A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

  Swinging out on Empire, she looked back down at the phone. Her father. He knew she was at the meeting. He knew it was important. But he had called anyway. Over and over. And sent three texts too, asking her to call him. She’d do it when she got home. She couldn’t let him believe that he still had that kind of power over her. His congregation meant votes, and votes meant that he could walk into any elected official’s office and get to the point without ever having to donate to a campaign. But at the end of the day, votes didn’t make you rich.

  Friends in City Hall won’t make you rich either, not unless you skim a little off the top. And say what you would about McArthur Hill, he was thoroughly, deeply, totally incorruptible. He might play to the cameras, threaten a riot, or accuse a mayor of racism with the best of them, but graft was unthinkable. Every penny that flowed into his congregation from the city went straight where it had been earmarked. McArthur Hill could get the city to turn on the faucet, but he would never drink from it himself. Powerful but humble, if Eleanor’s father wasn’t exactly poor, he was a long way from rich.

  Not like Eleanor. She considered herself just as incorruptible as her father, but there were plenty of non-corrupt ways to make money in this city. Born in Brooklyn in 1971, she had seen at least four rapid-fire waves of development, buildings selling for nothing one day and for millions a few years later. She had raised a little capital, made a few deals, and pretty soon she was swimming with the best of them. She made money on affordable housing and luxury condos. She made money when they put in a basketball arena and when they put in a community center. It irked her when the protesters called her names, when a community board would vote against her. She was serving the community, making mostly good things happen. Sure she took a cut, but that was the way of the world.

  Her father was a worrier. He called too often and demanded too much. He wanted to know who lived in the buildings she was buying. He asked where they would move when she tore them down and put in the new ones. Sometimes he seemed like one of the protesters, leaving thinly veiled accusations that she was betraying her people. That even though a thousand affordable units would mean housing for people of every race, she was somehow in league with the moneyed interest, and could therefore never do right.

  As she pulled onto Midwood and toward her own home, she thought finally on the accident. She had been called in the morning. One dead, a few injured. It happens. Construction workers had died putting up the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, both World Trades. They discovered the bends when workers digging the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge surfaced and died. She had been briefed already. Wade Valiant wasn’t married. Didn’t have a family. That would make it easier. No children in the newspaper. She had heard something about a problem at the Department of Buildings. She would be happy to pass the blame back to the city.

  She pulled up her driveway alongside her massive Edwardian brick home. It was ringed with terraces and broad bright windows; the original parquet floors were polished so bright you could almost see the shine from outside. The American Dream, smack in the middle of Flatbush. She stopped the car and dialed her father.

  “Eleanor.”

  “Dad. You knew I was at the board meeting. I couldn’t answer.”

  “Listen. I have to tell you something.”

  She sighed into the phone. It was going to be another of his petty grievances. “All right, Dad. Let me know.”

  “No, Eleanor. It’s not that. Something terrible has happened. Something truly terrible.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ralph Mulino leaned back in his blonde wooden chair, his bad right knee propped up on a little stool he brought to his office for that very purpose. When they promote you, you get a perk or two. He kept his desk neat, without a computer. Wooden inbox and outbox, and the inbox was usually emptied as soon as something was put in it. The desk itself was metal, banged up, probably recovered from the basement of a school that got torn down to make way for condos, but it would do. It wasn’t as though he’d been promoted to inspector, after all.

  Mulino turned to his guest and spoke. “Nowadays, people don’t just disappear.”

  Leonard Mitchell sat in front of him. Guests still got uncomfortable chairs. It seemed to Mulino that Leonard was, if anything, even leaner than he had been a year ago. At least in the face. Six months in Moriah Shock will do that to you, though. You start the day with push-ups at dawn, and you plow the dirt roads, and if the weather is right, you farm. Mulino had visited Moriah Shock once. It looked like something out of the nineteenth century. But there were no bludgeonings, no gang wars, no scalpels snuck inside to settle the scores of the criminal world. When they got out, most of the inmates never again wanted to do whatever they had done to get sent there. The rest of the prisons in the state could learn from a place like that. If only prison systems were the kinds of places that learned anything.

