Red on Red Read online

  Garelick slid the pad over. Nick called and got a recorded message—not in service. He held the phone up for the table to hear, like a magician’s assistant.

  “And we have our statement from Marina, a person whose credibility we have no reason to doubt, that she will not be in this hemisphere by tomorrow. Are you with me so far?”

  “So far.”

  “You want to show something about the mental health of somebody at this table,” observed Esposito, “not including yourself.”

  “Watch, listen, learn. I take out a new piece of paper.” He tore out a half-sheet from his pad. “We provide a name and a phone number, which we have demonstrated to be nonworking.”

  He wrote in a bouncy cursive, attempting to seem feminine. After a pause, he changed the dot of the i in Marina to a heart.

  “That’s it. Watch. Wait. Observe.”

  Marina returned to place the check on the table, but Garelick took hold of it—“Hang on, wait”—and slipped a few bills inside the brown vinyl folder.

  “We don’t need change.”

  “Thank you!”

  “Best of luck, Marina. We’re on our way here, too. Duty calls. The other guy, in the bathroom? He’ll be out in a minute, but we have to go. He dropped this piece of paper, from a homicide case, I think it is. Would you mind giving it to him?”

  “No, not at all.”

  The four of them slipped out of the booth, taking care not to appear desperate to leave, as Perez came out of the bathroom. He viewed the empty booth with dismay, but was reassured at the sight of Garelick waving to him from outside. As he walked toward the door, Marina intercepted him.

  “You dropped something.”

  Marina beamed so brightly that Nick wondered how much Garelick had tipped her. Perez opened the folded note and smiled at her. He winked at her as he left.

  “Good thing you caught it,” Perez said.

  Perez touched her shoulder as he left, with a lightness in his step. The joy in his face was so contagious that the other four detectives were nearly as childishly elated. As they drove off, Nick knew that he’d never feel sorry enough for Perez to risk spoiling the scheme, or rather—in this instance, at least—his conscience was no match for his curiosity. Sunlight, sleep, and whatever this was, Nick was glad to have started the day with them.

  On the drive downtown, little was said; the meal had been heavy, the night long. Esposito said that driving helped to wake him up, and as much as Nick didn’t want to think about that, he didn’t like to drive. The wind took up the gray surface of the Harlem River in feathery ruffles, and the Bronx projects and apartments lined the palisade on the far side, like sentry towers. Nick saw Esposito regarding the projects darkly, as if there were a mile-long BEWARE OF DOG sign along the shoreline, warning trespassers of all kinds. When any ghetto cop got a glimpse of some other rough stretch of town—the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, forget about Newark—they thought, Now, this place is baaaaddd! And all of a sudden Spanish Harlem or East New York seemed easy, like home. Highbridge rose above to the left, with its rocky slopes and hardy oaks. Allison used to say that she couldn’t believe Nick was a city kid, because what he liked best about the city was the country. Ah, the green woods of Gotham, sweet home.

  Across the water were the East River islands, Randall’s, Wards, Roosevelt, adrift in history. No one had ever really figured out what to do with them. They had been workhouses, poorhouses, madhouses, places of quarantine. The names changed, following their shifting purposes—Blackwell’s Island became Welfare Island before it became Roosevelt Island. Though the lighthouse at the northern tip still stood, a haphazard bar graph horizon of concrete housing towers had taken the place of the Idiot Asylum and the Inebriate Asylum. At the southern end, the ruins of the smallpox hospital were lit up at night, the grand shell of a chateau, fenced off to keep tourists from being crushed by falling stone. It was the problem with islands—everyone wanted to get on them or no one did. To the right, where the skyscrapers of Manhattan rose, a square foot of space might cost more than a square mile in Texas. On the little river islands, ideas went wrong, and money fell short, and then interest dwindled. But when they lit up the smallpox hospital at night, it looked like a palace.

  “Why have you been staring at me?”

  Nick laughed so hard he choked. “I was looking at Roosevelt Island.”

  “Nobody ever looks at Roosevelt Island.”

  “That’s true, but I was looking at Roosevelt Island.”

