Same Difference, page 23
‘Don’t talk to us like we’re children,’ Eliza said. ‘This isn’t Sesame Street.’
Mank made it to Brooker’s side and pulled a handkerchief out of his own pocket. Of course Brooker’s fingerprints would be on his own gun but there was no sense in getting Mank’s on them, too. He pulled Brooker’s gun out of the holster carefully and deposited it into his own pocket. Brooker, staring at Eliza, didn’t look at all pleased. That was probably good.
‘You’re right, Eliza,’ Ken said. ‘We’re talking down to you and we shouldn’t. But I don’t know who that man is, the one that you’re pointing the gun at, or this one.’ He looked at Jules for clarification, since we knew they were in some way connected.
‘That’s Andrew, man,’ Jules said of the man with the birthmark. ‘I don’t know nothing about him snatching this guy, or girl, or whatever, off the street. I just got here.’ Jules had an instinct toward self-preservation and very few others. When he referred to her that way I thought I saw Eliza move the gun toward Jules but she stopped herself and kept it trained on Brooker. ‘The other guy came with Neil. I don’t know him.’
‘That’s my associate, Mr Martin,’ Brooker said. A shudder went through my neck.
‘That ain’t my name,’ Mr Martin said. Enlightening.
Mank showed Brooker his shield and took two steps away from him, keeping Brooker’s gun out of his reach. ‘What’s going on, Detective?’ he asked. ‘Were you just checking in on your investment property? On the night your partner was killed?’
To his credit, Brooker did not pretend he didn’t know what Mank was talking about. ‘I’m here because someone in the room is an informant, and you know I’m not going to tell you who that is,’ he lied. ‘I thought I could get something on Merchant’s shooting.’
‘How come Eliza says you took her off the street when she was with Fran?’ Ken wasn't pointing his handgun at anyone yet but you knew he wanted to. If I hadn’t been there he probably would have done so already.
‘I honestly don’t know,’ Brooker answered. ‘Can I put my hands down now?’
‘No!’ Eliza shouted. ‘You sent that guy and he put his hand over my mouth and dragged me away. You know you did it!’ Eliza indicated she was talking about Mr Martin.
‘You’re crazy,’ Mr Martin said. ‘That guy must have done it.’ He pointed at Andrew.
‘I just live here, man,’ Andrew said. ‘All of a sudden everybody’s in my house.’
Mank, still walking backward, stepped toward me and stopped. He looked serious and baffled. I couldn’t blame him. The last thing I’d expected when I walked in was to see Eliza holding everybody – even her father, who was still looking like a scared puppy – at gunpoint.
‘What are you doing here, Brian?’ I asked him, being the only one of the latest arrivals to have met the man before.
‘I don’t want to say,’ he mumbled.
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Brooker advised him.
‘Shut up!’ Eliza was feeling her power in the room but her face said that she was at a loss for what to do next. ‘You don’t get to tell him what to do!’
Mr Martin looked annoyed. ‘She’s disrespecting you, Detective,’ he said to Brooker.
‘Let it go.’
‘Please, Brian,’ I went on. Maybe if I ignored the drama I could get toward an understanding of the situation. ‘Tell me how you got here.’
Brian Hennessey turned his body so he was facing me and, more importantly from his perspective, away from Brooker. ‘He called me and said he had Eliza and I needed to come here or she’d get killed,’ he said. He looked at his daughter. ‘I can’t let that happen, not ever.’
‘That’s not true,’ Brooker tried.
‘Yeah, it is,’ Mr Martin said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘I said shut up!’ Eliza shouted. It was a minor miracle nobody had called the police about the noise, but this wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. ‘He took me to blackmail my dad, but it’s because I’m trans!’
Brian shook his head slowly. ‘No, honey. It’s not. Brooker didn’t say anything about you being trans. I have something he wants and it was the only way he thought he could get me to give it to him. He was right.’
The timeline was confusing me, but then so was everything else. ‘What did he want from you?’ Mank asked Brian while I was trying to determine how long Eliza had been here, and how she’d managed to conceal that gun until just before we had arrived.
