Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  Stradazzi sat down on a broken tube chair and hopped it across the linoleum to Kennedy’s desk. Dragging out a pack of Colts, he offered one to Kennedy, lit his own, pushed back off the desk edge with one foot, and nodded at the flag. “Is that story true? About the chopper raid?”

  “More or less. It’s not true that we strafed them.”

  “Only napalm, huh?”

  Kennedy smiled and let it go. “So … let’s hear it.”

  Stradazzi drew on the Colt for a full thirty seconds, obviously pleased with himself.

  “Long version or short version? Yeah, okay. You ever hear of a small-time coke dealer, street name Mantecado?”

  “Ice cream? Yeah, a little bit. So …?”

  “So I’m up against three muchachas doing my weird Ramon come-on come-on baby number, which they are ignoring as usual. One chick, she’s very upset. Muy trastornada. The other girls are telling her to shut up. They say to be smart, not to make a scene. I get the idea that the first chick, she wants to do something. I don’t get the idea that the stiff is, like, her brother or her boyfriend. You know, maybe she knows him from the neighborhood, something like that. Anyway, las muchachas more or less do the number on her and she pulls herself together. I can’t hang around too much, you know. Tip myself. Spent too much time on Ramon to blow Ramon. Anyway, I like Ramon. So—Okay, okay! I’ll rush it. What’s the matter with your back?”

  Kennedy had leaned back in his oak swivel chair, forgetting about the scratches Dudley had left on him. When he did feel them, he yelped and jerked forward again.

  “Nothing. Got a couple of scratches.”

  As soon as he said it, he knew it was a mistake. Stradazzi positively glowed with prurient fire.

  “Ah-hah! Marked you up a bit, huh? Eddie, you gotta watch out for those black broads. Get those legs around you and then they sink a few—”

  “Wasn’t a black broad. It was some Italian broad. Said her name was—”

  “Stradazzi? Very funny, Kennedy. Anyway, the three of them are all togged out in really grubby clothes, clothes no self-respecting hechizita is going to walk around in, even in that shithole. The biggest one—they called her Nadine—she’s carrying an apple basket with one of those claw things in it, and a pair of shears. Look like …”

  “Garden tools?”

  “Yeah, yeah, garden tools. And all of them have their knees all muddied up and worn. Definitely old clothes—clothes like you’d only wear to work in the yard. So—”

  “The Homesteaders’ Association. They’ve got a bunch of vegetable plots, all fenced in, right? Over on Tenth around Avenue C? You follow them there?”

  “Well, I been all over them, right? So I don’t want to get too close. And I wasn’t sure if there was anything to it. Thing was, they left almost right away, and if there wasn’t anything to it, you know, other than the usual brainless shit you get from young Spanish pussy, well, I’d have fucked the operation. So I marked them down and stayed with the people. Heard some of this and some of that. But mostly they were just complaining about how the neighborhood just isn’t the same since they were children and you could only go to the Mission Evangelica y Bautista and say your oraciónes for el pobrecito across the street there. But I did get—”

  “You got diddly. You get this Nadine’s address?”

  “No, but I did get—”

  “You go over there later? To the gardens?”

  “Not in my Ramon rig, I told you. Will you hold off for a second? I got the kid’s momma!”

  “What kid’s momma? The broad’s? How’d you get her momma if you don’t know where the fuck Nadine lives?”

  Stradazzi pushed the tube chair back so far Kennedy was certain he was going straight over and grinned at Kennedy, a huge, self-satisfied, and oddly engaging grin.

  “Jesus, Kennedy, Detective Kennedy, sir, you have some kind of bad mood going on there. You recall, sir, I did mention a coke dealer name of Mantecado? Yesss … Well, Detective Kennedy, sir, I report that said small-time coke dealer owes one of our vice guys a big favor and the vice guy owes me, so he puts the blocks to Mantecado about which you don’t want to know, and the greaser coughs up that one of his shooters-in-training is missing, a pendejo, a putz kid, by the name of Porfirio Magdalena Ruiz, a.k.a. Salto Mortal—which means ‘somersault,’ Detective, sir, in Spanish, sir—and guess who was into the Eighth just this very morning to report on the disappearance of her son, whose name happens to be Porfirio Ruiz? Shall I go on, sir?”

  Stradazzi paused and raised his right eyebrow.

  Kennedy had to grin back.

  “You little bastard! You’ve been shagging me since I got in. Where’s the mother? Christ, you didn’t go off half-cocked here and pick up the mother, did you?”

