Forced Entry (34 page)

“Get the pig,” Ben ordered curtly from the front seat. “Wake the fuck up and chill that pig. Ma’s gonna kill us if we blow this deal.”

Rabbit was the first to jerk his eyes away from the naked, twitching body on the sidewalk. He raised the Uzi and tried to point it at Moodrow, but couldn’t seem to keep it aimed; he was seated on the waterbed, his legs folded under him, and the recoil from the first volley of shots had set the water in motion. It was like trying to shoot geese from a speedboat.

“We didn’t put the masks on,” Mick observed, startling Rabbit, who began pulling the trigger as fast as he could.

If asked beforehand, Moodrow would have insisted, with full sincerity, that
he
was the real cop and Paul Dunlap a Community Affairs facsimile, but it was Paul Dunlap who reacted in proper cop fashion to the naked woman and the volley of shots from inside the van. Moodrow froze initially, but then, as if protecting a child from the blows of an angry parent, turned and took Betty Haluka in his arms, crushing her against his chest. Though his back was completely exposed to the gunshots exploding so close to each other they made a single crashing roar, he had no awareness of personal danger. He was on a street corner in midtown Manhattan, trying to warn the woman who waved to him from across the street. “Watch out, watch out, watch out” he yelled over and over again. Trying to warn her before it was too late. Seeing two scenes at once, seeing another woman and a younger helpless cop unable to protect her. The sounds of the present jumbled into a series of separate impressions. Like a cubist painting in which the parts cross, but never touch. The roar of gunshots; the chink of bullets slamming into brick; the chunk of 9mm slugs entering the flesh of Inez Almeyda; the high-pitched wail of a terrified infant; the voice of a frightened cop holding his woman. It was all happening in pieces—random sounds garnered from a dozen old movies. It would have taken sight to put those sounds together and Stanley Moodrow’s eyes were tightly closed and pressed into the hair of Betty Haluka.

Paul Dunlap, on the other hand, took no notice of the bullets ripping past his body. He saw Katerina Nikolis go down, her body erupting blood from a half-dozen holes, and all the anger in his being exploded at once. He’d been passing empty days for more than a decade, filling the time with a few well-practiced hobbies. Working out with his .38 at the police practice range (in preparation for a competition he never found the nerve to enter) was his oldest hobby. Without a second thought, he drew his revolver with practiced skill and blew Ben Cohan’s brains out.

The Irishman fell against the steering wheel, turning the van sharply into the curb, throwing the already bouncing shooters away from the door and into each other. For a second, as the barrel of Mick’s Uzi swung up toward him, Rabbit Cohan thought his own execution was somehow part of his mother’s arrangement with Marty Blanks. He was surprised when Mick’s chest fell apart under the onslaught of a dozen rounds from his own weapon. He was even more surprised when Porky Dunlap appeared in the open door of the van, his .38 thrust forward, and fired two rounds directly into Rabbit’s chest, killing him instantly.

I
N SOME WAYS, THE TRANSFORMATION
of the entranceway to the Jackson Arms from slaughterhouse to official NYPD crime scene was more chaotic than the original attack. The first rule in the protection of crime scene evidence is to limit access to the primary detectives, the medical examiner, and the Crime Scene Unit (formerly “Forensics”). On the other hand, when the crime scene is outdoors and bodies are lying one atop the other and the wounded are screaming for help, such considerations go out the window. The first uniform on the scene (in this case, a portable assigned to the front of the subway station two blocks away) had a dual function: to secure the scene and to act as a recorder, noting name and rank as well as the time when various cops entered or left the crime scene. The second and third cops to arrive (two uniforms on sector patrol) were expected to control the crowd, keeping civilians (with a special emphasis on reporters) as far away as possible. Unfortunately, all three patrolmen responded to the carnage by turning over the bodies of Inez Almeyda, Katerina Nikolis, the Cohan brothers, and a young black male who no longer looked like a hardened drug dealer. They were searching for signs of life.

