The Right to Remain Silent

by Charles Brandt

  “What about Covaletzki?” I asked.

  “He’s chief, Lou, and like I said, Figaro don’t say nobody else was involved. Covaletzki was supposed to be getting a bottle of Nehi grape out of the soda machine when it went down. Figaro wouldn’t have no reason to cover for Covaletzki now. I know the way you always felt about him, Luig, with your instincts and all. You got a knack all right for reading people, and you could be right about him, but there just ain’t nothing there and there’s never gonna be. Not without Figaro saying something or Covaletzki, if he even knows anything. The whole thing is one of them unsolvable things. Like trying to find out what’s on those eighteen minutes of tape of Richard Nixon.”

  “It’s funny. I was arrested January ninth, 1961, Nixon’s last birthday as vice president, and now I don’t even know who the vice president is.”

  “It’s Rockefeller, but he ain’t runnin’,” said Rocco. “It’s gettin’ hard to keep track.”

  “This call is bringing a lot of things out of me again,” I said. “All at once. They must not have been buried very deep. I want to know why they framed me, Rock. I read something in the Bible when I was in jail that I haven’t thought about in a long time. ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ ”

  “Yeah, but where you gonna hear it from?”

  4

  In the next two months there were many long-distance calls, “interurbano, America,” but they were all from the Fraternal Order of Police lawyer. It got so that I started paying the Lopes boy, and sure enough his cousin showed up. It was just as well because before I left I put Lopes in charge of everything. And with me gone he’d need both boys, and the cousin’s father. And now it was June 28, 1976. The crash of lightning that struck in the hallway outside of dicks in 1961 was 5,649 days ago, but who was counting.

  On the journey from Belém to Miami, I imagined I was a lot like one of those wild-eyed Japanese soldiers they’d find on jungle islands years after the war. The guys they used to show on Movietone News. The malnourished buggers had no idea the war was over and couldn’t believe at first that Japan had been defeated. With lights glaring and cameras rolling they’d be introduced to the industrial wonders that postwar prosperity had brought to mankind, and they’d be told that the American newsmen were now brothers under the sun to the Japanese soldier as if the Death March at Bataan had never happened. But this soldier wasn’t buying it.

  When I got off the plane at Miami International Airport, the changes that immediately hit my eyes in the bright fluorescent lighting were not industrial wonders.

  Everybody looked tired and somehow insecure. The young people sitting around me in the waiting room didn’t look nearly as cool as I remembered. Neither did the adults, except maybe for one or two, like the sparkling red-haired woman sitting alone across from me. Make that except maybe for one. Her. I took a close look at the others. They made me think of a description of French peasants that stuck in my mind from a teacher at the University of Delaware. He said that French peasants didn’t trust banks and buried their money in their backyards and lived in fear that their neighbors knew their spot.

  Whatever caused Americans to look mistrustful was at that time none of my business. It had all happened without me and could go on happening for all I cared. I was probably what Sigmund Freud’s pet cat would call alienated. My business was sifting dirt in Brazil, and while I intended to sift a little dirt in America, I didn’t intend to make a career out of it. I didn’t intend to be away from my real business longer than a month, whether or not I found anything in the dirt in America.

  I tried vainly to get comfortable in my short-backed, gray plastic waiting room seat. I thought of going for a walk, but I liked sitting across from the redhead. I closed my eyes and focused on Wilmington and how it had looked when I got out of jail in the summer of 1963. First, I remembered that it was a hot day and that Kennedy was still president. I remembered that men’s ties were skinny, and olive green suits were popular, and so were Ruby and the Romantics. I remembered that the murder of famous people almost never happened. That was a funny thing to remember. The last one I could think of before Kennedy was Huey Long in the thirties when I was in short pants.

  I opened my eyes, and tiny things around me, no matter how trivial, began to hold my attention. I couldn’t stop reading the grafitti on the walls. I read every word compulsively. It was dumb stuff, nothing clever, and probably there had been some when I left, but I didn’t remember it. At least I didn’t remember that so many public walls and plastic seats were assaulted by so many streaks of swirling black paint.

