by Lee Lamothe
For Ray Tate it was different story. He was glad that she was safe in a do-dick squad, but he missed his streets, cruising in his ghoster from call to call, looking after the young cops, mentoring them as he’d been mentored. Working in an office day after day, he felt the cop in himself evaporating away, buried under bags of money and stacks of paperwork. He thought he could hear his gun turning to rust.
It wasn’t real police work, but they weren’t in separate cells either, and they made the best of it.
After examining every inch of the Cadillac for damage or blemish, Abner Hussey in his baggy, saggy suit, told Ray Tate they were even. “That’s it, right? You don’t come at me again unless I’m carrying, that’s the deal, right? I’m no rat. I’m not registered, my name on no paperwork, I didn’t take any dough from you.”
“No problem, Abbie. Enjoy your ride.”
Djuna Brown gave him a serious nod. “Your car’s a free man, Abbo.” She looked at the gorgeous lines of the Cadillac. “Look, you might want to put this boss ride into long-term parking for a while, in case this Markowitz guy that sent you out with his dough wonders why it didn’t get seized with his money, starts looking at you funny.”
“Like I told you, Marko’s got other things to worry about. Me, I’m taking a vacation.” He got into the Cadillac, checking his mirrors for alignment. “This town is too fucking strange right now. Colour my red-haired ass gone.”
“Paris, Ab,” Djuna Brown smiled at him fondly. “You ever think about Paris?”
“Paris. What’s with this fucking Paris all the time? You guys are fucking weird.”
The Cashman waved them into his office. He looked askance at Ray Tate’s flapping avian shirt tail and at Djuna Brown’s perky Pompidou T-shirt that showed no signs of a bra. She looked like a Chicago shoo-wop girl on her day off and Ray Tate looked like a car thief on his day on. “Abner give something up?”
“Yep.” Ray Tate nodded. “He gave up a major conspiracy.”
“We’re not in the conspiracy business. Conspiracies are people. That’s for the real cops. Forget about being cops, you guys. You’re fancy bank tellers. You came about two heartbeats from being locked up. We need dirty dough, that’s all we want. Hussey tell you where to find some?”
Before Ray Tate could answer, Djuna Brown said, “You been to France, boss? Ate snails in pails, mussels from Brussels? Good shit, that shit. And we want to go back. So let me ask you one. What’s the deal if we back, say, ten million in dope cash up to your back door?”
“Ten? Bullshit.”
“Ten ems, boss. Think on that.” She made googly eyes at him and did a little Detroit free-range shoulder shimmy that caught his eyes. “Me, I’m turned on. Check it out, I’m squigglin’ here. Big time.”
“Ray?” Cash looked at her, dazed. She was squirrelly, a State cop with no home. Ray Tate, he thought, was a city guy. There was hope for him. “This is jake, Ray? Ten?”
“Yep. There’s ten million out there. But like Djuna says, what’s in it for us? We spend all our time tracking down a stash of drug dough for you, get some notice for you, get a promotion for you. We ignore our French cooking classes, our vocabulary CDs, our wine tastings. So how about, ah, I dunno. A bonus? Some time off for Django Reinhardt guitar lessons?”
“Yeah, we gotta get back to Montparnasse, boss. We left a pot of water on the stove.” Djuna Brown was feeling pretty good. A return to Paris was a possibility. She was already planning. They’d skip the hotels and rent an apartment with a good kitchen, work on their cassoulet. They’d never come back to Murder City.
Cash stared at them. “You guys are lucky you’re not scratching off days on a calendar up in Craddock.” But he was adding up the ramifications if his crew brought in ten million bucks. Ten ems was a major seizure for any city police force. There would indeed be a promotion to a swank office in the Jank, near enough to the chief’s office to get him noticed. And whether in big bills or small, the press conference would be a golden photo op, a record cash grab. You only needed one boost in your rocket to get up there into the blue orbit where anything was possible.
They sat pleasantly staring at him, waiting.
“Okay. Okay, you guys put ten ems on the seizure board, you get two weeks’ leave time.” He thought they were both loony, but harmless. “So?”
Ray Tate said, “You ever heard of a mutt named Marko Markowitz?”
