A Long Line of Dead Men

"He didn't go away for Cloonan," he said. "What happened, there was a rash of these in '90 and '91, gypsy cab drivers shot in Harlem or the Bronx, some Third World part of the city. There was a task force formed consisting of cops from five different precincts in the Bronx and upper Manhattan, and they set out a string of decoys and came up with Eldoniah Mims. A Norwegian kid, obviously."

"Well, they've always been a race of troublemakers."

"I know, them and the fucking Estonians. They had Mims flat-footed for half a dozen killings, and they took the most rock-solid case to trial, one where they had physical and eyewitness evidence. The plea they offered him, he could cop to six counts of second-degree murder, and in return they'd let him serve the sentences concurrently."

"Very generous."

"So he had to turn it down, and the case they brought was a Manhattan killing, so you didn't get one of those Bronx juries determined to avenge three hundred years of racist oppression. The judge and jury both did the right thing, and Eldoniah's got to do twenty upstate before he's eligible for parole, and if he ever gets out they can try him for some of the other cabbies he killed, the useless little son of a bitch."

"Could they try him for Cloonan?"

"He'd be way down at the bottom of the list. You know, you get someone dead to rights like that, you want to close whatever files you can."

"But you don't know that he did it."

"I don't know zip, my friend, because all of this happened up in Washington Heights and the fucking Bronx, so what do I know? What I hear, which isn't the same thing, is nobody's all that sure Mims did Cloonan, but what's it hurt to let him take the weight until somebody better comes along?"

"You said gypsy cabs," I said. "If Cloonan was picking up on Fifth Avenue, wouldn't he have been driving a metered taxi?"

He nodded. "He was in a Yellow and the rest were gypsies. He was also shot with a nine-mil and the others with twenty-twos. Not all the same gun, different guns, but all the same caliber."

"Sounds as though they were reaching some to hang it on Mims."

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "Anyway, there were similarities. They were all driving cabs and they all wound up dead."

"Of course Mims said he didn't do it."

"Mims said he didn't do anything. If Mims had gone to confession, all he'd have been able to come up with was impure thoughts and taking the Lord's name in vain. Matt, it's like muggings and burglaries. The typical mutt, by the time you land on him he's gotten away with it fifty times running. So you clear fifty could-bes and tie them to his ass. It averages out, and if you don't do it your clearance rate looks like shit."

"I know how it works."

"Of course you do."

"I just thought homicide was different."

"It is," he said, "and nobody plays as loose with it as with break-ins and chain snatchings. This case here, Eldoniah flat-out did five out of six of those cabbies, no question, no argument. Cloonan he probably didn't do, and if somebody else ever comes along and looks better for it, well, nobody uptown's gonna argue against reopening the file." He picked up a pencil, tapped the eraser three times on the desktop, set it down. "So if you got anything," he said casually, "I'd be happy to pass it on."

"Why would I have anything?"

"Well, you don't own a car, so I figure you probably take a lot of cabs. Maybe one of the drivers said something."

"Like what?"

"Like, 'Hey, mister, you look like you used to be a cop, an' ain't it a hell of a thing what happened to Tommy Cloonan?' "

"Nobody ever said anything like that to me."

"No, huh?"

"No," I said. "As a matter of fact, I don't take very many cabs at all. If it's too far to walk I'll take the subway."

"What about the bus?"

"Sometimes I'll take a bus," I said. "Sometimes I'll stay home. Where are we going with this conversation, do you happen to know?"

"Alan Watson should have taken a cab. He worked down at the World Trade Center and generally took the E train home to Forest Hills, but when he worked late he'd take an express bus because he didn't like the longer walk late at night, or standing around on subway platforms. So he rode on the bus in air-conditioned comfort, had a slice of pizza on Austin Street, and was a block away from his house on Beechknoll Place when somebody stuck a knife in him."

"What did he do, resist a mugger?"

"Sounds like it, doesn't it? Guy I talked to said it doesn't really add up that way. Incidentally, he had more questions than answers for me. Watson was an affluent commodities broker, two kids in college, owned a nice home in a solid neighborhood. They want to solve this one, and the case is only four months old so they're not ready to give up on it. So why was I taking an interest, and what did I know that he didn't?"

"What did you tell him?"

"I don't remember, something about we had a case with a similar MO. According to him, forensic evidence suggests Watson's killer surprised him from behind and got him in a choke hold."

"Muggers will do that."