Brooklyn Noir (25 page)

“What?” Rizzo repeated.

“I don’t know any Brooklyn ADAs. I need you to talk to the ADA writing tonight. I want this to go hard. Two top counts, D felonies. Assault two and sexual abuse one. I don’t want this prick copping to an A misdemeanor assault or some bullshit E felony. Okay?”

Rizzo smiled, and McQueen became aware of the tension that had been hidden in the older man’s face only as he saw it melt away. “Sure, kid,” he nodded. “I’ll go down there myself and cash in a favor. No problem.” He pushed his face in the direction of the bar and said, “Now, let’s go get him.”

Rizzo walked in first and went directly to the bar. McQueen hung back near the door, his back angled to the bare barroom wall. His eyes adjusted to the dimness of the large room and he scanned the half-dozen drinkers scattered along its length. He noticed two empty barstools with drinks and money and cigarettes spread before them on the worn Formica surface. At least two people were in the place somewhere, but not visible. He glanced over at Joe Rizzo.

Rizzo stood silently, his forearms resting on the bar. The bartender, a man of about sixty, was slowly walking toward him.

“Hello, Andrew,” McQueen heard Rizzo say. “How the hell you been?” McQueen watched as the two men, out of earshot of the others, whispered briefly to one another. McQueen noticed the start of nervous stirrings as the drinkers came to realize that something was suddenly different here. He saw a small envelope drop to the floor at the feet of one man.

Rizzo stepped away from the bar and came back to McQueen.

He smiled. “This joint is so crooked, old Andrew over there would give up Jesus Christ Himself to keep me away from here.” With a flick of his index finger, Rizzo indicated the men’s room at the very rear in the left corner.

“Our boy’s in there. Ain’t feeling too chipper this evening, according to Andrew. Flain’s back on the junk, hard. He’s been sucking down Cokes all night. Andrew says he’s been in there for twenty minutes.”

McQueen looked at the distant door. “Must have nodded off.”

Rizzo twisted his lips. “Or he read Andrew like a book and climbed out the fucking window. Lets us go see.”

Rizzo started toward the men’s room, unbuttoning his coat with his left hand as he walked. McQueen suddenly became aware of the weight of the 9mm Glock automatic belted to his own right hip. His groin broke into a sudden sweat as he realized he couldn’t remember having chambered a round before leaving his apartment for work. He unbuttoned his coat and followed his partner.

The men’s room was small. A urinal hung on the wall to their left, brimming with dark urine and blackened cigarette butts. A cracked mirror hung above a blue-green stained sink. The metallic rattle of a worn, useless ventilation fan clamored. The stench of disinfectant surrendered to—what?—vomit? Yes, vomit.

The single stall stood against the wall before them. The door was closed. Feet showed beneath it.

McQueen reached for his Glock and watched as Rizzo slipped an ancient-looking Colt revolver from under his oat.

Then Rizzo leaned his weight back, his shoulder brushing against McQueen’s chest, and heaved a heavy foot at the stress point of the stall door. He threw his weight behind it, and as the door flew inward, he stepped deftly aside, at the same time gently shoving McQueen the other way. The door crashed against the stall occupant and Rizzo rushed forward, holding the bouncing door back with one hand, pointing the Colt with the other.

Peter Flain sat motionless on the toilet. His pants and underwear lay crumpled around his ankles. His legs were spread wide, pale and varicosed, and capped by bony knees. His head hung forward onto his chest, still. McQueen’s eyes fell on the man’s greasy black hair. Flain’s dirty gray shirt was covered with a brown, foamy, blood-streaked vomit. More blood, dark and thick, ran from his nostrils and pooled in the crook of his chin. His fists were clenched.

Rizzo leaned forward and, carefully avoiding the fluids, lay two fingers across the jugular.

He stood erect and holstered his gun. He turned to McQueen.

Morte
,” he said. “The prick died on us!”

McQueen looked away from Rizzo and back to Flain. He tried to feel what he felt, but couldn’t. “Well,” he said, just to hear his own voice.

Rizzo let the door swing closed on the sight of Flain. He turned to McQueen with sudden anger on his face. “You know what this means?” he said.

McQueen watched as the door swung slowly back open. He looked at Flain, but spoke to Rizzo.

“It means he’s dead. It’s over.”

Rizzo shook his head angrily. “No, no, that’s not what it fucking means. It means no conviction. No guilty plea. It means, ‘Investigation abated by death’! That’s what it means.”

