“Dodd was too good?”
She looked away. “Was fine with having me as a partner. A rookie with a year in and a woman. Taught me things. That’s all. I’m not saying anything about the case to the paper. I’m in over my head and trying not to drown.”
“Who says you’re giving anything to the paper?”
“Why are you here then?”
“Right now we’re just having a drink. If you see I can help and want to talk later, great.” Taylor looked around the bar. “Besides, wouldn’t be so smart to do an interview in this place.”
“That would be very stupid indeed. My father, the mighty Sergeant Mick Callahan, gave me one single piece of advice after I joined the force.” She drank her beer. “Keep in mind, this was after he had a cow over me joining. Took him a year to finish having that cow. But The Sergeant got over it eventually. Bless him. When he did, The Sergeant told me to keep my head down. That’s what I’ve tried to do the whole time. I’m this alien thing. A female on the force. Talking to you is not keeping my head down. None of this is. Just the opposite.”
Don’t push any harder.
“Is your father still on the job?”
“Yeah. The One-Nine.”
“Upper Eastside. Classy.”
“Don’t get any ideas.” Almost a smile. “We’re from the Bronx.”
“Small world. I live on City Island now.”
“You’re a Bronx boy?” Samantha gave her head a light turn like this surprised her.
“No, Queens.”
“How the hell did you end up out on City Island?”
It was the obvious question to ask. Queens and Bronx did not mix, just like the Yankees and Mets. Add to that the fact that City Island was one of the strangest corners of the Bronx—an actual island in the Long Island Sound with houses, apartments, clam bars, and boatyards.
“Short version. I had a house in Queens. Nice place. There was a fire. When it was half done, the guys repairing it ran off with the money to finish the other half. Had to sell. A buddy at the paper has a houseboat on City Island. It’s got a hole in the hull, so it’s up on blocks. That’s where I live while he’s away.”
“A house fire? That’s scary. Anyone hurt?”
He paused a moment. This would test whether Samantha really wanted to have anything to do with a police reporter, particularly Taylor. It might get her to see he was the one to help. Or scare her very far away.
“No, luckily. About a year ago, I did a story on a ring of corrupt detectives on the Harlem Vice Squad. Week later, a Molotov cocktail came through my living room window. Nobody was arrested. That’s probably the least surprising part of the story.”
“Corrupt cops? That will make you unpopular. I didn’t know there really were any of those.” Her tone was breezy and sarcastic. She gave him an actual smile. The way it lit her pretty face, he wanted to think of ways to keep it there. “Dodd said dirty cops just about destroyed the force. He said the job was simple. You enforced the laws or you broke ’em. These guys have a bunch of convoluted excuses for why they’re above the law. Pure bullshit. Dodd knew. He’d seen it all. He’d spent four years in the Four-One.”
“Fort Apache. Wow. Very tough place to work. Even tougher to get out of.”
“Yeah, he busted his ass and caught a break a year back. Just to get shot down on the Lower Eastside.”
Samantha was up again and back with more shots.
Shit. I need more facts, not whiskey. Not a good direction.
“To The Sergeant. Sergeant Michael Callahan. To getting the bad guys.”
The second whiskey went down easier. He was too warm and comfortable, getting ready to settle in for a good session—a very bad sign. He was going to miss something important or forget something important. Or start ignoring the bad signs. Which he did immediately, going to the bar and ordering two more beers. On the trip there and back, cops followed him closely, all dark looks and a few clenched fists. Did they know he was a reporter? Or were those just the looks they gave any outsider? Taylor didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
A tall, wiry guy with medium-length brown and gray hair sauntered over from his place at the other end of the bar. The guy might be plainclothes, but didn’t have to be. Some patrol cops looked pretty shaggy now. Gone were the days of neat and tidy. The man turned one of the chairs around and straddled it. “What’s up, Callahan?”
“Oh you know, the usual, Schmidt. Drinking to a fallen comrade. With no one else. Will you join me?”
“You already seem to have company.” Schmidt continued to stare with hungry gray eyes at Samantha. “We need to keep things in the family. Who’s your friend?”
