“We can subpoena you before a grand jury,” Carella said, figuring if the ploy had worked at least a thousand times before, it might work yet another time.
“So subpoena me,” Lonnie said.
When Brown went out back to where the precinct’s vehicles were parked, he was surprised first to see that it was the same rotten decrepit automobile they’d pulled last Saturday night, and next to see Kling on his hands and knees in the back seat.
“I told them I didn’t want this car again,” he said to Kling’s back. “What are you doing?”
“Here it is,” Kling said.
“Here’s what?”
“Eileen’s earring,” he said, and held up a small gold circle.
Brown nodded. “You want to drive?” he asked. “I hate this car.”
“Sure,” Kling said.
He put the earring in his coat pocket, dusted off the knees of his trousers, and then climbed in behind the wheel. Brown got in beside him on the passenger side. “This door doesn’t close right,” he said, slamming and reslamming the door until it seemed at last to fit properly into the frame. He turned on the heater at once. The heater began rattling and clanging. “Terrific,” he said. “Where we headed?”
“Diamondback,” Kling said, and started the car.
“Terrific,” Brown said.
A police department adage maintained that the best time and place to get killed in this city was at 12:00 midnight on a Saturday in the middle of August on the corner of Landis Avenue and Porter Street. Brown and Kling were happy that they reached that particular corner at 12:00 noon on a freezing day in February, but they weren’t particularly delighted to be in Diamondback at all. Brown appreciated their destination even less than did Kling. Diamondback, in the 83rd Precinct, was almost exclusively black, and many of the residents here felt that a black cop was the worst kind of cop in the world. Even the honest citizens up here — and they far outnumbered the pimps, pushers, junkies, armed robbers, burglars, hookers, and assorted petty thieves — felt that if you had any kind of law trouble it was better to go to Whitey than to one of your own brothers. A black cop was like a reformed hooker who’d gone tight and dry.
“What’s this kid’s name?” Brown asked.
“Andrew Fleet,” Kling said.
“White or black?”
“Black,” Kling said.
“Terrific,” Brown said.
The last known address for Fleet was in a row of grimy tenements on St. Sebastian Avenue, which started at the eastern end of Grover Park, and then ran diagonally northward and eastward for a total of thirteen blocks between Landis and Isola avenues, to become — inexplicably — another thoroughfare named Adams Street, presumably after the second president of the United States, or perhaps even the sixth. St. Sab’s, as it was familiarly called by everyone in the neighborhood, looked particularly dismal that Tuesday afternoon. You could always tell a neighborhood of poor people in this city because the streets were always the last to be plowed and sanded, and the garbage, especially in bad weather, was allowed to pile up indefinitely, presumably as an inducement to free enterprise among the rat population. It was not unusual in Diamondback to see rats the size of alley cats striding boldly across an avenue at high noon. It was ten minutes past 12:00 when Kling pulled up alongside a snowbank outside Fleet’s building. There was not a rat in sight, but all the garbage cans along the street were overflowing, and the sidewalks were cluttered with the loose debris of urban waste, much of it frozen into the icy pavement. Up here, people didn’t use plastic garbage bags. Plastic garbage bags cost money.
Two old black men were standing around a fire in a sawed-off gasoline drum, warming their hands as Brown and Kling approached the front stoop of the building. The men knew immediately that Brown and Kling were detectives. There’s a smell. Brown and Kling knew immediately that the men around the gasoline drum knew immediately they were detectives. There’s a symbiosis. The two men didn’t even look up at Brown and Kling as they climbed the front steps. Brown and Kling didn’t look at the two men. The unspoken rule was that if you hadn’t done anything wrong, you had no bona fide business with each other.
In the small vestibule, they checked the mailboxes. Only two of them had nameplates.
“Have we got an apartment for him?” Brown asked.
“3-B,” Kling said.
The lock on the inner vestibule door was broken. Naturally. The socket hanging from the ceiling just inside the door had no lightbulb in it. Naturally. The hallway was dark and the steps leading upstairs were darker, and there was the aggressive aroma of tight cramped living, a presence as tangible as the brick walls of the building.
“Shoulda taken a flash from the car,” Brown said.
“Yeah,” Kling said.
They climbed the steps to the third floor.
They listened outside the door to Fleet’s apartment.
Nothing.
They listened some more.
Still nothing.
Brown knocked.
“Johnny?” a voice said.
“Police,” Brown said.
“Oh.”
“Open it up,” Brown said.
“Sure, just a second.”
Brown looked at Kling. Both men shrugged. They heard footsteps inside, approaching the door. They heard someone fumbling with a night chain. They heard the tumblers of a lock falling. The door opened. A thin young black man wearing blue jeans and a tan V-necked sweater over a white undershirt stood in the doorframe, peering out into the hallway.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Andrew Fleet?” Brown said, and showed him his shield and ID card.
“Yeah?”
“Are you Andrew Fleet?”
“Yeah?”
“Few questions we’d like to ask you. Okay to come in?”
“Well, uh, sure,” Fleet said, and glanced past them toward the stairwell.
“Or were you expecting somebody?” Kling asked at once.
“No, no, come on in.”
He stepped aside to allow them entrance. They were standing in a small kitchen. A single ice-rimed window opened onto the brick wall of the tenement opposite. There were dirty dishes stacked in the sink. An empty wine bottle was on the small table. A clothesline was stretched across the room from one wall to the wall opposite. A single pair of Jockey shorts was draped over the line.
“It’s a little chilly in here,” Fleet said. “The heat’s slow coming up today. We already called the Ombudsman’s Office.”
“Who’s we?” Brown asked.
“A guy on the tenants’ committee.”
Through an open door off the kitchen, they could see an unmade bed. The floor around the bed was heaped with dirty clothes. On the wall over the bed, there was a framed picture of Jesus Christ with his hand hovering in blessing over his exposed and bleeding heart.
“You live here alone?” Brown asked.
“Yes, sir,” Fleet said.
“Just these two rooms?”
“Yes, sir.”
He was suddenly all “sirs”; the formality was not lost on the two detectives. A glance passed between them. They were both wondering what he was afraid of.
“Okay to ask you a few questions?” Brown said.
“Sure. But... uh... you know, like you said, I was kind of expecting someone.”
“Who?” Kling said. “Johnny?”
“Well, yeah, actually.”
“Who’s Johnny?”
“A friend.”
“You still doing heroin?” Brown asked.
“No, no. Who told you that?”
“Your record, for one thing,” Kling said.
“I ain’t got a record. I never done time in my life.”
“Nobody said you did time.”
“You were arrested last July,” Brown said. “Charged with Rob One.”