A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

  “I enjoyed DIMAC. I was working on justice. I was bringing down the corrupt. I was fighting the good fight. It doesn’t seem the same at the Parks Department. I want to make a difference, and real estate seems to be—well, that’s what’s making a difference in this city now.”

  “In this borough, anyway. Look around you, Leonard. Look behind you.”

  Leonard turned over his shoulder. He had lived in Brooklyn for twenty years. He remembered the night that Amy Watkins was stabbed for her handbag, walking home from the subway on Park Place. The townhouse that she died in front of sold last year for $3.2 million. He remembered Shoot the Freak and the rickety roller coasters at Coney Island, dismantled and replaced with bright blue-and-orange rides that came pre-packaged from a factory in Kansas. He remembered when Gavin Cato was mowed down while fixing his bicycle on President Street. And he remembered the riots that followed. Now those streets too were lined with unadulterated luxury homes.

  Out the floor-to-ceiling window, following Eleanor’s gesture, he could count six new residential towers, each over fifty stories tall, not to mention the arena, the shopping center, the parking garage. No one had bothered to repaint the insides of the courtrooms at Brooklyn State Supreme in fifty years, but any sliver of land that could fit an apartment building had become fair game.

  “Do you see that, Leonard? It’s progress. Thirty years ago this borough was a wasteland. Crime. Poverty. Corruption. You know something about corruption. Remind me how hard it was to bribe a state senator from Canarsie in 1976?”

  Leonard didn’t say anything. They both knew the answer. Eleanor went on.

  “And now look around you. New stores. New restaurants. New housing. Everyone in the world wants to come and live in Brooklyn. They make television shows about the place. And we have provided that. Through hard work. Through taking a burnt-out building, rebuilding it, and finding someone who will take the risk to move into it. And then doing it again, and again, and again. Until the whole place is transformed.”

  “I understand.” The best thing to do when someone is giving a speech is let her talk. Pretty soon you’ll understand what she’s really saying. She probably wasn’t going to say that everything she was taking credit for was made possible by fat tax credits. Or by ending subway crime, so rich people felt safe enough to shuttle home from a Times Square office to a Crown Heights condo. Bernie Goetz was only thirty years ago, after all.

  “And what credit do we get? For transforming this borough into the jewel of the city? Do they thank us? No. Look at the papers. Who are always the easy villains? Developers, builders, creators. I was at a community board meeting last night and it was shut down by protesters. Did you hear about the community board meeting?”

  Leonard had done his research. He had dug up the controversy, read about the vote, seen the proposal for the new building that Hill and Associates wanted to splay along Empire. Mulino wasn’t the only one who could do legwork. “I heard.”

  “And why? Because I want to bring more housing to their neighborhood—affordable housing. They’d rather keep the junk shops. I grew up in Flatbush. My father runs a church in Flatbush. And there was a reason that people who were living in Flatbush in 1982 joined his church. There was nothing else on offer in this city. Now I offer more. With new buildings come opportunities. Sanitation comes by twice a week instead of once. The Department of Transportation builds out the crosswalks. Express buses, more subway cars. Because there are new buildings. But no matter what we do to improve lives, I’m still the bad guy.”

  The speech sounded familiar to Leonard. But he couldn’t place why. “It sounds like you need a press secretary. I can do that too.”

  “Leonard. I need everything. I need someone who can go to a building site and make sure I don’t have union guys taking two-hour lunches and harassing the girls on the street. I need someone to call the Daily News when a bunch of yahoos wants to shut me down. I need someone who can walk into the Department of Buildings and get me a permit before my so-called ‘expeditor’ can. I don’t need another office manager.”

  “I understand. I know some people at DOB, the Daily News. I earned a lot of favors that I haven’t called in yet.” There had always been a few DIMAC investigators who made their way over to Buildings. The rap was that the work wasn’t as hard, and if you missed an investigation or six, there were no real consequences. A place you could go to kick back. The whispers were that the whole agency was on the take.

  “Good. Let me tell you what I need this week. I have an open house on Sunday. It’s a small job. We just bought the building. We’re selling it as-is. A bring-your-architect listing. I don’t like paying three and a half percent to a broker when I already pay a staff. I could go out and show the place to people myself, but I don’t work on Sundays.”

  “I don’t have a brokers’ license.”

  “We have licensed staff to close the deal. You’ll just be a representative of Hill and Associates. Here is the listing. And here are the keys.”

  The folder and the key chain felt as though they had come flying over the desk. It had all happened so fast. A slick printout of a brick townhouse. Prospect Heights. One of the last four-stories to be converted from apartments to a single family house in the neighborhood.

  “So I have the job?”

  “You have this job. You run the open house. Get a sign-in sheet. The place is a wreck. Don’t pretend otherwise. We won’t vouch for even a light switch. If another developer takes it off our hands, even better. All you have to do is make sure no one coming to the open house steals something.”

  “What is there to steal?”

  “There are still a couple of renters in the building. It’s bad enough they’ll have to leave. We want to safeguard their property.”