  “It’s okay to admit it,” Esposito continued, the attention working through his system like caffeine. “As Garelick says, ‘Watch, listen, learn.’ ”

  Esposito smiled with a theatrical self-satisfaction, raising an eyebrow, letting slip an amused sigh. It was an act and it wasn’t; he wouldn’t have joked like that a month ago. Nick tried to think how long had they worked together—was it five months? Esposito fished for a piece of gum from his pocket, and Nick knew he wanted a cigar. Espo knew himself well enough to laugh at his vanity, and he trusted Nick enough to show him that he wasn’t entirely kidding. Friendship can begin with likeness, a shared past, a shared taste—You’re from Brooklyn? You like Sinatra?—or it can begin with unlikeness, a thrilling difference. You think, I’d never have thought of that joke. I could never sing like that, or have figured that out. Not only couldn’t I have done that, I wouldn’t have known how to begin. A stranger can almost become a brother through a handful of these little epiphanies. They began to hit it off after one visit to an apartment where they’d heard a perp from a shooting might be staying. It was a cousin living there, with the name Garces, uncommon enough to have promise. There was no answer at the door, or at the neighbors’, or at the super’s. There were no names by the doorbells, or the mailboxes, a two–tiered row of them at the side of the lobby. Nick and Esposito strolled over, glancing around to see if anyone was watching, and Nick pried back one of the mailbox covers half an inch with his house key. He took the chewing gum out of his mouth, wadded it to the end of a pen, and slid it inside the little gap. With a quick pluck, out came a phone bill, addressed to a Fernando Garces. He slipped it back inside.

  “This is the right place,” Nick said.

  “That was a federal offense,” remarked Espo approvingly. “Did you make that up yourself?”

  The other thing that warmed Espo to the partnership was a chance remark. Nick had asked him where he was from in Italy, and he’d said Sicily, two generations back. Nick told him that his name was for foundlings, a name given to children abandoned at hospitals and churches. It meant “exposed.” Others in the tradition tended to be prettified, puffed into euphemism—D’Amico was “from love,” Donodeo meant “gift of God.” There was an unpainted plainness to Esposito’s version, a factory flatness that appealed to him.

  “No kidding!” he said, beaming. “My name means something!”

  Never was someone prouder to learn of a bastard ancestor. But Nick understood that what appealed to Esposito was the idea that he was self-made, self-invented. He had no brothers, and his father was not loved and long gone. His life was the work of his own hands, he felt, and so the fortune-cookie factoid took on an oracular depth.

  As it was, neither had shown any particular gift for friendship before then. Nick was too self-contained, Esposito too competitive for lasting fellowship of any depth. Nick knew that his own unmoored state played some part, how he was both sinking and floating, and the greater effect of his betrayal, his pre-betrayal, had been to inspire in him a dedication to ensure there would be no need for further betrayal to occur. He stuck close to Esposito, listened and learned with true esteem, and his cautious counsel was accepted more often than not. He didn’t know why Esposito had taken to him, but he was glad for it. They pulled off the highway at Twenty-third and headed back up First. Here they were, in the city.

  “Why don’t you ever work down here, Espo?”

  “The city? Didn’t you hear, they made crime against the law down here. Nothing happens. A
nd if it does, the butler did it. What fun is that? I mean, I know shit happens sometimes, but half the time you’re running around because some millionaire, some politician, their silverware was stolen. What I like about uptown is nobody’s important. Nobody’s important until they kill somebody or get killed.”

  Though Nick dismissed the casual slander of their downtown colleagues, the last assessment had a measure of cruel truth. Still, Esposito’s contentment was not absolute.

  “You think it’ll be in the papers, last night?” he asked. “My homicide, I mean.”

  “I don’t know, maybe a line or two.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? We have three dead last night, and there wasn’t one reporter. Not a single picture that wasn’t taken as evidence.”

  Nick struggled to frame his comment so he wouldn’t snap under the weight of its irony. “No pictures? Not a single snapshot of me knocking a body out of a tree, you splashing the mud puddle on the hustlers, the old lady’s face before she died? That’s fine by me. You know the deal—you’re out of the limelight, but you’re also off the radar. It’s the better way.”

