One Police Plaza

by William Caunitz

  “I want,” he said, “to get a sense of the man.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “I see. S’pose I prepare you a pre-obit on Carter Moorehouse.”

  “That would be fine.”

  She got up. He followed her out into a row of secretarial cubicles and down the aisle into a large room filled with movable film racks and card drawers. She pointed to a room with video playback machines and large tape spools on the wall. “This is a shot-listing room.”

  For the next thirty-two minutes they combed the indexes for material on Carter Moore house. She searched and called out reference numbers and he copied them down on gray charge-out cards.

  When they were finished, she looked over at him, smiled, and said, “Some of this material is in our basement library.”

  The library was two stories below ground. Stepping off the elevator, they entered a labyrinth of underground passageways with vaulted ceilings and white stone walls. She saw the surprise register on his face. “At one time this building was a slaughterhouse for one of the big milk companies,” she said.

  She led the way through passageways crowded with maintenance men. At the end of a long serpentine route she turned right and signaled him to follow. They were in a cloistered area with fourteen-foot ceilings. There were files of portable racks that were crowded with film canisters and storage boxes. The yellow labels on the boxes’ spines contained reference codes and content annotations.

  It was a cold, damp place.

  He noticed the oxygen tanks and masks encased in glass.

  “What are they for?”

  She pointed to a sign on the door—WHEN HELON ALARM SOUNDS LEAVE IMMEDIATELY OR PUT ON OXYGEN MASK.

  She said, “We use Helon in our sprinkler system. It removes oxygen from the air and extinguishes fire. That way our film is protected. The difficult part is that anyone trapped in here at the time of a fire would have to put on an oxygen mask or suffocate.”

  Reference slips in hand, they combed the aisles and removed material. Their quest complete, they retired to a fourth-floor shot-listing room where she spent ten minutes showing him how to work the equipment.

  When she was gone he put on the first cassette, sat back, and fixed his attention on the large screen.

  Stewart King, the CBS anchorman, appeared in a standup open shot introducing Carter Moorehouse, the candidate. The scene switched to a tracking shot of Moorehouse moving among a cheering constituency. Malone noticed something and depressed the frame-hold button. Although they were much younger, their features lean and hair darker, he recognized Stanislaus and Zangline shouldering a path for the candidate.

  It was early in the campaign so the crowds were big and still friendly. Moorehouse had used the occasion, a speech at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, to present the broad outlines of what came to be known as “Remobilize New York’s Industry.” As he moved forward in the file tapes, Malone found himself admitting how much sense Moorehouse made when he outlined his program of tax and development incentives for smaller businesses, rebuilding, and restoring the fabric of neighborhoods, creating industrial development zones in dying areas of the city. But then, in a tape made three weeks into the campaign, Moorehouse began discussing rehabilitation of mass-transit services. Business needed workers arriving on time and unharassed by marginal equipment and operations. But they needed, above all, employees who felt they could use subways and buses in reasonable safety. And that took him off on a long tangent about crime. Malone watched with fascination as the tape ran over into outtakes, the unedited footage. Moorehouse left his prepared speech behind; the carefully modulated tones were replaced by the relentless harangue of a religious fanatic. And the crowd loved it, at least for a while. It went on for a long, long time. Moorehouse approved the death penalty and went on to suggest special courts for felony offenders that left no room whatsoever for due process.

  In later tapes, Moorehouse’s tendency to break into extemporaneous remarks about crime became more pronounced. Toward the end of one such speech a desperate aide had almost pulled Moorehouse away from the podium. The crowds were less and less responsive. There would always be a considerable number of people in each of Moorehouse’s different audiences who would listen, who seemed locked in a kind of terrible communion with Moorehouse. Malone remembered, now, what the Times had said in that damaging editorial: Moorehouse wanted to return to pure retributive justice, the kind of blood-vengeance suited to a savage tribe rather than the measured, constitutional law of a civilized city. As he watched the tapes unroll, Malone saw the animal emerging; it was signaled by the peculiar gleam in Moorehouse’s eyes, or the darting of his tongue. Malone also understood the code words. Moorehouse talked about blacks, Hispanics, the welfare poor as the “criminal element,” without differentiating them. Malone knew what he meant; and so did the hard knot of true believers in every audience.

