A Black Sail

by Rich Zahradnik

  “She’s a source for a story.” Taylor stood by the register. Mary was at the booth at the rear of the shop. “Some people want her dead. I’m interviewing her. I already called Samantha. I’m going to need her help.”

  “Yes, you do. You always need her help. Samantha should be here.”

  Carrying the ever-present coffee pot, Grandpop went to get Mary’s order, which turned out to be a large breakfast, a good sign. Withdrawal hadn’t kicked in yet. Taylor was on a ticking clock to get more info out of her.

  Samantha arrived from her office, where she’d gone to do some paperwork and wait for Taylor. She was joining him on Novak’s Bicentennial eve cruise around New York Harbor.

  He met her at the door. “That friend still helping addicts?”

  “Wendy? My only pal from high school to get a job—rather than settle for a husband and kids? Yeah, she’s running a halfway house near us in the Heights. Woman’s crazy. A nursing degree, but says this is more fulfilling.”

  “Would she take someone who’s not quite halfway?”

  He told her Mary’s story, half watching Mary as she dug into pancakes and eggs and half watching Samantha’s face. Would Samantha say something about him being on another of his rescue missions? That he was helping another woman? When he’d met Samantha last fall, she’d become one of his missions—though she’d ended up rescuing him in equal measure. Saved them both. After he finished talking, Samantha made no comment except to say she’d give Wendy a call.

  Taylor returned to the booth and opened his notebook. “Tell me what it’s like at Lowell’s place?”

  “He’s all right. Long as he gets his fifty cents. Even said we could party together. I’d get to stay for free. Maybe some cash.”

  Taylor looked up. “For sex?”

  Mary could still blush. “He said maybe I do a little favor for him. Didn’t get specific.”

  “How long have you been buying Black Sail?”

  “Three months. Two months. Something like that. I don’t know. The time’s been flying by. Stuff is so good.”

  “From Reggie? Same corner?”

  “Give or take a block.

  “No problem with police?”

  “Don’t seem to give a shit.”

  “You said the stuff’s stronger. Describe the difference.”

  “That’s hard. The brown shit. I don’t know. You get three or four hours of an okay high. Sometimes not so okay. Black Sail lasts most of the night. Long legs. Smooth.”

  “Anyone else selling it?”

  “I hope so. Since you fucked things up with Reggie.”

  “I need to know. Is anyone?”

  “I’ve talked to people who said they’re getting it farther up town.”

  “How many pushers?”

  “I don’t fucking know. I wasn’t taking a census.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Jeee-sus. Way above Columbia. That’s all I know. I can tell you I really hope they’re there now.” Samantha sat on the bench across from Taylor and Mary and gave Taylor a nod. Mary looked at both of them like she now realized she was hemmed in. Trapped. “You said I’d get those bags if I talked.” It was a combination of demand, complaint, and question.

  “Just a couple more questions, and I’ll lay out the deal.”

  “We have a deal.”

  “Have you seen any fights between dealers? Dealers attacked?”

  “Sometimes.” Petulant. “To get a corner.”

  “How about over selling China White rather than the other stuff—Ace of Diamonds, Black Knight, any of the brown smack?”

  “Never saw that. Reggie just showed up. You got your money, you get your smack from whoever you want as long as their package is in.”

  “What did you think when China White arrived?”

  “What was there to think? Shit changes all the time. Not usually for the better. So that was one thing that was different.”

  Taking out his wallet, Taylor pulled out two of the Black Sail envelopes and set them on the table out of her reach. Next, he removed the newspaper clipping from his wallet. He unfolded the yellowing article and handed the full-page spread to Mary. “I wrote it. Read it.”

  “Why?”

  He tapped the stamp bags. “Read it.”

  As she did, he reached across and squeezed Samantha’s hand. She squeezed back. Her intense blue eyes flicked over to Mary and back at him. Something had her worried.

  “So what.” Mary pushed the page from the Messenger-Telegram back at him. “A nine-year-old junkie. You trying to scare me? I’m not nine.”

