07-Shot

by Parnell Hall

I turned quickly, tried to blend into the crowd, headed up the platform ahead of him according to plan.

  Only 42nd Street isn’t your simple, ordinary station. You don’t just go up the stairs out the exit to the street. As I said before, Times Squares is where about half a zillion lines converge. There are dozens of tunnels, tracks, walkways, stairs and exits.

  For instance, just ahead of me is a staircase to the 41st Street exit, an alternative to walking up the platform to the 42nd Street exit. Only it doesn’t just go to 41st Street, it also offers two separate tunnels, one to the shuttle to Grand Central and one to the BMT. The staircase itself is a choice, and if you take it, you’re hit with an even wider choice and the problem escalates geometrically.

  So, what the hell am I supposed to do, guess where this guy might go and then go there? Sorry, Andrews, but your scenario just won’t play.

  I stepped behind a column and turned, facing the downtown local track as if I’d gotten off the express to transfer to the other train. I peered around the column, trying to catch sight of the Black Death. There were a lot of people on the platform and I couldn’t spot him. But that also meant he’d have trouble spotting me.

  Unless he’d spotted me already.

  That thought made me jerk my head, turn and look behind my back. No assassin’s hand was there. I did a slow curl around the column on the track side, looking down the platform.

  And almost bumped into him. He’d just come around a woman the size of a small house who’d been blocking him from view.

  I ducked back behind the column again. I couldn’t tell if he’d spotted me. I didn’t really want to look to see if he had.

  But not looking was worse. I peered around the column. And there was the back of his head going up the 41st Street stairs.

  Andrews grabbed me by the arm. I was so wound up by then I nearly jumped a foot.

  “What the hell was that move?” he said.

  “I had to get around him. You think he spotted me?”

  “Half the people in the station spotted you. Him I don’t know. Come on.”

  We sprinted up the stairs in time to see him take the tunnel to the BMT. It’s a long winding tunnel, lots of bends and angles, so we could follow pretty close. He came out of the tunnel, took the ramp to the downtown BMT. Stopped at the bottom.

  Small problem.

  It’s a long, straight ramp, totally exposed, no cover. And much too long to get down after a train pulled in. And if he didn’t move, we couldn’t.

  I knew the subway better than Andrews. I should, I photographed enough of it. I grabbed him by the arm.

  “Come on,” I said.

  Besides the ramp, there’s a staircase at the north end of the platform. If you go down it, you come out underneath the ramp. Which is what we did. We came down the stairs and walked under the ramp to the point where it got too low to stand. Perfect. We were on the platform, totally hidden, about one car length away.

  A train pulled in. He got on and so did we and off we went.

  Same drill. I sat, Andrews stood. We rumbled downtown.

  14th Street he still hadn’t got off. It seemed too much to hope for, but somehow it just had to be.

  Sure enough, he got off at Canal.

  This time, there was no problem. We were in the last car in the train, so there was no way he could turn toward us. Plus there wasn’t any other line.

  We got off, followed him up the platform to the street. He walked up Broadway to Grand, across Grand to a building I knew well. He rang the bell, and minutes later Charles Olsen came down and opened the door.

  I was praying it wouldn’t be a drop-off. If he gave Olsen the bag and split, it would be ten times messier, ten times harder to prove.

  My prayer was answered. It wasn’t just a drop. The two of them went inside, closed the door.

  Andrews was already on the horn, calling it in.

  It seemed an eternity before the cops got there, but it was probably more like ten minutes. Here I must admit, the cops really were prepared. They’d already drawn up search warrants for Charles Olsen, Alan Harrison, and the Black Death’s apartments, and ever since Andrews had phoned in from Harlem that we were on the move, they had had a judge standing by ready to issue them when we gave the word, our say-so being necessary for probable cause.

  At any rate, I stood there on the corner with my life flashing before my eyes, hoping like hell he wouldn’t leave before the cops got there. Before I knew it, three unmarked cars pulled up on the corner and six cops got out. A fourth car arrived a minute later with Sergeants Reynolds and MacAullif.

