by Barbara Paul
You Have the Right to Remain Silent
A Marian Larch Mystery
Barbara Paul
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
1
They were on the verge of nailing a killer, several killers, in fact; and Marian Larch was working on a heavy-duty, Guinness-Records-quality blue funk.
“What’re you looking like that for?” her partner asked, ripping open a bag of peanuts with his teeth. “We got ’em. Two more and they’ll all be here.”
My partner. “Yes, we got them.”
“So? Why the long face?”
She stared at him a moment before answering. “Doesn’t it ever bother you, Foley? The fact that people kill each other?”
His face didn’t change expression. “That’s a Girl Scout question if I ever heard one. Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work, Sergeant.” Heavy on the irony.
Marian didn’t bother responding. She shifted her weight behind the wheel of the car, trying to get comfortable. She was wearing one of the new half-ceramic, half-aluminum bulletproof vests; it weighed no more than a heavy coat, but it still impeded movement. And it trapped her body heat—probably a good thing in winter but not the first week of September. To add to her discomfort, the springs in the car seat were broken. The Chevrolet was several years old and in need of a good wash; it had been chosen especially not to attract attention in Alphabet City. They’d been waiting for over an hour, no time at all for a stake-out. Twelve of the girls had made their way into the abandoned tenement; only two to go.
The girls they were watching for were all members of a gang called the Downtown Queens, and they were dangerous. The Queens were different from other girl gangs like the Sandman Ladies or the Five Percenters; those gangs were auxiliaries of male gangs—pushing drugs for the boys, running errands for them, providing sexual favors. The girls joined the gangs for protection, which they almost never got. The boys simply allowed the girls to act tough for a while before settling down to the real function the boys had in mind for them all along: having babies.
But the Downtown Queens were allied to no male group, and they looked to themselves alone for protection. These girls didn’t just act tough. Fourteen black and Hispanic girls in their mid- to late teens, crossing racial barriers first to survive … and then to rule. The entire neighborhood knew the Queens. The Queens were feared and respected. The Queens were lethal.
“There they are,” Marian said.
The taller of the two girls was called Carmen; Marian couldn’t make out the face of the other girl even though the light was still good. Foley tossed the rest of his peanuts out the window and reached for the walkie-talkie. “You see ’em?”
A voice crackling with static answered. “Yeah, we got ’em. We move now?”
Marian was already out of the car. “Now,” Foley said.
Other car doors were opening silently down a couple of side streets; seven cops in all to capture fourteen teenaged girls. Two girls per cop; should work. Marian pulled out her service revolver and held it pointing toward the ground. Never draw your weapon unless you’re prepared to kill, the instructors at the Academy had said repeatedly. Marian hated this part of her job.
“Give me the walkie,” she said to Foley. When he’d handed it to her, she spoke into the mouthpiece. “Remember, easy on the triggers. No shooting at all except to defend yourselves.” There was no answer. “Acknowledge!”
“Yes, ma’am,” a voice said sarcastically. One of the gangs specialists borrowed from Intelligence, thank you very much.
The building had a bombed-out look to it—great gaping holes, most of the roof gone. Being open to the air hadn’t done much for the pervasive urine smell, though. Marian watched her step; the floor was littered with broken glass, cigarette butts, beer cans, used condoms. She listened a moment but heard nothing. Good; Foley was being careful. He wasn’t, always.
She caught a glimpse through a hole in a wall of two of the other cops, moving parallel to her. She pointed toward the one section of the building that still had a roof; the two cops nodded. The three of them converged on a closed door at the same time. Marian glanced behind her to check on her back-up; Foley was nowhere in sight. Angrily she stepped aside and motioned the other two cops to go in. The room was empty.
“Upstairs,” she said into the walkie-talkie.
That was bad luck; it was hard to climb a rotting staircase without making noise. And where the hell was Foley? They’d almost reached the top when they heard a sound behind them. Marian glanced down to see the other three cops starting up the stairway, one of them the sarcastic man from Intelligence. Foley wasn’t with them.
