“You’re worse than they said you would be.” He shook his head in disgust.
“Don’t worry, sonny, you’ve only got another seven hours of me.”
I took out the phone book and found the number for the local FBI office and dialed.
“Mendez here,” a male voice answered.
“I’m Lou Razzi, ever hear of me?”
“Sure, I was wondering if you’d call.”
“Excuse me,” I said into the phone, and then to Gronk, “Junior, you better write down that I’m calling the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” When he didn’t respond I said to him: “If you and Covaletzki think I’m stupid enough to walk into this room at 8:00 A.M. and not know that part of your job is to spy on me, neither one of you is bright enough for the Officer Friendly team.”
Gronk said nothing. He narrowed his eyes on purpose to look mean and lean. Then I heard the voice on the phone. “He’s Covaletzki’s son-in-law,” said Mendez.
“Bingo,” I said. “You know, Agent Mendez, I like you. We’ve never met, but I think you know something about what I’ve been through and what I’m after. I’m entitled to talk to Figaro. I don’t want to know where you’ve got him. Bring him to Delaware. I’ll talk to him in your office with me wearing a straitjacket. I just want to see his face and hear his voice when he answers my questions.”
“I’m not saying I would anyway, but I can’t. It’s a physical impossibility. The Witness Protection Program is run by the marshals. We have no jurisdiction over them.”
“Agent Mendez, in Brazil everything comes from the central government. You can’t get your electricity turned on without practically going to Brasilia, but sometimes if you get liked by the right person you can get anything done. How can I get you to like me?”
“If you want to be liked, go back to Brazil.”
“Agent Mendez, I was put in a coma for fifteen years. Don’t tell me to leave empty-handed. I had every single thing that means anything in this world taken from me, and I don’t even know why. Let me tell you a story. Please hear me out. You, too, sonny. When I was in high school I worked in old man Fisher’s drugstore.”
“Shot in a robbery,” interrupted Mendez. “Unsolved.”
“That’s terrible. He was a fine man. Anyway, we kept rubbers in the drawer behind the counter. In less than a month I could tell a hundred percent of the time whenever a man was going to ask to buy rubbers. It got so I could tell the second a man walked through the door fifty feet from my counter. When I told old man Fisher he said, ‘What’s the big deal; so could I. Just be nice to them.’ And so could the other clerks. Mendez, you can tell a lot by looking at people. Covaletzki was involved in my frame. I could see it in his face. Do you know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“Well, all right, you feds operated under tight-ass rules and you worked on cleaner crimes, and damn few of them. You never had to spot a junkie from a block away and try to tell if he was holding drugs. But you must have heard of what I’m talking about. You must’ve seen it in the movies.”
“What’s the point?”
“I was standing in the hallway with Covaletzki when he walked up to my locker. When he opened that locker he was like a junkie holding drugs. Like a man buying rubbers. He knew that money was in there.”
“You can’t prove that. You don’t know that. Figaro never told us that. And believe me we asked him. He said he handed the money to Hanrahan when Covaletzki was out getting a soda.”
“And Hanrahan took that kind of chance in that hallway with Covaletzki right there?” I shouted into the phone. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but you’re wrong. I’m not asking for much. All I want to do, as the victim of a crime, is to talk to Figaro face-to-face.”
“Sorry, no can do.”
“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
“Sorry, I can’t.”
“Let me talk to you, then. Just you. Face-to-face.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
We hung up. Gronk stared at me. I sat there. The frustration reminded me of doing time.
My mood was interrupted when Chief Elmo Covaletzki appeared in the doorway with two lieutenants whom I thought I recognized. They were probably cadets in recruit class when I was arrested.
Covaletzki walked up to my desk. He had changed even more than my friends. He’d kept his body in shape, and he was probably still one of the best boxers in the department; but his face was now a mass of lines and deep ravines, and he was practically bald except for a tiny bit of gray hair at the sides. The lines in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes and lips reminded me of shrunken Jivaro Indian heads I’d seen in São Paolo. His nose was on the red and puffy side, and he now wore tortoiseshell glasses over his gray eyes.
We looked at each other. He must have rehearsed this entrance. He spoke in that deep monotone, carefully pronouncing each syllable:
“I know all about the noise you been making and so does my legal counsel…in case you cross over the line slander-wise. You see, I got my own little theory on all of this, and you’ll hear me out without any interruption. That’s a direct order from your chief to you. Everybody knows that when a punk like Figaro tries out for the Witness Program he always exaggerates his prior crimes so he can look like a real important witness to the government prosecutor. Some crimes he makes up altogether, especially the juicy ones that nobody can disprove. If he told the truth he’d be just another small-time punk who doesn’t know anything worth paying for, which is what Figaro is, always was, and always will be. If everybody in this administration is quick to insult the memory of a dead man who gave his career to this department, so be it. I know you called the FBI,” he said, his lips in a thin curl of contempt. “I was in the hallway. I hope they let you talk to Figaro. If you find him, give me a holler. I want to talk to him, too.”
“I’d like to talk to you, too,” I said.
He looked away. “C’mon, Tim, we’re going over to Rodney Square to watch Mondale’s speech,” he said.