  Esposito grunted, unwilling to concede that he couldn’t have both privacy and publicity but he didn’t bring it up again.

  At the medical examiner’s, the lobby had a security desk in front of a marble wall inscribed with an ominous Latin quotation: TACEANT COLLOQUIA. EFFUGIAT RISUS. HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE. They both stared at it for a moment, as they grasped for ID to show the guard, who nodded them past. Nick had looked up the quote before and memorized it. There was a dignity here that was lacking in the Bronx morgue, where you went in the back of the building, through the loading dock. In the elevator, Esposito scratched himself as they waited for it to go downstairs; he seemed somewhat discomfited. Nick had never been to an autopsy with him, and quite a few detectives, even veterans, tried to avoid the procedure. More were troubled by the gore than the ghosts, he guessed, and Esposito seemed immune to haunting.

  “I wonder what the hell that means, on the wall there.”

  “It’s Latin.”

  “Duh.”

  “Do you want to know?”

  “I got a feeling you’re about to tell me.”

  “ ‘Let conversation cease. Laughter, take flight. This place is where death delights to help the living.’ ”

  The elevator stopped, and Esposito pursed his lips. “What’s the first bit again?”

  “ ‘Let conversation cease.’ ”

  “In other words, ‘Shut up already.’ ”

  Nick had fallen for it. His own vanities had not passed completely unnoticed. Esposito began to shake with laughter, and made little effort to control himself as they walked out into the basement corridor.

  “Bite me,” Nick said.

  “Itebay emay, in the Latin. This place skeeves me.”

  But Nick had been right about the squeamishness—“skeeve,” from the Italian “schifo,” “disgust.” Esposito wasn’t the only detective who had fallen out of the habit of going to autopsies. It was true that in outdoor gunshot cases, which are the benchmark murders of bad neighborhoods, you usually learned little from autopsies—whether Milton Cole’s liver had been otherwise healthy was as relevant as his sixth-grade report card. But Nick felt that you connected in a way that you would not if you only saw a rap sheet—and it was a rare man on the slab who didn’t have a criminal record. You might see abrasions on the knuckles, from the effort to do a hundred push-ups a day, or the waistline that told of fast food and video games. There was history in the skin. You might not have known he was a Latin King until you saw “Amor de Rey” tattooed on his back; you might have forgotten he had a mother until you read it on his shoulder. And you met the customer, who you now worked for, which was always a good idea. Esposito didn’t need to make the effort to connect, but Nick did.

  Esposito started to say that he’d go out for coffee if nothing looked too bad, when Tully, the detective liaison at the ME, caught them in the hall. Tully helped fill in the story when the pathologist had a question. Was there diabetes medication found at the scene? Was there any history of domestic violence? Was the body found in the bathtub or next to it? He helped negotiate the minefield of theoreticals—Why? Why not? What if? All the anal whatiffery that annoyed you most times—and embarrassed you on occasion, when they came upon the puncture from the ice pick that no one noticed at the scene. Tully took hold of Esposito’s arm and whispered that Internal Affairs was in the room—an old junkie locked up for shoplifting the night before had expired quietly in a midtown precinct holding cell. There was nothing suspicious about the death, but since he’d died in police custody, they were obliged to investigate. Esposito reacted as if he’d been told there was a gas leak.

  “Dead bodies, and now rats,” he muttered, glowering. “It’s like a horror movie.”

  Nick shuddered, and his discomfort was unfeigned. He had rationalized his decision to work for IAB by deciding he didn’t really work for them. They had a doubly bad reputation, for both credulous malice and incompetence. If there was an accusation that a cop was robbing banks, they’d blunder around ATMs for a month and then write up everyone in the precinct who came in ten minutes late. In-house justice for the NYPD was a Wizard of Oz affair, booming and arbitrary pronouncements from behind a curtain—five days for failure to wear a seat belt in a car crash; thirty for being out of residence while on sick leave; ten for felony assault, off-duty. Failure to comply with a lawful order, five days or sixty. There were stories behind all of the cases, Nick knew—Al Capone went down for the taxes, not the murders—and he hoped every hard hit on technicalities compensated for something rotten but unprovable. Still, the numbers were baffling, the charges relentlessly inventive—unauthorized sexual conduct while on duty, fifteen days. He’d never seen the on-duty sex authorization form. He’d have to check around the office. Could a sergeant sign it, or did you need a chief?

