“Detective Helen Kahn and I are being set up by an IAD lieutenant named Ken Kirby.”
“‘Honest’ Ken Kirby, scumbag extraordinaire.”
“I gather you know him.”
“Yeah, I do,” Danzer said scornfully. “He likes to investigate allegations of misconduct against female members of the force. And if he gets them good, where they could lose the Job, he plays Let’s Fuck a Deal. I represented a female sergeant in the Three Two who succumbed to his charms in order to save her job.”
“How does a guy like that survive?”
A mocking grin wrinkled Danzer’s face. “He survives for several reasons. He has ‘weight,’ he’s an excellent investigator who’s not afraid to work the streets, he’s tenacious, and most important, he knows where all the skeletons are buried.”
A slight cough dropped a curtain of silence over the table. Danzer took off his gold-rimmed glasses and cleaned them carefully with the fat end of his silk tie as the waitress set down their food and small plastic tubs of butter and maple syrup. “Look at all that cholesterol, and we order dry toast,” Danzer said as he put his glasses back on, taking care that his silver-gray hair overlapped the earpieces. Stuart noticed the slight puffiness under his deep blue eyes and wondered if he’d been out late last night seeking out his perfect woman.
When the waitress left, they again assumed the position. Danzer whispered, “Why do you think he’s setting you up?”
“Some pinky-rings want me off their case.”
“And Detective Kahn?”
He told him of her affair with Kirby.
Danzer leaned even closer to ask, “Are you and Kahn doing each other?”
“No.”
“Allow me to rephrase, have you and Detective Kahn ever done each other?”
“No.”
Danzer sat back, pleased. “Good, that simplifies things. Now all we can do is wait until we see what they have up their sleeve before we decide how to proceed.”
“They can’t get away with setting up a cop, can they?”
“It’s done every day, Matt. The police department cultivates the illusion that there’s real justice for cops, but it doesn’t exist. The police commissioner brings charges against a member, his trial commissioner hears the case and hands down the verdict. The PC passes sentence, and any appeals are made to the PC. During the trial they can admit hearsay, they can put anything into evidence against a cop. And there’s no presumption of innocence. You’re guilty until you prove differently. You call that justice?”
“No, I don’t,” he said, cutting into his stack of pancakes. “Do you think Kirby will be involved in the interrogation?”
“Absolutely not. The Chinese wall is supposed to protect a cop who has been given testimonial immunity.”
“What’s that?”
“I really shouldn’t use that term because it’s not politically correct. Nowadays it’s considered an ethnic slur. But, anyway, once GO Fifteen is given to a cop, it theoretically creates a wall like the Great Wall of China that separated and isolated the country from the outside world. Under testimonial immunity, a wall is created that separates the interrogation of a member from the investigation. Whatever a cop says during his interrogation is supposed to be privileged and kept secret from IAD’s investigative arm.”
A cynical smile pulled at Stuart’s face. “How do they get around the wall?”
“You cops are too goddamn suspicious,” Danzer said, a twinkle in his eyes. “They get around it by doing a synopsis of the transcript of the interrogation, which gets put on a worksheet that is then inserted into the case folder. Anyone assigned to IAD has access to that case folder, including detectives from the DA’s office. They’re always illegally obtaining evidence by breaching the wall.”
Stuart shook his head and said, “It’s ironic, really. We do that kind of shit all the time in the street.”
“Do you understand your rights as I’ve just explained them to you, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Let the record show that Lieutenant Stuart is represented by Richard J. Danzer, who is present. I am Captain Timothy Mansfield, assigned to the Internal Affairs Bureau, and I will be conducting the interview.” Mansfield had a long, angular face on a head that looked too big for his skinny body. His sharp green eyes were almost hidden under his overhanging brow, and his small ears were set very close to his head.
They were inside Interview Room 16, a sterile space with four low-back chairs arranged around a cheap conference table made of pressed wood. A microphone stood in the center of the table. No plaques or pictures adorned the walls, and the only decorating concession was the burnt orange vertical blinds on the windows.
Mansfield looked at Danzer. “Ready, Counselor?”
“Yes.”
“Lieutenant Stuart, please speak into the microphone. Whatever is said in this room will be recorded, and the tapes locked up in our property safe to ensure their confidentiality.”
“How reassuring,” Danzer said.
Mansfield shot him a dirty look. “Lieutenant Stuart, did you know a woman named Andrea Russo?”
“Yes.”
“Please tell us how you knew her.”
“She was a witness in the homicide of Anthony Rutolo.”
“What was your relationship with her?”
“Professional.”
“Did you ever see her socially?”
“No.”
“Did you ever see her during your off-duty hours?”
“Once.” He did not mention his meetings with her at Prospect Park or behind the Downstate Medical Center; he had been on duty during those encounters.
“Tell us the circumstances of that meeting.”
“I knew from interviewing her that she attended night classes at LaGuardia Community College. I waited for her one night and attempted to convince her to cooperate with us in the investigation.”
“And what happened?”
“I met her and offered to drive her home. She said okay, and during the drive I was able to convince her to help us out with the investigation.”
