Authors: Edward Conlon
Nick didn’t see how it was more poignant than the abduction of a little Francine or Joanne, but there it was. Esposito pressed ahead. “Did she see her here? Your friend?”
“Un momento …”
The conference resumed with urgency. The old woman shook her head, briefly, so that it seemed as much a tremor as a denial.
“No. She hasn’t seen her in the building, but she thinks she’s seen her in the neighborhood. Do you think, do you think little Grace is here with us somewhere?”
“Yeah, we got a tip. Somebody called it in, said she was here in the building. Do you know people in the building? Have you lived here long?”
“Is she hurt? Who took her?”
“We don’t know…. I can’t get into it right now. We just gotta find her. How long have you lived here?”
“Me? Like, five years, but I don’t talk to people here. It’s a messed-up building. There’s drug dealers here, bad people, and they don’t do nothin’ about it. Not the super, not the landlord, not the cops.”
“Yeah, sorry. How about this lady? Has she been here, does she know anybody?”
“Rosa? She know everything, everybody. She been in the building for years. Like, fifty. Nobody spoke Spanish when she got here. Now she don’t like anyone, but she won’t leave. You can ask her anything.”
“Okay. Who lives on this floor? What about the other three apartments? Has she seen anything strange here?”
The conference resumed with Rosa’s watchful decades now put to use. She had waited a lifetime to be asked, and she answered at length. Awilda turned to them for the recap. “Okay. I’m in 5A. Rosa’s in 5E. On this floor, we got six Africans in B, Islamics. They’re quiet. Mexicans in C, six of them, too, sometimes ten on weekends—that’s when they go off, but they only fight each other. And there’s a crazy old black man with Social Security in D. He has whores come in the first of the month, when the check comes in. He cries about Vietnam for the next three weeks. He sometimes wants to help Rosa up the stairs with groceries, but she won’t let him….”
The census proceeded to the next floor, duly noting race, religion, income, and other relevant data, which the detectives absorbed with polite frustration until mention of the probably lesbian Colombian X-ray technician, who “don’t talk to nobody, not even the gay guy, since she got into a fight with the super about the people in E. Because, you know what? There ain’t suppose to be anybody in E! And the music is loud! Like the biggest party in the building for the last week, and nobody’s invited! There’s good people here, but it don’t come to nothing—”
“This party, what’s that? Is there a lot of people there? Do they come in and out?”
“Nope! A guy here and there, but it’s just all noise. Rosa here, she’s
called the super, but he said she must be imagining things, she should go to a home. Can you believe that?”
“And that’s in 4E?”
“Yeah. You don’t think little Grace is there, at some wild party? My poor baby!”
“I don’t know if she’s there, but that’s a good place to look. Who comes in and out of this party?”
“Nobody, just guys now and then. And the music goes on and off. I meet these guys walkin’ up the stairs, they’re like hittin’ on me, hard, but on the fourth floor, it’s like I got bad breath. Just like that! What’s up with that? When’s the last time a guy wants you but shuts the door, when maybe you might go in? I mean, you guys are still guys, you follow me? I ain’t dead yet, and you know? I still got my body!”
Nick stepped in between them and smiled, placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Awilda, you are far from dead, and you are a big help here. How about the guy in 2B, Raul Costa? You know him?”
“Him, in 2B? I don’t like to talk bad about people, he never done nothing to me, but he’s a freak. Right, Rosa?”
The conference resumed in Spanish, and Awilda updated the detectives after some vigorous nodding.
“He gets his mail in his underpants. His little boy underpants, with his little thing half sticking out. Freak!”
Rosa remembered a last urgent detail about their downstairs neighbor, which Awilda translated uncertainly: “And she says he went crazy yesterday. He was screaming about something—cops, about cops did something to his mother? They put a dog face on her? I don’t know. Rosa don’t know what he was going off about, but he was mad. Him! I wouldn’t put it past him to take a little girl!”
“We’ll check. Thank you, ladies. We’re going to have a look downstairs.”
Nick’s phone rang as he and Esposito walked down to the fourth floor. It was Garelick.
“Apartment 4E. It’s vacant, but there’s people.”
“The super was cooperative?”
“I had to jog his memory. Napolitano and Perez are on their way up.”
“Wait with the super.”
