Close Pursuit
Page 31
The boy was embarrassed. “I have the clap. And stuff. I can’t hold my poo anymore. I need to wear a diaper.”
Mothering Christ, thought Kennedy. “Okay, we’ll do what we can.” God, the car seat! “Do you have to go now?”
“No. I have some Pampers on, anyway. But …”
There was obviously something more on his mind. Kennedy shot an exasperated look at Magenta. She just put a finger to her lips and motioned him to be still.
“I … I have to go to the doctor, right?”
“Yes, you do. You want us to take you? You want a bus? We can call one now.” Kennedy held his temper.
“My doctor isn’t a real doctor but he takes care of me. Only he’s not home. I mean, I don’t know if he’s home. The Green Ones are all in the way and I can’t see.”
“The green ones? What? The nurses?”
“So last night I had to see him at the hospital where he lives. He could give me something to fix my nose. And the other stuff. He tells me not to let them fist-fuck me too much. He tells me it’s bad for my colon. He’s nice to me.”
Definite basket boy here. “Yeah? Where is this doctor?”
“The thing is I went there and we were both waiting for him to come back home only he didn’t and so this other guy and I we waited together and this guy in the picture comes along and says he’s been waiting for hours.”
Robinson interrupted him. “This picture? This guy?”
Nunzio held the shot up in front of his right eye. His left one was badly swollen. “Yes. That was him. I know because when the vice cop was hitting me he was holding this man’s picture in front of me so when I saw the same face I knew it was him. It made me frightened all over again.”
“Let me get this straight. You saw this guy, the guy in the picture, after the cops went through here last night? Is that it?”
Robinson broke in again. “Where does your doctor live?”
“I can’t tell you that. If I tell you that then he won’t be able to help anybody anymore. He doesn’t have his license. They took his license away because he was giving us methadone so we wouldn’t be sick. He gives me free methadone so I feel better. I don’t need sky if I have my doctor. Anyway, we never went inside. My friend was waiting too and he’s the one who went away with this man in the picture. My friend says the man is his new roommate.”
Kennedy slammed the back of the seat. “Shit, kid! I don’t give a fuck if Christ himself is dealing shit out of the fucking communion bowl! You better tell me something I can use. Is our guy living with your guy? Is that it?”
Magenta was outraged. “Eddie! He’s sick! Don’t be a bastard. Anyway, he’s talking about Sugar Bowl.”
“Sugar Bowl? Where’s that?”
“Not where. Who. Azucarero—Sugar Bowl. His real name is George Blanquilla. I know where he lives.”
“The doctor, or Sugar Bowl?”
“Sugar Bowl, Eddie! There is no doctor. Nunzio is not all that healthy in the old beaneroonie, if you get my drift. His doctor is any paramedic at the Lincoln Hospital clinic who has the time to talk to him. What he’s trying to say is that your guy met with Sugar Bowl last night outside the Lincoln Hospital and that nobody has seen Sugar Bowl down here at Hunts Point for almost a week. Figure it out!”
Kennedy and Robinson looked blankly at each other.
“Wait a minute, Magenta. I’m a little confused here. Nunzio doesn’t have a doctor. What he’s trying to tell us in his own fucked-up brain is that he went to Lincoln Hospital and he met this kid …?”
“Sugar Bowl.”
“Sugar Bowl, and that while they are waiting to see some paramedic, along comes our guy, Mokie Muro, this guy in the picture, and …”
“Eddie, start the car,” said Robinson.
“Where are we going?”
“Where are we going, Magenta?” Robinson asked.
“The Melrose Houses.”
“Oh, shit,” said Kennedy.
“What?”
“The Melrose Houses are maybe ten blocks from the Blue Flame bar.”
At 1838 hours Kennedy and Robinson were standing on either side of George Blanquilla’s flat in the Melrose Houses. Although neither detective had a gun out, there was a certain tension in the air. Kennedy knocked on the door.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“Mr. Blanquilla?”
“Yes? Who’s there?”
“Police, Mr. Blanquilla. We’d like to talk to you.”
