Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  “Yeah, that one. Get him to tell you about it sometime, but wait till you get this perp down to Central Booking. You get Wolfie on to that, he’s liable to eat that sorry son of a bitch by the light of a full moon. Take a note, will you?”

  Kennedy cleared his pad and took a pencil out of a brass artillery shell on his desk. “Yeah, I’m listening.”

  Stokovich’s voice dropped, and his tone steadied. “Okay. First, about your little MacIlwhoosis there, I got a call from our buddy Shodiker at Midtown North Street Crime. He gave me a sheet on a weird little fucker named Ahmad something, also known as Ronnie Holloway. This Ahmad kid, he’s—get this—an albino nigger. Great, huh? He’s an albino and he runs a street crew on Forty-second Street. He got nailed by some Portables after he pulled a jostle operation on a pair of out-of-towners at Forty-eighth and Seventh Avenue. They pulled him out of a booth at the Show World—”

  That rang a bell. “This guy, Spiegel, he said something about there bein’ a racket in the basement. A bunch of patrol guys dragged an albino out of a booth and whacked him up pretty good. Is this the same …”

  “Oh, noooo, Eddie, it must have been another albino nigger perp who was there that night. There was a convention or something. They were bussing them in from Yonkers.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant, so then what?”

  “Well, they have this little shit on a whole mess of stuff—stolen property, jostling, resisting, wounding. He said he had AIDS, bit one of the officers, so they had to take him to Bellevue—”

  “I’ll bet they did.”

  “And when they get him up to the station he starts giving up every perp and skell he can think of. Anyway, in the middle of a whole lot of other shit, he gives them a pair of muggers he’d seen earlier, who he called Krush and Jimmy Jee.”

  “Jimmy Jee is Denzel Willoughby. Ex-Denzel Willoughby.”

  “Yeah, I know. I sent Farrell over to the morgue and he made the kid from his CATCH shot.”

  “You sent Ollie to do that?”

  Stokovich chuckled into the phone.

  “So, anyway, what we have here puts your guy and the victim in the same location, seen in each other’s company, on the street, right?”

  “Lieutenant, you think this Holloway kid’ll hold?” up?”

  “Hey, none of this’ll hold up without a confession. I just want you to lay it on your guy at the right moment.”

  “Yeah, it’ll help. But so far, all we have on this kid”—Kennedy dropped his voice and looked across at the holding cell—“all we can do him for is a C felony assault. We’ve also got him for possession of stolen goods, robbery, but I think we ought to go for second-degree felony murder under Section One Twenty-five of the Code.”

  “Which part? Intentional death? Or reckless endangerment? You can’t get him for ‘death while escaping’ because the victim was a participant. And if you’re going for reckless, how the hell are you going to back up the ‘depraved indifference’ part? What you got here, if we’re lucky, maybe a B felony manslaughter, first degree. Kid was on the run after a felony assault, so they’re gonna make a case for ‘extreme emotional disturbance.’ That’s definite manslaughter. I hear Peruggio says there are no witnesses?”

  “That’s what he says. I think we ought to do some canvassing of the Twenty-third Street station, see if some of the regulars can remember anything. The token seller, maybe the driver—he was right there when the Willoughby kid went over. I’ll want to talk to the Transit guys. If we can show that there was a fight going on, something like that?”

  “This is thin stuff, Eddie. I was hoping it would come together stronger than this. Right now, you’ll never get this by the DA. Even if the kid rolls over, he’s going to retract the whole thing in court. You’ll have to video the whole confession, and for God’s sake I hope he isn’t marked up, because if he’s showing anything on the video they’ll get us for duress.”

  “He’s not. He’s dirty—he slept outside all night. But he came in like a zombie.”

  “Drugs? Was he cranked up when he did it?”

  “You think he’ll go for diminished capacity? I can fill the place with people who’ll say he was in damn fine shape when he tear-assed all over Harlem with the cops at his tail. And his uncle says the kid is not a user. Anyway, he’s criminally liable for the Spiegel assault, even if Willoughby did the wet work. Frankly, I think we’ve got a shot at second-degree felony murder.”

