Bronx Requiem

by John Clarkson

  Palmer opened his mouth to respond, and again Wilson put up a hand.

  “Please, let me warn you. Do not tell me Tyrell Williams will verify Watkins shot Johnson. I’m not going to prosecute two murders on the testimony of one witness who could have shot Paco Johnson himself. Or Watkins, for that matter.”

  Palmer worked his tongue around in his dry mouth, wishing he had a decent cup of coffee to help him focus. His fatigue had made him irritable. He realized he’d have to keep calm. Ippolito had been right. They were going to need a lot more.

  “Mr. Wilson, it’s not surprising at this stage that we haven’t nailed everything down yet. But the connections are there. Paco Johnson goes to confront Derrick Watkins. There’s an argument. A fight ensues. Watkins and his crew beat up Johnson. We can prove that.”

  Wilson interrupted. “You’re simply repeating what you’ve already told me.”

  Palmer raised his voice to keep Wilson at bay. “We’re going to get you proof that Derrick Watkins, or one of his men under his orders, shot Paco Johnson. But even without that, right now we have enough to arrest James Beck. He had motive to revenge the death of Johnson. He was Johnson’s friend. We know he arranged housing for Johnson after his release. We’ll nail down how much time Beck was incarcerated with Johnson, but clearly they had a close relationship. Beck and his men tracked down Derrick Watkins. We’ll find out how. My eyewitness will testify Beck shot Watkins.” Palmer pointed to his chest. “I can put Beck and his men at the scene seconds after the shooting. I’m also in the process of identifying the man who shot at me, who I believe is a known associate of Beck’s.”

  Finally, Wilson interrupted.

  “Again, you’re simply repeating what you’ve told me. I don’t care about the man who shot at you. I don’t care that you saw Beck at the scene. If you want to charge Beck with shooting Watkins, I need motive. You have to get me proof that Derrick Watkins, or one of his men on his orders, shot Paco Johnson. And that Beck knew Watkins shot Johnson.”

  Palmer tried to stay calm, but couldn’t stop himself from raising his voice. “We already have leads. We’ll get corroboration. Trust me, we’ll follow this trail, we’ll connect the dots, we’ll get all the witnesses and confirmation you need, and this will end in a success. For you, your office, for all of us. I’m sure the Bronx DA’s office will be happy to get convictions on a double homicide with all the people involved.”

  Wilson gave Palmer an insincere smile and said, “Thank you for your career guidance, Detective Palmer, but frankly, I’m not interested in it. Just provide what I’ve asked for. Please.”

  Ippolito interrupted before Palmer responded to Wilson.

  “Okay, so we know what we gotta do. Right? We’ll pull this all together as fast as we can, and your office can start drawing up a warrant for Beck on suspicion of shooting Derrick Watkins. And once we identify his associate, who fired a shotgun at Detective Palmer, we’ll ask for a warrant for him, too. Assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. Agreed?”

  Wilson said, “I’m not going to say it again. Get me the evidence I’ve asked for; you’ll get your warrants.”

  Palmer jumped on Wilson’s comment. “We have enough to arrest Beck right now as a suspect in a brutal murder. We should get warrants now. Beck could be fleeing our jurisdiction as we speak. I’ve got an eyewitness. What more do I need for a warrant? The sooner we get him locked up, the better.”

  Wilson shot back. “No. That’s how mistakes are made. Beck is going to have first-rate representation. Look at his history. Very few people get a conviction overturned like he did. When you arrest him, he’s going to argue for bail and most likely get it, and most likely have the financial resources to post bail when it’s granted. And then what? Then we have a major problem. If this case does become as strong as we hope it is, Beck gets to decide whether to stay, or run, or eliminate witnesses. Or, sue us for false arrest. I want to arrest Beck as much as you, but when we do, I want it so no judge would even consider granting him bail.”

  Again, Ippolito spoke before Palmer. “Fair enough. It’s your call. We’ll get you the evidence you need.”

  Lieutenant Levitt stood up and said, “Okay, gentlemen, we all know what we have to do. Let’s go do it. Let’s keep this case on track.”

