Neptune Avenue (2 page)

Jack nodded. “Yeah, but what else?”

The rookie squinted. “I don’t know.”

Jack crossed his arms. “It was dry and empty. Now why would there be an open condom lying there with nothing in it?”

He watched the detective struggle to work through the implications. “Whoever was using it didn’t, um, finish what he was doing?”

Jack nodded. “You’re doing good. Let’s try to re-create the scene. Someone else was in that room with the woman. A john, or maybe her pimp. He unrolls a condom but can’t finish his business. Or can’t get started. Maybe she says something about his manhood, or maybe she doesn’t even have to; either way, he gets enraged. He reaches out and there’s some old appliance lying there and he strangles her with the cord. Did you notice that I looked at her fingernails?”

The rookie nodded uncertainly.

“What do you think we might find there?”

The rookie squinted. “The killer’s DNA? Like, what if she scratched him as she tried to pull his hands away?”

“Actually, we often find the victim’s
own
tissue under her fingernails: she digs into her skin, trying to pull away the cord. So anyhow,” Jack concluded, “the perp calms down and sees what he’s done, and then he tries to cover it up by making it look like a suicide. Luckily for us, like most criminals, he’s not a rocket scientist.”

The rookie sank down onto the stoop, took out a handkerchief, and wiped his face.

THEY SPENT THE NEXT
couple of hours canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses. Fruitlessly. Nobody wanted to step up and get involved, not the distrustful black locals, not the sour-looking Hasidim. They checked with a local Vice team to see if the victim was a known hooker, but no luck there. They showed a photo to some working girls—nada—and then ran it by some informants on the local drug scene. Nothing. And then their tour was over.

“Don’t worry,” Jack told his new partner. “We’ll have an I.D. soon. We’ll get a match on her prints. Or we’ll find out who was selling her drugs. …” He certainly hoped he was right—the odds of solving any homicide dropped drastically after the first forty-eight hours.

The rookie was quiet for the first part of the drive back to the Seven-one house. As they passed a bunch of little kids dancing around in the spray of an open hydrant and then rolled by clusters of old folks sitting on folding chairs right out on the sidewalk, Jack left him alone; the young detective had plenty to think about.

“You got any questions?” Jack finally said.

The rookie chewed his lower lip. “Does, ah, does it get to you?”

“The bodies?”

The rookie nodded gravely.

Jack leaned back and dropped his forearm on his armrest. “We do this every day. We kick into an investigative gear as soon as we hit the scene. If we got emotional or took it personally, there’s no way we could do the job.”

The rookie frowned but didn’t speak.

“What?” Jack said.

The rookie chewed his lip.

“Something bothering you?”

The rookie shrugged. “I was wondering why everybody didn’t wear Tyvek jumpsuits. I thought that, after O.J. and all, we were supposed to be more careful about dealing with possible evidence.”

Jack glanced at him. The rookie was looking straight ahead, as if he was embarrassed. “Well, law enforcement all across the country
has
been more careful since the Simpson thing, but that doesn’t mean that we’re gonna have a perfect textbook setup for every single investigation. If you watch some of these TV shows, you’d think that every murder gets solved by forensic evidence, but in real life that’s pretty rare. Most cases still get solved because we found a witness or because the mutt confessed.”

The rookie still frowned.

“
What?
”

The rookie looked away. “I was just wondering if maybe there would have been a more textbook setup if, you know—if the victim hadn’t been
black
.”

Jack resisted an urge to swerve to the curb and throw the car into Park. “Listen,” he said. “You’ve been on the job long enough to know that every case gets its own priority. And yeah, the killing of some crack-addicted hooker is not generally the highest-precedence type of situation, as far as the brass or the press are concerned. But if you’re suggesting that we might do a shoddy job because of the color of her skin …”

At the next red light, he turned and stared at the young detective. “I don’t hear you complaining about the fact that the victim was a
woman
. Or that somebody cold-bloodedly murdered a
prostitute
, because he thought nobody would give a shit …” Despite all his talk about professionalism and detachment, he pictured the girl hanging so helpless in that dismal room and he felt a deep flash of anger toward whoever had done this to her. “That girl wasn’t able to protect herself, and now she can’t speak for herself, and we’re damn well gonna stand up for her.”

