The initial silence was deafening. As Moodrow had hoped, it froze the participants in their tracks. In his estimation, he had come upon a scene that was almost, but not quite, out of control and his best move was to keep the lid on. Rudy-Bicho (making the two enormous men for cops) released Mike Birnbaum, who staggered back several steps. Andre Almeyda, who’d been eagerly closing with Talker Purdy, stopped in his tracks. Talker Purdy, confused and brokenhearted, stared at his radio with evident surprise.
“Dunlap?” Moodrow’s sharp voice broke the momentary silence.
“Right behind you.” Dunlap elbowed his way between Moodrow and Purdy, announcing, “Assume the position, asshole,” in the most bored voice he could muster.
Moodrow turned immediately and walked across to Rudy-Bicho Ruiz, who reacted by folding his arms across the chest. “The maricón attack me and I’m defendin’ myself. I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ when he attack me. He attack me for nothin’.”
Moodrow, though he took in the words, paid no attention whatsoever. He wasn’t looking for explanations; he’d just witnessed a felony and had absolutely no interest in explanations until the perpetrator was properly secured. Dominating the smaller man with his sheer bulk, he yanked Ruiz erect and spun him toward the wall, talking all the while. “Get up against it, prick. Get your fucking legs back. You make one twitch, I’m gonna crack your neck.” His hands were moving over Ruiz’s body, searching for a weapon, before he stopped speaking. Finding nothing, he yanked the man’s arms behind his back and cuffed him tightly.
“You’re under arrest,” he began automatically, forgetting that he had no powers of arrest and that he wasn’t a cop and that the loss of those powers was the reason why Paul Dunlap was with him. “You have the right to remain silent. If you choose to speak, anything you say can be used against you.” He went through the whole speech while he searched Ruiz down to his underwear and his socks. Having found no weapon, he was hoping for drugs, but, again, he was disappointed. Still, there was no question about the assault. It would stand up and if the man had any serious priors or if he was on parole, he might do real time.
“So what’s going on here?” Moodrow, much quieter now that the scene was under control, asked Mike Birnbaum.
“I come into my lobby and see two animals they wouldn’t even let in a zoo.” He wanted to say, “two spics” (if he’d been with his friend, Paul Reilly, the ex-fireman, he would have), but Andre Almeyda was an ally, so he held himself in check. “Nat’rally, I ask myself what they’re doing here. My lobby don’t look like the Waldorf Astoria. My lobby don’t look like the jail on Rikers Island, where these animals probably came from. Maybe they think it’s a day care center? Maybe they think they’re in shul? Maybe they’re looking for a minyan?”
“Mike,” Moodrow brought the old man up short. “Do me a favor and get to the point.”
Birnbaum tossed Moodrow his angriest look, but got only a blank stare in return. “I went up to this macher here.” He pointed to Ruiz. “I asked him what he thought he was doing in my lobby and he grabbed me by the throat without so much as a word.”
“That’s true,” Andre Almeyda chimed in. “I was coming from the mail and I see it happening. Mike didn’ do nothing to this guy.”
“We live here, too!” Talker Purdy suddenly cried out. “We’re neighbors.” The frustration was coming down on him hard. He was an easy-going man, but if they took Rudy-Bicho away, he wouldn’t be able to do the jobs anymore. And he wouldn’t have any good dope, either. In fact, without Rudy-Bicho’s connection in Brooklyn, he’d most likely have to take up his old profession, which policemen like to refer to as “opportunistic thief.”
“Tell me exactly what happened,” Dunlap asked Andre Almeyda. “Especially about this one.” He jerked his head toward Purdy.
As Andre launched into a detailed explanation of the assault (an explanation which, incidentally, exonerated Talker Purdy), the lobby began to fill with curious tenants. Moodrow’s first instinct was to protect the crime scene, but after glancing over at Dunlap, who seemed to be enjoying the show, he allowed the witnesses to assemble. Thus, almost a dozen tenants were present when Anton Kricic, his luminous, orange-red hair flaming in all directions, emerged from his first floor apartment to confront Moodrow and Dunlap.
“This man has as much right to be here as any resident,” Kricic screamed. He was extremely tall, taller than Moodrow, but stick-thin, with a narrow face framed by a halo of very curly, very long hair.
Dunlap put up a hand to stop the apparition. “What’re you talking about?” he asked, innocently.
