Good Day to Die (15 page)

I smashed the heel of my palm into his chest and he went over on the bed. He was lucky, in a way. I could have jammed his solar plexus, but I didn’t want him unconscious. Just scared.

“Don’t lie to me, Razor. I’m not gonna take it.”

Anger replaced his initial surprise. Enough anger for him to consider doing something about it. I could see it in his eyes.

“Make up your mind, Razor,” I said, calm in spite of the blood pounding in my temples. “Shit or get off the pot.”

He heaved a sigh and shook his head, resigned now. Ready to give me what I wanted. “Okay, Ah
did
get in his face, but it wasn’t nothin’ serious. The boy was fly, Mister Means. He was beautiful. Why he wanna sell that good shit on the street when he could be makin’ serious bank? See, Ah gots me an arrangement with a sissy lives on East Sixty-fifth Street. Knows
everybody,
specially the kinda faggots that’s too scared to buy they ass on the street. Understand what ah’m sayin’? Married faggots.
Politician
faggots.
Rich
faggots. The boy coulda got two, three hundred for his butt. Instead, he givin’ twenty-dollar blow-jobs. Didn’ make no sense.”

“Keep going, Razor. And don’t leave anything out.”

“Ah tried to talk some sense to the boy, but he don’t take nothin’ serious. He ain’t a bidnessman. Thinks everything’s a damn joke. Ah ’splained to him about what could happen to a boy on the street by hisself, but it didn’t do no good. Way ah sees it, the boy done had his faggotness cooped up so long, he steady believin’ he havin’ hisself the great adventure. Ah got so mad, ah jus’ hada smack him. Word, Mister Means, ah wasn’t after gettin’ him into mah stable. Ah was jus’ mad, ’cause ah hates stupid. If y’all don’ believe what ah’m sayin’, y’all could ask Dolly Dope. She right outside and she knowed the boy good. Dolly the one firs’ call the boy to my attention.”

I turned to Bouton. “You wanna get Dolly Dope?”

I was ordering her around again, but I think she was too involved to notice. As soon as she was gone, I returned to Razor Stewart.

“Face the wall, Razor. Sit on the bed facing the wall. I don’t want you passing her any signals. I want her to speak for herself.”

I took a chair off to one side and waited for Bouton to come back. The idea was to let the female officer interview the female witness. Even the most bigoted male cops were willing to concede females an edge in this one area.

Dolly Dope turned out to be the skinny whore with the needle tracks. Big surprise. I looked at her a little closer, noting that she had those sad, sad eyes common to terminal drug addicts. Eyes that’d seen everything. At that moment, I’d have bet my soul (assuming I had one) that she was HIV positive and knew it.

Bouton glanced at me uncertainly and I signaled her to go ahead. The first rule of cop interviews is to assume that everybody lies. Even if they don’t. My job was to catch the lies.

“Dolly,” Bouton began, “did you know John Kennedy?”

“John-John? Yes, I knew him.” Her voice was smooth and educated; it betrayed no surprise whatsoever. She glanced at Stewart for a minute, then back at Vanessa Bouton.

“He was a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“
A good
friend.”

“He was kind to me.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“He’s dead.”

“I know that, Dolly. What else?”

“He was happy.”

Bouton took a deep breath. “What can you tell me about his tricks?”

“John-John was doing car tricks.”

“Did he have any regulars.”

“Not that he talked about. He used to move around a lot.”

“Did you try to get him together with Stewart?”

Dolly shifted uncomfortably. She was claiming Kennedy as a friend. Bringing him into Stewart’s orbit could only be understood as betrayal.

“Yes,” she finally said. “I thought he could make a lot more money and I told him so. John-John was fresh, unspoiled. The streets would have ruined him.”

“But he didn’t want to work for Stewart.”

“That’s right. He told me that his father had money and was dying of cancer. John-John expected to inherit enough to get off the streets. That’s what made it a game. The streets, I mean. He thought it wouldn’t be permanent.”

“Kennedy had a brother, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ever talk about his brother?”

“John-John told me that his brother couldn’t deal with his being gay. He did write to his brother from time to time. I don’t think he ever got an answer.”

Bouton looked at me for some sort of guidance, but all she got was a shrug. There was no way Stewart could have anticipated our arrival and, therefore, no reason for him to make sure his and Dolly’s stories matched. Which they did.

