The Big Fear (4 page)

Or, to be precise, to give up the Little Fear. People had become used to being free from any worry that someone would pull out a switchblade on the sidewalk and ask you for your wallet. That someone would climb through your window and take your television. Advertisements for fixing torn earlobes were long gone from the subway. The Little Fear had vanished.

But the Big Fear was always with you. The fear that the buildings would come crashing down, that the elevators would be filled with poison gas, that the subway stalling for a moment on the bridge means the bridge itself is about to collapse into the water—that was part of you. Maybe not like it had been just after, maybe tempered a little, and smoothed out by your New York attitude, but it was always there beneath, throbbing a little, reminding you, like an old scar that you can feel when you lounge back into an otherwise comfortable chair. You couldn’t look away from the Big Fear.

As Leonard left the cop, who was dusting off the boy he had manhandled, he realized that even if he left the city, even if he moved out of the Ebbets Field Apartments into a bright condo in Hoboken, the Big Fear would stay with him too. He turned past the petty arrest and toward his office. He passed the fire-red sign for the John Street Bar and Grill pointing downstairs to cheap beer and sawdust hamburgers, the basement shoe stores hedging their boasts (“We are Probably the Lowest Priced in the City”), and the riot of egg sandwiches, weak coffee, and clutter. He was in a position of power now, but it came with risks. He could confront Detective Ralph Mulino, but the police department had its own way of bringing the Big Fear. If the shooting was dirty, there were ways that cops would go about taking it out on the messenger.

Leonard would have to be ready for them.

CHAPTER FIVE

COMPLIANCE

They were stacked four deep and three high and took up almost the entire desk. Two-inch-thick black binders, spreading a glum, dull welcome to Christine Davenport at the new job. Each one contained nearly three hundred tabs and each tab was set in perfect order. The labels on the covers and spines were precisely placed
—
EHA Investments, Internal Investigation, a date, a volume number. Most likely the paralegal had been scolded once after a label was found to be a half-inch off of perfect center. After that the kid had started using a ruler. In city government, when you want a binder of documents, what you get is a stack of loose paper and a level two admin who can show you that three hole punching and inserting tabs is nowhere to be found in her Tasks and Standards. And she has a copy handy if you’d like to look. In the public sector, everyone is her own assistant.

From the moment she had walked into the law firm, Davenport had learned that the paperwork, the binders, and the Post-its would always be precise and perfect. After all, there was an anonymous horde being well-paid to make sure. A few weeks ago, when she’d toured the place, when there was still some committee or other that was deciding her fate, they had shown her all of the various departments—office services, proofreading, three or four different kinds of “support” for tasks Davenport didn’t know existed. All that had sunk in was that she wouldn’t have to do anything that felt like work anymore. She would only be asked to do the thinking. She had met then with the team of junior attorneys, the people who would be sifting through the thirty thousand or so e-mails that were potentially relevant and come up with a few thousand that she was going to have to look at. The people who had gone through the four hundred and fifty thousand e-mails on EHA Investment’s actual servers, and who had culled that down to thirty thousand for the law firm, were anonymous contract attorneys working in off-site basements. Davenport didn’t even get introduced to them.

Davenport sat down and tugged at the first binder. This was her job now, to look through a few thousand carefully curated e-mails and see if she could find someone at a minor little investment house worth sending off to prison. But it was a quiet comfortable existence, and she smiled at the knowledge that she would never again be sweltering at DIMAC, making her own copies and taking lip from the general public. The office was a perfect sixty-eight degrees even though it was still broiling outside. She had a pristine view of the oversized marble woman rinsing her hair in MOMA’s manicured sculpture garden forty stories below.

EHA Investments had come to the firm. Some broad worries. Some concerns about trading patterns. But not even enough to get them focused properly. Maybe that had been the holdup. Maybe it hadn’t been the law firm at all. They had been waiting until they felt they had no choice but to submit to the investigation. They were very eager and wanted the help, but they were much less straightforward than most of these corporate clients as to what exactly they thought she would find. Usually what these places want is clear enough. They have already found some employee that would make a good sacrifice. Find out everything he did, and prove that no one else knew about it so we can wash our hands of him. But EHA Investments hadn’t given her a target. They had only given her worry. And that set off red flags, because that meant the target could be anyone.

The firm had taken Davenport on but hadn’t really included her. She had a reputation after her work at DIMAC, but she knew she wouldn’t be fully welcome yet. She had done her prosecuting for the city government, which the white-shoe guys all thought of as a little dirty and a lot cheap. They themselves had all been prosecutors, but they had served their stints at one US Attorney’s office or another. They got to give lip back to the federal prosecutor, if push ever came to shove.