  Palmer forced himself to stop arguing. Wilson and his assistant left the office. Nobody offered a handshake.

  Levitt told Palmer and Ippolito, “You two have a lot of work to do.”

  Ippolito led the way back to the detective bullpen, followed by the fuming John Palmer. Tyrell Williams was still at Ippolito’s desk, but now with his arms on the desk pillowing his head, sleeping.

  “Jeezus,” said Ippolito. “He’s probably drooling all over my stuff.”

  “Take it easy,” said Palmer. “And please don’t tell me how much he’s going to fuck me again.”

  “Okay.”

  “And don’t tell me you were right about the ADA.”

  “I don’t have to. Meanwhile, don’t overlook his fat Chink assistant sitting there. Every time you said something she looked like she wanted to take a shit. Guarantee you that see-you-next-Tuesday is going to yammer at Wilson all the way back to their office about all the stuff we don’t have: murder weapons, timelines, motive, corroborating witnesses, blah, blah, blah.”

  “Well fuck her, too. I sent all those guns from the murder scene for ballistics. Maybe one of ’em will match the bullet they took out of Johnson’s head, and we’ll have a murder weapon for the Johnson hit.”

  “Good. I hope so.”

  “Shit. Sorry, Ray. I’m just pissed at that asshole ADA.”

  “That’s his job. He’s going to break our balls for as much as he can get before he steps into a courtroom.” Ippolito lowered his voice. “So where are you on the other thing?”

  Palmer tipped his head and they walked slowly toward a far corner of the detectives’ bullpen.

  “Okay, you were right. I’m with you on the witness thing, but tell me—what can we give Jackson to make him help us without jamming ourselves up?”

  “It shouldn’t take much. Like I said, Eric Jackson will want to make this go away as much as we do. Listen, you’ve been nurturing your contact at the FBI for months. Now’s the time to get something out of it. Go to your guy. Find out what they have on Jackson and his boy Bondurant, we’ll give it to him, and keep this shit show moving.”

  “Man, that’s a big one, Ray.”

  “What the fuck, they’ll never know where Juju got the info from.”

  “The FBI isn’t stupid.”

  “But they’re busy. And they’re running tons of investigations.” Ippolito dropped his voice even lower and said, “And listen, a little way down the line, we feed your FBI guy something that’ll help him. Maybe even help them take down Jackson and Bondurant. Tie up all the loose ends, you know what I mean?”

  Palmer stared at his partner. Reality began to set in. The ruthlessness of it. The willingness to double-cross everybody if necessary. But it would have to start with betraying Gregory McAndrews.

  Ippolito watched Palmer struggling with the risk involved. He had no doubt Palmer would do it. As soon as he convinced himself he could do it without getting caught.

  “All right, Ray. Set it up.”

  “It’s the only way, John.”

  “I know. I know.” Palmer rubbed his face, rousing himself for the next task. “All right, let me get Tyrell home. I want to see where he lives. It’ll help me keep track of him.”

  “Sure. And John, go home after you drop off that shit bag, crank one out, and get some sleep. You look like hell.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  Ippolito watched Palmer head over to get Tyrell. He smiled to himself. Now we’ll see what the boy wonder is made of.

  28

  Walter Ferguson had lived in the hundred-year-old building on Livingston Street at the southern edge of Brooklyn Heights for twenty-seven years. Some would have avoided such an old b
uilding, but it very much suited Walter and his wife, Phyllis. They had an affordable one-bedroom on the fourth floor with a classic layout that had everything they needed, including a surprisingly spacious bedroom overlooking Packer Collegiate Institute across the street.

  The building went co-op in 1989, and with their two incomes they managed to scrape together the down payment and qualify for a mortgage. Phyllis taught in the New York public school system. Walter worked as a paralegal in a law office on Joralemon Street after graduating from Hunter College. During his time at the firm, he’d considered enrolling in law school, but Walter worked such long hours it didn’t seem feasible. Nor was he at all sure the never-ending relativism of a legal practice aligned with his core values.

