The Squad Room

by John Cutter

  Despite the difference in their lives before they joined the force, both Simmons and McNamara had worked extremely hard since then to get where they were now. Short of Detective Sergeant, Sergeant was the best policing job there was; and they had both put in countless hours of study and hard work to gain the necessary promotions. They’d each read the book of Penal Law and Criminal Procedure Law so many times, they probably dreamt about it, and had each been decorated numerous times for valor in the line of duty.

  Simmons spoke up.

  “Hey, Cap,” he said, and got right down to business. “Patrol picked up one guy a few blocks away, but I don’t think he’s even close to being a suspect.”

  “What’d they pick him up for?”

  “Possession of drugs—he’ll be going through the system anyway. I told the detectives to go slow with him, but I’m just not getting the feeling he’s our guy.” He leaned in confidentially. “Can you please just make sure to keep the Coke Brothers away from him during his interview?”

  Morrison smiled. The request was typical Simmons—diplomatic and polite. Others, he knew, might have used far more direct language. The “Coke Brothers” were detectives Mike Marchioni and Leo Kasak, who were still back at the house—almost certainly cooped up in their private office. Most detectives shared one common office area, commonly known as the squad room, but Marchioni and Kasak had their own office within the squad room, complete with a perennially closed door and two desks facing one another, so they could each speak to the only person—besides Morrison himself—who mattered. Their spectacular aloofness had been cause for quite a bit of speculation among the squad, and not all of it friendly. Everyone was loyal to the Captain, but these two were more than loyal; there was something almost fanatical about it, and to many of the others it was just plain insulting. Even in situations where talk was necessary, they’d withhold most of it for Morrison and each other, chain of command be damned. To say they were detectives of the old school would be putting it mildly. They were about as unorthodox as they came, and not always acceptably so. A lot of the young cops didn’t know it, but their nickname came from an interview they’d held with a particularly tight-lipped suspect back in the day, in which Marchioni had finally elicited a confession from the guy by pulling his head back by the hair and waterboarding him a few times with a shaken-up bottle of Coca-Cola.

  “All right, all right, I’ll keep ’em busy,” Morrison laughed. “We wouldn’t want any complaints.”

  “Thanks, Cap. I know you have a soft spot for the old-schoolers.”

  Morrison watched thoughtfully as Simmons got back to work. Simmons was right; he did have a soft spot for cops of the Coke boys’ pattern. But unlike many of the young cops who looked up to them, he didn’t appreciate them for their toughness, but for their integrity. Below their grandstanding, macho exteriors, Kasak and Marchioni had the hearts of true defenders of the public good. All too many cops nowadays, of the “collars for dollars” mindset, were happy to spend days processing their arrests, raking in the overtime hours while their shoplifters squirmed in a holding cell with rapists and murderers. The Coke boys, by contrast, got that part of their job over with as soon as they could; and when it couldn’t be done quickly, they more often than not gave the credit for their arrest to somebody else in order to get back out on the streets. Theirs was the thrill of the chase; and they pursued it tirelessly.

  Still, Morrison thought with a smile, it was a damn good thing he had cooler-headed cops like Simmons on his force to balance them out.

  Once the Crime Scene Unit had finished collecting their evidence, it was Captain Morrison and his team’s turn to go through the scene in greater detail. The processing of this scene was going to take more time than usual; but Morrison sensed that removing the carpet for forensic analysis would be worth it. He knew a crime like this, with a socialite victim in a neighborhood like Sutton Place, would bring tremendous scrutiny from every angle, and it wouldn’t do to be caught having left any stone unturned.

  All of the major media outlets had reporters assigned to police headquarters at One Police Plaza—otherwise known as the Puzzle Palace—so Morrison was quick to instruct all of his people to keep the lid tight on this case. Anyone outside their group was not to be spoken to—and that included other police offices. News traveled fast, but none faster than whispers in the hallways at 1PP; and an unfortunate reality of policing in the modern era was that even a notification to the Chief of Detectives’ office could quickly lead to an out-of-control press leak.

