Black Water Transit (8 page)

Fah! observed Mr. Rubinek.

At this point Judge Shabazz leaned forward in her creaking leather chair and spread her hands across the jumble of candy wrappers and legal papers on her desk.

“I’ve heard enough. I intend to review the
Harris
decision and consider the relevant case law. I will render my decision in this matter in a few … in good time.” She stopped Rubinek in mid-aria by raising her left hand and showing him a pink palm with stubby fingers spread wide.

“You can wait, Mr. Rubinek. I’ll give you my decision in good time. Into the hall with you both.”

In other words,
reply hazy, ask again later
. That’s why they called her the Eight Ball.

Twenty-six minutes later, after a séance with a Moon Doggie and a Monster Big Gulp down in the cafeteria, Judge Euphonia Shabazz returned to her chambers, called in the combatants, and ruled that the LoGascio
information, whatever it might have been, was inadmissible and that anything flowing from that information had therefore been obtained in a clear and
egregious
—that word was definitely making a comeback—violation of the suspect’s ARC rights—including the inculpatory evidence obtained at the Scarpas’ apartment, the underwear, the forensics—and was, under various loopholes in the Bonehead Justice Machine, totally inadmissible and tainted. As a direct result of this decision, Tony LoGascio and the Scarpa brothers hopped out of the holding cells on Centre Street before nine o’clock that very evening. They scrambled into a gypsy cab, and it was several months before they managed to attract the attention of the NYPD in any memorable way. Mind you, when they did, it was terminal. Now. Observe the following incident.

About an hour later, as he was walking home from the D train exit on Ninth Street, public defender Eddie Rubinek had his lights professionally punched out by an unknown but highly motivated assailant. The only description he was able to give the investigating officers from the Sixth Precinct, and this while sitting on the back steps of an EMS ambulance, talking through a purple face twice normal size and lips that looked like raw Polish sausages, was that she was female and black and built like an artillery shell.

“What millimeter?” asked a cop from the Sixth, a recon vet with four ugly years in Vietnam stuck deep into his ribs, who had early on in this case decided that whatever the victim had to say, he was certainly no judge of anything military and had probably spent the entire Vietnam War up in Toronto smoking ganja and spray-painting stupid Marxist slogans on the sides of public buildings.

“What do you mean?” says Rubinek, looking more than usually snitty. Blood was running from his nose
down into his goatee and one of his eyes was puffed and half closed and the eyeball was bright red. He looked like the hand puppet from hell.

The cop sighed and repeated the question.

“You said she looked like a shell. I asked you what size.”

Rubinek wiped some blood off his teeth with a swab of cotton and spat blood onto the sidewalk. Some of it hit the cop’s boot. Eddie Rubinek was a guy who never knew when to quit. He’s still at it, by the way; if you see him around Centre Street, ask him how’s his nose. He never gets it. He never will.

Anyway, shortly after the report came in from the Sixth, the CO of the Two Five called the Sex Crimes section and told Casey Spandau to get her butt into his office right now. He then asked her where she had been and if she had anything to say about the incident.

Casey Spandau just sat in the wooden rail-back chair he kept in his office exactly for this purpose and she gives him back that Chinese stare and asks if she could have a member of the NYPD’s black police officers association, the Guardians, as a witness to the meeting. The CO looked at her in silence for almost a full minute.

Then he asked her once again, straight out, had she in any way contributed to the thumping-out of Eddie Rubinek? She never broke her stare and never said a word. He fought back a red cloud around the edge of his vision and swallowed hard twice, told himself again that she was worth the effort.

“Spandau, can I ask you a hypothetical?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shawana Coryell is a little white kid and she’s scooped by three black guys. Are you still on the case?”

“Yes, sir! Of course. It’s not the kid’s fault.”

“Okay. And instead of Eddie Rubinek we have Johnny Cochran, and Johnny does his usual giant-squid
act, sprays sticky black shit all over the courtroom, the jury goes stone-blind, achieves the approximate IQ of bark mulch. Bingo, the perps walk. Are you now waiting for Johnny Cochran outside the D train exit?”

“I firmly believe that O.J. was framed, sir.”