Djuna Brown said, “You ever heard of a Colombian midget coming to town, a saltimbanques thing with chainsaws, jugglers, and crazy scenes of harlequinade?”
“Okay,” Cash sat back, linked his hands behind his head, and put his feet on his desk, ready to be entertained by the lunatics, “tell me all about it, kids.”
The Cashman called the Jank Center of Public Safety and told a deputy chief what he had. He was vague about it. You couldn’t make it sound too good. Piracy was an art over there; if you brought the wrong guy aboard you could wind up drinking salt water in a leaky dinghy, watching your beloved ship sail away into the far sunset under a Jolly Roger.
The deputy chief he called was Bob Hogarth, a former homicide boss. The rumour was that Hogarth, called Hambone because his first case involved one as a murder weapon, was the source of Ray Tate’s protection and that he’d saved the wandering artists from being fired or jailed. Hogarth had worked with Ray Tate and Djuna Brown on the serial killer case the year before. He’d taken a liking to them and it didn’t hurt that when they finished their investigation the deputy of chief’s operations went to the nut house and Hogarth wound up with the job.
“You’re being too careful, Jim,” Hogarth laughed. “I got enough guys over here ready to walk the plank. I don’t got to pirate your ship. Just lay it out. You got my word.”
“Well, Dep, it’s those two you sent me. The beatniks. They went out on a cash grab today, got a couple hundred grand, but they say they’ve turned the courier around, got intel there’s a big money stash out there.”
“How big?”
“Millions. They say. They say the courier said, anyway.” Cash was casual. “Maybe millions. Some guy named Markowitz. Druggie.”
“Well, Laszlo Markowitz is a big player, no question. I put his old man, Mickey, down dead during a bank robbery, back when I was first on. If anybody’s hoarding that kind of dough, it’s Marko. If you can jump into his shit, you’ll come out with some scalps all right. What are you calling me for?”
“Just want to be sure I’m not stepping on anyone’s pecker.”
“And, Jim, to maybe lay some footprints in case it goes south, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, that too. These two, they’re weird. She wears little slippers and no bra. He looks like a skid. If they fuck things up, swing with the dough off to France, I want some cover.”
Hambone Hogarth was silent for a few seconds. “Okay, take the leash off them and turn ’em loose. I’m vouching for them, for this phase, anyway. Start a project framework, send me some talking points about what you’re doing. I’ll sign off as a preliminary. But at the end of the day, Jim, we split this one. This is chief’s office and the asset recovery, coordinated.”
“Fifty-fifty, Dep.”
“Well, sure, Jim, fifty-fifty if it comes in successful. It goes down the tubes, it gets rubbed into your head. You know the scene over here, me hearty.”
They were taken out of the rotation and assigned an office down the corridor from the Green Squad bullpen. Eyebrows went up. Ray Tate and Djuna Brown were seen as goofy beatnik cops who somehow managed to loot the State out of a swank vacation and live to tell the Parisian tale. Djuna Brown, they said, knew more boudoir tricks than a rubber yoga man and was banging the governor. Or she was gay and was banging the governor’s wife. Or she was both, doing both.
Ray Tate, no one was sure. Street cops respected him because he’d gone the fatal distance three times, but except for Hambone Hogarth there was no love for him in the wood-panelled offices at the Jank. Ray Tate was what every police administrator feared: he
wasn’t gunshy and was willing to spray honest hollow-points when he had to. Ray Tate had killed two men in the line and a jealous lesbian ex-cop who’d stalked Djuna Brown. All three shoots came back clean, findings that were seen as suspect in themselves because you couldn’t wipe three shadows off the wall without having fucked up, even if you didn’t. You carelessly didn’t wait for backup; you negligently failed to exhaust other non-lethal measures; you wilfully failed to keep your badge polished; you against regulations didn’t check your horoscope that day.
The Cashman came into the office and told them they were a go. They’d be online and have telephones by the end of day. “I had to fight for this, you guys. The dep wanted to put you guys on the bus to Craddock and keep the whole thing, but I stood him off. My guys uncovered it, I said, we get first kick. So, focus. We don’t care about drugs, we don’t care about arrests. Don’t let me down. Ten million bucks and you can parlez vous with the es-car-gots. Fuck it up? You’ll be talking to each other by tapping Morse code with a spoon on the wall of your cells.”
