Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  Walking into the conference room in the DA’s office the next morning, I smelled blood everywhere. It was like I was a cat in a seafood restaurant and all around me were my back-alley hunting buddies, who were coming up with a plan to crack open a tank filled with plump pink salmon.

  Paul sat at the head of the table in his favorite blue suit. Two other ADAs, one from Rackets and one from Narcotics, and I sat to his left. Chief Elliot was on his right followed by Reddy, the DA from Kings County; his chief; and a police detective from their precinct in Downtown Brooklyn.

  I’d been away from the office for nearly a week, but when I walked into the conference room with my coffee cup in one hand and my laptop in the other, I smelled the blood, and sitting down in my chair to Paul’s right was like sinking my teeth into a rare piece of fish steak—the first bite. I let the feeling rush through me and looked around to see that we were all enjoying the same invisible meal. These men, all men, were determined to fill their bellies.

  I found Carol at her desk. I was unusually happy to see her. We’d actually hugged, and then she’d launched right into her notes for the day, asking if I’d had a chance to open the files she’d placed on the drive about the case. I lied and said I had. Really, it was only a half lie. I did open one of the files, but I couldn’t focus on anything after I got the news about Vonn and was waiting to hear back from King. I was so on edge I wanted to go downstairs to the store and get a bottle of Jameson. But I remembered my promise to Kent, so I took two of the pills King gave me instead and got into bed with my iPad and the case notes opened.

  As soon as I started reading the first paragraph, my cell phone started buzzing with a new message. I rushed to pick it up from the nightstand, sure it was King. It wasn’t. Just a mass text from my gym letting me know about the “summer sizzler sale.”

  I decided to take a short nap. Just a few minutes to calm myself down and then I’d get back at it. While it was an honest plan, that nap tumbled into a restless slumber that led to another car-accident nightmare, where I was yet again behind the wheel.

  When I awoke in the morning, I found my hand clutching my cell phone.

  “LeTiffany Tedget, known on the street as ‘Yellow,’ was arrested at Brooklyn College two months ago for prostitution and intent to sell prescription drugs.” Reddy had gotten up and started giving the background information on the drug ring with reach into both boroughs. He’d opened with the basics Paul shared with me the day before. “While Major Narcotics Investigation tried to hold her and get some information about her supplier, we didn’t have a whole lot on her, so we had to let her go.” As Reddy spoke, on the conference room projector he flashed arrest photos of a frail, light-skinned black woman who looked noticeably strung out. While the craters in her cheeks and pale peeling lips suggested that she was a meth addict, it was easy to tell she’d been beautiful in another life. “A week later, Yellow’s body was found on the bank of the East River.” He flashed crime-scene photos of her nude body spread on the riverbank. Her eyes were open and white with film. “She’d been shot in the back of the head.” The images switched from her muddy breasts to black bloody clumps of hair at the base of her skull, right above long keloids that looked like garden snakes beneath her skin slinking up her spine.

  “What’s that on her back?” Paul asked, pointing.

  “Lesions from some kind of incident. The coroner’s report says they’re fairly new,” Reddy said, looking down at the report in his hands. “Likely from trauma caused by some kind of instrument.”

  “A cheese grater,” I said, looking at the large image on the screen and remembering how Bernard had described the dancer Miguel Alvarez brutally attacked in front of him, the skin tearing off her back like Swiss cheese.

  “Yes,” Reddy said, looking up at me. He was an old prosecutor whose remarkable instinct made him very popular throughout the state. Like Paul, he liked working closely with detectives and police officers. He liked to keep his ear to the street, connecting law with order. “That’s what the coroner suggested.”

  “You know this woman?” Paul asked me.

  “Bernard Richard mentioned her attack during an interview about Miguel Alvarez and the Candy Shop indictment,” I said. “She was a stripper. Started selling for Alvarez. He turned her out. Beat her up pretty bad. Guess she moved on to Brooklyn.”

  “That’s how Special Victims Bureau got the lead on her supplier. They started passing her picture around, showed it to a Dominican stripper they busted in a car in back of Pumps,” Reddy said, referring to a strip club in East Williamsburg that was known for prostitutes. “If they took her in, it would’ve been her first trip to Rikers, so she started talking really fast. Said Yellow was her roommate. She’d stopped working in the club when her old pimp scarred up her back. And since then, she’d been on the street selling for this man—”

  I was taking notes on my laptop, so it took a minute before I looked up at the new image on the screen.

