Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  Marcuse was asleep in the blue Ford, his head propped up on the driver’s backrest, his gold-wire frames sitting up on his forehead. Kearny pounded on the window glass as he went by. Marcuse jerked up. From the way his mouth was moving, Kennedy assumed he was a little cranky. Kearny noticed none of this. He never did.

  “Well, Eddie. We’ve got the little greaser six ways from Sunday. I’ve got Dorfmann bagging the kid’s hands. I’m not so sure those are legit defense cuts, though. They look a little stagy. Too regular, y’know what I mean? Like they been arranged in neat little rows. Most of your defense cuts, they’re all over the wrists and hands, every which way, this ’n’ that, y’know? So anyway I got a bunch of shit and you gotta sign for this. Here’s a rough sketch. Get the formal sketch later. Measured the place like crazed weasels. Want me to chalk the site?”

  Kennedy laughed. “Chalk the site? What is this, Kojak? Kearny, I don’t chalk outdoor sites. I never have, and I never will. The spray-paint brigade will fuck it up as soon as we break for tiffin. You got a real thing about chalk, don’t you?”

  Kearny looked hurt. “Detective’s Guide, everybody says ‘chalk the site.’ So I chalk the site. Don’t be like that, Eddie. It don’t look good on you. You’re too short.”

  Kennedy laughed again, a short sharp snort. “Kearny, you want to chalk the site, I think you should chalk the site. I really do. And I’m sorry I haven’t had you chalking every damned crime scene I’ve ever worked on. I tell you what—we’ll go back down the list. We’ll go back to every crime scene you and me have ever worked on. Damn it, we’ll chalk every one of them this afternoon! Hah?”

  Kearny’s face set deeper and deeper into the lines of a martyred saint. “I’m saying a novena for your black Irish soul, Detective Kennedy, and little good it’ll do you, damned as you are. We’ll be running along now. Got work on Christopher Street. You sign all these, and we’ll be in with the shots directly.”

  “Color and black-and-white?”

  Kearny rolled his eyes, nodded, and stalked away to the wagon. Marcuse, the Assistant Medical Examiner, was already working on the body, delicately, painstakingly, but with swift and certain motions in spite of those knotted hands. Marcuse was a joy to watch. Kennedy had once broken up at a Benihana grill when it came to him in the middle of eating some shredded kobi slices that Marcuse could have gotten work anywhere as the blade man at a sushi bar. Thwock thwock thwock. Slick slick slick. Aha! Here’s the cause of death. You want ginger too?

  Kennedy left him to it and concentrated on bringing his notes up to date. So far, he’d done it all. It made quite a list. Under his initial entries, he had added:

  • exact time of arrival

  • the precise location and closest street address

  • weather and street conditions

  • lighting conditions

  • personnel interviews

  • names, ranks, badge numbers, of every official

  • time of arrival of each official

  • extensive notes of First Officer’s interview

  • location of victim

  • confirmed deceased Dead at Scene

  • how the death was confirmed

  • how he personally verified that pronouncement

  • his estimate of the extent of the crime scene

  • the names, ranks, and badge numbers of the CSU team

  • his instructions to the CSU teamy

  • steps taken to insure crime scene integrity

  • the Recorder’s name, rank, and badge number

  • when and how he notified Communications of his Command Post location (Right now, it was an RMP.)

  • name of the M.E. responding

  • name of the Assistant DA (when he gets here)

  • name, rank, and badge number of any additional investigators (So far, he hadn’t asked for any.)

  • complete documentation of the crime scene operations

  • his personal observations

  • his means of insuring the continuity of evidence

  • his methods for securing physical evidencey

  • how he established a “chain of evidence custody”

  • who his “searching officer” was (Kennedy put his own name here.)

  • the apparent cause of death

  That brought Kennedy around to Marcuse. It was Kennedy’s private hunch that the cause of death was that wound in the carotid, and that the head wound was mere stage dressing. Marcuse was still hunched over the body. He was taking so long with it that Kennedy began to think the matter would have to wait for the formal autopsy. He hoped Marcuse could do it this morning.

