Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  O’Neill threw his partner a wink and a wet, phlegmy laugh. “We been to see Greenwood’s mother and the ex-wife. They won’t give us the time of day. Ditto the sister and acquaintances. We don’t have no way to work it up from the bottom.”

  “I take it he doesn’t run with any of the dealers now?”

  “The fucking guy’s been rippin’ off people who used to be his best pals. There ain’t nobody close to him anymore. You got all them hookers tell ya everything that happens on the street. Shouldn’t take more’n two or three blowjobs to find the bastard.”

  “And what are you gonna do?” Moodrow asked.

  O’Neill smiled and shrugged. “We’re gonna do all the things you think you’re too good to do. We’re gonna tie it into a five borough task force to keep the politicians happy. Establish a hot line and a reward. Would you believe his fucking Honor’s goin’ to the writer’s funeral? Anyways, we’ll get Greenwood’s picture in the media and distribute it to the precincts. The papers are bound ta give his mug a big splash since he took out one of their own and most likely we’ll get the bastard quick. But if we don’t, Epstein’s gotta cover his ass which makes you the toilet paper.”

  “No problem,” Moodrow said, a sudden smile brightening his face. “Actually, I been looking forward to a little action. So I can break in my new partner.”

  2

  ONCE KIRKPATRICK AND O’NEILL were safely out of the way, Moodrow put the bourbon back on the shelf and poured himself another cup of coffee while his partner went through Greenwood’s M.O. file. M.O. (modus operandi) files are kept in every precinct and contain information from a variety of sources on individual criminals known to be living or operating within the precinct, along with their associates and crime patterns. This is in addition to major crime files which include the same information under broader categories such as arson, robbery, narcotics, etcetera. With these basic tools, a detective can approach an investigation from either end. He can begin with the crime and work toward the perpetrator or start with the criminal and widen an investigation to include associations with other criminals in the same field. The final backup, of course, is the precinct computer (operated by civilians) which not only ties the whole city together, but is capable of tapping the warehouse of information controlled by the FBI.

  Being a native of the 7th, Greenwood’s file was exceptionally thick, the oldest pages already yellowing, the newest handwritten. The story it told was common enough. In trouble with the police since he was ten years old, he’d been examined by a dozen social welfare agencies. Some pronounced him severely disturbed, some pronounced him normal, but in either event, he and his problems were thrown back into the hands of his family. His first four arrests got him probation, then six months in Rikers juvenile followed by two more probations. When he was eighteen, he’d done two years hard in Attica, come back smart enough to stay out of police hands for nearly two years (four arrests with no convictions) then got snatched at the scene of a particularly brutal rip-off by two alert patrolmen. Not that Levander went down easy. He broke one cop’s leg and bit halfway through the other one’s finger before a second set of uniforms, responding to a 10-13, filled his mouth, nose and eyes with Mace, then broke their nightsticks over his head. For this sin (and for all the sins of his past life) Greenwood drew a dime, of which he did six. According to his sheet, he went back to his old trade, the separation of children from their parent’s money, almost as soon as he was released.

  Greenwich Village, which is west of the Lower East Side and much more affluent, has been attracting rebellious youth since the turn of the century. On weekends, the streets are full of suburban children in daddy’s sedan cruising for girls and drugs. The Village, itself, now that the uniforms have sealed off Washington Square Park, is too commercial and too hectic for most of the street dealers, but the scene on the Lower East Side, where the condos give way to housing projects and tenements, is wide open, with marijuana salesmen out on the street soliciting the kids as they drive up First Avenue. The dealers, small-timers selling ten dollar bags, stare into the open windows of the cars and press their fingers to their lips as if they were hitting on a joint. If the occupants respond, there follows a quick exchange of envelope for cash.

  According to his file, Levander used this relationship to work his own scam. He’d approach the cars as they sat waiting for the lights on 11th Street, sell the occupants a small amount of pot, then ask them if they were interested in a little coke. Naturally, coke being a much more dangerous drug to handle, he couldn’t carry it on him, but if they just drove a few blocks…

  If they were afraid, he’d promise that they wouldn’t have to leave the car or hand the money over in advance. Just drive him to a certain apartment building and wait a few minutes until he came out. Once he had them parked among the burnt-out tenements on 4th Street, he would pull a gun, usually an automatic, smash the driver across the face by way of opening negotiations, then grab whatever cash and jewelry he could find. On several occasions, after taking the keys to the ignition, he dragged young women, screaming, into abandoned tenements.

