Enemy Within

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Robb returned his attention to it. It is a gigantic annoyance to the New York Police Department whenever one of its officers fires a gun in the line of duty. Cops say that the mass of paperwork generated by a police shooting weighs as much as the weapon that fired the shot. That annoyance becomes actual pain when the shot fired intersects any human flesh at all, except perhaps when the cop doing the shooting is obviously preventing a vicious, saliva-dripping felon from making off with a charming little girl, or similar. When the target dies, as here, and when the target is black and the shooter white, also as here, the pain reaches bone-cancer levels.

  When they had finished speaking with the principals involved, Captain Robb pulled Lieutenant Maguire into the backseat of his car and asked, “What do you think?”

  Maguire said, “Cooley’s a good cop. Nash is very solid.”

  Robb sighed and said carefully, “I know that, Bob. I meant what about this piece of shit we got here, how are we going to play it?”

  “Cooley said the perp charged him with the car. Deadly force. He acted to save his life and Nash’s.”

  “That’s the story we’re going to go with?”

  Maguire, like his immediate boss, was a corner in the department and understood the unspoken footnotes that hung from Robb’s question. It is difficult to make captain before age fifty, as Robb had, without being able to speak and understand a language that none but other initiates can comprehend. Maguire confidently expected to make captain, too, within the next couple of years, and he was similarly fluent. Wanting another moment to think about it, he deflected with, “Have you called his old man yet?”

  “No, I wanted to check the situation out myself and get our ducks in a row. Who’s the stiff, by the way?” Robb was not pressing the question, yet.

  “Lowlife. Not a citizen,” said Maguire. “Got a nice sheet for grand theft and receiving stolen.”

  “Violence?”

  “No, sir, unfortunately not. And the minority thing, of course.”

  “Yeah. That’s the bitch of it. But Nash is solid behind this?”

  “Nash will hold up,” said Maguire. “Like I said.” A pause. “What I think, sir, is that we should let the system work here. We’ll do the normal administrative in the department, take their testimony, the four of them, which will all be consistent, like we just heard out there. Chase of a stolen vehicle, perpetrator’s attempt to ram pursuit vehicle, credible risk to officer’s life, not to mention potential for harm to innocent drivers, fucking guy roaring the wrong way down the road. Officer fired, killing perpetrator. A righteous shooting, end of story. No deep probing, no reason to believe there was anything funny. Cooley’s record is clean as a whistle. Never any paper on him, brutality or whatever. Racism? Hell, his partner’s black. So we’re fine there.”

  “There’ll be a report,” said Robb.

  “Yeah, it’s a homicide, sir. I would expect the detectives involved to write it up to the best of their ability without fear or favor.”

  “Just like always.”

  “Just. And then it’s the DA’s ball.”

  “Right. Who caught the homicide, by the way?”

  “Steve Amalfi and Oscar Rivera.”

  Robb consulted the card file in his head that held the names of the hundred-odd detectives who worked in his fief. Nothing popped up, which was good. Had either of the homicide cops been a discipline problem, or a whistle-blower, or under the personal protection of some significant PD rabbi, Robb would have known about it. So he would have a clean, competent report, written by men who could, if it came to that, be burned. Which report no one in the department would read in great detail. There was so much paper passing across the desks of the bosses. The main thing was to ensure that if any shit started flying around behind this, none of it could stick to him or his. He thought he was pretty safe. He could in reasonable conscience convey to Deputy Chief Inspector Gavin the results of his preliminary investigation: a clean shooting—fleeing felon, credible threat—not another case of a half a dozen heavily armed white morons blowing forty or so holes in a crippled Negro deacon or an old Hispanic lady or a mentally retarded, minority twelve-year-old.

  Let the system work; good advice. The system would work and bring forth a result pleasing to the department and to the decent middle-class majority for whom it labored. That was mainly what the system was for, in Robb’s opinion. And he would call former chief inspector Ray Cooley and tell him that his younger son had killed a perp, but that the preliminary investigation was finding the shooting clean. And he would discreetly check on Amalfi and Rivera, too, to make absolutely sure they were solid, that they would also let the system work.

  The system now cranked into gear. The deceased was brought to the morgue at Bellevue, there to be probed by the medical examiner, whose duty it is to determine the manner and cause of death. The New York medical examiner is one of the best forensic medical shops in the nation, but even the best shops have difficulty attracting qualified personnel. Cutting up corpses is not what attracts most students to medicine, and most graduates of American med schools do not care to labor for civil service pay. The office was therefore populated largely by foreign born and trained, among whom, now wielding his knife through the chest of Cisco Lomax, was Osman Mochtar. Dr. Mochtar was from Afghanistan. He had escaped with his family during the Russian war and made his way to Libya, where he had obtained a scholarship to study at Garyounis University in Benghazi. He had been in the United States, in New York, for nearly five years. He thought cutting up corpses was a great job; you did not have to speak English to them, nor did they ever lay upon you unbearable insult, as was the case on the one occasion when he had sought work with patients at a public hospital. He was not a diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Medicine.