Opened, the binders smelled like fourth grade. No amount of money could keep a black office binder from looking and feeling like a piece of cardboard with a thick plastic skin. Davenport licked her finger librarian-like and started in on the tabs.

The kids had done their best. There were some nasty exchanges between traders and their clients. People who thought they had been screwed. People who maybe expected their broker to be using non-public information to make them money. Who sounded pretty disappointed when they learned he hadn’t. Traders who were carrying on affairs, who were cheating on their taxes, one series of e-mails showing that a guy wasn’t paying his nanny’s social security. Even the White Plains branch of the US Attorney’s office, Davenport knew, wouldn’t bother with that. Lots of e-mails from one guy talking about his suits. Davenport figured that one of the attorneys knew from the television that coke dealers used to talk about how many “suits” they were bringing in. Same with boxes of cereal, or pizzas, or anything that could stand in for drugs if you both knew what each other was talking about. But after reading an e-mail or two it was pretty clear that this guy was actually ordering his dry cleaning. Plus she hadn’t heard anyone refer to drugs as suits in ten years. Not to mention that she was hoping for something bigger than a drug bust.

She was about two hundred e-mails in when she found something she had to read twice. It was the sender’s address that struck her first. She turned to her computer to look it up and confirmed her suspicions. She reached for the neat packet of colored flags and marked the page. The smallest binder would be made up just of what she wanted them to see. Just what she would carry with her when she went to visit Eliot Holm-Anderson, the EHA of EHA Investments, in person. She read the e-mail again. It only made her more curious.

A few dozen e-mails later there was another one. The same curious suffix, the same worry. There would be more work to do. She would ask the junior lawyer to put together a list of the company’s trades on the days just before and after this one. An outside vendor would run that e-mail address. Another green flag. Ten e-mails later there was another. Then more. Every few pages another one. The last one had been sent only a week ago. By the end of the day she had gone through three packets of the flags and had not noticed that the sun had set. If what she had found had only been about money, she would have been home hours ago. She had expected to find something to do with money. But what she had found had been enough to keep her there. She had missed dinner with her husband and son and she was the last person at work at a Midtown law firm. She turned the last page of the binder. It was about so much more than just money. She stared blearily down at the shuttered sculpture garden and smiled. She was on the hunt again.

CHAPTER SIX

COLOR OF THE DAY

The table was too big for the room. Ralph Mulino wasn’t sure how they had even gotten it through the door, to be honest. It was close to eight feet long and four wide, the dull laminate nicked and stained from hundreds of terse interviews and cheap lunches. The walls were plain white paint over sheetrock. Barely any better than sitting in a cubicle. You listen closely enough, you can hear the guy in the next room giving his statement. The PD would never stoop to conducting confidential interviews in a room like this. There was a lot wrong with the job, but they had some standards. Mulino slouched in the flimsy folding chair and stared at the analog tape recorder. All they would need was a swinging light and the thing would be straight out of a ’40s movie. Maybe that’s why they did it; maybe these civilian investigators at DIMAC fancied themselves a troop of James Cagneys. Or maybe it was only that the agency’s budget didn’t provide for niceties like digital recorders or paint.

Mulino turned to his union rep as he heard footsteps in the hallway. He had every pin and button in place; he was trying to make a good impression. It had been bad enough to wear the suit and tie on the ship; here he had to submit to the uniform. He hated the ceremony of it all. Out on the ship, all the other cops who had come out had told him to stay strong, to keep it together. They all acted like they believed him, but they were just the first team out. They didn’t have any say over anything. He hadn’t slept all night, going over every moment on the ship, trying to think of when he could have found out that Rowson was a detective. He couldn’t think of a thing. His wife had consoled him about the
Daily News
, that they had to make him look bad so they could say something different from the
Post
, but Mulino took it personal.

His collar brass was pinching his neck. The union rep was taking notes. They give you this one for free at the administrative interview. If there’s an administrative charge you get a real lawyer, and if there’s a criminal charge then you get to meet the guy in the two-thousand dollar suit who’s the AA sponsor for half the judges on New York State Supreme. Getting the union rep means that the department doesn’t think your problems are serious yet. Most were SUNY law school grads who had signed up with the police unions after getting turned down by the district attorney’s office.

The footsteps stopped in front of the cheap door to Mulino’s left. They put little windows in them so that anyone walking by could check in on who’s subject to a confidential investigation that could cost him his job or worse. The window was reinforced with chicken wire in case some angry building inspector tried to break the glass and slit his wrists with the shards right there. Amateurs.

