The Ninth Step

by Gabriel Cohen

  He shook his head. The last thing he needed was to get lost in memories, but he couldn’t seem to focus on what he needed to do now. Could he go back home? Would he ever be able to return home, after what he had done?

  Light from the viewing windows rippled and shimmied against the dark walls. Nadim moved on to the next room, where he could see into the walrus pool. The big tank was filled with waving seaweed. A huge bull swooped down from the sunlit surface. It zoomed up until its whiskered face was just an inch from the glass, flipped over, and zoomed away.

  Suddenly Nadim saw before him the face of the big man in the deli, his rough, hard-hammered face, his odd little snapping-turtle mouth. He heard the man’s gruff voice. Nadim looked down: his hands were shaking again. He sat on a bench in the middle of the dark room and tucked them underneath his thighs. His heart was thumping and he had to wait several minutes before it finally slowed.

  A woman came in, holding the hand of a little boy. The child squirmed away from her, ran over to the window, and pressed his face to the glass. He gasped as the walrus swam right up and stared at him. Nadim wondered if it might give the child nightmares. Enny had had powerful bad dreams, perhaps because the other children teased her at school. Nadim remembered how he and his wife would rise in the middle of the night, stroke her forehead, tell her old folk tales to calm her down. The Farmer, the Crocodile, and the Jackal. The Seven Wise Men of Buneyr. And her favorite: Heer and Ranjha.

  He pictured his daughter’s face, plump and round, listening to that last one, that grand, doomed love story, her thick, round eyeglasses glinting in the low light of her bedside lamp. (Without them, she could barely even see her parents’ faces.) She listened as they told her of the peasant musician Ranjha, and how he was prevented from marrying Heer, his upper-caste love. Heer’s family married her off to someone else, but the young lovers still managed to elope one night. When her kinsmen recaptured her and took her back to their town of Rangpur, Heer cried out, “Oh, Lord, destroy this town and these cruel people so that justice may be done!” And then a fierce fire broke out and began to devastate the town.

  At this point, Enny would always interrupt to ask, wide-eyed, why all this suffering was necessary.

  It was her mother who answered, more often than not: “Because it was the will of Allah.”

  Nadim knew that others—Enny’s fourth-grade classmates especially—had found her plain and bookish, had made fun of the hijab that covered her pigtails. Without mercy they had teased his daughter, who had proclaimed her wish to become a scientist—a marine biologist, no less—a girl whose ancestors came from a landlocked desert state! She had loved this place, this aquarium, had never grown tired of it. Had loved coming here with her father.

  And now he had become a killer. What would she have thought of him? He would have explained to her, if he could. He had done it for her. For justice. Like the Christian Bible said. An eye for an eye.

  He stood up and moved to the next dark room. He thought again of the plan. Was it too late? Perhaps not. He doubted that the deli clerk had gotten a good look at him. He had run wildly out of the store, but he’d had the good sense to slow down outside, and he couldn’t recall anyone watching him go.

  He stopped in front of another huge window, watching a seal rocket down toward the bottom of the tank, trailing bubbles, then spin around and corkscrew up toward the surface.

  As if it were free.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST let them have it,” said Detective Sergeant Stephen Tanney two hours later.

  The man was Jack’s direct boss. They were crammed into his little office, along with Frank Cardulli, the head of Brooklyn South Homicide. Richie Powker, new to the headquarters, was gazing at the walls, checking out the clusters of red pins, one for each murder of the year, covering a map of the borough, and the clipboards for each of the seventeen precincts in their region.

  “I mean,” Tanney continued, “if the feds want the case so bad, why not let it be their problem?” The young sergeant always reminded Jack of a Hollywood actor wearing a fake mustache and trying to play a tough guy; he was the kind of boss who couldn’t appreciate the competence of his crew without considering it a challenge to his own tenuous control.

