Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  “God, Deke! What the hell have you got on your feet?”

  Deke smiled his slow Sicilian leer. It started with a crease in the right corner of his mouth and then he’d let it move to the left, a sardonic undulation revealing capped teeth as white and as even as convent tombstones.

  “My Mauris? Blue lizard, Eddie. Got them at Leighton’s up on the B’way. You like?”

  “Deke, you’re a vision. Thank god I’m sitting down. How’d it go with the Gypsies?”

  “They were there. That place. The Holland—Eddie, it’s a hellhole. They had kids living in the bathroom, along with the food. They were using the toilet for a sink. Another family was living in the main room. The kids were wearing cotton balls in their ears, so the roaches wouldn’t get inside. When we turned over the dresser to check the bottom, Frank gets about a zillion fat little brown roaches all over his arms and his hands. Drops the dresser on his foot, comes out of the bedroom and heads straight for the elevator. I had to go back to the car and get him. He hates roaches. But we nailed the husband and there’s a bunch of them squatting in the DAMP project, in the basement. I think we’ve got them. They had all the stuff right there, in those skirts with the sewn-in pockets. Weapons all over the place.”

  “The murder weapon?”

  “Forensic’s got it. The initial word from the M.E. is that the weapon is appropriate to the wound. But there’s a hilt print, and even I can see that it matches right up. Latent prints all over it too. They’re gone, Eddie!”

  “Where’s Frank?”

  “He’ll be along. He’s down at the lab. There’s a lot of narcotics stuff, and some forgeries, and we’re trying to lift a latent off a twenty-two. It’s not a murder weapon, so we’ll get Tyranski to drop it in the acid bath for us.”

  A booming laugh came up from the stairwell, followed by an exchange of insults. Bruno Stokovich filled the doorway, resplendent in a navy-blue pin-stripe suit, black shoes glittering, his custom shirt as white as cocaine, a raw-silk tie in regimental stripes, knotted just so, hard up against his thick muscular neck, grinning ferociously at the squad room like the father of all cops.

  “Ten-hut, you faggots! Your sun has arisen and yea verily I shineth upon your asses even as we speaketh!”

  There was a scattering of applause as Stokovich charged through the desks, obviously delighted with himself, clapping the men on the shoulders, dispensing affectionate curses, walking heavily on his heels, sending subterranean tremors across the dingy tiles.

  He stopped at the coffee machine, shaking the contents, holding it up to the light as if he expected to see something floating in the thick brown liquid. Satisfied, he poured out a cup into his personal mug, a large Toby jug with the face of a pig. He headed for his inner office, waving Farrell away. When he reached the door, he put a large hand around the molding and leaned back into the room.

  “Kennedy! I got you Robinson for the Muro thing. You and Frank, get us that Mokie kid, eh? Have you been over the response report?”

  Kennedy patted a file box on his desk. Stokovich dipped his head. “Okay, Eddie. You wanna talk about anything? You think about that meeting?”

  Stokovich’s tact could have sunk the Coral Sea. But it was honest concern, for all that.

  “I got the note, sir. I’ll have to kick it around.”

  Conflicting emotions played across the lieutenant’s uncompromising face, like sea birds soaring across a rock cliff, settling finally into a cheery go-to-hell grin.

  “Hey, I sense progress. Semper Fi! Back to work, girls! Graduation is only days away!” He closed the door behind him with a punctuating thump.

  Even the prisoners had shut up when he arrived. And they stayed quiet until Deke brought them out to take their statements and deliver them to Booking.

  Kennedy had brought most of his paperwork up to scratch and the interdepartmental courier wasn’t due until 1600 hours. It was close to 1400 hours and Kennedy was having some trouble with the file box in front of him. The trouble wasn’t with the box itself. It was the case inside it. Adeline Muro. Rape-homicide Case Number 114/09/85.

  Perhaps Calvin had heard something about Dudley. That call took up a few minutes. The doorman had kept watch for the cat all day. There had been no sign of him. He was sorry. Maybe if Kennedy wanted to call back around dinnertime? Dudley always showed up at Jackson’s desk around dinnertime because he knew Jackson could be touched for a couple of potato chips. He kept a bag behind the counter. Sour cream and onion flavored.

