The Righteous Men (2006) (43 page)

Will creaked it open and slipped inside.

Perez, La Pinez, Abdulla, Bitensky, Wilkins, Gonzales, Yoelson, Alberto
.
The mailboxes offered no clues.

There was a rickety elevator, but that was no use. He needed to check each
floor, every apartment. He ran quietly up the stairs, stopping at each landing:
but all he could see were shut doors, shabby doormats, the odd sodden umbrella
left outside. Will realized the futility of this expedition. What was he
looking for? A plaque announcing, ‘
Mr Righteous Tzaddik lives here.
Available for weddings, birthdays and bar mitzvahs
’?

By the third landing, he was poised to call Freilich and press him for more
information. Anything else they had which might narrow it down. But the last
apartment on the third floor stopped him dead.

The door was open.

Will crept towards it, lightly tapping it with his knuckles as he moved past
and inside. ‘Hello,’ he called out, almost in a whisper. No lights
were on, just the silver shadow of the moon, coming through the window that
faced the street.

He looked to his left. A galley kitchen, small and made up of 1950s units.
Not as some retro fashion statement, but the real thing: a bulky, curved
fridge; a stove with oversized knobs.

This was the home, Will concluded, of an old person.

Then he looked to his right. He could see a big radio on a table; a couple
of wooden chairs, whose seats were cushioned in thin, fake leather; one was
spilling out its stuffing. Then a couch—

Will gasped, jumping back. There was a man lying on it, flat on his back.
Silhouetted in the light were the bristles on his chin. He had a small,
squirrel-like face framed by clunky, chunky spectacles. The rest of him looked
shrunken with age, in a too-big cardigan. He seemed to be sleeping. Will took a
step forward, then another one, until he was crouched over him. He placed his
hand in front of the man’s mouth and waited to feel a breath.

Nothing.

Then Will touched him, placing a hand on his forehead.

Cold. He put a finger on his neck, searching for a pulse. He knew there
would be none.

Will moved backwards, as if to take in the enormity of what he could see. As
he did, he felt a crunch of glass. He looked down to see that he had just
stepped on a syringe.

He was bending down to get a closer look when the room flooded with light.

‘Put your hands in the air and turn around. NOW!’

Will did as he was told. He could barely see; he was dazzled by the three or
four torches aimed directly at his eyes.

‘Step away from the body. That’s good. Now walk towards me.
SLOWLY!’

His eyes were not yet adjusted but he could make out the small circle
dancing before him, right next to the ring of torch light. It was the barrel of
a gun — and it was aimed at him.

I
n a way, it helped that he
was so exhausted. In normal circumstances, his heart would have been banging
loud enough to wake the neighbourhood. Instead, his fatigue acted as a kind of
defensive shield, slowing down his reactions and even his emotions. His default
mental state had become weary resignation.

He was now in handcuffs in the back of a squad car, jammed up against an
officer of the New York Police Department. In front, the radio traffic was
constant — and all about him. He was, it was clear, a murder suspect.

The men in the car were giving off an odour that Will recalled from his
adolescence: testosterone and adrenalin, the smell of a locker room after a big
win. These men were high on success, and he was the prize. They had caught him
all but red-handed, looming over his victim, his fingerprints on his neck. The
officers in this unit could almost touch the police medals they were bound to
receive.

‘I did not kill that man,’ Will heard himself say. The scene was
so absurd, so remote from the rest of his life experience, that the voice
sounded disembodied, unconnected. It was like listening to the radio, one of
the BBC afternoon dramas his mother was hooked on.

‘I know what it looks like, but I assure you that’s not what happened.’
Suddenly a bolt of inspiration. ‘But I could lead you to the man who did
do it! I followed him out of that building less than an hour ago. I know where
he’s hiding! I can even give you a description.’

The officer in the front passenger seat turned around to give Will an ironic
smile.
Sure you can, son. And I’m gonna pitch for the Yankees next
Tuesday
.