The two other detectives joined Nick and Esposito, their breath heavy
after the march up the stairs, the adrenaline percolating through middle-aged blood. Esposito started to lean into the door of 4E, listening for voices, but Spanish music thumped, the horns and the drums, the galloping rhythms. The detectives spoke in stage whispers, but they didn’t need to; the noise that covered what happened inside the apartment covered them on the outside.
“We gonna knock?”
“We don’t have to. The super says it’s a vacant apartment. We’re checking on a burglary. So we get to break in.”
“Do we want to surprise them?”
“Do we want them to be ready for us?”
“Let’s at least raise the lieutenant, let him know we’re looking at—what is this, the southeast corner? We face the front, the alley. We got a fire escape. Do we want somebody on the roof? Perez?”
“Perez speaks Spanish. We want him here.”
“We want to go in speaking English, even if they don’t understand, so they know it’s cops, not other dealers come to rip ’em. We want Ralph nearby, though, if there’s more than a couple there, if they say anything to each other.”
“Okay, Perez stays. Napolitano on the roof.”
“Maybe you hang out on five, midway, that way you can go up or down, if they run.”
“We can’t do that and cover the roof.”
“We need more guys.”
“We need more guys.”
“We need more guys.”
“Right,” said Esposito. “Ready? Let’s do this.”
Napolitano backed up the stairs as he called the lieutenant, directing him to the point on the sidewalk where he could watch the windows of 4E. He cradled the phone on his shoulder, muttering into the receiver, and gave the thumbs-up.
Esposito took a dozen steps back and rushed the door. His feet struck the floorboards in percussive beats, quick and quickening, like a drum-roll, but instead of the tinny clash of the cymbal, it finished with a dull, momentous crunch. He bore down with his left shoulder, his momentum adding hundreds of pounds to his angry weight. The door caved in through the frame; above the knob, the lock pushed back through the splintery old wood, giving back three wheezing inches, four, when the
chain caught. It was the only time in Nick’s life when he wished Spanish music were louder. Esposito stepped back and freed the door with a kick. He charged in, gun drawn, and the rest followed.
“Police! Don’t move! Police!”
“Get down! Hands up!”
“Policía! Manos arriba! Quiero ver manos! Policía!”
The room opened up before them, and it was as if they were in sudden, bright light. A predator needs movement to read a scene. In that first second, when all is still, a standing man is a lamp, a man lying down is a rolled-up rug, and only motion—in fear, to fight—tells the target, the threat. Even with the delay from the chain, the detectives were faster than the reaction to them; the men inside had made the mistake of stopping to think. There were three men sitting on folding chairs, on three sides of a square, as if playing cards, though there was no table between them. One of the men was small and heavy, cocooned in plastic wrap. His arms were cellophaned to his body, and his body was cellophaned to the chair. Atop his body, his bloody head seemed to emerge from the casing, as if being birthed. Closer was the man Nick had seen in the lobby with the bags of wrap, stunned, unmoving. He held an electric iron in his hand. At his feet were a bucket, a wet towel, and a gun. On the far side was Kiko, now up and running, into the back room. He had done his thinking. The door slammed behind him.
Esposito followed Kiko, out of instinct, out of injured pride, but this door held against him, at least against his first push. Perez and Nick pointed guns at the bag man, who weighed his options still, gripping his electric iron as the seconds stretched out. He stood and held the iron up, like a shield, and Nick kicked him in the balls. When the man doubled over, he pressed the iron against his own leg; he screamed and fell back. Napolitano appeared at the door, and Esposito yelled to him—“Roof!”—and gave the door another solid shoulder, which knocked it loose. Esposito and Napolitano vanished from the room as Nick kicked the gun on the floor over to Perez. Nick walked over to the screaming man on the floor.
“Watch!” Nick called over to Perez. “The room’s not clear. I got this guy. Watch me!”
The man on the floor began to reach for something, the iron. Nick stepped over to him and gave him a kick in the ribs. The man clenched, pulling the iron over to his arm, searing himself afresh on the biceps. He screamed again. The music was still blaring, the antic brass in lively
rounds, and Nick knocked over the TV. After it smashed, the silence was almost lunar for a moment. They could have been alone on a pale rock at the edge of the night sky. The bound man sighed and began to weep.
