“Did Harris get Stradazzi yet? We have some signs of life here.” Kennedy looked down East 4th. People were showing up on the stoops. A few doors away an elderly black woman was struggling down the front stairs with a garbage bag. Past her a group of teenagers were gathering by a basketball court. It wouldn’t take them long to notice that something was going on down here at the corner.
The older white cop, whose plate read Haggerty, sighed and burped and generally conveyed his lack of interest. The black policewoman spoke up when it was clear that Haggerty wasn’t going to. Kennedy noted the tension between them.
“Central says Stradazzi took a cab. Harris is back at the station getting shit from Bergman for letting you fuck him over on the airwaves. Bergman don’t want Harris to pull no overtime and he says you can’t override the Patrol Supervisor and you got to go through the ACU Supervisor to get an ACU guy in the crowd. And the Duty Captain was standing by the desk when Harris got in so he’s coming out to oversee the investigation. And—”
“The Duty Captain? Bozeman?”
The black woman closed her eyes halfway and let a kind of cynical tide roll across her mahogany face. Kennedy waited her out. You had to walk carefully with black policewomen, especially the younger ones. Give them any rough talk at all and you were facing somebody from the Equal Employment branch and the Internal Affairs Department was shuffling through your performance records.
“Yes, sir.” She let the “sir” roll out just enough to give it a touch of insubordination. “The Duty Captain is Captain Bozeman and he’s on his way right now. Also he wants to know why there’s no EMS ambulance here.”
“Harris said he called a bus, but that Central couldn’t promise him a bus until oh-eight-hundred. He made the guy Deceased Confirmed Dead at Scene. Why hassle Emergency Medical Services?”
“Bozeman say you don’t have no bus, you don’t have no bust. Procedures according to the Patrol Guide regs—”
Kennedy held up a hand. She was dropping into that singsong tone and Kennedy was finding it harder and harder to be polite to her. If she’d been white and male, he’d have scorched the bastard and sent him off in the RMP to find a bus. But she was black and female and that gave her all the aces. He couldn’t win that fight and he’d learned not to try. One thing the black female PW knows is her goddam rights.
“Okay. Put a call in for a bus ASAP Emergency. Let’s get an official DCDS on this one. Now you, Officer Stokes?”
She pulled that long low up-from-under look again. He could see her thinking that she wasn’t going to take no shit duty from no mick dick. Kennedy swallowed his temper and asked her in as neutral a tone as he could find if she would kindly open her memo book and start making a record of every event and every person who showed up at the scene.
“I’m going to make you Recorder. I’ll need you to keep on top of the comings and goings. Mark down the fact that Lieutenant Stokovich is on the scene and currently up to his French cuffs in the body. No no, you know what I mean. Just keep track of this stuff, will you? There’s a good girl.”
Her head came up sharply at that, but Kennedy was away from the car and walking back toward Stokovich. He figured the lieutenant was probably coming up with pretty much the same ideas from the corpse. He was almost there when a blue Ford pulled up and the Assistant Medical Examiner got out.
Kennedy watched him sort himself out. He was glad to see him. The M.E. brushed down his charcoal two-piece suit, buffed his shoes one at a time on the back of each pant-leg, and yawned mightily in the sunlight. Kennedy felt a huge grin coming.
Marcuse looked over at Kennedy and pushed his half-frames up onto his wide pink forehead.
“Eddie, my boy! You’re up early. I thought you’d still be up in the Catskills plundering nature’s bounty and generally spreading venereal disease and lowering the land values.” Marcuse was watching Stokovich poke about in the crime scene as he said this. By a tacit agreement, neither said anything about it. Kennedy took the old man’s hand. It felt stiff and brittle, and there was arthritis in the knuckles. Marcuse was getting old.
Marcuse, perhaps sensing Kennedy’s reaction, tugged the hand away a little too quickly. The glasses flopped down onto his nose.
