Naked Cruelty Page 31

  Nick lit up his fifth. “All well and good, Carmine, but have you forgotten that the Dodo’s due tomorrow?”

  “Won’t happen,” Carmine said positively.

  Three pairs of eyes stared.

  “Won’t happen?” Delia repeated.

  “No. He may strike next week or even the week after, but not this week.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Helen asked.

  “Because this week is Thanksgiving Day, and it spoils his plans. He’s escalating, and there’s only one way he can go—to a longer, more complex process. That means choosing a victim who won’t be missed for three or four days,” Carmine said.

  “Of course!” Nick exclaimed. “Even the most solitary person is invited to someone’s Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “There’s that, yes, but he himself will be expected to eat Thanksgiving at someone’s table.”

  Delia jumped. “You know who he is!”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Tell us!” Helen cried.

  “I can’t do that, Helen. I have no evidence—not a shred. Until I do, his identity has to remain my secret.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “No,” said Delia, answering when it became obvious that the Captain wouldn’t. “It’s ethics, Helen. What if word should get out? All observation changes events, but if the Dodo has an inkling that his identity is known, the game changes in all sorts of ways. What the Captain knows as fact is still merely suspicion if there’s no evidence to back his contention up.”

  “I wouldn’t tell a soul!”

  “Of course you wouldn’t. But this is a relatively public place, dear.”

  “End of subject,” said Carmine, picking up a sheet of paper. “The Hollow is starting to boil worse than Argyle Avenue, and no one wants a repeat of last summer. We’re not going to have snow before Thanksgiving Day, which means we have to plan for a warm, green winter. Arson and looting can’t be allowed to happen, it’s too hard on the majority of ghetto residents. Captain Vasquez has asked for two-pronged preventive measures and Commissioner Silvestri thinks his ideas are right.” The amber eyes rested on Nick Jefferson. “The uniforms are not going to get much rest—they have to be ready for riot duty in literal minutes. The role of Detectives is to dig for information, which means Mohammed el Nesr and the Black Brigade. Without information, we won’t be able to nip riot nuclei in the bud. Abe Goldberg’s in charge of our contribution, but you, Nick, are going to have special duties. Abe feels you can be disguised—provided, that is, that you’re willing to take on something so risky.”

  “I’m willing,” Nick said, looking eager.

  “You have a family, and you owe them a duty too.”

  “If it hadn’t been for luck and one itty-bitty fire extinguisher, Carmine, my mother and father would have lost their house last July, and again in August, when they had six fire extinguishers. My uncle’s shop was looted. My wife and children won’t stand in my way. I’m up for it.”

  “Captain Vasquez has brought in this movie make-up artist—not all his uniforms are staying out in the open with riot gear, but they’re not trained in detection. So a lot rests on you, Nick. This make-up guy swears he can make you look six inches shorter and twenty years older. Go see Abe, okay?”

  On the echo of Carmine’s last words, Nick was gone.

  “I wish I could do something like that,” said Delia, clearly regretting both her sex and her color.

  “How would you like to join the whores behind City Hall? The pimps are black, so are most of their girls. Information, Delia, as much as you can glean. Whores and pimps talk, and I’ve heard your various American accents. Go mulatto, your skin will take that, and your hair color’s perfect.”

  “I need a pimp,” said Delia, wriggling in anticipation.

  “One of the new academy graduates is black, fortyish and has a perfect face for disguise. Jimmy the Pooch.”

  And Delia was gone.

  “What about me?” Helen asked, voice steely.

  “You have a forensics class from nine until noon, with an afternoon in the autopsy room.”

  “I want to be in the field!”

