by Andrew Case
Leonard clicked back to the photos. Brian Rowson was just another corpse in a sweatshirt now, the blood from his chest indistinguishable, melting into the harsh shadow cast by an amateur flash. He was lying on his back, his left arm twisted behind him and his right arm stretched above his head. The blast had flung him backward onto the deck. There was nothing in the hand. Leonard scoured the cop’s waistband. No sign of a holster either. It could have been behind his crumpled sweatshirt, but if it was you couldn’t see it. Rowson had a beard too, which used to be against the regulations of the NYPD. Couldn’t have put him on the best of terms with the real old-school guys, Leonard thought as he clicked to the next photo—black kid with a beard and a hoodie making detective. A sign of the times, and one that wasn’t welcome to the Flynns and O’Briens of the department. Maybe Ralph Mulino thought that way too.
The next picture was from just to the dead cop’s left, taken almost from ground level, showing his frozen eyes and the murky puddle erupting from his chest and engulfing his shoulders and face. The blood spattered in his beard could have come from the blast or it could have bubbled out after he was shot. Leonard had seen a good number of crime scene photos and autopsies: the tools of the paper investigator. He wasn’t a doctor, but it didn’t take one to see that Rowson had taken a single shot and been stopped in his tracks. From this angle, Leonard could see how close he was to the edge of the boat. His hand may even have hit the railing as he went back. They had removed his shield before taking the picture. Too inflammatory.
Finished with the photos, Leonard clicked open what had come through on the shooter. Less than he would have liked, if he was going to interview the guy the next day. Mulino had fired one shot from his thirty-eight. There were fewer than a dozen cops on the force who still used the revolver. Most of the ones who had fought off the upgrade to an automatic weapon changed their minds the first time they actually tried one out at the range, and the rest had almost all retired. Mulino had hung on to his old habit alone.
He had been stationed in OCCB for the past ten years. A catch-all assignment. One day he could be put on the security detail of a diplomat who wasn’t in danger but wanted to feel important, and the next he could be catching a murder case. A funny unit, the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Leonard thought. It sure never seemed to have anything much to do with organized crime.
For someone who had been on the force so long, Ralph Mulino had a pretty clean history with DIMAC. Most guys who tough it out either get promoted to the upper echelons of One Police Plaza or start getting bitter and taking it out on the citizenry. There were a lot of cops waiting out their last few years of work behind a well-polished desk, serving as the Deputy Commissioner of Looking Like You’re Doing Something Important.
There were also plenty of guys who hadn’t retired yet because it would mean spending more time with a wife they didn’t like. They would arrest people for petty crimes that they knew would get dismissed just for the rush of making the collar. Others would just set out and start busting heads. But Ralph Mulino hadn’t been given so much as a Command Discipline in the past seventeen years. He had never fired his weapon on the job except at the range. This man had whiled away a quiet little career in the New York Police Department, only to shoot a colleague in the chest one late summer night.
Leonard always started with the questions he truly didn’t know the answer to. Why was Rowson on the container ship on what the roll call showed was his day off? Why was Ralph Mulino called out to investigate when there were plenty of cops who regularly work a midnight tour? Who had killed the civilian officer of the shipping company? And where was Rowson’s gun? He was a detective after all. He had been wearing his badge. The recovered evidence list wasn’t in the packet that had come in Tuesday. Leonard would have to interview Mulino based just on the photographs. Maybe there had been a gun, but it was out of the frame of the pictures; maybe it flew off the boat when Rowson had been shot. Or maybe he was out on the ship unarmed. If Leonard could unravel it, maybe the administration would keep him on after all. With crime back on the rise, with the little disasters keeping the city skittish, the administration would want to show that it was still serious about weeding out bad cops. Middle-aged, white, carrying an old-school revolver, Detective Ralph Mulino would be a perfect trophy.
Clear of Trinity Church, Leonard was imagining himself at a press conference next to the mayor when he nearly stumbled into a teenager being grabbed by a police officer. The kid was very thin, maybe nineteen, black, wearing loose jeans and a tank top. The cops were back to grabbing teenagers off the street—as soon as crime had started to tick up, there were more backs to the walls. The NYPD wanted to prove that they weren’t stopping kids for no reason, not like they used to. So now they gave them summonses to prove they really thought they were up to something.
Leonard thought to intervene, but telling a cop you work for DIMAC is no way to get him to listen. Every cop on the force has a faded story about a brother or a friend who had been railroaded by DIMAC, had been forced off the street for doing his job and ended up sitting at a desk going mad while the hoodlums and the crazies took over the city. And even though the story took place twenty years ago, and even though whoever did this wrong had long since retired, and even though it probably wasn’t even true to begin with, the cop will hear where you work and shrug you off. Ignoring you will be his little opportunity for justice, revenge, whichever.
No one was jumping to the kid’s side either. People kept their noses out of it because they had all grown accustomed to a new city with low crime and fresh fruit on the corners, bright new apartment buildings and digital signs in the subways telling you when the next train was coming. They had become used to the warmth and the order, but had averted their eyes to how that order was maintained. When the order started to crack, and the old habits came back, people looked away. That was part of the deal.