  Instead, Walter took several civil service exams, including one for the NYPD. Phyllis worried about a reserved, young black man with a studious bent joining the police department. She had visions of Walter being hurt, or shot, or marginalized. Walter understood Phyllis’s concerns. When he also passed the exam for a position as a parole officer in the Department of Correction, and Phyllis urged him to take the safer job, he agreed.

  Over the years, Walter worked hard and made his way up the ladder. They both worked in various locations around the city. Phyllis never landed a teaching position in their neighborhood, but she didn’t mind traveling by subway and bus to wherever she had to go. She used the time to read, or listen to music, two of her favorite pastimes.

  After a number of years, Walter ended up in the parole office within walking distance of their peaceful, comfortable apartment.

  They lived quiet, almost contemplative lives. Phyllis was the one who pushed to see an interesting exhibition at the Met, found discount tickets for Broadway shows, or persuaded Walter to see an art film at BAM. Walter agreed to accompany her, mostly to please her. She would playfully chide him about being such a homebody. It never rankled or upset him. Any attention from Phyllis made him happy.

  For his part, Walter was more likely to ask Phyllis if she’d like to go for a walk. Walking seemed to help the tall man unwind. Phyllis wasn’t as athletic as Walter, and sometimes she had a little trouble keeping up with his long strides, but she never minded the effort. Being with Walter was the most important thing. And the long walks gave them time to talk about whatever was on their minds, as well as comfortably lapse into silence when the mood hit them. Most of the time Phyllis talked while Walter walked and listened.

  They were an attractive couple. Walter, tall, handsome in a down-to-earth way, his demeanor a bit solemn. Phyllis, a perfect match for him in terms of height and bearing, more pretty than beautiful, with a quick, winsome smile that won over nearly everyone she met.

  Walter, of course, had his challenges. There were many, many parolees who came through his office he knew were never going to escape the horrors of the debilitating penal system. For those, he tried to make the inevitable more bearable. For the few who still hadn’t committed crimes that would condemn them to decades of incarceration, Walter tried to piece together whatever stepping stones back to society he could. A GED course. An internship at a corporation willing to offer one. A program that helped people in the penal system with résumés and clothing suitable for interviews.

  He relentlessly pursued companies that might qualify for a grant or a subsidy to employ ex-convicts: supermarket chains, restaurants, warehouses. It was slow, tedious, often heartbreaking work. Many times, just when he had a candidate qualified and next in line for a job, something would destroy all his efforts. Little things and big things. An arrest for doing something impulsive or stupid like shoplifting, or jumping a turnstile. A lapse back into drug or alcohol addiction. Unexpected pregnancies. Traveling out of state. Even being in the company of the wrong person could send a parolee back to prison, back to square one where Walter might have to wait years to start over.

  Phyllis’s job challenged her, too, but brought her almost daily rewards. She loved teaching. And she loved the kids. For Phyllis, reading was the key to awakening minds. She knew if she could teach a child to read, the entire world, whole and wonderful and complete, would open up to them.

  In such things, as in all other matters, Walter and Phyllis shared with each other a complete, quiet, confident love that sustained them. Until the day when Walter lost Phyllis much too early to breast cancer at the age of fifty-six. Just when they were envisioning the next phase of their lives, retiring and growing old together.

  The loss shocked Walter to his core. Phyllis had always been such a vibrant, vital woman, with picture-book perfect posture. And strong. She’d been blessed with a wonderful body that Walter loved to hold and touch. And then everything had betrayed them. And she was gone, and Walter was alone, sliding into a world bereft of those special things Phyllis brought. Occasionally, he would force himself to go to a museum or a movie. But gradually, his life became mostly his work. The only other mainstay was his church, but too often the quiet solitude and peaceful atmosphere of St. Charles Borremeo’s felt very lonely to Walter.

  Walter made sure not to think about Phyllis too much. But as he packed a small carry-on bag opened on the bed where the two of them had slept together for so many years, he couldn’t help but remember her.

  He thought about Phyllis until he felt too sad, and then turned his attention to thinking about what he was doing with James Beck.

