Force of Nature
Page 31
“Finally making sense, Levander?” The voice came from behind him. From the doorway to the bedroom. It was unmistakable. Moodrow had come. Levander felt the steel of Moodrow’s pistol against the back of his neck, the shotgun taken away. His strength taken away. He knew, at that moment, that he was going to die, but it didn’t bother him, just a passing thought while a greater need overcame him. He took out his pipe and began to smoke.
“How you get here?” he finally asked.
“Through the fire escape. Just like you,” Moodrow replied, stepping carefully away. “Say, Marlee, you think you could let my partner in through the front door. Knock three times before you unlock it.” Marlee started to move, but Moodrow stretched out one hand. “And give me the gun, Marlee. Let’s not have any accidents.”
When Tilley stepped through the door, weapon in hand, he stared at Levander unbelievingly. Waiting outside, he had imagined some final combat. Fists. Guns. This was the man who had tried to kill Rose. Who had made her life a hell for years. Who’d terrorized the Lower East Side. But the man reeked of vermin, of lice and weeks away from soap and water. His weight couldn’t be more than a hundred and fifty pounds. Under any other circumstances, he would be pitiful. Without asking, Tilley moved in, cuffed Levander’s wrists behind his back and tossed him for a backup weapon. He found a gravity knife and threw it across the room.
“Let’s just be a little cool,” Moodrow said. He quickly retrieved the knife, wiping it free of prints while Tilley watched Greenwood. “You’re gonna kill him,” Tilley said to Moodrow. It was a statement, not a question.
“I’ll let Marlee do it. How ’bout it, Marlee? You want to put him away?”
Marlee spoke very quietly. “If I could have done it, it would already be done. All I could do was hold him for you. Like you asked.” She looked him in the eye. “It sounds so easy when you imagine it. But it’s not like that. It’s not like in the movies. Not when someone’s actually there breathing.”
“There’s people can do it between courses at a wedding,” Moodrow said flatly, then turned to his partner. “And you, Jimmy? You ready to chill him? Walk up and pull the trigger? You can use Marlee’s gun. We’ll dump it later.”
Tilley stepped closer, his hand reaching for the revolver Moodrow held out to him. He stared at it; rolled the cylinder in his palm. It was an ancient .44, a close-range weapon meant to stop anything smaller than a rhinoceros. Coming out, the slug would leave an exit wound the size of a softball.
Then Levander Greenwood spoke for the first time since Tilley had come in. “Gimme mah pipe, man,” he whined. “I need my pipe. I gotta smoke. I gotta get well. Please.” His voice held a note of terror, of overwhelming fear. He was coming down. “Then shoot me. Ah ain’t afraid to die. I took plenty with me. Get me well or shoot me. That’s fair, ain’t it?”
Tilley handed the gun back to his partner. He could feel his breath whooshing out as he admitted that he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pull the trigger despite the hatred. Despite the persistent image of Rose in her hospital bed. “I guess it’s up to you,” he finally said.
Instead of answering, Moodrow went to the phone and quickly punched out a number.
“Dominick Favara,” he said after a minute. Then, “Tell him it’s a man with a gift. An old acquaintance.” He listened intently. “I’ll wait. He’s gonna want to hear this, but it’s for his ears only. And for whoever has the phone tapped.”
In the silence that followed, Greenwood began to beg again. “Please. Please, man. You don’t got to be leavin’ me like this. I ain’t gon’ be no problem for y’all. Yo, please.”
All three ignored him until he tried to rise, to fight the cuffs. Then Tilley stepped forward and hit him in the face with a straight right hand, driving him down to the floor where he continued to babble.
“This man is a slave,” Tilley, who’d seen hundreds of heroin addicts, said in wonder. “He’s an absolute fucking slave.”
“Dominick,” Moodrow said, “you know who this is? It’s your old friend from Blue Thunder. Don’t say the name. I got your man for you. Not the little one. The big one.” He listened for a moment, then laughed. “You wanna meet up with him, huh? Well there’s two conditions. He’s gotta be found when you’re through. Dump him somewhere close, but not where you pick him up. Any problems?” He laughed again. “I didn’t think so. You ready to go right away? I mean now, Dominick. Good. We’ll be out of here in ten minutes. We don’t know who else is listening. Let’s not have anybody beat us to it.”
He gave Favara the address, hung up and began to tie Levander, hand and foot, with the cords from the drapes. Levander continued to beg and Moodrow continued to ignore him, removing the cuffs as soon as he was sure Greenwood could not escape. Finally, he turned to Marlee and said, “You understand what’s gonna happen?”
“Yes,” she answered. Her voice was strong.
“One of those people who kill before breakfast is gonna come over here and take care of your brother. That okay with you?”
“Yes.”
