Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp’s step halted for a moment, and he gave Fulton a hard look, leavened with appreciative humor. “You never stop detecting, do you?”

  “You weren’t tying to slide one by me, were you?”

  “Not really,” said Karp. “I had a meeting with Aaron Zwiller the other day, one of Lowenstein’s people. He thinks Lowenstein is assembling a little army. Guys from Israel, Israeli weapons. It was pretty vague …”

  Fulton frowned and chewed his lip. “Shit, man, I don’t even want to think that some Israeli guy working for the Hasidim killed seven cops.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. Maybe I’ll put in a call to Zwiller. Maybe he knows something. Meanwhile, maybe you can get Kirby to ask for a warrant to toss the Ostropoler shul.”

  Fulton cackled and waved good-bye, heading south for One Police Plaza. Karp went into the Criminal Courts through the D.A.’s entrance and ascended directly to the sixth floor. He hung his raincoat in his office and went to the D.A.’s suite.

  “Is he free?” Karp asked the O’Malley.

  “He’s got Roland in with him, but he said to send you in.” Her glance turned narrow. “You’ll behave yourself, now?”

  “Yeah, Marcie, we kissed and made up,” he answered and pushed through the door.

  Jack Keegan was on the couch in his shirtsleeves, with his arms flung out along the back of it, talking to Roland Hrcany, who sat easily in the wing chair opposite. They both looked up when Karp entered, and Keegan waved him over. Karp thought Keegan looked tired. Roland, however, looked better than he had appeared in some months. Perhaps the blow to the head, Karp thought.

  But no, it was a break in the terrible Mexican brothers case. Roland made this known, with glee.

  “I was just saying to Jack,” Roland said, “if it hadn’t been for this Arab thing, they might have gotten away. As it is, there must be a couple hundred cops wandering around Kennedy and La Guardia, guys off duty, whatever—the cop bars are going broke, I hear. They’re all out looking for the Arabs, but of course, they could spare some attention for a couple shitheads who only killed one cop.”

  “This would be Ray Netski,” Karp ventured. Roland caught the tone of hesitation in his voice, but being the new Roland and the D.A. being present, he did not bridle.

  “Yeah, at least it’s our working theory. The scene is full of prints. The two Obregons, this girl, Connie Erbes, a semi-pro whore, who we’re still looking for, and a third guy, who right now is pretty much a mystery, but we like him for Ray. Oh, and another thing: we found the pad that the notes threatening me were written on—the old ballpoint-pen impression routine. These guys don’t watch spy movies, apparently. Unfortunately, nobody but the girl and the Obregons got a good look at him, and we don’t have the girl and the Obregons are going, ‘What other man, señor?’”

  “What are we holding the brothers on now?”

  Roland did some nervous flexing. “Well, there’s the 240.30, with me as the complainant, and the 135.65, also me. I threw in conspiracy to commit murder, on the assumption that they were in on Netski’s murder, that this guy was acting as their agent, but without more evidence, or testimony from the girl …”

  Keegan said, “The harassment charge is a misdemeanor, and the coercion won’t hold up as a felony. The threats in the letters are too vague, and also we dismissed the damn charges against them on Morilla. So it’s oh, your honor, my girlfriend, she knows I’m innocent, so she writes to the prosecutor. We are simple people, your honor, and so forth, bumped down to a misdemeanor or tossed out. And the conspiracy charge is pure horseshit. You better find that third guy.”

  To Karp’s surprise, Roland was nodding along with this. “Yeah, otherwise it’s hasta la vista, Mexican brothers. Speaking of which, I got to go … unless there’s something else?”

  Keegan said there was not, and Roland got up. Karp had in his mind the image of loose ends flapping in the wind, intensely disturbing, but not articulable at present.

  “Just a second, Roland,” he said, “what about the dead Arab, the shooter in Morilla?”

  “You mean, who did him? Well, the smart money’s on man number three, him or the girl—she rented the car he was found in, and mystery guy’s prints are all over it. Did the Obregons put out a contract on the Arab? Possible, but again we need the guy or the girl.”

  “What about the Russian bullet?”