“Yeah? So was Jesus Christ, but then he never took Mary Magdalene apart with a Swiss Army knife. Casey, spare me your totally fucked-in-the-head opinions on the Simpson case and answer my damned question.”

“To answer that would … seem inculpatory, sir.”

“Inculpatory! God’s holy trousers! Now we got Kennesaw Mountain Clarence goddamn Darrow here. Okay. The Eight Ball is as black as dime-store licorice, Spandau. Does she get tuned-up for being the stupidest judge in Christendom?”

“She should be fired. She’s a disgrace to her people.”

“Oh man. What color
are
your people, Officer Spandau?”

“What color?”

“Never mind. I’ll tell you. Your people are blue. There are thirty-one thousand of them in the city. Everybody else is and will forever be a total goddamn stranger. Now. Did you or didn’t you tune-up Eddie Rubinek?”

“Sir, I can’t answer that question.”

“Why the
hell
not?”

“I … any answer I give you … would be dishonest.”

“Spare me that condescending crap, kid. You know where this will go, don’t you? Your badge is in the palm of my hand.”

“I know that, sir. I know you have to do what you have to do.”

“Spandau, you had the mojo. You could have gone anywhere.”

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. It means a lot to me.”

Then silence. So now what does he do?

He told her go wait in the hall and poured himself a belt of scotch from the bottle he kept in his drawer for occasions like this, when the burden of command got to be an unbearable pain in the neck, and then, after some further consultation with the Chivas, he has this, like, insight. A stroke of genius, he thinks.

He makes a call to One Police, gets a
possible maybe okay
from the personnel drone on the other end of the phone. He sits back in his chair and pops a Zoloft. Then he calls her back in, reads her the riot act from Section 9 of the administrative guide, and tells her to pack her gear and totally un-ass his area of operations in sixty seconds.

“Where to?” she asks, and he’s pleased to see she’s worried.

“JTF. The Jay Rats.”

That stopped her. Casey had never heard of them.

“JTF? What do they do?”

“What it sounds like. Joint task force. They work with state and federal cops on cases that cross jurisdictional lines.”

“Like what?”

“This isn’t an audition, Casey.”

“No. I’m sorry, sir. But …”

“Something happens in Poughkeepsie or Newark or Buffalo and a state cop thinks it connects to something going on in New York, he talks to the JTF guys. They help if they can, you follow? It’s not complicated.”

“Is this … you’re serious? I’m not suspended?”

He was. She wasn’t.

Jay Rats was a unit working out of an unmarked office in the Albee Square Mall over there in darkest Brooklyn. The boss of the Jay Rats is a gold-shield bull by the name of Vincent Zaragosa. The CO of the Two Five figured that if anybody could make a good cop out of Casey Spandau, Vince Zaragosa was the guy.

Casey Spandau lands on Vince Zaragosa’s doorstep sixty-four minutes later, carrying a beat-up brown briefcase with a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association sticker on it. Zaragosa was sitting behind his desk—a huge rosewood number with a clipper ship inlaid in blond wood—and looking at her over the top of his gold-rimmed reading glasses. Zaragosa was huge, thick-necked and heavy-shouldered, a battered face and deep-set brown eyes, a nose that took the long way down his face and made two lane changes on the way. He was wearing a gray single-breasted suit and a pale-gray tie over a charcoal shirt. The tie was held in with a gold collar pin. On the ring finger of his right hand a heavy gold detective’s ring glittered in the light from a green-glass reading lamp.

Casey sat down in front of him, balanced that pug-ugly briefcase on her lap like it held the secret to the meaning of the universe, and gave Zaragosa her Chinese eyes with her mouth thinned out and her back held so straight he could hear it creaking. Zaragosa took one long weary look at her and got right on the horn to her former CO at the Two Five.

“I got your package. She’s here now. She’s sitting in front of me. We’re making meaningful eye contact. What the fuck am I supposed to do with her?”

He says, “You owe me, Vince.”

“I owe you? You sick Irish mutt. For what?”

“Mulberry Street, you dumb guinea fuck.”

“Mulberry Street? Where’s that?”

“She’s a good cop, Vince. I’m trying to keep her on the job.”

“What’d she do at your house?”

