Good Day to Die (14 page)

“You’re crazy, Means.”

“You can still call it off, Captain. Maybe we can get a judge to issue a subpoena. Question Stewart with an attorney present.”

“Uh-uh, Means.” She was staring straight into the side of my head. “I have no intention of calling anything off. But you’re
still
crazy.”

“I see it as a vocation.”

No doubt about it, my adrenals were starting to pump. We’d just crossed 110th Street, and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, bathed in afternoon sun, loomed on our right. The saints carved into its facade seemed to beckon. Some pointed to scrolls cradled in their arms, others to heaven. I ignored their accusing eyes, ignored the ambulances off-loading wheelchair patients in front of Saint Luke’s Hospital, ignored the fresh young Columbia students heading to and from their classes. None of it had anything to do with me. The waters of my life flowed from another source altogether.

We crested the peak of Morningside Heights and drifted down into Harlem proper, crossing 125th Street, projects lining both sides of the avenue. Harlem is not the deep, dark hell it’s cracked up to be. (No pun intended.) The neighborhood has always been spotty, with middle-class enclaves tucked away between the projects and the rotting tenements. Middle-class enclaves housing middle-class families forced to raise their middle-class children behind locked doors and barred windows.

“Means, you all right? You’re awful quiet.”

Some people fear silence; they need words the way alkies need fortified wine. Bouton, apparently, was one of them.

“I’m girding my loins for battle. In a manner of speaking.”

She hesitated so long, I thought she was going to leave me alone with my thoughts. No such luck.

“Means, you think we should get some backup?”

“You’ve been watching too many TV shows. The last thing we need is more witnesses. Besides, it’s a good day to die, right?”

There wasn’t much traffic, but every fifth or sixth block, a red light brought us up short. I could feel Bouton’s impatience, but the delays didn’t bother me. I’d come to the point where I liked to draw it out. In some ways, there’s more pleasure in the anticipation than in the act itself. I was busy imagining the look on Razor Stewart’s face when I came through the door. Bouton was imagining what he’d do right after he recognized me.

We stopped for a light at 138th Street, just across the street from CCNY’s north campus. Like Columbia, it hummed with the comings and goings of young, fresh-faced students. Only here the faces were black or Latino instead of white or Asian.

“I went to this school,” Bouton said. “A long, long time ago.”

“You from around here?”

“Not anymore. I grew up in the Riverton Houses, fought for everything I have. Now I live in Forest Hills.” She managed a wistful smile. “With the white people.”

“You have a family?”

“The job’s my family.”

“Gee, where have I heard that one before?”

“I’m divorced, Means. My daughter’s away at Princeton. In her first year. I’m not looking to remarry; I’m looking to get ahead.”

“Seems like you put all your ambition eggs in one basket.”

She didn’t answer and I let it drop. What was the point? My focus had narrowed past the point of idle conversation.

I turned left on 147th Street, heading for the Hudson River and the domicile of Razor Stewart, as nervous as a nymphomaniac in a men’s prison. Some people race motorcycles for kicks; others jump out of airplanes. Me, I disrespect New York criminals who structure their entire lives around being respected. Junkies brag about the “rush” of mainlined heroin or inhaled crack cocaine; I’ll put the rush of danger up against any drug. I wasn’t kidding when I told Bouton it was a good day to die.
Any
day is a good day to die. As long as you go down fighting.

The 800 block of West 147th Street looked like it belonged on a movie set. The tenements lining both sides of the street, the few left standing, had been ravaged by the twin terrors of impoverished New York neighborhoods: abandonment and fire. Battered apartments, the windows broken out by firemen and never replaced, marked every building. Black stains, shaped like the flames that made them, crawled over the window frames and up toward the roofs.

Yet the apartments weren’t empty. Odd pieces of fabric, from gay prints to stained, yellowed sheets, hung over many of the gaping holes that passed for windows. They announced the fact of possession. Shouting, here I am and this is my home. Maybe the floors are busted open and the ceilings burned out; maybe the stink of the fire still scorches my lungs and there’s no heat and the junkies stole the plumbing; maybe I stole the plumbing out from under myself, but here I am and this is my home.