  Was the paint made in Delaware? Land of the DuPont Company. Gunpowder mill on the Brandywine. The chemical capital of the world. Nylonville. Corfamburg. Teflon-Del. Cruset country. Maybe I should get some swirling black paint and scrawl on the first wall I see in downtown Wilmington: “Louis John Razzi, Jr., lived here from April 4, 1932, to June 11, 1963, and returned one day in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-six.”

  Would I get a thrill being back on the department?

  I doubted that I’d work much longer than that one day. Under the deal the F.O.P. lawyer negotiated with city hall all I had to do was send a medical report from Brazil saying that I was physically fit and fly north and work one full day on the job. Thanks to a pension-bridging clause of the city charter for rehired employees, the mayor was going to exercise his power to bridge my pension over the years, and I’d pension out on half pay at a sergeant’s rate. More than enough to hire every Lopes in the Nordeste. Plus the city paid my legal fee for the union lawyer, the cost of my round-trip flight, and $5,000 in spending money. The city also agreed to issue a public apology. It was something I think the lawyer wanted so he’d get his name in the paper and the mayor wanted for his reelection campaign.

  I also had a demand. I knew that Covaletzki would never answer any of my questions, but I asked that the feds let me talk to Figaro in person. And I didn’t have to be alone with him. A roomful of FBI agents and the American Red Cross was hunky-dory.

  In the end, they wouldn’t let me talk to Figaro even if I waived my pension, my expense money, and my apology. Even if I paid them.

  That Figaro went unpunished and that I still didn’t know why I was framed or whether Covaletzki was part of it were, according to the union lawyer, “hard facts of life” that I would have to live with. “Additionally,” he pointed out to me during our last long-distance argument, “if you were so cocksure of who was really guilty and you wanted to see them all punished, you could have gotten some torpedo to put a snatch on them and build a nest of rats around them. Don’t tell me you were so sure.” Taking the law into your own hands had obviously become a fashionable topic over the years. Vigilante chic. Anyway, I think this tough guy’s point was that my first lawyer and I never had any more than a hunch about who actually did it and no way to ever prove anything, and I was lucky to get this break.

  I pressed my back into the plastic seat and closed my eyes. The old white-haired shanty Irish bastard, I thought, it was himself all along, but not himself alone, dear Rocco. They were all involved, including your new chief, our new chief.

  I decided to focus on the redhead. You don’t see many in Brazil and you don’t see a person like her every day. I watched her close her magazine promptly and efficiently and put it into her maroon travel bag when the flight was announced. She looked taller than I. She got up; she was. Her forest-green suit clung nicely to her wonderfully proportioned body, and I glanced at her large, round hazel eyes, made perhaps greener by the suit, her red eyebrows, sparse freckles, and red hair. It was nice, light-red hair. Soft and long and wavy. Flowing on her shoulders. It made me feel good to look at her. Like a pretty watercolor. She was definitely my type, the kind of girl who exercises, eats a balanced diet with plenty of fiber, and wears no wedding band on the road. I followed her.

  I was beginning to feel better
with each step. I wanted to samba. That’s all it takes. When you’ve got a bitter taste in your mouth, eat something that tastes good.

  As we boarded I stood right behind her and inhaled her fragrance. She wasn’t that much taller, an inch in heels. There were no assigned seats on the small jet, so it was easy for me to sit beside her. And I felt myself starting to get a little color in my cheeks. She smiled at me. I could tell that she smiled a lot, the kind of smiling that got Robert Browning’s Last Duchess into trouble every year in freshman English. Now this could be something, I thought. At the very least we’d have made a good commercial for the airlines. My short, curly, jet-black hair; my dark brown eyes; and my olive complexion made darker by the sun of Brazil. Her long, light-red hair; her hazel eyes; and her pink skin with freckles. Such a handsome couple, who wouldn’t fly the friendly skies —

  “Excuse me, are you a lawyer?” I asked, trying to match her smile for smile.

  “As a matter of fact, I am. I’m a prosecuting attorney in Wilmington.”

  She buckled her seat belt, removed her magazine as promptly and efficiently as she had put it away, and began to turn pages and read at a rapid rate. Not at all willing to enhance the airline’s image by making small talk with me.