I saw Ken inching his way toward Eliza and hoped he wasn’t going to be stupid enough to try and wrestle the gun out of her hands. He could easily accomplish that, of course, but he might hurt her and in the process send the room into even more chaos.
Brian looked sad. Of course, he had every right to be concerned, but sadness seemed to be stemming from Mank’s question. ‘I had it for a freelance article. I was going to sell it to a big news organization, maybe on TV.’ That certainly didn’t help at all.
‘Sell what?’ Mank asked. Ken was now at Eliza’s side and speaking quietly into her ear. He had to lean over quite a way to do that. I don’t read lips and he wasn’t speaking loudly enough even for me to hear him. Whatever it was, I hoped it would convince her to give him or Mank the gun so we could sort this all out. If such a thing was possible.
‘Brian,’ Brooker said. It sounded like a warning. But if he was threatening Eliza, I felt like that tactic was a little hollow at this point.
On the other hand, Brian looked stricken, as if he’d done something awful. ‘I don’t want to say.’ I didn’t see how that was relevant.
‘It was a computer thing,’ Andrew said. ‘I heard the call.’ Maybe he thought he was being helpful, but Brooker looked positively murderous and Brian was on the verge of panic. Whatever that ‘computer thing’ was, it clearly had a lot of value in this room.
Jules, standing next to his associate, gave Andrew a very hard push, sending the bigger man to the floor. ‘You know you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut!’ he yelled.
‘I’m sorry.’ It was pretty obvious Andrew wasn’t seriously injured.
‘Yeah, shut up, man,’ Mr Martin told him. Mr Martin was clearly a couple of steps slower than everyone else.
Ken, having finished delivering whatever message he had to Eliza, walked slowly back toward me. He leaned over (not nearly as far as with Eliza) and whispered in my right ear, ‘The gun isn’t loaded. She says she doesn’t want to hurt anyone.’
‘You can’t shoot everyone here,’ Mank said to Eliza. ‘The only sane way to work all this out it to put down the gun and talk this thing through. Then maybe we can figure out what happened and where this is going to go.’
Eliza looked at Ken, who gave her a small nod. He seemed to be vouching for Mank in general. Eliza took a deep breath and handed the gun … to Ken, who put it in his pocket immediately.
And that was when Brooker produced another handgun from his ankle. You might think that would be a gasp-inducing moment of panic but that’s because you don’t know my brother the way I do. Ken reached over and grabbed the gun before Brooker really had a hold on it, then lifted the detective off the floor by holding the lapels of his suit jacket and pulling up.
‘Hey,’ Mr Martin said. It wasn’t a friendly word.
Brooker, as you might expect, looked amazed, eyes wide and mouth open. Not the way Damien Van Dorn looked when we found his body. ‘Put him down, Ken,’ I said. ‘It’s time we all sat down and answered a few questions, don’t you think?’
THIRTY-SEVEN
‘I didn’t kill Damien Van Dorn,’ Brooker said. ‘I didn’t kill anybody. I’ve never fired my weapon in fourteen years on the job.’
We were all gathered in the living room of what I now understood was Andrew’s apartment: Jules, Andrew, Mr Martin, Brooker, Eliza, Mank, Ken and me. Everyone but Ken and Eliza was seated on various broken-down easy chairs and two sofas. It was, by New York standards, a huge room.
Brooker, to be fair, had been subdued physically by Ken and placed, almost gently, on one of the sofas, facing me, Mank and Eliza. That hadn’t sat well with Mr Martin, but even so he’d taken a look at Ken and done nothing about it. Next to Brooker was Jules, who had been carefully checked for any residual weapons, and Andrew, who had surrendered a small handgun and a retractable knife voluntarily. Andrew seemed to be somewhat stumped by all that was going on, and while it was for different reasons, I could relate. Mr Martin was just still, like he was waiting for a cue.
‘OK,’ Mank said. ‘You didn’t kill Damien, who wasn’t shot, anyway. Let’s even say you didn’t kill your partner, Merchant. We have witnesses who name you as the supplier of certain pharmaceuticals to Damien and some of his friends. Did you not do that, either?’