“Just a minute.” There was a sound like a drawer opening. Both men flattened against the wall far from the door, and now the guns were out.
“You sure there’s no other way out?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
There was a scrabbling at the door, chains dropping and bolts turning. It opened about two inches, enough to reveal one dark-brown eye, quite wide, and a crescent of cheek. “Yes?”
Kennedy held out his shield and ID folder. The eye studied it for a moment, and then drew back. The door closed and opened again.
“You want Mokie? He’s not home right now.”
At 1856 hours they had a Crime Unit on Morris, a van on Courtlandt, and a couple of Portables in the air shaft. Kennedy and Robinson were parked outside the Blue Flame bar, drinking coffee.
“You never worked in the Bronx, did you, Frank?”
“No. I came on in the sixties. They sent me straight to Harlem. I think they thought I was a nigger. I grew up in Vancouver. My father worked for Abitibi. I spent the first half of my life thinking I was perfectly normal. Thank God I got down here and had myself straightened out.”
“You Canadian?”
“No. Seattle originally. Nice town. Out there, everybody is my color, only it’s not the skin. It’s the rain. It rains all year ’round. You don’t tan. You rust.”
“You must have loved Harlem. Where’d they put you?”
“Where else? The Two-Eight. I did okay. Except for the roaches. I stopped believing in God when I saw my first roach nest. You know, I once calculated that there must be over six billion roaches in Harlem. There are more cockroaches in Harlem than there are people on the planet. It’s a good thing they don’t vote.”
A black woman in tight blue jeans and a satin jacket with a Black Socks logo came out of the Blue Flame bar and jogged along on her stilettos, heading in their direction with no particular ideas showing on her face. When she got even with the car, she made a sudden move, ducking down and slipping into the back seat.
“He’s there. He’s been there for about an hour. How you want to do this?”
“Well, what is it, Officer …?”
“Peavey, Violet G.”
“Yeah. What’s the scene in there. Where is he in the bar?”
“Right at the back, in a booth, with his eyes on the front door. Got his back up against the wall. Looks like a tense little shit. You been in there yet?”
Robinson laughed “Only three times today. Anybody with him? Any kind of support in there?”
“No. He’s alone as far as I can see. I sat at the bar and had a Coors with Ziggy. Let’s be careful with Ziggy, huh? He’s a nice guy. One of my best finks. I don’t want to see him getting hurt.”
Kennedy didn’t like that. “You think he’ll tip the guy? You know, help out another hard-luck pachuco?”
Officer Peavey gave Kennedy an up-and-down. She had just the faintest tint of violet color on her cheeks, and a dusting of gold sparkles in the shadows around her eyes. Kennedy took the chance to look right back at her. Nice-looking woman. He was starting to have a regular obsession about black women: hate them, love them. Say what you want, they sure had the eyes. Kennedy wondered if she’d like his scars. Would he like hers?
“Ziggy knows what the guy’s on the hook for. He wants to see you blow his fucking creep head right off. Are you?”
Kennedy said nothing. Robinson smiled over the seat-back at her. “I hope so, sweetheart. I sincerely hope so.”
“Good,” said Officer Peavey.
“Depends,” said Peavey. “What is it?”
“What have you got on under that jacket?”
Peavey’s face went through a number of changes.
Robinson’s face was closing up. “Eddie—”
“No,” said Kennedy. “That’s not what I meant.”
Violet Peavey was quiet for a moment. Then she smiled.
Officer Peavey reached for her zipper.
CHAPTER 14
THE DOPPLER EFFECT
Kennedy let himself wonder, for just a little while, sitting in his Plymouth outside the Blue Flame bar, how kids like Mokie Muro manage to get along with themselves. How do they cope with somebody’s last breath puffing up into their faces? Kennedy had killed one man in his whole career and he hoped never to kill another. So how did Mokie do it, work it around in his mind? Make it come out that the victim really wanted it, or that he had to do it?
