Buried on Avenue B (2 page)

 

CHAPTER 3

HOMICIDE SOUTH IS
buried in a warren of windowless rooms on the third floor of the 13. Just off the elevator is a lonely cubicle.

“Morning, Ray. Anything?”

“A kid got stabbed outside Rocco's on Delancey,” says Hickey and hands O'Hara a printout. “They took him to St. Vincent's. Listed in critical.”

Hickey works the overnight, between 1:00 and 9:00 a.m., an inglorious assignment known as the wheel. If all hell breaks loose, he calls Kelso, the lieutenant, and wakes him up. Something less urgent, like an assault that may or may not get upgraded to homicide, he fills out an unusual and hands it off to the detectives when they arrive for their morning shift. If you're working the wheel, you did something wrong and got caught. In Hickey's case it was knocking over a cyclist in a bike lane—or, more precisely, being captured on the cyclist's girlfriend's cell leaving the scene. Now he's strapped to the wheel as if it were a giant rock.

Unusual in hand, O'Hara continues into the squad room and sits at her desk beside her partner, Augustus Jandorek. Jandorek is in his mid-fifties, natty and thin, with closely cropped gray hair and beard, a late-career detective who's cast himself as Prince of the City. His gray tropical wool suit actually fits. A gold bracelet dangles at the cuff.

“This whole thing is about pepper flakes,” says Jandorek. Although his copy of the unusual is on his desk, he is preoccupied by something on his computer screen.

“At four in the morning, two guys step into Rocco's for a slice. One is built like a refrigerator, six-five, two-ninety. The other, like a hotel minibar, five-seven, one-fifty-five. The smaller man reaches for the pepper, which might suggest he's eaten at Rocco's before, because their pie needs all the help it can get, although the guy at the counter swears he's never seen him. As he reaches for the jar, he knocks the shoulder of the larger man. The smaller man apologizes, even offers to buy him a second slice, but the refrigerator won't let it slide. Apparently, when he was upstate, he read Emily Post cover to cover and is a stickler on dining etiquette.”

“He is unappeasable.”

“You got that right, Dar. The motherfucker is nothing if not unappeasable. He invites his fellow diner to step outside, and when the man shows no enthusiasm, he insists. Once outside, the little guy stabs the big guy, Ted McBeth, in the abdomen. McBeth is at St. Vincent's. The perp remains at large.”

“So much for etiquette,” says O'Hara.

Despite the way her day began, O'Hara is invigorated by the possibility of catching a homicide, a rare occurrence in Homicide South. On the far wall is a blackboard listing the eleven individuals unlucky enough to have been murdered below Fifty-Ninth Street in '07, ten of whom have a blue line running through the middle of their names. The only name that doesn't belongs to a man who choked on a hot dog in April. When the ME determined the choking was the result of damage to his esophagus sustained in an assault fifteen years before his last meal, the death went from a tragic case of underchewing to a homicide. To Kelso, who is obsessed with the squad's closure rate, it has become a blemish that will never go away, and every time he looks up at the board, he feels like the frank is repeating on him.

To detectives in the Bronx and Brooklyn or even Manhattan North, eleven murders in seven months is laughable, and the reason Manhattan South is called Manhattan Soft. Even compared to the 7, the pace is maddeningly slow, and not long after O'Hara arrived, Kelso, sensing her restlessness, sat her down for a little heart-to-heart.

“Manhattan South may have a small caseload,” he said, “but there's a flip side. When someone gets killed here, people, as in the media and brass, actually give a fuck, which is why we get assigned the best detectives in the system.” Kelso's office is just beyond Hickey's cubicle, and seeing it over Kelso's shoulder felt like a warning. “Our closure rate has been the highest in the city five years running. Hell, three of the last four years it's been perfect, and if it weren't for that motherfucker who forgot to chew, we'd be at a hundred percent this year too. It's not quantity, it's quality. The detectives in Homicide South are the last adults in NYPD, and when you come here, that's what's expected—adult behavior.”

