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Brett Mahoney was many things, but first and foremost he was a detective of New York City, and that meant he was used to the weird and unusual. The old guard grumble that it wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, so they say, New York was just gang fights and race riots, but these days it’s aliens and genetic experiments and who knows what else running amok at all hours of the night.
Even Hell's Kitchen, Brett's own little corner of Manhattan has its own vigilante. And sure, Brooklyn won’t stop crowing over two of the Howling Commandos, both of them defrosted and kicking ass, but fuck ‘em; Rogers lives in DC now and Barnes is who-knows-where killing who-knows-who. Daredevil is in New York in the here and now, and he’s in Hell’s Kitchen. Daredevil is a New York boy, through and through, just like Brett, and there’s something special about growing up in a city like New York, in a borough like Hell’s Kitchen. It makes you see the city, when everyone else just sees the symbol. Daredevil, Brett can tell, sees New York as the piss-stenched alleyways, and the garbage problem and the bodegas whose ATMs give out 10s instead of 20s so you can make withdrawals with 12.50 in your account. It’s not the Statue of liberty and the empire state building that all the wide-eyed corn-fed Midwesterners see when they first arrive.
New York is a real city, a working city, and it’s a hell of a learning curve for people who weren’t born and raised here. People expect the crime, and the bustle, and the smart ones even expect the poverty, but no-one expects what it’s like to live in New York day in and day-out without living there first. It’s the relentless, high-noise, always-bright bustle that gets to people. New York grinds you down, if you let it. New York won’t ever let up, will keep trying to squeeze you out of the city like a python with a rat. You either let it pop you out, a few years after you arrive, or you carve yourself a spot out of the constant construction and pre-war tenement buildings and tell New York to piss off, that you live here too, and that if it wants you out, too fucking bad. New Yorkers know, and he includes the smarter country kids in this, that if you rest for even a split second, New York will knock you on your ass and run you over.
People all over the world know New York as the city that never sleeps, but only New Yorkers know what that means.
What this has meant for Brett recently is that the assholes that don’t sleep in this city have taken to beating the holy hell out of each other in the alleyways of his precincts, when they’re not busy blowing each other up.
He’s staring at an alley full of groaning men (he recognises at least three of them from outstanding arrest warrants hung around the precinct) and one man still standing.
“Daredevil.” He greets.
“Detective Mahoney!” daredevil says cheerfully, holstering his billy clubs. “We never see each other anymore.”
“Well, half my precinct was arrested last year, maybe you’ve heard. It’s left us a little short-staffed.”
Daredevil smiled, smirked really, from under his cowl. “I might have heard it mentioned in passing.”
Jackass. “Get out of here before I call this in and I have to arrest you for vigilante justice.” Brett tells him, taking another step into the alley.
“Not a crime on the books in New York.” He says cheerfully, because of course he would know that.
“Yeah, well, battery definitely is.” Brett says, looking at what he can already tell will be a hell of a bruise on the forehead of one of the guys in the alley. “So clear out before I arrest you for that.”
Daredevil pulls some fancy acrobatic move that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Olympics, and then peers down at Brett from over a fire escape railing.
“Citizen’s arrest, and necessary force in self-defence.” He says cheerfully. “And detective? You might want to check the dumpster.” And then he’s gone again.
“Jackass.” Brett muttered, and flipped open the lid of the dumpster. The interior was piled high with what to Brett’s reasonably experienced eye, looked like nearly a three hundred grand worth of coke.
“Alright,” He corrects himself. “Useful jackass.”
He let the lid of the dumpster fall shut again, and called it in, telling the radio responder that Daredevil was long gone by the time he had reached the scene. It’s a lie that everyone on the force recognizes for what it is, and that nearly half the force has made at one point or another. They don’t like the rise of vigilantes in this city any more than Brett does, but Daredevil’s a New York boy. He cares about this city, same as them, and all the people in it.
*
Murdock, of Nelson and Murdock, comes in to the precinct looking to badger the captain about releasing information with a chunk of gauze two inches wide and six inches long taped to his forearm.
“Oh, this?” Murdock held up his arm, elbow out, oxford rolled up, to show it off when Brett asked. Shrugged, like getting a gash longer than Brett’s hand was nothing but a minor inconvenience. “Tripped down a flight of stairs at the office, put my hand through a window. Lucky I didn’t need stitches.”