When he was gone Djuna Brown wheeled around the office on her sparkly slippers. “Whee. How do we start, ma petit garçon?” She pronounced it, my petty gherkin.
“Fuck if I know.” Ray Tate was dazed. “I don’t even know what’s just happened. One minute we’re goofing on Ab Hussey, next thing we’re a task force on the road to Paris.” He laughed. “Man, I hope Abner wasn’t yanking us around just to get his car back.”
“That wouldn’t be great. But hey, we’re not locked up right? So I say we work it from Abbie’s interview, find this Markowitz dude, follow him around, and pick up the dough. Head to Paris, get stupid with the Sancerre by dinnertime tomorrow.”
He smiled fondly at her. She had doubts about herself after going ape during the Stonetown riots. She’d become afraid of the streets, what they brought out of her. Her brutality was created by her own terror which in turn fed back into her brutality.
But he loved the streets. And working a case that had a bit of street to it would be good for her. It was only money. You didn’t have to go out and get hurt, or go out and hurt anybody. But you got outside where cops were supposed to be, you were available if needed. “We’re gonna have to go out and run the streets a little, Djun’,” he said. “You up for it?”
“I’m okay, Ray.” Unconsciously she bit her lip. “Like, we’re just tracking money, right? A little driving, a little paperwork.”
“Yep. It’s a box of bon bons. Let’s start with the names. We got Laszlo Markowitz for a starting point. Why don’t you shape him out so we can ruin his life.” He took his cellphone from his pocket and began punching numbers. “I’m going to find a drug guy I know.”
Chapter 4
Jackson and Bonnacorso, two thugs from drugs, came out of the grey stone courthouse. Both were burly with thick necks, huge hands, and synchronized strides. Ray Tate saw they were in a jury trial: both wore their credibility suits, dark blue faint pinstriped numbers with white shirts and sober dark ties with subtle patterns. Believable blue, the colour was called. The suits were from Bumstead’s, Bummy’s, where city detectives bought them three for one, with two free shirts and two ties thrown in. The suits had no labels. There were careful razor marks where they’d been removed. A lot of things went on at Bummy’s outlet mall but none of it was violent.
Jackson and Bonnacorso stood at the top of the wide stone steps, looking like fit young businessmen who did contact football in their spare time and weren’t particularly good at it. Jackson was very black and had a thoroughly broken nose; Bonnacorso had cat-gut stitches in both eyebrows and a cauliflowered ear. Both had shaven heads. Bonnacorso had a Eurotrash spray-on beard. They lit cigarettes, muttering to each other out of the sides of their mouths.
Coming up beside them, Ray Tate saw they were smoking illegals off the reservation up in Indian Country. “Hey,” he whispered, “you dudes want to score some weed?”
Bonnacorso barely glanced at him. “No thanks, bud, we already got a ton.”
Jackson, whose suit was double-breasted with a Nathan Detroit drape and a rag in the breast pocket, turned slowly. “Ray Fucking Tate.” He looked at Ray Tate’s clothes. “You undercover? Infiltrating the asshole gang? You’d fool me.” He wore gold-rimmed glasses he didn’t need and a plain wedding band he’d picked up at a pawnshop. It was part of the credibility outfit. Jurors ate it. The busted nose said physical competence, the glasses said quiet intelligence, the wedding ring said personal commitment. That he was black could go either way, depending on the jury selection and the race of the accused. If the jury was at the bright end of the grey scale, Bonnacorso usually climbed into the box, looking boyish with his sandpaper beard, like an earnest kid trying to look older to impress the grownups.
“You guys on the break?”
“No. We’re done for the day. The prosecutor asked for an adjournment when Bonko here started growing the nose.”
“I didn’t grow the nose. I was telling the truth.” Bonnacorso shook his head. “It’s a genetic thing. When I get stressed out my nose grows. It don’t mean I’m lying.” He gave Ray Tate a bland look. “You think that Pinocchio’s nose thing is because he’s an Italian? People think all Italians lie, right?”
“I don’t know about that, man,” Ray Tate said earnestly, “but I definitely dig olive oil.”
