Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (3 page)

Williams had been passed up the line through a series of interviews, and now one of the deputy commissioners wanted to see him. Williams’s case was unusual, exceptional, and no one knew exactly what to do with him. On the one hand he had been a competent patrolman during his time there, and what with the constant racial issue the department did not want to get into anything with those overtones by holding a black man back from reinstatement. But on the other hand, the circumstances under which Williams had summarily left the department, amounting to a defiance of normal procedures, were quite mysterious. On top of that, Williams simply would not talk about them at all. Why he had left, what he had done during those two months was his business and none of the department’s. He had told this to the personnel sergeant, he had told it up the line to the lieutenants, and now he had been bucked up to the deputy commissioner. And on top of all that, there was the news item today about that murder in Harlem and the grenade thrown through a storefront that turned out to be a shooting gallery. Williams needed no prodding to know who had done
that
work.

Nor did the department. The department people weren’t fools. They read the papers and they had their contacts in the underworld. Even the new, fancy, modern, computerized NYPD made out in the same old ways, scruffing around with informants and informants on the informants, and they were pretty well briefed on what Wulff’s activities had been over the past six months, right up to this latest one, which was clearly his modus operandi and meant that the man was back in the city. The NYPD wanted him very badly. And for a number of reasons, they had gotten it into their heads that Williams had had some contact with him, that as a matter of fact, his mysterious AWOL might have been directly tied to Wulff, that he might have spent that period of time in his presence. The department was very anxious to find out everything they could about Wulff. Getting him was not only a matter of pride. For one thing they didn’t even know if they had that much to stick him with. No, it went much deeper than that. Wulff was conducting a vigilante campaign, which in essence was pointing out every step of the way that the authorities had lost control of the situation, but that a single, grim, determined man with a multiplicity of techniques might be able to do the job that they had failed to do for decades, to make real inroads against the drug traffic. This was not the kind of news with which the authorities were completely pleased, and the fact that Wulff had started off in the NYPD made him in a sense their responsibility, gave them an unusual interest in the case, just as a group of alumni might have a morbid interest in the activities of a fraternity brother.

So they wanted Wulff very badly, and they pretty much had the idea that Williams was a lead into him. Even so, Williams might have gotten away with it, not felt the really heavy pressure. Except that the incident in Harlem was the clear giveaway that Wulff was somehow back in town and operating in the old fashion. That, with the colliding circumstance that Williams was also in town, just trying desperately to be reinstated and to get back to where he had been six months ago before what he liked to think of as the madness hit him. That was all the department needed.

The deputy commissioner, a short man with surprisingly long and graceful hands, hands that he rubbed incessantly as if he were kneading clay, looked at him with a bright and rising glare of interest as Williams sat before him, and then he looked down at the papers on his desk. They were in his office, which despite all the rumored improvements in the PD over recent years was as scruffy as anything Williams remembered from movies taking place in the old precincts—paint coming off the walls in small, dismal chips, a cluttered desk, a window with bars that looked out on a courtyard where trainees were going through some kind of a crash emergency evacuation and riot control course, complete with clubs and screams. This deputy commissioner, Williams remembered vaguely, had been a member of the opposition party; appointed as some kind of political payoff. It stood to reason that his facilities would not be of the best. Administrations had a way of changing, so did deputy commissioners, but this office would go on and on. Nothing changed. The cities were run by civil servants functioning out of offices like this, and the politicians could have all the rhetoric they wanted; the civil servants would just grunt in their shabby little offices, shrug, and go on with their paperwork. The paint chips would continue to fall off the walls, the roaches would scuttle, the battered fluorescent lights would hum, and New York City would slide off into the sea. But those who were sinking would do it on full career and salary plan.

“I don’t know anything about him,” Williams said for about the fiftieth time since he had started shuffling through the reinstatement route, the third time in this office this morning. It averaged eight to ten denials an interview. “All I know is what I read.”