  That, plus some additional notations that were suddenly deemed indispensable for the Ruiz file, and a note to Charlie Marcuse about his copy of Gunshot Wounds, Vincent J. M. DiMaio’s new textbook on forensic ballistics, and a number of other housekeeping matters brought Kennedy to 1430 hours. It was time to call Maksins’ wife, Rita.

  “Yes, hello?” A ruffled, sleepy feminine voice. Very much like Trudy’s. She’d speak to him from under her pillow when he brought her a cup of coffee in the morning. It would be a voice just like that, with the sun coming in through the blinds, soft slatted light rippling across the rumpled bedclothes, rising to her hipline, and when he sat down at the edge of the bed, Trudy would slide closer under the covers, insinuating an arm around his waist, pulling herself in to him. She’d be lying on her left side and she’d open one startling blue eye, her blond lashes catching the sun, on fire, above a parabola of flawless cheek. A delicate excursion of fine blond hairs rested in the hollow of her temple, shading into a deeper wheat-toned gold where her hair thickened and grew dense, smelling of cigarette smoke and shampoo, a painfully evocative scent now.

  Kennedy felt a pang of guilt. These were indecently familiar thoughts to be having near another man’s woman. Kennedy’s feelings about fidelity and honor between mates was profoundly Old Testament, absolutely nonnegotiable.

  Rita and Trudy were thoroughly tangled in Kennedy’s mind by the time he managed to wake Maksins’ wife up enough to listen to his message.

  “He’s what?” An undertone here, sliding into peaks, a jagged reading on an oscilloscope. She was wavering between suspicion and panic, as Maksins had anticipated. She had reasons. Kennedy himself had called her up once or twice, backing up one of Wolfie’s lies while Wolfie wound himself in damp sheets and spilled champagne at some midtown hotel.

  “He’s on a stakeout. They’re watching some bikers right now. He asked me to call you because he can’t get to a phone.”

  She didn’t believe him. There was some resignation in her reaction, which was a dangerous sign. Anger was fine. Resignation was fatal. Well, that was Wolfie’s problem. The asshole.

  “You’re right, Rita. That’s bullshit. The fact is he caught a boot in the rib cage last night and he’s over at Bellevue being taped up. Wait.” Kennedy flipped through his Rolodex until he got the number. “Here’s Admitting. Give him a call. No, no, don’t worry! He’s fine. He just didn’t want you to worry!”

  She hung up without saying goodbye. Kennedy thought to himself: Wolfie, you’d better not be lying to me as well, because if you’re not at Bellevue, your marriage is in the toilet. And don’t ask me to lie for you anymore.

  While the squad room chatter rolled around the room and the typewriters thunked laboriously down an endless beltway of forms and carbon copies, Kennedy pulled a switch-blade from his desk drawer and slit the tape on the top of the manila case holding the Muro crime-scene shots. He tipped them out onto his desk, like a deck of tarot cards, overlapping, glossy black-and-white and color 8 × 10 prints of Adeline Muro. Her eyes held a startled expression, as if she had seen wonders. The open staring face floated like a dusky tropical moon above the devastated terrain of her body, a pulpy ruin where no shadows softened the record, driven off the body by the photographer’s flash, to gather in the hollows and depressions like blackbirds.

  Looking at the scene, Kennedy found himself thinking about Pete Garibaldi and the way he had died, the unkillable invincible madman of the Bronx Street Narcotics Unit, and his funer
al, and his wife, dry-eyed, white around the mouth, and the thing she had said to the rest of them.

  They were a street crew, all of them boys really, in their twenties, athletes and hardcases. They had a simple task: street surveillance and interception of smalltime heroin and smack dealers in the South Bronx. It was easy and simple work, in the way high steel work can be easy. The trick is not to look down and to keep your eye on your work. Because it was dangerous. They were getting in between an addict and his needle, a bad place to be. The addicts were as unpredictable and as feral as wild dogs, scored down to the bone by their habit. Even the tamest could come up off the sidewalk with a knife. It had happened just often enough to keep the crews on their toes. They ran the dealers and the bankers from one part of the Bronx to another, clearing this street only to find them turning up somewhere else, in another bar, at the back of another clubhouse, in a different vacant lot.

