The Graving Dock (12 page)

By this last month of 2001, the yearly count looked like it might reach only about ninety. Some attributed the drop in deadly crime to the waning of the crack epidemic, or changing demographics. Others pointed to the effectiveness of the Compstat approach. One thing was sure: No matter what, the commissioner and the mayor would claim the bulk of the credit.

And whatever happened, homicide never quite went out of style. People were not happy with each other, and they expressed their frustration with guns, with SUVs, with baseball bats, with electric carving knives, with their bare hands.

During the next three days, Jack and his team worked a couple of particularly pointless cases. First came a grim job out in Flatbush, a cocaine addict who had drowned her two young children in the bathtub. Then there was a middle-aged man in Canarsie who shot his friend and neighbor of thirty-five years in a dispute over dog poop on a lawn. There were no mysteries involved, other than the fundamental one: Why were people dropped on this earth, only to put each other to such sad or stupid ends?

I
T WAS A BAD
hair day from the get-go.

Jack emerged from his house into a cold, drizzly winter morning.

Then his car engine refused to turn over, which meant that he had to do something he always did his best to avoid: ride the subway. A detective prided himself on getting around in a respectable ride; taking the subway felt like showing up on a donkey.

He almost burned his tongue trying to sip a takeout coffee as he walked to the station. When the train came, there was only one available seat, next to a young blonde with a severe but beautiful face. A piece of newspaper lay on the empty seat. Jack bent to brush it away, but the woman shook her head. “You should not sit there,” she said in a thick Russian accent. “It’s
steecky
.” He shrugged and moved over to grasp a pole. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the blonde. Russians were common on the
Q
line, which ran to Brighton Beach; they went back and forth from the City, laden with shopping bags, living their mysterious, impenetrable lives. (Jack’s own parents had come from that part of the world, but it was hard to feel any common ground with these newer immigrants.) He heard a burst of metallic disco music; the blonde dug a cell phone out of her purse. (Unfortunately, the train ran above ground out to Coney Island, which meant a constant babble of one-sided conversations.) The call seemed very important to the young woman: She gripped the phone tightly and spoke urgently, but Jack couldn’t tell if she was about to smile or burst into tears.

Directly in front of him sat two girls wearing elaborate hairdos and huge hoop earrings. One of them conducted an endless monologue. “He was like, ‘Where you goin’, bitch?,’ and I was like, ‘Who you talkin’ to? You must’a got me confused with someone who gonna put up with your shit’…” Across the way, a young woman in a velour tracksuit sat popping her gum in a bovine daze. Waiting for the next loud pop set Jack’s teeth on edge.

Rush hour in NYC. At each stop, people pushed in and out of the train like amoebas in a science film. Jack found a seat, but then stood up to offer it to a pregnant woman, then had to scrunch into a corner when a tattooed teenager wearing incredibly baggy, low-slung pants entered the car pushing a mountain bike. Jack took a deep breath and tried to stay calm, offering thanks that he didn’t have to do this every day.

He wasn’t the only one who looked uptight, especially when—between stations—the elevated train suddenly jerked to a stop. He heard a siren somewhere below, and then another one. His fellow passengers glanced at each other uneasily; these days, every alarm felt like the herald of a new terrorist attack. The speakers overhead emitted a staticky, urgent-sounding, totally garbled message, which did nothing for everyone’s peace of mind. The gum-popper suddenly cracked her gum in the middle of the grim silence that followed and people visibly flinched. Everybody exchanged sheepish looks when the train started up again; they were all thinking exactly the same thing:
Thank God. I’m actually gonna live to see another day.

By the time Jack reached Coney Island and stepped out into the salty air, he breathed a big sigh of relief.

As soon as he arrived at work, Sergeant Tanney called him in to his office to inform him that the squad’s schedule had been rearranged: He would have to work Christmas Day.

“I’m already working Christmas Eve,” Jack pointed out.

Tanney just shrugged. “Brady is gonna be out for his surgery all that week and I need to cover the tour. Besides, with a last name like Leightner, I wouldn’t think that working Christmas would be all that much of a hardship for you.”