  Lieutenant Cardulli listened patiently. He was a squat fireplug of a man, also mustached. Unlike Tanney, though, he had the squad’s full loyalty and respect. The L.T. tugged at his earlobe. “Well, I guess Homeland Security does have the ultimate authority here, according to the bullshit Washington has handed down …”

  “What about this radiation business?” Richie said. “I sure didn’t like the sound of that.”

  Cardulli shrugged. “Let’s not get all worked up until we know more. The feds are already on this, and we need to keep focused on our own mission.” They were homicide cops, not specialists in counterterrorism. “Anyhow, this is probably just the latest false alarm.”

  The other detectives nodded. Ever since 9/11 and the anthrax thing, the whole country had been so nervous—color-coded threat levels going up and down, great paranoia about the mail and about unattended parcels, tiny towns in rural areas worrying about poison in their fishing holes—but it was hard to maintain that level of anxiety for long. Over the years since the big attack, after checking out hundreds of spurious reports, New York cops had learned to take new “threats” with a grain of salt.

  Jack sat near the door. Over his shoulder came a bustle of phone conversations, file cabinet drawers slamming, scanners crackling. Business as usual out in the Homicide squad room.

  Linda Vargas, another of the detectives on the Homicide squad, popped her head in. “You just got a call from Latent Prints. They didn’t find any matches for your deli perp.”

  All of the detectives frowned. “This is ridiculous,” Richie said. “All the feds need to do is give us a couple of frames from the security video. If we put out some posters of the perp, we can probably have this whole thing rolled up in a day or two.”

  Cardulli nodded. “I made that point. But Charlson said they don’t want to broadcast word of the incident yet.”

  Jack leaned forward. “Does he already know who our killer is?”

  Cardulli shrugged. “I just told you all I heard. I’ve asked the chief of detectives if he can put a call in, see if we can get more cooperation.”

  “What are we supposed to do in the meantime?” Richie said. “Twiddle our thumbs?”

  Cardulli crossed his arms. “They’re obviously not making this easy for us, but they didn’t say to drop the case. Far as I can tell, this is still an open one for the board.” He was referring to the big erasable chart out in the squad room, which bore the names of the victims in current cases. He turned to Jack again. “What’s your take on this?”

  “I’m thinking about shopping.”

  Sergeant Tanney made a face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jack shrugged. “The perp was shopping for groceries in a deli at around eight A.M. Think about that. First of all, was he on his way to work?” Before the others could answer, he continued with his musings. “On your way to work, you buy a cup of coffee and maybe a bagel. You don’t do your dinner shopping.”

  Tanney threw in his usual contradictory two cents. “What if he was shopping for someone else?”

  Jack didn’t blink. “There were a bunch of items in his basket. If he was shopping for someone else, he would probably have been looking at a list.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Another thing: you shop for food in your own neighborhood.”

  “But the owner didn’t recognize him,” Richie pointed out.

  Jack nodded. “That’s true. Still—he was buying ice cream and butter, and you don’t grab those far from home.”

  Tanney scowled. “So what’s your point?”

  “First of all, maybe our guy’s unemployed. Or he works nights—and what does that make him? A transit employee? A taxi driver? Anyway, I bet he lives within a few blocks of the
place.”

  Cardulli stood up. “Why don’t we start with what we know? We’ve got an I.D. for the victim. Let’s see if anybody can tell us why some Pakistani would want to bash his head in.”

  THE SOUND INSIDE R. J. Stanley’s brought back one of Jack’s earliest childhood memories, when he had been spun in an undertow just off the beach at Coney Island. This new roiling cacophony came from the ranks of giant-screen TVs lining the back wall of the appliance emporium: the roar of the crowd from fifty displays of a boxing match, mixed with the sound of wrenching metal from a superhero action flick, mixed with dopey singing from Disney’s Jungle Book.

  “Christ,” said Richie Powker. “I’m getting a headache and we’ve only been in here for thirty seconds.”

  Jack nodded. “Imagine working here.” And that’s exactly what he was doing, because this was where Robert Brasciak had spent a good number of his last living days on earth.