The homicide dicks who caught the squeal, two veterans named Jackson and Goldberg, were horrified at the chaos on 37th Avenue. They were late getting there, having been in the middle of an interview when the call had come through. The actual crime, they knew, had been committed at least thirty minutes before they arrived, but there were no ribbons of yellow plastic surrounding the Jackson Arms. Worse yet, they could see civilians touching the van and reporters taking photographs as the EMS paramedics ran back and forth with their folding gurneys and portable oxygen tanks. Lesser men would have panicked, but Jackson and Goldberg were wily veterans, who immediately recorded the time of
their
arrival in their notebooks, following that piece of information with the names of the first three cops on the scene. Later on, when the lieutenant—or worse, the Queens Chief of Detectives, a monumental prick with the sensitivity of a drill instructor—cornered them, they would offer these three uniforms as sacrificial lambs. They felt no guilt at this betrayal; sacrifice, in their opinion, was better than the stupid bastards deserved anyway. Now the area was too compromised to establish the sequence of events by using crime scene evidence. They (and they knew it) would have to rely on witness interviews to get a picture of the drive-by, drug-related shooting both believed to be at the bottom of the incident.

But the surprises weren’t over for Jackson and Goldberg. Having separated and catalogued the witnesses, they expected to proceed in a routine manner. What with the presence of Sergeant Paul Dunlap and the ex-cop, Stanley Moodrow, the statements were sure to be concise and accurate. What they didn’t expect was an ex-cop with a big reputation, a thirty-five-year veteran, who could tell them nothing of what happened.

“Explain something to me,” Jackson said in the course of the interview.

“Explain what?” Moodrow’s voice was sharp and impatient. He had to get out of there, but he was trapped. As a civilian, he had no right to leave until the detectives decided to release him.

“That thing beneath your jacket…That bulge over there. Is that a gun?”

“Yeah, it’s a gun.”

Jackson took his time with the next question. His partner and five other detectives were in different parts of the Jackson Arms lobby, conducting interviews with the various witnesses. The crime scene was at last secured and the victims, wounded or dead, had been carted away to Elmhurst Hospital or the morgue.

“You got a license to carry that gun, right?” he finally said.

“You already seen it.” Moodrow’s voice began to rise, both in tone and in volume. He’d conducted thousands of civilian interviews, but had never sat on the other side, never had to deal with the deliberately slow pace of the questioning. He knew that Jackson would slow down still further as they went along, would cut from one subject to another without transition. The game was designed to increase the anxiety of the guilty, to make a suspect indiscreet. Of course, Moodrow was not the perp, a fact which only aggravated his sense of being needled.

“And how long have you had this permit?” Jackson, a tall black man, was also aware of the game, but he was more than unhappy to discover that his second-best witness, a man trained to observe accurately, had had his eyes shut throughout the incident.

The answer Moodrow wanted to shout began,
Ever since your mother
…But he knew that defiance wouldn’t get him out of there. In the course of his own career, he’d almost always reacted to defiance with a further application of whatever abuse he happened to be dishing out. And he
had
to get out of there. It was that simple. There were too many things to put right and he might never get to the end of them if he didn’t start immediately.

“Since I came on the job. 1952.”

“Have you ever
used
your gun?”

Moodrow put his hand inside his jacket and pulled the .38, holding it gently on his lap. “You mean
this
gun?” he asked.

“That one.”

“Yeah, I used it a lot. One time I had the record for active cops. That was before the Rambos came into the job.”

Jackson turned away angrily. “Put the weapon back in the holster,” he ordered.

“I’d like to put it in your mouth and pull the trigger until your brains go into orbit.”

Moodrow giggled. The words had come unexpectedly; they were so
wrong
in terms of his real needs that he found it funny. Now Jackson, if he had any balls, would drag Moodrow’s ancient ass into the precinct and hold him there for eight or nine hours as a lesson in good manners.

“What’d you say?” Jackson sounded like he was in shock.

“What I said is that I’m not a fucking suspect. I’m a witness and I don’t wanna be cross-examined as if I pulled the goddamned trigger.” He smiled up at Jackson. Challenging him. The action made him feel much better, but did little to prepare him for Jackson’s response.

“Tell me how come,” Jackson said evenly, “you didn’t pull the gun when the shit went down? Tell me how come you turned around and hid your head? I just wanna know for my own curiosity. Like, did you crap your panties? Or maybe you settled for pissing down your leg.” He stared directly into Moodrow’s eyes, his hands on his hips. “The whole thing amazes me. The perps fire more than forty rounds before Dunlap takes them out. You’re listening to screaming civilians and you have a legal gun inside your jacket. But you don’t pull your gun. Oh, no. You don’t protect them.
You
turn away and close your eyes. Now, all of a sudden, you’re a hot shit again. You threaten me and I’m supposed to be afraid, but I gotta tell you I don’t see anything to be afraid of. What I see is an old man with his balls shriveled up into his asshole.”

