Our driver had pulled off the highway, and we were now cutting across West Thirty-sixth toward Tenth Avenue. About midway down the darkened block of squat, grimy tenements and loft buildings, I spotted a street snitch of mine who calls himself Rat. He was standing in the foggy yellow light of a doorway, pushing a needle into his arm. I would have to look up Rat sometime soon, maybe tomorrow; he might know something about Picasso.
Neglio also spotted Rat, and the general decrepitude of the lower end of my neighborhood. Neglio can also be irritating when the unfortunate differences between us show. He passed a remark up to the driver: “Isn’t it lovely here in Hell’s Kitchen where the high-minded Detective Neil Hockaday lives?”
The driver looked back at me in the rearview mirror. He gave me a nose laugh.
I leaned forward and tapped his sharkskin shoulder and said, “Just be a good errand boy now and drop me at Forty-fifth and Tenth, near-left corner. And stop at a drugstore, get something for your nose.”
“Hey,” he squawked to Neglio, “I don’t got to take that, do I?”
I said, “Officer Flunky, he speaks!”
Neglio told us both to shut up. And so I enjoyed nine blocks of peace and quiet.
As we passed my apartment house at Forty-third, I saw that Ruby had put on the light by the window. I imagined her sitting on the couch with a book, her smooth brown legs curled up under her hips.
When we finally got to the bodega, Neglio touched my arm before I could leave the car. “Try to understand one little thing, if nothing else. My world’s just as real as yours, Hock. Okay?”
I was certainly willing to concede him the point. “Yeah, okay.”
“So try thinking my way. This new mayor of ours—whether or not you even voted—you remember how he damn near lost the election to that Italian twerp of a federal D.A., right? The one with the really bad comb-over? The one with all those cockamamie law-and-order speeches?”
“Come, come, Tomassino Neglio. Such talk about a paisano.”
“Never mind that. The thing is, you think cops have interference from City Hall now? Can you imagine what it would be from an ex-D.A.?”
Again I conceded.
“So you see how there’s no harm in helping our guy’s image? Which is all it is—image. We help the mayor, the mayor stays off our backs when it really counts.”
There was a certain attractive logic to what Neglio was saying. But I kept my doubts firmly in mind, which is something that only comes natural after a few years in my trade.
“Let’s get this straight,” I said. “Supposing our boy keeps going off his nut like he is, and he wipes out a few more solid citizens, and the tabloids put two and two together and have a field day …”
“Oh, they will. Unless you think you can poke your boy tonight and be done with it.”
“Well, probably not.”
“No.”
“So down the line, when I’m ready to take down my man, you want me to wait for the camera crew and the mayor’s limo?”
“Crudely put, but that’s more or less it.”
“And if I do this, you’re going to set me up downtown? And see me to a pay bump?” It occurred to me that I might talk this over with Ruby.
“See? Not so bad, right?”
“What’s in it for you? Are you gunning for Senior Inspector? Or Super Chief so you can get a bigger car and a brighter flunky?”
The driver squawked again. Neither one of us paid him any attention.
Neglio said to me, “Could it happen to two nicer guys?”
“What are you, lonely down there at headquarters? Is that why you’d want me around, to share the misery?”
“It’s a reward—”
“Try thinking my way,” I interrupted. “Taking some desk job down there with you would be like retirement for me. Only you probably wouldn’t allow me to go to the ball park every day.”
“Christ, Hock! With all due respect …”
“Yeah, let’s keep this respectful. Which means I do want my pension one fine day, but I also want to be the one who says when I’m ready to collect. It also means I get to make my own goddamn collars my own goddamn way!”
I stepped out of the car as a fine flourish to dressing down the boss. The bodega did not have any customers inside, but the gates were not down yet and the place looked open still. Picasso’s terrified pig was gone from the window, but there was something else in its place, something in calcimine.
Neglio rolled down a window of the car and barked, “Hock, get over here, and that’s a goddamn order!”
So I walked on over, but I took my time. Neglio leaned out the window with his wing-collar shirt and black bow tie and his teeth were clenched and he said, “I could have you up on insubordination charges first thing in the morning, Hock. Remember that. You push me, and you’ll learn how there’s good opportunities in life—and then there are bad ones.”
“I’m on furlough, remember that? And you’re way out of bounds interfering with an officer. So maybe this insubordinate conversation never happened. So don’t bust my chops, I’ve got work to do.”
Neglio made some growling noises.
“Besides which, I’m only handling this job because you and your buddy the mayor have decided I’m the only cop you got who might clear it before we get some real serious panic going in this town,” I said. “Which, by the way, reminds me, I’m working on my own clock—your words.”
“Well, just what can we do about that?” Neglio said, smiling.
“I’ll make you one little deal tonight, just so you can keep your buddy happy. You shuffle the paper and get me back on the city’s clock, and I’ll think about it.”
“About the mayor?”
“I’ll think, I won’t promise.”
“Deal.”
Neglio rolled up his window, a happy man for effecting a minor corruption. He waved, then his car lurched off the curb and crossed the avenue and turned east up at Forty-ninth Street and then out of sight.
