Blood Count

CHAPTER 35

H e was pushed,” said Virgil, trying the door to the Hutchison apartment.

“I thought that, but tell me how you figure it?”

“You were with Wagner, I was talking to the ME, and she was saying it looked to her like Hutchison hit the ground from someplace high up, you heard that, right? So I get to thinking, Artie, since you’re asking, I mean how’s he going to just fall?” He got some keys from his pocket.

“Where’d you get those?”

“I sweet-talked Mr. Diaz,” said Virgil, opening the door.

“Let’s go. I want a good look before the rest of them get here.”

“Right,” said Virgil, pushing open the door.

“Jesus.”

“What’s that, Artie?” Virgil flipped on a light in the hall of the apartment, surveying the room.

“He went up there a lot to smoke, right? Maybe something happened. His wife didn’t like him going up there. They played this game that she locked him in the apartment. What do you think her game really was?”

“Humiliation.”

“Right. Yeah.”

“What did Wagner mean when he said ‘tomorrow’?” asked Virgil.

“Wagner wants this, whatever it is, wrapped by tomorrow. Says on Monday people will start to make noise, officials, people who want a piece of the publicity.”

“What else?”

“Says he’ll be glad when Dawes is back. I met him over at your station house.”

Virgil was silent.

“Wagner told me Dawes was your partner.”

“We split up. He didn’t like the way I do things, he thought I was some kind of loose cannon,” said Virgil. “Don’t get me wrong; Dawes is a good man, but it’s like working for your censorious uncle,” he added. “Listen, Artie, maybe Lionel could have had a heart attack and then fallen?” He had changed the subject.

“He was healthy as a horse. He told me he swam off Coney Island every winter.”

“Told me, too.”

“Listen, Virgil, you OK here by yourself for a couple minutes?”

“Sure.”

“See if you can find any of Hutchison’s notes. He kept a little notebook, maybe he wrote stuff down about people he treated,” I said. “Or helped.”

“You talking about his interest in euthanasia? I’d want my grandparents to go out easy,” Virgil said. “Wouldn’t you, Artie?”

I thought about my mother.

“I guess. Anyway, see if you can find the fucking dog too; maybe it crawled under something and fell asleep. This apartment has about nine rooms, from what I saw. I’m going on the roof.”

“What for?”

“Can you just do this? We only have twenty minutes until there’s cops all over this place.”

“Be careful up there.”

The wind whipped at my face. There was snow on the roof. The sun was coming up, and the sky was bright and slashed with color.

There were footprints in the snow that led from the door to the low brick wall.

Had Lionel come up here to smoke again? Had somebody else been here? Somebody who had pushed him? The footprints looked fresh, but it was hard to tell.

From the street I heard the sirens. From somewhere on the roof came the banging of a radiator, a generator, the noisy innards of an ancient building. The wind howled.

At the edge of the roof was the plastic sheet I’d seen the day before, some cans of paint, a ladder. The wall here was broken, and I could look over and see the cracked back of one of the stone figures-a gargoyle-that faced the street.

In spite of the fancy marble fireplace in the lobby, the high ceiling, the old chandeliers, restored now, the doormen in their caps with the gold braid, this was no fairy-tale castle on a hill. It had, like most of the great old buildings in the city, a secret life, all the histories buried in the apartments, in the basement rooms, in the people who had lived here on and on for decades.

A building was like a village, enclosed, wrapped up in its own life, with its own class system and a ruling caste-the co-op board. These were people who had power-it might be power to decide who got in, or just what kind of decorations went on the Christmas tree.

I had once worked a case where potential owners were so desperate to get into a co-op, they had their dogs’ voice boxes removed so they wouldn’t bark. Couldn’t get into a good co-op if your dog was noisy. I had worked another co-op downtown on Eleventh Street where one owner hated the color of paint in the lobby so much that, after a lot of martinis, he went for the board president with a sushi knife. Cut the tip of his nose off.

Easy at the Armstrong to get people talking, kids, old people, guys working around the place, guests at the party the night before. It was a talkative group, and they talked about the building, the Armstrong, its past, its problems, its glories. It was one of the building pastimes, like villagers in Russia might talk about the potato crop.

What I’d found out was that the Armstrong had fallen on bad times in the fifties and sixties. The landlord let it go, didn’t pay taxes or fix the plumbing, so the city took it over. Bad times-heroin, cocaine, Harlem in the toilet. Then in the eighties, the tenants go it together to take it back, formed their own co-operative, kept the maintenance prices same as their rentals had been. Low.

So people stayed on. Some had been here sixty years. A few new people bought in when there were apartments on the market-usually when somebody died. I figured what Carver wanted was to turn it around, make it into the usual kind of New York City co-op-fix it up, raise the maintenance from five hundred to five thousand. Sell off the apartments that were empty. He’d been buying them up, warehousing them. Telling people he’d buy them out.

He got himself on the co-op board, became its president, the rest of the members are his people. I’d heard one old man say at the party the night before, “Lennox says it’s to restore the Armstrong to its former grandeur, the glory days, but if it happens, the residents will just get moved on. Lennox? That fellow just waiting for us to die.”

I went to the other side of the roof. When I leaned out, I was right over the back lot where I’d found Hutchison’s body. There were still a few cops, but the ambulance had gone. I leaned out as far as I could, lost my footing, and gasped for breath.

For a split second I felt myself dangle in the cold space, the wind pushing at me; for a second I wondered if someone had pushed me from behind, or if it was an accident.

A voice from behind startled me, and I crashed back onto the roof, my foot twisted under me. Pain rattled my brain.

“Jesus, man, you OK?” A hand reached down to help me. It was Carver Lennox.

I stumbled to my feet. He asked if I wanted a doctor. I said I was OK and hobbled a couple of feet back from the edge of the roof.