“You have no authority to put this man out. He’s a human being with a right to shelter. You can’t put him on the street again.” Kricic, though he stopped coming forward, tried to make it clear that he was not about to be bullied by a couple of middle-aged cops. Not with this many witnesses handy.
“What’s your name?” Moodrow asked quietly. He was beginning to get the feeling that he’d been out-maneuvered again, that something new was sneaking up on him, and the feeling was making him very depressed.
“Anton Kricic,” Kricic announced proudly. “I live in apartment 1F In fact, my name is already on the mailbox.”
“Do you have a lease?” Moodrow asked.
“That’s not your business,” Kricic shouted.
“This man is under arrest for an assault,” Dunlap explained angrily. He didn’t care to be told that he had no authority any more than Moodrow did. “It has nothing to do with tenants and landlords. Now, I’m telling you to step back. I’m directly ordering you to remove yourself from the crime scene. If you don’t, I’m going to place you under arrest for hindering a police officer, which is a D Felony. The penalty for commission of a D Felony is an indeterminate sentence of up to seven years in prison. Now move your ass outta here.”
Kricic sneered, though he did, in fact, step away from Dunlap. His purpose in coming out had been to confront the other tenants with the reality of his existence. He had hoped, of course, that the arrest had something to do with the fact that Purdy and Ruiz were squatters with no legal right to their apartments, but he settled for the confused looks on the faces of his neighbors as he walked back to his apartment unmolested. Once they realized that he was living rent-free, they would protest to the landlord, who would move to kick him and the other squatters out. That would be a great day for the homeless: the day when the media chronicled the squatters’ physical eviction from warehoused apartments the landlord was deliberately keeping off the market.
Back in the lobby, Dunlap stepped closer to Moodrow, raising his eyebrows in a silent question.
“Forget about him,” Moodrow said calmly. “We’ll look into Anton Kricic later. As for this mutt…” He gave Ruiz a little tug, pulling him closer. “Call the One One Five and get a sector car down here. Give the collar to whoever shows up. Let ’em get statements from Andre and Mike and use them to write up the complaint. We can act as witnesses, but let’s not get trapped down at Central Booking. Let the uniforms sit around all day. We got a lotta work to do and it’s shaping up to be a very bad day.”
NINETEEN
AS SOON AS THE two patrolmen had arrived and been briefed, Moodrow and Dunlap walked from the lobby to Sylvia Kaufman’s apartment, their original destination when they’d happened upon Birnbaum and Ruiz. It was an obligatory visit for Moodrow, in light of his relationship to Betty Haluka and the Jackson Arms, but he didn’t see himself as an investigator. Nor was he going as a friend of the dead woman. He was occupying an uneasy middle ground, a position he’d occupied many times in the course of his policeman’s life. His best bet was to understand himself as a simple acquaintance (as Dunlap was doing), but the dual anger he felt (with himself for playing the fool and with men who kill with no regard for the manifest innocence of their victims) was too powerful to allow him that refuge.
Somebody had put up a card table outside the apartment door, and set a carafe of coffee on it. A smallish, middle-aged man sat
on a kitchen chair by the table. “Hello,” he said, smiling up at them. “I’m Herb Belcher. Sylvia Kaufman was my mother-in-law. I suppose one of you must be Stanley Moodrow. Betty’s boyfriend.”
He stuck out a hand and Moodrow shook it briefly before introducing Dunlap. “Betty’s inside. Are you going in?” Belcher asked.
“Yeah,” Moodrow answered. “We’re not gonna be long, though.”
The first thing Moodrow saw, after ducking into the apartment, was a thick candle burning in a glass cylinder. It reminded him of the Russian Orthodox Church where he’d gone as a boy. Even the smell of smoke was like the smell of the incense pouring from the metal censer swung by the priest. Then he remembered the last time he’d been inside a church; not surprisingly, it was at the last funeral he’d attended. A thought popped up in his mind: this can’t be the same, because you didn’t really know Sylvia Kaufman. Followed quickly by: it never should have happened.
Marilyn Belcher, who had been Marilyn Kaufman prior to setting off for UCLA twenty years before, a heavyset, graying woman, was sitting on a low stool when Moodrow walked into the room. Betty was kneeling beside her on the rug and both were crying. Marilyn wore a dark gray dress decorated only by a torn black ribbon pinned below her left shoulder. She was in her stocking feet, her face free of makeup. Her hair, which had been cut and feathered so carefully in a Santa Barbara salon a week before, was barely combed now.