  Most of this was “alleged,” of course, much of it coming from snitches, because the kids, realizing they had no hope of recovering their money, saw no sense in compounding their problems by having to tell their parents they were on the Lower East Side trying to buy cocaine. Better to take the beating and keep the cops out of it, which is what cheap rip-off artists like Greenwood counted on. Despite the violence, despite the stitches in the emergency room, it’s almost impossible to motivate cops without a signed complaint.

  In the first week of January, for reasons unknown, this pattern changed abruptly. Greenwood gunned down a middle-aged biker named Bill Ryder and made off with several ounces of newly manufactured methamphetamine. The eyewitness, the dead man’s common law wife, Sue-Ann Dosantos, had positively fingered him and wasn’t backing off.

  After adding murder to assault and rape, the department assigned Detective Paul Kirkpatrick to find him and put him away, for parole violation if nothing else could be proven. Unfortunately, this was after he changed his style, when he was no longer working openly on the street.

  Then the bodies began to pile up. Two in February, another in March, another in April. All dealers. Even where there were no witnesses, word on the street, from several different sources, kept coming up Levander Greenwood, aka Kubla Khan.

  “Any surprises in there, Detective Tilley?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve been buried in that file for half an hour. I thought you might like to share your thoughts. Impress me with the depths of your insight.” Without asking, Moodrow filled both cups with coffee, then pushed the sugar bowl across the table.

  “You want Greenwood’s exact address?” Tilley asked.

  “I want your analysis. Tell me how you’d play this if you were on your own.” He sat down and folded his hands on the table as if preparing to wait indefinitely for his partner to get serious.

  “I think Greenwood’s gotta be working with at least one partner.”

  “Why?” Moodrow leaned forward eagerly.

  “Let’s take the first rip-off. The biker. Greenwood took three ounces of amphetamine. He can’t use that much personally. It’d last for years. But if he’s selling it locally, he’d have to be visible. It’s one thing to make an unannounced visit to a bar at three o’clock in the morning, another thing to meet one buyer after another when half of them are gonna head for a telephone as soon as the deal’s finished.

  “Of course, he might be taking his action into another part of town, into South Jamaica or the Bronx, but then they’ll catch him from the other end. After they set up the task force and get his face in the newspapers, every rat in the city’ll come forward. Whoever turns Greenwood’s gonna be owed a hell of a favor. Not to mention that the reporter’s magazine has a $20,000 reward out. Put that together with the automatic twenty-five grand on any cop killing and you got quite a nice bundle.

&n
bsp; “With no takers, right? No, I don’t think they’re gonna find anything. I think Greenwood’s probably dealing with one partner. Someone smart enough to let him do the killing.” Tilley stopped for a moment, trying to work it through. “The way Greenwood’s going, someone’s most likely gonna kill him. That would leave the silent partner in the clear. Think about it, Moodrow. You put this sick fucker on the street, let him do his thing, split the profit and walk away after someone chills him. Not the dumbest scam we’ve ever come across.”

  Moodrow nodded. “Let’s suppose there is a partner. Just like you say. A dealer of some kind who takes whatever Greenwood comes up with and sells it on the street. Or even wholesale, if there’s enough of it. What’s this guy’s biggest problem?”

  “The partner’s biggest problem has to be Greenwood, himself. First of all, the man is unstable; a certified psychopath who went off the deep end six months ago and hasn’t hit bottom yet. Shit, this guy walked up to a crowd of people two blocks from a precinct house and started blasting away with a .12 gauge shotgun. Imagine what he might do if he thought his partner was cheating him? Whoever’s using him must be pretty bad in his own right.” He paused for a moment, looking for Moodrow to make a comment, but Moodrow continued to sip his coffee. “By the way, do you know if any of his shit is hitting the streets again?”

