Brooklyn Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  Lieutenant Justin Whitlock sets the precinct log aside when David Lodge and Dante Russo lead Clarence Spott into the nine-four. Both sides of Spott’s face are bruised and he leans to the left with his arm pressed to his ribs. His right eye, already crusting, is swollen shut.

  Whitlock is seated at a desk behind a wooden railing that runs across the nine-four’s reception area. He glances from the prisoner to Russo, then notices the blood on David Lodge’s face and Lodge’s blood-soaked collar.

  “That your blood, Lodge?”

  “Yeah. The mutt caught me a good one and we hadda subdue him.”

  Whitlock nods twice. The injury is something he can work with.

  “I want you to go over to the emergency room at Wyckoff Heights and have that wound sewn up. Count the stitches and make sure you obtain a copy of the medical report. Better yet, insist that a micro-surgeon do the job. Tell ’em you don’t wanna spoil your good looks.”

  “What about the paperwork on the arrest, loo? Shouldn’t I get started?”

  “No, secure the prisoner, then get your ass over to Wyckoff. Your partner will handle the paperwork.” Whitlock’s expression softens as he turns to Russo. “How ’bout you, Dante? You hurt?”

  Russo flicks out a left jab. “Not me, loo, I’m too quick.”

  Whitlock glances at the prisoner. “I see.” When Russo fails to respond, he continues. “Did the mutt use a weapon?”

  “Yeah, loo, that ring. That’s what cut Dave’s cheek.” Russo lifts Spott’s right hand to display a pinkie ring with a single large diamond at its center. “You know what woulda happened if Dave had gotten hit in the eye?”

  “He’d be out on the street with a cane.” Whitlock’s smile broadens. He and Russo are on the same track. “Charge the hump with aggravated assault on a police officer. That should keep the asshole busy. And make sure you take that ring. That ring is evidence.”

  Spott finally speaks up. “I wanna call my lawyer,” he mumbles through swollen lips.

  “What’d he say?” Whitlock asks.

  “I think he said something about your mother, lieutenant,” Russo declares. “And it wasn’t complimentary.”

  Russo leads Spott through a gate in the railing, then shoves him toward the cells at the rear of the building. “Hi ho, hi ho,” he sings, “it’s off to jail we go.”

  Smiling at his partner’s cop humor, David Lodge trails behind.

  Five minutes later, Dante Russo emerges to announce, “The prisoner is secure and Officer Lodge is off to the hospital.”

  “You think he’s sober enough to find his way?”

  Russo starts to defend his partner, then suddenly changes tack with a shrug of his shoulders. “Dave’s out of control,” he admits. “If I wasn’t there tonight, who knows what would’ve happened. I mean, I been tryin’ to straighten the guy out, but he just won’t listen.”

  “I coulda told you that when you took him on as your partner.”

  “What was I supposed to do? When I was told that nobody wanted to work with him? I’m the PBA delegate, remember? Helping cops in trouble is part of my job.”

  From David Lodge, the conversation drifts for a bit, finally settling on the precinct commander, Captain Joe Hagerty. Crime is up in the precinct for the second straight year and Hagerty is on the way out. Though his replacement has yet to be named, the veterans fear a wholesale shake-up. Dante Russo, of course, at age twenty-five, is far from a veteran. But he’s definitely a rising star within the cop union, the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, a rising star with serious connections. Dante’s uncle is the trustee for Brooklyn North and sits on the PBA’s Board of Directors.

  They are still at it thirty minutes later when Officers Daryl Johnson and Hector Arias waltz an adolescent prisoner into the building. Dwarfed by the two cops, the boy is weeping.

  “He done the crime,” Arias observes, “but he don’t wanna do the time.”

  “Found him comin’ out a window of the Sung Ri ware-house on Gratton Street,” Daryl Johnson adds. “He had this TV in his arms, the thing was bigger than he was.” Johnson gives his prisoner an affectionate cuff on the back of the head. “What were ya gonna do, jerk, carry it all the way back to the projects?”

  “Put him in a cell,” Whitlock says, “and notify the detectives. They’ll wanna talk to him in the morning.”

  “Ten-four, loo.”