“She allegedly kicked the living shit out of a PD name of Eddie Rubinek.”

“Did he allegedly need it?”

“Desperately. You know the Coryell thing?”

“Yeah. That hers?”

“It was. The PD got them off.”

“How?”

“The Eight Ball. Violation of ARC. She bought it.”

“So they’re back on the street?”

“Tonight. Even as we speak.”

“Shit. Spandau likely to do this kind of thing again?”

“Which … tune-up a PD, or get caught for it?”

“Either one.”

“No. I don’t think so. I think she’s pretty scared.”

“Is she likely to get charged for the Rubinek beef?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You gonna mojo the beef?”

“I won’t have to. There’s not enough evidence to lay a charge. Don’t tell her that. I want her to sweat this out for months.”

“I won’t. What else is wrong with her?”

“She’s got attitude.”

“No shit. I can see that from here. See? She’s not smiling. I really hate that not-smiling-oppressed-black-woman-Oprah-book-club-my-daddy-was-emotionally-unavailable bullshit.”

“She’s young, Vince. She’ll learn.”

There was a long silence. Zaragosa could hear the CO breathing on the other end of the line. He’s still making eye contact with Casey Spandau, watching her sit there hugging that stupid brown briefcase into her belly like it was a life preserver and the ship was already hard down by the bow with black ice on the promenade deck. He can see she’s trying not to cry. There’s no way she actually
will
cry. But the fact that she was close to it, okay, that made the difference for him.

“Okay, you Mick dick. I’m doing this for you. So remember. You owe me. I got just the guy for her.”

Zaragosa said a couple more very bad words and hung up and then he slammed Casey directly—right the
next thing—no nap—no tea and biscuits—dead-bang into a Jay Rats unit, a stakeout gig in Maspeth, run by this Irish gold shield by the name of Jimmy “Rock” Rule, who happens to be an outstanding street cop, but who is also a very intolerant guy on the issue of
the black thing
and its effect on the hiring and firing policies of the NYPD.

Anyway, here’s where it gets weird.

Nicky Cicero is working D watch—six at night to six in the morning—with the Highway Patrol section of the New York State Police. He’s got six years in, he’s unmarried, a man for the ladies, good-looking in a club-fighter kind of way, with a nice head of shiny black hair and, since he really is a club fighter but not too good at it, a nose pushed a little sideways and some scar tissue around his eyes. He’s known around the station as an easygoing troop with a six-second delay, but when you hear the click, you better be elsewhere.

He’s rolling west and north along Highway 82 listening to the cross talk on the radio and also listening to a Berlitz tape at the same time. He’s going to Italy on a vacation next fall—see the old people in a place called Giarre, in Sicily, and he wants to be able to speak some real Italian to them. Nicky doesn’t know there’s a big difference between Sicilian and Italian. It got explained to him later, but that’s another story.

He’s conjugating the “to be” part of
tu sei molto
bella, ragazzina mia
and rolling up a dark stretch of the road when his headlight glare bounces off something that glitters bright glassy-red in a big stand of trees way off in the middle of a wheat field.

He stops the cruiser and moves his roof-rack searchlight. It dances around the woods for a while and he thinks, hey, nothing, a fox eye or a skunk eye or maybe a cat. And then he sees a reflection off a patch of shiny black metal and a section of a license plate. He moves the searchlight and it shows him two crushed-down tracks in the wheat field that start in the wooded area and come all the way back to the edge of the highway.

Or the other way around, right? From here to there.

Somebody had a breakdown? But why park the vehicle way off there in the woods? He comes to a complete stop and turns on his roof-rack blue-and-reds. The disco lights bounce off the trees and he sees more reflections coming back from the vehicle. White, scattered, little diamond sparkles. Broken glass on the ground?

He picks up the radio.

“Echo One Four to base.”

“
Echo One Four?
”

“Base, this is Echo One Four. I’m at mile marker three-four northbound on Highway Eighty-two. I’m out of the vehicle to look at a possible MVA here. Give me a time check.”

“
Ten-four, Echo One Four. Time is zero hour six minutes.
”

“I can never figure that out, Gracie.”

The dispatcher’s voice breaks, comes back.