Forced Entry (35 page)

He waited until six o’clock before going inside, expecting Rosenkrantz to be long gone, and found the security guard, an elderly black man, sitting in a folding chair at the top of the stairwell leading to Precision Management’s offices.

“Whatta ya say?” Moodrow grunted.

“All right,” the man answered. His nametag, a black bar with silver letters, read
T. Sawyer
.

“Glad to hear it.” Moodrow, wondering if the “T” stood for Tom, flashed his ID at the guard. “I’m looking for Al Rosenkrantz. I didn’t see him come out.”

“The fat boy’s workin’ late tonight. He’s up in his office.”

“You mind if I go up?”

“Don’t mean shit to me.”

The main floor was deserted when Moodrow crossed it. With no humans scurrying about, the offices appeared even dirtier than on his first visit. The wastebaskets, each surrounded by a halo of crumpled paper, focused Moodrow on the contrast between the patches of white paper and the dirty brown tile floor. The condition of the offices hinted of corruption, not violence, and Moodrow came to the firm conclusion that Rosenkrantz could be no more than an office boy in this operation—a mouthpiece for the violent center. The only question was whether Rosenkrantz was a collaborator or a dupe. And the only important information to be gained was the source of his instructions.

Moodrow wasn’t surprised to find Rosenkrantz still in his office, despite having been convinced, only a few moments before, that Rosenkrantz had gone home. The tension growing inside Moodrow’s body was familiar and pleasant; it was like the memory of something especially helpful, something he should have known all along. He pushed open the door and stepped inside the small office, noting the sudden leap, from surprise to fear, that flashed across the fat man’s features. Rosenkrantz knew what had happened and he knew Moodrow was the target.

“You’re gonna fall,” Moodrow said. “You
gotta
fall. How’s about doing me a favor and not taking all day about it?”

Though he liked taking orders—carrying through was what he was
good
at, he’d never been creative—Al Rosenkrantz hated to be pushed around. Like many civilians who hadn’t had a fight since junior high school, he thought of himself as a tough guy, willing to look any tenant right in the eye before launching into a line of bullshit. He liked saying “Trust me” to people he intended to destroy and felt himself stronger than any man who played by the rules. Of course, the simple fact that Moodrow had no intention of playing by the rules was manifestly obvious, but without any other real option, Rosenkrantz decided to test Moodrow anyway. He was a large man, six foot tall and well over 250 pounds; when his bullshit hadn’t worked, he’d often used his size to intimidate building inspectors as well as tenants.

“Do me a favor,” he said, before realizing just how far he had to look up to meet Moodrow’s eyes, “and get the hell out of my office.”

Moodrow responded by slapping him across the face, an openhanded blow that, nevertheless, had most of the ex-cop’s shoulder behind it. It sent Rosenkrantz sprawling over the wastebasket beside his desk and he hit the floor with a very audible splat.

“You’ll pay for this,” was the best response Rosenkrantz could manage to formulate as he rose to his feet. His voice nevertheless conveyed defiance; he clearly meant to stand up to Moodrow’s harassment. Unfortunately, when he raised his left hand to the side of his face (which seemed to be on fire), he exposed his ribs and, despite the heavy layer of protecting fat and muscle, Moodrow’s fist exploded against the bones just beneath his heart like a two-pound hammer against a bag of peanuts. This time he had the good sense to stay on the floor, and when he spoke, his voice was much more conciliatory. “What do you want?” he asked.

By way of an answer, Moodrow took Rosenkrantz by the lapel of his jacket and, despite the fat man’s 250 pounds, hauled him to his feet. “You tried to kill me,” Moodrow said flatly, pushing him up against the filing cabinets. “And I’m gonna hurt you for it.”

“I didn’t,” the fat man started to protest. “Please…”

Rosenkrantz saw Moodrow draw back his left fist, but, with his back up against the filing cabinets, he was unable to move away. The best Precision Management’s Project Supervisor could do was cringe, and cringing had no effect on the intensity of the blow that crashed into the right side of his rib cage, driving him, once again, to the floor.

