Justice Denied (2 page)

The sound of sirens coming closer could be heard. “Hey, I just remembered,” said Wayne. “Did you call D.A. Homicide?”

This was new. An instruction had been passed down from the chief of detectives that the detective in charge of a crime scene in a suspected homicide was to call the newly reconstituted homicide bureau of the New York D.A.'s office immediately upon arrival at the crime scene.

Frangi said, “Yeah, I made the call. Our luck, we'll get a fourteen-year-old girl just out of law school.”

Now the little restaurant's window reflected the beams of a half-dozen red lights as the slicks arrived, in increasing order of rank, for it would never do for a superior officer to arrive on a scene without his inferiors stacked up to show that they too were on top of things. An elaborate system of delays and phone calls built into the vitals of the NYPD insured that this would ever be the case.

Thus Wayne and Frangi had to tell their story to the lieutenant in charge of their precinct squad, who told it to the duty captain, who informed the deputy chief in charge of Manhattan, who told the deputy commissioner, who told the deputy mayor. It was somewhat unusual to have a deputy mayor on a slick, but the mayor knew that the U.N. brought forty thousand jobs to New York, and he was determined to let the world know that whether or not lesser New Yorkers fell like flies, the flesh of the international community was as sacred to him as that of his sainted mom.

After the word had gone down and the deputy mayor had posed gravely before the cameras to ritually renew the City's marriage to the World Body and its every minion; and after the man from the P.C.'s office had come out strongly against terrorism in general and especially in New York (not forgetting to boast about the matchless anti-terrorism capacity of the NYPD); and after each level of command had left in decreasing order of rank, each one telling the next one down that there better not be a fuck-up on this one, they wanted clearance
yesterday,
and whosoever got the blame if there
were
to be a fuck-up (and it would certainly not be
himself
) would spend the rest of their career in a blue bag guarding a motor pool in the South Bronx; after all that, when there was no one left in the restaurant but the lieutenant, the two detectives, a half-dozen irritable witnesses, a restaurateur wondering whether a story he would tell for years was worth losing a Sunday lunch hour, and a dog who had to pee, Wayne said, “Hey, Lou, could you tell us one thing? What's all this horseshit about terrorists? We don't know zip yet. The guy's old lady could've had him whacked for the insurance or something.”

The lieutenant stared at him. He motioned the two detectives to follow him into the restaurant's small bar.

“Nobody told you?”

“Naw,” said Frangi. “I mean, what the fuck, we're just the detectives on the case, why give us any information? It'd be like cheating—”

“A guy called the
Post
and CBS. He gave the time and place and the name of the vic and said he was the Armenian Secret Army, and then a lot of political horseshit. We got a transcript back at the house.”

“Armenians, huh?” said Wayne. “You think it's legit, Lou?”

The lieutenant rolled his eyes. “The fuck I know. The brass wants a terrorist. If it turns out the guy was dorking some big
gaupo's
kid sister, well, we'll have to work around it. But, guys, I need speed on this one. Whatever you need—cars, radios, stealers up the ying-yang, whatever. Red ball, all right?”

Wayne and Frangi exchanged a look. Wayne said, “We'll toss his place, see if he's into anything naughty. His office too, maybe—”

“Uh-uh, the office is out. It's foreign territory,” said the lieutenant. “The guy's a dip; we're gonna move like silk around most of the people he knows. You understand the drill.”

“It's like parking tickets,” said Wayne.

The lieutenant shaped his face into a false smile. “You got it. No leaning. Please, thank you, yessir, nosir. Any intrusion on U.N. mission property, and that includes motor vehicles, has to be cleared up the chain to the P.C. After you've made your calls and figured out who you need to talk to at the mission, if anyone, I need to clear it in writing. There's a form.” The lieutenant paused and lit a cigarette from the butt of his old one. He asked, “You run the car yet? No? Well, get on it, and when you get the printout, check it for Armenian names.”

“Armenian names?” asked Frangi wonderingly. “You think these big-time terrorists used their own car on a hit?”

