Blood Count

by Reggie Nadelson

  “What about you?”

  “I’m up to my eyeballs. We got one homicide, dead white guy, somebody dumped him over at the Church of the Intercession, right there on West 155th. It’s got the look of some kind of mob hit, but which mob?” Radcliff groaned. “It’s too fucking much, especially when we already have another possible homicide. On Convent Avenue, in a brownstone, guy knifed bad, left in a closet to bleed out. About a month ago.” Radcliff walked fast. I kept up. “They don’t like this kind of thing around here. We’ve got a record to live up to, you know, murder down, crime down. My boss wants to keep up his image these days.”

  “I’ll check out the Simonova thing.”

  “That’d be good. Thank you. I know you’ll keep it between us, if possible,” said Radcliff. “Yeah, I’d be grateful. I’m trying to get out of town by Wednesday. Visit my grandfather.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “California,” he said. “Berkeley.”

  I was suddenly angry. He was playing games with me. “Is that why you didn’t want me to just call the ME in? You’re too busy, and you figured you might catch this case and fuck up your holiday plans?”

  “That’s not why,” Radcliff said.

  Radcliff looked at my car when we got to the front of the building. “Nice,” he said as I opened the door and got in. “Nice paint job.” He got in next to me.

  “You’re interested in paint?”

  “Just paying a compliment.”

  “Whatever.” I looked straight ahead, stepped on the gas.

  “Is this about Lily?” Radcliff’s voice was quiet and he chose his words carefully. “You need to talk to her about it, Artie. I mean, you’re gone a year, you show up, and you’re pissed off at me big-time, even when you’re not saying it right out, so talk to her. We’ve been having a nice time together, since you were asking.” It was a verbal tic with him, that phrase. It was driving me nuts. “OK? We’re all grown-ups, and I like her a lot, and I think she likes me,” said Radcliff. “I’m not planning on voluntarily giving her up just because you showed up, unless that’s what she wants, and I’m not under the impression she does. So there it is.”

  I didn’t answer. I knew he was waiting for me to say something. He was Lily’s boyfriend, and he was smart, good looking, young, and hard to hate. I drove around to the back of the building. Radcliff whistled softly “Spring is Here,” a favorite song of mine, and I wondered if Lily had played it for him.

  “You want to make that right turn, by the gas station,” he said.

  “How come you know this building so well?”

  “I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. My parents always had friends here. I had an uncle who lived here for a while. I knew some of the kids. We sometimes played up on the roof in the summer. We called it Tar Beach.”

  “So you all know each other?”

  “What ‘we all,’ Artie?” he said, but without attitude, and looked at his watch, an old Omega on a soft pigskin strap he might have inherited from a grandfather. “You mean us black people? We African Americans? You can pull in over there, next to mine,” he added as we reached the lot. He pointed at a burgundy Crown Vic. It surprised me. I’d had figured him for something more stylish than the standard-issue cop car.

  I parked. Radcliff made to get out, then handed me a card with his phone number. “So you’ll keep in touch, Artie? We’re on the same page about Simonova, right?” His tone was cool.

  “What do they usually call you? Radcliff? Virgil?” I said, by way of minor apology.

  He hesitated, one hand on the car door.

  “So, since you ask, Artie, yeah. At Harvard, I got some of the guys to call me Rad. It didn’t stick. It never fucking stuck,” he said. “I was back to being Virgil. Jesus. When it comes to names, I’m fucked. Everybody in my family is trapped in the past. My father teaches classics. My mother writes scholarly books about nineteenth-century literature. I had to lie to my grandmother about being a cop. She thinks I’m a lawyer.”

  “You have a middle name?”

  “Worse,” he said. “Darcy. My mom’s idea. Never mind.”

  “You think because I’m a cop I never heard of Jane Austen?”

  “Sorry about that. But just since you are interested, there’s been occasions when some of the time, in certain places, especially with some of my fellow officers, they call me nigger.”