  “That little girl almost died from smack. Then thugs came after her. Then she went through withdrawal. Rough. Terrible. You’re not nine, but you’re on a hot fast road to dead.”

  “Oh, don’t give me the dad sermon.” She put her head in her hands as her voice rose to a whine. “I wanna get high. I don’t need dull-as-shit classes. They take me nowhere. Home is worse. Sitting around the dinner table, no one saying anything. Because no one has anything to say.”

  He folded the article. The story of the junkie named Tinker Bell was the one that almost cost Taylor his job when dirty cops made it appear he’d invented the whole thing. Tinker Bell had been saved, in the end. But her story hadn’t convinced Mary. There were other ways to play it.

  “Here’s the deal.” He handed the heroin to Samantha. “You’re going with my friend. She’s an ex-cop. She can handle anyone who comes near you. She’s going to take you somewhere you can lay low for a bit.”

  Taylor and Samantha both stood up. Samantha pulled him three booths away, where they remained in the aisle blocking the path to the front door. Now Samantha was going to yell at him.

  She didn’t. She leaned close to his ear. “I don’t know if Wendy will go for this. Using while in the house.”

  “The smack is to get her there. If Mary goes back to that neighborhood to get high, she’s dead. Sounds like the tong is trying to move in quietly. Both of us disrupting a resupply doesn’t qualify as quietly. Try to convince Wendy to let Mary have some and then go for the cleanup. Cold turkey. Methadone. Whatever works.”

  “Do what I can. See you at the marina. Little before five.”

  Samantha rubbed the two stamp bags between her fingers so Mary could see them. “Let’s go.”

  The coed left the booth and followed, slipping past Taylor with, “You suck.”

  Yeah, I do.

  Taylor hated bribing an addict with drugs. If Mary could be helped, this was the moment to act.

  The one thing Grandpop didn’t complain about was pulling cash out of the register. He tried to hand his grandson $100, but Taylor insisted on taking $50 with an absolute promise to pay it back next week. Returning the money would be another fight.

  Mary was off to see Wendy. Mary. Wendy. Names from Springsteen songs. Mary was the girl in “Thunder Road” and Wendy the girl in “Born to Run.” Both trying to escape broken, lost lives. The real Mary was running to Wendy and her halfway house. She wasn’t escaping town in a fast car, but it would have to do.

  Chapter 11

  “Some of them are on crowd control. The rest went to see the ships come in.”

  The detective squad room was empty except for Cashman, a detective third grade, and Taylor. “The detectives too? Cabbie I was with earlier said the crowds are light.”

  Cashman, looking so young he might have gotten his gold shield nine minutes ago, smiled benignly. “A lot of them are vets. Navy. Marines. They wanted to get a look. Probably more cops out there than civilians. Now can we go over your statement one more time?”

  Cashman, with a shaggy Mod Squad haircut and Gordon Lightfoot mustache, had seen Taylor straight away when he arrived at the 26th Precinct on West 126th Street. He’d been pleasant and calm. Taylor had turned over the tong member’s gun from Morningside Park. Cashman had believed Taylor’s story, which didn’t always happen with cops. They were often upset that he knew something they didn’t or attempted to blame him
for something else. Or did both at the same time.

  Probably easygoing because of those nine minutes as a detective. On traffic duty out on Staten Island before he passed the test. Not jaded yet.

  Taylor had left Mary out of his statement. There was more than one way to get the poor girl killed. He also didn’t admit to the remaining bag of Black Sail in his wallet. Even this nice young man might arrest him for possession. And if he didn’t, Taylor couldn’t chance losing his only proof a new kind of heroin was moving into New York.

