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.”