“We don’t seem to think so,” the deputy commissioner said. He looked at a sheet of paper lying on the top of the stack, took it off, smoothed it, then passed it across to Williams. “I’ve gotten a memo on this man,” he said. “It’s going all through the department.”

Williams looked at the memo about Wulff with some interest. Apparently compiled by the police intelligence devision, or what passed for an intelligence division, it dealt with a reconstruction of Wulff’s activities since he had left the patrol car and the force. The work, all things considered was surprisingly accurate, although there were gaps in it, and they had missed a lot of the details as well as the relationship with the girl. He thought of the girl, Tamara, and a vision of Miami came back, the corpses littered on the sands, the girl’s body among them, blood draining from her body, Wulff standing over her, Williams trying to pull him away. He pushed the image away, squeezing his eyes shut, handed the memo back to the deputy. “I don’t see what that has to do with me,” he said carefully.

“According to this you were with him, at least in Los Angeles.”

“No,” Williams said. “I don’t know anything about that. I wasn’t with him. I haven’t seen him since that night on patrol.”

“People don’t accept that,” the deputy said, his voice showing some irritation. He was obviously one of those men who prided themselves on their absolute control of situations. But the voice was breaking; it seemed that the deputy commissioner had made something close to a calculated decision to go
out
of control. “And I don’t accept that either. I think that you’ve had contact with this guy.”

“Not for a long time.”

“He’s back in the city,” the deputy said. “Everybody knows that. Now that blowup in Harlem, that’s clearly his kind of operation. The question I want to have answered is what is he going to do next?”

“I don’t know what he’s going to do next,” Williams said. The thing to do was to cultivate a kind of flat calm, a patience, the same technique they taught you for interrogation: hit the same points over and over again, and after a while they might be so convinced you were stupid that they would cave in and let something enormous slip. “I don’t know anything about his plans at all. I was with this guy for one night of patrol car duty, you know that. We took a call about a girl on a drug o.d. in the west nineties, and he went up and investigated it; after awhile, when he didn’t come down, I thought I’d better get up there too and have a look. I go up there and I find him—”

“Yes,” the deputy said, “yes, yes, we’ve heard all that; that’s the same story we’ve been through time and again. I don’t find that acceptable. There are some pretty reliable reports that you were seen with him out in Los Angeles, that you joined him out there, that this explains your absence. I don’t have to tell you that this is a serious thing you’re involved in; you were aiding the commission of a felony. Now—”

Williams looked at a large picture on the wall. The picture, the only adornment in the room, aside from the cracked and falling paint and the bars on the windows, showed the deputy commissioner shaking hands with the present mayor of New York City, the background indicating that it was a political banquet of some sort; tables, a middle-aged woman in a strapless evening gown who might have been the deputy’s wife staring bleakly through huge-framed glasses through the small space opened between the mayor and the deputy. Both mayor and deputy looked uncomfortable, but for different reasons: the mayor appeared to be trying to break the handshake, wondering if the picture had already been taken, while the deputy was desperately holding on as if for dear life, wedging his hand into the mayor’s, an expression of strain and pain in his eyes that might have been from trying to hold the contact or from the middle-aged woman in the evening gown. It was hard to tell. Williams supposed that if he kept on looking at the picture it would, bit by bit, yield up all kinds of insights about the deputy commissioner that in the long run he could do without. It was in full color, badly framed, and seemed to be swaying on the wall, although this was hardly posssible, the air in the room being dense and absolutely static. “Listen here,” he said, the photograph giving him a kind of frame for conviction. The deputy’s position was as tenuous as his own; this photograph was so painful that beads of sweat seemed to be coming off it; it was impossible to conceive of the deputy as being anything other than what Williams was, a man in severe trouble. “Listen here now, I’m twenty-six years old and I’ve got a wife and a mortgage and I’ve just had a baby son—”

“I know all about that. Congratulations.”

