Enemy Within

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “No, you tell me.” Karp opened the folder, splaying out the crimescene photographs over his desk. “What’s wrong with this picture?” Murrow leafed through them. They were of the Cherokee and the surrounding road, and the unmarked police vehicle. The Cherokee was full of bullet holes, and its left fender and headlamp were smashed. The police unmarked was similarly damaged, with a severe crumpling of the left front and side. That much was clear; the pictures of the road and the side barriers, with chalk marks and tape measures, were more obscure.

  “Well, there was a glancing head-on crash of some kind,” Murrow ventured. “That confirms the cops’ story at least. Lots of bullet holes in the Jeep. You can see where the slugs went through the rear seat. But wait a second . . .” He shuffled through the eight-by-ten glossies. “The windshield has three holes in it. That seems to confirm the police story. I guess I’m stumped on the fishy part.”

  Karp smiled. “The autopsy, Murrow! Holes in the windshield, but no holes in the front of the vic. Lomax was killed from behind. But I doubt if your pal Flatow is intending to bring that out to the grand jury. The guy had ten bullet wounds in him, with eight bullets recovered. Of those, seven were from Cooley’s gun, one from Nash’s. Nash must have shot the man after the cars stopped moving because he was driving during the chase and didn’t have his gun out. Cooley was shooting from outside the car, too. But, of course, it’s impossible to distinguish the shots he took then from the ones he fired during the chase. Like you say, cars whirling around, night, a confused situation. Lomax could have been bouncing around in there, and just by chance all the bullets ended up in his rear.”

  “Pretty unlikely, don’t you think?”

  “Very. But we don’t build cases on unlikely, especially not with the Blue Wall holding solid. In any case, that’s what the grand jury will hear.” Karp collected the photographs, stacked them neatly, and returned them to the report folder. “Well, what else is new? A cop does a bad shooting and skates.” He seemed lost in thought. Murrow waited a decent interval and asked, “What was the other thing? You said two things were fishy.”

  “Oh, right. The other thing is we got two experienced cops sitting on a street in the middle of the night waiting for a major collar to go down. They’re waiting for a gun dealer, they’re going to grab a bunch of automatic weapons—a pretty big deal. Then this car drives by. The officers state that they recognized the vehicle as stolen from a radio report and pursued it, which led to the chase in question and all the shooting.”

  “That’s fishy?”

  “Murrow, it’s the fishiest thing about this goddamn case. It makes no sense at all. Let’s say they made it as hot. Let’s say the car belonged to, I don’t know, the mayor’s favorite aunt. Is it credible to you that they would have left their assigned position in a gun bust they’d been working on for weeks to go chase it? And if they chased it, does it make sense that they would have tried so hard to stop it with gunfire, in clear violation of police department regulations? I mean, where was the win in it for them? Even if they caught the guy, even if the chase didn’t result in someone running into a car full of nuns, they were still headed for a gigantic chewing out. You assholes left your post for what? A stolen car? Give me a break! So what was it?”

  “They were overtaken by a sudden insane animus against car thieves?”

  “Maybe,” said Karp, laughing, “but then they would have used the old sudden-insane-animus defense. No, really—it’s the key to the whole thing. A fishy shooting is always a pain in the butt, even if it’s a lot clearer than this one; you get a cop up there, he says he was in fear of his life, it’s hard to prove even manslaughter beyond a reasonable doubt, never mind depraved-indifference murder, unless maybe he put ten bullets into an unarmed old lady in a nightgown in broad daylight in front of a bunch of Shriners. Here you got darkness and danger, you got a known felon in commission of a felony, you got a motor vehicle, deadly weapon in use—typically, that would be a gimme for the cops, and, you know, I wouldn’t have even looked at it probably, if it wasn’t so obvious that they were trying to sneak something through. On the other hand, if what we’re looking at here is a personal thing, if Cooley and Nash weren’t just pursuing a random hot car, if the reason they were so weirdly anxious for a crappy stolen-car collar was because they knew Mr. Lomax . . .”

  “Then you have the element of intent,” Murrow finished.