Foggy came around the corner, and Murdock hastily pulled his shirt back down, buttoning the sleeve at the wrist even as Foggy glanced at it suspiciously.
“I think we’re in luck, Matty Matt,” Foggy says, clapping one hand on Murdock’s shoulder. “The captain’s agreed that we, upstanding citizens that we are, only get half the runaround instead of the full runaround! C’mon, we’ve got paperwork to fill out!”
Murdock grins in Foggy’s general direction, and thanks Brett again as he’s led from the precinct. Brett watches him go, and some horrible, nasty corner of his brain whispers that the place he usually sees cuts that shape and size is on corpses of murder victims, where they had thrown their hands in-between a knife and their face.
*
The next day, he gets a proper street meat hotdog from a vendor after he finishes his shift. The bun’s kind of stale, the meat is the weird, tasteless paste that street hotdogs are. He piles on so many condiments that they spill out both ends of the napkin, and then pours ketchup and mustard on over top of that. A proper New York hot dog. He lets the mustard and sauerkraut drip down his hand and thumb as he sits on the front steps to a tenement and enjoys a hot meal and a cold drink for $3.50, the can of Pepsi sweating on the concrete beside him.
He eats his three dollar hotdog, and watches the city go by just for a moment, and wonders who the hell told Murdock he didn’t need stitches for a gash in his arm spanning nearly wrist to elbow, that must have missed the main veins and arteries in his arm by fractions of an inch.
*
An old detective once told him that solving a crime was a lot like solving a crossword puzzle: Every fact, every piece of information might not help you solve the particular question you were stuck on, but it would help you solve a different puzzle, which would give you a hint to something else, which would get you where you were going.
Brett had never liked crosswords. They required him to know more about old figure skaters and the casts of 70s westerns and mountain ranges Asia for him to be any good at them anyway. Brett’s always been more of a Sudoku guy.
All the clues are right in front of you, all you need is time and patience and logic to figure them out. The thing about Sudoku, is that the puzzle is as much about figuring out where things weren’t as much as they were about figuring out where things were.
*
Hell’s Kitchen isn’t actually a huge neighbourhood, as far as boroughs in New York go, so it shouldn’t really surprise him that sometimes he and Murdock end up at the same deli to grab lunch. Today he’s waiting on a sandwich piled nearly two inches thick with shaved turkey and mustard when he sees Murdock waiting at the counter.
“Murdock! How’s it going?”
Murdock grins, and looks mostly in Brett’s direction.
“Mahoney, right? Nice to see you again. Or, well,” Matt gestured at his face, half mocking.
“You too Murdock.”
“Matt, please.” Murdock- Matt, Brett supposes- says. He switches his cane to his other hand, and fumbles in his plastic deli bag.
“How’s work, Matt?” Brett asks.
“Well, really well.” Matt replies. “We’re representing a whole tenement against their landlord, its exciting stuff.”
Brett snorted. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“What about you, officer?” Matt asks “How’s the precinct.”
Brett groans in reply, and Murdock actually laughs a little.
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse.” Brett replies. “I don’t think I’ve seen my apartment except to sleep in it for weeks.”
Matt snorts. “I know what that’s like. We’ve all been putting in too many hours at the office over this tenement case. It’s hard on all of us.”
Brett makes the appropriate sympathetic noises. “That’s rough. If you or Foggy ever need anything, though, let me know.”
“Actually, Mahoney, could I ask you a favour?”
Brett nods, and Murdock holds out two identically wrapped sandwiches. “Could you tell me which of these is egg salad and which is the ham? I’m sure it’s written on the package, but-“ Matt shrugs. “I could always take a bite, but I doubt Foggy’d appreciate getting a sub with a bite taken out of it if I guessed wrong.”
“Hey, fair enough.” Brett says, taking the bag “Whose is whose?”
“Egg salad’s mine.” Matt says. “I gave up meat for lent.”
“Good for you,” Brett says pushing the egg salad into Matt’s open hand. “My dad always went for coffee, but he could never make it last the full month and a half.”
Matt laughs, seemingly delighted, as he opens his egg salad. “You a catholic, Mahoney?”
“Used to be. Not so much anymore.” Brett accepts his Turkey club from across the counter, unwrapping it on the spot. “Didn’t work for me like it worked for my parents.”