For just about the entirety of his police career, Jack would have agreed. He was Jewish, and his wife had been Jewish, too. To them, as to most Jews, Christmas was a party to which they had not been invited. If you had to work, who cared? The holiday pay was nice, and then it was a relief when all the hoopla was over.

Now, though, things had changed. He was about to marry a Christian, a bona fide
shiksa
. He figured he and Michelle would probably work out some sort of compromise holiday, and the thought was not displeasing. When he went over to her place and saw her little pine tree with its precious heirloom ornaments, the kid in him, the one who had always felt shut out at Christmastime, felt a surprising flush of pleasure. He had been looking forward to spending the day with her, to watching her unwrap the presents he was going to buy for her, real soon.

“Is there a problem?” Tanney asked.

Jack suppressed a frown. He didn’t want to explain his personal life to this stuffed-shirt, didn’t want to have to demean himself by pleading. He shook his head. “No problem.”

He would make it up to Michelle on New Year’s Eve. He had already made the restaurant reservations at a fancy joint in Midtown. He would finally pop the question, and then she would certainly forgive him.

The third time is the charm…

He left the sergeant’s office and settled down at his desk, only to find that there was still no word from FBI man Ray Hillhouse. He had been eagerly anticipating the forensics results from the crime scene on the island, but who knew? Maybe he’d never see them. The fed had been friendly, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t decide to hog the ball.

It was one frustration too many.

By the time he finally escaped the office and made it out to a crime scene, Jack was ready to punch a wall.

It was not the best of days to meet Tenzin Pemo.

THE DHAMMAPADA TIBETAN BUDDHIST
Center was full of surprises.

First of all, Jack would have expected it to be somewhere close to Brooklyn’s Chinatown, near Sunset Park, but it was housed in a gritty section of Flatbush, in an old brick building above a check-cashing joint. The place
looked
like the real deal—a big room decorated with bright paintings of fantastical deities; an altar presided over by a fat, smiling gold statue; a smell of incense—but Jack checked out the members milling around and not one of them looked remotely Asian. They looked, in fact, like the kind of upscale bohemian white people he might find in a Park Slope coffee bar.

When told that the director was named Tenzin Pemo, he was still holding out for a wizened Tibetan man, but someone led him to a back office and introduced him to a small, stout Caucasian woman. (She did look rather mannish, though, with her close-cropped hair and her square, homely features. Jack couldn’t help wondering if she had taken up religion because she had never gotten any other offers.) The woman wore overlapping robes of winey red and orangey yellow, though one shoulder was left bare. Did she go around like that all winter long?

He didn’t know anything about Buddhism. He supposed that in its own setting, in Tibet or India or wherever, it would seem like a normal everyday religion, but the way it had been adopted by white people here reminded him of the Hare Krishnas he used to see in Greenwich Village, kids from privileged families acting out against their parents, screwed-up and unmoored. Back in the sixties, he hadn’t had the time or the luxury for hippie rebellion. He came from a poor working family, and he wanted desperately to escape Red Hook, and the fastest ticket out was to join the army, which he did. When he got back, he didn’t have much patience for flower children.

He had to admit that this woman didn’t have that fuzzy stoned look. She gazed at him with complete attention, and projected a calm authority, sitting firmly in her desk chair, hands folded in her lap.

In thirteen years with Homicide, he had seen many different reactions to the news of a death. Grief, horror, panic, evasion, fear, revulsion, anxiety, relief, even joy. He had watched relatives or friends sob, shout, faint, curse, tremble uncontrollably, avoid all eye contact, even laugh hysterically. But he had never seen anyone as poised as this, at least no one who was not deep in shock.