  Ah, Mr. Beck, thought Walter. He had come into his life a couple of years after Phyllis’s death, bringing a rough, aggressive vitality that both worried Walter and energized him. James Beck shared Walter’s dedication to helping men trapped in a ruthless, dehumanizing penal system. Not many. Just a few whom Beck and his inner circle had taken on as their own. But once committed, Beck would stop at nothing to make sure that man never saw the inside of a prison again.

  The stopping at nothing both worried Walter and invigorated him. He had to admit, Beck had resurrected him. Walter knew Beck had saved him from falling into a debilitating depression after Phyllis. Without Beck, Walter could never have imagined himself packing a bag late at night to take a spur-of-the-moment trip offering unpredictable consequences.

  Walter smiled. Shook his head. Even now, before he’d set out, Beck had made him feel a bit young and reckless.

  But not so reckless as to overpack. Just enough for one day

  Walter smiled ruefully. He could have packed for a week, or a month, or a year. There was no cat. No houseplants. Nobody on Livingston Street waiting for him.

  Walter put that last thought out of his mind and concentrated on the task at hand. Pack for one night. Think about how he could help Beck find out what had happened to Paco Johnson, and why. And then come home to his empty apartment.

  29

  Tyrell Williams’s apartment building on Daly Street was about a five-minute walk from Bronx River Houses. When John Palmer dropped him off, he made a point of saying to Tyrell, “So this is where you live?”

  “This is it.”

  Tyrell pulled himself out of the patrol car. Palmer watched him enter a five-story brick building and kept watching until the lobby door shut behind him.

  During the drive from the precinct, Palmer had alternated between threatening Tyrell with all the bad things that would ensue if he didn’t come through as a witness versus the good things that would happen if he did.

  Tyrell entered the building and walked up one flight of stairs before he turned around, went back to the lobby, and left the building. He walked to the Bronx River Houses and went straight to Derrick’s apartment, arriving at 1:15 A.M. Tyrell was one of the few who knew about the spare key Derrick had taped under the handrail out in the stairwell between the sixth and seventh floors.

  He let himself into the apartment, turning on lights as he made his way through the rooms. News of Derrick’s death would have already swept through the neighborhood so he wasn’t surprised to see Leon Miller had disappeared. It wouldn’t be long before Biggie or someone else came to clean out the apartment of anything incri
minating or valuable. Worst of all, it wouldn’t be long before word spread that the cops had arrested and released him. Juju Jackson would assume that meant he was working for the police, so Biggie, or God forbid Whitey Bondurant, would be coming for him soon. Time to quickly scavenge what he could, and then go convince Biggie he had no intention of ratting anybody out to the cops, and see if Biggie and Juju would agree to let him testify against the white guy. Hopefully, they’d see it was the right move. Keep the cops running in the wrong direction while he and Biggie hunted down that bitch Amelia and made her pay for what she did.

  Tyrell walked back to Derrick’s bedroom. He lifted the queen-size mattress off the box spring and tried to prop it against a wall, but the cheap mattress folded onto itself and sagged onto the floor. Wrestling with it sent a jolt of pain through Tyrell’s broken nose and cracked cheekbone. He lost his balance and became dizzy for a few seconds. Tyrell cursed the son of a bitch who had sucker punched him. He vowed he would do everything he could to see that bastard dead or in jail.

  He kicked the box spring away from the mattress and tore off the flimsy cloth covering the wood frame. In between the springs were three bundles of cash, two guns, two boxes of ammunition, and two ledger books.

  Tyrell stuffed everything into a pillowcase barely big enough to hold it all.

  He carried his plunder with him as he rifled through drawers, looked into closets, checked the freezer in the kitchen, the tension building in him as he progressed from room to room. Even though it was after two in the morning, he feared Biggie Watkins might come busting in on him at any moment.

  He decided he needed something better than a pillowcase. Anyone seeing him in the dark of night with a stuffed pillowcase, especially cops, would know he’d robbed somebody.

  He found a red nylon laundry bag in one of the closets. He shoved the full pillowcase into the bottom of the laundry bag, then added a sheet from Derrick’s bed for cover.