  The bad news was that Cashman was as diligent as he was civil. The detective had known about the incident at 121st Street when Taylor showed up, yet had taken an agonizing hour and a half to write up Taylor’s statement, asking questions that must only appear in a textbook on how to be a detective. How was Taylor supposed to know what other bystanders were wearing? He was paying attention to the guys trying to drill him. Taylor droned through the story one more time. How he was following a tip on the heroin trade and was approaching a dealer when two men showed up with what appeared to be a resupply. How all three of them got quite upset at Taylor’s presence, so he did what he needed to get out of there.

  He looked at his own notebook. Blank. He’d gotten zip from Cashman so far, which made this meeting similar to many of his visits to detective squads. “What happened to the sanitation truck driver?”

  “The sanitation truck driver?” Cashman repeated. He flipped through the pages of the statement.

  Taylor required all his control to keep the frustration out of his voice. “The one driving the truck that crashed into the light pole. After the gunshots.”

  “Oh yes. He’s at Harlem Hospital. Stable condition. He got lucky. Caught it in the arm.”

  The tension across Taylor’s shoulders relaxed a little, as if someone had turned an invisible knob. The driver’s fate had worried him since he’d run from the scene. One less mental hot potato to juggle. That only left Mary, plant-man, the addicts at Lowell’s, and the story itself. No, this wasn’t a story yet. This was an unwritable mess.

  Even though Taylor knew the driver would be okay, guilt remained. The guy had ended up in the hospital, after all.

  I didn’t do the violence, he told himself. Just trying to get the story.

  Yeah, but this was a drug story; if Taylor’s tip was right, a big drug story. Drugs were the deep dark hole of New York crime—pain, suffering, and the mob’s cash cow. Gambling and the sex trade didn’t even come close. Drug sales had taken off when the city plunged into its steep decline at the beginning of the decade, as if a good chunk of the population was trying to anesthetize itself to what was happening.

  Drugs were violence.

  He must be more careful.

  Taylor flipped his pen around his fingers nervously. “Anything on the guys with the drugs and the guns?”

  “At large. I’m hoping your descriptions will help. But there weren’t any drugs at the scene. No boxes or bags.”

  “How long have you been in the squad?”

  “Four months.”

  “You seen any change in the type of heroin on the street?”

  “Like what?”

  “China White. The color white, like the name. Stronger than the smack usually sold.”

  “We’ve busted a couple of pushers with that shit.”

  “They say where it came from?”

  “They don’t tell us shit.”

  “Nothing new there, I guess.”

  “Yeah, though these guys were nervous about talking, rather than the usual ‘fuck off.’ ”

  “What was the stamp on the bag?”

  Cashman pulled out his notebook. Flipped pages, didn’t find it right away, so started from the front as Taylor watched the clock on the wall. Five minutes passed. Felt like 20. “Had a Black Sail and a Chinese character.”

  “What about junkies busted with the stuff? What do they say?”

  “They want it bad. These nig—” Cashman eyed Taylor’s notebook. Racism in the NYPD was offhand, casual, and endemic, but cops, especially younger ones, were getting smart about what they said in front of notebooks. Didn’t mean their attitudes had changed. Cashman restarted, “It’s how we caught the dealers. The ones with Black Sail draw buyers like shit draws flies. We followed the traffic.”

  “Any violence among dealers? Guys with China White knocking people on the head to take over real estate?”

  “Not in this precinct. From what we can tell, they just appear. New dealers in places where there weren’t, and the junkies find them fast.”

  “What’s the theory? Slow infiltration, rather than declare war?”

  “Your words, not mine. We don’t do theories. We grab up pushers.”

  “I know, and put ’em away for long bits under the Rockefeller laws.”

  “Only if they’re holding the weight.”

  Taylor wasn’t going to prove the story unless he got facts backing it up from someone somewhere. Cashman hadn’t given him anything close to that. What the hell. “I’ve heard the Leung tong out of Chinatown is bringing in the China White. They could knock the Fronti crime family out as suppliers to Harlem.”

  Cashman furrowed his brow as he concentrated on the information. Probably because he was taking it in for the first time.

  “News to me.” Of fucking course. “That’s the kind of thing the boys in intelligence might know. They don’t tell us anything until after the shit’s exploded all over the fan. Is that your story?”

