“What’s that?”
“Just what it sounds, Detective. Me? I don’t like to go up to the street. Somebody might try to take me to a hospital or put me in some kind of sterile shelter. Cramp my style. Some moles, like Harry, can’t go up, ’cause they’d land in the Bellevue psych ward, where he busted out from two years ago. Wants to go up—show his stuff—but he just can’t. Ms. Sylvia? She’s got a load of warrants from when she used to have enough meat on her bones to turn tricks. Hank’s good to her. He just looks the other way and lets her be, so she sits tight, too.”
“And runners,” Mike said. “They’re the go-betweens, right?”
“Yes, indeed. Mostly, they live down here because we let them. Don’t plan to stay very long at first, but if their spirits are dark enough, compromised enough, they get used to our ways,” Smitty said, crossing his arms and resting his back against the platform. “But some of them—like your dead man—they still like the night prowl. Go up to steal food sometimes. Maybe swipe some clean clothes out of a Laundromat when no one’s looking. Take a shower in a summer rainstorm.”
“So this guy, who did he run for?”
“Anybody who asked him, Detective.”
“Someone stabbed him in the back last night,” I said, ratcheting up the urgency of our mission. “It doesn’t get more serious than that, Smitty. Was he a runner for moles, or for people above, on the street?”
“Stabbed to death was he? That’s sure as hell tied into his business.”
“What business?”
“Look, Ms. Alex,” Smitty said, coughing up enough of whatever was killing him to spit it out onto the tracks behind us. “When I was in charge of this tunnel—back when I had some juice—anything I asked the guy to get me from the street, he’d find a way to come back with the goods. Not my job to ask how, you understand? So you call him Carl or whatever you want, he was just a runner-boy to me. I had a craving for a Big Mac and fries? A carton of cigarettes? A new lightbulb or an old library book or a can of spray paint for me to draw with? He’d steal those things or hustle a few bucks to buy them. I don’t know whether he sold his sweet ass or knocked over your aunt Tilly to steal her purse. He got it done.”
Smitty realized he was snapping at me and backed off. “Now, he didn’t bother me and I didn’t know what he was up to. No doubt he was running up more regular in this heat. It’s a good time of year to escape the tunnels.”
“You called it business,” I said.
“I’m out of office, Ms. Alex. Kept my nose clean. Somebody on the street—your kind of people—somebody offered him a dime to do a job, that runner-boy’s likely to say yes. He liked to hustle. There are others here who’d know what he was up to. I didn’t much care.”
“So how do we find those moles?” Mike asked.
“Where runner-boy kept his crib,” Smitty said, taking the phone from Mike and staring at the lifeless image of his old neighbor.
“Where’s that at?”
“Last I knew, this runner-boy lived where it was easy to get in and out. Third tunnel ahead on the left, above the platform. There’s a great big hole in the concrete, almost gets you to the subway entrance if you can stand crawling through it, past the rodents and roaches. It’s got one of those old iron ladders—missing a few rungs.”
“Can you take us to it?” Mike asked.
“I don’t like to leave home. Officer Hank can find it,” Smitty said, turning to our underworld guide. “It’s near the wall where the concrete crumbled a few years back. Crushed that girl who was trying to get herself out. The city never patched it up, ’cause one less mole didn’t make the least bit of difference in the scheme of things.”
“I can probably get us there.”
“You know it, Officer Hank. Just south of that entrance on 47th Street. It’s the hole that connects to the Northwest Passage.”
FIFTEEN
I doubled back with Mercer, into the great train station, stopping in the restroom to scrub my hands and face before going outside and walking—first north on Lexington and then west to the corner of Madison and 47th Street.
The Northwest Passage was the entrance to the train system where the antique steamer trunk had been found—bleached out and abandoned.
Mike took the tunnel route along with Hank Brantley and Joe Sammen, hoping that Sammen might recognize other moles, men who were geographically closer to Carl’s turf in their underground lairs. Mercer told them we’d find a coffee shop near the corner of 47th Street and wait for them.
I couldn’t bear the thought of eating after what I’d seen belowground. Two cups of strong black coffee couldn’t make my nerves feel any more jangly than they already did.
At eight forty-five, a patrol car dropped Mike in front of the coffee shop, and Mercer waved him inside to us. He looked more like an off-duty coal miner than a cop.
“Sit down,” I said. “The girl will be right over with your coffee.”
“I gotta go home and shower first thing. I stink.”
“I’m going to shower in the office. The sooner I get there and fill Battaglia in, the better.”
“I’m with Alex. I got fresh clothes in my trunk,” Mercer said. “What’d you see?”
“First of all, I could probably get to Philly tunneling underground. Maybe all the way to DC.”
“But did you find out anything about who Carl is?” I asked.
“Everything but a name, kid.”
“What do you know?”
“That was his crib, right below 46th Street. If Hank’s coordinates are as accurate as I think, it’s an easy crawl—if you don’t mind feeling like you’re in an episode of some Animal Planet show—to the Northwest Passage. Joe Sammen recognized a whole pod of Carl’s friends.”
“What did they call him?”