“That’s a shame Brett,” Matt says, “The doors are always open if you change your mind.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Brett says as he turns to go. “You take care of yourself Matt.”
“You too detective.” Matt turns back to his sandwich, and for a split second Brett thinks he sees the shadow of a black eye underneath his dark glasses. “It’s a dangerous world out there.”
*
Brett’s a good Old Catholic boy, but he was a good Old Catholic boy who grew up in the 80s. He doesn’t have the unshakable faith that Murdock has, doesn’t go to church on Sundays. He’s a Christmas mass and Easter only Christian; he’ll go to Ash Wednesday, and give up chocolate or cream in his coffee for Lent, and he’ll cross himself when he needs a little bit of extra luck, or when he sees something that needs someone to pray for it. He knows his hail Mary’s, and he takes his hat off going into church, and the Gloria still gives him goosebumps, in a way that nothing else ever has.
But he doesn’t have faith, not the same way Murdock does. And hey, fair enough; Murdock was raised by nuns, after his old man got murdered, and that sort of thing leads to a certain faith in the institutions that protected you. But Brett remembers the 80s, remembers seeing priest after priest chased out of their parishes in Boston, remembers the outrage of his congregation, remembers the silence from the Vatican.
He also remembers the church organizing to cook hot meals for his grandmother when her joints swelled up with diabetes so badly she could barely open the door anymore, remembers coat drives and fundraisers and scholarships and a missionary mission, sending good old New York boys somewhere to spread the word of God where they should have been spreading vaccines and water filters.
Brett’s an Old Catholic boy, but he’s not a catholic any more, and he’s seen the nasty parts of the church before he left.
So it didn’t actually shock him that badly when half his precinct was led out in cuffs on corruption charges.
*
The devil of Hell's Kitchen showed up as he was walking from the stairs of the subway to the stairs of his walk up.
"You know," he told Brett, perched on his neighbour's fire escape. "You not being a beat cop anymore makes these nighttime rendezvous significantly harder."
Brett stared at him a moment, and then sighed.
"Are there unconscious mobsters nearby that I should call in? Or is this a conversation we can as I’m walking back to my apartment?"
Daredevil, the bastard, laughs and back flips off the fire escape to land next to him.
"Show off" Brett accuses.
Daredevil shrugs, clearly amused. "Gotta enjoy the little things. Can we walk and talk, detective?"
“Could I stop you if I said no?”
“Maybe.”
Brett sighed, and kept walking. “So what is it this time? Pile of bikers in an alley? Am I going to round the corner and find an international arms ring? Or can I go home and put my bread and eggs away first.”
“Just looking for information tonight, detective.”
“Is that so?” Brett asks, stepping neatly around a pile of garbage. “And what, exactly, is daredevil looking for information on tonight?”
“The Italians. What’s the word around the precinct about them?”
“You’re going after one of the families?” Brett asked, “I’d say you were stupider than you looked, but that’s damn near impossible with your new getup.”
“The Italians,” Daredevil asks again, “what do you know.”
Bret sighs, and shifts his bag of groceries. “What I know is that you made a power vacuum so big when you took out Fisk, the Russians and the Japanese all at the same time, every two-bit gangster between here and Chicago heard it and came running. I don’t know what’s going on with the Italians because I can’t keep track of who’s shooting who, these days.”
“Your best guess, then.”
Brett stops in his tracks, and stares at him. “You know I’m not actually an everything-that-happens-in-Hell’s-Kitchen encyclopedia right? You want one of the guys from organized crime for this shit. You should stalk Rodriguez after his shift, just, y’know, for a change of pase.”
“Detective.”
“Aright, aright.” Brett says. “Best guess? There’s serious money moving in construction here right now, between Fisk’s work and the dock reconstruction. Start there.” Brett shrugs. “That’s all I’ve got man-“
But Daredevil’s already gone, by the time Brett’s got his keys out of his pocket.
“Asshole,” Brett mutters to himself, and opens the door to his apartment.
*
Nelson and Murdock is across the hall from a rinky-dink pink sheet stock broker, and two levels up from a hardware store. It’s not exactly a promising location for a law firm. It is, however, jammed with potential clients, even at four in the afternoon on a Wednesday. The receptionist (Karen, he thinks. She was their first client, if her remembers correctly, and he’s sure he does) looks up and smiles at him as he arrives, before turning back to her conversation with a little old Korean lady regarding… something to do with her grandson? He shook his head; that’s not why he was here anyway. He’s just here to drop off relevant information to a client they were defending. They had the warrant for it, and usually it would be waiting for them at the precinct, but what the hell, Brett knew Foggy. Nelson & Murdock wasn’t that far out of his way. If he was using the opportunity to scope out exactly what was happening with Murdock that was his own business.
