Lieutenant Bruno Stokovich, NYPD.
C.O., Midtown Central Detective Area Task Force.
Then he started to describe the scene from the moment he had arrived, starting with the First Officer report. The First Officer is the first policeman on the scene, the person whose job it is to make the preliminary investigation of the crime. In most cases this amounts to nothing more than making certain the victim is really dead, helping him if he isn’t, and keeping the elements and the crowds off the crime-scene area until the detectives and the Patrol Supervisor get there.
In this case, the streets had been deserted when the officer had reached the scene. He had moved the man’s shirt aside so he could put a couple of fingers on the hollow place where the ribs meet the breastbone. There had been no movement. He had left the shirt up and he could see a wide area of purple stain under the skin, like a port-wine spill. He had also attempted to raise the man’s wrist. It was slightly stiff. Rigor was setting in. The officer had had no doubt the victim was dead. He had marked him so in his memo book, and called in for some assistance. Communications had relayed the call to the desk officer at the local precinct and an RMP had been dispatched to assist in protecting the site.
The young cop had referred to his memo book several times, and Kennedy had made certain that the officer’s entries were complete and accurate. The chain of evidence started from the moment the First Officer arrived at the killing, and Kennedy had lost cases because the sequence of events or the evidential chain had been broken by inconsistent or careless entries. He spoke to the young man for a long time, until he was satisfied that his report was correct and complete.
Since the streets had been deserted and the weather clear—the sun just rising and the day still cool—the cop had left the body uncovered and stepped carefully backward out of the crime scene, retracing his footsteps as if he were walking on ice.
Kennedy noted this, and took another look at the cop. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. Solid but half-formed, the way suburban kids are. Maybe an athlete in high school. Probably recruited from Jersey or up in Yonkers and still a little stunned by Manhattan. But the kid had done well. Kennedy had vivid memories of crime scenes where he’d arrived to find a couple of gold braids from downtown standing inside the ribbon, passing evidence around like a pretzel tray at a retirement racket. The kid had even made a note of his path into and back out of the crime scene. The other two cops, who had arrived in the RMP, had never gone inside it at all.
So the scene was still clean. It was a pleasant surprise. Kennedy finished his first notations and put the steno pad into his jacket pocket.
It was now 0637 hours. The block would be crowded soon, with kids on vacation and people getting up to go to their jobs. Monday in Manhattan came on fast. He thought for a second.
“Hey, sonny!”
The First Officer got up off the curb and came over to Kennedy. “Yes, sir?” His broad young face was a mixture of nausea and avidity. It was a look Kennedy knew well.
“We’re going to leave him here a bit. Let the crowds get a look. You call the Medical Examiner? The Crime Scene Unit? Yeah? Okay, I want one of your Anti-Crime guys out here in fifteen minutes. Who’s good?”
The kid thought about it for a minute.
“You want someone with Spanish?”
“No, I want Pushtu. Yeah, Spanish.”
“Stradazzi. Looks like a greaser too. But he’s not on until the next shift.”
“Yes? Look, young fellow, you get on your portable here and you call your Patrol Sergeant—who’s he today?”
“Bergman. Nathan Bergman? Sergeant Bergman, sir.”
“Long fucking name, hah? Yeah, I know that dildo. What’s your problem with him?”
“Problem, sir? I got no beef with Sergeant Bergman.”
“Bullshit. You got an overtime beef with him. Guy’s got the Administrative Guide tattooed on his ass. Give me the radio.” Kennedy took the Motorola handset and pressed the call button.
“One-oh-four to Central, K?”
“One-oh-four? No landline, one-oh-four?”
“Negative, Central. I’m in the field. Can you get me Sergeant Bergman, at the Eighth? We need an Officer Stradazzi out here. ACU man. Tell Bergman Detective Kennedy is asking. Badge number four-two-four-seven. Tell him I say please.”
The woman on Dispatch laughed once. “Roger, one-oh-four. You’re with Nine Frank?”
The driver of the RMP nodded at Kennedy.
“Yeah, Nine Frank. Still on that call. I’ll want a tape of that call on this run. You have a call back?”
“Negative, one-oh-four. No call back. You’ll have to call me on a landline for the rest.”
“Yeah. Tell Pendleton I’ll be in today.”
“Roger, one-oh-four.”
Kennedy handed the set back to the kid. “When Stradazzi gets on to you—What time you off, kid?”
