Pigtown Read online

  A beautiful black woman in her early thirties, wearing an open lab coat over a pleated beige skirt and black sweater, was sitting at one of the counters examining a fingerprint through a linen tester. A gold ankh cross hung around her neck.

  “Della, this is Lieutenant Matt Stuart from the Seven One Squad,” Manning said. “Matt, this is Detective Della Johnston, our resident expert on lifting prints off aluminum.”

  She smiled at Stuart. “Hi, Lou.”

  Manning handed her the evidence bag. “Do me a favor and see if you can lift anything off the foil.”

  She slid off the stool and signed the evidence into the property log. After concluding the official entry, she took the bag containing the burrito out of the envelope and placed it on the counter. Using a slender probe with scissor grips and a flat clamp end, she tweezed the burrito out of the plastic Ziploc bag. She placed it down on a big piece of filter paper on the counter and, using toothpicks, gingerly moved the tapered slivers of wood along the foil’s folds, unwrapping the sleeve just enough to be able to slide out the sandwich. With exaggerated delicacy, she pinched the end of the burrito with the probe and slid it out of its aluminum sleeve. Then she took the forceps and placed the remainder of the burrito on another piece of paper.

  Stuart glanced out the window. The Horace Greeley monument in front of the surrogate court was white with bird droppings. The afternoon sun softened the edges of City Hall and the Woolworth Building in a warm golden haze.

  Della went over to the row of supply lockers, opened the one second from the left, and came back with a handful of green-and-white capsules containing tubes of Krazy Glue. She unscrewed a capsule and shook out the tube and the green-crowned piercing needle. After unscrewing the cap, she pierced the tube’s seal and squeezed the glue into a beaker. After doing that to the remaining tubes, she slid the beaker onto one of the Bunsen burners.

  Stuart watched as the hot blue flame melted the clear glue into liquid. Della tugged on a baking mitt, took the beaker off the Bunsen burner, and poured the liquid into an atomizer. Next she picked up a ruler off the counter and inserted it inside the foil sleeve. Holding the ruler out in front of her, she carefully sprayed the liquid glue over the aluminum sheet.

  Leaning in close to Matt Stuart, Manning confided, “We discovered that liquid Krazy Glue sticks to fingerprint oil.”

  After spraying the sheet, Della brought the foil over to the metallurgical oven and opened the hatch. She stuck her hand inside the oven and inserted the sleeve of aluminum onto a porcelain rod protruding up from the oven’s floor. She closed the hatch and turned two dials.

  After about five minutes, she turned off the oven and opened the hatch. The liquid glue had oxidized into gray ash adhering to the friction ridges of three fingers—two whorls and one loop.

  “Now what?” Stuart asked Manning.

  Manning said, “Now we use enhanced imagery to develop a photograph of the fingerprints, and then we go visit my friend AFIS to find out who those prints belong to.”

  “How long is that going to take?” Stuart asked, watching Della carry over a tripod-mounted camera with a long, bulbous lens.

  “About thirty minutes to develop a photograph,” Della said.

  “I have to go to Personnel. I’ll be back in a half hour,” Stuart said.

  One of the responsibilities charged by the NYPD’s Organizational Guide to the commanding officer, Personnel Bureau is to establish and maintain standards of performance, accountability, and productivity for operational and supervisory personnel. In order to fulfill this duty, CO Personnel maintains the “Fucked File,” or “F File,” as it is sometimes referred to. These folders contain unsubstantiated allegations of misconduct, gossip, rumors, and hearsay against members of the service. Before any member is transferred or promoted, an official round-robin is made through the various Internal Affairs and Intelligence units within the Job, searching out any derogatory information against the member concerned. The F File is always consulted unofficially and in person by an authorized member above the rank of sergeant. Only the CO Personnel has the authority to add to or excise information from the F File, and this access makes CO Personnel a feared and powerful member of the Palace Guard elite.

  Stuart stepped off the elevator on the twelfth floor, wondering what kind of reception he was going to get from the Ice Maiden: would he be “Matt” or “Lieutenant”?