He pushes his way into one of the actual offices of Nelson and Murdock to catch the tail end of an argument.
From the sounds of it, Foggy’s in the middle of telling his partner why he can’t go out tonight. Brett raises his eyebrows, and Foggy drops Matt’s arm like he’s been burned.
“Brett!” Foggy exclaims, “What are you-“
“What can we do for you, officer Mahoney?” Matt finishes smoothly. He’s got a bland, boring little smile on, like he’s being paid minimum wage to deal with screaming customers, instead of whatever the going rate of a defence attorney is to deal with crying ones.
Brett lets the box he’s carrying fall heavily on the desk in front of him, sure that Matt can hear the thud it makes even over the noise of the air conditioner and the walk-ins in their reception area.
“Detective, actually.” Brett corrects. “And I brought you files for the Murano tenement.”
“Detective huh,” Matt sounds unaccountably smug, and his grin widens slightly, “Congratulations. Did that happen after the big Castle arrest?”
Foggy’s giving Matt the evil eye, to which he is of course oblivious.
“Yeeeeaaah.” Brett draws out the single syllable as long as he can. “You didn’t know that? It’s been a while. I thought the news would have made its rounds by now.”
“Well, you know us,” Foggy said, glaring at his partner. “A little slow on the uptake, over at Nelson and Murdock.”
“Thanks for dropping by, detective.” Matt says, as though Foggy hadn’t said anything “We appreciate it. Really.”
Brett nods at the two of them, slowly.
“He just nodded at us,” Foggy says.
“I gotta get going, but it was nice stopping by.” Brett says, pulling his cap back on. “You’ve got a good thing going here. Maybe someday, you can even stop slipping my mom cigars for clients.”
Foggy scowls, mock-angry, and Murdock snickers as Brett backs through the door. He lingers by the door just long enough to hear Foggy declare furiously that he didn’t care if Matt helped the president, he’s still staying in tonight.
“Do you need anything else, detective?” Karen page, wearing her blouse and pencil skirt like most officers he knew wore their blues, is staring at him, hands on her hips. Despite the blonde curls and the disarmingly large blue eyes, there’s something threatening about her.
“No Ma’am” He says. “Just leaving.”
“Oh! Well, fine.” Page says. “But detective-“
She steps in front of him, between him and the door and lowers her voice so no-one else in the office can hear her.
“Listen, I don’t know what you’re up to here, but I do know that there’s no reason for the 15th’s newest detective to deliver evidence to an attorney personally, so you’re up to something here.”
She takes one more stilettoed step into his personal space, and gives every impression of wanting to jam a finger in his chest is she thought she could get away with it.
“We have a good thing going here. I’m not going to let anyone change that.”
Brett’s slightly amused, but mostly impressed. “Was that a threat, Ms. Page?”
She pulls back, and smiles politely at him again. “Of course not. Threatening an officer is a felony.”
“Detective.” He corrects.
“Well detective, don’t let me keep you.” She gestures to the door. “The good people of Hell’s Kitchen await.”
She smiles at him as he shuts the office door, and he amends his assessment of Karen Page to ‘definitely impressed.’ He wonders, idly, if she’s seeing anyone. The line of thought makes him smile, as he heads down the stairs, and he notes the anti-slip traction pads on each and every step.
He checks every window on the way out of the building, and not a single one of them is broken or recently repaired.
*
An old cop joke:
What do you call a wife –beater who never goes to jail?
One of New York’s finest.
Brett remembers this joke, remembers the old beat cop who told it two him, a detective who did twice her fair time as a traffic officer and time and a half again as a beat cop before making detective. He remembers her steel-coloured bun, her nicotine stained fingers, and her stony-faced, laugh-so-you-don’t-cry gallows humor as she told it to him, in the ER of one of Hell’s Kitchen’s over worked and underfunded hospitals.
She’d been staring at a woman in to get treated for a broken arm, at the way she kept tugging her wine-coloured cardigan down over the finger shaped bruises on her wrist.
