The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  Nearly every day for the last month, Leonard saw as he scrolled through the roll call, Detective Rowson had been paired with the same cop: Officer Joey Del Rio. They had been all over the city: scouting the East River looking for illegal dumping, Coney Island where a drunk might just slip and drown, and the Bronx side of the Hudson where now and again someone would still leave a body. Most of the other officers would trade partners every few days, but Rowson was paired with Joey Del Rio every day that he wasn’t assigned to be the sergeant’s driver.

  The name of the sergeant caught Leonard’s attention as well. Sparks. Of course. It was the sergeant who had ferried Mulino out to the boat. Once or twice a month, Rowson was assigned to drive Sparks. A routine duty for a junior cop, driving the sergeant around. But Rowson wasn’t a junior cop any more. It seemed that even though Rowson got to keep his detective’s badge, after his IAB investigation he was back to being a patrol officer in everything but title. On the day he was killed, Brian Rowson was RDO—on his Regular Day Off. So was Officer Del Rio.

  Leonard checked the assignment for Rowson’s weapon. It was a standard-issue nine millimeter. Just what Mulino said he saw, the same gun that almost every cop in the city carries. If Rowson had been out on that boat without his weapon, the gun would be at his house or at his precinct. Doing a search of a precinct locker requires a field visit, and for DIMAC to do a field visit requires NYPD approval. You get your approval from the wrong lieutenant and whatever you’re looking for is gone when you show up.

  The full evidence report hadn’t come through yet, but there were ballistics on Mulino’s weapon and effects at least. The techs on board had snapped and bagged the shell, Mulino’s flashlight, the small bit of flesh that ended up on the deck of the boat. The bullet itself had probably landed in the ocean after. Little chance that they’d recover it. Not that it mattered; there was no need to run the ballistics to see who had done the shooting.

  Mulino’s gun was preserved, along with the results of his breathalyzer (he had passed). But there was no photograph of a second gun. Maybe it would show up later today with the full evidence list. Maybe some tech forgot to take a picture of it. But given the dozens of photographs of the scene and the minutiae that had been recovered, Leonard kind of doubted it. He was left with a statement by a detective that he had seen a gun. Not just the shine and the flash of it, not so he could maybe have made a mistake. Mulino said that he had walked up to the body and seen the gun by the dead man’s hand. But the photographs from the boat gave no clue that a gun had ever been there.

  Except that wasn’t true exactly. Leonard scrolled to the end of the file. The pictures of the crime he didn’t have any jurisdiction to investigate. The dead sailor that Mulino had stumbled across before he shot Rowson. The kid’s head was a mangled mess. A fair chunk had been scooped out from the left temple, but both eyes were still open and the lips were parted as if about to speak. The uniform was tidy and he was lying straight on his back. He may or may not have been shot with a nine millimeter, but he was shot with something. Only one bullet was gone from Mulino’s gun. So if Rowson hadn’t killed the crew member, or if he hadn’t been armed at all, then someone else had been out on that deck. The rest of the skeleton crew—only seven men on the whole boat—had all been below deck and had slept through the whole thing, if you could believe them. It’s not as though Leonard would ever get access to them. They were for the NYPD to interview now. If he couldn’t prove that it was related to Mulino shooting Detective Rowson, he couldn’t force anyone to talk to him.

  Mulino had been called after midnight, he’d said. He was sent out with a Harbor Patrol sergeant he’d never met and he’d never been told the color of the day. He received no briefing. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Or who. Anything could have been happening on that boat.

  The detective had had no idea what he was getting into out there.

  Leonard stood away from his computer and surveyed the dumpy office. It wasn’t much, but he was in charge now. He had a stable of sixty-five investigators at his disposal, but most of them were admittedly burnouts or kids ducking out from work early to work on screenplays or civil service lifers watching their own pensions. Even the best of them were spending two years getting their feet wet before heading off to law schools and corporate towers and bundles of money to assuage the guilt. They didn’t know yet that the quest for truth is thick with contradiction. That sometimes you have to bully someone to catch a brute, to lie to someone so he’ll confess to being a liar. Even the smart kids could be easily outmaneuvered by a diligent corrupt official or a clever union lawyer. In a few years, they would understand. But he couldn’t trust them now.

