A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Mulino beat Peralta and Leonard to the hospital door. Maybe they were younger, and Peralta was certainly in better shape, but Mulino could still turn it on when he had to. They were rounding the last corner of the hallway when he reached the door to Reeves’s room.

  There was someone standing guard, but not who Mulino expected. It was a uniform officer, from patrol, one step removed from traffic enforcement. Small, white, meek, the guy couldn’t have been more than twenty-six years old. Mulino looked at the collar brass—the patrol cop was from the six-seven. He was not even technically out of the local precinct; Brookdale was on the edge of the seven-oh. The six-seven was just across Bedford, near enough to bring in a body just about every week, so the guy wasn’t too far out of his sector. But there wasn’t supposed to be a uniform watching the door at all. There was supposed to be Mulino’s detective, Timothy Bruder. Mulino didn’t remember telling his direct report that he could kick off. He moved in very close to the little cop.

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m PO Reggie Shay. I’m in the six-seven.”

  “I can read your collar brass, officer. I can read your nameplate too. That’s not what I mean when I ask who you are.”

  “Timmy—Detective Bruder said his tour was over and he had maxed out on overtime for the month already. He called me up and asked if I could watch the door until you got here. No one’s come in or out. I mean, except for the doctors and the nurses.”

  You can promote someone to detective because he passes a test and has a lot of collars under his belt and because (let’s face it) his dad knows a lot of guys at One PP. But you can’t make someone think like management if he doesn’t want to. Timmy Bruder would spend his whole career calculating to the penny how much his pension was going to be worth. And he’d put in his papers the first day he was eligible. He would not do a lick of work if he couldn’t add it to his time sheet, and monthly caps on overtime meant a monthly cap on how many hours Detective Bruder would serve the people of New York. If Mulino didn’t like it, he could call up the union rep. But Mulino liked talking to the union reps even less than he liked talking to Reggie Shay.

  “And I suppose you wrote down the names of each doctor that came in, and each nurse, and each orderly, so that I can go up to personnel and make sure people with those names actually work at this hospital?”

  The uniform kid didn’t say anything.

  “And you checked them all for hospital ID. You told them that PD needed a secure room and you were very polite and apologetic but you did need to check their ID to make sure they weren’t some co-conspirator coming in to give Reeves a story. Or a friend of the guy who pushed him off a building coming by to finish the job. You did all of that, right, Police Officer Shay of the six-seven?”

  The kid looked at his shoes. Mulino thought maybe he was going to cry. He was worried he was laying it on a little thick. Then again, this was someone the city trusted to run around with a gun and a pair of handcuffs, so giving him a tongue-lashing to teach him how important it is to take care on the job might not be the end of the world.

  “I just watched the door, Detective. Timmy just told me to spell him for a little while watching the door. I did my best.”

  Mulino put a hand on the recruit’s shoulder. They sure did raise them soft nowadays.

  “Okay, Officer. Head back to your precinct. I’ll talk to Detective Bruder.”

  The kid slunk away. Mulino checked over his shoulder, making sure that Leonard and Detective Peralta had caught up with him. Leonard was out of breath, but Peralta already had her memo book out. Good for her. Mulino pushed down the handle and swung into the room.

  The odor was better than he had remembered it from the day before. The sharp antiseptic hospital smell lingered, but the stink of rot and muck and who knows what else was gone. Once someone wakes up, he can call to have the bandages changed, his bedpan emptied. The unconscious in a big-city hospital are treated only marginally better than the corpses in a morgue.

  And Reeves wasn’t as far from the morgue as all that. He looked pretty much like he had the day before: bandaged, bound, and weak. His eyes were fluttering open a little and he had a tube in his left hand with a button at the end of it. That would be the morphine. Mulino had seen plenty of gunshot victims given the opiate drip as they came out of it. Reeves would be able to give himself a very small dose with the button, and then it would lock up and deny him a hit for half an hour to ward off addiction. Sixty seconds after he squeezed, he would lunge at the button again, desperate for another. Then he’d writhe in pain for twenty-nine hopeless minutes, a junkie in the making.

