The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  “Ms. Rowson.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted to pay my respects.”

  “All right. I know.”

  He could tell she was tired. It had probably been going on all week, he figured, one cop after another telling her how much he cared. How much Brian Rowson had done for the community. How well they supported a fellow officer. It couldn’t have been easy to stomach this parade of thick white men coming by to tell her how much they loved her husband. Her husband who had endured it all himself most likely: his locker glued shut with Gorilla Glue at the Academy, the caricature gorilla face slapped over his nameplate; the sudden quiet when he entered a room of laughing officers; the stiff way other cops spoke to him when they first met him, sussing out whether they could tell their favorite jokes without word getting back to their sergeant. Dead, he was one of them, but on the job he had never been.

  “And I was wondering if you could tell me something.”

  Mulino was just another member of the faceless mob to her. Intruding without intruding. Sharing in her grief for a moment and then going back out onto the job while she was left alone again. She was nodding, playing the routine as she had for days. She hadn’t even heard him speak.

  “Ms. Rowson?”

  “I’m sorry. I was. What was that?”

  “Your husband, Ms. Rowson. You ever know him to go to work without his gun? You ever see him leave the house without it? He keeps it locked up in the house when he’s there, doesn’t he?”

  “This city, my husband wouldn’t walk to the train without his weapon.” He saw her catch herself. She had spoken before she realized it. Now she was staring at him, trying to bring his face into focus. He wasn’t just one cop in the parade anymore. Mulino couldn’t hide his face, the one that had been in both tabloids already, the soft skin around the eyes, the thin lips, not another anonymous cop. He was surprised it hadn’t happened when she first opened the door. But she definitely recognized him now. She stepped back into the house, ready to slam the door. She paused and iced a question at him.

  “What are you doing here, Detective? Why would you come here of all places?”

  He looked up, holding the weight of nearly thirty years on the force on his shoulders. “I really am sorry, Ms. Rowson. I really do want to pay my respects. He would have done the same for me.”

  “And yet you ask me that. You ask me about his gun so you can make yourself feel better. I don’t think you should feel better, Detective. I want you off my property.”

  She didn’t slam the door. She was in too much control for that. Mulino heard the deadbolt snap shut with finality. He didn’t look over his shoulder. He knew she was watching him go.

  It had made him nearly an hour late for the Property Clerk. It’s not like they can fire you or punish you any further for that. But the assignment sergeant can make your morning a little more unpleasant. It wasn’t Mulino’s turn at the window, but for showing up when he did, he had been handed the voucher and sent to the basement to look for a watch that everyone knew he wasn’t going to find. Still, he had learned something from the detour. The gun had been real. His mind wasn’t playing tricks on him. It had been there when he shot Rowson and it wasn’t there afterward. The evidence team wasn’t going to vindicate him by finding Rowson’s gun on the ship, but no one was going to hang him by finding it in his house this week either. If the weapon was plumb gone, he still had a chance. Someone had been shot on the boat before he got on, after all. Unless they were going to pin that on him too.

  Satisfied that he had sat in the basement long enough to seem as though he had been looking for the watch, he sweated back up the narrow stairway and to the two-inch Plexiglas window. The man on the other side was stepping from one foot to the other, red-eyed, eager to get his watch back so he could sell it on the street for ten dollars’ worth of whatever was making him feel so horrible. In the background, the scanner droned about radio runs that none of these officers were going to have the chance to answer. A woman in Flatbush saying her husband was threatening her with a knife, sure to turn on the police when they arrived. A man seemed to be trying to break into a house in Cobble Hill, according to a neighbor. When the patrol showed up, he’d prove he lived there and accuse them of profiling him.

  “Sir, I’m afraid we did a thorough search of the premises. Anything after two years you can never be sure. I couldn’t find this. I did my best.”

  “No no no no no. You gotta find my watch.” The man’s thin sockets held eyes that had once been bright blue but were now dull, graying to match his aging hair. Guy couldn’t have been more than forty but wouldn’t make it another five years.

