“Internal examination: No hernias were present in the diaphragm. Domes normal. Pleural cavities showed no fluid, air, or blood. Pericardium fluid contents normal, no pericarditis in evidence. Mediastinum contents normal as well. Teeth were his own, in poor repair. Nose—nares patent, blood present. Pharynx showed clotted blood. Tongue slightly abraded due to mastication under duress. Hyoid bone fracture of recent origin. Thymus weighed twelve grams. Sectioned normal. Thyroid weighed twenty grams and was also normal. Larynx and vocal cords normal. Mucosa and contents showed blood in small quantities. Trachea and bronchi mucosa normal. Contents normal, although some blood present here. Pulmonary pleura normal, and pulmonary vessels also normal. Right lung weighed four hundred and fifty grams, showed moderate congestion but no gross pneumonitis or tumor was noted. Left lung weighed four hundred and twenty-five grams, and also showed moderate congestion but no pneumonitis or tumor. Heart weighed three hundred and twenty grams, and was normal in size. Auricles normal in size and contents. Ventricles were also normal in size and contents. Tricuspid valve size and cusps normal. Pulmonary valve …”
As Marcuse went through the litany, Kennedy and Mervyn were labeling and securing the samples taken. Toxicology would get much of this, for blood typing, signs of sexual assault, and for tests of possible drug usage. The drug connection was getting stronger with every hard fact that emerged from Kennedy’s investigation. Stradazzi’s fairy tale about Mantecado called for some serious spadework. Kennedy’s job was to find out who killed Porfirio Magdalena Ruiz and bring him before a judge to answer for it. If that involved kicking around in some goddam narco trap-line, that’s what he would do.
“… Aorta and large vessels of normal caliber and elasticity. Major branches in chest and abdomen are patent. Blood in heart and vessels is below normal quantity, and there are several post-mortem clots. Esophagus presents normal caliber, inflamed, mucosa bloody. Stomach shows minor incipient ulceration, erosion of stomach lining, and blood in mucosa. Meal last eaten appears to have been ground beef, lettuce and other vegetable material, potato, some liquid …”
“Special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onion on a sesame seed bun. Damn kid ate at McDonald’s, Charlie. Put that down as the probable cause!”
Marcuse ignored this. “… Intestine normal, lumen patent, and appendix also normal. Mucosa and wall of the large and small intestine is normal. Liver shows signs of hepatitis with extensive periportal infiltration—lymphocytes and plasma cells to Pathology for verification of this. There was no acute necrosis.…”
Hepatitis. The kid had hepatitis. Drugs again. “Charlie, I want the toxicology report as soon as possible. The kid was a user, and I need to know how much of what.” Marcuse nodded and went on.
“… Gall bladder size and contents hepatic. Bile ducts patent. Spleen weighed two hundred and three grams and section normal. Pancreas normal. Mesenteric lymph nodes enlarged. Adrenals total weight eight grams normal on section. Urinary bladder contained only traces of urine—samples to Toxicology. Mucosa and wall normal. Ureters patent, right and left kidneys weighed one hundred thirty and one hundred twenty-six grams, sectioned normally. Prostate normal. Urethra inflamed …”
“Why was his urethra inflamed, Charlie?”
“Damned if I know, Eddie. Could be he was jerking off on a regular basis. Too regular. Irritated the glans or some such. Not relevant, I’d say. We continue with the testes, which are normal and descended. Epididymes normal. There is a large entrance wound in the right temple with severe stippling and gunpowder residue. No starring. Meninges normal. Evidence of extensive subarachnoid hemorrhage. Skull is point-five centimeters in average thickness. Entrance hole in right temporal region measures one-point-four by one-point-two centimeters. There is a fracture and displacement of the right splenoid and temporal bone in the middle fossa. There is a large uneven exit hole in the left occipital bone measuring two by one-point-eight centimeters, and the plane of the bullet was about fifteen percent off the horizontal, downward from front to back. Ears were normal. No abnormalities were noted in the remainder of the osseous system. The brain weighed thirteen hundred and seventy-five grams. The bullet entered the right frontal lobe, passing downward and to the left, exiting from the brain at the junction of the pons and the medulla to the left of the midline and inferior to the cerebellum. Track diameter was irregular due to projectile tumbling, averaging two-point-three centimeters. Moderate hemorrhaging around the bullet track was noted. Bloodstained fluid was present in the ventricles, and hemorrhages were noted in the pons and the cerebellum. Medulla was normal on section. Pituitary body was normal. And the pineal …” Marcuse sighed and stretched again. A joint popped audibly. Kennedy waited a few feet away, listening to Marcuse but looking at a section of green tile.
