Red on Red

by Edward Conlon

  “Yeah.”

  “And? What else?”

  “Perez moved the gun, for what it’s worth,” Nick reflected. “The way I figure it, the Dominican kid forgot he left it in the bathroom, came out trying to shoot with an empty hand. Perez moved it, so it was next to the body, after. In the end, I don’t think it matters much.”

  “Yeah. That’s the way I figure it, too. He wanted to frame a guilty man for me, tighten it up so I come out all right. Guys like that, the helpful ones … Last year, there was a rookie in the precinct, him and his partner make a great collar, take a machine gun off a guy wearing a raincoat on the hottest day of the year. His partner says to him, ‘Can you say you’re the one who found it? I got a family cookout tomorrow. I can’t spend the day in court.’ ‘Yeah, no problem.’ There was somebody walking by with a camera in their phone, took a picture of what really happened. The guy with the machine gun, he walked away, scot-free. They let the rookie take a plea to a misdemeanor.”

  “He meant well.”

  “They always do. I can make enough of my own trouble. Jesus, Nick—look at Perez’s new girlfriend. If she was a blow-up doll, at least she’d be real.”

  The first things had been said. That felt better than the beer. You could be sad about something that happened, even if you’d do it again. Esposito ran a hand through his hair, considering things.

  “You okay, Nick?”

  “Me? Yeah, sure. This isn’t about me.”

  Esposito spat out his beer, laughing. Nick was discomfited when he realized that he’d just quoted the voice in the pipes in his apartment. Esposito slapped his knee, raised his bottle.

  “I’m glad you were there, Nick. I’m glad you’re my partner. You’re a thinker, but it doesn’t get you down. You get it, you get me, and I know you got my back.”

  Right then Nick thought about returning to the Bronx. He’d find the lieutenant, the mystery caller, and tell them they had the wrong man. Two wrong men. The calculations, the implications—Did two wrongs make a right, or did you need more?—all of it was too much. No, he’d stay here and keep the best of his promises. He watched the elderly gent at the shore as he turned and began to walk away, age in his hips, his step slow and careful. Esposito drank his beer and looked at the river.

  “The old guy didn’t bring much food for the ducks.”

  They weren’t ducks, Nick knew. He didn’t know what to say. He asked, “Do you feel bad about it?”

  “No,” Esposito said, after a moment of thought. “I love life. I love my life. I got kids. What kind of chances should I take?”

  “None you don’t have to.”

  “Do you think I shouldn’t have shot him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think you should have shot, too?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was on the other guy, the plastic wrap guy. He wasn’t cuffed up yet. It would have been a mistake for me to let go. I needed both hands.”

  “Do you wish it turned out different?”

  “Wishing is a waste of time.”

  “Yeah.”

  With that, it was over for Esposito. Nick watched him hold his beer out to the side, tilting it for a moment, so the liquid ran up the neck, to the lip of the bottle. Then he drank it, without a drop spilling on the ground. Such tribute as would be paid had been paid. Let the dead bury the dead. He spat and shook his head.

  Nick sought to reassure both of them. “Perez doesn’t matter. We have what we have. We saw what we saw.”

  “What did you see?”

  “What you did.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We took the door. The three guys were there—bag man, voodoo man, Kiko. Kiko goes running, you follow, I cuff up the bag man. You come back, bad guy walks out of the bathroom, makes to pull a gun, you shoot him.”

  Esposito didn’t look at Nick as he spoke, but stared straight ahead. When the story was finished, he took a long drink. They were convincing themselves that all had gone as it should have, as it had needed to. It wasn’t a lie, but it felt like it. Esposito took the part of the challenger, knowing the challenges would come. Theirs was an adversarial system, they were constantly reminded, an immense and unstable collection of rules—constitutional principles that the highest judges disagreed about, new administrative procedures that spewed out of headquarters like rolls of sheet music from a player piano. So many rules that you could barely count them, so many that it felt like you were breaking some of them even if you were sure you did everything right. Trials were a fact-finding process in which the most crucial facts were often withheld from the jury. You couldn’t say a victim picked a perp out of a mug shot, when the whole case existed because a victim picked the perp out of a mug shot. A man could confess to murder, but if he began his confession by saying he wanted to talk to a lawyer first, he hadn’t confessed to murder. If you locked up a crack dealer for the fifth time, you probably couldn’t tell about the first four. And most of these exclusions and suppressions were premised on a belief that a jury’s blind bias favored the state—the cops—when that was not the world Nick lived in and knew. It was astonishing that it worked as often as it did.

