The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  There were no secrets in the police station. Everyone was aware of who was on the take and who wasn’t. Emmett had no loyalty to the Irish gangsters or the East Ward’s mob. Being Polish made him a minority in more ways than one. When Emmett was on probation as a patrolman, a few of his fellow rookies had peaked at the personnel files and found out where he had been prior to the academy. From then on, nobody would walk a beat with him. As a detective, no one would partner with Emmett. Though he hadn’t actually become a priest, the stigma persisted. Nobody was keen to be in the company of a man that they felt the impulse to confess to. They knew better than to confess anything to a cop.

  The night after his meeting with Ahern, Emmett had bought the bottle of Jim Beam and sat up all evening deciding what he was going to do, unable to open the bourbon. To the Jesuits, obedience entailed following the direct commands of the superior perinde a cadaver. The translation: “much like a corpse.” A Jesuit followed orders without hesitation. Blind faith in the superior’s wisdom was all the faith required. If Emmett gave Ahern what he was asking for, he had complete faith that Otis Fossum would be dead within a week.

  The next morning, Emmett resubmitted the same report, uncorrected, and the lieutenant was clear where he stood. Retribution was swift. Emmett caught fellow Homicide detective Nic Serletto digging through his drawers that afternoon, searching for the missing name of the witness. Serletto and his partner, Larry Hochwald, had graduated to Homicide via Vice. Giancone was a friend of theirs, and they made no effort to hide their affiliation with him and with Ruggiero Caligrassi. They were garden variety thugs, the sort who would steal tips off restaurant tables when the waitress wasn’t looking, then use their badges to get free coffee. With his hand in Emmett’s top drawer, Serletto had the nerve to claim he was borrowing a pen.

  “Maybe you should’ve enlisted with your brother,” Serletto had whispered to him. “Maybe you woulda come back in a bag instead.”

  Emmett decked him. He had never hit another man in anger in his entire life. The second his fist connected with Serletto’s jaw, Emmett realized that it was a trap, Serletto the bait. Emmett blamed himself for falling for it.

  Rather than suspending him for striking Serletto, the lieutenant ousted Emmett to the Records Room. So began the slow squeeze. Whoever Ahern truly took orders from—because it certainly wasn’t Inspector Plout—had demanded Fossum’s name, and the lieutenant was going to get it by whatever means necessary.

  “When I heard about this case with the colored kid in the train tunnel, I knew you were the right man for it, Martin.”

  Lieutenant Ahern took a soulful drag off his cigarette for emphasis. Two months earlier, he had put Emmett in his hip pocket until the day came when he could use him. That day had arrived.

  To investigate the crime, Emmett would likely have to go into the projects to interview the family. After last night’s skirmish, that would be a challenge. He was white and he was a cop. Without a partner, he had no backup. If instead Emmett let the case drop and did nothing, he would take the hit in the press and at the precinct, proving the rumors true, that he was unfit for duty. The lieutenant was offering a lose-lose proposition. Or so Ahern must have assumed.

  Emmett still had his badge and he still carried a weapon, however his demotion to the basement told everyone that Lieutenant Ahern didn’t trust him. Getting an investigation of his own would change that. It would also give Emmett the chance he had been hoping for on the Vernon Young case.

  “You want the body or not?”

  Emmett didn’t answer. Ahern stabbed out his cigarette on the stone ledge. He wasn’t about to push Emmett down the proverbial stairs. He was going to let him fall.

  “Yeah. I’ll take it.”

  The lieutenant wouldn’t allow his satisfaction to show. “Then you should get a move on. Transit’s stopped service on the subway line on my orders. They’re telling the public it’s for maintenance. Won’t be able to hold the trains for more than an hour.”

  The Warren Street stop was on the city’s main subway artery. The fact that Ahern could get it shut down for any length of time attested to his power, a strong warning to Emmett. If the lieutenant could stop a train, there was no telling what else he was capable of.

  “Listen, Martin, I don’t want to see this niggerboy’s body on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. Whole city’d go up in smoke. Watts would look like a backyard barbecue. You hearing me?”

