Samaritan (18 page)

And before she was fully aware of what she was doing, Nerese began retracing her mortified march from Eleven Building to the management office, walking along the bush-trimmed footpath lined with low chain-looped stanchions, walking past Nine Building, Seven, Five, Three, but rather than reexperiencing the shame, she became instead filled with a sneaky low-key sense of pride in herself—she was a police officer, a detective who in the course of nearly two decades had saved lives, restored and/or maintained order, locked up every conceivable kind of transgressor from bus-riding ass grabber to multiple murderer, and had been responsible at least in part for delivering to innumerable people over the years varying degrees of justice, solace, comfort and revenge. She was also a solo parent, the master builder of a reasonably intact son on the cusp of his majority. She was a mortgage-free homeowner and, for better or worse, the sole source of financial support for half a dozen people. Truly, as she had announced to Ray the first time she visited him in the hospital, she was blessed; truly truly blessed.

And along with the plummy glow of pride that came over her as she continued along the path of her childhood calvary came an exhilarating epiphany—above and beyond her avowed creed of reciprocation—and purely on a more selfish note: If she could successfully work Ray’s assault, bring in a Closed by Arrest—Freddy Martinez the obvious doer here—it would grant her the perfect coda for the last twenty years of her life. Ray, the Powell family, Hopewell Houses—Tweetie: if she could wrap this one up, it would bring her not-easy career full circle, yield her an exit suffused with a degree of symmetry and grace that she had never thought possible.

“Yes,” Nerese saying it out loud, so jacked by the rightness of this. Where it had all begun for her was where it would all come to an end.

As the management office, the finish line of her walkabout, once again came into view, Nerese saw that the tenant-worker who had given her the lowdown on the Powell family was still standing there as if waiting for her return, the woman taking slow thoughtful drags off a cigarette and staring into the middle distance.

“Can I ask you something?” Brenda Walker cocked her head as Nerese drew close, then gestured with the detective’s card between her fingers to the rotting floral cross hanging over the entrance to Eight Building. “You have anything to do with that up there?”

“Not, no, this isn’t my district.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, just so you know,” she said. “That lady that was killed? She had just moved in about three months ago and I believe she had brought her trouble in with her. Because all things being equal? This project’s still a pretty good place to call home.”

Nerese headed over to the Bureau of Criminal Identification, situated in the basement of one of the smaller courtroom buildings in Dempsy. It was a greenish place consisting of two rooms: one, a vast and dusty warehouse lined with ancient oak filing cabinets which held thousands of criminal records still awaiting conversion to a county-wide database; the other, much smaller, almost claustrophobically so, set up for processing the catch of the day. It included a fingerprinting station, a fixed camera and backdrop for mug shots, an ancient scale and a small steel table for last-minute negotiations. There was also a tiny holding cell in here, no bigger than an elevator car but which in the course of the last century had temporarily housed two German saboteurs working the Dempsy waterfront in World War I; Longy Zwillman, the behind-the-scenes founder of syndicated crime; Dutch Schultz; Carmine Galante; Henry Hill; and Abbie Hoffman.

Sitting on the edge of the small steel desk, Nerese studied the rap sheet of Freddy Martinez. Yes, there was a murder charge that had brought him before a grand jury midway during his second stretch in County, but they had failed to indict, which invariably meant that he had acted in self-defense, as Brenda Walker had claimed; and in front of witnesses, the guards themselves most likely, as required for a No Bill judgment. So for now, Nerese put this incident aside in order to get a clearer picture of the whole; on the face of it, a fairly run-of-the-mill history of mid- to low-level drug transgressions, but for those who could read between the charges and dispositions, the trajectory was a little trickier. There were four arrests over a period of twelve years; for the earliest, on a County-based charge of possession with intent, he was sentenced to three to five years but only served nine months—not that unusual for a first offense. But of the three subsequent arrests, all initially for PWI, two were downgraded to simple possession and one to a disorderly persons, each in turn kicked back to municipal court, where the longest possible sentence was a year and a day. He served nowhere near that: two months on the first municipal complaint, during which he had killed the other inmate; a desk appearance on the second; and, for this most recent one, six weeks.