It was a beautiful afternoon, and the locals were out in force. We were driving a four-door Plymouth sedan with blackwall tires, one of tens of thousands owned by the city. As we slowly cruised the block looking for number 865, the citizens, making us for the cops we were, began to drift away. By the time we found Stewart’s building, the street was deserted except for the very young and the truly insane.

One of the former, a little girl who looked all of ten years old, sat on the stoop of 865 West 147th Street. She was wearing pink pants and a blue Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Someone had taken the time to braid her hair into neat cornrows. That same someone had allowed her to go out onto the mean streets by herself.

Poverty creates its own contradictions, and like any good cop, I’d learned to ignore them. As far as I was concerned, that kid was just another part of the landscape. There was no reason to acknowledge her existence. Bouton didn’t see it that way.

“Hello, baby,” she said, touching the girl’s cheek. “What’s your name?”

The child looked up at Bouton and grinned a grin as wide as the mouse on her T-shirt. “Lena,” she said.

“What’re you doing out here by yourself? Where’s your mama?”

“She upstairs with a trick.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. As if she were reciting her breakfast menu.

“Welcome to hell,” I muttered.

The girl looked at me, then back at Vanessa Bouton. “Bombo geekin’,” she said solemnly.

“Pardon me,” Bouton answered. “I don’t understand.”

Lena pointed to a man on his hands and knees in the rubble-strewn lot next to the building. “Bombo geekin’,” she repeated.

“What’s ‘geeking,’ baby?” Bouton asked.

The kid’s eyes opened in surprise. She cocked her head to one side and explained, “Bombo lookin’ for rocks.”

“Rocks? I don’t get it.”

“For Christ’s sake, Captain,” I said, “this just isn’t the time for social work.” All I got was a blank stare in return for my words of wisdom, so I compounded the felony by continuing. “It’s like this, Captain. Every night the crack junkies go into that lot and every other lot on this block to smoke rock cocaine. Being as the rocks are mostly sold in little vials and the people handling them are stoned out of their minds and all the streetlights have been shot out, rocks get spilled and lost. Bombo is searching for those lost rocks. Now, can we get going?”

“Bombo geekin’,” the girl repeated, her smile gone now.

“Lena,” Bouton squatted in front of the girl, “do you know Razor Stewart?”

“Yes.”

“Is he upstairs?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you seen him today?”

“No. He mostly don’t come out before dark. If he need somethin’, he send one of his bitches for it.”

That did it. I turned my back and started into the building. If Bouton wanted to hang out, that was her problem. The last thing we needed to be feeling, at that point, was compassion or pity.

I heard her coming after me, but I kept going until I reached the second-floor landing. Then I turned the gold chain around to let my shield dangle against my chest. Bouton’s eyes widened when she saw the way I had it displayed. They grew into saucers when I slipped the Detonics out of my belt.

“I think you wanna go in with your piece in your hand, Captain. We’re not planning to knock.”

I walked over to apartment 2B and examined the lock, a small Medeco installed just above the doorknob on a wooden frame. That was another advantage to going after pimps instead of drug dealers. Pimps just aren’t security conscious; they don’t have that much to protect.

I took a deep breath, then stepped forward, kicked the lock out and walked into the apartment. It was a perfect moment, as good as they get for me. Stewart was sitting on the bed. A tall, heavy woman (a girl, really, all of seventeen or eighteen) bent over him, her naked breasts hanging right in front of his face. A second woman, an emaciated junkie with dark tracks crawling over both arms, stood in front of the stove, cooking something that smelled like breakfast.

Nobody moved for a long time. I suppose I could have shifted things into gear, but I wasn’t in a hurry. I wanted to preserve the scene, to give it the sharp reality of a photograph. The kind you put in a scrapbook.

Stewart finally broke the spell by dropping his head into his hands. “Oh, shit,” he muttered. “I thought you was dead.”

The woman standing next to Stewart reached for a robe on the back of a chair and I instinctively swung the Detonics around to cover her.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “Not a fucking thing.”

She froze in place, squeezing her eyes shut. “Please don’t kill me.” It came out a whisper. The whisper of a very small child confronted by a raging parent.

“Captain, would you secure the women?”

