Drop Dead Punk

by Rich Zahradnik

  A piece of blanket, a black trash bag, cigarette packages, and garbage from lunches littered their way. Beyond one more massive tree, maybe one of the oldest in the park, they stopped at a fresh dirt mound. A sign wrapped in Saran Wrap rested on the mound. Actually, its four corners were tied to strings and staked to keep it in place.

  The sign was lettered in marker, graffiti style, though these words were far easier to read than the tags that covered subway cars.

  Rest in deepest peace, dear Moon. I didn’t believe he’d kill you. Now I must do worse to save the others.

  Below the sentences was an eight on its side with two vertical lines through it. Taylor got up from a crouch. “How do you know that’s Moon?”

  “Do you see the note?” Rayban asked, aggravated and antsy at the same time. “That’s Johnny’s style and his tag at the bottom. We’re not going to dig the poor thing up. It’s Moon, believe me.”

  “It’s Moon. It’s Moon.” Sally walked from the grave, shaking her head.

  “You both seem awfully sure. You know something more?”

  “No.” Rayban switched from aggravated to angry. “We just goddamn know looking at it.”

  Taylor repeated part of the sign. “ ‘I must do worse to save the others.’ Is that the mugging? Shooting Dodd?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

  Rayban, Sally, and John-Boy were already walking out of the park.

  “Don’t know. Don’t know.”

  Chapter 7

  Taylor sat down at the same table he and Novak had shared four hours earlier. He was half surprised not to find his friend there. Novak had been working up to a pretty decent midday bender and had said, after his third Manhattan, there wasn’t much work left for the day, which for Novak meant there couldn’t be any at all.

  The waiter stopped at the table. Taylor’s brain forced his mouth to order an RC Cola. He’d told Samantha Callahan he wanted a serious conversation, and he intended to have one.

  At 5:35 p.m., Samantha arrived in jeans and loose fitting NYPD sweatshirt, her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked even younger than at Little Cindy’s the night before. Maybe it was the hair. Of course, she was young, early twenties—close to Laura’s age, now that he thought about it.

  “Not even sure why I’m doing this.” She ordered a beer. “I’m fucked. What have you really got that can help?”

  “Did you see the bodies at the scene?”

  “Spend most of my time trying to forget what I saw.” She put two fingers to each temple and rubbed, as if scrubbing away those memories.

  “Dodd was shot in the face.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s hard to shoot someone else with your face taken off.”

  “Mort was armed. Dodd shot first.”

  “The mugger takes one in the leg and one right in the chest yet still manages to aim accurately.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Possible, but unlikely. People who knew Mort say he wasn’t violent. Most he ever did was shoplift to feed these neighborhood dogs he took care of.”

  “What can I tell you? People go crazy. He had a gun when we saw him. You’re not telling me anything that’s going to change anybody’s mind.”

  Samantha’s beer was already empty. He needed to convince her to tell him what she knew before the heavy drinking got going again.

  Toss out the big one.

  “Here’s something that may change minds. Johnny Mort had a quarter million dollars worth of New York City bonds concealed at his squat. Hidden in a briefcase in a shed. I don’t know if it’s connected, but I’m really starting to believe Johnny Mort wasn’t a mugger who died after killing a cop. Or just a mugger, let’s say. There’s something else going on.”

  Samantha whistled low. “Two hundred fifty thousand.”

  “That’s the face value. Not sure what they’re really worth. We’ll see what Trunk makes of them.” He tapped his pen on the notebook. “That’s what I got. Until I tipped the detectives, they didn’t know about the squat. Trunk got pissed off when I tried to ask some questions this afternoon. He said you’re in trouble with IA.”

  She stared at the empty Rheingold. Hearing about the bonds had changed the look on her face. Now she seemed to actually be listening to him. “They’re going to get me for breaking a bunch of regs. Probably get kicked off the force. Won’t matter. I’ll have to resign. Word’s going around I didn’t back up my partner. No one will take me. As if that wasn’t hard enough before this. Impossible now.”

  Don’t push too hard.

