling a silence on them, puzzled the way men are when the skin of life comes off and something shows underneath that is not what was expected—when Zeke Parrot and Butch Johnson caught up with them. Zeke’s face was black and thick. They came to a stop in a stand of trees, Zeke was out of his car and coming at them, Butch calling to him, Keogh and Butler staring at him as Zeke came around the Riviera at Keogh. Keogh got out of the car fast but Zeke’s fist caught him in the side of the head above the ear and he went down.
Zeke Parrot stood over him, fists up, his chest going like a bellows, his shirt torn at the belly. “Get up, you mick bastard!”
Butler pushed Butch out of the way and came over the hood after Zeke Parrot. Keogh got to his feet again, his ear burning, working his jaw, stepping forward to come in at Zeke. Butler had Zeke wrapped up, lifting him off the ground with his arms around Zeke’s chest. Zeke could see nothing but Frank Keogh’s eyes, Keogh in front of him.
“You trying to fuck up this case? Is that it?”
“No, Frank! Wait. Zeke, what the hell—”
Zeke twisted himself out of Butler’s grip and squared off in front of Keogh. Keogh looked up at him and held his place, his feet apart, his blunt Irish face giving away nothing.
“The Ching-a-Lings, you assholes! That’s what this is about. Butch and me said stay away from them! But no, you two got hard-ons, have to go play movies. You couldna fucked this case up better, you been trying to!”
Butler moved around between Keogh and Parrot, facing the Homicide cop. Keogh moved to the side, where he could see Zeke’s hands. Butch stood watching, his face uncertain, his hands up in front of him.
“You talking about Roberto?”
“What the fuck you think I’m talking about? I got a snitch said he could put two of those suckers in the area at the time. I’m trying to get a warrant on Roberto. And you wanna know where the fuck Roberto is now?”
Butler and Keogh said nothing.
“Cowboys, that’s what you guys are! You’re always gonna be cowboys. Botched Casualties and the Some-Dunce Kid. You’re a fucking pair, ain’t you?”
There was a long silent moment. Then Butch Johnson began to laugh. Butler had to smile. Parrot and Keogh were still looking at each other hard, but Keogh could feel a smile coming.
“Not bad, Zeke. Botched Casualties—I like that. Is that me, or is it Frank here?”
“The point is, the guy is down at the Civil Liberties lawyer right now. Guy’s swearing an Information. They’re naming you, Frank, Butch, and me, and half the task force. I got the D.A. on my ass, he’s saying Miranda, Mallory, Elstad, Fourth this, and Weeks that. Tainted Evidence! Fruit of the Poisoned Tree. The case against those guys is dead in the water. You’re letting a bunch of cop killers walk!”
Keogh moved away a couple of feet and turned around to look at the three of them standing there in the hollow of land, surrounded by worn-looking oaks, the sun coming in through the leaves, a hazy dappled light on them.
Zeke Parrot’s face darkened again.
“It’s not them, huh? Who the hell is it then? Is it you, you cocksucker? You got this little pussy police broad to lie for you? You go in there, choke out Pike yourself? I can see it. You’re crazy. Fucking sniper. Man, I can see you doin’ it!”
Butler shoved Zeke back onto the car.
“You’re starting to sound like a real dickhead, Zeke. What we’re trying to say here, we don’t think the Ching-a-Lings have anything to do with whoever took out Pike.” He looked over at Keogh. “Roberto—”
“Roberto had nothing to do with it, Zeke,” Keogh said. “Best thing you could do, stop fucking around with that theory. Pat and me don’t think any of those guys had anything to do with it.” Keogh smiled at Zeke, a slow twist of his mouth. “Zeke, if Roberto had anything to tell us, he’d have told us. Believe it.”
“Roberto says you guys pulled some weird army shit on him. What’d you do to him, anyway?”
Butler looked away from Keogh. Keogh’s face was empty now. “We made an impression on him, is all.”