  “I did my best, sir.”

  “You stole it. I’m gonna go to City Hall. Cops stole my watch, you planned it, I know all about you.”

  In the background, the scanner sent out another dismal call for help. Mulino turned his head. They were sending out a description. A location. A body. The docks by the financial district. A name he recognized. He slid the paper below the bulletproof barrier.

  “I’m sorry, sir. You go talk to who you need to talk to. Your watch isn’t here.”

  The man started screaming, stomping his feet. He banged on the Plexiglas as the officers behind ticked off the word puzzles in their tabloids. Mulino had done his duty and no one needed to address this man again. Mulino walked past the other cops quietly consigned to their desks, turned left toward the exit onto Concord Street, and slipped out.

  He had somewhere to be.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE DESDEMONA EFFECT

  Leonard had read his share of autopsies: a woman beaten to death with a claw hammer, a man shot eight times by police-issued, armor-piercing bullets. He had seen sudden violent death advertised across the body in mottled blood, jagged skin, and raked limbs. He knew too, that drowning was as miserable a way to go as any. If someone has been in the ocean for a month, getting chawed on by the fish and soaking himself in seawater, he’s going to come out bloated and ripe and he won’t have any eyes and his tongue will be the size of a subway rat. But when someone is fished from the river the morning after she succumbed, then apart from her skin wrinkling up as though she had taken a long bath, she won’t even look tired. As Leonard looked over Christine Davenport’s body, displayed on the dock, he thought she was about to sit up and start scolding him.

  The sharp suit and polished brogues were saturated but intact. The towel she’d been laid out on was drenched, but her flesh was still bright and her arms and legs seemed loose. Leonard saw for the first time, her clothing pasted now to her body, how thin she really was. She’d worn the bulky suits to intimidate; underneath she was a waif, a hamster of a person who in another era and a different set of clothes could have been a hanger-on at Warhol’s Factory. At first Leonard was shocked, realizing how hard she had worked to make her wiry body look intimidating. It took him a minute to be shocked that she was actually dead. When he was, he stumbled, ready to retch, until the homicide detective caught him by the elbow and propped him up.

  “Steady, Mr. Mitchell.”

  Harrison pulled Leonard up by the shoulders. Leonard knuckled his knees, pressed himself upward, and caught his breath. He had managed to hold it down. Just barely. No surprise. Everyone throws up at their first real corpse, whether it’s rancid and mangled or quiet and still like this one. It’s the thought of death that sickens you, not the stench. Harrison turned back toward the techs. Leonard stared at him. The detective turned his head as he listened to the tech talk, keeping an eye on Leonard. Keeping an eye on Leonard was probably about the most important thing he could do here.

  A couple of cops crouched over her, holding up the hands, checking how far the blue tinge had crept up the fingernails, checking off lists that they’d hand over to the ME so that he could write up a report saying what everyone already knew: She had died sometime last night, maybe late. Harrison fin
ished his coffee and kept his distance. He was listening to the kids, but Leonard could tell he wasn’t really paying attention. His eyes were scanning the park. Looking for ways someone might have come in, if she were dumped here. He walked away from his crew and back to Leonard.

  “You might want to go ahead and have a seat. It will be a few minutes anyway. And it’s hot.” Leonard nodded, settling into a bench where he could watch the slow pageant himself. Harrison sat next to him. Maybe the cop was trying to console him; maybe he wanted to watch. Leonard was doing his best to keep calm under close surveillance.

  Ordinarily there would have been a morning crowd of moms with strollers and self-righteous joggers throbbing over the flagstones, but it was too hot. The evidence team was in shirtsleeves, but sweat still bubbled up from their temples as they knelt next to the corpse. It was a slow heavy heat; the sun wasn’t high enough to glare and burn. Instead, a thick, wet haze strangled the half-dozen uniforms pricking the limp figure, twisting and testing the joints.

