A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series) Read online

  The yellow tape blocked off the whole sidewalk from the train station up to Empire. Even the bus station was shut down. A rookie officer stood by the tape, bored, directing pedestrians around the long way.

  “You gotta go around, sir.”

  “Leonard Mitchell. Parks Department.” Leonard took out his city ID. He didn’t get to carry a badge anymore, not like he did at DIMAC. The official card was usually good enough for an ordinary crime scene that was basically inside his agency’s jurisdiction. Usually. But the young cop just stared at it.

  “Parks Department?”

  “I need information so my commissioner can make a statement.”

  “The park is across the street.”

  You can always count on a police officer to say something basically true and utterly irrelevant. Leonard slowly simmered, ready to tell the cadet just how much he outranked him, when he saw a heavy man with a wide, red face and a mismatched suit watching him. The man stepped away from the crowd of officers conferring by the twisted metal, still in place.

  “Leonard Mitchell. Well, isn’t this a surprise?”

  Leonard looked up and smiled. “Hello, Detective.”

  The man with the red face gestured to the gatekeeper. “Let this one in, laddo. He’s all right.”

  The cop lifted the tape and Leonard stooped under. He walked up to the familiar figure and shook his hand.

  “So what happened?”

  Detective Ralph Mulino shook his head. “Let me show you, Leonard. You wouldn’t believe me otherwise.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Detective Mulino was not going to learn anything about this one from looking at the body. Eighteen stories, straight down. Dragged by his own safety harness when the platform dislodged from the crane, from the look of it. At least Mulino wouldn’t have to listen to some so-called expert on spatter patterns or bite marks prattle on about what had killed the guy. Blunt force trauma: the simplest cause of death there is. Just thinking about it made him feel old and heavy all over again. His bad knee had started throbbing the moment he hit the scene.

  From the look of it, the techs had said, he had tried to scramble off the platform but his safety harness pulled him down. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. The techs had taken their notes, snapped their photos, and zippered him up; the body was off the scene by mid-morning. There would be a coroner’s report tomorrow that would tell Detective Ralph Mulino precisely nothing about why. For that, he was going to have to do his own legwork. And if Mulino was familiar with anything, it was legwork.

  After what had happened last year, Mulino had been as surprised as anyone that he had been given his own squad, a new rank, and a higher pay grade. At the end of last summer, he had been worried about losing his shield, forfeiting his pension, even going to jail. Alone on a container ship floating in Buttermilk Channel, he had opened fire at a man running toward him with a gun, only to learn afterward that the man had been a detective too.

  He had been subject to a civilian investigation, but in the end, the investigator had been a better friend to him than most cops. Leonard Mitchell had believed him, and together they had rooted out a crime ring. The Department doesn’t like it much when civilians uncover too much of its dirty work, so Mitchell himself had been scuttled to the background. He lost his job and did a short stint upstate. All the credit had gone to Mulino. The tarnish of twenty-five years of dirty looks from his superiors had been polished away in a few weeks. He figured he owed the guy in the cheap suit at least a favor or two.

  After all, Mulino got everything he could have hoped for. Supervisory Detective Sergeant. SDS. The rank he’d always wanted. There is no straightforward promotional path if you are a detective in the NYPD. If you want to run the department, don’t become a detective. Get promoted through patrol. Sergeants man the desk at precincts; lieutenants supervise a tour; captains run the precinct itself. Deputy inspectors, inspectors, and deputy commissioners either have real power or are just too much of a pain in the ass to fire. Very rarely you can have the detective’s badge and get the promotion to SDS. And what happened to Mulino last summer counted as very rare.

  So here he was, leading his own little unit. Still stuck in the strangest bureau in the NYPD—OCCB, the Organized Crime Control Bureau. Still no sign of anything that looked to Mulino like organized crime. But when you needed an investigation done, and it wasn’t precisely clear from the outset that you were looking at a homicide—there was no bullet in anyone’s forehead, after all—then the precincts and the homicide bureau didn’t want to touch it. And then OCCB could step in.