“Did she know you were going to be waiting for her after school?” Mansfield leaned forward. An involuntary twitch had developed in his left eye.
“No.”
“When was this meeting, Lieutenant?”
“Tuesday, September 20.”
“I see. When you drove her home, did she invite you inside?”
“No, she didn’t.” Stuart stole a look at Danzer, who was frowning.
“You said your relationship with Miss Russo was professional. Do you wish to stand by that answer?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever have sexual intercourse with Miss Russo?”
“No.”
“Subsequent to your driving Miss Russo home, she has become the subject of a homicide that your squad is investigating. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
He reached into the accordion folder resting against a table leg and took out a single sheet of paper. He placed it on the desk in front of him and said, “I have a copy of Russo’s autopsy protocol. It states Miss Russo was killed by a thirty-two-caliber Smith and Wesson. Do you own such a gun, Lieutenant?”
Stuart put the brakes on his rising anger and said, “No.”
“Are you in possession of any unregistered firearms, Lieutenant?”
“No.”
“Is Detective Helen Kahn assigned to your command?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever have sexual relations with Detective Kahn?”
“No.”
“Did you ever have sexual relations with Detective Kahn and Miss Russo together?”
“No.”
“To your knowledge, did Detective Kahn ever force Miss Russo to have sex with her?”
“No.”
Danzer sliced his forefinger across his throat.
Mansfield said, “Let the record show that the tape of this interview is being turned off at te
n seventeen hours at the request of Mr. Danzer.” He switched off the microphone.
“Where the hell are you going with this?” Danzer demanded.
Mansfield looked at the lawyer. “We have a complainant who alleges that Lieutenant Stuart had a sexual relationship with Miss Russo.”
“Your complainant, Captain, is Mary Terrella, the girlfriend of an organized crime guy I’m investigating in connection with the Rutolo homicide,” Stuart said.
“She’s a pretty persuasive witness,” Mansfield said. Looking at Danzer, he asked, “May we begin?”
“Yes.”
Mansfield switched on the microphone.
Danzer leaned forward in his seat and said, “Captain, for the record I want to know if Lieutenant Kenneth Kirby is part of this investigation.”
Mansfield’s jaw muscles pulsed. “It’s not our policy to tell the subjects of an investigation who the investigators are.”
“I have reason to believe that Lieutenant Kirby is illegally involved in this investigation, and I am advising you and the department that any activities that violate my client’s rights will result in a substantial lawsuit against the city, the department, and any individual members of the department connected to the case.”
The twitch in Mansfield’s eye was more pronounced.
Danzer continued, “I insist that no transcription of this interview be made onto any of the worksheets in the case folder.”
“Your objection is duly noted, Counselor.”
15
Stuart stood outside 315 Hudson Street, watching the parade of cops entering and leaving the building. They had been directed to report in civilian clothes because the Palace Guard considered it unseemly for the civilians working in the neighborhood to see just how many of New York’s Finest were under investigation at one time.
Danzer had told him to wait outside while he had a private chat with Captain Mansfield. Stuart was anxious because it was during these in-house conferences that the Job laid its cards on the table and let the victim know what the game rules were.
The weather had cleared, and crisp stratus clouds were gathering in the eastern sky. An October chill tinged the air. Topcoat temperatures were around the corner. Kahn walked out of IAD headquarters shaking her head in disbelief. She went over to Stuart and, in a throaty voice, asked, “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”
“Better.”
“Can you imagine those bastards,” Kahn hissed. “I only wish I got off as many times as they said I did.” She smiled disdainfully. “And with Andrea Russo, yet. She was definitely not my type.”
“Mine either.”
“Although I must confess I was intrigued by our wild sex life.” She held his eyes for an awkward moment before adding hastily, “But that’s something better left to fantasizing about.”
“Did they give you a real hard time?” he asked, wanting to change the tenor of the conversation.
“I was questioned by a female lieutenant who suffered from crotch rot. A prune-faced bitch who got off talking dirty. Who the hell thought up all that crap about us?”
“Kirby.”
She nodded once and asked sadly, “Are you going right back to the Squad?”
“I have to wait for my lawyer. There’s something I want you to do.” He took hold of her elbow and led her away from the building. After he told her what he wanted, she smiled and walked away. He admired her self-assured gait as she walked off.
“Let’s walk,” Dick Danzer said a few minutes later as he left the snakepit.
At the corner of West Houston Street they stopped at a frankfurter stand and ordered two dogs with the works. Just before biting into his napkin-wrapped sandwich, Danzer said, “Mansfield spent twenty minutes trying to convince me that he’s not really a bad guy. Even told me he worked in the Two Four and the Two Eight.”
“All those guys try to convince themselves that they’re not scumbags, but they know, just like we know. When you check their records you find that some of them did work busy houses, but always inside, never on the street.”
Chewing his food slowly, Danzer looked at Stuart. “Mansfield seemed impressed with your record.”
Stuart’s face openly conveyed his disgust. “Why don’t you cut to the bottom line, Dick.”
