Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  “That,” she declared, gesturing over her shoulder in the direction of a slope of starched sheeting from which ran several clear plastic tubes—“that is my son. I want you to know that I am dis-gus-ted, ab-so-lute-ly dis-gus-ted at the way you have allowed the worst elements of the city to as-sault an innocent young child in the very lobby of his hotel! I fully in-tend to—”

  Kennedy flipped out his shield. “Ma’am, I’m Detective Kennedy and this is Sergeant Maksins. Are you the mother of Jamie Spiegel? If so, ma’am, we are very sorry for what has happened, and we’d like to hear the story from your son. Can you step outside and have a word with Sergeant Maksins while I talk to your boy?”

  Kennedy could feel Maksins cringing from a yard away, but the woman went with him, her voice rising and falling in a harsh snappish cadence, like a lapdog with a grievance.

  The boy on the bed appeared to be sleeping as Kennedy stepped closer. He looked a little shrunken, as if he had pulled away from the flesh that covered him. He had skin like milky water, and he smelled of cigarette smoke. A hesitancy in his breathing made Kennedy think the boy was only pretending to sleep.

  “Mr. Spiegel? I’m Detective Kennedy. Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  The boy opened his eyes and looked about the room. “Is she gone? My mother?”

  Kennedy grinned at the kid. “Yeah, she’s gone. What the hell happened to you?”

  The kid looked younger than the twenty-one years set down on his chart. He stared down the coverlet at a spot on his midriff where a tube ran out from under a gauze band. A tousle of curly hair angled out from the back of his head. He sighed and looked up at Kennedy.

  “I sure screwed up this time. Do you have to tell my mother what I was doing when I got stabbed? I mean, what a putz!”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I … ahh, I was …”

  Kennedy got it immediately. “You were catching the skin flicks along Forty-second Street? Kid, if I can keep it from your mom, I will. But you’re twenty-one and I think getting stabbed is kind of a drastic punishment for taking in a few porn shops. Want to tell me about it?”

  Jamie did. He talked easily and with self-deprecating humor about his night on The Deuce. Kennedy kept his face straight and wrote steadily in another brand-new steno pad. Now and then he’d ask the boy to go over a detail, or to explain precisely where he had been when a particular move was made. Spiegel seemed to fear that he was somehow liable for damages, or open to charges, for having caused such a fuss along 46th Street. He was in some pain, and the wound, although draining well, had been deep. He didn’t seem to know much about the kind of weapon. He did say that he heard a snicking sound just before he was stabbed. Kennedy suggested a switchblade, although he knew from the ESU report that a butterfly knife had been found on the body of their prime suspect in the case. Spiegel said no, it had been a more complicated sound, a series of sounds really, like a ratchet or a chain. When the knife went in, Jamie had tried to believe that it was just a punch. He hadn’t really felt the cut. But then the man had knocked him down, and as he fell he knew he’d been cut.

  “The guy, the one who stabbed me? You be careful with him, eh? He likes to hurt people. The other one, he was out of it. I don’t think he really wanted to hurt me, you know? But that one, the guy with the marks all over his face? He liked it. He was into it, you know?” When he realized the ambiguity of the phrase, Spiegel laughed and then winced. Kennedy liked him.

  The boy had a fairly clear memory of the evening. Although he’d been frightened, he had managed to notice quite a bit. He gave Kennedy a good description of both muggers. He described the one who stabbed him as a racist. The man had called him a Jewboy. The name had had an odd effect on the mugger. The more he had used it, the closer he had come to stabbing Spiegel.

  “It was funny, you know? Like he wanted to do it to me all along? Like he was mad at me for something? I don’t know what. I was the one being killed.”

  Were any names used? The boy thought about it for almost four minutes. Kennedy waited in silence.

  “Yes. The crazy one? The one who stabbed me? He called me a bunch of names. Dickhead, Jewboy. And when I was … after I had fallen down? He said, ‘Hey crush-crush,’ and then something about a guy named Jake? And another name. But he said it. Crush-crush … and this guy Jake.”

  “Jake probably meant a cop. They call cops ‘jakes’ on the street. Can you think of that other name?”

