The Big Fear (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

DUTY

Joey Del Rio looked up from his terminal to find Sergeant Sparks staring down at him. Joey hadn’t noticed him show up, wrapped up as he was in entering the week’s daily activity reports into his computer. Harbor Patrol had it good, with computers and everything. Back in the Four-Six, Joey had to tally the DARs by hand, and copy them into a logbook every week for his sergeant. The Harbor Patrol had its downsides, most of which involved the fact that Joey very easily got seasick, but the computers were nice. The sergeant didn’t say anything.

“What is it, boss?”

“What do I have to do to get your attention?” The guys with a little military, Joey thought, were the worst supervisors. Sparks was okay, but he was in the reserves, and every couple of months he went out to the Catskills or wherever with his army buddies and they built rafts and ate MREs and whenever he came back he always had a hard-on for protocol. For mopping the floor of the precinct twice a day even though no one ever came in, for making sure the laces of your uniform shoes were tucked into the shoes themselves after you changed out of them to go home. For all the administrative bullshit side of the NYPD. He was a badass, Sparks, but Joey would just as soon have taken it a little easier most days.

“You have my attention, Sergeant.”

“I just got a call from our friend.”

“No, Sergeant. Find someone else. I’m off tour in thirty minutes.”

Sergeant Sparks never got angry. Instead, he started to speak more slowly and he lowered his chin. Like he was displaying his unhappiness with a small child who was mildly retarded. He was speaking very slowly to Joey now, with his chin nearly touching his chest.

“You are going to go off tour when I tell you to go off tour. You accepted the special assignments. And I don’t have to remind you what you were given in return.”

Joey gritted his teeth. When Sergeant Sparks had first come to him, almost a year ago, he had been desperate. He had been taking in extra money working security for an underground card room. Frisking the guys that came in. Advising them what to do in case of a bust. The undercover that came and played had never even sent a team to bust the room—he had just notified IAB that Joey had been working there.

Sparks had straightened it all out, but the price got higher and higher. At first there was extra money for the work, and the jobs were easy. Then they kept asking him to do things a little bit worse. Damage property. Hurt people. And by the time he realized that Sergeant Sparks owned him, it was too late. The NYPD remained a paramilitary organization. If he tried to rat out Sparks to his lieutenant, he would take the fall with him. Maybe even instead. Ever since what had happened to Brian on Monday, Joey had sworn he wasn’t going out on any more of the special operations. But Sergeant Sparks did not see eye to eye with him on that one.

“Please, Sergeant. No one ever said it would be dangerous.”

“It got dangerous.”

“Well, isn’t that your fault? Wasn’t the detective supposed to come out after it was all done?”

Sparks looked at the floor. It was the first time Joey had ever seen him look vulnerable. “I did everything I could to slow him down. I told you both to be quick. I told you we were coming. He was getting suspicious, the way I drove the boat. He jumped on board as soon as we got there. I couldn’t hold him off any more than I did.”

“You didn’t hold him off long enough, did you? You didn’t hold him off long enough to keep Brian from getting killed.”

“We’re almost through. The whole operation is coming to a head. But tonight we need you. We’re relying on you.”

There was no one else in the precinct. Joey thought, just for a moment, about what would happen if he drew his gun on the sergeant. He might have surprise on his side. He might get his shot off before the sergeant did. But even if he did, what then? How would he explain to the Firearms Discharge Control Board why he’d shot his direct supervisor in the middle of a station house with no civilians for a mile around? And if he just refused the sergeant—he wasn’t sure exactly how Sparks would pull it off, but he knew that the NYPD wouldn’t stop to mourn the loss of Joey Del Rio very long.

“What do you need me to do, boss?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

WAITING

It was warm and soft outside, the kind of summer night where you start out sixteen and stay up late and pretty soon you’re thirty-four with a kid and you don’t know where it all went. Leonard was worse even than that. His body ached in a thousand places. He had fled a hospital without getting discharged. He was probably wanted by the police. His only hope of coming through was to get the proof that Christine Davenport had been putting together. Proof about the cops. Proof about Eliot. He stepped up from the Wall Street subway and walked toward number Twenty-Six. With his change of clothes he was presentable, but only barely. Even with the badge, he would arouse suspicion if he tried to go in. He would have to wait for Veronica out here.

