Silent City: A Claire Codella Mystery

by Carrie Smith

  “Yeah, fried chicken.”

  “Don’t smell like fried chicken.” He pulled back his jacket and showed his identification. “Smell like I gotta get in that apartment.”

  “You got no warrant, copper.”

  “I got a nose, bro. My nose is a warrant. I know ingredients when I smell ’em.”

  Then Black Eyes shrugged. “Whatever.” He opened the door and let Muñoz into the darkened room, and then he made a bolt. As he rounded the corner, he slammed into Codella, knocking her against the wall. By the time she got her balance, he’d opened the door to the fire stairs and disappeared. Muñoz raced down the hall after him. When Codella reached the stairwell, Muñoz was two flights below her and Black Eyes was even farther down. She could hear each man grunt with the effort of taking three or four steps at a time. She willed her legs to descend the steps faster and faster until her muscles could no longer keep up with the signals from her brain.

  When she reached the ground floor, all she wanted to do was sink onto a step and catch her breath, and she thought, Jesus, I’m not ready for this yet, but she forced her leaden legs to carry her out of the stairwell in time to see Black Eyes racing away from the building toward an identical adjacent tower. Her heart was throbbing in her chest, and her quads and hamstrings burned. Muñoz’s arms were pumping like a hundred-meter sprinter’s, and she watched him close the gap between himself and Black Eyes in long strides.

  He grabbed Black Eyes by his collar and pulled him back in one powerful jerk that sent him crashing to the walkway. His head hit concrete, and as he sat up, blood gushed down one side of his face. “Fuck you!” he screamed.

  Muñoz kicked him back to the ground and rolled him onto his stomach with his long shoe as Codella finally caught up. Black Eyes was wearing a cheap, too-tight gray sweater that hugged his thin arms and concave, underdeveloped torso. His mouth was covered with open, red sores. His hair was a wild mass of wiry, oily, black curls. He had pinpoint pupils, his skin was pallid, and perspiration seeped from the pores all over his face. “Hands behind your back. Do it now.” Muñoz pressed his shoe into the small of the man’s back as Codella reached for her cuffs and slapped them tightly around his wrists.

  They got him up and walked him back to Tower Nine and returned to the apartment. Codella felt around for the light switch. When she flipped it on, the two detectives stood still and stared. The small living room was bare except for a pedestal table piled with containers of acetone, coffee filters, rubber tubing, rock salt, a turkey baster, measuring cups, buckets, tin foil, and a propane tank. Blankets over the windows blocked all traces of daylight. Muñoz pushed Black Eyes onto a chair. “No fried chicken here, bro. We’re gonna need to call in Narc. I just know they’ll wanna chitchat with you.”

  Codella continued to the far end of the living room and opened the door to one of the two back rooms. “Better call CPS while you’re at it,” she told him.

  A little girl was sitting on the bed, and she didn’t move when Codella stepped over and turned on a lamp. “What’s your name?”

  The girl didn’t answer.

  “Are you Vondra?”

  She nodded.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  Vondra shrugged.

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Yesterday,” she whispered.

  “When yesterday? Do you remember?”

  “Bedtime. She wasn’t here when I woke up.” Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.

  “Was he here?” She pointed out the door toward Black Eyes.

  Vondra shook her head.

  “When did he come?”

  “Today. I thought he was my mom. I let him in. He told me to stay in here and close the door.”

  The little girl started to cry. “Where’s my mommy?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ll look for her. And while we’re looking, we’ll get you something to eat and drink, okay?” Codella put her arm around the girl. “I have a couple of important questions for you. Were you home here yesterday?”

  Vondra nodded.

  “Did anybody come here to see you and your mom?”

  “Like who?”

  “Mr. Sanchez, your principal.”

  “Mr. Sanchez? Why’d he wanna come here?”

  “To check up on you. To find out why you weren’t in school.”