“I already heard my speech today.” I said. “I guess that leaves me in command of the Officer Friendly project. Hey, Tim, where’d you leave off on the ruler count?”
The two lieutenants made a great facial show of ignoring me and at the same time expressing their amused pity for the bitterness inside me that could only destroy me. I felt like hitting them.
A tall, distinguished-looking man appeared in the doorway wearing gray slacks, white shirt, blue-and-red-striped tie, and a blue blazer with shotgun-shell insignia buttons. He nodded hello as if he knew me. He was maybe a dozen years older than I. He had a precise black-and-gray mustache, 1930s’ matinee idol, and wore large metal-framed aviator eyeglasses with a yellow tint that would have looked good on a state trooper.
“Sergeant Razzi,” Covaletzki said, relishing each syllable, “I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine, Professor Carlton Cruset. Professor, meet Sergeant Razzi.”
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Cruset said in a well-modulated and well-controlled voice. “I was told I’d find the chief here. We’d planned on watching the campaign speech together.”
“Oh no,” said Covaletzki, “you’re not interrupting anything. We were just leaving, and Razzi has a lot of work to do.”
“It’ll get done,” I said. “Every bit of it before I go back to Brazil.”
The entourage walked out, with Cruset nodding at me and me at him, and my adrenaline scoring a 9.5 even with the Russian judge.
I settled down all alone with Officer Friendly to divert youth. Shy Whitney peeked in to say hello, but he couldn’t stay because he had to work the Mondale speech. “Nobody wants the son of a bitch killed in Delaware,” he said as he left, puffing on his Muriel. “Although I could use the overtime…”
At 11:03 the phone rang. I picked it up and said, “Youth Di
version.”
“Tim,” said a woman’s voice.
“Tim won’t be back for a while.”
“Oh no, I don’t know what to do.” The woman was crying. “My husband said to call Timmy.”
“What’s the problem?”
“My little Stevie got hurt something terrible. I’m at the hospital, and they’re asking us questions. I don’t know what to say. I know it’s my fault. Dear God, my little Stevie’s such a nice boy. He walked off from the backyard, and somebody musta tried to kill him. They choked him half to death. I know it’s my fault. I feel terrible. I don’t know what to say to them questions she got. Timmy knows us. That’s why Ralph said to call Timmy.”
“Ralph what?”
“Morris.”
“What hospital?”
“Delaware Division.”
“I’ll send someone right over,” I said and hung up. “After all, I am a sergeant,” I muttered. However, when I went up a flight to the mezzanine to detectives, there was nobody to send. I checked Traffic and Patrol and they were all out, too. Everybody was watching Mondale.
Then it started coming back to me, like riding a bicycle, the scent of the old familiar hunt. I figured I’d go myself. There was really no decision to it. It flowed naturally from the bulge in my side pocket.
7
It was easy to spot Mrs. Morris and Ralph at the emergency room. They were sitting in cold-looking pink plastic seats and they were holding each other tightly. They were in their late forties. Little Stevie had apparently come late in life. Mrs. Morris was small, pudgy, and round, with an orange kerchief surrounding her dark hair. Her tight powder-blue slacks bulged, as did her rose-colored pullover. She was crying very loudly, drowning out a soap opera on the waiting-room TV. Mr. Morris was a short, skinny man with long, hairy arms that were full of muscle and were wrapped around his wife. He wore faded dark-green work clothes.
“I’m Sergeant Razzi from Wilmington, the one you spoke to.”
“The doctor’s got little Stevie now,” said Ralph Morris, letting go of his wife as her crying got softer.
“Is he walking and talking normally?”
“Yes,” they both said at the same time.
“How old is Stevie?” I asked, changing the subject and relieved that he probably wouldn’t be left paralyzed from the choking as long as he was moving around well.
“Almost four,” sobbed Mrs. Morris through her tears. “It’s all my fault. Everything is always my fault. There’s no use talkin’, Ralph, the whole thing is my fault. This never woulda happened if I watched him better.”
“You have no right to think of yourself at a time like this,” I said sharply. “Now what happened? Every detail.”
“I was puttin’ in the laundry,” she said while she sniffled. “Down the cellar, you know. I was only down a couple minutes. I finished maybe half a can a beer from upstairs. Then I put the laundry in. What’s it take to put the laundry in? And Stevie was out in the yard. Our yard don’t have no fence. We shoulda made the landlord put up a fence, dear Jesus. We’re only four houses up from the hill where the B and O tracks is. You know where that is. Anyways, when I come up from the laundry I couldn’t find Stevie. I thought I would die. I never been so scared in my life the more I looked. So, I went all over the alley and then I knocked on the neighbor that’s home days. Right? She ain’t seen him. So, I went down the hill to the B and O over by the tin shack, you know the one in the woods. There he was all beat up, thank God, and almost dead, oh dear Jesus. He was terrified — like he seen a monster.” She started crying again. “I’ll never open another can of beer as long as I live. Am I telling it right?”
“You’re doing fine,” I said. “What did Stevie say?”
“He ain’t said nothin’ yet. He ain’t talked really. He just keeps sayin’ ‘bad boy’ and crying. I told him he’s a good boy. He most probably thinks he’s a bad boy for going down to the tracks.”
