Death by auto-asphyxiation was not an unfamiliar sight for NYPD cops. The victims choked themselves as they masturbated in order to increase the pleasure of their orgasm. The sixteen-year-old boy lay naked on the bed, the rope noose around his neck fastened to the brass headboard, his flaccid penis in his hand, a porn flick in the VCR.
After examining the scene, Stuart walked into the kitchen. Another terrified sixteen-year-old boy sat at the table. Jones had caught the case. It was the first time Stuart had met him. When Jones saw the sergeant’s shield pinned to Stuart’s shirt, he motioned him out into the corridor that connected the apartment’s six rooms.
“A couple of teenagers experimenting with life,” Jones confided. “One got carried away.”
“How you gonna classify it?”
“Can we step outside the apartment for a few minutes, Sarge?”
They walked out into the project’s sterile sixth-floor hallway. Jones said, “The kid in the kitchen is Joshua Ham, Isaac Ham’s son. His wife died five years ago and the kid is all he’s got.”
“Who’s Isaac Ham?”
“A rising star in the Rastafarian Posses. I wanna hand the kid a collar for manslaughter two.”
“It’s an accidental homicide. How you gonna hit ’im with manslaughter?”
“This is his home. He got the rope. He helped tie it around the stiff’s neck. He recklessly caused the death of another person.”
“Com’ on, that’s a throwaway. The DA wouldn’t even move to indict.”
“He wouldn’t have to,” Jones said. “We collar the kid, then tell his father we’re going to do him a solid and have the charges thrown out. We’re good guys who don’t wanna hand his son a rap sheet. That way Isaac is gonna owe us down the line. He’d have a heavy marker on his back.”
Stuart shook off the memory, looked at Isaac Ham, and said, “Isaac, you just had a sit-down with Carmine Marino. I need for you to tell me what it was about.”
Isaac picked up his glass and drank some straight rum. He put down the glass and looked at Stuart. His smile was contemptuous. “I’ve paid that debt many times over the years, Lieutenant Matthew.”
“Some debts just don’t go away,” Stuart said, twisting around in his chair and looking over at the man cuffed to the bar rail. He looked back at Isaac. “I’m charging your friend with attempted murder of a police officer and aggravated assault on a police officer.” He looked at Jones and asked, “Can you think of anything else?”
Jones leaned back in his seat, considering the ceiling. “Mopery in the second degree,” he announced, snapping forward.
“What be that?” Isaac asked.
“Being a public asshole,” Jones said.
“I got nothin’ to tell you,” Ham said.
“I’ll also toss in criminal possession of a deadly weapon and possession of the narcotics I’m going to find in his pockets. Now, if your friend on the floor is a virgin, he’ll only do twenty-five years, but if he be having a long rap sheet, he’ll get life with no parole,” Stuart said.
Isaac turned his head and glanced at his struggling friend on the floor. “He walks away this place a free man and you don’t come this place no more.”
“Done,” Stuart said.
Isaac drained the rest of the rum from the glass and said, “All right. It’s simply good business. The other Eye-talians charge us two points to do our laundry, Carmine charges us one.”
“So he’s gone into money laundering for himself,” Stuart said, then added, “Frankie Bones Marino and him have the same surname. Are they related?”
“Frankie Bones be his uncle,” Isaac said.
“They had Hollyman and Gee killed because one of them took out Beansy Rutolo. Why did they shoot Beansy?”
“Dey got into a fight,” Isaac said. “Wasn’t a planned killing, Lieutenant Matthew. Dey went to dat house to do business.”
“What kind of business?” Stuart asked.
“Better you leave now, Lieutenant Matthew. There’s no more to tell you.”
“What kind of business?” Stuart persisted.
Isaac shrugged, said, “Why not?” and added, “We made the Eye-talians something to hold stuff. Made out of balsa wood—lots of ’em. Dey had to be perfect—round like a wheel and hollow. After all that work, dey wanted dem but didn’t want to pay us our price. So dey fought with Rutolo.”
“Talk to me, Isaac, tell me something, whisper into my ear and make me a happy man. What are they putting in those containers?”
