Red Hook (16 page)

In the corner, another tech dusted a china cabinet filled with a series of presidential plates. The doors were open and the shelves inside in disarray. Jack picked up two broken halves of a plate and put them together to form Richard Nixon’s jowly face. (What a strange and terrible thing: to be admired and respected as the president of the United States, then fall so low and be reviled.)

He glanced up at the ceiling and his heart froze: the stucco held a spray of little red dots he recognized as castoff, the splatter pattern made when a perp yanked a weapon back in preparation for another blow. Or stab.

He followed a trail of bloodstains across the carpet toward the back of the apartment. Halfway across the room, a partial shoeprint marred the edge of a sticky pool of blood.

“Did you guys get this?” he asked the nearest Crime Scene tech.

“You bet. I’ll bring in a saw to take up that carpet and get it to the lab.”

Jack took a deep breath, then continued on toward the kitchen.

He stood in the entry; the first thing he noticed was a wide blood smear on the inside of the back door. He moved in past the kitchen table, to a point where he could see the bottom of the stain, which led down to the corpse of Raymond Ortslee. The barge captain knelt against the bottom of the door, as if he had toppled forward while searching for a mouse hole—or praying. He wore only boxer shorts and a T-shirt with yellow sweat stains under the armpits; he’d probably been home alone at the time of the attack. The side of his right wrist bore two deep red slashes: defensive wounds he’d sustained while raising an arm in a useless attempt to protect his body from a knife. Red streaks ran down the bottom half of the door; they marked where his grasping fingers had fallen short of the knob.

Jack flashed on a
World Book
picture he’d been fascinated by as a kid: it showed the ashen mold of an ancient Roman trapped in the volcanic eruption at Pompeii, his body curled in a fetal position as he raised feeble hands against the death raining down from above.

Gary Daskivitch knelt next to the body, his necktie flung over one shoulder to keep it clear of the blood. As Jack moved close, his partner glanced up, then wordlessly pulled back the T-shirt to reveal another nasty stab mouth under the man’s protruding ribs.

Jack went clammy. He forced himself to draw several deep breaths, then took out a handkerchief and wiped off the sweat beading his forehead.

Daskivitch looked up. “
You
all right?”

“How did you know he was here?” Jack said grimly. There was no routine reason why a Seven-six detective would be immediately informed of a murder in the Seven-two.

“The Crime Scene guys found my card on the body. It was in his fucking shoe.”

Jack turned away from the body. The techs had left their sooty print dust on the door, the rusting stove, the cabinets…

Daskivitch tugged nervously at his tie. “That Berrios murder was no amateur job. These people figured out how to track this guy down.”

“Speaking of which—”

“I know. We need to check with whoever’s in charge of the canal to see if they got any strange calls. I think it’s the DOT.”

A big droopy-eyed black man in a sharp double-breasted suit came through the door. Ed Colby, from the Seventy-second Precinct. Jack had met the detective before, when they were both working Robbery.

“Nice of you to drop in,” the detective said. His left eye twitched, an involuntary tic. The other cops at the Seven-two had taken to calling him Detective Winks.

“This your case?” Jack asked.

“Yes, it is. You rookies screwing up my crime scene?”

“We’ll get out of your way.”

Colby hitched up his pants. “Way I see it, the vic’s in bed, the perp comes in through the front door there, starts searching around. Vic wakes up, comes out, confronts the perp in the living room.” Colby pointed to the front of the house; his eye twitched. “Perp assaults him there—that’s probably where he gets the defense wounds, vic goes for the back door and the fire escape, doesn’t make it. The drawers in the bedroom are open; some stuff looks like it’s missing in there.” He pointed to the living room. “I think we got a B and E gone bad.”

“Robbery, huh?” Jack rubbed the back of his neck and exchanged a look with Daskivitch.

“Yeah. We found his pants upstairs. The pockets are turned out, wallet’s gone…what? What do you guys know?”

“Let’s get some air,” Daskivitch told the detective. “I’ll fill you in.”

Jack stayed in the kitchen, staring down at the barge captain’s abused body. A wave of nausea swept over him. He leaned against a counter and pressed a hand to his stomach. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing the queasiness to disappear.

Be professional, he told himself. Look at the whole picture. Find the evidence. He took another look at Ortslee curled up by the door and then—he couldn’t help it—he knelt down and lifted the little man up.