Shock would have been appropriate. At eleven-thirty the previous evening, a young monk from the center had been killed just a few yards down the street. Several witnesses had watched the whole thing from their apartment windows. A group of adolescent boys from the nearby projects had come upon the gangly, bald-headed young man as he was locking the center’s street-level entrance. They started making fun of him because of the robes he wore below his army surplus parka. “Yo, faggot, nice dress.” Experience had taught the detective that few things could be more dangerous than a pack of adolescent boys: They often had no sense of the consequence of their actions, couldn’t conceive of death, and were so eager to hide their insecurities from their peers that they would go to terrible, tragic lengths to appear tough. In this case, the cackling and name-calling had escalated into trash throwing, and one glass bottle had caught the young monk in the back of the head.

Jack studied the woman in front of him. He took his time—it was his colleague Carl Santiago’s case, and he was just along to help out. “So, are you a nun?” he asked.

The woman nodded. Very calm. Calmer than she should be if she had been close to the victim. Maybe the monk had been new to the center?

“How long did you know”—he glanced down at his notepad—“Andrew Steinberg?” The members of the center referred to the victim as Gen Kelsang Thubten. That seemed to be the style here: The clergy had an extra handle, like Brooklyn homeboys with their street names.

“He has been with our center for the past four years.” Another surprise: The woman had a rather stuffy British accent.

“Would you say that you were close?”

“I would. He was one of my senior students before he was ordained, and we’ve worked together ever since.”

“Would you say that you liked him?” It wasn’t a professional question, really, but Jack found himself wanting to shake up the nun’s unnerving composure, just on the off-chance that she had some hidden reason for staying so calm…

“I would say that I
loved
him,” the nun replied evenly. “Almost like I love my own children.”

Jack’s eyes widened; he couldn’t help it. “You have children?”

The woman smiled slightly, as though she was aware of his uncharitable assumptions, yet was not disturbed by them. “I used to be what you would call a housewife. I became a nun twelve years ago.”

Jack’s curiosity was piqued, but he didn’t follow up—so far as he knew, this woman’s former life had nothing to do with the matter at hand. He needed to get started with the usual drill: What was the victim’s schedule; Had he had run-ins with neighborhood kids before?…Still, something didn’t feel right. Just because the woman was a nun didn’t mean she was free of any connection to her young colleague’s death. Jack wanted to get underneath her serene exterior, to probe around a little.

He knew just how to ruffle her. “What’s your real name?” he asked. Clearly she had invested a lot in her religious authority, and would bridle at having it challenged.

“Charlotte Colson,” she replied without hesitation or irritation.

“Where were you at the time of the incident?”

“I was at home.”

Jack had to admit that he had no reason to challenge her answer. Unless something unexpected popped up, he was pretty sure how the case would shake out: The kids who had done the crime would get nervous, and one of them would rat the others out.

He leaned back in his chair. “You seem very calm today.”

The nun didn’t stir. “I don’t think that getting agitated will help the situation.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up again. “A little grief would be normal.”

The woman seemed to wrestle a bit with her answer. “I don’t…perhaps we have a way of dealing with things that might be a bit different than you’re used to.”

Jack glanced around the room. “What? This Buddhist thing? How’s that different? Your friend’s gonna come back in another life, or something?”

The woman seemed to consider a response, but she refrained. “I’m sure you didn’t come here for a lecture on Buddhism.”

Jack frowned. Maybe he hadn’t gone to a fancy college, but he had completed his own rigorous course of study: Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, Toxicology, Forensic Psychology…and he could certainly detect a little intellectual condescension when it came his way.

“Try me,” he said curtly.

The nun frowned. “You must be very busy.”

“I’ve got time.”

The nun considered him frankly. Then she looked away, as if hoping that if she gave him a minute of silence, he might decide to go away. But he didn’t. He had all day.

The nun finally spoke. “All right. Everybody suffers. But a great deal of our suffering comes from believing that things should never change.
I’ve gotten married, so my spouse should love me for the rest of my life. I need my parents, so they must never die…
We’re continually shocked and disappointed when life doesn’t go the way we think it should.”

Jack sat back and waited to see where this was going.

“In reality,” the nun continued, “everything is in a constant state of flux. The seasons change, plants and animals die. We’ll all die, one way or another. I would think that in your job you must see how impermanent things actually are.”