  Carmine’s face set. He clasped his hands together and gazed at her sternly. “You’ve entered a predictable phase in your detective training,” he said, “and you have to get through it, Helen, without derailing your career. You’re finding the classes frustrating, even though they are by far the most important part of your curriculum. Later on you’ll see that I’m right, but now, while you’re blind to that fact, you simply obey orders. What do you expect me to do with a twenty-four-year-old apprentice who looks like Jane Fonda, huh? Dye your skin and put you in the Hollow or Argyle Avenue to gather information? How stupid can you get? You’d be kidnapped and raped, and not by the Dodo! By some junkie off his face or some hate-crazed Black Brigader! If I could use you safely in a field job, I would, but there’s nothing that suits your talents or your appearance. Your ambition is boundless, but next time you pass a mirror, look in it. You’d be ideal for corporate crime or thousand-dollar call girls, not work in ghettoes on the verge of riot or tawdry poor-white dives. Class is bred in the bone, never forget that, and accept your limitations without blaming the boss.”

  Speechless, she sat with her mind in turmoil, hating the fact that she had exchanged her father for a man who could have doubled for him. Of course he was right, there wasn’t an argument in the world could make him wrong. Fantasy was fine and dandy, but it had no business intruding on reality.

  After what she gauged was an interval long enough to save a little face, she got up and went to the team’s room, there to sit at her desk and enter her journal until ten of nine.

  His paperwork organized, Carmine went to Corey’s office, a walk that these days felt like a thousand miles of slogging, and always made him feel sick to his stomach. The poor girl! He had hated to do it, especially given that he had reprimanded her on other occasions in recent days, but it had to be done. And, as he had known, Helen MacIntosh possessed sufficient strength of character to realize that the boss was right. Passion had driven her in her perpetual quest to belong, to have an equal chance to shine. But when brutal fact was pointed out, she could step far enough away from her passion to see the truth.

  Unfortunately, he thought, entering Corey’s office, Corey Marshall had nothing like Helen’s intelligence. Life for him was a crueler arena, and at this moment his most formidable opponent in it was his boss. A no-win situation.

  Sure enough, Corey was on his feet in a second, knuckles on his desk, head snaked forward. He was going to get in first.

  “I have my own methods, my own style, my own goals!” he said with lips peeled back from his teeth. “If you’re here to preach me another sermon, don’t bother. I get the work done, I even fill in all Vasquez’s forms! What’s with all his paperwork, tell me that? The guy’s not a cop, he’s a paper-shuffler!”

  He left the desk and began to pace up and down; Carmine, face expressionless, took a chair and watched him.

  “You look down on me,” Corey said, “but I can’t figure out why. Except that you’re an obsessive who can’t bear the tiniest loose end, even if it’s an end that doesn’t matter a fuck. The whole world has to be squared up! No wonder you love Abe—you’re so like him! A pair of obsessive-compulsive freaks!”

  Maureen’s vocabulary, phrases, thinking.

  And here I am, Carmine thought, still wondering how I missed this side to Corey. Yes, I was aware that he and Abe were two very different kinds of men—detectives too—but I didn’t see Corey’s incipient paranoia, his lack of tactical planning, the underlying weakness, and the sheer enormity of Maureen’s hold over him. I guess they didn’t exist, at least to their present extent. While ever he took orders he could keep his chin above the rising flood, and the rivalry with Abe was there only as an equal’s chance at a sole l
ieutenancy. His independence was finite, and the responsibility was mine. He could function at the peak of his talents. Now that he has the responsibility, one part of Corey has filled with overweening pride, while most of him is wandering, lost. And he’s shut me out.

  “I wish you’d let me help,” Carmine said suddenly.

  “Help? With what?”

  “Your difficulty coping with the job.”

  Corey closed his eyes. “I seem to remember our having this conversation, or one like it. I don’t know where you get your ideas from, Carmine, but they’re mistaken. What do you want?”

  “The Hollow is about to go ballistic, and I need to know that the Taft High weapons case is properly closed.”

  “I’ve submitted the paperwork saying it is.”

  “Buzz still doesn’t seem so sure.”

  “Buzz is an old woman. When am I getting my second-stringer, and who is it?”

  “Donny Costello. He’s on his way up.”

  The discontented face didn’t lighten. “Costello? He’s as big a nit-picker as Buzz.”

  “You need all the nit-pickers you can get, Corey, because you’re not one,” Carmine said. “Watch out for your men.”

  “Oh, fuck off, Carmine! Your trouble is that you keep trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs!”

  “It’s clear that you never knew my grandmother Cerutti.”

