Red Hook (21 page)

“Nobody’s ordering you to see a counselor.”

“Well, that’s good. Because I’m fine.”

The sergeant rolled a pen around his desk. He considered Jack carefully.

Jack stood up. “Well, if that’s all, I’ve got a lot of paperwork to catch up on.”

Tanney tugged at his earlobe. “There’s one more thing. I’ve been reviewing your work on this Berrios case.”

Jack sat down.

“You’re a good detective, Leightner. Thorough. Strong on the details. You work a case hard.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No. Not most of the time. But my job’s a little different from yours. I’m not just looking at things case by case. I have to watch the big picture. How we’re allocating our resources. Our time. Our energy.”

“What? You’re saying this isn’t an important case? No press, right? Just some poor Hispanic schlub, is that it?”

The sergeant rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Slow down, Leightner. Every victim is important. Though he wasn’t exactly the Mexican ambassador, was he?”

“He was
Dominican
.” Jack sighed. “Listen, Sergeant: at least half the victims we get are dirtbags. Some of these mutts might as well be running around wearing signs saying ‘Kill Me’! But as far as I can tell, this kid was clean. A family man. A good worker. He didn’t deserve to be trussed up like a hog, to have his face bashed. To get stabbed in the, in the fucking
heart
.”

“Of course not. But the question is, how much time do you need to spend on this? And do you need to go knocking on doors all along the Upper East Side?”

Jack smiled fiercely. “Oh,
okay
. Now I see where we’re going with this. Heiser. That son of a bitch went and complained to One PP. They’re busting your balls.”

“It’s not like that.”

“How is it? Some rich prick doesn’t feel like answering a few questions, you’re gonna yank my chain?”

“If you have so much energy, how about helping with some of our priority cases? Santiago could use a little help with this Cobble Hill thing I have to read about in the papers every goddamn day.”

“You’re saying that Tomas Berrios wasn’t as important as some Cobble Hill yuppie? And it’s not just him—what about the Ortslee murder?”

“We don’t know for sure that there was any connection. Look—all I’m saying is that we don’t need to stir up problems unless there’s some concrete reason.”

Jack stood up. “You want me off this case, I want an order in writing.”

The sergeant sat back in his chair and swung from side to side for a moment, considering Jack. “I’m just asking you to use your best judgment, Detective.”

Jack glared at his boss. “That’s what I get paid to do.”

In the Seven-six squad room, Daskivitch was at his desk, his head down as he shuffled through some paperwork.

“Hey, bud,” Jack said as he walked in. “Everything good with you? ’Cause everything’s
great
with me.”

Daskivitch looked up, his guilt in his eyes. “I didn’t go to the sergeant—he came to me and asked me how you were doing. I was worried about you. You haven’t been sleeping, you seem all riled up—”

“Listen, you’re a good kid. But what you did—
not good.
This is not how a cop fucking behaves, You have a problem with me, you bring it to me.”

“Come on, Jack. I don’t have a problem with you. He thought you might want a few days off. That’s all.”

“Number one: the last thing I need is the sergeant on my back. Number two: mind your own goddamn business.
Capisce?
”

“I was just trying to be—”

“Fuck you. Okay? Just fuck you.”

A female clerk turned from a filing cabinet in the corner of the room and stared.

“Fuck
you
too,” Jack told her. Daskivitch started to get up but Jack pushed him back into his seat.

“Leave it alone, kid. I’m not gonna tell you again.”

He strode out of the squad room.

He found a café on Court Street to sit in, a yuppie place with tiny, expensive pastries and fancy coffees. At least it was air-conditioned. At the wrought-iron table next to him, two young mothers discussed the speed of their Internet connections as their little kids ran around and whined that they wanted to go home.

It took half an hour before the rage inside him ebbed away, and then he was just left with shame. Sometimes it seemed that Daskivitch was more like a son to him than his own son—and he couldn’t seem to get right with either one of them.

He resolved to go home and talk to Ben. The kid was getting to be a man now—maybe they could finally bury the hatchet and meet on a new level. Get to know each other after all these years.

But his son wasn’t home. Was he avoiding his father, or just busy with work?

B
EFORE HIS NEXT SHIFT
, Jack stopped off at the hospital to see Mr. Gardner.