“Is there anything you want to add?” Bouton asked. “Anything more you can tell me?”

Dolly Dope thought about it for moment. She looked down at her ruined arms, raising them slightly, then shook her head from side to side.

“He was happy,” she whispered, “and now he’s dead. That’s all there is to it.”

T
HERE WAS GOOD NEWS
and bad news.

The best news was that it was seven o’clock in the morning and the worst news was over. Vanessa Bouton had gone home to her bed about an hour before, leaving me in front of a twelve-inch Goldstar, Heineken in hand, watching
Moulin Rouge
on Cinemax.

The bad news had begun somewhere between Razor Stewart’s apartment and our first stop on West Street when Bouton fixated on saving Dolly Dope by getting her into a long-term rehab program. Even if I’d been interested, which I wasn’t, it was the wrong time and place. We were in the middle of an investigation, and her mind belonged on the business at hand. It was that simple.

I tried to explain it to her. Along with the obvious fact that Dolly Dope was beyond redemption, that her eyes reached all the way to an inevitably painful death in a city-supplied hospital bed. Naturally, Vanessa wasn’t buying. She was far too busy with Dolly’s resurrection to listen to a poor schmuck like me.

Once Bouton got started, there was no stopping her, and about thirty minutes into her verbal daydream, I realized that she had two problems. The first was that she’d grown up in the projects, so she knew what the streets were like. She had to know. The second was that she’d spent most of her adult life running away from her childhood. She could have chosen to come up in the job by way of the streets. Lots of cops have done it. But she’d gone a different way, burying herself in personnel and earning her brownie points one ranking officer at a time.

I’m not saying the insight elevated me to the level of Sigmund Freud, but it did show me just how complex keeping Bouton happy was going to be. I’d been charged (
ordered
might be a better word) with finding a suitable drug rehab program, after which Bouton would apprise Dolly Dope of her glorious future. Manufacturing a real investigation out of a piece of shit was challenge enough as far as I was concerned. Saving Dolly Dope was beyond my abilities.

I did catch one break, however. Between the cocaine I’d spread around the night before and Barry Millstein’s putting out the good word, the whores, male and female, as well as a handful of pimps, were eager to talk with us. Bouton, I could see, was impressed. I’d come advertised as a super street cop and I was producing. Unfortunately,
what
I was producing confirmed Razor’s and Dolly’s assessment of John-John Kennedy as a nutty little hick with a deeply entrenched Pollyanna complex.

We didn’t do any better with Rosario Rosa. Rosario had had plenty of enemies; in fact, we couldn’t find a single person, not even the pimps, who had anything good to say about him. Over the years, he’d cheated, assaulted, or hustled just about everybody he knew. Rosa, so the story went, had a fondness for angel dust, a drug widely associated with mindless violence. When he was high, he was completely unpredictable. Nobody cared, as long as he limited his attacks to common citizens, but whenever Rosario beat on one of the girls, her pimp was forced to seek revenge. Protection is the only tangible thing pimps have to offer.

Even two cops committed to finding a motive for murder couldn’t make Rosario into a blackmailer. Blackmail is too complex. The carnal encounter has to be carefully set up and recorded. The victim has to be approached and convinced that paying off is the only option. It takes time, patience, and diplomacy to do it right, none of which Rosa possessed.

At one point, Bouton dropped her Dolly Dope fantasy long enough to suggest that I’d targeted the wrong victims. Yes, she admitted, my theory had
sounded
good, but it wasn’t working out. Kennedy and Rosa were too ordinary to inspire a killer like Thong. Maybe we should move on to someone else.

I countered with the assertion that we’d already found a motive. Namely that Kennedy’s father had money and was close to death. Suppose Kennedy’s brother wanted the inheritance for himself? Suppose he’d concocted a diabolical scheme to divert the investigation?

“Face it, Captain,” I finished, “if Kennedy had been found in his room with a knife in his back, the suits would’ve been driving upstate the next day.”

And that was the problem. Upstate. The task force had interviewed Kennedy’s brother, and while they hadn’t been terribly interested, they’d pegged him as a rural type without any direct connection to the Big Apple. Thong, on the other hand, had a detailed knowledge of male prostitution in New York. He’d pulled his victims off five different strolls; he’d posed as a horny john; he’d killed, carried, and disposed of his victims on city streets.