  “So what do we tell Arndt when he gets here?” Sergeant McNamara asked.

  Morrison laughed out loud.

  “Sergeant,” he said, “I doubt you have anything to worry about. There’s no way our illustrious Chief of Detectives is coming out on Christmas Day—not unless the Commissioner himself lights a fire under his ass. But to take your question seriously,” he added, “if by chance Arndt does show up, I don’t want you or anyone on our team telling him anything. Just call me. Got it?”

  McNamara nodded. Morrison dismissed him back to work, chuckling again. There was no way that phone call would be coming through today.

  Just then he saw Sergeant Rivera walking in the door, and grabbed him. Frankie Rivera was a distinguished Vietnam vet and longtime commanding officer of the Homicide squad, and was Morrison’s go-to guy to put in charge of touchy situations like this. He was a very funny man, despite a troubled interior that came out in his war stories when he’d had a few too many vodkas, and on the job, he was a perfectionist among perfectionists. He was a born cop—close to mandatory retirement, and dreading the day—and his years of experience had taught him to leave nothing to chance. Under his control, there would be no questions about chain of custody, or sloppy reporting; everything would be well organized and forensically correct.

  Leaving Rivera to catch up with the others, Morrison next called back to Homicide, to speak with Kasak and Marchioni. Kasak picked up, a slightly deeper tone the only aspect that discriminated his voice from his partner’s.

  “What’s happening, Cap?”

  “Kasak,” Morrison said, “I need you guys to take over a patrol arrest related to this Sutton Place incident. He’s a homeless guy they picked up in the area, working Sutton Place instead of one of the train stations—probably just figured the pickings were better here.”

  “Can’t say I blame him,” said Kasak mildly. “Though if I were him, I’d get someplace warmer—I understand Fort Lauderdale has one of the largest homeless populations in the country this time of year.”

  Morrison cut the small talk. “Listen, this is serious. I don’t want you fluffing this off, or stopping at the deli before you talk to this guy. Simmons doesn’t think the guy has anything to do with what’s happened here, and we need to move quick to make sure nobody starts talking like they’ve caught John Dillinger. I’ll square it with the desk lieutenant that you guys are taking over from patrol.”

  “All right, Cap, we’re on it.”

  Morrison hung up, and turned to see Sergeant Rivera regarding him with anxiety written across his handsome Puerto Rican features.

  “Aw man, don’t tell me the Coke boys are already on their way in,” Rivera said. “It’s too early for me to deal with those two prima donnas.”

  Morrison held back a smile. Even given how often that term was used for detectives—just the price you paid for not wearing a clip-on tie to work—Kasak and Marchioni got it the most.

  “Frankie, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m giving them strict orders, and they’ll follow them.”

  At the word “orders,” Rivera visibly relaxed. The Coke Brothers were a handful, but no one who worked for Bill Morrison ever disobeyed him.

  “All right, all right, you know what I want to hear,” he said.

  When the scene was pretty much done, Morrison got ready to head out. On the way out he stopped to talk to the cops on the scene, wishing them all a Merry Christmas and addressing them by name. He�
��d always had a gift for remembering names; it was one of the qualities that made him a cops’ cop. Everyone liked to be remembered, from the janitor to the precinct commander, but a personal connection with their superior officer made cops want to walk through fire for him.

  Offhand, one of the officers asked where the Chief of Detectives was. “I figured he’d love to come to this part of town,” he laughed.

  “Not on a holiday, he wouldn’t,” Morrison said, chuckling too. “Besides, I don’t know if he’s ever solved a crime, or even seen a dead body. This is obviously not going to be an easy one, and I’m sure Arndt knows the press will have more questions for him than he’ll be able to answer.”

  He caught himself before he could say more. His hatred for Arndt was off the charts, but none of that needed to be said to the rank and file. With a few more salutations, he grabbed one of the detectives, Alexander Medveded, to ride back to “the house” with him, and they went out to his car.