“It shows movement, dammit,” snapped the lieutenant. “And call B.S.S.I. too. There's a guy there, Flanagan, he's waiting for your call.”

Frangi made a sour face. The Bureau of Strategic Services and Intelligence, the former Red Squad, was not popular with street detectives, who considered politically motivated crime of such trivial concern that it was not worth the time and money expended on it. Besides that, B.S.S.I. did not put people on the pavement, which meant they were kibbitzers rather than helpers.

The lieutenant caught the look. “Just do it!” he said. “Okay, you got the word. I want to be kept up on this on a daily basis, follow?”

Frangi let his head loll and dangled his arms at shoulder height, miming a marionette. In a squeaky voice he said, “Hi, kids! I'm a detective. Want to play with me?”

The lieutenant shook his head and allowed himself a sour grin as he left.

Wayne said, “Movement, huh? Tell me, you think this case is gonna be a serious pain in the ass or what?”

“Well, the first movement I'm gonna make is my bowels,” replied his partner. “And after that I think we should movement the witnesses out of here before they all starve to death.”

“Yeah,” Wayne agreed, “and speaking of which, we could make a movement toward getting some lunch. Maybe the guy here could give us some veal scallopini on the arm, seeing how we brightened up his day so much. Hello, Roland.”

This last was directed toward a man who had just entered the restaurant. Both detectives smiled and greeted him warmly, because he was evidence that they would not, amid their other troubles, have to put up with a fourteen-year-old girl assistant D.A.

“You on this case, Roland? You poor bastard!” said Frangi with feeling.

Roland Hrcany, assistant D.A. in the homicide bureau, sat deliberately down on a chair and regarded the two detectives balefully. “You know what I was doing when you guys' call came in? Do you know? I was in my bed and I was chewing on a buttock the size and firmness of a ripe cantaloupe melon and letting the juice drip into my mouth.”

“Not a voter, hey, Roland?” said Wayne.

“Correct in your surmise, Detective,” said Hrcany. “Twenty is plenty. Okay, what do we have on this abortion?”

They discussed the case, easily and humorously. They were all pros and had worked together many times before. Besides that, Roland was the most popular with the police of all the A.D.A.'s in Manhattan. It was his stock in trade, and he worked at it. He was arrogantly male in the way most cops conceived maleness: profane, violent, and a tremendous drinker. He knew hundreds of available women and had made dates for hundreds of cops, not that cops need help in that area, but the thought counted. He would also do favors for cops in line of duty, save them from embarrassment in court when they had screwed up the evidence, or make a cop look particularly good, or help cops stack up overtime for court appearances around the holidays when they needed extra cash.

But most of all there was the body. Roland Hrcany was a committed bodybuilder and weight lifter. He had twenty-five-inch biceps and a forty-four-inch chest and a nineteen-inch neck. Cops are physical people. They believe they have to dominate physically to survive. Roland was physically dominating. That he was also a very smart, aggressive lawyer, capable of grinding mutts and their candy-ass lawyers to powder in court, was just the cherry on top.

They laid out the case, respectfully, knowing that Roland would understand the fix they were in with the slicks and sympathize, and he did. Roland interviewed the witnesses and dismissed them. Frangi went to the bathroom. The patrolmen stopped guarding the entrance, and the Villa D'Este opened for business.

Frangi came back. The proprietor walked over and, smiling, offered lunch, which they accepted. His place was going to be on television, and he was happy with the world. When they had been given a huge bread basket and a round of drinks, Wayne said, “So, Roland, what do you think? A ball breaker, right?”

“Not really, Barney. I got a good feeling about this one. I think it's gonna play right for us.” The two detectives made skeptical noises, but Roland advanced his case with undiminished confidence. “No, look: they were waiting for the guy, this Ersoy. They were parked where they knew he was going to pass at that particular time. So they knew him—”

“Not necessarily,” Frangi interrupted. “They could've been pros, casing him for weeks.”

“Okay, or they knew his habits, but no way they were pros. A pro who knew as much about the vic as these guys did would've waited by his apartment and given him three in the head from a small-caliber gun.”