  When he glanced at his watch he got a small jolt. It was a little after nine-thirty in the morning. He still had to decide on a canvass of the neighborhood. One would certainly be necessary, but it wasn’t always a good idea to do it right away. For one thing, the crowd was still pretty avid, and the way the straights and the shits were mixed up over there, no sensible citizen would freely give a cop good information with all sorts of criminal elements standing around and memorizing faces. Better to pull in some of the afternoon shift, and some of the second platoon guys from the 8th. Give them a good briefing after Kennedy had the M.E.’s report and after he’d managed to get some kind of handle on the thing. No, no canvass right now. It could wait until the dinner hour, when everybody’d be at home and more inclined to talk. Stokovich loved to throw a canvass into the Jacob Riis Houses at three in the morning. Kennedy figured Bruno got off on the stir, and on freaking out the citizenry. Also it looked great when the Duty Captain pulled up with his gold-shield chauffeurs and saw all those uniforms buzzing around and the lieutenant right there in the middle of it, looking grim and professional.

  Trouble was, nobody who has to get out of bed at three in the morning will give the guy at the door anything but the bum’s rush. Kennedy always staged his canvasses at a decent hour, and he made sure the people doing the asking had a real interest in the case.

  A lot of the Patrol guys down here in Lower Manhattan liked to work for Kennedy. Eddie was always careful to send in commendation reports on any patrol officer who did good work, or who showed some insight and effort. The secret of getting these usually bored-brainless cops to put some heart in it was to make damned certain that the ones who did got some credit for it. Credit for good uniform work was what had gotten Kennedy his gold shield in the first place.

  No, no canvass now. And here’s Marcuse with a face like a Chippewa hatchet. Kearny bother him that much? No.

  Marcuse took a Styrofoam coffee cup and poured two fingers of brandy into it from a brown bottle marked FORMALDEHYDE. It was Marcuse’s little joke.

  “Well, Detective Kennedy … it’s a hard day when the criminals of this city get to acting out their television fantasies on the actual streets of the town.”

  “Yeah? You think the thing’s a setup?”

  “Lacking only the script girl and a faggot with a bullhorn screeching at the citizenry. Young fellow’s been dead, I’d say maybe eight hours, maybe more.”

  “The lividity? Fixed?”

  “Are you sure you’re Irish? So clearly do you think, I find myself doubting it more and more. Yes, well, the lividity, extent of rigor, weight, body type, skin color, etcetera, and so forth. He’s fair drained, as well. But I don’t think that’s his blood running all over the place—no I indeed do not.”

  Kennedy didn’t either, but the idea was to listen to your M.E. Not outscore him.

  “No, I do not. Even if he’d been drained into a bucket they’d have had the devil’s own time keeping the blood from congealing, breaking down, clotting. If I read this correctly, I’d say it’s not human blood at all. Steer’s blood, or some such.”

  “Or taken from a more recent corpse?”

  “Always a possibility. We’ll see.”

  “Can you do it soon?”

  “The autopsy? You’ll attend?”

  “ ‘Yes. I’m ‘chain of evidence,’
right?”

  “Bruno not giving you a lackey today?”

  “I’ll get one. When do you want me there?”

  Marcuse pulled his left hand down the side of his face, an unsettling gesture in the old man.

  “We’ll have the attendants in now. It’s nine forty-five? Barring a crowd … Let’s say we set it up for noon? I’ll have Mervyn set out some sandwiches?”

  Boris, thought Kennedy. A definite Boris Karloff.

  “Thanks, Charlie. But no snacks, hah?”

  Marcuse leered at him.

  “Then let’s get a sheet over the chappie. I hear Bozeman’s on his way over. You don’t want that asshole from Live at Five talking the Duty Captain into posing with his foot on the youngster’s chest, do you?”

  Christ, the Duty Captain. Kennedy had forgotten all about Bozeman.

  “Has anybody heard from him? Or from the DA’s office, for that matter? Where the hell’s Sorvino?”

  Marcuse sighed theatrically, and patted Kennedy’s shoulder. “Not my cross to bear, son. I’ll see you at noon. Sure about those snackies?”

  Kennedy said yes, he was sure.