The young detective looked only slightly chastened, but enough so that Jack didn’t feel a need to point out that if the case
had
been high priority, the rookie would never have been given responsibility for it. He was here to encourage the kid, not bust his chops. And so he added, decisively, “And you know why we’re gonna put some extra mojo into this case?”

The rookie shook his head.

“Because this bastard thinks he’s smarter than the NYPD.”

A
T HOME LATER, JACK
tossed his keys on a side table and headed back to the kitchen to see what he could scrounge up for dinner. He hated the way his footsteps echoed in his front hallway. He knew he should have been glad to be free from foul odors and grim sights, but the fact was that he would have been happy to stay on the job all the livelong day. Hell, he would have been willing to work around the clock, but ever since a precipitous drop in the Big Apple’s murder rate, the golden days of overtime were gone.

He stood holding open the door to his near-empty fridge for a minute before he realized that he wasn’t even paying attention to what was inside. He wasn’t very hungry anyhow—at least, not enough to try to cobble together a meal from a block of cheese, a jar of peanut butter, and the remains of some Chinese takeout. He cocked his head; as always, he could hear his landlord’s TV blaring upstairs. He told himself that the old man could probably use a visit, but then shook his head—who was he kidding? They could keep
each other
company.

Upstairs, he found Mr. Gardner sitting in his murky front room, in his duct-tape-patched recliner, watching the local news. The old man had always been short and stocky, but the weight had melted off after his stroke a couple years back, leaving behind a shriveled, bespectacled garden gnome. Jack handed him a can of Schaefer and then dropped down onto the spavined, nubbly couch.

On the TV, a massive old console that had probably once displayed the original
Honeymooners
, a reporter with starched blond hair was delivering a report about a pothole in Forest Hills, intoning so gravely she might as well have been describing the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Jack shook his head. Where did they find these people, these puffed-up androids?

During a commercial for maxi pads, both men instinctively turned away from the screen’s blue glow. Mr. G trained his thick eyeglasses on his tenant. “Hey, whatever happened with that lady friend of yours, that … what was her name? I ain’t seen her around for a long time.”

Jack stared down at his beer, working up a fib. “She, ah … she got a job out in California.”

Thankfully, Mr. G—easily distracted—had returned his attention to the TV, where they were showing footage of a factory explosion in Tennessee. (Which had nothing whatsoever to do with local news, but fulfilled the station’s mission of constantly providing viewers with something to gawp at.)

Now that they had gotten past the one subject Jack didn’t want to discuss, they sat in a companionable silence. Jack glanced around the dimly lit room: a shelf of knickknacks collected by Mr. Gardner’s long-deceased wife, a bookcase holding rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a pair of shriveled leather slippers lying on the worn carpet. Mr. G lived a lonely life, enlivened only by visits from his health care aide or much rarer visits from his uptight son. Jack thought of his apartment below: was his own home life so different? He had been divorced for more than fifteen years, had settled into a comfortable bachelor routine where he didn’t ask for anything outside of his work—and then romance had given him a whole new life. He had become spoiled, and it had blown up in his face. He was learning to accept less all over again.

When the local news gave way to “entertainment news”—celebrities falling in and out of rehab, making babies, then bailing out on their childish marriages—his tolerance meter pushed too far into the red. He rubbed his hands on his knees and stood up.

Mr. Gardner turned away from the TV, its light reflecting sideways on his thick bifocals. “You okay, Jackie?”

Jack frowned. The old man
knew
; he didn’t miss a trick. He reached out and squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “I’m fine, Mr. G.”