“Gracias … Dios mio …”
Nick stood over the man on the floor. “Hands! Give me your hands!
Manos! Tu manos!
”
The man clutched and clenched and moaned. He didn’t do what Nick told him. Nick kicked him again.
“Hands! Hands behind the back! Ralph, say it in Spanish!”
“Manos atrás!”
When Nick put his foot on the man’s neck, he felt him tense again before he eased into obedience. The man flattened, facedown, and extended an arm back. Nick put a cuff around the wrist. They were in, he thought, this was done. This was a surrender. To quit this much was to quit altogether. Nobody gives up just one hand. A thug fakes it at first, doesn’t fight—
I can’t move. It hurts. I can’t hear you. I don’t understand. It hurts
—but if he’s still faking it, he doesn’t let a hand go in the cuff. The cuff connects him, to the radiator, to a rail, to the cop. And it’s over. Nick could smell the burn on the man, the burnt polyester shirt, the burnt hair on the arm, the burnt skin. He was finished. Perez checked the kitchen, then the bedroom that Kiko had fled through. He looked under the bed, in the closet. He was still there as Esposito walked back through the front door, sweating, his collar loose, hair rising up in loose tussocks. He looked at Nick and shook his head. And then they heard the toilet flush. Esposito and Nick looked at each other again. Nick felt the arm tense in the cuff, and he yanked it back. He put a knee into the shoulder. There wasn’t much give. There wasn’t supposed to be. Nick spoke quietly.
“The other hand, now!
La otra mano … El otro mano!
”
From behind the bathroom door, they heard the toilet cover drop, and the sink turn on in sporadic gushes. Esposito adjusted his stance, blading his body sideways, and extended both arms, aiming the gun at the bathroom door. He had made a promise to the men that they would go home today, and the promise would be kept. As the plumbing groaned in the pipes, a voice could be heard, an off-key sing-along, growing louder.
“Mi amor … da, da, da … mi corazón …”
There was a fumbling at the knob, and they heard the old metal gears of the lock, the soft
oof
of the door that barely fit in the frame. He must have been shy, closing the door so tight. He walked out, and he looked
like Kiko, but maybe seventeen, in a tight purple shirt. He was slim and lithe, unworn yet by life. He stepped with a teen bravado, singing, making his grand entrance, his finale, arms outstretched. He had clunky headphones on, and he sang whatever was sung to him, as a joke, but with feeling, eyes shut and smiling.
“Y mi corazón …”
And he bowed with a flourish, clicking his heels. When he looked up, he froze, and his knees buckled for a moment. Esposito yelled for him to put up his hands, but he dropped them both to his waist, digging for the gun, any gun, both guns, as if he might have had two, slung on either side, quick draw like in a cowboy movie. There were two shots, and he fell down. The man under Nick jerked his arm, and Nick pulled it back, hard. He felt the tear of gristle, a little pop. The man tightened, but there was no more fight in him. Nick got the other arm out, cuffed it to the first. Perez came running out of the bedroom, gun drawn. Esposito stood there a moment, staring down at the boy he had killed. Nick called over to his partner, who stood there, blankly contemplating, as if all of this were over. They’d been wrong about that before.
“Cuff him up, Espo! Go there, cuff him up, call for an ambulance, call the boss.”
Perez stood also, staring. Nick patted down his cuffed perp for weapons and called again, “I’ll call, Ralph. Just go cuff him, check for the gun.”
Perez walked over to the body—it was a body already, no longer a boy—that sat slumped against the wall. Perez touched him around his waist, hesitant, repulsed, as if the body might jump up at him. There was nothing there. He wore a tight purple shirt, tight white pants; you would have seen the gun, Nick thought, if he’d carried it tucked in his belt. Perez looked back at Esposito, in wonder and fear. Esposito holstered his gun and stood there. He was in his own movie now, and it was a horror movie, about a man trapped in a small room with a dead kid, a kid the man had killed, and neither of them would ever leave it, and only one of them would always be young. Maybe that was Nick’s movie. He looked again at Esposito, who stared down, shaking his head. His expression, Nick thought, was resentful. But his voice was calm.
“Check the bathroom, Ralph. That’s where he was. Don’t touch it, don’t move it, just check for the gun.”
The man on the floor strained to look around at the body, and Nick put his gun to the man’s head.