Bouton knew the drill. Like any good bureaucrat. She put both women on the floor, slapped on the cuffs, then stood them up and carefully frisked them.

“Sit them against the wall,” I ordered, knowing I’d hear about it later. “I want them to watch.”

“Why you doin’ this, Means, why …”

“Means?”
I shouted, taking a step toward him. “You know what to call me, Stewart. I taught you last time we met.”

“Mister
Means. I forgot, man.” He put his hands in front of his face.

“Stand up, Stewart. Stand up and strip.”

“Damn, why you doin’ this. I ain’t been near that shelter. All I’m after is mindin’ my own bidness.”

“Do what he says, you piece of shit.”

I glanced over at Bouton to find her face contorted with rage. At first I thought she was pissed off at
me,
but her narrowed eyes were focused on Razor Stewart. I made a mental note to ask her about it when we were alone.

Stewart’s own eyes were fixed on the two women as he stood up and stripped off his shirt and trousers. He was being disrespected and they were watching, perhaps even enjoying, his discomfort. The glance he shot them was more than a warning not to laugh or smile. He was announcing the fact that they were going to get their butts kicked as soon as we were gone. Not only was it a matter of principle, it also made good business sense.

“Damn,” I said, “now I can understand why you girls stay with old Razor. That’s not a dick, that’s a goddamned bazooka. You take transfusions to keep it supplied, Razor?”

“Oh, man. I mean Mister Means. Please, tell me what you want from me.”

I slipped the Detonics into my belt and folded my arms across my chest. “It’s simple, Razor. You killed John-John Kennedy and I want you to confess.”

His eyes shot up and his jaw dropped down. He couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d just announced his candidacy for Citizen of the Year.

“Who? John-John Kennedy? Wasn’t he the president?” The attempted lie, given the expression on his face, was actually pitiful.

“Ahhh, you’re bullshitting me. I was hoping for that.” I smiled and let my hands drop to my sides. “Kennedy went to The House of Refuge to get away from
you.
A dozen kids at the shelter told me so.”

There’s something about nudity that takes the fight out of people. Or maybe Stewart was remembering that he and I had gone hand-to-hand before. He’d taken a bad beating that night. A bad beating in an even-up contest.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t want no trouble. There ain’t no cause to get in my face. You ain’t got to dog me here, Mister Means. Ah’m ready to cooperate.”

The fun was over. He’d said the magic word and it was time to go to work. The first thing I did was toss the apartment, looking for any indication that blackmail was part of Stewart’s financial strategy. I found a cheap .32 and a small amount of cocaine, but nothing else. No photos, no videos, no hastily scribbled notes.

I put him up against the wall, searched his clothing, had him dress, then marched him into one of the bedrooms. By that time, Bouton had released the two women. There was no point in confining them, because they no longer had an obligation to defend their man. He was cooperating.

“All right,” I said, once the door was safely closed behind us, “let’s hear the confession.”

Stewart’s jaw dropped again. As did Vanessa Bouton’s. She was standing right next to me and clearly having a problem understanding my strategy. Which didn’t surprise me, because what I was doing was having fun. Fun was not Vanessa Bouton’s strong point.

“You said you were going to cooperate,” I continued.

“I never killed
nobody,
” he hissed. “Least of all some damn sissy wasn’t worth shit anyway.”

“I know that, Razor. But I really
need
this confession.”

“You crazy, Means. You out your fucking mind.” He turned to Bouton. “The man is a damn
psycho.
” His voice had risen two full octaves; he was actually pleading. “Ah didn’ do nothin’ to that boy. Word, Officer, the boy was sellin’ his butt ’fore I ever knowed he was alive. Ah was doin’ him a solid-gold favor. Kid like him don’t know shit about the street. How he gonna survive out there by hisself? Little skinny thing lookin’ like a damn
girl?
How he gonna make it ’thout somebody watchin’ his back? Alls I did was tell him where it’s at.”

“And then?”

“Then he go hide in that damn shelter you so worried about.”

“The one I told you to stay away from?”

“I
did
stay clear. I ain’t come within a mile of that shelter.”

“Before or after you slapped Kennedy around?”

“I never …”