  “I understand.” The distasteful side of the whole thing. Of course there would be renters in place. That’s the reason to flip the property quickly. Evicting people wouldn’t be good for Eleanor Hill’s corporate profile.

  “Thank you, Leonard.”

  “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  “Come back on Monday for that.”

  It was a start. But he hadn’t learned anything that would explain why anyone wanted to kill Wade Valiant. One step at a time. He shoved the keys in his pocket and left her office.

  As he drifted down, he remembered why Eleanor’s speech about being targeted despite doing so much good for the world sounded familiar. It was a cop’s speech. With only a few words different, it was a speech about how the thin blue line protects the population from gangbangers and villains, and how the population’s response is to be angry at those very cops. How if anyone understood all the sacrifice made by police officers, they would put down their picket signs and pray that patrols on the streets would double, that thousands more would be stopped and frisked. It was a speech, Leonard also remembered, that was usually given by the chief of the officers’ union. And it was usually given a few days before jury selection in the manslaughter trial for a couple of cops who had shot another unarmed black teenager. Anything to get an advantage.

  Leonard tucked the open house materials into his bag, swept past the doorman, and made his way into the first frost of an early winter.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mulino stared across his desk at Detective Bruder. The kid actually had his cell phone out. If the Chief of Patrol wasn’t best friends with the guy’s dad, Mulino would have whipped around the desk and yanked it out of his hand. Meanwhile, Detective Peralta was sitting upright like a petulant sixth grader hoping the teacher would call on her, notebook at the ready. Mulino wondered what he had gotten himself into by becoming a supervisor.

  Bruder pretended that the text on his phone was about the case. “TARU tells us they are still trying to find something.” Mulino knew better.

  Peralta made a quick jot in her memo book. You don’t need to take notes when he doesn’t say anything useful, Detective Mulino wanted to tell her. But you criticize a young detective
and suddenly you’re a mean boss. Or maybe the subject of an EEO complaint. Best to ask questions. Act like these two were the ones getting investigated. Speak slowly; wait for answers; keep calm.

  “So what, exactly, did you ask them? And what, precisely, did they say?”

  Bruder held up his finger. Reading from his phone. That kind of reaction would have merited a Command Discipline on the spot in Mulino’s day. He wanted to smack the kid. But then he thought again about Bruder’s family and held off. A week before, when Bruder had been in the field, Mulino had stopped at the kid’s desk and seen what he was reading all the time. It was a pro-police online message board. The kind of place where every cop in the country who guns someone down is a hero, where every crowd of protesters is made up only of savages. It was a big red flag, that kind of thing. Usually most of the people trolling through those sites were retired—a bunch of Archie Bunkers who could yell together without getting out of their recliners.

  When a young cop was reading that, it meant that the message of the new NYPD was not getting through. Mulino had his own problems with the new messaging, with the white-glove treatment you had to use sometimes nowadays. But he understood the reasons for it. There were plenty of past sins to be made up for. And more than anything, he understood that if the Commissioner tells the command officers how things are going to be, then that was the way they were going to be. You want to work somewhere where every employee can publicly bitch about his boss with no recrimination, then go get a job teaching college.

  Mulino was done with Bruder. Even the kid’s father would understand if Mulino took some action now. “Detective. You can finish with your cell phone later. What did you ask TARU, and what did they tell you?”

  Bruder’s glossy eyes showed he hadn’t heard the question. Even the second time. Peralta flipped back a page in her memo book and started to read from it. Nice to have someone to bail you out of a jam, Mulino thought.

  Bruder settled into his chair. Mulino could tell he wasn’t used to being talked to like that. He would have to get used to it. Peralta read the details. “We did provide the cell number, email address, and pedigree information to the Technical Assistance Response Unit at eleven hundred twenty-six hours yesterday. Having received no answer from them this morning, we called at oh-nine-hundred forty-four hours. The lieutenant there told us he had no new information to report.”

  Peralta had made the report, but Mulino was still talking to Bruder. “No new information like, Manny hasn’t used his cell phone and he hasn’t checked his email? Or no new information like, we haven’t even bothered to check yet?”

  Bruder stewed. “The lieutenant didn’t say.”

  “And did you ask?”

  Peralta looked back down to her memo book. She flipped another page. She wasn’t going to find the answer there. Bruder was going to have to come up with his own excuse.

  “So those guys. They are really busy. They’ve got the Thanksgiving parade coming up. Gotta make sure there isn’t any terrorist chatter, people getting ready to attack the parade. There is just tons of data they have to sift through. So, you know, we can keep asking, but you know . . .”

  At least Bruder had put away the cell phone. Mulino wondered what TARU would find if they got their hands on that. How many text messages that were not strictly work-related, sent during work hours? During the supervisor’s training, Mulino had been told about an LA County investigation where a cop had been fired for sexting on a department-issued cell phone. They had to spend a year in court to prove it was okay for the department to check his cell records. And that was when the department had issued the phone and paid the bill.

