Red on Red (52 page)

Esposito extended his hand, and Malcolm took it. Esposito held on.

“Malcolm, I want you to know that I’m taking a risk.”

Nick began to sing louder, in fear of hidden recorders, but also in disbelief of hearing what was being said. “In other words, darling, kiss me …”

“Me, too. I’m taking a risk,” Malcolm said.

“No. You’re not. You’re an inmate lookin’ at freedom. I’m a cop lookin’ at jail. Not the same, not even close. It’s the opposite. I want this on top. Look at this as the interest, or look at it as a show of good faith. Gimme three more, three more homicides, guys who got bodies we don’t know nothin’ about. Find out, work it. I know you can. I believe in you.”

Esposito started to release his hand, but now Malcolm held on.

“Jail ain’t all I’m looking at. Every time I talk to you, my ass is on the line. I could wake up with my balls cut off, somebody sees me. Forget about what they hear. Somebody hears, it’s over. I don’t wake up. That’s snitching on strangers. Friends is worse. For that, they’d have some kinda party. I’d be the food. A brother? I don’t think they invented what they’d do to me. So I’m glad you believe in me, and we got a deal, but don’t give me any bullshit about risk.”

In other words, please be true.

There was no singing on the way back, not much talking, either. Nick
hadn’t asked for this, and would have had no part in it, had he known how it would end. Did he know how it would end? Of course not, no. It had just begun. They had just leapt from the cliff. The bottom was far enough away for anything to happen. The law of gravity could be repealed before they were halfway down. It had been repealed. It was as if Esposito had cut the ground from beneath them and they’d been tossed loose from the earth, riding a meteor. Nick played the day in reverse. They should have stayed in the bar. They should have never gone in. He should have checked for gum on the seat. Should he have told Esposito about Michael? Of course, he’d had to tell him. What had he asked for? Nick had prayed for something to happen, a wish cast upon the waters. The prayers had been answered by the wrong god. Ellegua, maybe. He was known for playing tricks. It had been a while since he’d been in touch.

Nick knew Esposito meant to deliver on his promise, knew that this mad gambit had been undertaken on his behalf. He also knew that his partner was not entirely altruistic in his motives. He had been sidelined for months, and he wanted to get back into the game, to play it as it had never been played. He wanted to impress himself—Nick, too, as an audience of one—in full knowledge that the story could never be shared, the subject never discussed. That was the sad part, for Esposito, that this olympiad would be entirely underground, and if there were tokens of victory in any sheen—bronze, silver, gold—they would be buried in order of importance, deep, deeper, deepest.

“How’s the kids?”

“Good. Great. They ask about you all the time. I lie to them, say you’re doing fine.”

Esposito saw through the ploy, and he didn’t even try to ally Nick to his present course. He didn’t need reminding that he had children—three of them, all alive—that he knew were bound to him, in whatever choice he made, in the near or far consequences of this hour. He took joy in this life, in the burdens and risks, joy that Nick might never know. Nick’s own lost tribe, the three little girls, splashed in the shallows of the soft gray waters of limbo.

“How would you get the tapes?”

“They don’t even make extra copies, unless somebody asks. The original’s in storage. Maybe the defense lawyer has one, but he’s not gonna
give it up. I asked for one because of my well-known dedication and professionalism. So I have one, too. That’s not a problem. It’s insurance.”

“It is a problem.”

“Nah, it happens. C’mon. It happened last week! Didja read the papers—with the dentist’s wife, the hit man? You know how this goes. Two or three more times, they’ll make a new procedure. ‘Hey, why not make extra copies!’ ”

“It’s a problem.”

“Try harder. Tell me another one.”

Esposito warmed to the challenge as they fell into their old roles, devil’s advocate and—what? Nick didn’t want to think about that. He had to think. This was not the adversarial system, not as he was accustomed to it. Not the friendship business, either, not one in which he was ready to invest. Malcolm would have said anything to stay out of jail. He’d already tried. How would it shake up Esposito, if he knew that Malcolm had called IAB, had said Esposito had tried to kill him, once upon a time? But there was no way for Nick to say that, without revealing how he knew.