  Esposito cleared his throat and rehearsed the cross-examination. “Did you see the gun in his waist, Detective?”

  “No,” Nick answered, playing Esposito’s future part.

  “Did you see the gun on the floor, after?”

  “Yes. After-after.”

  “Just answer the question, Detective.”

  “Yes, I saw the gun on the floor, after, beside the body.”

  “Did you see Detective Perez place a gun there?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Can you testify, with positive certainty, that you observed the entire contents of the floor in the general vicinity of the deceased?”

  “No, I cannot.”

  “Thank you, Detective. The witness is excused.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  The beers were half-gone. As the two men looked west over the river, the tension of the past hour began to subside. The geese didn’t stray far from the shore, waiting to see if there were more crumbs for them. When there were none offered, they mustered up on the rocks.

  “This kid,” Esposito began, trailing off before he could decide on a description. “You think he’s Kiko’s brother?”

  “He’s the spitting image. He’s gotta be.”

  “Malcolm Cole’s gonna be happy to hear that.”

  “An eye for an eye.”

  Kiko’s brother and Milton Cole, both with headphones, lost in the music until the end.

  “A brother for a brother,” Nick said.

  “Do you have brothers?”

  “No, solo, only child.”

  “Same here. Parents?”

  “One, father.”

  “I think I knew that. Mother only here.”

  Nick knew Esposito didn’t have a father, but he couldn’t remember who had told him; he hadn’t known that Esposito had no siblings. Everyone else did, it seemed, if they were their age. No father of that vintage said one is enough, no mother did, if they were born in the first half of the last century; from the slums, from the farms, it didn’t matter, most of them didn’t know how to say no, even if they wanted to. The two detectives had been working together for months, but it hadn’t come up; a lot hadn’t. Nick knew that Esposito had a wife and kids, but he didn’t know their names. The two men spoke constantly when they were working, but seldom when they weren’t. They’d call to tell each other if one was taking a day off, or working earlier, going to court. It was a friendship of necessity, which may not be real friendship; it was confined to work, but they were, too, it seemed. Nick loved work now, sometimes, which was more than he could say for most of his life; Esposito loved work, far more than Nick did, even though he had a family to whom he was devoted, in his way. When Esposito spoke to his wife on the phone, the conversations were jokey and te
asing, or full of affectionate reassurance; Nick never heard an argument. As far as Nick knew, Esposito made his wife as happy as any faithful husband he knew.

  Nick shook his head. “Should we go?”

  “Yeah,” said Esposito, his mind already moving on. “Let’s talk to Papa Doc in the hospital, get his statement, start on the perp back at the station house. Plus, we’re gonna have … our friends from downtown waiting to talk to us.”

  They bagged the empty beers and stood up stiffly.

  “And then we hunt Kiko again,” said Nick, thinking as his partner did, a few moves ahead.

  “Yeah. Is this a real kidnapping? I’m a little rusty on the law there. We don’t really get too many of these. Does there have to be a ransom?”

  “No. That’s only one kind. The victim has to be held for at least twelve hours, for the purpose of ‘terrorizing’ him. With the plastic wrap and the iron, they got the terror part covered. We don’t know about the clock. But I bet we’re okay, time-wise. I bet they had him yesterday, when we ran into the guy in the lobby with all the plastic wrap. When we saw Kiko and his kid.”

  “That woulda been something, if we took him in for endangering the kid yesterday? It would have been a nice alibi. Last night he must have gone to sleep laughing, couldn’t believe his luck. He walks away from us on the homicide, and we don’t have a clue he’s got a hostage across the street.”