  Within seconds, Daryl Johnson returns. Johnson is a short, overweight black man long renowned for his deadpan expression. This time, however, his heavy jowls are lifted by an extension of his lips unrelated to a smile. “That mope locked up back there? I mean, it’s none of my business, but who does he belong to?”

  “Me,” Russo responds. “Why?”

  “Because he’s dead is why. Because somebody caved in his fucking skull.”

  The evidence implicating David Lodge in the death of Clarence Spott is compelling, as Ted Savio explains in the course of a fateful meeting on Rikers Island several months later. Ted Savio is Lodge’s attorney, provided gratis by the PBA.

  Although Savio’s advice is perfectly reasonable, Lodge is nevertheless reluctant to accept it. Lodge has been ninety days without a drink and the ordeal of cold turkey withdrawal has produced in him a nearly feral sense of caution. Alone in his cell day after day, he has become as untrusting as an animal caught in a snare. At times, especially at night, the urge to escape the inescapable pushes him to the brink of uncontrolled panic. At other times, he drops into a black hole of despair that leaves him barely able to respond to the demands of his keepers.

  “You gotta face the facts here, Dave,” Savio patiently explains, “which, I note, are lined up against you. You can’t even account for your movements.”

  “I had a blackout. It wasn’t the first time.”

  “You say that like you maybe lost your concentration for a minute. Meanwhile, they found you passed out in the basement. Holding a bottle in your hands.”

  “I knew that’s where it was kept,” Lodge admits. “But just because I was drunk doesn’t mean I killed Spott.”

  “You had the victim’s blood on your uniform and your blood was found on the victim.”

  “That could’ve happened when we subdued the mutt.”

  “We?”

  “Me and my partner.”

  “Dave, your partner didn’t have a drop of blood on him.” Savio makes an unsuccessful attempt at eye contact with his client, then continues. “What you need to do here is see the big picture. Dante Russo told Lieutenant Whitlock that he had to pull you off Clarence Spott. He said this before the body was found, he repeated it to a Grand Jury, he’ll testify to it in open court. That’s enough to bury you all by itself, even without Officer Anthony Szarek’s testimony.

  “The Broom,” Lodge moans. “I’m being done in by the fucking Broom.”

  “The Broom?”

  “Szarek, he’s a couple years short of a thirty-year pension and the job’s carrying him. He spends most of his tour sweeping the precinct. That bottle they found me with? That was his.”

  “Well, Broom or not, Szarek’s gonna say that he was present when you and Russo brought Spott to the holding cells, that he heard Russo tell you to go to the hospital, that he watched Russo walk away …”

  “Stop sayin’ his name.” Lodge raises a fist to his shoulder as if about to deliver a punch. “Fucking Dante Russo. If I could just get to him, just for a minute.”

  “What’d you think? That you and your partner would go down with the ship together? Maybe holding hands? Well, Dave, it’s time for you to start using your head.”

  Lodge draws a deep breath, then glances around the room. Gray concrete floor, green cinder-block walls, a table bolted to the floor, plastic chairs on metal legs. And that’s it. The room where he confers with his attorney is as barren as his cell, as barren as the message his attorney delivers.

  “Face the facts, Dave. Take the plea. It’s not gonna get any better and it could be withdrawn.”

 
; “Man-one?”

  “That’s right, first-degree manslaughter. You take the deal, you’ll be out in seven years. On the other hand, you go to trial, find yourself convicted of second-degree murder, you could be lookin’ at twenty-five to life. Right now you’re thirty seven years old. You can do the seven years and still have a reason to live when you’re released.”

  Though Lodge believes his lawyer, he still can’t bring himself to accept Savio’s counsel. At times over the past months, he’s literally banged his head against the wall in an effort to jog his memory. Drunk or sober, he feels no guilt about the parts he can vaguely recall. Yeah, he tuned Spott up. He must have because he remembers Russo driving to a heavily industrial section of Greenpoint, north of Flushing Avenue, remembers turning onto Bogart Street where it dead-ends against the railroad tracks, remembers yanking Spott out of the backseat. Spott had resisted despite the cuffs.

