Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  “You should come to my house tomorrow early,” he said. “Eight o’clock. We’re gonna talk out Katjcic’s tip with Epstein and someone from the D.A.’s office. These are people I trust, Jimmy. Other than them, let’s keep it entirely quiet.”

  In the course of his run, Tilley had considered every aspect of the Greenwood case except Katjcic’s assertion that another cop was behind it. If it was true that some cop, probably a detective from the 7th, was running Levander, the man was responsible for the deaths of ten people, including four cops. That didn’t seem possible, but Katjcic had been very convincing and neither one of them thought he was lying. Not that he (or they) couldn’t be wrong.

  “Eight o’clock’s a little early for a Sunday, isn’t it?”

  “What could I do? Epstein’s driving out to Riverhead to visit his grandchildren. He wants to get an early start.”

  “Figures. We gonna be there all day? Do we get the afternoon off at least?”

  “Yeah, your mom told me you were going out.” He shrugged without looking at Tilley. “But I don’t know. Epstein’ll pull Greenwood’s entire package and photocopy it tonight so nobody should know it left the precinct. Tomorrow, after he leaves, we’ll go over it with the D.A.’s man. I don’t remember any hint that Greenwood’s a snitch, but we’ll make a list of the cops that busted him and work up any likely candidates. If that don’t work, we can pull the files of every narc in the precinct, one at a time, and see if there’s any mention of Greenwood.”

  “Fine, but when do we finish tomorrow? I mean if the assistant D.A.’s running the show, just tell me. I’ll understand.”

  Moodrow glanced up, clearly annoyed, and Tilley threw him his best Irish altar boy look.

  “You know what scares me?” Moodrow abruptly changed the subject. His voice was very low, his eyes riveted to the tabletop. “If we call in the headhunters at Internal Affairs they’ll tear the precinct apart. The captain won’t take it. Me neither. We’ll be retired in six months.”

  “What’s Internal Affairs?” Susanna’s voice shocked both of them.

  “Internal Affairs are the cops that put other cops in jail,” he responded. “When they decide to run through a precinct, nobody’s immune. They find one cop who’s on the take and use him as a wedge to batter the whole force. Or they take a thief or a dealer and have him offer bribes to arresting officers. That’s when cops stop caring about the people they’re supposed to protect. When they get frightened, they always react by trying to avoid contact with the public as much as possible. They expect to be set up by the headhunters and they don’t trust anyone.”

  10

  ROSE CARILLO WAS STAYING in an apartment on 174th Street near Audubon Avenue, a mixed neighborhood called Washington Heights which sits just above Harlem at the northern end of Manhattan. The island is only half a mile wide at that point and buildings on its western edge rise from bluffs high above the Hudson, offering spectacular views of the George Washington Bridge and the New Jersey palisades. The apartments along this edge, especially on Cabrini Boulevard and Haven Avenue, are solid and middle-class, rentals going co-op with most of the former tenants showing their faith in the neighborhood by purchasing their apartments. Hard to believe that two blocks away, from Broadway to the East River, a Puerto Rican/Dominican barrio provides the marketplace for hundreds of crack dealers serving the Jersey trade.

  The housing in the Heights is more solid than the tenements on the Lower East Side. The neighborhood began much later in New York’s history and the Jewish immigrants who built it up were a step further from Ellis Island. But Washington Heights lacks the hip veneer of the Lower East Side. It lacks the art galleries and the Indian restaurants on 6th Street; the flaming punks and the Krishna devotees dancing in Tompkins Square Park. Except for the students at Yeshiva University which sits, defiantly, on both sides of a few blocks of Amsterdam Avenue and which is heavily protected by private security, the only white people left in Washington Heights stay west of Broadway.

  That’s not where Tilley was going, of course, west of Broadway. He was headed for cocaine heaven: ten or fifteen square blocks that defied the strenuous efforts of local residents to improve the Washington Heights area. Rose Carillo’s building was only four blocks from the George Washington Bridge, a golden highway for the privileged children of northern New Jersey who drove their own TransAms or their daddys’ BMW’s slowly down Audubon Avenue, criss-crossed all through the 170s, and cut back down St. Nicholas. The dealers checked them out, approached them every bit as boldly as the pot dealers on First Avenue in the Village. Except here the dealers sold rock cocaine in little plastic vials: tiny pellets of passing ecstasy.

