Blood Count

CHAPTER 12

Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock…”

In the station house, the sergeant at the front desk was fielding calls. He waved at me to wait while he finished. On his tiny hand, little and strange like a dwarf’s, was a school ring with a huge blue glass stone. The man’s name tag said he was Edigio Russomano. He was small. After a minute, I realized he was sitting on a stack of phone books.

Near the front desk, his back to me, was a guy in a black jacket and gray hoodie, the hood up. Big guy. Meaty shoulders.

“What’s your name?” said Russomano to me after he hung up the phone.

I told him.

He asked again. “I’m getting deaf,” he said. “Doc told me my hearing’s shot. Yeah, right, Detective Artie Cohen, that’s it, glad a meetcha. Chief made me look for your number earlier. He had some Russian thing he wanted you to look at. You Russian or something? Cohen? That a Russian name? Why don’t you grab a pew over there, and I’ll get the chief.”

I got the feeling the guy in the black jacket had been listening all the time Russomano was talking to me. The little sergeant turned to him. “I thought you was on your way out. You need something or you just got nothing better to do than hang around here?”

Without saying a word, the guy stuffed his hands in his pockets and bolted from the station house, through the doors, into the street.

“Who was that?” I said to Russomano.

“What?”

“That guy who just left.”

“You have to ask the chief. I ain’t been around last couple days; I only just came on like a few minutes before you got here,” Russomano said.

I sat on a chair near the door. It was warm in the precinct. I unzipped my jacket, got out my cell, looking for calls from Lily.

I’d heard the stories about the Thirtieth. In the early nineties, this had been a station house that dealt big-time in narcotics, mostly cocaine. It had been so famous for the corruption, they’d made movies about it. Back in the day. Not anymore.

I was impatient. All I wanted from Jimmy Wagner was some input on the Armstrong-there was stuff going on there I didn’t understand. There was Virgil Radcliff-I didn’t like his insistence we work the case ourselves, if there was a case. He’d been holding back.

I looked around, hoping I wouldn’t find Radcliff still at the house so I could talk to Wagner about him. Was Radcliff still at the Armstrong where I’d left him in the parking lot? With Lily? Had she really gone out to do errands?

“ Dancing and prancing in Jingle Bell Square, in the frosty air…” The song played. I tried Lily on my cell. No answer.

I sat on an orange plastic chair opposite Russomano’s desk. A drunk who had wandered in and was yelling incoherently, inserting the word motherfucker between every syllable he uttered, was followed by a couple of kids, boys, maybe ten years old. Their jeans hung low on their skinny asses. They told Russomano somebody had stolen their sneakers. He told them to sit. They took the chairs next to mine.

“Hey, yo, what up, man?” the first boy said to the second.

“Jes chillin’.”

“You comin’ down J’s party? I tell you, It’s goin’ down right there, man. We gonna tear it up, I mean this gonna be stoopid tonight, you know what I’m saying?”

The boys kept it up, looking at the sergeant and me, making sure they had an audience, turning up the volume. They reminded me of those comic characters in Shakespeare who show up in the middle of the action. The little boys had high, childish voices. I tried not to laugh. I didn’t want to humiliate them.

The first little boy started talking trash again. He was a sweet-faced boy, he reminded me of my nephew Billy, when Billy was little and I used to take him fishing. Like the kid at the police station, he thought if he talked big, it would make him seem grown up, but it only made him seem younger. Billy was dead now, and I missed him.

“Shut up,” the sergeant called out to the kids.

I was laughing now, couldn’t help it.

“ Jingle bell…”

“Detective Cohen?”

A uniform-a black guy with Coke-bottle glasses-finally appeared and showed me to Wagner’s office. I passed dozens of cops bent over their desks, shooting the breeze, yakking into the phone, or worrying about money.

Mix of black, white, and Latino cops, a lot of joking around. It was almost Christmas, and in spite of all the shit in the city-money, crime, real estate-people could get it up a little for a holiday.

A lot of people probably think a station house is a lousy place to work-the smells, the noise. I realized how much I missed it, missed the community. It was probably too late for me now. I’d taken the promotions. I’d gone for special assignments. Special squads. But working at Police Plaza was like operating inside a corporation. I had been spending most of my days, until recently, reading official documents about Russian banks, at least until I caught the pigeon killer.