  Roland shrugged. “It doesn’t match anything else in the case. Netski was killed with a nine, American made. Hell, it could’ve been there from the last tenant.”

  It could have been, Karp thought as he watched Hrcany leave, and doubted it tremendously, but there was nothing solid to make a point upon.

  “So? What transpired at our federal government?” Keegan asked, and Karp told him, Keegan laughing aloud at Fulton’s coup.

  “Anderson was not amused,” noted Karp.

  “Oh, Anderson will get over it. He’s a grown-up and Hoover’s still dead. Four GS-13s, including Don Herring, will get transferred to Butte, and the Feds’ll dive into this with both feet. My Lord, seven dead cops and the Hasids too! Kirby must be shitting himself, I hate to say it, but thank God it’s Brooklyn. You going to the funeral?”

  “I hadn’t intended to. I haven’t gone to an official funeral since Garrahy died.”

  “Go. You’ll drive out with me. It looks good, they’re cops, we’re on the same team. What the hell is that?”

  The phone was ringing, and clearly Keegan had told O’Malley to hold calls. He stumped over to his desk, picked up, said, “Okay, put him on,” listened for three minutes, pounded his fist once on the desk, muttered something to the other party, and hung up.

  “I spoke too soon,” he said. “Let that be a lesson.”

  “What?”

  “That was the police commissioner himself. It seems that at approximately five this morning, a Hasid shot three black kids uptown, killed two and wounded one. With a machine gun. Crowds are gathering. Black Muslims are standing on cars with bullhorns.”

  “My God! What happened to the Hasid?”

  “Escaped apparently, covering his retreat with a hail of lead, as they used to say.”

  They were silent for a moment, and then Karp said, “Well, this sucks,” and they both laughed hysterically, and a little too long.

  In the nervous, sober moment that always comes after such an outburst, Keegan picked up his toy cigar and said reflectively, “It’s so thin, really, what keeps it all together. Society. The law. You know, we talk lightly about the asphalt jungle, crime is out of control, it’s anarchy. Well, it’s not. Cops can go anywhere in the city, and they almost never get shot at. That’s why it’s such a big thing when a cop gets it in LOD. But I was with a military government unit in Italy in the last eight months of World War Two, and I’ve seen what breakdown really is. Say all you want about the cops, they’re brutal, they’re corrupt, the courts don’t work, criminals go free—but even a real bad criminal justice system is better than any military government, and you have to move to military government a lot faster than most people think when you’ve got gangs of people running around with heavy weapons aimed at the police.”

  “We’re far from that,” said Karp.

  “Are we?” Keegan shook his head, as if to clear it of old thoughts of cities in ruins. “Oh, I guess we are. I’m just pontificating, because I’m so pissed off at this Arab-Jew thing, and I hoped we could slide by it this time, but I guess not. Watch this for me, Butch. Bird-dog the cops. Find out what’s going on. And let them see our flag.”

  Karp put on his still damp raincoat and called Ed Morris, and they drove up to Harlem in the dark blue Plymouth Fury. While they drove, Karp got on the radio, was patched into a phone line, and made inquiries of Zone Five homicide, which had caught the case. This was Fulton’s old yard, and Karp knew most of the people working murders up there, and when he heard who was covering these murders, he was about as relieved as he could get, given the circumstances.

  At 110th Street, C
entral Park West becomes Eighth Avenue and loses its class, becoming just another seedy New York avenue, wet and greasy today, broad, lined with heavily barred shops, with most reachable surfaces on the buildings, doors, and street furniture covered with spray-painted gang tags. Despite the thin rain there seemed to be more people than usual on the streets, groups of ten to twenty-five, mostly young men, dressed in team jackets and hooded sweatshirts, hanging around convenience stores or moving like migratory herds up and back on the avenue.

  A can flew through the air and clanged against the Plymouth’s fender. Karp heard a bottle smash behind them. Morris picked up the pace a little.

  Morris said, half to himself, “We’ll be fine, we’re almost there,” and Karp said “What you mean ‘we,’ white man?” Morris laughed.