  “Aah, Eddie. This has ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ written all over it. But you give it a shot. And make sure you have your notes complete on his visible demeanor, because they are sure going to try for diminished capacity and you’re going to have to show clearly that he was sharp and aware when he talked to you. Right now, you’ve got him nailed for robbery second, because by Spiegel’s own account it was this Denzel shit who did the damage, and your guy was only an accessory. Shit. I was hoping this would pull together more. You see this holding up under Section Seventy in the Procedure Law? Have we got ‘reasonable cause to believe’? Have we got ‘weight and persuasiveness’? I don’t see it.”

  “Are you kidding? What kind of ‘reasonable cause’ do you need? If we can use Holloway and somebody like the token seller at the Twenty-third Street station to put them together and if the driver can give us some support—maybe even get an Information from the driver—then he’s gone.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Eddie. Even if he confesses, we’re going to have to find a fuck of a lot of corroborative testimony, and I don’t see that happening. People go deaf and dumb in something like this. You’re sure not going to get anybody on a Hundred Fourteenth Street to help you out, even if he did ace one of his own people. Have you talked to Sorvino yet? Maybe he can help us out.”

  “The Duck? He won’t go for this one unless we can nail the kid eight ways from Tuesday. You think he wants to screw up his conviction ratio?”

  And back, and forth. Maybe we could this? What about that? as Kennedy and Stokovich tried to step carefully through the thickets and tiger traps of Criminal Procedure Law on their way to laying a charge that had some chance of sticking. It was a typical procedure, repeated in every squad room and station house all over the five boroughs. Finding the criminal was perhaps the simplest part of the process. It was the pattern in New York for one out of a hundred felony cases actually to proceed to trial. It takes an average of fifteen court appearances to dispose of one felony charge, and there are close to 40,000 felony and misdemeanor charges before the courts in any single year. Going by the odds, crime does pay.

  Given the sheer frequency of criminal events in New York City, the egregious business of the plea bargain—what Kennedy and Stokovich referred to as “Let’s Make a Deal”—is arguably the only way in which the legal system can make a dent in the case load.

  Which is just fine, if what you are after is legality, but not so fine if you seek simple and unequivocal justice. Both men knew going into it that their chances of securing charges of murder in the second degree against Dennis McEnery for the death of his accomplice were slender, but until they had made the attempt, the matter was still up in the air. There were several reasons for the attempt, starting with the simple fact that they had some free time to put a man on it. And it was advantageous for both of them to have Kennedy in hot pursuit because it gave them a way to stall the investigation of Kennedy’s alleged conduct violation.

  At the heart of it, they went after the case because some good could come out of the pursuit, even if charges were never laid. Dennis McEnery was going to face some charges, and this time it was unlikely that he would get a simple suspended sentence. He was now over sixteen, so this would be the first felony charge he would have to face unsheltered by Section 30 of the Penal Code, which suggests that a person under the age of sixteen is not criminally responsible for his conduct. There were some exceptions to this in Paragraph Two, dealing with violent offenses, but as a general tendency, minors got comparatively gentle treatment in the New York court system—gen
tleness which most police officers felt was quite inappropriate.

  In the McEnery case, both Stokovich and Kennedy knew that the possibility of a murder charge, even if a conviction was unlikely, would give the prosecutor an extra card when it came to the inevitable plea bargain with McEnery’s lawyer. And at the bottom of the list for everybody else, but right at the top for the detective, was the emotional and moral certitude that the kid had gone on the street to rob, that he had robbed someone, and that he had then pushed a living person off the platform of the uptown IND at 23rd and Eighth Avenue. Whether or not the kid went to jail for it, somebody ought to fuck up his weekend over it. Most of the time, that was the only satisfaction that a detective would ever get.

  There was one other factor at work in the calculus of crime and punishment, and that was the political nature of the office of District Attorney. Most DAs do give a visceral damn about crime. If they’re still alive below the cortex, they feel the sense of outrage that violent crime produces in a human heart.

  But the human heart plays no role whatsoever in the courtroom. In that arena, the blood is always dry and the visible wounds are either healed or buried. All that remains is the cerebral combat of lawyers on the paper battlefield of the Code and the Constitution. Whatever may have happened in the heat of the moment, whatever may have been done and whatever may have been endured, all that remains is dry prose.