  Late in the campaign Moorehouse began to address the issue of terrorism. Again, in an outtake that, fortunately, had not aired, Moorehouse gave his thoughts on the subject, even going as far as to warn his somewhat perplexed listeners that New York City would have to look like Beirut before people took the threat seriously. When Moorehouse talked about the horrifying ineffectiveness of our immigration controls, Malone got the clear impression that Moorehouse felt the wrong sort of people had been let in for the last fifty years. That kind of message, in the racial and ethnic stew that constituted the human element of the city, was not likely to be popular. But in the later tapes it was clear that Moorehouse cared little about popularity. He was speaking out of deep conviction and the public be damned.

  Malone saw the tapes as a portrait of self-destruction. He was amazed by the kindness of the media to Moorehouse, the same media which Moorehouse perceived as his personal enemies. What had been aired was bad enough; what remained unaired and in the can revealed Moorehouse’s pathological disregard of the bare minimum of polite disguise. The code words were there, especially, in his concession speech. When Moorehouse talked about “malign foreign influences” on a free press, he was talking about Jews and Zionists. Perhaps, Malone conceded, Moorehouse had been right in a twisted way. Reporters, producers, and editors had kept many of Carter Moorehouse’s less attractive sentiments out of the news, not so much as a means of protecting Moorehouse from himself but to protect a troubled city from the suggestion of remedies that were worse than any disease. The cumulative effect of the footage was overwhelming; Moorehouse was a man who held in contempt much of the law that Malone served. He despised many of the ordinary people who Malone tried to protect. The grinding political process had stripped Moorehouse of his civil veneer and led him to defeat by a humiliating margin.

  Malone watched all the tapes and then switched off the machines. He lit a cigarette and remained in his seat, watching the smoke drift upward. He had gotten what he wanted; a sense of the man. He now knew a great and frightening thing about Carter Moorehouse. He knew that Moorehouse was a man who did not know how to forgive or forget.

  In the lobby of the CBS building Malone called the precinct. Bo Davis answered. “Are the transcripts ready?” Malone asked.

  “Everything is waiting on you. The film, the transcripts, and the wire. You better get back here fast. This shit is dynamite.”

  “I’m on the way. Who’s on deck?”

  “The whole crew is here.”

  Malone looked at his watch: 9:58 A.M. “I want you and Jake to hit Stanislaus’s place and execute the warrant, just for the record. Before you go, check with Harrigan and make sure Stanislaus is at the SOD compound. This way he won’t know that we were there until he returns home. It’ll give us some extra hours. And, Bo, don’t forget to leave a receipt for the property.”

  Malone hung up and dialed Erica Sommers at her sister’s house in Washington Heights. The line was busy. He called the special operator and asked her to check it. When she came back on the line the operator told him that the phone was off the hook.

  A man with a moon
face was waiting on the stationhouse steps. “Lieutenant Malone, I am Deputy Inspector Obergfoll. You have a Forthwith from the Chief of Op.” He was a heavy man somewhere in his fifties. A man who had forgotten how to smile.

  “What is it about?” Malone said, searching the blank face for a clue.

  “The chief will tell you.”

  “I’ll just be a minute. There are a few things I have to tell my men.” Malone started to walk around him.

  Obergfoll grabbed his arm. “Forthwith, Lieutenant. Your men are waiting for you at One Police Plaza.”

  While every crime scene has its own special aura, they are essentially all the same.

  Policemen loitered in the corridor. Two officers stood guard outside the door leading into Joe Mannelli’s official office at One Police Plaza. They had stretched a rope across the doorway and hung a crime-scene sign on it. Deputy Inspector Obergfoll climbed over the rope and then lifted it up so that Malone could duck under.

