Deadly Assets

by W. E. B Griffin

  Harris nodded. “Sometimes a little bit better.”

  “Still better than Camden’s thirty percent, huh?” O’Sullivan grinned, then added, “So if I were you, I wouldn’t put too much effort in this job.”

  Silently, Harris, holding his right hand palm up, gestured with his fingers Give me more.

  O’Sullivan looked him in the eyes.

  “Okay,” he then said, “let’s say, hypothetically of course, that someone with a real motivation found this golden-voiced rapper first, and then recovered the merchandise, or what’s probably left of it, and then made an example of him to others who might think that if a dipshit like Hooks could get away with ripping off a casino, so could they. Go hit the one across the street, or any of the others in Philly or at the Shore.”

  Harris narrowed his eyes.

  O’Sullivan shrugged, and then said: “Ghetto punks are killing each other every day in this city, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to it.” Then he added, his tone dripping with sarcasm, “I’ve heard there’s even a name for it—Killadelphia?”

  Harris pursed his lips, then nodded.

  “Yeah. I may have heard that, too,” he said, adding his own sarcasm.

  “That may be job security for you,” O’Sullivan said. “But when those ghetto punks bring their shit into my casino . . .”

  After a moment, Harris said, “Kind of hard to be surprised it happened, no? They built this fancy place with lots of money in the middle of a really rough part of town, not to mention right across the bridge from Camden. That’s like dragging a carcass of raw meat past a pack of starving dogs.”

  “Tony, those animals this morning killed a poor bastard just trying to make a living selling watches. And they may have killed a beautiful, innocent young girl.”

  After a moment, Tony sighed disgustedly.

  “I hear you, Sully. And agree. But—”

  “No buts,” O’Sullivan said sharply. “Being a wild dog, particularly a starving one, to use your analogy, usually does not end well.”

  Harris raised his eyebrows again.

  “That mean what I think it means? You’d be party to that, Sully?”

  O’Sullivan shook his head.

  “Not only no, Tony—hell no. You should know me better than that. Never. That’s why Mr. Antonov ordered me to give you everything you ask for—copies of the videos, everything—on the level . . .”

  His voice trailed off as his eyes scanned the room. Then he motioned for Harris to follow him across the room.

  “Look, Tony,” he said quietly a moment later, “I’m going to do everything in my power to help you do your job. But that doesn’t mean other gears aren’t turning. I don’t know for a fact that they are—on my mother’s grave, I swear it—but I do know that I cannot control what others do. Just as you can’t.”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “Remember the Frankford Five guys? Shaking down the dealers they were supposed to be arresting? And then that rookie kid walking his Fifteenth District beat actually caught one of the dealers dealing, and when he cuffed him the dealer announced that he was untouchable, and why.”

  “Yeah, and then the rookie, trying to do the right thing, told his superior in the Fifteenth.”

  “And next thing the kid knows,” O’Sullivan picked back up, “the dirty guys are calling him a gink, and even though no charges stuck, the kid spent every day looking over his shoulder, then finally felt he had to quit the department.”

  “I hate that gink term, Sully. The kid wasn’t ratting out those dirty guys. He did the right thing. Those scumbags got lucky that nobody believed the dealers, who kept changing their stories. That’s why no charges stuck, and why they kept their damn badges, not because they weren’t dirty.”

  O’Sullivan grunted. “You’re right. Trouble was, the kid still paid the price. But it makes my point, and you and I’ve seen this, that things are not always black and white, not always that right and wrong.”

  Harris met his eyes for a long time.

  “We go back a long way, Tony. I’m just giving you a friendly heads-up. I’m not saying that I know something is going to happen to this ghetto punk—”

  “The hypothetical one?” Harris interrupted.

  “—this hypothetical punk,” O’Sullivan went on, “but no one would be surprised if the shooter and everyone else involved suffers the consequences of their actions. And—who knows?—worse comes to worst, you might just get them handed to you on a silver platter. Add one more to the closure rate, you know?”

