Close Pursuit Read online

  “IT’S AN ODDITY OF LIFE that most people who fantasize about working on a big-city homicide squad don’t seem to realize that at the heart of every homicide investigation is a dead body, and the essence of the job is to be able to confront that body in all its grim carnality. Every cop maintains that detachment is the key, but the truth is that he gives up a section of his soul to every corpse and he dies a little death at the beginning of every case.”

  CLOSE PURSUIT

  “Like New York City itself, Close Pursuit is an assault on the senses. And it shines a pitiless light on the street cop’s perceived enemies—from the homicidal scum in the streets to the timid ‘slicks’ at One Police Plaza to the ambitious ‘suits’ roaming the halls of justice. THIS REMARKABLE BOOK IS AS CLOSE AS YOU WILL COME TO PEERING INTO THE SOUL OF A SQUAD ROOM, AND A CITY, WITHOUT JOINING UP YOURSELF AND TAKING YOUR CHANCES ON THE MEAN STREETS.”

  —Nicholas Proffitt

  “Rings with authenticity … It’s the world of homicide detective Eddie Kennedy, a world of often senseless violence, racism, petty politics, gutter language and gutter morals. And it’s a world that’s vividly and dramatically brought to life by Stroud … MAY VERY WELL PROVE TO BE THE DEFINITIVE BOOK ABOUT BIG-CITY POLICE.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “THERE’S A RULE CALLED 24/24 IN THE HOMICIDE LEXICON. It means that the most important hours in the investigation of any murder are the last 24 hours in the victim’s life and the first 24 hours after the body has been discovered. The secret of the killing lies in this time zone. Go back beyond that and the forces that led to his death are too diffuse, and after the first 24 hours the witnesses are starting to forget things; the tissues are drying out; the weapons are being destroyed. Clothes are being burned and stories are being agreed upon. Sometimes, Kennedy felt a sense of urgency. The trick was to ignore that. Kennedy’s first partner used to say, ‘The stiff will still be dead in the morning.’ The one thing a homicide cop has that no other cop can count on is the time to do it right. But he gets no second chance.”

  CLOSE PURSUIT

  “RANKS WITH THE BEST OF WAMBAUGH.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “IF YOU SEE THIS BOOK, ARREST IT ON SIGHT AND SENTENCE IT TO 12 HOURS OF UNINTERRUPTED READING … Close Pursuit is extremely well crafted and written with a masterly flair for the capturing of language and the relentless passing of time during this week in the life of a cop.… As a portrait of a cop and a police department in trouble, it is honest, unbiased and extremely well documented.”

  —Detroit News

  “KRUSH AND JIMMY SAW THE CROWDS AS A STREAM OF SWATCH WATCHES, Calvin Klein jeans, Guess? jackets, satin and black leather, fourteen-karat gold chains in endless loops around slender necks, marks and vics staggering along the street dazzled by the lights, heavy with cash, cash, cash and none of it for them. Krush could tell you the price of any car on the street; he knew logos and brand names at 50 yards. He could smell a woman from up the block and he could read her scent and know if it was Opium or Tuxedo or Charlie. It told him what she’d have on under the dress and which card she’d carry. Opium and Tuxedo meant black and lacy and a gold American Express. Charlie meant Calvin Klein jockey shorts with cutaway thighs and a Citibank Visa.”

  CLOSE PURSUIT

  “A GRITTY SLICE-OF-LIFE LOOK AT A NEW YORK CITY HOMICIDE DETECTIVE ON AND OFF DUTY … It rings true throughout.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “THE MOMENTUM OF TOP-FLIGHT CRIME FICTION.”

  —Toronto Globe and Mail

  “BRILLIANTLY CAPTURED … Carsten Stroud has written a book that for insight, understanding and colorful and full-blooded evocation of the specialized world of the homicide detective … takes its place on the short list of superb police books.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  CLOSE PURSUIT

  A Bantam Book

  Bantam hardcover edition published March 1987

  Bantam paperback edition / April 1988

  “Get Happy” by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler copyright © 1929 (Renewed)

  WARNER BROS. INC. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “Only You (And You Alone).” Words and Music by Buck Ram and Ande Rand TRO—

  copyright © 1955 and renewed 1983 Hollis Music, Inc., New York, N.Y. Used by permission.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1987 by Carsten Stroud.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86–22155.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81524-8