Maybe if I’d stayed the regular course, I could have been a captain like Jimmy Wagner. Anyway, it was too late.

“Artie Cohen? Hey, man, how you doing? What a fucking pleasure. It’s good to see you, man.”

“You, too, Jimmy,” I said, as he came from behind the desk where he had been sitting and gave me one of those man-hugs. I was glad to see him.

“Sit. You want coffee?”

“I’m fine.”

“And thanks, man, for getting that translation, Artie. I didn’t have a current number for you so I went through Sonny Lippert.”

“Sure. You need anything else, Jim?”

“Hey, you didn’t need to come all the way uptown, but I appreciate the thought. You still living in that crazy loft down there off Broadway?”

“Still there, Jimmy, same phone number. In case you need me again. You?”

“Yeah, sure, but I guess you heard I mighta croaked.” He laughed.

We’d met a couple of days after 9/11. Wagner was one of the heroic cops who worked on the pile without any protection, for weeks. Digging out bodies, then pieces of bodies, then tiny fragments that only the DNA people could ID. They did it so people would know, so they could mourn, so the families would have something to bury.

I’d been out on the pile, too, but I didn’t have anything like Wagner’s obsession. He and a lot of other guys had worked it for months. I knew Wagner had been there until the end. He’d told me he was sure one of his pals was under the rubble; he kept digging in his crazy way.

Guys who’d been on the pile still have a bond. If you had worked with somebody like Wagner there, he was your friend for life.

White skin, freckles, reddish hair going gray, a fireman’s mustache, Wagner had once been very big and very tough. Now, he was thinner and racked with a gritty cough.

“So how you doing on the case with the dead guy they stuck the Russian document on?”

“We just had to let a suspect go,” Wagner said. “I was even hoping I could also get him for another homicide we had, what, almost a month ago, over on the West Side a brownstone, one of them fixer-uppers, some gay guy bought it, then he goes in the first day and finds somebody in his closet. Be funny if it wasn’t so fucked up.”

“Jesus.” I took a piece of candy from a dish on Wagner’s desk. Must be the case Radcliff had mentioned.

“Whoever the killer is, he is one vicious fuck,” Wagner said. “He cuts up the brownstone guy, then he locks him in a closet, listens to him yell, waits until he don’t yell no more.”

“How’d you figure that?”

“ME figured it that way. You feel this coulda been some kind of Russki sadist mob muscle? You dealt with creeps like this before, guys who like making people suffer.”

I thought of the last case I had worked, the girl bound head to toe with duct tape and left, still alive, to suffocate. “Yeah,” I said. “The dead guy was white?”

“Right. Then we get the second vic, covered up with earth in a cemetery, paper skewered into his heart-paper you did that translation on-same kind of knife; we had to figure it for the same killer. And both vics was white, and looked Slav,” said Wagner.

“I thought the Russians were in Brooklyn. I thought uptown was all Latino.”

“You and me both,” Wagner said. “I mean, this was close to Washington Heights that once was Russian, right, but now, geez, if we’re getting more of them, that’s gonna be a fucker. I mean, you get Russian gangs and Latino gangs, you get a shit storm. We got the lowest murder rate any place in this city, and this precinct is one of the best, so I could really do without this.” He sneezed, fumbled in his desk for a Kleenex, blew his nose. “Fucking cold,” he said, then hit his head with the flat of his hand. “Shit,” he said. “Oh my God!”

“What?”

“The guy, the suspect I just let go-we held him as long as we could, couldn’t get a thing, nada, nothing on him-we let him go”-he looked at his watch-“ten minutes ago? Fifteen? Around the time you got here. Shit, man, I coulda got you to talk to him in Russian.”

“Big guy? Black jacket? hoodie?”

“You know him?”

“I saw somebody leaving the building while I was waiting for you-he was Russian? I figured he was black,” I said. “I couldn’t see his face.”

“Fuck,” said Wagner. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Everything’s timing.” He groaned. “But, I still don’t think it was him. We grilled him good, he was polite, he talked excellent English, he had a green card, a job downtown in a bank, so not your usual creepola.”

