Hillhouse nodded thoughtfully. “But you’re concerned that he took the gun?”
Jack shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe he just sees that as a means of self-defense. He hasn’t used it yet, as far as we know. No, there’s something that worries me more.”
The FBI man’s glasses had slipped down his nose again; he stared over the top of them. “What’s that?”
Jack grimaced. “He took the Magic Marker.”
RAY HILLHOUSE GOT CALLED away by one of the Crime Scene techs. Jack spent a few more minutes poking around the basement, and then he went up to the kitchen for some fresh air. He found Michael Durkin sitting on a kitchen counter, slumped against a cabinet.
“You all right?” he asked.
The security man winced.
“Tell you what,” Jack said. “Why don’t you show me the waterfront, so I can see where the perpetrator might’ve escaped to?” Durkin slid down the counter until his feet reached the floor.
THE SECURITY MAN LIT a cigarette and drew in a deep lungful of smoke. “Quite a view, huh?”
Jack nodded. The two men stood on an asphalt esplanade just behind the house. It stretched off around the island in both directions.
“I grew up right over there.” Jack pointed across the channel. The Red Hook side was dominated by the loading cranes of the container port, and multicolored stacks of the massive containers were piled next to them like a child’s giant toy blocks. “I’ve never seen it from here, though. It’s weird: It’s kind of like the first time a barber holds up a mirror and you see the back of your head.” He turned around, leaned against a railing, and faced back toward the island. “This is quite a place.”
The security man nodded. “It used to be a whole self-contained world. They had a school, a bowling alley, swimming pools, churches, markets. They even had a seven-hundred seat Loews movie theater.” He pressed his hands down on the railing and stared across the water. “You know the Talking Heads?”
“The TV news creeps?”
Durkin shook his head. “No, the band. From a while back.”
Jack nodded. “Oh…right. With that cute blonde, Debby something?…”
Despite his sad mood, Durkin managed a smile. “Whatever. The point is, they had a song that said, ‘Heaven is a place, where nothing ever happens.’ I think about that sometimes, driving my little golf cart around this island.” He squinted, even though the sun was at his back. He cleared his throat, but remained silent.
Jack glanced at him. “Hey, Michael? Is there something you haven’t told me about this situation?”
The security man rubbed a hand over his face. He looked away for a moment. When he turned back, pain was etched all over his face. “Um, well, yeah. That man in there, Barry Reynolds…he’s my father-in-law.” He sighed. “I’m the one who got him the job. He used to be a cop. Not in the city, but over there in Jersey. Newark. He put in his twenty, and then he retired, and then…like a lot of retired cops, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He was the kind of guy who always liked a good drink at the end of the day, but he started really…pretty soon it wasn’t just a beer now and then. He seemed real depressed. My wife started getting worried about him. I did, too. I talked him into going to some meetings, AA and all, and it seemed like it was working. The thing is, I don’t know if you’ve been to Newark recently, but it’s a hard luck town. Lots of bars, cheap liquor stores. A tough place to stay sober…”
The security supervisor cleared his throat again and watched a tugboat muscle a long flat barge against the current. “Anyway, I had this job out here, and I figured I could do him a favor. I brought him on board, so to speak. It seemed like the perfect place for somebody who was trying to dry out. No liquor stores, no bars, absolutely nowhere to buy a drink.” Durkin’s voice broke. “I really liked the guy. And I wanted to help him. This was perfect. There was no way he could get himself in trouble.”
CHAPTER fourteen
THAT NIGHT, JACK’S BED was a raft. He floated on a sea of memories: Michael Durkin’s miserable, guilt-wracked face; the view of Brooklyn from Governors Island; being ten years old and jumping off a pier in Red Hook, laughing with his brother Peter. But Petey was gone forever…
Michelle reached out in the dark and laid her hand on his shoulder, reminding him that he was not alone; they were on the raft together. He turned to her, caressed the side of her face. She hadn’t just stuck with him after the shooting—she had brought him back to life even before it, after all of those years when he had pretty much given up on love.
