by Andrew Case
The receptionist directed her upstairs, to the seventh floor. The hospital was quieter than she’d imagined. On your way to recovery, there is no hurry. All the panic has already happened somewhere else.
Leonard Mitchell was propped by the window in an outdated hospital bed. In a hospital gown, his shoulder bulging comically with layer upon layer of bandage, he looked thinner and older than he had in a suit in her office. She noticed for the first time that his hair was thin and receding, with a hint of gray at the temples. He had been such a tempest of energy before that she had never really stopped to get a good look at him.
And he wasn’t alone. Sitting by the window was the other detective. Peralta. The one who had shot her partner. The one who had saved Leonard’s life. She was in her trim slacks and had her badge out over her shirt. Police don’t have to wait in the same lobby as everyone else. Peralta’s own hair was tied tight and her eyes didn’t leave Leonard’s face, even as he looked up to Eleanor.
“I brought flowers.” They were from the bodega on the corner. There was a florist in the hospital, but the flowers looked just as tired in there and they cost four times as much as the ones out on the corner. Eleanor hadn’t gotten where she was in life by wasting money. She handed Leonard the crinkled plastic package, wrapped and stapled. There was no vase in the room. Leonard cradled them to his body with his good arm.
“Thanks, Eleanor.”
“I’m sorry about all this, Leonard.”
Leonard sighed. “I’m sorry too, Eleanor. I shouldn’t have lied to you about why I was there. We should have knocked on your front door and asked what we needed to know.”
“But I might not have told you.”
Leonard smiled. “Well, we all have our regrets.”
Peralta was staring Eleanor down, blaming her. Eleanor looked at the floor. She had berated this woman in front of her father’s church. She hadn’t told the detectives about Robert Armstrong right after the accident. It had never occurred to her that he was capable of killing someone. She probably deserved to get a little of it back. She met the detective’s gaze.
“I’m sorry.”
Peralta almost smiled. “Like Leonard said, we all make mistakes.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got one question, though.” Peralta’s eyes held fast on Eleanor, just as they had on Leonard. This was someone who was never distracted. Who would never flinch from what she had to see and what she had to do. Eleanor recognized why Peralta was a good cop.
“What is it?”
“When I first went in, when I spoke to Verringer. He said he didn’t own that building any more. 80 Smithdale. He said he had sold it. You know anything about that?”
Eleanor hadn’t been planning to tell them yet. But after all this, it wouldn’t do for her to still look as though she was holding out. Armstrong and Verringer were gone. They would prosecute Manny Reeves, as soon as he was well enough, but that would be little consolation. So they were not done asking her questions, and Eleanor figured it was time to come clean.
“I bought it.” The closing papers were still being filed. But the transaction was done. It meant that Verringer had his money. That he could get himself almost anywhere in the world.
“I thought you might have. You getting into the slumlord business?”
“My father owns almost a quarter of my company. He wanted out. I had to raise money to buy him out, and I know it might not make sense to you, but the best way to raise money is to get investors to pitch in to buy something new.”
“So have you paid off your father yet?”
“No.” This part she had raised with him. He hadn’t agreed yet, but she knew he would. It would allow him to appear powerful and to do the right thing all at once, and she knew her father wouldn’t be able to resist that. “I’m going to give him the building. In payment of his shares. He can use it to house congregants if they hit hard times. And Hill and Associates will do all the rehab. We’ll bring it up to code, we’ll fix the wiring, we’ll put everything in order. And once people are housed there, we will keep it that way. But the building will be his.”
“That’s very big of you. And I’m sure you’re getting some kind of tax break to thank you.”
“You want to run an audit on us, you just give the word. Leonard knows just about everything we’ve ever done anyway.”
Leonard shifted in bed at the sound of his name. “I know you did your best, Eleanor. I know you didn’t want any of this to happen. You should go back to your business.”
“Thanks.”
He turned toward the window, to the detective. He moved slowly, his shoulder in obvious pain with every shift of his weight.
“Aurelia.” Eleanor hadn’t known the detective’s first name. None of these police people seemed to address each other by their first name. Leonard, his strength sapped and his body busted, seemed almost childlike addressing the cop so casually. “Did they find the wristband the boy had been wearing? It was green, and it snapped together. There was a flash drive on it.”
Eleanor reached across to feel her own plastic flash drive bracelet. She knew the answer to this already. Peralta spoke.
“No. They searched the car that Bruder had taken. The searched the house. Armstrong must have taken it with him when he vanished. But it means you were right. You knew why the boy was taken.”
“Have they spoken to him?”
“The boy? They have him back with his father. We have a foot post on the street to protect him. The kid is vulnerable. Turns out that Bruder had gotten him to go with him by saying he had news about his mother. That boy would leap in front of a car if he thought it would help bring Christine Davenport back.”
Leonard grimaced. Eleanor knew this name too. The boy’s mother. The woman who had been killed last year. Leonard had worked with her. Leonard went on.
“And the father?”
