The Right to Remain Silent

by Charles Brandt

  We all wrote in silence. A few minutes later a set of footsteps approached from far down the hall. Deputy Chief Francis X. Hanrahan walked into the division wearing a mackinaw jacket of red and black squares with snow on the hood and shoulders. He said “howdy” to no one in particular, went into the captain’s office, and crisply shut the door. In less than three minutes Covaletzki came back out, shutting the door behind him.

  Shy Whitney asked Covaletzki: “What’s the drill on counterfeit hun’erds you get a deputy chief in on a night like ’is?”

  “Routine,” said Covaletzki. “Fig says he trusts Hanrahan. He won’t talk to nobody but him. No big deal.”

  “You callin’ ’im ‘Fig’?” said Shy, smiling. “Sounds like you’re winnin’ ’im over. The acting captain here is usin’ psychology, Lou.”

  Covaletzki twisted his lips and said, “Keep it up, cracker,” as he walked into the hallway with a smug look on his face. I heard him pass our green lockers and get to the machine, and I heard a soda can clunk out.

  Then Hanrahan jerked open the captain’s door and rushed past us with his eyes fixed on the floor. He disappeared into the hallway, walked to the soda machine, and said in a calm but very loud and dramatic voice: “Lieutenant Covaletzki, return with me, please, if you will, to the captain’s office. This Figaro fellow is making very inappropriate remarks that cause me concern, and I want you to listen to them.”

  We listened to their steps as they walked back together. They entered the division and went straight into the captain’s office and shut the door without looking at us. Shy looked at me with raised eyebrows.

  I said to Shy: “They must be onto something bigger than counterfeit hundreds. What do you think, Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre?”

  “He’s leadin’ the Great White Hunter into quicksand, that’s what I think. Walk in on ’em. What’re they goin’ do, throw you out? You talk to ole Figgie baby. Those boys’ll be in there all night ’fore he tells them how old he was when he got laid.”

  “I’ll wait until he tells them he’ll only talk to the mayor.”

  The door to the captain’s office opened again and Covaletzki walked out, staring at me while he shut the door behind him.

  “Make ’em beg,” muttered Shy.

  “Razzi,” said Covaletzki, “don’t take any offense, but I gotta ast you to stand up and empty your pockets.”

  “Ah, no,” said Shy. “What’s ’at li’l pus-sucker tellin’ you? With all due respect, this is the Detective Division. ’Is ain’t Vice. We been lettin’ you handle ’is little scumbag long enough. ’S time to turn ’im over to us. You don’t do sum’in like ’is based on sum’in Sergeant Bilko in ’ere would say. Get my point?”

  “I’m on orders from the deputy chief,” said Covaletzki.

  “Make ’im come out and give the order,” said Shy.

  “Empty your pockets,” said Covaletzki. “I gotta ’ast’ you.”

  I stood up. “You empty them,” I said.

  He had been a light heavy in the navy during the war. He stepped toward me, crouching slightly and watching me all the way. He reached for my pants pocket. I slapped his hand away when it got close.

  “I meant for you to empty your own goddamn pockets,” I said. “Not mine. It’s bad enough you took my arrest.”

  “All right,” he said in his monotone. “Let’s everybody empty his own pockets. Shy Whitney. Me. And you. Now that’s a direct order, and you’re both subject to getting fired if you violate it. You got that, Whitney? You want to lose your pension, well you’ll lose it. That’s a direct order that comes from the deputy chief. He wants to see empty pockets right now. Both of you.”

  Shy stood motionless, glared at Covaletzki defiantly, and then folded his arms.

  “Empty your pockets, Whitney, or you’re on charges.”

  Shy and I had both played the same trick and trap that Covaletzki was playing on me now. The brown leather chair. Put the toughest kid from the gang of suspected car thieves in the brown leather chair behind the glass door and beat the hell out of the chair with a stick and warn the kid to scream with each whack so that his friends in the hall can hear him, otherwise you’ll hit him for real. And he screams and the other kids confess in tears to save him. Not to save themselves, of course. I looked at Shy. I didn’t want to cause him problems, even if it was a bluff. I emptied my pockets, and when Shy saw me, he emptied his, all the while humming “Dancing in the Dark” in that tenor of his.