  Emmett had heard exactly what he needed to hear, but before he went to see the body, he had a call to make.

  SIX

  Two patrolmen were there to meet Emmett at the subway station. They huddled in a sliver of shade under an overhang, acting like they had better things to do. When a woman in a minidress strolled by, the younger of the two swiveled his head after her. He would have whistled if Emmett hadn’t walked up.

  “Hot enough for you, Detective?” the officer with the wandering eye asked, grinning as if they were old friends.

  “Where’s the body?”

  “Over here, sir,” the older patrolman replied, flashing his partner a stifling glare.

  Repair signs and traffic cones cordoned off the doors, preventing people from entering. Inside, the station was steamy. The tiled walls retained the heat. Decorative mosaics depicting the old Morris Canal seemed molten in the humidity and ready to drip.

  Newark’s Seven City subway system had been constructed in the 1930s in the dry bed of the canal, which had been drained and filled forty years prior because the stagnant waters were a health hazard. Subway lines had run above and below ground, using cars that were similar to street trolleys. At its height, the system covered seven lines, operating from Newark to Bloomfield, Caldwell, East Orange, Jersey City, Montclair, and Orange, hence the name “Seven Cities.” Emmett had vague memories of the trolleys from his childhood. For a nickel fare, they were as close to an amusement park ride as he and his brother could get. Sadly, service on the streetcar routes was short-lived. They were eventually discontinued and converted to buses, all save one—the Number Seven, which looped through Newark. Most residents had been sorry to see the trolleys go, Emmett included. The cars brought a certain charm to the city, and they were a symbol of what Newark could have been. Their departure marked a kind of demise, a step in the wrong direction. It wouldn’t be the last.

  “You’ll need this,” the older officer said. He handed Emmett a flashlight.

  “Wait. The body’s inside the tunnel?”

  “Yes, sir. Conductor noticed it this morning.”

  The patrolmen hopped off the platform onto the tracks. Emmett followed tentatively. He hated tunnels. His phobia was born when he was a boy, when being afraid was something he thought he would outgrow. This was a fear he hadn’t shed.

  “Watch your step, Detective,” warned the younger officer, boldly leading. “Once we get into the tunnel, you can barely see your hand in front of your face even with the flashlights.”

  As they passed from the lighted section of the station into the mouth of the tunnel, the wall tiles transitioned into concrete. The deeper they went, the dimmer it got. Soon the darkness swallowed them. They snapped on their flashlights, casting wide arcs of light that glinted along the iron tracks. The sound of their footsteps bounced off the vaulted walls. Panic was swelling in Emmett’s chest. He gripped the flashlight so it wouldn’t betray his shaking hands.

  “Least it’s cooler in here,” the older patrolman commented.

  “Yeah, there’s a little breeze.” The other mopped his neck with a handkerchief.

  A thin wind blew through the tunnel, swirling wisps of dust. It was no relief to Emmett, nor was the chitchat. “How much farther?”

  “Right up ahead, sir. See?”

  Their flashlights illuminated the outline of an immense figure lying faceup on the ground, straddling one side of the tracks. When Emmett got closer, he saw that the leg between the rails had been severed and rolled away from the torso. At its center, a white pearl of den
uded bone glowed in the dark. The sight of the mangled body diverted his anxiety and helped him hold it under wraps.

  “I was told the victim was a boy. This looks like a grown man.”

  “He had a student movie pass in his pocket,” the older patrolman explained. “Name’s Ambrose Webster. This address was paper clipped to the pass.” He rattled off an apartment number in the Hayes Home projects.

  “Did you call it in and confirm that was his address and not somebody else’s?”

  “Sir?”

  “You assumed the address was his.”

  “I get it,” the younger patrolman said, proud of himself. “Why would the guy have his own address in his pocket?”

  The body lying on the tracks was either that of the real Ambrose Webster or of a John Doe who stole the movie pass from him. Emmett hoped for the latter. Only the infirm or the mentally ill would keep their own addresses on their person, and this victim didn’t appear to fall into the first category.

  “So you didn’t confirm it?”

  They shook their heads. “No, sir.”