“He’s recovering. His knee wasn’t as bad as your shoulder, even. A lot of blood but the patella is intact. He’s downstairs, actually.”
“Did we debrief him yet?”
Peralta sighed. “He doesn’t want to talk. He hasn’t had a great week with regards to the NYPD. We parked him in your apartment and he ran to the precinct to get help. They had some way of helping him, shooting him and running off with his boy. How would you feel, frankly? Would you want to sit in an interview room with a cop anytime soon?”
Eleanor turned to Leonard. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. Detective Mulino said that if this worked out I could come join him at OCCB. As some kind of civilian support. I don’t know if he would consider this working out or not. I don’t think I’m going back to the Parks Department.”
“If you’re interested in working in real estate, you can come talk to me. For real, not just as a spy for the police department. I think we could use you.”
“Thanks. I’ll think about that. I figure I have to think about a lot of things.”
Peralta put a hand on Leonard’s good shoulder. “You have to talk to Mulino. I don’t know what he told you before you started. But I think there are some things going on you have to talk to him about.”
Leonard nodded. “Okay.”
“And I have to go talk to the Homicide Division. They’ve been keeping some innocent guy in lockup for three days now. If we don’t get it taken care of, we’re going to end up with a lawsuit.”
“Yeah.”
Peralta took her hand off of Leonard’s shoulder and turned from the window. Eleanor watched her. Did she notice a closeness, a tenderness in that touch? In the way they addressed each other by their first names? This woman had just saved Leonard’s life, after all. It wouldn’t be altogether surprising for that to be personal. But that wasn’t all Eleanor thought was going on. Maybe it wasn’t any of her business anyway.
Leonard watched Peralta go, then turned back to Eleanor. “I should get some rest.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you for the fl
owers.”
“You’re welcome. I am glad you’re going to be all right.”
Leonard pulled himself up in the bed again. Another grimace. He was going to be all right, but he was not all right just yet. “So am I.”
Eleanor shifted her feet. “So I guess I should go. Let you rest.” She hadn’t quite said what she meant to say. That she was angry at him for spying on her but glad that he had found out what Armstrong had done. That her father had raised her to be skeptical of the police, and she knew he was right, but that she had learned in the past few weeks that there are some good cops out there in addition to some very bad ones.
She knew he wasn’t going to come work for her. She most likely was never going to see him again. She would pay her penance to her father, keep 80 Smithdale in tip-top shape, and go on making money by putting up new buildings and charging through the roof for them. People would admire her for the 80 Smithdale work, and maybe that way they wouldn’t give her too much flack for everything else. She was, in the end, one of the good guys. That’s what she thought. That’s what she wanted to tell Leonard, what she wanted him to tell her. But his eyes were shut. He was already drifting off to sleep. His hand slipped from the bouquet of bodega flowers. She reached over and tucked it under his blanket so it would not fall off his bed. She patted it in place, turned, and left him to his sleep.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Leonard looked across Flatbush Avenue and the park beyond. His shoulder was killing him. They had given Leonard some meds. Lortab. Oversized white pills flecked with green, as though they were mint candy. They took away the pain, but they put his head somewhere he never wanted it to be. At least it meant he could go home, even if most of the day at home he just sat on the couch and stared. Without the medicine, he could get up and about. But without the medicine, his shoulder attacked him all day long. Today, it was worth it.
Detective Mulino had asked to meet him in the park, so he had made do with a couple of aspirin. On the Lortab he would likely wander out into traffic. Six days after a bullet to the shoulder, four days after being discharged from the hospital, a couple of aspirin were not going to cut it. But he had told the detective he would show up, so he gritted his teeth and squirmed through the pain as he crossed Flatbush.
He looked up at the construction site. It was only a little over a week ago that he had come out here to get a statement on the crane collapse and found Mulino on the scene. The site was up and running again. A new crane, new members of the crew, business back to usual in the never-ending rush upward. Maybe they would finish the thing by spring after all. Twenty percent of the units were supposed to be designated as affordable. Maybe he would call Eleanor Hill, see if a unit could be reserved for him. Civil servants make almost enough to live in affordable housing, after all.
But he wasn’t sure he even was a civil servant anymore. Even if he could talk his commissioner at the Parks Department into having him back, he couldn’t convince himself that he really wanted to go. He had been back in action with Mulino, and he knew he had missed it. Two decades investigating corruption at DIMAC couldn’t be washed out of his system so quickly. He had agreed to see Mulino to find out whether the deal was still on, to learn if he could still join the detective’s team at OCCB for good.
Mulino wanted to meet at Lakeside. In the summer, they ran sprinklers and kids ran through ankle-deep water squirting each other with plastic spray bottles provided by parents who frowned on actual squirt guns. In winter it was a skating rink. Now, in the tail end of November, it was mainly empty. The water had been turned off months ago, but they hadn’t laid down the ice yet for the winter. As Leonard crossed into the park and along the narrow path toward the rink, he practiced what he would say to Mulino.