Then they had a piece of good luck; angry voices reached their ears. The Queens were arguing about something, energetically and loudly, effectively covering any small sound the advancing police might make. Still, Marian’s mouth was dry; one of the first bits of advice she’d been given when she came into the Ninth Precinct was Watch out for the Queens. The fact that they were girls made no difference; the number of homicides committed by teenaged females had risen twenty-five percent in just the last five years. The Queens had contributed their share.
The girls were in the one room on the second floor that still had a door; the argument was raging louder than ever. The sarcastic gangs man from Intelligence, whose name was Jaime Romero, didn’t wait for Marian’s go-ahead. One kick knocked the door in, the hinges pulling easily from the decaying wood frame. “Hold it!” Romero yelled, moving his gun to cover as many of the girls at once as he could. “Don’t move!”
“Drop it!” Marian shouted when every one of the Queens drew a blade—small enough to be concealed easily but not too small to kill a careless cop. “Put down the knives!”
The other cops were in the room, guns drawn, yelling instructions and moving out in a semicircle. The Queens gave as good as they got, holding on to their knives and screaming abuse. White pig bitch was their epithet for Marian; she’d heard it before and it hadn’t sounded any better then. The police were working the Queens, herding them into pairs that could be more readily controlled. But because Foley was still on vacation, Marian found herself trying to restrain four of the girls at once. They started to separate, clearly meaning to encircle her. “Get back there!” she yelled, hoping desperately she wouldn’t have to use her gun. “Stay together!” The girls stopped moving, neither circling nor retreating.
“Where’s your back-up?” Romero yelled from across the room.
“Wish to hell I knew,” Marian snarled. She picked out the one girl of the four she knew best and spoke directly to her. “Carmen, you’ve got some sense—use it! You’re facing guns. I fire once, and they all start shooting. You want that? Is that what you want? Don’t make it worse for yourself!”
The tall Hispanic girl hesitated. Out of the corner of her eye Marian saw Romero had disarmed his two Queens and was handcuffing them. Carmen saw it too. “Deal?” she asked under her breath.
Marian shook her head. “First-degree, Carmen.”
Carmen looked at Romero heading toward them, his gun aimed directly at her, and dropped her knife with a clunk. “We surrender,” she said quickly. Three more clunks followed.
Romero covered the girls while Marian cuffed Carmen and another girl; the other two remained free because the police were out of handcuffs. One of the cops started chanting the Miranda warning; “Listen to the man,” Romero ordered. Then he glanced toward the doorway. “Well, look who’s decided to join the party!”
Foley was in a crouch, arms straight out, gun pointing at no one in particular.
“Where the hell were you?” Marian snapped.
“Checking the back.” Foley stood up a
nd holstered his gun. “You didn’t tell me you were going upstairs.” Accusingly.
“You weren’t there to be told. You’re supposed to stick with me, Foley!”
He stared at her with challenging eyes. “You need a sitter, Sergeant?”
“Children, children,” Romero interrupted mockingly, enjoying the row. “Save it for later. Let’s get this bunch out of here.”
Marian pointed toward the last two Queens. “Cuff them,” she told Foley and motioned everybody else out. She put a hand on Carmen’s arm and held her back until last. When they were alone in the room, Marian said, “Off the record, Carmen. Just between you and me. Why Mrs. Alvarez? Why’d the Queens go after her?”
Anger and frustration seethed in the Hispanic girl’s face. After a moment she muttered, “Bitch needed killin’.” It wasn’t really an admission, but it was all she would say.
Marian was feeling a bit of frustration of her own. She looked at the girl before her: eighteen years old and her life was as good as finished. And why? Why?
Bitch needed killing.
The Public Defender’s Office could spare only two attorneys to represent the Queens; both were kids fresh out of law school, learning the ropes until they could land jobs with real law firms. Marian didn’t worry about that, but the prosecutors wouldn’t be any better—and that she did tend to worry about. Her unit had reported to the captain, and interrogations of the fourteen girls were now under way.
