Red on Red (35 page)

“What do they say about him?”

“That he’s mad crazy about shit. He’s hot to pop somebody. He was pissed off when you got Kiko’s brother before he did. Now he has to find somebody else.”

“How about us? He talk about goin’ after cops?” Esposito was quick to ask it, and Nick was glad he did.

“C’mon, man. That’s my blood you’re talkin’ about.”

“No, Malcolm. It’s my blood,” Nick said, and he wasn’t angry, but he wanted to know. “Not my relatives—I love ’em, don’t get me wrong, I do—but I’m talking about real, actual blood, the stuff inside my body. I like to keep it there. Esposito, too. Has your brother talked about killing us? Killing cops?”

The silence now belonged to the detectives. It was theirs to work, to put into play. Malcolm thought for a while, and Nick could see him deciding whether what he’d say next was a betrayal. He looked down and rubbed his cheek. He had decided. He looked up at both detectives, from one to the other, eye to eye. There was no need for the words. It would be easier this way, at least at first.

“Does he got a gun?” Esposito took the same measured tone Nick had. There was no cause for accusation, no benefit to it.

Malcolm shook his head. “But he can get one, anybody can.” Asked and answered.

“Who does he want?” Nick asked. “Me? Esposito? What has he said? Who did you hear it from?”

Malcolm took a breath, then grabbed hold of his chin, pulling down a few times, as if he had a beard. Nick didn’t know whether this was hard for him or he wanted to make it look like it was. He would say it, they knew, and they waited. Malcolm tilted forward, elbows on the knees.

Esposito leaned toward him, in the same posture. “All right. You understand, this is not just whether we get hurt. It’s whether he does. He goes nuts, tries to hurt a cop, odds are he loses, Malcolm. Maybe he gets the jump on some random rookie, walking down the street, but what is he gonna do? Tell me, what is he gonna do? Punch him? Shoot him?”

“He don’t got a gun—that I know about.”

“So you said.”

“I don’t know how he’s gonna get it out of his system, whatever it is. All I know, somethin’s gotta get out of it, and I don’t know on who. You guys ain’t first. Kiko is. That much I can bet. Like I said, I wasn’t told direct by him. My sister told me, people I know. And I know Michael. Somethin’s gonna go. Michael don’t mouth off like that, he don’t talk shit. I’m surprised he talked, said anything at all. But he walked my sister from one coffin to the other, Milton and Mama. He squeezed her hand in front of each one. Said he’d make this right.”

“What else did he say?”

“Nothing. Like I say, he ain’t much of a talker. But she knew what he meant.”

“Could you talk to him?”

“If I got out, maybe …”

“That’s out of my hands, Malcolm, for the here and now,” Esposito said. “So, what do we do to calm him down? Find him a job? Buy him a puppy?”

Malcolm returned his head to his hands, leaning down to think. “Nah, he hates dogs. He’s scared of ’em.” He had given more thought to the pet than the job offer. “Kiko, he still on the run?”

“Yeah.”

“The funeral today?”

“The wake is.”

“All I know, ain’t no way Kiko gonna walk away without sayin’ goodbye, without showin’ his face, somehow. I said my goodbyes. You let me. You helped me do it. That’s why I’m talkin’ to you, workin’ with y’all. Michael knows it, too—he knows Kiko’s gotta be there.”

“That’s gonna be bad, Malcolm.”

“I know.”

All of them leaned down, elbows on knees, chins in hands. It was Malcolm who sat up first. “So who’s gonna change his mind?”

That was the question he left them with, as they headed out of the building. They still had to meet a supervisor from the Department of Corrections, and they were late. They walked awhile, then returned to the car to drive. Acres of landfill and dozens of boxy buildings, parking lots, and fields, all fenced in, the fences topped with razor wire. More than twenty thousand people once lived here. Now it was less. Still, this was its own city. They drove around slowly, making one wrong turn, then another, guided from one point to the next by random guards, leaving work, or going to it from their cars in the lots. All of them stopped at the sight of a slow-moving car. There weren’t many visitors here in private vehicles. The reaction was always wary, the directions offered with a note of relief. “Yeah, okay, here’s where you go….” The building was found. Esposito had a name to ask for, a Captain Terence Smolev. They had spoken on the phone.