“… was undersized but normal. Blood work remains to be done. X-ray findings showed no bullet fragments in track.”
Kennedy turned around. “It tumbled but it didn’t break up at all. No fragments at all?”
“Nothing that showed up. It happens sometimes. Bullets are freakish. So is bone. I’d say it wasn’t suggestive. If I track you correctly, you’re positing a Teflon slug, something of that nature? Can’t rule it out, of course. But on the evidence I’d say not. Get some lead wipings back from forensic labs—you’ll see.”
Kennedy was inclined to agree. Glazer or Teflon slugs were rare. Since they were designed to penetrate police body armor, even the new Kevlar vests, any sign that killers in town were getting access to Teflon slugs would have to go right to Nicastro this afternoon.
Marcuse was wrapping it up. “To summarize thus far: We can say that the deceased has been shot in the head at close range, the bullet entering the temporal aspect of the forehead close to the right eye and passing downward and to the left through skull and brain to exit from the skull in the left occipital region. There is also an incision-type wound measuring thirteen centimeters extending from a point just beneath the right ear in a line downward to the right collarbone, exposing and severing a portion of the right common carotid. There are no hesitation marks in this area. The cut was made cleanly and without hesitation by a narrow-bladed object with a very sharp edge. There are also various severe incisions in the digits and palm of both hands, suggestive of defense cuts. A recent needle mark was found in the left ante-cubital fossa. Blood work follows.”
He paused here. Mervyn was already cleaning up the wreckage and sponging down the body. A newly pressed sheet waited on the side table. The M.E. thought for a moment, although Kennedy was sure he had already come to a decision in the first few minutes after he’d reached the crime scene down in Alphabet City.
“I, Charles Marcuse, have examined this body, and I have opened and examined the above-noted cavities and organs as recorded, and in my opinion the cause of death was severe and extensive injury to the right common carotid caused by the application of a narrow-bladed and sharp-edged tool, causing extreme loss of blood and consequent central-nervous-system shock and heart failure due to loss of blood pressure. Deceased was at or near the point of death when the projectile was fired into his brain, and since the prognosis for recovery from the initial wound after no more than two minutes would be negative, we feel that this second wound can only be described as contributory. And so, cause of death: knife wound to the carotid. Charles Marcuse, Assistant Medical Examiner for the City of New York at … thirteen forty-four hours this date in and for the City of New York … et cetera, et cetera, as they say. Mervyn, if you will. Edward, walk this way …”
Marcuse dropped a shoulder and lumbered off, quite intentionally dragging one foot, muttering to himself in a creditable and deliberate imitation of Boris Karloff. Kennedy followed him into the scrub room, still chewing on the plastic tip of the Colt cigarillo and thinking to himself …
Good afternoon, Mrs. Ruiz, I’m Detective Kennedy and I have some information about … No, no. Pick her up at work and … No. Wait until she’s home?
He heard the flutter and snap as
Mervyn threw the white sheet out over the corpse. It cracked at a corner, and then settled slowly over the ruins of Porfirio Magdalena Ruiz, billowing and rolling as it came down, like a fog from a chilly sea.
Charlie was pouring two 10cc shots of Martell into a pair of graduated cylinders as Kennedy came into the scrub room. He handed one to Kennedy and raised the other to the light.
“Here’s to us!” said Marcuse.
Kennedy answered, “Who’s like us?”
“Devil a one!” said Charlie, and waited again.
Kennedy smiled, lifted his cylinder.
“And they’re all dead!”
They drained the vials and stood in silence, as good friends do.
CHAPTER 4
SALTO MORTAL
The traffic on Second Avenue was backed up all the way from the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. Kennedy sat in the detective’s car with the air-conditioning on high, waiting for a bus driver to stop arguing with a Sikh cabbie, waiting for him to stop slamming the roof of the cab with his fist, waiting for the Sikh to stop honking his horn, and getting none of it.