“The body’s not gonna be found here, so it doesn’t matter if anybody saw you come in. I’ll get rid of the gun for you.”
“I won’t need it anymore.”
“And you, Jim Tilley? What about you?”
“I wish I had the guts to do it myself.”
Suddenly, Moodrow stepped forward and took his partner by the shirt. “This isn’t about revenge. This is about the 7th Precinct and Allen Epstein and Internal Affairs and the people who live on the Lower East Side.” He pointed to Greenwood. “The man’s already paranoid. In an hour he’ll be a jibbering idiot. He’ll finger the whole precinct just to get ten minutes attention. If he turns up dead in a vacant lot, the brass’ll be happy for weeks. They’ll be suspicious about Kirkpatrick, but ya know what they’ll do? They’ll give him a fucking inspector’s funeral and bury the whole thing. Only I.A.D. busts for corruption. The big brass never do it and with Kirkpatrick dead, they have that much more reason to forget about it. I was hoping Marlee would take care of the situation, but she didn’t. Now it’s up to us.”
Tilley pulled away abruptly, stepping back and out of Moodrow’s grasp. “What’s the difference between this and doing it yourself? Why don’t you pull the trigger?”
“Because I don’t want to explain it. I don’t want to explain about Kirkpatrick in that tunnel. I don’t wanna try to put a throwaway piece in a dead man’s hand. I don’t want to explain why I didn’t call for backup as soon as Kirkpatrick went down. I don’t want two hundred headhunters in my fucking precinct.”
“But there’s another reason, Stanley. You can’t bullshit me anymore.” His eyes bore into Moodrow’s. “You can’t pull the trigger, either. You can’t do it. You’re not a killer.”
Moodrow stared at his partner for a moment, then smiled. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. Before the pros arrive.”
32
IN A WAY, IT went exactly as planned. When Levander Greenwood’s body showed up in a vacant lot on 6th Street, a neat hole behind his left ear, it was assumed that person or persons unknown had exacted the ultimate penalty for his past transgressions. True, the task force (and, naturally, Moodrow and Tilley) had failed to find him, to bring him to justice. But he was through menacing the citizens of the Lower East Side. And he would never kill another cop. Levander Greenwood was dead.
Kirkpatrick, on the other hand, wasn’t found for nearly a week. A transit worker, sent to investigate the open ventilation grating on Houston Street, had merely kicked it back into place and put it on the welding schedule. It took an anonymous tip from Jim Tilley to bring Kirkpatrick’s body to light and, as that tip didn’t come into the 7th until a week after the shooting, there was no one to remember seeing him in the company of two other men when he stepped off the platform.
There was, of course, a good deal of speculation about what Kirkpatrick was doing in an abandoned subway corridor. A careful search of the small room had turned up proof that Levander
Greenwood had been living there and, for a short time, there was talk of denying Paul Kirkpatrick his death benefits pending a more complete investigation.
But the threat of a civil action by lawyers from the Detective’s Benevolent Association put an end to that kind of talk and Kirkpatrick’s death was marked “line of duty.” As per Stanley Moodrow’s prediction, he was given the full inspector’s funeral accorded to every member of the force who dies while performing his job. He was an official hero.
At almost the same time Kirkpatrick’s body was “discovered” and brought to the surface, Rose Carillo hobbled out of St. Vincent’s Hospital. She gathered her children together and took them home to her apartment on the Lower East Side. Tilley, on the few nights he spent uptown, didn’t mistake the relieved looks on his neighbors’ faces once the children were gone. Though no one actually approached him, he found himself avoiding the people he’d grown up with as if they were strangers. It was obviously time to move on. It was all he thought about as he ran along the Drive in the mornings. He was past this place and these people.
Moodrow kept him busy, introducing him to the various players on the Lower East Side, players on either side of the law. Along with Moodrow, he took to volunteering at a small boxing gym in a Boys Club on Houston Street. He found that if he pulled the headgear low enough and kept his left hand close to his head, the cut wouldn’t open. The kids, all black or Puerto Rican, recognized his ability and accepted him easily, just as the whites on the Lower East Side accepted Rose and her children.
Then the roof fell in on Moodrow and the 7th Precinct. At some point, the Mayor and his advisors had made a simple decision. The homeless were messing up Manhattan below 96th Street. They were much too visible, much too available to television crews looking for filler on slow news days and, therefore, the city would eliminate the welfare hotels, most of them in midtown Manhattan. Then the Port Authority suddenly decided that the bus terminal, where hundreds of people slept every night, would close at one in the morning. Grand Central and Penn Station would follow as soon as there were shelters established to house the homeless who slept there. And the small parks would be subject to a curfew. No more overnight guests.
