Close Case (28 page)

“Anything about Officers Jamie Powell or Curt Foster?”

She lowered her voice. “Do you know the position you’re putting me in right now? I can’t exactly give you the details, but it was only a few times in a few weeks. He never told me anything about his stories. Now, please, just leave us alone.”

“I’m sorry, Alison. I—”

“Goodbye, Sam. Tell Chuck I said hello.”

I closed my phone, ashamed. Percy didn’t get where he was by sharing the facts he dug up with other people, yet I had called Alison anyway. Just because I could.

Selma Gooding and Janelle Rogers had already paid the price for being dragged into this story. I knew I could decipher a few notes in a reporter’s book and do it without hurting the innocent people around him even more. I just needed to think.

From memory, I dialed the cell number of my favorite sergeant in the Drug and Vice Division.

“Yo, what’s up in the big MCT? Have you forgotten about us little people yet?”

“Tommy, I just saw you two weeks ago in the pit.” Thanks to similar eating habits, Tommy Garcia and I run into each other frequently in the food court at the mall next to the courthouse. And every time he hassles me about my promotion into the big leagues.

“Yeah, but you never call me anymore.”

“Until just now. How much do you know about what’s going on with street-level crack sales up in Northeast Precinct?”

“I know we’re not finding as much of it as we want to.”

“How so?”

“The whole year, we just haven’t been pulling as much crack off the streets as we used to, although North and Northeast Portland are the main districts for crack, at least traditionally.”

“Maybe it’s just fallen out of favor. More heroin and meth?”

“Yeah, right,” he said, laughing. “You and I both know that crack doesn’t fall out of favor until you take so much of it off the streets that it’s no longer a cheap high. And in those long-ass joint task force meetings with the Feds, they keep telling us that, if anything, the amount of crack coming into the entire Pacific Northwest has been going up.”

“So the question is, with all the policing we throw at street-level drug sales, why aren’t you finding the rocks?”

“Precisely. It’s frustrating as hell. Now that I’ve enlightened you, are you going to tell me what’s up?”

“How much do you care if a few cops get pissed at you?” Tommy was familiar enough with my penchant for understatement to know that
a few
meant
a lot
and
pissed
meant
bloodthirsty
.

“I forgot how much trouble you cause, Kincaid. Let’s see, are these angry cops going to be good cops?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t give a shit.”

“Good. Meet me at Northeast Precinct in an hour. And I might have a reporter there.”

“You’re fucking with me, right?”

“Serious as a heart attack,” I said, flipping my phone shut. From what I could tell, Heidi Hatmaker was going to snoop around with or without official cooperation. Given that her last attempt at amateur sleuthing had gotten Selma shot, I’d rather keep an eye on her myself.

I made one last phone call and then found Heidi in the lobby, freeing a Snickers bar from the slot of the vending machine. “Late breakfast,” she explained.

A woman after my own heart. “Let’s go, little miss Jessica Fletcher.”

“Who?” she asked through her first enormous bite of candy bar.

I shook my head. “You don’t watch nearly enough television.”

“Where are we going?”

“First, we’re getting some lunch.” I had skipped my Sunday dumplings, and a pudding parfait plus machine-issued hospital food just wasn’t going to cut it. “Then you’re going to meet some cops.”

Heidi and I grabbed sandwiches at the Tin Shed Café; then she followed me to the precinct in a cute little BMW that looked like something Chuck would want to take apart and put back together again.

When we arrived, Alan Carson was waiting for us in the lobby, hair still stiffly in helmet formation. When you only know one Internal Affairs detective, it’s not hard to decide whom to call.

“I didn’t think you’d get here that quickly.”

“I told you, if there’s one thing we can do well at IA, it’s organize some files,” he said, holding up two legal-sized manila folders. “Pulling a couple of them for you was the least I could do after you jumped into Frist’s shoes on Hamilton.”

“That went real well until it fell apart.”

“Hey, you went for it; sometimes that’s all we can do.” He lowered his voice, even though the lobby was empty at the moment except for us. “Trust me, I know it’s not easy being on the other side of a case from a cop.”