  For two years at DIMAC he had done all of Christine Davenport’s heavy lifting. He had pored through the padded hours of the minions of the Consumer Affairs Department and the fake sick days of sanitation officers. He had watched seventeen hours of video footage to see which firefighter had looted a trove of personal possessions. He had drafted her speeches and balanced her budgets. Now he was in charge, but he had no deputy as reliable as himself. His job would be pretty much the same as it had been before.

  Except that he would be the target if something went wrong. If the investigation failed, his head would roll. And if Mulino felt cornered, he would feel that Leonard was the one cornering him.

  Maybe no gun would show up. If Mulino was making up the part about the gun, then this was a cop who had shot an unarmed man in cold blood. Who could be facing the loss of his job, his pension, worse. Leonard shrugged it off. The cops never take revenge on you. Not personally. That’s the first thing they tell you when they train you at DIMAC. Never worry that the cops will actually come after you. Because if you do, you will be paralyzed with fear.

  But there is no harm in seeking a little protection. He closed his door, picked up the phone, and called City Hall. Even with Davenport quitting so suddenly, Leonard still had a friend or two left. He had paid out enough favors as the top lieutenant in a couple of different agencies. There are always children of friends looking for jobs, tickets to minor-league baseball games to distribute, introductions to make. All of it the completely-above-board butter that feeds any big organization. And the City of New York is a very big organization.

  A soft, bored lifer answered the phone. You have to be pretty high up in the city before they give you someone to pick it up for you. “Deputy Mayor Victor Ells’s office.”

  “Is he in? It’s Leonard Mitchell at DIMAC.”

  “Let me check.”

  The Deputy Mayor for Legal Matters had been brought into the new regime from the US Attorney’s office and had a reputation as a corruption fighter himself. He had led the rackets division in the Southern District, prosecuting a crime family that had controlled every street repair project in Manhattan. Not content to lock up mobsters, he had started going after the executive staff of the Department of Transportation, bagging the deputy commissioner there on fraud and perjury charges. After the election, the new mayor had brought him on board—maybe because he trusted him or maybe because he wanted to pluck him away from a job where he could throw the mayor’s cronies in jail. Leonard had always liked him; he was the only person at City Hall he could speak to without getting the impression that he was being scolded for something.

  Rumors were that he was eager for the top job himself and was going to challenge his own boss in a couple of years. He would be receptive to what Leonard had to say either way. His patent-leather voice was worth the wait to reach him.

  “Leonard. It must have been an interesting day and a half over there.”

  “Is that because my boss has just quit, or because I’ve got one detective that gunned down another and swears the guy had a gun that no one seems to be able to find?”

  “Isn’t it great to finally be in charge of something, though?”

  Leonard held the phone away from his face for a moment. He was in charge
. Was about to be. And what he was about to ask Victor Ells to do might compromise that, if it went the wrong way. No matter what, he was about to go from being someone who was owed a debt to being someone who owed. But if it all panned out, he would be able to pay it back, and then some.

  “Listen, Victor. I have something to ask you. I need to call in a favor.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LEGWORK

  As he rounded the corner of the third flight of stairs, Detective Mulino’s knee started talking to him. It asked him to find an ottoman or a coffee table to prop his leg up on. No dice. Mulino looked up the landing. The only NYPD building he had ever been in with a working elevator was One Police Plaza downtown. Even here at the OCCB headquarters, right next to the recently refurbished Brooklyn DA’s office, it was five flights up if you wanted to talk to a chief. Mulino figured there had to be an elevator somewhere. The chief himself wouldn’t take the stairs.

