“But then, I don’t know, he changed. His mood changed or something and he started talking different, like he was mean.”
Lauver had heard the play before. A guy like Angelo knew he’d reached his now-or-never point and he had nothing to lose.
The redhead shivered and started crying again. She managed to stop herself and then she continued after she’d wiped her eyes.
“He said, well … he said, ‘You girls into rough fucking?’
“We didn’t say anything at all. I guess we didn’t want to know what he meant. And then he started driving real slow and it looked like he was going to park the car up against the curb somewhere. God, I was never so scared in all my life.
“So he manages to get the big limo double-parked for a while and we hear all the door locks click shut on us and there we were, all of us in the back of that limo and we couldn’t get out or anything. Angelo turns around and starts talking to us.
“He starts telling us that if we do what he wants, he’ll get us any drugs we want and we can meet a lot of important people and that we’ll all have a lot of fun anyway because he knows just how to please three … well, he called us ‘cunts.’ He said he knew just how to please three of us, all at once.
“I started thinking maybe he had a gun or something. So I screamed, or maybe I just thought I did …”
“You screamed, all right,” one of the blondes said.
“Well, Angelo pushed a button up front and the doors opened and he said, ‘What do you think, I’m going to rape you?’ And he had this look on his face like he was real mad at us for thinking something like that of him.
“We moved pretty fast then. We just got out the limo door on the street and thank God there was a taxicab coming along. The taxi stopped for us and we got in.
“So we just started crying and the taxi driver didn’t know what to do and we just told him to get out of there, fast. So he was driving along when all of a sudden we could see Angelo and his limousine pull up alongside of us in that taxicab.
“He was in his limo, driving along, and he was laughing at us and he had this gun.”
“It was Third Avenue and what?”
“Third and Sixty-ninth.”
“Two blocks from the station house.”
“Yeah, just around the corner.”
“How many shots?”
“I don’t know. Three maybe. We had the windows open. The shots went right through.”
“From one end to the other?”
“Clear through, except once and a window was cracked.”
“And I’ve got the cabby’s hack number and the limo license plate number?” Lauver looked at the notes on his desk.
He had them.
“So that’s what happened. Then this Angelo just drove off and we didn’t see him again and we came here in the taxi.”
“How come the driver didn’t come in with you?”
The redhead shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, thanks a million,” Lauver said. “I have your local number?”
He did.
It was as good a place as any to sack out the night. Until sometime around the second week of January, when the air gets dry enough to really hold the cold, a man can sleep without freezing himself right out on the streets of New York. If he’s lucky, he can find a grating that has some good warm steam shooting up from below, or even a steam tunnel like Joe finds for himself. He’ll be all right if he’s got a little alcohol in him. Another way of keeping warm is to sleep alongside your partner for some extra heat.
Bandana Bill, Frenchy and Whispering Ed bunched up together on the mattress after finishing off the Mad Dog 20/ 20 and nodded off amid the noise of motor traffic on both sides. Nothing to stop for on Houston Street at First, so it seemed safe enough. Frenchy kept his leg strapped on tight. He had enough of his brain left to know someone might steal it from him, just to be mean.
Whispering Ed dreamed about hunting up in the Adirondack Mountains again, and he dreamed something about a Sam Shepard play and a song about V-8 engines in that play.
And then he heard screams.
Whispering Ed opened his eyes and he saw flames.
Frenchy was screaming, struggling to get up onto his foot and his wooden leg. And he was flapping his arms against his pants legs, which burned orange and smoked and smelled of gasoline.
Ed’s cuffs blazed, too, and he screamed and jumped up to his feet, then went back down and rolled around on the cement and managed to douse the fire.
Bandana Bill was okay, and for just a moment, Ed thought he might have done it.
But then he heard running feet and laughter more crazy than he’d ever heard from Bandana Bill.
