Red Hook Read online

  “What do you think?” Jack said.

  “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in all the way down.”

  “Correct. How many hours since the lights went out?”

  “I dunno.” That was another good thing about the kid—he didn’t bullshit. “Less than twelve?”

  “I’d say six.”

  Alvarez nodded. “I’ll have to take an internal temp to make sure, but that sounds about right.”

  The back of the dead man’s neck was purple, a different tint from the bruises. Jack pushed a finger into the flesh and pulled it back. The spot momentarily whitened. He knelt down and pulled, the back of the T-shirt up: same purple discoloration, same white spot when pressed.

  “The body was moved postmortem,” Jack said. “How do I know?”

  Daskivitch frowned again. “Uh, lividity, right? After the blood stopped circulating, it would have pooled in the lowest parts of the body. That should be his side, not the back.”

  “Good.” Jack turned to Alvarez. “Could these blows to the face have done him in?”

  The forensics man stared down thoughtfully. “I think that was just a warm-up.”

  “Help me here,” Alvarez said to Jack. They rolled the body over and Alvarez pulled aside the plaid shirt. The T-shirt underneath was stained with a big patch of rust-colored blood. There was no blood on the ground, confirmation that the body had been moved.

  Alvarez rolled the T-shirt up the victim’s chest. “There you go.”

  At first Jack didn’t see what he was talking about, but then Alvarez pressed down on the corpse’s side, opening the thin ugly slit of a stab wound. Jack pressed his hands against the spiky grass and squeezed his eyes shut. Sweat beaded his upper lip.

  “You okay?” Alvarez asked.

  Jack nodded, but swallowed, fighting the bile rising in his throat. His head swam and he was afraid he might black out.

  “Jack?” Daskivitch said.

  Weakly he shook his head, lurched to his feet, staggered a few yards away, and heaved up his guts.

  He took a deep breath and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, ashamed to turn around. A veteran getting queasy over such a well-preserved corpse—it was as pathetic as a surgeon fainting over a nosebleed.

  He patted the sweat from his forehead, straightened up, and turned back to the other detectives. They seemed to have trouble meeting his eyes.

  “Whew. Must’ve been something I ate. Bad shrimp, maybe.”

  “What is it with you and the stabbings?” Alvarez said quietly.

  Jack looked up sharply. “Why don’t you mind your own fucking business!”

  “Whoa.” Alvarez raised his hands.

  Daskivitch’s eyes widened. The kid had seen the veteran lose his lunch; now he was losing his cool. Jack cleared his throat. “Sorry. I just got a little dizzy, is all. I’ll be fine.”

  The forensics man shrugged, then knelt down by the corpse and started doing something unpleasant with a thermometer.

  Jack turned away, queasy again. He glanced at Daskivitch, alert to any condescension or contempt.

  The kid just looked concerned. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah. Let’s just drop it, all right?”

  Daskivitch nodded and looked away.

  “Okay,” Jack said, taking charge again, “the vic died somewhere else and was shlepped here. He could have been carried from the bridge, but that’s a long way and there’s no stairs. I think they just chucked him over the fence, and he got snagged on the other side.”

  “They?”

  “One guy could never have gotten him over. So—first of all, they would’ve had to untangle him from the wire. Then they’d have to carry him down to the water. The question is, why didn’t they finish the job?”

  “You think somebody eyeballed them from the bridge?”

  “Too far. The sightlines are crap.”

  He looked down at the water. “At least the scubas will be glad they don’t have to go in.” Once he’d seen a couple of miserable Harbor Scuba Unit divers kneeling by a hydrant near the canal as they hosed off a thick layer of scum and muck. Perhaps they were remembering a scuba whose mask had slipped off while he was down: the poor bastard inhaled a mouthful of typhus and cholera and ended up in intensive care.

  Daskivitch grimaced. “A few minutes in that poison would strip a body like frikkin’ piranhas.”

  Alvarez pulled out a couple of paper bags and taped them over the victim’s hands. If the man had died fighting, he might have tissue from his murderer under his nails. Unfortunately, they’d have to wait until after the autopsy to take fingerprints.

