The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  Having dispatched with Mr. Starr, Leonard checked his watch again. It was time. “Okay guys, have at it. Commissioner speaks in two.” He opened the door to the stampede of curiosity, and the reporters swarmed the breakfast spread just as eagerly as had Mr. Starr.

  CHAPTER THREE

  OUT WITH THE NEW

  Christine Davenport, rail-thin, not quite as tall as she seemed at first, but proud that she could look large when she needed to, was in her usual post. She angled back in the Aeron chair, feet up on her desk, Diet Coke in one hand and a pad of paper in the other. It was a big day. She’d busted out the designer goods—the notched suit from Barney’s and the brogues from an obscure designer known only to the cognoscenti. It didn’t matter that none of the people who would watch her perform today would know how stylish she was. It was enough that she would know herself. An angular collar peeked out above the suit, the final flair of class. To Christine Davenport, it was not enough to display power. She had to display taste as well. But taste costs money. And city government wasn’t known for splurging.

  She stopped to look out the broad semi-circular window and onto the West Side Highway. The window itself was covered in soot. The ledge was speckled with pigeon shit. Under the last mayor, city buildings had had exterior cleanings twice a year, and even that hadn’t been enough. In her two years at DIMAC, no one had been by to clean the ledge once. Specks of garbage pitted themselves in the snow all winter and melted into a permanent slick come spring. The low-grade gray carpet that had been laid in the hallways sometime in the 1970s had sprung a series of runs that had never been fixed. Davenport suspected that some of her own employees hoped they’d trip on it so they could sue the city. She’d had Leonard go out and patch up two of the most severe tears with electrical tape. It looked even worse after that.

  She hit the hallway with a fierce stare, ready to own the room. She could always own a room. As a prosecutor, before she caught the eye of the last mayor, she had led the Public Integrity Bureau at the Manhattan DA’s office. There she had successfully jailed fifteen officers who had set up a crime ring within a precinct, taking payouts from drug dealers to plant evidence on their rivals and arrest them. One sergeant had cemented fifty thousand dollars inside his Suffolk County swimming pool. After she had imprisoned those once-powerful men who hid behind their shiny brass badges and their silly octagonal hats, she had never walked softly again. Not bad, she had thought to herself at the time, for a girl whose parents had run a tire store in Piscataway.

  She slipped behind the podium and looked over the crowd. The reporters had already ravished the spread of bagels and muffins. As soon as they saw her, crumbs fell from lapels as they stopped chattering and sat to attention. Against the rear wall, Leonard Mitchell, her trusted deputy, met her eyes and nodded. But he stayed hunched and leaning against the wall. She looked him over and saw a man who looked as though he had been tough once, but had since been pressed and steamed into a compliant little bureaucrat. Someone who couldn’t stand up straight even for a momentous occasion.

  She flashed a powerful smile as the press snapped into place. She owned them. Even then, she thought for a moment, maybe she wouldn’t go through with it. Maybe she would take one last ride, sink one last career, cut one more notch on her belt. She already felt the rush. But there was another, stronger rush pulling the other way. You can only be a hero for so long in this city. And if the shooting presented an opportunity to score one more victory, there was risk in it too. You play a death case wrong and you’re not only fired, but your name is in all four papers. Good luck getting a cushy private sector gig after that. Better to quit on your own terms than to get clobbered again. Twelve years at DIMAC and she had been clobbered plenty. So just as they thought she was stepping up to take charge, she was actually saying goodbye.

  It was going to be the end of the X-rays of fractured orbital bones, the medical records explaining how many times a man had to be hit in the back with a nightstick before his spleen ruptured, the autopsies. Stories of armor-piercing bullets and bribes from the Department of Buildings would all ease away into quiet paper investigations that would be plain and simple and would involve nothing more complicated than money. She took the podium proud and lulled in her willing audience.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I know you are eager to hear about the confrontation situation last night. I read your coverage this morning and can confirm that we have opened an investigation, but frankly I have nothing to add at this point.”