Captain Smolev came out to meet them, with a grip-testing handshake and a uniform that was as crisp as a marine’s. Esposito managed a more cheerful greeting than Nick did, but both of them were anxious to leave. The appointment had been made, and it had to be kept. City agencies can be like society ladies, thin-skinned and grudge-holding about matters of etiquette. If the detectives skipped this meeting, the next time they went to see an inmate, he might suddenly be sent to court for the day.

“Good to meet you, detectives. Is there anything I should know about this?”

“No, not that I know of,” Esposito said. “It’s a big case, so there’s always gonna be questions. At least we’ll be able to say we came out here, we talked to you. It is what it is.”

“I get it. No problem. What do you want to look at? We have video. It’s not great. We lost power for a couple of seconds. Or if you want, we can go to the scene.”

“Let’s do the scene first.”

Smolev led them to a secure room, to check their guns, before heading out to the unit where Miguel had been housed. They were examined from behind a camera, then a Plexiglas screen, before they were buzzed in; in hallways, barred gates swung closed behind them before the next
gate opened. The inmates had been put into their cells while the detectives were there, and a few had begun to complain—hoots and curses, the look-at-me! noises. There were three levels on the tier, two flights of steel stairs leading up on each side from a concrete platform on the floor. Smolev took them to the platform on the far side.

“This is it, where he landed. All mopped up already. In fact, it was mopped just before he fell. One of the officers noticed that. It’ll be in the report when it’s done. There was a little puddle on the top. Maybe soap in the water? Who knows?”

Esposito walked up to the top of the stairs, counting them. Twelve. Not much height there, but in a contest of skull versus concrete, you needed very little momentum when you had the right angle. The one-punch homicides, they happened now and then—the uppercut that connects, the head on the curb, the horrified seconds that pass as the winner sees how thoroughly he has won. Jamie could have been that, earlier today. Esposito laid a hand on the banister, then yanked it back, as if stung.

“Sharp there,” he muttered, giving his hand a shake before looking down. “Loose screw … Well, I guess we’ve seen what there is to see. Captain?”

From there, Smolev led them to the video monitors, back in the administrative building. As they walked, Nick tapped on his watch, and Esposito nodded. Nick couldn’t think what they needed to do next, exactly, but it wasn’t here. The video was not much more revealing. A bank of monitors, each split into multiple screens; a digital system, decent quality, but several price points below what you’d find in the average shopping mall.

“Fortunately for us, the guy fell in this unit. The video is good there. We had a mini-blackout, an outage for a couple of seconds, but the surveillance system runs on a separate power source. There isn’t much light, but the screen just gets kinda dark, not black, and you can pretty much make him out.”

A technician had the footage cued up and waiting. The second tier by the stair was empty before Miguel walked up to it, then stopped, as if called to. He put his hand down, then pulled it up, as Esposito had; then it went dark.

“No sound?”

“No.”

“Can we see it again?”

Miguel stopped, looked, and put his hand up and down, as before, and you could see the figure pitch forward, a second of denser darkness. It was what it was.

“You have a camera on the floor?”

“Coming up.”

Two groups of inmates, both talking, one an animated storyteller, arms swinging, the rest laughing at his joke. A corrections officer walked across the floor. The screen went dark for three, four, five, six … six seconds, and then the lights went on again. All had frozen, and then the officer did a little crab-step backward, three or four paces, lifting up his radio, ready to be jumped. Three or four of the inmates fell into combat stances, with balled-up fists, held up to throat level. A few more seconds passed, and then one of the inmates ran over to where Miguel lay. No one had been near the stairs, not within twenty feet. The officer rushed to follow and pushed the inmate back.