  Being in charge meant he had a couple of freshly minted gold badges that no one else wanted to work with reporting to him. Timothy Bruder had become a cop because his daddy had been a cop and his brother had been a cop and maybe an uncle somewhere had been a cop. He had made detective on his third try because the people who make up the promotional lists still liked getting free drinks at the retirement bar his father had opened in St. George. The kid looked like he needed a good kick in the ass, but giving it would be a good way for Mulino to lose everything he had worked for. There were dozens of people in the department who may not have liked Timmy Bruder, but they liked his family well enough to look out for him. Bruder would barely speak to the other detective, Aurelia Peralta, but that’s because Bruder could probably barely speak at all.

  Peralta herself was more muscle than mind, but at least she was in the job for the right reasons. Only twenty-six, she had graduated the academy with the highest fitness scores since they started letting women on the force. Peralta was a legwork cop, and she had opted for working the streets, nabbing guns, and making detective. Mulino saw a lot of his young self in her. He worried mainly that she’d get hurt or that she’d maybe shoot someone. There is a lot of danger in being the first person through the door.

  Bruder and Peralta had spent the day talking to witnesses. Everyone saw the crane come down. Nobody was looking up beforehand. They had brought in an engineer to look over the heap of metal on the ground. They had scaled the scaffold. Mulino had been told that the building was set for occupancy come spring. He couldn’t believe it. It was November already, and the site was nowhere near to sealed off. You can’t do electrical work when you’re open to the snow.

  Mulino had been conferring with Peralta and Bruder when he saw Leonard Mitchell arguing with the patrol officer manning the tape. His first feeling was guilt. Here the guy had spent six months away and Mulino hadn’t even checked up on him to see if he was okay. His second thought was surprise. He had heard Mitchell was comfortably squatting at the Parks Department. But that didn’t explain why he’d be at the scene of this particular tragedy. Then he figured he might as well let the old investigator in. Having Mitchell around could come in useful.

  After greeting Leonard, Mulino walked him over to his detectives. “Len, this is Detective Aurelia Peralta and Detective Timmy Bruder.”

  Glum stares from the two kids in the gold badges. And why not? If they didn’t know anything about Leonard Mitchell, then he was a stranger to them, and at first pass the NYPD is not open for business to strangers. If they did know anything about him, they probably knew that he had worked at the Department to Investigate Misconduct and Corruption, investigating their colleagues. That was just as bad as the rat squad, without the benefit of being a cop.

  Mitchell held out a thin hand. It was cold enough that Leonard should have some sort of overcoat on, but he was still in the same municipal suit. His knuckles had just started to glow red when he took out his hand.

  “Leonard Mitchell. Parks Department.” Presented with the hand, Peralta and Bruder couldn’t find a way out. Each politely shook, and gave an introduction by rank and name.

  Mulino turned away from his subordinates. “So what are you even doing here, Len? If you’re with the Parks Department.”

  “Commissioner wants to give a statement. It happened next to the park. We take down a lot of trees with these same kind of cranes.
”

  Peralta spoke up. “The park’s across the street. And Empire Boulevard is a pretty big street.”

  Leonard shrugged. Mulino smiled at him. What was he going to say? His commissioner liked getting his name in the paper. It was as good an excuse as any, a terrible accident near enough to a park. It beats standing up at the podium and giving a speech about the kind of grass they are seeding the Great Meadow with this year.

  “Len, I’m going to trust you not to spill the whole thing to your commissioner.”

  “Detective.” It was Bruder this time, hoping to preserve a little confidentiality. Mulino wasn’t interested and nodded to his subordinates.

  “Detectives, can you start out on those follow-up interviews? We’ll reconvene tomorrow and start canvassing. Don’t worry. I’m going to give just an overview to our friend here.”