  It was a short walk anyway from Gold Street, where Mulino had been stewing for three days. Mulino understood the optics—you shoot someone, you have to turn in your gun and get parked someplace where you can’t hurt anybody, no matter how competent you are. If they pin you for it, you stay there. So every customer service job in the NYPD was filled with guys too dangerous to put on the street but too insulated by their union protection to actually fire. Vehicle impound centers. Parade and demonstration licenses. And most of all the Property Clerk, sandwiched between the Eight-Four on one side and the Social Security office on the other. The dim brick municipal office dug in even as one thirty-story glass condo after another sprouted next door.

  There were twenty-six officers in Property, and it was a strict daytime tour, so if you were lucky you didn’t have to spend a full hour at the window more than once every couple of days. Because waiting for you on the other side of that window was a thick angry river of the general public, free to make demands on you. There were a few vics coming to pick up a necklace that had been recovered from the pawnshop after the babysitter lifted it, sure, but well over ninety percent of the items vouchered at Property were the effects of people who had themselves been arrested. Lottery tickets that had been scratched but held onto just in case. Half a pack of cigarettes that would have been worth twenty dollars apiece in lockup. A nickel-plated pipe that no one was even going to bother to test for drugs because the perp had been brought in on a stabbing anyway. And each morning after the bail hearings, a swarm of newly released not-quite-criminals crossed Jay Street and stumbled toward Gold to demand the return of their personal scraps. On the first of the month, when the Social Security office next door had checks, they would make it all in one trip. The NYPD sent its worst officers to the Property Clerk Division because it didn’t really care how people coming off an arrest were treated. Most likely they’d be back inside in a few months, after their plea, so why not give them a taste of it now.

  Mulino had done his hour as best he could. The other cops in Property didn’t speak to him at all. He was a probie to them. In a few days, a week maybe, he might be back out on the street—as stale as OCCB felt to Mulino, it would have been a dream to most of these guys. So when each skell at the window handed him a yellow carbon-copy voucher, he walked down the stairs to hunt for the envelope himself. And each time the guy said that there were twenty bucks missing from his envelope, Mulino slid over a complaint form and a pen. He didn’t ask for any help from anyone. If in a couple of months the Department frowned on him and decided that he could spend the rest of his career in Property, then he would be one of them.

  Or maybe not. Because here in Property, surrounded by officers who had been ratted out or had caught a raw deal or had otherwise been beaten down by the NYPD, Mulino felt the cold disdain of what had happened at the Ebbets Field Apartments more than he ever had at OCCB. These guys had been betrayed, and most of them had been on the force long enough to remember what Mulino had done. They weren’t like Sparks, who maybe heard the story along with fifteen or twenty others. When these guys heard that Detective Ralph Mulino was coming in, they knew who he was in a snap.

  He turned the last corner onto the landing and shook out his knee. He stopped to catch his breath. He had felt light, walking up the stairway without his gun, his radio, his flashlight, but after four flights he was still winded. He checked that his shirt was tucked in. He pushed into the hallway and announced himself to the admin, a sleek woman who had grown her nails so long that she couldn’t possibly use her fingers to type.

  “Detective Ralph Mulino for Chief Travis.”

  The woman nodded. He had been announced downstairs. Mulino walked toward the square wooden chairs, a few copies of day-old tabloids on the end table. Ordinarily he would leaf through them while he waited. Today that wasn’t such a good idea.

  Whenever he started thinking about Ebbets Field, he always imagined something he could have done. Some way to make it end differently. But it always came out the same. It had been hot that night, not as hot as the night on the ship but hot enough. Mulino had been in OCCB no more than a month and was still taking radio runs, still hoping that he could prove something to someone and move far enough up the ladder to make a difference. He was paired with Chuck Ramsay, a real old-school guy, someone who had weathered Knapp and Mollen and laughed at all the jokers in suits who had never been on the streets but thought they could make judgments. Good for a laugh and an old story, but someone who would never have lasted at the new NYPD, even if they had let him stay.

