Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  “Golly, Genno … I don’t know where we stand on that. What do you think? Professionally?”

  “Well, it’s certainly a complex one. How are you handling the jurisdictional problems?”

  “That’s the tricky part, certainly. We’re just trying to get all our ducks in a row here, see if something bites our asses, y’know. How’s it look from your end? What’s the DA’s position on it?”

  Maksins and McEnery had stopped talking. Wolfie was watching Kennedy talk the way a man would watch another man juggle a pair of straight razors; interested but not envious.

  “Well, naturally he’s watching it carefully. The interest level here is pretty high. We see the whole thing as … linked, you know. I can’t put it too specifically, but there’s a definite … aaah …”

  “Linkage?”

  “Exactly! I don’t have to tell you how vital it is that we observe the strictest security on this. Have you interfaced with Justice on this yet?”

  “Not directly. We’re bulletinizing them subofficially on an hourly basis, of course. But, well, can you keep this quiet? Just between us, Genno? This is pretty raw data we’re getting, and I’m not sure how far it’s going to take us. You’ll have to keep this close. I mean, if it surfaces outside Intelligence, I’m going to need deniability, you follow?”

  “Are we blue-skying it here? Are we into a covert op situation-wise? You can tell me, Eddie. I mean, we’re getting the briefing from the federal side, but you know how it is, you like to read off as many probes as possible. What are you getting from Intelligence?”

  Kennedy picked up a piece of the wrapper from his corned-beef sandwich and compressed it noisily next to the phone.

  “What was that, Genno? Genno, is this line … secure?”

  Maksins laughed outright. Kennedy waved him down.

  “Christ, Eddie! Aah, well, I mean I’m calling from the office. I think the lines are …”

  “Okay, Genno. Sorry to overreact there. You ought to know what you’re doing. What I’m hearing is that the Ruiz thing is just the state-side end of it. This thing could go all the way, investigatively speaking. We’re into loose-cannon territory here. A lot of people are getting pretty nervous. I’m going to give you this, Genno, but if it gets back to me, we never had this conversation, understand?”

  “Yes, Eddie. You have my word.”

  “Okay, Genno. This is strictly unofficial. I’m getting this right off the Phoenix system, but it’s beginning to look as if this thing goes deep deep deep into the whole Nexus project. You understand, my data is strictly down-link from the AT and F guys, and the spooks are doing most of the field work. I do know they have a mole in place right now, but nobody outside of the Combined Task Force is seeing the hard-copy. It’s at the ‘eyes only’ and ‘need to know’ stage right now.”

  “You really think this runs into the … the Nexus thing? What do you see coming out of this, consequencewise? Should this office interface directly with State? Will there be a special combined-services task force dropped into it? My case load is pretty heavy, but if you see the whole thing taking off, well, I can clear the decks pretty fast here. Be in a go-status.”

  A go-status? “Well, you’ll have to take your cues from the man upstairs, I guess. Just like us. You’ll see the inside of this one before any of us at the operational level. I’d say you should be ready for them. I know the Nexus guys are getting mucho funding. They’ll … reach out for you. That’s my reading. I’d say you should hold yourself in a go-status situation until the clearances come through from the federal level. Look, I can’t get into this any deeper. I know I’m way outside the protocol as it is. And Genno …?”

  “Yes, Eddie?”

  “Code Alpha on this whole thing, hah? That’s vital! That’s the main position we’re in. Code Alpha.”

  “Code Alpha? Okay, Eddie. Code Alpha it is.”

  “Thanks, Genno. While I have you on the landline, Genno, did you get the day sheet out of us yet?”

  “Yeah. You mean the McEnery case?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Well, forget murder second,” said Sorvino. “You got shit. No way The Man is going for that one. Even if you get a shitload of corroborative evidence, best we can give you is second-degree B felony manslaughter.”

  “What if we do get all that, and the guy rolls over as well? It could happen in this one. I can feel it.”

  Genno’s condescension paraded itself as pity.

  “Jeez, Eddie, you know I’d ramrod it through this office if I thought you had a hope in hell. But let’s face it, we’re in a cui bono situation. It’s a matter of where’s the good in it. You don’t have enough makeable cases lying around? They’re climbing up my ass already on the rape-homicide thing you caught last week, and so far I don’t see diddly on that one coming out of your day sheets. When the hell are you going to scoop those guys—Mokie and what’s his name?”

