Reckless Endangerment Read online

  “Loo, the guy was out cold. I’m trying to solve a case here. What did he have to do with it?”

  “Out cold? Well, he woke up, and he talked to his daughter, and she got in touch with the good rabbi there, and here we are. The story is, the guys who killed his wife came in shouting Arab slogans, Allah, Allah, whatever, and so now we got it blown into a gang of Arab terrorists is starting a campaign of assassination against Jews in New York. Lowenstein is demanding protection—ha!—and also, and especially, that we grab the mutts who did it, preferably yesterday. So—what do you have?”

  “Have? For crying out loud, Loo, I been on the case three hours. The guy up at Columbia says the killers wrote ‘kill the Jews’ and ‘free Palestine’ on the wall and the writer was probably a Palestinian who couldn’t spell real good. That narrows it down.”

  Meagher kept glancing over at the group of suits and brass standing in a small group behind their guards. Huge fake-fur-covered mikes on poles thrust up at them like a hostile phalanx. Below, the press was baying questions. One of the suits gave Meagher the eye, and the lieutenant hurried over. They conversed briefly, and the suit spoke to another suit, who moved forward and addressed the cameras. To his dismay, Raney heard the words “already several suspects” and “arrest imminent,” and the suit went on to mention a $25,000 reward for information leading to, put up by the United Jewish Philanthropies of New York.

  White, who had skulked in the background while Raney dealt with Meagher, came up and said disgustedly, “Oh, great! Now every hard-on in town is gonna be on us with his cousin Charley did it. What’d the Loo say?”

  “Shilkes is conscious again. Get over to Beth Israel and take his statement. Go now! Before the riot starts.”

  White left and the riot did start, as more Tacticals de-bussed at Ninth Avenue and started to clear the street, moving in a line with helmet shields down and batons swinging. A thrown bottle shattered against the door frame. The suits all hunched momentarily and then, some glancing about to see if anyone had noticed, strode boldly to their cars and departed.

  As he watched, bemused, the dispersal of the Jews, Raney felt a hand on his arm. “Whatever you need, Jim, just ask!” said Lieutenant Meagher. “And forget everything else you got on the board. But wrap this one up fast, wrap it up good! Make it disappear!”

  Napoleon, they say, when presented with an officer to be promoted to the rank of general, always asked, “Is he lucky?” Raney was a good, bright, conscientious detective, like many another on the force, but he was also lucky. This was apparent, since he had, after all, gone into that darkened bakery after four robbers armed with shotguns and automatic weapons and had killed them all without suffering a scratch himself. Lucky Jim was his third nickname.

  “So, Lucky Jim,” said White later that day, as he drove them across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, “is our ass in a sling now or what?”

  “Partially,” admitted Raney. “On the up side, I don’t think we’re dealing with a big international mastermind here. Carlos the Jackal is probably not a player.”

  “They were sloppy, you mean? The tracks, the cigarettes…”

  “Yeah. On the other hand, they didn’t just walk down Fourteenth and go, ‘Hey, look, Jews, let’s waste them.’”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the thing was cased. The Shilkeses opened the store at seven every Sunday carrying fresh bagels, like clockwork. The perps knew that and they were waiting. Then they disappear. How? I doubt they just strolled away. They either had to have a car, or they took the subway, and if they took the subway, they had to know what the train schedule was going to be early on Sunday, because they sure as shit didn’t want to be hanging around on a platform with maybe blood on their clothes for twenty minutes. So, planning.”

  White thought about that for a while, and it did not amuse him. “What do you think? Is Brooklyn going to do us any good?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Raney, leaning back and watching the gray tenements of Williamsburg rush by. “It could be we’ll catch a break.”

  Their first stop was the Eighty-fourth Precinct, on Gold Street, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. The Eighty-fourth is a squat little precinct that has the misfortune to include both the gentrified brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and the ungentrified brownstones of South Brooklyn, a once decent working-class neighborhood ruined by freeway construction, gone slummy, and full of people wishing to prey on the conveniently nearby gentry. It logs a lot of robbery, a lot of burglary, and somewhat under a hundred killings a year, all of which argued against the cops there having much time to spare for accumulating deep knowledge of Arab fringe organizations.