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Notes on the Material

  Dream Sequence

  Carnivores

  Ghormenghast

  Salto Mortal

  Bloods

  Three Hundred Twenty-two Hours

  Tuesday

  Juris Diction

  Cardillo

  Wednesday

  Dudley

  Thursday

  Friday

  The Doppler Effect

  Glossary

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  NOTES ON THE MATERIAL

  Early in the research for this book I was spending a lot of time sitting around in my apartment on East 38th Street, going quietly bonkers waiting for various New York Police Department detectives to return my calls. I got into the habit of cruising through the boroughs in a rented Plymouth, drinking black coffee and listening to the cross-talk on my police radio. One Friday night I was pushing my way through the standard traffic jam on 42nd Street, trying to guess how many neon lights there were between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. It was a dense and humid night, early in the spring but showing some real heat down on street level, the air thick enough to slide on, reeking of diesel oil and popcorn, the way midtown does on a Friday night. A call came over my radio for the foot patrol officers—they call them Portables in the NYPD. There was a fight going on in a porno theater at Eighth and 43rd. To my right I could see four of these officers, three solid-looking guys and a wiry female cop who looked a little like Patti LuPone. They were jogging west along the block, answering the call. The woman was talking into her handset and I could hear her voice on my radio, a little breathless, talking as she ran, saying that she and three other Portables were on their way. It seemed a couple of squad cars were also responding. Well, this was nothing special for a midtown Friday night, but, as I said, it was either do this or go home and talk to Elmore, my house plant, so I decided to follow them over in the Plymouth.

  In the night, in the right light, I look a bit like a plainclothes cop, just under six feet and a little on the beefy side, hard-case moustache and I don’t smile a lot, so when the Portables met up with six other uniform cops outside the porno theater, I just eased myself into the group and went inside with them. For kicks, more or less. Which, as it turned out, was exactly what I got.

  The theater was massive and packed with people, and black as a dragon’s colon except for the screen, where the film was still running. The place smelled like a dr
agon’s colon too. My feet stuck to the floor as I ran along the back row behind the cops. They split up and went both ways down the aisles toward what looked like a small riot going on in the front row. People were screaming and shouting. Somebody was getting the better of somebody else and being pretty noisy about it. Whatever was going on in the film had something to do with sex but it looked more like a full-color close-up of a car accident. Over the screams and the shouts from a crowd of people fighting each other down in the first row, just black outlines against the screen, you could hear the heavy breathing and the sighs of the couple making love in the film, and the crackle of police radios and heavy feet pounding down the aisles and the jingle of police gear on their belts. I was still at the top of the aisle, holding the radio, when a big black guy came racing up out of the dark. Behind him I could just make out a couple of coplike figures chasing him. It dawned on me that this was not a good place to be standing, looking vaguely official and holding a portable police radio, so I decided to get out of the guy’s way. I was still trying to do that, shoving at the crowd behind me, when he flew right into me and we both went down.

  Now I was not at all sure what it was my feet had been sticking to on the floor of this porno theater but I could imagine, so as we got all tangled up and went down, I did my best to see to it that the black guy was on the bottom. Let him worry about what was on the floor. He hit the ground with a meaty thump and his breath came out all at once and I found myself more or less kneeling on his chest, trying to get up again. This hand grabbed me by the hair and I felt my head being jerked back hard. There was a red exit light shining just above us and I could see this very angry black woman with her blouse unbuttoned and her teeth clenched. She was hissing at me in some foreign language and I got the impression that the guy I was kneeling on was somebody important to her, but before I could get off my knees she poked me, hard, in the right eye with her thumb.

  This smarted a bit and I was wearing contact lenses so the next few seconds were a little hazy. The next clear recollection I had, I was on one hand and two knees on the floor, holding my right eye. The black guy was back on his feet and tugging at the arm of the black woman. I could hear cop boots pounding up the aisle and the jingle of handcuffs and the couple on the screen gasping and crying out in the same rhythm. I tried to get to my feet and just as I did, the black woman hissed something at me and then she stepped back and kicked me with a pointy-toed shoe in the soft part of my right side just beneath the rib cage. I stopped looking for my contact lens at this stage and settled down onto the floor again, making a sound like a slow leak in a truck tire.

  When I got back to my apartment on East 38th Street it was four in the morning and there was a message on the machine for me from a detective I’d been trying to reach for a week. I called him at work and he told me he’d heard I had just gotten myself beaten up by a black hooker and how would I like to go out for a drink and tell him about it because he hadn’t had a good laugh in a couple of weeks. Of course I said yes.

  This is what you have to go through to get a cop to talk to you in this town.

  Not that I’m complaining. After all, news is one thing. Most detectives know that it’s a reporter’s job to ferret out stories and generally harass the NYPD to find out things the department would rather you didn’t know. That’s what journalists do, and God bless them. But that’s not what I was after.

  What I wanted was something more elusive, certainly more intrusive, and, finally, none of my damned business. I wanted the essence of the thing, the psychic landscape of homicide work in New York City, how it felt and what it did to them, what they were afraid of and what they hated. What kind of dreams they had. Personal stuff.

  I have an editor in Toronto who says that it is the business of writers to ask questions whose answers they have no right to. That’s literally what I was doing.

  It took about two years of background and six months in the city, but I finally got a few working detectives in the NYPD to open up. I went to crime scenes, interrogations, autopsies, arrests. I met some wives and children. I saw a lot of squad-room life, and I got a view of New York that will stay with me forever. As much as any outsider can be, I was allowed into the club and I was told the truth as they saw it. It is an uncompromising truth, frequently ugly and racist, often violent and cruel. As one detective used to say to me, whenever I was looking a little green around the edges or taking things too hard, it is what it is. As far as they were concerned, I could either accept it and live with it, or I could go back to my place, open up a Beck’s, and watch TV with the sound off.