“It’s Harris, sir. Brian Harris? I’m off at oh-eight-hundred, sir. But if you need me to stay …?”
“I need you to stay. When this ACU guy gets on to you, I want him out here in the crowd. What’s the color today?”
“The color, sir?”
“Will you can the ‘sir’ crap? Call me Eddie. I’ll call you Brian, okay? Good. I mean the code color for your SCU guys. You know, if it’s Tuesday I must be wearing a lime-green headband. That shit.”
Harris’s face opened up. “Oh, yes, sir. The color for last shift was blue. But it’s not headbands now—it’s a belt. At least I think it was a belt.” He went for his memo book but Kennedy stopped him.
“Yeah. Well, I want to know the color for right now, and see that your guy’s wearing it when he wanders out here. I don’t want him walking up to me and asking me what should he do, right? I’m going to let this stiff cook for a bit until we draw a crowd. Maybe we can tag the asshole before lunch.”
“Oh, I see. You mean he works the area. Sees what he can hear? What he can see, I mean.”
“Brilliant, Harris. You should be a cop. You take the RMP and pick him up if you have to.”
“Oh, sir—Eddie. I can’t pick up an MOS in a department car unless it’s official. Patrol Guide regulation number one-sixteen—”
Kennedy held himself in. “Harris, how long you been out of the Academy? An hour? I’m supervising this investigation and I can send you to Albany for cigarettes if I want. I need a good ear on that street right now and you’re gonna go get him. Now go!”
As Harris pelted away toward the squad car, one hand on his hat, the other holding up his belt, Kennedy let himself curse the ten million ways in which department regs made his life hell. It seemed that every stage of every investigation had to be pushed through or around a mountain of bureaucratic bull. The Patrol Sergeant wasn’t really to blame for being reluctant to cut into his overtime allowances. Patrol Sergeants had to answer to the desk officer, who had to answer to Ops Coordinator, who jumped whenever the Exec woke up and asked for coffee, and the Exec got the heebies whenever the Precinct Commander had a skin rash, and the Precinct Commander got skin rashes because he had to keep the Duty Captain for the Borough happy, which cannot be done, because the Duty Captain is worried sick about what the Zone Commander is going to say about the overtime rates when he finds out, and the Zone Commander spends most of his office hours agonizing about the things the Patrol Borough Commander will say to him. And of course the Patrol Borough Commander lives for the day when he can take his monthly report to the Chief of Patrol, who is God, and say, with just the right mixture of pride and humility, that he is smack-dab into the black side of his Payroll Estimate for the month. Whereupon the Chief of Patrol will smile a sweet smile and silently thank the gods that he doesn’t have to explain to the Deputy Chief just exactly why is that his department is still costing the city too goddam much.
Which explains why young Officer Harris didn’t want to ask anybody back at the precinct for overtime pay, and why Eddie Kennedy spends many of his off-duty hours at Brew’s d
rinking Miller Lite out of an Old-Fashioned glass and pretending it’s Chivas Regal, which he used to drink back in the days before he got an ulcer.
Kennedy had already taken several shots of the whole crime scene from outside the ribbon. He now stepped over the ribbon and entered the crime area itself. The first thing he looked at was the body.
It’s an oddity of life that most people who fantasize about working on a big-city homicide squad, or who pretend to do it for CBS or NBC, don’t seem to realize that at the heart of every homicide investigation is a dead body, and the essence of the job is to be able to confront that body in all its grim carnality, its stolid and perfect distance, and its sensory intimacy. You walk up to the thing and you step in its blood and juices, you smell it and you feel it, and your job is to get down onto the ground with it and to slip underneath the skin and inhabit the skull and make its last seconds live and live again. Every cop maintains that detachment is the key, but the truth is that he gives up a section of his soul to every corpse and he dies a little death at the beginning of every case. If he were truly detached he could never see what has to be seen. The key to the thing is intimacy without emotion. Even the ones who have that quality never keep it for long. A few years on the job, and you’re either out of homicide or well into the process of freezing solid forever. For cops, homicide work is the end of the line. You become a boss and drive a desk, you go to the FBI or Drug Enforcement or the Department of Investigation. Now and then you kill a glass of Johnnie Walker Black with a .357 chaser and your widow has to call in a workman to get your brains off the wood paneling.
