by Andrew Case
“Detective Mulino, I’m Leonard Mitchell.” The investigator didn’t shake Mulino’s hand. Maybe they train them not to. “Let me get the tape recorder set up.” The union rep nodded to Mulino, inviting him to sit back down.
Leonard took his seat and fired up the tape recorder. The big, heavy, old-fashioned kind where you can’t press the button down all the way if you don’t have a tape in. An extra bit of idiot-proofing. He breathed in and started with the boilerplate. The union rep nodded slowly to the patter. Maybe he knew it by heart. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention.
“On the record at nine seventeen a.m. My name is Leonard Mitchell and the date is August 25. We are at the offices for the Department to Investigate Misconduct and Corruption, on the sixteenth floor of Forty Rector Street, New York, New York. For the record, could you state your name, rank, shield, and command?”
Mulino remembered what the rep had told him. What they always tell you. Always answer direct. Say as little as you can. Don’t volunteer. This interview, the very first one, was already a dull routine. Like an appointment at the DMV except not as much fun. “Detective Ralph Mulino, shield 9284, Organized Crime Control Bureau.”
The investigator went on. “And you have brought a representative with you today.” Then he turned to the rep. “Could you state your name?”
“Bernie Andropovic, A-N-D-R-O-P-O-V-I-C.” Mulino thought that the recitation sounded like more patter. He was here every day for some cop or other and probably spelled it every time.
“Detective, you are here pursuant to an investigation into whether you did use excessive force on or about August 23 at approximately two fifteen a.m.” Mulino smiled to himself at the way the investigators would try to sound like cops. How many reports had he written where a perp “did conceal a glassine envelope” or “did display a knife with a retractable blade.” They come after you, but they can’t help but use your language. Lost in thought, he had almost missed the investigator asking his first question. “This investigation is being conducted pursuant to Interim Order 118-9. Are you familiar with IO-118-9?”
Mitchell looked up from the script. Mulino nodded. It’s just a routine, he kept reminding himself. Be friendly. Agree. If you look like you’re worried about something they’ll pounce.
“I understand.”
Mulino was asked to read his official account in the record. He did it slowly, spelling out the radio codes and the shorthand. A brief statement in a code they both understood.
“And can you tell me in your own words what happened?”
Mulino looked to Andropovic. The man nodded. Speaking carefully, he told the investigator about getting dragged out of bed, about climbing the wet ladder, the body on the boat. “It wasn’t as though I had just dropped in when I saw Detective Rowson. By that point it was already a murder investigation.”
Mitchell didn’t look up from his notes. “Go on.”
Mulino told him about the sounds. The squeaks. Asking over and over for the guy to come out. Saying over and over he was a cop. And then the running toward the railing, the flashing of the gun, the fear.
“Was that gun recovered? You can’t see it in the photos.”
“You’d have to check the log for that.” Mulino noted that Mitchell didn’t say anything about the log. Maybe it wasn’t in yet. Maybe the gun was logged and the investigator was testing him. But if he doesn’t say anything, don’t volunteer. Mulino thought about the swarm of cops that had come in. They had crowded him out and taken pictures, then taken inventory. He’d been kept to the side the whole time, and had eventually been taken off the boat by helicopter after they gave him the now-standard breathalyzer. He had never even seen Sergeant Sparks.
“Regardless of the log. You see this gun get recovered?”
“I saw it on the deck. When I approached the body, the gun was in Detective Rowson’s hand. Or just by his hand. A department-issued nine millimeter.”
“I saw you still carry the revolver yourself.”
Mulino was about to talk when Andropovic tapped his knee. A signal. They had worked it out beforehand. If the guy says something and it isn’t a question, you don’t have to say anything. If he asks you a yes or no question, you can just say yes or no. Keep it short. You aren’t at a bar with your friends.
Mulino saw the investigator’s eyes dart toward Andropovic’s hand. He’d seen the tapping. That probably didn’t make Mulino look so smart. Mitchell finished a note and spoke. “The log isn’t in yet. If you want to wait I can bring you back down after it comes in.”