  The Two-Eight was located at 2271 Eighth, off 135th Street. Karp walked up the stairs to the bay where the homicide cops sat. Detective Second Grade Lanny Maus was at his desk, typing. He was wearing a dark purple shirt with an antique 1940s wide tie bearing a painting of firecrackers exploding, and baggy cream linen and wool trousers held up by thin woven leather suspenders. Maus had a blue-eyed, blunt, dull-looking white working-stiff–type face, a wide mouth, uneven teeth, a low forehead. His shaggy blond hair fell over his collar. It was the kind of cracker, redneck, peckerwood face that showed up in old photographs of lynch mobs. In fact, however, Maus loved working in Harlem, loved what remained of New York black culture, and might have joined the Black Muslims if they let white guys in. He had a black girlfriend and lived on 103rd Street. This did not increase his popularity with other white cops.

  He caught sight of Karp and waved him over. “You’re a college graduate—how many s’s in aggressive?” Karp told him and he finished his line. He looked up at Karp and said, “So they busted you down to riding D.A.?”

  “Nope. I’m still a big-time desk jockey. Who was the riding D.A. for this abortion?”

  “Name of Womroth. Thirteen years old, braces and acne, I gave her a spanking and sent her to bed without her supper. Why? She fuck up?”

  “No, given what’s going on, Jack wanted me to watch this one. What happened?”

  “Who the fuck knows, like usual. I haven’t had a chance to hit the snitches yet, so all we have is the statement of the surviving kid, who’s in Harlem Hospital, and statements from the kind of mopes you expect to be wandering around Lenox and ‘seventeenth at five in the a.m.; they all back Roscoe’s story.”

  “Roscoe being the survivor.”

  “Right, Haroon Roscoe, nineteen, a.k.a. Rough, a.k.a. Shane. Not a choirboy. A mugger, a hype. Now a hero of the downtrodden black race, a model citizen cut down in his youth along with his dear friends, also model citizens. The vics are Jermane Metcalf, eighteen, a.k.a. Doughboy, and Pierre Claussen, seventeen, a.k.a. Bose. According to Roscoe, these fine lads were just minding their business in front of the Ro-Lo convenience stores at five-ten this morning, you know, discussing contemporary French literature and the latest advances in molecular biology, when this Hasid walks in, buys a carton of o.j., some rubbing alcohol, and some shaving and first-aid stuff, pays, and walks out. Metcalf approaches this person—”

  “Right there, in front of the store?” Karp asked.

  “Ah, you catch on!” said Maus, grinning. “No, it seems the boys felt the need of some exercise just then, and they headed down Lenox about thirty yards, down to where this Jewish fella had parked his van. He had a new white Dodge van with tinted windows. Metcalf politely asks if he’s got a light, and the fella pops open his coat and blows Metcalf practically in half with a burst, and then sends another burst at Claussen and Roscoe, who wun’t doin nuthin’. Then he drives away. We got a city-wide out on the van.”

  “So what really happened?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. These three guys are a strong-arm crew; they’re all graduates of Spofford Prep and Rikers. They’re hanging out there, just about set to put it away for the evening, when the vic from heaven shows up—a skinny little Hasid with a brand-new van and carrying Allah knows how much cash, because it’s well known that the Jews are all loaded. It’s practically a direct deposit in their bank. So they follow this fool back to his van, maybe play with him a little, tell him to give it up, cash and keys, and then—surprise! He pulls a fucking Kalashnikov out and mows them all down.”

  “A Kalashnikov, hm?”

  “Yeah. We found nineteen 7.62mm casings at the scene, Soviet military markings and all. And Roscoe knows what an AK looks like. They’re hard to miss.”

  Karp said, “You know …” and paused so long afterward that Maus said, “What?” and then Karp said, “Just thinking out loud. You know, Jim Raney found a Kalashnikov bullet with Soviet markings in the apartment where Ray Netski got shot. It’d be interesting to see if they match up. You know, same batch marks and all.”

  Maus knotted his brow, puzzled. Given the character of his face, he looked like he was trying to figure out what number came between four and six. “Netski? I thought that was Mexicans. Where does a Hasid fit in?”

  “Well, as far as that goes, what we have for sure is a man wearing Hasidic clothes. Everybody in a Santa Claus suit isn’t Santa Claus.”

