by Andrew Case
The woman held her son while she stared at Leonard and spoke. “Mr. Mitchell, I live here. And I am not going to get out of my home to make it easy for you or anyone else to sell this building and kick me to the street. So I am going to sit here with my son for the next two hours and every time someone walks into this room I am going to weep. And I am going to wail. And I am going to tell them please not to kick me out.”
The doorbell downstairs rang. They were already here.
“I think I’m going to just keep your apartment locked.”
“I will hear them on the stairs. I will call out.”
Leonard had spent most of his career working on behalf of those who had been abused. Reading the medical records of those who had been beaten by police officers. Sitting across from them and hearing their stories. Working to bring a little justice to the world. But now here he was, the enforcer. The bad guy. The white man bringing people by who were going to kick a black woman and her son out of their apartment. But he had signed on to work for Hill and Associates. And if he quit because he couldn’t bear even the above-board part of the job, he would never learn what was going on behind the scenes. He would never get Mulino anything. He nodded to the woman and subdued the knot in his stomach. He walked down the stairs to open the front door.
There they were, a crowd of them already. Bearded white men in skinny jeans with skinnier wives, each wide-eyed at the idea of a real Brooklyn townhouse. Leonard opened the door and smiled. They started to filter past, an indistinguishable mass of recently acquired wealth.
“As you’ll see, the place needs a lot of work. But the location is perfect. And the bones are in great shape.”
They filtered past him, the men pretending they knew the first thing about beams or soffits or LED lighting. There was chatter about tankless water heaters, ductless air conditioners, and other expensive amenities. The men talked about building a passive house, the women noted the obvious water damage, and none of them ventured into the overgrown backyard. Leonard nodded and smiled and handed out brochures. He did his best to answer the concerns of each couple. But he knew that as soon as they went upstairs, the happy buyers would come face to face with a problem much bigger than picking out new appliances.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Doing it the right way would have taken too long. Detective Peralta couldn’t wait for the hospital intake coordinator to send a fax to OCCB, where it might sit in an inbox for a day or two before a PAA decided to hand it to a sergeant, who might or might not initial it and fax it back. Flashing the badges and saying they were investigating a murder would have to do. Peralta had asked Bruder to watch the door in case a nosy administrator got ideas. At least he was good for something.
Peralta couldn’t stand these big hospitals. The wide halls never seemed as clean as you hoped; the strong smell of bleach masked the faint whiff of urine. Peralta couldn’t read the codes that were sent by a different set of scrubs or a different length of lab coat: who was a nurse or an orderly or a doctor or an intern was lost on her. She could tell you whether the bars above a sergeant’s shield meant that he had saved a life or merely aced the firing range, but the uniforms of the city hospital were incomprehensible.
But she would have recognized a lawyer. A lawyer would be wearing a suit. And a lawyer would not be happy if two detectives had bluffed their way past the front desk, asked where Manny Reeves was being held, and taken outposts inside the room. He would have quoted New York State privacy statutes, and HIPPA, and reminded the detectives that they were supposed to have provided the intake coordinator with an initialed fax from their command. Maybe even a warrant. Peralta had asked Bruder to guard the door because she didn’t have time for lawyers. Bruder thought that guarding the door was the important job.
Manny Reeves was alone in the room, in the window-side bed. The bed was thin, with a cheap aluminum railing. There was no budget for tricked-out hospital beds in this place. The window itself was smeared with dirt from the outside and bolted shut. Whether to prevent jumpers from getting out or dealers from sneaking in was anyone’s guess. Through the window, Peralta could barely make out the grim traffic along Flatbush and the bare trees looking more dead than hibernating. Manny Reeves was unconscious. Both legs were bound, bandaged. His torso was elevated with a pillow but not in full traction. The right arm was in a cast, but the left arm and the head were clear. He was intubated and on an IV. There was no bandage on his head. They were probably keeping him under so he wouldn’t scratch at the casts. He was white, around thirty, scraggly brown hair already thinning, with a wispy beard—maybe trying to look like the new craftsmen with their thick manes, and failing at it.
Peralta pulled the chart from the railing at the foot of the bed. Most of the codes were the same that the department used, a circled L for left and a circled R for right and “time and place of occurrence” condensed to “tpo.” The true medical jargon she could look up later. She took out her cell phone and snapped photos of the four pages, in case she had to get out of here in a hurry. The hospital lawyers would love that. Once she had the photos, she started to walk through the chart herself.
Manny Reeves had been picked up in the bottom of a ventilation shaft about six blocks from where Wade Valiant had died. He had broken both legs, an arm, and his right hip. Peralta figured the dressing on the hip was under the covers. He had been brought in unconscious and kept under for the past few days. Peralta couldn’t make out if the chart gave a reason why. They had gotten his name from somewhere, his address. Most likely someone went through his possessions.
Peralta looked around the room. There was a cupboard on the wall between the bed and the bathroom. Reeves wouldn’t have been able to get up and use it yet. One of the tubes running under his covers was probably a catheter. The clothes and wallet would be in the cupboard. Next to the bed was a small table; on it, a cell phone. It explained the ping. Some helpful nurse had plugged in the phone this morning. That meant that they thought he might be waking up soon. There was no indication he had ever been awake long enough to talk to anyone. That was good. She would get to him first. Maybe it was worth sending that fax after all.
