Night Watch

by Linda Fairstein

  “Grunge up, Coop. Checking into the Adonis of the Gowanus before the sun sets. We’re going fishing.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “It stinks,” I said.

  Forty-five minutes later, in jeans and a baseball cap that covered half of my face from the curious eyes of the Harbor Unit cops, Mike and I were walking along the edge of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

  “Kind of that dead-rat-on-a-wet-doormat stench, don’t you think? You are so not an outer-boroughs girl, blondie, but it’s good for your soul.”

  On the ride over the Brooklyn Bridge, I’d brought Mike up to speed on the difficult day with Blanca Robles. Mercer seemed glad that I was going off with Mike for whatever distraction that offered, and Mike tried to assuage my concerns about the homicide investigation involving the unidentified man floating in the canal last night.

  “This place is an environmental disaster. How could it be good for anything?”

  “You’re on probation once you leave Manhattan. Don’t piss off the locals.”

  The water in the canal was speckled with dark slimy spots. Aside from the usual city trash—broken bottles, used condoms, and empty syringes—there were dead crabs and tiny mollusks lodged in the algae along the canal walls.

  “I thought you were off the case once the Homicide Squad picks it up in the morning.”

  “You wanted inside information, Coop, so I made myself indispensable.”

  I turned to Mike and threw my arms around his neck. “I’m so grateful to you. How’d you do it?”

  “Unhook yourself, okay? I hate clingy.”

  We continued on the walkway that lined the rotting wooden bulkheads while Mike talked to me. Off to our side was row after row of deserted warehouses, and across the canal were a series of barges and boats secured to the shore.

  “First of all, the autopsy result is in on Lisette Honfleur, the dead girl in Mougins.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Try the matchbox in her pocket, for starters.”

  “I meant to tell you about that this morning, but—”

  “I may administer a little truth serum tonight, in the form of your favorite cocktail, to see what else you’ve held back. I just figured I ought to know if there were any similarities between that killing and my floating Adonis.”

  “Lisette’s throat wasn’t slit.”

  “Nope. But they’ve labeled it a homicide pending the toxicology results. The docs think she was pretty high—she’s got a long history of drug abuse—tossed in the water by one or two people and held under till she stopped breathing.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m working off the tidbit that the autopsy revealed that she had a Bronx wallet.”

  “Filled with—?”

  “Enough cocaine wrapped in little plastic baggies to snort her way to heaven with half the people in that quaint French village.”

  Some Bronx-based cop had come up with the catchy euphemism for the vaginal vaults of female drug mules who concealed contraband there because they knew that body cavity searches were terrifically unpopular with the courts.

  “But your guy didn’t have drugs on him.”

  “Like you said to me this morning, it’s strange that he didn’t have anything at all except the matchbox in his pocket. That’s what someone wanted us to find. And that’s what someone wanted us to link to Luc. So I called the team and suggested they use one of the unmanned submersible drones.”

  “The whats?”

  “You heard me right. Drones. ROVs. Remote-operated vehicles.”

  “What happened to police scuba divers?”

  “Hey, the only human ballsy enough to go into this creek is Katie Cion,” he said, referring to our favorite Emergency Services detective. “Machines first.”

  “Katie would never say no to you.” We were making our way around rusty oil barrels and corroding lengths of pipe. In the distance I could make out the blue-and-white coloring of two of Harbor’s smaller power boats. “How does it work?”

  “It’s about so big,” Mike said, holding his hands a foot apart. “The drone weighs sixteen pounds. It’s got lights and sonar and a camera that’s connected to the computer—which is manned on the boat—by an umbilical cord. Color video images get sent back to base. Mostly, the drones are used to sweep the harbor when there’s a suspicious boat under a bridge or a floating package near the Statue of Liberty that might be carrying a bomb. It’s primarily a counterterrorism thing.”

  “You think it can see anything in this muck?”

  “Of course it can.”

