Red Hook (6 page)

“Around. Out Fourth Avenue. We was going past Bay Ridge and Coney. To Floyd Bennis.”

“Floyd Bennett Field?” There was a Coast Guard base out there. All of a sudden, Jack had a vision of a drug connection—this thing might turn into something big and ugly and blow up in his face. “Did you meet anybody there?” If the answer was somebody from the Guard, he was screwed.

“Naw. We just stopped to take a piss.”

“Any special reason why you went there?”

“Naw. We go all over. Don’t matter where. We just ride.”

“Do you meet people?”

“I told you, mister. We ride. Tommy likes to go to the bridge.” Hector blinked. “Liked.” His friend had only been dead for a day.

“Listen, Hector. Whatever you tell me, it’s just between you and me. Nobody’s going to get in trouble. We’re just trying to find out who did this to Tommy, okay?”

Hector nodded.

“Was he carrying any drugs when you went on these rides?”

“No…” Hector chewed his lip. “Not really.”

“Not really?”

“It’s fucked up to talk to cops.”

Jack lowered his voice. “Don’t worry about what your friends tell you. This is important.”

“I have to go back.”

“Nobody’s going to get in trouble. Just tell me what happened.”

“He”—Hector turned to look down the street—“he had some
chiba
. Just enough for a couple of joints. That’s all, mister. I swear.”

So much for a drug-free Tomas Berrios. Nobody got whacked over a couple of joints, but at least this was a start. “Who did he buy it from, Hector?”

The kid squirmed. “I don’t know, mister. He never told me nothin’ about that.”

Jack sighed. “You said Tommy liked to go to the bridge. What bridge?”

“Verrazano.”

“Why?”

Hector shrugged. “He likes to sit in the park next to the bridge. To chill. We talk.”

“Did you talk to him there the other night?”

“Yeah. Everybody was bustin’ on me ’cause I was late. But he didn’t care. He was all hyped up.”

“About what?”

“My bike’s too small. He said, ‘Tomorrow, I’m gonna buy you a new mountain bike. Replace that piece of shit.’”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Where would he get the money for a new bike?”

Hector shrugged again. “I don’t know. He had a good job. He was making, like eight or nine dollars a hour.”

Jack rubbed his hand over his mouth. This kid was no rocket scientist—you didn’t go around buying people new mountain bikes on less than three hundred take-home per week. “He was talking about ‘tomorrow,’ huh? What did he say was gonna happen ‘tomorrow’?”

Hector shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Yeah.”

Jack leaned closer.

“He said don’t let him forget he was s’posed to buy some Woolite for Mrs. Espinal.”

A
S THE DETECTIVES DROVE
out Fourth Avenue toward Sunset Park, the midday sun flared on the asphalt. Bodegas flew past, auto-lube garages, auto-supply stores. Places to buy fuzzy dice or Playboy air fresheners. On the radio, the dispatcher chattered away, the woman’s voice always in the background of the detectives’ lives.

Tomas Berrios had cycled out this same way less than forty-eight hours earlier. Five young men, pumping along the avenue at night, calling out to each other, laughing, joking—the image grew in Jack’s mind. He tried to draw it out, expand it. Where were they headed? Who did Tomas Berrios expect to meet? Put enough of these images together, and he’d create a mental movie of the vic’s last days.

Near the Park, they passed a bus depot named after Jackie Gleason.

“Look at that,” he said, grinning. “You gotta love this borough.”

Daskivitch shifted his weight in the seat. “So what’s your take? I still think it looks like a Mob hit.”

“Mafia sounds glamorous, but I think this kid probably just got in over his head with some bad local player. Took the drugs, owed the money.”

Stopped at a light, he glanced to the west down a San Francisco—steep hill: past the end of the street, the grand orange Staten Island ferry plowed the slate-blue water of Upper New York Bay. In the intersection ahead, a stout middle-aged woman with permed hair shuffled across at a stoic, deliberate Brooklyn pace. Jack reached into the pocket of his sports coat and pulled out a couple of tablets.

“You got candy?”

“Just some antacids.”

“You all right?”

“Would you shut up with that? I’m fine.”

Daskivitch shrugged.