  Moodrow had left the car with Tilley, since it was expected that Tilley would be coming back with Rose and her children, but driving a black Plymouth onto 174th Street was equivalent to waving a badge at the locals. There was no possibility of remaining anonymous.

  But, what cannot be cured.…Tilly put on his brown cop suit, his scuffed brown shoes, a white on white shirt and a solid brown tie and drove up the East River to 179th Street. There were derelict cars, burnt-out rusting hulks, on every corner, another sign of neglect in this out-of-the-way corner of Manhattan. They would not have been tolerated in any part of the city frequented by tourists, and their presence made the inevitable hunt for parking space (even illegal parking space) that much more absurd.

  All of which presented Tilley with another problem altogether. Several years ago, the city had purchased thousands of these black four-door Plymouths and handed them out to the various city agencies. Because of their high visibility, they had become the target of choice for teenage vandals out to make a rep. Tilley didn’t relish coming out with Rose and her children to find a car with four slashed tires. If he parked six blocks away and the locals noticed him walking into the sunset, it would be like waving the proverbial red flag in front of the bull.

  He circled her block twice, looking for a safe spot before he gave up and double-parked in front of her building. There was a narrow stairway leading down to an alley between her’s and a neighboring structure and the knot of people gathered at the head of those stairs took off at a dead run the minute Tilley stepped out of the car. They looked like a stand of zebra flushed by a lion.

  By the time he came around the car, only one man remained, hands on his hips, defiant. Tilley gathered he was an entrepreneur put temporarily out of business by the cop’s appearance on the scene and he obviously had no fear of being arrested, probably because he was only the lookout. The drugs must have been somewhere in that alley and were surely gone by now. Still, he was mightily pissed. It was Saturday, trade was just beginning to build and this was his place of business. He could not pack up his bags and move, like the peddlers along Fifth Avenue. Most likely, he and his partners had fought to obtain this spot. Their regulars knew where to find them, as did their suppliers. The last thing they needed was Jim Tilley to spoil the best day of the week.

  Nevertheless, Tilley was there and the man reacted with a hard stare that only got him into more trouble. Tilley walked straight toward the sentry (the man didn’t run, though he looked like he was about to explode) and stopped about two feet away, just close enough to make the man nervous.

  “I’m not blocking you in, am I?” The Plymouth was parked alongside a rusted-out derelict with all four tires gone. It had been there so long, the kids had smashed the roof down until it rested on the seatbacks. The hood was missing and thin black wires hung over the empty fenderwells.

  “Whaaaa?”

  Tilley’s question caught the man entirely off-guard and when Tilley flashed his best “two buddies in a barroom” smile, it only added to the confusion. “Am I blocking your car? See? Over there? I double-parked and I was afraid you might want to get out.”

  “Thass no my car.” He was much smaller than Tilley and slender, wearing a half-dozen gold chains and paper-thin leather pants over the pointiest shoes Tilley had ever seen. Even his bandanna was sil
k and carefully pressed. Most likely, if he broke into a sweat, he’d take the damn thing off.

  “That’s too bad. I was really hoping it was your car. You know why?”

  “Why?” What could he say? His basic mistake, of course, was in not leaving as soon as Tilley got out of the car.

  “Because I gotta leave my car and go up in this building. I’m a police officer and I gotta talk to someone. I ain’t gonna be up there long. Maybe fifteen minutes. But supposing the guy who owns this car wants to get out and sees me blocking his way? Not knowing that my car belongs to a police officer in the performance of his duty, he might get mad and do something bad to it.” Tilley stopped abruptly and waited, his eyes locked on those of the smaller man.

  “How is someone gonna fuck with tha’ piece of shi’ car? How come you don’ esplain to me wha’ the fuck you wan’ with me?”