What the hell is going on today? Kennedy was thinking. Bitching about the bosses and ragging the harness guys and doing pretty much zip about this poor son of a bitch leaking his vital essences into the street. Kennedy took six more shots with his pocket Kodak as he moved carefully inward toward the body up against the wall. He took these shots for his personal record; he always used a whole roll of film on each case and he tried to get his shots in before the Crime Scene Unit wagon got there. The CSU photographer takes the official shots, and the forensic technicians bag whatever samples or scrapings or detritus the supervising detective asks them to bag. But the process changes things; maybe it even changes the invisible lines of psychic force that hang over a body like spider webs. Once you walk through the crime scene you can never get it to feel the same again, any more than you could put a spider web back together so the spider wouldn’t know.
Kennedy got to within two feet of the body, which up to now had played such a little part in the game. He pulled up the legs of his pure wool slacks and set his Florsheim Eagles down like bone china in two clear patches. The street and the block and the whole damned city slowed down and stopped so Eddie could hear the ghost of a heartbeat coming from the dead man. It gave him a chill, but he knew this frisson from a long way back. You always got it at this moment. You thought: Shit, the guy’s not dead, and you saw a chest rise and fall or you heard the heartbeat. It was part of focussing. It passed as soon as Kennedy took a breath. This guy was dead, dead enough to start that mushroom-on-a-wet-basement-wall scent. This asshole gets up again without help and I’m out of here at flank speed, thought Kennedy.
The man was maybe in his twenties, dressed in tattered Reeboks, no socks, army fatigues with worn cuffs held in tight by two yellow elastic bands. He had long skinny legs. There was a hole in one knee of his pants, and the skin under it was the color of walnut except where it had been scraped away. The scrape was raw and empty, just an abrasion through the top skin and down into the fat beneath it. There was no blood. Kennedy could make out the torn ends of a few capillaries. He had gotten that scrape around the same time he died—within a few minutes perhaps. Up past the knees there was a slice in one of the big patch pockets. Something in that? A mugging? Look at that in a second. Oh my, look at this. The man’s crotch was wet, and there was a strong smell coming from the area. He’d let go of everything when he died, or just before. Thank god for M.E.’s. Let them sort out the guy’s underwear. His pants were held up with a garrison belt closed by a tarnished brass buckle. The buckle had a Marine Corps badge on it. Maybe a vet? Check with the VA. His T-shirt was pulled out of his belt and had ridden up his chest, exposing a sunken belly. The belly had patches of wine-colored stain, just like that Harris kid had said. Some of the patches had solid lines of demarcation and the belly was mottled. Harris had said he’d pulled the shirt aside so he could check the man’s signs, so maybe that was how the shirt came out. One thing sure. The guy hadn’t died here. The port-wine stains were post-mortem lividity. That came from the effect of gravity on the blood after the heart stopped pumping. The blood settled into the lowest portions of the body. If this guy had died here under the painting he’d have PML on his buttocks, except where the weight of his body had pressed the blood out. It showed up as two white patches surrounded by purple. And he’d have it in places on his back, between the shoulder blades. He sure wouldn’t have it on his belly like that. So he’d been killed somewhere else and dumped here.
Moving up the body, still not touching it, Kennedy noted in passing that there were defense cuts in the victim’s left hand: a series of parallel wounds in his fingertips and in the palm. The defense cuts were open, empty of blood, and the skin around them was waxy and pale. There were no rings or bracelets on the body, but there was a tattoo of a teardrop on the man’s left cheek.
Marielito? Maybe one of the exiles expelled by Castro from Mariel Harbor back in 1980? Some of the Marielitos were hardened criminals and they affected this kind of criminal society marking, such as tears or crosses or knives tattooed on the hands or the cheeks. The last time Kennedy had seen marks like this he’d been working in the Bronx. Marielito gangs were causing a lot of trouble up around the 46th Precinct. But the Hell’s Angels owned Alphabet City, and they were unlikely to let a Marielito hit take place down here unless they were doing the hitting. The man’s right eye was wide open and the ball itself was protruding slightly from the socket. The cornea was milky. Kennedy pulled out a pair of thin plastic gloves and slipped them on. He put his right hand up against the chest close to the armpit and held it there for a few seconds.
