Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  August 19, 1991, had been an unseasonably cool day. Barely eighty degrees. Saul was working patrol then, walking the beat in his blue uniform and the yarmulke the brass insisted he wear. Saul protested that he was no longer observant, but his captain didn’t care. An obviously Jewish officer helped with “community relations.” And Saul was not in a position to argue. He was working a four-to-twelve shift and was just two blocks away from the intersection of Utica and President when the 22-year-old Lubavitcher lost control of the big car he was driving and pinned the two black children against an iron window grate. He heard the long scrape of the car against the building; he heard the screams. He saw the twisted bicycle that the little boy had been fixing thrown into the street. And he saw, as the mêlée began: black men pulling the driver from his car and beating him; Jews taking him away in a Hatzolah ambulance; city workers trying to extricate seven-year-old Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela.

  When he thought about it a year later, Saul supposed that what happened next was inevitable. Here they were, two communities with years of grievances against each other now face-to-face over the body of a child. Add a man like Al Sharpton, looking for attention, exploiting the anger and the timing (it was just a few months after America watched Los Angeles police officers beat Rodney King, after all), and cognizant of, indeed counting on, the fact that the longer the fires burned the more the TV and tabloid audiences would see his face and say his name. Saul sometimes wondered if the men and boys chanting “Heil Hitler!” and hurling rocks and smashing windows appreciated the awful symbolism of the boy being struck by a car in Rebbe Menachem Schneerson’s motorcade: the power structure of one group literally colliding with the weakest members of the other. Saul knew it was just a terrible accident, but he couldn’t help thinking that the neighborhood was being punished.

  When the riots were over, the little boy beneath the car was dead, as was a Jewish student from Australia, set upon and stabbed in the street; and a salesman, maybe mistaken for a Jew because of his beard, dragged from his car and killed. An elderly Holocaust survivor was dead, too, but by her own hands—so distraught by the chants of “kill the Jews” that she leapt from her window.

  It would be inaccurate to say that any “good” came from the riots, but there were people who saw the near destruction of the neighborhood as an opportunity to reset and rebuild, and even to reach out. Pastor Redmond Green was one of those people. Pastor Green was one of the first residents Saul met when he was assigned to the 77th precinct back in 1988. He and his then-patrol partner, Officer Kevin O’Connor, were driving past the storefront when Pastor Green flagged them down. Saul expected he was going to report being robbed—they’d just come from a stick-up at a Chinese food restaurant—but instead the pastor pointed to human feces at the doorstep of the church and demanded they write it up as vandalism. O’Connor didn’t even want to take the report, but Saul admired Pastor Green for his commitment to his neighborhood.

  Since being sworn in to the NYPD, Saul had found that there were all kinds of cops. The kind of cop he was—or at least, the kind of cop he wanted to be—was the kind that worked hard for people who didn’t break the law, people who wanted to live peacefully and with a little dignity in the middle of an ugly, dangerous place. His days were filled with people spun out by rage and shame, people with deep holes in their souls. Many of his fellow officers focused on those people. They called the residents animals and complained that they didn’t sign up to be zookeepers. Why should they go out of their way, risk their lives, make their wives widows and their children orphans, to protect people who would kill their own mother for crack? Or shoot a teenager for sneakers? They considered themselves exterminators in a rat-infested building. Most did not believe the neighborhood would ever get better, and there were days when Saul felt that way, too. But he tried to focus on the people who called in the crimes. Without them the neighborhood was doomed. Saul saw it as part of his job to support people like Pastor Green. The more support they had, the more likely they were to lift Crown Heights out of the sticky hell it had fallen into.

  Inside the church, Saul found the pastor kneeling beside a small boy with what looked like blood on his face and shirt. Olivetti and a black woman were standing beside him.

  “Pastor Green,” said Saul.

  “Officer Katz,” said the pastor, standing up. “Thank you for coming.”

  “You know each other?” asked Olivetti.

  “I’ve taken some vandalism reports,” said Saul. “What’s going on?”

  “The kid won’t say,” said Olivetti. “We’ll go check at his house.”

  “I didn’t clean him off,” said the woman. “I thought perhaps there might be evidence.”

  “We’re going to have him taken to the precinct,” said Olivetti.

  “I’d like to accompany him,” said the woman.

  “Fine.”

  Outside, the sidewalk was crowded with churchgoers.

  “There a problem?” asked a man smoking a cigarette.

  “Step back, please,” said Olivetti.

  “I’m a member here,” he said. His tan suit was worn thin and shiny. “I got a right to know.”

  “Step back, please.”

  A squad car pulled up behind Olivetti’s sedan.

  “You arresting that little boy?”

  “I’m not going to ask you again,” said Olivetti.

  “Go inside, Walter,” said Dorothy. “Talk to Red.”

  “Where’s Malcolm?” asked the man. “He know Ontario being taken away by the po-lice?”

  “Walter, please,” said Dorothy.

