Reversible Error (3 page)

Karp whooped. "It would be my last act on earth. But let me say this, Clay: if she ever does kill me, I want you to catch the squeal. Might as well keep it in the family."

The two men talked easily for the next few minutes, the man-trivia of sports and politics. They were friends from Karp's earliest time with the D.A.'s office, when he had been the most junior member of the fabled Homicide Bureau, and Fulton, already the owner of a glowing reputation as a detective, had taken him under his wing, taught him police procedure, and provided the evidence and witnesses that enabled Karp to make his own reputation as a prosecutor.

"So," said Karp after a pause, "they still killing people in Harlem?"

Fulton's face grew serious. "Yeah, that's what I need to talk with you about. Somebody aced Larue Clarry last night."

Karp searched his mind for the name and came up empty. Fulton saw the blank look and explained, "The dope dealer. Ran coke for the flashy set. Somebody killed him in his own car and left it under the FDR at 120th. Left the gun he done it with too."

"Any reason why we should especially mourn Mr. Clarry's passing?"

"No, unless you his momma. But look here. The last three months we had five major dope wholesalers knocked off in Harlem. Clarry's number six. Listen to this." He consulted a notebook. "April 2, Jimmie Williams, shot in the back of the head with a large-caliber pistol in a vacant apartment, Harlem. Nobody saw nothing. April 28, Togo McAllister opened the door to his apartment, Morningside Heights, and walked into a shotgun blast. Nobody saw nothing.

"May 12, Sweets Martin, found in an alley, Lower East Side, hands tied, throat cut, puncture wounds all over him, ditto. May 16, Bowman 'Heat' Fletcher, shot in the heart with a large-caliber pistol, also in his apartment, Upper West Side, also ditto. June 3, Ollie Bender, found in a construction site, Eighth and 43rd, with his head bashed in: fucking ditto."

Fulton put his notebook away and looked at Karp. "Anything strike you as odd about that set?"

Karp thought for a moment, then shook his head. "I don't see any pattern, except that there isn't any pattern. It just looks like a bunch of guys in a tough business got taken out in a short period of time. Their number was up. I mean, what's the average life span of a dope dealer? Three, five years? Or do you see something I don't?"

Fulton grimaced, a comical wrinkling of his heavy brow and broad nose, as if he smelled rottenness, and began pacing to and fro in front of Karp's desk. "I don't know what I see yet. Like you say, it looks like a normal couple of months in the dope scene. Maybe that's what's bothering me: it's too normal, too-I don't know-miscellaneous. Like somebody was painting a picture for the cops that's saying, 'Ain't nobody doin nothin special down here, boss!'"

"Like in Sherlock Holmes," Karp put in, "the unusual incident was that the dog didn't bark in the night."

"Yeah, like that! And look here: six different M.O.'s, in four different detective zones, and not a single witness in any of them worth a damn. Like somebody was designing the set so that it wouldn't be seen as a set, somebody who knows how cops think."

"Who benefits?" asked Karp abruptly.

"How do you mean?"

"Well, you say 'somebody,' implying that there's a single agent responsible for all six crimes. Assuming you're right, and that you've got no good leads, why don't you start with whoever you think might want to have all six of these guys killed?"

Fulton shook his head. "Yeah, I thought of that. It could be any of a dozen, twenty people, guys who could move in on the business with the dead dealers out of the way. That's in the city. God knows about out-of-town gangs, Colombians, Cubans, Jamaicans… where to start?"

"So you're stumped?"

"Yeah, and I can't stand it. God damn, I hate a mystery! Some slick fucker going around getting off on spitting in my eye. I ain't whipped yet, but I need help. That's why I'm downtown. If I'm not crazy, the only chance we got is on this Clarry hit. It's fresh and the guy made his first mistake."

Karp made an inquiring sound, and Fulton went on. "He left his gun on the seat of the car. It's a cheap piece of shit, a twenty-two, but it's something."

"Prints?"

Fulton snorted. "Not that good, but we got a serial number. Something could turn up. I want to squeeze the street hard on this. I'm gonna put the King Cole Trio on it, full-time."

Karp grinned and raised his hands in mock horror. "Uh-oh. Are they gonna be good, or am I gonna have 'police brutality' all over my cases?"

