Saints Of New York (6 page)

Homicide
Division at the 126th was a blunt and brutal fuck of a thing.
Working here,
someone once said,
is like watching a slow- motion
car crash. You know what's gonna happen but you can't stop it, and you sure as
shit can't look away.

It had been said
too many times to be anything but true, but cop life was not a movie. The phone
goes. There's a dead person somewhere. You find your car keys, you drive out
there. Get there, no-one saw anything. No-one wants to see anything. The
black-and-whites have rigged a perimeter, contained the scene. The Deputy
Coroner is late. You stand for a while in the bitter cold or the aching heat.
You need to piss but you can't leave. You smoke too many cigarettes. Eventually
you give up waiting and walk over there with a flashlight and a pair of latex
gloves. You take a look up close, you see the obvious, you look for the un-
obvious. You go through the guy's pockets, or the girl's purse, or maybe if
it's one of the transvestites downtown you go through
his
purse. You find
gum, keys, a cell phone, bills, change, smokes, condoms, pens, subway tickets,
bus tickets, candy wrappers, a watch. Sometimes a whistle or a can of mace,
string, scraps of paper with scrawls of indelible handwriting, receipts, photos
of kids, photos of husbands, wives, lovers, girlfriends, parents and friends.
There is only so much to be found in the pockets of the dead.

When the Deputy
Coroner shows up you help him roll the body, note any obvious signs of wounding
from bullets, knives, chains, pipes, baseball bats, boots, fists; every once in
a while something melodramatic like a nail gun, a non-recoiling ball- peen
hammer or a heavyweight wrench - the kind that screws up the bolts on car tires
so they won't come loose on the freeway.

Then
you walk the edges. You look for beer cans, wrappers, spent casings, blood
spatter, brain matter, skid marks, tire treads, escape routes, vantage points
for eyewitnesses, the impact of stray gunfire in concrete walls and wooden
doors. You make copious notes. You start to feel the enervating tide of
disillusionment as you add another name to the dead-file.

Under the direct
aegis of the Crime Lab Director there are Supervisors, Criminalists, Scene
Analysts, Firearms Specialists, Forensic Techs and Latent Print Examiners. In
the Coroner's Office there are Deputy Coroners, Forensic Pathologists, Anthropologists,
Toxicologists, Duplicate Testing Supervisors and the Peer Review Unit. The
Firearms unit alone could determine make, model, caliber, serial number,
indications of carriage and concealment, land and groove marks, striations,
rifling, types of ammunition, marks from the firing pin and the breech-block
face, weapon distance, the size and shape of powder particles around the entry
wounds. All these things. Necessary things, important things - and futile if
there was no weapon recovered, no bullet located. Futile if the deceased had
been decimated with shells from a sawn-off Magnum at a range of four feet.
Futile if funding cutbacks put the network out of reach.

This was not the
movies. This was real. Here the bad guy got away. Nine times out of ten you
didn't even know who the bad guy was and, even when you did, he walked on a
technicality. It was always a day late and a dollar short.

Parrish was
neither pessimistic nor cynical. He was pragmatic, methodical, realistic. He
was not disillusioned, he was reconciled and resigned.

Homicide was
simply about the dead, and more often than not there was little justice where
the dead were concerned.

Now his concern
was Rebecca, Danny Lange's sister, and why Danny would be dead in an alleyway
when his kid sister had been choked to death in his rat-hole apartment. He
remembered the money he'd taken from Danny's body. He dropped it into a cigar
box in the lower drawer of his desk.

First thing was
the parents. Secondly, go chase up some of Danny's contacts - Lenny Hunter,
Garth whatever, the other one with the bad skin who looked like someone had
dragged his face through a grater and put it back all wrong.

Parrish picked
up the phone and dialed numbers he knew by heart. A stony heart - perhaps
somewhat cold and unyielding - but a heart all the same.

A little after
eight Frank Parrish found Louis Bryan. His skin was even worse than he
remembered it, and he was still living with his bedridden mother. Every once in
a while Mother would bang on the floor upstairs and Louis would have to hurry
up and tend to her needs.