Behind me, a woman screamed in Spanish.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Han matado a mi esposo!”
The screams came from inside the bodega. They grew louder and louder, piercing through all other sounds of a Hell’s Kitchen night until only the widow’s cry was heard: “Han matado a mi esposo!” They killed my husband!
A gang of teenagers loitering outside a video store at the corner heard her. They started toward me, en masse.
A woman appeared on the fire escape outside an apartment directly over the bodega’s door. She leaned over the edge of the black wrought-iron railing and called, “Carolena, Carolena?”
I crouched, pulled the .38 revolver from my shoulder holster and scuttled toward the doorway. I shielded myself behind a steel corner plate that connected the long curved glass display window and the entrance.
The woman up on the fire escape spotted the gun in my hand and shrieked.
“Carolena! Benito!”
The gang of teens, maybe a dozen boys and three or four girls, had become silent. They moved toward me, but more slowly now.
I pulled back the firing hammer of the revolver, gripped the hand stock and tucked the barrel close against my chest. I had only seconds to get a fix on whatever lay waiting inside the bodega.
There was a small sales floor with a couple of dividers that made aisles of canned goods, cellophane-wrapped snack foods, infant formula and diapers, six-packs of beer, soda, mousetraps, cockroach bombs. Noisy cooling cabinets held milk, cheese and fresh meats. Cigarettes, coffee, candy and sandwiches were sold at the counter. There was a curtained door in the back that probably led to an illegal apartment.
A woman about fifty years old sat squat-legged on the floor in front of the counter, with a man’s bloody head flopped in her lap. “Han matado a mi esposo!” She looked directly at me, seeing nothing but her own fear and loss.
She raised her head to the ceiling. Her body rocked back and forth. Blood sloshed across her large bosoms, and tr
ickled down her arms and elbows into the dusty cracks of the wooden floor. Her screams turned to desperate prayer: “Dios, guardar mi esposo!” God, save my husband!
The teenagers had stopped about thirty feet from me, afraid to come farther and startled by the sight of my gun.
I pulled my gold shield from a side pocket of my jacket and held it up high, so the woman on the fire escape could see it as well as the teenagers. I said in Spanish, then English, “Llamar por teléfono las policia.” Call the police.
The woman on the fire escape disappeared into her apartment.
One of the teenaged boys stepped forward. I knew the kid, thank God.
“Luis, I need your help,” I said to him.
“What’s going on here, Hock?”
“Listen to me carefully. There’s been a murder. People are afraid. I’m afraid, Luis. The killer might still be inside there.”
I jerked my head around and looked at the widow again. She kept on screaming and rocking. The huge gash across her husband’s neck kept spewing blood.
“You understand it’s dangerous?”
Luis turned to the others and said something that persuaded them to take several steps back and out of harm’s way. My own Spanish was nowhere near fluent enough to handle a crowd. And so Luis, the busboy at my regular neighborhood spoon, had become my deputy.
He turned back to me now, eyes hot and excited. “What do you need, Hock?”
“A police backup squad. Somebody should call up 911. Say an officer’s in trouble, got it?”
“Yeah.” He turned and said all this in Spanish to the girl just behind him. She ran to the public phone at the corner.
“Okay, I’m counting on you, Luis. On you and your friends. You all have to stay cool, and you have to help me by keeping the area clear, understand? I don’t want anybody in the neighborhood getting hurt.”
Already there were separate streams of curious forming crowds. There was a knot of them across the street, another at the opposite corner.
“You got it, friend.”
“Great. Thanks, Luis.”
Luis and the rest formed a line between me and the people starting to get closer and closer to the widow’s screams.
And then I heard the comforting sound of approaching sirens. Soon I would have plenty of help. I looked back inside the bodega.
So far as I could tell, the killer had already left. And only moments ago, just moments before Neglio’s car had delivered me to another murder in my own backyard.
The killer could be hiding yet in the back room, but that was unlikely. The way things looked, the wife—Carolena, going by the upstairs neighbor—had come out from behind the curtained back door to find her husband dead out in the store. And certainly from the look of the gash that halved Benito’s neck, the killer had been ever as swift and sure with this deadly job as with the two before.
How did I know it was my killer who had now struck three times?
I knew.
I turned and looked through the crowd of frightened faces held off by Luis and his friends, to the darkened park on the other side of Tenth Avenue, the park where I had met him, and listened. “… this is mainly how I now have the artistic thrill of being a painter these days…. I wish you would cross over there to the bodega sometime before next week’s special—so you can see up close how I captured the essential terror …”
I knew. The proof was there. But I did not have to look at it right away. It would wait.
Just now, the widow inside screamed her loudest. And prayed. And six squad cars roared up the avenue and dispersed the crowd, and the streets and sidewalk became brilliant with flashing blue, red and white light. And more cars came, blockading the avenue and the side streets.
I held up my gold shield as uniformed cops swarmed at me. I called out my identification: “Detective Neil Hockaday—Street Crimes Unit, Manhattan!”
