The Graving Dock
“[A] sophisticated contemporary noir … What Cohen does so well here is to give us everything we require from a cop story … and then so much more: There’s a documentary panache to his depiction of Brooklyn and its history.” —
Los Angeles Times
on
Red Hook
“Gives you a real feeling for the neighborhood … [An] outstanding first novel.” —
The New York Times Book Review
on
Red Hook
“At a time when some of the older masterful cop writers, like Ed McBain, are dying or just fading away, Cohen’s appearance comes as a relief and pleasure.” —
The Washington Post Book World
on
The Graving Dock
“Intricate, atmospheric, funny, and enthralling. An impressive crime novel from a powerful, promising writer.” —George Pelecanos, author of
The Night Gardener
, on
The Graving Dock
“A murdered friend, a beautiful widow and the borough of Brooklyn loom large in this superb installment from NYPD Detective Jack Leightner… . An impeccable procedural plus a poignant love story, intelligent, understated and refreshing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
, starred review of
Neptune Avenue
“Cohen’s novels belong … at the top of every Brooklyn crime-fiction list.” —
Booklist
, starred review of
Neptune Avenue
“Spellbinding … Deftly plotted and convincingly written. Cohen once more does the genre proud.” —
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review of
The Ninth Step
A Jack Leightner Crime Novel
Gabriel Cohen
What is this river but the one
Which drags the things we love
Processions of debris like floating lamps
Toward the radiance in which they go out?
—GALWAY KINNEL, FROM “THE RIVER THAT IS EAST”
one
O
UT ON THE COLD
, blustery end of a Brooklyn pier, Herman Rios and Angel Oviedo had just caught a flounder when death literally drifted into their lives.
“What the hell is that?” said Herman as his friend reeled in the unhappy fish. Prior to this moment, they had never seen one of the bottom-dwelling creatures in its natural state.
Angel stared at the fish, which had both eyes on one side of its flat body. He dropped it on the concrete and backed away fast.
“Throw it back,” urged Herman. “That
bastit
must’ve grew up near a nuclear power plant.”
“Least I caught something,” Angel said, glancing at his friend’s empty bucket.
Herman shrugged. He bent down and rummaged through his tackle box until he found a new lure. The guy at the bait shop had sworn by it: The head was lead and the body was comprised of four little pieces of surgical tubing.
Angel stared out at where his line led down into the gray-green water. He was hoping for a few stripers, which were supposed to run well in the cold weather. After a while he grew tired of watching the filament and his gaze traveled beyond the sheltered cove. Red Hook was a humble neighborhood of warehouses and machine shops, but the waterfront offered a spectacular view of New York Harbor lying under a vast cloud-dappled plain of sky. Across the south stretched the spare, simple span of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. To the southwest, across the gleaming harbor, lay the wooded shoreline of Staten Island. The Statue of Liberty stood in the middle of the harbor; she seemed so close Angel almost believed he could chuck a rock and hit her green torch. Some anonymous island covered with low brick buildings sat in the water farther north, and then the view was dominated by the southern skyline of Manhattan, bold glass buildings reflecting back the morning sun. There was a huge recent hole there, but Angel preferred not to think about it.
He glanced at his line again—still quiet—and then something moving in along the edge of the cove caught his eye.
“You see that?” he asked his friend. “What you think that is?”
Herman squinted at an object bobbing along in the bright choppy water. His eyes grew big.
“It looks like some kind of
cwawfin
.”
Indeed it was, a homemade wooden box just four and a half feet long.
two
T
WENTY-FOUR HOURS BEFORE
he was summoned to peer down into that opened box, death was the last thing on Jack Leightner’s mind. This was unusual: As a detective with the elite Brooklyn South Homicide Task Force, corpses were the focus of his every working day.
He had the weekend off, though, and he was far from New York City’s steady influx of bodies. At the moment, his attention was riveted by another box, one whose dimensions were considerably smaller. Standing just inside the closet, he slipped the black velvet case out of his traveling bag and into his pants pocket, but it was too obvious there, so he took it out again and removed the ring. He felt like he was getting an ulcer.
“What are you doing in there?” asked his girlfriend, Michelle. She had flopped down on their new bed as soon as they’d checked in and unpacked.
“Nothing,” Jack replied, slipping the ring into his pocket. “I’m just trying to figure out what to wear down to dinner.” This was a silly excuse, as he only had two choices: one of the dark blue sports jackets he wore on the job, or the tweed jacket he saved for the occasional court appearance or NYPD retirement racket.