Any port in a storm, right? The idea was to stretch out the investigation for as long as possible, right? Don’t blame me, I’m only the messenger. Right?

The messenger of doom.

Zsa Zsa Gabor was whirling around Jose Ferrer’s deathbed when I hopped off my own bed, trotted over to the phone, and dialed the task force’s number.

“Yeah?”

“Sergeant Pucinski, please.”

“Speakin’.”

“Pooch, it’s Russell Means.”

“Whatta ya say, Means? You bring in the perp yet?”

“Not now, not ever. Pooch, you were right. It’s a piece of shit.”

“Great insight, Means. So, what can I do for ya?”

“I want to get to Chief Bowman. Without Bouton finding out about it.”

His laughter quickly degenerated into a choking, phlegmy cough. “And what’re you gonna tell him?” he finally asked.

“I thought he might want to be apprised of our progress.”

“Why couldn’t he just ask Bouton?”

“Maybe he’d like an
independent
opinion.” I hesitated long enough for him to think about it. “Look, Pooch, my ass is on the line here. Bouton’s out of her mind. I don’t wanna go down with her.”

“I could understand that. I could
definitely
understand that. Tell ya what, Means. Why don’t you keep
me
apprised and I’ll pass the information to Bowman. He likes having a white cripple for a mascot.”

“I can’t go to him direct?” Somehow, the idea of trusting Pucinski wasn’t all that appealing.

“You could do anything you want if you don’t mind it gettin’ back to
El Capitan.
Face it, Means, there’s no reason for you to be going into Bowman’s office, and he ain’t the kind of officer meets with schmucks like you on dark streets in the middle of the night. You and me, on the other hand, are supposed to work together. I’m your liaison with the task force.”

“And you have access to Bowman?”

“Absolutely.”

“You’re asking me to trust you here, Pooch.”

“Please, Means, you’re hurtin’ my feelings.”

“I’m gonna hurt a lot more than your feelings if you fuck me. I’m gonna take that wooden leg and beat you to death with it. You think I’m bluffing, just try me.”

“That ain’t right. What’ve I ever done to you that you should threaten me?”

“Nothing. And that’s the way I want to keep it.”

I quickly outlined what Bouton and I had done over the last twenty-four hours, then hung up, went to the refrigerator and made myself a ham sandwich. The sandwich went on the table along with a jar of pickles, a jar of hot peppers, and another cold Heineken. I left it all sitting there while I went off in search of the pile of material supplied by Pooch.

The box was lying next to the bed where I’d left it the night before. The idea was to compare the names supplied by Pooch with those Barry Millstein had supplied, then compare both with the people we’d interviewed on the street. The end result would be a list of those we’d missed. Searching them out (or so I hoped) would take a couple of days. After which we could drive upstate to interview Kennedy’s brother. Three days ahead was as far as I could think.

I made a mental note to pick a warm, dry day for the drive, then dug into the sandwich and the work. Half an hour later, I’d come up with a very short list of people who’d already indicated they had nothing to offer. Now it was time to read myself to sleep.

As usual, I picked the most boring material I could find. Namely the
American Psychology
article entitled “Sexual Murder.” It was a fairly long piece, almost thirty pages, and more objective than I’d expected. The author, a psychologist named Miriam Brock, had managed to locate and interview more than twenty serial killers who’d exhausted their appeals and therefore had no reason to hold anything back. In the opening paragraphs, Brock emphasized how eager her subjects were to be interviewed.

I wasn’t the first to visit these men. A dozen journalists had been here before me, but they had gotten their stories and left, usually within a day. I made it clear that I expected much more, and the response was enthusiastic.

I’ll bet. Brock’s killers had accumulated a grand total of seventy-five life sentences and three thousand years between them. They were going to die in jail and they knew it.

Who wouldn’t be willing to talk under those conditions? Every single one of Brock’s murderers was being held in protective custody because they, themselves, were subject to being murdered by cons looking to make a reputation. Protective custody is no more than solitary confinement with a few amenities (like televisions and books) tossed in to make it look good. Time is the enemy, and interviews help to pass the time.