Reversible Errors Page 9

  Collins rubbed his face, where the kinky stubble of several days had gone unshaved, probably a fashion statement. Within the jail, Collins couldn’t be questioned without fresh Miranda warnings, which had not been administered. In the tortured logic of the law, therefore, nothing he said here could be used against him. Muriel explained, but Collins had been around the block often enough to understand that on his own. He was just taking a moment to ponder tactics.

  “Had half a pound, man,” he said, finally, “till the narcos took their pinch. Six zones now. Left just enough so it’s still an X.” Collins laughed as he contemplated the depravity of the police. They’d sell two ounces on the street or blow it themselves. He was still headed for life without parole.

  “How about you tell us what you’ve got?” Muriel asked.

  “How ’bout you tell me what my time-cut is, and stop acting like I’m some dumb jailhouse nigger just gone fall out for the po-lice.”

  Larry rose. He stretched briefly, but as things developed, that was a ruse so he could circle behind Collins. Once there, he grabbed the chain locked to the floor and jerked the links until they tightened in the young man’s groin, snapping him back. Muriel cast Larry a warning look, but he knew how far to go. He placed a hand on Collins’s shoulder from behind.

  “You have way too much attitude, my friend,” Larry told him. “Now, you don’t have to talk to us. You really don’t. We can go away and you can do life. But if you want out from under, then you better start behaving yourself. Because I don’t see a line of prosecutors outside the door waiting to cut you a better deal.”

  When Larry released the chain, Collins peered back at him with an insolent look, then turned his stare on Muriel. Almost against his will, he was appealing to her. Even Collins wasn’t certain how big a badass he actually was. She waved to Larry and they went out the door, waiting to speak until the deputy had stepped back in to watch his prisoner.

  “I hate haggling with dope peddlers,” said Larry. “They’re always so much better at it than me.”

  Muriel laughed out loud. Larry could put in on himself. That was one thing Talmadge. would never learn. Larry was still wearing his coat, a mid-length black leather jacket, and whispering with him in the close confines of the jail, she felt the animal heat that always radiated from his sheer bulk.

  “I don’t know if this afterbirth’s trying to get something for nothing,” he said, “or if he has the keys to the kingdom.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out,” she said. “This isn’t window-shopping. He has to put what he’s got on the table. Once he spills, we see if it proves. If he hands us a killer and testifies, then maybe Narcotics will reduce it to less than six ounces and let him go for ten to twelve years. But I can’t promise him anything on my own.”

  Larry nodded. It was a plan. Muriel grabbed his thick arm before he could turn back.

  “But maybe you should let me do the talking. I think you already nailed down the bad-cop part.”

  When they re-entered, Muriel explained the ground rules. With time to himself, Collins’s tone had grown slightly more agreeable, but he still shook his head.

  “Didn’t tell nobody I’d testify, man. I’m gonna be inside some time, now. Isn’t that so? No matter what I say, I’m inside, right?”

  Muriel nodded.

  “That’s hard time if I testify. G.O.’s,” he said, referring to the Gangster Outlaws, “they don’t wait to see you go state twice.”

  “Look,” said Muriel, “you’re not our dream date either. A Triple X who’s talking to get out from under life doesn’t sell to a jury like a nun. But if you won’t get behind what you’re gonna tell us, it’s worth nothing.”

  “Can’t testify,” said Collins. “Put me on the lie box, man, okay,” he said, “but no way I can get up there. I’m strictly a c.i.” Confidential informant.

  They went at it a few more minutes, but Muriel was willing to pass on his testimony. She still had the feeling that Collins would clean up okay, but a case that required a Triple X as a witness wasn’t worth bringing in the first place. Ultimately, she offered to try to sell a time-cut in the office, but only if Collins’s information led to a conviction. And they’d have to hear what he had to offer right now.

  “And what if you-all trick on me, man? Arrest this dude and fade me? Where am I then?” Collins’s eyes, a light umber shade, fell on Larry, as he inquired about getting swindled.

  “I thought your uncle told you I was okay,” Larry said.