“You’re already on the radar with IAB—more than that. They’re gunning for you. A homicide case goes south, in a shady way. You don’t think that won’t bring attention, won’t make ’em try harder? Won’t they see something going on?”

Esposito laughed, too loudly.

“Number one, I’m the only reason Malcolm got locked up. It was never much of a case, and without me, it woulda never got this far. Why would I be the one to wreck it? Number two, it’s a ghetto homicide, perp-on-perp, and nobody gives a shit. Three, it’ll look like the DA’s mistake, not the cops’, and the DA and the cops are not gonna cooperate when they can point fingers at each other. Four, if IAB ever had anything on me, anything close to something, I’d be in a rubber-gun squad somewhere already, delivering the baloney sandwiches at Central Booking. The Job doesn’t have to be fair, doesn’t even have to pretend to be. I don’t know why the rats have it in for me, whoever it is at IAB, but I bet he never caught a real bad guy before, and he ain’t gonna catch me. Because I’m not the bad guy! What else you got, Nick? C’mon, bring it on!”

Nick resolved not to let his jaw go slack at the summation, shrewd and rousing at once, the tack-sharp point-by-point rejoinder of fact, and
the canny, roving, worldly-wise grasp of the politics at the far end of the island. Wasn’t Lena the lawyer in the family? Didn’t Nick have something to contribute here? Maybe a care package, with warm mittens and homemade cookies, vitamins, for his best friend, who was heading upstate, farther north than his usual destination. And who was inviting him to come along with him.

“Witnesses. Two witnesses to the statement.”

“Try harder, Nick. The video guy won’t remember. He’s done a hundred of these since. He turns on the camera and thinks about lunch. The DA maybe, maybe not. This one practically had pneumonia. She barely remembered her name. And lawyers don’t like to put their own people on the stand. Yeah, they could put me on the stand, and I’d say what Malcolm said. It wouldn’t mean shit. Try harder, Nick! Records of visits here, to Rikers? I talk to everybody who’ll talk to me, every bad guy who might do us some good. I didn’t create the situation, but I will take advantage. That’s my job. Yours, too!

“But with the tape gone, the case is down the toilet,” Esposito continued. “The whole thing would stink to a jury. Either we look like mongoloids or it’s all some kind of superconspiracy, Elvis lives and 9/11 and Area 51 all wrapped up into one. It won’t float. Us—the DA—we lose cases all the time, even when we’re trying our hardest, when we think we got everything nailed tight. Let’s let the system break down to our advantage, for once.”

“Breakdown,” that was the word, Nick thought. Michael had saved him, in a way, and now Esposito might ruin him. He had been used to being part of the system; he hadn’t thought of himself as such, a cog on a wheel, but he was a semi-significant functionary of a massive governmental organization. In the past, he had been frustrated by what it couldn’t accomplish. What would it be like to fear what it could? He was not ready to learn. After he shook his head, Esposito continued soothingly.

“You weren’t wrong to hold back and wait for me, Nick. Nothing could have happened to Michael aside from an interview, if you’d called it in right then. What does he say? ‘Fuck you and goodbye.’ And you woulda been gone, from your house. You know that. They woulda asked Allison if you lived with her, and she woulda said no, and you woulda been ‘Out of residence during sick leave.’ Guys get twenty-, thirty-day hits for that. ‘Failure to report change of residence,’ another ten days. You
know why? The brass have to do something. They have to act like they did. And they pick the problem they can solve. The precinct, too. They’d never let you stay. Maybe you’ll land back at the old place in the Bronx, where your old sergeant stole your best case for his buddy. Either that or they’d take your gun and send you to Psych Services, for not reporting it right away. The government, the police department, is not your friend. I am.”

