Forced Entry (32 page)

“Are ya givin’ yer saintly mother a hard time?” Mick asked, reaching for his own coffee. It was a ritual they observed whenever they assembled, although Ma never seemed to get the joke. But then, Ma was, indisputably, the brains of the gang.

“We’ll go through it one more time,” Ma announced. “If ya can stop stuffin’ yer mouths. It’s a wonder yer not fat as pigs. Ben, let’s hear you say it.”

Ben, sullen as ever, continued to chew his food and Ma went into a frenzy, her lined face trembling as if she had Parkinson’s disease. “If that’s the way it’s gonna be,” she declared, “yer can all stay home and we’ll go on the welfare. Yer incompetent bastards, I’d sooner have three Brits than a gang of fools like yourselves.”

“C’mon, Ben,” Mick said quietly, “let’s just do it.”

Ben finally looked up, muttering, “We already did it fifty times.”

“Then once more wouldn’t hurt, boyo,” Mick observed, tossing brother Ben his friendliest smile. “Wouldn’t wanna make a mistake and do the wrong pig, would we? Don’t think we’d get no second chance.”

“I’m the driver,” Ben said, his gaze returning to his plate. “Mick and Rabbit are the shooters. We wait on 37th Avenue between 72nd and 73rd Street until we get a call on the cellular phone that Moodrow’s leaving.”

“Do yiz have the photos?” Ma interrupted. “So ya know what in the name of God yer shootin’ at?”

Ben held up Moodrow’s photo (taken three days before with a telephoto and supplied by Blanks’ man, Mikey Powell) for his mother’s inspection. “Then I drive to the front of the building and double-park until he comes out. As soon as I see him, I nod to Mick and Rabbit. They open the van door and start firin’. If Moodrow runs, I follow. If he runs toward the front of the van, I try to keep the side door lined up with him. If he goes toward the back, Rabbit kicks open the rear doors and they fire through the back. The boys have two twenty-five-round clips taped back to back. When the clips are empty, I go, even if the pig is still alive.”

“Well,” Ma observed. “So ya can talk. I didn’t think ya had it in ya. But how is it possible ya forgot about the masks? Is it because yer as stupid as ya look?”

“Yeah,” Ben muttered. “Before we move in, we put on ski masks, so’s the witnesses think we’re a bunch of niggers.”

She paused to let the information sink in, then went on. “And you, little Rabbit, what do yer do if there’s other people around when the pig comes out? What do yer do if there’s darlin’ little children returnin’ home from school?”

“We blow ’em into the next fuckin’ universe.”

Ma actually smiled for a moment. “They should all be as quick as you, me lovely boy,” she said. “But I’ll be pleased if ya’ll watch yer filthy mouth as long as yer livin’ in my home.”

Moodrow and Betty found Paul Dunlap in his office, playing with a computer terminal. They called out quick greetings, then helped themselves to coffee before sitting down next to his desk.

“Since when did they start letting cops use computers?” Moodrow asked. “I always thought we were too stupid to use computers. If I wanted access when I was working, I had to beg some civilian.”

“Well, it’s the old good news and bad news routine,” Dunlap explained. “The bad news is the captain won’t give me any other men. He’s not convinced the fire was deliberate.”

“Is he a fool?” Betty asked. “What about the wiped vials? And the syringes?”

“He says it could have been by accident. Maybe the marshal mishandled them. Maybe the druggies wiped ’em for some reason. Also, even if it is arson, most likely the print belongs to some junkie and the perp missed it when he was wiping down the vial. It’s enough to keep the case open, but not enough to spare any homicide dicks. Meanwhile, I should work on it in my spare time. He
did
manage to get a print man over to do the basement, though. Dusted the doorknobs and like that. We found out the doors and the glass weren’t wiped, but that’s as far as the captain’s willing to go without more evidence.”

“And that’s where the computer comes in, right?” Moodrow observed wryly. “So you can do the work by yourself. I take it you’re hooked into the FINDER system.”

The FINDER system, only a few years old, had been created by the FBI to allow the computer to cull probables from among the millions of prints in FBI files. The probables were then given over to humans for closer comparison.

