Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  Maksins stopped a few paces away, thinking.

  “Yeah, I will. The Angels are asking for it—they’ll get it now. Things were just ticking over. But when they start taking out Grand Jury witnesses, it’s a new game. You’re not going up there on your own?”

  “No, I’ll snag somebody. Maybe I’ll get Frank—he’s good company.”

  “Yeah. Frank’s okay. Eddie … I’m sorry if I rubbed you a little raw today. You were right about that kid. It wasn’t worth it.”

  Kennedy lifted up his shot glass and blessed it.

  “What is, Wolfie? Give my regards to Kolchinski.”

  Maksins was gone. Kennedy killed his drink, feeling just a little lonely. A woman smiled at him as he looked around for a waiter. Her face was familiar. Irene … Eileen … something. Very dark hair, big eyes, and pale skin with a network of good lines around the eyes.

  Elaine. That was her name.

  “Elaine?”

  “Eddie. You look lousy. Come over here and tell me why.”

  Elaine was a caseworker for Human Resources, so they had a lot in common, including the good sense not to talk about anything remotely resembling their jobs on a fine fall night at Brew’s.

  She talked with detachment and irony about her last Yuppie stud, a broker for Chase Manhattan who had “bi-coastal goals” and the ethics of a piranha. Kennedy told her about the Nexus project, playing Sorvino’s part up to and including his Westchester accent.

  Other people came in, friends of Eddie’s from Ryan’s, off-duty uniform guys from Midtown South. Around midnight they were heavily into a discussion about Daniel Perlmutter, the Giuliani aide who had stolen a half-million dollars’ worth of heroin and cocaine from the evidence vaults to finance his infatuation with an actress named Stacy Hunnicut. Then there was the Alex Liberman bribery scandal to deal with, and the rumors of corruption in the Parking Violations Bureau, and the growing power of Russian Jewish criminal conspiracies, and the fraud charges against Sallie Mathis for illegal key-charges collected from welfare tenants. Elaine contributed some stories about mismanagement between the owners of the Carter and the Holland hotels and the Manhattan Human Resources Agency. Welfare cases were being warehoused in the Carter and the Holland at room rates approaching $2,000 a month. The rooms were roach-infested, crawling, filthy horrors. Babies were being sodomized in their cribs. Children were coming to her with venereal infections of the lips. A mother was caught renting her seven-year-old daughter to addicts at the Holland. They had ended up talking about their jobs after all.

  Elaine’s last name was Farraday and she lived in a co-op in the East Sixties, only a few blocks from Kennedy’s building. They walked home up Second Avenue, past the shuttered stores, stopping for a while at the promenade in Tudor City, watching the Secret Service cars prowl around the UN neighborhood, enjoying the fleeting illusion that it was still 1935, believing through an act of will in the lyrics of Cole Porter, choosing their blocks carefully, talking quietly and easily about the drought, about the mayoral race, about Sidney Sheldon’s latest.

  She was taller than Kennedy by an inch, perhaps two. Her black hair was heavy and glossy. When she started a sentence, she would look down, taking in a breath, making a gesture with her right hand, a gathering-in motion. Kennedy watched the way the streetlights changed the contours of her face. He altered his pace to match hers. Feeling a sense of daring, he took her arm at the corner of 57th and First. He was still holding her left wrist and she had laid her fingers along the top of his hand as they crossed the broad concrete space beneath the Roosevelt Island tramline. The air smelled of hot coffee, popcorn, exhaust fumes, dead leaves, muddy curbstone pools. Cabs and cars rushed by, other couples followed a few paces behind, or passed them going down Second with their heads together, disputing, intent, connected. Content.

  Under her canopy, in the bright-blue light from a courtyard statue, she offered him coffee. He said thank you but no, he really had to go. She withdrew imperceptibly, warming only a little when he asked her if she wanted to go up to the Catskills for the weekend. She said she might—would he call her on Friday afternoon? Yes, said Kennedy, he would do that.

  Eddie felt it was better to sleep alone. His nights were not the nights he wanted to share with anyone.

  Calvin Jackson was standing out in front of Kennedy’s apartment building when Kennedy came down the street. He had a garden hose in his hand and he was playing a soft stream of water over the glass doors and the terazzo floor under the canopy.