  The Assistant District Attorney for the shift was an ambitious kid named Genno Sorvino. He stayed exactly eleven minutes, long enough to put his Bass Weejuns into the blood, fiddle with the paper bags tied around the corpse’s hands, give a few random and contradictory orders to various officials who were not in any way under his authority, strike a few manly poses for the benefit of the gaggle of teenagers at the corner, and to warn Eddie Kennedy that the DA took a harsh view of this sort of random street crime and he, Genno Sorvino, was personally going to make it his business to see that some real work got done on things like this instead of the usual cop complacency, and furthermore …

  But the Live at Five cameras showed up then, so Kennedy didn’t have to listen to any more. It came to him that Sorvino had timed that very nicely.

  CHAPTER 3

  GORMENGHAST

  When they trucked away the body it spoiled things for the crowd. Kennedy sat in the back of the RMP with Stokes and Haggerty and watched the attendants wrap the victim up in a clean white sheet, which was used to tuck him into a body bag. The body bag was zipped up in seconds. As soon as the metal snap hit home, something came out of the crowd, an invisible exhalation, almost ectoplasmic. It floated above the crowd the way the smoke from Kennedy’s bedspread had hovered over the room. After a long time, a hot dry wind came in off the East River and blew it east and north, into the megaliths and stelae of lower midtown. Giving up this vapor took the heart out of the people. They broke up into smaller groups, disintegrated further, slipping away along the side streets and across the empty lots toward their cold-water apartments and their stifling studios, where the heat that had moved in back in May, in the first days of The Drought, was now curled up in the corners of the ceiling. The hallways and the stairwells hold the heat the way they hold the smells. No breezes come here. On daybeds still damp from last night’s sweat, they think about nothing over and over again while the evening comes on softly. At night there would be an RMP from the 8th standing guard over the crime scene, and another squad car would replace it at midnight.

  Kearny had come up zero on positive ID of the deceased, so Kennedy had released the body to the M.E.’s attendants, seen to it that every trace of the crime-scene search was picked up and bagged, and checked out Stokes’s journal of the morning’s comings and goings against his own record. She was precise, accurate, and she could even write neatly. He was glad he’d gotten her to do the job, even if she was a mildly insubordinate bitch. Kennedy would always trade an amiable incompetent for a surly professional—black, white, or windowpane plaid like Bruno’s suit. Just as long as The Job got done.

  Stokes and Haggerty helped Kennedy perform a modified grid search of the crime-scene perimeter. Kennedy hadn’t expected much. It was fun, however, to watch Haggerty huffing and chuffing on his knees through the litter in the curbside gutters. It was just possible that Officer Stokes got the slightest boot out of this, too, but you wouldn’t know it from the flat half-lidded look she was walking around under.

  There just isn’t a chillier chill than the chill a black woman can put on you, Kennedy mused, picking through the bloodstains with a wooden shish-kabob skewer. He kept a few of these in his coat pocket in case he had to put his hands into places of which his mother wouldn’t approve. They found nothing worth noting, nothing that rang any kind of alarm bell in Kennedy’s mind. Kennedy liked to imagine that he could think like his cat in matters of this sort. Let all the colors slide down out of the landscape, let the scene go all flat and two-dimensional, find a still place for his thoughts, and leave them there. Stop thinking. Hold his breath. Wait for something to move out there. Wait for somebody’s nerves to resonate. Dudley could do that sort of thing half-asleep.

  “Hey, Stokes! You got a cat?”

  Stokes didn’t even look up. “No, sir, I don’t have no cat. I don’t even like cats. Sir.”

  Kennedy wasn’t surprised. She didn’t look like the cat type. Neat little creature, though. Short and solid, with a reasonable set of hips on her. Kennedy shook his head and grinned into the blood pool. You’re a long way from heaven, Eddie Kennedy.

  “Stokes, Haggerty, let’s can this. Take me to the station. I need a car.”

  He also needed to talk to Stradazzi. Right now, the Anti-Crime Unit man was Kennedy’s best bet. Nobody spoke in the RMP until Kennedy asked Haggerty to stop at a Photomat on 23rd Street. Kennedy knew a girl there who would have his Instamatic cassette processed and ready within the hour. He needed those shots for the autopsy at noon. The CSU shots wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow morning.