  Stradazzi looked hurt. “Mapp, Gideon, Massiah, Escobedo, Miranda, Mallory, Elstad …” He pulled up an eyebrow and sent Kennedy a wry look. “I know the rules, Kennedy. I pulled the Missing Persons report. It seems that Mrs. Ruiz has a school picture of her boy, whom she also refers to as Salto—because he could do one from a standing position, go right over in the air and land on his feet again.”

  Kennedy put out a hand. Stradazzi reached into his jacket pocket and passed a 2 × 3 color photo across the littered desk to Kennedy. The boy in the picture was clean and young, with a strong well-made face, dark-brown eyes set well apart, a broad, slightly flat nose, rich blue-black hair, an impish smile, and a good clear intelligence shining out of the photo. A school kid, perhaps closing in on seventeen. There was no resemblance other than a superficial one between this bright teenager and the bloody distorted ruin Kennedy had stood watch over this morning. Kennedy had intended, as a matter of routine, to check out the Missing Persons entries for last night and this morning. He hadn’t done it yet partly because most desk officers won’t even take an MP sheet until twenty-four hours have passed.

  “It could be him. How long’s her kid been missing?”

  “Since around three Sunday afternoon. He works Sundays as a stocker at Los Hermanos Supermarket. That’s why I went after Mantecado.”

  “I was wondering about that.” Kennedy found it hard to pull his eyes off the photo. Kids who looked like that shouldn’t end up as a gutter cutlet for brown rats.

  “Los Hermanos Supermarket is on the SNU shit list for coke and smack dealings. Bag boys been handing it out at the cash registers. Mantecado is always around there, by the door or across the street. When I heard that a Mrs. Ruiz had been in about her son, and that he worked at Los Hermanos, I hit on Street Narcotics for a name.”

  Kennedy got up and came around the desk. He was going to have to see Mrs. Ruiz fairly soon, and he wasn’t looking forward to the interview.

  “Marco, that’s a neat story and I think you’re leaving out a whole bunch of shit you think I shouldn’t know about. Has somebody federal got his little fingers into Los Hermanos? I’m going to have to know sooner or later, if this Mantecado shit is connected.”

  Stradazzi shrugged, letting the chair come forward.

  “I got a link. It’s your problem now. Also you should know, the word is this Nadine broad, she’s one of Mantecado’s best customers. And she fucks who he tells her. You follow?”

  Kennedy followed just fine. That was the trouble with Alphabet City, with any crime-prone location in New York. You couldn’t take three steps to the right without tripping over a Narcotics stakeout or a DEA/FBI/NYPD Task Force operation, or Ward’s latest Street Narcotics Apprehension Program. And whenever drugs came into the picture, all the fountains got muddied up. Maybe you had to bust a guy and you get a polite fuck-off from your Detective Supervisor—no no no can’t touch that little shit. He’s crucial to somebody else’s investigation. Federal, state, local, Joint Force, U.N. police, aces within eights, games within games, thousands of games and all the players invisible, moving their markers on a cut-glass game board. You had to shine your light just so, if you wanted to see the rules.

  “So you just lucked out with Man
tecado?”

  Stradazzi stood up and walked to the door, turning to face Kennedy just as he reached it.

  “Sir, I’m not saying that there aren’t some things going on here about Los Hermanos. But I don’t think your case is going to be affected by it, whatever it is. I’d have been told to piss off otherwise.”

  Kennedy fought back a number of conflicting emotions. He had spent a few years in Narcotics himself. He got his Gold Third Grade from Narcotics work. It was a messy world, a brutal world, and it marked everyone who moved in it, cop or runner, dealer or snitch, major league with a snake-line straight into Cartagena or just a small-time banker in the back of the poolroom. Drugs had made the South Bronx what it was, and Eddie Kennedy had gotten all of the South Bronx he could handle three years ago. He wanted nothing more to do with it, and nothing more to do with narcotics on any side of the law.

  Stradazzi shifted from one foot to the other. Something had come into the sunny room that neither man liked.

  “Marco, I’m going to talk to Mrs. Ruiz, and I’ll want to bounce this Nadine kid, see what she has to say. I think you did good work this morning, and I’ll get Stokovich to put in a commendation, the full five one-sixty-twos.”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir. They told me about you. But?”

  Kennedy said nothing for about ten seconds. “No, there’s no ‘but.’ You did good work. I appreciate it, and I’ll see to it that you get something out of it. See you downstairs in a minute?”