  The boats in the little basin bobbed expectantly, patiently hoping that their masters would take them out for a spin again soon. The pier had been built for the yachts that banks kept at the ready to take clients past the reach of American law. A night with dope and girls, roulette for the squares. The boats were still there—a couple of sixty-footers, some smaller personal vanity craft—but they hadn’t seen much action since about October 2008. It would have sent the wrong message.

  Harrison turned away from his view of Hoboken and spoke.

  “So I’m sorry for you. I really am.”

  Leonard just nodded, staring off past the body and into the harbor. The adolescents with the blue gloves were finishing up their work. There was an ambulance nearby to transport her; she would have that small dignity. Leonard started to think about anything that he had seen or heard over the last few days. She hadn’t seemed afraid. She hadn’t seemed upset. She was busy making plans that didn’t include him, but busy nevertheless. He turned toward the cop.

  “I can’t believe this. Just yesterday she was . . .”

  But of course Harrison would already know that. By now he would already know the calendar of Davenport’s last few days down to the minute. He let Leonard trail off, giving him the chance to finish the sentence if he wanted to. Leonard didn’t want to. Instead he looked at the detective, taking in the vacant expression, the hangdog posture, the suit jacket he hadn’t taken off despite the heat. Behind Harrison, across the plaza and on a prim deserted sidewalk, Leonard saw another figure, all too familiar.

  “So look, Mr. Mitchell. It’s just that someone’s gotta ask, so it may as well be me. You wanna tell me where you were last night?”

  It was bound to come sooner or later. Leonard had known as soon as they had started searching his office. He nodded and stared back out from Davenport into the harbor. “Home. I was at home last night, Detective. I worked late. I went home.” No need to mention watching Mulino visit the Harbor Patrol. If push came to shove, he could explain that sojourn as working late.

  “And where is home exactly?”

  “The Ebbets Fields Apartments. Brooklyn.”

  The detective tried not to look surprised. Leonard was used to the look. No one expected him, a guy in a suit working on the executive row at a city agency, to be living in Ebbets Field. Not ten years ago, it had been worse than any project in the city. Brooklyn was changing so fast that even the Manhattan Homicide Bureau couldn’t keep up with it.

  “Ebbets Field? Crown Heights?”

  “Not what it used to be. I make a city salary just like everyone else. I went home after work, I closed the door and I didn’t go out again.”

  “A lot of that going around, the last few years.”

  “And I have a pretty nice view of the city from there.”

  “It’s only that someone has to ask.” Leonard could feel the detective’s eyes on him now. Watching his expression. Looking to see if he was too calm, not calm enough. That was the way innocent people ended up in prison, he knew. They look as though they aren’t being quite honest to a cop who needs to lock someone up pronto. You feel it’s so unjust that you scream and maybe he thinks you look so upset that you’re faking it. You check out and he wonders why you aren’t more emotional, given the loss you’ve been through. No matter what you do, it makes you look more suspicious. The Desdemona Effect, they call it. The truly innocent people, the ones who don’t even know they are under suspicion, are the ones who look guilty as hell.

  Beyond the detective’s view, the other figure had crossed the street. A guy who was trying to look a little lighter on his feet than he really was. Who walked to the next set of benches, just out of the drama’s circumference, and started staring out at the waterfront himself. Leonard couldn’t help but watch Detective Ralph Mulino spy on this little scene as the homicide guy kept up his routine, kept not-quite-asking-questions, just to see if Leonard would say something more.

  “Sure.” Leonard didn’t respond. It would make sense to a cop: Leonard got mad at Davenport for stranding him at DIMAC, hanging him to be fired by the powers that be. He had gone to confront her and things got out of hand. The kind of quick savage decision-making that motivates most murders. The kind of thing that most cops think most people are capable of at any moment.

  Leonard had a dull sense that there was something he ought to be remembering. Something Davenport had done. Something he had seen. He didn’t ask Harrison any questions. Showing curiosity about how she was killed would make him look guilty too. But something was missing, there was a spark deep in his mind fighting its way up, telling him that he was forgetting something important.

