out?”
Driving south on East Tremont, they passed the Forty-fifth Precinct house on Barkley Avenue, an ugly squat building with too few parking spaces for the number of squad cars packed around it. The thermometer was touching eighty and the street was teeming with Puerto Ricans, toting plastic shopping bags, pushing baby carriages, or just strolling along with cell phones pressed against ears, moving in and out of the grocerias, bodegas, and cheap mom-and-pop stores. The women were showing a lot of flesh. Too many heavy chicks in halter tops and short-shorts, jiggling along in flip-flops, for his liking. Do they actually think they look foxy? he wondered. They made his passenger look like a supermodel.
Nancy was buried in the map, trying not to screw up. “From here, it’s the third left,” she said.
Sullivan Place was an inconvenient street for a major murder. Cruisers, unmarked vehicles, and medical examiner vans were double-parked in front of the crime scene, choking off the traffic. Will pulled up to a young cop trying to keep one lane passable and flashed his badge. “Jeez,” the cop moaned. “I don’t know where to put you. Can you swing around the block? Maybe there’s something around the corner.”
Will parroted him. “Around the corner.”
“Yeah, around the block, you know take a couple of rights.”
Will turned off the ignition, got out and tossed the cop the keys. Cars started honking like mad, instant gridlock.
“Whaddya doing!” the cop hollered. “You can’t leave this here!” Nancy continued to sit in the SUV, mortified.
Will called to her. “C’mon, let’s get a move on. And take Officer Cuneo’s badge number down in your little book in case he does anything disrespectful to government property.”
The cop muttered, “Asshole.”
Will was spoiling for a dust-up and this kid would do just fine. “Listen,” he said, boiling over with rage, “if you like your pathetic little job then don’t fuck with me! If you don’t give a shit about it, then take a shot. Go on! Try it!”
Two angry guys, veins bulging, face-to-face. “Will! Can we go?” Nancy implored. “We’re wasting time.”
The cop shook his head, climbed into the Explorer, drove it down the block and double-parked it in front of a detective’s car. Will, still breathing hard, winked at Nancy, “I knew he’d find us a spot.”
It was a pocket-sized apartment building, three floors, six units, dirty white brickwork, slapped together in the forties. The hallway was dim and depressing, brown and black ceramic checkerboard tiling on the floors, grimy beige walls, bare yellow bulbs. All the action was in and around Apartment 1A, ground floor left. Toward the rear of the hall, near the garbage shaft, family members crowded together in multigenerational grief, a middle-aged woman wailing softly, her husband, in work boots, trying to comfort her, a fully pregnant young woman, sitting on the bare floor, recovering from hyperventilation, a young girl in a Sunday dress, looking bewildered, a couple of old men in loose shirts, shaking their heads and stroking their stubble.
Will squirmed through the half-open apartment door, Nancy following. He winced at the sight of too many cooks spoiling the broth. There were at least a dozen people in an eight-hundred-square foot space, astronomically increasing the odds of crime scene pollution. He did a quick reconnoiter with Nancy on his heels, and amazingly no one stopped them or even questioned their presence. Front room. Old-lady furniture and bric-a-brac. Twenty-year-old TV. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to part the curtains to peer through each window, a procedure he repeated in every room. Kitchen. Spic-and-span. No dishes in the sink. Bathroom, also tidy, smelling of foot powder. Bedroom. Too crowded with chattering personnel to see much except for plump dead legs, gray and mottled, beside an unmade bed, one foot half inside a slipper.
Will bellowed, “Who’s in charge here?”
Sudden silence until, “Who’s asking?” A balding detective with a big gut and a tight suit separated himself from the scrum and appeared at the bedroom door.
“FBI,” Will said. “I’m Special Agent Piper.” Nancy looked hurt she wasn’t introduced.
“Detective Chapman, Forty-fifth Precinct.” He extended a large warm hand, the weight of a brick. He smelled of onions.
“Detective, what do you say we clear this place out so we can have a nice quiet inspection of the crime scene?”
“My guys are almost done, then it’s all yours.”
“Let’s do it now, okay? Half your men aren’t wearing gloves. No one’s got booties on. You’re making a mess here, Detective.”
“Nobody’s touching nothing,” Chapman said