Red on Red Page 3

  Nick turned to him and began to approach, when he was halted by Lopez’s furious objection. “Not you! Stay away from me! You’ve done enough!”

  Nick raised his hands and retreated as Esposito finished his instructions.

  “Yeah, and one of you oughta take this guy to the hospital. Maybe the pound, after. I think he needs a new dog.”

  “What should I tell them when I get there? The hospital, I mean?” the older cop asked.

  Esposito paused, pursed his lips. “Say he was a victim of a self-inflicted injury committed during an offense against my giving a shit.”

  Nick appreciated the aptness of the summary, but instead he suggested that the cop write it up as a “city-involved accident,” so at least Lopez would not get the hospital bill.

  “Fine, have it your way, Nick,” Esposito replied. “How are we doing?”

  “I’d say we’re finished.”

  “Right. We’re out of here,” said Esposito to the cops. “Me and Nick, we’re the only ones on tonight in the squad, if something heavy—something real—happens. The night’s young. And I’m an optimist.”

  As the detectives departed for their car, Nick thought that this qualified as something heavy, something real. He was also inclined to believe they should do something, stay to help clean up the mess—bring the ladder back, say—but he held his tongue, unwilling to delay their leaving. Inside the car, he was about to tell Esposito that he was right about Lopez, that his story mattered, that it changed things, even if it hadn’t been true—when Esposito brought up something in the same vein first.

  “You were wrong about Lopez, Nick.”

  “How?”

  “You broke him.”

  Nick wasn’t quite ready to laugh about that yet, though it was clear that their thoughts had further commingled. Not a successful containment under any terms, not between him and his partner, not between yesterday’s mess and tomorrow’s. All of the bad stuff should have been stopped in a bottle, corked, and put away in the basement. Instead, he’d christened a ship with it. Not a wise act, not safe, not one associated with good fortune. Nothing gained here—a presumed suicide, still, in the woods, in the rain. What else had he failed to do, failed to learn? Nick surveyed the wreckage as they left the park: a suicidal death, an accidental injury, homicidal feelings. Was there anything natural here, to complete the last category? God help them if any of it was natural.

  Esposito’s optimism had been well founded. Nick had halfheartedly half-cleaned his shoes, but Esposito had changed his, as well as his suit, from abundant spares he kept in his locker, when the next call came. The crime scene had been taped off when the detectives arrived on the project grounds, the yellow plastic strip marking the area like a construction site. Which it was, in reverse. A dozen cops were there, and the bosses had begun to arrive, their white uniform shirts setting them apart from the patrolmen’s dark blue. There were never just the right amount of cops—either not enough to contain an angry crowd, or more than was needed to block the door of a rented basement room. Here, on the path by a playground, a young black man lay on the ground, his face largely gone, from a shotgun blast. The rain kept all but a few of the onlookers away, the hard-core fans of uptown drama, and the cops mulled and muttered like they were at the wake of a distant in-law. The yellow tape threaded through fence and trees to mark an irregular square twenty yards on each side of the body, and an orange traffic cone was placed beside the shotgun shell. A young cop was bringing over a black plastic tarp to protect the corpse from the elements. Esposito held up a hand, motioning for the cop to wait.

  “Relax. He ain’t gonna catch a cold.”

  “The sergeant said—”

  “Don’t worry what he said. Worry what I say.” Esposito smiled. “Nah, don’t worry, just listen.”

  Nick followed his partner into the crime scene. Lifting up the yellow tape always felt like passing the velvet rope at a nightclub, and the little thrill of that moment never paled for Nick—the looks from the crowd, from cops and bosses, rookies and veterans alike, greeting the squad’s arrival as if they were VIPs at a premiere. It was good to be on the list, but never as the guest of honor. Or should the victim be called the host? The star of the show? This one was dressed for the part—expensive sneakers, black and red, and a sweat suit of a shiny material, in the same colors; on his chest a necklace of heavy gold Cuban link chain, and diamond-studded initials in florid script: MC. A white wire led up from the digital music player tucked in the slim waist, splitting by the neck for each ear-bud. One was still in place, snug in the ear. The other lay beside him, tapping out a hip-hop beat. It was unlikely that the victim had seen it coming, but he definitely hadn’t heard it. Millions of soft kids dreamt of seeing this, of being this, in suburbs from Scarsdale to Tokyo, scribbling rhymes in notebooks: “rich-bitch,” “fat-gat.” What face remained was ragged meat.