  Boss though he was, Morrison drove. He almost always drove; it helped him to focus and stay feeling in control. In his head, he continued the conversation that he’d just curtailed with the officers on the scene. Frederick Arndt—even the man’s name was pretentious. Nine months ago Arndt had taken over for the previous Chief of Detectives, Francis Donohue, when Donohue had finally lost his battle with cancer; and since then he’d lost no time in alienating just about everyone who worked for him. No investigator himself, he’d risen on the strength of his political connections to the highest position possible in an investigator’s career, and now wore his phoniness with aggressive pride, disdaining the police who worked under him. Morrison remembered hearing a story from his former partner about Arndt’s promotion to Sergeant, which seemed to sum the man up perfectly. He’d been proud as a peacock, strutting around the auditorium at 1PP with his new Sergeant’s stripes sewn on his dress uniform. The only problem was, they were sewn on upside-down in a V, the way the British use them. He’d already pissed off everyone else there, so they just let him walk across the stage like that; and when the PC asked him if he’d switched departments and the room erupted in laughter, he’d just glared at everyone, like they were the ones who had it wrong.

  Detective Medveded broke the silence. “What’re you thinking about, Cap?” he asked.

  Morrison smiled grimly out at the traffic ahead. “Oh, you know—just some no-good, backpack and boat shoe–wearing son of a bitch,” he said quietly.

  “Ha! Right,” Medveded said. There was only one man Morrison could be referring to, and Medveded definitely had no love for him, either.

  Morrison laughed again. “Hey, you remember when we were out drinking that night, and you said—?” he began.

  “How could I forget?” Medveded said. “I still think we should’ve done it.”

  “If not for the vodka, huh?” Morrison looked over at him. “God, you were so pissed at him.”

  “How could I not be? The asshole wanted to transfer me to Staten Island!”

  “I remember.”

  Boy, did Morrison remember. It was hard not to look back on it with a little regret, even.

  He and Medveded been drinking together, and getting pretty heated about Arndt’s treatment of the latter, who was only recently back on the job after a pretty haunting experience in the Bronx that had almost gotten him killed. Arndt had been the 44th Precinct desk officer at the time of the incident, when Medveded—then an officer on the Street Crime unit—and his partner Tommy Davis had responded to a call that a woman was being held at gunpoint in her apartment. At the scene they’d heard a woman crying inside and rushed in, thinking they had the element of surprise. They were wrong. The perp, in a classic “suicide-by-cop” plan, had gotten his ex-girlfriend to call another friend over to the apartment, then tied them both to chairs, called 911 on himself and told the women to cry out when the cops showed up, and waited with his gun pointing at the door. When Medveded and Davis had burst in, he’d opened fire on them, hitting Davis in the chest and Medveded in the abdomen before Medveded was able to put him down with returning fire. Davis had died that night. But Desk Officer Arndt, as it turned out, cared less about two cops shot, than about the ton of paperwork he had to do because of it; and attempted to have Medveded transferred to Staten Island, claiming he’d violated department policy.

  So Morrison and Medveded had ended up pretty well sauced at the bar by the precinct, and Medveded had made a startling suggestion: Let’s rob him. Morrison, naturally, had assumed he was joking; but Medveded had gone on: Come on, Bill, it’ll be easy. We mask up, follow him when he goes to his car—that prick never parks near the house, he knows someone would slash his tires. And everyone knows he never carries his gun.

  Morrison had realized then that Medveded was only half-joking. It was exactly the sort of idea the Crazy Russian—as some of his fellow officers had since taken to calling him—would take seriously. Yet as crazy as the idea was, he’d been distinctly intrigued by it. He’d thought about how gratifying it would be to pull out that fucking Nantucket belt with the whales (a piece of Arndt’s wardrobe he was never without) and wrap it around the guy’s neck. He’d smiled to imagine seeing Arndt on the ground, his pants around his ankles, weeping—as he was known to do whenever he was under stress. It all sounded good—but he also knew it wasn’t worth losing his pension over. There were too many cameras around nowadays; and besides, he had to believe that guys like Arndt always got their just deserts. Thankfully, the vodka had taken its toll on both of them, and they’d fallen asleep in their car outside the precinct.