"Come on, Butch, these are changed men. They've seen the light. They're gonna treat every skell in Harlem like their momma. The thing of it is, I need to run everything that anybody finds out on all the investigations of all these killings through me. If there's a pattern, that's the only way to find it."

"That could be a problem."

"No shit! I made the case to the zone commander and he shined me on to the borough commander and he said he agreed 'in principle' that I should coordinate, but whether he'll do fuck-all about it, I don't know."

"Anything I can do?"

Fulton flashed a bright sudden smile. "Hey, I resent you implying that this wasn't just a social call. But since you ask, yeah. Just keep your ears open to anything that fits in the pattern. I might miss something. Also, I'd like just one ADA on all six cases: somebody good. And if the Chief of D. happens to call you, you might put a word in."

"No problem, Clay," said Karp, although they both knew it was in fact a considerable problem to juggle cases around like that.

But Clay Fulton was one of only a handful of people whom Karp considered to have a blank check on his help, and he did not begrudge the effort, although he personally believed that Fulton was chasing shadows. Karp was not a hunch player. He liked evidence in plastic bags and sworn depositions. He liked witnesses.

Was there a hidden conspiracy to kill drug dealers? Maybe, but thinking about it did Karp no good. At a certain level, he well knew, he found it all too easy to imagine that the whole city was engaged in a conspiracy. Karp's tendency toward paranoia was well-established and familiar to him, fed daily by the hostility of his management, and nurtured by the environment of the criminal justice system, itself a vast lie. He felt for the detective, his friend, but was not about to give him any enthusiastic encouragement.

The business done, some desultory conversation followed and then Fulton looked at his watch and stood up. The two men shook hands warmly. "Take care, man," said Karp.

"Watch your own butt, hear?" answered Clay Fulton. Fulton went back to his office, the office of the Zone 5 homicide squad, which operated out of the Twenty-eighth Precinct on 135th Street off Lenox Avenue, and was responsible for homicides occurring in the northeastern section of Manhattan Island, a chunk of territory that included most of Harlem. Fulton ran the squad. It was rarely at a loss for work.

There were three detectives waiting for him in the squad room. They were the best men he possessed and as good as any team in the city. They had been famous when he had taken over the squad, and he had left them more or less alone. They were known on the street, for obscure reasons, as the King Cole Trio.

Fulton perched on a desk and looked inquiringly at the most senior of the three, a lean, intense man of about fifty, with skin the color of black coffee, yellowish eyes, and cropped natural hair growing gray on the sides. "What've we got, Art?"

The man, Detective Sergeant Art Dugman, pulled a spiral notebook out of his suit jacket pocket and placed a pair of cheap reading glasses on his nose. When he spoke, it was in a voice dry but vibrant, dressed in the accents of prewar Harlem. "I went down with Mack as soon as we heard the squeal. Got there about, oh, two this morning. The first officer was still on the scene. Couple of D.T.'s from the Two-three showed up; I told them it was ours, orders from downtown. They split."

He peered at Fulton over his glasses. "We do got the case, am I right?"

Fulton nodded and motioned him to continue.

"OK. Man was shot in the face at close range with a twenty-two-caliber revolver, sitting in the back seat of his own car. The shooter probably was in the front seat when he did it. Initial M.E. report says he'd been dead no more than four, five hours when they examined him, which puts the crime around midnight, day before yesterday.

"Crime Scene dusted the car; nothing but Clarry's own prints in the back. The front's been wiped. The gun's wiped too. The RMP cop found it sitting on the seat of the car. It's a little piece-of-shit gun. The lab's checking it out now. The driver's-side door was left open. That's what attracted the RMP to the scene-the door light."

Fulton said, "Looks like the shooter took off in a hurry. Something must have spooked him. Did the RMP see anything?"

"Didn't see shit. Nobody saw shit. We did a canvass the next morning…"

"Nobody heard the shots?"

"No. But I don't think he was popped there."

"I thought you said he got it in the car."

"Yeah, yeah, in the car, but not at the place-under the FDR."

"How do you know that?"