  He tried, lying on the bed in a patched green hospital gown, tubes in his stomach, tubes up his nose. He tried very hard. Kennedy had a brief flash of the boy lying nude on a flat perforated-steel table with Charlie Marcuse leaning over him, bringing a scalpel down under a beam of sulphurous light, the edge glittering and Charlie’s rubber fingers settling into the puffy blue skin under the boy’s throat. A pump labored in the background.

  “No, Mr. Kennedy. I can’t get the name. I didn’t feel so good at that point. I’m sorry.”

  Kennedy snapped the pad shut. “Forget that, kid. I’m the one who’s sorry. Get some sleep.”

  Wolf had Mrs. Spiegel backed up against the wall outside the room. He was leaning over her, one hand on the wall, the other in his lizard-skin belt. It took Kennedy a second or two to realize that Maksins was flirting with the woman. She was staring up at him, brightness in her eyes, holding her breath, her hands clutching the huge white bag. Maksins pushed himself off the wall and extended his hand. Mrs. Spiegel took it. Kennedy thought she would lick it, but she folded it into one of her hands and disappeared in a puff of rouge and white powder. Maksins had unexpected talents.

  They fought traffic all the way across 34th Street to Ninth Avenue and worked their way around toward Midtown Central. Maksins listened to the Patrol Division Communications cross-talk while Kennedy bulled his tan Chrysler around cabs and trucks and through the masses of jaywalkers at every major intersection. The sun was high above, shining down into the streets between the walls and storefronts of lower midtown. There was a two-hour period this late in the season when daylight came right down to the ground level. The cross-talk was full of “south eddie” and “north charlie” and an angry ACU car telling Communications “no further no further” and somebody else wanted “any housing for a missing person?” You could tell the white Bronx voices and the black Brooklyn voices and the upstate twang of an older male down at Communications. “Nine Eddie, you’re ten ninety-eight stand by. One Adam, K. One Adam report of two male blacks breaking into an auto at Beaver and Broadway. Nothing further. One Adam, K? South Boy, you’re out on a sixty-one. Ten four.”

  “What d’you listen to that stuff for? If there’s a city-wide, we’ll hear the beep. Wolfie?”

  “I don’t know, Eddie. Makes me feel like a cop, I guess. Mrs. Spiegel says the kid’ll be laid up for a couple of weeks. You get anything out of him?”

  “Enough.”

  At Midtown Central the desk officer referred them to a harried plainclothes cop by the name of “Peruggio, Anthony B., up the stairs and to your left. Sir. Have a nice day. Sir.” They found Peruggio arguing with a Crime Unit man in a dirty Knicks jacket. They wandered around the cluttered squad room for a while, turning over report sheets and flirting with the black PW on the typewriter at the far end of the room. Finally Peruggio told the Anti-Crime Unit man to do something anatomically improbable and headed in their direction with a face on him that could shatter glass.

  “You here about that jumper last night? I got the sheet in the office. Which one’s Kennedy? You Kennedy? Look, I always wanted to tell you, you did a nice job on that chicken hawk up in the Bronx. You’re the one, aren’t you? Eighty-sixed the fucker? I ain’t got the wrong Kennedy, have I?”

  Kennedy concentrated on keeping his reaction small, not letting anything show. This happened from time to time.

  “Yeah. I’m that Kennedy. You have the EMS report? I hope somebody took shots.”

  Peruggio pushed through a litter of papers, photos, tapes, letters, enve
lopes, type balls, empty cigarette packs, finally coming up with a large manila envelope which he threw across the desk. It opened when it hit, spilling a fan of glossy 8 × 10’s out onto the floor. Wolf scooped them up in one low motion and dropped them in front of Kennedy.

  “Oh, fuck,” said Kennedy.

  In four of the twelve shots there were two bloody heaps of clothing and tissue, about six feet apart, shadowed and hard in the white glare of a powerful flash. It took you a moment or two to sort out the body parts and the bits and make some kind of coherent guess as to just what it was you were looking at. When you did, you got it like a gestalt, all in one corruscating and searing jolt.