  “Rig McDonnell,” Reddy started, and the two words stung me harder than King’s face in a mug shot behind Paul’s head, “is the co-owner of Damaged Goods, a hole-in-the-wall bar in downtown Brooklyn.”

  I felt like King’s blue eyes were staring right at me—his eyes and everyone else’s at the table. Like the next picture on the screen would be of me. The next question aimed at me.

  Reddy added, “For a long time, Narc has known about Rig’s dealings in organized crime. His father, Dr. Rig Conor ‘R.C.’ McDonnell, started opening pain clinics in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the early nineties.” Reddy switched to a map of New York with, like, twenty stars dotting neighborhoods throughout the boroughs. “Soon that ballooned into operations in middle-income communities in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and even Westchester.”

  “They were nothing more than pill mills pumping oxycodone,” one of the Brooklyn detectives, Kern Strickland, said, jumping in. “Narc shut most of them down in 2000.” I knew Strickland from a few cases I’d taken on that led me to Brooklyn. He was a brother. Had a bald head and a distinct distaste for lawyers. I always noticed it in how he spoke to me or over me. At first I thought he was just like the other boys who thought girls shouldn’t be playing on their ball court and resented me for whatever power I had, but then I saw that he treated all lawyers with the same judgment—man or woman, black or white, he held us all in contempt.

  “But before that happened, the clinics made him a very rich man. And even when Narc shut down the clinics and took his license to practice in New York, McDonnell opened legal pain clinics and had his old doctors writing prescriptions for him like bus passes. Dr. Stan Xuhui Li, one of the doctors on McDonnell’s payroll, wrote more than seventeen thousand prescriptions in thirty months,” Reddy said, flashing pictures of Li and King’s father on the screen. “We took Li down last year. Tried to get to McDonnell, but he used his muscle and his money and went underground. But he’s still out there. We think he’s in somewhere in Central America—Belize maybe.”

  “That brings us back to his son—Rig. He goes by ‘King’ on the street,” Strickland said when King’s photo was on the screen again. Strickland fit the typical profile of a black Brooklyn detective—tall and muscly with a walk that carried the weight of the heavy-ass chip on his shoulder. He was no lawyer, but he wanted blood, too.

  “You okay?” Paul whispered to me. “You look sick.”

  “I’m fine,” I replied. “I’m just a little thirsty.” I kept my eyes low and off the screen, so Paul couldn’t read anything into my reaction to King’s image—if he hadn’t already.

  He reached past me and picked up the carafe to pour water into the empty glass beside my laptop.

  Reddy went on, “As I said earlier, Rig has been using his daddy’s money to make moves through this nightclub.” He showed a picture of Damaged Goods. “Working with a couple of local thugs—small-time dealers—for a while. We’ve kept our eyes on them. Kept our eyes on Rig.”

  Reddy explained that King had the perfect plan to mo
ve drugs out of Damaged Goods. The girls at the club, and at that point I was assuming it was the beauties I’d seen lined up at the bar at Damaged Goods, had prescriptions from actual doctors throughout the city. He registered a pain clinic to the club’s address, legally dispensed pills to the women using their prescriptions, and even acquired medical insurance payouts for the drugs. They then went out and sold the pills. Gave King 90 percent of the profit. The women played it safe though. They were all strippers who used their beauty to work the college scene and sell to an audience that couldn’t get enough until it was all too late. They sold everything from codeine to Ritalin. They hosted “welcome back” parties at the beginning of the semester. Had payment plans to collect student loan funds and even took credit cards. They were working the stripping parties legally and just added the cost of the Baggie to the cost of the dance. It all appeared legit until the kids started dropping off like flies toward the end of the semester, showing up at addiction clinics shaking and begging their suburban parents for more pills.

  It was hard for me to hold the Cronut I’d eaten for breakfast in my stomach as I ingested the information about King. As Reddy and the detective carried on, I pretended to take notes to keep my eyes off of the images, but all I could feel was King all over me. Hear him in my ear. Feel him inside of me. There was buzzing in my ear. The croissant/doughnut tossing around in my stomach. I was asking myself every question that began with “What the fuck?” and ended with “How didn’t I know?”