  A medallion, solid gold of course, dangled from one of his chains. The name Enrique was engraved on the front. Tilley reached out and gave it a little tug. “Do you support your local police, Enrique?”

  Enrique hesitated a moment and then said, “Yeah.”

  “You got a lot of money on you, Enrique?” There was just the possibility that he was the banker, the man the dopers paid before they went down the alley to collect their little vials.

  “You going to rip me off?” Enrique was incredulous.

  “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to stay out here for the next fifteen minutes and make sure that if the man who owns this other car turns up and gets mad, you’ll tell him the car belongs to a police officer in the performance of his duty. Remember: ‘Police officer in the performance of his duty.’”

  Enrique thought about it for a moment, then flashed a big, gold-toothed smile. “Sure, man. I watch your car for you. But if the dude come tryin’ to get his car out. Like if it’s a mergency and he got to go out right now, what ’partment I should tell him you’re in?”

  Tilley smiled back. “Hopefully, yours.”

  Rose Carillo’s uptown residence was every bit as decrepit as her downtown apartment. As he pushed past the broken door locks in the lobby, it occurred to Tilley, that if this hell was all you had to run to when you were in trouble, your life must be very marginal. The intercom system with its rows of buzzers had been gutted and lay strewn about the tile floor, most likely an act of robbery on the part of one doper looking for another doper’s stash. The mailboxes hung wide open, an invitation to junkies who steal Social Security and welfare checks, then fence them for ten cents on the dollar. The tenants of buildings like this (and there are tens of thousands of them scattered about the five boroughs) know enough to gather by the mailboxes before the postman arrives, to take the check from his hand and, protected by the company of fellow tenants, melt back behind locked doors or trot off to the supermarket where the check can be turned into cash and the cash hidden in a shoe or an undergarment.

  By the time he got to the third floor and Rose Carillo’s apartment, Tilley was lost. He felt like an alien stumbling on a new civilization. One he was entirely unprepared for and from which he could expect nothing positive. The only hope was to get out and the sooner he got his job over with, the better. He was as brave as Sir Lancelot on the street, but inside, with the hallways so narrow his shoulders almost brushed the walls.…He pushed on the bell and held it.

  Nothing. Not a sound. He pushed on it again, this time with his ear to the door, listening for a buzz to indicate the damn thing was working. Absolute quiet. Then he heard a noise on the floor above him, the sound of a door closing, and his hand went behind his back, searching for the handle of his .38.

  But there was nothing more coming from upstairs, either, and with a tremendous effort, he calmed himself down. He’d been in places like this before, many, many times. But the narrow hallways, the sharp turns in the stairs, the bare plaster walls and concrete floors which echo every sound always made him jumpy. Add the stench of cooking and urine, of cat vomit and dead rats in the walls and Jim Tilley felt like he was about to be attacked.

  All of this translated itself as an intense desire to be inside the apartment, to be on the other side of the door with the door triple-locked. He knocked very hard, three times, just like in the movies, but there was still no response. Did he have the right address? Did she give Moodrow the right address? Again he reached out, now more annoyed than nervous, but this time the door suddenly swung inward and he found himself facing the barrel of a small automatic pistol.

  As it turned out, the pistol was .32 caliber, one of those cheap handguns as likely to jam as to fire, but at that moment, it filled his entire field of vision. He could have been looking into a narrow hallway or into the main lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. All Tilley could see was a round, black hole.

  Then the hole dropped down, the darkness dissolved and Rose Carillo, her features tight with rage, floated into focus. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  It took him ten seconds to respond. Ten seconds to convince his chest to start moving again. Seven-year-old Lee was standing in a doorway leading to the kitchen, still holding the knob of the front door. His eyes were wild with terror, but he’d had the courage to whip that door open. Even though he expected to find the father who tormented him behind it.

  Which meant the move had been carefully planned and if Levander Greenwood had been on the other side of the door instead of Jim Tilley, he would most likely be dead. Of course, there was no guarantee that Levander would knock before he made his entrance, but the point was well-taken. She must have been scared shitless or she never would have made her child part of an execution.

