Reckless Endangerment (2 page)

To Raney’s inquiring look White responded, “It looks like he’s going to make it. Took a couple of holes in the gut and one to the neck. Lucky.” He laughed. “Not exactly the right word, considering.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Uh-uh. He’s recovering from the surgery. I’ll go by later. What’s up?”

“CSU says it’s at least a couple of mopes. No money taken, but they helped themselves to the cigarettes—packs scattered all over.”

“Guys had a nicotine fit,” said White. “They plead temporary insanity and walk. What about that shit on the mirror?”

“I set up a meet with a professor at Columbia, we’ll get it translated. Meanwhile, assuming we’re dealing with Arabs, we need to touch base with Brooklyn, the Eight-Four.” White nodded. Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, where the Arabs lived.

Dr. Philip Adouri was younger than he had sounded to Raney over the phone, and proved to be a gentle-faced Lebanese in his early thirties with a slight accent and a careful manner of speech. He looked at the eight-by-ten photographs of the mirror graffiti for so long that Raney thought he had dozed off.

“Um, is there some problem with the translation, sir?” Raney asked.

“Oh, no, no, it is quite clear as to the meaning. It is just that … who did you say wrote these?”

Raney and White shared a look. “That’s what we’re trying find out, sir. It’s an investigation.”

“Oh, yes, of course—how stupid! Well, then, as to the meaning. This line, here, is
mot lil yehudeen,
‘death to the Jews,’ and this below is
huriyah li falastin,
‘freedom for Palestine.’ This,” he said, pointing a slim finger at three large single letters at the bottom of the screed, “this means nothing, unless it is the initials of some organization; in English the closest equivalent would be D.D.H.”

“You have any idea of what it means, Doctor?” Raney asked, writing the translations neatly into his notebook. “Any organizations you’re familiar with …”

The professor smiled and made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, Arabs are always making organizations. They come and go like the clouds. This could be three people, four people in a back room, or it could even be the initials of a person. But, you know, the orthography is interesting. The person who wrote it … I should tell you that while written Arabic is the same all over the world, spoken Arabic is quite different from nation to nation, region to region. A Mahgrebi, from Morocco, say, can hardly understand a Lebanese. There are also differences, slight differences, in the way the letters are formed in different places, just as you would notice, for example, a German’s writing is different from an American’s, even in English. So … this person—educated to a degree, but certainly not a university graduate or student. Perhaps the equivalent of high school? In any case, an unpracticed writer. There are errors—here he has used the medial rather than the final form, there, the wrong letter. Not a Mahgrebi. Not Iraqi. Egyptian perhaps, but more likely Eastern Mediterranean—Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan. Notice here how he writes this letter, the long ee sound, slanting over to the left, and here—”

Raney’s beeper sounded, and he was saved from learning more about Arabic calligraphy than he wanted to know. He asked to use a phone and called Lieutenant Meagher, his watch commander, who ordered him to return to the precinct house
forthwith,
which is a word that NYPD officials use when they want you to do something so immediately and so urgently that it is not worthwhile thinking of excuses not to.

Raney and White thus left the professor with brief thanks and headed south from Columbia on Broadway. On the way Raney called the desk sergeant at the Midtown South Precinct and asked what was going on; Meagher had been excessively terse.

“Oh, we got a lovely situation here, Raney,” said the desk sergeant. “Wait’ll you see this!”

“What?”

“Jews, Raney. We got black hats, we got the TV, the radio, we got suits from downtown, we got the Tacticals coming. Oh, it’s rare … what? Raney, I got to go now.”

There were some odd sounds over the receiver and then silence. White frowned and stomped harder on the pedal. Raney slapped the red flasher on the roof, and they sped south.

The Midtown South homicide squad is responsible for homicides in the fat band across the island of Manhattan that runs from Central Park down to the north side of Thirteenth Street. It is housed in the Manhattan South Precinct at 357 West Thirty-fifth Street. As it happens, this location is in an area even more bountifully supplied with Jews than the rest of the city. The garment district, the theatrical district, and the diamond district are all within an easy hike, and in fact, there is a synagogue right across the street. When Raney and White arrived, they discovered that what looked like a large proportion of all these people had converged in front of Midtown South.