A few minutes later, Tommy Garcia arrived wearing an Oregon Ducks sweatshirt, jeans, and his always-perfect white smile. “You’re off duty?”

“Yeah, finally got rid of Sundays. But for you, anything. If it pans out, I’ll get some OT, right?”

Garcia, Carson, and I showed ID to the front receptionist as I asked for an open room. “She’s with me,” I said, pointing to Heidi. I made a point of saying hello to a couple of familiar faces in the hallways once we were buzzed inside. Good. Let word seep out that the new crime reporter was running around with DVD, IA, and a DDA. The more acronyms, the hotter the action.

I pulled the blinds in the interrogation room, and we got down to business. I introduced Heidi and asked her to explain the theory she had pieced together from Percy’s notes. It started with the fact that cops in Northeast Precinct were stopping and searching black suspects, but then arresting them at lower rates than other suspects. Heidi initially thought Percy was looking into racial profiling or another form of discrimination.

“But then,” she explained, “I found out that sergeants review the patrol officers’ stop-and-search statistics to gauge their work effort. I also learned—as I’m sure you already know—that different racial cliques control different drugs. When I put it all together, I realized cops might be stopping and searching as required but then underarresting when it came to crack cocaine. Maybe their allegiances were somewhere other than the war on drugs. After I had a theory in place, I realized that two names in Percy’s notes—Powell and Foster—weren’t street names at all, like I had figured, but the names of two officers in Northeast Precinct. So I started looking for more information to nail down the theory.”

“Like what?” Tommy asked.

“I came here and read a couple weeks of reports. I went to a Buckeye Neighborhood Association meeting yesterday and then talked to Selma Gooding afterward, in the parking lot.”

“Now Selma’s in the hospital,” I said, “a friend of hers is dead, Heidi’s getting creepy stories fastened to her front door, and the four of us are going to figure out what to do about it. And, Heidi, there’s one thing I haven’t told you yet. You’re obviously going to have the lead on this once we put it together, but I swear to God, if you go to print before we’re ready, I’ll never talk to you again, and I’ll make sure no one else does either.”

“I can live with that.”

Trusting her was the right thing to do. She was scared enough over the shooting, but she needed to know the extent of the danger she was looking at.

“I found out Friday that the defendants charged with killing Percy have an alibi,” I told her. “We’re still checking it out, but it looks solid. That means we’re back to square one.”

I saw a swallow in Heidi’s throat and a fearful blink of her eyes as she realized the implication of what I was telling her.

“Heidi, you need to watch your back. No more running around the city asking questions and stirring up neighbors. You get the story through us, not on your own.”

“Trust me. After what I’ve seen today, that’s just fine.”

“OK. Tommy, does this sound like something that fits in with what you’ve seen on the drug side?”

“There’s no doubt we’ve been stumped by some of the patterns. Still lots of meth, pot, heroin, X, you name it, but crack arrests are down.”

“And, before today, any theories?”

He folded his arms in front of him. “Depends on who you ask. Some guys write off the Feds as having their heads squarely up their asses and insist there must be less crack coming into the city, with other drugs filling the void. I for one don’t put any stock in that, because the price of a rock’s still steady on the street. Cheaper, if anything.”

“So no crack shortage,” I said.

“No way. Personally, I chalked it up to those stupid stop-and-search cards. The way I saw it, if a guy’s afraid of looking like a racist, he might think twice about following his instincts when the target’s black. If we have enough guys doing that, given how the market’s divided up, down go the crack busts and up go the other busts. Problem with that, though, is exactly what you pointed out.” He looked to Heidi.

“The numbers show that cops are doing the stop-and-searches and filling out the cards. But they’re not arresting.”

“Right. That leaves the theory that the black guys have just gotten better at this. They hide the dope behind a bush while they’re dealing, or they use a kid across the street to hold product and shuttle it deal-by-deal on a signal. Even if we bust someone on a hand-to-hand, the product stays protected. You never see that kind of stealth with meth and X because, honestly, white people don’t need to worry as much about getting stopped in the first place.”

“And what about Heidi’s theory?”

Tommy’s eyes grew big, and he sighed before speaking. “Well, I hate to think that’s what we’re looking at. But if Percy Crenshaw’s writing down the names of cops in his book before he gets killed, and now two women have been shot….”