  That word coming from him startled me. I hear the word plenty. There’s white cops who use it plenty. There’s black detectives on the squad down at One PP where I normally work who use it between themselves. Rappers, too, of course; teenagers on the street. But coming from Radcliff—and I was guessing he didn’t use it often and not in front of Lily—it had a different kind of power.

  “You think I’m a soft, naïve guy, don’t you, Artie?” said Virgil Radcliff, who didn’t wait for an answer. He looked at his watch again. “I have to get back to work, you want to look into this unofficially, fine, but do it fast. Easier for Lily. Easier for everybody.”

  “What’s your house?”

  “The Three-O. Captain’s name is Wagner. Why, you want to check up on me?” He smiled. His tone was cool. I didn’t see anything else on his face.

  “Jimmy Wagner?”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Virgil, and got out of my car.

  I’m not surprised, Virgil Radcliff had said. Was it race? Did he think about me the same way he thought about Jimmy Wagner, a white Irish guy from Staten Island?

  I’ve been in New York thirty years now, and I’ve worked with plenty of cops who are brutal racists; it goes with the territory. Same with the rest of the population. Nothing like the fucking Russians, though. I wondered if Radcliff knew from Lily I was one of them. A Russian.

  Maybe Paul Robeson had been idolized by the whole Soviet Union back when, but it didn’t stop the Russians from being the racist bastards they always were. Still are.

  The asshole Commies had lured African students over, said they’d educate them, put them in dorms like Patrice Lumumba House in Moscow, told everyone, Look, we’re not racists, we’re not like the imperialist fucks in the west, we’re good to the peoples of the world whatever their color, our system is free from racism.

  Ironic, how we were taught as little snot-nosed Soviet kids to love and honor black people; the Negro race, according to our teachers, was dignified and even under imperialism, noble. It didn’t stop anyone, kids, grown-ups, from being racists. Peoples of the world! It was horseshit.

  It never ends. Never. Just goes on and on, and now there are a lot of poor Africans stranded in Russia, just flotsam left over from before, the detritus of a dead system, the way people see it, if they see it at all.

  Those poor African bastards are the worst victims of the Soviet fallout. It was lousy then; it’s worse now: in Russia, if you’re black, you get the shit beat out of you. I was there.

  I’m in Moscow, July of ’08, and I see it everywhere: people spitting at Africans, swearing at them, beating on them. One day I’m near the Pushkin Museum, some ugly acne-scarred Russian creeps, three of them, pin a skinny black guy up against the wall of a building. Start punching his face. They kick him, screaming insults. The poor guy covers his head, but they yank his arms away and hit him in the face some more.

  And I lose it. I start yelling, and when they don’t stop, I push one of them on the ground, tell him I’m official, flash my badge. I manage to scare the bastards. When I walk the black guy back to his hostel, I ask if he wants me to call the cops. No point, he says, and thanks me.

  There’ve always been two kinds of people in Russia. The first want to beat up all black people or just make them disappear. Then there are a few of us, like me, maybe my dad in his time, who have always sentimentalized black Americans, because of the music.

  For me it was always the music. Jazz had transformed my miserable little pimply Soviet being, even when I was a good young pioneer si
nging the praises of Vladimir Ilyich.

  I listened to Willis Conover’s Jazz Hour on the Voice of America under the covers. When every other kid was secretly listening to Beatles bootlegs, if they could get an illicit disc, I was listening to jazz. I listened with my father on our big Grundig in the dacha; it was safer in the countryside.

  But race has everybody fucked up. When Obama was elected it had been as if, for a second, it was all over, all the ugly stuff. It didn’t last.

  Now I was in Harlem, sitting in my car, an outsider.

  What was Radcliff’s game? Did he have one? Was it only Lily he was worried about? He knew the building, he knew the people in it. He thought Simonova’s body had been posed, fixed up after she died, but he didn’t want me calling the ME.

  It was Jimmy Wagner who had called Sonny looking for me. Wanting me to translate the piece of paper left on the dead guy, skewered into his heart. And it was Wagner who turned out to be Virgil Radcliff’s chief.

  I’m not surprised, Radcliff had said when I told him I knew Wagner.