  “Hey, Jackson!” Kennedy called to him, absurdly delighted to find someone awake at this hour. “Don’t you read the papers? We’re in a drought-type situation here, go-status-wise!”

  Jackson’s smile was just a bit thin.

  “Evening, Eddie.”

  There was a tint in the pool of water. The palest rose. “Calvin, that’s blood. What happened?”

  “Rats, Eddie. I found one here, t’other over that way. By the tree. Fearsome fight, I guess. Look.”

  Jackson pulled a carton out from the shrubs. Two large brown rats lay in the bottom, clotted and torn. Brown incisors caught the light, a sickly wet sheen. And there was blood on one torn muzzle. Tiny slivers of black fur lay up underneath the rows of teeth, along blue gums.

  Jackson looked at him apologetically. “I checked your apartment, Eddie. Hope you don’t mind? But he ain’t there. He ain’t nowhere.”

  Kennedy stopped looking for Dudley around seven in the morning. There were just too many places where a hurt cat could go, too many window wells and Dumpsters, crates, stoops, shrub rows. If he could make it home, he would. If he couldn’t make it home, then he wouldn’t.

  Jackson met him in the lobby with a mug of hot black coffee and a promise to keep his eye open for Kennedy’s cat. Kennedy thanked him and went back up to his apartment to shower and change. He knew when he opened the door that Dudley was not there.

  CHAPTER 10

  WEDNESDAY

  Oliver Farrell was the only man in the squad room when Kennedy labored up the stairs at 0800 hours on Wednesday morning. Farrell liked to keep his coat off in the squad room, so that he could show off his shoulder holster. The sight of Farrell fussing about the common room—sorting out the interdepartmental mailbag, cleaning out the coffee maker, setting it up to brew another ten cups of a coffeelike substance—incongruously suggestive of a solicitous aunt, put Kennedy into a slightly better frame of mind. It held up through a half-hour of Farrell’s talk as the man wandered through the last twenty-four hours of station-house life, rattling on discursively about things Kennedy didn’t give a damn for, occasionally dropping into sententious, sepulchural tones, touching upon matters that Kennedy cared quite passionately about, but not in any way that Farrell could understand, and from a body of experience unguessed-at.

  There was mail for Kennedy. A peremptory summons from the Detective Division, instructing Kennedy to present himself at the Bureau offices at 1000 hours on the following Tuesday, to be interviewed by representatives of the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity with regard to “certain allegations of racist and prejudicial statements” which were “alleged to have been made by Detective Kennedy,” such complaints having been registered with the Internal Affairs investigators, so on and so forth … the essence of which quite clearly suggested that he had better present his ass downtown on time, and with his hat in his hand, to discuss the matter, or face “such disciplinary steps as may be considered appropriate” by Kennedy’s superiors in consultation with the Departmental Advocate’s office.

  Kennedy found a note from Maksins taped to his phone.

  Eddie …

  Got cracked up a bit last night. Rita does not know. She’s asleep until two this afternoon. Can you give her a buzz at 1430 hours? Tell her I’m on a surveillance detail but I’ll be home around dinnertime? Don’t let Farrell call her. He always makes it sound like I’m out screwing around. I’m getting some X-rays and a tape job, and I’m supposed to hang around for an EEG and some
tests. I’ll see you in the house later.

  Called you at four this morning. No answer. You finally notice that number with the black hair? She was staring at the back of your head all night.

  Thanks.

  Wolfgar.

  P.S. No, I can’t call Rita myself. I can’t talk too well with my ribs all banged up. She’ll think I’m either shot or getting laid. Be a buddy? OK?

  “Farrell! What the hell happened to Wolfie last night? What’s this shit about getting his ribs taped up?”

  Farrell looked up at him from the pages of the Green Book, over his glasses, slyly ingenuous.