  “Nobody come here,” she said resolutely.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  Vondra Williams nodded. “Nobody be comin’ here ’less they have to,” she said with more insight than a nine-year-old should possess.

  Chapter 12

  As Codella started the car, Muñoz stared at the spot where he had tackled Black Eyes. The spot was imprinted in his mind. He could close his eyes and still see the tall oak trees on either side of that sidewalk the way they had looked three months ago in full foliage. He could remember staring up at the leaves and thinking they were a lush but blurry rainforest canopy. He could still see the dense row of pigeons sitting on a low branch. Bird shit from those pigeons had formed a speckled pattern all around him, and as he’d watched those birds jockey for positions, he’d wondered when some of that shit was going to land on him.

  The last time Muñoz had been at the Jackie Robinson Village, he’d chased down a crack dealer who’d bolted when they showed up at his door with a warrant. Muñoz was ten feet behind him when the guy had fished a .22 out of his backpack, turned, and taken a shot that sent Muñoz to the concrete. He had lain there on his back with another narc pressing against the bullet hole in his shoulder at the edge of his bulletproof vest and he’d lapsed in and out of consciousness waiting for the EMT. Was it simple irony, he wondered as Codella pulled out of the parking spot, that his very first homicide case had brought him to the scene of his final narcotics case? Was it a sign that your past always followed you into your present?

  Working narcotics had never been his end goal, just the only available game plan to get a gold shield. He’d paid for his the hard way, with two years of street work, a shattered shoulder, and a four-hour operation. And to what end? So he could get targeted by the precinct bully? So he could be humiliated in a smelly pub? He pictured Marty Blackstone last evening tossing back shots with his self-satisfied smirk, and he almost felt nostalgic for the past. Wasn’t it better to face physical danger doing buy-and-busts on the corner of 179th Street and St. Nicholas than endure psychological torture? He had pondered this question last night all the way from the pub to a gay bar in Chelsea, where he’d anaesthetized his mortification with two strong martinis and used his Grindr app to find a nearby hook-up so he wouldn’t have to hear New Dick in his brain anymore.

  “What’s wrong, Muñoz?” Codella’s voice snapped him back to the present.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  She threw him a skeptical glance, but all she said was, “You eat breakfast? I didn’t. Let’s go.”

  Ten minutes later, they slid into a vinyl-upholstered window booth at Metro Diner on 100th and Broadway. The restaurant was quiet. The breakfast rush had ended and the lunch crowd was still an hour or so away. She was reading the laminated menu when the waitress came for their order, so Muñoz went first. “Bacon burger, fries, and a large vanilla shake—extra thick.”

  Codella looked up at that, and he could tell she was tempted to make a comment—maybe about men and their craving for meat at all hours of the day or night—but she only smiled and turned to the waitress. “Green tea, and can you do an egg white omelet?”

  When they were alone, she said, “That was good work back there. Really good. I wasn’t up to that chase. You saved my ass.”

  “Well, you didn’t take me there for my great conversational skills.”

  She smiled appreciatively as the waitress set down her tea. “So how do you like life in the 171st?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Does everyone new get a nickname there?”

  “Blackstone?” she guessed.
r />   He nodded.

  “So what’s yours?”

  He shook his head.

  “Come on. I had one too. Miss Marple.”

  “New Dick,” he admitted.

  “New Dick? That’s the best he could do? Not Blue Giant or something? He’s losing his touch. He usually does a lot better.”

  They both smiled. The waitress slid Muñoz’s milkshake across the Formica table. He inserted his straw and tested the viscosity. There was nothing he hated more than a thin milkshake, but this one measured up to his standards.

  “He’ll forget about you sooner or later,” Codella assured him.

  Muñoz didn’t know about that. How many times, he thought, did a bully cop get a fag cop to whip? But he didn’t want to dwell on that now. “So what did you learn at the school?”

  “That Sanchez has an equal share of fans and critics. Everyone I talked to had a different impression.”

  “Any possible suspects?”