  Mulino walked up to the right side of the bed and stood by the man’s bandaged arm. Leonard had taken a place at the foot of the bed and Peralta was on the man’s other side, by the morphine. They could look at the chart all they wanted now, but they had to be careful talking to Reeves. Witnesses have rights, after all. And Detective Mulino had just enough of a soft spot to make sure he honored them.

  “You there, Manny?”

  The eyelids fluttered. Mulino’s voice brought him back just enough from whatever happy place he had been in. His left thumb started madly pumping the button. Maybe a little more morphine would help. But a little more morphine wouldn’t come in for about twenty-six minutes.

  “You are Manny Reeves, right?”

  The man turned his head slightly toward Detective Mulino. His beard was so thin it looked as though you could brush it off his face. His hair was wispy and hadn’t been washed in days. His whole body had the limp look of failure, the feel of a man who had given up trying to do much of anything. If Mulino hadn’t read Manuel Reeves’s personnel file, he would have thought he was twenty years older than he actually was.

  The man strained his neck and craned it down again. Mulino figured it was safe to read the gesture as a nod.

  “Mr. Reeves, I’m Detective Ralph Mulino. I’m with the NYPD. Do you understand me?”

  The same weak gesture. Mulino nodded along with him, if only to give him confidence. To show him he was being understood.

  “Mr. Reeves, you fell down an air shaft. Do you remember falling down the air shaft?”

  And this time a little moan. A faint whistle, like wind through the chimney. The man was trying to talk. Mulino leaned in. He put his ear right up against the man’s face. Reeves’s eyes were closed but he was doing his best to make out words.

  “Didn’t. Fall. Pushed.”

  Mulino looked up at Peralta. “Detective, please note that Mr. Reeves claims he didn’t fall down the air shaft. He claims he was pushed.”

  Peralta jotted in the memo book. Mulino looked down to the foot of the bed. Leonard was watching the broken man, silent. Mulino remembered how Leonard had almost thrown up when he had seen Christine Davenport’s body for the first time. And it hadn’t even been a particularly gruesome corpse. Or maybe Leonard wasn’t silent because he was sick. He was staring at the man’s eyes. He had done his share of interviews, after all, and anyone who interviews people for a living has a personal system for figuring out when a witness is lying. Maybe Leonard was trying to judge Manny Reeves, even in his semi-conscious state. Maybe Leonard was trying to figure out if this guy had himself put together enough to lie to a detective on his way out of the coma.

  “Do you know who it was that pushed you, Mr. Reeves?”

  This time Reeves’s head turned toward Mulino. Reeves opened his lids a little wider. The deep-set eyes looked up at Mulino’s face, then down at the shield hanging around his neck. The eyes were conscious now, more than they had been. Reeves turned his head back level. He looked straight up at the ceiling. Then he squinted his eyes shut, hard, firm.

  “That wasn’t a nod, Mr. Reeves, but it didn’t look like you said no either. Can I try this again? You went to 80 Smithdale a few days ago with another man. Older than you. Gray hair. Wearing an overcoat, we’re told, even though it might not have been cold enough for it. You went t
o the roof with this man. And the next thing anyone knows is, you are in the bottom of the air shaft almost dead. You want to tell me who this guy was?”

  The eyes stayed squinted. The thumb squeezed for another hit. It wasn’t coming.

  Peralta leaned in on Reeves’s other side. She put her hand on his arm. Gentle, coaxing. She spoke quietly and firmly.

  “We want to help you, Mr. Reeves. We want to find out who did this to you. Anything else, anything that might have happened before you went to that building, we can figure that out later. But you have to know, you help us out on who it was tossed you over the edge, and we will remember it. Because once we are done finding the guy that did this to you, we are going to have other questions. You have to understand that.”

  Mulino grimaced. It was too soon. Their best hope had been to get the guy to spill something while he was still in a morphine haze. Before he could process the kind of trouble he was in. Asking someone to horse trade, to make deals, was for later. When he was conscious and clear and could weigh his options. Right now, the guy could probably barely figure out where he was, let alone what he had done to get himself nearly killed. All Peralta had done was remind him. And once he was reminded, he would start worrying. And worried witnesses are unlikely to be much help at all.