  Jack and his partner took a walk along the canal, discussing the possibilities. A few yards on, they came upon the first officer on the scene, a young uniform anxiously checking the yellow tape he’d stretched between the fence and a tiny tree. In one hand he held a clipboard, his log of everyone who entered the perimeter. He coughed awkwardly as the two detectives approached, unsure whether to look at them or away.

  “How’s it going, kid?” asked Daskivitch. That he was only a few years older than the patrol cop didn’t matter—a detective’s shield hung on the pocket of his jacket.

  “Very good, sir,” the uniform replied. “Do, um, did you find out what happened?”

  “Yeah,” Daskivitch said. “The vic was offed by a big guy, probably an American Indian, left-handed, wearing a blue-jean jacket and Air Jordans.”

  The patrol cop’s brow furrowed.

  Jack remembered his own days walking a beat. Half the time, dealing with the public, you felt like a big wheel; the other half your superiors made you feel like shit. “Don’t worry about it,” he told the young cop. “He’s just busting your chops.”

  A deflated soccer ball drifted downstream. Jack watched it for a moment, then turned to his partner. “The canal.”

  “Huh?”

  “Someone was sailing down the canal.”

  “What, are you kidding? It’s a cesspool—nobody’s sailed here in a hundred years.”

  On the bridge, a knot of gawkers had already assembled, drawn by the Crime Scene truck and the flashing patrol cars. Jack and his partner pushed through and made their way to the bridgehouse, a squat brick tower rising next to the far end. They peered over the side of the bridge. A crusted metal ladder descended to a half-open door. The detectives climbed over the railing and made their way down.

  “Hello?” Jack called.

  Inside the tower, a musty stairwell brought them up to a small office, where an old man sat facing a gleaming metal control panel covered with knobs and gauges. In front of him, a picture window offered a broad view of the canal and the metal-grated roadway. He wore headphones over greasy gray hair and flipped through a copy of the Post, whistling tunelessly with the music inside his head. ‘If you wanna be my lover,’ he suddenly sang, falsetto.

  Jack rapped on the door and the bridgekeeper spun around. The detectives badged him, then explained their disagreement about canal traffic.

  “Well,” the man said, “nobody sails on the Gowanus, but we get some barges. Did you know this used to be the end of the Erie Canal? Back in the eighteen-eighties—”

  “How much traffic do you get?” Jack said.

  “I lift the bridge a couple times a day.”

  “How many people on the barges?”

  “They usually run with a crew of two—they trade watches, six hours on and off.”

  “They have radios?”

  “Yeah. These days some of them carry portable phones too.”

  “You keep a log?”

  “Of course I do. It’s the law.” The keeper lifted a large open notebook from a desk and handed it over.

  The Volsunga, captained by one Al Perry, had passed by at 9:47 that morning, and the Chem Trader, captained by Raymond Ortslee, had passed at 12:40 that afternoon. The anonymous call to the Seven-six had come in five minutes later.

  Jack lit a cigarette as he and Daskivitch stepped out the bridgehouse door. A
cross the canal lay a squat grass-covered berm, an oil company depot, surrounded by coils of barbed wire. Along the front of its loading dock No Smoking was painted in red letters six feet high.

  “Jesus, don’t drop that cig,” Daskivitch said. “Don’t worry about the oil—the canal itself’ll catch and we’ll have a river of fire all the way to Red Hook.”

  As the detectives climbed back onto the roadway, raindrops spattered down out of the leaden sky. Jack hunched his shoulders and lifted the collar of his sports jacket. “It’s Murphy’s Law—on rainy days, the bodies are always outside.”

  The windshield of the young detective’s unmarked Grand Marquis fogged up quickly. Jack rubbed his handkerchief across the glass and watched the thundershower scatter the audience on the bridge. Down by the canal, the Crime Scene Unit was scrambling to spread plastic tarps inside the perimeter.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little white packet.

  “What’s that?” Daskivitch asked.

  “It’s a hand wipe. “You want one?”

  “No, thanks,” his partner said, amused.

  Jack ripped open the packet and wiped down his hands, pleased by the familiar stinging scent of the alcohol. He knew the gesture was mostly futile—the world was teeming with hostile bacteria—but it made him feel better.

  The ugly little mouth of the victim’s stab wound opened in his mind and he shivered.

