His father’s eyes widened. “She said that? I mean, she told you that?”
“I’m fed up.” Ben’s voice cracked with anger. “I’m fucking fed up. Why do you even bother calling me anymore?”
“Hey. Come on. I know I could’ve done a better job with you guys. I know that. And I’m trying to do better now.”
Ben sighed. “Forget it. It’s not worth it.” He stood up, just wanting to get away. When it came to fight or flight, his family was much better at the second option.
“Where you going?”
“I’m going out to do some shooting.”
“Shooting?”
“Filming. It’s what I do—remember?”
“Wait up,” his father said. “I’ll give you a ride.”
Ben clenched his fists. “I’ll walk.”
Jack watched his son stride out of the restaurant. By the time he settled the bill and went outside to look for him, Ben was gone.
He walked down toward the East River, the massive stone anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge hanging over his head. He crossed a cobbled street and stepped out on a sun-baked plaza. Across the water, tourists crowded the terraces of South Street Seaport. The metal-and-glass towers of Wall Street and the World Trade Center glinted cruelly in the afternoon sun. He stared across at the moneyed towers of Manhattan as he had stared years ago as a poor kid growing up in a poor housing project on the wrong side of the river.
Disgusted. Loser. His son’s words rang in his head. He couldn’t believe it: he’d never once raised his hand to the kid—how could the boy have turned out so angry?
He remembered one time when he’d taken Ben swimming—the kid must’ve been about six years old. “Look, Dad!” his son kept shouting in his little voice, craving attention, proud as only a kid could be of his splashy dog paddling. Jack went out into the middle of the pool and asked his son to swim over to him. But he’d gotten distracted for a second when the kid was about halfway there. When he looked down, the boy had swallowed some water and he was panicking, beating the water with his little fists, desperately trying to stand up in water over his head. Jack scooped him up—that panicked, hiccupping little kid—reproached by his son’s look of disbelief that his father could let him down, would let him down.
No father could protect his son from the harshness of the world, but it was easier for a kid to put the blame close to home.
He spent a few minutes wandering around by the river feeling sorry for himself, then turned back to his car. Maybe he couldn’t win at love or parenting, but there was one thing he still had a chance to get right.
thirty
JACK SIGNED THE DAY log, glad to be home in the task force office again. The phone rang.
One of his fellow detectives swiveled in his chair. “You’ve got a call, Leightner. Some guy named Larry—he says you’ll know who he is.”
Jack reached across his desk for the phone.
“You got something for me, buddy?”
“Yeah,” Larry Cosenza said. “I asked around the neighborhood, real low-key like you said. About that Sumner International company: last year they bought up a couple of big lots on the Red Hook waterfront, just across from Governor’s Island. Another thing: they own P and L Enterprises and that garage over on Coffey Street.”
Jack whistled. “Jesus, Larry, I owe you big-time. Tell you what: when I’m ready to kick, I’m gonna order the fanciest casket in your place.”
He walked into the supply room and paced. Randall Heiser had just been promoted from interviewee to suspect. If the man had been less prominent, the next step would have been to ask him to come in for questioning at the Seventy-sixth Precinct, screw with his head for a while in hopes that he’d break or let something slip. Legally, suspects were not required to come in unless they were formally charged with a crime, but thanks to TV cop shows many still thought they were supposed to make the trip. But someone as well placed as Heiser would immediately call his attorney, who’d tell him to simply clam up.
There was another option, though. If he could charge the man with some other, minor violation—failure to pay his parking tickets, say—then he could bring him in.
Sergeant Tanney got up and closed the door to his office. He turned to Jack. “We’re not going to arrest the man for three parking tickets.”
Jack gripped the arms of his chair. “He lied to me. He said he wasn’t in Red Hook.”
“He wasn’t under oath when he talked to you. He could just say he forgot. Why are you still on this? Didn’t I ask you to move on?”
Jack took a slow breath. “It was a direct lie.”
“You know what I think, Detective? You’re being a bit overzealous here.”
“Overzealous! Unless—by some incredible coincidence—Berrios and the barge captain both got randomly knifed in the same couple of weeks, we’re looking at two connected murders.”
“Do you have any direct evidence that Heiser was involved?”
“No, but I’ve got lots of good reasons to believe he was.”
“Such as?”
“Number one: he told Berrios to stay away from his apartment just a month ago. Number two: his company owns the garage, the address Berrios had in his pocket the day before he was killed. Three: Heiser himself was in Red Hook on at least one occasion recently. Four: he lied to me about that and said his company couldn’t be bothered with Brooklyn. Now it turns out they bought property there recently.”
“None of those brings us close to charging the guy with anything, not even conspiracy. Anything else?”
“I’ve been on the job long enough to know when somebody is not right, and the second I met the guy my Not-Right Meter started swinging off the scale.”
“I respect your judgment, but that’s not good enough. I want you to leave this man alone unless you have a concrete reason to charge him.”
Incredulous, Jack forced himself to take a deep breath. He raised his hands. “Okay. Listen—how about we at least get a warrant and send a forensics team over to the garage? Then we can get Alvarez and the Crime Scene people to analyze Berrios’s shoes. Maybe we can definitely place him there on the morning he died.”