  “My uncle, man,” said Collins and laughed at the idea of Erno. “What is it he knows? Put lipstick on a pig, man, it’s still a pig.”

  In spite of herself, Muriel smiled, but Larry had stiffened. ‘Pig,’ even these days, pushed a button with most cops, and Muriel touched Larry’s arm while she told Collins this was the best she could do, take it or leave it.

  Collins stretched his neck, rotating it as if to ease some small discomfort.

  “I was in this tavern,” he said then. “Lamplight.”

  “When?” she asked.

  “Last week. Right before I got cracked. Tuesday. And there’s this hook who comes round there. Just some raggedy street thing, you know.”

  “Name?”

  “Folks there call him Squirrel. I don’t know why. Probably cause he’s, like, nuts.” Collins took a second to enjoy that. “Anyway, I was kickin with some dudes and this Squirrel, he’s kind of sneakin round, selling shit.”

  “What shit was he selling?” asked Larry.

  “He had gold last week. Chains. And he’s pulling them outta his pockets, and he’s got something—what the hell do they call that lady’s necklace with a face on it?”

  “Cameo?” asked Muriel.

  He snapped his long fingers. “One of these brothers at the bar wanted to see it, and Squirrel shows him, but he’s like, ‘No way, man, that’s not for sale.’ Turns out, it opens up, you know, under the face, it’s a locket, and it’s got two little pictures inside, two babies. ‘Kin gonna give good money for that,’ he says. Kin, I’m thinking. Damn if I knew what that was about. So later I was back to, you know, the lavatory, and I saw him again, and we just fell to rappin, and I say to him, ‘What you mean “kin”?’ ‘Hell,’ he says, ‘lady I got that offa, she six under now. Busted a cap in her.’ And this brother, man, you know, he don’t look like he’d take off anybody. I’m like, ‘Man, you sky-up?’ ‘Word,’ he says, ‘smoked her and two more back there on the Fourth of Ju-ly. You seen it, too, man, TV and all, I was famous and everything. I got me a whole lotta shit offa all them, but I done unloaded it, ’cept that piece, cause ain nobody gonna give what her kin will pay. Gone do like ransom or somethin, once’t it get cold and all, and I need me money for a place to stay.’” Collins shrugged. He wasn’t sure what to think of it himself.

  Larry asked for a description of the locket. Many of the items lifted from the victims had been mentioned in the papers, and Larry was clearly looking for undisclosed details.

  “Any more?” Muriel asked Collins, once he’d answered Larry.

  “Mmm-mmm,” said Collins.

  “Not even a full name on this character?” asked Larry.

  “I don’t know, man. Could be somebody called him Ronny, something like that.”

  “You think he was woofin about killing those three people?”

  Collins looked at both of them. He was finally without poses.

  “Could be,” he said. “Right now, I’m hoping like hell he wasn’t, but you know, a man gets buzzed, who knows what he’s gonna say? He was struttin, that’s for sure.”

  Collins was doing this the right way, Muriel thought, telling it straight. At the end of the day if Squirrel was not the man, she would still be able to put a word in for him.

  Larry asked several more questions to which Collins had no answers, then they sent him back to the tiers. They said nothing about him until they reached the street, outside the vast fortress that was the House of Corrections.

&nb
sp; “Straight?” she asked him then.

  “Probably so. If he was gonna dress it up, he could have done a lot better than that.”

  Muriel agreed. “Any chance Collins was in it?”

  “If he was, and Squirrel gives him up, then Collins is meat. Collins can figure that. So I’d bet no.”

  That one, too, Muriel saw the same way. She asked how much of what Collins had said about the cameo had been in the papers.

  “We never let out it was a locket,” Larry said. “Those are Luisa’s daughters’ baptism pictures in there. And I’ll tell you what blows my mind is he’s right, the thing is big stuff to the family. Some kind of heirloom from Italy. The mom got it from her mom, who got it from hers. This puke, Squirrel, one way or the other, he has to know something.”

  “You calling Harold?”