  The detective squad room there was a near duplicate of the many in which Raney had spent the past decade, the banged-up furniture, the green paint, the brown tile underfoot, the pervasive reek of tobacco, the continual din of ringing phones. Two cops were at desks, one phoning, one typing slowly. A thin brown man, obviously a skell from the tank downstairs, was pushing a broom desultorily across the floor for cigarette money.

  “Arabs, huh?” said McIlvey, the day-shift detective sergeant. “Yeah, we got Arabs up the ying-yang, but they don’t usually give us much trouble. Peaceful bastards, and a lot of them are illegals; they don’t want to see us much.” He creaked back in his chair, to demonstrate peacefulness. McIlvey was a white-haired, heavy set Irishman of the booze-blossom-nosed type, nearing retirement and not apt to get exercised over a Manhattan case, no matter what the bosses said.

  They showed him the pictures of the graffiti from the crime scene.

  “We think those initials down at the bottom are an organization,” said Raney. “You recall seeing anything like that sprayed on walls or on tattoos?”

  “Nah. But I don’t get out as much as I did. What I’ll do for you is post it in the squad room, maybe somebody saw something. Like I say, we got ’em, but we don’t got ’em. Not like the spics, you know?”

  They knew, and if White had not been there it would have been the niggers too. Raney sensed his partner’s intense desire to get away from this useless man. He was just thinking that they would have to come back and talk to the night-shift people, maybe get a live one, when McIlvey said, “You know, it’s funny, we had one of them in here last night. Yo, Harris,” he called to the man at the typewriter, “what was the name of that crazy fucker last night?”

  “The fuck I know, Sarge,” answered Harris, and went tap. Tap. “Ask his roomie there.” Tap.

  “Oh, yeah,” said McIlvey, and turned to the broom. “Skeeter, what was your pal’s name there, that AY-rab?”

  “Not my pal, Sarge.”

  “Well, fuck it, anyway. Fuckin’ thing too,” said McIlvey. “Couple of our guys brought him in last night, late in the graveyard. Driving like a bat out of hell down Fulton Street in a fuckin’ bakery truck, no taillights, so our guys, Pendergrass and Newton … hey, Harris, it was Pendergrass, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, right,” said Harris. Tap.

  “Yeah, so they give chase, like they say, going seventy, eighty down Fulton Street, got a couple more RPCs in on it, and they finally got the mutt in a box and he gave it up. Guy had a knife on him as long as your arm. Didn’t have a license, no registration. Insurance? Lots of luck! I don’t know, the fuckin’ people this country lets in nowadays. …”

  Raney had been looking for a graceful way to pull away, but the mention of the knife sparked a flicker of interest. “You say they picked this guy up late last night?”

  “Morning, actually. Maybe four.”

  “So he was in custody at like around seven this morning?”

  “Oh, yeah. He must have gone out with the van to central booking at eight or around there. But like I say, that’s unusual. Most of ’em are pretty peaceful. Although, now that I think of it, a couple months ago we had a guy beat up his wife pretty bad, an Arab—”

  “Yeah, well, look, Sarge, we got to get going right now—” Raney began, and then the broom sai
d, “He was gonna kill him some Jews, that boy. Boy had a mother-fuckin’ thing about the Jews. Him and his friends. Said he had some damn organization. Damn sumbitch didn’t have no more sense than a chicken. I said to him, hey, man—”

  “Say, Skeeter?” Raney interrupted, vibrating now, feeling the luck flow and the sweat pop up on his scalp. “This kid say exactly which Jews he was planning to kill?”

  “Nah. He just running his mouth, you know? Like, he said his organization was gonna do one this morning, and he was real pissed he wasn’t gonna be there, on account of his ass being in jail, you know? He was hot to go. He kept asking me, when we get out, when we get out? Like I the fuckin judge, you know?” The man laughed, a phlegmy, unpleasant rattle that turned into a cough.

  Raney said, “Sarge, I think we’re gonna need to borrow Skeeter for a while.” McIlvey grunted and looked at the floor, and for an instant Raney actually thought he was going to refuse until Skeeter finished a sweep and a damp-mop.