  When Stokes and Haggerty let Kennedy off at the station, Stradazzi was standing at the desk. “You’ve got to be Kennedy,” he said, putting out a filthy hand. “I’m Marco Stradazzi. I got something for you.”

  “Yeah?” said Kennedy. “I sort of hoped you would.”

  Marco Stradazzi was a compact little wop with sloping shoulders and big hands and a sardonic sideways pull to his smile that made him look twice his age. He said he’d been on the force about three years and that Anti-Crime Unit work in Alphabet City came to him naturally, since he was the only member of his family who wasn’t into something illegal. In the part of Jersey where he was born, the family thought of him as mildly embarrassing. He told Kennedy all this as they walked across the station-house hall under the color portraits of Ronald Reagan, Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo,Benjamin Ward, and various Deputy Chiefs in blue and gold.

  Most of the patrol cops were out on The Job. Sergeant Bergman stayed on the phone as they left. Kennedy figured he was listening to the weather tape. It was easier to send secondhand shit to a gold shield than it was to serve it up across the counter. There were three types of cop, as far as Kennedy had been able to determine: bandits who were brilliant on the street and terrible in the station; stand-up officers who played by the rules as much as they could; and drones like Bergman, corporate functionaries who lived by the Patrol Guide and told themselves that police work was easy if you had nice handwriting and knew exactly whom to cut and whom to curry. People like Bergman were the blood and bones of Headquarters, as far as Kennedy was concerned. And this sharp little ACU guy? So far it looked like Marco Stradazzi was a bandit. Stradazzi had taken a phone call from his ACU supervisor at around 0715 hours, caught a cab all the way in from Long Island City, and slipped into his character in the locker room downstairs. His character was “Ramon,” ex-psychiatric case summa cum yo-yo from Bellevue with a minor in blue sky and toot. No one in the neighborhood was surprised to see Ramon stumbling around at the shooting this morning. The deserted building across from the mural was a shooting gallery for a lot of the Cuban and Puerto Rican junkies, so his cover was perfect.

  Kennedy could see that Marco Stradazzi had enjoyed himself this morning. If his information was good, Kennedy would see to it that he got a bar for it—Meritorious Police
Duty, if something solid came out of it.

  Kennedy and Stradazzi went up to the Task Force squad room. Six gray metal desks stood in a row across from a line of dark-green metal filing cabinets. A special holding cell, painted dull-brown, was set into one of the walls. Most of the wall space was covered with duty rosters, special Department notices, Legal Bureau bulletins, calendars, all of them taped to the green-painted cinder blocks or pinned into various corkboards. No one was in the squad room, since the week before had been busy and most of the eight-man day shift was out and about chasing down witnesses or collecting paperwork around the city. The light came from a set of windows facing north and a double bank of fluorescent lights. The lights buzzed. They always did. Kennedy believed that the buzzing fluorescent-light bars were part of a subtle program of mind control and personality shaping developed somewhere down at One Police Plaza. He hadn’t decided if the mind control was aimed at the prisoners they brought up or at the detectives themselves. The lieutenant had a private office, where he kept the portable radios and the plastic NYPD dashboard permits.

  Kennedy had a large 7th Cavalry pennant, almost three by five, attached to the wall behind his desk. If Kennedy had a trademark within the NYPD it was this huge 7th Cavalry flag. It had been a gift from his first uniform partner, years back, when they had both been working out of an RMP way out in Queens. Kennedy’s partner, an older black cop by the name of Weeks, had gotten trapped in a dead-end street in a rough industrial area. Street gangs were calling in Signal Thirteens, luring squad cars to this narrow street lined with tenements. As soon as a squad car got halfway down the street, gang members on the rooftops would start throwing Molotov cocktails and cinder blocks down on it. Sometimes they even closed off the escape route. Kennedy had been back at the station house doing paperwork on a B&E collar when Weeks’s panicky call had come in. They sent every squad car in the precinct, but Kennedy had reached Floyd Bennett Field and called in a chopper. He had lied a bit—he had lied a lot—about the seriousness of the situation. But he got the chopper and they rounded up more than fifty black gang members in a raid that later passed into NYPD history as Kennedy’s Last Stand. Weeks had come in with the flag the next day.