“May I help you?”
Stuart badged her and said, “I’d like to see the director.”
Chet Soren, the civilian director of the Photographic Unit, came out from behind his desk as Stuart and Kahn walked into his glass-fronted office. “What can I do for you, Lou?” he asked as they shook hands.
“I’m doing graduate work at John Jay, and I’m thinking of writing a paper on photographic security in the Job,” Stuart lied.
Soren’s cherubic face beamed. “I set up the security system. What would you like to know?”
Stuart said, “When the Photo Unit receives a ‘ninety’ requesting mug shots, you develop the negative and send the pictures through department mail to the command of the member requesting them.”
“That’s correct,” Soren agreed.
“What happens to the ‘ninety’?” Stuart asked.
“It’s entered into the computer tracking system and then destroyed,” Soren said.
“How does the tracking system work?” Kahn asked.
“Every time mug shots are ordered, the name, shield number, and command of the requesting officer are entered into the tracking system. We’re able to enter a mutt’s Nisid number into the computer and pull up a list of every member of the service who ever ordered mug shots on that individual.”
An idea suddenly came to Stuart, and he asked, “How long has the tracking system been in place?”
“Since eighty-one,” the director replied.
Stuart jerked his thumb at the sliding glass window. “What about detectives who show up out there and order ‘wet’ copies?”
“Same procedure,” Soren said.
Stuart scratched the back of his ear. “When a detective waits for a ‘wet’ one, does anybody check to see that the name on the ‘ninety’ he submits is the same as the name on his ID card?”
Soren’s face took on a slightly worried expression. “No. We automatically assume that he’s legit because he’s been passed through building security.”
Stuart glanced at Kahn. She got his message, opened her pocketbook, and took out a handful of mug shots. She handed them to the whip. Stuart began randomly shifting through the stack and pulled out Hollyman’s and Gee’s mug shots. He passed them to Soren. “Would you mind showing me how the system works?”
Chet Soren led the detectives out of his office and along an aisle of green clothing lockers that had plants hanging down over their sides. Row after row of sliding file drawers held the negatives of every person arrested by the NYPD. They walked by a huge Noritsa photo printer and over to the tracking system’s computer. The civilian technician sitting in front of the screen wore jeans and a gray Gap sweatshirt. Soren handed the man the mug shots of Gee and Hollyman and said, “Print out their sheet.”
The operator took the mug shots and typed in Gee’s Nisid number. The tracking data with the names of all previous requestors scrolled onto the screen. The operator pressed another key, and the laser printer on the side of the console whirred to life.
At that moment Stuart’s beeper went off. He opened his jacket and looked at the LED display. He turned to Kahn and said, “Call the Squad and see what’s up.”
Kahn walked away, looking for a phone.
Soren tore off Hollyman’s and Gee’s tracking sheet and handed them to Stuart. On Wednesday, September 21, the day Hollyman and Gee were whacked, a Sergeant Brown from IAD had ordered mug shots on the two men.
This was an emergency job, Stuart thought: he would have had to come here and wait for a “wet” set to be developed, which meant that building security probably had his ID card on the file tape for that day. And as a general rule, department tapes were kept for sixty days before being erased and reused.
Sergeant Brown from IAD, he mused. The name might be a phony, but the command wasn’t. Whenever criminals em-ployed aliases they almost always used their real first name, and whenever cops tried to get cute, they might use a phony first and last name, but they almost always unthinkingly used their own command.
He slipped the printout into his jacket pocket and was thanking Soren for all his help when he heard the metallic jangle of Kahn’s bracelets. When he saw her tense expression, his chest tightened. “What is it?”
“We caught a double homicide in Banjo High.”
George W. Wingate High School at 600 Kingston Avenue was built in the shape of a banjo, with the main building a three-story-high circle resembling the drum and a long arcade of classrooms looking like the fretted neck of the musical instrument.
