Close Case

by Alafair Burke

  “I can live with that.”

  Trusting her was the right thing to do. She was scared enough over the shooting, but she needed to know the extent of the danger she was looking at.

  “I found out Friday that the defendants charged with killing Percy have an alibi,” I told her. “We’re still checking it out, but it looks solid. That means we’re back to square one.”

  I saw a swallow in Heidi’s throat and a fearful blink of her eyes as she realized the implication of what I was telling her.

  “Heidi, you need to watch your back. No more running around the city asking questions and stirring up neighbors. You get the story through us, not on your own.”

  “Trust me. After what I’ve seen today, that’s just fine.”

  “OK. Tommy, does this sound like something that fits in with what you’ve seen on the drug side?”

  “There’s no doubt we’ve been stumped by some of the patterns. Still lots of meth, pot, heroin, X, you name it, but crack arrests are down.”

  “And, before today, any theories?”

  He folded his arms in front of him. “Depends on who you ask. Some guys write off the Feds as having their heads squarely up their asses and insist there must be less crack coming into the city, with other drugs filling the void. I for one don’t put any stock in that, because the price of a rock’s still steady on the street. Cheaper, if anything.”

  “So no crack shortage,” I said.

  “No way. Personally, I chalked it up to those stupid stop-and-search cards. The way I saw it, if a guy’s afraid of looking like a racist, he might think twice about following his instincts when the target’s black. If we have enough guys doing that, given how the market’s divided up, down go the crack busts and up go the other busts. Problem with that, though, is exactly what you pointed out.” He looked to Heidi.

  “The numbers show that cops are doing the stop-and-searches and filling out the cards. But they’re not arresting.”

  “Right. That leaves the theory that the black guys have just gotten better at this. They hide the dope behind a bush while they’re dealing, or they use a kid across the street to hold product and shuttle it deal-by-deal on a signal. Even if we bust someone on a hand-to-hand, the product stays protected. You never see that kind of stealth with meth and X because, honestly, white people don’t need to worry as much about getting stopped in the first place.”

  “And what about Heidi’s theory?”

  Tommy’s eyes grew big, and he sighed before speaking. “Well, I hate to think that’s what we’re looking at. But if Percy Crenshaw’s writing down the names of cops in his book before he gets killed, and now two women have been shot….”

  “So let’s assume Heidi’s right. If cops were taking money to look the other way, who’d be paying it? Not the kids on the corners. They don’t have the kind of cash it takes to get to an officer, and the pattern’s too widespread.”

  “It’s got to be someone big. But part of the reason I can’t give you a definitive answer on who the key players are is because the fewer street people we pop, the less chance we’ve got flipping someone to work our way up the chain. We’ve got a theory, though—” Tommy cut himself off.

  “And?” I prompted.

  He looked at Heidi, then at me again. Heidi caught the drift. “I’m not going to write a story exposing law enforcement’s plans on an ongoing investigation. That’s not how I operate.”

  Tommy looked at me, and I nodded. He went on. “We’ve heard a lot about a guy named Andre Brouse. Thirty years old. He was a street kid up here back in the day, but on paper at least he’s become mister legitimate businessman. Owns a nightclub called Jay-J’s.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” I said. Grace was more connected to the club scene than I. According to her, the downtown crowd headed over to North Portland in the wee hours for Jay-J’s thumping blend of hip-hop, rap, and world music. The fact that Jay-J’s was willing to pour after the better-known bars stopped serving also helped.

  “A lady at the Buckeye meeting said there were rumors about drugs there,” Heidi volunteered. “She said the owner knew about it, too.”

  “And rumors are pretty much all we’ve got on Brouse other than a bunch of liquor law violations, which we’ve ignored so far. Let him think he’s still off the radar.”

  “What makes you think he’s dealing?” Alan asked.