  “Still there?” Reynolds said.

  Andrews nodded. “He’s there.”

  “And it’s the guy?” he asked me.

  “It’s him.”

  “All right, let’s move.”

  Move they did. The locked downstairs door, which would have baffled me, was half a minute’s work for one of the cops with a set of keys. I didn’t know what apartment, but fortunately it was on the mailbox inside the door. “Loft 3,” it said. The cops went up the stairs, Reynolds and MacAullif in the lead. I had to be there of course, to make the I.D., but not at first. Only after it went down.

  The cops stopped on the third floor. There was no chance for confusion, no wondering was the ground floor one or the loft up the first flight, making this loft two or three. There was a number 3 right on the door.

  I watched the scene from down the hall. The cops fanned out on either side of the door, drew their guns. Reynolds stepped up and knocked on the door. Then stepped carefully away to one side. That was the scary thing. That was what got me. Not the drawn guns. Not the threat to them. No, the realization that Reynolds was prepared for them to start shooting through the door.

  That didn’t happen. Instead, there came the sound of a peephole sliding open, and a voice said, “Who is it?”

  Reynolds held out his badge in front of the hole. “Police. Open up.”

  If they didn’t, I wondered if he’d kick it down. It was a solid-looking door, and I wondered if he could. And if he tried, I wondered if that’s when the bullets would come flying through. But no, there came the click of the lock and the door swung open.

  The cops surged through, guns drawn. In less time than it takes to tell it, Andrews and I were alone in the hall.

  Showtime.

  My big moment. To walk in, meet the shooter face to face. To say in his presence, “That’s the man.”

  I didn’t want to do it. Needless to say. But I had Andrews with me, which helped. No chance of me turning and walking quietly down the stairs. Not that that would have been an option. Not that that would have even helped.

  From the moment I set this thing rolling, there was no turning back. There was only one outcome, only one choice.

  No choice.

  Showtime.

  You’re on.

  I took a breath, walked through the door.

  It was a huge, one-room, floor-through loft. High ceiling. Exposed pipes. Floodlights dangling from them. Spotlights. All switched on. Illuminating an incredible scene.

  In the middle of the side wall were two huge canvases, each maybe twelve by twenty feet, side by side. It was on these that the floodlights were aimed. They were each only half finished, but enough to show they both were part of the same scene. And only a small part at that. Each panel clearly depicted portions of the same child’s face.

  Standing in front of them were the eight cops and the three suspects. Yes, three, Alan Harrison was there too. The cops no longer had their guns out, unnecessary now, since they had the suspects handcuffed. Two cops flanked each man, held him by the arms. Charles Olsen. Alan Harrison. And the Black Death.

  I can’t say they looked too tough, caught there in the glare of their spotlights. They looked intimidated. Helpless. Confused.

  And the Black Death. The mighty Black Death. He no longer looked large and threatening. If anything, he looked soft and flabby now.

  I walked into the
room.

  MacAullif and Reynolds turned to meet me. They had been standing in-front of Alan Harrison, blocking his view, and when they turned, he saw me for the first time.

  He started, blinked, his mouth dropped open, and he said, so help me God, “Jesus Christ. I tell you. I swear. I didn’t see any damn accident!”

  48.

  IT DIDN’T HIT ME THEN. I suppose it should have, but there was so much happening, so much to sort out. Not that I was doing the sorting. I just stood there as if in a daze, while the cops pieced it all together.