  The Personnel Bureau had many rows of desks, each of which had a civilian sitting in front of a computer terminal. Stuart stopped at one desk at the end of the wide aisle and said to the secretary, “I’m Lieutenant Matt Stuart from the Seven One Squad. I’d like to see Inspector Albrecht.”

  Without looking up at him, the fat lady asked, in the chiding tone of a civilian used to working for a powerhouse, “Do you have an appointment to see the inspector?”

  “No, I don’t. But I’d suggest you get on the horn and tell your boss I’m waiting. I don’t have the time to play mind games with you.”

  She looked up at him, chastened, dialed her boss, spoke softly, and then, slipping the receiver back, said, “Go right in, Lieutenant.”

  Inspector Suzanne Albrecht’s name had never appeared in the F File because she had gone to great lengths during her twenty-three-year career to keep her personal life personal. At forty-three she had never married, never received personal phone calls at work, never gone to department social functions, never joined any of the Job’s religious or fraternal organizations, had gotten her promotions based solely on merit and hard work, and had never, as far as anyone in the Job knew, gone to bed with anyone in the department. The opinion in the Big Building was evenly split as to whether she was asexual or gay. Her nickname, the Ice Maiden, had come about because of her officious school-marm exterior, her anonymous, if existent, sex life—and because, by not revealing herself, Suzanne Albrecht had made men wonder what she had locked up inside.

  Stuart knocked and walked into the glass cubicle that was her office. She was standing by her desk, reading a report. She wore a pin-striped business suit and a strand of pearls. Her high-necked blouse was buttoned to the top and had a lace collar and cuffs. Watching her reading through ugly oversize eyeglasses that marred her beautiful face, noticing she wore no makeup, and how her long auburn hair was severely swept back across her head and gathered into an unflattering bun in the back, he thought, Uh-oh, I get the icy version.

  She looked up at him and said with impersonal courtesy, “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

  ’At’s my Ice Maiden, he thought. Aloud: “I’d like to run a detective through the F File.”

  “Why?” She looked back down at the report.

  “He’s being dumped into my squad from Pickpocket and Confidence, and I’d like to know how big of a problem I’m inheriting.”

  She continued reading as if she hadn’t heard him.

  Stuart stewed in silence; he looked pointedly at his wristwatch.

  “Am I keeping you, Lieutenant?”

  “There are a lot of things going on in the Squad, Inspector. I really do have to get back there soon.”

  Still reading, she said, “There are a lot of things going on here, too, Lieutenant.” She closed the folder, put it on her desk, and moved around behind it, sitting in her high-backed executive chair. Swiveling around to her computer terminal, she asked, “What else brings you to the Big Building?”

  “A homicide investigation,” he said with an air of detachment as he looked around her stark, impersonal office.

  She logged on to the computer and input the secret access code that admitted her into the F File databank. “What is your detective’s name?”

  “Paul Whitehouser.”

  As she typed in the name, she asked offhandedly, “You doing a day duty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here we are,” she said as Whitehouser’s name scrolled onto the screen. “Your detective doesn’t think women should be on the Job. He thinks their activities should be confined to the be
droom. He’s had six sexual harassment complaints filed against him in the past four years, all of which were squashed by promoting the women concerned and transferring them to the assignment of their choice. He’s also a married philanderer who envisions himself as Dirty Harry.”

  Stuart muttered a curse under his breath. “The Palace Guard will keep protecting him until he gets himself jammed real good, and then look to hang his current boss for failure to supervise, lead, train, and prevent.”

  “That is the usual drill, Lieutenant. Are you going to try and kill the transfer?”

  “I’m going to do what I have to do.”

  A momentary smile softened her businesslike demeanor. “You’ll think of something, Matt, you always do.” She exited the databank and plucked another report out of her basket.

  When Matt Stuart returned to the fifth floor, he found Bill Manning looking over the shoulder of the fingerprint examiner and smoking his briar with great determination as he watched the examiner studying the fingerprints on the split-screen terminal. On the left side of the split screen shone an arrest fingerprint of a whorl, its unbroken friction ridges clear and distinct, spiraling around its core and flowing out past its deltas. On the screen’s right was a latent of a whorl that had been lifted off the aluminum foil. Its broken friction ridges were not distinct, one of its deltas was missing, and its core was smudged.

