Excerpt from Bronx Angel
In a freak April snowstorm they found the body of an off-duty cop on a Bronx back street, his throat slashed, his pants pulled down to his knees.
He'd been dead for over two hours and I was still crawling in three inches of wet snow on The Cross Bronx Expressway.
"It's four a.m., New York," the radio DJ said, her voice a husky, intimate whisper. "And it's still coming down."
Police Officer Marc Ross had been discovered in his own car, an
alleged prostitute seen fleeing the scene. The key word here was prostitute. The brass at
One Police Plaza wanted the straight story, all the sordid details, undiluted by precinct
loyalty. The NYPD does not bang the drum for all its slain comrades.
"The eighteenth snowstorm of the season," the DJ said. "Are we being punished by God?"
My Honda fishtailed as I swerved around a muffler in the middle
of the exit ramp. I slid through the stop sign sideways and came to a halt in the middle
of Tremont Avenue. Salsa music blared from a corner bar. Not a car in sight. I
turned the
Honda around and made the right onto Boston Road. That's when I saw the crowd.
"Can't be," I said. Not just for a homicide. Not on a night like tonight.
The crowd, mostly women and children, carried flashlights and
food they shared with each other. They were lined up single file, up the entire block,
then around the corner and down into East 179th Street. I stopped at the corner of East
179th, a short dead end, with a steep drop ending at the Bronx River. The Bronx River
flowed south out of the Bronx Zoo and eventually into the East River.
At the bottom of the hill I saw the flash of turret lights; NYPD
cars filled the circle at the end of the cul-de-sac. The roadway was broken and slippery,
the carcass of a dog stuffed in a pothole. Protective metal barriers separated the
pavement from the grassy hill leading down to the river. Grainy shafts of light rose from the river bed below.
The Bronx saddened me. I'd been a rookie cop on the streets of
this brawling borough, and my good memories outweighed the bad. These days, except for the
occasional high profile homicide, the only reason I returned was out of loyalty to the
Yankees. But the Yankees, like many of the cops I'd worked with in the last thirty years,
were in the warm Florida sunshine. And I was in the snow, in the burned-out Bronx with
nobody but myself to blame. Cops like me hang around too long, destined to revisit the past.
I parked behind Joe Gregory's new Thunderbird. Detective Joe
Gregory, my partner off and on for two decades, had come all the way from Brooklyn and
beat me to the scene. But the grim crowd I'd been following didn't stop at the murder
scene. The line stretched along the river bank, into the darkness, well past the last
police car. To them, the cops searching a crime scene were only a curious sideshow, like
jugglers working a theater line. Murder is not a blockbuster event in the Bronx.
The breath of two dozen cops puffed in the frigid air and floated in the glare of floodlights. My brother officers worked quickly. Wet weather erases evidence.
"Detective Ryan, Chief of Detectives Office," I said, showing my shield to a tall, red-haired policewoman at the barriers.
"Hey, Mr. Ryan," she said. "How's it going?"
"Great," I said. "How about you?"
I had no idea who the hell she was. As I worked my way down the
slippery bank I figured I'd probably worked with her father somewhere; an extraordinary
number of sons and daughters of cops were on the job. Her name tag said Antonucci, which didn't ring a bell, but I'd worked with a lot of cops.
At the bottom of the hill, a dark gray BMW sat inside a border of
yellow tape, the front end barely dipping into the icy river. All around the car the
ground had been trampled. Fresh snow fell into a thousand footprints. Inside, slumped over
on the passenger seat, was Police Officer Marc Ross, his jeans and white boxer shorts
pulled down, his shirt dyed crimson. I shaded my eyes from the floodlights as I knelt to look at his butchered throat.
"Jesus Christ," I said.
"No, the Blessed Virgin, you heathen bastard," a
gravelly voice said. My partner, the great Joe Gregory stood with his suit pants rolled
up, ice crystals on the cuffs. "You here for the homicide or the miracle?"
"What miracle?" I said.
"You didn't see the line of people?" he said.
"I saw the line."
"Down the whole goddamn street," he said. "See where the line ends? By the wall there. Look at the spot above all those flashlights. See her?"
"See who?"