  The Black Death was Lionel Wilkens, an artist of some renown, with several New York exhibitions, mostly in SoHo, to his credit. His work, I gathered, had already won widespread critical acclaim, if not great financial success. On the basis of his reputation, he had been commissioned to render a mural for Martin Luther King Day. The mural, intended for outdoor display, was gigantic, so much so that it could only be broken down and done in sections, which would ultimately be pieced together to form the finished work. It was also too large for a single artist to paint. For that reason, Lionel had enlisted the aid of Charles Olsen and Alan Harrison, two fellow artists who happened to admire his work, to help him in the execution. Each man was entrusted with two sections of the mural to paint in accordance with Lionel’s design. The theme, of course, was brotherhood, and the scene depicted children of racially mixed backgrounds playing in harmony.

  Lionel, of course, was in charge of the whole operation, including mixing the paint. Since the sections of the mural naturally had to match, it was crucial that the same mixture be used for each one. For that reason, bags of powdered paint, mixed by Lionel for the project, were often picked up and distributed to the various parties involved.

  David Melrose, who knew Charles Olsen from work, and who had done favors for him in the past, had been assisting in the distribution. Whether this was out of the goodness of his heart, or out of a desire to curry favor with what he considered to be the artistic in-crowd, was not entirely clear, but in view of the fact that David was deceased and not there to defend himself, the artists tended toward a more charitable interpretation of his actions.

  His demise had also left them without a messenger, requiring them to carry on the distribution themselves.

  By the way, if you think the cops took their word for any of this, you are mistaken. All three were taken downtown and officially questioned. And Charles Olsen’s loft, Alan Harrison’s apartment and Lionel Wilkens’s were duly searched. The searches turned up nothing but bags of paint and four other sections of the mural.

  The interrogations turned up even less.

  Charles Olsen admitted to having once had a problem with drugs, but insisted that he had been clean for years.

  Alan Harrison, while in college (my god, was he that young—or am I just that old?) had indeed been busted at a pot party along with half a dozen other students, but, as he said with a shrug, in those days, who wasn’t?

  Lionel Wilkens had no police record whatsoever. He did have a letter of commendation from Mayor Dinkins, praising him for both his artistic talent and humanitarian work.

  In response to the question of what he was doing in that abandoned building on the day in question, Lionel stated that he had gone in one door and out another, a short cut he often took that allowed him to get from 146th Street to 145th without going all the way around the block.

  In response to a question suggested by me and asked by Sergeant Reynolds, Charles Olsen stated that what David Melrose had picked up from him on the Friday evening prior to his death was a sketch suggesting an alteration of one unfinished corner of the mural for the purpose of saving time and labor, to be delivered to Lionel Wilkens the next time David picked up paint. Since Lionel had never received it, and Charles Olsen had been forced to draw him another sketch of the alteration (which, by the way, Lionel had graciously approved—by all rights the man was a saint, when anyone tries to change my work, I go bananas), it was suggested that if the police were to search the personal effects of David Melrose, they would probably find the original sketch.

  Whether the cops actually looked or not, I don’t know. All I know is by that point Sergeant Reynolds had lost a good deal of enthusiasm for the whole affair, and within the next half hour all three men were gone, having been released without charge after cheerfully signing waivers relinquishing their rights to sue for false arrest.

  That left me alone with Sergeant Reynolds and Sergeant MacAullif and in a slightly unenviable position. I had attempted to extricate myself from trouble and exonerate myself from the charge of making a false report. As a result, I was now guilty of making two false reports. Although, as MacAullif was kind enough to point out, in the latter case I was actually innocent. To be guilty of making a false report, you must make it knowing it to be false. Since everything I told the police about Charles Olsen, Alan Harrison and the Black Death I believed to be true, there was no way they could hold me liable.

  I found that small consolation.

  The whole thing was just too much for me. To have gone through the fear, the anxiety. And then to have conquered my fear, at least to the degree of doing what had to be done. And then to have the whole thing blow up in my face.

  I felt like I’d stepped into a fantasy world, a parallel universe, where nothing was quite what it seemed to be, where anything might change at any time.

  That’s why my head was spinning. Why I was in a daze.

  Why I hadn’t gotten it yet.

  When Reynolds and MacAullif finally let me go, I stumbled out of the office and walked down the hallway as if in a dream.