  Walter flicked his cigarette toward the marked car. Saul saw it, but mercifully, Olivetti didn’t. Saul was working with Olivetti as part of his training for Anti-Crime. They were grooming him for detective, and Olivetti was the precinct’s prodigy. He worked Homicide, officially, but like everyone else, Olivetti caught what came in, because there was too much crime and not enough cops. If it turned out to be murder, Olivetti stayed on the case. If not, he usually kicked it down. He was just thirty-five then, not much older than Saul, who had come to policing late, but Olivetti was beloved—revered, even. He helped other cops work their cases. He had no children or wife—he told Saul he’d married once and wasn’t the kind of man to make the same mistake twice—so his financial obligations were minimal, and he could always be counted on to buy a round or two. In the beginning of his time as a cop, Saul had been surprised how much the camaraderie among officers resembled the camaraderie among the men in shul. In the police academy classrooms and the precinct locker rooms and the bars and on the street, the men in blue uniforms—like the men in black hats—had a common language, a common purpose, a common set of rules and prejudices. They were misunderstood by outsiders, but outsiders were not important. What was important was the man beside you. Olivetti personified this ethic. At first, he rubbed Saul the wrong way. He was impatient; an adrenaline junkie. In the academy, Saul learned that police work required precision. Evidence must be collected and preserved. Witnesses listened to carefully, inconsistencies probed. It only took a few days with Olivetti to see that precision was not chief among the detective’s talents. It was hard to argue with the solve rate, though. Since January, Olivetti had been lead on twenty-two homicides and made arrests in seventeen. So, by the time they pulled up at Glorious Gospel, Saul realized that there was a lot he could learn from the man. They were to ride together for one month, and for that month Saul would follow Olivetti’s lead.

  “Here we go,” said Saul, opening the back door of the squad car for Ontario and Dorothy.

  “Come on, honey,” said Dorothy. She sat down in the car first and slid over, her church dress hiking up above her knee. She held out her arms to Ontario and he stepped inside. Saul shut the door, then leaned into the front window and handed the officer in the passenger seat a five-dollar bill.

  “Pick up some breakfast from McDonald’s for him. I don’t know how long we’ll be.”

  C
HAPTER FIVE

  Afternoon

  July 5, 1992

  Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  There was no sign of forced entry on the front door to the Davises’ ground-floor apartment. Olivetti knocked. Knocked again.

  “NYPD,” he shouted. The street was quiet, the sidewalks littered with detritus from the night before: popped bottle rockets, torn red, white, and blue streamers, and family-sized bags of chips, in addition to the usual cigarette butts and broken crack pipes and beer cans and dog shit.

  Olivetti tried the knob and the door opened.

  “NYPD. Anybody home?” He drew his weapon and motioned to Saul to draw his. “What was the name again?”

  “Davis,” said Saul.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Davis?”

  The house was still. They stepped into the front living room. A worn leather sectional sofa and a glass coffee table faced an old television set inside a wooden cabinet. Children’s toys were put away neatly in one corner. Above the fireplace hung framed portraits of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus. Olivetti called out again. Silence. They checked the kitchen—mismatched dishes stacked in the drying rack, a frying pan soaking in the sink—and then Saul followed Olivetti down the hallway. The first bedroom had bunk beds, both unmade. In the second, there was a toddler bed and a play kitchen. The bathroom was clear.

  “Can you smell that?” asked Olivetti.

  They found the bodies in the master bedroom. Saul saw the little girl first, twisted near the end of the bed. Her torso flopped sideways, face blown open to the ceiling. The man was facedown in the pillows, one bare foot hanging off the side of the bed. But for the back of his skull being gone he could have been fast asleep. The woman was slumped against the headboard, eyes wide open, a hole in her chest.

  Olivetti spoke first. “I’ll call it in.”

  Saul thought of the little boy at the church, and then of his own son. He would rather Binyamin blinded than see what Ontario saw this morning. “Do you think the boy saw what happened?”

  “Could be,” said Olivetti. “Though, if the perp killed the girl you’d think he’d kill the boy, too. Kid was probably hiding. Or maybe asleep. Stay here. I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything, right?”

  “No,” said Saul. The iron scent from the blood and the bits of gunpowder in the air tickled the inside of his nose. The only sound was an air-conditioning unit humming somewhere, upstairs perhaps. There was blood spray up the wall behind the headboard. Blood spray on the carpet on both sides of the bed. Blood spray on the mirror of the woman’s bureau. Blood spray on the pile of clothing in the laundry basket on the man’s side of the bed. The sheets were soaked in blood. Saul tried not to look at the little girl who had lost her face. He tried not to look at the woman’s bare chest, one breast gone, one exposed by a fallen nightdress. He tried to focus on the details of the room. There were no explicit signs of a robbery: no drawers pulled out, no overturned jewelry boxes or lamps on the floor. He looked at the carpet beneath his feet. The evidence team might be able to find footprints or hair. He wondered about drugs. The Davises wouldn’t be the first straight-looking family to have a connection to the trade. Theirs could be a holding house. Perhaps one of the Davises had a past: maybe the husband left a gang years ago, or testified against someone. Maybe one of them was having an affair. The child was what threw him. A girl this young would never remember, let alone be able to describe or testify to the killer’s face. He could have left her alive.