  “Well, shit, Kennedy. We tried to reach you all night, but you were out screwing around as usual. They eighty-sixed one of the Angel witnesses last night. Stokovich got the DA’s office to come up with a warrant and they punched a raid into the clubhouse on Avenue D. The whole nine yards. ESU brought the ram. Wolfie and the lieutenant went in after them and it looks like Wolfie caught a tire iron across the ribs. It took Stokovich and two of the ESU guys to drag him off this biker, big as Vermont. Wolfie fucked him up pretty good. They say the guy’s gonna lose his eye. They called from Complaint Review. That Conroy character, the corporate lawyer for the Angels? He laid a brutality charge on Wolfie, along with excessive force, abusive language, a whole bunch of shit. Gonna look pretty hinky on his Performance Profile. Personnel is already looking at his charge rate, so he’s gonna have the shoo-fly brigade sitting on his head. Conroy is talking civil suit, damages, maybe lay an assault charge. Loony tunes, Kennedy!”

  “The boss was in on it? Bruno went through the door?”

  “That he did, Eddie. This Angel thing, the Grand Jury is going to take it all the way. The Strike Force is onto it. Anyway, the lieutenant took it personal when they whacked the witness. Nobody was supposed to know about him, but somebody decided to take him out anyway, just to be on the safe side. Oh, yeah, I have a message for you from the lieutenant.” Farrell fumbled about in his center drawer, flipping out old cigarette packs, note papers, crumpled file folders, his thin white fingers riffling through the mess, nicotine stains showing between the index and second fingers of his left hand. “Here it is.”

  Kennedy took the paper. It had been folded as if it had been put inside an envelope, but there was no envelope. Farrell had probably opened it, destroying the envelope as he did so. Information was Farrell’s stock in trade, his source of influence and his value to the squad. It was typical of him to conceal the news about Maksins’ injury and to open private communications. Kennedy had gotten used to it. It was Farrell’s sense of theater. Maybe the man was a lightweight, but he wasn’t an intriguer. He just liked to know things, to be on the inside.

  Eddie.

  You are going to have to go see the OEEO people on Tuesday. There’s no way around it. I tried to get the boss to shitcan the hearing. I said you would settle for a command discipline and that would be it. But the IAD guys have their noses out of joint over you not coming in when you were told. I said you were in hot pursuit, but they say that racism in the department is a cancer and you have to clear the air.

  I did find out who the complainant was. It was Bergman. An unidentified MOS reported you as using racially prejudicial language at a crime scene. “Grossly abusive” is the line I like best. You’re supposed to have said “Hebe cocksucker.”

  You pissed off Sergeant Bergman when you went over his head about the ACU man, Stradazzi. Downtown knows this is a bullshit charge. Bergman lays at least three a year.

  But you have to be there. That is the best I can do. If you don’t show up, I can’t help you.

  Stay in the office today. I’ll be in at 1300 hours. Do some paperwork, why don’t you?

  Stokovich.

  He folded the letter up, picturing the encounter they had in mind for him. In one of the round-table rooms downtown, the fluorescent banks buzzing away over their heads, Styrofoam cups all around. Two college kids in gray two-button suits, pale-blue button-down shirts, black socks, black penny loafers, one of those Manhattan power club ties, a yellow background with tiny red paisley patterns. There’d be a notebook out, and one of the gold-shield gophers from the Detective Division. The two college kids would have only a few minutes. They’d convey solicitude and urgency, and when they looked at you they’d have this look Barbara Walters gets when she wants to ask you if it’s true about you liking to fuck helpless bunny rabbits: the puzzled frowning expression that says, hey, this is so painful for both of us, and if you just unburden yourself to me, why, we’ll all feel ever so much better.

  “So, Detective Kennedy, we have a complaint here from a Sergeant Bergman where it says you called him a ‘Hebe cocksucker’—I believe that was the phrase?” Then he’d look at his roommate with a quizzical expression.

  “Yes, Randolph, that’s what it says here. A, ahem, a ‘Hebe cocksucker’ was the phrase. Hhmmph!”

  Kennedy would say, “No, excuse me, I think it was dildo. I think I called him a dildo.”

  “Really? Reeeally? A ‘dildo’? Well, Sergeant Bergman maintains that his source testifies that the words, your exact words, were ‘Hebe cocksucker.’ Nobody said anything about ‘dildo,’ did they, Randolph?”

  “Not a word, Carter, not a word.”