“Detective Peralta?”
Bruder at the door. Peralta slipped the chart back into the slot at the foot of the bed and took a step away. She pulled up her best police posture. If it was a nurse it wouldn’t matter. If it was a doctor she could flash her badge. And it probably wasn’t a lawyer.
“Yes, Bruder.”
Peralta looked up as soon as her hand was off the chart. There were two of them, and Bruder hadn’t kept them from making their way inside already. Neither one of them was a doctor. Instead it was Detective Mulino with a thin woman in a Sunday suit. Caramel skin, hair pulled tight behind her head in bun; her fingernails had been done professionally and tastefully. The woman who had dressed her down in front of the church, Eleanor Hill. Detective Peralta hoped the woman wouldn’t remember her. Maybe she thought all Hispanic female cops looked alike.
“Detective Mulino, I was just . . . I was checking on the patient. We heard from TARU about the cell phone ping.”
“Peralta, this is Eleanor Hill. She runs the company that was putting up the building.”
No look of recognition. That was a relief. Or maybe she was faking it. Peralta relaxed a little as she shook the woman’s hand. Mulino spoke.
“What have you got for us?”
“Well, we just got here.”
Mulino cocked his head. “Detective Peralta, I notified intake and there are two hospital administrators on their way here now. You and I both know that once they are here, it will be six hours before they give us their records. So I hope you were a good detective and got a peek at that chart and can tell us something useful to act on during those six hours. Or you can spend those six hours here watching him.”
Some rules were made to be broken. Mulino could give you a hard time, but when push comes to shove, he was an old-school detective after all. “He was found at the bottom
of an air shaft.”
The woman in the suit took a breath. “Where?”
“At 80 Smithdale Street. A few blocks from the accident.”
Mulino this time. “I think we can stop calling it an accident.”
Eleanor Hill was already reaching for her cell phone. “That’s David Verringer’s building.”
“You know him.”
“Everyone knows him. He’s—well, you can go run the records on the building yourself. He gets money from the city to house people on their way out of shelters. The city pays him more than any market tenant would. The place is a dump. The heat is never on, there’s mold. The building is so bad that the neighbors complain.”
“An old friend of yours, this guy?”
“That’s what your affordable housing gets you in this city. Taxpayers making someone rich to keep his tenants in misery.”
“And any reason, Ms. Hill, that your employee would be in this guy’s building? Especially right after trashing your crane and getting another one of your employees killed?”
Peralta watched the woman as she considered. Detective Mulino never stopped conducting an investigation. He didn’t sit out at a table and swing a light over you. But when he asked you what time it was, the question was loaded. Asking you where your employees might have gone is an interrogation. Always with that chipper tone. He would ask you for a cup of sugar and slam you over the head with it. As the woman bit her lip, waiting to answer, Peralta marveled. Maybe, after all, these developers were all in it together, somehow. As Mulino always had told her, finding out the what is easy. But you have to work to figure out the why.
“No, detective. I have no idea. We want to help in any way we can. I don’t have much contact, usually, with the men on the sites.”
Mulino nodded. Peralta was already putting together theories. The slumlord was sabotaging Hill’s building. Or Hill had set it up to make it look that way. She had wanted to cash in an insurance policy, maybe. She had wanted to drive a stake through her competitor. Get David Verringer out of the way so she could make his building into a glass condo too. And after all, maybe he didn’t put in Bosch washing machines and Sub-Zero fridges, but he was providing housing for actual poor people. Peralta knew that when someone like Eleanor Hill talks about affordable housing, she means something that you could never afford on an NYPD salary, even if you make detective early.
They were interrupted by Bruder again. With two men in suits at the door. They were white, with neatly cut dark hair, and they wore indistinguishable suits. If one of them hadn’t had a mustache, she wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. They brushed past Bruder and spoke only to Mulino. It was as though the rest of them were not even in the room.
“Detective, we understand you want to have some information on the patient.” The first one did the talking. The second one held the paperwork. “You’re going to have to fill out a few forms. You can fax them to your squad and when they come back we can give you access to Mr. Reeves’s files. You understand we have privacy laws here, and we just want to be compliant.”
“I understand.” The men hadn’t introduced themselves. The one holding the clipboard slipped around to the foot of the bed and fished out Manny Reeves’s chart. Very clever. Because three NYPD detectives might not actually know where you keep it.
“Only one question, guys. You have any sense when this guy is planning to wake up? You know, we’d like to talk to him.”
“You’ll have to talk to the doctors for that.”
“But I can’t talk to the doctors till we get the forms done?”
“That’s right.”
Peralta realized that she had been in the room close to an hour now. She hadn’t seen a doctor come in. No nurse, no attendant, no nothing. The big-city hospital. Somewhere in the bowels of the building there were some very expensive machines, but the ordinary suffering patients were left to wait it out.