This time he made up his mind not to get up under any circumstance, not to get up even if Moodrow kicked him to death. He curled himself into a ball and grabbed at the handles of a locked filing cabinet. When he wasn’t immediately attacked, he relaxed slightly, hoping against hope that the nightmare was over. Like a child pretending to evade a raging parent, he squeezed his eyes shut, opening them only when he felt Moodrow’s weight drop onto his chest. What he saw—the barrel of a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson less than twelve inches from the end of his nose—was so frightening, his bladder released and he began to urinate. Curiously, he was unaware of the sensation of warm fluid on his thigh; it was the odor, sharp and acrid, that made him realize what he’d done.

“Please don’t kill me,” he moaned softly. “Please, please, please, please…”

Though he had no intention of really hurting Rosenkrantz, Moodrow knew he was using more force than necessary. He also knew that, of all the guilty ones, Rosenkrantz and the lawyer were the most likely to walk away unscathed. As a cop, he would have accepted this reality; he understood law enforcement as a series of compromises. As the target of fifty rounds of 9mm ammunition, however, he had a vested interest in seeing Al Rosenkrantz squirm, and he cocked the hammer of his pistol without cracking a smile. “You tried to kill me,” he repeated.

“I didn’t. I didn’t. Oh, God, believe me. I didn’t know anything about it.”

Moodrow eased the hammer down, but kept the gun barrel in the fat man’s face. “When did you find out?”

Rosenkrantz, though still terrified, had a dim realization of the reality that any convict would have understood the minute Stanley Moodrow came through the door. Moodrow wanted information; the violence was only a way of demonstrating his side of the deal. And Rosenkrantz’s answer, should he decide to give it, would be the same as signing the contract.

“I got a phone call from Holtz about twenty minutes ago.” To his surprise, the dominant emotion sweeping through him was shame, not relief. Nevertheless, he continued. “That’s why I stayed late. He calls me this time every week.”

Moodrow, recognizing the fat man’s total capitulation (and anxious to put some distance between himself and Rosenkrantz’s wet legs), stood up, holstered his weapon, and took the visitor’s chair next to the desk. “C’mon, asshole,” he said, pointing to Rosenkrantz’s chair, “get off the fuckin’ ground. It’s time to spill your guts.” He waited until Rosenkrantz was seated, then took a small cassette recorder from his jacket pocket and laid it on the desk. “On the way over here, I picked up this recorder and five tapes. After I load the tape and get it going, I’m gonna ask you some questions. If your answers give a hint of the fact that I’m forcing you to submit, I’m gonna shut down the recorder and load another tape. Nowadays the experts can tell if you erase the tape and that limits me. I can only go through it five times, so you should remind yourself that it definitely pays for you to make sure I don’t run out of tape.”

“Are you going to try to use this in a courtroom?” Rosenkrantz was careful to keep his voice soft.

“Could be.”

“But I don’t have a lawyer.”

“Oh yeah, that’s very interesting.” Moodrow, the tape inserted and ready to go, put the tape deck in his lap. “It used to be, when I was still a cop, that I’d have to do all kinds of shit before I could ask you any questions. But now that I’m retired, all the rules have changed. It don’t matter if I gotta break the law to obtain evidence against you. I mean you could always go to the precinct and make a complaint against me. Maybe you could even get me arrested. But none of that would make the evidence inadmissible.
Miranda
doesn’t have anything to do with civilians. You understand what I’m sayin’?”

Moodrow turned the recorder on, labeling it with the day, the date and the place, then laid it on the desk between himself and Rosenkrantz. “So when did you find out that someone tried to kill me today?”

“I got a call from the lawyer…”

“Say his name.”

“Holtz. Bill Holtz. From Bolt Realty.”

“He told you I was the target of the hit?”

“No, no. He told me there was a shooting in front of the apartments and he gave me some instructions.”

In the end, Moodrow was disappointed. Rosenkrantz freely admitted his part in the assault on the tenants of the Jackson Arms—he went so far as to admit participation in a dozen similar schemes—but he completely denied having any part in the violence. He’d helped to select the targets for eviction and deliberately fired the old superintendent, but his main function was to keep the tenants from organizing. To convince them that Precision Management would handle the problems. At no time was he part of the general planning. Nor did he personally meet any of the squatters, though he’d furnished the lawyer with a list of empty apartments. And, most of all, he had absolutely no idea who, if anyone, stood behind William Holtz.