  Morrison and Medveded arrived at the precinct, having made the decision to pass on the bar tonight as they parked the car. It’d be an early morning tomorrow, and both of them lived far away—Medveded in Brighton Beach, in the same apartment he’d grown up in—so they’d also both decided to sleep at the precinct. Medveded headed off to the dorms, while Morrison walked up the back staircase towards the squad room. He knew that trying to sleep would be futile for the time being; again the bagpipes were playing loudly in his head.

  Sergeant Rivera was already back at his desk, the door to his office open. Looking up as Morrison passed and recognizing the look in the Captain’s eyes, Rivera got up and headed casually over to his office.

  “Hey, Cap. You got a minute to talk?” he asked. This was a common enough routine with them; he didn’t have anything in particular to talk about, but he knew the Captain did, and knew that asking him like this was the best way to get him to relax.

  “Sure,” said Morrison, and sat. The two men sat quietly for a while, Rivera taking slow sips at his coffee, before Morrison spoke up.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Morrison said. “You were in Vietnam, right?”

  Rivera had described his experience in the military to Bill Morrison more than once, but was always ready to tell him again when the Captain was in this frame of mind. “Yeah,” he said. “I was drafted when I was nineteen and a half. I had to report to Whitehall Street for the usual induction procedure before they sent me to Fort Gordon, in Georgia. I was assigned to the 25th Infantry. They sent me to advanced infantry training at one of the ugliest places in America—Fort Polk Louisiana. Tigerland. When I finished my training with a bunch of other guys, we were shipped out.”

  Morrison listened, and sat thoughtfully again for a moment. “All right, well, let me ask you this,” he said finally. “Have you ever talked to Arndt about your time there?”

  Rivera smiled cryptically. “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Morrison said; “just a hunch of mine, I guess. I was at a dinner a while back, where he accepted an award from the Mayor for his service in Vietnam. He cried like a baby the whole time, talking about how returning vets were treated, and what an honor it was. It just—it seemed a little too over-the-top for me to buy.”

  “Well, he’s right about how we were treated then,” Rivera said slowly, “but him being in Vietnam?” He laughed. “If you ask me, your hunch
is right. I’m sure he wasn’t there.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, I haven’t been around the guy much. But the few times I have been around him—in fact, the last time we spoke, a couple of years ago, he’d been talking to a few guys in the precinct about being in the military. None of these guys had served, mind you. When I walked in on the conversation, I heard him say he was at the battle of Khe Sahn. Thing is, it was the Marines who were at Khe Sahn—Con Thien, Hill 881, I remember—and he was saying he was in the army. I was in the army, and we weren’t there during the offensive. I asked him if he had a CIB—a Combat Infantry Badge—and he gave me a funny look, and found a way out of the conversation.” Rivera shook his head. “Man, if you’re going to lie about being in ’Nam, at least do your research.”

  “I knew it,” Morrison said quietly, leaning back with a sardonic smile. He wasn’t quite sure if he was satisfied or not. “You know, Chief Donohue, God rest his soul—he couldn’t stand Arndt. Now there was a guy born to be Chief of Detectives. He must be rolling in his grave, to have had this guy take over for him.”

  “So was it just the politics that got him in?” Rivera asked.

  “One hundred percent,” Morrison said. “The Commissioner didn’t want to appoint him—you know Harrington hated him almost as much as I do.”

  “Yeah, I figured that,” Rivera said. He knew the answer to his next question, but asked it anyway. “Didn’t you and the PC work together as cops?”

  “Yeah, sure, back in the day. He was quite a cop; he took his job very seriously.” Morrison’s face broke out in a wide grin. “You know, before we were partners he worked Narcotics as an undercover—he had the whole long-haired biker look. One day he went into one of those old Blarney Stone Bar & Grills—you know, they have them all over the city; used to keep corned beef in the window, and all the old-time shot-and-beer guys with the spider veins in their noses hung out there. Pretty conservative places. Well, Officer Harrington walks in, looking like he just got off his low-rider, and they refuse to serve him. So he flips out, jumps over the bar, throws a bunch of hot corned beef at the bartender.”