Captain DiFalco, like Marian, was a newcomer to the Ninth Precinct. His predecessor had retired, and the lieutenant in charge of the Precinct Detective Unit was a desk jockey everyone agreed could never run the station. So Captain DiFalco had been brought in to fill a void, just as Marian had. She had to wonder whether his new job was a demotion; she felt her own was. DiFalco seemed at home in the Ninth, though, comfortable in a way Marian never would be. The lieutenant ostensibly running the PDU was on vacation; Marian could see no difference in the day-to-day operation of the station except that now she reported directly to the captain.
Right then he was nodding to her with the closest expression to approval he ever showed. “Nice going, Sergeant,” he said. “You got ’em all without firing a shot. That’s the kind of report the Zone Commander likes to get. Worked out all right with the Intelligence people, did it?”
“No complaints. They did their job. Only one sticky moment, and that wasn’t their fault.”
DiFalco’s face showed neither sympathy nor disapproval. “Foley.”
“This isn’t the first time he’s failed to back me up, Captain. If Romero hadn’t stepped in, I would’ve had some serious grief back there. I need a partner I can count on.”
“Nobody available.”
“Get somebody.”
“You want a desk job?”
“No! I want you to put Foley on a desk. Before he gets somebody killed.” Namely me.
The first time she’d asked for a new partner, the captain had looked at her with a narrow-eyed expression of disapproval that said she was guilty of breaking one of the primary rules of police work: Never bitch about your partner. But DiFalco had had to call Foley on the carpet often enough to convince him that Marian wasn’t just playing the crybaby. Right then he unbent enough to say, “I know he’s a problem. Going sour right now, but his record says he used to be a good cop. I’ll request a replacement so I can move Foley to a desk. But don’t hold your breath—the Ninth isn’t the only precinct with a manpower problem. Just stick with him for now. That’s the best I can do.”
Marian knew it was. “Thanks, Captain. Appreciate it.” She got up to leave.
“Larch—do the paperwork on this one yourself? And send Foley in.”
Foley was on the phone when she got back to the PDU room. He looked up and she jerked a thumb over her shoulder: Captain wants you.
He hung up abruptly. “What’d you tell him?”
“The truth.”
Foley snorted. “I’ll bet.” He headed toward the captain’s office.
Marian muttered to herself and started rolling forms into the old mechanical typewriter on her desk. She’d just started filling in details when a shadow fell over the paper.
Romero was standing by her desk. “Went all right, didn’t it?”
She finished typing a word and said, “Went just dandy.”
“Maybe we can do it again sometime.”
Marian looked up at him, this sarcastic man from Intelligence who’d done her partner’s job for him. “Wouldn’t mind,” she said. He nodded without answering and went on out.
She was only halfway through the report when Foley came out of the captain’s office, his face purple; DiFalco must have given him a real going-over. Her partner stormed over to her desk. “You and your buddy Romero fixed me real good, you did. Proud of yourself?”
So Jaime Romero had backed her up in the captain’s office as well. “You fixed yourself, Foley,” Marian said. “You can’t blame somebody else this time. Too many people saw it.”
“Saw what? I didn’t do anything!”
“That’s what they saw. You not doing anything.”
He didn’t even hear. “He gave me a warning. Me, a warning! I been working this shithouse precinct eleven years and you two virgins come in here and tell me I—”
“Put a cork in it, Foley,” Marian said sharply. “Enough! And that’s an order.”
“Oh, yes sir, Sergeant Larch, ma’am sir! Whatever the sergeant wants, ma’am sir!”
Marian lowered her voice. “And it’s not my fault you failed the Sergeants Exam. If you’d studied a little harder, I wouldn’t be here at all. That’s what really burns your ass, isn’t it?”
Foley wasn’t quite self-destructive enough to say what he was thinking. Rank was rank, and he’d been a cop too long to forget that. He whirled and charged out of the squad room, muttering obscenities under his breath.