He had a whole speech ready, on what he had contributed to the investigation. He only hoped that Mulino didn’t make too much of the part where Adam Davenport had snuck out while he was supposed to be in Leonard’s apartment. Or the part where Leonard had nearly gotten himself killed until Peralta had saved his life.
Detective Mulino was standing with a cup of coffee, staring over the broad field of concrete and toward the lake beyond. Something looked off about the cop, but Leonard couldn’t quite place it. He was standing a little straighter, maybe, not favoring his right leg quite so much. Or maybe that he was dressed up a little, more like a lawyer on a Friday afternoon than a detective. Or maybe it was the smile. Because Mulino was wearing a broad, guileless smile, showing off a casual happiness that Leonard had never seen in him. For the first time that Leonard had seen him in two years, Detective Mulino appeared genuinely untroubled.
“Detective.”
“Leonard.”
“You look well.”
“You look like hell. You look like a guy that got shot and shouldn’t even be out of bed yet.”
Mulino was right. The shoulder hadn’t stopped hurting since the last Lortab had worn off hours ago. “You could have always come by the apartment to see me, Detective. If you’re so worried about whether I should be out of bed.”
Mulino moved to pat Leonard on the back but held off. Worried, maybe, that he would hurt him more if he slapped him in the wrong place. “You’ll be all right, Len. I spoke to the doctors. You’re going to be just fine. I know a couple of guys who have been shot. Nice clean exit wounds like you have, they end up good as new in a couple of months, blessing their luck the whole way.”
“I certainly was lucky.” Leonard cocked his head, trying to take Mulino in. He wasn’t sure whether it was time to raise the question. Maybe he should come out and just say it: Remember how you said you would take me on your squad? Are you going to follow through with that? But maybe that would be too forward. The detective had called him out here. So he had something to say. Or at least Leonard hoped he did. Mulino took a long sip of his coffee.
“I have some news for you, Leonard.”
“Okay.” Mulino still had that smile on. But just because he was happy didn’t mean that he had good news for Leonard.
“You heard about how they changed the pension rules.” Leonard didn’t follow the inner workings of the police department. But he had heard about some changes in city rules. Instead of paying out a pension based on your last year, they’d pay it out now based on an average of any three years of your choosing. The point was to keep people from piling on fake overtime in their final year.
“I heard a little.”
“Well, you know I’ve had my twenty for a while. And I had a couple of fat years back when everyone had them.” It dawned on Leonard what Mulino was about to tell him. Like most cops, he had probably put in a ton of overtime after 9/11. The department had lost a lot of officers to retirement right after, guys who could get the pension calculated on a big year. Now, with the new rules, Mulino would be able to throw that year in the mix. Mulino was done with the NYPD.
“So when are you going to put in?”
“I did it this morning. That’s why I wanted to tell you right away.”
Leonard wasn’t going to join a team after all. There wasn’t going to be a team. Mulino couldn’t force anyone else to bring on a civilian who once investigated cops and had a six-month stint in prison on his resume. Leonard tried not to show his disappointment.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
“So is that it for you?” Retired cops don’t have many options. You can’t go work at a different city agency—your pension gets withheld until you’re retired from city service entirely. You can work in the private sector, but that mainly means sitting at the desk of an office building, signing people in until something goes wrong. Mulino couldn’t take that. A lot of retired NYPD spend the last twenty years of their lives puttering around a workshop in a basement in Long Island.
“I’ve actually got something lined up.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m going to be a special advisor in another department. Mainly training. Some investigations.”
Another department, Leonard knew, meant another city, likely another state. “Where are you going?”
“Scottsdale. Arizona.” And Leonard could see, suddenly, why Mulino looked so different. He had shrugged off thirty years of danger. Thirty years of never knowing what was behind the door. Thirty years of always having someone above you tell you precisely what you did wrong during that moment when you were afraid for your life. And he was going to go somewhere where it was never cold, where everyone has a swimming pool, and where anything that amounts to real crime is committed well outside the city limits and handled by ATF or the DEA anyway. Leonard knew what these retirement gigs were like: it basically amounted to coming into a precinct a couple of times a week to tell war stories to the new cadets. Mulino was cashing in and would be taking it easy from here on out. Because after all, why shouldn’t he?
“Okay. Well, Detective, it was an honor working with you.”
“Thanks, Leonard.” Mulino held out his hand. “No hard feelings.”
Leonard reached out his good arm, the painless arm, and shook the cop’s hand. “No hard feelings, Detective.”
“And I know I told you that you could come work for the squad. After all this. And I know you deserve it. I put in a word for you. Obviously, I don’t make the decision anymore. But I said they should still do it. And the new SDS said you should come by.”
Leonard nodded. What Ralph Mulino’s word meant to some newly promoted detective was anyone’s guess. But it was better than nothing. He saw that Mulino was holding out a business card.
“You should give a call.”
Leonard reached out and took the card from Mulino. He looked down at it, then back at the detective. Mulino was still wearing his new, easy smile. He would probably wear it for the rest of his life. Leonard looked back down at the card, marveling at the familiar name on it. He still had one stop to make.