  Is everything always about race? What the hell did I know? With this stuff there were no reliable witnesses, not anywhere. I stepped on the gas.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock…”

  In the station house, the sergeant at the front desk was fielding calls. He waved at me to wait while he finished. On his tiny hand, little and strange like a dwarf’s, was a school ring with a huge blue glass stone. The man’s name tag said he was Edigio Russomano. He was small. After a minute, I realized he was sitting on a stack of phone books.

  Near the front desk, his back to me, was a guy in a black jacket and gray hoodie, the hood up. Big guy. Meaty shoulders.

  “What’s your name?” said Russomano to me after he hung up the phone.

  I told him.

  He asked again. “I’m getting deaf,” he said. “Doc told me my hearing’s shot. Yeah, right, Detective Artie Cohen, that’s it, glad a meetcha. Chief made me look for your number earlier. He had some Russian thing he wanted you to look at. You Russian or something? Cohen? That a Russian name? Why don’t you grab a pew over there, and I’ll get the chief.”

  I got the feeling the guy in the black jacket had been listening all the time Russomano was talking to me. The little sergeant turned to him. “I thought you was on your way out. You need something or you just got nothing better to do than hang around here?”

  Without saying a word, the guy stuffed his hands in his pockets and bolted from the station house, through the doors, into the street.

  “Who was that?” I said to Russomano.

  “What?”

  “That guy who just left.”

  “You have to ask the chief. I ain’t been around last couple days; I only just came on like a few minutes before you got here,” Russomano said.

  I sat on a chair near the door. It was warm in the precinct. I unzipped my jacket, got out my cell, looking for calls from Lily.

  I’d heard the stories about the Thirtieth. In the early nineties, this had been a station house that dealt big-time in narcotics, mostly cocaine. It had been so famous for the corruption, they’d made movies about it. Back in the day. Not anymore.

  I was impatient. All I wanted from Jimmy Wagner was some input on the Armstrong—there was stuff going on there I didn’t understand. There was Virgil Radcliff—I didn’t like his insistence we work the case ourselves, if there was a case. He’d been holding back.

  I looked around, hoping I wouldn’t find Radcliff still at the house so I could talk to Wagner about him. Was Radcliff still at the Armstrong where I’d left him in the parking lot? With Lily? Had she really gone out to do errands?

  “Dancing and prancing in Jingle Bell Square, in the frosty air…” The song played. I tried Lily on my cell. No answer.

  I sat on an orange plastic chair opposite Russomano’s desk. A drunk who had wandered in and was yelling incoherently, inserting the word motherfucker between every syllable he uttered, was followed by a couple of kids, boys, maybe ten years old. Their jeans hung low on their skinny asses. They told Russomano somebody had stolen their sneakers. He told them to sit. They took the chairs next to mine.

  “Hey, yo, what up, man?” the first boy said to the second.

  “Jes chillin’.”

  “You comin’ down J’s party? I tell you, It’s goin’ down right there, man. We gonna tear it up, I mean this gonna be stoopid tonight, you know what I’m saying?”

  The boys kept it up, looking at the sergeant and me, making sure they had an audience, turning up the volume. They reminded me of those comic characters in Shakespeare who show up in the middle of the action. The little boys had high, childish voices. I tried not to laugh. I didn’t want to humiliate them.

  The first little boy started talking trash again. He was a sweet-faced boy, he reminded me of my nephew Billy, when Billy was little and I used to take him fishing. Like the kid at the police station, he thought if he talked big, it would make him seem grown up, but it only made him seem younger. Billy was dead now, and I missed him.

  “Shut up,” the sergeant called out to the kids.

  I was laughing now, couldn’t help it.

  “Jingle bell…”

  “Detective Cohen?”

  A uniform—a black guy with Coke-bottle glasses—finally appeared and showed me to Wagner’s office. I passed dozens of cops bent over their desks, shooting the breeze, yakking into the phone, or worrying about money.

  Mix of black, white, and Latino cops, a lot of joking around. It was almost Christmas, and in spite of all the shit in the city—money, crime, real estate—people could get it up a little for a holiday.