Isaac clamped his mouth shut and folded his arms tightly across his chest. “You’d better go now, Lieutenant Matthew.”
“Talk to me, Isaac, and I’ll go away, and not come back no more, no more, no, I’ll not come back no more.”
Isaac’s weary eyes swept over his face. “Dat’s a big promise for a policeman to keep.”
“You know I keep my promises.”
Isaac’s stared at him for a long time, deciding what to do. His eyes seemed to grow larger when he made his decision, and he moved close and whispered, “What you think, mon? Not sugar and spice but sumpin’ very nice.”
Stuart knew not to press his luck, so he got up off the chair, walked over to the bar, and asked for a glass and some paper towels. The bartender looked past him to Isaac, who nodded. Stuart stuck three fingers into the glass and bent down beside the handcuffed man. He told him to hold the glass in his right hand. The man glowered up at him.
Stuart said, “If you don’t take this glass, now, I’m going to give your foot another boo-boo.”
The man opened his right hand and held the glass.
Stuart stuck three fingers inside the glass, spreading them to create sufficient tension to lift the glass from the man’s grasp. Using his other hand, he frisked the man for any more concealed weapons. Having found none, he unlocked the handcuffs and tucked them back into the pouch. He told the Rastafarian to stay where he was until they left, then walked back to the table with the glass held upward. “Isaac, your friend on the floor has twenty-four hours to get his ass back to Jamaica.”
“You no can do that, Lieutenant Matthew.”
“He tried to kill me. I can do it. And if he doesn’t go back, I’m going to lift his prints off the glass and match them up with his prints on file. Then I’m going to pull up his rap sheet and his photo and send them to the IPPA in every city in this country.”
Jones leaned close to Isaac to confide, “That’s the International Policeman’s Protective Association.”
“And on his photo I’m going to stamp ‘Code Six.’”
Jones confided to Isaac, “That means plant big gun and felony-weight narcotics on his black ass.”
“Dat be unconstitutional, Lieutenant Matthew.”
“Isaac, almost everything we do is unconstitutional,” Stuart said.
16
It was the time between twilight and night, when the sky was a deep purple and the white luminance that dappled the horizon grew dimmer and dimmer. A flood of emergency calls had backlogged the Seven One’s radio network. Occasional sharp cracks of gunfire were followed by the strident warbles of police sirens. The Seven One’s detention cage was filling with the evening’s catch. Jordon and Whitehouser were out in the squad room, processing prisoners. Jones was planted inside the anticrime surveillance van a block and a half away from Holiday’s bar, with the Cellmate on the floor between his legs, waiting for Holiday to go cellular.
Stuart, closeted in his office with Kahn and Borrelli, inserted the stolen security tape into the Squad’s VCR and pressed the play button on the remote.
Kahn leaned forward in the chair, her hands gripping her arms, her eyes fixed on the television. The faces of policemen scrolled across the screen with digital numbers showing times and dates flashing over the bottom part. Borrelli glanced at Kahn’s grim face.
The first cassette played out; Stuart inserted the next one. It played for eleven minutes before Kahn said, “That’s Ken,” and got up and left the room.
> Stuart stopped the tape. Kirby looked much younger than his forty-seven years. He wore his blond hair short, and his weathered complexion showed few signs of wear. Large brown eyes shone clearly past the fold of skin that stretched over the corners of his eyes. His short nose was somewhat flattened and upturned.
Stuart ejected the tape and put it inside a large manila envelope, then went over to the form cabinet. He pulled a pair of latex gloves out of the dispenser box and snapped them on his hands. He then reached back inside the cabinet and took out two UF 95’s—“Request for Photographs”—and rolled one of them into the typewriter.
He looked at Borrelli, smiled, and said, “Time for a little creative police work,” and typed in a request for mug shots on Hollyman, dating it September 21, 1994, the day of Hollyman’s and Gee’s murders. In the signature box he typed in “Sergeant I. Brown, IAD,” along with the shield number he had noted down from the computer tracking system at the Photographic Section. He then scribbled “I. Brown” across the typewritten one. He took the other form and typed out a request for Gee’s mug shots.