  Emmett traced the length of the victim’s massive, muscled body with his flashlight. He was about Emmett’s height, but a hundred pounds heavier. Even in death, he was menacing. It would have taken tremendous courage or coercion to get the upper hand on someone that large.

  “Ten to one this kid played high school football,” the older officer mused.

  “Five to one he was a linebacker. He’s the size of a frickin’ house.”

  Emmett deflected the beam of his light from the body onto the officers. Despite his rank, he no longer had the status to threaten. A glower would have to suffice.

  “Sorry,” they muttered in unison.

  At the abbey, speaking ill to or of the brethren had been frowned upon. In Jesuit terms, that translated to forbidden. The other novices were four years younger than Emmett, and they had come straight from posh Jesuit prep school such as Regis, Fordham, and Xavier in New York. To them, his alma mater, Saint Peter’s, was a backwater, third-rate barn, and the fact that Emmett had arrived at the monastery at the old age of twenty-two made him ripe for recrimination, if not outright, then in furtive stares. Although communication at Saint Andrew’s had been conducted entirely in Latin, most of it clumsy and poorly conjugated, the subtlest insults were trumpeted like curse words. Emmett got them loud and clear, and they became louder in his own mind when he left. That taught him to think before he spoke and not to speak at all without cause.

  “Did you find anything besides the movie pass on him?”

  “A dollar and change and a house key. That was it.”

  The rattle of a distant train welled into the tunnel. The three of them turned. Emmett scouted for an approaching light and the darkness gaped back at him.

  “This route’s shut down, isn’t it?”

  Worry swept across the older patrolman’s face. “They said it was.”

  The margin between the tracks and the wall was negligible. If a train did come through, there was no room for them to step aside. Emmett was fast on his feet, but he doubted he could outrun a subway car.

  “You’d better cross your fingers they were right.”

  He knelt to study the victim. Aside from the bodies of his own parents, this was the second corpse Emmett had ever seen up close. Vernon Young had been lying facedown. That made him easier to look at. Nothing was easy about this body except that the victim’s eyes were closed. Emmett considered that a blessing, for him and the deceased. Tiny brown ants clustered around the victim’s eyelashes and at the edges of his lips. Emmett wanted to dust them away. He didn’t.

  “Where’s all the blood?” the younger patrolman asked. “Shouldn’t there be more blood?”

  Emmett had also noticed the absence of blood. He hadn’t planned to bring it up. He wasn’t there to give a lesson. This being his second homicide, he was in no position to teach the officers anything. “The leg was probably sheared off by a passing train postmortem and the dead don’t bleed.” He left it at that.

  “Oh, okay,” the patrolman said. “That’s some cut on his neck though, ain’t it?”

  Cut was an understatement. The injury to the leg was clearly the result of a train car. The slash across the victim’s throat most certainly was not. Knives usually produced scratches or lines on a body depending on depth. This wound was on a par with the mark an ax would leave in a tree trunk. The position of the body was all that kept the head from unhinging altogether.

  Rivulets of dried blood streamed from the gash, and the front of the victim’s T-shirt was stained brown from a geyser of arterial spray. The T-shirt was a size too small, and the pants, shredded by the train, were thin at the knees, earmarks of hand-me-down clothes. Emmett had gotten his share as a novice. When he received his cassock, it had been donned by countless others. The elbows and sleeves were frayed, and the stains of a million meals were embedded in the fabric even though it had been washed so often that the black cloth had turned an off-putting greenish gray. Novices were issued four pairs of shirts, shorts, and socks each week, purchased from army surplus for little more than a prayer by one of the lay brothers. The victim’s clothes had presumably been bought at the Goodwill for a slightly higher price and were worse for the wear. Mud was streaked across his chest. More was caked on his shoes and flecked along the pant leg to the shin. Emmett panned his light across the tunnel floor. All he saw was gravel and dry dirt.

  “We checked for footprints,” the younger patrolman told him. “There were none.”

  “Guy could’ve walked on the wood slats in the center of the tracks.”

  “Or on the rail.”

  “On the rail? That’d be like walking a tightrope. What is he? One of the Flying Wallendas?”