  “Mokie Muro and Tinto Olvera. We’ve got a few leads. But I’m telling you, this one, we’re close on it. Close!”

  “Hey, it’s a who-gives-a-shit situation. It’s up to you, but I’ve seen this Denzel kid’s rap sheet and he’s no loss to anyone. Best thing you can say about him, he’s dead. Nobody downtown is going to give you a breast bar for nailing McEnery, even if you can, which I doubt. Anyway, it’ll be Dennis McEnery come-on-down! Right now, I’d be willing to saw it off at a C felony manslaughter and then where’d we be with the solid stuff you’ve got? You want to see the felony assault and robbery two go down the tubes on a plea bargain, just so we can stick it to the guy over murder charges that’ll turn into accidental death if the defense is any good at all? No, you don’t. I say, go with what you’ve got. Call me tomorrow. Bye, Eddie!”

  Kennedy said goodbye into a dead phone.

  And that was the way it went. They took him to Central Booking and did him on felony assault, robbery second, and manslaughter, along with a sidecar of related junk charges. In the next few days his public defender managed to plea-bargain the manslaughter charges away in exchange for a rollover on the felony assault. In the meantime, Uncle Ray had made the kid’s bail somehow, and Dennis McEnery was back on The Deuce a month later.

  Wolfgar Maksins and Edward Kennedy got the squad car back to the Task Force garage at a little after ten o’clock in the evening. Life was picking up for the Patrol side of Midtown Central. The Hall was packed with hookers and wackos the RMPs had jerked out of the 42nd Street area. Most of the uniform people were young clean-faced boys and girls, competent, confident, happy kids, a lot of Italian faces, a few blacks and Latins, one or two blonds, more women than the force had fielded a few years back. Change. You could see it.

  Maksins and Kennedy leaned on either side of the precinct gates and watched the blue-and-whites zipping up and squealing away as the festivities got under way in the lower-midtown cross streets.

  “Well, Eddie? You want to share a cab?”

  “You packing it in, Wolfie?”

  Maksins checked his watch. “I don’t know. Rita’s on the seven-to-seven shift in Oncology. You want to get a drink? Go to Brew’s? We can snag a cab on Thirty-fourth, go straight across?”

  “Sounds good. Wolfie, how about you and me get seriously pissed and you can tell me how you got to be such a weird fucker?”

  “You buyin’, Eddie?”

  “The beer or the chicken wings?”

  “Either one.”

  “Hey, a wing and a beer. Ten of each.”

  “You’re the weird fucker, Kennedy.”

  CHAPTER 9

  CARDILLO

  They caught a cab across 34th Street to Brew’s, a cop bar at Third Avenue. Wolfie liked the boar’s head behind the long oak bar. Kennedy liked the women and the collection of snapshots of the regulars over the last fifty years.

  Typical city grumblings and rough talk went around and around the room. The bartender knew them, and he wordlessly set down a Beck’s and a Miller Lite, leaving the tab on a ledge nearby. He nodded
and smiled, a big slope-shouldered man, white-haired, seamed and softening and slightly rumpled-looking, and like all good bartenders he knew when to hover and when to give you the room. The two men drank in silence, canted into the bar, both of them settling the right foot on the rail. Beyond the tilted and uneven slopes of the broken sidewalks, 34th Street went by like a broad black river. Pools of yellow light lay here and there over the crowd in the bar, with bulked dark shadows around and in between. The air smelled of wood polish, bitters, fresh-cut lemons, the cedar-smoke-on-ice tang of brandy in a snifter a few places down. Someone at the curve of the bar was smoking a pipe, an old Petersen bent; the smoker, out of the light, sent intermittent puffs of rich blue smoke into the beam from an overhead spot, where it would billow and curl and fold in upon itself, recoil, resolve into tendrils, ascending and falling away, until someone’s hand or the breath from an argument would cut it in half and blow it into a haze, while the pipe bowl flared again.