Danzer licked a glob of mustard off his thumb and said, “Here’s the deal they’re offering. You and Kahn will be served green sheets charging improper fraternization with a witness in a homicide investigation. You both cop a plea, and you’ll be fined thirty vacation days and Kahn fifteen. Their sweetener is you’ll both keep your current assignments.”
“And if we don’t play?”
“Then you will both be charged with having sex with a witness, and you specifically will be charged with failure to supervise, failure to report misconduct by a subordinate, failure to take proper police action, and failure to do whatever else they can think of, in addition to the ever-loving charge of ‘conduct unbecoming.’”
Danzer tossed the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth, worked a strand of sauerkraut out from between his front teeth, and continued, “Mary Terrella will testify that Andrea Russo told her all that bullshit, and you and Kahn will be convicted. You’ll both be flopped back into uniform. Kahn will be suspended for three months without pay, and you’ll be given a year’s suspension in addition to losing your commander’s money.”
“Why not just throw us off the Job?” Stuart asked with an ugly edge.
“Because then you would fight in the courts to get your jobs back. And the NYPD frowns on the courts scrutinizing their quaint method of administering justice.”
Stuart balled up his napkin and tossed it into the cardboard box at the end of the stand. “I think Kirby is nothing more than a messenger boy. He set things up inside the Job for the wiseguys, but there is just no way he’d pull a stunt like this without the okay from someone higher in the Job.” He looked closely at his lawyer. “How long you been defending cops, Dick?”
“Twenty-seven years. And you know, Matt, there have been actual times during those years that I thought I’d figured out all the tricks that the Palace Guard had up their sleeves. And it’s taken me all these years to learn that nobody who is not in the Job, no matter how close he might be to the Job, can ever really fathom what makes the damn thing work.”
“Welcome to the club.” Stuart watched an eighteen-wheeler struggle with the turn into West Houston. “You ever hear of Knight’s Roundtable?”
“Of course. But all those guys are retired or dead.”
“Suppose before one of them retired from the Job his slot was filled by an equally crooked cop, and the same thing happened when any of them died?”
“Then the descendants of Knight would still control corruption within the Job.”
“And now ‘good money’ doesn’t exist anymore,” Stuart said, his hands clenching into fists. “There’s no more precinct and division pads of nine hundred dollars a month for plainclothesmen to protect gambling operations. Today it’s millions in payoffs to protect the free flow of narcotics throughout the city. And, Dick, you don’t need a whole lot of people to do that, just a few people in the right assignments. The guys at the top get the real cream.”
They walked west. Eastbound traffic was stalled. Looking straight ahead, Danzer said, “Did you know that the Five Families met six days earlier than Knight’s Roundtable, on Saturday, September 27, 1963?”
“I knew they met before Knight’s people had their meeting, but I didn’t know when.”
“And did you know that the wiseguys sent a representative to Knight’s Roundtable to help straighten out any kinks in their sweet deal to keep ‘good money’ flowing to buy off the rest of the crooked cops?”
“No, I didn’t.”
The two men walked on, each thinking about what all this was leading to. Suddenly Stuart halted and turned to his lawyer. “Can you buy me some time, Dick?”
“I can get you a week, maybe a little more. What do you
have in mind?”
“I’m going to fuck them before they fuck me!”
Ater saying good-bye to Danzer, Stuart walked back to the garage and slid his ticket under the change slot of the bulletproof partition. He paid the fifteen-dollar fee for the three and a half hours, which included the city’s eighteen and a half percent parking tax, and drifted off to the side to wait for an attendant to bring down his car.
The garage’s first floor was filled with very expensive cars whose owners had slipped the attendants five dollars to park there in order to protect their investments from the attendants’ kamikaze driving. The squeal of brakes echoing off the ramp made him look up. He saw his car come to a screeching stop. He palmed a dollar into the attendant’s hand and slid in behind the wheel.
He had just braked the car at the curb to check the oncoming traffic on Charlton Street when a signal blast of a car’s horn whisked his attention across the street to the woman in the driver’s seat of a late-model black sedan. Their eyes locked, and understanding flashed between them.
The sedan drew away from the curb, and Stuart maneuvered his car behind the other one. They drove north on the West Side Highway, along the extreme outer edge of lower and midtown Manhattan. Fifteen minutes later the World War II permanently moored aircraft carrier USS Intrepid appeared in the distance, her flight deck crowded with warplanes.
At Forty-eighth Street, both cars made sharp, left, hairpin turns and drove south a few blocks, pulling off through a break in the concrete dividers bordering the western edge of the highway. At the entrance to the Intrepid Air-Space Museum, both drivers tossed their vehicle identification plate onto the dashboard and got out. Stuart walked over and tinned one of the five uniform policemen assigned to the museum, told him they weren’t going to be parked there long, and asked him to keep an eye on the cars.
“We’ll take good care of it, Lou,” the young cop said.
They paid the entrance fee and walked out onto the pier. The Intrepid loomed above them majestically, her guns long removed, her boilers long cold. Patches of orange rust and peeling battleship gray paint marred her proud hull.
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