The Big Fear (6 page)

Rumors were that he was eager for the top job himself and was going to challenge his own boss in a couple of years. He would be receptive to what Leonard had to say either way. His patent-leather voice was worth the wait to reach him.

“Leonard. It must have been an interesting day and a half over there.”

“Is that because my boss has just quit, or because I’ve got one detective that gunned down another and swears the guy had a gun that no one seems to be able to find?”

“Isn’t it great to finally be in charge of something, though?”

Leonard held the phone away from his face for a moment. He was in charge. Was about to be. And what he was about to ask Victor Ells to do might compromise that, if it went the wrong way. No matter what, he was about to go from being someone who was owed a debt to being someone who owed. But if it all panned out, he would be able to pay it back, and then some.

“Listen, Victor. I have something to ask you. I need to call in a favor.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

LEGWORK

As he rounded the corner of the third flight of stairs, Detective Mulino’s knee started talking to him. It asked him to find an ottoman or a coffee table to prop his leg up on. No dice. Mulino looked up the landing. The only NYPD building he had ever been in with a working elevator was One Police Plaza downtown. Even here at the OCCB headquarters, right next to the recently refurbished Brooklyn DA’s office, it was five flights up if you wanted to talk to a chief. Mulino figured there had to be an elevator somewhere. The chief himself wouldn’t take the stairs.

It was a short walk anyway from Gold Street, where Mulino had been stewing for three days. Mulino understood the optics—you shoot someone, you have to turn in your gun and get parked someplace where you can’t hurt anybody, no matter how competent you are. If they pin you for it, you stay there. So every customer service job in the NYPD was filled with guys too dangerous to put on the street but too insulated by their union protection to actually fire. Vehicle impound centers. Parade and demonstration licenses. And most of all the Property Clerk, sandwiched between the Eight-Four on one side and the Social Security office on the other. The dim brick municipal office dug in even as one thirty-story glass condo after another sprouted next door.

There were twenty-six officers in Property, and it was a strict daytime tour, so if you were lucky you didn’t have to spend a full hour at the window more than once every couple of days. Because waiting for you on the other side of that window was a thick angry river of the general public, free to make demands on you. There were a few vics coming to pick up a necklace that had been recovered from the pawnshop after the babysitter lifted it, sure, but well over ninety percent of the items vouchered at Property were the effects of people who had themselves been arrested. Lottery tickets that had been scratched but held onto just in case. Half a pack of cigarettes that would have been worth twenty dollars apiece in lockup. A nickel-plated pipe that no one was even going to bother to test for drugs because the perp had been brought in on a stabbing anyway. And each morning after the bail hearings, a swarm of newly released not-quite-criminals crossed Jay Street and stumbled toward Gold to demand the return of their personal scraps. On the first of the month, when the Social Security office next door had checks, they would make it all in one trip. The NYPD sent its worst officers to the Property Clerk Division because it didn’t really care how people coming off an arrest were treated. Most likely they’d be back inside in a few months, after their plea, so why not give them a taste of it now.

Mulino had done his hour as best he could. The other cops in Property didn’t speak to him at all. He was a probie to them. In a few days, a week maybe, he might be back out on the street—as stale as OCCB felt to Mulino, it would have been a dream to most of these guys. So when each skell at the window handed him a yellow carbon-copy voucher, he walked down the stairs to hunt for the envelope himself. And each time the guy said that there were twenty bucks missing from his envelope, Mulino slid over a complaint form and a pen. He didn’t ask for any help from anyone. If in a couple of months the Department frowned on him and decided that he could spend the rest of his career in Property, then he would be one of them.

Or maybe not. Because here in Property, surrounded by officers who had been ratted out or had caught a raw deal or had otherwise been beaten down by the NYPD, Mulino felt the cold disdain of what had happened at the Ebbets Field Apartments more than he ever had at OCCB. These guys had been betrayed, and most of them had been on the force long enough to remember what Mulino had done. They weren’t like Sparks, who maybe heard the story along with fifteen or twenty others. When these guys heard that Detective Ralph Mulino was coming in, they knew who he was in a snap.