When Stuart and Kahn arrived at Banjo High they found a lone RMP parked inside the schoolyard. A pool of blood had congealed on the ground under the tattered net of a basketball hoop, along with the chalked outlines of two bodies.
Stuart told Kahn to wait in the car. He got out, went inside the wire-fenced yard, and walked over to the radio motor patrol car. The heavyset cop behind the wheel saw him approaching and stuck his head out the window. “The Squad brought it all into the house, Lou.”
Standing next to the blue-and-white, Stuart leaned down and asked, “What went down?”
“A bunch of, you should pardon the expression, schoolchildren were playing spongeball. They got into an argument over some bullshit and got into a pushin’ and shovin’ match. One of ’em, a fifteen-year-old boy named Pablo Asante, runs home and comes back ten minutes later with a MAC-11 and proceeds to spray the schoolyard with nine-millimeter slugs. Two boys, one fourteen and the other fifteen, DOA on the ground.”
“And the shooter?”
“Can you believe it? He hung around the schoolyard struttin’ his macho bullshit until the first RMP responded and collared his ass.”
Stuart looked up at the school windows. Students inside the building crowded around them, looking out at the police, making obscene gestures. One girl who looked about thirteen was sucking on three of her fingers, sign language for an oral sex act. Stuart looked at the chalked outlines on the ground, shaking his head with disgust at the incredible casualness of murder. When he’d come on the Job only twenty years ago, a homicide was high priority. Today no one gave a damn unless it was a high-profile killing. We respond to the scene, he thought, gather whatever physical evidence there is, canvass for witnesses, and go back into the house to do our paper. Then we just wait for the next homicide to come along tomorrow.
“Whitehouser asked us to stay here until you came, Lou. You need us anymore?” asked the RMP’s operator.
“No. Thanks for waiting.”
The radio motor patrol car slowly rolled out of the schoolyard, leaving Stuart staring down at the chalked outlines.
The squad room was crowded with witnesses. The detectives had spread them out around the room so they could not talk to one another, compare notes, change impressions. As the whip and Kahn entered the squad room, Whitehouser came over to them and said to Stuart, “The DA is using your office to take statements.”
Stuart looked into the empty detention cage. “Where’s the shooter?”
“Handcuffed to a chair in the interview room,” Whitehouser said. “We had him inside the cage, but he kept wising off to the witnesses.”
“Who’s taking the collar?” Stuart asked.
“The uniform cops who grabbed him.”
“Good.”
Court proceedings ate a lot of man-hours, so Stuart was glad that the uniforms got the credit but would have to spend the time in court. Kahn went over and started to help Borrelli and Jones with the paper. Stuart walked into his office and nodded to the DA and the woman working the stenotype machine. The DA was questioning a witness who looked to be no older than thirteen.
Stuart walked over to a desk and picked up the phone and dialed. When he got the Ice Maiden’s answering machine on her home phone, he waited for the beep, then said, “It’s Matthew. Please call me at home tonight, it’s important.” He hung up, irritated by her rule outlawing personal calls to her when she was in the office. His next call was to IAD. When the cop on duty at t
he other end answered, he said, “Sergeant Brown, please.”
“He died three years ago.”
“Thanks.” Replacing the receiver slowly, he thought: So Sergeant Brown bought the farm. So who’s ordering mug shots, his ghost?
Frankie Bones Marino walked out onto the terrace of Danny Lupo’s office. Lupo was glued to the eyepiece of his telescope. Frankie Bones could tell by the way he was stroking the tripod with his left hand that he was watching a woman. Danny L heard him approach and said, “Frankie, come look. I got this dame naked on a bed jerking off with a dildo.”
“Not interested.” He walked over to the parapet and looked down at the late afternoon congestion. The traffic was worse than usual. Frankie’s squat body dwindled into insignificance against the background of the surrounding tall buildings. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match over the edge, watching it drift down until he lost sight of it. Then he turned and looked disapprovingly at Danny L, who was still playing at being a Peeping Tom. If he wasn’t such a big earner, he’d be dangerous with that kinky shit of his, Frankie thought. “My lady friend just phoned me,” he called out.