  Olivetti returned with his camera and began taking pictures.

  “I’ll wait here for the techs,” he said. “You knock upstairs. See what they know. Fucker picked a great night to shoot people. Nobody’s gonna remember gunshots on the Fourth of July.”

  Saul left the bedroom. He stepped into the bathroom and glanced around. There was a child’s training toilet and smears of finger paint on the inside of the plastic bathtub-shower insert. A black Barbie doll in an evening gown lay inside the tub. A cup held three toothbrushes. Saul looked into the bedroom with the bunk beds. Both appeared to have been slept in recently. The room was spare: one poster of Spider-Man, one of Michael Jordan; a bin full of sports equipment, and a row of sneakers along the wall. Two pairs appeared likely to be Ontario’s, but two others belonged to a bigger boy. An older boy.

  Saul rang the bell for the upstairs apartment, and after about a minute, he saw legs on the stairs. An old woman making her way down. He held up his badge and she opened the door.

  “Good morning, Officer,” said the woman. He could smell liquor on her breath.

  “Good morning, ma’am. My name is Saul Katz; I’m with the 77th precinct. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Perhaps we can talk inside.”

  “Is it Monique? Oh, dear God, what’s she done now? I have done everything I can for that girl.”

  “No, ma’am,” said Saul. “I just have a few questions. It’s about your neighbors. The Davises.”

  “Sabrina and Malcolm? Oh, they’re probably at church. If you come back in an hour or two … Though they might take the kids to the park. Sometimes they pack a picnic on Sunday.”

  “Do you mind if I come inside, ma’am? It shouldn’t take too long.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s all right.” He followed her up the green-and-blue carpeted staircase. Her back was bent and her heels cracked to white in her slippers. She wore a pink housedress that zipped up the front.

  “Can I offer you some coffee, Officer…?”

  “Katz. No, thank you, ma’am.”

  “Like I said, Sabrina and Malcolm should be home this afternoon. They usually cook out on Sunday evenings.”

  Saul took out his notebook. “May I ask your name?”

  “Mrs. Treble,” she said. “Virginia Treble.”

  “When was the last time you saw your neighbors, Mrs. Treble?” asked Saul.

  Mrs. Treble set a mug of coffee on the oilcloth covering the table. Her hands trembled, and she plopped down, barely bending her knees.

  “The last time? What do you mean?”

  “Did you see them last night?”

  “I don’t understand. Has something happened?”

  “If you could just stay with me a minute, ma’am.”

  “Well, I suppose I saw them yesterday afternoon sometime. I don’t stay up for all the hoopla.” Saul imagined Virginia Treble passing out in the La-Z-Boy chair with a folding dinner tray beside her, ice melting in a glass. He imagined the television turned up loud. He wondered what her drink of choice was. Saul had a brother, Ira, who drank. He kept little bottles of gin in coat pockets and poured them into coffee mugs and plastic cups and water bottles. Mrs. Treble didn’t seem drunk, but with a longtime drinker you often couldn’t tell. Drunks were difficult to interview and made terrible witnesses. Saul needed her to focus her mind into the past and recall small details. If the case ever got to trial, she would drink before she got on the stand, and even if she managed to testify coherently, all the defense attorney would have to do to discredit her entirely is ask, Have you been drinking today, ma’am?

  “Did you hear anything unusual last night? Shouting? Or … anything?”

  “No. Not that I can recall. I’m a pretty sound sleeper. My husband snored something awful. Woke the kids up down the hall. Never bothered me, though. What’s this about?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” said Saul, “but the Davises were victims of a crime last night.” He told Mrs. Treble that her neighbors were dead. He told her that Ontario appeared to have discovered them this morning, and walked to church to report what he’d seen. She listened, her hand over her mouth. When he finished, she put her shaking hands on the table.

  “Honey,” she said. “I’ve got a bottle in the cabinet above the sink. Bring it to me, would you? I need a steady.”

  Saul got her the bottle: vodka. She pointed to the dish drying rack, and he brought her a glass. She poured herself two
fingers-full and drank it. She poured again and lifted it to her mouth, then set it down.

  “What about DeShawn?”

  “DeShawn?”

  “DeShawn been with Sabrina and Malcolm for years.”

  “He’s their son?”

  “Foster son. Been with them longer than any of the others. Is he dead, too?”

  “No,” said Saul. “Do you know where I might find him?”

  She shook her head. “Sabrina and Malcolm have been having trouble with him.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Skipping school. Smoking dope.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Sixteen, I think.”

  “What’s his full name?”

  Mrs. Treble thought a moment. “Perkins. DeShawn Perkins.”

  “Do you know if he has a criminal record?”

  “I know he was arrested once. But I don’t know the details. Sabrina was ashamed. She and Malcolm are good people. The best kind. When they couldn’t have children of their own they started taking in strays. That’s what I called them. Sabrina didn’t like that.” Mrs. Treble took another drink from her vodka. Saul got up and filled a glass with water, set it beside her vodka. She acknowledged this gesture with a nod, but didn’t take a drink.