Now I was surrounded by uniforms, at either side of the doorway. Somebody said, “We’ve got a team on the roof and a couple of teams around back. If he’s in there, we got him.” Somebody else called something to the widow in Spanish; she did not respond. She kept rocking and screaming and praying. The blood kept flowing.
“Han matado a mi esposo … Dios, guardar mi esposo!”
“I’m going in …” I said.
“You wearing a vest?” somebody asked me.
“I’m going in!”
There is nothing like murder to calm a room. Outside the bodega, the lights were flashing and the people were shouting and the terrible screams of the widow Carolena floating out the door quickened the night. Inside, the screams seemed somehow quieter with every step I took toward her. When I passed very near, on my way to the curtained door, they seemed no more than wind in trees.
I stood very still near the counter. Nothing in the bodega moved besides the gently screaming widow, and there was no other sound. I saw a seven-inch box cutter lying on the floor near the dead man’s feet. Muggers who cannot afford guns use these weapons, known as shanks.
It was an ugly, efficient knife—and sticky with blood. The tip of the retractable blade was still pushed up through the smooth steel handle. That blade, so capable of slashing open the strongest packing box with a single swipe, so capable of laying raw a man’s windpipe and vocal cords.
The curtain over the back door did not move.
The widow, in the trance of her shock, paid no mind as I moved past her.
I looked at the floor as I advanced toward the back room, careful not to step into the streams of blood filling wood grooves. At the edge of one small pool of blood was something green: a feather. I bent and picked it up, and slipped it into my shirt pocket.
I touched the curtain over the passage to the next room. Then I pulled it open.
On the other side was an extension of the store space fashioned into a one-room apartment with a separate alcove at the front containing a sink and toilet and makeshift stall shower. The place was empty.
The bodega owner’s wife had probably been sitting in a rocking chair with her sewing, judging from the kit of needles and thread and a button jar sitting on the seat, and some shirts and a pair of trousers slung over an arm. Up front, her husband was tending the store. Maybe she thought it had grown too quiet, maybe she called his name and he failed to answer; then maybe she got up from her rocking chair, put down her sewing things and shut off the television set to listen; then she bustled out the curtained door and found her husband fatally wounded.
That was how it played.
I returned to the other room. The cop who had asked about a vest was standing just inside the door, and I saw by the stripes on his shoulder patch that he was a squad leader from Midtown North. His name tag said Sergeant Walsh.
Beyond the sergeant, out in the street, I saw a new kind of blue-white light. They were kleigs, the kind of lights used by television camera crews at night.
I walked up to Sergeant Walsh and said, “Easy in, easy out.”
Walsh nodded. “That’s the way it is these days, hey? These freaking kids, they walk up and down around here robbin’ stores like they got the right to help themselves to whatever they want. Like they think they’re all freaking Congressmen or something.”
I laughed. “But I don’t think it’s robbery.”
“How come? You looked in the till already?”
“No. Just a guess.”
Walsh stared at my clothes and said, “You look too good to be working SCUM patrol tonight.”
“I’m not, exactly.”
“Exactly how does it happen you’re here and guessing about goings-on in this godforsaken neighborhood?”
I took the sergeant by the elbow and steered him closer to the front door, out of respect for the screaming widow. I did not bother telling him that it happens I live only a few blocks away. I am the only New York cop I know who lives in a crime-ridden neighborhood of New York City, which was not a distinction that I cared to discuss just then with the likes of Sergeant Walsh. In
stead, I briefly told him that I was investigating two linked homicides, which had led me to the bodega to question the owner about a possible suspect. I also told him that Inspector Neglio and the mayor were especially interested in any progress I might make.
Walsh whistled appreciatively. “So, your suspect went and whacked another guy, and now you really got yourself a serial case?”
“It looks that way.”
“So how do you want the cleanup assigned?”
“I’ll put in a call to Central Homicide, so you don’t have to bother your own PDU.”
“That’s okay by me.” Walsh looked back over his shoulder at the widow. “You think she’s approachable yet?”
“Give her a minute,” I said. “Then have a couple of your good men pry her off and get her to a hospital.”
I left Walsh and stepped outside into a sudden flood of harsh television lights. They beamed in on me since I was so far the only cop around without a uniform.
Cameras were restricted to the street, behind a wall of blue uniforms and sawhorses that had been set up along the curb. Reporters barked questions that I decided not to hear. I covered my eyes against the glare of the lights and looked for Luis. I spotted him back behind the line of cameras and waved him over.
Luis walked self-importantly through a trail of kleigs to my side. We stood in front of the bodega window. Finally, I turned to look at it, knowing what I was to see.
There, in neatly brushed calcimine paint, was the picture of a sprawled man with a gaping hole in his throat. And despite the simple, blunt lines, there was an essential fear in the wounded man’s eyes.
“Who painted this?” I asked.
“I guess the usual guy.”
“The funny-looking old guy in the beret?”
“Yeah, him.”
I touched a stroke of the calcimine paint. It was still tacky. “Did you see him do this?”
“I seen him maybe an hour ago, hanging around here like he does. You know, painting.”
“And he was with somebody, right?”
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