  “We just fed your latents into AFIS,” Manning told Stuart.

  Matt looked at the screen. “How does AFIS work?”

  “The automated fingerprint identification system is the good guys’ secret weapon. We’re knocking the balls off the mutts.” He took his pipe out of his mouth and, using it as a pointer, said, “Before AFIS, whenever latents were lifted at a crime scene, the examiner would have to work out the permutations of every possible filing formula and then manually search through thousands of fingerprints, searching out one particular one. An impossible job, could take years to search out one print. With AFIS, the latents are scanned into a computer using a special magnifying camera. The examiner marks the print’s identifying characteristics and the computer translates them into a digital code, which the computer then compares with the codes on file.”

  “How fast does this thing work?”

  “Eighteen hundred prints a second,” Manning said. “AFIS picks out the top twenty possibilities and displays them one at a time on the split screen next to the latent lifted at the scene, so that the examiner can conduct a side-by-side comparison.” He was as proud of his system as a kid with a brand-new bike.

  “What about a rap sheet?”

  “Once we get a hit, the laser printer churns out the perp’s criminal record and latest mug shot.”

  Stuart checked the time. “While AFIS is running my latents, I’d like to phone the Squad.”

  “Use the one in my office,” Manning said, putting his pipe back in his mouth.

  “What’s happening?” Stuart asked Jones when he answered the Squad’s phone.

  Jones sounded tired and more than a little discouraged. “We did two more canvasses and came up dry. All the paper is done, and Helen faxed the ‘Unusual’ to the Palace Guard.”

  “Any problem with the Rasties?”

  “Not so far.”

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” Stuart said. He hung up and dialed Carmine Vuzzo at Intelligence Division, catching him just as he was about to leave for the day. “I spoke to Angela Albertoli, and she swore Beansy had no connection with the company.”

  “Bullshit. Beansy inherited half of the company when the old man died. You ever hear of a pinky-ring walking away from a money-making machine? Because that’s what Albertoli is.”

  “She admitted he shared the profits, but she insisted that he had nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the company.”

  “Maybe she’s telling the truth, Matt. We could never come up with any hard intelligence that he was involved in the running of the company. But like I told you, those guys don’t walk away from a score.”

  When Stuart returned to AFIS, the fingerprint technician was comparing side-by-sides. The technician’s ass overflowed the edges of the chair he was sitting on. Using a felt pen, he circled points of comparison on the latent prints. Stuart’s adrenaline surged when he saw the points of comparison reach twelve. The technician’s double chin shook when he lifted his head to Manning and said, “We got a hit.”

  He typed something into the keyboard and then propelled his swivel chair to the laser printer on the right side of the split-screen computer. The printer hummed and began churning out Manny Rodriguez’s rap sheet. When Stuart saw the top of Rodriguez’s head flow out of the machine, he said, “C’mon, c’mon, lemme see that pretty face of yours.”

  Spray-painted white graffiti defaced the stoop and first story of the three-story Romanesque Revival mansion. The handsome residence, located on Brooklyn’s once exclusive Parkside Avenue on the southern fringe of the Seven One, had been purchased twenty-three years ago by a Jamaican dope dealer, who had turned its rich mahogany-paneled interior into furnished rooms. Manny Rodriguez’s room was on the second floor, front.

  Stuart and Jones were parked on the corner of Parkside and New York Avenues, watching Helen Kahn walking toward the mansion. Before leaving the squad room, Kahn had gone into the female locker room and opened the disguise locker. She’d taken off her bracelets, curled her hair up in blue rollers, and wrapped her head in a chartreuse scarf. She’d put on oversize triangle-shaped nugget earrings, taken off her black skirt and blouse, and tugged on kelly green stretch pants and a cotton sweater.

  Before leaving, Borrelli had gotten Manny’s unlisted number from telephone security. He’d dialed it several times without getting an answer.