He could just make out the sight of three or maybe four young men, probably no more than eighteen years old and maybe younger because they all wore high school varsity jackets from someplace. They ran up the traffic island and one of them carried a can that sloshed with gasoline. They jumped into a car.
Whispering Ed pushed Frenchy down to the pavement and Frenchy hurt himself with the fall, but he wouldn’t know about that for a while because he was screaming in pain from the fire that licked up and down his pants.
Bandana Bill jumped on his partner, putting out some of the fire by pressing his body against Frenchy’s good leg and his wooden one. He got it under control. Now there was only the sickening smoke from what was left of Frenchy’s pants, and the smell of burned wood and the shrillness of Frenchy’s screams.
Whispering Ed started running for the car.
The car lurched away with a ripping squeal of tires and all that Ed saw was the color green and a license plate from Jersey. If he’d had his service revolver with him, he could have stopped the car maybe. Then maybe he would have killed the punks.
Chapter 12
“He’s over there.”
Orange Lips the stoolie pointed with a long, bony index finger through the window of the unmarked Chevrolet. Monahan peered through the gray cloud of cigarette smoke that Orange Lips had made across a vacant lot at the corner of East Ninety-sixth Street that was strewn with used condoms and broken glass. There was a thin young black man in a knit cap in the distance. He was smoking, too. Monahan could see the circle of orange at the tip of a cigarette in the darkness of the morning. He looked as nervous as Monahan felt.
“We’ll walk it,” Monahan said. “Get out.”
“Shee-it!”
“Let’s go.”
Monahan slipped quietly out the driver’s door, shut it lightly. Orange Lips made a slamming fuss on his side. Monahan walked around the front of the car and grabbed Orange Lips by the back of his neck. He dug his thick fingers deep into Orange Lips’ skin, then pressed hard against his collarbone. He used his other hand to cover Orange Lips’ mouth.
“You don’t come along with me on this nice and quiet, pal, you’re going to get a little cop hell. You know what I mean, don’t you, Orange Lips?”
Monahan released him. He wouldn’t have any more trouble.
The two men walked across the lot, in the direction of the nervous thin man in the distance, the ASPCA Building looming behind him. The air was damp and a little chilly. Monahan hadn’t slept all night, not with Orange Lips to watch and not with the idea that he might have Kano collared in the morning.
The thin man spat the cigarette out of his lips and stepped on it when it hit the ground. Orange Lips spoke.
“This is the detective dude, man,” he said to the thin black man. To Monahan, “This is Moses.”
Neither man offered a hand.
“What do you got for me, Moses?” Monahan asked.
“Hey, Mick, you tell Moses what you got for him, understand?”
“For you, maybe I got criminal association. You know Orange Lips here and you’re violating your parole just by talking to him and I know you did because here we all are, right? So that’s enough for me to crack you on a nickel beef. You got me up out of my warm bed on this cold morning, away from my nice wa
rm lady and standing around here with two pieces of the ugliest shit walking the streets and I’m mad, see, so maybe I’ll just do the nickel beef. What do you say?”
“Motherfuck—”
“Not a bad idea, slimeball. Where’s your mama, anyway?”
Moses cocked an arm and swung at Monahan, but Monahan knew what he was doing, knew the punch was coming, and blocked it with his right forearm. At the same time, he raised a knee into Moses’ crotch and made a dull, painful contact.
Moses fell to his knees, both hands between his legs.
“Get up,” Monahan said. He turned to Orange Lips. “You get him up, pal, or you get the same and then I’ll run you both in to that little museum we talked about.”
Orange Lips stuck out his hand and Moses used it to right himself.
“Okay, toilet cake,” Monahan said. “Let’s get it straight and short because I can’t take much more of your stink.” He reached into his breast coat pocket and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill, then slapped it into Moses’ hand. “Give it to me.”
Moses told him quick about the all-night filling station uptown, told him how Kano used it twice a week, just where he drove into the place, how long it took to fill up the Lincoln and which direction he took leaving.
