Yates doesn’t reply to my request, but apparently he listens. The car slows to double the speed limit, and there’s less screeching around the corners. When we finally pull up in front of a redbrick six-floor walk-up and park behind the two double-parked squad cars, half my iced coffee is still in my cup.
“Smooth enough for you, gramps?”
When we reach the fourth floor, everyone is already here-Heekin from Forensics, Nicolo and Hart from Homicide, and the street cop who broke down the door after a neighbor alerted the super to the funky smell inside.
But except for the guys in white gloves dusting the doorknobs, faucets, light switches, and window, everyone’s been waiting for me to get here and see the scene as it was found.
No one’s touched the teenage brother half lying, half sitting on the bed. Judging by the smell and the pallor and the chunk a rat gnawed off his big toe, I’d say the kid’s been dead about a week.
“TV on when you got here?” I ask.
“Yup,” says Hart, the younger of the two homicide detectives and a bit of a kiss-ass. “Same volume. Same channel. No one touched a thing, Connie.”
Blaring away on the tube is one of those stand-up comedian shows. Right now some skinny black female comic is riffing about large black women, and Heekin seems to think it’s hysterical.
“We catch you at a bad time, Jimmyboy? Because if we did, we can reschedule.”
“That’s okay, Chief.”
“You sure? Girlfriend’s pretty damn funny. I mean, she’s killing our friend over here.”
I get one of the guys from Forensics to dust the TV remote for prints so we can turn the set off and I can ask the question of the hour.
“So who is this poor, unfortunate deceased individual?”
Chapter 37. Raiborne
THERE ARE THREE characteristics I find particularly endearing in a friend or coworker-a deep and dependable level of misery, male-pattern baldness, and a sexually stingy wife. Again, maybe all these traits work together, but that doesn’t make them any less likable, and my favorite medical examiner, Clifford Krauss, bless his heart, has all three.
Because of all his winning qualities, it doesn’t bother me in the least that Krauss, who took over the morgue nine years ago, one year after I made chief of Homicide, is two or three times better at his job than anyone else in the Seventeenth. And he definitely knows it.
By now we all know that the kid stretched out on his back on the metal gurney in the morgue is Michael Walker, seventeen, from Bridgehampton, Long Island, and one of the kids wanted in connection with three East Hampton homicides. Till this morning I didn’t even know there were black people in the Hamptons, let alone triple homicides. But hey, I’m just a street cop from Bed-Stuy.
When I walk in, Krauss is at his desk in front of his laptop. He cups one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and says, “ Suffolk County coroner.”
“They just went through my report,” he says after hanging up, “and are pretty sure that the same gun that killed Walker was also used in the three Hampton homicides on Labor Day weekend.”
Then Krauss grabs his long yellow pad, comes over to where I’m standing next to Walker, and, wielding a stained Hunan Village chopstick for a pointer, takes me on a dead man’s tour.
The crispness and intensity of Krauss’s delivery hasn’t softened in nine years, and if anything, his enthusiasm for gleaning secrets from a corpse has only increased. He starts with the exact size and location of the entrance and exit wounds, and the angle at which the bullet traveled. Reading from his notes, he describes the caliber, make, and casing of the bullet picked out of the plaster from behind the bed, and says all three are consistent with the weapon and silencer recovered by police in Long Island.
“I put the time of death at early in the morning of September eleventh,” he says, “very early in the morning, approximately four a.m.”
“Approximately?”
“Yeah,” says Krauss, with a twinkle in his eyes. “Could have been four thirty. All his blood work and the amount of dilation of his pupils indicate someone who’d been in a deep sleep right up to the moment he was shot.”
“Hell of a way to wake up,” I say.
“I’d prefer a kiss from J-Lo,” says Krauss.
“So Walker wasn’t the one watching the tube?”
“Not unless he left it on.”
“Also, we found a basketball cap on the floor of the closet, where it looked like someone was searching for something. The hat’s barely been worn and is about three sizes too big for this guy here.”
“Isn’t that how they wear everything now?”
“Jeans, coats, sweatshirts, but not hats. And none of Mr. Walker’s prints are on it. Maybe if we’re really lucky, it was left by the shooter.
“That’s all you got for me, Cliffy?”
“One last thing. The rat who snacked on Walker ’s big toe-a black Norwegian, four to six pounds, female, pregnant.”
“Why’s it always got to be a black rat, Krauss? Why never a white one?”
One thing, just for the record. That description of Cliffy’s wife-pure bullshit. Her name is Emily, and she’s a sweetheart.
Chapter 38. Marie Scott
LAST WEEK THIS very same Riverhead courtroom was filled with a sickening indifference. It is even worse now. It turns my stomach inside out.
Today the room’s bursting with reporters, family and friends of the victims, and, more than anything else, a lust for blood. The parents of the three dead boys stare at me with powerful hatred, and Lucinda Walker, Michael’s mom, who I’ve known since she was a grade-school student at Saint Vincent ’s, looks at me as if she doesn’t know what to think. I feel so bad for Lucinda. I cried for her last night. Deep down she must realize Dante would no more kill Michael than Michael would kill Dante, but there’s so much hurt in her eyes that I look away and squeeze Clarence’s arm and rub the embossed leather cover of my Bible.
The spectators crane their necks and gawk as my grandson Dante, in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit, is led to that bare table with nothing but a water pitcher in the middle of it. They stir with anticipation or whatever as a booming voice intones, “The State of New York versus Dante Halleyville” as if it were the ring announcement before a disgusting boxing match. Dante looks so scared and sad up there it breaks my heart. I need to go and hug him but I can’t, and that makes me feel almost as bad.
The electricity builds as the judge leans into his microphone and says, “The state of New York charges Mr. Halleyville with a fourth count of first-degree murder.” Then the judge asks, “How does the defendant plead?”
Dante’s court lawyer says, “Not guilty.” But it’s as if he has said nothing at all. No one seems to believe him, or even listen to the man. Until this very moment, I don’t think I believed that a trial could ever really happen, but now I know it can.
The crowd’s only interest is the district attorney, and now that white man, so young he can’t possibly understand what he’s saying, so forgive him, Lord, addresses the judge.
“Your Honor,” he says, “in light of the heinous nature of the original crimes and the wanton disregard the defendant displayed in executing his accomplice, just as he did in the first three execution-style murders, the state of New York has no choice but to seek the ultimate penalty available to defend its citizens. In this case, the prosecution takes the extraordinary step of seeking the death penalty.”
I nearly collapse, but I won’t let myself fall in front of all these people. The state of New York wants to murder my grandson! Lord, it’s as simple as that. The state wants to murder my miraculous grandson who is as innocent as your own son, Jesus Christ, and the crowd thrills, THRILLS, to these terrible words. If they could, or if it were fifty years ago, they’d surely drag Dante from his chair and pull him out of this so-called courtroom and hang him from the nearest tree.