  The call had come in at the Ebbets Field Apartments, on the border of Crown Heights and Flatbush. Twenty-six stories of misery, then, rising above a broad cement plaza that was itself a good twenty feet above street level. Once you climbed the stairs off of Bedford and into the houses, you were in another world. It wasn’t technically a housing project, but there wasn’t a soul inside that paid market rent. The whole thing had been a boondoggle from the start between a developer who knew someone in the Section 8 office and found a way to make a fortune off of poverty. The Dodgers had left, the stadium had been torn down, and affordable housing was all the rage. But it had never worked out to be anything other than a hellhole, a place where for thirty years the few honest people unlucky enough to be stuck there locked their doors and ran down the stairwells with their eyes to the floor, hoping not to be caught in the crossfire on their way to the street.

  The call had been vague, like they all were. Woman in distress. When they had arrived, Mulino and Ramsay had found her hiding in a Dumpster. Jeans, barefoot, topless, she was curled in a ball and bleeding from the head and neck. She wouldn’t speak to them and wouldn’t unlock her arms from around her knees, the only thing protecting the shame of her breasts from the two cops. Mulino didn’t blame her. Ramsay tugged at her arm and gave up. The paramedics could take care of her; he called for a bus and described her injuries. She muttered an apartment number and they muscled their way into the building and upstairs.

  They should have just shot the guy when they first saw him. That’s what Mulino had come to believe over the past twelve years. The door was open, the man was screaming incomprehensibly, and he was smashing everything in sight with a foot-long claw hammer. The television was in shards, there were dishes in tatters, about seven or eight good-sized gashes in the drywall. If they’d just pulled out their guns and opened fire, they would probably have been able to weather it.

  But this was just after Louima, not long past Diallo, and people remembered Baez and the others too. So Ramsay, out of character, had taken it slow. He’d pulled out his pepper spray—they had just upgraded from the chemical mace to the pepper spray, and all the officers had been encouraged to use it. The mace interfered with the nervous system—someone on angel dust wouldn’t even notice. Pepper spray swells the soft tissue of the eyes and throat. Even if you’re drugged out, you can’t do a thing if you can’t see and you can’t breathe. So after Ramsay had told the guy to stop, and instead he spun around with the hammer, Ramsay ha
d let loose with the pepper spray. When the man went down, Ramsay had worked on cuffing him and Mulino had called in that they had one under and needed another ambulance too.

  Months later, in the trial room, Mulino had done his best. He had said he didn’t see Ramsay cuff the man; didn’t see how he was sitting; had been watching the stairway for the paramedics the whole time. He didn’t mention that Ramsay had pulled out a second set of cuffs and shoved the man’s face into the ratty carpet. He had pretended he hadn’t seen the knee to the back, the twisting of the neck. He had never heard the words positional asphyxia, and he figured that when the coroner came back and said there was cocaine in the man’s blood that would be the end of it. But that wasn’t the end of it. The paramedic had said that the man had been on his chest and rear-cuffed when they came, and somewhere in the Patrol Guide regulations on pepper spray it says you’re supposed to turn someone onto his side, because the coughing and hacking caused by the pepper spray is indistinguishable from the coughing and hacking of suffocation.

  So Mulino had done his best, but his best wasn’t good enough. For another cop to ever trust you, you have to do more than simply pretend that you didn’t see. You have to actively swear that the other guy did everything according to the book. The implicit promise, every time you roll up to the curb, shut down the sirens, and step out of the RMP, is that you will lie to the Grand Jury for the guy next to you. You may not like him, he may not like you, but if you don’t both know that you will take a perjury charge before you let the other take a murder rap, then all bets are off. The only way to get through the job is with someone next to you who will give you his full support. And Mulino’s mild lie about an averted gaze, when they snipped off Ramsay’s badge and swiped his pension, was always considered by his fellow officers to be a betrayal.