The Ninth Step

by Gabriel Cohen

  And now—glancing at the clock a half-hour later—he should have been stopping for a karahi and some saag at Tabeer’s café on Coney Island Avenue, making idle conversation with Fayaz and Shafiq and some of the other drivers. Then back out on the streets, tracing the glowing pathways of the city, as they had been laid out beneath him that night twelve years ago when he had first arrived in this country, swooping low over Brooklyn in a huge airplane.

  He emerged from the café bleary-eyed. A big poster on the side of a bus stop jumped out at him, a reminder of the city’s severe vigilance after 9/11: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. He hurried past, eyes down, avoiding the passersby. He thought of calling one of his fellow drivers, of asking for rescue or at least a couch on which to spend the night, but he would not risk implicating anyone else in his troubles. Agents of the government were everywhere.

  He stopped in at a corner deli and bought a pack of cigarettes, even though the damned things were so expensive and it occurred to him that he ought to be saving his money now. He lit up, breathing the smoke deep into his lungs; it helped ease his anxiety.

  He trudged back to the boardwalk. The night was fairly warm and people were still out, strolling along the weathered wooden walkway, chatting amiably, without any cares in the world. This place was too busy; Nadim walked west, toward Coney Island, until he found an unpopulated stretch of the walkway. Reeling with exhaustion, he found a bench facing the sea, lay down, and curled up. He couldn’t risk staying out in the open like this for long, but maybe he could at least take a short nap.

  He lay there as the night grew colder, chilled by ocean breezes, sleeping as if drugged, wracked by his recurring nightmares. His Enny came back to him, as she often did, that sweet little wraith, pressing her hand to her chest and coughing, coughing, imploring him, Help me, Abbu. Please help me. Then the dreams turned violent. One ended with Nadim covered in blood, and he jolted awake, shocked to find the sky brightening slowly with the dawn, then jolted again by the sight of a stocky policeman standing at the foot of his bench. The officer tapped Nadim’s foot with a nightstick.

  Never, he thought. I will kill this man—or myself—before I allow them to cage me away again. He tensed, prepared to launch himself up off the bench.

  But the policeman just yawned. “Can’t sleep here, buddy. Gotta move on.” And then the man actually, miraculously, sauntered off toward the rising sun.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “LET’S GO,” RICHIE POWKER said. “There’s no one home.”

  “One more try.” Jack pressed the doorbell again, then waited a few seconds. Finally, he turned away; he was walking down off the stoop into the bright morning sunshine when he heard a sound behind the door.

  The house was ramshackle, leaning to the left, with a threadbare little front yard and crumbling shingles on the roof. The old woman who opened the door was not in much better shape. Her hair poked out of her head like dry straw and her face was scrunched into what looked like a permanent scowl. “Whaddaya want?” she said.

  Jack called up to her. “Is this Robert Brasciak’s residence?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  He pulled his badge out of the pocket of his sport coat. “We’re with the New York Police Department. About Brasciak.”

  “There’s no one here by that name.”

  “That’s funny,” Jack said. He pointed toward a little pile of mail resting on the front porch. “There’s a couple of letters and bills for him. Are you a relative, or his landlady?”

  The woman scowled. “I was his landlady, but he doesn’t live here anymore. He moved away last year.”

  Jack didn’t believe her. “We’d just like to take a quick look at his apartment.”

  The woman crossed her arms. “I ain’t stupid. I watch the TV. You need a warrant.”

  “You’re right. We would need a warrant. If he was alive.”

  The woman took a step back. “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “I’m sorry to break the news: he was found dead yesterday morning.”

  The woman’s right hand flew up to her cheek. “But he owes me two months’ rent!”

  Jack didn’t bother to comment. In his time with Brooklyn South Homicide, he had witnessed just about every possible reaction to the news of a murder.

  “What happened?” the woman asked.

  “We’re investigating what looks like a homicide.”

  She pressed a hand to her chest. “Who did it?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Jack and his partner trooped in past her, into a front hall that was decorated with flowered wallpaper more faded than the owner’s house-dress. “Which way, ma’am?”

  Grudgingly, she pointed to a doorway. They followed her down a dimly lit, narrow stairway to another closed door. She reached into the pocket of her housedress and took out a key ring. As she turned the key, she looked back at them with a puzzled expression.

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  “The door was unlocked. He never leaves it that way.”

  Jack flashed on the image of the feds piling out of their van. “Has anyone else come by asking about Robert?”

  The landlady shook her head. Jack frowned. Maybe the feds had dropped by without bothering to ring the bell. This landlady seemed like a tough watchdog, but these locks were old and not very effective; it would have been a simple matter to slip in while she was out. He started thinking about radiation: What if there was something nasty beaming little rays behind this door? In that case, he hoped the feds had paid a visit.

  She turned the knob and pushed the door open. The reason for her wariness soon became obvious: the basement apartment was devoid of windows.

  “Nice illegal rental,” Richie noted dryly.

  “You’re not gonna turn me in, are ya?”

  Jack saw a big chunk of her income disappearing in her panicked eyes, and he adopted a reassuring tone. “We’re not here to make any problems for you—as long as you tell us the truth.” He and his partner wandered through the apartment while they asked her more questions. They didn’t stumble across any atomic bombs in the making, which was certainly a relief.