McQueen shook his head. “So?” he asked. “So what?”

Rizzo frowned and leaned back against the tiled wall. Some of the anger left him. “So what?” he said, now more sad than angry. “I’ll tell you ‘so what.’ Without a conviction or a plea, we don’t clear this case. We don’t clear this case, we don’t get credit for it. We don’t clear this case, we did all this shit for nothing. Fucker would have died tonight anyway, with or without us bustin’ our asses to find him.”

They stood in silence for a moment. Then, suddenly, Rizzo brightened. He turned to McQueen with a sly grin, and when he spoke, he did so in a softer tone.

“Unless,” he said, “unless we start to get smart.”

In six years on the job, McQueen had been present in other places, at other times, with other cops, when one of them had said, “Unless…” with just such a grin. He felt his facial muscles begin to tighten.

“What, Joe? Unless what?”

“Un-less when we got here, came in the john, this guy was still alive. In acute respiratory distress. Pukin’ on himself. Scared, real scared ’cause he knew this was the final over-dose. And we, well, we tried to help, but we ain’t doctors, right? So he knows he’s gonna die and he says to us, ‘I’m sorry.’ And we say, ‘What, Pete, sorry about what?’ And he says, ‘I’m sorry about that girl, that last pretty girl, in the subway. I shouldn’ta done that.’ And I say to him, ‘Done what, Pete, what’d you do?’ And he says, ‘I did like I did before, with the others, with the knife.’ And then, just like that, he drops dead!”

McQueen wrinkled his forehead. “I’m not following this, Joe. How does that change anything?”

Rizzo leaned closer to McQueen. “It changes everything,” he whispered, holding his thumb to his fingers and shaking his hand, palm up, at McQueen’s face. “Don’t you get it? It’s a deathbed confession, rock-solid evidence, even admissible in court. Bang—case closed! And we’re the ones who closed it. Don’t you see? It’s fucking beautiful.”

McQueen looked back at the grotesque body of the dead junkie. He felt bile rising in his throat, and he swallowed it down.

He shook his head slowly, his eyes still on the corpse.

“Jesus, Joe,” he said, the bile searing at his throat. “Jesus Christ, Joe, that’s not right. We can’t do that. That’s just fucking wrong!”

Rizzo reddened, the anger suddenly coming back to him.

“Kid,” he said, “don’t make me say you owe me. Don’t make me say it. I took this case on for you, remember?”

But it was not the way McQueen remembered it. He looked into the older man’s eyes.

“Jesus, Joe,” he said.

Rizzo shook his head, “Jesus got nothin’ to do with it.”

“It’s wrong, Joe,” McQueen said, even as his ears flushed red with the realization of what they were about to do. “It’s just wrong.”

Rizzo leaned in close, speaking more softly, directly into McQueen’s ear. The sound of people approaching the men’s room forced an urgency into his voice. McQueen felt the warmth of Rizzo’s breath touching him.

“I tole you this, kid. I already tole you this. There is no right. There is no wrong.” He turned and looked down at the hideous corpse. “There just
is.”

Buoy bells in Buttermilk Channel gave DeGraw and Mintz lazy company as they started their waterfront stroll at India Wharf off Summit Street. Even as late as 3 in the morning, the constant hum of vehicles entering the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel off the Gowanus Expressway lent the bells a pleasant harmony.

The nightly foot patrols these cops made through the labyrinth of freight containers and warehouses were keeping Wild Willy’s crew—Red Hook’s Mafia bad boys—from molesting the busiest stretch of freight piers left in the big city. Every year, the derricks at the water’s edge offloaded 120,000 containers of cocoa, coffee, salt, pumice, and all sorts of other goods—especially those of the electronic variety—that became catnip to thugs looking to take their taste of things.

There was pressure for DeGraw and Mintz to look the other way, a lot in the way of temptation thrown at them. But they resisted the escalating bribe offers, even arrested some of Wild Willy’s tougher customers, and this patch of waterfront got so quiet on the overnight shift that the dynamic duo started hating the isolation, felt cursed by their own success. With nothing much to do, even the night watchmen of the local freight hauling companies left them alone, retreating to some dim office somewhere to play poker.

DeGraw tried to get the duty changed so that at least some of the other overnight cops could split patrol time in the waterfront area, but Mintz followed him in to the brass and argued against it, the son of a bitch.