‘Damien told me it was a guy named Neil,’ Eliza volunteered.
‘A lot of men are named Neil,’ said Brooker.
‘Did they all kidnap Eliza off the street and call her father with a ransom demand?’ I asked. Enough of letting Mank conduct my interviews. ‘What was it you told him to bring in exchange for his daughter, while you weren’t killing anybody?’
‘I don’t know what he’s talking about,’ Brooker said. It was possibly the dumbest answer he could have offered, because immediately all eyes in the room turned toward Brian, who looked warily at Brooker but then at Eliza. He straightened his spine and put his head, which had been leaning forward, back.
‘It was a small plastic bag,’ he said. ‘Inside there would have been a drug called Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that’s called tranq on the street. Except this particular bag, I’m guessing, would have been empty. I didn’t have that one, but I knew about tranq and I had spoken to Neil about it.’
My mouth got a little dry all of a sudden. ‘What would this stuff do if it was given to a person?’ I asked Brian. He’d written on pharmaceuticals for a trade magazine for years and had insight into more substances than I even knew existed.
‘If it was a large enough dose, and it would have to be pretty large, it would make the victim stop breathing,’ Brian said. He stared at Brooker with an expression of unexpected defiance. ‘Give them enough, and they’ll suffocate.’
‘Why a small bag?’ I asked Brian.
‘Because it would have had an evidence tag on it, I’m guessing. The cops are aware of tranq and they can generally get access to things that are confiscated in drug raids, with a little effort.’
There is, it should be noted, no such thing as a deafening silence. If you don’t hear anything during a silence, it’s because there’s no sound. But I’ll admit the silence sounded more silent in this moment that almost any other I’d ever not heard.
Everyone looked at Brooker.
His expression changed more dramatically than I would have thought possible. From a man being falsely accused of a tragic crime, he became an aggressive angry entity, still human but acting upon his basest animal instincts. He wanted out and he didn’t care what he had to do to achieve that.
‘Get out of the way!’ he screamed and everyone just stood there and stared at him. Ken took up a position between Brooker and the door because he would clearly be the hardest one to get by physically. Mank reached into his jacket. He didn’t want to draw his gun in a crowd like this but he couldn’t be caught without it if force became necessary, which certainly seemed likely.
I am the negotiator in the family; I always seek a peaceful solution. Maybe I could talk Brooker down. ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. ‘Was it just because Damien couldn’t pay his debt to Jules, here?’
‘You have nothing!’ Talking Brooker down was going to be somewhat more difficult than I might have anticipated. ‘You can’t prove a thing!’
Mank, the police detective, was now in his element, right hand still in his jacket pocket. ‘If Brian knew about the bag of tranq, others did too,’ he said. ‘Like Merchant. He knew you were supplying Julio, didn’t he? Was he in on the action, Brooker?’
‘Don’t call me Julio,’ Jules said.
‘No!’ Then Brooker realized what he’d just said and his eyes widened. ‘There was no action! I wasn’t supplying anybody with anything!’
Eliza laughed, of all things. ‘Everybody on campus knew it was you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know your name, but I saw you almost every day. And you had to know that Julio was sending Andrew after Damien, or did you send the two of them yourself?’
‘I didn’t go after no Damien,’ Andrew said, and he looked at Mr Martin. ‘I don’t work for that guy, Brooker.’
‘You trying to get me in jail?’ Mr Martin asked. He was just catching up.
‘How did you find out about the tranq?’ I asked Brian.
‘I knew the detective here from my time with a trade magazine about the uniform business,’ he said.
‘There’s a trade magazine for the uniform business?’ I asked. That just seemed so specific.
‘There’s a trade magazine for everything, although most of them are all online now,’ Brian answered. ‘But I met Detective Brooker doing a story about the NYPD’s uniform standards a number of years ago when he was Officer Brooker and we kept in touch.’
‘Shut up, Brian.’ That was the best Brooker could do.