As if on cue, the conversation in the bar slowly died to almost nothing. The off-duty men in Little Cindy’s watched Samantha’s table. Sinatra continued singing “Summer Wind.”
“He’s not a friend. He’s a newspaper reporter.”
Samantha’s eyes took on a dangerous glint that made Taylor want to be a lot more sober. He didn’t know enough yet to read what was going on.
“We’re worried about you. Things I’m hearing about what happened with Dodd—those things are a serious concern. Now this. Airing your dirty laundry with a fucking reporter.”
“Our dirty laundry.”
Need to cool this down.
Taylor lifted the bottle of beer. “Just having a drink with Samantha here. That’s it. I know a lot of people on the force. Check me out.”
“I don’t give a shit who you know. I don’t know you. Nobody on this patch knows you. Nobody on this patch talks to any reporters.”
Taylor watched his hopes for the night go out the window. He’d needed to learn as much as he could from Samantha, even if he had to wait until later to get it all on the record. Tonight was supposed to be about figuring out what direction to go with the story. Have drinks with a source and get a handle on where to go next. That was how reporting worked. ’Course it didn’t usually involve multiple shots of whiskey. Or violence. How was he going to learn anything more? He needed a plan B.
“The only story I’m interested in is Officer Dodd. He’s a hero, and I want to write a profile of a hero. Give me something for that.”
“Bullshit. We’re not heroes in your paper. Not any paper. You’re here looking for dirt. You’re going to leave here bloody.”
“Stop being such asshole.” Samantha stood, sliding her chair back with her calves. The wiry cords on Schmidt’s arms tightened. She went to the bar and brought back another round of shots and set all three down.
“I’m not drinking with the bitch who got Dodd killed.”
“I didn’t get him killed. But something’s going on. Any idea what?”
“Be careful, little girlie. Dodd’s gone, and he’s about the only one round here who tolerated a meter maid.”
There would be no toast. Samantha’s whiskey went right in Schmidt’s face. He slid off his chair and slammed her into the wall with one hand on her throat.
Taylor wanted to react fast, he really did, but thoughts moved so slowly through his brain, sludged up by booze on no dinner. If he put a hand on Schmidt, these cops would kick the crap out of him and charge him with whatever they felt like once he got out of the hospital.
He slowly stood up. “Easy, Schmidt.” He slipped the notebook out of the field jacket’s pocket and opened it. “This is a bad story for everyone. Let her go. Let’s sit down. Or better, the two of us can leave.”
Apparently, Samantha didn’t feel she needed Taylor’s help—what little threat the notebook might have been. She drove her foot down hard on the top of Schmidt’s, broke the chokehold, and pushed him away.
He limped sideways, groaning. “I’m going to fucking hurt you, bitch.”
Samantha stood her ground. “C’mon, then. Hurt me. Try.”
Two hands grabbed Taylor from behind and threw him at the table they’d been sitting at. He managed to twist around so he landed on his shoulders and slid off as the table tipped over
. Without that move, he’d have ended up with more than a sore ass.
A silver blur as Taylor rose to his feet on the far side of the overturned table. Something long and metal hit the edge of the Formica. The bartender with the cleavage held the golf club—probably a nine iron—that had put a decent sized dent in the table edge. “Nobody fights in Little Cindy’s. Or it’s a life ban.” She pulled the club back onto her shoulder.
The hefty cop who’d tossed Taylor clearly valued his time in the bar because he backed away into the crowd instantly. Schmidt straightened up, grimacing against the pain. He showed his teeth. “Stay out of this, Cindy. This isn’t covered by your rules.”
“Yes it is. It always is. Nothing gets settled in my place. Nothing. Not ever.”
“She broke more important rules.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t wanna know. Not on any day, but particularly not on this day. My rules, they get followed. Nobody gets hit in here. You both need to leave, and whoever you are,” the nine iron pointed at Taylor, “you too. I never like it when I don’t know a person.”