“You almost killed yourself-you sure you’re OK? I could call somebody.”

I said I was fine. I asked if he’d talked to Mrs. Hutchison, and he said he’d called her over at her sister’s, but the sister said she wasn’t there, and was trying to find her. The sister thought she might be at church but wasn’t sure if she was attending her usual Catholic mass or was over at the Abyssinian Baptist, where she sometimes went with a friend.

“I want to tell her about Lionel myself,” he said. “I want to be with her. She’s going to take this hard, you know; I mean, fifty, sixty years or something like that, they were married. You have anything at all on this? I talked to Captain Wagner, but he didn’t have any idea. He said you and Radcliff are working it.” Lennox looked at me. “How the fuck did Lionel fall? Celestina used to tell me she locked him in because he walked in his sleep.”

“She has quite a few stories.”

“Yes, and I never got the impression Lionel Hutchison listened to anything she said; he just humored her.”

I headed for the door and he followed, not touching me, but holding an arm out as if to catch me in case I fell. My ankle was throbbing like somebody had stuck it with nails. Lennox opened the door to the stairs and held it for me.

“You were close to them, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you wanted them to stay here.”

“Of course,” he said. “Even though Celestina never stopped telling me she wanted to sell-even last night at the party. She wanted to go somewhere warm.”

“I thought you were anxious to get hold of the apartments.”

“You think I’d just buy them out and not help them? I’ve offered to re-house all of them, anywhere they like-brand-new apartments in midtown so they can go hear music or go to the theater, or in lovely assisted-living facilities up in Westchester, or Queens, just a stone’s throw from here, lovely gardens. Many have already told me they’d like to move somewhere warm-Hawaii, the islands. I can enable that. Did you think I would just kick them out into the street?” he said. “Well, how would that look to prospective buyers? As for the Hutchisons, I told Celestina I’d be real sad if they were to go. They’re part of the history. I see this building as a fusion of past and future.”

“I see,” I said, walking painfully down the stairs from the roof.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“What about Simonova? Was she was part of your glorious plan?”

Lennox didn’t answer, not until we got to the fourteenth floor. In the light of the hallway I saw his face, saw a change in his expression.

“You were saying. About Simonova?” I looked at him.

“I wasn’t saying anything.” He removed his thick tweed coat and looked at it. “Where did I get this old thing? I can’t remember.”

“You didn’t like Simonova, did you?”

“I didn’t have a view about Marianna Simonova,” he said, and I knew he was lying. “She was a little crazy, but she was part of the Armstrong family, so attention was paid. I’ll go to Celestina now.”

“What the hell were you doing on the roof, by the way?” I said.

“Saving your ass, it looks like,” said Lennox, and hurried into his apartment.

Carver Lennox was fucked up over Hutchison’s death, but it felt like grief he might have borrowed from some TV talk show, public grief, standard cliches. What really worried him, was that the death would give the building a bad rep.

Or maybe I was wrong. There were things about Lennox I didn’t get. I had met guys like him, bankers, lawyers, hedge-fund guys on the make, had met them in restaurants, at parties. But Lennox was black. There weren’t a lot of black guys like him on Wall Street, and I wasn’t sure I’d read him right.

There was plenty I didn’t understand about the building, too, about what I’d seen and heard: the decent old doctor, as limber and healthy as somebody twenty years younger, who believed in euthanasia, was sharp as hell, talked about status and light skin and dark, laughed about New Harlem, had loved Marianna Simonova; the African woman who thought the place was haunted by evil spirits in the shape of black dogs; Celestina Hutchison’s bitterness; the stiff-necked Dr. Bernard; Virgil Radcliff, the young detective who didn’t play by the book, whose father looked like a white man.

It was more than that. I was a white cop in a black neighborhood-I had felt the tensions between Jimmy Wagner and his black detectives. I was an outsider. For all my love of black music, I didn’t belong. I should have been used to it. I’d been an outsider as a kid at school in Moscow, a nonbeliever, with a mother who became a refusenik and a father who was kicked out of the KGB; I’d been an outsider in Israel, where I spent most of my time hanging with peaceniks or Arab kids or lolling on the beach with sexy Sabra drop-outs, girls who liked smoking dope better than fighting wars.

New York, too, those first years, when I still had an accent, and got lost in the subway, and later at the academy, where I tried to be a tough cop.

Finally, I had found a place I could belong. When I lost my accent, ditched my past, became a real New Yorker, it seemed right. For a long time now, I’d been at home here, along with all the millions of foreigners and outsiders.

But now, I felt it again, that disconnect, the sense of being on the outside that made me wonder if I understood anything.

Am I getting anything right? I kept thinking. Is it just I’m so focused on Lily, or did the beating I got in the storage room fuck me up in some way I couldn’t determine? Was I tone deaf in a different country? A code I couldn’t quite catch, or hear, or translate? I thought of the bebop guys back when they invented music so fast, so complex, almost nobody got it at first, and how, in a sense, they did it to outfox whitey.

In the Soviet Union, we had done the same thing, though without the genius. Ways of dealing with the system. You left home, you stepped out the door, you took on a different role-at school, at work, any place where you pretended to listen, pretended to follow the party line, at least until you got home where you could take off your mask, sit at the kitchen table, curse the bosses.

Maybe it had always been that way in Harlem, for black people. Maybe it still was. Maybe no matter if you were a doctor or a teacher, you had to toe the line when you were outside, when you went to work or school in white America, or were confronted with white people, cops especially. Were you always somebody else? Even in 2008? Even after Obama’s election, after that one dazzling night in November?

Did Carver Lennox feel that I threatened his empire? When he’d suddenly come up behind me on the roof, had he been planning to help me, or push me over?