  Harris looked at him for a long moment.

  “You understand, Sully,” Harris then said evenly, “that I’m going to have to share this with Matt Payne. And you know he has the personal ear of the white shirts with stars on their shoulders.”

  “That’s right—Payne got himself promoted to sergeant, didn’t he? Passed the exam at the top of the list. Super-smart guy. I always thought the bastards who called him a Richie Rich playing cop were just crumbs being petty pricks. His old man and uncle were damn good cops.”

  He paused, then went on: “Tony, I fully expected you to send what I told you up the chain—I certainly would do the same in your shoes—but now that I know it’s going to go to the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line, hell, that tells me the odds of this ghetto punk getting his due just got better.”

  —

  Five minutes later, Sully O’Sullivan, his arms crossed over his chest as he looked up at the security room’s wall of monitors, watched Detective Tony Harris walking through the revolving door and out of the casino.

  O’Sullivan was not at all surprised to see Harris holding his cellular phone to his head with his left hand while he cupped his right hand over his mouth so that what he was saying could not be overheard.

  VII

  [ ONE ]

  The Roundhouse

  Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia

  Saturday, December 15, 3:45 P.M.

  The enormous black thirty-six-year-old homicide detective standing at the two-way mirror of the Homicide Unit’s Interview Room II turned at the sound of the door opening.

  Harold Kennedy nodded as Sergeant Matt Payne entered the small, dimly lit viewing room.

  “Hey, Sarge,” he said.

  “I miss anything, Hal?” Payne gestured toward the interview room on the other side of the two-way mirror. “How’s he doing in there?”

  Payne saw that Detective Dick McCrory was in the slightly larger—ten by twelve feet—harshly lit room with a male teenager. McCrory stood leaning against the far wall, looking down at the teen, who was seated in one of two metal chairs, both of which were bolted to the floor on opposite sides of a bare metal table, also bolted to the floor. A manila folder was on the table, next to an open plastic bottle of water.

  Payne studied the unkempt teenager, who was handcuffed to the chair, one cuff on his left hand and the other around a thick bar on the seatback. He had matted hair and filthy clothing—a black sweatshirt, ragged blue jeans, scuffed leather boots. The hood of his sweatshirt was down, exposing a hard face with hollow eyes behind thick black-framed eyeglasses and framed by a scraggly beard.

  Kennedy’s massive shoulders shrugged as he raised his eyebrows, making a look of frustration.

  “So far it’s looking like you wasted your time coming. All I can say for certain is the kid’s got a clear case of rectal cranial inversion.”

  Payne grunted.

  “Don’t they all have their head up their ass?” he said, then added, “So, this guy is supposed to be our big lead, but now my time’s wasted?”

  Kennedy grimaced.

  “Key word supposed. Say hello to eighteen-year-old Michael Hayward, aka Jamal. Turns out Antwan ‘Pookie’ Parker lied—”

  Payne, making his eyes wide in mock horror, slapped his hand to his chest and said, “
A CI lied? I’m shocked!”

  “And—brace yourself—one of the things he lied about was this guy wanting to see the famous Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”

  Payne thought: I knew the bastard was blowing smoke.

  He said: “Well, in addition to being shocked, now Jamal the Junkie has really hurt my feelings.”

  Kennedy chuckled.

  “What’s more,” Kennedy went on, “Jamal said he doesn’t have a clue who the famous Wyatt Earp of the Main Line is. In fact, with his high level of maybe an eighth-grade education—he got thrown out of Mansion barely into his first year—it wouldn’t surprise me if he ever heard of the actual Marshal Earp and/or the Main Line.”

  “Mansion”—Strawberry Mansion High School, its student body of four hundred coming from deeply impoverished families—struggled to overcome a reputation as one of the most dangerous schools in the entire United States. The addition of metal detectors manned by armed school police officers, and the running of students through them throughout the day, had helped create a somewhat safer learning environment. But that hadn’t stopped the fights in the hallways and the cafeteria from breaking out daily.

