Rogan was nodding politely when Carenza broke out laughing. ‘Gotcha nervous there, didn’t I? Nah, my stuff might not be quite up to what you got going on here,’ he said, pointing at Rogan’s three-button Canali suit, ‘but this getup’s definitely for the job. The mod’s running some buy-and-busts tonight at some of the clubs.’ In addition to the teams of stop-and-frisk uniform cops that had made New York’s zero-tolerance policing famous, the narcotics division used so-called investigatory modules to run undercover operations.
Carenza pulled at the diamond-encrusted dollar sign dangling from his gold chain, most likely a trophy seized during a prior bust. ‘Too much?’
‘Fierce,’ Ellie said.
‘Yeah, I thought so. So what can I do you for? My sergeant made a point of instructing me to be helpful, so consider me your most helpful helper.’
Rogan scratched his cheek while he spoke. ‘We’re still chasing a case from May – dead body left behind in a home invasion on Kenmare and Lafayette.’
‘Yeah, I know that case. The 212. Should be called the 646. Last time I checked, no one could get a 212 number anymore. The place belonged to Sam Sparks, right?’
Rogan nodded, and it struck Ellie that Sparks might be better known to the general public than she had realized, even without the assistance of a reality show.
‘We checked with Boyle at the time to see if we might be looking at a case of mistaken identity. He came up with nothing. Now Sparks’s lawyer says he hears otherwise. He claims you’re running an operation on one of Sparks’s neighbors.’
‘I wouldn’t call it an operation,’ Carenza said, handing Ellie a DD5, the departmental form used to report on ongoing investigations. This one related to Apartment 702 at 212 Lafayette.
‘It’s directly next door,’ she said.
Rogan glanced at the sheet of paper over her shoulder. ‘The only other apartment on that floor, as I recall.’
The DD5 contained entries for three events – two in March, one in June.
‘Two neighbors came to our front service desk in March, complaining about a drug dealer who had just moved into one of the luxury condos on the top of the building. You’ve seen that building?’
They both nodded.
‘Okay, so you know the deal. It’s this old building, been there forever. Most of the tenants are rent-stabilized. Also been there forever. Then Sam Sparks buys up the roof space, stacks a few multimillion-dollar apartments on top, and calls the place 212. Two totally different kinds of tenants, now sharing one elevator and one lobby. You get your culture clashes.’
Ellie felt her cell vibrate against her waist but let the call go to voice mail.
‘And where did these two neighbors fit into the clash?’ she asked.
‘The old ladies who eat dinner at four thirty at the corner-diner side. They’d lived a good century and a half between them. And I’m telling you, they were a hoot. Watched Law and Order and CSI reruns all day long on “the cable”, as they called it. They had the lingo down: skels, perps, mary jane, CIs, gun run. I mean, you name it, and they knew it. They were ready to sign up as CIs themselves. But let’s say that as confidential informants go, they weren’t the most reliable profilers when it comes to detecting drug dealing. Dirty old men? Not pushing the garbage all the way down the chute? That, I would trust them on. But they were the kind of sweet innocent citizens who think anyone who’s got friends coming and going at all hours of the night must be up to no good. Let’s call it a generational divide.’
‘So why do you have a DD5 on the apartment?’
‘Because the sweet biddies wouldn’t go away. God love ’em, they kept coming in and harping to the front desk with all their cop slang, cracking up everyone in the house but also being a major pain in the ass. So eventually the poor sacks in the community policing unit got dragged in to calm them down. You know what those guys are all about – it’s appeasement. So finally they put the old birds to work on a citizen-driven search warrant.’
‘How come Boyle didn’t tell us about this when we called you guys at the end of May?’
‘Because half the time when we start a citizen-driven warrant, the oh-so-concerned citizens get lazy and let it drop. We don’t bother logging anything onto a DD5 until they come back with all their paperwork. In this case, that didn’t happen until June.’
‘What exactly is a citizen-driven warrant?’ Rogan asked.
‘No time in Narcotics, huh?’ He said it as if no qualified cop could make it into Homicide without pulling duty in the drug squad. Given that Ellie made it to her current position after only five years in uniform and one as a detective in general crimes, she was thankful the question hadn’t been aimed at her.
‘Major Case Squad, then SVU,’ Rogan said. His confident tone made clear that the Special Victims Unit made Narcotics look like crossing guard duty.
‘Okay, so a citizen-driven warrant is this thing we came up with, but it’s really a community policing tool. You know, after nine-eleven, we’ve got these ads all up and down MTA, telling people, “If you see something, say something.” ’
‘But we’re not always talking about the next Zacarias Moussaoui.’
‘No, knock on wood, not in most cases. Instead, we get these nosy neighbors convinced that someone’s up to something. So the citizen-driven warrant puts them to work. They write down every suspicious thing they see. They turn in the pages to us. If it adds up to probable cause, we ask for a warrant. If not –’
‘You assure them you did everything you could, and then tell ’em to pound sand.’
‘Pretty much. So that’s what we’ve got here on the DD5. The two ladies walk in to the help desk in March. A couple weeks later, after a few more streetwise Laurel and Hardy routines downstairs, they hook up with the community policing liaison, who tells them about the citizen-driven warrants. We take a look at it after a couple months, and there’s nothing there.’
‘You’re sure?’ Ellie asked.
‘No doubt. You work drugs a little while, and you get super-honed spidey senses. Homeboy’s getting his party on like any other single man with that kind of money in Manhattan. And so we could say we did everything we could, my partner and I even did a little knock and talk with the guy. That’s the entry in June there. Truth be told, I just wanted to score a peek at the place.’
‘And?’ Rogan nudged.
‘The condo was sweet. Marble floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows–’
‘The resident. Drugs? Dealing?’
‘Would never happen. Dude’s Eurotrash, buying up Manhattan real estate while the dollar’s in the toilet. Goes clubbing every night. Picks up bridge-and-tunnel skanks looking for a short-term sugar daddy, a place to party for the night. Had no problem letting me search. The place was clean but for some personal-use marijuana in the nightstand. He didn’t seem fazed that I found it, and I really didn’t want to process him for it, so he flushed it. No hard stuff. No paraphernalia. No packaging materials. No cash or books.’
‘No dealing.’
‘No dealing.’
‘You got a cell number in case we need you to nail this down for court?’ Ellie asked. ‘Sparks’s lawyer made it sound like Pablo Escobar lived next door.’
She jotted down the number in her notebook, and they began to make their way out of the squad room. Guerrero had been blowing smoke with his claims of a drug operation going down across the hall at the 212, but she still wondered how the lawyer had even known about it. Then she realized the likely source.
She turned toward Carenza. ‘Hey, you don’t happen to know Nick Dillon, do