  “Fuck off!”

  “Corey doesn’t appreciate the value of routines,” Carmine said to John Silvestri at five that evening. “While Maureen is in the driver’s seat, he won’t improve one iota either. I hadn’t incorporated her into the equation, more’s the pity. She’s gotten delusions of grandeur, as the psychiatrists say.”

  “Funny how we tend to overlook a man’s domestic situation. Can you imagine two women farther apart than Maureen Marshall and Ava Jones?” Silvestri asked. “They’ve both worn their knees down, but for different reasons.”

  “I can’t get rid of Corey, can I?”

  “No. We can see the express train roaring down the tracks at us, but until it hits, we have to assume it won’t.”

  “Gossip says Buzz Genovese is still insisting the Taft High business isn’t closed, and that worries me.”

  “Has he gone over Corey’s head to you, Carmine?”

  “Who, Buzz? Not in a thousand years. Too honorable.”

  “Who does Corey get as second-string?”

  “Donny Costello.”

  “Better him, than the kind of recruit a Helen MacIntosh trainee system would give him. Costello doesn’t mind paperwork.”

  “How about putting a brake on Fernando’s paperwork, John?”

  “Funny, he’s not that much younger than you, but his attitude to the job says every police department he’s ever worked in must be a yard deep in paper. How can you be so relaxed, with the Dodo due to strike tomorrow?”

  Carmine rose to his feet. “Want to stroll down to Malvolio’s for a drink?” he asked. “Then I can tell you about Thanksgiving Day. Incidentally, how are you and Luigi related?”

  “First cousin, but no Cerutti.”

  “I’m improving. It’s taken me a mere eighteen years to find that out. Some detective.”

  What Carmine couldn’t know was the ferocity involved in the difference of opinion between Corey and Buzz about Taft High.

  Two weeks ago Buzz had confronted Corey yet again.

  “Let me continue,” he had begged Corey. “Everything at Taft indicates that there’s a splinter of the Black Brigade operating—and that the Black Brigade is about to go to war against it. You know as well as I do how much black militancy gets wasted on in-fighting, especially places like Holloman, where there are two ghettoes separated by a university campus and a business center. It works to our advantage, but the Black Brigade is entrenched in the Hollow, while something new is going on in Argyle Avenue. And Taft seems to be the ham in the sandwich.”

  “It sounds great, but where are your facts, Buzz?”

  “Thin on the ground,” Buzz had admitted. “That doesn’t mean I’m imagining things, Cor. There are still weapons at Taft High.”

  Corey had flicked the report in his hand. “Your argument is as flimsy as the paper it’s written on, Buzz. I have very reliable snitches in the Black Brigade, and they say that the Taft High business was a genuine mistake, never a part of a plan.”

  “But this is not the Black Brigade itself!” Buzz persisted. “It’s a splinter group with a more violent agenda, and its aim is to spread revolution in the style of Lenin—terror first and foremost. One of its cornerstones is high school violence. The Black Brigade soldiers don’t know the splinter group exists, it isn’t something Mohammed el Nesr wants spread about.”

  “This report is pure supposition, Buzz. If I were to be guided by it, I’d be laughed at,” said Corey.

  “And being laughed at is more important than the chance that there’s violence brewing at Taft?” Buzz demanded.

  Flushing, Corey had put the sheets down as if they burned. “That is uncalled for! Give me facts and I’ll be happy to believe you, but I won’t act on hunches. Can’t you see it now?” His voice had taken on tones of hysterical drama. “Taft High School parents sue the city of Holloman for discrimination and defamation! Go away, Buzz! Do the job I’ve just given you—nail whoever held up the Fourth National Bank out in the Valley. It’s both tangible and important.”

  Unable to do more, Buzz had left it. There was some justice in Corey’s stand; only the thought of a tragedy involving children had spurred him to such effort.

  His report went into the Taft High weapons cache file, but on two Thursdays, when Carmine, Abe and Corey met to discuss the cases of the week, Corey had not produced the report, or even mentioned it in passing. It sat in the back of the file, unread.

