Suspects

by William Caunitz

  20

  0840 hours. Monday. Eleven days had elapsed since the Gallagher/Zimmerman hit. Scanlon was sitting in the squad room, a scone and a mug of coffee on a brown paper towel atop the desk’s slide-out board. Hector Colon was sweeping out the Whip’s office with a long-handled broom. It was his turn to do the morning housekeeping chores. Lew Brodie had taken the call from Christopher and Biafra Baby. They had reported on duty from the field. Brodie had made a Telephone Message and was now making a Log entry: “0800—Dets. Jones and Christopher reported on duty from the field. Re: canvass theatrical makeup stores—UF 61# 6794.”

  Three prisoners from the late tour were asleep on the floor of the detention cage. Their arresting officer, a cop with an altar boy’s face, dozed in a chair awaiting the van that would transport them to Central Booking.

  Maggie Higgins stood by the window, looking out at the sky.

  Scanlon glanced over at her and noticed her forlorn look. He picked up his mug, got up, and ambled over to the urn. Bending to work the spigot, he said, “How’s everything?”

  When she turned to look at him he saw her red-rimmed eyes. “Gloria and I are not going to make it living together.” Her voice cracked. “The Job gets in the way.”

  He nodded and went back to the desk.

  “Teniente, you got a call on four,” Colon shouted from the Whip’s office.

  Herman the German sounded as though he were champing on a mouthful of Wiener Schnitzel. “I flew Harris on another detail.”

  “Thanks, Inspector,” Scanlon said. “I’ll keep you advised.” He plunged down the disconnect button with his finger and made another hang-up call to Mrs. Gallagher. Lew Brodie came up to him and wanted to know if he still wanted him to plant on Linda Zimmerman. Scanlon told him he did. Brodie signed himself out in the Log: “0910—Det. Brodie to surveillance, Sutton Place area re: UF 61 # 6794.” The van came to transport the prisoners and the arresting officer to Central Booking.

  Realizing that they were at a dead end until he heard from Christopher and Biafra Baby, Scanlon telephoned his mother and promised he would try to make it to her house for Sunday dinner.

  “I’ll make lasagna,” she promised.

  Higgins began work on another term paper: “The Weaknesses of Line Inspection.”

  Hector Colon telephoned his girlfriend.

  Scanlon remained in his office wrapped in his own thoughts. Flying Harris should unnerve him. Narcotics supervisors were seldom forced to put on the bag and flown out of their commands on uniform details. It shouldn’t take Harris long to realize he was on somebody’s shit list. And if he was guilty, he’d start to wonder where he made a mistake. And that was when he would become careless and do something dumb, Scanlon hoped.

  Hanging up the phone, Hector Colon glanced around the squad room in search of mischief. He grabbed up the telephone and dialed Patrol Borough Brooklyn North, Uniform Force. “This is Inspector Suckieluski from the chief of patrol’s office,” he barked. “The chief wants the name and shield number of your borough AIDS coordinator.” Pause. A mischievous grin came over his face. “Whaddaya mean you don’t know? Don’t you people in Brooklyn read the orders?” Pause.

  Higgins turned in her seat and tossed a handful of paper clips at Colon.

  Colon covered the mouthpiece and mouthed “screw you” to her. “Interim Order 8, current series, requires every borough commander to designate a borough AIDS coordinator. Well, you better. Have that Forty-nine on my desk by fifteen hundred today.” He hung up the phone.

  Higgins turned around in her seat, one arm hooked over the back of her chair. “Don’t you think you’re the funny one. Don’t you know that cockroaches spread AIDS?”

  Colon raised himself up out of his seat and lifted and shook his testes at her. “Wanna get into a dwarf-growing experiment with me?”

  “Don’t look now, Hector, but there’s a nest in your brain.”

  The telephone message had read: “On Monday 6/29/86 at 0750 hours report to Captain Kuhn in front of the Soviet Mission to the United Nations on East 67th Street between Lexington and Third avenues in connection with demonstration to free Soviet Jewry. Uniform of the day, helmets and batons.”