“I saw the gun when I went up to him.” Mulino only noticed after he had said it that Andropovic had been tapping him again. It hadn’t been a question.
“Tell me when you first noticed anything that you thought resembled a gun.”
“Well. I saw the guy. When I saw him first it was dark and I didn’t see anything. He was out on the deck and he went behind some of the containers. Then when he came out, when he charged, he was running pretty fast and I saw it in his hand then. I was pretty sure of it. As he ran toward me screaming.”
“You were pretty sure of it?”
“I was sure of it.”
“And what did you do before you shot him?”
Mulino had practiced this part. “I considered whether it was safe to retreat and I determined it was not. I called out ‘Freeze, Police’ while holding my gun out. When he continued to charge I fired one shot.” Mulino was never comfortable lying. He had thought about whether to admit he hadn’t said “police,” about whether to try to make Mitchell understand what it is like to have so many things going through your head at once. But it was easier just to say he had done it. He had said freeze, and he was a police officer, after all. He’d called out “police” a half-dozen times on the boat, just not right before he fired. And it wasn’t as though Rowson was going to wake up and tell them otherwise. It just would have made things all the more complicated.
Mitchell turned back to his notes. He cocked his head and stared straight at Mulino.
“Detective, what was the color of the day Monday?”
“Excuse me?”
“When you were out on the ship, late night Sunday early morning Monday, what was the color of the day?”
Mulino thought to reach out for his memo book, but it wouldn’t be there. That was his usual habit when asked the color of the day. At the start of every tour, roll call tells every cop in the city a color code. If you come across someone out of uniform, and he says he’s a cop, he can only prove it if he knows the color of the day. The true undercovers—guys doing their best to look like criminals—will actually wear wristbands to prove it. The idea is that it will end the standoff when two cops are pointing guns at each other, each convinced that the other is an imposter. A pretty low-tech trick. They stick close to the familiar with the colors: white, green, blue, red, black. Detective Mulino would always write it down, but could never remember half an hour after he was told. He hoped that if he was ever face-to-face with another cop with their guns drawn, the guy would let him reach into his back pocket to look it up.
But it wasn’t there now. When they had called him, they hadn’t bothered with that. Sergeant Sparks hadn’t told him on the little motorboat. Not the sergeant’s fault, maybe. The lieutenant who called him maybe was the one that was supposed to tell him. Mulino wasn’t even sure. When he’d gotten the call, the last thing he would have expected to find on the boat was another cop. Mulino shrugged.
“I don’t have any idea.”
“When you were called to go out with the harbor unit, did they give you a color of the day?”
“No.”
“Did any one, at any point, tell you the color of the day that night?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. He never said he was a cop. I wouldn’t have had the chance to ask him for it. And he didn’t ask me for it either.”
“But no one told you.”
When he asks you a yes or no question, you have to answer. “No.”
The investigator turned a leaf of his notes, and the sharp flap of it startled Mulino. “I want to talk about the detective. Brian Rowson.”
The union guy pushed his glasses up on his nose. “I understand why you’re curious about Detective Rowson, but your only jurisdiction is to investigate Detective Mulino. Who, I’m sure you’re already aware, saved his own and possibly other people’s lives by making a quick and correct decision.”
Mulino knew that Andropovic didn’t mean a word of it. He was there to protect Mulino so he’d say whatever he thought would work. If the shooting had gone the other way, the union rep would be boosting Rowson and skewering the dead Mulino. There was no comfort in the paid praise.
“Anyone ever figure out why Detective Rowson was on that boat?”
The rep was silent. Mulino figured it was safe to answer. “One of the techs that was on the crime scene unit knew him. Said he’d had money problems. Maybe he had sticky fingers.”
“The ship was filled with refrigerators and washing machines. Could they even have gotten one appliance off of it?”
Mulino shrugged. “I don’t even know myself. It’s just what the guy on the deck told me.” Mulino couldn’t make sense of it either. “The guy was out of money. I got called out to the ship. Someone drew a gun at me and I took a shot. The other way around, then I’d be dead and you could ask him what he was doing out there.”