  “You and Hanrahan right proud of yo’selves?” Shy asked when he’d finished. “Lou Razzi should interrogate Figaro. Whyn’t you two stick to whatever it is you do and leave interrogating to Lou. All you brass’re jealous of ’im. Ever’ damn one of you. I’m sick of ’is fuckin’ department.”

  “No harm done,” I said to Shy. “It’s better than a stick in the eye.”

  “I’m only doin’ what I was ordered,” said Covaletzki. “I was ordered to have you empty your pockets. I could have had Shy search you, but I only went as far as I was ordered to go. Now there’s one more thing. What’s the combination to your locker, Razzi?”

  “Lowlife,” said Shy as he very deliberately placed his cigar into his brown glass ashtray. “I’m ’bout to hit you just one time. And you know what you can do with your pension. And you know what you can do with your Marquess of Queensberry. ’Is ain’t goin’ be no aircraft carrier match, boy. I’m goin’ hurt you.”

  Covaletzki took a step back and hollered, “Chief Hanrahan!”

  Hanrahan came out. He had on his Irish priest expression. A faint odor of rye whiskey hit the air as he spoke. “What seems to be the trouble? I merely asked Lieutenant Covaletzki here to quickly disprove certain malicious allegations that that little greasy Figaro…now Razzi, nothing personal is meant by any of this. You’re a credit to our city and to all the Italians in it. I see deputy chief for you some day. Mark my words. The first Italian deputy chief. Now kindly cooperate with Lieutenant Covaletzki and we’ll be turning your prisoner back to you. They tell me you’re the best interrogator in the whole Detective Division, with your college degree and everything. Imagine the blarney that Figaro won’t talk to you. The gall that he’ll only talk to me on a miserable night like this. Look now, you’ve got Detective Whitney all worked up and getting himself insubordinate. I beg of you that we get this night’s work over with and get you home to your beautiful wife. Been working a private-pay job, have you? Lieutenant Covaletzki here works a private-pay job every chance he gets. It’s a sign of ambition. I worked ’em all the time when I was young. Give us the combination or we’ll break your lock.”

  “Break it,” said Shy.

  “Eighteen–twenty-four–two,” I said.

  Hanrahan backed into the captain’s office, shaking his head, and closed the door. Covaletzki led the way out the Detective Division, past the oak bench where I’d first cuffed Figaro, Janasek, and Tina Darvi, and along the dark-green narrow lockers just short of the soda machine. Mine was the twelfth. RAZZI, L. was printed on a cardboard label stuck in a frame for it. Shy Whitney, Tony Landis, John Judson, and I watched Covaletzki painstakingly twirl 18-24-2, with his tongue peeking out from a corner of his mouth. He opened the metal door wide and pointed to new counterfeit hundreds on the floor of my locker. And even Shy Whitney took a step back from me.

  3

  April 17, 1976

  “Telefonica. Telefonica.”

  “Who is it?” I yelled in Portuguese at the sweaty office boy. I cut off the engine on the bulldozer and jumped down to the freshly sheared earth.

  “Interurbano, America.” He shrugged his shoulders as a fly landed on his nose. It was a very hot day for April, even in the dry Nordeste of Brazil, and he looked anxious to get back under the electric fan in the shanty. He didn’t do much, but then he really didn’t work for me. His father, Lopes, was my foreman and the kid just showed up every day. If
I gave him a job, tomorrow his cousin or his brother would take his place under the fan, and so on.