  The last week was in instant replay in my mind. Every minute since I walked into Damaged Goods. Since King walked into Damaged Goods.

  I heard Reddy say, “We had reason to believe McDonnell was behind LeTiffany’s murder.” Through the corner of my eye, I saw King’s mug shot beside the photo of Yellow’s body beside the river. I took air fast into my nose to calm an uneasy feeling growing in my stomach. “We have statements from her roommate that Yellow was afraid because King’s crew heard about her arrest. They thought she was talking to us, and that was how she got dead.”

  “Real dead,” Strickland chimed in.

  “I don’t get it. If you had the statement from the roommate, how didn’t you get an arrest?” Paul asked.

  “We brought all the guys in,” Reddy explained, moving his slides along to a collage of pictures of every one of King’s friends I’d seen with him at the club—including Vonn. “We were ready to go. But then the roommate lawyered up. She suddenly had a whole bunch of money. Recanted her statement, saying the officers set her up. Turns out one of them was her old john. We can’t touch her.”

  “But we did have one ace in the hole—LaVonnte Russell—a member of the crew the feds nabbed a long time ago on the Jersey Turnpike with a shitload of cocaine,” Strickland said. “He was moving his own stuff but said he’d give intel on a boss behind a bigger operation that was growing and about to take over the city—move into Manhattan.”

  Vonn’s picture grew larger.

  “He’d been wearing a wire for us for weeks,” the detective added before Vonn’s mug shot changed to the crime-scene image of his body washed up along the shore. “We found him yesterday morning.”

  “You think McDonnell did this?” Paul asked.

  “Number-one suspect,” Strickland answered. “Vonn betrayed McDonnell. Vonn’s dead. That’s what we got. Motive, but it’s all speculation right now. We can’t seem to get anything to stick to McDonnell. He operates like the old mobsters did back in the day. Never gets his hands dirty. Just orders and orders through so many ears, he comes out clean every time.”

  “So no charges?” Paul added.

  “No. We’re just bringing him in for questioning. Try to shake things up. But these guys always have alibis,” Reddy jumped in, switching the picture back to a close-up of King’s mug shot that spread so wide on the screen, his blues eyes became huge pixelated cubes that nearly looked demonic. “We’ll ask where he was the night Vonn was murdered. And there will be something. A girlfriend. Probably one of the strippers. You know the drill.”

  The men at the table traded knowing stares.

  The Cronut pieces shot up my throat, and I jumped out of my seat to stop myself from vomiting.

  “Bathroom,” I said, rushing out with my hand over my mouth.

  I locked myself in the bathroom before staggering into a stall and vomiting Cronut bits into the latrine.

  “Oh my God,” I said, bending down over the yellowing water, my knees on the dirty floor and hands embracing the bowl. “Fuck! Fuck!”

  Hunched over and heaving, I kicked the wall and cursed some more. Vonn’s waterlogged body washed up on the shore and Reddy’s comments about King’s alibi sent the last bits of Cronut and bile up my throat, and my body contorted to stop myself from vomiting.

  “Get it together, Kim!” I cried with the bile in my throat burning so much it forced tears to my eyes. “Please! Please! What the fuck is going on?”

  I felt in my pocket for my phone and pulled it out.

  “No! Don’t call! Don’t call!”

  There was knocking at the door.

  “Kim? You okay?” It was Carol.

  “I’m fine, Carol!” I answered. “Tell them I’ll be right back. Just a little nausea. I’m fine.”

  Still heaving, I looked up at the ceiling and asked myself what was happening.

  “Just get it together!” I cried as a tear rolled down my cheek. “Please!”

  When I left the stall and stood in the mirror to wipe my tears, I looked at myself and thought of how my father always said he could see my mother in my eyes. I never saw it. Sometimes I thought maybe I couldn’t remember what her eyes looked like. Still, I looked at my eyes and pretended they were hers. Thought of what she might say if she was standing there looking at me. How she might say it. But I heard nothing. Maybe I couldn’t remember her voice either.

  “I got this! Yes! I do. I can do this,” I snapped, and suddenly wiped my tears and sucked up the snot in my nose. “We’re good. We can do this,” I said to myself before washing my hands with methodic coolness to redirect my tension. “This is your career, Kim. You will not let anyone fuck it up.” I stared into my eyes. “No one.”