  So the game is played for purposes other than vengeance, and one of the prizes is reputation. Thomas Puccio rode his reputation as a successful prosecutor into stardom as the defense attorney in the media circus known as the Von Bülow trial. He was hired for the defense because of his record of successful prosecutions. He was made, as they say, in criminal court. The same forces are making national stars out of Rudolph Giuliani and Robert Morgenthau, both active DAs in the New York area.

  It is hardly surprising that other Assistant DAs in the region want to secure an impressive reputation that may someday translate into an offer from a powerhouse law firm, and the best way to do it is to make damn sure you get a lot of convictions. One of the ways to get a lot of convictions is to make certain you go into court with the odds in your favor. Judges don’t like to be seen as Torquemadas, so they shy away from hard, draconian sentences for grievous crimes. And they don’t appreciate seeing their calendars cluttered with cases that could have been plea-bargained away. All these factors create a desire in the District Attorney’s office for extra depth in the evidentiary material and for three or four different paths leading to an almost certain conviction. They see nothing to be gained in proceeding without evidence in depth. They frequently refuse cases that have only a reasonable chance of success. They want to win in court, and they want to win as often as possible.

  Part of what drove Kennedy crazy about his life was the number of times he had to drag a violent criminal back in front of a judge before the son of a bitch finally got a sentence that would slow him down for a while.

  Kennedy and Stokovich tangoed like this until Maksins came back with corned-beef sandwiches and coffee from the All-Nite-Rite-Bite around the corner. The steam-table scent and the tang of Gulden’s mustard reminded them that chocolate chip cookies are not the staff of life, whatever they think up on Columbus. Kennedy took his and attacked it as Stokovich gave him some advice about the Internal Affairs Department.

  “Eddie, I’ve talked to downtown about this and even the guys in IAD think it’s bullshit. All they want is, you should come down, talk to them, tell them your side. They close the case, you go back to work. Thing is, you don’t go down, then they rack you up for refusing to cooperate.”

  Kennedy snarled around a mouthful of coleslaw. “Fuck that, Lieutenant. I’ve been around the track on this one. I can’t think of anything I said yesterday that could have offended anybody. Last year these assholes put a captain on my case for a full two months over a few pictures I used in a lecture at John Jay. Some female in the crowd thought they were sexist! Can you believe it? Yeah, I know you know. The point is, I don’t want to give those guys the idea that I’m going to belly-down there because one of their fucking stoolies heard me say a bad word. It’s the … the precedent I don’t like. You already know all this, Lieutenant.”

  Stokovich sighed into the phone. “Eddie, the thing is, sooner or later you’re gonna have to tell them your side. Why not tomorrow?”

  “No, not tomorrow. Not next week. I’m just fucking tired of this shit. They haven’t got anything better to do? Isn’t there some wounded cop, they can go visit him in the hospital, try to get him for a breach of the uniform regs? Or maybe there’s some poor putz on the Fixer at Beth Israel, he’s sleeping in the box. Land o’ Goshen, Bruno. It’s a fucking cop crime wave!”

  “All right, Eddie, you’re not gonna go down, give them the satisfaction. Maybe you’ll think it over tonight, you’ll come up with a different attitude tomorrow. In the meantime you’re doing such a nice job out there, snagging the perps and whatnot, how about you take a boo up around the Bronx tomorrow? I got some good news for you. An RMP from the Four-Oh saw a man answering Mokie Muro’s description going into the Blue Flame bar at Third and a Hundred Thirty-eighth Street around thirteen-thirty hours today.”

  “Jesus! They get him?”

  “Nah, the mopes. Said they had a perp in the back. Some Crime guys checked it out later but no luck. You get your butt up there and do better, right?”

  There was a short scuffle over at Maksins’ desk as he and Krush worked out a divergence of opinion about the spelling of his mother’s name. Maksins was taking the kid through the preliminary paperwork.