  “Just right, Murrow: the element of intent. So— did they, in fact, know the man? If this was a normal investigation, we would get the cops to find out whether the two defendants had any contact with the victim, and what that relationship was. But since the defendants are cops, we can’t, or we can’t right now.”

  “Because of the . . . um?” Murrow gestured vaguely in the direction of the DA’s office across the hall.

  “Yes, because of the um. If I still had Clay Fulton here, it would be a different story, but they kicked him upstairs to Police Plaza, and if I went to that yo-yo who’s running the DA squad now, the news of the request would be in Fuller’s hands and up on the twelfth floor of One PP practically before I put the phone down. However, I have a plan.”

  “May one know it?”

  “Not just now. Meanwhile”—here Karp looked at his watch—“you might wander by and see if the grand jury has taken up this case yet. It’ll do you good to see corrupt practices taking place before your very eyes.”

  “Okay, but why don’t I stand up and in a voice of doom cry out, ‘Cooley! Cooley, you knew the victim! Cooley, you murderer!’ Then if he turned white and fainted, we would know he was guilty.”

  “Good plan, Murrow. Let’s use that as a fallback if mine doesn’t work. Now, scram.”

  When Murrow was gone, Karp hit a speed-dial button. One of the secrets of the modern age is that every important person in the world has a private number, known only to a select few. Karp had one of these, and he knew a bunch of others, such as this one, mostly people in New York’s criminal-justice and forensic establishments. Karp’s mind did not often dwell on Judaica, but he liked the image of the Nine Just Men for whose sake Ha-Olam does not destroy the wicked world, and while he did not puff himself up so much as to consider himself personally one of these, he imagined that all of the Just would have each other’s private numbers.

  After a few rings, a throaty bass voice said, “Yeah, Fulton.”

  “Clay, it’s Butch.”

  The voice turned softer, and they chatted about family, sports, the local scene. Fulton was one of Karp’s oldest friends, one of the first black college graduates to serve in the NYPD and a mentor from Karp’s earliest days at the DA. He had been head of the DA squad and had functioned almost as Karp’s private police force until being promoted to inspector and kicked upstairs, where the bosses could keep a closer eye on him.

  “They keeping you busy up there?” Karp asked.

  “Oh, you know—it’s paperwork mostly. They found out I could spell. Surprised the shit out of them, I think, me being a colored fellow and all. Strategic planning they call it.”

  “What’s the strategic plan?”

  “Frisk as many niggers as possible is the main one.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Hey, crime rate’s down. Of course, it’s down just as much in cities where they don’t do shit like that, but that don’t cut much ice up here on the twelfth floor. How’s by you?”

  “Not that great, actually. I need to talk to you about stuff, but not over the phone. Lunch?”

  “Sure, where at?”

  “How about Lemongrass on Varick?”

  Pause. “Isn’t that a vegetarian place?”

  “Uh-huh. It smells of carrots and no cop would be caught dead eating there. See you in a bit.”

  It did smell of carrots, and purity, and contained several elegant, slow-moving young waitpersons, who seemed by their expressions to be suffering directly from mankind’s abuse of the planet. Lucy ate here all the time, which was how Karp had learned of the place. B
oth men had a meatless, cheeseless, taste-free dish of quasi-lasagna and filled up on the bread, which was surprisingly good.

  “This better be worth a set of ribs at Jack’s,” grumbled Fulton when the waitress had tripped off. Fulton was a big, dark brown man in his late fifties with a brush mustache and a balding dome of a head. He had an elegant gray suit on, and silver cuff links with gold detective badges on them. His expression, disarmingly genial at most times, was now a little wary.

  “You got it, a whole cow, if you want. Push that crap aside and take a look at this.” Karp handed a manila folder across the table.

  Fulton opened it, saw what it was, and shot a hard stare across the small table.

  “What’s going on, Butch?”

  “That’s what I need to know. Read the whole thing, especially including the autopsy. Take your time.”

  Fulton did so, reading silently, spreading the pictures out over almost the whole of the table, including those that were quite out of place in a vegetarian restaurant. When he was done, he shoved the papers and photographs back into the folder and handed it back to Karp.

  “So?” Fulton said.

  “So what do you think?”

  “About what? This Lomax? He fought the law and the law won.”