Mulino looked to his detectives and spoke. “Bruder, I want you to stay on this door. You call us if anyone comes and tries to talk to him. You call us if he wakes up. He’s an NYPD detective, he’s allowed to stand at the door, isn’t he?”
The lawyer without the clipboard looked at Bruder. Then to Mulino. Peralta figured he wasn’t actually sure. Better to go along than admit it. “Yeah. He can stand there.”
“I’m going to go and fill out this paperwork. Detective Peralta, could you go look into that other matter that we were talking about? The Housing and Preservation Department question? Look up those violations. We have a few hours before this will pick up.”
That other matter. To throw off the administrators. Peralta nodded. He meant the building at Smithdale Street, where Peralta had found out that Reeves had fallen. But if he said that, the suits would be on to them. As the two suits led Mulino out through the hall, Peralta turned back toward the stairway to the hospital entrance. He had mentioned HPD violations, and Eleanor Hill had said the building was a dump. She could look up the violations in ten minutes. But that was just the start of it. She knew what Mulino had really asked her to do. He had just given her license to do real legwork.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From the roof, all Peralta could see was a heap of accumulated scraps. Looking over the edge of the air shaft at 80 Smithdale Street, she thought that the residents threw their garbage straight out here instead of bothering to walk to the kitchen. It was a long way down. Not as far as Wade Valiant had fallen. But Detective Peralta was at least a little surprised that Manny Reeves was still alive. Speckled along the inside walls were a series of small, smudged windows. They were where the garbage had come from. And they were the only reason that the air shaft was there.
You can’t call a room a bedroom in New York unless it has an exterior window. By building an air shaft that was eight feet square, the original builder could put a window in a little room in the back of each apartment. That window made the room a bedroom, and that bedroom made the unit a two-bedroom apartment. Never mind that the window was about eighteen inches tall and only twelve across. Never mind that unless you were on the top floor you didn’t get any light, and even then only for a few hours in the middle of the day. Or that you kept the window closed all the time with a shade pulled because otherwise someone only eight feet away could look in at you. And that all you really used it for was to throw garbage out into the heap at the bottom of the air shaft. It was a bedroom, and that meant they could jack up the rent.
Or they could have at one point. Because from what Detective Peralta could tell on her way into the building, there was no one living there who could pay any rent at all. Or who would want to. The front door not only hadn’t been locked, it had long ago been busted with a crowbar and barely hitched back on its hinges. What otherwise would have been called the interior lobby was crowded with broken tiles, piles of trash, and mail strewn on the floor because the mailbox keys had been lost or stolen long ago.
She hadn’t seen any people on the way up. With the building not secure, most of them probably just kept their doors locked and hoped no one was coming to bang them down. What she had noticed were the cables. On every floor, big orange extension cables ran across the hall, snaking out from under the door of one apartment to its neighbor. The paint on the walls was so old, it had given up on peeling and begun to sag like drapes.
There was no railing over the ledge of the air shaft. That was probably some kind of violation as well. It wasn’t listed on the 194 violations she found on the HPD website when she looked up the building just after leaving the hospital. Inspectors can’t catch everything. The tar roof was in decent-enough shape, with less trash than there was in the bottom of the shaft. Peralta stood and looked around. The building felt large if you looked east, down the row of barrel-front limestone townhouses. If you looked west, toward the avenue, where the new steel giants cut off views and access to the park, it felt weak and small, about to crumble under its own weight.
Someone had to have called 911. Someone had to have turned
in the body. The building was four stories, twelve units each; that was big enough that there ought to be a building manager, a super, something. It was back to good old-fashioned legwork, banging on doors and showing her badge. Aurelia Peralta headed down from the roof and into the unforgiving corridor, crisscrossed with extension cords.
She knocked politely at first. No answer. She stepped over the orange cable and went to the next one. Knocking harder. Banging. Nothing. She was hesitant to identify herself. Most likely someone in every one of these units had some sort of problem with the police, or knew someone who did. She wasn’t serving warrants, but if someone saw her and ran away, she would have to give chase, if only to save face. And she was investigating a murder; she didn’t want to spend all night processing paperwork on some skell who had skipped arraignment after getting picked up selling a dime bag. Patrol officers can pride themselves on the sheer number of collars they pick up. Peralta wasn’t in the volume business anymore.
But after a whole hallway of silence, after banging on the doors hard enough that she was afraid she might knock one down by accident, she knew she needed another strategy. The place wasn’t empty. Whoever was in these units knew someone was out there. The doors were thin enough that they could hear her from one hallway to the other. She could pull the fire alarm, but panic wasn’t what she was looking for either. She walked back down the hallway past the extension cords and turned for the floor below.
The extension cords. The HPD report had said that up to 40 percent of the units didn’t have any working power outlets. The residents were running power across the hallway so they could keep their lights on and run their televisions. Never mind the fire hazard. Never mind that the HPD citation was from four years before and no one seems to have sent an electrician. People will do what they need to do to survive. If they were surviving on the power from one unit to the next, then it was at least one way to get their attention. And the cords were lying out in the hallway. She wasn’t breaking into an apartment or anything.