  Technically, Nick was an IAB “field associate,” a kind of informal informant, someone in the neighborhood who would pass on word, gossip more than hard news. If he saw a cop do wrong—real wrong—his obligation was no different from any other cop, which was to tell the truth. No different from any other person, really, though perjury was apparently a crime only for policemen, not politicians. Nick himself was in daily violation of department regulations by living in the same precinct where he worked, but he had been assured that petty stuff was not what IAB was looking for. What they were looking for was Esposito, though Nick didn’t know until later how hard they were trying.

  There had been nothing especially wrong with the squad where Nick had started his detective career, but it had not been in the same Bronx precinct where he had worked as a cop and had expected to go when promoted. He’d been moved because of manpower issues, it had been explained, due to retirements, resignations, and promotions. It was temporary, he’d been assured, and he’d believed them. That belief may have figured into why he’d never settled in, never connected to the people and place as he might have, and his sense of transience and separation, made emphatic by the same qualities in his off-duty life, had begun to corrode the sense of fulfillment and fun he’d come to depend on. No matter its burdens, work had been a refuge, his last one of late, and Nick had not wanted to test his capacity to withstand the equal aversions he’d felt for going to the office and coming home. He had not wanted to be at either, and he had not known where else to go. When he’d judged that he had done his time, he’d put in for a transfer to Manhattan.

  But months passed without even the rumor of movement, and Nick could foresee the months turning into years. He had no significant friends or relatives to intercede for him; his personnel file would molder and yellow in a cabinet downtown. He could picture it, and he knew how it felt. As he waited, one less-than-stellar colleague was transferred to a suburban corner of Queens because he couldn’t keep up with his cases; another, notoriously abrasive, found himself reassigned to Manhattan overnight when a
chief didn’t like how he answered the phone—“What do you want?” Nick had no desire to be as incompetent as the one or as impolitic as the other, but when they called to crow variously about the better restaurants, the lighter workload, the ease of the commute, he left the office in a foul temper. Hours were spent in acrid speculation over whether he was being refused or merely ignored, and which was the preferred insult. When he asked for a robbery assignment with steady tours, he was passed over for a junior man, the sergeant’s favorite. His considerate treatment of a tearful perp he locked up for a fight—ex-wife, hooking up with the ex–best friend—led to what should have been a professional coup, a data dump on a gang of home invaders—names, addresses, phone numbers, past and planned jobs. Kilos and machine guns were ultimately recovered, but Nick wasn’t there for the takedown. It happened on his day off, and the sergeant had forgotten to call him in. Junior took the collars. Nick had always had his bleak side, but after this, he was becoming bitter.

  On his next day back, he confided his frustration to one of the veteran detectives, a shrewd and decent old Barbadian. What Nick took at first to be magnificently sympathetic indignation proved to be the onset of a stroke. At the emergency room, he met a neighborhood acquaintance from lnwood, a former partner of the ailing man, now a lieutenant at IAB. “Don’t hold that against me,” he joked, and Nick didn’t. The man had always been affably unserious, almost boldly so, noted mostly in his youth for running naked through a church picnic on a twenty-dollar dare. They went out for a beer and had at least eight, at which point the offer was casually tendered, impetuously accepted.

  “What do I do?”

  “Nothing, really. Just keep your eyes open. Some of the shitheads I work with have a real hard-on for some guy,” he said, laying out the allegations by Malcolm Cole and Babenco, hinting he didn’t take them at face value. “Who knows? You don’t have to be best friends with the guy. Nick, I never worked really hard at anything, but I never did less than what I do here….”