Butch spoke up. “That you did, Frank. He also says you stole all of his cash. And some guy named Jugo is in the hospital, got a concussion. And this Fausto guy, he wants four hundred bucks for a new suit.”
Butler laughed outright at that.
“New suit! You want the money was in Roberto’s bank, you go ask Fausto.”
“That what you guys are saying? That Fausto scooped the Ching-a-Ling bank?”
“How much Roberto say was stolen?”
“Twenty-eight grand, old bills.”
Zeke and Butch were looking very carefully at Frank and Pat. One of the great moral dangers of working in Vice was the amount of untraceable cash you tended to come across. Zeke and Butch knew that both Keogh and Butler had worked in Bronx Vice. Sometimes you took the cash; you told yourself you were just doing what the courts would do. You were fining the dealers, putting them out of business.
Butler’s hand was very close to his Ruger.
It got very still in the little clearing. A sound of sirens and children playing came drifting in the air. A candy wrapper rustled along the pathway.
“You calling us Buddy Boys, Zeke?”
“Buddy Boys” was the code name a group of bent cops had used a couple of years back. They had been busting dealers and splitting up their bank. One of them committed suicide when he was charged. The rest of them were simply destroyed by the Department, forced to wear wires against their own men, turning evidence against one another.
Zeke turned away and sat down under a tree, putting his head back on the trunk.
“Fucking job, man. Fucking shootout.”
Butch Johnson walked around to the back of their cruiser and opened the trunk. He reached into a cooler in the trunk and pulled out some Stroh’s. He threw one at Frank Keogh, who caught it without looking away from Zeke and Butler. Butch cracked his, cold foam arcing out in the sunlight.
“So, Frank. If it ain’t the Ching-a-Lings did it to Art, then who the hell was it?”
Butler took a beer, and Zeke caught his on the fly. Keogh took a long pull and looked around the clearing.
“I don’t know, Butch. Something’s happening. I just don’t know what the hell it is.”
Zeke took off his suit coat and slipped his tie off over his head. He exhaled slowly and took another drink of beer. Butler came over and sat down facing him, on grass as worn as an old carpet. Butch walked away from Keogh and went to the car radio.
“Sergeant Four B to Central, K?”
“Sergeant Four B?”
“Central, we’re gonna be sixty-two at Crotona Park and Charlotte with ESU Single Six, Butler and Keogh, K?”
“Any problems, Sergeant Four B?”
Butch looked over the car top at Frank Keogh. Keogh was looking past him at the woods, at a couple of black kids playing Frisbee with a big yellow dog. The dog went high for it and took it out of the air as neat as Roger Craig, coming down in a spin and racing back toward the boys on the long green lawn. A soft wind moved in Keogh’s thick black hair.
“Nah, Central. No problems.”
The four of them sat around on the grassy slope off Charlotte Street, drinking cold Stroh’s out of Butch’s cooler and saying pretty much nothing for a while. They were all feeling a little shaky, feeling that they had come pretty close to shooting at one another in the middle of Crotona Park. It was crazy and they were a little scared.
Finally Zeke opened his eyes and looked over at Pat. “Okay, what’d Roberto say to you, made you so sure he had nothing to do with Pike?”
Butler ran the cold can over his forehead. Whether he told Zeke about what they had done to Roberto depended a lot on how long it had been since Zeke and Butch had been off the streets. Life was different for Homicide cops. It was kind of a technical exercise for them, the main player in the thing being dead and just as likely to stay dead. It gave them the time to think strategically, to make moves and set up traps for suspects. It was a rare Homicide detective who ever actually terrified the truth out of a man, because there was a limit to how long a man could be terrified. No matter what you did to him, sooner or later he’d try to put himself together again and change what had happened in his mind. Most of the hardcases knew their rights better than the cops. But in Vice, things had been different. All that mattered then was the bust, and being the force on the block. You did whatever it took to make an impression on the man, and he told you what he knew. Then you went to the next man up the ladder and you took away his illusion that he was safe, that he had some real power. Butler believed that if power corrupted you, then having no power at all, being broken on the hard spur of that, made a man pure for a while, and he’d tell you the truth in that sudden clear time that came over him when he saw where he was and what was real about him and what was only luck in not being broken before this. But how did you tell this to guys who could afford to worry about due process?
