Reckless Endangerment (11 page)

Although El Chivato had never actually been imprisoned, he had visited jails many times, in Nogales, Tucson, and various places in Mexico. Many of his clients were incarcerated and wished still to conduct their businesses or to deal with difficult witnesses. The James A. Thomas Center, one of Rikers Island’s ten facilities, was the largest jail he had ever visited. Passing through visitor clearance, the youth was conscious of a small uneasiness, which stemmed not so much from the precise venue, but from being in a crowd of strangers and unarmed. The guard who passed them in with the other visitors was, for example, staring at him insolently, and he could do nothing about it under the circumstances. This made him cross.

The guard had seen a good many odd couples pass through his metal detector, but even so, this one stood out. The woman had a big mane of blond hair done in the current Farrah style, or maybe it was a wig, and she had a coarse, lively face, with the eyebrows plucked into fine geometric parabolas and the wide mouth greased a shining reddish purple. She had on a wild jungle-print blouse with the top two buttons open. The guard didn’t mind taking a look, and saw she had a red lace bra on, brim full of tan flesh, on which trembled a petite gold cross. She also wore shiny aquamarine slacks tight enough to show the slice of her vulva, tucked into white boots trimmed with fur, and had over her shoulders a fake fur coat of a bluish color not found among the furry creatures of the wild. Whore, was his thought, although she had signed in as the prisoner’s wife. Maybe she was both—not an unfamiliar combo on the Rikers visiting list.

The kid was definitely in a different class of weirdness, however. He was a little guy, a Latino of some kind, and the guard was glad he was not an inmate, because he had the kind of girl’s face and lithe body that would have had knife fights breaking out all over the joint on the first day. The hat was the first thing, a tall white cone with a wide brim, the kind cowboys used to wear in the old movies. His shirt was black and embroidered and had pearl buttons, and his neatly pressed whipcord trousers just brushed the tops of elaborately worked cowboy boots in black and white, which had tooled silver tips on them. He wore a peculiar loose pale coat, like a raincoat but made of a heavier material like canvas, that hung down nearly to the top of his boots.

People in the line were looking at him and some were making comments, and the guard could see the kid didn’t like it. He passed them through with only a cursory examination of the woman’s large leather bag. It was late in his shift, and he didn’t want any trouble.

By the time El Chivato and Obregon’s woman, Connie Erbes, were seated at the visitors’ table, and Jesus Obregon was staring through the glass from the other side, the young man was in a foul mood. He had looked into a number of the faces of those who had mocked him, and should he ever encounter them again it would be too bad for them. Obregon greeted him effusively in Spanish, asked after his uncle and the rest of his family, uttered compliments and congratulations on hearing that they were—thank God—quite well, inquired about his flight, asked if he had encountered any trouble in getting to the apartment in Washington Heights and meeting Connie.

Then to business. El Chivato listened in silence to the story of the deal, the man Lucky, the betrayal, the lost product, the arrest, the failure of the bribe. The youth had heard such stories before. As the suspicious lump is to the surgeon, or the leaking pipe to the plumber, they were the basis of his trade. He listened further while Jesus Obregon explained what he wanted done.

“I understand,” said El Chivato. “I find this man and I tell him, you must confess to the police that you have killed the
lahara
and not the Obregons. With them, I tell him, you go to jail, but if not, something worse.”

“You will feed him his little
chile
chopped up in a tortilla,” said Obregon.

“A taco,” said El Chivato without inflection, as if correcting a minor point of technique, and then asked, “And suppose he does not confess, or dies somehow? Also, it may be that I can’t find him. What then?”

“What then? You understand that while this is a comfortable jail, I would still rather be outside. So the most important thing is to get our release from the false charge. I would naturally prefer to combine this with fucking that
pendejo,
but if not, then not. There is the prosecutor. Perhaps a judge. You understand how these things are done.”

“Yes, I do,” said El Chivato, and for the first time he gave Jesus Obregon the favor of his remarkable, glittering smile.