  Moodrow shrugged. “I’m gonna try to find out, but I don’t have much expectation of running him down that way. The amount he’s taking isn’t enough to make much of an impression if it’s put back into circulation. But I’m gonna put out the word that I’m looking for any trace of the mighty Kubla Khan and when my little rats come back to me, I’m gonna turn you onto the ones who’re willing to meet you.”

  “Let’s start with Cecil the Armenian Hooker.” Actually, despite the weak joke, Tilley was surprised. Most detectives guard informants like they were made of gold.

  “You ain’t ready for Cecil,” Moodrow pronounced solemnly. “Cecil would eat your little ass for breakfast. We’ll start with Greenwood’s mother. She lives in the Vladek Houses off South Street.”

  “Greenwood’s mother is a snitch?”

  “Greenwood’s mother is a citizen. But they’re allowed to help, too.”

  “She must be some sweetheart to have raised a monster like Greenwood.”

  Moodrow shrugged into his jacket. “She’s all right. She works as a practical nurse at Mt. Sinai.”

  “And she lives in the project? How can that be?”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “I thought you had to be poor to live in the projects.”

  “How much you think she makes?”

  “Too much for low income housing.”

  Moodrow started to open the door, then stopped and turned to face his partner. “She makes fifteen thousand a year, gross. Maybe, after taxes, she’s got eleven. If she ever lost her apartment, she’d be sleeping in the fucking bus terminal.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t threaten her with it.”

  “If she knows anything, she’ll tell me without any of that.” He gave Tilley a worried look. “You can’t put everyone in the same bag, Jimmy. She’s a citizen. She’s one of the people we’re supposed to help.”

  “Does that mean she’s under the personal protection of Don Moodrow?”

  “That’s exactly right.” Moodrow’s face registered his surprise. “My personal protection. If there ain’t no good guys, why be a sheriff?”

  “Hey, a job’s a job. You might as well say, ‘Why be an accountant?’”

  Moodrow’s face went blank. His small features seemed to shrink back into his skull. For ten seconds, he fixed Tilley with his hardest stare. Then he pushed himself away from the table and stood up. “Let’s get to work.”

  3

  VIRTUALLY ALL OF NEW York City’s vast network of public housing was built during the liberal post-WWII era of Mayor Robert Wagner. Not that it was easily done, despite the prevailing New Deal mentality. The overwhelming question, even then, was whether or not “we” had an obligation to do anything at all for “them” and the prediction, as these red and yellow brick buildings went up, was universally bleak: substandard from the first, it was solemnly declared, they would soon fall into disrepair—“instant slum” and “breeding grounds for crime” were the phrases most often heard.

  Tilley was born in 1962, just as the construction was getting into high gear and if he’d ever heard this depressing forecast (though he certainly heard plenty about “us” and “them”), he didn’t remember it. For Jim Tilley, New York’s projects were a fact of life, a given. Moodrow, on the other hand, had listened to the forecasts patiently, then was surprised at the city’s simple, effective solution—the creation of a special police force to serve the nearly five hundred thousand citizens living in the projects. Now each set of public houses has its own miniature police force, cops who come back to the same group of buildings day after day, until they (or the better ones, at least) can tell the good guys from the bad guys.

  But, crime or no crime, the irony is still clear, because it’s New York’s alternative housing, the tenements built early in the century to house the vast labor force emigrating from eastern and southern Europe, that have fallen into disrepair. For all the poverty closed off by those narrow, yellow hallways, the projects, including the Vladek Houses where Mrs. Louise Greenwood lived, represent the housing of choice for most of New York’s poor.

  The absolute proof of that assertion can be found in the ten-year waiting list for available apartments, even for apartments in the Vladek Houses which, an exception to the general rule, were completed in 1940 as part of the cure for the Great Depression.

