Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (11 page)

Williams was the one who made the actual discovery of the corpse. Not that it made much difference; the porter had been damned curious about that apartment, having a feeling that something was wrong inside it. When Williams showed his police credentials, he said that it was just as good that Williams had shown up because he, the porter, had been planning to call the cops about it anyway, quite soon. Something was wrong in that place, he was sure of it; and he didn’t like the looks of the guy who had rented it either; he seemed to be a strange type. So it was academic as to who would actually find the corpse in there, although Williams supposed that it was just as well that he had; it would indicate to the deputy commissioner that the Wulff Squad was making progress, at least of some sort, and the deputy probably needed all the help that he could get at headquarters.

The lieutenant had been pleased as hell, of course. Williams had phoned the call into the precinct with full identification, and the lieutenant had been on the scene almost before the homicide squad, beaming and nodding, talking to all of them, giving whispered confidences to the one police reporter that had come up with the squad, and he had taken Williams aside in the hallway while the squad was working to tell him that he thought he was doing a wonderful job. “I haven’t found him yet,” Williams said, “so what’s a wonderful job? As far as I can see, this is just another murder that we weren’t able to prevent.”

“But it means that we’re closing in!” the lieutenant said. “It means that we’re throwing the net around him and this is clear evidence, clear evidence of effective progress that we were first on the scene. We’re hot on his trail, don’t you understand that?”

“I don’t think it means anything at all. I got an idea, I got a good lead, was able to track his whereabouts to this place, that’s all. I have no idea where the hell he is now.”

“But of course you do!” the lieutenant said with wide, astonished eyes. “If you got this close, then you’ve got an excellent lead on him and it should only be a matter of a short period of time until you apprehend him, right? Of course we’ll have reinforcements for you now; you won’t have to take him alone. I can tell them,” and he motioned back toward the open door, the sounds of the squad working, the presence of the reporter, “I can tell them a capture is imminent, right?”

“That would be very stupid,” Williams said, “and what would be even stupider is to release news that there’s a special detail to track him. Do you really want to make him aware of us?”

“Oh,” the lieutenant said, “ah. I see what you mean,” and went away looking rather vague and troubled. The squad had lumbered through its basic details, the meat wagon had come, and the corpse had been taken out of there. Williams gathered that the victim might be some kind of minor mafioso figure, a fringe guy on the edges of the organization. There was something familiar about the face, and Williams suspected that he had operated out of the Midwest. They would check Chicago on this; the teletype was already going through. Williams did not see where the identity of the victim made a hell of a lot of difference, but if it gave them satisfaction to make him, then they could go ahead. He had a far more serious and basic problem: he had the feeling that he had lost Wulff.

He had had his one good shot; he should have had him, he had obviously been just a few hours too late. If he had gone to see Justice faster, if he had not bullshitted with Justice so long but had forced the information out of the reverend at gunpoint (but how would that accord with the principles of brotherhood?) if he had nine-elevened his information into headquarters instead of making the arrogant gesture of trying to get to Wulff himself, he might have gotten him. Perhaps the old man there on the floor would not have been dead. Perhaps some people who Wulff had in mind for his next outing would be alive as well.

He was in a difficult position. It was hard for him, on the one hand, to think of Wulff as a felon, an assailant, an arrest case, but on the other hand he guessed that he agreed with what the deputy commissioner had said. Wulff was too dangerous; he was dangerous not only on principle but example, and if the department would tolerate a campaign of this sort in its midst, it was opening up the possibility for a lot of other people, less principled than Wulff, trying similar campaigns. And that could not be done.

No. He had to be stopped. And Williams guessed the reason that he had not nine-elevened the call in was really quite simple: he had thought that a private confrontation with Wulff might have worked. He owed him that much; maybe he was crazy, he thought that he owed to Wulff the chance to be talked around to reason. But if Wulff did not listen …

Well, what then? What was the difference? Why pursue it? Now there was the report out of Fort Lee and that report was very bad, worse than New York even. Here he was up to his guerilla campaign again, and the cost was high, four more bodies and fragmentation that had substantially rocked an adjoining high-rise. It was fortunate that there had been no one surrounding that vacant lot when the incident had occurred, otherwise innocents might have been added to Wulff’s death roll of honor.