  “Look, Lieutenant, we’re going to have to get this kid booked. Let me poke around the area tomorrow morning, and you get that Crime Unit car at the Four-Oh to see if they can pick up Mokie Muro in their sector. If they can’t and I get nothing from the finks, maybe I’ll take a spin up there in the afternoon. How’s it goin’ with the Ruiz thing?”

  There was a short break here. Kennedy could hear the wheels going around. “Well, buddy, it’s a bag of snakes, like you said. It’s connected to a crank factory, and the case goes to New Jersey so the FBI is all over it. I’m trying to get them to see our boy Porfirio as something separate, but they’re not going for it. I’m down to taking notes and they’re telling me that when the hammer comes down on their bad guy I’ll get a piece of him for the Ruiz trial.”

  “Sure, boss. Unless it’s big enough for him to get under the witness protection thing. Do I get to hear some more of this later?”

  “Yeah, as soon as I do. Semper Fi, Eddie. Say good-night to Wolfie for me.”

  Sorvino’s line was busy. Kennedy and Maksins Mirandized the McEnery kid again, and pinned the Miranda card to his sheet. They listed him for felony assault, robbery second degree, and possession of stolen goods. According to the law, they could not question him about the death of his accomplice unless they were prepared to charge him with the murder, and that would require a separate Miranda reading. All they could hope for right now was that the kid would stew quietly over his unspoken crimes, and that he wouldn’t feel compelled to blurt out a confession.

  Outside the house the cars were packed into the narrow cross street like cast-iron bulls in a pen, bellowing and bawling, butting each other. The hoarse curses of an angry cabbie carried over the din. Evening had come down on Manhattan. On both of the river drives the cars formed a long chain of winking tail-lights, stretching endlessly up the FDR and the Hudson River Parkway, lining up at the white-tile mouths of the Midtown and the Holland tunnels, inching across the Triborough Bridge, the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, and the Williamsburg into the bedroom communities of Maspeth and Hackensack and Long Island City. The squad room windows turned a deep smoky blue under a skin of fine gray dust. The Westclox on the wall sounded off the seconds in a taut little click and the city rolled eastward toward whatever the hell the morning had in mind.

  It was funny, Kennedy thought. It was funny about truth. People behaved as if i
t were something you could catch in a bottle and take to court: This is precisely what happened and that’s the guy who did it; he says he didn’t but I have the truth here and it says he did. Kennedy sat there and listened to Dennis McEnery go over the events of the previous night in a weary, half-sullen, half-defeated whine, and with each pass Kennedy could feel the truth fade. There was never a crime done and a criminal caught where the man failed to come up with three good reasons why he could not have done it and another six to explain why he had to do it, why it was the only reasonable thing to do. It was a bitch just trying to keep it straight in your own mind, to remember just what happened and who the hell did it.

  The phone rang as Maksins threw the kid a pad of paper and told him to write out the story his way, describe just how he had been tricked by Jimmy Jee into holding on to a bunch of cash, a gold-plated Seiko watch, and a Marine Midland credit card made out to a James Spiegel.

  “Yeah, Kennedy here?”

  “Is that Detective Edward Kennedy?”

  A woman’s voice. Nobody Kennedy knew.

  “Please hold for Mr. Sorvino.” There was nothing in her tone to support the “please.” Wait or fuck yourself—it was the same thing to her.

  He waited. Where the hell did Sorvino get a secretary to make his calls? How much staff did they have over there?

  “Eddie?”

  “Yeah, Genno. Since when do you rate a secretary?”

  “Ms. Fremont is not a secretary. She’s clerking this fall and has kindly agreed to assist me in clearing up some critical case loads. I’m going over a set of briefs with her right now.”

  Kennedy wasn’t going after that one. “So?”

  “So, I haven’t been getting your summaries on anything like a regular basis. That’s par. But that stiff we caught yesterday, the Ruiz case? Where do we stand on that?”

  Tricksy tricksy tricksy.

  Did he know and was he hoping Kennedy would breach security? Or had nobody told him a thing, so that he was trying to get it out of Kennedy? He was a pretty junior ADA and it was possible that the honchos in the DA’s office were kissing him off with minor shit and keeping the sweet stuff for themselves.