Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  He knew it wasn’t any one thing bothering him here. True, it was the first time he had worked into the interior of a crime, into the bowels. He had known criminal and victim, quick arrests and questioning detectives, but hadn’t understood that violent crime never occurs in a vacuum, that it spreads back through families, back through communities. Beyond that, Moodrow had him thoroughly frightened. There was no way to know what he would do next. Prime example: Did the scene at Katjcic’s come about as a result of Rose Carillo’s sob story? Or was Moodrow pissed off because his snitch had cheated on him? Moodrow told his partner (he laughed while he did) that he had no intention of keeping his promise to Rose Carillo and Tilley found himself believing that no cop would be so suicidal as to agree to commit murder in front of a witness, partner or not. Yet, as Moodrow made the explanation, his eyes were as blank and unyielding as the eyes of a dead fish in a storefront window.

  And suppose Moodrow did kill Greenwood? Where would Tilley be if he failed to report Moodrow’s promise to, for instance, Captain Epstein? What if, in going back over Moodrow’s record, the headhunters got wise to their game of Kill the Motorcycle? It was one thing for the Captain to sic Moodrow on the underbelly of the Lower East Side when the only career to be destroyed was Moodrow’s. Now there was Tilley’s career as well. The name of the game in the NYPD, a game shared by all civil servants, is “Cover Your Ass.”

  In between his considerations of Stanley Moodrow and his potential for career-threatening behavior, Rose Carillo’s features floated like a ghost in a cheap black-and-white movie. And not the helpless woman who described Greenwood’s brutal attacks, but the laughing girl who’d teased Moodrow about his drink. Tilley couldn’t believe she didn’t know how beautiful she was. All women know the value of that commodity, know how to package and sell it. Or so he assumed.

  One thing was certain. The fifteen-year-old girl who’d walked through the Port Authority bus terminal was not the Rose Carillo who’d calmly told of her struggle to be rid of Levander Greenwood. She’d said it was the birth of her son that gave her the strength to fight. Imagine the irony, then, of that fight leading directly to the abuse of the children she wanted to protect.

  The sun rose on Tilley’s left, turning the sky over the houses on Roosevelt Island a flaming orange. It burned, a soft, luminous copper, in ten million panes of midtown skyline. The sky in the west, behind the buildings, was still dark and the air, cleaned by the rain, was so clear the massive towers stood out like volcanoes in some piece of Spielberg movie trickery. Tilley recalled taking a cousin out to Boulevard East in Weehawken, to the spot where Aaron Burr had killed Alexander Hamilton, and looking east over the Hudson River to where the aircraft carrier Intrepid was berthed. He remarked that the Intrepid looked like a rowboat. Less than that, a gray dot against the massive skyline of Manhattan.

  There are times when the city simply shrinks you down to size. When somehow you can step outside it long enough to feel its power. The sunrise burning in the windows slowed the runners, though they didn’t speak to each other. Anyone who runs the Drive sees this sight sooner or later and almost everyone slows down long enough to acknowledge it. In the shadow of Roosevelt Island, the East River reflected an ice-blue sky and looked clean enough to drink. The tide in New York Harbor was pulling rapidly south across the face of Queens and Brooklyn and an oil barge, headed north for depots in the Bronx, was having trouble making headway.

  Tilley started running again, more slowly this time. Louise Greenwood’s image floated up, pleading with the school principal. Psychology had been his first major at Fordham. After a few courses, he’d switched to Political Science, but he’d learned enough to believe there was no hope for the Levander Greenwoods of this world. The criminal psychopath is beyond the reach of modern medicine and responds only to drug therapy, which, as Marlee remembered, renders the person dead-in-life, as if the government had decided to take a mental life because it didn’t have the guts to take a physical life.