  “Leave it to the uptown trains, huh? Barreled right into him, spread him out like a bialy widda shmeer, huh? One of the guys from Emergency Services hooped into his boots over it. You see this little pulpy bit over here? Halfway to the wall? No, down from that. Guy’s liver, would you believe it? Fucking liver pops right out. Not a mark on it, either. Coulda picked it up, hosed it down, and fried it right up. With onions, huh, Kennedy? So what the fuck you want with this dipshit, anyway? You’re homicide now, ain’t you?”

  Maksins waited for Kennedy to answer this one. He pulled the shots together and sat down in a hard metal chair, easing his Dan Wesson out and turning it in his huge hands, his pale-blue eyes on Kennedy.

  Peruggio lit a stogie as Kennedy laid it out for him. The jumper’s effects had included an item, a gold mezuzah on a link chain, that had been taken from a stabbing victim up on West 46th last night. They had interviewed the boy at Bellevue and he had given them reason to believe that there were two men working in concert and that one of the men was still at large.

  Peruggio sucked wetly on the stogie. He had a blond gunfighter’s moustache, stained with tobacco juice. He looked like a short-timer; he had a big belly and heavily veined hands, and he carried his piece in an ankle holster. Whatever he hadn’t seen in the NYPD he had read about later. A jumper was yesterday’s news.

  “You got a jumper here—he’s dead. You got a maybe accessory to felony assault. You got a kid with a scar who when the case comes to trial a year from now, he’s bored with the whole thing, he don’t wanna come to Noo Yawk anymore. You got the kid’s meshugana or whatever. Why you wanna go jerking around looking for somebody else?”

  “We think your jumper was pushed.”

  Peruggio snorted into his cigar. “So what? How the hell will you make that stick? Even if you find this kid, what makes you think he’ll roll over? You got zip witnesses. I know, because we turned that place upside down and as usual everybody was suddenly struck blind and deaf. Maybe the kid confesses, you get him after his shyster talks to him, and suddenly he was coerced into an ill-advised admission of guilt by two brutal cops. Give it up, Kennedy!”

  Kennedy got a little tactless. “Look, ahh, Tony, you on the Mayor’s Committee or something? Why do you want this thing shitcanned? You want to call this suicide?”

  “Hey! I don’t give a fuck if you call it chicken cacciatore! I’m just saying why call it a murder when you can call it a suicide and we all go for a drink, huh? You don’t have enough murders in this city, you gotta go make one up?”

  Maksins and Kennedy sighed and stood up. There had been some pressure coming down from Administration to lower the murder stats in New York this year. I Love New York, the Murder Capital of the World. Some of the bosses had made it clear that an iffy call between murder and suicide could be called suicide. Enough calls like that, et voila! The murder rate in New York has dropped. Everybody wins! It looked like Peruggio was slightly slanted.

  “Well, thanks for your input, Sergeant. We’ll just run the usual checks on it. If you don’t mind, hah?” Kennedy put his hand out. Peruggio puffed on the cigar for a while, staring at Kennedy. He tossed a file folder onto his desk and pulled some papers out of a drawer. “Okay, hotshot. There you go. And top o’ the marnin’ to yez!”

  Maksins got up and collected the papers again. As they were leaving Peruggio’s office, he was calling upstairs. That didn’t matter to either of them.

  They had a link between the Spiegel knifing and a John Doe killed an hour later. The victim had given them a description that seemed to fit what was left of the John Doe. And best of all, he had given them a name. They went to the computer room of the precinct. The female attendant was busy running a clipboardful of names for the station Crime Units. A couple of black patrolmen were standing in the hall when Kennedy and Maksins came up. They tipped their hats back, smiled, scuffed a little. Gold shields get that kind of treatment in the NYPD. One of the patrolmen offered to get the men a couple of coffees. Maksins and Kennedy said yes, thanks, that would be great. The attendant raised her hand, held up five fingers. Five minutes? Kennedy nodded. They waited in the hall with the patrolman eyeing both of them, obviously hungry for his own gold.