Borrelli had laid out the latent prints he had lifted off Kirby’s steering wheel on the desk with the friction ridges upward. Stuart took a tube of graphite and sprinkled it over the upended tape, adhering the black carbon crystals to the ridges. He laid the Request for Photographs form on the desk with the front part facing up and picked up one of the lifting tapes. He gently pressed the carbon-coated ridges against the front of the form, transferring the fingerprints Borrelli had lifted.
He went back into the cabinet and removed the Squad’s Polaroid camera and took several photographs of the UF 95 request form. He then repeated the procedure on the request for mug shots of Gee. Leaning across his desk, he slid open the top drawer and took out a photographic copy of Kirby’s fingerprint chart.
“How the hell did you get hold of that?” Borrelli asked.
“Earlier today I stopped at the Ident Section and told one of the clerks we were having a bachelor party for Kenny and were going to make up a phony rap sheet listing all his old girlfriends, and needed his prints for a Wanted poster we were making.”
He tore the top sheet off a department scratch pad, rolled it into the typewriter, and paused a moment, thinking, before he typed, We got your prints on the mug shots and on the request forms. And we have you entering Headquarters the same date and time that the mug shots were ordered. And we have a tape of you discussing Andrea Russo’s hit with Paddy. You’re an accessory in two murders. You can kiss your pension bye-bye; you’re going away for a long, long time.
He took out an unused multiuse envelope, typed Kirby’s name and command in the first box, put it into a large manila folder along with the two Polaroid photographs of the UF 95 forms ordering mug shots on Hollyman and Gee and the note. He handed it to Borrelli along with the cassette.
“Joe, I want you to drive over the bridge and deliver the security tape cassette showing Kirby entering the Big Building to Elliot Goldman at Movie Gem Productions. It’s on Eleventh Avenue and Fifty-seven. He’s expecting you. He’ll make up photographs of Kirby from the tape. Put those photographs into the multiuse envelope I made out, along with the rest of the stuff, and drop it into the department mail. Bring the cassette back to me.”
“You think Kirby is gonna buy this con?”
“When he sees what’s in that envelope he’s not going to be rational. He’ll be so terrified at getting caught that he’s going to get real stupid, I hope.”
“I hope so, too,” Kahn said, leaning against the doorjamb.
Stuart sat at his desk with the contents of Suzanne’s envelopes piled neatly before him. The IAD case folder on Paddy Holiday had been marked “Closed, no results possible due to subject’s retirement.” Stuart was not surprised to see that Kirby had been the investigating officer. Several nasty communications between the commanding officer IAD and the CO Pension blamed each other for Holiday’s escape. IAD claimed never to have been notified of his pending retirement; Pension claimed the notification had been made. Stuart was positive Kirby had shit-canned the message, allowing the thirty-day clock to run out. He was mildly surprised to see that the current chief of detectives, Kevin Hartman, was boss at IAD at the time of the great escape.
As he flipped through the thin folder, he saw Kirby hadn’t even bothered to do a preliminary investigation on the allegations against Holiday in order to protect himself against the accusation of not conducting a timely investigation. This told him Kirby had been sure his shenanigans would not backfire on him.
The information on Knight’s Roundtable was contained in three blue folders. They included the rank, name, and assignments of the people who attended the meeting, all of it typed on dog-eared white paper.
This list has been looked over many times, he thought. Every borough commander was there, along with Chief Thomas Kirby, CO Narcotics, Ken Kirby’s father; the CO Order Section; CO IAD; chief of detectives; and the holder of the now defunct rank of chief inspector, the highest-ranking member of the uniform force. The valiant protectors of “good money,” Stuart mused, the same bastards who tried to shaft my father, who caused my mother countless sleepless nights and me to endure the endless taunts of so-called childhood friends. “Good money!” he muttered. “Phony fucks never did learn that dirty is dirty, and crooked is crooked.”
He put a lid on his pointless anger.