He turned the last corner onto the landing and shook out his knee. He stopped to catch his breath. He had felt light, walking up the stairway without his gun, his radio, his flashlight, but after four flights he was still winded. He checked that his shirt was tucked in. He pushed into the hallway and announced himself to the admin, a sleek woman who had grown her nails so long that she couldn’t possibly use her fingers to type.

“Detective Ralph Mulino for Chief Travis.”

The woman nodded. He had been announced downstairs. Mulino walked toward the square wooden chairs, a few copies of day-old tabloids on the end table. Ordinarily he would leaf through them while he waited. Today that wasn’t such a good idea.

Whenever he started thinking about Ebbets Field, he always imagined something he could have done. Some way to make it end differently. But it always came out the same. It had been hot that night, not as hot as the night on the ship but hot enough. Mulino had been in OCCB no more than a month and was still taking radio runs, still hoping that he could prove something to someone and move far enough up the ladder to make a difference. He was paired with Chuck Ramsay, a real old-school guy, someone who had weathered Knapp and Mollen and laughed at all the jokers in suits who had never been on the streets but thought they could make judgments. Good for a laugh and an old story, but someone who would never have lasted at the new NYPD, even if they had let him stay.

The call had come in at the Ebbets Field Apartments, on the border of Crown Heights and Flatbush. Twenty-six stories of misery, then, rising above a broad cement plaza that was itself a good twenty feet above street level. Once you climbed the stairs off of Bedford and into the houses, you were in another world. It wasn’t technically a housing project, but there wasn’t a soul inside that paid market rent. The whole thing had been a boondoggle from the start between a developer who knew someone in the Section 8 office and found a way to make a fortune off of poverty. The Dodgers had left, the stadium had been torn down, and affordable housing was all the rage. But it had never worked out to be anything other than a hellhole, a place where for thirty years the few honest people unlucky enough to be stuck there locked their doors and ran down the stairwells with their eyes to the floor, hoping not to be caught in the crossfire on their way to the street.

The call had been vague, like they all were. Woman in distress. When they had arrived, Mulino and Ramsay had found her hiding in a Dumpster. Jeans, barefoot, topless, she was curled in a ball and bleeding from the head and neck. She wouldn’t speak to them and wouldn’t unlock her arms from around her knees, the only thing protecting the shame of her breasts from the two cops. Mulino didn’t blame her. Ramsay tugged at her arm and gave up. The paramedics could take care of her; he called for a bus and described her injuries. She muttered an apartment number and they muscled their way into the building and upstairs.

They should have just shot the guy when they first saw him. That’s what Mulino had come to believe over the past twelve years. The door was open, the man was screaming incomprehensibly, and he was smashing everything in sight with a foot-long claw hammer. The television was in shards, there were dishes in tatters, about seven or eight good-sized gashes in the drywall. If they’d just pulled out their guns and opened fire, they would probably have been able to weather it.

But this was just after Louima, not long past Diallo, and people remembered Baez and the others too. So Ramsay, out of character, had taken it slow. He’d pulled out his pepper spray—they had just upgraded from the chemical mace to the pepper spray, and all the officers had been encouraged to use it. The mace interfered with the nervous system—someone on angel dust wouldn’t even notice. Pepper spray swells the soft tissue of the eyes and throat. Even if you’re drugged out, you can’t do a thing if you can’t see and you can’t breathe. So after Ramsay had told the guy to stop, and instead he spun around with the hammer, Ramsay had let loose with the pepper spray. When the man went down, Ramsay had worked on cuffing him and Mulino had called in that they had one under and needed another ambulance too.