  “Why did Dodd take you?”

  “He never actually said. He wasn’t ordered to. He sure as hell didn’t spout off on feminism or any other politics. He said being a cop’s a job, not a special position, just a job and you did it right. He was a straight shooter without being any sort of Boy Scout.” She rolled the beer bottle between her palms. Taylor’s gaze drifted from her unpainted fingernails to her dark blue eyes and back to his own notes. “ ‘A cop’s a cop,’ he’d say. ‘It’s simple.’ Dodd didn’t treat me bad and he didn’t treat me special. He didn’t treat me differently as far as I could tell.”

  “What happened yesterday?”

  “A quarter million.” She shook her head again. “Give you credit. You do find out things the detectives didn’t. We were standing outside our car on Lafayette and East Eighth. We heard a scream from across the street—the stairs to the Astor Place stop. The assailant had a semi-automatic.” The gun that’s missing. “He grabs her purse and takes off east toward Saint Marks Place, running fast. We follow on foot. Couldn’t use the car, not with the one-ways and alleys and traffic.”

  “Hold on. You’re parked just across the street, and a man pulls a daylight robbery?”

  “Yes. When we got to Second Avenue, Dodd told me to go north a block to East Ninth and sprint so we could trap him on Saint Mark’s between Second and First Avenues.”

  Samantha eyed the waiter as he passed. Taylor had to get the rest before she had another. Sober stories were the only kind for this work.

  “How fast are you?”

  “City parochial champ in the mile. Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Still hold a record.” The glimmer of a smile before it disappeared like wisps of smoke in a breeze. “I took off. Just as I was getting to the avenue, I heard the radio report Dodd in pursuit of an armed assailant north on First Avenue heading toward 10th Street.”

  Taylor frowned. The map was in his head. “They made it to the avenue and got one street north of you before you could run the same block.”

  “That’s what the radio said. It gets stranger. I’d run two blocks north myself trying to catch up when Dodd reports he’s turned from Saint Mark’s Place on to Avenue B with the suspect in sight. The first radio call had sent me in the wrong direction. Dodd and the mugger kept going east one full avenue and through Tompkins Square Park while I was going north. In his last call, Dodd said the suspect was in the condemned brownstone on Avenue B. He said he was going in after. When I got there, they were both dead.”

  The notes about the first radio call—the wrong one—already had triple underlines.

  “Someone came on the radio and sent you away from the chase.”

  “I guess. Unless it was mistake.”

  “What do the detectives think?”

  “That there was no such call.”

  “How could there be no call?”

  “No record of one. I’m going to get written up for failing to back up my partner, for not pursuing a chase. Basically, for being a coward. They don’t have a reg for that, but that’s what it means. That’s what’s being said. It’s so awful. I can’t describe ….” She paused, picked up the beer, realized it was empty, and set it down. “Then I think of Dodd and his family and feel even worse for thinking about myself. I’m not dead. I’m not missing my husband. I went round and round like that in my head, sitting at the desk all day today. This is the worst.”

  If
Samantha Callahan, New York police officer, really were going to break down, she would have then. She didn’t.

  “Why would someone put that on the radio?”

  “Don’t know. I’m starting to think I imagined it. That I am a coward.”

  “No. Someone wanted the chase to end without you to back Dodd up.” Taylor did the obvious math. “Means someone set Dodd up, someone on the force.”

  “Good luck proving that. The detectives think I invented the call after leaving Dodd to die.”

  “Who are Dodd’s enemies at the Oh-Nine?”

  “Didn’t have any that I know of. Sort of kept to himself. The usual work talk with most guys. Although Schmidt—the guy in the bar last night—had been pestering Dodd about something for the past few weeks. Didn’t hear what was said. Dodd was never in a good mood after those talks.”

  “Had they been pals before?”

  “Not at all. Schmidt’s a dick. Nothing like Dodd.”

  “A lot of loose ends in this,” Taylor said.

  “Exactly. Doesn’t help either of us.”