  “I wanna eyeball Squirrel first.” That meant Larry was afraid the Commander would assign other detectives to find Squirrel. Police officers kept track of their arrest statistics, as if there was a scoreboard in lights down at McGrath Hall. Larry, like everyone else, wanted the big ones.

  “I won’t say anything to Molto,” Muriel answered.

  They stood in the encroaching cold, drawn together, as was so often the case, by the speed of their compact. Their breaths clouded and trailed away and the air held the bracing somber scent of autumn. Along one side of the jail, the line was forming for evening visits, composed principally of young women, most of them with a child or two. Several of the kids were crying.

  Larry looked at her at length in the dim light.

  “Time for a soda pop?” he asked.

  She squinted through one eye. “That sounds a little dangerous.”

  “You love danger,” he said.

  That was true. She had always loved danger. And Larry was part of it. But she was determined to grow up.

  “The defendant in my case is gonna jump on tomorrow. I should work on the cross.” She provided a little sealed grin meant to reflect just a vapor of regret, then turned toward the P.A.’s Office across the street.

  “Muriel,” Larry said to her. When she revolved, he had his hands jammed in the pockets of his long jacket and he flapped them against his side. His mouth moved, but he clearly had no idea what to say next. Instead, they stood in the night, facing each other, and let her name, spoken with the faintest woeful echo, remain the last word.

  8

  OCTOBER 8, 1991

  Squirrel

  “SQUIRREL?” asked Carney Lenahan. “We’re always chasin after that birdbrain.”

  “What is he?” Larry asked. “A doper?”

  Lenahan’s partner, Christine Woznicki, answered. “He’s the ring around the bowl.” She gave Larry Squirrel’s proper name, Romeo Gandolph, and he wrote it down. They were in the squad room at Area Six, a little after 8 a.m. The watch commander had just finished briefing the new shift and the two officers were ready to go out on patrol. Woznicki was awfully nice-looking, but with a tough set to her jaw and a lanky dryness that reminded Larry of a leather strop. Probably that kind, not that he cared either way. Her father had been on the job when Larry started his career here in Six more than fifteen years ago. Stan Woznicki had also ridden with Carney. The longer you live, Larry thought, it’s just a big wheel.

  “A thief is what he is,” said Lenahan. “And a fence. Steal it or sell it, preferably both. Worse than a gypsy. We run his screwy little ass in here once a month, at least. Ed Norris had him on the ring yesterday.”

  “For?”

  “S.O.S.” Same old shit. “Lady Carroll got a wig store on 61st. That’s what she calls herself, Lady Carroll. So Lady Carroll gets a little wrecked and don’t lock her back door. This birdcage, Squirrel, that’s his thing, back doors, hiding in a cabinet till after closing time. Yesterday a.m., half her stock has taken a walk. And most of the trade on 61st is wearing a new mop. So Ed let Squirrel lounge here for the evening but he wouldn’t cop. It was him. Believe me. Fenced it for sure.”

  Carney had to be right at the end of the trail, sixty if he was a day. Everything about the guy was gray, even his face under the wan interior light. Larry loved cops like this. They’d seen it all and done it all and still had something good left. When Larry came on the job in 1975, Carney was still complaining that the Force had bought air-conditioned cruisers. That was just looking for trouble, he said, encouraging the element that didn’t want to get out of the car in the first place.

  “Any property?” Larry asked. “When Norris grabbed him?”

  Lenahan flicked a look at Woznicki, who shrugged.

  “What he gets he unloads fast,” she answered.

  Larry said he’d like to see Norris’s report. When he asked if Squirrel had any connection to Gus, Carney laughed deeply.

  “Mongoose and cobra, those two,” he said. “Gus figured Squirrel had a hard-on for his cash register. I guess he tried to get his hand in there once. Gus caught Squirrel so much as sittin at his counter for a coffee, he’d run him out.” At Paradise, anybody who paid his tab was equal. Gang lords sat next to pols and $20 hookers. When there was trouble, local kids getting noisy, vagrants who took up residence, or morons like Squirrel, Gus preferred to deal with it himself, even if a copper was in one of his booths. “One time I saw Gus go at him with a butcher knife,” Lenahan said. “Don’t think those two were writing love letters.”