  Red rubber mats led down the aisles of the big fluorescent-lit showroom, between stacks of microwave ovens and rows of stoves. The place smelled of plastic and metal. Salesmen in cheap khaki pants, pressed shirts, and dull-colored ties roamed their sections like tired lions out on a big synthetic plain; they perked up a little at the sight of the detectives, new meat on the sales floor, but not enough to rouse themselves. For the thousandth time, Jack was grateful for the constantly varied nature of his job: he got to roam the entire southern half of Brooklyn, checking out new scenery and new people every day. (Some of them were dead, of course, but still …)

  At the sound of gunfire, he turned toward the back of the store, then relaxed: it was just a video game booming out over a home theater system. A security guard in a blue blazer ambled over, a huge dreadlocked black man with the stolid, comfortable demeanor of a pro. “Can I help you guys?”

  “We need to see a manager,” Jack said.

  The guard didn’t ask why; Jack knew the guy had made him and his partner as cops.

  PHIL MANGIOLE, THE FLOOR manager, sat on a half-size refrigerator in the back loading area, shaking his head. He was a small, olive-skinned man with the anxious face of someone whose job depended on meeting monthly sales quotas.

  “I can’t freakin’ believe it!” he said. “The guy was just loading in the new Toshiba forty-seven inchers yesterday afternoon. And now? Phfft—adios. Man, what a fuckin’ city! My wife keeps pushing me to move down to the Jersey shore, and I been resisting ’cause I’m from here, ya know, but shit like this really makes you think. Here today, gone tomorrow, am I right?” He looked up at the two detectives, as if expecting praise for this deep insight.

  Jack nodded, to be polite. He glanced around. The floor in the back was plain concrete and the walls were grease-stained cinder block. Piles of broken-down boxes and other trash littered the room, and Jack—rather fastidious despite the ghastly untidiness of his chosen career—looked on in disapproval. He noticed a hand-lettered sign on the nearest wall: DO NOT RIDE ON CONVEYOR!!

  “How long did Brasciak work here?” he asked, taking out his notepad.

  Mangiole shrugged. “I’m not sure. I got transferred to this store about a year ago and he was already here. When I first came, he was working security, but we both decided it would be better if he switched to the back. He was okay with it because the loading job paid better, which was good because frankly I wanted him off the floor. There were a couple of incidents.”

  Jack’s eyebrows went up. “Incidents?”

  Mangiole tugged at his chocolate-brown tie. “He, ah, he took the job real seriously. I mean, we want somebody intimidating out there, but he thought he was Chuck Norris or something. He was a bit lacking in the, whaddayacallit, people skills.”

  “How’d he do back here? Did he stay out of trouble?”

  “Yeah,” Richie said. “Or did he ride the conveyor?”

  Mangiole smiled at the small joke but shook his head. “He wasn’t exactly the fun-loving type.”

  “Did he get along with the other workers?”

  The manager pinched his mouth with his fingers. “How do I put this? We, ah, we have a very mixed staff here. Very urban, if you know what I’m saying.”

  The detectives nodded. The employees were quite racially diverse.

  Mangiole frowned. “Robert was not the, ah, most open-minded of individuals.”

  Powker crossed his arms. “You mean he was racist?”

  Mangiole shifted. “Not to speak ill of the dead or anything …”

  Jack scratched his jaw. “Sounds like he was kind of a problem. Why’d you keep him on?”

  Mangiole pointed to a full-sized refrigerator sitting in the open mouth of a service elevator. “The guy could probably have bench-pressed one of those. He had some quirks, but he worked like a freaking ox.”

  “Did he have any enemies?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that he didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. He kept to himself.”

  “Do you happen to have any Pakistani employees here? Or Indian?”

  Mangiole looked puzzled. “No. Why do you ask?” Jack shrugged. “Just curious.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THIS WAS THE LAST place on earth Jack Leightner wanted to be.