The monuments to capitalism past—the stock exchange, the Federal Reserve—loomed larger without the daytime crowds, and Leonard felt suddenly small beside them. He was reminded that he was only a petty bureaucrat, someone with maybe a little power over those even pettier. To the gangsters who flashed in and out of here all day, Leonard and the cops were both equivalent suckers working too hard for too little money. Whether he ran a city agency or pushed paper around the back rooms, at the end of the day, he went back to the Ebbets Field Apartments and the banker went back to Rye. They had no trouble keeping the streets clean here, sanitation strike or no.

Leonard had just seen how the strike was hitting everyone else. He had cut through the Whitman Houses on the way to the subway. Black plastic bags had been torn open and shredded through the courtyard, spilling spoiled fruit and coffee grounds. The fresh rot had been blown into piles.

But on Wall Street, the trash wasn’t so bad. The corner bins were overflowing with the soda cups and fast-food wrappers, sure, but nothing had burst and spilled across the sidewalk. The street was already quiet. Fifteen minutes after the closing bell, the subways were crammed with administrators and traders and all manner of support staff. When Leonard had passed Trinity Church, the eternal traffic of Lower Broadway still slogged toward downtown tunnels, but Wall Street itself was dark and still and silent. Throughout the rest of the night, the others would trickle out, never lingering, heading to celebrate at a discreet underground club or just meandering home. Leonard saw a figure in the revolving door. Veronica was on her way out. She saw him. Her fierce green eyes, for the first time since Leonard had met her, flashed with a hint of fear. Maybe she was just surprised to see him; she looked at him and spoke.

“You’ve changed.”

“I got some clothes. I’m staying with a friend.”

“Don’t tell me who.”

“I’ve seen your file. They were trying to sink the boat. I don’t know what Davenport showed Eliot, but if you’re right, she had something more. She knew where they were hitting next.”

Veronica looked inside her building, back toward the elevator bank. “You have to hurry. Eliot spoke to me again this afternoon. He called me into his office. I think he knows that we’re onto him.”

“Okay.”

“You have to stop the next attack. You have to find out what the next one is going to be. You’re in danger. We both are.”

Leonard steeled himself despite the evening swelter. “I’m going to Davenport’s.”

“The police already searched it, I’m sure. If there were anything there, they would have found it.”

“The police searched for evidence of her murder. They weren’t looking for what I’m looking for.”

“If you find it, come by to tell me. Here at the office. Anywhere. I’m worried about Eliot. About what he knows. The sooner you find anything out, the sooner we can act. And then we’ll be safe.”

Leonard nodded. A slim breeze drifted between the heavy, old buildings.

“Okay.” He turned away from her. He could hear the thin clatter of her heels on the broad flagstones, making the deep, full city sound like just another medieval village. The sound of a bored tourist on her way home from checking the Duomo off her list.

Leonard set out north from Wall on another long walk, this one to Davenport’s apartment. He walked softly on the cobblestones himself. The click of Veronica’s footsteps faded away and Leonard made his way up Nassau Street. At night, total silence here. Or at least it ought to have been. He stopped when he thought he heard another pair of footsteps behind him. He turned around to see only the thick and still darkness. His imagination. He set back onto his walk, pretending he didn’t hear the other footsteps start back up again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

REAL ESTATE

Christine Davenport had lived with her husband and child in what had once been a quiet apartment building on Perry Street. Some couples, some families, people doing just well enough to put down roots in what wasn’t exactly the heart of the village. At one time, the old units could see unobstructed over low, abandoned warehouses. Then developers began to take advantage of favorable zoning laws, tax breaks, and river views to raze the last light industrial pockets of Manhattan and push the new Village all the way to the shore. The old tenements and townhouses, where the alcoholic artists of the 1920s had sung each other miserable poems, had long since become single-family residences. The only place for apartments was west. So they had risen, cold metal and sharp glass that blotted the water from the windows of the merely well-off. It was a neighborhood for those who were rich but not banker-rich, people with enough money to do everything except stop developers from putting up a forty-story rhombus between themselves and the river.

The new units blocking the precious view were stocked with hedge funders and tech tycoons. They insisted on kitchen counters made of Italian limestone that chipped if you cooked on it, couches made of gauzy fabric that stained if you breathed on it, and other luxuries that showed off your wealth but made your life generally uncomfortable. Davenport’s tidy two bedroom, a pretty nice place in most of the city, would look almost dumpy by comparison. Leonard had been there once, had met her husband and kid and seen what was left of her view after the last condo had gone in. A sliver of water and a bit of Hoboken were on display to the south if you tilted your head just the right way.