  A sergeant near the cop with the tarp seemed to be in control, and Esposito put a hand on his shoulder, commanding despite the show of deference.

  “What’s up, boss? Whadda we got here?”

  “Half hour ago, we got two calls for ‘shots fired,’ then one witness—not really a witness—he comes by later, sees the guy on the ground.”

  Esposito looked up and around. The projects were more than fifty yards away, and the view was blocked by sycamores. The calls had likely come from there, and the callers likely had nothing more to say than that they’d heard a shot. A homicide case breaks because of statements and substances, things seen, said, and left. Shotgun cartridges were not traceable in the way bullets could be, which left Esposito nothing physical to work with. None of the revolutionary technologies of digital databases and cellular signatures would make a bit of difference. This would be all story, no science. It was the kind of case Esposito thrived on, and its meager potential, its difficulty, brought out in him the ferocious focus that made part of his reputation so enviable.

  Nick was relieved that it wasn’t his homicide. He hated them, the thug-on-thug blast-’em-ups, the victims who were no better than their killers, only a little slower. Even in the newly safe new-millennium city, this slaughter still happened, the retrograde ghetto shoot-outs, the street gang drug-driven turf war hits that were exhausting and depressing to work, thankless if not exactly pointless. Territory, discipline, retaliation—those were the rational ones; there were also the ridiculous ones, over a look, a remark, a move on a girl, but for men who killed for business, the killings for pride or pleasure worked as exercise and good advertising. It was a radicalism without politics, rage as a style or sport. Mostly, you found out what happened; often, nothing could be done. The neighbors were glad the guy was dead; the witnesses—if you found them—were terrified; the friends hated cops more than the killers; and the relatives thought him an angel, now in heaven. Nature—or was it history?—sometimes intervened before the police could, when the killer was killed. “Exceptional clearances,” as they were known. Nothing was righted, as such, but something was resolved. In the military, when the enemy turned on the enemy, they called it “red on red.” Soldiers didn’t have to pretend to be sad about it.

  Esposito thrived here in the red zone, more than he should have. Maybe he had some thug in him, too. He crouched down by the body. He didn’t want to be too close, but he knew he was under reverent observation. The cop with the tarp leaned in, to watch him watch. Esposito feigned dipping a hand into the blood pool and tasting a finger.

  “B-positive. As I expected.”

  There was a convention of jokes among cops at scenes like these that worked equally well at covering whether you were bothered by the dead body or you weren’t. You didn’t want to admit the first to other cops, and you didn’t want to admit the second to yourself. Nick was in the second group. The cop with the tarp thought for a moment, then smiled. This was drama, and Esposito was a showman.

  This was the other part of Esposito’s reputation, Nick knew, the need to be envied. It was the engine that drove hi
m, or at least a rich strain in its fuel. Nick did not know how far, how fast this need could take him—take them—and whether his own genuine admiration could get them to slow down at the sharper curves.

  The cop asked, “What do you think happened?”

  “I think somebody didn’t like him.”

  Esposito winked at the cop, then stared at the medallion, at what was left of the face. The showmanship was forgotten. Esposito began to think, to work, to realize. “I think I don’t like him, either. Lemme just check one thing.”

  He shuffled back half a foot, then picked up one of the arms, pinching a bit of the sleeve, to examine the hand. The nails were long enough to hold skin if there had been a fight, but they looked clean, and there were no scratches or bruises; the same for the other hand.

  “These are not a workingman’s hands. The ME’s not gonna get anything off this body. And you know what? I think I know this sonofabitch. I think I just closed a homicide, or somebody closed it for me.”

  He lightly patted down the pockets, the jacket and then the pants, and then pulled out a driver’s license from beside the right hip. He handed it to Nick without looking.