  “Any idea why someone would have it in for your tenant?”

  “He kept to himself. I don’t know nothin’ about his personal life.”

  “You ever hear any fights or arguments going on down here?”

  “He never had company, not that I know of.” She stared at Jack. “Was it a nigger that killed him? Robert could never tolerate the niggers.”

  Jack frowned at the casual slur; the last thing he needed right now was a reminder of his own teenage stupidity. “It seems like it might have been a Pakistani or an Indian.” He watched carefully for her reaction.

  Her eyebrows went up. “Well, that’s a surprise. Those people seem pretty quiet. Family types.”

  Jack turned back to his survey of the apartment. He wished he could tell if Brasciak might have had a little company post-mortem, but even if the feds had tossed the place, they could hardly have left it in more of a mess. It was a real bachelor dump, with empty beer cans scattered around, overflowing ashtrays, clothes strewn about. It looked as if it hadn’t been renovated since the seventies or eighties: the wallpaper was silvery, and there was a wall-sized photo mural of Manhattan at night in the little living room, which offered just enough space for a beat-up leather couch, a big-screen TV (employee discount?), an elaborate video game controller, and a weight bench and some dumbbells. The gray wall-to-wall carpeting smelled funky, like spilled beer and mildew. A poster on the wall bore a picture of a Hispanic-looking hoodlum holding a white woman in an arm lock. Crosshairs were superimposed over the man’s face, and Jack realized that it was a shooting gallery target.

  “Did Brasciak have family?” Richie asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How about girlfriends?”

  “I don’t think so.” The landlady’s nose wrinkled as she gestured at a pile of lurid porn magazi
nes on the coffee table, along with a spread of well-thumbed copies of Soldiers of Fortune and Small Arms Review and a bunch of candy wrappers.

  “Did he have problems with any neighbors?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t go outside much.”

  Jack wandered into the kitchen. The refrigerator was nearly empty, except for some beer and big cans of bodybuilder’s muscle powder. He passed through a back doorway: the bedroom was more like a walk-in closet, just big enough for a mattress on the floor, which smelled of sweat and foot odor.

  As Jack returned to the living room, a phone rang upstairs and the landlady trundled off to answer it.

  “What do you think?” Jack asked his partner.

  Richie shook his head. “You know what this reminds me of? When I was a kid, I used to dream about being grown up. I thought it would mean that I could eat candy bars and watch TV all day, and no one could stop me.”

  The detective picked up one of the porn magazines, flipped through it, then tossed it back onto the coffee table. “This must be a pretty weird part of working in Homicide: you look through everything in people’s houses. Like, they go off to work, never expecting that they’re not gonna come home, and all their stuff is just layin’ there. My mom always used to tell me that thing about making sure I went out with clean underwear, in case I got hit by a car and had to go to the hospital.” He frowned. “Man, I wonder what the crap in my house would say about me.” He shrugged. “I guess I don’t have any big secrets lying around, though.” Richie sighed and sat on the edge of the couch. “I keep thinkin’ about those feds. They certainly didn’t leave us a lot to work with.”

  Jack shrugged. “It could be worse. A lot worse. We sometimes get dump jobs, a decapitated body in a Dumpster, or out in a marsh off the Belt Parkway. Sometimes we can’t even get fingerprints. Look at the bright side here: we know the vic, and we’ve got a big jump on identifying the perp.”

  Richie wrinkled his bulbous nose. “There are tens of thousands of Pakistani or Indian men in this city.”

  “Yeah, but we know our killer is not black or white or Hispanic or Chinese. We can cross about eight million potential perps off the list.” He headed for the front door. “We may be looking for a needle in a haystack, but at least we know what the needle looks like.”

  Richie chuckled. “You must be a glass-half-full kind of guy.”

  Jack smiled. “A glass half-full of needles.”

  IN HOPES OF RECOGNIZING their suspect, the two detectives spent the rest of the morning staring at computer databases: any files that cross-referenced zip code and country of origin, and provided photos. They found no matches for their mysterious Pakistani or Indian in 11218 or 11230. Searching citywide—not to mention the rest of the state and nearby New Jersey and Connecticut—might take days, so they decided to leave the computers alone and follow an old but trustworthy motto: Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors.

  “I told you this wasn’t going to be easy,” said Richie, later in the day.

  The two detectives had just walked out of a little Pakistani café on Coney Island Avenue, half a block from the deli crime scene. Outside, the weather was pleasant, but the agreeable aromas of spring were damped down by the avenue’s usual odors of motor oil and car exhaust.

  The café owner, a mournful little man with a bushy mustache, had not offered a single remotely useful piece of information. “Please, sirs, I saw nothing,” he’d said, eyes wide. “I will do everything possible to cooperate, but I saw nothing.”

  The man wiped down the counter with what seemed like a suspicious amount of nervous energy. In front of him lay steam table vats of mysterious entrées, orangey-red, pale yellow, muddy brown. The food looked oily, Jack thought; his digestion was already not the greatest. The place was tiny and narrow, with just a few humble tables and fluorescent lighting that reminded him of the Kings County morgue. The only decoration was some garish film posters of brown-skinned he-men with impressive pompadours and veiled women with sultry eyes.