  I’ll remember my holdover in Miami as a series of openings and closings of my eyes. I closed them again. This time I wondered what Marian looked like, whether there was any gray in her hair and whether Sally still looked Italian like me. During that great big exploding phone call DiGiacomo had told me that he knew exactly where the Crusets lived. I toyed with the idea of watching from across the street like the little match girl in the fairy tale. Only the way the Rock described it, it sounded too exclusive an area to have an across-the-street. Still, there were probably other ways to get to see them. Like going up to the front door and knocking.

  When it caused a knot in my stomach, I decided to change the subject. I used my newly acquired subject-changing technique. I simply reopened my eyes. Next, I turned to face and win over a red-haired French peasant who obviously thought I was after her buried money.

  “Excuse me,” I said to her. “I don’t mean to be forward, but I’ve been in Brazil for thirteen years. I haven’t talked to an American girl in a long time, and I noticed that you were reading about Kandinsky. I just feel like talking to you.”

  “That’s an honest approach. Do you like abstract painting?”

  “No, but I’ll pretend I do if it’ll keep you talking to me.”

  She laughed. I beamed.

  “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” she asked, then suddenly laughed again. “Talk about cornball lines, oh boy, but you really do look familiar. How could you tell that I’m a lawyer?”

  “I heard you talking to the check-in lady. I was behind you when you told her that you had ‘indicated’ a preference for a dinner flight, and she told you none were available. ‘Indicate’ is a lawyer’s word.” I was talking fast.

  “Why do you say that?” She looked intrigued.

  “I don’t mean to offend your profession, but lawyers do a lot of ‘indicating.’ ”

  “Indicating?”

  “In my previous line of work, when I was a Wilmington detective, I used to deal with lawyers all the time. They never ‘said’ anything to anybody or ‘told’ anybody anything, and nobody ever ‘said’ anything or ‘told’ anything back to them. People always ‘indicated’ things. ‘Indicate’ has a lot of ‘imply’ in it. ‘Indicating’ leaves plenty of room for wishy-washy maneuvering. You know, you ‘indicate’ by sort of, more or less, pointing in the general direction, and when somebody ‘indicates’ something to you, you’re never pinned down to his exact words. Precision and neatness don’t count. Like abstract painting. You don’t have to color inside the lines. ‘Your Honor, my client indicates an inability to raise that amount of bail.’ Now that doesn’t exactly mean he said he can’t raise the bail if he borrows five for six on the street, which he’d rather not do if he can get the bail lower. See what I mean?” I illustrated my point by sort of, more or less, pointing toward the wing of the plane with a zigzagging forefinger.

  “So you’ve got lawyers figured out, do you?”

  “Well…some lawyers.”

  “I know you,” she said. “I recognize you from your picture in the paper. It’s an old picture, but it’s you all right. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I’m me all right.”

  “I read the transcript of your trial. It was lying around the office. It looked like a pretty tight frame against you. They never found out why they framed you, did they? Do you have any ideas?”

  “Do you? I started talking to you to get my mind off it.”

  “Look, this conversation isn’t working, and don’t burn your brown eyes at me in that way,” she said huskily and with deliberation. “I like Kandinsky, and I happen to like the way lawyers talk.”

  The smile was gone, and her hazel eyes darkened as the pupils dilated. She reopened her magazine and returned to the read.

  I thought to myself that I was more famous than I realized and that I was at my best with strangers when they were criminals and that I was only good with them because I had rehearsed all the time as a kid in the forties preparing for the day I’d go on the job. I decided that the best time I’d had in Miami was when my eyes were shut. I shut them and kept them shut the rest of the way to Wilmington.

  I dreamed that my teeth fell out in big clumps and that the clumps were held together by a hard, shiny black plastic that looked a lot like the black opal I’d been finding in the jungle. When the plane landed, my jaw hurt from pressing my teeth together.

  5

  “Jeez, you look good,” he said as he smothered my five feet ten inches with a tight bear hug. The .38 in his clip-on holster dug into my side.

