by Lee Harris
“And you don’t want to be chief of D’s.”
“Never. Besides, I’m too old to go through the ranks.”
“I think it would be good for you to study, keep that brain of yours working.”
“I read, Flora. That keeps my brain going.”
“With me, every test I passed boosted my ego. I loved moving up. I loved the power, if you want to know the truth. With rank I could accomplish more. I could get in more people’s faces.”
It was an old story. Flora was forever pressuring her women to do more, achieve more, rise in the ranks. Jane suspected Hack would be pleased if she took the sergeant’s exam, but Hack’s career and hers had diverged near their starts, reflecting their different goals—Hack’s closer to Flora’s.
“You know I’m not interested in rank. I get my highs figuring things out, not doing paperwork.”
Flora exhaled, clouding the air between them. “It’s not all pushing paper.”
“I know that. Look, I’m first grade. I know that’s the end of the line, but I never thought I’d make it. And this cold case stuff has turned out to be much more challenging than I thought it would. Making sergeant would mean a pay cut.”
“I withdraw.”
“You’re annoyed.”
“I just think you could do more. Let’s change the subject.” She looked down at the table. “You didn’t fill in those bullet holes.”
“I’m not going to.”
“They’re not a happy reminder.”
“They remind me I’m alive. There are nights I need a little prodding.”
Flora laughed. “I know the feeling. Make me a fire and when I’m nice and warm, I’ll leave you to your bullet holes and your case.”
They moved to the living room. Jane had already laid a fire. Now she lit it, hoping it would not embarrass her. Fires were undependable, sort of like most of the men who had been in her life. You went through the process each time and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.
This time it worked. The flame flared, the starter caught, and the logs began to burn. She sat back with pleasure, watching.
“You’re a real master at that,” Flora said approvingly. “I’ve never learned the trick. Not that I’ve tried many times.”
“It’s your rank, Flora. When you’re an inspector, you’re expected to have a sergeant light your fires for you.”
“Touché. I won’t mention it again.”
Jane gave her a disbelieving glance. “That’ll be the day.”
Flora raised her eyebrows. “Enough chitchat. Tell me about the Anthony case.”
“It’s in big trouble. We lost our best suspect today. His wife probably warned him off. He wasn’t where he should have been this afternoon, and we don’t have a clue where to look.”
“Today you don’t have a clue. Tomorrow you’ll have seven. Who is this guy?”
“A TA worker, a track maintenance man. He’s the guy that wasn’t in the crib when they arrested the three that stood trial.”
“There was a fourth man involved?”
“And a fifth, the brains. This guy knew him, maybe the only one of the four who did.”
“You’ve come a long way, Jane.”
“Not far enough. Shit, we were this close.” She held her thumb and index finger an eighth of an inch apart. “We were waiting for him and he didn’t show up for work at four. He’d been taking days off, one at a time, when they were trying to figure out what to do with my partner. Today he was going back to work.”
“I would guess you had the place in Rockaway covered.”
“Solid.” She got up and nudged the fire, renewing the flames.
“You do that like a pro,” Flora said.
“My next career, lighting fires.”
“You’ve been doing that for twenty years.”
“This is a big case, Flora.” She put the poker back on its stand and returned to her chair.
“And you can’t discuss it. Well, Medal Day’s coming up. I bet your father can’t wait.”
“He’s buying a new summer suit for the occasion.”
“A suit! Who wears a suit in New York in the summer anymore?” Her voice rose and fell in an old New York cadence.
“John Bauer.”
“Well, God bless him.” Flora shook her head in disbelief and perhaps some admiration. As she began to add another comment, the phone rang.
It was McElroy. “Hi, Loot.”
“Got some bad news.”
“Farrar?”
“One and the same. His body was found near a siding about an hour ago. He’d been dead for a while, maybe since this morning. Whoever did it made sure his body was away from the track.”
“A transit cop,” Jane said miserably.
“Could be.”
“And he was the link. We were just one day too late.”
“Not your fault. I’ll give Smithson a call. You can tell Defino. Have you told him about the guns?”
“Nobody.”
“Keep it that way.”
“Lost your guy?” Flora said.
“Yeah, our missing link, the only one who could lead us to the top guy. They just found his body.” She sat down in the living room, trying to think where to go next.
“Sleep on it, Jane.” Flora raised herself from the sofa and retrieved her shopping bag.
Jane got her coat out of the closet and helped her on with it. “Don’t agitate yourself.”
“This guy has lived ten years too long. I want him.”
“We all want him.”
When Flora had left, Jane called Defino and gave him the news. Smithson called a little while later.
“I need some inspiration,” Jane told him.
“That makes two of us.”
“I’ll see you in the morning. I’m all talked out.”
She washed the dishes and poked the fire. That was depressing news, their one lead gone. Whoever the TA cop was, he was free as a bird now, safe and secure. Neither Randolph nor Manelli could finger him. She wondered what Graves would do about the guns in the Second Avenue subway.