  “He didn’t even have to pay for a babysitter.”

  “He paid,” said Esposito. “Come on. Let’s do what we gotta do.”

  There was neither sorrow nor satisfaction in his voice. Nick felt both, and more, as his mind slipped between images of the young man dead, the older man saved, thoughts of his own faithlessness and new friendship. They took their time leaving, brushing bits of grass and leaves from their suits, stretching their legs. Spies in ambulances? He couldn’t even pretend he’d ever understand or really wanted to know. Nick looked a last time at the river, where the geese had begun to drift downstream. He wished he could stay here, but wishing was a waste of time.

  At the precinct, the crowds were already beginning to form, the workers and wonderers forming up into little camps outside, the first ripples of snap and reaction. It wasn’t as bad as all that. They had gone by Kiko’s building before the trip uptown and had seen the small combustible head-to-heads forming up between cops at the perimeter of the scene and the local trouble. Nick had glanced up at the roofline and had seen more cops stationed there. That would keep the bricks from raining down, at least for now. This would be a day of noise, because a cop had killed someone. Esposito had rolled through the block, to take the temperature of the street. They’d seen the crackhead who had pissed in the lobby the day before; he laughed when he saw them, and gave them the thumbs-up. You could only control the rumors so much, but when the santero had been rolled out in his fantastic plumage, Nick was later told, he had called out that the police had saved him. When the boy had been carried out in the bag, half an hour later, the onlookers had not been able to see his wasted teenage face.

  Right now it was still the afternoon, so the night people, the merchants and the creatures, had not yet stirred to offer their commentary. No, this one wouldn’t be bad. At the precinct, there were four or five news vans, and two or three cameras pointed at reporters who used the precinct as a backdrop, speaking into their microphones, in front of the cinder block. One reporter brought a garrulous old woman in front of a camera, but when she began to scream about Jews breaking her washing machine, the reporter made the cutoff sign. The detectives drove into the parking lot and walked in through the back entrance.

  The media and the police machines were in simultaneous, sometimes rival motion. Neither was unfriendly, so they reminded the detectives, a little too often. Everyone wanted to know, and even though there was no bad odor to this one, both machines had to act as if there might be. More union delegates arrived, with pizza, warning Nick and Esposito to be careful what they said. The two detectives had serial interviews, official and otherwise, some taped by Internal Affairs, and some conducted by the other cops, when they stepped out for coffee, or into the men’s room for a piss. Lieutenant Ortiz remained in his office, at his desk, as men of higher rank and lesser time surrounded him, testing his decisions. “If you thought it was nothing, why did you go yourself?” “If you thought it was something, why didn’t you go with more people?” Nick could see his hand gestures, cutting through clouds of smoke. It was as he’d said before, the operation had been an investigation, not an invasion, a jail-house rumor coupled with a chance meeting. Lieutenant Ortiz could handle the chain of command. The suspect Nick had arrested was in one of the rooms. When he was interviewed in English, he didn’t understand. “No comprendo,” he said. When he was interviewed in Spanish, he didn’t understand any better. “No comprendo,” he said. It was a philosophical approach. You could say it was the inspiration for philosophy itself. It didn’t help them. It didn’t help him, either.

  Once Internal Affairs interviewed Fernando at the hospital, the mood in the office palpably changed. Word came in that after a detailed account of his abduction and day of torture, he told of the detectives’ arrival like knights on horseback, their expertise and restraint; more to the point, he had seen the boy, Miguelito, draw on them, had seen the glint of steel, the barrel yanked from the waistband, and he’d seen that Esposito had done the minimum necessary, to his maximum gratitude. Fernando’s story would play beautifully, uptown and down. He did not expound on Ellegua and vengeance, the red and the black, and he had agreed to speak to the media. The police did not discourage him, and the doctors made only mild complaints. It would hit the five o’clock news, and the six, and on news radio it would play every ten minutes, followed by traffic and weather. It would hit the Spanish media even harder, but after tomorrow’s papers, it would be gone. The chiefs left, with firm handshakes and clipped smiles.