“Runner-Boy. From the days when Smitty was in charge and dubbed him that.”
“Get anything useful?” Mercer asked.
“I went in to look at his space. All he had was a yoga mat on the floor, a couple of torn T-shirts, a pair of sandals, and a picture of himself from a few years back. I grabbed that,” Mike said. “I asked Hank to see if he could find a man to safeguard the joint till you can get a warrant to search it. Didn’t want to get you riled up, but there won’t be anything left of Runner-Boy’s once the pals in the hood know he’s dead.”
I reached across the table for the old photograph. “We don’t need a warrant. Carl wasn’t paying any rent. No expectation of privacy. Call Hank and tell him to go in and grab whatever there is. Look for paper, for other photos. Grab it all.”
“Love it when you go rogue, Coop.”
“It’s the law, Mike. Every now and then the law is your friend.”
“Clean-cut kid,” Mercer said, when I passed him the picture. “Wonder what happened here.”
“At least it gives us another photo to go public with. Sort of before and after looks.”
“Does headquarters have the shot on your iPhone?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s okay to forward it to Mercer and me now.”
“Will do.”
“Mercer, let’s you and I stop by to see Johnson White before we go to the office.”
“Who’s he?” Mike asked.
“The porter who saw a man make off with the Yalie’s steamer trunk,” I said. “You didn’t find any other clothes in Carl’s cubby?”
“Torn-up tees, like I told you.”
“So the Grim Reaper fetches him in a new sports shirt from the Gap,” I said. “And a touristy baseball cap.”
“And long dark hair over the collar of the shirt,” Mercer said.
“But he’s got no other clothes. What does that say?”
“That whoever he was running for recently bought him new duds. Suited him up for a job, like stealing a trunk while no one’s lo
oking.”
“Might get us a step closer,” I said.
“Then Johnson White it is,” Mercer said, paying for the coffee as we stood up.
“I’ll be home till I hear from you two,” Mike said. “Unless Rocco’s got plans for me.”
“Call you later.”
We walked across to Park Avenue and down to 43rd, to the Bank of America building. I waited in the lobby while Mercer was directed to the basement to find White.
He returned five minutes later, shaking his head. “Best he could say was that the shirt was light-colored, like the one Carl was wearing when he was found, and that the cap was darker than the guy’s hair. But because the brim of the cap was pulled down so low, White couldn’t make anything out of his features. Showing him the iPhone photo didn’t give us anything.”
“Skunked. Might as well go downtown.”
“I’m parked on 45th Street, just east of Grand Central.”
We tried to make a game plan for the day, unable to factor in what would happen once Commissioner Scully made a public statement about the second murder.
“Did you ask Mike to have the dead man’s face run through facial recognition programs in the Real Time Crime Center?”
The NYPD’s dramatically effective “real time” center worked with more than thirteen million mug shots and arrest photos, scanning them against images of suspects sought for violent crimes.
“Rocco’s on it.”
“Last count,” I said, “there were more than four thousand closed-circuit TV cameras in the subway system citywide. There must be a few at the entrance to the Northwest Passage.”
“Same way the baseball cap pulled snug down prevented Johnson White from seeing the trunk thief’s face? That would have foiled facial recognition software, too.”
We were almost near the courthouse when Mike called.
“We haven’t even reached Hogan Place,” I said. “Be patient.”
“Got a hit?”
“Not yet. The photo you took last night?”
“Didn’t work. Rocco had it run against Universal Face Workstation,” Mike said, referring to the program with millions of criminal faceprints, digitally recorded representations of human faces, as individual as fingerprints. “But the system works in part on the theory that faces are symmetrical. And our boy wound up a little cockeyed last night. The photo drew a complete blank.”
“Scully will go public by noon,” I said. “That should help.”
“I stole his thunder, Coop. That other photo of him I swiped, that was taken a few years ago?”
“The one where he looks like a Boy Scout?”
“That one. Earned him a few badges they don’t give out in scouting,” Mike said.
“A criminal history?” I asked.
“Smitty was right about our boy hustling. His picture comes up with three arrests for prostitution. About five years ago, in Midtown South, before he went down under and got too dirty to sell his flesh. And he was a frequent flier for petty theft, too.”
“Sounds like a runner for hire to me. Now what in God’s name would a guy like that have to do with Corinne Thatcher?”
SIXTEEN
Laura printed out the two photographs Mike had forwarded to me of Carl the mole—dead and alive—while I went to the ladies’ room and showered. The spare clothes I kept at the office to dress down when I had an unexpected reason to go out into the field were a huge step up from the tunnel-tour threads in which I’d left home.
“Mr. Battaglia’s waiting,” Laura said, when I returned to my office.
“Where’s Mercer?”
“He cleans up faster than you do. Maybe better, too. Put a brush to that hair, young lady.”
I closed the door that separated her cubicle from my office and tried to make sense of my tangle of clean hair in the mirror that hung on the rear of the door.
“Mercer’s out in the hallway waiting to go over with you. When you’re done, Judge Aikens wants to see you on the Dominguez case. Drusin’s filed some everything-but-the-kitchen-sink motions to get his client out of jail immediately and to get you off his back,” my efficient secretary said. “And Mike asked me to print out the rap sheet on the deceased.”