  The two underlings turned back to the street. Somewhere parked along Ocean would be an unmarked car. Their eyes made clear they didn’t like being told to go, but the department is a paramilitary organization after all. That’s what happens when you make supervisor. You actually get to tell people what to do.

  “Len, you may have already heard there was something wrong with the crane.”

  “I’ve heard. Department of Buildings failed to inspect.”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s easy to make people believe that. It’s true often enough. It gets people to stop paying attention.”

  “And why don’t you want people paying attention?”

  Mulino looked up at the unfinished building. “This building is being put up by Hill and Associates. Are you familiar with Hill and Associates?”

  A blank look from Leonard.

  “Are you familiar with Eleanor Hill?”

  Another stare. “Not unless she’s related to McArthur Hill.”

  “Bingo. She’s the daughter.”

  Leonard nodded, and Mulino could see him putting it together. McArthur Hill ran the Songhai Methodist Church in Flatbush, one of the largest in Brooklyn. He had risen to prominence twenty years earlier by denouncing police violence against black youth, long before it was popular to do so. He had led marches and twisted the arms of mayors and police commissioners. He had reminded them all that his three thousand parishioners not only voted, but that they drove vans and manned polling stations and told their less pious friends about elections. He ended up with a comfortable fiefdom with grants for after-school programs, senior centers, and other predictable gravy.

  Mulino spoke. “Hill’s daughter started into real estate. She fixed up a few burnt-out buildings, bought a few more, and now she’s feeding on the condo boom. So if it looks like we are accusing her of anything, we not only get the Borough President calling and asking what we’re up to, we get three thousand parishioners chasing us over the bridge back into Manhattan. So better let everyone think we’re going to pin it on a building inspector.”

  “The DOB didn’t miss the crane inspection?”

  “Maybe they inspected it, maybe not. But there was nothing wrong with it.”

  Leonard looked at the twisted heap of metal, the six-inch-deep gash in the sidewalk. Something was wrong with it now. “So if nothing was wrong with it, what brought it down?”

  Mulino knelt by the body of the crane. He ran his hand along the bright white iron, just where it had snapped. There were scuff marks on the paint. Six or seven, steep slashes along the body.

  “You see this, Len?” Leonard leaned down to see the marks on the crane.

  Mulino went on. “And on the building, when we went up, we saw paint on the girders. Paint that had come off of this crane.”

  “The crane fell into the building first?”

  “It didn’t fall. The crane was banged against the beams until it hit right on the joint and the joint gave way. Most likely the guy running the cab.”

  “And who was in the cab?”

  “The personnel records show a man named Manuel Reeves. Been with Hill and Associates for five years. Worked on buildings himself, hurt his leg, got put in the cab. Partial disability.”

  “And where is Mr. Reeves now?”

  “We have twenty perfectly competent officers canvassing the area asking that very question. And I just sent my detectives off to get to the source of it.”

  “So what do we think happened?”

  Mulino smiled. Leonard Mitchell was going to come in very useful for him after all. “We know what happened. Someone in the cab banged this crane into the building until it snapped. We don’t know why it happened. Tell your commissioner to give a very bland statement about how important it is to inspect cranes regularly, and maybe even throw the Department of Buildings under the bus a little. And on top of that, I have a proposition for you that I think you’ll find very appealing.”

  “Detective Mulino, I’m all ears.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Well, that was a waste. Eleanor Hill sat alone in her car in the middle school parking lot, facing the mean traffic on Empire Boulevard. Piled on her passenger seat were twenty-nine neat packets, one for each member of the Community Board. But she hadn’t had the chance to hand them out. She had come to the school that night ready to pitch her latest project to the Board, hoping for swift approval so she could move on to the City Council, then the Department of Planning, and then break ground. It was going to require a zoning change, turning two blocks of boarded-up businesses to residential. And if they had only given her a chance, she was sure she could have convinced them.