  Stradazzi relaxed again, pulled his mouth around in that sardonic way. “Okay … thanks, Kennedy. Hasta!”

  Kennedy listened to the ACU cop racketing down the stairs. There was always that shock, whenever you ran into the high-voltage underground cable: the hidden agenda. Cops from other cities, maybe they had the same trouble. But no place in the world was like New York. So many agencies playing so many games, guarding their cases, stealing witnesses—the constant sniper fire of jurisdictional warfare. Cop solidarity was a myth for the moviegoing suckers. Time was, when you were back in uniform, you could have trusted your partner. But Kennedy had no partner. Homicide cops worked alone. Now and then you ran into something like this, like a wind in a sealed room or a darker shadow in a dark alley. A hint here, a breath there. A report killed. A case closed suddenly. You hardly ever found out the whole story. If you did, it never made you feel good.

  Kennedy’s shots were ready at the shop on 23rd Street. He riffled through them in the detective’s car. It was a new one, a Chrysler with tan vinyl seats, power windows, even an air conditioner. Stokovich had left the permit and the keys on his desk, along with a note asking Kennedy to call him at home at the end of the day. Stokovich lived up in Westchester County, in a tract house north of Yonkers. A very nice place, so Kennedy had heard. He’d never been asked up, but then he had never invited Stokovich up to his place in the Catskills.

  The shots were excellent, sharp clear color photos of the scene and the body itself. He took out the Missing Persons file on Porfirio Magdalena Ruiz. There was no discernible similarity between the dead boy in the street and the school shot of Ruiz. But Kennedy knew it was the same kid, and he could never have told you why.

  Mrs. Ruiz’s file showed an address in the Riis houses, one of the projects on Avenue D. Apartment 556. She worked as something called a binder, in a factory over on the West Side. She would be at work right now. Kennedy checked his watch. It was 1151 hours. Nine minutes to noon. He had a date with Charlie Marcuse at the M.E.’s office over on East 33rd at noon. He closed the file and pulled out into the traffic on 23rd Street. He used the siren now and then on the way up. Well, that’s what it was for, wasn’t it?

  Marcuse smelled of ammonia and brandy. Kennedy put a hip up on an empty stainless-steel gurney and watched old Charlie Marcuse, M.E. extraordinaire and a forensic pathologist for thirty-one years, struggling with his surgical gloves. There were four stainless tables in this part of the center. Each table had a little wooden pedestal at one end, a perforated steel sheet running its length, and a set of double sinks and taps at the other end. A large scale was suspended above each of the perforated steel tables. A white enamel basin hung from each scale. A twin set of fluorescent light banks and an adjustable high-intensity light on an articulated arm provided illumination for each table. The walls were solid ceramic tile, moss-green in color, and the floor was covered with Armstrong Cushion Floor or something like that. Couldn’t have the M.E.’s getting shin splints.

  “No other customers today, Charlie?”

  Marcuse snugged the gloves down over the sleeves of his lab coat, sniffed at Kennedy through his gold-wires, and nodded at the attendant, Mervyn Polk. The man walked off toward the storage facilities down the hall. Kennedy had been there many times. A long room with a wall of stainless-steel lockers, temperature controls above each heavy door. The lockers themselves were large enough to hold a full-size gurney, and each gurney held one corpse. A shelf underneath each gurney held whatever personal effects the victim might have had.

  “Eddie, we will never lack for customers here. Dying is the one thing you can count on everyone to do sooner or later. Say, Eddie, did you ever consider that the last thing a man wants to do—”

  “Is the last thing he does? Gee, Charlie, I don’t think I have. That’s a wonderful thought. I’m going to have to get somebody to sew that into my pajamas.”

  “Fact is, we do have someone else due. Mondays are odd days, Eddie. You’d think people would get up to most of their shenanigans on Friday or Saturday night. But now and then you get a Monday—people are down, depressed, maybe the wife’s been a special pain this morning.”

  “That what you have? A domestic?”

  Marcuse stretched his arms up into the air, flexing his knotted fingers, reaching up to the ceiling. “Aaah … wooof! Not as limber as I used to be. What? Oh, yes. Yes, a sad one this—young wife, got a small baby boy, so I hear. Next door neighbors hear a fuss on Saturday night. But this is a good neighborhood, and in good neighborhoods the good neighbors mind their own business. Just ask Kitty Genovese, right? Anyway, the husband calls in, he’s a wreck, just got home, found his young wife nude, beaten to death. Terrible ruckus. Everybody up in arms. Black menace in the streets. Who could have done this? Alarums and excursions, that sort of thing.”