“I told you already: we have more important cases to deal with right now.”
“We’re looking at a double murder, Sergeant. With a conspiracy to commit. If that isn’t a media case, I don’t know what is.”
Tanney’s face tightened. “Are you threatening me, Detective?”
Jack sighed. “No, sir. I would never have kept my shield this long if I was the kind who would talk to the press.”
“Let it go, Jack. I want you to help Santiago with the Cobble Hill thing, full-time.”
“You’re ordering me off the Berrios case?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re just gonna drop it?”
“No, I’ll put Mickey on it. I need you for the more pressing case.”
Jack got in his car and rolled down the window while he waited for the AC to start blowing cold.
Take a minute to make sure you’re doing the right thing, he told himself. As a detective, he knew that he had a lot of power and he was conscientious about not abusing it. He didn’t like Heiser on a personal level—could that be why he was so convinced the real estate man was guilty?
Hell, even if a detective was biased somehow, that didn’t make the suspect innocent.
He pictured the knife wound in Tomas Berrios’s chest. Pictured a terrified Raymond Ortslee holding up his hands as the knife slashed down. And he pictured Red Hook, abandoned, stinking with trash. That filled him with the righteous rage he needed.
“You don’t need to stir up problems unless you have some concrete reason,” Tanney had said. Randall Heiser had told several direct lies to a member of the Homicide Task Force. Any self-respecting cop could see that that was an insult. And reason enough.
Traffic was bad. Going over the Brooklyn Bridge, it slowed until everything was funneled through one tight lane. Then it stopped a
ltogether. Jack sat and watched the temperature gauge rise.
He’d thought of calling Gary Daskivitch, asking him to ride along. (The Berrios case officially belonged to his partner.) But if the shit had to hit the fan, he wanted the young detective safely out of the way.
Finally, the cars began to crawl forward. Near the Manhattan end of the bridge, the reason for the delay became apparent: a dented utility van with tinted windows had slammed into the back of a yellow cab, sending the taxi skidding into a guard rail. Shattered glass glittered on the roadway and paramedics swarmed over the accordioned cab. The right lane was clear and traffic should have been moving, but everyone was slowing down to rubberneck, hoping for a glimpse into the glass-toothed mouth of the cab’s rear window. Hoping for blood.
Sumner International was headquartered in a fancy new skyscraper on Fifty-second Street. Jack emerged from the elevator to find two sleek-looking women with telephone headsets sitting behind a huge circular teak desk in the reception area.
One of them, a beautiful young woman in a canary-yellow suit, held up her forefinger as she finished with a call.
“May I help you?” she said.
“I’m here to see Randall Heiser.”
“Do you have an appointment, sir?” She raised her finger again as another call came through the switchboard.
Jack veered around the desk and picked a direction.
“Sir,” the receptionist called, “you can’t go back there.”
He headed down a hallway full of people in cubicles clacking away at keyboards. Everything was plush, modern, expensive. The computers looked brand-new.
The receptionist called out again, louder this time.
He hurried on. He turned a corner and leaned over a cubicle. “Hey, which way is Heiser’s office?”
A harried secretary was immersed in her computer screen. “Down the hall and to the left. It’s the corner office—you can’t miss it.”
Sensing that she might have been too free with this information, she looked up. “Is he expecting you?”
Jack was already moving. “We’re old friends,” he said.
He pressed on, ignoring the anxious voice of the receptionist who was now following behind.
He found the corner office and wrenched the door open. A floor-to-ceiling tinted window dominated the far wall. Across a huge plush carpet, Randall Heiser looked up from his desk in surprise.
The receptionist burst in behind Jack. “I’m sorry, sir—I asked him to wait, but he just—”
“It’s okay, Helen,” Heiser said. “Perhaps the gentlemuhn is in the market for a little real estate.”
“Not exactly. I’m doing a little follow-up on the murder of your porter, Tomas Berrios.”
Heiser waved a hand and the receptionist withdrew, closing the door behind her.
“You just happened to be in Manhattan? That’s a long way from Coney Island, isn’t it?”
“Was, sir, it certainly is.” He wondered how the man knew that the Brooklyn South Task Force was based near Coney. That wasn’t a secret, but it was hardly common knowledge.
He walked across the carpet and gazed out the huge window. Forty-nine stories—the only time he’d seen Manhattan from this high up was when he’d visited the Empire State Building. Down below, tiny pedestrians marched past the red-and-yellow umbrellas of hot dog stands. Strings of taxis flowed up Park Avenue like blood cells pulsing through a vein. The air-conditioning system whispered softly.
Jack pulled out his steno pad. “I don’t want to waste your time. Does Sumner International own a garage on Coffey Street in Red Hook?”
Heiser leaned back in his massive, padded leather chair. “I have no idea.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re the parent company to a number of real estate and development companies. All told, Sumner owns well over a hundred properties. Many of them are significant, but our companies manage all sorts of small buildings. Surely you don’t expect me to have memorized every one.”