  The Arab misdemeanant, whose name was Walid Daoud, had a job and a father who owned a business, and so had been released on his own recognizance by the time they got to the Brooklyn jail. They drove the short hop to Atlantic Avenue, where the bakery was at which Daoud supposedly worked. Raney looked around him with greater interest. This neighborhood had expanded a good deal in the last decade. Once a relatively small community of Syrian and other Mideastern Christians, it had burgeoned down Atlantic Avenue east of its former boundary at Court Street and become more exotic, more Muslim. Women with shawls and shapeless dresses whose hems touched their shoes pulled shopping carts and hand-held strings of olive-skinned children down the street and in and out of small shops. There were even some women wearing the full traditional robes, with veil, and there were old bearded men wearing checkered headdresses. Sunday was clearly a big shopping day among the Brooklyn Arabs. There were a lot of kids. The day had turned warm, a herald of spring, and the storekeepers had moved the merchandise out on the sidewalk on homemade flats, and the clothing merchants had hung garments up on poles, giving the street the air of a souk, as did also the odors, burnt coffee, baking bread, and something spicy that Raney did not recognize, but which, he thought, was probably as familiar to these people as … what was a typical Irish fragrance? Cabbage? Whiskey? This had been an Irish neighborhood once, eighty years back, then Italian, now Arab.

  Raney reflected on this transition to White, who was unimpressed. “Mutts are mutts, it don’t matter a fuck where they come from.”

  “No? You don’t think there’s a difference? A Jew mutt and a black mutt?”

  “What, you think the Jew mutt is smarter?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. Just… different people put a different curve on the ball. It changes, but it’s always the same. Twenty-five years the houses and stores’ll still be here, but the cops’ll be Arabs and the people, the mutts’ll be, I don’t know, Eskimos, Tibetans, whatever.”

  The interested tone in Raney’s voice did not spark any enthusiasm in White, who was a sports-and-pussy rather than a sociological-speculation kind of guy, nor in Skeeter, who was snoring liquidly in the backseat. They drove in relative silence therefore until Gallatin Street, where White said, “There it is. Want me to go around the back?”

  “No, I don’t think so. This guy’s not going to run.”

  Nor did he. Walid Daoud was summoned from the back of the shop by the pretty, sullen teenage girl minding the counter and came out trailing his father and clouds of white dust. The detectives made the usual explanation about wanting to ask a few more questions, the father berated the boy strenuously in Arabic, swatted him on the head a few, and they left without resistance. If Walid was surprised to see Skeeter in the car, he made no show of it, riding in silence during the twenty-five-minute trip to Midtown South.

  They got Walid in the little room, and White, of course, was the bad cop. Raney thought he did a good job, no rough stuff, but a lot of shouting, and banging of chairs and throwing of telephone books, and impugning the manhood of the interviewee. You and your friends planned this, and then you chickened out, didn’t you? You little coward! What are you, some kind of faggot, you don’t have the guts to knife an old Jew? And so on, which got the expected rise out of Walid and an excuse—I was going, I was hurrying, I got arrested. What were their names? Your friends? Silence. Rage from White, threats, a final chair kicking, and then Raney stopped it and hustled White out of the room.

  Offer of coffee, offer of cigarettes, apologies for White, a little racist remark, just to solidify the bond, we’re white men, you and I, he’s … well, you know what they’re like. Then the schtick.

  “Look, Walid, you know, if it was a political crime, that’s one thing, we respect that. I mean, a man’s got to stand up for his rights, am I right?”

  Walid nodded at this. A good-looking kid, Raney thought: big eyes, clear skin, good little body. Those eyelashes—little shit probably gets more pussy than Warren Beatty.

  “We are fighters for free Palestine, fedayin,” said Walid with feeling.

  “I appreciate that, Walid, but I got to say, you’re in a lot of trouble over this. I don’t like to see that, a kid your age.

  “But … I was not there!”

  “Yeah, we know that. But you’re what we call an accessory. You helped your friends plan this crime. You can be charged with conspiracy. You could go to jail for a long time.”

  “I do not care!” said Walid. “The Zionists put hundreds in jail, hundreds, hundreds, so I join them. I do not care.”

  “Right, I see that, but Walid, for you it wouldn’t be like that. You see … I’m not supposed to tell you this, but…” Raney looked over his shoulder and leaned forward conspiratorially. “The thing is, your friends robbed the people they attacked. They took the money from the store, so this won’t be treated as a political crime at all. It’s just gonna go down as another store robbery and murder. It’s not gonna help your cause one little bit.”