“And how is our dear Mary?”
“Concerned for us.”
Lupo’s hand froze on the tripod. He stepped back from the telescope, staring at Frankie. “And why is that?”
“Today is Friday. She cooks for me every Friday night. She hadda go out this morning to buy sausages and tomato paste for the gravy. As she was driving by Downstate Medical Center she spotted Andrea Russo getting into that police lieutenant’s car.”
Lupo’s calm expression vanished. “What does Russo know about us?”
Frankie Bones’s pudgy hands waved in the air. “Dunno for sure. I don’t see how she can hurt us.”
“She can hurt us with the past, Frankie. She’s from the neighborhood. She knows things. Maybe she’s working with this cop.”
Frankie Bones dragged deeply on his cigarette and blew the smoke up at the water towers of the Chanin Building. “I phoned Holiday after I spoke to Mary. He told me that he ordered Andrea to get close to the cop in order to find out what he knew about Beansy’s hit. He said that the cop is doing Andrea, and he figures that this morning was nothing more than a matinee.”
“Holiday’s an asshole,” Lupo snapped.
He went inside and plopped down on the high-backed chair behind his desk. He took a cigar out of the humidor and, balancing it between his fingers, began rolling the Cuban beside his ear, listening to the crackle of tightly packed tobacco.
“Do you really believe Stuart is doing her?”
“I don’t see him hopping into bed with a dried-up junkie.”
“Me either.”
Frankie Bones took a final pull on his cigarette and, crushing it out in the ashtray, asked, “What do you wanna do?”
Lupo’s cold eyes sent out an unspoken but clear message.
Frankie Bones nodded. “Who ya wanna use?”
Lupo tapped his thumbnail against his upper tooth, thinking. “Give it to the Hippo.”
“And the cop?”
“Get him off our backs.” His tone was deceptively mild.
“Done like a dinner.”
Lupo checked the time. “I gotta run over to Jersey and see Angela.”
“Think she’s gonna play?”
“I think it’s goin’ to be okay with her,” Lupo replied, speaking more confidently than he felt.
Patterns of golden autumnal sunlight dappled the ground under the canopy of trees covering the hill behind Albertoli’s parking field. In the west, twilight crowded the horizon, yielding to the darkness.
Angela and Danny Lupo stood outside, looking around the asphalt parking field.
“How come you never use it?” Danny L asked.
“We don’t need to. Everything comes and goes through the bays on the side of the building.”
“We could put four tankers in here if we had to.”
“How are you going to ship your cheese?”
“Inside the tanker truck. It’ll unload the milk at the bottler and refill with cheese for the return trip to Chicago. We’ll save on transportation costs.”
A sudden thought made Angela frown. “When you refill, the milk will taste like pecorino Romano.”
“We’ll flush out the tanks real good before we fill ’em up again.”
He looked her in the eyes, and she turned her head, refusing to meet his stare. His confident grin annoyed her.
Lupo asked, “Can I look around inside the plant?”
She turned away quickly and walked toward the gray steel door at the rear of the building. She unlocked it. After striding past her, he gallantly held open the door. She brushed by him into the factory and its rich aromas of cheese.
He went over to one refrigeration unit and pushed aside the curtain of thick plastic vertical slats. “Could you make room for my pallets in here?”
“Your cheese is hard; it doesn’t need refrigeration.”
“Yeah, but this way we avoid mix-ups.”
“Okay, if I agree to your deal.”
Uncertainty crept into his voice. “It’s a good deal, Angela. It costs you nothing, and you pick up some tax-free walking-around money.”
She looked at him with a suspicious expression. “I find your sudden generosity out of character.”
“It’s good business, nothing more. You got the right space and location, and I trust you. This is a one-shot deal.”