  Dr. Mochtar extracted eight bullets from the body of Cisco Lomax and traced the course of two more. He determined that the cause of death was massive trauma to the brain from a bullet that had entered five centimeters posterior to the right zygomati arch, pierced the temporal bone, traversed an upward course, and exited through the anterior, left frontal bone. Even without this coup de grâce, the subject, he concluded, was unlikely to have survived long. His seventh cervical vertebra had been shattered by a bullet that had torn through the spinal cord and exited from the right ventral surface of the neck, and there were two wounds in the left arm and six in the torso, the latter doing massive damage to the lungs and other internal organs. Dr. Mochtar dropped the last of these torso bullets into a kidney dish and handed it to the detective standing there. Detective Rivera bagged them in individual bags, sealed the bags, signed his initials and badge number over the seals, and had Mochtar sign them, too.

  “So, tell me, Doc,” said Detective Rivera, “you traced the path of these bullets, right?”

  “Oh, yes. These and two others that I have not got here. They exit to outside, you know?”

  “Uh-huh. And they came from the front, the back, what?”

  “Oh, definitely all from back, posterior as we say. And perhaps, you see, a little to the side in these cases.” The body was facedown. He indicated a wire sticking out of the skull wound, and another emerging from a black hole slightly to the left of the posterior midline of the neck. “The others are all directly from the rearward, except the shoulder wound, here at the left side. But this one to the skull is from the right, a fatal wound, do you see?”

  “Right, got it.”

  Rivera left. Dr. Mochtar and a diener turned the body over, and Dr. Mochtar began to stitch up the corpse. The man had run from the police and had, most properly, been shot down. Dr. Mochtar did not think that a corpse shot in the back by police was worthy of much comment. Certainly he did not bring it to the attention of his superiors.

  Some short time after the completion of the homicide detectives’ report, at eight-forty the following morning, and its delivery up the chain of command, the police department notified the district attorney’s office that a police officer had kill
ed someone. The part of the DA where the phone rings in such cases is called the special investigations bureau. It is located on the seventh floor of an ugly Depression-era building at 100 Centre Street. The criminal courts are here, and the DA’s office, and the Tombs, which is what New York calls its jail. Normal homicides go directly to the homicide bureau. On the sixth floor, homicide is staffed with several dozen ADAs who believe that they are the best in the business at bringing killers to justice. Whether or not they are, it is undeniable that they work daily with the police force, and of necessity form close relationships with homicide detectives, and so when a police officer is the killer, homicide does not get the case. Instead, it goes to the seventh floor, where the people in special investigations never work with the cops at all, if they can help it. If they can’t, special investigations has its own little police force, made up largely of retired police. Its chief target is official corruption, but it is also called in when any arm’s-length distance from the NYPD is required, as here.

  The person who took this particular call, just after ten, was the chief of the bureau, a man named Lou Catafalco. The bureau chief took the call himself because the caller was Chief Inspector Kevin X. Battle, from the police commissioner’s office, which was nearly as high as you can get in the political side of the NYPD and still wear a blue uniform. Battle had a reputation as the man they called in when things became messy. He had served three police commissioners and knew where all the bodies were buried. Catafalco was therefore alert for something interesting, and perhaps a little fetid.

  After the usual guy entrée—sports, their respective golf games—Battle ushered in the main event. “Lou, why I called, we had a shooting last night, over on the Henry Hudson. Car chase, stolen vehicle, the actor attempted to ram the detective’s car and he was shot. He died at the scene.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay, where’s your guy? I’ll send someone over right away.”

  “He’s waiting for you at the Two-oh; but Lou? This is a little bit of a special case here.”

  Here it is, thought Catafalco. “Oh? Special in what way?”

  “The officer involved is Brendan Cooley,” said Battle, and paused to let that sink in.

  “The poster boy.”

  “Him. So what we have here is not the kind of officer—and you know and I know that in thirty-nine thousand we’re going to get a few of those—the kind that’s heavy with his hands, that drinks, that’s free with firearms. This is a splendid kid. He’s got the police Medal of Valor, as you know, and here in this incident he risked his life to take down a dangerous felon.”

  “The deceased was a felon?”

  “Yeah, a thief, a pro, sheet on him a yard long.”

  “Minority.”

  “Yeah, as it happens, but there again, you got a kid who’s never had any trouble in that department. Now, Lou, I’m just telling you this as background. Obviously, we’ll do our investigation, and you’ll do yours independently. What I’m interested in here is doing the minimum damage to Detective Cooley’s career. We need to get past this as smooth as we can.”

  Catafalco asked the obvious question. “How’re they playing it?” He meant the press.

  “Light. We had good control of the scene, the highway. Nothing in the News; the Times had a two-incher on A20. One mention on the metro part of the Today show. I don’t think there’s much to worry about on that end. Thug tries to kill cop, gets his, I think that’s the story. I figure it to die pretty quick.”

  “There’s the minority thing . . .”

