Red Hook (32 page)

Jack lurched to his feet and staggered forward.

Startled, Greenlee grabbed the gun from the card table and fired. The shot popped hollow in the bare room. Jack jerked back as if pulled by a giant hand. He stumbled over the chair and crumpled onto the damp floor.

The goon in the baseball jacket reached into the back of his waistband. He pulled out a small stubby gun and shot the knife man in the back. Greenlee wheeled around, but the big man raised his gun and shot him in the face.

Jack thought he was hallucinating.

The big man spun around. “Get down, motherfucker!” he screamed at Heiser in an odd high voice. “Lie down! Hands behind your head!” He tucked his head down toward his chest and shouted, “Move in, move in! We’re in the warehouse next door!” His eyes were wide and he was hyperventilating. “The back! We’re in the back! Downstairs!”

Greenlee lay on his side in the middle of the room. He sucked air through what was left of his mouth. All Jack could see of the knife man was his legs sticking out from under the card table. Bitter smoke hung in the air.

Holding his gun in both hands, the man in the baseball jacket bent down over Heiser. “Don’t move an inch, shit-head!”

He turned to Jack. “It’s okay!” he shouted. “I’m a federal agent. Fuck—we told you to stay out of this.” He knelt down and felt Jack’s neck for a pulse. “Ten-thirteen!” he shouted into his wire. “Ten-thirteen!” The most urgent police code.
Officer down.

Jack struggled to lift his head: a puddle of blood had soaked through his shirt and pooled on his chest; it fountained up.

He thought of his brother. He thought of his son.

The world died.

O
N SUCH A BEAUTIFUL
fall day, it would have been easy to forget that Green-Wood Cemetery was a place for the dead.

The burial grounds covered almost five hundred acres. Ben Leightner walked up a steep rise near the northern edge. He’d followed many twisting lanes to get here, all paths with soothing names: Jasmine, Cypress, Lily, Laurel…Hoping for a view of Manhattan, he climbed higher. The cemetery was all hill and hollow, forested with trees, stone angels, and obelisks.

From the top, he saw only more marker-covered hills. On this crisp day, the sun flooded the trees in a bright glory of red, orange, and yellow.

After he entered the cemetery, he’d seen a guard in a security car and a couple of orange-vested workers raking leaves, but in the past few minutes he hadn’t seen anyone. The few sounds were pleasant ones: the crunch of leaves beneath his feet, the wind sighing in the trees, a hint of traffic so far away it sounded like a softly rushing brook. It was so peaceful he could hardly believe he was in the middle of Brooklyn.

He had received word of his father’s shooting early the next morning through a phone call from his dad’s boss, one Detective Sergeant Tanney. The sergeant offered his sympathies, but very little information.

The official story was released two days later, when the police commissioner himself announced that Detective First Grade Jack Leightner had gone down in the middle of a valiant attempt to arrest the murderer of two Brooklyn residents.

The real story didn’t emerge until several days after that, when an anonymous tip to the
Daily News
opened up a very different account. It turned out that Randall Heiser had been under covert investigation by the FBI for two years. Though the Feds should—in hindsight—have moved against him after the Berrios and Ortslee murders, they argued that they’d lacked any direct evidence of Heiser’s involvement. They claimed that a shaky indictment would have jeopardized a much broader investigation into racketeering in the national real estate and development markets. In their defense, they pointed out that following the murders they had assigned an undercover team to monitor the man around the clock.

Two senior FBI managers and an NYPD lieutenant were suspended from duty pending the conclusion of a full investigation into the matter.

Ben heard a noise and his heart iced over, but it was only a squirrel skittering through the leaves. He tromped down the hill, retracing his footsteps. At the bottom he crossed an asphalt lane called Linden Avenue and climbed another ridge, this one thickly wooded, the trees shading ornate marble mausoleums. Even in death, the rich had grander homes. The view opened onto a sunny clearing below. His father stood there, leaning on his cane in front of his brother Peter’s humble tombstone. The cane was a recent luxury after two weeks in intensive care, a month in a private bed, then a month in which he shuffled around with a walker. At first, before the true story came out, the city had tried to lawyer out of full coverage for the medical bills—they argued that his father had been officially suspended before the incident, that he’d acted outside the department’s jurisdiction and responsibility—but his boss, Sergeant Tanney, threatened to quit if they didn’t do the right thing.

The doctors said his father might never be fit enough to qualify for active police duty again. Ben was surprised to discover that the old man didn’t seem to care. A week ago, he’d gone to visit his father at the apartment in Midwood. (The landlord was doing relatively well upstairs with the help of a home-care attendant and he’d brushed off his son’s demands that Jack move out.) Much of the conversation was still awkward, but at least this time they had more to talk about.

The old man had been down there by the grave site for almost an hour. Ben was about to step down the hill, but he saw his father’s lips moving. Embarrassed, he turned away to give him more time.

These days his father seemed
lighter
, somehow, which was kind of weird, considering that he’d been shot, and all. Maybe it was the therapy. His dad would never have admitted that he was seeing a shrink, but Ben had accidentally come across a bill on the old man’s kitchen counter. His father
did
say that as soon as he got better, he planned to go back to school for a certificate—he wanted to try for a new career as a drug and alcohol rehab counselor.

Maybe it was the romance. It was pretty weird seeing his father with a new girlfriend. In the hospital, Ben had been grumpy with her out of loyalty to his mom, but Michelle turned out to be nice, and she seemed to really care about his dad.

His father called out for him.

“I’m up here,” Ben shouted.

Jack looked up, shielding his eyes, to locate his son among the shady leaves. He rested his hand on the tombstone for a moment, then slowly set off up the path.

Ben pulled out a camera and began to film. Someday, if he had a son, the kid would be able to see what his grandfather had looked like when he was still a relatively young man.

I
’D LIKE TO THANK
the many people who helped me research this book. They include Buddy Scotto, Sonny Balzano, Adam Cohen, Kevin O’Leary, Chino Suarez, Ivor Hansen, NYPD Detective Sergeant Christopher Jackson, former NYPD Detectives James J. Conaboy and Bill Clark, and several kind detectives from the 76th Precinct. (Any factual errors are mine.) Several fine readers gave me invaluable advice: Miriam Cohen, Tim Cross, Chris Erikson, and Elana Frankel. Important support or encouragement came from Michael Epstein, Naomi Ayala, Roxanne Aubrey, Todd Colby, Thom Garvey, Lee Sherratt, Phyllis Rose, James Wilcox, Jared Cooper, Mary Beth Lewis, Edward Scrivani, Dr. Ian Canino, and Paul Griffin (a.k.a. The King).

Thanks to Michael Ackerman and Eric Wolf for the photos. Very special thanks to Jen Bervin. I’m deeply grateful to my agent, Paul Chung, and to Ruth Cavin, Pete Wolverton, and Julie Sullivan at Thomas Dunne Books.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Jack Leightner Crime Novels

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”

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.

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.)