“Ever anybody with him?” Monahan asked.
“Just puss.”
“All the time or some of the time?”
“Puss sometime, sometime a bimbo. You know, white-bread shit. He most always with puss one kind or another.”
“One, two? More?”
“Sometime two pusses. Least one all the time.”
“And that’s all?”
“Kano be the only cannon, if that’s what you’re sayin’. He do what he do all by his lonesome, man. He run with the players sometime,’cause he can’t keep his hands off that white shit, but he don’t run with nobody like him.”
Monahan liked it. It sounded right, like Moses wasn’t hiding anything, like he knew just what he knew and no more. Monahan almost felt sorry about kneeing Moses in the balls. He put his hands behind his back, clasped them, looked around to see if Moses had any friends nearby. Not so far as he could tell.
“How’s the family jewels?” he asked Moses.
“Fuckin’ poe-lice brutality, man!” Moses turned his head and spat on the ground defiantly. He would have spit in the cop’s face if he could and then he would have cut him and thought nothing about it. Under the circumstances, though, it was best to complain about police brutality.
“Sometimes I wonder if a turd like you could have thought up that phrase all by himself,” Monahan said.
Moses looked at Orange Lips, his eyes flashing. “This poe-lice a case, man. He makin’ me awful hot.”
“Now I want you two to come along with me,” Monahan said.
“Hey, I ain’t goin’ nowheres with no nutjob pig, man!” Moses said.
“Come on, brother. We goin’ be okay if we just get the hell out of here, right?” With that, Orange Lips put a friendly grip on his pal Moses’ shoulder.
Monahan almost could have kissed Orange Lips. Almost.
He grinned at his two snitches. “Now look how good it can be when the law-abiding members of the community cooperate with their local law enforcement agents. I tell you fellows, America is a wonderful place.”
“Motherfucker’s a fuckin’ case, man!” Moses said to Orange Lips.
Dominick Salvato awoke with the usual nightmare. He sat up in bed and drew his knees up to his chest and clasped them with his arms. He trembled a little less that way. There was a roaring sound in his head, something like a subway express train barreling around a curve, somewhere beyond visibility.
It hadn’t come in a while, the nightmare. For two days, he didn’t sleep. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw it. Then everybody worked on him—Inspector Short, a psychological counselor for the department, the department lawyer, his family, his fellow officers at the Nineteenth.
It’s not your fault.… The guy was a creep, a rapist creep who took aim at you. … You did what you had to do. … He was nothing and all the people he was victimizing, including your partners, had to be protected. … You helped the innocent and the weak against this creep, this racist, this scum of the earth.
For a few hours at a time, sometimes only a few minutes, it all helped. But then Salvato could only seem to see this nobody kid, a good-looking Puerto Rican kid who no one claimed at the morgue, this kid who was buried now under the earth somewhere out on Hart Island, the Potter’s Field of New York. He saw that handsome kid, dark-eyed and wavy-haired, his face so eerily peaceful in death, lying there in the blood on the street. It was Salvato himself who first noticed that the weapon aimed at him was a pellet gun.
Dominick Salvato had gone to his priest:
It’s not a question of right or wrong, son. … There isn’t anything I can tell you that will take away your pain. … But try to understand how life-affirming your own pain is, son; it shows you’re humane and compassionate, it shows you reverence life if you feel so responsible for the death of even one of the least of us. … Don’t you see?. … Given the facts at hand, you were the man who happened to have had to do what was inevitable. … We can only work to your grace now; you and I can pray for the soul of this Miguel. …
The priest’s words helped Salvato more than he thought they would. “Everybody says that,” the priest told him. “We’re not so bad, you know, even though our mothers dressed us funny.”
The priest’s humor helped, too. But even that, along with his wisdom, was enough. Salvato began to learn what most every other cop in the same situation learns, that the power he holds is more awesome than he ever imagined—and the consequences of that power as well.