  “No, loose ends are a good thing. They lead somewhere. There’s definitely something going on.” He closed the notebook, put it in his field jacket, and smiled. “I told you I’ve been given the prestigious assignment of covering the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. Some kind of pageant, apparently. Care to join me?”

  “I’m tired of talking about this. Tired of thinking about it.”

  “No more questions. We’ll have a couple of beers before the parade steps off. In fact ….” He waved down a waiter and ordered Samantha a Rheingold and a Rolling Rock for himself.

  “Oh, why the hell not.” The sentence ended in a sigh. “My dad doesn’t know what to say to me now. You saw what happened in Little Cindy’s last night. That was a mistake. I just wanted to show them I could still go in there. Probably my last time.” She lifted her beer. “Why not check out what the fun folks of the Village do on Halloween.”

  “Excellent. Let me just call in to the paper.”

  The MT’s operator gave him one message from a sergeant on the Upper Westside. Taylor was pretty sure what that meant. His father again.

  He made the call.

  “Dr. Taylor is throwing handfuls of candy at the kids, throwing it hard, and screaming at them. We’ve warned him twice. A parent’s going to slug him.”

  “Got it. Thanks. I’m on a story now. I’ll try to get up there later tonight.”

  “I can’t promise anything.”

  “I hear ya. He’s a grown man.”

  Yeah, the grown man who’d moved to the Upper West Side from Queens two years after Taylor’s mother died of emphysema. He’d said he wanted a new lifestyle. He was ready to swing. He’d swung all right—from barstool to barstool, to the floor, to his apartment, and back to the barstool again. Tenure at City College was the only reason he still had funding for his full-time drunk. Another sign, albeit small, of how screwed up the city’s institutions were.

  Taylor and Samantha finished their beers and walked over to the Peculiar Pub on Bleecker Street for a couple more at the bar.

  “Two hundred fifty thousand dollars.” Samantha spoke to her beer. The revelation had clearly gotten her attention. “That’s huge. What could it have to do with Dodd?”

  “What did Mort have to do with Dodd?”

  “Nothing that I know of. How are you making that connection?”

  “I can’t yet. Too much unexplained. Which is why I said the shooting maybe isn’t what it seems.”

  A mythic beast, maybe a lion with a snake’s tail, floated past the pub’s window, a giant puppet held by two men manipulating sticks. Taylor hadn’t expected that. He’d need to find a parade organizer to interview. He might be stuck with a shitty story, but he wouldn’t do it badly. Never could.

  Chapter 8

  Skeletons in the lead danced the parade toward Washington Square, cavorting in head-to-toe black costumes with white bones painted on them. They looked like figures from a newswire picture of the Day of the Dead. One spun and offered his hand to a chubby lady on the sidewalk next to Taylor and Samantha. She joined in the dance at the exact same moment a child on the other side of them burst into tears. Friday night was always busy in the Village, yet this was something different—organized and chaotic at the same time.

  The puppets followed. Towering, articulated things, they appeared to move of their own accord, floating over the street. A dragon in the Chinese style. A bigheaded man with a grin so wide it was threatening. Humpty Dumpty cracked in half and a yellow silk yolk whipped over the heads of the spectators on the sidewalk. Laughter and applause.

  Farther back, music from a group that sounded more Dixieland than marching band set a cadence no one could really march to, but some were trying anyway. The sweet burning-hay perfume of pot tickled Taylor’s nose. He wondered what all this would look like if you were under the influence of a hallucinogen. It was crazy enough sober. Well, sort of sober. No other New York parade—St. Patrick’s, Columbus Day, Easter—came off like this one. Even with its lurching drunks, the St. Patrick’s Day parade seemed very much a part of New York City. Greenwich Village had come up with a march that was from some other world. Perfect for Halloween. Perfect for the Village.

  At the door of a hole-in-the-wall bar, a waitress held a tray of beers.

  Taylor pointed. “How much for two?”

  “Just say trick or treat.”

  He did and she handed two over.

