City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Whitaker spoke up. “Oscar Shiner is a good starting point.”

  Even Graves nodded at that one.

  Kehoe thought about it for a few seconds. “You and Page go put his feet to the fire.”

  Whitaker closed her notebook. “Yes, sir.”

  “And, Page?” Kehoe was still standing and he reached into his pants pocket, producing a leather security wallet.

  Lucas didn’t move. He didn’t want to give in to the theatrics. But he knew what was coming, and he resented that he felt a little blip of adrenaline hit his system.

  Kehoe held the wallet out. “You’re officially back in; drop by HR and sign the papers.”

  Lucas unfolded the leather and examined the gold shield. It was identical to the one he had carried a lifetime ago, and seeing the eagle and the enamel letters brought back all kinds of emotions, none of which he was prepared for. They had used the photo from his passport, and he wondered just how they had managed that.

  “All right,” Kehoe said. “Get to work.”

  And with that, Lucas realized that they had been dismissed. He watched Kehoe for a few seconds, but he didn’t see anything to indicate the thought process going on behind the controlled public image. Kehoe looked like all was fine and things were going exactly as planned.

  Which was what bothered Lucas the most.

  24

  The Lower East Side

  Bunny Morgan had moved into the nineteenth-century brownstone on February 21, 1947—the day after her marriage. It had been a nicer neighborhood then, but it had been her and Bert’s home for half a century. He died of cancer in 1997, and she figured that she’d follow soon enough, but the wait had turned from months into years into decades, and by the time she realized she should have moved out, she was too old for any meaningful change. During that time, the area continued its steady, albeit incremental, slide into decay. Bunny Morgan, if pressed to remember the way things had actually been when she moved here as a young wife, would be horrified at the siege mentality she had adopted. Like the cracks in the limestone façade, newly refurbished when they had moved in, her survival skills had slowly broadened.

  Over time, an increasingly paranoid obsession with her surroundings became the norm. And the first rule she had developed was to always keep her eyes on the Negroes—the ones on the street; the ones who lived next door; the ones who packed her bag at the market (especially the ones who packed her bag at the market—they liked to steal her sardines because she bought the good ones in oil).

  But the pendulum of change was once again swinging back, and the neighborhood was succumbing to gentrification. At least that was what everyone said. But Bunny didn’t believe any of it. Not as long as the Negroes and the Mexicans and the other foreigners were still around. You’d think that they’d want to go back to their own countries, but that was proving harder than you’d think. Which didn’t make any kind of sense. Especially since the government would pay for them to go back—she had heard all about it on the news. Free rides to sunny places. Damn ingrates, if you asked her. They’d be smart to get away from the snow and the cold. Anyone would.

  She didn’t even go out in weather like this. And she didn’t order in, either. Nope. She didn’t want the Negro delivery boy knowing where she lived. Not a woman on her own. They liked white women, didn’t matter their age. She paid attention to the news, and she knew what they were like. All of them. Except that Bill Cosby. He was the funniest. And Bunny Morgan didn’t believe a word they said about him on the news. You couldn’t trust anything out of Hollywood. The stations were run by a big Jewish propaganda machine, she had learned that. Actually, Bert had pointed it out the summer of 1969 when they faked the moon landing to drive up stock in batteries. And it worked. After that, everyone started getting cancer. Even Bert.

  She had a little more faith in local news, but barely; again, too many Jews. But with the storm outside, there wasn’t much to do. So she warmed up the roasted chicken from two nights back, cracked a bottle of good six-dollar wine, and plopped down in front of Dancing with the Stars. It was a rerun (a crappy one), but she watched it anyway.

  When the commercials came on, she flipped through the channels and stopped on a news station where they were running a good local story about a Negro with a gun killing policemen. It was entertaining as heck. Of course, they didn’t specifically say it was a Negro—they never did—but when they caught him, a Negro it would be. Shooting policemen was one of their favorite things to do. And people wondered why they got killed by the police in return. All they had to do was be respectful. But the government was fixing all that. They would fix everything. They had promised.