  The man started moaning again. He gestured to Peralta. She knelt close and put her ear to his mouth. Mulino knew already what the guy was going to say, so the frown on Peralta’s face didn’t surprise him at all. He barely noticed that his cell phone was going off, vibrating in his pocket. At least he had remembered to turn the ringer off in the hospital. Peralta had stood up and was writing in her memo book when Mulino pulled out the phone and saw that it was Chief Travis from OCCB calling. He looked to Peralta as she finished her note.

  “So what did he say, Detective?”

  She finished scribbling. “He wants a lawyer.”

  Mulino shoved off from the bed. Maybe Peralta took good notes, but she hadn’t figured out how to talk to a witness yet without scaring the life out of him. Mulino started wondering what kind of menial task he could assign Peralta, to peg her down a notch. He looked back at the barely living man and spoke.

  “Well, then, I guess we’re about done here.”

  His phone started ringing again, and this time he answered. “Mulino.”

  “Detective, it’s Chief Travis.”

  “Hello, Chief. I’m here at the hospital with the second victim. He just came out of consciousness this afternoon.”

  “Okay, Detective. Your team has done a good job so far. But based on what you’ve picked up, this case is going to the Homicide Division. You know as well as I do, this wasn’t an accident. They’ve got more guys to do the kind of legwork it’s going to need.”

  “Whatever you say, Chief. Frankly, I kind of figured.” Mulino was a supervisor now, but wouldn’t have the chance to work his own case to the close. But you can’t let them see you’re disappointed.

  “Can you spare someone from your team to work with them? Get them up to speed?”

  Mulino looked across the hospital bed at Detective Peralta. She was still writing in her memo book. She wouldn’t even realize he was punishing her. “Yeah. I think I can manage that.”

  “Good. Because I have something else for you now. I need you to come to OCCB headquarters right away. Not that the murder isn’t important. But this is more urgent. We need you down here now.”

  “You want to tell me why?”

  “I’ll tell you that when you get here.”

  “Then I guess I’m on my way.” Mulino shot a glance to Peralta on his way out the door. She was looking up with a sad pair of forgive-me eyes. At least she knew she had dropped the ball. That was some kind of progress, anyway. So Ralph Mulino, still dutiful, packed up his phone and wound his team out of the hospital.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Leonard didn’t know exactly what was done in these circumstances, only that when he and Ralph Mulino came in to see Adam Davenport, the man looked like he’d been wrung through a piece of heavy machinery and then softly petted back to life again. The niceties were already over. Adam had a cup of coffee. He had had his cry and his scream and maybe he had gone somewhere and thrown up. There was a sandwich in front of him—baloney on white, it looked like. They don’t spare any expense when they bring you in to give a statement about your missing son. Leonard wouldn’t have wanted to eat anything if he had been in this guy’s shoes either.

  The room was nice. Nicer than anything that Leonard had used to interview witnesses at DIMAC. The place had a plush couch and a coffee table and a stack of magazines on the end table. Adam was being swallowed by the couch. The coffee and the sandwich were on the coffee table. There was a napkin, but the sandwich wasn’t even on a plate. Across from Adam, there was a single plastic chair. The chair was the only thing that looked to Leonard like it came from the police department. Other than that, Leonard would have thought they were in a psychiatrist’s waiting room.

  They’d left Peralta with Reeves, for what good it would do. She had goaded him into asking for a lawyer and now she could wait for Legal Aid to log the case and find someone with a manageable caseload to send over. On the way in to OCCB, Mulino drove while a line detective told Leonard what had happened. Adam had gone to pick up his son from school. No son. No witnesses except for a seven-year-old boy. All the boy had said was that the person who picked up Henry had been a grownup, male, white, wearing dark clothes and a jacket. And clean-shaven: among elementary school parents in Brooklyn, this at least winnowed the field.