Remember, she’d told him, remember this, remember this whenever any cop ever tries to preach loyalty to each other over loyalty to the law, loyalty to your fellow boys in blue over loyalty to this woman right here, married to the captain’s pet over on at the 17th. She stared at him, this old battered cop when Brett was still fresh out of the academy, all starched collar and optimism, and she stared at him and told him that joke as a warning, daring him to laugh, informing him that she’d been expected to laugh at the joke, when she’d first started.
He remembered this joke as Matt Murdock lowered himself tenderly onto one of the steel chairs in a precinct interrogation room. Brett watches him wince as his ass hits the bare metal. He watches Foggy excuse his partner’s behaviour, saying something about a bicycle messenger, and another old cop joke comes to mind unbidden.
How do you know when a lawyer is lying?
His lips are moving.
Brett watches Murdock, and watches Foggy watch Murdock, and hopes to god the conviction rate on defence attorneys is higher than the one on officers.
*
There’s a Puerto Rican woman who has been running a woman’s shelter in Hell’s Kitchen for the past five years, squeezed between a kosher butcher and a kitchen supply shop. In the time Brett’s worked at the 15th, they’ve sent probably hundreds of women and children to her doors, and she’s not turned a single one away. She’s stubborn, and tough as nails, and shot half a dozen chitauri when the sky opened up two summers ago. Gina Xiorro was a pillar of Hell’s Kitchen, and exactly who Brett needed to talk to at the moment.
This proves harder than he expects. She keeps an irregular schedule due to the needs of the women in her care, and has been locked in a terrible battle with the city for grant renewal for the past six months. He ends up meeting her well outside the bounds of Hell’s Kitchen at city hall, him after a trial, her after an afternoon trying to get a restraining order filed for one of the women in her care.
“Ms. Xiorro!” He calls at her, across the hall. “Can I talk to you a minute?”
Although she had immediately tensed when she was called, one hand in her purse for a can of mace, she mostly relaxed when she saw who it was.
“I suppose we can, officer.” She says. “Mahoney, right?”
Brett nods. “Thank you. If there was someone I was concerned might be in an abusive relationship-“
“You haven’t done anything stupid like slip them brochures, have you?” She interrupted. “Given them numbers? A list of people that could help them out?”
“What? No, he’s blind. Why would that be stupid?”
Ms. Xiorro sighs, and takes a seat on one of the wooden benches that are scattered around city hall like flies on a dog.
“Because, if an abuse sunofabitch finds evidence that their victim is trying to leave, they tend to kill them.”
“Oh.” Brett takes a heavy seat beside her. “I never thought about that.”
“People usually don’t,” Xiorro says grimly, “And then you end up with dead women.”
“Jesus.” It’s not often that as a cop in Hell’s Kitchen, Brett feels he has the easier job of his friends. Xiorro is always an exception to this rule. “Glad I didn’t try that then.”
“Don’t ever.” She stretches her legs out in front of her, and crosses them delicately at the ankles. “Tell me about your suspicions.”
“Bruises,” Brett says, “Cuts that should have gotten stitched up at the hospital but didn’t. Fighting about being allowed out. I dunno.”
Xiorro hums. “Blind, you said?”
“Yeah.” Brett says. “That matter?”
“Could,” Xiorro hedges, “Doesn’t necessarily. But disabled people tend to get into abusive relationships way more than average. Financially independent?”
“No idea,” Brett admits. “He’s a lawyer, but he shares his practice with the guy I think is rouging him up.
Xiorro raises her eyebrows. “Shit. That’s going to be complicated.”
“Yeah.” Brett’s sure of that much, at least. “What do you think?”
“I think he needs someone he knows on his side, not just a cop that knows his friend.” Xiorro says. “He have other friends you could reach out to? Friends? Family?”
Brett thinks of Karen, threatening a New York City cop to protect a pair of lawyers. “He does.”
“Good!” Xiorro says. “I hate sticking men up in hotels when they come out of those situations. Always better to keep ‘em with their support network than stick ‘em in isolation.”
“You wouldn’t take him?” Brett asks in alarm.
“Into my shelter? Over my dead body.” Xiorro says, “Half the women in there only come because I guarantee no man gets in the door of the place. I still have a deal with a hotel who puts up battered men as a tax write off, and I still give ‘em all the legal help and job training as the girls, but he’s not staying at my actual place. Can’t do it.”