  Mulino kept up his little lecture. “Back in my time, someone wants to run off, what can you do to track him down? You ask his friends. You have a driver’s license if you’re lucky. His address. The places he liked to hang out. And sometimes people would do that, try to run from us, and the Warrants squad would find them at happy hour at Moonies. But if someone really wanted to hide, back then, there was nothing we could do.”

  Mulino looked past Leonard for a moment. Peralta was talking to Bruder out at their open-air desks. They had both just gotten in. Give detectives a daytime tour and they will almost immediately take advantage. Eight thirty arrival becomes nine, then nine fifteen. But they had been out doing interviews last night, after all. He didn’t want to be the kind of boss that cracks heads right away. Tough to strike that balance.

  Mulino went on speaking. “Now, you have the Internet. This guy, Manny Reeves. He had his Facebook. He had his email. He had a cell phone. A cell phone is a tracking device; it pings your carrier constantly. We don’t need a warrant to get that from the carrier. We don’t need a warrant to get into his email, his social media. We call up these people and say he’s missing, we get it all within minutes. So we are going to find Manny Reeves.”

  “But you haven’t found him yet.”

  “No, Leonard, if we had found him yet, I wouldn’t be talking to you. I’d have him in an interview room and I’d be asking him why he slammed his partner into the wall of a building hard enough to break a steel crane. I appreciated the statement your commissioner put out, by the way.”

  Leonard shuffled in his seat. His hands moved to his knees. Mulino could tell Leonard was uncomfortable. And why not? He had just conned his Commissioner into playing it like an accident, when they both knew it wasn’t. Mulino had made sure that the new head of the Department to Investigate Misconduct and Corruption had taken up the city angle. Not just an investigation of who was supposed to have approved this crane. A full audit of the DOB’s inspections of the past year. By the time they came around to issuing a report, no one would even remember.

  “We have people looking into Mr. Reeves. We’ll get him.” Mulino had told Bruder to contact the Technical Assistance Response Unit. At TARU they hack phones, subpoena service providers, and basically operate as if they were their own little NSA. But Mulino knew TARU would back-bench his request. If you tell them you are hunting a terrorist, you have their full attention. But if you are investigating a death that may not even be a murder, they will get to it when they get to it.

  “My detectives were out last night gathering data. And now the department has Mr. Reeves’s data, and he is going to be found. I’m just telling you so that you don’t think that’s why I brought you in here.”

  Leonard nodded. “Why did you bring me in here?”

  Mulino lifted his right leg and moved it about six inches across his stool. It ached if he walked and it ached if he left it still for too long. “The lucky part of being OCCB is we aren’t limited to investigating the homicide. If our initial determination that it was a homicide turns out even to be correct.”

  “I got you.”
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  “This building is being put up by Hill and Associates. Their fourth one in the neighborhood. They have three others in downtown Brooklyn. The land gets bought, the buildings go up fast; it’s a rapid-fire operation.”

  Leonard nodded. “Welcome to New York. Ever upward.”

  “Yeah. Well, not every developer wakes up in the morning to a dead body on the doorstep and tries to get the building back online the next day. Not every developer is run by a woman whose father controls a quarter of the votes in Flatbush.”

  “I figured. You ever meet McArthur Hill?”