  Pete Garibaldi was the sergeant who ran the squad, a beefy Calabrian cop, swarthy and crude and vital. He wore a mammoth black moustache, like a pair of black bull’s horns, so wide it stretched beyond his ears. And he was strong, unearthly. Kennedy had seen him pick up a Volkswagen full of addicts and set it on its grill-work, with his cheeks bursting and the deep-blue veins popping up all over his neck and forearms. He’d taken one of the baseball bats the crew used and beaten that car into an ashtray, with the dopers inside quailing and crying, scuttling from one side to the other as that bat came down and the paint chips flew, Pete Garibaldi laughing and raging around it while the crew leaned on the pursuit cars and passed around the Coca-Colas.

  The method was simple and crazed. The man in the observation post would radio the pursuit team, waiting out in the street in confiscated cars and old Department wreckers. They would take the handoff when the dealers came out of the bar and they’d follow them until they were in the right spot. And then they’d land on them, six to eight guys in a crew, wild men, with the guns out, bellowing. Usually the pushers would be paralyzed by fear. Sometimes there’d be a fight.

  The best way was to close up on the dealers in the pursuit cars, one in front and one behind, until they all reached a light. Pete Garibaldi was the bat-man. He’d be out first, jumping up on the hood of the dealer’s car, swinging that bat into the windshield. The dealers would sit there, too stunned to move, while Garibaldi pounded their window into fragments. The rest of the crew had the shotguns out. It took seconds. It never failed.

  Afterward, if it was a good bust or the end of a long surveillance, they’d all go back to Garibaldi’s house in Maspeth. There’d be hundreds of red-hot chicken wings and chicken-fried steaks, kegs and kegs of Coors. The girls would show up later, and they’d push the rugs back and dance to Garibaldi’s Wurlitzer with the bubbles in the pipes and the toffee-colored panels. They’d listen to “Ain’t That a Shame,” and “Since I Don’t Have You.” Booker T. and the MG’s doing “Green Onions.” The Platters sang “Only you can make this change in me / For it’s true you are my destiny / When you hold my hand I understand the magic that you do / You’re my dream come true / My one and only you.…”

  Garibaldi put red bulbs in all the table lamps, changing his rec room into a bar in a movie, where Kennedy danced with a girl named Holly in the red haze, feeling the ribs of her bra, feeling her body working underneath the dress, burning wherever their hips touched or their thighs moved against each other, spinning her in the red haze until the room rolled like the diadem of a Ferris wheel, spinning in the long summer nights.

  It was death in a boy’s world, a childish world, but no less dangerous for that. They lived a kind of Vietnam in the south Bronx, experiencing the same wild exaltation wrung from the nerve’s tightest twisting.

  Kennedy could still smell the cinammon and gasoline interior of the van the night of the Crotona Park buy. The dealer played with a butterfly knife, shick-kah-shick in the dashboard light. His ratboy did the acid test on their kilo of cocaine. By now Kennedy was sure the buyer was crazy, so far down the cocaine highway that he was never coming back. He radiated a hunger for the in-and-out of killing, as some men do, a hunger for the loopy fruits of somebody else’s belly to come sliding out across his wrist, and the blood to run. They knew he’d killed a man in the yard in Attica and another man in Union City. They wanted him off the streets. Kennedy gave the signal and his crew came out of nowhere. Pete Garibaldi took the windshield out, laughing, and the ratboy came up with a cut-down Winchester over-and-under from someplace near the glove box. The interior of the van rang like a big bronze bell, once for each barrel. Pete Garibaldi flew backward into the dark, riding the plumes of flame at his chest, with that look on his face, the shock and the sudden comprehension mingling with arterial blood and tissue as he sailed backward onto the grass with the pink mist settling down around him.

  His father wanted the ashes sent back to Reggio, so that’s what happened, but the Department gave him honors at Cypress Hills, on a hot humid August afternoon. When the ceremony was over, the men in the squad drove Garibaldi’s wife around the cemetery until they reached the driveway in front of Cypress Hills Abbey. The Abbey was closed, the massive bronze doors frosted with verdigris. Creepers and vines covered the huge stone walls. It seemed to float a few feet above the earth, on a miasma rising up out of the steamy black earth and the strangling vegetation.

  Kennedy felt the heat on his shoulders as the crew stood in a circle around Garibaldi’s wife. She listened to their sympathetic talk for a while, and then lashed out at them, spots of white on her flushed cheeks, her hands held tightly together under her breasts.

  “You’re children,” she said, and Garibaldi was the worst, and he died playing a boy’s game for nothing worth having. A stupid, empty, silly death. You’re fools and asses to play such stupid games. Where was the good of it? Did the drugs go away? Did the streets get better? Did anybody care? Why die in such a trivial way? Where’s the honor in it? Where’s the glory now? Pete’s dead. I’m alone. You say you’re my friends, and in a year you won’t know my first name. You’re not men. You’re nothing.