Curmudgeons had complained, sure, that the grunge and the dirt had made New York special. They whined that there had been character in dirty bookstores on Ninth Avenue or junkies spread out across your stoop in the morning. But most people were glad for the swap, they were happy to give up the local color, or the mystique, or however you wanted to describe it, so long as they also were able to give up the fear.
Or, to be precise, to give up the Little Fear. People had become used to being free from any worry that someone would pull out a switchblade on the sidewalk and ask you for your wallet. That someone would climb through your window and take your television. Advertisements for fixing torn earlobes were long gone from the subway. The Little Fear had vanished.
But the Big Fear was always with you. The fear that the buildings would come crashing down, that the elevators would be filled with poison gas, that the subway stalling for a moment on the bridge means the bridge itself is about to collapse into the water—that was part of you. Maybe not like it had been just after, maybe tempered a little, and smoothed out by your New York attitude, but it was always there beneath, throbbing a little, reminding you, like an old scar that you can feel when you lounge back into an otherwise comfortable chair. You couldn’t look away from the Big Fear.
As Leonard left the cop, who was dusting off the boy he had manhandled, he realized that even if he left the city, even if he moved out of the Ebbets Field Apartments into a bright condo in Hoboken, the Big Fear would stay with him too. He turned past the petty arrest and toward his office. He passed the fire-red sign for the John Street Bar and Grill pointing downstairs to cheap beer and sawdust hamburgers, the basement shoe stores hedging their boasts (“We are Probably the Lowest Priced in the City”), and the riot of egg sandwiches, weak coffee, and clutter. He was in a position of power now, but it came with risks. He could confront Detective Ralph Mulino, but the police department had its own way of bringing the Big Fear. If the shooting was dirty, there were ways that cops would go about taking it out on the messenger.
Leonard would have t
o be ready for them.
CHAPTER FIVE
COMPLIANCE
They were stacked four deep and three high and took up almost the entire desk. Two-inch-thick black binders, spreading a glum, dull welcome to Christine Davenport at the new job. Each one contained nearly three hundred tabs and each tab was set in perfect order. The labels on the covers and spines were precisely placed—EHA Investments, Internal Investigation, a date, a volume number. Most likely the paralegal had been scolded once after a label was found to be a half-inch off of perfect center. After that the kid had started using a ruler. In city government, when you want a binder of documents, what you get is a stack of loose paper and a level two admin who can show you that three hole punching and inserting tabs is nowhere to be found in her Tasks and Standards. And she has a copy handy if you’d like to look. In the public sector, everyone is her own assistant.
From the moment she had walked into the law firm, Davenport had learned that the paperwork, the binders, and the Post-its would always be precise and perfect. After all, there was an anonymous horde being well-paid to make sure. A few weeks ago, when she’d toured the place, when there was still some committee or other that was deciding her fate, they had shown her all of the various departments—office services, proofreading, three or four different kinds of “support” for tasks Davenport didn’t know existed. All that had sunk in was that she wouldn’t have to do anything that felt like work anymore. She would only be asked to do the thinking. She had met then with the team of junior attorneys, the people who would be sifting through the thirty thousand or so e-mails that were potentially relevant and come up with a few thousand that she was going to have to look at. The people who had gone through the four hundred and fifty thousand e-mails on EHA Investment’s actual servers, and who had culled that down to thirty thousand for the law firm, were anonymous contract attorneys working in off-site basements. Davenport didn’t even get introduced to them.
Davenport sat down and tugged at the first binder. This was her job now, to look through a few thousand carefully curated e-mails and see if she could find someone at a minor little investment house worth sending off to prison. But it was a quiet comfortable existence, and she smiled at the knowledge that she would never again be sweltering at DIMAC, making her own copies and taking lip from the general public. The office was a perfect sixty-eight degrees even though it was still broiling outside. She had a pristine view of the oversized marble woman rinsing her hair in MOMA’s manicured sculpture garden forty stories below.
EHA Investments had come to the firm. Some broad worries. Some concerns about trading patterns. But not even enough to get them focused properly. Maybe that had been the holdup. Maybe it hadn’t been the law firm at all. They had been waiting until they felt they had no choice but to submit to the investigation. They were very eager and wanted the help, but they were much less straightforward than most of these corporate clients as to what exactly they thought she would find. Usually what these places want is clear enough. They have already found some employee that would make a good sacrifice. Find out everything he did, and prove that no one else knew about it so we can wash our hands of him. But EHA Investments hadn’t given her a target. They had only given her worry. And that set off red flags, because that meant the target could be anyone.
The firm had taken Davenport on but hadn’t really included her. She had a reputation after her work at DIMAC, but she knew she wouldn’t be fully welcome yet. She had done her prosecuting for the city government, which the white-shoe guys all thought of as a little dirty and a lot cheap. They themselves had all been prosecutors, but they had served their stints at one US Attorney’s office or another. They got to give lip back to the federal prosecutor, if push ever came to shove.
