Authors: Edward Conlon
“Yeah, me, too. I got an idea. Let’s take a break.”
Esposito made a sharp turn right, and then another one, so that they weren’t heading south to the hospital anymore, but north, toward the precinct, and wherever else. He pulled over by a bodega and returned with a brown bag before heading west. At the far end of 181st Street, they left the car. There was a short walk over a pedestrian bridge that crossed the highway, the railroad, and then they went into parkland, lawn and trees, green and rolling, near the foot of the colossal steel supports of the George Washington Bridge. Down to the left were massive gray boulders, piled to the river’s edge, where an old man in a black suit reached
into his pocket and tossed handfuls of bread crumbs into the water. A few Canada geese paddled in close to him, bumping like tugboats, their snaky necks thrashing down at the crumbs.
The detectives scrambled down the embankment and sat down on the hillside. There was more air here, again, and Nick breathed it as if it had just been invented. The river flowed past, as dirty as an old nickel, but the breeze felt fresh. Esposito took a quart of beer out of the bag and handed another one to Nick. They raised the bottles and tapped them against each other. Esposito poured a few drops of beer onto the ground, a libation. The movement was quick, surreptitious, as if he did not mean for it to be observed. There was a gap in the air, as if there were something that needed to be said. Esposito spoke first, with a kind of cracked curiosity in his voice. “You know what’s the most fucked up thing about all of this?”
Nick was startled; he had expected some expression of sorrow or regret over the death, but the tone was jarring, almost angry. He didn’t respond, and after a few seconds, Esposito continued.
“The EMTs. This is the third time we get these two in, what, four days? Three times in four days, when there’s dead people and almost-dead people that some people might say was our fault. My fault. Come on, Nick! What are the chances? What do you think, it’s one of them or both? The girl or the guy?”
“What?”
Nick was relieved that the crisis was not what he had at first feared; beyond that, he was baffled. They had just lived through a moment of mythic intensity—door crashing, lifesaving, death dealing, with good witchcraft and bad music—and the last of Nick’s preoccupations was the fluky cameo in the aftermath. Esposito looked at him, half-smiling, his black hair sticking up in sweaty clumps and weedy blades where he had rubbed his head in his penitential moment, now past. He was reanimated now, awake to a new challenge.
“Nicky, come on. You’re supposed to be the smart one.”
“I’m not.”
“They’re IAB, Nick. Gotta be. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a conspiracy. Can you believe these people? We’re lucky to scrape up a handful of guys to bust up a kidnapping. How many of these fucks are working on us, on overtime, watching to see if we fuck it up?”
Nick took in the news like a snake swallowing a rat—yes, a
rat—slowly, in difficult stages, but with certain result. Esposito mistook the shame in his face for fear, and laid a hand on his shoulder. More than one thought went through Nick’s mind; the last one was that he was not trusted himself, by the people who’d sent him.
“Interesting,” Nick said.
Esposito gave him an easy shove. “Don’t worry, pal. I got a knack for these people. I can spot ’em a mile away.”
Now Nick knew. Love brought the gift of not-seeing. He laughed in turn, and Esposito was reassured that his partner had not lost confidence, either.
“Was it a good shoot? Tell me, Nick, whaddaya think? Me, I think it had to go that way. It was meant to be.”
Nick nodded, eager to talk about something else. He hadn’t tried to picture what was behind the apartment door, waiting to see it instead. In retrospect, the result had been predictable, the most likely end if not the inevitable one—three trained men surprised three distracted amateurs, and advantage prevailed. Seconds later, Nick realized that was not the case, not it at all. The result had been a blind bull’s-eye at the end of a crazy chain of wanton whatiffery. A sturdier front door, a different breakfast for the boy in the bathroom—skipping that last cup of coffee, having cereal instead of bacon and eggs—or a lack of headphones might have led to an entirely different outcome. Esposito was beguiled by his own charisma, a kite that thought it ruled the wind. No, that wasn’t quite right, either. Choice and chance, in a game of hide-and-seek. Ellegua was as good an explanation as any, and it would do for now.
“Yeah.”
“And? What else?”
