Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  “The only thing I believe, is that Katjcic wasn’t lying.” Moodrow stood up and began to gather the plates and the silverware. As he spoke, he wiped the table clean, then handed Tilley half the folders Epstein had brought. All of a sudden, Tilley’s Sunday afternoon began to retreat into the distance. “He thinks Greenwood’s tied in with a cop. Yesterday I heard it again. Twice. There’s always a lotta rumors on the street, but this one seems to be coming from Greenwood himself. I hear that he shows up at parties or in the social clubs after hours. Stays a few minutes looking for crack, buys a few hundred vials at a time, then retreats to his cave.”

  “Maybe he’s preparing a defense,” Leonora suggested.

  “Just like you’re preparing a prosecution?” Tilley needled her and she grinned back. In that moment, they were friends.

  “Touché, Officer Tilley.”

  “Anyway the cop thing makes sense,” Tilley continued. “Right from the beginning we thought he must have a partner selling the dope he rips off. A narc would fit the pattern perfectly. Someone who could set up the original robbery, then hand over the contraband to another snitch. That’s why the rats haven’t put us onto Levander. The dealers who sell what he rips off never see him.”

  “I agree. I have to admit it,” Epstein said. “Not only that, but I got a bad feeling that when Greenwood goes down he’s gonna take half the fucking precinct with him. You ready for retirement, Stanley? You got a fishing pole?”

  Moodrow shook his head. “I’m gonna wait until after I see whether he gets taken alive or not. If he dies, everything’s different.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” Epstein implored. “In thirty-six years I never wanted a man as bad as this. Any idea who could be running him?”

  “Have to be someone in the precinct,” Moodrow responded. “The rip-offs are going down right here. If he was borough-wide or inter-borough, they’d be hitting all over the city. I spoke to O’Neill over the phone and that’s not what he’s getting. In fact, except for us, the city’s been pretty quiet the last couple of weeks. Meanwhile the shitheads’re lining up at the telephones to give us Levander’s address. Fifteen different tips in the last two days. Imagine knocking on all those doors? Never knowing if this time the shotgun’s waiting on the other side? Anyway, I’m throwing you out, Captain. You, too, Leonora. Now that our asses are good and covered, me and James are gonna go through these folders, see if there’s anything here.”

  13

  THERE WAS NOTHING THERE, of course, but Moodrow and Tilley didn’t know it until the afternoon was long gone. Epstein had been very thorough. He’d gone outside the precinct to include narcs from inter-precinct, borough-wide and city-wide task forces—any cop who’d worked closely enough with the 7th to have accumulated a file. Add to this the files of men who’d transferred out or retired and the two cops were forced to wade through forty-two thick folders. By the time they were finished, all they knew was that none of them had ever been directly involved with Levander Greenwood, but since it’s understood that all detectives have snitches whose names are never put to paper, this simple fact meant nothing. Moodrow, however, pronounced himself satisfied. If none were implicated, none were exonerated either and they could continue the present line of their investigation without the nagging fear that they’d missed something.

  “I’m gonna let you go,” Moodrow finally tossed the folders into a drawer. It was nearly six o’clock and the kitchen table was littered with McDonald’s wrappers and empty cans of Coke. “How’s Rose taking the change?”

  “I’d say she’s overjoyed to be somewhere safe.” Tilley kept his voice as matter-of-fact as possible, but Moodrow threw him a sharp look anyway.

  “I hope she’s not too much trouble for you. I mean with the kids and everything. That kind of invasion can wear thin in a hurry, so if you can’t take it anymore, just let me know and I’ll find someplace else for her.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Actually, the chances of Jim Tilley sending Rose any further than the next room were slim to none. He’d been itching for her all day and the sensation only grew stronger as he drove uptown.

  He had some daydream of walking into the apartment and carrying her off to the bedroom, but he came home to Lee and Jeanette playing noisily (and confidently) in the living room while Rose and Susanna prepared a family dinner, the first in that house in months. It wasn’t what Tilley wanted, but even this scene out of some TV sitcom didn’t take place until he’d been interrogated by still another neighbor.

  As Tilley entered the building, Irving Blaustein, all eighty-five years of him, sat on a chair in the lobby, apparently waiting for him to come home. Tilley had known Blaustein for most of his life. A refugee from a deteriorating Jewish neighborhood in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Blaustein had moved into the building when Tilley was four years old. Irving, long retired, had made his living as a union organizer in the garment center and rumors of mob connections had followed him into retirement. Even now, more than twenty years later, some of his neighbors professed to be afraid of him. Curious that they’d turned to him in time of need.

  “Jimmy, Jimmy,” he said, his voice raspy from seventy years of unaltered Chesterfields. “You could come here a minute, please? Talk to Irving?”

  His presence in the lobby was a shock. He lived on the fourth floor and was very thin and somewhat arthritic. Still, Tilley didn’t manage to put it together until after Blaustein spelled it out.

  “Irv,” he said innocently, “what’s up? You come out to see me?”