  “Tell me it doesn’t say Malcolm Cole.”

  As Nick read the name on the license, he felt light-headed, for reasons that had little to do with Esposito’s uncanny prediction. He struggled to regain enough composure to toss off a weak wisecrack. “If it does say Malcolm Cole, do you still want me to not tell you?”

  “Sonofabitch.”

  Malcolm Cole was a drug dealer who had killed another dealer named Jose Babenco a year before. It was Esposito’s case. Cole and Babenco had worked different corners that had seemed to grow closer over the years, and as the crack market had dwindled, the corners had grown closer still, until the dealers had been stepping on each other’s feet. Malcolm made a little room one night, slipping behind Babenco in line at the window of an all-night bodega as Babenco bought cigarettes. He put a hole in the back of Babenco’s head and caught the pack of New-ports as they dropped. There had been one weak and ambivalent eyewitness—the bodega worker, looking through scuffed Plexiglas—and some suggestive phone records, but little else. Esposito would have had to take a crack at Malcolm to try to get a confession, but Malcolm, rumor had it, had struck out for the Carolinas. Another exceptional clearance, it seemed.

  What Esposito didn’t know was that both Babenco and Malcolm Cole, despite their divisions, had each made accusations against him to the Internal Affairs Bureau. Sometime in the past, Babenco had claimed that Esposito had taken money from him, that Babenco had paid Esposito a thousand dollars a week to leave him alone. Babenco had made several allegations while under several indictments, so the story had been regarded as somewhat dubious—for one, Esposito didn’t work in Narcotics; for another, the price had been exorbitant—and Babenco’s death had closed the IAB case. When Malcolm Cole had been on the run from the Babenco murder, he’d called Internal Affairs to say that Esposito had fired a shot at him when he’d seen him on the street. They’d been acquainted with each other, though most of the better troublemakers in the precinct had crossed paths with Esposito at some point. Downtown, at Internal Affairs, there were those who saw Malcolm’s fugitive status as proof of his credibility, that he was afraid to come in, and the more streetwise among them, who saw Malcolm’s story as the scam of a killer laying the muddy groundwork for his defense. Still, there were two major allegations, and in some minds, two lies added up to at least a half-truth. Skeptics and believers concurred that Esposito should be watched, and Nick had agreed to do the watching. He’d been desperate for a transfer at work, any kind of change, and he’d traipsed into the situation as Lopez had, with a kind of dishonest innocence, a narrow selection of his better intentions. He was not a traitor at heart, Nick told himself, but he’d managed well enough, so far.

  Nick indulged himself for a wishful millisecond that Malcolm Cole’s death would end the investigation of Esposito, too. After all, he would be his partner’s alibi for tonight. He savored the delusion, its sweetness and neatness, as if the issue were now closed, the story successfully contained. More likely, IAB would look at Esposito as Esposito had looked at Ivan Lopez, dirty per se, with the ultimate particulars of his guilt to be determined at leisure. Esposito leaned over the body again.

  “Wait! Did you hear that?”

  They leaned in, the three of them—Nick, cop, sergeant—all attention on Esposito’s earnest face.

  “There it is again! ‘I killed Jose Babenco. I gotta clear my conscience before I meet my Maker.’ ”

  Esposito was trying too hard. The sergeant didn’t laugh; the cop did, a little forcibly. The sergeant walked away, and the cop hung in close.

  “A ‘dying declaration’?” Nick asked, still dutiful in his sideman role.

  “You know, in the old days, it would have been,” said Esposito, eyeing the young cop. “Some of those detectives, they had incredible hearing back then. A guy like this, a couple of bad cases would be buried with him.”

  “I got a few of those,” Nick muttered.

  “Everybody does. Well, Officer, those bad days are behind us. So stay in school, brush your teeth, and always remember, crack is wack.”

  Esposito liked playing the grand old man, and the young cop liked seeing it.

  “Nick, let’s get to it. Malcolm, we hardly knew ye.”