  Jack pulled out a Polaroid of the victim in the deli. “Do you recognize this man?”

  The owner took a nervous peek. “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever seen him?”

  “Never,” the man replied, too firmly, in Jack’s opinion. If the victim lived just a few blocks away, he had probably walked past here any number of times.

  The owner wrung his hands. “I am sorry I cannot assist you.”

  Jack noted a layer of sweat on the man’s upper lip, despite the moderate temperature inside the café.

  Richie handed over a business card. “Thanks a lot. Please call if you hear anything about what happened yesterday.”

  The owner nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir. Of course. Anything I can do to help.”

  Now the two detectives were out on the avenue again, empty-handed. Jack took out a pack of gum and offered it to his partner. Then he unwrapped a stick, popped it into his mouth, and squinted off down the avenue. “I think that guy seemed kinda hinky.”

  Richie scuffed something off the bottom of his shoe. “He was just scared.”

  “That’s what I mean. Why would he be scared if he doesn’t know anything?”

  Across the street, a yellow cab emerged from the open front of a car wash and a little crew of Mexicans rushed forward to dry and buff it. Richie walked to the curb and leaned against his car, an unmarked Crown Vic. Jack followed.

  “You ever work a case around here before?” the local detective said.

  “A couple. You don’t get many murders around here, what with all the devoutness.” The neighborhood, thick with East Asian Muslims, butted right up against Midwood, thick with Hasidic Jews.

  Richie scratched at a little food stain on his tie. “I been workin’ this beat for eleven years, most of that on patrol. You know they call this Little Pakistan, right?”

  Jack nodded. Brooklyn was dotted with all sorts of intensely ethnic enclaves: former Russians in Brighton Beach, Chinese in Sunset Park, Poles in Greenpoint …

  “When was the last big case you worked here?”

  Jack thought about it. “I don’t know, maybe five years? We had a nasty triple homicide over on Avenue C.”

  Richie nodded. “I remember. A guy killed his wife and his stepkids.” He glanced around. “The thing is, the neighborhood has changed a hell of a lot since then. From the Pakistani point of view, it really hit the skids. Lots of stores and restaurants have closed down. The biggest mosque, not far from here”—he gestured south down Coney Island Avenue—“used to be so full that they’d have people praying on rugs right out on the sidewalks. Now they can’t even come close to a full house.”

  “Why?”

  “Two words: Nine-eleven. Before that, you couldn’t find a parking space because there were so many Pakistani people here shopping, eating, praying …”

  “And now?”

  “Almost half of them are gone.”

  “Why?”

  “After the World Trade Center went down, the feds ordered the community here to do ‘special registration.’ There were lots of Immigration raids. Tons of people got deported, and others skipped to Canada or other places because they were afraid of getting deported. Or arrested.”

  “For what?”

  “For any kind of suspicion. It was a lousy time to have brown skin. It still is. That’s why our friend in there”—he nodded back at the café—“wasn’t eager to take a look at the photo of our vic. The people around here are petrified of getting caught up in something that has nothing to do with them. They just wanna keep their heads down and go on with their lives. Nine-eleven totally screwed them over.”

  Jack frowned. “I know most of the hijackers were Saudis, but weren’t some of these people involved in the bombing of the Trade Center in ninety-three?”

  “Some were, yeah, some newly arrived radical types, but most of these people were not at all happy with them, even before the bombing. The newcomers took over some of the mosques and forced the more moderate
imams out.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this stuff.”

  Richie shrugged. “Like I told you, I’ve been working this turf for a long time.”

  Jack sighed and stretched. “Let’s keep going.”

  And so they did, walking in and out of Laundromats, gas stations, auto parts stores, seeking anyone who might have any information related to their case. No matter how many times they assured people that they were not feds, that they had absolutely nothing to do with Immigration, every time they interviewed a Pakistani-American, the result was the same: a look of barely suppressed panic, a clamping down.

  Two hours later, they stopped to take a break and sit in a coffee shop for a few minutes.

  “Well, whaddaya wanna do?” Powker said as they settled onto a couple of counter stools. “I guess we can go back and keep working on the Brasciak end of things.”

  Jack frowned. They had already discovered that their victim was unmarried, didn’t seem to have any wives or kids in his past, had a decent credit rating and no criminal record.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said. “What a waste of time!”

  “I told you,” Richie said. “You can’t hold it against them. They’re just afraid of getting deported.”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m not talking about the Pakistanis; I’m talking about that fed. I think maybe he already knows who our perp is, while we’re wandering around here like a couple of mopes. It burns me up—it’s disrespectful of the NYPD, and it’s totally pointless. Aren’t we all on the same team?”

  “Nothing new from your boss?”

  Jack snorted. In typical fashion, Sergeant Tanney had been told what to do, and then had meekly gone ahead and done it. “He says he called again today, but the feds didn’t call back.”

  Richie sighed, then picked up a menu. “You gonna get something to eat or just coffee?”