Months later, in the trial room, Mulino had done his best. He had said he didn’t see Ramsay cuff the man; didn’t see how he was sitting; had been watching the stairway for the paramedics the whole time. He didn’t mention that Ramsay had pulled out a second set of cuffs and shoved the man’s face into the ratty carpet. He had pretended he hadn’t seen the knee to the back, the twisting of the neck. He had never heard the words positional asphyxia, and he figured that when the coroner came back and said there was cocaine in the man’s blood that would be the end of it. But that wasn’t the end of it. The paramedic had said that the man had been on his chest and rear-cuffed when they came, and somewhere in the Patrol Guide regulations on pepper spray it says you’re supposed to turn someone onto his side, because the coughing and hacking caused by the pepper spray is indistinguishable from the coughing and hacking of suffocation.

So Mulino had done his best, but his best wasn’t good enough. For another cop to ever trust you, you have to do more than simply pretend that you didn’t see. You have to actively swear that the other guy did everything according to the book. The implicit promise, every time you roll up to the curb, shut down the sirens, and step out of the RMP, is that you will lie to the Grand Jury for the guy next to you. You may not like him, he may not like you, but if you don’t both know that you will take a perjury charge before you let the other take a murder rap, then all bets are off. The only way to get through the job is with someone next to you who will give you his full support. And Mulino’s mild lie about an averted gaze, when they snipped off Ramsay’s badge and swiped his pension, was always considered by his fellow officers to be a betrayal.

“Detective Mulino, the chief is ready for you.”

The knee still hurt as he stood up and made his way into the plumb office. Here were oak and teak and tasteful photographs on the walls of Chief Travis handing out plaques to men and women to remind them of their bravery and loyalty. He was in uniform—once you are promoted high enough, once they give you stars, it becomes a perk to wear the bag again. Anyone who can read the code written into the collar brass and buttons knows where you stand: whether you are a patrol officer forced into the uniform or whether you are a commander asserting your authority. Mulino had met the chief only once before, after the investigation in Ebbets Field. This guy remembered him too.

“Detective, I have some bad news for you. I wanted to let you know before you heard it from somewhere else. Evidence is sending its final inventory to DIMAC today from the shooting. Officer Rowson’s gun was never recovered.”

Mulino looked at the chairs fronting the chief’s desk. His knee begged him to sit, but he hadn’t been offered.

“I’m telling you just what I told the investigator, Chief. I saw the gun.”

“I understand that. I wanted to let you know. As a courtesy. What they found on the ship.”

Mulino bit his lip. He had been thinking, during three days of being shunned even by the guys at Property, if there couldn’t be another answer. If some of the techs who had come on board didn’t also know him. Didn’t think that maybe this would be a good way to get payback on someone who didn’t truly trust his fellow cops.

“I saw it in his hand and I saw it on the deck, Chief. You want to stop and consider what that might mean? What someone may have done?”

Chief Travis looked across the desk at the detective. Mulino could sense himself being evaluated. He could feel the pity spill forth. They probably had started on the job about the same time. And here was Travis with a white shirt and an oak desk, while Mulino couldn’t even sit down without being invited. Travis was telling Mulino, as delicately and subtly as he could, that he simply didn’t give a damn about him.

“I’m not handling the investigation, Detective. I’m just letting you know. If you think that the Harbor Patrol cops or the Evidence Control Unit improperly disposed of evidence, you can always go to IAB.”

Mulino nodded. That would really seal his reputation. The detective who turned on his fellow cops, accusing them of setting him up because he couldn’t be trusted to protect them. He’d try that and cold shoulders in Property would be the least of his problems; he could actually turn up dead.

“Is that all, Chief?”

“I just wanted to tell you in person. As a courtesy.”

And that was his signal to leave. Turning on his good leg, leaving the door open for some subordinate to handle, Mulino made his way back toward the four flights of stairs and an afternoon by himself in the back room of Gold Street. Not, he thought, that anyone would miss him if he didn’t show. He turned down one landing, then another. His knee was feeling a little better, to tell the truth. No one at the Department was going to check out whether he had been set up. No one at DIMAC cared if they got one corrupt cop or another; every badge was a trophy indistinguishable from every other. If he wanted to clear his name, he was going to have to do it himself.