Daskivitch walked through the door. “Did I leave my—?” He stopped in shock. “Jesus Christ—what are you doing!”

Jack looked down at the frail body in his arms. “I don’t know,” he said weakly.

Daskivitch turned to see if anyone was behind him. “Jack, you gotta put him down.”

Groggy, he complied.

“Fuck,”
Daskivitch muttered. He wet some paper towels and wiped the blood off Jack’s hands. “Come on,” he said, and tugged Jack’s arm to lead him out the back door onto the fire escape.

Jack sank down in the corner. The iron rails pressed into his back. He breathed deep of the night air, trying to free his nostrils of the scent of blood. Above the door, some sort of strange flying beetle was zittering around a bare light bulb. Down below, across a shadowy asphalt lot, a couple of cops leaned against a squad car, shooting the shit and laughing.

Daskivitch paced back and forth, rubbing his chin. “Jesus, guy, what the hell were you thinking?”

Jack didn’t answer.

Daskivitch crouched down. “What is it with this one, Jack? Why is this case different for you?”

Jack considered the question as if he were staring at a foreign object. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you won’t say?”

Jack sat silent for a moment, then raised his head. “We killed the barge guy, Gary.
I
killed him.”

“What!”

“I laughed at him. I ordered him to stay put.”

Daskivitch turned to look down into the lot. “Maybe…maybe Colby was right. Maybe this was just a bad B and E. A fluke, you know? A coincidence.”

Jack snorted. “How many burglars go around carrying knives?”

“Maybe he found it in the kitchen.”

“Come on, Gary. It was the same goddamn perp.”

Daskivitch sighed and scratched the back of his head. “Maybe we screwed up. But it’s like my first partner on patrol taught me. You learn from it, then let it go. Right?”

Above the door, the beetle kept smacking its head against the light. Jack smiled bitterly. “Let it go. Sure.”

“You gonna be okay?”

Jack shrugged.

His partner stood up. “All right. “You better not go back in there. Why don’t you head down this back way? I’ll go inside and tell Colby you got an emergency call.”

J
ACK JOLTED AWAKE IN
the middle of the night. His heart was palpitating, constricted, and he was panting. He didn’t know if he was having his first asthma attack since boyhood, or his first heart attack. He pushed himself up to a sitting position and clutched the sheets, willing his breath to slow.

After a few minutes it did, and the bands across his chest eased.

Shaken, he got out of bed and drank a glass of water. Had he been having a nightmare? He couldn’t remember.

He did remember Raymond Ortslee, crouched down by his back door, begging for help. Begging
him
for help.

He turned on the TV and tried to focus on an infomercial for an abdominal exerciser. Then he turned off the TV and lay staring up into the dark.

Daskivitch called in the early afternoon.

“Hey, bunk. Jeannie wanted me to ask what we can bring over.”

Jack didn’t answer.

“We’re still on for this evening, aren’t we?”

He looked out his kitchen window. Down in the sunny backyard, his landlord was repairing the leg of a garden table.

“Jack?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I’m not sure I’m up for a party, after what happened the other day.”

“You mean Ortslee?”

“That shouldn’t have happened.”

Daskivitch was silent for a moment. “Well,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, right?”

“Yeah, there is. We can catch the bastards who did this.”

“I’m with you. But today…come on. “You need to forget about it for just a few hours. You don’t want to bum Michelle out, do you?”

Outside, Mr. Gardner flipped the table over and rocked it to make sure it was steady. He was always puttering around in the yard, pruning the roses or building a barbecue out of spare bricks or painting all of the lawn furniture a light purple that made it look like some kind of modern art. Looking down on him from above, Jack noticed that his white hair had a sea-green tinge in the back. The old man hitched up his pants and stood still for a moment, as if listening to some distant sound.

Suddenly his cat scrabbled up over the chain-link fence and Mr. Gardner snapped out of his daydream. The cat raised its head and let out a tortured yowl. It was in heat, Jack realized. So much for self-sufficiency.

“All right,” he said, finally. “Just bring a six-pack or something.”

He had less than three hours to clean up and shop before his guests arrived.

He mopped his kitchen floor, cleaned the toilet, polished the bathroom mirror. By the time he got around to scouring the kitchen sink, he was starting to feel better about the evening ahead. When he heard Mr. Gardner clumping up the basement stairs, he impulsively stuck his head out into the hall.

