Soul Patch (9 page)

“What part of the Bronx you from, Detective?”

“Pelham.”

“Am I allowed to ask your last name?”

“Murphy.”

“John Murphy, now there’s a rare name on the NYPD.”

I could see him smile.

“What were you guys tailing me for?” I wondered.

“You’ll see,” he said. “We didn’t wanna discuss it in front a your little girl. We were waiting for you to come out, and then you come out with your kid. So we figured—”

Just then, Detective Melendez opened the driver’s side door. She put the Chevy in reverse and tore down the street, tossing my car keys out the window as she went. I hoped I got back to my car before dark. Finding those keys wasn’t going to be easy. She hit the siren, pulled into traffic, and up onto the Belt Parkway heading east. When she shut the siren off, I tried to get back to my chat with her partner.

“So, Murphy, when you saw me come out of my house with Sarah, you—”

“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” Melendez stared at me in the rearview. “We ask the questions.”

I ignored that. “You’re a real hothead, huh?”

“Shut up and enjoy the drive.”

“You’re kinda young to be a detective, aren’t you?” I pressed on. “Christ, when I was on the job—”

“Don’t gimme any of that old timers’ bullshit. It’s all you old guys do, talk about how it was back in the day. What you got to worry about is that I
am
a detective, not how I got to be one.”

Murphy’s head was turned sideways, away from her. I could see he was rolling his eyes. Wanted to ask him how he’d ended up with the young hotshot, but I didn’t figure she’d much enjoy that line of questioning.

“Back in the day or today, people don’t usually make detective at your age.”

She bit the bait hard. “If I was a man, you wouldn’t even be asking me this shit about my age. It’s not about my age! I got to put up with
this crap all the time ’cause dinosaurs like you think it’s about whether you stand or squat to pee. I’ll tell you what it’s about, it’s about if you’re a good cop.”

Murphy, making sure his head blocked her view, pointed his right hand at me and motioned like a quacking duck. He’d heard this speech before. I egged her on.

“So it’s not about your being Hispanic either, then? Not even a little bit?”

Taking her eyes off the road, she turned to give me the cold stare. Murphy crossed himself. I’d done it now.

“Listen,
viejo
, I was waiting for that. See, you assholes are all the same. In your eyes, my gold shield is about my pussy or Puerto Rico, not about if I’m a good cop.”

“Did I say that?”

“You didn’t have to. I was always a big reader, but I read best between the lines, grandpa. Besides, you ever make detective?”

“Nope.”

“So, you’re just a resentful old fuck, huh?”

“I had my shot,” I said.

“What happened?”

“In ’72, I rescued this missing little girl from the roof of an old factory building. Everyone had given her up for dead. It was a big story. These days, they’d throw me a ticker tape parade. Back then—”

“This is it!” Murphy barked.

Melendez hit the siren and lights and yanked the wheel hard right, cutting the Chevy across two lanes of traffic. Several cars smoked their tires as they braked and swerved trying to avoid smacking into the flank of the unmarked cruiser. We pulled up around the Pennsylvania Avenue exit of the Belt Parkway.

The Fountain Avenue dump had been a working landfill for about the first twenty years of my life. I don’t know how long before that. When we were kids, Aaron and I used to call it Stinky Mountain. You didn’t have to see it to know it was coming up. Depending on wind direction, you could tell you were in the vicinity from several miles away. And even when the wind blew the stench of rotting garbage and methane in the other direction, you could always spot the swirling clouds of thousands of gulls and other birds that feasted at the banquet of our moldering debris. Freaked me out more than a little, those
swooping, spinning, wheeling clouds of feather and flesh, of bills and bony feet. Used to like to watch the tractors and bulldozers, though, perched atop Stinky Mountain, blending the newly dumped piles of garbage into the compost.

Then, a decade or so back, the city just shut it down. I think someone got the brilliant idea that maybe it wasn’t such a good thing to have a huge dump in the wetlands around Jamaica Bay. Across the way from the dump, some developers had built a maze of apartment buildings, called Starrett City. Like everything else in Brooklyn and the city itself, Starrett City blended in with the surrounding landscape like a pile of pus in a vanilla milk shake. Even I had to remind myself that in New York, it’s always about the money and never the beauty. Beauty was a commodity affordable only to people who foisted eyesores like Starrett City upon the rest of us.