  But Spott deserved his punishment. He’d committed a crime familiar to every member of every police force in the world: Contempt of Cop. You didn’t run from cops, you didn’t disrespect them with your big mouth, and you never, under any circumstances, hit them. If you did, you paid a price.

  That was it, though, the full extent as far as Lodge was concerned. To the best of his knowledge, he’d never beaten a prisoner with any weapon but his hands. Never.

  “What if I’m innocent?” he finally asks his lawyer.

  “What if there’s a million black people residing in Brooklyn who already think you’re guilty?”

  One week later, suspended Police Officer David Lodge appears before Justice Harold Roth in Part 70 of the Criminal Term of Brooklyn Supreme Court. Lodge is the last piece of business on Roth’s calendar late this Friday afternoon. It’s a cameo shot, posed in front of the raised dais where Roth sits—Lodge, his lawyer Savio, and the deputy chief of the District Attorney’s Homicide Bureau—nobody is in the audience in the cavernous courtroom.

  Justice Roth is not one to smile unduly or waste words. “Well, counsellor?”

  “Yes, your honor,” Savio marshalls his words. “My client has authorized me to withdraw his previously entered plea of not guilty and now offers to plead guilty to manslaughter in the first degree, a class-C violent felony, under the first count of the indictment, in satisfaction of the entire indictment.” Savio stops then, but does not look at Lodge, who is three feet to his right, standing ram-rod straight, staring fixedly at the judge. Lodge heard not a word Savio said.

  “Is that what you want to do, Mr. Lodge?” Roth asks, not unkindly.

  Mister Lodge. The words rock him like a blow to the body. Yet he remains transfixed, mute.

  A full minute has passed. Roth has had enough. “Come up.”

  The lawyers hasten up to the bench, huddling with Roth at the sidebar. Savio earnestly explains that his client is unable to admit guilt because he was in the throes of an alcoholic blackout when he allegedly bludgeoned the victim, and so has no memory of the event. After several minutes of back-and-forth, Roth ends the debate.

  “He can have an Alford-Serrano. Step back.”

  At Lodge’s side, Savio explains their good fortune. In an Alford-Serrano plea—normally reserved for the insane—Roth will simply ask Lodge if he is pleading guilty because Lodge believes that the evidence is such that he will be found guilty at trial. Savio whispers urgently in Lodge’s ear, an Iago to his Othello.

  Suddenly, David Lodge’s body goes slack, his gaze falters. Lodge has an epiphany. He sees the faces of all the skells he’d ever arrested who’d whined innocent, and for the only time in his life he’s flooded with a compassion, till the fear takes hold—the fear of a small child upon awaking alone in the dark in an empty house.

  PART IV

  Backwater Brooklyn

  TRIPLE HARRISON

  BY MAGGIE ESTEP

  East New York

  She was wearing her t-shirt but she’d shed her jeans and her bleach-stained panties. She had me pinned down by the shoulders and her long dirty hair was tickling my cheeks as she hovered over me. I kept trying to look into her eyes but she had her face turned away. Even though her body was doing things to mine, she didn’t want me seeing what her eyes thought about it.

  “Stella.” I said her name but she wouldn’t look at me. She took one hand off my shoulder and started raking her fingernails down my chest a little too violently.

  “Hey, that hurts, girl,” I warned, trying to grab at her hand.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’re hurting me,” I repeated.

  Her eyes suddenly got smaller, her mouth shrank like a flower losing life, and she slapped me.

  “Hey! Shit, stop that, Stella,” I protested, shocked. I didn’t know much about the girl but what I’d seen had been distinctly reserved and nonviolent.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked her.

  She slapped me again. I tried to grab her hands but she made fists and pummeled my chest.

  “You fuck!” she screamed.

  I was pretty baffled. I’d been seeing Stella for a couple of months. She never said much, but up until now, she’d seemed to like me just fine. She would turn up on my door-step late at night, peel off her clothes, and get in my bed. I’d bought her flowers once and taken her out to dinner twice. I’d never said anything but nice things to her and I didn’t think I’d done anything to incur her fists.

  “What’s the matter, Stella?” I asked again, finally getting hold of her wrists and flipping her under me.