“Perez moved the gun, for what it’s worth,” Nick reflected. “The way I figure it, the Dominican kid forgot he left it in the bathroom, came out trying to shoot with an empty hand. Perez moved it, so it was next to the body, after. In the end, I don’t think it matters much.”
“Yeah. That’s the way I figure it, too. He wanted to frame a guilty man for me, tighten it up so I come out all right. Guys like that, the helpful ones … Last year, there was a rookie in the precinct, him and his partner make a great collar, take a machine gun off a guy wearing a raincoat on the hottest day of the year. His partner says to him, ‘Can you say you’re the one who found it? I got a family cookout tomorrow. I can’t spend the day in court.’ ‘Yeah, no problem.’ There was somebody
walking by with a camera in their phone, took a picture of what really happened. The guy with the machine gun, he walked away, scot-free. They let the rookie take a plea to a misdemeanor.”
“He meant well.”
“They always do. I can make enough of my own trouble. Jesus, Nick—look at Perez’s new girlfriend. If she was a blow-up doll, at least she’d be real.”
The first things had been said. That felt better than the beer. You could be sad about something that happened, even if you’d do it again. Esposito ran a hand through his hair, considering things.
“You okay, Nick?”
“Me? Yeah, sure. This isn’t about me.”
Esposito spat out his beer, laughing. Nick was discomfited when he realized that he’d just quoted the voice in the pipes in his apartment. Esposito slapped his knee, raised his bottle.
“I’m glad you were there, Nick. I’m glad you’re my partner. You’re a thinker, but it doesn’t get you down. You get it, you get me, and I know you got my back.”
Right then Nick thought about returning to the Bronx. He’d find the lieutenant, the mystery caller, and tell them they had the wrong man. Two wrong men. The calculations, the implications—Did two wrongs make a right, or did you need more?—all of it was too much. No, he’d stay here and keep the best of his promises. He watched the elderly gent at the shore as he turned and began to walk away, age in his hips, his step slow and careful. Esposito drank his beer and looked at the river.
“The old guy didn’t bring much food for the ducks.”
They weren’t ducks, Nick knew. He didn’t know what to say. He asked, “Do you feel bad about it?”
“No,” Esposito said, after a moment of thought. “I love life. I love my life. I got kids. What kind of chances should I take?”
“None you don’t have to.”
“Do you think I shouldn’t have shot him?”
“No.”
“Do you think you should have shot, too?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was on the other guy, the plastic wrap guy. He wasn’t cuffed up yet. It would have been a mistake for me to let go. I needed both hands.”
“Do you wish it turned out different?”
“Wishing is a waste of time.”
“Yeah.”
With that, it was over for Esposito. Nick watched him hold his beer out to the side, tilting it for a moment, so the liquid ran up the neck, to the lip of the bottle. Then he drank it, without a drop spilling on the ground. Such tribute as would be paid had been paid. Let the dead bury the dead. He spat and shook his head.
Nick sought to reassure both of them. “Perez doesn’t matter. We have what we have. We saw what we saw.”
“What did you see?”
“What you did.”
“Tell me.”
“We took the door. The three guys were there—bag man, voodoo man, Kiko. Kiko goes running, you follow, I cuff up the bag man. You come back, bad guy walks out of the bathroom, makes to pull a gun, you shoot him.”
Esposito didn’t look at Nick as he spoke, but stared straight ahead. When the story was finished, he took a long drink. They were convincing themselves that all had gone as it should have, as it had needed to. It wasn’t a lie, but it felt like it. Esposito took the part of the challenger, knowing the challenges would come. Theirs was an adversarial system, they were constantly reminded, an immense and unstable collection of rules—constitutional principles that the highest judges disagreed about, new administrative procedures that spewed out of headquarters like rolls of sheet music from a player piano. So many rules that you could barely count them, so many that it felt like you were breaking some of them even if you were sure you did everything right. Trials were a fact-finding process in which the most crucial facts were often withheld from the jury. You couldn’t say a victim picked a perp out of a mug shot, when the whole case existed because a victim picked the perp out of a mug shot. A man could confess to murder, but if he began his confession by saying he wanted to talk to a lawyer first, he hadn’t confessed to murder. If you locked up a crack dealer for the fifth time, you probably couldn’t tell about the first four. And most of these exclusions and suppressions were premised on a belief that a jury’s blind bias favored the state—the cops—when that was not the world Nick lived in and knew. It was astonishing that it worked as often as it did.