  “Why didn’t you look through the fucking peephole, you stupid bitch?” Despite his understanding, Tilley was livid. Or terrified. Or both. “You could have killed me.”

  “People shoot through peepholes,” she explained. “They hear the rattle when you move the eyepiece and they shoot straight through it. Why didn’t you call before you came?”

  “The phone don’t work, that’s why. You couldn’t even live in a place with a phone that works and now you wanna shoot a cop.”

  She looked past him with practiced eyes, searched the other doorways on the floor, the shadows by the stairwell. “You better come in.”

  He didn’t hesitate. Her fear was contagious, as if she was expecting Levander at any moment. Tilley waited until the door was locked, then took his .38 from its holster at the small of his back and shifted it to the front, jamming it down inside his waistband. When he turned to face her, she was still holding the .32 automatic.

  “Is that gun registered?” he asked.

  She raised her eyes to his questioningly. They were almost perfectly round and nearly black. “Moodrow…”

  “Fuck Moodrow. Moodrow isn’t here. You didn’t try to shoot Moodrow.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about what happened. I heard from downtown that Levander knows where I am. Or at least some people think he does.”

  “How is that possible? How many people did you tell?”

  “It’s not only that. Levander smokes crack. He’s been doing it steady for about a year. You must have seen what this building is when you walked into it. I know he comes up here to cop.”

  “So why did you stay here?”

  “Where am I gonna go?” She suddenly called her children to her and sat down between them on the couch. They pressed up against her, staring at Tilley with large, accusing eyes.

  “Why didn’t you go to the shelter? There’s a shelter for battered women.”

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet? Levander will kill anyone who gets between him and what he wants. Or he’ll try. He’ll walk through the door with that shotgun and keep firing until he’s got me or he’s dead. I think I might have a chance with the gun. If I surprise him…” Suddenly she started crying, huge, consuming sobs that had her children frantic. Tilley assumed they were blaming him, but they seemed to be paralyzed without her instructions. She hugged them against her chest and rocked bac
k and forth.

  He waited until it was over before he spoke. It didn’t take very long. When she finally raised her eyes to face him, he said, “Rose, give me the gun.” It lay on the floor between her feet. He could have grabbed it, but he wanted her to hand it over. He wanted to make sure the fear hadn’t driven her insane before he invited her to his home. “I can’t let you keep the gun.”

  At first she looked incredulous, then panicky. “We have to have it.”

  “Is it registered?”

  “Don’t be an asshole. How could it be registered?”

  “If I leave you here with that gun and you use it to kill someone, it makes me an accessory to murder. I don’t want to take the chance.” His voice, calm and determined, surprised him. The adrenaline rush was over and the man who remained was very sure of himself. “Give me the gun,” he repeated.

  She reached down and took it in her hand, her fingers curling around the butt, then swiftly reversed it and passed it over. “Now you’re responsible,” she said. “You’ve taken it out of my hands.”

  Tilley suspected that she was relieved. Certainly, she seemed more relaxed. She leaned back against the couch and took her children’s hands in her own. “I want you to go into the kitchen and pour Detective Tilley a glass of orange juice. Put in a couple of ice cubes and bring it out here.” They ran off and she looked back at him. “I have some vodka out here in case you want to finish it up.”

  “You know, you can’t take him with this.” He held up the little .32 for her inspection. “He’s too crazy and too well armed. You’d probably only make him mad.”

  “What should I do? Go back to my daddy and his brother? It’s you cops that made Levander Greenwood happen. You should have put him away a long time ago, but you didn’t. Now he’s out there committing murders and you’re up here disarming me. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

  The kids came back with the juice. Naturally they tried to hand it to their mother who redirected them to Tilley’s chair. He took the glass, added two fingers of Smirnoff and began to explain what Moodrow had in mind for them. Without telling her that a cop was involved with Levander, he let her understand that they could get a policeman assigned to her for protection, but for the same reason she couldn’t go to a shelter, they couldn’t guarantee her security. Moodrow had a different and a better idea, one that was completely safe. Tilley described his apartment, its size and how far it was from the Lower East Side, adding that he lived there alone except for his mother.