  “Get offa me, Triple,” she spat, wiggling like an electrified snake.

  I released her wrists and slid my body off hers. I lay there, panting a little from the effort of the struggle.

  I watched Stella scramble to her feet, then pick her panties and jeans off the floor. She yanked her clothes on. She was so angry she put her pants on backwards.

  “I don’t get it, what’d I do, Stella?” I asked her, as she furiously took her pants back off then put them on the right way. She ignored me.

  I was really starting to like Stella. Maybe that’s what got her mad.

  She zipped her pants, slipped her feet into her cheap sneakers, then went to the door and walked out, slamming it behind her.

  “What the fuck?” I said aloud. There was no one to hear me though. My dog had died of old age and the stray cat I’d taken in had gotten tired of me and moved on. It was just me and the peeling walls of the tiny wood-frame house. And all of a sudden that didn’t feel like much at all.

  Ever since Stella had come along, I hadn’t dwelled on any of it. On being broke and close to forty and living in a condemned house that was so far gone no one bothered to come kick me out of it. But now, for mysterious reasons, Stella probably wouldn’t be back and there wasn’t much to distract me from my condition. I only had one thing left that gave me any hope, and that was my horse. As it happened, it was just about time to go feed her, so I put on my clothes and went out, heading for the barn a hundred yards down from the house. I don’t suppose too many Brooklynites have horses, period, never mind keep them a hundred yards from the house. But real estate isn’t exactly at a premium here at the ass-end of Dumont Avenue, where Brooklyn meets up with the edge of Queens.

  It was close to dawn now and the newborn sun was throwing itself over the bumpy road. Two dogs were lying on a heap of garbage ten yards down from my house. One of them, some kind of shepherd mix, looked up at me. He showed a few teeth but left it at that.

  Our little neighborhood is technically called Lindenwood but most people call it The Hole. A canyon in a cul-de-sac at the edge of East New York. It had been farmland in the not-so-distant past, then, as projects sprung up around it, it became a dumping ground. A few old-timers held on, maintaining their little frame houses, keeping chickens and goats in their yards. I don’t know who the first person to keep a horse here was, but it caught on. Within five years, about a dozen different ramshackle stables were built using old truck trailers and garden sheds. Each stable had its own littl
e yard, some with paddocks in the back, all of it spread over less than five acres. Now, about forty horses live in The Hole, including my mare, Kiss the Culprit. I brought her here six months ago. It’s not exactly pastoral but we make due.

  I reached the big steel gate enclosing the stable yard, unlocked it, and pushed it open. The little area looked like it usually did. A patch of dirt with a few nubs of grass fight-ing for life in front of the green truck trailer that had been converted to horse stalls. Beth, the goat, butted me with her head. The six horses started kicking at their stall doors, clamoring for breakfast, their ruckus waking up the horses in the surrounding barns so that, within a few minutes, the entire area was sounding like a bucolic barnyard in rural Maryland and, in spite of my troubles, I suddenly felt good all over. Particularly as I took my first look of the day at Kiss the Culprit. She had her head hanging over her stall door and was looking at me expectantly. She looked especially good that morning in spite of the fact that, by most standards, she’s not considered a perfect specimen of the Thoroughbred breed. She’s small with an upside-down neck and a head too big for the rest of her. She’s slightly pigeon-toed and, back in her racing days, she’d run with a funny gait that only I thought resembled the great Seabiscuit’s.

  “Hey, girl,” I said, putting one hand on her muzzle and leaning in close to catch a whiff of her warm creature smell. She wanted breakfast though, not cuddling. She pinned her ears and tried to bite me.

  “All right, then,” I laughed, and walked off to the little feed room.

  I fed all six horses even though only Culprit is mine. I keep her here free but I have to look after other people’s horses in exchange. Which suits me fine. The only job I have right now is working as a lifeguard at a pool in Downtown Brooklyn. No way I could afford to pay board for my mare.

  As the horses ate their grain, I started raking the stable yard’s nubby dirt, trying to make the place look presentable despite the fact that there were ominous puddles in front of the stalls and the lone flower box near the tack room had a propensity for killing anything we planted in it. This week it was working on terminating some hapless petunias.