  The Vladek Houses, however, are only a small part of the network of subsidized projects blanketing the waterfront area of the Lower East Side, and as he and his partner drove toward Louise Greenwood’s, Moodrow ticked off the names as they drove south from 14th Street: the Baruch Houses, the Lillian Wald Houses, the Jacob Riis Houses, the Seward Park complex. “Nearly thirty thousand people, Jimmy, who need help to pay the rent. This neighborhood was never good. It was always dirt poor. First Irish, then Jewish and East European. Now it’s mostly Puerto Rican and Chinese with a few leftover whites and a gang of punk artists and yuppies north of Houston Street. And dope, of course. Probably the most dope of any place below 96th Street. You know how in black neighborhoods, it’s hard to tell the good kids from the bad ones? Well, we got punks down here with green hair knocking down half a million dollars a year making sculpture out of garbage. We also got punks who manufacture speed. Some of the guys out there with rings in their noses write for Rolling Stone magazine. You fuck with them, you find yourself on page one. But others, looking just exactly the same, like to pimp young runaways. Think you can tell ’em apart? The 7th ain’t a regular precinct. We got more than a hundred thousand Puerto Ricans living here. We got nine different kinds of ethnic whites above Houston Street. We got Chinese by the Brooklyn Bridge. We got Hasidic Jews on Grand Street. We even got junior executives in co-ops. It might be a pot, but most of the time, it don’t melt. It fucking boils.”

  Moodrow parked the Plymouth next to what was left of the nearly demolished Gouverneur Hospital and the two cops stepped out into the noontime heat. There are no air conditioners in city houses and the pathways and small parks dotting the Vladek Houses were crowded with residents seeking the nonexistent breeze. Moodrow and Tilley walked from their car to the headquarters of Public Service Area #41, without looking too closely at the gangs of kids openly smoking joints. The two cops were about to check in with the housing cops, a courtesy that, if overlooked, would come back to haunt them if they should need a favor sometime in the future.

  Naturally, the desk sergeant, an ancient warrior named Handlesman, knew Moodrow and welcomed him, “How’re the whores treatin’ ya these days, Moodrow? You got AIDS yet?”

  “Yeah, from sharing a needle with your sister. This is my new partner, Jimmy Tilley. Guess what we’re
here for?”

  Brian Handlesman threw the young detective a close look, wondering how anyone could be so unlucky. Handlesman was extremely fat, even by the beefy standards of the NYPD, and he kept shifting his weight on the armless metal chair behind the small desk at the entranceway to PSA #41 headquarters. “I bet you’re here about Levander Greenwood. Am I right?” He laughed. “We got a bulletin today. In fact, we been gettin’ bulletins once a month for the last six months.” He gestured to a corkboard in the hallway leading to the back rooms. A mug shot of Greenwood glared from the case.

  “That’s our boy,” Moodrow admitted. “Any word?”

  Handlesman shrugged his shoulders. “I think you’re wastin’ your time. His mama got a restraining order nearly a year ago. He ain’t allowed within a hundred yards of the Vladek Houses. Last time he was here, he absconded with the fuckin’ rent money.”

  “Were you here when Greenwood was a child?” Tilley asked. “Did you know him?”

  “Shit, kid, I testified at his first juvie hearing. Long fuckin’ time ago. I told the hearing officer, Kill the little bastard. Now. Don’t let this kid grow up. They got mad as…What’s ya name again?”

  “Jim.”

  “They had one of these fag social workers there. Judy Cohen. Judy the Jew, I used ta call her. I swear ta fuckin’ Christ, Jim, every time one of these little animals stabbed someone, this bitch was up there tryin’ ta protect him. Tryin’ ta protect Levander Greenwood. I hada sit there and listen’ ta her fuckin’ defame me to the judge for over an hour.

  “I mean, I been in these projects almost thirty-five years and I say Levander Greenwood was the meanest kid I ever seen. No shit. Even when he was stumbling along in diapers, he couldn’t be near the other kids. As he grew up, he got fuckin’ worse. Would ya believe that? He got fuckin’ worse.”

  The fat cop hesitated, as if waiting for Moodrow or Tilley to dispute his claim. He stared at each; noted their silence. “One day, about fifteen years ago, we came up on him smokin’ a joint in a basement hallway where he wasn’t supposed ta be in the first place. Now we don’t wanna bust nobody for smokin’ a lousy fuckin’ joint. We know that’s the kind of bust gets a brick dropped on ya head, but the kids’re supposed ta play the fuckin’ game. When they see us comin’, they’re supposed ta run away. Greenwood just stands there lookin’ at me and my partner, Joe Jefferson, who was colored, by the way, darin’ us to make a move on him.