Dunlap shrugged. It was warm in the precinct and he was beginning to sweat, but he knew the captain wouldn’t trigger the air conditioning for another month at the earliest. By then, Moodrow would probably have him on the street. “I only wish I could, but it’s not gonna be that easy. All we have is a piece of a central pocket loop. Eight ridges of one fingertip. There’s not enough potential points of comparison for the computer. I tried to feed it to the FINDER system anyway, but the computer spit it out. I’m using the state system now. First I’m gonna pull a list of all known arsonists working out of the city. Go back about ten years. Then I’ll cull out the ones in jail or dead. That’ll leave me with about four hundred names. I’ll punch the names into the computer, one by one, and get a screen on the right little finger. From there I can make the comparison by myself.”

“You know that’s gonna take you about…”

“I know,” Dunlap interrupted. “I have it figured. Five-minute delay between keying the name and getting a screen on the print. One minute for comparison. One minute to punch in the new name. Seven minutes times four hundred names equals twenty-eight hundred minutes. Forty-five hours of work. Now, if you’ve got something better for me…”

“Sounds like you spent some time in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice,” Moodrow teased.

Dunlap smiled ruefully at the name of the school. “Yeah, I went to John Jay. About five years ago. I had this flash that I could get off Community Affairs by studying forensics and I took eighteen credits before I gave up. I’m not saying I’m an expert, but if we get an exact match, I’ll know it.” He turned to Betty. “The print we took off the vial has a triple bridge to the left of the loop. That’s rare enough to use for a key. I’ll check for the bridges first and if there’s no match, I’ll move to the next name. That triple bridge is how come I can do a comparison in sixty seconds. If the print we’re looking for was more common, it’d take forever.”

“I’d say forty-five hours is pretty close to forever,” Betty said. “Do you have enough points to go into court?”

Dunlap shook his head. “I can’t be sure, but I don’t figure to get more than ten points. We need twelve to get it admitted. Maybe I could stretch it, maybe not. Of course, there’s enough so
we’ll
know who set the fire, assuming the print belongs to the perp
and
he was printed in the city some time in the past ten years.”

“Did the captain at least canvass the neighborhood?” Moodrow asked.

“No way. I canvassed the building myself, but nobody saw anything out of the ordinary. As for the rest of the neighborhood…I think my time’s better spent working on the print.”

“Well, I gotta take a few hours of that time,” Moodrow said. “Me and Betty are on the way to brace the political, Anton Kricic. I checked him out and he’s serious about the squatters. He’s some kind of housing freak. A leftover from the 60s or maybe a new breed altogether. I can’t tell anymore, but I’m hoping he’s bright enough to feel something for Sylvia Kaufman. If I can get him to explain how he heard about this building, I can start digging down to the bottom of the bullshit.”

“So what do you need me for?”

“I’m not a cop,” Moodrow explained simply. “Kricic doesn’t have to give me the time of day. If you flash your shield, at least he’ll talk to us.”

Paul Dunlap came within an inch of asking Moodrow why he, an NYPD sergeant, should take orders from a civilian, but he held himself in check. “Yeah, but let’s do it fast, so I can get back to work.”

According to the Cohan brothers, their biggest challenge was keeping themselves occupied until the hit went down. Once they had the van parked near the Jackson Arms, all three would move to the rear of the van and wait for a phone call from an anonymous spotter inside the building. If Moodrow decided to spend the day talking to the tenants, the wait would seem like forever. They’d voiced their objections to Ma when she announced the plan, but she’d screeched their objections away. Calling them “sissyboys” and “homos.”

“It’s our chance in life, boyos,” she’d explained. “Marty Blanks told me personal that he’d be more than grateful if this man was relieved of his life. Since when does the likes of Marty Blanks personally call the likes of us? And here’s another question for yer bunch of lazy bastards. If ya will risk such a chance for lack of a mornings entertainment, what sort of men are ya? Are ya even men at all? I tell ya, the curse of an Irish muther has always been the Irish son.”

It wasn’t a long drive from the Cohans’ home in Woodside to the Jackson Arms (the neighborhoods lay against each other), but the brothers, mischievous as ever, took a detour into Astoria. They went to an attached home on 28th Street near the Con Ed plant, cruising slowly past the house before pulling to the curb near the corner. Five minutes later, Katerina Nikolis trotted down the block and climbed into the back of the van without a word. Though she still lived with her parents and still spoke Greek at the dinner table, Katerina was one soldier in a growing army of middle-class New York children addicted to crack cocaine. At fifteen, without money and not yet ready to commit herself to the street, she would do almost anything for the man (or men) who supplied her with the drug. Curiously, she
never
thought of this as prostitution. When she looked in the mirror, she saw a siren with black hair and black, black eyes, milky skin, and full lips. As far as she was concerned, her flat abdomen and the patch of dark pubic hair so startling against her white flesh merited the slavery of the men who gladly spent hundreds of dollars to feed her habit (a habit which, coincidentally, inflamed her own sexual desire, making the whole business that much easier).