  St. George Harris felt uncomfortable in the bag. He hated having to work in uniform. He was standing in front of the Soviet Mission along with the ten men who had been assigned to him, filling in their names, their shield numbers, their commands, and their present assignments on the UF 30, Detail Roster Assignment Sheet.

  Completing the form, he thought briefly about how the Job had divided department forms according to the various branches of the Job. UF forms were for the Uniform Force. DD forms were for the Detective Division. He was a DD man. So what the hell was he doing in the bag, standing in front of this damn Commie mission, looking into the faces of ten asshole cops who were all trying to estimate just how much they would be able to get away with, and looking to get lost on him the minute he turned his back. He had flown two of his last three tours. Someone had a hard-on for him. Who? And more important, why? Herman the German? He didn’t think so. He had seen the inspector this morning when he stopped by the One-fourteen to pick up his uniform and equipment. The inspector had smiled and waved at him. Scanlon? Maybe that pegleg guinea had gotten wise? Naw. He dismissed that thought. Don’t get stupid because of a few details, he warned himself.

  Harris became conscious of the noise made by the demonstrators. A circle of jeering people, most of whom were carrying anti-Soviet placards, were marching behind police barricades on the east side of Lexington Avenue. Mounted policemen faced the demonstrators, the horses reined in tight.

  His eyes slid over the faces of the ten cops lined up in front of him. Might as well let them know up front who the boss is, he thought. “Our post is the second line of barricades in the middle of the intersection on Lexington Avenue. No one gets past us, understand. I’m gonna be around, so make damn sure you’re all out. I don’t intend to go looking for anyone. If you’re not out, I’ll stick one up your ass. Any questions?”

  A hairbag with tomato sauce on his shirt said, “You didn’t assign us meals, Sarge.”

  “I’ll do that later. Now take your posts.”

  Harris turned the Detail Roster in to the clerical man inside the mobile headquarters van that was parked across the street from the Soviet Mission. He wished he could get rid of the tremor of uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. I have to stay calm, he told himself, going to join his men on the barricade.

  “Abb-sah-loo-tah-mehn-teh nada,” Biafra Baby complained, slumping into a chair in the Whip’s office. “It took us three days to canvass every damn makeup store in the city and we came up dry.”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” Christopher said. “We gave it our best shot.”

  Taking in the brass buttons on Christopher’s sky-blue jacket, trying to hide his disappointment, Scanlon said, “I know you did.”

  “Where do we go from here?” Higgins asked Scanlon.

  Scanlon checked the time: 1640 hours. “We call it a day, Maggie.”

  The detectives slowly left for home, except Hector Colon, who lingered behind in the squad room. When Scanlon had finished signing a Five Colon walked into his office and said, “Lou, I got a problem.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Scanlon said.

  “It’s my girlfriend. I promised her a couple of months ago that I’d take her to an engagement party. It’s tomorrow night. I put in a Twenty-eight a few weeks ago and you signed it.”

  Scanlon reached into one of the side drawers and took out the Squad’s Diary. He flipped the pages to tomorrow’s date and saw that Colon had taken three hours off at the end of his tour. “You got the time. What’s the problem?”

  “Well, with this Gallagher thing going down you might need me. I don’t wanna leave you short-handed, so if you want, I’ll pull the Twenty-eight.”

  Scanlon returned the Diary to the drawer. “Go to the party, Hector. We’ll hold it down. Wouldn’t want you to disappoint
your lady love.” Scanlon’s expression did not betray his thoughts. A detective should know where his loyalty lay; if he didn’t, then he would have to learn the hard way.

  It was after 1900 when Lew Brodie ambled back into the squad room, slightly tipsy. “I might have somethin’, Lou.”

  Scanlon was powdering his stump. “What?” he said, wondering what bar the detective had spent the past hour in.