At the seventh precinct station, Will maintained his defiance. ‘I just
found that body!’ he said, as they led him upstairs.

I’d seen the man leave the building, I followed him and then I went
back. I thought he had killed someone and I was right!’

Even as the words came out of his mouth, he knew they sounded ridiculous.
The cop who had been guarding Will from the start stared at him contemptuously.
‘Will you shut the fuck up?’

For the first time since the police had picked him up, Will began to panic.
What the hell was he doing here? He needed to get to Beth. He needed to be out
on the streets, in Crown Heights or wherever else, searching for his wife
— not chained up as a prisoner of the New York Police Department. He was not
even thinking about the prospect of being charged with murder; merely losing
vital hours battling the bureaucracy of the New York criminal justice system
was nightmarish enough.

Every minute spent here was another minute not finding Beth. Besides, the
Hassidim had been emphatic: there was no time to lose; the fate of the world
was to be decided in the coming hours and minutes. Yet here he was, doing nothing;
his hands literally tied.

They took him to the sergeant’s desk, where someone was waiting for
him: the detective he had seen at the apartment building. He had inspected the
scene while they kept Will in the car. ‘I got a prisoner to log in,’
he said, addressing the clerk and ignoring Will. Whippet-faced and in his late
thirties, the rising star of the homicide department, Will guessed.

‘OK, let’s empty his pockets.’ The cop who had played
bodyguard stepped forward. He had already frisked Will hard at the apartment:
after the police had seen the syringe, they were taking no chances. They also
took his cell phone and BlackBerry: no calling of accomplices. Now they took
the rest: coins, keys, notebook.

‘Let’s get all this stuff vouchered,’ the detective said.
Each item was put in a clear, plastic zip-loc bag and sealed. The detective
made a note, witnessed by the desk sergeant.

As they opened his wallet, Will was prompted to make one of his biggest
mistakes of the night. In among the plastic was his press card:
Will Monroe,
New York Times
.

‘OK, I’ll admit it. The real reason I was in that building was
that I was on assignment for the
Times
. It was undercover.

I’ve been writing a series on crime in the city and that’s what
I was doing.’

The detective looked at him for the first time.

‘You work for The
New York Times
?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do,’ said Will, glad just to have got a response.

The detective looked away and the clerk went back to her work.

Will was led to another desk, where he was asked to place his right index
finger on the electronic device in front of him, hold still, and then do the
same with his left. Then the rest of his fingers and his thumbs. It beeped, as
if he was a package at a supermarket.

Next, Will was taken towards a room marked ‘interview suite’. On
the way the detective handed a copy of Will’s details to a colleague: ‘Jeannie,
can you do a name-search on this for me?’

Now they were inside. Just a table, with a chair on either side and a phone
in the corner. Nothing on the walls but a calendar: New York, the Empire State.

‘OK, my name is Larry Fitzwalter and I’m going to be your detective
for the evening. We’re going to begin like this.’ He produced
another form. ‘You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand?’

‘I do understand, but I would really like to explain—’

‘OK, you understand. Can you initial here, please?’

‘Look, I was in there because I followed a man in there—’

‘Can you initial here, please? That means you understand that you have
the right to remain silent. OK. Anything you say can and will be used against
you in a court of law. Do you understand?’

‘This is a simple mistake—’

‘Do you understand? That’s all I’m asking right now. Do you
understand the words I am saying? If you do, then initial the goddamn form.’

Will said no more as Fitzwalter got to the end of the form, telling him his
rights. Once it was initialled, the detective pushed it to one side.

‘OK, now that you know your rights, do you wish to talk to us?’

‘Don’t I get to make a phone call?’

‘It’s the middle of the night. Who you gonna call?’

‘Do I have to tell you?’

‘No,’ said the detective, taking the phone from the back table
and stretching its cord to place it on the desk between them. ‘Just tell
me the number you want me to dial.’