  “Word on the street, to start. He’s surrounded by an armed entourage and a ton of cash. And, by all appearances, he had the money before the club, and no one knows where the money came from. Some people say it’s from his dad. I guess his daddy was a one-hit wonder—one of those songs where they spelled some stupid word out in letters. Anyway, we don’t buy it. His mom moved him up here alone from California as a kid, and they were poor. Plus, rumor is, he’ll smack the shit out of anyone who even asks him about that song.”

  “So the story about the father might be something put out there to make him seem legit?” I asked.

  “Exactly, like the old-school gangster’s sanitation management business. He looks like a law-abiding bar owner, but meanwhile he’s sitting on top of the city’s crack trade. Plus, from what we hear, the network’s totally out of control. Too many kids trying to climb too fast. Supposedly there’s infighting among the managers who sit just above the corner dealers, all battling for Andre’s attention. The problem is, these guys aren’t Andre’s age, and they’re not as smooth. Andre’s thirty years old, has never spent a day in prison as an adult, and has never taken a bullet. His people? They’re thugs, and the way they get attention is by thugging. The Gang Unit’s been hopping with unsolved shootings. We hadn’t heard about cops in the picture, but if Brouse is as smart as he seems to be, it’s possible.”

  “Which brings us to Powell and Foster. What do we know about them?” I asked Carson.

  “Well, I pulled their rookie file photos,” he said, tossing copies of two photographs across the table to Heidi. “Do either of these men look like the officer who watched you read the reports?”

  “Yeah, that one,” she said, pointing to the darker of the two men.

  “Curt Foster.”

  “He was the one whose reports were most out of whack,” Heidi explained. “Lots of arrests but no crack cases.”

  He opened the two personnel files in front of him. “Now these I can’t let you have access to,” he said to Heidi.

  “City rules,” I explained. “Any external releases have to go through the City Attorney.”

  “You know what? I’m just going to go home.” She stood and started pulling on her rain jacket.

  “No, it’s just the personnel records,” I said.

  “Seriously, given the state of Percy’s notes when I found them, I’m just happy to see the three of you work out the rest of it from here. And in exchange for keeping my mouth shut, I trust you to give me the story when you’re done. Besides, I’m scared out of my pants right now. Honestly, I’m tempted to wash my hands of this and become a day-care teacher or something.”

  “Don’t do that,” Tommy said. “Little kids are far more dangerous.”

  Before she left, I walked her to the hallway. “You’ll be careful, yes? You’ve got my cell number?”

  “I’m fine. In fact, a guy who’s safe and protective has been trying to call me all day. The thought of dinner, movie, and a very large companion sounds pretty good right now.”

  After she left, Alan, Tommy, and I pored over Foster’s and Powell’s personnel records. Neither one of them was what you’d call a star. Mediocre scores on the civil service entrance exam. None of the special letters of recognition that come when a supervisor spots the promise of advancement through the ranks. Powell had early run-ins several years ago with suspects, marked by a disproportionate number of resisting-arrest complaints by—and excessive-force complaints against—him. Recently, though, he seemed to have mellowed out, making fewer arrests than the typical patrol officers on his same shifts and beats. Was it the laziness that ofte
n sets in with experience or something more nefarious?

  “Wait, here’s something,” Carson announced. “Two years ago, Powell was one of the last remaining moonlighters. Threatened with discipline, settled when he voluntary terminated his non-PPB employment.” Unlike a lot of departments, Portland’s bureau prohibits officers from accepting independent gigs as private security. Roughhousing on their off-hours creates too many questions about the city’s liability. “All it says here is a tavern at 4112 Coving.”

  Tommy Garcia smiled and smacked the table. “Otherwise known, boys and girls, as Jay-J’s.”

  I grabbed Foster’s file from Garcia, paging through it quickly, hoping to find the club mentioned there as well. Instead, I read with surprise the name of a young officer with whom Curt Foster was partnered five years ago, when the bureau could still afford two-man patrols. It was a piece of evidence I couldn’t ignore, as much as I wanted to.