She’d been dead almost a week. The cops would have already done a search, like Veronica said. He’d put on a good face for her, but he wasn’t all that hopeful he’d find anything. If the official verdict was that she was a jumper, though, Leonard still had a chance. The NYPD doesn’t send its firecrackers to suicides. If there had been a knife or a gun stuck under a pillow cushion, they would have found it, but if Davenport had hidden something to stay hidden, it would still be there.

Leonard stood in front of the stout brick building after his weary summer promenade. Even after midnight, people had been out on the streets, drinking beer in paper bags, listening to baseball on the radio. The old New York was beginning to show its face after over a decade in hiding—a city that was middling poor and a little on edge but sparked with life. People complained, but walking the length of Broadway on a summer night, Leonard had seen that there was a song in the city as well. New York was finally having a little burst of freedom, or maybe, Leonard thought, it was only having a rebound from the past twenty constricting years. Maybe New York had grown so safe, so sterile, and so cold so quickly that it had hit a wall, and the only thing happening now was to spring back.

The boom had been bad for street life; people had stayed inside, checking their stock portfolios at all hours and rubbing their hands at the paper value of their apartments. Now that the bust had finally settled in, people cut their budgets and split a pizza with their friends at a park. They stayed out late. The cops had better things to do now, with street crime creeping up, than to smack down on open-container laws. The quality of life, long kept in check by wealth, was returning.

But not to Perry Street. Tucked away from the main drags of the Village, extending to the water, it was still and quiet and too clean. At nearly one in the morning at the tail end of August, the building was dark upstairs. Davenport’s lobby was bright and spare, trying to keep up with the pristine neighbors—white walls, white couches, powerful light. The apartment building as art gallery, minus any art. Leonard swerved through the doors and was met with the weight of overpowering air conditioning. He suddenly could feel his sweat start to freeze in place.

There was a saggy doorman inside, reading the
Post
and listening to a radio at the same time. A guy who had spent a lot of time plopped in a chair like this doing just about nothing—he’d once been in pretty good shape, maybe, but now bulged in the waist, legs, and forearms. His eyes were clear and his hair was thinning and he drank from an oversized Styrofoam soda cup. Maybe he’d spiked his Pepsi to get through the night, and who could blame him. The radio droned with baseball—the Yankees were on the West Coast, which meant the game would last well past one. The guard looked up at him, and Leonard held up his badge, nonchalant.

“Follow-up on the Davenport suicide.”

His jowls sagged as he looked up from his paper. “Uniform guys have come already.”

“We have some new intel on a possible fraud. City Hall stuff.”

“Lady’s already dead.”

“It might implicate some other people.” Leonard stepped toward the guard, giving off his best air of shared confidence. “I’d appreciate you keeping this quiet. It’s sensitive. If the wrong people find out, they might start destroying documents.”

“Uniform guys already took her computer.”

“We have some intel.” Leonard could tell that the guy had been a cop once. He was heavy now, but even a few years in the NYPD can get you set up with the kind of work he had, which you can then keep for life. “Where were you on the job?”

He chuckled. “That was a long time ago. I did six years in the Seven-Seven. Found out I wasn’t going to make detective and didn’t want to keep walking around waiting to get shot.”

Leonard’s old neighborhood. Back before the bakeries and the cocktail lounges and the sustainable seafood shop had driven him just outside of its boundaries and into the Seven-Oh. “I know the Seven-Seven. Before they redrew the precinct lines. Prospect Heights.”

“We called it Crown Heights then. Cause that’s what it is.”

“The rough side.”

“Both sides of it were rough then.”

“I suppose they were.”

Leonard smiled at him. People love to talk. People love to believe that their memories of the good old days—or the bad ones—still mean something. That what happened to them is relevant, which means they must be relevant too. Once you get someone to think you’re on the same side, warm, together, maybe they stop asking you questions.

Leonard could sense the guard looking him over. Wondering if maybe Leonard wasn’t dressed up enough to be a cop. Remembering all the task force guys who would go to church in their Jets hoodies if their wives would let them get away with it. But Leonard knew that the guard would let him pass. It was either that or call a precinct to check him out, and calling a precinct would always be too much work for a guy waiting for his retirement by working overnight security. The guard nodded, swigged his soda, and lifted his paper back up to his eyebrows.

Leonard walked past him to the elevators, which had been redone a few years ago but already looked tired. People put up all-white interiors and it looks cool and minimalist for a moment, and then smudges start to show, hands propping people up against the wall when they come home drunk, someone bringing their kids over to their friend’s house for brunch, a patina of grime covering the elegance, unless it is constantly scrubbed, repainted. All the sorts of things that building management is likely to cut back on when the place is undersold and understaffed. The elevator dinged and Leonard stepped inside.