  “Jimmy, I want you should personally know that this is very embarrassing to me. This is not a thing I would dream up all by myself, but some of the neighbors came to me. They think because I was with the union, I know how to talk to people, so they ask me to wait here for you to come home. They wanna find out about the situation. You know…about the little yams in your apartment. They’re only babies, I know, but the people here, they find a roach in the kitchen, they think the Russians are at the door. You gotta make allowances for such ignorance. For them, two little babies mean the coloreds are taking over the building. They see dope dealers in every apartment. Junkies climbing through the windows. It’s their nature to be frightened.

  Me, I worked all my life with the niggers and I know how to get along, but the others…”

  “Get to the point, Irv.” The word yam was a corruption of an Italian word which meant eggplant.

  “Your neighbors just wanna know that the kids ain’t stayin’ permanently. Maybe they’re like sick and you and the pretty lady are takin’ care of ’em.” He waved his hands apologetically. “Ah, Jimmy. This ain’t my style. I tol’ them Jimmy wouldn’t fuck us. Jimmy wouldn’t dirty his own house. How long they gonna be here, Jimmy?”

  Tilley had been raised and educated as a Roman Catholic and one of the most basic assumptions of that religion is that any sin can be forgiven. When he was a child, first trying to grasp this principle, he conjured images of murderers on their knees before black-robed priests. His own failures, on the other hand, had always been smaller; unexpected moments when he could make the cowardly choice without fear of witnesses. He knew how Rose felt about her children; he could feel the strength of her commitment to their well-being and her contempt for the white world that rejected all three of them, but what he said was, “Hey, what’re you worried about, Irv? They’ll be with us for a few days. It’s a police matter, so I’m not at liberty to go over the details, but you got nothing to worry about.”

  “Oh yeah, yeah,” he answered. “I heard you made detective. Congratulations.” He stared into Tilley’s eyes for a moment, perhaps remembering the days when he would have simply told the cop to get rid of them, then began to shuffle toward the stairs. There was no elevator in the building and the journey back to his apartment would be a long one. Despite an urge to kick the old man down the stairs, Tilley followed behind him, step by step, in case he should slip. When they got to his door, Blaustein turned and grabbed Till
ey’s arm with one bony claw. “You’re a good boy, Jimmy. So many bad ones in the world, but you’re a good boy.”

  When Tilley came down the hallway into the living room of his apartment, Lee and Jeanette were playing tug-of-war with a coloring book. Instead of a greeting, they checked him out closely, then went back to their game. Rose came out of the kitchen, a huge smile across her face. Tilley wanted to hug her, but didn’t quite have the nerve to do it in front of the children. Instead he took her hand and said, “Well, we didn’t get him today either. Maybe tomorrow.”

  But they didn’t get him on Monday. Or any other day that week. Levander Greenwood had disappeared as completely as if he’d left the country, and the speculation among members of the task force was that someone had killed him and buried his body in one of the abandoned tenements. Considering their special information about his relationship with a police officer, neither Moodrow nor Tilley was prepared to reject that theory. Nevertheless, acting in concert with the task force, both agreed that a show of solidarity was more important than the line they were pursuing and they decided to make good on Moodrow’s threat to put heat on the entire neighborhood, to force the underworld of the Lower East Side to give up its most infamous member.

  This is a common practice in New York’s various ghettos and barrios and the procedure is very simple: without any regard for Constitutional principles, the cops arrest everyone who comes within two hundred yards of any known drug location until their actual target is behind bars. This is done in order to encourage the businessmen engaged in the drug trade to sacrifice the man for the sake of the dollar. The dealers understand, of course, that even though the arrests have no chance of standing up in court, a massive police presence inevitably negates the possibility of a positive cash flow and they’re usually more than willing to cooperate, if they can.

  On the other hand, the method does have one serious flaw: it almost always sweeps up the citizens with the dirtbags. Which is why it’s only used in the hunt for cop killers and why it’s very rarely applied to mixed or white neighborhoods. The Lower East Side, on the other hand, is the most integrated neighborhood in Manhattan, with a number of relatively famous artists and writers as long-term residents. It would not do to have these people standing about in crowds waving police brutality banners (which they are liable to do even without provocation) and so the task force planned the operation much more carefully than they ordinarily would. Instead of wholesale street busts, they made lists of known dealing apartments and they started with the ones they were most sure of, the residences of their own informants.

  The rationale was the snitches were supposed to supply cops with information and their failure to hand over Greenwood entitled the cops to dump their side of the bargain. Consequently, the task force members printed the names and addresses and tossed them into a hat along with the addresses of drug houses run by noninformants. Then Epstein took the hat into his office and drew up a master list. That way, no one could be absolutely sure which snitch belonged to which cop or even if an individual was a snitch. Finally, they broke off into three groups of ten and went through the doors with sledgehammers.

  The odd thing was that no one fought back. The cops were brutal in a way that was new to Tilley, brutal without emotion, sometimes striking out before they even identified themselves. Apartments were torn apart while children stared in terror. The cops made piles in the centers of the rooms, piles of everything that wasn’t drugs so they wouldn’t have to check the same items twice. Inevitably, they found drugs on somebody and they arrested everyone in the apartment unless there were children. Then they let the mother slide.