"You can't see her? On the rocks? What kind of Catholic are you, you don't know the Mother of God?"
"Where?"
"Look where my finger's pointing," Gregory said. He moved next to me, his bulk blocking the lights.
The wall Gregory pointed to was fifty yards away. It looked like
a stone retaining wall for the bridge over the Bronx River at E. 180th Street. Water
running down the stones had frozen into a mass of icicles forming one large striated
figure, a mass of long vertical lines of ice like the folds of a cloak. The figure was lit
by flashlights held by people who had climbed down to the river bed. Some knelt on the
side of the hill, some knelt in the snow at the river's edge.
"Looks like Lourdes don't it?" Gregory said.
"Looks like a big chunk of ice," I said.
Gregory blessed himself. "City says it ain't from the river; some underground pipes must of busted."
"How long has this been going on?" I said.
"Started last night, according to the Five-One precinct cops."
"Then we must have witnesses."
"We got more freaking witnesses than Carter got liver pills," Gregory said.
Up close I could smell gin on Gregory's breath, his clothes reeked of smoke. I knew he was half drunk.
"Story is this," he said. "Oh-two-hundred hours, BMW stops up there. Driver, this dark-skinned woman, drives around the barriers onto the
grass. Then she gets out, reaches in, releases the brake. Car rolls straight down here.
Nobody saw the body till some kids started to strip the car." Gregory rocked back on
his heels, then steadied himself as if on a balance beam only he could see. "Cops'
name is Marc Ross. Uniform cop. Three years on the job. Works in the precinct combat car.
Three man car, supposed to make the drug problem go away."
"Married?"
"No, thank God. I wouldn't want to explain this one to a wife. Works steady six to twos. Off Sundays and Mondays."
"He was off tonight then. What was he doing here?"
"Beats the shit out of me, pally. They say he's a musician. Moonlights in some band in Manhattan on Sunday nights. His trumpet is in the trunk."
"Maybe he met this woman there?"
"The squad thinks it's a hooker murder," he said. "I think they got another think coming."
"Why would she drive him here and dump the car with all these witnesses?"
"They're saying she didn't know the church crowd was here.
She drives in, sees the crowd. Surprise Surprise! She panics, dumps the car. Personally, I think that's a crock a shit."
"You're thinking she wanted it to look like a hooker ripoff."
"Actually, yeah," he said. "I'm betting it's a girlfriend, a barmaid, someone he knew. That's my take, but I'm in the minority."
A makeshift canvas covering had been constructed over the dark
gray sedan. We stood out of the weather as the tech man, using curving strokes, dusted the
roof with the fine, sooty black powder. If the car had been any darker he would have
needed a silver or white powder, for contrast. Every few strokes he'd step back to see if
any powder had stuck to the grease left by a human hand. If a print was found, he would
photograph it, then lift it, with simple, transparent tape and place it on an index card.
"After she dumped the car," I said, "where did this mystery woman go?"
"Walked away. Up the hill, then towards Tremont."
"Just walked away?"
"Affirmative. Cool as ice."
"Description?"
"Dark-skinned Hispanic. Slender build. Five foot to five four. Black hair, styled big. Black coat, red dress, red shoes, white gloves."
"White gloves in this weather? Sounds like your date book."
"I don't know from gloves," he said. "But slender ain't my style. I still
like 'em zaftig. Meat on the bone."
"So what do you think?" I said.
"Blowjob that went very wrong," Gregory said. "Ended up a slice and dice."
"No possible way it could be a hooker robbery?"
"Guaranteed," he said. "The only thing missing,
far as the squad can determine, is his gun. Holster's empty. But she left his watch. Not a
Rolex, but not a cheapo. Two rings, wallet, credit cards, about seventy bucks in cash."
"Maybe she saw the crowd and panicked, forgot the money."
"Hookers don't forget the money, pally."
Officer Marc Ross had been cut very deeply, an artery perhaps.
Blood had pooled on the passenger seat beneath him and dyed the leather a dark red. But
the driver's side was also brushed with blood. Wide red streaks slashed across the
driver's side door, the steering wheel and center console. Marc Ross had probably been
slashed as he sat in the driver's seat, then moved to the passenger seat.