But just because the dump had been closed, its mounds of fetid garbage tarped over, its methane vented and burned, its clouds of birds relocated to Staten Island, it didn’t mean people had forgotten what it once had been. As Rico’s task force had proved many years ago, there were plenty of bodies beneath the tarpaulins. Now, apparently, there was one outside its gates. As soon as I saw the other “official” vehicles lining the road, I knew this wasn’t going to be pretty. This wasn’t a drug bust or a speeding ticket or a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association barbecue. There were no flames or aircraft debris strewn about. No plane had gone down on its approach to Kennedy. This scene had homicide written all over it. Disquiet wrapped me in its arms and squeezed tight.

As we rolled along, Melendez navigating us through the throng of uniforms and suits, I got that sick feeling in my belly. I know that’s something people just say, but I meant it. This wasn’t any old crime scene either. There was a lot of brass in attendance, a lot of suits, a lot of worried white faces. We veered off the road and into a patch of tall blond reeds and cattails. A blue and white NYPD chopper flew tight circles overhead, the downwash from its rotors toying with the reeds like a fickle plain’s wind blowing Kansas wheat to and fro. We came to a full stop. Detective Melendez threw the Chevy in park.

“Okay, get him out,” she groused at her partner. Murphy’s clenched jaw indicated just how much he loved being ordered around.

I slid over to the rear passenger door and Murphy helped me out, making sure I didn’t crack my head on the car frame. He looped his
left hand around my right bicep and marched me through the tangle of tall weeds and cops. Melendez walked ahead of us, never looking back. The ground was muddy, black, and slick. Murphy and I fought not to slip down. About fifty feet ahead of us, over Melendez’s right shoulder, I saw a line of yellow tape strung across a clearing in the cattails. The chopper wash blew the stink of the dump into our faces as we approached. A row of men in dark suits stood just inside the tape. Closer now, I recognized the profiles of several of the suits: Police Commissioner Cleary, Deputy Mayor Brown, Brooklyn D.A. Starr, and—shit!—Queens D.A. Fishbein. He’d already dealt himself in.

Almost to the yellow perimeter, Melendez ducking under the tape in front of us, I turned away from the line of princes and to my left. There, in the midst of the reeds, hundreds of feet away from the closest paved road, was an incongruous blue Chevy, not dissimilar to the one I’d just gotten out of. A swarm of men and women moved around it like worker bees attending to the queen. When one of the worker bees moved away from the driver’s side window, I noticed a figure slumped against the wheel. I couldn’t make out his face, but I knew in my heart it was Larry McDonald.

They say energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and I guess I’ll have to take their word for it. But when a man with that much ambition dies, there has to be fallout somewhere—an earthquake, a tsunami, an erupting volcano, something. Or did Larry have ambition in place of a soul? Did it pass into the body of the first cop on the scene or the person who found him? Did it inhabit the first ant that crawled by or the first gull to swoop over? If so, the other gulls had better watch out.

“What are you smiling at?” Murphy wanted to know.

“Seagulls.”

“Whatever.”

He guided me under the tape. It took a few seconds for the assembled minions to notice me, my police escort, and my NYPD issue jewelry. When they did, Fishbein scowled.

“Detective, what is Mr. Prager doing in cuffs?” he asked Murphy in a less than cordial tone. “You were ordered to bring him to the scene, not arrest him.”

Melendez started to answer. “I told him to cuff—”

“Get them off. Now!” Fishbein ordered.

“Hey, Hy,” D.A. Starr said, “this is my borough. Don’t be ordering my cops around.”

“They’re
my
cops!” corrected Police Commissioner Cleary. Ah, the world of New York politics and fiefdoms. “Well, Melendez, why the cuffs?”

“I—he—When we went to get him, he, uh—he,” she stuttered, flushing slightly.

“Spit it out, Detective. Sometime this week.”

“He ran a red light.”

Fishbein, Starr, Cleary, and Brown sneered disapprovingly, shaking their noggins like four bobblehead dolls on the back deck of the same car.

“If you’re so desperate for traffic enforcement, Melendez, we can put you on Highway Patrol,” Cleary said. “You’d cut a fine figure in those tall black boots and riding pants.”