  “Right now it’s a theory. The arrests you mentioned might be a start. Still need to connect the dots. Now if I’ve completed my civic duty, I need to go do a story about all those boats in the harbor.”

  “You’ll be available if my partner has additional questions?” Taylor handed his card to Cashman, who read it. “The City News Bureau. Never heard of it.”

  He wanted to groan. Instead he said, “Always available to the NYPD.”

  Taylor stopped at the water fountain downstairs to swallow a Dramamine and found a cab for the ride to the marina in the West 20s. The naval ships were now anchored in the Hudson facing west, appearing to have changed their mission, now ready to defend Manhattan from an invasion by New Jersey.

  Probably the best use of them.

  On the ride to meet Samantha and Novak, he went through his notes to try and make some sense of what he had. One pass through all he’d collected, and he couldn’t. A nervous quiver fluttered around in his stomach. He didn’t have a story. He’d spent a ton of time collecting info on the movement of China White into New York. A ton of time. But he didn’t have a single fact confirming a heroin war between the Leung tong and the Fronti organization. Still worse, he was no closer to understanding what happened to Bridget Collucci. That was the point of all this, to find a motive for murdering a housewife and dumping her body in the harbor with six packages of street heroin attached to her. Her husband was playing the innocent, claiming he wasn’t a mobster whose wife had been attacked because he was a mobster. A real odd thing to claim when he had that thug Lucco guarding his house and making threats. Something was up with Carl Collucci, and Taylor hadn’t uncovered it. He had to get back to that part of the story.

  That wouldn’t be possible for the rest of today or tomorrow. The Bicentennial started in earnest as soon as he got on Novak’s boat. Tomorrow he’d have to spend all day in Manhattan, covering the Fourth of July events. With 2,700 journalists in town, you’d think one less wouldn’t hurt the cause of coming up with words to describe sailing ships, ethnic dances, demonstrations of patriotism, and fireworks. His own cause would be in real jeopardy on Monday. The Brooklyn detectives could hardly sit on Bridget Collucci’s murder much longer. Taylor might go ahead and write up what he saw on the launch. Yes, he had the tabloid details on the body. No, he didn’t have any of the important information, like how, why, and, most important of all, who. Once he reported on the woman’s murder, the New York press pack would jump all over his story. He’d start a race he couldn’t w
in, not with the number of reporters the papers would field. As always, he wanted to write the big story no one else was chasing. They were rare in New York, rarer still now that he worked for a tiny newswire few knew about and fewer still bothered to call with tips.

  He’d wait. And hope. His patience showed how much he’d grown from his early days covering cops at the Messenger-Telegram. Then he was only interested in being first. Get a story he could rub in the noses of his competitors. He still liked scoops, but there were more important things. Could he expose villains hurting those who had no one else to speak for them? He spent so much time on that kind of story, there was usually no question about being first because no other reporter cared. At the MT, his editors joked he was obsessed with the homeless. Maybe he was. However, always and with every story, no matter who the victim or the criminal was, he needed the facts. As bad as a situation might be, Taylor wouldn’t turn in a story unless he had the hard details on what had gone down. The two times he’d broken that rule had proved disastrous for him. He was no historian, but he often quoted John Adams on this: “Facts are stubborn things. Whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts.” Every story began and ended with facts, including the story of Bridget Collucci. It wasn’t that the facts were stubborn right now, it was that they were stubbornly unavailable.

  Taylor paid the cabby with some of the money from Grandpop and stood watching yachts and cabin cruisers sway back and forth on the Hudson. The temperature was climbing to the 80 degrees promised. He took off his sport coat and folded it over his arm. Fifteen minutes later, Samantha arrived and kissed him.

  “Thank you for the help.”

  “Wendy says she’ll do what she can. That girl looks like she’s ready to run.”

  “I hope she stays put. Her pusher will kill her. The guys from the tong may figure they can get to me through her.”