  “Goodness,” says Randolph.

  “Goodness,” says Carter.

  “Goodness,” says the gold-shield gopher.

  “Well,” says Randolph, “which was it, Detective Kennedy?”

  “Which was what?”

  Randolph will ice up a little here, just around the edges of his tan. Carter will adjust his ankle holster.

  “This is a serious matter, Detective Kennedy. Racial slurs and prejudicial attitudes are not going to be tolerated in this department!”

  “Goodness, no!” says Carter.

  “Goodness, no!” says Randolph.

  “Here’s my tin,” says Eddie Kennedy.

  Well, one good thing had come out of all this nonsense. Kennedy was prepared to bet a year’s vacation pay that the mysterious mole who had lodged the original charge was none other than the charming and eager and helpful Officer Brian Harris, the young First Officer on the scene at the Ruiz killing.

  Knowing who one of the precinct moles was did not make Kennedy’s day, but it helped a little.

  Kennedy put in five unbroken hours on his paperwork backlog, on updating the response report for the Willoughby investigation, on collating the Forensic reports, on the Toxicology reports, on the index-card system, on the assignment sheet, on the case-file folder cover notes, on summaries for the DA’s office, on the Response Report Investigator’s interview summary and the verbatim transcript of his conversations with Grace McEnery, with Dennis McEnery, with Uncle Ray Washington. He organized the protocol for the Willoughby post-mortem, and verified the IDs and shield numbers of the morgue attendants who had taken the remains of Denzel Willoughby to the M.E.’s office.

  He went over all his notes from the field investigation and the details of the pursuit and capture of Dennis McEnery and the times at which key events took place. The exact circumstances of the Mirandization, the actual card used to Mirandize the boy, and the verbatim responses of the boy to the procedure—all of this had to be included, clearly and accurately, in the official report, the chronological diary of the progress of any homicide investigation.

  Since the Ruiz case was no longer his direct responsibility, Kennedy was only required to furnish a complete description of his movements and his activities in connection with the case. He had already broken down the various people involved in the case into a series of three-by-five index cards, each card carrying the name, the homicide case number, the address, the response report number, and the relevance to the investigation.

  All information from Kearny’s Crime Scene Unit had to be organized, notated, filed, receipted, and tagged with an evidence number.

  There were also additional comments to be entered concerning cases not currently under full-time inves
tigation. Kennedy had primary responsibility for about twenty of these, as the Detective Investigator responding. Stokovich was the Detective Supervisor, and all the cases were ultimately his responsibility, but it was up to Kennedy to update and review all his open cases whenever new information became available, or whenever he had the time for a simple reassessment of the events.

  The work went well, and Kennedy found it calming.

  It appealed to the clerk in him—all those stuffed brown files covered with notations in black ink, annotated and alphabetically filed, duly entered into the Green Book, cross-referenced to Evidence Storage, flimsies of the DA Summaries included, receipted, invoiced, triplicated, quadruplicated, deceptively tidy accumulations of humanity’s most untidy proclivities.

  He had been aware of men coming and going as he worked. Deke Fratelli came in around noon with two Hispanic males in handcuffs. They fought him halfheartedly when he put them in the holding cell, taunting the room in gutter Spanish, calling the men maricones and lajaras and camarones—which for some reason meant “detectives,” although the original Spanish word meant “shrimp.”

  There was a department mythology to the effect that the Hispanic gangs called the cops lajaras because of a legendary patrolman out of the Two-Five whose name had been O’Hara. The story held that O’Hara was such a ferocious bull that all the people in Spanish Harlem went in great fear of him, and that whenever he was spotted, the children would run up the block before him, crying “O’Hara! O’Hara!” and that after a while the word became lajara and applied to any uniform officer of the Two-Five. After a while, the name spread down to Alphabet City, to the Marielito and Puerto Rican population in the Lower East Side.

  Deke Fratelli tossed a bagel over to Eddie. Fratelli was looking extremely “GQ” today. Like most NYPD detectives in Manhattan, Fratelli dressed to kill. He had his navy-blue Gianni Versace on today, with a wrinkle-shirt to match, and a linen tie in a smoky-blue tone. The shoes … the shoes were amazing.