  “Alan, I need one more file. I just sent it back to IA on Thursday.”

  22

  That night, hidden away with Vinnie in the small cluttered room I call my home office, I was still studying the three IA files Alan Carson had entrusted to me. I had learned nothing new about Curt Foster or Jamie Powell, but I was, unfortunately, piecing together new information about Chuck’s partner.

  When Mike Calabrese joined PPB seven years ago, he started out in Northeast Precinct, partnered with Curt Foster. According to Carson, Calabrese was brought in when the bureau, struggling to meet hiring needs, created a laundry list of exceptions to the usual requirements of civil service exams and background checks.

  Calabrese was hired under an exception for lateral hires, which explained the personnel forms I had neglected to photocopy for Lopez. In lieu of the usual procedures, the precinct commanders could rely on a review of the candidate’s personnel file and a recommendation from a supervising officer in the transferring jurisdiction.

  I wasn’t surprised when Carson told me that this short-lived experiment was wracked with political, familial, and personal patronage. But Mike’s file was more troubling than the hiring of someone’s Gomer Pyle nephew. For starters, there was no documentation whatsoever from NYPD. Carson insisted that Mike’s file should have contained a complete copy of his former records.

  Even more troubling, I had done my own investigation into Patrick Gallagher, the “officer with knowledge” upon whom the precinct commander had relied when he hired Mike. An Internet search of news articles in New York about Patrick Gallagher turned up years of references to a lieutenant consistently assigned to the Internal Affairs Bureau of the NYPD.

  I seriously doubted that Mike worked IAB in New York. He wouldn’t have had enough years on the job by then, it didn’t suit his temperament, and I would have heard about it. But somehow an IAB lieutenant had “knowledge” about Mike and had helped ship him out to Portland.

  I dug my old Rolodex from the back of my desk drawer, the one I’d used at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York. I dialed the number for Ed Devlin, an NYPD sergeant who was my local police contact when I was a federal prosecutor. He had been close to retirement even then, so I was surprised when I heard his familiar voice on the outgoing message.

  “Ed, it’s Samantha Kincaid from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, back in the day. I’m at the DA’s Office in Oregon now, and a question has come up about one of our officers who used to be NYPD. I need you to get me the scoop.” I left Mike’s name, NYPD badge number, and my home phone, hoping he was still working graveyards.

  As I tried to make sense of the gaps in Mike’s file, I thought about the lessons I learned on the Hamilton case. It’s not easy to prosecute cops. It’s not even easy to fire them. If Mike had trouble in New York—but not enough trouble to lose the support of his union—was it that farfetched to imagine the city settling the case by finding him a place with another bureau, one desperate for new hires?

  I heard a tap on the door and, before it opened, quickly pushed Mike’s file beneath a stack of old legal magazines I kept telling myself I’d read someday.

  “Good game. You sure you can’t take a break?”

  “Not quite yet. I’d rather wait just a little longer until my brain dries up completely. Then I can enjoy the rest of the night.”

  “Okay. I ordered Pizzacata, half gourmet for you.” Chuck’s a pepperoni guy, I’m goat cheese and artichoke. “Want me to bring it up when it gets here?”

  “Hopefully I’ll be done by then.”

  He started to leave, then turned around. “Are those IA files?”

  Uh-oh. Chuck knew I was working on something Percy had been researching. I had mentioned Heidi, the Buckeye shooting, and the newspaper article. Beyond that, I hadn’t gotten specific.

  “Yeah, that story Percy was working on involved two patrol officers at Northeast Precinct.”

  He reached over my shoulder and separated the files to see the names on the tabs. “Oh, shit. Curt Foster was Mike’s partner back on patrol for a while.”

  I didn’t want to lie by feigning surprise, but I didn’t want to get into this, either. Instead, I said nothing.

  “You should call him. Mike didn’t like that guy at all.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know the details, but it came up a few times when he said how glad he was to get out of patrol.”