'She's bad man,
real bad. Don't think she's gonna last much longer.'

'I'm sorry,
Louis.'

'Hey man, it
goes this way, you know?'

'You heard about
Danny.'

'Sure I did.'
'You don't seem so upset.'

Louis
smiled. His teeth, those that he still possessed, were junkie-yellow. 'I don't
know what to tell you. Goes with the territory. If I kept count of the ones
that went down I'd lose count in a month.'

'ODs
I get,' Parrish said, 'but Danny got shot in the head.'

'So?
You think some of these motherfuckers don't carry guns? Some of these assholes
would pop you for a ten-bag. You know the score, man. You been around the
block.'

'But
Danny wasn't in with those kind of people, Louis, not when I last saw him.'

'And
when the fuck was that?' Louis was scratching bad. Just watching him made
Parrish feel like his skin didn't fit.

'I
don't know, a year ago, eighteen months maybe.'

'Well,
nothing changes faster than things, man. Six months you can go from bad to
worse to worser.'

'What's
the deal with his folks?'

'They're
dead. Been dead forever.'

'What
happened?'

'Car
crash. Both killed.'

'How
long ago?'

Louis
shook his head, turned his mouth down at the corners. 'I don't know - four,
five years maybe.'

'And
his sister?'

'What
about her?'

'You
know her?'

'Know
of
her, sure. Seen
her coupla times. Cute looking. She don't do no skag though. Hardest thing she
done is Pepsi- Cola.'

'Not
anymore.'

Louis
looked worried. 'She got done too?'

'Yeah,
she got done.'

'Same
way as Danny?'

'Nope.
She got herself strangled in Danny's apartment.'

'Shee-it!'
Louis seemed genuinely surprised. 'She was a sweet kid, real sweet. Pretty an'
everything. Who the fuck woulda wanted to off her? They do her as well? Like
they raped her or what?' 'I don't think so. Just killed her.'

'That's
them all gone then, ain't it? All the whole family gone. Mom, Dad, Danny and
the kid sister. Shee-it, that's gotta fuckin' hurt when the whole family's gone.'

'You
know who looked after the sister?'

'Some
chick up in Williamsburg, as far as I remember. Don't know her name. Danny
never really talked about it.'

'Any
idea where she went to school?'

Louis
shook his head.

'And
you think Danny would have—'

Louis'
eyes widened. 'Danny? No fuckin' way man. He loved that girl. Far as he was
concerned she's walkin' on water. Said she was gonna be a model, you know? Me,
I figure you gotta be five eight, five nine minimum to do that catwalk shit,
but Danny wouldn't have it. She's gonna be a catwalk model and she gonna get
herself all Calvin Kleined up an' earn some serious money. He's shootin' for
the high-life, the penthouse suite, you know? He's a fuckin' dreamer man, but I
don't say nothin'. You take away someone's dream, even if they's real foolish,
and you take away their hope.'

'When
did you last see him?'

Louis
thought for a moment. 'What day we got? Tuesday . . . ? I seen him Sunday
afternoon, maybe four, five o'clock.'

'Where?'

'His
place. We did a smoke or two together. I didn't stay long, had some business to
attend to.'

'And
his sister?'

'She
wasn't there, man. Didn't see her.'

'Did
he say where she was?'

'Nope.
He didn't say nothin' and I didn't ask.'

'And
you haven't heard word around of what happened? Anything at all. Someone
shooting their mouth off? Someone bringing it up in conversation?'

Louis
shook his head. 'I don't make these things my business, man. You don't go
lookin' for it then it ain't gonna find you, know what I mean?'

'Okay,
Louis, okay. You keep an ear and an eye out for me, okay? You hear anything you
give me a call.' Parrish took the twenty and gave it to Louis. Louis took it.
'An ear and an eye I can do.' Louis showed Parrish to the door just as Momma
started banging on the floor again.