  “When we frisked him,” Kennedy went on, “he had that belly pocket full of packets of smack and pills. And in his waistband there was a .40 cal semiauto, a Smith & Wesson M-and-P with—get this—only one cartridge. The fifteen-round magazine was empty. When I asked him about it—while doing my little show you said to do—he told me that one bullet was all he had left.”

  “Did Jamal get tested for gunshot residue?”

  “Yeah, and there was none on him. And it’s not like he washed his hands and clothes of it. I mean, look at him. Washing would have actually cleaned some part of him. And I’m not going to ruin your day and describe what we saw passes for a toilet on his street.”

  “The street probably is the toilet.”

  Kennedy grunted.

  “Right. Close enough . . .”

  “Well,” Payne said, pointedly getting back on topic, “if there was no GSR on him, then someone cleaned the gun.”

  “Yeah, but only wiped down the exterior. When I glanced down the barrel, the bore was filthy. Someone ran a lot of rounds through it. Way more than just the one magazine.”

  “He say where he got the gun?”

  Kennedy shook his head.

  “He hasn’t really said anything. But I’m betting it was from Pookie. He has a reputation for that. Where Pookie got it is another story. We do know that the street and sidewalk at the scene of Dante’s drive-by was riddled with .40 cal casings.”

  “And nine-millimeter, right?”

  “Right. And there was plenty of lead recovered, by the Crime Scene guys and a couple during Dante’s autopsy. That’ll keep ballistics busy looking for a match. Especially if they find any of the recovered .40 cal bullets are full metal jackets that had been scored.”

  “Cut so they can flatten more like hollow points?”

  Kennedy nodded. “Looks that way. That’s what the lone round in Jamal’s gun had. Obviously, a match won’t point to the shooter, but it would at least place the gun at the scene.”

  “Sounds like it would be a helluva lot easier having a heart-to-heart chat with ol’ Antwan ‘Pookie’ Parker and getting him to confess,” Payne said, then glanced above the mirror.

  Mounted on the wall at the top of the mirror’s window frame was a twenty-inch flat-panel monitor. There were six images, two rows of three, on it, the cameras of the interview room showing its entire interior from various angles. A line of text at the bottom of each image had a date and time stamp and showed the names of the officer conducting the interview and the person being interviewed. All of it was being digitally recorded.

  Payne looked at Jamal through the two-way mirror. He knew that the thermostat for the interview room was generally set around sixty degrees. Yet the teenager had beads of sweat on his forehead and the armpits of his sweatshirt were darkened by more moisture.

  “What’s Jamal the Junkie on?” Payne said.

  “We thought smack. He’s pretty much got needle tracks on his needle tracks. But he said he smoked some wet. Whatever he took, we didn’t get much out of him on the drive over here. Dick wanted to see if he’d open up to him in here—and to you, but that was before we learned Jamal doesn’t know any Marshal Earp exists. Now we’re just about to hand him over to the Detention Unit—let him dry out downstairs and try again later.”

  “Look at that body language,” Payne said. “He’s closed-off, defensive. Legs crossed, his free arm hugging his chest. And he’s clearly anxious—he’s about to chew off his lower lip.”

  “Uh-huh. He’d probably really be a basket case if it wasn’t for the drugs making a zombie of him.”

  Payne reached toward the control panel and turned up the volume to the interview room microphone. From the speaker in the ceiling came McCrory’s voice: “Okay . . . remember me asking, back in the car, how familiar you are with McPherson Square, Jamal?”

  “With what?”

  McCrory pointed at a sheet that was a desktop computer-printed map, his fingertip touching a square that had been marked in yellow highlighter.

  —

  The park—off Kensington Avenue, at F and Indiana, just two blocks from an elementary school and another two from a magnet middle school—was well known as an open-air market for the dealing and consumption of drugs.