  “Where is this? Up in the East Sixties?”

  “Yes. You heard about this?”

  “No. Just sounds like the East Sixties.”

  “Yes. That it do. Well, anyway, the gendarmerie arrive, encounter distraught hubby wringing hands upon the stoop. First Officer is guarding the scene. First Officer reports that hubby claims to have found wife in the bathroom, nude, in predictable physical disarray. Beaten to death, other ugly imputations. Detective examines wife and detects petechial hemorrhages in both lids.”

  “Suffocation?”

  “The very one. Also, she’s been dead rather longer than hubby would have us believe.”

  Kennedy shrugged. “Nearest and dearest.”

  Marcuse smiled at the old homicide axiom. “Yes … Well, here’s the man of the hour now.”

  The attendant pushed a gurney in. The body on it was covered by a plain white sheet. Kennedy noted the arrangement of the limbs.

  “Rigor all gone, Charlie?”

  Marcuse nodded, drawing back the sheet. “Yes. As supple as a willow now. Passed very quickly.”

  Kennedy looked on as Marcuse flipped on the overhead and adjusted his microphone. The silent attendant flicked on the fluorescent bank. The body was clothed, still bloody, still a ruin. Kennedy opened his evidence cases and laid out the eleven Instamatic crime-scene shots for Marcuse to refer to if he had need.

  “Charlie … you think the rapid passage of rigor is significant here? Anything suggestive of a drug or storage?”

  Marcuse shook his head, dislodging a strand of silky gray hair. In the glare of the overhead, Kennedy could see that there was a yellow undertone to the pathologist’s hair. Charlie was aging rapidly
these days. Kennedy would miss the old bastard, and who the hell would replace him? Some slick from State with a Fiber-glas suit and the personality of a wolverine. Likely.

  “No, for God’s sake, Eddie, it’s almost ninety degrees out there. We’re lucky he’s not rancid. Got your things together?”

  The attendant had delivered a series of wooden probes, plastic jars, vials, slides. There were a number of tissue and fluid samples to be taken. It was Kennedy’s job to witness the process and to provide the evidential chain required by Criminal Procedure Law. Marcuse had anticipated many of Kennedy’s requirements. It was one of the joys of working with the man. He thought like a detective, and he wasn’t shy about making his own suggestions. Few defense counsels tried to challenge forensic evidence developed in an autopsy performed by Charles Marcuse.

  Marcuse shot Kennedy a look from over the top of his glasses. “Mr. Kennedy. I give you the choice today. What will it be?”

  Kennedy thought for a few seconds. “The one with that violin solo? The one that crashes about for a while and then the violin takes off on its own?”

  Marcuse sighed and frowned at Kennedy. “The ‘one that crashes about for a while’! Do I take it that you’re referring to ‘Scheherazade’?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “Liked it, did you?”

  Kennedy grinned at him over the corpse. “Yeah! Neat beat, and okay lyrics. I give it a seven.”

  Marcuse and Von Karajan got under way at around the same time. The music helped. But not much.

  As Mervyn and Marcuse shifted the body onto the autopsy table, Kennedy made certain that Officer Harris had been in to sign the PI form required by the Criminal Procedure Law. The PI, or Police Identification form, was a legal-size document detailing the circumstances under which the First Officer had discovered the body, his shield and precinct number, the location of the body, whatever he might have been able to discover regarding the event, and his official identification of the body now on the table as the same body he had discovered under the street mural in Alphabet City. Bodies had been mixed up before this, to the discomfort of all concerned except the defendant. It was upon details such as this that the evidential case rested, and since New York was averaging 1,800 to 1,900 murders a year, the NYPD and the Medical Examiner’s office were fanatically scrupulous about documentation. Kennedy kept a copy of Harris’s PI form in his case file, along with all the other paperwork done so far on this case. As Marcuse and Mervyn Polk finished the transfer, Kennedy put the file aside and walked over to a point just a little behind and to the left of the Assistant Medical Examiner. Technically the medico-legal pathological examination was the responsibility of the doctor alone, but it was up to Kennedy to request, and to witness, any particular procedures or samplings that he might consider pertinent to the case. Kennedy had a number of these in mind, beginning with the victim’s shoes.