“Let’s see if we can drag Lestrade off the carcass, shall we? Step aside there, you great ugly thing. Let me see what they’ve done to the poor laddie.”
Kennedy stopped him. “Give us a while, Doc. We haven’t had the CSU in yet. Go get a coffee from Nine Frank. Okay?” Marcuse sighed and walked over to the squad car. Stokovich came back out just as the Crime Scene Unit wagon arrived.
“CSU guys are here. You wanna brief ’em, Eddie? I’ve got Robinson coming over, and I think Farrell is off that floater job. You want me to give you this one?”
“I thought you already gave me this one. You got me out of bed at five in the fucking morning.”
“Yeah? I hear you were playing with your cat. How is that crazy fucker, anyway?” Stokovich and Dudley had met once, at a pre-racket racket Kennedy had thrown for one of his buddies in the old Seven Zone, and Stokovich had shown up to do some campaigning. The buddy’s name was Fogarty, and Fogarty was making quite a name for himself in the Organized Crime Task Force, a joint FBI, IRS, Justice Department, and NYPD operation headquartered over on West 57th. It looked like Fogarty was going to ride the Agniello della Croce confessions up to the thirteenth floor. Chief of Detectives Nicastro was saying nice things about Fogarty, so Stokovich wanted Fogarty to say nice things about him to Nicastro. Anyway, the thing had gone a little sour when Stokovich got the idea that it would be amusing to use Kennedy’s electric razor to shave the initials of the Seventh Zone Homicide Squad into Dudley’s back. Kennedy had stayed out of the thing. Stokovich and a mope from Justice who was at the time learning the ropes from Fogarty tried to corner Dudley in the kitchen. It wasn’t the best idea Stokovich had ever had.
While Bruno was talking to him, Kennedy tried to get a look at the lieutenant’s left wrist. The sleeve was too long. Damn, but he loved those heavy gold cuff links. Maybe he wore his sleeves too long to cover up the marks Dudley had given him. Thinking about that made Kennedy glad he hadn’t shot his cat this morning.
“You in there, Eddie?”
“Yes, sir, I’m here. Sorry, I was thinking about Farrell. He beat that one?”
“Yeah. Victim was a hooker from Hunts Point. Looks like the hooker was doing a hose job on one of the truckers up at the market—guy gets a hand up underneath the broad’s skirt and finds out he’s got a boy gobbling on his machinery. Beat the hooker to death. Threw him in the drink off Baretto Point.”
“Baretto Point? How the hell’d the guy float all the way down to the Thirty-fourth Street heliport?”
Stokovich shrugged. “Beats me, Eddie. Anyway, what you got on your sheet right now? You got the Adeline Muro thing?”
“Yeah, but that’s beginning to look a little messy. Serology shows there were two secretors involved, right? Two blood types? A two-on-one breakaway. A cameo belonging to her turned up in a bust uptown but they turned the guy loose for some dumb reason. And we’ve got the Gypsies—looks like they were in on that stabbing over on Van Dam. You’ve got me doing the Green Book too. You could say I got a full sheet.”
“Hey, Eddie … you take the city’s money.”
This was typical homicide talk. Investigators in every Task Force carried massive caseloads, each one spinning away in time, and they scurried from one to the other like a juggler on the Ed Sullivan show keeping his plates spinning on the top of a row of canes. The record of all those cases—the time, date, location, and major circumstances of every homicide the Task Force had been handed that year—was kept in a clothbound ledger, the Green Book. Entries got made in varying hands, in blue ball-point, stamped SOLVED in red ink or noted as OPEN or PENDING. The Green Book was reviewed and updated by any squad man with the time.
Kennedy looked at Stokovich for a long second, trying not to let the prodding set him off. Any
way, the man was right. And the Adeline Muro case was special, a particularly nasty bit of business, now over a week old and still a scar in his memory.