  Now Louise Greenwood clung to the idea of Jesus reaching out a hand to ‘save’ her child. If only Moodrow would spare Levander Greenwood’s physical body, the Lord would spare his soul. Still, her assumption (that the police were prepared to kill her son on sight) was outdated. In the 50s, before Escobar and Miranda, when the police were immune to any punishment but that of the department, cop killers were never brought in. Tilley had this scoop from his ex-cop uncles, now retired to beer and the barroom. They delivered the information at every family gathering along with their estimates of how far the department (and the city and America) had fallen from the pinnacle of its majesty. A pinnacle reached, not incidentally, during their tenure and which they referred to as B.M.: Before Miranda.

  Tilley suspected that Moodrow knew this when he made his promise to Mrs. Greenwood. As he’d predicted, there would probably be a hundred cops present when Greenwood was taken, not to mention photographers, journalists and the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s one thing to take out an anonymous perp in a burnt-out tenement in Brooklyn, quite another to publicly execute Levander Greenwood.

  Which meant, Tilley hoped, that unless Greenwood decided to fight it out, Rose Carillo would probably not get her wish. Nonetheless, the murder of a policeman (first-degree murder) is a special crime in New York State and carries with it a mandatory life sentence. Realistically speaking, “life” means something less than an actual lifetime, but cop killers in New York cannot expect to spend less than thirty years in prison. Add to this Greenwood’s half-dozen other murders and he would undoubtedly receive one of those unimaginable three-hundred-year sentences given out by New York judges in cases where reporters outnumber spectators.

  Her fear that Levander would escape was even less realistic. Not that it wasn’t possible, but the chance of being killed in traffic does not keep one out of automobiles. Perhaps, though, the mouse walking by the caged cat still trembles with terror. Maybe certain fears cannot be erased. Seeing her once again, her eyes fixed on Moodrow’s, Tilley realized that Levander’s life, even in prison, was the last remaining bar on her own cage. That without him, she would be free. Then he remembered the children.

  All the while he continued to run effortlessly, as if he could dissipate the agitation in his mind through the automatic rhythms of running. Instead of coming back up the drive, he crossed over the traffic onto 64th Street and ran west toward Central Park before heading back uptown. He had the women tucked into safe places, having worked through to the resolution of the Greenwood case. Moodrow, on the other hand, continued to trouble him. Not that the resolution of his conflict with the big cop wasn’t equally simple. Tilley knew he couldn’t hope to control Moodrow, but he could report him. Or request a new partner without specifying a reason.

  Fifth Avenue, across from the Park, was still in shadow as he made his way past 79th Street. In spite of the early hour and the weekend, the limos and radio cars were lined up in front of the canopies, ready to transport high-power executives to their offices. A lone cop, a uniform driving a motor scooter, was standing alongside a double-parked Lincoln with a DIAL 4311 sign in the front window. The driver, a turbaned Sikh with a jet black beard, was complaining loudly. “Why you do this to me? This is Saturday and whole city is quiet? Why are you writing me this ticket? Forty dollars. You hear this? I work whole day I only make forty dollars.”

  The cop went about his business as if he was writing up an empty vehicle. Tilley, approaching and curious, slowed down enough to attract the cop’s attention, and the uniform threw him a challenging look.

  “Detective Tilley,” Tilley said confidently. “Everything under control?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Fuckin’ scumbags think they can park wherever they want.”

  Tilley shrugged and picked up the pace. There were detectives, he knew, who approached their jobs the way that cop wrote tickets on a Saturday morning. Make the quota, then go home. It’s all time-in on the pension. That magical, twenty year, half-pay, yellow brick road that keeps cops in
line.

  Is that what he wanted? When Moodrow and he were alone in the backyard with the biker motorcycles, they were completely in sync. Again, with Peter Katjcic lying in that filthy bed, he had no doubts at all. Only later, when he made that lame explanation of his promise to Rose Carillo, did Moodrow start to scare him again.

  Tilley slowed down at Park and 85th. Like all serious runners, he walked the last few blocks to give his legs a chance to cool down. One thing seemed certain, his partnership with Stanley Moodrow was leapfrogging him over the mediocrity in the job. Big cases win the attention of the administrators at One Police Plaza as well as the eyes of the media. And Levander Greenwood was as big as they got, a genuine maniac busily engaged in the eradication of his fellow citizens. His face was on page four of the Daily News every day.