  A lot of people probably think a station house is a lousy place to work—the smells, the noise. I realized how much I missed it, missed the community. It was probably too late for me now. I’d taken the promotions. I’d gone for special assignments. Special squads. But working at Police Plaza was like operating inside a corporation. I had been spending most of my days, until recently, reading official documents about Russian banks, at least until I caught the pigeon killer.

  Maybe if I’d stayed the regular course, I could have been a captain like Jimmy Wagner. Anyway, it was too late.

  “Artie Cohen? Hey, man, how you doing? What a fucking pleasure. It’s good to see you, man.”

  “You, too, Jimmy,” I said, as he came from behind the desk where he had been sitting and gave me one of those man-hugs. I was glad to see him.

  “Sit. You want coffee?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And thanks, man, for getting that translation, Artie. I didn’t have a current number for you so I went through Sonny Lippert.”

  “Sure. You need anything else, Jim?”

  “Hey, you didn’t need to come all the way uptown, but I appreciate the thought. You still living in that crazy loft down there off Broadway?”

  “Still there, Jimmy, same phone number. In case you need me again. You?”

  “Yeah, sure, but I guess you heard I mighta croaked.” He laughed.

  We’d met a couple of days after 9/11. Wagner was one of the heroic cops who worked on the pile without any protection, for weeks. Digging out bodies, then pieces of bodies, then tiny fragments that only the DNA people could ID. They did it so people would know, so they could mourn, so the families would have something to bury.

  I’d been out on the pile, too, but I didn’t have anything like Wagner’s obsession. He and a lot of other guys had worked it for months. I knew Wagner had been there until the end. He’d told me he was sure one of his pals was under the rubble; he kept digging in his crazy way.

  Guys who’d been on the pile still have a bond. If you had worked with somebody like Wagner there, he was your friend for life.

  White skin, freckles, reddish hair going gray, a fireman’s mustache, Wagner had once been very big and very tough. Now, he was thinner and racked with a gritty cough.

  “So how you doi
ng on the case with the dead guy they stuck the Russian document on?”

  “We just had to let a suspect go,” Wagner said. “I was even hoping I could also get him for another homicide we had, what, almost a month ago, over on the West Side a brownstone, one of them fixer-uppers, some gay guy bought it, then he goes in the first day and finds somebody in his closet. Be funny if it wasn’t so fucked up.”

  “Jesus.” I took a piece of candy from a dish on Wagner’s desk. Must be the case Radcliff had mentioned.

  “Whoever the killer is, he is one vicious fuck,” Wagner said. “He cuts up the brownstone guy, then he locks him in a closet, listens to him yell, waits until he don’t yell no more.”

  “How’d you figure that?”

  “ME figured it that way. You feel this coulda been some kind of Russki sadist mob muscle? You dealt with creeps like this before, guys who like making people suffer.”

  I thought of the last case I had worked, the girl bound head to toe with duct tape and left, still alive, to suffocate. “Yeah,” I said. “The dead guy was white?”

  “Right. Then we get the second vic, covered up with earth in a cemetery, paper skewered into his heart—paper you did that translation on—same kind of knife; we had to figure it for the same killer. And both vics was white, and looked Slav,” said Wagner.

  “I thought the Russians were in Brooklyn. I thought uptown was all Latino.”

  “You and me both,” Wagner said. “I mean, this was close to Washington Heights that once was Russian, right, but now, geez, if we’re getting more of them, that’s gonna be a fucker. I mean, you get Russian gangs and Latino gangs, you get a shit storm. We got the lowest murder rate any place in this city, and this precinct is one of the best, so I could really do without this.” He sneezed, fumbled in his desk for a Kleenex, blew his nose. “Fucking cold,” he said, then hit his head with the flat of his hand. “Shit,” he said. “Oh my God!”

  “What?”

  “The guy, the suspect I just let go—we held him as long as we could, couldn’t get a thing, nada, nothing on him—we let him go”—he looked at his watch—“ten minutes ago? Fifteen? Around the time you got here. Shit, man, I coulda got you to talk to him in Russian.”