  This last bit was a tease. Tantalizing them, as though in the next moment or two she would have something to add. As though any of them didn’t know that DIMAC, like every other authority, was required to wait forty-eight hours before interviewing an officer involved in a shooting. As though there wasn’t a special provision in state law prohibiting the release of any information whatsoever about an investigation of a police officer. Of course the reporters would know this. They would know too that the press conference was a precise and meaningless burlesque. But they would also know that the real story would flow out over a phone call or a beer at a quiet nearby bar. And if you didn’t show your face at the public presser, you wouldn’t get invited to hear the real story later.

  She could tell herself she was getting out because she didn’t like the sight of blood or because she was afraid she’d be fired. But she knew it was really about the money. Her husband had tenure but was never going to get a real raise. The apartment had seemed spacious ten years ago, with a little nook that didn’t quite count as a second bedroom where Adam had put the desk and worked on his tenure file. Soon the nook was a nursery and the office was in the middle of what used to be the living room. And now Henry was five and didn’t really fit in a nursery any more.

  They could have moved to New Jersey, they could have struggled through, or she could have taken a private sector job that would pay the astronomical salary you need to raise a family in New York. The last option didn’t feel like selling out when you’re walking away from twelve years of city service. Christine Davenport had served the general public plenty. Once the money came in, they could get a bigger apartment, a house in Brooklyn maybe. Adam would have a longer drive, but that would only mean more time to ponder the deeper meaning of The Mill on the Floss before giving a lecture to students who couldn’t be bothered to leave New Jersey even for college.

  Davenport went on. “I am not going to be able to speak about last night’s shooting now. In fact, I am not going to be at liberty to speak about it ever. Because as of now, I am stepping down as the commissioner of this agency. I have spent the last two decades pursuing justice. For the Manhattan District Attorney, for the State of New York, and here at DIMAC. I have done everything I can to put the people first. And now it is time for me to move on to a new set of challenges. I leave you in the capable hands of Leonard Mitchell, whom I believe you all know. Leonard will serve as acting commissioner until further notice. And let me add that I think he would make a capable and qualified replacement for me when that decision is made.”

  Davenport smiled politic at Leonard as he finally stood up off the wall. This had at least gotten his attention. She hadn’t told him beforehand; it only would have gone to his head. Or he would have called the press and leaked it himself, always trying to sound important. Now she could see him preening, finally ready to be the center of something. Davenport almost lost her place in her speech watching him. Be careful what you wish for, kid. That afternoon, she knew he would have a quick, horrid introduction to his new job.

  After each monthly meeting, there was always a parade of discontents desperate to bring their complaints in person. People too invested to just call the agency on an ordinary day and have their case assigned to a line investigator. Sitting through the intake after the meeting could take all day, and often deep into the night. It was the glum duty of the commissioner, that one day a month, to sit and take it. If the commissioner is going to quit, it’s best to do i
t on the morning of the monthly meeting. Spare yourself one wretched afternoon with the general public. Davenport felt a little sorry for Leonard. His dinner plans were shot, and the workday wasn’t half an hour old. But not sorry enough to change her mind. If he wanted to be the boss, he would have to stomach it.

  Leonard looked up as the crowd wheeled around to stare at him. A dozen sets of passive eyes. Tony Licata gave him a small mean wink. Davenport could see the pity behind the looks. Most probably figured that the promotion wouldn’t last. She had been untouchable herself. She had come in with too many accomplishments for the new administration to simply abandon her. But with her out of the picture, her staff was fair game. Even the plug she’d given for Leonard at the end of the speech was likely to backfire. In a week or two he’d be out of a job. Maybe he’d show up at her firm, asking if he could be a paralegal or something. Maybe she’d even let him.