"Pretty strong woman," I said. "To pull him over the console."
"He ain't a big guy. Looks like he only goes about one-fifty. Lot of women could handle one-fifty, easy."
"Not dead weight," I said. "Not easily. Tell me this, if it was a girlfriend, why didn't she leave him where she killed him and run?"
"Because she iced him near where she lived. Maybe in the
parking lot of a bar where she worked." Gregory pointed to the body with a crooked
index finger, yellowed from nicotine. "Look at the wound," he said. "All
that ripping and gouging. Classic overkill. My money says this is personal. We got an adrenalin factor working here."
"Who caught the case?" I asked.
"The Ivy League detective over there with the shit-eating
grin." Gregory pointed to a young, balding guy smoking a pipe. "Asshole rookie third grader. Wouldn't make a pimple on a real cop's ass."
Sergeant Neville Drumm was talking Ivy League through the search.
Sergeant Drumm had been the squad commander when I was in the precinct. His hair, now
completely white, gave him the look of a kindly plantation butler in an old civil war movie.
"Anyone talk to his partner?" I said.
"Partners," Gregory said. "Three men, remember? POs Verdi and Guidice.
"Not Sonny Guidice?"
"One and the same," Gregory said. "He just arrived, some blonde on his arm."
I hadn't seen Sonny Guidice since I left the precinct twenty years earlier. Not that I gave a shit. He was in civilian clothes, standing in a circle of
young uniformed cops, his arm around a woman. A very young, very blonde woman, her eyebrows so white and thick it looked like snow clinging to a ledge.
"Drumm says he'll interview Sonny and the other guy," Gregory said.
"Suits me."
Sonny Guidice had small black eyes, puffy cheeks, and pointy
features made him look like an overweight rodent. He'd arrived in the precinct from the
academy shortly before I left. He shot and killed a seven year old boy, Martin Luther
Hopkins, in the bedroom of apartment 4C of 1645 Bathgate Ave, at five minutes after six on
a warm evening, June 23, 1968. The Grand Jury declared it to be accidental. I was a witness.
"Where the hell were you tonight?" I whispered to Gregory.
"Auto Crime retirement racket out in Flushing. I told you I was going. I just got home, the chief calls. What'm I supposed to say: 'sorry Chief, I'm shitfaced?'"
I stepped back away from him. No need to whisper. The precinct detectives were giving us a wide berth, pissed off because we were "Downtown" invading their turf.
"I grabbed two coffees on the way," Gregory said. "What can I say? I ain't ready to do brain surgery, but I can sleep walk through this scene."
"What makes you think the woman was Hispanic?" I said.
"Not me." He pointed up at the line. "That's what Ivy League tells me the people say. Personally, I don't think he could find a brother in Harlem.
These cops today, I'm telling you, we're in deep shit."
"Looks like everything is under control to me."
I climbed back up the hill. Within a few minutes I found an
interpreter: a friendly, bilingual woman dressed in an Air Force parka. We started working
the line. It didn't take long to confirm the old truth that too many witnesses were worse
than none. The kids knew all about the car, the model, year and accessories. The women
noticed her clothes and hair. They all thought the hair was a wig. The dress was red, the
gloves were long, white gloves, spotted with blood. She walked away carrying a black coat.
But the more I asked, the more the range of age, complexion, height, and weight increased.
It was near dawn when the Crime Scene Unit finished and began
lugging gear up the hill. Morgue attendants yanked the body out of the car. The smell of
burning tires wafted from the junkyards of Hunts Point. Gregory scrambled up the slippery bank, burly and agile as a Grizzly Bear.
"For the sake of argument," I said. "Let's say our
killer chose this location purposely for the presence of the Blessed Virgin. Who are we after now?"
Gregory was breathing hard as we walked to our cars. Down the
block, women were lighting rows of candles set in paper bags, creating a fiery path to the vision.
"A whore, an angel," he said. "It don't freaking matter, pally. Either way we're looking for a psycho."
Please report any technical problems to the webmaster.
Copyright 2000-2008 Edward Dee
To order books from Amazon.com, please click on these links:
The Con Man's Daughter
Nightbird
Little Boy Blue
Bronx Angel
14 Peck Slip
| 