“That’s about all we got.”

“That’s about all you could ask for,” said Esposito. “Law of gravity is not in my jurisdiction. Any reaction from the inmates?”

“A petition for carpeting on the stairs.”

“Any contact info? Next of kin?”

“No, not a name, not a number, not a thing. I bet ‘Miguel Mendoza’ isn’t even a real name. He’ll wind up in Potter’s Field.”

Captain Smolev left them at gun storage with two more punishing handshakes. They’d spent an hour on this, which was more than Nick had wanted, but it had needed to be done. An hour on a fatality wasn’t at all bad. They knew what had happened here, or at least they knew what hadn’t. Law of gravity, and too many variables for anyone to plan—a puddle of soapy water, a distracting shout, a spur of metal on the rail, a few seconds with the lights out. A false step, literally, with none of that three-card monte of impossible conjecture—Did he jump? Did he slip? Was he pushed? There was proof he’d been alone, for anyone susceptible to rational belief. And those who clung to faith in deeper forces, hidden causes, would not be swayed by any picture, hours old, always fresh, fixed somewhere in digital heaven, of a man bleeding in the dark, the colors of Ellegua, the black and the red.

T
here was much to plan, but Nick’s mind was scattered. Esposito had resolved to go to the wake, at least to watch it from a rooftop, and Nick knew that once they got there, he’d have a hard time getting Esposito to leave. It had the feel of a long night. A camera had been set up outside the funeral home, and someone would watch the monitor with Kiko’s mug shot taped up beside it. But it wouldn’t be the same; no one knew Kiko like Esposito did, how he walked and gestured, which way he was likely to run. Detectives always complained about not getting enough help on their cases, and then they complained about the help. Still, it was better to do it themselves. And worse—no one should get too close to the funeral, least of all the cops who’d caused it. If Nick and Esposito spotted Kiko, they’d call it in, have him collared a few blocks away. Esposito talked even as he turned up the radio in the car. Noise within, noise without.

On the drive back, Nick only half-listened as Esposito told about how when he was a new cop in the precinct, someone called in to say that a baby had been left in a sack in the park. A young couple stood beside it, watching something inside kick weakly, afraid to touch. Turns out it was a Santeria thing, a chicken in a pillow case…. It was a good enough story, but Nick was trying to think about his father, whether he should worry about him, whether he should worry more. Memories of Daysi from last night kept popping up—the restaurant, the museum, bed, how they’d shushed each other like teenagers, the fear of getting caught adding to the thrill. He was about to tell Esposito about the Galway vacation, when they were diverted by the sight of two blue-and-white harbor patrol launches in the Harlem River, cops from each raking the turbid water between them with long-poled gaffs. A body, maybe, but
since the boats were on the Bronx side of the river, it looked to be someone else’s problem. Esposito began to tell about a floater he once had, but Nick’s eye was caught by a pigeon flying beside the car, at eye level, at the exact same speed, for nearly a mile. “Synchronous,” was that the word? No, it wasn’t.

At the precinct, Esposito went behind the desk to let the sergeant know about the funeral, so he could make an announcement at the four-to-twelve roll call to be aware of its hot-spot potential. Nick steered clear of a delegation of Africans in the front hall, five or six men in lacy skullcaps, a few women in bundled head scarves, all of them in florid flowing robes, with determined looks. One of the men was negotiating unsuccessfully with a gaunt older black cop for the release of a female prisoner. If the cop had been assigned to handle them out of a presumed affinity, it was misguided. He might have been intrigued by the dilemma—the African spoke on behalf of a friend whose two wives had had a slugfest, and the winner was in a holding cell—but he was resistant to the proposed remedy. “If you please, you will let her go home to eat, and one of us will wait in her place? Her return will be guaranteed.”

The cop began to wave them out, his arms a little stiff, saying “These people …” without caring who heard. When Garelick walked past them, coming in the front door, one of the African women tapped his shoulder.