But Brian, having warmed to the topic, didn’t take the hint. ‘So when I heard someone was supplying pharmaceuticals to the New Amsterdam campus I got curious and I called the detective here. And without him telling me much of anything, I could figure out he was the supplier, in some small part through confiscated drugs. I’d been researching it for a story I’m trying to sell to The New York Times. They’re interested and this will probably make them even more interested.’ Brian made the mistake of chuckling lightly.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Brooker lurched forward, presumably to confront Brian, who backed away reflexively, putting up his hands as if to push Brooker away.
Mr Martin also made a quick move, but then he looked at Ken, who had barely lifted a hand. Mr Martin was just smart enough to stop.
Brooker caught himself, trying not to look even more guilty, but Brian was still in info-dump mode. ‘When I found out Damien was dead and how he had died, I wondered if it could be tranq,’ he said. ‘And there was a story in the Daily News two weeks ago about a seizure of the drug in the Bronx. My friend Neil here was listed as the detective on the case.’
This time Brooker couldn’t control himself and tried to dive across the room toward Brian. But he didn’t get the chance because my brother took a step to his left and blocked Brooker’s path. ‘Don’t be stupid, Brooker,’ Ken said. ‘You’re done.’ He stepped closer to the cop.
Brooker might have been done, but he was also quick. He was close enough now to stick his hand into Ken’s pocket and remove the gun that was there. And given that Ken was standing right in front of the detective, he pointed the gun at my brother.
Ken, for his part, looked less terrified than bemused. He was probably asking himself (as I would later, if we were still around) how he could have let himself be disarmed so easily. There was a gasp from Brian, Jules and Andrew seemed mostly confused, and Eliza looked angry. I was rooted to the spot because a gun was pointed at my brother’s chest.
‘There are too many guns in this room,’ Ken said.
‘There are too many guns everywhere,’ I answered. I’m not sure where that came from.
Mank was inching around, not toward Ken but in Brian’s direction, possibly because Brooker seemed most angry with Eliza’s father.
‘Brooker,’ I said, to get his attention away from my brother.
The man with the gun wasn’t really paying attention to me, which was his mistake because I could literally toss him out the window if I wanted to, but he did start to back away from Ken and toward the rest of the group, who were in a semicircle deeper into the living room. Nobody was sitting anymore.
‘I’m a good cop,’ Brooker said, apparently gearing up to deliver a bad-guy-says-why speech from an action movie. I would have welcomed that, but then he stopped talking and continued backing away from Ken, whom he seemed most wary of in this group. Savvy analysis on Brooker’s part.
‘You are,’ Mr Martin said. He had obviously graduated at the top of his yes-man class.
‘Killing a college kid doesn’t make you a good cop,’ Brian told Brooker. Brian’s instinct for self-preservation appeared to have taken a vacation. ‘That makes you a murderer.’ (Just as an aside, ‘murderer’ is not a profession. We should watch the use of the word. OK. Commercial message done.)
Brooker was, luckily for Brian, paying even less attention to what he said than he had to me. I couldn’t tell what his intent was now, but I could see that Jules and Andrew looked especially afraid. I was certain they had weapons somewhere in this apartment but only when I watched them for a full minute did I notice they kept glancing to a desk too far away to reach without being noticed, right on the wall outside the kitchen.
I tried to catch Jules’s eye to warn him off the plan, but he was alternating between the desk and Brooker. Andrew was more staring straight ahead in a dazed sort of aura.
‘The kid wanted out of the business and that would have been fine, but he was in for almost twenty grand and he said he couldn’t pay,’ Brooker went on, as if nothing else had been said. So he was intent on that villain speech after all. ‘I offered him a discount on what he had to pay Julio, but he didn’t want to take it, said he couldn’t afford anything at all. God knows where his money was going. Then he said if I didn’t let him off the hook he’d go to the cops. The real cops, he said. Little bastard.’ It felt like Brooker was starting to see his future, it wasn’t pleasant, and he was unraveling. If he thought he could get out of this apartment alive and not in custody, he didn’t realize the people he was up against or he had completely jumped the rails and was out of touch with reality.