  Across the street leaning against a light pole was a uniformed cop. He was tall with arms that looked too long. The cop’s eyes caught Taylor’s through the marchers then slid over to Samantha. His I-don’t-give-a-shit mask turned to one of startled anger. He left the pole and walked along parallel to them as Taylor and Samantha continued toward the rear of the parade. Taylor wanted to see as much as he could, as fast as he could.

  He nudged Samantha with his elbow. “You know the one across the street?”

  “Saw him. Carmichael. A bastard. He hit on me when I first got to the Oh-Nine. As he explained so romantically, ‘If we got to have you here, we ought to get something out of it.’ Like the rest, blames me for what happened.”

  Carmichael reached the next uniformed cop and they both walked together, becoming their only little police parade. The second had an ugly face and was giving Samantha an uglier look. Taylor stopped to let some marchers pass, jotting down descriptions of the costumes. When he looked across the street again, the two officers were gone. This made Taylor more nervous. With the stares they were giving Samantha, he’d rather know where they were.

  As it grew darker, streetlights, neon beer logos and store signs lit the parade, which moved like no other. Instead of marching in even files, groups of people jumped and swirled. Paraders continued to beckon costumed trick-or-treaters to join in.

  A giant elongated head with a pointed nose and red pyramid of pimples stooped down toward Taylor. A red tongue slowly emerged and ran rough papier-mâché up Taylor’s cheek.

  Two college-aged women and a man on the sidewalk laughed hard at this. Samantha joined in.

  “I think you made a friend.”

  “Yeah, it’s a friendly parade. Let’s go back to the square.”

  He found a woman with a megaphone by the stage in Washington Square making loud, garbled announcements no one could understand.

  “You with the organizers?”

  “A volunteer.”

  “How’d all this come about?”

  “Do you know Ralph Lee?”

  “No.”

  “Well you should.” A snobby Greenwich Village look of disappointment. “He wanted to create a mile-long theater of the street for Halloween. As you see, performers, giant puppets, and music. Last year was the first. He’s an incredible puppeteer in his own right. He put a hundred puppets and masks from other productions into this parade. People are supposed to join in.”

  As the parade flowed into the square, more revelers had in
deed joined in, such that you couldn’t tell the official marchers—if official was the right word—from the people who didn’t know they were going to be in a parade until half an hour earlier.

  Samantha had stood a few paces back while Taylor talked to the megaphone lady. He rejoined her as she was finishing her beer and dropping the cup in a garbage can. “Interview for the story?”

  Taylor nodded.

  “So reporters don’t just make it all up.”

  “Many of us actually ask questions. We’re not allowed to beat the answers out of people either.”

  She hit him in the arm, but smiled. “Not much you could get out of me. I told you everything.”

  The triumphal arch of Washington Square, looking like something dropped there from a European capital, towered over the stage. Several uniformed patrolmen were at the perimeters of the square. None were the pair they’d seen, and this detail nagged at Taylor.

  The vaudeville show that concluded the parade was as ragtag as they came. One comedian, in the heart of hip and groovy Greenwich Village, was determined to do a routine that must have played back in the days of actual vaudeville. A lot of groans. A ukulele duo was followed by a decent magician—baffling card tricks—who was followed by a tumbling, juggling trio.

  As the performance went on, Samantha and Taylor drifted farther from the stage and the crowd. His buzz was gone. He could use a bar and more of those little beers. Would Samantha be interested? Her face was thoughtful. She’d been this way most of the time they’d been in the Square, except to groan along with everyone else at the comedian’s string of jokes about his wife’s girth.

  She turned to find him looking at her. “You did tell me a lot. You said you would. I don’t know what to do about it.”

  They were now several yards from the back of the crowd under trees partly blocking the streetlights. A breeze flipped the leaves and moonlight flashed on their reds and golds for an instant.

  Three Halloween revelers came from the even darker corner of the park behind Taylor and Samantha, having emerged it seemed from the gloom. They wore street clothes and masks—Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolfman—the great horror-movie triumvirate of Taylor’s youth. The masks were store-bought plastic, oddly old fashioned after all the artistic stuff this evening. They made him smile.