  The cameras in the outer office had been switched off. The Chief of Op was in a corner talking to the first deputy police commissioner. McQuade caught sight of Obergfoll and Malone and excused himself.

  The top echelon of the department had gathered in the outer office and were talking guardedly. Malone spotted his detectives and started for them. Obergfoll grabbed his arm and told him to remain where he was. The inspector then went over to the detectives and told them to follow him. They were to wait for their boss in McQuade’s office. As they filed past Malone each one looked the lieutenant in the face and made a deprecatory little shrug. Malone was relieved to see that Davis and Stern were among the missing. The search warrant was being executed, officially.

  McQuade came up to him, and without saying one word looped his arm through his and proceeded to shepherd him across the width of the room to a window.

  McQuade said, “Things have changed since we last talked.”

  “How so?”

  “Zambrano. And now this,” McQuade said.

  Malone looked him in the eye, waiting for an explanation.

  McQuade rubbed his palms together. A film of sweat covered his lip. “There has been an accident. Mannelli is dead. Suicide.”

  Malone was stunned. He slapped his hands over his face and began to press his pupils until he could see shimmering tiles rushing through the blackness. Another dead cop. Sara Eisinger, what hath your grounder wrought? He stared out at the City.

  “It’s your baby,” McQuade said.

  “Any direction from the fourteenth floor?” he said, looking up at the golden cupola of the Municipal Building, and envisaging the PC sitting behind Teddy Roosevelt’s massive desk pondering what to do with the Mannelli caper.

  “The place of occurrence is within your zone. Handle it as you would any other suicide.”

  Malone glared scorn. “Fuck off with that bullshit.”

  McQuade bit his lips. “Do what ever you have to, Lieutenant.”

  “What happened?” Malone flared.

  “The PC received an envelope with photographs of Mannelli. They were sex pictures of him in bed with a man and woman. The PC called him in and told him that his position in Intelligence had been compromised. He suggested that he vest his pension and get out. Whoever sent the envelope to the PC also sent one to Mannelli’s wife. She’s a tight-assed Bronx Irish Catholic. She ordered him from their home. I guess something inside him must have snapped.” He reached into his pocket and took out a letter. “This is addressed to you.”

  He took it from McQuade and read it.

  Dan. Believe me when I tell you that I did not know what they were doing. They used me. Watch yourself. They are out to kill you. The Braxtons set me up. I’m scared. Stop them before it is too late. I want you to do me one last favor. Please …

  The letter ended.

  Malone folded it and slid it into his pocket. “Where is he?”

  “In there,” McQuade said, pointing to an inner door.

  “Where are my men?” Malone said, with an undercurrent of hostility in his tone.

  “Waiting for you in my office.”

  The apprehension in McQuade’s face was apparent. Suicides do not fit the public image. “Let’s take a look.”

  They entered the quiet room. McQuade drew the door closed. The body was slouched in the white plastic chair. The head was back and tilted to the side. The right arm was extended, the weapon clutched in a death grip. His mouth was agape and the eyes half open. A pool of red mud seeped down over the left shoulder.

  Malone circled, examining the scene. He placed the back of his hand against Joe’s face. The skin was rubbery and cold. Capilarity cast its spidery hue. There was a heavy accumulation of powder grains around the center of the flame zone.

  “Goddamn it!” He kicked the desk. “You could have prevented this.”

  McQuade shrugged helplessness. “How? I had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “You are the Chief of Operations. You knew damn well what Zangline and his crew were into.” He pointed to the body. “No way you can escape responsibility.”

  “Lieutenant, not now! We can talk later. At this moment there are more pressing considerations that require our attention.”

  “How many children did he have?”

  “Three. One still in grade school.”

  “At least they will get his pension.”

  “They get zilch,” McQuade said. “Mannelli did not have his time in the Job, and suicides are not classified line-of-duty deaths. His family will get whatever money he contributed to his pension fund and one year’s salary.”

