Pariah (9 page)

Finally, Doyle says, ‘My money’s on the white dude.’

The man next to him brings another mound of chips to his mouth, munches on them thoughtfully.

‘I coulda taken him,’ he says in all seriousness.

Doyle’s eyes slide to his neighbor. Yeah, he thinks, you could. Back in the day.

As an eight-year-old kid fresh over from Ireland, Doyle had it tough growing up in the South Bronx. It might not have been so bad had his father migrated his family into one of the few remaining
Irish communities in the borough. For some reason unknown to Doyle, he chose instead to bring them to an area inhabited predominantly by blacks and Hispanics. Of the white minority in Doyle’s
neighborhood, few could lay claim to any Irish ancestry, and even then it was an Irishness distanced from them by several generations. The problem for Doyle was that he
sounded
like he had
just walked off the bogs, and for that he was teased mercilessly. Rare was a week that went by without his getting embroiled in at least one fist fight.

Tired of trying to keep her young son out of trouble, Doyle’s mother decided that if he was going to fight anyway, then he might as well learn how to do it properly. Her solution was to
sign him up in the nearest boxing gym.

Doyle learned a lot in that gym. Not just about how to defend himself, which he did with great success, but also about life itself. It was here that Doyle was coached by a black ex-cop named
Herbie Chase. As a boxer, Doyle was above average in ability but never top class, and it was Chase’s fascinating stories of life on the streets that eventually convinced Doyle to apply for
the Police Academy. But there were others in that gym who showed a lot more boxing promise.

Like Mickey ‘Spinner’ Spinoza, for example – the man now seated next to Doyle.

Right into his teens, Doyle looked up to Spinner as a role model. The guy was five years older and not as bulky as Doyle – he was a lightweight, in fact – but back then he had a
perfectly sculpted physique. And his technique – boy, was that something to behold. That guy could
move
, man, and his punches would shoot out with the speed of an arrow and the force
of a sledgehammer. Doyle always envisioned that Spinner was destined for great things in the boxing world.

And then life played one of its cruel jokes. As blows go, it looked nothing. A jab to the side of the head that Spinner shouldn’t have even noticed. But he dropped as though his legs had
just disappeared. Just lay there, drooling and twitching.

They diagnosed a brain hemorrhage. It had probably been waiting to pop in his head for months, maybe even years. When it did, its effect was like being hit by an express train.

Spinner recovered eventually. But not fully. He pretty much lost all use of his left arm, and the left side of his face would always droop lower than the right, but at least he had his life
back, right?

Wrong.

Spinner’s life was in that gym. Was in the ring. Boxing was what kept him off the streets. When he was told he would never box again, Spinner did what many other of his South Bronx
compatriots had done: he slipped into the murky world of drugs and crime.

Doyle lost contact with him. As the years passed, Spinner became a fading memory of unachieved greatness. Then, six months ago, he showed up at Doyle’s precinct station house in the East
Village. Desperate for money to feed his drug habit, he offered the only thing he now possessed: knowledge. From that point on, Spinner became Doyle’s confidential informant.

Doyle continues to stare at the pathetic figure next to him. Spinner is now just a husk, his muscles having wasted away as quickly as his dignity. And yet, Doyle knows that there’s a part
of Spinner that still wishes he could be in that ring right now, showing that pasty-faced kid what
real
boxing is.

‘Took a while for me to find you today,’ Doyle says. ‘What happened to that cellphone I gave you?’

‘Threw it away. Never did like those gadgets. Damn things give you cancer. I think that’s why they call them
cell
phones – ’cause they rot away your brain cells.
And my brain don’t need to lose no more of
them
.’

‘Uh-huh. I hope you wiped the numbers from it before you sold it.’

Spinner gives him a disapproving look. ‘You here to bust my balls over a phone?’

‘No. I got bigger fish to fry.’

Spinner pushes more chips into his mouth, then something in the fight grabs his attention. ‘Keep that chin in,’ he shouts, and soggy pieces of potato chip fly from his mouth.
‘Jab, Jab! Follow through, you son of a . . .’ He leans toward Doyle. ‘Look at that, will ya? He coulda had him. Even a slow lunk like you wouldn’t have missed an opening
that wide.’