  Well, that’s how you get it, thought Kennedy. A gold shield is different from anything else in the NYPD. Technically, a gold-shield detective is a simple patrolman. He’s not a sergeant. He’s not even headed in that direction. The gold-shield designation is a separate fork in the promotion lines within the NYPD. He’s chosen from the uniform ranks, tested in something like plainclothes Anti-Crime work, or in small-time narcotics undercover assignments. If he shows wit, nerve, some ambition, and a major helping of style, he loses his “tin” and gets a “gold.” He gets that chiseled gold badge, and he becomes part of the mythical elite of the NYPD. But he’s technically a patrolman on special duty. He gets paid according to three grades: third, second, and first grade, with first being the highest. The pay is called grade money. A second-grade gold shield ranks with a sergeant, although he has slightly more unofficial status than a detective sergeant. First grade brings more money. Most of the active gold shields in the NYPD are third grade. Kennedy was a second-grade gold. By the time a man or woman gets to first grade, he or she is close to retirement. Few ranks in the NYPD have the special aura of freedom and power that a gold detective’s shield can deliver. But unlike sergeants, lieutenants, and so on, a gold shield—because he is always a patrolman operating on special duty with grade money—can be broken back to uniform with terrible speed. It’s called “flopped back to the bag” and it can happen to a gold shield with the kind of random, unpredictable, and devastating effect of a cardiac stroke. One day you make some boss unhappy, or you screw up magnificently by losing a prisoner or blowing a publicized case. The gold is gone. You are in uniform, on a portable beat, saluting a boy-child linebacker from an upstate high school.

  The attendant waved to them from the CATCH room. CATCH stands for Computer-Assisted Terminal Criminal Hunt, and it delivers NYSIIS, or Criminal Identification Numbers. They are actually two separate systems, but they work together in a very effective way. CATCH uses a hard-copy microfilm file to deliver full-size photographs of every man and woman ever formally photographed during an in-state booking process. The computer terminal connected to the CATCH system carries disk memory codes indicating which microfilm file a suspect’s photo has been stored under. The names are cross-referenced and updated regularly. It takes the attendant about five minutes to search all possible variations of a name, including street names or aliases, legally altered names, nicknames, typical abbreviations, and a range of similar-sounding or phonetically linked names. The search area can be narrowed by entering the investigating officer’s opinions about the race of the suspect, his age, any prior convictions, even a possible address or a known associate. The system takes up a large room in several city precincts, and it can be used by any officer or detective with a good reason. A printer delivers hard-copy data along with a facsimile photograph of the wanted person. The only way a suspect can have his photo deleted from the CATCH system is to apply through a lawyer and have the records purged. This rarely happens. Kennedy was going to the CATCH system first, before doing any other investigating, because he had one solid clue that, with some luck and a good operator on the CATCH machine, might
shorten the whole case. In his steno pad, under a long column of scratched notes, he had printed the words:

  CRUTCH

  CROSS

  CRUSH

  DOUBLED?

  CROTCH

  CHRIS?

  The Spiegel boy had been pretty specific about the names. Kennedy had gone back to the names three times, each time asking the question as if it had never been asked before. He got the same name, or a variable of it that was too close to argue about, and Kennedy believed it was a solid lead. The shadowy alternate name, the one Spiegel had been unable to recall, might have been the man’s birth name. Unless the kid had been quite confused, Kennedy was sure that the name he had heard was a street name. Muggers, street people, pushers, even undercover cops—they all had a string of operating names, a different name for a different circle or a different block. Kennedy talked it over with the woman in the cotton-candy red hairdo. She thought it over for a while, drumming on the keypad in front of her. Finally, she typed CRUTCH onto the green monitor. She typed the search code, hit ENTER, and sat back. In thirty seconds, three NYSIIS number codes appeared.

  Each NYSIIS number indicated a film wheel and frame number. One was an actual name, but it belonged to a criminal who had been sent to Attica only six months before. The second man was a cripple, which was how he got the nickname. He was definitely out. The third name was a young black male with a string of felonies. Possible. Kennedy made a note of all the NYSIIS files, and the attendant took down the coordinates of his microfilm mug shot.

  CROSS delivered up seventeen possible suspects. The street name was popular, although most of the people who used it were either white southerners or female. They asked for a hard-copy printout of eight of the CROSS items.

  CRUSH gave the detectives sixteen possible names. Three of them used the street name in a different spelling: one CRRUSH, one KRUSH, and one KRUSH-GROOVE. Kennedy rejected the KRUSH-GROOVE on an instinct. This felt right. The kid was here somewhere. He could smell the kid.