Across the river stretched the flat plain of Queens; farther south, Brooklyn disappeared into a haze. From this high up, homes and streets and stores were just part of tracts of land. Sites for development. Like Robert Moses before him, Heiser wouldn’t have to care about what might happen to the people so far below. If Red Hook was buried under thousands of tons of trash, the smell would never waft up here.
“Is there some problem, Detective? Something I can help you with?”
“Maybe. The last time I talked to you, you said you hadn’t been to Red Hook recently. Can you remember the last time you were there?”
“I travel constantly, all over the country. No offense, but a visit to Brooklyn would not constitute the most mem’rable occasion.”
Never the direct answer. Jack decided on a more forceful approach. “Were you in Brooklyn on May eighth of this year?”
“I don’t remember,” Heiser snapped. “And I have no idea why you’ve come barging into my office to ask me such an irrelevant question.”
“You got a traffic ticket in Red Hook on that date. Let’s try another one: were you in Brooklyn on July twelfth of this year?”
The real estate mogul narrowed his eyes. “That was the day that poor man was murdered. I think you’ve gone far beyond the bounds here, Detective. I don’t know what your problem is, but if you have further questions, you’ll need to direct them to my lawyers. Tell me something: do you enjoy working for the city?”
Jack weighed the implied threat. “Yes, sir, as a matter of fact I do. And it would take quite a lot to stop me from doing my job. You can complain all you want.”
“If you keep badgering me, you can be damn certain I will complain.” Heiser stood up abruptly. “Goodbye, Detective. I wish you the best of luck. This seems to be a difficult case for you—you might need it.”
The man’s smug manner infuriated Jack. He knew he was going too far, being outrageously unprofessional—he could hear himself saying the words but couldn’t stop them: “I don’t think I’ll need luck. Do you really think you can commit murder and walk away? You screwed up, dirtbag, and I’m gonna nail your rich little ass to the wall.”
Heiser started to sputter something about his lawyers, but Jack turned on his heel and walked out.
On the drive back from Manhattan, his beeper went off. Sergeant Tanney’s number, at the Homicide Task Force office. Urgent code. Jack shook his head: Heiser certainly hadn’t wasted any time.
He thought of turning his beeper off and pretending he hadn’t gotten the page. He thought of staying in his car and driving until he ran out of highway. Canada. Or Key West.
He headed back to Coney Island.
“Close the door behind you,” Tanney said.
From the grim expression on the sergeant’s face, the man might as well have been holding a cane. Jack sat down.
“Do you remember what we discussed the last time we talked?” the shift commander asked. “Just a couple of hours ago?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“I know that I haven’t been here long, that you haven’t gotten a chance to know me very well, but tell me: do I look like an idiot to you?”
Jack didn’t answer.
Tanney sighed. “Look—I’m not here to break anybody’s balls unnecessarily. I try to leave that to One PP.” He stood up, walked around his desk, and looked up at the left wall. An acetate-covered chart ran the length of the office, bearing a list of victims. Each name was written in black if the case was closed, red if it was still open. The primary detective’s initials were attached to the right of each victim’s name. Jack knew what the board told the sergeant: not only was his shift running behind in the ever-continuing race to clear away the red, but Jack’s name was attached to fewer cases than most of his colleagues.
Tanney turned. “I told you to give this case a rest. Next thing I know, you’re running in to Manhattan to flog it.”
“That prick complained again, did he?”
“Why do you have such
a hard-on for this guy, Leightner? If there was some sort of tangible evidence, maybe I could understand your behavior.”
“The man lied. Don’t you want to know why?”
“One thing you should know about me, Detective, is that I don’t talk just to feel my lips flap. We don’t need to discuss this any more. I want you to take some time off. To rest up and think about the priorities of the squad.”
“No, thank you. Sir.”
“I’m not asking you—I’m telling you.”
“You’re suspending me?”
“That’s right. For ‘willful disobedience of a lawful order.’ Until further notice.”
“But you can’t—”
“I can’t afford to have a loose cannon rolling around these decks. If you want, you can appeal through the union. That’s all, Detective. Put your gun and your shield on my desk, and leave the door open on your way out.”
“So don’t say hello,” called out Mary Gaffney from behind the desk downstairs.
Jack thought he detected a look of pity on her face, even though he knew that was impossible; the news could not have spread through the building that fast. He ducked his head and jogged past her, just as he had avoided his comrades in the task force squad room.
He missed the weight of his detective’s shield in his pocket. For almost twenty years he’d carried it off duty and on. It was his armor, his flag, his totem of power.
A blast of heat met him as he pushed through the back door of the building. He was used to striding through that door with a sense of purpose, but now he didn’t have anywhere to go. He stood still, heart twisted with anger and shame.
His son’s voice echoed in his head: loser.
Out in the street beyond the parking lot, a couple of kids were having a contest, seeing who could ride his bike the farthest on a wheelie. The air was so humid that already Jack could feel sweat soaking his chest. He took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. One of the kids came down hard on his front wheel and swerved, narrowly missing a car. The other kids hooted and laughed.
Jack took a deep breath and set out across the sweltering blacktop toward his car.
Red Hook Page 22
