Tainted Evidence

by Robert Daley

  "Police."

  The detectives went inside and the steel door clanged shut behind them.

  Three Chinese cooks were frying food at a long stove while steam rose around them. The walls were greasy and the odor was of cooking oil too often reused.

  "You made a complaint about a robbery," Muldoon began.

  The night before, one of the cooks had been robbed at gunpoint on the street. The takeout joint had closed and he was three blocks from the subway station on his way home to Chinatown. According to his statement, which he gave to night watch detectives, the cook had recognized the perpetrator, for he had sometimes seen him hanging out on a certain corner.

  Now Muldoon and Barone attempted to question the cook but all he did was bow and grin.

  "Do you speak English?" said Muldoon. "You don't, do you?"

  "I don't think he does," said Barone.

  "Fucken guy," said Muldoon.

  Using the woman as interpreter they offered to drive the cook up and down streets. If the perpetrator was from the neighborhood, they might spot him.

  But an expression of fear had come onto the cook's face.

  "Tell him," Barone said gently, "that no one will see him. All he has to do is point the guy out from the back of the car."

  Eventually the cook seemed as afraid of the detectives as of the stickup man he might have to identify, and he followed them out to the street. As he got into the car he seemed to be trying to smile.

  They drove up one street and down another.

  In the Three-Two, street crime was mostly by locals. Muldoon knew this: the mutts blow the money in a crack joint and they're out on the corner again. If you go looking for them with the victim, often you find them.

  Barone knew it too, but it continued to surprise him. "Before I came into this precinct, I worked only your better neighborhoods," he said as he drove. "If somebody ripped somebody off, he got out of the precinct instantly. No one waited around to get caught."

  "The mutts here are not as smart as that," responded Muldoon.

  At each clump of people they passed Barone slowed almost to a walk, and turned to the cook:

  "You see him?"

  After thirty minutes, they returned the cook to the takeout joint. He had identified no one.

  "I didn't think he would," muttered Muldoon.

  "I thought he might," said Barone, as they resumed patrol. "We'll try him again tomorrow night."

  By now everyone was out. In the warm night people hung over the window sills talking to other people on the sidewalk below. People sat on stoops on camp chairs, and swilled liquor out of bottles concealed inside paper bags.

  "The colored are great drinkers," Muldoon muttered. "The reason they have no money is, they drink it all. Those that aren't on crack.”

  Because Barone seemed to feel sympathy for these people, or pretended to, Muldoon finished his thought in his head: and when they get drunk enough, they piss against the walls. Animals.

  Even the children were still out, some of them running beside the slow moving black car chanting: "Poh-leece-man. Poh-leece-man!” Some were swilling from cans or bottles of soda which, in emulation of their parents, they carried inside paper bags.

  The voice of central came over the radio: "Man bleeding heavily, corner of St. Nicholas and 142nd, which car responding?”

  Barone grabbed up the hand radio that had been lying on the seat between them. "Two squad, Central," he said, holding it close to his lips. "We'll take that call."

  He turned onto St. Nicholas Avenue and raced south, his gun already out and lying on the seat beside the radio. Muldoon's was in his hand in his lap. But when they reached the site there was no commotion of any kind. Mystified, they cruised on past. The grocery on the corner was still open, and a number of people had congregated near it, men and women both, some of them sitting in chairs. No one, as they drove by, called out to them or flagged them down.

  Still expecting to come upon a disturbance, they continued down St. Nicholas for several blocks. Nothing. Finally Barone keyed the radio and asked Central for a clarification.

  After a moment the same information came back a second time, same address too. Man bleeding heavily.

  So Barone made a U-turn and went back. When they reached the corner again he slowed almost to a stop and they scrutinized the people on the sidewalk. There was still no commotion, and then they were past.

  "Forget it," said Muldoon, "nothing there."

  But Barone made another U-turn and a third pass, this time pulling into the curb and calling out: "Is somebody bleeding heavily there?"