“I’m still not convinced you’re being honest with me.”
“Why are women so goddamn suspicious?”
“Because we know men.”
“This is a legit deal,” he said irritably.
“Is it, Daniel?”
“I’d never do anything to hurt you. You’re from the neighborhood, f’crissake.”
“You hurt me once. Bad.”
Shaking his head in angry frustration, Lupo turned his back on her and stormed across the factory floor.
She tilted her head, watching him. “Where the hell are you going?”
“Home. In the morning I’ll start looking for another place.”
“I haven’t said no.”
He turned around; a smile flickered across his face. “You ain’t said yes, either.” Lupo stood there, waiting for her move.
She came toward him, the clap of her heels echoing off the concrete. She walked past him and gestured for him to follow her into the empty business office. Piles of hard-covered accounting ledgers covered the tops of three desks; the computers slept.
She switched on the lights in the conference room behind her own office. A long, oval-shaped table presided over the room. High-backed chairs embroidered with orange-and-black floral designs stood around the table. She moved to the chair at the head and sat down, pivoting her legs under the ledge.
“Do you remember this room?” she asked him.
He sat on the chair beside her. “Yes. We used to drive out here at night and make love on top of this table. We were too broke for motels.”
“And do you remember the things we used to do?”
“Yes.” He leaned over and tried to kiss her.
She turned her face away and got up from the chair.
“Do we have a deal?” he demanded.
She switched off the light and stepped out of the room. “Yes, Daniel. We have a deal. But only on the trucks.”
10
Stuart opened his eyes and stared up at the sunlight creeping into his bedroom. Suzanne was in bed next to him. She was lying on her side with her back to him, legs spread wide under the sheets. She had phoned him late the night before in response to the message he had left on her answering machine. He’d told her he needed to talk to her. She’d come over and spent the night.
He stretched out his hand and began caressing her leg, slowly moving up her thigh to the warm, moist mound in the middle. For a sweet minute his hand lingered there, massaging her. She lay perfectly still, moaning with her eyes half closed. “Go for it, Ma
tthew.” He gently nudged her onto her stomach and mounted her, penetrating her from the rear.
When they were spent, they crowded into each other’s arms, breathing rapidly. Suddenly she broke away and pushed herself up onto one elbow. Looking down at his face, she said, “More and more I find myself wanting to be with you. That’s a bad sign for a woman with my agenda.”
“I’m sure you’ll manage to cope.”
“Do I detect an edge?”
“No, not really. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
She kissed him lightly on his mouth. “It’s eight, and I have a ten o’clock step class at the gym.”
“I’ll make us some coffee.” He dragged himself out of bed and went downstairs into the kitchen. When he returned, Suzanne was in the shower. He went into the bathroom, pushed aside the curtain, and stepped into the tub. They lathered each other’s body slowly, kissing under the cascading water.
A robin was hopping around the flower box on the kitchen window when they finally went in to make breakfast. They sat at the round table, drinking coffee and picking at the blueberry muffins that he had taken out of the freezer and nuked in the microwave. Holding her mug up to her mouth, Suzanne said, “It seems that we spend most of our time together in bed.”
“I know.” He put down his mug and said, “I need to ask you for a couple more favors.”
“You’re beginning to run up a big tab.”
He smiled reassuringly. “I’ve never walked away from a marker.”
“I know. I read your F File.”
Their eyes joined briefly. “I need a copy of the Big Building’s security tapes for September 20 and 21.”
“What’s the other favor?”
“IAD had an open case on Paddy Holiday before he got out. I need to see that case folder.”
She ran her fingers over the bud vase in the center of the table. “I’m a one-way street, Matthew. I’ve never made a secret of that.” She sighed. “I don’t think I’m going to allow myself to get entangled in your little mystery.”
“I’m asking a friend for help, Suzanne.”
“I can’t.” She pulled his old white terry-cloth robe around herself more tightly.
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