Night Watch

TWENTY-ONE

“It stinks,” I said.

Forty-five minutes later, in jeans and a baseball cap that covered half of my face from the curious eyes of the Harbor Unit cops, Mike and I were walking along the edge of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

“Kind of that dead-rat-on-a-wet-doormat stench, don’t you think? You are so not an outer-boroughs girl, blondie, but it’s good for your soul.”

On the ride over the Brooklyn Bridge, I’d brought Mike up to speed on the difficult day with Blanca Robles. Mercer seemed glad that I was going off with Mike for whatever distraction that offered, and Mike tried to assuage my concerns about the homicide investigation involving the unidentified man floating in the canal last night.

“This place is an environmental disaster. How could it be good for anything?”

“You’re on probation once you leave Manhattan. Don’t piss off the locals.”

The water in the canal was speckled with dark slimy spots. Aside from the usual city trash-broken bottles, used condoms, and empty syringes-there were dead crabs and tiny mollusks lodged in the algae along the canal walls.

“I thought you were off the case once the Homicide Squad picks it up in the morning.”

“You wanted inside information, Coop, so I made myself indispensable.”

I turned to Mike and threw my arms around his neck. “I’m so grateful to you. How’d you do it?”

“Unhook yourself, okay? I hate clingy.”

We continued on the walkway that lined the rotting wooden bulkheads while Mike talked to me. Off to our side was row after row of deserted warehouses, and across the canal were a series of barges and boats secured to the shore.

“First of all, the autopsy result is in on Lisette Honfleur, the dead girl in Mougins.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Try the matchbox in her pocket, for starters.”

“I meant to tell you about that this morning, but-”

“I may administer a little truth serum tonight, in the form of your favorite cocktail, to see what else you’ve held back. I just figured I ought to know if there were any similarities between that killing and my floating Adonis.”

“Lisette’s throat wasn’t slit.”

“Nope. But they’ve labeled it a homicide pending the toxicology results. The docs think she was pretty high-she’s got a long history of drug abuse-tossed in the water by one or two people and held under till she stopped breathing.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m working off the tidbit that the autopsy revealed that she had a Bronx wallet.”

“Filled with-?”

“Enough cocaine wrapped in little plastic baggies to snort her way to heaven with half the people in that quaint French village.”

Some Bronx-based cop had come up with the catchy euphemism for the vaginal vaults of female drug mules who concealed contraband there because they knew that body cavity searches were terrifically unpopular with the courts.

“But your guy didn’t have drugs on him.”

“Like you said to me this morning, it’s strange that he didn’t have anything at all except the matchbox in his pocket. That’s what someone wanted us to find. And that’s what someone wanted us to link to Luc. So I called the team and suggested they use one of the unmanned submersible drones.”

“The whats?”

“You heard me right. Drones. ROVs. Remote-operated vehicles.”

“What happened to police scuba divers?”

“Hey, the only human ballsy enough to go into this creek is Katie Cion,” he said, referring to our favorite Emergency Services detective. “Machines first.”

“Katie would never say no to you.” We were making our way around rusty oil barrels and corroding lengths of pipe. In the distance I could make out the blue-and-white coloring of two of Harbor’s smaller power boats. “How does it work?”

“It’s about so big,” Mike said, holding his hands a foot apart. “The drone weighs sixteen pounds. It’s got lights and sonar and a camera that’s connected to the computer-which is manned on the boat-by an umbilical cord. Color video images get sent back to base. Mostly, the drones are used to sweep the harbor when there’s a suspicious boat under a bridge or a floating package near the Statue of Liberty that might be carrying a bomb. It’s primarily a counterterrorism thing.”

“You think it can see anything in this muck?”

“Of course it can.”

“What did you tell them to look for?” I asked.

Mike ran his fingers through his hair and gave me his best poker face. “They can look for anything they damn well please. I’m just trying to make myself relevant so we get a little feedback on where this investigation is going.”

“Thanks for-”

“Park yourself on a barrel, Coop. Let me see what they’re up to.”

I sat down and scanned the horizon while Mike approached the Harbor team. I knew that some of the areas around the canal had been gentrified in the last five years, and that art galleries and coffeehouses and commercial properties had been installed. But this was one of the sorriest stretches of urban blight imaginable.

After a few minutes of conversation, Mike returned and sat beside me. “The drone is down, and so far, it’s not a pretty sight. Just a lot of sludge, sort of like black mayonnaise.”

“Why did you pick this area as the starting point?”

“The canal’s a bit under two miles long. You got five east-west bridge crossings over it, but they’re too well trafficked to have been the drop-off point. We know where the body was found, and it’s more likely moving in this direction-toward Red Hook and away from Carroll Gardens. It’s rougher this way-fewer people, lots of deserted buildings, more barges in the water. The Harbor guys figure the tides and all that, put it together with the information we gave them, and they make the call where to look.”

“They can’t search the whole thing. It’ll be dark in an hour.”

“The drones don’t know dark, Coop. It’ll be fine.”

“Why does it smell so awful here?”

“Take it back four centuries. Gowanus was the chief of the Canarsie Indian tribe that owned all the land around here-the western tip of Long Island. They sold the land to the Dutch-the earliest recorded property sale among settlers-for a tobacco plantation and mill. Close your eyes and imagine that this was all marshlands and creeks, full of fish and wildlife.”

“And you know this because-?”

“August 27, 1776. The Battle of Brooklyn. First major battle of the American Revolution following the Declaration of Independence. The redcoats forced Washington’s troops to retreat right across the Gowanus Creek. You’re looking at history, kid.”

“Military history, of course. Then how did it get to be so disgusting?”

“Like everything else that came with the other revolution-the industrial one. This spot was the hub of Brooklyn’s navigational business. Some genius decided to drain the marshland and dredge the old creek-deepen it into a canal-so ships could cut right through here to Upper New York Bay.” Mike was using his arms to explain the geography.

“For commercial reasons?”

“Exactly that. Next came the factories and warehouses, gas refineries and tanneries, chemical plants full of pollutants-and all of the sewage flowed right down into the canal. Raw sewage, Coop. That’s what’s blowing up your nostrils.”

A few quick shakes of my head did nothing to relieve the horrible odor.

“C’mon. They’ll give us a call if they come up with anything. I’ll buy you a drink.”

I stood up and gave a last look in the direction of the Harbor Unit crew. Two of the guys were leaning over the sides of the boats, using pool skimmers to pluck things out of the dark water. I turned away and walked with Mike.

“This canal makes a pretty ideal dumping ground,” I said. “You wouldn’t even smell a corpse decomposing.”

“That’s why the mob has used it for most of the last century. Body parts submerged in suitcases, guns buried deep in the mud, wiseguys shot up like Swiss cheese and weighted down with bricks. Legend has it that Al Capone did his first murder right here.”

My head was somewhere else. Luc Rouget had nothing to do with mobsters, and the elegance of his professional lifestyle was the flip side of this dark urban cesspool. I expected he knew no more about its existence than I did.

“I learned another thing about the canal today,” Mike said.

“What’s that?”

“In colonial times, the six-foot tides of the bay forced saltwater into the creek. That gave it the perfect brackish mix that bivalves thrive on. For Dutch farmers living in Brooklyn in the seventeenth century, their largest export item to Europe was Gowanus oysters. Four to six inches long, sweet and succulent as they could be.”

“Out of these waters? Now you’re joking.”

“I have it from an unimpeachable source,” Mike said. “The detective who called Luc asked him if he’d ever heard of the Gowanus Canal, and Luc gave him the backstory on the oysters. Much as I wish he’d never heard of it, he knows all about this place.”