  Larry felt a sensation travel through him. He was the doer. Squirrel.

  “What about drugs?” he asked. “He use?”

  Woznicki answered. “He don’t have any kind of jones. He gets high like the rest of them. For a long time, he was sniffing paint,” she said, referring to toluene, “which may be part of his problem. He’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic, that one. Squirrel, you know, he’s just livin the life. He wants to steal enough to get completely noodled come nightfall, so he can forget how strange he is. You ain’t gonna have to consult the Buddha to figure him out.”

  “Does he carry?” Larry asked, meaning a gun.

  “Not so I seen. Kind of a weak puppy, actually,” Christine said. “He’ll run his mouth, but I don’t know if he’d actually go to war. You figure him for the guy who capped Gus?”

  “I’m starting to.”

  “I didn’t think the little fuck had it in him.” Marveling, Woznicki tossed her narrow, long-jawed face about for a second. That was one of the sad lessons of police life. People were a lot more likely to be worse than you expected, before they were better.

  Lenahan and Woznicki left for patrol. In the front, Larry asked the records clerk to pull documents. Rommy’s criminal history arrived by fax from downtown in half an hour, but the clerk said Norris’s report from last night must still have been in filing. While the clerk was looking, Larry called Harold Greer.

  Harold was in a meeting, which was just as well. Larry talked to Aparicio, Harold’s right hand, who was too amiable to ask many questions. There was one other call Larry needed to make.

  “You want a warrant?” Muriel asked. She was in her office waiting on her jury.

  “Not yet. Just stay close.”

  “Always,” she told him.

  Always, he thought. What the hell did that mean? The other night, outside the jail, he had looked at Muriel in her go-to-court outfit, her red high heels elevating her scampish height, and suddenly felt the world was only empty space. The fiber of feeling that connected him to her was the most certain thing in it. The strength of that sensation, which was not only the welling of desire but some larger yearning, had left him speechless after uttering her name. “Always,” he muttered, cradling the phone.

  After another hour, he asked dispatch to round up Lenahan and Woznicki. They were only a few blocks away and he met them behind the station. It was past noon now and the lot was as crowded as a shopping center.

  “T’s up?” asked Woznicki through the driver’s window of the cruiser. “You still looking for that report?”

  “As a matter of fact.”

  “I c
alled Norris a while ago.”

  “Okay, but right now I could use some help scooping up Squirrel. Where do I find him?”

  “Usually the street,” said Lenahan. “It’s not cold enough yet for him to take the hike to the airport. Whenever he’s run one of his little jobs, we find him at the same pizza parlor on Duhaney.”

  “What’s he do there?”

  “Eat. I don’t know if he gets high from the thrill or he’s just hungry.”

  “Probably hungry,” said Woznicki. “Hop in and we’ll take a ride.”

  Today, Squirrel had skipped the pizza. After a couple of hours, they ended up at the joint where Collins said he’d encountered Candolph. It was called Lamplight and it was strange it had any name at all. It was a shithole. You knew you were in trouble when a place kept cyclone fencing across the window while it was open. Near the door, there was a small liquor counter, the merchandise locked behind heavy gratings, and a dim barroom in back. Larry had made this scene a thousand times before: only a few lights that worked, including the reflecting beer signs, and what they revealed was aged, filthy, and broken. The paneling in the room was so old it had started to fray, like worn cloth, and the toilet in the one john was stained, with a seat that had been cracked in half and a cistern that leaked and was always running. Even from the front door, the whole place smelled of rot and a vague gas leak. There were customers back there all day, little groups of young men standing around, talking stuff nobody believed, now and then dealing dope in little coveys in the corner. It was that activity, in all likelihood, that had brought Collins around.

  Outside, on the sidewalk near the door, there was more of the same: smacked-out hookers trying to score a john or a fix, guys with disability checks or habits of their own. The paper-bag crowd. When the three officers strolled up, they all scattered. Carney and Christine went in the front and Larry ambled around to the alley, in case Squirrel opted for the stage door.

  He heard Lenahan whistle for him a minute later.