Monty wasn’t smiling.
“No problem,” Malone called back. He looked at Pena. “And you, shitbird. I’ll ass-fuck your widow on your coffin until she calls me Papi.”
They geared up, heavy.
Started carrying freakin’ artillery.
It could come from any direction, from Pena or even from the Ciminos, although Malone doubted a Mafia family would be reckless enough to kill an NYPD detective.
They took precautions. Malone didn’t go home to Staten Island but cooped up on the West Side. Russo kept his shotgun on the passenger seat. But they still hit the streets, worked Pena’s operation, worked their sources, chipped away.
And Malone took the tape to Mary Hinman.
“Berger will walk through this like shit through a goose,” Hinman said. “You didn’t have a warrant, you didn’t have probable cause—”
“Police officers surveilled a fellow officer on an undercover operation,” Malone said. “In the course of those duties they heard a man confessing to a multiple murder and—”
“You want me to charge Pena with the Cleveland homicides based on that?” Hinman asked. “Career suicide.”
“Just bring him in,” Malone said. “Get him in the room. Let Homicide play him the tape and work on him.”
“You think Berger will let him answer any question other than his name?” Hinman asked.
“Try anyway,” Malone said, so tight, so frustrated, he was about to break out of his skin. “You owe me.”
How many convictions did you get from me testilying?
They brought Pena in.
Malone watched from behind the window as Hinman played the tape. “Cleveland knew the rules. He knew that a man puts not only himself on the line, but his entire family. That’s our way.”
Berger held his hand up to Pena to keep quiet, looked at Hinman and said, “I don’t hear anything even remotely close to a confession to or even guilty knowledge of the Cleveland murders. I heard a man expressing an admittedly repulsive cultural norm that, while reprehensible, is not criminal.”
Hinman turned the tape back on.
“There’s two hundred fifty thousand dollars in there. Take it and eat.”
“What’s this for?”
“You know what it’s for.”
“So now you think you have my client for attempting to bribe a police officer,” Berger said. “Except you don’t have the money. Perhaps the briefcase was empty. Perhaps my client was merely taunting Sergeant Malone in admittedly misguided retribution for his endless puerile harassments. Next?”
“No, you tell me what it’s for, you piece of garbage. You tell me it’s for giving you a pass for murdering that family.”
“Pat him down.”
Hinman played the rest of the tape.
Berger said, “I heard nothing incriminating. I did hear an NYPD detective threaten a subject and say that he was going to ‘ass-fuck’ his wife on his coffin. You must be very proud. In any case, this tape is not only useless, it would be inadmissible should you be so foolish as to bring charges against my client. A grand jury might be impressed; a judge would indignantly toss it in the garbage where it belongs. You have nothing on my client.”
Hinman said, “We have a line on the shooters and they’ll implicate your client. His moment to get on the bus, spare himself the needle, is now.”
It was a total bluff, but Pena flinched.
Berger didn’t. “Do I hear whistling past the graveyard? Or a tacit admission that your ‘case’ presently amounts to nothing? I will tell you this, Counselor, your police are out of control. I will take that up with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, but I would recommend you save your career by taking action and culling the rabid dogs from your pack.”
He stood up and gestured for Pena to do the same. “Good day.”
Berger looked straight into the mirror, took out a handkerchief, smiled at Malone and lifted his shoe. He wiped the sole and tossed the handkerchief into the trash can.
The neighborhood started to turn on Pena.
It was subtle at first, a mere leak. But the leak became a stream that became a flood that cracked open the wall of Pena’s invulnerability. No one came into the house—there wasn’t that kind of trust—but it was a nod, a flick of the head, the slightest gesture to let Malone know, as he cruised the streets, that a conversation was wanted.
Those talks happened on the corner, in alleys, in tenement hallways, in shooting galleries, in bars. Words about who killed them three kids, who Pena hired, who the shooters were.
Some of it was cynical; the informants wanted the flow of heroin to resume, the hassling to stop, Malone to shut down his relentless campaign. But a lot of it was conscience freed from fear as the tide started to turn.
A picture began to emerge that Pena had hired two ambitious up-and-comers who wanted to make their bones with him. And the community was especially angry because they were black.
Tony and Braylon Carmichael were brothers, twenty-nine and twenty-seven, respectively, with sheets that stretched back to the early teens for assault, robbery, dealing and burglary, and now they were looking to move up as wholesalers for Pena.
He had an entry-level job for them first.
Kill the Clevelands.
The whole family.
Malone, Russo and Montague crashed into the apartment on 145th with guns drawn, ready to shoot.
Pena had gotten there first.
Tony Carmichael was slumped in a chair, two entry wounds in his forehead.
Well, Malone thinks, we managed to execute one of the killers, anyway—indirectly, by telling Pena we were on the shooters. They searched the rest of the apartment but didn’t find Braylon, which meant that their case against Pena was still alive.
Malone went to Nasty Ass. “Put it out on the street. He reaches out to me, I promise to bring him in safe. No beating. He makes whatever deal he can make for testifying on Pena.”