  It was the timeworn women’s lament, but none of them had an answer for her. Women look at men from a great distance, no matter how close they might feel to their husbands and brothers. The women Kennedy knew had pulled even farther away during the last ten years. They had shed the round flesh of the girls of Garibaldi’s basement. Now they were lean and sinewy, and cord-bound at the heart as well. Men had lost them, of course—men who promised to take care of their women and then failed, willfully and relentlessly, proving nothing to the women but the durability of their faithlessness. He looked around the squad room at the detectives talking, working, typing, and ragging one another. The walls were covered with drawings. The commander had a picture called “Sitting Duck” pinned to his door, a cartoon duck in sunglasses, holding a drink, staring up at the wall behind his right shoulder where two bullets have smacked into the concrete. There was a circular for a retirement racket on the filing cabinet, “Farewell to Cash,” and a dancing elf. The place looked like a team locker room, a boy’s clubhouse.

  Women rejected babies and fought for careers. They wore heavily padded-shoulder suits, stalking around in the Manhattan streets like Mafia button-men, in lavender sneakers and sweat socks. They swore like dragoons at you across the roofs of cabs. The television was littered with women as cutting as blades, wearing headbands, pumping iron, running the board-room meetings; models with Fiberglas lips like the flank of a Ferrari struck threatening postures and glowered into the camera. Everywhere you looked, the women bristled and strutted like Prussian duelists and the men sank into languorous androgyny, pouting at each other under blunt shocks of razor-cut hair.

  Women walked and talked in daily contempt for the values of Kennedy’s era, imagining, perhaps rightly, that times were different now. It wasn’t clear yet just what the women proposed to put up in the place of all those fallen values. As far as Kennedy could see, they had no new ideas. Just the usual naked lun
ge for power and privilege.

  Kennedy found himself thinking about Elaine Farraday, the caseworker for Manhattan Human Resources. He didn’t know her well, but he knew her territory, the Holland Hotel, the Carter, the George, Hell’s Kitchen, Tenth Avenue, the Lower West Side. In a sense they both worked the same acreage, and they saw the same things festering there.

  Perhaps every lean and self-absorbed parasite on either side of the gender line had a counterweight like Pete Garibaldi and Elaine Farraday, someone who lived a good life far away from the well-lit avenues of mid-town, in a thousand little combats with poverty and the inevitable violence that comes out of it. Perhaps you had to be a child to think it was still worth doing.

  It wasn’t a widow’s hard words or the contempt of sheltered and self-absorbed idealogues and careerist harpies that put the strain on Kennedy’s dwindling reserves of humor and compassion, nor was it the senseless death of Pete Garibaldi. There it was under his hand, in full color, the undeniable proof that the world was not nearly as safe or as civilized as they thought it was on 57th Street or Columbus Avenue.

  A neighbor had heard Adeline Muro’s baby crying all night, in a sunken brownstone in Alphabet City. She had knocked on the door when the sound persisted. Finally a number of the tenants had forced the lock to Adeline Muro’s two-room apartment. The television was on, tuned to static, in a room with an iron bedstead and a crib beside it. A naked two-year-old was standing in a filthy diaper, still crying. The bars over the window had been forced inward. Whatever the woman may have owned that had the slightest street value had been taken. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been enough to satisfy the jackals who had come in through the window. They had taken out their frustration on Adeline Muro.

  She had been beaten and stripped, and apparently beaten again, and then they had raped her, repeatedly, stifling her screams with a Pampers pulled from a crib-side box. The woman had fought back. They found blood and skin under her nails. So they had tied her up and gagged her and gone back to it, with an atavistic, witless, vile intensity far beyond any atrocity the animal world could show, bestiality uniquely human. It had gone on for a long time, while one man had rested, wandering around the apartment, fumbling through her closets, tossing her possessions into the center of the room. For some reason they did not kill the baby, probably because a backhand blow had been enough to knock it unconscious. Then they had turned Adeline Muro over and raped her again. Then they sodomized her. Then they used a kitchen tool on her. And after they had exhausted their invention and squeezed themselves dry into her body, they bound her up with towels and hacked her throat open. As a kind of after-thought, they sliced off her breasts.