M
OODROW DROVE DIRECTLY FROM
Precision Management to Betty Haluka’s apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He was hoping for a quick trip, but as Precision Management was in eastern Queens and Park Slope was in west-central Brooklyn and it was only seven o’clock, the trip was long enough and slow enough for him to face his disappointment. He’d hoped (even though he knew better) that Rosenkrantz would lead him directly to the owners of Bolt Realty. A futile hope that was doomed from the beginning. Bolt Realty had gone to great lengths to keep its owners away from public scrutiny and there was no reason to suppose the principals would trust their security to a flunky like Al Rosenkrantz.

As he drove, Moodrow tried to occupy himself with the question of who, exactly, had been the target of the brothers Cohan. His initial conviction, that he had been the one slated for execution, had come instinctively, but now, like any good investigator, he had to subject it to an application of cop logic. Working backward, he quickly eliminated the obvious. The attackers were white males, nearly thirty years of age, and clearly atypical in terms of the crack wars of the 80s and 90s. Those wars were being fought on the streets of black and Hispanic ghettos, not in middle-class Jackson Heights. They were also being fought, in the main, by ultraviolent savages masquerading as children. A prime example—the dealers hanging out in front of the Jackson Arms were no more than fifteen years old, ten years younger than the youngest of the assassins. There was a reason, of course, why these children were allowed to function unimpeded by their elders in the drug business. Any dealer with half a brain divorced himself from the street as soon as he had enough capital to participate in the wholesale end of the industry. Those too stupid to make the jump inevitably capped their careers with long, hard periods of incarceration. If they survived at all.

But even if the three dealers had not been the target of the Cohan brothers (they’d actually had their identification in their pockets, another example of their ultimate stupidity), that didn’t mean their target was Stanley Moodrow. One by one, as he drove up onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Moodrow went over the others present at the scene: Dunlap, Betty, the Almeydas. They were all replaceable: Paul Dunlap, from the killers point of view, was only one of 30,000 cops in New York (his cop status also made him an extremely unlikely target for assassination); Betty Haluka was a Legal Aid lawyer, one of thousands, and her efforts to halt the decay of the Jackson Arms amounted to nothing more than harassment; Inez Almeyda, a housewife with little more than anger to contribute to the struggle to save her home was, of course, the most innocent of innocent bystanders.

He, on the other hand, private investigator Stanley Moodrow, was the man pursuing the source; he had already made up his mind not to stop until he found Sylvia Kaufman’s killer. (And the killer of Inez Almeyda and Katerina Nikolis and a fourteen-year-old crack dealer named Roy “Pinwheel” Johnson.) He was also the man who had decked Al Rosenkrantz, a fact certainly reported to the fat man’s employers. His willingness to step away from the narrow line of the law was certain to set off an alarm in the mind of a criminal, criminals being only too aware of the short-term advantages to be derived from a highly developed contempt for the law.

Of course, there was always the chance that the Cohan brothers hadn’t been after anyone in particular. Maybe the attack had been no more than a faked drive-by with assault rifles, a message to send the tenants packing while the cops searched their files, looking for Queens crack czars. Nevertheless, prudence dictated that he consider himself a target. For the same practical reasons, he should have considered Betty a target, as well, but he wasn’t ready to face what he’d done at the scene. Sooner or later, he would have to probe his actions with the same cop logic driving his present speculations, but not then and there. Better to deal with the victims, to psych himself up for the chase.

Betty’s apartment was empty when Moodrow finally arrived, and there was no sign that she’d come home and gone out again. A phone call to the 115th Precinct produced a detective named Downey who told Moodrow that all the witnesses had given statements and gone home. Likewise for Porky Dunlap and, yes, the Legal Aid lawyer had been given a ride back to somewhere, maybe Brooklyn. How long ago? At least two hours.

A sudden feeling of apprehension washed over Moodrow as he laid the phone down and went back to the car. The fear had no basis in “cop logic”; not even in the “cop instincts” sitting at the source of his pride. Maybe she was angry with him. Maybe she thought him a coward or…But he didn’t want to think about alternatives. He wanted to drive home and find her waiting for him and he did it quickly, cutting in and out of the heavy traffic on Flatbush Avenue. When he climbed the stairs to his fourth floor apartment and found her sitting with her back against his door, he was so relieved, he stopped in his tracks.