  "This man is," someone called back, pointing toward one of the chairs.

  They got out and approached. The man in the chair was old, his face deeply lined, his hair white, and he had evidently had a nosebleed. There were blood spots on his shirt and a wad of toilet paper had been rammed up his nose.

  "How you feeling, old fellow?" Barone said to him.

  "Ah's feeling a bit better now, thank you," the old man said.

  "Looks like you had a pretty bad nose bleed there. I think it may have stopped now though. Do you live near here? Do you have anyone who can take care of you?"

  "Ah takes care of myself, mostly."

  Muldoon had already turned to go back to the car. "Let's go," he said over his shoulder. "We're supposed to be homicide detectives for crisssake."

  Barone put the hand radio to his lips and called in an ambulance.

  "What's your name, old fellow?" he asked.

  Barone, who had his notebook out, wrote down the old man's name: Eugene Mitchell. "What's your date of birth, Eugene? Where do you live?"

  Eugene was only 64, it seemed, not nearly as old as he looked, and Barone was surprised. But in Harlem, life spans were about ten years shorter than the national average.

  Bystanders had crowded around wanting to get in on the excitement.

  Having closed his notebook Barone waited to see that Eugene got into the ambulance. Sometimes, if the cops didn't stay, the paramedics would refuse the patient and drive away.

  "How'd you get the nosebleed, Eugene," he asked as they waited.

  "Ah don't rightly know.”

  Barone decided to try to lift the old man's spirits. "I bet I know how you got it. You were humping your old lady, weren't you, Eugene.”

  Eugene liked this idea, and he began to grin.

  "Is that what you were doing, Eugene?" joked Barone.

  The bystanders were all grinning.

  "At your age? Eugene, I'm ashamed of you."

  The old man was grinning too.

  "I bet it wasn't your old lady at all," said Barone, for he saw that the old man was enjoying the attention. "I bet it was your girlfriend. She was too much for you. Am I right, Eugene?”

  Barone was patronizing them, decided Muldoon, watching from a distance. They liked it. Everyone was laughing. They didn't even realize they were being patronized.

  Barone said: "Listen to me, Eugene, you gotta take it easier. Young girls are too energetic. You stay away from them, you hear me. Or at least cut it down to only one of them at a time."

  Eugene was grinning, sitting up straighter.

  "You gotta learn to avoid these strenuous exercises, Eugene."

  Everyone was laughing. A bystander said to Muldoon: "Your partner missed his calling, man, he shoulda been a standup comedian."

  Muldoon gave him a look, and resumed watching for the ambulance. Finally it came, backed into the curb and two paramedics got out. When Barone told them to take Eugene to Harlem Hospital, they nodded and walked him on board. Just before the doors closed, Barone called into the ambulance: "I hope you feel better, Eugene."

  He got back in the car beside Muldoon.

  "These people get a fart stuck between two ribs and they call 911," said Muldoon.

  "Well," Barone said, "they don't have anybody else but us.”

  Now as he drove Barone was looking for a patrolling radio car, for a form needed to be filled
out on Eugene, and he didn't have one. Finally on l55th Street underneath the elevated road that crossed to the Bronx he came upon one of the precinct cars parked on the sidewalk in front of a defunct gas station. The interior light was on. Both cops were writing in their memo books. Barone, approaching from the rear, drove up onto the sidewalk and pulled to a stop beside them. They were so concentrated that they didn't see him until he was there, six inches away.

  "Excuse me, Officer," Barone said into the recorder's window, "can you tell me where Harlem is at?"

  The cop's head jerked up, startled. Then he grinned.

  "You went through a red light, before," he said. "I saw it. Corner of 135th and Lenox. I'm going to have to write you a ticket."

  The banter of cops in Harlem in the night. "But officer," said Barone in a pleading voice, "it's my first time.”

  "Tell it to the judge," the cop said.

  "You guys should be more vigilant," said Muldoon, talking across Barone. "We could have stuck one in your ear. You would've never known what hit you."