Will knew there was only one person he could possibly call but the idea was
appalling. How could he, with this news? He looked at his watch. 2.15am.
Fitzwalter was getting impatient.

Will dictated the number. The detective dialled it, then handed him the
phone — staying firmly in his seat. It was clear he was going to listen
in on every word. Finally, Will heard the voice he was wanting and dreading to
hear.

‘Hello? Dad?’

‘I
have good news and
bad news for you, Mr Monroe.’ It was Fitzwaiter. ‘Which would you
like first?’

Will lifted his eyes slowly. He had spent only forty minutes in this cell,
but it felt like forty nights. His father had told him to invoke the first of
the rights he had been read and to say nothing. Once Fitzwalter was certain
Will was not going to crack, and that the interview was over, he had him locked
up.

‘The good news is that His Honour Judge William Monroe Senior has
telephoned to say he is on his way in from Sag Harbor.’

His father’s voice floated back into Will’s head now, as audible
as it had been when he made that call. Sleepy, then shocked, then stern, then
disappointed, then purposeful. Since Will had spent his youth three thousand
miles away from his father, he had never gone through that teenage rite of
passage: announcing’ to your father that you have in some way betrayed
his trust.
Dad, I trashed the car. Dad, I got caught smoking dope
. These
were sentences he had never had to utter. He had never heard his father say, as
all his contemporaries had, ‘Son, you’ve let me down.’ So to
hear it now — not the words, but that tone — was an extra ordeal,
to be piled on top of all the others.

‘Mr Monroe, are you listening to me?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ve had the good news. Don’t you want to hear the bad
news?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘The bad news is, I’ve just come off the phone with the duty
lawyer at the
Times
. He’s made some calls and guess what? They don’t
think you’re on assignment for them at all. In fact, what they say is
that you’re taking a few days “rest”. By order of the editor
himself. Sounds like you got yourself in a whole pile of trouble, my friend.’

Will cupped his hands over his eyes. What a basic error: to offer a lie that
could so easily be disproved. His legal defence was already compromised. He had
made that cardinal mistake of all guilty men: he had changed his story. As for
his career, that was surely over. He would be suspended ‘in order to
defend himself on these grave charges’ — and then quietly dropped.

The door slammed shut. In some strange way, Will almost felt grateful to be
in this cell. Ever since Friday morning, he had been on the move, feverishly
rushing from one place to another, from one new plan to the next. He had
criss-crossed the city, in and out, either to Brooklyn or Long Island or back again,
trying to think, to focus, to act. Even when sitting down, he had been willing
the train or cab to go faster, to get there now, or praying for the phone to
ring or an email to arrive.

Now there was nowhere he could go and nothing he could do. The scheming and
thinking and frantic calculating were at an end. His jailers had not even
allowed him a pencil and paper.

The pause let in the realization he had been resisting for days. Any time it
had broken surface in the last nearly seventy two hours, Will had pushed it
back down. But now he had no strength for the task.

Everything was falling apart. That was the conclusion he had refused to
face, but which was now too strong to resist.

His wife was missing, a captive of men whose fanaticism ran deep. He was
about to be charged with murder, facing a pile of circumstantial evidence that
would be hard to refute.

Worse still, he had fallen for a classic set-up.

After all, who had sent him to that building in the middle of the night? Was
he really meant to believe it was just a coincidence that a brutal murder was
in progress the minute he appeared on the scene? And how strange that the
killer should almost certainly have taken refuge in, of all places, a Hassidic
synagogue.

All that guff about fearing for the end of the world. They were bringing it
about themselves! Will and TC had cottoned onto their plot, so Freilich had had
to come up with some bullshit about ‘whoever is behind this’ blah,
blah. Will’s first instinct had been right. There was no ‘they’.
The Hassidim had found the identities of these righteous men and now, for some
warped reason of their own, they wanted them dead. Will was getting in the way.
What better way to take him out of circulation than to have him picked up not
by them, but by the police! Will had to hand it to them: it was masterful.