  “Around thirteen-thirty today Linda Zimmerman comes out of her aunt’s apartment house and walks west on Fifty-first Street. I followed on foot. I trailed her to the Chemical Bank on Five-one and Third. She was inside for a long time, so I moseyed in for a look-see. I didn’t see her, so I figured she was downstairs in the safety deposit boxes. Sure enough, after about ten minutes more she comes trudging up the stairs like an old lady and leaves the bank. I let her go, then hauled ass downstairs. Turns out that the guy who runs the vault room is retired from the Job. He let me sneak a look at her card. She rented the box on June 20 of this year, one day after her mother was killed. And, I’m willing to bet you, right after she cleaned out her mother’s apartment. The vault guy told me that she comes there a lot and that she stays in the room with her box for long periods of time. Once she was inside for so long that he thought something had happened to her, so he went over to the door and listened. He could hear her talking to someone, like she was making a tape or something.”

  Scanlon rolled on his stump sock, leaned back in his seat, and slid his stump into the socket of his prosthesis. “I’d love to get a look inside that safety deposit box,” he said, pushing his pants leg down.

  “Yeah, but how? We’d need a search warrant, and we don’t have any grounds to apply for one.”

  “Stay with her, Lew. Let me know the next time she goes there.”

  “You got it,” Brodie said, leaving for the local watering hole.

  It was a little past 2000 hours when Scanlon looked up from the report he was writing and saw George Harris standing in the doorway, watching him. The sergeant’s head was cocked to the side, and he wore jeans, a blue work shirt, and cowboy boots.

  I smoked the bastard out, Scanlon thought. “Long time no see, Sarge.”

  “I thought I’d catch you in,” Harris said, moving to a chair in front of the desk. “You busy?”

  “I’m plagiarizing the parameters of my semiannual Management by Objectives report from last year’s plagiarized parameters.” He leaned back, studying his visitor. “I reached the conclusion a long time ago that the Job is one big word blender. We keep throwing in the same words, mixing them up until they’re a mix of polysyllabic bullshit.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Harris agreed, planting one boot firmly up against the front of the desk and leaning his chair back onto its hind legs.

  Picking up the dictionary on his desk, Scanlon said, “A little game that I play with the pencil pushers in the big building. I always include a highfalutin word in the reports that I send downtown and then sit back and wait to see how long it takes some pencil pusher to steal it. Last years word was ‘tableau.’ It took them exactly three weeks to put ‘tableau’ in a department bulletin.”

  “What’s the new word?” Harris asked, examining the tip of his boot.

  “‘Affranchise,’” Scanlon said. “Every member of the force has an obligation to affranchise the department from the evil influences of greed and corruption.”

  Harris’s face remained blank. “Do the pencil pushers always steal your fancy words?”

  “Yeah. Some people you can count on to always act the same way. Don’t you agree?”

  Harris’s right eye twitched. “Maybe, I don’t know. How’s the case coming?”

  “It ain’t. I’ve got the feeling that it’s going to end up collecting dust in the old record room.”

  “You’ve come up with nothing?”

  “Not a helluva lot, I’m afraid.”

  “Did you make any tie-in with the Zimmerman hits?”

  “The Nineteenth came up with a witness who saw the perp fleeing the scene.”

  Harris flopped his foot off the desk. “They got a good description?”

  “Good enough to have a composite made.” Scanlon leaned forward and took his time rummaging in the case folder. “Here it is.” He pulled out the glossy black-and-white sketch. He examined the composite and then glanced from the sketch to Harris. He flattened his palm across the mouth of the man in the sketch, looked at Harris again, and said, “You know, Sarge, take off this guy’s mustache and he’d be a dead ringer for you.”

  “Lemme see,” Harris said, reaching across the desk. After scrutinizing the composite for several minutes, he tossed it back. “I guess you could say that he looks a little bit like me.”

  Scanlon took note of the twitch in Harris’s eyes. “Tell me, Sarge, do you know anyone who owns a Browning automatic shotgun, Sweet Sixteen model?”

  Harris rubbed his chin in concentration. “No, I can’t say that I do. Why?”

  “The ballistics boys think that was the weapon that was used to take Gallagher out.”

  “Are you checking the dealers?”

  “There are too many of them. Besides, all anyone needs to buy a rifle or a shotgun is a forged or stolen driver’s license. And the weapons were more than likely purchased out of state.”

  “Weapons?”