  Walid stared, his mouth slightly open.

  “Yeah, see, they screwed up, and the shame of it is, you’re gonna have to take the fall, for nothing.” He let that sink in for a moment and then resumed. “Now, this place where you planned the thing, the attack, that’s your organization headquarters, right?”

  “Yes. Duhd el Dar al-Harb. This is us.”

  “Uh-huh. What does that mean exactly?”

  “It means, Against the House of War. It is the struggle. The Dar ul-Islam fights against the Zionists, the imperialists. These we call the Dar al-Harb, the House of War.” He banged his fists together violently to mime the intensity of the thing.

  “I see. Now in this headquarters you probably have posters, pamphlets, all about what you’re doing, political stuff, right?”

  “Yes, of course. We have this. And cassettes, from Palestine.”

  “Well, that’s great, Walid. So, if we went there and found that stuff, see, it would be political then. You’d be in a whole different situation. You’d be a hero.”

  Walid frowned. “You want … just the place, the garage. Not the names. I don’t give the names.”

  “Hey, right, just the place. You’re a stand-up guy, Walid. We respect that. No, just the address. So we can get the political stuff.”

  Raney left the room elated, with an address. An hour later, armed with a search warrant and backed up by a dozen heavily armed and flak-jacketed uniforms from the Eighty-fourth, Raney and White burst through the back door of a garage on Adams Street, Brooklyn, where they found posters of Yassir Arafat, pamphlets justifying the destruction of Israel, cassettes urging the same, a pair of field jackets spotted with a reddish-brown substance, one with a big green magic marker (similarly stained) in a pocket, and the other with eight packs of Salems in a pocket, two eight-inch hunting knives, stained with a reddish-brown substance, and two surprised young men. The young men did not speak much English, but sometime later they were identified (with the aid of a Syrian-American patrolman from the Eighty-fourth) as
Yussuf Naijer and Mahmoud Hamshari, both late of Gaza, in the occupied territories of Palestine, and illegally in the United States. They were both taken to Midtown South, where they were put into a lineup and videotaped, which tape was then brought to Beth Israel, where it was shown to Mr. Shilkes. He had no trouble picking Naijer and Hamshari out as the men who had killed his wife. Raney went back to Midtown South and booked the two men for murder and Walid for conspiracy to commit murder.

  As he sat down at his desk to complete the paperwork, he looked at his watch. It was a little over twelve hours since the crime. The suits would be pleased.

  Ali al-Qabbani watched the police take away his two comrades and seal the room behind the garage. He doubted that Abdel, the garage’s owner, would wish to re-employ him after this, which meant that he had no money, no job, no clothes or possessions other than what he stood in now, and no place to sleep. He had, however, one place to go, and so he went there.

  It was a long walk in the waning light, up Atlantic Avenue and south down Sixth Avenue into the more genteel, tree-shaded precincts of Park Slope. There he walked through a wrought-iron gate up to a nicely groomed brownstone and rang the bell. The man who answered it was well-fleshed and short, with a beautiful head of dark hair swept back from his forehead. He was wearing red leather slippers, blue jeans, and a white shirt buttoned at the collar. And he was sleek in the way that some men were where Ali came from, the men with the big cars and the bodyguards. You went to men like that when you were in trouble, and they helped you or they did not. The expression on this man’s face when he saw Ali standing there did not promise well.

  “What are you doing here, you idiot?” he said in Arabic. “You were told never, ever to come here.”

  Ali looked down from his height and said, “Please, Khalid-effendi, the police have been to Abdel’s. I have no place to go and no money.”

  Chouza Khalid’s angry look was replaced by one of calculation and then one of beneficence, which, had Ali any brains at all, would have made him flee as from wild dogs. Instead, he followed the man’s gesturing arm into the tiled entranceway and then through another door into a carpeted hallway lit with sconces and furnished with a gold-framed mirror, a shining wooden table holding a vase of flowers, and a carved red velvet chair. There Khalid bade him wait and he did, standing, of course, because it would never have occurred to him to take the liberty of sitting in the velvet chair.