A beleaguered clerk at the front desk told him that unless he was immediate family, visiting hours for the intensive care unit were not due to start for another forty-five minutes. He held up his detective shield.

Upstairs, a pretty young Filipina nurse led him through the ICU, a loud demented frog pond with its constant un-synchronized beeping and booping, its bubbling of liquids and hissing of gases. She pulled back a curtain to reveal a small oasis in the whirl of activity. Mr. Gardner looked shrunken, like an elf sleeping amid a tangle of intravenous tubes, hoses, electrical cables, and hanging bags of bright liquids. A compressor chugged, feeding air into the tube which branched into the old man’s nostrils.

Jack looked up at the four jagged green lines surging across the monitor over the bed. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s stable,” the nurse said. “But if he’s a witness or something, you won’t be able to talk to him today. He’s very weak.”

“Do you know what the prognosis is? What are the chances of a good recovery?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s too early to tell. I can give you the name of his doctor so you can check back later.”

“Thank you. Do you mind if I sit here for a minute?”

The nurse shrugged. “I’ll come back.” She stepped out and drew the curtain closed.

Jack set down the box of chocolates he’d bought at the newstand in the lobby and prayed that Mr. Gardner would be well enough to eat them before they went stale. He stood next to the bed and held on to the metal railing.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, Mr. G., but it’s Jack. I just want to tell you that I hope you get better soon. And”—he swallowed—“and that I’m sorry this happened.”

In the corner, the air compressor chugged on. “I been screwing up a lot recently,” he confided to the sleeping man. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Somewhere beyond the curtain a small alarm trilled.

He sat for a few minutes watching the sheet over Mr. Gardner’s chest slowly rise and fall.

He leaned over and murmured, “I’ll come back when you’re feeling better, You fight City Hall, okay?”

He spent the morning helping one of the other task force members canvass an apartment building in Flatbush. It was the kind of work no one wanted: going door to door, floor to floor, in a place where just about everybody hated you for being a cop. And then you had to spend more time typing up the Fives.
3B
—
no answer. 3C
—
tenant at work at time of incident. 3D—tenant watching TV with grandmother at time of incident…
Normally, a team of uniforms would have been assigned to the duty, but on some sensitive cases the detectives did the work themselves—patrol rookies didn’t have the experience to analyze the subtle undercurrents of an interview.

He’d just returned to the task force office and sat down to his lunch, a meatball hero, when a call came through from Gary Daskivitch. The young detective sounded breathless. “Can you come over right away?”

“What’s up?” Jack said curtly, peeling a hot string of mozzarella off the sandwich’s foil wrapping.

Daskivitch cleared his throat. “When I’m not too busy here, I keep an eye out for what comes through the Eight-four.” That precinct was in Brooklyn North, just over the line from the Seven-six. “Last night they brought in a kid named Ramon Aguilar.”

“So?” Jack said around a mouthful of steaming meatball.

“He was one of Tomas Berrios’s bicycle buddies.”

“What did they bring him in for?”

“Attempted assault. With a knife.”

Jack almost choked on his sandwich. “Hot damn!” he said. He slapped his desk and grinned like a proud father. “You know what, kid? You’re not as dumb as you look.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line, then Daskivitch said, “Thanks…I think.”

They met at the Seven-six house and then the young detective drove them north, through Carroll Gardens, on past the genteel brownstones of Cobble Hill. At Atlantic Avenue, in the middle of a strip of Middle Eastern grocery stores, they sat waiting for a long red light. A couple of Arab women veiled from head to toe were slowly crossing the intersection.

“Just use the siren and go on through,” Jack said impatiently.

“I don’t want to hit those women. They must be boiling inside there,” Daskivitch said. “What a strange way to go through life.”

Jack nodded distractedly. His heart lifted as the car picked up speed and swung around onto Atlantic. He remembered Tomas’s buddies, remembered one particularly lippy, sharp-faced kid, the one who’d made some dumb joke about the Mod Squad. He hoped this was Ramon Aguilar.

Daskivitch careened left onto Boerum Place, just next to the massive barred monolith of the Brooklyn House of Detention, where—God willing—the Berrios/Ortslee killer would soon take up temporary residence. Daskivitch swerved into a side lane and zipped past the traffic waiting to go across the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Speed it up,” Jack said.