They had to leave their car at the corner of Ninth and Thirty-fifth. The street was impassable: besides the mob itself were TV vans, the buses from Tactical, and a number of large, shiny vehicles in which police brass traveled through the City. The crowd was composed largely of black-hatted, bearded men, although there was also a good number of men in contemporary business and working garb, and a sprinkling of women. They filled the street from wall to wall, and their angry attention was directed at the front steps of Midtown South, where, behind a wall of tall, broad Tactical cops in helmets and body armor, stood a group of worried-looking police officials.

White used his bulk to cleave through the crowd, holding his gold shield before him like the bowsprit of a clipper, Raney followed in his wake. The Tacticals parted to let them through, and Raney was immediately spotted and hustled through the door by his lieutenant.

“What the fuck
is
this, Loo?”

“This is your case, Jim, the Shilkes killing. The natives are restless, son. That asshole on the car’s been pumping them up for the last twenty minutes.”

Raney looked out through the door and saw a man wearing a black hat and suit and a short black beard standing on the hood of a car haranguing the crowd through a bullhorn. Raney could not make out the exact words, but he seemed to be displeased with the NYPD.

“Who is he?”

“Rabbi Lowenstein,” said Meagher, an expression of profound distaste forming on his broad, pink Irish face.

Raney nodded. Lowenstein was semi-famous in the city as the leader of a paramilitary group he called the Guardians of Israel; his relationship with the NYPD was not good, that organization taking a dim view of groups with vigilante pretensions.

Meagher seemed to recall something and turned to Raney, scowling. “Why the hell didn’t you keep a watch on Shilkes? That’s how this whole mess started.”

“Loo, the guy was out cold. I’m trying to solve a case here. What did he have to do with it?”

“Out cold? Well, he woke up, and he talked to his daughter, and she got in touch with the good rabbi there, and here we are. The story is, the guys who killed his wife came in shouting Arab slogans, Allah, Allah, whatever, and so now we got it blown into a gang of Arab terrorists is starting a campaign of assassination against Jews in New York. Lowenstein is demanding protection—ha!—and also, and especially, that we grab the mutts who did it, preferably yesterday. So—what do you have?”

“Have? For crying out loud, Loo, I been on the case three hours. The guy up at Columbia says the killers wrote ‘kill the Jews’ and ‘free Palestine’ on the wall and the writer was probably a Palestinian who couldn’t spell real good. That narrows it down.”

Meagher kept glancing over at the group of suits and brass standing in a small group behind their guards. Huge fake-fur-covered mikes on poles thrust up at them like a hostile phalanx. Below, the press was baying questions. One of the suits gave Meagher the eye, and the lieutenant hurried over. They conversed briefly, and the suit spoke to another suit, who moved forward and addressed the cameras. To his dismay, Raney heard the words “already several suspects” and “arrest imminent,” and the suit went on to mention a $25,000 reward for information leading to, put up by the United Jewish Philanthropies of New York.

White, who had skulked in the background while Raney dealt with Meagher, came up and said disgustedly, “Oh, great! Now every hard-on in town is gonna be on us with his cousin Charley did it. What’d the Loo say?”

“Shilkes is conscious again. Get over to Beth Israel and take his statement. Go now! Before the riot starts.”

White left and the riot did start, as more Tacticals de-bussed at Ninth Avenue and started to clear the street, moving in a line with helmet shields down and batons swinging. A thrown bottle shattered against the door frame. The suits all hunched momentarily and then, some glancing about to see if anyone had noticed, strode boldly to their cars and departed.

As he watched, bemused, the dispersal of the Jews, Raney felt a hand on his arm. “Whatever you need, Jim, just ask!” said Lieutenant Meagher. “And forget everything else you got on the board. But wrap this one up fast, wrap it up good! Make it disappear!”

Napoleon, they say, when presented with an officer to be promoted to the rank of general, always asked, “Is he lucky?” Raney was a good, bright, conscientious detective, like many another on the force, but he was also lucky. This was apparent, since he had, after all, gone into that darkened bakery after four robbers armed with shotguns and automatic weapons and had killed them all without suffering a scratch himself. Lucky Jim was his third nickname.

“So, Lucky Jim,” said White later that day, as he drove them across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, “is our ass in a sling now or what?”

