Brooklyn Busted Read online

  BROOKLYN BUSTED

  MZ KELLY

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  Madison’s Story...

  Here’s a little background for those of you who are new to my story...

  My name is Madison Knox. I’m twenty-eight, divorced, and an NYPD detective, third grade. Maxine Carter is my partner on the force. She’s a couple years older than me, African-American, and grew up in Detroit. She came east to New York a few years after her marriage went south, but, lately, her prospects with men are improving, thanks to her dating a cop named Sonny.

  We’re both doing a bullet in Precinct Blue, the department’s version of reform school, just a few weeks into our one-year sentence. My partner’s violation involved her failing to properly secure a sex offender after his arrest, resulting in his premature death from a fall, something that I, personally, felt deserved a promotion. My offense involved a fellow cop, who looked suspiciously like an extra-terrestrial, chasing a suspect before falling into a vat of grease, hitting his head, and drowning. I got the blame only because I believe that Satan has a personal vendetta against me, constantly poking my ass with an invisible pitchfork for some past life failings.

  Max and I are trying to make ends meet by living at Funk’s Forever Fields. We live in the caretaker’s quarters of the Brooklyn cemetery and do part-time security work with our other roommate and my best friend, Amy Ross. Amy owns a private investigation business called Girl Gotcha. She’s a Jersey girl, recently divorced, with loads of attitude and a penchant for trouble.

  The three of us had recently formed something we call The Women’s Crime-Fighting Club, a clandestine, informal arrangement to help Amy on her cases, when needed. Amy, in turn, assisted Max and me, working behind the scenes to solve crimes that we knew would otherwise go unsolved. We’d had some success on a couple past cases, but had to make sure our activities remained confidential so that we wouldn’t get into trouble with the department.

  There’s a lot more to my story, including the fact that my mother, who abandoned me as a child, might be in league with a serial killer named William Jeffers.

  Enjoy the ride...

  Madison

  ONE

  “I ain’t seen this many bigwigs since a Hair Club For Men convention,” Max said to me, lowering her voice. “And most of ‘em don’t got enough hair for the club.”

  We were at the opening of the new quarters for Precinct Blue. It had recently been moved to Manhattan, across the street from One Police Plaza, the home of the NYPD’s commissioner. The new stationhouse was in a converted office building, complete with classrooms and physical training facilities. The room was full of brass, including Lieutenant Corker, our big-mouth boss, who made a habit of going out of his way to make my life miserable.

  “This is pretty impressive,” I said, taking in the renovated precinct building, which was painted in hues of blue and green, with slogans on the wall about integrity and professionalism. “I wonder why they made such a big investment in trying to retrain officers they essentially black-balled.”

  Max folded her arms across her ample girth and lowered her voice. “Word has it the CCRB isn’t happy with the department and put pressure on the Commish to set up a major retraining program.”

  I’d also heard rumors about the Citizen Complaint Review Board being unhappy with Frank Pearson, our new police chief. Several recent arrests by his officers had been captured on video, resulting in abuse-of-force allegations. The ensuing almost nonstop TV coverage had blamed the department’s command staff for a lack of competency and leadership.

  “Too bad you won’t be able to use the new digs,” I heard a man say from behind me.

  I turned to see Carmine O’Brien. The recalcitrant cop was about my age, but several inches shorter than me. Max and I had decided O’Brien was all mouth and bluster, trying to compensate for both his physical and intellectual deficiencies.

  Carmine went on, telling Lenny Stearns, his older and considerably heavier partner, “I bet Madison’s going to milk this into an ADR.”

  An ADR was an Accident Disability Retirement. I’d recently had surgery on my wrist after a suspect knifed me during the attempted arrest of a prostitute, resulting in me being on medical leave. My injuries weren’t severe enough to give me any thoughts about retiring.

  “You got your disability papers filled out?” Lenny asked me with a sneer.

  I levelled my eyes on the corpulent cop. “No. I’m hoping to get back to work in a couple months.”

  “That’s a load of BS,” Carmine said. “Everybody knows you’re janking it ‘cause you got assigned to B squad along with your partner, Max the Sack.”

  Max came over and stood in front of Carmine, her hands planted on her wide hips. “One more word outta you, and I’ll personally see to it that you got a plot in our cemetery. They got a section for people like you called Dwarf Fields.” She looked at Lenny. “I’ll make sure they also got a plot wide enough for the likes of you.”

  Carmine turned red with anger, as other officers gathered around and laughed. “Is that a threat?”

  Max stood her ground. “I’d call it a promise.”

  “The LT wants to see you both,” Frank “Woody” Woodson said, coming up behind Carmine and Lenny.

  “Looks like the lieutenant sent his errand boy,” Carmine said to Lenny, referencing the older gaunt cop. Carmine and Woody had some bad blood, thanks to a worthless annuity policy that Carmine’s father had sold to Woody’s mother. He fixed his muddy eyes on Woody. “What’s he want?”

  “They’re shooting a video of the new building, and he wants you both to star in it. Word has it they’re in need of a couple guys who look like major fuckups, and you’re both perfect for the parts.”