  “Yeah, that,” said Battle smoothly, “but I’ll tell you, Lou, the community will get cranky when it’s a bad thing. Hell, we get cranky when it’s a bad thing. The old lady, the kid with the water pistol shot in the back, the cop was drunk—I’m talking gross violations. This, on the other hand . . . well, your guy will see Cooley and Nash, his partner, who by the way is black, and the witnesses, one of whom is also minority, as a matter of fact, and read the report, you’ll come to your own judgment. Steve Amalfi handled the case out of the Two-oh, he’ll confirm, of course. All I’m saying’s we’d like the system to work extra smooth on this one, grand jury in and out, so the kid can get back to his life.”

  Catafalco agreed that this would be a good thing for the kid. After some brief pleasantries, he hung up. He sat and thought for a while, lacing his fingers across his pear of a belly. Catafalco was a tall, heavy, untidy man in his late fifties, with a yellowish complexion and a slick of hair across his domed and freckled pate. He had been bureau chief here for over ten years, and while he had not rooted official corruption out of the isle of Manhattan, neither had he made any major political mistakes nor stepped on any important toes. He understood at some level that he was a placeholder, and that his bureau did not attract sterling talent. Special investigations ran no trials and so did not attract the bright, aggressive, and ambitious from among the new young lawyers who entered the DA each year. These went into the trial bureaus and, after a few years, if they were very good, into homicide. Catafalco was content with the less talented. He told himself that you didn’t want flashy people, standouts, in special investigations, not for the slow, dull, but vital work of checking bank accounts and contracts and the mind-rotting task of, say, listening to all the telephone conversations of some suspiciously well-off elevator inspector. He himself was a methodical man, and he liked the slow, steady accumulation of evidentiary particles that, when pasted together, might sink a judge or a welfare clerk. Or a cop. He rose heavily and walked out of his office. Who to send? He heard a door open and a young man appeared in the hallway, a chubby, shortish man with an unfashionable fifties shoe-clerk haircut.

  The bureau chief crooked a finger and said, “Flatow, come in here. I got something for you to do.”

  Back in his office, Catafalco settled into his big maroon leather chair. “You ever work a cop shooting before?”

  “A cop got shot?”

  “No, George, a cop shot someone. A cop gets shot, it goes to homicide. A cop shoots someone, kills him, like in this case, we handle it here.” Catafalco saw the worry bloom on the youth’s face and hastened to calm him. “It’s no big deal, this one. A car thief tried to ram a cop car and they took him out. Basically, what you need to do is go down to the Two-oh and interview some people, the cops involved, get their story. Also you’ll want to talk to the homicide investigators on the case. They’ll be there, too. It’s all set up—a boilerplate operation. Get the stories and schedule a grand jury session.” Catafalco paused. “You ever present to the grand jury before?”

  “Yeah, a couple of times, before they transferred me out of the trial bureau. But I never did a homicide.”

  “It’s not a homicide,” said Catafalco quickly, and then, “I mean, technically it is, there’s a dead guy, but basically it’s a formality in this particular case. The shooting’s okay, no question of that. Our job is to process it through the system as clean as we can. In and out, ba-boom! Prep your witnesses, parade them up to the g.j., and get your no bill. You think you can handle that?”

  “Sure, I guess.” Flatow took a piece of paper out of his pants pocket, smoothed it on his knee, reached for a writing implement, found he had none, began to search again through the same pockets. The bureau chief, sighing inwardly, handed him a Bic. He then gave him the relevant names and a stringent time frame. Four grand juries—two in the morning and two in the afternoon—run continuously in New York County. It would not be hard to slip into one next week and get the whole thing over with.

  Four hours later, when Flatow tapped on the door and stuck his head in, Catafalco was just getting ready to leave, for the special investigations bureau typically kept judge’s hours, and he had a number of errands to run, including, in just twenty-three minutes, an appointment for a massage.

  “You’re back already,” said the bureau chief. “How did it go?”

  “No problems,” said Flatow. “The cops’ stories were all the same, so we won’t have any conflict problems o
r like that. Cooley, the guy, the shooter, was pretty impressive. He’ll be a good witness. He’s some kind of hero, too, is what I understand.”

  “Yeah, he is,” said Catafalco shortly. “What about the homicide report?”

  “I got a copy. The guy, Amalfi, wasn’t that forthcoming. He said anything he had to say was in the report.”

  “You read it yet?”

  “I haven’t read it in detail,” said Flatow, who had, in fact, hardly looked at it before shoving it into his briefcase. The notion of reading the report before interviewing Amalfi and his partner, Oscar Rivera, had not occurred to him. “Basically, captain gave me a summary report that has all the major facts.”

  “Yeah, that’s good; major facts is what we want. The main thing is not to confuse the grand jury with a lot of ifs and maybes. You’ll probably want to play down the homicide report itself, concentrate on the testimony. Follow their summary. That should be enough. In fact, why don’t you give the homicide report to me; I’ll read it and have a copy run off for you.”