Mokie Muro must have been feeling pretty good because he was smiling to himself when the black couple came in the front door. But he noticed there was something strange about them. The satin jacket had been on the woman the last time he’d seen her, standing at the bar. Hadn’t it?
Robinson and Peavey never looked his way, not once, but he bolted anyway. He was up and out of that booth and slamming through the kitchen on his way to the back door, smashing through the swinging doors, over the garbage in the slippery hall, slamming a palm against the plaster to keep upright, skittering, hearing the voices shouting behind him, and the heavy feet, and the woman cursing him. He may have tensed up across the back, trying to feel the shot as it punched through. He may even have felt a little self-pity. He probably did. Tinto Olvera was thinking along the same lines yesterday, thinking about how it wasn’t fair and he didn’t mean to do it and she was just asking for it. Mokie and Tinto, they were both like that. God knows where they thought they were going to run to. People like to put things off as long as they can. It’s just human nature. They like to pretend that things will work out okay. Some neurologists suggest that we even have a biological mechanism to help us with it, a denial gland. It’s a great concept. Quite liberating, really. With something like that pumping away inside us, who needs a heart? Don’t shoot me, Officers, says Mokie Muro, flying down the back hall of the Blue Flame bar. It wasn’t my fault. Give me another week, I’ll have convinced myself I wasn’t even there. Just don’t kill me.
And nothing exploded out the front of his chest in a meaty red ball. Nothing smacked its way through the back of his head, through the years of his childhood and his teenage years—what it was like at Spofford, getting his first taste of pussy, his first spike full of crank and the red blood rising in the bulb, the greasy pink thrill of raping.… Those memories stayed intact as he cleared the last crate and flew toward the door, and he was still pulling in the air and pushing it out, all systems were go within a foot of that door.… He must have thought how sweet it is to be alive. He must have thought: Please, God, don’t let them kill me. Because he knew they wanted to kill him and it wasn’t his time. Just let me get to that door and don’t kill me please till I get through that door.
And back of that was the thought that if he got through the door he’d just ask to make it to the next block and there’d be another request when he got there. It was the Doppler effect of a soul on the run, sending back a cry: Let me get to the door. Let me get to the street. Let me get to paradise still standing on my feet. Some of us even deserve it. Some of us go just saying Please let this kid not kill me. Please let this kid not kill my child. Let him just rape me and call it a day.
Mokie hit that door with the point of his shoulder, in the air, flying, well on his way, his ears full of the crash of it and the hinges tearing and the wood splinters tumbling in the fading light.
Eddie Kennedy put everything he had that kick, the Chief not even in his hand, Kennedy not wanting to kill him, just kick him in the crotch. You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes, you get to give it.
Kennedy and Robinson rolled back into Manhattan around eight in the evening, into a major thunderstorm rocking and rolling on the Triborough Bridge. They felt the power of the storm in the tires and in the steel of the bridge itself. Through the wrack and shreds of cloud and the lateral rain, midtown and downtown shimmered and wavered, wrapped in a pale aura of slimy light. The East River was a sea of wild black water, showing white along the pilings and foaming in the races. Roosevelt Island and the 59th Street Bridge looked like cruise ships foundering.
Robinson cracked open another Coors, the foam shooting out over the dashboard. Kennedy took his and held it so tight it crackled. The cold hurt to the bone.
“Here’s to us,” said Robinson. They drank a toast in silence, listening to the wind.
Mokie Muro was under guard at Lincoln Hospital, riding an ice pack like Cowboy Bob, looking a little stretched around the cheeks and eyes. They’d have to go back and get him in the morning. The intern had been critical. There had been talk of ruptures and internal bleeding. He had raised the grim specter of sterility and lawsuits. Kennedy had thanked him, quite sincerely, and walked out to the squad car to wait for Robinson. Stokovich was a happy man, up in Westchester County, with his feet up on a hassock and his wife flipping through Woman’s Day. “Go home,” he said. “Get drunk. Kiss Robinson for me.”
“I will,” said Kennedy, hearing the wind through the lines.
“So what do you think, Eddie? Think the island will blow away?”