Doyle smiles. Like Spinner, he wants to be up there so much his biceps are twitching. It’s a feeling that never leaves.

Spinner asks, ‘This fish, it’s already been fried and it’s carrying a gold shield, am I right?’

‘Actually, I got four dead fish. My partner, Joe Parlatti, was killed along with a hooker, night before last.’

‘That one I heard about.’

‘Last night, another cop got it. Detective Tony Alvarez. Blown to pieces while talking to a pimp named Tremaine Cavell.’

‘That I didn’t know. So that makes two.’

‘Two what?’

‘Come on, don’t pretend you’re here because of a pimp and a hooker. They’re nothing to you. You’re here because of your cop buddies. Far as you’re concerned,
the others, they’re just collateral damage.’

It’s a cynical view that Doyle finds all the more irritating because he knows it to be true. ‘Whatever. The point is, I need to find who did this.’

‘Parlatti – you said he was your partner, right? That must be tough for you, coming on top of the Laura Marino thing.’

Doyle shrugs. ‘The timing could have been better, sure.’

‘And this other cop, this Alvarez guy . . . ?’

Doyle hesitates. ‘Yeah, he kinda started working with me when we lost Parlatti.’

Spinner stops eating. He slides himself along to the end of the bench.

‘Hoo, Cal, buddy. Is this safe, me sitting so close to you like this? It’s starting to sound like you got some kind of curse on you, man. You upset any voodoo witch doctor or
something lately? I mean, the odds against three strikes in a row . . .’

Doyle holds up his fingers. ‘Two. That’s two strikes. Parlatti and Alvarez. Laura Marino has nothing to do with this. Now get your skinny ass back here before I add another dead
acquaintance to my list.’

Warily, Spinner shuffles back to Doyle’s side.

‘Whaddya want from me, Cal?’

‘Anything you can get me. These were calculated hits. Very clever, very professional. Whoever did these is no mutt; he knew exactly what he was doing. I need you to ask around for me.
Anyone talking about offing cops. Anyone looking to put out a contract on cops. Find out if we got any big hitters come in from out of town, like that.’

Spinner nods, his eyes back on the fight. ‘Tell me what you got so far.’

Doyle gives him a summary of what the investigation has revealed since the night of the first murders, which to his mind is a big fat zero.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Spinner says. ‘But I have to tell ya, if this is just some lone sicko out there . . .’

‘I know.’ Doyle stands up. ‘Take it easy, Spinner.’

‘Yeah. And you watch out for that left hook. Sometimes it just comes from nowhere.’

As soon as Doyle steps out of the gym, he knows his day has just gotten a whole lot worse.

Parked directly in front of him is a gray Chevrolet Impala. A man sits on the car’s hood, smoking a cigarette. He wears a midnight-blue suit, skinny black tie and charcoal overcoat. Lank
black hair fans out across his forehead, and he stares at Doyle from eyes set deeply beneath thick eyebrows. His cheeks are hollow, and become even more concave when he draws on his cigarette. He
looks like he’s on his way to a funeral. As the one in the coffin.

Doyle throws his hands up in despair. ‘Jesus H Christ, Paulson. What the fuck are you doing here?’

Sergeant Paulson takes the cigarette from his thin lips, blows a cloud of smoke in Doyle’s direction.

‘Nice to see you too, Doyle. Been a long time. I was just passing through, you know, and I thought to myself, Hey, wouldn’t it be nice to hook up with good old Callum Doyle again? We
could talk about old times, swap some stories . . .’

‘Passing through, huh? If you knew I was here, then you know what I’m doing here, right? I’m having a meeting with a confidential informant. Emphasis on the
confidential
. That means being discreet, Paulson. Look at you. You might as well put up a neon sign saying “The Cops Are Here”. Jesus, do you even remember what it was like to be
on our side of the fence?’

Paulson pushes himself off his car and pretends to look hurt.

‘Aw, gee. Don’t be like that. We got history, you and me.’

‘Yeah, history. Meaning, in the past. Now get the fuck out of here, before I do something I regret.’

Doyle turns and starts to walk back to his own car, but he can hear the clicking of Paulson’s shoes as he trails after him.

‘Can’t do that, Doyle. I feel this burning need to talk to you. If not here, then it’ll have to be somewhere else.’