  Esposito walked back to find the witness, an elderly man who’d been returning from church. As expected, his statement regarding how he’d found the body was that he’d been walking past and found the body. He saw nothing else, and his hearing was poor, so he didn’t recall any gunfire. Nick took down the uniformed cops’ information, the smaller, duller facts that had to be collected for the report—shield numbers, assignments for the day, the time they responded.

  Esposito told the young cop to take out more tape, to make the crime scene bigger, not twenty yards but fifty to circumscribe the scene. His case, his call. Not a nightclub rope, Nick thought, but an eruv, like the Jews made, an imaginary boundary that made the larger world your home. And Nick knew why Esposito did it. There wasn’t any more evidence to be found in the wider area, but enlarging the space would make it seem more important, giving the cops more to consider, more to protect. Though Esposito clowned around as if the situation didn’t matter, it mattered more than anything to him. He’d circle the world like Magellan, yellow ribbon unspooling behind him, until the perp was trapped inside. One day, Malcolm was Esposito’s sworn adversary; the next, Esposito was Malcolm’s last champion. The terms could change, but the contest went on.

  At the far side of the tape, a man rode up on a bicycle and lifted it, ducking under, and managed to get five or six feet before a burly cop spotted him. The cop charged over to block him, barking out, “Hey! You!”

  “Who?”

  “You, asshole! Who do you think?”

  “What?”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Gotta get through!”

  “Do you see the yellow tape? What do you think it’s there for?”

  “You don’t gotta talk like that to me.”

  “If you listened, I wouldn’t have to. Go around. What’s the matter with you?”

  “It’s muddy over there. I don’t wanna mess up my bike.”

  “You gotta be kiddin’ me. Get out of here. Beat it!”

  The man walked off, taking his bike and wounded dignity, shaking his head. “You don’t gotta be like that….”

  The man had begun to rewrite the story in his head to recast himself as the injured party. Mindin’ my own business, doin’ nothin’ wrong, when all of a sudden this cop starts screamin’ … Sometimes you had to freeze a lobby for hours for a crime scene, and the inconvenience was real—especially for the mother with her arms laden with laundry, groceries, three kids in tow—but it had to be done. Most waited with some semblance of patience, but a few always tried to push through, or screamed as if the cops had lost sight of the
real victim—Me!—who risked dinner getting cold, or having to use an unfamiliar bathroom. The man with the bicycle broke from his ruminations to look back and ask, “Who died?”

  The cop stared at him coldly. “Who cares?”

  The man got on his bike and rode off, muttering curses. Esposito walked over to Nick, slipping his notebook back into his pocket.

  “We good here?”

  “We’re not making any friends.”

  “We’re not in the friends business. Let’s do the notification, pay a visit to Momma Cole. I was there a couple of times, after the Babenco homicide. And before, for an older brother. I wanted him for a shooting, when he got killed. Stabbed, at a club downtown. You know, Nick, these things have a way of working out. Anyway, she’s not the friendliest lady. Not that I blame her. Whaddaya think I should I go with, ‘You want the good news, or the bad news?’ ”

  “It’s a classic, but maybe not this time.”

  “Whatever. You’re the diplomat. Let’s go.”

  The drive to the Cole residence would be a short one. The apartment was beneath the elevated subway, in the same projects, at the northern end. News would travel fast, and they had to get there first. The weather had slowed down the ghetto grapevine, but time was limited. They had to deliver the shock, to watch the responses and gather what they could before the defenses went back up. The rain had eased again, and the hustlers had begun to creep back out onto the corners, ready for the night. Esposito scanned the landscape from behind the wheel—he always drove, by mutual preference—as the wipers cleared the fat, irregular splashes that fell from the elevated train above them. On one corner, five or six young men, one or two women, had gathered on the far side of the street beneath a bodega awning. As the car approached, Esposito grabbed Nick by the biceps.

  “Watch this.”

  The car swerved across the street, screeching, and the gang half-froze, half-started to scatter, all of them too late as the car struck the puddle by the curb. The puddle was wide and deep, and sent a cascade of filthy rainwater over them, staining their baggy pants and doo-rags and three-hundred-dollar sneakers. The car was half a block away before they recovered enough to throw beer cans and shout empty threats. Esposito bellowed with laughter and grabbed Nick again.