Downstairs, he heated up the remains of the chow mein and ate it on his kitchen table with
The Daily News
spread out in front of him. He couldn’t focus on the words tonight. He rose, placed his dirty plate in the sink, then walked through his empty apartment. He had done his best to remove all traces of Michelle: some lotion she had left in the bathroom cabinet, bobby pins on his dresser, the earplugs she had used when he snored … Wincing inside, he went to his small office at the front of the apartment, sat at his desk, and reached under a stack of medical papers. (He’d been shot in the chest two years before, after an ambush on a dark street in Red Hook. His insurance company had supposedly covered his surgery and hospital care, but the bills kept coming.)

There was one romantic memento left, this snapshot he now held in his hands, taken by his friend and colleague Gary Daskivitch. The big young bear of a detective had introduced him to Michelle in the first place, had set up their original blind date. Occasionally they had all gone out together, Jack and Michelle, Daskivitch and his cute little red-haired wife.

He stared down at the picture. Wood paneling in the background, light glinting off rows of bottles. Monsalvo’s bar, a local dive he’d frequented for years, for a quick draft after work. Both couples had sat in a back booth, laughing, when they weren’t gathered around the jukebox—Dolly Parton singing “Crimson and Clover,” Sinatra crooning “The Way You Look Tonight”—or waltzing across the ancient linoleum floor or playing a new video bowling game old Monsalvo had (shockingly) installed, trying to keep up with the times. In the picture, Jack sat with Michelle leaning against him, her head on his shoulder, her black hair shining faintly in the dim light, eyes closed, a beautiful, soft look on her face. He had cupped her cheek in his palm and gazed down at her, heart full of love He sighed. Enough of this crap. He had worked hard to harden himself, just like he did at work.
Nothing personal,
that was the credo. He carried the picture into the kitchen and lit a burner on the stove.
I’m through with romance,
he said to himself, and lifted the photo toward the flame—but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t give up this bittersweet vestige, this last sadly pleasurable source of pain.

BROOKLYN SOUTH HOMICIDE WAS
headquartered in Coney Island. When Jack stopped by early the next morning, he noticed two things in quick succession.

First, he veered into the back room, where he discovered that—pet peeve—nobody had bothered to refill the old Mr. Coffee maker that sat on one of the storage shelves.

And then he came back into the squad room, glanced up at the wall, and stopped short. A big erasable bulletin board held the names of all of the victims in current homicide cases. A new name jumped out at him. And he knew that his claim about taking every case impersonally was about to get shot to hell.

D
ANIEL LELO.

He had hoped there might be another Brooklynite with the same name. Even as the attendant pulled out the drawer, he held on to that slim chance. The morgue was freezing, especially after the August heat outside, but now a deeper chill ran up his spine.

The victim had a bullet hole in the center of his forehead, and undoubtedly the back of the head would be a pulpy mess, yet the stern, round face was easily recognizable. Jack noticed powder burns speckling the skin, which indicated that Daniel had been shot from a distance of less than eighteen inches. Killed in his car, the report said. On Neptune Avenue.

Jack stared down at his friend. Daniel had been a big man, with a body like a seal’s; it was hefty, but you sensed that there was plenty of muscle underneath. And here was his tattoo: a mermaid drawn crudely on his left shoulder.

The man had been lying down when Jack had first seen him two years ago, when they had been in the hospital together, but warm blood had coursed through Daniel’s veins, and his eyes had been able to move, at least enough to follow an overhead TV. …

AT FIRST, JACK HAD
been given a private room. He’d felt like a dog hit by a car: he just wanted to curl up and sleep. Across the hall, though, lay a wounded gangbanger who shouted and complained all night long.

“Gimme some morphine!” the kid whined. And “Where are my goddamned Mar’boros?”

Jack wanted to march over, put a stop to the noise, and give the poor nurses a break. But he couldn’t even sit up.

The racket went on. At 2
A.M.
he managed to reach the call button. While he waited for someone to come, he fingered the bandage on his chest. The entry wound beneath it was only the size of a dime. As a veteran homicide detective, this didn’t surprise him—he had seen more bullet holes than he could remember, and they were often modest. Inside, though, the burning metal had passed through his lung and a fragment had lodged in one of his vertebrae—its heat had shocked his spinal cord, causing temporary paralysis from his chest down.