It was escalating out of sight. Now Williams had the feeling that the real crunch was on.

He told his wife about it. Not the full details, just sketches here and there to give her some conception of what he was going through; a way of seeking out advice. He was back in the house in St. Albans; so was she, so was their month-old son; superficially he was living exactly as he had when all this had started in the neatly mortgaged home protected from the world by the lawn and his civil service job; but inside everything had changed, only part of it having to do with Wulff, and he was sick of living inside himself now; he could not steer a solitary decision as he had before. Solitary decision had driven him away so that he was not even there when the baby was born. Now he had come back but there was a kind of pain that he could never transmit to her and a determination never to do it again. Whatever he did from now on could not come merely from inside himself but would have to be shared with her.

Not that there was much she could do about it, of course. She thought the Wulff Squad was even worse than Williams thought it was. Also, she had met Wulff, she had liked him, there was some kind of feeling there and oddly she had more to say in his defense now than Williams had. The scar he had taken from the knifing near the methadone center1 still ached, it burned late at night, a flame of implication circling through his gut; sometimes he could not differentiate the pain within from the pain without; maybe they were the same thing. Maybe not. He did not know what he would do if he had Los Angeles to live over again. Wulff and he had attacked each other in the trailer park; if it had not been for the onslaught of the enemy, one of them might have been killed. Knowing this, would he have gone out to Los Angeles still?

“Leave it,” she would say to him late at night, sometimes holding the baby, sometimes not, sometimes lying next to him in the bed, sometimes speaking from the high, straight chair she would use in their bedroom to breast-feed the baby, a scene that Williams would have found maternal and touching if there had not been so much desire in it, and if she had not been so conscious but so ungiving of that desire. “If it hurts you that much, if you can’t straighten it out in your own head, David, then get off the squad. It isn’t worth going through this,” she would say in the bed, on the chair, with the child, without the child, clutching her breast to the baby, and sometimes just lying on her back looking at the ceiling. She would not let him touch her breasts or have anything to do with them while she was nursing the baby. That was definite. She had made it clear to him from the first that she would take him back but she would do it only on certain terms, and that was one of them. It had seemed easy then; it did not seem easy now. Still, comparing his life to the lieutenant’s or the two patrolmen, did he have the right to complain? “Get away from it,” she said, “I can’t listen to it any more.”

“I can’t leave the squad,” he said. “My squad is the way back to the PD, don’t you understand, if I don’t stay on the squad then they’ll break me for good. I’m back on probation. I’ve got to stay, but I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t do anything,” she said. “Don’t do anything, let the others worry about it, let it be their decision.”

“I can’t,” he said. “It all comes down to me. I’m the only one who can take him.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You’d better believe that. He’d kill any of the others on sight. I’m the only one who would have a chance to talk to him.”

“But there’s nothing to talk about, is there?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know,” and got off the bed and began to pace through the night as she watched him with that imperturbable, closed-in, mysterious expression that women with infants have; an impression of special knowledge denied everyone outside that circle. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I think you know what you want to do,” she said. “You just don’t want to face it. You don’t want to face your real feelings, what you know you should feel about this.”

And this was almost true, it came so close to being true that he could not take it. So he said, “All right. Forget it, I won’t talk about it anymore; I’ll work it out on my own.”

“Can you?”

“I think I can,” he said, “I’ve got to.” He thought of the attack in Fort Lee, the dead man he had seen in the furnished room in the west nineties. “It’s starting to come clear,” he said. “It won’t go on this way any more.”

“He’s your friend. You don’t want to kill him. You’re not even sure if you want to stop him.”

“I don’t know about that either. I don’t know whether I do or not. But the squad is doomed. The squad isn’t going to work; it’s either me or none of them.”

“And you can’t stand that,” she said, “you can’t stand having to make that decision.”

“All right. All right, I can’t, but I’ve got to make it anyway. There’s no way around it. I’ve got to face up to it and no one else will,” and he said no more. Sometimes, after these conversations, he slept; sometimes he closed his eyes and merely looked at the wall of darkness superimposed upon them; sometimes he left the room to sit by himself by the television set staring out through the slats of the blinds at the empty lawns of St. Albans; sometimes he did none of these whatsoever but merely came to terms with all of them in some private way that had nothing to do with the blankness or the darkness, had nothing to do even with his wife.