Katerina lay back on the waterbed in the rear of the fully-customized van Rabbit had liberated from a north Jersey parking lot the night before. Smiling happily, she reached for the crack pipe and the tiny vials in Mick Cohan’s palm. As she fired up the first hit, she raised her knees to allow her short skirt to slide up toward her waist. “Top o’ the mornin’, boys,” she called in her heartiest false-Irish voice. “Top o’ the mornin’.”

Moodrow began to suspect that it was going to be a bad day when he pushed open the front door to the Jackson Arms (without benefit of a key) and found Ino Kavecchi waiting in the lobby. At first, the paralegal turned to Betty, reeling off a list of court dates, and Moodrow was momentarily relieved, but then, after passing Betty several manila envelopes enumerating legal precedents in the various actions they were pursuing, Kavecchi turned back to the ex-cop.

“Hey, Moodrow,” he screeched. “What’s the matter with these people? I never seen anything like it. They won’t even let me in the door. ‘Don’t wanna get involved. Don’t wanna get involved.’ Whatta they think, they’re invincible? The Chinese don’t wanna talk to the Indians. The Indians don’t wanna talk to the Irish. The Koreans must think they’re goddamn Japanese, because
they
won’t talk to nobody.
They
think they’re too good for Jackson Heights, anyway, so they don’t mind moving out, which is what they’re doing. The rich ones are buyin’ two families out in Flushing and the poor ones’re gonna be the tenants. I mean it just amazes the hell out of me. I could go up to Harlem and the first thing anyone asks is when we’re gonna throw a rent strike. Nobody talks about running. These fools…”

“All right, Ino.” Moodrow put his hand on the paralegal’s chest, shutting him off abruptly. “Why don’t you tell me what you want. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Kavecchi, offended, stepped away from Moodrow. “Hey, look, I couldn’t care less. I’m just trying to let you know what’s happening out here. I mean it’s your party and all, but I think you oughta realize that the building’s gonna be empty of bona fide tenants if things don’t turn around. I been doing this a long time and it’s my experience that if the people don’t wanna stand up for themselves, the courts and the politicians don’t wanna stand up for ’em, either.”

“What about the city councilman, Connely?” Betty interrupted, trying to smooth Kavecchi’s ruffled feathers. “And HPD. I thought they were all involved.”

“They’re involved for right now because of Birnbaum’s publicity, but the cops’re gonna drop the gun charge and the public is gonna forget. If you wanna keep the bigshots in the ballgame, you better hope something dramatic happens. The new super, Henry something, fixed the main lock yesterday, but somebody busted it out again last night. By three o’clock this afternoon, when the kids get home from school, there’ll be dealers out by the ramp leading to the basement and…”

Once again, Moodrow interrupted. This time, though, his voice held little annoyance. He spoke in a matter-of-fact monotone. “I’m sad to say it, but I think you’re right. Most of the people here don’t have any fight in them. Maybe they think paying taxes entitles them to a safe world. What I see is that the first ones to move out were the last ones to move in. They don’t have any sense of home and they pay the highest rents. I thought about it all last night and I came to the conclusion that none of this makes a problem for me. I’m looking for an arsonist and whoever told him to make a fire. That’s what I’m good at. I can’t make miracles, but I can bust scumbags and that’s what I’m gonna do. So if you got something specific you want from me, I’ll be glad to help out. Other than that, I don’t have any advice.”

Rabbit Cohan, temporarily satiated, sat on the rolling waterbed with his back against the front seat of the van. He watched in amazement as Katerina Nikolis alternately pulled at the smoking glass pipe and at his brother Mick’s cock. Mick was lying flat on the bed and Katerina, kneeling with her bare ass high in the air, worked him over as earnestly as she worked the pipe. She seemed blissfully unaware of Rabbit’s scrutiny and, as far as Rabbit was concerned, her twin preoccupations were just two more indications of the power of the white lady. Especially when reduced to her purest state in the form of rock cocaine.