by Tim O'Mara
‘Pretty well,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Is he equipped to take over where Maurice left off? I know what he told me the other day, but what’s your take on him?’
‘Absolutely not.’
He took a small sip of bourbon. ‘You sound very sure of that.’
‘Because I am. Edgar is a self-described non-people person. He was – is – the tech side of the business. Maurice was the one who set up the jobs, worked the phones, led client meetings, things like that.’
Another ‘Fuck’ came out of his mouth, replaced by a final sip of bourbon. ‘This is the problem working with CIs,’ he said.
‘Your CI,’ I said, ‘had a pregnant wife, David. If you’re looking for sympathy, you’re in the wrong place. Maybe you want to go visit Lisa Joseph and explain to her how much the death of the father of her unborn child sucks for you.’
He looked at me like he was not used to being spoken to like that. He raised his hand for another glass of bourbon. With his eyes still on me, he said, ‘You don’t mince words, do you?’
‘I’ve also been told recently that I’m too sarcastic, and that this may be stalling my climb up the career ladder. I’m guessing you got your ass chewed out by your boss?’
He got quiet again. Then he said, ‘Something like that.’
‘Something like that’ didn’t ring true. So here I was, sitting with a federal agent who was close to apologizing for lying to Edgar and me and who was still continuing to lie to me. I decided to push it.
‘Your bosses don’t know about your investigation, do they?’ When I didn’t get an answer, I kept poking. ‘You’re working off the books, aren’t you? Which means – in a not-mincing-my-words kind of way – you are completely fucked. And you got a good man killed.’
‘You don’t know that, Mr Donne.’ His new bourbon came and he pulled it close to him. Like a security shot.
‘You don’t know that you didn’t, David. It’d be one hell of a coincidence that your investigation has nothing to do with MoJo’s murder. And without backup from your supervisors, you have really stepped in it. When MoJo’s wife finds out about this, there’s gonna be a line of lawyers waiting to crawl up your federal ass.’
He gave that some thought. ‘She’s an African-American woman.’
‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?’
‘We were trying to take down Duke Lansing,’ he said, and again checked around to see if he’d been overheard. ‘I can’t tell you more than that, but Maurice was in a unique position to help us take down this low-life. I’m sure his wife would understand that.’
‘Because she’s black?’ I asked. ‘Her husband’s dead.’
‘There’s no proof of a connection between that and what he was doing for me.’
‘That you know of.’ Another thought came to me. ‘How are you going to explain this to the cops, David?’
He thought about that. ‘I haven’t thought about that,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’
‘Yeah. Fuck.’
He brought his glass up to his nose, closed his eyes, and took a big sniff instead of a sip this time. ‘The local cops don’t need to be involved.’
If I had had some beer in my mouth when he said that, I would have spit it out. ‘What the fuck do you mean, they don’t need to be involved? They are involved.’
‘With investigating his murder, not with what he was doing for me.’
‘I gotta tell ya, David,’ I said, ‘that’s gonna change tomorrow.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘If you do not go to the detective-in-charge with what you know about MoJo and Lansing, I will.’
‘You already gave them the recording.’
‘That’s before we knew MoJo was working with you as a CI. Royce needs to know about that.’
‘We’re not ready to bring the locals in on this, Raymond.’
I put all my fingers except my two thumbs on my pint of beer. In about as level a tone as I could manage, I said, ‘You have to stop with that local bullshit. You know about me, so you should know how I feel about this. I don’t give one shit about your investigation. I do give many shits about finding out who killed MoJo. So if you don’t inform Detective Royce about your involvement with MoJo by the end of my school day tomorrow, I will.’
‘Then I’ll charge you with impeding a federal investigation.’
‘No, you won’t,’ I said. ‘Because Royce will make … excuse me … a federal case out of it and counter-charge you with impeding a murder investigation. And since we’re both aware your bosses know very little about what you’re up to, I hope you have a good kayak for your trip up Shit’s Creek.’