I picked up both files—the Thatcher murder and the Dominguez papers—from her desk, and grabbed the rap sheet. Mercer was outside in the main corridor, fifteen feet from Laura’s desk.
I handed the rap to Mercer. “Carl Condon. Get familiar with the record so you can help me answer the district attorney’s questions.”
We walked the gauntlet together, the locked executive wing hallway—lined with photographs of the stone-faced white men who had preceded Battaglia as DA—that led to his executive assistant’s desk.
“He’s ready for you, Alex,” Rose said, smiling at me. “Pat yourself on the back for calling him last night, even though it was late. The mayor thought the boss was at the crime scene, he seemed to know so much.”
Paul Battaglia had no use for the new mayor, who had no understanding of the criminal justice system. It suited Battaglia’s personality to walk all over a politician in whom he sensed a point of weakness, of vulnerability. New York City’s latest leader wouldn’t have a clue how to handle the DA and the police commissioner in front of the media, with all the frenzy surrounding a serial murderer.
The smell of Battaglia’s expensive Cohiba at ten in the morning was like a breath of cool mountain air after the oppressive odors in the Grand Central tunnels.
The cigar was lodged in a corner of the DA’s mouth when he said hello to Mercer and me, and he showed no intention of removing it. Words occasionally slurred as he talked around the brown stub, but it never got in the way of expressing his strong opinions.
“You two figured this one out yet, Alex?”
“This second kill has thrown us way off track, Paul.”
“You’re sure it’s the same guy?”
“Or team,” Mercer said. “No doubt.”
“You’ve got a young woman in a top-tier hotel, throat slit and body violated. Good family, important job. Now tell me about this guy.”
Mercer had done a quick study of the criminal history. “Carl Condon. Twenty-six years old. Originally from Apalachicola, Florida. Dropped out of FSU and moved here six years ago. Four collars for larceny and three for prostitution.”
“Common denominator?”
“Marks on their bodies,” I said. “Drawings that might represent train tracks.”
“Might? I can’t do a stand-up on might. The department never declares a serial case till there are three crimes. Why go on two?”
“I agree with the commissioner this time, Paul. People have to be made aware before the body count grows. Maybe these few clues will resonate with someone who knows the killer. They are especially brutal crimes.”
“There’s a homicide that isn’t brutal?”
“I’d say there’s a good chance that Carl Condon was an accomplice in getting the Thatcher girl into the Waldorf. He might have stolen the trunk—”
“I get that,” the DA said, blowing me off and turning to Mercer. “Did this guy really live in a hole in the ground? In a tunnel?”
“Yes, sir.”
Battaglia leaned forward, on the scent of a hit. “Were you there? Did you see it yourselves? Am I safe in actually saying people make their homes down there?”
“Alex and I went in this morning, with an officer from Grand Central. It was only Chapman who actually saw where Condon lived.”
“But the moles Alex described last night,” he said to Mercer, “they actually exist in numbers?”
“No question about it. We met a few dozen of them.”
“So the mayor’s been in office almost nine months,” the sixth-term incumbent noted. The DA’s office relied heavily on funding from the city, and the new mayor had not
been Battaglia’s candidate. “He’ll get pummeled on his homeless problem once this gets out, am I right?”
“In all likelihood, sir.”
Paul Battaglia leaned back, sensing a hole in the mayoral armor. “All his blather about New York as a tale of two cities, and he hasn’t done a goddamn thing about the homeless problem yet. It’s an absolute disgrace on a human level, driving the murder rate back up after all the successes of my crime-strategies approach.”
“But, Paul—,” I said, trying to interject a thought.
“Cavemen lived underground, Alex. Troglodytes and other subhuman cultures burrowed into cliffside dwellings. Egyptian slaves lived and died in their mines. Cimmerian monks cut their cells into rocks, coming out only to minister to passing pilgrims.”
Battaglia was revving up a speech for his fall appearance at Riverside Church. I tried not to choke on his rhetoric as I stared at the sign hanging behind his head, reminding me that he couldn’t play politics with people’s lives.
“Scully and I may have two homicides to answer for this week, but City Hall has allowed the larger problem to exist, to flourish under this new leadership.” The cigar bobbed up and down furiously, marking the tempo of Battaglia’s prattle. “And if the mayor thinks that by spending all his time trying to raise taxes on my most loyal constituents while every John Doe Lunatic takes up residence in a train tunnel, he’ll be a one-termer faster than you can say Jimmy Carter.”
“Is there a problem you want to tell us about?” I asked.
Paul Battaglia had known Mercer for almost as long as he had known me, and trusted him as the loyal NYPD partner that he was.
“My application to the city council for twenty million dollars for the international cyberbanking initiative I want to create—remember that?”
It was part of the program for my counterparts in the white-collar crime unit of the office, which was Battaglia’s pet division. They did more intellectual work than street crime, cleaner and without any element of violence. “It was discussed at the last bureau chief’s meeting. That’s all I’ve heard.”
Terminal City (Alex Cooper) Page 13