  “What did you tell them to look for?” I asked.

  Mike ran his fingers through his hair and gave me his best poker face. “They can look for anything they damn well please. I’m just trying to make myself relevant so we get a little feedback on where this investigation is going.”

  “Thanks for—”

  “Park yourself on a barrel, Coop. Let me see what they’re up to.”

  I sat down and scanned the horizon while Mike approached the Harbor team. I knew that some of the areas around the canal had been gentrified in the last five years, and that art galleries and coffeehouses and commercial properties had been installed. But this was one of the sorriest stretches of urban blight imaginable.

  After a few minutes of conversation, Mike returned and sat beside me. “The drone is down, and so far, it’s not a pretty sight. Just a lot of sludge, sort of like black mayonnaise.”

  “Why did you pick this area as the starting point?”

  “The canal’s a bit under two miles long. You got five east-west bridge crossings over it, but they’re too well trafficked to have been the drop-off point. We know where the body was found, and it’s more likely moving in this direction—toward Red Hook and away from Carroll Gardens. It’s rougher this way—fewer people, lots of deserted buildings, more barges in the water. The Harbor guys figure the tides and all that, put it together with the information we gave them, and they make the call where to look.”

  “They can’t search the whole thing. It’ll be dark in an hour.”

  “The drones don’t know dark, Coop. It’ll be fine.”

  “Why does it smell so awful here?”

  “Take it back four centuries. Gowanus was the chief of the Canarsie Indian tribe that owned all the land around here—the western tip of Long Island. They sold the land to the Dutch—the earliest recorded property sale among settlers—for a tobacco plantation and mill. Close your eyes and imagine that this was all marshlands and creeks, full of fish and wildlife.”

  “And you know this because—?”

  “August 27, 1776. The Battle of Brooklyn. First major battle of the American Revolution following the Declaration of Independence. The redcoats forced Washington’s troops to retreat right across the Gowanus Creek. You’re looking at history, kid.”

  “Military history, of course. Then how did it get to be so disgusting?”

  “Like everything else that came with the other revolution—the industrial one. This spot was the hub of Brooklyn’s navigational business. Some genius decided to drain the marshland and dredge the old creek—deepen it into a canal—so ships could cut right through here to Upper New York Bay.” Mike was using his arms to explain the geography.

  “For commercial reasons?”

  “Exactly that. Next came the factories and warehouses, gas refineries and tanneries, chemical plants full of pollutants—and all of the sewage flowed right down into the canal. Raw sewage, Coop. That’s what’s blowing up your nostrils.”

  A few quick shakes of my head did nothing to relieve the horrible odor.

  “C’mon. They’ll give us a call if they come up with anything. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  I stood up and gave a last look in the direction of the Harbor Unit crew. Two of the guys were leaning over the sides of the boats, using pool skimmers to pluck things out of the dark water. I turned away and walked with Mike.

  “This canal m
akes a pretty ideal dumping ground,” I said. “You wouldn’t even smell a corpse decomposing.”

  “That’s why the mob has used it for most of the last century. Body parts submerged in suitcases, guns buried deep in the mud, wiseguys shot up like Swiss cheese and weighted down with bricks. Legend has it that Al Capone did his first murder right here.”

  My head was somewhere else. Luc Rouget had nothing to do with mobsters, and the elegance of his professional lifestyle was the flip side of this dark urban cesspool. I expected he knew no more about its existence than I did.

  “I learned another thing about the canal today,” Mike said.

  “What’s that?”

  “In colonial times, the six-foot tides of the bay forced saltwater into the creek. That gave it the perfect brackish mix that bivalves thrive on. For Dutch farmers living in Brooklyn in the seventeenth century, their largest export item to Europe was Gowanus oysters. Four to six inches long, sweet and succulent as they could be.”

  “Out of these waters? Now you’re joking.”