On the north side of the Park, many of the storefronts were covered in Asian lettering. Times changed. Back in Jack’s father’s day, the neighborhood had been known as Little Finland, home to thousands of Scandinavians skilled in the building trades. That was before the Gowanus Expressway forced out many of the old Finnish homeowners, before the same highway ripped the heart out of Red Hook and the old man.

When Jack’s parents first got married, they lived in a nice little house in the center of the Hook. Back in the 1940s, when city planner Robert Moses dreamed up the expressway, its path ran directly through the house. The city had condemned and demolished the property, along with hundreds of other homes.

The highway continued on through Sunset Park. Though residents there had pleaded with Moses to place the route along Second Avenue, a marginal industrial strip, the planner ignored them, calling their thriving neighborhood a slum. He ran the elevated highway right above Third Avenue, the vital center of the place, a boulevard of little mom-and-pop stores, of newsstands and family restaurants. Half the buildings along the route were torn down. The new highway was so wide that it cast the avenue below into darkness. The surviving businesses didn’t survive long, with the thunder of trucks and cars overhead and the gloom below. After the central arteries of Sunset Park and Red Hook were destroyed, the blight spread through the smaller streets.

The Gowanus Expressway was followed by the Belt Parkway, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, massive construction projects that further isolated the Hook from the rest of Brooklyn. More bad news arrived in the 1960s. In the old days, stevedores like Jack’s father lifted everything out of the ships by hand. But shipping technology advanced—cranes were able to hoist giant metal containers directly out of the holds. Red Hook caught on to the change too late and most of the shipping moved to yards in New Jersey, where it was easier to load the containers directly onto trains.

Once, after his father’s funeral, Jack asked his mother why the old man had been so tough. “He was always kind of hard,” she explained. “But he turned
mean
after Robert Moses tore down our home.”

Raymond Ortslee lived on a quiet street near the eastern edge of the Park. On the corner a red and yellow plastic sign read Muchachos Grocery. Across the way stretched a row of little houses with diamond-shaped windows cut in their front doors. White filigreed iron fences surrounded the tiny yards. Jack parked between a dented van and a repainted Mustang.

The barge captain’s building sat ten yards back from the sidewalk, across a dismal yard. A dog barked somewhere in the back as Jack and his partner entered the cracked driveway. The apartment house was boxy and covered in faded mustard-yellow paint; one section of the facade was slightly darker, where some shingles had been replaced. An exterior staircase crawled up to the third story, where faded aquamarine curtains hung in the windows.

As Jack led the way up the staircase, he saw one of the curtains move slightly. The doorbell rang inside with a harsh metallic clatter.

The detectives waited on the landing. Daskivitch stepped forward and rang the bell again.

“He’s in there,” Jack said quietly. “Right behind that curtain.”

Daskivitch rattled the knob. Suddenly the door swung open and they were looking into the barrel of an ancient rifle. Behind the weapon stood a small man, wild-eyed behind heavy spectacles. The barge captain’s hair was gray and bristly but it had been Brylcreamed back—he looked like a wet otter.

Jack and his partner traded a wary look. Without a word, they moved to opposite sides of the landing: if the guy opened fire, he wouldn’t take them both out.

“I didn’t see nothin’,” the man said desperately. “I’ll swear to it in court. You guys don’t have nothing to worry about.”

“Point the gun down, Mr. Ortslee,” Daskivitch said firmly.

The man continued to point the rifle, but he pulled off his eyeglasses. “I’ll say I wasn’t wearing these. Look, I’m blind as a bat without ’em. I’ll say my eyes were bothering me and I took ’em off. Please, I’ll do anything you guys want.”

“We’re detectives,” Jack said. “NYPD.”

The man blinked and put his glasses back on. He peered out from the doorway, ready to dive back inside. “I’m not fallin’ for that,” he said. “I know damn well who you guys are.”

Moving slowly and deliberately, Jack took out his shield. Then he reached into his wallet and pulled out a card.

“Here,” he said. “Call this number and ask for Sergeant Tanney.

The man blinked down at the card. He stared out of the dark doorway. The door closed. They could hear him locking it on the other side.

“Jesus,” Daskivitch said, “did you see that fucking gun?”

Jack wiped sweat from his forehead. “It was prewar.”

“It was pre-
Civil
War. It’s a whaddayacallit, a fowling piece.”

“A blunderbuss.”

“That’s right. What the Pilgrims used to shoot turkeys.”

Both men grinned at their fortune to be standing there alive and in one piece.