  The cop thought this over a moment. "No one's looking to stick one in a cop's ear."

  "When I came on the job," said Muldoon, "that's exactly what used to happen up here."

  "Well," said the cop, "it doesn't happen anymore."

  "It could start again," said Muldoon. "Anytime."

  "You got an aided card there?" asked Barone. "Give me an aided card."

  The cop handed one across.

  Some nights, thought Barone as he filled in the card, there would be a murder, a victim on the floor, sometimes more than one, and they would work till dawn. Not tonight though. He filled in Eugene's address, date of birth and the disposition: subject removed to Harlem Hospital. At the stationhouse later he would get a case number from the 124 man, fill it in, and toss the card into the box.

  Chapter 2

  The offices of the elected district attorney of New York County, and those of his bureau chiefs and principal administrators, are on the eighth floor of a building at 100 Centre Street. The rest of the staff, more than 450 assistant district attorneys, many of them fresh out of law school but prosecuting major cases nonetheless, work out of offices on three other floors or else in other buildings, most of them nearby, into which, with the increase in crime and the increase in their own numbers, they have overflowed.

  On the eighth floor there are anterooms and secretaries. On the DA's other floors and buildings there are sometimes neither, and everything must be shared. There is and has always been a disproportion in the allocation of law enforcement funds; the DA's office has never been given remotely the amount it needed.

  The building at 100 Centre Street is huge, 17 stories high and occupying an entire city block. One whole side of it is the commodious prison known as The Tombs. Most of the rest is courtrooms, floor after floor of them. From the Tombs barred corridors cross from the cellblocks to the courtrooms; they are called bridges, and in a sense that's what they are. They bridge the gap between crime and justice, between the mindless and the deliberative, between violence and reason, between man at his worst and what is perhaps the best that man can do.

  Some years ago the Tombs became so overcrowded with felons and presumed felons, with psychopaths, perverts and the permanently enraged, that it could not be managed or even repaired. Beds and plumbing were ripped off walls. Door mechanisms were wrecked by inmates, or broke down. Whole cellblocks became unusable. The Tombs was closed by court order, its inmates removed elsewhere. But having been repaired--even in a certain sense redecorated--it has reopened and filled up again.

  The front entrance of 100 Centre Street is for jurors, witnesses, complainants, defense lawyers and those defendants not already incarcerated, who come in under the rotunda, approach security as they might approach the pearly gates, and then ascend to the place of judgment.

  Assistant district attorneys, meanwhile, use a door around on Leonard Street on the side. There are always armed cops on duty there to screen would-be visitors, and from inside the building the DA's floors are accessible only by certain elevators and stairwells which are kept locked and for which the assistants have special keys. These are not choir boys they are prosecuting, and they perform their job at a certain risk.

  On this particular afternoon in one of the conference rooms on the eighth floor a dozen lawyers had met to consider the latest murders. There had been fourteen in Manhattan the previous week, about average. The meeting had gone on for an hour and would last at least an hour more. The three women at the table were variously dressed, whereas the men were dressed mostly alike although, since it was a warm afternoon and the DA's offices were air conditioned only in the hottest summer months, some of them had stripped down to their shirtsleeves. Most, however, had gone no further than their vests. They were, after all, lawyers.

  This was the weekly meeting of what its participants sometimes referred to jokingly as "the heinous crimes bureau"--crimes that the city, meaning the politicians and the press, might be watching closely, and which, therefore, the DA and his bureau chiefs were determined to watch closely as well.

  There were briefcases standing beside the chairs, and legal pads in front of each place. These men and women were the stars of the DA's office, and one after another they briefed each other on what had recently come in--the latest ways people had shot, knifed, strangled, bludgeoned, poisoned, defenestrated, decapitated, butchered other people in this city. Some of the cases were tangled. One could hear the speaker himself trying to make sense of a case even as he presented it. Sometimes there were legal technicalities involved, and the speaker was looking to his colleagues for advice. But other times whichever prosecutor had the floor was trying mostly to make his colleagues laugh, for some of these cases were so grotesque as to be funny.