De Masso had fallen easily. That was the funny thing; the papers were full of the bombed-out area in Fort Lee, they had picked up on that old man he had killed in the furnished room (Gianelli? was that his name, Gianelli? It was funny: once you got a name to put on a corpse, an entire sense of identity began to filter in along with the complexity that came with murder. Before he had known the old man’s name, it was not a murder but merely an administrative act, what you could call an exchange; now he had another to add to the list,) but they had missed on De Masso completely. Either De Masso was so obscure that his death was not even worth a mention, because he had thoroughly covered his tracks in dealing or, and this was the more difficult part of it, the De Masso murder was big news, really substantial and they were keeping it out of the press for other reasons. That was something to think about, not that he didn’t have enough on his mind already.

But De Masso had been a simple process. He had simply gotten through the unlocked door of the lobby, looked the man up on the building residents’ board downstairs, taken the elevator to the seventh floor, knocked on the man’s door, had it opened on him, confronted a short, grim man in his late fifties wearing an undershirt, made a voice identification (De Masso? yeah, De Masso), taken out the .45, and shot him in the head three times with the silencer, using his left hand braced into the outer wall for leverage, aiming deep and true. And the man, De Masso, had fallen backwards into his foyer, his palms splayed outward, shrugging and jerking away as if he were apologizing, somehow, for the indignity of his collapse, and lay there on the carpet, his blood soaking into it, little pulpy sounds coming from his throat as his life ran away. It had been a noisy death as so few of them were, De Masso lying there, squeaking his life away. Then a woman in her twenties had come from somewhere behind, had peered out from the living room and seeing De Masso lying there on the rug had begun to scream. The screams had started even before comprehension had settled; reflex action, spastic tremors like frogs in a laboratory, and Wulff had struggled with the temptation to shoot her as well, nothing personal, just cut off the screams … but at the last moment he had not, holding back, shuddering with the knowledge of how close he had come to murdering her.

He had closed the door neatly, turned away, and taken the fire exit down, blind staircase, all six flights of it, to a small alley hidden in the bowels of the development, opening up to a small patch of grayish light outside, the street. That exit had carried him far away from De Masso’s side of the building, and it had been simplicity itself to clear his way through the streets and back to the bus terminal. In all respects the tenants of these high-rises were transplanted Manhattanites. Nobody came out into these streets at night except on very urgent business. The place was as deserted as the lot had been.

So he had gone back to New York. Again that shuddering feeling had hit him in transit; how close, how very close he had corne to shooting the woman. That had not been the point of his odyssey; he was not going to hit bystanders, witnesses, victims, relatives of his enemy, but only the enemy himself. It was going to be a clean series of kills; like the enemy itself, at least in the old days, he had wanted to abide by the principle that the families stayed out of it; what was being settled was an extension of business practices. But he had come to the verge of hitting the woman, not in panic, not even in feeling, but simply because it would have been easier to have done it than not. And there would have been a pleasure in it too. He would have multiplied his fury against De Masso.

So what did that make him? Did it mean that something subtle or not so subtle had been altered within him: that he was turning now into an indiscriminate killer; that the indiscriminate kill itself was the new shape that the campaign was taking? He did not know; what he realized was that in some dark and complex way he was turning the corner, and he simply was not looking at this situation the way he had when he had begun. People changed.
He
changed. The price he had paid in nine cities was too great.

And they had killed Tamara. They had violated their own principles; she had been abducted and murdered only because they knew they could reach Wulff through her. Seeing her dead on the beach, soaked with blood like water, the blood pouring freely from all the vents of her body, Wulff had had a clear insight down the tube and into the bright center1 of all implication: if you were in the business of death, you could not go into it halfway. Death, like sex, was a totality; you had to follow it through to its logical end, just as you could not, as a mature man, interrupt intercourse, pull out, be courtly, spill all over her piled clothes instead.
That
had been the turn that the campaign was taking. He was bringing death home now; he was killing them viciously and indiscriminately, just as the junk they peddled anointed some with death, others with cramps, many with jail, and a few with great wealth. Wulff’s own great wheel was spinning and spinning in the night, and where it came up death was delivered.