  Woody smiled as he walked away, and Carmine and Lenny let loose with a litany of obscenities.

  “What’s going on here?” Lieutenant Corker demanded, coming over to us. Our boss was almost as heavy as Lenny, but was pushing sixty. He had a round, hairless head that had a perpetual red glow, probably the result of high blood pressure. I silently prayed for a stroke, as Corker levelled his angry eyes on me. “You here to cause trouble?”

  “I just wanted to see the new precinct,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.

  “I’ll bet.” Corker turned to Carmine and Lenny. “You two squirrels go find a tree to climb, or I’ll have you demonstrate PT for the top dogs with Hock.”

  “Hock” was Sergeant Hock, a former drill instructor, who did physical training for Precinct Blue. Rumor had it he’d studied at the Marquis de Sade School of Torture.

  Corker turned back to me. “What’s the doc say about when you can return to work?”

  “Probably a couple months, but I’ll be back sooner if he releases me.”

  A scoff. “I’ll bet.”

  After the lieutenant scurried off, probably to pucker up to his superiors, Max cut her eyes in Corker’s direction and said to me, “I’d take as much time as you need, Mads. Corker’s gonna make it his number one priority to make your life miserable when you get back.”

  “Yeah,” I said, seeing that Laverne Fenny and Penny Kurtz were headed our way. I lowered my voice and said, “Sharks in the water.”

  “You got some nerve showing your face ‘round here,” Laverne said, when she and he
r sidekick stopped in front of me. She folded her arms and looked at Penny. “Maybe life in the boneyard ain’t so good. I heard that FBI guy she was dating is still married.”

  “You so desperate that you’re dating married guys now?” Penny said, pointing her enormous fake breasts in my direction.

  Laverne laughed. “Next thing you know, she’ll probably be dating a corpse.” She said to me, “I always thought you’d be a good match for a zombie.”

  I’d recently been involved with an FBI agent named Sam Crawford. We’d gone out a couple times before he admitted that he and his estranged wife hadn’t filed their divorce paperwork, something he’d recently rectified. I had no idea how the bitch twins had found out about it, and was angry that someone had betrayed my confidence.

  “It’s none of your business who I do or don’t date,” I spat.

  Laverne’s heavily made-up face couldn’t conceal the deep creases on her brow and the lines around her eyes as she glared at me. “You come ‘round here when you got some made-up injuries and you get what you got coming to you.” She glanced at my arm, which was in a sling. “I heard those stiches had nothing to do with a perp.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Rumor has it you fell out of bed when you and the fed were acting like a couple of dogs in heat.”

  “She was on all fours and went to the floor,” Penny agreed, chuckling at her rhyme.

  I was about to lose it when Max came over and, this time, planted her big body between me and the two women. “It’s about time you two reported for work.”

  “We got the day off on account of the new precinct celebration,” Laverne said.

  Max smiled. “I’m talking ‘bout your side jobs. The way I heard it, you guys are working the nightshift stroll over on Greene Street. You hurry up, you can probably make ten or twenty bucks before the night’s over.”

  Max and I walked away as Laverne and Penny told us we were something lower than bacteria on the evolutionary scale.

  “Those two are gonna get what they got coming one of these days,” Max said.

  “Yeah, maybe we should work on a payback,” I said as my phone rang. “It’s Amy,” I told Max before answering the call. As I answered, I said to my best friend, “I hope you’re having more fun than we are.”

  Amy took a moment before answering, seemingly distracted. “Not really. I got me a situation, Mads.”

  “What kind of situation?”

  “I guess you could call it a guy problem.”

  I chuckled. “What’s his name?”

  She lowered her voice. “Wally Boyle, and I’m gonna need your help with him.”

  “What, exactly, is going on?”

  “My guy problem is more of what you might call a body problem. I killed him.”

  TWO

  Since Max had the day off, we managed to slip away from the Precinct Blue festivities shortly after Amy’s call. We took an Uber to 42nd Street in Manhattan. Along the way, Max kept her voice low, so the driver couldn’t hear, and asked me what Amy had said.

  “After she...” I took a breath, and whispered, “...after she told me what happened, she had a meltdown. I couldn’t make sense of anything she was trying to tell me.”

  “Was she working a case?”

  “I think so. She recently told me that she’d been hired by a woman whose son died of a drug overdose. She said something about the drug dealer being the world’s biggest sleazeball.”

  Max brushed a hand through her short dark hair. “Seems like sleazeballs are Amy’s specialty lately. Maybe she needs to get out of the PI business.”

  Our driver was pulling to the curb as I said, “I told her something similar a few days ago, but she said chasing bad guys is all she knows how to do.”

  After tipping the driver, Max followed me out of the car and said, “Maybe Amy should become a cop.”

  I chuckled. “I don’t think she would last more than five minutes with somebody like Lieutenant Corker.”

  Max laughed as we headed up the sidewalk. “You got a point there, but I’d love to see her go at it with the fat little a-hole.”