Esposito cleared his throat and rehearsed the cross-examination. “Did you see the gun in his waist, Detective?”
“No,” Nick answered, playing Esposito’s future part.
“Did you see the gun on the floor, after?”
“Yes. After-after.”
“Just answer the question, Detective.”
“Yes, I saw the gun on the floor, after, beside the body.”
“Did you see Detective Perez place a gun there?”
“No, I did not.”
“Can you testify, with positive certainty, that you observed the entire contents of the floor in the general vicinity of the deceased?”
“No, I cannot.”
“Thank you, Detective. The witness is excused.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The beers were half-gone. As the two men looked west over the river, the tension of the past hour began to subside. The geese didn’t stray far from the shore, waiting to see if there were more crumbs for them. When there were none offered, they mustered up on the rocks.
“This kid,” Esposito began, trailing off before he could decide on a description. “You think he’s Kiko’s brother?”
“He’s the spitting image. He’s gotta be.”
“Malcolm Cole’s gonna be happy to hear that.”
“An eye for an eye.”
Kiko’s brother and Milton Cole, both with headphones, lost in the music until the end.
“A brother for a brother,” Nick said.
“Do you have brothers?”
“No, solo, only child.”
“Same here. Parents?”
“One, father.”
“I think I knew that. Mother only here.”
Nick knew Esposito didn’t have a father, but he couldn’t remember who had told him; he hadn’t known that Esposito had no siblings. Everyone else did, it seemed, if they were their age. No father of that vintage said one is enough, no mother did, if they were born in the first half of the last century; from the slums, from the farms, it didn’t matter, most of them didn’t know how to say no, even if they wanted to. The two
detectives had been working together for months, but it hadn’t come up; a lot hadn’t. Nick knew that Esposito had a wife and kids, but he didn’t know their names. The two men spoke constantly when they were working, but seldom when they weren’t. They’d call to tell each other if one was taking a day off, or working earlier, going to court. It was a friendship of necessity, which may not be real friendship; it was confined to work, but they were, too, it seemed. Nick loved work now, sometimes, which was more than he could say for most of his life; Esposito loved work, far more than Nick did, even though he had a family to whom he was devoted, in his way. When Esposito spoke to his wife on the phone, the conversations were jokey and teasing, or full of affectionate reassurance; Nick never heard an argument. As far as Nick knew, Esposito made his wife as happy as any faithful husband he knew.
Nick shook his head. “Should we go?”
“Yeah,” said Esposito, his mind already moving on. “Let’s talk to Papa Doc in the hospital, get his statement, start on the perp back at the station house. Plus, we’re gonna have … our friends from downtown waiting to talk to us.”
They bagged the empty beers and stood up stiffly.
“And then we hunt Kiko again,” said Nick, thinking as his partner did, a few moves ahead.
“Yeah. Is this a real kidnapping? I’m a little rusty on the law there. We don’t really get too many of these. Does there have to be a ransom?”
“No. That’s only one kind. The victim has to be held for at least twelve hours, for the purpose of ‘terrorizing’ him. With the plastic wrap and the iron, they got the terror part covered. We don’t know about the clock. But I bet we’re okay, time-wise. I bet they had him yesterday, when we ran into the guy in the lobby with all the plastic wrap. When we saw Kiko and his kid.”
“That woulda been something, if we took him in for endangering the kid yesterday? It would have been a nice alibi. Last night he must have gone to sleep laughing, couldn’t believe his luck. He walks away from us on the homicide, and we don’t have a clue he’s got a hostage across the street.”
“He didn’t even have to pay for a babysitter.”
“He paid,” said Esposito. “Come on. Let’s do what we gotta do.”
There was neither sorrow nor satisfaction in his voice. Nick felt both, and more, as his mind slipped between images of the young man dead,
the older man saved, thoughts of his own faithlessness and new friendship. They took their time leaving, brushing bits of grass and leaves from their suits, stretching their legs. Spies in ambulances? He couldn’t even pretend he’d ever understand or really wanted to know. Nick looked a last time at the river, where the geese had begun to drift downstream. He wished he could stay here, but wishing was a waste of time.