Brett wonders if Matt would sleep on his couch, if he offered. “I getcha. Won’t send him your way unless I have to.”
“But if you have to, do.” She stood up again, and stretched. “Hotel room’s better than a backseat of a car, or a subway car or wherever else he might end up.”
Brett bought her lunch before they went on their way, a tub of salad and an iced coffee so rich with cream and sugar that Brett’s teeth hurt just looking at it, and returned to the precinct with a handful of brochures to read for himself, and never under any circumstances give to suspected abuse victims.
*
The next time he sees any of them, it’s just Matt and Page, no Foggy in sight.
“What can I do for my favourite DAs in Hell’s Kitchen?” he asks them, as they walk into the precinct.
“Ouch!” Matt says, mock offended from Karen’s arm. “Do you hear that Karen? Damned by faint praise, by the good detective.”
Brett smiles in spite of himself, and then notices that there’s a tensor bandage wrapped thickly across Murdock’s other wrist. “You okay there Murdock?”
“What?” He asks, “Oh, you mean-“he waves the offending wrist vaguely between them.
“I was being an idiot, this is nothing more than I deserve.” Brett raises his eyebrows at Karen, who’s looking deeply unimpressed with Matt.
“Really, it doesn’t hurt at all.” Matt continues. “Nothing to worry about.”
It has to be some of the least convincing testimony he’s ever heard, but there’s nothing he can do about it at the moment.
“I assume you’ve made the trip down to my precinct for a reason?” Brett asks.
“Yes, of course,” its Karen, this time, who takes the lead. “We need the old files for the Russo arrests, from ‘89.”
Brett raises his eyebrows. “The mafia boss? For your tenement case?”
“We think there might be some connection” Karen hedges. “We found some patterns between noise complaints, and old news coverage of Mafia activity in the area, but we want have something more concrete than circumstantial evidence before we accuse our client’s landlord of mob connections.”
Brett raises his eyebrows, impressed this time. “You’re hypothesizing a connection to one of the Families based on noise complaints?”
“Murano’s also cousin once-removed from one of Russo’s enforcers.” Karen adds. “Different last names, but I found records at city hall proving it.”
Matt looks proud as a parent at a spelling bee.
Brett nods. “I’ll put in the request. And ask around about it, too. Nice work, Ms. Page. You’d’ve made a hell of a detective.”
“Hey!” Matt protests, “No stealing our future paralegal, we already have to beat the editor of the Bulletin off with a stick. Karen’s a pillar of Nelson and Murdock. We’d be lost without her.”
Karen preens. Just a little, but she does. It’s sort of unfairly attractive.
“Actually,” Brett says, “Could I grab a word with her for a moment? Privately?”
“Oh! Um,” She glances at Matt on her arm, and he politely disentangles himself.
“I’ll wait outside.” He says.
Karen nods and tucks her hair behind her ear in the same movement, a nervous little bob, as Matt leaves.
“Detective?”
“He’s been looking pretty rough lately,” Brett says, gesturing to the door Matt left through. “Have you noticed anything funny, between Murdock and Nelson?” He asks, “Arguments? Fights?”
“Not recently,” was the immediate reply, “not that I’ve noticed, anyway. Foggy’s going over to Matt’s apartment after work way more though. And they’re- I dunno. Tense, I guess would be the best word to describe it.”
Karen frowned to herself, clearly mulling something over, and Brett simply stood back and watched her think.
“Actually,” She said slowly, “Foggy’s been pretty mad at Matt recently. Never in front of me, but it’s hard to miss that they both shut up the moment I come back from my lunch break every day.”
Brett raises his eyebrows. “”s that so?”
“Why? You don’t think-“She stops herself for a moment, and Brett can almost see the pieces fall into place for her, one after another click-click-click. She lowers her voice as she continues. “You don’t think that Foggy is-“
“I don’t think anything yet, Ms. Page.” Brett tells her. “All I know is that Murdock’s been looking pretty beat up lately. It’s what I don’t know that’s bugging me. I was hoping you could help me fill in some of those gaps.”
Karen nods, once, deceive, clearly already thinking about it. Brett really likes her. He scribbles his number on a sticky note, and gives it to her.
“If you see anything that could actually confirm, let me know.” She folds his number and tucks it into her breast pocket.
“In the meantime, tell him to put some ice or something on that wrist,” Brett says.