They ran up the steps of the Eight-four house and slipped around three laughing patrol cops coming out the door.

A young sergeant with a weak mustache glanced up from behind the front desk as they rushed in. “Hey, Gar’,” he said. “What are you doin’ over here?”

Daskivitch hunkered down over the desk. “I need to know who brought in a kid named Ramon Aguilar last night. Attempted assault.”

The sergeant consulted a computer printout. “Let’s see…that was Tony Ruiz.”

“Did they take the kid to the House of D yet?”

The sergeant swiveled in his chair and called out to an office next door. “Hey, Nootsie, did Ruiz leave with that Spanish kid?”

“They’re still upstairs,” said a voice from the office.

The sergeant turned back with the news, but the detectives were already on their way up.

Ramon Aguilar paced back and forth in a holding cage at the back of the squad room. Jack recognized him as the wisecracker of Tomas’s little crew. The kid walked up to the bars and scowled. “Oh, shit, it’s the Mod Squad again. What’s your problem? You lock
me
up, but you can’t even find the guys who killed Tommy.”

Jack grinned. “Oh, yeah? Maybe we got lucky today. Maybe we got a two-for-one.”

“The fuck you talking about?” sputtered Ramon, but Jack and his partner moved on to find Tony Ruiz, a handsome detective with the on-the-balls-of-his-feet stance of an ambitious young riser in the department. They stepped into the squad lounge, another drab little room with crappy furniture, to give him the background on the Berrios and Ortslee stabbings.

Ruiz frowned at the grave direction his case was taking. “The complainant’s a kid named Carlos Fulgencia, twenty-three, also Latino. He says he was walking with his girlfriend and one of her friends in the Fulton Street Mall last night. Says they passed Ramon here, and our friend made a comment about his girl’s ass.”

“Did the guys know each other?” Daskivitch asked.

“Yeah. He said they used to be friends, but apparently last year there was a falling-out—something about a bike. Anyhow, the Fulgencia kid said he challenged Ramon, and our guy pulled out a knife. They were tangling when a mall security patrol came by and broke it up.”

“Did Ramon cut the kid?”

“Nope. He just pulled the knife out in the middle of the scuffle and waved it around.”

“You have witnesses?” Jack asked.

“Well, the two girls backed up Fulgencia’s story. My partner’s down at the mall trying to find others.”

“Did they recover the weapon?”

“Yeah. We got it downstairs.”

The clerk in charge of the evidence room, a very pregnant young Italian-American woman, unlocked the cage and waddled back among shelves crowded with tagged brown bags. A minute later she waddled back with a small sack.

Jack eagerly opened it and reached in to lift out a plastic bag.

The detectives frowned. The bag contained a folding hunting knife with a blade about four inches long. It was certainly-big enough to cause mortal damage, but had no hilt.

“Maybe he has more at home,” Daskivitch said. “At least we know he likes blades.”

Ramon glared across the table at Jack and his partner. Tony Ruiz leaned against the closed door with his arms folded across his chest:
to get out, you have to go through
me.

Ramon turned to look back at the detective from the Eight-four. “I told you already, man—yeah, I said something about his girlfriend, but he’s the one who got all up in my face. And it wasn’t my fuckin’ knife! She was carrying it, in this little Hilfiger backpack.”

Jack leaned forward and set his palms flat out on the table. “Let’s forget about this for a minute. What I wanna know is: if Tomas Berrios was such a good friend of yours, why would you stab him? How could you do that, Ramon?”

Ramon groaned and grabbed the sides of his head. “You’re fuckin’ crazy, cop. I never had nothin’ to do with that. Me and Tommy din’t have no problems.”

Jack lowered his voice. “What knife did you use when you stabbed him?”

Ramon squirmed and glanced back at the door. “This is fucked up,” he moaned. “You got the wrong guy. I never even been arrested.”

This was true: the kid didn’t have a sheet.

“Where were you on the morning Tomas was killed, then?”

Ramon pointed at Daskivitch. “I already told this guy!
I work in a bodega on Hoyt Street. I was there alt day.
Why don’t you just call my boss?”