If all things were on the up-and-up, each arrest should have led to more time than the last, and the fact that after the initial bust County kept downgrading the charges, then booting them into city court, told Nerese that after Freddy’s first arrest County Narcotics had turned him into an informant and pretty much kept him out of jail save for just enough time to keep his street credentials intact. In addition, as these relationships primarily worked on a don’t ask, don’t tell basis, his handlers most likely turned a blind eye to his continuing career as some kind of dopeslinger. The scale of his dealings was difficult for Nerese to tell from the paper in her hands, except that there always seemed to be a bigger fish out there that justified County’s perpetual catch-and-release policy toward whomever they happened to have on their hook at any given moment.

Nerese sat across the desk from Kenny Howell, a lieutenant in the Dempsy County Narcotics Squad ten years her junior.

It was common knowledge that Kenny owed his quick rise up the ranks to his foresight in casting his lot with a dark-horse mayoral candidate who pulled off an upset victory in the last election; the lieutenant’s shield a reward for volunteering thirty hours a week during the campaign and dropping $3,000 into the war chest from his own pocket. On the actual lieutenant’s examination, Howell had finished fourteenth out of one hundred and forty candidates, usually well beneath the cutoff for new appointments, but the mayor got around this by simply declaring that the Dempsy PD needed fifteen new lieutenants, the guy beneath Howell lucking out in order to make the reward a touch less obvious. Not that anybody would complain. This was how things were done in Dempsy; Nerese knew it, the newspapers knew it, the governor of the state knew it—it was just how things were done.

For a cop like Nerese, though, the downside of all this realpolitik was that although she knew exactly what to do in order to get ahead, she basically lacked the moxie, the hustle, the desire to gamble, had no interest in advancing herself by playing the political ponies—attending the right dinners, joining the right organizations or investing a couple of paychecks into this one or that one’s campaign fund. And it had nothing to do with race—there were as many black and Hispanic ponies to bet on as there were white ones—but she just didn’t have the appetite for it. And as a result, whenever she found herself around high-stakes careerists like Lieutenant Howell here, she always wound up feeling like an outsider in her own department, a borderline nonentity, and if she gave the slightest bit of a damn it would probably have pissed her off.

“Freddy Martinez.” Kenny tore off a mouthful of sandwich, held up a finger for Nerese to wait as he chewed and swallowed. “Interesting guy.” He put the sandwich back on his desk, passed a hand across his mouth. “He brings the shit in from Washington Heights, sells it to guys who sell it to guys who sell it on the street. No Pablo Escobar but not exactly Bonehead Jones, either. And he’s smart. We can never catch him with weight. Usually it’s him being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“OK.” Nerese nodded.

“On the other hand, I have to be honest, we kind of like the guy. Never gives us shit, always comes along without a fuss, throws us a useful nibble now and then, you know the type.”

“Sure.” Nerese was almost choking on the horseshit.

“Yeah, he’s an interesting hombre, Freddy. Did you know he and I both went to Montclair State? The thing is, me? I dropped out after two years, but Freddy, he hung in for the full ride and got his degree.”

“Degree in what.” Nerese just asking.

“You’re an aspiring drug dealer, what are you going to major in?”

“How the hell do I know. Chemistry?”

“C’mon, chemistry’s for your underlings. Marketing, baby, marketing.”

“OK.” Nerese thinking, Whatever.

“The thing is, we must have nailed him what, four, five times over the years? When my son was born last July, Freddy came by the office and dropped off a miniature Yankees uniform for him. When I told my wife who it was from and how I knew the guy, she gave it to Goodwill, but it was a nice gesture.”

“Well, I’m kind of liking him for an assault.”

“Who, Freddy?” Howell clasped his hands across his gut, made a face. “I don’t see it.”

“What do you mean, you don’t see it? He was charged with murder.”

“That was no-billed.” Howell held up that finger again.

“But he did it, right?”

“Whoa, hang on hang on, you want to know how that went down? Because I can tell you.”

“Sure.” Nerese shrugged, suppressing her dislike for cops who so eagerly rushed to protect the good names of their street connections.