  “I’ve got some hunches, but I try to ignore those, and you should, too. Let’s follow the evidence. That’s why we went to that apartment. Sanchez told his assistant principal that he was going over there to check on a student—but apparently, he lied to her.”

  “Where next?”

  “I’m not sure. But a lot happened at that school yesterday. And I’m going to find out what it means.” She blew on her tea and looked out the window as a large, black caregiver pushed a double stroller toward West End Avenue. “I’m going to solve this murder.” She took a sip. “I’m going to solve it before that bastard can yank it out from under me.” She squinted across the street in the direction of the Wang Chen Table Tennis Club. Her mind was somewhere else, he thought.

  Just then the waitress appeared and set their plates in front of them. When she left, he leaned his long torso over the table and spoke in a low voice. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous, Detective Codella, but I imagine being a woman who just got back from a medical leave puts a lot of pressure on you.”

  She unfurled her paper napkin and arranged it on her lap. “What’s your point?”

  “Just that you probably have a lot to prove right now, at least as much as a gay detective who just got outted on his first night drinking with the other precinct boys.” He paused.

  “Oh.” She cringed. “I’m sorry.”

  He held her stare. “Then let me stay on this case with you. Let me help you solve this.” He wanted to say, Please. He almost said, I need this too.

  Her eyes narrowed appraisingly. A New York City diner had never felt so silent to Muñoz. Finally she lifted her tea mug and held it over the table between them. “You’re a good bodyguard. Let’s see what else you can do.”

  He raised his milkshake glass to meet her mug. She smiled. He smiled, too.

  Chapter 13

  Network news vans with satellite uplinks lined the curb in front of the school, and local reporters were spread out, interviewing anyone they could. Codella and Muñoz climbed out of the car and flashes went off in her face. “Detective, give us a comment!”

  They hurried past the cops blocking the press from the school. Ragavan met them just inside. “What’s been happening?” she asked.

  “They brought kids into the auditorium one or two grades at a time. Psychologists talked to them. Now the kids are back in their classrooms. I’ve mostly been helping keep parents and reporters out of here. It’s a zoo.”

  “How are your computer skills?”

  “Good enough.”

  “Follow me.” She led him to Marva Thomas’s office. Thomas’s thin fingers were dancing across her keyboard, and she didn’t look up until Codella rapped loudly. “I’d like you to meet Detective Muñoz, Miss Thomas. He’ll be assisting me in this investigation. We plan to speak to some of your staff while Detective Ragavan examines Mr. Sanchez’s computer. He needs the login information.”

  Thomas nodded and pushed back her chair.

  “And you still haven’t e-mailed me his mother’s contact information. The media have this, Ms. Thomas. Do you want his mother hearing about his death on the evening news fifteen hundred miles away? Would you want to hear about your son’s death that way?”

  “Of course not. I’ll get it right away. I’ve been very busy.”

  Codella thought, Right. Busy being clueless. She wanted to shake the woman and say, Don’t you realize Hector Sanchez was lying to you? Don’t you know that he wasn’t checking on those children he was supposed to care so much about? She wanted to ask, What the fuck’s going on here? Instead, she simply stated, “However busy we are, we have certain obligations to the dead.”

  Then she led Muñoz and Ragavan next door to Sanchez’s office and took out her frustration by ripping the crime scene tape off his door. “Get on that computer,” she told Ragavan. “Read his e-mail. Look at his bookmarks. Search his hard drive. Find out what was going on in his life. Who did he speak to? What did they talk about? Which names keep coming up and why? Write things down for me. I’ll be back.”

  She and Muñoz climbed to the second floor and peered through the windows of closed classroom doors. In room after room, children were sitting at their desks, working on assignments or participating in conversations with teachers who paced between their tables. Were they discussing the dead principal? Were they sharing what they had admired about him? Were they asking hard questions that no teacher was really trained to answer, like “Why do people kill other people?” or “Is anyone else going to die?” How did you possibly make a murder sound nonthreatening to elementary schoolchildren without diminishing the terribleness of the act?