  Tracking down the Fourth National Bank robbers had taken time, but Buzz Genovese was a good detective, albeit inexperienced. The crime had all the earmarks of a funding exercise rather than self-profit, but Corey’s Black Brigade snitches were very young and very junior in the hierarchy, so knew nothing of Mohammed el Nesr’s thinking, and swore it wasn’t the Black Brigade—with complete truth. A $74,000 take would buy a lot of firearms up to and including fully automatic weapons, but if Mohammed was innocent, who else was there with the organization? A question Corey didn’t ask. Buzz went to his splinter group, and, eventually, to an address: 17 Parkinson in the Argyle Avenue district.

  At noon on Tuesday, November 26, Buzz, Nick Jefferson and four uniforms entered the house to find two black men watching a Lakers replay on television; neither man was armed, and a rigorous search of every cranny on all three floors revealed no firearms. 17 Parkinson was a three-family house that had been gutted and completely lined with mattresses, every window boarded up. Milo Washington and Durston Parrish clearly lived in it, but Buzz’s snitch, vouched for by Nick, swore that Milo and Durston were the heads of the new splinter group. So where were the caches of weapons?

  Posters had been pinned to the mattresses extolling bloodshed, black supremacy, the slaughter of whites, and, many times over, three capital letters: BPP. It was a new acronym to Buzz.

  He stared at Milo Washington, a more commanding figure than Durston Parrish. Well over six feet, a good physique, a handsome face, milk coffee skin and hip threads; the eyes, large and an interesting shade of green, regarded him with contempt. He must, Buzz reflected, be feeling an utter fool—watching a Lakers replay!

  “What does BPP stand for, Milo?” Buzz asked.

  “Black People’s Power,” Milo said proudly, defiantly.

  “So that’s it! Who’re you, man?” Nick asked.

  “I am the founder and leader.”

  “And articulate when you need to be. Where are the guns?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know, Uncle Tom pig?”

  A frisson of fea
r shot down Buzz’s spine; they hadn’t been quiet about raiding 17 Parkinson, thus giving those in the houses nearby time to evacuate before the bullets started humming.

  “Something’s wrong,” Buzz said to Nick when the search proved fruitless. “Milo didn’t deny the guns—he’s stupidly articulate, needs time inside having talks with Wesley le Clerc.”

  “We’ve got nothing on them,” Nick said. “Watching the Lakers win isn’t a crime, and there were no stashes of any kind.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, Milo,” Buzz said to him on the porch, a corner of his mind wondering why the uniforms, clustered around one squad car, looked so upset.

  They had all been inside the house when the fracas at Taft High occurred. Two students, two teachers and a riot cop were dead, and another thirty-three were wounded, all but two slightly. Someone on Parkinson had run to the school to alert the kid who led Black People’s Power there; spoiling for action, he gathered his troops, broke out automatics and spare clips from the BPP cache, and set off to bust Milo and Durston free. If the pigs thought they were taking Milo in, they better think again! But one of the BPP kids was a spy, there to tip off the Black Brigade kids when the BPP arsenal surfaced. The BB kids tapped their own cache, and a gun battle developed within the school. Only the intervention of riot police had stopped the hostilities.

  Why hadn’t Corey Marshall believed his report? It all hinged on that, thought Buzz, wandering desolately across the courtyard blaming himself—and Corey. He’d known the guns were at the school! Trouble was, he didn’t have enough evidence to lay before Captain Vasquez, who might otherwise have hit the school at the same moment as Buzz hit the BPP house on Parkinson. No, no, it was all wrong! Corey Marshall was the necessary link and—

  Someone was pacing the courtyard: Carmine Delmonico. His face was grim, nor did Buzz need to ask why he was out here, pacing. Sometimes a man needed to have space and open air.

  Carmine saw him and strode over.

  “Do you believe this?” he demanded. “Two rival black power factions, two thousand hapless kids of every color God makes a human skin—shit, shit, shit! How did one faction think it could bust Milo Washington loose, and why did the other faction decide to stop them inside the school? My wife is right, it’s guns! And drugs! Why can’t they use a classroom as a place to learn instead of as a place to come down off of smack?”