With a slow turn of the head, Samantha took in Schmidt, Cindy, and the two dozen other off-duty cops staring at the standoff. Then she turned from the overturned table and made for the door. Taylor followed. Once on the street, he had to work to keep up with Samantha, who walked fast and seemed less affected by the whiskey. Maybe it was getting thrown on the table that had wobbled his balance. He was smart enough to give her time to calm down. She stayed quiet as they strode all the way to the Astor Place subway stop. She was about to go down the stairs, but halted. She pointed at the corner of Lafayette and East Eighth Street.
“That’s where Dodd and I were. The guy did the mugging right in front of us. We heard the woman scream. How could that’ve happened just this morning?”
“I’m sorry about back at the bar.”
“You weren’t the biggest asshole in that place. I want to go home.”
“Thanks, I think. I’m going to check out Mort’s background. Also see if I can talk to Dodd’s family.”
“Knock yourself out.”
“I’m going to figure out what’s going on. I’ll let you know what I learn. If you want to tell me what you know, that’s great.”
“Like I said, knock yourself out.”
She stepped around Taylor and disappeared down the steps. As it happened, he needed the 6 train too. Taylor had a feeling Samantha wouldn’t take it well if it even looked like he was staying with her, so he waited five minutes, went down and caught the next train, changed to the 4 and back to the 6 at 125th Street. At Pelham Bay Park, the end of line, he waited for the bus to City Island. By the time he got to the bed in the houseboat on cinderblocks, the buzz was gone, his butt hurt, and he was dead tired. In the cabin, he banged his head and elbow getting out of his clothes. The marooned vessel had all the negatives of living in a tiny boat without the positive of a gently rocking swell. He couldn’t even make out the whisper of the Long Island Sound.
He was asleep before he could do his nightly ritual of running through the story he was working on.
Chapter 4
Taylor woke to the tang of low tide, mingled with more than a hint of petroleum and some other chemicals he couldn’t ID but knew weren’t natural to the badly polluted Long Island Sound, which narrowed past City Island on its way to joining the dark, even dirtier East River.
Would he ever get to sleep in a real house again? When the contractors took half the insurance money with the house still badly in need of work, he’d been forced sell at the worst possible time. The real estate market was still in the crapper, like the rest of the economy. Jerry Hanson, a decent guy then working on the city staff, had lent him the Bulldog Edition when he was assigned to the MT’s one remaining foreign bureau in London. Hanson would be back in six months. It was only fill-in duty. Everyone at the paper knew the London bureau remained so the Garfield kids could play at journalism and play in Europe. Their parents, aunts, and uncles owned the paper along with the New Haven Life Insurance Company—the increasingly impatient New Haven Life Insurance Company.
Taylor appreciated Hanson’s generosity. Hell, he needed it. But the Bronx? On City Island? For a Queens boy, it was like being shipped off to Nantucket.
Out the back window, the sun glanced off the slate gray water. A small two-humped island stuck out of the sound. Rat Island. Perfect name. No one lived there. No surprise, either.
His mouth was gummy from last night’s drinking and a medium-grade headache pulsed in his temples. He swallowed aspirin and two glasses of water, showered in the boat’s tiny head, and dressed in cords, plaid shirt, and Army field jacket. He walked out to the main drag, appropriately named City Island Avenue. In appearance, the island wasn’t so much Nantucket as a down-in-the-dumps Jersey shore town grafted onto the Bronx. The main avenue cut the length of the mile and a half long island, with side streets leading to boatyards and four yacht clubs—each almost a century old. City Island had been all about boats for a long time.
Lining the avenue were seafood joints decorated with plaster statues of Neptune, giant red lobsters, and neon signs of impressive size. This was where the Bronx came to eat seafood and look at the “ocean.” The island had no beach; it was all docks. For swimming, you had to go back over the causeway to the mainland and a mile through Pelham Bay Park to Orchard Beach, dubbed the Riviera of the Bronx. Now, it was hardly that. Like most city parks, it was a dangerous place, a casualty of gang war, drug dealing, and general neglect.