  After he and Richie interviewed some of the other salesmen at the appliance store, with little benefit to their investigation, he had given his colleague some advice about other avenues to pursue, and then he’d gone over to the Brooklyn D.A.’s office to give a deposition about another case. And then his shift was over, and he had started driving home, but he kept going, down toward the harbor, drawn back despite every instinct in his being.

  He had left this place as soon as he could after Petey’s murder; even though he was only seventeen, he’d managed to join the Army. He’d been shipped off to the Philippines, then Germany, eager to avoid his grieving parents, Petey’s friends, the whole goddamn neighborhood offering him pity every goddamn moment. (He never told the full story of what happened that day—just that he and his brother had been mugged.) He had gone to the far reaches of the earth, but he had never outrun what had happened on this spot.

  The trailer was gone, but the vacant lot was still there, where he and Petey had found the case of Scotch. It sat behind a Romanesque brick house of worship, now called the Red Hook Pentecostal Holiness Church. Jack looked off down the street: the waterfront lay to the northwest, just a couple of blocks down. He turned and set off the other way, though his feet practically stuck to the sidewalk in rebellion, retracing the route he and his brother had taken on that fateful morning back in 1965.

  The sky stretched over the waterfront—it always seemed more impressive here than elsewhere in New York City, a vast open plain sweeping high above the humble little two- and three-story brick houses. Jack walked up Sullivan Street to Van Brunt, which ran through the heart of Red Hook like the main street of some Wild West ghost town.

  He plodded along past the Patrick F. Daly elementary school, named after a principal who had been killed in the crossfire of a drug-related shootout back in ’92. Ahead rose the redbrick towers of the Red Hook West public housing projects, where he had lived as a kid, back when they had been filled with longshoremen and pipefitters and welders, with Norwegians and Basques and Italians and even Russians like his own folks. Back when the mighty Todd Shipyards, just several blocks away, had built oceangoing steel behemoths, when this neighborhood had been packed with bars and restaurants and movie theaters. Now the shipyards were gone, the streets so quiet you could hear the sea breeze whisper past, the Red Hook Houses transformed into an inner-city ghetto.

  The school looked like a minimum-security correctional facility. Jack’s chest tightened as he forced himself to turn its far corner, onto Richards Street. He could almost feel the weight of the case of Scotch in his arms. He could hear Petey singing “Help Me, Rhonda,” the way his brother would always get a song stuck in his head. Jack could picture him doing his impression of Norton from The Honeymooners or improvising some slapsti
ck stunt to cheer up their often-depressed mother. He could even make their father laugh, when Max Leightner was not too deep into his cups. He had been a miracle, that kid, emerging from his screwed-up family like a bright plant rising from a dung heap. It wasn’t until he was gone that the others realized how he had held them together—and then they all retreated in different directions: Jack’s father into his drinking, his mother into her three-day periods of “lying down,” and Jack himself into his torturous guilt. (And maybe into a career as a cop.)

  He walked on, remembering how he and his brother had hurried that long-ago day, hoping to get their treasure to Joe Kolchuk’s house before they were spotted by some family friend. They had laughed with the audacity of it, he and Petey, thinking they were almost home free, unobserved.

  But they had been watched, as Jack had learned just thirty-two hours ago. Somewhere along the way a car had slowly cruised behind them with an Italian-American man at the wheel and two Negro teenagers sitting low in the back. His brother’s killer and the friend he had brought along for backup—both members of Fort Greene’s Black Chaplains street gang, a world away from their home turf. On Richards Street, the man had stopped the car and the back door swung open.

  “That’s them, boys. You know what to do.”

  Forty years later, Jack forced himself to continue on. Scraps of paper and empty potato-chip bags littered the sidewalk, challenged by big weeds pushing up through the cracks. A Puerto Rican woman and two little pigtailed girls emerged from the bodega across the corner, the kids laughing and skipping. He walked along a block of spavined little houses, their facades weather-beaten; old ornamental cornices ran along the rooflines. Take away the cars and the telephone wires, and the scene might have looked the same a hundred years before.