  Most rookie detectives fortunate enough to be assigned to such a case would sit at the bottom of a task force, maybe answering the hot line published in the papers. Moodrow and Tilley were like parasites on Levander Greenwood’s underbelly, chewing their way inside. Suddenly he found himself imagining the final scene: Greenwood trapped in a room, the reporters asking questions, the cameras turning. Was he so frightened of Moodrow that he wanted to play the rookie detective to some asshole from Levittown?

  He was hooked. And it only took six miles to realize it. Six miles to run out the emotional kinks of the last twenty-four hours. Still, he felt much better. He was satisfied with a resolution to protect himself even as he slid deeper into the muck, and he wasn’t at all surprised to find Moodrow waiting for him when he got home.

  9

  THEY WERE TOGETHER IN the kitchen—Susanna Tilley, Jim Tilley’s mother, and Stanley Moodrow, his partner. Mugs of steaming-hot coffee sat on the table in front of them. Tilley supposed he should have been shocked (or at least surprised) to find them conspiring like old neighbors watching a soap opera, but somehow it seemed as natural as the progression of scenes in a movie he’d already watched. Or that moment at the top of the first hill on a roller coaster, when the clank-clank-clank of the chain hoist stops and the carnival, spread out below you, freezes solid.

  “This is a great apartment,” Moodrow said, just as if they hadn’t gone over the same ground less than twenty-four hours earlier. “What have you got here. Five rooms?”

  “Seven, actually,” Susanna Tilley answered. “Four bedrooms.”

  “How’d you get it? I thought these places disappeared ten years ago.”

  “We got this place right after Pete and I married. That was thirty years ago. It was a tenement then. Now people would kill to get it.”

  “Thirty years rent control,” Moodrow observed. “You must have it for next to nothing.”

  “Four-fifty a month.”

  “I got the same thing, but not so big. I took my apartment on 5th Street near Avenue B when I got home from Korea. One bedroom. I pay three-fifty, but the landlord’s letting the building go down. Probably wants to convert it.”

  Talking about housing (or the lack of it) is New York’s favorite pastime, but Tilley, though he knew his partner was only making polite conversation, was too pissed at finding Moodrow so comfortable to be more than civil. “What’s the scoop, Moodrow. What’d you come up here for?”

  “I tried to reach you last night, but there was no answer.”

  Moodrow handed his partner a copy of the Daily News. The front page photo showed two attendants loading a closed body-bag into an E.M.S. ambulance. The headline read COP KILLER HITS AGAIN. The incident had taken place just before the News went to press and the story was fairly sketchy, but the basics, two dead cops, another in critical condition and the name Levander Greenwood, came through well enough. Tilley tossed the paper back to Moodrow and poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “Were they set up?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It seems like it could be, but I can’t figure out why.”

  “Should I go inside?” Susanna Tilley asked. She pushed back her chair and started to get up.

  “Suit yourself,” Moodrow shrugged. “But if you wanna stay, it don’t bother me.”

  “Good,” she said. Avoiding her son’s sharp glance, she dropped back into her chair.

  “The paper doesn’t say what the cops were doing there,” Tilley said. “Gotta be a tip, right?”

  “Exactly. Someone dropped a dime and these were the first cops on the scene. The rat said Greenwood was holed up in 4D, but the word from the survivor is he and his partner were ambushed from an apartment on the second floor. Then the moron covering the front entrance Rambo’d his way up the stairs and got caught from behind. Didn’t even stop to call it in. When the task force showed up ten minutes later, they found the fourth cop still covering the back of the building.”

  “That’s it? There was nobody in the apartment? Who was he there to see?”

  “Apartment 4D was a burn-out. Abandoned. There was a mattress on the floor. A woman’s underwear on top of that. Clean underwear. Could be he was holed up there, but most likely he was out for a piece of ass.” He stopped suddenly and looked over toward Susanna Tilley. “Sorry, Susanna. Sometimes I get carried away.”

  “That’s all right, Stanley.”