The man who had murdered Ali al-Qabbani and thrown his weighted body off a Brooklyn pier was the product of a desert society and could therefore not have been expected to know much about tides and currents, especially the peculiar ones present in New York harbor and its various rivers. For the same reason he also was not overly familiar with the great increase in buoyancy attendant upon decomposition of the human body, or that to make sure a corpse does not float, you must make sure that the internal cavities are well punctured. Bloated like a young whale, Ali’s corpse easily dragged the trivial weight of the concrete blocks that were wired to his ankles (which in any case soon fell away as the flesh softened and stripped off) and set boldly off upon the broad waters.

Arriving after many a tidal diversion at the Statue of Liberty ferry slip, the thing became the concern of Detective Al Camera, who caught the new floater out of the First Precinct, within whose purview lies the southernmost point of Manhattan, including the slip. Camera was, perhaps inevitably, known as Primo in the cops, although (perhaps because) he was not in the least like the late gigantic pug, but rather a rotund, balding, mild-eyed, scholarly-looking man of forty-eight, whose tastes ran to dull cardigans and comfortable cord suits.

He had a set of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose (the nostrils thereof having been liberally smeared with Vicks against the smell) as he peered over the dank ruin of Ali. Camera had been with the First for twelve years and had seen all kinds of floaters. He was glad that this one was male and not mutilated in any way that he could see. Aside from that, he did not mind watching autopsies. He especially liked watching this particular assistant medical examiner work.

“Shot from behind, close range, four … one, two, three, four, no, I tell a lie, five times,” said the M.E. He had a soft Irish accent and thinning red hair, and he was not as drunk as he would be later in the day. His name was Maher.

“A professional hit,” said Camera.

“Well, sure, you’d know about such things, being a detective and all that,” said the M.E. “In my own professional capacity, however, I believe I am almost ready to rule out both suicide and accidental death.”

Camera laughed, and Maher joined him, their noise echoing off the tiled walls.

“The entries are small,” Maher observed, “and there are no exit wounds, which suggests a small-caliber weapon, the bullets bouncing around within the calvarium, doing great mischief. I expect a mere pudding when I come to crack his noggin open.”

“How long would you say he’s been dead, Doc?”

“Oh, a week, ten days, no more. He was slain in the dark of the moon by an attractive brunette with a Polish accent wearing Nuits de Paris and a pair of bloodred knickers. More than that I cannot say.”

“How thick was the accent?”

Maher put on a look of mock affront. “Please, Detective, the profession frowns on rank speculation. But I was serious about him being killed in the dark. Take a look at this.”

Maher went to the side of the exam table and lifted the corpse’s shoulder slightly.

“A tattoo,” said Camera. “You’re saying he shot the guy in the dark and stripped him and if he’d’ve seen the tattoo he would’ve cut it out?” Camera thought for a moment and then added, “I like that. The clothes were stripped, but the fingers and the head weren’t removed, which means the guy didn’t have a sheet on him, or he was a stranger, so not much worry about somebody missing him or a bunch of people who could make an ID. It’s night, the killer’s in a hurry. Maybe he did it out in the open, some pier, or off a boat.” He bent over and examined the tattoo.

“What do you think? Not a pro job. A jailhouse tattoo. Some kind of gang mark?”

“Possibly,” said Maher, looking too. “But it looks like an inscription in Arabic to me.”

“Yeah? You think the guy’s an Arab?” They both looked at the corpse. It was grayish-white and the features were blurred and ragged, but it was not immediately out of probability that the man had once been numbered among that ethnic group.

Maher used an instrument to pry open the corpse’s mouth. “A young man, but the teeth are carious and there’s no dental work apparent except for one extraction. Thus unlikely to be an American, or a foreigner of the middle classes. Circumcised, as you see. So if it transpires that he is a Muslim boyo from east of Suez, Denny Maher for one would not fall off his chair.”

Camera watched as Maher sliced and sawed, scooped and weighed and talked into the microphone. The cop took prints from the dead man’s fingers and used a Polaroid camera he had brought with him to photograph both the tattoo and the man’s face. Maher removed the five .22 slugs from the brain, and Camera put them in an evidence bag. Driving back to the precinct, he had a sudden thought and stopped off at a jewelry shop on Pine Street that he sometimes patronized, which was run by two Egyptian brothers. They told him that the inscription was indeed in Arabic and translated its meaning.