  “I have it from an unimpeachable source,” Mike said. “The detective who called Luc asked him if he’d ever heard of the Gowanus Canal, and Luc gave him the backstory on the oysters. Much as I wish he’d never heard of it, he knows all about this place.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “I’ll take you up on that drink,” I said, putting the baseball cap on the car seat between us and shaking out my hair. “But can’t I talk to Luc now? Can’t I phone him?”

  “Has he called you?”

  “Not the entire day.”

  “Don’t look so glum. He’s trying to keep you at arm’s length from trouble.”

  “I don’t want to be at arm’s length. I want to help him.”

  We had driven only three minutes from the canal when Mike braked the car and parked it on Conover Street.

  “Here?” I asked, looking at the faded paint on the facade of the bar, sporting a yellow-and-red neon sign that said SUNNY’S. “We’re drinking in Red Hook?”

  “Don’t turn your nose up at this joint. It’s an institution. They’ve got a bar and I’ve got a crush on the barmaid, and they’ve got a TV and you’ve got a crush on Brian Williams. Even Steven. See what the world is saying about Baby Mo and drown your French-fried sorrows at the same time.”

  “Is there a bar in this city that you don’t know?” I asked, opening the car door.

  “Mostly the ones your yuppified friends hang out in. I first came here with my old man, back when this hood was all longshoremen and wannabe wiseguys. Now that there’s a fringe group of so-called artists who are threatening to make Red Hook chic, Sunny probably doesn’t know what hit him.”

  Sunny himself greeted Mike inside the door and led us past the pack of thirtysomethings at the bar to a small table in the corner. Mike was out of luck—the bartender was a long, lean guy with spiky hair—and nobody was paying attention to the television screen. It looked like we had walked into a 1950s movie set, down to the Pabst Blue Ribbon stained glass lamps that decorated the small tabletops.

  Mike walked to the bar, asked Sunny to flip the channel to NBC, and came back with our drinks.

  “Cheers!” he said. “Here’s to Gowanus Canal oysters. Maybe Luc just knows about them ’cause they were such powerful aphrodisiacs.”

  “Talk about something else, will you?” I lifted the glass so that I could get the stench of the canal out of my brain.

  “Food, sex, history. I’ve exhausted my repertoire. I’m done.”

  The local news ended and the commercials were a lead-in to Brian Williams. His first story was about a car bomb in Afghanistan, and the second was a long piece on a kidnapping off the coast of Somalia.

  “This is good for Battaglia,” I said. “We’re not the top story tonight. He’ll be criticized for whatever decision he makes in the morning—grand jury this week or not. Every reporter thinks he or she’s got the inside track on how a case like this ought to be handled; only none of them has ever been in the hot seat with a witness who’s under a magnifying glass.”

  “Yeah, well I’m the guy who took Mo off the plane, so try and make me look good at the end of the road.”

  “You absolutely had to do that, Mike.”

  “But that started the clock running for Battaglia. You could have vetted everything she said before we cuffed him, if he wasn’t sitting on the runway, headed for home. That’s what you usually do.”

  “Blanca is so good at storytelling I don’t know what to think. One minute, she’s got you all balled up when she talks about the massacres in Guatemala, and in the next breath she’s so facile at lying you just want to tear your hair out.”

  “And when we return,” Williams said, “we’ll have the latest on the MGD scandal that has garnered worldwide attention for the powerful World Economic Bureau leader.”

  I stood up to walk to the bar, to better hear the television. “For once, Brian may be wrong. I think I’ve got the latest.”

  “What’s that?” Mike asked as he followed me.

  “Blanca’s last shot of the day was to tell us she doesn’t ‘do’ black men. Can you imagine me summing up on that point? That she couldn’t possibly have consented to Baby Mo’s advances because she’s a racist?”

  Mike gave me his best grin. “I can see the defense case coming. Forget the jism all over the floor and wall and on her uniform. Lem Howell just shows up with ten of his blackest brothers to swear they’ve been done by Blanca. No contest.”