  The hit on a Henry Street shooting gallery the following Tuesday was a perfect example of the technique. Shooting galleries are at the bottom of the heroin industry and, for the most part, drugs are not even sold there. They offer only a safe place to shoot up and nod out and are often run by families who don’t use drugs, families desperate for money. The task force hit this particular house about 2:30 P.M. The detectives on the squad had been taking turns smashing the doors open and Moodrow crashed through the lock on this one, forcing the door inward with a single blow of the sledgehammer. A Spanish man, middle-aged, came to the door with a faint smile on his face and Kirkpatrick stepped forward and punched him in the mouth. The junkies sitting against the wall tried to force what they hadn’t injected into their noses. One kid, sweat pouring down his face, frantically jammed a full needle into the soft flesh on the inside of his elbow. Naturally, he missed the vein and his arm swelled up like a balloon.

  There were four detectives on Moodrow and Tilley’s team, wearing sweatshirts and sneakers, and six patrolmen in black SWAT Team uniforms carrying shotguns. While the detectives slapped bags of dope out of the hands of thoroughly panicked junkies, the uniforms went from room to room, shotguns proffered, and collected the family of the man who operated the gallery. Then the apartment was systematically torn to pieces. They ran through every inch, ripped it apart and left what was now garbage piled in the center of the rooms. Finally, they arrested everyone except the woman who lived there and her four small children. The amazing thing is that no one complained. Not one sound from anyone. The message the cops were sending and which the junkies received was simple—cops were dead and until Levander Greenwood could be made to pay, everyone would pay. By the fourth day, however, word had spread and the dealers were taking long vacations in the Bronx. On Thursday the task force hit six empty apartments and they decided to, at least temporarily, abandon the strategy. Instead, Epstein put half the precinct on the streets. There were a hundred cops walking patrol and dozens of cars criss-crossing the avenues. All had orders to harass no one, but the dealers (and especially their middle-class customers) kept as far out of sight as possible. From the detectives’ point of view, the investigation had settled into the pattern cops hate most. All they could do was sit and wait.

  Tilley’s life uptown had also settled into something like a routine. Now that Blaustein had spread the word, his neighbors smiled at Susanna as she came and went. The bit about “a police matter” gave her an excuse to withhold the details from the gossipers and Rose showed no desire to leave the apartment until Greenwood was safely in custody. She was secure, she was comfortable and every night, after Susanna and the children were asleep, she came to Tilley’s bed.

  They fucked hard and quickly, with a violence Tilley had never experienced before and even though he had the feeling he was being used, a machine to bleed the edge off all those years of frustration, he was so hot for her it didn’t matter. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation about the kids or Moodrow (whom she’d known for years), they’d jump into it as if someone had thrown a switch. She’d be sitting across from him on the bed, naked, her legs crossed in front of her and he’d reach for her with more intensity then he’d reached for his lover on the night after a big victory in the ring. Rose Carillo was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known and in spite of sessions that stretched until dawn, there wasn’t a time, as he watched her walk down the hallway to her own room, when he didn’t ache to pull her back into his bed.

  Surprisingly, she didn’t talk much about Greenwood or the nightmare of her childhood. What Tilley finally got from her, after four or five nights of the usual lover’s bullshit, was totally unexpected. Rose was grateful, insisting that only a slave can fully understand freedom. She swore that the girl who shot dope and whored for Levander Greenwood, who snuck out of some preposterous redneck town in West Virginia only to find imprisonment in the promised land, no longer existed. And with no past to carry on her back, the new woman, Rose Carillo, could become anything. The future was limitless.

  Always assuming, of course, that Levander Greenwood disappeared permanently from her life. And her fear of him was as apparent as her love for her children. All of Rose Carillo’s plans involved a life with her children, a life of what most consider drudgery; of getting up in the morning, of cooking breakfast then rushing off to drop the
kids at school before going to work. That life (or, possibly, any life) would be denied to her as long as Greenwood stayed free and, to a certain extent, as long as he was alive. Rose told him that Greenwood had escaped custody three different times. Twice from juvenile facilities where escape is almost as simple as walking out the door, but once from a corrections department bus transporting inmates from the courts back to Rikers Island. A dozen of those buses make the trip everyday, moving hundreds of prisoners, yet there have been only six successful escape attempts. Levander had accomplished his by having a friend sideswipe the bus with a stolen oil delivery truck. After the bus flipped, Levander forced himself through a very small opening in the steel mesh covering the windows, an opening so small he’d arrived home with long, deep cuts from his chest to his hips, courtesy of the jagged steel.

  He was apprehended on the following day, but the point was made and Rose was convinced that sooner or later, assuming he got his inevitable life sentence, Levander would escape and the scenario she concocted seemed almost plausible. Once they become institutionalized, most lifers are transferred to medium security or even minimum security facilities. Occasionally, a savvy con only pretends to be that ultra-safe lobotomized trustee in order to be in a situation where the administration pronounces him harmless. To a man facing fifty or sixty years in prison, ten years between the planning and the execution of an escape is not a very long time.