“OK.” Kenny briskly rubbed his hands. “Each residential pod in County’s got its own mini-gym, right? Like a twenty-by-twenty workout cage? Freddy’s in there, working the speed bags, some three-hundred-pound tattooed numb-nuts comes in has it in his head that Freddy did him some dirt, on the inside, out in the world, who knows, comes at him with a sharpened toothbrush, OK? Now, like I said, the room’s a twenty-by-twenty cage. There’s a guard posted on the outside, but he’s forbidden to enter that space without backup. So, Slobbo goes after Freddy, Freddy’s dancing away best he can, screaming for the guard, who finally removes the thumb from his ass and hits the panic button, which, once again is all he
can
do. Meanwhile, the guy finally corners Freddy, takes a swipe and opens his forehead like a tin can, at which point, Freddy just straight-out wigs, and by the time the response team shows up, which was maybe all of ninety seconds later? That big tub of shit is laying there with his toothbrush in his heart, and Freddy’s back to working the speed bag again like nothing happened except you can’t see his face for the blood coming down plus he’s hyperventilating. And when they go to grab him? He starts freaking again and blind as a bat, runs face first into the edge of a barbell, breaks his own nose, knocks himself unconscious and spends the next three days in the psych unit. Overall, not what you’d call a cold-blooded killer, you know what I’m saying?”

“Well, I didn’t ask anything about him being cold-blooded,” Nerese said, trying to fend off the image of Freddy as a buck-wild berserker. “I’m just liking him for this assault and I wanted to know if you thought . . .”

“If it was in his general nature?” Kenny shrugged disparagingly. “I believe that thing in jail was a one-time-only situation. I mean, hey, who can say for sure, but . . .” He threw her another uninspired look, then inched forward across his desk. “I mean, it’s up to you, but do you want to throw me the specifics of the situation? Maybe I can . . .”

“Nah, that’s okay.” Nerese sensed that not only wouldn’t Howell give her anything to work with here if it meant putting one of his primo informants in some kind of jackpot, but he might even go so far as to give Freddy a heads-up.

“I’m just curious,” Nerese said, slipping this in as she made a show of gathering up her things. “Do you know anything about his domestic situation?”

“His home life?” Another shrug. “All I know is what I need to know to do my job, you know?”

“OK, then.” Nerese was about to rise, get some fresh air, but was distracted by another narcotics lieutenant—Billy Herman, steroid-puffed chest, salt-and-pepper ponytail and a face like a frying pan—marching into the office with some sorry-ass-looking street kid in cuffs, Billy steering him with a hand at the back of his neck, planting him in a chair facing Nerese and Howell.

“Kenny, check this out,” ignoring Nerese as he turned to his grab. “Tell him your name.”

“Aw, c’mon, man.” The kid winced, looked away.

“
Hey.
” Billy towered over him, hands on hips.

“Michael Jackson,” the kid muttered.

“Michael Jackson,” Billy marveled.

Howell made a token noise of amusement; not really—much to his credit, Nerese thought—into the usual niggers-as-God’s-clowns school of cop humor.

“Say it again.”

“Michael Jackson.” The kid looked away, then added, “They din’t ast me when I was born, they just gave it to me.”

“Michael Jackson,” Billy said. “Live and in cuffs.”

Nerese had a history with this prick Herman. She began to leave again.

“Hey, Nerese.” Billy smiled. “I didn’t even see you there. You meet Michael Jackson?”

“She’s asking about Freddy Martinez,” Howell said so blandly that to Nerese’s ears it was insulting in its blatant effort to talk around and through her.

“Oh yeah?” Billy gave her a long look. “How’s your brother Butchie doing? I heard he came down with the Package.”

“Well, you heard wrong,” Nerese controlling her temper, not wanting to put on a show in front of this kid in cuffs.

“Then I must’ve heard it about Antoine. Is it Antoine?”

Nerese just glared at him, unable to lie. A mug of hot coffee sat on the edge of Howell’s desk, steam rising in lazy intertwining swirls.

“So how’s he holding up?” Billy pushing it.

“Not so good,” Nerese answered flatly.

“I’m sorry to hear that. He wasn’t a bad guy.”

“He’s still alive,” Nerese said, trying to lock eyes with him; Billy Herman was having a good day, though, immune to any
malocchio.

“Well you tell him he’s in my thoughts, OK?” he said, then gave her his back.