  “Come on, Clay.”

  “Oh, don’t you give me that ‘Come on, Clay.’ Let me ask you something—do you know Ray Cooley?”

  “More or less. Not personally. He was borough chief of detectives. Retired a couple of years ago. What’s he got to do with it?”

  “I’ll tell you what, Stretch. There is probably not a senior cop in this city in the last twenty-five years who was more respected than Ray Cooley. When the Mollen Commission shit hit the fan, they got Ray Cooley to clean out the Manhattan houses that were dirty because everybody knew he was clean as a whistle, and that he was a cop’s cop and wouldn’t sacrifice the little guys to protect the big ones. And he didn’t. And he was decent, especially compared to the usual gang of Paddies they got running the department—I’m talking about racism here. Never a hint. Now, Ray had two sons, both of them cops. Brian, the oldest, got himself shot. He was working undercover out of the Twoeight, talking out there one night to a CI he had, over on Fourteenth east, and somebody drove by and popped a bunch of caps. They were trying to get the snitch, but they got Brian instead. He pushed the snitch down and tried to return fire, but they got him. The younger son, that’s the fella you have in that file, got the Medal of Valor two years ago. You know what he did?”

  “No, I don’t, but—”

  “Listen! A hostage situation. A guy holed up on the fifth floor, stoned out of his gourd, he’s got his girlfriend and two little kids, and a pistol. The girlfriend’s mother runs out of the place, calls the cops. These are black people, by the way. Brendan Cooley happens to be in the neighborhood. I think he was working the Three-oh then, before he went over to anticrime. So him and his partner answer the squeal. Okay, you know a hostage situation, you got your protocols, your regs. Call for the specialists, the negotiating team, the snipers, the helmets, the SWATs. Brendan goes in there, and he decides this guy isn’t going to wait for that, he’s going to pop in the next two minutes. So what does he do? He stands in the doorway, he throws down his weapon, he takes off the vest he put on, he even rips open his shirt, and he goes, ‘Hey, you want to shoot someone, shoot me! Go ahead, shoot. But, for Christ’s sake, let the woman and the kids go!’ For some reason—I don’t know, God was having a slow day, maybe He decides to tweak this fuck-head’s brain the right way—and he goes with it. He lets the kids go, the girlfriend. By the time they roll up the heavy artillery, Brendan’s got the guy’s piece and they’re sitting on the bed together, the guy’s crying his eyes out on Brendan’s T-shirt. What do you think of that?”

  “Sounds like something of a cowboy, Brendan.”

  “That’s what you derive from that story?”

  “Yeah, speaking as a cowboy myself. How come they didn’t ding him for not going by the book?”

  “Oh, they chewed him, all right. But the press got ahold of it, and it was too much for them, especially given that the usual story is white cop blasts black guy. Here the white guy saved three, maybe four, uptown-type folks.”

  “And what’s the moral of all this, Clay? That he saved four so he gets to cap one for free?”

  Fulton waved a finger in Karp’s face, a finger like the barrel of a .38. “Hey! Don’t be a jerk! The moral is, number one, Brendan Cooley is a good cop, and not just with white people, and two, the status of Ray Cooley in the department is such that his son, his one remaining son, is about as untouchable as anyone has ever been in the department. He could be dealing smack out of a whorehouse across from City Hall and he’d never see a courtroom. You may not like it, but there it is. If you think the job is going to go after him because he shot a mutt like Cisco Lomax, in a halfway plausible self-defense situation, you are nuts.”

  Karp had been breaking a lump of bread into small pieces and lining them up neatly in front of his plate, as if to shield him from what he was hearing. He said, “Look, we know each other for what? Getting to be twenty years now. You know I’m not a cop-baiter. If you recall, some years ago a rogue detective was doing assassinations to order for a dope king, and you found out about it, and he snatched you up and tortured you to find out what you knew and if you had told anyone yet. And when that trio of thugs you used to run out of the Thirty-second Precinct broke you loose, you arranged for them to whack him.”

  “That would be hard to prove.”