“You think of any reason you in particular would get called out onto that boat?”
Mulino almost told the investigator the whole story. Almost spilled about how he was the reliable cop, the one that would always go on the call that others turned down. About how he had been kept from being promoted, how he had been on the job for ten years, watching people retire around him with healthier pensions than he would ever see. “No.”
The man stared at Mulino, waiting maybe to see if he could coax a longer answer out of him by staying silent. Mulino knew to keep his mouth shut now without being prompted. The investigator took a quick jot of a note, turned another page. Mulino wondered if this guy had ever been in the field for anything. If he’d even taken a witness statement at a bodega, a dispatch stand, a hospital.
Mitchell went on. “Let’s talk about what happened after the shooting.” But even Mulino knew he was safe on this part. After the shooting, he had done everything as close to proper as it gets. He had called right away for the backup and the medic. He hadn’t touched anything. He was supposed to have tried CPR, but it wouldn’t have mattered. The helicopter took twelve minutes to get there and Rowson was probably dead within three.
Soon the interview was over and they were both standing. Mitchell reached out and shook Mulino’s hand. Mulino wondered if that was a good sign, given that he’d turned him down before they started. Then Mitchell turned back to the cardboard hallway and was already gone. Andropovic stood up, already thinking of his next case, and patted Mulino on the back.
“You did great. It’s probably all over.”
Another lie. Mulino knew the guy was there to protect him, but it made him feel dirty just to have representation. Having a lawyer felt like an admission that he’d done something wrong.
Leonard Mitchell had done his job, Mulino supposed. He was supposed to ask. He had been told the color of the day a thousand times in his career and barely remembered it when he did. He did begin to wonder about the gun though. He saw it in the detective’s hand. The thing was, though, there was no moment where the crime scene guy lifted it up and showed the whole crowd and put it in the bag. They do that on a street shooting because by that time there are reporters present. But everyone on the boat had been PD, except for the six crew members who had woken up, claiming to have slept through the whole thing. It gnawed at Mulino a little. Maybe the gun had slid off the boat somehow. Maybe it was going to show up in the report tomorrow and the whole thing would be over. Maybe, he worried, his mind was playing tricks on him, and he thought he remembered something that wasn’t there. Or maybe something else.
The something else he didn’t want to think about. Maybe some cop had heard just enough about Mulino from back in the day. A story about Ebbets Field and the trial room and maybe this detective was due a little payback. Not that any of them knew the whole story. Just the bits and pieces that get passed down as warnings in locker rooms and grimy hallways. Enough, though, to maybe take action. To think it would be a good idea to make Mulino squirm. They didn’t know how much he had squirmed back then. Or maybe something worse. Maybe it wasn’t some line officer on the ship kicking the gun overboard. Maybe someone higher up was thinking about Mulino too. Maybe there was a reason he was called that night after all. Mulino hurried out of the elevator and into the heat. He had someone to talk to.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PAPER
Leonard slouched by the nautical window and stared past the pigeon shit onto the West Side Highway. He’d taken over Davenport’s office because what the hell, he was in charge now. At least until they threw him out. And if he didn’t at least stake a claim to the corner office, then he’d be sending a signal that even he didn’t think that he belonged there. And if he brought this one in, maybe he could stay.