They had just arrived on the train from Grand Central. It had run along the sparkling Hudson River, through the last bright scraps of fall foliage, past the gray stone blocks of Sing Sing prison. The inn was only an hour and a half north of Manhattan, but it might as well have been on another planet. There was no rap music thumping in the streets of this quaint little town, no car alarms, no trash piled on the curbs. No NYPD vehicles blowing by to remind Jack of his latest case.
As he stepped back into the bedroom he wondered if Michelle might be suspicious, but she was busy reading a brochure. She lay on top of the frilly bedspread. That wasn’t the right word: It was probably a
duvet
, or a
sham
or something; there was undoubtedly a Victorian name for it. That was the big keyword here,
Victorian
, and it seemed to mean that everything had to be wildly overdecorated and look like something you shouldn’t sit on, or even touch. It wasn’t Jack’s style, but he hoped his girlfriend liked it.
Michelle Wilber was forty-one, with long black hair, slightly slumped shoulders, and wrinkles in the corners of her eyes. (Jack had never been the kind who chased after young women.) Right now she looked so good that his heart ached.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Okay,” she murmured, engrossed in her reading.
He stepped out into the hall and gently closed the door. The inn was supposed to be one of the oldest in the United States. The plank floors had been polished smooth by generations of guest feet. The narrow stairs down to the lobby were so ancient that they bowed. At least the place was well kept; he would have been very disappointed if he had brought Michelle to some kind of dump. (You could never really tell from an ad—the photo might show laughing couples lounging around a fancy pool, and then you’d arrive and find a little cracked kidney bean full of dead leaves.)
Behind the front desk the innkeeper was tapping away at a computer, one of the only objects in the whole place that wasn’t topped by some porcelain knickknack. The woman was a brisk middle-aged blonde.
“Hello,” Jack said. “I need to ask a little favor.”
The woman peered through tortoiseshell half-glasses. She was several inches shorter than he was, but managed to give the impression that she was looking down at him. “Yes?”
Her smile struck him as brittle. Maybe that was because he had asked to change rooms earlier. It wasn’t his fault. On the Internet, a view from one of the windows had showed a cozy little street packed with antiques shops. When he and Michelle actually showed up, though, a chambermaid had led them up to a room at the back, which faced out onto a parking lot and a drive-through bank. Maybe the innkeeper had heard his Brooklyn accent and assumed she could get away with it. Normally Jack might not have cared, but this was a special occasion and he was determined to do it right.
He cleared his throat, glanced at the stairs, and took the ring out of his pocket. “I need a little help with this,” he said. “I’m gonna propose to my girlfriend at dinner tonight.”
The innkeeper’s smile suddenly grew a lot more genuine. “Isn’t that wonderful!” she said. “What can we do?”
BY THE TIME JACK
got back to the room, Michelle had kicked her shoes off and piled a couple of pillows under her wavy hair. There was a hole in the toe of one of her stockings and that made Jack feel better—he wasn’t the only one unaccustomed to such upscale digs. He had prepared an excuse about getting something from the car, but she didn’t even ask where he had been. Michelle was pretty self-sufficient. It was not that she was uninterested in what he did, but she trusted him—she only got on his case if he screwed up in some major way. He couldn’t help comparing her to his ex-wife, who would probably have grilled him like a detective in an interview room.
He looked at his watch; they had the whole day to kill. He supposed they could scope out the antiques shops, but the thought made him itch.
He pressed a hand against his stomach. He had always prided himself on keeping in shape, not letting middle age turn him flabby, but he could feel a hint of a pot developing. “Hey—why don’t we go get some of this country air everybody’s always going on about?”
Michelle set down the brochure, smiled, and unbuttoned her blouse. “What’s your hurry?”
AFTER, THEY TOOK A
walk, setting off along a two-lane blacktop that led out into the countryside. A couple of days after Thanksgiving the weather had taken a plunge into winter and the air was nippy, but after a few minutes of hiking Jack was warm enough to unzip his jacket. The busy tourist kernel of the town gave way to some grand, dilapidated old estates, and then the view opened up across stubbly farm fields dotted with an occasional cow. Crows cawed up in bare branches; other than that there was an almost eerie silence, broken only by their own footsteps and an occasional passing car.
Jack wished they had come in spring, when there would be flowers and stuff to look at, or in the fall during peak foliage days, but Michelle was not put off by the stark views. She found things to comment on, pointing out an interesting weathervane or farm silo. Jack was an observant sort himself, but he focused on different things, like how isolated some of these country houses were, how easy, it would be to break in. How owning a gun might make some sense out here, rather than in the city where every time somebody fired one of the damned things they ran the risk of popping an innocent—or not-so-innocent—bystander.