Later, Betty would tell Moodrow that Marilyn’s grief, already compounded by the sudden, violent nature of her mother’s death, had been aggravated by the years she and her mother had spent apart; Marilyn was blaming both herself and her husband for lost opportunities. At the time, however, Moodrow saw only the face of a woman made frantic by grief, a woman very near to tearing at her own flesh. The emotion was so strong, it stopped him as soon as he entered the room. It stood in his way and held him back, like the force field in a Hollywood science-fiction movie.
Sergeant Paul Dunlap (which is the way he introduced himself to Marilyn Belcher), on the other hand, had attended more than a hundred funerals in his official capacity as Community Affairs Officer. He walked directly to the women and began to offer his condolences in a strong, clear, hearty-Irish voice. “I’m so sorry,” he began.
If Betty hadn’t come over and taken Moodrow’s hand, he might have spun on his heel and walked out of the apartment. He’d turned his head away from Marilyn an instant after reading her grief, preferring to concentrate on the fruit and cake displayed on a coffee table, the white sheets covering the mirrors, the sharp, destructive odor of the smoke. The smell of smoke dominated the apartment; it stung Moodrow’s eyes and burned his nostrils, reminding him of the job ahead.
“Don’t stay long,” Betty, an unconscious angel of mercy, whispered. “Marilyn and I need to talk.”
The smell of smoke, powerful as it was in the apartment upstairs, was far worse in the basement. It rushed over Moodrow and Dunlap as soon as the elevator door opened, causing both to jerk their heads away from the open door as if they’d just come upon a moving rat in a narrow corridor.
“Jesus Christ,” Dunlap muttered. “You smell that?”
Moodrow didn’t answer. Once over the initial shock, he eagerly snorted the odor up into his nostrils, using it like ammonia in the nose of a fainting virgin in a romantic novel. It pulled his attention away from the apartment above and focused it on the fire marshal in the spiffy uniform with the peaked hat. The man was standing in a large room just past a series of cheaply partitioned storage sheds. He had his hands on his hips, obviously impatient with his not-unexpected visitors.
“Sam Spinner?” Dunlap asked. “I’m Paul Dunlap, from the One One Five. This is Stanley Moodrow.”
Sam Spinner suspected that the two cops (he knew that Dunlap was a cop and he assumed Moodrow was Dunlap’s partner) were there to second-guess the investigation. His investigation. He was a short, thick man with a heavy face dominated by allergy-tormented blue eyes. Allergies had been the curse of his career and he was especially allergic to smoke.
“What’s up?” he asked curtly. Cop briefings were obligatory courtesies extended by one department to another. Spinner couldn’t avoid them, but he didn’t have to like them. Or to make them pleasant.
“I spoke to you on the phone yesterday,” Dunlap said evenly. “So you already know what it’s about.” Dunlap (as Sam Spinner had predicted) believed that all crime was the property of the NYPD. Including arson.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. You’re the Sherlock Holmes who talks about arson before he even comes down to the scene. You’re a psychic, right?”
Dunlap threw Moodrow a sharp look before responding. He was trying to tell Moodrow that, as far as Sam Spinner was concerned, they were in trouble. Moodrow, who never doubted that he would eventually find proof of deliberate arson, was unimpressed.
“I take it you’ve completed your investigation?” Dunlap asked.
“Except for the lab tests,” Spinner announced.
“So whatta ya think?” Moodrow was all smiles as he suddenly entered the conversation. “Did you come to any conclusions yet?”
“Well, I sure don’t think it was arson.” Spinner turned to the more sympathetic Moodrow. “I think you cops are barkin’ up the wrong tree.”
“See,” Moodrow said, turning to Dunlap, “I told you it wasn’t arson. No way it could be arson. You’re buyin’ me lunch, Paulie. Don’t forget our bet.” He turned back to Spinner, still grinning. “I got a partner sees murder every time he farts.”
Spinner laughed. He didn’t like cops much. Most of them, he knew, held the Fire Department’s investigatory division in contempt, especially the detectives. “He oughta buy ya two lunches fa this one. I been through every inch of this basement and I don’t see nothin’ but an accidental fire.”