  Long distance. America. I wondered what it meant. The last interurbano, America, had been from Marian, calling from Delaware. That was ten long years ago in 1966 and five years after they’d arrested me. When I had heard the sound of her voice say “Lou,” I wondered whether my support check had gotten lost in the mail. But she fooled me. She said, “I’d like you to hear something, and she put Sally on and a preschool voice said, “I want Daddy Carlton to ’dopt me.” Marian wanted me to sign a termination of parental rights form. She was going to marry Professor Carlton Cruset. The professor “agreed” to adopt Sally, give her the gift of his locally powerful name and inherited fortune, and I was to terminate my parental rights when the papers reached me in Brazil. “Marrying a Cruset is marrying with real skill,” I said. She said that because of Cruset’s trusts set up by a grandfather who’d patented something or other for the DuPont Company, she no longer had any “practical need” for the monthly money I was sending. That “voluntarily” signing the form was the “easy way.” The hard way was to “drag Sally through a court battle. Besides, you heard her. That’s what she wants. She doesn’t even know you.”

  I said, “That’s not my fault,” and she said, “Lou, let’s not talk about fault. Things are what they are. I hope you’re still content mining for opal in Brazil, making a new life for yourself. Let Sally and I make one for ourselves. God, I hope you’re not still torturing yourself. I told you in prison —”

  “I remember what you told me in prison. You said I had lost my sense of humor. You know, I’ve only got eighteen days left on the probationary part of my sentence. Maybe I’ll get my sense of humor back on day nineteen. Not one of these past five years since the jury said ‘guilty’ has been a corker.”

  “Lou, admit it. Those two years you spent in prison did terrible things to you. It made your mind so little. I hated visiting you in prison. I dreaded it. The only thing you ever talked about was your case. Who could blame me for getting tired of hearing about that hallway, and those green lockers and that ridiculous soda machine, and that the only reason you got two years in jail was because you were a cop. Oh brother, I hope and pray, for your sake, you’re still not going over it in your mind at night.”

  With the use of my little mind and for Sally’s sake, I signed the papers when they arrived. Daddy Carlton could “ ’dopt” Sally. I had made my choices a long time ago, for better or for worse. Whatever plague had struck me down and caused me to lose my sense of humor should not infect my daughter.

  I had seen Sally once. Marian didn’t want to bring her into the prison, and the older cons had warned me not to see her because it would make the time harder, but I insisted. Marian held her up to the glass in the visitor’s room. She was barely six months old, in a pink snowsuit, and I had been in the workhouse seven months. The old cons were right as rain. It hurt like crazy. Marian never brought her back. Five months later she visited and said she was divorcing me and that if I had any grip left on reality I wouldn’t try to see Sally when I got out, and she’d prevent me if I tried. It was going to be “hard enough” on Sally in a small town like Wilmington without me “cropping up” and exposing Sally to the shame of the whole “sordid” affair.

  I walked into the shanty, turned off the noisy fan, and picked up the telephone, bracing myself for Marian’s voice again, a decade later.

  “Razzi Enterprises, Lou Razzi.”

  “Sounds prosperous,” said a gruff voice.

  “Who is this?”

  “You fart in a windstorm,” said a second, more familiar voice.

  “Shy Whitney,” I said, “and Rocco DiGiacomo.”

  “Very good,” said DiGiacomo. “You gonna quit now and take the Cadillac or move on to the next plateau? Hah?”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Delafuckinware,” said DiGiacomo. “Now listen up, Razzi. This is long distance and we didn’t call collect. Now am I right, you had the knack for knowing if a guy was lying better than anybody? Hah?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Stati zitto, Luigi,” he said. “I’m doing the talking. You’re doing the listening. Now, remember the way you used to brag you could read a lie from a sucker’s eyes, the corner of his mouth, his words, and the sound of his belch, and all the rest of that hocus-pocus. Hah? What? Well, my friend, you finally showed us all.”

  “Out with it.”

  “Patience, hoss,” said Shy. “You been waiting fifteen years for this. You’ll wait a little longer while the Rock gets to it.”

  “Did something break on my case?” I asked sharply.

  “I think he’s got it,” said Rocco. “By George he’s got it.”

  “Tell him,” said Shy. “I hate to see a grown man squirm over the telephone.”

  “Figaro went for it,” said Rocco. “He confessed. He admits you were framed by him and, get this, Deputy Chief Francis X. Hanrahan himself, Friar Drunk.”