Mulino wasn’t quite finished surveying the shoddy room when a lean man in a cheap suit opened the door and stepped in. This one looked patient, calm, not as jittery as most of the kids at DIMAC, who seemed to be play-acting at conducting an investigation. Mulino knew he was supposed to stand up, like he was in a court or visiting a priest. Ceremony again. He pressed himself up out of the plastic chair as gracefully as he could and held out his hand.

“Detective Mulino, I’m Leonard Mitchell.” The investigator didn’t shake Mulino’s hand. Maybe they train them not to. “Let me get the tape recorder set up.” The union rep nodded to Mulino, inviting him to sit back down.

Leonard took his seat and fired up the tape recorder. The big, heavy, old-fashioned kind where you can’t press the button down all the way if you don’t have a tape in. An extra bit of idiot-proofing. He breathed in and started with the boilerplate. The union rep nodded slowly to the patter. Maybe he knew it by heart. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention.

“On the record at nine seventeen a.m. My name is Leonard Mitchell and the date is August 25. We are at the offices for the Department to Investigate Misconduct and Corruption, on the sixteenth floor of Forty Rector Street, New York, New York. For the record, could you state your name, rank, shield, and command?”

Mulino remembered what the rep had told him. What they always tell you.
Always answer direct
.
Say as little as you can. Don’t volunteer
. This interview, the very first one, was already a dull routine. Like an appointment at the DMV except not as much fun. “Detective Ralph Mulino, shield 9284, Organized Crime Control Bureau.”

The investigator went on. “And you have brought a representative with you today.” Then he turned to the rep. “Could you state your name?”

“Bernie Andropovic, A-N-D-R-O-P-O-V-I-C.” Mulino thought that the recitation sounded like more patter. He was here every day for some cop or other and probably spelled it every time.

“Detective, you are here pursuant to an investigation into whether you did use excessive force on or about August 23 at approximately two fifteen a.m.” Mulino smiled to himself at the way the investigators would try to sound like cops. How many reports had he written where a perp “did conceal a glassine envelope” or “did display a knife with a retractable blade.” They come after you, but they can’t help but use your language. Lost in thought, he had almost missed the investigator asking his first question. “This investigation is being conducted pursuant to Interim Order 118-9. Are you familiar with IO-118-9?”

Mitchell looked up from the script. Mulino nodded. It’s just a routine, he kept reminding himself. Be friendly. Agree. If you look like you’re worried about something they’ll pounce.

“I understand.”

Mulino was asked to read his official account in the record. He did it slowly, spelling out the radio codes and the shorthand. A brief statement in a code they both understood.

“And can you tell me in your own words what happened?”

Mulino looked to Andropovic. The man nodded. Speaking carefully, he told the investigator about getting dragged out of bed, about climbing the wet ladder, the body on the boat. “It wasn’t as though I had just dropped in when I saw Detective Rowson. By that point it was already a murder investigation.”

Mitchell didn’t look up from his notes. “Go on.”

Mulino told him about the sounds. The squeaks. Asking over and over for the guy to come out. Saying over and over he was a cop. And then the running toward the railing, the flashing of the gun, the fear.

“Was that gun recovered? You can’t see it in the photos.”

“You’d have to check the log for that.” Mulino noted that Mitchell didn’t say anything about the log. Maybe it wasn’t in yet. Maybe the gun was logged and the investigator was testing him. But if he doesn’t say anything, don’t volunteer. Mulino thought about the swarm of cops that had come in. They had crowded him out and taken pictures, then taken inventory. He’d been kept to the side the whole time, and had eventually been taken off the boat by helicopter after they gave him the now-standard breathalyzer. He had never even seen Sergeant Sparks.

“Regardless of the log. You see this gun get recovered?”

“I saw it on the deck. When I approached the body, the gun was in Detective Rowson’s hand. Or just by his hand. A department-issued nine millimeter.”

“I saw you still carry the revolver yourself.”

Mulino was about to talk when Andropovic tapped his knee. A signal. They had worked it out beforehand.
If the guy says something and it isn’t a question, you don’t have to say anything. If he asks you a yes or no question, you can just say yes or no. Keep it short. You aren’t at a bar with your friends.

Mulino saw the investigator’s eyes dart toward Andropovic’s hand. He’d seen the tapping. That probably didn’t make Mulino look so smart. Mitchell finished a note and spoke. “The log isn’t in yet. If you want to wait I can bring you back down after it comes in.”

“I saw the gun when I went up to him.” Mulino only noticed after he had said it that Andropovic had been tapping him again. It hadn’t been a question.