He called in for a patch to the Task Force desk. Farrell was in, and he took the call with a mouthful of chili dog and a snarl.
“Task Force, whaddya want?”
“Christ, Oliver—nice manners!”
“That you, Kennedy? Where you been?”
“At the M.E.’s. Why? Anybody asking?”
“Yeah. Got this guy Stradazzi, says Mrs. Ruiz been calling all morning, says she hears somebody was dead over on Avenue C, her neighbors are saying it was her kid. She’s having a major shitfit, been calling the desk all day. Stradazzi says should he tell her? Wants you to give him a shout. Also Bruno says you should call him at sixteen hundred hours sharp—he’s at home. You get anything on this one?”
“Yeah, I did. You want to know, I’ll tell you, we can read all about it in the Post tomorrow. You have anything big on your desk right now?”
Farrell, sensing the dark shadow of imminent work rising out of the handset, let a few seconds pass.
“Oliver, it’s nothing that’ll cut into your day job. I want you to get the Patrol Supervisor to let me have some of his Third Platoon guys for a canvass tonight. Say around nineteen hundred hours?”
“Sure, Eddie. You be wanting some help with it from the squad? I’m up against it, but Frank’s here doing the dog—yes, you are, you weird fucker—yes, he is, Eddie. Don’t listen to that mope. And Wolf’s court call didn’t come in by thirteen hundred hours, so he’s loose. I’ll ask him, you want?”
“Wolf” was Wolfgar Maksins, a heavy-boned farm boy with bluish skin, and coarse hair the color of dead wheat cut into a spiky brush, shaved almost bald at the temples and tapering to a small pointed tuft at the back of his neck. There wasn’t a female cop in the Lower Manhattan area who hadn’t spent a few idle seconds wondering what Wolfgar would be like in bed. Wolf was doing his best to see that as many of them as humanly possible got to find out firsthand. He was a provisional sergeant, having passed the last test easily. Nobody called him Provisional Sergeant, however. It wasn’t healthy. Wolfgar was a “provisional” sergeant because every man and woman in the NYPD who had passed the last sergeants’ exam was currently hanging by his or her thumbs waiting for the society of black policemen known as The Guardians to settle their suit with the administration over the number of black officers who had failed to pass the test. It was a sore point with every ranker in the NYPD, a point of race and therefore saturated with legal nitroglycerine. Lines were being drawn in the force, and Wolfgar Maksins, along with Deke Fratelli, another member of Kennedy’s squad who had also been promoted on the basis of the last test, was standing right on top of it. He could use some distracting.
“Yeah, ask Maksins if he’ll give me a hand. I’ll pick him up. Tell him I’ll be there in about a half-hour. And clear that with the desk, okay Farrell?”
“One-oh-four, K.”
A traffic officer, known as a brownie in New York, was breaking up the argument in front of Kennedy’s car. She was a short overweight black woman with a carrying voice, and it took her about thirty seconds to send the bus driver back to his vehicle, bent almost double, like a sapling in a gale, by the force of the woman’s personality. Kennedy found that he was still chewing on the stump of his Colt cigar. The brownie waved him through the intersection, holding the cross-street traffic back by leaning on the grillwork of the lead car. He brought the side window down and threw the cigar out into the gutter, squinting through the dust and fumes, noting with sardonic amusement as it bounced onto the sidewalk under a blue and red sign that read LITTERING IS FILTHY AND DISGUSTING SO DON’T DO IT!
He got all the way to 23rd Street before he ran into another major traffic jam. A pushcart peddler was repeatedly crashing his battered metal wagon into the rear of a tractor trailer. The tractor trailer had a sign on the back that read LORD ONE DAY AT A TIME and another one that read I BRAKE FOR HALLUCINATIONS! The pushcart man was missing his left ear. His face was distorted and white with rage. He must have been screaming quite loudly but no one could hear him through the noise of a hundred car horns blatting and wailing and fifty voices bellowing. Black fumes pumped out of the tractor trailer’s stack and settled over the tangle of cabs and trucks and junkers and limos and wacked-out pushcart peddlers, muting the glare and softening the outlines so that in the hot midafternoon sun the whole demented collection acquired a soft amber glow like a seventeenth-century horizon. Kennedy found a swing channel on the radio and listened to Tommy Dorsey, feeling at home, feeling connected to everything, part of the town, until a large black dog with red eyes and a bad case of mange leaped up on the hood of his car and howled through the glass at him, yellow slaver hanging from its jaws, bad teeth glittering, covering the hood with spit and grit. It stayed there until Kennedy hit the siren. The dog went straight up into the air about ten feet, yelping, fell away to the side, claws marking the paint job, and disappeared.
