Edward Conlon - Red on Red

ALSO BY EDWARD CONLON
Blue Blood

Red on Red is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Edward Conlon

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conlon, Edward.

Red on red: a novel / Edward Conlon.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-679-60441-9

1. DetectivesNew York (State)New YorkFiction.
2. Criminal investigationNew York (State)New YorkFiction.
3. Male friendshipFiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.O5413R43 2011
813.6dc22 2010017534

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Title page photograph by Kevin Brainard

Jacket design and photography: Kevin Brainard and Darren Cox

v3.1

To the memories of

T ED P HILLIPS
&
V AL M ARGOLIS

We might wish that policemen would not act with impure plots in mind, but I do not believe that wish a sufficient basis for excluding probative evidence. In addition, sending state and federal courts on an expedition into the minds of police officers would produce a grave and fruitless misallocation of judicial resources.

J USTICE B YRON W HITE , in a dissenting opinion

Nature loves to hide.

H ERAKLEITOS

As of this writing, I am a New York City detective. I was born in Manhattan, but I have never worked or lived there. While pains have been taken to produce an effect of surface realismmany features of the landscape and much police procedure are described substantially as they areall has been seized, as by eminent domain, and remade to fit the needs of the story. Mother Cabrini is a high school for girls in Washington Heights, but its role in this book is wholly imagined. No character corresponds to any real person. Facts end where this story begins. None of this is true.

N ick Meehan knew there was more to every story, but he usually didnt want to hear it. He was in the woods, at a presumed suicide, and it was raining. There had to be limits, even if it seemed cold-blooded to set them. If, say, he asked a young man if hed hit his girlfriend, a No might not mean anything, but a Yes always did, and Nick wouldnt have to listen much longer. The story would be worth hearing if shed chased him with a hatchet, but there was no point listening to his sad proofs and sorry protests about how shed never really loved him. That was another story, maybe true, but what mattered was how the man put his belief into action with a roundhouse right, chipping her tooth with the gold ring shed bought him for his birthday. She might then wonder whether she had ever loved him, doubting why shed stolen the money for the ring from her mothers new boyfriend, who tended to walk into the bathroom when she was in the shower. You needed to contain a story like a disease, before it spread. Nick was at a suicide in the park, and it was raining.

What happened was this: The rain had let up in the early evening, and Ivan Lopez had been walking through Inwood Hill Park when the shoe had dropped on him. Inwood, the stalagmite tip of Manhattan, where the Dutch had bought the wild island from the Indians, green since the beginning of time. The shoe, an open sandal with a low heel, had fallen from the foot of a woman who was hanging from a tree. She was half-hidden amid the lower branches of an old oak whose leaves had just begun to turn gold and red. Lopez had given a little shoutOho!but had regained his breath a moment later and called the police. He had done nothing wrong, he knew, aside from wandering in the woods after dark. He told the first cops that hed gone there to walk his dog. Lopez didnt see the problem with his story, but even when it was pointed out that he didnt have a dog, he clung to the tale like a child clings to a toy, fearful that if it were taken, nothing would be the same.

Lopez was a slight man, with a put-upon air that made him look older than his thirty-odd years. He would not have agreed with any suggestion that his was a dishonest face, despite his worried, furtive manner. He had other burdens, other troubles. Hed had little experience with the police, but he knew at once that he shouldnt have begun by telling them, Youre not going to believe this, but Those first seven words were the only ones they seemed to accept, as he stumbled and jumped through his version of events, further jarred by the skeptical questions that seemed to presume he knew the womans name, where she lived. Two cops had arrived, and then two more, in cars that had rambled over the muddy fields between the street and the woods, with stops and starts and shifts in direction, as if theyd been following a scent. The cops were all larger than Lopez, younger than him, and both facts rubbed against his dignity. He reminded them angrily that hed tried to be a good citizen in a neighborhood where that quality was not always apparent. The rebuke seemed to have some modest effect on the cops, who withdrew and asked him to wait to speak with the detectives. No one was wrongnot yet, not terriblybut neither side credited the other with good sense or good faith. No one knew what had happened, and as more was said, less was believed.

That was the scene of stalemate the detectives took in when they arrived. One of them was physically robust, emphatic in manner, ready for conflict, the other spare and withholding. More of one, less of the other. The second one, the lesserMeehanseemed more sympathetic, and Lopez chose to focus on him when he repeated his account. The audience-shopping instinct was noted with suspicion, and it was the first detective, Esposito, who asked the first question, taking control of the conversation and returning to the earlier sticking point.

So, wheres the dog?

Lopez exhaled heavily and said he did not know. He knew how it made him sound, but he didnt see the pointor rather, he didnt like it. He didnt like the next question any better, or the manEspositowho asked it.

What kind of dog was it?

A brown one, he said, after some hesitation.

What was the dogs name?

Brownie.

That answer came too quickly, and seemed anticipated rather than remembered. Esposito pressed ahead, testy.

Brownie. Wheres the leash?

I dont have one. What does this have to do with anything? I was walking by and I got hit, out of nowhereI could have lost an eye or somethingand I try to do the right thing, and I get my balls busted by guys who

By guys who what?

Nick Meehan intruded with a mild and slightly sideways follow-up, and Lopez couldnt tell whether he cared more or less than the first detective, if he were signaling that he shared the joke with Lopez or was playing a new one on him: You could get a ticket for not having a leash for the dog.