  As the crowd turned back to her, she was already thinking of the next morning, when she would begin to read all of the dirty secrets of EHA Investments, a little player in a big market. For weeks the documents had been culled and processed, and they already were waiting for her on the desk of a Midtown tower. She wasn’t leaving the corruption business. But finding corruption in the private sector was valuable; people would pay you plenty for it. She didn’t care whether she was looking for bad guys who hit kids over the head with sticks or whether she was looking for bad guys who had pried out information about the takeover of a Brazilian valve manufacturer. She had always been born to prosecute, and she had timed her move perfectly.

  The reporters lapped up the coda of Davenport’s farewell address. “I want to tell you all how grateful I am for your time, and for the patience of the people of New York. I have had a great time serving you. I won’t be taking any questions.”

  As she left the podium, she felt like she was actually floating. Her hard shoulders were rolled back and her chin was high. She had spent twenty years grinding it out for the general public, and she was walking out on them while she still could, dodging a run in the miserable carpet on her way out the door and back toward her office.

  Leonard found himself leaning back against the wall as she finished, and pressed himself up again as the reporters turned toward him. Despite the crowd, once Davenport left the podium, the room felt empty and a little cold. Someone had to go talk to them about the business of the day. Whatever questions wouldn’t get answered about his boss’s sudden career change, there were still a thousand questions about the agency. The case closure rate had ticked down last month. The number of days to complete a full investigation was on the rise. And oh, yeah—there was a shooting last night.

  Leonard could feel the thin suit pinch his shoulders again. The thing about working for the city is that you have to dress up just enough: You have to wear a suit so that when you walk into a bodega or a precinct or a taxi dispatch station the people inside recognize that you’re important and feel they have to talk to you. But it has to be kind of a cheap suit, not just because you can’t afford any better but because if you start walking around Highbridge in Paul Stuart people might suspect that their taxes are being wasted on you. Or worse, that you’re on the take. But now, facing the wide crowd of reporters and activists, Leonard felt weak and underdressed. He realized why Davenport always broke out serious suits for these presentations. The air conditioning wasn’t strong enough to keep him from starting to sweat.

  He walked to the podium, swallowed, and prepared to be savaged by the crowd.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BIG FEAR

  Eventually Leonard had it figured out—the best line out of the subway was from the second door back in the third car. New York’s antique infrastructure squeezed the rush hour throng through subway stairwells. If the bottleneck caught you, it could take twenty minutes to get out.

  The Wall Street station on the Four train served two clienteles. The downtown platform spewed forth finance guys from the Upper Eighties who would prance past the shoeshine booths and up to the street of their dreams. Across Broadway, civil servants trekked from Brooklyn to the municipal offices down Rector Street. The crowds wheedled past each other, each crossing Broadway just after a pair of subway cars stopped simultaneously. They pretended that each other didn’t exist.

  Slower, sleepier, and in cheaper suits, the city guys mainly shined their own shoes. There was no urgency up the stairway on the uptown track, so if Leonard wanted to get out quickly he had to place himself at exactly the right set of doors. Which he did every single day.

  He had been pondering the Mulino shooting the whole ride in. It had blown up the tabloids two days running. Each paper had an exclusive story with someone who claimed to be on the ship, the stories were completely at odds with each other, and Leonard knew they were each probably leaked by a cop on the force with some petty grievance to air. Still, there hadn’t been any protests. No one was quite sure who they would protest for, exactly, with a cop as a victim and a cop as the shooter. There was going to be a full-dress funeral in four days, and the commissioner and the mayor had both issued simpering meaningless statements. For two days, Leonard’s phone had been shut off; it was the only way to maintain even twenty minutes of silence.

  And he needed silence to do his job. City law provides that a cop in a shooting can’t be interviewed for forty-eight hours. A union rule, enough time so the officer can meet with his rep and put together a decent story. But the forty-eight hour rule gave Leonard time to prepare too.