O'Hara got the message, and Hickey's cube, which seemed even scarier for being empty, reinforced it. Over time, however, O'Hara has also come to see that in homicide,
adult
is synonymous with
old
. Every detective in the squad, except for her, has got their twenty years in, or even their twenty-five. After that long, the job is like elevator music, what's playing in the background while you're thinking about something else.

“We heading to St. Vincent's?”

“You in a rush to catch SARS? Or Ebola
?
Or West Nile? You must not have seen that waiting room lately. I made a call. McBeth is still in surgery. We won't be able to talk to him for hours.”

“We could talk to the nurses. He might have said something as they wheeled him in.”

“It's possible,” says Jandorek as he stares at his computer screen, “but let's sit tight. Besides, there's something I want to ask you. There's this kid, maybe the best cop softball player in the country. I went to his Facebook page, and he's posted a ten-minute video of himself working out. Does that strike you as gay?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. But my buddy who knows him insists he's not, and swears he gets more tail than anyone.”

“Okay, then. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's just a little off. Maybe he's a scientologist.”

Jandorek looks up from his screen and shoots O'Hara a quizzical look, and O'Hara knows she has to be careful. For Jandorek it's all about cops, being part of the fraternity—that's why he's checking out the Web site for the NYPD softball team rather than the one for the Yankees or the Mets—and determining whether the best cop softball player in the country is gay is not something to be taken lightly.

“I don't think you are wrong, Dar.”

“I don't think I am either. But let me ask you something. Why do you give a fuck?”

“That's a very good question. But it's a completely different question than the one I'm addressing right now. By the way, you might want to consider brushing your teeth.”

“That bad?”

“Yes.”

As O'Hara fishes in her drawer for her toothbrush, Lauricella, the desk sergeant from downstairs, approaches her desk in the company of a tall black woman in her fifties.

“Paulette Williamson,” he says, “this is Detective Darlene O'Hara. Ms. Williamson wants to report a possible homicide. She asked to talk to a woman.”

Two potential hommies in one morning, thinks O'Hara. In Homicide Soft. What the hell?

“Please,” says O'Hara and points to a chair.

“I'm a home health aide,” says Williamson. “I take care of an elderly man on East Third named Gus Henderson. A couple weeks ago he caught the flu, and for a few days it looked bad.” Williamson is about fifty, pretty and well-spoken with a trace of Caribbean lilt. She exudes the patience needed for her line of work.

“We thought he might pass, and I think he thought so too because one night he asked me to close the shades and light a candle. There was something he wanted to get off his chest.” O'Hara doesn't have to look over at Jandorek to know he's rolling his eyes.

“Gus tells me that seventeen years ago he killed someone, stabbed him to death in a fight, then buried the body.”

“He mention where?”

“He said it was under a tree.”

“He say anything else about the victim—his name, age, physical description?”

“A big black guy,” says Williamson, “only he didn't say it like that.”

“He used the N-word?”

“Correct.”

“Your client, how old is he?”

“Sixty-seven, but he seems older. He was a drug addict for a long time.”

“How about mentally? Is he playing with a full deck?”

“He has good days and bad days.”

Was this a good one or a bad one? thinks O'Hara. At this point, she's heard enough, but if Williamson could let Gus get it off his chest, O'Hara figures she can do the same for Williamson. It's that or talk about softball.

“I was going to ignore it, too,” says Williamson pointedly. “Thank goodness, Gus got better, and yesterday on our way back from the doctor, he stopped the cab at Sixth Street and Avenue B. He made us both get out, so he could point into the garden at a spot by a tree where he ‘buried the big black nigger.' Since it would take you people about five minutes to find out if it's true or not, I thought I should come forward.”

As Williamson sits beside her, O'Hara types “Gus Henderson, 67” into the system, and in seconds calls up an endless rap sheet of low-level offenses. Talk about focus and endurance. As she scrolls the lowlights, she sees that his first arrest, for possession of narcotics, was at seventeen in Tompkins Square Park, and his last, for the same offense, barely two blocks away on Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place, was forty-five years later, at the age of sixty-two. In between were some hundred and fifty other arrests, the overwhelming majority in eight square blocks of the Lower East Side and East Village. If they gave a lifetime achievement award to junkies, thinks O'Hara, this guy would be tough to beat.