DeGraw couldn’t understand being blocked by a partner who went behind his back. It bugged him. But then, for their two years together, Mintz was always a strange partner. He was a bundle of quirks and nerves and had a bad habit of busting balls just a little too often. Sometimes it made DeGraw question where Mintz’s head and heart were.

Ultimately, though, DeGraw decided that Mintz was just a strange guy—one who sometimes played dumb so he could shirk some duty, sure, but one who wouldn’t sell you short when it really counted. He believed that for all his faults, Mintz was a decent enough cop, clearly not a gung ho type but a guy who’d stood up during some heavy-duty moments they’d faced together. DeGraw figured he could do worse for a partner.

And maybe Mintz had been right to fight for the water-front patrol. The piers even began to grow on them when they realized that the duty was cake. In fact, the precinct commander was so happy to reap the glory for their accomplishments that they were given latitude to freelance with no brass looking over their shoulders, a rare privilege for cops in uniform. Long as they got back to Red Hook Park when they were supposed to patrol it, the duty sarge let them do as they pleased. Wasn’t the first time what started as a crap assignment turned out to be okay.

They were so isolated as they made their way from India Wharf south across Commercial Wharf and onto Clinton Wharf, tugging on all the locked warehouse doors, looking down all the alleys and between the big metal containers, that they’d taken to eating their lunch on the Clinton pier head near the railroad yard, under one of the big red derricks. If the weather was right, it was actually a pretty peaceful spot, except for the occasional turf war that broke out between armies of river rats.

On a clear night, the partners could see Lady Liberty standing vigil on the Jersey side of upper New York Bay, but on this balmy mid-September night, rain was forecast. Taking lunch, DeGraw and Mintz could hardly see Governor’s Island across the Buttermilk because a fog was starting to blanket the water where the upper bay became the East River.

Mintz dropped the last piece of crust from his meatball Parmesan hero and it didn’t bob on the undulating black water for even five seconds before some unseen creature snatched it under.

Probably a striped bass, DeGraw figured.

“Prob’ly a striper,” Mintz said.

Still trying to drown the breakup of his marriage, DeGraw’s lunch consisted of four bottles of tepid beer and eight cigarettes. Draining the last bottle, he flipped the empty into the water and let go a satisfying belch.

After a still moment spent staring at the water, they stood up on the pier, unzipped, and started peeing into the brine—another nightly ritual.

“Actually got plenty of time, you know,” Mintz said.

“Might as well finish up early,” DeGraw said, “go back and get the park done.”

“What’s this job do to your mind, Frankie?” Mintz said. “I mean, we’re out here foiling the bad guys all the time, we gotta imagine how these skells think, don’t we? Gotta do something to the way we think, don’t it?”

“Nah, we thought like this to begin with,” DeGraw said, peeing on and on. “Some of us, if we don’t put on a uniform, we end up doing exactly what the skells do.”

“You sayin’ I have a criminal mentality?”

“We look at these buildings and containers and we see what the criminals see. God help me, Lou, but if we’re not wearin’ these uni’s, you and me are in there even before Wild Willy’s guys, taking shit outa here and fencin’ it. I do believe that’s true.”

“I sold fireworks when I was a kid,” Mintz said. “Made myself fat green while the other guys got pinched. Guess I got a talent for puttin’ the other guy ’tween me and danger.”

“Criminal mentality,” DeGraw said. “I boosted cars, sold nickel bags. Then we lied on the police interview, another dishonesty. Face it, pal. Takes one to know one.”

“Guess that’s true, with, uh…” Mintz said, “with that other stuff you do.”

DeGraw almost came back at Mintz for making mention of his outside activities. As far as DeGraw knew, Mintz was the only one on the force who was aware that he sold illegal guns, and DeGraw had made it understood that the touchy subject was to be off limits. DeGraw kept it all fairly well hidden, but unnecessary talk could put him in jeopardy. Still, DeGraw thought better of scolding Mintz, because it would have required him to talk about it.

They let go the last drops of pee in silence, shook themselves, and zipped up.

“… ’Cuz we’re two friggin’ corrupt sons a bitches…” Mintz muttered as they made their usual way out toward Ferris and Wolcott, checking doors and alleys as they went. “… And remember, whatever I learned about crime I learned from you, Frank. So if all that’s in our bones, why do we play it straight? Why don’t we go, you know, like they say in the movies, to the dark side?”