  Stuart had distributed Rodriguez’s photo and rap sheet to his detectives. He did not want to hit the flat until he was sure Rodriguez was there, because he knew that if they went storming into the room and he wasn’t there, the word would spread quickly on the street, and Manny Rodriguez would become one of the permanently missing.

  Kahn walked down the street, aware of the tug of her nine-millimeter under her sweater. A woman approached her, wheeling a baby carriage decorated with blue fringe. Kahn stopped to admire the newborn. The mother tensed as the garishly dressed stranger bent over and cooed to her baby.

  Watching Kahn looking at the baby triggered a sudden and unbearable memory for Stuart. A spasm of pain contorted his face as he thought of his son. He turned his head away, focusing his teary eyes across the street on the apartment house.

  “Helen’s into her maternal mode,” Jones said. “I’d bet she’d be a good mother.”

  “I’m sure she would, too,” Stuart said, brushing his eyes.

  Kahn’s eyes went to the windows on the second floor. She saw no activity. She gave the baby a final coo and strolled down the cracked walkway through the patchy, untended lawn into the mansion’s vestibule. The name slots of each bell were crowded with different surnames. She spied a slot with a Manny del Rio and M. Rodriguez. He’s getting cute with his names, she thought. Probably getting his welfare check under Manny del Rio. She rang the bell several times; no answer.

  “He ain’t in.” She was short and fat and stuffed into a garish orange pants suit and was carrying a bag of groceries. “I just saw Manny on Nostrand Avenue. He was all dolled up, a man ready to party.”

  “He told me he was in training,” Kahn protested.

  “Humph. Men don’t need no trainin’ for what he’s looking for, darlin’.”

  “Please don’t tell that bastard you saw me, I don’t want him to know I was here.”

  “I won’t say a word, honey. I’ve been in that boat many times myself.”

  The night duty team was filtering into the squad room when Stuart returned. He briefed them on the Hollyman and Gee homicide and told them to scoop up Rodriguez if they spotted him during their tour, but not to ask around for him. “He’ll run if he knows we’re looking for him.”


  “You want us to stake out his flat?” Hector Colon asked the whip.

  “No, I wanna keep it loose. We’ll hit his flat in the A.M.”

  The detectives moseyed out of the whip’s office. The night duty detectives got out the spray cleaners and began emptying wastebaskets. Plaintiff phoned Jones to complain that her car needed a new transmission. He slammed down the phone, looked across at Borrelli, and asked, “Wanna stop for a taste?”

  “Can’t, ma man. I got a woman in need of my bionic tongue.”

  “Stop for a few with me,” Jones said.

  “Ma man, booze screws up my sex life. After two drinks, getting laid is like trying to stick a clam into a slot machine.”

  Jones shrugged and phoned a lady friend who worked in the Fifth Squad. Outside, the darkness held the first real chill of autumn, and a wind suddenly swirled trash and leaves over the steps of the Seven One.

  6

  The two-story Colonial-style house on Harbor View Terrace was on a knoll overlooking the upper New York bay. The wide driveway leading to the two-car garage was lined on both sides with autumn mums. Stuart drove his car into the garage and walked into the kitchen. Matt’s grandfather had had the house built during the Great Depression. His family had always lived in Bay Ridge, or the Ridge, as it was called by the people who lived in that small section of Brooklyn locked inside the cement tentacles of the intertwined Gowanus Expressway and the Leif Ericson Drive.

  His great-grandmother’s cuckoo clock was chirping nine when Matt walked into the large living room. Upstairs in the bedroom, he took off his jacket and tie, then unclipped his nine-millimeter and stuck it in a drawer in the bedside table along with his handcuffs and ammo pouch.

  After, he went downstairs into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, liberated a can of Miller from its plastic noose, and popped the top. Swigging beer, he walked out into the living room and over to the bay window. He looked out at the large container ships lying at anchor, their lights bright sparkles against the night. Off to his left, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge spanned the river majestically, its slivered cables aglow with lights; and in the far-off distance, where the black night sky met the ocean, a faint white light shimmered on the horizon.