  Daskivitch looked glum. “I wish I didn’t catch this one. I’ll take a grounder any day. The jealous wife—you get to the scene and she’s standing there with the Ginsu knife in one hand and her husband’s stones in the other. Baddabing: case closed.”

  Jack didn’t answer. He wished his partner would stop talking, and especially that he’d stop talking about knives.

  “Why do you think the barge captain phoned it in anonymous?” Daskivitch asked.

  Jack shrugged.

  His partner answered his own question. “The guy’s probably shitting bricks. He thinks he witnessed the end of a Mob hit, and the guys who did it saw him, and he’s gotta pass by here every day. You think it was Mob?”

  “I doubt it.” Though the side streets of nearby Carroll Gardens were home to a number of known Mafia soldieri, the neighborhood was quiet—they didn’t do business where their wives and children lived. Mobsters would have taken the body out and dumped it in the harbor, or by some distant parkway. Secondly, the victim was Hispanic, and stabbing was a Hispanic MO. A knife was often associated with domestic violence—the first weapon handy—but Jack couldn’t see some angry woman beating the shit out of this guy and then hoisting his body over a fence. He lacked the patience right now to discuss all this, so he just said, “If it was a Mob hit, they’d probably have just shot the guy.”

  Daskivitch pondered the matter. After a moment, he chuckled. “How’d you like the look on that rookie’s face, huh? ‘Blue-jean jacket and Air Jordans’!”

  Jack didn’t answer. He pictured the hilt mark next to the wound, indicating that the knife had plunged all the way in.

  His partner drummed on the steering wheel with his index fingers, a habit Jack remembered from the last time they’d worked together. “You like the mysteries,” Daskivitch said, his tone a mix of admiration and annoyance. “You’re the only detective I know who doesn’t mind a dump job.” Nearly impossible cases sometimes turned up in car trunks or Dumpsters, decomposed, without ID, without witnesses. Jack had a reputation on the task force for pursuing such cases as far as he could. It wasn’t always a good reputation: spending too much time on a few hopeless cases could drive down the team’s clearance rate.

  A slight tightening of his face was Jack’s only response. He looked out the side window. A CSU man’s red umbrella bobbed alongside the canal, a small splash of color against the unrelenting gray of the scene.

  He loosened his tie, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes. Rain rattled on the roof.

  The stab wound was directly above the heart. The victim might have bled to death, or the trauma might even have stopped the muscle directly. Sweat beaded Jack’s lip again.

  Daskivitch drummed his fingers on the wheel. “What do you say we go find the barge captain? I know the shift’s almost over, but we could pick up some good OT.”

  Jack opened the door and stepped out. The red lights of a patrol car parked on the bridge slapped him repeatedly in the face. Cars slowed as they neared the bridge, their tires making a sound on the wet asphalt like tape being pulled up. He bent down to speak through the window.

  “I’m gonna head home. We can do it first thing in the A.M.”

  He turned away from Daskivitch’s look of surprise. They had a hot murder; the rookie was excited to pursue it. And here was the infamously dogged Detective Leightner, ready to call it a day.

  Daskivitch shrugged. “All right, bunk. You okay?”

  Jack was already walking toward his car.

  two

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, he arrived home in Midwood, a quiet Brooklyn suburb of stucco and brick. The houses kept close company; tulips filled small front yards often marked by one special tree—a weeping willow, a Japanese maple, an exotic pine. When he moved there after his divorce, Jack knew nothing about the neighborhood save that it was populated largely by Orthodox Jews and had a very low murder rate. He was Jewish himself, but the religious makeup of the neighborhood didn’t matter to him—he just needed to live somewhere he didn’t have to worry about what was happening in the streets.

  He worried about his landlord, though. As he entered the front hall, he cocked his head for sounds of life upstairs. At eighty-six Mr. Gardner was alert and active, but his wife had died the year before and now he lived alone.

  Radio voices, a clanking of dishes—thank God, the old man motored on.

  Jack stooped to lift a bundle of mail from the Astroturf-carpeted floor. (Mr. Gardner was a big fixer-upper, but he improvised with found materials.) He sensed that he was not alone—an orange cat sat on its haunches at the top of the stairs, regarding him coolly. The cat belonged to his landlord, as much as it belonged to anyone. Jack respected its self-sufficiency: the old man fed it once a day, but otherwise it took care of itself.