To Taylor, the oddest thing about City Island was the proximity of the elements of a dowdy seaside resort to the trappings of New York City. MTA buses ran on the avenue. PS 175 taught the kids. The firehouse said NYFD.
Taylor bought a buttered hard roll and coffee with two creams and two sugars and climbed on one of those buses for his long morning commute. Add that to the things he hated about being stuck out here. Still, free was free, and every day he tried to make the commute count. On the bus and then the subway into Manhattan, he worked out his next steps. He wanted to try and find Johnny Mort’s squat in Alphabet City, or failing that, people on the street who could tell him more than he already knew about the kid. The angle about his caring for stray dogs was interesting. He needed more specifics. Mort was being written off as a cop killer. There was much to learn.
On the inside cover of his reporter’s notebook, he started listing the key people in the shooting. Samantha Callahan was at the top. Bad things were swirling around her. Was she involved in those bad things? Or was she a victim? He liked the way she’d stood up to Schmidt. He liked the way she looked too, which was an immediate alarm bell. Liking the source—or the subject—of a story would send a reporter down a rat-hole. That had been one reason being in a relationship with another reporter, with Laura Wheeler, had worked out so well—for as long as it did work. He and Laura could talk about work and help each other and never end up with that sort of conflict. That wasn’t the first or only reason he liked Laura so much. It had just made things easier. Life hadn’t been easier since she left the paper … left the paper and him.
He pictured Laura smiling, dark eyes lit by her intelligence, and had to blink twice to see the notebook again. The notes were there, but so was the knot of loneliness he carried around every day. When a good story distracted him, the knot would shrink some, almost to the point where he didn’t notice it. Another reason to push hard on this assignment.
Taylor underlined Samantha Callahan’s name a second time, as if to remind himself she was a story to get, not a woman in distress to help. He would need to uncover something to gain her trust, or at least get her interested. At the scene, Samantha had said they were bringing weight down on her. In Cindy’s, Schmidt had straight out accused her of getting Dodd killed. He put “Schmidt” second on his list as the train braked into 125th Street with a screeching that made thinking impossible. The car’s doors rattled open and commuters from Harlem boarded.
>
Next on the list was Dodd’s wife. He hated door-stepping the families of victims. He didn’t need to ask Dodd’s wife how she felt—the classic Eyewitless News line. He knew already. He’d interviewed enough relatives of victims. Still, he had to get more information about Dodd the man, and she would be the source for that.
His visit to the crime scene had left him with other questions. Since Dodd had taken a shot to the face, he must have fired first. There was nothing wrong with that in and of itself. Mort had a gun, so Dodd had every right to warn and fire. Still, Taylor wanted to know exactly what had gone down inside the building. He was no pathologist, but the bullet to Mort’s chest looked like it should have knocked him down instantly and killed him very quickly. How then had Mort managed to aim and hit Dodd in the face? That was the real question. And where was Mort’s pistol? It was the strangest ending to any standoff Taylor had seen. He wouldn’t be happy until he had reasonable answers to his questions. Detective Trunk went on the list.
He skipped stopping off in the newsroom. He was on a legitimate story and didn’t need to give Worthless a shot at sending him back to Room 9.
Avenue C between East Seventh and Eighth Streets was typical of the wreckage of Alphabet City. Typical and shocking. Some buildings were burnt out, some were boarded up, and some were in use. And, Taylor knew, some were all three. A shirtless man in raggedy blue pants and no shirt weaved toward him with his hand out. He was so high or drunk or both, he didn’t stop or ask for change, just weaved past, leaving behind the stench of human filth.
Taylor hoped to avoid canvassing every building on the block. That would be dangerous and could take more time than he had. There was no guarantee he could even get into the most decrepit ones—the very buildings where people like Mort squatted.
Across Avenue C, two homeless people were sitting in cardboard boxes propped against the wall of a boarded-up building. A surprisingly well-fed German shepherd sat between them, wearing a thick rope. Taylor crossed the street, saying a silent reporter’s prayer that they would be coherent at least, sober at best.
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