  Well, she wouldn’t have to see any Negroes in real life. Not today. Not with the storm outside and the television inside. And her bottle of wine. After this one, maybe she’d crack another. Which would make what? Thirteen bottles in the past three days. Not bad—she was keeping it down.

  Bunny took a munch off one of the two remaining drumsticks (she always ate the white meat first) and topped off her drink on the end table. As she poured, something in the distance, beyond the big window facing the final block of buildings before the FDR, caught her eye. Visibility was terrible, and she couldn’t see past the rooftops behind her—the river, two blocks away, was nonexistent in the storm—but someone was up there. Sneaking by the chimneys.

  No, not someone—a pair of someones.

  They were carrying … what were those? Shovels? Were they there to shovel the roof? In this wind, they’d fall off and kill their own damn selves. Maybe it was that spic landlord and one of his kids. That man was always complaining about her disposing of her wine bottles in his recycling bin. Damn Puerto Ricans, always causing trouble. Didn’t he know that this was her country, not his? Bunny put on her glasses, and the figures came into sharper focus.

  Holy Jesus. It wasn’t the landlord. Or his son.

  It was Negroes. Two of them. Bundled up in heavy winter clothing, carrying rifles.

  Bunny nearly knocked her wine bottle over when she snatched the phone off the cradle.

  25

  The Lower East Side

  Officers Jason Lydon and Eddie Grozner were in a coffee shop two blocks from Bunny Morgan’s house when the call went out. Lydon had been a patrolman for thirty-one years and had a record that he was sure he’d take to his retirement; Grozner had been in uniform for nine years but had amassed more street sense than a lot of officers ever gleaned from the blood and leather and concrete. They were good cops. And like any population under siege, they were aching to fight back.

  Special Weapons and Tactics were on the way, but with the snow and traffic and generally shitty condition of the streets, it would take them half an hour to make the trek. By which time someone else might be in the ground.

  So, in that nonverbal language that street cops develop, they came to an agreement—why should they wait for the men in tactical gear to do something that they could accomplish?

  Grozner hit the lights, ignored the siren, and rocketed out of the parking spot in a cloud of white snow tinted blue with exhaust. They punched through the first light, barreled down the opposite lane in a haze of speed, and skidded through the second light, sliding around the corner and nearly taking out a stop sign in a perfect cinematic moment.

  Lydon read off the numbers until they were half a block from the address the dispatcher had cited. Grozner slammed the car into a drive with No Parking strung across the entrance, breaking the chain and sending the sign flying off into the snow.

  Lydon unlocked the shotgun from the mount on the transmission hump, and Grozner moved around the back of the car and popped the trunk, taking out the second Remington pump. They suited up and headed around the corner.

  The building was a prewar five-story walk-up that had seen better times and would do so again with the wave of gentrification sweeping the area. There were no broken windows, and the snow covering all the horizontal—and some vertical—surfaces hid a lot of sins. />
  One of the tenants was coming out of the building as they mounted the steps, and Lydon gave her a keep-quiet signal by holding his finger to his lips. As they moved by, he leaned over and said, “Get someplace safe.”

  The woman—bundled up in an imitation fur coat and big red hair—took off, almost slipping on the steps.

  They moved up the four staircases at a good clip, being as silent as five hundred pounds of human dressed in combat gear carrying shotguns can. They saw no one the rest of the way up, and the building was strangely silent in the way of ambient noise. The only sounds were their footsteps and a soft whistling from the wind finding its way through the structure’s weak points.

  When they hit the top floor, they had to check two doors to find the one to the roof. The passage was colder than the rest of the building, and light was shining in through the access door at the top of the steel staircase that stretched up into the dark like an antenna to some alternate world. Grozner, who was in better shape, went first. As he climbed, slush and other frozen shit fell off his boots and dripped down on Lydon.

  There was a small landing at the top of the ladder, and the officers stopped, both trying to hear human-generated sounds above the whistle of the storm.