  Inside his apartment, a floor-through with faded wallpaper, he hung his jacket neatly in a closet and fished his NYPD paycheck out of a stack of junk fliers and credit card offers. In the kitchen, he scrubbed his hands and turned on a radio for background noise while he gathered a makeshift dinner: a can of sardines in mustard, creamed spinach in a boilable pouch, a packaged microwaveable potato. Bobby Darin crooned “Beyond the Sea.”

  While he ate, he read the back of a cracker box, which suggested accompaniments, including a slice of cheese. What kind of moron, he wondered, needed to be told that cheese went well with a cracker? The answer bounced back: the same kind of moron who couldn’t bake his own potato.

  The food sat heavy in his stomach while he washed the dishes. As he rinsed the sardine can, he nicked his finger on the sharp rolltop. A knife wound—ugly little mouth—opened in his mind’s eye. He flushed with shame. Indigestion. That was the reason he’d gotten sick that afternoon. To hell with Alvarez.

  He wandered into the living room and picked up the newspaper. Dropped it. Wandered back into the kitchen. The evening stretched ahead. He regretted turning down Daskivitch’s suggestion that they work late, but he hadn’t felt up to dealing with the kid’s concern.

  Mr. Gardner’s footsteps clomped across the ceiling.

  Jack reached into the fridge for a couple cold cans of beer. Several nights a week he went upstairs to keep the old man company. Sometimes the favor was mutual.

  When Mr. Gardner opened the door, Jack half expected to look over his shoulder and see Mrs. Gardner in the kitchen, bending down to pull something from the massive old stove. She would reach a hand back to support the base of her spine, turn, hold up an angel food cake. She’d smile a crinkly big-toothed smile and her dentures would shift, click. Hair white as sugar. “Siddown,” s
he’d say. “Have a piece a cake.” Her voice deep, husky, kind. But Mrs. Gardner was gone.

  “Hey, Jackie, come on in.” Age had brought stocky Mr. G. even closer to the ground. He wore a time-grayed white shirt, faded chinos, cracked shoes. His eyes peered big and droopy through thick black-framed glasses. Leaving the door open for Jack, he reached up into a cabinet and pulled down two delicate china coffee cups. He set them on the kitchen table next to a Tupperware container filled with coupons and reached for a bottle of cheap bourbon.

  “Here’s how!” he said; they downed the warm liquor.

  This ritual dispensed with, Mr. Gardner invited Jack into the living room. “You’re just in time,” he said, easing back into a duct-tape-repaired La-Z-Boy recliner. Jack handed his landlord a beer, then settled into a nubby brown armchair. They sat before the TV in silence, the muteness of men.

  On Wheel of Fortune, Vanna White was still going strong, waving at all the lovely prizes. The empty white tiles of a mystery phrase appeared on screen. Players bought letters,

  Vanna flipped tiles. A­ _ _ AST F­_ _ _ T_ _ _AST. Jack glanced at Mr. Gardner. The old man rarely ventured a guess, but that didn’t stop him from chuckling and nodding in satisfaction at the solutions. Aside from his grief over his wife’s death, the man seemed complacent about his life. At least, he never complained.

  Most nights Jack would have been content to relax and sip his beer too, but tonight he was restless and the endless commercials didn’t help.

  During an ad for Maxi-Pads, Mr. Gardner muted the volume. “Have you heard from the Gangbuster?”

  Jack had discovered the apartment through the old man’s son, a file clerk at the Sixty-first Precinct. Neil Gardner rarely came by the house, or even called. His father had somehow gotten—or been given—the impression that the guy was busy with critical departmental affairs.

  “He’s doing great,” Jack said, to make the old man feel better. “How was your day?”

  Mr. G. shrugged. “Not too exciting, but what are ya gonna do? You can’t fight City Hall.” One of his stock sayings, applicable to bad weather, ill health, even wars. He said no more and Jack didn’t follow up. To be so old, to have so much time for reflection, for regret…He was struck by the musty, old-butter smell of the man’s skin.