  “The way I figure it, the same people took out Gallagher and the Zimmermans. A 5.56mm was used on the doctor and his wife. An assassin’s rifle, capable of being broken down and assembled in a matter of a few minutes.”

  “What makes you so sure that the rifle was capable of being broken down?”

  “Because the witness who saw the perp fleeing the Kingsley Arms stated that he was carrying an attaché case. What do you think the perp had in that case, gefilte fish?” He measured Harris. “How’s Mrs. Gallagher?”

  “All right, Lou. It takes time, but she’s going to be fine.”

  “Did she return the children?”

  “Yeah, she did. That was tough on her. But she decided that it was the best thing for them.”

  “Sounds like a strong-willed woman to me.”

  “She is that.”

  Scanlon placed his elbows on the desk and held his palms skyward. “Any chance she was stepping out on her husband?”

  “No way. You asked me that once before—what made you ask again?”

  Scanlon shrugged. “There is something about the lady that makes my stump itch.”

  “I hate to say it, Lou, but maybe you need a bath.”

  “You just might be right, Sarge,” Scanlon said, getting up and going out into the squad room to sign out.

  Harris accompanied him downstairs. Scanlon waved to the desk officer and he and Harris left the station house. A distant clap of thunder caught their attention. A radio car jerked to a stop at the curb, and both the driver and the recorder leaped out, slamming their respective doors. These were two pissed-off cops, Scanlon thought, watching the driver pull open the rear curb-side door to reveal a handcuffed man sprawled over the seat. The driver leaned into the car to take hold of the prisoner. The trussed-up man kicked out at the cop. The officer leaped back, out of the way of the thrashing feet.

  The recorder of the radio car, a heavyset black cop with short gray hair, pushed his white partner aside, yanked the blackjack from its pocket in his trousers, and proceeded to beat the prisoner on the soles of his shoes. “You wanna kick a cop, haw, scumbag?”

  “No more! No more!” begged the prisoner, pulling his feet away from the blackjack.

  The cops dragged the man out of the car and stood him upright on the sidewalk. They took turns pushing and shoving the prisoner toward the station house. Scanlon stepped ahead of the prisoner and opened the station-house door. The black cop gave a final shove and the prisoner toppled onto the vestibule floor.

  “These fucking polacks can’t hold their firewater,” the black cop groused, walking past the lieutenant.

  “How’re you getting a
long with Gallagher’s replacement?” Scanlon asked, walking with Harris.

  “I hardly see him. I came back off emergency leave and I’ve flown two out of my last three tours.”

  “There are a lot of details this time of the year—what with vacations and military leaves, there’s always a shortage of bosses during the summer.”

  “I know that, Lou. But bosses in the junk squad never fly. Well, almost never.”

  Scanlon unlocked his car door and slid inside. “Maybe someone is mad at you?”

  “I can’t figure out why.”

  “If anything develops, I’ll get in touch with you.”

  Harris nudged the car door closed and watched Scanlon bend forward to insert the key into the ignition.

  Mary Ann Gallagher wore a widow’s dress with black cloth buttons down the front. Around her neck hung a crucifix on a thin gold chain. She had no makeup on. On her left wrist she wore a watch with a gold link bracelet. She stood in the doorway of her Anthony Street apartment on the western edge of Maspeth Creek in Greenpoint, her anxious eyes sweeping the hallway over George Harris’s shoulder. “Hello, George.”

  “How do you feel, Mary Ann?” Harris asked, stepping inside.

  “Thank God, I’m coming along,” she said, closing the door and resting her back against the portal.

  Harris moved a short distance into the apartment and turned. “Are we alone?”

  “The last of the biddies left a few minutes ago. But they could be back anytime.”

  He held out his arms, and she moved easily into his embrace, biting his shoulder right through his shirt, pressing into his body.

  “I need to be inside you,” he said.

  “And I want you there. But first we have to talk.” Taking hold of his hand, she pulled him into the bedroom and over to the bed, where they sat facing each other. “What’s going on, George? I have this awful feeling that everything is about to fall apart.”

  “They have a witness who saw me running from the Kingsley Arms. They’ve made up a composite.”