I wasn’t sure about that whole ‘counter-charge’ thing, but Henderson was so upset at the moment I figured it would work to keep him on the ropes. Maybe that’s something else whoever told him about me should have mentioned: I hate being lied to.
‘What are you proposing, Mr Donne?’
‘I’m not proposing anything. You tell Royce by three-thirty tomorrow or I will.’ I thought a little more. ‘And maybe I will have a bourbon.’
He finished his and ordered two more. We were quiet for a minute or two, so I took the time to check out the TV across the way. Another Yankee was on his way to the Injured List. Then something else occurred to me.
‘Any truth to that missing kid story you sold MoJo?’
Again, poker was not in David Henderson’s retirement plan. This time he clearly knew it. ‘Actually, yes. There is a missing kid we are looking for.’
‘And by we you mean …’
‘Me,’ he said. ‘I have intel that one of the kids from Lansing’s compound went AWOL. I figure I find the kid, he may be a source of more information.’
‘Not to mention that finding missing kids is a good thing in and of itself.’
‘He’s sixteen. We don’t consider him missing so much as a runaway. But, he’s not turning himself in to any authorities yet, so …’
Oh, shit, I thought. He was talking about Harlan S., the subject of Allison’s series.
‘What?’ he said to me. I guess my poker face wasn’t working either.
‘I just don’t like the idea of using kids to get the grown-ups in their lives,’ I said, knowing full well whose pants were on fire now. ‘The kid’s upset enough to run away and now you want to use him to help take down one of the assholes in his life. Like he hasn’t been through enough. How’d you find out the kid was missing?’
‘Why do you want to know that?’ I would have asked that, too.
‘Just makes sense that if you have someone inside Lansing’s organization, you wouldn’t need MoJo or the kid.’
‘I never said I had someone inside Lansing’s organization. I said we had intel.’
I took a sip of bourbon. My guess was Henderson’s intel was MoJo; then Harlan pulled his disappearing act after MoJo told Henderson and gave Harlan Allison’s contact info. Run-on sentences can be confusing. It was getting so I needed a scorecard to keep up with the players here, but I think I had it. And if I did have it, I should have told Henderson about Allison meeting with the kid she called Harlan, but that could come back to bite me on a few levels. And if Henderson wasn’t hip enough to keep up with New York Here and Now, how was that my responsibility?
Shit. Although I knew how the conversation would go, I needed to talk with Allison about this. She was not going to agree to tell the feds or Royce that she knew – or would know soon – the whereabouts of a runaway who was associated with Duke Lansing and therefore may or may not be connected to MoJo’s murder. I had to go home.
I stood up, downed the rest of my bourbon and pushed the half-empty beer bottle away. ‘That’s it for me, David,’ I said. ‘I’m done playing word games. I’ll be calling Royce tomorrow at three-thirty to see how your conversation with him went.’
‘Anything I can do to make you hold off on that?’
‘You wanna extradite me to some black ops thing overseas, go for it. But you know the r
ight thing to do here.’ I stuck out my hand. ‘You may be FBI, but you’re still a cop.’
He looked at me without getting off his barstool. ‘I’ll be in touch. Soon.’
‘Looking forward to it.’ I pointed at the bartender. ‘Be sure to tip like a real cop and not a fed.’
FOURTEEN
It took me twenty minutes to walk home and to halfway clear my head, partly from the bourbon I’d had and partly from the information Henderson had just laid on me. The air was cool and I could smell some of the salty East River in it. I took in as much as I could, imagining that with each exhale a little stress was leaving my body. It was a trick Allison had taught me. Sometimes it worked. Tonight I wasn’t sure what it was doing for me.
When I turned the corner onto my street, I saw a large man leaning against a black Town Car, smoking a cigar, exhaling enough smoke to give people on the sidewalk a reason to put some distance between them and the smoker. Oh boy.