“Yes, sir. I do the city’s work. And I have a lot of it. Gypsies, the Muro thing. The Green Book, and this poor bastard over here. What I want, I think we ought to get up to the Bronx after Mokie Muro. That’s what I’d rather do, tell you the truth. This kid’ll still be dead in the morning but who the fuck knows where Mokie Muro’s gonna be? You ask me, I say he’s hanging out with the Ching-a-lings. You want to make me happy, send me up there.”
Stokovich was silent for a moment. Kennedy watched the crowd sidelong, as if he were unconcerned. In the last few minutes the word had spread all around the area. Close to a hundred people were gathering here and there across the street, straining and staring, talking fast between themselves in soft Cuban Spanish, and the “Swain” jargon blacks use on the streets was carrying in the still air. The sunlight had moved down across “La Colonización” until it reached the dead man. It seemed to Kennedy that the sprawled figure caught in the hot yellow light, hard up against the theatrical background, was there for precisely that reason: to be seen, in the morning, in the sunlight. If that was true, then he had been killed as an example, and the example was meant to be seen by the very people who were now gathering around. Somebody in that collection of closed black faces and Spanish eyes knew the dead man. Maybe he knew the killers too. Kennedy took the camera out again. The cassette was only half-used.
Stokovich looked up as he sensed Kennedy’s attention drifting.
“You figure the perps are in the crowd?” He said it softly, casually.
“It occurred to me. He’s been moved here. I figure they moved him to set an example.”
Stokovich looked around in an offhand way. “So tell the CSU guys to take shots of the crowd, sort of by the way. Don’t make a thing out of it. Why don’t you get one of the ACU guys from the Eighth to get out there and mingle?”
Kennedy had been looking for his man. He didn’t know if Stradazzi was on the street yet. He had spotted three possible undercover guys. What was the color today?
Stokovich was waiting for an answer.
“Good idea, sir. I’ll get right on it.”
Stokovich nodded. “Look, Eddie. You’re gonna have to wait for Quantico to get back to us on the mutilations in the Muro case before we can spare a team for citywide. You take this shmuck here, and I’ll get Fratelli to chase those Armenians, okay? Maybe you can close this one by the end of the shift, hah?”
Kennedy looked at his watch. It was 0800 hours. His workday officially started at 0800 hours this week.
“I’m into overtime by fifteen-hundred hours, sir.”
“Don’t give me that shit, Kennedy. Go get your car!”
The boss went the way he’d come, conveying a sense of urgency—a man full of purpose. When he pulled off he did it fast, and he liked to use the siren. People got out of his way.
As the lieutenant pulled away through the crowd in his new blue Chrysler, Eddie Kennedy felt a look coming from the bystanders. A scruffy little man with long black curly hair and a twitchy way about him was wandering around in front of a knot of Hispanic males. Something about the guy set off a small clear bell in Kennedy’s mind.
So, Harris got me my ACU man, thought Kennedy. Good act. Looks like a junkie from here. Plaid work shirt, do-rag, pointy-toed shoes, pants too short, and baby-blue socks. Don’t tell me baby-blue socks are the ACU code color for the day. Only in Manhattan would they tell a guy to wear baby-blue socks so his fellow officers don’t blow his nuts off one day when he comes pelting down the alleyway with his piece out answering some cop’s Signal Thirteen.
Kennedy spent the next hour overseeing the work of the Crime Scene Unit. Working on his hunches and his observations of the area, Kennedy had widened the crime scene perimeters to include a large section of the street in front of the mural, the roof of the market itself, and a stretch of the sidewalk for forty feet in either direction. He had no solid reason for doing this, but the larger the net the better your chances of catching something. The head of the CSU for this shift was a lanky redheaded cop with blue-white skin and a general air of gloom. He looked mildly dead. Kennedy’s private name for the Forensic technician was Spider, but his real name was Sergeant Alastair Kearny, and he claimed descent from Stephen Kearny, the U.S. Army general who got the Mexican War off to a fine start by annexing Texas for President Polk. Alastair therefore considered it his moral and family duty to loathe all things vaguely Andalusian, which he did with a nicely judged sense of egalitarianism, hating all Hispanic races equally and without passion, serving up a distillation of venom in a half-hearted way, wearily and with little hope that his enmity would be felt as acutely as he would wish.