Marian let her own breath out. Pulling rank wasn’t the most diplomatic way of handling a troublesome partner, but she’d had it up to here with Foley. The confrontation had rattled her a little—not as much as facing four healthy teenagers armed with knives, but enough. Locking horns with Foley was nothing new. The first day she showed up at the Ninth, he’d let her know he resented her presence and he’d reminded her of it without fail every day since.
Marian missed her old partner. She and Sergeant Ivan Malecki had worked together for almost four years, and they’d reached the point where they could anticipate each other and even complete each other’s thoughts. That kind of rapport wasn’t built up quickly or easily, but their partnership had been dissolved in a blink of an eye. Shortage of sergeants, their superior officer had told them. Bunch of retirements coming all at once, along with the lowest median score on the Sergeants Exam in the history of the NYPD. They couldn’t have two sergeants working as a team out of Police Headquarters when a couple of precincts were screaming for at least one sergeant.
So Sergeant Malecki was sent to the Thirty-second Precinct and Sergeant Larch to the Ninth, Ivan to Harlem and Marian to the Lower East Side. It’s only temporary, their captain had told them; once we get some qualifiers after the next Sergeants Exam, you’ll both be back here. The two sergeants had gritted their teeth and said Yes sir, wanting to believe him. Once a week Marian and Ivan got together and debated which of them had the lousier job. Ivan’s new partner was a hotshot rookie who saw himself as an irresistible force chosen by destiny to clean up New York’s crime scene all by himself; consequently he had to be watched all the time. Marian would gladly have traded Foley for him.
At first Marian had looked on Foley’s hostility as just another challenge, but after a month she’d given up on him. She wished to god Foley had passed the exam; the two of them would never find a way of working together. Sergeant Larch ma’am sir, he’d called her.
Sergeant Larch. Still Sergeant Larch. But Marian couldn’t dwell on that; she had enough to be dejected about.
She put Foley out of her mind and re-imme
rsed herself in the life and times of the Downtown Queens; and right away she felt the chronic sadness creeping in that plagued her whenever she arrested someone for murder. This time it all seemed especially senseless. Why had the Queens killed Mrs. Maria Alvarez? A harmless, helpless woman with no connections. What did they possibly have to gain from her death? Mrs. Alvarez was a native Jamaican whose husband had long since disappeared from her life; she was struggling against great odds to make sure her four children stayed clothed and fed. Her English was poor enough to keep her in menial jobs, whenever she could find one—usually cleaning office buildings at night. She’d been on and off welfare for the past ten years.
Marian had first come across Mrs. Alvarez while investigating a minor scam a paper boss was working. Paper bosses oversaw the distribution of the dailies, dealing with both carriers and newsstands. Unsold papers were returned to the bosses, who cut off the banner and date from the front page to be turned in for credit; the rest of the newspaper was discarded. But one paper boss had gotten the idea of clipping all the manufacturers’ coupons from the papers and selling them to grocery store managers at a discount. The managers then sent in the coupons for their full value plus a handling fee and the books showed a little extra profit that week. The arrangement had grown into a big enough enterprise that the paper boss had had to hire Mrs. Alvarez to cut out coupons for him.
But that was the only dishonest venture Mrs. Alvarez had ever been associated with. She’d steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the business of the project house where she lived. She’d even managed to keep her four children free of drugs. But Mrs. Alvarez had been found with forty-three stab wounds in her body. Why? She was no threat to the gangs; she was no threat to anybody.
Their tip that the Queens were responsible had come from a male gang calling itself, theatrically, the Symptom of Death. The gang coveted the Queens’ turf, and because of that Marian had been inclined to discount the tip at first. But then the Symptom had turned up two witnesses, a ten-year-old boy and an old man, both scared witless. The kid and the old man were afraid of the Queens if they talked, and afraid of the Symptom of Death if they didn’t. But eventually the story came out. The Queens had been waiting for Mrs. Alvarez when she came home from her night job; they’d jumped her and stabbed her repeatedly, right there in the street. It was like they wanted ever’one to know, man, the kid had said. Yes, there were other witnesses.