  Emmett allowed the officers to carry on with their conjecture to occupy them. Normally, he would have told them to wait outside. Since he couldn’t tolerate being in the tunnel alone, he would have to tolerate them. He touched the mud on Ambrose Webster’s shoe. It was fresh.

  That summer’s heat wave had brought on a drought. The city was under water restriction. People were barred from washing their cars or running their sprinklers. Water was being rationed the way it would in a desert. Emmett thought of the previous night’s upheaval, the fires and the hoses spraying gallons upon gallons of water into the streets. The victim could have been at the riot. Emmett was more interested in where he went afterward.

  The lack of blood meant that the body had been dumped in the subway tunnel. There were no drag marks leading in from the station. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to bring a victim that large to that exact spot. How they did it, Emmett couldn’t begin to imagine. Why they left him on a train track where his body was bound to be discovered was equally baffling. The mud crusted in the palm and nail beds of the victim’s right hand didn’t make sense either. His being in the vicinity of the Fourth Precinct and the fires might account for his muddy shoes, but the crowd that had surrounded the police station was slinging mud figuratively, not literally.

  The victim’s left hand was tucked under his hip, indicating that he had been dropped without care or that the train that ripped his leg off had dragged him, twisting the body, impossible to tell which. As Emmett bent down to get a better view, a pigeon flew out of the darkness, wings flapping loud as applause. The noise startled him as well as the patrolmen.

  “Stupid bird,” the younger officer said.

  Emmett felt dizzy. His heart was racing. If he didn’t rein in his nerves, he might faint. He put his hand on the ground to steady himself.

  “Before you got here, dispatch radioed to say the photographer’s running late. You wanna hang around, Detective?”

  Newark employed one forensic photographer for all five wards. His name was Albert Rafshoon, and he would have shown up late even if he didn’t have such a broad area to cover. Rafshoon had rolled onto the Vernon Young crime scene an hour and a half behind schedule, waddling under the weight of his equipment, his
thinning hair combed over his scalp in the expert swirls of an iced cake. What he lacked in punctuality, he compensated for in thoroughness, getting pictures from every conceivable angle. Rafshoon’s shots of Vernon Young were burned into Emmett’s brain more indelibly than the original crime scene. The lagoon of blood surrounding the body reflected the camera’s flash in every image. Had he been anywhere else, Emmett would have held out for the photographer, but the tunnel was breaking him.

  “No, tell Rafshoon to get the pictures to me as quickly as he can.”

  “Will do. Wagon’s here to take this guy to the coroner. Can we bring ’em in?”

  The body no longer interested the patrolmen. The thrill of the location and the severed leg had faded. They’d had enough.

  “Yeah. They can’t touch him until the photographer’s finished. Got that?”

  They answered “Yes, sir” in tandem.

  Heading back, Emmett’s pulse peaked when he saw light shining from the subway station ahead. He was leaning forward as he walked, like a runner nearing a finish line. The younger patrolman climbed onto the platform to confer with the coroner’s men, who were wheeling in a gurney, while the other helped lower it onto the tracks. The fluorescent lamps were a comfort compared to the dark, yet Emmett couldn’t catch his breath. His knees were about to give.

  “You okay, sir?” From the platform, the younger officer held out his hand to him.

  Emmett ignored the gesture and hoisted himself up unaided. “I’m fine. It’s the heat.”

  Red-faced, the patrolman went to the entrance to await Rafshoon while the older one accompanied the coroner’s crew to the body, the gurney clattering over the train tracks. Alone on the platform, tension eased its stranglehold on Emmett. He uncurled his stiffened fingers from the flashlight, picturing the victim’s muddy nails as he shook the powdery dirt from the tunnel floor off his own hands. It didn’t make sense. Nothing about murder made sense to Emmett. In the past, he had been able to disconnect himself from compassion or anger because he was dealing with robberies and thefts, not death. With a murder, compassion and anger could overtake him as the tunnel had. Emmett had to ignore his feelings. Feelings wouldn’t help him. Logic could. He wondered how the body had gotten in that far and who would have wanted to put it there. Then he wondered if he really wanted to know. If he did, it was going to cost him.