  “Detective, I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Of course not. You just understand I have to ask. I figure it goes without saying, though, that you should stay close, make sure that you’re available if someone wants to talk to you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Good to know. You have a nice day then.”

  Harrison turned away and back toward the tech. It had been a soft warm-up of an interview. Just enough, Leonard knew, to keep him worried. They didn’t have any reason to look at him for this yet, except for the fact that they didn’t have a reason to look at anyone else either. The techs had lifted Davenport onto a gurney and were sliding her into the ambulance. The heat had kept any crowd away; there were no gawkers, and stringing up the tape had only been theater. Harrison scanned the park one last time, taking in the few people who were out, all of them keeping their distance. Leonard saw his eyes settle on Mulino for a moment. Maybe he recognized him too.

  Leonard turned away from the scene; it wasn’t going to stop getting hotter. He stared hard at Mulino from across the plaza. He had heard somehow about the body. He was gloating, maybe, that Leonard would know how it felt to be interrogated. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t shot detective Rowson. And it didn’t mean Leonard would ease up on him. The best thing he could do would be to head back to his desk and work the case in the relative comfort of semifunctioning air conditioning.

  He clattered back toward West Street, past the broad plaza that had come to replace the Trade Center. Just after it had happened, they had built an aluminum pedestrian bridge to replace the one that had collapsed along with everything else. It looked like something you would string up in the back of a traveling circus to take you to the port-a-potties. So long afterward and it was still there, the only way to cross the highway-speed street. Leonard mounted the metal stairs and withstood the overwhelming echo as he crossed back toward Rector.

  Passing him in the corridor inside, a woman in a dark suit with alarming fingernails banged shoulders with him as she passed. Leonard turned to see if she would apologize, but she was already gone. No matter that you’re investigating a shooting and that you might get fingered for a murder, the little pedestrian indignities never fail to annoy you. He turned down t
he stairway toward Rector.

  On the sidewalk, Leonard jammed his hands into his pockets to think. Harrison couldn’t really make him out to have murdered Davenport. She had stranded him at DIMAC, but that wasn’t enough to kill anyone. He didn’t stand to profit from her being gone. Surely there was a husband. Maybe he had a girlfriend. Maybe there was life insurance. Something nice and quick and clean to divert the attention.

  Inside his pocket he felt something. A small piece of cardstock. He fished out the business card. Harrison hadn’t given him one: They usually do. He turned it in his fingers; etched into it was a name he didn’t recognize. Veronica Dean, EHA Investments.

  The woman on the bridge. She had bumped into him just to give him this. And she was walking toward the crime scene. The card was a smooth bone hue, minimalist, Wall Street impressive. But he could feel with his thumb that the other side had been scraped. He turned it over to reveal a frantic ball-point scrawl: Manna! Midnight! Danger!

  Leonard put the card back into his pocket very slowly. As if what he had been through with Harrison wasn’t bad enough. Another warning. Was it because of the investigation of the shooting? Davenport’s death? Leonard was a long way from being a quiet bureaucrat doing paper investigations now. Whoever this woman was, and whatever she was afraid of, he was in no position to turn her down. He stood up as straight as he could and took a breath. His neck raw from the heat, he stepped into the overmatched air conditioning of his building’s lobby and started putting together a plan.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SOURCES

  By the time Leonard had made his way upstairs, the search team was done with his office. The remains of the investigation littered the dull carpet: upturned desk drawers, lazily opened filing cabinets, everything from a shelf or nook that hadn’t been bagged up had been left to rot on the floor. Pens, blank Post-it pads, paper clips, and other office detritus swam into a uniform muck. The place was a mess. The paperwork coming in on the Mulino investigation had never been in prim shape, but it was an abomination now. And who knows what the skinny kid who wasn’t a real warrants officer yet had seen fit to pack up and take with him.