Bonnacorso’s face became puzzled. “The fuck?” He turned to Jackson. “Is that a racial slur? Jack? This guy got something against wops?”
“Ray’s okay, Bonko,” Jackson told him. “Ray’s never shot a wop, right, Ray?”
“Well, not yet. But I’m only in the middle of my career.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s beer o’clock. You got time?”
Jackson and Bonnacorso were the heavies on the drug squad. There were stories about the Flying French Canadian, a dealer from up in Canada who brought poisoned precursor drugs through the border for the Chinese labs. Nine people died in twisting agony before the thugs from drugs raided a fifteenth floor leased apartment and the Quebecker fatally tried to escape over the balcony. Another night, when the door teams were tied up in the Hauser Projects, the thugs were shanghaied into a raid on a pedophile video studio. One of the producers ran naked up a staircase to a door leading to the roof, presumably forgetting he’d chained it shut. He lost his footing and fell back down the stairs twice, breaking both legs in the process and landing balls first on Bonnacorso’s taser.
There were other stories. The thugs from drugs stocking the food banks with cans and clothing they muscled from city firms; four heavies from the drug squad booking vacations and driving to New Orleans after Katrina and raising houses for a Canadian philanthropist.
Across from the courthouse they went onto the patio of the Duke of Fuzhou, an Irish pub operated by a Chinese family. Their server, a middle-aged Asian woman, dropped menus and took beer orders.
“So, Ray,” Jackson said, “you came looking for us?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m working something, there’s a drug angle. Markowitz? Druggie?”
“Marko. Well, you definitely got a game there, if you can drill into him.” Jackson nodded definitively. “Old Marko’s come on strong, the past few years. Colombians, mostly. We’re hearing rumours he’s maybe got a big stash of dough, someplace. Him and Jerry Fucking Kelly are in the switches with the Colombian back end to get the money out.”
“Don’t know this Kelly,” Ray Tate said, jotting the name on the back of a paper placemat. “Our guy didn’t mention him.”
“No surprise there, Ray. We’ve interrogated guys who’ll drop anybody’s name, you get them in the room and you ask them politely. But I can’t recall anyone dropping Jerry Fucking Kelly’s name, anywhere, even when their teeth fell out on the desk. ‘Hooth Therry?’ they say.”
“Well, anyway, we took a guy with some dough this morning, said he was muling for Markowitz. He said there might be more around.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. People are talking.” Jackson nodd
ed. “How come you’re out? I heard you were in the penalty box, something to do with Paris? Ripping off the governor? With that foxy little chick from the Staties? How’s she doing, anyway? She okay?”
Everyone knew that Djuna Brown had gone rogue in the Stonetown riots and laid waste. No one saw anything, but the city was paying out huge settlements to demonstrators and passersby who’d been brutalized, caught in the kettles or jumped by cops in the streets.
“She’s okay. She’s sorting.” Ray Tate appreciated him asking. It was the blue way. If he bumped into Jackson in a year, he’d ask after Bonnacorso. “Anyway, they’ve got us looking for money while they decide if they’re going to hang us. So, when it looked like there might be a good stash around, we figured we might parlay a seizure into some mercy. And because this dough comes from Markowitz, we figure it’s dope money, so I thought I’d better keep you in the loop. Professional courtesy.” He nodded firmly. “That’s how I roll, definitely.”
“You can slow your roll to a stroll, man.” Jackson smiled. “I’m almost convinced. More like, you’re wandering in the stinky brown echo chamber and you want us to lend you our flashlight.”
“That, too,” Ray Tate said, sitting back as a round of tall dark Guinness was dealt onto the table. After the waitress was told they didn’t want food and left, he added, “Anything to do with drugs, I’ll pass it to you. Any bodies? You get them. Right now, I just need to know the players so I can pick their pockets.”
“Well, like I said, Marko’s a player.” Jackson stared away for a moment. “This thing could be good. You want to do something? Something together? Maybe down the road? Work something out, joint forces operation? We can make a lot of overtime dough if we become a JFO.”
Bonnacorso shrugged. “I paid my house off a fuckin’ JFO.” He sounded miserable about it.