“Tell me when you first noticed anything that you thought resembled a gun.”

“Well. I saw the guy. When I saw him first it was dark and I didn’t see anything. He was out on the deck and he went behind some of the containers. Then when he came out, when he charged, he was running pretty fast and I saw it in his hand then. I was pretty sure of it. As he ran toward me screaming.”

“You were pretty sure of it?”

“I was sure of it.”

“And what did you do before you shot him?”

Mulino had practiced this part. “I considered whether it was safe to retreat and I determined it was not. I called out ‘Freeze, Police’ while holding my gun out. When he continued to charge I fired one shot.” Mulino was never comfortable lying. He had thought about whether to admit he hadn’t said “police,” about whether to try to make Mitchell understand what it is like to have so many things going through your head at once. But it was easier just to say he had done it. He had said freeze, and he was a police officer, after all. He’d called out “police” a half-dozen times on the boat, just not right before he fired. And it wasn’t as though Rowson was going to wake up and tell them otherwise. It just would have made things all the more complicated.

Mitchell turned back to his notes. He cocked his head and stared straight at Mulino.

“Detective, what was the color of the day Monday?”

“Excuse me?”

“When you were out on the ship, late night Sunday early morning Monday, what was the color of the day?”

Mulino thought to reach out for his memo book, but it wouldn’t be there. That was his usual habit when asked the color of the day. At the start of every tour, roll call tells every cop in the city a color code. If you come across someone out of uniform, and he says he’s a cop, he can only prove it if he knows the color of the day. The true undercovers—guys doing their best to look like criminals—will actually wear wristbands to prove it. The idea is that it will end the standoff when two cops are pointing guns at each other, each convinced that the other is an imposter. A pretty low-tech trick. They stick close to the familiar with the colors: white, green, blue, red, black. Detective Mulino would always write it down, but could never remember half an hour after he was told. He hoped that if he was ever face-to-face with another cop with their guns drawn, the guy would let him reach into his back pocket to look it up.

But it wasn’t there now. When they had called him, they hadn’t bothered with that. Sergeant Sparks hadn’t told him on the little motorboat. Not the sergeant’s fault, maybe. The lieutenant who called him maybe was the one that was supposed to tell him. Mulino wasn’t even sure. When he’d gotten the call, the last thing he would have expected to find on the boat was another cop. Mulino shrugged.

“I don’t have any idea.”

“When you were called to go out with the harbor unit, did they give you a color of the day?”

“No.”

“Did any one, at any point, tell you the color of the day that night?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. He never said he was a cop. I wouldn’t have had the chance to ask him for it. And he didn’t ask me for it either.”

“But no one told you.”

When he asks you a yes or no question, you have to answer. “No.”

The investigator turned a leaf of his notes, and the sharp flap of it startled Mulino. “I want to talk about the detective. Brian Rowson.”

The union guy pushed his glasses up on his nose. “I understand why you’re curious about Detective Rowson, but your only jurisdiction is to investigate Detective Mulino. Who, I’m sure you’re already aware, saved his own and possibly other people’s lives by making a quick and correct decision.”

Mulino knew that Andropovic didn’t mean a word of it. He was there to protect Mulino so he’d say whatever he thought would work. If the shooting had gone the other way, the union rep would be boosting Rowson and skewering the dead Mulino. There was no comfort in the paid praise.

“Anyone ever figure out why Detective Rowson was on that boat?”

The rep was silent. Mulino figured it was safe to answer. “One of the techs that was on the crime scene unit knew him. Said he’d had money problems. Maybe he had sticky fingers.”

“The ship was filled with refrigerators and washing machines. Could they even have gotten one appliance off of it?”

Mulino shrugged. “I don’t even know myself. It’s just what the guy on the deck told me.” Mulino couldn’t make sense of it either. “The guy was out of money. I got called out to the ship. Someone drew a gun at me and I took a shot. The other way around, then I’d be dead and you could ask him what he was doing out there.”

“You think of any reason you in particular would get called out onto that boat?”

Mulino almost told the investigator the whole story. Almost spilled about how he was the reliable cop, the one that would always go on the call that others turned down. About how he had been kept from being promoted, how he had been on the job for ten years, watching people retire around him with healthier pensions than he would ever see. “No.”

The man stared at Mulino, waiting maybe to see if he could coax a longer answer out of him by staying silent. Mulino knew to keep his mouth shut now without being prompted. The investigator took a quick jot of a note, turned another page. Mulino wondered if this guy had ever been in the field for anything. If he’d even taken a witness statement at a bodega, a dispatch stand, a hospital.