  When Grozner opened the door, the blare of sunlight was drowned out by the blast of snow that funneled in, sucked into the tunnel and down into the body of the building. They burst out, teleporting to the surface of the moon. There were two sets of footsteps—now almost obliterated—trekking off to the east, toward the FDR.

  They rounded the small support building that opened up onto the roof, and there they were. Backs to the officers. Rifles cradled in their arms.

  “Drop your weapons!” Grozner screamed.

  The figures spun.

  Grozner raised his shotgun.

  It was over and too late all at the same time.

  26

  Whitaker and Page arrived with the rest of the FBI entourage. By this point in the day, traffic was moving at the pace of plate tectonics, and it had taken them thirty minutes to get here. Which was good under the circumstances.

  Police cruisers cauterized both ends of the block, but the news crews had yet to arrive, so there was still a semblance of order. Or at least it wasn’t total bedlam. Two patrol cars sat across each intersection, nose to nose. Down the block, in front of the crime scene, an ambulance, a SWAT van, and two more cruisers lit up the snow with flashing lights, sirens silent. Even in the extreme cold, cops stood around outside, their dark uniforms in stark contrast to the white surroundings. Lucas could tell that it was more bad news from the communal body language; they were too late.

  After a uniformed officer in a big coat took in Whitaker’s badge, he nodded to one of the cruisers, and it backed away to let them through. She threaded between the two grilles, then wove down the street between the parked cars and snowbanks, stopping the 4 × 4 where it wouldn’t get blocked in by more cars. Once again, they headed out into the punishing elements.

  Graves, followed by another support vehicle from the bureau, entered the street behind them just as Lucas slid on his glove.

  The snow squeaked underfoot and the wind off the river funneled between the buildings, freezing Lucas’s ears and stinging the back of his neck. He wondered if he had gotten soft or old—back in the day, he wouldn’t have noticed shit like this.

  A few citizens stood out on their stoops, curious and cold. Faces were visible in windows but they disappeared behind dirty curtains or sagging blinds the moment Lucas turned to look at them. Several people were filming the goings-on with cell phones.

  Up close, the scene was even more disheartening than it had been from a block away. Cops and SWAT team members smoked, talked, and drank coffee, the unmistakable look of defeat in their movements. If it were good news, they would have been doing their we got a bad guy dance instead of the depressed wallflower routine. The door to the building was open. A woman sat in a police cruiser beside the SWAT van, cradling a cup of something and crying. Two cops stood on the steps, guarding the entrance.

  Whitaker once again flashed her badge. “Who’s the OIC?” she asked.

  One of the cops on the steps nodded at a big Suburban parked at a precarious angle on a snowbank just up the street. “There’s a detective from the Twenty-first who you’ll want to talk to. You guys want to go up? I can call her over.”

  “Yeah, we want to go up,” Whitaker said, and they walked over to the Suburban.

  A woman sat behind the wheel, a cell phone to her ear. Lucas couldn’t see much through all the shit on the window other than she had a black pageboy. A big man whose face was equally obscured sat beside her. When the woman saw Lucas outside the window, she ended the call and got out of the vehicle. The man exited as well—SOP for partners.

  She was in her thirties and looked like she had a mouth too wide for her face. “Yes?” she said as if Lucas were some great cosmic inconvenience. She was tall, six feet in her socks, and had the broad shoulders of someone who spent time in the gym. There was a mass of scar tissue on her jaw that Lucas recognized as reconstructive surgery troweled over with a skin graft. She also looked familiar.

  Her partner was over sixty but had a curb weight and posture that Lucas wouldn’t want to go up against. It didn’t take a Ph.D. in body language to see that he was the strong, silent type.

  Lucas held up the badge, and the move somehow felt natural. “Dr. Lucas Page, FBI.”

  Her demeanor didn’t soften at all, one of the earmarks of years of dealing with humanity’s finest. “Detective Alexandra Hemingway.” She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at the big man standing on the other side of the Suburban and looking unhappy. “That’s Phelps.”