“I’ll find an icepack.” She tells him, and then she’s gone again, and Brett returns to his email with the organized crime unit.
*
So Matt was a self-flagellating catholic. That’s alright, Brett knew how to deal with those; his own father fell under that particular umbrella.
Catholic guilt took many forms, and the woe-is-me, I-deserve-whatever-befalls-me-to-atone-for-my-sins variety that Murdock was displaying was by far the most pedestrian variety. Now that she’s dead, Brett can fondly remember the way his own grandmother brandished her guilt as a weapon, made other people feel guilty by sheer weight and presence of her own guilt. She had once burst into tears, loudly and publicly at a family dinner, and despaired that none of her grandchildren were proper Catholics; that she had failed as a grandmother, and that she had clearly failed as a mother if her children had raised children that were going to burn in hell. In retrospect, it was nearly impressive in a terrible, unnecessary sort of way. Brett still wonders sometimes how long she’d been planning that particular outburst, whether she weighed the fallout of that performance during after-dinner drinks or before dessert, if she’d debated doing it on an actual Christian holiday or after thanksgiving dinner, when she actually conjured her crocodile tears.
Still, it made one of his cousins baptise all three of his children the next month. Nanna, wearing a violet pillbox hat with such authority it might have been a mitre, sitting in a place of honour at the front of the church. She looked smug as the cat who’d caught the canary, watching her great-grandchildren be baptized.
He’d take Murdock’s insistence he become a martyr over his grandmother’s variety any day of the week.
Once he collects the evidence, he’s sure he can convince any judge of battery, can get a restraining order of however big he wants once he’s out of Foggy’s grip. Brett’ll buy him a damn hair shirt to celebrate, once the restraining order goes through.
*
Daredevil continued to be a pain in Brett’s ass.
“You’re a pain in my ass,” He told him.
Daredevil, the bastard, laughed. “Detective, I thought we were closer than this.”
“We’re never gonna be close enough that you delivering to me to an active crime scene isn’t going to be a pain in the ass.” Brett replied. At the start of the night, this had been a construction site. Now, it was a battlefield, strewn with sawed off shotguns and moaning mobsters. “What, you just happened to stop by at the right time?”
“I’m a good Samaritan.” Daredevil said.
“The fuck you are.” Brett told him. “You have any idea how complicated my life is now? You know they’ve got me starting a, what did they call it, ‘special responders’ taskforce because there are so many of you assholes running around?”
Brett nudges one of the mobsters onto his side, so he won’t suffocate while unconscious.
“No kidding.” Daredevil sounds tickled pink.
“Yeah.” Brett starts ticking them off on his fingers. “Me, couple of guys from Brooklyn who Cap likes, some folks from midtown that deal with the area around Avengers tower, one poor bastard who was involved in that Killgrave mess, and a pair of cops from Queens who are dealing with the new kid in red and blue. You’re in the big leagues now, Daredevil.”
“The upstart; he’s the wall climber?” Daredevil asks.
Brett snorted. “Yeah, I guess ‘runs around in long underwear’ isn’t as useful a descriptor as it used to be.”
“Well, you should try it.” Daredevil says, springing from scaffolding to the raised arm of an excavator. “It’s surprisingly breathable.”
“I’ll stick to my slacks, thanks.” Brett settles on a stack of two-by fours while they wait for the reinforcements to show up. “Construction, huh? My tip pay off then?”
“More or less. Bunch of interested parties involved in ‘urban renewal projects’, never mind the people already living in them.”
“Christ,” Brett mutters “it’s like Fisk all over again.”
Daredevil hums in agreement. They share a moment in the dusty construction site, in the middle of the night, before something occurs to Brett.
“Hey, can I ask you a favour?”
“An officer of the law such as yourself?”
“Knock it off with that crap,” Brett snaps“this is serious.”
That seems to sober him up slightly, at least. “Go ahead, detective.” Daredevil says sheepishly.
“Aright. This might be small-time for you, know that you’re trying to put the organized crime department out of business, but you remember the law firm that helped bring Fisk down? The pair of local boys?”
Daredevil smiles, and there’s blood on his teeth. “Nelson and Murdock. Yeah, I remember.”
“One of ‘em, Nelson is an old…” whatever Foggy was to him, “we go back.”
Daredevil makes an inquisitive noise.