The cigar smoker was my Uncle Ray: Chief of Detectives, NYPD. Visiting me on a Monday night. This could not be good.
When he saw me, he took one more drag from his almost-finished cigar, threw the remaining two inches to the ground, and crushed it under his shoe. I had often wondered when I watched him do that if he was imagining that I was the cigar. It was feeling that way now.
As I usually did when greeting my uncle during an unexpected visit, I threw my arms open and stepped in for one of his enormous hugs. ‘Uncle Ray,’ I said as he enveloped me. He held me for twenty seconds and two hard pats on the back. That meant more than mildly annoyed.
‘Welcome home, Nephew,’ he said when he released me.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I heard you were in jail today. It’s good to have you home.’
‘How did you …’ I stopped myself because I knew the answer. ‘Someone at the jail recognized my name – our name – and called to tell you I was there.’
He patted me on the back again. ‘You’re finally getting it, Ray. You’re not there yet, but you’re getting it.’ What he meant was that because we shared the same name, it was hard for me to do anything within the five boroughs – sometimes beyond – involving a uniformed employee of the city that did not somehow find its way back to him.
At least he wasn’t here because Detective Royce had called him.
‘I also got a call this morning from your favorite detective,’ Uncle Ray said. ‘Wanna guess what that was about?’
‘The recording I found. I gave that to him as soon as I knew what it was.’
‘Almost, Ray. You waited a little more time than you should have before calling him. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were considering whether or not to call him.’
I could have told him I wasn’t sure what to do with the recording and that’s why I waited, but again, I knew what his response to that would be. What I knew about chain of evidence I had learned as a kid from my lawyer dad and his detective brother. Come to think of it, most of what the instructors were teaching me at the police academy I had learned before graduating high school.
‘So,’ he said, ‘your little excursion to Riker’s today. I’ve never known you to be one to visit former students, Ray. And, honestly, I would not have thought much about it were it not for the call from Detective Royce.’
I was about to say something when he held his hand up. ‘As soon as I knew that it was your school where the guy got the Wounded Knee treatment, I knew we’d be having this conversation soon. Actually, it took a little longer than I had predicted.’
I took a deep breath of the cool night air, and as I exhaled, I imagined a puff of gray stress leaving my body. ‘It’s not my fault that people trust me, Uncle Ray. And it’s definitely not my fault that my uncle is the Chief of Detectives and sometimes people will take advantage of that.’
‘No one takes more advantage of that than you, Nephew.’
‘Only when I need to.’
‘You seem to need to a lot.’ He paused, and then let out a deep breath of his own. I wondered what he saw when he did that. ‘You know I only get upset with your getting involved with these cases because I worry about your safety. And let’s be honest, over the past five years, you’ve given me more than enough reasons to worry.’
‘True.’
‘And now there’s Allison,’ he said. ‘With you two living together – in sin, I might add – you have to think of her, Ray.’
He was quoting my mother on that sin part. Uncle Ray was on his second wife and thought it was smart of me to try living with Allison before making the big decision. ‘Believe me,’ I said. ‘I do.’
‘OK then.’ He was using his Uncle Ray voice now, not Chief Donne. ‘You guys still planning on coming out to the Island for Easter?’
‘Unless we get a better offer.’
‘That’s funny. Keep it up, that sense of humor’s gonna come in handy one day.’
‘I’ll see you on Easter, Uncle Ray.’ He was about to bring me into a farewell hug when something occurred to me. Something I knew had a good chance of backfiring, but I decided to go for it anyway. ‘That former student I was visiting at Riker’s,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’ he said.
‘His name is Gabriel Ocasio. Goes by Gator. He got picked up on a possession with intent charge a few days ago right after he got back from Riker’s.’
‘Aren’t those the kids you work with, Ray?’ he asked. ‘The ones who don’t always think before they possess?’
I let that pass as I was about to ask for a favor. A big one. I explained to him the kind of kid Gator was and that although it wasn’t past him to do something like this, I had the feeling he’d been set up to get him off the streets.