“But how do you know for sure?” Dunlap asked. “I mean, gimme a goddamn break. This guy eats like a horse.”
Spinner drew himself up. If they wanted a lecture on fire investigation, he would be glad to give them one. “First thing, there ain’t no sign of an accelerant anywhere. No gasoline, no kerosene, no lighter fluid, no nothin’. I took samples, nat’rally, and I’m gonna put ’em through the chromatograph, but I guarantee they’re gonna come out clean. Second thing is the mattress where the fire started. It’s been there for years. All ya gotta do is pick it up and look at the concrete underneath to see that. Third thing is there’s been people using this area for living quarters. There’s well-decayed human feces behind the boiler. There’s urine stains in several places along the back wall. There’s food particles…”
“How come there’s no damage? How come nothing got burned?” Dunlap continued to probe, asking his questions curtly while staring angrily at his partner. In every respect, he appeared to be no more than a dumb flatfoot pissed at being caught on the wrong side of an argument.
“Mattress fires don’t make a lotta heat. Smoke, yeah. Clouds of black smoke. Especially when they got motor oil soaked into one corner like this one did.”
“I thought you said there was no accelerant?” Dunlap said.
“Motor oil, unless you got tremendous heat, puts a fire out. Ain’t you seen all the ads on TV about engine heat and the oil don’t break down? You practically gotta use napalm to ignite motor oil. Here, lemme learn you a little something about fires.” Snorting triumphantly, he led them to the back of the room where the remains of the mattress, a jet-black rectangle almost lost against the smoke-scorched-wall, still lay. The fire had evidently begun in the center of the mattress and, fueled by the newspaper padding, spread to the edges. One corner was almost untouched and it was here that Sam Spinner pointed. “See this here?” he said. “Where it ain’t burnt? This corner is soaked with motor oil. I figure there musta been oil in the middle, too, but when the fire reached where the oil was thick, it went out. That oil, in case ya thinkin’ about askin’ me, is gonna show up in scrapings we took off the wall and ceiling. It don’t mean nothin’ in ter
ms of heat, but it makes very dense smoke.”
“How do ya know someone didn’t pour the oil on the mattress, then set the fire?” Dunlap asked.
Spinner looked at Moodrow, gesturing over at Dunlap. “Some guys don’t like ta lose,” he said, sarcastically.
“You got that right,” Moodrow agreed.
“The reason,” Spinner announced, turning back to Paul Dunlap, “why I know how long the oil has been in the mattress is that I picked up a corner of the goddamn mattress and checked to see if there was oil on the bottom. That mattress, my friend, is soaked through and the oil in the mattress is gritty and dry. That’s because it’s been there for a long time. No way it coulda been put there even a week ago.” He glared at Dunlap contemptuously, leaving a long, empty silence before taking up the thread of his logic. “Now the third reason why this fire was accidental is the presence of drug paraphernalia. Crack vials, glassine envelopes, syringes, candles, bent spoons, scorched bottle caps, etcetera, etcetera. Evidently, the neighborhood druggies come down here ta get their jollies and somebody didn’t blow out his candle. Could be the asshole just nodded out, as junkies are known to do. He nods off and, when he wakes up, the fire is too strong to put out. Or maybe he could put it out, but he don’t give a shit. Whatever the case, he takes off for parts unknown without havin’ the decency ta call 911.”
“It sounds right to me,” Moodrow interrupted. He had less than no interest in Spinner’s speculations. What he wanted was a rundown of the physical evidence, which he’d already been given. Now it was time to see if there was any profit to be squeezed from that evidence. “It’s too bad about the lady upstairs.”
Spinner’s eyes dropped to the floor. “I feel like shit about that,” he said, piously. “The bad breaks she got are almost unbelievable. First, when the landlord decides ta put in new pipes, he hires a lumberjack with a chainsaw instead of a plumber. The hole on this goddamn retrofit is nearly twice as big as the pipe. Second, the guy livin’ above the old lady stuffs the hole around his pipes with insulation so the smoke can’t go up. Third, she’s got the windows closed tight, the bedroom door shut and the smoke alarm out in the hallway. See, that’s another reason why this fire was an accident. What did an arsonist stand ta gain? How could he know all those things would be that way upstairs? I mean about the windows and the smoke alarm? It don’t make sense anyone should do it deliberately.”
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