He leaned over and kissed her. He pulled the covers down off her body, slowly ran his hand over her flat warm stomach, over the round hill of a breast. Her nipple hardened under his palm. He eased her panties off of her hips. Soon he was inside her, diving in a warm blue sea, no memories now, just this eternal present moment. This time, everything felt right. She cried out; he joined her; they were the sea.
THERE ARE ONLY TWO kinds of problems in this world,” pronounced Detective Sergeant Stephen Tanney early the next morning. “There are the my problems, and then there are the not my problems. This is definitely the second kind.”
Jack sat up straight and clasped his hands in his lap; that helped keep him from strangling his boss. “But it relates directly to the Red Hook case.”
The sergeant’s office felt close and stuffy, especially with three people in it. Lieutenant Frank Cardulli, the head of the Homicide Task Force, was sitting in, listening to what his subordinates had to say. He was a stout, mustachioed fireplug of a man who had been in charge of the task force for years. Unlike Tanney, he inspired great confidence in his team.
Tanney frowned. “Aside from the fact that this has nothing to do with our task force jurisdiction, this isn’t even a New York City matter.”
A groan formed in Jack’s throat and he did the best he could to hold it back. “We’re talking about someone who committed two homicides.”
Tanney shook his head. “We’re talking about some nut bird who was holed up on federal property. If it wasn’t for some fluke water current, this whole mess would never have had anything to do with Brooklyn.”
Jack clasped his hands tighter. So typical. Yes, the new Compstat program was helping the NYPD target and deal with the areas of highest crime, and yes, crime rates across the city had plummeted. But it was hard to believe that the Department’s ultimate aim was reducing crime itself. The goal, as always, was making the stats look good. If the easiest way to do that was simply to move the crime elsewhere, so be it. If it could all be shifted out of state, the top dogs would have been perfectly happy. Who gave a shit what was happening in New Jersey or Connecticut? No Department jobs were riding on those stats.
Jack stared down at the floor. Count to ten, he told himself. “What we have here,” he said slowly and deliberately, “is someone who has killed two separate innocent people, including a child. And he did so in a way that’s likely to blow up in the media, as soon as some smart reporter makes the connection.”
Tanney snorted. “Give it a rest, Leightner. How many times do you think I’m gonna fall for that one? This new shit happened on federal property. It’s not our worry.”
Jack turned to Lieutenant Cardulli. “What do you think?”
The lieutenant leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands together. He deliberated for a moment, then leaned forward. “Well, I certainly agree with you that if we’ve got some wackjob running around out there, he’s gotta be stopped. But the sergeant is right: This is a federal case. And even if the city did have jurisdiction over the island, it would be a Manhattan thing.” He stood up and sighed. “We’ve got plenty to do without worrying about cases that aren’t even ours.” Jack started to protest, but Cardulli raised a palm. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t continue to work on this, but we can’t pull you out of the rotation. If you need some extra resources to work the Brooklyn side of it, I’ll do my best to help out.”
Jack nodded wearily. Like his elderly landlord
was fond of saying about just about every problem, from potholes to bouts of the flu: “Whadda ya gonna do? Ya can’t fight City Hall.”
THE HOMICIDE TASK FORCE was like a crew of fishermen, only they didn’t even have to cast their hooks: Cases kept flopping over the side of the boat. You never knew what each day’s catch would bring.
There had been times when they flew in so fast that the detectives could barely keep up. Back in 1990, soon after Jack joined up, the precincts of Brooklyn South had seen two hundred and sixty murders. He remembered one crazy tour when the first call came just five minutes after his team punched in. Another came an hour later, then another. By the end of the shift, five fresh homicides had piled up, and the detectives could only stare at each other, amazed.
By this last month of 2001, the yearly count looked like it might reach only about ninety. Some attributed the drop in deadly crime to the waning of the crack epidemic, or changing demographics. Others pointed to the effectiveness of the Compstat approach. One thing was sure: No matter what, the commissioner and the mayor would claim the bulk of the credit.