Keogh told Zeke and Butch exactly what it was he had done to Roberto. Butch and Zeke listened in absolute silence. When Keogh had finished, both Butch and Zeke stared at him for a long time, seeing him from a distance.
Finally Butch said, “You learn that in Vietnam, Frank?”
“You could say that.”
“Shit! Who would think of that?”
“They did. Charlie did. They used bamboo.”
There was nothing to say to that. Zeke shook his head to get the image out.
“Okay, Frank. You think Roberto doesn’t know anything about Pike. That’s good news. It means that the Ching-a-Lings aren’t going to war with us. I can tell my wife and kids to come home. But that leaves us nowhere. It leaves us with some completely unknown guy who comes into Pike’s room and he strangles him for reasons we may never figure out. That’s the worst kind of case there is. And you know what? In eight years working Homicide, I have never once come across the kind of case you’re telling me this is. Not once. It was always somebody knew the guy, always somebody had something to gain. If it’s like you’re saying, we’re never gonna solve this one.”
“What about Forensic—fibers and all that stuff?”
Zeke and Butch started to laugh.
Zeke said, “Frank … this isn’t the movies. All that stuff can do for you, it can say where something might have been, or it can tell you yeah, this guy was there. You get something like bite marks, that’s good, like a clear fingerprint. But none of this stuff is going to tell you your guy is right now taking a piss in the phone booth in the back of a restaurant at First and Fifty-first. You send forensic to Quantico, they’ll do miracles with it, and when you actually put your hands on the guy and you drag him into Central Booking, man, these guys they’ll say: Well, yup yup yup, that’s the man okay. Then they look at you like you should kiss their butts because they solved your case for you.”
Butch threw his can at a couple of crows sitting on a rock at the top of the slope. “Damn right. Don’t matter what you know about the guy, you still gotta find him. And finding him is still the same old shit, the shit you guys made a hundred times more complicated. Cop gets killed, okay, we got a task force and all the time we need, we got a budget, we got the Feds, we got Albany and Langley and Quantico, we can pull a whole platoon, fly off to Iceland if the case goes there. It’s not like Pike’s some addict, we find him smoked in a dumpster, who gives a shit. But you tell us: Hey, Butch, I didn’t do it, and the guys with a clear motive didn’t do it. It was some total fucking stranger did it. We’re like fucking stable cats in a barn full of blind horses.”
Butler wanted to know what the hell that meant.
Butch raised his hands, made a gesture that took in all of the park, all of New York City. “You ever seen a stable cat when they’re bringing the horses out? I grew up on a farm. Huge horses come out of the stalls, hooves the size of a sledgehammer. These crazy little cats are walking around in and out of the hooves—the horses don’t step on them because the horses can see them. But New York, Pat, all the horses are blind. We’re ducking around, hooves are coming down like hammers. We’re not gonna make it.”
They were all staring at Butch. Zeke said, “Butch, what the hell are you talking about?”
“I don’t know, Zeke. But that’s how I feel. We’re just cats chasing rats in a barn full of blind horses.”
Keogh walked over and handed him a can of Stroh’s and patted him on the cheek. “Don’t you worry, Butch. You and Zeke’ll hurl the glove of defiance into the jaws of destiny and the dragon of fate will throw up the fur ball of truth onto the pool table of life and the pool shark of justice will knock the eight ball of evil into the … the …”
“Dumpster of destiny?” said Butler.
“No. Keogh already said destiny,” said Zeke. “The … the …”
“Anyway,” said Keogh, brushing his jeans off, “things will work out okay, Butch. Me and Pat’ll leave you to it. Anything you want us to do? Other than stay the fuck out of your way?”
Zeke smiled up at Keogh.
“No, that’s enough. Just stay out of the way.”