Jackson stopped for a moment, giving Moodrow a chance to reply, but Moodrow, having no desire to explain his actions to Detective Jackson, held his peace until the detective went on. “I’ll be at the precinct from nine to eleven tomorrow morning. You get your ass in there and make a statement. I want your chickenshit response in writing, so I can send a copy to the boys in the 7th Precinct. Now get the fuck out of here.”

On his way out, Moodrow noted Betty Haluka and Paul Dunlap; they were huddled in a far corner of the lobby with the Chief of Patrol, a silk from One Police Plaza who stood just behind the Commissioner in the hierarchy of the NYPD. The presence of the chief, a man named Sean Murphy, meant the media was playing up the shooting as a major incident. Moodrow recalled the spring day a couple of years before when a black and Hispanic wolfpack had beaten a woman jogger over the head with a pipe before raping her. The jogger had been white and what might have passed unnoticed (by the TV stations and the papers, anyway), had it taken place in the South Bronx, became a source of page-one headlines for weeks. The presence of the Chief of Patrol in an obscure Queens precinct meant the Jackson Arms was getting that kind of attention. Good news for the tenants; bad news for the dealers. Moodrow knew from long experience that the department, faced with the kind of situation that
could
be resolved, would undoubtedly respond with a show of force designed to end the problem in a hurry.

“Moodrow.” The voice was deep, full of humor. It belonged to Franklyn Goobe, the Chief of Detectives for New York City.

“What’s up, Franklyn?” Moodrow wondered if he was about to get another lecture. He’d never gotten along with Goobe, never liked the pompous bastard.

Goobe straightened up, giving his carefully blow-dried mane of white hair a quick shake. “What’s the situation here, Moodrow?”

“Speak to those people over there,” Moodrow said, waving at Betty, Paul, and the Chief of Patrol. “I really have things to do.”

“Don’t be such a hard-on,” Goobe said. “I thought when you retired, you’d ease up a little.”

“Maybe I’m dedicated,” Moodrow said. “Maybe I try harder.”

Goobe nodded solemnly. “What I can’t really see is how this incident affects the detectives. Sure, there’s the shooters and the question of who, if anyone, sent them, but that investigation should go over to narcotics. The Commissioners calling for one of his ‘special efforts,’ but I don’t see what the detectives can do.”

“You know something, Goobe? For once I gotta say you’re a hundred percent correct.” Moodrow had already come to the conclusion that he’d been the target of the brothers Cohan. In his opinion, the presence of the three dealers in front of the building had been nothing more than a lucky (from the killers’ point of view) accident. “What you got here is a drug-related shooting in which the perps are dead. Of course, the detectives are supposed to find out who sent the shooters, but we both know that’s a long-term project.
At best.
Your move is to give it over to narcotics and forget about it. Let Patrol move anticrime into the building—make it a dozen men. And don’t pull ’em out as soon as the reporters disappear. Let ’em stay here for a couple of months. I guarantee the problem’s gonna disappear.”

It was almost five o’clock when Moodrow, released by Franklyn Goobe, pulled Betty’s Honda to the curb outside the offices of Precision Management (he knew Dunlap would arrange to get Betty home) and settled down to wait. Even with the seat all the way back, the Honda’s interior was too small for him, but he felt no discomfort. He was working.

The employees of Precision Management began to leave the building at five o’clock. They continued to leave for the next twenty-five minutes, and by a quarter to six everything was quiet. Moodrow was waiting for Al Rosenkrantz; he planned to follow Rosenkrantz home, to find some private place for a conversation. The kind of criminal who’d send two assassins into a quiet neighborhood, with orders to keep firing no matter how many people got in the way, was very new to Moodrow. Even during the worst of the heroin wars in the 60s, some attempt had been made to confine the carnage to fellow combatants. The man (or men) responsible for the violence that had taken place in front of the Jackson Arms was certain to come back to do the job right, which not only put Moodrow at risk, but threatened any poor innocent who happened to be standing within a hundred feet of him. Moodrow was looking for the short road.