Braylon was a dumbass—his late brother was the brains of the operation. But Braylon had to be smart enough to know that Pena was hunting him, Cleveland’s friends were hunting him, and his only chance was Malone.
He reached out that night.
Malone and his team picked him up in St. Nicholas Park, where he’d been hiding in some bushes, and brought him into the station.
“Don’t say a fucking word to me,” Malone said as he cuffed him. “Keep your mouth shut.”
He wanted to do this right. Called in and made sure that Minelli was ready to interview and that Hinman was present. Braylon didn’t want a lawyer. He gave it all up, how Pena had hired him and his brother to kill the Clevelands.
“Is it enough?” Malone asked.
“It’s enough to arrest him.”
She got a warrant on Pena, and Homicide went to pick him up—Hinman strictly forbade Malone to go.
Pena wasn’t there.
They missed him by minutes.
Gerard Berger had surrendered his client to the feds.
Not for murder, for narcotics trafficking.
Malone exploded when Hinman called him with the news. “I don’t want him for trafficking! I want him for the murders!”
“We don’t get everything we want,” Hinman said. “Sometimes we have to settle for what we can get. Come on, Malone, you won. Pena turned himself in to save his life and go to a federal lockup where his own people can’t kill him. He’ll do fifteen to thirty, probably die there. That’s a victory. Take it.”
Except it wasn’t.
Gerard Berger cut his client the sweetheart deal of all time. In exchange for providing intelligence on the cartel and testifying in a dozen standing cases, Diego Pena received two years minus time served, which meant that when he was finished ratting on the stand he would probably walk away.
A federal judge had to sign off on the deal and did, saying that the information Pena could provide would take tons of heroin off the streets and save more than five lives.
“Bullshit,” Malone sa
id. “If it’s not Pena’s heroin, it will be someone else’s. This won’t change a thing.”
“We do what we can,” Hinman said.
“What am I supposed to tell the people?” Malone asked Hinman.
“What people?”
“The people in the neighborhood who put their fucking lives on the line to bring this guy down,” Malone said. “The people who trusted me to get justice for those kids.”
Hinman didn’t know what to tell him.
Malone didn’t know what to tell them.
Except they already knew. It was an old story to them—the careers of a bunch of white suits were more important than the deaths of five black people.
Braylon Carmichael received five life sentences to be served consecutively.
Denny Malone lost part of his soul. Not all of it, but enough of it that when Pena got tired of the straight life and went back to dealing heroin, Malone was both willing and able to execute him.
Chapter 34
Malone’s cell door opens and O’Dell stands there.
He asks, “You had your shower yet?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” O’Dell says. “We’re going uptown.”
“Where?” Malone is content in his cell, with his own thoughts.
O’Dell says, “Some people want to see you.”
He walks Malone outside, puts Malone in the back of a car and slides in beside him. O’Dell takes the cuffs off. “I assume I can trust you not to run on me?”
“Where would I run?”
Malone looks out the window as the car drives past City Hall and takes Chambers out to West Street and then up the West Side Highway.
After only one night in a cell, freedom already seems strange to Malone.
Unexpected.
Heady.
The Hudson seems broader, bluer. Its wide span seems to offer escape, the whitecaps off a stiff breeze tantalize release. The car passes the Holland Tunnel, then Chelsea Piers, where Malone used to go to play midnight hockey pickup games, then the Javits Center, the concrete and plumbing and windows and lighting of which saved the mob, then the Lincoln Tunnel, and Pier 83, where Malone always meant to take the family on the Circle Tour around Manhattan but never did and now it’s too late.
The car turns east on Fifty-Seventh and that’s when Malone sees that something’s wrong.
The air to the north has a yellow tint to it.
Almost brown.
He hasn’t seen that kind of air since the Towers came down.
“Can I roll down the window?” Malone asks.
“Go ahead.”
The air smells like smoke.
Malone turns to O’Dell with the question in his eye.
“The riots started about five o’clock yesterday,” O’Dell says. “Shortly after you went in.”
The protests on the Bennett decision began peacefully, O’Dell tells him, then a bottle was thrown, then a brick. By six thirty storefront windows along St. Nicholas and Lenox were being smashed, shops and bodegas looted. By ten o’clock Molotov cocktails were being thrown at sector cars on Amsterdam and Broadway.
The tear gas and batons came out.
But the riots spread.
By eleven Bed-Stuy was in flames, then Flatbush, Brownsville, the South Bronx, and parts of Staten Island.
When dawn finally came, smoke obscured the hot July sunshine. City officials hoped the violence would end with the night, but it started again at around noon, as protesters massed outside City Hall and One Police Plaza and charged police lines.
In Manhattan North, firefighters trying to put out blazes were shot at by snipers from the towers of St. Nick’s and then refused to answer any more calls, so entire blocks just burned.
Every cop in the city has been called in on riot duty. They haven’t gone home, instead have grabbed combat naps in locker rooms and cribs. They’re exhausted, mentally and physically played out, ready to snap.
“Volunteers”—biker clubs, militias, white supremacist groups, gun-rights crazies—have come in from other areas to help reestablish “law and order,” making the job even tougher for the police now trying to prevent the riots from escalating into a full-out race war.