  “All right.”

  “You want his number?”

  “I’ve got it somewhere.”

  “Babe, you and Mike can’t stay angry forever, and it’s stupid for you to spend all night on files when Mike can give you the skinny. Let’s call him together,” he said, picking up the phone on my desk and starting to dial.

  I cut the call with the click of a finger on the phone base. “Chuck, wait.”

  “Sam, c’mon, I’m just trying to help you. Why won’t you—?” He replaced the phone in its cradle. “Is that another IA file?” he asked, looking beneath my pile of magazines.

  I looked at him, trying to figure out the best way to tell him what I needed to say.

  “Whose file is it, Sam?”

  I bit my lower lip and reached for his hand. He pulled it away. “Is that what I think it is?”

  I unearthed the file and extended it toward him. He looked at it as if it were food I’d stolen for him from a child. “Why do you still have that? You’ve been up here with that for hours while I’m watching football and calling in a pizza order?”

  “Chuck, I’m sorry. His name came up because he was Foster’s partner.” He also happened to be the detective who extracted Todd Corbett’s murder confession—the confession that closed off any suspicions that Percy’s killing was related to a story. “I had to at least look at it, and I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “When are you ever going to get it? I only get upset with you when you isolate yourself from me. You never trust me. You never trust anyone. First, it’s Matt York. Now it’s Mike. You look at these guys—my friends, our friends—like they’re anyone else in your caseload, like you don’t even know them.”

  “That’s not true, Chuck. Do you think I want those names to turn up on our cases? But am I supposed to just ignore the fact that Matt’s wife was sleeping with Percy and Matt himself happens to have a bunk alibi? I’ve been busting my ass all day to prove that Foster and Powell did it instead, and every second, in the back of my mind, part of my motivation has been to clear Matt. Now it turns out that the detective who coerced Corbett’s confession in the first place happens to be connected to Foster. And you should see this, Chuck. Mike’s hire was very strange. Do you know anything about why he left New York?”

  The look on his face cut straight to my heart. “Have you even stopped to think about the position you’re putting me in?”

  “Of course. Why do you think I put the file where you couldn’t see it?”

  He shook his head. “That’s your version of caring about me? Doing exactly what you want but hiding it? Now that I know, what am I supposed to do?”

 
; “Well, you certainly can’t tell Mike about it. It’s a pending investigation.”

  “An investigation by whom, Sam? By you. So you can be the one to call it off.”

  “OK, I shouldn’t have even called it an investigation. I just want to make sure I’m not missing something.”

  “You’re not, Sam. I know Mike. You know Mike. And you should have enough faith in him—and in my judgment about him—to know that you don’t need to go down that road.”

  “All I’m doing is asking some questions.”

  “You are so naive sometimes. A DA and IA don’t just ‘ask questions.’ Mike’s already suspended, and now you’ve got IA looking at him for corruption? Once your name even comes up with something like that, your reputation? It’s over.”

  “Well, it’s pretty much over for Mike anyway, no matter what I do.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” When I didn’t respond immediately, he jumped back in. “I knew it. I knew it on Friday when you said this was ‘probably’ only temporary, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Are you telling me that my partner’s out? For good?”

  “I don’t know that for sure. It depends how this all falls out.”

  “You mean it depends on whether your boss needs a scapegoat.”

  “That’s not fair, Chuck. He’s certainly more responsible for this cluster fuck than either of us.”

  “No. Todd Corbett and Trevor Hanks are the ones responsible.”

  “Fine, yes, to some extent, but they didn’t kill Percy. I’m trying to find out who did, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t criticize me for that.”

  “I’m criticizing you for running over Mike’s career in the process. Give his file back to IA and leave him out of it, before you get him kicked out of the bureau entirely.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Then I can’t know about this and keep it from Mike. He’s my partner.”

  “And I’m your girlfriend.”