Still, the papers had not reported De Masso.

Now, in another furnished room in the west nineties, only a few blocks from where he had murdered the old man, Wulff braced himself against his ordnance and talked to the man that he had brought up from the street—a junkie, nodding and nodding his time away on the sidewalk outside, too offensive to pass by, too pitiful to harass and yet he could not let it go by, had jammed a finger in his back and said
start walking
and now that he had him in his room he literally did not know what he had wanted. “Where did you get the stuff from?”

“What stuff?” the junkie said. He could not have been more than thirty, but he had the posture of an old man, the same quavering delicacy of movement, the same tentative gesture of hand and mouth. “What you talking about?”

“Where’d you get it?” Wulff said again. “Who’s your supplier? Who gives it to you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” the junkie said. He had been nodding off even as Wulff had poked him up the stairwell into his bare, bleak room, the open cases of armaments glinting away. But now some comprehension seemed to have seeped into him, some realization that he was not in a run-of-the-mill situation, that he was not dreaming this but coming to terms in some way so complex that he could not get at it. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do,” Wulff said. He showed the junkie the gun. “You see this? I’ll blow your head off if you don’t tell me your source of supply.”

“Now that’s shit man,” the junkie said, “that’s shit if you think that I know anything about that.” He looked at the gun in a querulous, highly interested way, as if he had read about things like this somewhere but had never quite had to deal with them until this moment. “That is fucking ridiculous,” he said. “A gun.”

“I’m running out of patience.”

“I’m sure you’re running out of patience,” the junkie said. His eyes were large, white, luminous, distended almost like tentacles from the hidden spaces of his skull, “but that don’t have nothing to do with it.” Those eyes became cunning. “You from the governor’s task force?” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The governor’s task force. Understand he’s rounding people up the streets to kick the shit out of them.” The junkie blinked. “There’s no more supply left in New York,” he said. “The governor ought to understand that. His program’s working away just fine; you can’t get a fucking thing this side of the river.”

“All right,” Wulff said, showing him the gun, clicking the trigger gently, an old trick that he understood had worked pretty well in the interrogation rooms right up until things had tightened up. “You see this?”

The junkie’s face was very weary. “Yes,” he said, “I see that.”

“I’m going to use it. You know I’m going to use it, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Yes. I believe you’re going to use it.”

“Make it easy for me,” Wulff said almost pleadingly. “It doesn’t have to be this way at all, you know. You can resolve it very simply. Where are you getting the stuff from? Tell me your source of supply.” I’ve been through this before, he thought. I started this way at the very beginning, back in an Eldorado in Harlem. Started by tracing it up piece by piece. A hell of a thing to be back at the beginning now. But wasn’t life, all of it, in itself a beginning? What the hell were you supposed to do when you knew you would have to repeat the same acts over and over again? Deny them?

The junkie seemed to sigh in collaboration; a look of knowledge passed between them then, outside the context of the confrontation as if the two of them might have been old actors staggering through yet another repertory season together: different masks, different sets, different towns to play in but underneath the same script, the same tired, ravaged old faces behind those masks, the same sense underlying the staging. No, you could never really get out of it.

“Tell me,” Wulff said again and realized that there was a pleading tone in his voice; nothing to be done about it. He could not cancel out the tone because he
was
pleading. Any fool, even the junkie, could see that the balance had shifted the other way.

“I can’t tell you that, man. You know that as well as I do; I can’t tell you shit and besides that,” the junkie said, “besides that, I’m not really on the stuff anyway. You’ve got me pegged the wrong way. I’m just being social.” His eyes blinked, the whites becoming even more luminous. Wulff leaned forward to find such a clarity there that they might have been tiny screens in which he could see running the clips of his own response as he stared at them. Wide eyes, wide mouth, wide heart, the junkie was telling him the truth, and Wulff could see that. He could no more tell him where he was getting supplies than he could have cut out his heart and presented its palpitating mass to Wulff. In the New York that had been created by the new laws that confidence would be death. Dealing was life imprisonment without parole now; a man facing that would have very little compunction about killing anyone who had put him in that position.