  Bruder’s phone was his own. Asking for those records would mean not just the kid’s dad, and the kid’s dad’s friends, but a wall of union lawyers talking about the Fourth Amendment. As though they thought about that when they were kicking down doors. Used to be, they could always find a way to fire you if they really wanted to.

  Mulino at least had their attention now. He looked from one to the other and spoke very slowly. “Detectives, here is what we are going to do. You’re going to tell me what you have done to find Mr. Reeves. You’re going to tell me what you have found out about Mr. Valiant. I presume you spoke to some friends? Some coworkers, during the course of the whole afternoon yesterday?”

  Peralta nodded. Bruder was bursting to speak. A bit lip; he knew just enough to hold off on interrupting for now.

  “Then you are going to call back TARU. You are going to ask the lieutenant what devices they have tracked, what requests or subpoenas have been issued, and to which carriers. And if they tell you they haven’t run anything yet, then you’ll tell me that so I can call them up and rip their heads off. But if they tell you that they have run all the data, and Reeves’s cell phone isn’t pinging, then you’re going to tell me that too. Because that would tell me something, wouldn’t it?”

  Bruder couldn’t help himself. “They’re going to find him soon enough. And it’s pretty clear that he killed the guy. So what are we spinning our wheels for? Why do we have to talk to every guy that knew them? It’s a waste of time.”

  Mulino steamed. It was a struggle to keep calm. Someone had taught him back when he was a hothead, so he had to teach these two now. “If you keep up the way you have, Detective Bruder, I have no confidence whatsoever that you are going to find Mr. Reeves. And even if you do, with nothing more than we have right now, the DA will not be able to convict him. They have these people called criminal defense attorneys in this country. And if you don’t have a motive, they can come up with all sorts of stories. Mr. Reeves had some sort of seizure. Mr. Reeves lost control of the machine. Mr. Reeves was trying to lower Mr. Valiant, and the machine malfunctioned. And then they say to the jury that you know they’re right because they haven’t heard the prosecutor give any reason at all that Mr. Reeves would want to kill someone. And what exactly do you propose the prosecutor should do then?”

  Bruder slouched back. “That’s the lawyer’s job. We’re just supposed to get the bad guys.”

  Mulino looked to Peralta. Bruder was turning into a lost cause. Untouchable based on his family, but incompetent and proud of it. Peralta was going to have to do all the heavy lifting on the case, only to have Bruder boast to his friends at the bar that he’d cracked a homicide. Only to have him whine that she shouldn’t be a detective at all, to think that the Department had made a special exception for her, when really it had made one for him. She was going through the memo book again.

  “We spoke to the other workers on site. There were no beefs between the two men. Everyone liked Wade. Most people liked Manny. They seemed to like each other. Not best friends, but no one was sleeping with anyone else’s wife or anything. No public fights.”

  “Who didn’t like Manny?”

  “A couple of newer guys thought he was sort of a pain in the ass. Talking about how long he’d been at it and how he could have done their jobs better than they did. He had some sort of injury that put him in the cab instead of on the scaffolding. The new guys thought he rubbed it in their face a little.”

  “But not Wade.”

  “Wade wasn’t a new guy.”

  Mulino nodded. This was expected. The first time you ask, no one wants to come out and accuse someone of anything. But you dig a little, listen a lot, give people a chance to open up, and you’ll hear it then. When Peralta went back to those guys who didn’t like Manny all that much, they would think of something that kind of pissed them off one time or another. Something a little petty or a little mean. That would be the start.

  “And when you checked with the employer?”

  “There was no one at the office of Hill and Associates in the evening when we stopped by. We couldn’t reach the CEO, Eleanor Hill. We’ve put in a request for HR records for both men. They’re going to tell us by the end of the day whether they will comply without a subpoena.”

  “And if they won’t?”

  “Then we’ll get a subpoe
na.”

  “Call the DA’s office today. Get the subpoena out to Hill and Associates today. Don’t wait for them to decide whether they are cooperating.”

  “Okay.”

  Bruder was back now. He had blown off whatever steam he had needed with his outburst. “And don’t forget the father.”

  “What?” Mulino asked.

  Peralta looked to Bruder, then back to her book. “Yeah. When there was no one home at the office, Timmy said maybe we should go call on the father. See what’s going on with him. Maybe thought he would know something.”

  “You went to McArthur Hill’s church?”

  “It was Timmy’s idea.”

  Bruder was looking at the floor now. As much as Mulino thought it was a bad idea for his detectives to burst in on a politically connected pastor without paving the way first, he didn’t like one of them throwing the other under the bus for it either. That was the kind of behavior that would get Peralta’s locker glued shut. Or worse.

  “And what happened?”

  “He yelled at us. He told us we were profiling his entire congregation. He told us that we thought . . .” She had to look this part up. “That we thought not only the sins of the father flowed to the son, but that the sins of the daughter’s employee flowed back to the father. He was pretty upset.”

  Bruder steamed again. “He was trying to hide something. That’s what all the yelling and the calling us racists was about. He’s got something going on that he didn’t want the police looking into.”