“Anyway, we go back, but there’s something fishy going on in that office.”
“What- What do you mean fishy?” Daredevil asks, suddenly engaged again. “Are they in danger? Is someone after them?”
“Not that I know of, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They stack up enemies nearly as fast as clients, no help that you keep tossing them the legal parts of your job,”
Daredevil makes a noise of protest, but Brett keeps going. “Don’t tell me that’s not what you’re doing; they just happened to start looking into Mafioso apartments as you made a move on the families? I’m not an idiot, Daredevil, and if they ever get targeted it’s on your head. But that’s not it.”
Brett mulls over what he’s about to say, turns it over in his mouth until he can stomach spitting it out. “I think Nelson’s been beating on his partner.”
Daredevil stills completely.
“What,” he says, voice flat.
“Can’t confirm yet, but I’ve noticed some things. Arguments, bruises, excuses. Not going to the hospital when he should really go to the hospital, that sort of thing.” Brett doesn’t like this, not at all, but you can’t turn away from something because your friends are involved. That’s how the bastards get away with it.
“And you think that F- That Nelson’s the one doing that to Murdock?”
Brett shrugs, uncomfortable. “I don’t know anything yet,” he hedges “but it makes sense. Just- Keep an eye on Murdock, would you? Guy needs someone in his corner right now.”
Daredevil makes a choked noise, and Brett looks over in concern. He’s heard the guy get sucker punched and react with less.
“You ok?” He asks Daredevil, because apparently this is his life now.
“I should get going.” He’s already scaling the crane in the middle of the construction area. “Backup’s on its way, after all.”
“Just keep an eye!” He calls after his retreating back, and turns back to the mobsters at his feet. He still needs to take care of this. Hopefully, Daredevil will take care of Murdock.
*
He gets a call from Karen, early the next afternoon.
“Ms. Page” he greets over the phone.
“Something’s going on,” she says bluntly. “Foggy dragged Matt into his office a few minutes ago, as soon as he got to the office, and Matt had a split lip when he got here this morning.”
Brett’s already out of his chair and moving out the door “They’re still at the office?”
“Yeah, for now,” Karen says “but-“
“Keep them there.” Brett says. “I’m on my way. Does Matt need a place to stay?”
“He can sleep on my couch, but they don’t live together or anything.” Karen says “He should be able to sleep at his own apartment.”
“They don’t?” Brett asked. “Then why the hell- Never mind. You know what the fight’s about?”
“No idea!” in the background, something clattered, and Brett picked up the pace. “It’s not about the case; Murano’s landlord was arrested last night for some money-laundering thing, he was funnelling money through the tenements and trying to clear them out without anyone getting suspicious, we’ve got the case in the bag.”
Must have been one of the mafia men Daredevil turned over to the police the night before, Brett guessed.
“You think Murdock’ll press charges?” he asked.
“I don’t know!” Karen said, “Hang on, Foggy’s just grabbed Matt’s cane, I gotta-“
“Ms Page!”
“Gotta go.”
Brett swore as she hung up, and sprinted the last half block to Nelson and Murdock, and then sprinted up three flights of stairs. The screaming match he emerged into was unexpected, in that it was Karen page screaming at the two Lawyers.
“-Lying about this for how long? To protect me?”
Matt and Foggy were standing behind a table, and were the only ones to see Brett walk in the door. Foggy looks at him, eyes wide and panicked, and moves to shush Karen.
“Foggy Nelson, don’t you DARE,” Karen yells “Do you have any idea how scared I was? How worried I was about this? And you’re trying to shush me?”
She turns to Matt, who is looking increasingly alarmed. “And you!” Karen continued, “Did you not think, anytime in the past two years, that it was maybe appropriate to tell me that you were Daredevil!”
“What.” Brett says.
Karen whipped around, and turned from furious to guilty in a single heartbeat.
“Detective,” Foggy says, grinning unconvincingly, “Hi. How are you. Did you hear all that?”
“He did.” Matt says glumly. “Every word.”
Brett gently closes the door to the law firm behind him. He turns back around, and stares directly at Murdock, who is looking intimidated even behind the glasses. Now that he’s taking a closer look, the cut on his lip is identical to the one Daredevil had contracted the night before.
“We need to talk.” Brett says, and he can see Matt’s throat bob as he gulps, but Brett thinks he already gets it. They’re both New York boys, after all.