“Hey, listen, Mr. G.—I’m having a couple of friends over for dinner this evening. Why don’t you come down and join us?”

The old man hitched up his pants. “Oh, no. Thanks, but I wouldn’t wanna be a bother.”

“No, really. You can help me with the barbecuing.”

That did the trick. Mr. Gardner smiled shyly. “I don’t wanna be in the way.”

“Come on down in a couple of hours.”

Avenue M was the commercial strip that time forgot. There were no supermarkets or chain stores, just family businesses on the ground floor of two-story brick buildings. Outside the markets, old brown and yellow signs in 1950s script: Norwegian Schmaltz Herring Only $1.49 Lb; Homemade Rugalech, Challah, Babkas. Chinese Cuisine—Glatt Kosher. Other signs were in Hebrew so Jack could only guess what they said. Lotto banners swayed like party decorations in front of newsstands where
Playboy
would never be sold. The avenue still had men’s hat stores, for chrissakes.

Outside Goldie’s Deli, he listened to the cheery, tinny melody of a five-cent mechanical pony being ridden by a little Hasidic boy. Along the sidewalks came a parade of ancient pensioners, slow-moving, dignified trolls.

He hadn’t eaten anything all day. He stopped in to Goldie’s for a quick bite, ordered some fries from the Puerto Rican guy behind the counter. On his right sat a tiny, ancient, bent-over woman in a red designer suit. She launched into her own order. “How much for the french-fried onions? Does the sandwich come with slaw?”

He looked closer at this sparrow’s big jewelry and saw that it was fake. Her collar was stained. Despite her natty outfit, she wasn’t being stingy about the onion rings: she couldn’t afford them.

Mr. Gardner in his empty apartment, this little lady making an afternoon out of her deli lunch—they gave him a chill. He’d seen shootings, decapitations, car crashes, all sorts of quick, violent ways to die. What scared him more was the thought of growing old and infirm alone.

When his sandwich arrived, the woman turned to him and said with a sweet smile, “You’re young. I could never eat what you’re eating. Enjoy. It’s
good
to be young.”

They got up to leave at the same time. He stood behind her patiently as she tottered toward the door, moving as if on tiny wheels.

On the way home, guilty thoughts of Raymond Ortslee kept drifting into his head, but he did his best to brush them aside. This was an evening to relax. To get away from work.
Let it go.

He and Michelle exchanged shy smiles. She wore a short skirt and a blue and white striped T-shirt that showed off her figure. Over her shoulder, Daskivitch winked. Jeannie stuck out her hand. They’d all come together in Daskivitch’s car. He would have expected his partner’s wife to be a tall blonde with teased hair and big boobs, but Jeannie was a surprise, a small lively redhead. She said she worked as a fund-raiser for breast cancer research. Jack’s respect for his partner went up another notch.

Daskivitch wore Bermuda shorts and a nice polo shirt, but with his athletic socks and hi-top Converse sneakers, he still looked like a giant kid.

Jack led everyone into the backyard. Round slate flagstones made a walkway across the small lawn to Mr. Gardner’s new barbecue, where the old man stood squirting lighter fluid on the charcoal. A pair of tongs rested on a side table, which he had constructed by resting a marble slab on two porcelain toilet tanks. Dusky roses trailed up the chain-link fence at the back of the yard.

Jack made the introductions.

“Oh, hey, how ya doin’?” Mr. G. said heartily.

While Michelle complimented him on the roses, Daskivitch turned to Jack. “Hey, did you hear what happened to Billy Kehoe over at the Eight-four?”

“Don’t start with the cop talk,” Jeannie said. “You promised.”

Daskivitch raised his hands in surrender. “You’re right. I’ll shut up. We’re here to relax.”

The sky was blue as it could be; the air was dry and cool. Next door, a neighbor’s birch tree shimmied in the breeze. Mr. Gardner went inside to his workshop to search out more barbecue implements.

“This is lovely,” Jeannie said. “Would you mind if I used your bathroom?”

“I’ll go with you,” Michelle said.

“Look out,” said Daskivitch. “The women are plotting.” He watched his wife and her friend go inside. He turned to Jack and bit his lip. “Listen, are you okay? You seemed pretty freaked out the other night.”