  When you’re the human target of a false accusation, it can be enough to kill you. At the least, it rips the supports from a lifetime of foundations. It devastates you by its profound injustice. During the frame, you can’t even look at people you know and love and feel any comfort. Nothing makes you feel good. Not even rebuilding your life into something new. Being unframed by a telephone call doesn’t begin to repair the destruction. Being unframed fifteen years later gives the comfort that licking with your tongue gives to a badly infected tooth. It takes time and patience before it does the slightest good, but Rocco and Shy deserved some kind of reaction.

  “That’s great news,” I said.

  “Yeah. You remember Figaro disappeared while you was doing time in the old workhouse?” asked Rock. “Well, he resurfaces here and there over the years and he builds himself a rap sheet you could brag about. Finally he gets busted in New Orleans on third-offense federal drug charges. It was either become a government informer or spend every night for the rest of his life in the federal joint in Atlanta with a different dick up his ass. Well, as part of the deal he had to tell the government prosecutor every damn thing he ever done, and that’s where you fit in. They passed the information to the FBI in the Wilmington office. Them guys interviewed him and sent a report to the State Attorney General. I read it. The governor’s gonna sign your pardon next week, and I got the union lawyer right now trying to get you reinstated with back pay. Not that you want to come back. I don’t know. That’s up to you, but you ought to get some money out of it. Only thing is, the lawyer says it ain’t gonna be that easy ’cause of the statute of limitations. But I don’t know. This is an election year, and the boys in city hall need the Italian vote. They’ll do the right thing by you.”

  “Thanks, Rocco. Thanks, Shy,” I said. “It’s starting to sink in. What else did Figaro say?”

  “He didn’t say much,” DiGiacomo continued. “But what he said was solid gold. He lied on the stand when he said he seen you grab some bills off the bed and pocket them. He said he slipped Hanrahan some bills that he had in his crotch in his underpants to surprise that little loudmouth twat, Tina Darvi. She’s an old junky now. Burned out on PCP. He figures Hanrahan slipped the hundreds in the air slits in your locker when he went down the hall to get Covaletzki. He said he don’t know why the old bastard done you, which nobody believes, and he don’t know whether anybody else was involved. It looked like to him to be a spur-of-the-moment idea that Hanrahan got just to fuck you ’cause he had a hard-on for you. Anyway, the scumbag goes along with Hanrahan so he can get immunity from prosecution for possession of the counterfeit zoot in exchange for testifying against you.”

  “Where is he now? If I do come to the States, can I question him?”

  “He’s in a new thing called the Witness Protection Program. Not even the FBI can get to him. They gave him a new identity in a small town. Forget a
bout it. I already tried. I tell you, Lou, if there’s a hell I pray that Hanrahan’s in it, and Janasek, too. Your old lawyer, Barnesie, was on the right track blaming Figaro and Janasek. It made sense at trial. Figaro and Janasek sitting on the oak bench cooking it up, stashing the bills behind the bench, and then Figaro sayin’ he’ll only talk to Hanrahan, stalling so Janasek could get let go, grab the bills, and drop them in your locker. That ain’t the way Figaro tells it now, but somehow that Janasek was involved in this thing. It’s just we’ll never know how. It’s one of them unsolvables. But at least Janasek and Hanrahan got theirs while you were still in jail. The bastards worried themselves into heart attacks that you were gonna come back on the noon train and shoot it out. You know, Lou, I don’t care what anybody said, I said you was smart to go to Brazil day one when you got out of the joint. I said, and I still say, it was that three years’ probation hanging over your head that was the motherfucker after you got out. That was the worst part. That part about you couldn’t go near Figaro or anybody who testified. It tied your hands, Luigi. Don’t worry, I know. Even if you combed the country back then and got your hands on Figaro, all it would’ve meant to you is another three years in. Figaro could’ve grabbed you for another three years just by saying you called him up on the phone. Yeah, I said to everybody, that was a smart move leaving the country, what with Hanrahan and Janasek dead anyway. I even told you at the time. You had nothing to stay for. We kinda halfway thought you’d come back after the three years’ probation was up, but the way Marian treated you and all about the baby. Hah, sometimes you bide your time and it all works out. Hah? What?”