“He musta been in shock,” said Ralph Morris as he lit a Pall Mall and exhaled through brown teeth. “He talks pretty good for his age, I think.”
“Precisely where did you find him?” I asked.
“Like I told you, in the teenage boys’ tin shack in the woods there on the other side of the B and O,” she said. “Right inside the shack on a dirty mattress.”
“Describe Stevie’s appearance when you found him.”
“Oh,” she wailed, and put both chubby hands over her face and cried. A sopping wet handkerchief fell to the floor from between her moist fingers. “Oh,” she wailed again and shook her head no.
“She can’t talk about it,” said Ralph. “I seen the poor kid. He got little red dots covering his whole face like measles, but they ain’t measles. And he got choke marks like on his throat. So far they ain’t found nothin’ on the X-rays. They’re doin’ lab work, too. We’re just waitin’.”
“How about his clothes?” I asked of Ralph as Mrs. Morris sobbed into her hands.
“All he had on was a shirt when she found him. His dungarees and underpants is most probably gone, I guess. She put his red blanket around him and we drove right here. I’m home on disability. I was sleeping. I get tired easy with my back. He ain’t even four years old yet. The poor little thing. What a sight. We kept him from lookin’ at himself in any mirrors. I don’t blame her for carryin’ on so. This wasn’t her fault.”
Ralph fought back his own tears by biting on his lower lip. He took me aside and said softly: “It’s hard on her, you know. We never thought we could have kids at our age, so we stopped usin’ protection. But we got married soon’s she got pregnant. It’s been rough on her bringing him along this far. He’s got a crooked foot, you see, and he never goes down by those B and O tracks. I think he was took down there. It’s a good steep drop down there. He’s a good boy. He wouldn’t go down there by himself. Not to that teenage hideout.”
“How was his breathing?”
“Okay. I guess. He was just screaming a lot and we was both trying to keep calm in front of him. They musta just kept pokin’ his face with a stick to make all them bloody dots.”
“Have you talked to the doctor yet?”
“No. Just some Spanish woman which wasn’t no nurse or nothin’. Kept asking my wife stuff is all, and so I said to call youse. She’s gonna come back after Mildred calms down and ask all her questions again.”
We walked back to Mrs. Morris and I said, “The red dots on his face are hopefully nothing to worry about. They’re petechial hemorrhages. Tiny blood vessels in his face must have ruptured from cutting off the air supply in his throat. They’re bad to look at for a few days, but they’ll clear up. He’s probably still a little shocky like your husband says. Where is Stevie now?”
“Back through those doors,” said Mr. Morris.
“What’s your address?”
“Twenty-two-twelve Clifton Avenue,” he said.
“Just answer all the lady’s questions. First thing the hospital has to make sure of is that you or your wife didn’t do this.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” cried Mrs. Morris as she sobbed more loudly.
“Don’t take it personally, Mrs. Morris. Meanwhile, I’ll find out what I can about who really did this. I know you didn’t.”
I walked through the double doors. He was in an examination room sitting on the edge of a stetcher, with a gray-haired heavily made-up nurse of about sixty standing next to him. Stevie was very skinny. His hair was over his ears, stringy and blond. His eyes were light blue and the pupils somewhat dilated. He looked cold. His red blanket was around him. You would not want him to look in a mirror.
“Stevie,” I said.
He didn’t answer or look up but stared straight ahead uncomfortably.
I stuck my hand in my jacket pocket and pulled out my gold WPD badge. “I’m the police,” I said as I put the badge on his knee.
/> He reached out very slowly and kept it from falling. He held it tightly in his hand.
“We’ve got to work fast to catch the bad boys and spank them. I need your help, Stevie.”
“We’re waiting for the psychologist,” said the nurse. “Do you really have to question him now?”
“Best thing for him,” I said and looked intently at her eyes. “Get his mind active. Get him fighting back.”
Stevie looked from me to her and back again, and his expression showed that he sided with me.
“Tell me all about the bad boys,” I said. “What did they look like?”
“Bad boy,” he said “Bad boy choked me.”
“Only one.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Was he younger than me?”
“Umm…yeah.”
“Was he older than you?”
“Y-yeah.”
“A teenager?”
“Yeah.” He answered with less hesitation.
“This big?” I said and held my hand to the top of my head.
“Yeah.”
“Was he bigger than me?”
“No.”
“Skinny like your daddy or heavy like Mommy?” I puffed air into my cheeks and held my arms out in front of my body like a fat belly.
“Like Daddy.”
“Was the bad boy a white person?”
“Yeah.”
“Was his hair dark like my color?”
“No.”
“Light color hair like yours? Blond?”
“Yeah.”
“My color eyes?”
“Don’t know.”
“Long hair like hers?” I pointed to the nurse.
“No.”
“Short like mine?”
“Yeah.”
“What else, Stevie?”
“Shiny teeth.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Stevie. That’s very good. What else about the bad boy, Stevie?”
“He laughed like a monster.”
“What else, Stevie? Can you tell me anything else about the bad boy?”
The Right to Remain Silent Page 6