  Rocco Cosmo DiGiacomo is a big, fitting name for a very big man. He released his grip and held my shoulders in his spreading hands. He’d been a pitcher in Triple A ball, a step below the bigs, and a baseball could get lost in those meaty fingers. His gut was stretching to the limit the fabric of a copper-brown double-knit suit. His shirt was a faded green iridescent. His soiled yellow knit tie was tacked with miniature pewter handcuffs. He was hatless and had lost most of his hair in the fifteen years since my arrest.

  “Jeez, you look good,” he said again, still squeezing my shoulders. “There ain’t no fat on you, Luigi. What you been doing in Brazil, digging opal with your bare hands?”

  “Hey, Rock, it’s good to see you.”

  “Jeez, you look good…Don’t worry about how I look,” he said, reading my mind. “Say something.”

  “What’s there to say, Rock. It’s good to see you, but it’s hard to feel good. You know what I mean?”

  “Ah, what are you gonna do?” he said, which is East Coast Italian American for many things. I’d disappointed him. He let go of me, shrugged, and lumbered away in the direction of the luggage return and the guillotine-shaped metal detector, a device for which there was no need when I left the country.

  “Hey, goombah,” I called out. “I don’t have any luggage, except what I’m carrying. Let’s get me home. It’s been too long.”

  “All right, Luigi, all right. That’s more like it. You never was one to complain. Talk? Absolutely. You were the best talker around, bar none. To this day. But you never complained. Come on, let’s go. Talk to me.”

  He put his arm around me. We walked through the magic-eye self-opening doors and into the humid night air. He was parked the wrong way in a one-way lane and partly on the sidewalk.

  “I forgot how to park on a sidewalk,” I said, pointing to the OFFICIAL POLICE sign in his window. “Maybe I’ll rent a car in the morning so I can have a little fun tomorrow before I put in my retirement papers.”

  He laughed and said, “That’s more like it. You scared the piss out of me back there for a second. Like we di
d something wrong bringing you back. Hah?”

  We got in his faded blue 1970 Plymouth for what turned out to be a thirty-minute expressway drive to downtown Wilmington and the Hotel DuPont. It used to take a lot longer.

  My imprisonment had left an open sergeant’s slot, and Rock had filled it, but he’d never made lieutenant and had quit trying. He and Angie had just celebrated their twentieth together. His oldest, Theresa, was working nights in the post office, and the other five were still in school. The next oldest, Dominick, was about to graduate from St. Thomas’s High School and go into the marines. After his hitch he’d go to college courtesy of the corps. Rocco, Jr., the next oldest, was a sophomore at Shelton High School. He was born about a month before my Sally, and while I’d seen Theresa and Dominick as babies, I’d never seen Rocco, Jr., and the young ones.

  “I hate to complain myself,” said Rocco, Sr., “but my Junior’s turning into a wrong guy. He got in with some dopers at public school. The dope’s not as bad in Catholic school, but since Angie stopped working on account of her back, we don’t have the money to send the four young ones. Next year they’re gonna put in school busing, too, you know, from the federal court, and they’re gonna raise tuition. It’s a mess, that public school. One of the girls in his class got knocked up and named the kid Crystal Meth after the drug. Can you imagine? Crystal Meth McGraw. Poor little kid. Ah, what are you gonna do? That goddamn kid of mine can pitch. Smoke. Wicked curve. I taught him a change, then the next thing he goes and gets himself thrown off the team. He wouldn’t cut off his hair. I could never get my curve over. He throws his for strikes. What a waste.”

  “Is he running with a gang? Fighting a lot?”

  “Gang? What gang? There ain’t no corner gangs no more. I wouldn’t mind so much if he was fightin’ and raisin’ hell. He’s just a wart on my ass. I can’t sit down to a meal without feelin’ that little cocksucker trying to irritate me. Shit. Gangs. Lou, I wish he’d run with a gang and get his ass kicked once in a while. It’s good for a kid, but kids don’t do that shit no more like we used to. Nobody has it out. Everything’s to the death. Like the moolonyons used to be with razors. I blame all this karate from the Japs. No more fair fights where the worst you get is a broken nose or maybe a broken jaw once in a while or maybe a broken hand. Today it’s double-oh-seven all the way. Everything is for blood.”