  “Oh, now you’re really fucking with my head, Karp. Let’s try to keep some things sacred, okay? Also, I’m trying to think why a guy would want to run around Harlem at night dressed up like that, unless he was looking for trouble.” He stopped. “Uh-oh …”

  “Right. If the guy was halfway legit, then there’s a possibility that somebody’s trying to get the word out on the street, don’t fuck with the Hasidim.” He told Maus what he had told Fulton about Zwiller’s fears.

  “Oh, shit,” said Maus. “That’s all we need, Jewish vigilantes. Did you notice what’s going on in the street?”

  “A little. You think it could get bad?”

  Maus humped his shoulders. “This was August, I’d say no question. The X-men are hot over this, and they’re hot over this Arab business too. Solidarity with the Arab brothers, even though actual Arab Muslims think they’re full of shit. Still, it’s something to get pissed off about through a bullhorn. We better pray for a couple weeks of cold, chilly rain.”

  El Chivato lay in a dry bathtub and poured rubbing alcohol into the festering wound in his side. He was biting on a washcloth so he wouldn’t scream, but he made a noise anyway, arching his back and writhing, washed with waves of agony such as he had never imagined. He rested for a while and then, staggering to his feet, turned on the shower.

  While the hot water beat down on his head, he thought about his recent misfortunes and the various stupidities he had committed. He had, naturally, no remorse for shooting the three negros, only that he had not made sure that they were all dead at the scene. Nor had he killed the pimp and the girls from whom he had taken the van; nor, worst of all, had he taken out the man with the black Chrysler. So there were people alive who could identify him as the cause of a good deal of death and damage. In Mexico, he thought ruefully, this would not have happened. On the one hand, he was well known—mothers pulled their children in off the streets in both Hermosillo and Nogales when he walked by. On the other hand, the police were bought off. The law belonged to the man paying the highest mordida, and El Chivato had always worked for that sort of man. But here in New York the rules were all different. The police were bribed, as everywhere—drugs and prostitution were much in evidence, openly pursued, and this was clearly impossible without the connivance of the police. But the Obregons had not been able to buy their way out of jail. Why? Because they had killed a cop? Or because they had tried to buy the wrong person or hadn’t offered enough? It remained a mystery, and one that he would never decipher, because he was not going to be there very long.

  El Chivato left the shower and dried himself, as he did so examining his wound in the mirror. It was still vividly red on both sides of the gouge, and swollen and dripping a pale, unpleasant fluid, and it throbbed, sending a bolt of pain out with each heartbe
at. He bound it up with the material he had purchased, padding it heavily with gauze squares and absorbent cotton. Then he wrapped a towel around his middle, lay down on the bed, and switched on the television.

  He drank orange juice with ice and flicked through the channels. At five-thirty the local news came on. Several of the items were of interest. A black man in a suit and a bow tie was shouting to a crowd about the shooting of three black boys. It took a while for El Chivato to understand that these were the boys he had shot. This confused him. The man seemed to be saying that there was something wrong with shooting the thieves, that the Jews were to blame, that the police should arrest someone for the shooting, but that they would not, because the thieves were black and the man who shot them was a Jew. Pictures of the thieves appeared on the screen, and then a drawing of himself in the black costume with hat and glasses. He understood now, a little. The word “Jew” had meant little to him; it was like “Toltec” or “Aztec,” a name for people with odd customs who lived long ago. They had killed Christ, he recalled, and then, as far as he knew, had vanished. But it seemed they were still around, and he had inadvertently disguised himself as one of them. El Chivato had very little sense of humor, but this made him smile.

  The smile vanished during the following story, which showed a picture of police officers leading the Obregon brothers away in handcuffs. The announcer said they were being held as material witnesses in the murder of police detective Ray Netski. A picture of Netski appeared on the screen, and although he was younger and in full uniform, El Chivato recognized him as the man he had shot and refrigerated. He was more interested, however, in the next snippet, which showed a group of reporters and a muscular blond man identified in white letters at the foot of the screen as Roland Hrcany, Chief of the Homicide Bureau, N.Y.D.A. He was saying, “We are holding the Obregons as material witnesses in the shooting of Detective Netski. That’s all I can say about an investigation that’s ongoing.”