Kennedy was in a pretty good mood for quite a long time afterward. It was, after all, one of the great gridlock-gonzo interludes of the season, and he’d been there to see it. His good mood lasted all the way to the squad room and held up for a good fifty-seven seconds after he got there.
Sergeant Oliver Farrell had not wasted the forty-five minutes it took Detective Kennedy to reach the squad room. He was ready with a number of persuasive reasons why he personally was unable to provide any material aid to Kennedy in his investigation. Kennedy poured himself a cup of nearly-coffee, borrowed a package of Vantage Lights from Sergeant Benjamin Kolchinski’s cache in the bottom drawer of his desk, wrote out a note for Kolchinski, left a dollar bill clipped to the note, broke open the pack, and was well into the typing of his Investigation Summary for Stokovich by the time Farrell had reached the end of his excuses, none of which Kennedy had heard. Farrell was nearing the magic number twenty, and he intended to bail out of the NYPD with his pension intact and his record of blameless if undistinguished service unsullied by any voluntary expenditure of effort. Farrell was a drone. Drink and the faintest tincture of timidity had shaped his face and his career, leaving both slightly puffed-up, tentative, and inconclusive. The infamous Knapp juggernaut had rolled perilously close to him during the black years of ’72 and ’73, stealing what little heart he might have had for the job and impressing his soul with an obsessive need to remain nearly invisible. This end he had achieved, being a man without mark or blemish, without opinion, and as sensitive to the shifting zephyrs of squad-room power politics as a fern in a glade. He was, oddly, not despised by the other men, who covered for him as best they could, but he was not respected, and respect in the society of men is breath and blood, something without which no man can flourish. Farrell was translucent by now, a difficult man to keep your mind on. By the end of his career he would be transparent or dead. It was an ugly thing to watch, and he was fortunate that the other men had enough character and grace to be gentle with him.
Maksins h
ad already assembled much of the paperwork required by the day’s efforts in the Ruiz investigation. Kennedy was nominally responsible for all the evidence, and for maintaining the Activity Log that Stokovich insisted upon. Stokovich wanted no prima donnas on the squad, and he was a bear for records, summaries, notes, duty rosters, assignment sheets. He wanted any man or woman under his command to be able to maintain notes and progress reports clearly enough that any other detective could be assigned at any stage of the investigation without disorientation or the need for lengthy briefings. Clarity such as that depended upon extensive records and detailed field-work. It also generated even more paperwork than the usual police action, pounds and reams and quires of it, along with cartons and boxes of hard evidence, tagged and annotated, cross-referenced and dated, signed for, vacuum-sealed, and nailed into reality like a deerskin on a plank. It was a good system. Stokovich’s squad had one of the best efficiency ratings in the department, it was respected by the DA’s office, and it solved a hell of a lot of its cases. Maksins and Kennedy pulled the case into shape over the next hour, wrapping the process up with a Response Report, a chronological record of the precise times, locations, dates, durations, and shield numbers of every official who had had any impact at all on the homicide case so far. Kennedy was good at this kind of thing. He had a reporter’s instinct for the telltale item, a talent for separating crucial facts from the aggregate and laying them out accurately. Maksins put together an Index for the Homicide Investigation and typed out a series of three-by-five cards with specific information about the case.
Kennedy looked up from his battered Remington, sensing a body standing over him. Farrell was there, moving from one foot to another, looking pained and avid and bored, each emotion canceling the other, adding up to zero.
Kennedy drew on the Vantage. “Yes, Oliver?”
“Ah, it’s sixteen hundred hours, Eddie. You’re supposed to call the lieutenant?”
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