Doyle stops on the street, his fists bunched. Watching the fighters train back there has put him square in the mood for landing a haymaker on someone. If not Paulson, then he has a good second
choice in mind.

There was a time when informants were more or less regarded as a cop’s personal and private property. Undisclosed sums of money and favors were traded in dark and dingy locations, the fact
of these meetings and the identity of the CI often never being revealed to anyone else.

That time has long gone. Nowadays, CIs have to be formally registered with the Police Department, which entails a tree’s worth of paperwork and a list of signatures that seems to involve
everyone up to the US President. Partly for reasons of ‘investigative transparency’, but partly also to ensure the safety of the detective involved, meetings with CIs have to be
logged.

Doyle regards himself as a man not predisposed to breaking rules. Save in circumstances when those rules are stupid. And on the odd occasion when they prove inconvenient. So, naturally enough,
he called in his whereabouts when he came over to the gym here on East Eleventh. He trusted his colleagues not to go blabbing his location to all and sundry, and especially to members of the
Internal Affairs Bureau.

Most of his colleagues, that is.

Doyle turns around, folds his arms, and waits for Paulson to reach him.

‘So talk,’ he says.

Paulson looks from side to side. ‘Here?’

‘I ain’t going for coffee and donuts with you, Paulson. Talk.’

Paulson takes another puff on his cigarette. ‘You’re an interesting man to know, Doyle. Things seem to happen around you, like you’re a source of cosmic disturbance in the
universe.’

‘It’s my animal magnetism. All the chicks love it.’

‘I think you’re underestimating your power. What I’m talking about is a destructive force. Enough to start people dropping like flies all around you.’

‘Ah, you’re referring to my deodorant.’ Doyle raises his arm. ‘You wanna take a sniff?’

Paulson taps his finger on his cigarette, watches the slug of ash drift to the sidewalk and roll away.

‘The wisecracks are all very funny, Doyle. But they don’t make this any less serious. This situation, cops dying, it’s making a lot of pen-pushers sit up and take notice. 1PP
is buzzing with this right now. They’re getting nervous. They’re looking at the connections. And you know what? There’s one obvious connection staring them right in the
face.’

Doyle can picture the brass in NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza, running around like soon-to-be-headless chickens and wondering who’s wielding the hatchet.

‘And you see it as your job to try to prove them right, is that it?’

Paulson looks shocked.

‘Not at all. Me, I think there’s nothing there to find. Just like there was nothing to find a year ago.’ He pauses. ‘Jeez, was it really a whole year ago? Seems like
yesterday.’

It’s a vivid memory to Doyle too. He recalls only too well being cooped up in that interview room, just him and Paulson. He remembers the quick-fire salvos of questions, the devious
attempts to trip him up, the insults and veiled threats. He remembers how much he hated Paulson’s guts, how close he came to leaping out of his chair and closing his meaty hands around
Paulson’s throat. It was a point in Doyle’s life at which his career, perhaps even his freedom, were nearly brought to an end, and he resented with ferocity the fact that this shadow of
a cop could have so much power over him.

And now, like a bad smell, the wraith-like figure is back with his poison.

‘So it’s just coincidence that you end up on this gig? All the dirt-diggers in IAB, and you’re the lucky guy gets the spade.’

‘Let’s just say I already had a vested interest in your precinct.’

The object of interest being me, Doyle thinks.

‘Like I said, Paulson, what do you want?’

Paulson takes a last long inhalation of nicotine. He drops the stub to the sidewalk and grinds it out with a polished shoe before finally blowing the fumes out through his nostrils.

‘The best way for you to think of me is as someone who can be a lot of help to you. Regard me as your benefactor, a force for good in your life.’

‘There being every reason for me to think of you in that way.’

Paulson shrugs. ‘The alternative is to feel embittered and victimized. No, in a situation like this you need to promote some positive energy. Look at it this way: anytime any criticism
comes your way, anybody even hints that you might be wrong, you can point me out and say, “See, kindly Sergeant Paulson here has been dogging my every step, turning over every stone in my
path, and he’s found nothing, not a crumb of incriminating evidence.” You see how that would work, Doyle? I could be the best defense a cop could possibly have.’

‘And that’s what you intend to do – stay on my case like that?’