More information on the shooting would dribble onto his computer for the rest of the day. Memos from the Crime Scene Unit, roll calls from the Harbor Patrol, scans of memo books from patrol officers and daily activity reports from detectives, and every scrap of paper filled out by every cop that had stepped foot anywhere near the boat that night. The NYPD ran the full technological gamut. There were the elite security units with retinal scanners, the high-end narcotics squads with fifty-foot cranes mounted with ultraviolet cameras to look into your apartment, and the counterterrorism units with goodies galore. The evidence guys are fully capable of scouring a ship in the middle of the night and sending you a bundled e-mail with eighty-seven photographs to look at the next morning. But in its daily plodding heart, the NYPD is a pen-to-paper operation. There are dozens of carbon paper forms that haven’t been updated yet, so every precinct has to keep a typewriter on hand to fill them out. Personnel files are printed on immense rolls of paper, complete with hole-punched perforated edges clinging to a spool as the machine chirps away. The entry-level kid at most businesses keeps a digital calendar, but cops are stuck with memo books where they are supposed to ballpoint everything they do, from collaring a murderer to helping someone down a flight of subway stairs. Mostly the memo books are filled up with the phone numbers of girls who like a guy in uniform. Aided cards, stop-and-frisk forms, use-of-force reports, warrant execution reports: a cop has to write out every one by hand. So even though Leonard would get every piece of digital data sometime today, his file wouldn’t be nearly complete.
In a week or two, the actual paper would come in. Leonard could smell the dusty residue of Ms. Mortiz’s third grade class whenever he opened a manila envelope from a local precinct. You need the hard copy. Even the pages that they scanned and sent ahead were all only one-sided. Whenever a cop needs to know something but doesn’t want someone to look at it later, he folds over a page of his memo book and jots it down on the flyleaf.
He had done the interview too soon, he thought. He didn’t know enough. Mulino had been almost too bright and too eager. Showing up in the uniform when most detectives will roll into DIMAC in their sweatshirts. The detective had been smiling, trying to help, until Andropovic used his stupid tapping-on-the-knee stunt again. Leonard made a note to report that to the union.
Mulino hadn’t looked like Leonard had expected either. Skeptical dark eyes on an otherwise broad sweet face, Mulino looked almost too nice to be a lifelong cop. He had shot another detective, he was answering for it at DIMAC, and he hadn’t hardened into the traditional scowl, even now. The skin around the corners of his eyes was still soft and his hair had only a h
int of gray. The guy had spent most of the interview almost smiling.
And the story had sounded good enough. But the story always sounds good the first time. Before you’ve gone back over it and checked against the logs and the other guy’s memo book and the security video if you can get it. It would all turn on whether the part about the gun panned out. If a gun turned up, Leonard wasn’t going to bask in City Hall’s glow after all. But if there was no gun, it wouldn’t matter what Mulino said.
And it still didn’t make sense that Mulino was the guy who got this call. Plenty of detectives awake at one in the morning, regular day off or no. And it wasn’t like Mulino was some special firecracker, the guy you absolutely need to have when you’re stomping around a container ship.
Maybe he would find some answers in the digital production. The least he could do was to start looking. The preliminary personnel records had shown that Rowson had a tussle with Internal Affairs about eighteen months ago. Now the whole thing was spelled out. A summary investigation for improper disposal of evidence—a euphemism for pocketing the profits of someone you busted. Rowson had taken down a small-time fencer of stolen jewelry—stuff that discreet household help tries to sell through private channels because it would attract attention at a pawnshop. The detective had been accused of keeping a couple of pairs of earrings for himself. They had been in his desk, and he’d claimed the whole thing was an accident. He hadn’t sold them, so they couldn’t bust him for it. The report had hinted that maybe he had been planning on giving them to his wife for their anniversary. They hadn’t even been real diamonds, but Brian Rowson probably didn’t know that. The investigation had been closed as unsubstantiated, with no trip to the trial room. Instead, Rowson had been transferred to the Harbor Patrol. Somewhere where he couldn’t get into any more trouble. From then until the day he was shot he had a crisp and uneventful history.
Nearly getting busted for stealing a pair of earrings, though, is no reason to get killed. And it wouldn’t explain why he had been on the boat to begin with. Leonard set down the personnel file and tracked through the roll call. The original would be a thick printout from an antique computer, complete with dot-matrix rendering and a ribbon of holes on the side to hold the paper to the printer’s knotty spool. The scan was almost illegible. Every day each precinct churns out this record of who is partnered with whom, which sector they plan to patrol, which car they will do it in, all capped off with the serial numbers of their guns. Harbor Patrol doesn’t use cars much, but officers are still divvied up with partners, and as often as not cruise assigned swatches of the waterways.