“That? Look at it, Frank. Nothing moves that town.”
He looked over at Robinson, watching his face.
“I gotta tell you, Frank. Sometimes it’s true. All I can see are your eyes.”
“How’s the beer? We have three left.”
“I’m fine, Frank. You go ahead.”
“Tell me something, Eddie. If they’re crazy, why do they run?”
There was nothing to say to that. “Don’t go all philosophical on me now.”
“Yeah? Then tell me something else, Eddie. You popped a guy once, up in the Bronx, isn’t that right?”
After a pause, Kennedy said, “Yes. I did.”
“A chicken hawk, wasn’t it? I heard it was a chicken hawk. Some guy was killing children, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah. He was.”
“I heard he racked you up, in one of those burnouts in Morrisania. I heard you got pretty fucked up, fell through a hole?”
Kennedy said nothing. What could he say?
“They ever find that kid? The one who went missing?”
“Yeah. They found him. He was dead.”
Kennedy ran into traffic on the FDR. Frank turned on the radio, ran through some stations, uptown chatter, midtown swing, a couple of rock channels, until he found somebody willing to play a little slow dancing and shut the fuck up while he did it. Nothing more was said until Kennedy got them down to the 49th Street turnoff. There was more traffic around U.N. Plaza, but the wind was easier.
“I met this cop once, from out of town. A detective. He was telling me about this homicide they caught. It’s June, and it’s hot, right? Eddie?”
“Hey, I’m here. It’s June and it’s hot.”
“Okay, so they find this kid, he can’t be any more than twelve or thirteen. All he’s wearing is a pair of shorts and a thin blue T-shirt. He’s in a park, on his back, kind of folded up into himself, next to some trees. It looks like somebody has tried to bury him in the grass. But only a couple of inches. Like they tried to push him into the soil and they gave up when it was only half done.”
“Are we going somewhere with this, Frank?”
“Yeah. There’s a catch. The kid is frozen solid. He is a solid block of frozen flesh. It’s June and the kid is lying in the grass, it looks like he’s been l
ying there for a couple of hours, and he’s still frozen solid.”
“Was he dumped from a truck or something? Kept in a freezer and just dumped in the park?”
“No. There were no footprints, no tracks, no sign that anybody had ever stepped on that piece of ground. If somebody had dumped him there, they’d have to have left some sign of it. There was nothing.”
“No way. Not possible. They must have missed it.”
“Not this guy. He was a sharp cop. If it was there, he’d have found it. It wasn’t that the first guys on the scene had just screwed up the sight. There were no marks at all. And the kid was frozen solid.”
“No marks? Your guy was sure? Then it’s impossible. He’s telling you a story.”
“No. That’s the thing. It wasn’t impossible. Can you figure it out?”
Robinson left him alone to try. All the way down Second, Kennedy thought the thing over.
Finally, he got it. “This park. Was it anywhere near a flight path? Was there an airport around?”
“Yes. Right on both counts.”
“Was the park close enough to the airport that the planes would be putting their wheels down as they went over it? Over the park?”
“Yes.”
“A stowaway. The kid was a stowaway. They find any ID on him?”
“No. Flat broke and busted.”
“So he got over the fence, in some rat’s-ass airport, in Guadeloupe or Haiti, someplace in the Caribbean. Plans to go to A-may-ree-ca. He hides in the wheel well of some big airliner. It takes off. He freezes to death at thirty thousand feet. The plane comes in to land at the airport. The wheels go down. Out comes the frozen little kid. He drops a couple of thousand feet and ends up, frozen, half-buried, in the middle of your park. With no footprints or tire tracks to explain how he got there.”
“Bingo! You got it!”
“Yeah, I got it. So what’s your point?”
“The point is, Eddie, that there’s no point to it. It’s just what it is. You know that as well as I do. You even said it to Wolfie, the other night.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He told me about it. He was thumping the drum about Cardillo. Remember? He was all upset about that dipshit Farrakhan, and you said to him—I remember it because Wolfie had written it down—you said—”