  When police patrolled it, the junkies slipped away into the shadows, looking like so many cockroaches suddenly exposed to light, and leaving the park grounds littered with empty glassine packets and dirty syringes. When the patrols left the park, the waves of junkie zombies rolled back in for another high.

  Not all fled. Some were so severely wasted—it was not uncommon for the heavily addicted ones to shoot up ten to twenty hits of heroin a day—that they could not move, and simply sat or lay on park benches in a drug-induced state that bordered on the comatose.

  The police found the park environment, as hopeless as it seemed, was preferable to the days of widespread drug dens in abandoned row houses and factory buildings. There the addicts would shoot up crack cocaine and heroin out of sight—but would then frequently simply disappear, their bodies discovered days or months later, if ever.

  In the open, however, the officers—as well as various teams of volunteers, often those who had sons and daughters lost to the drugs—could approach those in and near the park and try talking them into attending a substance abuse program—detoxifications with the synthetic opioids Suboxone and Methadone—like the one at the addiction hospital across from nearby Norris Square.

  The odds were great that the addicted, absent professional help would—sooner or later but most likely sooner—join the hundreds who died each year in Philly either from an overdose of heroin or, indirectly, from the violence associated with it—being killed in a robbery, for example, or in the course of performing sexual acts, as they tried to raise cash for their next high.

  —

  “Uh-huh,” Jamal said, nodding. “That’s Needle Park.”

  “So McPherson—what you call Needle Park—that’s Antwan’s turf, right?”

  “Antwan?”

  “Antwan—Pookie.”

  Jamal nodded again.

  “I’ve seen Pookie there, if that’s what you mean—”

  “Then it’s his turf?”

  Jamal shrugged. “But I see lots of folks there.”

  “Pookie work for anyone?”

  Jamal again shrugged, then tried looking McCrory in the eye but looked away and said, “Guess you’d have to ask him about that.”

  McCrory shook his head.

  “So,” he pursued, “you see Pookie there working the park. And then along comes Dante Holmes. Was he trying to move in, work it, too? And that got him capped?”

  Jamal, nervously chewi
ng on his lower lip, did not reply.

  “Okay,” McCrory then said, opening the manila folder on the table and placing a series of photographs before Jamal. The top one showed the street view of a row house with police line yellow tape strung from the porch out to the street. Evidence markers, inverted yellow plastic Vs with black numerals, filled the marked-off area.

  “This is where the drive-by shooting took place,” McCrory said. “On the front stoop . . .”

  Jamal’s eyes darted to the photograph, then looked away.

  “. . . of Dante’s grandmother’s house in Kensington, on Clementine at E Street. Five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Yesterday. Grandma happens to look out her upstairs bedroom window when a Chevy Impala with tinted windows comes rolling up Clementine and stops shy of her house. It’s dark already, but she can just make out the car’s front passenger window opening, and she sees a guy waving Dante to come over. Dante, probably thinking he’s about to move some product, starts walking toward the Impala. Then the back passenger window goes down and a hand reaches out with a semiauto. The night lights up with muzzle flashes as both passengers start firing multiple shots, at least twenty-five, at Dante. Grandma says that it looks and sounds like really loud Chinese firecrackers going off. Then the car speeds off. And Dante’s down. Three rounds, two to the chest, one to his thigh. He never had a chance. And right in front of his grandma.”

  McCrory paused to let that sink in, then went on: “That’s bad enough. But what’s worse: most of those bullets skipped past Dante, some going into a neighbor’s row house. You have any family, Jamal, any brothers or sisters?”

  Jamal, stone-faced, did not respond.

  McCrory flipped to the next photograph. It showed three evidence markers—one by a large dark stain on a threadbare couch—in the living room of a home.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, this is where a ten-year-old girl was watching TV after school with her little brother. She takes one of those bullets to the head. Now she’s still in intensive care, and not looking like she’s going to make it. And Dante, he’s dead.”