  Mulino let out a slow breath before answering. “I had some dealings with him.” You couldn’t have been in the NYPD and not had some dealings with McArthur Hill. He had swept through Brooklyn like a firestorm twenty years ago, bottling local rage and selling it to the city at a premium. When he was still a beat cop, Mulino had been assigned to stand patrol at a march Hill’s people had organized down the length of Flatbush Avenue, allegedly a memorial march for a man who crashed his car into Grand Army Plaza while fleeing from the police at eighty miles an hour. The crowd had walked, quiet and peaceful, for the most part. But there was a police officer every seventy feet, so every seventy feet someone sneered, or called the cop a killer, or spat on his shoes. The patrol rookies sent out for the rally had been told that their job was to stand there and take it. This kind of thing burns out if you let them have a day to be angry, the thinking went back then. But if one officer takes the bait and leaps into that crowd, then all hell breaks loose. The department assigned rookies to these marches because they didn’t have union protection yet and could be quickly fired if they lost their cool.

  Mulino went on. “Eleanor Hill runs the development company. It’s not affiliated with the church. The father owns a stake in it, but it seems totally passive. Helped his daughter out when she was getting started. But you never know what kind of role he may play. After all, lots of people love McArthur Hill. Or at least lots of people want to please him.”

  “And some people don’t.”

  Mulino nodded. That was true too. “So one guy kills another on a Hill and Associates worksite. Maybe the two of them had some personal grudge. Or maybe someone who doesn’t like the company wanted to make it look bad. Somehow got to this Manny character. Or maybe, just maybe, this guy Wade knew something about what was going on with the operation. Maybe everything at that company isn’t as above-board as it looks. And maybe they had a way of taking care of him.”

  “There are better ways of rubbing someone out than this. Quieter, certainly.”

  “Maybe this is someone’s idea of making it look like an accident.”

  “Which is why you want everyone to think that you’re looking only at the Department of Buildings.”

  “You know better than anyone, Leonard. When someone is on guard, they are not going to tell you anything. You need to catch someone after they think they have gotten away with it.”

  Leonard had leaned in now. Mulino could sense he was ready to be asked. Leonard’s fingers were twitching on his knees. His neck a little stiffer above the collar. He wasn’t going to be stuck writing press releases for the rest of his life after all.

  “You want me to go after Eleanor Hill.”

  Mulino heaved himself off the chair and made his way to the door. He nodded to his detectives, now sitting at their desks shuffling through their Daily Activity Reports, and closed the door. He took out a piece of paper and slapped it on the desk in front of Leonard. “Hill and Associates has put out an ad. For a director of operations. Manage people. Run the paperwork through. Get permits. I want you to go work there. And I want you to tell me what you find.”

  “I don’t know anything about real estate. Why would they hire me?”

  “You managed a seventy-person agency. You know a half-dozen city commissioners. You know every block of this city. I’m sure you will manage to sell yourself to them.”

  “They’ll figure me out.”

  “No, they won’t, Leonard. You’re too good for that. You brought down an entire criminal operation within the NYPD. You solved a murder while the department was hunting you as a suspect. We couldn’t catch you then. Eleanor Hill won’t catch you now.”

  “Am I going to be working for the NYPD, then? Am I undercover?”

  “They’ll pay you plenty if you get the job. Your arrangement with me will be informal. Harder to trace. You help me on this one, then when it’s over, we’ll see what sort of special investigator position might be open on this squad.”

  Leonard stared at the paper Mulino had handed him. Mulino could see him checking off the qualifications. Manage large organizations. Handle detailed analytics. Paperwork. City government. So what if it was putting up buildings rather than dragging down cops? Recognition set in across Leonard’s face. Mulino could see what he was thinking: he could do this.

  “All right, Detective. I’ll put together a resume. I’ll send it in.”

  “We put your resume together for you already. We already sent it in. Your interview is this afternoon.” Mulino reached out to shake Leonard’s hand. It was thin, and still a little cold. The guy really should start to wear an overcoat. Mulino let go of Leonard’s hand and spoke.

  “Good luck.”

  As soon as Leonard Mitchell was out the door, Detective Mulino slumped into his chair and propped his bad knee back up into the air. A small comfort at last.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Leonard could barely recognize the block. He had seen his own neighborhood change quickly enough. He had seen the new condos rise, and seen the old brownstones lathered in scaffolding and reborn as urban luxury. But there was never any need to go to downtown Brooklyn. After all, it was filled with odd shops selling used tires, stolen jewelry, and day-old chicken wings. At least that was how he remembered it.