Esposito was his friend. He knew that. Nick hadn’t betrayed him, even in a friendship born of betrayal, arranged in advance. Nick wouldn’t go to hell for what he’d done so far. Not for that, not that circle, the lowest one, where the traitor Judas was locked in ice. Judas was a suicide, too, the one unforgivable sin. Which stop was on Judas’s ticket, suicide or betrayal, when he took the downtown line to the terminal station? Enough, enough. Nick wanted to get off the train. He’d been assigned to Esposito because someone was convinced of his textbook corruption, the classic dirty cop stuff of finger wagging editorials.
A disgrace to the badge
. And even though Nick had witnessed vanity and arrogance, raw appetites and rough hands, nothing had come close to a real crime until Nick had inspired him to commit one.

“Don’t do it, Espo. Not for me, not at all.”

Esposito’s tone was calming and adult, with a kind of bemused understanding—the bedtime story was frightening, yes, but he’d be in the next room if Nick had a bad dream. “Worse guys than Malcolm have gotten bigger breaks. Look what the Feds do for mob rats. Sammy the Bull. What was it, nineteen murders? And he did less than five years. Malcolm’s done a couple of months already. I’m not waiting for somebody to die—me or you, especially—while the lawyers hash it out. Don’t worry. Don’t think about it. I got this.”

Esposito laughed and patted him on the shoulder. The emptiness of whatever objection Nick might make was plain to both of them. Nick couldn’t play father to the child, refusing to sign a permission slip for a school trip to an amusement park. Nick could do nothing to stop him. Esposito would have fun. Nick had been troubled lately by the sense that his life was not in his hands, and he had played with the idea of giving up, giving in. The sidewalk potshot had ended the game, had made real the possibility of extinction, and Nick had tightened his grip. He was not ready to cede control to an ad hoc committee of his partner and the Cole brothers. He didn’t need his life to be that interesting.

It wasn’t late when they got back, but Esposito drove straight to the apartment, slowing down a moment, then circling the block again. He pulled over and looked at the opposite side of the street, scanning the roofline, and waited for Nick to get inside before driving away. It was an escort’s gesture; even on bad dates, Nick would walk the girl in, making sure she got home safe. The other detectives must have signed them out at the end of the shift, believing that they were out on the town, having the fine time that had been expected, ordered even, by the lieutenant. No one at the squad had called them back in, so Nick had to assume that the night had been quiet in their part of town. It was Valentine’s Day, after all. Daysi must have been as busy as hell.

A
tip, that was all it took sometimes. “Look at what’s taped under the bumper of the green Honda, the third in from the corner.” “He has another cellphone, and this is the number.” “He’s sleeping with his cousin’s girlfriend, and if you confronted either, they’d give up everything.” The momentum could be as important as the information, spurring one side to renewed commitment, the other to new mistakes. Sometimes, that bit of input was all it took to break a case, to break a man, the loose rock that became a landslide. Nick was intimately familiar with the experience. He was off balance, unsure whether his legs were unsteady or the earth were trembling, shifting beneath his feet. It wouldn’t take much to push him over, and he didn’t know which way he’d fall. You don’t find this stuff out in church, as they said, but Nick didn’t know how many times they could go to hell to get it and still come back.

Malcolm had begun producing information on a wartime footing, wholesale and piecemeal, good enough for the troops. The detectives chased bodies that lacked names, names that lacked bodies. They called around to different squads, putting together details—“Shot three times, outside, by two guys on a motorcycle”—with approximate locations. “There’s a subway nearby, a block away, elevated? And on one corner there’s a vacant lot. On the other there’s a chicken place, and on the third corner, there’s a nail salon? … No, I don’t know what the fourth corner is. You’re in Brooklyn—you tell me.” Amazing how much of it there was, how easily obtained, like a subscription to
Bad Times
. It was also interesting to see Esposito work so hard on cases that weren’t his, the answers passed to stumped classmates by the kid who cared most about how he did on the test. Nick didn’t know whether Esposito had changed or only
adapted, adjusted tactics for a larger, longer game. Malcolm was no longer just an informant for him but almost an oracle, dispensing cryptic wisdom from his guarded island. No, Nick thought, it was nothing as fancy as that. Malcolm was Esposito’s new partner.