After a moment, the door opened again.

“I’m sorry, officers,” the man said. “The gun is registered. Perfectly legal. I’ve got the papers.”

They sat in Ortslee’s living room, low-ceilinged like an attic. Despite the bright day outside and the big windows facing the street, the room was dingy and dim, paneled with cheap, dark veneer. It smelled of mothballs and sweat and mildewed carpet. The furniture was splintered rattan that looked like it belonged on a patio.

“Was it you who called to tip us off, Mr. Ortslee?” Jack said.

“I don’t wanna get involved in this.”

“You already are. Did you make the call?”

Ortslee struggled with himself, then gave a dismal nod.

“What did you see?”

“It was far away. I couldn’t see nothin’.”

“This is a very serious matter,” Jack said patiently. “We’ll keep anything you tell us entirely confidential.”

“I was far off. Probably seventy-five yards.”

“And?”

“There was two of them. Throwing something over the fence. That’s all I know.” Ortslee rose. “I gotta get ready for work now.” He scuttled out of the room.

The detectives followed. They caught up with him in his bedroom. A big suitcase lay open on the bed, half filled with jumbled clothes.

“Don’t fuck with us,” Daskivitch said.

“I really didn’t see nothin’,” Ortslee replied. His hands shook as he lifted a stack of shirts out of a dresser drawer.

“If you want, we can discuss this down at the precinct house,” Daskivitch said. “We could charge you with obstruction of justice. One way or another, you’re gonna tell us what you saw on that canal.”

“I know how this works,” Ortslee said. “I watch
NYPD Blue
every week.” His eyes darted to Jack, “You play the good cop and he plays the bad cop. Well, I’m not gonna fall for it.”

Jack chuckled.

“That damn
NYPD Blue
,” Daskivitch said, shaking his head. “And I was so looking forward to my bad cop routine.”

“I can’t stay here,” Ortslee said. “They’re gonna figure out how to find me. And if they already killed one guy, why would they stop there?”

“Relax,” Jack said. “If you couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see you, right? Tell us what happened.”

“How’d it go?” asked Daskivitch’s boss, Sergeant Riordan. The man slouched on the edge of his desk in the Seven-six squad room, rubbing his jaw as if he had a toothache. The pain of command.

“Jack called it,” Daskivitch said. “The barge is motoring along, the captain’s up on deck checking a pressure gauge for the plutonium or whatever-the-hell-poison he’s hauling, and he glances up and sees this thing come flipping over the fence.”

“A ‘thing’?” Riordan asked.

“Yeah—it was our vic. First the bargeman thought someone was dumping trash along the canal—which seems to be the big sport over there—but then these two white guys come climbing over the fence after it. He couldn’t see too well on account of the trees and shrubs and crap, but then the perps see
him
and they wig and scramble back over the fence.”

“What kind of a look did he get? Could he ID ’em?”

“Doubtful. He says he was seventy-five yards away.”

“You want to bring him in and show him some pictures?”

“He swears he never saw their faces.”

“He’s just a little hermit who watches too much
TN
,” Jack said. “I ordered him to stay put in case we need him again. Gary gave him the number here in case he suddenly remembers something, but he seems pretty useless.”

“What’s next?” Riordan said.

Jack picked up a glass paperweight from his partner’s desk and hefted it in his palm. “I’ve got a couple of snitches to see.”

“You want company?” Daskivitch asked.

Riordan looked up at the clock. “You guys are gonna be heading into OT soon.”

Daskivitch looked dejected. “You want me to punch out?”

The rest of New York City was ecstatic that the murder rate had dropped to a fraction of its peak ten years before, but the detective squads had suffered budget cuts. Business, as it were, was off.

Riordan sighed. “Go with Leightner. God knows, you might actually learn something.”

T
HEY SAT IN JACK’S
car, just up Atlantic Avenue from a little grimy bunker of a bar called the Luray Inn, the kind of dive where a customer might try to unload coat pockets full of boosted cigarettes or supermarket steaks. Jack shifted, but the back of his shirt stuck to the seat—they couldn’t keep the air conditioner running because they might have to wait for hours. Daskivitch, mercifully had given up drumming on the steering wheel and they sat in a companionable silence. Jack was optimistic: they’d started with an anonymous dump job, but in just over twenty-four hours they had an ID and a possible drug connection.