  They talked about nothing with a great deal of conviction for a good half-hour. Kennedy had worked with Wolfgar for close to a year now. Wolfie was a newcomer to the squad, coming in on a trial basis, promoted to Homicide, in an unusual move, while still at the sergeant’s rank. He was working on detective sergeant, and it looked like he’d get it.

  Kennedy, noting Maksins’ favored treatment, speculated from time to time and in a disinterested way about the identity of Wolfie’s “rabbi” or “angel.” An influential senior officer was frequently vital in obtaining rapid promotion through the ranks. The identity of an officer’s rabbi was that person’s private business. Maksins had said nothing about his, and Kennedy was happy to leave it there. Maksins seemed like a good cop. He had brains and spine enough. It was his bloodyminded attitude about blacks that kept Kennedy from complete respect.

  Their table came up in half an hour. They ordered a basket of chicken wings and a bottle of Freixenet and when they got to the bottom of the first basket, Kennedy said to himself: Oh, fuck it, just come right out with it.

  “Stokovich tells me you knew Phillip Cardillo? That true?”

  Maksins ducked his head a bit, as if something had just gone flying past his ear.

  “Jesus, Kennedy. Don’t beat around the bush like that. Just get it out there.” He let a full minute go by, looking at Kennedy from out of those pale-blue eyes. That was all right with Kennedy. It was a fair question. If Wolfie didn’t like it, that was a fair answer. He smiled back and watched a muscle work in Maksins’ right cheek as he ate the second-to-last chicken wing.

  “No, that’s not exactly right. I saw him around the Two-Eight. He wasn’t a buddy or anything like that. Just one of the older guys, a tough guinea son of a bitch, you know? Had a way about him, always happy, always ragging the desk man, never backing away from a tussle. We were the little tads—that’s what they called us. The tads.”

  “So what happened? I mean, I know what happened to Cardillo. I got the general report. I was up at the Four-One, in the Bronx. But everybody was at Thomas Quinn and Son’s in Long Island City for the funeral. You know, Foster and Laurie and then Cardillo. All the guys were getting it in those days. Like they were giving away kewpie dolls.”

  “Curry, Binetti …”

  “The black guy … Jones? Waverly Jones?”

  “And Joe Piagentini. They shot them all down in Harlem, Eddie. They were shooting them for fun, for kicks.”

  “I remember. When Jones and Piagentini were down, they put sixteen more rounds into them, just for keepers.”

  Maksins nodded, only half-listening. Few policemen will ask another any questions about his past service. It’s as if their careers started the day they hit the same unit. The reasons for this vary. Sometimes it’s just tact; other times it’s because you never know what wound you’re going to be prodding. Better not to ask at all.

  “This was in ’71, I think? They were looking for the black guys, the Zebra Killers? Anyway, they were staking out a place up on a Hundred and Sixteenth Street, west of Lenox. The finks had said that one of the guys who shot Foster and Laurie was holed up in the building. So they had, you know, the hard guys, the stars. Sonny Grosso and Randy Jurgenson. Things are pretty cool. I was on my way in, it was maybe around noon. What happens is, there’s a Ten-Thirteen phoned in to Communications, around eleven-forty hours. They have this male black-sounding voice—he says there’s an officer in trouble at one-oh-two West a Hundred and Sixteenth Street. So of course everybody hits the bricks. They do the whole number, and the closest units are there in seconds, right?”

  Kennedy knew most of this story. What he knew very little about was Maksins himself. He made the right noises and let Wolfie tell his story. Maksins was calm, telling it with no apparent anger or intensity. He spoke as people speak about events that took place in another century.

  “So, one-oh-two West a Hundred Sixteenth Street is—tah-dah!—Mohammed Temple Number Seven, a Muslim office building they’ve turned into this Black Muslim semi-religious, semi-political hangout for their people. We had trouble all the time, in and around that place, and a lot of the street shit we were getting was a result of the speeches and the talk coming out of this Louis Eugene Walcott character, a real firebrand with that gotch-eyed look in his right eye, his hair all afro’ed and all this bandy-cock rooster flyweight arrogance coming off him. He hated. You tell me I hate the blacks—buddy, you haven’t seen hatred until you’ve tried to enforce some bylaw or make some drug collar on a Hundred Sixteenth Street in those days. And along comes this Walcott guy—he was calling himself the Reverend Louis Farrakhan by that time—he’d be on the street with his bodyguards, walking along in that funny little stiff-legged way that street guys have. We bad. I’m the baddest motherfucker you ever did see! You know all that black bullshit.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen Farrakhan. Stages big rallies at the Garden. Saw him on Donahue—Phil is trying to get him to admit he said the Jews had a ‘gutter’ religion. Farrakhan, he’s bobbing and weaving: No, sir, I believe I said ‘dirty’ religion. As if it made any goddam difference.”