  “We want to take a look at the scene before the medical examiner’s people get here.”

  Hemingway smiled at that, and the impression of too many teeth was confirmed. “Sorry, no one’s going up there.”

  “We’re not no one.”

  “Until my captain says it’s all right, you are.”

  “Look, Detective, I don’t mean to push things, but this is an ongoing investigation, and it’s already been handed over to us.” He symbolically tapped his wrist. “And we’re losing time.”

  At that, Hemingway stood up a little taller and took a step toward him. “Until my captain gives you the go-ahead, it’s fuck-off time.”

  Lucas was about to shift into combat mode when he realized that there was a disconnect here somewhere. “We received an alert that two individuals with rifles were spotted at this address. The ambulance is either for the shooters or an officer.”

  Graves came up behind them and put a hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “We good here?”

  Lucas nodded but kept his eye locked on the detective. “I think there’s a mix-up.”

  Hemingway asked, “Which one of you is the big cheese?”

  Graves stepped forward.

  She pulled him aside, spoke a few hushed sentences, then nodded at the ambulance.

  When the conversation was over, whatever she told Graves was enough for them to pull out. Graves rallied Whitaker and Lucas back to their vehicles. “Let’s go before the news shows up.”

  On cue, a pair of news vans tried to honk their way through the police barricade. Hemingway glanced over at them, then turned back to Lucas, her irritation now a going concern. She zipped up her jacket and pulled on a pair of leather gloves. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go talk to these assholes before they commence their fuckery.” And she walked away.

  When they were back at the pair of bureau Navigators, Graves pulled his people in. The information was delivered with a tone suggesting that there was a silver lining somewhere in the mix. “The call came in from a neighbor, an elderly lady who said she saw a pair of men with rifles on the roof. Two patrolmen nearby were first on the scene and decided to get a jump on the guys before they could execute their plan. The cops went upstairs and found two individuals on the roof. Those two individuals are d
ead.”

  “How do we know one of them wasn’t our shooter?” Whitaker asked.

  “They were kids, a nine- and ten-year-old playing with plastic rifles.”

  It was Whitaker who said, “Let the pants-shitting begin.”

  27

  The West Village

  After leaving Graves’s convoy, they headed across the island to an address off Jane Street. It was a three-story commercial building from an age when form trumped function. The structure might have been brown or red or even white at one point, but two hundred years of pollution, acid rain, and disregard had incrementally patinated it the color of an old smoker’s remaining lung. The façade was a textbook example of Renaissance revival, intricately sculpted with time-blackened gargoyles, flowers, and detailed arch work. Above the door, cleanly chiseled into the capstone, were the words Dempsey Headstones. All the windows on the building were barred, including the inaccessible ones on the top floor.

  “Swanky,” Lucas said, “in a Frank Lloyd Wrong meets Gomez Addams kind of way.”

  Whitaker took a final loud sip from a travel mug and put the cup back in the holder. “I know; it looks”—she followed his line of sight—“a little run-down.”

  “Lady, the 375th Street Y looks a little run-down; this place looks like archaeologists discovered it at the bottom of a petroleum deposit.” He hooked an aluminum finger through the door handle. “Before we walk in, would you care to tell me what we’re doing at a headstone factory?”

  “They haven’t made headstones here for years.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “You? Sarcastic?” She ratcheted the zipper on her parka up. “This is Oscar Shiner’s place. He used to be a gunsmith for the bureau. Oscar’s old-school, no CNC machines—everything is done by hand. He knows everyone, and he’s worked for everyone. When you see the Prince of Wales attending the annual fox hunt, Oscar’s the guy who customized his shotgun. John Milius is a client. So was Dick Cheney. He used to do all of Idi Amin’s pistols. And when Hussein was still an ally, Oscar is the guy who gold-plated and tailored his Kalashnikovs.” She tapped the space under her coat where her pistol sat. “He retired from the bureau before I started; his daughter and wife were killed in a car accident, and he walked away. But a lot of the agents still come to him for porting or custom grips.”