his word quota for the night, stepping to the corner for a smoke.
“So my question to you, boss,” Stupak said, “are they perps or victims?”
Billy thought about it a moment. “They’re perptims.”
“You think this is funny?” a young Hispanic woman snapped, her eyes shimmering with anger.
“Hey, how’re you doing, did you know either of these guys?” Stupak asked easily, making her disappear into the Smiths. “Can you bring her back here please?” she asked a uniform.
Billy’s cell thrummed inside his sport jacket, a fresh text from Stacey:
can you please answer my calls please
thats the only way to get me to stop
He knew her enough to know that this was true and it was time to get it over with. To brace himself he went into an all-night bodega and came out chugging a Turbo Tea.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Jesus, he lives.”
“Sorry, my phone’s been . . .”
“Don’t, don’t, don’t.”
Was it the energy drink that made the cigarette taste so good or the other way around? “So what’s up. You OK?”
As usual after building up a case against returning Stacey’s calls, now that he was actually talking to her, he couldn’t remember what the big deal was.
“Yeah, but I need to tell you something,” she said.
“What’s that.”
“Have breakfast with me. It’s a long story.”
“Give me the headline.”
“Just have breakfast with me.”
“Stacey . . .”
“You’ll be glad you did. Well, maybe ‘glad’ isn’t the right word.”
That right there was the big deal.
Five hours later, Billy sat in his parked car outside the tin can of a diner in Mount Vernon where he was to break bread with Stacey Taylor. He smoked one cigarette, then another, delaying as long as possible the sit-down to come. Seeing her was always a wrenching experience, the psychic equivalent of returning to a battlefield with your former enemy years after the bloodbath that had scarred you both, eager to reach out but unable to rid yourself of the lingering acid that still bit at the back of the throat.
In 1997 Stacey had been a young reporter for the New York Post, an aggressive up-and-comer who glommed onto Billy’s notorious double shooting in the Bronx, attempting to make her journalistic bones by investigating the rumor that he’d been high when he pulled the trigger. Backed by two independent eyewitnesses, both willing to go public, both claiming to have seen him doing blow in the rear of an Intervale Avenue bar an hour before the shooting, as well as two more witnesses who wouldn’t go on record but corroborated the statements of the two who would, Stacey went in and made a hard pitch to her editors, touting the thoroughness of her background checks on her sources, then bombarding them with reports about police abuse in the area, anecdotal evidence that was as easy for her to gather out on the street as picking daisies.
In the end, she needn’t have tried so hard. One week earlier, the Post had lost out to the Daily News on the suicide of a retired police lieutenant in a Queens dope motel, and her editors were hot to get back on top. The story was page one for two days running, so when it all fell apart shortly after, everyone involved got scorched, but no one as badly as Stacey. In the end it came down to those background checks: in her anxiety about losing her scoop to the time-sucking demands of a thorough vetting of her sources, she hadn’t done them at all.
The real background checks—conducted, embarrassingly enough, by the Daily News —revealed that one of the on-record eyewits was the brother of a heroin dealer Billy had sent upstate, while the other had twice before born false witness against cops as payback for his own slew of arrests in that precinct. As for the two others who would only talk off the record, no one had seen them since the article hit the stands.
With Stacey caught flat-footed in her lie, and with no hard evidence to back up her account, the story was
“So my question to you, boss,” Stupak said, “are they perps or victims?”
Billy thought about it a moment. “They’re perptims.”
“You think this is funny?” a young Hispanic woman snapped, her eyes shimmering with anger.
“Hey, how’re you doing, did you know either of these guys?” Stupak asked easily, making her disappear into the Smiths. “Can you bring her back here please?” she asked a uniform.
Billy’s cell thrummed inside his sport jacket, a fresh text from Stacey:
can you please answer my calls please
thats the only way to get me to stop
He knew her enough to know that this was true and it was time to get it over with. To brace himself he went into an all-night bodega and came out chugging a Turbo Tea.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Jesus, he lives.”
“Sorry, my phone’s been . . .”
“Don’t, don’t, don’t.”
Was it the energy drink that made the cigarette taste so good or the other way around? “So what’s up. You OK?”
As usual after building up a case against returning Stacey’s calls, now that he was actually talking to her, he couldn’t remember what the big deal was.
“Yeah, but I need to tell you something,” she said.
“What’s that.”
“Have breakfast with me. It’s a long story.”
“Give me the headline.”
“Just have breakfast with me.”
“Stacey . . .”
“You’ll be glad you did. Well, maybe ‘glad’ isn’t the right word.”
That right there was the big deal.
Five hours later, Billy sat in his parked car outside the tin can of a diner in Mount Vernon where he was to break bread with Stacey Taylor. He smoked one cigarette, then another, delaying as long as possible the sit-down to come. Seeing her was always a wrenching experience, the psychic equivalent of returning to a battlefield with your former enemy years after the bloodbath that had scarred you both, eager to reach out but unable to rid yourself of the lingering acid that still bit at the back of the throat.
In 1997 Stacey had been a young reporter for the New York Post, an aggressive up-and-comer who glommed onto Billy’s notorious double shooting in the Bronx, attempting to make her journalistic bones by investigating the rumor that he’d been high when he pulled the trigger. Backed by two independent eyewitnesses, both willing to go public, both claiming to have seen him doing blow in the rear of an Intervale Avenue bar an hour before the shooting, as well as two more witnesses who wouldn’t go on record but corroborated the statements of the two who would, Stacey went in and made a hard pitch to her editors, touting the thoroughness of her background checks on her sources, then bombarding them with reports about police abuse in the area, anecdotal evidence that was as easy for her to gather out on the street as picking daisies.
In the end, she needn’t have tried so hard. One week earlier, the Post had lost out to the Daily News on the suicide of a retired police lieutenant in a Queens dope motel, and her editors were hot to get back on top. The story was page one for two days running, so when it all fell apart shortly after, everyone involved got scorched, but no one as badly as Stacey. In the end it came down to those background checks: in her anxiety about losing her scoop to the time-sucking demands of a thorough vetting of her sources, she hadn’t done them at all.
The real background checks—conducted, embarrassingly enough, by the Daily News —revealed that one of the on-record eyewits was the brother of a heroin dealer Billy had sent upstate, while the other had twice before born false witness against cops as payback for his own slew of arrests in that precinct. As for the two others who would only talk off the record, no one had seen them since the article hit the stands.
With Stacey caught flat-footed in her lie, and with no hard evidence to back up her account, the story was
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