They had traded war stories, she and Hack, after the relationship became firm. They were, after all, cops, and they had lots of stories. But their careers had been so different, they could have worked at different jobs. He had made detective much earlier than she, and then with his law degree and his appointment as sergeant, his life on the job became largely political. He worked with cops. Jane worked with crime, with criminals. His tales were of cops in trouble, cops trying to move up in a system that was often hostile, cops dying; hers were of collars cleverly orchestrated, of close calls and near misses, of panic and fear and, occasionally, laughter. And of cops dying.
He didn’t use the L word for weeks, maybe more than a month; she couldn’t remember now. It happened the first night he brought ice cream, as though a connection existed between love and sweet food, and maybe it did. What it meant for Jane was that she would always think of love when she ate ice cream, not a stretch, really, as almost all the ice cream in her life was eaten with Hack.
About a year into the relationship, he told her he wanted to leave his wife and marry her. He had alluded in the past to their being together on a permanent basis, but that night he laid it out. He would give his wife the house and he would put his daughters through college. He was a captain now and he could manage it.
“I just want to be with you,” he said when the plan was on the table.
She was sitting next to him on the sofa, nestled against him, his left arm around her. Feelings of comfort, love, and security enveloped them. They had eaten, left the dishes, and moved to the living room because he wanted to talk. Listening to him she felt a conflict so sharp, so severe, that for a moment she could not find her voice.
“Something wrong?” he asked easily.
“Your daughters need you. You shouldn’t leave them, Hack. They’re early teens. It’s so important for them to grow up with a father in the house.” She had tol
d him that she was adopted but hadn’t said anything about the child she had given up. Even a dozen years later, it was hard to talk about.
“They’ll have me. I’m not going to the end of the world. I love you, Jane. It’s hell waking up without you every day.”
“I know. But their lives are important too, maybe more important than ours.”
“Do we have a problem?”
“No!”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. You know I’m sure.” She hadn’t looked at another man since the first time they’d had a drink together. She started unbuttoning his shirt.
“We’ll talk about it again.”
“OK.”
He stayed longer that night, and he smoked more. She found herself feeling terrible. She had disappointed him. And she had disappointed and confused herself. Her reaction to his proposal had been double-sided: profound happiness that he loved her so much, and absolute certainty that she did not want to marry.
She wasn’t sure why. His relationship with his daughters was certainly part of it, but the stuff that made her who she was was at least half of it. It wasn’t fear of commitment; she was committed to him. It was something about a togetherness that went on without break. What he wanted, to wake up next to her each morning, scared her. She had a need to spend time alone, to talk out loud to herself if she had something to say, to take off down a street if the mood struck her, to eat when she felt hungry and sleep when fatigue hit her, even in the middle of the day. All of that said, or reflected, she wanted him forever. It crossed her mind that if she maintained this stance, however, she might lose him.
Perversely, she found she could understand him better than she could understand herself. Her parents would love to see her married, and they would somehow get over the fact that he had had to leave a wife to become their daughter’s husband. She wished she could explain what made her the way she was. Was it knowing she was adopted? Was it giving up that baby girl she had seen only once?
Whatever, she thought, pushing away shadows, moving a large log out of the center of the dying fire. Charley Farrar was dead and the man who had killed him was on the loose, maybe for the rest of his life. The man, she thought, who had ordered the death of Micah Anthony.
27
IT WAS NOT a happy Friday morning. MacHovec, who didn’t like to think about work after he left Centre Street, got the word when he sat down with his coffee. He had hardly uttered his four-letter comment when Annie placed herself in their doorway.
“The inspector’s office, Detectives. Now.”
“She taking over for McElroy?” MacHovec growled in a low voice as she left.
“Save it,” Jane said.
“You’ve all heard the news,” Graves said before they had finished sitting down. “This puts us in a tight spot. I think we go back to Randolph now and squeeze him. Offer him a better deal, get him sprung, whatever it takes to get him talking.”
Jane shook her head absently. “You have a better idea, Detective Bauer?”
“Randolph doesn’t know Farrar’s contact. They worked it so only Farrar knew him. The other three may have known there was a cop at the top—Curtis Morgan knew it—but that’s all they knew.”
“But they knew Farrar.”
“We’ve established that. Manelli knew him. Curtis Morgan had to know him because Morgan told his brother there was a cop at the top. Randolph had Farrar’s phone number, but I’ll bet he rarely used it.”
“Till you and Defino went to visit him,” Smithson said.
“Detective Smithson, your group looked into Manelli’s life from birth to last week. You come up with anything we can run with?”
“Sorry, sir. Manelli’s friends were a bunch of dirtbags, but there’s no indication they were in on the Anthony hit. And he kept them separate from the woman he lived with.”
“Has anyone talked to her recently?” Graves’s eyes swept the room.
“We did, yesterday morning,” Jane said.
“Do I have a Five on that?” Graves was sounding more like an irritable boss than a smooth-talking TV head.
“On my desk.” Defino had taken care of typing the Fives. She had done that one while they were watching the clock before going after Farrar.
“I want it on my desk.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did she say?”