There were three men in Kearny’s team this morning: the photographer, with his 4 × 5, and a couple of technicians to do the formal sketch, make every measurement imaginable and relate each one to the compass points, and to collect any and all objects, samples, scrapings, and particles that might be on or around the body. It was Kennedy’s job to isolate and identify items of special interest to the investigation, based on his almost intuitive sense of the scene. It was in judgments such as these that the skills and talent of a homicide detective made the most difference. Crime Scene Units would, if asked, spend three days at the scene taking scrapings from anything and everything that had ever come within a block of the place. Good homicide detectives helped to focus this search without being too cavalier about possible clues.
While Kearny was setting up, Kennedy went over to South Frank and poured himself a cup of coffee in the Recorder’s seat. Officer Stokes was standing over by the ribbon, taking notes with a grim intensity. Well, she might not be a sweetheart, but Kennedy figured that her generalized dislike of all things white would insure that she got it all down in print. Haggerty, the older cop who had been on the scene when Kennedy arrived, showed every sign of being a short-timer whittling his stick down and doing as little as possible to risk his pension. Taking on an assignment as Recorder at a crime scene meant risk. He’d have to do overtime, he’d have to do the work, he’d have to get it right, and one way or another he’d have to go to court or see the Assistant District Attorney, and along every step of the way there was ample opportunity to screw up royally. Better to let the uppity shine they’d stuck him with do the tricky stuff. Serve her right, she fucks it up. Kennedy had read all that in the gray defeated contours of Haggerty’s face and come to more or less the same conclusion. Let Stokes do it. At least she’d get it right.
Kennedy leaned back into the black vinyl, propped a foot up on the dashboard, and tried to figure out just where and when he’d got the hook in him over this miserable little killing. It came to him in a minute. They were too fucking cute. Whoever killed this boy was a smartass. If he’d just shot the boy where he stood and walked away, the Department would have had a rat’s chance of finding him, and less chance of getting the DA to take the case. But noooo, as Belushi used to say, but noooo … he had to get cute about it. Kill the kid, leave him lying around on his belly somewhere, dropping skin flakes and physical evidence all over the carpet, and then scoop him up and drive him over to “La Colonización” and dump him in the street. In Kennedy’s street, too. And Kennedy has to get up at five in the morning, on a Monday, and dragass down to this shithole and do his dance just so the smartass could sit at a window somewhere around here, sit there in his purple jockey shorts and his gold earrings, and stuff himself with cold tacos and Coors while he laughed at Kennedy around a mouthful of chili rellenos. And he makes a call to Communications just in case the patrol guys manage to overlook a leaking stiff in the roadway.
Of course there were a couple of puzzles here. Just to make the thing intriguing. For instance, post-mortem lividity fixes, in average room temperature, about eight hours after death. Gravity will pull the blood into the low places of the body; gravity will make it leak out of the nose and
the eyes, out of the mouth. But after a while the blood gets too thick to move, and you can hang the corpse up by its big toe without changing the post-mortem lividity one bit. So Kennedy had made the time of death at five to ten hours into last night. But the lividity was fixed, which meant the body had to have stayed in its original position for at least eight hours, give or take one. Right? Right.
So, where did all the blood come from? Kennedy leaned forward in the seat. He could see the boy’s head from here, lying in a sludge of dark-brown blood. The problem was, how did they get enough blood out of him to carry in a bucket and dump on him here? And how did they stop it from congealing during the eight hours that the body was lying in whatever it was it was lying in?
Well, that was why God made medical examiners. Kearny was making his way over, stepping high and bringing his lanky long legs down in a series of barely coordinated extensions, looking for all the world like a depressed daddy-longlegs.
Close Pursuit Page 4
