Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

I looked away just before he caught my eye. “I know,” I said into the phone, my fake conversation. “I couldn’t believe it, either.”

The guy across the platform didn’t see me looking at him, I was pretty sure. But I got a good look at his face in that nanosecond before I averted my eyes.

I knew him. He was my boss.

The man watching me from across the platform was Lieutenant Paul Wizniewski.

Forty

MY HEART started pounding. The Wiz, my boss, was the one tailing me.

Did he know? Did he know I was Internal Affairs? Did he know that I was more than just a homicide detective, that I was working undercover for Goldie and BIA?

Did he know that he was one of the main targets of my undercover investigation?

The tall African American guy, he of the camel coat and colorful scarf, was making his way toward me now. Goldie had sent him, so he was almost surely BIA.

The man walked up and stood next to me as though he didn’t know me—just another guy waiting to take a northbound train.

I kept up my bogus conversation on my phone. I shook my head as I spoke, like something in the conversation was frustrating me.

Yep, two guys just waiting for a train.

I mean, we had to make it look like we were trying to be surreptitious, right? My tail—whom I now knew was the Wiz—would expect nothing less.

As casually as I could, I turned around so my back was to the platform and, more important, so that I was facing away from Wizniewski. I wanted it to be easy for the Wiz to watch me, and if I had my back to him, he could stare all he wanted. He could even snap photos with his phone if he was so inclined.

Now it was time for the guy next to me, Mr. Camel Coat, to sneeze.

He did. Faking a sneeze isn’t hard, especially when the person you’re trying to fake out is across the train tracks from you. After he did so, Mr. Camel Coat turned away, an instinctive, polite thing to do, so he could blow his nose. He reached into his coat as he turned. He produced a handkerchief and a manila envelope, one large enough to hold a set of glossy eight-by-ten photographs.

At this point we both had our backs to the Wiz, and we made a point of keeping a small distance between us so the Wiz could clearly see the envelope pass from Camel Coat to me.

Camel Coat, without missing a beat, blew his nose, or pretended to, then folded up his handkerchief and turned around to face the platform again. He was good. I caught a whiff of his aftershave as he turned. But I never looked directly at him.

I stuffed the envelope into my coat and pretended to end my phone conversation. I turned around so that I, too, was facing the opposite platform again.

Just two guys waiting for a train. Eyes cast casually downward, in a fog after a long day of work.

Now that we were both facing the platform again and the Wiz could see our faces, it was time for Camel Coat to speak, just one word.

“When?” he said.

He enunciated the word sharply, so it would be easy to read his lips.

Now it was my turn to utter one word, and I did it the same way, pretending to be casual but making sure the word would be easy to read off my lips, as though I were serving it on a silver platter to Lieutenant Paul Wizniewski.

I said, “Soon.”

Forty-One

I MADE it back to my town house, stripped off my winter garb, dropped the manila envelope that Mr. Camel Coat had given me on the kitchen table, and poured myself a few inches of bourbon.

To summarize: my boss was surveilling me, my sister was secretly meeting with the manager of the brownstone brothel, and my partner distrusted and probably despised me. And a prosecutor whom I found incredibly attractive, and whom I could not stop thinking about, wanted to put me in prison.

Other than that, things were looking up.

I carried my drink and the manila envelope up the stairs. I was anxious to put everything together, but I’d learned over the years that you can’t always force these things. Sometimes you have to sit still and let everything move around you until the pieces lock into place.

My undercover investigation was a good example. I had stumbled over it, really. Nobody assigned me to it. It was just something that came my way when I wasn’t looking.

Here’s what happened: around eighteen months ago, I was investigating a homicide in Greektown, some oily Mediterranean type who took a bullet in the wee hours of the night out on Adams Street near all the restaurants. You know—the ones with lots of white stucco, blue accents, flaming cheese, and waiters chanting Opa!

Anyway, the murder itself was pedestrian. No big deal, right? It was the investigation that I found interesting. I had a couple of suspects, one of whom was a young guy whose parents owned one of the restaurants. So I ran a sheet on him and found that he’d been arrested eight—count ’em, eight—times, but none of the charges ever stuck. Not one. Eight arrests, zero charges filed. A few of the times, he’d been released before a prosecutor even weighed in on possible charges—he was let go, in other words, by the cops on their own, which was unusual.

As it turned out, this suspect wasn’t my guy for the murder, but I kept a copy of his rap sheet and stared at it for weeks. How did this guy manage to get such favorable treatment? Especially when the cops never even referred the case to the state’s attorney—when the cops just released the guy from his jail cell and sent him on his way?

It first hit me then: someone was protecting this guy. Someone was making sure he didn’t get in trouble.

The cases on this guy’s rap sheet went back several years, and as I looked back at the supervising officers and the top badges in that district, one name stuck out like a glass of ice water in a desert. The name was Paul Wizniewski, who since had been promoted to lieutenant and transferred to my district.

The Wiz, I thought, was running a protection racket. You stuff a few bills in my pocket, I make your arrest go away —that kind of thing.

It’s not hard to do, really. Prosecutors depend, first and foremost, on the cops, who are the engines that drive the criminal justice system. If the cops say the guy didn’t do it, or if the victim isn’t credible, or if there isn’t enough evidence to charge, the prosecutors rarely push back. Why would they? They aren’t out there on the streets with us. If a cop calls a case bullshit, the prosecutor usually goes along; they have plenty of other cases to charge.

So I could see it happening. I saw it eighteen months ago. That’s how this whole undercover investigation started—with that one suspicious rap sheet. I had no clue how high this thing went or how many people were involved. All I knew was that I had to investigate.

I went to Goldie and told him we had to open a file on this. Goldie, of course, said yes. We both knew it was sensitive, as touchy as a case can get. Goldie also said something to me that I never forgot.

If you wanna do this, he said, you damn well better be right.

Take your time, he told me, and be sure you have a case before you make it .

So that’s what I’ve been doing in my spare time. Over the last year and a half, in between trying to figure out who stabbed that woman or shot that guy or strangled that baby, instead of reading fine works of literature or taking up pottery or learning a foreign language, I’ve been trying to figure out if members of the CPD are on the take, handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people in exchange for some pocket money that never gets reported to the IRS.

I’ve been investigating Lieutenant Wizniewski, in other words, while I’m right under his nose, working for him as a homicide detective.