“Finally he drops Z. Z is what he’s really pissed about. Z is, he says he got a subpoena from the Knapp Commission and why him and not me?”
Why Buck and not him? It was not something Munson wanted to ponder overlong. Before the City Council granted Knapp and his crew subpoena power, nobody was sweating them. Another phony commission for public relations. Running stings on low-level patrolmen putting the bite on bar owners and tow-truck drivers, penny-ante bullshit. But in March they got that subpoena power. And people are getting served. And people who should definitely be getting served are not talking about getting served.
Munson first heard of Knapp back in the ’50s, when the assistant DA busted up the waterfront rackets. A serious man. It was public knowledge that the commission’s budget ran out July 1—Munson had figured on waiting them out. But if it was Memorial Day and they’re calling the guy who sits next to him, how much longer until they came knocking? Sometimes Munson thought he should’ve gone into the corruption beat, back in the day. Steady work, and you can probably come up with some higher-level grifting from the inside.
Munson lit a cigarette. That was two he had going. He commenced to alternate. “I’ve been with Buck for ten years,” Munson said. “Seen men wet their pants when we roll up. He’s got that ‘mean fuel’ from his childhood. But he got shot two years ago and he is not the same man. Buck’s wife’s got this divorce lawyer, she knows where he gets his cash from, wants to use that to juice him. In his prime, he was something else. Now he’s scared money.
“I have to wonder,” the detective said, “they bring him in, can they break him? In the old days, forget about it. But these are not the old days. The city has changed. It’s crumbling around us and we have to outrun all the shit raining down.” Munson stopped to consider his guest. Did Carney understand what he was saying? One of those inscrutable colored guys who never let you know what they’re thinking. Most of the time it was fine. Tonight Munson had to know if Carney had what it took to keep up his end.
We’ll see.
“Can they break him?” Munson said. “That’s the question I am mulling when the lights go out in the apartment and those cocksuckers we’ve been sitting on come out of the building.”
Munson and his partner had a choice: Follow the three suspects or go on up and toss the place. Were they ducking out for cigarettes or are they up to something worth tailing them for? He put it to Buck and Buck voted to go upstairs. His partner smelled it, too, it was floating on the breeze: They were about to make a score.
Five stories, two apartments per floor. Some mamacita was cooking up some Spanish shit and it filled the halls and made Munson hungry. The stairwells were empty, no junkies nodding off on the landing or baby in an overflowing diaper crawling down the black-and-white tile. Never knew what you were going to find. TVs blaring, gunshots ringing out on the same cop show everybody’s watching floor after floor. Munson’s hands shook these days but Buck, for all his recent lack of vim and vigor, still had his knack with locks. They’re inside like that.
Apartment 3F was one bedroom and a living room, with a tight fit in the hallway from the bags and boxes piled up. The apartment belonged to a religious type, Jesus bleeding out on the wall and what have you, but the place had been overrun. One of the BLA guys picks her up in the park—You love Christ our lord? I love him, too, he’s the fucking bee’s knees—and next week his whole crew has moved in. It was mattress to mattress on the floor, no sheets, army bags of clothes. Munson figured there were five or six people staying there now.
Buck took the bedroom, Munson handled the front room. A big, ratty red rug covered most of the floor. Boxes of revolutionary newspapers and pamphlets made it cramped. “The usual scholarly articles on the cover,” Munson said. “Kill Whitey, Stand Up for Our Yellow Brothers in Vietnam.” He removed a pillow that had been stuffed into a milk crate. Under the pillow were four revolvers and a couple of boxes of ammo. Two automatic rifles beneath the couch like kicked-off sandals.
“Buck called from the other room,” Munson said. “Upbeat, like his old self, and I know he’s found the score we smelled down on the street. Go back there and he’s holding a duffel bag of cash, and there’s another bag inside of that—what turns out to be the haul from the J. M. Benson rip-off a couple of days before. We toss the room looking for more, but that’s the plum. We nod. Nothing more is needed. We’re taking the whole thing.”
No sign of Jones’s and Piagentini’s service revolvers. Munson took one of the milk-crate revolvers. It’d come in handy sooner or later. That was a reliable quality in revolvers.
He hadn’t seen Buck that happy in months. Grinning like a big Irish ape, skipping down the stairs. At the top of the stoop, though, he gave a signal: The BLA were coming up west on 146th. The same three guys.
“Our car is in the wrong direction,” Munson said, “so we know we’re going to beat it, call in the location, and return later. The priority is to tuck the score away safe and sound.” Maybe even join the fun later. It was fun to rob some shitheads, split, and then show up with the responding officers. What have we here? Ten bucks if you can make your partner laugh.
There was one black radical that the others deferred to, the top dog. He was a tall man with a big Afro and goatee, striding forth in combat boots and an army field jacket with leopard-skin epaulets. When they exited the apartment, he had scanned the street like a pro while his lieutenants jived and joked. Later, Munson double-checked the militant casebook at the station house. The man was Malik Jamal, born Robert Taylor from Chattanooga. Wanted for armed robbery and assault, former member of the Black Panthers and currently a big honcho in the Black Liberation Army. Since the cop killings, brass had kept everyone up to speed on black radical activity. The BLA had been pulling jobs here and in California the last few months to build up a war chest. “Expropriations,” they called it. Knocking over after-hours clubs, bank jobs botched and successful, and more brazen daylight capers like J. M. Benson.
“Jamal meets my eyes as we turn up the sidewalk and he’s made us. Buck is cradling the bag so it’s mostly out of view, but two beefy middle-aged white men who walk like cops? On that block, coming out of that building? He makes us in a second. He shouts, we’re running, and then one of them starts firing. We give some of that back, but main priority is to get the stuff out, not pull out a badge and make this official.”
Ducking between vehicles for cover like he was playing ringolevio. Is that when it all started, the link between him now and who he used to be? Munson said, “Friday was warm if you remember so on Amsterdam there’s a lot of civilians out, playing loud music and dominoes. The BLA breaks off—they know with the stepped-up patrols, there’ll be cars in a flash. Buck’s wheezing, out of shape. I’m pretty winded, too, to be honest. We grab a Checker cab when we get over to Broadway. It’s like the old days, me and him pulling off a number like that. Like I had just transferred to Harlem and there was money all over, coming out of the sidewalk like crude.”
For the last five years Munson and his partner maintained a pad on Fifty-fourth off Lexington. “You know in movies when they show a really nice building, they have rich broads coming out walking poodles? I swear whenever I walk up, this rich cunt with a poodle comes out, it’s crazy.” The detectives entertained girls there, stored sundry items from time to time. The fourteenth-floor view provided a sweep of the unconquered city night and the illusion of invincibility. The impassive skyline betrayed no indication of its opinion on the matter. Everybody got a kick out of the wet bar, which had a Western theme. Squeeze the horn next to the ice bucket and it mooed.