Thus Tompkins Square Park, occupying two square blocks of a rapidly gentrifying section of the Lower East Side, was to be closed every night and the NYPD was sent out to enforce the edict. They were met by hundreds of people—artists and derelicts; Hare Krishnas; skinheads and punks; even a few liberal junior executives.
Later, the cops claimed they were provoked. They claimed they were pelted with bottles and rocks while the civilians claimed the cops simply went berserk. The bits and pieces captured on videotape tended to support the civilians and established, without a doubt, that a number of cops had covered their nametags and the numbers on their shields. Which, the reporters were quick to point out, proved that the cops intended to violate regulations before the riot began.
Allen Epstein was not in charge of the operation. The mobile command station was set up by a deputy chief, a hairbag named Charles Doyle, who knew nothing of the Lower East Side. He did not set up in a spot that afforded him a clear view of the troops he was expected to command. But he commanded them, anyway, along with an inspector, John McGuire; commanded with a heavy hand, calling in three hundred extra cops (all from other precincts) and ordering them to get the situation under control, which they did by clubbing anyone within five blocks of the park.
There was plenty of blood and the media had a field day. Epstein, who was against a curfew in the park and who knew he could have avoided a confrontation, was advised to hand in his retirement papers within the week. He did as he was told, then submitted to an enormous farewell party. Long retired cops showed up, along with cops from other precincts who’d once worked in the 7th. Allen Epstein was a stand-up commander. If you screwed him he would find some way to get you, but he would never throw you to the department wolves. He would never sacrifice his men.
As Moodrow had predicted, Captain Ruiz took over. The department felt that he would have more rapport with the Hispanics (almost none of whom were in Tompkins Square Park on the night of the riot), than the others who coveted the job. Initially, Ruiz and Moodrow ignored one another. Moodrow and Tilley made two decent busts, one for second degree murder which stuck and the other for assault with a deadly weapon (a machete) which was plea bargained down to simple assault on the grounds that the perp, though he’d given it his best effort, had not actually managed to strike his quicker adversary. But the arrests were a sham, anyway. Moodrow was teaching his partner the neighborhood, teaching him to separate the merely tough (a mandatory condition for anyone coming up on the Lower East Side) from the truly predatory. The tough ones would help you, if you could present yourself to them as an equal. They hated the criminals as much as Tilley, though they understood crime better. And they hated the gung-ho cops who, out of ignorance, treated every poor New Yorker as a criminal.
But Captain Ruiz, again as Moodrow had predicted, had no place for an uncontrollable force of nature in his precinct. He called Moodrow into his office a month after taking over and declared him the new community affairs officer for the 7th Precinct. He even wanted to throw a press conference. Now Moodrow would go to the public schools and lecture the students on the evils of drugs. He would also attend meetings of the Rotary Club and the Lions Club and the Elks Club whenever their respective memberships needed reassurance.
Moodrow and Tilley were together when Ruiz called Moodrow into the house and, with a satisfied smirk, gave him the bad news. Moodrow nodded, his face a blank, and requested, in his softest voice, that Ruiz wipe the smile off his face (which Ruiz did, immediately), then announced his retirement. Moodrow had seen it coming, of course, but still put on twenty years as he passed the already filled-out paperwork across Ruiz’s desk.
Afterwards, Moodrow and Tilley had a hell of a drunk. For two days they walked around the Lower East Side, glaring at anyone who appeared even slightly out of place. They must have looked especially fierce, because no one cared to challenge them. But on the third day, when Tilley woke up on Moodrow’s couch and heard Gretchen giggling in the bedroom, he knew it was time to go home. Moodrow was clearly able to take care of himself and had already had calls from two New York criminal lawyers who wanted him to look into the affairs of their clients. Now it was Tilley’s turn.
He walked the few blocks to Rose Carillo’s tenement. The kids were visiting their grandmother and he found her alone, her wounds, after a month, nearly healed. Still a bit drunk and certainly hungover, he begged her to marry him. She was standing at the sink in a pair of loose jeans and a blue halter that scooped to the tops of her breasts. For a moment, she had nothing to say, then she turned back to the dishes.
“I guess I don’t have to give you the lecture about the white couple with the black children,” she said.
“Fuck the racists. And fuck the goddamn dishes. Turn around and look at me.”
“If I do, that’s the end of the small talk. We’re gonna be in bed before you can say, ‘I do.’”
Tilley put his hand on her shoulder and turned her toward him. “I’m serious, Rose. I want to talk about it. To get it out in the open.”
But she was right. She slid into his arms and his hands ran down her back and over the globes of her ass before he could form a coherent sentence. Five minutes later, soaked in sweat, they writhed on her bed. Jim Tilley hasn’t left it since.
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copyright © 1989 by Stephen Solomita
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