When he got back to the station house, the first thing he did was call Jim Raney at Midtown South homicide.

“Jim? Primo Camera at the One. I got something here you might be interested in. You got those two Arab kids on the Shilkes thing—was there any suggestion that there could be more of them, like a gang?”

“Not a gang,” said Raney carefully, “but there could be another guy. Why?”

“A floater yesterday. Five through the head with a .22, and he’s got ‘against the house of war’ tattooed on his arm. Interested?”

“Yeah, you could say that,” said Lucky Jim.

FIVE

T
his could complicate things,” said Roland Hrcany. He was walking back and forth in front of his desk, breathing deeply, like a diver about to go under, and clenching and unclenching his fists, his biceps stretching his shirtsleeves into sausage skins. Neither of his visitors, the detectives Jim Raney and Primo Camera, said a thing, but watched and listened with the blank, wary, patient expressions that were typical of their trade. Roland continued, talking as if to himself, “On the other hand, the only thing that connects this stiff to the Shilkes case is this tattoo. We have no evidence that he was even involved. So there’s no reason to bring this in at all.” He suddenly seemed to notice the detectives where they sat. He glared at Raney. “Is there?”

“Not especially,” said Raney. “But somebody killed this guy. The case is up on the board. I’ll be wanting to speak to Naijer and Hamshari. They’ve been saying all along that there was another guy along on the job. Maybe they got some idea of who whacked the John Doe. At least we could get a name.”

“Yeah, but the problem is, let’s say he was the lookout, he never went in. It doesn’t matter. My problem here is these jokers find out their pal’s dead, each of their stories is going to change to ‘Hey, two guys did the job, sure, but one of them wasn’t me.’ I don’t like it. It casts doubt.”

Raney said, “We got Hamshari’s print on the till. And the Shilkes ID on the two of them.”

“Okay, the print, fine, although they’ll argue that Hamshari was in the place before and left it then—”

“In blood?”

Roland frowned and made dismissive motions. “Okay, I take it back, maybe we got Hamshari, but that leaves Naijer. I want both of them. I don’t want that little scumbag laying it off on a dead man.”

Raney was starting to get irritated. Like most homicide cops, he liked Roland well enough, but there was something peculiar about this present line of argument, something nervous, a fussiness that was alien to the prosecutor’s usual breezy and profane manner. Raney knew that Hrcany was taking the case himself, which was unusual for a bureau chief. Could he be worried enough about convicting the Arabs to try to suppress the John Doe homicide investigation? Roland was still maundering on: if this, if that, when Raney broke in with, “I don’t understand where this is all leading, Roland, I really don’t. I’m here talking to you because Camera found a homicide and he came to me because it was connected to the Shilkes thing I caught, and we came to you because you’re the D.A. and we need to talk to your defendants. I mean, it’s a courtesy, Roland. We already solved the Shilkes killing. Naijer and Hamshari did it, and they’re going down for it.”

“How about letting me be the legal strategist here, Raney, okay?” said Roland testily.

“Great, I’ll be the cop,” snapped Raney.

“Oh, go right ahead, Detective,” said Hrcany, flushing and clenching even more vigorously. “Be my guest! But if this case gets fucked, let me tell you, it’s
your
ass that’s going to fry.”

Raney was out of his chair with warning strips of red popping out across his cheekbones. Camera stood up too, however, and carefully positioned himself between the two men. “Yeah, well, we’ll keep you up with how it goes, Roland,” he said, “but if this conspiracy business heats up, you’re going to be real glad we found this guy.”

This stopped Roland short. “What are you talking about, conspiracy?”

Smiling, Camera said, “Hey, I just read the papers, chief. Arabs kill a Jew, there’s always a taste of this Middle East horseshit.”

“Horseshit is right,” said Roland contemptuously. “What, you’re listening to that fucking rabbi? He’s got conspiracies on the brain.”

“Yeah, right,” agreed Camera, “but, ah, Jim and I have been putting our heads together and, well, this John Doe kind of changes things in that department.”

Raney could hardly keep a straight face, or rather, could hardly keep his scowl steady. Camera was reflexively playing the good cop to his own bad cop, and Roland was going for it. Up to a point.