Still some warmth there. He looked up at the sky. It was fully morning; the sun was shining at an oblique angle down into the streets. The top half of the mural was in the sun now. The day was going to be hot, even this late into September. What had the night been like? Hot and humid even up in the East Eighties. So it would be a cookhouse down here on the Lower East Side. Wherever this man had died, it had probably been hot. The underarm was still warm. The variables were numberless when you were trying to guess the time of death. The victim was skinny, and sometimes rigor set in faster in skinny people. Some fat people never went through rigor. Kennedy pushed the man’s jaw and touched his neck. The muscles here were like boards. Well along into rigor. The eyes were milky. There was no give to the eyeball. He guessed the man had been dead for no more than five to ten hours.
Things got more complicated up around the face and neck. There was a deep wound in the right-hand side of the neck, exposing the cartilage and neck muscles. The severed stump of an artery showed clearly. The wound had pulled open along the lines of cleavage, the tensions placed on various sections of the surface skin by muscle groups or skeletal structure. The cleavage lines at the side of the neck run in a more or less horizontal pattern, and the cut had been made from behind the ear almost to the collar bone. A bitch of a cut, thought Kennedy. Question is, did he get it before or after he died? Let the Medical Examiner sort that out. The blood had dried brown and thick around the blue-black hair. He could see the unmistakable signs of a large penetrating wound in the body’s right temple area. That accounted for the popped eye. Intracranial pressure and hydraulic shock from a large-caliber bullet, probably. But Kennedy had seen similar wounds made by hammers, police batons, even a gin bottle. A slug was a good bet, though. He couldn’t make out an exit-wound site without moving the b
ody, and he didn’t want to do that until the CSU and the Assistant Medical Examiner had gotten here.
Come to think of it, where the hell was the Assistant DA? A Monday morning, at this hour—what was it, almost 0700?—shit, they’d send that dildo Sorvino! Otherwise known as The Duck. Well, Sorvino wouldn’t be here until after 0800. He’d wait until then to deal with him.
So, he’d got a male victim, possible mid-twenties, possible Hispanic, so far no ID. Got a major incision-type wound, not a stabbing wound, in the carotid area of the neck. Also a possible large-caliber bullet wound in the right temple area. Possible defense cuts, one abrasion visible on left knee. Post-mortem lividity and degree of rigor suggested a probable time of death from maybe 2000 hours last night to around 0100 hours this morning. One last thing here.
Kennedy put a knee down gingerly and leaned across the body as far as he could without putting a hand on the brick wall or touching it in any way. With his right hand he managed to lift the victim’s head up very slightly. There was dried blood pooled in the curve of his ear, but the sidewalk under the skull was relatively free of blood. “Bingo,” said Kennedy.
“What the hell are you doing, Kennedy?”
Kennedy knew the voice. He resisted the urge to drop the man’s head, and instead set it down gently. He had to push it a bit at the end, to counter the effects of rigor. Then he swiveled on his toes without rising. A large shape was blocking out the sunlight, standing in the aura with hands on hips. A familiar pose.
“Morning, Lieutenant. You’re still up?”
Stokovich didn’t move out of the way. “You through with the touchy-feely, Kennedy? You screwing up another crime scene? Where’s the Command Post? Who’s your Recorder?”
Kennedy got up slowly and stepped backward out of the crime scene. Stokovich waited until he had cleared the ribbon, and then he brushed by him and walked straight on in and crouched down beside the body. Kennedy stayed outside and watched Stokovich’s broad back stretching the windowpane check of his business suit. He was heavyset, with an unruly shock of prematurely white hair. The back of his neck folded down over the stiff white collar of his tailor-made shirts. My my my, Lieutenant Bruno Stokovich, ruler of the Task Force. A lawyer with a degree in criminology, citations up the ying-yang, puts in more time running lectures at John Jay College of Criminal Justice than anybody else in the Midtown area. Hands like a pair of fat hairless pit bulls. That’s Stokovich, the biggest pit bull in the five boroughs and the most profane son of a bitch ever to draw breath. It had taken Kennedy a few months to realize that underneath Bruno Stokovich’s gruff facade there was an even rougher interior. He was pushing to become one of the homicide stars in the NYPD, and after that he was headed right into Headquarters. He had an eye on the Chief of Detectives’ position, and if Mr. Nicastro didn’t watch out, he’d have it too. Look at the bastard, squatting in there like a bull in a lottery pen, putting his fat pink dogs all over the body. Kennedy turned away and walked back to the RMP. The two harness cops were still there, looking supremely bored.
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