  “Watch him talk, Eddie. Who’s he remind you of?”

  “Aah, Wolfie! He looks like every asshole who runs for public office. I’ve heard this black Hitler shit before. Hitler was a heavy-hitter if there ever was one. Farrakhan’s about as much like Hitler as Butterfly McQueen.”

  “Maybe. He said—I think it was last year—he said Hitler was ‘a great man’ and some crap about Hitler ‘raising Germany up from the ashes of defeat.’ What does he think about the Jews, Eddie? How about ‘Hymie Town’? And when that Coleman guy, the black reporter, put that story out, Farrakhan puts his ‘Fruit of Islam’ enforcers on the guy.”

  “Jesse Jackson is the guy who said ‘Hymie Town,’ Wolfie. Not Farrakhan.”

  “Okay, okay. So who jets off to Libya to hit Qaddafi up for a few bucks, calls him a great leader? None other than our little buddy Louis Farrakhan. Who’s calling the rest of the country a nation of ‘white devils’?”

  “I’m just saying the woods are full of assholes, Wolfie, assholes of every stripe. I can name you six white assholes I hate just as much as this Farrakhan guy without going outside the Manhattan telephone directory. Don’t build him up like that.”

  “You want to hear about Cardillo, or what?”

  “Yeah, I want.”

  “Anyway, because of the Foster and Laurie stakeout, there’s a lot of tension in the street, because, you know, they’re always doing that: calling in a Ten-Thirteen, a false alarm, just to smoke out the surveillance guys and the perp gets a chance to boogie. So you can’t ignore a Code Thirteen, but the precinct RMPs are also supposed to not make too much of a fuss and blow the stakeout thing. Anyway, they get to the Temple, answering a Code Thirteen, and there’s a whole mess of black guys standing just inside the doors. They won’t let them in, right? Well, the guys, they freak out. Here’s a Ten-Thirteen, an officer in trouble at this address, and now they’ve got all these black dudes jerking them around on t
he steps. As far as the guys are concerned, there could be a cop getting killed right then, right inside the doors. This is no time for chitchat with a bunch of niggers.”

  “Probable cause?”

  “That’s the whole argument, right there! In any other situation they would have had probable cause to go inside and check the place out. But because this Farrakhan guy has got all of Harlem boiling, we’re supposed to stand around and wait for the Muslims to let them in. If the Thirteen had gone down at the building next door, or the Arco station on the corner, they would have gone in like the cavalry and nobody would have said boo about it later.”

  “But there was some noise, wasn’t there?”

  “The Muslims say no. Our guys say yes. I don’t give a shit either way—there was a noise, there wasn’t a noise. The point is, you get a Code Thirteen, you go in, you look, and if anybody tries to stop you, down they go. Fuck them. If you can’t be sure that a Code Thirteen is going to bring the rest of the guys running, no matter where you are, no matter how deep inside somebody else’s property, then they have no right to ask you to do the job. It’s your safety net, your ace in the hole. What else have you got?

  “So, there either is or there isn’t a noise, and the uniform guys say whoops, excuse us. In they go, and up the back stairs. They get to the second floor, and pow, they’re up to their asses in crazy black bastards. Guys are jumpin’ on them from everywhere. Dropping down out of the sky.

  “The fight goes back and forth. It breaks up into small groups. People are yelling and going down. The sticks are out. Meanwhile, out in the street, of course, all the black militants are getting the word around. The supervisor sees a potential riot building. That was the big fear, of course. Watts, Chicago, Harlem, the Bronx. Riots had everybody shaking down at One Police Plaza.