By the look on the men’s faces, the image of Melendez so dressed had universal appeal. Christ, it appealed to me. But I saw that some of what Melendez had said to me on the ride over was true. She might carry the shield, but she was always one misstep away from being dismissed as portable pussy and nothing more.

“I did worse than blow through a red, Commissioner Cleary. I cut across a crosswalk and sped in a school zone. I saw I was being followed and overdid it, I guess.”

But instead of being pleased or impressed by my jumping to her defense, Detective Melendez shot me a look that would scare the numbers off a clock.
I don’t need rescuing
. She was tough to figure, and now wasn’t the time to try.

“Cut him loose,” said Cleary.

Murphy let me go. I wanted so hard not to rub my wrists, to show everybody, especially Melendez, how tough and cool I was. I immediately rubbed my wrists.

“You know who that is in that car over there?” Fishbein asked, ignoring the icy stare of his Brooklyn counterpart.

“I can guess.”

“Guess.”

“Larry McDonald.”

“Give Mr. Prager a cigar!” Fishbein joked. “Commissioner, you smoke cigars, don’t you?”

“How’d you know?” D.A. Starr got a question in before Fishbein could breathe.

“I didn’t know. It was a guess.”

“Why guess Chief of Detectives McDonald?”

“If it was a 1930 DeSoto or something instead of an ’89 Chevy, I would have guessed Judge Crater.”

“That’s not an answer,” Starr growled. Fishbein didn’t do a good job of hiding his delight at the displeasure of his Brooklyn counterpart.

“Because I knew Larry was missing.”

“You did, huh?” said Cleary.

Decision time. I had to choose my words very carefully. There’s lying, and then there’s the truth. Lies are lies, but you can filet the truth all sorts of ways depending on the dish you’re cooking. For much of my life, I’d been a bad liar and an unskilled butcher of the truth. Patrick Michael Maloney’s disappearance had changed all that. I’d since learned s-e-c-r-e-t-s was just an alternative spelling of l-i-e-s. And, God help me, I could parse the truth like a Catholic school nun with a run-on sentence.

“I did. I knew he was missing.”

“How’d you know?” Cleary kept on. “The chief was taking vacation time, so there’d be no reason to believe he was missing.”

Time to start parsing. “His ex-wife called me up.”

“And . . .” Starr said.

“And she told me she was worried about Larry. That he had called her recently to apologize about their divorce. They had made a date to talk it over, but Larry never showed up.”

“It’s a big leap from standing up your ex to going missing, Prager,” Fishbein piled on.

“I guess,” I agreed. “But he never got back in touch with her. That wasn’t Larry’s style. He could be a selfish, ambitious prick, but never an impolite one. Not to Margaret, not after what he’d done to her.”

They nodded again in unison.

“Is that all, Mr. Prager?”

“Is that all what?” I turned the question back on Fishbein.

“Let’s not be coy. Was there anything besides his ex-wife’s call that might have led you to believe something was up with Chief of Detectives McDonald? It’s no secret that you and Larry were close friends.”

“Close?” I asked. “Was anybody really close to Larry Mac?”

For the first time, I saw something in Detective Melendez’s eyes that looked like admiration. She enjoyed how I kept deflecting their questions with questions of my own.

“Well, then, closer than most,” Fishbein said.

“Okay, yeah, Larry and me, we were closer than Larry and most other people, but he had a lot more layers than an old onion, so I’m not really sure there’s much I can tell you.”

Fishbein screwed up his face as if he were working hard to think of a follow-up, but it was all an act. He was questioning me for appearance’s sake. I guess he was also trying to give me cover. Because, whether I liked it or not, whether I had intended to or not, I was now Fishbein’s boy. By going to him the way I had, he had the inside track. I’d got almost nothing out of the relationship so far except an autopsy report and yellow sheet on Malik, but with me he might knock one out of the park.

“You know, Mr. Prager,” Starr picked up, “you don’t seem awfully broken up about your friend’s suicide.”

“The ground ain’t wet from your tears either, Mr. D.A.,” I said, trying to hide the shock.
Suicide! Larry McDonald?
“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll grieve on my own terms.”