“Partially,” admitted Raney. “On the up side, I don’t think we’re dealing with a big international mastermind here. Carlos the Jackal is probably not a player.”

“They were sloppy, you mean? The tracks, the cigarettes…”

“Yeah. On the other hand, they didn’t just walk down Fourteenth and go, ‘Hey, look, Jews, let’s waste them.’”

“Why not?”

“Because the thing was cased. The Shilkeses opened the store at seven every Sunday carrying fresh bagels, like clockwork. The perps knew that and they were waiting. Then they disappear. How? I doubt they just strolled away. They either had to have a car, or they took the subway, and if they took the subway, they had to know what the train schedule was going to be early on Sunday, because they sure as shit didn’t want to be hanging around on a platform with maybe blood on their clothes for twenty minutes. So, planning.”

White thought about that for a while, and it did not amuse him. “What do you think? Is Brooklyn going to do us any good?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Raney, leaning back and watching the gray tenements of Williamsburg rush by. “It could be we’ll catch a break.”

Their first stop was the Eighty-fourth Precinct, on Gold Street, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. The Eighty-fourth is a squat little precinct that has the misfortune to include both the gentrified brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and the ungentrified brownstones of South Brooklyn, a once decent working-class neighborhood ruined by freeway construction, gone slummy, and full of people wishing to prey on the conveniently nearby gentry. It logs a lot of robbery, a lot of burglary, and somewhat under a hundred killings a year, all of which argued against the cops there having much time to spare for accumulating deep knowledge of Arab fringe organizations.

The detective squad room there was a near duplicate of the many in which Raney had spent the past decade, the banged-up furniture, the green paint, the brown tile underfoot, the pervasive reek of tobacco, the continual din of ringing phones. Two cops were at desks, one phoning, one typing slowly. A thin brown man, obviously a skell from the tank downstairs, was pushing a broom desultorily across the floor for cigarette money.

“Arabs, huh?” said McIlvey, the day-shift detective sergeant. “Yeah, we got Arabs up the ying-yang, but they don’t usually give us much trouble. Peaceful bastards, and a lot of them are illegals; they don’t want to see us much.” He creaked back in his chair, to demonstrate peacefulness. McIlvey was a white-haired, heavy set Irishman of the booze-blossom-nosed type, nearing retirement and not apt to get exercised over a Manhattan case, no matter what the bosses said.

They showed him the pictures of the graffiti from the crime scene.

“We think those initials down at the bottom are an organization,” said Raney. “You recall seeing anything like that sprayed on walls or on tattoos?”

“Nah. But I don’t get out as much as I did. What I’ll do for you is post it in the squad room, maybe somebody saw something. Like I say, we got ’em, but we don’t got ’em. Not like the spics, you know?”

They knew, and if White had not been there it would have been the niggers too. Raney sensed his partner’s intense desire to get away from this useless man. He was just thinking that they would have to come back and talk to the night-shift people, maybe get a live one, when McIlvey said, “You know, it’s funny, we had one of them in here last night. Yo, Harris,” he called to the man at the typewriter, “what was the name of that crazy fucker last night?”

“The fuck I know, Sarge,” answered Harris, and went tap. Tap. “Ask his roomie there.” Tap.

“Oh, yeah,” said McIlvey, and turned to the broom. “Skeeter, what was your pal’s name there, that AY-rab?”

“Not my pal, Sarge.”

“Well, fuck it, anyway. Fuckin’ thing too,” said McIlvey. “Couple of our guys brought him in last night, late in the graveyard. Driving like a bat out of hell down Fulton Street in a fuckin’ bakery truck, no taillights, so our guys, Pendergrass and Newton … hey, Harris, it
was
Pendergrass, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, right,” said Harris. Tap.

“Yeah, so they give chase, like they say, going seventy, eighty down Fulton Street, got a couple more RPCs in on it, and they finally got the mutt in a box and he gave it up. Guy had a knife on him as long as your arm. Didn’t have a license, no registration. Insurance? Lots of luck! I don’t know, the fuckin’ people this country lets in nowadays. …”

Raney had been looking for a graceful way to pull away, but the mention of the knife sparked a flicker of interest. “You say they picked this guy up late last night?”