“And I’ve got to put my life together,” Williams said. “I’m in a whole lot of trouble and I admit it; I shouldn’t have taken the walk that I did, but I was very confused and I had my reasons.”

“We know you had your reasons.”

“Let me finish!” Williams said, his voice shaking to a kind of passion, and the deputy retreated, put both hands on his desk, pushed himself away imperceptibly but in a way that for Williams was a signal that he had temporarily gained some kind of control. “I admit that I made a mistake, and I’m the first one to say it, but does a man have to live all his life in shame because he’s made one mistake? Does a whole life have to rest on one decision? I want to get back; I admit I was wrong but it didn’t seem wrong at the time, and I’m willing to apologize and come back. I’m not asking for any favors, but there’s a hell of a lot of training and experience that I’ve got tied up in me and you can’t send it down the drain.” Crawl you bastard, he thought. Go on and crawl. Still, what alternative did he have? He even more than the deputy knew how limited his options had become. If it wasn’t the police department, what was his alternative? Send his wife back to work in a department store, take care of the baby during the days and tend night bar? That was promising. That was really promising for a guy who two years ago thought he had the game beat: you would join the system and make it work for you, laugh at all of them from behind the career and salary plan. Oh, he had learned a few things all right. He had learned a few goddamned things; the trouble was that everything that he had learned he would have been better off not knowing. “I’m asking for a chance,” he said, loathing himself. “I’m entitled to a chance.”

“You’re entitled to nothing,” the deputy said mildly, “nothing at all. But we’re not out to punish people. We’re not out to humiliate here; we’re trying to save people.”

Sure you are, Williams thought furiously, that’s exactly what the PD is in, the people-salvation business. But he said nothing, merely looked at the man impassively. Nothing, nothing to say. Sooner or later you had to learn to keep your mouth shut.

“I’ll offer you a deal,” the deputy said, “but I don’t know whether you’ll be interested or not. If you’re telling the truth you’ll probably be interested, but if you’re not you won’t be.”

“What deal?” Williams said and almost added, swab out latrines in the sixty-second precinct for a couple of months just to prove my loyalty to the department? Or maybe I should go out in a black T-shirt and jeans, prowl Forty-Second street, go out on the fag patrol to get broken in. But again he said nothing. Shutting up was easy once you made a discipline of it. He should have tried it months ago.

“We’re putting together a special squad,” the deputy said and ran his fingers over the memo he had shown Williams, “trying to put together a special squad to find this man.”

“Wulff?”

“Wulff,” the deputy said flatly. “You know who I mean. He’s an embarrassment to the department, and in many senses he’s a departmental responsibility. He comes from New York and if certain things has been handled differently by us he never would have been in business in the first place.” He looked at the ceiling, gave a half shrug. “That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “I’m not discussing whether we were right or wrong in handling him that way. As you know I wasn’t here when all of this happened. I was appointed only three months ago. We’re putting together an elite squad, some of the best men we can find, heavy weapons men, intelligence operators, men experienced in intelligence work, keeping it small and compact, trying to keep it to ten men. And I think that you could be useful on it. You have first-hand knowledge of the man, his habits, his modus operandi. For one thing you were out in Los Angeles with him.”

“No,” Williams said, “I was not.”

The deputy stared at him, and Williams held the gaze until he could no longer, looked away, past the photograph, swinging his gaze toward the gates covering the window. No, the man was no fool. He had to face that; the photograph, the particulars of his appointment might show that the deputy was as human and fallible as any of them except Wulff himself, but this did not mean that the man was a fool. On a certain level he had his own control, own self-awareness, enough insight. Williams could not look this man in the eye and tell him that he had not been with Wulff in Los Angeles. For all its weaknesses the PD had compiled a pretty good dossier on Wulff, better than it would have been credited with achieving. Keep quiet. Keep your mouth shut. At a certain point forbearance was the only tool left in the arsenal. “I just don’t know,” Williams said, “I just don’t know what to say about that.”