  “I don’t have to prove it,” Karp snapped, and in a milder tone said, “I’m talking to an old and trusted friend here. With whom I am unfailingly honest. To resume, these guys also took care of any witnesses to that particular cop’s felonies, all justifiable shoots, of course, and you covered up the guy’s evil empire, and he got an inspector’s funeral, and his widow got the pension. This was in the interest of protecting the rep of the department and maybe also the rep of the bad detective, who happened to be black and was also a pretty good guy before he jumped into the shit. And, if you recall, I sat down for all of that. Hey, I know it’s rough justice.”

  “What’s your point here, Butch?”

  “That I know how the game is played, which I shouldn’t even have to demonstrate to you. But since you’ve gotten so puffy now you’re a boss, I thought I would anyway. But I also know there are lines, and you know that as well as I do. We don’t do frames, that’s one line. We kick out cases that don’t pass the laugh test. We like it when the guy who actually did the crime is the one the cops bring in, not just a guy who did some similar crimes and they want to get his ass off the street. And, especially, while I’d like the line here to be pushed back in the direction of a little less tendency to violence, I believe we still draw the line at assassination.”

  “What are you talking ‘assassination’? Where the hell did that come from?”

  Karp tapped the report. “From here. Look, I have no question it’s a bad shooting. But you know and I know that I would never ever be able to make that case, not against that copy anyway, for reasons you’ve just eloquently laid out for me. And you know that if I spent energy worrying about evil shit that went down on the island of Manhattan where I don’t have a decent case, I wouldn’t have the strength to take a good piss. But this one worries me. I want to know why two perfectly rational, competent cops took off on a high-speed chase, with guns blazing, to rescue some dentist’s sport utility vehicle from a car thief. Hah! I can see by your face that it worries you, too. You saw the same goddamn thing I did when I read that report.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I know you too long, Clay.”

  Fulton slammed the table, drawing looks. It was not a table-slamming sort of place. In a controlled hiss, veins bulging on his forehead, he said, “Well, what exactly do you expect me to do about it, pal? Call in the snakes on Ray Cooley’s kid?”

  “Of course not. Start an IAD beef on
this guy and the snakes would be falling all over themselves, deep-sixing unpleasant evidence. It’d be son of Warren Commission. But it should be pretty easy to find out if that really was a chase of a stolen vehicle, if it was reported and sent out, if Cooley reported himself in pursuit. You’re the guy who has all those crime pattern reports. And if it was that, well . . . all you got to do is tell me it was just a boyish outburst, a mistake in judgment. They were bored, say, middle of the night, a hot car goes by, they figure on a quick collar just to pass the time. But the guy runs, and it gets out of hand, the adrenaline shoots up, the bullets fly . . . Honestly, hell, I’d love a story like that. Just bring me that story and you’ll never hear anything more about it from me. It’s not like I got nothing better to do.”

  “And say it’s not that story?”

  “If it’s not . . . ah, shit . . . well, then, I’ll have to decide how to go forward with it, depending on the available evidence and the nature of the case, just like I always do. But in any case you’re out of it. Your name’ll never come up.”

  “It better not, Stretch. I don’t intend to spend the rest of my time on the job running a motor pool out on the ass end of Staten Island.” Fulton stood up abruptly, threw some bills on the table, and walked out. Karp caught up with him on the sidewalk, under the restaurant’s pink and pale green awning.

  “You hate me now, right?”

  “Ah, fuck, I don’t know,” said Fulton, a disgusted look on his face. “The old days when we were working together and I didn’t give a rat’s ass about what the bosses thought, I would’ve gone into this with you, no problem. Now we got a crew up there in the Plaza, they’re falling all over each other to show they’re not a bunch of Paddy racist motherfuckers, they got to have some more black faces up on the top floors. I mean I know I’m good, but I’d be kidding myself if I pretended that wasn’t a part of it. Meanwhile, I am there, and I can do a lot of good, not just for myself—shit, you know I’m not into that crap—but for the job, and providing a little counterbalance for boss types who think that walking while black is a major felony. But the downside is, now I am a boss, I have to think like one, and even though it pisses me off to see how I slipped into that thinking, there it is. I bought it, now I have to pay for it.” Fulton smiled bleakly and shook Karp’s hand as his official car drew to the curb. “You keep me honest, Stretch. But not too honest, hear?”