“He had a name?”

Wagner snorted. “Ivan Ivanov. You fucking believe it? But there it was on his driver’s license, social security, the green card, all of it, plus I called his home number and a nice lady answered and said she was his mother. Out in Queens.”

“Right.”

“I mean, so what could I hold him on, Artie? He had a few tats, but I couldn’t hold a guy for some body ink, could I? He didn’t have no dirt on his shoes that matched the cemetery where we found the victim.”

“You got good people working homicide here, Jimmy?”

“Yeah. One of the best there is. Let me see if he’s around.” He left the office. I figured he’d reappear with Radcliff. Instead, Wagner returned and said to me, “Dawes is coming in to say hi.”

“Anybody I ever met?”

“I doubt it. He’s good. Julius Dawes, straight up by the book. Too methodical for some of the younger guys. You know, they watch TV, they want to solve a crime in an hour, not including commercials, so they take stupid chances and then we can’t indict.”

The cop in uniform who had brought me in passed, and Wagner bellowed out, “You got smokes?”

The uniform nodded, went away and returned with a crumpled pack and Jimmy lit up, coughed until I thought he was going to puke his lungs out, then leaned back and took another drag on his cigarette.

“I hate this fucking weather,” he said. “If the snow gets worse, it’ll be bad. We don’t have enough guys, we already got a pileup over on the West Side Highway. No money in the city, more homeless.”

“Listen, Jimmy, I hate to bother you, with everything you got going on, but I was wondering if you knew anything about a building called the Louis Armstrong Apartments. Friend of mine looking at a place there.” It was an easy lie.

“Sure,” said Wagner, then stopped and looked at his office door. “Hey, Dawes, come meet my pal, Artie Cohen,” he said to the middle-aged black detective. Wagner told Dawes I’d done the translation. We shook hands.

“Artie’s been asking about the Armstrong.”

“I can’t stop long,” said Dawes. “Got to get over to my daughter’s place in Riverdale. But what’s your interest in the Armstrong?” he said, putting on his overcoat. Medium height, compact, about fifty, Dawes wore his gray hair short and had a small, trim beard.

“I have a friend who’s thinking of getting a place there.”

“I didn’t think they ever sold those apartments at the Armstrong, unless somebody dies,” said Dawes. “My aunt lived over there for quite a while. Who’s your friend, then, detective?” He was polite but distant. I got the feeling he knew I was lying, or maybe he was just in a hurry.

“Just someone I know,” I said. “Looks like you’re busy.”

“I have to get going now,” Dawes said. “But if I can help you out, Detective Cohen, please be in touch. Tell your friend if they’re thinking of moving in to the Armstrong, make sure they know what they’re doing.”

“How do you mean?”

“Great building. Definitively one of the finest. Built to show off Sugar Hill. But a lot of tension over there, old folks wanting to keep it like it is, younger people wanting to fix it up, raise the maintenance, don’t care about who gets turned out on the street. No reason not to take it if your friend can get in, but just make sure the contract’s solid,” he said. “So, if I can help, you can get my number from Captain Wagner. That your red Caddy outside, by the way?”

“Yes.”

“Nice paint job,” he said, and I suddenly knew Dawes had intended to ask me about the car from the moment he saw me.

“Thanks,” I said, as Dawes took a green peppermint out of the bowl on Wagner’s desk and left the office.

“Man, I wish he wasn’t taking off right now,” said Wagner. “He’s the best I got, but he planned this break with his family for almost nine months, ever since his oldest girl got pregnant.”

“He’s been here a while?”

“Long time. Before me. What’s with this Armstrong business?”

“Just looking for enlightenment.”

“Dawes is your guy. He’s like us; he came up through the ranks. He walked a beat down around 125th Street in the worst fucking times, late eighties, crack fucking dealers in every door. He’s good and he’s straight, and even in the bad times at this house I don’t think he ever took so much as a free cup of coffee from anyone. He’s got cast-iron morality stamped on his soul, that guy.”

“Thanks.”

“So that’s what you wanted, this thing about the Armstrong?” Wagner looked at his watch.

I didn’t move.

“Artie?”

“Yeah?”

“You wanna tell me what this is really about?”