It’s the fire this time.
The car drives along Billionaires’ Row and pulls up alongside Anderson’s building.
Berger stands outside the building, clearly waiting for the car. He steps up and opens Malone’s door. “Don’t say anything until you’ve heard them out.”
“What the fuck?”
“That would be saying something.”
They take an elevator to the penthouse.
It’s quite a roomful, Malone sees.
The commissioner, Chief Neely, O’Dell, Weintraub, the mayor, Chandler, Bryce Anderson, Berger, and Isobel Paz. Malone’s surprise at seeing her shows on his face and she says, “We’ve all come to a little arrangement. Have a seat, Sergeant Malone.”
She points to a chair.
“I’ve sat plenty,” Malone says.
He stays standing.
“Seeing as we have a previous acquaintance,” Paz says, “I’ve been asked to emcee this meeting.”
The commissioner and Neely look as though they’d just as soon set Malone on fire. The mayor looks at the coffee table, Anderson looks frozen, Berger smiles his smug smile.
O’Dell and Weintraub look like they want to vomit.
Paz says, “First of all, this meeting never happened. There are no recordings, no memos, no record. Do you understand and agree?”
Malone says, “Write any fiction you want. I don’t give a fuck anymore. Why am I here?”
“I’ve been authorized to make you an offer,” Paz says. “Gerard?”
“I thought you were conflicted out,” Malone says.
“That’s when it looked certain that we were headed to trial,” Berger says. “That is no longer so certain.”
“Why’s that?”
“You may or not be aware of the social turmoil that has resulted from the unfortunate grand jury decision on the Michael Bennett case,” Berger says. “Put simply, one more match will set the entire city, if not the country, aflame.”
“Call the Fire Department,” Malone says. “Can I go back to my cell now?”
“Certain rumors have reached the mayor’s office,” Berger says, “that a video clip, taken with a cell phone, exists of the Michael Bennett shooting, which purports to show Bennett running away when Officer Hayes shot him. If that tape were to be made public, it will make what is happening now look like Girl Scouts roasting s’mores.”
“It can’t be allowed to happen,” the mayor says.
“What’s it have to do with me?” Malone asks.
“You have relationships in the African American community in Manhattan North,” Berger says. “Specifically, you have a relationship with DeVon Carter.”
“If you want to call it that.” Someone wanting you dead is a relationship, I guess.
“Cut the shit, Detective!” the commissioner says. “You and your whole unit were on Carter’s pad!”
Not exactly, Malone thinks.
Torres and his team were.
But close enough.
“Our understanding is that Carter has the video,” Paz says, “and is threatening to make it public. He has gone deep underground where we can’t find him. Our offer is—”
“Can we quit fucking around?” the commissioner asks. “Malone, the deal is you get us the vid clip, you walk. It stinks to high heaven, if you ask me, but there it is.”
“What about Russo?”
Weintraub frowns as he says, “His deal will stick.”
“And no indictment on Montague,” Malone says.
The commissioner says, “Sergeant William Montague is a heroic New York police detective.”
“Do we have a deal?” Paz asks Malone.
“Not so fast,” Berger says. “There is the matter of forfeiture.”
“No,” Weintraub says. “We are not let
ting him keep the money. No.”
“I was thinking of the house,” Berger says. “Malone agrees to transfer full ownership of their house to his wife, who I understand is starting divorce proceedings anyway, and she keeps the house.”
Chief Neely says, “We’re going to let the dirtiest cop in this city just walk away?”
Bryce Anderson finally speaks. “Would you rather the city burns down? I mean, do we really give a damn that a heroin dealer got what he had coming to him? Are we going to put that against the potential deaths of innocent people, not to mention the destruction? If three bad cops get a pass, well, they won’t be the first, will they? If letting this guy go stops this city from burning, that’s a deal I make every time.”
It’s the last word.
The man in the penthouse gets the last word.
Paz looks to Berger. “Are we good?”
“‘Good’ is not exactly the word I’d choose,” Berger says. “Let it suffice to say we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory arrangement that we can all tell ourselves is for the greater public welfare. Do we have a deal, Detective Malone?”
Malone says, “I’ll need my shield and gun.”
He’s going to be a cop again.
For one last time, he’s going to be a cop.
Chapter 35
Manhattan North is under siege.
Malone runs the gauntlet of rioters pressing up from Grant and down from Manhattanville.
Squadrons of uniformed cops line MLK Boulevard, facing south; more are in position on 126th, facing north, creating a corridor in which the precinct house sits like a surrounded fort. The cops have lined squad cars up like wagons and stand behind them. Mounted cops sit on horses that prance nervously up on the sidewalk. Snipers man the rooftop of the precinct house.
Amsterdam Liquor Mart’s been looted, its windows smashed in, its contents taken. On MLK, the C-Town Supermarket has been trashed. Ministers from Manhattan Pentecostal and Antioch Baptist are on the street, urging calm and passive resistance, while across 126th protesters gather in the little park next to St. Mary’s as both sides seem to be waiting for sundown to see what happens next.