And whatever happened, homicide never quite went out of style. People were not happy with each other, and they expressed their frustration with guns, with SUVs, with baseball bats, with electric carving knives, with their bare hands.
During the next three days, Jack and his team worked a couple of particularly pointless cases. First came a grim job out in Flatbush, a cocaine addict who had drowned her two young children in the bathtub. Then there was a middle-aged man in Canarsie who shot his friend and neighbor of thirty-five years in a dispute over dog poop on a lawn. There were no mysteries involved, other than the fundamental one: Why were people dropped on this earth, only to put each other to such sad or stupid ends?
CHAPTER fifteen
IT WAS A BAD hair day from the get-go.
Jack emerged from his house into a cold, drizzly winter morning.
Then his car engine refused to turn over, which meant that he had to do something he always did his best to avoid: ride the subway. A detective prided himself on getting around in a respectable ride; taking the subway felt like showing up on a donkey.
He almost burned his tongue trying to sip a takeout coffee as he walked to the station. When the train came, there was only one available seat, next to a young blonde with a severe but beautiful face. A piece of newspaper lay on the empty seat. Jack bent to brush it away, but the woman shook her head. “You should not sit there,” she said in a thick Russian accent. “It’s steecky.” He shrugged and moved over to grasp a pole. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the blonde. Russians were common on the Q line, which ran to Brighton Beach; they went back and forth from the City, laden with shopping bags, living their mysterious, impenetrable lives. (Jack’s own parents had come from that part of the world, but it was hard to feel any common ground with these newer immigrants.) He heard a burst of metallic disco music; the blonde dug a cell phone out of her purse. (Unfortunately, the train ran above ground out to Coney Island, which meant a constant babble of one-sided conversations.) The call seemed very important to the young woman: She gripped the phone tightly and spoke urgently, but Jack couldn’t tell if she was about to smile or burst into tears.
Directly in front of him sat two girls wearing elaborate hairdos and huge hoop earrings. One of them conducted an endless monologue. “He was like, ‘Where you goin’, bitch?,’ and I was like, ‘Who you talkin’ to? You must’a got me confused with someone who gonna put up with your shit’…” Across the way, a young woman in a velour tracksuit sat popping her gum in a bovine daze. Waiting for the next loud pop set Jack’s teeth on edge.
Rush hour in NYC. At each stop, people pushed in and out of the train like amoebas in a science film. Jack found a seat, but then stood up to offer it to a pregnant woman, then had to scrunch into a corner when a tattooed teenager wearing incredibly baggy, low-slung pants entered the car pushing a mountain bike. Jack took a deep breath and tried to stay calm, offering thanks that he didn’t have to do this every day.
He wasn’t the only one who looked uptight, especially when—between stations—the elevated train suddenly jerked to a stop. He heard a siren somewhere below, and then another one. His fellow passengers glanced at each other uneasily; these days, every alarm felt like the herald of a new terrorist attack. The speakers overhead emitted a staticky, urgent-sounding, totally garbled message, which did nothing for everyone’s peace of mind. The gum-popper suddenly cracked her gum in the middle of the grim silence that followed and people visibly flinched. Everybody exchanged sheepish looks when the train started up again; they were all thinking exactly the same thing: Thank God. I’m actually gonna live to see another day.
By the time Jack reached Coney Island and stepped out into the salty air, he breathed a big sigh of relief.
As soon as he arrived at work, Sergeant Tanney called him in to his office to inform him that the squad’s schedule had been rearranged: He would have to work Christmas Day.
“I’m already working Christmas Eve,” Jack pointed out.
Tanney just shrugged. “Brady is gonna be out for his surgery all that week and I need to cover the tour. Besides, with a last name like Leightner, I wouldn’t think that working Christmas would be all that much of a hardship for you.”
For just about the entirety of his police career, Jack would have agreed. He was Jewish, and his wife had been Jewish, too. To them, as to most Jews, Christmas was a party to which they had not been invited. If you had to work, who cared? The holiday pay was nice, and then it was a relief when all the hoopla was over.