  When Brian Williams returned, he introduced the local reporter who covered the courthouse, and the visual was Byron Peaser standing at a microphone on the steps of 100 Centre Street, with Blanca Robles at his side.

  “For the first time today, Brian,” the reporter said, “the world gets to see the woman who has accused Gil-Darsin of this violent sexual attack.”

  “I can’t believe she actually did that,” I said. “When I left, Pat McKinney was giving her a pretty stern admonition about going public before she testified. And now she’s defied him.”

  “So much for all the safeguards of her privacy and security that everyone was concerned about.”

  “Ms. Robles,” the reporter went on, “was introduced by the lawyer who filed a civil suit on her behalf today, seeking fifty million dollars from Gil-Darsin, whose political ambitions now seem to be derailed. She spoke only seven words from the podium, Brian, telling us emphatically: ‘I am the victim. I was raped.’”

  “Thank you for that update,” Williams went on. “It certainly sounds like her lawyer is taking a stab at getting the court of public opinion on her side. Gil-Darsin, of course, is still on Rikers Island and still hasn’t issued any statement, anticipating his next appearance before a judge later this week.”

  “Okay if I shut Brian down?” Mike asked.

  I nodded, grabbing a bowl of peanuts from the bar counter and returning to our table.

  “Are you hanging out with me until you start your tour tonight?” I asked. “Afraid I’m going to burn up the phone lines to France?”

  “I’m hanging out with you because I think you’re in overdrive and need a little adult supervision. And besides, the next show after this is Jeopardy!”

  I was cracking the peanut shells with my teeth.

  “Don’t break any bicuspids,” Mike said. “I get lucky and win tonight, I may buy you a real meal.”

  “I’ll settle for a second round, as long as you’re buying.”

  My elbow was on the table, my head in my hand, as I gave Mike all the details of today’s interview. He kept one eye on the TV screen, and when Alex Trebek announced the Final Jeopardy! category, he walked over to turn up the volume and then came back to me.

  “Famous Misnomers,” Trebek read the large letters on the single blue square to the three contestants. “Famous Misnomers is tonight’s category.”

  Mike opened his wallet and took out a twenty, our usual wager. “This could be tricky.”

  Two contestants were neck a
nd neck with about eight thousand dollars each. The third one had less than one thousand.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m in. My money’s in the car.”

  Trebek read the answer as it was revealed on the screen. “The Rembrandt painting actually named The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch is mistakenly called this.”

  The two women contestants both looked as stumped as Mike, but the guy tied for the lead put his head down and started to write a question.

  “Total fraud,” Mike said. “They should have said the category was art. This one has your Wellesley art history bullshit all over it.”

  I laughed for the first time in hours. “Double or nothing?”

  “Hardly.”

  I sipped on the second Scotch. “What is The Night Watch?”

  “Night Watch? Like my duty assignment?”

  As Trebek was congratulating the man with the correct answer, an image of the colossal painting flashed on the screen.

  “These are the citizens who defended the ramparts of Amsterdam—but the painting actually depicts them in daytime, off duty. It was just so dark a canvas that it was given the wrong name for centuries. It wasn’t night, and they weren’t on their watch.”

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying the peanuts because that may be all you get tonight,” Mike said as I picked up his twenty-dollar bill and pocketed it.

  We were almost done with our drinks when Mike’s phone rang. He put a finger in his left ear to block out the noise and held the phone to his right one.

  “Chapman here.”

  He listened to the caller for more than a minute. Then he responded. “Yeah, I can do you that favor. I know the place. I can head over there before I sign in. Call you back.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I always hate it when my vic turns out to have a better name than the one I gave him.”

  “You mean Adonis of the Gowanus isn’t Adonis anymore? They’ve ID’d him?”

  “Luigi Calamari,” Mike said. “Louie the Squid. No wonder he winds up dead in the most toxic waterway in the world.”