"The blood. From his face-it was streaked back along the side of his head, like when it rains against the side windows of a car and the speed of the car drags it backwards. And there was a big mass of clotted blood piled up against where the deck behind the back seat meets the back window. They shot him somewhere else and drove him there and dumped him. Took all his stuff too-wallet, jewelry. Look like a deal gone bad or a ripoff. Tricky fuckers, whoever."

Fulton worried his mustache with his lower teeth. "Yeah, but not tricky enough, this time. What about his place?"

Dugman looked across the room at a stocky white man in a brown nylon jacket, gray work pants, and a blue plaid shirt. The man was in his early thirties and had a lumpy face with a strong jaw. The dark eyes were slightly too close together, but his mouth was wide and humorous. His dirty-blond hair was worn as long as the police department then allowed; the picture was redneck, working stiff, union-card-carrying, not a bright light. It was a picture he cultivated. His name was Lanny Maus, and he had been a detective-third for a little over ten years.

Maus was leaning backward in his chair against the scarred police-station-green walls and had his feet propped up on his desk. He wore the kind of heavy tan leather shoes favored by construction workers. He removed the wooden match on which he had been sucking and consulted his own little book.

"We tossed the place at five-ten P.M. on the night of. Ton of coke, some smack, pills. Could he have been a dope dealer? Man had a gun, a nice nine, didn't take it with him. Glass on the table in the living room, fresh prints, not Clarry's. We're checking that out.

"Moving to the bedroom, we find signs of recent sexual activity. Clarry apparently got one last piece of ass before he checked out. Bed sheets gave us head hair, female, Caucasian, dyed red, pussy hair ditto, not dyed, brown. She wears purple lip gloss, assuming the Kleenex in the wastebasket belongs to her. That's about it, except a lady in a front apartment said she thought she saw two men get into a big black car parked in front of the building and drive off a little past twelve."

Fulton acknowledged the report with a nod and said, "Ok, the girl left, then Clarry left with somebody who drove him someplace and shot him and drove the car with the body in it under the highway, and left on foot." He stood up and started pacing back and forth in front of the three men.

"This is looking good. This is the first time we got anything on these killings. We need that girl."

Maus cleared his throat. "Loo, I'd like to volunteer to go up to every redhead in the city and ask them what color is their snatch. I'd have to verify their answer, of course."

Fulton gave him a look. The fourth man in the room, who had been silent up to now, said in a voice so deep and rumbling that it was like the noise made by a piece of heavy machinery, "Clarry like them young."

They all turned toward him. Detective Third Class Mack Jeffers was a very black and extremely large man, was, in fact, as large as it is possible to be and still be a member of the police force in New York. He was just under the six-foot-seven limit and weighed over 285 pounds. He was the youngest member of the Trio, not yet thirty, and had made detective with record speed because, it was said, they had run out of blue cloth. He was taciturn, patient, and like many big men, friendly and even-tempered.

"He got his girls from Slo Mo," Jeffers continued. "You know Slo Mo, Art?"

"Yeah, he pimps down on the Deuce. Picks the moppets up at the Port Authority. OK, we'll check it out."

Fulton said, "Good, that's a start. Now, on these other dope-dealer hits, we're taking all of them over."

Groans all around. Dugman said, "Loo, what the damn hell! We don't pull enough murders in Harlem? You got to drag in stale fucked-up cases from all round town?"

Fulton set his jaw. "Can it, guys! This is real, and this is big, and I want complete control of it all. I want every one of those case files squeezed until the juice comes out. There's a pattern here, and you're gonna find it. That's all!"

He turned and strode into his private office, slamming the door behind him.

The three detectives looked at one another, their expressions exhibiting mixed feelings of disbelief, annoyance, resignation-the standard cop expressions. But there was also the beginning of something else, a kind of fascination, the first faint scent of prey in the air. The King Cole Trio hated mysteries too.

"What did he do then?" asked Marlene Ciampi, trying to keep the weariness out of her voice as she moved through yet another rape interview. This victim-she glanced down at the name… Paula Rosenfeld-was shut down, reciting the facts of her recent violation as if she were reading off the periodic table. You got them like that; you also got the one who couldn't stop shaking, and the weepers, and the cursers. Those were just the ones who came in. Marlene suspected that the majority of the raped of New York were in another class entirely-the no-shows, the ones who turned off the memory, told no one, denied it happened, took a long bath and tried to get on with life.