A thought popped into his head as he sat up in bed, as he pulled at his legs to keep them from shaking: Maybe I’ll go up there to Hart Island someday, to Miguel’s grave …
He learned, too, to take comfort in the occasional nightmare as the closest thing to knowing an understanding source, a friend who had gone through precisely the same experience. The nightmares, though they hurt his head, also did their part to make Salvato understand that what had happened under those streetlamps was a tragedy, not an evil.
Yet for a time, Salvato had thought his burden might be lighter if someone could find that he had been wrong, that somehow he shot the wrong person, shot when something short of deadly force would have done the job of stopping a thief. Something! Some way that punishment could be visited on him, some way that he might be made to feel he could pay for what happened.
But no one had anything for him on that order. Everyone comforted him. Salvato didn’t even have the accusation of police brutality leveled against him. If someone had told him he would have welcomed such a charge, he would have denied it. Yet he did wish he could feel punishment coming. The priest said it was his “Catholic guilt” working against him and laughed.
Everyone felt sorry for Dominick Salvato, the cop who killed the “creep,” the “rapist creep.”
Children who lived on his street in the Woodhaven section of the Bronx looked at him oddly. Salvato was the big guy who killed somebody. Watch out for Officer Salvato! Hey, Officer Salvato, are you going to shoot me?
Salvato shut his eyes. He opened them and looked toward his bedroom window, saw his reflection and didn’t recognize it. He shook again.
Then a thought hammered into his head. It came to mind like some half-forgotten old tune:
Too much power… too much power for any one man … maybe too much power for me.…
Later, after another hour of lying awake in his bed, Officer Dominick Salvato arose, dressed and took the subway train into Manhattan. He walked through the big, dreary lobby of the Nineteenth Precinct station and past a wall he refused to look at.
On a section of wall just outside Inspector Short’s office was a plaque proclaiming Dominick Salvato “Cop of the Month.”
Detective Joe Simon had the identification by early after
noon. “McC” was Paul McRae and was a forty-four-year-old city manager of a suburb of San Francisco, unmarried. It was easy enough. He put out the only clues he had to his counterparts in San Francisco, who in turn made the information known via California’s LEIN—Law Enforcement Information Network. Missing persons reports were checked and up popped the name Paul McRae, who never returned home from attending a wedding in New York City.
Simon got hold of the bridegroom in New York, who turned out to be a longtime friend of McRae’s who broke his pal’s heart by marrying a woman. The bridegroom gave Simon the preliminary identification he would need to put some money out on the street to anybody with a special knowledge of murky goings-on among the more discreet homosexuals living in the Nineteenth Precinct.
But he didn’t hope for much.
A few more clues had popped up in the meantime. McRae stayed on in New York for at least three days longer than he had planned, without notifying his parents back in California; he’d stayed in New York for the initially scheduled two days at the Hotel Wyndham on West Fifty-eighth Street and kept to himself, so far as anyone at the hotel knew; his lodgings were unknown after that; in New York, he knew only his old friend, no one else; he had disappeared from the site of the wedding reception without saying farewell to his friend or his friend’s bride.
There were loose ends all over the place and Simon knew it and knew there was nothing he could do about it. Just then, anyway. No detective enjoys that. It seems disrespectful and it isn’t anything like the cop television shows, shipshape little dramas that insist on the image of a cop with lots of wavy blow-combed hair with the luxury of being able to drop everything in the way of a case load when someone decides to kill someone else.
Joe Simon has a bald head and gravity has a grip on his belly and he smokes too many cigarettes. A lot of the time, especially on homicide cases, he wishes he were that TV dick. Things would be so much simpler.
She hadn’t the slightest idea who was feeding the material to the top brass, but she had always feared the worst and now her fears had come to pass. Officer Cibella Borges sat at the kitchen table of her mother’s apartment on the Lower East Side, dropped her head into her arms and sobbed. In the other room, her mother was sleeping, her mother who had been praying for days.
Precinct 19 Page 18