“So let’s assume Heidi’s right. If cops were taking money to look the other way, who’d be paying it? Not the kids on the corners. They don’t have the kind of cash it takes to get to an officer, and the pattern’s too widespread.”

“It’s got to be someone big. But part of the reason I can’t give you a definitive answer on who the key players are is because the fewer street people we pop, the less chance we’ve got flipping someone to work our way up the chain. We’ve got a theory, though—” Tommy cut himself off.

“And?” I prompted.

He looked at Heidi, then at me again. Heidi caught the drift. “I’m not going to write a story exposing law enforcement’s plans on an ongoing investigation. That’s not how I operate.”

Tommy looked at me, and I nodded. He went on. “We’ve heard a lot about a guy named Andre Brouse. Thirty years old. He was a street kid up here back in the day, but on paper at least he’s become mister legitimate businessman. Owns a nightclub called Jay-J’s.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said. Grace was more connected to the club scene than I. According to her, the downtown crowd headed over to North Portland in the wee hours for Jay-J’s thumping blend of hip-hop, rap, and world music. The fact that Jay-J’s was willing to pour after the better-known bars stopped serving also helped.

“A lady at the Buckeye meeting said there were rumors about drugs there,” Heidi volunteered. “She said the owner knew about it, too.”

“And rumors are pretty much all we’ve got on Brouse other than a bunch of liquor law violations, which we’ve ignored so far. Let him think he’s still off the radar.”

“What makes you think he’s dealing?” Alan asked.

“Word on the street, to start. He’s surrounded by an armed entourage and a ton of cash. And, by all appearances, he had the money before the club, and no one knows where the money came from. Some people say it’s from his dad. I guess his daddy was a one-hit wonder—one of those songs where they spelled some stupid word out in letters. Anyway, we don’t buy it. His mom moved him up here alone from California as a kid, and they were poor. Plus, rumor is, he’ll smack the shit out of anyone who even asks him about that song.”

“So the story about the father might be something put out there to make him seem legit?” I asked.

“Exactly, like the old-school gangster’s sanitation management business. He looks like a law-abiding bar owner, but meanwhile he’s sitting on top of the city’s crack trade. Plus, from what we hear, the network’s totally out of control. Too many kids trying to climb too fast. Supposedly there’s infighting among the managers who sit just above the corner dealers, all battling for Andre’s attention. The problem is, these guys aren’t Andre’s age, and they’re not as smooth. Andre’s thirty years old, has never spent a day in prison as an adult, and has never taken a bullet. His people? They’re thugs, and the way they get attention is by thugging. The Gang Unit’s been hopping with unsolved shootings. We hadn’t heard about cops in the picture, but if Brouse is as smart as he seems to be, it’s possible.”

“Which brings us to Powell and Foster. What do we know about them?” I asked Carson.

“Well, I pulled their rookie file photos,” he said, tossing copies of two photographs across the table to Heidi. “Do either of these men look like the officer who watched you read the reports?”

“Yeah, that one,” she said, pointing to the darker of the two men.

“Curt Foster.”

“He was the one whose reports were most out of whack,” Heidi explained. “Lots of arrests but no crack cases.”

He opened the two personnel files in front of him. “Now these I can’t let you have access to,” he said to Heidi.

“City rules,” I explained. “Any external releases have to go through the City Attorney.”

“You know what? I’m just going to go home.” She stood and started pulling on her rain jacket.

“No, it’s just the personnel records,” I said.

“Seriously, given the state of Percy’s notes when I found them, I’m just happy to see the three of you work out the rest of it from here. And in exchange for keeping my mouth shut, I trust you to give me the story when you’re done. Besides, I’m scared out of my pants right now. Honestly, I’m tempted to wash my hands of this and become a day-care teacher or something.”

“Don’t do that,” Tommy said. “Little kids are far more dangerous.”

Before she left, I walked her to the hallway. “You’ll be careful, yes? You’ve got my cell number?”

“I’m fine. In fact, a guy who’s safe and protective has been trying to call me all day. The thought of dinner, movie, and a very large companion sounds pretty good right now.”