  Moodrow looked over at his partner, pudgy-cherub expression firmly in place. “The task force knocked on every door. It’s a heavy crack building on a known crack block. The owner hasn’t paid the taxes in four years and as far as the city is concerned, the building is empty. In fact, there were signs of occupancy in every room, but except for a trio of homeless seniors on the third floor, the tenants had all abandoned ship. Hear me? Maybe twenty-five people in the building. They had to step over the bodies, but nobody bothered to drop a dime. Left the one cop bleeding to death.”

  Susanna Tilley, somewhat unnerved, got up and went to the refrigerator. Without asking, she poured out three glasses of orange juice and began to crack eggs into a bowl.

  “So how does it fit in with us?” Tilley asked.

  “I doesn’t, really. The task force’ll search the building. Probably got thirty cops in there now, all waving tweezers and magnifying glasses. Think they’re gonna find Greenwood’s address in the dirt?” He leaned back in his chair, accepting the juice Susanna Tilley put in front of him. “The kids on the street are starting to make Greenwood into a hero. Kubla the Invincible. I’m talking about the ones that have a chance. The sixteen-year-olds trying to decide between dope and work. We don’t take the bastard soon, he’ll have disciples.”

  “That’s why you came here? To lecture me? You could have done this over the phone.”

  “Actually, I came here to talk to you about Rose Carillo. I want you to go up to see her.”

  Tilley’s heart jumped in his chest. But, at the same time, he shifted his weight in response to a more basic sensation. “Something wrong?” he asked as innocently as he could.

  “We gotta move her out of there. Or at least warn her if she won’t leave. Word’s already on the street that Greenwood knows she talked to us about Katjcic.”

  “What if she doesn’t have any place to go?”

  Susanna interrupted before Moodrow could answer. “That’s what Stanley and I were talking about before you got back.”

  Tilley threw Moodrow a look that would have melted asbestos. Then his mother finished the message. She said, “We have so much room here. Don’t you think she could stay with us until her husband is out of the way? Stanley says it shouldn’t be more than a week or so.”

  “Stanley should have asked me first,” Tilley returned evenly.

  “He didn’t say a word, Jimmy. It was my idea completely.”

  She looked so shocked that Tilley started laughing. There was no doubt in his mind that Moodrow had come there to set this up. No doubt whatsoever. Still, the image of Rose Carillo sitting in his living room, a glass of vodka in her hand, didn’t offend him at all. He wasn’t even surprised to find himself so eager.

  Finally, Moodrow broke the silence. “Hey, if it’s inconvenient
, we could always think of something else. It’s just that we gotta get her out of there if there’s anyone who knows where she is. I guarantee he’s gonna kill her if he gets the chance. That’s the word on the street. He’s bragging that he’s gonna chill her out before he gets it himself. Anyway, there’s no harm if you go up and talk to her. See if she’s got some place to go. I’m gonna stay on the backs of a few people who claim they’re close to Greenwood. Most likely bullshit, but I don’t feel like sitting home.”

  Susanna Tilley dropped a bowl of scrambled eggs into a hot frying pan and the sharp crack of the eggs hitting the butter jolted their attention.

  “I hope you’re not making breakfast for me,” Moodrow protested.

  Susanna didn’t bother looking up. “Don’t worry. I only made enough for me and Jimmy. You weren’t hungry, were you?”

  “No, no.”

  “Sure? You could have Jimmy’s eggs if you want.”

  “I couldn’t take his eggs.…”

  She executed a quick turn and dropped a plate in front of him. “Shut up and eat, Stanley.” Then she went back to the stove and filled two more plates.

  Moodrow watched her retreat, his eyes glued to her backside. Tilley kicked him under the table, not even knowing what he meant by it, and Moodrow turned calmly back to his partner. Automatic respect for a friend’s mother may be dying out, but in Moodrow’s time, it was as unquestioned as patriotism. Tilley knew he had no right to interfere (it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a man stare at her), but watching it made him itch, especially considering his own quick fantasy of Rose Carillo’s lips on his.