  They’d called Mulino because Adam was Christine Davenport’s husband. Mulino had asked Leonard to come along. Homicide would take over the murder. But Mulino had worked the Davenport case, and Leonard had known her. So it only made sense that they would talk to Adam.

  The machinery of the NYPD had already been deployed to try to find the boy. An intake detective had taken down the details: time and place of occurrence, names of possible witnesses. There were uniforms now probably speaking to any school employee who could possibly know anything or have seen anything: the teacher, the janitor, other parents who had not really been watching as their kids kicked a soccer ball around a cement yard. The boy who had spoken to Adam was probably holed up somewhere being forced to tell his story fifteen or twenty times, his terrified mother sitting next to him, worried that this could happen to her someday.

  But the machinery of the NYPD had only been deployed to find out the what. To maybe track the boy himself. Mulino and Leonard were in this plush little room to find out the why. Adam Davenport was sitting staring at his phone. Hoping maybe that someone would send him a text, call him with a ransom. Even Leonard knew that things didn’t work that way. But he wasn’t in the hope-dashing business today.

  Adam spoke without looking up. “I told the other guys everything that happened. I don’t know why I can’t leave. Maybe he’ll come home. Someone should be at home.”

  Mulino took the lead, making his way to the chair across from Adam. “Someone’s at your house, Adam. The chief thought that maybe you should talk to the two of us a little.”

  Adam looked up from his phone. First at Mulino. Leonard couldn’t tell if it was relief or surprise that shone in the man’s face when he recognized the detective. But when Adam turned and looked up at him, Leonard could see that he was filled with anger. Anger and fear. Adam turned back to Mulino.

  “What’s he doing here? He isn’t a police officer.”

  Mulino spoke slowly. Leonard knew better than to try to defend himself. “Leonard’s working with us. He was working with us when Christine died. He was extremely helpful.”

  “He went to jail.”

  “Leonard stepped over a couple of lines. But he’s paid for that. And we wanted him on board here. He knows a lot about what happened to Christine.”

  “More than I do, I think. No one ever told me what happened.”

  Leonard saw his opening. “Mr. Davenport, I came by
to tell you. That night I was at your house. I told you to call me. I want to help you. I did everything I could for Christine, and I did everything I could to find out who killed her after. She found out some very dangerous truths. If anyone didn’t tell you everything she found out, it was to protect you.”

  “Some job they did.” And the phone was back up again. He was looking back into it like a child placated in a restaurant by his stressed parents.

  Mulino settled into the chair. He held his hand up to Adam and guided the phone down. “Mr. Davenport. Adam. We need to talk to you. There are people out there looking for your son now. There are people at your house. But someone did this to you. And we need to walk through some things. I know you gave a description of the boy to the intake guys. But I’m going to ask you to do it again.”

  Adam stammered out his description. “White, he’s got straight brown hair, just past his ears.”

  Mulino was taking his own notes now. “Height?”

  “Not quite four feet. Forty-seven inches? Tall enough to get on the roller coaster at Coney Island.”

  “Clothes?”

  “He is wearing a soccer jersey. It’s white, has the name Ronaldo on the back.”

  Mulino wrote it down. Soccer jerseys nowadays. They all looked the same to him.

  “He have a school bag? A lunchbox?”

  “A green backpack. It’s too big for him, it has wheels on the bottom like a roller bag. They give them so much to bring home now, the bags are too heavy for them.”

  “Does he have any jewelry? A chain? A watch?”

  “He wears a green plastic wristband. His mother gave it to him. Like those cancer survivor things, but thicker. It snaps together, but he never takes it off. He’s always picking at it.”

  “Shoes?”

  “Blue sneakers.”

  “Any scars? Any birthmarks?”

  “No.” And what seven-year-old kid, after all, looks all that much different from any other one?

  Then Mulino straightened up in his chair. He got a little more serious. He leaned in. “Now, Mr. Davenport, we need to talk about anyone who might have wanted to harm you. Because that can help us find him too. If anyone wants something from you, you will know. But we don’t want to wait for that. The best way you can help us is to tell us anything that’s happened. Anything out of the ordinary. Any conflict. Any argument you had with anyone at work. Just to help us get started.”