So things had changed. It was not like the old days on the narco squad when you could squeeze out the squalid information you needed from the informants, all of it a game, an end-run against the middle with only a few people hurt and most of them held at bay. The days of the trade-off or the deal were gone now; it was all or nothing. Looking at the junkie, Wulff thought, yes, you could see some merit in the old ways after all. Damn it to hell but you had to face that insight: the narco squad, the old lax drug laws were more workable; at least you could get along in a world that would not have worked at all had it not been for the easy collaborations you had forced. But now it had changed. It had changed for all of them, enforcers, junkies, dealers, vigilantes alike, all of them were pinned on the edge of that drug law, fluttering away like insects. Nothing could be done. Nothing.

He could kill the junkie or he could let him go. But the trail of information would end here.

“All right,” Wulff said then, “get out of here.”

The junkie did not move. He looked at the floor, spread his palms, looked up at the ceiling. “Out of here?” he said.

“Out. Get the fuck out.”

“All right,” the man said. He came to his feet in a beaten posture, shuffled, clasped his hands together. “You just going to let me walk out of here?”

“Not if you don’t go right now.”

“All right. All right, I’ll go right now. I can’t tell you shit, you understand? Maybe you’re law, state police or something like that, right? Well let me tell you that you can’t get nothing this way. It won’t work. It just won’t work.”

“Go,” Wulff said again, “just get out of here, get out,” and the rage overtook him, he was swinging the revolver, butt end before he became quite conscious of it, hit the junkie a blow high on the shoulder, stunning him. The man cracked against a wall, little showers of sweat droplets exploding from him. “I mean it,” Wulff said, “I mean get out.”

“Yeah,” he said weakly. “Yeah, I’m going, I’m going,” and turned weakly, went to the door, opened it. The foul, dense odors came pouring from the hall, a mixture of plaster, poison, cooking, grief. “Yeah, I’ll go,” the junkie said and went out of there, closing the door quickly, quietly behind him, the door on automa tic lock clicking once. Wulff could not hear him as he went down the hall.

Gone: he was gone. And so much for that.

Wulff did not like the room. All furnished rooms looked the same in these old single-room-occupancy tenements; all of them served the same basic purposes, but some were more ominous than others, some fell wholly below the line of acceptability. If this room had been his life, he would have had to leave it because the overall effect, the density, the unpainted ceiling through which he could see the bare struts of the building themselves coming through, the flaking walls, the stinking furniture smelling of urine lined up against the walls military fashion: bed, desk, chair—this effect would not have been tolerable for a sane man who found himself committed to these quarters. No, you could understand the drug freaks, the junkies, the acid freaks, the potheads, the hash droppers, the cocaine sniffers, the whole cornucopia of twentieth-century American visionaries, if you could see that they were trying, many or most of them, to escape rooms exactly like this. You had to have sympathy for them. You had to understand as he had finally, confronting the junkie in this room, that all of them were victims.

But not so for the dealers and the distributors.

No, it was not true for them: they lived in pleasant houses shielded by trees, or in high apartments in the better areas of the city. They drove their cars in and out of the areas that festered with drugs, on superhighways that walled them off from sight. They had batteries of lawyers, accountants, corrupt cops to shield them from any consequences of what they had done. No, there could be no mercy for the dealers.

But sooner or later, he thought, you had to make a distinction, you had to separate the two. At the beginning of his war, he had seen all of it as a swamp: everything was mixed into one slimy mass. Dealers, distributors, junkies, pushers, peddlers, occasional users, even the journalists who sympathized, glamorized the drug culture had been in that swamp as he had envisioned it, all of them equally needing to be torched out. Bring flame to the swamp, burn it out, he had thought then. But, no, he had been wrong. There were whole levels of authority and responsibility here, varying levels of implication. The junkies were
not
the same as the dealers; the dealers were
not
in the same category as the potheads. Even within this subculture, and perhaps here more than on the outside, there were whole shadings, gradations of moral confrontation. He had to face it now. All right, he would face it. He was not unequal to it. He had never thought that he had known everything. He had moved into this from a simple position of ignorance, seeing things in clear-cut terms exactly because the fucking liberals who underlay modern police procedure along with the criminals who manipulated and paid off the cops—exactly because
they
would see no discrimination. But there was. There had to be.