  At the head of the table sat Assistant District Attorney Karen Henning, presiding. She was 38 years old, with blond curly hair worn short to set off her long, rather elegant neck. As a girl she had worried about her neck. She had hated her hair. She had wished for dark straight hair, as dark as possible, and it should hang down below her shoulders like those girls in her class she most admired. She had got over that. She had grown into an extremely attractive woman, and she knew it. She was a true blond, though her hair was darker now than it had been. She had blue eyes and a fair complexion--if something happened to make her blush everyone nearby could see it. She had nice teeth and a fleshy mouth that her husband often told her was sexy.

  "Who's next?" she said.

  "Me, I guess," said Assistant DA Doug Van Horn, and he launched his case upon the room. "The deceased is not the deceased yet, but soon will be. He's got two in the head and it looks like he's going out."

  "This was where?" Karen Henning said.

  "Harlem, broad daylight," Van Horn said.

  His manner indicated that this was a bizarre case, and around the table the smiles came on, and the other assistants waited to hear the rest of it.

  Karen sat with her legal pad balanced on crossed knees. Most assistant DAs joined the office fresh out of law school, but Karen had been already an experienced lawyer when hired. For this reason, and because the pressure was on to promote women, her rise had been rapid. As chief of the trials division, she was the highest ranking woman in the District Attorney's hierarchy--the token woman it sometimes seemed to her. There were 450 assistants in all and many now were women, but the other divisions were run by men, most of the squads were run by men, and in the normal course most of the best cases were routinely assigned to men to try.

  "The defendant," Van Horn said, "is 56, black, with a grey beard. He's got a bible in one hand and an automatic in the other, and he stands on the sidewalk shouting: The Lord sent me to clean up the neighborhood. I am the law. He then pumps three bullets into the victim, a man he didn't know who had just come out of the building."

  Karen said: "Any witnesses?"

  "Five. An off duty cop who happened to be driving by, two FBI agents on surveillance for a ba
nk robbery, the building's super, and a bystander.” Van Horn grinned back at his colleagues.

  "Do you think you can win this case?" asked one of them, Mike Tananbaum, and everyone laughed.

  "The super's not going to be much good to us," said Van Horn thoughtfully. "The defendant shot him next, and it looks like he's going out too."

  "You still got a cop, two FBI agents and a bystander," Tananbaum said.

  "I'm not so sure," said Van Horn. "The defendant runs off down the street and the bystander starts chasing him. He's going to make a citizen's arrest, I guess. Unfortunately he's got a gun too, and as he's running after him he's firing away. This attracts the attention of the off duty cop who jumps out of his car and starts firing, but not at the killer, at the bystander. He and the bystander stand there firing at each other until they both run out of bullets. It's a standoff."

  "So you've got the bystander, anyway," said Tananbaum.

  "Well, no. His gun being empty, he sprints right between the two FBI agents never to be seen again.”

  Everyone was now laughing, even Karen.

  "We don't know who he was, where he came from, nothing," said Van Horn.

  "Who arrested the defendant."

  "The cop and one of the FBI agents have a fist fight over it. The cop wins. Knocks the FBI agent cold. The other FBI agent then tries to arrest the cop."

  "And people wonder why we sometimes accept pleas," Karen murmured.

  "In the stationhouse the defendant makes two statements," said Van Horn. "You'll like this. The first is: the revolution starts at four PM."

  "And the second statement?" said Karen.

  "Give me liberty or give me death."

  Karen was wiping her eyes. "Who's next," she said.

  The meeting went on, relentless descriptions of crimes outrageous to the point of hilarity. Karen had a habit of twisting her wedding band as she listened.

  In one case four men had stabbed the deceased; a fifth had shot him.

  "So, what are we supposed to put in the indictment?" asked Tananbaum, whose case it was. "While four other guys were stabbing the deceased to death the defendant shot him to death? That's going to be some indictment."