  It was as though an entire neighborhood had been plowed under and replanted with glass and steel. One thirty-story building after another anchored the avenue. A bank where the pawn shop used to be. A national chain selling dull jewelry where the Moroccan guy used to roast lamb skewers. It couldn’t have all been built in the six months that Leonard was away.

  He found what he was looking for soon enough. At twenty-five stories or so, the glass monolith was one of the more modest on the block. He double-checked the address and went inside.

  The lobby was tight. More room to squeeze a juice bar on one side and a watch store on the other. The guard at the desk was indistinguishable from his brethren across the river. He looked down at Leonard’s cheap suit and worn shoes. When Leonard had been at DIMAC, this would be the moment that he would pull out his badge. When he would metamorphose from a dumpy underdressed visitor into a law enforcement official. But he couldn’t do that anymore. A little card saying that you are the spokesman for the Parks Department does not impress thick men guarding elevators.

  “Leonard Mitchell. I’m here for Eleanor Hill.”

  The guard nodded. He looked down at his list. Leonard was now just an ordinary man looking for a job, and if he wanted to go inside, he was going to have to be invited. And it would stay that way if they hired him. Even at the Parks Department, he could barely get his old contacts to return his calls. Tony Licata of the Daily News had been almost a drinking buddy when Leonard was at DIMAC. Now, unless Leonard was calling about a body, Tony wouldn’t even pick up the phone. If Leonard went to work for Eleanor Hill and there was no scandal for him to report back to Ralph Mulino, he would have transformed himself into just another working stiff.

  Lost in thought, Leonard didn’t notice when the guard nodded at him and sent him through the elevator. He didn’t see that the elevator was pre-programmed to take him to the proper floor. He barely took in the sweet young man who offered him coffee, and didn’t see the view when he reached the offices of Hill and Associates. Only when he had been ushered past the bright glass walls, peering out across the river at lower Manhattan and its own brand-new glass tower, and was seated across from El
eanor Hill herself did he snap back into the present.

  He was slumped into a designer stainless chair strapped with cream leather, struggling to bring himself up. Eleanor Hill looked down at him. Her chair was higher, maybe, or perhaps her entire desk was on a pedestal. She was holding a sheet of paper at a distance with her left hand, barely glancing at it as she drilled into him.

  “Twenty years in city government. Investigating the police. Press secretary for DIMAC. Deputy Commissioner. Acting Commissioner. And over to the Parks Department. You have never worked in the private sector a day in your life. What made you wake up one day and decide you wanted to work in real estate? What makes you think you’re remotely qualified for this?”

  That wasn’t a good start. Leonard pushed himself up from the chair a little, but slipped uncontrollably back down. It was a losing battle. But Eleanor Hill was a powerful woman. Her time was valuable. She wouldn’t have scheduled an interview with him just to humiliate him. He might as well answer.

  “I’ve supervised a staff of sixty investigators. I’ve worked with sensitive information. I’ve put dirty cops in jail. I figured to run your operations you’d need someone with a spine. You have accountants to work out your rent rolls and your depreciation.”

  Eleanor put the paper down. At least he had her attention. “What it looks like to me is that you made your city pension and you’re looking to cash out.”

  In some ways that was true. It had been a long struggle working for the city. As soon as he left, he would be guaranteed 75 percent of his salary just for staying away. It wouldn’t kick in for a few years, and he couldn’t get it if he had another job with the city, but other than that it would be waiting for him. If he could find a nice quiet job behind a desk making a good deal more than he did at DIMAC, then seven years from now, the pension would be a healthy raise. He would never be rich by New York standards, but he could sure move out of the Ebbets Field Apartments. Still, he was smart enough to know that admitting it wasn’t the right answer.