  Grainy black-and-white photographs were strewn over the floor. Malone bent and harvested them. Mannelli in bed with Aldridge and Thea Braxton. A threesome. Ain’t no way, he thought. That was not Mannelli’s bag. He remembered Major Landsford and how he died. A suicide by gun with incriminating film as the catalyst. He began to wonder if they were suicides.

  Malone said, “Is this my investigation?” A purposeful tone.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you better leave. Because I am going to conduct it my way.”

  McQuade said, “I’ll stay. There might come a time when you will need a witness.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes, two policemen understanding a contract. Malone knew what the Chief of Op expected of him.

  Standing over the wastebasket that was on the side of the desk, Malone tore up the photographs and rained the pieces into the basket. He shot out a hand. “Gimme a book of matches.”

  McQuade handed them to him. He squatted and struck a match, turning the contents of the basket ablaze.

  He got to his feet and started to rummage the desk. Each drawer was pulled out and searched. Not finding what he wanted, he slowly scoured the room. The coat closet? He went over and jerked the door open. First he checked the floor and then he started to push uniforms aside.

  “What the hell are you searching for?” McQuade said.

  “Something that every cop keeps nearby,” he said, stepping back to check the shelf. Three shoe boxes were stacked one on the other. The corners of the bottom one were stained with oil. “Here it is,” he said, sliding out the box.

  Mannelli’s gun-cleaning kit was placed on the desk. “You don’t have to be a party to any of this.”

  “I am just beginning to appreciate your style, Malone. I will stay. Might learn a thing or two.”

  Malone assembled the cleaning rod. A patch was removed from the crumpled box and inserted through the rod’s eye. The cap was taken off the bottle of cleaning solvent and the patch dipped inside and soaked.

  He had to pry the fingers back in order to retrieve the revolver. He opened the chamber and plunged out the rounds, returning the one spent cartridge. He checked the make of the pistol. A Smith & Wesson. The cylinders on S&Ws turn counterclockwise. The cylinder was spun until the spent round fell under the firing pin. It was then closed and the revolver placed on the floor beneath the stiffened hand. He stepped back to check the scene. Re
alizing that some of the stage props were missing, he then spread the remaining rounds over the desk. He moved away like a director checking the scene before the final shot. Nodding satisfaction, he turned to McQuade. “My investigation leads me to conclude that Lieutenant Mannelli died as the result of an accidental discharge incurred while he was cleaning his service revolver. I shall so testify before the grand jury.”

  McQuade said, “The Patrol Guide requires members to maintain their service revolvers in a clean and serviceable condition. Since his death was the direct result of that provision it would be line-of-duty.”

  Malone took out the suicide note. He glanced at it briefly and then tossed it into the flickering flame. The center of the paper scorched outward and the ends began to char and curl under. Soon there was nothing left but a smoldering charcoal mass.

  McQuade came up to him. “Obergfoll can clean up here. We had better go to my office and talk.”

  21

  MONDAY, July 6 … Afternoon

  Some of the men shuffled about the room as though they had no other place to go while others slouched in chairs; each man shared the patina of gloom. Malone stopped short, surprised at the unexpected gathering in the Chief of Op’s office.

  Yachov Anderman wore a melancholy expression. “Hello, policeman.”

  David Ancorie’s ears were beet red and his face bore a steady, bland expression.

  A movie camera and screen had been set up. A tape recorder and a pile of mimeographed transcripts were next to the camera. McQuade saw Malone looking at them. “When Obergfoll went to get you and your men he found the detectives examining this material. He directed that it all be brought here.”

  Malone nodded to his detectives and crossed the room to Anderman. As he lowered himself into the chair next to Anderman he said, “So? What’s new?”

  “What could be new, policeman?”

  “Well. For starters, the man you met in Battery Park is dead. Mannelli, perhaps you remember him?”

  Anderman’s face set in a scowl.

  Malone continued, “And now I find the man who never associates with policemen in the office of the Chief of Operations with a rabbinical student who instructs policemen on the use and care of the Uzi submachine gun. Don’t you find that interesting, Mr. Anderman?” He spat his words with contempt.