  “Kim! Come open the door. It’s Paul.”

  Paul started knocking in a way that made it clear he wasn’t going to stop until I unlocked the bathroom door.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I’d been gone so long,” I called from the sink.

  “Open the door,” he said again, as if he hadn’t heard me, and continued his annoying slow knocks.

  I left the mirror and opened the door. “Yes,” I said, stepping out into the hallway with him.

  He looked at me suspiciously from head to toe to head.

  “You sick?” he asked. “You look like you’ve been crying. What happened in there?” He nodded toward the bathroom.

  “Nothing. I was just feeling sick,” I said defensively as I tried to lead him back to the conference room. “I didn’t think I’d been in there that long. Why did you leave the meeting?”

  Paul grabbed my arm.

  “Sick like what? Did you vomit in there?” he asked, sounding rather nervous.

  “Now you care if I’m sick? Really?” I laughed at his clear desperation. “Wait. This isn’t about you caring. You’re”—I pointed at the bathroom—“Wait. You think I’m”—I pointed at my stomach. “And by you?” I laughed again. “Not a chance.”

  “You have been acting funny lately. And not talking to me.” He stepped closer to me and whispered, “Maybe that’s what all of this not-wanting-to-see-me bullshit is about.”

  “Get over yourself, dickhead. I’m not pregnant with your child,” I said. “And if I was, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be at a clinic. Look, let’s just go back into the meeting. We can not talk about this later.” I started walking toward the conference room again.

  “Too late. Everyone’s gone,” Paul said, stopping me.

  “Gone?”

  Paul said, “The
detective squad from the Eighty-Fourth Precinct picked McDonnell up an hour ago. Reddy said we can sit in on the interview. See what kind of animal we’re dealing with.”

  “We? I don’t want to sit in on the interview. I’m not—”

  “Now you’re joking right? Come on. If we’re going to take this guy down, we have to be in the loop with the cops. You know that.” Paul chuckled, pulling the keys to the police wagon from his pocket. “Ride with me. We’ll use the sirens. Be in Brooklyn in ten minutes.”

  The Eighty-Fourth was the big bad bully of the Kings County precincts. Its choke hold on a grid of the moneymaking businesses in downtown Brooklyn, signature-signing aristocrats in Borough Hall, and the major courts in Brooklyn that called the precinct home made it a lion with a silent growl and an invisible reach that few could ignore. That probably sounds strange when speaking about an entity that was essentially created to shuffle criminals in and out as law enforcement sought to make Brooklyn a pleasant place to call home, but there was so much more the officers in any precinct controlled. As the old saying goes, “If you want to do business in Brooklyn, it’d better be a blue business.” That meant you needed the cops on your side to survive. Sometimes those cops were good guys. Sometimes those cops were bad guys.

  The Eighty-Fourth’s close proximity to the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges meant that officers, officials, and attorneys on either side of the East River often worked together or bumped heads over crimes and casualties.

  When Paul and I walked into the Eighty-Fourth, it felt the same way it always had—like walking into a room filled with sorority sisters who may have slept with your husband. Everyone was all hugs and “Hey, it’s been a while,” but careful with what they said and what they didn’t say because too much of either one wouldn’t be good for anyone.

  Greeting everyone as we walked in, I kept my smile wide and casual as I had in the police wagon with Paul on the way over. Under the blare of the siren, he’d told me about what I’d missed at the meeting with Reddy after I left. With so much pressure on his operation, Vonn had let on that King was slowly moving his business into Manhattan and had set up a new operation just a few blocks from the DA’s office. His goal was simple. He wanted to move on from the college crowd in Brooklyn and into the deeper pockets of the upper class in Manhattan—entertainers, executives, socialites, and tech geeks, an entire population of addicts who preferred drugs that came with prescriptions. In the wagon, I kept up the conversation with Paul, trying so hard to seem concerned, but King’s next move wasn’t at the top of my list. While no one aside from Tamika and her friends knew about King, just the thought of me being attached to him in any way was heartbreaking and even embarrassing. I was worrying about where he’d been and whether everyone else was going to find out that I’d been with him. I didn’t want King to see me—I couldn’t let him see me. But I couldn’t exactly refuse to go into the interrogation. I didn’t know why, but I could feel Paul watching me. I could tell he was trying to figure some-thing out.