‘Because …’ Uncle Ray said.
‘I’m thinking someone knew he saw the shooter a day or two before it happened. If he’s on the Island, he can’t do much with that information.’
My uncle considered that. It was another reason I loved the man. As much as he thought I should stay in my lane and avoid anything along the lines of police work, he knew my instincts were still sharp.
‘So,’ he finally said, ‘you’d like me to find out who tipped off the cops that picked up your boy Gator?’
‘If you don’t mind’
‘And after I procure this information, what do you expect me to do with it, Encyclopedia?’
I laughed. He was the one who’d bought me the entire Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective series as a kid, probably leading me onto this path of wanting to be the guy who figured things out.
‘Give it to Detective Royce, of course,’ I said. ‘What else would I want?’
‘It’s the “what else” that gives me pause, Nephew.’ About five seconds passed. ‘But it’s a good idea. I’ll find out and get back to Royce on it when I do. But I will be expecting a much better bottle of Scotch for Easter this year.’
‘I can do that. Thanks.’
We hugged again and he got into the back seat of the Town Car and it drove away. I took a few more deep breaths and went upstairs to see if my girlfriend was still awake.
She was. ‘The freaking FBI?’
‘I saw the badge and everything.’
‘So you were right about him lying to you and Edgar the other day.’
‘He’s still lying. I’m not sure what about, but this guy’s working off the books. It’s like he’s got a personal boner for Duke Lansing.’
‘“Personal boner,”’ she repeated. ‘Is that technical jargon for cops or teachers?’
‘Whatever happens next, I’m glad Royce will find out about Henderson tomorrow. I’m calling him at three-thirty unless he calls me first.’
Allison thought about that for a few seconds. ‘I’m gonna give Royce a call tomorrow myself, Ray.’
‘About what?’
‘It may sound a little insensitive, but I’d love to do a piece from the killer’s perspective.’ She read the look on my face. ‘From the vantage point, at least. The window. Didn’t
you ever wonder what it was like to commit premeditated murder, Ray?’
I nodded. As a cop, you couldn’t ignore that feeling. What kind of person plans out a murder and then waits around to commit it? ‘Yeah, sure. But what do you expect to get by visiting the scene of the crime? The window?’
‘That’s what makes it interesting. Didn’t you tell me the other day that sometimes I’ll find the answers before knowing the questions?’
I remembered saying something like that to her shortly after finding MoJo’s body, but I was still somewhat fuzzy. ‘Did I say that?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘this is kinda like that. Maybe.’
I had to admit it. She was good. Knowing her, she’d write a great piece. I’d be more excited about it if I hadn’t known the victim, but I could see how this would interest readers, and I knew how much she needed to keep a story like this alive with fresh perspectives. As for getting permission from Royce, that was on her and I told her so.
‘Of course I’m gonna ask him directly,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure if he’s still sore about the video I took, but involving you – no offense – would not be a good idea.’
‘No offense taken. Good luck. Just do me a favor and call him early in the day so our phone calls aren’t back to back. I don’t want him thinking we’re timing this stuff.’
‘First thing in the morning, tough guy.’ She pulled me in for a hug and a rather surprising squeeze of the butt. ‘You ready for bed?’
I squeezed back. ‘This journalism thing gets you kinda hot, huh?’
‘Don’t blow it by pointing it out, Ray. Just go brush that whiskey from your mouth and meet me in the bedroom.’
Like most obedient boyfriends, I did as instructed.
FIFTEEN
It turned out that I didn’t have to worry about calling Royce. He showed up the next day at my school right after I’d finished lunch duty. I was sitting on the steps outside the building, soaking up a little sun, finishing an apple, and sucking a bottle of water dry. He pulled up in front of the building and walked over to me. He took off his blue suit jacket and held it in front of him.
‘Got an interesting phone call from your guy at the FBI,’ he said.