Opened, the binders smelled like fourth grade. No amount of money could keep a black office binder from looking and feeling like a piece of cardboard with a thick plastic skin. Davenport licked her finger librarian-like and started in on the tabs.
The kids had done their best. There were some nasty exchanges between traders and their clients. People who thought they had been screwed. People who maybe expected their broker to be using non-public information to make them money. Who sounded pretty disappointed when they learned he hadn’t. Traders who were carrying on affairs, who were cheating on their taxes, one series of e-mails showing that a guy wasn’t paying his nanny’s social security. Even the White Plains branch of the US Attorney’s office, Davenport knew, wouldn’t bother with that. Lots of e-mails from one guy talking about his suits. Davenport figured that one of the attorneys knew from the television that coke dealers used to talk about how many “suits” they were bringing in. Same with boxes of cereal, or pizzas, or anything that could stand in for drugs if you both knew what each other was talking about. But after reading an e-mail or two it was pretty clear that this guy was actually ordering his dry cleaning. Plus she hadn’t heard anyone refer to drugs as suits in ten years. Not to mention that she was hoping for something bigger than a drug bust.
She was about two hundred e-mails in when she found something she had to read twice. It was the sender’s address that struck her first. She turned to her computer to look it up and confirmed her suspicions. She reached for the neat packet of colored flags and marked the page. The smallest binder would be made up just of what she wanted them to see. Just what she would carry with her when she went to visit Eliot Holm-Anderson, the EHA of EHA Investments, in person. She read the e-mail again. It only made her more curious.
A few dozen e-mails later there was another one. The same curious suffix, the same worry. There would be more work to do. She would ask the junior lawyer to put together a list of the company’s trades on the days just before and after this one. An outside vendor would run that e-mail address. Another green flag. Ten e-mails later there was another. Then more. Every few pages another one. The last one had been sent only a week ago. By the end of the day she had gone through three packets of the flags and had not noticed that the sun had set. If what she had found had only been about money, she would have been home hours ago. She had expected to find something to do with money. But what she had found had been enough to keep her there. She had missed dinner with her husband and son and she was the last person at work at a Midtown law firm. She turned the last page of the binder. It was about so much more than just money. She stared blearily down at the shuttered sculpture garden and smiled. She was on the hunt again.
CHAPTER SIX
COLOR OF THE DAY
The table was too big for the room. Ralph Mulino wasn’t sure how they had even gotten it through the door, to be honest. It was close to eight feet long and four wide, the dull laminate nicked and stained from hundreds of terse interviews and cheap lunches. The walls were plain white paint over sheetrock. Barely any better than sitting in a cubicle. You listen closely enough, you can hear the guy in the next room giving his statement. The PD would never stoop to conducting confidential interviews in a room like this. There was a lot wrong with the job, but they had some standards. Mulino slouched in the flimsy folding chair and stared at the analog tape recorder. All they would need was a swinging light and the thing would be straight out of a ’40s movie. Maybe that’s why they did it; maybe these civilian investigators at DIMAC fancied themselves a troop of James Cagneys. Or maybe it was only that the agency’s budget didn’t provide for niceties like digital recorders or paint.
Mulino turned to his union rep as he heard footsteps in the hallway. He had every pin and button in place; he was trying to make a good impression. It had been bad enough to wear the suit and tie on the ship; here he had to submit to the uniform. He hated the ceremony of it all. Out on the ship, all the other cops who had come out had told him to stay strong, to keep it together. They all acted like they believed him, but they were just the first team out. They didn’t have any say over anything. He hadn’t slept all night, going over every moment on the ship, trying to think of when he could have f
ound out that Rowson was a detective. He couldn’t think of a thing. His wife had consoled him about the Daily News, that they had to make him look bad so they could say something different from the Post, but Mulino took it personal.
His collar brass was pinching his neck. The union rep was taking notes. They give you this one for free at the administrative interview. If there’s an administrative charge you get a real lawyer, and if there’s a criminal charge then you get to meet the guy in the two-thousand dollar suit who’s the AA sponsor for half the judges on New York State Supreme. Getting the union rep means that the department doesn’t think your problems are serious yet. Most were SUNY law school grads who had signed up with the police unions after getting turned down by the district attorney’s office.
The footsteps stopped in front of the cheap door to Mulino’s left. They put little windows in them so that anyone walking by could check in on who’s subject to a confidential investigation that could cost him his job or worse. The window was reinforced with chicken wire in case some angry building inspector tried to break the glass and slit his wrists with the shards right there. Amateurs.
Mulino wasn’t quite finished surveying the shoddy room when a lean man in a cheap suit opened the door and stepped in. This one looked patient, calm, not as jittery as most of the kids at DIMAC, who seemed to be play-acting at conducting an investigation. Mulino knew he was supposed to stand up, like he was in a court or visiting a priest. Ceremony again. He pressed himself up out of the plastic chair as gracefully as he could and held out his hand.