  When Nick and Esposito went to the hospital, the EMTs were still with the victim. They were in a little bay, behind sheets of loose curtain that were too short, like hospital gowns, depriving you of dignity where they were supposed to preserve it. A cop waited just outside, and Esposito reminded him to bag up the plastic wrap. Great swaths of it, cloudy, clear, or pink-streaked, were heaped around the bed. There were tufts of it melted into his thighs in three or four places, and as many again on his arms. One eye was swollen, and his lower lip was fat, but there was less damage than you would have guessed. When the blood was wiped away, he looked no worse than if he’d been in a bar fight. His body had been cleaned; there was only a faint odor, not much stronger than the disinfectant air of the emergency room. The victim held the woman EMT’s hand. Nick reached out to take her other one.

  “You know, I never got your name. I’m Nick.”

  “Odalys.”

  “Odalys, would you mind staying a minute here with us, with this guy? He seems comfortable with you here.”

  “No problem. If you need his information, I have it here, on the chart.”

  Odalys handed it over to Nick to copy down. Fernando Dotti, aged fifty-one, of San Francisco de Macoris, Dominican Republic. Local contact, a niece, a few blocks away. Odalys spoke softly to Fernando, and he smiled weakly back. Esposito stepped over to them, anxious to get a statement before the painkillers kicked in.

  “He knows we’re police, right? We’re all police, right—Odalys?”

  She nodded, oblivious to his little joke, and Esposito did not belabor it. Nick was proud of himself when he did not cringe.

  “Just let him know again, he’s safe now, we’re all here to help him.”

  “I told him. He knows,” Odalys said. “He says ‘Thank you,’ you were an answer to his prayers.”

  “That’s okay. Let him take us through this, bit by bit, all right? Who did this to him?”

  “The three, the three who were there, and another one.”

  “Did he know them?”

  “No, not before this.”

 
“Why did they do this? What did they want? Why him?”

  “His brother. His brother Rodolpho died, last month. Heart attack. Fernando came up here just after, to help his brother’s family. The brother had money. The men thought he had a lot of money. He had bodegas, taxis. They took Fernando to make his niece give it to them.”

  “How much did they want?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  “Did she have it? Did she agree? Does he know what happened?”

  Until then, the conversation had been concise, to the point; Fernando’s voice, though hoarsening, had been steady, expending no excess effort and no emotion. When Odalys brought up the next topic, however, he wheezed and growled, then gargled up a throatful of phlegm and spat it out in contempt. It caught the lower part of the curtain and hung there, dark and glistening, waiting to drop. They all watched it in reluctant fascination until Fernando began to hold forth, and Odalys tried to divine his relevant speech like a soothsayer amid his digressions and curses.

  “Her husband, the niece’s husband, he’s—how can I call it, excuse my French—he’s a miserable prick…. He offered five grand and a Honda Civic. Three years old, two doors. It had thirty thousand miles on it…. Excuse my French, but he calls him ‘pudejo.’ It’s basically ‘private hair.’ ”

  Odalys winced as she went on, as if she were unsure which group was more sordid. “Fernando remembers the kidnappers arguing over it. The main guy, who ran away—he thinks they called him Kiko—he said it was a good car, the Japanese make the best ones now, they run forever, it could run for another two hundred, two hundred fifty thousand miles. But then the other one, who got arrested—they called him Miguel—he said he didn’t do this for a bullshit used car. And then the little one, Miguelito—he was Kiko’s brother—it turned out Kiko had bought him a Honda, not new….

  “So he got mad that Miguel called the car bullshit, and they had a fight over it for an hour…. And then Miguel gets the iron out, and he burns Fernando…. And Kiko says, ‘Go easy with la plancha’—I mean the iron—‘because it means they go to the hospital after, and the cops get involved.’ But Fernando doesn’t think Kiko meant it, meant to stop Miguel. They were gonna kill him. They talked about sending fingers to the niece, her cheapskate husband. And the little one, Miguelito, he was gonna go out and get a knife. He went to the bathroom before—he had to go. Then he was gonna go out for the knife.”