  And bumped smack into Sergeant Thurman.

  I hadn’t even seen him. And Thurman’s hard to miss. But it took me a few seconds to even recognize him.

  He stood there, blocking my way. He was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Hi, hotshot,” he said. “Heard about it.”

  I was sure he had. By now I was sure everyone had heard about it.

  “Oh,” I said.

  That was not the response he wanted.

  “Well,” he said. “Heard about it?”

  That time I caught the inflection. A question, not a statement.

  “What?” I said.

  “You mean you haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “She confessed.”

  “What?”

  “Melissa Ford. She confessed. She killed him.”

  I blinked. “What did you say?”

  “She killed David Melrose. Bang, over, finished. Hey, don’t look so surprised. Didn’t you know she killed him?”

  “I—”

  “Of course you did. Everyone knew that. Easiest case I ever had.”

  My mind was reeling. I took a breath. “You’re telling me she confessed to the murder?”

  “Of course she did. I knew she would. That type always does. She killed him. Did it for love. He betrayed her with another woman. If she couldn’t have him, no one could. You ought to hear her.” He chuckled. “She’s so happy now she’s confessed. They always are. Those mousy types. They love it. The tragic heroine. As if they were born to play the part. It’s like they can’t make it as lovers, but as killers who did it for love—that they can handle.”

  He banged me on the shoulder like we were old pals. Thank god it was my good one.

  “So this one’s all wrapped up. We may not even need your testimony anymore. But if we do, don’t worry, we’ll be in touch.”

  He grinned the happy grin of the blissfully ignorant, and walked off down the hall.

  That’s when it hit me. About a year too late. Hell, you probably knew it all along.

  Melissa Ford had killed David Melrose.

  David Melrose had not been killed for being involved in any drug ring.

  And I had not been shot for investigating his death.

  That didn’t leave much else.

  49.

  I FOUND RAHEEM SITTING ON the hood of a parked car. Head dow
n, arms folded in his lap, legs swinging slightly.

  “King shot me,” I said.

  He didn’t react. Didn’t look up. Just sat there, eyes to the ground.

  The scar on his forehead had faded, seemed paler now, not nearly so garish. If it healed right, he was going to be a good-looking kid.

  “You don’t have to tell me, Raheem,” I said. “I know. King shot me.

  “But that’s not all.”

  He didn’t look up then, didn’t say, “What?” I hadn’t expected him to.

  “You’re the one who pulled me out. You got me out of there. You’re the one who called the cops, too. Told ’em you heard a shot.

  “The cops came, but they didn’t go inside. So they didn’t find me and they went away.

  “So you had to call them again.

  “But you didn’t want to tell them where I was—that I was in the building. That would be admitting that you knew too much, saying that the body was in there. It was one thing to say you heard a shot. Another thing to say you found a body. In a place no one would go. Like admitting you knew the whole scene.

  “So you dragged me out of there. Into the empty lot. And called the cops to report a body there. No explanations needed, even on the phone. Body in an empty lot. Easy enough for any fool cop to check out.”

  He still said nothing. I could see his eyes were fixed quite determinedly on the ground.

  “It’s all right, Raheem,” I said. “You don’t have to tell what you saw. You’re not a witness. You don’t have to testify. You don’t have to talk to the cops, anyone.” I paused. “Even me.

  “I know why you’re scared, Raheem. Because you followed him that day. I left here and you saw him follow me. So you tagged along. You saw me go into the building. You saw him go in too. And then you heard the shot.

  “You know who shot me. That’s why you’re scared. You figure that makes you a witness. Someone’s gonna make you stand up to him, force you to say he did it. You know he shot me, and that’s why you’re afraid.”

  I smiled slightly. “And that’s why you think me brave.

  “Well, no one’s gonna do that, Raheem. No one’s even gonna know. Particularly not him. You don’t have to face him, Raheem. Believe me, you never have to deal with him again.”