Before Suzanne gave him the folders, she had written down the ranks and names of the people who held the current assignments of the old Roundtable crew. Many of the titles had been changed. The chief inspector was now the chief of the department; an assistant chief inspector was now an assistant chief; a deputy chief inspector was a deputy chief. But the same duties and responsibilities tagged along with the new titles, including the ability to control corruption within the Job.
Suzanne had also included the family pedigrees of the current people, with the names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers of the wives and children. This told Stuart the avenue of investigation she thought would pay off; it was the same one he planned to walk down.
She had really offered up her head for sacrifice by slipping him this material. His concern for her gave way to missing her; he wished he had been able to give more of himself to her. He snatched up the phone and dialed his home number, hoping that she had left a message. She hadn’t. Loneliness hit him hard.
He came to two pages torn from a spiral memo pad. “October 2, 1963” was scrawled in ink across the top one. The left-hand column contained the abbreviation arv., which was old official NYPD short form for “arrived.” Next to it was written “4:10p.,” which was the old way of writing “4:10 P.M.” in official records. After the time came the rank, assignment, and initials of the person.
He compared the initials on the steno pages with those on the white sheets; they matched. He leaned back, smiling. Someone had maintained an attendance log. Every damn conference ever held in the NYPD had an attendance log. A gathering of corrupt cops, and some idiot kept a record. Habits were hard to break. Or was corruption so pervasive that those involved thought what they were doing was somehow okay?
One entry in the log snagged his attention. “At 5:04p. DCI JMcM PBBS arv. w/ J.A.” Stuart translated that as “At 5:04 P.M. Deputy Chief Inspector Joseph McMahon arrived with J.A.”
Who the hell was JA? Whoever had maintained the log would not have listed a civilian. Which meant that JA was on the Job.
He gathered up the records and put them in his locker. He went into the bathroom and washed up. He signed out in the command log, “1920 end of tour,” and left to keep his appointment.
Billy’s, on Manhattan’s First Avenue at Fifty-second Street, was an upscale saloon operated by the same family since 1870. The restaurant was a favorite watering hole for the high-rollers of the Seventh Avenue rag business and divorced Barney’s businessman types who gathered at the bar each night to eat their dinners and tell the readily available high-maintenance divo
rcées how important they were. The bar was crowded when Stuart pushed through the door, but he spotted her immediately.
“It’s not every night a cop offers to buy me dinner,” Angela Albertoli said, toying with her cigarette lighter, watching him suspiciously as he sat in the bentwood Victorian scroll-back chair across the table from her. She wore a coral wool tweed and Lurex suit with brown fur trim.
Stuart looked up at the early-nineteenth-century photograph of the Sutton Place area hanging on the paneled wall and said, “It was good of you to see me on such short notice.”
She lit a cigarette, blew the smoke upward, and said, “You said it was important. Besides, I was intrigued by your suggestion that I’m being used.”
“I’m hungry. Shall we order?” He gestured for the waitress.
Angela selected broiled fillet of sole and steamed spinach. Stuart wanted pork chops and a baked potato with a side of applesauce. Both ordered a glass of the house Chardonnay. The waitress went over to the crowded bar to get them their wine. Angela’s eyes followed. She leaned close to him and confided, “See that woman sitting alone at the end of the bar?”
“Yeah, I see her.”
“She’s a stockbroker who’s gone to bed with every available man in this place and still can’t get one of them to marry her.”
“We all have our crosses to bear.”
The waitress set down their wine and left. Stuart moved his chair closer and asked, “Have you received any odd business offers lately?”
“I get them all the time, Lieutenant.”
“Wiseguys are not wise, or nice. They’ll do whatever they have to do to make money. They’ll murder, lie, cheat, destroy lives and reputations.”
“Don’t preach that stuff in my face. I know that better than you do. I’m an Italian American whose blood boils every time she reads about one of those hoodlums.” She took a final drag of her cigarette, crushed it in the ashtray, and said, “I’m a Republican who hates Mario Cuomo, our lousy governor. But I vote for him every time he runs because he’s Italian. Make sense to you?”
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