  Eleanor had come prepared. She had a portfolio filled with data: with five thousand units and the housing coming in at 20 percent affordable, she was offering a thousand discount apartments in a neighborhood desperate for them. She could turn a profit on the deal even if they jacked up the affordable demand to 30 percent, but you never start a negotiation at your closing number.

  Plus, she had calculated the revenues for the city: jobs created, property taxes paid, sales taxes from the in-neighborhood spends on services and amenities. What dry cleaner doesn’t want four thousand professionals moving in around the corner? She was going to upgrade the sewers; she was going to put in an electrical substation; there was going to be some space given back for a soccer field for the very school where they were having the meeting. Anyone reasonable would have given her the thumbs up.

  But she should have known that in some neighborhoods, reason doesn’t rule the day. The board meeting that night had been disrupted by twenty protesters waving signs, chanting slogans, blocking the exits. They said that the unpaid board members were in the pockets of malicious developers. The majority-black board was a tool of the sinister Jews. Tearing down an empty sugar warehouse to build housing was going to displace local families.

  Eleanor Hill knew many of the protesters. They lived mainly one block up from the proposed development, on Guilder Street, a neat row of hundred-year-old townhouses. Their angry chants were a cover: what they were really worried about was that the new development would front their private backyards.

  She had waited it out in the auditorium or cafeteria—whatever that ungodly room was—until after all the protesters had left. One of them kept screaming until the board chair had to call the police. As a cop dragged her out of the room, she yelled that she was being assaulted, that her life mattered, that she couldn’t breathe. Never mind that most of the board, Eleanor Hill, and the cop manhandling her were all black, too. Say what you will about the demonstrators. They knew how to put on a show.

  Eleanor Hill had underestimated the protesters. They were never going to let the board vote if they could help it. They were never going to look at her charts and decide the development was a good idea. But sitting in the middle school parking lot, she realized that their obstinacy was not a problem. If they didn’t want to negotiate, she would simply run them down.

  But the board was trickier. The board vote didn’t matter in any real sense. Hill and Associates had bundled donations for the local council member, for the borough president, for the mayor
, public advocate, comptroller. Eleanor knew the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure so well that she didn’t even sound silly saying “ULURP.” If the variance came before the committee at the City Council with a thumbs-down from the community board, all it would mean would be a few more office visits. Electeds will always come around.

  But a couple of months spent lobbying city council members would be a couple of months lost breaking ground, laying the foundations, and in the end a couple of months less rent from four thousand market-rate units. Not to mention the optics. If the board approves you even though some protestors complain, eventually everyone in the neighborhood will fall in line. If the board turns you down and you build anyway, there are going to be people picketing the site, storming the open houses, filing frivolous lawsuits. It would be easier to avoid the whole headache.

  Eleanor guided her Lexus toward the edge of the parking lot. She slipped her phone onto the passenger seat. Her father had called her six times during the meeting. She had noticed the first ring, just before the meeting started, and managed to silence it. That was the last thing she needed, to be the person whose phone was going off during the community board meeting.

  The speeches had been canceled because of the protests. She had no chance to hand out her neat packets of convincing data. She had emailed it to the board members a week before, but she knew they hadn’t read it. You have to spoon-feed people everything. The board had gone into executive session after the protest. So they had voted, but they hadn’t heard from her. And she wouldn’t find out for a week what they had decided. Lots of the board members, deep down, sided with the protesters. It wasn’t that they wanted one kind of building instead of another. They just didn’t want any new buildings at all. Eleanor thought maybe they should all move to Topeka.

  There was a new guy on the board she hadn’t been able to get a bead on. White, a little heavy; he had mottled hair and faraway eyes, and looked as though he had just woken up from a twenty-year nap. Trying to look professional with a tie and a sport coat, but instead only looking uncomfortable. She figured he would vote whichever way the majority was going. Or against the other white people, to prove he wasn’t a newcomer-gentrifying-racist. He probably was against her. It was too bad that community board members get appointed and work for free. They don’t have election campaigns you can contribute to.