  He had spent the afternoon of the public meeting taking the complaints of the general public. He wouldn’t have to investigate these cases, but the people who walked in on the day of a public meeting expected to talk to someone in charge, so Monday afternoon had been a parade of misfortune. The first was a seventeen-year-old who said a cop had whaled on his head with a nightstick four times before running scared when he saw how strong the kid was. A background check showed him to be a low-level drug dealer with a lawyer who made a living grinding out lawsuits that the city would routinely settle. The second person in brought X-rays of her husband, who actually had been hit in the head with a nightstick, just once. He had a broken orbital bone, a hairline skull fracture, and was expected to come out of the coma sometime in the next few weeks. It had gone on like that until well past eight, leaving Leonard only one day to prepare to interview Mulino.

  Out of the subway, across Broadway, he trucked along Rector Street, the wrought iron fence of Trinity Church and its famous tombstones looming above him. There was a man curled in a ball by the low wall abutting the graveyard. Every day another desperate wraith on the sidewalk. Every day another reminder of the city’s slow slide downward. Leonard stepped over him and looked up at the Bank of Bremen building. The last piece of the Trade Center puzzle, the sleek black tower had just been completed. The whole thing was over with, the obelisk seemed to be saying. After the horror on the day it happened, after the construction site that never seemed to end, after the armed men needlessly patrolling the subways and train stations, and after everything else, finally the whole place was just back to being a bunch of office buildings. Move along; nothing to see here.

  Leonard had spent all Tuesday locked in his office reading the case file that had come through on the shooting. Even five years ago you had to wait weeks to get a single scrap of paper from the police department. But everything was digital now. Now, the day after a shooting, it was all waiting to be opened on Leonard’s desktop. He could scroll through Mulino’s personnel file, photos from the deck of the ship, preliminary ballistics. Maybe not a full report—not an autopsy, he noted—but Leonard was pretty sure he knew what had killed the other detective.

  The dead man’s name had been Brian Rowson. A twenty-six-year-old kid who had grown up in Cambria Heights, in the farthest reaches of Queens. Seventy years ago it had been a tight middle-class community, but then they built the airport and it found itself right under the flight path. Se
aring noise and slow decay followed. Most whites had predictably skipped out soon after, but the place had never crashed and burned like the worst of the boroughs. It was no Ocean Hill or Brownsville. Instead, it stayed mainly black and middling prosperous. A neighborhood of clapboard houses and churches and a very long commute if you wanted to come to the city. Rowson got his degree at York College in three years. He had joined the force and made detective by the time he was twenty-five. Not a superstar exactly, but well above average. One investigation by Internal Affairs; no disciplinary action taken. No indication of what he would have been doing out on a container ship in Buttermilk Channel on his regular day off. Too bad Leonard wouldn’t get the chance to ask him.

  Scrolling through Rowson’s file, Leonard had thought about his own move, his relocation to the fringe. He was a funny sort of gentrifier; he’d lost a lease and realized he had nowhere to move but deeper into Brooklyn. It wasn’t a housing project, he kept telling his friends, but the Ebbets Field Apartments sure looked like one.

  The locals in Ebbets had been just as surprised as he was that he had joined them there. On the site of the old baseball stadium, it had been built to house the throngs moving to Brooklyn in 1960—twenty-six stories of thick yellow brick and tiny cement balconies. You had to walk up a flight of stairs from Bedford Avenue to get to the squat concrete plaza, a great wide space out of view of the street that had been Brooklyn’s biggest open-air drug market for twenty years. Inside, the stairs were narrow, the elevators were broken, and there was a strange sweet smell in the hallways most mornings.

  Most of the residents were middle-aged women or older—their husbands and sons locked up for long-ago minor transgressions—and the place was no longer dangerous. But it was still heavy, quiet, and old. It was nowhere you could bring a date. He could move to Nassau or Hoboken and live much better for the same price. He had been thinking it over between his bouts with the crime scene photos. If he didn’t get fired in the next few weeks, he might leave the city altogether.