Then O'Hara turns to Williamson. “Paulette, I'm going to run your name too. Before I do, is there anything I ought to know about?”

Williamson stares hard at O'Hara, then wearily shakes her head, as if telling herself she should have known that this would be her thanks for walking fifteen blocks on her own time.

“At one point, Detective O'Hara, I had a drug problem myself. Eight years ago, I cashed two stolen checks. Since then I've been clean. A year ago I made full restitution, every last cent.”

O'Hara runs her name, and what comes up corroborates her story. Her last arrest was in '99.

“Those checks totaled almost eleven thousand,” says O'Hara, looking at the screen. “That's a lot of money. How'd you pay it back?”

“I worked,” says Williamson, although it sounds more like “Fuck you.” “Are you going to look into this?”

“I doubt it,” says O'Hara, “but thanks for coming in.”

Williamson gets up to leave, then hovers over her chair and looks down at O'Hara. “I had a problem, Detective. It's true. But at least I dealt with mine.”

MCBETH MAKES IT
through his first surgery, and two hours later he is wheeled back in for a second. When O'Hara and Jandorek step into St. Vincent's ER, it's almost 7:00 p.m. The office of the admissions nurse has a glass window overlooking the dreaded waiting room. Above it is a sign informing arrivals that patients will be treated based on the seriousness of their condition, not the order in which they arrived. Jandorek refers O'Hara to the second sign, which reads, “Don't Spread Germs! Please cover your mouth when you cough.”

“You think these motherfuckers cover their mouths when they cough? Not a chance in hell.”

They are informed that the nurse in charge of the intensive care unit is on her way down, but twenty minutes later she still hasn't arrived. Being in a hospital with Jandorek reminds O'Hara of the events that made him a legend among fellow detectives. A dozen years ago, Jandorek was working in homicide in Queens when he was appointed to be a union rep, a full-time position that supplants all your responsibilities as a detective. Careerwise, a stint with the union can work for or against you, but if you're already in homicide and essentially guaranteed to make grade, there's not much upside. Nevertheless, Jandorek took the job, and proved to be an effective rep, but one incident elevated him to the pantheon. About ten years ago a Brooklyn detective, after a long night of drinking, ran a stop sign and broadsided another car. Although the detective had only suffered minor injuries, a couple broken ribs, both passengers in the other car—a kindergarten teacher and her husband—were killed. Jandorek got the call in the middle of the night. He told the detective not to say a word before he got there, and more importantly, not to blow a Breathalyzer. “Tell them you're in too much pain,” he said, “that you can't breathe.” Both Jandorek and the DA arrived at the scene within minutes. The DA wanted the detective bad, which was understandable—he drove drunk and killed two human beings. But Jandorek refused to let the detective blow a test, said he'd got three cracked ribs, he could barely breathe, claimed it was unconscionable to even ask an officer in his condition to blow, that it was jeopardizing his life. Without the failed test, the only thing they got him for was running a stop sign, and a year later, the detective retired with a full pension. But brass was pissed, and now Jandorek is the only longtime homicide detective in the city who hasn't been promoted to first grade and probably never will be.

Finally the head ICU nurse, Evelyn Priestly, deigns to brief them. Like Williamson, she is a tall, handsome Caribbean, and compared to the chalky complexions of the men and women slumped nearby, her cheeks and forehead glisten.

“Detectives, I assume you're here to check on the condition of Ted McBeth,” she says, “who was admitted to the hospital early this morning. I have good news, although from your point of view it might not be. The young man came through his second surgery extremely well and is no longer in danger.”

“Can we talk to him?” asks O'Hara. “Even if he didn't succeed, someone did his best to kill him.”

“He asked not to be disturbed.”

“Maybe tomorrow, then.”

“He told us he doesn't want to talk to the police while he's in the hospital. And I don't have to remind you about the HIPPA rules, which mandate that his wishes be respected.”