“How can you say that, Roland? It's on TV all the time: the terrorists in Europe and the Middle East hit these politicians like a fucking army: machine guns, rockets—”

“Yeah, but those people are covered by heavy security. You can't get to them unless you blast your way through. Our guy was naked. He didn't feel threatened at all. So, of all the times to hit someone, why pick broad daylight on a Sunday, with your car pointed down a one-way street whose only outlet is through U.N. Plaza, which practically every other weekend is loaded with cops and demonstrators. It doesn't make sense unless it's amateur hour.”

“He's got a point, Joe,” said Wayne.

Frangi replied, “Okay, fine, say I buy that, what does that give us?”

“It means,” said Roland, “that either the killing comes out of his life, as usual, and the Armenian Army thing is horseshit, a dodge,
or
that you're looking for a bunch of Armenian assholes sitting around a kitchen table in Brooklyn. I mean, it's not gonna be Carlos the Jackal.”

Wayne sighed. “Yeah, well, nothing against the Armenians, but that would suit me fine. We have to start tracing through this dude's life, we're talking weeks, swimming upstream against this diplomat shit all the way. So I guess we have to start with the blue car and the printouts and the Armenian names. And if you're right, they
might
have used their own car.”

“They might have,” Roland agreed. “But we still have to check out the vic. Did I see a safety-deposit key on that case you took off him? Yeah? People with boxes usually have more interesting lives than most. You're going to toss his place today?”

The detectives looked nervously at each other. “Well, that's what I meant about swimming upstream. We got a lecture about being diplomatic,” said Wayne. “The brass wants us to go through the embassy on everything.”

“Yeah, well, that's fine for the embassy personnel and the office, but his personal place is our meat. It's a felony investigation, not a parking ticket. If you get any heat there, call me. I'll take it all the way up the line if I have to, and—”

He looked up, aware of a presence looming over him. It was a very tall, very black man wearing a Burberry over a gray suit and a brightly colored pillbox hat on his head. He had gold-rimmed spectacles. They all stared. The man smiled and reached into his coat. They all tensed, but he brought out only a leather card case.

“Excuse me,” the man said. “I understand you are of the police?”

“Yeah,” said Frangi. “Who're you?”

The man passed each a large, stiff engraved card declaring him to be M. Etienne Mbor Sekoué of the Senegalese mission to the U.N. He said, “I extremely regret not coming before this, but I felt it proper to escort my sister home. She was entirely devastated by the lamentable events of this morning. It is her first visit to New York and—”

“Wait a minute, you're a
witness
?” Frangi exclaimed.

“Yes, I approached one of the officers on the street, and they directed me here.”

“Please sit down, Mr. Sekoué,” said Roland. “Tell us what you saw.” Wayne brought out his notebook and said, “Where were you when the shooting took place?”

The African settled himself at the table's fourth seat. “I … we, that is, my sister and myself, were on point of crossing Second Avenue. We were perhaps in the center of the street when we heard the shots commence—a fusillade.”

Wayne frowned. The man had been farther away from the action than some of the other witnesses. He asked a few more questions about the movements of the killers and their victim, but this merely confirmed what they already had. “Anything else, Mr. Sekoué? Did you notice anything unusual about the killers? Or their car?”

“Of the assassins? No, no one could see anything of them. Their masks, their gloves. As to the car,” he smiled self-deprecatingly, “it was a large American car, new, of the color dark blue. I am not familiar with the American marques.” He paused. “Surely, however, you will be able to search it, having the license number, no?”

Frangi said, “Sure, if we had the number, but we don't.”

M. Sekoué's spectacles glittered when he smiled. “Ah, but I have written it down, you see.”

And he had. Before their amazed faces he produced a tiny leather address book with a gold pencil attached. A license number had been neatly written inside the back cover. Wayne wrote it down in his notebook. The three men thanked the diplomat profusely, and he departed.

“That's the kind of brother we need more of in this town,” said Frangi with feeling. “Now, five bucks says it's ripped off and we're back to zero. You want to make the call, Barney?”