  All the access I got was unofficial—kindnesses and trust extended to me by serving officers and detectives in various sectors of the force. Without their help and guidance this book would not have been written.

  For that reason, I have changed names and altered the details wherever it was necessary to protect the identity of my sources. I make no apology for this. The book is not an exercise in investigative journalism. There have been many superb investigative books written about the NYPD, starting with Target Blue by Robert Daley, and Black Police, White Society by Stephen H. Leinen. Nick Pileggi and Michael Daly are doing good work in this area for New York Magazine. A New York Homicide lieutenant by the name of Vernon Geberth has written a brilliant text on the techniques of homicide work, called Practical Homicide Investigation. Reporters from print and television dissect the triumphs and failures of the NYPD on a regular basis, and some of this work is superb. A lot of it isn’t. A lot of it is shallow and exploitive, or reflexively, thoughtlessly liberal and fuzzy-minded.

  I’m good at emotion, at atmosphere and sensation. I’m not as ready to pronounce one element of the NYPD vile and another element heroic as I might be if I were a full-time player in the local journalistic games. I’m an outsider, a Canadian, and it seems the better part of wisdom for me to step carefully here. I have a lot of background in police work. I’ve written about the police and worked next to them for almost ten years, in one capacity or another. I know them pretty well, in Canada, in Mexico and Central America. And the most difficult and indecipherable police force I’ve ever run into is the subject of this book: the NYPD.

  I lived as close to the NYPD as I could for six months and although I have made some friends and some enemies, I see now that a lifetime could be spent trying to get a clear and valid picture of the force. New York City is, in many ways, a unique environment, with its own ethics and rules, its own code. The NYPD reflects this dichotomy, at once profane and vulgar and brutal, and yet with something in it that is noble and true and fine. Like America, I suppose, and like all of us, waiting for the dawn with one foot in hell. The book is about homicide work in New York City. This is what the streets are like, and these are the people as I see them. This is how they live, and this is what they dream about. If you care about these things, you will care about this book.

  CHAPTER 1

  DREAM SEQUENCE

  This little black kid is running, he’s got one knee out of the fabric and every time his right leg comes up the cap shows like the top swivel of a camshaft rod, down it goes again and up comes the other. Kennedy is watching this from his car and he can see that the kid isn’t running for fun: His blue-black skin is streaming wet and pulled back tight and his mouth is wide and gasping, the bony little body stretching out for every yard of sidewalk. Kennedy can see the kid coming from two blocks away but the scene is compressed: just a small nigger kid racing toward Kennedy, straight into the slanting sundown so that the dusty yellow light is glinting off the kid’s cheeks and his eyes are almost closed, he’s flying up this street with a solid wall of grills and smashed headlights and rusting fenders on his left and the tenement stoops and the garbage on his right. Kennedy can hear the pam pam pam pa-pam of the kid’s shoes and see the dust puff up each time the toe comes down. Kennedy’s own heart is working and his breath is short and chuffing, keeping a pace with the kid. He feels he ought to get out of the car, get down there on
the street but he’s in a post here, can’t leave that or the whole number’s blown. In his mind he’s saying come on come on, kid, move move. The kid seems to hear this, Christ knows how, and he gets some speed from somewhere and now he can see Kennedy in the car, something to run to, so his eyes change and some of the panic is going from his face …

  … THERE! There that’s the son of a bitch, Kennedy’s belly muscles jump and the skin across his shoulders tightens up. A sharp-faced white guy with bottle-blue eyes, half-hidden, he’s got a black satin jacket, come on, kid, run, but the guy’s between them, between Kennedy and the kid, the man’s too close. Kennedy sees all this in the time it takes for the kid’s leg to come forward, toe out, heel drops and takes the shock and the dust comes up. Kennedy reaches for the door latch, he can see the thick gold ring on his heavy hand, and he starts to get out.

  Now he’s out on the sidewalk and down on a knee, he’s yelling to the kid and his arms are wide like he’s a catcher or a saint. Kennedy can feel the sidewalk grit digging into his knee through the gray wool of his slacks. Maybe the gun, should he have the gun out? No, this is a street kid, he’ll think it’s for him, he knows I’m a cop but the gun will slow him up. Kennedy calls again, he can feel the places in his arms where the kid will hit, he can feel the skinny body and the weight of it as he takes him in and picks him up off the ground, his left hand locked around his right wrist, he’ll swing the kid straight into the car and then go for the asshole down the street. He lives this future-second five times and each time the kid makes it to him his chest fills up with a lightness so liquid he can feel tears start. Safe safe and home. Now a car door slams from up the block behind him, he’s back in real time, the kid is still closing fast, and the lieutenant is severely pissed here, Kennedy can hear that. Kennedy, you fuckin’ dildo, what the fuck are you doing? Kennedy turns to call back. It’s okay, I’m just going to save this kid, sir. When he looks back there’s a flicker of black satin fifty yards down the block and the street is empty.