  Amy had told me she was in a shuttered office building on the corner of 42nd Street and 10th Ave. The building was undergoing renovation, but we managed to get inside through the open door where Amy said she’d picked the lock. We made our way up to the second floor, where we found our roommate, still in a state of distress.

  “Are you okay?” I asked when we got over to her.

  Amy removed her cap, brushed her red hair back, then replaced it. “Not really. Wally Boyle was that guy I told you about a few days ago. He was dealing to my client’s son before he overdosed. When he realized I was following him, he hid, then jumped out at me. We got into a shoving match, and...” She waved a hand. “Follow me.”

  We went over to an elevator shaft, where Amy used a flashlight to illuminate the body at the bottom. “The shaft looks like it goes down to the basement,” she said. “I think he died when his head smacked the cement.”

  Boyle’s body had landed at an odd angle. One side of his head was caved in, and, even from where we stood, I could see there was blood everywhere.

  “We’d better call it in,” Max said. She looked at Amy. “You sure this was an accident?”

  “Of course I’m sure. You think I’m some kinda killer who goes around pushing people down elevator shafts?” Amy looked at me. “We can’t call it in.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wally’s brother is Jimmy ‘The Weasel’.”

  “Who?” Max said.

  Amy cut her blue eyes back to Max. “He’s a drug dealer over in Harlem. He’s got a reputation for cutting out the competition by cutting the balls off anyone who moves in on his territory. And, just for the record, I don’t got any balls, but it doesn’t mean that Jimmy will go easy on me. Wally and him were brothers in arms.”

  I looked at Max. “I suppose we could call it in anonymously.”

  Max’s dark eyes found Amy. “You leave anything here that can be traced back to you?”

  Amy held up her hands. “I always wear gloves. No prints. Nothin’.” She looked at me, her voice taking on a pleading tone. “Jimmy can’t know I was involved, or I’m as dead as roadkill in Trenton.”

  I nodded, looked at Max. “It looks like we don’t have any other option. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  ***

  After leaving the area, Amy waited until we were almost home, then used a burner phone to anonymously call the police about there being a dead body in the vacant office building. We got home to our cozy underground catacombs below Funk’s Forever Fields a little after six. It was happy hour for Amy.

  Tonight’s wine of choice was something called 19 Crimes. The wine was one of Amy’s favorites, maybe because, she had told us, the labels featured nineteen crimes that, in the late 1700s in the United Kingdom, were punishable by transportation. Those deemed guilty of the offenses were deported to Australia, for everything from stealing a shroud from a grave to engaging in something called “clandestine marriage”, whatever that was.

  After clinking glasses, Amy grumbled, “If I didn’t have shit for luck, I’d just have shit.”

  “What are you going to tell your client about what happened today?” I asked her.

  “I guess I’ll just say that Wally went to Wally World and leave out the part about helping him along. I should at least get a payday out of everything.” She swigged her wine. “Shit, I got no morals. I just killed somebody and now I’m talking about getting paid for it.”

  “You didn’t kill anyone. It was an accident.” I studied her for a moment, but she didn’t make eye contact. “Right?”

  She sighed. “Yeah, it just...”

  “What?”

  “Maybe if I’d kept my big mouth shut, Wally woulda calmed down and not started shoving me.”

  “What did you say to him?” Max asked.

  “I called him a human pork roll.”

&nbs
p; Max laughed. “I been called worse.”

  “Yeah, but Wally...he was the world’s biggest lard ass. I think I hit a sensitive spot. He pushed me, so I pushed back.”

  “Well, at least, it’s over,” I said. “Maybe you should try to put everything out of your mind.”

  “I guess you’re right. If I’m lucky, I’ll probably have another forty years before I burn in hell for killing somebody.”

  Max rolled her eyes. “I got a feeling you’re gonna have lots of company down there.”

  I was working on my glass of 19 Crimes when something suddenly hit me. “Shit!”

  Amy looked at me. “You gotta shit, you use the crapper. I got enough of my own shit.”

  I looked at Max. “CCTV cameras.”

  “Shit,” Max said.

  Amy looked at us. “Enough with the shitstorm. What are you guys so upset about?”

  “There were probably closed-circuit TV cameras on the street,” I said. “It means that we all could have been captured on cameras near the scene of what the police might think was homicide.”

  THREE

  “What we gonna do?” Amy asked, after swigging the last of her wine and pouring another glass. “I’m too young to go to the joint. I’d probably end up with Mable.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Mable Stein, who gives it from behind.”

  Max rolled her eyes and looked at me. “What are we gonna do? If there are CCTV cameras, this could be some serious shit.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Maybe we should go back to 42nd Street and check it out for cameras,” Amy suggested. “Then we’d know for sure if we were captured near the scene of a crime.”

  “If there are cameras, that would make us all look guilty as hell,” Max said. “And what happened wasn’t a crime.”

  I sighed. “I guess we just have to wait it out and hope for the best.” I looked at Max. “Maybe we can discretely ask around, see if they think Wally’s death was accidental.”

  “I can ask my friend Rosie, who works in Records, about it.”