  They found Jenny Bernstein sitting alone at her desk. Bernstein had shoulder-length brunette hair with bangs and glasses with dark, fashionable frames. She was chewing the end of a No. 2 pencil like a middle-aged graduate student.

  Codella stepped into the room first and introduced herself and Muñoz. “Your students are done for the day?”

  “I’m sure they wish they were, but no, they’re with their math teacher. I can’t imagine they’re really concentrating on math, however.”

  “How did they take the news?”

  “A few of them broke down.”

  “You’re John Chambers’s teacher, aren’t you? I heard about the incident yesterday. Did you speak to Mr. Sanchez after the attack?”

  Bernstein shook her head. “I went to see him as soon as school ended, but he had left for the day.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No.”

  “What can you tell us about him?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t know him that well.”

  “But you must have formed some impression.”

  Bernstein set her pencil down. “Look, I’m sorry this happened to him. I am. It’s awful—more than awful. There aren’t really words for it. But I have to be honest with you. He wasn’t the person he was made out to be.”

  “The ‘Savior of PS 777’?”

  She nodded. “His idea of saving the school was throwing perfectly good teachers under the bus. I’m sorry, but you want me to tell the truth, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I’ll solve this case a lot quicker if people tell me the truth.”

  “He treated us like a bunch of recalcitrant children. He was always popping into our classrooms unannounced as if he expected to catch us misbehaving. He’d slip into your back row,” she pointed to the back of her classroom, “and pull out his Observation Checklist and start assessing all your deficiencies with his four-point rubric. We all lived in dread of being in his crosshairs.” She opened a desk drawer and removed several sheets of paper. “Here, look. My October report card.”

  Codella took the pages. Muñoz glanced at them over her shoulder. Bernstein had been evaluated on various categories, including her creation of a respectful learning environment, her management of classroom procedures and student behavior, her classroom organization, her teaching strategies, her questioning and discussion techniques, and the level of student engag
ement. She had received a score in each of these categories as well as an overall grade of C+ for the month. Sanchez’s handwritten observations filled the pages, and at the bottom of the final page was a note to Bernstein: You need to work harder, Jenny. You need to demand more of them and yourself.

  “And that’s a relatively good score,” said Bernstein, “for a legacy teacher.”

  “Legacy teacher?”

  “I was here before Mr. Sanchez was appointed. Other legacies have fared much worse than me. Evelyn Robinson, for instance. She teaches second grade. Two weeks ago, he skewered her at a faculty meeting.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Mr. Sanchez showed up in her room five minutes before recess. Evelyn had just finished small-group reading and the recess bell was about to ring. There wasn’t much time to start something new, so she and the kids were playing vocabulary hangman and in walks Mr. Sanchez. Well, he didn’t approve of hangman—even though Evelyn was using the game to review words from their reading—and at the faculty meeting the next afternoon, he told everybody how she had wasted precious instructional time and that PS 777 students deserved better than hangman. And then he announced to everyone that Evelyn had the lowest overall October grade—a D minus.”

  When Codella and Muñoz left Bernstein, they made their way to the opposite end of the corridor where third-grade teacher Christine Donohue was reading on her iPad in her empty classroom. “What can you tell us about Mr. Sanchez? We’re trying to get a sense of who he was.”

  Donohue lowered her cheap reading glasses and let them dangle on the fake gold chain around her neck. The quarter inch of natural silver at her roots contrasted sharply with the rest of her bottled red hair. She set down her iPad, folded her arms, and arranged her face into a smirk that revealed deep creases in her freckled skin. She had a husky voice. “Don’t expect me to give you the standard ‘Isn’t this awful?’ and ‘He was such a great principal’ speech. He was a naïve Johnny-come-lately who thought he knew more than everyone else.”

  Codella moved closer. “Go on.”