Now, though, things had changed. He was about to marry a Christian, a bona fide shiksa. He figured he and Michelle would probably work out some sort of compromise holiday, and the thought was not displeasing. When he went over to her place and saw her little pine tree with its precious heirloom ornaments, the kid in him, the one who had always felt shut out at Christmastime, felt a surprising flush of pleasure. He had been looking forward to spending the day with her, to watching her unwrap the presents he was going to buy for her, real soon.
“Is there a problem?” Tanney asked.
Jack suppressed a frown. He didn’t want to explain his personal life to this stuffed-shirt, didn’t want to have to demean himself by pleading. He shook his head. “No problem.”
He would make it up to Michelle on New Year’s Eve. He had already made the restaurant reservations at a fancy joint in Midtown. He would finally pop the question, and then she would certainly forgive him.
The third time is the charm…
He left the sergeant’s office and settled down at his desk, only to find that there was still no word from FBI man Ray Hillhouse. He had been eagerly anticipating the forensics results from the crime scene on the island, but who knew? Maybe he’d never see them. The fed had been friendly, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t decide to hog the ball.
It was one frustration too many.
By the time he finally escaped the office and made it out to a crime scene, Jack was ready to punch a wall.
It was not the best of days to meet Tenzin Pemo.
THE DHAMMAPADA TIBETAN BUDDHIST Center was full of surprises.
First of all, Jack would have expected it to be somewhere close to Brooklyn’s Chinatown, near Sunset Park, but it was housed in a gritty section of Flatbush, in an old brick building above a check-cashing joint. The place looked like the real deal—a big room decorated with bright paintings of fantastical deities; an altar presided over by a fat, smiling gold statue; a smell of incense—but Jack checked out the members milling around and not one of them looked remotely Asian. They looked, in fact, like the kind of upscale bohemian white people he might find in a Park Slope coffee bar.
When told that the director was named Tenzin Pemo, he was still holding out for a wizened Tibetan man, but someone led him to a back office and introduced him to a small, stout Caucasian woman. (She did look rather mannish, though, with her close-
cropped hair and her square, homely features. Jack couldn’t help wondering if she had taken up religion because she had never gotten any other offers.) The woman wore overlapping robes of winey red and orangey yellow, though one shoulder was left bare. Did she go around like that all winter long?
He didn’t know anything about Buddhism. He supposed that in its own setting, in Tibet or India or wherever, it would seem like a normal everyday religion, but the way it had been adopted by white people here reminded him of the Hare Krishnas he used to see in Greenwich Village, kids from privileged families acting out against their parents, screwed-up and unmoored. Back in the sixties, he hadn’t had the time or the luxury for hippie rebellion. He came from a poor working family, and he wanted desperately to escape Red Hook, and the fastest ticket out was to join the army, which he did. When he got back, he didn’t have much patience for flower children.
He had to admit that this woman didn’t have that fuzzy stoned look. She gazed at him with complete attention, and projected a calm authority, sitting firmly in her desk chair, hands folded in her lap.
In thirteen years with Homicide, he had seen many different reactions to the news of a death. Grief, horror, panic, evasion, fear, revulsion, anxiety, relief, even joy. He had watched relatives or friends sob, shout, faint, curse, tremble uncontrollably, avoid all eye contact, even laugh hysterically. But he had never seen anyone as poised as this, at least no one who was not deep in shock.
Shock would have been appropriate. At eleven-thirty the previous evening, a young monk from the center had been killed just a few yards down the street. Several witnesses had watched the whole thing from their apartment windows. A group of adolescent boys from the nearby projects had come upon the gangly, bald-headed young man as he was locking the center’s street-level entrance. They started making fun of him because of the robes he wore below his army surplus parka. “Yo, faggot, nice dress.” Experience had taught the detective that few things could be more dangerous than a pack of adolescent boys: They often had no sense of the consequence of their actions, couldn’t conceive of death, and were so eager to hide their insecurities from their peers that they would go to terrible, tragic lengths to appear tough. In this case, the cackling and name-calling had escalated into trash throwing, and one glass bottle had caught the young monk in the back of the head.
The Graving Dock Page 9