“Manelli had friends. They called, they came over and picked him up, but they never stayed. Or he went out to meet them. She didn’t know them. She thought maybe he had a friend named Charley.”
“Joe Riso,” Graves said, pulling out the last name Jane could think of. “Is it worth going back with some tough questions? Or bringing him in?”
“I think he told us all he’s going to, maybe all he knows,” Smithson said.
“That leaves us with no one.” Graves looked at MacHovec. “You got any ideas?”
“Manelli’s a dead end, Morgan’s a dead end. I’ve been looking into Charley Farrar’s work record.”
“OK,” Graves said with a note of hope.
“It doesn’t appear to have been tampered with. He looks to have a pretty clean record. I’ve got names of supervisors going back twenty years.”
“He ever work on the Second Avenue subway?”
“I haven’t gotten back that far. And he could’ve met Morgan somewhere else in the system. It’s hard to pinpoint it, since Morgan’s got no history.”
“OK, Detectives, that’s where you pick up the case.” Graves put down the pen he had been holding. “Any questions?” It was clear he didn’t want any. “Then get cracking.”
They got up and Jane hung behind as the men left. When they were gone, she closed Graves’s door. “Smithson doesn’t know about the guns.”
“Right. That slipped my mind. I mentioned the Second Avenue subway, didn’t I? Tell you what, brief him. We can’t have him working on a case he isn’t fully informed about.”
“Thanks, Inspector. Are you leaving the guard there?”
“With Farrar gone, I think we’ll pull them. I’m talking to the chief of D in half an hour. We’ll work something out.”
In the office, with the door closed, she and MacHovec told Smithson the story.
He whistled at the revelation of the guns in the subway. “How’d you find them?”
“That’s my secret.”
“You found them?”
“With someone I know who has access. We knew roughly where Curtis Morgan had worked and we looked in likely places. I wasn’t looking for them; I was looking for my partner.”
“Some find.”
Jane took the Fives she had completed yesterday and dropped them in Graves’s in box while MacHovec dug up Farrar’s work history. He pulled the names of supervisors going back to the beginning of Farrar’s career. The work assignments were similar, just in different locations. He had worked Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, and he had lived in Brooklyn for over thirty years at the address Jane and Smithson had visited the day before.
“OK, here’s the connection,” MacHovec said. “Farrar worked on the Second Avenue subway at least part of the time Curtis Morgan did.” He had two sheets side by side on his desk, the one on the left a printout, the one on the right handwritten notes, which had to be information Jane had gotten on Morgan. “Doesn’t look like he worked there a long time, but you only need a day to meet a guy.”
“That was about twenty years before the Micah Anthony killing,” Jane said. “They could have met and stayed friends, or they could have been assigned the same location again later.”
“Hard to tell without Morgan’s record. I would guess these guys run into each other from time to time. Cops do. You think his wife remembers where he worked?”
“She gave me the Lex and the Second Avenue subway. I’ll give her a call.” Jane dialed the number.
“Detective, I don’t have the time, and I’m sitting with all of these people around,” Emma Morgan said.
“A couple of quick question
s, Mrs. Morgan.” She asked about locations and took notes as the woman spoke.
“Did your husband know a track maintenance man named Charley Farrar?”
A phone rang in the background and a distant voice answered. “I think he knew a Charley,” Mrs. Morgan said. “I don’t know if I ever met him. He wasn’t a good friend like some of the others I told you about.”
“Did he ever know a Transit cop?”
“A cop? Never.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’d swear to it.”
“Thanks for your help.” Jane hung up. “She remembers the Broadway line in Manhattan before ‘the incident with the cop,’ and Morgan never knew a Transit cop. We’re not going to get much more out of her.”
“Farrar worked the Number One line,” MacHovec said. “About two years before Anthony was killed. So we’ve got two overlaps. Give me a minute and I’ll have it all together.”
Smithson took the supervisors during the first half of Farrar’s career and Jane took the rest. One of Smithson’s was dead; one of Jane’s was off today. As she was about to make another call, McElroy appeared at the door.
“We’ve got a preliminary report on Farrar’s body. My office.”
They trooped over. What he had was handwritten notes, obviously taken from a telephone conversation.
“One shot to the back of the head,” McElroy said when they were seated.
“Gun?” The word came from Jane and Smithson at the same moment.
“Small-caliber. Probably a throwaway. Body looked like it had been dragged, but not far. The shooter wanted him off to the side, not on the tracks, not where he’d be seen readily. He was probably dead six to eight hours when he was spotted.”
“Who found him?” Smithson asked.
“A homeless guy who sleeps down there. He walked to the nearest station and told a clerk.”
“A Good Samaritan.”
“Probably thought he’d get a reward,” MacHovec said glumly.
“He available for questioning?” Jane asked.
“I’ve got a fax of the Five, the names of the cops who responded, and the detectives who caught the case.” He pushed papers across his desk.
Jane grabbed the Five and read it, Smithson looking over her shoulder. The man, who gave his name as Catty Fellows, had been questioned and released by the time McElroy got the news the night before. By now he could be sleeping in the Bronx.
